gold mines of Colorado.  Everybody seemed to be prospecting and staking gold claims.  He thought he saw his chance to get rich quickly, so he, too, began prospecting.  He very soon developed a great love for the mountains, and while you were a baby he used to go to Colorado Springs for his vacations.  His mind was very active, and as he became more closely acquainted with the mines he conceived an idea for a machine to roast gold ore by electricity.  In the winter evenings he would sit sketching its parts and dreaming over his plans.  Sometimes in his boyish enthusiasm he would assure me that he would yet be a rich man.”

“And what about his mine, mother; doesn’t that come into the story pretty soon?” “Yes, yes, but don’t hurry me, son.  It seems so very strange to be sitting here telling you all about him, for it seems to have happened so long, long ago.

“On one of his trips west he fell in with an old mountaineer named Kieser, Tad Kieser.  Tad became interested in his roasting machine, and they decided to locate claims together.  Tad was to put up the ’grub stakes,’ as they called it, for your father had no money except his salary.  All one fall, when he was not installing machinery, they explored the mountains south of Colorado Springs, especially along the old Stage Road to Cripple Creek, looking for suitable claims.  The old Stage Road was a steep, rocky mountain road over which they hauled provisions and passengers into the Cripple Creek district.

“Several miles from the city there was an old log hostelry—­’Wright’s Road House’ they called it.  Here lived a strange old man, a mountaineer of the oldest type.  Daddy Wright, they called him.  He and Tad were old friends, so your father became very well acquainted with him.  The stages to and from the gold camp always stopped at Dad’s; sometimes for a meal and sometimes for all night.  It was one of the delights of your father’s business trips to spend an evening with this old man in his rough mountain cabin, sitting before his crude stone fireplace smoking and listening to stories of the days of ‘forty-nine,’ when Dad had hunted for gold in the mountains of California.  Your father and Tad were both in the old road house the night it was burned and barely escaped with their lives.  He didn’t tell me about it until long afterwards.

“Tad and your father finally filed on two claims.  One was on Cheyenne Mountain, near Dad’s claims, and the other was somewhere near a mountain called Cookstove.  Your father thought that valley was the most beautiful spot he had ever seen.  He used to write me long letters describing the beautiful canyon and the falls, which was just a ribbon of water that trickled down the face of a monstrous granite boulder hundreds of feet in height.  He called it St. Marys Falls.  Here, somewhere in a hidden spot of this canyon, they found a strange outcropping of black rock which your father believed would lead to an extensive gold vein in the interior of the mountain.