Here we soon killed a deer, and leaving the greater part of the carcass for our companions, pushed on another day across the mountains. We had at last sighted the prairies from our lofty heights, when, pressed by hunger, I was so ill advised as to eat some of the berries we found hanging to the bushes. As a result I suffered such vertigo that I was compelled to lie quiet in camp. But Brown put in the time very well by killing no less than six deer.
Early in the forenoon of the sixth, as we hastened down out of the mountains, we again came within earshot of the torrential river of the gorge. Drawn by the sound, we scrambled around the point of an out-jutting ridge, and found ourselves on the river bank where it flowed from the gorge. It was not the first time I had stood on that selfsame spot.
"Good God!" I groaned. "After all our toil, and only this!"
"You may well say it, John," echoed a melancholy voice from beneath the cliff upstream.
"Montgomery!" I cried. "You here?"
He appeared from around a big rock, sad and dejected; but at sight of my companion, instantly assumed a look of unbending resolve.
"We scattered," he explained, as I grasped his hand. "The others took the horses up out of the gorge by the least difficult of the side ravines. I followed your trace down into the midst of that awesome cleft and up the icy ascent. But I lost the trace on the mountain top, and so came on down here—"
"To find that, after all our toil and privation, it is not the Red River!" I cried.
"Ah, well, it is something to have rounded the headwaters of the Arkansas," he replied. He turned to Brown: "You will find two of your fellows downstream at the old camp. Join them, and see what the three of you can do toward killing meat against the coming of the others."
"Aye, sir!" responded Brown, with ready salute.