ut this is a disappointing world. He was the cook from a mine--strange,
the way we met cooks, floating around loose in a world that seems to be
growing gradually cookless. And he carried with him his knife and his
bread-pan, which was, even then, hanging to a branch of a tree.

We fed him, and he offered to sing. The Optimist nudged me.

"Now, listen," he said; "these fellows can _sing_. Be quiet, everybody!"

The bandit twisted up his mustachios, smiled beatifically, and took up a
position in the trail, feet apart, eyes upturned.

And then--he stopped.

"I start a leetle high," he said; "I start again."

So he started again, and the woods receded from around us, and the
rushing of the river died away, and nothing was heard in that lonely
valley but the most hideous sounds that ever broke a primeval silence
into rags and tatters.

When, at last, he stopped, we got on our horses and rode on, a bitter
and disillusioned party of adventurers whose first bubble of enthusiasm
had been pricked.

It was four o'clock when we began the ascent of the switchback at the
top of the valley. Up and up we went, dismounting here and there, going
slowly but eagerly. For, once over the wall, we were beyond the reach
of civilization. So strange a thing is the human mind! We who were for
most of the year most civilized, most dependent on our kind and the
comforts it has wrought out of a primitive world, now we were savagely
resentful of it. We wanted neither men nor houses. Stirring in us had
commenced that primeval call that comes to all now and then, the longing
to be alone with Mother Earth, savage, tender, calm old Mother Earth.

And yet we were still in touch with the world. For even here man had
intruded. Hanging to the cliff were the few buildings of a small mine
which sends out its ore by pack-pony. I had already begun to feel the
aloofness of the quiet places, so it was rather disconcerting to have a
miner with a patch over one eye come to the doorway of one of the
buildings and remark that he had read some of my political articles and
agreed with them most thoroughly.

[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY L. D. LINDSLEY
_Looking out of ice-cave, Lyman Glacier_]

That was a long day. We traveled from early morning until long after
late sundown. Up the switchback to a green plateau we went, meeting
our first ice there, and here again that miracle of the mountains,
meadow flowers and snow side by side.

Far behind us str