CHAPTER V.
OUR FIRST DAYS IN THE BARN.
The route we had chosen, a drive of about eighteen miles, was supposed to be the least steep in its ups and downs; an important consideration, with our heavy load. When we crept round the last turning and could see our hill, with its little patch of brown earth turned up, and the barn which looked like a small wooden box, we felt that our difficulties for the day were conquered. At that moment we were passing a ranch which was just being enclosed with a fence made of narrow laths wired together; these were lying in large bundles at intervals all along the road for a distance of about a quarter of a mile. To our dismay, when Dan reached the first of these bundles, he put back his ears and gave a sudden and most violent shy, almost lurching the surrey over, and then stood trembling, his legs planted apart in an obstinate manner, and absolutely refused to move an inch further.
We tried coaxing, then whipping, till Dan showed us his heels in a series of most vicious kicks, higher and higher, till we feared he would break some part of the harness, or the surrey itself.
Eventually he did allow himself to be slowly coaxed past, I making myself as broad as possible to try and screen that side of the road, and leading him, and my husband checking his evident desire to bolt after each separate bundle was left behind. By this time it was grey twilight, and when we reached our haven, we had to be satisfied with the simplest arrangements possible for the night.
As we were occupying the rooms which by rights belonged to the horses, they had to be staked out on the open hillside, and during the night Joe managed to get loose and went careering off, up and down and round the barn, so that we were awakened by the clattering of his hoofs. It was a brilliant starlit night, perfectly still and mild, and all the family turned out in their night gear to help to catch him and fasten him up again. It was a curious sensation to be so absolutely alone, and free, with nothing but the great ranges of big bare mountains lying spread out into the far distance.
The absolute stillness was very weird; the smallest sound from miles around reached us in the calm quiet. The plaintive call of the little brown owls had a sad uneasy ring in it, and the coyote’s mocking yelp seemed most uncomfortably near.
The mountain ranges looked so calm and stately and unreachable in the cold clear moonlight, and we felt horribly lonely.
There was one cañon some four miles away, across the Silvero Valley, called Mexican Cañon, and we wondered uneasily whether Indians and Mexicans lived there; for we seemed to be on the very borders of civilisation. When we got to know the neighbourhood better, we found nothing but peaceable ranches, and more ranches far back into the hills.
Returning to the barn we were rather glad to roll the big door to, and close it fast. We crept into our makeshift beds and were asleep before long. But we were awakened with a disagreeable start, hearing right inside the barn a strange cry, which, in our sleepiness and ignorance, might well have been the call of a Red Indian, straight from the Mexican Cañon, intent on securing the scalps of us “tenderfeet.” The cry was repeated, as we sat up listening eagerly, and then we all laughed to see a little squatty figure sitting on one of the open windows, and recognised a harmless little brown owl.
In the morning we made some kind of order and comfort around us. The one large room in the barn (viz., the hayloft) we had divided into two with a temporary screen, one half for our bedroom, the other for sitting- and dining-room. A small shanty had been added outside for kitchen, and a shed which was to receive the cow, when we had one, served meanwhile as bedroom for our “coloured lady.” There was a lower floor which was divided into stalls for the horses, and which was entered by a lower road, as the barn stood on a steep slope.
The fifty cases of furniture, which had been stored at San Francisco till we sent for them, were strewn all about the hill top on which the barn stood, and our first task was to open most of these, take a few things out, and pack away all the rest safely before the rains came.
For days and days we worked away busily at this, my husband and I, and our boys, standing out in that hot glaring Californian sun, with the dry dust of the soil getting into our shoes and stockings and soaking all our clothes. Our ranchman was busy with the trees, and the coloured lady looked on when she was not cooking; looked on with a disdainful air, showing by many signs a great contempt for people who could be so foolish as to carry about such quantities of “stuff,” as she called it.
To English eyes many Californian houses look very empty, and no doubt our possessions did seem ridiculously unnecessary to this darky, who thought only of the bother they would be to keep clean.
As we packed away case after case into every available corner, stringing up chairs and sofas, and all manner of things on to the rafters, we began to wonder where we ourselves were to be housed. We have always since considered that it was a proof positive of great sweetness of temper that we got through a time of such terribly close quarters without doing any violence to each other.
But with all our contriving there were a number of cases for which we could find no room, and these we covered with bits of oil-cloth, and left them out of doors. They led us a dreadful life, those seven cases; our ranchman was for ever predicting rain, which did not come, but kept us anxiously on the watch. Finally, when it did come, it was unexpected, and we had to rush out one night to see if the high wind, which had risen with the rain, had dislodged the oil-cloth. That was a lively night, for the rain came running down the inside walls of our barn in little streams on the windward side, and pictures and other things hung there for safety had to be hurriedly removed.
It was the first night, too, that a large, handsome kangaroo rat paid us a visit, running about like an acrobat among the chairs on the rafters, and when I carried a candle quite near to him, to see what he was like, he looked down at me with the greatest coolness and impudence, with his brilliant black eyes. The place seemed to suit him, for he became a constant visitor. Another intimate guest was a particularly large lizard, who darted in and out under the big door.
We were a little uneasy lest some less harmless visitors should invite themselves. We knew that there were scorpions and tarantulas; the men who had built our barn had unwittingly pitched their tent the first night just over a nest of tarantulas, and had discovered them in the early evening, and spent the rest of the night in searching for and killing them with their hammers.
Ugly, wicked-looking things they are, with their enormous hairy legs and body and cruel nippers; they are very aggressive, too, and would much rather fight than run away.
But most of all we dreaded the rattlesnakes. Our ranchman had killed thirty on the adjoining land, and several had already been found on ours. Everyone told us they were very easy to kill, but that did not reassure us.
Our first introduction to snakes was more alarming than dangerous. We had put all our umbrellas and sticks into a corner of the barn behind a large corner seat. One day whilst we were quietly resting after dinner, our youngest boy, Gip, asleep on his couch, my husband chanced to be looking at these umbrellas, thinking sleepily that he did not recognise one of the handles, which seemed to stand out from the rest, when he was suddenly made wide awake by seeing it move quietly round, first to one side then to the other, and knew that it was a snake. He reached out his hand quietly for something to strike it with, but it darted out of sight at once behind the couch, and though we searched long for it, we did not find it. We found, however, a large notch hole through which it had probably crept in, and we lost no time in closing this securely. It was not a rattlesnake, however, and was probably quite harmless, as numbers of the snakes are, some of them being considered valuable as destroyers of vermin.
Some of these try to pass themselves off as rattlers, however, and we often wondered how they knew that the faint sound of the rattle is so strangely horrible and frightening, that they should try to imitate it as a means of defence.
Another fright which we had, while still in the barn, was very thrilling. It was in the night, and we had been fast asleep, when all at once we became wide awake, straining our ears for the repetition of a horrible sound that we seemed to have heard in our sleep. It is impossible to describe the cold horror and fear which that curious dry rattle gives one.
Here was the thing we had so dreaded—a rattlesnake in the room. As we sat up in the dark the sound was repeated, seemingly from the middle of the room. Someone whispered, “Do you hear,” and we answered, “Do not move.” We reached cautiously for matches and candle, and of course these poor, wretched Californian matches—the worst surely in the world—did nothing but break off or go out. For some minutes the sound continued with an angry crescendo, till we began to wonder if the dreadful thing had got itself wedged in somewhere between the piles of furniture.
At last a feeble, uncertain light and four pairs of strained eyes searched the dim room. And there, sitting nicely balanced on his hind legs, with his sharp black eyes shining brightly, was a small field mouse with a long rattle between his teeth, shaking it about vigorously every few minutes, then running a few paces and rattling it again.
We had cut off a number of rattles from the snakes killed on our ranch to keep them as curiosities, and this was one of them which the mouse had got hold of and seemed to find such a good plaything.
(To be continued. )
[VARIETIES.]
How He grew Rich.
A man who had by his own unaided exertions become rich, was asked by a friend the secret of his success.
“I accumulated,” said he, “about one-half of my property by attending to my own business and the other half by letting other people’s entirely alone.”
Toil on.—If you want knowledge you must toil for it; if food you must toil for it; if pleasure you must toil for it. Toil is the law. Pleasure comes through toil, and not by self-indulgence and indolence. When a girl gets to love work her life is a happy one.
I Don’t Care!—When you say “I don’t care!” see that your tone of voice doesn’t indicate that you do.
No, not Heavy.
A little girl was wandering in an Edinburgh street, dragging about a great baby boy almost as big as herself.
A clergyman who was passing stopped and said, “Why, my little lass, can you carry that boy? He must be heavy.”
The child looked up in his face and gasped, “No, sir, he’s no heavy. He’s my brither.”
Surely a whole sermon in itself!
With his Friend.
In a London mission school near a “settlement,” the teacher asked, “Where does Jesus live?”
A small boy spoke up: “Some of His friends have come to live in our alley, and I think He lives with them.”
A Poet’s Marriage.
Robert Browning, the famous poet, and Elizabeth Browning, one of the sweetest and truest of our poetesses, were married on the 12th of September, 1846, in the parish church of St. Marylebone.
The poet proved a model husband, intensely devoted to his wife, proud of her genius, and watchful over her happiness. In his “Life” we read that in 1851, and indeed “on each succeeding visit paid to London with his wife, he commemorated his marriage in a manner all his own. He went to the church in which it had been solemnised and kissed the paving-stones in front of the door.”
Time for Everything.—There is time enough for everything in the day if you do but one thing at once.