Scipio laughed, and I laughed. It was the only thing to do. How much had the boy walked in the darkness? “I think I’ll take him with us,” I then said. “I’d rather have him with us.” During breakfast we discussed which hill we should ascend, and, this decided on, I was about to tell Timberline his company was expected, when he saved me the trouble by requesting to be allowed to go himself. His usually pale, harmless eyes were full of some sort of glitter: did his fingers feel that they were about to clutch the reward? That was the thirtieth of August; a quarter of a century and more has passed; my age is double what it was; but to-day, on any thirtieth of August, if I think of the date, the Washakie Needles stand in my eyes,--twin spires of naked rock,--and I see what happened there. The three of us left camp. It was warm summer in the valley by the streaming channel of our creek, and the quiet day smelled of the pines. We should not have taken horses, they served us so little in such a climb as that. On the level top our legs and breathing got relief, and far away up the next valley were sheep. This second top we reached, but they were gone to the next beyond, where we saw them across a mile or so of space. In the bottom below us ran the north fork of Owl Creek like a fine white wire drawn through the distant green of the pines. Up in this world peaks and knife-edged ridges bristled to our north away and away beyond sight. We now made a new descent and ascent, but had no luck, and by three o’clock we stood upon a lofty, wet, slipping ledge that fell away on three sides, sheer or broken, to the summer and the warmth that lay thousands of feet below. Here it began to be very cold, and to the west the sky now clotted into advancing lumps of thick thundercloud, black, weaving and merging heavily and swiftly in a fierce, rising wind. We got away from this promontory to follow a sheep trail, and as we went along the backbone of the mountain, two or three valleys off to the right, long, black streamers let down from the cloud. They hung and wavered mistily close over the pines that did not grow within a thousand feet of our high level. I gazed at the streamers, and discerned water, or something, pouring down in them. Above our heads the day was still serene, and we had a chance to make camp without a wetting. This I suggested we should do, since the day’s promise of sport had failed. “No! no!” said Timberline, hoarsely. “See there! We can get them. We’re above them. They don’t see us!”