"Let's stop and have our fortunes told!" cried Miss Dangerfield, but my employer vetoed that proposition. It was a vivid flash of colour. The brightly painted wagons with their canvas tops, the red-shirted men, black of hair and eyes, olive of skin, and graceful in their laziness; the older women bare-headed, bent of shoulder, and brilliantly shrouded in shawls; the younger women straight as arrows, bold and keen of glance, and decked in ribbons and jewelry, and on every hand swarms of gipsy children, more or less clothed. The blue smoke of their camp-fires twisted through the dark green of the fir trees in the background.
Again the forest closed upon us. The grade became steeper, and in places our road had been blasted through solid rock. And then we reached the summit of this ridge, and like a flash the superb panorama of the Hudson burst upon us. At our feet lay the broad bosom of the Tappan Zee, its waters glistening in the sunlight, the spires of a village in the foreground, and the distance blue-girt with cliffs, hills, and mountains.
I have seen it a thousand times, but it is ever new.
"Stop; Jacques Henri!" commanded Miss Harding, and I stopped.
"What's the matter?" asked Harding. "Something busted?"
"We're going to sit right here a minute or more and admire this," declared Miss Harding.
"Great; isn't it?" admitted Harding. "Who owns it, Smith? Does it cost anything to look at it?"
"First time I've got something for nothing since I struck New York," was the comment of that gentleman.
Four or five miles across the Tappan Zee the blue of the mountain was splattered with the white of straggling houses. To the left was a checker-board of farms, an area hundreds of square miles in extent basking in the rays of a cloudless sun. Yet beyond, the Orange mountains lifted their rounded slopes. To the south was the grim line of the Palisades, blue-black save where trees clung to their steep sides. On the north Hook Mountain dipped its feet into the Hudson, and to our ears came the dull boom of explosions where vandals are blasting away its sides and ruining its beauty.
"Right over there," said Carter, pointing toward Piermont, "is where André landed when he crossed the river on the mission to Benedict Arnold which ended in his capture and death. Beyond the mountain is the monument which marks the spot where he met with what our school books term 'an untimely fate.'"