“But there’s my son John that keeps store in West Cliff”--and it was beautiful to see her face light up--“no woman ever had a better son than him. He’s been like a father to the family. I don’t know what we’d ever have done without him, for he’s been the greatest help to us in all our troubles.” They urged me to stay longer on Friday morning, but the day was perfectly clear and patches of dry ground had begun to appear through the snow, and so I set out early, hoping to cover before night most of the distance to the entrance of Musa Pass, which leads from Green Mountain Valley over the Sangre De Cristo Range to the San Luis country. I accomplished it comfortably, and early on the next morning made my way into the pass. The snow lay deep about the entrance, and it deepened as I climbed the range, but a party of prospectors had just come over the trail as I started in, and it was a simple matter to walk in the path which their burros had made through the snow. The prospectors did me another unconscious service, for when I met them two of the five men were suffering keenly from snow blindness, and, taking warning, I tore a strip from a coarse cotton handkerchief and bound it around my eyes, in a way that interfered very little with vision and yet acted as an adequate protection from the blinding glare of the sunlight on the snow. That night I reached a Mormon’s ranch well in the San Luis Valley. It was a matter of easy marching after that, for the snow was all gone in a day or two and I had only to walk by way of Alamosa and Monte Vista and Del Norte to the Wagon Wheel Gap region and so up to Créede. I was much disappointed there in not finding work in the mines. Numbers of them were in operation, and there were large gangs of men employed, but there were plenty of experienced hands about, and nothing whatever in the mines for a raw tenderfoot to do. Still I had no difficulty, for at the very first asking I got work with a gang which was cutting a new road down Bachelor Mountain from the New York Chance Mine to Créede. And so, while not a member of a mining crew, I was a member of one which contained many miners, and I lived in the camp on Bachelor Mountain with scores of the men from the New York Chance and the Amethyst Mines. I fell in eventually with a group of truest Bohemians, a mine superintendent of the best type, and a magnificent chap who was an engineer and surveyor and whom I liked best of all, and a young Harvard-bred barrister who was on the high road to being the District Attorney, and a newspaper editor. I cannot now recall how I came to be one of their number, it was done so quickly and naturally; but I was suddenly aware that I had been accepted as such, and all that belonged to my new-found friends was mine, and the engineer and barrister and I were sleeping three in a bed.