using his own feet as a mode of travel. But away in the edge of the
pine grove were food and raiment, and a shelter from the night that
was creeping down on him with the hurried stealth of a mountain lion
after its quarry. He shifted the sheepskin mantle for the thousandth
time; this time he untied it from his galled shoulders and festooned
it modestly if unbecomingly about his middle.

Feeling sure of the unfailing hospitality of the rangeland, be the
tent-dweller whom he might, Happy Jack walked boldly through the soft,
spring twilight that lasts long in Montana, and up to the very door of
the tent. A figure--a female figure--slender and topped by thin face
and eyes sheltered behind glasses, rose up, gazed upon him in horror,
shrieked till one could hear her a mile, and fell backward into the
tent. Another female figure appeared, looked, and shrieked also--and
even louder than did the first. Happy Jack, with a squawk of dismay,
turned and flew incontinently afar into the dusk. A man's voice he
heard, shouting inquiry; another, shouting what, from a distance,
sounded like threats. Happy Jack did not wait to make sure; he ran
blindly, until he brought up in a patch of prickly-pear, at which he
yelled, forgetting for the instant that he was pursued. Somehow he
floundered out and away from the torture of the stinging spines, and
took to the hills. A moon, big as the mouth of a barrel, climbed over
a ridge and betrayed him to the men searching below, and they shouted
and fired a gun. Happy Jack did not believe they could shoot very
straight, but he was in no mood to take chances; he sought refuge
among a jumble of great, gray bowlders; sat himself down in the shadow
and caressed gingerly the places where the prickly-pear had punctured
his skin, and gave himself riotously over to blasphemy.

The men below were prowling half-heartedly, it seemed to him--as if