At Empire I found my conveyance awaiting me—a light wagon and a pair of playful mules; little fellows with coats of satin and gentle eyes. Some fellow would say they had “sinews of steel,” but these mules were not built that way; they were the natural sort. I dearly love a mule, and were I a poet, would write a sonnet to a mule’s eye. I admire a mule’s eye; always feel interested in that portion of his anatomy, and, as one likes to be in the vicinity of that which is pleasing, so I, when I have any business with a mule, find his head the attractive feature. These mules behaved remarkably well; they took us to the top of Berthoud Pass in about three hours, and climbed over each other only twice during the trip. That, however, was only in playfulness; they pretended to be frightened, in one instance at a laborer’s coat lying by the roadside, and in the other at an empty fruit can. I thought on both occasions that the mountain side was steeper, the gulch ever so many million feet deeper, and the road narrower than any other place I had ever been in. But as the mules were only in fun, I did not feel scared. After the first exhibition of hilarity the driver told me that the last stranger who rode behind those mules had his neck broken by jumping out of the wagon. I know the driver to be an innocent young man, unversed in the wicked ways of this world, and it was comforting to be in congenial company.
On the summit Captain Gaskill handed me his thermometer. I don’t know why he did it; I had not said anything about the temperature. But I saw the mercury rise in the tube the moment I touched it; I told him to take the blasted thing away or I would melt right there; with my heavy overcoat on I would have been a mere spot in ten minutes. He hung the agitator on the side of the house, and it registered 45°. I felt cool, and he took me to the fire. No one that I know of except Hamlet’s father has returned to give us any authentic information from beyond the sea; and how it was ascertained that “in the twinkling of an eye” we mortals should realize the end of our journey from this shore, I am not prepared to say. But I can vouch for the fact that it was just eight hours from Denver to happiness. If dissatisfied humanity demands a country better adapted to its wants than Colorado, it will have to die to find it.
Upon a former occasion several years ago, I took upon myself to say publicly through the columns of a Denver daily, that I thought Coates Kinney’s “Rain on the Roof” a satire. But the night before I had lain in a pool of water on the banks of the Blue with nothing between me and the angry heavens except my prayers for daylight; they, of course, were thin but earnest. This night, however, I had, as the preacher used to say, “a realizing sense” of the effect of surrounding circumstances, repented me of my harsh verdict, and hope to be forgiven. I had supper, a not uncommon event on the top of the range at this particular point. Thanks to the mules (they had allowed me to walk a mile or more) and the light air, and wholesome food well cooked, and the obliging host and his wife (think of their hibernating, the snow level with the ridge-pole, and never a soul to visit them except the mail carrier on snow-shoes), I had an appetite, and made good use of it, while the clouds gathered outside for a jubilee. After supper came the indispensable pipe and chat, and then to bed, right under the rafters, with the rain pattering on the shingles.
“It seemed as if the music
Of the birds in all the bowers,
Had been gathered into rain-drops
And was coming down in showers.”
There is only one line of Kinney’s poem that ever troubled me (the foregoing is not his):
“Then in fancy comes my mother.”
When I was a boy I didn’t fancy my mother coming around my bed after I had crawled into it. It meant something besides prayers for me; we had hard timber in the country where I was born and bred,—how pliant the young twigs were! Coates must have been a good boy, especially with such a name; I can solve the mystery in no other way. But all that about “another,”
“With her eyes delicious blue,”
will do “passing well,” except the color; mine were not blue, and she played the same game on me.
With the “patter of the soft rain overhead,” I soon forgot all about the thermometer and the other misfortunes, being wrapped in—forty pounds of blankets.