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that dreary spot among the Pikes, with nothing in view except barren hill-sides ravaged by mines, and the unbeautiful shanties of miners as rough as the landscape.
Don Fulano, a horse that would not sell, was my profit for the sternest and roughest work of my life! I looked at him, and looked at the mine, that pile of pretty pebbles, that pile of bogus ore, and I did not regret my bargain. I never have regretted it. “My kingdom for a horse,”—so much of a kingdom as I had, I had given.
But was that all I had gained,—an unsalable horse for two years’ work? All,—unless, perhaps, I conclude to calculate the incalculable; unless I estimate certain moral results I had grasped, and have succeeded in keeping; unless I determine to value patience, purpose, and pluck by dollars and cents. However, I have said enough of myself, and my share in the preparations for the work of my story.
Retire, then, Richard Wade, and enter the real hero of the tale.
C H A P T E R I V .
JOHN BRENT.
A MAN who does not love luxury is merely an incomplete man, or, if he prefers, an ignoramus. A man who cannot dispense with luxury, and who does not love hard fare, hard bed, hard travel, and all manner of robust, vigorous, tense work, is a weakling and a soft. Sybaris is a pretty town, rose-leaves are a delicate mattrass, Lydian measures are dulcet to soul and body: also, the wilderness is “no mean city”; hemlock or heather for couch, brocken for curtain, are not cruelty; prairie gales are a brave lullaby for adults.
Simple furniture and simple fare a campaigner needs for the plains,—for chamber furniture, a pair of blankets; for kitchen furniture, a frying-pan and a coffee-pot; for table furniture, a tin mug and his bowie-knife: Sybaris adds a tin plate, a spoon, and even a fork. The list of provisions is as short,—pork, flour, and coffee; that is all, unless Sybaris should indulge in a modicum of tea, a dose or two of sugar, and a vial of vinegar for holidays.
I had several days for preparation, until my companions, the mailriders, should arrive. One morning I was busy making up my packs of such luxuries as I have mentioned for the journey, when I heard the clatter of horses’ feet, and observed a stranger approach and ride up to the door of my shanty. He was mounted upon a powerful iron-gray horse, and drove a pack mule and an Indian pony.
My name was on an elaborately painted shingle over the door. It was my own handiwork, and quite a lion in that region. I felt, whenever I inspected that bit of high art, that, fail or win at the
mine, I had a resource. Indeed, my Pike neighbors seemed to consider that I was unjustifiably burying my artistic talents. Many a not unseemly octagonal slug, with Moffatt & Co.’s imprimatur of value, had been offered me if I would paint up some miner’s hell, as “The True Paradise,” or “The Shades and Caffy de Paris.”
The new-comer read my autograph on the shingle, looked about, caught sight of me at work in the hot shade, dismounted, fastened his horses, and came toward me. It was not the fashion in California, at that time, to volunteer civility or acquaintance. Men had to announce themselves, and prove their claims. I sat where I was, and surveyed the stranger.
“The Adonis of the copper-skins!” I said to myself. “This is the ‘Young Eagle,’ or the ‘Sucking Dove,’ or the ‘Maiden’s Bane,’ or some other great chief of the cleanest Indian tribe on the continent. A beautiful youth! O Fenimore, why are you dead! There are a dozen romances in one look of that young brave. One chapter might be written on his fringed buckskin shirt; one on his equally fringed leggings, with their stripe of porcupine-quills; and one short chapter on his moccasons, with their scarlet cloth instep-piece, and his cap of otter fur decked with an eagle’s feather. What a poem the fellow is! I wish I was an Indian myself for such a companion; or, better, a squaw, to be made love to by him.”
As he approached, I perceived that he was not copper, but bronze. A pale-face certainly! That is, a pale-face tinged by the brazen sun of a California summer. Not less handsome, however, as a Saxon, than an Indian brave. As soon as I identified him as one of my own race, I began to fancy I had seen him before.
“If he were but shaved and clipped, black-coated, booted, gloved, hatted with a shiny cylinder, disarmed of his dangerous looking arsenal, and armed with a plaything of a cane,—in short, if he were metamorphosed from a knight-errant into a carpet-knight, changed from a smooth rough into a smooth smooth,—seems to me I should know him, or know that I had known him once.”
He came up, laid his hand familiarly on my arm, and said, “What, Wade? Don’t you remember me? John Brent.”
“I hear your voice. I begin to see you now. Hurrah!”
“How was it I did not recognize you,” said I, after a fraternal greeting.
“Ten years have presented me with this for a disguise,” said he, giving his moustache a twirl. “Ten years of experience have taken all the girl out of me.”
“What have you been doing these ten years, since College, O many-sided man?”
“Grinding my sides against the Adamant, every one.”
“Has your diamond begun to see light, and shine?”
“The polishing-dust dims it still.”
“How have you found life, kind or cruel?”
“Certainly not kind, hardly cruel, unless indifference is cruelty.”
“But indifference, want of sympathy, must have been a positive relief after the aggressive cruelty of your younger days.”
“And what have you been doing, Richard?”
“Everything that Yankees do,—digging last.”
“That has been my business, too, as well as polishing.”
“The old work, I suppose, to root out lies and plant in truth.”
“That same slow task. Tunnelling too, to find my way out of the prison of doubt into the freedom of faith.”
“You are out, then, at last. Happy and at peace, I hope.”
“At peace, hardly happy. How can such a lonely fellow be happy?”
“We are peers in bereavement now. My family are all gone, except two little children of my sister.”
“Not quite peers. You remember your relatives tenderly. I have no such comfort.”
Odd talk this may seem, to hold with an old friend. Ten years apart! We ought to have met in merrier mood. We might, if we had parted with happy memories. But it was not so. Youth had been a harsh season to Brent. If Fate destines a man to teach, she compels him to learn,—bitter lessons, too, whether he will or no. Brent was a man of genius. All experience, therefore, piled itself upon him. He must learn the immortal consolations by probing all suffering himself.
Brent’s story is a short one or a long one. It can be told in a page, or in a score of volumes. We had met fourteen years before in the same pew of Berkeley College Chapel, grammars by our side and tutors before us, two well-crammed candidates for the Freshman Class. Brent was a delicate, beautiful, dreamy boy. My counterpart. I was plain prose, and needed the poetic element. We became friends. I was steady; he was erratic. I was calm; he was passionate. I was reasonably happy; he was totally miserable. For good cause.
The cause was this; and it has broken weaker hearts than Brent’s. His heart was made of stuff that does not know how to break.
Dr. Swerger was the cause of Brent’s misery. The Reverend Dr. Swerger was a brutal man. One who believes that God is vengeance naturally imitates his God, and does not better his model.
Swerger was Brent’s step-father. Mrs. Brent was pretty, silly, rich, and a widow. Swerger wanted his wife pretty, and not too wise; and that she was rich balanced, perhaps a little more than balanced, the slight objection of widowhood.
Swerger naturally hated his step-son. One intuition of Brent’s was worth all the thoughts of Swerger’s life-time. A clergyman who starts with believing in hells, devils, original sin, and such crudities, can never be anything in the nineteenth century but a tyrant or a nuisance, if he has any logic, as fortunately few of such misbelievers have. Swerger had logic. So had the boy Brent,—the logic of a true,
pure, loving heart. He could not stand Swerger’s coming into his dead father’s house and deluding his mother with a black fanaticism.
So Swerger gave him to understand that he was a child of hell. He won his wife to shrink from her son. Between them they lacerated the boy. He was a brilliant fellow, quite the king of us all. But he worked under a cloud. He could not get at any better religion than Swerger’s; and perhaps there was none better—or much better —to be had at that time.
One day matters came to a quarrel. Swerger cursed his step-son; of course not in the same terms the sailors used on Long Wharf, but with no better spirit. The mother, cowed by her husband, backed him, and abandoned the boy. They drove him out of the house, to go where he would. He came to me. I gave him half my quarters, and tried to cheer him. No use. This bitter wrong to his love to God and to man almost crushed him. He brooded and despaired. He began to fancy himself the lost soul Swerger had called him. I saw that he would die or go mad; or, if he had strength enough to react, it would be toward a hapless rebellion against conventional laws, and so make his blight ruin. I hurried him off to Europe, for change of scene. That was ten years ago, and I had not seen him since. I knew, however, that his mother was visited by compunctions; that she wished to be reconciled to her son; that Swerger refused, and renewed his anathemas; that he bullied the poor little woman to death; that Brent had to wring the property out of him by a long lawsuit, which the Swergerites considered an unconstitutional and devilish proceeding, another proof of total depravity. Miserable business! It went near to crush all the innocence, faith, hope, and religion out of my friend’s life.
Of course this experience had a tendency to drive Brent out of the common paths, to make him a seer instead of a doer. The vulgar cannot comprehend that, when a man is selected by character and circumstance, acting together under the name of destiny, to be a seer, he must see to the end before he begins to say what he sees, to be a guide, a monitor, and a helper. The vulgar, therefore, called
Brent a wasted life, a man of genius manqué, a pointless investigator, a purposeless dreamer. The vulgar loves to make up its mind prematurely. The vulgar cannot abide a man who lives a blameless life so far as personal conduct goes, and yet declines to accept worldly tests of success, worldly principles of action. If a man rebels against laws, and takes the side of vice, that the vulgar can comprehend; but rebellion on the side of virtue is revolutionary, destroys all the old landmarks, must be crucified.
Brent, therefore, boy and man, had had tough experience. I knew of his career, though we had not met. He had wished and attempted, perhaps prematurely, to make his fine genius of definite use. He wanted to make the nation’s prayers; but the Swergerites pronounced his prayers Paganism. He wanted to put the nation’s holiest thoughts into poetry; they called his poetry impious. He wanted to stir up the young men of his day to a franker stand on the side of genuine liberty, and a keener hatred of all slavery, and so to uphold chivalry and heroism; the cynical people scoffed, they said he would get over his boyish folly, that he ought to have lived before Bayard, or half-way through the millennium, but that the kind of stuff he preached and wrote with such unnecessary fervor did not suit the nineteenth century, a practical country and a practical age.
So Brent paused in his work. The boyhood’s unquestioning ardor went out of him. The interregnum between youth and complete manhood came. He gave up his unripe attempt to be a doer, and turned seer again. Observation is the proper business of a man’s third decade; the less a spokesman has to say about his results until thirty, the better, unless he wants to eat his words, or to sustain outgrown formulas. Brent discovered this, and went about the world still pointless, purposeless, manqué, as they said,—minding his own business, getting his facts. His fortune made him independent. He could go where he pleased.
This was the man who rode up on the iron-gray horse. This was the Indianesque Saxon who greeted me. It put color and poetry into my sulky life to see him.
“Off, old fellow?” said Brent, pointing his whip at my traps. “I can’t hear him squeak, but I’m sure there is pig in that gunny-bag, and flour in that sack. I hope you’re not away for a long trip just as I have come to squat with you.”
“No longer than home across the plains.”
“Bravo! then we’ll ride together, instead of squatting together. Instead of your teaching me quartz-mining, I’ll guide you across the Rockys.”
“You know the way, then.”
“Every foot of it. Last fall I hunted up from Mexico and New Mexico with an English friend. We made winter head-quarters with Captain Ruby at Fort Laramie, knocking about all winter in that neighborhood, and at the North among the Wind River Mountains. Early in the spring we went off toward Luggernel Alley and the Luggernel Springs, and camped there for a month.”
“Luggernel Alley! Luggernel Springs! Those are new names to me; in fact, my Rocky Mountain geography is naught.”
“You ought to see them. Luggernel Alley is one of the wonders of this continent.”
So Ithink now that I have seen it. It was odd too, what afterward I remembered as a coincidence, that our first talk should have turned to a spot where we were to do and to suffer, by and by.
“There is something Frenchy in the name Luggernel,” said I.
“Yes; it is a corruption of La Grenouille. There was a famous Canadian trapper of that name, or nickname. He discovered the springs. The Alley, a magnificent gorge, grand as the Via Mala, leads to them. I will describe the whole to you at length, some time.”
“Who was your English friend?”
“Sir Biron Biddulph,—a capital fellow, pink in the cheeks, warm in the heart, strong in the shanks, mighty on the hunt.”
“Hunting for love of it?”
“No; for love itself, or rather the lack of love. A lovely lady in his native Lancashire would not smile; so he turned butcher of buffalo, bears, and big-horn.”
“Named he the ‘fair but frozen maid’?”
“Never. It seems there is something hapless or tragic about her destiny. She did not love him; so he came away to forget her. He made no secret of it. We arrived in Utah last July, on our way to see California. There he got letters from home, announcing, as he told me, some coming misfortune to the lady. As a friend, no longer a lover, he proposed to do what he could to avert the danger. I left him in Salt Lake, preparing to return, and came across country alone.”
“Alone! through the Indian country, with that tempting iron-gray, those tempting packs, that tempting scalp, with its love-locks! Why, the sight of your scalp alone would send a thrill through every Indian heart from Bear River to the Dalles of the Columbia! Perhaps, by the way, you’ve been scalped already, and are safe?”
“No; the mop’s my own mop. Scalp’s all right. Wish I could say the same of the brains. The Indians would not touch me. I am half savage, you know. In this and my former trip, I have become a privileged character,—something of a medicine-man.”
“I suppose you can talk to them. You used to have the gift of tongues.”
“Yes; I have choked down two or three of their guttural lingos, and can sputter them up as easily as I used to gabble iambic trimeters. I like the fellows. They are not ideal heroes; they have not succeeded in developing a civilization, or in adopting ours, and therefore I suppose they must go down, as pine-trees go down to make room for tougher stalks and fruitier growth: but I like the fellows, and don’t believe in their utter deviltry. I have always given the dogs a good name, and they have been good dogs to me. I like thorough men, too; and what an Indian knows, he knows, so that it
is a part of him. It is a good corrective for an artificial man to find himself less of a man, under certain difficulties, than a child of nature. You know this, of course, as well as I do.”
“Yes; we campaigners get close to the heart of Mother Nature, and she teaches us, tenderly or roughly, but thoroughly. By the way, how did you find me out?”
“I heard some Pikes, at a camp last night, talking of a person who had sold a quartz mine for a wonderful horse. I asked the name. They told me yours, and directed me here. Except for this talk, I should have gone down to San Francisco, and missed you.”
“Lucky horse! He brings old friends together,—a good omen! Come and see him.”
C H A P T E R 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 dancingmaster. 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 a bushel. The profits of the “Foolonner” Mine 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. ”
“Isn’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 of Don Fulanos when we rode the miscreants 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 shouldn’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 who had outlived his hopes at home, and fancied 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 them how a saddle feels, and that dangling legs 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 dancingstep, 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 manyleagued 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 viaticumof 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 if they bore each other, finally and hopelessly they can exchange cigars and part for all time, and still be friends, not foes. But the illusions of sham goodfellowship 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 of tough toasted dough a volau vent, and the 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 brooks and shrinks from the gloom of forests primeval, or adores meadows and haystacks, and dreads the far sweeping plain and the sovran snowpeak. Even the greatest artist runs a risk, 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 a ploughman. Ploughmen may tarry in those 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
“Love all waste 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 for the sake of such good faith,—all 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 watermelons’ 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.
C
H A P T E R V I . JAKE SHAMBERLAIN.
IF Heaven’s climate approaches the perfect charm of an American October, I accept my place in advance, and book my lodgings for eternity.
The climate of the best zone in America is transcendent for its purpose. Its purpose is to keep men at their keenest, at high edge and high ardor all the time. Then, for enchanting luxury of repose, when ardent summer has achieved its harvest, and all the measure of the year is full, comes ripe October, with its golden, slumberous air. The atmosphere is visible sunshine. Every leaf in the forest changes to a resplendent blossom. The woods are rich and splendorous, but not glaring. Nothing breaks the tranquil wealthy sentiment of the time. It is the year’s delightful holiday.
In such a season we rode through the bare defiles of the Wasatch Mountains, wall of Utah on the east. We passed Echo Cañon, and the other strait gates and rough ways through which the Latter-Day Saints win an entrance to their Sion.
We met them in throngs, hard at work at such winning. The summer emigration of Mormons was beginning to come in. No one would have admitted their claim to saintship from their appearance. If they had no better passport than their garb, “Avaunt! Proculeste profani!” would have cried any trustworthy janitor of Sion. Saints, if I know them, are clean,—are not ragged, are not even patched. Their garments renew themselves, shed rain like Macintosh, repel dust, sweeten unsavoriness. These sham saints needed unlimited
scouring, persons and raiment. We passed them, when we could, to windward. Poor creatures! we shall see more of their kindred anon.
We hastened on, for our way was long, and autumn’s hospitable days were few. Just at the foot of those bare, bulky mounds of mountain by which the Wasatch range tones off into the great plains between it and the Rockys, we overtook the Salt Lake mail party going eastward. They were travelling eight or ten men strong, with a four-mule wagon, and several horses and mules driven beside for relays.
“If Jake Shamberlain is the captain of the party,” said Brent, when we caught sight of them upon the open, “we’ll join them.”
“Who is Jake Shamberlain?”
“A happy-go-lucky fellow, whom I have met and recognized all over the world. He has been a London policeman. He was pulling stroke-oar in the captain’s gig that took me ashore from a dinner on board the Firefly, British steamer, at the Piræus. He has been a lay brother in a Carthusian convent. He married a pretty girl in Boston once, went off on a mackerel trip, and when he came back the pretty girl had bigamized. That made Mormon and polygamist of him. He came out two or three years ago, and, being a thriving fellow, has got to himself lands and beeves and wives without number. Biddulph and I stayed several days with him when we came through in the summer. His ranch is down the valley, toward Provo. He owns half the United States mail contract. They told me in the city that he intended to run this trip himself. You will see an odd compound of a fellow.”
“I should think so; policeman, acolyte, man-of-war’s-man, Yankee husband, Mormon! Has he come to his finality?”
“He thinks so. He is a shrewd fellow of many smatterings. He says there are only two logical religions in the civilized world,—the Popish and the Mormon. Those two are the only ones that have any basis in authority. His convent experience disenchanted him with Catholicism. He is quite irreverent, is the estimable Jake. He says monks are a set
of snuffy old reprobates. He says that he found celibacy tended to all manner of low vice; that monogamy disappointed him; so he tried the New Revelation, polygamy and all, and has become an ardent propagandist and exhorter. Take the man as he is, and he has plenty of brave, honest qualities.”
We had by this time ridden up to the mail party. They were moving slowly along. The night’s camping-spot was near. It was a bit of grassy level on the bank of a river, galloping over the pebbles with its mountain impetus still in it,—Green River, perhaps; Green, or White, or Big Sandy, or Little Stony. My map of memory is veined with so many such streams, all going in a hurry through barren plains, and no more than drains on a water-shed, that I confuse their undistinguishing names. Such mere business-like water-courses might as well be numbered, after the fashion of the monotonous streets of a city, too new for the consecration of history. Dear New England’s beloved brooks and rivers, slow through the meadows and beneath the elms, tumbling and cascading down the mountain-sides from under the darkling hemlocks into the sparkle of noon, and leaping into white water between the files of Northern birches,—they have their well-remembered titles, friendly and domestic, or of sturdy syllables and wilderness sound. Such waters have spoiled me for gutters,—Colorados, Arkansaws, Plattes, and Missouris.
“Hillo, Shamberlain!” hailed Brent, riding up to the train.
“Howdydo? Howdydo? No swap!” responded Jake, after the Indian fashion. “Bung my eyes! ef you’re not the mate of all mates I’m glad to see. Pax vobiscrum, my filly! You look as fresh as an Aperel shad. Praisèd be the Lord!” continued he, relapsing into Mormon slang, “who has sent thee again, like a brand from the burning, to fall into paths of pleasantness with the Saints, as they wander from the Promised Land to the mean section where the lowlived Gentiles ripen their souls for hell.”
Droll farrago! but just as Jake delivered it. He had the slang and the swearing of all climes and countries at his tongue’s end.
“Hello, stranger!” said he, turning to me. “I allowed you was the Barrownight.”
“It’s my friend, Richard Wade,” said Brent.
“Yours to command, Brother Wade,” Jake says hospitably. “Ef you turn out prime, one of the out and outers, like Brother John Brent, I’ll tip ’em the wink to let you off easy at the Judgment Day, Gentile or not. I’ve booked Brother John fur Paradise; Brother Joseph’s got a white robe fur him, blow high, blow low!”
We rode along beside Shamberlain.
“What did you mean just now?” asked my friend. “You spoke of Wade’s being the baronet.”
“I allowed you wouldn’t leave him behind.”
“I don’t understand. I have not seen him since we left you in the summer. I’ve been on to California and back.”
“The Barrownight’s ben stoppin’ round in the Valley ever since. He seems to have a call to stop. Prehaps his heart is tetched, and he is goan to jine the Lord’s people. I left him down to my ranch, ten days ago, playing with a grizzly cub, what he’s trying to make a gentleman of. A pooty average gentleman it’ll make too.”
“Very odd!” says Brent to me. “Biddulph meant to start for home, at once, when we parted. He had some errand in behalf of the lady he had run away from.”
“Probably he found he could not trust his old wounds under her eyes again. Wants another year’s crust over his scarified heart.”
“Quite likely. Well, I wish we had known he was in the Valley. We would have carried him back with us. A fine fellow! Couldn’t be a better!”
“Not raw, as Englishmen generally are?”
“No; well ripened by a year or so in America.”
“Individuals need that cookery, as the race did.”
“Yes; I wish our social cuisine were a thought more scientific.”
“All in good time. We shall separate sauces by and by, and not compel beef, mutton, and turkey to submit to the same gravy.”
“Meanwhile some of my countrymen are so under-done, and some so over-done, that I have lost my taste for them.”
“Such social dyspepsia is soon cured on the plains. You will go back with a healthy appetite. Did your English friend describe the lady of his love?”
“No; it was evidently too stern a grief to talk about. He could keep up his spirits only by resolutely turning his back on the subject.”
“It must needs have been a weak heart or a mighty passion.”
“The latter. A brave fellow like Biddulph does not take to his heels from what he can overcome.”
By this time we had reached camp.
Horses first, self afterwards, is the law of the plains travel. A camp must have,—
1. Water.
2. Fodder.
3. Fuel.
Those are the necessities. Anything else is luxury.
The mail party were a set of jolly roughs. Jake Shamberlain was the type man. To encounter such fellows is good healthy education. As useful in kind, but higher in degree, as going to a bear conversazione or a lion and tiger concert. Civilization mollifies the race. It is not well to have hard knocks and rough usage for mind or body eliminated from our training.
We joined suppers with our new friends. After supper we sat smoking our pipes, and talking horse, Indians, bear-fights, scalping, and other brutal business, such as the world has not outgrown.
C H A P T E R V I I .
ENTER, THE BRUTES!
THE sun had just gone down. There was a red wrangle of angry vapors over the mounds of mountain westward. A brace of travellers from Salt Lake way rode up and lighted their camp fire near ours. More society in that lonely world. Two families, with two sets of Lares and Penates.
Not attractive society. They were a sinister-looking couple of hounds. A lean wolfish and a fat bony dog.
One was a rawboned, stringy chap,—as gaunt, unkempt, and cruel a Pike as ever pillaged the cabin, insulted the wife, and squirted tobacco over the dead body of a Free State settler in Kansas. The other was worse, because craftier. A little man, stockish, oily, and red in the face. A jaunty fellow, too, with a certain shabby air of coxcombry even in his travel-stained attire.
They were well mounted, both. The long ruffian rode a sorrel, big and bony as himself, and equally above such accidents as food or no food. The little villain’s mount was a red roan, a Flathead horse, rather naggy, but perfectly hardy and wiry,—an animal that one would choose to do a thousand miles in twenty days, or a hundred between sunrise and sunset. They had also two capital mules, packed very light. One was branded, “A. & A.”
Distrust and disgust are infallible instincts. Men’s hearts and lives are written on their faces, to warn or charm. Never reject that divine or devilish record!
Brent read the strangers, shivered at me, and said, sotto voce, “What a precious pair of cut-throats! We must look sharp for our horses while they are about.”
“Yes,” returned I, in the same tone; “they look to me like Sacramento gamblers, who have murdered somebody, and had to make tracks for their lives.”
“The Cassius of the pair is bad enough,” said Brent; “but that oily little wretch sickens me. I can imagine him when he arrives at St. Louis, blossomed into a purple coat with velvet lappels, a brocaded waistcoat, diamond shirt-studs, or a flamboyant scarf pinned with a pinchbeck dog, and red-legged patent-leather boots, picking his teeth on the steps of the Planters’ House. Faugh! I feel as if a snake were crawling over me, when I look at him.”
“They are not very welcome neighbors to our friends here.”
“No. Roughs abhor brutes as much as you or I do. Roughs are only nature; brutes are sin. I do not like this brutal element coming in. It portends misfortune. You and I will inevitably come into collision with those fellows.”
“You take your hostile attitude at once, and without much reluctance.”
“You know something of my experience. I have had a struggle all my life with sin in one form or other, with brutality in one form or other. I have been lacerated so often from unwillingness to strike the first blow, that I have at last been forced into the offensive.”
“You believe in flooring Apollyon before he floors you.”
“There must be somebody to do the merciless. It’s not my business—the melting mood—in my present era.”
“We are going off into generalities, àpropos of those two brutes. What, O volunteer champion of virtue, dost thou propose in regard to them? When will you challenge them to the ordeal, to prove themselves honest men and good fellows?”
“Aggression always comes from evil. They are losels, we are true knights. They will do some sneaking villany. You and I will thereupon up and at ’em.”
“Odd fellow are you, with your premonitions!”
“They are very vague, of course, but based on a magnetism which I have learnt to trust, after much discipline, because I refused to obey it. Look at that big brute, how he kicks and curses his mule!”
“Perhaps he has stolen it, and is revenging his theft on its object. That brand ‘A. & A.’ may remind him what a thief he is.”
“Here comes the fat brother. He’ll propose to camp with us.”
“It is quite natural he should, saint or sinner,—all the more if he is sinner. It must be terrible for a man who has ugly secrets to wake up at night, alone in bivouac, with a grisly dream, no human being near, and find the stars watching him keenly, or the great white, solemn moon pitying him, yet saying, with her inflexible look, that, moan and curse as he may, no remorse will save him from despair.”
“Yes,” said Brent, knocking the ashes out of his pipe; “night always seems to judge and sentence the day. A foul man, or a guilty man, so long as he intends to remain foul and guilty, dreads pure, quiet, orderly Nature.”
The objectionable stranger came up to our camp-fire.
“Hello, men!” said he, with a familiar air, “it’s a fine night”; and meeting with no response, he continued: “But, I reckon, you don’t allow nothin’ else but fine nights in this section.”
“Bad company makes all nights bad,” says Jake Shamberlain, gruffly enough.
“Ay; and good company betters the orneriest sort er weather. The more the merrier, eh?”
“Supposin’ it’s more perarer wolves, or more rattlesnakes, or more horse-thieving, scalpin’ Utes!” says Jake, unpropitiated.
