Saddle and Mocassin

by Francis Francis

With his back against a pine-log, B. sits cleaning his gun, and, for the moment unoccupied, I smoke and watch "Texas" singeing a plucked grouse over the camp-fire. Opposite to him, "Mac" is engaged in baking a damper in an enormous frying-pan, the ringed handle of which is propped against a deadwood stick. The fire itself, built just above the highest water-mark, is composed of drift-wood and confined between two pine-logs, on either end of which are arranged our tin cooking utensils. In the background lies the lake.

And who is B.? who "Texas"? who "Mac"? What lake is here alluded to? B. is an old travelling companion of mine; the reader has met him before. The lake is that called Pend d'Oreille, in northern Idaho, Texas and Mac (partners, and, respectively, an ex-cowboy and unsuccessful miner) are a couple of waifs, whom we found spending the summer in hunting round its edges.

An oddly assorted pair they were, these two. Texas, the incarnation of action and life, was vif, cheery, and good-natured, industrious, ambitious, and roughly but genuinely polite—a man who economised labour, and yet whose hands were never idle, who foresaw events, and as far as possible prepared for them himself. If he were ostensibly wasting his time here, it was because, driven out of Texas by the "chills," he was endeavouring to reinstate his health, before resuming regular work. He chewed "baccer," talked "stock," washed dishes, had towels drying, water boiling, coffee cooling, an eye for passing events, and an ear for transient sounds, simultaneously. What he did, he, nevertheless, did thoroughly, and withal he was intelligent, and talked shrewd sense.

Texas was a true gamin in appearance. There was an irrepressible air of cock-sparrow-like bravado about him. His boyish figure was clad in a blue flax shirt, brown flax overalls, and mocassins. His perky nose, of a sun-burnt, fiery red, seemed to be in an everlasting condition of strenuous rivalry with the perky peak of his black cloth cap, and his small bright eyes sparkled in a small round face, of leathery-complexioned features, partially hidden by a dusty-coloured beard and moustache. He cocked his eye, he cocked his nose, he cocked his elbow. Cheek in his presence would have hung its head abashed. He had the effect upon one of a pick-me-up, and you often caught yourself involuntarily smiling as you looked at him.

Mac (an abbreviation, by the way, of "Macaroni"), an old mining enthusiast, was an Italian by birth, and looked like the typical European organ-grinder—a resemblance heightened by the broad black sombrero that he wore. He was one of those easy-going, good-natured men, who inevitably obtain nicknames, and the familiar prefix "old." Old Mac was a capital cook, and though always willing to be employed, was not given, like Texas, to initiating work of his own proper motion. Texas lived entirely in the present; Mac chiefly in the past, or future, in a ruined palace, or brand-new castle in the air. Absently twisting a spear of grass, or piece of string, in his fingers, he would sit by the hour, cross-legged, gazing into the camp-fire, with eyes that smouldered and darkened, glowed and again grew shadowed, as he dreamt of magnificent "prospects," big "leads," and "twenty-stamp mills," or failure, and the enforced sale of claims at insignificant prices, for lack of "a little more" capital to develop their hidden treasures. Sometimes he would break abruptly into the conversation with an irrelevant remark concerning mines, or mining, and, seduced by the subject, launch out, and unfold the schemes he nourished for employing that wealth which he would probably never acquire. He had found a good mine once—a well-known mine, which produced $17,000,000 after he had sold the prospect for $1,000.

No occupation is so fascinating as that of mining, it would seem. Once a miner always a miner. Found in any other walk in life, the old prospector is only "lying by" to tide over evil times, or "making a raise" to enable him to return to his favourite pursuit. Even if he resolve to abandon it, sooner or later resolution fails him, and, metaphorically speaking, it is at the mouth of the shaft that he dies. Nor is there one in a thousand of these men but dies a pauper. Still they are not to be pitied. It matters little how a man dies; the material point is, how he lives. And the lives of these men are spent on the shores of enchanting mirage lakes, they themselves the very genii of wealth, in fancy. If life be a dream, theirs at any rate is a pleasant one, for, in expectation, they enjoy more happiness than is ever achieved by the most fortunate of practical men. And since expectation is the better part of happiness, and they never live to see their idols and ideals shattered, they are doubly to be envied. Perpetually, as it were, beneath the influence of opium, present miseries but lightly affect them, and they revel in "fine phrensies," the magnificence, if not sensuous splendour of which may fairly vie with the gorgeous visions of an Eastern imagination stimulated by majoon.

For a few dollars Texas and Mac had purchased a kind of duck punt, that an amateur undertaker had apparently begun to build as a coffin for his mother-in-law, or some other but little beloved relative. It combined the lightness and symmetry of a wood pile with the sea-going qualities of a crate, and the fact that its present owners had navigated the lake in it for some weeks in safety, afforded a most interesting instance of the inexhaustible mercy of Providence.

It would be useless to recount what led us to this Ultima Thule, or how it further happened that we took ship haphazard with a brace of loafers, and went in quest of game there. Rub the Aladdin's lamp of imagination, and transport yourself to our camp-fire; do so, at least, if you admit the charm of a vagabond life in a fine climate, the enchantment of fine skies, fine days, and finer nights spent at Musette's Hôtel de la Belle Étoile, undisturbed, though, by the "courants d'air" she dreaded.

With doubtful hearts we had embarked in the modified coffin. Laden down with baggage it had had a more than usually unseaworthy appearance. But although once or twice we had shipped seas, and once had been nearly swamped by a billow at least four inches high, after a voyage of six miles we had safely reached the point where the reader first discovered us. Then, whilst B. and Mac had gone out to shoot some grouse, Texas and I had chosen a site for camp, shifted the baggage, lit a fire, and placed in readiness our cooking apparatus and stores.

The million-voiced hum of tiny surf breaking upon the sand, some fifty yards away, was heard in long, low chords, singing a song writ long before the era of man, but whether betokening prophecy or strange record, an eternal requiem or only a passing overture, equally unintelligible now. In the crests of the little knot of cotton-wood trees by which we were located, the wind was stirring with a touch so light that it barely tilted the topmost leaves. But in endless corridors of quill-fringed pines, in leagues upon leagues of forest behind us, it had gathered force, and softened by distance, enriched exquisitely in sweetness, in a chorus audible only when sought for above the fairy clashing of leafy cymbals near at hand, its organ tones rose and fell like the measured breathing of a great sound that slept.