46 



Rod, Gun, and Palette in the High Rockies 



William and Arthur, in spite of the 

 weather, go to their sempiternal game of 

 rhum, which they play with a business- 

 like earnestness impressive to observe. 

 It supplies to them the place of all other 

 things they might do, and very much 

 worse, for they are 

 the gentlemen appar- 

 ently who invented 

 the game. Arthur's 

 great point of play 

 appears to a casual 

 onlooker to be in 

 holding cards, and 

 William's in freely 

 drawing and discard- 

 ing with an uncanny 

 prescience, be it said, 

 of what he is likely 

 to catch. Arthur's 

 coups take time to 

 prepare, but they land with the effectiveness of a twelve-inch 

 shell from a siege gun. 



Last evening's mallards with boiled potatoes and soda bis- 

 cuit, and, of course, sundry trimmings from cans and bottles, made 

 dinner. There is a heavy Scotch mist outside. Geese and ducks 

 are haunting the marshes, and helped out by a distant band of 

 coyotes, make the night eerie with their calls. With cheerful com- 

 pany in the messtent, and a warm stove in the sleeping tent, in 

 spite of the weather, all's well. 



It goes on forever 



Monday the twenty-first. 



A cloudy, chilly dawn, with a sodden feeling left over from 

 the previous evening's rain, yet presented its own peculiar beauty. 

 Below the lowering clouds in the east, a lovely pale lemon glow 

 filled the width of the Madison canyon, and made its abrupt 

 sides, seen at this distance, loom against the sky with startling 

 impressiveness. From this point of illumination the golden light 



