The conductor opened a narrow door in the big, smoky snow-shed, and they stepped out into the crisp, sunny air.
“Oh! how perfectly beautiful,” exclaimed the enthusiastic girl, gazing over the top of aspen groves, where the trees were hung with millions of jewels that sparkled and quivered in the morning sun.
When the train had begun to wind away down the mountain side the conductor brought a camp stool, and the young lady sat upon the rear platform of the rearmost car and watched the mountains spring up in their wake. Once, when they were rounding a long curve, the conductor asked her to look over the low range, Poncho Pass, that walls the San Luis away from the Arkansas Valley, and there she saw an even hundred miles of the snowy Sangre de Cristo, lifting her white crest far up into the burnished blue.
Presently, when they had dropped into the cañon, and there were no more mountains to be seen, Miss Landon asked the conductor to send her the words of the song his friends had sung to them over beyond the Rockies.
“I’ll write you the chorus now, on a leaf from my train-book.”
“Oh, do you remember it?”
“I ought to; I have heard it all my life.”
“Then it was not made for us—for you, I mean?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then how did it happen to have our—your name?”