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Updated: May 15, 2025
Having the lofty hill for some hours between them and the sun, they bumped, and jolted, and stuck in mud-holes, and flogged and swore the cattle out of them again, till at last they got to the bottom, where ran a turbid kloof or stream. It was fordable, but the recent rains had licked away the slope; so the existing bank was two feet above the stream.
Rain had fallen during the night, and the vanquished generally landed heavily on their backs in the mud-holes, the wrestlers joining in the general laugh at their expense. To encourage them I had promised every victor twenty cents, which added much to the interest.
Our servants gathered up our rather extensive impedimenta, and sprang into the water. We were forced to follow suit, and begin our day's march with wet feet. A few steps up the stream we came upon an old elephant track and plunged boldly in, and it was in! For three miles we labored through a series of the most elaborate mud-holes that I have ever seen.
They travelled the roads which John Darling had followed, several days before; but now the mud-holes and quaking bogs were frozen and covered with snow. Bill McKay drove the sled that led the way at a pace that gave the following teamsters all they could do to keep in touch; but willing hands manned the whips and hammering sled-stakes.
I have said that the danger that attends the traveller in the great prairies is trifling; but it is very different in the eastern swamps and mud-holes, where the enemy, ever on the watch, is also always invisible, and where the speed of the horse and the arms of the rider are of no avail, for they are then swimming in the deep water, or splashing, breast-deep, in the foul mud.
Drunken men, especially, that stumble into mud-holes at night, say the Onis pushed them in. Naughty boys that steal cake, and girls that take sugar, often tell fibs to their parents, charging it on the Onis. The Onis love to play jokes on people, but they are not dangerous. There are plenty of pictures of them in Japan, though they never sat for their portraits, but this is the way they looked.
So we wound on through the narrow wood-paths in single file sinking occasionally pastern-deep, where the thin ice over mud-holes supplanted the safe crackling snow-crests traversing frequent fords, where rills had swollen into brooks and turbid streams; some of those gullies must have been dark even at noon-day, with overhanging cypress and pine; they were so bitterly black now that you were fain to follow close on the splash in your front, for no mortal ken could have pierced half a horse's length ahead.
The road was fine, with the exception of a few mud-holes, and the woods lovely with wild flowers and dogwood blossoms and with all the fragrance of early spring, the dark holly and pine intermingling with the delicate leaves just brought out by the genial season, daisies, wild violets, and heart's-ease. I have not seen so many wild flowers since I left Arlington.... "Thirteenth.
"But only think how delicious the ham would have been," said Kate. Our real troubles began that afternoon. We had not been driving long when the trail swooped down suddenly into a broad depression a swamp, so full of mud-holes that there didn't seem to be anything but mud-holes. We pulled through six of them but in the seventh we stuck, hard and fast.
Just as it left the town, however, it was cheered and assisted by a guide-board, upon which was the legend "10 Mils to Hawkeye." The road had never been made except by the travel over it, and at this season the rainy June it was a way of ruts cut in the black soil, and of fathomless mud-holes.
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