The Golden Butterfly

They were in California, and were not buffalo-hunting now, because there is not a buffalo within five hundred miles of Sacramento. Their buffalo-hunting was over, having been accompanied by such small hardships as have been already alluded to. They rode along a track which was as much like a road as Richmond Park is like the Forest of Arden. They were mounted on a pair of small nervous mustangs; their saddles were the Mexican saddles used in the country, in front of which was the never-failing horn. Round this was wound the horsehair lariat, which serves the Western Nimrod for lassoing by day, and for keeping off snakes at night, no snake having ever been known to cross this barrier of bristly horsehair. You might as well expect a burgling coolie, smeared with oil, and naked, to effect his escape by crawling through a hedge of prickly pear. Also, because they were in a foreign land, and wished to be in harmony with its institutions, they wore immense steel spurs, inlaid with silver filigree, and furnished with "lobs" attached to them, which jangled and danced to make melody, just as if they formed part of an illustration to a Christmas book. Boots of course, they wore, and the artistic instinct which, a year before, had converted the younger man into a thing of beauty and a joy for the whole Park in the afternoon, now impelled him to assume a cummerbund of scarlet silk, with white-tasselled fringes, the like of which, perhaps, had never before been seen on the back of a Californian mustang. His companion was less ornate in his personal appearance. Both men carried guns, and if a search had been made, a revolver would have been found either hidden in the belt of each or carried perdu in the trousers-pocket. In these days of Pacific Railways and scampering Globe Trotters, one does not want to parade the revolver; but there are dark places on the earth, from the traveller's as well as from the missionary's point of view, where it would be well to have both bowie and Derringer ready to hand. On the American continent the wandering lamb sometimes has to lie down with the leopard, the harmless gazelle to journey side by side with the cheetah, and the asp may here and there pretend to play innocently over the hole of the cockatrice.

Behind the leaders followed a little troop of three, consisting of one English servant and two "greasers." The latter were dressed in plain unpretending costume of flannel shirt, boots, and rough trousers. Behind each hung his rifle. The English servant was dressed like his master, but more so, his spurs being heavier, the pattern of his check-shirt being larger, his saddle bigger; only for the silk cummerbund he wore a leather strap, the last symbol of the honourable condition of dependence. He rode in advance of the greasers, whom he held in contempt, and some thirty yards behind the leaders. The Mexicans rode in silence; smoking cigarettes perpetually. Sometimes they looked to their guns, or they told a story, or one would sing a snatch of a song in a low voice; mostly they were grave and thoughtful, though what a greaser thinks about has never yet been ascertained.

The country was so far in the Far West that the Sierra Nevada lay to the east. It was a rich and beautiful country: there were park-like tracts—supposing the park to be of a primitive and early settlement-kind—stretching out to the left. These were dotted with white oaks. To the right rose the sloping sides of a hill, which were covered with the brush-wood called the chaparelle, in which grew the manzanita and the scrub-oak, with an occasional cedar pine, not in the least like the cedars of Lebanon and Clapham Common. Hanging about in the jungle or stretching its arms along the side of the dry water course which ran at the traveller's feet beside the road was the wild vine loaded with its small and pretty grapes now ripe. Nature, in inventing the wild grape, has been as generous as in her gift of the sloe. It is a fruit of which an American once observed that it was calculated to develop the generosity of a man's nature, "because," he explained, "you would rather give it to your neighbour than eat it yourself."