Toward night I came suddenly upon another saddle-horse around a bend in the road. Saddle-horses are in such customary use, both by men and boys, that it is no uncommon sight to see half a dozen such horses hitched to trees near the school-houses, the scholars riding them to and from school. This particular horse was hitched in front of a saloon out in the country, and before I could stop he pulled back, broke the bridle, and ran down the road. A man came reeling out of the saloon into the road with a black rawhide whip in his hand, a tall, large-framed man, with full, red cheeks, long face, moustache, and goatee, a typical Kentuckian, drunk, too. “Now you jest take that bridle, and ketch that horse, and bring him back here again, or you’ll get a pounden. I am a peaceable man, but I ain’t afraid of Christ, damnation, or high water. Now you do as I say,” and he walked deliberately back into the saloon, perhaps out of consideration for my humiliated feelings, but probably to take another drink.
AN ODORIFEROUS AWAKENING.—(Page 232.)
Although I was not mentioned in his “little list,” from his other remarks I judged he was not afraid of me either, and certainly a Kentuckian who is not afraid of water is a brave man indeed. So quickly mending the bridle with a string, I walked a rod or so, put the bridle on the horse without the least trouble, hitched him, and went on my way. Passing through Frankfort, I went to the north of Lexington, which is situated in the heart of the blue-grass region, and rode on to Georgetown. The term “blue grass” is derived, I was told, from the fact that the grass in that section of the State has a bluish color when it is in seed. The sun, during the middle of the day, was so hot that occasionally I was inclined to lie down on the grass under a shady tree. Once I was stretched out with my head within a foot of a stone wall, and had dozed off almost to sleep, when I suddenly smelt a snake. To one who has handled so many live and dead ones, the scent of a snake is very familiar, and, as may be supposed, I was not long in jumping to my feet. There was no snake in sight, but sure enough out on the road was the track of a snake that had recently crossed, and I felt certain it was not many inches from my head when I awoke. Judging from the size of the track left by one I saw crossing the road a little farther on, this one must have been five or six feet long.
Reaching Cincinnati on the third day from Louisville, I had a few moments’ pleasant talk with Robert H. Kellogg, formerly of Manchester, Conn., but now general agent of Cincinnati for the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company. “Seeing a Yankee from Connecticut will make me feel good for a week,” said he, as I left him.
When I went across Ohio in May, the consul at Cleveland in directing me to Columbus sent me off into a section of the State where the roads were miserable, and where I got stuck two days in the yellow clay. Consequently I never felt like advising others to follow the misdirections of that consul at Cleveland. But after traveling so many miles since, and not being misled by any one to amount to anything, it is curious, upon entering Ohio again, and applying to the consul for the best roads to Chillicothe, that he, even with the help of the Ohio State Road Book, should be unable to send me out of Cincinnati in the right direction. The map that goes with the road book is a splendid map. It gives every river, all the railroads, the outlines of every town, the name of every county, city, and village—everything almost but the roads. It is large in size, but it is remarkably small in road information, and so of little use to a touring wheelman. At least the consul and I studied it diligently for nearly half an hour, and then he decided I must go out to Loveland, twenty or twenty-five miles, and inquire, just as the consul at Cleveland sent me to Wellington, and then told me to inquire, just as any three-year-old boy could direct me.
So the next morning I started for Loveland, but I inquired before I got there, and found I was going in the wrong direction, of course. Then I rode across four or five miles of dirt roads, composed mostly of loose rocks and dust, to another pike, a splendid one, but at Goshen found I was still going in the wrong direction; so after six or eight more miles of dirt roads, I found a pike that leads almost in a straight line from Cincinnati to Chillicothe. The pikes radiate from the city as do the spokes of a wheel from the hub, and consequently it is important to start out on the right one, but it was two o’clock in the afternoon before I found out which one that was. But it was a good one, especially near Hillsboro, and the second night I was one hundred and twenty miles from that useless road book and the friendly but misleading consul.
Coming, with the help of steam-power for a short distance, to the Ohio River again, opposite Parkersburg, West Virginia, I rode along up toward Marietta. The roads were good, running close to the bank of the river which was forty or fifty feet below, and, with fine farm-houses along both banks, and trains of cars rushing up and down, the ride was greatly enjoyed. I kept pace for miles with a stern-wheel steamer going up the river. The water looked so inviting, I pushed the machine down behind some bushes next the river, stripped, and took a good bath. Then I hung the pocket-mirror against the root of a large stump, left there by the big flood probably, took the shaving apparatus out of the knapsack, and had a good shave. This recalled to my mind where I performed the operation one morning in the Yellowstone. It was in a pretty meadow between the Grand Cañon and Morris, and near a pebbly brook. I had laid the machine up against a pine tree, under which I was standing, and had just got my face well lathered when three stages came down the road close by. Several ladies exclaimed simultaneously, “O, see the bicycle!” but catching sight of me, with me chin elevated, they murmured something more I could not hear, and went out of sight.
Leaving the machine outside in front of the post-office at Marietta I found I must wait several hours for the next Eastern mail, and so escaping the crowd that in so short a time had blocked the door and filled the sidewalk, I pushed my way out, and rode a mile to the “Mound Cemetery,” as it is called, and I believe generally accepted to be the resting place of a part of the nation, the Toltecs of Mexico, who passed from the face of the earth before the Aztecs appeared, who were in turn annihilated by the conquering Spaniards. I had not time to pursue the study of ethnology, but climbed to the top of the big mound, feeling secure there among those quiet folks from the flood of questions that inevitably pour down upon me wherever I stop. But no, a man who heard me inquire the way followed and climbed up the forty-five stone steps only to bore me while I write these words. He could not wait to give the others a chance, those who had waited silently for a couple of thousand years. But the Toltecs have more sense. As I pushed the machine up the steep side of the mound they did not ask me “Why don’t you get on and ride?” but I have met hundreds of persons who would not derisively but soberly ask that same question if they saw a wheelman pushing his machine up the side of a house. And doubtless this man would have done the same when I came if he had been where the Toltecs are. (I wish he was.) But he is gone now, and I can almost hear the old Toltec beneath me give a sigh of relief. It may be the wind, though, blowing through the big oak trees that are growing up the sides of the mound.