第62章

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.