I would rather have died among the pebbles than surrender my

right to play and land a salmon, weight unknown, with an
eight-ounce rod. I heard California, at my ear, it seemed,

gasping: "He's a fighter from Fightersville, sure!" as his fish
made a fresh break across the stream. I saw Portland fall off a

log fence, break the overhanging bank, and clatter down to the
pebbles, all sand and landing-net, and I dropped on a log to rest

for a moment. As I drew breath the weary hands slackened their
hold, and I forgot to give him the butt.

A wild scutter in the water, a plunge, and a break for the
head-waters of the Clackamas was my reward, and the weary toil of

reeling in with one eye under the water and the other on the top
joint of the rod was renewed. Worst of all, I was blocking

California's path to the little landing bay aforesaid, and he had
to halt and tire his prize where he was.

"The father of all the salmon!" he shouted. "For the love of
Heaven, get your trout to bank, Johnny Bull!"

But I could do no more. Even the insult failed to move me. The
rest of the game was with the salmon. He suffered himself to be

drawn, skip-ping with pretended delight at getting to the haven
where I would fain bring him. Yet no sooner did he feel shoal

water under his ponderous belly than he backed like a
torpedo-boat, and the snarl of the reel told me that my labor was

in vain. A dozen times, at least, this happened ere the line
hinted he had given up the battle and would be towed in. He was

towed. The landing-net was useless for one of his size, and I
would not have him gaffed. I stepped into the shallows and

heaved him out with a respectful hand under the gill, for which
kindness he battered me about the legs with his tail, and I felt

the strength of him and was proud. California had taken my place
in the shallows, his fish hard held. I was up the bank lying

full length on the sweet-scented grass and gasping in company
with my first salmon caught, played and landed on an eight-ounce

rod. My hands were cut and bleeding, I was dripping with sweat,
spangled like a harlequin with scales, water from my waist down,

nose peeled by the sun, but utterly, supremely, and consummately
happy.

The beauty, the darling, the daisy, my Salmon Bahadur, weighed
twelve pounds, and I had been seven-and-thirty minutes bringing

him to bank! He had been lightlyhooked on the angle of the right
jaw, and the hook had not wearied him. That hour I sat among

princes and crowned heads greater than them all. Below the bank
we heard California scuffling with his salmon and swearing

Spanish oaths. Portland and I assisted at the capture, and the
fish dragged the spring balance out by the roots. It was only

constructed to weigh up to fifteen pounds. We stretched the
three fish on the grass--the eleven and a half, the twelve and

fifteen pounder--and we gave an oath that all who came after
should merely be weighed and put back again.

How shall I tell the glories of that day so that you may be
interested? Again and again did California and I prance down

that reach to the little bay, each with a salmon in tow, and land
him in the shallows. Then Portland took my rod and caught some

ten-pounders, and my spoon was carried away by an unknown
leviathan. Each fish, for the merits of the three that had died

so gamely, was hastilyhooked on the balance and flung back.
Portland recorded the weight in a pocket-book, for he was a

real-estate man. Each fish fought for all he was worth, and none
more savagely than the smallest, a game little six-pounder. At

the end of six hours we added up the list. Read it. Total:
Sixteen fish; aggregate weight, one hundred and forty pounds.

The score in detail runs something like this--it is only
interesting to those concerned: fifteen, eleven and a half,

twelve, ten, nine and three quarters, eight, and so forth; as I
have said, nothing under six pounds, and three ten-pounders.

Very solemnly and thankfully we put up our rods--it was glory
enough for all time--and returned weeping in each other's arms,

weeping tears of pure joy, to that simple, bare-legged family in
the packing-case house by the water-side.

The old farmer recollected days and nights of fiercewarfare with
the Indians "way back in the fifties," when every ripple of the

Columbia River and her tributaries hid covert danger. God had
dowered him with a queer, crooked gift of expression and a fierce

anxiety for the welfare of his two little sons--tanned and
reserved children, who attended school daily and spoke good

English in a strange tongue.
His wife was an austere woman, who had once been kindly, and

perhaps handsome.
Very many years of toil had taken the elasticity out of step and

voice. She looked for nothing better than everlasting work--the
chafing detail of housework--and then a grave somewhere up the

hill among the blackberries and the pines.
But in her grim way she sympathized with her eldest daughter, a

small and silent maiden of eighteen, who had thoughts very far
from the meals she tended and the pans she scoured.

We stumbled into the household at a crisis, and there was a deal
of downrighthumanity in that same. A bad, wicked dress-maker

had promised the maiden a dress in time for a to-morrow's
rail-way journey, and though the barefooted Georgy, who stood in

very wholesome awe of his sister, had scoured the woods on a pony
in search, that dress never arrived. So, with sorrow in her

heart and a hundred Sister-Anne glances up the road, she waited
upon the strangers and, I doubt not, cursed them for the wants

that stood between her and her need for tears. It was a genuine
little tragedy. The mother, in a heavy, passionless voice,

rebuked her impatience, yet sat up far into the night, bowed over
a heap of sewing for the daughter's benefit.

These things I beheld in the long marigold-scented twilight and
whispering night, loafing round the little house with California,

who un-folded himself like a lotus to the moon, or in the little
boarded bunk that was our bedroom, swap-ping tales with Portland

and the old man.
Most of the yarns began in this way:--"Red Larry was a

bull-puncher back of Lone County, Montana," or "There was a man
riding the trail met a jack-rabbit sitting in a cactus," or

"'Bout the time of the San Diego land boom, a woman from
Monterey," etc.

You can try to piece out for yourselves what sort of stories they
were.

IV
The Yellowstone

ONCE upon a time there was a carter who brought his team and a
friend into the Yellowstone Park without due thought. Presently

they came upon a few of the natural beauties of the place, and
that carter turned his team into his friend's team,

howling:--"Get out o' this, Jim. All hell's alight under our
noses!"

And they called the place Hell's Half-Acre to this day to witness
if the carter lied.

We, too, the old lady from Chicago, her husband, Tom, and the
good little mares, came to Hell's Half-Acre, which is about sixty

acres in extent, and when Tom said:--"Would you like to drive
over it?"

We said:--"Certainly not, and if you do we shall report you to
the park authorities."

There was a plain, blistered, peeled, and abominable, and it was