Sundown in the hills. The scene was a southeast spur of the Rockies; call the region the Upper Red River or the Vermejo, whichever you will for a name. Forty miles due west from the Spanish Peaks would stand one on the very spot.
I had been out all day, ransacking the canyons, taking a Winter's look at the cattle to note how they were meeting the rigours of a season not yet half over. I had witnessed nothing alarming; my horned folk of the hills still made a smooth display as to ribs, and wore the air of cattle who had prudently stored up tallow enough the autumn before to carry them into the April grass.
“Many a day have I dwelt in a wet saddle, only to crawl into a wetter blanket at night; and all for cows!” It was Bob Ellis who fathered this rather irrelevant observation. I had cut his trail an hour before, and we were making company for each other back to camp. I put forth no retort. Bob and I abode in the same small log hut, and I saw much of him, and didn't feel obliged to reply to those random utterances which fluttered from him like birds from a bush.
It had been snowing for three days. This afternoon, however, had shaken off the storm. It is worth while to see the snow come down in the hills; flakes soft and clinging and silently cold; big as a baby's hand. Out in the flat valleys free of the trees the snow was deep enough to jade and distress our ponies. Therefore Bob and I were creeping home among the thick sown pines which bristled on the Divide like spines on a pig's back. There was very little snow under the trees. What would have made an easy depth of two feet had it been evenly spread on the ground over which our broncos picked their tired way, was above our heads in the pines. That was the reason why the trees were so still and silent. Your pine is a most garrulous vegetable in a sighing fashion, and its complaining notes sing for ever in your ears; sometimes like a roar, sometimes like a wail. But the three-days' snow in their green mouths gagged them; and never a tree of them all drew so much as a breath as we pushed on through their ranks.
“Like the Winchester you're packin?” asked Bob.
I confessed a weakness for the gun.
“Had one of them magazine guns once myse'f,” Bob remarked. “Model of '78. Never liked it, though; always shootin' over. As you pump the loads outen 'em and empty the magazine, the weight shifts till toward the last the muzzle's as light as a feather. Thar you be! shootin' over and still over, every pull.”
Having no interest in magazine guns beyond the act of firing them, I paid no heed to Bob's assault on their merits.
“Now a single-shot gun,” continued Bob, as he rode an oak shrub underfoot to come abreast of me, “is the weepon for me. Never mind about thar bein' jest one shot in her! Show me somethin' to shoot, an' I'll sling the cartridges into her frequent enough for the most impatient gent on earth. This rifle I'm packin' is all right—all except the hind sight. That's too coarse; you could drag a dog through it.”
Bob's dissertation on rifles was entertaining enough. My mood was indifferent, and his wisdom ran through my wits like water through a funnel, keeping them employed without filling them up. Bob had just begun again—all about a day far away when muzzle loaders were many in the hills—when my pony made sudden shy at something in the bushes. The muzzle of my gun instantly pointed to it, as if by an instinct of its own. Even as it did I became aware of the harmless cause of my pony's devout breathings—one of those million tragedies of nature which makes the wilderness a daily slaughter pen. It was the carcass of a blacktail deer. Its torn throat and shoulders, as well as the tracks of the giant cat in the snow, told how it died. The panther had leaped from the big bough of that yellow pine.