"

"You've hit the nail on the head as sure as you're a year old!" cried
Langdon enthusiastically. "Bruce, I never thought of that!"

"There's a good many things you don't think about until you run across
'em," said the mountaineer. "It's what you said a while ago--such things
are what makes huntin' a fine sport when you've learned huntin' ain't
always killin'--but lettin' live. One day I lay seven hours on a
mountain-top watchin' a band o' sheep at play, an' I had more fun than if
I'd killed the whole bunch."

Bruce rose to his feet and stretched himself, an after-supper operation
that always preceded his announcement that he was going to turn in.

"Fine day to-morrow," he said, yawning. "Look how white the snow is on the
peaks."

"Bruce--"

"What?"

"How heavy is this bear we're after?"

"Twelve hundred pounds--mebby a little more. I didn't have the pleasure of
lookin' at him so close as you did, Jimmy. If I had we'd been dryin' his
skin now!"

"And he's in his prime?"

"Between eight and twelve years old, I'd say, by the way he went up the
slope. An old bear don't roll so easy."

"You've run across some pretty old bears, Bruce?"

"So old some of 'em needed crutches," said Bruce, unlacing his boots. "I've
shot bears so old they'd lost their teeth."

"How old?"

"Thirty--thirty-five--mebby forty years. Good-night, Jimmy!"

"Good-night, Bruce!"

Langdon was awakened some time hours later by a deluge of rain that brought
him out of his blankets with a yell to Bruce. They had not put up their
tepee, and a moment later he heard Bruce anathematizing their idiocy. The
night was as black as a cavern, except when it was broken by lurid flashes
of lightning, and the mountains rolled and rumbled with deep thunder.
Disentangling himself from his drenched blanket, Langdon stood up. A glare
of lightning revealed Bruce sitting in his blankets, his hair dripping down
over his long, lean face, and at sight of him Langdon laughed outright.

[Illustration: "They headed up the creek-bottom, bending over from their
saddles to look at every strip of sand they passed for tracks. They had not
gone a quarter of a mile when Bruce gave a sudden exclamation and
stopped."]

"Fine day to-morrow," he taunted, repeating Bruce's words of a few hours
before. "Look how white the snow is on the peaks!"

Whatever Bruce said was drowned in a crash of thunder.

Langdon waited for another lightning flash and then dove for the shelt