rely my meat's transparent by the way her voice struck through among
my bones. If angels speak like that I'd die to hear. She told me
nothin', not one word about the trouble that's killing her, but her
voice made me want to cry. If you'd spoke like that when I was your
puppy, you'd a had no need of that old slipper, mother.

'Cause I couldn't tear him away from the beef bones, I'd left Mick up at
the Sky-line, or I'd ast that lady to accept my dog. You see, he'd bite
Trevor all-right, wharas I has to diet myself, and my menu is sort of
complete. Still by the time she stayed in camp, my talk may have done
some comfort to that poor woman. She didn't know then that her trouble
was only goin' to last another week.

This is pie day. I comes now to describing my last trip down from the
Sky-line, when I hustled the ponies just in case Mrs. Trevor might be
taking her _cultus cooly_ along toward Soda Spring. Of course she wasn't
there.

You'd have laughed if you'd seen Jones after she drank her fill of water
out of the bubbly spring, crowded with soda bubbles. She just goes hic,
tittup, hic, down the trail, changing step as the hiccups jolted her
poor old ribs. The mare looked so blamed funny that at first I didn't
notice the tracks along the road.

To judge by the hind shoes, Mrs. Trevor's mean colt had gone down toward
the river not more'n ten minutes ago, on the dead run, then back up the
road at a racking out-of-breath trot. Something must have gone wrong,
and sure enough as I neared a point of rocks which hid the trail ahead,
Jones suddenly shied hard in the midst of a hiccup. There was the Widow
Bear's track right across the road, and Mick had to yell blue blazes to
get the other ponies past the smell. Ahead of me the tracks of the
Trevor colt were dancing the width of the road, bucking good and hard at
the stink of bear. Then I rounded the point of rocks.

There lay Mrs. Trevor all in a heap. The afternoon sun caught her hair,
which flamed gold, and a green humming-bird whirred round as though it
were some big flower. Since Jones would have shied over the tree-tops at
a corpse or a whiff of blood, I knew she'd only fainted, but felt at her
breast to make sure. I tell you it felt like an outrage to lay my paw on
a sleeping lady, and still worse I'd only my dirty old hat to carry
water from a seepage in the cliff. My heart thumped when I knelt to
sprinkle the water, and when that blamed humming-bird came whirring past