Two or three hundred yards behind him, still buried in the timber, Otto was having trouble with Dishpan, a contumacious pack-mare.  Langdon grinned happily as he listened to the other’s vociferations, which threatened Dishpan with every known form of torture and punishment, from instant disembowelment to the more merciful end of losing her brain through the medium of a club.  He grinned because Otto’s vocabulary descriptive of terrible things always impending over the heads of his sleek and utterly heedless pack-horses was one of his chief joys.  He knew that if Dishpan should elect to turn somersaults while diamond-hitched under her pack, big, good-natured Bruce Otto would do nothing more than make the welkin ring with his terrible, blood-curdling protest.

One after another the six horses of their outfit appeared out of the timber, and last of all rode the mountain man.  He was gathered like a partly released spring in his saddle, an attitude born of years in the mountains, and because of a certain difficulty he had in distributing gracefully his six-foot-two-inch length of flesh and bone astride a mountain cayuse.

Upon his appearance Langdon dismounted, and turned his eyes again up the valley.  The stubbly blond beard on his face did not conceal the deep tan painted there by weeks of exposure in the mountains; he had opened his shirt at the throat, exposing a neck darkened by sun and wind; his eyes were of a keen, searching blue-gray, and they quested the country ahead of him now with the joyous intentness of the hunter and the adventurer.

Langdon was thirty-five.  A part of his life he spent in the wild places; the other part he spent in writing about the things he found there.  His companion was five years his junior in age, but had the better of him by six inches in length of anatomy, if those additional inches could be called an advantage.  Bruce thought they were not.  “The devil of it is I ain’t done growin’ yet!” he often explained.

He rode up now and unlimbered himself.  Langdon pointed ahead.

“Did you ever see anything to beat that?” he asked.

“Fine country,” agreed Bruce.  “Mighty good place to camp, too, Jim.  There ought to be caribou in this range, an’ bear.  We need some fresh meat.  Gimme a match, will you?”

It had come to be a habit with them to light both their pipes with one match when possible.  They performed this ceremony now while viewing the situation.  As he puffed the first luxurious cloud of smoke from his bulldog, Langdon nodded toward the timber from which they had just come.

“Fine place for our tepee,” he said.  “Dry wood, running water, and the first good balsam we’ve struck in a week for our beds.  We can hobble the horses in that little open plain we crossed a quarter of a mile back.  I saw plenty of buffalo grass and a lot of wild timothy.”

He looked at his watch.

“It’s only three o’clock.  We might go on.  But—­what do you say?  Shall we stick for a day or two, and see what this country looks like?”