"What's the matter?" growled Emerson. "Why don't we get under way?" But the other replied:
"Not to-day. Them tips are smoking, see!" He indicated certain gauzy streamers that floated like vapor from the highest pinnacles. "That's snow, dry snow, and it shows that the wind is blowing up there. We dassent tackle it."
"Do you mean we must lie here waiting for an absolutely calm day?"
"Exactly."
"Why, it may be a week!"
"It may be two of them; then, again, it may be all right to-morrow."
"Nonsense! That breeze won't hurt anybody."
"Breeze!" Balt laughed. "It's more like a tornado up yonder. No, we've just got to take it easy till the right moment comes, and then make a dash. It's thirty miles to the nearest stick of timber; and once you get into the Pass, you can't stop till you're through."
Still unconvinced, and surly at the delay, Emerson resigned himself, while Balt saw to their sled, tended the dogs, and made final preparations. "Fingerless" Fraser lay flat on his back and nursed a pair of swollen tendons that had been galled by his snowshoe thongs, reviling at the fortune that had cast him into such inhospitable surroundings, heaping anathemas upon the head of him who had invented snowshoes, complaining of everything in general, from the indigestible quality of baking-powder bread to the odor of the guide who crouched stolidly beside the stove, feeding it with green willows and twisted withes.
The next dawn showed the mountain peaks limned like clean-cut ivory against the steel-blue sky, and as they crept up through the defiles the air was so motionless that the smoke of their pipes hung about their heads, while the creak of their soles upon the dry surface of the snow roused echoes from the walls on either side. At first their progress was rapid, but in time the drifts grew deeper, and they came to bluffs where they were forced to notch footholds, unpack their load and relay it to the top, then free the dogs, and haul the sled up with a rope, hand over hand. These labors, besides being intensely fatiguing, delayed them considerably, added to which the higher altitudes were covered with a soft eider-down that reached nearly to their knees and shoved ahead of the sled in great masses. Thus they dragged their burden through instead of over it.