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Updated: September 22, 2025
We're right where we were before." "Well, I'm going to get into that mill and look around, just the same," exclaimed John Ellison. "I'll do it some way." "Then you'll be committing trespass," said Lawyer Estes, cautiously. "I don't care," insisted the boy. "I won't be doing any harm. I'm not going to touch anything that isn't ours. But I'm going to look."
"I am here at your grandmother's request, Mistress Mary," I said. Then my Lord Estes came elbowing me aside, and made no more of me than if I were a black slave, and hoarsely shouting for the sedan chairs and the bearers, and after him Ralph Drake and half a score of others, and all cursing at me for a convict tutor and thrusting at me.
We return up the silent stairs, I carry a bottle of Pommery and a milkjug for you shall revel, too, Polyphemus; and as I have forgotten to bring a saucer, you shall drink, as no cat has drunk before, from an old precious platter bearing the arms of the Estes of Ferrara over which Lucrezia Borgia laughed when the world was young. It is a pity cats don't drink champagne.
Some days later, following a protracted visit on the part of Lawyer Estes to the Half Way House, there emerged from the doorway of the same, at evening, a portly person that could not be mistaken. He brought out the horse from the barn, harnessed it to a carriage, and drove away down the road at a furious pace. The next day, Colonel Witham was missing from the inn and from Benton.
Most of the lost are found, but a few persons have vanished never to be seen again. The Reverend Sampson disappeared supposedly somewhere along the Continental Divide between Estes Park and Grand Lake, and though parties made up of guides, rangers and settlers searched for more than a week, they found no trace of the missing man.
Then truly that temper of mine, which I have had some cause to lament, and yet I know not if it be aught I can help, it being seemingly as beyond the say of my own will as the recoil of a musket or the rebound of a ball, sent me forth into the midst of that gallant throng, and I would not say for certain, but at this late date I am inclined to believe that I saw Ralph Drake, who came in my way with a storm of curses, raising himself sorely from a pool of mud, which must have worked havoc with his velvets, and my Lord Estes struggling forth from a thorny rose bush at the gate, with much rending of precious laces.
At all events, when on a certain day the droning of the mill told that its wheels had resumed their interrupted grinding, there might have been seen, within, the burly form of Colonel Witham, moving about as one with authority. Short, curt were his answers. There was little to be made out of him by Lawyer Estes or anyone else. What was his business was his and nobody else's.
Toward noon I came to the ranch I sought, located nine miles from the nearest neighbor, at nine thousand feet altitude, and surrounded by rugged mountains. Above it rose Long's Peak, up and up into the clouds, to more than fourteen thousand feet. The rancher was the Reverend E. J. Lamb, one of the early settlers of Estes Park.
But when I plumped the question squarely at Estes he had nothing to say except that the jewel had been slipped into his hand while he stood looking into a shop-window. Where it came from he did not know; what it meant he either could not or would not tell. So I had to drop the subject for the time. But it came up again of its own accord four days later, the exact date being May 15th.
And Heyl had answered, in his quiet, reassuring way: "Some day that feeling will get too strong for you. When that time comes get on a train marked Denver. From there take another to Estes Park. That's the Rocky Mountains, where the horizon lives and has its being. Ask for Heyl's place. They'll hand you from one to the other. I may be there, but more likely I shan't.
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