“Come on, cheer up, Westy, old boy,” said Warde. “We came out here to see Yellowstone Park and now you’re grouching because a funny little man with a cigar as big as he is that we met on the train says we’re just playing a little game, sort of. What’s the matter with the little game? We always had plenty of fun at it, didn’t we? Are you going to spoil the party because a little movie man wouldn’t take us up in the forest with him? Gee whiz, I wouldn’t call that being grateful to the Rotary Club that wished this good time on us. I wouldn’t call that so very big; I’d call it kind of small.” Westy gave him a quick, indignant glance. It was a dangerous moment. It was the ever-friendly, exuberant Ed who averted angry words and perhaps prevented a quarrel. “If there’s anything big anywhere around and it wants to wait till I get to it, I’ll do it. I won’t be bullied. I’m not going to run after it, it will have to wait for me. I’m just as big as _it_ is—even more so. It will have to wait.” They all laughed. CHAPTER IX THE ROCKY HILL They picked blackberries along the way during the hour or so preceding noon and made bags of their handkerchiefs and stored the berries in them. At noontime they sat down by the wayside and made a royal feast. The country was rugged and in the distance were always the great hills with here and there some mighty peak piercing the blue sky. There was a wildness in the surroundings that they had never seen before. Perhaps they felt it as much as saw it. For one thing there were no distant habitations, no friendly, little church spires to soften the landscape. The towering heights rolled away till they became misty in the distance, and it seemed to these hapless wayfarers that they might reach to the farthest ends of the earth. But the immediate neighborhood of the road was not forbidding, the way led through no deep ravines nor skirted any dizzy precipices and it was hard for the boys to realize that they were in the Rocky Mountains. They lolled for an hour or so at noontime and talked as they might have talked along some road in their own familiar Catskills.