While I was thinking these matters over Clayton came in.  He supplemented my doubts by telling me that if I was not used to riding, a journey of such length would make me lame; at least a little.  I then decided that I would take the stage, and the boat.  The next morning, promising to see me in Jacksonville and offering to befriend me in any way he could, Clayton bestrode his pony and was off.  In an hour I was rolling in the stage toward the Illinois River....

CHAPTER VI

We were some hours getting through the sand.  Then we came to hilly country overgrown with oaks and some pines.  Later the soil was rocky.  We skirted along a little river; and here and there I had my first view of the prairie.  The air above me was thrilling with the song of spring birds.  I did not know what they were.  Some of them resembled the English skylark in the habit of singing and soaring.  But the note was different.

My head felt heavy.  I seemed to be growing more listless.  But I could not help but note the prairie:  the limitless expanse of heavy grass, here and there brightened by brilliant blossoms.  All the houses along the way were built of logs.  The inhabitants were a large breed for the most part, tall and angular, dressed sometimes in buckskin, coonskin caps.  Now and then I saw a hunter carrying a long rifle.  The wild geese were flying....

Some of the passengers were dressed in jeans; others in linsey-woolsey dyed blue.  As we stopped along the way I had an opportunity to study the faces of the Illinoisians.  Their jaws were thin, their eyes, deeply sunk, had a far-away melancholy in them.  They were swarthy.  Their voices were keyed to a drawl.  They sprawled, were free and easy in their movements.  They told racy stories, laughed immoderately, chewed tobacco.  Some of the passengers were drinking whisky, which was procured anywhere along the way, at taverns or stores.  The stage rolled from side to side.  The driver kept cracking his whip, but without often touching the horses, which kept an even pace hour after hour.  We had to stop for meals.  But the heavy food turned my stomach.  I could not relish the cornbread, the bacon or ham, the heavy pie.  When we reached La Salle, where I was to get the boat, I found myself very fatigued, aching all through my flesh and bones, and with a dreamy, heavy sensation about my eyes.

The country had become more hilly.  And now the bluffs along the Illinois River rose with something of the majesty of the Palisades of the Hudson.  The river itself was not nearly so broad or noble, but it was not without beauty....  More oblivious of my surroundings than I had been before, I boarded The Post Boy, a stern wheeler, and in a few minutes she blew the most musical of whistles and we were off....