Steele grinned, and handed it up. "Take it along," he advised, "and practice some more. It may bring you fresh meat. Sometimes elk and mountain sheep come down to the Creek to drink over there--won't come amiss, anyhow." Ross accepted the gun; and Steele, going back to the head of the procession, mounted, and led the way up the canon, which presently broadened until it formed a snow-flecked valley a few rods wide. Here were a dozen shacks, another eating house, and the store of the Mountain Company. The mouth of its tunnel could be seen high on the side of the mountain above the store. Immediately beyond this valley the canon was nearly closed by two great peaks. The one on the left was still Dundee; but on the right Gale's Ridge gave place to Crosby, behind which lay Meadow Creek Valley. Zigzagging across the face of this mountain wound a narrow trail gradually ascending. Up and yet up climbed the horses until Ross clung to his saddle involuntarily while looking down. Soon Wood River became a thread, and the shacks became black doll-houses set in patches of snow. On the trail the snow lay deep in the hollows, but was swept away wherever the east wind could touch it. But, snow-filled or black, the trail ever ascended. The peak of Dundee opposite, which had seemed from the canon narrow and remote, stretched out now immense and so near that Ross felt he could hurl a stone across and hit it. He looked ahead. They were approaching the dizzy shoulder of Crosby. Steele rounded it, and disappeared. One by one the slow packhorses, their loads hitting against the rocks on the inside of the trail, crawled cautiously after, and also disappeared. Then before Ross opened a view of startling grandeur. He was looking out over the top of Gale's Ridge and down across Big Horn Basin, beyond Cody, eighty miles away and into the blue heart of the Big Horn Mountains. The sight brought with it a pang of homesickness. Eighty miles from a railroad! Eighty difficult, laborious miles! Ross felt helpless and small and decidedly shaky in this strange new world about which he had so much to learn. Clinching his teeth hard together, he looked up. Above were bowlders seemingly glued to the almost upright mountainside. Below--but Ross's head swam, and he turned his eyes to the inside of the trail, and clung to the saddle. Below was a sheer drop of a thousand feet down to the falls of Meadow Creek, which separated Crosby from Gale's Ridge. The mist came up in clouds rolling thick and frosty in the zero air. This was the quarter-mile of trail which cut Meadow Creek Valley off from Wood River Canon for months during the year. "Well," laughed Steele as they stopped where the trail widened beyond the dangerous shoulder, "you didn't take a header, did you?" Ross passed his hand across his forehead. His face was pale. "No, but--I felt every minute that I'd go over."