The Golden Spider by Francis Lynde

When Dick Maxwell was left alone on the summit of Mule-Ear Pass, he watched his two companions running along the spur ridge as long as he could see them. But after they were fairly out of sight he began to get ready for the descent of the western trail.

When he attacked it, he found the downward trail on the western slope much less difficult than that over which they had gained the pass from the east. So, by the time the daily thaw was setting in, Dick had his two-jack train well down into the timber and was casting about for a good place in which to camp and wait for Larry and Purdick.

Oddly enough, as he thought, the good places were slow in revealing themselves. Upon leaving the snow slopes and entering the timber, the little-used trail, after crossing and recrossing the little torrent in the gulch a number of times, seemed to fade out gradually. Being only a sort of apprentice pathfinder, Dick didn't notice the fading at first. What he was looking for was a bit of grass for the burros in a place where Larry and Purdick would have no trouble in finding it, and him, when they should come over the mountain.

It was getting pretty well along toward noon when Dick began to wonder if something wasn't wrong. For one thing, the trail seemed to have disappeared entirely, and for another, he suddenly realized that the noise of the stream, which he had been holding in the back of his mind as a guide, had been gradually growing fainter and fainter until now he couldn't hear it at all.

Plainly, it was time to call a halt and do a little thinking. Though he had been taking it easy, and letting the jacks do the same, he knew he must have covered considerable distance in the course of the forenoon. And every added mile he was traveling was making it just that much harder for Larry and Purdick to overtake and find him. Moreover, the little pack beasts couldn't go on forever without feeding. He must find grass, and find it soon, or the burros would suffer.

Having reached that sensible conclusion, he hitched the patient little animals to a tree, and made a wide circuit in search of a patch of grass. Luckily, he soon found one in a little open glade, and to this he drove the burros, relieved them of the packs, and turned them loose to graze.

Munching his own midday meal while the jacks were feeding, Dick did some more thinking. Little by little the conviction that he had lost his way grew upon him, and the consequences began to loom up. Since he himself had packed their haversack, he knew that Larry and Purdick had barely enough for two meals. If he and the provisions were lost so that the two who had been left behind couldn't find them, they'd go hungry.

Confronted by this nettlesome fact, Dick ate his own dinner hurriedly. The only thing to do was to turn back and find out where he had left the trail. But when he came to consider this matter of back-tracking, confusion set in. In which direction had he wandered? Was the stream he had been following to the left or to the right?

He was swallowing the last mouthful of biscuit and cold bacon when the confusion of ideas climaxed in the admission that he didn't know which side of the stream he had crossed to last. There had been a number of the crossings, and he hadn't taken any notice of the particular direction he was going. It was a bemuddling state of affairs, but the need for action was none the less pressing. Larry and Purdick mustn't be left to wander all over the lot, famine-stricken, just because their provision freighter hadn't had sense enough to stay where he could be found.

Dick got the packs ready and waited impatiently for the burros to fill up. They were doing their hungry best; anybody could see that. Still, it was taking time.

"Chew――chew fast, you little beggars! " he grumbled at them, stretching himself out on a bed of fir needles and watching them as they cropped. "We've got to be making tracks out of this, if you did but know it."

Now, when one has lost half a night's sleep, and, on the heels of the loss, has tramped up one side of a mountain and down the other, a bed of dry conifer needles is likely to prove a pretty subtle temptation――not to go to sleep, of course, with the urgencies making it perfectly plain that one really mustn't do that, but just to close one's eyes and doze for a minute or two. Dick locked his hands under his head and lay gazing at the industrious burros. He had to look down his nose to see them, and that, too, is dangerous, if one doesn't mean to go to sleep. Two or three times he found his eyes closing automatically; and at last, with the thought that he might just as well doze off for the half-hour that it would take the jacks to fill themselves up, he was gone.

That was that. But, unlike Larry, Dick had no alarm clock in the back part of his head that he could set to go off promptly at the end of half an hour. Quietly in the silence of the little glade, which was broken only by the industrious grazing of the little pack beasts, the half-hour slipped by, and then another and yet another.

The burros had finished the filling-up process and were beginning to sniff the air for water. Inch by inch the tree shadows lengthened as the good old earth turned over in its daily wallop, and still Dick slept on. When he was finally awakened by one of the jacks nosing him over to find out if he were anything that a donkey could top off with by way of dessert, he leaped up with a yell and looked at his watch. It was nearly five o'clock. He had lost over four hours of the day!

Reproaching himself remorsefully for having been so heedless as to go to sleep on his job, Dick hustled the pack saddles into place, loaded them, and was ready to hike. Since all directions looked alike to him, he set off, with the westering sun at his back, thinking that that course must at least take him, sooner or later, to the upper edge of the timber where at the worst he could get a wider look at things than could be had in the forest.