第59章

One February I walked out of the North Country on snowshoes and stepped directly into a Canadian Pacific transcontinental train.I was clad in fur cap, vivid blanket coat, corded trousers, German stockings and moccasins; and my only baggage was the pair of snowshoes.It was the season of light travel.

A single Englishman touring the world as the crow flies occupied the car.He looked at me so askance that I made an opportunity of talking to him.Ishould like to read his "Travels" to see what he made out of the riddle.In similar circumstances, and without explanation, I had fun talking French and swapping boulevard reminiscences with a member of a Parisian theatrical troupe making a long jump through northern Wisconsin.And once, at six of the morning, letting myself into my own house with a latch-key, and sitting down to read the paper until the family awoke, I was nearly brained by the butler.He supposed me a belated burglar, and had armed himself with the poker.The most flattering experience of the kind was voiced by a small urchin who plucked at his mother's sleeve:

"Look, mamma!" he exclaimed in guarded but jubilant tones, "there's a real Indian!"Our last camp of this summer was built and broken in the full leisure of at least a three weeks' expectation.

We had traveled south from the Golden Trout through the Toowah range.There we had viewed wonders which I cannot expect you to believe in,--such as a spring of warm water in which you could bathe and from which you could reach to dip up a cup of carbonated water on the right hand, or cast a fly into a trout stream, on the left.At length we entered a high meadow in the shape of a maltese cross, with pine slopes about it, and springs of water welling in little humps of green.There the long pine-needles were extraordinarily thick and the pine-cones exceptionally large.The former we scraped together to the depth of three feet for a bed in the lea of a fallen trunk; the latter we gathered in arm-fuls to pile on the camp-fire.Next morning we rode down a mile or so through the grasses, exclaimed over the thousands of mountain quail buzzing from the creek bottoms, gazed leisurely up at our well-known pines and about at the grateful coolness of our accustomed green meadows and leaves;--and then, as though we had crossed a threshold, we emerged into chaparral, dry loose shale, yucca, Spanish bayonet, heated air and the bleached burned-out furnace-like country of arid California in midsummer.

The trail dropped down through sage-brush, just as it always did in the California we had known; the mountains rose with the fur-like dark-olive effect of the coast ranges; the sun beat hot.We had left the enchanted land.

The trail was very steep and very long, and took us finally into the country of dry brown grasses, gray brush, waterless stony ravines, and dust.Others had traveled that trail, headed the other way, and evidently had not liked it.Empty bottles blazed the path.Somebody had sacrificed a pack of playing-cards, which he had stuck on thorns from time to time, each inscribed with a blasphemous comment on the discomforts of such travel.After an apparently interminable interval we crossed an irrigating ditch, where the horses were glad to water, and so came to one of those green flowering lush California villages so startlingly in contrast to their surroundings.

By this it was two o'clock and we had traveled on horseback since four.A variety of circumstances learned at the village made it imperative that both the Tenderfoot and myself should go out without the delay of a single hour.This left Wes to bring the horses home, which was tough on Wes, but he rose nobly to the occasion.

When the dust of our rustling cleared, we found we had acquired a team of wild broncos, a buckboard, an elderly gentleman with a white goatee, two bottles of beer, some crackers and some cheese.With these we hoped to reach the railroad shortly after midnight.

The elevation was five thousand feet, the road dusty and hot, the country uninteresting in sage-brush and alkali and rattlesnakes and general dryness.

Constantly we drove, checking off the landmarks in the good old fashion.Our driver had immigrated from Maine the year before, and by some chance had drifted straight to the arid regions.He was vastly disgusted.At every particularly atrocious dust-hole or unlovely cactus strip he spat into space and remarked in tones of bottomless contempt:--"BEAU-ti-ful Cal-if-or-nia!"

This was evidently intended as a quotation.

Towards sunset we ran up into rounded hills, where we got out at every rise in order to ease the horses, and where we hurried the old gentleman beyond the limits of his Easterner's caution at every descent.

It grew dark.Dimly the road showed gray in the twilight.We did not know how far exactly we were to go, but imagined that sooner or later we would top one of the small ridges to look across one of the broad plateau plains to the lights of our station.

You see we had forgotten, in the midst of flatness, that we were still over five thousand feet up.Then the road felt its way between two hills;--and the blackness of night opened below us as well as above, and from some deep and tremendous abyss breathed the winds of space.

It was as dark as a cave, for the moon was yet two hours below the horizon.Somehow the trail turned to the right along that tremendous cliff.We thought we could make out its direction, the dimness of its glimmering; but equally well, after we had looked a moment, we could imagine it one way or another, to right and left.I went ahead to investigate.The trail to left proved to be the faint reflection of a clump of "old man" at least five hundred feet down; that to right was a burned patch sheer against the rise of the cliff.We started on the middle way.