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There being no surface water, although the ground was so soft that the horses kept bogging up to their bodies, we were forced to retreat five miles to obtain some for them. Wind south-east, the stormy weather apparently breaking up. Camped at 5 p.m. Latitude, 23 degrees 28 minutes 51 seconds. Tuesday, 26th March, Scrub North-east of Hamilton Springs.
Our travels to-day were very agreeable; the day was fine, the breezes cool, and the scenery continually changing, the river taking the most sinuous windings imaginable; the bed of it, as might be expected in such a glen, is rough and stony, and the old fear of the horses bogging has departed from us.
Why, have you seen the trail? Take a look; it's a man-killer, and the rate is forty cents a pound to Linderman. It'll go to fifty now maybe a dollar- -and there aren't enough packers to handle half the stuff." "Things are worse at Skagway," another man volunteered. "I came up yesterday, and they're losing a hundred head of horses a day bogging 'em down and breaking their legs.
There was just one place where they could cross the creek without bogging in the tricky mud that was almost as bad as quicksand. He therefore pulled out of the rocky patch and made straight for the crossing. He would soon know if they had crossed there.
Meanwhile my host told me his story, how hard he worked "bogging" for a neighboring farmer, turning up a meadow with a spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten dollars an acre and the use of the land with manure for one year, and his little broad-faced son worked cheerfully at his father's side the while, not knowing how poor a bargain the latter had made.
And when the hoeing, weeding and haying were done, the farmers dug meadow-muck for compost. Ready and willing as I was to try my hand at whatever came along, I went into the meadow and followed the plough with a bogging hoe, and one day tried digging muck but the chief of the group thought the labor was too heavy for me; I would have to wait until I grew stronger.
Some Mexicans and certain outlawed whites who kept close to the border for different reasons, and the possibilities of bogging in a cane-brake were the only uncertainties. In so many words he advised me against going. Still I persevered. I had planned so long on completing my boating trip to the Gulf, that I disliked to abandon the idea altogether.
We barely had time to note that the men who served the guns were denned in holes in the earth like wolves, with earthen roofs above them and straw beds to lie on, and that they had screened each gun in green saplings cut from the woods and stuck upright in the ground, to hide its position from the sight of prying aeroplane scouts, and that the wheels of the guns were tired with huge, broad steel plates called caterpillars, to keep them from bogging down in miry places I say we barely had time to note these details mentally when things began to happen.
Two months or a little more since Harrisburg. The brazen heat had given way to torrents in mid-August, and the rain had made quagmire traps of roads, forming rapids of every creek and river bogging down horses, men, and guns. But it had not bogged down Bedford Forrest.
I was surprised at seeing him because he had told me that he and his wife were going to Monterey Centre; but there he was, laboring with his text, speaking in a halting manner, and once in a while bogging down in a dead stop out of which he could not pull himself without giving a sort of honk like a wild goose. It was his way.
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