"A strange horse, here!" was his swift thought. "Whose?"
He ran his hands along the big brute's back. There was no saddle. About the neck only a knotted rope. His hands ran on to the dragging end of the rope. The strands were rough there, unequal, bespeaking a tether snapped. He noted now, too, that the rope was damp and a little muddy.
"He's come down the trail from the north. We are close to Sefton's camp."
From the north because there was no place which Drennen remembered having passed during the end of the day where a horse could muddy a dragging rope. The lake shore was sand and gravel. And, before he had gone to bed that night, he had seen a straggling stream which a little further on ran across the morrow's trail, making shallow ponds in the grass, the banks oozy mud.
Tying the strange horse swiftly, Drennen went back to his bed. He found his rifle and cartridge belt, filled his pockets hit or miss from his food pack, and, making no noise, returned to the flat. Again leading the strange horse he pushed on, up trail, toward the muddy brook.
Too dark to see more than the lowering mass of trees, the blackness of the ground looking a bottomless pit under foot, the wall of cliffs standing up against the stars. But slowly he could find his way to the creek, across, and along the lake shore.
Again and again he stumbled against a boulder or tree trunk or clump of bushes. He cursed his eyes for fools, drew back and around the obstacle and pushed on. He would make little speed this way, but there might arise the situation in which every moment would be golden.
After a little an inspiration came to him and he acted upon it swiftly. He let the rope out through his fingers and holding it at the broken end drove the horse on ahead of him, calculating upon the fact that it could see even if he could not, and having been over the trail once would travel it again in the darkness.
So Drennen made his way northward. Now he was making better time, perhaps a couple of miles an hour. By dawn he would be several miles ahead of the others, and then he could travel more rapidly.
But, before the dawn came, he must stop. He had come under the cliffs which stood tall and bleakly forbidding at the upper end of the lake. The horse came to a dead standstill. If there were a way up here, a trail through the cliffs, the animal seemed to have no knowledge of it and Drennen's blind groping could not discover it.