I spent the next week walking south, since I had the Gobi to the west and a bunch of warlords to the east. I kept thinking that a town ought to pop into view any minute, but I didn't see anything except a bunch of farmfields and an occasional former warlord being hung out to dry, and I began thinking that my picnic basket could have used a little less jade and a little more lunch.

I was sitting down in the shade of a tree, thinking that whoever had called China a crowded country hadn't actually tried walking across it, when I heard a familiar voice coming from behind me.

“Well, I'll be damned if it ain't the Reverend Lucifer Jones!”

I got to my feet and turned around and found myself facing Capturing Clyde Calhoun, decked out in his usual khakis and pith helmet and leading a safari column.

“Well, howdy, Clyde,” I said. “I ain't seen you since Mozambique. What are you doing in these here parts?”

“Same as usual,” he said, walking up and shaking my hand. “Collecting animals for my circus—them what survives getting captured, anyway. The rest go to museums and gourmet chefs and other interested parties.”

“I ain't seen hide nor hair of any animals since I got here,” I said.

“Well, they take a heap of finding,” he said. “But I just picked up seventy-three giant pandas from the bamboo forest up north.”

“That's a lot of pandas,” I said. “I hear tell they're an endangered species.”

“They are now,” he agreed, patting his rifle fondly.

“Maybe you should have left some for the Chinese,” I suggested.

“Oh, I left ’em enough to breed,” he assured me. Suddenly he frowned. “Unless both of ’em was females.” He took a swig from his canteen, and then offered it to me. “How about yourself, Lucifer?” he continued as I took a long drink of water. “What are you doing out here in the middle of China?”

“Mostly looking for a way out,” I admitted.

“Well, I'm headed for Tibet,” he said. “Why don't you come along with me? I could use a little companionship; none of my bearers speak any American.”

“What's so special about Tibet?” I asked.

“That's where we'll find the Abominable Snowman,” he replied.

“Sounds ugly,” I said. “Or at least sadly lacking in manners.”

“He's worth a pretty penny back in the States,” confided Calhoun. “Fifty grand stuffed and mounted, and at least twice that much if he's still mildly alive and twitching.” He paused for a minute. “Tell you what: you come along with me, and I'll not only give you three squares a day, but I'll split the take with you if you find him first.”

Which suddenly make Tibet start looking a whole lot more interesting.

“Clyde,” I said, “you got yourself a deal. What's for lunch?”

He had a couple of his people set up a table and his chef whipped us up some panda sandwiches, and we washed ’em down with a few beers and got to reminiscing about old times, and before we knew it was getting dark, so we wound up spending the night right there. We were up bright and early the next morning, and we made pretty good time, especially considering that Clyde had this habit of stopping every couple of minutes to shoot birds or squirrels or anything else that this regrettable tendency to breathe in and out. I kept expecting to run into some warlord or other, but Clyde kept shooting so much that all the local warlords must have figured the Imperial Army was on the march and hightailed it out of our path, because we didn't see nary a one during the whole trek.

After a couple of months it started getting right chilly at night, and pretty soon the days weren't much warmer, and finally we had to stop long enough to make us a pair of fur coats out of panda skins. When we finally hit the Kunlun Mountains, Clyde paid off about eighty of his bearers and skinners and sent ’em packing, and just kept a cook and a couple of trackers with us.

Now, it's entirely possible that there's a piece of level ground somewhere in Tibet, but if there is, I never did see it. We started following footpaths up the mountains, hunting for a pass to the other side, where Clyde was sure he could get a line on the Abominable Snowman in a little town called Saka, but once we found the pass all it did was lead us out of the Kunlun Mountains into the Tangkula Mountains, which were even higher and colder, and before long we were sitting in a cave at about ten thousand feet in the middle of a howling blizzard, warming our hands next to a fire he'd built and trying real hard not to listen to our teeth chattering.

The weather had cleared by morning, and as we wandered out of the cave we came upon some tracks in the snow.

“Looks like we had some polar bears hanging around last night,” I said.

“Ain't no polar bears in Tibet,” answered Clyde, squatting down and examining them. “These here tracks was made by something what walks upright, and stands maybe eight feet tall.” He looked up at me with a great big smile. “I don't think we're gonna have to go to Saka after all. I think maybe we just lucked out and are sharing this mountain with the Abominable Snowman.”

“Yeah?”

He nodded vigorously. “Let's split up forces and go out searching for him. I'll follow his tracks, and you go the other direction just in case he circled around, and we'll meet back at the cave at nightfall.”

He started walking off.

“Ain't you gonna take your gunbearer or your tracker with you?” I asked.

“Too dangerous,” he shouted back. “Best to leave this kind of work to experienced hunters.”

“I don't want to cast no pall of gloom on the proceedings, Clyde, but I ain't an experienced hunter, or even an inexperienced one if push comes to shove.”

“Then wait in the cave with the others. I'll be back in a few hours.”

Which made excellent sense, and which is what I did.

Clyde piled in at twilight, with little icicles hanging down from his moustache, and immediately sat down by the fire.

“How'd it go?” I asked, since I didn't see no snowman, abominable or otherwise, in tow.

“The tracks vanished about a mile from here,” he said, holding his hands out to warm them. “I spent most of the afternoon hunting for his lair, but I couldn't find it.” He paused thoughtfully. “I think tomorrow I'll lay some traps for him.”

“Tell me more about this here Snowman,” I said.

“Ain't that much to tell,” answered Clyde. “The locals call him the Yeti, and near as I can figure out he spends most of his time hanging around the mountain doing abominable things.”

“Anybody ever seen him?”

“Probably,” said Clyde, “but I get the distinct impression that them what's actually encountered him have passed on to the next plane of existence with remarkable alacrity.”

“I wonder what he eats?” I mused, hoping that he hadn't developed a taste for Christian missionary somewhere along the way.

“Beats me,” said Clyde. “If it's anything but snow and rocks, he must be one hungry snowman.” Suddenly he looked up. “Say, you gave me an idea, Lucifer. I think I'll bait some of them traps with the last of the panda meat.”

I told him I thought it was a good plan, especially since I'd had my fill and then some of panda steaks, and then we turned in, and the next morning Clyde was out laying his traps as soon as the sun came up.

I asked Kim, our cook, to fix me up some coffee. He came back a couple of minutes later with a pot of tea.

“I said I wanted coffee,” I told him.

“Coffee all gone,” he said. “You drink tea.”

I didn't think no more of it, but when Clyde went out the next morning to bait more traps, I asked for tea, and this time what I got was a pitcher of hot water.

“Tea all gone too,” explained Kim.

“Just how much tea did Clyde drink last night?” I asked.

“Him no drink tea at night. Just whiskey.”

“Maybe he took it with him this morning,” I suggested.

“Twenty pounds of it?” replied Kim.

That did seem like a lot of tea, no matter how eleven o'clockish Clyde might feel, so I got to thinking, and it didn't take me long to figure out that someone was swiping our supplies. And since the bearer and the tracker hadn't gone out in two days and there wasn't no place inside the cave to stash it, I figured it had to be someone else.

And since there was only one other person who was crazy enough to be wandering around on the mountain in this weather, I decided that things were suddenly looking up for my bank account.

Clyde returned at sunset, and immediately started warming himself by the fire.

“How'd it go?” I asked.

“Oh, he's out there all right,” answered Clyde. “And he's a smart one, too.”

“How so?”

“He managed to pick up one of the panda steaks without getting snared. I'll have to camouflage my traps better.”

We talked for a while, settled down for a hard evening's drinking, and fell asleep just about the time the nightly blizzard started blowing.

The next morning I waited until Clyde had left, then told Kim to fix me up a dozen sandwiches. While he was busy making them, I got into my panda coat and picked up one of Clyde's auxiliary rifles. When Kim was done, I put the sandwiches into a backpack, and then, as an afterthought, I added twelve bottles of beer, and told him I was going out for a little exercise and to maybe hunt up a grocery store.

I saw Clyde's footprints heading off to the left, so I turned right and began following a narrow ridge that wound its way down the mountain. I stopped about every half mile, took a sandwich and a beer out of my backpack, and placed them on the snow. After about three miles the path I was on started branching every which way, but that didn't bother me none since all I had to do to get back was turn around and follow my footprints, so I just kept on wandering and setting down sandwiches and beer.

The snow was right deep, and the altitude wasn't exactly a boon to serious breathing, and by the time I'd emptied my backpack I figured it was getting on toward midafternoon, so I turned around and started heading back to the cave.

I'd gone about half a mile, and was just turning a corner around a big boulder, when I saw this huge shaggy figure, maybe eight feet high, standing about two hundred yards away with its back to me, eating a sandwich and washing it down with a beer. I figured the safest course was to fire a warning shot, just to kind of get its attention and let it know I was armed, so I pointed the rifle straight up at the sky and pulled the trigger.

I think I ought to break into my narrative at this point to make a suggestion born of bitter experience: if you ever find yourself on a narrow ledge of a snow-covered mountain in Tibet, firing a .550 Nitro Express into the air probably ain't the smartest course of action available to you.

When I woke up, I felt kind of constricted. I thought I heard the sounds of digging, but I couldn't move, or even turn my head, to see what was happening. Then, after a couple of minutes had passed, I felt two huge hands grab me by the shoulders and pull me up through the snow, and suddenly I was facing this great big guy who was wearing a shaggy coat made out of sheepskin.

“All right,” he said, holding me off the ground by my shoulders and shaking me. “Who are you?”

“The Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones.”

“You're from Guido Scarducci, right?” he said, finally putting me down.

“I ain't never heard of him,” I said, brushing myself off.

“Then why did you shoot at me?” he demanded.

“I thunk you was the Yeti.”

“What's a Yeti?” he asked.

“Well, as near as I can tell, a Yeti is you,” I said. “Except it sure sounds to me like you're speaking one hundred percent pure American.”

“Of course I am,” he said. “I was raised in Butte, Montana.”

“What's a fellow American doing on a mountain in Tibet?” I asked.

“It's a long and tragic story, Doctor Jones,” he said, sitting down on a big rock. “My name is Sam Hightower. By the time I was fifteen years old I was seven feet tall and still growing, so I figured that playing basketball was my calling in life, and as soon as I got out of high school I latched onto a semi-pro team called the Butte Buccaneers. About a week before we were scheduled to play the Great Falls Geldings for the championship, for which we were a real big favorite, a gambler called Guido Scarducci came up and offered me five thousand dollars to make sure we didn't win by more than ten points.”

“No sense embarrassing the other team,” I said sympathetically.

“Those were my feelings precisely,” said Hightower. “The problem is that the next night, another gambler named Vinnie Bastino offered me twenty thousand to make sure we won by fifteen points or more.”

“I can see where that might present a serious moral and economic dilemma,” I said.

“Well, I was young and innocent and didn't view it as such,” said Hightower. “I just figured I'd pay Mr. Scarducci his five thousand back out of my earnings and we'd be all square and there'd be no hard feelings and we might even have a laugh about it over a drink or two.”

“I take it he didn't quite see it that way?” I said.

“I realized he and I had a little communications problem when he blew up my car and set fire to my apartment that night,” said Hightower. “And when he missed me and shot six of my teammates during the victory parade the next day, I figured it was probably time to take my leave of the fair city of my birth, so I hopped the first train heading east, and wound up in New York.” He paused. “Problem is, he found me there, too. And in London. And in Rome. I finally decided that it's not all that easy to disappear in a crowd when you're eight foot two inches tall, so after he found me again in Athens, I made up my mind to go where there weren't any crowds at all, and I've been living on this damned mountain for six years now, waiting for Guido Scarducci to hunt me down.”

“You hang around here much longer and you're gonna get yourself hunted by a lot more people than Guido Scarducci,” I told him.

“Why?” he asked. “Surely borrowing a little coffee and tea isn't a capital offense even in Tibet.”

“This ain't got nothing to do with coffee or tea,” I said. “You ever hear of the Abominable Snowman?”

“I heard legends when I was growing up, just like I heard about Bigfoot and Paul Bunyon.”

“Well, most folks in these parts think you're him.”

“Why on earth should they think that?” he asked, kind of bewildered.

“Well, the notion of an eight-foot basketball player hiding out from gamblers on top of a mountain in Tibet probably ain't had time to take root yet,” I explained.

“Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “Now that I come to consider it, I can see your point. I assume that's why you were shooting at me?”

I nodded. “After all, you did go for my bait.”

“You know how hard it is to find food up here?” he replied. He rubbed his jaw. “And I damned near broke a tooth on that frozen meat you put out yesterday.”

“I didn't put it out,” I said. “Which reminds me—we'd better get back to my cave so I can tell Capturing Clyde not to shoot you.”

“Capturing Clyde Calhoun?” he said excitedly.

“You've heard of him?”

“I've seen all his movies and read all his books,” said Hightower. “He's one of my boyhood heroes.”

“I'm sure he'll be mighty glad to hear it,” I said.

“But surely I'm not in any danger from him,” continued Hightower. “I mean, doesn't Capturing Clyde always bring ’em back alive?”

“Well, now, that's subject to various delicate shades of interpretation,” I said. “But I think it's fair to say that them what he brings back without eating or skinning first is generally alive. Still,” I added, “if I was you, I'd introduce myself to him right quick, and preferably when he wasn't carrying his gun.”

He stood up and looked up the mountain.

“I'm afraid that won't be possible, Doctor Jones,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because when you fired your rifle you started an avalanche that seems to have brought down half the mountain. We could be days or even weeks getting back to your cave.”

“What are we going to do in the meantime?” I asked.

“I've got shelters hidden all over the mountain,” answered Hightower. “We'll find one that hasn't been covered by the avalanche and use it for a headquarters while we try to clear the trail to your cave.”

Well, I couldn't think of no better alternative, and so I followed him to one of his shelters, where he had a fire going and an old hand-cranked Victrola and lots of Rudy Vallee records, which weren't really to my taste but were a lot better than just sitting there listening to the wind whistle by.

He was real interested in finding out what events of Earth-shaking import had transpired since he'd left the States in rather a hurry, so I told him about how the Red Sox had traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees, and how Clara Bow had encouraged the Southern California football team to win the Rose Bowl, and that one of our Presidents had died but I couldn't remember which one. He was especially glad to hear that Morvich had won the 1922 Kentucky Derby.

“I put all my money on him just before I took off,” he explained.

“Well, you ought to have a tidy nest egg waiting for you when you finally go home,” I said.

“I doubt it,” he replied with a sigh. “My bookie was Guido Scarducci.”

“Maybe there's some subtle little nuance I'm missing here,” I said, “but ain't Guido Scarducci the fellow that's out to kill you?”

“Yes.”

“Then why on earth did you bet your money at his particular establishment?”

Hightower shrugged. “He was the only bookie in Montana.”

I suddenly found myself silently agreeing that Tibet was probably just the place for him to hang out while his survival skills were catching up with the rest of his growth, but I kept these sentiments to myself since I make it a practice never to offend anyone over eight feet tall unless it ain't avoidable.

The nightly blizzard came and went, and we were out at sunrise the next morning, digging a path up to Clyde's cave. It wasn't all that hard to dig through the snow, but every half hour or so we'd come to a boulder that we couldn't climb over or walk around, and as you might imagine it kind of slowed our progress. Hightower was afraid Clyde might be trapped in his cave, but I figured that Clyde was used to taking care of himself in strange lands and ticklish situations, and in truth the one thing that kept me going through all them days of digging and shoving boulders down the mountainside was the thought of all that jade sitting there in my picnic basket.

After a week we ran out of food and had to change shelters, and after two more weeks all the shelters were plumb out of food, and we figured if we didn't reach Clyde in another day or two we were going to have to climb down the mountain and borrow a little food from some of the locals. Hightower assured me that it wouldn't be no problem, since whenever they saw him they started screaming and running the other way, which up to now had made him think he should maybe have packed some deodorant when he left Athens, but which he finally realized was just their reaction to him being the Abominable Snowman.

Anyway, we finally cleared the way to Clyde's cave on the twenty-second day, and much to our surprise we found that it was deserted, except for a note and some kind of printed ticket that he'd stuck onto the wall right near the entrance, and which I picked up and read as follows:

Dear Lucifer:
I went out looking for you after I heard the shot, but I soon saw that you were probably buried under half the mountain. If that is true and you are dead, then read no further, but if you are alive and manage to make your way back here, I should tell you that after waiting a week for you to show up I have figgered that you and the Yeti are both dead, and have therefore decided to make tracks for Australia, where I got me a commission to hunt down a few hundred koala bears. At least they figure to make better eating than panda meat. (Ho ho.)
It seems a shame to leave all your jade doodads to rot here in the cave, so I am taking them with me back to civilization and will buy a drink to your sainted memory with some of the profits when I sell them. And just in case you ain't dead, I want you to know that I am a honorable man what would never rob a friend, and I am leaving you a lifetime pass to Capturing Clyde's Circus and Wild Animal Show in exchange for taking the trinkets with me.
Your Pal (or Rest in Peace,
whichever is applicable),
Clyde Calhoun

I crumpled up both the letter and the lifetime pass and threw them to the floor of the cave.

“The son of a bitch ran off with my jade!” I said.

“You can't eat jade,” said Hightower unhappily. “He might at least have left us some food.”

“Well, we got no money and we got no food,” I said. “I reckon it's time we took our leave of this here mountain.”

“Where will we go?” asked Hightower. “I'm still a wanted man, you know.”

“Well, there's no sense going back north into China,” I said. “They'd probably just ask a bunch of bothersome questions about General Chang's knick-knacks. I figure our best bet is to head south.”

“If we go south we'll run into the Himalayas,” said Hightower.

“Religious sects don't bother me none,” I replied confidently. “I'll convert ’em in no time flat.”

I walked out of the cave and started heading south, having wasted the better part of three months and a modest fortune in jade while wandering around the countryside with Clyde, and I promised my Silent Partner that the next time I took charge of a wall or an army or anything big like that, I was setting up shop and finally building my Tabernacle.

But as you will soon see, it wasn't quite as easy as it sounds.