“The snow is just breaking up on the main range, and you’ll find the trail for two or three miles each side of Mule-Ear Pass pretty hard to negotiate with the jacks unless you can catch it while it is frozen,” he told them. “Late as it is in the season, it freezes every night on the range, and if you’ll take my advice, you’ll push as far up toward the pass as you can this afternoon, camp early, and turn out in the morning early enough to cross the range before the sun gets a melting chance at it. If you don’t do that, you’re likely to have a lot of trouble with the burros. They’re pretty sure-footed little beasts, but they will slip off a thawing trail once in a while.”
Larry was the only one who was thoughtful enough to ask if anybody had been over the trail since the thawing began.
“Yes,” said the smelter superintendent, “two men went over yesterday with supplies for the Little Eagle mine in Dog Gulch. They were experienced packers, and they told us they had to wait for the freeze before they could make it, coming out.”
They promised to do as the superintendent advised, and five minutes later, under a sun that seemed hot enough to make all thoughts of frost and snow troubles a sheer absurdity, they were trailing out the single street of the small smelter settlement and heading for the Lost Canyon portal.
Just as they were leaving the last shacks of the town behind, Purdick, to whom all this wild western stuff was as strange as a glimpse into an entirely different world, happened to look back down the street. What he saw meant nothing to him at first: there were a few stragglers in the street, workmen returning to the smelter after the noon hour, some children playing in the dust, and the usual number of stray dogs foraging for something eatable in the empty tin cans littering the roadway.
But in front of a tar-papered building labeled “Hotel Nophi” three horses were hitched, and as Purdick looked back, three men came out of the hotel to unhitch and mount them. That, in itself, was nothing remarkable, of course, and Purdick wouldn’t have given it a second thought if he hadn’t happened to see, or think he saw, one of the three stick something that looked like a crutch under his saddle leather before he climbed to the back of his riding animal.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” he exclaimed, wholly to himself. But when Dick said: “What for?” Purdick’s reply was perfectly non-committal. “Nothing,” he returned, with a laugh. “I guess the altitude’s getting on my eye nerves and making me see double—or triple.”
As he spoke, the street, which had now dwindled to a rocky bridle path, turned sharply to the left and entered the narrow mouth of the canyon; whereupon the brawling stream thundering through the gorge swallowed up all other sounds, even as the cliff-like walls shut out all sights save that of the sky overhead. Nevertheless, as the patient little pack animals plodded steadily on, their tinkling hoofbeats hardly audible above the noise made by the stream, Purdick fancied he could hear heavier hoofbeats clinking upon the stones far to the rear.