It was evening in the mountains. The golden god of day was gliding slowly adown the crimson west. Here and there the cerulean dome was flecked with snowy clouds.

The flecks were visible to the naked eye.

Meanwhile the golden god of day, hereinbefore referred to, continued to glide adown the crimson west, with about the same symmetrical glide. It had done so on several occasions previous to the opening of this story.

The katydid was singing sleepily in the long grass, and the grizzly bear was trilling between eleven trills on the still air.

It was a spot where the foot of man had never trod, and the undisturbed temple of nature with its hallowed hush and never ending repose. The lofty pines were swaying softly to and fro in the gentle breeze of evening, and the babbling brook went babbling along down its rocky bed in the bottom of the canon, with a merry bab.

All at once, like a flash of dazzling light, a noble youth came slowly down the mountain side, riding an ambling palfrey of the narrow-guage variety, with a paint-brush tail on him—(that is the palfrey, of course.) The palfrey was a delicate buckskin color, with high, intellectual ears and Roman nose.

In crossing the stream the palfrey stubbed his toe, and fell on his noble rider, breaking the man's leg in three places, and jamming one of his ribs through the liver and into the ground, thus pinning him to the earth, and preventing him from rising.

The buckskin palfrey, with almost human foresight, and wonderful intelligence, found a soft place in the grassy bottom, and lay down.

There, in the slanting rays of the declining sun, and stretched out upon the sedgy brink of the clear mountain stream, far from the reach of man and miles beyond the outer line of civilization, lay Pumpkin Jim, the Yipping, Yelling Yahoo of Dirty Woman's Ranch.

He lav there partially submerged in the stream and partially in the clear, bracing atmosphere. Wild-eyed and beautiful he lay there, looking up into the glad realms of space, with that murderous glitter in his eye that wins a woman's love, and the sympathy of kind hearted philanthropists.

Occasionally he would raise his broken limb and try to use it, but it generally wilted and drooped like the leg of a rag doll.

Then he would struggle to raise himself up and drag his body out upon the bank, but the broken rib would tear out large chunks of his liver, and make him feel wretched and unhappy.

"Curses upon thee, thou base and treacherous mule!" he murmured, brokenly. "By my beard, thou hast poorly repaid me for my unremitting kindness to thee. Ah, alack, alack, alack—"

He was just about to alack some more, when a mellow, girlish voice came floating down the gulch and fell in large fragments near where he lay.

He gathered up some of the chunks of melody to see what the song might be. It was that wonderful masterpiece of Mozart's, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home."

Then he swooned.

The gurgling brook still continued to gurg. We will let it gurg.