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Dale and Roy drove the pack-animals across the stream, and followed, going deep to the flanks of their horses. Bo rode into the foaming water as if she had been used to it all her days. A slip, a fall, would have meant that Bo must drown in that mountain torrent. Ranger trotted straight to the edge, and there, obedient to Helen's clutch on the bridle, he halted.
Then she looked out again. The riders were close at hand now. The foremost one, a man of Herculean build, jumped his mount across the brook, and leaped off while he hauled the horse to a stop. The second rider came close behind him; the others approached leisurely, with the gait of the pack-animals. "Ho, Kells!" called the big man. His voice had a loud, bold, sonorous kind of ring.
Waving his hand as a farewell, he retreated again into the wood: when I again looked round he was not to be seen. We galloped forward, the Dominie, Martin, and Dio leading the pack-animals, which as they were lightly laden, kept up with us; Dan and I rode alongside each other ahead of the rest. "This is capital fun!" cried my young brother; "I would not have missed it on any account.
Our camp equipage, which was very welcome, was uninjured, together with a few knives and other articles of iron. So serious was our loss, that it became absolutely necessary to return to the nearest settlement to obtain fresh pack-animals and a supply of powder. By the loss of our baggage, we were reduced to hard fare.
On these plains the Telegraphic Commission uses motor-trucks; and these now to relieve the mules and oxen; for some of them, especially among the oxen, already showed the effects of the strain. Travelling in a wild country with a pack-train is not easy on the pack-animals.
"Say, is that a usual morning's task with the pack-animals?" asked Shefford. "They're all pretty decent to-day, except Dynamite," replied Withers. "She's got to be worked out." Shefford felt both amusement and consternation.
The squalid inn was almost deserted, for the overnight lodgers had departed with their carts and pack-animals before dawn, so that I had not to face the individual whom I had so unceremoniously dispossessed of his bed, although I left a dollar for him with the innkeeper, knowing full well it would never reach him, but choosing thus to ease a somewhat guilty conscience.
But early you will learn that while it is foolish to carry a single ounce more than will pay in comfort or convenience for its own transportation, it is equally foolish to refuse the comforts or conveniences that modified circumstance will permit you. To carry only a forest equipment with pack-animals would be as silly as to carry only a pack-animal outfit on a Pullman car.
The ponies plodded slowly upward, to turn and plod up the next angle of the trail, without loitering and without haste. When Dorothy checked her pony to gaze at some new vista, the pack-animals rested, waiting for the word to go on again. Lorry, awakened to a new charm in Dorothy, rode in a silence that needed no interpreter. At a bend in the trail, Dorothy reined up. "Oh, I just noticed!
Under the shade of a lonely tree in the courtyard, the villagers connected with the assault case sat in a picturesque group, looking like a chromo-lithograph of a camp in a book of Eastern travel. One missed the obligatory thread of smoke in the foreground and the pack-animals grazing. A blank yellow wall rose behind overtopping the tree, reflecting the glare.
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