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Having begun the ascent of the lofty and precipitous east slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, one night about the first of September the camp-site selected was at a spot said to be directly on the boundary line between Nevada and California.
While Lorry was away with the pack-horses and a week's riding ahead of him, the writer arrived in Jason, introduced himself and his daughter, a rather slender girl of perhaps sixteen or eighteen, and later, accompanied by the genial Bud, rode up to the Blue Mesa and inspected the proposed camp-site.
"We'll strike the old logging road just above here, you see," he explained, "and by following it a mile or so we are due to come on the place where I've been told we'll find a dandy camp-site, with running water near by." "Lucky for us you managed to get hold of that old map, and copy it, I tell you, Jack," ventured Steve.
"I can tell that. Look at those Jwari pines," I replied, pointing up over the wall. A rugged slope rose above our camp-site, and it was covered with a tangled mass of stunted pines. Many of them were twisted and misshapen; some were half dead and bleached white at the tops. "It's my first sight of such trees," I went on, "but I've studied about them.
Somewhere ahead was a brawling river descending in great leaps from Lyman Lake, which lay in a basin above and beyond. Our camp, that night, was to be on the shore of Lyman Lake, at the foot of Lyman Glacier. And we had still far to go. Mr. Hilligoss met us on the trail. He had found a camp-site by the lake and had seen a bear and a deer. There were wild ducks also.
Often to make a mile's advance we traveled four on the mountain-side. So when they tell me that it was a trifle of sixteen miles from the top of Cascade Pass to the camp-site we made that night, I know that it was nearer thirty. In point of difficulties, it was a thousand. Yet the last part of the trip, had we not been too weary to enjoy it, was superbly beautiful. There was a fine rain falling.
He'll make a cowpuncher!" His remark pleased me. In view of Romer's determination to emulate the worst bandit I ever wrote about I was tremendously glad to think of him as a cowboy. But as for myself I was tired, and the ride had been rather unprofitable, and this camp-site, to say the least, did not inspire me. It was neither wild nor beautiful nor comfortable.
The last hour of travel was tedious and toilsome, a zigzag, winding, breaking, climbing hunt for the kind of camp-site suited to Anson's fancy. He seemed to be growing strangely irrational about selecting places to camp. At last, for no reason that could have been manifest to a good woodsman, he chose a gloomy bowl in the center of the densest forest that had been traversed.
Away from the main road, and up a steadily rising byway that merged into an axle-snapping mountain-track, toiled the cars; at last coming to a wheezy and radiator-boiling halt at the foot of a rock-summit so steep that no vehicle could breast it. In a cup, at the summit of this mountain-top hillock, was the camp-site; its farther edge only a few yards above a little bass-populated spring-lake.
A sure enough pretty place, and would make the finest camp-site you ever saw." "Perhaps we may move over here to-morrow," said Thad. "I've several reasons for thinking that way." "One of which is that you'd like to get rid of that bear," chuckled Bob. "Don't be too sure of that," answered the other; "we might want to fetch him over here with us.
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