"I've heard of people who could read your thoughts better than you could think them," she said; and Connie was too sleepy to strike back.
CHAPTER XII
For a week after the arrival of his visitors, Bartrow had scant time and less inclination for troublement about such purely mundane affairs as the driving of tunnels and the incidental acquisition of wealth thereby. There were burro journeys to the top of the pass, and to the sheer cliff known to the prosaic frontiersmen as the devil's jumping-off-place; excursions afoot down the mountain to the cool depths of Chipeta Canyon, and to Silver Lake beyond the shrugged shoulder of Lost Creek Mountain; and finally there was a breath-cutting climb to the snow-patched summit of El Reposo, undertaken for the express purpose of enabling Myra Van Vetter to say that she had been where there was reason to presume that no human being had preceded her.
These things three of them did, leaving Stephen Elliott to his own devices, in accordance with the set terms upon which he had consented to father the parti carré. "Go on and climb your mountains and just leave me out," he would say, when the preparations were making for the day's jaunt. "I've had my share of it, off and on, while I was hunting for something I hadn't lost. Dick, here, hasn't any better sense than to humor you; but you'd tramp mighty little if I had to go along."
Whereupon he would plant his chair for the day upon the slab-floored porch of the cabin, tilt it to a comfortable angle against the wall, and while away the hours smoking a mellow pipe and reading the day-old Denver paper painstakingly, from the top of the title page to the bottom of the last want column.
Thus the crystalline autumn days winged their flight, and Bartrow squired the two young women hither and yon, and finally to the top of El Reposo, as recorded. This excursion was the climax, from a scenic point of view; and Myra, having long since exhausted her vocabulary of superlatives, was unusually silent.
"What's come over you? are you gorged with mountains?" queried Connie sympathetically, slipping her arm around her cousin's waist.