About an hour and a half before daylight we
were bowling along smoothily over the road - so smoothly that our cradle
only rocked in a gentle, lulling way, that was gradually soothing us to
sleep and dulling our conciousness - when something gave way under us! We
were dimly aware of it, but indifferent to it. The coach stopped. We heard
the driver and the conductor talking together outside, and rummaging for a
lantern, and swearing because they could not find it - but we had no
interest in whatever had happened, and it only added to our comfort to think
of those people out there at work in the murky night, and we snug in our
nest with the curtains drawn. But presently, by the sounds, there seemed to
be an examination going on, and then the driver's voice said:
"By George, the thoroughbrace is broke!"
This startled me broad awake - as an
undefined sense of calamity is always apt to do. I said to Myself: "Now, a
thoroughbrace is probably part of a horse; and doubtless a vital part, too,
from the dismay in the driver's voice. Leg, maybe - and yet how could he
break his leg waltzing along such a road as this? No, it can't be his leg.
That is impossible, unless he was reaching for the driver. Now, what can be
the thoroughbrace of a horse, I wonder? Well, whatever comes, I shall not
air my ignorance in this crowd, anyway."
Just then the conductor's face appeared at a
lifted curtain, and his lantern glared in on us and our wall of mail matter.
He said: "Gents, you'll have to turn out a spell. Thoroughbrace is broke."
We climbed out into a chill drizzle, and felt
ever so homeless and dreary. When I found that the thing they called a "thoroughbrace"
was the massive combination of belts and springs which the coach rocks
itself in, I said to the driver:
"I never saw a thoroughbrace used up like
that, before, that I can remember. How did it happen?"
"Why, it happened by trying to make one coach
carry three days' mail - that's how it happened," said he. "And right here
is the very direction which ic wrote on all the newspaper-bags which was to
be put out for the Injuns for to keep 'em quiet. It's most uncommon lucky,
becuz it's so nation dark I should 'a' gone by unbeknowns if that air
thoroughbrace hadn't broke."
I knew that he was in labor with another of
those winks of his, though I could not see his face, because he was bent
down at work; and wishing him a safe delivery, I turned to and helped the
rest get out the mail-sacks. It made a great pyramid by the roadside when it
was all out. When they had mended the thoroughbrace we filled the two boots
again, but put no mail on top, and only half as much inside as there was
before. The conductor bent all the seat-backs down, and then filled the
coach just half full of mail-bags from end to end. We objected loudly to
this, for it left us no seats. But the conductor was wiser than we, and said
a bed was better than seats, and moreover, this plan would protect his
thoroughbraces. We never wanted any seats after that. The lazy bed was
infinitely preferable. I had many an exciting day, subsequently, lying on it
reading the statutes and the dictionary, and wondering how the characters
would turn out.
The conductor said he would send back a guard
from the next station to take charge of the abandoned mail-bags, and we
drove on.
It was now just dawn; and as we stretched our
cramped legs full length on the mail sacks, and gazed out through the
windows across the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist, to
where there was an expectant look in the eastern horizon, our perfect
enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. The stage
whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping curtains and suspended
coats in a most exhiliarating way; the cradle swayed and swung luxuriously,
the pattering of the horses' hoofs, the cracking of the driver's whip, and
his "Hi-Yi! g'lang!" were music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees
appeared to give us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look
after us with interest, or envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the
pipe of peace and compared all this luxury with the years of tiresome city
life that had gone before it, we felt that there was only one complete and
satisfying happiness in the world, and we had found it.
PAGE 10
After breakfast, at some station whose name I
have forgotten, we three climbed up on the seat behind the driver, and let
the conducter have our bed for a nap. And by and by, when the sun made me
drowsy, I lay down on my face on top of the coach, grasping the slender iron
railing, and slept for an hour or more. That will give one an appreciable
idea of those matchless roads. Instinct will make a sleeping man grip a fast
hold of the railing when the stage jolts, but when it only swings and sways,
no grip is necessary. Overland drivers and conductors used to sit in their
places and sleep thirty or forty minutes at a time, on good roads, while
spinning along at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour. I saw them do it,
often. There was no danger about it; a sleeping man will seize in time when
the coach jolts. These men were hard worked, and it was not possible for
them to stay awake all the time.
By and by we passed through Marysville, and
over the Big Blue and Little Sandy; thence about a mile, and entered
Nebraska. About a mile further on, we came to the Big Sandy -one hundred and
eighty miles from St. Joseph.
As the sun was going down, we saw the first
specimen of an animal known familiarly over two thousand miles of mountain
and desert - from Kansas clear to the Pacific Ocean - as the "jackass
rabbit." He is well named. He is just like any other rabbit, except that he
is from one third to twice as large, has longer legs in proportion to his
size, and has the most preposterous ears that ever were mounted on any
creature but a jackass. When he is sitting quiet, thinking about his sins,
or is absentminded or unapprehensive of danger, his majestic ears project
above him conspicuously; but the breaking of a twig will scare him nearly to
death, and then he tilts his ears back gently and starts for home. All you
can see, then, for the next minute, is his long gray form stretched out
straight and "streaking it" through the low sage-brush, and scores a leap
that would make a horse envious. Presently he comes down to a long, graceful
"lope," and shortly he mysteriously disappears. He has crouched behind a
sage-brush, and will sit there and listen and tremble until you get within
six feet of him, when he will get under way again. But one must shoot at
this creature once, if he wishes to see him throw his heart into his heels,
and do the best he knows how. He is frightened clear through, now, and he
lays his long ears down on his back, straightens himself out like a
yard-stick every spring he makes, and scatters miles behind him with an easy
indifference that is enchanting.
Our party made this specimen "hump himself," as
the conductor said. The secretary started him with a shot from the Colt; I
commenced spitting at him with my weapon; and all in the same instant the
old "Allen's" whole broadside let go with a rattling crash, and it is not
putting it too strong to say that the rabbit was frantic! He dropped his
ears, set up his tail, and left for San Francisco at a speed which can only
be described as a flash and a vanish! Long after he was out of sight we
could hear him whiz.
I don not remember where we first came across
"sage-brush," but as I have been speaking of it I may as well describe it.
This is easily done, for if the reader can
imagine a gnarled and venerable live oak-tree reduced to a little shrub two
feet-high, with its rough bark, its foliage, its twisted boughs, all
complete, he can picture the 'sage-brush" exactly. Often, on lazy afternoons
in the mountains, I have lain on the ground with my face under a sage-brush,
and entertained myself with fancying that the gnats among its foliage were
lilliputian birds, and that the ants marching and countermarching about its
base where lilliputian flocks and herds, and myself some vast loafer from
Brobdignag waiting to catch a little citizen and eat him.
PAGE 11
It is an imposing monarch of the forest in
exquisite miniature, is the "sage-brush." Its foliage is a grayish green,
and gives that tint to desert and mountain. It smells like our domestic
sage, and 'sage tea" made from it taste like the sage-tea which all boys are
so well acquainted with. The sage-brush is a singularly hardy plant, and
grows right in the midst of deep sand, and among barren rocks, where nothing
else in the vegetable world would try to grow, except "bunch-grass." -
{"Bunch-grass" grows on the bleak mountainsides of Nevada and neighboring
territories, and offers excellent feed for stock, even in the dead of
winter, wherever the snow is blown aside and exposes it; notwithstanding its
unpromising home, bunch-grass is a better and more nutritious diet for
cattle and horses than almost any other hay or grass that is known -so
stockmen say.} - The sage-brushes grow from three to six or seven feet
apart, all over the mountains and deserts of the Far West, clear to the
borders of California. There is not a tree of any kind in the deserts, for
hundreds of miles - there is no vegetation at all in a regular desert,
except the sage-brush and its cousin the "grease-wood," which is so much
like the sage-brush that the difference amounts to little. Camp-fires and
hot suppers in the deserts would be impossible but for the friendly
sage-brush. Its trunk is as large as a boy's wrist (and from that up to a
man's arm), and is crooked branches are half as large as its trunk - all
good, sound, hard wood, very like oak.
When a party camps, the first thing to be done
is to cut sage-brush; and in a few minutes there is an opulent pile of it
ready for use. A hole a foot wide, two feet deep, and two feet long, is dug,
and sage-brush chopped up and burned in it till it is full to the brim with
glowing coals. Then the cooking begins, and there is no smoke, and
consequently no swearing. Such a fire will keep all night, with very little
replenishing; and it makes a very sociable camp-fire, and one around which
the most impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive, and
profoundly entertaining.
Sage-brush is very fair fuel, but as a
vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it
but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule. But their testimony to
its nutritiousness is worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or
anthracite coal, or brass fillings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or
anything that comes handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they
had had oysters for dinner. Mules and donkeys and camels have appetites that
anything will relieve temporarily, but nothing satisfy.
In Syria, once, at the head waters of the
Jordan, a camel took charge of my overcoat while the tents were being
pitched, and examined it with a critical eye, all over, with as much
interest as if he had an idea of getting one made like it; and then, after
he was done figuring on it as an article of diet. He put his foot on it, and
lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it,
gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a
kind of religious ecstasy, as if he has never tasted anything as good as an
overcoat before, in his life. Then he smacked his lips once or twice, and
reached after the other sleeve. Next he tried the velvet collar, and smiled
a smile of such contentment that it was plain to see that it was plain to
see that he regarded that as the daintiest thing about an overcoat. The
tails went next, along with some percussion caps and cough candy, and some
fig-paste from Constantinople. And then my newspaper correspondence dropped
out, and he took a chance in that - manuscript letters written for the home
papers. But he was treading on dangerous ground, now. He began to come
across solid wisdom in those documents that was rather weighty on his
stomach; and occasionally he would take a joke that would shake him up till
it loosened his teeth; it was getting to be perilous times with him, but he
held his grip with good courage and hopefully, till at last he began to
stumble on statements that not even a camel could swallow with impunity. He
began to gag and gasp, and his eyes to stand out, and his forelegs to
spread, and in about a quarter of a minute he fell over as stiff as a
carpenter's work-bench, and died a death of indescribable agony. I went and
pulled the manuscript out of his mouth, and found that the sensitive
creature had choked to death on one of the mildest and gentlest statements
of fact that I ever laid before a trusting public.
I was about to say, when diverted from my
subject, that occasionally one finds sage-brushes five or six feet high, and
with a spread of branch and foliage in proportion, but two or two and a half
feet is the usual height.