Roughing It eBook

bloody-minded tarantulas.  I had skipped from bed to bed and from box to box in a cold agony, and every time I touched anything that was furzy I fancied I felt the fangs.  I had rather go to war than live that episode over again.  Nobody was hurt.  The man who thought a tarantula had “got him” was mistaken—­only a crack in a box had caught his finger.  Not one of those escaped tarantulas was ever seen again.  There were ten or twelve of them.  We took candles and hunted the place high and low for them, but with no success.  Did we go back to bed then?  We did nothing of the kind.  Money could not have persuaded us to do it.  We sat up the rest of the night playing cribbage and keeping a sharp lookout for the enemy.

CHAPTER XXII.

It was the end of August, and the skies were cloudless and the weather superb.  In two or three weeks I had grown wonderfully fascinated with the curious new country and concluded to put off my return to “the States” awhile.  I had grown well accustomed to wearing a damaged slouch hat, blue woolen shirt, and pants crammed into boot-tops, and gloried in the absence of coat, vest and braces.  I felt rowdyish and “bully,” (as the historian Josephus phrases it, in his fine chapter upon the destruction of the Temple).  It seemed to me that nothing could be so fine and so romantic.  I had become an officer of the government, but that was for mere sublimity.  The office was an unique sinecure.  I had nothing to do and no salary.  I was private Secretary to his majesty the Secretary and there was not yet writing enough for two of us.  So Johnny K——­ and I devoted our time to amusement.  He was the young son of an Ohio nabob and was out there for recreation.  He got it.  We had heard a world of talk about the marvellous beauty of Lake Tahoe, and finally curiosity drove us thither to see it.  Three or four members of the Brigade had been there and located some timber lands on its shores and stored up a quantity of provisions in their camp.  We strapped a couple of blankets on our shoulders and took an axe apiece and started—­for we intended to take up a wood ranch or so ourselves and become wealthy.  We were on foot.  The reader will find it advantageous to go horseback.  We were told that the distance was eleven miles.  We tramped a long time on level ground, and then toiled laboriously up a mountain about a thousand miles high and looked over.  No lake there.  We descended on the other side, crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or four thousand miles high, apparently, and looked over again.  No lake yet.  We sat down tired and perspiring, and hired a couple of Chinamen to curse those people who had beguiled us.  Thus refreshed, we presently resumed the march with renewed vigor and determination.  We plodded on, two or three hours longer, and at last the Lake burst upon us—­a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still!  It was a vast oval, and one would have to use up eighty or a hundred good miles in traveling around it.  As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.