I bore a hand in getting the tents down, but suddenly there caught my eye something on the ground which held me stock-still, staring. It was a trail of footsteps in the snow, a double trail, as of someone going and coming; and it drew a straight line from the door of the bearers' tent to the very spot where I had stood last night when I peeped round the angle of rock. That vague form disappearing into the tent hadn't, then, been a trick played on me by my fevered eyes. Philipson had had another watcher. We used our last sticks of fuel for a fire to cook breakfast, and when we had finished the meal, one of the bearers cringed up to Philipson and knelt down, beating his forehead on the ground. The man spoke, still with that curiously fixed expression of despair and fear that I had noticed on the faces of them all. Philipson heard him out, and dismissed the fellow with a quick word, whereupon he sprang up with alacrity and ran back to his fellows. 'You understand what the man said?' queried Philipson, turning to us. 'Not a word.' 'He voiced the unanimous desire of the gang to leave our service and go home. I told him they would be allowed to do so.' The pair of us looked at him in surprise. 'Great Scott!' exclaimed Poyning. 'What on earth for?' 'Because,' replied Philipson, very positively, 'it was the one thing on this earth to do. I know that breed. I can stand the six of them in a row and shoot them here if I like, but neither I nor anybody else can make them follow us farther.' 'Yet you thought we should have no more trouble with them?' 'I did. At that time they feared me more than anything else in the world. Now a greater terror has arisen.' 'Why, what's up with them?' 'They believe the mountains are haunted hereabouts. One of them got up in the night and saw a devil.' I gave an involuntary start, and I am sure Philipson noticed it. I felt his eyes were keenly on me. 'Superstitious cattle, are they not, Mirlees?' he said. 'But one thing is absolutely certain: it is a waste of time trying to remove their superstition by argument. I shall pay them off and let them go.' Poyning looked bewildered. 'How in Hades are we to get the gear along?' he said. 'Hump it ourselves. There will still be five of us to share it. Moreover, we can reduce the gear. _We have not much farther to go._' 'What's told you that?' The words were out before I realised I had said them. Philipson looked at me, and for one instant there seemed almost a shadow of suspicion, of defiance, in his eyes. But only for an instant. When he answered me, he might have been a city man mentioning the hour of a train. 'Plain common-sense,' said Saunders Philipson. CHAPTER VIII HOW WE CAME TO THE VALLEY OF GREAT BIRDS