"This matter needs a lot of thinking out, and it looks as if our lives depended on our thinking right. Allinson's instructions to the hog seem to have been pretty clear, and he wouldn't plant the cache too far from the gap. Then he'd have to arrange things so the boys would think they'd dumped the truck in a handy place for a party coming down from the north." "I believe he has never been up here," Andrew argued. "Are there any good maps? I couldn't get one." "They're sketchy," Graham said. "My idea is that Mappin would get hold of a prospector who knows the country and have a good talk with him; but he wouldn't send him up with the other men." "It's probable," agreed Carnally. "Well, in my opinion the provisions are lying south of the pass in one of the gulches leading down from the height of land, but not directly on our line of march. You can come up from Rain Bluff several ways, and the hog would mark a route for the boys which would bring them in, so far as he could figure, a bit outside the shortest track. We've got to find the gulch they'd pitch on. It's our brains against Mappin's." "Your brains," Andrew corrected him. Carnally knocked out his pipe. "I allow I'll want a clear head to-morrow and I'm going to sleep." He and Andrew left camp in the dark the next morning; but day had broken when they stood in the gap of the neck, looking down on the broken country beneath. For a short distance the descent from the pass was clearly defined, leading down a hollow among the rocks, but after that it opened out on to a scarp of hillside from which a number of ravines branched off and led to the banks of a frozen creek. They seemed to be filled with brush, and the spurs between them were rough. It was a difficult country to traverse, and Andrew realized with concern that the search might last several days. "Take that right hand gulch," Carnally directed. "Follow it right down to the creek and come back up the next farther on, while I prospect east. If we find nothing in the ravines, we'll try the spurs." "The obvious place is the gap we're standing in," Andrew pointed out. "How would Mappin get over that without making his packers suspicious?" "I thought of it," said Carnally. "He'd contend that he was afraid the cache might get snowed up; and it would be a pretty good reason. The drifts pile up deep in a gap like this."