Along a cliff face the trail narrowed horizontally, leading across a foot-wide ledge overhanging a sheer drop of fifty feet and covered with loose shale and scrub plants. Nothing, of course, to an experienced climber—a foot-wide ledge might as well be a four-lane superhighway. Kendricks made a nervous joke about a tightrope walker, but when his turn came he picked his way securely, without losing balance. The amateurs—Lerrys Ridenow, Regis, Rafe—came across without hesitation, but I wondered how well they would have done at a less secure altitude; to a real mountaineer, a footpath is a footpath, whether in a meadow, above a two-foot drop, a thirty-foot ledge, or a sheer mountain face three miles above the first level spot.
After crossing the ledge the going was harder. A steeper trail, in places nearly imperceptible, led between thick scrub and overhanging trees, thickly forested. In spots their twisted roots obscured the trail; in others the persistent growth had thrust aside rocks and dirt. We had to make our way through tangles of underbrush which would have been nothing to a trailman, but which made our ground-accustomed bodies ache with the effort of getting over or through them; and once the track was totally blocked by a barricade of tangled dead brushwood, borne down on floodwater after a sudden thaw or cloud-burst. We had to work painfully around it over a three-hundred-foot rockslide, which we could cross only one at a time, crab-fashion, leaning double to balance ourselves; and no one complained now about the rope.
Toward noon I had the first intimation that we were not alone on the slope.
At first it was no more than a glimpse of motion out of the corner of my eyes, the shadow of a shadow. The fourth time I saw it, I called softly to Kyla: "See anything?"
"I was beginning to think it was my eyes, or the altitude. I saw, Jason."
"Look for a spot where we can take a break," I directed. We climbed along a shallow ledge, the faint imperceptible flutters in the brushwood climbing with us on either side. I muttered to the girl, "I'll be glad when we get clear of this. At least we'll be able to see what's coming after us!"
"If it comes to a fight," she said surprisingly, "I'd rather fight on gravel than ice."
Over a rise, there was a roaring sound; Kyla swung up and balanced on a rock-wedged tree root, cupped her mouth to her hands and called, "Rapids!"
I pulled myself up to the edge of the drop and stood looking down into the narrow gully. Here the narrow track we had been following was crossed and obscured by the deep, roaring rapids of a mountain stream.