There is nothing to be seen but great knolls of grass and sage brush, sometimes showing their rocky anatomy; and this nakedness is a relief after the strain upon our attention in the cañon. Finally we get high enough to look far away to a horizon full of hazy mesas and peaked mountains, with a touch of valley land down in the center of the picture. A cool breeze blows, and comes with refreshing.
The valley we see is our first view of the Uncompahgre; and in the middle of the afternoon we reach the town of Montrose,—a settlement of wooden houses.
Here we stopped. There were two reason: first, this was the point of departure for the upper valley of the Uncompahgre, and the mining region on the northern front of the San Juan mountains; second, we wanted to know the arguments that had induced some hundreds of people to make their homes in the midst of this white sahara.
The first of these objects required instant attention, for between our arrival at Montrose and the departure of the stage up the valley to the Uncompahgre Cantonment, and the town of Ouray, there was time only to get a hearty luncheon. Chum had said from the start that he was quite willing to concede all the attractions of Ouray, and declined positively to leave the comfort of home. I told him he was missing a good deal, but he said that he had lost all faith in good deals—didn’t “gamble any more on that chance,”—and persisted in his “No, thank you.”
BUTTES OF THE CROSS.
The Madame felt both inclined and disinclined. She knew the horrors of staging, she said it was a fit punishment for malefactors, and she dreaded even forty miles of it, on a level road, worse than a fit of sickness. Then she looked unutterable sympathy at me, and began to reflect that possibly her duty as a wife required her to go (seeing that I couldn’t escape it,) in order to share the discomforts her husband was obliged to undergo, and do what she could to alleviate his tortures.
Just at this juncture, for doubt had swayed her usually well-decided mind up to the last minute, she caught a glimpse of the big red coach coming from the hotel toward us. Its noise was as the thundering of “the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof.” It swung from side to side like a fire steamer tearing over Baltimore cobble stones. It lunged into irrigating ditches and came pitching up out of them, while the hind boot dived in to be brought up with a frame-cracking jolt, and it rocked fore and aft like a Dutch lugger in a chop sea. Its great concavity was packed full of unfortunate Jonahs, swallowed “bag and breeches.” Its capacious baggage receptacles before and behind were distended with trunks and valises, rolls of blankets, packages of newspapers, boxes of fruit and dozens of mail-sacks. Its roof was piled with a confused mass of luggage and sweltering humanity. There wasn’t a lady to be seen. Chum looked at me as I buttoned my duster, and lifting a corner of the Madame’s apron to his eye, choked back a sympathetic sob.
“Come on!” I called to the person who was anxious to alleviate my tortures, but she held back.