Ha! Come adventure! Come romance! Come rifles and pistols and all the arsenal, including the Little Boy, with pure joy writ large over him! A bandit, armed to the teeth!
But this is a disappointing world. He was the cook from a mine—strange, the way we met cooks, floating around loose in a world that seems to be growing gradually cookless. And he carried with him his knife and his bread-pan, which was, even then, hanging to a branch of a tree.
We fed him, and he offered to sing. The Optimist nudged me.
"Now, listen," he said; "these fellows can sing. Be quiet, everybody!"
The bandit twisted up his mustachios, smiled beatifically, and took up a position in the trail, feet apart, eyes upturned.
And then—he stopped.
"I start a leetle high," he said; "I start again."
So he started again, and the woods receded from around us, and the rushing of the river died away, and nothing was heard in that lonely valley but the most hideous sounds that ever broke a primeval silence into rags and tatters.
When, at last, he stopped, we got on our horses and rode on, a bitter and disillusioned party of adventurers whose first bubble of enthusiasm had been pricked.
It was four o'clock when we began the ascent of the switchback at the top of the valley. Up and up we went, dismounting here and there, going slowly but eagerly. For, once over the wall, we were beyond the reach of civilization. So strange a thing is the human mind! We who were for most of the year most civilized, most dependent on our kind and the comforts it has wrought out of a primitive world, now we were savagely resentful of it. We wanted neither men nor houses. Stirring in us had commenced that primeval call that comes to all now and then, the longing to be alone with Mother Earth, savage, tender, calm old Mother Earth.