If the accident had happened quickly, there would not have been anything so very funny about it; but, instead, the wagon toppled slowly, the men striving meanwhile to prevent it from going entirely over. In the heavy wagon were Mrs. Russell and four children. We saw first the youngest child, as if some one had tossed him out, come shooting from the wagon and strike the water. Then another child, and so on, one after another, exactly like a lot of grasshoppers, until Mrs. Russell herself appeared. Out they marched in the same order, water streaming from their clothing, which was bedaubed with mud.
Mother reproved Ellen and me severely for laughing when our neighbors were suffering; but even as she spoke the Russell procession passed along the edge of the bank, marking the way with mud and water, and I noticed that it was all she could do to keep her face straight while she scolded us.
CHIMNEY ROCK
When finally we crossed the Platte River, the men of the company rejoiced, although I was unable to learn why, except that it marked, as mother suggested, the first stage of the journey, the second of which would come to an end at Fort Bridger, and the third in that land where we hoped to settle.
Not long after crossing this river we had a first glimpse of that enormous mass which travelers speak of as Court House Rock, which, so those who have seen both say, looks from the distance not unlike the Capitol at Washington. A few miles farther on we saw another huge pile called Chimney Rock.
I doubt not but that both would have been well worth the seeing, yet our desire to look at them more closely was not gratified. The trail leads some distance off, and when mother proposed to father that we might halt for a day in order to get a nearer view of the curiosities, he shook his head decidedly, saying, almost gruffly, that we who were bent on finding new homes had no time to fritter away in looking at this odd thing or at that.
Eben Jordan, however, borrowing one of his father's horses, rode off to Chimney Rock by himself, and when he came back he told Ellen and me that we need not shed many tears because of failing to see it close at hand, because it was nothing more than a lot of big stones that looked as if they might have been carelessly plastered together with mud.
Of course this couldn't be the fact; but Eben has no eye for scenery and, I dare say, might turn his nose up at what every one else would believe wonderful or full of beauty.