CHAPTER XXXI

THE END OF THE LONG TRAIL

IT was just at that critical moment that something wholly unexpected happened. As long as they lived Dick and Roger believed that the Providence that had so long watched over their fortunes, seeing their terrible distress, had come to the rescue.

They heard a sudden sound that bewildered them at first. It was a horrible sucking noise, and both lads actually felt the ground quivering under their feet.

Instinctively they came to a pause, as the yells back of them changed to cries of great fear, some of which seemed to be half-muffled. There was, accompanying these sounds, a strange splashing, and the crash of trees going down.

As the boys whirled around, stunned by all these remarkable sounds, they looked upon one of the most terrifying spectacles that had ever come before them. A large section of the bank of the river, where they had found it so wet in passing, had suddenly let go while the Indians were crossing it, and, together with a number of trees, had slipped into the deep river. Fully half of the Flat Head Indians went with the landslide, together with both of the renegades.

Dick plainly discovered Lascelles throwing up his arms in an agony of fear, as he found himself being dragged along, with those tons and tons of earth, into a watery grave. Then a great tree smashed down directly over him and that was the last that human eyes ever saw of the French trader.

The rest of the Indians stood there spellbound, just as the two boys