They picked blackberries along the way during the hour or so preceding noon and made bags of their handkerchiefs and stored the berries in them. At noontime they sat down by the wayside and made a royal feast. The country was rugged and in the distance were always the great hills with here and there some mighty peak piercing the blue sky. There was a wildness in the surroundings that they had never seen before. Perhaps they felt it as much as saw it. For one thing there were no distant habitations, no friendly, little church spires to soften the landscape. The towering heights rolled away till they became misty in the distance, and it seemed to these hapless wayfarers that they might reach to the farthest ends of the earth.
But the immediate neighborhood of the road was not forbidding, the way led through no deep ravines nor skirted any dizzy precipices and it was hard for the boys to realize that they were in the Rocky Mountains. They lolled for an hour or so at noontime and talked as they might have talked along some road in their own familiar Catskills.
One thing they did notice which distinguished this storied region from any they had seen and that was the abundance of great birds that flew high above them. They had never seen birds so large nor flying at so great a height. They appeared and disappeared among the crags and startled the quiet day with their screeching, which the boys could hear, spent and weak by the great distance. They supposed these birds to be eagles. Their presence suggested the wild life to be encountered in those dizzy fastnesses. The boys saw no sign of this, but their imaginations pictured those all but inaccessible retreats filled with grizzlies and other savage denizens of that mighty range. As Westy looked about him he fancied some secret cave here and there among the mountains, the remote haunt of outlaws and of the storied “bad men” of the West.
They hiked all day assured of their direction by the friendly sun. Now and again they passed a house, usually a primitive affair, and were tempted to verify the correctness of their route by comforting verbal information. But Westy thought of Mr. Madison C. Wilde and refrained. They were not often tempted, for houses were few and far between. Once they encountered a lanky stranger lolling on the step of a shabby little house. He seemed to be all hat and suspenders.
 
THEY HIKED ALL DAY ASSURED OF THEIR DIRECTION BY THE FRIENDLY SUN.
“Shall we ask him if this is the way?” Warde cautiously asked.
“No,” said Westy.
“I’m going to ask him,” said Ed.
“You do——” said Westy threateningly, “and——”
But before he had a chance to complete his threat, the blithesome Ed had carried out his fiendish purpose.
“Hey, mister, is this the way?” he said.
“Vot vay?” the stranger inquired.
“Thanks,” said Ed.
“You make me tired,” Westy said, constrained to laugh as they hiked along. “If that man could have spoken English——”
“All would have been lost,” said Ed, “and we would be sure of going in the right direction; we had a narrow escape. That’s because I was a good scout; I saw that he was a foreigner; I remembered what it said in my school geography. ‘Montana has been settled largely by Germans who own extensible—extensive farms—in this something or other region. The mountains abound in crystal streams which are filled with trout—that can easily be caught with safety-pins.’ It’s good there’s one scout in the party. If we had some eggs we’d fry some ham and eggs if we only had some ham; I’m getting hungry.”
“Now that you mentioned it——” said Warde.
“How many miles do you think we’ve hiked?” asked Westy.
“I don’t know how many you’ve hiked,” said Ed, “but I’ve hiked about ninety-seven. I think we’ve passed Yellowstone Park without knowing it, that’s what I think. Maybe we went right through it; the plot grows thicker. I hope we won’t walk into the Pacific Ocean.”
It was now late in the afternoon and they had hiked fifteen or eighteen miles. Once in the midafternoon they had heard, faint in the long distance, what they thought might be a locomotive whistle and this encouraged them to thi............