“Darned queer fellows, them,” he said to himself, as he watched them go down the road very sedately for a little way, then suddenly fall to shaking one another by both hands and slapping one another’s backs.
“Bet you they’ve been a leetle too long at the El Dorado,” he suggested aloud to himself, as there was no other auditor; and Himself quite agreed with the speaker. “Now just look at that!”
They danced and chorused their yah, yahs! till they were out of breath, an ending not long delayed in the thin air of the high Rockies. And as the aged and weather-beaten wanderer looked at them, he felt such an attack of memory, and suffered such twinges of boyish feeling, as had not pierced his cynical old frame in many and many a day.
“They’re way-up boys!” he exclaimed to himself. “I hope they’ll get the drop on that cantankerous old female they call Fortune,—and I reckon they will!”