"It goes in and out, and where there's an obstacle it winds around. That's the difference between a white man's and an Indian's nature. The Siwash strikes a big fir log, and he walks around it, if he has to keep on doing it for months. It doesn't seem to worry him that he's wasting a minute or two every time. Then the white man comes along and gets to work with his ax. He goes right straight through. It's born in him."
Frank had made a sign of understanding. He knew something of the history of the old great nations as well as that of his own country, and he remembered another dominant race that ages ago blazed its trails from Rome across all Europe and far into Asia. It was characteristic of those men that, turning aside for no obstacle, they went straight, and long after their power had perished their roads remained, running, as the crow flies, through morasses and over mountains and rivers. His own people had done much the same, whittling west with the axes through the eastern woods, and then pushing on with their wagons across the lonely plains, until they drove the steel track through the snow-clad Rockies and over the Sierras. They died in shoals on the journey, but it was the march of a nation, and always more came on, the lumberman after the trapper, the track-grader on the cowboy's heels, with ranches and farms and factories growing up along the line. Now they had reached the Pacific, and Frank wondered vaguely whether that would be the limit, or where they were going then. It was, however, a question that seemed too big for him.
"This country's rough on one's clothes," he said ruefully, looking down at a second tear in his trousers.
Harry laughed. He was dressed in old duck overalls, long boots, and a battered gray hat.
"That's a fact. What you want to wear is leather. There were two sports from back East came out to hunt last fall, and they had their things made of some patent cloth warranted to turn water and resist any thorns. Jake went along to cook for them." He paused with a chuckle and added, "They were wearing their blankets because they hadn't any clothes left when he brought them back."
They went on for an hour or so until they came out upon the bank of a frothing river which roared among the rocks in a shallow cañon. There was no way of reaching the water, had they desired it, and, as Harry had predicted, the trail they followed grew rapidly worse. In places it wound perilously along narrow ledges beneath a dripping wall of rock, in others it led over banks of stones which had slipped down from the heights above. The boys made very slow progress until noon, when they stopped for a meal from the package Jake had thrown them. While they ate it Frank looked down again at his boots, which were already badly ripped.
"They were new just before I left Winnipeg," he said. "In some ways the people in Europe are ahead of us. There are one or two countries where they make their shoes of wood."
Harry was too busy to make an answer, and when he had finished eating he carefully tied up the packet, which was now considerably smaller, before he turned to his companion.
"We'd better be hitting the trail," he said. "Unless we can make the ranch by sundown, we'll get mighty little supper."
They pushed on for a couple of hours, still floundering and stumbling among the rocks. Harry stopped for a moment where the bush was thinner and pointed to a big gap in a ridge of hillside three or four miles away.