CHAPTER XIX
A GLIMPSE OF THE WEST THAT WAS
We might have been taking an unconscious part in some vast moving picture production, or, more easily still, if we overlooked the fact of our own motor car, we could have supposed ourselves crossing the plains in the days of the caravans and stage coaches, when roads were trails, and bridges were not!
To Pueblo by way of Canyon City and over the Royal Gorge loop, you go through great defiles between gigantic mountains, then out on a shelf road overlooking now vistas of mountains, now endless plains, now hanging over chasms two or three thousand feet deep, now dipping down, down to the brink of the river tearing along the base of the canyon walls. All of the mountain roads of Colorado are splendidly built—even though some of their railless edges are terrifying to anyone light of head, and by no means to be recommended to an inexpert driver. One famously beautiful drive has a turntable built at an otherwise impossibly sharp bend.
After Pueblo—which by the way is not in the least quaint or Indian as its name promised, but a smoky and smeltering industrious little Pittsburgh—you come out upon the plains, plains that look as you imagined them, on which cattle and cowboys ranged and prairie schooners came slowly over the horizon. A few miles beyond Pueblo, exactly like a scene in the moving pictures, we passed three of the white-topped wagons, their hoods rocking and gleaming in the sun and little burros with saddles on them trotting on either side. A man walked at the head of the caravan and two others walked behind. One wagon was driven by a woman, while a man slept, and two children peered out at us from within. A young man drove the second wagon; by his side was a young woman holding a baby. All that was needed to make a frontier drama was a band of befeathered Indians on the warpath.
A little way farther we saw a cowboy galloping over the plains swinging a lariat. He laughed when we came up to him, as though he had been caught doing something foolish. In the next few miles we passed another caravan and through a herd of cattle driven by three cowboys, but not a sign of our friend, the Englishman, with whom we had planned to lunch. He, having taken the direct road, which was about sixty miles or so shorter than ours, had agreed to select an attractive spot and wait for us. We had about decided that he had either been lost or overlooked, when we saw a team coming toward us and behind it, being towed, his nice, new, little car. He had come to a ford through a wide, swift river which he so mistrusted from the start that he made his valet wade across it first. But as the water came up only to the man’s knees, and the bottom was reported to be firm and pebbly, the Honorable Geoffrey plunged in—and, bang! she blew up! The water flooding his carburetor sucked into the hot cylinders and was changed so violently into steam that it blew off the cylinder heads!
Halfway Across a Thrilling Ford, Wide and Deep, on the Huerfano River
Mixed with our very real sympathy with the Englishman was not a little doubt as to whether we had better risk a like fate. The driver of the team, seeing our doubt, explained: “The river’s a mite high just now, but when you come to the bank, just go in slow and steady, and if the water comes up too high, stop your engine quick, and fire a revolver! See! I’ll hear you and send someone to pull you through!”
The thought of luncheon had vanished. We parted with our unfortunate friend and approached with not a little trepidation the rushing waters that had wrecked him. The river looked formidable enough; wide, swift, bubbling, and opaque—like coffee with cream, exactly. We remembered that it had a gravel bottom and that its greatest depth was very little over the drenched valet’s knees.