But we did not come up with them.  We kept on finding traces of the party in marshy spots, and once Tish hopped off her horse and picked up a small handkerchief with a colored border and held it up to us.

“It’s hers,” she said.  “Anybody would know she is the sort to use colored borders.  They’re ahead somewhere.”

But it seemed strange that they would go so far, and I said so.

“We’re far enough off the main trail, Tish,” I said.  “And it’s getting wilder every minute.  There’s nothing I can see to prevent a mountain lion dropping on us most any time.”

“Not if it gets a good look at Aggie!” was Tish’s grim response.

It began to grow dark in the valley, and things seemed to move on either side of the trail.  Aggie called out once that we had just passed a grizzly bear, but Tish never faltered.  The region grew more and more wild.  The trail was broken with mudholes and crossed by fallen logs.  With a superb disdain Tish rode across all obstacles, not even glancing at them.  But Aggie and I got off at the worst places and led our horses.  At one mudhole I was unfortunate enough to stumble.  A horse with a particle of affection for a woman who had ridden it and cared for it for several days would have paused.

Not so my animal.  With a heartlessness at which I still shudder the creature used me as a bridge, and stepped across, dryfoot, on my back.  Owing to his padded feet and to the depth of the mud—­some eight feet, I believe—­I was uninjured.  But it required ten minutes of hard labor on the part of both Tish and Aggie to release me from the mud, from which I was finally raised with a low, hissing sound.

“Park!” said Aggie as she scraped my obliterated features with a small branch.  “Park, indeed!  It’s a howling wilderness.  I’m fond of my native land,” she went on, digging out my nostrils, so I could breathe, “but I don’t calculate to eat it.  As for that unfeeling beast of yours, Lizzie, I’ve never known a horse to show such selfishness.  Never.”

Well, we went on at last, but I was not so enthusiastic about teaching people lessons as I had been.  It seemed to me that we might have kept on along the trail and had a mighty good time, getting more and more nimble and stopping now and then to bake a pie and have a decent meal, and putting up our hair in crimps at night, without worrying about other folks’ affairs.

Late in the afternoon of that day, when so far as I could see Tish was lost, and not even her gathering a bunch of wild flowers while the horses rested could fool me, I voiced my complaint.

“Let me look at the map, Tish,” I suggested.  “I’m pretty good at maps.  You know how I am at charades and acrostics.  At the church supper—­”

“Nonsense, Lizzie,” she returned.  “You couldn’t make head or tail of this map.  It’s my belief that the man who made it had never been here.  Either that or there has been an earthquake since.  But,” she went on, more cheerfully, “if we are lost, so are the others.”