Matters grew serious that afternoon. The trail became hopelessly lost, so that not even Price, with his developed instinct, could find it again. We were in the heart of the hills now, with cañons opening in strange confusion about us. One after another we explored them, only to find each a “box-cañon” at the end. Price was sure that our desired country lay just beyond, and it was maddening, late in the day, to acknowledge that he could find no way out but the one by which we entered. It was a sorry retreat; hungry and worn we went supperless into camp. By rare good luck, however, we hit upon camping-ground where there was more grass than we had seen for some time, and in the morning our burros and the pony were comparatively revived, fit again for a hard journey. And we gave it them. Price and I had had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours, and very little then. Meanwhile we had been working hard in keen mountain air, and I was so hungry by the time that we got back to the cow, now dead beside the trail, that I proposed our eating some of her. Price quickly put an end to the plan, however, not on hygienic grounds, but by explaining that the cattlemen, if they found her mutilated, would conclude that she had been killed, and would make matters lively for us in consequence, hanging being the not uncommon penalty for this offence. One does not keep close count of days in wandering over a frontier, and it was only an aggravation of our plight to remember that it was not Sunday merely but Christmas-day as well. But if Christmas heightened the sense of hardship, it furnished an admirable setting to its end. By trusting his instinct for a short cut, Price brought us out in the middle of the afternoon upon open hills, from which we not only saw a section of Young’s Valley, but, rising clear from the middle of it, a column of blue smoke from the chimney of a ranchman’s cabin. We wasted no time in covering the intervening miles and then we lifted, light-heartedly, the latch of the road-gate and, with the easy assurance of the frontier, drove our animals into the yard beside the corral. For some reason we had not been seen from the cabin, so Price walked on to the door, while I mounted guard over the burros. From a seat in the sun on an old hen-coop I could watch them as they nibbled the short grass, while from the cabin came peals of laughter, denoting that Price had fallen among friends who were keeping Christmas festival.