Around and around and around the house he voyaged all that night, proceeding by hops and plunges as a hobbled horse must, his gait just enough hampered by the lashings of his two front feet to impart a syncopated tempo to the discords and jangles of that flat metallic bell. At times he would pause, as if for breath, and there would be quiet—deep silence—just sufficient for a doze; then—clankety, clang, clang, clank! he would break out again.
I have listened to jazz orchestras of various colors and degrees of crime, and other peace-destroying nuisances meriting death; but I have never heard anything equal to the nocturnal pilgrimage of that old gray horse. I would drop off to sleep, and suddenly wake as if feeling his hobbled feet squarely in the centre of my contracted chest; but he would be ten yards off, miserably clanking his way to another sector of the snow-covered terrain. And confused, I would lift my head to listen, knocking it of course against the bottom of the stove, when a long icicle would stab through a wall chink and take me fairly in the ear. Perhaps it was a pleasant night for Smith, who faithfully and harmoniously snored away the hours.
With the dawn I struggled up. No! I did not bound out joyously to gambol in the pure air of the stunted cedar-forest. It was a cold gray dawn with a foot of snow, and there was a dank rheumatic caress in it. With all speed I began smashing a packing case for kindling. Crash! down came the axe, and splinters flew wide, when Smith stirred in his bunk, awakening to duty and the dangers thereof. He blinked his eyes and spluttered:—
“Watch out for that dynamite.”
“Dynamite?”
“Yes; it’s right under my bunk. Chop your wood furder off.” [[62]]
I followed these directions to the letter. In fact, I gently carried all the wood outside and chopped it.
The getting of breakfast, a complete demonstration of my culinary ignorance, occupied me fully in the half-dark. I walked to and fro gingerly, fearing to wake the dynamite; and I wondered how that stupid fellow could have slept and have snored as he did, superimposed above a quiescent earthquake. Dynamite is a great friend to man in the rocky gorges of the West, but it should not be permitted to join the family circle.
When next I opened the door, what a transformation! I had come to this place in the cold grim darkness, heartened only by the perfume of burning cedar. Occupied with the wood and the wet-handled axe, I was dimly aware of a drowsy landscape in the clammy mist of dawn. But now the sun had lifted, and the scene was a snowy fairyland. The gnarled cedars of the foreground were laden with dripping snow, their branches picked out with gems. And where the snow lay in unbroken sheets, pure white, glistening, the shadows of the dwarfed trees formed rare patterns. Behind the house were cliffs, and each gaunt angle held its draping of snow. The time-worn bastions of those lava ledges stood as gaping at the winter’s cheery Good-morning. It was a stage scene under the great amber light.
A long valley stretched away to the Bidahoche Plains and the Bad Lands with their honeycombed hills. Its dim recesses were now painted by the first plashes of sunshine. To left and right, overhanging the snowy meadows, reared great buttresses and crags of lava, and all down the valley ancient promontories loomed amid the fading veils of mist. Prehistoric ages had seen these as the shelving inner walls of some vast crater, when they had seared [[63]]and glazed and baked and colored to form Nature’s pottery. Now, broken and rent apart, they stood as fantastic separate monuments, lining that sunlit corridor to the outer plains.