Roughing It
in the gathering twilight and fasten her steadfast eyes on a mosquito
rooting into her arm, and slowly she would raise her other hand till she
had got his range, and then she would launch a slap at him that would
have jolted a cow; and after that she would sit and contemplate the
corpse with tranquil satisfaction—for she never missed her mosquito; she
was a dead shot at short range. She never removed a carcase, but left
them there for bait. I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her kill
thirty or forty mosquitoes—watched her, and waited for her to say
something, but she never did. So I finally opened the conversation
myself. I said:
“The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam.”
“You bet!”
“What did I understand you to say, madam?”
“You BET!”
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Then she cheered up, and faced around and said:
“Danged if I didn’t begin to think you fellers was deef and dumb. I did,
b’gosh. Here I’ve sot, and sot, and sot, a-bust’n muskeeters and
wonderin’ what was ailin’ ye. Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then I
thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin’, and then by and by I begin to
reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldn’t think of nothing
to say. Wher’d ye come from?”
The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more! The fountains of her great deep were
broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty
nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge
of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder
projecting above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed
pronunciation!
How we suffered, suffered, suffered! She went on, hour after hour, till
I was sorry I ever opened the mosquito question and gave her a start.
She never did stop again until she got to her journey’s end toward
daylight; and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage (for
we were nodding, by that time), and said:
“Now you git out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple o’
days, and I’ll be along some time to-night, and if I can do ye any good
by edgin’ in a word now and then, I’m right thar. Folks’ll tell you’t
I’ve always ben kind o’ offish and partic’lar for a gal that’s raised in
the woods, and I am, with the rag-tag and bob-tail, and a gal _has_ to
be, if she wants to _be_ anything, but when people comes along which is
my equals, I reckon I’m a pretty sociable heifer after all.”
We resolved not to “lay by at Cottonwood.”
CHAPTER III.
About an hour and a half before daylight we were bowling along smoothly
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
consciousness—when something gave away under us! We were dimly aware of
it, but indifferent to it. The coach stopped. We heard the driver and
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 is 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 exhilarating 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.
After breakfast, at some station whose name I have forgotten, we three
climbed up on the seat behind the driver, and let the conductor 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 the irons 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.
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When he is sitting quiet, thinking about his sins, or is absent-minded
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, head erect,
eyes right, and ears just canted a little to the rear, but showing you
where the animal is, all the time, the same as if he carried a jib. Now
and then he makes a marvelous spring with his long legs, high over the
stunted 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-bush, 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.
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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 do 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-bush, and
entertained myself with fancying that the gnats among its foliage were
liliputian birds, and that the ants marching and countermarching about
its base were liliputian flocks and herds, and myself some vast loafer
from Brobdignag waiting to catch a little citizen and eat him.
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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 mountain-sides 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