good man!"

Yesterday morning the mercury was 20 degrees below zero. I think I
never saw such a brilliant atmosphere. That curious phenomenon called
frost-fall was occurring, in which, whatever moisture may exist in the
air, somehow aggregates into feathers and fern leaves, the loveliest of
creations, only seen in rarefied air and intense cold. One breath and
they vanish. The air was filled with diamond sparks quite intangible.
They seemed just glitter and no more. It was still and cloudless, and
the shapes of violet mountains were softened by a veil of the tenderest
blue. When the Greeley stage wagon came up, Mr. Fodder, whom I met at
Lower Canyon, was on it. He had expressed a great wish to go to Estes
Park, and to hunt with "Mountain Jim," if it would be safe to do the
latter. He was now dressed in the extreme of English dandyism, and
when I introduced them, he put out a small hand cased in a
perfectly-fitting lemon-colored kid glove.[22] As the trapper stood
there in his grotesque rags and odds and ends of apparel, his
gentlemanliness of deportment brought into relief the innate vulgarity
of a rich parvenu. Mr. Fodder rattled so amusingly as we drove away
that I never realized that my Rocky Mountain life was at an end, not
even when I saw "Mountain Jim," with his golden hair yellow in the
sunshine, slowly leading the beautiful mare over the snowy Plains back
to Estes Park, equipped with the saddle on which I had ridden 800 miles!

[22] This was a truly unfortunate introduction. It was the first link
in the chain of circumstances which brought about Mr. Nugent's untimely
end, and it was at this person's instigation (when overcome by fear)
that Evans fired the shot which proved fatal.

A drive of several hours over the Plains brought us to Greeley, and a
few hours later, in the far blue distance, the Rocky Mountains, and all
that they enclose, went down below the prairie sea.

I. L. B.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, by
Isabella L. Bird

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