Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/68

52 or the tenderer poetical growths. Rude men, roughed by the frontiers, they father a rude nomenclature. Devil's Slide, Fool's Peak, Shirt Tail Cañon, Yankee Jim's, Hang Town, such are the names which sprinkle the western mountain country, names given out of hand which cling on as a memory of an earlier day. Hell's Goblet might have been christened otherwise and more gently, perhaps more befittingly, but it never was.

It was a great granite bowl measuring some twenty-five or thirty feet across filled with eddy-churned, white, angry water, fed from a full stream which plunged down into it from the rocks above, which whipped at the troubled surface night and day, which had lashed the restless waters into white froth and flying spray throughout the ages. And as the stream hurled itself into the monster cup in a frenzied orgy of liquid flashing and thunderous sound, so did it pour itself out over the worn rim, to fall echoing into the pools below. If in the wide woods through which Steele had ridden there held the calm and peace of the solitude, then here was that other expression of the wilderness, the passionate heart of the wild itself.

"And here," mused Steele, his hat off, the cañon air stirring his hair, in his eyes the sombre tints of the forest, the glint of tumbling water, the cloudless blue of the sky, "do I begin my holiday. Thank God I went broke as soon as I did! Old goblet, fuss and fume and sputter and boil over all you please; you are mine now! Tonight you'll sing me to sleep, tonight we'll light up the stars for our candles while we use the world for a pillow! A royal welcome for your liege