"Glass?" queried the Professor, alighting, microscope in hand. "Really?"
"Shore," assured Aconite. "They cracked the road out of the cliff by building fires to heat the glass and splashin' cold water to make the chunks pop out—jelluk breakin' a tumbler washin' up the dishes."
"Oh, I see," said Professor Boggs. "Merely obsidian."
"Merely!" repeated Aconite. "Some folks always reminds me of the folks that branded old Jim Bridger as a liar becuz o' what he told of this here region eighty or ninety years ago. He built Fort Bridger, and Bridger's Peak was named after him, and he discovered Great Salt Lake, and I guess he wouldn't lie. He found this glass cliff and told about it then—and everybody said he was a liar. An' he found lots o' things that ain't on the map. We see a little thread o' country along this road, but the reel wonders of this Park hain't been seen sence Jim Bridger's time—an' not then. W'y, once back in this glass belt, he saw an elk feedin' in plain sight. Blazed away an' missed him. Elk kep' on feedin'. Blazed away ag'in. Elk unmoved. Bridger made a rush at the elk with his knife, and run smack into a mountain of this glass so clear that he couldn't see it, and shaped like a telescope glass that brought things close. That elk was twenty-five miles off."
"Giddap!" said Colonel Baggs to the horses. "Time to be on our way."
"After all," said the Poet, "we may not have lost the power to create a mythology."
"Bridger for my money," said the Artist, with conviction.
"Jim Bridger said that," asserted Aconite, "an' I believe him. They found Great Salt Lake where he said it was, all right, an' Bridger's Peak, an' the few things we've run across here. You wouldn't believe a mountain would whistle like a steam engine, would yeh? Well, I'll show you one—Roarin' Mountain—in less'n four miles ahead—in the actual act of tootin'."
"I believe all you said, Mr. Driscoll," said the Bride as they sat about the fire that night. "The glass mountain, the elk and all. After those indescribable Twin Lakes, the Roaring Mountain, and the Devil's Frying Pan, stewing, stewing, century after century—that's what makes it so inconceivable—the thought of time and eternity. The mountains are here for ever—that's plain; but these things in action—to think that they were sizzling and spouting just the same when Mr. Bridger was here ninety years ago, and a million years before that, maybe—it flabbergasts me!"
"Yes'm," said Aconite. "It shore do."