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 âÂbecause it weighs a good deal more. But that was all we could take âÂtwenty-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 âstogyâ 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 knowâÂpoor innocentsâÂthat 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 & Wessonâs 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 faultâÂyou could not hit anything with it. One of our âconductorsâ 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 Coltâs 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 âAllenâ revolver, such as irreverent people called a âpepper-box.â 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 âAllenâ in the world. But Georgeâs was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers afterward said, âIf she didnât get what she went after, she would fetch something else.â 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 weaponâÂthe âAllen.â 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 modestâÂwe 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 oâclock 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 âthe Statesâ 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 rollingâÂa grand sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far as the eye could reachâÂlike the stately heave and swell of the oceanâs 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 ârollingâ 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 descriptionâÂan imposing cradle on wheels. It was drawn by six handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the âconductor,â 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 bagsâÂfor we had three daysâ 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 saidâÂâa little for Brigham, and Carson, and âFrisco, but the heft of it for the Injuns, which is powerful troublesome âthout they get plenty of truck to read.â 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 satisfactionâÂfor 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 mosquitoesâÂwatched her, and waited for her to say something, but she never did. So I finally opened the conversation myself. I said:Â
âThe mosquitoes are pretty bad, about here, madam.â
âYou bet!â
âWhat did I understand you to say, madam?â
âYou bet!â
Then she cheered up, and faced around and said:Â
âDanged if I didnât begin to think you fellers was deef and dumb. I did, bâgosh. Here Iâve sot, and sot, and sot, a-bustân muskeeters and wonderinâ what was ailinâ ye. Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then I thot you was sick or crazy, or suthinâ, and then by and by I begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldnât think of nothing to say. Wherâd ye come from?â
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 journeyâs end toward daylight; and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage (for we were nodding, by that time), and said:Â
âNow you git out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple oâ days, and Iâll be along some time to-night, and if I can do ye any good by edginâ in a word now and then, Iâm right thar. Folksâll tell youât Iâve always ben kind oâ offish and particâlar for a gal thatâs 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 Iâm a pretty sociable heifer after all.â
We resolved not to âlay by at Cottonwood.â