His companion struck me as a half-breed Indian, somewhere about eighteen years of age, his beardless face showing deep, brutal lines, and a mouth which was a mere crease between hideously heavy lips. Blood stained the rowels of his spurs; an old felt hat, crumpled and ragged, slouched forward over his eyes, doing its best to hide the man.
I thought them a hard couple, and summed up their traits as stolidity and utter cruelty.
I was pleased that the stable-man who saddled Kaweah was unable to answer their inquiry where I was going, and annoyed when I heard the hotel-keeper inform them that I started that day for Millerton.
Leaving behind us people and village, Kaweah bore me out under the grateful shade of oaks, among rambling settlements and fields of harvested grain, whose pale Naples-yellow stubble and stacks contrasted finely with the deep foliage, and served as a pretty groundwork for stripes of vivid green which marked the course of numberless irrigating streams. Low cottages, overarched with boughs and hemmed in with weed jungles, margined my road. I saw at the gate many children who looked me out of countenance with their serious, stupid stare; they were the least self-conscious of any human beings I have seen.
Trees and settlements and children were soon behind us, an open plain stretching on in front without visible limit,—a plain slightly browned with the traces of dried herbaceous plants, and unrelieved by other object than distant processions of trees traced from some cañon gate of the Sierras westward across to the middle valley, or occasional bands of restless cattle marching solemnly about in search of food. It was not pleasant to realize that I had one hundred and twenty miles of this lonely sort of landscape ahead of me, nor that my only companion was Kaweah; for with all his splendid powers and rare qualities of instinct there was not the slightest evidence of response or affection in his behavior. Friendly toleration was the highest gift he bestowed on me, though I think he had great personal enjoyment in my habits as a rider. The only moments when we ever seemed thoroughly en rapport were when I crowded him down to a wild run, using the spur and shouting at him loudly, or when in our friendly races homeward toward camp, through the forest, I put him at a leap where he even doubted his own power. At such times I could communicate ideas to him with absolute certainty. He would stop, or turn, or gather himself for a leap, at my will, as it seemed to me, by some sort of magnetic communication; but I always paid dearly for this in long, tiresome efforts to calm him.
With the long, level road ahead of me, I dared not attack its monotony by any unusual riding, and having settled him at our regular travelling trot,—a gait of about six miles an hour,—I forgot all about the dreary expanse of plain, and gave myself up to quiet reverie. About dusk we had reached the King’s River Ferry.
An ugly, unpainted house, perched upon the bluff, and flanked by barns and outbuildings of disorderly aspect, overlooked the ferry. Not a sign of green vegetation could be seen, except certain half-dried willows standing knee-deep along the river’s margin, and that dark pine zone lifted upon the Sierras in eastern distance.
It is desperate punishment to stay through a summer at one of these plain ranches, there to be beat upon by an unrelenting sun in the midst of a scorched landscape and forced to breathe sirocco and sand; yet there are found plenty of people who are glad to become master of one of these ferries or stage stations, their life for the most part silent, and as unvaried as its outlook, given over wholly to permanent and vacant loafing.
Supper was announced by a business-like youth, who came out upon the veranda and vigorously rang a tavern bell, although I was the only auditor, and likely enough the only person within twenty miles.
I envy my horse at such times; the graminivorous have us at a disadvantage, for one revolts at the cuisine, although disliking to insult the house by quietly shying the food out of the window. I arose hungry from the table, remembering that some eminent hygeist has avowed that by so doing one has achieved sanitary success.