The boys piled spruce and fir browse on the floor of their tent, sealing up its sod cloth, rolled out their sleeping bags, and hung wall pockets at the head of each bed to hold all their small camp belongings. Then they went out to inspect the Colonel’s bivouac. Near their own tent it was, a classic of comfort and lightness for one lone hiker. A stretcher bed hung on two stout poles, which were lashed to a pair of shears about a foot above the soil, and over the shears ran a ridge rope, with the tarp thrown over it and pegged down behind to form a windbreak. Its front edge was guyed out in a gentle slant, so that the Colonel had a cooking space in front of his bed, in out of the rain; and he could sit on the bed and tend his meal or clean his rifle, or just loaf or lie at ease on it. As the boys approached he was filling the bottom of the stretcher bed with fine fir browse. “Learned that trick in the Army, long ago, boys. The Service camp cot is the coldest thing to sleep on ever devised by the brain of man,--unless you put a layer of hay or browse in the bottom of it. Then it is good, and comfortable and warm.” He rolled out his canvas bed roll on it and lay down, to dream indolently in the sunny, pine-scented glade, while through a rift in the foliage his eyes drank in the hazy, purple splendor of the Canyon. “This is good enough, for the present, boys,” he grunted, stretching his arms in lazy happiness. “I haven’t any idea when we’ll ever bother to leave here again, but to-morrow we’ll hang up a deer and try to get the dogs on a cougar.” Sid and Scotty wandered on to inspect the rest of the camp. The tinkle of horse bells came from a little mountain meadow where their ponies had been turned out. Up near them a gray and black patterned blanket, hanging in a tree, told where Niltci had staked out his claim for sleeping quarters. Under a nest of big pines lay Big John’s bed roll on a thick bank of needles. Down near a tiny spring in the ravine, that facetious child of Montana was at work making a stone fireplace, and already he had a saddle and horse gear rack built to keep their leather above the rodent zone.