As I sat that night by the low-burning embers of our first camp fire I
forgot my new companions. Through the gathering night mists I could
just discern the dim outlines of the opposite shore of Grand Lake. It
was over there, just west of that high spectral bluff, that Hubbard
and I, on a wet July night, had pitched our first camp of the other
trip. In fancy I was back again in that camp and Hubbard was talking
to me and telling me of the "bully story" of the mystic land of won-
ders that lay "behind the ranges" he would have to take back to the
world.

"We're going to traverse a section no white man has ever seen," he
exclaimed, "and we'll add something to the world's knowledge of
geography at least, and that's worth while. No matter how little a
man may add to the fund of human knowledge it's worth the doing, for
it's by little bits that we've learned to know so much of our old
world. There's some hard work before us, though, up there in those
hills, and some hardships to meet."

Ah, if we had only known!

Some one said it was time to "turn in," and I was brought suddenly to
a sense of the present, but a feeling of sadness possessed me when I
took my place in the crowded tent, and I lay awake long, thinking of
those other days.

Clear and crisp was the morning of June twenty-eighth. The atmosphere
was bracing and delightful, the azure of the sky above us shaded to
the most delicate tints of blue at the horizon, and, here and there,
bits of clouds, like bunches of cotton, flecked the sky. The sun
broke grandly over the rugged hills, and the lake, like molten silver,