“Step it off, Charley; twenty paces east to the rock, with the big peak over the shoulder of the hill,” he said.

Seaforth walked straight forward with measured strides.  “A foot over!” he said.

Alton nodded.  “Go back and make your traverse,” he said.  “Forty north with the gully over the fork of the river.”

“Forty,” said Seaforth, “and a half.”

“Well,” said Alton, “whatever you don’t remember, hold tight on to that.”

Seaforth felt the depression he had shaken off return to him.  “There are,” he said slowly, “few things that you forget.”

Alton, glancing at him, understood, and then turned his eyes towards the snow of the wilderness.  “It’s the man that can’t look forward who gets left,” he said.  “Now something might stop me coming back with you for that grub.”

Seaforth said nothing, and he was a little graver than usual as they packed the tent and blankets on the remaining horse, and an extra load upon their own backs.  A good many things might happen up there in the north, including snow-slides, floods and frost, or the downward rush of great trees in a brulee.  That was possibly why he commenced a little jingling song of the music-halls when they took the trail again, but the white grandeur of the great peaks silenced him, or his breath gave out as they floundered into fern-choked forest which was further garnished with the horrible devil’s club.  Seaforth fell into a clump of it, and for several minutes his comments were venomous, for though he had been taught restraint in England and had further tuition in Canada of a grimmer description, little can be expected from the man who is gripped by that Satanic thorn.

It was half an hour before he went on again with his garments ensanguined as the result of Alton’s treatment with the knife, and he gasped with relief when after a march of four miles, which occupied most of what was left of the day, they came out into the more open spaces of a big brulee.  Some time in the hot autumn a fire had passed that way, and the great trees towered above them, stripped and blackened columns, that seemed to stretch between earth and sky.  There was no limb left them, and they rose, majestic in their cylindrical symmetry, in apparently endless battalions, a vista of plutonic desolation.  Underfoot there was charcoal, and feathery ashes that whirled aloft, and sprinkling the men with a fine grey powder slowly settled again.

Alton was white in ten minutes, a gritty mire defiled the horse’s sides, and Seaforth floundered, coughing, ankle-deep at times, with livid circles where he had rubbed the grime away about his eyes.  There was no sign of beast or bird, and the shuffle of weary feet and thud of hoofs rose muffled out of a great silence, until there was a stupendous crash somewhere in the distance.  The charred trunks took up the sound, and while they flung it from one to another Alton sprang forward and smote the pack-horse with his fist.