“HE’S NO SARDINE.”
Wagon Wheel Gap ought to have been colonized by Frenchmen. Why, did you say? Well, the Gap proper is a few hundred feet long. On the southwest side of the Rio Grande, a cliff, about six hundred feet at the base, reaches heavenward perpendicularly about the same distance. Opposite, and stretching for two miles or more down the stream, is a beetling wall, in some places, they tell me, thirteen hundred feet high. To reach the summit, one must go two miles up the river to Bellows Creek, strike into a game trail that leads through numberless little parks, bordered with mountain pines, and gorgeous with the hues of wild flowers. If a Frenchman should walk to the summit of his ambition, he would be too tired to fall off; if he rode up, being a mercurial creature, he’d have time to, and would, change his mind, go back to his family, if he had any, and wonder why he had ever entertained the notion that this is not a good world to live in. Looked at from below, there would be such a fascination in the absolute magnificence of the means to his end, that when the melancholy fit enraptured him again, he’d go over the same trail, with the same happy result. With those cliffs hanging over him, the consequences of charcoal, morphine, the pistol or the rapier would become coarse. He would abandon all other routes to immortality, and finally die in his bed with the weight of years, like a Christian. That was my explanation to the Captain, and he believed in it, as we lay peering over the edge and looking down at our six-feet friends turned into midgets.
Those friends of ours, good rodsters, all, stood on the bank of the river, evidently predicting what a day might bring forth. The Rio Grande was metamorphosed from a crystal stream into a river of mud. From our dizzy height, it looked like a demoralized rope, the impeding boulders in the current making the frayed patches. We had seen it in that plight and none other for two weeks. But that we had been assured each day that there would certainly be a change on the morrow, we would have sworn its normal condition was “rily.”
Having been lied to daily for the last fourteen days, our hope had ended in the faith that inspired our comforters. “So much a long communion tends to make us what we are:—even I” promised each newcomer, anxious to test his skill, that the river would “clear up to-morrow.” We had heard, too, about four times a day, of the eight-pound trout captured somewhere in Antelope Park, on a seven-ounce rod,—the trout I mean, not the park. I knew all the history of that trout; it had been skinned and the skin stuffed; I saw a woman who saw the trout, and I, of course, had no hesitation in confidently asserting its weight and the details of its capture.
Our hourly routine had been to go to the river, examine the color of the water, and the mark that registered its stage; every fellow said it would “clear up to-morrow;” then we went back to the house and smoked.
Being on higher ground, the Captain thought he would vary the subject, so he said:
“I’d like to catch a pound and a half trout.”