ring strength whistled eerily about the desolation
of rock and snow. They were wet to the knees, and Weston fancied that
the girls' cheerfulness was a trifle forced. He was ready to admit
that he was somewhat stiff and weary, for he had carried the
provisions and the heavy blankets that the girls had now tucked round
them.

The latter commenced to flag when they started again; and, as it
happened, the strip of bench they followed rapidly narrowed in and
grew rougher until it became little more than a sloping ledge with the
hillside dropping almost sheer away from it. It was strewn with great
fragments that had fallen from the wall of rock above, and banks of
snow lay packed between them in the hollows. Every now and then one or
another of the party sank deep on stepping down from some ledge of
slippery stone. They were on the northern side of a spur of the higher
range, though they were approaching the angle where it broke off and
fell in a steep declivity facing west. This point they had to turn
before they reached the spot from which Kinnaird purposed descending
to the river. They made very slow progress, while the shadow of the
peaks grew blacker and longer across the hills. At length, when they
had almost reached the corner, Kinnaird stopped to consider, and the
girls sat down with evident alacrity. This time he looked at Weston,
and his manner implied that he was willing to consider any views that
he or the others might express.

"I'm afraid that I have been a little at fault," he admitted. "In
fact, I quite expected that we would be down again by this time. It is
now well on in the afternoon, and, as we have probably covered about
two-thirds of the distance, it would not be advisable to go back as we
came up."

"That," said Arabella Kinnaird decisively, "is unthinkable."

She turned to Weston, who nodded.

"Anyway, the canoes have gone on, which means that there would be
nothing to eat until we came up with them," he said. "It must be eight
or nine miles, by water, from our last camp to where they are to wait
for us, and the ladies couldn't go so far through the thick timber in
the valley."

Kinnaird looked beneath him.

"Well, I don't think anybody could get straight down from here," he
said.

It was clearly beyond the power of those who were with him, as they
quite realized. A few yards away, the hillside fell almost
precipitously for perhaps a thousand feet to the tops of the pines
below. Part of it