The Breaking Point - Page 156/275

By mid-afternoon they were obliged to rest their horses and let them

graze, and the necessity of food for themselves became insistent. Dick

stretched out and was immediately asleep, but the reporter could not

rest. The magnitude of his undertaking obsessed him. They had covered

perhaps twenty miles since leaving the cabin, and the railroad was still

sixty miles away. With fresh horses they could have made it by dawn of

the next morning, but he did not believe their jaded animals could go

much farther. The country grew worse instead of better. A pass ahead,

which they must cross, was full of snow.

He was anxious, too, as to Dick's physical condition. The twitching was

gone, but he was very pale and he slept like a man exhausted and at his

physical limit. But the necessity of crossing the pass before nightfall

or of waiting until dawn to do it drove Bassett back from an anxious

reconnoitering of the trail at five o'clock, to rouse the sleeping man

and start on again.

Near the pass, however, Dick roused himself and took the lead.

"Let me ahead, Bassett," he said peremptorily. "And give your horse his

head. He'll take care of you if you give him a chance."

Bassett was glad to fall back. He was exhausted and nervous. The trail

frightened him. It clung to the side of a rocky wall, twisting and

turning on itself; it ran under milky waterfalls of glacial water, and

higher up it led over an ice field which was a glassy bridge over a

rushing stream beneath. To add to their wretchedness mosquitoes hung

about them in voracious clouds, and tiny black gnats which got into

their eyes and their nostrils and set the horses frantic.

Once across the ice field Dick's horse fell and for a time could not get

up again. He lay, making ineffectual efforts to rise, his sides heaving,

his eyes rolling in distress. They gave up then, and prepared to make

such camp as they could.

With the setting of the sun it had grown bitterly cold, and Bassett was

forced to light a fire. He did it under the protection of the mountain

wall, and Dick, after unsaddling his fallen horse, built a rough shelter

of rocks against the wind. After a time the exhausted horse got up, but

there was no forage, and the two animals stood disconsolate, or made

small hopeless excursions, noses to the ground, among the moss and scrub

pines.

Before turning in Bassett divided the remaining contents of the flask

between them, and his last cigarettes. Dick did not talk. He sat, his

back to the shelter, facing the fire, his mind busy with what Bassett

knew were bitter and conflicting thoughts. Once, however, as the

reporter was dozing off, Dick spoke.