"Shin? Well, you'd better believe I do; he's pretty well known around. Say, Alice! d'ye hear?" she cried, raising her voice, "Shin's coming 'long."
A merry laugh from the interior of the log-house greeted this announcement.
"There ain't another just like Shin from here to Panama," explained the damsel. "He's a genius. He's bound to be foolin' all the time, and he looks so sad with it—like he'd got a pain somewhere, or was making up poetry. Oh! Shin's a whole show, and he plays the music himself."
We lunched here, the gate-keeper's daughter kindly undertaking to cook quails for us if we would pluck them. Shin "played the music."
In the afternoon we set forth again through the forest, and its clearings, and its old deserted villages, that had flourished when the route we were following was the high-way betwixt Sacramento and Virginia City, when placer mining was carried on in the district, and before the railway had usurped the traffic. Now, owing to neglect, and to the destruction caused by heavy rains, the track appears to have lain disused for centuries instead of for little more than a decade. Many a yarn had Shin and B. to relate of the days when this same dried watercourse was a well-kept road, and they rattled up and down its steep grades on the mail-coach. One, and not the least curious of the wayside features, is the still standing trunks of pine-trees that were sawn off twenty and thirty feet from the ground, when the snow lay that deep on the Sierras.
We had come in our old weather-stained hunting garments, and, in order not to burden the buggy, had brought with us very little extra clothing. During the day's work the dust had accumulated upon us, until it almost seemed as if we were fulfilling the biblical prophecy and returning to the original component of man. It was anything but comforting, therefore, to hear Shin remark, as we turned off the main road in the direction of Soda Springs, that it was the time of year when visitors were numerous there. He, however, was right. When, in due course, we issued from the forest, and crossing a rustic bridge drew up before the hotel, we found its verandah full of pretty faces and well-dressed men.
Soda Springs is a summer resort, consisting merely of a hotel, a few outhouses, and a private cottage, all prettily situated in a valley. A dashing trout stream runs hard by, and there is some fair shooting in the neighbourhood.
To visit Soda Springs without ascending Tinkler's Nob was to incur an everlasting stigma of reproach. Nevertheless, as I sat smoking in the verandah next morning (Sunday), eyeing askance that most uncompromisingly perpendicular mountain, my heart opened towards the stigma. It was so hot. I suggested this to B., he merely remarked that it was nothing to what we should experience half-way up the Nob. B. had determined that I should go up. I indulged in another long and careful survey of the disagreeable eminence with the cacophonious appellation. It looked more inaccessible than ever. I observed that, the farther you were from mountains the finer they looked; that when once you had scaled a mountain you seemed to lose all respect for it; and that I had a reverence for Tinkler's Nob which I should be loth to disturb.
But I had to deal with one of those energetic men who love to get to the top of everything. I confess to a preference for the base end, at any rate, of mountains and high places. It is shadier and safer, and not so far off where I generally am. However, after exhausting a variety of excuses, Tinkler's Nob and the path of duty still lay directly in front of me, B. was still sternly pointing at them, and the thermometer was still rising.
Shin did not accompany us. We reluctantly left him with a cool drink, a long cigar, and a newspaper in the verandah. He said that the only thing he had promised his parents when he left Kentucky, twenty years before, was, "to sit around and reflect on Sunday mornings;" that the more he sat around and reflected, the more he became convinced that there was "something in it;" and that as soon as he "struck a Bonanza," he meant to sit around and reflect on week-days too. He said, moreover, that he didn't believe mountains were ever intended to be ascended, or they would have been arranged somehow differently, perhaps bottom upwards—he wasn't sure; the question was too deep a one to go into on so warm a morning.