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Once an hour I descended to a hole far beneath by a rope ladder, life depending on a spike driven in the rock above and a secure handhold, for the handful of "pay dirt" two peons were grubbing down out of a lower veta, a long narrow alleyway of soft earth and small stones that stretched away into the interior of the mountain between solid walls of rock.

She wrote several short goodbye notes, one of which was written to my mother, which I reproduce here. I am grateful to think that at that critical moment she remembered me. Kara Youssouff. 29 February 1913. "Dearest Veta: We are under fire the projectiles are going over our heads, one just fell on the other side of our tents, and the ground is torn up before our eyes.

Most of the men who were gunning in Gunnison in the early 80's were fearless men, who, when a difference of opinion arose, faced each other and fought it out; but there had come to live at La Veta a thin, quiet, handsome fellow, who moved mysteriously in and out of the camp, slept a lot by day, and showed a fondness for faro by night. When a name was needed he signed "Buckingham."

He shouted, "Hullo, Bev! Why, what have you struck? Bless me, it's the little girl they're all hunting! She belongs to Miss Combs, it seems. Her mother died here the other day. Found her up the cañon, eh? They been all ranging north, thinking she'd taken after her pa. Maybe she thought he'd headed for La Veta pass? Looks sure 'nough bad, don't she?"

During that winter my mother moved from the country where we were living to Petersburg, and Nelka happened to be with us when this took place and took part in the moving. Here is some of the description of the event: Kovno 1914. "We followed the next day with a dog and a cat. Veta, Max and I with all the baggage, a parrot 'Tommy' and two small birds in separate cages.

They were the "ideas" of his fair daughter, many of whose hours were spent beneath their shade. To Don Ambrosio the sight of a great cavity in the earth, with huge quarries of quartz rock or scoria, and a rich "veta" at the back, was more agreeable than all the flowers in the world.

"It seems to me almost superfluous to comment any more on the sadness and pain of what occurred it is also just more and more and everywhere. The more one sees of life, the more frightened one is of being happy. I think life is just totally and absolutely inexplicable." "Veta has got a little apartment opposite the Lycee and Max hopes to get in January.

I am giving him English dictations and he is studying all day. Veta thinks of nothing else and wants to get him safely married at 21, which she thinks is the best thing for Russian men." Well, I was safely married at 21 but not with the approval of my mother who opposed my marriage to Nelka because of our age difference. Poustinka 1913.

I recalled this experience of my girlhood a few years ago when, in a luxurious palace car, a party of us wound up and over the Veta pass, an ascent of 2,439 feet in fourteen miles, and looking down the dizzy height, as the two powerful engines, puffing and snorting like living creatures, labored to reach the summit, I marvelled at the splendid triumph of genius and skill.

Max had all kinds of complications afterwards ending in an abscess in the ear. I looked after him for three days and nights and then Veta got up." Kovno 1914. "Every day I live the more insoluble everything seems and the more convinced I am of the insolubility of everything.