there is a stage journey
of such interminable monotony as induces forgetfulness of all previous
states of existence.

The road to Jimville is the happy hunting ground of old stage-coaches
bought up from superseded routes the West over, rocking, lumbering, wide
vehicles far gone in the odor of romance, coaches that Vasquez has held
up, from whose high seats express messengers have shot or been shot as
their luck held. This is to comfort you when the driver stops to rummage
for wire to mend a failing bolt. There is enough of this sort of thing
to quite prepare you to believe what the driver insists, namely, that
all that country and Jimville are held together by wire.

First on the way to Jimville you cross a lonely open land, with a hint
in the sky of things going on under the horizon, a palpitant, white, hot
land where the wheels gird at the sand and the midday heaven shuts it in
breathlessly like a tent. So in still weather; and when the wind blows
there is occupation enough for the passengers, shifting seats to hold
down the windward side of the wagging coach. This is a mere trifle. The
Jimville stage is built for five passengers, but when you have seven,
with four trunks, several parcels, three sacks of grain, the mail and
express, you begin to understand that proverb about the road which has
been reported to you. In time you learn to engage the high seat beside
the driver, where you get good air and the best company. Beyond the
desert rise the lava flats, scoriae strewn; sharp-cutting walls of
narrow canons; league-wide, frozen puddles of black rock, intolerable
and forbidding. Beyond the lava the mouths that spewed it out,
ragged-lipped, ruined craters shouldering to the cloud-line, mostly of
red earth, as red as a red heifer. These have some comforting of shrubs
and grass. You get the very spirit of the meaning of that country when
you see Little Pete feeding his sheep in the red, choked maw of an old
vent,--a kind of silly pastoral gentleness that glazes over an elemental
violence. Beyond the craters rise worn, auriferous hills of a quiet
sort, tumbled together; a valley full of mists; whitish green scrub; and
bright, small, panting lizards; then Jimville.

The town looks to have spilled out of Squaw Gulch, and that, in fact, is
the sequence of its growth. It began around the Bully Boy and Theresa
group of mines midway up Squaw Gulch, spreading down to the smelter at
the mouth of the ravine. The freight wagons