The two hunters, red and white, who had taken eight days to ascend the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, were only one reaching a reasonable approach to the level of the plateau of the Yellowstone Basin.

A little above them shone the snow line belting the giants of granite, and here the timberline spread in brown. The breath of numberless icy caverns murmured of the stupendous crystal founts, sources of powerful streams which would be on their way to enrich regions remote.

The declining sun glimmered along the smooth steeps and glittered on the jagged ones, reflected from ice, softened by snows, sparkling in torrents as the scattered diamonds leaped so far that finally they were dissipated in humid dust.

Through all the difficulties of the way, where no trodden way existed, the two guides and guards of the little train proceeded with the perfection of experience to be acquired only by bearing fatigues and danger with which that magnificent mountain chain abounds.

In fact, it was impossible, even among the host of Western pioneers, more numerous than those imagine who never can see them collected, to find two mountain men more keen, skilled, and resolute than "Old Jim" Ridge and "Cherokee Bill."

Ridge was a taller man than ordinarily met, even in the West; but too well proportioned, though a little spare, to reveal to the careless eye how enviably he was gifted by nature. His features were handsome, though worn and weather-beaten; after a course of Turkish baths and fine toilet appliances, he would have eclipsed the showiest cavaliers in a Paris, London, or Vienna opera house ball. His forehead, high and broad, was creased rather by play of emotions than effect of age. His blue eyes were mild enough in repose to charm the most timid maid; but in action they became fierce and sharp as a buffalo's at bay. They were eyes that could follow a trail without his getting out of the saddle or leaning over much. His nose was long, rather curved than straight, with pliant nostrils which rose and fell freely in his liberal respiration for the supply of a massive chest. The mouth was full of teeth, strong, sound and white, as only garnish those who are mostly meat eaters; the lips were red, but almost concealed in a moustache and beard, trimmed rarely, yet well kept, of a warm flaxen striped with silver; this tint also gleamed in his long locks from under a blue fox skin cap. Erect, something like a Mars who inclined towards Apollo rather than Hercules, sturdy, firm, energetic, any beholder knew that he stood before an exceptional man, full of goodness, courage, and simple belief in man being no merely inspired animal.

In "citizen's dress" he would have seemed confined; hence, his hunting costume suited him far better. It was – from the fur cap mentioned to the moccasins fortified with rawhide soles – composed of a leather frock, caught in at the waist to support his small arms by its belt, fringed with its own buckskin; a red flannel shirt, with a black silk neckerchief carelessly fastened by a diamond pin of California gold, such as an ingenious miner himself may shape; the leggings were also of buckskin, fringed like the frock, and similarly so "worked up in grease" as to have lost the tendency to stretch in the wet which plays the mischief with leather garments. Balancing a sword bayonet on one hip, not unlike a machete, hung a hatchet, whilst his six-shooters were of a size that promised damage at a longish range. His gun was peculiar. It was a "yager," or short rifle of the old United States dragoons, sending a large ball; he had had it converted into a breechloader, a "fourteen shoot," with the availability to reserve the store and load at the muzzle with any particular charge independently. The stock was fortified with homemade rawhide bands. Thanks to long and continual practice, knowing how to humour all "her leetle peculiarities," as he would affectionately say, the rifle was used by him afoot or on horse, offhanded or in a rest, with long and calculated aim or at a snap shot with a fatality that made it dreaded. As often as by any other title, Jim Ridge was called "the Yager of the Yellowstone." As far south as the mysterious sun-worshipping Indians' secluded homes, this name was the backbone of camp stories, in which our mountaineer's marksmanship was not unduly praised.

Jim Ridge looked the man to make history, but his time had not come, he would have modestly said, if reproached therefore.

As for his comrade, he was clad as an Indian rover, with better underclothing and equipments than the red man obtains. His gun was a formidable and costly Winchester rifle. He was tall and slender, rather forbidding and haughty, gloomy and imperturbable; but his small beadlike black eyes sparkled with daring cunning and a kind of nourished hatred. Spite of his savage airs and war paint, the close observer must have perceived that he had enjoyed civilisation at one period. He was not an "unwashed Injin." Indeed, Cherokee Bill was the best pupil in a St. Louis college, where his intelligence, courtesy quite charming, kindliness, and devotion to study gained the esteem of his tutor and the respect of the white students, who, Southerners though they were, never objected to his blood.

One day, when he was about eighteen, an old Indian woman, whom he passed at the college gate, followed him to a lonely street, and called him affectionately. It was his mother, whom he had rarely seen, and whose latest absence had lasted nearly a year. She had not wasted those ten months; they were spent on his behalf.

She was a Cherokee, daughter of a chief; she had been united gladly to the celebrated South and Northwestern trapper and mountain adventurer, Bill Williams, one of those excellent shots whose gains in the fur trade were seldom capped by any other three, though "there were giants in those days" – 1830-50. There was no doubt that he possessed some secret knowledge of the winter refuges of the wild animals valuable in commerce. Hither he went, always alone, to slay the pick at leisure. Quaint, hearty, "whole-souled," "Old Bill" Williams had not an enemy, spite of this "certainty," and even the hunters who tried to follow him and discover the sources of his fortune, would turn away laughingly when, at some mountain pass, where one man could keep back a multitude, they would abruptly run up against Williams' trusty rifle, and hear him challenge.

"D'ye h'ar, now, boys! Go 'way from fooling with the old mossback when he has his shooting iron loaded – it may hurt some o' ye; mind that, boys!"

Nevertheless, at last, Bill Williams failed to come to St. Louis or Santa Fe with the well-known pack; and, as year after year passed, the old hunters would sadly shake their frosting brows and feelingly mutter, "Old Billy's gone up, sure! 'Tell 'ee for a true thing, they've rubbed out the old marksman. See! H'yar goes for a sign on my stock; I've a bullet for the nigger that sent him under, mind that!"

At length the mountains yielded up the mystery in part. Bill Williams' squaw, penetrating snow filled gorges where, assuredly, no woman had ever stepped, came into a glade where a skeleton of a horse gleamed yellow like old alabaster in the icy crust. In a snowbank, half fallen open like a split nut, was visible a kind of human figure, mummified by dry cold. It was the veteran trapper. He was in the position of a hunter awaiting a prowling foe ambushed in the shrub, his rifle in advance, his shrunken face still leaning out eagerly. In the leather shirt and breast, almost as tanned with sun and wind, was a bullet's wound: the squaw could even chisel it out of the frozen flesh, where blood had long since ceased to flow. That was the only clue to the tracker and slayer of the trapper, and that was the single token and heritage which altered the entire course of young Williams' life. School and cities saw him no more; he took to the wilds, and lived on the warpath as far as the still unpunished murderer of his father was concerned.

He was rich, like Jim Ridge, for they had penetrated the very "mother pocket" of the Rocky Mountains' gold store; but he, no more than his pure white partner, would renounce the existence of peril, but also of independence.

Suddenly a deep "Hugh!" of attention from Cherokee Bill attracted the white man's ear.

"What?" said he, peering around, but seeing nothing to alarm him; nor had the animals, usually acute observers, perceived anything even novel.

"A solitary man," answered Bill, who spoke good English, of course.

Ridge shook his head, not in doubt of his comrade's ability, but in self-blame.

On the highlands, nothing but long habit endows one with the power to calculate distances exactly. Rarefaction gives the atmosphere a clearness which seems to bring the horizon to hand – the sight is extended indefinitely, and masses of shadows in vast valleys look like mere specks in the expanses of light, so that the space between the standpoint and a distant object is usually mistaken. There are also fantastic effects from the vapour being frozen or expanded, and presenting apparently solid forms, where, in fact, unsubstantially reigns.

"I am going for him," proceeded Cherokee Bill; "after all, it's no odds – we are 'to home!'" with a smile at his own imitation of the Yankee twang.

Wrapping his gun in his buffalo robes, taken off his pony, the half-breed slid down the declivity at the side of the "road," so to flatter it, and scrambling along an icy torrent of lovely blue water, suddenly sprang in under the cascade from an arching rock and disappeared.

Ridge did not even glance after him; besides, he had arrived, indeed. He suddenly took the bell mare by the bridle, and swerved her into an apparently impenetrable thicket – a "wind-slash," where the maze of deadwood was increased by the prostration of many tough evergreens, blown down by an irresistible tornado. But there had been traced here a kind of way, through which the pack animals insinuated themselves with the sureness of a cat, brushing off nothing of their loads. As for the two horses, they were more familiar with the strange path, and threaded its sinuosities like dogs tunnelling under the walls of a meat smokehouse. It is probable they scented their stable, and knew rest and food would shortly reward them for terrible toil and tribulation. Having pierced the tunnel of vegetation, there was one of stone, still more curious.

It was an almost regular tube, in black lava stone, four feet wide, seven or eight in height, smooth as glass mostly. Invisible fissures, however, must have supplied sweet air, for it was not hard breathing in all the extent, nearer three quarters of a mile than a half on the straight. No human hand had fashioned it; one must presume that, in the days when Vulcan swayed over Neptune on the earth, a torrent of lava was rushing down the steeps, when, suddenly, an immense snowfall smothered the fiery river and chilled it into a casing of stone around a still molten interior. That inner flow had continued, and left the tubular crust intact.

The ground was a fine sand, heavy with iron, so that it did not rise far. At the end of this channel a star suddenly gleamed, welcome in the complete darkness, into which, assuredly, the bravest of men would have hesitated to follow a foe. It was the outer air again, filling a basin, rock-engirt to a great height. In this lonely spot there was not a scrap of moss, not one blade of grass, and no shrub, however hardy. The calcined "blossom rock" wore a yellow hue, streaked with red and black; but here and there rose separate boulders of quartz, disintegrated by time and rain and whirling winds, which danced these Titanic blocks like thistles, and squeezed out those dull misshapen lumps. Those lumps were gold, however; this was a "mother-source" – one of those nests of Fortune for which the confirmed gold seeker quits home, family, wealth itself in other mines that content the less ravenous. Ridge traversed this placer – no pleasure to him, lonely Man of the Mountain – with a foot as reckless as those of the string of animals. The night was coming. He hurried them on into a second but short subterranean passage, with a couple of turnings, which finally opened into a cavern. At its far end a natural doorway afforded a view of the deep blue sky, where the brilliant stars seemed all of a sudden to be strewn. In those few moments the sun had gone down, and darkness come.

Ridge laid aside his gun, and started a fire, already laid, in a cavity of the grotto. The walls gleamed back the rising firelight; here amber studs in coal, there patches of mica-schist, varied gold and silver in hue.

After unpacking the animals, whose stores he carefully placed in caves, he sent them after the bell mare and the hunting horses, in through a channel to a sort of enclosed pasturage. Returning, he put some jerked meat down to broil, some roots to roast like so many potatoes, and added to the setting-out of a rude but hearty meal several of the delicacies brought in the train from Oregon. He was calmly smoking, reclining at great ease, with the air of one who felt he had earned the repose, lulled by the sweet murmur of underground streams, pouring out of ancient glaciers. The approach of footsteps made him glance round. The steps he knew to be Cherokee Bill's; so it was their being heavier than usual that alone roused him.

The half-breed was carrying a man over his shoulder with no more delicacy than if it had been a deer's carcase.

"Got him, Bill!" remarked Ridge.

"I should smile not to capture such a tenderfoot," was the rejoinder, as he flung his human prize upon the cavern floor.

CHAPTER IV
THE MAN WHO RAN RIGHT INTO TROUBLE

The prisoner of the Cherokee half-breed was in a forlorn state, more particularly as regarded apparel. Hardly suited for mountaineering at their best, his clothes were sorry rags, which an attempt at mending with bark fibre and rawhide had even rendered more lamentable. A horsehair lasso, of remarkable fineness and strength, was wound round and round him with a care which a Chinese would have envied. A handful of moss was the gag which nearly choked him, but his eyes were more full of rage than supplication, and they seemed to burn with enhanced indignation when he found the Indian was in concert with a white hunter.

Young Bill Williams flung his captive down on some dry rushes, and, laying aside his gun and the stranger's, which was broken, he sat down at the fire.

"It was a coyote," he remarked, scornfully. "But the Cherokee did not give him even time to yelp."

"Ah!" said Ridge, "I wonder you did not shoot him thar. Thar will always be plenty of that game on the prairie for the greenhorn hunter, I opine. It is all very well our discovering this country, but we don't want any raw Eastern fellows, with Boston dressing, discovering us!" Bill made no comment. He had pulled the soused bears' paws over to him, poured out some coffee – from which the full aroma was extracted by a sudden chill at the height of its boiling with cold water – and was thus beginning his meal.

The silence that fell was broken only by the champing of the two men as they repaid themselves for the travail since Monday. Each had a brandy flask, and their supplies included spirits, but neither drank anything but the sweet, pure water of the snow torrent. Ridge was naturally abstemious, the half-Cherokee sober from having seen the mischief wrought his mother's race by the firewater.

After the meal, the two smoked, and the white man faintly whistled a lively tune. Neither gave heed to the prisoner, who had ample leisure to gaze on the strange resort into which he had been unceremoniously conveyed.

The firelight illuminated the grotto; several gaps were outlets or storehouses; bales of furs, bundles of army and trade guns, kegs of powder, pigs of lead, packages of fancy goods used in Indian trading, harness, simple cooking utensils, these encumbered the place; but one could guess that they would form a barricade at emergency in case the enemy penetrated to this inmost hold. At first glance, and even at the leisure gaze of the prisoner, it seemed the den of a bandit.

"What did you bring him into the ranche for, chief?" inquired Ridge, in that pigeon-English of the Northwest, called the "Chinnook" dialect, though composed of Chinnook, Scotch, English, and Canadian-French, as well as hunters' English, to which confusing medley these two friends imparted still another zest by an infusion of Cherokee, Creole, French, and Spanish-American, for which good reason we forbear the sentences verbatim.

"Because," replied the other, "it was too dark to see the trail, and he must tell whether he is alone or the spy of a band. At all events, it doesn't look as if he had been in to the fort for his pay lately," added Bill, with a quiet fleeting smile, "and bought any clothes!"

"You are right. Loose him, and we'll try him. By the way, that's a beauty lariat, I can tell you."

Indeed, as before hinted, the lasso confining the captive was composed of selected horsehair, and toilsomely and deftly plaited.

"I was still on the scout," said Bill, whilst engaged undoing the bonds, rolling the man to and fro as suited his desires, "when suddenly a movement of a scrub pine half a pistol shot off made me bring my rifle to bear on it. I was just about to pull, when up pops my man, crying: 'Hold hard, or you're a dead Injun!' Me? It looked as if we were going to make our bullets kiss in midair, but I reckon I was a leetle the quicker, and while his ball whistled upon the top storeys of the sierra, mine cut his barrel in half, right there at the stock, which remained in his hand. So, as he staggered in surprise, I sprang on him, took off from his belt the lasso – a real article, and no mistake! Worth a war pony! – and girdled him like a papoose. Moreover, I wrapped my robe round his head, so that he should not see how we glide into the Rocky Mountain House, proprietors, Messrs. Ridge and Williams, and here he is dumped down."

The man was hardly able to stand when unbound. He wiped his mouth with the tattered sleeve of his old army overcoat, shook himself, and reeled round toward the fire, whither the half-breed had given him a gentle push.

"We don't often meet a white man away here," said Ridge, sitting up like a judge. "Let me have a good long look."

The firelight fell full upon him. Already, whilst waiting, the stranger had fortified himself: he was cold, calm, save for his lips curling in a mocking smile, though he very well saw that his confronters were his judges, and, possibly, executioners, if they determined on death.

He was a man about five and forty, rather tall, with legs "split up so far" as to be as good a walker almost as Ridge himself. He was the more gaunt from recent privations. His "weather skin" seemed newly assumed, and, seen in the town, he would have been taken for a schoolmaster of the Indian Reservations or a trader's bookkeeper.

"You are a white, an American, from the Eastern States," said Ridge, after a couple of minutes. "You are not a hunter or trapper, a gentleman sportsman, or a squaw man. What brings you out here up in the mountains?"

"You are a white, an American of these Western States," returned the other, quietly, "whence your right to pull me about and question me? If this Indian is on the land of his forefathers, I will pay him tribute as far as in my power. As for you, why stop my wandering? Have I sought to run against you? Have I done anything more than essay to defend my life when a firearm was levelled at my breast? State anything that gives you a right to deal with a citizen of the United States in the United States?"

"These are big words," replied Ridge, puzzled whether to be angry or amused, though there was no doubt that Cherokee Bill felt the first sentiment; "but I am not exchanging Fourth of July speeches with you, but asking questions."

"To answer? 'Spose I don't choose?"

"You'll be made to, I guess," rejoined the mountaineer, hotly.

"You mean you two will cut my throat in this den, or hang me in my own lasso! The latter will serve me right, as I took it at the cost of a life from the redskin who hurled me off my horse with the same. Well, suppose you do kill me, will you know more about me than you do now?"

"What! Killed an Indian for the rope?" said Ridge, turning to the Cherokee. "What breed?"

"Comanche!" said the latter, examining the lasso critically.

"The lasso is of Comanche make," went on the mountain man, severely frowning again. "And I'll swear your cheek has never been burnt south of the Platte."

"That's so. It was a 'foot Indian' who tried to kill me. I boast no knowledge of these gentry. That's one of his shoes. The other I wore to death on these cursed flinty hills."

"Crow!" cried the Half-breed, with a glance at the moccasin. "Mountain Crow! And a war shoe!"

"The Crows 'out,'" repeated Ridge, biting his lips. "You see, we are getting information, though you are so stingy. Come, as your news leads off so good, continue it. Who are you, I say? And what is your business where few of us who are regular trappers venture?"

"A trapper?"

"An honest trapper! What did you take us for? – robbers and murderers?" said the hunter, indignantly.

"Well, I kind o' don't know," rejoined the stranger, with a significant glance at Cherokee Bill, whose savage eyes were not reassuring like the other's. "My name is no value out here, four thousand miles from my folks, I guess; but if you are a regular trapper – "

"I am called the Old Man of the Mountain," said Ridge, sadly rather than proudly. "I am about the last of the old guard – I fear one of the oldest men. I am Jim Ridge. That's the young man's best companion out here, that's called the Yager – same name put on me, too, by the hearing of it; the Yager of the Yellowstone. When I handled that first in '42, I bent a trifle under the weight. Them was the grand, good old times! The sort of men we get now don't grade up with the brand that passed up to 1850. They don't hunt now – they butcher. They don't trap – they surround and slaughter. They'll be clearing out a beaver lake with a diving bell, next! I wonder! Yes, I am the Old Man, the Yager of the Yellowstones," he repeated, a little piqued at his fame falling on a dead ear – "Injin or white, they all know this child."

The stranger seemed easier; but, unfortunately, the ghost of a smile on his wan features was assumed to be impudence.

"Answer, then," went on Ridge, testily, "for I don't want none of your blood on my knife, though it is itching to be in at your ribs."

"Nonsense. You are neither hasty nor bloodthirsty, Mr. Ridge. One question from me first, if you please – "

Old Jim waved his hand disgustedly at this polite address, and the "Mistering."

"I just want to know if you know Mr. Brasher, of Varina?"

"Do I know 'Trading Jake?' Muchly; and ever so long. Those bales are for him," pointing to a stack against the walls.

"Then I have a message for you, Mr. Ridge," went on the prisoner, relieved entirely.

"A letter?"

"The letter is lost; I ate it up when a gang of Digger Indians played the joke of making me exchange a good outfit for these rags. Luckily, they thought it was a talisman, and that to cook me and eat me with that medicine paper in my gullet was an error, and so I got away, together with my gun. But I know the contents, and they are important, Mr. Brasher said."

"Fire away!" said Ridge, more and more thawed out towards the speaker.

"But first, some proof I am not being deceived."

"Hang the man!" laughed Jim, amused at being an unknown to one person in this world. "Show him my brand on those packs, Bill."

"'J. Ridge' – hem! Well," said the captive, "this is the communication: 'The man they call Captain Kidd and a gang of border troublers slid out of town with tools, stores, and firearms galore, and I want the Old Man of the Mountain to know that they are bound for the Big Placer in the Yellowstone Region.' That is what I was to tell every regular hunter and trapper until Mr. Ridge heard of it."

"Oh, call me Jim! I am much obliged to Brasher. Well, stranger, you are too deep for me if this is a getup of your'n. Resarve your own secret, and meanwhile there's sage ile and snake grease for your bruises, and fire and meat and Injin 'taters; and you can have whiskey if your appetite calls that way. Fall on! As the soldiers say."

Then vacating the fireside, he drew aside with the Indian, and the two eyed the captive inquisitorially while he devoured the supper, which represented probably two or three meals he had missed.

"Drink free!" said Ridge, offering a horn cup. "You need fear nothing now. One who has shared the trapper's hospitality has to be a precious mean skunk to deserve kicking out."

"Nobody's going to say a word against your hospitality," retorted the stranger, sarcastically. "The feed's capital, and the liquor a reviver, for, though a temperance man, I need it as medicine, I can tell you. But the way the trapper introduces guests to his hospitality by shooting a welcome at him, trussing him up like a turkey, and tossing him down on the floor like a roll of carpet to be beaten, is not what a simple traveller from the Atlantic seaboard approves of."

"Stranger," said Ridge, sitting down on a buffalo skull stool covered luxuriously with furs which a Russian grand duchess might give her earrings to possess, "this is our home round here by all the rights the first discoverer and the constant defender may claim. My companyero was not to know with what intentions you were making yourself a neighbour. You may think yourself lucky that his shot did not pierce your brain or heart, and that he did not use the slipknot of your lariat to decorate the nearest larch with you. It is necessary that our mountain fort should be kept hid from everybody. Gentlemen like Mr. Brasher do not know it, sir. Tell me your name, show that you are no evildoer, and after you have rested you may equip yourself and go your way. We can trust to your being led out, hoodwinked as you were brought, to maintain our secret. So much I will do for Trading Jake's messenger. Anything else, stranger?"

The ex-prisoner was surprised at so much confidence, and the promise to place him on a fair footing for the task upon his shoulders.

"You will do this, eh?" cried he with frank joy; "A good rifle instead of that broken musket, food and powder, clothes against this searching air?"

"Jim Ridge never yet broke his word," remarked the Cherokee, for the first time relenting in his suspicion so as to address his late captive.

"My name goes for nothing, but I will tell you my mission out here, and why your gift will put me under a great obligation. Besides, you have the experience which I lack, and who knows but that your comments on my story may be of service."

"Make yourself at home, then," said the old mountaineer, pleasantly; "there's a pipe for you, too, and the night is only begun. We so seldom have company, eh, Bill? that a couple of hours for a storyteller will be a real treat. Stranger, we listen, if the grub has put you in pretty good shape again."

"One moment," demurred the other; "you talk of the need to guard this place from spies. Now, I can't compliment you on your vigilance and prudence when you squat here in the broad firelight with the cavern gaping open yonder – an Indian boy could riddle us with arrows."

Ridge laughed.

"If you don't mind getting up and coming to the opening, you shall see that – but not so near the brink – the crust is shaky. See, how readily I detach a chunk. Don't lean forward. Look forth – it is a clear night."

It was serene and lovely. The stars shone unveiled, and that was all in the deep indigo black, where, beneath, the deep-rooted pines could be heard slowly swaying, not seen, like a field of grain in a zephyr.

"I see nothing."

"No trees, no rocks?"

"No. Nothing but stars."

"You would see nothing but stars if you were to step after that stone. Hark!"

Jim trundled the rocky lump out of the cave; but not the faintest sound or echo betokened that it touched bottom or anywhere.

"Heaven preserve us!" ejaculated the guest, recoiling. "'Tis the Bottomless Pit!"

"Pretty nigh," answered the mountaineer, laughing; "that's fallen five thousand feet. This is not a precipice sheer down, but a peak hollowed out – a cut-off, we say; the Injins say a devil's jump. Stranger, on this side, we shall not be invaded. Now for your tale! Stir up the fire brightly, Bill."

"Yes, for it is a dark and horrid story, gentlemen."