"My eye!" He glowered up at me, and the flicker of the match I held showed a one-eyed face—the eye that had stared at me askew a few minutes before was missing!
Finally the glass optic was recovered, and he explained that the dust, working in about it, irritated him, so that occasionally he slipped it out for cleaning with his handkerchief. During such a polishing it had slipped to the floor. "I never get caught," he added with a touch of pride, "here's number two, in case of accidents," and he fished a substitute from his pocket. That second eye, I noted by daylight later, was blue, while his own was brown. No doubt it is difficult to get eyes that match.
As we bumped along a valley bottom, shrouded in our tenacious cloud of dust, the driver, with whom I rode again, pointed out a couple of ultra-prosperous appearing ranches.
"Millionaires row," he chuckled. "They don't pay interest, but they're real wild and western when it comes to frills. Further up the line you'll see somethin' rich, perhaps."
The promised attraction was a young gentleman in a silk shirt and white flannels following a plow down a furrow, and in turn followed by an aristocratic-looking bulldog. "The dawg," explained my companion, "is blue blood Borston. His pedigree's a heap longer than mine and valued at more thousand dollars than I dare tell. His boss there has a daddy worth a million or so, and when he himself ain't farmin' he scoots around in a five-thousand-dollar ortermobile. But mostly he plays rancher an' makes hay an' beds down the hawses an' all the rest of it. It's a queer game. Crazy's what I call it. There's a whole nest of 'em hereabouts."
So we saw the un-idle rich laboring in the fields. In the nature of things the old-timers regard the species with amusement, figuring, now and then, how many cuttings of alfalfa it would take to pay for the Boston bull, and attempting to determine why anyone with an income should elect such an existence, with the wide world at their beck!
This was my introduction to the land of great distances—twenty odd hours of toil over rolling plains of sagebrush, green-floored valleys, timbered hill lands, always—their indelible influence is the first impression of the newcomer whose outlook is a fraction higher than the earth he treads—always with the mountains of the western skyline dominating whatever panorama presented itself. Peaks turbaned with white, tousled foothills, olive green, their limitless forests of pine surging upward from the level of the sage-carpeted, juniper-studded plains. The land of many miles, and of broad beautiful views, is Oregon's hinterland.
Many miles? Aye, truly. My friend Kinkaid drives his auto trucks to Burns, one hundred and fifty miles to the southeast. Southwards to Silver Lake is another truck line, ninety miles long, which daily bears Uncle Sam's mails to the inland communities, a notable example of the pioneering of this age of gasolene. Each morning automobiles start from Bend, the railroad's end, for paltry jumps of from fifty to three hundred miles, and the passengers drink their final cup of coffee with the indifference a Staten Island dweller accords a contemplated trip across the bay.
Viewed sanely, the contempt for distances is appalling—at least as distance is measured elsewhere. An instance, this: Burns is one hundred and fifty miles from Bend; a year or two ago, through the enterprise of citizens of the two communities, a new road was "opened" between—scarcely a road, but a passageway among the sagebrush navigable with motor-driven craft. It is to celebrate! So some forty citizens of Bend, in a fourth that many cars, make the little jaunt to Burns. They leave at dawn: they reach Burns that night: they are dined and wined and the road-marriage of their town is fittingly celebrated; then, another dawn being upon them, they deem it folly to waste time with trivialities like sleep, they crank their cars, and they are back at Bend, and lo! it is but the evening of the second day!
The past, naturally, was worse than the present, so far as the difficulties of great mileage are concerned. The little town of Silver Lake in south-central Oregon, to-day is in the lap of luxury, transportationly speaking, being but a beggarly ninety miles from a railroad. But in the early 'nineties no one but a centipede would have considered frequent calls at Silver Lake with any equanimity. Then all the freight came from The Dalles, two hundred and thirty miles to the north, and the tariff often showed four cents a pound, which must have contributed fearfully to the high cost of living, not to mention the cost of high living, with wet goods weighing what they do. When the roads were good and teamsters moderately sober the round trip occupied forty days, one way light, the return loaded. In all the two hundred and thirty miles Prineville was the only town, and some of the camps were dry.