"He'll be along directly—just as soon as he has rested. You can't leave those old cusses behind when they know the road."
Don Cabeza was right. Before we had finished supper at Smith's Wells, the horse appeared at the drinking-trough there.
It was the last typical evening that I expected to spend on the frontier, after nine months of almost uninterrupted life amongst rancheros and miners, cow-boys and teamsters, gamblers and traders, and all the nondescript flotsam and jetsam of humanity that drift "out West" from the cradles of mankind, and find rough rest upon the shores of unskilled labour. A curious kaleidoscopic field of character lies here. Men grow as chance will have them. No rules of etiquette or fashions trim and compress them into stereotyped moulds. At least they retain some originality, and are not wholly copyists. Rough characters may be found amongst the many fine fellows that one meets, and to spare—men who are narrow-minded, bigoted, and intolerant to a degree that is extraordinary. But since they make no pretence to be what they are not, at least they are not vulgar or snobbish. However marked the faults in any nature may be, if in the main it is natural, it can never be wholly repulsive. The roughest cow-boy is a gentleman by comparison with the effeminate New York dude, who copies his very soul from a flash model in London, or the "society man" of San Francisco who in turn imitates the dude. The one, at any rate, is true metal of its kind, the others are of the poorest kind of pinchbeck.
There is a great charm in the climate "out West." The sun gilds everything. It matters little how poor a cabin be, if the owner live almost entirely outside it. Old Sol sheds a halo of contentment everywhere. A scarcely minor attraction exists in the sense of freedom and independence—of empire, in fact, that the vast stretches of open country which occupy most of the West beget in the native of a land where walls and hedges, gates, fences, and trespass notices bristle at every turn, and create a constant and irritable impulse to lift the elbows and draw deep breaths.
Supper was over, and news of the old gray's reappearance had taken us out into the open air.
"The sun was gone now, the curled moon
Was like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf——."
A certain clear obscurity was gathering upon the vega; the outlines of things were unnaturally distinct, but their shading was becoming confused. Where the sun had set, still glowed a luminous field of amber light. And in the vault thus formed hung tiny isolated clouds of various tints like crushed blossoms from an Indian garden. Hills above hills and long cloud-reefs were mingled together on the near horizon, and stretched farther and farther away until the former resembled silhouettes of tissue paper, the latter something even more delicate still.
Sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred miles of country lay before us. And over all the twilight deepened, slowly invading even the mountain-tops, where still some light clung tenderly. Once more the impalpable canopy of darkness drooped over the quiet plains—tissues of gray dusk and soft blue sky, shot with a silver thread of moonlight, all tasselled by dim stars, and crossed by the filmy figure of a bat. With an amnesty of sweet repose Night had begun her reign, but her dream subjects flocked to her sable standard swiftly; the haunted air became filled with the vague population of fancy, and Silence was revealed in all its eternal nakedness, that for once Sound had lost the power to hide. It was a strange night—a night when the spirits of Destiny seemed to hover near, and Mystery to be half-indifferent even if her veil were lifted, and her secrets penetrated—a night that inspired odd speculation. But the voice of the coyote, baying unceasingly in the silence—fit symbol of human interest in the world—kept calling us back, calling us back to earth, and let no thought escape and fairly rise above the dust and ashes of this life.