“H’m,” observed Scipio. “Most as queer as chemistry. D’ y’u know chemistry?” “Why, what do you know?” “Just the embalmin’ side. Didn’t y’u know I assisted an undertaker wunst in Kansas City?” “What’s that?” I interrupted sharply, for something out in the darkness had jumped. “Does a stray steer scare you like that to-night? Now, that embalmin’ trick give me a notion I’ll work out some time. What do you miss worst in camp grub?” “Eggs,” said I, immediately. “That’s you. Well, I’m going to invent embalmed eggs--somehow.” “Hope you do,” said I. “Do you believe I’m going to get sheep this time? It’s all I came for.” “You’ll get sheep,” Scipio declared, “or I’ll lose my job at Sunk Creek ranch.” Judge Henry had lent him to me for my hunting trip. “Of course I’d not _call_ ’em embalmed eggs,” he finished. “Condensed,” I suggested. “Like the milk. Do you suppose the man really did go to Idaho?” “They do go there--and they go everywheres else that’s convenient--Canada, San Francisco, some Indian reservation. He’ll never get found. I expect like as not he killed the confederate along with the victims--it’s claimed there was a cook along, too. He’s never showed up. It’s a bad proposition to get tangled up with a murderer.” I sat thinking of this and that and the other. “That was a superior lie about the lights on the steers’ horns,” I remarked next. Scipio shoved one hand under his hat and scratched his head. “They say that’s _so_,” he said. “I’ve heard it. Never seen it. But--tell y’u--he ain’t got brains enough to invent a thing like that. And he’s too conceited to tell another man’s lie.” “Well,” I pondered, “there’s Saint Elmo’s fire. That’s genuine.” Scipio desired to know about this, and I told him of the lights that are seen at the ends of the yards and spars of ships at sea in atmospheric conditions of a certain kind. He let me also tell him of the old Breton sailor belief that these lights are the souls of dead sailor-men come back to pray for the living in peril; but he stopped me soon when I attempted to speak of charged thunder clouds, and the positive, and the negative, and conductors, and Leyden jars. “That’s a heap worse than the other stuff about yellow and blue,” he objected. “Here’s Broke Axle. D’ y’u say camp here, or make it in to the station?” “Well, if that filthy woman still keeps the station--” “She does. She’s a buck-skinned son-of-a-gun. We’ll camp here, Professor.” Scipio had first called me by this name before he knew me, in Colonel Cyrus Jones’s Eating Palace in Omaha, intending no compliment by the term. Since that day many adventures and surprises shared together had changed it to a word of familiar regard; he used it sparingly, and as a rule only upon occasions of discomfort or mischance. “You’ll get sheep, Professor,” he now repeated in a voice of reassurance, and went his way to attend to the horses for the night.