The sun was sinking to its setting in a far-distant western wilderness when three young fellows who had been tramping steadily all afternoon up a steep mountain trail came out upon the summit of the range and stopped to look back upon another wilderness, with the buttes and gulches, valleys and rugged upheavals of which they had become affectionately familiar during the long summer weeks.
“Gee!” said the smallest of the three. “Has it all been real? Or have we only been dreaming it? It’s—it’s getting away from me already!”
The other two laughed, and the one of the two whose tongue was always the readiest said: “Good land, Purdy! if it’s fading out on you now, what will it be two weeks from now, when we’re back at the grind in Old Sheddon? It’s real enough to me.”
For a long minute the smallest one stood looking steadfastly into the depths from which they had lately ascended; looked so long and steadily that his eyes filled and he had to wink them rapidly to be able to see at all.
“Say, fellows—I want always to remember that bully old mountain wilderness just as we’re seeing it now,” he said in low tones; “it, and the good times we’ve had this summer, and the way we got tangled up in The Web of the Golden Spider. Don’t you?”
“Here, too,” said Dick Maxwell softly.
And then they turned away reluctantly to tramp down the descending trail in the eye of the glowing sunset.
THE END