dn't well get off
it, and it was all you could do to stay on it. The dust lay a foot thick
in the blind ruts, and under the dust we found bits of planking and
bundles of brushwood that sent the wagon bounding into the air. The
journey in itself was a delight. Sometimes we crashed through bracken;
anon, where the blackberries grew rankest, we found a lonely little
cemetery, the wooden rails all awry and the pitiful, stumpy head-stones
nodding drunkenly at the soft green mullions. Then, with oaths and
the sound of rent underwood, a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down a
"skid" road, hauling a forty-foot log along a rudely made slide.

A valley full of wheat and cherry-trees succeeded, and halting at
a house, we bought ten-pound weight of luscious black cherries for
something less than a rupee, and got a drink of icy-cold water for
nothing, while the untended team browsed sagaciously by the road-side.
Once we found a way-side camp of horse-dealers lounging by a pool, ready
for a sale or a swap, and once two sun-tanned youngsters shot down a
hill on Indian ponies, their full creels banging from the high-pommelled
saddle. They had been fishing, and were our brethren, therefore. We
shouted aloud in chorus to scare a wild cat; we squabbled over the
reasons that had led a snake to cross a road; we heaved bits of bark
at a venturesome chipmunk, who was really the little gray squirrel of
India, and had come to call on me; we lost our way, and got the wagon so
beautifully fixed on a khud-bound road that we had to tie the two hind
wheels to get it down.

Above all, California told tales of Nevada and Arizona, of lonely nights
spent out prospecting, the slaughter of deer and the chase of men, of
woman--lovely woman--who is a firebrand in a Western city and leads
to the popping of pistols, and of the sudden changes and chances
of Fortune, who delights in making the miner or the lumber-man a
quadruplicate millionaire and in "busting" the railroad king.

That was a day to be remembered, and it had only begun when we drew rein
at a tiny farm-house on the banks of the Clackamas and sought horse feed
and lodging, ere we hastened to the river that broke over a weir not a
quarter of a mile away. Imagine a stream seventy yards broad divided
by a pebbly island, running over seductive "riffles" and swirling into
deep, quiet pools, where the good salmon goes to smoke his pipe after
meals. Get such a stream amid fields of breast-high crops su