This road is notorious for the depredations of the “road agents,” as white highwaymen are politely called, red or yellow robbers being still “darned thieves.” At Desert Wells, the coach had been robbed, a week before I passed, by men who had first tied up the ranchmen, and taken their places to receive the driver and passengers when they arrived. The prime object with the robbers is the treasury box of “dust,” but they generally “go through” the passengers, by way of pastime, after their more regular work is done. As to firing, they have a rule--a simple one. If a passenger shoots, every man is killed. It need not be said that the armed driver and armed guard never shoot; they know their business far too well. Close here we came on hot and cold springs in close conjunction, flowing almost from the same “sink-hole”--the original twofold springs, I hinted to our driver, that Poseidon planted in the Atlantic isle. He said that “some one of that name” had a ranch near Carson, so I “concluded” to drop Poseidon, lest I should say something that might offend. From Desert Wells the alkali grew worse and worse, but began to be alleviated at the ranches by irrigation of the throat with delicious Californian wine. The plain was strewn with erratic boulders, and here and there I noticed sharp sand-cones, like those of the Elk Mountain country in Utah. At last we dashed into the “city” named after the notorious Kit Carson, of which an old inhabitant has lately said: “This here city is growing plaguy mean--there was only one man shot all yesterday.” There was what is here styled an “altercation” a day or two ago. The sheriff tried to arrest a man in broad daylight in the single street which Carson boasts. The result was that each fired several shots at the other, and that both were badly hurt. The half-deserted mining village and wholly ruined Mormon settlement stand grimly on the bare rock, surrounded by weird-looking depressions of the earth, the far-famed “sinks,” the very bottom of the plateau, and goal of all the plateau streams--in summer dry, and spread with sheets of salt; in winter filled with brine. The Sierra Nevada rises like a wall from the salt pools, with a fringe of giant, leafless trees hanging stiffly from its heights--my first forest since I left the Missouri bottoms. The trees made me feel that I was really across the continent, within reach at least of the fogs of the Pacific--on “the other side;” that there was still rough, cold work to be done was clear from the great snow-fields that showed through the pines with that threatening blackness that the purest of snows wear in the evening when they face the east.