“Why, you must be mad,” he said. “Isn’t he? No man couldn’t get along there. It would want a cat.”
“I don’t know,” said Gunson, thoughtfully. “Here, let’s camp for a bit.”
At these words, Quong, who had been rocking himself quietly to and fro, jumped off his bundle, looked sharply about him, and then made a run for a niche in the side of the gorge right up in the entrance, where the sides literally overhung.
Here he placed his pack, and began to collect wood, descending toward the river to where a large tree, which had been swept down the gorge when the river was much higher, now lay beached and stripped, and thoroughly dry. He attacked it at once with the axe, and had soon lopped off enough of the bare branches to make a fire, and these he piled up in the niche he had selected, and started with a match, the inflammable wood catching at once; while I took the axe and went on cutting, as Quong unfastened the kettle and looked around for water.
There was plenty rushing along thirty or forty feet below us, but it was milky-looking with the stone ground by the glaciers far up somewhere in the mountain. That, of course, had to be rejected.
“Make mouth bad,” Quong said, and he climbed up to where a tiny spring trickled down over a moss-grown rock so slowly that it took ten minutes to fill our kettle.
“This is a bit of a puzzle,” said Gunson, as he sat calmly smoking his pipe and gazing up the terrible gorge; and I was returning from the fire, where I had been with a fresh armful of wood, leaving Esau patiently chopping in my place.
“Puzzles can be made out,” I said.
“Yes, and we are going to make this one out, Gordon, somehow or another. What an echo!”
He held up his hand, and we listened as at every stroke of Esau’s axe the sound flow across the river, struck the rock there and was thrown back to our side, and then over again, so that we counted five distinct echoes growing fainter as they ran up the terribly dark, jugged rift, till they died away.