rfoot.

He has a horrifying facility in losing himself. Nothing is more
cheering than to arise from a hard-earned couch of ease for the purpose
of trailing an Algernon or so through the gathering dusk to the spot
where he has managed to find something--a very real despair of ever
getting back to food and warmth. Nothing is more irritating then than
his gratitude.

I traveled once in the Black Hills with such a tenderfoot. We were off
from the base of supplies for a ten days' trip with only a saddle-horse
apiece. This was near first principles, as our total provisions
consisted of two pounds of oatmeal, some tea, and sugar. Among other
things we climbed Mt. Harney. The trail, after we left the horses, was
as plain as a strip of Brussels carpet, but somehow or another that
tenderfoot managed to get off it. I hunted him up. We gained the top,
watched the sunset, and started down. The tenderfoot, I thought, was
fairly at my coat-tails, but when I turned to speak to him he had gone;
he must have turned off at one of the numerous little openings in the
brush. I sat down to wait. By and by, away down the west slope of the
mountain, I heard a shot, and a faint, a very faint, despairing yell.
I, also, shot and yelled. After various signals of the sort, it became
evident that the tenderfoot was approaching. In a moment he tore by at
full speed, his hat off, his eye wild, his six-shooter popping at every
jump. He passed within six feet of me, and never saw me. Subsequently
I left him on the prairie, with accurate and simple instructions.

"There's the mountain range. You simply keep that to your left and
ride eight hours. Then you'll see Rapid City. You simply CAN'T get
lost. Those hills stick out like a sore thumb."

Two days later he drifted into Rapid City, having wandered off
somewhere to the east. How he had done it I can never guess. That is
his secret.

The tenderfoot is always in hard luck. Apparently, too, by all tests
of analysis it is nothing but luck, pure chance, misfortune. And yet
the very persistence of it in his case, where another escapes, perhaps
indicates that much of what we call good luck is in reality unconscious
skill in the arrangement of those elements which go to make up events.
A persistently unlucky man is perhaps sometimes to be pitied, but more
often to be booted. That philosophy will be cryingly unjust about once
in ten.

But lucky or unlucky, the tenderfoot is human. Ordi