He was tempted to turn back.  The mountains surrounded him, somber and majestically still.  They made him feel infinitely small and rather impertinent, as though he had come to penetrate the secrets they never yielded.  He had almost to fight a conviction that they were hostile.

After an hour or so he determined to go on.  Let them throw him over a gorge if they so determined.  He got up, grunting, and leading the horse beside a boulder, climbed painfully into the saddle.  To relieve his depression he addressed the horse: 

“It would be easier on both of us if you were two feet narrower in the beam, old dear,” he said.

Nevertheless, he made good time.  By six o’clock he knew that he must have made thirty odd miles, and that he must be near the cabin.  Also that it was going to be bitterly cold that night, under the snow fields, and that he had brought no wood axe.  The deep valley was purple with twilight by seven, and he could scarcely see the rough-drawn trail map he had been following.  And the trail grew increasingly bad.  For the last mile or two the horse took its own way.

It wandered on, through fords and out of them, under the low-growing branches of scrub pine, brushing his bruised legs against rocks.  He had definitely decided that he had missed the cabin when the horse turned off the trail, and he saw it.

It was built of rough logs, the chinks once closed with mud which had fallen away.  The door stood open, and his entrance into its darkness was followed by the scurrying of many little feet.  Bassett unstrapped his raincoat from the saddle with fingers numb with cold, and flung it to the ground.  He uncinched and removed the heavy saddle, hobbled his horse and removed the bridle, and turned him loose with a slap on the flank.

“For the love of Mike, don’t go far, old man,” he besought him.  And was startled by the sound of his own voice.

By the light of his candle lantern the prospects were extremely poor.  The fir branches in the double-berthed bunk were dry and useless, the floor was crumbling under his feet, and the roof of the lean-to had fallen in and crushed the rusty stove.  In the cabin itself some one had recently placed a large flat stone in a corner for a fireplace, with two slabs to back it, and above it had broken out a corner of the roof as a chimney.  Bassett thought he saw the handwork of some enterprising journalist, and smiled grimly.

He set to work with the resource of a man who had learned to take what came, threw the dry bedding onto the slab and set a match to it, brought in portions of the lean-to roof for further supply for the fire, opened a can of tomatoes and set it on the edge of the hearth to heat, and sliced bacon into his diminutive frying-pan.

It was too late for any examination that night.  He ate his supper from the rough table, drawing up to it a broken chair, and afterwards brought in more wood for his fire.  Then, with a lighted cigar, and with his boots steaming on the hearth, he sat in front of the blaze and fell into deep study.