3. 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.
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.
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.
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."
*
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. 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.
[*]
"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 other hay or grass that is known—so
stock-men say.