Roughing It
doing double duty—had driven seventy-five miles on one coach, and was
now going back over it on this without rest or sleep. A hundred and
fifty miles of holding back of six vindictive mules and keeping them
from climbing the trees! It sounds incredible, but I remember the
statement well enough.
The station-keepers, hostlers, etc., were low, rough characters, as
already described; and from western Nebraska to Nevada a considerable
sprinkling of them might be fairly set down as outlaws—fugitives from
justice, criminals whose best security was a section of country which
was without law and without even the pretence of it. When the “division-
agent” issued an order to one of these parties he did it with the full
understanding that he might have to enforce it with a navy six-shooter,
and so he always went “fixed” to make things go along smoothly.
Now and then a division-agent was really obliged to shoot a hostler
through the head to teach him some simple matter that he could have
taught him with a club if his circumstances and surroundings had been
different. But they were snappy, able men, those division-agents, and
when they tried to teach a subordinate anything, that subordinate
generally “got it through his head.”
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A great portion of this vast machinery—these hundreds of men and
coaches, and thousands of mules and horses—was in the hands of Mr. Ben
Holliday. All the western half of the business was in his hands. This
reminds me of an incident of Palestine travel which is pertinent here,
so I will transfer it just in the language in which I find it set down
in my Holy Land note-book:
No doubt everybody has heard of Ben Holliday—a man of prodigious energy,
who used to send mails and passengers flying across the continent in his
overland stage-coaches like a very whirlwind—two thousand long miles in
fifteen days and a half, by the watch! But this fragment of history is
not about Ben Holliday, but about a young New York boy by the name of
Jack, who traveled with our small party of pilgrims in the Holy Land
(and who had traveled to California in Mr. Holliday’s overland coaches
three years before, and had by no means forgotten it or lost his gushing
admiration of Mr. H.) Aged nineteen. Jack was a good boy—a good-hearted
and always well-meaning boy, who had been reared in the city of New
York, and although he was bright and knew a great many useful things,
his Scriptural education had been a good deal neglected—to such a
degree, indeed, that all Holy Land history was fresh and new to him, and
all Bible names mysteries that had never disturbed his virgin ear.
Also in our party was an elderly pilgrim who was the reverse of Jack, in
that he was learned in the Scriptures and an enthusiast concerning them.
He was our encyclopedia, and we were never tired of listening to his
speeches, nor he of making them. He never passed a celebrated locality,
from Bashan to Bethlehem, without illuminating it with an oration. One
day, when camped near the ruins of Jericho, he burst forth with
something like this:
“Jack, do you see that range of mountains over yonder that bounds the
Jordan valley? The mountains of Moab, Jack! Think of it, my boy—the
actual mountains of Moab—renowned in Scripture history! We are actually
standing face to face with those illustrious crags and peaks—and for all
we know” [dropping his voice impressively], “our eyes may be resting at
this very moment upon the spot WHERE LIES THE MYSTERIOUS GRAVE OF MOSES!
Think of it, Jack!”
“Moses who?” (falling inflection).
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“Moses who! Jack, you ought to be ashamed of yourself—you ought to be
ashamed of such criminal ignorance. Why, Moses, the great guide,
soldier, poet, lawgiver of ancient Israel! Jack, from this spot where we
stand, to Egypt, stretches a fearful desert three hundred miles in
extent—and across that desert that wonderful man brought the children of
Israel!—guiding them with unfailing sagacity for forty years over the
sandy desolation and among the obstructing rocks and hills, and landed
them at last, safe and sound, within sight of this very spot; and where
we now stand they entered the Promised Land with anthems of rejoicing!
It was a wonderful, wonderful thing to do, Jack! Think of it!”
“Forty years? Only three hundred miles? Humph! Ben Holliday would have
fetched them through in thirty-six hours!”
The boy meant no harm. He did not know that he had said anything that
was wrong or irreverent. And so no one scolded him or felt offended with
him—and nobody could but some ungenerous spirit incapable of excusing
the heedless blunders of a boy.
At noon on the fifth day out, we arrived at the “Crossing of the South
Platte,” _alias_ “Julesburg,” _alias_ “Overland City,” four hundred and
seventy miles from St. Joseph—the strangest, quaintest, funniest
frontier town that our untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been
astonished with.
CHAPTER VII.
It did seem strange enough to see a town again after what appeared to us
such a long acquaintance with deep, still, almost lifeless and houseless
solitude! We tumbled out into the busy street feeling like meteoric
people crumbled off the corner of some other world, and wakened up
suddenly in this. For an hour we took as much interest in Overland City
as if we had never seen a town before. The reason we had an hour to
spare was because we had to change our stage (for a less sumptuous
affair, called a “mud-wagon”) and transfer our freight of mails.
Presently we got under way again. We came to the shallow, yellow, muddy
South Platte, with its low banks and its scattering flat sand-bars and
pigmy islands—a melancholy stream straggling through the centre of the
enormous flat plain, and only saved from being impossible to find with
the naked eye by its sentinel rank of scattering trees standing on
either bank. The Platte was “up,” they said—which made me wish I could
see it when it was down, if it could look any sicker and sorrier. They
said it was a dangerous stream to cross, now, because its quicksands
were liable to swallow up horses, coach and passengers if an attempt was
made to ford it. But the mails had to go, and we made the attempt. Once
or twice in midstream the wheels sunk into the yielding sands so
threateningly that we half believed we had dreaded and avoided the sea
all our lives to be shipwrecked in a “mud-wagon” in the middle of a
desert at last. But we dragged through and sped away toward the setting
sun.
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Next morning, just before dawn, when about five hundred and fifty miles
from St. Joseph, our mud-wagon broke down. We were to be delayed five or
six hours, and therefore we took horses, by invitation, and joined a
party who were just starting on a buffalo hunt. It was noble sport
galloping over the plain in the dewy freshness of the morning, but our
part of the hunt ended in disaster and disgrace, for a wounded buffalo
bull chased the passenger Bemis nearly two miles, and then he forsook
his horse and took to a lone tree. He was very sullen about the matter
for some twenty-four hours, but at last he began to soften little by
little, and finally he said:
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“Well, it was not funny, and there was no sense in those gawks making
themselves so facetious over it. I tell you I was angry in earnest for
awhile. I should have shot that long gangly lubber they called Hank, if
I could have done it without crippling six or seven other people—but of
course I couldn’t, the old ‘Allen’s’ so confounded comprehensive. I wish
those loafers had been up in the tree; they wouldn’t have wanted to
laugh so. If I had had a horse worth a cent—but no, the minute he saw
that buffalo bull wheel on him and give a bellow, he raised straight up
in the air and stood on his heels. The saddle began to slip, and I took
him round the neck and laid close to him, and began to pray. Then he
came down and stood up on the other end awhile, and the bull actually
stopped pawing sand and bellowing to contemplate the inhuman spectacle.
“Then the bull made a pass at him and uttered a bellow that sounded
perfectly frightful, it was so close to me, and that seemed to literally
prostrate my horse’s reason, and make a raving distracted maniac of him,
and I wish I may die if he didn’t stand on his head for a quarter of a
minute and shed tears. He was absolutely out of his mind—he was, as sure
as truth itself, and he really didn’t know what he was doing. Then the
bull came charging at us, and my horse dropped down on all fours and
took a fresh start—and then for the next ten minutes he would actually
throw one hand-spring after another so fast that the bull began to get
unsettled, too, and didn’t know where to start in—and so he stood there
sneezing, and shovelling dust over his back, and bellowing every now and
then, and thinking he had got a fifteen-hundred dollar circus horse for
breakfast, certain. Well, I was first out on his neck—the horse’s, not
the bull’s—and then underneath, and next on his rump, and sometimes head
up, and sometimes heels—but I tell you it seemed solemn and awful to be
ripping and tearing and carrying on so in the presence of death, as you
might say. Pretty soon the bull made a snatch for us and brought away
some of my horse’s tail (I suppose, but do not know, being pretty busy
at the time), but _something_ made him hungry for solitude and suggested
to him to get up and hunt for it.
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“And then you ought to have seen that spider legged old skeleton go! and
you ought to have seen the bull cut out after him, too—head down, tongue
out, tail up, bellowing like everything, and actually mowing down the
weeds, and tearing up the earth, and boosting up the sand like a
whirlwind! By George, it was a hot race! I and the saddle were back on
the rump, and I had the bridle in my teeth and holding on to the pommel
with both hands. First we left the dogs behind; then we passed a jackass
rabbit; then we overtook a cayote, and were gaining on an antelope when
the rotten girth let go and threw me about thirty yards off to the left,
and as the saddle went down over the horse’s rump he gave it a lift with
his heels that sent it more than four hundred yards up in the air, I
wish I may die in a minute if he didn’t. I fell at the foot of the only
solitary tree there was in nine counties adjacent (as any creature could
see with the naked eye), and the next second I had hold of the bark with
four sets of nails and my teeth, and the next second after that I was
astraddle of the main limb and blaspheming my luck in a way that made my
breath smell of brimstone. I _had_ the bull, now, if he did not think of
one thing. But that one thing I dreaded. I dreaded it very seriously.
There was a possibility that the bull might not think of it, but there
were greater chances that he would. I made up my mind what I would do in
case he did. It was a little over forty feet to the ground from where I
sat. I cautiously unwound the lariat from the pommel of my saddle—”
“Your _saddle_? Did you take your saddle up in the tree with you?”
“Take it up in the tree with me? Why, how you talk. Of course I didn’t.
No man could do that. It _fell_ in the tree when it came down.”
“Oh—exactly.”
“Certainly. I unwound the lariat, and fastened one end of it to the
limb. It was the very best green raw-hide, and capable of sustaining
tons. I made a slip-noose in the other end, and then hung it down to see
the length. It reached down twenty-two feet—half way to the ground. I
then loaded every barrel of the Allen with a double charge. I felt
satisfied. I said to myself, if he never thinks of that _one_ thing that
I dread, all right—but if he does, all right anyhow—I am fixed for him.