They had been talking about this, and their good luck in being warned beforehand by Mr. Broadwick in Nophi, when Larry said:
“I hope Dick didn’t have any trouble going down on the other side. I’ll bet it’s no one-man job to get a packed burro out of a drift if it breaks through where there’s any depth.”
“I should say not,” Purdick agreed. “But I guess Dick made it all right. What I’m wondering is how far he had to go before he could pull up and wait for us.”
“It won’t be long, now, before we’ll find out how far he had to go,” said Larry, and they went on toiling up the last of the slippery grades.
By the time they had topped the pass and had their first good look over into the mountain wilderness beyond, the sun had gone behind the high-lifted crests of the Little Hophras. What they saw between the two ranges was a roughly tumbled intervale which could hardly be called a park because it was so cut up by spurs from the surrounding mountains. It was rather a series of parks, some wooded and some bare, with a scattering of the great rounded hills known from Montana to Arizona as buttes.
To their great comfort they saw that the snow did not extend nearly as far down the western slope of their range as it did on the eastern; as a matter of fact, they had gone scarcely a mile down the descending trail before they were out of the snow belt altogether, and with only a narrow zone of the stiffening slush and mud to cross before they came to good going again.
With the snow trail left behind, and no signs on it to indicate that Dick had had any trouble negotiating it with the burros, they were expecting to overtake him at every turn in the descending path. But the expectation seemed to be in no hurry to get itself fulfilled. Turn after turn was made, and still there was nothing to show that Dick had passed that way.
By this time sunset was fully come, and though there was a fine afterglow on the peaks, the dusk was falling rapidly in the canyons and valleys.
“I don’t like this,” said Larry, halting at last in a little grassy glade. “Dick had no reason to try to make distance on us. And he wouldn’t go far enough from the trail so that he couldn’t watch for us. I wish we had one of the guns so we could signal to him.”
Purdick had crossed to the farther side of the glade and was stirring something on the ground with the toe of his boot.