"This compensates for the humble scene of our wedding, doesn't it?" I demanded.
"It is more than I dreamed of having," she replied.
In truth no blood relations could have been more sympathetic, more generous, more considerate than the Ehrichs. They rejoiced in us. Skilled and happy hosts, they did their utmost to make our honeymoon an unforgettable experience. Each hour of our stay was arranged with kindness. We drove, we ate, we listened to music, with a grateful wonder at our good fortune.
They would have kept us indefinitely had I not carefully explained my plan to show my bride the Crestones and Marshall Pass. "We must make the Big Circle and get back to Wisconsin in time for Thanksgiving," I said to Louis, who, as a loyal Colorado man, immediately granted the force of this excuse. He understood also the pathos of the old mother in West Salem, watching, waiting, longing to see her new daughter. "You are right," he said. "To fail of that dinner would be cruel."
That night we took the Narrow Gauge train, bound for Marshall Pass and the splendors of the Continental Divide.
At daylight the next morning we were looping our way up the breast of Mount Shavano, leaving behind us in splendid changing vista the College Range, from whose lofty summits long streamers of snow wavered like prodigious silver banners. Unearthly, radiant as the walls of the sun, lonely and cold they stood. For three hours we moved amid colossal drifts and silent forests, and then, toward midday, our train plunged into the snow-sheds of the high divide. When we emerged we were sliding swiftly down into a sun-warmed valley sloping to the west, where hills as lovely as jewels alternated with smooth opalescent mesas over which white clouds gleamed. The whole wide basin glowed with August colors, and yet from Montrose Junction, where we lunched, the rugged slopes of Uncompagre, hooded with snow and dark with storms, were plainly visible, so violently dramatic was the land.
"From here we proceed directly toward those peaks," I explained to Zulime, who was in awe of the land I was exhibiting.
As we approached the gateway to Ouray, the great white flakes began to fall athwart the pines, and when we entered the prodigious amphitheater in which the town is built, we found ourselves again in mid-winter, surrounded by icy cliffs and rimy firs. Dazzling drifts covered the rocks and almost buried the cottages from whose small windows, lights twinkled like gleaming eyes of strange and roguish animals. Every detail was as harmonious as an ideally conceived Christmas card. It was the antithesis of Kansas.
Upon entering our room at the hotel, I exultantly drew Zulime's attention to the fact that the sky-line of the mountains to the South cut across the upper row of our window panes. "You are in the heart of the Rockies now," I declared as if somehow that fact exalted me in her regard.
When we stepped into the street next morning, the snow had ceased to fall, but the sky was magnificently, grandly savage. Great clouds in career across the valley momentarily caught and dung to the crags, but let fall no frost, and as the sun rose laggardly above the dazzlingly white wall, the snow-laden pines on the lower slopes appeared delicate as lace with distance. At intervals enormous masses of vapor, gray-white but richly shot with lavender, slid suddenly in, filling the amphitheater till all its walls were hid, then quite as suddenly shifted and streamed away. From time to time vistas opened toward the west, wondrous aisles of blinding splendor, highways leading downward to the glowing, half-hid, irridescent plain. In all my experience of the mountains I had never seen anything more gorgeous, more stupendous—what it must have meant to my bride, who had never seen a hill, I can only faintly divine.