"Well, then—so long," she said.

"So long."

"Don't forget Madam Leo," she admonished, giving utterance, again, to her strident, feeble-minded laugh.

"I won't," I promised.

And I never, never shall.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE MORMON CAPITAL

I think it was in Kansas City that I first became conscious of the fact that, without my knowing it, my mind had made, in advance, imaginary pictures of certain sections of the country, and that, in almost every instance, these pictures were remarkable for their untruthfulness. Kansas City itself surprised me with its hills, for I had been thinking of it in connection with the prairies. With Denver it was the other way about. Thinking of Denver as a mountain city, instead of a city near the mountains, I expected hills, but did not find them. And when I crossed the Rockies, they too afforded a surprise, not because of their height, but because of their width. Evidently I must have had some vague idea that a train, traveling west from Denver, would climb very definitely up the Rocky Mountains, cross the Great Divide, and proceed very definitely down again, upon the other side, whither a sort of long, sloping plain would lead to California. Denver itself I thought of as being placed further west upon the continent than is, in reality, the case. I did not realize at all that the city is, in fact, only a few hundred miles west of the halfway point on an imaginary line drawn from coast to coast; nor was I aware that, instead of being for the most part sloping plain, the thousand miles that intervenes between Denver and the Pacific Ocean, is made up of series after series of mountain ranges and valleys, their successive crests and hollows following one another like the waves of the sea.

In short, I had imagined that the Rockies were the whole show. I had not the faintest recollection of the Cordilleran System (of which the Rockies and all these other ranges are but a part), while as for the Sierra Nevadas, I remembered them only when I came to them and then much as one will recall a slight acquaintance who has been in jail for many years.