ing gray spruce-trunks rose round it like the pillars of a
colonnade. The forester blew up his air bed. In front of the
supper-fire, the shadowy figures of the cooks moved back and forward.
From a near-by glacier came an occasional crack, followed by a roar
which told of ice dropping into cavernous depths below. The Little Boy
cleaned his gun and dreamed of mighty exploits.

We rested all the next day at Camp Romany--rested and fished, while
three of the more adventurous spirits climbed a near-by mountain. Late
in the afternoon they rode in, bringing in their midst Joe, who had, at
the risk of his life, slid a distance which varied in the reports from
one hundred yards to a mile and a half down a snow-field, and had hung
fastened on the brink of eternity until he was rescued.

Very white was Joe that evening, white and bruised. It was twenty-four
hours before he began to regret that the camera had not been turned on
him at the time.

Not until we left Camp Romany did we feel that we were really off for
the trip. And yet that first day out from Romany was not agreeable
going. The trail was poor, although there came a time when we looked
back on it as superlative. The sun was hot, and there was no shade.
Years ago, prospectors hunting for minerals had started forest-fires to
level the ridges. The result was the burning-over of perhaps a hundred
square miles of magnificent forest. The second growth which has come up
is scrubby, a wilderness of young trees and chaparral, through which
progress was difficult and uninteresting.

Up the bottom of the great glacier-basin toward the mountain at its
head, we made our slow and painful way. More dust, more mosquitoes. Even
the beauty of the snow-capped peaks overhead could not atone for the
ugliness of that destroyed region. Yet, although it was not lovely, it
was vastly impressive. Literally, hundreds of waterfalls cascaded down
the mountain wall from hidden lakes and glaciers above, and towering
before us was the mountain wall which we were to climb later that day.

We had seen no human creature since leaving the lake, but as we halted
for luncheon by a steep little river, we suddenly found that we were not
alone. Standing beside the trail was an Italian bandit with a knife two
feet long in his hands.

Ha! Come adventure! Come romance! Come rifles and pistols and all the
arsenal, including the Little Boy, with pure joy writ large over him! A
bandit, armed to the teeth!

B