CACHAPES, AND OTHER THINGS.

To a man coming from the Southern Camps to the forest belt of Santa Fe, the cachape must appeal as something peculiar to the district, and most essentially local.  He has had a surfeit of carts with two wheels, each 12 feet high, and dragged by anything from sixteen to twenty-eight horses; Russian carts, like Thames punts on four wheels, no longer amuse him, while American spring carts are much too European to warrant unslinging the Kodak.  But the cachape—­here is something not to be lightly passed over.  Lying idle it may not strike him at first sight as a cart, but rather as a remnant of some revolution, when, tired of waging light operatic war, the army disbanded, leaving their gun-carriages to serve more peaceful purposes.

Two pairs of short, squat, enormously powerful wheels; between, and joining them, a roughly hewn pole and various chains in an apparently hopeless tangle.  Yet see them in work—­every niche doing its work, every chain taking ten per cent, more strain than it was ever intended to take, creaking, groaning, crashing into holes, crawling laboriously over snaps and trunks to fall again with its load of four tons with a jerking, swaying, and straining as though struggling to free itself from its load, and you recognise the raison d’etre of the queer little cart.

The capache is not without its humorous moments.  Supposing the cartmen find a log too heavy to load in the ordinary way; they do not return and inform the boss that the log must be hoisted by mechanical means or propose high-priced cranes.  Seeing that obviously they can’t put the log on the cart, they accept the alternative and put the cart on the log, chain it on securely, then haul everything right side up again with the bullocks and proceed to the unloading station.  Once there, it might be supposed that they would tumble the cart over again, but here the intelligent foreigner is misled.  The correct proceeding now is for the cartmen to lie on their backs and push with their feet, after the manner of the gentlemen in music halls, who, reclining on sawed-off sofas, twiddle gold-spangled spheres with their toes; only our cartmen lie in water and mud and the gold-spangled sphere is changed for a three-ton log.  The force the men can exert in this position is little short of marvellous.  Out one crawls, reviews the situation, then back again under, a creak, a combined push, and over the wheels comes the log, throwing up the mud and water for 50 feet around.  Then back they go again for another load six miles through the forest.  Wet through, their clothes hanging in ribbons from shoulders and belt, one day’s mud caking on another’s, and with a long sword stuck through their belt in front, they present a figure comical enough were it not that one knew the other side of the picture.