"I'll get to sleep," he said, interrupting the train of my thoughts. "I'll be fresh when my turn comes for guard."
"Tell me," I said, for the matter had been puzzling me all night, "where did you learn to light your pipe with red-hot coals?"
"Oh, that," he said with a laugh. "I saw you doing it earlier in the evening, and I made up my mind that what you did I could do."
"Then it must have burnt you."
"Horribly," he said with a grimace. "Good-night."
Chapter III.
THE PROMISED LAND.
"This," I remarked, "is the sort of country Adam Lindsay Gordon would have loved. No man but he could do justice to it."
"We've been out seven days," said Cumshaw, "we've travelled God knows how many miles, we've climbed up a Hades of a lot of mountains, and I don't think there's a blind creek for twenty miles that we haven't followed to the end and back again, and at the end of it all we're no nearer the Valley than we were when we started. Gordon might have made an epic out of it, but I'm hanged if I'm poet enough to appreciate the country or philosopher enough to ignore the sheer physical discomforts of the journey."