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The smoked and dried meats, the canned things, flour, sealed lard, oatmeal, hard-tack, dried fruits everything was slowly but inevitably giving out day upon day. Before and behind them stretched hummocks of trailless snow. Not an Indian, not a dog train, not even a wild animal, had set foot in that waste for weeks.
Hers always the rides in the open, with the sun at her back and the wind in her face! And hers surely, sooner or later, the nameless adventure which had its inception in the strange yearning of her heart and presaged its fulfilment somewhere down that trailless sage-slope she loved so well!
To enumerate her good points: she was an excellent weight-carrier; took good care of her pack that it never scraped nor bumped; knew all about trails, the possibilities of short cuts, the best way of easing herself downhill; kept fat and healthy in districts where grew next to no feed at all; was past-mistress in the picking of routes through a trailless country.
Several times during the afternoon we lose the trail; we seem to be going across an almost trailless country, and more than once have to call a halt while men are sent to the summit of some neighboring hill to survey the surrounding country for landmarks. At dark we pitch our camp in a grassy hollow, where the horses are made happy with heaps of pulled bottom-grass.
"Stanton tells off four of his savages an' lines out with them for the Red Cloud agency; Bloojacket bein' one. From the Rawhide Buttes to the Red Cloud agency is one hundred even miles as a bullet travels. What makes it more impressive, them one hundred miles is across a trailless country, the same bein' as rocky as Red Dog whiskey an' rough as the life story of a mule.
It was not possible to light a pipe even, a noche triste indeed. Most of the men stood up all night, this being better than lying down in the mud; to march on was impossible, as the country was then trailless, except for the Spanish trail mentioned, to attempt which by night would have been suicide.
Wagon caravans moved on from the railroad into the interior, many going as far as fifty, sixty, a hundred miles over a trailless desert. Homesteaders who had no money and nothing to haul, came through in dilapidated vehicles and lived in tents until they got jobs and earned money to buy lumber. A few came in automobiles. There were more cars seen in the moving caravans now.
And over trailless desert." "All of that. But we're not going across country. We're going by water." "By water? Ban, you are out of your mind. Where is there any waterway?" "Dry Bed Arroyo. It's running bank-full. My boat is waiting there." "But it will be dangerous. Terribly dangerous. Io, you mustn't." "I'll go," said the girl quietly, "if Ban says so." "There's no other way out.
Up through the mighty forests he climbed, through the trailless deep mosses and matted vines, up to the summit of what the white men call Grouse Mountain. For many days he camped there. He ate no food, he drank no water, but sat and sang his medicine-songs through the dark hours and through the day. Before him far beneath his feet lay the narrow strip of land between the two salt waters.
Duggan, the old Duggan of years ago, the Duggan who had planned and dreamed with him, his best friend, was with him now, and the light came back into his face as he looked toward the mountains. Off there, only a few miles distant, was the Little Fork, winding into the heart of the Rockies, seeking out its hidden valleys, its trailless canons, its hidden mysteries.
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