The other nodded. "Simpson admits your help was worth much. Well, you will certainly be made accountable for poaching, but this may satisfy my chiefs—I don't know yet. I expect there's no use in my trying to get some light about your friends' plans?"
"There is not much use," Stannard agreed. "For one thing, my friends did not altogether enlighten me."
"Very well," said the officer, smiling. "So long as you do not go off the ranch, you can go where you like. After breakfast in the morning we start for the railroad."
XVI
THE NECK
Mist floated about the rocks and the evening was dark. To push on was rash, but Jimmy hoped he might get down to the trees below the snow-line. Anyhow, he must if possible get off the broken crest of the range. Since noon until the sun went west and shadow crept across the mountain, he and the Indian had crouched behind a shelf and watched snow and stones plunge to the valley. Now all was quiet and the snow was firm, but the mist was puzzling and Jimmy could not see where he went. All he knew was, he followed the neck to lower ground.
Jimmy was tired. In the wilds, if one can shoot straight, fresh meat may sometimes be got, but one must carry a rifle, flour, and groceries. Moreover, he now felt the reaction after the strain, and the journey on which he had started daunted him. He must push across a wilderness of high rocks and snow. In the mountains one cannot travel fast, and when he reached the plains the distance to the American frontier was long. He dared not stop at the settlements and, until he crossed the boundary, must camp in the grass, although the days got short and the nights were cold.
The Indian, heavily loaded, went a few yards in front, but he came from the warm coast and his part was to supply them with game and fish. Jimmy got some comfort from reflecting that he himself knew the Swiss rocks, because he rather thought all mountains whose tops were above the snow-line, so to speak, approximated to a type.
Frost split their ragged pinnacles and great blocks plunged down. Avalanches ground their shoulders to precipitous slopes, from which battered crags stuck out. As a rule, the top of the long ridges was narrow, like a rough saw-edge, but sometimes a bulging snow-cornice followed the crest. Where the snow-fields dropped to a hollow, a glacier generally went down in flowing curves. One could follow a glacier, but at some places the surface wrinkled and broke in tremendous cracks.
By and by the Indian stopped and Jimmy looked about. The neck had got very steep and the mist was thick. The pitch at the top of the glacier is awkward and Jimmy knitted his brows. If he balanced properly, pushed off, and trailed his rifle butt, he would go down like a toboggan; the trouble was, he might go over a perpendicular fall and into the bergschrund crack. To climb down and slip meant a furious plunge like the other, and if there was not a bergschrund, he might hit a rock. Yet, if he meant to go east, he must get down, and for a few minutes he sat moodily in the snow.