 | CHAPTER V.
ACROSS COUNTRY. John Brent |  |
5. CHAPTER V.
ACROSS COUNTRY.
I led my friend toward the corral.
“A fine horse that gray of yours,” said I.
“Yes; a splendid fellow, — stanch and true!
He will go till he dies.”
“In tip-top condition, too. What do you call
him?”
“Pumps.”
“Why Pumps? Why not Pistons? or Cranks?
or Walking-Beams? or some part of the steam-engine
that does the going directly?”
“You have got the wrong clue. I named him
after our old dancing-master. Pumps the horse
has a favorite amble, precisely like that skipping
walk that Pumps the man used to set us for
model, — a mincing gait, that prejudiced me,
until I saw what a stride he kept for the time
when stride was wanting.”
“Here is my black gentleman. What do you
think of him?”
Don Fulano trotted up and licked a handful
of corn from my hand. Corn was four dollars
did not allow of such luxuries. But old Gerrian
had presented me with a sack of it.
Fulano crunched his corn, snorted his thanks,
and then snuffed questioningly, and afterwards
approvingly, about the stranger.
“Soul and body of Bucephalus!” says Brent.
“There is a quadruped that is a HORSE.”
“Is n't he?” said I, thrilling with pride for
him.
“To look at such a fellow is a romance. He
is the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”
“No exceptions?”
“Not one.”
“Woman! lovely woman!” I cried, with
mock enthusiasm.
“If I had ever seen a woman to compare with
that horse, after her kind, I should not be here.”
“Where then?”
“Wherever she was. Living for her. Dying
for her. Chasing her if she were dragged from
me. Snatching her from the jaws of death.”
“Hold hard! You talk as furiously as if you
saw such a scene before your eyes.”
“Your horse brings up all the chivalric tales
I have ever read. If these were knightly days,
and two brothers in arms, like you and myself,
ever rescued distressed damsels from the grip of
caitiffs vile, we ought to be mounted upon a pair
down.”
The fine sensitiveness of a poetic man like
Brent makes a prophet of him, — that is to say,
a man who has the poet's delicate insight into
character anticipates everything that character
will do. So Brent was never surprised; though
I confess I was, when I found men, horses, and
places doing what he had hinted long before.
“Well,” continued I, “I paid two years' work
for my horse. Was it too much? Is he worth
it?”
“Everything is worth whatever one gives for
it. The less you get, the more you get. Proved
by the fact that the price of all life is death. Jacob
served seven years for an ugly wife; why
should n't an honester man serve two for a beautiful
horse?”
“Jacob, however, had a pretty wife thrown in
when he showed discontent.”
“Perhaps you will. If the Light of the Harem
of Sultan Brigham should see you prancing on
that steed, she would make one bound to your
crupper and leave a dark where the Light was.”
“I do not expect to develop a taste for Mormon
ladies.”
“It is not very likely. They are a secondhand
set. But still one can imagine some luckless
girl with a doltish father; some old chap
he was going to be Melchisedec, Moses, and
Abraham, rolled into one, in Utah, toted out
there by some beastly Elder, who wanted the
daughter for his thirteenth. That would be a
chance for you and Don Fulano to interfere.
I 'll promise you myself and Pumps, if you
want to stampede anybody's wives from the New
Jerusalem as we go through.”
“I suppose we have no time to lose, if we expect
to make Missouri before winter.”
“No. We will start as soon as you are
ready.”
“To-morrow morning, if you please.”
“To-morrow it is.”
To-morrow it was. Having a comrade, I need
not wait for the mail-riders. Lucky that I did
not. They came only three days after us. But
on the Humboldt, the Indians met them, and
obliged them to doff the tops of their heads, as a
mark of respect to Indian civilization.
We started, two men and seven animals.
Each of us had a pack mule and a roadster
pony, with a spare one, in case accident should
befall either of his wiry brethren.
Pumps and Fulano, as good friends as their
masters, trotted along without burden. We rode
them rarely. Only often enough to remind
are not frightful. They must be fresh, if we
should ever have to run for it. We might;
Indians might cast fanciful glances at the tops
of our heads. The other horses might give out.
So Pumps, with his fantastic dancing-step, that
would not crush a grasshopper, and Fulano,
grander, prouder, and still untamable to any
one but me, went on waiting for their time of
action.
I skip the first thousand miles of our journey.
Not that it was not exciting, but it might be
anybody's journey. Myriads have made it. It
is an old story. I might perhaps make it a new
story; but I crowd on now to the proper spot
where this drama is to be enacted. The play
halts while the scenes shift.
One figure fills up to my mind this whole
hiatus of the many-leagued skip. I see Brent
every step and every moment. He was a model
comrade.
Camp-life tests a man thoroughly. Common
toil, hardship, peril, and sternly common viaticum
of pork, dough-cakes, and coffee sans everything,
are a daily ordeal of good-nature. It is not hard
for two men to be civil across a clean white tablecloth
at a club. If they feel dull, they can study
the carte; if spiteful, they can row the steward;
if surly, they can muddle themselves cheerful;
they can exchange cigars and part for all time,
and still be friends, not foes. But the illusions
of sham good-fellowship vanish when the carte
du jour is porc frit au naturel, damper à discretion,
and café à rien, always the same fare, plain
days or lucky days, served on a blanket, on the
ground.
Brent and I stood the test. He was a model
comrade, cavalier, poet, hunter, naturalist, cook.
If there was any knowledge, skill, craft, or sleight
of hand or brain wanted, it always seemed as
if his whole life had been devoted to the one
study to gain it. He would spring out of his
blankets after a night under the stars, improvise
a matin song to Lucifer, sketch the morning's
view into cloudland and the morning's earthly
horizon, take a shot at a gray wolf, book a new
plant, bag a new beetle, and then, reclining on
the lonely prairie, talk our breakfast, whose
Soyer he had been, so full of Eden, Sybaris, the
holocausts of Achilles, the triclinia of Lucullus,
the automaton tables of the Œil de Bœuf, the
cabinets of the Frères Provençaux, and the
dinners of civilization where the wise and the
witty meet to shine and sparkle for the beautiful,
that our meagre provender suffered “change
into something rich and strange”; the flakes of
fried pork became peacocks' tongues, every quoit
coffee that never saw milk or muscovado a
diviner porridge than ever was sipped on the
sunny summits of Olympus. Such a magician
is priceless. Every object, when he looked at it,
seemed to revolve about and exhibit its bright
side. Difficulty skulked away from him. Danger
cowered under his eye.
Nothing could damp his enthusiasm. Nothing
could drench his ardor. No drowning his energy.
He never growled, never sulked, never
snapped, never flinched. Frosty nights on the
Sierra tried to cramp him; foggy mornings in
the valleys did their worst to chill him; showers
shrank his buckskins and soaked the macheers
of his saddle to mere pulp; rain pelted his blankets
in the bivouac till he was a moist island in a
muddy lake. Bah, elements! try it on a milksop!
not on John Brent, the invulnerable. He
laughs in the ugly phiz of Trouble. Hit somebody
else, thou grizzly child of Erebus!
Brent was closer to Nature than any man I
ever knew. Not after the manner of an artist.
The artist can hardly escape a certain technicality.
He looks at the world through the spectacles
of his style. He loves mist and hates sunshine,
or loves books and shrinks from the gloom of forests
primeval, or adores meadows and haystacks,
and dreads the far-sweeping plain and the sovran
which only the greater than greatest escape, of
suiting Nature to themselves, not themselves to
Nature. Brent with Nature was like a youth
with the maiden he loves. She was always his
love, whatever she could do; however dressed, in
clouds or sunshine, unchanging fair; in whatever
mood, weeping or smiling, at her sweetest;
grand, beautiful for her grandeur; tender, beautiful
for her tenderness; simple, lovely for her
simplicity; careless, prettier than if she were
trim and artful; rough, potent, and impressive,
a barbaric queen.
It is not a charming region, that breadth of the
world between the Foolonner Mine and the Great
Salt Lake. Much is dusty desert; much is
dreary plain, bushed with wild sage, the wretchedest
plant that grows; much is rugged mountain.
A grim and desolate waste. But large
and broad. Unbroken and undisturbed, in its
solemn solitude, by prettiness. No thought of
cottage life there, or of the tame, limited, submissive
civilization that hangs about lattices and
trellises, and pets its chirping pleasures, keeping
life as near the cradle as it may. It is a
region that appeals to the go and the gallop,
that even the veriest cockney, who never saw
beyond a vista of blocks, cannot eliminate from
his being. It does not order man to sink into
dull, boundless plough-fields, the prairie lands
of mid-America. These desert spaces, ribbed
with barren ridges, stretch for the Bedouin tread
of those who
And solitary places, where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.”
It may be a dreary region; but the great white
clouds in the noons of that splendid September,
the red dawns before us, the red twilights
behind, the vague mountain lines upon the far
horizon, the sharp crag lines near at hand, the
lambent stars that lit our bivouacs, the moon
that paled the lambent stars, — all these had
their glory, intenser because each fact came
simple and alone, and challenged study and
love with a force that shames the spendthrift
exuberance of fuller landscapes.
In all this time I learned to love the man John
Brent, as I had loved the boy; but as mature
man loves man. I have known no more perfect
union than that one friendship. Nothing so
tender in any of my transitory loves for women.
We were two who thought alike, but saw differently,
and never quarrelled because the shield
was to him gold and to me silver. Such a friendship
justifies life. All bad faith is worth encountering
cold shoulder for such warm heart.
And so I bring our little party over the first
half of its journey.
I will not even delay to describe Utah, not
even for its water-melons' sake, though that tricolor
dainty greatly gladdened our dry jaws, as
we followed the valley from Box Elder, the
northernmost settlement, to the City of the
Great Salt Lake.
In a few days of repose we had exhausted
Mormon civilization, and, horses and men fresh
and in brave heart, we rode out of the modern
Mecca, one glorious day of early October.
| CHAPTER V.
ACROSS COUNTRY. John Brent | |