As the days went on there was a subtle change in the party. Women, who had to be helped into their saddles at the beginning of the trip, swung into them easily. Waistbands were looser, eyes were clearer; we were tanned; we were calm with the large calmness of the great outdoors. And with each succeeding day the feeling of achievement grew. We were doing things and doing them without effort. To some of us the mountains had made their ancient appeal. Never again should we be clear of their call.

To those of us who felt all this inevitably in the future would come times when cities and even civilization itself would cramp.

I have traveled a great deal. The Alps have never held this lure for me. Perhaps it is because these great mountains are my own, in my own country. Cities call—I have heard them. But there is no voice in all the world so insistent to me as the wordless call of the Rockies. I shall go back. Those who go once always hope to go back. The lure of the great free spaces is in their blood.

We crossed many passes. Dawson Pass was the first difficult Rocky Mountain pass I had ever seen. There was a time when I had thought that a mountain pass was a depression. It is not. A mountain pass is a place where the impossible becomes barely possible. It is a place where wild game has, after much striving, discovered that it may get from one mountain valley to another. Along these game trails men have built new paths. Again and again we rode through long green valleys, the trail slowly rising until it had left timber far below. Then at last we confronted a great rock wall, a seemingly impassable barrier. Up this, by infinite windings, back and forward went the trail. At the top was the pass.

"I'm getting right tired," said Charley Russell, "of standing in a cloud up to my waist."

Each new pass brought a new vista of blue distance, of white peaks. Each presented its own problems of ascent or descent. No two were alike. Mountain-climbing is like marriage. Whatever else it may be, it is always interesting.

There was the day we went over the Cutbank Pass, with instructions to hold our horses' manes so that our saddles would not slip back. I shall never forget my joy at reaching the summit and the horror that followed when I found I was on a rocky wall about twenty feet wide which dropped a half-mile straight down on the other side to a perfectly good blue lake. There was Triple Divide. There was the Piegan Pass, where, having left the party for a time, I rode back to them on the pack-horse I have mentioned before, with my left foot dangling over eternity.

Triple Divide. The trail had just been completed, and ours was the first party after the trail-makers. I had expected to be the first woman on the top of Triple Divide. But when I arrived, panting and breathless and full of the exaltation of the moment, two girls were already there sitting on a rock. I shall not soon recover from the indignant surprise of that moment. Perhaps they never knew that they had taken the laurel wreath from my brow.

Triple Divide is really the culminating point of the continent. It is called Triple Divide because water flows from it into the Gulf of Mexico, into the Pacific Ocean, and into Hudson Bay.

There was the day when, on our way to Gunsight, we rode for hours along a trail that heavy rains had turned into black swamp. The horses struggled, constantly mired. It was the hardest day of the trip, not because of the distance, which was only thirty-five miles, but on account of the constant rocking in the saddle as our horses wallowed out of one "jack pot" into another—jack pots, I presume, because they are easy to get into and hard to get out of!

There was some grunting when at the end of that day we fell out of our saddles, but no complaining. That night, for the first time, the Eaton party slept under a roof at the Gunsight Chalet, on the shores of a blue lake. The Blackfoot Glacier was almost overhead. It was the end of a hot July, but we gathered around a fire that evening, and crawled in under heavy blankets to the quick sleep of fatigue.

One more pass, and we should be across the Rockies and moving down the Pacific Slope. The moon came up that night and shone on the ice-caps of the mountains all around us, on the glacier, on the Gunsight itself, appropriately if not beautifully named. As far up the mountain-side as the glacier our tired horses ranged for grass, and the tiny fire of the herder made a red glow that disappeared as the night mist closed down.

No "Come and get it" the next morning, but a good breakfast, nevertheless: a frosty morning, with the sun out, and the moving-picture man gone ahead to catch us as we climbed. There was another photographer who had joined the party. He had been up at dawn, on the chance of snapping a goat or two.

Late the next night, when after a hard day's ride we had reached civilization again at Lake Macdonald, and had dined and rested, the ambitious young man limped into the hotel on foot. For more than twenty miles he had tramped, carrying a heavy plate camera and extra plates. The zeal of the artist had made him careless. He left his horse untied, and it promptly followed the others.

Of the last part of that trip of his afoot I do not care to think. The trail, having scaled great heights, below the Sperry Glacier dropped sharply into the dense forest of the Pacific Slope. There were bears there. We saw seven at one time the next day, six black and one silver tip, on the very trail he had covered.

But he got the picture.

Once over the crest of the Gunsight, there was a change in the air. It blew about us, warm with the heat it had gathered in the South Pacific. Such animal life as the altitude permitted was out, basking in the sun. There were still snow-fields in the shadows, but they were not so numerous. The rocks threw back the sun-rays on to our burned faces. The trail dipped, climbed, dipped again. Here on a ledge was a cry, "Pack-train coming," and we halted to let pass by a train of men on horseback and of laden little burros, tidy and strong.

Climbing again, the trail was lost in the shale, and arrows painted on the rocks gave us the direction. Two lakes lay together below. One appeared from our elevation rather higher than the other. Rather higher! The rock wall that separated them was fourteen hundred feet high, and vertical.

As we began the last descent, the party grew silent. It was the last leg of the journey. A day or so more and we should be scattered over the continent on whose spine we were so incontinently tramping. Back to civilization, to porcelain bathtubs and course dinners and facial massage, to stays and skirts, to roofs and servants and the vast impedimenta of living.

Sperry Chalet and luncheon. No more the ham and coffee over a wood fire, the cutting of much bread on a flat stone. Here were tables, chairs, and linen. Alas, there was a waitress who crumbed the table and brought in dessert.

Back, indeed, with a vengeance. But only to the ways of civilization itself. All afternoon we went on, descending always, through the outriders of the forest to the forest itself. Dusk came, dusk in the woods, with strange soft paddings of unseen feet, with a gray light half-religious, half-faËry, that only those who penetrate to the hearts of great forests can know.

"It makes me think of death," some one said in a low tone. "Just a great shadow, no color. Nothing real. And silence, and infinite distance."

Then Lake Macdonald. We burst out of the forest on a run. The horses had known, by the queer instinct of horses, that just ahead would be oats and a corral and grass for the eating. They broke into a canter. The various things we had hung to ourselves during the long, slow progress over the mountain rattled and banged. We hung on in a kind of mad exultation. We had done it. We had crossed the Continental Divide, the Lewis Overthrust, whatever geographers choose to call it.

The trail led past a corral, past a vegetable garden such as our Eastern eyes had seldom seen. Under trees, around a corner at a gallop. Then the Glacier Hotel at Lake Macdonald, generally known as "Lewis's."

Soft winds from the Pacific blew across Lake Macdonald and warmed us. Great strawberries were ripening in the garden. Our horses got oats, all they could eat. In a pool in front of the hotel lazy trout drifted about.

There was good food. Again there were people dressed in civilized raiment, people who looked at us and our shabby riding-clothes with a disdain not unmixed with awe. There was fox-trotting and one-stepping, in riding-boots, with an orchestra. And that night at Lewis's they gave Howard Eaton a potlatch.

A potlatch is an Indian party. An Indian's idea of a party is to give away everything he possesses and then start all over again. That is one reason why our Indians are so poor to-day. We sat in a great lobby hung with Indian trophies and bearskins, sat in a circle with Howard Eaton in the center. There were a few speeches and some anecdotes. Then the potlatch went on.

There were hot fried trout, sandwiches, and chips of dried meat—buffalo and deer, I believe. There was beer. After that came the gifts. Everybody got something. Howard Eaton received a waistcoat made of spotted hide, and the women got necklaces of Indian beads. It was extraordinary, hospitable, lavish, and—Western. To have a party and receive gifts is one thing, but to have a party so you can give away things is another.