Janus led the way around a rear corner of the Shelter, after having labeled and stowed their packs in the hut.  He said they would be perfectly safe there, that no one would disturb them.  But the girls were rather amazed when, instead of beginning to climb up, the guide started down a sharp incline, calling to his charges to follow.

“Thith ithn’t up,” cried Tommy.

“We have to go through this gully first of all, then we begin going up,” he explained.

The couloir proved to be something of a hard proposition right at the beginning.  Jagged rocks, sudden narrow miniature gullies, bushes with sharp thorns, slippery, treacherous shale, made the descent a trying one.  Once Margery lost her footing on one of these shale shelfs.  She fell flat on her back and slid screaming a full twenty yards, shooting out on a grassy slope little the worse for her slide, except that she had been badly frightened.

Tommy was delighted.

“Wouldn’t Buthter make a fine toboggan?” she laughed.

Reaching the bottom of the gully, a long, narrow crevasse in the mountain, they began the real ascent.  Up and up they went, now and then lying against a rock, to which they clung, out of breath from their exertions, their faces flushed and warm.  Far above them Janus pointed out a little projection of rock that seemed no larger than a human hand.

“That,” said the guide, “is where we camp to-night,”

“Thave me!” wailed Tommy.

“Keep going.  We must reach the Sokoki Leap before dark,” urged Janus.  And far up there on the mountainside the Meadow-Brook Girls fixed their gaze on the bit of rock that was to be their sleeping place, and where they were to spend a night more full of interest than they dreamed.

CHAPTER X

A SLIPPERY CLIMB

For a few moments after the guide’s ultimatum they plodded patiently along.  No one noticed that the sky was cloudy until a shower of cold raindrops smote them in the face.  Tommy and Margery cried out in alarm.

“Climb!” shouted the guide.  “You’ve got to keep going.  It isn’t going to rain much.  Just that one little cloud overhead.”

But the cloud, though small, held a deluge of water which was poured directly down into the faces and over the heads of the Meadow-Brook Girls, drenching them.  Furthermore, the water made the rocks so slippery that it became difficult for one to take a safe hold with either hands or feet.  Progress became more slow, the ascent more difficult.