e them forward at all.

They seemed to sense a great hopelessness in their undertaking. Usually
well-trained pack horses will follow their leader without question, walk
almost in his tracks, and the rider in front only has to show the way.
After the first few days of grinding toil, the morale of the entire
outfit began to break. The horses broke away into thickets on each side;
and time after time, one hour upon another, the horsemen had to round
them up again. When they came to the great rivers--wild tributaries of
the Yuga--they had to follow up the streams for days in search of a
place to ford. Then they were obliged to carry the packs across in small
loads, making trip after trip with the utmost patience and toil. The
horses, broken in spirit, took the wild waters just as they climbed the
steep slopes, with little care whether they lived or died.

The days passed, June and July. Ever they moved at a slower pace. One of
the horses, giving up on a steep pitch and frenzied by Ray's cruel,
lashing blows, fell off the edge of the trail and shot down like a
plummet two hundred feet into the canyon below--and thereupon it became
necessary not only to spend the rest of the day in retrieving and
repairing the supplies that had fallen with him, but also to heap bigger
loads on the backs of the remaining horses. And always they were faced
by the cruel possibility that this whole, mighty labor was in
vain,--that Ben and Beatrice might have gone to their deaths in the
rapids, weeks before.

The food stores brought for the journey were rapidly depleted. The
result was that they had to depend more and more upon a diet of meat.
Men can hold up fairly well on meat alone, particularly if it has a fair
amount of fat, but the effort of hunting and drying the flesh into jerky
served to cut down their speed.

The constant delays, the grinding, blasting toil of the day's march, and
particularly the ever-recurring crises of ford and steep, made serious
inroads on the morale of the three men. Just the work of urging on the
exhausted horses drained their nervous energy in a frightful stream: the
uncertainty of their quest, the danger, the scarcity of any food but
meat, and most of all the burning hatred in their hearts for the man who
had forced the expedition upon them combined to torment them; even now,
Ben Darby had received no little measure of vengeance.

No experience of their individual lives had ever presented such a daily
ordea