"Ain't this an awful world!" By this observation Uncle Bill Griswold, standing on a narrow shelf of rock, with the sheep's hind quarters on his back, meant merely to convey the opinion that there was a great deal of it.
The panting sportsman did not answer. T. Victor Sprudell was looking for some place to put his toe.
"There's a hundred square miles over there that I reckon there never was a white man's foot on, and they say that the West has been went over with a fine-tooth comb. Wouldn't it make you laugh?"
Mr. Sprudell looked far from laughter as, by placing a foot directly in front of the other, he advanced a few inches at a time until he reached the side of his guide. It was an awful world, and the swift glance he had of it as he raised his eyes from the toes of his boots and looked off across the ocean of peaks gave him the feeling that he was about to fall over the edge of it. His pink, cherubic face turned saffron, and he shrank back against the wall. He had been in perilous places before, but this was the worst yet.
"There might be somethin' good over yonder if 'twas looked into right," went on Uncle Bill easily, as he stood with the ball of his feet hanging over a precipice, staring speculatively. "But it'll be like to stay there for a while, with these young bucks doin' all their prospectin' around some sheet-iron stove. There's nobody around the camps these days that ain't afraid of work, of gittin' lost, of sleepin' out of their beds of nights. Prospectin' in underbrush and down timber is no cinch, but it never stopped me when I was a young feller around sixty or sixty-five." A dry, clicking sound as Sprudell swallowed made the old man look around. "Hey--what's the matter? Aire you dizzy?"
Dizzy! Sprudell felt he was going to die. If his shaking knees should suddenly give way beneath him he could see, by craning his neck slightly, the exact spot where he was going to land. His chest, plump and high like a woman's, rose and fell quickly with his hard breathing, and the barrel of his rifle where he clasped it was damp with nervous perspiration. His small mouth, with its full, red lips shaped like the traditional cupid's bow, was colorless, and there was abject terror in his infantile blue eyes. Yet superficially, T. Victor Sprudell was a brave figure--picturesque as the drawing for a gunpowder "ad," a man of fifty, yet excellently well preserved.
A plaid cap with a visor fore and aft matched his roomy knickerbockers, and canvas leggings encased his rounded calves. His hob-nailed shoes were the latest thing in "field boots," and his hunting coat was a credit to the sporting house that had turned it out. His cartridge belt was new and squeaky, and he had the last patents in waterproof match safes and skinning knives. That goneness at his stomach, and the strange sensations up and down his spine, seemed incongruous in such valorous trappings. But he had them unmistakably, and they kept him cringing close against the wall as though he had been glued.