The food stores brought for the journey were rapidly depleted.  The result was that they had to depend more and more upon a diet of meat.  Men can hold up fairly well on meat alone, particularly if it has a fair amount of fat, but the effort of hunting and drying the flesh into jerky served to cut down their speed.

The constant delays, the grinding, blasting toil of the day’s march, and particularly the ever-recurring crises of ford and steep, made serious inroads on the morale of the three men.  Just the work of urging on the exhausted horses drained their nervous energy in a frightful stream:  the uncertainty of their quest, the danger, the scarcity of any food but meat, and most of all the burning hatred in their hearts for the man who had forced the expedition upon them combined to torment them; even now, Ben Darby had received no little measure of vengeance.

No experience of their individual lives had ever presented such a daily ordeal of physical distress; none had ever been so devastating to hope and spirit.  There was not one moment of pleasure, one instant of relief from the day’s beginning to its end.  At night they went to sleep on hastily made beds, cursing at all things in heaven and earth; they blasphemed with growing savagery all that men hold holy and true; and degeneracy grew upon them very swiftly.  They quarreled over their tasks, and they hated each other with a hatred only second to that they bore Darby himself.  All three had always been reckless, wicked, brutal men; but now, particularly in the case of Ray and Chan, the ordeal brought out and augmented the latent abnormalities that made them criminals in the beginning, developing those odd quirks in human minds that make toward perversion and the most fiendish crime.

Jeffery Neilson had almost forgotten the issue of the claim by now.  He had told the truth, those weary weeks before, when he had wished he had never seen it.  His only thought was of his daughter, the captive of a relentless, merciless man in these far wilds.  Never the moon rose or the sun declined but that he was sick with haunting fear for her.  Had she gone down to her death in the rapids?  This was Neilson’s fondest wish:  the enfolding oblivion of wild waters would be infinitely better than the fate Ben had hinted at in his letter.  Yet he dared not turn back.  She might yet live, held prisoner in some far-off cave.

At first all three agreed on this point:  that they must not turn back until either Ben was crushed under their heels or they had made sure of his death.  Ray had not forgotten that Ben alone stood between him and the wealth and power he had always craved.  He dreamed, at first, that the deadly hardships of the journey could be atoned for by years of luxury and ease.  His mind was also haunted with dark conjectures as to the fate of Beatrice, but jealousy, rather than concern for her, was the moving impulse.