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.”—[“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.]—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.
