"No mining for me!" he stated emphatically. "I paddled around after the stuff for a while, till my hands swelled up like p'ison, and my back creaked like a frozen pine tree in the wind. Then I quit, and I stayed quit. I'm a hunter; and I'm makin' a good livin', because I ain't very particular on how I live." He and Yank smoked interminable pipes, and swapped yarns. Johnny and I liked nothing better than to keep quiet and listen to them. Bagsby had come out with Captain Sutter; and told of that doughty soldier's early skirmishes with the Indians. His tales of the mountains, the plains, and the game and Indians were so much romance to us; and we both wished heartily that fate could have allowed us a chance at such adventures. "But why don't you fellows branch out?" Bagsby always ended. "What do you want to stick here for like a lot of groundhogs? There's rivers back in the hills a heap better than this one, and nobody thar. You'd have the place plumb to yoreselves. Git in where the mountains is really mountainous." Then he would detail at length and slowly his account of the great mountains, deep canons, the shadows of forests, ridges high up above the world, and gorges far within the bowels of the earth through which dashed white torrents. We gathered and pieced together ideas of great ice and snow mountains, and sun-warmed bars below them, and bears and deer, and a high clear air breathing through a vast, beautiful and solitary wilderness. The picture itself was enough to set bounding the pulses of any young man, with a drop of adventure in his veins. But also Bagsby was convinced that there we should find richer diggings than any yet discovered. "It stands to reason," he argued, "that the farther up you git, the more gold there is. All this loose stuff yere is just what washed down from the main supply. If you boys reely wants rich diggings, then you want to push up into the Porcupine River country." But with this glowing and vivid impression we gathered another: that of a trackless wilderness, fearful abysses down which to find a way, labyrinthine defiles, great forests. None of us knew how to cope with these things. Yank, the best woodsman of us all, had had no experience in mountains. None of us knew anything of Indian warfare. None of us had the least idea that we could find Porcupine River, even if we were to be given accurate directions on how to get there.