The Tenderfoots by Francis Lynde

WITH the vanguard of the army of eager gold-hunters fairly in sight, the two who were pursued cut the summit breathing halt short and resumed their flight. Avoiding the sand-covered snowdrifts in which they had come to grief on the journey out, they pushed on down the western declivities at the best speed the boulder-strewn slopes and craggy descents would permit, postponing the breakfast stop until they reached a grassy glade well down in the foresting where the animals could graze.

After a hasty meal made on what prepared food they could come at easily in the packs, and without leaving the telltale ashes of a fire, they pressed on again westward and by early afternoon were in the mountain-girt valley of the stream which had been their guide out of the western wilderness two days earlier. Again they made a cold meal, watered and picketed the animals, and snatched a couple of hours for rest and sleep. Scanting the rest halt to the bare necessity, mid-afternoon found them once more advancing down the valley, with Philip, to whom horseback riding was a new and rather painful experience, leading his mount.

One by one, for as long as daylight lasted, the urgent miles were pushed to the rear, and after the sun had gone behind the western mountains they made elaborately cautious preparations for the night. A small box canyon, well grassed, opened into the main valley on their left, and in this they unsaddled the horses and relieved the jacks of their packs and picketed the animals. Then, taking the needed provisions from one of the packs, they crossed the river by jumping from boulder to boulder in its bed, and made their camp fire well out of sight in a hollow on the opposite bank; this so that there might be no camp signs on the trail side of the stream. But in the short pipe-smoking interval which they allowed themselves after supper, Bromley laughed and said: "I guess there is a good bit of the ostrich in human nature, after all, Philip. Here we've gone to all sorts of pains to keep from leaving the remains of a camp fire in sight, when we know perfectly well that we are leaving a plain trail behind us for anybody who is even half a woodsman to follow. That's a joke!"

"Of course it is," Philip agreed; and for a time before they extinguished the fire and recrossed the river to roll up in their blankets in the box canyon where the animals were grazing, they discussed the pressing matter of trail effacement without reaching any practical solution of the problem.

The next morning they were up and on their way in the earliest dawn twilight. As yet, there were no signs of the pursuit. The mountain silences were undisturbed save by the drumming thunder of the swift little river and the soft sighing of the dawn precursor breeze in the firs. Convinced that all the haste they were making was clearly so much effort thrown away unless they could devise some means of throwing their followers off the track, they resumed the camp-fire discussion, falling back in the end, not upon experience, which neither of them had, but upon the trapper-and-Indian tales read in their boyhood. In these, running water was always the hard-pressed white man's salvation in his flight, and, like the fleeing trapper, they had their stream fairly at hand. But the mountain river, coursing along at torrent speed, and with its bed thickly strewn with slippery boulders, was scarcely practicable as a roadway; it was too hazardous even for the sure-footed broncos, and entirely impossible for the loaded jacks.

Next, they thought of cutting up one of the pack tarpaulins and muffling the hoofs of the animals with the pieces, but aside from the time that would be wasted, this expedient seemed too childish to merit serious consideration. In the end, however, chance, that sturdy friend of the hard-pressed and the inexperienced, came to their rescue. Some seven or eight miles beyond their night camp they came upon a place where, for a half-mile or more, the left-hand bank of the stream was a slope of slippery, broken shale; the tail of a slide from the mountain side above. Bromley was the first to see the hopeful possibilities.

"Wait a minute, Phil," he called to his file leader; "don't you remember this slide, and how we cursed it when we had to tramp through it coming out? I've captured an idea. I believe we can delay this mob that's chasing us, and maybe get rid of it for good and all. Is the river fordable here, do you think?"

Philip's answer was to ride his horse into the stream and half-way across it. "We can make it," he called back, "if we can keep the jacks from being washed away."

"We'll take that for granted," said Bromley. "But we don't need to go all the way across. Stay where you are, and I'll herd the rest of the caravan in and let it drink."

This done, and a plain trail thus left leading into the water, Bromley explained his captured idea. While they couldn't hope to make a roadway of the stream bed for any considerable distance, it was quite possible to wade the animals far enough down-stream to enable them to come out upon the shale slide. After they had been allowed to drink their fill, the expedient was tried and it proved unexpectedly successful. On the shale slide the hoof prints vanished as soon as they were made, each step of horse or burro setting in motion a tiny pebble slide that immediately filled the depression. Looking back after they had gone a little distance they could see no trace of their passing.

"This ought to keep the mob guessing for a little while," Bromley offered as they pushed on. "They'll see our tracks going down into the creek, and think we crossed over. They'll probably take a tumble to themselves after a while -- after they fail to find any tracks on the other side; but it will hold 'em for a bit, anyway. Now if we could only scare up some way of hiding our tracks after we get beyond this slide -- -- "