He was the life of the camp; but sometimes there would come a reaction and he could hardly speak for a day or two.  One day a pack of wolves chased us, and the hound Sam speaks of never stopped to look back till he reached the next station, many miles ahead.

Judge Oliver adds that an Indian war had just ended, and that they occasionally passed the charred ruin of a shack, and new graves:  This was disturbing enough.  Then they came to that desolation of desolations, the Alkali Desert, where the sand is of unknown depth, where the road is strewn thickly with the carcasses of dead beasts of burden, the charred remains of wagons, chains, bolts, and screws, which thirsty emigrants, grown desperate, have thrown away in the grand hope of being able, when less encumbered, to reach water.

They traveled all day and night, pushing through that fierce, waterless waste to reach camp on the other side.  It was three o’clock in the morning when they got across and dropped down utterly exhausted.  Judge Oliver in his letter tells what happened then: 

The sun was high in the heavens when we were aroused from our sleep by a yelling band of Piute warriors.  We were upon our feet in an instant.  The pictures of burning cabins and the lonely graves we had passed were in our minds.  Our scalps were still our own, and not dangling from the belts of our visitors.  Sam pulled himself together, put his hand on his head as if to make sure he had not been scalped, and then with his inimitable drawl said:  “Boys, they have left us our scalps.  Let’s give them all the flour and sugar they ask for.”  And we did give them a good supply, for we were grateful.

They were eleven weary days pushing their wagon and team the two hundred miles to Unionville, Humboldt County, arriving at last in a driving snow-storm.  Unionville consisted of eleven poor cabins built in the bottom of a canon, five on one side and six facing them on the other.  They were poor, three-sided, one-room huts, the fourth side formed by the hill; the roof, a spread of white cotton.  Stones used to roll down on them sometimes, and Mark Twain tells of live stock—­specifically of a mule and cow—­that interrupted the patient, long-suffering Oliver, who was trying to write poetry, and only complained when at last “an entire cow came rolling down the hill, crashed through on the table, and made a shapeless wreck of everything.”—­[’The Innocents Abroad.’]

Judge Oliver still does not complain; but he denies the cow.  He says there were no cows in Humboldt in those days, so perhaps it was only a literary cow, though in any case it will long survive.  Judge Oliver’s name will go down with it to posterity.

In the letter which Samuel Clemens wrote home he tells of what they found in Unionville.