Part 16

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

One October day, as Kaweah and I travelled by ourselves over a lonely foothill trail, I came to consider myself the friend of woodpeckers. With rather more reserve as regards the bluejay, let me admit great interest in his worldly wisdom. As an instance of co-operative living the partnership of these two birds is rather more hopeful than most mundane experiments. For many autumn and winter months such food as their dainty taste chooses is so rare throughout the Sierras that in default of any climatic temptation to migrate the birds get in harvests with annual regularity and surprising labor. Oak and pine mingle in open growth. Acorns from the one are their grain; the soft pine bark is granary; and this the process:

Armies of woodpeckers drill small, round holes in the bark of standing pine-trees, sometimes perforating it thickly up to twenty or thirty and even forty feet above the ground; then about equal numbers of woodpeckers and jays gather acorns, rejecting always the little cup, and insert the gland tightly in the pine bark with its tender base outward and exposed to the air.

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.