All these efforts having failed, and the winter having fallen with exceptional suddenness and severity, even. Huntington was forced to accept the general opinion that nothing more could be done; that they could only wait for summer, when they could go to the mountain top and bring back Marion's body--and doubtless Haig's too. And so, said Huntington, the feud was ended. One person alone in the Park refused to admit all this. Pete was forced indeed to admit it in theory, but he was resolved to prove it or disprove it on his own account. He had studied Thunder Mountain from the ridge above the ranch house all that day of Sunnysides' escape, and the next. And he remembered now that a period of calm had followed the storm on that second day. If Haig or Marion, or both of them, had by chance reached the flat top in that interval, they might have crossed, and might be now somewhere in the forests on the other side. He went to Parker, talked with him long about the character of the Black Lake country, induced him to draw the crude map, and then visited Seth and Claire. Seth shook his head gloomily, but Claire eagerly proceeded to assemble enough supplies to have loaded down a pack horse. There followed a pitifully comical struggle with her before her "first aid" was reduced to what Pete could carry in his canvas knapsack,--a small roll of underwear, needles and thread, bandages and a packet of household medicines in addition to Pete's own selection of a strip of bacon, a dozen onions, two score of vegetable soup tablets, two cans of condensed milk, small quantities of coffee and tea, salt and pepper, two cakes of soap and (especially insisted on by Pete) a plug of black tobacco and a pipe. All these supplies Pete had saved untouched, living himself on game shot on the long journey. For nearly five weeks he had struggled against unbelievable hardships, fighting like primitive man against the fiercest enmity of nature; had searched the whole Black Lake country; and that day, slowly following the direction of the trail up through the narrowing gulch among the tree tops, the smell of smoke was brought to his nostrils on the wind, and he traced it along the foot of the cliff. "But did you really expect to find us alive?" asked Haig. "No." "Then why did you do all this?" "All I could do. Indian never forgets." Thereupon he brought out Haig's pipe and his own, and they smoked over it in silence, late into the night.