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Spurring his horse, he rode straight toward the village. Shirley appeared to be a large, pretentious country town. A branch of some railroad terminated there. The main street was wide, bordered by trees and commodious houses, and many of the stores were of brick. A large plaza shaded by giant cottonwood trees occupied a central location.
Leaving dreary Cottonwood with even greater pleasure than we had felt in abandoning Yreka, we began ascending the slope toward the Oregon line. At every mile the country grew lovelier. California seemed determined to make our last impressions of her tender. The bare, brown rocks became densely wooded with oaks and evergreens.
In the latter short canyons separate extensive valleys with wide alluvial bottoms capable of high cultivation, though often subject to overflow. Almost anything will grow there. Vast groves of cottonwood and mesquite exist. In the alluvial division, the last stretch of the river, from the Gila down, cotton and sugar cane would probably grow.
The trail we followed wound along the crest of a ridge midway between the Crossing and Ten Mile Spring, where we had left Baker's outfit that rainy morning. The freighters had moved camp, but the mud and high water had held them, for we could see the white-sheeted wagons and a blur of cattle by the cottonwood grove where Hank Rowan had made his last stand.
No wonder they were called "floating palaces," thought Abe. Sometimes passengers standing by the rail waved to the boys. Each day of their journey brought gentler breezes, warmer weather. Cottonwood and magnolia trees grew on the low swampy banks of both shores. The boys passed cotton fields, where gangs of Negro slaves were at work.
At the uppermost angle grew a slender young cottonwood, with leaves as light and agitated as the swarms of little butterflies that hovered above the clover. Mr. Royce made for this tree, took off his black coat, rolled it up, and sat down on it in the flickering shade. His shirt showed big blotches of moisture, and the sweat was rolling in clear drops along the creases in his brown neck.
Along the river banks dark, crumbling seams exposed coal resources which solved all questions of fuel, and fringes of cottonwood and poplar afforded rough but satisfactory building material.
We resolved not to "lay by at Cottonwood." About an hour and a half before daylight we were bowling along smoothly over the road so smoothly that our cradle only rocked in a gentle, lulling way, that was gradually soothing us to sleep, and dulling our consciousness when something gave away under us! We were dimly aware of it, but indifferent to it. The coach stopped.
Colorado sunsets covered the west with glory, and then came quick coolness. Dry as it was, the cottonwood leaves made a sound like refreshing rain, and the cicadas hummed comfortably. All the Beechams stayed outside till far into the night, for the chicken-house was miserably hot at the end of every day.
While the green, glossy undulations of the prairie to the right seem to spread out in infinite succession, like waves subsiding after a storm, and covered with herds of gambolling buffalo, on the left, towering to the height of seventy-five to a hundred feet, rise the sun-gilt summits of the sand hills, along the base of which winds the broad, majestic river, bespeckled with verdant islets, thickly beset with cottonwood timber, the sand hills resembling heaps of driven snow.
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