comfortable as possible, and constructed a pillow for him with our coats.
He seemed very thankful. Then he looked up in our faces, and said in a
feeble voice that had a tremble of honest emotion in it:
“Gentlemen, I know not who you are, but you have saved my life; and
although I can never be able to repay you for it, I feel that I can at
least make one hour of your long journey lighter. I take it you are
strangers to this great thorough fare, but I am entirely familiar with
it. In this connection I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if
you would like to listen to it. Horace Greeley—-”
I said, impressively:
“Suffering stranger, proceed at your peril. You see in me the melancholy
wreck of a once stalwart and magnificent manhood. What has brought me to
this? That thing which you are about to tell. Gradually but surely,
that tiresome old anecdote has sapped my strength, undermined my
constitution, withered my life. Pity my helplessness. Spare me only
just this once, and tell me about young George Washington and his little
hatchet for a change.”
We were saved. But not so the invalid. In trying to retain the anecdote
in his system he strained himself and died in our arms.
I am aware, now, that I ought not to have asked of the sturdiest citizen
of all that region, what I asked of that mere shadow of a man; for, after
seven years’ residence on the Pacific coast, I know that no passenger or
driver on the Overland ever corked that anecdote in, when a stranger was
by, and survived. Within a period of six years I crossed and recrossed
the Sierras between Nevada and California thirteen times by stage and
listened to that deathless incident four hundred and eighty-one or
eighty-two times. I have the list somewhere. Drivers always told it,
conductors told it, landlords told it, chance passengers told it, the
very Chinamen and vagrant Indians recounted it. I have had the same
driver tell it to me two or three times in the same afternoon. It has
come to me in all the multitude of tongues that Babel bequeathed to
earth, and flavored with whiskey, brandy, beer, cologne, sozodont,
tobacco, garlic, onions, grasshoppers–everything that has a fragrance to
it through all the long list of things that are gorged or guzzled by the
sons of men. I never have smelt any anecdote as often as I have smelt
that one; never have smelt any anecdote that smelt so variegated as that
one. And you never could learn to know it by its smell, because every
time you thought you had learned the smell of it, it would turn up with a
different smell. Bayard Taylor has written about this hoary anecdote,
Richardson has published it; so have Jones, Smith, Johnson, Ross Browne,
and every other correspondence-inditing being that ever set his foot upon
the great overland road anywhere between Julesburg and San Francisco; and
I have heard that it is in the Talmud. I have seen it in print in nine
different foreign languages; I have been told that it is employed in the
inquisition in Rome; and I now learn with regret that it is going to be
set to music. I do not think that such things are right.
Stage-coaching on the Overland is no more, and stage drivers are a race
defunct. I wonder if they bequeathed that bald-headed anecdote to their
successors, the railroad brakemen and conductors, and if these latter
still persecute the helpless passenger with it until he concludes, as did
many a tourist of other days, that the real grandeurs of the Pacific
coast are not Yo Semite and the Big Trees, but Hank Monk and his
adventure with Horace Greeley. [And what makes that worn anecdote the
more aggravating, is, that the adventure it celebrates never occurred.
If it were a good anecdote, that seeming demerit would be its chiefest
virtue, for creative power belongs to greatness; but what ought to be
done to a man who would wantonly contrive so flat a one as this? If I
were to suggest what ought to be done to him, I should be called