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This Hank came to me one evening as I sat on a bluff above the scene of our labors, listening for the call of a coyote away back in the low range beyond the sand-hills, and broached a subject that greatly interested me. He and his partner Slim were going to leave, going to walk down into the United States. Walk, mark you. Would I care to accompany them?

I was twenty years of age and full of love of seeing. I assuredly would care to go. I had not been long at Penny's Pit, but I had been long enough to know its life, and here was a chance to dip into another. When he said they had not decided whether to take the trail in from Ducks or go in by Salmon Arm, I got that fret that comes of place-names and the word "trail."

We would, of course, he said, have to get our wages first, and they could not be paid to us at Penny's Pit; we would have to go to North Bend, a hundred miles or so west, with our time-checks to collect unless we stayed till the end of the month when the paymaster came past. They were not going to wait, men of impulse, and the impulse already curbed long enough. I calculated my wages due and discovered they would just meet the cost of a ticket to North Bend and back.