Following a tortuous canyon route westward, they had emerged this morning onto the flat, level reaches of the famed South Park, a lush mountain valley thirty miles wide in some places, stretching for more than sixty miles north and south against the very base of the Continental Divide at a mean altitude of some eight thousand feet above sea level. The town of Fairplay lay at the extreme northern end of South Park, an isolated village perched on the lower slope of the Divide, cramped against the base of a secondary range on the north. There was a wagon road from Fairplay into Denver over which the smelted gold ore was transported to the mint, and for years there had been agitation for a railroad to connect the mining center with the larger city. Fairplay itself was small, with a resident population of not more than a thousand, but it was a hell-roaring town in its own right when the bearded miners came down from the hills to carouse and gamble and get rid of the high wages paid them for mucking gold out of the bowels of the towering peaks above the little town.
