“Timberline,” said Scipio the next day, “if Anthony Comstock came up in this country he’d jail you.” “Who’s he?” screamed Timberline, sharply. “He lives in Noo York, and he’s agin the nood. That costume of yours is getting close on to what they claim Venus and other immoral Greek statuary used to wear.” After this Timberline put on the Lander clothes, but on one of his wash-days we discovered that he kept the rags next his skin! This clinging to such worthless things seemed probably the result of destitution, of having had nothing, day after day and month after month. His poor little pay at Rongis, which we gradually learned they had always got back from him by one trick or another, was less than half what I now gave him for his services, and I offered to advance him some of this at places where it could be spent; but he told me to keep it until he had earned the whole of it. [Illustration: _Waiting for nothing_ was stamped plain upon him from head to foot] Yet he did not seem a miser; his willingness to help at anything in camp was unchanging, and a surer test of not being stingy was the indifference he showed to losing or winning the little sums we played at cards for after supper and before bed. The score I kept in my diary showed him to belong to the losing class. His help in camp was real, not merely well meant; the curious haze or blur in which his mind had seemed to be at the corral cleared away, and he was worth his wages. What he had said he could do, he did, and more. And yet, when I looked at him, he was somehow forever pitiful. “Do you think anything is the matter with him?” I asked Scipio. “Only just one thing. He’d oughtn’t never to have been born.” “That probably applies to several million people all over this planet.” “Sure,” assented Scipio cheerfully. He was not one of these. “He’s so eternally silent!” I said presently. “A man don’t ask to be born,” pursued Scipio. “Parents can’t stop to think of that,” I returned. “H’m,” mused Scipio. “Somebody or something has taken good care they’ll never.” We continued along the trail, engrossed in our several thoughts, and I could hear Timberline, behind us with the pack horses, singing:-- If that I was where I would be, Then should I be where I am not. Our mode of travel had changed at Fort Washakie. There we had left the wagon and put ourselves and our baggage upon horses, because we should presently be in a country where wagons could not go. I suppose that more advice is offered and less taken than of any other free commodity in the world. Before I had settled where to go for sheep, nobody could tell me where to go; now almost every one advised some other than the place I had chosen. “Washakie Needles?” they would repeat unfavorably; “Union Peak’s nearer;” or, “You go up Jakey’s Fork;” or “Red Creek’s half as far, and twice as many sheep;” or, “Last spring I seen a ram up Dinwiddie big as a horse.”