In Central City they told us a story of a miner, who was awakened one night by a noise at his window, and found it to be a burglar trying to get in. Slipping quietly out of bed, he waited patiently by the window until the sash was well up, and the burglar tolerably in, when he placed his revolver against the fellow's head, and sententiously remarked, "Now you _git_!" The story ran, the burglar looking quietly up surveyed the situation, with the cold steel against his brow, and as sententiously replied, as he backed out and dropped to the ground, "_You_ BET!" FOOTNOTES: [4] See Appendix. [5] This road since built and now in operation. CHAPTER VI. AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. The Plains after awhile became somewhat of a bore, they are so vast and outstretched, and you long for a change, something to break the monotony. To us this came one evening, just beyond Fort Morgan, when a hundred and fifty miles away, just peeping above the horizon, we descried the cone-like summit of Long's Peak, all pink and rosy in the sunset. "Driver, isn't that the Mountains?" said some one. "You bet!" was his answer, of course. "'Tisn't often you can see the Peak this fur; but it is mighty clar to-day!" The night soon afterwards shut down upon us, during which we bowled rapidly along from station to station, and the next morning were early awake. Soon the sun rose bright and clear; but the air was keen, with a stiff breeze eastward in our teeth. We were down in a wide depression of the Plains; but presently we rose up out of it, and as we struck the summit of the "divide," lo, the Rocky Mountains were before us in all their grandeur and sublimity. To the north rose Long's Peak, fourteen thousand feet above the sea, heaven-kissing, but with his night-cap still on; to the south, was Pike's Peak, eleven thousand feet above the sea, snow-crowned; while between, a hundred miles or more, swelled and towered the Mountains--at the base mere foot-hills, then ridge mounting on ridge and peak on peak, until over and above all the Snowy Range cropped out sublime. Patches of pines dotted their surface here and there, but the general effect was that of nakedness and barrenness. Clouds hung about their summits, or lingered along their sides; but the uprising sun soon dissipated these, or sent them careering aloft, as if bound for heaven. In the course of the morning we whirled into Denver, and there for a week or more--by sunlight, by moonlight--the Mountains were ever before us, in all their thousand varieties of tint and shadow. They never seemed precisely the same. Some new point was ever looming up, or flashing out--and yet they always realized one's best conceptions of beauty, grandeur, vastness, and sublimity.