I relive once more that bitter night on the wharf in Glenora when (chilled by the cold wind), he first began to cough. I am thinking of his journey on the boat with me to Wrangell; of the day when I left him there (the only horse on the coast); of my return; of our long trip to Seattle; of his trust in me as he faced the strange monsters of the city; of his long dark ride to St. Paul; of the joyous day when I opened his prison door and finding him safe and well, rode him forth to the admiration of my uncles at the county fair. A vast section of my life faded with the passing of that small gray horse. "Lost my Ladrone, gone the wild living. I dream, but my dreaming is vain."
My sense of uneasiness was deepened by another warning, a third sign of decay. One morning my father while apparently in his usual health, suddenly grew dizzy and fell and as I bent above him he gazed up at me with an expression which I had never before seen in his face, a humble, helpless, appealing look. It seemed that he was going as William had gone.
Happily I was mistaken. His indomitable soul reasserted itself. He refused to surrender. He rallied. "I'm all right," he said at last, a grim line coming back into his mouth. "It's passing off. I can move," and lifting his arm he opened and shut his hand in proof of it. "I'm better than a dozen dead men yet."
He was distinctly stronger next day, and when, looking from my window I saw him going about his work in the garden, bareheaded as was his habit, resolute and unsubdued, I was reassured, but never again did he move with the same vigor as before. For the first time he acknowledged his age.
During all these melancholy experiences so significant of the dying border, I had the comfort of my undaunted wife whose happy spirit refused to be clouded by what she recognized as merely the natural decay of the preceding generation. Her mind was set on the future, our future. She refused to yield her youthful right to happiness, and under the influence of her serene philosophy I went back to my writing, or at least to the serious consideration of another mountain theme, which was taking shape in my brain.
With a mere love-story I had never been content. For me a sociological background was necessary in order to make fiction worth while, and I was minded to base my next novel on a study of the "war" which had just taken place, at Cripple Creek, between the Free Miner, the Union Miner and the Operator or Capitalist.
The suggestion for this theme had come to me during a call on some friends in New York City, where I had been amused and somewhat embarrassed, by the ecstatic and outspoken admiration of a boy of fourteen, who was (as his mother put it) "quite crazy over miners, Indians and cowboys. His dream is to go West and illustrate your books," she had said to me.
This lad's enthusiasm for the West and his ambition to be an illustrator of western stories had started me on a tale in which a fine but rather spoiled New York girl was to be carried to Colorado by the enthusiasm of her youthful brother, and there plunged (against her will) into the warfare of mountaineers and miners, a turbulence which her beloved brother would insist on sharing. Such a girl might conceivably find herself in the storm center of a contest such as that which had taken place on Bull Hill in the late nineties.
I called this study Hesper, or the Cowboy Patrol for the reason that in "the Cripple Creek War," cattlemen had acted as outposts for the union miners, and in this fact I perceived something picturesque and new and telling, something which would give me just the imaginative impulse I required.
Some of my friendly critics were still occasionally writing to me to ask, "Why don't you give us more Main Traveled Roads stories," and it was not easy to make plain to them that I had moved away from that mood, and that my life and farm life had both greatly altered in thirty years. To repeat the tone of that book would have been false not only to my art, but to the country as well.