Rocky Mountain Sam — page 24: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

at Eat ees : ' . KOCKY MOUNTAIN SAM. 15 to feel their influence, Presently there was a snapping of cloth and cords, the mighty air-bag trembled violently, and then plunged off in a slantwise direction so violently as to almost upset the car; which, however, almost directly righted, and there was a consciousness on the part of the balloonists of being carried through the atmosphere at a terrific speed. ‘“Hooray!” shouted Max, grasping the rudder in a steady position, ‘‘we’ve struck the current. Chuck out that smallest bag at your feet, Sam. We must get up well intoit. You see,” he explained, more calmly, ‘‘in rising to take advantage of this glorious current we must have drifted nearly a hundred miles to the eastward. We have to double back on that as well as make the original distance traversed by me in coming to your assistance. But we’re making fully ninety miles anhour. Ha! there is Fort Ben- ton, just below us; but we’re rapidly dropping it away from us,” cried Max, giving the crank a whirl and shouting with a sort of strange, demoniac glee, that was utterly devoid of mirth. ‘‘Hooray! this is the way I felt when I crossed the Atlantic from Havre to Rio Janiero in 1800. This is what I experienced when I explored the mysteries of the Antar- tic Ocean two years later,when I crossed the icy barriers to the warm sea beyond, where the waters become so hot that all the whales are boiled as red as lobsters, where at last the sea goes plunging into the great crater at the pole, and is lost in the fiery bowels of the earth. Hooray, hooray! this is life, this is the philosopher’s paradise.” Sam had seen him in these delirious eestasies before, and had always found them harmless; still 1t was not very sooth- ing to his finer feelings to be entirely unarmed, alone with even a wild-mannered lunatic, sixteen thousand feet above terra firma. But these enthusiastic ‘‘spells”’ of the old gentleman ap- peared to be of as brief duration as they were harmless. He soon quieted down, came out of his dream, with a jerk, as it were, and began to talk as rationally as at the outset. ‘‘We’re making splendid time, Sam,” said he, his eyes - still snapping with the excitement under which he had been laboring. ‘“There’s Crown Butte away off to the right, and Cadoutt’s Pass almost under us; and I think I see Silver Oity to the southward there, say fifty miles away. In _ half an hour we'll be over the Rockies, prepared to settle down Gomichboo (elo)