“It’s a lot farther than it looks,” Larry put in.
“Don’t you know it!” said Purdick; and then: “Say, isn’t that a railroad train just coming into the town?”
What he was pointing at looked like a tiny worm barely moving along a dimly defined line on the borders of the buckskin plain, and trailing off from the head of the worm there was a thin black smudge—the smoke from the engine’s stack.
“Our east-bound Flyer,” Dick said, naming the train. Then: “It doesn’t seem believable that that crawling worm of a thing will be in Brewster by dinner-time this evening, does it? But we can’t stay here all morning admiring the scenery, grand as it is,” he went on. “Which way do we aim for the go-down, Larry—north or south?”
The question was asked because it was perfectly apparent that they had to aim either one way or the other in order to find a place where the descent could be made. In the straight-ahead line there was nothing doing. As far as they could see in either direction—which wasn’t very far because the mountain summit was as crooked as a snake—the western slope was as near to being an abrupt precipice as it could be and still figure as a slope.
Larry shook his head, and it surely was a tricksy fate that led him to say: “There doesn’t seem to be much choice; perhaps we’d better go south.” This when, all unknown to them, less than half a mile distant to the north lay that excellent trail by which they could have reached Natrolia early in the afternoon—and by so doing would have changed the entire complexion of any number of things.
But of the trail and its possibilities they knew nothing, so they turned—fatefully, as we say—to the southward, skirting the brow of the mountain, without gaining a single foot of descent, for two long hours before they came to a slope which seemed at all practicable for the burros. Even then their progress was exasperatingly slow. Time and again one of the jacks would slip and roll down into some gulch from which it took no end of time and labor to rescue it; and when that didn’t happen, they would be heading canyons too steep to be crossed, or going a mile or so out of their way to find a gulch through which they could chimney down from one bench of the great mountain to another.
Struggling manfully with all these difficulties, and even cutting out the noon halt to save time, night overtook them long before they were low enough down to get another sight of the Natrolia hogback, and they had to camp.
“Thank goodness, we’re down in the grass altitudes again, anyway,” said Dick as he pulled the packs from the burros’ backs and turned the little beasts loose to graze. “I don’t know how long a jack can go without feeding, but we’ve certainly given Fishbait and Lop-ear a tough siege of it since yesterday noon.”