Presently, on the little train, bound for Cripple Creek, the fact was further demonstrated. I had never imagined that anything less than a cog-road could ascend a grade so steep. All the way the grade persisted. Never had I seen such a railroad, either for steepness or for sinuosity. The train crawled slowly along ledges cut into the mountain-sides, now burrowing through an obstruction, now creeping from one mountain to another on a spindly bridge of the most shocking height, below which a wild torrent dashed through a rocky cañon; now slipping out upon a sky-high terrace commanding a view of hundreds of square miles of plains, now winding its way gingerly about dizzy cliffs which seemed to lean out over chasms, into which one looked with admiring terror; now coming out upon the other side, the main chain of the Rockies was revealed a hundred miles to the westward, glittering superbly with eternal ice and snow. It is an unbelievable railroad--the Cripple Creek Short Line. It travels fifty miles to make what, in a straight line, would be eighteen, and if there is, on the entire system, a hundred yards of track without a turn, I did not see the place. We were always turning; always turning upward. We would go into a tunnel and presently emerge at a point which seemed to be directly above the place where we had entered; and at times our windings, our doublings back, our writhings, were conducted in so limited an area that I began to fear our train would get tied in a knot and be unable to proceed. However, we did get to Cripple Creek, and for all its mountain setting, and all the three hundred millions of gold that it has yielded in the last twenty years or so, it is one of the most depressing places in the world. Its buildings run from shabbiness to downright ruin; its streets are ill paved, and its outlying districts are a horror of smokestacks, ore-dumps, shaft-houses, reduction-plants, gallows-frames and squalid shanties, situated in the mud. It seemed to me that Cripple Creek must be the most awful looking little city in the world, but I was informed that, as mining camps go, it is unusually presentable, and later I learned for myself that that is true. Cripple Creek is not only above the timber-line; it is above the cat-line. I mean this literally. Domestic cats cannot live there. And many human beings are affected by the altitude. I was. I had a headache; my breath was short, and upon the least exertion my heart did flip-flops. Therefore I did not circulate about the town excepting within a radius of a few blocks of the station. That, however, was enough.