Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska | Page 9

against me, I saw a figure like a ghost, but a very buxom and wholesome ghost indeed.
I asked for the hostess. Alas! she was far away and had been ill; it was not known when she would return. Her address was offered me, and I thought to write her,--thought to tell her how I had sought out her home, hoping to find her after years of patient waiting; and that while I talked of her through the wire-cloth screen the kitten, which she must have petted once upon a time, climbed up the screen until it had reached the face of the amiable woman within, and then purred and purred as only a real kitten can. I never wrote that letter; for while we were chatting on the porch she of whom we chatted, she who has written a whole armful of the most womanly and lovable of books, Helen Hunt Jackson, lay dying in San Francisco and we knew it not. But it is something to have stood by her threshold, though she was never again to cross it in the flesh, and to have been greeted by her kitten. How she loved kittens! And now I can associate her memory with the peacefulest of cottages, the easiest of veranda chairs, a bay-window full of books and sunshine, and a strawberry bed alive with berries and blossoms and butterflies and bees. And yonder on the heights her body was anon laid to rest among the haunts she loved so dearly.
CHAPTER IV.
A Whirl across the Rockies.
A long time ago--nearly a quarter of a century--California could boast a literary weekly capable of holding its own with any in the land. This was before San Francisco had begun to lose her unique and delightful individuality--now gone forever. Among the contributors to this once famous weekly were Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Prentice Mulford, Joaquin Miller, Dan de Quille, Orpheus C. Kerr, C. H. Webb, "John Paul," Ada Clare, Ada Isaacs Menken, Ina Coolbrith, and hosts of others. Fitz Hugh Ludlow wrote for it a series of brilliant descriptive letters recounting his adventures during a recent overland journey; they were afterward incorporated in a volume--long out of print--entitled "The Heart of the Continent."
In one of these letters Ludlow wrote as follows of the probable future of Manitou: "When Colorado becomes a populous State, the springs of the Fontaine-qui-Bouille will constitute its Spa. In air and scenery no more glorious summer residence could be imagined. The Coloradian of the future, astonishing the echoes of the rocky foothills by a railroad from Denver to the springs, and running down on Saturday to stop over Sunday with his family, will have little cause to envy us Easterners our Saratoga as he paces up and down the piazza of the Spa hotel, mingling his full-flavored Havana with that lovely air, unbreathed before, which is floating down upon him from the snow peaks of the range." His prophecy has become true in every particular. But what would he have thought had he threaded the tortuous path now marked by glistening railway tracks? What would he have said of the Grand Ca?on of the Arkansas, the Black Ca?on of the Gunnison, Castle Ca?on and Marshall Pass over the crest of the continent?
I suppose a narrow-gauge road can go anywhere. It trails along the slope of shelving hills like a wild vine; it slides through gopher-hole tunnels as a thread slides through the eye of a needle; it utilizes water-courses; it turns ridiculously sharp corners in a style calculated to remind one of the days when he played "snap-the-whip" and happened to be the snapper himself. This is especially the case if one is sitting on the rear platform of the last car. We shot a ca?on by daylight, and marvelled at the glazed surface of the red rock with never so much as a scratch over it. On the one hand we nearly scraped the abrupt perpendicular wall that towered hundreds of feet above us; on the other, a swift, muddy torrent sprang at our stone-bedded sleepers as if to snatch them away; while it flooded the ca?on to the opposite wall, that did not seem more that a few yards distant. The stream was swollen, and went howling down the ravine full of sound and fury--which in this case, however, signified a good deal.
Once we stopped and took an observation, for the track was under water; then we waded cautiously to the mainland, across the sunken section, and thanked our stars that we were not boycotted by the elements at that inhospitable point. Once we paused for a few minutes to contemplate the total wreck of a palace car that had recently struck a projecting bowlder--and spattered.
The camps along the track are just such as may be looked for