relationships with
women. I had been too poor and too busy in Boston to form any
connections other than just good friendships, and even now, my means
would not permit a definite thought of marriage. "Where can I keep a
wife? My two little rooms in Chicago are all the urban home I can
afford, and to bring a daughter of the city to live in West Salem would
be dangerous." Nevertheless, I promised mother that on my return to
Chicago, I would look around and see what I could find.

For three months--that is to say during May, June and July, I remained
concerned with potato bugs, currant worms, purslane and other important
garden concerns, but in August I started on a tour which had
far-reaching effects.

Though still at work upon _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_, I was beginning to
meditate on themes connected with Colorado, and as the heat of July
intensified in the low country, I fell to dreaming of the swift mountain
streams whose bright waters I had seen in a previous trip, and so
despite all my protestations, I found myself in Colorado Springs one
August day, a guest of Louis Ehrich, a New Yorker and fellow reformer,
in exile for his health. It was at his table that I met Professor
Fernow, chief of the National Bureau of Forestry, who was in the west on
a tour of the Federal Forests, and full of enthusiasm for his science.

His talk interested me enormously. I forecast, dimly, something of the
elemental change which scientific control was about to bring into the
mountain west, and when (sensing my genuine interest) he said "Why not
accompany me on my round?" I accepted instantly, and my good friends,
the Ehrichs out-fitted me for the enterprise.

We left next day for Glenwood Springs, at which point Fernow hired
horses and a guide who knew the streams and camps of the White River
Plateau, and early on the second morning we set out on a trail which, in
a literary sense, carried me a long way and into a new world. From the
plain I ascended to the peaks. From the barbed-wire lanes of Iowa and
Kansas I entered the thread-like paths of the cliffs, and (most
important of all) I returned to the saddle. I became once more the
horseman in a region of horsemen.

For the first time in nearly twenty years I swung to the saddle, and by
that act recovered a power and a joy which only verse could express. I
found myself among men of such endurance and hardihood that I was
ashamed to complain of my aching bones and overstrained muscles-