The gloom was occasionally dispelled. Somewhere in Nevada, “a man with a nice long beard, wearing well-used denims, tied his pack-mule to the hitching-post, then rode the other one, his mount, into the bar where we were consoling ourselves,” Klári writes. “Nobody blinked an eye, the bartender handed the man a glass of beer and a bucket of the same brew was placed in front of the mule. The whole scene was a mute play; it seemed completely routine, the man paid, he and his beast drank up and quietly left the place.”
