“But,” he thought a moment later, “as she has said, we must hope. It would break her heart.”
Next day they started early. There was hope in each heart that they might make the pass before sunset and camp for the night on the other side.
One thing was in their favor; they soon passed from the zone of spring into the high level where winter still reigned. No longer was the snow soft under their tread, no longer were they obliged to skirt the banks of streams for a safe passage. There were no streams. All was ice and snow and barren rocks.
“Look at it,” Johnny said after an hour of desperate struggle up an all but perpendicular wall. “Not a shrub, not a scrub birch or fir. Barren as the hills of doom. No living creature could be here. Tonight we go supperless and without a fire.”
Faye Duncan shuddered. It was mid-afternoon, and the smoking mountain peak still loomed far above them.
“No wood, no food, no shelter!” Gladly would she have turned back. But one look at the grim look of determination on the old Scot’s face sealed her lips.
“He crossed these mountains in his prime,” she told herself. “He will cross them again or die.”
“Look!” Johnny pointed excitedly toward a sloping waste of barren rocks.
“What is it?”
“Something moving over there.”