Part 3

The engineer’s house was built against a hill; from the end of the upper piazza a short bridge, or gang-plank, joined the hill and met a steep trail which led upward to the tents, the garden, the road to the lower camp, the road up the bluffs, and all the rest of the children’s world beyond the gulch. One of their favorite exercises with Mrs. O’Dowd was to ride her down the trail, and try to force her over this gang-plank. She would put her small feet cautiously one before the other, hanging her great white head and sniffing her way. The instant her toes touched the resonant boards of the bridge, she stopped, and then the exercises began. Mrs. O’Dowd’s gravity and resignation, in the midst of the children’s laughing and shouting and pulling and whacking, was most edifying to see; but she never budged. She saw the darlings of the household dance back and forth before her in safety; the engineers in their big boots would push past her and tramp over the bridge. Mrs. O’Dowd was a creature of fixed habits. Useless, flighty children, and people with unaccountable ways of their own might do as they liked; it had never been her habit to trust Mrs. O’D. on such a place as that, and she never did.

“Yes, the boy might ride Peggy,” said Jack’s father. “He could keep her up with John and the pack-mule, if not with us.”

“Oh, I should not want him behind with the men,” said Jack’s mother,--“and those high trails! If he’s to go over such places, he must ride where you can look after his saddle-girths.” She could hear Jack’s disconsolate whistle as she spoke. “I hope he does not hear us,” she said. “It would break his heart to think he is going, and be left behind after all.”

“If the boy’s heart is going to break as easily as that, it is time it was toughened,” said his father, but not ungently. “I should tell him there is a chance of his going; but if it can’t be managed, he must not whine about it.”

Jack went to bed by himself, except on Sunday nights; then his mother went with him, and saw that he laid his clothes in a neat pile on the trunk by his bed,--for in a camp bedroom trunks sometimes take the place of chairs,--and heard him say his prayers, and sometimes they talked together a little while before she kissed him good-night. That night was Sunday night, and Jack’s mother asked him, while she watched his undressing, if it ever made him dizzy to stand on high places and look down. Jack did not seem to know what that feeling was like; and then she asked him how far he had ever ridden on Mrs. O’Dowd at one time. Jack thought he had never ridden farther than Mr. Hensley’s ranch--that was three miles away, six miles in all, going and coming; but he had rested at the ranch, and had walked for a part of the journey when his sister Polly had resolved to ride by herself, instead of behind him, holding on to his jacket.

It made his mother very happy to tell the boy that the next day, if nothing happened to prevent, he was to set out with the fishing party for a week’s camping up the river. She knew how, in his reticent child’s heart, he had envied them. He was seated on the side of his bed, emptying the beach sand out of his stockings, when she told him. He said nothing at first, and one who did not know his plain little face as his mother knew it might have thought he was indifferent. She took a last look at him, before leaving the room. It seemed but a very little while ago that the close-cropped whity-brown head on the pillow had been covered with locks like thistle-down, which had never been touched with the scissors; that the dark little work-hardened hands (for Jack’s play was always work) lying outside the sheet had been kissed a dozen times a day for joy of their rosy palms and dimples. And to-morrow the boy would put on spurs,--no, not _spurs_, but _a_ spur, left over from the men’s accoutrements,--and he would ride--to be sure it was only Mrs. O’Dowd, but no less would the journey be one of the landmarks in his life. And many older adventurers than Jack have set out in this way on their first emprise,--not very heroically equipped, except for brave and joyous dreams and good faith in their ability to keep the pace set by better-mounted comrades.

Jack woke next morning with a delightful feeling that this day was not going to be like any other day he had known. Preparations for the journey had already begun. In the cook-tent two boxes were being filled with things to eat and things to cook them with. These were to be covered with canvas, roped, and fastened, one on each side of the pack-mule’s pack-saddle. On the piazza, saddle-bags were being packed; guns, ammunition, fishing-rods, rubber coats, and cushions were being collected in a heap for John to carry down to the beach to be ferried across the river, where the man from Turner’s horse-ranch was already waiting with the animals. The saddle-horses and Mrs. O’Dowd were to cross by the ford above the rapids. The boat went back and forth two or three times, and in the last load went Jack and his mother and Polly in the care of one of the young engineers. The stir of departure had fired Polly’s imagination. It was not mamma saying good-by to Polly,--it was Polly saying good-by to mamma, before riding off with “bubba” on an expedition of their own. She was telling about it, in a soft, joyous recitative, to any one who had time to listen. The man from Turner’s had brought, for Mrs. Gilmour to ride, a mule he called a lady’s animal, but remarked that for his own use he preferred one that would go. Mrs. Gilmour thought that she did, too; so the side-saddle was changed from the “lady’s animal” to the mule that “would go.”

The pack-mule was “packed,” the men’s horses were across the ford, mamma had kissed Polly, two pairs and a half of spurs were jingling impatiently on the rocks,--but where was Mrs. O’Dowd?

She was dallying at the ford,--she was coy about taking to the water. Sticks and straps and emphatic words of encouragement had no effect upon her. She had unfortunately had time to make up her mind, and she had made it up not to cross the river. She was persuaded finally, by means of a “lass’ rope” around her neck. Everybody was laughing at her subdued way of making herself conspicuous, delaying the whole party and meekly implying that it was everybody’s fault but her own.

The camp of the engineers was on a little river of Idaho that rises in the Bitter-root range of the Rocky Mountains, and flows into the swift, silent current of the great Snake River, which flows into the Columbia, which flows into the Pacific; so that the waters of this little inland river see a great deal of grand and peculiar scenery on their way to the ocean. But the river as it flows past the camp is still very young and inexperienced. Its waters have carried no craft larger than a lumberman’s pirogue, or the coffin-shaped box the Chinese wood-drivers use for a boat. Its cañons have never echoed to a locomotive’s scream; it knows not towns nor villages; not even a telegraph pole has ever been reared on its banks. It is just out of the mountains, hurrying down through the gate of its last cañon to the desert plains. But young and provincial as it is, it has an ancestral history very ancient and respectable, if mystery and tragedy and years of reticence can give dignity to a family history. The river’s story has been patiently recorded on the tablets of the black basalt bluffs that face each other across its channel. Their language it is not given to everybody to read. The geologists tell a wonderful tale which they learned from those inscriptions on the rocks. They do not say how many years ago, but long enough to have given a very ancient name to our river,--had there been any one living at that time to call it by a name,--it met with a fearful obstruction, a very dragon in its path, which threatened to devour it altogether, or to scatter it in little streams over the face of the earth. A flood of melted, boiling-hot lava burst up suddenly in the river’s bed, making it to boil like a pot, and crowded into the granite gorges through which the river had found its way, half filling them. It was a battle between the heavens and the earth,--the stream of molten rock, blinding hot from the caverns beneath the earth’s crust, meeting the sweet cool waters from the clouds that troop about the mountains or hide their tops in mist and snow. The life-giving flood prevailed over that which brought only defacement and death. The sullen lava flux settled, shrank, and hardened at last, fitting into the granite gorges as melted lead fits the mould into which it is poured. The waters kept flowing down, never resting till they had worn a new channel in the path of the old one, only narrower and deeper, down through the intruding lava. When the river was first known to men, wherever its course lay through a granite gorge the granite was seen to be lined in places, often continuously for miles, with black lava rock, or basalt, standing in lofty palisades with deeply scarred and graven fronts and with long slides of crumbled rock at their feet, descending to the level of the river.

Another part of the river’s story has been toilsomely written in the trails that wind along its shores, worn by the feet of men and animals. Whose feet were the first to tread them, and on what errands? This is the part of the river’s story some of us would like best to know. But this the geologist cannot tell us.

It was one of these hunters’, miners’, cowboys’, packers’, ranchmen’s trails the fishing-party followed on its way up the river. Through the cañon they wound along the base of the lava bluffs; then entered a crooked fold of the hills called Sheep Gulch, passing through willow thickets, rattling over the pebbles of a summer-dried stream, losing the breeze and getting more than they wanted of the sun. Sheep Gulch is one of the haunts of grouse, wood-doves, and “cotton-tails” (as the little gray rabbits are called to distinguish them from the tall leaping “jack-rabbits” of the sage-brush plains, which are like the English hare).

Above Turner’s horse-ranch, Sheep Gulch divides into two branches; up one of these goes the old Idaho City road. Where the gulch divides there is a disused cabin, (which Jack remembered afterward because there they saw some grouse which they didn’t get,) and there they left the trail for the old stage-road. As they climbed the little divide which separates the waters (when there are any) of Sheep Gulch from those of Moore’s Creek, they were met by a fresh breeze which cooled their hot faces and seemed to welcome them to the hills. The hills were all around them now,--the beautiful mountain pastures, golden with their wind-sown harvest of wild, strong-stemmed grasses. As the grass becomes scarce on the lower ranges the herds of cattle climb to the higher, along the spiral trails they make in grazing, taking always, like good surveyors, the easiest upward grade.

In the fall the cattle-men send out their cowboys, or “riders,” to drive the herds down from these highest ranges, where snow falls early, and to collect them in some valley chosen for the autumn “round-up.”

At Giles’s ranch, on the divide, the party halted to cinch up and to ask a drink all around from the spring which every traveler who has tasted it remembers.

The women of the household--a slender, dark-haired daughter and a stout, fair, flushed mother with a year-old baby--were busy, baby and all, in an outdoor kitchen, a delightful-looking place, part light and part shadow, and full of all manner of tools and rude conveniences that told of cheerful, busy living and making the best of things. They were preparing for the coming, next week, of the threshers,--a yearly event of consequence at a ranch,--fifteen men with horses for their machines and saddle-horses besides, all to be fed and lodged at the ranch. In the corral behind the big new barn, there were stacks of yellow and stacks of green, and between them a hay press, painted pink, which one could see as far as one could see Giles’s. Altogether it was lovely at Giles’s; but they were building a new house,--which, of course, they had a perfect right to do. But whoever stops there next year will find them all snugly roofed and gabled and painted white; and it is to be feared the outdoor kitchen, with its dim corners full of “truck” and its lights and shadows, will be seen no more.

The old stage-road went gayly along a bit of high plain, and then, without the slightest hesitation or circumlocution, dropped off into the cañon of Moore’s Creek. These reckless old pioneer roads give one a vivid idea of the race for possession of a new mining-camp, and of the pluck it took to win. At the “freeze-out” stage-passengers probably got out and walked, and the driver “rough-locked” the wheels; but the horsemen of that new country doubtless took a fresh hitch on their cinches and went jouncing down the breakneck grade, with countenances as calm as those of the illustrious riders of bronze and marble horses we see in the public squares, unless they were tired of the saddle and walked down to rest themselves,--never their horses.

Jack’s short legs were getting numb with pressing the saddle, and he was glad to walk, and to linger on his way down the wild descent into the cañon. It was the middle of September; Moore’s Creek had not more than enough water left to float the “Chinaman’s drive” of cord-wood, cut higher up on its banks. Its waters, moreover, were turbid with muddy tailings emptied into them from the sluice-boxes of the placer-miners who had been working all summer on the bars. Above Moore’s Creek the water of the river is clear as that of a trout-stream and iridescent with reflections from sky and shore; but after its union with that ill-fated stream it is obliged to carry the poor creek’s burden, and its own bright waters thenceforth wear the stain of labor. A breath of coolness, as of sunless rocks and damp, spicy shade, came up to them from the cañon; and a noise of waters, mingled with queer, discordant cries. It was dinner-time at the Chinamen’s camp and word was being passed up stream, from man to man, calling the wood-drivers to leave their work. They were not the sleek-braided, white-bloused, silk-sashed Chinese of the house-servant variety. They had wild black hair, rugged, not fat, sleepy faces, and little clothing except the boots,--store boots, in which a Chinaman is queerer than in anything except a store hat. They struggled with the jam of cord-wood as if it were some sort of water-prey they had hunted down, and were now meeting at bay, spearing, thrusting, hooking with their long boat-hooks, skipping from rock to rock in midstream, hoarse with shouting.

The party had now left the stage-road and turned down the pack-trail along the creek toward its junction with the river. The pack-trail here crosses the creek by a bridge high above the stream; the bridge was good enough, but it was a question whether Mrs. O’Dowd, with her known prejudices, could be induced to go over it. It was quickly decided to get a “good ready,” as Jack said, and hustle the old lady down the trail between two of the horses and crowd her on the bridge before she had time to make up that remarkable mind of hers. This simple plan was carried out with enthusiasm on the part of all but Mrs. O’D. herself.

Soon after leaving Giles’s, they had met a wagon-load of people townward bound from Gillespie’s, the beautiful river ranch above Moore’s Creek. Mr. Gilmour had stopped them to inquire if a pack-animal and two riding animals, mules or horses, could be sent from the ranch up to the fishing-camp, on a day set for the journey home; for the mules from Turner’s were to go back that same day, to start the next day but one, as part of a pack-train bound for Atlanta.

The people in the wagon “couldn’t say.” Most of the horses were out on the range; those at the ranch were being used for hauling peaches to town, fording Moore’s Creek and the river, and scaling the “freeze-out.” But Mr. Gillespie himself was at home; the travelers had better stop on the way up and find out.

So, after crossing the bridge and gaining the good trail along the river-bank, Mr. Dane spurred on ahead and forded the river, to make the necessary inquiries at the ranch. Gillespie’s is on the opposite side of the river from the packer’s trail. It is most beautiful with the sun in the western sky, its hills and water-front of white beech and pine trees all in shadow, and a broad reflection floating out into the river at its feet.

The sun was still high and the shadows were short; but the river ranch was a fair picture of a frontier home as they looked back at it passing by on the other side,--the last home they should see on the wild way they were taking.

The trail went winding up and up, and still higher, until they were far above the river and could see, beyond the still reflections that darkened it by Gillespie’s, the white-whipped waters of the rapids above. And the higher they went, the more hills beyond hills rose along the horizon widening their view.

Mr. Dane had rejoined the party, with a satisfactory report from the ranch. He rode ahead on his blue-roan Indian pony twirling his _romál_, a long leathern strap attached to the bridle, the end divided like a double whip-lash by means of which and a pair of heavy blunt spurs “Blue Pete” and his rider had come to a perfect understanding. Blue Pete was a sulky little brute, with a broad white streak down his nose and a rather vicious eye, but he was tough and unsensitive and minded his business.

Next came Jack’s mamma on the “mule that would go”--with a will, as far as Turner’s,--but after that needed the usual encouragement; a gentle-paced creature though, and sure-footed on a bad trail. Then came Jack on Mrs. O’Dowd. The poor old girl had been vigorously cinched and it wasn’t becoming to her figure; but those were bad places for a saddle to turn, even with an active, eight-year-old boy on it.

The boy was deeply content, gazing about him at the river, the hills, the winding trail ahead, and serenely poking up Mrs. O’Dowd with his one spur in response to the packer’s often-repeated command to “Keep her up!” When Mrs. O’Dowd refused to be kept up Jack’s father made a rush at her--a kind of business his good horse Billy must have despised, for Billy had points that indicated better blood than that which is usually found in the veins of those tough little “rustlers” of the desert and the range. He loved to lead on a hard trail, with his long, striding walk, his cheerful, well-opened eyes to the front. He was gentle, but he was also scornful; he was not a “lady’s animal;” he had a contempt for paltry little objectless canters over the hills with limp-handed women and children flopping about on his back. He liked to feel there was work ahead; a long climb and a bad trail did not frighten him; he looked his best when he was breasting a keen ascent with the wind of the summit parting his thin forelock, his ears pointed forward, his breath coming quick and deep, his broad haunches working under the saddle. Poor work indeed he must have thought it, hustling a lazy, sulky old donkey along a trail that was as nothing to his own sinewy legs.

After Billy came the pack-mule, driven by the man from Turner’s, a square-jawed, bronzed young fellow, mounted also on a mule and conversing amicably with John Brown. The lunch-bag had been passed down the line, but there was no halt, except for water at the crossing of a little gulch. The trail wound in and out among the spurs of the hills and up and down the rock-faced heights. They passed a roofless cabin, once the dwelling of some placer-miners, and farther on the half-obliterated ditch they had built leading to the deserted bars, where a few gray, warped sluice-boxes were falling to pieces in the sun.

Between two and three o’clock they came in sight of some large pine-trees, sheltering a half circle of white sand beach that sloped smoothly to the river. Above the pines a granite cliff rose, two hundred and fifty feet of solid rock against a hill five hundred or more feet higher, that shut off the morning sun. Between the cliff and the lava bluffs opposite, the eastern and western shadows nearly met across the river. There were deep, still pools among the rocks near shore, where the large trout congregate. Below the shadowed bend, the river spread out again suddenly in the sunlight that flashed white as silver on the ripples of a gravelly bar. This was the spot chosen at sight for the fishing-camp.

A bald eagle perched on a turret of the lava bluffs across the river watched the party descending the trail. At the report of a rifle echoing among the rocks, he rose and wheeled away over the pine-trees without hurrying himself or dropping a single feather in acknowledgment of the shot. It was a dignified, rather scornful retreat.

Where the trail hugs the cliff closest on its way around the bend, it passes under a big overhanging rock. No one, I am sure, ever rode under it for the first time without looking up at the black crack between it and the cliff, and wondering how far up the crack goes, and when the huge mass will fall. There is a story that the Bannock braves, following this trail on the war-path, always fired a passing arrow up into the crack,--perhaps out of the exuberance of youth and war-paint, perhaps to propitiate the demon of the rocks, lest he should drop one of his superfluous boulders on their feathered heads. The white men who followed the trail after the Indians had left it, amused themselves by shooting at the arrows and dislodging them from the crack. The story must be true, because there are no arrows left in the crack! Jack stared up at it many times, and never could see one.

* * * * *

So now they were at home for a week in the wilderness. Jack followed Brown about as he was “making camp,” cutting tent-pegs and poles and putting up the old A-tent, which had seen service in the army and in many frontier camps since it was “condemned” and sold at quartermaster’s sale.

The man from Turner’s had taken another bite of lunch and returned with his animals. He bade Jack to watch for him as he passed the camp, day after to-morrow, with his mule-train for Atlanta.

The kitchen was unpacked down on the beach and the fireplace chosen,--a big, wedge-shaped rock,--in the lee of which John built a fire, not for warmth, but for the sake of a good bed of coals for cooking. Mrs. Gilmour was resting in the tent, under the pine-trees. Mr. Gilmour had gone up the river to catch some trout for supper.

After four o’clock the sun left the river bank, but all the colors were distinct and strong,--the white beach, the dark pine boughs against the sky, the purple colors in the rocks, and the spots of pale green and yellow lichen on them, the changing tints in the dark water swinging smoothly around the bend and then flashing out into a broad sheet of silvery sparkles over the bar. It was as if it went gravely around the shadowy bend, and then broke out laughing in the bright light.

As it grew darker, the kitchen fire began to glow red against the big gray rock. In front of it John was stooping to heap coals on the lid of the bake-kettle, where the bread was spread in a thin, round cake for cooking.

There were three big trout for supper and four or five little ones. The big ones were a noble weight to tell of, but the little ones tasted the best when they were taken out of the bake-kettle on hot tin plates and served with thin slices of bacon and camp bread.