Mrs. O’Flannigan was boarding and lodging them at ten dollars a week apiece, and they were cheerfully giving their notes for it.  They were perfectly satisfied, but Bridget presently found that notes that could not be discounted were but a feeble constitution for a Carson boarding-house.  So she began to harry the Governor to find employment for the “Brigade.”  Her importunities and theirs together drove him to a gentle desperation at last, and he finally summoned the Brigade to the presence.  Then, said he: 

“Gentlemen, I have planned a lucrative and useful service for you —­a service which will provide you with recreation amid noble landscapes, and afford you never ceasing opportunities for enriching your minds by observation and study.  I want you to survey a railroad from Carson City westward to a certain point!  When the legislature meets I will have the necessary bill passed and the remuneration arranged.”

“What, a railroad over the Sierra Nevada Mountains?”

“Well, then, survey it eastward to a certain point!”

He converted them into surveyors, chain-bearers and so on, and turned them loose in the desert.  It was “recreation” with a vengeance!  Recreation on foot, lugging chains through sand and sage-brush, under a sultry sun and among cattle bones, cayotes and tarantulas.

“Romantic adventure” could go no further.  They surveyed very slowly, very deliberately, very carefully.  They returned every night during the first week, dusty, footsore, tired, and hungry, but very jolly.  They brought in great store of prodigious hairy spiders—­tarantulas—­and imprisoned them in covered tumblers up stairs in the “ranch.”  After the first week, they had to camp on the field, for they were getting well eastward.  They made a good many inquiries as to the location of that indefinite “certain point,” but got no information.  At last, to a peculiarly urgent inquiry of “How far eastward?” Governor Nye telegraphed back: 

“To the Atlantic Ocean, blast you!—­and then bridge it and go on!”

This brought back the dusty toilers, who sent in a report and ceased from their labors.  The Governor was always comfortable about it; he said Mrs. O’Flannigan would hold him for the Brigade’s board anyhow, and he intended to get what entertainment he could out of the boys; he said, with his old-time pleasant twinkle, that he meant to survey them into Utah and then telegraph Brigham to hang them for trespass!

The surveyors brought back more tarantulas with them, and so we had quite a menagerie arranged along the shelves of the room.  Some of these spiders could straddle over a common saucer with their hairy, muscular legs, and when their feelings were hurt, or their dignity offended, they were the wickedest-looking desperadoes the animal world can furnish.  If their glass prison-houses were touched ever so lightly they were up and spoiling for a fight in a minute.  Starchy?—­proud?