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Show CHAP. III. ROUGH-AND-TUMBLE.-MR.. MACARTHY. 183 tion of words, in hearing a by-stander apply to the Founder of Christianity the "Mr." which is the "Kyrios" of the West, and is always prefixed to "Joseph Smith:" he stated that the mission of the latter was " far ahead of" that of the former prophet, which, by-the-by, is not the strict Mormon doctrine. My companion and his family preferred as usual the interior of the mail-wagon, and it was well that they did so; after a couple of hours entered Mr. Macarthy, very drunk and " fighting mad." He called for supper, but supper was past and gone, so he supped upon "fids" of raw meat. Excited by this lively food, he began a series of caprioles, which ended, as might be expected, in a rough-and-tumble with the other three youths who occupied the hard floor of the ranch. To Mr. Macarthy's language on that occasion horresco referens; every word was apparently English, but so perverted, misused, and mangled, that the home reader would hardly have distinguished it from High-Dutch: e. g., "I'm intire mad as a meat-axe ; now du don't,' I tell ye; say, you, shut up in a winkin', or I'll be chawed up if I don't run over you; 'can't come that 'ere tarnal carryin' on over me," and-0 si sic omnia! As no weapons, revolvers, or bowie-knives were to the fore, I thought the best thing was to lie still and let the storm blow over, which it did in a quarter of an hour. Then, all serene, Mr. Macarthy called for a pipe, excused himself ceremoniously to himself for taking the liberty with the "Cap's." meerschaum solely upon the grounds that it was the only article of the kind to be found at so late an hour, and presently fell into a deep slumber upon a sleeping contrivance composed of a table for the upper and a chair for the lower portion of his person. I envied him the favors of Morpheus : the fire soon died out, the cold wind whistled through the crannies, and the floor was knotty and uneven. Echo Kanyon. August 21th. At 8 15 A.M. we were once more en voyage. Mr. Macarthy was very red-eyed as he sat on the stool of penitence: what seemed to vex him most was having lost certain newspapers directed to a friend and committed to his private trust, a mode of insuring their safe arrival concerning which he had the day before expressed the highest opinion. After fording Bear Biver-this part of the land was quite a grave-yard--we passed over rough ground, and, descending into a bush, were shown on a ridge to the right a huge Stonehenge, a crown of broken and somewhat lanceolate perpendicular conglomerates or cemented pudding-stones called not inappropriately Needle Rocks. At Egan's Creek, a tributary of the Yellow Creek, the wild geraniums and the willows flourished despite the six feet of snow which sometimes lies in these bottoms. We then crossed Yellow Creek, a water trending northeastward, and feeding, like those hitherto forded, Bear Biver: the bottom, a fine broad meadow, was a favorite camping-ground, as |
