owder, salt, and flour, warmed through--not cooked--in a
frying-pan. He deluged these with molasses and devoured three
platefuls. It would have killed an ostrich, but apparently did this
decrepit veteran of seventy-two much good.

After supper he talked to us most interestingly in the dry cowboy
manner, looking at us keenly from under the floppy brim of his hat. He
confided to us that he had had to quit smoking, and it ground him--he'd
smoked since he was five years old.

"Tobacco doesn't agree with you any more?" I hazarded.

"Oh, 'taint that," he replied; "only I'd ruther chew."

The dark fell, and all the little camp-fires under the trees twinkled
bravely forth. Some of the men sang. One had an accordion. Figures,
indistinct and formless, wandered here and there in the shadows,
suddenly emerging from mystery into the clarity of firelight, there to
disclose themselves as visitors. Out on the plain the cattle lowed,
the horses nickered. The red firelight flashed from the metal of
suspended equipment, crimsoned the bronze of men's faces, touched with
pink the high lights on their gracefully recumbent forms. After a
while we rolled up in our blankets and went to sleep, while a band of
coyotes wailed like lost spirits from a spot where a steer had died.

[1] See especially Jackson Himes in The Blazed Trail; and The Rawhide.

XX

THE GOLDEN TROUT

After Farewell Gap, as has been hinted, the country changes utterly.
Possibly that is why it is named Farewell Gap. The land is wild,
weird, full of twisted trees, strangely colored rocks, fantastic
formations, bleak mountains of slabs, volcanic cones, lava, dry powdery
soil or loose shale, close-growing grasses, and strong winds. You feel
yourself in an upper world beyond the normal, where only the freakish
cold things of nature, elsewhere crowded out, find a home. Camp is
under a lonely tree, none the less solitary from the fact that it has
companions. The earth beneath is characteristic of the treeless lands,
so that these seem to have been stuck alien into it. There is no
shelter save behind great fortuitous rocks. Huge marmots run over the
boulders, like little bears. The wind blows strong. The streams run
naked under the eye of the sun, exposing clear and yellow every detail
of their bottoms. In them there are no deep hiding-places any more
than there is shelter in the land, and so every fish that swims shows
as plainly as in an aquarium.

We