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Most of the visitors do not like this part, and are content to stop at the end of the horse-trail and look down on the dull-brown flood from the edge of the Indian Garden Plateau. By the new Hance trail, excepting a few daringly steep spots, you can ride all the way to the river, where there is a good spacious camp-ground in a mesquit-grove.
"Well," said Rob, "we know something about this country ourselves now, and we'll make a map of it some time, perhaps a better one than we have now." "Yes," said Jesse, "but who can draw in that horse-trail from Hudson's Hope to the head of the steamboat transport? I'd like to see that trail!" "I suppose we could get on the steamboat some time before long if we wanted to," said John.
Where the ditch plunges through the mountain, it climbs over; and where the ditch leaps a gorge on a flume, the horse-trail takes advantage of the ditch and crosses on top of the flume. That careless trail thinks nothing of travelling up or down the faces of precipices.
A man, on foot, cutting his way through, might advance a mile a day, but at the end of a week he would be a wreck, and he would have to crawl hastily back if he wanted to get out before the vegetation overran the passage way he had cut. O'Shaughnessy was the daring engineer who conquered the jungle and the gorges, ran the ditch and made the horse-trail.
"Ah, senor, the risks of war are many." Sanchez' teeth flashed. He clucked to his horse and the little cavalcade wound, single-file, up a narrow horse-trail toward the hills. They passed many bands of horsemen, all armed, saluting Sanchez as their chief. Among them were owners and vaqueros from a score of ranches.
Not until dawn did he steal out cautiously from his shelter of thorn. The sun gave him courage and confidence again and he began wandering back through the valley, the scent of the horse-trail growing fainter and fainter until at last it disappeared entirely.
The means of access to points of interest are constantly changing; the rough horse-trail of to-day becomes the stage-road of to-morrow and the railway of the day after. The conservative clinging to the old, so common in Europe, has no place in the New World; an apparently infinitesimal advantage will occasion a bouleversement that is by no means infinitesimal.
Its bed was covered with small pebbles, and a horse-trail upon these was scarcely to be followed, as the track only displaced the pebbles, leaving no "sign" that could be "read" to any advantage. Old and new foot-marks were all the same. Into this ravine the party descended, and, after travelling down it for five or six miles, halted.
He built enduringly, in concrete and masonry, and made one of the most remarkable water-farms in the world. Every little runlet and dribble is harvested and conveyed by subterranean channels to the main ditch. But so heavily does it rain at times that countless spillways let the surplus escape to the sea. The horse-trail is not very wide. Like the engineer who built it, it dares anything.
His companions clung to the rock till another canoe came shooting down-stream, when lines were hoisted to the castaways, and they were hauled ashore. Where the Clearwater comes into the Thompson they found the fur-trader's horse-trail and tramped the remaining hundred miles overland south to Kamloops.
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