“Like another. Somebody in camp didn’t.”
I turned and looked at Timberline cooking over at camp.
“Looking for the horses early this morning,” pursued Scipio, “I found his tracks up and down all over everywheres.”
“Perhaps he has found the reward.”
Scipio laughed, and I laughed. It was the only thing to do. How much had the boy walked in the darkness?
“I think I’ll take him with us,” I then said. “I’d rather have him with us.”
During breakfast we discussed which hill we should ascend, and, this decided on, I was about to tell Timberline his company was expected, when he saved me the trouble by requesting to be allowed to go himself. His usually pale, harmless eyes were full of some sort of glitter: did his fingers feel that they were about to clutch the reward?
That was the thirtieth of August; a quarter of a century and more has passed; my age is double what it was; but to-day, on any thirtieth of August, if I think of the date, the Washakie Needles stand in my eyes,—twin spires of naked rock,—and I see what happened there.
The three of us left camp. It was warm summer in the valley by the streaming channel of our creek, and the quiet day smelled of the pines. We should not have taken horses, they served us so little in such a climb as that. On the level top our legs and breathing got relief, and far away up the next valley were sheep. This second top we reached, but they were gone to the next beyond, where we saw them across a mile or so of space. In the bottom below us ran the north fork of Owl Creek like a fine white wire drawn through the distant green of the pines. Up in this world peaks and knife-edged ridges bristled to our north away and away beyond sight.