“Are you sure you’re going right?” he inquired.

“Sure?  Of course I’m sure.  D’you think I’m lost?”

Folsom fed some twisted willow-tops into the sheet-iron stove.  “I wouldn’t recommend you as a pathfinder,” said he.  “You said we’d sleep out one night.  This is two, and to-morrow we’ll walk hungry.”

“Well, don’t blame me!” challenged the other.  “I’m going slow on your account.”

Now nothing could have galled Folsom more than a reflection upon his ability to travel.  His lips whitened, he was upon the point of speaking his mind, but managed to check himself in time.  Harkness’s personality rasped him to the raw, and he had for days struggled against an utterly absurd but insistent desire to seize the little coxcomb by the throat and squeeze the arrogance out of him as juice is squeezed out of a lemon.  There is flesh for which one’s fingers itch.

“I notice you’re ready to camp when I am,” the larger man muttered.  “Understand, this is no nice place to be without grub, for it’s liable to storm any hour, and storms last at this season.”

“Now don’t get cold feet.”  Harkness could be maddeningly patronizing when he chose.  “Leave it to me.  I’ll take you a short cut, and we’ll eat lunch in a cabin to-morrow noon.”

But noon of the next day found Harkness still plodding up the river with the dogs close at his heels.  The hills to the northward were growing higher, and Folsom’s general knowledge of direction told him that they were in danger of going too far.

“I think the Imnachuck is over there,” said he.

Harkness hesitated, then he nodded:  “Right-o!  It’s just over that low saddle.”  He indicated a sweeping hillside ahead, and a half-mile further on he left the creek and began to climb.  This was heavy work for the dogs, and mid-afternoon came before the partners had gained the summit only to discover that they were not upon a saddleback after all, but upon the edge of a vast rolling tableland from which a fanlike system of creeks radiated.  In all directions was a desolate waste of barren peaks.

Folsom saw that the sky ahead was thick and dark, as if a storm impended, and realizing only too well the results of the slightest error in judgment he called to Harkness.  But the latter pretended not to hear, and took advantage of the dogs’ fatigue to hurry out of earshot.  It was some time before the team overhauled him.

“Do you know where you are?” Folsom inquired.

“Certainly.”  Harkness studied the panorama spread before him.  “That blue gulch yonder is the Imnachuck.”  He pointed to a valley perhaps four miles away.

A fine snow began to sift downward.  The mountain peaks to the northward became obscured as by thin smoke, the afternoon shortened with alarming swiftness.  Night, up here with a blizzard brewing, was unthinkable, so after a while the driver called another halt.

“Something informs me that you’re completely lost,” he said, mildly.