“It’s only a few hundred yards to the top, now,” said Lew.  “It will be easier going down the other side.”

Painfully slow was their progress.  More than once each of them tripped and fell.  The sharp ends of the broken branches tore their clothes and scratched them badly.  But silently, doggedly, they pushed on.  At last there remained but one barrier between them and the summit.  It was a great pile of fallen trunks that had no visible ending.  There was nothing to do but go over it.  From one log to another they scrambled up, each helping the other, advancing a foot at a time, feeling the way with hands and feet and searching out a path with the little light.  So high were the trees piled that at times the boys walked ten feet in air, making their way gingerly along the slender trunks.  Eventually they got beyond the log barrier and the remainder of the way to the top was more open.  At last they stood on the very summit.

“I wonder where our landmark is,” queried Lew, flashing his light this way and that.  “I understand now why we saw it so plainly from below.  There were no standing trees to hide it.  We never saw it from so far away before.”

The landmark was a great, upright rock like a huge chimney.  It was not far distant and presently Lew found it.  The boys made their way to it.

“Now,” said Lew, with a sigh of relief, “we go straight down.  We should come to the brook flowing from the spring in a few minutes.  We’ll have to make it soon or I’ll die of thirst.”

They started down the slope.  The fire had swept over the summit and the way before them was like the area they had just crossed.  But they were now going down-hill and it was far easier to force their way.  A few yards at a time they advanced, now held back by a fallen log or turned aside by dense entanglements of prostrate trunks.

Presently Lew gave a cry.  “Do you see that big stone like an altar, Charley?” he called, turning the light on a great rock.  “That’s the stone where we made our fire the last time we were here.  It stands within twenty-five feet of the brook.”

“Thank goodness!” answered Charley.  “My back is about broken.  This pack weighs a ton!  And I’ll die if I don’t get water soon.”

Recklessly they pushed forward, almost running in their eager haste.

“Here we are,” exulted Lew, a moment later.  “Here’s the brook.”

Before him he could dimly make out the depression in the earth where the stream ran.  He dropped his pack and ran forward, then threw himself flat in the darkness and felt in the stream bed for a pool deep enough to drink from.  His fingers touched only dry sand and stones.

“The light, Charley,” he panted.  “Bring the light, quick.”

His comrade flung his own pack on the earth and ran forward to the bank of the stream.  He turned his light downward and flashed it right and left along the bed of the brook.  There was no answering sparkle of light.  The bed of the brook was not even moist.  The spring had gone dry.