Roughing It by Mark Twain (large screen ebook reader .txt) 📕

Absurdity could go no farther. We shook hands and agreed to say no more about “reform” and “examples to the rising generation.”

The station we were at was at the verge of the Twenty-six-Mile Desert. If we had approached it half an hour earlier the night before, we must have heard men shouting there and firing pistols; for they were expecting some sheep drovers and their flocks and knew that they would infallibly get lost and wander out of reach of help unless guided by sounds. While we remained at the station, three of the drovers arrived, nearly exhausted with their wanderings, but two others of their party were never heard of afterward.

We reached Carson in due time, and took a rest. This rest, together with preparations for the journey to Esmeralda, kept us there a week, and the delay gave us the opportunity to be present at the trial of the great landslide case of Hyde vs. Morgan⁠—an episode which is famous in Nevada to this day. After a word or two of necessary explanation, I will set down the history of this singular affair just as it transpired.

The mountains are very high and steep about Carson, Eagle and Washoe Valleys⁠—very high and very steep, and so when the snow gets to melting off fast in the Spring and the warm surface-earth begins to moisten and soften, the disastrous landslides commence. The reader cannot know what a landslide is, unless he has lived in that country and seen the whole side of a mountain taken off some fine morning and deposited down in the valley, leaving a vast, treeless, unsightly scar upon the mountain’s front to keep the circumstance fresh in his memory all the years that he may go on living within seventy miles of that place.

General Buncombe was shipped out to Nevada in the invoice of Territorial officers, to be United States Attorney. He considered himself a lawyer of parts, and he very much wanted an opportunity to manifest it⁠—partly for the pure gratification of it and partly because his salary was Territorially meagre (which is a strong expression). Now the older citizens of a new territory look down upon the rest of the world with a calm, benevolent compassion, as long as it keeps out of the way⁠—when it gets in the way they snub it. Sometimes this latter takes the shape of a practical joke.

One morning Dick Hyde rode furiously up to General Buncombe’s door in Carson city and rushed into his presence without stopping to tie his horse. He seemed much excited. He told the General that he wanted him to conduct a suit for him and would pay him five hundred dollars if he achieved a victory. And then, with violent gestures and a world of profanity, he poured out his grief. He said it was pretty well known that for some years he had been farming (or ranching as the more customary term is) in Washoe District, and making a successful thing of it, and furthermore it was known that his ranch was situated just in the edge of the valley, and that Tom Morgan owned a ranch immediately above it on the mountain side. And now the trouble was, that one of those hated and dreaded landslides had come and slid Morgan’s ranch, fences, cabins, cattle, barns and everything down on top of his ranch and exactly covered up every single vestige of his property, to a depth of about thirty-eight feet. Morgan was in possession and refused to vacate the premises⁠—said he was occupying his own cabin and not interfering with anybody else’s⁠—and said the cabin was standing on the same dirt and same ranch it had always stood on, and he would like to see anybody make him vacate.

“And when I reminded him,” said Hyde, weeping, “that it was on top of my ranch and that he was trespassing, he had the infernal meanness to ask me why didn’t I stay on my ranch and hold possession when I see him a-coming! Why didn’t I stay on it, the blathering lunatic⁠—by George, when I heard that racket and looked up that hill it was just like the whole world was a-ripping and a-tearing down that mountain side⁠—splinters, and cordwood, thunder and lightning, hail and snow, odds and ends of hay stacks, and awful clouds of dust!⁠—trees going end over end in the air, rocks as big as a house jumping ’bout a thousand feet high and busting into ten million pieces, cattle turned inside out and a-coming head on with their tails hanging out between their teeth!⁠—and in the midst of all that wrack and destruction sot that cussed Morgan on his gatepost, a-wondering why I didn’t stay and hold possession! Laws bless me, I just took one glimpse, General, and lit out’n the county in three jumps exactly.

“But what grinds me is that that Morgan hangs on there and won’t move off’n that ranch⁠—says it’s his’n and he’s going to keep it⁠—likes it better’n he did when it was higher up the hill. Mad! Well, I’ve been so mad for two days I couldn’t find my way to town⁠—been wandering around in the brush in a starving condition⁠—got anything here to drink, General? But I’m here now, and I’m a-going to law. You hear me!”

Never in all the world, perhaps, were a man’s feelings so outraged as were the General’s. He said he had never heard of such high-handed conduct in all his life as this Morgan’s. And he said there was no use in going to law⁠—Morgan had no shadow of right to remain where he was⁠—nobody in the wide world would uphold him in it, and no lawyer would take his case and no judge listen to it. Hyde said that right there was where he was mistaken⁠—everybody in town sustained Morgan; Hal Brayton, a very smart lawyer, had taken his case; the courts being in vacation, it was to be