第47章

But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time!'--and you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!"When we were eight hours out from Salt Lake City a Mormon preacher got in with us at a way station--a gentle, soft-spoken, kindly man, and one whom any stranger would warm to at first sight.I can never forget the pathos that was in his voice as he told, in simple language, the story of his people's wanderings and unpitied sufferings.No pulpit eloquence was ever so moving and so beautiful as this outcast's picture of the first Mormon pilgrimage across the plains, struggling sorrowfully onward to the land of its banishment and marking its desolate way with graves and watering it with tears.His words so wrought upon us that it was a relief to us all when the conversation drifted into a more cheerful channel and the natural features of the curious country we were in came under treatment.One matter after another was pleasantly discussed, and at length the stranger said:

"I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it.Horace Greeley went over this road once.When he was leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an engagement to lecture in Placerville, and was very anxious to go through quick.Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace.The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way that it jolted the buttons all off of Horace's coat, and finally shot his head clean through the roof of the stage, and then he yelled at Hank Monk and begged him to go easier--said he warn't in as much of a hurry as he was awhile ago.

But Hank Monk said, 'Keep your seat, Horace, and I'll get you there on time!'--and you bet you bet you he did, too, what was left of him!"Ten miles out of Ragtown we found a poor wanderer who had lain down to die.He had walked as long as he could, but his limbs had failed him at last.Hunger and fatigue had conquered him.It would have been inhuman to leave him there.We paid his fare to Carson and lifted him into the coach.It was some little time before he showed any very decided signs of life; but by dint of chafing him and pouring brandy between his lips we finally brought him to a languid consciousness.Then we fed him a little, and by and by he seemed to comprehend the situation and a grateful light softened his eye.We made his mail-sack bed as comfortable as possible, and constructed a pillow for him with our coats.

He seemed very thankful.Then he looked up in our faces, and said in a feeble voice that had a tremble of honest emotion in it:

"Gentlemen, I know not who you are, but you have saved my life; and although I can never be able to repay you for it, I feel that I can at least make one hour of your long journey lighter.I take it you are strangers to this great thorough fare, but I am entirely familiar with it.In this connection I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to listen to it.Horace Greeley----"I said, impressively:

"Suffering stranger, proceed at your peril.You see in me the melancholy wreck of a once stalwart and magnificent manhood.What has brought me to this? That thing which you are about to tell.Gradually but surely, that tiresome old anecdote has sapped my strength, undermined my constitution, withered my life.Pity my helplessness.Spare me only just this once, and tell me about young George Washington and his little hatchet for a change."We were saved.But not so the invalid.In trying to retain the anecdote in his system he strained himself and died in our arms.

I am aware, now, that I ought not to have asked of the sturdiest citizen of all that region, what I asked of that mere shadow of a man; for, after seven years' residence on the Pacific coast, I know that no passenger or driver on the Overland ever corked that anecdote in, when a stranger was by, and survived.Within a period of six years I crossed and recrossed the Sierras between Nevada and California thirteen times by stage and listened to that deathless incident four hundred and eighty-one or eighty-two times.I have the list somewhere.Drivers always told it, conductors told it, landlords told it, chance passengers told it, the very Chinamen and vagrant Indians recounted it.I have had the same driver tell it to me two or three times in the same afternoon.It has come to me in all the multitude of tongues that Babel bequeathed to earth, and flavored with whiskey, brandy, beer, cologne, sozodont, tobacco, garlic, onions, grasshoppers--everything that has a fragrance to it through all the long list of things that are gorged or guzzled by the sons of men.I never have smelt any anecdote as often as I have smelt that one; never have smelt any anecdote that smelt so variegated as that one.And you never could learn to know it by its smell, because every time you thought you had learned the smell of it, it would turn up with a different smell.Bayard Taylor has written about this hoary anecdote, Richardson has published it; so have Jones, Smith, Johnson, Ross Browne, and every other correspondence-inditing being that ever set his foot upon the great overland road anywhere between Julesburg and San Francisco; and I have heard that it is in the Talmud.I have seen it in print in nine different foreign languages; I have been told that it is employed in the inquisition in Rome; and I now learn with regret that it is going to be set to music.I do not think that such things are right.

Stage-coaching on the Overland is no more, and stage drivers are a race defunct.I wonder if they bequeathed that bald-headed anecdote to their successors, the railroad brakemen and conductors, and if these latter still persecute the helpless passenger with it until he concludes, as did many a tourist of other days, that the real grandeurs of the Pacific coast are not Yo Semite and the Big Trees, but Hank Monk and his adventure with Horace Greeley.[And what makes that worn anecdote the more aggravating, is, that the adventure it celebrates never occurred.

If it were a good anecdote, that seeming demerit would be its chiefest virtue, for creative power belongs to greatness; but what ought to be done to a man who would wantonly contrive so flat a one as this? If Iwere to suggest what ought to be done to him, I should be called extravagant--but what does the sixteenth chapter of Daniel say? Aha!].