She saw a queer scar on an old pine before her when she broke through some brush, and she was studying its strange formation when Tally came up behind her. He recognized the blaze and laughed.
“Betty find him! Come see!” shouted he.
The others galloped across the park and stared at the deeply scarred pine, while Tally read its meaning to them.
“It must have been blazed in the days of the First People,” said Julie.
But little attention was paid her remark, as every one was eager to go on. Tally broke a way through the jungle of bush and young timber, and finally they all came out to the silent woods again.
They rode through twilight forests of gigantic red-spruce trees, measuring from three to six feet in diameter and towering over a hundred feet in height. The ground under these was carpeted with pine needles, which lay, year after year, until no sound echoed from the hoofbeats upon them.
Looking in any direction, the scouts could see only dense forests, with not a crevice in their vaulted roofs of green where the sun might filter through. These pines seemed to waft down virgin incense upon the heads of the riders, who fully appreciated the still beauty of the place, and the velvety corridors they went along.
Then the trail became steeper, and the trees grew smaller, allowing great splashes of sunshine to bask here and there upon the passive treetrunks, or to sprawl out upon the thick pine needles that covered the ground.
After riding for several hours, the scouts left the pine forest behind, and rode out upon a faint trail that ran through aspen brakes. Now and then they came to parks where the trail lost itself, and every one had to seek for it again.
A great deal of time was lost in each park they came to, over thus finding the trail, as so many misleading ones were made in the thick buffalo grass by wild animals that came to graze there. The only thing Tally relied upon for the right way was by finding a blaze upon an old tree nearby.