Changing places now and then to relieve the leader of the work of breaking footholds, they reached the summit, and Andrew's heart sank as he gazed at the landscape which stretched away before him. The air was clear, bright sunshine glittered on the high rocks, but the snow in the shadow was steeped in ethereal blue; dark spruces broke the gleaming surface with a delicate intricacy of outline. The scene had a wild grandeur, but from Andrew's point of view it was inexpressibly discouraging. They had laboriously scaled the first and largest rampart, but beyond it lay a series of lower ridges with rugged and almost precipitous sides. The hollows, so far as he could see, were filled with spruce muskeg—the small rotting trees falling across each other with underbrush pushing up between. To traverse these places would be a very difficult matter.
"It looks pretty bad," he said slowly. "Mappin knew his business when he had the cache made on the wrong side of the range."
"He's smart," Carnally agreed. "A hard man to beat, and you want to use a full-sized club when you stand up to him; but I guess he'd go down if he got the right knock-out."
Andrew, tired and hungry, failed to see how the decisive blow could be given: there did not seem to be much probability of his ever coming to close quarters with his enemy. So far as his brief experience went, injustice was singularly hard to vanquish and the reformer's path rough.
"Couldn't we work around the hills to the other fork?" he asked.
"The grub would run out before we got there."
"I suppose we couldn't push straight across, leaving Graham until we came back?"
"We might, if we had time enough. I believe there's forty miles of this broken country. Look at it!"
Andrew had already done so, and it had daunted him. He remembered that they had been since sunrise reaching the top of the first ridge.
"Then what must be done?"