“Out of a pretty mucky hole in the ground, as you’d imagine,” he grinned, looking down at his earth-stained corduroys and boots. “But tell me: how under the canopy did you get here?”
“‘Canopy,’” she smiled; “that is New England, isn’t it? We came on the train. Harry brought us—Mysie and me—just for a little outing. We left Leadville this morning. But I hadn’t the slightest idea that we’d find you up here.”
“Just one of Harry’s little jokes, I suppose. I think he meant it to be a surprise, all around. I wrote him last week and told him where we were—Big Jim Garth and I—and how we could be reached, now that the snows have melted. I thought perhaps he might care to run up and have a look at Jim’s prospect. It isn’t a bonanza, but Jim can probably sell it for enough, with the development work we’ve done, to take care of him in his old age.”
“You have been working with him all winter?”
“Yes. We were snowed in most of the time, but that didn’t matter. We had plenty to eat. But this morning we found that the tobacco was all gone, and at that, of course, everything had to stop dead until one of us could go down to the railroad and get some. No tobacco, no work.”
She sat down again on the rock ledge and made room for him beside her.
“As I say, I hadn’t the remotest idea we were going to find you up here. Harry never gave us the least little hint—which was just like him. What a perfectly glorious view there is from here!”
Her enthusiastic exclamation was well warranted. The atmosphere was crystal clear, and across a mountain-studded interval of nearly two hundred miles of sheer distance earth and sky met on the remote horizon formed by the serrated summits of a blue range in eastern Utah. Philip pointed out and named some of the eye-filling grandeurs: White Mountain, Shingle Peak, the rampart buttressings of the White River Plateau, and beyond these the Book or Roan Mountains, too distant to show the striated colorings of their majestic cliffs, and in the southwest, the far-away bulwark of the Uncompahgres.
“I can never look at it without being made to feel my own, and all human, littleness,” he said. “And, after all, tremendous as it is, this is only a dot, a vanishing point, in a universe too vast to be even faintly comprehended by our little insect minds.”
She stole a glance aside at him. Lean, wind-tanned, athletic, with work-hardened hands and knotted muscles, there was little to remind her of the neatly groomed, reserved young railroad clerk who had sat beside her in the Kansas Pacific day-coach two years earlier; the “damn Yankee” she had told him she had been taught to call him and his kind. Even his speech was different now.