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At the end of an hour we were in the oaks and sycamores; at the end of two we were in the pines and low mountains of Bret Harte's Forty-Nine. The wagon-trail felt ever farther and farther into the hills. It had not been used as a stage-route for years, but the freighting kept it deep with dust, that writhed and twisted and crawled lazily knee-high to our horses, like a living creature.
Waterford is a quiet village of about seven hundred inhabitants, lying among the foot-hills of the White Mountains. When Browne was a child it was a station on the western stage-route, and an important depot for lumbermen's supplies.
I seemed to have learned all I wanted to know about it. After a little rest and a breakfast at a sort of roadhouse, a relay of horses was taken, and we travelled one more day over a flat country, to the end of the stage-route. Jack was to meet me. Already from the stage I had espied the post ambulance and two blue uniforms. Out jumped Major Ernest and Jack.
Chugg, eating her pies regularly once a week on his stage-route, said nothing, but he presented her with a red plush photograph album with oxidized silver clasps, and by this first reckless expenditure of money in the life of Chugg, Natrona, Johnson, Converse, and Sweetwater counties knew that Cupid had at last found a vulnerable spot in the tough and weather-tanned hide of the old stage-driver.
That was their first inkling that fraudulent practices were being carried on and that they had been deceived, that there was, in fact, no stage-route from St Paul to Cariboo.
Simultaneously with the fiendish atrocities committed on the Saline and Solomon rivers and the attack on Comstock and Grover, the pillaging and murdering began on the Smoky Hill stage-route, along the upper Arkansas River and on the headwaters of the Cimarron.
A group of threescore young men from different parts of Canada, from Kingston, Niagara, and Montreal, having noticed advertisements of an easy stage-route from St Paul, set out for the gold-diggings in May 1862.
At the end of that time they struck the old stage-road, which, in the days gone by, had served as a highway between Brownsville and some of the remote frontier-towns; but when the raiders forced the settlements back into the interior the stage-route was abandoned, and all that now remained to tell of the business that had once been done on it were the half-ruined stations which were scattered along the road at intervals of fifteen or twenty miles.
But he was content with a modest surveillance of the lady from the top of the coach. On arriving at Stockton this surveillance became less easy. It was the terminus of the stage-route, and the divergence of others by boat and rail. If he were lucky enough to discover which one the lady took, his presence now would be more marked, and might excite her suspicion.
When Mountain Pink and the mule-wrangler returned as bride and groom and set up housekeeping on the remainder of Chugg’s stocking, and on his stage-route, too, so that he had to drive right past the honeymoon cottage every time he completed the circuit, they lost caste in Carbon County. Chugg never spoke of the faithlessness of Mountain Pink.
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