Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/35

Rh by the discomforts of camp life, and he was eager to return to his own kind; his stock of liquor had been running low and without it he did not believe he could exist; he spoke loudly and his spirit was dead within him: and thus the forest had remained a closed book. His choice of a companion had not been particularly fortunate either. Pete had good blood in him, the blood of as brave and hardy a race as ever lived, but degeneracy was upon him and his people. He had been employed as Hugh's guide, but he had found it much more convenient to stay in camp and drink Hugh's whisky.

The Indian guide would have been a familiar type to any one of the hardy, farseeing frontiersmen that occasionally ranged through the forest, but Hugh himself would have wakened some wonder. He was still obviously a man of cities. He wore the outdoor clothes of a gentleman, which is but rarely the outdoor garb of the frontier. They were stained with dirt and their careful crease was destroyed; yet they marked him as a tenderfoot.

The truth was that the Colonel's experiment had seemingly failed: the few days that Hugh had already spent in the far Rockies had wrought no change in him. He had not found Broken Fang—the great cougar that had already won a name through a thousand square miles of Idaho forest—and he was ready to admit to himself, at least, that he had made no real effort to find him. He