Page:Hendryx--Connie Morgan with the Mounted.djvu/60

42 in cold defiance of the brighter, more intense colours of the wild gardens of the valleys.

The ascent of the McQuesten was laboriously slow. Day after day the three indomitable officers pushed into the wild, and each day their progress became more difficult. Rapid succeeded rapid with discouraging frequency necessitating innumerable portages, while the steep, stony banks of the diminishing river gave scant foothold for work at the tracking line. But each day the three laboured from daylight to dark, with faces and hands swollen and red from the sting of the mosquitoes that whined about them in countless millions. Unprotesting they toiled, as became sourdoughs, indulging at rare intervals in a rough-growled word of encouragement or approbation.

On the morning of the tenth day, they halted at the mouth of a small creek that bore in from the south-east. High above them, upon a rocky crag, separated far from its kind, like some gaunt, battle-scarred sentinel of the unknown, stood a gnarled, storm-riven banskian tree.

“Look!” cried Connie. “The creek of the blasted pine!”