"You'll get used to that," returned Steele easily. "You see why that trail becomes impassable later, don't you? If it was just the snow on the trail, why, that wouldn't count. You could shovel it off around the shoulder, and go on snow-shoes the rest of the way. But, when the snow lodges up over the shoulder something like ten feet deep, and a chinook or warm wind comes along and loosens it, a footfall or a man calling might start it, and then----" Steele shrugged his shoulders. "And there is no other way you can get into the Creek valley?" asked Ross. "No other way with a horse. You can follow the Creek toward its source, they say, a few miles and then across. Hunters go that way sometimes, but on foot; and they have to scramble for it." On and on they went over a wide trail now beside the clear little Meadow Creek. Ross began to feel giddy again. "Of course you do," Steele explained the next time they made a stop, "because the Creek is half a mile higher than the canon. But you get over that in a few days." "I wonder," exclaimed Ross suddenly, "how Leslie Jones stood that trail?" "About the same as the average and ordinary mortal," rejoined Steele sarcastically. "But you'll probably have a good many chances of finding out for yourself. You'll be glad to see anybody, even young Jones!" At last, after threading their way between spurs and over bowlders and through valleys, they emerged on the other side of Crosby, and found themselves in a bowl the sides of which were formed by mountains so high and grim that Ross gasped for the breath that he felt the peaks would eventually shut off. It was a queer and uncomfortable feeling, this which the mountains gave him, a sense of being shut in and overpowered and helpless. The peaks on all sides were snow-heaped; but the valley, protected as it was, showed patches of black earth. Sage-brush with scrub spruce and hemlock were the only vegetation of the valley visible, but the sides of the mountains showed a good growth of hemlock and pine trees reaching to timber line only a few hundred feet up. On the left at the foot of Crosby--whose back looked as high to Ross as its face, despite the fact that he was half a mile higher here than in the canon--two columns of smoke were ascending from two clusters of hemlocks a quarter of a mile apart. Toward these, Steele, drawing in his horse, pointed. "The first is your layout," he called back over his shoulder, "the other is the McKenzies'!" "And where is Wilson's?" asked Ross, eagerly. Steele faced in the opposite direction and indicated a narrow trail that led to the right, disappearing in a forest of scrub pine which filled the ravine between two of the mountains that formed the rim of the bowl. "Follow that trail and you'll reach 'em. But ten to one, before you can do it they'll follow the trail this way and reach you!" "I hope so!" exclaimed Ross in a heartfelt tone. A few moments later he was face to face with Weimer.