The Cruise of a Schooner

by Albert W. Harris

Here we turned our horses loose for the first time, thinking they were too tired and hungry to leave the bunch grass, and we were right. They didn’t leave that grass, and when it came time to turn in I just hobbled Dixie to be on the safe side. After this we hardly ever tied up our horses unless we were near a town or in a stock country where they might be enticed away by other horses, but before our trip was over even this was unnecessary, as we found they could not be driven very far away from the wagon. In fact, any horse we were not using would follow the wagon like a dog.

A DESERT CAMP

Our camp was in sight of three immense sand hills in a section of the desert called the Devil’s Playground. We were told these hills moved about and that sand storms were of frequent occurrence here. After supper, although it was nearly as light as day, the wind sprung up and we were doubtful about the advisability of turning in, but finally did so.

The heavens were a wonderful sight. The stars seemed to hang low and were more brilliant than usual. A comet with a long tail was plainly seen in the west, and the moon was rising over the sand hills. We began to speculate on the comet and, as the moon got above the sand hills and the wind freshened, the most remarkable thing happened--the sand hill began to move toward us! It kept getting closer, obscuring the moon, until it had moved up far enough to shut the moon from our sight entirely. We jumped up and each one of us was about to take a horse and ride for his life, when the Doctor laughed and said, “It is an eclipse of the moon. Don’t you see it’s coming out on the lower side again?” and we rolled over laughing at our fright, each claiming that he had known it was an eclipse all the time.

Later we found the comet we had seen was the famous Halley’s Comet and were sorry some of our astronomers had not been with us, as probably very few of them had an opportunity of seeing both the eclipse of the moon and the comet under such favorable circumstances.

We go to sleep looking at the heavens and in the morning, after the train has gone by, we start east again. We come to a section house about a mile down the track, at which we find a section foreman. He tells us it is twenty miles to Kelso, and the sand is “just as deep as you can stick down a cane.” This is not very encouraging, but we keep on the track, and finally, near time to make camp for the night, we reach Glasgow, another section house, where we find a water car.

We had to drive off the track here to get by the switches, and pulled through the sand up to the water car in front of the section house. We very nearly put the horses out of business, so to speak, pulling only a hundred yards at a time, but got all the water we wanted.

The foreman told us we could not drive on the track any farther as we were cutting up the ties and the oil which held the sand down. We told him that suited us; we wanted to be boarded until he could get a car and haul us out, and that we were about out of horse feed. He admitted that we could not pull through the sand and if we could not drive on the track we would have to stay there, but, as the railroad was not open for regular business and he had no facilities for feeding us, he changed the subject by asking us if we had got what water we wanted. When we told him we had, he said, “Why don’t you fellows go on then?” which we promptly did, after thanking him for the water.

We made only about two miles more before camping for the night, and were still thirteen miles from Kelso. It did not seem possible that we could have made only about eight miles that day, but as I looked back over the road and remembered the number of times we had driven off the track to get around trestle work, and how hard we had labored to get back on again, and how slow we had to go to keep from jolting our wagon to pieces, I concluded that there was sufficient excuse and only hoped the horses’ shoulders would not get sore with the jerking before we could get off the railroad for good. Besides, we must get to a town soon as we are about out of feed for the horses. With a firm determination to reach Kelso the next day we rolled up in our blankets and went to sleep looking at the stars.