After breakfast we felt better, and the zest of life soon came back.  The world looked bright again, and existence was as dear to us as ever.  Presently an uneasiness came over me—­grew upon me—­assailed me without ceasing.  Alas, my regeneration was not complete—­I wanted to smoke!  I resisted with all my strength, but the flesh was weak.  I wandered away alone and wrestled with myself an hour.  I recalled my promises of reform and preached to myself persuasively, upbraidingly, exhaustively.  But it was all vain, I shortly found myself sneaking among the snow-drifts hunting for my pipe.  I discovered it after a considerable search, and crept away to hide myself and enjoy it.  I remained behind the barn a good while, asking myself how I would feel if my braver, stronger, truer comrades should catch me in my degradation.  At last I lit the pipe, and no human being can feel meaner and baser than I did then.  I was ashamed of being in my own pitiful company.  Still dreading discovery, I felt that perhaps the further side of the barn would be somewhat safer, and so I turned the corner.  As I turned the one corner, smoking, Ollendorff turned the other with his bottle to his lips, and between us sat unconscious Ballou deep in a game of “solitaire” with the old greasy cards!

Absurdity could go no farther.  We shook hands and agreed to say no more about “reform” and “examples to the rising generation.”

The station we were at was at the verge of the Twenty-six-Mile Desert.  If we had approached it half an hour earlier the night before, we must have heard men shouting there and firing pistols; for they were expecting some sheep drovers and their flocks and knew that they would infallibly get lost and wander out of reach of help unless guided by sounds.

While we remained at the station, three of the drovers arrived, nearly exhausted with their wanderings, but two others of their party were never heard of afterward.

We reached Carson in due time, and took a rest.  This rest, together with preparations for the journey to Esmeralda, kept us there a week, and the delay gave us the opportunity to be present at the trial of the great land-slide case of Hyde vs.  Morgan—­an episode which is famous in Nevada to this day.  After a word or two of necessary explanation, I will set down the history of this singular affair just as it transpired.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

The mountains are very high and steep about Carson, Eagle and Washoe Valleys—­very high and very steep, and so when the snow gets to melting off fast in the Spring and the warm surface-earth begins to moisten and soften, the disastrous land-slides commence.  The reader cannot know what a land-slide is, unless he has lived in that country and seen the whole side of a mountain taken off some fine morning and deposited down in the valley, leaving a vast, treeless, unsightly scar upon the mountain’s front to keep the circumstance fresh in his memory all the years that he may go on living within seventy miles of that place.