e edge of the chapparal, and therefore knew the direction.

After a while, I observed them moving more slowly, with their eyes upon
the ground as if they had lost it, I had doubts of their being able
either to find or follow it now. The shallow hoof-prints would be
filled with the debris of the burnt herbage--surely they could no longer
be traced?

By myself, they could not, nor by a common man; but it seemed that to
the eyes of those keen hunters, the trail was as conspicuous as ever. I
saw that, after searching a few seconds, they had taken it up, and were
once more moving along, guided by the tracks.

Some slight hollows I could perceive, distributed here and there over
the ground, and scarcely distinguishable from the surrounding level.
Certainly, without having been told what they were, I should not have
known them to be the tracks of a horse.

It proved a wide prairie, and we seemed to be crossing its central part.
The fire had spread far.

At one place, nearly midway, where the trail was faint, and difficult to
make out, we stopped for a short while to give the trackers time. A
momentary curiosity induced me to gaze around. Awful was the scene--
awful without sublimity. Even the thorny chapparal no longer relieved
the eye; the outline of its low shrubbery had sunk below the horizon;
and on all sides stretched the charred plain up to the rim of the leaden
canopy, black--black--illimitable. Had I been alone, I might easily
have yielded to the fancy, that the world was dead.

Gazing over this vast opacity, I for a moment forgot my companions, and
fell into a sort of lethargic stupor. I fancied that I too was dead or
dreaming--I fancied that I was in hell--the Avernus of the ancients. In
my youth, I had the misfortune to be well schooled in classic lore--to
the neglect of studies more useful--and often in life have the poetical
absurdities of Greek and Latin mythology intruded themselves upon my
spirit--both asleep and awake. I fancied, therefore, that some
well-meaning Anchises had introduced me to the regions below; and that
the black plain before me was some landscape in the kingdom of Pluto.
Reflection--had I been capable of that--would have convinced me of my
error. No part of that monarch's dominions can be so thinly peopled.

I was summoned to reason again by the voices of my followers. The lost
trail had been found, and they were moving on.

CHAPTER SEVENTY ONE.

THE TALK OF THE TRACK