“I’m all right,” declared Harry Ware stoutly, although his panting sides and streaming face belied his words, “but how about lunch?”
“Yes, cantering crackers! I’m hungry as one of those lions that tried to gobble up Ralph,” declared Persimmons, who always had, as may have been noticed, an excellent appetite.
“Don’t be thinking of lunch yet,” admonished Jim. “You’re a fine bunch of hunters. The first thing we want to do is to get a crack at those goats, ain’t it? If we don’t keep on, they will.”
That settled the question of lunch, and after a brief rest they kept pushing on up the mountain side. A chill wind was now blowing from the vast snowfields, and the cool of it fanned their flushed cheeks refreshingly.
They reached a stretch of rocky ground made smooth and slippery by melting snow from the ridges above. The scrap broke off on the verge of an almost precipitous rift, in the depths of which a torrent roared. They stopped for a minute upon the dizzy ledge of rock and gazed down above battalions of somber trees upon the lake below. They could see the camp and the ponies, dwarfed to specks, moving about far beneath. Harry Ware and Percy Simmons shouted and waved their hats, but Jim instantly checked this.
“Are you hunting goats or out on a picnic,” he admonished the abashed boys.
“Huh! Not much of a picnic about this,” grunted Hardware in an audible aside.
“Cheer up, it will get worse before it gets better,” said Ralph with a laugh.
A short distance further on they came upon some green grass growing in a marshy spot, kept damp by the constant running of silvery threads of melted snow.
“Now look to your rifles,” warned Jim. “We’ll be using the shooting irons before long, or I miss my guess.”