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By mid-afternoon they were obliged to rest their horses and let them
graze, and the necessity of food for themselves became insistent. Dick
stretched out and was immediately asleep, but the reporter could not
rest. The magnitude of his undertaking obsessed him. They had covered
perhaps twenty miles since leaving the cabin, and the railroad was still
sixty miles away. With fresh horses they could have made it by dawn of
the next morning, but he did not believe their jaded animals could go
much farther. The country grew worse instead of better. A pass ahead,
which they must cross, was full of snow.
He was anxious, too, as to Dick's physical condition. The twitching was
gone, but he was very pale and he slept like a man exhausted and at his
physical limit. But the necessity of crossing the pass before nightfall
or of waiting until dawn to do it drove Bassett back from an anxious
reconnoitering of the trail at five o'clock, to rouse the sleeping man
and start on again.
Near the pass, however, Dick roused himself and took the lead.
"Let me ahead, Bassett," he said peremptorily. "And give your horse his
head. He'll take care of you if you give him a chance."
Bassett was glad to fall back. He was exhausted and nervous. The trail
frightened him. It clung to the side of a rocky wall, twisting and
turning on itself; it ran under milky waterfalls of glacial water, and
higher up it led over an ice field which was a glassy bridge over a
rushing stream beneath. To add to their wretchedness mosquitoes hung
about them in voracious clouds, and tiny black gnats which got into
their eyes and their nostrils and set the horses frantic.
Once across the ice field Dick's horse fell and for a time could not get
up again. He lay, making ineffectual efforts to rise, his sides heaving,
his eyes rolling in distress. They gave up then, and prepared to make
such camp as they could.
With the setting of the sun it had grown bitterly cold, and Bassett was
forced to light a fire. He did it under the protection of the mountain
wall, and Dick, after unsaddling his fallen horse, built a rough shelter
of rocks against the wind. After a time the exhausted horse got up, but
there was no forage, and the two animals stood disconsolate, or made
small hopeless excursions, noses to the ground, among the moss and scrub
pines.
Before turning in Bassett divided the remaining contents of the flask
between them, and his last cigarettes. Dick did not talk. He sat, his
back to the shelter, facing the fire, his mind busy with what Bassett
knew were bitter and conflicting thoughts. Once, however, as the
reporter was dozing off, Dick spoke.