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Again the cowboy became serious and confessed: "Nope; I've officiated at several plain killin's, an' been chief usher at a lynchin', but this yere's my first weddin', an' I'm goin' to turn loose some and enjoy it." Sage-brush grinned in anticipation of the good times that he knew lay in store for him at the dance.
Then Eleanor spoke. "Polly, you're sure you know the road?" "We can't go very far wrong! If we keep to the trail we are bound to come out on the top somewhere!" laughed Polly, giving Noddy her head in selecting a safe footing on the rough trail. Eleanor, eager to show how well she could ride, forced her burro past Noddy while the latter was making a slight detour about a sage-brush.
She half expected to see a shepherd with his crook and sheep approaching her out of the dim shadows, or a turbaned, white-robed David with his lifted hands of prayer standing off among the depths of purple darkness. It would not have been out of keeping if a walled city with housetops should be hidden behind the clumps of sage-brush farther on.
Now, at that moment, as was afterward ascertained, Joey was wandering about in the sage-brush on the opposite side of the continent, near Winnemucca, in the State of Nevada. He had been taken to that town by some good persons distantly related to his dead father, and by them adopted and tenderly cared for. But on that evening the poor child had strayed from home and was lost in the desert.
He made himself not merely the arbiter but the inspiration of his contributors, and in a region where literature had hardly yet replaced the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made the sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created a literary periodical of the first class on the borders of civilization.
This he did, by gradually increasing the volume of each snore and breaking it off with a whistle. At the very moment Sage-brush suggested gun-play, Show Low snorted his loudest. "What's that?" asked Sage-brush, grabbing his revolver. "Show Low. He's a regular brass band when he gets started from the big trombone down to the tin whistle," laughed Fresno.
There was a violent struggle, as if the cowboy had hooked a leaping tuna, cactus plants and sage-brush were uprooted, then the pony began to back away, always keeping the lariat taut.
He'd look well, they said, a-laying out there in the sage-brush plugged full of lead waiting for his friends to call for him; and they asked him how he thought he'd enjoy being a free-lunch counter for coyotes; and they told him he'd better write down on a piece of paper anything he'd like particular to have painted on the board and they just generally devilled him all round.
He dropped his ears, set up his tail, and left for San Francisco at a speed which can only be described as a flash and a vanish! Long after he was out of sight we could hear him whiz. I do not remember where we first came across "sage-brush," but as I have been speaking of it I may as well describe it.
After traveling about five miles we crossed a little sage-brush valley that was almost covered with jack-rabbits, and they were dying by the thousand. We could see twenty at one time lying dead in the sage-brush.
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