"The time's up, now, aint it?"
"No, you keep still.Do you want to take any chances with these bloody savages?"Presently Mike said:
"Now the time's up, anyway.I'm freezing.""Well freeze.Better freeze than carry your brains home in a basket.
Maybe the time is up, but how do we know?--got no watch to tell by.
I mean to give them good measure.I calculate to stand here fifteen minutes or die.Don't you move."So, without knowing it, I was making one joker very sick of his contract.
When we took our arms down at last, they were aching with cold and fatigue, and when we went sneaking off, the dread I was in that the time might not yet be up and that we would feel bullets in a moment, was not sufficient to draw all my attention from the misery that racked my stiffened body.
The joke of these highwayman friends of ours was mainly a joke upon themselves; for they had waited for me on the cold hill-top two full hours before I came, and there was very little fun in that; they were so chilled that it took them a couple of weeks to get warm again.Moreover, I never had a thought that they would kill me to get money which it was so perfectly easy to get without any such folly, and so they did not really frighten me bad enough to make their enjoyment worth the trouble they had taken.I was only afraid that their weapons would go off accidentally.Their very numbers inspired me with confidence that no blood would be intentionally spilled.They were not smart; they ought to have sent only one highwayman, with a double-barrelled shot gun, if they desired to see the author of this volume climb a tree.
However, I suppose that in the long run I got the largest share of the joke at last; and in a shape not foreseen by the highwaymen; for the chilly exposure on the "divide" while I was in a perspiration gave me a cold which developed itself into a troublesome disease and kept my hands idle some three months, besides costing me quite a sum in doctor's bills.
Since then I play no practical jokes on people and generally lose my temper when one is played upon me.
When I returned to San Francisco I projected a pleasure journey to Japan and thence westward around the world; but a desire to see home again changed my mind, and I took a berth in the steamship, bade good-bye to the friendliest land and livest, heartiest community on our continent, and came by the way of the Isthmus to New York--a trip that was not much of a pic-nic excursion, for the cholera broke out among us on the passage and we buried two or three bodies at sea every day.I found home a dreary place after my long absence; for half the children I had known were now wearing whiskers or waterfalls, and few of the grown people Ihad been acquainted with remained at their hearthstones prosperous and happy--some of them had wandered to other scenes, some were in jail, and the rest had been hanged.These changes touched me deeply, and I went away and joined the famous Quaker City European Excursion and carried my tears to foreign lands.
Thus, after seven years of vicissitudes, ended a "pleasure trip" to the silver mines of Nevada which had originally been intended to occupy only three months.However, I usually miss my calculations further than that.
MORAL.
If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error.The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no account," go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not.Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them--if the people you go among suffer by the operation.
APPENDIX.A.
BRIEF SKETCH OF MORMON HISTORY.
Mormonism is only about forty years old, but its career has been full of stir and adventure from the beginning, and is likely to remain so to the end.Its adherents have been hunted and hounded from one end of the country to the other, and the result is that for years they have hated all "Gentiles" indiscriminately and with all their might.Joseph Smith, the finder of the Book of Mormon and founder of the religion, was driven from State to State with his mysterious copperplates and the miraculous stones he read their inscriptions with.Finally he instituted his "church" in Ohio and Brigham Young joined it.The neighbors began to persecute, and apostasy commenced.Brigham held to the faith and worked hard.He arrested desertion.He did more--he added converts in the midst of the trouble.He rose in favor and importance with the brethren.
He was made one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church.He shortly fought his way to a higher post and a more powerful--President of the Twelve.
The neighbors rose up and drove the Mormons out of Ohio, and they settled in Missouri.Brigham went with them.The Missourians drove them out and they retreated to Nauvoo, Illinois.They prospered there, and built a temple which made some pretensions to architectural grace and achieved some celebrity in a section of country where a brick court-house with a tin dome and a cupola on it was contemplated with reverential awe.
But the Mormons were badgered and harried again by their neighbors.