So at last they cooked the fish. Warde cleaned them with his jack-knife on a flat stone while Westy and Ed gathered enough wood for a little fire. Westy was now so affluent in heroism, and had so far regained his poise in consequence, that he could stand calmly by and witness the civilized proceeding of lighting a fire with a match. Or perhaps he was too weary and hungry to experiment with any of those primitive devices for striking a spark with Nature’s raw materials. And it might be observed that if you should happen to have escaped from train robbers in the Rocky Mountains and have walked a dozen miles more or less in the night, a mess of fish cooked loose upon a wood fire is not half bad. You will find them charred and tasting of smoke (which is well) and elusive when subjected to the rules of table etiquette. They crumble and fall apart and have to be sought for in the glowing fastnesses of consuming wood and extracted like the kernels of hickory nuts. They have to be caught all over again. But they are delicious—if you have lately escaped from train robbers in the Rocky Mountains.
In such a country as they were in one is much less likely to suffer from cold and exposure at night, notwithstanding the biting air, than in some tamer woodland where the ruggedness of Nature offers no natural shelters and wind-breaking rocks.
The boys, refreshed by their meal, but staggering from fatigue, walked around the little lake in search of a shelter along the precipitous shore. They found a place which seemed to have been made for three weary scouts, a place which, as Ed remarked, any boarding-house keeper in the East could get ten dollars a week for. It was not high enough to sit up in, but none of them felt like sitting up. Only a few pine branches were necessary to transform this little recess into a dormitory. And here the three award boys slept with a profundity which there is no word in any language capable of describing.
It was midmorning when Westy awoke, finding his companions still sleeping soundly. His joints were stiff and he found it soothing to his knees to hold his legs out straight. But he was not exactly tired. It was the aftermath of fatigue.
The sun was well up over the little mountain lake, glinting the water as it made its slow progress across the blue sky. How cheering it was! It seemed to radiate hope. How companionable—like a friend from home. The same genial sun that rose over the hills at Temple Camp and flecked the lake there with its glinting light. And here it was in the Rocky Mountains! What a change it wrought in the country and in the award boy’s spirit. Oh, he could do anything now, and all was well!
He stretched one leg out stiff and held it that way and lingered upon the ineffable relief that this afforded his knee.
Westy did not know how far they had walked in the brook during the night, nor in what direction, but the great mountains seemed still to be far away. He tried to identify the landscape with that he had last been able to see, which was from his vantage point in the big elm, but there was nothing recognizable now, only the brook.
He had thought that perhaps daylight would find them amid the wild fastnesses they had seen from a distance. But as he looked about he saw that the immediate neighborhood was not forbidding though it was wild and unpeopled. Could it be that he was in the heart of the Rockies? In such a place as Lewis and Clark, for example, had camped in their adventurous journey of exploration? The Rockies that he had dreamed of were always in the distance, holding themselves aloof as it seemed, from these hapless pilgrims. It was strange. Was he, in fact, in the Rockies?
He was, indeed, only the Rockies were too big for him. He had expected to find them under his feet. He had thought of them as something quite limited and distinct. Of course, there were dizzy heights and remote passes, terrible in their primeval wildness, and these it was not vouchsafed him to visit. But he was in the vast, enchanted region, just the same. Had he not escaped from train robbers in these very wilds? He, Westy Martin?
He felt in his pocket and made sure of the precious wallet of which he was the proud custodian. It was there, smooth and bulging; the whole thing was real. He had slept and awakened and the whole thing was real. If he had shot a grizzly, as Dan Darewell in the Rockies by Captain Dauntless had done, he could hardly be more incredulous of his own achievement. He began to reflect how it had all happened.
He was glad that the others were not yet awake. Their sprawling attitudes bespoke rest rather than grace. There seemed no danger of their rousing. He did not know whether they were farther from the Yellowstone Park than they had been the day before or nearer to it. If their journey of the night had tended in a fairly straight course toward it then they might be now within four or five miles of it, perhaps even less.
There was no particular direction which attracted Westy’s gaze; he just gazed ab............