At first everybody was a little nervous with the accumulating velocity of the car, and the yawning abyss below us; but later we got more accustomed to it, and the solemn grandeur of the green pine-covered canons, the lofty snow-covered peaks, apparently so near us; and the rushing, foaming torrent far below us, were all we saw. Like lightning we rounded the sharp curves where the road seemed to hang over instant destruction, and we held our breath as we thought that, like Dutch Charlie and other great men, only a piece of two-by-four scantling stood between us and death.
Again and again the abrupt curve loomed up ahead, and below us, while we flew along the narrow gauge at such a pace that we were almost sure the car would, leave the track before it would round such a point, and each time the two-by-four went down on the drive wheel with a pressure that sent up volumes of blue smoke.
It was a wild, grand ride—so wild and grand in fact that even yet we wake up at night with a start from a dream in which the same party is riding down that canon at lightning speed, and Mr. Wilbur, in a thoughtless moment, has dropped his pine brake overboard!
Shades of Sam Patch, but wouldn't it scatter the average excurter over southern Colorado if such a thing should happen some day! Why, the woods would be full of them, and for years to come, the prospector along Chalk Creek Canon would find pyrites of editorial poverty, and indications of collar buttons, and fragments of Archimedean levers, and other mementoes of the great editorial hegira of 1882.
CORRALED HIM.
LAST May Sheriff Boswell received a postal card from a man up near Fort McKinney, describing a pair of horses that had just been stolen and asking that Mr. Boswell would keep his eye peeled for the thief and arrest him on sight.
Last week the sheriff discovered the identical team with color, brands and everything to correspond. He told the driver that he would have to turn over that team and come along to the bastile. The man stoutly protested his innocence and claimed that he owned the team, but Boswell laughed him to scorn and said he often got such games of talk as that when he arrested horse thieves.
Just as they were going down into the damp corridors, Judge Blair met the criminal, recognized him at once and called him by name. It seems that he was the man who had originally written Boswell, and having found his horses he had neglected to inform him. Thus, when he came to town four months afterward, he got snatched. You not only have to call the officer's attention to a larceny in this country, but it is absolutely necessary that you call off the sleuth hound of eternal justice when you have found the property, or you will be gathered in unless you can identify yourself. Boswell's initials are N. K., and now the boys call him Nemesis K. Boswell.