Many a strange shift were they put to. Once Bill had to fell a great
spruce across a twenty-foot crevice. It took him two days to hew it
flat so that his horses could be led over. The depth was bottomless to
the eye, but from far below rose the cavernous growl of rushing water,
and Hazel held her breath as each animal stepped gingerly over the
narrow bridge. One misstep--

Once they climbed three weary days up a precipitous mountain range,
and, turned back in sight of the crest by an impassable cliff, were
forced to back track and swing in a fifty-mile detour.

In an air line Roaring Bill's destination lay approximately two hundred
miles north--almost due north--of Hazleton. By the devious route they
were compelled to take the distance was doubled, more than doubled.
And their rate of progress now fell short of a ten-mile average.
September was upon them. The days dwindled in length, and the nights
grew to have a frosty nip.

Early and late he pushed on. Two camp necessities were fortunately
abundant, grass and water. Even so, the stress of the trail told on
the horses. They lost flesh. The extreme steepness of succeeding
hills bred galls under the heavy packs. They grew leg weary, no longer
following each other with sprightly step and heads high. Hazel pitied
them, for she herself was trail weary beyond words. The vagabond
instinct had fallen asleep. The fine aura of romance no longer hovered
over the venture.

Sometimes when dusk ended the day's journey and she swung her stiffened
limbs out of the saddle, she would cheerfully have foregone all the
gold in the North to be at her ease before the fireplace in their
distant cabin, with her man's head nesting in her lap, and no toll of
weary miles looming sternly on the morrow's horizon. It was all work,
trying work, the more trying because she sensed a latent uneasiness on
her husband's part, an uneasiness she could never induce him to embody
in words. Nevertheless, it existed, and she resented its existence--a
trouble she could not share. But she could not put her finger on the
cause, for Bill merely smiled a denial when she mentioned it.

Nor did she fathom the cause until upon a certain day which fell upon
the end of a week's wearisome traverse of the hardest country yet
encountered. Up and up and still higher he bore into a range of
beetling crags, and always his gaze was fixed steadfastly and dubiously
on the serrated backbone toward which they