The Cowboy and the Lady and Her Pa

 The Gatlings threaded the trail like so many plodding ants and saw enough landscapes to fill all the souvenir post-card racks of the world.   

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.

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