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Now, to repeat, the man was not malicious, neither was he bad, but as he debated whether he should back-track there came to him the memory of his humiliation on the Imnachuck divide. So! His brains were in his feet, eh? Folsom had strangled him until he kicked, when, all the time, they had been on the right trail.
"Do you know where you are?" Folsom inquired. "Certainly." Harkness studied the panorama spread before him. "That blue gulch yonder is the Imnachuck." He pointed to a valley perhaps four miles away. A fine snow began to sift downward. The mountain peaks to the northward became obscured as by thin smoke, the afternoon shortened with alarming swiftness.
There was abject terror in his eyes. He reeled away, but saw there was no safety in flight. "Own up!" Folsom commanded. "You said this was the way," the pathfinder whimpered. "You made me turn off " Folsom uttered a growl and advanced a step, whereupon his victim gurgled: "D-don't touch me! That's the Imnachuck, so help me God! I'm I'm almost sure it is." "Almost!"
They left their stove and tent and grub-box behind, planning to make a road-house every night except during the long jump from the Imnachuck to Crooked River. They argued that it was worth a hundred dollars to sleep once under the open sky. The fruits of that sporting enterprise were bitter; the trader won his bet, but he never cashed it in.
Leaving the last road-house behind them, they came into a hilly section of great white domes, high hog-backs, and ramifying creeks, each one exactly like its neighbor; two days' travel through this, according to Harkness, should have brought them to the Imnachuck, where there was food and shelter again.
But noon of the next day found Harkness still plodding up the river with the dogs close at his heels. The hills to the northward were growing higher, and Folsom's general knowledge of direction told him that they were in danger of going too far. "I think the Imnachuck is over there," said he. Harkness hesitated, then he nodded: "Right-o! It's just over that low saddle."
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