"No chance of your brake bustin' agin, is ther?" inquired Cal, rather apprehensively.
"No, it's as strong as it well can be now," Nat assured him.
"Glad of that. If it gave out on this grade we'd go backward to our funerals."
"Guess that's right," agreed Joe, gazing back out of the tonneau at the steep pitch behind them.
Despite the steepness of the grade and the rough character of the road, or rather trail, the powerful auto climbed steadily upward, the rattle of her exhausts sounding like a gatling gun in action.
Before long they reached the summit and the boys burst into a shout of admiration at the scene spread out below them. From the elevation they had attained they could see, rising and falling beneath them, like billows at sea, the slopes and summits of miles of Sierra country. Here and there were forests of dense greenery, alternated with bare, scarred mountain sides dotted with bare trunks, among which disastrous forest fires had swept. It was a grand scene, impressive in its magnitude and sense of solitary isolation. Far beyond the peaks below them could be seen snow-capped summits, marking the loftiest points of the range. Here and there deep dark wooded canyons cut among the hills reaching down to unknown depths.
"Looks like a good country for grizzlies or deer," commented Cal.
"Grizzlies!" exclaimed Joe, "are there many of them back here?"
"Looks like there might be," rejoined Cal, "this is the land of big bears, big deer, little matches, and big trees, and by the same token there's a clump of the last right ahead of us."
Sure enough not a hundred yards from where they had halted, there stood a little group of the biggest trees the lads had ever set eyes on. The loftiest towered fully two hundred feet above the ground, while a roadway could have been cut through its trunk—as is actually the case with another famous specimen of the Sequoia Gigantea.