"Wa'al, son," the mountaineer replied, "I reckon I've done some kind o'
huntin' for fifty years on end. But there's not much huntin' in this
part o' the country."

"No," said Wilbur, looking around him, "I guess there isn't."

The road ran along a little gully with a small stream shaded by scrub
oak, but arising from this and similar gullies, in great rounded bosses,
heaved the barren slopes, the grass already turning yellow and too
sparse to cloak the red earth below.

"Yet," said Rifle-Eye, pointing with his finger as he spoke, "there's a
desert fox."

Wilbur strained his eyes to see, but the unfamiliar growth of cacti,
sage-brush, palo verde, and the dusty-miller plants made quick vision
difficult. In a moment, however, he caught sight of the little
reddish-gray animal running swiftly and almost indistinguishable from
its surroundings.

"But up there?" queried the boy, pointing in front of them. The road
wound onward toward the middle Sierras, thickly wooded with oak and
digger pine, and, of course, the chapparal, and towering to the clouds
rose the mighty serrated peaks of the range, where magnificent forests
of pine, fir, and cedar swept upwards to the limits of eternal snow. "Up
there the hunting must be wonderful."

"Among the mount'ns!" said the old hunter slowly. "Wa'al, up there, you
see, is home."

"You certainly can't complain about the looks of your home, then," said
the boy, "for that's just about the finest I've ever seen."

"'There's no place like home,'" quoted Rifle-Eye quietly, "but I ain't
ever feelin' that my home's so humble. It ain't a question of its bein'
good enough fer me, it's a question o' whether I'm good enough fer it."

"It makes quite a house," said Wilbur, following the old mountaineer's
line of thought.

"I've never lived in any smaller house than that," responded Rifle-Eye,
"an' I reckon now I never will. There's some I know that boasts of
ownin' a few feet o' space shut in by a brick wall. Not for me. My house
is as far as my eyes c'n see, an' from the ground to the sky."

Wilbur was silent for a moment, feeling the thrill of Nature in the old
man's speech.

"It's to be my home, too," he said gently.

Rifle-Eye smiled at the lad.

"I don't know that I'm quite the oldest inhabitant," he said, "but I
sure am the oldest Ranger in the Service, an' all I c'n say is, 'Make
yerself to home.'"

"All right," said Wilbur promptly, "I'll take that as an official
welcome fro