In the small circle of Chicago’s smart set this wifely attitude of “speak to him not; he is mine” is certainly not apparent. A very opposite attitude, however, is very noticeable in Colorado Springs where a perfectly adoring wife said to Celia, who is one of the most attractive women imaginable: “For Heaven’s sake, do take Fred out on the veranda and talk to him; he has been here two years without seeing a new face, and scarcely anyone to talk to about home but me!”
Just how the pioneers and cowboys affect the place is hard to define, and yet they undoubtedly do. Colorado people love the very name “cowboy” with an almost personal sentiment, just as, in their love for them, they seem personally to appropriate the “mountains,” and from both, in spite of the luxury which many have brought from Europe or the Atlantic coast, and in contrast to their mere recklessness, they have acquired directness of outlook, fearless, open-air customs of living, and an unhampered freedom from unimportant trifles. The spirit of going through with what you undertake and not being stopped by a little mud that we first met with in Rochelle is here much intensified. In Illinois they prided themselves on surmounting obstacles; out here they are so imbued with the attitude of the men who live out on the plains and through the mountains—the pioneers whose adventures the most frivolous social leader knows by heart—that they don’t even recognize an obstacle when they see it.
Notwithstanding the luxury of his own house, L. goes off into the wilderness generally with one guide but sometimes entirely alone, sleeps on the ground, eats what he can kill and reverts to the primitive. And you can sit in a room the interior of which might be in the Palace of Versailles and hear your hostess in a two-hundred-dollar simplicity of chiffon and lace repeat to you by the hour stories beginning: “Bill Simpson, who was punching cattle on the staked plains——” or “The Apaches were on the warpath and Kit Carson——” Possibly even she may tell you of a hold-up adventure of her own when as a child she was traveling in the Denver stage.
One amusing anecdote told us one afternoon at tea was of a celebrated plainsman who, carrying a large amount of money and realizing that he was about to be held up, quickly stuffed his roll of money down his trouser leg, but craftily left two dollars in his waistcoat pocket. The outlaws finding him so ill supplied with “grub money” made him a present of a dollar to show him that he had met with real gentlemen.
Perhaps from habit, just as when someone says, “How are you?” you say, “Very well, thank you,” though you may be feeling wretchedly, whenever anyone mentions the topic of motoring, I find myself saying:
“Can you tell me anything about the roads between here and ——?” Why I keep on asking about the roads I really don’t know! Hearing that they are good or bad is not going to help or hinder. I think I must do it for the sake of being sociable and making conversation. So, sitting next to one of the prominent members of the Automobile Club, yesterday, I found myself quite parrotlike asking for details of the road to Albuquerque.
“With good brakes, and an experienced chauffeur who won’t get flustered or light-headed, you oughtn’t to have much trouble. You will find teams nearly always available to pull you through dangerous fords,” he said casually.
Having ourselves withstood the mud of Iowa without injury and survived the perils of the Platte River Valley without meeting any, we find ourselves as commonplace as anyone who had crossed Long Island would be to New Yorkers. These people out here talk about being hauled through quicksand streams, or of clinging along shelf roads at the edge of a thousand-foot drop as though it were pleasant afternoon driving. I don’t like the sound of the word “shelf”—why not by calling them mountain-view roads let us keep our tranquillity at least until we get to them? And beyond the precipices is the desert, where there is no place to stop over and Heaven alone knows what fate awaiting us should anything happen to the car.
