.

"Man alive, open y'r throat an' let out a yell."

"I'm too busy drinking in the air," answered Wayland.

And they both laughed. The mule and the broncho stood pointing their
ears forward. Wayland's mare, which he had bought at one of the
irrigation farms, lifted up her neck and whinnied. It was at that
irrigation farm operated by a retired newspaper man from Chicago--they
had got a reading of the first newspaper seen since leaving the Valley
and learned that the bodies of the two remaining fugitive outlaws had
been found by the railway navvies. Wayland thoughtfully removed his
Forest Service medallion. Men do not question each other over much in
the West. They had passed on unquestioning and unquestioned, Wayland a
disguised figure in his new ready-to-wear kakhi, not a sign of the
Forest Service about them, but the green felt hat still worn by the old
preacher, and the hatchets fastened to the saddles.

"How many Holy Cross Mountains have y' in the West, Wayland?"

"Three that I know of."

"That's ours, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's ours: the old priests and explorers scattered the name round
pretty thick in the old days."

"How far do you make it?"

"About a hundred miles, perhaps more!"

"Been a pilot to the priests and explorers for centuries?"

"I guess so, sir."

"Wayland, may it be so t' th' Nation, now! Y've got a wilderness an' a
Red Sea an' a Dead Sea an' a devilish dirty lot o' travellin' to do on
th' way t' y'r promised land; an' A'm thinkin', man, y've wasted a lot
o' time on the trail worshippin' th' calf; an' God knows who is y'r
Moses."

They camped that night among the evergreens with red fir branches for
beds, the first beds they had known for seven weeks, with the needled
end pointing in and the branch end out, "unless y' want t' sleep on
stumps," the old preacher had admonished the bed maker. And during the
night, the wind sprang up shaking all the pixie tambourines in the
pines and the hemlocks, and setting the poplars and cottonwoods
clapping their hands. A spurt of moisture hit the old man's face.

"Man alive, but is that rain?" he asked. Wayland laughed. "Only a
drop from a broken pine needle; but rain would taste good, wouldn't it?"

"D' y' smell it? Smell hard! It's like cloves."

Wayland laughed. He had had all these sensations of coming back from
South to North before.

The next night, they camped beside a chorus of waterfalls, joyous,
gurgling, laughing silve