ighty walls, and one night we camped in the deeps, a dramatic
experience, for a mountain lion yowling from the cliffs gave voice to
the savage grandeur of the scene. Then at last, surfeited with splendor,
weary with magnificence, we turned our faces homeward. With only a stop
at Laguna to watch the Indian Corn Dance, we slid down to Kansas City
and at last to West Salem and home.

What a vacation it had been! Pike's Peak, Cripple Creek, Glen Eyrie, our
camp beside the singing stream at Baldy, Sierra Blanca, Wagon Wheel Gap,
Creede, Red Mountain, Lake City, Slumgullion, Tennessee Pass, noble
dinners on the car, trail-side lunches of goose-liver and sandwiches and
jam, iced watermelon and champagne in hot camps on the mesas--all these
scenes and experiences came back accompanied by memories of the good
talk, the cosmopolitan humor, of the Palmers and their guests.

From this royal ease, this incessant shift of scene and personality, we
returned to our shabby old homestead brooding patiently beneath its
maples, reflecting upon the glittering panorama which our magic lamp and
flying carpet had wrought so potently to display. As I had started out
to educate my wife in Western Life, it must be admitted that this summer
had been singularly successful in bringing to her a knowledge of the
splendors of Colorado and a perception of the varied character of its
population.--Best of all she returned in perfect health and happy as a
girl.

"This being married to a poor novelist isn't so bad after all," I
remarked with an air of self-congratulation. "True, our rewards come
without reason, but they sometimes rhyme with joy and pride."

Strange to say, I got nothing out of this summer, in a literary way,
except the story which I called _The Steadfast Widow Delaney_, a
conception which came to me on my solitary ascent of Sierra Blanca. All
the beauty and drama, all the humor and contrast of the trip with the
Palmers, had no direct fictional value to me. It is hard to explain why,
but so it was. I did not so much as write a poem based on that gorgeous
experience.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The White House Musicale

The Homestead on the day of our return, was not only a violent contrast
to the castle in Glen Eyrie, but its eaves were dripping with water and
its rooms damp and musty. It was sodden with loneliness. Father was in
Dakota and mother was away never to return, and the situation would have
been quite disheartening to me had