“Very well, Hal, we’ll listen to you first,” announced the doctor, and all became attentive with a readiness that indicated almost military training.
CHAPTER II
SOMETHING ABOUT DR. BYRD
It was well known how Mummy Cañon obtained its name. High up on the face of a bluff was a large rock, almost human in shape, in wrappings like a mummy. Mummy Cañon had not yet attracted the attention of sight-seers. No railroad ran near it, and only a rattling stage-coach line carried visitors between the nearest depot and the small settlement of Jamestown, or “Jimtown,” as it was popularly called, near which Dr. Byrd had located his boys’ school.
Dr. Byrd had served many years as a physician on English ships visiting the Orient, and, by both inheritance and good fortune, had become wealthy. When about fifty years old he found that the heat and dampness of the tropical climate were undermining his health and that he must heed the warnings of nature. So he returned home, but in London found that his throat still troubled him, and he decided that he most move elsewhere.
His children being grown and married, he and his wife sold part of their personal effects and came to America. Then they traveled about a good deal, trying to find a climate that would promote better health for the doctor, but every place they visited proved unsatisfactory until they reached Colorado.
The altitude of this state, second highest of all the states of the Union, together with the atmospheric conditions, proved “just the thing.” But where should they make their home? Denver was delightful as to climate, but the doctor was not contented there. He loved nature, to be out of doors; he had no patience with clanging street cars, smoking engines, and houses huddled together. So they began their search anew.
One day they stopped at Lake City and took a stage-coach ride over the La Garita Mountains. The vehicle was only a rattling two-seated open buggy, drawn by four horses that might have pulled a plow over any American field, but it was dignified with the name stage-coach. The driver was a young man who had a contract with the government for transporting mail to and from various mining points along the way, and he added to his profits by carrying passengers and all manner of light freight.
Along the foot of the mountains they rode for several miles, then up a grade and around a spur of a perpendicular hill, up, up, up, winding here and there, overlooking deep gullies, dashing downgrade into a ragged valley, with its noisy brook; then up again and on and around they wound to where the pines stuck in the mountain sides like toothpicks.
In the course of this journey they passed through Mummy Cañon. But this gorge had not yet received its name, and when the imaginative Dr. Byrd beheld the “swathed form” on the face of a lofty bluff, he called attention to it.
“That’s the mummy,” said the driver in a matter-of-fact way.