Roughing It
other hay or grass that is known—so stock-men say.]—The sage-bushes
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 “greasewood,” 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 its
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 filings, 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 apparel, he began to contemplate 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
had 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 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.
035.jpg (95K)
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-bushes 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.
CHAPTER IV.
As the sun went down and the evening chill came on, we made preparation
for bed. We stirred up the hard leather letter-sacks, and the knotty
canvas bags of printed matter (knotty and uneven because of projecting
ends and corners of magazines, boxes and books). We stirred them up and
redisposed them in such a way as to make our bed as level as possible.
And we _did_ improve it, too, though after all our work it had an
upheaved and billowy look about it, like a little piece of a stormy sea.
Next we hunted up our boots from odd nooks among the mail-bags where
they had settled, and put them on. Then we got down our coats, vests,
pantaloons and heavy woolen shirts, from the arm-loops where they had
been swinging all day, and clothed ourselves in them—for, there being no
ladies either at the stations or in the coach, and the weather being
hot, we had looked to our comfort by stripping to our underclothing, at
nine o’clock in the morning. All things being now ready, we stowed the
uneasy Dictionary where it would lie as quiet as possible, and placed
the water-canteens and pistols where we could find them in the dark.
Then we smoked a final pipe, and swapped a final yarn; after which, we
put the pipes, tobacco and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the
mail-bags, and then fastened down the coach curtains all around, and
made the place as “dark as the inside of a cow,” as the conductor
phrased it in his picturesque way. It was certainly as dark as any place
could be—nothing was even dimly visible in it. And finally, we rolled
ourselves up like silk-worms, each person in his own blanket, and sank
peacefully to sleep.
Whenever the stage stopped to change horses, we would wake up, and try
to recollect where we were—and succeed—and in a minute or two the stage
would be off again, and we likewise. We began to get into country, now,
threaded here and there with little streams. These had high, steep banks
on each side, and every time we flew down one bank and scrambled up the
other, our party inside got mixed somewhat. First we would all be down
in a pile at the forward end of the stage, nearly in a sitting posture,
and in a second we would shoot to the other end, and stand on our heads.
And we would sprawl and kick, too, and ward off ends and corners of
mail-bags that came lumbering over us and about us; and as the dust
rose from the tumult, we would all sneeze in chorus, and the majority of
us would grumble, and probably say some hasty thing, like: “Take your
elbow out of my ribs!—can’t you quit crowding?”
Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the
Unabridged Dictionary would come too; and every time it came it damaged
somebody. One trip it “barked” the Secretary’s elbow; the next trip it
hurt me in the stomach, and the third it tilted Bemis’s nose up till he
could look down his nostrils—he said. The pistols and coin soon settled
to the bottom, but the pipes, pipe-stems, tobacco and canteens clattered
and floundered after the Dictionary every time it made an assault on us,
and aided and abetted the book by spilling tobacco in our eyes, and
water down our backs.
038.jpg (54K)
Still, all things considered, it was a very comfortable night. It wore
gradually away, and when at last a cold gray light was visible through
the puckers and chinks in the curtains, we yawned and stretched with
satisfaction, shed our cocoons, and felt that we had slept as much as
was necessary. By and by, as the sun rose up and warmed the world, we
pulled off our clothes and got ready for breakfast. We were just
pleasantly in time, for five minutes afterward the driver sent the weird
music of his bugle winding over the grassy solitudes, and presently we
detected a low hut or two in the distance. Then the rattling of the
coach, the clatter of our six horses’ hoofs, and the driver’s crisp
commands, awoke to a louder and stronger emphasis, and we went sweeping
down on the station at our smartest speed. It was fascinating—that old
overland stagecoaching.
We jumped out in undress uniform. The driver tossed his gathered reins
out on the ground, gaped and stretched complacently, drew off his heavy
buckskin gloves with great deliberation and insufferable dignity—taking
not the slightest notice of a dozen solicitous inquires after his
health, and humbly facetious and flattering accostings, and obsequious
tenders of service, from five or six hairy and half-civilized
station-keepers and hostlers who were nimbly unhitching our steeds and
bringing the fresh team out of the stables—for in the eyes of the
stage-driver of that day, station-keepers and hostlers were a sort of
good enough low creatures, useful in their place, and helping to make
up a world, but not the kind of beings which a person of distinction
could afford to concern himself with; while, on the contrary, in the
eyes of the station-keeper and the hostler, the stage-driver was a
hero—a great and shining dignitary, the world’s favorite son, the envy
of the people, the observed of the nations. When they spoke to him they
received his insolent silence meekly, and as being the natural and
proper conduct of so great a man; when he opened his lips they all hung
on his words with admiration (he never honored a particular individual
with a remark, but addressed it with a broad generality to the horses,
the stables, the surrounding country _and_ the human underlings); when
he discharged a facetious insulting personality at a hostler, that
hostler was happy for the day; when he uttered his one jest—old as the
hills, coarse, profane, witless, and inflicted on the same audience, in
the same language, every time his coach drove up there—the varlets
roared, and slapped their thighs, and swore it was the best thing
they’d ever heard in all their lives. And how they would fly around
when he wanted a basin of water, a gourd of the same, or a light for
his pipe!—but they would instantly insult a passenger if he so far
forgot himself as to crave a favor at their hands. They could do that
sort of insolence as well as the driver they copied it from—for, let it
be borne in mind, the overland driver had but little less contempt for
his passengers than he had for his hostlers.
The hostlers and station-keepers treated the really powerful _conductor_
of the coach merely with the best of what was their idea of civility,
but the _driver_ was the only being they bowed down to and worshipped.
How admiringly they would gaze up at him in his high seat as he gloved
himself with lingering deliberation, while some happy hostler held the
bunch of reins aloft, and waited patiently for him to take it! And how
they would bombard him with glorifying ejaculations as he cracked his
long whip and went careering away.
The station buildings were long, low huts, made of sundried, mud-colored
bricks, laid up without mortar (_adobes_, the Spaniards call these
bricks, and Americans shorten it to ’_dobies_). The roofs, which had no
slant to them worth speaking of, were thatched and then sodded or
covered with a thick layer of earth, and from this sprung a pretty rank
growth of weeds and grass. It was the first time we had ever seen a
man’s front yard on top of his house. The building consisted of barns,
stable-room for twelve or fifteen horses, and a hut for an eating-room
for passengers. This latter had bunks in it for the station-keeper and a
hostler or two. You could rest your elbow on its eaves, and you had to
bend in order to get in at the door. In place of a window there was a
square hole about large enough for a man to crawl through, but this had
no glass in it. There was no flooring, but the ground was packed hard.
There was no stove, but the fire-place served all needful purposes.