“Sit still, ma’am,” said the doctor, sternly, for Mrs. Watson was wildly fumbling at the fastening of the door.  “Mary, put your arm round Mrs. Watson, and hold her tight.  There’ll be a real accident, sure as fate, if you don’t.”  Then in a gentler tone, “It’s only a buggy, ma’am; there’s plenty of room.  There’s no possible risk of a pedler’s wagon.  What on earth should a pedler be doing up here on the side of Cheyenne!  Prairie-dogs don’t use pomatum or tin-ware.”

“Oh, I didn’t know,” repeated poor Mrs. Watson, nervously.  She watched the buggy timorously till it was safely past; then her spirits revived.

“Well,” she cried, “we’re safe this time; but I call it tempting Providence to drive so fast on such a rough road.  If all canyons are as wild as this, I sha’n’t ever venture to go into another.”

“Bless me! this is one of our mildest specimens,” said Dr. Hope, who seemed to have a perverse desire to give Mrs. Watson a distaste for canyons.  “This is a smooth one; but some canyons are really rough.  Do you remember, Mary, the day we got stuck up at the top of the Westmoreland, and had to unhitch the horses, and how I stood in the middle of the creek and yanked the carriage round while you held them?  That was the day we heard the mountain lion, and there were fresh bear-tracks all over the mud, you remember.”

“Good gracious!” cried Mrs. Watson, quite pale; “what an awful place!  Bears and lions!  What on earth did you go there for?”

“Oh, purely for pleasure,” replied the doctor, lightly.  “We don’t mind such little matters out West.  We try to accustom ourselves to wild beasts, and make friends of them.”

“John, don’t talk such nonsense,” cried his wife, quite angrily.  “Mrs. Watson, you mustn’t believe a word the doctor says.  I’ve lived in Colorado nine years; and I’ve never once seen a mountain lion, or a bear either, except the stuffed ones in the shops.  Don’t let the doctor frighten you.”

But Dr. Hope’s wicked work was done.  Mrs. Watson, quite unconvinced by these well-meant assurances, sat pale and awe-struck, repeating under her breath,—­

“Dreadful!  What will Ellen say?  Bears and lions!  Oh, dear me!”

“Look, look!” cried Clover, who had not listened to a word of this conversation; “did you ever see anything so lovely?” She referred to what she was looking at,—­a small point of pale straw-colored rock some hundreds of feet in height, which a turn in the road had just revealed, soaring above the tops of the trees.

“I don’t see that it’s lovely at all,” said Mrs. Watson, testily.  “It’s unnatural, if that’s what you mean.  Rocks ought not to be that color.  They never are at the East.  It looks to me exactly like an enormous unripe banana standing on end.”

This simile nearly “finished” the party.  “It’s big enough to disagree with all the Sunday-schools in creation at once,” remarked the doctor, between his shouts, while even Clover shook with laughter.  Mrs. Watson felt that she had made a hit, and grew complacent again.