A Daughter of the Middle Border, page 129 by Hamlin Garland
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e had given to our brief wedding just the right touch of dignity, we were grateful to him. It was the kind of service which cannot be obtained by any fee.
At four o'clock we took a dusty, hesitating local train for the small town in Nebraska where we expected to catch the express for Colorado Springs. In such drab and unromantic fashion did Zulime Taft and Hamlin Garland begin their long journey together. "But wait!" I repeated. "Wait till you see the Royal Gorge and Shavano!"
CHAPTER TEN
The New Daughter and Thanksgiving
At about half-past seven of a clear November morning I called my bride to the car window and presented to her, with the air of a resident proprietor, a first view of Pike's Peak, a vast silver dome rising grandly above the Rampart Range. "Well, there it is," I remarked. "What do you think of it?"
Her cry of surprise and her words of delight were both entirely genuine. "Oh, how beautiful!" she exclaimed, as soon as she recovered breath.
It was beautiful. Snow covered, flaming like burnished marble, the range, with high summits sharply set against the cloudless sky, upreared in austere majesty, each bleak crag gilded with the first rays of the morning sun. Above the warm, brown plain the giants towered remotely alien like ancient kings on purple thrones, and the contrast of their gleaming drifts of snow, with the dry, grassy foothills through which we were winding our way, was like that of deep winter set opposite to early September. However, I would not permit Zulime to exhaust her vocabulary of admiration. "Keep some of your adjectives till we reach Ouray," I said with significant gravity.
Before the train came to a stop at the platform of Colorado Springs, I caught sight of the red, good-humored face of Gustave, coachman for Louis Ehrich, one of my Colorado friends. Gustave was standing beside the road wagon in which I had so often ridden, and when