And he carried with him his knife and his
bread-pan, which was, even then, hanging to a branch of a tree.
We fed him, and he offered to sing. The Optimist nudged me.
"Now, listen," he said; "these fellows can _sing_. Be quiet, everybody!"
The bandit twisted up his mustachios, smiled beatifically, and took up a
position in the trail, feet apart, eyes upturned.
And then--he stopped.
"I start a leetle high," he said; "I start again."
So he started again, and the woods receded from around us, and the
rushing of the river died away, and nothing was heard in that lonely
valley but the most hideous sounds that ever broke a primeval silence
into rags and tatters.
When, at last, he stopped, we got on our horses and rode on, a bitter
and disillusioned party of adventurers whose first bubble of enthusiasm
had been pricked.
It was four o'clock when we began the ascent of the switchback at the
top of the valley. Up and up we went, dismounting here and there, going
slowly but eagerly. For, once over the wall, we were beyond the reach
of civilization. So strange a thing is the human mind! We who were for
most of the year most civilized, most dependent on our kind and the
comforts it has wrought out of a primitive world, now we were savagely
resentful of it.
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