His first impulse was to throw off his jacket before climbing the tree, but he did not do this. He was good at climbing and he shinned up the tree with the agility of a monkey. He rested at the first branch and was surprised to see how even here the view seemed to expand before him. He felt that at last he was doing something free from the contamination of roads and railroad tracks. He was alone in the Rockies. He had once read a boys’ book of that title, and now he reflected with a thrill that he, Westy Martin, was, in a sense, alone in the Rockies. Not in the perilous depths, perhaps, but just the same, in the Rockies. He wondered if there might be a grizzly within a mile, or two or three miles of him. _The Rockies!_ He ascended to the next branch, and the next. Slowly he climbed and wriggled upward to a point beyond which he hesitated to trust the weight of his body. And here he sat in a fork of the tree and looked southward and eastward where a vast panorama was open before him. To the north and west was a near background of towering mountains, making his airy perch seem low indeed. But to the south and east he saw the West in all its glory and majesty. Mountains, mountains, mountains! Magnificent chaos! Distance unlimited! Wildness unparalleled! Such loneliness that a whisper might startle like a shout. It needed only the roar of a grizzly to complete this boy’s sense of tragic isolation and to give the scene a voice. From where he sat, Westy could look down into the cosy little cleft and see Ed Carlyle standing clearly outlined in the first gray of twilight; standing like a statue, hopefully angling with his converted safety-pin and braided worsted. Warde was gathering sticks for their fire. Westy’s impulse was to call to them, but then he decided not to. He preferred not to call, nor even see them. For just a little while he wanted to be _alone in the Rockies_. So he did not call. He looked in another direction and as he did so his heart jumped to his throat and he was conscious of a feeling of unspeakable gratitude to the saving impulse which had kept him silent. For approaching up the hill from the direction in which he now looked were the figures of two men. And one glimpse of them was enough to strike horror to Westy Martin’s soul. CHAPTER XII IN THE TWILIGHT It required but one look at these two men to cause Westy devoutly to hope that they had not seen him. They were rough characters and of an altogether unpromising appearance.