“Of course it is,” Philip agreed; and for a time before they extinguished the fire and recrossed the river to roll up in their blankets in the box canyon where the animals were grazing, they discussed the pressing matter of trail effacement without reaching any practical solution of the problem.
The next morning they were up and on their way in the earliest dawn twilight. As yet, there were no signs of the pursuit. The mountain silences were undisturbed save by the drumming thunder of the swift little river and the soft sighing of the dawn precursor breeze in the firs. Convinced that all the haste they were making was clearly so much effort thrown away unless they could devise some means of throwing their followers off the track, they resumed the camp-fire discussion, falling back in the end, not upon experience, which neither of them had, but upon the trapper-and-Indian tales read in their boyhood. In these, running water was always the hard-pressed white man’s salvation in his flight, and, like the fleeing trapper, they had their stream fairly at hand. But the mountain river, coursing along at torrent speed, and with its bed thickly strewn with slippery boulders, was scarcely practicable as a roadway; it was too hazardous even for the sure-footed broncos, and entirely impossible for the loaded jacks.
Next, they thought of cutting up one of the pack tarpaulins and muffling the hoofs of the animals with the pieces, but aside from the time that would be wasted, this expedient seemed too childish to merit serious consideration. In the end, however, chance, that sturdy friend of the hard-pressed and the inexperienced, came to their rescue. Some seven or eight miles beyond their night camp they came upon a place where, for a half-mile or more, the left-hand bank of the stream was a slope of slippery, broken shale; the tail of a slide from the mountain side above. Bromley was the first to see the hopeful possibilities.
“Wait a minute, Phil,” he called to his file leader; “don’t you remember this slide, and how we cursed it when we had to tramp through it coming out? I’ve captured an idea. I believe we can delay this mob that’s chasing us, and maybe get rid of it for good and all. Is the river fordable here, do you think?”
Philip’s answer was to ride his horse into the stream and half-way across it. “We can make it,” he called back, “if we can keep the jacks from being washed away.”
“We’ll take that for granted,” said Bromley. “But we don’t need to go all the way across. Stay where you are, and I’ll herd the rest of the caravan in and let it drink.”
This done, and a plain trail thus left leading into the water, Bromley explained his captured idea. While they couldn’t hope to make a roadway of the stream bed for any considerable distance, it was quite possible to wade the animals far enough down-stream to enable them to come out upon the shale slide. After they had been allowed to drink their fill, the expedient was tried and it proved unexpectedly successful. On the shale slide the hoof prints vanished as soon as they were made, each step of horse or burro setting in motion a tiny pebble slide that immediately filled the depression. Looking back after they had gone a little distance they could see no trace of their passing.
“This ought to keep the mob guessing for a little while,” Bromley offered as they pushed on. “They’ll see our tracks going down into the creek, and think we crossed over. They’ll probably take a tumble to themselves after a while—after they fail to find any tracks on the other side; but it will hold ’em for a bit, anyway. Now if we could only scare up some way of hiding our tracks after we get beyond this slide——”
Though the continuing expedient did not immediately suggest itself, the good-natured god of chance was still with them. Before they came upon ground where the tracks of the animals would again become visible, they approached the mouth of one of the many side gulches scarring the left-hand mountain, and in the gulch there was a brawling mountain brook with a gravelly bottom.
“This looks as if it were made to order, don’t you think?” said Philip, drawing rein at the gulch mouth. “If we turn up this gulch we can walk the beasts in the water.”