“I see quite a lot of smoke,” said Charley.

“Then the boys over Jackass way and by the Crossing ought to see it for themselves.”

The four men designated caught up their horses, saddled them, and mounted.  Thorne handed them each a broad hoe, a rake and an axe.  They rode off up the trail.  Thorne mounted on his own horse.

“Pack up and follow as fast as you can,” he told the two who still remained.

“What you want we should take?” asked Jack.

“Amy will tell you.  Get started early as you can.  You’ll have to follow their tracks.”

Amy took direction of them promptly.  While they caught and saddled the pack horses, she was busy in the storeroom.  They found laid out for them a few cooking utensils, a variety of provisions tied up in strong little sacks, several more hoes, axes and rakes, two mattocks, a half-dozen flat files, and as many big zinc canteens.

“Now hurry!” she commanded them; “pack these, and then get some blankets from your camp, and some hobbles and picket ropes.”

With Bob’s rather awkward help everything was made fast.  By the time the two had packed the blankets and returned to headquarters on their way to the upper trail, they found Amy had changed her clothes, caught and saddled her own horse, tied on well-filled saddle bags, and stood awaiting them.  She wore her broad hat looped back by the pine tree badge of the Service, a soft shirtwaist of gray flannel, a short divided skirt of khaki and high-laced boots.  A red neckerchief matched her cheeks, which were glowing with excitement.  Immediately they appeared, she swung aboard with the easy grace of one long accustomed to the saddle.  Bob’s lower jaw dropped in amazement.

“You going?” he gasped, unable even yet to comprehend the everyday fact that so many gently nurtured Western girls are accustomed to those rough-and-ready bivouacs.

“I wouldn’t stay away for worlds!” she cried, turning her pony’s head up the trail.

Beyond the upper meadow this trail suddenly began to climb.  It made its way by lacets in the dry earth, by scrambles in the rocks until, through the rapidly thinning ranks of the scrubby trees, Bob could look back over all the broad shelf of the mountain whereon grew the pines.  It lay spread before him as a soft green carpet of tops, miles of it, wrinkling and billowing gently as here and there the conformation of the country changed.  At some distance it dropped over an edge.  Beyond that, very dimly, he realized the brown shimmer rising from the plain.  Far to the right was a tenuous smoke, a suggestion of thinning in the forest, a flash of blue water.  This, Bob knew, must be the mill and the lake.

The trail shortly made its way over the shoulder of the ridge and emerged on the wide, gentle rounding of the crest.  Here the trees were small, stunted and wind-blown.  Huge curving sheets of unbroken granite lay like armour across the shoulder of the mountain.  Decomposing granite shale crunched under the horses’ hoofs.  Here and there on it grew isolated tiny tufts of the hardy upland flowers.  Above, the sky was deeply, intensely blue; bluer than Bob had ever seen a sky before.  The air held in it a tang of wildness, as though it had breathed from great spaces.