Now those sage-bushes were all about the same height—­three or four feet; they stood just about seven feet apart, all over the vast desert; each of them was a mere snow-mound, now; in any direction that you proceeded (the same as in a well laid out orchard) you would find yourself moving down a distinctly defined avenue, with a row of these snow-mounds an either side of it—­an avenue the customary width of a road, nice and level in its breadth, and rising at the sides in the most natural way, by reason of the mounds.  But we had not thought of this.  Then imagine the chilly thrill that shot through us when it finally occurred to us, far in the night, that since the last faint trace of the wheel-tracks had long ago been buried from sight, we might now be wandering down a mere sage-brush avenue, miles away from the road and diverging further and further away from it all the time.  Having a cake of ice slipped down one’s back is placid comfort compared to it.  There was a sudden leap and stir of blood that had been asleep for an hour, and as sudden a rousing of all the drowsing activities in our minds and bodies.  We were alive and awake at once—­and shaking and quaking with consternation, too.  There was an instant halting and dismounting, a bending low and an anxious scanning of the road-bed.  Useless, of course; for if a faint depression could not be discerned from an altitude of four or five feet above it, it certainly could not with one’s nose nearly against it.

CHAPTER XXXII.

We seemed to be in a road, but that was no proof.  We tested this by walking off in various directions—­the regular snow-mounds and the regular avenues between them convinced each man that he had found the true road, and that the others had found only false ones.  Plainly the situation was desperate.  We were cold and stiff and the horses were tired.  We decided to build a sage-brush fire and camp out till morning.  This was wise, because if we were wandering from the right road and the snow-storm continued another day our case would be the next thing to hopeless if we kept on.

All agreed that a camp fire was what would come nearest to saving us, now, and so we set about building it.  We could find no matches, and so we tried to make shift with the pistols.  Not a man in the party had ever tried to do such a thing before, but not a man in the party doubted that it could be done, and without any trouble—­because every man in the party had read about it in books many a time and had naturally come to believe it, with trusting simplicity, just as he had long ago accepted and believed that other common book-fraud about Indians and lost hunters making a fire by rubbing two dry sticks together.