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We went on board a narrow passenger boat towed by two horses, and followed by two freight barges. We did not go at a breakneck pace, and had plenty of time for conversation, and to look at the scenery, which consisted of prairies, sloughs, woods, and rivers. The picture lacked background, as there is nothing in Illinois deserving the name of hill.
In shaded places the icicles from slow-seeping waters clung for days unmelted, and the migrant ducks, down from the Arctic, rose up from the half-frozen sloughs and winged silently away to the far south. Yet through it all the Dos S cattle came out unscathed, feeding on what dry grass and browse the sheep had left on Bronco Mesa; and in the Spring, when all hope seemed past, it rained.
Then Jeremy Stickles knew that if he could only escape the sloughs, he was safe for the present; and so he stood up in his stirrups, and gave them a loud halloo, as if they had been so many foxes. Their only answer was to fire the remaining charge at him; but the distance was too great for any aim from horseback; and the dropping bullet idly ploughed the sod upon one side of him.
Lark's ranch was the first one below the head-gates, lying between the river and the ditch, an old homesteader's claim, sub-irrigated by means of rude dams ponding the natural sloughs. The worn-out land, never drained, was foul and sour, lapsing into swamps, the black alkali oozing and spreading from pools in its boggy pastures.
Their coats of mail cut off by means of arrows, and their bodies covered with blood, Karna and Bhima then looked like a couple of snakes just freed from their sloughs. Indeed, those two tigers among men mangled each other with their arrows, like two tigers mangling each other with their teeth. The two heroes incessantly showered their shafts, like two masses of clouds pouring torrents of rain.
And the stage rolled away from Smith's Pocket, leaving the just Aristides standing in the dust of its triumphal wheels. When the tide was out on the Dedlow Marsh, its extended dreariness was patent. Its spongy, low-lying surface, sluggish, inky pools, and tortuous sloughs, twisting their slimy way, eel-like, toward the open bay, were all hard facts.
The strain and labour of six good horses, sometimes eight, drew us through the sloughs of Mireden and many other places. We were constantly out two hours before day, and as late at night, and in the depth of winter proportionally later.
Once astray on this, we found our path beset with sloughs and morasses; among which we saw every prospect of passing the night, when La Font espied at a little distance a wind-swept wood that, clothing a low shoulder of the moor, promised at least a change and shelter. We made towards it, and discovered not only all that we had expected to see, but a path and a guide.
There were fields in which nothing was sowed because they were ploughed with the hoofs of war horses, and ditches in which dead men were thrown, and dismal marshes, and roads that were no roads at all, but only sloughs. And there was a great stone house, old and ruinous, with tall poplars shivering in the rain and mist.
I question not to make it appear it is easy to put all the highroads, especially in England, in a noble figure; large, dry, and clean; well drained, and free from floods, unpassable sloughs, deep cart-ruts, high ridges, and all the inconveniences they now are full of; and, when once done, much easier still to be maintained so.
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