The Cowboy and the Lady and Her Pa
The Gatlings threaded the trail like so many ploddingants and saw enough landscapes to fill all the souvenir post-cardracks of the world.
From up on the first level of the first shelf of thewagon road above Avalanche Creek came the voice of DadWheelis, the wagon-train boss, addressing his front span.The mules had halted at the head of the steep grade to twistabout in the traces and, with six ’cello-shaped heads stretchedover the rim and twice that many somber eyes fixed on the abyssswimming in a green haze beneath them, to contemplate itsoutspread glories while they got their wind back. It becameevident that Dad thought the breathing space sufficiently hadbeen prolonged. On a beautiful clearness his words dropped downthrough the spicy dry air.
“Git up!” he bade the sextet with an affectionate violence, andyou could hear his whip-lash where it crackled like a string offirecrackers above the drooping ears of the lead team. “Git up,you scenery-lovin’ so-and-soes!”
There was an agonized whine of tires and hubs growing faint andthen fainter and Mrs. Hector Gatling sighed with a profoundappreciation. “How prodigal nature is out in these Westernwilds!” she said.
“Certainly does throw a wicked prod,” agreed her daughter,Miss Shirley Gatling. But her eyes were not fixed where hermother’s were.
“Such a climate!” affirmed the senior lady, flinching slightlythat the argot of a newer and an irreverent generationshould be invoked in this cathedral place. “Such views! Suchpicturesque types everywhere!”
“Not bad-looking mountains across over yonder, at that,” saidMr. Gatling, husband and father of the above, giving hisgestured indorsement to an endless vista of serrated peaks of anaverage height of not less than seven thousand feet. “Not bad atall, so long as you don’t have to hoof up any of ’em.”
“Mong père, he also grows poetic, is it not?” murmured MissGatling. “Now, who’d have ever thunk it, knowing him in hisnative haunts back in that dear Pittsburgh!”
Her glance still was leveled in a different direction from theone in which her elders gazed. Mr. Gatling twisted about so thata foldable camp-chair creaked under his weight, and lookedthrough his glasses in the same quarter where his daughterlooked. His forehead drew into wrinkles.
Miss Gatling stood up, a slim, trim figure in her riding-bootsand her well-tailored breeches and with a gay little shirt drawnsnugly down inside her waistband and held there by a broadbrilliant girdle of squaw’s beadwork. She settled a largesombrero on her bobbed hair and stepped away from them over thepine-needles and thence down toward the roaring creek. The morningsunlight cameslanting through the lower tree boughs and picked out and madeshiny glitters of the heavy Mexican silver spurs at her heelsand the wide Navaho silver bracelet that was set on her rightwrist. She passed between two squared boulders that might havebeen the lichened tombs for a couple of Babylon’s kings.
“Continue, I pray you, dear parents, to sit and invite yoursouls, if any,” she called back. “I go to make sure they’reputting plenty of cold victuals in the lunch kit. Yest