It was by mere accident that I drifted in the evening to Squaw’s Gulch, and fell in there with an old prospector who was working out the assessment on his claim, and who offered me food and shelter in his cabin and a certain share in the mine if I would help at the work. When, finally, I left Cripple Creek, Créede was my next objective point. Down the mountain road in the direction of Cañon City I went, but I did not get so far as that on the first day’s march, for I was late in leaving Cripple Creek and darkness overtook me when some fifteen miles of the way yet remained. For some time I had been following an excellent road which wound through a charming valley in its easy descent to the plain. The valley narrowed presently, leaving but a few hundred yards between the steep sides of mountains, which hemmed it in. A stream was flowing swiftly along its rocky bed, and the evening winds were blowing with the sound of a low murmur among the pines as I pressed on in the darkness through the ankle-deep dust of the road. It was not a light that first attracted me, but the black bulk of a cabin that seemed to rise suddenly from the ground on my right. Soon I saw that it was occupied, and, going near, I found a side door wide open, with lamplight streaming from it into the night. For a moment I stood unnoticed in the doorway, and could see at a glance the heavy wooden table and the chairs and the large, old-fashioned cooking-stove, and the prints tacked to the walls, and the cooking utensils hanging behind the stove, which made up the furniture. The floor was of well-planed boards, which had been scrubbed white, and the whole room partook of the atmosphere of cool, wholesome cleanliness, characteristic of the best New England kitchens. And the figure that stood ironing at the table in the centre of the room was in perfect keeping with her surroundings. A tall woman, evidently past fifty, of strong, muscular frame, and with a face of high intelligence, wearing in repose an expression of sweetness and of lady-like serenity, which gives to the wrinkled faces of some women so high-bred and distinctive a grace. I knocked on the open door, and she looked up in no wise disturbed at sight of a stranger there. I explained my purpose and asked whether there was anything that I could do in payment of shelter and a breakfast. She drew out a chair from the wall and invited me to be seated, saying that we should consider that matter in the morning. For some time I sat talking with her, and while she ironed she conversed in an easy, natural manner, bred of the free life out here, which has in it all the charm of the directness and simplicity of a true woman of the world.