THROUGH THE COWBOYS' COUNTRY.
The Santa Cruz Valley—The Cactus—An ancient and honourable Pueblo—A terrible Beverage—Are Cicadas deaf?—A floral Catastrophe—The Secretary and the Peccaries.
YUMA marks the frontier between California and Arizona. But it might just as well mark the frontier between India and Beluchistan, for it reproduces with exact fidelity a portion of the town of Rohri, in Sind. A broad, full-streamed river (the Colorado) seems to divide the town into two; on the top of its steep bank stands a military post, a group of bungalows, single-storied, white-walled, green-shuttered, verandahed. On the opposite side cluster low, flat-roofed houses, walled in with mud, while here and there a white-washed bungalow, with broad projecting eaves, stands in its own compound. Brown-skinned men with only a waistcloth round the loins loaf around, and in the sandy spaces that separate the buildings lean pariah dogs lie about, languid with the heat. The dreadful temperature assists to complete the delusion, and finally the mosquitoes of the Colorado river have all the ferocity of those that hatch on the banks of the Indus.
Against our will, too, these pernicious insects board our train and refuse to be blown out again by all the draughts which we tax our ingenuity to create. So we sit up sulkily in a cloud of tobacco smoke far into the night and Arizona—watching the wonderful cactus-plants passing our windows in gaunt procession, and here and there seeing a fire flash past us, lit probably by Papajo Indians for the preparation of their abominable "poolke" liquor. But the mosquitoes are satisfied at last, and go to sleep, and so we go too.
We awake in the Santa Cruz Valley, with the preposterous cactus poles and posts standing up as stiff and straight as sentries "at attention," and looking as if they were doing it for a joke. There is no unvegetable form that they will not take, for they mimic the shape of gate posts, semaphores, bee-hives, and even mops—anything, in fact, apparently that falls in with their humour, and makes them look as unlike plants as possible. I am not sure that they ought not to be punished, some of them. Such botanical lawlessness is deplorable. But, after all, is not this America, where every cactus "may do as he darned pleases"? These cacti, by the way—the gigantic columnar species, which throws up one solid shaft of flesh, fluted on each side, and studded closely with rosettes of spines—are the same that crowd in multitudinous impis on the side of the hills which slope from the massacre-field of Isandula in Zululand, down to the Buffalo River. How well I remember them!
If it were not for the cactus it would be a miserably uninteresting country, for the vegetation is only the lowest and poorest looking scrub, and water as yet there is none. But now we are approaching what the inhabitants call "the ancient and honourable pueblo of Tucson," pronouncing it Too son, and ancient and honourable we found it—For does it not dispute with Santa Fe the title of the most ancient town in the United States? and was not the breakfast which it gave us worthy of all honour?
It takes, reader, as you will have guessed, a very long journey indeed to knock into a traveller's head a complete conception of the size of North America. Mere space could never do it, for human nature is such that when trying to grasp in the mind any great lapse of time or territory, the two ends are brought together as it were, and all the great middle is forgotten. Nor does mere variety of scene emphasize distance on the memory, for the more striking details here and there crowd out the large monotonous intervals. Thus a mile of an Echo canyon obliterates half a state's length of Platte Valley pastures, and a single patch of Arkansas turtle-swamp whole prairies of Texan meadow. But in America, even though many successive days of unbroken travel may have run into one, or its many variations—from populous states to desert ones, from timber states to pasture ones, from corn states to mineral ones, from mountain to valley, river to lake, canyoned hills to herd-supporting prairies, from pine forest to oak forest, from sodden marsh to arid cactus-land—may have got blurred together, there grows at the end of it all upon the mind a befitting sense of vastness which neither linear measurement in miles nor variety in the panorama fully explain. It is due, I think, to the size of the instalments in which America puts forward her alternations of scene. She does not keep shifting her suits, so as to spoil the effect of her really strong hand, but goes on leading each till she has established it, and made each equally impressive. You have a whole day at a time of one thing, and then you go to sleep, and when you wake it is just the same, and you cannot help saying to yourself: "Twenty-four successive hours of meadowland is a considerable pasturage," and you do not forget it ever afterwards. The next item is twenty-four hours of mountains, "all of them rich in metals;" and by the time this has got indelibly fixed on the memory, Nature changes the slide, and then there is rolling corn-land on the screen for a day and night. And so, in a series of majestic alternations, the continent passes in review, and eventually all blends into one vast comprehensible whole.
Apart from physical, there are curious ethnological divisions which mark off the continent into gigantic subnationalities. For though the whole is of course "American," there is always an underlying race, a subsidiary one so to speak, which allots the vast area into separate compartments. Thus on the eastern coast we have the mulatto, who gives place beyond Nebraska to the Indian, and he, beyond Nevada, to the Chinaman. After California comes the Mexican, and after him the negro, and so back to the East and the mulatto again.
Here in Arizona, at Tucson, the "Mexican" is in the ascendant, for such is the name which this wonderful mixture of nationalities prefers to be called by. He is really a kind of hash, made up of all sorts of brown-skinnned odds and ends, an olla podrida. But he calls himself "Mexican," and Tucson is his ancient and honourable pueblo. It is a wretched-looking place from the train, with its slouching hybrid men, and multitudinous pariah dogs. Indians go about with the possessive air of those who know themselves to be at home; and it is not easy to decide whether they, with their naked bodies and ropes of hair dangling to the waist, or the half-breed Mexican with their villainous slouch and ragged shabbiness, are the lower race of the two. And the dogs! they are legion; having no homes, they are at home everywhere. I am told there is a public garden, and some "elegant" buildings, but as usual they are on "the other side of the town." All that we can see on this side, are collections of squalid Arabic-looking huts and houses, made of mud, low-roofed and stockaded with ragged-looking fences. The heat is of course prodigious for eight months of the year, and the dust and the flies and the mosquitoes are each and all as Asiatic as the heat—or any other feature of this ancient and honourable It has its interest, however, as an American pueblo. It has its interests, however, as an American "antiquity;" while the river, the Santa Cruz, which flows past the town, is one of those Arethusa streams, which comes to the surface a few miles above the town and disappears again a few miles below it.
For the student of hybrid life, Tucson must have exceptional attractions; but for the ordinary traveller, it has positively none. Kawai Indians have not many points very different from Papajo Indians, and mud hovels are after all only mud hovels. But it is an ancient and honourable pueblo.
The only people who look cool are the Mexican soldiers in blue and white, and that other Mexican, a civilian, in a broad-brimmed, flimsy hat, spangled with a tinsel braid and fringe. Have these men ever got anything to do? and when they have, do they ever do it? It seems impossible they could undertake any work more arduous than lolling against a post, and smoking a yellow-papered cigarette. Yet only a few days ago these Mexicans, perhaps those very soldiers there, destroyed a tribe of Apaches, and then arrested a force of Arizona Rangers who had pursued the Indians on to Mexican ground! These Apaches had kept the State in a perpetual terror for a long time, but finding the Federal soldiers closing in upon them, they crossed the frontier line close to Tucson, and there fell in with the Mexicans, who must at any rate be given the credit for promptitude and efficiency in all their Indian conflicts. The Apaches were destroyed, and the force of Rangers who had followed them were caught by the Mexican general, and under an old agreement between the two Republics, they were made prisoners of war, disarmed, and told to find their way back two hundred and fifty miles into the States as best and as quickly as they could. Some thirty years ago a Mexican general, who captured some American filibusters in a similar way at the village of Cavorca, paraded his captives and shot them all down. So the Arizona men were glad enough to get away.
The cactus country continues, and the plants play the mountebank more audaciously than ever. There is no absurdity they will not commit, even to pretending that they are broken fishing rods, or bundles of riding whips. But the majority stand about in blunt, kerb-stone fashion, as if they thought they were marking out streets and squares for the cotton-tail rabbits that live amongst them. Under the hill on the left is the old mission church of "San'avere" (San Xavier); and over those mountains, the "Whetstones," lies the mining settlement of Tombstone, where the cowboys rejoice to run their race, and the value of life seldom rises to par in the market. Then we enter upon a plain of the mezcal all in full bloom, and a "lodge" of brown men, partly Indian, partly Mexican, waiting it may be for the plant to mature and the time to come round for distilling its fiery liquor. I tasted mezcal at El Paso for the first time in my life, and I think I may venture to say the last, so whether it was good of its kind or not, I cannot tell. I am no judge of mezcal. But I know that it was thick, of a dull sherry colour, with a nasty vegetable smell, and infinitely more fiery than anything I ever tasted before, not excepting the whisky which the natives in parts of Central India brew from rye, the brandy which the Boers of the Transvaal distil from rotten potatoes, or the "tarantula juice" which you are often offered by the hearty miners of Colorado. It is almost literally "fire-water;" but the red pepper, I suppose, has as much to do with the effect upon the tongue and palate as the juice of the mezcal.
On a sudden, in the midst of this desolate land, we come upon a ranche with cattle wading about among the rich blue grass; but in a minute it is gone, and lo! a Chinese village, smothered in a tangle of shrubs all overgrown with creeping gourds, with the coolies lying in the shade smoking long pipes of reed.
Have you ever smoked Chinese "tobacco"? If not, be careful how you do. A single pipe of it (and Chinese pipes hold very little) will upset even an old smoker. For myself, can hardly believe it is tobacco, for in the hand it feels of a silky texture, utterly unlike any tobacco I ever saw, while the smell of it, and the taste on the tongue, are as different to the buena yerba as possible. It is imported by the Chinese in America for their own consumption, and in spite of duties is exceedingly cheap. A single sniff of it, by the way, completely explains that heavy, stupefying odour which hangs about Chinese quarters and Chinese persons.
But this glimpse of China has disappeared as rapidly as the ranche had done, and in a few minutes later a collection of low mud-walled huts, overshadowed by rank vegetation, an ox or two trying to chew the cud in an uptilted cart, some brown-skinned children playing with magnolia blossoms, and lo! a glimpse of Bengal.
And then as suddenly we are out again on to the cactus plains with cotton-tail rabbits everywhere, and cicadas innumerable shrilling from the muskeet trees. Above all the noise of the train we could hear the incessant chorus filling the hot out-of-doors, and, stepping on to the rear platform, I found that several had flown or been blown on to the car. Poor helpless creatures, with their foolish big-eyed heads and little brown bodies wrapped up in a pair of large transparent wings. But fancy living in such a hideous din as these cicadas live in! Do naturalists know whether they are deaf? One would suppose of course that the voice was given them originally for calling to each other in the desolate wastes in which they are sometimes found scattered about. But in the lapse of countless generations that have spent their lives crowded together in one bush, sitting often actually elbow to elbow and screaming to each other at the tops of their voices, it is hardly less rational to suppose that kindly Nature has encouraged them to develop a comfortable deafness. At any rate it is impossible to suppose that even a cicada can enjoy the ear-splitting clamour in which its neighbours indulge, and which now keeps up with us all the way as we traverse the San Pedro Valley, and mounting from plateau to plateau—some of them fine grass land, others arid cactus beds—reach another "Great Divide," and then descend across an immense, desolate prairie, brightened here and there with beautiful patches of flowers, into the San Simon Valley. And all the time we eat our dinner (at the Bowie station) the cicadas go on shrilling, on the hot and dusty ground, till the air is fairly thrilling, with the waves of barren sound. That sounds like rhyme,—and I do not wonder at it,—for even the cicadas themselves manage to drift into a kind of metre in their arid aimless clamour, and the high noon, as we sit on our cars again, looking out on the pink-flowered cactus and the mezcal with its shafts of white blossoms, seems to throb with a regular pulsation of strident sound.
What a desolate land it seems, this New Mexico into which we have crossed! But not for long. We soon find ourselves out upon a vast plain of grassland, upon which the sullen, egotistical cactus will not grow. "You common vegetables may grow there if you like," it says. "Any fool of a plant can grow where there is good soil; but it shows genius to grow on no soil at all." So it will not stir a step on to the grass-land, but stands there out on the barren sun-smitten sand, throwing up its columns of juicy green flesh and bursting out all over into flowers of vivid splendour, just to show perhaps that "Todgers's can do it when it likes." There is about the cactus' conduct something of the superciliousness of the camel, which wades through hay with its nose up in the air as if it scorned the gross provender of vulgar herds, and then nibbles its huge stomach full of the tiny tufts of leaves which is found growing among—the topmost thorns of the scanty mimosa.
Here, on this plain, is plenty of the "camel thorn," the muskeet, and a whole wilderness of Spanish bayonet waiting till some one thinks it worth while to turn it into paper, and there is not probably a finer fibre in the world. Nor, because the cactus contemns the easy levels, do other flowers refuse to grow. They are here in exquisite profusion, a foretaste of the Texan "flower-prairies," and when the train stopped for water I got out and from a yard of ground gathered a dozen varieties. Nearly all of them were old familiar friends of English gardens, and some were beautifully scented, notably one with a delicate thyme perfume, and another that had all the fragrance of lemon verbena.
Both to north and south are mountains very rich in mineral wealth, and at Lordsburg, where we halted, I could not resist the temptation of buying some "specimens." I had often resisted the same temptation before, but here somehow the beauty of the fragments was irresistible. Outside the station, by the way, under a heap of rubbish, were lying a score or so of bars of copper bullion, worth, perhaps, twenty pounds apiece. Such bulky plunder probably suits nobody in a climate of everlasting heat, but it is all pure copper nevertheless—pennies en bloc.
The plain continues in a monotony of low muskeet scrub, broken here and there by flowering mezcal. It is utterly waterless, and, except for one fortnight's rain which it receives, gets no water all the year round. Yet beautiful flowers are in blossom even now, and what it must be just after the rain has fallen it is difficult to imagine. To this great flower-grown chapparal succeeds a natural curiosity of a very striking kind—a vast cemetery of dead yuccas. It looks as if some terrific epidemic had swept in a wave of scorching death over the immense savannah of stately plants. Not one has escaped. And there they stand, thousand by thousand, mile after mile, each yucca in its place, but brown and dead. And so through the graveyards of the dead things into Deming—Deming of evil repute, and ill-favoured enough to justify such a reputation. Even the cowboy fresh from Tombstone used to call Deming "a hard place," and there is a dreadful legend that once upon a time, that is to say, about ten years ago, every man in the den had been a murderer! No one would go there except those who were conscious that their lives were already forfeited to the law, and who preferred the excitement of death in a saloon fight to the dull formalities of hanging. However, tempora mutantur, and all that I remember Deming for myself is its appearance of dejection and a very tolerable supper.
And then away again, across the same flower-grown meadow, with its sprinkling of muskeet bushes, and its platoons of yucca, but now all radiant in their bridal bravery of waxen white. The death-line of the beautiful plant seems to have been mysteriously drawn at Deming. I got out at a stoppage and cut two more of the yuccas. The temptation to possess such splendour of blossom was too great to resist. But alas! as before, the dainty thing in its virginal white was hideous with clinging parasites, and so I fastened them into the brake-wheel on the platform, and sitting in my car smoking, could look out at the great mass of silver bells that thus completely filled the doorway, and in the falling twilight they grew quite ghostly, the spectres of dead flowers, and touching them we find the flowers all clammy and cold. "How it chills one!" said a girl, holding a thick, white, damp petal between her fingers. "It feels like a dead thing."
And sitting out in the moonlight—an exquisite change after the hateful heat of the day thfit was past—we saw the muskeet growth gradually dwindle away, and then great lengths of wind-swept sand-dunes supervened. And every now and then a monstrous owl—the "great grey owl of California," I think it must have been—tumbled up off the ground and into the sky above us. Otherwise the desolation was utter. But I sat on smoking into the night, and was abundantly repaid after awhile, for the country, as if weary of its monotony, suddenly swells up into billows and sinks into huge troughs, a land-Atlantic that beats upon the rocks of the Colorado range to right and left; and as we cut our way through the crests of its waves, the land broke away from before us into bay—like recesses; crowned with galleries of pinnacled rock and curved round into great amphitheatres of cliff. But away on the left it seemed heaving with a more prodigious swell, and every now and then down in the hollows I thought I could catch glimpses of moon-lit water glittering. And the train sped on, winding in and out of the upper ridges of the valley brim, and then, descending, plunged into a dense growth of willows, and lo! the Rio Grande, and "the shining levels of the mere." It was it then, this splendid stream, that had been disturbing the land so, thrusting the valley this way and that, shaping the hills to its pleasure, and that now rolled its flood along the stately water-way which it had made, with groves of trees for reed beds and a mountain range for banks!
We cross it soon, seeing the Santa Fe line pass underneath us with the river flowing underneath it again—and then with the Rio Grande gradually curving away from us, we reach El Paso. And it is well perhaps for El Paso, that we see it under the gracious witchery of moonlight, for it is a place to flee from. Without one of the merits of Asia, it has all Asia's plagues of heat and insects and dust. And no one plants trees or sows crops; and so, sun-smitten, and waterless, it lies there blistering, with all its population of half-breeds and pariah dogs, a place, as I said, to flee from. And yet on the other side of the river, a rifle-shot off, is the Mexican town of El Paso—for the river here separates the States from their neighbour Republic—and there, there are shade trees and pleasant houses, well-ordered streets, and all the adjuncts of a superior civilization.
A brawl alongside the station platform, with a horrible admixture of polyglot oaths and the flash of knives, is the only incident of El Paso life we travellers had experience of. But it may be characteristic.
One of the party who had been incidentally concerned in the disagreement travelled with us. He knew both New and Old Mexico well, and among other things which he told me I remember that he said that he had seen peccaries in New Mexico, on the borders of Arizona. I had thought till then that this very disagreeable member of the pig family confined itself to more southern regions.
Treed by pigs is not exactly the position in which we should expect to find a Colonial Secretary—at least, not often. But when one of the Secretaries in Honduras was recently exploring the interior of the country, he was overtaken by a drove of peccaries, and had only time to take a snap shot at the first of them and scramble up a tree, dropping his rifle in the performance, before the whole pack were round his perch, gnashing their teeth at him, grunting, and sharpening their tusks against his tree. Now the peccary is not only ferocious but patient, and rather than let a meal escape it, it will wait about for days, so that the Secretary had only two courses—either to remain where he was till he dropped down among the swine from sheer exhaustion and hunger, or else to commit suicide at once by coming down to be killed there and then. While he was in this dilemma, however, what should come along—and looking out for supper too—but a jaguar. Never was beast of prey so opportune! For the jaguar has a particular fondness for wild pork, and the peccaries know it, for no sooner did they see the great ruddy head thrust out through the bushes than they bolted helter-skelter, forgetting, in their anxiety to save their own bacon, the meal they were themselves leaving up the tree. The jaguar was off after the swine with admirable promptitude, and the Secretary, finding the coast clear, came down—reflecting, as he walked towards the camp, upon the admirable arrangements of Nature, who, having made peccaries to eat Colonial Secretaries, provided also jaguars to eat the peccaries.
And so to sleep, and sleeping, over the boundary into Texas.
American neglect of natural history—Prairie-dogs again; their courtesy and colouring—Their indifference to science—A hard crowd—Chuckers out—Makeshift Colorado.
"HAVE we struck another city?" I asked on awaking, and finding the train at a standstill.
"No, sir," said the conductor, "only a water-tank."
"You see," I explained, "there are so many 'cities' on the Railway Companies' maps that one hardly dares to turn one's head from the window, lest one should let slip a few—so I thought it best to ask."
No, it didn't look like a country of many cities. It was Texas. And the grazing land stretched on either side of us to the horizon, without even a cow to break the dead level of the surface. It was patched, however, with wildflowers. Yellow verbena and purple grew in acres together. And then the breakfasting station suddenly overtook us. It was called Coya, and we ate refuse. When we complained, the man and his wife—knock-kneed folk—deplored almost with tears their distance from any food supply, and vowed they had done their best. And while they vowed, we starved on damaged tomatoes; and on paying the man I gave him advice to go and buy some potter's field with the proceeds, and to act accordingly.
What I hate about being starved is, that you can't smoke afterwards. The best part of a good meal is the pipe afterwards, and the more ample the meal the better the subsequent weed. But on a pint of bad tomatoes no man can smoke with comfort to his stomach. But I ate bananas till I thought I had qualified for tobacco, and with my pipe came more kindly thoughts. Outside the cars the country was doing all it could to soothe me, for the meadows were fairly ablaze with flowers. They were in distracting profusion and of beautiful kinds. I knew most of them as garden and hothouse flowers in England, but not their names; the verbenas, however, were unmistakable, and so was the "painted daisy." It suffices, however, that the country seemed a wild garden as far as the eye could reach, yellow and orange being as usual the prevailing colours.
This determination of wild flowers to these colours is a point worth the notice of science. And why are the very great majority of Spring flowers yellow?
One of my companions called this distraction of colour a "weed-prairie," which reminds me to say that it is perfectly amazing how indifferent the present generation of Western Americans are to the natural history of their country. They cannot easily mistake a crow or a rose. But all other birds, except "snipe" and "prairie chickens," seem to be divided into "robins" and "sparrows;" and all flowers, the sunflower and the violet, into lilies and primroses. They have not had time yet, they say, to notice the weeds and bugs that are about. But, in the meantime, a most appalling confusion of nomenclature is taking root. As with eatables and other things, the emigrants to the States have taken with them from Europe the names of the most familiar flowers and birds, and anything that takes their fancy is at once christened with their names.
As the sun rose the population of these painted meadows came abroad, multitudes of rabbits, a few "chapparal hens," and myriads—literally myriads—of brilliant butterflies.
And so on for a hundred miles. And then Texas gets a little tired of so much level land and begins to undulate. Dry river-beds are passed, and then a muskeet "chapparal" commences, and with it a prodigious city of prairie-dogs. But the inhabitants are partially civilized. The train does not alarm them in the least. It does not even arouse their curiosity. They sit a few feet off the rails, with their backs to the passing trains. Perhaps they may look over their shoulders at it. But they do not interrupt their gambols nor their work for such a trifle as a train. They eat and squabble and flirt—do anything, in fact, but run away. Now and then, as if out of good taste and not to appear too affected, they make a show of moving a little out of the way. But the motive is so transparent that the trivial change of position counts for nothing. The jack-rabbit imitates the prairie-dog, just as the Indian imitates the white man, and pretends that it too does not care about the train. But there is an expression on its ears that betrays its nervousness; and why, too, does it always manage to get under the shady side of the nearest bush?
One thing more about the prairie-dog, and I have done with him. The soil east of Colorado city changes for a while in colour, being reddish. Before this it had been sandy. And the prairie-dog alters its colour to suit its soil. You might say of course that the dust round its burrows tinged its fur, just as dust will tinge anything it settles on. But it is a fact that the fur itself is redder where the soil is redder, and that in the two tracts the little animal assimilates itself to the ground it sits upon. And the advantage is obvious. Dozens of prairie-dogs sitting motionless on the soil harmonized so exactly with their surroundings that for a time I did not observe them. Detecting one I soon learned to detect all. Now one of the grey prairie dogs on the red soil would have been very conspicuous, just as conspicuous in fact as a red one would have been trying to pass unobserved on the lighter soil.
The undulations now increase into valleys, and splendid they are, with their rich crops of wild hay and abundant life. The train stops at a "station" (I am not sure that it has earned a name yet), and some cowboys, and dreadful of their kind, get on to the train. But it is only for an hour or so. But during that hour the prairie-dogs had much excitement given them by the perpetual discharging of revolvers into the middle of their family parties. It is impossible to say whether any of them were hit, for the prairie-dog tumbles into his hole with equal rapidity, whether he is alive or dead. But I hope they escaped. For I have a great tenderness for all the small ministers of Nature, in fur and in feathers.
"Their task in silence perfecting, Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil, Labours that shall not fail, when man is gone."
And yet I would be reluctant to say that their indifference to express trains should be encouraged. I don't like to see prairie-dogs thus regardless of the latest triumphs of science. And so if the cowboys' revolvers frightened them a little, let it pass.
The train stopped again at another "station," and our cowboy passengers got out, being greeted by two evil-looking vagabonds lying in the shade of a shrub. The meeting of these worthies looked unmistakably like that of thieves re-assembling after some criminal expedition. All alike seemed eager to converse, but they evidently had to wait till the train was gone. One man had a bundle which he held very tight (so it seemed to us) between his legs. A few muttered sentences were exchanged, the speakers turning their heads away from the train while they talked, and the rest assuming a most ludicrous affectation of indifference to what was being said. We started off, and looking out at them from the rear platform of the car, I saw they were already in full talk. Their animated gestures were almost as significant as words. Had I referred to the conductor I might have saved myself all conjecture. For mentioning my suspicions to him, he said, "Oh, yes! Those Rangers who got off at Coya are after that crowd: and they're a hard crowd too."
They were, without doubt, a terribly "hard crowd" to look at, these cowboy-men. In England they would probably have followed "chucking out" as a profession. I remember in a police court, during election time, seeing some hulking victims of the police charged with "rioting." But they pleaded, in justification of turbulence, that they were "chuckers out of meetings!" They had been captured when expelling the supporters of a rival candidate from a public hall with the fag ends of furniture, and made no attempt at concealment of their misdemeanour. They were paid, they said, to chuck out, and chucked out accordingly, to the best of their intelligence and ability, and when overpowered by the police attempted no subterfuge. Their stock-in-trade were broad shoulders and prodigious muscle. For any odd job of fancy work they would perhaps provide themselves with a few old eggs or put a dead cat or two into their pockets. But, as a rule, when they went out to business they took only their fists and their hob-nailed boots with them, relying upon the meeting room to provide them with table legs and chairs. As soon as the signal for the disturbance was given, the chuckers-out "went for" the furniture, and, armed with a convenient fragment, looked about for people whom they ought to chuck. There were plenty to choose from, for a meeting consists, as a rule, of several or more persons, and the chuckers-out having marked down a knot of the enemy, would proceed to eject them, individually if refractory, in a body if docile, and would thus, if unopposed by police, gradually empty the room. There is something very humorous in this method of invalidating an obnoxious orator's arguments, for nothing weakens the force of a speech so much as the total absence of the audience. Nevertheless, the chucker-out sees no humour in his job. It is all serious business to him, and so he goes through his chucking with uncompromising severity. Now and then, perhaps, he expels the wrong man, or visits the political offences of an enemy upon the innocent head of one of his own party; but in political discussions with the legs of tables and brickbats, such mistakes can hardly help occurring.
And the beautiful undulating meadows continue, sprinkled over with shrub-like trees, and populous with rabbits and prairie-dogs and chapparal hens. Here and there we come upon small companies of cattle and horses, most contented with their pastures; but what an utter desolation this vast tract seems to be! The "stations" are, as yet, mere single houses, and we hardly see a human being in an hour. And then comes Colorado, a queer makeshift-looking town, with apparently only one permanent place of habitation in it—the jail.
Beyond the town we passed some Mexicans supposed to be working, but apparently passing time by pelting stones at the snakes in the water, and soon after stopped to take up some Texan Rangers for the protection of our train during the night. These Rangers reminded me very much of a Boer patrol, and there is no doubt that both cowboys and Indians find them far too efficient for comfort. They are, as a rule, good shots, and all are of course good riders. The pay is good, and, "for a spell" as one of them said, the work was "well enough." And as the evening closed in, and we began to enter a country of dark jungle-looking land, the scene seemed as appropriate as possible for a Texan adventure. But nothing more exciting than cicadas disturbed our sleep. Somebody said they were "katydids," but they were not—they were much katydider.
Nature's holiday—Through wonderful country—Brown negroes a libel on mankind—The wild-flower state—The black problem—A piebald flirt—The hippopotamus and the flea—A narrow escape—The home of the swamp-gobblin—Is the moon a fraud?
IN the morning everything had changed. Vegetation was tropical. Black men had supplanted brown. Occasional tracts of rich meadow, with splendid cattle and large-framed horses wading about among the pasture, alternated with brakes of luxuriant foliage concealing the streams that flowed through them, while fields of cotton in lusty leaf, gigantic maize, and league after league of corn stubble, showed how fertile the negro found his land. And the wild flowers—but what can I say more about them? They seemed even more beautiful than before.
There is something very striking and suggestive in these impressive efforts of Nature to command, at recurring intervals, a recurring homage. Thus, for one interval of the year the rhododendron holds an undivided empire over the densely-wooded slopes of the great Himalayan mountains in India. All the other beauties of mountain and valley are forgotten for that interval of lovely despotism, and every one who can, goes up to see "the rhododendrons in bloom." Nature is very fond of such "tours de force," thinking, it may be, that men who see her every-day marvels and grow accustomed to them require now and then some extra-ordinary display, like the special festivals of the ancient Church, to evoke periodically an extraordinary homage. Lest the migration of creatures should cease to be a thing of wonder to us, Nature organizes once in a way a monster excursion, sometimes of rats, sometimes of deer, but most frequently of birds, to remind man of the marvellous instinct that draws the animal world from place to place or from zone to zone. For the same reason, perchance, she ever and again drives butterflies in clouds from off the land out on to the open sea, and, that the perpetual miracle of Spring may not pall upon us, she gives the world in succession such breadths and tones of colour that even the callous stop to admire the sudden gold of the meadows, the hawthorn lying like snowdrifts along the country, the bridal attire of the chestnuts, or the blue levels of wild hyacinth. As the priestess of a prodigious cult, Nature decrees at regular intervals, for the delight and discipline of humanity, a public festa, or universal holiday, to which the whole world may go free, and wonder at the profusion of her beauties.
The track was, in places, very poor indeed, the cars jumping so much as to make travelling detestable and travellers "sea-sick." And then Dallas, with an execrable breakfast, and away again into the wonderful country, with cattle perpetually wandering on to the track and refusing to hear the warning shriek of the engine. The country was richly timbered with oak and willow and walnut, with park-like tracts intervening of undulating grassland. Here the stock wandered about in herds as they chose, and except for a chance tent, or a shanty knocked together with old packing-cases and canvas, there was no sign of human population. But in the timbered country every clearing had the commencement of a settlement, the tumble-down rickety habitation with which the African, if left to his own inclinations, is content. And wonderfully picturesque they looked, too, these efforts at colonization in the middle of the forests, with the creepers swinging branches of scarlet blossoms from the trees, and the foliage of the plantains, maize and sugar-cane brightening the sombre forest depths. But the heat must be prodigious, and so must the mosquitoes.
It was Sunday, and after their kind the children of Ham were taking "rest." Parties of negresses all dressed in the whitest of white, with bright-coloured handkerchiefs on their heads, or hats trimmed with gaudy ribands and flowers, and sometimes wearing, believe me, gloves, were promenading in the jungle with their hulking, insolent-mannered beaux. They looked like gorillas masquerading. In his native country I sincerely like the negro. But here in America I regret to find him unlovely. I am told that individual negroes have done wonders. I know they have. But this does not alter my prejudice. I think the brownish American negro of to-day is the most deplorable libel on the human race that I have ever encountered. And I cannot help fearing that America has a serious problem growing into existence in the South. The brown-black population is there formulating for itself, apart from white supervision, ideas of self-government, morality, "independence," and even religion, that may make any future intervention of a better class a difficult matter, or may eventuate in the contemporary growth of two sharply-defined castes of society. I find the opinion universally entertained in America that the brownish-black man is not a sound or creditable basis for a community, and now that I have seen in what numbers and what prosperity he has established himself in the South, I cannot but think that he may be found in the future an awkward factor in the body politic and social.
The country in fact appears to be breeding helots as fast as it can for the perplexity of the next generation.
To the north of us as we travelled was a large Indian reservation, and at more than one station I saw them crouching about the building. But I should not have mentioned them had it not been that I saw a white man trying to buy a cradle from a squaw. He offered $20 for it, but she would not even turn her head to look at the money. It is quite possible that the mother thought he was bargaining for the papoose as well as the cradle. But I was assured that these women sometimes expend an incredible amount of labour and indeed (for Indians) of money also upon their papoose-panniers. One case was vouched for of an offer of $120 being refused, the Indians stating that there were $80 worth of beads upon the work of art, and that it had taken eleven years to complete.
How beautiful Texas is! And what a future it has! For half a day and a night we have been traversing grazing-land, and for half a day fine timber growing in a soil of intense fertility. And now for half a day we are in a pine country, sometimes with wide levels of turf spreading out among the trees, sometimes with oak and walnut so thickly intermingled with the pines that the whole forms a magnificent forest. Passion-flowers entangle all the lower undergrowth, and up the dead trees climbs that fine scarlet creeper which is such an ornament of well-ordered gardens of some English country houses. But here in Texas the people, as usual, have not had time yet to think of adornments, and their ugly shanties therefore remain bare and wooden. They are of course only ugly in themselves, that is to say, in material, shape, and condition, for their surroundings are delightful and location perfect. There is of course a good deal of "the poetry of malaria," as I heard a charming lady say, about some of these sites. For it is impossible to avoid the suspicion of agues and fevers in those splendid clearings, with the rich foliage mobbing each patch of cotton, grapes, or maize.
Whenever we happen to slacken pace near one of them an interesting glimpse of local life is caught. Negroidal women come to the doors or suddenly stand up in the middle of the crops in which, working, they were unperceived. From the undergrowth, the ditches, and from behind fences, appear dusky children, numbers of them, a swart infantry that seems to me to fill the future with perplexity. Are these swarms going to grow up a credit to the country? Have they it in their breed to be fit companions in progress of the progeny of the best European stocks?
The abundance of wild life, too, is very noticeable. Wherever we stop we become aware of countless butterflies and insects busy among the foliage, and the voices of strange birds resound from the forest depths.
But other sites appear to me perfection. Take Marshall for instance, or Jefferson. Which is the more beautiful of the two? Some of the "commercial" settlements, just beginning life with a railway-station, six drug stores, and seven saloons, have situations that ought to have been reserved for honeymoon Edens. They are "hard" places. Law as yet there is none except revolver law, and that is pitiless and sudden and wicked. For Texas, the beautiful flower state, blessed with turf and blessed with pines, has still the stern commencements of American life before it—that rapid, fierce process of civilization which begins with cards and whisky and murder, which finds its first protection in the "Vigilantes" who hold their grim tribunals under the roadside trees, but which suddenly one day wrenches itself, as it were, from its bad, lawless past, and takes its first firm step on the high road to order and prosperity and the world's respect. For every intelligent traveller these ragged, half-savage, settlements should have a great significance and interest. Before he dies they may be Chicagos or San Franciscos. And these men, with their mouths full of oaths and revolvers on their hips, are the fathers of those future cities. They will have no immortality though in the gratitude of posterity. For they will shoot each other of in those saloons, or the Rangers will shoot them down on the flower prairies beyond the forests. But they will have done their work nevertheless. Nature in every part of her scheme proceeds on the same system of building foundations upon ruins. Whole nations have to be killed off when they have prepared and preserved the ground as it were for those that are to follow. Whether they are nations of men, or of beasts, or of plants, she uses them in exactly the same way. Everything must subserve the ultimate end.
But I did not intend to moralize. The negress waiter at Longview (where we dine very badly) reminds me how practical life should be. She never stops to moralize. On the contrary, she just stands by the window, swallowing all the peaches and fragments of pudding that the travellers leave on their plates. Two he negroes wait upon us. But it looks as if they were there to feed the negress rather than to feed us. For they keep rushing in with full dishes to us and rushing off with the half empty ones to her. And there she stands omnivorous, insatiable, black. Everything that is brought to her of a sweet kind she swallows. Not as if she enjoyed it, but as if she must. It was like throwing things into a sink. She never filled up.
And then, through the splendid tropical country, to Marshall. I must return to Marshall, Texas, some day and be disillusioned, or else I shall go down to my grave accusing myself of having passed Paradise in the train, and not "stopped off" there. What an exasperating reflection for a deathbed! I should never forgive myself. But perhaps it is not so beautiful as it seems. In any case studies "from the life" would be immensely interesting. I caught a few glimpses which entertained me prodigiously. There was the negro dandy walking painfully in patent-leather boots that were made for some man with ordinary feet, with a fan in his hand and a large flower in his button-hole, an old stove-pipe hat on his head, and a very corpulent handleless umbrella under his arm. There was another, similarly caparisoned, escorting three belles for a walk in the neighbouring jungle, the ladies all wearing white cloth gloves and black cloth boots that squelched out spaciously as they put their feet down. And alas! there was the black coquette, with her bunch of crimson flowers behind her ear, her black satin skirt and white muslin jacket, her parasol of black satin lined with crimson—and how she flirts up the green slope, with a half-acre smile on her face! She looks back at every other step to see which, if any, of the black men, or the brown, or the yellow, on the station platform is going to follow her expansive charms, and so she disappears, this piebald siren, into the groves, her parasol flashing back Parthian gleams of crimson as she goes. But every one, man, woman, or child, black, brown, or yellow, was a study, so I must go back to Marshall some day.
At present, however, we are whirling away again through the lovely woodland, and the whole afternoon passes in an unbroken panorama of forest views, with great glades of meadow breaking away to right and left, and patches of maize and cotton suddenly interrupting the stately procession of timber. And then Jefferson. Is Jefferson more prettily situated than Marshall? I cannot say. But Jefferson lies back among the trees with an interval of orchard and corn-land between it and the railway line, and looks a very charming retreat indeed. A fat negro comes on board on duty of some kind connected with the brake, and a witty little half-breed boy comes on after him. The fat negro is the brown boy's butt. And he nearly bursts with wrath at the hybrid urchin's chaff, and threatens, between gasps, a retaliation that cannot find utterance in words. But the brown boy is relentless, and though the train is rapidly increasing in its speed, he clings to the step and taunts the negro who dare not leave his look-out post. But he knows very well where the fat man will get off, and suddenly, with a parting personality, the little wretch drops off the step, just as a ripe apple might drop off a branch. And then the fat man has to get off. The speed is really dangerous, but he climbs down the steps backwards, thinking apparently only of his tormentor, and still breathing forth fire and slaughter; and then lets go. Is he killed? Not a bit of it. He lands on his feet without apparently even jarring his obese person, and when we look back, we see that he is already throwing stones at the small boy, whose batteries are replying briskly. I wonder if the hippopotamus ever caught the flea? And if he did, what he did to him?
And I remember how the Somali boys in Aden used to drive the bo'sun to the verge of despair by clambering on to the ship and pretending not to see him working his way round towards them with a rope's end behind his back, and how at the very last moment, almost as the arm was raised to strike, the young monkeys used to drop off backwards into the sea, like snails off a wall.
But is this Bengal or Texas that we are traveling through? The vegetation about us is almost that of suburban Calcutta, and the heat, the damp steamy heat of low-lying land, might be the Soonderbuns. And here befell an adventure. We were nearing Atalanta. The train was on a down grade and going very fast indeed, perhaps half a mile a minute. I was sitting on my seat in the Pullman with the table up in front of me and reading. At the other end of the car was a lady with some children sitting with their backs to me. Further off, but also with his back to me, was the conductor. Each "section" of a car has two windows. The one at my left elbow had the blind drawn down. The other had not. On a sudden at my ear, as it seemed, there was a report as of a rifle; the thick double glass of the window in front of me flew into fragments all over me, and the woodwork fell in splinters upon my book. I instantly pulled up the blind of the other window and looked out to see who had "fired." But of course at the speed we were going, there was no one in sight. I called out to the conductor that some one had fired through the window. He had not heard the explosion, nor had the lady. So their surprise was considerable. And while I was looking in the woodwork for the bullet I expected to find, the conductor picked off my table a railway spike! Some wretch had thrown it at the passing train, and the great velocity at which we were travelling gave the missile all the deadly force of a bullet. "An inch more towards the centre of the window, sir, and you might have been killed," said the brakeman. A look at the splintered woodwork, and the bullet-like groove which the sharp-pointed abomination had cut for itself, was suffcient to assure me that he was right. But think of the atrocious character of such mischief. The man who did it probably never thought of hurting any one. And yet he narrowly missed having a horrible crime on his head. "If we could have stopped the train and caught him, we would have lynched him," said the conductor. "A year or two ago a miscreant threw a corn cob into a window, very near this spot too. It struck a lady, breaking her cheek bone, and bursting the ball of her left eye. We stopped the train, caught the man, and hanged him by the side of the track then and there."
And then Atalanta, in a country that is very beautiful, but with that poetry of malaria which suggests a peril in such beauty. And gradually the land becomes swampy, and the old trees, hung with moss, stand ankle-deep in brown stagnant water. The glades are all pools, and where-ever a vista opens, there is a long bayou stretching down between aisles of sombre trees. It is wonderful in its unnatural beauty, this forest standing in a lagoon. The world was like this when the Deluge was subsiding. There is a mysterious silence about the gloomy trees. Not a bird lives among them. But in the sullen water, there are turtles moving, and now and then a snake makes a moment's ripple on the dull pools. Sunlight never strikes in, and as I looked, I could not help remembering all the horrors of the slave-hunt, and the murder at the end of it, in the dark depths of some such horrid brake as these we pass. What a spot for legends to gather round! Has no one ever invented the swamp-goblin?
For an hour and more we pass through this eerie country, and then comes a change to higher land with a splendid growth of pine and walnut and oak all healthily rooted in dry ground. But towards evening we come again into the swamps, and the sun goes down rosy-red behind the water-logged trees, till their trunks stand out black against the ruddy sky and the pools about their feet take strange tints of copper and purpled bronze. And suddenly we flash across the track of the narrow-gauge line to New Orleans—and such a sight! The line pierces an avenue, straight as an arrow, for miles and miles through the belt of forest. On either side along the track lie ditches filled with water. But to-night the ditches seem filled with logwood dye, and the wonderful vista through the deep green trees is closed as with a curtain, by the crimson west!
It was only a glimpse we got of it, but as long as I live I shall never forget it, the most marvellous sight of all my life.
No, not even sunrise upon the Himalayas, nor the moonlight on the palm-garden in Mauritius—two miracles of simple loveliness that are beyond words—could surpass that glimpse through the Texan forest. It was not in the least like this earth. Beyond that crimson curtain might have been heaven, or there might have been hell. But I am not content to believe that it was merely Louisiana.
And now comes Texakharna with its sweltering Zanzibar heat, but an admirable supper to put us into good humour, and a beautiful moonlight to sit and smoke in. If the sunset was weird, the moonlight was positively goblinish. Such gloom! Not darkness remember, but gloom, blacker than darkness, and yet never absolutely impenetrable. At least so it seemed, and the fire-flies, flickering in thousands above the undergrowth and up among the invisible branches, helped the fancy. And the frogs! Was there ever, even in India in "the rains," such a prodigious chorus of batrachians? And the katydids! Surely they were all gone mad together. But it was a delightful ride. Sometimes in the clearings we caught glimpses of negro parties, the white dresses of the women glancing in and out along the paths, and the sound of singing coming from the huts in the corners of the maize-patches.
Here at the corner of a clearing stands a cottage, a regular fairy-tale cottage "by the wood," and in the moonlight it looked as if, "really and truly," the walls were made of toffy and the roof was plum-cake. At any rate there were great pumpkins on the roof, just such pumpkins as those in which Cinderella (after they had turned into coaches) drove to the Prince's ball. And I would bet my last dollar on it that the lizards that turned into horses were there too, and the rats, and in the marsh close by you might have a large choice of frogs to change into coachmen.
And yet, I cannot help thinking, there is a good deal of false sentiment expended upon the moon, the result of a demoralizing humility which science has taught the inhabitants of "the planet we call Earth." We are for ever being warned by our teachers against the sin of pride, and being told that the universe is full of "Earths" just as good as ours, and perhaps better. We are not, they say, to fancy that our own world is something very special, for it is only a little ball, spinning round and round in the firmament, among a number of other balls which are so superior to it that if our own insignificant orange came in contact with them we should get the worst of the collision. Nor are we to fancy that the moon is our private property, and grumble at her shabbiness, as our planetary betters have a superior claim to their share of her, and this sphere of ours ought to be very thankful for as much of the luminary as it gets.
Now, to my thinking, there is something distinctly degrading in this view. Englishmen maintain patriotically that Great Britain is the Queen of the Sea; why, then, should not we Earthians, with a larger patriotism, say that our planet is the best planet of the kind in the firmament, and, putting on one side all petty territorial distinctions, boldly challenge the supremacy of the Universe itself? Depend upon it, if any presumptuous moon-men or Jupiterites were to descend to Earth and begin to boast, they would be very soon put down, and I do not see, therefore, why we should not at once call upon all the other stars and comets to salute our flag whenever we sail past them on the high seas of the Empyrean. As it is, we are taught timidity by science, and told that whenever a filibustering comet or meteor—the pirates and privateers of the skies—comes along our way we are to expect instant combustion, or something worse. Why are they not made to drop their colours by a shot across their bows? or why, when we next see a meteor bearing down upon us, should we not steer straight at it, and, using Chimborazo or Mount Everest, or the dome of St. Paul's, or the Capitol at Washington as a ram, sink the rascal? A broadside from our volcanic batteries, Etna and Hecla, Vesuvius, Erebus, and the rest would soon settle the matter, and we should probably hear no more for a long time to come of these black-flagged craft who go cruising about to the annoyance of honest planets. The same unbecoming apprehensions are entertained with regard to the moon. Yet it is absurd that we should be afraid of her. The Earth, by its velocity and weight, could butt the moon into space or smash her into all her original fragments, could bombard her with volcanoes, or put an earthquake under her and make a ruin of her, or turn the Atlantic on to her and put her out. The moon is really our own property, something between a pump and a night light, and, if the truth must be told, not very good as either. Twice a day she is supposed to raise the water of our oceans, but we have often had to complain of her irregularity; and every night she ought to be available for lighting people home to their beds, but seldom is. As a rule, our nights are very dark indeed, owing to her non-attendance; and even when she is on duty the arrangements she makes for keeping clouds off her face are most defective. If the Earth were to be half as irregular in the duties which she has to perform there would soon be a stoppage of everything, collisions at all the junctions, accidents at the level crossings, planets telescoped in every direction, and passengers and satellites much shaken, if not seriously injured. But the Earth is business-like and practical, and sets an example to those other denizens of the firmament which are perpetually breaking out in eruptions, getting off the track, and going about in disorderly gangs to the public annoyance. Why, then, we ask, ought our planet to be for ever taking off its hat to the flat-faced old moon, who is always trying to show off with borrowed light, makes such a monstrous secret of her "other side," is perpetually being snubbed by eclipses, and made fun of by stars that go and get occultated by her?
But there are objections to discarding the luminary, for it is never a graceful act to turn off an old dependant, and, besides, the moon is about as economical a contrivance as we could have for keeping up the normal average of lunatics, giving dogs something to bark at by night when they cannot see anything else, and affording us an opportunity of showing that respect for antiquities which is so becoming.
But what business the Man in the Moon has there, remains to be decided; and who gave him permission to go collecting firewood in our moon, remains to be seen. For it is well to remember that a very distinguished French savant has proved that the moon is the private property of the Earth. We used, he says, to do very well without a moon once upon a time; but going along on our orbit one day, we picked up the present luminary—then a mere vagabond, a disreputable vagrant mass of matter, with no visible means of subsistence—"and shall, perhaps, in the future pick up other moons in the same way." As a matter of fact then, he declares the moon to be a dependant of our Earth, and says that if we were selfishly to withdraw our "attraction" from it, the poor old luminary would tumble into space, and never be able to stop herself, or, worse still, might come into collision with some wandering comet or other, and get blown up entirely. We ought, therefore, to think kindly of the faithful old creature; but we should not, all the same, allow any length of service to blind us to the actual relations between her and ourselves—much less to make us frightened of the moon.
But the man in the moon should be seen to. He is either there or he is not. If he is, he ought to pay taxes: and if he is not, he has no right to go on pretending that he is.
Frogs, in the swamp, and as a side-dish—Negroids of the swamp age—Something like a mouth—Honour in your own country—The Land Of Promise—Civilization again.
ARKANSAS remains on the mind (and the traveller's notebook) as a vast forest of fine timber standing in swamps. There are no doubt exceptions, but they do not suffice to affect the general impression. And if I owned Arkansas I think I should rent it to some one else to live in; especially to some one fond of frogs. For myself, I feel no tenderness towards the monotonous batrachian. Even in a bill of fare the tenderness is all on the frog's side. But on the whole, I like him best when he is cooked. In the water with his "damnable iteration" of Yank! yank! yank! I detest him—legs and all. But served "a cresson," with a clear brown gravy, I find no aggressiveness in him. It gets cooked out of him: he becomes the gentlest eating possible. Butter would not melt in his mouth, though it does on his legs. There is none of the valiant mouse-impaling "mud-compeller" about him when you foregather with him as a side dish. Aristophanes would not recognize him, and the "nibbler of cheese rind" might then triumph easily over him. Yet to think how once he shuddered the earth, and shook Olympus! The goddess that leans upon a spear wept for him, and Aphrodite among her roses trembled.
But here in Arkansas, on a hot night in "the Moon of Strawberries," what a multitudinous horror they are these "tuneful natives of the reedy lake!" Like the laughter of the sea, beyond arithmetic. Like the laughter of the sea, beyond arithmetic. Like the complainings of the plagued usurers in Hell, beyond compassion. I cannot venture my pen upon it. It is like launching out upon "the tenth wave," for an infinite natation upon cycles of floods. It is endless; snakes with tails in their mouths; trying to correct the grammar of a Mexican's English.
But, seriously; was ever air so full of sound as these Arkansas swamps "upon a night in June!" It fairly vibrates with Yank! yank! yank! And yet over, and under, and through, all this metallic din, there shrills supreme the voice of strident cicadas, without number and without shame, and countless katydids that scream out their confidences to all the stars. It is really astonishing; a tour de force in Nature; a noisy miracle. I wonder Moses did not think of it, for such a plague might have done him credit, I think. At all events, the ancestors of Arabi Pasha would have been egregiously inconvenienced by such a hubbub. It is no use trying to talk; yank—Katy did—yank—yank. That is all you hear. So you may just as well sit and smoke quietly, and watch the moon-lit swamps and wonderful dark forests go by, with their perpetual flicker of restless fire-flies, twinkling in and out among the brushwood. If they would only combine into one central electric light! All the world would go to see them—the new "Brush-light." But there is very little sense of utility among fire-flies. They flicker about for their own amusement, and are of a frivolous, flighty kind; perpetually striking matches as if to look for something, and then blowing them out again. They strike only on their own box.
But here comes a station—"Hope." We are soon past Hope; and then comes another swamp, with its pools, that have festered all day long in the sun, emitting the odours of a Zanzibar bazaar, and standing in the middle of them apparently are some clearings already filled with crops, and a hut or two cowering, as if they were wild beasts, just on the edge of the timber where the shadows fall the darkest. What kind of people are they that live in this terraqueous land? No race that is fit to rule can do it. No, nor even fit to vote. Some day, no doubt, the wise men of the world will dig up tufts of wool, and skulls with prognathous jaws, and label them "Negroids of the swamp age." Or they may fall into the error of supposing that the wool grew all over their bodies equally, and some Owen of the future discourse wisely of "the great extinct anthropoids of Arkansas." For in those wonderful days that are coming—when men will know all about the wind-currents, and steer through ocean-billows by chart, when doctors will understand the smallpox, and everybody have the same language, currency, religion, and customs duties, and when every newspaper offce will be fitted with patent reflectors, showing on a table in the editor's room all that is going on all over the world, and special correspondents will be as extinct as dodos, and when many other delightful means of saving time and trouble will have come to pass—then, no doubt, as the Mormons say, all the world will have become a "white and a delightsome people," and the commentators will explain away the passages in the ancient English which seem to point to the early existence of a race that was as black as coals, and lived on pumpkins in a swamp.
And still we sit up, long past midnight, for never again in our lives probably shall we have such an experience as this, so unearthly in its surroundings—forests that crowded in upon the rails and hung threateningly over the cars, pools that lay glistening in the moonlight round the foot of the trees, the air as thick as porridge with the yanking of brazen-throated frogs, and the screaming of tinlunged cicadas, yet all the time alive with lantern-tailed insects—just as if the clamour of frogs and cicadas struck fireflies out of each other in the same way that flint and steel strike flashes, or as if their recriminations caught fire like Acestes' arrows as they flew, and peopled the inflammable air with phosphorescent tips of flame—a battery of din perpetually grinding out showers of electric sparks.
And to make us remember this night the cars bumped abominably over the dislocated sleepers and the sunken rails, as the Spanish father whipped his son that he might never forget the day on which he saw a live salamander; and the engine flew a streamer of sparks and ink-black smoke, till it felt as if we were riding to Hades on a three-legged dragon. But it came to sleep at last, and we went to bed, leaving the moonlit country to the vagaries of the fireflies and the infinite exultations of the frogs.
Awaking in the morning with "the grey wolf's tail" still in the sky, what a wonderful change had settled on the scene! The same swamped forests on either side of us: the same gloomy trees and the same sulky-looking pools; but a dull leaden Silence supreme! Where were the creatures that had crowded the moonlight? You might live a whole month of mornings without suspecting that there were any such things in Arkansas as frogs or katydids or fireflies!
I should have gone to sleep again if I had not caught sight of our new porter, or brakeman. He happened to be laughing, and the corners of his mouth, so it seemed to me, must have met behind. I need hardly say he was a negro. But at first I thought he was a practical joke. I took the earliest opportunity of looking at the back of his neck, to see what kept his head together when he laughed. But I only saw a brass button. I should not have thought that was enough to keep a man's skull together, if I had not seen it. And he was always laughing, so that there was nearly as much expression on the back of his head as on the front. He laughed all round.
I felt inclined to advise him to get his mouth mended, or to tell him about "a stitch in time." But he seemed so happy I did not think it worth while.
Is it worth while saying that the swamp forest continued? I think not. So please understand it, and think of the country as a flooded forest, with wonderful brown waterways stretching through the trees, just as glades of grass do elsewhere, with here and there, every now and again, a broad river-like bayou of coffee stretching to right and left, and winding out of sight round the trees, and every now and again a group of wooden cabins, most picturesquely squalid, and inhabited by coloured folk.
Does anybody know anything of these people? Are they cannibals, or polygamous, or polyandrous, or amphibious? Surely a decade of unrestricted freedom and abundant food in such solitudes as these, must have developed some extraordinary social features? At all events, it is very difficult to believe that they are ordinary mortals.
The hamlets are few and far between, and it is only once or twice during the day that we strike a village nomine dignus. Looking at a garden in one of these larger hamlets, I notice that the hollyhock and pink and petunia are favourite flowers; and it is worth remarking that it is with flowers as with everything else—the imported articles are held in highest esteem. Writing once upon tobacco cultivation in the East, I remember noting that each province between Persia and Bengal imported its tobacco from its next neighbour on the west, and exported its own eastward. It struck me as a curious illustration of the universal fancy for "foreign" goods. So with flowers. It is very seldom that the wild plants of a locality arrive at the dignity of a garden. In England we sow larkspurs; in Utah they weed them out. In England we prize the passion-flower and the verbena; in Arkansas they carefully leave them outside their garden fences. And what splendid flowers these people scorn, simply because they grow wild! Some day, I expect, it will occur to some enterprising settler that there is a market abroad for his "weeds;" and that lily-bulbs and creeper-roots are not such rubbish as others think.
Then Poplar Bluff, a crazy-looking place, with many of its houses built on piles, and a saloon that calls itself "the XIOU8 saloon." I tried to pronounce the name. Perhaps some one else can do it. Then the swamp reasserts itself, and the forest of oak and walnut, sycamore and plane. But the settlements are singularly devoid of trees, whether for fruit or shade. The people, I suppose, think there are too many about already.
And now we are in Missouri—the Mormons' 'land of promise,' and the scene of their greatest persecutions. It is a beautiful State, as Nature made it; but it almost deserves to be Jesse-Jamesed for ever for its barbarities towards the Mormons. No wonder the Saints cherish a hatred against the people, and look forward to the day when they shall come back and repossess their land. For it is an article of absolute belief among the Mormons, that some day or other they are going back to Jackson County, and numbers of them still preserve the title-deeds to the lands from which they were driven with such murderous cruelty.
It was here that I saw men working a deposit of that "white earth" which has done as much to bring American trade-enterprise into disrepute as glucose and oleomargerine put together. In itself a harmless, useless substance, it is used in immense quantities for "weighting" other articles and for general adulteration; and I could not help thinking that the man who owns the deposit must feel uncomfortably mean at times. But it is a paying concern, for the world is full of rascals ready to buy the stuff.
And, after all, one half the world lives by poisoning the other.
A thunderstorm broke over the country as we were passing through it, and I could not help admiring the sincerity of the Missouri rain. There was no reservation whatever about it, for it came down with a determined ferocity that made one think the clouds had a spite against the earth. Moss Ferry, a ragged, desolate hamlet, looked as if it was being drowned for its sins; and I sympathized with pretty Piedmont in the deluge that threatened to wash it away. But we soon ran out of the storm, and rattling past Gadshill, the scene of one of Jesse James' train-robbing exploits, and sped along through lovely scenery of infinite variety, and almost unbroken cultivation, to Arcadia.
But this is "civilization." In a few hours more I find myself back again at the Mississippi, the Indus of the West, and speeding along its bank with the Columbia bottom-lands lying rich and low on the other side of the prodigious river, and reminding me exactly of the great flat islands that you see lying in the Hooghly as you steam up to Calcutta—past the new parks which St. Louis is building for itself, and so, through the hideous adjuncts of a prosperous manufacturing town, into St. Louis itself.
Out of deference to St. Louis, I hide my Texan hat, and disguise myself as a respectable traveller. For I have done now with the wilds and the West, and am conscious in the midst of this thriving city that I have returned to a tyrannical civilization.
And I take a parting cocktail with the Western friend who has been my companion for the last three thousand miles.
"Wheat," says he, with his little finger in the air.
And I reply, "Here's How."
THE END.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY GILDERT AND RIVINGTON, LIMITED, ST. JOHN'S SQUARE.