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Updated: May 19, 2025
And all day long the boatmen struggled with the most serious problem yet, for the wagon-trail was now hardly good enough for horses. Where the trail turned off toward the mountains and Kintla Lake, we met a solitary horseman. He had ridden sixty miles down and sixty miles back to get his mail.
We straightened in our saddles, we breathed deep, we joked. The country was scorched and sterile; the wagon-trail, almost paralleling the mountains themselves on a long easy slant toward the high country, was ankle-deep in dust; the ravines were still dry of water. But it was not the Inferno, and that one fact sufficed.
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.
They had packed the precious blue dishes in a barrel with hay, and had brought them safely over all the long way. The stormy sea voyage of two months in a sailing vessel, the oft-interrupted train and boat journey from Quebec to Toronto, the weary jolting of the wagon-trail to the Holland Landing, and the storms of Lake Simcoe the blue dishes, safe in their hay nest, had weathered them all.
Just where the wagon-trail passed out into the broader public road leading from Lexington to Frankfort and the travelling began to be really good, the horse caught one of his forefeet against the loop of a root, was thrown violently forward, and the bundle slipped noiselessly from the saddle to the earth. She did not see it.
They came on horseback, all except the postmaster, who brought his family in a wagon over the only broken wagon-trail. The Widow Steavens rode up from her farm eight miles down the Black Hawk road. The cold drove the women into the cave-house, and it was soon crowded. A fine, sleety snow was beginning to fall, and every one was afraid of another storm and anxious to have the burial over with.
It was only necessary for me to be shown the direction." "The road is over that way," he said, indicating its position with his arm. "Keep in that direction a while and you will strike a wagon-trail. Then follow that and it will bring you right out on the road. After you get to the road, you will find a house about a mile to the right. That is, if you intend to go that way."
We waited, but we could not hear so much as the tinkle of its bells. So we munched cakes of chocolate from the pockets of our riding-coats and went grimly on. The wagon with the boats had made good time. It was several miles along the wagon-trail before we caught up with it. It had found a quiet harbor beside the road, and the boatmen were demanding food.
Two days ago, snow had fallen but the birds did not remember it. Seven hours brought him to a lonely wagon-trail called Ozark Lodge because after winding among hills several miles it at last reached the clubhouse of that name overlooking the lake. He left the train in the dusk of evening, and walked briskly away, the only moving figure in the wilderness.
So again the wagon-trail, with its white choking dust, its staggering sun, its miles made up of monotonous inches, each clutching for a man's sanity.
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