A fiction short story book. The mountain countries of all the earth have always been wonder-lands. The oldest and best known of them are to this day full of things that nobody has found out. That is the reason why people are always exploring them, but they keep their secrets remarkably well, particularly the great secret of how they happened to get there in that shape. The great western mountain country of the United States is made up of range after range of wonderful peaks and ridges, and men have peered in among them here and there, but for all the peering and searching nothing of the wonder to speak of has been rubbed away. Right in the eastern, edge of one of these mountain ridges, one warm September morning, not long ago, a band of Nez Percé Indians were encamped. It was in what is commonly called "the Far West", because always when you get there the West is as far away as ever. The camp was in a sort of nook, and it was not easy to say whether a spur of the mountain jutted out into the plain, or whether a spur of the plain made a dent in the ragged line of the mountains. More than a dozen "lodges", made of skins upheld by poles, were scattered around on the smoother spots, not far from a bubbling spring of water.