grave posts,
and was eager to go on.

"That must have been seventy-five years ago," commented Rob. "Perhaps
small-pox killed off the villagers who built this little town. See, the
wind and the weather have polished these posts until they are white as
silver. Well, I don't know but I'm ready to go on myself."

Shouldering the packs which they had put down when they paused for their
investigation, they took their way on up the ancient trail made by the
bears and possibly once beaten by human feet. Once they came upon the
fresh trail of a giant bear which had passed the night before, according
to Skookie, but as the animal had swung off to the left and out of their
course, they made no attempt to follow it; and if truth be told, they
seemed now so far from home in this new part of the country, and were so
depressed by the thought of the abandoned village, that something of
their hunting ardor was cooled for the time. The walking across the mile
of meadow-like tundra was hard enough, and they were glad when they
reached the rockier bank of the stream which came down, broad and
shallow in some places, narrow and tumbling in others. Here sometimes
they waded in the water to escape the tangled thickets of alder
interspersed with the prickly "devil's club," peculiar to all Alaska--a
fiendish sort of plant covered with small spines, which grows in all
fantastic shapes, but which manages to slap one somewhere, no matter
where one steps upon it, and whose little prickly points detach
themselves and remain in the flesh. Our young explorers, however, were
used to Alaska wilderness travel, and they took all of this much as
matter of course, pushing steadily on up the valley until they reached a
fork, where to the right lay rather better going and larger trees.

They concluded to bear up the right-hand canyon, and, pausing only for a
bit to eat, about the middle of the afternoon, they had perhaps gone
six or eight miles from the sea-shore when they concluded to camp for
the night.

They were now at the foot of a dense mountain forest, where the shadows
lay thick and cold, and there seemed something sinister in the silence
all about them. None the less, they soon had a good camp-fire going, and
with the axe they proceeded to make a sort of lean-to shelter out of
pine boughs. Rob picked out a place near a big fallen log, drove in two
crotches a little higher than his head, and placed across them a long
pole; then from the log to th