to our island and talked over the whole project of the Enchanted
Bluff, renewing our resolution to find it.


Although that was twenty years ago, none of us have ever
climbed the Enchanted Bluff. Percy Pound is a stockbroker in
Kansas City and will go nowhere that his red touring car cannot
carry him. Otto Hassler went on the railroad and lost his foot
braking; after which he and Fritz succeeded their father as the
town tailors.

Arthur sat about the sleepy little town all his life--he died
before he was twenty-five. The last time I saw him, when I was
home on one of my college vacations, he was sitting in a steamer
chair under a cottonwood tree in the little yard behind one of the
two Sandtown saloons. He was very untidy and his hand was not
steady, but when he rose, unabashed, to greet me, his eyes were as
clear and warm as ever. When I had talked with him for an hour and
heard him laugh again, I wondered how it was that when Nature had
taken such pains with a man, from his hands to the arch of his long
foot, she had ever lost him in Sandtown. He joked about Tip
Smith's Bluff, and declared he was going down there just as soon as
the weather got cooler; he thought the Grand Canyon might be worth
while, too.

I was perfectly sure when I left him that he would never get
beyond the high plank fence and the comfortable shade of the
cottonwood. And, indeed, it was under that very tree that he died
one summer morning.