Roughing It
farther deserts. And if it _was_, he was not a pretty creature or
respectable either, for I got well acquainted with his race afterward,
and can speak with confidence. The cayote is a long, slim, sick and
sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a
tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression
of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp
face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general
slinking expression all over. The cayote is a living, breathing allegory
of Want. He is _always_ hungry.
He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures
despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is
so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are
pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he
is so _homely_!—so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful.
When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and
then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his
head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sage-brush,
glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he is about
out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate
survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again—another fifty and
stop again; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the
gray of the sage-brush, and he disappears. All this is when you make no
demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a livelier
interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts
such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon, that by the
time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a minie rifle, and
by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by
the time you have “drawn a bead” on him you see well enough that nothing
but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where
he is now. But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy
it ever so much—especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of
himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about
speed.
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The cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his,
and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder
that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly
ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and
stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick
his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet
wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser
cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across
the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet
behind the cayote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why
it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get
aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the
cayote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he
grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been
taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long,
calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting
fagged, and that the cayote actually has to slacken speed a little to
keep from running away from him—and _then_ that town-dog is mad in
earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand
higher than ever, and reach for the cayote with concentrated and
desperate energy. This “spurt” finds him six feet behind the gliding
enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a
wild new hope is lighting up his face, the cayote turns and smiles
blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to
say: “Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub—business is
business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all
day”—and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of
a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and
alone in the midst of a vast solitude!
It makes his head swim. He stops, and looks all around; climbs the
nearest sand-mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head
reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to
his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and
feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at half-
mast for a week. And for as much as a year after that, whenever there is
a great hue and cry after a cayote, that dog will merely glance in that
direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself, “I believe
I do not wish any of the pie.”
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The cayote lives chiefly in the most desolate and forbidding desert,
along with the lizard, the jackass-rabbit and the raven, and gets an
uncertain and precarious living, and earns it. He seems to subsist
almost wholly on the carcases of oxen, mules and horses that have
dropped out of emigrant trains and died, and upon windfalls of carrion,
and occasional legacies of offal bequeathed to him by white men who have
been opulent enough to have something better to butcher than condemned
army bacon.
He will eat anything in the world that his first cousins, the desert-
frequenting tribes of Indians will, and they will eat anything they can
bite. It is a curious fact that these latter are the only creatures
known to history who will eat nitro-glycerine and ask for more if they
survive.
The cayote of the deserts beyond the Rocky Mountains has a peculiarly
hard time of it, owing to the fact that his relations, the Indians, are
just as apt to be the first to detect a seductive scent on the desert
breeze, and follow the fragrance to the late ox it emanated from, as he
is himself; and when this occurs he has to content himself with sitting
off at a little distance watching those people strip off and dig out
everything edible, and walk off with it. Then he and the waiting ravens
explore the skeleton and polish the bones. It is considered that the
cayote, and the obscene bird, and the Indian of the desert, testify
their blood kinship with each other in that they live together in the
waste places of the earth on terms of perfect confidence and friendship,
while hating all other creature and yearning to assist at their
funerals. He does not mind going a hundred miles to breakfast, and a
hundred and fifty to dinner, because he is sure to have three or four
days between meals, and he can just as well be traveling and looking at
the scenery as lying around doing nothing and adding to the burdens of
his parents.
We soon learned to recognize the sharp, vicious bark of the cayote as it
came across the murky plain at night to disturb our dreams among the
mail-sacks; and remembering his forlorn aspect and his hard fortune,
made shift to wish him the blessed novelty of a long day’s good luck and
a limitless larder the morrow.
CHAPTER VI.
Our new conductor (just shipped) had been without sleep for twenty
hours. Such a thing was very frequent. From St. Joseph, Missouri, to
Sacramento, California, by stage-coach, was nearly nineteen hundred
miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen days (the cars do it in
four and a half, now), but the time specified in the mail contracts, and
required by the schedule, was eighteen or nineteen days, if I remember
rightly. This was to make fair allowance for winter storms and snows,
and other unavoidable causes of detention. The stage company had
everything under strict discipline and good system. Over each two
hundred and fifty miles of road they placed an agent or superintendent,
and invested him with great authority. His beat or jurisdiction of two
hundred and fifty miles was called a “division.” He purchased horses,
mules harness, and food for men and beasts, and distributed these things
among his stage stations, from time to time, according to his judgment
of what each station needed. He erected station buildings and dug wells.
He attended to the paying of the station-keepers, hostlers, drivers and
blacksmiths, and discharged them whenever he chose. He was a very, very
great man in his “division”—a kind of Grand Mogul, a Sultan of the
Indies, in whose presence common men were modest of speech and manner,
and in the glare of whose greatness even the dazzling stage-driver
dwindled to a penny dip. There were about eight of these kings, all
told, on the overland route.
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Next in rank and importance to the division-agent came the “conductor.”
His beat was the same length as the agent’s—two hundred and fifty miles.
He sat with the driver, and (when necessary) rode that fearful distance,
night and day, without other rest or sleep than what he could get
perched thus on top of the flying vehicle. Think of it! He had absolute
charge of the mails, express matter, passengers and stage-coach, until
he delivered them to the next conductor, and got his receipt for them.
Consequently he had to be a man of intelligence, decision and
considerable executive ability. He was usually a quiet, pleasant man,
who attended closely to his duties, and was a good deal of a gentleman.
It was not absolutely necessary that the division-agent should be a
gentleman, and occasionally he wasn’t. But he was always a general in
administrative ability, and a bull-dog in courage and
determination—otherwise the chieftainship over the lawless underlings of
the overland service would never in any instance have been to him
anything but an equivalent for a month of insolence and distress and a
bullet and a coffin at the end of it. There were about sixteen or
eighteen conductors on the overland, for there was a daily stage each
way, and a conductor on every stage.
Next in _real_ and official rank and importance, _after_ the conductor,
came my delight, the driver—next in real but not in _apparent_
importance—for we have seen that in the eyes of the common herd the
driver was to the conductor as an admiral is to the captain of the flag-
ship. The driver’s beat was pretty long, and his sleeping-time at the
stations pretty short, sometimes; and so, but for the grandeur of his
position his would have been a sorry life, as well as a hard and a
wearing one. We took a new driver every day or every night (for they
drove backward and forward over the same piece of road all the time),
and therefore we never got as well acquainted with them as we did with
the conductors; and besides, they would have been above being familiar
with such rubbish as passengers, anyhow, as a general thing. Still, we
were always eager to get a sight of each and every new driver as soon as
the watch changed, for each and every day we were either anxious to get
rid of an unpleasant one, or loath to part with a driver we had learned
to like and had come to be sociable and friendly with. And so the first
question we asked the conductor whenever we got to where we were to
exchange drivers, was always, “Which is him?” The grammar was faulty,
maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go into a book some
day. As long as everything went smoothly, the overland driver was well
enough situated, but if a fellow driver got sick suddenly it made
trouble, for the coach _must_ go on, and so the potentate who was about
to climb down and take a luxurious rest after his long night’s siege in
the midst of wind and rain and darkness, had to stay where he was and do
the sick man’s work. Once, in the Rocky Mountains, when I found a driver
sound asleep on the box, and the mules going at the usual break-neck
pace, the conductor said never mind him, there was no danger, and he was