On other days, when she was not well enough to drive, I pushed her about the village in a wheeled chair, which I had bought at the World's Fair. In this way she was able to make return calls upon such of her neighbors as were adjacent to side-walks. She was always in my thought,--only when Franklin took her in charge was it possible for me to concentrate on the story which I had begun before going abroad, and in which I hoped to embody some of the experiences of my trip. _Boy Life on the Prairie_ was also still incomplete, and occasionally I put aside _The Hustler_, as I called my fiction, in order to recover and record some farm custom, some pioneer incident which my mother or my brother brought to my mind as we talked of early days in Iowa. The story (which Gilder afterward called _Her Mountain Lover_) galloped along quite in the spirit of humorous extravaganza with which it had been conceived, and I thoroughly enjoyed doing it for the reason that in it I was able to relive some of the noblest moments of my explorations of Colorado's peaks and streams. It was an expression of my indebtedness to the High Country. I made the mistake, however, of not using the actual names of localities. Just why I shuffled the names of trails and towns and valleys so recklessly, I cannot now explain, for there was abundant literary precedent for their proper and exact use. Perhaps I resented the prosaic sound of "Sneffles" and "Montrose Junction." Anyhow, whatever my motive, I covered my tracks so well that it was impossible even for a resident to follow me. In _The Eagle's Heart_ I was equally elusive, but as only part of that book referred to the High Country the lack of definite nomenclature did not greatly matter. Personally I like _Her Mountain Lover_, which is still in print, and for the benefit of the possible reader of it, I will explain that the "Wagon Wheel Gap" of the story is Ouray, and that the Grizzly Bear Trail leads off the stage road to Red Mountain. Our red raspberries were just coming into fruit, and a few strawberries remained on the vines, therefore it happened that during the season we had a short-cake with cream and sugar almost every night for supper,--and such short-cakes!--piping hot, buttered, smothered in berries. I fear they were not very healthful either for my mother or for her sons, but as short-cakes were an immemorial delicacy in our home I could not bring myself to forbid them. Mother insisted on them all the more firmly when I told her that the English knew nothing of short-cake or our kind of pies, and then, more to amuse her than for any other reason, I told of a visit to my English publisher and of my bragging about her short-cake so shamelessly that he had finally declared: "I am coming to Chicago next year, and I shall journey all the way to West Salem just to test your mother's short-cake." This made her chuckle. "Let him come," she said confidently. "We'll feed him on it."