ien-p'u a
couple of li away. The _fu-song_ were making considerable hue and cry
because Rusty had rolled thirty feet down the incline, and as I looked I
saw the animal get up and commence neighing because he had lost sight of
us. He was in the habit of wandering on, nibbling a little here and a
little there, and rarely gave trouble unless in chasing an occasional
horse caravan, when he gave my men some fun in getting him again into
line.

It was not yet midday, and we had four hours' good going. So I
calculated. Not so my men. They could not be prevailed upon to budge,
and knowing the Chinese just a little, I reluctantly kept quiet. It was
entirely unreasonable to expect them to go on to Ch'u-tung, ninety li
away--it was impossible. And I learnt that the reason they would not go
on was that no house this side of that place was good enough to put a
horse into, even a Chinese horse, and they would not dream of taking me
on under those conditions. There was not even a hut available for the
traveler, so they said. I had come over difficult country, plodding
upwards on tiptoe and then downwards with a lazy swing from stone to
stone for miles. Throughout the day we had been going through fine
mountain forest, everywhere peaceful and beautiful, but it had been hard
going. In the morning a heavy frost lay thick and white about us, and by
10:30 a.m. the sun was playing down upon us with a merciless heat as we
tramped over that little red line through the green of the hill-sides.
Often in this march was I tempted to stay and sit down on the sward,
but I had proved this to be fatal to walking. In traveling in Yuen-nan
one's practice should be: start early, have as few stops as possible,
when a stop _is_ made let it be long enough for a real rest. In
Szech'wan, where the tea houses are much more frequent, men will pull up
every ten li, and generally make ten minutes of it. In Yuen-nan these
welcome refreshment houses are not met with so often, and little
inducement is held out for the coolies to stop, but upon the slightest
provocation they will stop for a smoke. On this walking trip I made it a
rule to be off by seven o'clock, stop twice for a quarter of an hour up
to tiffin (my men stopped oftener), when our rest was often for an hour,
so that we were all refreshed and ready to push on for the fag-end of
the stage. We generally were done by four or five o'clock. And I should
be the last in the world to deny that by this time I ha