“And he’s in his prime?”

“Between eight and twelve years old, I’d say, by the way he went up the slope.  An old bear don’t roll so easy.”

“You’ve run across some pretty old bears, Bruce?”

“So old some of ’em needed crutches,” said Bruce, unlacing his boots.  “I’ve shot bears so old they’d lost their teeth.”

“How old?”

“Thirty—­thirty-five—­mebby forty years.  Good-night, Jimmy!”

“Good-night, Bruce!”

Langdon was awakened some time hours later by a deluge of rain that brought him out of his blankets with a yell to Bruce.  They had not put up their tepee, and a moment later he heard Bruce anathematizing their idiocy.  The night was as black as a cavern, except when it was broken by lurid flashes of lightning, and the mountains rolled and rumbled with deep thunder.  Disentangling himself from his drenched blanket, Langdon stood up.  A glare of lightning revealed Bruce sitting in his blankets, his hair dripping down over his long, lean face, and at sight of him Langdon laughed outright.

[Illustration:  “They headed up the creek-bottom, bending over from their saddles to look at every strip of sand they passed for tracks.  They had not gone a quarter of a mile when Bruce gave a sudden exclamation and stopped.”]

“Fine day to-morrow,” he taunted, repeating Bruce’s words of a few hours before.  “Look how white the snow is on the peaks!”

Whatever Bruce said was drowned in a crash of thunder.

Langdon waited for another lightning flash and then dove for the shelter of a thick balsam.  Under this he crouched for five or ten minutes, when the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun.  The thunder rolled southward, and the lightning went with it.  In the darkness he heard Bruce fumbling somewhere near.  Then a match was lighted, and he saw his comrade looking at his watch.

“Pretty near three o’clock,” he said.  “Nice shower, wasn’t it?”

“I rather expected it,” replied Langdon carelessly.  “You know, Bruce, whenever the snow on the peaks is so white—­”

“Shut up—­an’ let’s get a fire!  Good thing we had sense enough to cover our grub with the blankets.  Are yo’ wet?”

Langdon was wringing the water from his hair.  He felt like a drowned rat.

“No.  I was under a thick balsam, and prepared for it.  When you called my attention to the whiteness of the snow on the peaks I knew—­”

“Forget the snow,” growled Bruce, and Langdon could hear him breaking off dry pitch-filled twigs under a spruce.

He went to help him, and five minutes later they had a fire going.  The light illumined their faces, and each saw that the other was not unhappy.  Bruce was grinning under his sodden hair.

“I was dead asleep when it came,” he explained.  “An’ I thought I’d fallen in a lake.  I woke up tryin’ to swim.”