"Perhaps not many men" answered Shan Kar. "But they have many who are not men. Too many for us."
"More superstition," spat Nick Sloan, disgustedly. "He's trying to tell us there are intelligent beasts coming against us."
Nelson hesitated. "This Brotherhood may use trained beasts as fighters at that. Such a fight would be plenty messy. Especially in a narrow pass."
Again, he was forced to make a quick decision based on information whose sources seemed too fantastic to be credited.
"Get the ponies moving!" he ordered. "Whatever danger may be ahead, we'd be better off to meet it inside the valley than up in that pass."
They started climbing out of the great gorge, Shan Kar leading them up a trail that twisted amid giant boulders and gaunt firs. Soon they glimpsed above them the crack of a pass that split the titanic moonlit wall of the range.
A pulse-quickening sense of expectation spurred Eric Nelson as he helped drag the ponies upward. What lay within that mighty wall of mountains, what guarded answer to the mysteries that seemed to deepen around them hour by hour?
They came up clear of the last trees onto naked rock and shingle with the last lofty rampart of the range looming before them. The pass was a mere narrow crack through that rampart.
It was a place of shadows and shivering cold. The ponies' hoofs clattered on the loose rock as they rode through.
They came out onto an open ledge of moonlight, and Shan Kar leaned in his saddle to gesture ahead.