Tales of Lonely Trails | Page 8

of a deserted village. Teague,
the guide, lived there. He assured me it was not quite as lively a place
as in the early days when it was a stage center for an old and rich
mining section. We stayed there at the one hotel for a whole day, most
of which I spent sitting on the board walk. Whenever I chanced to look
down the wide street it seemed always the same--deserted. But Yampa
had the charm of being old and forgotten, and for that reason I would
like to live there a while.
[Illustration: THE GRASSY UPLANDS, WITH WHITELEY'S PEAK
IN THE DISTANCE]
On August twenty-third we started in two buckboards for the foothills,
some fifteen miles westward, where Teague's men were to meet us with
saddle and pack horses. The ride was not interesting until the Flattop
Mountains began to loom, and we saw the dark green slopes of spruce,
rising to bare gray cliffs and domes, spotted with white banks of snow.
I felt the first cool breath of mountain air, exhilarating and sweet. From
that moment I began to live.
We had left at six-thirty. Teague, my guide, had been so rushed with
his manifold tasks that I had scarcely seen him, let alone gotten
acquainted with him. And on this ride he was far behind with our load
of baggage. We arrived at the edge of the foothills about noon. It
appeared to be the gateway of a valley, with aspen groves and ragged
jack-pines on the slopes, and a stream running down. Our driver called
it the Stillwater. That struck me as strange, for the stream was in a great
hurry. R.C. spied trout in it, and schools of darkish, mullet-like fish

which we were informed were grayling. We wished for our tackle then
and for time to fish.
Teague's man, a young fellow called Virgil, met us here. He did not
resemble the ancient Virgil in the least, but he did look as if he had
walked right out of one of my romances of wild riders. So I took a
liking to him at once.
But the bunch of horses he had corralled there did not excite any
delight in me. Horses, of course, were the most important part of our
outfit. And that moment of first seeing the horses that were to carry us
on such long rides was an anxious and thrilling one. I have felt it many
times, and it never grows any weaker from experience. Many a scrubby
lot of horses had turned out well upon acquaintance, and some I had
found hard to part with at the end of trips. Up to that time, however, I
had not seen a bear hunter's horses; and I was much concerned by the
fact that these were a sorry looking outfit, dusty, ragged, maneless, cut
and bruised and crippled. Still, I reflected, they were bunched up so
closely that I could not tell much about them, and I decided to wait for
Teague before I chose a horse for any one.
In an hour Teague trotted up to our resting place. Beside his own mount
he had two white saddle horses, and nine pack-animals, heavily laden.
Teague was a sturdy rugged man with bronzed face and keen gray-blue
eyes, very genial and humorous. Straightway I got the impression that
he liked work.
"Let's organize," he said, briskly. "Have you picked the horses you're
goin' to ride?"
Teague led from the midst of that dusty kicking bunch a rangy
powerful horse, with four white feet, a white face and a noble head. He
had escaped my eye. I felt thrillingly that here at least was one horse.
The rest of the horses were permanently crippled or temporarily lame,
and I had no choice, except to take the one it would be kindest to ride.
"He ain't much like your Silvermane or Black Star," said Teague,

laughing.
"What do you know about them?" I asked, very much pleased at this
from him.
"Well, I know all about them," he replied. "I'll have you the best horse
in this country in a few days. Fact is I've bought him, an' he'll come
with my cowboy, Vern.... Now, we're organized. Let's move."
[Illustration: A SPRUCE-SHADED, FLOWER-SKIRTED LAKE]
[Illustration: LOOKING DOWN UPON CLOUD-FILLED VALLEYS]
[Illustration: SEARCHING BURNED-OVER RANGES FOR GAME]
We rode through a meadow along a spruce slope above which towered
the great mountain. It was a zigzag trail, rough, boggy, and steep in
places. The Stillwater meandered here, and little breaks on the water
gave evidence of feeding trout. We had several miles of meadow, and
then sheered off to the left up into the timber. It was a spruce forest,
very still and fragrant. We climbed out up on a bench, and across