27. CHAPTER XXVII.
HURRY, was the word! We wasted no time. Our party
consisted of four persons—a blacksmith sixty years of age, two
young lawyers, and myself. We bought a wagon and two
miserable old horses. We put eighteen hundred pounds of
provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of Carson
on a chilly December afternoon. The horses were so weak and old
that we soon found that it would be better if one or two of us got
out and walked. It was an improvement. Next, we found that it
would be better if a third man got out. That was an improvement
also. It was at this time that I volunteered to drive, although I had
never driven a harnessed horse before and many a man in such a
position would have felt fairly excused from such a responsibility.
But in a little while it was found that it would be a fine thing if the
drive got out and walked also. It was at this time that I resigned
the position of driver, and never resumed it again. Within the
hour, we found that it would not only be better, but was absolutely
necessary, that we four, taking turns, two at a time, should put our
hands against the end of the wagon and push it through the sand,
leaving the feeble horses little to do but keep out of the way and
hold up the tongue. Perhaps it is well for one to know his fate at
first, and get reconciled to it. We had learned our in one
afternoon. It was plain that we had to walk through the sand and
shove that wagon and those horses two hundred miles. So we
accepted the situation, and from that time forth we never rode.
More than that, we stood regular and nearly constant watches
pushing up behind.
We made seven miles, and camped in the desert. Young
Clagett (now member of Congress from Montana) unharnessed
and fed and watered the horses; Oliphant and I cut sagebrush, built
the fire and brought water to cook with; and old Mr. Ballou the
blacksmith did the cooking. This division of labor, and this
appointment, was adhered to throughout the journey. We had no
tent, and so we slept under our blankets in the open plain. We
were so tired that we slept soundly.
We were fifteen days making the trip—two hundred miles;
thirteen, rather, for we lay by a couple of days, in one place, to let
the horses rest.
We could really have accomplished the journey in ten days if we
had towed the horses behind the wagon, but we did not think of
that until it was too late, and so went on shoving the horses and the
wagon too when we might have saved half the labor. Parties who
met us, occasionally, advised us to put the
horses in the wagon,
but Mr. Ballou, through whose iron-clad earnestness
no sarcasm could pierce, said that that would not do, because the
provisions were exposed and would suffer, the horses being
"bituminous from long deprivation." The reader will excuse me
from translating. What Mr. Ballou customarily meant, when he
used a long word, was a secret between himself and his Maker. He
was one of the best and kindest hearted men that ever graced a
humble sphere of life. He was gentleness
and simplicity itself—and unselfishness, too. Although he was
more than twice as old as the eldest of us, he never gave himself
any airs, privileges, or exemptions on that account. He
did a
young man's
share of the work; and did his share of conversing and
entertaining from the general stand-point
of
any age—not from the arrogant,
overawing summit-height of sixty
years. His one striking peculiarity was his Partingtonian fashion of
loving and using big
words
for their own sakes, and
independent of any bearing they might have upon the thought
he was purposing to convey. He always let his ponderous syllables
fall with an easy unconsciousness that left them wholly without
offensiveness. In truth his air was so natural and so simple that
one was always catching himself accepting his stately sentences as
meaning something, when they really meant nothing in the world.
If a word was long and grand and resonant, that was sufficient to
win the old man's love, and he would drop that word into the most
out-of-the-way place in a sentence or a subject, and be as pleased
with it as if it were perfectly luminous with meaning.
We four always spread our common stock of blankets together
on the frozen ground, and slept side by side; and finding that our
foolish, long-legged hound pup had a deal of animal heat in him,
Oliphant got to admitting him to the bed, between himself and Mr.
Ballou, hugging the dog's warm back to his breast and finding
great comfort in it. But in the night the pup would get stretchy and
brace his feet against the old man's back and shove, grunting
complacently the while; and now and then, being warm and snug,
grateful and happy, he would paw the old man's back simply in
excess of comfort; and at yet other times he would dream of the
chase and in his sleep tug at the old man's back hair and bark in his
ear. The old gentleman complained mildly about these
familiarities, at last, and when he got through with his statement
he said that such a dog as that was not a proper animal to admit to
bed with tired men, because he was "so meretricious in his
movements and so organic in his emotions." We turned the dog
out.
It was a hard, wearing, toilsome journey, but it had its
bright side; for after each day was done and our wolfish hunger
appeased with a hot supper of fried bacon, bread, molasses and
black coffee, the pipe-smoking, song-singing and yarn-spinning
around the evening camp-fire in the still solitudes of the desert was
a happy, care-free sort of recreation that seemed the very summit
and culmination of earthly luxury.
It is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men, whether city
or country-bred. We are descended from desert-lounging Arabs,
and countless ages of growth toward perfect civilization have
failed to root out of us the nomadic instinct. We all confess to a
gratified thrill at the thought of "camping out."
Once we made twenty-five miles in a day, and once we made
forty miles (through the Great American Desert), and ten miles
beyond—fifty in all—in twenty-three hours, without halting to eat,
drink or rest. To stretch out and go to sleep, even on stony and
frozen ground, after pushing a wagon and two horses fifty miles, is
a delight so supreme that for the moment it almost seems cheap at
the price.
We camped two days in the neighborhood of the "Sink of the
Humboldt." We tried to use the strong alkaline water of the Sink,
but it would not answer. It was like drinking lye, and not weak
lye, either. It left a taste in the mouth,
bitter and every way execrable, and a burning in the stomach that
was very uncomfortable. We put molasses in it, but that helped it
very little; we added a pickle, yet the alkali was the prominent
taste and so it was unfit for drinking.
The coffee we made of this water was the meanest compound man
has yet invented. It was really viler to the taste than the
unameliorated water itself. Mr. Ballou, being the architect and
builder of the beverage felt constrained to endorse and uphold it,
and so drank half a cup, by little sips, making shift to praise it
faintly the while, but finally threw out the remainder, and said
frankly it was "too technical for
him."
But presently we found a spring of fresh water, convenient,
and then, with nothing to mar our enjoyment, and no stragglers to
interrupt it, we entered into our rest.