ts way would be shorter, and it would miss Fort
Mowbray altogether, and take up its quarters at the headwaters of Snake
River, to await the coming of the leaders. Abe and Saunders would
conduct this expedition, while Kars and Bill traveled via Fort Mowbray,
with Peigan Charley, and an outfit of packs and packmen such as it was
their habit to journey with.

The start of the expedition was without herald or trumpet. It left its
camp in the damp of a gray spring morning, when, under cover of a
gradually lightening dawn, it struck through a narrow valley, where
feet and hoofs sank deep into a mire of liquid mud.

To the west the hills rose amidst clouds of saturating mist. To the
east the rolling country mounted slowly till it reached the foot of
vast glacial crests, almost at the limit of human vision. The purpling
distance to the west suggested fastnesses remote enough from the
northern man, yet in those deep canyons, those wide valleys, along
creek-bank and river bed, the busy prospector was ruthlessly
prosecuting his quest for the elusive "color," and the mining engineer
was probing for Nature's most deeply hidden secrets.

This was the Eldorado John Kars had known since his boyhood's days,
when the fierce fight against starvation had been bitter indeed. Few
of the secrets of those western hills were unknown to him. But now
that his pouch was full, and the pangs of hunger were only a remote
memory, and these hills claimed him only that he was lord of properties
within their heart which yielded him fortune almost automatically, his
eyes were turned to the north, and to the hidden world eastwards.

It was a trail of mud and washout. It was a trail of landslide and
flood. It was a dripping land, dank with melting mists, and awash with
the slush of the thaw. The skies were pouring out their flood of
summer promise, those warming rains which must always be endured before
the hordes of flies and mosquitoes swarm to announce the real open
season.

But these men were hard beyond all complaint at physical discomfort.
If they cursed the land they haunted, it was because it was their habit
so to curse. It was the curse of the tongue rather than of the heart.
For they were men who owed all that they were, or ever hoped to be, to
this fierce country north of "sixty."

Spring was over all. The northern earth was heaving towards awakening
from its winter slumber. As it was on the trail, so it was on Snake
River, w