Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/382

368 I sat with the driver as the six horses spun us at a gallop around the spurs of the mountain crags over hanging the Sacramento river. Our road, cut from the rocks, had looked like a spider web swinging in the air when we saw it first from the waters of the Sacramento, that boiled and foamed in a bed-rock flume now thousands of feet below us.

The passengers, who had been very loud and hilarious, were now very quiet, and an old gentleman, who was engaged in some quartz speculation, and had been extremely anxious to get ahead, here stuck his head out of the window as he gasped for breath, and protested to the driver that he had changed his mind about reaching camp so soon, that, in fact, he was in no hurry at all, and that, if he was a mind to, he might go a little slow.

The driver then gently threaded the ribbons through his fingers as if to get a firmer hold, threw his right arm out, and snapped the silk under the heels of his leaders.

This was the nervous man's only answer.

It was perfectly splendid. We were playing spider and fly in the heavens. Down at the mountain's base and pressed to the foamy rim of the river, stood the madroño and manzanita, light, but trim-limbed, like sycamore; and up a little way were oak, and ash, and poplar trees, yellow as the autumn frosts could paint them; and as the eye ascended the steep and stupendous mountain that stood over across the river against us, yet so close at hand, the fir and