I muttered that in fragments, but the lines only adumbrated the longing without revealing its hidden fount. Still groping mentally, I unwrapped some forks and spoons done up in a page of the Los Angeles _Times_. Ah, that gave me the cue! _Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce tourist literature._ And to think a Crow Indian started that kind of a thing! Running until the river bottoms were swamped in purple shadows, I landed and made camp in a soft little nest of snowy sand left behind by a high-water eddy. There was an abrupt yellow cliff rising straight out of a woolly-white riffle on the right bank, and beyond a grove of cottonwood to the left were the shadowy buildings of some kind of a ranch. Even in the deepening twilight I could read something of the record of its growth--groups of log cabins, groups of unpainted, rough-sawed lumber and finally a huge red barn and a great square, verandahed house that was all but a mansion. I was wondering if the same pioneering frontiersman who had built the cabins had survived to occupy the big green and white house, when the soft southerly wind brought the scent of sweet clover and the strains of a phonograph. "_Evening Star_," the _Jocelyn_ Lullaby, the _Baccarole_, wafted me their "convoluted runes" one after the other; then a piano began to strum and a girl, neither mean of voice nor temperament, sang Tosti's "_Good-Bye_." It always had had a softly sentimentalizing effect on me, that "_Lines of white on a sullen Sea_," sung (as it always is) the night before the steamer reaches port. And here it was getting me in the same old place--that mushy spot under the solar plexus that non-anatomically trained poets confuse with the heart. I simply _had_ to hike over and tell that impassioned songstress how perfectly her song matched the scent of sweet clover. Cleaning up the last of the dried apricot stew in my army mess tin, I pushed southward across the moonlit bar. No luck. I was on an island. [Illustration: © _L. A. Huffman_ POMPEY'S PILLAR] [Illustration: © _L. A. Huffman_ THE YELLOWSTONE FROM THE TOP OF POMPEY'S PILLAR] I tried out my new bed for the first time that night. It turned out to be a combination of a canvas bag and inflatable rubber mattress, called by its makers a "Sleeping Pocket." Here again it transpired I had played in luck in the matter of a pig bought in a poke. I used that precious little ten-pound packet of rubber and canvas all the way to New Orleans without blankets. On wind-blown sand bars, mud-banks, coal barges or the greasy steel decks of engine-rooms it was ever the same--always dry, always soft, always warm. Comfortable sleeping measures just about the whole difference between the success and failure of many a trip. I shudder to think of the messy nights I must inevitably have suffered had all those lurking thunder-storms that I weathered so snugly caught me in blankets.