“Why, I heard the splash, and supposed it was Ferguson; then I remembered Ferguson was a church member in good standing.”
I took my revenge by competing with my brother for the contents of that pool, and beat him by one. But to this day he greets me with a smile. When I got back to camp I learned that the Governor had been trying to follow in the footsteps of his father, and had tumbled into the spring. He had been fished out by the combined efforts of his mother and Mrs. Ferguson, and I discovered him swathed in a blanket by the kitchen stove, mad as a hornet; I shook hands with him.
Our camp is pitched in a pleasant spot, with two tall pines, a hundred feet away, for sentinels. Coup de soleil is unknown in Colorado, so I prefer the sun’s rays to lightning, especially while trees seared from top to bottom are plentiful in the Park as monitors. To the right is Prospect Mountain, with its west end a beetling cliff, perhaps two thousand feet high, where I once had the buck-ague during an interview with a “big-horn.” To the left and in front, the range, where the storm-king holds high carnival, while lower down and nearer is a mountain of towers and pinnacles of brown and red and gray, carved out by that whimsical sculptor, Old Time. With the sun for my artist, the range for both his easel and background, I have lounged away many an hour under one of the old pines. My gaze wandering down the green slope to the river half a mile away, and with the weird music of the tumbling waters coming and receding on the summer breeze to help my dreams, we have together wrought out fantastic ruins and ghostly shapes to people them. A drifting cloud, perhaps, will change a barbacan to a spire, and a Doric capital to a Corinthian, or the knight panoplied to a brownie with a lily for a throne, and
“......jolly satyrs, full of fresh delight,
Come dancing forth, and with them nimbly ledd
Faire Helenore, with girlonds all bespredd,
Whom their May-lady they had newly made;”
to give place again, as the golden meshes weave, to cowled monks or ladies, fair, as suits the whim of the artist’s patron. Again, the goblins of the range begin their game of nine-pins, and the fleecy clouds that have been slowly drifting, drifting all the day, settle down upon the mountain top and change from white to gray and from gray to black as the sport grows furious. Something these elves must have to light up their frolic, and presently it comes in great flashes of wicked steel-blue and red, zigzaging down the mountain side, or in straight blinding bolts that rive paths in the hard granite, scattering the loose rock and shivering the pines, while the noise of the jolly nine-pins rattles and re-echoes among the crags, and dies away to come again more quickly, until the mountain-top is a sheet of lurid flame and the din unceasing, so closely follows peal upon peal. The game is too violent to last, but the gnomes love to hug the range in their pastime, and I, understanding the signs, and having no fear of their electric lights, watch the fast growing rift of azure that crowds hard upon the driving blackness. At last the mellow rays touch up my mountain ruins, and they are arrayed in new splendors and peopled with other phantoms.
So I have dreamed, and might go on dreaming, but this time I am brought back to the green slope and a little figure. The Governor is toiling up the trail with a quart bucket, his special chattel, from the spring, whence he volunteered to bring a drink for his mother. I can see no impediment in his path, yet he stumbles and falls. Would I had been there to warn him; but the water is spilled. He does not cry, but gathers himself and his property up, and goes back to begin his task over again. Just then there came to me pat, an aphorism, I think, of “Poor Goldsmith”: “True greatness consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall;” and I took it as an omen of good for the boy.
The time is approaching when we must break camp and go back to the brick and mortar and the realities of civilization. Duties to be performed will be undertaken with better zest when I get to them, but I cast lingering looks toward my mountain ruins as the day of departure draws nigh. I even have a thought that it would be pleasant to relapse into barbarism, if out of such as mine our civilization has grown—we might build up a better. As this may not be, I am encouraged by the thought that another season will come, and with hope in my heart I am better prepared for the work awaiting me. I know that I shall go back with a fresher feeling for my kind, and more charity. So when one September morning, after a day of gray mist hanging over the range, the wind comes down chill from the heights, and the morning sun lights up my castles and pinnacles in diadems of new-fallen snow, I say we must be off. We gather together our lares of nomadic life, and with a regretful farewell to those I cannot bring away, we make the journey home, a better man and woman, with a nut-brown, healthy boy, for much of which I give credit to the artificial fly, and the beautiful denizens of the mountain streams.