Doggedly they pushed on, thankful for the heavy rains of the last two days, which had reached even here and left little pools of bad-tasting water for themselves and their beasts. At noon they stopped and built a fire of stunted cedar, for in daylight its telltale flames told nothing. They cooked another black-tailed deer, smoked some of the meat, and ran bullets until they had all of the latter they could possibly use. On again toward the Canadian until nightfall, lighting no fire, but eating the meat they had cooked at noon. They arranged a four-shift watch and passed a peaceful night. In their range of vision were Raton Peak, Pike's Peak, and the Wet Mountain, that paradise for hunters; the twin Spanish Peaks with their caps of snow, and behind these towering sentries loomed the sullen bulk of a great mountain range under a thin streak of glittering white. At any distance their appearance hardly would tell whether they were white hunters or Indians from Bent's, since their garb was a mixture of both and their skins so tanned, their hair so long as to cause grave doubts. More than once in that country two white men have exchanged shots, each taking the other for an Indian. At Bent's Fort on the Arkansas there were stray Indians from far-off tribes, and they dressed in what they could get; and at The Pueblo, that little trading post farther up on the Arkansas, Indians and whites lived together and intermarried. Not one of the four but could speak more than one savage dialect; and Tom's three companions possessed an Indian vocabulary which left little to be desired. If it came to a test which might prove too severe for him he could be dumb, and fall back on the sign language. At last the Canadian was reached and passed, and Hank led them unerringly up the valley of a little feeding stream which poured its crystal flood down the gorges of a mountain range now almost over their heads. Coming to a rocky bowl scooped out of the sheer, overhanging wall at a bend, he built a fire of dry wood that was safely screened, and from his "possible" sack he took various leaves and stems and roots he had collected on the way. Four white men looking more like Indians had entered that little valley just before dusk. In the morning at dawn two white men, a Blackfoot and a Delaware, a hunting party from Bent's Fort with messages for Bent's little Vermajo ranch, located in a mountain valley, left the ravine and followed a little-used Ute trail that their leader knew well. Hank wore the Blackfoot distinctive double part in his hair just above the forehead, the isolated tuft pulled down to the bridge of his nose, and fastened to his buckskin trousers were thin strips of beadwork made by Blackfoot squaws.