Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska | Page 9

There was a mosquito door in the porch,
and there I knocked for admittance. I knocked for a long time, but
received no answer. I knocked again so that I might be heard even in
the strawberry bed. A little kitten came up out of the garden and said
something kittenish to me, and then I heard a muffled step within. The
door opened--the inner door,--and beyond the wire-cloth screen, that
remained closed 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 Cañon of the
Arkansas, the Black Cañon of the Gunnison, Castle Cañon 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 cañon 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 cañon 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