CHAPTER XXVII.

Hurry, was the word!  We wasted no time.  Our party consisted of four persons—­a blacksmith sixty years of age, two young lawyers, and myself.  We bought a wagon and two miserable old horses.  We put eighteen hundred pounds of provisions and mining tools in the wagon and drove out of Carson on a chilly December afternoon.  The horses were so weak and old that we soon found that it would be better if one or two of us got out and walked.  It was an improvement.  Next, we found that it would be better if a third man got out.  That was an improvement also.  It was at this time that I volunteered to drive, although I had never driven a harnessed horse before and many a man in such a position would have felt fairly excused from such a responsibility.  But in a little while it was found that it would be a fine thing if the drive got out and walked also.  It was at this time that I resigned the position of driver, and never resumed it again.  Within the hour, we found that it would not only be better, but was absolutely necessary, that we four, taking turns, two at a time, should put our hands against the end of the wagon and push it through the sand, leaving the feeble horses little to do but keep out of the way and hold up the tongue.  Perhaps it is well for one to know his fate at first, and get reconciled to it.  We had learned ours in one afternoon.  It was plain that we had to walk through the sand and shove that wagon and those horses two hundred miles.  So we accepted the situation, and from that time forth we never rode.  More than that, we stood regular and nearly constant watches pushing up behind.

We made seven miles, and camped in the desert.  Young Clagett (now member of Congress from Montana) unharnessed and fed and watered the horses; Oliphant and I cut sagebrush, built the fire and brought water to cook with; and old Mr. Ballou the blacksmith did the cooking.  This division of labor, and this appointment, was adhered to throughout the journey.  We had no tent, and so we slept under our blankets in the open plain.  We were so tired that we slept soundly.

We were fifteen days making the trip—­two hundred miles; thirteen, rather, for we lay by a couple of days, in one place, to let the horses rest.

We could really have accomplished the journey in ten days if we had towed the horses behind the wagon, but we did not think of that until it was too late, and so went on shoving the horses and the wagon too when we might have saved half the labor.  Parties who met us, occasionally, advised us to put the horses in the wagon, but Mr. Ballou, through whose iron-clad earnestness no sarcasm could pierce, said that that would not do, because the provisions were exposed and would suffer, the horses being “bituminous from long deprivation.”  The reader will excuse me from translating.  What Mr. Ballou customarily meant, when he used a long word, was a