“He didn’t come pilgriming down to shoot up the gulch _muy_ plentiful, I’m bettin’!” averred Big John sardonically. “I’ll tell ye, Sid; thar’s only one way to bust her, and that’s to make a string of long ladders, same as _he_ done. You don’t get me off this hoss on no fly-creepin’ climb without a-doin’ jest that--savvy?” “Oh, thunder!” exclaimed Sid impatiently. “It’d take two days of perishing work. Le’s try to get up this cleft here.” He pointed to the beginnings of a practical ascent. “No!” barked Big John, and his tone was final. “The Colonel, yore pappy, he’d stake me out an’ build a fire on me tummy ef I let ye do any sech thing. Thet halter’s still waitin’ for you, Sid, I’ll admit, to save having it proved on me, but I ain’t aimin’ to cheat your friends out of their necktie party none. We camps right here an’ does the job proper, sabe, lil’ hombre?” Sid acquiesced, after a little further study of the cliff. There was a tall vertical cleft that led up to the swallow’s nest holes by a series of breaks and rises. It was easy to reconstruct the old shaman’s route by imagining the proper ladders set up so as to negotiate a number of these vertical rises. They could be made of slender lodgepole pine, with the branches left on for steps in place of the heavier logs with notched steps which the aborigines had used. And not over half a dozen of them would be needed altogether. It was worth doing, to “bust” an “Inaccessible.” Making camp in that rainless country was a simple matter. Sid simply selected a pleasant site on a knoll down the cañon overlooking the brook under a canopy of huge pines, while Big John unsaddled both horses and took them to the nearest grass plot, staking them out and leaving Blaze, his Airedale, on guard. The dog had been a present from Colonel Colvin after the Black Panther trip. He had the noted sagacity of his breed, and with a year’s hunting experience with Ruler, the giant coonhound of that expedition, had become a most devoted and dependable “pardner” on all their hunts. After merely piling the sleeping and cooking gear and hanging up their food bags above the rodent zone, Sid was ready to go ladder cutting. The White Mountain region is pine forest, sparsely timbered, the trees not crowded or packed so densely as in eastern forest growth. As a result, the mountains, which resemble much the rounded and rolling Alleghanies of the east, seem stippled with individual trees instead of banked in mossy green as with closely growing timber. In the river valleys, however, there are thickets as dense as in any well watered clime, so Sid lost no time in getting into such a pine grove armed with his light belt ax. That light, little long-handled ax of his was far more efficient than any sort of hatchet. It would drop a four-inch pole thirty feet high almost as quickly as a full ax. Before the first tree crashed down Big John had joined him.