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Show /3 die private cool green shade. At the north end of the field I old look out over the tip of the mesa and see below me and two les away the town of Selig, a cluster of trees on the floor of the ley where on velvet lawns the town boys lolled in an eternal ss of nothing to do. But I couldn't really envy them, for diough ig was small, U.S. Highway 50 ran through it, crossed the nation m Washington to San Francisco via our Main Street, and the tit of the town called up the cities of the world glittering in my ams and ready to receive my indelible mark. Those dreams carried me back to the soudi end of the field, where ooked on south to the mountain range of the San Juans and iecially to the peak which dominated the range, Mt. Sneffels, t of a poor boy's Kilimanjaro. It didn't matter to me that it s lower than that other peak, which I'd never heard of, nor that top was not the House of God, a place which little interested me. lat did matter was that my grandfather had once run cattle in : San Juans, that this had been cattle country and where now I ;d corn had been the home ranch growing hay for the winter ding, that there had been a summer ranch under Sneffels with lothy hay and pastures and leased government range. Cattle, rses, cowboys-the wild West hating sheep and contemptuous ol mers-and my grandfather in a tall white hat, boots and spurs, le flaring chaps and mustaches curving out like the horns on bulls. Old Bill he was called when I was seven or eight before death, still with those wild white mustaches, and, since I associ- :d him with Wild Bill Hickok and Billy the Kid, one of my itasies had Billy not dying young at all but faking it and going ;it and he was my grandfather. In that same daguerreotype stood my father looking like a young >m Mix, and the two together looked capable of roping and tying d branding the world theirs. Apparently, when my father got ck from France and that first war, he thought so too, and our :tle empire was expanding to fit his dream when, in the twenties, th the rest of the economy booming, agriculture and my father nt into a spin, down. Now, gone the summer ranch and the vernment leases and the high mountain valleys, gone tlie white-red herds and the horses, and all that remained was the home rich turned farm, growing beans and potatoes and sugar beets and lier dirt farmer crops, and me in the corn. I wore Levis, of course, 229 |