He looked ahead. They were approaching the dizzy shoulder of Crosby. Steele rounded it, and disappeared. One by one the slow packhorses, their loads hitting against the rocks on the inside of the trail, crawled cautiously after, and also disappeared. Then before Ross opened a view of startling grandeur. He was looking out over the top of Gale’s Ridge and down across Big Horn Basin, beyond Cody, eighty miles away and into the blue heart of the Big Horn Mountains. The sight brought with it a pang of homesickness. Eighty miles from a railroad! Eighty difficult, laborious miles! Ross felt helpless and small and decidedly shaky in this strange new world about which he had so much to learn.
Clinching his teeth hard together, he looked up. Above were bowlders seemingly glued to the almost upright mountainside. Below–but Ross’s head swam, and he turned his eyes to the inside of the trail, and clung to the saddle. Below was a sheer drop of a thousand feet down to the falls of Meadow Creek, which separated Crosby from Gale’s Ridge. The mist came up in clouds rolling thick and frosty in the zero air. This was the quarter-mile of trail which cut Meadow Creek Valley off from Wood River Cañon for months during the year.
"Well," laughed Steele as they stopped where the trail widened beyond the dangerous shoulder, "you didn’t take a header, did you?"
Ross passed his hand across his forehead. His face was pale. "No, but–I felt every minute that I’d go over."
"You’ll get used to that," returned Steele easily. "You see why that trail becomes impassable later, don’t you? If it was just the snow on the trail, why, that wouldn’t count. You could shovel it off around the shoulder, and go on snow-shoes the rest of the way. But, when the snow lodges up over the shoulder something like ten feet deep, and a chinook or warm wind comes along and loosens it, a footfall or a man calling might start it, and then––" Steele shrugged his shoulders.
"And there is no other way you can get into the Creek valley?" asked Ross.
"No other way with a horse. You can follow the Creek toward its source, they say, a few miles and then across. Hunters go that way sometimes, but on foot; and they have to scramble for it."
On and on they went over a wide trail now beside the clear little Meadow Creek. Ross began to feel giddy again.
"Of course you do," Steele explained the next time they made a stop, "because the Creek is half a mile higher than the cañon. But you get over that in a few days."
"I wonder," exclaimed Ross suddenly, "how Leslie Jones stood that trail?"