Page:A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).djvu/291

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LETTER XV.
THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS.
259

hang about while the men hauled it up and fixed it, so I went slowly back, encountering Mr. Nugent in a most bitter mood—almost in an "ugly fit"—hating everybody, and contrasting his own generosity and reckless kindness with the selfishness and carefully-weighed kindnesses of others. People do give him credit for having "as kind a heart as ever beat." Lately a child in the other cabin was taken ill, and though there were idle men and horses at hand, it was only the "desperado" who rode sixty miles in "the shortest time ever made" to bring the doctor. While we were talking he was sitting on a stone outside his den mending a saddle, skins, bones, and skulls lying about him, "Ring" watching him with jealous and idolatrous affection, the wind lifting his thin curls from as grand a head as was ever modelled—a ruin of a man. Yet the sun which shines "on the evil and the good" was lighting up the gold of his hair. May our Father which is in heaven yet show mercy to His outcast child!

Mr. Kavan soon overtook me, and we had an exciting race of two miles, getting home just before the wind fell and the snow began.

Thanksgiving Day. The thing dreaded has come at last, a snowstorm, with a north-east wind. It ceased about midnight, but not till it had covered my bed. Then the mercury fell below zero, and everything froze. I melted a tin of water for washing by