The first thing we did on that glad evening that landed us at St. Joseph
was to hunt up the stage-office, and pay a hundred and fifty dollars
apiece for tickets per overland coach to Carson City, Nevada.
The next morning, bright and early, we took a hasty breakfast, and hurried
to the starting-place. Then an inconvenience presented itself which we had
not properly appreciated before, namely, that one cannot make a heavy
traveling trunk stand for twenty-five pounds of baggage—because it
weighs a good deal more. But that was all we could take—twenty-five
pounds each. So we had to snatch our trunks open, and make a selection in
a good deal of a hurry. We put our lawful twenty-five pounds apiece all in
one valise, and shipped the trunks back to St. Louis again. It was a sad
parting, for now we had no swallow-tail coats and white kid gloves to wear
at Pawnee receptions in the Rocky Mountains, and no stove-pipe hats nor
patent-leather boots, nor anything else necessary to make life calm and
peaceful. We were reduced to a war-footing. Each of us put on a rough,
heavy suit of clothing, woolen army shirt and “stogy” boots
included; and into the valise we crowded a few white shirts, some
under-clothing and such things. My brother, the Secretary, took along
about four pounds of United States statutes and six pounds of Unabridged
Dictionary; for we did not know—poor innocents—that such
things could be bought in San Francisco on one day and received in Carson
City the next. I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith &
Wesson’s seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homoeopathic
pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult. But I
thought it was grand. It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon. It only
had one fault—you could not hit anything with it. One of our “conductors”
practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and
behaved herself she was safe; but as soon as she went to moving about, and
he got to shooting at other things, she came to grief. The Secretary had a
small-sized Colt’s revolver strapped around him for protection
against the Indians, and to guard against accidents he carried it
uncapped. Mr. George Bemis was dismally formidable. George Bemis was our
fellow-traveler.
We had never seen him before. He wore in his belt an old original “Allen”
revolver, such as irreverent people called a “pepper-box.”
Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol. As the
trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn
over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the
ball. To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a
feat which was probably never done with an “Allen” in the
world. But George’s was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as
one of the stage-drivers afterward said, “If she didn’t get
what she went after, she would fetch something else.” And so she
did. She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and
fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did
not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun
and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon—the
“Allen.” Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once,
and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind
it.
We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in the
mountains. In the matter of luxuries we were modest—we took none
along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco. We had two large
canteens to carry water in, between stations on the Plains, and we also
took with us a little shot-bag of silver coin for daily expenses in the
way of breakfasts and dinners.
By eight o’clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side
of the river. We jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and
we bowled away and left “the States” behind us. It was a
superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine.
There was a freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of
emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost
made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling
and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away. We were spinning along
through Kansas, and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly
abroad on the great Plains. Just here the land was rolling—a grand
sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far as the eye could reach—like
the stately heave and swell of the ocean’s bosom after a storm. And
everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares of deeper green, this
limitless expanse of grassy land. But presently this sea upon dry ground
was to lose its “rolling” character and stretch away for seven
hundred miles as level as a floor!
Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous
description—an imposing cradle on wheels. It was drawn by six
handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the “conductor,”
the legitimate captain of the craft; for it was his business to take
charge and care of the mails, baggage, express matter, and passengers. We
three were the only passengers, this trip. We sat on the back seat,
inside. About all the rest of the coach was full of mail bags—for we
had three days’ delayed mails with us. Almost touching our knees, a
perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof. There was a great
pile of it strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots
were full. We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver
said—“a little for Brigham, and Carson, and ’Frisco, but
the heft of it for the Injuns, which is powerful troublesome ’thout
they get plenty of truck to read.”
But as he just then got up a fearful convulsion of his countenance which
was suggestive of a wink being swallowed by an earthquake, we guessed that
his remark was intended to be facetious, and to mean that we would unload
the most of our mail matter somewhere on the Plains and leave it to the
Indians, or whosoever wanted it.
We changed horses every ten miles, all day long, and fairly flew over the
hard, level road. We jumped out and stretched our legs every time the
coach stopped, and so the night found us still vivacious and unfatigued.
After supper a woman got in, who lived about fifty miles further on, and
we three had to take turns at sitting outside with the driver and
conductor. Apparently she was not a talkative woman. She would sit there
in the gathering twilight and fasten her steadfast eyes on a mosquito
rooting into her arm, and slowly she would raise her other hand till she
had got his range, and then she would launch a slap at him that would have
jolted a cow; and after that she would sit and contemplate the corpse with
tranquil satisfaction—for she never missed her mosquito; she was a
dead shot at short range. She never removed a carcase, but left them there
for bait. I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her kill thirty or forty
mosquitoes—watched her, and waited for her to say something, but she
never did. So I finally opened the conversation myself. I said:
“The mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam.”
“You bet!”
“What did I understand you to say, madam?”
“You BET!”
Then she cheered up, and faced around and said:
“Danged if I didn’t begin to think you fellers was deef and
dumb. I did, b’gosh. Here I’ve sot, and sot, and sot, a-bust’n
muskeeters and wonderin’ what was ailin’ ye. Fust I thot you
was deef and dumb, then I thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin’,
and then by and by I begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that
couldn’t think of nothing to say. Wher’d ye come from?”
The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more! The fountains of her great deep were
broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty
nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge
of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder projecting
above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed
pronunciation!
How we suffered, suffered, suffered! She went on, hour after hour, till I
was sorry I ever opened the mosquito question and gave her a start. She
never did stop again until she got to her journey’s end toward
daylight; and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage (for we
were nodding, by that time), and said:
“Now you git out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple o’
days, and I’ll be along some time to-night, and if I can do ye any
good by edgin’ in a word now and then, I’m right thar. Folks’ll
tell you’t I’ve always ben kind o’ offish and partic’lar
for a gal that’s raised in the woods, and I am, with the rag-tag and
bob-tail, and a gal has to be, if she wants to be anything,
but when people comes along which is my equals, I reckon I’m a
pretty sociable heifer after all.”
We resolved not to “lay by at Cottonwood.”
