sun shone on the flowers and the snow, on the pail
in which our cocoa was cooking, on the barrels of our unused guns and
the buckles of the saddles. We watched the pack-horses coming down, tiny
pin-point figures, oddly distorted by the great packs. And we rested for
the descent.

I do not know why we thought that descent from Cascade Pass on the
Pacific side was going to be easy. It was by far the most nerve-racking
part of the trip. Yet we started off blithely enough. Perhaps Buddy knew
that he was the first horse to make that desperate excursion. He
developed a strange nervousness, and took to leaping off the trail in
bad places, so that one moment I was a part of the procession and the
next was likely to be six feet above the trail on a rocky ledge, with no
apparent way to get down.

We had expected that there would be less snow on the western slope, but
at the beginning of the trip we found snow everywhere. And whereas
before the rock-slides had been wretchedly uncomfortable but at
comparatively low altitudes, now we found ourselves climbing across
slides which hugged the mountain thousands of feet above the valley.

Our nerves began to go, too, I think, on that last day. We were plainly
frightened, not for ourselves but each for the other. There were many
places where to dislodge a stone was to lose it as down a bottomless
well. There was one frightful spot where it was necessary to go through
a waterfall on a narrow ledge slippery with moss, where the water
dropped straight, uncounted feet to the valley below.

The Little Boy paused blithely, his reins over his arm, and surveyed the
scenery from the center of this death-trap.

"If anybody slipped here," he said, "he'd fall quite a distance." Then
he kicked a stone to see it go.

"_Quit that!_" said the Head, in awful tones.

Midway of the descent, we estimated that we should lose at least ten
horses. The pack was behind us, and there was no way to discover how
they were faring. But as the ledges were never wide enough for a horse
and the one leading him to move side by side, it seemed impossible that
the pack-ponies with their wide burdens could edge their way along.

[Illustration: _Watching the pack-train coming down at Cascade Pass_]

I had mounted Buddy again. I was too fatigued to walk farther, and,
besides, I had fallen so often that I felt he was more sure-footed than
I. Perhaps my narrowest escape on that trip was where a huge stone had
slipped