Part 3 (2/2)
air, and a smart _sang de boeuf_ bow under her chin. In the course of some conversation which ensued I mentioned that Mr. s.h.i.+n was on the road, and inquired whether she knew him. A smile rose immediately on her cherry lips.
”s.h.i.+n? Well, you'd better believe I do; he's pretty well known around.
Say, Alice! d'ye hear?” she cried, raising her voice, ”s.h.i.+n's coming 'long.”
A merry laugh from the interior of the log-house greeted this announcement.
”There ain't another just like s.h.i.+n 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! s.h.i.+n'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. s.h.i.+n ”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 s.h.i.+n 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 s.h.i.+n 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 das.h.i.+ng 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.
s.h.i.+n 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 s.h.i.+vering 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. s.h.i.+n 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 s.h.i.+n, 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.
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