stranger! You’re goan home across lots. You want a horse. I’m goan to stop here. I’d jess as lives gamble off a hundred or two head o’ bullocks on that Foolonner Mine. You can’t find ayry man round here to buy out your interest in that thar heap er stun an the hole it cum out of. It’ll cost you more ’n the hul’s wuth ef you go down to San Frisco and wait tell some fool comes along what’s got gold he wants to buy quartz with. Take time now, I’m goan to make yer a fair banter.”
“Well, make it.”
“I stump you to a clean swap. My hoss agin your mine.”
“Done,” said I.
“I allowed you’d do it. This here is one er them swaps, when both sides gits stuck. I git the Foolonner Mine, what I can’t make go, and you’ll be a fool on a crittur what’ll go a heap more ’n you’ll want. Haw! haw!”
And Gerrian laughed a Pike’s laugh at his pun. It was a laugh that had been stunted in its childhood by the fever and ague, and so had grown up husk without heart.
“Have the black caught,” said I, “and we’ll clinch the bargain at once.”
There was a Mexican vaquero slouching about. Gerrian called to him.
“O Hozay! kesty Sinyaw cumprader curwolyow nigereeto. Wamos addelanty! Corral curwolyose toethoso!”
Pike Spanish that! If the Mexicans choose to understand it, why should Pikes study Castilian? But we must keep a sharp look-out on the new words that come to us from California, else our new language will be full of foundlings with no traceable parentage. We should beware of heaping up problems for the lexicographers of the twentieth century: they ought to be free for harmonizing the universal language, half-Teutonic, half-Romanic, with little touches of Mandingo and Mandan.
The bukkarer, as Gerrian’s Spanish entitled Hozay, comprehended enough of the order to know that he was to drive up the horses. He gave me a Mexican’s sulky stare, muttered a caramba at my rashness, and lounged off, first taking a lasso from its peg in the court.
“Come in, stranger,” said Gerrian, “before we start, and take a drink of some of this here Mission Dolorous wine.”
“How does that go down?” said he, pouring out golden juices into a cracked tumbler.
It was the very essence of California sunshine—sherry with a richness that no sherry ever had—a somewhat fiery beverage, but without any harshness or crudity. Age would better it, as age betters the work of a young genius; but still there is something in the youth we would not willingly resign.
“Very fine,” said I; “it is romantic old Spain, with ardent young America interfused.”
“Some likes it,” says Gerrian; “but taint like good old Argee to me. I can’t git nothin’ as sweet as the taste of yaller corn into sperit. But I reckon thar ken be stuff made out er grapes what’ll make all owdoors stan’ round. This yer wuz made by the priests. What ken you spect of priests? They ain’t more ’n haff men nohow. I’m goan to plant a wineyard er my own, and ’fore you cum out to buy another quartz mine, I’ll hev some of ther strychnine what’ll wax Burbon County’s much’s our inyans here ken wax them low-lived smellers what they grow to old Pike.”
Chapter III • Don Fulano
Don Fulano
Hector of Troy, Homer’s Hector, was my first hero in literature. Not because he loved his wife and she him, as I fancy that noble wives and husbands love in the times of trial now; but simply because he was Hippodamos, one that could master the horse.
As soon as I knew Hector, I began to emulate him. My boyish experiments were on donkeys, and failed. “I couldn’t wallop ’em. O no, no!” That was my difficulty. Had I but met an innocent and docile donkey in his downy years! Alas! only the perverted donkey, bristly and incorrigible, came under my tutorship. I was too humane to give him stick enough, and so he mastered me.
Horses I learned to govern by the law of love. The relation of friendship once established between man and horse, there is no trouble. A centaur is created. The man wills whither; the horse, at the will of his better half, does his best to go thither. I became, very early, Hippodamos, not by force, but by kindness. All lower beings—fiendish beings apart—unless spoilt by treachery, seek the society of the higher; as man, by nature, loves God. Horses will do all they know for men, if man will only let them. All they need is a slight hint to help their silly willing brains, and they dash with ardor at their business of galloping a mile a minute, or twenty miles an hour, or of leaping a gully, or pulling tonnage. They put so much reckless, break-neck frenzy in their attempt to please and obey the royal personage on their back, that he needs to be brave indeed to go thoroughly with them.
The finer the horse, the more delicate the magnetism between him and man. Knight and his steed have an affinity for each other. I fancied that Gerrian’s black, after our mutual friendly recognition on the prairie, would like me better as our intimacy grew.
After hobnobbing with cracked tumblers of the Mission Dolores wine, Gerrian and I mounted our mustangs and rode toward the corral.
All about on the broad slopes, the ranchero’s countless cattle were feeding. It was a patriarchal scene. The local patriarch, in a red flannel shirt purpled by sun and shower, in old buckskin breeches with the fringe worn away and decimated along its files whenever a thong was wanted, in red-topped boots with the maker’s name, Abel Cushing, Lynn, Mass., stamped in gilt letters on the red—in such costume the local patriarch hardly recalled those turbaned and white-robed sheiks of yore, Abraham and his Isaac. But he represented the same period of history modernized, and the same type of man Americanized; and I have no doubt his posterity will turn out better than Abraham’s, and scorn peddling, be it Austrian loans or “ole clo’.”
The cattle scampered away from us, as we rode, hardly less wild than the buffaloes on the Platte. Whenever we rose on the crest of a hillock, we could see several thousands of the little fierce bullocks—some rolling away in flight, in a black breadth, like a shaken carpet; some standing in little groups, like field officers at a review, watching the movements as squadron after squadron came and went over the scene; some, as arbitrators and spectators, surrounding a pair of champion bulls butting and bellowing in some amphitheatre among the swells of land.
“I tell you what it is, stranger,” said Gerrian, halting and looking proudly over the landscape, “I wouldn’t swop my place with General Price at the White House.”
“I should think not,” said I; “bullocks are better company than office-seekers.”
It was a grand, simple scene. All open country, north and south, as far as the eye could see. Eastward rose the noble blue barrier of the Sierra, with here and there a field, a slope, a spot, or a pinnacle of the snow that names it Nevada. A landscape of larger feeling than any we can show in the old States, on the tame side of the continent. Those rigorous mountain outlines on the near horizon utterly dwarf all our wooded hills, Alleghanies, Greens, Whites. A race trained within sight of such loftiness of nature must needs be a loftier race than any this land has yet known. Put cheap types of mankind within the influence of the sublimities, and they are cowed; but the great-hearted expand with vaster visions. A great snow-peak, like one of the Tacomas of Oregon, is a terrible monitor over a land; but it is also a benignant sovereign,
