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The forelopers walked slouching along, shouldering a bamboo sixteen or eighteen feet long, without so much as turning their heads in my direction; and the drivers on the wagon-boxes were sitting with heads down and shoulders raised, apparently asleep and troubled about nothing.
Louis specially for the plains business. They were very large and very strongly built, being capable of carrying seven thousand pounds of freight each. The wagon-boxes were very commodious being about as large as the rooms of an ordinary house and were covered with two heavy canvas sheets to protect the merchandise from the rain.
Those who came farthest were first on the ground; and by the time twelve-year-old Thomas Jefferson, spatting barefooted up the dusty pike, had reached the church-house with the key, there was a goodly sprinkling of unhitched teams in the grove, the horses champing their feed noisily in the wagon-boxes, and the people gathering in little neighborhood knots to discuss gravely the one topic uppermost in all minds the present outpouring of grace on Paradise Valley and the region round-about.
Two hundred of his men captured the mule herd; five hundred of them attacked the wagon train there, burned the wagons and drove the soldiers and teamsters and choppers who were outside the corral, in flight to Fort Kearney. Scalps were taken. Now it was the turn of the puny corral, and the rest of the soldiers. He could see only the low circle of wagon-boxes.
They crossed the Rocky Mountains to Fort Hall; thence followed down the Snake River for three or four hundred miles, their cattle limping and failing on the rough lava plains; swimming the streams too deep to be forded, making boats out of wagon-boxes for the women and children and goods, or where trees could be had, lashing together logs for rafts.
Smudge fires burned in a wide circle about the house to repel the hungry mosquitos that, with high, monotonous battle-songs, stormed the smoky barrier between them and the inner circle of horses and oxen feeding from wagon-boxes.
They lived rudely, a lucky few in the huts they had built; more in tents and wagon-boxes. Nor did they fail to thank Providence for the mild winter vouchsafed to them during this unprotected period, permitting them not only to survive, but to continue their labours of logging, home-building, the making of rough furniture, and the repairing of wagons and tools.
The wagon-boxes were very commodious being as large as the rooms of an ordinary house and were covered with two heavy canvas sheets to protect the merchandise from the rain. These wagons were generally sent out from Leavenworth, each loaded with six thousand pounds of freight, and each drawn by several yokes of oxen in charge of one driver.
But I hid under one of the wagon-boxes and got him, in the end. I brought him down, a tumbling flurry of wings, like Satan's fall from Heaven. When I ran out to possess myself of his Satanic body he was only wounded, however, and was ready to show fight. Then I saw red again. I clubbed him with the gun-butt, going at him like fury. I was moist with perspiration when I got through with him.
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