One figure fills up to my mind this whole hiatus of the many-leagued skip. I see Brent every step and every moment. He was a model comrade.
Camp-life tests a man thoroughly. Common toil, hardship, peril, and sternly common viaticum of pork, dough-cakes, and coffee sans everything, are a daily ordeal of good-nature. It is not hard for two men to be civil across a clean white tablecloth at a club. If they feel dull, they can study the carte; if spiteful, they can row the steward; if surly, they can muddle themselves cheerful if they bore each other, finally and hopelessly they can exchange cigars and part for all time, and still be friends, not foes. But the illusions of sham good-fellowship vanish when the carte du jour is porc frit au naturel, damper à discretion, and café à rien, always the same fare, plain days or lucky days, served on a blanket, on the ground.
Brent and I stood the test. He was a model comrade, cavalier, poet, hunter, naturalist, cook. If there was any knowledge, skill, craft, or sleight of hand or brain wanted, it always seemed as if his whole life had been devoted to the one study to gain it. He would spring out of his blankets after a night under the stars, improvise a matin song to Lucifer, sketch the morning’s view into cloudland and the morning’s earthly horizon, take a shot at a gray wolf, book a new plant, bag a new beetle, and then, reclining on the lonely prairie, talk our breakfast, whose Soyer he had been, so full of Eden, Sybaris, the holocausts of Achilles, the triclinia of Lucullus, the automaton tables of the Œil de Bœuf, the cabinets of the Frères Provençaux, and the dinners of civilization where the wise and the witty meet to shine and sparkle for the beautiful, that our meagre provender suffered “change into something rich and strange”; the flakes of fried pork became peacocks’ tongues, every quoit of tough toasted dough a vol au vent, and the coffee that never saw milk or muscovado a diviner porridge than ever was sipped on the sunny summits of Olympus. Such a magician is priceless. Every object, when he looked at it, seemed to revolve about and exhibit its bright side. Difficulty skulked away from him. Danger cowered under his eye.
Nothing could damp his enthusiasm. Nothing could drench his ardor. No drowning his energy. He never growled, never sulked, never snapped, never flinched. Frosty nights on the Sierra tried to cramp him; foggy mornings in the valleys did their worst to chill him; showers shrank his buckskins and soaked the macheers of his saddle to mere pulp; rain pelted his blankets in the bivouac till he was a moist island in a muddy lake. Bah, elements! try it on a milksop! not on John Brent, the invulnerable. He laughs in the ugly phiz of Trouble. Hit somebody else, thou grizzly child of Erebus!
Brent was closer to Nature than any man I ever knew. Not after the manner of an artist. The artist can hardly escape a certain technicality. He looks at the world through the spectacles of his style. He loves mist and hates sunshine, or loves brooks and shrinks from the gloom of forests primeval, or adores meadows and haystacks, and dreads the far sweeping plain and the sovran snow-peak. Even the greatest artist runs a risk, which only the greater than greatest escape, of suiting Nature to themselves, not themselves to Nature. Brent with Nature was like a youth with the maiden he loves. She was always his love, whatever she could do; however dressed, in clouds or sunshine, unchanging fair; in whatever mood, weeping or smiling, at her sweetest; grand, beautiful for her grandeur; tender, beautiful for her tenderness; simple, lovely for her simplicity; careless, prettier than if she were trim and artful; rough, potent, and impressive, a barbaric queen.
It is not a charming region, that breadth of the world between the Foolonner Mine and the Great Salt Lake. Much is dusty desert; much is dreary plain, bushed with wild sage, the wretchedest plant that grows; much is rugged mountain. A grim and desolate waste. But large and broad. Unbroken and undisturbed, in its solemn solitude, by prettiness. No thought of cottage life there, or of the tame, limited, submissive civilization that hangs about lattices and trellises, and pets its chirping pleasures, keeping life as near the cradle as it may. It is a region that appeals to the go and the gallop, that even the veriest cockney, who never saw beyond a vista of blocks, cannot eliminate from his being. It does not order man to sink into a ploughman. Ploughmen may tarry in those dull, boundless plough-fields, the prairie lands of mid-America. These desert spaces, ribbed with barren ridges, stretch for the Bedouin tread of those who
“Love all waste
And solitary places, where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.”