ttle body toboggan down the canvas. Our pocket-knives,
compasses and all other small objects were never safe unless securely
packed away out of reach of these nocturnal marauders.

Our conversations around the camp fire evenings were highly interesting
too, for Big Pete was a fluent talker with a wealth of stories of the
Great West at his tongue's end. Indeed, the story of his family and
their migration west was one that fascinated me. His father had been a
trapper in the old days; he had done his share of roaming the mountains,
prospecting and making his strikes, small and large, fighting Indians
and living the strenuous life of the border pioneer. He had found the
woman he afterward married unconscious under an overturned wagon of an
emigrant train that had been raided by the Indians, and after nursing
her back to health in his mining shack, had married her. With money he
had worked from the "diggin's" he had acquired, by grants from the
government, the beautiful and expansive mountain park where he had
planned to develop a ranch. He never went very far with his project,
however, for a raiding party of Indians caught him alone in the
mountains and his wife found his body pinned to the ground with arrows.
The shock of his tragedy killed Big Pete's mother soon after, and the
young Peter Darlinkel, then three years old, went to a nearby settlement
to be brought up by an uncle and a squaw aunt. Pete became prospector,
scout, trapper and hunter, using this beautiful park that became his as
a result of the passing of his father, as a private game preserve, so to
speak. That is, it was private except for the intrusion of the Wild
Hunter and his black wolf pack.

In a fragmentary way Big Pete told me this story and other interesting
tales of this wild western country, but mostly our conversation turned
to this old man of the mountains who was such a mystery to everyone,
even to Big Pete, but who, despite the lugubrious reputation, had
proved a kindly gentleman and a good friend to me.

There were no visible signs of a change in the weather which had been
clear for weeks, and the sky was otherwise clear blue save where the
white mares' tails swept across the heavens. But when we sat down to
supper that evening I could hear the rumbling of distant thunder. I knew
it was thunder for, although the fall of avalanches makes the same
noise, avalanches choose the noon time to fall when the sun is hottest
and the snows softest. Soon