As early darkness came on I reached a familiar cañon that dropped down toward the valley where the ranch lay hidden. Drunkenly I staggered homeward, too exhausted to care what happened. The last three miles required three hours of heroic work. I became extremely weary and wanted nothing so much as to sink down in the snow and go to sleep; but I knew what that would mean, so I kept slapping and beating myself to keep awake. In the end I reached the ranch, pounded upon the door and, when it was opened, pitched headlong across its threshold. The Parson gazed down at me from his six feet of height. "Well," he said at length, "guess you found a pretty big world." CHAPTER FOUR DANCING ACROSS THE DIVIDE So new was the life, so fascinating the animals and elements of the primitive world, so miraculous was it that my lifelong dreams were come true, that I never thought of home-sickness, nor missed the comrades left behind me, although the Parson and his quiet wife were rather elderly companions for a youngster. There were, too, the diversions of going for the mail, either horseback or in the old spring wagon behind the steady, little mountain ponies, the swapping of yarns while waiting for the generally belated stage to dash up, its four horses prancing, and steaming, no matter how cold the weather, from the precipitous ups and downs of the mountain roads they had traveled. The return journey in the dusk or by moonlight was never without incident: porcupine, deer, bear, Bighorn, mountain lion--some kind of game invariably crossed my trail. And, as was true in all pioneer regions, the community abounded in interesting personalities. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the fame and fairness of the country had reached the centers of Eastern culture, and had lured the ambitious and the adventurous to try their skill in hunting and trapping and fishing in this Paradise, roamed over by big game, crossed by sparkling streams, alive with trout. Kit Carson was the first white man to look down upon its beautiful valleys. Others soon followed: Joel Estes, for whom the Park was eventually named; "Rocky Mountain Jim," a two-gun man, living alone with his dogs, looking like a bearded, unkempt pirate, taciturn, yet not without charm, as later events proved, unmolesting and unmolested, enveloped in a haze of respected mystery. There was also that noted lady globe-trotter, Miss Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman of undoubted refinement, highly educated--whose volume, "A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains," is one of the earliest and most picturesque accounts of that time--upon whom "Rocky Mountain Jim" exerted his blandishments. Some sort of romance existed between them, how serious no one knows, for the tragic shooting of Jim, by an irate pioneer father, cut short its development.