This circumstance Leonard had innocently narrated to the group around the camp-fire in the fuller elaboration of the hunt, and the story had an immediate success, the idea seeming to prevail that nothing in the world could have tempted him to fire before he was compelled to—which, as a matter of fact, I think was only prudent on his part, considering the arms he bore.
The next morning, to the infinite chagrin of some of us, the younger patron discovered that his presence was required at home, where, if he was mildly chid by my friend, his elder brother, who in generosity to his junior had yielded his own place and the leadership of this expedition, I should not greatly grieve.
Upon the third day thereafter we regained the ranch.
Alden Sampson.
The Ascent of Chief Mountain
In the most northern corner of the Piegans' country, in northwestern Montana, almost grazing the Canadian border with its abrupt side, stands a turret-shaped mountain. Behind it the great range of the Rockies, which for hundreds of miles has been trending steadily northwood, bends sharply away toward the west, leaving the corner on which the mountain stands a huge protruding pedestal for its weird shape. Ninety years ago Lewis and Clarke saw it from far to southward as they passed along the dwindling Missouri and called it Tower Mountain; but to the Indians it has always been The Chief Mountain. Even those prosaic German geographers to whom we owe so much for information about our own and other lands have either seen it and fallen under the spell of its strange power, or have taken their nomenclature directly from the Piegans, for they have crowned it Kaiser Peak.
For more than a year we had been numbered with the Chief's subjects. During the previous summer we had been seeking the acquaintance of the mountain goat; not the shorn degenerate which throngs the slopes of the Cascades and straggles among the southern peaks of Montana, but the true snowy buffalo of the northern Rockies; and from the ledges of the St. Mary Mountains, where we had sought him, could be seen still further to the northward the Piegans' Chief. Of the range, yet not in it, like a captain well to the front of his battle-line, he pressed out into the broad prairie, as if leading a charge of Titans toward the far distant lakes. And through the long months of an Eastern winter, and the still longer months of an Eastern summer, above all the memories of that wondrous land where every butte and mountain peak teems with legend, and where every bison skull on the prairie tells its story, had towered the clear-cut image of that Northern mountain, a worthy sovereign of any man's allegiance. Now, as inevitably as an antelope returns to its lure, we had returned for a closer look at our mountain. Down deep in our hearts, battling with the awe which we felt for him, was the almost unspoken hope that perhaps in some way we might struggle up his sheer sides and make him, in a way he was to no one else, our king.
We were a party of three, the Doctor and I, and our faithful packer, Fox. A cold storm was blowing spitefully across the open foothills and out on to the prairie as we broke camp under the high banks of Kennedy Creek on the morning of the last stage of our journey. The clouds, driving over the range from the northwest, swung so low that they hid the peaks, and the great pedestal of the Chief met them all uncrowned, indistinguishable from the others about him. It was one of those doubtful mornings with which the mountains love to warn off strangers, or to greet their friends—one which might presage a week of storm or usher in a fortnight of surpassing beauty.