A Whisky Slave

A trapper passing last night brought us the news hat Mr. Nugent is ill; so, after washing up the things after our late breakfast, I rode to his cabin, but I met him in the gulch coming down to see us.  He said he had caught cold on the Range, and was suffering from an old arrow wound in the lung.  We had a long conversation without adverting to the former one, and he told me some of the present circumstances of his ruined life.  It is piteous that a man like him, in the prime of life, should be destitute of home and love, and live a life of darkness in a den with no companions but guilty memories, and a dog which many people think is the nobler animal of the two.  I urged him to give up the whiskey.  which at present is his ruin, and his answer had the ring of a sad truth in it “I cannot, it binds me hand and foot — I cannot give up the only pleasure I have.”  His ideas of right are the queerest possible.  He says that he believes in God, but what he knows or believes of God’s law I know not.  To resent insult with your revolver, to revenge yourself on those who have injured you, to be true to a comrade and share your last crust with him, to be chivalrous to good women, to be generous and hospitable, and at the last to die game — these are the articles of his creed, and I suppose they are received by men of his stamp.  He hates Evans with a bitter hatred, and Evans returns it having undergone much provocation from Jim in his moods of lawlessness and violence, and being not a little envious of the fascination which his manners and conversation have for the strangers who come up here.

On returning down the gulch the view was grander than I have ever seen it, the gulch in dark shadow, the Park below lying in intense sunlight, with all the majestic canyons which sweep down upon it in depths of infinite blue gloom, and above, the pearly peaks, dazzling in purity and glorious in form, cleft the turquoise blue of the sky.  How shall I ever leave this “land which is very far off”?  How can I ever leave it? is the real question.  We are going on the principle, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,” and the stores are melting away.  The two meals are not an economical plan, for we are so much more hungry that we eat more than when we had three.  He had a good deal of sacred music today, to make it as like Sunday as possible.  The “faint melancholy” of this winter loneliness is very fascinating How glorious the amber fires of the winter dawns are, and how gloriously tonight the crimson clouds descended just to the mountain-tops and were erected on the pure surface of the snow!  The door of this room looks due north, and as I write the Pole Star blazes, and a cold crescent moon hangs over the ghastliness of Long’s Peak.

I.L.B.