Roughing It
looked so sunny. Sometimes we rowed out to the “blue water,” a mile or
two from shore. It was as dead blue as indigo there, because of the
immense depth. By official measurement the lake in its centre is one
thousand five hundred and twenty-five feet deep!
Sometimes, on lazy afternoons, we lolled on the sand in camp, and smoked
pipes and read some old well-worn novels. At night, by the camp-fire, we
played euchre and seven-up to strengthen the mind—and played them with
cards so greasy and defaced that only a whole summer’s acquaintance with
them could enable the student to tell the ace of clubs from the jack of
diamonds.
We never slept in our “house.” It never recurred to us, for one thing;
and besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough. We
did not wish to strain it.
By and by our provisions began to run short, and we went back to the old
camp and laid in a new supply. We were gone all day, and reached home
again about night-fall, pretty tired and hungry. While Johnny was
carrying the main bulk of the provisions up to our “house” for future
use, I took the loaf of bread, some slices of bacon, and the coffee-pot,
ashore, set them down by a tree, lit a fire, and went back to the boat
to get the frying-pan. While I was at this, I heard a shout from Johnny,
and looking up I saw that my fire was galloping all over the premises!
Johnny was on the other side of it. He had to run through the flames to
get to the lake shore, and then we stood helpless and watched the
devastation.
The ground was deeply carpeted with dry pine-needles, and the fire
touched them off as if they were gunpowder. It was wonderful to see with
what fierce speed the tall sheet of flame traveled! My coffee-pot was
gone, and everything with it. In a minute and a half the fire seized
upon a dense growth of dry manzanita chapparal six or eight feet high,
and then the roaring and popping and crackling was something terrific.
We were driven to the boat by the intense heat, and there we remained,
spell-bound.
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Within half an hour all before us was a tossing, blinding tempest of
flame! It went surging up adjacent ridges—surmounted them and
disappeared in the cañons beyond—burst into view upon higher and farther
ridges, presently—shed a grander illumination abroad, and dove
again—flamed out again, directly, higher and still higher up the
mountain-side threw out skirmishing parties of fire here and there, and
sent them trailing their crimson spirals away among remote ramparts and
ribs and gorges, till as far as the eye could reach the lofty mountain-
fronts were webbed as it were with a tangled network of red lava
streams. Away across the water the crags and domes were lit with a ruddy
glare, and the firmament above was a reflected hell!
Every feature of the spectacle was repeated in the glowing mirror of the
lake! Both pictures were sublime, both were beautiful; but that in the
lake had a bewildering richness about it that enchanted the eye and held
it with the stronger fascination.
We sat absorbed and motionless through four long hours. We never thought
of supper, and never felt fatigue. But at eleven o’clock the
conflagration had traveled beyond our range of vision, and then darkness
stole down upon the landscape again.
Hunger asserted itself now, but there was nothing to eat. The provisions
were all cooked, no doubt, but we did not go to see. We were homeless
wanderers again, without any property. Our fence was gone, our house
burned down; no insurance. Our pine forest was well scorched, the dead
trees all burned up, and our broad acres of manzanita swept away. Our
blankets were on our usual sand-bed, however, and so we lay down and
went to sleep. The next morning we started back to the old camp, but
while out a long way from shore, so great a storm came up that we dared
not try to land. So I baled out the seas we shipped, and Johnny pulled
heavily through the billows till we had reached a point three or four
miles beyond the camp. The storm was increasing, and it became evident
that it was better to take the hazard of beaching the boat than go down
in a hundred fathoms of water; so we ran in, with tall white-caps
following, and I sat down in the stern-sheets and pointed her head-on to
the shore. The instant the bow struck, a wave came over the stern that
washed crew and cargo ashore, and saved a deal of trouble. We shivered
in the lee of a boulder all the rest of the day, and froze all the night
through. In the morning the tempest had gone down, and we paddled down
to the camp without any unnecessary delay. We were so starved that we
ate up the rest of the Brigade’s provisions, and then set out to Carson
to tell them about it and ask their forgiveness. It was accorded, upon
payment of damages.
We made many trips to the lake after that, and had many a hair-breadth
escape and blood-curdling adventure which will never be recorded in any
history.
CHAPTER XXIV.
I resolved to have a horse to ride. I had never seen such wild, free,
magnificent horsemanship outside of a circus as these picturesquely-clad
Mexicans, Californians and Mexicanized Americans displayed in Carson
streets every day. How they rode! Leaning just gently forward out of the
perpendicular, easy and nonchalant, with broad slouch-hat brim blown
square up in front, and long _riata_ swinging above the head as they
swept through the town like the wind! The next minute they were only a
sailing puff of dust on the far desert. If they trotted, they sat up
gallantly and gracefully, and seemed part of the horse; did not go
jiggering up and down after the silly Miss-Nancy fashion of the riding-
schools. I had quickly learned to tell a horse from a cow, and was full
of anxiety to learn more. I was resolved to buy a horse.
While the thought was rankling in my mind, the auctioneer came skurrying
through the plaza on a black beast that had as many humps and corners on
him as a dromedary, and was necessarily uncomely; but he was “going,
going, at twenty-two!—horse, saddle and bridle at twenty-two dollars,
gentlemen!” and I could hardly resist.
A man whom I did not know (he turned out to be the auctioneer’s brother)
noticed the wistful look in my eye, and observed that that was a very
remarkable horse to be going at such a price; and added that the saddle
alone was worth the money. It was a Spanish saddle, with ponderous
‘_tapidaros_’, and furnished with the ungainly sole-leather covering
with the unspellable name. I said I had half a notion to bid. Then this
keen-eyed person appeared to me to be “taking my measure”; but I
dismissed the suspicion when he spoke, for his manner was full of
guileless candor and truthfulness. Said he:
“I know that horse—know him well. You are a stranger, I take it, and so
you might think he was an American horse, maybe, but I assure you he is
not. He is nothing of the kind; but—excuse my speaking in a low voice,
other people being near—he is, without the shadow of a doubt, a Genuine
Mexican Plug!”
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I did not know what a Genuine Mexican Plug was, but there was something
about this man’s way of saying it, that made me swear inwardly that I
would own a Genuine Mexican Plug, or die.
“Has he any other—er—advantages?” I inquired, suppressing what eagerness
I could.
He hooked his forefinger in the pocket of my army-shirt, led me to one
side, and breathed in my ear impressively these words:
“He can out-buck anything in America!”
“Going, going, going—at twent—ty—four dollars and a half, gen—”
“Twenty-seven!” I shouted, in a frenzy.
“And sold!” said the auctioneer, and passed over the Genuine Mexican
Plug to me.
I could scarcely contain my exultation. I paid the money, and put the
animal in a neighboring livery-stable to dine and rest himself.
In the afternoon I brought the creature into the plaza, and certain
citizens held him by the head, and others by the tail, while I mounted
him. As soon as they let go, he placed all his feet in a bunch together,
lowered his back, and then suddenly arched it upward, and shot me
straight into the air a matter of three or four feet! I came as straight
down again, lit in the saddle, went instantly up again, came down almost
on the high pommel, shot up again, and came down on the horse’s neck—all
in the space of three or four seconds. Then he rose and stood almost
straight up on his hind feet, and I, clasping his lean neck desperately,
slid back into the saddle and held on. He came down, and immediately
hoisted his heels into the air, delivering a vicious kick at the sky,
and stood on his forefeet. And then down he came once more, and began
the original exercise of shooting me straight up again. The third time I
went up I heard a stranger say:
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“Oh, don’t he _buck_, though!”
While I was up, somebody struck the horse a sounding thwack with a
leathern strap, and when I arrived again the Genuine Mexican Plug was
not there. A California youth chased him up and caught him, and asked if
he might have a ride. I granted him that luxury. He mounted the Genuine,
got lifted into the air once, but sent his spurs home as he descended,
and the horse darted away like a telegram. He soared over three fences
like a bird, and disappeared down the road toward the Washoe Valley.
I sat down on a stone, with a sigh, and by a natural impulse one of my
hands sought my forehead, and the other the base of my stomach. I
believe I never appreciated, till then, the poverty of the human
machinery—for I still needed a hand or two to place elsewhere. Pen
cannot describe how I was jolted up. Imagination cannot conceive how
disjointed I was—how internally, externally and universally I was
unsettled, mixed up and ruptured. There was a sympathetic crowd around
me, though.
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One elderly-looking comforter said:
“Stranger, you’ve been taken in. Everybody in this camp knows that
horse. Any child, any Injun, could have told you that he’d buck; he is
the very worst devil to buck on the continent of America. You hear _me_.
I’m Curry. _Old_ Curry. Old _Abe_ Curry. And moreover, he is a simon-
pure, out-and-out, genuine d—d Mexican plug, and an uncommon mean one at
that, too. Why, you turnip, if you had laid low and kept dark, there’s
chances to buy an _American_ horse for mighty little more than you paid
for that bloody old foreign relic.”
I gave no sign; but I made up my mind that if the auctioneer’s brother’s
funeral took place while I was in the Territory I would postpone all
other recreations and attend it.
After a gallop of sixteen miles the Californian youth and the Genuine
Mexican Plug came tearing into town again, shedding foam-flakes like the
spume-spray that drives before a typhoon, and, with one final skip over
a wheelbarrow and a Chinaman, cast anchor in front of the “ranch.”
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Such panting and blowing! Such spreading and contracting of the red
equine nostrils, and glaring of the wild equine eye! But was the
imperial beast subjugated? Indeed he was not.
His lordship the Speaker of the House thought he was, and mounted him to
go down to the Capitol; but the first dash the creature made was over a
pile of telegraph poles half as high as a church; and his time to the
Capitol—one mile and three quarters—remains unbeaten to this day. But
then he took an advantage—he left out the mile, and only did the three
quarters. That is to say, he made a straight cut across lots, preferring
fences and ditches to a crooked road; and when the Speaker got to the
Capitol he said he had been in the air so much he felt as if he had made
the trip on a comet.
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In the evening the Speaker came home afoot for exercise, and got the