ACROSS COUNTRY.
I led my friend toward the corral.
“A fine horse that gray of yours,” said I.
“Yes; a splendid fellow,--stanch and true. He will go till he dies.”
“In tip-top condition, too. What do you call him?”
“Pumps.”
“Why Pumps? Why not Pistons? or Cranks? or Walking-Beams? or some part
of the steam-engine that does the going directly?”
“You have got the wrong clue. I named him after our old dancing-master.
Pumps the horse has a favorite amble, precisely like that skipping walk
that Pumps the man used to set us for model,--a mincing gait, that
prejudiced me, until I saw what a stride he kept for the time when
stride was wanting.”
“Here is my black gentleman. What do you think of him?”
Don Fulano trotted up and licked a handful of corn from my hand. Corn
was four dollars a bushel. The profits of the “Foolonner” Mine did not
allow of such luxuries. But old Gerrian had presented me with a sack of
it.
Fulano crunched his corn, snorted his thanks, and then snuffed
questioningly, and afterwards approvingly, about the stranger.
“Soul and body of Bucephalus!” says Brent. “There is a quadruped that
is a HORSE.”
“Isn’t he?” said I, thrilling with pride for him.
“To look at such a fellow is a romance. He is the most beautiful thing
I ever saw.”
“No exceptions?”
“Not one.”
“Woman! lovely woman!” I cried, with mock enthusiasm.
“If I had ever seen a woman to compare with that horse, after her kind,
I should not be here.”
“Where then?”
“Wherever she was. Living for her. Dying for her. Chasing her if she
were dragged from me. Snatching her from the jaws of death.”
“Hold hard! You talk as furiously as if you saw such a scene before
your eyes.”
“Your horse brings up all the chivalric tales I have ever read. If
these were knightly days, and two brothers in arms, like you and
myself, ever rescued distressed damsels from the grip of caitiffs vile,
we ought to be mounted upon a pair of Don Fulanos when we rode the
miscreants down.”
The fine sensitiveness of a poetic man like Brent makes a prophet of
him,--that is to say, a man who has the poet’s delicate insight into
character anticipates everything that character will do. So Brent was
never surprised; though I confess I was, when I found men, horses, and
places doing what he had hinted long before.
“Well,” continued I, “I paid two years’ work for my horse. Was it too
much? Is he worth it?”
“Everything is worth whatever one gives for it. The less you get, the
more you get. Proved by the fact that the price of all life is death.
Jacob served seven years for an ugly wife; why shouldn’t an honester
man serve two for a beautiful horse?”
“Jacob, however, had a pretty wife thrown in when he showed discontent.”
“Perhaps you will. If the Light of the Harem of Sultan Brigham should
see you prancing on that steed, she would make one bound to your
crupper and leave a dark where the Light was.”
“I do not expect to develop a taste for Mormon ladies.”
“It is not very likely. They are a secondhand set. But still one can
imagine some luckless girl with a doltish father; some old chap
who had outlived his hopes at home, and fancied he was going to be
Melchisedec, Moses, and Abraham, rolled into one, in Utah, toted
out there by some beastly Elder, who wanted the daughter for his
thirteenth. That would be a chance for you and Don Fulano to interfere.
I’ll promise you myself and Pumps, if you want to stampede anybody’s
wives from the New Jerusalem as we go through.”
“I suppose we have no time to lose, if we expect to make Missouri
before winter.”
“No. We will start as soon as you are ready.”
“To-morrow morning, if you please.”
“To-morrow it is.”
* * * * *
To-morrow it was. Having a comrade, I need not wait for the
mail-riders. Lucky that I did not. They came only three days after us.
But on the Humboldt, the Indians met them, and obliged them to doff the
tops of their heads, as a mark of respect to Indian civilization.
We started, two men and seven animals. Each of us had a pack mule and a
roadster pony, with a spare one, in case accident should befall either
of his wiry brethren.
Pumps and Fulano, as good friends as their masters, trotted along
without burden. We rode them rarely. Only often enough to remind them
how a saddle feels, and that dangling legs are not frightful. They must
be fresh, if we should ever have to run for it. We might; Indians might
cast fanciful glances at the tops of our heads. The other horses might
give out. So Pumps, with his fantastic dancing-step, that would not
crush a grasshopper, and Fulano, grander, prouder, and still untamable
to any one but me, went on waiting for their time of action.
I skip the first thousand miles of our journey. Not that it was not
exciting, but it might be anybody’s journey. Myriads have made it. It
is an old story. I might perhaps make it a new story; but I crowd on
now to the proper spot where this drama is to be enacted. The play
halts while the scenes shift.
One figure fills up to my mind this whole hiatus of the many-leagued
skip. I see Brent every step and every moment. He was a model comrade.
Camp-life tests a man thoroughly. Common toil, hardship, peril, and
sternly common _viaticum_ of pork, dough-cakes, and coffee _sans_
everything, are a daily ordeal of good-nature. It is not hard for two
men to be civil across a clean white tablecloth at a club. If they
feel dull, they can study the _carte_; if spiteful, they can row the
steward; if surly, they can muddle themselves cheerful if they bore
each other, finally and hopelessly they can exchange cigars and part
for all time, and still be friends, not foes. But the illusions of
sham good-fellowship vanish when the _carte du jour_ is _porc frit au
naturel_, _damper à discretion_, and _café à rien_, always the same
fare, plain days or lucky days, served on a blanket, on the ground.
Brent and I stood the test. He was a model comrade, cavalier, poet,
hunter, naturalist, cook. If there was any knowledge, skill, craft, or
sleight of hand or brain wanted, it always seemed as if his whole life
had been devoted to the one study to gain it. He would spring out of
his blankets after a night under the stars, improvise a matin song to
Lucifer, sketch the morning’s view into cloudland and the morning’s
earthly horizon, take a shot at a gray wolf, book a new plant, bag
a new beetle, and then, reclining on the lonely prairie, talk our
breakfast, whose Soyer he had been, so full of Eden, Sybaris, the
holocausts of Achilles, the triclinia of Lucullus, the automaton tables
of the Œil de Bœuf, the cabinets of the Frères Provençaux, and the
dinners of civilization where the wise and the witty meet to shine and
sparkle for the beautiful, that our meagre provender suffered “change
into something rich and strange”; the flakes of fried pork became
peacocks’ tongues, every quoit of tough toasted dough a _vol au vent_,
and the coffee that never saw milk or muscovado a diviner porridge than
ever was sipped on the sunny summits of Olympus. Such a magician is
priceless. Every object, when he looked at it, seemed to revolve about
and exhibit its bright side. Difficulty skulked away from him. Danger
cowered under his eye.
Nothing could damp his enthusiasm. Nothing could drench his ardor. No
drowning his energy. He never growled, never sulked, never snapped,
never flinched. Frosty nights on the Sierra tried to cramp him; foggy
mornings in the valleys did their worst to chill him; showers shrank
his buckskins and soaked the macheers of his saddle to mere pulp; rain
pelted his blankets in the bivouac till he was a moist island in a
muddy lake. Bah, elements! try it on a milksop! not on John Brent, the
invulnerable. He laughs in the ugly phiz of Trouble. Hit somebody else,
thou grizzly child of Erebus!
Brent was closer to Nature than any man I ever knew. Not after
the manner of an artist. The artist can hardly escape a certain
technicality. He looks at the world through the spectacles of his
style. He loves mist and hates sunshine, or loves brooks and shrinks
from the gloom of forests primeval, or adores meadows and haystacks,
and dreads the far sweeping plain and the sovran snow-peak. Even the
greatest artist runs a risk, which only the greater than greatest
escape, of suiting Nature to themselves, not themselves to Nature.
Brent with Nature was like a youth with the maiden he loves. She was
always his love, whatever she could do; however dressed, in clouds or
sunshine, unchanging fair; in whatever mood, weeping or smiling, at her
sweetest; grand, beautiful for her grandeur; tender, beautiful for her
tenderness; simple, lovely for her simplicity; careless, prettier than
if she were trim and artful; rough, potent, and impressive, a barbaric
queen.
It is not a charming region, that breadth of the world between the
Foolonner Mine and the Great Salt Lake. Much is dusty desert; much is
dreary plain, bushed with wild sage, the wretchedest plant that grows;
much is rugged mountain. A grim and desolate waste. But large and
broad. Unbroken and undisturbed, in its solemn solitude, by prettiness.
No thought of cottage life there, or of the tame, limited, submissive
civilization that hangs about lattices and trellises, and pets its
chirping pleasures, keeping life as near the cradle as it may. It is
a region that appeals to the go and the gallop, that even the veriest
cockney, who never saw beyond a vista of blocks, cannot eliminate from
his being. It does not order man to sink into a ploughman. Ploughmen
may tarry in those dull, boundless plough-fields, the _prairie_ lands
of _mid_-America. These desert spaces, ribbed with barren ridges,
stretch for the Bedouin tread of those who
“Love all waste
And solitary places, where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.”
It may be a dreary region; but the great white clouds in the noons of
that splendid September, the red dawns before us, the red twilights
behind, the vague mountain lines upon the far horizon, the sharp crag
lines near at hand, the lambent stars that lit our bivouacs, the moon
that paled the lambent stars,--all these had their glory, intenser
because each fact came simple and alone, and challenged study and
love with a force that shames the spendthrift exuberance of fuller
landscapes.
In all this time I learned to love the man John Brent, as I had
loved the boy; but as mature man loves man. I have known no more
perfect union than that one friendship. Nothing so tender in any of
my transitory loves for women. We were two who thought alike, but saw
differently, and never quarrelled because the shield was to him gold
and to me silver. Such a friendship justifies life. All bad faith is
worth encountering for the sake of such good faith,--all cold shoulder
for such warm heart.
And so I bring our little party over the first half of its journey.
I will not even delay to describe Utah, not even for its water-melons’
sake, though that tricolor dainty greatly gladdened our dry jaws, as we
followed the valley from Box Elder, the northernmost settlement, to the
City of the Great Salt Lake.
In a few days of repose we had exhausted Mormon civilization, and,
horses and men fresh and in brave heart, we rode out of the modern
Mecca, one glorious day of early October.