I walked for an hour, following an old Indian trail which occasionally approached within seeing distance of the river, and then, apparently quite satisfied, diverged again into the desert. When about four miles from the Shoshone, it bent abruptly to the north, and led to the cañon edge. Here again the narrow gorge widened into a broad theatre, surrounded, as before, by black, vertical walls, and crowded over its whole surface by rude piles and ridges of volcanic rock. The river entered it from the east through a magnificent gateway of basalt, and, having reached the middle, flowed on either side of a low, rocky island, and plunged in two falls into a deep green basin. A very singular ridge of the basalt projected like an arm almost across the river, enclosing within its semi-circle a bowl three hundred feet in diameter and two hundred feet deep. Within this the water was of the same peculiar beryl-green, dappled here and there by masses of foam which swam around and around with a spiral tendency toward the centre. To the left of the island half the river plunged off an overhanging lip, and fell about one hundred and fifty feet, the whole volume reaching the surface of the basin many feet from the wall. The other half has worn away the edge, and descends in a tumbling cascade at an angle of about forty-five degrees. The river at this point has not yet worn through the fields of basaltic lava which form the upper four hundred feet of the plain. Between the two falls it cuts through the remaining beds of basalt, and has eroded its channel a hundred feet into underlying porphyritic trachyte. The trachyte erodes far more easily than the basalt, and its resultant forms are quite unlike those of the black lava. The trachyte islands and walls are excavated here and there in deep caves, leaving island masses in the forms of mounds and towers. In general, spherical outlines predominate, while the erosion of the basalt results always in sharp, perpendicular cliffs, with a steeply inclined talus of ragged débris.

The cliffs around the upper cataract are inferior to those of the Shoshone. While the level of the upper plain remains nearly the same, the river constantly deepens the channel in its westward course. In returning from the upper fall, I attempted to climb along the very edge of the cliff, in order to study carefully the habits of the basalt; but I found myself in a labyrinth of side crevasses which were cut into the plain from a hundred to a thousand feet back from the main wall. These recesses were usually in the form of an amphitheatre, with black walls two hundred feet high, and a bottom filled with immense fragments of basalt rudely piled together.

By dint of hard climbing I reached the actual brink in a few places, and saw the same general features each time: the cañon successively widening and narrowing, its walls here and there approaching each other and standing like pillars of a gateway; the river alternately flowing along smooth, placid reaches of level, and rushing swiftly down rocky cascades. Here and there along the cliff are disclosed mouths of black caverns, where the lava seems to have been blown up in the form of a great blister, as if the original flow had poured over some pool of water, and, converted into steam by contact with the hot rock, had been blown up bubble-like by its immense expansion.

I continued my excursions along the cañon west of the Shoshone. About a mile below the fall a very fine promontory juts sharply out and projects nearly to the middle of the cañon. Climbing with difficulty along its toppling crest, I reached a point which I found composed of immense, angular fragments piled up in dangerous poise. Eastward, the battlemented rocks around the falls limited the view; but westward I could see down long reaches of river, where islands of trachyte rose above white cascades. A peculiar and fine effect is noticeable upon the river during all the midday. The shadow of the southern cliff is cast down here and there, completely darkening the river, but often defining itself upon the water. The contrast between the rich, gem-like green of the sunlit portions and the deep violet shadow of the cliff is of extreme beauty. The Snake River, deriving its volume wholly from the melting of the mountain snows, is a direct gauge of the annual advance of the sun. In June and July it is a tremendous torrent, carrying a full half of the Columbia. From the middle of July it constantly shrinks, reaching its minimum in midwinter. At the lowest, it is a river equal to the Sacramento or Connecticut.

After ten days devoted to walking around the neighborhood and studying the falls and rocks, we climbed to our wagon, and rested for a farewell look at the gorge. It was with great relief that we breathed the free air of the plain, and turned from the rocky cañon where darkness, and roar, and perpetual cliffs had bounded our senses, and headed southward, across the noiseless plain. Far ahead rose a lofty, blue barrier, a mountain-wall, marbled upon its summit by flecks of perpetual snow. A deep notch in its profile opened a gateway. Toward this, for leagues ahead of us, a white thread in the gray desert marked the winding of our road. Those sensitively organized creatures, the mules, thrilled with relief at their escape from the cañons, pressed forward with a vigor that utterly silenced the customary poppings of the whip, and expurgated the language of the driver from his usual breaking of the Third Commandment.

The three great falls of America—Niagara, Shoshone, and Yosemite—all, happily, bearing Indian names, are as characteristically different as possible. There seems little left for a cataract to express.

Niagara rolls forward with something like the inexorable sway of a natural law. It is force, power; forever banishing before its irresistible rush all ideas of restraint.

No sheltering pine or mountain distance of up-piled Sierras guards the approach to the Shoshone. You ride upon a waste,—the pale earth stretched in desolation. Suddenly you stand upon a brink, as if the earth had yawned. Black walls flank the abyss. Deep in the bed a great river fights its way through labyrinths of blackened ruins, and plunges in foaming whiteness over a cliff of lava. You turn from the brink as from a frightful glimpse of the Inferno, and when you have gone a mile the earth seems to have closed again; every trace of cañon has vanished, and the stillness of the desert reigns.

As you stand at the base of those cool walls of granite that rise to the clouds from the green floor of Yosemite, a beautiful park, carpeted with verdure, expands from your feet. Vast and stately pines band with their shadows the sunny reaches of the pure Merced. An arch of blue bridges over from cliff to cliff. From the far summit of a wall of pearly granite, over stains of purple and yellow,—leaping, as it were, from the very cloud,—falls a silver scarf, light, lace-like, graceful, luminous, swayed by the wind. The cliffs’ repose is undisturbed by the silvery fall, whose endlessly varying forms of wind-tossed spray lend an element of life to what would otherwise be masses of inanimate stone. The Yosemite is a grace. It is an adornment. It is a ray of light on the solid front of the precipice.

From Yosemite our course was bent toward the Merced Obelisk. An afternoon in early July brought us to camp in the self-same spot where Cotter and I had bivouacked in the storm more than two years before. I remembered the crash and wail of those two dreary nights, the thunderous fulness of tempest beating upon cliffs, and the stealthy, silent snow-burial; and perhaps to the memory of that bitter experience was added the contrasting force of to-day’s beauty.

A warm afternoon sun poured through cloudless skies into one rocky amphitheatre. The little alpine meadow and full, arrowy brook were flanked upon either side by broad, rounded masses of granite, and margined by groups of vigorous upland trees: firs for the most part, but watched over here and there by towering pines and great, aged junipers whose massive red trunks seemed welded to the very stone.

It was altogether exhilarating; even Little Billy, the gray horse, found it so, and devoted more time to practical jokes upon thick-headed mules than to the rich and tempting verdure; nor did the high, cool air banish from his tender heart a glowing Platonic affection for our brown mare Sally.

To the ripened charms of middle age Sally united something more than the memory of youth; she was remarkably plump and well-preserved; her figure firm and elastic, and she did not hesitate to display it with many little arts. In presence of her favored Billy she drew deep sighs, and had quite an irresistible fashion of turning sadly aside and moving away among trees alone, as if she had no one to love her—a wile never failing to bring him to her side and elicit such attention as smoothing her mane or even a pressure of lips upon her brow. And woe to the emotional mule who ventured to cross our little meadow just to feel for a moment the soft comfort of her presence. With the bitterness of a rejected suit he always bore away shoe-prints of jealous Billy.

He led her quietly down to the brook, and never drank a drop until the mare was done; then they paid a call at camp, nosing about among the kettles with familiar freedom, nibbling playfully at dish-towel and coffee-pot, and when we threw sticks at them trotted off as closely as if they had been harnessed together. In quiet, moonlit hours, before I went to bed, I saw them still side by side, her head leaning over his withers; Billy at qui vive staring dramatically with pointed ears into forest depths, a true and watchful guardian.

A little reconnoitring had shown us the most direct way to the Obelisk, whose sharp summit looked from the moraine to west of us as grand and alluring as we had ever thought it.

There was in our hope of scaling this point something more than mere desire to master a difficult peak. It was a station of great topographical value, the apex of many triangles, and, more than all, would command a grander view of the Merced region than any other summit.

July eleventh, about five o’clock in the afternoon, Gardiner and I strapped packs upon our shoulders. My friend’s load consisted of the Temple transit, his blanket, and a great tin cup; mine was made up of field-glass, compass, level, blanket, and provisions for both, besides the barometer, which, as usual, I slung over one shoulder.

For the first time that year we found ourselves slowly zigzagging to and fro, following a grade with that peculiarly deliberate gait to which mountaineering experience very soon confines one. Black firs and thick-clustered pines covered in clumps all the lower slope, but, ascending, we came more and more into open ground, walking on glacial débris among trains of huge bowlders and occasional thickets of slender, delicate young trees. Emerging finally into open granite country, we came full in sight of our goal, whose great western precipice rose sheer and solid above us.

From the south base of the Obelisk a sharp mural ridge curves east, surrounding an amphitheatre whose sloping, rugged sides were picturesquely mottled in snow and stone. From the summit of this ridge we knew we should look over into the upper Merced basin, a great, billowy, granite depression lying between the Merced group and Mount Lyell; the birthplace of all those ice rivers and deep-cañoned torrents which join in the Little Yosemite and form the river Merced. Toward this we pressed, hurrying rapidly, as the sun declined, in hopes of making our point before darkness should obscure the terra incognita beyond.

It put us at our best to hasten over the rough, rudely piled blocks and up cracks among solid bluffs of granite, but with the sun fully half an hour high we reached the Obelisk foot and looked from our ridge-top eastward into the new land.

From our feet granite and ice in steep, roof-like curves fell abruptly down to the Merced Cañon brink, and beyond, over the great gulf, rose terraces and ridges of sculptured stone, dressed with snow-field, one above another, up to the eastern rank of peaks whose sharp, solid forms were still in full light.

From below, it is always a most interesting feature of the mountaineer’s daily life to watch fading sunlight upon the summit-rocks and snow. There is something peculiarly charming in the deep carmine flush and in the pale gradations of violet and cool blue-purple into which it successively fades. We were now in the very midst of this alpine glow. Our rocky amphitheatre, opening directly to the sun, was crowded full of this pure, red light; snow-fields warmed to deepest rose, gnarled stems of dead pines were dark vermilion, the rocks yellow, and the vast body of the Obelisk at our left one spire of gold piercing the sapphire zenith. Eastward, far below us, the Illilluette basin lay in a peculiarly mild haze, its deep carpet of forest warmed into faint bronze, and the bare domes and rounded, granite ridges which everywhere rise above the trees were yellow, of a soft, creamy tint. Farther down, every foothill was perceptibly reddened under the level beams. Sunlight reflecting from every object shot up to us, enriching the brightness of our amphitheatre.

We drank and breathed the light, its mellow warmth permeating every fibre. We spread our blankets under the lee of an overhanging rock, sheltered from the keen east wind, and in full view of the broad western horizon.

After a short half-hour of this wonderful light the sun rested for an instant upon the Coast ranges, and sank, leaving our mountains suddenly dead, as if the very breath of life had ebbed away, cold, gray shadows covering their rigid bodies, and pale sheets of snow half shrouding their forms.

For a full hour after the sun went down we did little else than study the western sky, watching with greatest interest a wonderful permanence and singular gradation of lingering light. Over two hundred miles of horizon a low stratum of pure orange covered the sky for seven or eight degrees; above that another narrow band of beryl-green, and then the cool, dark evening blue.

I always notice, whenever one gets a very wide view of remote horizon from some lofty mountain-top, the sky loses its high domed appearance, the gradations reaching but a few degrees upward from the earth, creating the general form of an inverted saucer. The orange and beryl bands occupied only about fifteen degrees in altitude, but swept around nearly from north to south. It was as if a wonderfully transparent and brilliant rainbow had been stretched along the sky line. At eleven the colors were still perceptible, and at midnight, when I rose to observe the thermometer, they were gone, but a low faint zone of light still lingered.

At gray dawn we were up and cooking our rasher of bacon, and soon had shouldered our instruments and started for the top.

The Obelisk is flattened, and expands its base into two sharp, serrated ridges, which form its north and south edges. The broad faces turned to the east and west are solid and utterly inaccessible, the latter being almost vertical, the former quite too steep to climb. We started, therefore, to work our way up the south edge, and, having crossed a little ravine from whose head we could look down eastward upon steep thousand-foot névé, and westward along the forest-covered ridge up which we had clambered, began in good earnest to mount rough blocks of granite.

The edge here is made of immense, broken rocks poised on each other in delicate balance, vast masses threatening to topple over at a touch. This blade has from a distance a considerably smooth and even appearance, but we found it composed of pinnacles often a hundred feet high, separated from the main top by a deep, vertical cleft. More than once, after struggling to the top of one of these pinnacles, we were obliged to climb down the same way in order to avoid the notches. Finally, when we had reached the brink of a vertical cul-de-sac, the edge no longer afforded us even a foothold. There were left but the smooth, impossible western face and the treacherous, cracked front of the eastern precipice. We were driven out upon the latter, and here forced to climb with the very greatest care, one of us always in advance making sure of his foothold, the other passing up instruments by hand, and then cautiously following.

In this way we spent nearly a full hour going from crack to crack, clinging by the least protruding masses of stone, now and then looking over our shoulders at the wreck of granite, the slopes of ice, and frozen lake thousands of feet below, and then upward to gather courage from the bold, red spike which still rose grandly above us.

At last we struggled up to what we had all along believed the summit, and found ourselves only on a minor turret, the great needle still a hundred feet above. From rock to rock and crevice to crevice we made our way up a fractured edge until within fifty feet of the top, and here its sharp angle rose smooth and vertical, the eastern precipice carved in a flat face upon the one side, the western broken by a smoothly curved recess like the corner of a room. No human being could scale the edge. An arctic bluebird fluttered along the eastern slope in vain quest of a foothold, and alighted, panting, at our feet. One step more and we stood together on a little, detached pinnacle, where, by steadying ourselves against the sharp, vertical Obelisk edge, we could rest, although the keen sense of steepness below was not altogether pleasing.

About seven feet across the open head of a cul-de-sac (a mere recess in the west face) was a vertical crack riven into the granite not more than three feet wide, but as much as eight feet deep; in it were wedged a few loose bowlders; below, it opened out into space. At the head of this crack a rough crevice led up to the summit.

Summoning nerve, I knew I could make the leap, but the life and death question was whether the débris would give way under my weight, and leave me struggling in the smooth recess, sure to fall and be dashed to atoms.

Two years we had longed to climb that peak, and now, within a few yards of the summit, no weakheartedness could stop us. I thought, should the débris give way, by a very quick turn and powerful spring I could regain our rock in safety.

There was no discussion, but, planting my foot on the brink, I sprang, my side brushing the rough, projecting crag. While in the air I looked down, and a picture stamped itself on my brain never to be forgotten. The débris crumbled and moved. I clutched both sides of the cleft, relieving all possible weight from my feet. The rocks wedged themselves again, and I was safe.

It was a delicate feat of balancing for us to bridge that chasm with a transit and pass it across; the view it afforded down the abyss was calculated to make a man cool and steady.

Barometer and knapsack were next passed over. I placed them all at the crevice head, and flattened myself against the rock to make room for Gardiner. I shall never forget the look in his eye as he caught a glimpse of the abyss in his leap. It gave me such a chill as no amount of danger, or even death, coming to myself could ever give. The débris grated under his weight an instant and wedged themselves again.

We sprang up on the rocks like chamois, and stood on the top shouting for joy.

Our summit was four feet across, not large enough for the transit instrument and both of us; so I, whose duties were geological, descended to a niche a few feet lower and sat down to my writing.

The sense of aërial isolation was thrilling. Away below, rocks, ridges, crags, and fields of ice swell up in jostling confusion to make a base from which springs the spire of stone 11,600 feet high. On all sides I could look right down at the narrow pedestal. Eastward great ranks of peaks, culminating in Mount Lyell, were in full, clear view; all streams and cañons tributary to the Merced were beneath us in map-like distinctness. Afar to the west lay the rolling plateau gashed with cañons; there the white line of Yosemite Fall; and beyond, half submerged in warm haze, my Sunday mountain.

The same little arctic bluebird came again and perched close by me, pouring out his sweet, simple song with a gayety and freedom which wholly charmed me.

During our four hours’ stay the thought that we must make that leap again gradually intruded itself, and whether writing or studying the country I could not altogether free myself from its pressure.

It was a relief when we packed up and descended to the horrible cleft to actually meet our danger. We had now an unreliable footing to spring from, and a mere block of rock to balance us after the jump.

We sprang strongly, struck firmly, and were safe. We worked patiently down the east face, wound among blocks and pinnacles of the lower descent, and hurried through moraines to camp, well pleased that the Obelisk had not vanquished us.

X

CUT-OFF COPPLES’S

1870

A woodpecker, having drilled a hole, has its exact measure in mind, and after examining a number of acorns makes his selection, and never fails of a perfect fit. Not so the jolly, careless jay, who picks up any sound acorn he finds, and, if it is too large for a hole, drops it in the most off-hand way, as if it were an affair of no consequence; utters one of his dry, chuckling squawks, and either tries another or loafs about, lazily watching the hard-working woodpeckers.

Thus they live, amicably harvesting, and with this sequel: those acorns in which grubs form become the sole property of woodpeckers, while all sound ones fall to the jays. Ordinarily chances are in favor of woodpeckers, and when there are absolutely no sound nuts the jays sell short, so to speak, and go over to Nevada and speculate in juniper-berries.

The monotony of hill and glade failing to interest me, and in default of other diversion, I all day long watched the birds, recalling how many gay and successful jays I knew who lived, as these, on the wit and industry of less ostentatious woodpeckers; thinking, too, what naïvely dogmatic and richly worded political economy Mr. Ruskin would phrase from my feathered friends. Thus I came to Ruskin, wishing I might see the work of his idol, and after that longing for some equal artist who should arise and choose to paint our Sierras as they are with all their color-glory, power of innumerable pine and countless pinnacle, gloom of tempest, or splendor, where rushing light shatters itself upon granite crag, or burns in dying rose upon far fields of snow.

Had I rubbed Aladdin’s lamp? A turn in the trail brought suddenly into view a man who sat under shadow of oaks, painting upon a large canvas.

As I approached, the artist turned half round upon his stool, rested palette and brushes upon one knee, and in familiar tone said, “Dern’d if you ain’t just naturally ketched me at it! Get off and set down. You ain’t going for no doctor, I know.”

My artist was of short, good-natured, butcher-boy make-up, dressed in what had formerly been black broadcloth, with an enlivening show of red flannel shirt about the throat, wrists, and a considerable display of the same where his waistcoat might once have overlapped a strained but as yet coherent waistband. The cut of these garments, by length of coat-tail and voluminous leg, proudly asserted a “Bay” origin. His small feet were squeezed into tight, short boots, with high, raking heels.

A round face, with small, full mouth, non-committal nose, and black, protruding eyes, showed no more sign of the ideal temperament than did the broad daub upon his square yard of canvas.

“Going to Copples’s?” inquired my friend.

That was my destination, and I answered, “Yes.”

“That’s me,” he ejaculated. “Right over there, down below those two oaks! Ever there?”

“No.”

“My studio ’s there now;” giving impressive accent to the word.

All the while these few words were passing he scrutinized me with unconcealed curiosity, puzzled, as well he might be, by my dress and equipment. Finally, after I had tied Kaweah to a tree and seated myself by the easel, and after he had absently rubbed some raw sienna into his little store of white, he softly ventured: “Was you looking out a ditch?”

“No,” I replied.

He neatly rubbed up the white and sienna with his “blender,” unconsciously adding a dash of Veronese green, gazed at my leggings, then at the barometer, and again meeting my eye with a look as if he feared I might be a disguised duke, said in slow tone, with hyphens of silence between each two syllables, giving to his language all the dignity of an unabridged Webster, “I would take pleasure in stating that my name is Hank G. Smith, artist;” and, seeing me smile, he relaxed a little, and, giving the blender another vigorous twist, added, “I would request yours.”

Mr. Smith having learned my name, occupation, and that my home was on the Hudson, near New York, quickly assumed a familiar me-and-you-old-fel’ tone, and rattled on merrily about his winter in New York spent in “going through the Academy,”—a period of deep moment to one who before that painted only wagons for his livelihood.

Storing away canvas, stool, and easel in a deserted cabin close by, he rejoined me, and, leading Kaweah by his lariat, I walked beside Smith down the trail toward Copples’s.

He talked freely, and as if composing his own biography, beginning:

“California-born and mountain-raised, his nature soon drove him into a painter’s career.” Then he reverted fondly to New York and his experience there.

“Oh, no!” he mused in pleasant irony, “he never spread his napkin over his legs and partook French victuals up to old Delmonico’s. ’Twasn’t H. G. which took her to the theatre.”

In a sort of stage-aside to me, he added, “She was a model! Stood for them sculptors, you know; perfectly virtuous, and built from the ground up.” Then, as if words failed him, made an expressive gesture with both hands over his shirt-bosom to indicate the topography of her figure, and, sliding them down sharply against his waistband, he added, “Anatomical torso!”

Mr. Smith found relief in meeting one so near himself, as he conceived me to be, in habit and experience. The long-pent-up emotions and ambitions of his life found ready utterance, and a willing listener.

I learned that his aim was to become a characteristically California painter, with special designs for making himself famous as the delineator of muletrains and ox-wagons; to be, as he expressed it, “the Pacific Slope Bonheur.”

“There,” he said, “is old Eastman Johnson; he’s made the riffle on barns, and that everlasting girl with the ears of corn; but it ain’t life, it ain’t got the real git-up.

“If you want to see the thing, just look at a Gérôme; his Arab folks and Egyptian dancing-girls, they ain’t assuming a pleasant expression and looking at spots while their likenesses is took.

“H. G. will discount Eastman yet.”

He avowed his great admiration of Church, which, with a little leaning toward Mr. Gifford, seemed his only hearty approval.

“It’s all Bierstadt, and Bierstadt, and Bierstadt nowadays! What has he done but twist and skew and distort and discolor and belittle and be-pretty this whole dog-gonned country? Why, his mountains are too high and too slim; they’d blow over in one of our fall winds.

“I’ve herded colts two summers in Yosemite, and honest now, when I stood right up in front of his picture, I didn’t know it.

“He hasn’t what old Ruskin calls for.”

By this time the station buildings were in sight, and far down the cañon, winding in even grade round spur after spur, outlined by a low, clinging cloud of red dust, we could see the great Sierra mule-train,—that industrial gulf-stream flowing from California plains over into arid Nevada, carrying thither materials for life and luxury. In a vast, perpetual caravan of heavy wagons, drawn by teams of from eight to fourteen mules, all the supplies of many cities and villages were hauled across the Sierra at an immense cost, and with such skill of driving and generalship of mules as the world has never seen before.

Our trail descended toward the grade, quickly bringing us to a high bank immediately overlooking the trains a few rods below the group of station buildings.

I had by this time learned that Copples, the former station-proprietor, had suffered amputation of the leg three times, receiving from the road men, in consequence, the name of “Cut-off,” and that, while his doctors disagreed as to whether they had better try a fourth, the kindly hand of death had spared him that pain, and Mrs. Copples an added extortion in the bill.

The dying “Cut-off” had made his wife promise she would stay by and carry on the station until all his debts, which were many and heavy, should be paid, and then do as she chose.

The poor woman, a New Englander of some refinement, lingered, sadly fulfilling her task, though longing for liberty.

When Smith came to speak of Sarah Jane, her niece, a new light kindled in my friend’s eye.

“You never saw Sarah Jane?” he inquired.

I shook my head.

He went on to tell me that he was living in hope of making her Mrs. H. G., but that the bar-keeper also indulged a hope, and as this important functionary was a man of ready cash, and of derringers and few words, it became a delicate matter to avow open rivalry; but it was evident my friend’s star was ascendant, and, learning that he considered himself to possess the “dead-wood,” and to have “gaited” the bar-keeper, I was more than amused, even comforted.

It was pleasure to sit there leaning against a vigorous old oak while Smith opened his heart to me, in easy confidence, and, with quick eye watching the passing mules, pencilled in a little sketch-book a leg, a head, or such portions of body and harness as seemed to him useful for future works.

“These are notes,” he said, “and I’ve pretty much made up my mind to paint my great picture on a gee-pull. I’ll scumble in a sunset effect, lighting up the dust, and striking across the backs of team and driver, and I’ll paint a come-up-there-d’n-you look on the old teamster’s face, and the mules will be just a-humping their little selves and laying down to work like they’d expire. And the wagon! Don’t you see what fine color-material there is in the heavy load and canvas-top with sunlight and shadow in the folds? And that’s what’s the matter with H. G. Smith.

“Orders, sir, orders; that’s what I’ll get then, and I’ll take my little old Sarah Jane and light out for New York, and you’ll see Smith on a studio doorplate, and folks’ll say, ‘Fine feeling for nature, has Smith!’”

I let this singular man speak for himself in his own vernacular, pruning nothing of its idiom or slang, as you shall choose to call it. In this faithful transcript there are words I could have wished to expunge, but they are his, not mine, and illustrate his mental construction.

The breath of most Californians is as unconsciously charged with slang as an Italian’s of garlic, and the two, after all, have much the same function; you touch the bowl or your language, but should never let either be fairly recognized in salad or conversation. But Smith’s English was the well undefiled when compared with what I every moment heard from the current of teamsters which set constantly by us in the direction of Copples’s.

Close in front came a huge wagon piled high with cases of freight, and drawn along by a team of twelve mules, whose heavy breathing and drenched skins showed them hard-worked and well tired out. The driver looked anxiously ahead at a soft spot in the road, and on at the station, as if calculating whether his team had courage left to haul through.

He called kindly to them, cracked his black-snake whip, and all together they strained bravely on.

The great van rocked, settled a little on the near side, and stuck fast.

With a look of despair the driver got off and laid the lash freely among his team; they jumped and jerked, frantically tangled themselves up, and at last all sulked and became stubbornly immovable. Meanwhile, a mile of teams behind, unable to pass on the narrow grade, came to an unwilling halt.

About five wagons back I noticed a tall Pike, dressed in checked shirt, and pantaloons tucked into jack-boots. A soft felt hat, worn on the back of his head, displayed long locks of flaxen hair, which hung freely about a florid pink countenance, noticeable for its pair of violent little blue eyes, and facial angle rendered acute by a sharp, long nose.

This fellow watched the stoppage with impatience, and at last, when it was more than he could bear, walked up by the other teams with a look of wrath absolutely devilish. One would have expected him to blow up with rage; yet withal his gait and manner were cool and soft in the extreme. In a bland, almost tender voice, he said to the unfortunate driver, “My friend, perhaps I can help you;” and his gentle way of disentangling and patting the leaders as he headed them round in the right direction would have given him a high office under Mr. Bergh. He leisurely examined the embedded wheel, and cast an eye along the road ahead. He then began in rather excited manner to swear, pouring it out louder and more profane, till he utterly eclipsed the most horrid blasphemies I ever heard, piling them up thicker and more fiendish till it seemed as if the very earth must open and engulf him.

I noticed one mule after another give a little squat, bringing their breasts hard against the collars, and straining traces, till only one old mule, with ears back and dangling chain, still held out. The Pike walked up and yelled one gigantic oath; her ears sprang forward, she squatted in terror, and the iron links grated under her strain. He then stepped back and took the rein, every trembling mule looking out of the corner of its eye and listening at qui vive.

With a peculiar air of deliberation and of childlike simplicity, he said in every-day tones, “Come up there, mules!”

One quick strain, a slight rumble, and the wagon rolled on to Copples’s.

Smith and I followed, and as we neared the house he punched me familiarly and said, as a brown petticoat disappeared in the station door, “There’s Sarah Jane! When I see that girl I feel like I’d reach out and gather her in;” then clasping her imaginary form as if she was about to dance with him, he executed a couple of waltz turns, softly intimating, “That’s what’s the matter with H. G.”

Kaweah being stabled, we betook ourselves to the office, which was of course bar-room as well. As I entered, the unfortunate teamster was about paying his liquid compliment to the florid Pike. Their glasses were filled. “My respects,” said the little driver. The whiskey became lost to view, and went eroding its way through the dust these poor fellows had swallowed. He added, “Well, Billy, you can swear.”

“Swear?” repeated the Pike in a tone of incredulous questioning. “Me swear?” as if the compliment were greater than his modest desert. “No, I can’t blaspheme worth a cuss. You’d jest orter hear Pete Green. He can exhort the impenitent mule. I’ve known a ten-mule-team to renounce the flesh and haul thirty-one thousand through a foot of clay mud under one of his outpourings.”

As a hotel, Copples’s is on the Mongolian plan, which means that dining-room and kitchen are given over to the mercies—never very tender—of Chinamen; not such Chinamen as learned the art of pig-roasting that they might be served up by Elia, but the average John, and a sadly low average that John is. I grant him a certain general air of thrift, admitting, too, that his lack of sobriety never makes itself apparent in loud Celtic brawl. But he is, when all is said, and in spite of timid and fawning obedience, a very poor servant.

Now and then at one friend’s house it has happened to me that I dined upon artistic Chinese cookery, and all they who come home from living in China smack their lips over the relishing cuisine. I wish they had sat down that day at Copples’s. No; on second thought I would spare them.

John may go peacefully to North Adams and make shoes for us, but I shall not solve the awful domestic problem by bringing him into my kitchen; certainly so long as Howells’s “Mrs. Johnson” lives, nor even while I can get an Irish lady to torment me, and offer the hospitality of my home to her cousins.

After the warning bell, fifty or sixty teamsters inserted their dusty heads in buckets of water, turned their once white neck-handkerchiefs inside out, producing a sudden effect of clean linen, and made use of the two mournful wrecks of combs which hung on strings at either side the Copples’s mirror. Many went to the bar and partook of a “dust-cutter.” There was then such clearing of throats, and such loud and prolonged blowing of noses as may not often be heard upon this globe.

In the calm which ensued, conversation sprang up on “lead harness,” the “Stockton wagon that had went off the grade,” with here and there a sentiment called out by two framed lithographic belles, who in great richness of color and scantiness of raiment flanked the bar-mirror;—a dazzling reflector, chiefly destined to portray the bar-keeper’s back hair, which work of art involved much affectionate labor.

A second bell and rolling away of doors revealed a long dining-room, with three parallel tables, cleanly set and watched over by Chinamen, whose fresh, white clothes and bright, olive-buff skin made a contrast of color which was always chief among my yearnings for the Nile.

While I loitered in the background every seat was taken, and I found myself with a few dilatory teamsters destined to await a second table.

The dinner-room communicated with a kitchen beyond by means of two square apertures cut in the partition wall. Through these portholes a glare of red light poured, except when the square framed a Chinese cook’s head, or discharged hundreds of little dishes.

The teamsters sat down in patience; a few of the more elegant sort cleaned their nails with the three-tine forks, others picked their teeth with them, and nearly all speared with this implement small specimens from the dishes before them, securing a pickle or a square inch of pie or even that luxury, a dried apple; a few, on tilted-back chairs, drummed upon the bottom of their plates the latest tune of the road.

When fairly under way the scene became active and animated beyond belief. Waiters, balancing upon their arms twenty or thirty plates, hurried along and shot them dexterously over the teamsters’ heads with crash and spatter.

Beans swimming in fat, meats slimed with pale, ropy gravy, and over everything a faint Mongol odor,—the flavor of moral degeneracy and of a disintegrating race.

Sharks and wolves may no longer be figured as types of prandial haste. My friends, the teamsters, stuffed and swallowed with a rapidity which was alarming but for the dexterity they showed, and which could only have come of long practice.

In fifteen minutes the room was empty, and those fellows who were not feeding grain to their mules lighted cigars and lingered round the bar.

Just then my artist rushed in, seized me by the arm, and said in my ear, “We’ll have our supper over to Mrs. Copples’s. O no, I guess not—Sarah Jane—arms peeled—cooking up stuff—old woman gone into the milk-room with a skimmer.” He then added that if I wanted to see what I had been spared, I might follow him.

We went round an angle of the building and came upon a high bank, where, through wide-open windows, I could look into the Chinese kitchen.

By this time the second table of teamsters were under way, and the waiters yelled their orders through to the three cooks.

This large, unpainted kitchen was lighted up by kerosene lamps. Through clouds of smoke and steam dodged and sprang the cooks, dripping with perspiration and grease, grabbing a steak in the hand and slapping it down on the gridiron, slipping and sliding around on the damp floor, dropping a card of biscuits and picking them up again in their fists, which were garnished by the whole bill of fare. The red papers with Chinese inscriptions, and little joss-sticks here and there pasted upon each wall, the spry devils themselves, and that faint, sickening odor of China which pervaded the room, combined to produce a sense of deep, sober gratitude that I had not risked their fare.

“Now,” demanded Smith, “you see that there little white building yonder?”

I did.

He struck a contemplative position, leaned against the house, extending one hand after the manner of the minstrel sentimentalist, and softly chanted:

“and there’s where they’re getting up as nice a little supper as can be found on this road or any other. Let’s go over!”

So we strolled across an open space where were two giant pines towering sombre against the twilight, a little mountain brooklet, and a few quiet cows.

“Stop,” said Smith, leaning his back against a pine, and encircling my neck affectionately with an arm; “I told you, as regards Sarah Jane, how my feelings stand. Well, now, you just bet she’s on the reciprocate! When I told old woman Copples I’d like to invite you over,—Sarah Jane she passed me in the doorway,—and said she, ‘Glad to see your friends.’”

Then sotto voce, for we were very near, he sang again: