“There’s only one thing the matter with this lay-out of ours,” Dick said, as his companions were preparing to leave him. “Suppose you don’t find the book where Purdy dropped it—what then?”
That was a sort of an impasse to give them pause, as the old writers used to say. If they shouldn’t find the book, they would be worse off than ever. But Larry Donovan was of the breed of those who cross bridges when they come to them—and not before.
“We’ve got to take a chance on that;” he said quickly. “You can’t keep the jacks here all day with nothing to eat; they’ve got to either go on or go back. We’ll be with you again by to-morrow morning, book or no book. And then, if we haven’t got what we went after, we can decide what is best to do. Come on, Purdy. We’re losing precious time.”
The start was made without more ado, but instead of taking the trail over which they had reached the pass, Larry led the way around the sloping shoulder of the northern peak, kicking himself footholds in the frozen snow crust, and thereby taking long chances, as he well knew, of breaking through into some bottomless drift.
“Step light and walk in my tracks, and for Pat’s sake don’t slip!” he called back to Purdick; but the caution was hardly needed. Purdick still had a vivid mental picture of the freed horse of the hold-ups whirling and slipping and shooting down to oblivion over the skating-rink surface of the snow slope, and he was all claws to clutch and hang as he followed Larry around the steepest part of the shoulder.
Past the steep shoulder they came out upon what the Alpine climbers called an arrêté; a ridge sloping gently down and roughly paralleling the main range on their left and Lost Canyon on the right and far below. This ridge was what Larry had been aiming for. Its rocky crest had been blown clear of the winter snows; it was taking them in the right direction; there was good footing; and the descent was rapid enough to let them take a dog-trot without cutting their wind too severely.
“Don’t let me wear you out,” Larry cautioned; “but here’s where we’ve got to make time, if we’re going to beat those plug-uglies back to our camp site in the canyon. Are you good for the dog-trot?”
“Plenty good, so long as it’s down-hill,” panted the runner-up. “But I don’t see where we’re making anything. We can never get down to the canyon off of this thing.”
“Wait,” Larry flung back, “and I’ll show you.”
From the top of the high ridge they could get occasional glimpses of the trail winding down the deep valley to the canyon head, and one of these glimpses gave them a sight of the baffled hold-ups making their way slowly along the slippery path, two riding and one walking; mere black dots they were, visible only because the dazzling white surroundings made them so.