."

"They are yours for the present. I admit that," said the lad, "but I
shall get them back again. Meanwhile, if you're willing, I'll go to
sleep."

He thought it best to assume a perfect coolness, even if he did not feel
it, and Heraka said that he might sleep, although they bound his arms
and ankles again, loosely, however, so that he suffered no pain and but
little inconvenience. He fell asleep almost at once, and did not awake
until old Inmutanka aroused him at dawn.

After breakfast he was put on the pony again, blindfolded, and they rode
all day long in a direction of which he was ignorant, but, as he
believed, over low hills, and, as he knew, among bushes, because they
often reached out and pulled at his legs. Nevertheless his sense of an
infinite distance being created between him and his own world increased.
All this traveling through the dark was like widening a gulf. It had not
distance only, but depth, and the weight it pressed upon him was
cumulative, making him feel that he had been riding in invisible regions
for weeks, instead of two days.

Being deprived of his eyes for the time being, the other four primal
senses again became more acute. He heard a wind blowing but it was not
the free wind of the plains that meets no obstacle. Instead, it brought
back to him a song that was made by the moving air playing softly upon
leaf and bough. Hence, he inferred that they were still ascending, and
had come into better watered regions where the bushes had grown to the
height of trees now in full leaf.

Once they crossed a rather deep creek, and deliberately letting his foot
drop down into it, he found the water quite cold, which was proof to him
that they were going back toward the ridges, and that this current was
chill, because it flowed from great heights, perhaps from a glacier.
They made no stop at noon, merely eating a little pemmican, Will's share
being handed to him by Inmutanka. He ate it as he rode along still
blindfolded.

The ponies, wiry and strong though they were, soon began to go much more
slowly, and the captive was sure that the ascent was growing steeper. He
was confirmed in this by the fact that the wind, although it was
mid-afternoon, the hottest part of the day, had quite a touch of
coolness. They must have been ascending steadily ever since they began
the march.

He soon noticed another fact. The ears that had grown uncommonly acute
discerned fewer hoofbeats about him. He was firm i