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"We will have them with us always, little comrade." It was the fourteenth day when they descended the eastern slopes of the Divide, and he knew that they were not far from the Kwadocha and the Finley.
Later on it took them two days to carry their canoe and supplies around a mountain. Fifteen days were spent in making eighty miles. Easier travel followed then. It was the twentieth of June when they made their last camp before reaching the Kwadocha. The sun was still up; but they were tired, utterly exhausted. David looked at his map and at the figures in the notebook he carried.
"Old Towaskook and his tribe are on the Kwadocha," he added, as if seeing a glimmer of hope. "He might. But I doubt it. They're a lazy lot of mongrels, Towaskook's people, who carve things out of wood, to worship. Still, he might. I'll send up a good man with you to influence him, and you'd better take along a couple hundred dollars in supplies as a further inducement." The man was a half-breed.
"You're still seventy miles from the Stikine when you end up at the Kwadocha," he went on, thumbing the map. "Who the devil will you get to take you on from there? Straight over the backbone of the Rockies. No trails. Not even a Post there. Too rough a country. Even the Indians won't live in it." He was silent for a moment, as if reflecting deeply.
He had been thinking as they had climbed up the mountain. Off there, where she was pointing, were his friends, and hers; between them and that wandering tribe of the totem people on the Kwadocha there were no human beings. Nothing but the unbroken peace of the mountains, in which they were safe.
And Mac Veigh, the factor at Hudson's Hope, looked at David in a curious sort of way when David told him where he was going. "You're the first white man to do it," he said an inflection of doubt in his voice. "It's not bad going up the Finly as far as the Kwadocha. But from there...." He shook his head. He was short and thick, and his jaw hung heavy with disapproval.
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