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Show I J8 of Gold to the Funeral Range A Desert Ride to Greenwater (Written for.Good win's., Weekly) I (By Karl Von Herrmann.) When they brought the good news from Aix to Ghent the stunt was considered spectacul"v enough to merit embalming in a metrical spasm by a celebrated poet. The poet thus inspired lived, however, in an age when the chug of an automobile had not yet been heard in the land and long before polite society chat was redolent of gasoline. Wherefore, I am sorry for Browning. Brown-ing. I have been sorry for him three days on end. For I have just participated in a hastening performance which had the Aix of Ghent endeavor, en-deavor, or Sheridan's ride, or any mythological contortion of Pegasus left at the post. Were I a bard of sufficient caliber I would like to sing my feelings on this subject. But being merely what a world-worn news editor once termed a collector and disseminator of corral dust, I must plod un-wil1' un-wil1' ly in prose. I have, then, been careering over the sun-smitten sun-smitten deserts of Nevada in a fifty-horsepower Pope Toledo, with a bonanza in the balance, and the melancholy peaks of the Funeral Range for bjal. When I add that the temperature on those same sun-smitten deserts occasionally climbed to 135 degrees Fahrenheit; that water for drinking cost us in places a dollar by the canteen; that wo slept one night on the dirt floor of a mining camp grocery, with rats as big as puppies cavorting ca-vorting on our countenances; that we had luncheon lunch-eon on the summit of Monkeyface mountain, from which we could peer at the pasty expanse . of Death valley, a sheer five thousand feet below, and that the bonanza turned out to be the one best bet, it may bo understood that we nad a perfectly splendid time. Certainly! The promulgators of this strenuous excursion were the gentlemen who direct the destinies of the L. M. Sullivan Trust company, a Goldfleld jgpr-poration jgpr-poration with a habit of striking twelve. These gentlemen, from the cushioned ease of their most ! private offices, were suddenly seized with a notion no-tion that there was something in Greenwater, a I speck on the map in Inyo county, California, which they wanted. Accordingly, like old King 3 Cole, they called for things. The automobile was I one of the things; the chauffeur known in pri- vate life as William DeJarlis, and as Wild Bill I when in action was another. Then the rest of I us were informed, casually, as a man might in- I form you of a desire to buy a drink, that we !were to forthwith climb into that automobile, with nary a razor, tooth brush, extra shirt, or alternative sock among us, and depart. The quar- A Breakdown in the Desert. Funeral Range, in the Background, tette of victims thus selected was composed of Jack Campbell, the Sullivan's sonsoy mine manager, man-ager, who can split postal cards at forty paces with a revolver bullet, who can smell gold hld- i den in lignum vitaei and who is a reputed bon vivlante whatever that is; Jack Reynolds, who used to train with the Salisbury boys and who is now a broker broking in Goldfleld; Harry Hed-rick, Hed-rick, a spry linguist who turns out reams of copy bristling with technical verbiage that looks like a Russian ballad; and myself, the inquisitive tenderfoot. ten-derfoot. We departed shortly after two, on a Sunday afternoon. Our way for some eighty miles lay over a road which Nevada automobilists have out through the stretch of desert between Goldfleld and Bullfrog. As roads go, in a country where macadam is never mentioned and where asphalt is something that you read about in guide books, this road was very decent. Be bowled over it at about forty miles an hour, Wild Bill being in a mild mood, and so reached a shack called Farmer's Farm-er's Station, where everybody, including the car, had a drink, and where Jack Campbell perforated a sidewinder which showed a disposition to keep .Wild Bill from cranking up. Meeting another chug-chug outfit a few minutes later, we paused once more to compare notes and brands and things, and when we finally resumed our journey the sotting sun had turned Stonewall mountain into a hunk of gold. On we sped, through dreary wastes of sagebrush sage-brush and gray sand and alkali daubs, with here and there a gaunt yucca palm, and here and there Main Street in Greenwater. a stretch of chapparal; passing the big ranch of Panamint Pete, Chief of the Shoshones, who has made the desert blossom, and so, at nightfall, into Beatty. There isn't much to see in Beatty a straggling street of tents and shacks, with a hotel at the farther end. But the hotel was built when the boom was on, and cost $20,000. And it is a good hotel still. We had a chicken dinner there; in fact, being somewhat hungry, about three dinners and among our companions at the table were John Poe, famous in Princeton's football foot-ball history, and John Sparks, Nevada's governor. gover-nor. The bartender, so we heard from those who went to the bar for toothpicks, was a graduate of Columbia. And I remember trying some close harmony with the bartender and Poe, just before be-fore Wild Bill began to clamor that we must bo on our way. We spent that night in the bungalow of Cur-tiss Cur-tiss Mann, at Rhyolite a dream of a bungalow, furnished in Mission oak, with leather upholstery, uphol-stery, with brass beds and a porcelain bath. And early the next morning we sot forth once more. Our road thereafter lay across the Amargosa desert, hot as well, hot as the Amargosa desert; with ruts six inches deep in the abominable road, with dust like flour filled ,with pepper, with no rest for the roving, half-blinded eye, except the sprawling, frowning masses of Funeral Range, - tfl marching on our right. ' At noon we paused at Resurrection Point, or Kelly's Well, "an oasis II marking the re-rislng of the Amargosa river, and H here, sizzling in the sun, we halted long enough jfl to eat bacon and eggs and pie, in the company of jH a score of mule skinners, whose wagons and anl- mals foregathered around the old wooden bucket. Before we left Kelly's we were joined by "S three automobiles, all of them Thomases, and j '''fl learned with gratification that while we had not H even stopped to change a spark plug, they had 'H The Way They Carry Water to Greenwater. gone through the whole automobilist's category jfl of curses one of them even having had to 'M change tubes four times. They trained us, the 'fl story told, into the twenty-four mile chasm that leads up from Kelly's to Greenwater a chasm called by some Morning After Canyon, because it :' lakes so much water to get through it, and by others known as Dead Horse Gulch, from the ''M equine skeletons with which thirst has littered 11 Lho trail. To make that twenty-four mile climb iH took us nearly six hours. The engine vorked like a watch, Wild Bill was at his best; but the road, sandy and crooked and steep, and some- '; times strangely like quicksand, was beyond de- sciiption. ' jH We reached Greenwater at sunset, when the 9 afterglow was painting all that tumultuous chaos of peaks in mauve and pink and russet and pur- jflfl pie. We stayed there two days, visiting all the circumjacent copper mines, nailing our own 'H bonanza. And we made the run back to Gold- field in ten hours, though even on the steep jH down grade of Dead Horse Gulch we had to use jH the intermediate speed to plow our way, and ended our IGO-mile run with nothing broken, with every tiro intact, and with the engine purring like a kitten. Then we had a few baths and several shaves. jH |