The Comstock Club. Goodwin Charles Carroll
supper, when the pipes were lighted, the conversation of the previous evening was resumed.
The second night brought out something of the history of each. They had nearly all lived in California; some had wandered the Golden Coast all over; all had roughed it, and all had an experience to relate. These evening visits soon became very enjoyable to the members of the Club, and the friendship of the members for each other increased as they the more thoroughly, knew the inner lives of each other.
On this night, Wright was the last to speak of himself. When he had concluded, Ashley said to him: "Wright, you have had some lively experiences. What is the most impressive scene that you ever witnessed?"
"I hardly know." Wright replied. "I think maybe a mirage that was painted for me, one day, out on the desert, this side of the sink of the Humbolt, when I was crossing the plains, shook me up about as much as anything that ever overtook me, except the chills and fever, which I used to have when a boy, back in Missouri. For only a picture it was right worrisome."
The Club wanted to hear about it, and so Wright proceeded as follows:
"We had been having rough times for a good while; thar had been sickness in the train; some of the best animals had been poisoned with alkali; thar had been some Injun scares – it was in '57 – and we all had been broken, more or less, of our rest, I in particular, was a good deal jolted up; was nervous and full of starts and shivers. I suspect thar was a little fever on me. We halted one morning on the desert, to rest the stock, and make some coffee. It was about eight o'clock. We had been traveling since sundown the night before, crossing the great desert, and hoped to reach Truckee River that afternoon.
"While resting, a mighty desire took possession of me to see the river, and to feel that the desert was crossed.
"I had a saddle mule that was still in good condition. I had petted him since he was three days old, had broken him, and he and myself were the best of friends. His mother was a thoroughbred Kentucky mare; from her he had inherited his courage and staying qualities, while he had also just enough of his father's stubbornness to be useful, for it held his heart up to the work when things got rough.
"I looked over the train; it was all right; I was not needed; would not be any more that day.
"The mule was brought up in the Osage hills, and I had named him Osage, which after awhile became contracted to Sage. I went to him and looked him over. He was quietly munching a bacon sack. I took a couple of quarts of wheaten flour, mixed it into a soft paste, with water from one of the kegs which had been brought along, and gave it to him. He drank it as a hungry boy drinks porridge, and licked the dish clean. The journey had impressed upon him the absolute need of exercising the closest economy.
"When he had finished his rather light breakfast, I whispered to him that if he would stand in with me, I would show him, before night, the prettiest stream of water – snow water – in the world. I think he understood me perfectly. Telling the people of the train that I would go ahead and look out a camping place, I took my shotgun, put a couple of biscuits in my pocket, and mounted Sage. He struck out at once on his long swinging walk.
"It was an August morning and had been hot ever since the sun rose. That is a feature out thar on the desert in the summer. The nights get cold, but so soon as the sun comes up, it is like going down into the Comstock. In fifteen minutes everything is steaming. Old Ben Allen, down on the borders of the Cherokee Nation, never of a morning, warmed up his niggers any livelier than the sun does the desert.
"I rode for a couple of hours. As I said, I was weak and nervous. In the sand, Sage's feet hardly made any sound, and the glare and the silence of the desert were around and upon me. If you never experienced it you don't know what the silence of the desert means. Take a day when the winds are laid; when in all directions, as far as your vision extends, thar is not a moving thing; when all that you can see is the brazen sky overhead, and the scarred breast of the earth, as if smitten and transfixed by Thor's thunderbolts, lying prone and desolate like the face of a dead world, before you; and withal not one sound: absolute stillness; and strong nerves after awhile become strained. On me, that forenoon, my surroundings became almost intolerable. I had been on foot driving team all night; I had eaten nothing since midnight, and then had only forced down a small slice of bread and a cup of horrible black coffee, and was really not more than half myself. One moment I was chilly; the next was perspiring, and sometimes it seemed as though I should suffocate. With my nerves strung up as they were, I guess it would not have required much to give me a panic.
"Just then, out against the sun to the southward, and apparently a mile away, I saw something. Talk about being impressed! that was my time. I was sure I saw five hundred Indian warriors, all mounted. They were wheeling in black squadrons on the desert, wheeling and forming, as I thought. Horses and men were all black, and now and then as they wheeled or swung to and fro, I marked what I was sure was the gleam of steel. They evidently had seen me: I expected every moment to hear their yell and wondered that I did not feel the tremble of the earth beneath their horses' feet; I was too nearly paralyzed to try to escape. I slipped or fell, I don't know which, from my mule, and lay panting like a tired hound upon the sand. But I could not keep my eyes from the terrible sight before me. Still those tawny warriors kept wheeling and forming, and as I believed, menacing me.
"At length I grew a little calmer, and remember that I explained to myself that the reason I did not hear the thunder of their horses' feet, was because of the sand, and from the fact that the ponies could not be shod. But I wondered more and more where an Indian tribe could get so many black horses.
"Once, when they seemed particularly furious, and just on the point of charging down upon me; I remember that I said to myself: 'If they eat me they will have to broil me in the sun, for thar is no fuel here.' All the time too, I was pitying Sage, and my own voice frightened me as I unconsciously said: 'Poor Sage, it is a hard fate to be faithful and suffer as you have and then fall into the hands of savages.'
"When a little more under my own control, I cautiously rose to my feet and looked at the mule. It was no use. On top of the fatigue of coming quite two thousand miles, he had, on that morning, been constantly traveling for fourteen hours, with only two rests of thirty minutes each. He never could get away from those fresh ponies. I looked back in the direction of the train; it was nowhar in sight and must have been back probably five miles.
"In this strait I looked up again toward my savages. At that very moment the charge commenced; the whole array was bearing down upon me. I took my gun from the horn of the saddle and sat down on the ground. I felt – but no matter how I felt; I only know that at that moment I would have given my note for a large sum to have been back in Missouri.
"On they swept, and I watched them coming. But somehow they began to grow smaller and smaller, and in an instant more the squadron vanished. Where the moment before an armed band, terrible with life and bristling with fury, had shone upon my eyes, now all that there was to be seen was a flock of perhaps twenty ravens, flying with short flights, and hopping and lighting around some little thing, which lay above the level of the desert. I mounted Sage and rode out to the spot, some four hundred yards away.
"I found another road, and strung along it, were the carcasses of a good many cattle that had died in emigrant trains. The ravens were hopping about these carcasses and flying from one to another. I had heard of the mirage of the desert, when a boy in school, and suddenly 'I dropped upon' the whole business. By some mighty refraction of the beams of light, these miserable scavengers of the desert had been magnified into formidable, mounted warriors, and the glint of steel that I had seen, was but the shimmer of sunbeams upon their black wings.
"Again I headed Sage for the river. In a little while he commenced to stretch out his nose; soon, of his own accord, he quickened his pace to a trot, a little later he took up his long lope and never relaxed his speed until he drove his nose into the delicious water of the Truckee. I dismounted and joined him. Right there we each took the biggest and longest drink of our lives; then I gave Sage one of my biscuits and ate the other myself, and we both felt immensely refreshed. I stripped the saddle and bridle from the mule and let him go. The river bank was green with grass and Sage was happy.
"Throwing myself upon the ground, and laying my head upon the saddle, I composed myself for a sleep.
"I