“Oh, Stacy! You are as hopeless as ever, aren’t you?” laughed Grace. “Oh, this wonderful air!” she cried enthusiastically, turning to her companions. “Tom, aren’t you going to look for the guide who was to meet us here?”
Tom Gray said that Hippy Wingate was attending to that, and just then the Overlanders saw him halt before two bewhiskered natives standing on the station platform side by side and assuming almost identically the same pose. Both were old men. Their faces were seamed and tanned, their shoulders stooped, and as they stood with heads tilted back until their long beards protruded at almost the same angle, they presented a picture that made the Overlanders smile.
“I am looking for Jim-Sam, who is to guide us,” announced Hippy, addressing the men.
“We’re Jim-Sam,” answered the men in chorus. “Be ye the dudes?”
“Well, not exactly,” interjected Stacy Brown.
“This is the party that engaged Jim-Sam,” repeated Hippy patiently. “Which of you is Jim-Sam?”
“Both of us,” added the taller of the two men. “I’m Sam, an’ this heah galoot standin’ side me is Jim, an’—”
“I’ll have ye understand that I ain’t no galoot,” objected Jim heatedly, shaking a finger under Sam’s nose.
“Hold on, you two! Let me get this clear,” interposed Tom Gray, stepping up to them. “Do you mean that we have engaged, not one guide, but two?”
Sam explained that he and Jim were “pards,” and that they had always worked together, and “fit an’ died together” these many years, adding further, that Jim, being a spavined, ring-boned old cayuse wasn’t much good to anyone, himself included, but that he could hold the horses and howl like a coyote at the pack-horses to keep them going.