“Of course you don’t. You’d have to have eyes like a snail’s to be able to see yourself. But just wait, and hold my little prophecy in mind.” Philip, still staring into the heart of the fire, remembered a similar prediction made by his desk-mate in the Denver railroad office. “I know your kind....” Middleton had said. What was there about his kind that made other people so sure that the good thread of self-control had been left out in his weaving? “I’ll wait,” he said; and then: “You haven’t said what you’d do in case it should turn out that we’ve made the improbable ten-strike.” “I?” queried the play-boy. “Everybody who has ever known me could answer that, off-hand. You know my sweet and kindly disposition. I wouldn’t want to disappoint all the old ladies in Philadelphia. And they’d be horribly disappointed if I didn’t proceed to paint everything within reach a bright, bright shade of vermilion.” Philip looked at his watch. “Nine o’clock,” he announced, “and we start at daybreak, sharp. I’m turning in.” In strict accordance with the programme of impatience, the start was made at dawn on the Monday morning. Their map, though rather uncertain as to the smaller streams, seemed to enable them to locate their valley and its small river, and their nearest practicable route to Leadville appeared to be by way of the stream to its junction with a larger river, and then eastward up the valley of the main stream, which the map showed as heading in the gulches gashing the western shoulder of Mount Massive. A day’s tramping behind the two diminutive pack beasts brought them to the larger stream, and the third evening found them zigzagging up the slopes of the great chain which forms the watershed backbone of the continent. Philip had been hastening the slow march of the burros all day, hoping to reach the pass over the range before night. But darkness overtook them when they were approaching timber line and they were forced to camp. It was at this high camp that they had the unique experience of melting snow from a year-old snowbank at the end of summer to water the burros and to make coffee over their camp fire. And even with double blankets and the tarpaulins from the packs, they slept cold. Pushing on in the first graying light of the Thursday dawn, they came to the most difficult stretch of mountain climbing they had yet encountered: a bare, boulder-strewn steep, gullied by rifts and gulches in which the old snow was still lying. At the summit of the rugged pass, which they reached, after many breathing halts, a little before noon, there was a deep drift, sand-covered and treacherous, and through the crust of this the animals broke and floundered, and finally did what over-driven burros will always do--got down and tried to roll their packs off. It was then that Philip flew into a rage and swore savagely at the jacks; at which Bromley laughed.