But it was not to be, either sooner or later. Silver of beard and of hair and lamb-gentle of eye, old 'Yankee' fairly swam in an aura of benevolence when I dropped in upon him a couple of days later--and the table was bare. He raised his hands in holy horror when I asked him to tell me Injun fighting stories, and especially of the tortures he had seen and had inflicted. He admitted that such stories had been attributed to him, but couldn't imagine how they had got started. He had lived with the Crows and the Bannocks, it was true, but only as a friend and a man of peace, never as a warrior. Far from ever having been even a passive spectator of torture, he had always exerted himself to prevent, or at least to minimise it. And he flattered himself that his efforts along this line had not been without success. He felt that no village in which he had lived but had experienced the civilizing effect of his presence. [Illustration: _Courtesy Northern Pacific R. R._ "YANKEE JIM'S" CABIN] Of course all this was terribly disappointing to a youth who had read of the hair-raising exploits of "Yankee Jim, the White Chief," in yellow-backed shockers, and who had looked forward for weeks to hearing from his thin, hard lips the story of the burning of the squaw at the stake, immortalized by Kipling. Forewarned, however, that it was something like ten to five against my stumbling upon the felicitude of a black-bottle régime, I philosophically decided to go ahead with my ski trip through the Park on the chance that the process of the seasons might bring me better luck on my return. After inducing Jim to undertake either to find or to build me a boat suitable for my contemplated down-river trip, I pushed on to Fort Yellowstone.