It Was Not
Wise To Go Up The Divide At All, And It Was Necessary To Do It In
Haste.
On my way down I spoke to the woman at whose cabin I had
dined, and she said, "I
Am sure you found Comanche Bill a real
gentleman"; and I then knew that, if she gave me correct
information, my intelligent, courteous companion was one of the
most notorious desperadoes of the Rocky Mountains, and the
greatest Indian exterminator on the frontier - a man whose father
and family fell in a massacre at Spirit Lake by the hands of
Indians, who carried away his sister, then a child of eleven.
His life has since been mainly devoted to a search for this
child, and to killing Indians wherever he can find them.
After riding twenty miles, which made the distance for that day
fifty, I remounted Birdie to ride six miles farther, to a house
which had been mentioned to me as a stopping place. The road
ascended to a height of 11,000 feet, and from thence I looked my
last at the lonely, uplifted prairie sea. "Denver stage road!"
The worst, rudest, dismallest, darkest road I have yet traveled
on, nothing but a winding ravine, the Platte canyon, pine crowded
and pine darkened, walled in on both sides for six miles by
pine-skirted mountains 12,000 feet high! Along this abyss for
fifty miles there are said to be only five houses, and were it
not for miners going down, and freight wagons going up, the
solitude would be awful.
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