Saddle And Mocassin Part 3

"Hush!" whispered B.

"Hush!" repeated the giant.

I also said, "hush!" The driver made the same pertinent observation--the only remark he contributed that day. Then we all "hushed" in chorus, which started the horses, and quieted the quails.

(_Par parenthese_, may I inquire if you ever hush, when told to do so?

Systematic experiments upon all sorts and conditions of people have led me to conclude that the impulse to "hush" back at once is one that human nature cannot resist.)

Silence being restored, we listened. Soon the quails' calling burst forth again away up the hill-side, and, hastily alighting, we plunged into the forest and followed them.

In a few minutes a bird suddenly rose before me, and vanished behind a bush. Whilst debating in my own mind whether it were a quail or not, another bird rose and whisked round another bush. I shot the bush. And then another bird got up, and I shot another bush. And then another bird got up, and there being no bush in its immediate vicinity, I stopped it, and proceeded to pick up my first Californian mountain quail.

What a pretty bird it is, with its long drooping top-knot, and its mottled breast and thighs! Of the sad-coloured birds, few can excel it in beauty of shape or marking. It has that symmetrically prosperous, that aesthetically fastidious, confidently reposeful, felicitously demure appearance, only to be observed in perfection in wealthy, wicked, and juvenile widows. Shin, an exquisitely bad shot (so bad indeed that he rarely succeeded in killing a quail, unless he caught one sitting for its photograph), used to a.s.sert that: "They would roll about on the granite boulders with their heels in the air, and laugh till they moulted, when they saw _him_ coming with a gun." I cannot say that I myself ever witnessed in the quail any so striking an example of their just appreciation of the humorous as this; but my informant was a man of thoughtful habits, keen powers of observation, and unimpeachable veracity. Moreover, it is well known that certain birds do laugh, and that, too, under less provocation than Shin's quails experienced. To the curious collector of ornithological data I can, therefore, commend this instance.

Having bagged a couple more birds, a sugar-pine, and a granite boulder, I rejoined the buggy, where the others soon met me, and, remounting, we drove slowly on again. In a few minutes the same proceedings were re-enacted, and this continued throughout the afternoon. It was the easiest sport that I ever enjoyed. Quail shooting after this fashion has all the attractive simplicity of vice. It induces that pleasurable exultation which, until detection supervenes, always, I believe, attends an infraction of the law. Enjoyment of such kind seldom fails to stimulate even the jaded appet.i.tes of the wicked, but more especially doth it afford a relish to those who, never having impaired their moral palates by intemperate indulgence in crime, are still able to sin with the sentiments of novelty and zest that ever reward moderation. Need I say that our moral palates were yet susceptible of these delightful impressions.

At length the driver pulled up on the summit of a grade. The shadows had grown longer and deeper, the day had waxed old and weary, rich in colour and in gilded glory, but in breathing faint and low. Both near and far away the granite peaks were lurid with purple and with blood-red lights, as if the sun shone on them through stained gla.s.s. The crests of the ridges had become fringed with a lace-work of coruscated fire, that glittered through the dark pine-quills, and shot soft, luminous rays and ways down into the delicately pencilled pools of twilight in the bottoms, whose leafy edges seemed like pebbled sh.o.r.es. And at one point, where the hidden trout stream, winding on its course, had widened for itself a resting-place, deep in a wilderness of foliage and shade there gleamed a strange hieroglyphic in thread of gold, that flashed upon the shifting eddies of the water-node, as though some magic beetle circled there.

The squirrels and the chipmunks had vanished. No longer did the challenge of the doughty quail call us to arms. It was that transient interlude betwixt the minstrelsy of day and night. Dumb stillness had fallen upon all the forest, and not a breath of wind wooed any flower, nor whispered round any cone, till, with one long, low sigh, like a lost, lonely note of music singing to seek its fellows in the brown whorls of curled leaves--those forest sh.e.l.ls of daintiest biscuit-work--the dirge of day stole through the valley and pa.s.sed on.

There was only the murmur of the rock-embosomed stream, and from afar off, the fitful tinkling of a wether-bell came faintly down our way.

"Hence, thou lingerer, light!

Eve saddens into night."

"Drive on to Campbell's--we'll stay there to-night. It is getting too late to shoot," said Shin.

The wheels grated once more on the stony track, and on we went to Campbell's hostelry.

Very many of the pleasantest days in life are the most poverty-stricken in regard to incident. In all this week, only one episode occurred which would make you really laugh, and that, I regret to say, Shin would not like me to relate. Do not infer though, that, because the current of the trip was placid, it necessarily was dull. So far from such being the case, we did not pa.s.s a single dull half-hour. An exhilarating freshness, an evanescent crispness is in this mountain air, which absolutely defies dulness. Moreover, we had started in that state of helpless good humour in which anything serves as food for laughter. It was not recorded that any one made a sensible remark during the whole drive; we talked pure nonsense exclusively. In this congenial spirit we were encouraged by the fact that, our wooden-visaged, saturnine driver--an eminently matter-of-fact and sensible man--preserved, throughout, impenetrable reserve. He sat on the box-seat in dignified silence, a mute protest against the egregious imbecility of human nature as exemplified in ourselves. Evidently he had been designed without any reference to the rules of risible acoustics. He was angular and flat all over. People constructed on this principle are not adapted for the expression of merriment. If he ever had laughed, the displacement of solemnity would have been so tremendous, that he would never have recovered his centre of gravity, and would probably have died mentally upside down, and mad. He only made one spontaneous observation during the excursion. We were talking of chipmunks and squirrels.

"Chipmunks----" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. And then he paused and thought for a while. "Chipmunks," he resumed, later in the day, "is alegant food."

Up the hill we were slowly toiling towards Campbell's, when a ragged boy in a broad-leafed hat, seated upon a ragged pony, whose tail coquetted with his heels, came jogging on the down-grade towards us.

"Say!" exclaimed Shin, "now when this fellow pa.s.ses, we'll all take off our hats to him. Don't say anything; just bow and watch him."

Accordingly, when the boy drew near we greeted him with three sweeping bows. Probably he had never seen any one bow before; evidently he was not familiar with this form of salutation. He pulled up, and was staring after us in dumb astonishment, when, a thought seemed to strike him.

Removing his own hat, he carefully examined it. But there was nothing the matter with that, and he rammed it on again with an air of dogged perplexity. Anon, he shouted something--our inability to catch which was perhaps not to be deplored; and when, some minutes later, we turned a corner and lost sight of him, he was still where we had left him, gazing after us.

_a propos des bottes_: this unkempt, young mountaineer possessed aquiline features of the purest type; and it appears to me, as a superficial observer, open to correction, that these will distinguish the American of the future. The fusion of races in America is remarkably rapid. Distinctive physical peculiarities vanish not less swiftly than do national idiosyncrasies in character. And the mould in which these disappear is one that bears a striking resemblance to that formerly prevalent among the higher cla.s.s Indian nations of the continent. The typical American is aquiline-featured, stern or impa.s.sible in expression of countenance, spare of frame, chary of speech, impa.s.sive in demeanour, endued with unusual self-control and determination. But these traits--which, if further example were necessary, could be multiplied--were all once distinctive of the Indian; and that they should rea.s.sert themselves thus uniformly in the descendants of the divers alien races settled in America, opens a physiological problem of unusual magnitude and interest. Doubtless, in process of time, the citizen of the republic will become tinged with copper. A tone of bra.s.s is already noticeable occasionally.

Next morning saw us early under way; and during all the forenoon the road led through rocky pa.s.ses, or was blasted in the steep sides of sombre valleys. On we drove amidst a network of crumbled light, whose shadowed meshes were cast by the vast trunks of cedars, sugar and yellow pines, red and silver firs, tamaracks, and spruces. Nothing in the forest races can match the stately beauty of these straight-limbed giants, clad in dark plumes. They are an order of knights, a dynasty of kings amongst trees. Where they have fallen, they lie like vanquished t.i.tans, and seem even grander stretched out beneath clinging palls of moss than when upreared, archetypes of strength and grace, they toss their quilled foliage in the winds, and tower majestically above the earth.

Ever and anon the continuity of their solemn crypts and corridors was interrupted by some still glen, a cache of dreams and summer beauty. And here--scattered amidst enormous boulders, or gray and grim, or worked with gorgeous blazonry in lichens--red-leaved sumachs, golden-foliaged aspens, and ma.s.ses of flushed flowers blent in the rich arabesque of purple, brown, and russet bracken, had writ an idyl in a silent language, whose words were colour, and whose characters were leafy tracery, delicate and ever new. Yonder, by the lucent gleam of sunbeams, its tinted poetry was touched with fire, and there in the pearly shadows of midday it was yet coolly sleeping.

Long must have been the list of killed and wounded in the _Quail Gazette_ after that morning's work. At times the forest rang and re-echoed like a choice covert in England. Towards noon, having finished a beat before the others were ready, I walked on ahead of the buggy to a turnpike gate to ask for a gla.s.s of water. Instead of a crusty old gate-keeper I was agreeably surprised to see, tripping bare-headed from the neighbouring cottage, a pretty dark girl with black eyes, a "peart"

air, and a smart _sang de boeuf_ bow under her chin. In the course of some conversation which ensued I mentioned that Mr. Shin was on the road, and inquired whether she knew him. A smile rose immediately on her cherry lips.

"Shin? Well, you'd better believe I do; he's pretty well known around.

Say, Alice! d'ye hear?" she cried, raising her voice, "Shin's coming 'long."

A merry laugh from the interior of the log-house greeted this announcement.

"There ain't another just like Shin from here to Panama," explained the damsel. "He's a genius. He's bound to be foolin' all the time, and he looks so sad with it--like he'd got a pain somewhere, or was making up poetry. Oh! Shin's a whole show, and he plays the music himself."

We lunched here, the gate-keeper's daughter kindly undertaking to cook quails for us if we would pluck them. Shin "played the music."

In the afternoon we set forth again through the forest, and its clearings, and its old deserted villages, that had flourished when the route we were following was the high-way betwixt Sacramento and Virginia City, when placer mining was carried on in the district, and before the railway had usurped the traffic. Now, owing to neglect, and to the destruction caused by heavy rains, the track appears to have lain disused for centuries instead of for little more than a decade. Many a yarn had Shin and B. to relate of the days when this same dried watercourse was a well-kept road, and they rattled up and down its steep grades on the mail-coach. One, and not the least curious of the wayside features, is the still standing trunks of pine-trees that were sawn off twenty and thirty feet from the ground, when the snow lay that deep on the Sierras.

We had come in our old weather-stained hunting garments, and, in order not to burden the buggy, had brought with us very little extra clothing.

During the day's work the dust had acc.u.mulated upon us, until it almost seemed as if we were fulfilling the biblical prophecy and returning to the original component of man. It was anything but comforting, therefore, to hear Shin remark, as we turned off the main road in the direction of Soda Springs, that it was the time of year when visitors were numerous there. He, however, was right. When, in due course, we issued from the forest, and crossing a rustic bridge drew up before the hotel, we found its verandah full of pretty faces and well-dressed men.

Soda Springs is a summer resort, consisting merely of a hotel, a few outhouses, and a private cottage, all prettily situated in a valley. A dashing trout stream runs hard by, and there is some fair shooting in the neighbourhood.

To visit Soda Springs without ascending Tinkler's n.o.b was to incur an everlasting stigma of reproach. Nevertheless, as I sat smoking in the verandah next morning (Sunday), eyeing askance that most uncompromisingly perpendicular mountain, my heart opened towards the stigma. It was so hot. I suggested this to B., he merely remarked that it was nothing to what we should experience half-way up the n.o.b. B. had determined that I should go up. I indulged in another long and careful survey of the disagreeable eminence with the cacophonious appellation.

It looked more inaccessible than ever. I observed that, the farther you were from mountains the finer they looked; that when once you had scaled a mountain you seemed to lose all respect for it; and that I had a reverence for Tinkler's n.o.b which I should be loth to disturb.

But I had to deal with one of those energetic men who love to get to the top of everything. I confess to a preference for the base end, at any rate, of mountains and high places. It is shadier and safer, and not so far off where I generally am. However, after exhausting a variety of excuses, Tinkler's n.o.b and the path of duty still lay directly in front of me, B. was still sternly pointing at them, and the thermometer was still rising.

Shin did not accompany us. We reluctantly left him with a cool drink, a long cigar, and a newspaper in the verandah. He said that the only thing he had promised his parents when he left Kentucky, twenty years before, was, "to sit around and reflect on Sunday mornings;" that the more he sat around and reflected, the more he became convinced that there was "something in it;" and that as soon as he "struck a Bonanza," he meant to sit around and reflect on week-days too. He said, moreover, that he didn't believe mountains were ever intended to be ascended, or they would have been arranged somehow differently, perhaps bottom upwards--he wasn't sure; the question was too deep a one to go into on so warm a morning.

We started without a guide, and when half the ascent was completed, lost the track. After some time spent in vainly seeking it, we laid the reins upon our horses' necks, and commended ourselves to their sagacity. They did not immediately bear us to our destination without guidance, although they must have known every pebble in the route; they started straight down hill, fast. With some difficulty we put them about, and eventually invented a way of our own to the summit.

I had carefully abstained from spoiling the effect of the final _coup d'oeil_ by studying the panorama in detail as we ascended. Lavishly was my patience rewarded. Far as the eye could reach on every side stretched a confused sea of keen-crested rocky billows. Ridge behind rugged ridge rose up, and bluff behind leonine bluff appeared like mountains couchant. Peak towered over peak, from the vast iron helmets near at hand to the thin, blue, palpitating spectres of hills upon the verge of the horizon; from Devil's Point and Fremont's granite roof away to Imperial Shasta "diademed with circling snow," queen of them all. And grim as sentinels, keeping a silent watch throughout all time over the pine-shut valleys, they reared their furrowed brows far up above the clouds that sought to veil their majesty, but only lay a wreath of snowy fleece about their mighty shoulders. The world lay below us. What solitudes were there not there, what distances, what joyous mood, what melancholy, what fields of light, what cloud-cast drifting wastes of shadow! Beside hollows of lapis-lazuli, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with golden haze, might be seen gulfs of sullen gloom; through the mantle of purple pines showed flanks of naked stone. Even summer noon but half beguiled the scene of its savage character.

"There was wide wandering for the greediest eye."

Yonder was Emerald Bay; the Sacramento Valley there; there ran the railways, covered in for miles and miles by snow-sheds. Elsewhere two forest fires headed by columns of smoke crept on their devastating march. And in the distance, in the midst of all this wild scenery, like a great opal upon the iron bosom of the Sierras, slept crystal Tahoe beneath hazy curtains, its gray and silver ripples shivering in cold light, and winking through the atmospheric dimness with countless rapid flashes.

Here, reader, upon the extreme summit of Tinkler's n.o.b, I purpose to abandon you: you must find your own way down. Shin met us when we returned half baked to the verandah. He said that he had changed his mind about going up, and if we cared to turn round and repeat the ascent, he would now come with us.

What followed was but a repet.i.tion of what had gone before. On the next day we started to return to Emigrant Gap, and parting there from Shin, the pleasantest of companions and hosts, sped on to San Francisco.

CHAPTER IV.

A GLIMPSE OF SONORA.

"At what time does the stage start for Magdalena?" I inquired of the bar-tender at the "Metropolitan Hotel," Tucson, where the Southern Pacific Railway had just landed me.

"Magdalena?" he drawled. "Well, guess you'll have to wait here till Sat.u.r.day now. Stage went out this morning at eight o'clock."

It was nine o'clock on Tuesday. _En route_ from the station I had seen quite enough of Tucson to put my ill-luck in its strongest light. But the bar-tender did not seem to realise that there could be any misfortune in a delay of four days there.