Leaping and slipping over the icy rocks beside the furious rapids and falls, and creeping along the narrow ledges of ice that here and there rimmed the less torrential stretches of the stream, we at last gained a spot where a little ravine ran up through the face of the precipice. We saw that it was impossible for us to descend that gloomy gorge even a few yards farther. The icy waters of the roaring cascades swept the bed of the chasm from wall to wall. Yet to ascend the side cleft seemed no less beyond our power. The water, running down from above earlier in the season, had coated the rocky surface from top to bottom with an unbroken slide of ice. It seemed outright madness to attempt that dizzy ascent. However, a man never knows what he can do until he has tried. We set to, I with my tomahawk and Brown with his axe, and by cutting footholds, turn about, in the ice of the ravine's bottom, we slowly worked our way up the giddy rise. Again and again we came near to slipping and so plunging headlong down that glassy slide. After the first hundred feet, we dared no longer look back below, for fear of being overcome with dizziness. Yet at last we came to easier climbing, and, scaling the side of the ravine, found ourselves safe on the mountain ridge, far above the river and its cavernous gorge. Here we soon killed a deer, and leaving the greater part of the carcass for our companions, pushed on another day across the mountains. We had at last sighted the prairies from our lofty heights, when, pressed by hunger, I was so ill advised as to eat some of the berries we found hanging to the bushes. As a result I suffered such vertigo that I was compelled to lie quiet in camp. But Brown put in the time very well by killing no less than six deer. Early in the forenoon of the sixth, as we hastened down out of the mountains, we again came within earshot of the torrential river of the gorge. Drawn by the sound, we scrambled around the point of an out-jutting ridge, and found ourselves on the river bank where it flowed from the gorge. It was not the first time I had stood on that selfsame spot. "Good God!" I groaned. "After all our toil, and only this!" "You may well say it, John," echoed a melancholy voice from beneath the cliff upstream. "Montgomery!" I cried. "You here?" He appeared from around a big rock, sad and dejected; but at sight of my companion, instantly assumed a look of unbending resolve. "We scattered," he explained, as I grasped his hand. "The others took the horses up out of the gorge by the least difficult of the side ravines. I followed your trace down into the midst of that awesome cleft and up the icy ascent. But I lost the trace on the mountain top, and so came on down here--" "To find that, after all our toil and privation, it is not the Red River!" I cried.