He was swallowing the last mouthful of biscuit and cold bacon when the confusion of ideas climaxed in the admission that he didn’t know which side of the stream he had crossed to last. There had been a number of the crossings, and he hadn’t taken any notice of the particular direction he was going. It was a bemuddling state of affairs, but the need for action was none the less pressing. Larry and Purdick mustn’t be left to wander all over the lot, famine-stricken, just because their provision freighter hadn’t had sense enough to stay where he could be found.
Dick got the packs ready and waited impatiently for the burros to fill up. They were doing their hungry best; anybody could see that. Still, it was taking time.
“Chew—chew fast, you little beggars!” he grumbled at them, stretching himself out on a bed of fir needles and watching them as they cropped. “We’ve got to be making tracks out of this, if you did but know it.”
Now, when one has lost half a night’s sleep, and, on the heels of the loss, has tramped up one side of a mountain and down the other, a bed of dry conifer needles is likely to prove a pretty subtle temptation—not to go to sleep, of course, with the urgencies making it perfectly plain that one really mustn’t do that, but just to close one’s eyes and doze for a minute or two. Dick locked his hands under his head and lay gazing at the industrious burros. He had to look down his nose to see them, and that, too, is dangerous, if one doesn’t mean to go to sleep. Two or three times he found his eyes closing automatically; and at last, with the thought that he might just as well doze off for the half-hour that it would take the jacks to fill themselves up, he was gone.
That was that. But, unlike Larry, Dick had no alarm clock in the back part of his head that he could set to go off promptly at the end of half an hour. Quietly in the silence of the little glade, which was broken only by the industrious grazing of the little pack beasts, the half-hour slipped by, and then another and yet another.
The burros had finished the filling-up process and were beginning to sniff the air for water. Inch by inch the tree shadows lengthened as the good old earth turned over in its daily wallop, and still Dick slept on. When he was finally awakened by one of the jacks nosing him over to find out if he were anything that a donkey could top off with by way of dessert, he leaped up with a yell and looked at his watch. It was nearly five o’clock. He had lost over four hours of the day!
Reproaching himself remorsefully for having been so heedless as to go to sleep on his job, Dick hustled the pack saddles into place, loaded them, and was ready to hike. Since all directions looked alike to him, he set off, with the westering sun at his back, thinking that that course must at least take him, sooner or later, to the upper edge of the timber where at the worst he could get a wider look at things than could be had in the forest.
But he had scarcely got the small procession in motion before he began to have trouble with the jacks. Though they had hitherto gone on amiably enough in any direction they happened to be headed, they now seemed determined to edge away to the left. Again and again Dick pushed and dragged them back into the uphill path, but before he could take his place at the tail of the procession they would be crabbing aside and circling—always in the same direction.
“Aye—Fishbait; what’s the matter with you?” he shouted at the leading burro; and then, all at once, he knew. The jacks had had a feed, but no water. And now they were smelling water somewhere to the left and wanted to go to it.
“All right, little donks!” he said, laughing at his own dullness; “I guess you know what’s what better than I do. Find the creek and get your drink, and then we’ll follow it back to where the trail begins to show up for us again.”