“I believe you are as right as rain,” Dick agreed quickly. “In which case?——”
“In which case, it’s us for the speedway!” Larry exclaimed, and forthwith he urged the little pack animals into their nearest approach to a trot.
“If we can’t beat that bunch to the bad going, it’s up to us to make a fight or get ready to tramp back to Nophi with our tongues hanging out. Get along, Fishbait! If you only had sense enough to know what’s behind you, you’d make tracks a lot faster than you’re making them now!”
That was the beginning of a blind race which was made all the more difficult by the fact that the fugitives never knew a minute ahead what they were coming to next. If they had been familiar with the trail it would have been different. But they had to trust wholly to the instinct of the leading burro, and at times, when the little beast and its pack mate went plunging through dense thickets of the young trees, they were reasonably sure they were off the track.
Also, in a very short while the pace began to tell, particularly upon little Purdick. By the time they reached muddy going, the high, upper valley where patches of the old snow were showing dimly among the tree trunks, with leaky rivulets trickling down from them to make a spongy swamp of the footway, Purdick was gasping for breath and lagging behind the procession, in spite of all his efforts to keep up.
“Getting next to you, old scout?” said Larry, leaving Dick to urge the pack beasts on while he dropped back to relieve Purdick of the weight of his gun. “This is a pretty hard row of stumps to put you into—the first crack out of the box, this way.”
“I’m—I’m all right,” the small one stammered gamely. “If I—if I could only—could only get my second wind——”
“That’s it,” said Larry encouragingly. “It’ll come, after a bit. But if it’s too hard for you, we’ll let up a few notches. Dick and I are more or less used to these altitudes, and——”
“L-l-let up, nothing!” stuttered the game laggard. “Wh-when I can’t hold up my end you can ch-chuck me into the creek and leave me behind!”
It was the trail itself that presently cut the speed down to something less breathless. Within the next five hundred yards the spongy swamp underfoot had become snowy slush, and with another hundred feet or so of elevation the slush began to crunch encouragingly under their feet to tell them that they were at least reaching the zone of nightly frosts.