Garvin rose and stretched himself stiffly.
"You're a cool one," he commented. "What if it'd been tails?"
Jeffard got up and kicked the brick into the pond. "In that case I should have been obliged to ask you to lend me your pistol. Let's go back to town and get something to eat with that dollar. I haven't had anything since last night."
CHAPTER XI
After toiling all night through black gorges and over unspeakable mountain passes, the narrow-gauge train from Denver, headed by two pygmy locomotives, came out into daylight, sunshine, and wider horizons at Alta Vista. In the sleeping-car three sections had been transformed by the drowsy porter into daytime smugness, and three persons—two of them in deference to the enthusiasm of the third—were up and dressed.
"Isn't it all perfectly indescribable?" Myra was saying, when the engineer of one of the pygmies sounded the whistle for the station. "Do you know, I couldn't go to sleep for hours last night, late as it was. I put up the window curtain and piled the pillows in the corner so I could look out. The sky was like a great inverted bowl lined with black velvet and spangled with diamonds, circling around us as we darted around the curves. And in the open places there was always a solemn procession of cliffs and peaks, marching with us sometimes, and then turning to slip past again when the bowl whirled the other way. Oh, but it was grand!"
"I'm glad it lays hold of you," said Connie, who was loyally jealous for the scenic renown of her native Colorado. "Now you know why I wouldn't let you go on any of those breathless little one-day excursions from Denver. They just take you up in a balloon, give you a glimpse while you gasp, and drop you without a parachute. The tourist people all make them, you know,—it's in the itinerary, with a coupon in the cute little morocco-bound book of tickets,—and they come back wild-eyed and desperate, and go without their suppers to scribble incoherent notes about the 'Cache la Platte' and 'Clear Poudre Canyon,' and other ridiculous things. It would be funny if it wasn't so exasperating."
Myra nodded. "I'm beginning to 'savez,' as Mr. Bartrow would say. By the way, isn't this the place where he was to meet us?—Why, yes; there he is now!" She waved her hand and struggled with the window-latch as the train drew up to the platform.