he could not reach it with
the stones he threw. His thoughts, however, were brought back to his
surroundings so that he remembered Peppajee. He stood still, and scanned
carefully the jumble of rocks and bowlders which sloped steeply down to
the river, looking for a betraying bit of color or dirty gray hat-crown.

"But I could look my eyes out and welcome, if he didn't want to be
seen," he concluded, and sat down while he rolled a cigarette. "And
I don't know as I want to see him, anyway." Still, he did not move
immediately. He was in the shade, which was a matter for congratulation
on such a day. He had a cigarette between his lips, which made
for comfort; and he still felt the exhilarating effects of his
unpremeditated boldness, without having come to the point of sober
thinking. He sat there, and blew occasional mouthfuls of smoke into
the quivering heat waves, and stared down at the river rushing over the
impeding rocks as if its very existence depended upon reaching as soon
as possible the broader sweep of the Snake.

He finished the first cigarette, and rolled another from sheer force of
habit rather than because he really wanted one. He lifted one foot, and
laid it across his knee, and was drawing a match along the sole of his
boot when his eyes chanced to rest for a moment upon a flutter of green,
which showed briefly around the corner of a great square rock poised
insecurely upon one corner, as if it were about to hurl its great bulk
down upon the river it had watched so long. He held the blazing match
poised midway to its destination while he looked; then he put it to the
use he had meant it for, pulled his hat-brim down over his right eye and
ear to shield them from the burn of the sun, and went picking his way
idly over to the place.

"HUL-lo!" he greeted, in the manner of one who refuses to acknowledge
the seriousness of a situation which confronts him suddenly. "What's the
excitement?"

There was no excitement whatever. There was Peppajee, hunched up against
the rock in that uncomfortable attitude which permits a man to come
at the most intimate relations with the outside of his own ankle, upon
which he was scowling in seeming malignity. There was his hunting-knife
lying upon a flat stone near to his hand, with a fresh red blotch upon
the blade, and there was his little stone pipe clenched between his
teeth and glowing red within the bowl. Also there was the ankle, purple
and swollen from the ligature a