nows where anything is, remembers accurately your instructions,
follows them if remembered, or is able to handle without awkwardness
his large and pathetic hands and feet; he is always lost, always
falling off or into things, always in difficulties; his articles of
necessity are constantly being burned up or washed away or mislaid; he
looks at you beamingly through great innocent eyes in the most
chuckle-headed of manners; he exasperates you to within an inch of
explosion,--and yet you love him.

I am referring now to the real tenderfoot, the fellow who cannot learn,
who is incapable ever of adjusting himself to the demands of the wild
life. Sometimes a man is merely green, inexperienced. But give him a
chance and he soon picks up the game. That is your greenhorn, not your
tenderfoot. Down near Monache meadows we came across an individual
leading an old pack-mare up the trail. The first thing, he asked us to
tell him where he was. We did so. Then we noticed that he carried his
gun muzzle-up in his hip-pocket, which seemed to be a nice way to shoot
a hole in your hand, but a poor way to make your weapon accessible. He
unpacked near us, and promptly turned the mare into a bog-hole because
it looked green. Then he stood around the rest of the evening and
talked deprecating talk of a garrulous nature.

"Which way did you come?" asked Wes.

The stranger gave us a hazy account of misnamed canons, by which we
gathered that he had come directly over the rough divide below us.

"But if you wanted to get to Monache, why didn't you go around to the
eastward through that pass, there, and save yourself all the climb? It
must have been pretty rough through there."

"Yes, perhaps so," he hesitated. "Still--I got lots of time--I can
take all summer, if I want to--and I'd rather stick to a straight
line--then you know where you ARE--if you get off the straight line,
you're likely to get lost, you know."

We knew well enough what ailed him, of course. He was a tenderfoot, of
the sort that always, to its dying day, unhobbles its horses before
putting their halters on. Yet that man for thirty-two years had lived
almost constantly in the wild countries. He had traveled more miles
with a pack-train than we shall ever dream of traveling, and hardly
could we mention a famous camp of the last quarter century that he had
not blundered into. Moreover he proved by the indirections of his
misinformation that he had really been t