The night was cold and still, the sky cloudless. Nevertheless Shirttail Henry set up his rain gauge, muttering that he could not imagine how he was to send in his report if the gauge showed moisture in the morning. But no rain or snow fell to discomfit him, and the weary trailers passed the night in peace. An hour after sunup the following day they came to the end of the cañon, to find that the source of the creek was a series of springs in a hillside. From the springs Henry set a course southwest through unbroken forest land, across which the going would have been easy but for the fact that the trail led continually up and down over a seemingly endless system of ridges. The party would struggle wearily up one steep hill, only to be obliged to clamber and slide down the other side of it into a deep V-shaped cañon--and then up the near side of another hill as steep as the one just mastered. Then down again, and up again--forever and ever, it seemed. “Henry,” said Mary, as they stood panting on the top of about the fifteenth rise that they had negotiated, “is this ever going to end?” “Why, yes’m,” Henry told her meekly. “These here little rises here get bigger and bigger until we’re top o’ th’ mountains. Then we begin to crawl.” “Crawl!” puffed Mary. “I’ve done nothing else but crawl up and slide down since we left the creek back there. I don’t feel like a human being any more. I’m a four-footed beast. I growl and show my teeth when a rock or a root gets in my way.” “But what I’m talkin’ about,” said Henry patiently, “is reg’lar crawlin’. Sure enough on yer hands an’ knees, ma’am. An’ f’r miles an’ miles at that. Th’ patch o’ chaparral we’ll have to go through ain’t got its match in th’ whole West, I’m thinkin’.” “Do you mean, Henry, that we’re actually to _crawl_ for miles and miles? Like a father playing bear with his baby on the floor?” “Jest crawl, ma’am,” replied Henry softly. “Unless we cut our way through with th’ axes--an’ that would take forever ’n’ ever ’n’ after.” “And you realize that, do you, Charmian?” Mary asked of the head of the party. “Oh, yes--it’s all been explained to me,” Charmian assured her. “All right,” said Mary. “Then let’s find a place to eat. I’m so hungry I could eat quirkus.” “Which is?”--Andy’s question. “Quirkus,” Mary explained, “is the stuff you skim off the top of a kettle of fruit when you’re cooking it for canning. Or it’s the stuff that grows on the bottom of a watering trough in summer. Or sometimes it’s any soft stuff that you don’t know the name of, and that isn’t fit to eat, but looks too valuable to throw away.”