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Chapter XIII · G.T.T., or The Wonderful Adventures of a Pullman

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  Chapter thirteen of g tt or The Wonderful Adventures of a Pullman by Edward Hale.
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  This LibriVox according is in the public domain. Chapter thirteen. Please to
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  observe that in distance from Shreveport to Austin, these ladies had traveled about four
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  hundred miles, say as much as the width of France from the Bay of
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  Biscay to Switzerland. But they had not crossed half of the Empire of Texas.
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  For Texas is an empire. And by the way, be it said,
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  she knows she is? Who were these ladies? Then that they should
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  stay even in the prettiest garden in Austin, or waste a month on its
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  pleasantest veranda, and go home to confess that they had not gone half across
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  Texas. They must see some Mexicans. They must know a ranchero by sight.
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  They must walk and talk Spanish. For San Antonio they had started,
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  and to San Antonio they would go. They would show they were not women
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  to be turned about by every word of friendship. The zeal that drove them
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  from their native home shall drive them dadding round the world to Rome, said
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  the wretched Effie paradiying dryden as she packed a pot of sensitive plants in a
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  safe place among her spring bonnets and laces. In the agony of the late
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  Sunday night, before they started across the prairies, that kind Judge Treadwell,
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  who had done everything for them so carefully, had engaged an ambulance and a
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  driver who was to take them to San Antonio. If the man were my
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  own brother, Missus Apgar, I could not trust him more implicitly than I
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  trust Tustan. I have sent Missus Treadwell and the children with him over the
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  prairies a hundred times. I do so wish I could go with you.
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  So they were really to go in an ambulance anything, my dear Effie,
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  said Hester. So it be not a stage coach, for since Hester's wretched
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  failure in taking care of herself on this great party, she had subsided ignominiously,
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  and she was no longer the chief of the expedition. Effie made all
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  the arrangements. Now the pretense that either knew an inch of the geography had
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  been long since abandoned. At half past seven, an eager waiter at Hester's
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  door announced that the ambiorlence had come. Hester flung the door open, bade
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  him strap her trunk and take it down, gathered one, two, three,
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  four, and took them herself. Fairly ashamed of her own eagerness to
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  see what manner of machine and ambulance might be, she found simply a long
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  canvas topped wagon, lightly sprung, such as she had ridden in on the
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  White Mountains twenty times and had never heard called an ambulance before. There were
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  but two seats in it, where there might have been three, but as
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  the party was so small, the middle seat had been taken away to make
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  the more room for the luggage. Half amused and half provoked with herself,
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  she turned to meet Effie and see if she would confess to any surprise,
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  Is this an ambulance? I supposed there would be a bed in it,
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  and that I should lie in it all day? And you sit by my
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  side in the costume of Florence Nightingale to feed me with paregoric. A little
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  crestfallen. They hurried through the last breakfast at Austin, and then to the
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  relief of the good natured Dustin, the tall Pennsylvanian, to whose escort they
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  were entrusted. They mounted their chariot and were away a lovely morning. Why
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  it is really made a hester of all the day in the year, the
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  air fresh and even bracing, the sun just clouded without the slightest risk of
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  rain dust laid. Who shall say how, since no rain had fallen for
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  weeks, Light hearts, light freight, a cheerful driver, and a good
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  team. Who could ask for a better way to spend May day? Effie's
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  first chance for a sketch, and that only the bareest suggestion of values and
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  of groups, was as you leave the city at the ford of the Colorado,
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  when the river chooses to rise, and nobody knows when that will be.
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  It is twenty three hundred feet wide. On this May day, it
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  was perhaps sixty yards across. The horses were to be watered before crossing it,
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  and at that moment a drove of beautiful cattle, a drove to fill
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  rosa boneau ne Juno, herself with rapture, chose to file across the river
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  at just middle distance from them, so prettily grouped, and the varied figures
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  standing out so well against the water and the distant skyline. Then the ambulance
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  was to ford. As soon as the stage had gone by. Neither of
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  the girls had ever forded a river. At the bottom of each heart was
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  sober certainty that they should be swept into the Gulf of Mexico. But each
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  was ashamed to tell the other. And as in truth there was no danger
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  nor shadow of danger, they could enjoy the wonderful picture all the way,
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  a hard pull across the dry river bed, and then began the wonders of
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  eighty miles drive through a park of matchless beauty. Yes, everybody says an
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  English park, like the sturdy englishman to his birth dozed wife in the pullman
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  high praise to our English friends. Twenty years ago Robin said, of these
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  prairies like a park. Good mister Flint keeps saying, you should think you
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  were in a park. That clever englishwoman thirty years after says, it is
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  all like a park. And as the girls dipped into mister Olmsted's Texas from
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  time to time, they could not but ask whether inspirations from these Texan parks
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  had not stolen since into the masterpieces of his success. The road was perfect.
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  It would not have been so after rain, But now the most sensitive
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  critic could not ask anything better. Sometimes it was fenced in much more often,
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  not almost never was at exactly level, not once so steep, but
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  that the horses kept the even tenor of their trot. Oh, Effie,
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  look here, Hester, do look there see that distance? Would you not
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  be certain it was? The sea? Was ever anything grouped like those trees?
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  Had you any idea that a prairie was so beautiful? Do you suppose
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  this is a bona fide prairie. There are so many trees, and so
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  on and so on, and then the flowers may day. Indeed, Hester
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  had been in Switzerland at the end of June years on years before, and
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  often had she raptured to Effie about the day's ride, in which they collected
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  a hundred varieties of flowers, most of them new to them. Here was
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  the same experience in a new form. And these were not horrid, coarse
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  things, as people say. Prairie flowers are any one of the succession of
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  the nosegays, which Tom Dustin gathered for them, or which for themselves the
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  girls gathered in one or another irresistible escape from the carriage would have been a
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  beauty and a joy in any competition with any collection. Mistress Botanist Hester,
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  Prime Botanist extraordinary to the expedition, beside herself for names, and the well
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  battered gray living in the bottom of the wagon proved of more use to press
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  things in which were to be sent home to Letitia, to soak out in
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  water and analyze, than for a guide in nomenclature. The gray stood bold
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  to its determination to pass no limit south of Kentucky and Virginia. He won't
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  pass it, said Effie proudly. But we have this list may well be
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  compared with the lists of Swiss travel dividing by Old Ransom's floral system, in
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  which there were nine classes of flowers based on the several tints of the rainbow
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  there were. To use his language, one them as bears. The white
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  blossom in this class was the original eupatorium of Ransom, and two or three
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  other varieties. Be it said to the unlearned that when a botanical writer wants
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  to say he has seen a thing himself, he marks it with the mark
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  of exclamation, and when he doubts the remark of another, he appends an
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  interrogation. The girls as they made their list, when Dustin was watering or
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  at other writing spots, delighted in the immense ejaculations, which lighted it up.
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  It went on, two lamb as bears. The violet blossom is magenta,
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  violet, no child magenta is red? Are you color blind? Then
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  I shall put in purple lupin and false loopin here put in what you choose.
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  You already see the radical error of ransom system. But down went the
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  two loopins, with two marks of wonder exclamation point exclamation point and purple verbenis,
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  of which there were acres on acres of color. Had to come in
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  here, three lamb as bear, here's the indigo blossom. Hester was blank.
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  Here she had only two or three vile hyssops, which she could have
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  gathered in any barnyard. But when they came to four lamb as bears the
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  blue blossom, she put down lupens and blue verbenaes. What is that about
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  that horticultural society which offered a prize for blue verbans? Was it all humbug?
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  Or why did not somebody come here and win the sordid dross. Here
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  I must put in many surprise marks to show my scorn of the older observer.
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  But these things were only preliminary. Blue flowers, said Hester, I
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  always distrusted blue flowers. My Verbenas at home, always had a passion for
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  running into the class of purples, though I never got the prize. It
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  was not till she came to her reds that she ran rampant. This magenta
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  blossom which she wanted to put in from which the maidens of the region call
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  wild hollyhock, the painted cup only red reminiscence of New England, the Star
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  of Texas, an exquisitely cut flower of very delicate pink. These were alone
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  enough to give dignity to class number five of the ransomic system, so different
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  from lands where the ruling color is yellow on grass. But when the girls
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  had come to class number five, their classification ended in their first reasonable access
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  of terror. Judge Treadwell had not told them that ten days before the mail
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  coach had been attacked by highwaymen and all their watches and money taken from the
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  passengers, but this was really the reason why he had entrusted them to Dustin
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  and an ambulance. The private team is safer because nobody knows it is coming.
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  Effie had seen on a handbill in the post office offering a reward that
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  the mail had been raw, but she had not mentioned it to Hester.
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  Hester had seen the same reward offered in a Galaston newspaper, but she had
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  not shown it to Effie, and had torn the paper to bits lest she
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  should see it. Duston was no more anxious about the matter than he was
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  at the danger of a thunderbolt, because he had heard of thunderbolts, but
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  he had too much sense to speak of it to the ladies. All the
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  same, however, when as they gathered up his reins after watering the horses,
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  looking back on the eastern horizon, he saw two men perhaps two miles
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  away, pressing their horses towards them on a hard gallop. Duston stepped back
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  into the ambulance rather too hastily, and he gave the horses rather an untimely
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  and ungracious cut, for Dustan meant to push them beyond the strip of woodland
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  which they were entering before these horsemen overhauled him. It was in this very
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  strip of woodland that the mail had been overhauled. The sun was now setting
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  as far as ever in advance of them, though they had traveled towards him
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  so long. The accent of Dustan's cry to his team was unfortunate, Hester,
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  more nervous than usual, perhaps caught the alarm she had noticed his look
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  back and the sudden change of his manner. She thrust her body out of
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  the carriage, looked back and saw the horsemen against the eastern sky. It
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  is the robbers, It is the robbers. She sobbed as she fell back,
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  and Dustin did not say her no, but he cut the horses again
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  with that same merciless lash, which the ladies had never seen before. Effie
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  Atgar thrust her body out on her side. She saw the two horsemen also.
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  She said no word, but she detached her watch and chain. She
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  wrapped them in her handkerchief with her purse, and she crowded the hole into
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  the bottom of the bag of corn which Duston had for his horses. She
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  bade Hester to do the same with hers. A stern chase is a long
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  chase, and the two bays understood what was expected. The road was rougher
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  in that thicket than in the open prairie, but the ambulance held together,
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  even though it sprang wildly from side to side, and sometimes toppled fearfully as
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  if it would go over. Duston only spoke to his cattle. And the
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  girls said no word to each other or to him, but they knew what
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  he thought the exigency when they saw the horses break into that wild run from
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  the quick trock before, unchecked by him, up a little slope, round
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  a curve in the timber. Then Duston spoke, when we have rounded yon
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  Oak, mum, we shall be in sight of tremlets, and all's well.
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  But Yon Oak was fearfully far away. They had not reached it,
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  no, nor half reached it. When they could hear horses hoofs behind them,
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  then they could hear voices. Hold up, Hold up, tom Dustin,
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  hold up. But tom Duston this time really swore at his horse,
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  as though he had never been known to be profane before, and cut more
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  unmercifully than ever, rattaitut, rattaitut. How fearfully near the hoofs came,
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  and at last, though the road was narrow, a white horse dashed by
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  them. Will you hold up? I say? End of Chapter thirteen.