the Virginian lay and watched. Noonday's extreme brightness
had left the river and the plain in cooling shadow, but spread and
glowed over the yet undimmed mountains. Westward, the Tetons lifted
their peaks pale and keen as steel through the high, radiant air. Deep
down between the blue gashes of their canons the sun sank long shafts of
light, and the glazed laps of their snow-fields shone separate and white
upon their lofty vastness, like handkerchiefs laid out to dry. Opposite,
above the valley, rose that other range, the Continental Divide, not
sharp, but long and ample. It was bare in some high places, and below
these it stretched everywhere, high and low, in brown and yellow parks,
or in purple miles of pine a world of serene undulations, a great sweet
country of silence.

A passing band of antelope stood herded suddenly together at sight of
us; then a little breeze blew for a moment from us to them, and
they drifted like phantoms away, and were lost in the levels of the
sage-brush.

"If humans could do like that," said the Virginian, watching them go.

"Run, you mean?" said I.

"Tell a foe by the smell of him," explained the cow-puncher; "at fifty
yards--or a mile."

"Yes," I said; "men would be hard to catch."

"A woman needs it most," he murmured. He lay down again in his lounging
sprawl, with his grave eyes intently fixed upon my fly-casting.

The gradual day mounted up the hills farther from the floor of earth.
Warm airs eddied in its wake slowly, stirring the scents of the plain
together. I looked at the Southerner; and there was no guessing what
his thoughts might be at work upon behind that drowsy glance. Then for a
moment a trout rose, but only to look and whip down again into the pool
that wedged its calm into the riffle from below.

"Second thoughts," mused the Virginian; and as the trout came no more,
"Second thoughts," he repeated; "and even a fish will have them sooner
than folks has them in this mighty hasty country." And he rolled over
into a new position of ease.

At whom or what was he aiming these shafts of truth? Or did he moralize
merely because health and the weather had steeped him in that serenity
which lifts us among the spheres? Well, sometimes he went on from these
beginnings and told me wonderful things.

"I reckon," said he, presently, "that knowing when to change your mind
would be pretty near knowledge enough for plain people."

Since my acquaintance with him--this was th