ot much! The man who stalks and kills an ibex has nothing more to
learn about stalking. Chamois, red deer, Scotch stag make you laugh after
you've done your bit in the ibex line."

"How about our sheep and goat?" inquired Brown, staring at his comrade.

"It's harder to get ibex."

"Nonsense!"

"It really is, Jim."

"What does your ibex resemble?"

"It's a handsome beast, ashy grey in summer, furred a brownish yellow in
winter, and with little chin whiskers and a pair of big, curved, heavily
ridged horns, thick and flat and looking as though they ought to belong to
something African, and twice as big."

"Some trophy, what?" commented Brown, working away at his sketches.

"Rather. The devilish thing lives along the perpetual snow line; and, for
incredible stunts in jumping and climbing, it can give points to any Rocky
Mountain goat. You try to get above it, spend the night there, and stalk
it when it returns from nocturnal grazing in the stunted growth below.
That's how."

"And you got one?"

"Yes. It took six days. We followed it for that length of time across the
icy mountains, Siurd and I. I thought I'd die."

"Cold work, eh?"

Stent nodded, pocketed his sketch, fished out a packet of bread and
chocolate from his pocket and, rolling over luxuriously in the sun among
the alpine roses, lunched leisurely, flat on his back.

Brown presently stretched out and reclined on his elbow; and while he ate
he lazily watched a kestrel circling deep in the gulf below him.

"I think," he said, half to himself, "that this is the most beautiful
region on earth."

Stent lifted himself on both elbows and gazed across the chasm at the
lower slopes of the alm opposite, all ablaze with dewy wild flowers. Down
it, between fern and crag and bracken, flashed a brook, broken into in
silvery sections amid depths of velvet green below, where evidently it
tumbled headlong into that thin, shining thread which was a broad river.

"Yes," mused Stent, "Siurd von Glahn and I were comrades on many a foot
tour through such mountains as these. He was a delightful fellow, my
classmate Siurd----"

Brown's swift rigid grip on his arm checked him to silence; there came the
clink of an iron-shod foot on the ledge; they snatched their rifles from
the fern patch; two figures stepped around the shelf of rock, looming up
dark against the dazzling sky.

CHAPTER V

PARNASSUS

Brown, squatting cross-legged among the alpine roses, sq