The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Short Stories by Bret Harte

Author:Bret Harte [Bret Harte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

An Ingénue of the Sierras

ONE

WE ALL HELD our breath as the coach rushed through the semidarkness of Galloper’s Ridge. The vehicle itself was only a huge lumbering shadow; its side lights were carefully extinguished, and Yuba Bill had just politely removed from the lips of an outside passenger even the cigar with which he had been ostentatiously exhibiting his coolness. For it had been rumored that the Ramon Martinez gang of “road agents” were “laying” for us on the second grade, and would time the passage of our lights across Gallopers in order to intercept us in the “brush” beyond. If we could cross the ridge without being seen, and so get through the brush before they reached it, we were safe. If they followed, it would only be a stern chase with the odds in our favor.

The huge vehicle swayed from side to side, rolled, dipped, and plunged, but Bill kept the track, as if, in the whispered words of the expressman, he could “feel and smell” the road he could no longer see. We knew that at times we hung perilously over the edge of slopes that eventually dropped a thousand feet sheer to the tops of the sugar pines below, but we knew that Bill knew it also. The half visible heads of the horses, drawn wedgewise together by the tightened reins, appeared to cleave the darkness like a plowshare, held between his rigid hands. Even the hoofbeats of the six horses had fallen into a vague, monotonous, distant roll. Then the ridge was crossed, and we plunged into the still blacker obscurity of the brush. Rather we no longer seemed to move—it was only the phantom night that rushed by us. The horses might have been submerged in some swift Lethean stream; nothing but the top of the coach and the rigid bulk of Yuba Bill arose above them. Yet even in that awful moment our speed was unslackened; it was as if Bill cared no longer to guide but only to drive, or as if the direction of his huge machine was determined by other hands than his. An incautious whisperer hazarded the paralyzing suggestion of our “meeting another team.” To our great astonishment Bill overheard it; to our greater astonishment he replied. “It ’ud be only a neck and neck race which would get to h—ll first,” he said quietly. But we were relieved—for he had spoken! Almost simultaneously the wider turnpike began to glimmer faintly as a visible track before us; the wayside trees fell out of line, opened up, and dropped off one after another; we were on the broader tableland, out of danger, and apparently unperceived and unpursued.

Nevertheless in the conversation that broke out again with the relighting of the lamps, and the comments, congratulations, and reminiscences that were freely exchanged, Yuba Bill preserved a dissatisfied and even resentful silence. The most generous praise of his skill and courage awoke no response. “I reckon the old man waz just spilin’ for a fight, and is feelin’ disappointed,” said a passenger.

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