"Hallo!" said the horseman, "what on earth are you doing, Jack?"
"Doing!" replied the other sulkily. "Can't you see? I am taking off my boots to wade this infernal river."
"River!" exclaimed his friend; "what river? That thing's only a two-foot ditch!"
"Daresay," was the dogged response. "It looks only a two-foot ditch. But you can't trust anything in this beastly country. Appearances are so deceptive."
But we caught Salina at last, for we managed to head it up into a cul-de-sac of the mountains, and overtook it about sundown. A few years ago the settlement was depopulated; for Black Hawk made a swoop at it from his eyrie among the cedars on the overlooking hill, and after killing a few of the people, compelled the survivors to fly northward, where the militia was mustering for the defence of the valley. It was in this war that the Federal officer commanding the post at Salt Lake City, acting under the orders of General Sherman, refused to help the settlers, telling them in a telegram of twenty words to help themselves. The country, therefore, remembers with considerable bitterness that three years' campaign against a most formidable combination of Indians; when they lost so many lives, when two counties had to be entirely abandoned, many scattered settlements broken up, and an immense loss in property and stock suffered.
At Salina I met an apostate Mormon who had deserted the religion because he had grown to disbelieve in it, but who had retained, nevertheless, all his respect for the leaders of the Church and the general body of Mormons. He is still a polygamist; that is to say, having married two wives, he has continued to treat them honourably as wives. With me was an apostle, one of the most deservedly popular elders of the Church, and it was capital entertainment to hear the apostate and the apostle exchanging their jokes at each other's expense. I was shown at this house, by the way, an emigration loan receipt. The emigrant, his wife, and three children, had been brought out in the old waggon days at $50 a head. Some fifteen years later, when the man had become well-to-do and after he had apostatized, he repaid the $250, and some $50 extra as "interest." The loan ticket stipulated for "ten per cent per annum," but as he said, it was "only Mormons who would have let him run on so long, and then have let him off so much of the interest."
My host was himself an interesting man, for he had been with the Saints ever since the stormy days of Kirtland, and had known Joseph Smith personally. "Ah, sir, he was a noble man!" said the old fellow. Among other out-of-the-way items which he told me about the founder of the faith, was his predilection for athletic exercises and games of all kinds; how he used to challenge strangers to wrestle, and be very wroth when, as happened once, the stranger threw him over the counter of a shop; and how he used to play baseball with the boys in the streets of Nauvoo. This trait of Joseph Smith's character I have never seen noticed by his biographers, but it is quite noteworthy, as also, I think, is the extraordinary fascination which his personal appearance—for he was a very handsome man of the Sir Robert Peel type—seems to have exercised over his contemporaries. When speaking to them, I find that one and all will glance from the other aspects of his life to this—that he was "a noble man."
Rabbit-hunting across country in a two-horse waggon is not a sport I shall often indulge in again. The rabbit has things too much its own way. It does not seem to be a suitable animal for pursuing in a vehicle. It is too evasive.
Indeed, but for an accident, I should probably never have indulged in it at all. But it happened that on our way from Salina to Monroe we lost our way. Our teamster, for inscrutable reasons of his own, turned off from the main road into a bye-track, which proved to have been made by some one prospecting for clay, and the hole which he had excavated was its terminus. I tried to think out his reason for choosing this particular road, the least and most unpromising of the three that offered themselves to him. It was probably this. Two out of the three roads, being wrong ones, were evils. One of these was larger than the other, and so of the two evils he chose the less. Q.E.D.
To get back into the road we struck across the sage-brush, and in so doing started a jack-rabbit. As it ran in the direction we wanted to go, we naturally followed it. But the jack-rabbit thought we were in murderous pursuit, and performed prodigies of agility and strategy in order to escape us. But the one thing that it ought to have done, got out of our road, it did not do. We did not gain on the lively animal, I confess, for it was all we could do to retain our seats, but we gave it enough to prose about all the days of its life. What stories the younger generation of jack-rabbits will hear of "the old days" when desperate men used to come out thousands of miles in two-horse waggons with canvas hoods to try and catch their ancestors! And what a hero that particular jack-rabbit which we did not hunt will be!