But the effect of this Spartan training is not merely
physical; the men who leave the bush and the ranges, as a rule, come to
the forefront in commerce and industry. Endurance, swiftness of action
and stubborn tenacity are apt to carry their possessor far anywhere.
Vane and his comrade needed these qualities during the following week.
The valley grew more wild and rugged as they proceeded. In places, its
bottom was filled with muskegs, cumbered with half-submerged, decaying
trunks of fallen trees; and when they could not spring from one crumbling
log to another they sank in slime and water to the knee. Then there were
effluents of the main river to be waded through, and every now and then
they were forced back by impenetrable thickets to the hillside, where
they scrambled along a talus of frost-shattered rock. They entered
transverse valleys, and after hours of exhausting labor abandoned the
search of each in turn and plodded back to the one they had been
following. Their boots and clothing suffered; their packs were rent upon
their backs; and their provisions diminished rapidly.
At length, one lowering afternoon, they were brought to a standstill by
the river which forked into two branches, one of which came foaming out
of a cleft in the rocks. This would have mattered less, had it flowed
across the level; but just there it had scored itself out a deep hollow,
from which the roar of its turmoil rose in long reverberations.
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