Meanwhile the pass was getting grander every moment; the brook was working its way deeper below the level of the road, while here and there in this sombre defile a splash of yellow aspen gleamed like living gold on the face of the precipice. The wild and beautiful gorge interested him in spite of himself; it disengaged his thoughts alike from his personal grievance, and from his dissatisfied contemplation of his own lack of proper vindictiveness. There was nothing grand like this in the neighborhood of the ranch. It was more like his father's description of the "Flume" and the "Notch," those natural wonders of the White Hills which Waldo Kean the elder liked to talk about. "When I was a boy over in New Hampshire," he used to say; and to the children it seemed as if "over in New Hampshire" could not be more than a day's journey from the ranch. [Illustration: "THE WILD AND BEAUTIFUL GORGE."] "When I was a boy over in New Hampshire," he would say, "I got it into my head that if I could only get away to a new place I sh'd get to be something big; and the farther away I got, the bigger I expected to be. Colorado was a territory then, 'n I thought, 'f I could only get out here they'd make me gov'nor's like 's not. 'N I do' know but what I'd have looked to be made President of the United States 'f I'd sighted the Pacific Ocean!" Then the shaggy, keen-eyed mountaineer who made so light of boyish expectations would knock the logs together and take a puff or two at his pipe before coming to the climax of his remarks, which varied according to the lesson he wished to inculcate. "It took me several years of wrastling with life," he was fond of saying, "to find out that it ain't so much matter _whar_ you be, as _what_ you be. 'N if I was you, Waldy,"--here was the application,--"I'd contrive to learn a little something on my own hook, before I aspired to go consorting with them as knows it all!" When, however, the time was ripe, and "Waldy," having fulfilled these conditions, was fairly off for college, the ranchman had signified his approval of his son's course by escorting him a few miles on his way. The boy had felt himself highly honored by the attention, yet when the time of parting came, it was with no such stricture about his throat as had taken him at unawares in the early morning, that he watched the tall form disappearing among the pine-trees. There was a certain self-sufficiency about the "old man,"--aged forty-five,--that precluded any embarrassing tenderness in one's relations with him.