"Yet," said Rifle-Eye, pointing with his finger as he spoke, "there's a desert fox."
Wilbur strained his eyes to see, but the unfamiliar growth of cacti, sage-brush, palo verde, and the dusty-miller plants made quick vision difficult. In a moment, however, he caught sight of the little reddish-gray animal running swiftly and almost indistinguishable from its surroundings.
"But up there?" queried the boy, pointing in front of them. The road wound onward toward the middle Sierras, thickly wooded with oak and digger pine, and, of course, the chapparal, and towering to the clouds rose the mighty serrated peaks of the range, where magnificent forests of pine, fir, and cedar swept upwards to the limits of eternal snow. "Up there the hunting must be wonderful."
"Among the mount'ns!" said the old hunter slowly. "Wa'al, up there, you see, is home."
"You certainly can't complain about the looks of your home, then," said the boy, "for that's just about the finest I've ever seen."
"'There's no place like home,'" quoted Rifle-Eye quietly, "but I ain't ever feelin' that my home's so humble. It ain't a question of its bein' good enough fer me, it's a question o' whether I'm good enough fer it."
"It makes quite a house," said Wilbur, following the old mountaineer's line of thought.
"I've never lived in any smaller house than that," responded Rifle-Eye, "an' I reckon now I never will. There's some I know that boasts of ownin' a few feet o' space shut in by a brick wall. Not for me. My house is as far as my eyes c'n see, an' from the ground to the sky."
Wilbur was silent for a moment, feeling the thrill of Nature in the old man's speech.
"It's to be my home, too," he said gently.