Cowboys -- Fiction; Ranch life -- Fiction; Western stories; Wyoming -- Fiction
I had inquired much about Still Hunt Spring. Every man seemed to know of
it, but no man you talked with had been to it. Description of it always
came to me at second hand. Scipio I except; Scipio assured me he had
once been to it. It was no easy spot to find; a man might pass it close
and come back and pass it on the other side, yet never know it was at
his elbow: so they said. The Indians believed a supernatural thing about
it--that it was not there every day, and few of them would talk readily
about it; yet it was they who had first showed it to the white man. And
because they repeated concerning a valley two hundred feet deep, a mile
long, and a quarter-mile wide at its widest, this haunted legend of
presence and absence, its name now possessed my mind. Like a strain of
music it recurred to my thoughts each day of my November hunting in the
mountains of Wind River. Still Hunt Spring; down there, somewhere in
that drowsy distance, it lay. One trail alone led into it; from one end
of the secret ravine to the other--they said--grew a single file of
trees lank and tall as if they stood on stilts to see out over the top,
and at the further end was a spring, small, cold, and sweet; though it
welled up in the midst of sage-brush desert, there was no alkali--they
said--in that water. Still Hunt Spring!
That night I announced to my two camp companions my new project: next
summer I should see Still Hunt Spring for myself.
“Alone?” Scipio inquired.
“Not if you will come.”
“It is no tenderfoot’s trail.”
“Then if I find it I shall cease to be a tenderfoot.”
“Go on,” said Scipio, with indulgence. “We’ll not let you stay lost.”
“It is no tenderfoot’s place,” the cook now muttered.
“Then you have been there?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “I am in this country for my health,” he drawled. On
this a certain look passed between my companions, and a certain laugh. A
sudden suspicion came to me, which I kept to myself until next afternoon
when we had broken this camp where no game save health seemed plentiful,
and were down the mountains at Horse Creek and Wind River.
“I don’t believe there is any such place as Still Hunt Spring.”
This I said sitting with a company in the cabin known later on the
Postal Route map as Dubois. The nearest post-office then was
seventy-five miles away. No one spoke until a minute after, I suppose,
when a man slowly remarked: “Some call that place Blind Spring.”
He was presently followed by another, speaking equally slowly: “I’ve
heard it called Arapaho Spring.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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