u on the genteel
European plan. Comfortably sitting in a willow chair on the broad
veranda, one will read the signs on those cliffs--all about the best
shoes to wear, and what particular pill of all the pills that be, should
be taken for that ailing kidney. But it will not be I who shall sit in
that willow chair on that broad, as yet unbuilt, veranda.

The sun was glinting at the rim of the cliffs, and the place of awe and
thunders was slowly filling with shadow. We found a steep trail,
inaccessible for vehicles, leading upward in the direction of Benton. It
was getting that time of day when even a sentimentalist wants a
beefsteak, especially if he has hiked over dusty scorching trails and
scrambled over rocks all day.

Some kind man back in the town, with a fund of that most useless
article, information, had told us of a place called Goodale,
theoretically existing on the Great Northern Railroad between Great
Falls and Benton. We had provided only for luncheon, trusting to fate
and Goodale for supper.

Goodale! A truly beautiful name! No doubt in some miraculous way the
character of the country changed suddenly just before you got there
merely to justify the name. Surely no one would have the temerity to
conjure up so beautiful a name for a desert town. Yet, half unwillingly,
I thought of a little place I once visited--against my will, since the
brakeman put me off there--by the name of Forest City. I remembered with
misgivings how there wasn't a tree within something like four hundred
miles. But I pushed that memory aside as a lying prophet. I believed in
Goodale and beefsteak. Goodale would be a neat, quiet little town, set
snugly in a verdant valley. We would come into it by starlight--down a
careless gypsying sort of country road; and there would be the sound of
a dear little trickling bickering cool stream out in the shadows of the
trees fringing the approach to Goodale. And we'd pass pretty little
cottages with vines growing over the doors, and hollyhocks peeping over
the fences, and cheerful lights in the windows.

Goodale! And then, right in the middle of the town (no, _village_--the
word is cosier somehow)--right in the middle of the village there would
be a big restaurant, with such alluring scents of beefsteak all about
it.

I set the pace up that trail. It was a swinging, loose, cavalry-horse
sort of pace--the kind that rubs the blue off the distance and paints
the back trail gray. Goodale was a sort