Cowboy and the Lady and Her Pa: A Story of A Fish out of Water

From up on the first level of the first shelf of the wagon road above Avalanche Creek came the voice of Dad Wheelis the wagon-train boss addressing his front span. The mules had halted at the head of the steep grade to twist about in the traces and with six ’cello-shaped heads stretched over the rim and twice that many somber eyes fixed on the abyss swimming in a green haze beneath them to contemplate its outspread glories while they got their wind back. It became evident that Dad thought the breathing space sufficiently had been prolonged. On a beautiful clearness his words dropped down through the spicy dry air. “Git up!” he bade the sextet with an affectionate violence and you could hear his whip-lash where it crackled like a string of firecrackers 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 and then fainter and Mrs. Hector Gatling sighed with a profound appreciation. “How prodigal nature is out in these Western wilds!” she said. “Certainly does throw a wicked prod” agreed her daughter Miss Shirley Gatling. But her eyes were not fixed where her mother’s were. “Such a climate!” affirmed the senior lady flinching slightly that the argot of a newer and an irreverent generation should be invoked in this cathedral place. “Such views! Such picturesque types everywhere!” “Not bad-looking mountains across over yonder at that” said Mr. Gatling husband and father of the above giving his gestured indorsement to an endless vista of serrated peaks of an average height of not less than seven thousand feet. “Not bad at all so long as you don’t have to hoof up any of ’em.” “Mong père he also grows poetic is it not?” murmured Miss Gatling. “Now who’d have ever thunk it knowing him in his native haunts back in that dear Pittsburgh!” Her glance still was leveled in a different direction from the one in which her elders gazed. Mr. Gatling twisted about so that a foldable camp-chair creaked under his weight and looked through his glasses in the same quarter where his daughter looked. His forehead drew into wrinkles. Miss Gatling stood up a slim trim figure in her riding-boots and her well-tailored breeches and with a gay little shirt drawn snugly down inside her waistband and held there by a broad brilliant girdle of squaw’s beadwork. She settled a large sombrero on her bobbed hair and stepped away from them over the pine-needles and thence down toward the roaring creek. The morning sunlight came slanting through the lower tree boughs and picked out and made shiny glitters of the heavy Mexican silver spurs at her heels and the wide Navaho silver bracelet that was set on her right wrist. She passed between two squared boulders that might have been the lichened tombs for a couple of Babylon’s kings.