He had no sugar and no milk—­not even a spoon to stir the ingredients with.

We could not eat the bread or the meat, nor drink the “slumgullion.”  And when I looked at that melancholy vinegar-cruet, I thought of the anecdote (a very, very old one, even at that day) of the traveler who sat down to a table which had nothing on it but a mackerel and a pot of mustard.  He asked the landlord if this was all.  The landlord said: 

“All!  Why, thunder and lightning, I should think there was mackerel enough there for six.”

“But I don’t like mackerel.”

“Oh—­then help yourself to the mustard.”

In other days I had considered it a good, a very good, anecdote, but there was a dismal plausibility about it, here, that took all the humor out of it.

Our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle.

I tasted and smelt, and said I would take coffee, I believed.  The station-boss stopped dead still, and glared at me speechless.  At last, when he came to, he turned away and said, as one who communes with himself upon a matter too vast to grasp: 

“Coffee!  Well, if that don’t go clean ahead of me, I’m d—–­d!”

We could not eat, and there was no conversation among the hostlers and herdsmen—­we all sat at the same board.  At least there was no conversation further than a single hurried request, now and then, from one employee to another.  It was always in the same form, and always gruffly friendly.  Its western freshness and novelty startled me, at first, and interested me; but it presently grew monotonous, and lost its charm.  It was: 

“Pass the bread, you son of a skunk!” No, I forget—­skunk was not the word; it seems to me it was still stronger than that; I know it was, in fact, but it is gone from my memory, apparently.  However, it is no matter—­probably it was too strong for print, anyway.  It is the landmark in my memory which tells me where I first encountered the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains.

We gave up the breakfast, and paid our dollar apiece and went back to our mail-bag bed in the coach, and found comfort in our pipes.  Right here we suffered the first diminution of our princely state.  We left our six fine horses and took six mules in their place.  But they were wild Mexican fellows, and a man had to stand at the head of each of them and hold him fast while the driver gloved and got himself ready.  And when at last he grasped the reins and gave the word, the men sprung suddenly away from the mules’ heads and the coach shot from the station as if it had issued from a cannon.  How the frantic animals did scamper!  It was a fierce and furious gallop—­and the gait never altered for a moment till we reeled off ten or twelve miles and swept up to the next collection of little station-huts and stables.

So we flew along all day.  At 2 P.M. the belt of timber that fringes the North Platte and marks its windings through the vast level floor of the Plains came in sight.  At 4 P.M. we crossed a branch of the river, and at 5 P.M. we crossed the Platte itself, and landed at Fort Kearney, fifty-six hours out from St. Joe—­three hundred miles!