"Then we'll have to make it after dark," said Lew. "For the canteen is about empty and we've got to have water. I'm so thirsty I could drink a gallon."
They said no more, but pushed ahead as fast as their weary legs would carry them.
"We're not far from the top now," Lew said after a time. "I see our old landmark over to the left. It isn't more than half a mile from that to the water. We'll make it all right."
But he had hardly gone fifty yards before he stopped and cried out. Before him lay a blackened, desolate area that stretched the remainder of the way to the summit. Fire had swept over the spot. But it was not the fact that fire had been through the region that made Lew cry out. Fire and subsequent storms had practically leveled the stand of trees between the spot where Lew stood and the summit. Here and there a blackened tree thrust its bare trunk upward, limbless, its top gone, a ragged, spectral, pitiful remnant of what had been a beautiful tree. But mostly the thick stand of young poles had been laid low even as a scythe levels a field of grain. And these fallen poles lay in almost impassable confusion, twisted and tangled and in places heaped in towering masses. A barbed wire entanglement would hardly have been a worse obstacle. To penetrate the mass, even in the light of noon, would have been no easy work; but to cross the area now, with dusk fast deepening to darkness, was indeed a difficult task.
"Well," said Lew, after a few searching glances at the burned area, "we've got to go on, and we might as well plow straight through it. I can't see that one way looks any easier than another."
They went on, slowly, painfully. Now they were forced to crawl underneath a fallen tree, now to climb over one. Again and again their way was completely blocked by high barriers of interlocked trunks and branches. Sometimes they had to mount the fallen trunks and cautiously walk from one to another. Darkness came on apace. They could hardly see. The flash-light was brought forth, the last drop in the canteen swallowed, and they started forward on their final push.
"It's only a few hundred yards to the top, now," said Lew. "It will be easier going down the other side."
Painfully slow was their progress. More than once each of them tripped and fell. The sharp ends of the broken branches tore their clothes and scratched them badly. But silently, doggedly, they pushed on. At last there remained but one barrier between them and the summit. It was a great pile of fallen trunks that had no visible ending. There was nothing to do but go over it. From one log to another they scrambled up, each helping the other, advancing a foot at a time, feeling the way with hands and feet and searching out a path with the little light. So high were the trees piled that at times the boys walked ten feet in air, making their way gingerly along the slender trunks. Eventually they got beyond the log barrier and the remainder of the way to the top was more open. At last they stood on the very summit.
"I wonder where our landmark is," queried Lew, flashing his light this way and that. "I understand now why we saw it so plainly from below. There were no standing trees to hide it. We never saw it from so far away before."
The landmark was a great, upright rock like a huge chimney. It was not far distant and presently Lew found it. The boys made their way to it.