Like all boys, Roy had had his dream of wild Indians, of cowboy life, of horses and the endless plains. But as he grew older, the intense practicality of life in the busy city had, in great part, driven these fancies from his mind. Now he discovered that the longing for the mysteries of the far west had not gone out of his heart.
From his father Roy had learned that he would probably go to the little town of Dolores in southwestern Colorado, the nearest railroad point to his destination in Utah. Dolores was in the mountains and, on a map he had secured, Roy traced his route into the valleys and out across the deserts toward Bluff, a hundred miles or more further west.
It was all desert, to be sure, but the very barrenness of the map thrilled the boy. The canyons, the isolated mountains, the desolate plains, fascinated the eager lad. He was not courting danger—he was too practical for that—but to be thrown into a region where he must depend upon his own ingenuity was joy supreme for Roy.
“I never even hoped for anything so great,” said the boy sleepily to himself, “but, now that I have the chance, I’ll make the most of it. I may have to come back to Newark in a few months and settle down to common things, but I’ll make all I can of my opportunity. I’m not aching to fight Indians, and I’m not anxious to get lost in the desert, but I would like to get close enough to the wilderness to know what it means. I’m tired of machinery and coal smoke and trolley gongs.”
It is doubtful if Roy would have been so enthusiastic if he had known the adventures he was to fall into so soon. He got close enough to both Indians and the waterless wastes to understand just what they meant.
“I wonder,” he mused as he dropped off to sleep, “if I’ll meet my mother’s uncle—what’s his name?”
And, hazily trying to think of his Utah relative, the Mormon Willard Banks, Roy fell asleep. Strangely enough, in that sleep, among dreams of bottomless canyons and white arid plains, whereon spectral Indians danced like thistledown, another figure appeared always to the sleeping lad—a featureless face with immense flowing whiskers and wearing an enormous black hat. The constant figure beckoned Roy on in his dreams like a ghost—the spirit of his great uncle, Willard Banks, long since lost to his family in the far away land of Brigham Young.
Roy’s brain was so full of all the wonders to come that, when he awoke in the morning, he was dazed for a few moments. His dreams had run together until he seemed almost feverish. While he was trying to straighten them out, his mother stole into his room.
“Mother,” exclaimed the boy, with a laugh, “do you reckon your Mormon uncle is alive now?”