er "a little farther on."

Our restlessness was further increased by the fact that we were now
seeing a good deal of Sam Bagsby, the hunter. He and Yank had found much
in common, and forgathered of evenings before our campfire.

Bagsby was a man of over fifty, tall and straight as a youngster, with a
short white beard, a gray eye, and hard, tanned flesh. He was a typical
Rocky Mountain man, wearing even in the hottest weather his fur cap with
the tail hanging behind, his deerskin moccasins, and his fringed
buckskin hunting shirt. Mining possessed no interest for him whatever.
He was by profession a trapper, and he had crossed the plains a
half-dozen times.

"No mining for me!" he stated emphatically. "I paddled around after the
stuff for a while, till my hands swelled up like p'ison, and my back
creaked like a frozen pine tree in the wind. Then I quit, and I stayed
quit. I'm a hunter; and I'm makin' a good livin', because I ain't very
particular on how I live."

He and Yank smoked interminable pipes, and swapped yarns. Johnny and I
liked nothing better than to keep quiet and listen to them. Bagsby had
come out with Captain Sutter; and told of that doughty soldier's early
skirmishes with the Indians. His tales of the mountains, the plains, and
the game and Indians were so much romance to us; and we both wished
heartily that fate could have allowed us a chance at such adventures.

"But why don't you fellows branch out?" Bagsby always ended. "What do
you want to stick here for like a lot of groundhogs? There's rivers back
in the hills a heap better than this one, and nobody thar. You'd have
the place plumb to yoreselves. Git in where the mountains is really
mountainous."

Then he would detail at length and slowly his account of the great
mountains, deep canons, the shadows of forests, ridges high up above the
world, and gorges far within the bowels of the earth through which
dashed white torrents. We gathered and pieced together ideas of great
ice and snow mountains, and sun-warmed bars below them, and bears and
deer, and a high clear air breathing through a vast, beautiful and
solitary wilderness. The picture itself was enough to set bounding the
pulses of any young man, with a drop of adventure in his veins. But also
Bagsby was convinced that there we should find richer diggings than any
yet discovered.

"It stands to reason," he argued, "that the farther up you git, the more
gold there is. All this loose stuff y