and while the
buildings in Golden below shrank smaller and smaller. The reservoir
lake in the center of the town, a broad expanse of water only a short
time before, began to take on the appearance of some great, blue-white
diamond glistening in the sun. Gradually a stream outlined itself in
living topography upon a map which seemed as large as the world itself.
Denver, fifteen miles away, came into view, its streets showing like
seams in a well-sewn garment, the sun, even at this distance, striking
a sheen from the golden dome of the capitol building. Higher! The
chortling truck gasped at the curves and tugged on the straightaway,
but Robert Fairchild had ceased to hear. His every attention was
centered on the tremendous stage unfolded before him, the vast
stretches of the plains rolling away beneath, even into Kansas and
Wyoming and Nebraska, hundreds of miles away, plains where once the
buffalo had roamed in great, shaggy herds, where once the emigrant
trains had made their slow, rocking progress into a Land of Heart's
Desire; and he began to understand something of the vastness of life,
the great scope of ambition; new things to a man whose world, until two
weeks before, had been the four chalky walls of an office.

Cool breezes from pine-fringed gulches brushed his cheek and smoothed
away the burning touch of a glaring sun; the truck turned into the
hairpin curves of the steep ascent, giving him a glimpse of deep
valleys, green from the touch of flowing streams, of great clefts with
their vari-hued splotches of granite, and on beyond, mound after mound
of pine-clothed hills, fringing the peaks of eternal snow, far away.
The blood suddenly grew hot in Fairchild's veins; he whistled, he
repressed a wild, spasmodic desire to shout. The spirit that had been
the spirit of the determined men of the emigrant trains was his now; he
remembered that he was traveling slowly toward a fight--against whom,
or what, he knew not--but he welcomed it just the same. The exaltation
of rarefied atmosphere was in his brain; dingy offices were gone
forever. He was free; and for the first time in his life, he
appreciated the meaning of the word.

Upward, still upward! The town below became merely a checkerboard
thing, the lake a dot of gleaming silver, the stream a scintillating
ribbon stretching off into the foothills. A turn, and they skirted a
tremendous valley, its slopes falling away in sheer descents from the
roadway. A