"We've done 'bout enough for one spell, and nobody's going to see us here," he said. "Get a fire started. I'm emptier'n a drum." Brooke, who knew where to find the resinous knots, was glad to help, and soon a great fire blazed upon a shelf of rock. The mules were tethered and forage given them, and the men lay steaming about the blaze until the breakfast of flapjacks, canned stuff, and green tea was ready. It was despatched in ten minutes, and rolling his half-dried blanket about him, Brooke lay down to sleep. He had a strip of very damp rock for mattress, and a bag of ore for pillow, but he had grown accustomed to a hard bed in the bush, and had scarcely laid his head down when slumber came to him. Food and sleep, he had discovered, were things to be appreciated, for it was not always that he was able to obtain very much of either. His stay in the Canadian cities had been brief, and the night he had spent with the brown-eyed girl at the opera-house had already drifted back into the past. It was raining when he awakened, and they once more took the trail, while during what was left of the day they plodded among the boulders beside frothing streams, crept through shadowy forests, and climbed over treacherous slopes of gravel and slippery rock outcrop round the great hill shoulders above. Everywhere the cold gleam of snow met the eye, save when the mists that clung in ragged wisps about the climbing pines rolled together and blotted all the vista out. The smell of fir and balsam filled every hollow, and the song of the rivers rang through a dead stillness that even to Brooke, who was accustomed to it, was curiously impressive. There was no sign of man anywhere, save for the smear of trampled mire or hoof-scattered gravel, and no sound that was made by any creature of the forest in all the primeval solitude. For no very evident reason, tracts of that wild country remain a desolation of grand and almost overwhelming beauty, and in such places even the bushman speaks softly, or plods on faster, as though anxious to escape from them, in wondering silence. The teamsters, however, appeared by no means displeased at the solitude, and Brooke was not in a condition to be receptive of more than physical impressions. His long boots were full of water, his clothes were soaked, the sliding gravel had galled his feet, and his limbs ached. The beasts were also flagging, for their loads were heavy, and the patter of their hoofs rose with a slower beat through the rain, while the teamsters said nothing save when they urged them on.