Barbarians

e mountainous official fiasco at Gallipoli. Here, a few perished among the filt

nd its makers are alr

ent and Jim Brown. Destiny linked arms with them; Fate jerked a mysterious thumb over

ark[pg 34]ing of the British overseas

entrain at night. Nobody knew th

he Trentino, but British and Canadian noses were sniffing at something beyond the Carnic A

ing the Austrian sky-line to the northward; and all day long Dominion reconnoitering parties wandered among valleys, alms, forest, and peaks in company sometimes with Italian

nadian northward reconnaissance-nothing much to see, except a solitary moving figure here and there on the mountains, crawling like a deerstalker across ledges and stretches of br

ion," remarked the British Military

observed h

"every variety of adventurer in their ranks-cattlemen, ranchmen, Hudson Bay trappers, North West police, lu

36]

Yankees-the most object

remarked the

've a relative of sorts with 'em-leftenant, I be

O

the B. M. O., adjusting his field glasses and focussing them on two dark d

d a moment afterward the dots became invisible against the vast mass of the mountain, and did not again reappea

good-looking,[pg 37] bronzed young man in khaki, puttees, and mountain sho

ee a better cou

layout," returned the younger offi

country was made for them. I fancy they hav

re, too, called an ibex. You n

rd and stood silently beside him, looking out across the v

forests far below carpeted the abyss like wastes of velvet moss, amid which glis

ke a note or two,"

inconspicuous, brownish-grey figures, cuddled close among the greyish rocks, with nothing of military insignia about their dress or their round grey wool caps to d

ks and glistening fields of crag-broken white carried the eye on upward to the

d; not a cloud hung there. But westward mist clung to a few mou

pidly but accurately, laugh

he Carnic Alps. It's very funny, isn't it? Our surve

the smoke drifting fragrantly from his brier pipe, nodded in silence

, "I started to tell you about the ibex, Jim

it," said Bro

d me-Siurd von Glahn-a splendid fellow-educated at Oxford-

s always a Boche, Harry.

w. Anyway, his dad had a shooting where there were chamois, reh, hi

ing his pencil and glancing out across the val

d

ner of be

ooh, I've seen chamois within a hundred yards of a mountain macadam highway. But the ibex? Not much! The man who stalks and kills an ib

d goat?" inquired Brown

rder to

nse

It really

your ibex

ith little chin whiskers and a pair of big, curved, heavily ridged horns, thick and fl

ommented Brown, workin

g and climbing, it can give points to any Rocky Mountain goat. You try to get above it, spend the nig

ou got

or that length of time across the icy mo

work

chocolate from his pocket and, rolling over luxuriously in the sun

his elbow; and while he ate he lazily watched

imself, "that this is the mos

dewy wild flowers. Down it, between fern and crag and bracken, flashed a brook, broken into in silvery sections amid d

des on many a foot tour through such mountains as the

an iron-shod foot on the ledge; they snatched their rifles from the fern patch; tw

g