Bert Wilson in the Rockies | Page 2

when that dusky gentleman will come along with the call to dinner."
"Always hungry," laughed one of the others. "The rest of us eat to live, but Tom lives to eat."
"You've struck it there, Dick," assented the third. "You know they say that no one has ever been able to eat a quail a day for thirty days hand running, but I'd be willing to back Tom to do it."
"Well, I wouldn't quail at the prospect," began Tom complacently, and then ducked as Dick made a pass at him.
"Even at that, I haven't got anything on you fellows," he went on, in an aggrieved tone. "When you disciples of 'plain living and high thinking' get at the dinner table, I notice that it soon becomes a case of high living and plain thinking."
"Such low-brow insinuations deserve no answer," said Dick severely. "Anyway," consulting his watch, "it's only half-past eleven, so you'll have to curb the promptings of your grosser nature."
"No later than that?" groaned Tom. "I don't know when a morning has seemed so long in passing."
"It is a little slow. I suppose it's this blistering heat and the long distance between stations. It's about time something happened to break the monotony."
"Don't raise false hopes, Bert," said Tom, cynically. "Nothing ever happens nowadays."
"Oh, I don't know," laughed Bert. "How about the Mexican bandits and the Chinese pirates? Something certainly happened when we ran up against those rascals."
"They were lively scraps, all right," admitted Tom, "but we had to go out of the country to get them. In the little old United States, we've got too much civilization. Everything is cut and dried and pared and polished, until there are no rough edges left. Think of the fellows that made this trip across the continent sixty years ago in their prairie schooners, getting cross-eyed from looking for buffalo with one eye and Indians with the other, feeling their scalp every five minutes to make sure they still had it. That was life."
"Or death," put in Dick skeptically.
"Then look at us," went on Tom, not deigning to notice the interruption, "rolling along smoothly at fifty miles an hour in a car that's like a palace, with its cushioned seats and electric lights and library and bath and soft beds and rich food and servants to wait upon us. We're pampered children of luxury, all right, but I'm willing to bet that those 'horny-handed sons of toil' had it on us when it came to the real joy of living."
"Tom was born too late?" chaffed Bert. "He doesn't really belong in the twentieth century. He ought to have lived in the time of Ivanhoe, or Young Lochinvar, or the Three Musketeers, or Robin Hood. I can see him bending a bow in Nottingham Forest or breaking a lance in a tournament or storming a fortress by day, and at night twanging a guitar beneath a castle window or writing a sonnet to his lady's eyebrow."
"Well, anyhow," defended Tom, "those fellows of the olden time had good red blood in their veins."
"Yes," assented Dick drily, "but it didn't stay there long. There were too many sword points ready to let it out."
And yet, despite their good-natured "joshing" of Tom, they, quite as much as he, were eager for excitement and adventure. In the fullest sense they were "birds of a feather." In earlier and ruder days they would have been soldiers of fortune, cutting their ways through unknown forests, facing without flinching savage beasts and equally savage men, looking ever for new worlds to conquer. Even in these "piping days of peace" that they so much deplored, they had shown an almost uncanny ability to get into scrapes of various kinds, from which sometimes they had narrowly escaped with a whole skin. Again and again their courage had been severely tried, and had stood the test. At home and abroad, on land and sea, they had come face to face with danger and death. But the fortune that "favors the brave" had not deserted them, even in moments of deadliest peril. They were accustomed to refer to themselves laughingly as "lucky," but those who knew them best preferred to call them plucky. A stout heart and a quick wit had "many a time and oft" extricated them from positions where luck alone would have failed them.
And most of their adventures had been shared in company. The tie of friendship that bound them together as closely as brothers was of long standing. Beginning at a summer camp, five years earlier, where chance had thrown them together, it had grown increasingly stronger with every year that passed. A subtle free masonry had from the start made each recognize the others as kindred spirits. Since this first meeting their paths had seldom diverged. Together they had gone to