A mile down the valley Jim Langdon stopped his horse where the spruce and
balsam timber thinned out at the mouth of a coulee, looked ahead of him for
a breathless moment or two, and then with an audible gasp of pleasure swung
his right leg over so that his knee crooked restfully about the horn of his
saddle, and waited.

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