B. "He had caught a nice mess."
C. "Climbing Pike's Peak."
We crossed the long, low bridge over the Platte, early in the morning. It required nearly an hour and all our wits and energies to get the donkeys across, even after blindfolding them. And when my party ambled into Kearney, that sultry, dusty June day, grimy with dirt and perspiring, we all were in ripe condition for a swim. The little city looked to be about the size of Hastings, but did not show the same enterprise and thrift. In fact, the inhabitants ventured out in the broiling sun with an excusable lack of animation, and seemer to show no more interest in their local affairs than they did in Pye Pod's pilgrimage. It was here I first saw worn the Japanese straw helmet. It served as a most comfortable and effective sun-shade, and purchasing a couple, we donned them at once.
Kearney is said to be the half-way point, by rail, between New York and San Francisco. My diary, however, showed I had covered fully two thousand miles of my overland journey; I had consumed 227 days, with only one hundred and thirty-four days left me, the prospects of accomplishing the "feat" in schedule time looked dubious enough.
The great Watson Ranch, when my donkey party arrived, was experiencing its busiest season. But, while the male representatives were in the fields, the good matron in charge of the house made us welcome and treated us to cheering bowls of bread and milk. When Mr. Watson, Jr., arrived, he showed us about the place and enlightened me about alfalfa, of which he had over a thousand acres sown; fifty hired hands were busy harvesting it.
For a week or two we had, for the most part, been trailing through the perfumed prairies at an invigorating altitude ranging from two thousand to nearly three thousand feet, inhaling the fresh, pure air, gazing on the flower-carpeted earth, and enjoying a constant shifting of panoramic scenes of browsing herds, and bevies of birds, and occasional glimpses of the winding Platte and the sand dunes beyond.
The cities and villages, that formed knots in the thread of our travels on the plains, came into view like the incoming ships from the sea. At first one spied a white church-steeple in the distance like a pointed stake in the earth only a mile away, but soon the chimneys and roofs and finally door-yard fences would come into view, then what we thought a village, nearby, proved to be, as we journeyed onward, a town of much greater size seven or eight miles beyond the point of calculation. The crossbars on the telegraph poles, along the straight and level tracks of the Union Pacific, formed in the eye's dim perspective a needle, as they seemed to meet with the rails on the horizon. Little bunches of trees, scattered miles apart and then overtopped by the spinning wheel of an air motor, indicated the site of a ranch-house where we might procure water. The trail ahead became lost in a sea of flowers and grasses.
From time to time, as I dismounted to ease myself and little steed I picked from the stirrups a half dozen kinds of flowers, ensnared as my feet brushed through the grasses. Great beds of blood-red marshmallows; natural parterres of the wax-like blooms of the prickly pear; scattering stems of the flowery thistle with white corollas as large as tulips; and wild roses and daisies of all shades and colors—the white and pink, and the white wild roses being the first I ever saw; these with varicolored flowers of all descriptions were woven into the prairie grasses and likened the far-reaching plain to a great Wilton carpet enrolled from the mesa to the river.
Some of the sunsets were gorgeous. At times, the western sky glowed like a prairie fire; and the sunrises were not less magnificent. Sometimes, we were overtaken by severe electric storms, and obliged to pitch the tent in a hurry. When the lightning illuminates the plains at night, the trees and the distant towns are brought into fantastic relief against the darkness, like the shifting pictures of a stereopticon.
A flash of lightning to the right reveals a church or school-house, to the left, a bunch of cattle chewing the cud or grazing, ahead of us, a ranch house, and, sometimes, to the rear, a pack of cowardly coyotes, at a safe distance, either following my caravan, or out on a forage hunt.