The Mountains [72]
Then at once the abrupt descent ceased. We glided out to the silvered flat, above which sailed the moon.
The hour was seen to be half past one. We had missed our train. Nothing was visible of human habitations. The land was frosted with the moonlight, enchanted by it, etherealized. Behind us, huge and formidable, loomed the black mass of the range we had descended. Before us, thin as smoke in the magic lucence that flooded the world, rose other mountains, very great, lofty as the sky. We could not understand them. The descent we had just accomplished should have landed us on a level plain in which lay our town. But here we found ourselves in a pocket valley entirely surrounded by mountain ranges through which there seemed to be no pass less than five or six thousand feet in height.
We reined in the horses to figure it out.
"I don't see how it can be," said I. "We've certainly come far enough. It would take us four hours at the very least to cross that range, even if the railroad should happen to be on the other side of it."
"I been through here only once," repeated the driver,--"going the other way.--Then I drew a corpse." He spat, and added as an afterthought, "BEAU-ti-ful Cal-if-or-nia!"
We stared at the mountains that hemmed us in. They rose above us sheer and forbidding. In the bright moonlight plainly were to be descried the brush of the foothills, the timber, the fissures, the canons, the granites, and the everlasting snows. Almost we thought to make out a thread of a waterfall high up where the clouds would be if the night had not been clear.
"We got off the trail somewhere," hazarded the Tenderfoot.
"Well, we're on a road, anyway," I pointed out. "It's bound to go somewhere. We might as well give up the railroad and find a place to turn-in."
"It can't be far,' encouraged the Tenderfoot; "this valley can't be more than a few miles across."
"Gi dap!" remarked the driver.
We moved forward down the white wagon trail approaching the mountains. And then we were witnesses of the most marvelous transformation. For as we neared them, those impregnable mountains, as though panic-stricken by our advance, shrunk back, dissolved, dwindled, went to pieces. Where had towered ten-thousand-foot peaks, perfect in the regular succession from timber to snow, now were little flat hills on which grew tiny bushes of sage. A passage opened between them. In a hundred yards we had gained the open country, leaving behind us the mighty but unreal necromancies of the moon.
Before us gleamed red and green lights. The mass of houses showed half distinguishable. A feeble glimmer illuminated part of a white sign above the depot. That which remained invisible was evidently the name of the town. That which was revealed was the supplementary information which the Southern Pacific furnishes to its patrons. It read: "Elevation 482 feet." We were definitely out of the mountains.
XXII
THE LURE OF THE TRAIL
The trail's call depends not at all on your common sense. You know you are a fool for answering it; and yet you go. The comforts of civilization, to put the case on its lowest plane, are not lightly to be renounced: the ease of having your physical labor done for you; the joy of cultivated minds, of theatres, of books, of participation in the world's progress; these you leave behind you. And in exchange you enter a life where there is much long hard work of the hands--work that is really hard and long, so that no man paid to labor would consider it for a moment; you undertake to eat simply, to endure much, to lie on the rack of anxiety; you voluntarily place yourself where cold, wet, hunger, thirst, heat, monotony, danger, and many discomforts will wait upon you daily. A thousand times in the course of a woods life even the stoutest-hearted will tell himself softly--very softly if he is really stout-hearted, so that others may not be annoyed--that if ever the fates permit him to extricate himself he will never venture again.
These times come when long continuance has