umptuous in my ignorance, that I might
hold my own with the old-timer if I judiciously painted up a few lies
gathered in the course of my wanderings. Yankee Jim saw every one of my
tales and went fifty better on the spot. He dealt in bears and
Indians--never less than twenty of each; had known the Yellowstone
country for years, and bore upon his body marks of Indian arrows; and
his eyes had seen a squaw of the Crow Indians burned alive at the stake.
He said she screamed considerable. In one point did he speak the
truth--as regarded the merits of that particular reach of the
Yellowstone. He said it was alive with trout. It was. I fished it from
noon till twilight, and the fish bit at the brown hook as though never a
fat trout-fly had fallen on the water. From pebbly reaches, quivering in
the heat-haze where the foot caught on stumps cut foursquare by the
chisel-tooth of the beaver; past the fringe of the water-willow crowded
with the breeding trout-fly and alive with toads and water-snakes; over
the drifted timber to the grateful shadow of big trees that darkened the
holes where the fattest fish lay, I worked for seven hours. The mountain
flanks on either side of the valley gave back the heat as the desert
gives it, and the dry sand by the railway track, where I found a
rattlesnake, was hot-iron to the touch. But the trout did not care for
the heat. They breasted the boiling river for my fly and they got it. I
simply dare not give my bag. At the fortieth trout I gave up counting,
and I had leached the fortieth in less than two hours. They were small
fish,--not one over two pounds,--but they fought like small tigers, and
I lost three flies before I could understand their methods of escape. Ye
gods! That was fishing, though it peeled the skin from my nose in
strips.

At twilight Yankee Jim bore me off, protesting, to supper in the hut.
The fish had prepared me for any surprise, wherefore when Yankee Jim
introduced me to a young woman of five-and-twenty, with eyes like the
deep-fringed eyes of the gazelle, and "on the neck the small head
buoyant, like a bell-flower in its bed," I said nothing. It was all in
the day's events. She was California-raised, the wife of a man who owned
a stock-farm "up the river a little ways," and, with her husband, tenant
of Yankee Jim's shanty. I know she wore list slippers and did not wear
stays; but I know also that she was beautiful by any standard of beauty,
and that the trout she cooked we