"Any relation to Dan Failing of the Umpqua Divide?"
Dan had never heard of the Umpqua Divide, but he couldn't doubt but that the sender of the wire referred to his grandfather. He wired in the affirmative. The head of the Chamber of Commerce received the wire, read it, thrust it into his desk, and in the face of a really important piece of business proceeded to forget all about it. Thus it came about that, except for one thing, Dan Failing would have probably stepped off the train at his destination wholly unheralded and unmet. The one thing that changed his destiny was that at a meeting of a certain widely known fraternal order the next night, the Chamber of Commerce crossed trails with the Frontier in the person of another old resident who had his home in the farthest reaches of the Umpqua Divide. The latter asked the former to come up for a few days' shooting—the deer being fatter and more numerous than any previous season since the days of the grizzlies. For it is true that one of the most magnificent breed of bears that ever walked the face of the earth once left their footprints, as of flour-sacks in the mud, from one end of the region to another.
"Too busy, I'm afraid," the Chamber of Commerce had replied. "But Lennox—that reminds me. Do you remember old Dan Failing?"
Lennox probed back into the years for a single instant, straightened out all the kinks of his memory in less time than the wind straightens out the folds of a flag, and turned a most interested face. "Remember him!" he exclaimed. "I should say I do." The middle-aged man half-closed his piercing, gray eyes. Those piercing eyes are a characteristic peculiar to the mountain men, and whether they come from gazing over endless miles of winter snow, or from some quality of steel that life in the mountains imbues, no one is quite able to determine.
"Listen, Steele," he said. "I saw Dan Failing make a bet once. I was just a kid, but I wake up in my sleep to marvel at it. We had a full long glimpse of a black-tail bounding up a long slope. It was just a spike-buck, and Dan Failing said he could take the left-hand spike off with one shot from his old Sharpe's. Three of us bet him—the whole thing in less than two seconds. With the next shot, he'd get the deer. He won the bet, and now if I ever forget Dan Failing, I want to die."
"You're just the man I'm looking for, then. You're not going out till the day after to-morrow?"
"No."
"On the limited, hitting here to-morrow morning, there's a grandson of Dan Failing. His name is Dan Failing too, and he wants to go up to your place to hunt. Stay all summer and pay board."
Lennox's eyes said that he couldn't believe it was true. After a while his tongue spoke, too. "Good Lord," he said. "I used to foller Dan around—like old Shag, before he died, followed Snowbird. Of course he can come. But he can't pay board."
It was rather characteristic of the mountain men,—that the grandson of Dan Failing couldn't possibly pay board. But Steele knew the ways of cities and of men, and he only smiled. "He won't come, then," he explained. "Anyway, have that out with him at the end of his stay. He wants fishing, and you've got that in the North fork. He wants shooting, and if there is a place in the United States with more wild animals around the back door than at your house, I don't know where it is. Moreover, you're a thousand miles back—"