It was nearly six o'clock before Pine Flat, five miles up the mountain, was reached, and during the last two or three miles I could not walk without staggering sometimes, and often stopping to rest, I was so faint. But a good meal of eggs and venison fixed me all right, and the next morning the summit was reached without much trouble, and only six miles of coasting remained. But such coasting! The grade is not as steep as in some parts of the Yosemite route, Priest's Hill, for instance, on the Big Oak Flat route, but the road is much narrower and decidedly more crooked. It twists around the sides of the mountain and runs so close to the edge of precipices two or three hundred feet high, that it must make one's head swim to ride round these turns in a stage.
Clark Foss, the celebrated driver, who owned this route, and was one of the twenty-five different men in different places who drove Horace Greeley on the ride when he promised "to get him there in time" (every one who ever came to California has heard the story; it is the worst chestnut ever perpetrated, but they still retail it), died about a year ago, and his son, Charlie Foss, now drives the six-horse open wagon. For three or four miles I was in constant dread of meeting the stage coming up, and had I done so on some of those oxbow shaped curves in the road, where there is not a foot of space on either side of the hubs, between a ledge of rocks and a precipice, the result can well be imagined. The stage suddenly appeared around one of these very curves, when but a few seconds before, I had been thrown off upon my feet by a rock in the road and was walking, but although I was told I should hear the stage coming, I did not till the leaders' heads appeared around the ledge of rocks, not ten feet ahead of me. But for striking the rock in the road, I should surely have been coasting, and the result would have been, in all probability, I should have gone over the edge, or the horses and stage would have done so. Then what a volley of questions was fired at me by the dozen passengers aboard. The driver stopped, and for five minutes it seemed as if everyone in the stage was talking and asking questions, all at the same time. Some of the passengers had seen me before and knew of the trip, and as the stage disappeared around the curve with the gentlemen waving their hats and the ladies their handkerchiefs, and all wishing me good luck, the pleasant impression left with me will long be remembered, not only for the good feeling shown towards me, but because our meeting on that sharp curve at one of the most dangerous points of this dangerous mountain road might have terminated so differently and perhaps disastrously.