Clancy, clinging to Old Joe, leaned over the two and stared.

"Didn't I tell you, kid," he said faintly, "Grubville was at the end of the lane?"

"She's a stayer, I'll be dogged if she ain't," he continued, disappointed that the child did not look up.

"You bet," replied Mrs. Old Joe, lifting a handkerchief on the other side and displaying the bronzed intaglio of her own babe's face.

It was many a day before Clancy saw the child again; a few hours later he was in a delirium. Old Joe brought the surgeon from the government reservation, and for weeks the man struggled for life. But one day, when the sun came pouring down into the cañon, Mrs. Old Joe placed the child in his arms, and Clancy knew that he had accomplished the impossible. A runner was sent over the mountains to Sierra with the news, and one morning when the snow had gone, when great mounds of green went tumbling eternally away to the distant sea, a queer outfit crawled slowly up the divide that looked down on the valley of Sierra Vista; first came Clancy, leading a burro upon which sat Mrs. Old Joe, hired on a life lease as nurse in perpetuity by the miners of Sierra Vista, looking more like Buddha than ever, and holding the child; while behind, mounted on a mule, rode Old Joe with his own papoose. As they reached

the divide the whole town came rushing up, and at the head Bill and a fair, brown-eyed woman who was not dead, who, by a miracle, had lived. As she reached Mrs. Old Joe and the child she had never seen, Alec and Lou Doyle and the rest turned away and looked at the scenery-then laughed and shouted through many tears; and then Clancy, Old Joe, and a protesting Buddha went up upon the shoulders of the citizens of Sierra as they hit the trail and wound down into the valley of deepest snow.

CHAPTER IV

THIS

THE RIVER OF FEATHERS

HIS little river rose in an amateur glacier on the slope of Mount Lassen-once a terrific volcano in northern California, but now a mother of trout streams on the east slope of the Sierra Nevada. You pass through Humbug Valley to reach it, climb the Sierra Nevada until you are on top of the world, and from ten in the morning until six in the evening you are staging through eternal forests; now looking out over the land, or down into abysmal chasms from a pinnacle nearly eight thousand feet in air; again descending some deep cañon, or skirting an abyss from which you look into other depths, deeper and farther on, but always on the finest mountain road anywhere in so wild a country, always in the deep black forest on the very top of the world.

The River of Feathers appears very large on the map, but when you climb out of Humbug Valley and through the big pines, and look down on Big Meadows, the fair river is really very small. But then the trout are very large, and

again, what pleasure to the angler is there in a Mississippi or an Orinoco? You could not cast half-way across, and if you did, catfish, not trout, would be your reward.

Late in the day you drop from the high Sierras into a little village, founded by a man named Pratt. What Pratt was doing half a century ago on the Feather no one knows, but millions in gold have been washed from the bed of the stream, so we assume that he was not hunting for big trout. Whatever it was, he has his monument, and you may have guessed it: It is Prattville. There is a blacksmith shop and two or three others, a post-office and a row of buildings that gradually dwindles down into little homes, and, last, there is the Feather River winding in and out; and away up to the north, hanging like a roc's egg in space, the splendid, glowing snowcap of Lassen. Down the river another mile, hard by a great mass of fine trees and on the edge of the meadow, you come to a little shop, and on the sign read, 66 Costar, Artificial Fly Maker."

You have seen all sorts of signs from Chico up to Sterling and the divide; one reading, "Keep Off the Snow," tacked on a big tree thirty feet in air, where the coach drives in winter when it tries to reach Humbug, or where the Indian mail carrier coasts on skees. But this, one hundred miles from anywhere, is the first

to really appeal to you; and so you stop, and find that Costar not only makes flies, but keeps a little inn that is so near the River of Feathers that if the inn had a veranda you could stand on it, and cast one of the inn-keeper's flies nearly to the other side, and the chances would be that you would land a trout.

As you enter the yard you notice a number of creels and rods hanging on the side of an old weather-beaten shed, and they are the bulky baskets that are seen only on the Pacific coast, built by some dreamer who had seen trout in a nightmare. A little crowd surges out of the inn to meet the coach, and inspect the new arrival, and already recognizing the fact that your creel is outclassed, you try to hide it, but fail. An hour later, in the central room, you hear the truth about the River of Feathers from a group of sturdy, big-booted, gray-shirted anglers. They pretend not to know what the creel is, and take you over to the fly-maker's sanctum and show you the Hall of Fame of the River of Feathers. The walls are covered with rude but correct and life-size paintings of trout made by the simple means of placing the trout on paper, running a pencil around him, and painting him in, with colored chalk. What fish stories these walls tell! There is the story of every notable catch in the Big Meadows for the past decade; and the size of these monsters, their massive pro