But how I did miss my
dear dog! He was always so happy when with us and the horses, and his
joyous bounds and little runs after one thing and another added much
to the pleasure of our rides.
Fort Benton is ten miles from camp, and Faye met me there with an
ambulance. I was glad enough to get away from that old stage. It was
one of the jerky, bob-back-and-forth kind that pitches you off the
seat every five minutes. The first two or three times you bump heads
with the passenger sitting opposite, you can smile and apologize with
some grace, but after a while your hat will not stay in place and your
head becomes sensitive, and finally, you discover that the passenger
is the most disagreeable person you ever saw, and that the man sitting
beside you is inconsiderate and selfish, and really occupying two
thirds of the seat.
We came a distance of one hundred and forty miles, getting fresh
horses every twenty miles or so. The morning we left Helena was
glorious, and I was half ashamed because I felt so happy at coming
from the town, where so many of my friends were in sorrow, but tried
to console myself with the fact that I had been ordered away by Doctor
Gordon. There were many cases of typhoid fever, and the rheumatic
fever that has made Mrs. Sargent so ill has developed into typhoid,
and there is very little hope for her recovery.
The driver would not consent to my sitting on top with him, so I had
to ride inside with three men. They were not rough-looking at all, and
their clothes looked clean and rather new, but gave one the impression
that they had been made for other people. Their pale faces told that
they were "tenderfeet," and one could see there was a sad lacking of
brains all around.
The road comes across a valley the first ten or twelve miles, and then
runs into a magnificent canon that is sixteen miles long, called
Prickly-Pear Canon. As I wrote some time ago, everything is brought up
to this country by enormous ox trains, some coming from the railroad
at Corinne, and some that come from Fort Benton during the Summer,
having been brought up by boat on the Missouri River. In the canons
these trains are things to be dreaded. The roads are very narrow and
the grades often long and steep, with immense boulders above and
below.
We met one of those trains soon after we entered the canon, and at the
top of a grade where the road was scarcely wider than the stage itself
and seemed to be cut into a wall of solid rock.
