Roughing It
his clothes, snatching at things to save himself, taking hold of trees
and fetching them along with him, roots and all, starting little rocks
now and then, then big boulders, then acres of ice and snow and patches
of forest, gathering and still gathering as he goes, adding and still
adding to his massed and sweeping grandeur as he nears a three thousand-
foot precipice, till at last he waves his hat magnificently and rides
into eternity on the back of a raging and tossing avalanche!
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This is all very fine, but let us not be carried away by excitement, but
ask calmly, how does this person feel about it in his cooler moments
next day, with six or seven thousand feet of snow and stuff on top of
him?
We crossed the sand hills near the scene of the Indian mail robbery and
massacre of 1856, wherein the driver and conductor perished, and also
all the passengers but one, it was supposed; but this must have been a
mistake, for at different times afterward on the Pacific coast I was
personally acquainted with a hundred and thirty-three or four people who
were wounded during that massacre, and barely escaped with their lives.
There was no doubt of the truth of it—I had it from their own lips. One
of these parties told me that he kept coming across arrow-heads in his
system for nearly seven years after the massacre; and another of them
told me that he was struck so literally full of arrows that after the
Indians were gone and he could raise up and examine himself, he could
not restrain his tears, for his clothes were completely ruined.
The most trustworthy tradition avers, however, that only one man, a
person named Babbitt, survived the massacre, and he was desperately
wounded. He dragged himself on his hands and knee (for one leg was
broken) to a station several miles away. He did it during portions of
two nights, lying concealed one day and part of another, and for more
than forty hours suffering unimaginable anguish from hunger, thirst and
bodily pain. The Indians robbed the coach of everything it contained,
including quite an amount of treasure.
CHAPTER IX.
We passed Fort Laramie in the night, and on the seventh morning out we
found ourselves in the Black Hills, with Laramie Peak at our elbow
(apparently) looming vast and solitary—a deep, dark, rich indigo blue in
hue, so portentously did the old colossus frown under his beetling brows
of storm-cloud. He was thirty or forty miles away, in reality, but he
only seemed removed a little beyond the low ridge at our right. We
breakfasted at Horse-Shoe Station, six hundred and seventy-six miles out
from St. Joseph. We had now reached a hostile Indian country, and during
the afternoon we passed Laparelle Station, and enjoyed great discomfort
all the time we were in the neighborhood, being aware that many of the
trees we dashed by at arm’s length concealed a lurking Indian or two.
During the preceding night an ambushed savage had sent a bullet through
the pony-rider’s jacket, but he had ridden on, just the same, because
pony-riders were not allowed to stop and inquire into such things except
when killed. As long as they had life enough left in them they had to
stick to the horse and ride, even if the Indians had been waiting for
them a week, and were entirely out of patience. About two hours and a
half before we arrived at Laparelle Station, the keeper in charge of it
had fired four times at an Indian, but he said with an injured air that
the Indian had “skipped around so’s to spile everything—and ammunition’s
blamed skurse, too.” The most natural inference conveyed by his manner
of speaking was, that in “skipping around,” the Indian had taken an
unfair advantage.
The coach we were in had a neat hole through its front—a reminiscence of
its last trip through this region. The bullet that made it wounded the
driver slightly, but he did not mind it much. He said the place to keep
a man “huffy” was down on the Southern Overland, among the Apaches,
before the company moved the stage line up on the northern route. He
said the Apaches used to annoy him all the time down there, and that he
came as near as anything to starving to death in the midst of abundance,
because they kept him so leaky with bullet holes that he “couldn’t hold
his vittles.” This person’s statements were not generally believed.
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We shut the blinds down very tightly that first night in the hostile
Indian country, and lay on our arms. We slept on them some, but most of
the time we only lay on them. We did not talk much, but kept quiet and
listened. It was an inky-black night, and occasionally rainy. We were
among woods and rocks, hills and gorges—so shut in, in fact, that when
we peeped through a chink in a curtain, we could discern nothing. The
driver and conductor on top were still, too, or only spoke at long
intervals, in low tones, as is the way of men in the midst of invisible
dangers. We listened to rain-drops pattering on the roof; and the
grinding of the wheels through the muddy gravel; and the low wailing of
the wind; and all the time we had that absurd sense upon us, inseparable
from travel at night in a close-curtained vehicle, the sense of
remaining perfectly still in one place, notwithstanding the jolting and
swaying of the vehicle, the trampling of the horses, and the grinding of
the wheels. We listened a long time, with intent faculties and bated
breath; every time one of us would relax, and draw a long sigh of relief
and start to say something, a comrade would be sure to utter a sudden
“Hark!” and instantly the experimenter was rigid and listening again. So
the tiresome minutes and decades of minutes dragged away, until at last
our tense forms filmed over with a dulled consciousness, and we slept,
if one might call such a condition by so strong a name—for it was a
sleep set with a hair-trigger. It was a sleep seething and teeming with
a weird and distressful confusion of shreds and fag-ends of dreams—a
sleep that was a chaos. Presently, dreams and sleep and the sullen hush
of the night were startled by a ringing report, and cloven by _such_ a
long, wild, agonizing shriek! Then we heard—ten steps from the stage—
“Help! help! help!” [It was our driver’s voice.]
“Kill him! Kill him like a dog!”
“I’m being murdered! Will no man lend me a pistol?”
“Look out! head him off! head him off!”
[Two pistol shots; a confusion of voices and the trampling of many feet,
as if a crowd were closing and surging together around some object;
several heavy, dull blows, as with a club; a voice that said
appealingly, “Don’t, gentlemen, please don’t—I’m a dead man!” Then a
fainter groan, and another blow, and away sped the stage into the
darkness, and left the grisly mystery behind us.]
What a startle it was! Eight seconds would amply cover the time it
occupied—maybe even five would do it. We only had time to plunge at a
curtain and unbuckle and unbutton part of it in an awkward and hindering
flurry, when our whip cracked sharply overhead, and we went rumbling and
thundering away, down a mountain “grade.”
We fed on that mystery the rest of the night—what was left of it, for it
was waning fast. It had to remain a present mystery, for all we could
get from the conductor in answer to our hails was something that
sounded, through the clatter of the wheels, like “Tell you in the
morning!”
So we lit our pipes and opened the corner of a curtain for a chimney,
and lay there in the dark, listening to each other’s story of how he
first felt and how many thousand Indians he first thought had hurled
themselves upon us, and what his remembrance of the subsequent sounds
was, and the order of their occurrence. And we theorized, too, but there
was never a theory that would account for our driver’s voice being out
there, nor yet account for his Indian murderers talking such good
English, if they _were_ Indians.
So we chatted and smoked the rest of the night comfortably away, our
boding anxiety being somehow marvelously dissipated by the real presence
of something to be anxious _about_.
We never did get much satisfaction about that dark occurrence. All that
we could make out of the odds and ends of the information we gathered in
the morning, was that the disturbance occurred at a station; that we
changed drivers there, and that the driver that got off there had been
talking roughly about some of the outlaws that infested the region (“for
there wasn’t a man around there but had a price on his head and didn’t
dare show himself in the settlements,” the conductor said); he had
talked roughly about these characters, and ought to have “drove up there
with his pistol cocked and ready on the seat alongside of him, and begun
business himself, because any softy would know they would be laying for
him.”
That was all we could gather, and we could see that neither the
conductor nor the new driver were much concerned about the matter. They
plainly had little respect for a man who would deliver offensive
opinions of people and then be so simple as to come into their presence
unprepared to “back his judgment,” as they pleasantly phrased the
killing of any fellow-being who did not like said opinions. And likewise
they plainly had a contempt for the man’s poor discretion in venturing
to rouse the wrath of such utterly reckless wild beasts as those
outlaws—and the conductor added:
“I tell you it’s as much as Slade himself wants to do!”
This remark created an entire revolution in my curiosity. I cared
nothing now about the Indians, and even lost interest in the murdered
driver. There was such magic in that name, SLADE! Day or night, now, I
stood always ready to drop any subject in hand, to listen to something
new about Slade and his ghastly exploits. Even before we got to Overland
City, we had begun to hear about Slade and his “division” (for he was a
“division-agent”) on the Overland; and from the hour we had left
Overland City we had heard drivers and conductors talk about only three
things—“Californy,” the Nevada silver mines, and this desperado Slade.
And a deal the most of the talk was about Slade. We had gradually come
to have a realizing sense of the fact that Slade was a man whose heart
and hands and soul were steeped in the blood of offenders against his
dignity; a man who awfully avenged all injuries, affront, insults or
slights, of whatever kind—on the spot if he could, years afterward if
lack of earlier opportunity compelled it; a man whose hate tortured him
day and night till vengeance appeased it—and not an ordinary vengeance
either, but his enemy’s absolute death—nothing less; a man whose face
would light up with a terrible joy when he surprised a foe and had him
at a disadvantage. A high and efficient servant of the Overland, an
outlaw among outlaws and yet their relentless scourge, Slade was at once
the most bloody, the most dangerous and the most valuable citizen that
inhabited the savage fastnesses of the mountains.
CHAPTER X.
Really and truly, two thirds of the talk of drivers and conductors had
been about this man Slade, ever since the day before we reached
Julesburg. In order that the eastern reader may have a clear conception
of what a Rocky Mountain desperado is, in his highest state of
development, I will reduce all this mass of overland gossip to one
straightforward narrative, and present it in the following shape:
Slade was born in Illinois, of good parentage. At about twenty-six years
of age he killed a man in a quarrel and fled the country. At St. Joseph,
Missouri, he joined one of the early California-bound emigrant trains,
and was given the post of train-master. One day on the plains he had an
angry dispute with one of his wagon-drivers, and both drew their