Jump to content

Page:Mythsandlegends03skingoog.pdf/206

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

Myths and Legends

the goal of posthumous delights. Hence the phrase in use to-day: "Poor Bill! He's gone over the divide."

The Indian's name of heaven"—the happy hunting ground"—is of similar significance, and among many of the tribes it had a definite place in the far Southwest, to which their souls were carried on cobweb floats. Just before reaching it they came to a dark river that had to be crossed on a log. If they had been good in the world of the living they suffered no harm from the rocks and surges, but if their lives had been evil they never reached the farther shore, for they were swept into a place of whirlpools, where, forever and ever, they were tossed on the torrent amid thousands of clinging, stinging snakes and shoals of putrid fish. From the far North and East the Milky Way was the star-path across the divide.

THE PHANTOM TRAIN OF MARSHALL PASS

SOON after the rails were laid across Marshall Pass, Colorado, where they go over a height of twelve thousand feet above the sea, an old engineer named Nelson Edwards was assigned to a train. He had travelled the road with passengers behind him for a couple of months and met with no accident, but one night as he set off for the divide he fancied that the silence was deeper, the canyon darker,

192