Page:Hugh Pendexter--Kings of the Missouri.djvu/59

 bewilderment. "So fine a man can not be a liar. When he told me about pickling enough buffalo in the Great Salt Lake to last a big band of trappers a whole season I could see there was sense to the scheme. But, my friend, I'm sorry he told about the cooking springs. Warm water perhaps; but to catch fish from a stream and throw them over and boil them—name of a pipe! Yet I try to believe him. The pickling of buffalo rang true but—there, there! He is a fine man. Let us not say more about it."

"Why hasn't some one else seen that wonderful lake, sixty miles long, hemmed in by mountains?" persisted Lander.

Papa shrugged his thin shoulders and with a malicious little grin said:

"I know one way to prove it is, or isn't. If I were younger I should do it by myself. That is to go there and look about. If I were younger— Well, well, Jim Bridger has seen so much that is wonderful he has no need to tell fairy stories. I swallowed his pickled buffalo. Why not? But behold! I feel depressed when he tells of the cooking-spring. The cave of war-paint. Some one must have left some paint there. But to say it grows—holy blue! Yet he saw something.