About two miles below Windy Point I had the good luck to overtake a miner, who had been spending Sunday with his family near Colorado Springs and was now on his way back to work in Cripple Creek. He was not at all encouraging as to the prospect of my finding work in the camp, but before we parted at Windy Point he gave me careful directions about the way, and I began to feel, in his calling me “partner” and in his talk of “claims” and “gulches” and “blazed trails,” my first intimation of nearing the mining regions of the Rockies. We separated where the cog-road sweeps around the southern side of the mountain, only because I was bent on reaching the summit before going on to Cripple Creek. All the difficulty of the ascent I found concentrated in the last hour of climbing. It no longer was a matter of steady uphill work, but a succession of short spurts wherein one breathed more by accident than design. You were not tired in the least, but, at an altitude of some 14,000 feet, your breath failed completely in an upward walk of fifty yards, and you were obliged to stand still, panting until respiration became normal again. Exactly at twelve o’clock I reached the summit, where I found a piercing cold wind blowing and small drifts of snow lying in crevices among the rocks on the northern slope; in an air as clear as crystal my eye swept boundless mountain-ranges to the north and west and south and a boundless plain below, where, at the foot of the mountain, lay Colorado Springs, a few, dim squares formed by the intersection of faint parallel lines at right angles to one another. Above the rushing of the wind among the grim, naked crags which form the summit, a wind, which at that solemn height suggests the sweep of awful interstellar spaces, the only sound I heard was the voice of an attendant in a stone building near by as he sang, again and again, the chorus of “Ta, ra, ra, ra, boom, de ay!” I remained at the summit as long as I dared, held by the fascination of the view; then I returned to Windy Point and went down the south face of the mountain and across a beautiful grass-grown level to the brink of another descent, where, according to my miner friend of the morning, I should find a blazed trail. I found instead the sheer side of a cañon. I followed the brink of the precipice for some distance, and coming at last upon a less abrupt point, I plunged down and made my way over shelving rock and fallen trees until I eventually chanced upon the trail. This I followed to the deep bed of the cañon, where I saw some claims staked out and lost my way in a tangle of cattle trails. It was growing dark, and there was no sign of the journey’s end, but I knew the general direction of Cripple Creek, and the moon was at its first quarter.