Old Ugly-Face by Talbot Mundy

The trail reached the limit beyond which even the yaks could no longer climb unaided. They and the ponies had to be lifted or else unloaded and then reloaded when their packs had been carried up by hand. In places the ledge was less than three feet wide, with an impending cliff on the right hand. The slippery rock was like a devil's stairway. But it was the last lap; the animals knew it; so they got along without accident, everyone lending a hand. When the phony lama made the mistake of refusing to work, Andrew kicked him and made him put his shoulder under a pony's rump to help it scramble while Andrew took the worst of the strain. That was a mistake. He should have known better. Fake dignity can't endure too much humiliation. His life wasn't worth ten cents from that minute, if it should be up to the lama.

Tom Grayne's secret hiding-place was away up on the face of a cliff, at least a thousand feet above that terrific trail. It was utterly impossible to reach with the pack animals. There were two ways to it, and Andrew knew the landmarks; but one way would have made a wild goat hesitate, and the other was a cascade, iced over by the frozen vapor from a hot spring. However, there was a more accessible and much larger cavern lower down, where they had cached quite a lot of fodder left over from last year's expedition. It wasn't secret, like Tom Grayne's cave; it was too close to the trail, and too near to a weird community of hermits, who are the least talkative but most vigilant spies in the world. It was that lower cavern that Andrew headed for, hoping Tom Grayne had seen them from far off and would save him the trouble of climbing to the hide-out.