Read Treasure Mountain (1972) for Free Online Page B

and it had to be something pretty positive or he wouldn't call me.
    Fanny seemed anxious to leave Orrin out of it, and she chatted away, telling stories about the French Quarter, the old homes, and the plantations. "I'd love to show you ours," she told me. "It is a lovely old place, magnificent oaks with long Spanish moss trailing from them, flowers, green lawns ... it is lovely!"
    "I'll bet it is," I said, and meant it. There were some beautiful places around, and as for me, if I had to be in a city, there was no place I'd rather be in than New Orleans ... if I had time on my hands. It had beauty and it had atmosphere, and as for the mean streets, well, they added color and excitement to the town.
    "You mentioned Colorado," Fanny said. "Where do you plan to live?"
    "Like I said, some of the boys have settled on the La Plata. That's pretty much down in the southwestern corner, just beyond the San Juans."
    Well, I'm too old a fisherman not to know when I'd had a nibble, and I had one.
    Just what it was about her expression I don't know, but I knew she was interested when I mentioned the San Juans.
    Now that's no little string of hills. There are fourteen peaks that go up fourteen thousand feet or more, and that's some of the most rugged country in the world. When it starts to snow back in there you either light a shuck and get out fast or you dig in for the winter.
    "What is it like? I have never seen a mountain."
    Well, I just looked at her, but I wasn't seeing her. I was seeing the La Plata River where it comes down from the mountain country, picking up little streams as it comes along, tumbling over the rocks, shaded by trees, chilled by the snow water, catching the color of the sky and the shadows of clouds. The stillness of beaver ponds, broken only by the widening V of a beaver swimming, mirroring the trunks of the aspen, catching the gold of the sun. Canyons quiet as the day after the earth was born, heights where the air was so clear the miles vanished and the faraway mountains of New Mexico showed themselves through the purple haze.
    "Ma'am," I said, "I don't know what it is you are wishful for in this life, but you set down of a night and you pray to God that he'll let you walk alone across a mountain meadow when the wild flowers are blooming.
    "You pray he'll let you set by a mountain stream with sunlight falling through the aspens, or that he'll let you ride across an above-timberline plateau with the strong bare peaks around you and the black thunderheads gathering around them--great, swelling rain clouds ready to turn the meadows into swamp in a minute or two ... you let him show you those things, ma'am, and you'll never miss heaven if you don't make it.
    "There's majesty in those peaks, ma'am, and grandeur in the clouds, and there's a far and wonderful beauty in the distance.
    "Have you never looked upon distance, ma'am? Have you never pulled up your horse where your trail drops off into a black, deep canyon? Brimful with darkness and shadow? Or seen a deer pause on the edge of a meadow and lift its head to look at you? Standing there still as the trees around you to watch it? Have you never seen the trout leaping in a still mountain lake? Ma'am, I have, and before God ... that's country!"
    For a moment she sat still, looking at me. "You are a strange man. Tell Sackett, and I don't believe I should know you long."
    She got up suddenly. "You would ruin me for what I want, and I'd ruin you because of what I am."
    "No, ma'am, I would not ruin you for what you want because all those things you want don't amount to anything. They are just little bits of fluff and window dressing that you think will make you look better in the eyes of folks.
    "You think maybe having a mite more money will build a wall around you to keep you from what's creeping up on you, but it won't. Out there where I come from, there's folks that want the same things you do and will go just as far to get them, but all of them wind up on the short