CACHAPES, AND OTHER THINGS.
CACHAPES, AND OTHER THINGS.
To a man coming from the Southern Camps to the forest belt of Santa Fe,
the cachape must appeal as something peculiar to the district, and most
essentially local. He has had a surfeit of carts with two wheels, each
12 feet high, and dragged by anything from sixteen to twenty-eight
horses; Russian carts, like Thames punts on four wheels, no longer amuse
him, while American spring carts are much too European to warrant
unslinging the Kodak. But the cachape--here is something not to be
lightly passed over. Lying idle it may not strike him at first sight as
a cart, but rather as a remnant of some revolution, when, tired of
waging light operatic war, the army disbanded, leaving their
gun-carriages to serve more peaceful purposes.
Two pairs of short, squat, enormously powerful wheels; between, and
joining them, a roughly hewn pole and various chains in an apparently
hopeless tangle. Yet see them in work--every niche doing its work, every
chain taking ten per cent, more strain than it was ever intended to
take, creaking, groaning, crashing into holes, crawling laboriously over
snaps and trunks to fall again with its load of four tons with a
jerking, swaying, and straining as though struggling to free itself from
its load, and you recognise the _raison d'etre_ of the queer little
cart.
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