"A mountain o’ mud," he said. "That’s it right enough. Some folks thinks that everything that prospectors says they come across in the mountains is jest their demented imaginatings like; but I seen mountains o’ mud before. There ’s a terror of a one in the Crow’s Nest Pass, away up the east Kootenai; and there’s one in Colorado down to the Warm Springs country. You can feel it quiver under you when you walk on it—all same jelly. See—you see that black crest there? That’s all mud. This here, where we are, is good enough earth though, all right, with rock into it. It’s here that we turn now. Let me see——" He took some fresh bearings, looking to the line of hills to the south-east. I thought I could pick out the notch at the summit, over there, through which Apache Kid, Donoghue, and I had come; and then he led off again—along the hill this time, his head jerking terribly, and his whole body indeed, so that now and again he leapt up in little hopping steps like one afflicted with St. Vitus’ dance. Up a rib of the mountain, as it might be called, he marched, I now walking level with him; for I must confess I was excited. And then I saw at last what I had journeyed so painfully and paid so cruelly to see,—a little "shack," or cabin, of untrimmed logs of the colour of the earth in which it stood, there, just a stone’s cast from us, between the rib on which we stood and the next rib that gave a sweeping contour to the hill and then broke off short, so that the mountain at that place went down in a sharp slope, climbed upon lower down by insignificant, scrubby trees. But there—there was the cabin, sure enough. There was our journey’s end. Canlan turned his ashen face to me, and his yellow eyeballs glittered. "It looks as we were first," he said, his voice going up at the end into a wavering cry and his lips twitching convulsively. *CHAPTER XIX* _*Canlan Hears Voices*_ You should have seen the way in which Canlan approached that solitary, deserted cabin. One might have thought, to see him, that he fully expected to find it occupied. "Hullo, the shack," he cried, leading his horse down from the rocky rib on which we had paused to view the goal of our journey. I noticed how the horse disapproved of this descent; standing with firm legs it clearly objected to Canlan’s leading. The reins were over its head, and Canlan was a little way down the rib hauling on them, half-turned and cursing it vehemently. It could not have been the slope that troubled the animal, for that was trifling; but there it stood, dumbly rebellious, its neck stretched, but budge a foot it would not.