But Lollo shook the dust of the trail from his four white feet, in defiance of the crows; nor was he ever known to hide the light of his white nose under a bushel, except when there were oats in the bottom of it.
Jack’s mother advised him to make sure of his lunch by taking it with him, in case John might be absent from the camp in the hills. But for some reason (it is very difficult to know a boy’s real reasons) Jack preferred to take the chances of the trip without provisions.
His father told him that when he had ridden as far as John Turner’s, by the river trail, he must take the upper trail which runs along the bluffs.
As it turned out, this was mistaken advice. The upper trail was not a good one, as Jack soon discovered; and in certain places, where it was highest and steepest above the river, it had been nearly rubbed out by the passage of herds of stock, crowding and climbing past one another and sliding over the dry and gritty slope.
In one spot it disappeared as a footing altogether, and here Jack was obliged to dismount and creep along on all fours, Lollo following as he could. A horse can go, it is said, wherever a man can go without using his hands. As Jack used his hands it was hardly fair to expect Lollo to follow; but the pony did so. These Western horses seem as ready as the men to risk themselves on dangerous trails, and quite as sure of what they are about.
What with all these ups and downs, the breeze on the bluffs, and the natural state of a boy’s appetite about midday, Jack was hoping that lunch would be ready at John’s camp by the time he reached it; and it is possible that he wished he had not been so proud, and had taken a “bite” in his pocket, as his mother advised him.
John’s camp was in a gulch where a cool stream came down from the hills. There were shade and grass and flowers in the season of flowers. The prospect-holes were higher up beneath the basalt bluffs which rise like palisades along the river. Earlier prospectors had driven tunnels, such as prisoners dig under the foundations of a wall, some extending a few feet, some farther, under the base of the bluffs. John was pushing these burrows farther still and “panning out” the dirt he obtained in his progress.
Jack soon found the sluice-boxes that John had built, and the “head” he had made by damming the little stream, but he could not find John nor John’s camp.
He argued with himself that John would not be likely to “make camp” below the pool of water; it was clear and cold, much better for drinking than the murky river water. His searching, therefore, was all up the gulch instead of down toward the river; but nowhere could he discover a sign of John nor of his belongings.
Jack’s mother asked him afterwards, when he told his story, why he did not call or make a noise of some kind. He said that he did whistle, but the place was so “still and lonesome” that he “did not like the sound of it.”