dinner, haven't you?"

"Yes, I have half an hour before it will be time to dress; I'll smoke a pipe and talk to you for that time. Now, ask your questions."

Jack Danvers was a New York boy about fourteen years old. He lived in East 38th Street, near Park Avenue, and Mrs. Danver's brother, Will Sturgis, had a ranch out on the Plains, on which were many horses and cattle. Mr. Sturgis spent the summer on the ranch, but often came to New York for the winter. The ranch was in a wild country, where there were bears and elk and deer and antelope, and sometimes buffalo and Indians.

Jack was not a very strong boy. He was slim and pale and spent most of his time reading, instead of playing out of doors as all boys should. In the summer when he was in the country and in the open air he grew brown and hearty, but through the winter he became slender and white again.

Jack had no brothers and sisters, and his parents were often anxious about his health. They had thought several times of moving to the country to live, so that Jack might have an out-door life all the year round, but Mr. Danvers' business was so confining that he was obliged to be in town constantly, and Mrs. Danvers was not willing to leave him.

Dr. Robertson, whom Mr. Danvers had consulted, had given much thought to the boy's case, and at last had advised his mother to send him out to his uncle's ranch for a year, or at least for a summer, telling her that a few months of rough life in the open air would do him more good than all the medicines in the world. When Dr. Robertson told her this, Mrs. Danvers at first thought the advice dreadful. She said, "Oh, doctor, I couldn't think of doing that. Why the life out there is one of constant danger and hardship. There are cowboys and Indians and wild animals of all sorts. I should never have an easy moment while Jack was away."

"My dear madam," said the doctor, "medicine is often very unpleasant to take, unpleasant for the patient and sometimes for his friends as well. I can build your boy's system up from time to time with tonics, but I can do him no permanent good. My medicines are only palliatives; the real trouble is with his environment. If the conditions of his life are changed, he will be certain to throw off the lassitude and weakness which he now feels, and to become a stout and hearty boy about whose general health you need have no farther concern; but it is important that now, when eight or ten years of schooling and study are before him, he should have a well-nourished body. I know of nothing that promise so much in this direction as a course of open-air life and vigorous exercise. Now he stays too much in the house and cares for nothing but books. This is not natural for a boy of his age. He ought to be full of animal spirits and to be working them off by climbing trees, running races and fighting. Think this matter over carefully, Mrs. Danvers, and let me know what you and your husband decide."

After much thought and many long talks, the parents had at last made up their minds to let their boy go. All preparations had been made, and on the next day Jack and his uncle were to take the train for the Far West.

"Well, Uncle Will," said Jack, "first, I want to know how long it will take us to get out to the ranch?"

"Five days, unless something happens to delay us," said Mr. Sturgis.

"Next," said Jack, "I want to know what I can do on the ranch. I want to help in the work, you know, but I don't know how to ride, or how to do anything that you have to do out there among the cattle and horses. I'll have to learn a great deal before I can be of any use."

"Yes, of course, you will have to learn. You will pick up riding and roping readily enough, but to learn the ways of the prairie and the mountains is not so easy, and unless you are with some one that knows all that and tries to teach you, it will take you a long time to learn. You can easily learn the cowboy part of your education from almost any of us out at the ranch, but there is only one man there who can teach you how to become a good mountain man; that is old Hugh Johnson. He has lived on the plains and in the mountains for more than forty years, and has hunted, trapped and fought Indians from the Mississippi to the Pacific, and from the Saskatchewan to the Rio Grande. He knows the plains and the mountains better than any one I ever saw, and is like an Indian for reading sign."

"What do you mean by reading sign, Uncle Will?" said Jack.

"Sign is a word which may mean a great many things. Sign may be the tracks of animals, or of people, or the smoke of fires, or an old camp, or clothing dropped by some one who has passed along. Anything that shows that animals or people have been in a certain place is called sign. Sign may be old or fresh, and there is always something about it that should tell you more than the mere fact that whatever made it has been there. You ought to be able to tell when the sign was made, and sometimes how it came to be made. Sometimes the sign is merely the way the wild animals act. I remember years ago, when the Sioux and Cheyennes were troublesome, I was travelling alone with Hugh, and one night when we camped, he rode out to kill a buffalo heifer. Before long he came back and told me that he had seen Indian sign, and that as soon as it was dark we must start and travel on all night. When I asked him what he had seen, he said that the animals were uneasy and the buffalo were running, and that some one was chasing them not far off. We hid our horses in a ravine and crept on top of a near-by hill from which we could see a good stretch of country. Sure enough, before long we saw buffalo running as if frightened, and a little later we saw, far off, two Indians chasing a little bunch. We lighted no fire that evening, but soon after dark rode away, and did not rest till we had put forty miles behind us."

"Do you think they would have tried to kill you, if they had seen you?" asked Jack.

"I don't know," said his uncle, "we were not taking any chances.

"Now, when you get to the ranch," he went on, "you will learn a lot about the birds and animals, and if your tastes lie that way, and you keep your eyes open, you will find out much of the life of these wild things that few people know. Although I have been out there so many years and have always tried to observe things, I see every season something that I never saw before, and learn more and more how little I really know about the beasts and the birds of the west—even those that are most common about the ranch. Only last year I saw for the first time a little blind coyote puppy dug out from a hole in a ravine and was astonished to find that, instead of being yellow it was dark blue, almost black in fact. You could get a great collection of pets together at the ranch. Young elk, young antelope and deer and wolves, possibly a buffalo calf, some foxes, and birds of a dozen different kinds, grouse, ducks, magpies, young hawks. Why, you could have a regular menagerie."

"Oh, what fun that would be," said Jack. "I should like that. But how do you catch all these things? I supposed that young deer and antelope could run so fast that they could not be caught. I thought that they ran even faster than the old ones."

"They can run very fast and they are hard to catch as soon as they are a few weeks old," said his uncle; "but when they are quite young—for the first few days after they are born—they can scarcely run at all. During this time the mother hides them, telling them, I suppose, in her own language, to lie perfectly still until she returns. The young one lies flat on the ground, and the old mother goes off a little way—not far though—and feeds about. If she sees