It was only through the mastery of a strong will, long seasoned and drilled, that Drennen could force himself at last to sit down and wait the coming of the light. His soul was in turmoil. His mind was filled with broken fancies, tortured visions. In him the simplicity of a normal existence had been phantastically twisted into complication. Before him were Sefton and Lemarc and Garcia … and Ygerne Bellaire. Behind him were George and Ernestine with their warped lives, Sothern and Max with their souls upon the verge of convulsion. Max, young and straightforward, his sky clear to the star of his duty, was sleeping in ignorance, while if he but knew he would be torn a thousand ways. And it seemed to Drennen that the restless thing in each of these lives, behind him and in front of him, raised its hissing head to dart venom into his own breast, to make for unrest and doubt there.
At last the objects about him were slowly restored to their own individual forms from the void of the night. The trees separated, the expanse of the lake grew grey and liquid, the cliffs showed their ancient battle scars. And the trodden earth held fresh and plain the trail he sought.
Leading the horse again, he climbed up from the level of the lake toward the cliff tops. The trail, hazardous enough at all times, looking now and then impossible, wound and twisted among the boulders, snaked its way into a narrow gorge, mounted along a bit of bench land clinging like a shelf to the mountain side, and in an hour's time brought him to the top.
Now the day was full upon him. Behind and below lay the lake he had just quitted. He could make out a plume of smoke where the impatience of Max and George would be bestirring Itself. Ahead and below lay Red Deer Lake, a thousand dizzy feet down, seeming impossible of achievement from where Drennen stood. He pushed a stone over the rocks with his boot. He saw it leap outward and drop, plummet wise, saw the white spray of the lake leap upward as the stone plunged into the water.
Drennen had turned the horse loose. From the hog's-back upon which he stood he could look down into a little valley lying to the eastward and could make out in it two more pack animals, tethered. He headed this one down the trail and then turned his eyes back toward Red Deer Lake and, across it, to the cliffs beyond. For there he had seen a second plume of smoke.
It seemed to him then that a man must have wings to reach that other line of cliffs, on the far side of the lake, from which the smoke was climbing upward. Everywhere the sheer precipices marched up to the rim of the blue laughter of the water below him, so that one might believe that neither man nor four-footed denizen of the forestland could come here to drink; that only the birds, dropping with folded wings, could visit its shore. But others had been here before him; and surely it was their smoke which curled upward from the far cliffs. If they had found a way to go on on foot, leaving their horses here, then he could find it. And he must find it quickly … before Max and George.
First he noted the location of the smoke toward which he sought to go, so that he would not miss it. Nature aided him, making the spot distinctive. Everywhere the cliffs were barren, just rock and more rock, a jumble of great boulders strewn along sheer precipices, everywhere save alone in this one spot. But there was a scant table land, and from it a small grove of pines rose high in the blue of the brightening sky, their gnarled limbs still and sturdy. It was above this single noteworthy clump of ancient boled trees to be seen upon these inhospitable heights that the thin bluish smoke arose.
To Drennen, frowning across the gulf separating him and his quarry, there seemed but one conceivable reason why a human being should have sought to win a way to that rocky aerie. From its nature it was all but unscalable; from its position it commanded in limitless, sweeping view all possible paths of approach. Did Sefton's party seek a hiding place where defence even against great numbers would be a simple matter, this nest upon the cliff tops was the ideal spot.
Thus Drennen answered the riddle. But there were other riddles which he could not answer and which he gave over. Why had the horses been left where they would be found so readily? Why that careless beacon smoke where no man could fail to see it?
Max would see it and he would be hurrying, swifter than Drennen had come because now it was daylight. With the need of haste crying in his ears Drennen experienced the slipping by of slow hours with nothing accomplished. Back and forth along the edge of the cliffs he searched eagerly, like some great, gaunt questing hound, baffled by a cold track. Sefton and those with him had come here, had found the way down, had gained the far side two miles away across the lake. They had gone before, so he knew that he could come after. But he grew feverish over the delay, thinking as much of Max behind as of Sefton in front.