“Wayland, man, look!”

The old frontiersman had taken off his hat.

“Man alive, open y’r throat an’ let out a yell.”

“I’m too busy drinking in the air,” answered Wayland.

And they both laughed.  The mule and the broncho stood pointing their ears forward.  Wayland’s mare, which he had bought at one of the irrigation farms, lifted up her neck and whinnied.  It was at that irrigation farm operated by a retired newspaper man from Chicago—­they had got a reading of the first newspaper seen since leaving the Valley and learned that the bodies of the two remaining fugitive outlaws had been found by the railway navvies.  Wayland thoughtfully removed his Forest Service medallion.  Men do not question each other over much in the West.  They had passed on unquestioning and unquestioned, Wayland a disguised figure in his new ready-to-wear kakhi, not a sign of the Forest Service about them, but the green felt hat still worn by the old preacher, and the hatchets fastened to the saddles.

“How many Holy Cross Mountains have y’ in the West, Wayland?”

“Three that I know of.”

“That’s ours, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s ours:  the old priests and explorers scattered the name round pretty thick in the old days.”

“How far do you make it?”

“About a hundred miles, perhaps more!”

“Been a pilot to the priests and explorers for centuries?”

“I guess so, sir.”

“Wayland, may it be so t’ th’ Nation, now!  Y’ve got a wilderness an’ a Red Sea an’ a Dead Sea an’ a devilish dirty lot o’ travellin’ to do on th’ way t’ y’r promised land; an’ A’m thinkin’, man, y’ve wasted a lot o’ time on the trail worshippin’ th’ calf; an’ God knows who is y’r Moses.”

They camped that night among the evergreens with red fir branches for beds, the first beds they had known for seven weeks, with the needled end pointing in and the branch end out, “unless y’ want t’ sleep on stumps,” the old preacher had admonished the bed maker.  And during the night, the wind sprang up shaking all the pixie tambourines in the pines and the hemlocks, and setting the poplars and cottonwoods clapping their hands.  A spurt of moisture hit the old man’s face.

“Man alive, but is that rain?” he asked.  Wayland laughed.  “Only a drop from a broken pine needle; but rain would taste good, wouldn’t it?”

“D’ y’ smell it?  Smell hard!  It’s like cloves.”

Wayland laughed.  He had had all these sensations of coming back from South to North before.