“And we could have seen ’em hours ago, if we’d only been looking ahead,” Joe complained, as they took their seats on the observation platform. “They can’t be more’n ten miles off now.”
A big, heavy man who was sitting there laughed loudly.
“Guess you ain’t never been out here before, have you?” he asked.
“No, we never have.”
“Well, this train’s making thirty miles an hour, and we got three hours to go yet before we get to them hills,” he went on. “You chaps remind me of a story, about a friend o’ mine who was prospectin’ up here before the government made a park out o’ Glacier. An Englishman came along one day, and he started out to walk to the base o’ one o’ them mountains before breakfast, so my friend, bein’ just naturally curious, allowed he’d go along too. Fust, though, he sneaked out and got a bite o’ grub. Well, they walked and walked till along about ten o’clock, and the mountain not gettin’ any nearer. By’mby they come to a brook a baby could have jumped, and the Englishman started to peel off his clothes.
“‘What in blazes be you goin’ to do?’ asked my friend.
“‘Well,’ said the bally Britisher, ‘that looks like a brook, but I ain’t taking no chances.’”
“I’ve always heard you could see awfully plain out here,” said Tom. “It must bother you at first sighting a gun.”
“I reckon it does bother a stranger. I seen fellers sight for a goat at four hundred yards, when he was a clean eight hundred, and kick up the dust on the rocks twenty feet below him.”