, and eyes, and hands. He actually hated
her sturdy legs in their boots or puttees--those tireless, pitiless
legs, always twinkling ahead of him, up the trail.

On the fateful day he was tired. He had often been tired to the point of
desperation during the past three weeks. But this was different. Every
step was torture. Every breath was pain. Jessie was a few hundred feet
up the trail, as always, and hallooing to him every dozen paces. The
Harvard hellions were doing the chamois ahead of her. The rest of the
party were toiling along behind. One guide was just ahead. Another,
leading two horses, bringing up the rear. Suddenly, desperately,
Florian knew he must rest. He would fling himself on a bed of moss by
the side of the trail, in the shade, near a stunted, wind-tortured
timber-line pine, and let the whole procession pass him, and then catch
up with them before they disappeared.

He stepped to the side of the narrow trail, almost indiscernible at this
height, flung himself down with a little groan of relief, and shut his
sun-seared eyes. The voices of the others came to him. There was little
conversation. He heard Jessie's accursed halloo. Then the soft thud of
the pack-horses' hoofs, the creak of the saddles. He must get up and
follow now. In a minute. In a minute. In a m----

He must have slept there for two hours. When he awoke the light had
changed and the air was chill. He sat up, bewildered. He rose. He looked
about, called, hallooed, shouted, did all the futile frenzied things
that a city man does who is lost in the mountains, and, knowing he is
lost, is panic-stricken. The trail, of course! He looked for it, and
there was no trail, to his town-wise eyes. He ran hither and thither,
and back to hither again. He went forward, seemingly, and found himself
back whence he started. He looked for cairns, for tree-blazes, for any
one of the signs of which he had learned in the last three weeks. He
found none. He called again, shrilly. A terror seized him. Terror of
those grim, menacing, towering mountain masses. He ran round and round
and round; darted backward and forward; called; stumbled; fell, and
subsided, beaten.

He had a tiny box of matches with him, but little else. He had found the
trail difficult enough without being pack-burdened. Food? He bethought
himself of a little blue tin box in his coat pocket. He took it out and
looked at it. Its very name struck terror to his heart.

U. S. Emergency Ration. I