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Knowing full well that a halt of a single minute would mean a general mustering of the population, and an importuning rabble following me through the unridable mud, I ignore the old melon-man's foghorn efforts to arrest my onward progress; but he proves a most vociferous and persistent specimen of his class.
With a good ridable road I could win the race; but, being handicapped with an unridable trail, nearly obscured beneath tall, rank grass, the storm overtakes me, and comes in at Potter Station a winner by about three hundred lengths. In the morning I start out in good season, and, nearing Sidney, the road becomes better, and I sweep into that enterprising town at a becoming pace.
The streets are, of course, muddy and unridable, and ere the suburbs are overcome a messenger overtakes us from the Prince, begging me to return and drink tea with him before starting. "Tell the Prince, the sahib sends salaams, but cannot spare the time to return," replies my companion, who knows Persian thoroughly.
Descending into a narrow valley, I reach a road-side khan, adjoining a thrifty-looking melon-garden this latter a welcome sight, since the day is warm and sultry; and a few minutes' quiet, soulful communion with a good ripe water-melon, I think to myself, will be just about the proper caper to indulge in after being worried with dogs, people, small streams, and unridable hills since six o'clock.
"You have that horse under perfect control, and yet, if I am not mistaken, he is the worst of the three 'outlaws' which all the other boys have declared unridable. Abbie told me this morning that everybody is afraid of them." "Abbie tells you a great many funny things, I reckon," he said, with an evasive grin, and she laughed reminiscently.
Many a night De la Vega and his stoical guide slept beneath a cactus, or in the mocking bed of a creek. The mustangs he managed to lasso were almost unridable, and would have bucked to death any but a Californian. Sometimes he lived on cactus fruit and the dried meat he had brought with him; occasionally he shot a rabbit. Again he had but the flesh of the rattlesnake roasted over coals.
East of Deh Namek, the wheeling continues splendid for a dozen miles, traversing a level desert on which one finds no drinkable water for about twenty miles. Across the last eight miles of the desert the road is variable, consisting of alternate stretches of ridable and unridable ground, the latter being generally unridable by reason of sand and loose gravel, or thickly strewn flints.
This undesirable trait of their character is, of course, easily counteracted by a short spurt, where spurting is possible, but it is a soul-harrowing thing to trundle along a mile of unridable road, in company with twenty importuning katir-jees, their diminutive donkeys filling the air with suffocating clouds of dust.
Six o'clock next morning finds us travelling southward into the interior of Slavonia; but we are not mounted, for the road presents an unridable surface of mud, stones, and ruts, that causes my companion's favorite ejaculatory expletive to occur with more than its usual frequency.
Through the smooth kunkah-laid bazaars of Jullundar, so different from the unridable bazaars we have heretofore been made familiar with, and I wheel past the Queen's Gardens and into the cantonment along lovely avenues and perfect roads.
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