Page:A La California.djvu/393

Rh and out the winding road, and dash down the steep declivity with something of the sensation which the hawk or eagle must feel as he sets his wines at an angle, and slides down with arrowy swiftness from the realms of ether toward the lower earth. Stones dislodged by our horses' feet go over the precipice, and we hear them bound and crack from rock to rock down to the very bottom of the cañon, hundreds of feet below; but the sense of danger seems to give fresh zest to the excitement of man and horse, and the mad gallop is not broken until we reach the wagon-road in the bed of the creek, or the bottom of the great ravine by which we entered the mountain. Then the guide and myself run our horses across an irrigating-dam, strike a hard, smooth mesa, dotted with live oaks like an orchard, and leaving our friends to go round by the road, ride at the full speed of our mustangs down it, only halting when we have reached the stable at Clayton, and dismount to order dinner.

Dinner over, we re-saddle and hitch up, and are off at two for San Francisco, by the road we came on the previous day. An occasional race, pistol shooting at quail or hare, a lunch by a mountain spring by the roadside, and occasional halts for "refreshments," only diversifying the ride homewards, and at six we are again on board the Washoe at Oakland, steaming-across the Bay of San Francisco, having ridden fifty miles up and down mountains and across the valleys since sunrise.

Reader, it would pay you to make the trip, and may you be with us when next we mount our fiery and untamed caballos to ride up and down Mount Diablo.