you forget all about your life-insurance papers
and freeze to your pommel with both hands, and cram your poor cold feet
into the stirrups--even in warm weather they'll be good and cold--and
all your vital organs come up in your throat, where you can taste them.
If anybody had shot me through the middle just about then he would have
inflicted only a flesh wound.

You have come out on a place where the trail clings to the sheer side of
the dizziest, deepest chasm in the known world. One of your legs is
scraping against the everlasting granite; the other is dangling over
half a mile of fresh mountain air. The mule's off hind hoof grates and
grinds on the flinty trail, dislodging a fair-sized stone that flops
over the verge. You try to look down and see where it is going and find
you haven't the nerve to do it--but you can hear it falling from one
narrow ledge to another, picking up other boulders as it goes until
there must be a fair-sized little avalanche of them cascading down. The
sound of their roaring, racketing passage grows fainter and fainter,
then dies almost out, and then there rises up to you from those
unutterable depths a dull, thuddy little sound--those stones have
reached the cellar! Then to you there comes the pleasing reflection that
if your mule slipped and you fell off and were dashed to fragments, they
would not be large, mussy, irregular fragments, but little teeny-weeny
fragments, such as would not bring the blush of modesty to the cheek of
the most fastidious.

Only your mule never slips off! It is contrary to a mule's religion and
politics, and all his traditions and precedents, to slip off. He may
slide a little and stumble once in a while, and he may, with malice
aforethought, try to scrape you off against the outjutting shoulders of
the trail; but he positively will not slip off. It is not because he is
interested in you. A tourist on the canyon's rim a simple tourist is to
him and nothing more; but he has no intention of getting himself hurt.
Instinct has taught that mule it would be to him a highly painful
experience to fall a couple of thousand feet or so and light on a pile
of rocks; and therefore, through motives that are purely selfish, he
studiously refrains from so doing. When the Prophet of old wrote, "How
beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him," and so on, I judge he
had reference to a mule on a narrow trail.

My mule had one very disconcerting way about him--or, rather, ab