Of course there was no kind of a trail for them to follow.  As far as possible they followed the winding pathways of big game—­as long as these led them in their general direction—­but often they were obliged to cut their way through the underbrush.  Time after time they encountered impassable cliffs or rivers from which they were obliged to turn back and seek new routes; they found marshes that they could not penetrate; ranges they could not climb; wastes of slide rock where they could make headway only at a creeping pace and with hourly risk of their lives.

They had counted on slow travel, but the weeks grew into the months before they even neared the obscure heart of Back There where they thought Ben and Beatrice might be hidden.  The way was hard as they had never dreamed.  Every day, it seemed to them, brought its fresh tragedy:  a long back-trailing to avoid some impassable place, a fatiguing digression, perhaps several hours of grinding work with the axe in order to cut a trail.  Sometimes the harness broke, requiring long stops on the trail to repair it, the packs slipped continually from the hard going; and they found it increasingly difficult to secure horse feed for the animals.

Even Indian ponies cannot keep fat on such grass as grows in the deep shade of the spruce.  They need the rich growths of the open park lands to stiffen them for the grinding toil; and even with good feeding, foresters know that pack animals must not be kept on the trail for too many days in succession.  Jeffery Neilson and his men disregarded both these facts, with the result that the animals lost flesh and strength, cutting down the speed of their advance.  Oaths and shouts were unavailing now:  only cruel blows could drive them forward at all.

They seemed to sense a great hopelessness in their undertaking.  Usually well-trained pack horses will follow their leader without question, walk almost in his tracks, and the rider in front only has to show the way.  After the first few days of grinding toil, the morale of the entire outfit began to break.  The horses broke away into thickets on each side; and time after time, one hour upon another, the horsemen had to round them up again.  When they came to the great rivers—­wild tributaries of the Yuga—­they had to follow up the streams for days in search of a place to ford.  Then they were obliged to carry the packs across in small loads, making trip after trip with the utmost patience and toil.  The horses, broken in spirit, took the wild waters just as they climbed the steep slopes, with little care whether they lived or died.

The days passed, June and July.  Ever they moved at a slower pace.  One of the horses, giving up on a steep pitch and frenzied by Ray’s cruel, lashing blows, fell off the edge of the trail and shot down like a plummet two hundred feet into the canyon below—­and thereupon it became necessary not only to spend the rest of the day in retrieving and repairing the supplies that had fallen with him, but also to heap bigger loads on the backs of the remaining horses.  And always they were faced by the cruel possibility that this whole, mighty labor was in vain,—­that Ben and Beatrice might have gone to their deaths in the rapids, weeks before.