For they want to lie down as they sleep on the bough;
They want to lie down, but they don’t know how.
—Copyright by Harr Wagner Co., San Francisco, and used by kind permission.
THE FUNERAL AT PARADISE BAR
By Paul Shoup
About four o’clock in the morning, Uncle Hank Witherspoon would climb up on the box while the sun was tossing a few experimental shafts of light across the canyon, and, watching with pride and satisfaction the leaders dancing little dust clouds out of the stage road, would remark to bystanders who turned up their coat collars and talked politics to keep warm: “Some men are born hostlers; you see it by the way they lifts a hoss’s foot; some sabes how to ride, and most gin’r’lly they overruns their boots’n their spurs is bright; and then there be others that are fine at hoofin’ it and lambastin’ a pack train with a rawhide an’ one hundred choice selections from two langidges; but as for me, my special speci-ality is just plain drivin’ of a stage; a stage with four hosses; just that and nothin’ more.” With that Uncle Hank would loosen his whip, the leaders would rear like chargers on a monument, the wheel horses would gather their feet under them—and down the road, pitching, swaying, leaving behind them a wall of dust, would go the famous Mokelumne stage, while half the population of Paradise Bar—they were early risers in the camp—would stand with hands in pockets, staring after in silent admiration. Uncle Hank was wiry and grizzled and storm-beaten; his pointed beard stood out at a strong angle to his determined nose; his eyes were of a mild and pleasant blue, but the fire in them awaited only the flint. His laugh was merry, but he had a voice that would make the most obstreperous horse remember that he was but as the dust of the earth before this master.
Uncle Hank was at the helm of the transportation system of Paradise Bar; he and his stage the connecting link between camp and civilization, the latter represented by the county seat, Meadow Lark.
Uncle Hank, recognizing his importance in both communities, and especially in Paradise Bar, was as gracious as an only hope—he was never forlorn. He was an absolute dictator, it was true; he even decided the locations of the passengers on the stage, and settled disputes as to outside and inside. But he was autocratic wisely, and there was really no reason why he should have been called upon to divide his sovereignty. Yet, one sad day the Alladin Bonanza Company built a lumber road down from Paradise Bar to Lone Pine. At Lone Pine the new road connected with the line of the Gray Eagle Stage Company, which, as Uncle Hank put it, flopped its way up from Meadow Lark. So, when the Gray Eagle extended its tri-weekly service from Lone Pine to Paradise Bar, trouble outcropped on Uncle Hank’s trail at once. George William Pike, of the Upper Basin, was the driver to whom Uncle Hank referred as the dry goods clerk who handled the ribbons for the opposition corporation.
George William surmised here and there and elsewhere, when he cornered an audience, that the new route was two miles the shorter, and the grade, calculating ups and downs, at least five per cent better. The report reached Uncle Hank by air line, of course. He was silent a little while, and then with elaborate courtesy thanked his informant, adding that he was greatly obliged, not for the news itself, but because he had for a long time been trying to recollect the name of the chap who left Placerville after trying circumstances without advising his bondsmen. It was indeed strange that a man caught stealing garments from a poor washerwoman’s clothes line should be directing horses; remarkably odd, when it was evident that he was cut out for a Chinaman and not a stage driver. So saying, Uncle Hank awoke an echo unusually far off, making it jump startled from the hillside at the crack of his whip, and drove on.
There was some difference of opinion in Paradise Bar concerning the merits of the two lines; so long as they ran on different days and at different hours, the question could not be satisfactorily settled, and the Bright Light kept open an hour later in the evening to permit a full discussion of the subject—thereby saving shutting up at all. The real trouble began when the Gray Eagle line, perceiving that Uncle Hank continued to carry the larger part of the business, borrowed his schedule and started to operate upon it with their new yellow coach with vermillion trimmings and four white horses, to say nothing of George William Pike with his curled mustache, red necktie and stand-up collar. He would have worn a silk hat too—the owners of the line were aristocrats, with ideas and winter residences in Lunnon—but Morosin’ Jones who squirmed his shoulders and clasped his hands like an awkward maid of fifteen when he talked, begged him to desist; he, Morosin’, had such an unconquerable inclination to perforate high hats with his forty-four wherever they might be. George William wisely desisted. Uncle Hank’s stage had nothing but a faint recollection of paint, and was written over with history recorded by bullet holes; the harness was apt to be patched, and Nebuchadnezzar, the off leader, was wall-eyed, and his partner, Moloch, sway-backed and short maned. Of the wheel horses, one was a gray with hoofs that needed constant paring; the other had the appearance of a whitewashed house at which mud had been flung with startling effect. Of the two, Rome and Athens, no god could have decided which was entitled to the palm of ugliness; but Uncle Hank, who loved them all with the love a man may have for a homely dog, declared that the wheel-horses were beauty spots in nature alongside the leaders.