Onward.
Whether the Indians followed up their trail the peril finders never knew, for they saw no more of that tribe, and wandered on for days in safety, passing into a new tract of country which Griggs hailed with delight.
“It’s not goldy land,” he said, pointing, “but a place where we can do a deal of hunting and lay up stores—dried meat for stock—before we enter the mountains yonder.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Ned. “Because of those old bleached bones?”
“Yes: buffalo. That means going on for months. Once we hit upon the tail-end of a drove we can hang on to them as long as we like, and head them in towards the mountains and forest-land yonder. There’s a peak there that looks very like the one we want to find.”
But the weeks went on, during which the bison-drove was found, and supplied the party with all the meat they needed, and sport besides, at the long gaunt wolves always on the lookout for the weakly calves. There was sport too with the bears, and a narrow escape for the doctor from a grizzly which overtook and clawed him from his pony’s back, the end seeming very near. But Chris Lee’s rifle-bullet was quicker than the huge bear, whose skin when sun-dried, became the doctor’s bed by night when it was hot, his cover when it was cold.
Then the great peak, reached at last, gave the adventurers a wondrous view all round, but not of the golden city, which always seemed to be farther off, while none of the peaks they found accorded with the old prospector’s map.
But as the time glided on adventures were always at hand. Another strange rock city was discovered, evidently inhabited at a later date, for here the old dwellers’ domestic implements were plentiful in the cell-like homes cut in the terraces of cliff or cañon. Great earthen handmade pots that had evidently held some kind of grain, flint-heads for arrows, and those of larger size which might have been used for spears.
And so the journeying went on, with times when Indians surprised the party and were driven off, while others again that were found by a rushing river proved friendly and willing to show the strange white people how it was possible to get mule-loads of a kind of salmon in a day from the rushing waters for present eating, and for splitting open and drying in the sun.
Then bison again—another salmon-river—a narrow escape from a horrible death by thirst once more—encounters with rattlesnakes—the discovery in a great open plain of the cause of a distant roaring sound like water, just at a time when it was once more wanted most. And there it was where they could look down, Tantalus-like, from the brink of a vast crack in the level plain and see a vast river foaming along half-a-mile below them, never to be reached.