Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/104

 few minutes’ climb. It’s weakening to live for three days on cold lunch alone, especially on short rations of that. I had to travel light.”

She slipped into the harness of the haversack in which she had packed her scanty store of food. The single blanket was rolled sling fashion, and she adjusted it across her shoulders and started to climb the slope.

For two hundred yards the ascent was steep. They crawled under and over log jams and threaded their way between close growing spruce trunks. Then Flash stepped in his tracks.

The ground had flattened into a tiny hollow at the base of the cliffs that towered abruptly up above the trees and defined the limits of the narrow gorge. In the center of this depression a cabin showed among the trees.

His nose had given him no warning of this. Always he knew of the presence of man before drawing near, yet he had come full upon this house; even now his nose told him that his eyes were wrong. There was not the slightest trace of man scent, and his ears caught no single vibration of sound. He had no previous experience to guide him in sizing up a house that had been so long untenanted as to have lost all taint of