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There was no lack of company along the road: donkeys numberless, camels by twos and threes; now a mule-driver, trudging along the road, chanting a most queer melody; now a lady, in white veil, black mask, and yellow papooshes, bestriding her ass, and followed by her husband, met us on the way; and most people gave a salutation.
I turned immediately, and accompanied by the mule-driver, followed Mike across a little open square into a small and narrow street, at the end of which a light was seen faintly twinkling. We hurried on and in a few minutes reached a high wall of solid masonry, from a niche of which we now discovered, to our utter disappointment, the light proceeded.
After hours of prying and pushing and tugging and yelling they at length got the wagon over the slough, reaching camp about midnight. "Orderly," said Si, "I believe I'd like to resign my place as mule-driver. It's a nice, soft thing, but I'd jest as lief let s'mother feller have it, so I'll take my gun an' go to hoofin' it agin!"
I answered, that I would speak of it to a mule-driver of my acquaintance, as in fact I did, and the muleteer undertook the affair.
"Now a good mule-driver is the littlest, orneriest speck in the human line that's known to the microscope, but when you get a poor one, he'd spoil one of them cholera germs you read about just by contact. The leader of this bunch was worse than the worst; strong on whip-arm, but surprising weak on judgment.
The following morning, at daylight, Tuttle and Slivers reappeared at camp, from a pilgrimage, and the mule-driver held in his arms a little red Indian papoose, as fat, dimpled, and pretty as a cherub, and as frightened as a captive baby rabbit. "Now, then," said the man, placing his charge on the floor, in the midst of a circle of wondering citizens, "there's your kid.
The fluent profanity of the mule-driver, the shrill laugh of the dance-hall; the prolonged rattle and final roar of the ore-chute, the steady pick of the laborer at the prospect-hole; each played its part to burden and stain the pure, high air that had seemed so like the air of Heaven itself. Amberley stayed on in his lonely lean-to, or roamed over his desecrated acres, bewildered and aggrieved.
The "head boiler" was also a man of consequence among them, also the head carpenter, cooper, and mule-driver. These and others filled situations of responsibility, which required more than ordinary capacity. Of these trusts they were proud. The manager or overseer on a plantation seldom interfered in the domestic arrangements of the slaves. Their religious and moral instruction was neglected.
I forgot all the solemn thoughts that possessed me at the grave, and tried to talk to the mule like a mule-driver, but the animal just fooled along, as though there was no especial hurry. Occasionally I could hear bullets 'zipping' along by me, and the rebels were yelling for all that was out. O, how I did wish I had my old race horse that the chaplain had beat me out of.
A gloomily imaginative mule-driver had darkly suggested that, as no one had really seen Uncle Jim leave the camp, he was still there, and his bones would yet be found in one of the ditches; while a still more credulous miner averred that what he had thought was the cry of a screech-owl the night previous to Uncle Jim's disappearance, might have been the agonized utterance of that murdered man.
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