about. We just went up, and then we went down. It took six horses half a
day to draw us up the last mile--some twenty thousand seconds of
conviction on my part (unexpressed, of course; see side talk) that the
next second would find us dashed to everlasting splinters. And it took
ten minutes to get us down!

Of the two, I preferred going up. If you have ever climbed a greased pole
during Fourth of July festivities in your grandmother's village, you
will understand.

When we got to the bottom there was something different. Our driver
informed us that in two hours we should be eating dinner at the ranch
house in Jackson's Hole, where we expected to stop for a while to
recuperate from the past year's hard grind and the past two weeks of
travel. This was good news, as it was then five o'clock and our midday
meal had been light--despite the abundance of coffee, soggy potatoes,
salt pork, wafer slices of meat swimming in grease, and evaporated
apricots wherein some nice red ants were banqueting.

"We'll just cross the Snake River, and then it'll be plain sailing," he
said. Perhaps it was so. I was inexperienced in the West. This was what
followed:--Closing the door on the memory of my recent perilous
passage, I prepared to be calm inwardly, as I like to think I was
outwardly. The Snake River is so named because for every mile it goes
ahead it retreats half way alongside to see how well it has been done. I
mention this as a pleasing instance of a name that really describes the
thing named. But this is after knowledge.

About half past five, we came to a rolling tumbling yellow stream where
the road stopped abruptly with a horrid drop into water that covered the