There wasn’t any homes to see as the Injun and me rode down the hill. But trees that could shade you, and grass a horse could eat, and water not runnin’ like it wanted to kill you, but friendly water. And the mountains all around was pleasant too--timber on ’em. Snow not on ’em yet, except a dozen or so high-up, far-back patches, lyin’ around white like wash-day. So we rode along up the valley and camped, and next day struck a cabin, and corral and haystacks. Sure enough! Married man with wife and kids. Kids had regular Texas-colored hair. But the most homes was farther up the river, they said, near the Forks and store; and so I went along with the Siwash, who was bound for the store with his mail-sack. The store was the post-office, of course--Beekman was its name. We passed by a tent ‘side of the road, and voices was screechin’ inside the tent, and the Siwash he started to laugh. So I asked him what he knowed about it. Let me see. What did he say? I don’t have use any more for the Chinook I learned up there. Oh, yes! He said:-- “_Klaska tenas man, klaska hyas pilton._” So I didn’t know what that meant, and there wasn’t much good mentioning this to him; but I didn’t have to, for they came a-rushin’ out of the tent, no hats on. “How does a coyote walk?” screeched out the littlest one, aimin’ his finger at me. Well, I felt huffy--never’d saw him before or his partner neither--didn’t catch the joke--but he wasn’t jokin’. The big one arrives and he yells:-- “Don’t he walk separate?” “He walks together, don’t he?” yells the little one. Little one had scrambled hair, white, and it hadn’t been cut lately. Big partner had left his hair behind him somewheres along life’s journey. They was glarin’ up at me for an answer. So I said: “Tell me what you mean.” So they did. They was trappers. One claimed you could always tell a coyote’s tracks by the way he put his right foot and his left foot down in different places, so you could tell he was a four-footed animal; and the other he said that was the way the bobcat and the link and the mountain-lion walked. And then the first one he yelled out that they struck one foot right in the other foot’s track, so it looked like a two-footed animal had been walkin’ there. “That’s all easy,” I said; for I’ve trapped some myself. So I set ’em straight as to the facts. Thing was, they quieted down right off and took my say-so. But that was their way, I found--get up a regular state-of-things that would mean trouble, you’d suppose, and drop it as if nobody’d said a word. “Come and finish dinner,” says the little one to the big one. “Dinner!” says the big one. “Quit your dining. You’ve eet enough to wake the dead.” So they starts back to their tent like twins. I expect they were sixty, or seventy, or eighty--I don’t know how long they’d lasted in this world--and one had boots, and the other had his feet tied in gunnysack, and both looked like two-bits’ worth of God-help-us.