The animated and confident manner of Jane did not lessen the anxious, even horrified, expression in the brown eyes, but the grey were a study as the owner drew the abashed urchin to him, with the inquiry:
“Is it true, my boy?”
“Yes, father.”
“Go bring me your fishing tackle.”
It was a sorry looking outfit—a fraction of a cane pole, about ten feet of a common line, and an indifferent hook looped on the end. The hand line was of better material, but a wreck—a very Gordian knot. They were dubiously but promptly passed over for inspection.
“Throw these into the stove—and, Jane, you make kindling wood of this pole.”
“Oh, father!” The boy’s lips quivered, the eyes filled, but the owner of the grey eyes gently held back the appealing hand that would have rescued the precious treasures.
“Hold on, my boy; do not misunderstand; papa will trust you; you shall have the best tackle in town.”
“Why do you deal with the boy in this way?” remonstrated the mother.
“Why? Because I myself was a boy once, and I don’t want to forget it.”
The grey eyes were the first to close—it is many a long year since—and the old boy’s fill a little now, as he reverently thinks of that day.
But the boy drifted with the tide, over the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies, and twenty odd years ago he anchored in the wilderness, where Denver now stands, to surprise you folks from down East.
Do we have fishing in the Rocky Mountains? Aye, that we do, and right royal sport it is.
One day, nineteen years ago this summer, a neighbor came into my cabin and wanted to know of a young married woman there if she could not spare her Benedict for, say three days. He was fish hungry, this neighbor; was going off into the mountains, and wanted company. Of course she could; was glad to be rid of him. And so early next morning old Charlie was hitched to the buckboard. At five o’clock that same day there was a tent pitched in a little valley upon Bear creek, thirty-five miles from home, with two pairs of blankets, a coffee pot, two tin cups and a frying pan; not a soul or a habitation within twenty miles of us; a beautiful mountain stream, clear as crystal, cold as ice, and teeming with trout. What would you have, money? Why, bless your soul, money was at a discount; there were acres of it a little way off, only for the digging.
In those days fishing tackle was scarce, and a plum-bush pole and linen line were the best in the land. Flies were a novelty to me, but my friend had a dozen or so, some that he had saved over from more civilized times, and that had got out here by mistake. He divided with me, told me to fasten one upon the end of my line and “skitter it over the water.” This was my first and only instruction in trout fishing. “Skittering” was as novel to me as the fish, but my Professor was a Cambridge man with glasses, and I did not want him to feel that my education had been entirely neglected. I took my pole and instruction in silence, and walked a quarter of a mile up the creek. Pure instinct? Yes, I walked up stream for the single purpose of fishing down; it came just as naturally as swimming in deep water. I found a place clear of bushes for a few rods, where the current swept directly into my shore and out again, forming an eddy. I thought it a “likely place.” I gave that plum sapling a swing and landed the fly, in which I had no confidence whatever, just at the edge of the swirl. It had no sooner touched the water than I saw a salmon-colored mouth, felt a tug, and the following second my first trout was flying over my head. I deliberately put down that pole and walked out to investigate. There was no doubt about it; there he lay, kicking and gasping his life out on the green grass, his bright colors more beautiful by the contrast. He was near a foot long, and I put my hand upon him as gently as though he had been an immortal first born. It was not a dream. When he was dead I strung him upon a forked stick, went back to the eddy and caught three others, and wondered if all the trout in that stream were twins. I had already become gentler, too, even with the unwieldy plum sapling. I found their mouths were not made of cast iron nor copper lined. By the time I had fished down to camp, and with my ten trout, I felt equal to the business of the morrow. My friend, of course, had better luck, having passed his novitiate, but he complimented me in saying that I “took to it naturally.”
Camping out was no novelty, but fresh trout was a revelation, and that night we had no bad dreams under our canvas. The next evening found us preparing nearly, what a Yankee would call, two patent pails, of trout to take home to our friends and neighbors.
And here I am moved to say that ours is a noble fellowship; it is a gentle craft we cultivate, one that should beget brotherly love and all things charitable; and if any of you have, as I hope you have, a little white-haired tot who seems inclined to follow you down stream upon summer days, do not say nay, but let your prayer be: “Lord, keep my memory green.”
OVER THE RANGE.
Of course it is never agreeable to go camping; it is not convenient to carry about with one bedsteads, chairs, bureaus, wash-stands, bath-tubs, and such like plunder deemed essential to comfort. And then again it is not comfortable to live out doors like a tramp. It is either too hot or too cold, too dry or too wet—that is for a certain large class of human beings. They wonder why one will forego the comforts of our civilized ways for those of the Ute. But perhaps we may get to the solution of the problem further on.
It was dusty when our party left Idaho for a fifty-mile drive to Hot Sulphur Springs. Of course it was dusty; the dust was in the road, in our eyes and mouths, throats and lungs, just for our discomfort, and the toll-road companies were never known to keep sprinklers. So we traveled in a cloud for half an hour, then it began to rain. Of course it did; the first rain-storm for three weeks; we got damp, then we forgot the dust, and were doggedly satisfied that if pleasure had not been one of our objects in going camping it would not have rained. We got to Empire; it rained till dark, and everybody said the rainy season had begun in earnest; that it was liable to keep on raining for three weeks to get even with the “dry spell,” and we went to bed feeling very much encouraged. There is an exasperating sententiousness about the mountain weather prophet that prevails nowhere else on the globe, I verily believe; when he tells you what the weather is, or is going to be, you must believe him. You dare not even express a hope that he may be mistaken. But even this gentry, one soon begins to believe, is essential to comfort; the weather prophet is the means of agreeable disappointment. Our weather prophet was the most entertaining old liar that ever contributed to the misery of a tenderfoot or the mortification of a moss-back. The sun never broke over the eastern hills more gloriously than on the eventful next morning; he seemed to come up in a spirit of exultation, as if aware that the prophet at Empire had been maligning him. But the prophet was not overcome; far from it; the appearance of the sun was a “weather breeder,” and the cheerful old atmospheric vaticinator swore that before we could reach the summit of the range it would and must rain, and snow and hail and freeze and thaw and blow and the——. We bade him good morning sadly, and took the road with a determination to wrest comfort, if necessary, from the worst “spell of weather” the range could boast.
The rain of the day before was the first element to lend its influence to the day’s enjoyment; it had sweetened the air, if Colorado mountain air is ever otherwise; it had laid the dust, and the road was a marvel of excellence—for a toll road; it had sharpened the fragrance of the pines, and the wild flowers, lacking in perfume, made amends by such a wealth of beauty that one became lost in the multitude of bright colors.
We were a happy party that rode up through the Devil’s