gs. Then they cut, each of them, a good
armful of browse for his bed. Long Lester strode off with his rifle in
search of anything he might find for the pot, while Norris and the boys
scrambled down to the river with their trout rods.

He broke trail along a narrow ledge, just such a one as the luckless
burro had gone hurtling over when his pack scraped the rising wall.
Almost a sheer drop, and the rapids roared in torrents of white foam.
Pedro clung to every root and every rock crack for fear of growing dizzy.

"My fault entirely," Ace reproached himself, as he thought of the lost
flour and bacon, rice, onions, cheese, smoked ham, dried fruit, coffee,
canned beets and spinach, tinned jams, and other compact and
rib-stretching items of their so lovingly planned duffle. "Never should
have packed it all on one burro."

The Senator's son had a dry fly outfit that was his treasure. Ted used
the crudest kind of hook and line for bait casting. The subject was one
of keen rivalry between them.

"Dad always prayed: 'May the East wind never blow,' when we went fishing
down in Maine," dogmatized Ace.

"Well, Pop was born in Illinois, and he used to say, 'When the wind is in
the South, it blows your bait into a fish's mouth.'"

"Huh! That may be poetry, but we don't have much of any wind out here
except the west wind. And if we wait for a cloudy day in this neck o' the
world, we'll wait till September."

"All the same," insisted Ted, "trout do bite best when it rains, because,
don't you see, the big fellows lie on the bottom, just gobbling up the
worms the rain washes down to them."

"They won't rise to a fly in the rain."

"Well, I dunno anything about dry flies, though I sh'd think they
couldn't _see_ the fly up on the surface, with the water all r'iled the
way it gets in a storm."

"No more can they when the sun glares."

"Well, then, you better choose the shady spots. I don't see sign n'r
symptom of even a wind cloud to-day."--And yet, even as he gazed
argumentatively at the horizon, a pink-white bank of cumulus began
drifting into view in the niche between two distant peaks.

"Gosh! It's sunset already," exclaimed Ted.

"At half-past five!"--Ace peered at his wrist watch, then held it to his
ear. "Besides, it's in the East----"

"Looks more like a fire starting off there," contributed Norris. "Whew!
See old Red Top, there?"

"Red Top!--Where Rosa is?"

"I think it must be."

"Radcliffe's plumb worried, wi