[A Ball Player’s Career by Adrian C. Anson]@TWC D-Link book
A Ball Player’s Career

CHAPTER XIX
3/8

Breakfast over we resumed our ride, turning off into a little valley a mile below the hotel that formed the rear entrance to the Garden of the Gods.

The sandstone formation here was of the most peculiar character and the ladies of the party went into ecstasy over "Punch and Judy," "The Balanced Rock," "The Mushroom Rock," "The Duck," "The Frog," "The Lady of the Garden," and the "Kissing Camels." The great sandstone rocks that form the gateway come in for their share of admiration and I think we could still have found something to look at and admire had we remained there for a month instead of for the brief time that was at our disposal.
That one morning's experience did more to convince me than anything else that there is no use for the American to travel in search of scenery, as he has some of the grandest in the world right here in his own country.
After admiring the many remarkable things that were to be seen there we made on through the gateway down the valley and then to the summit of the hill, some two miles in height.

Here we debouched on to a little plateau, from which we obtained a magnificent view of Pike's Peak crowned with its eternal snows; Cheyenne Mountains, looking dark and sullen by contrast, and the ranges of the Rocky Mountains that upraised themselves twenty-five miles away, and yet seemed but a few miles distant.
That cross-eyed sorrel of mine had persisted in taking me off on a cattle herding exhibition not long after we had left the Springs, and at Manitou I had turned him over to the tender mercies of Bob Pettit, who had more experience in that line than I had, and in whose hands he proved to be a most tractable animal--in fact, quite the pick of the bunch, which goes to show that things are not always what they seem, horses and gold bricks being a good deal alike in this respect.

Mark Baldwin's mustang proved to be a finished waltzer, and after the saddle-girth had been broken and Mark had been deposited at full length in the roadway, he turned his animal over to Sullivan, who soon managed to become his master.
It was a morning filled with trials and tribulations, but we finally turned up at Colorado Springs with no bones broken, and so considered that we were in luck.

The Denver and Rio Grande people had promised to hold the train an hour for our accommodation, but greatly to our surprise word came to us right in the middle of the game that we had but fifteen minutes in which to catch the train, and so we were obliged to cut the game short and make tracks for the depot.
The exhibition that we put up in the presence of that crowd of 1,200 people at Colorado Springs was a miserable one, the rarefied air being more to blame for it than anything else, and when we stopped play at the end of the sixth inning with the score at 16 to 9 in our favor I could hardly blame the crowd for jeering at us.


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