Look, Tom! There is a real westerner! Harry Hazelton's eyes sparkled, his whole manner was one of intense interest.

"Eh?" queried Tom Reade, turning around from his distant view of a sharp, towering peak of the Rockies.

"There's the real hing in the way of a westerner," Harry Hazelton insisted in a voice in which there was some awe.

"I don't believe he is," retorted Tom skeptically.

"You're going to say, I suppose, that the man is just some freak escaped from the pages of a dime novel?" demanded Harry.

"No; he looks more like a hostler on a leave of absence from a stranded Wild West show," Tom replied slowly.

There was plenty of time for them to inspect the stranger in question. Tom and Harry were seated on a mountain springboard wagon drawn by a pair of thin horses. Their driver, a boy of about eighteen, sat on a tiny make-believe seat almost over the traces. This youthful driver had been minding his own business so assiduously during the past three hours that Harry had voted him a sullen fellow. This however, the driver was not.