His eyes, sweeping now across the field of tumbled rocks which topped the ridge at the base of his peak, were arrested by a flat piece of granite resting on top of a boulder which rose conspicuously above its neighbors.
A monument!
Here, where only a second ago he had told himself that perhaps no other human foot than his own had come! The old sign of a man-made trail, the sign to be read from afar, to last on into eternity. For the shrieking winds of winter and the racing snows do not budge the flat rock laid carefully upon flat-topped stone.
Was he tricking himself? Had nature, in some one of her mad moods, done this trick? He strode over to it swiftly, sliding down the side of the slope up which he had clambered, making his way by leaps and bounds from rock to rock.
The monument was man-made.
Nature doesn’t go out of her way, as some man had done, to get a block of granite, carry it a hundred yards up-hill, and place it upon a rock of another kind and shade where it can be the more conspicuous.
One monument calls for another in a trackless field of stone. In a moment, farther along the ridge, he found the second monument. He hurried to it. Yonder, lower on the slope, was the third; a hundred yards farther on, the fourth!
He got the trend of the trail now, for it curved only a bit, and then ran straight, straight toward the eastern rim of the valley lying far below him. And the other way, the trail ran back toward the cañon from which he had climbed. A trail here, in the very innermost heart of the Sasnokee-keewan, where men said there were no trails!
Eagerly he turned back toward the cañon. Monument after monument he found, leading cunningly between giant boulders, under cliffs, down a little, upward a little, down again, slowly, gradually seeking the lower altitude. Again and again Sheldon lost the way, which had but rock set on rock to indicate it; but always, going back, he picked it up again.
There were a dozen monuments to show the way before he came down into the meadow a mile above the spot where he had left Buck. And here also, at the base of the slope fully two hundred yards from the willows of the creek, he found a fresh, green willow-rod. It had been dropped here not more than a few hours ago, for the white wood where the bark had been torn away was not dried out. A bit of the bark itself he could tie into a knot without breaking it. And the stick had been cut with a sharp knife, the smooth end showing how one stroke had cut evenly through the half-inch branch.