fter that there were the potatoes to gather--a
very heavy piece of work.

All these tasks had to be cleared out of the way before we could move up
to Sulphide to begin on our timber-cutting enterprise. But between the
harvesting of the oats and the gathering of the potato-crop there
occurred an incident, which, besides being remarkable in itself, had a
very notable effect upon my father's fortunes--and, incidentally, upon
our own.

To make understandable the ins and outs of this matter, I must pause a
moment to describe the situation of our ranch; for it is upon the
peculiarity of its situation that much of my story hinges.

Anybody traveling westward from San Remo, the county seat, with the idea
of getting up into the mountains, would encounter, about a mile from
town, a rocky ridge, which, running north and south, extended for
several miles each way. Ascending this bluff and still going westward,
he would presently encounter a second ridge, the counterpart of the
first, and climbing that in turn he would find himself upon the
wide-spreading plateau known as the Second Mesa, which extended, without
presenting any serious impediment, to the foot of the range--itself one
of the finest and ruggedest masses of mountains in the whole state of
Colorado.

In a deep depression of the First Mesa--known as Crawford's Basin--lay
our ranch. This "Basin" was evidently an ancient lake-bed--as one could
tell by the "benches" surrounding it--but the water of the lake having
in the course of ages sawed its way out through the rocky barrier, now
ran off through a little canyon about a quarter of a mile long.

The natural way for us to get from the ranch down to San Remo was to
follow the stream down this canyon, but, curiously enough, for more than
half the year this road was impassable. The lower end of Crawford's
Basin, for a quarter of a mile back from the entrance of the canyon, was
so soft and water-logged that not even an empty wagon could pass over
it. In fact, so soft was it that we could not get upon it to cut hay and
were obliged to leave the splendid stand of grass that grew there as a
winter pasture. In the cold weather, when the ground froze up, it was
all right, but at the first breath of spring it began to soften, and
from then until winter again we could do nothing with it. It was, in
fact, little better than a source of annoyance to us, for, until we
fenced it off, our milk cows, tempted by the luxuriant grass, wer