Flip, a California Romance

red springs,and the muffled beat of plunging hoofs, it held out a promise ofsheltered coolness and green silences beyond. Sunburned and anxiousfaces yearned toward it from the dizzy, swaying tops of stagecoaches,from lagging teams far below, from the blinding white canvas covers of"mountain schooners," and from scorching saddles that seemed to weighdown the scrambling, sweating animals beneath. But it would seem thatthe hope was vain, the promise illusive. When the terrace was reached itappeared not only to have caught and gathered all the heat of thevalley below, but to have evolved a fire of its own from some hiddencrater-like source unknown. Nevertheless, instead of prostrating andenervating man and beast, it was said to have induced the wildestexaltation. The heated air was filled and stifling with resinousexhalations. The delirious spices of balm, bay, spruce, juniper, yerbabuena, wild syringa, and strange aromatic herbs as yet unclassified,distilled and evaporated in that mighty heat, and seemed to fire witha midsummer madness all who breathed their fumes. They stung, smarted,stimulated, intoxicated. It was said that the most jaded and foot-sorehorses became furious and ungovernable under their influence; weariedteamsters and muleteers, who had exhausted their profanity in theascent, drank fresh draughts of inspiration in this fiery air, extendedtheir vocabulary, and created new and startling forms of objurgation.It is recorded that one bibulous stage-driver exhausted descriptionand condensed its virtues in a single phrase: "Gin and ginger." Thisfelicitous epithet, flung out in a generous comparison with his favoritedrink, "rum and gum," clung to it ever after.