They held under their hammers a
thousand miles of mineral country with all its riddles to solve,
and its stores of possible wealth to mark. They felt the future
in their hands.
Emmons's party was out of reach in the Uintahs, but Arnold
Hague's had come in to Laramie for supplies, and they took charge
of Adams for a time. Their wanderings or adventures matter
nothing to the story of education. They were all hardened
mountaineers and surveyors who took everything for granted, and
spared each other the most wearisome bore of English and Scotch
life, the stories of the big game they killed. A bear was an
occasional amusement; a wapiti was a constant necessity; but the
only wild animal dangerous to man was a rattlesnake or a skunk.
One shot for amusement, but one had other matters to talk about.
Adams enjoyed killing big game, but loathed the labor of
cutting it up; so that he rarely unslung the little carbine he
was in a manner required to carry. On the other hand, he liked to
wander off alone on his mule, and pass the day fishing a mountain
stream or exploring a valley. One morning when the party was
camped high above Estes Park, on the flank of Long's Peak, he
borrowed a rod, and rode down over a rough trail into Estes Park,
for some trout. The day was fine, and hazy with the smoke of
forest fires a thousand miles away; the park stretched its
English beauties off to the base of its bordering mountains in
natural landscape and archaic peace; the stream was just fishy
enough to tempt lingering along its banks.
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