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Yellowstone Nights

by Herbert Quick · English · Gutenberg #40587 · 407,900 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Yellowstone Nights

Author: Herbert Quick


        
Release date: August 26, 2012 [eBook #40587]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YELLOWSTONE NIGHTS ***

                        YELLOWSTONE NIGHTS

                         By HERBERT QUICK

    AUTHOR OF "ALLADIN & CO.," "VIRGINIA OF THE AIR LANES," ETC.


    GROSSET & DUNLAP
    PUBLISHER NEW YORK

    COPYRIGHT 1911
    THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY




YELLOWSTONE NIGHTS




CHAPTER I


It was August the third--and the rest of it. Being over Montana, and the
Rockies, the skies were just as described by Truthful James. In the
little park between the N. P. Station and the entrance to Yellowstone
Park a stalwart young fellow and a fluffy, lacy, Paquined girl floated
from place to place with their feet seven or eight inches from the
earth--or so it seemed. They disappeared behind some shrubbery and sat
down on a bench, where the young man hugged the girl ferociously, and
she, with that patient endurance which is the wonder and glory of
womanhood, suffered it uncomplainingly. In fact she reciprocated it.

Note that we said a moment ago that they disappeared. From whose gaze?
Not from ours, for we saw them sit and--and what followed. Their
disappearance was from the view of a slender man of medium height who
was off toward the station, inspecting the salvias, the phloxes, the
cannas, the colei, the materials with which the walks were paved, and
the earth in the flower-beds. He looked the near things over with a
magnifying-glass, and scrutinized the far landscape with field-glasses.
When he removed his traveling cap, one saw that he was bald, though not
so bald as he seemed--his weak and neutral hair blended so in color with
the neutral shades of his face and garb.

As he looked at things near and far, from the formal garden of the
little park to the towering peak of Electric Mountain, which flew a
pennon of cloud off to the west, or Sepulcher Mountain, half lost in an
unaccustomed haze to the south, but displaying above the blue its
enormous similitude of a grave, with the stone at head and foot, he made
notes in his huge pocket-book, and in making notes he approached closer
and closer to the big boy and little girl on the bench. In fact, he
stopped on the other side of the bush, and as the lovers kissed for the
tenth time, at least, he stepped round toward them, peering into the top
of the bushes, pencil poised to jot down the cause of the chirping
sound which had greeted his ears.

"I think I heard young birds in this bush," said he.

"You did," responded the young man, blushing.

"This park is full of them," said the girl, rather less embarrassed.

"Did you note the species?" queried he of the glasses. "I seem quite
unable to catch sight of them."

"They are turtle-doves," said the girl.

"Gulls!" said the man.

The girl giggled hysterically. The naturalist was protesting that gulls
never nest in such places, and the young man was becoming hopelessly
confused, when a fourth figure joined the group. He was clad in garments
of the commonest sort--but the girl was at once struck by the fact that
he wore a soft roll collar on his flannel shirt, and a huge red silk
neckerchief. Moreover, he carried a long whip which he trailed after him
in the grass.

"Local color at last!" she whispered to her lover. "I know we're going
to have a shooting or a cow-boy adventure!"

"Well," the new-comer said, "do you go with us, or not, Doc?"

"Go with you?" asked the ornithologist. "Go where?"

"Tour of the Park?" replied the man with the whip. "I'm having hard work
to get a load."

"I think," said the person addressed, "that I can finish my inspection
of the Park on foot. It is, in fact, surprisingly small, and not at all
what I had expected. I have been pacing it off. There are very few acres
in it--"

"I'll be dog-goned," said the man with the whip, "if he don't think
_this_ is the Yellowstone Park! Stranger, look at yon beautiful arch,
erected by Uncle Sam out of hexagonal blocks of basalt! That marks the
entrance to the Wonderland of the World, a matchless nat'ral park of
more'n three thousand square miles, filled with unnat'ral wonders of
nature! This is the front yard of the railroad station. It'll take you
days and days to do the Park--an' years to do it right."

"Oh, in that case," responded the investigator, "of course you may rely
upon my joining you!"

"I want two more, lady," said the driver. "What say?"

"No," said the young man. "We've decided to cut the Park out."

"I've changed my mind, I believe," said the girl. "Let's go!"

"But I thought--"

       *       *       *       *       *

And so the party was made up. It was like one of those strange meetings
that take place on shipboard, on the wharves of ports--wherever fate
takes men in her hands, shakes them like dice, and throws them on the
board--and peeps at them to see what pairs, threes, flushes and other
harmonies make up the strength of the cast.

There were seven of them. In the rear seat of the surrey sat two young
men wearing broad-brimmed Stetsons, and corduroys. Their scarfs were
pronouncedly Windsor, and the ends thereof streamed in the breeze as did
the pennon of cloud from the top of Electric Peak off there in the west.
The one with the long hair and the Dresden-china complexion starting to
peel off at the lips, was the Minor Poet who eked out a living by the
muck-raker's dreadful trade. He spoke of our malefactors of great wealth
as "burglars" and grew soft-eyed and mute as the splendors of the
Yellowstone Wonderland grew upon him. With him was a smaller man,
shorter of hair, and younger in years--which youth was advertised by
its disguise: a dark, silky Vandyke. He was an artist who was known to
the readers of _Puck_, _Judge_ and _Life_ for his thick-lipped "coons"
and shapeless hoboes, and who was here in the Park with the Poet for the
purpose of drawing pictures for a prose poem which should immortalize
both. So much for the rear seat.

The next seat forward was sacred to love. That is, it was occupied by
the Bride and Groom, who called each other by the names of "Billy" and
"Dolly," and tried to behave as if very mature and long-married--with
what success we have seen. It was in pursuance of this scheme that they
deliberately refused to take the rear seat when it was pointedly offered
them by the Poet and the Artist. They were very quiet now, the Bride in
stout shoes, mountain-climbing skirt and sweater, the Groom in
engineer's boots and khaki. In the next seat forward sat the man of
note-books, field-glasses, magnifying-glasses and drabs. The driver
called him at first "Doc"; but soon adopted the general usage by which
he was dubbed "Professor." He was myopic; but proud of his powers of
observation. So wide was his reading that he knew nothing. His tour of
the Park was made as a step toward that mastery of all knowledge which
he had adopted as his goal. At once he saw that the rest of the party
were light-minded children, frittering life away; and at once they took
his measure. This made for mutual enjoyment. Nothing so conduces to good
relations as the proper niching of the members of the party.

With him sat Colonel Baggs, of Omaha, who smoked all the time and quoted
Blackstone and Kent for his seat-mate's Epictetus and Samuel Smiles.
Whenever time hung heavy on the party for sheer lack of power to wonder,
Colonel Baggs restored tonicity to their brains by some far-fetched
argument to which he provoked Professor Boggs, wherein the Colonel
violated all rules and escaped confusion by the most transparent fakir's
tricks, solemnly regarding the Professor with one side of his face, and
winking and grimacing at those behind with the other.

In the driver's seat sat Aconite Driscoll, erstwhile cow-boy, but now
driver of a Yellowstone surrey, with four cayuses in hand, and a whip in
place of the quirt of former years. When you tour the Yellowstone may he
be your guide, driver, protector, entertainer and friend.

So they were seven, as I remarked. The Bride counted out as for I-spy,
"'One, two, three, four, five, six, seven; All good children go to
heaven!'" The Minor Poet said, "'We are seven.'" The Artist quoted,
"'Seven men from all the world'"--and looked at the Bride. "'Back to
Docks again,'" she continued, knowing her Kipling, "'Rolling down the
Ratcliffe Road, drunk and raising Cain.' Thanks for including me as a
man." The Artist bowed. "Anyhow," said the Poet, "'We are seven.'"

They were all in the surrey and Aconite had the reins in hand, his whip
poised, and his lips pursed for the initiatory chirrup, when there put
his foot on the hub the Hired Man, who looked the part and presently
explained that he worked on farms as a regular thing, and who was to be
number eight. "If this seven business is eatin' yeh so bad," said he,
"kain't I make a quadrille of it? I never pay fare, nowheres; but I kin
cook, 'n drive, 'n rustle firewood, 'n drive tent-pins--an' you seem to
have an empty seat. What say?" Aconite looked back into the faces of his
load. All looked at the Bride as commander-in-chief--the Bride nodded.
"Shore!" said Aconite. "Hop in!"

They rolled through the great arch at the entrance, and bowled along the
road in breath-taking style as they crossed bridge after bridge, the
walls of Gardiner Cañon towering on each side with its left-hand copings
crumbling into pinnacles like ruined battlements, on which sat
fishing-eagles as sentinels, their eyes scanning the flashing stream
below. The wild roses were still in sparse bloom; the cottonwood groves
showed splotches of brilliant yellow; the cedars gloomed in steady and
dependable green. Autumn leaves and spring flowers, and over all a sky
of ultramarine.

"See there!" exclaimed the Bride, pointing at the huge stream of hot
water where Boiling River bursts from its opening in the rocks, and
falls steaming into the Gardiner. "What in the world is it--a geyser?"

"That there little spurt," said Aconite, "is where the sink-pipe dreens
off from Mammoth Hot Springs. Don't begin bein' surprised at things like
them!"

The Professor made notes. Colonel Baggs asserted that hot water is hot
water, no matter where found or in whatever quantities, and couldn't be
considered much of a wonder. The Professor took up the gage of battle,
while the carriage wound up the hill, away from the river; but even he
forbore discourse, when the view opened, as the afternoon sun fell
behind the hills, on the steaming terraces and boiling basins of Mammoth
Hot Springs.

They scattered to the near-by marvels, and returned to camp where
Aconite, assisted by the Hired Man, had prepared camp fare for the
party. The Bride and Groom announced their intention to take pot luck
with the rest, though the great hotel was ready for their reception.

"We are honored, I am sure," said Colonel Baggs. "Would that we had a
troupe of performing nightingales to clothe the night with charm fit for
so lovely a member of the party."

"Oh, thank you ever so much," said the Bride, "but I've just proposed to
Billy a plan that will be better than any sort of troupe. We can make
this trip a regular Arabian Nights' entertainment. Tell them, Billy!"

"We're to make a hat pool," said Billy, "and the loser tells a story."

"Good thought!" said the Poet

"I don't understand," protested the Professor.

"Well, then, here you are!" said Billy. "I write all our names on these
slips of paper--Driver, Poet, Artist, Professor--and the rest of us. I
mix them in this Stetson. I pass them to the most innocent of the
party, and one is drawn--"

"Well, let me draw, then!" said the Bride.

"Not on your life!" said Billy. "Here, Professor!"

Amid half-hidden chuckling, the Professor took a slip from the hat and
handed it to the Groom.

"On this ballot," said he, "is written 'The Poet.' That gentleman will
now favor the audience, ladies and gentlemen, with a story."

The moon was climbing through the lodge-pole pines, and the camp was
mystic with the flicker of the firelight on the rocks and trees. The
Poet looked about as if for an inspiration. His eyes fell on the Bride,
so sweet, so cuddleable, so alluring.

"I will tell you a story that occurred to me as we drove along," said
he. "If you don't like tragedy, don't call on a poet for entertainment
in a tragic moment."


A TELEPATHIC TRAGEDY

BEING THE STORY TOLD BY THE MINOR POET

He sat reading a magazine. Chancing upon a picture of the bronze Sappho
which, if you have luck, you will find in the museum at Naples, he
began gazing at it, first casually, then intently, then almost
hypnotically. The grand woman's head with its low masses of hair; the
nose so high as to be almost Roman, so perfect in chiseling as to be
ultra-Greek; the mouth eloquent of divinest passion; the neck, sloping
off to strong shoulders and a bust opulent of charm--it shot through him
an unwonted thrill. It may have arisen from memories of Lesbos,
Mytilene, and the Leucadian Rock. It may have been the direct influence
from her peep-hole on Olympus of Sappho's own Aphrodite. Anyhow, he felt
the thrill.

Possibly it was some subtle effluence from things nearer and more
concrete than either, for as he closed the magazine that he might rarefy
and prolong this pulsing wave of poetry by excluding the distracting
pages from his sight, his vision, resting for an instant upon the ribbon
of grass and flowers flowing back beside the train, swept inboard and
was arrested by a modish hat, a pile of ruddy hair, a rosy ear, the
creamy back and side of a round neck, and the curve of a cheek. A most
interesting phenomenon in wave-interference at once took place. The
hypnotic vibrations of the Sapphic thrill were affected by a new series,
striking them in like phases. The result was the only possible one. The
vibrations went on, in an amplitude increased to the height of their
superimposed crests. No wonder things happened: it is a matter of
surprise that the very deuce was not to pay.

For the hair combined with the hat in a symmetrical and harmonious
whole, in an involved and curvilinear complexity difficult to describe;
but the effect is easy to imagine--I hope. The red-brown coils wound in
and out under a broad brim which drooped on one side and on the other
curled jauntily up, as if consciously recurving from the mass of
marvelous bloom and foliage under it. Dark-red tones climbed up to a
climax of quivering green and crimson in a natural and, indeed,
inevitable inflorescence. But, engrossed by sundry attractive details
below it, his attention gave him a concept of the millinery vastly more
vague and impressionistic than ours.

The sunburst of hair was one of the details. It radiated from a core of
creamy skin from some mystic center concealed under fluffy laciness.
The ear, too, claimed minute attention. It was a marvel of curves and
sinuosities, ivory here, pearl-pink there, its lines winding down to a
dainty lobe lit by a sunset glow, a tiny flame from the lambent furnace
of the heart. Cold science avers that these fairy convolutions are
designed for the one utilitarian purpose of concentrating the
sound-waves for a more efficient impact upon the auditory nerve; but
this is crudely false. They are a Cretan labyrinth for the amazing of
the fancy that the heart may be drawn after--and they are not without
their Minotaur, either!

"Pshaw!" said he to himself. "What nonsense! I'll finish my magazine!"

This good resolution was at once acted upon. He turned his eyes back
along the trail by which they had so unwarrantably wandered--along the
line of coiffure, window, landscape, page, Sappho; describing almost a
complete circle--or quite. As he retraced this path so virtuously, the
living picture shifted and threw into the problem--for a problem it had
now become--certain new factors which seemed to compel a readjustment of
plans. These were a fuller view of the cheek, a half profile of the
nose, and just the tiniest tips of the lips and chin. He forgot all
about Sappho, but the Sapphic vibrations went on increasingly.

The profile--the new one--was, so far, Greek, also. It was still so
averted that there was no danger in amply verifying this conclusion by a
prolonged gaze.

No danger?

Foolhardy man, more imminent peril never put on so smooth a front! Read
history, rash one, and see thrones toppled over, dungeons filled with
pale captives, deep accursed tarns sending up bubbling cries for
vengeance, fleets in flames, plains ravaged, city walls beaten down,
palaces looted, beauty dragged at the heels of lust, all from such gazes
as this of thine. And if you object to history, examine the files of the
nearest _nisi prius_ court. It all comes to the same thing.

Would she turn the deeper seduction of those eyes and lips to view?
Seemingly not, for with every sway of the car they retreated farther
behind the curve of the cheek. This curve was fair and rounded, and for
a while it satisfied the inquiry. What if another cheek be pressed
against that tinted snowy fullness! And what if that other were the
cheek we wot of!

Clearly, said the inward monitor, this will never do! This
Sappho-Aphrodite-Sunburst Syndicate must be resisted.

At the same time--the half concealed being traditionally the most potent
snare of the devil--would it not be in every way safer, as well as more
satisfactory, to have a full view of the face? Were there any truth in
the theory of telepathy the thing might be accomplished. A strong and
continuous exercise of the will acting upon that other will, and the
thing is done.

You see the extent to which the nefarious operations of the syndicate
have been pushed? Unaffected by the malign influence of those waves
meeting in like phases, he would have felt himself no more at liberty to
do this thing than to put his rude hand under the dimpled chin and
ravish a look from the violated eyes.

For all that, he found himself fixing his will upon the turning of that
head. He fancied he saw a rosier glow in the cheek and ear. Surely this
can be no illusion--even the creamy neck glows faintly roseate. And
still he sent out, or imagined he sent out, the thought-waves
commanding the face to turn. And mingled with it was the sense of battle
and the prevision of victory.

Slowly, slowly, like a blossom toward the sun, the head turned, the eyes
directed upward, the lips a little apart. The mouth, the chin, the Greek
nose, the violet eyes, enthralled him for a moment, and swung back out
of sight again. He had won, and, winning, had lost. The neck was rosy
now. He felt himself tremble as once more she turned her head until the
fringed mystery of those upturned eyes lay open to his gaze, though her
glance never really met his. He saw, in one intense, lingering look, the
blue irises, the lighter border about the pupils, the wondrous rays
emanating from those black, mystic flowers; he saw the fine dilated
nostrils, the rosy, perfect lips; he saw the evanescent quiver of
allurement at the corners of the mouth, the white teeth just glinting
from their warm concealment. He saw--

"Oak Grove! All out for Oak Grove! Remember your umbrellas and parcels!"

Thus the brakeman raucously rescuing the victims of wave-interference.
Thus Terminus baffling Aphrodite. Yet not without a struggle do the
sea-born goddess and the sea-doomed poet surrender their unaccomplished
task. He rose, stepped into the aisle, and passed her; then he turned,
looked gravely for a moment into her eyes, and sadly whispered,
"Good-by!"

If surprised, she did not show the fact by the slightest start. Soberly
she dropped her eyelids, seriously she raised them, and with the manner
of one who, breaking intimate converse at the parting-place, bids
farewell to a dear companion, she breathed, "Good-by!"

Said the lady who drove him from the station, "My dear, is it a guilty
conscience or the fate of the race that makes you so--abstracted?"

"A guilty conscience," he laughed, laying a hand on hers. He looked
after the flying train, and smiled, and sighed. "After all," he added,
"I believe it's the fate of the race!"

       *       *       *       *       *

"Is that all?" asked the Hired Man.

The pipes went on glowing and dying like little volcanoes with ephemeral
periods of activity and quiescence. The campers rose one by one and went
to their tents.

"Wasn't that a curious tale?" asked the Bride when they were alone.
"What do you suppose made him think of it as we drove along?"

"Dunno," returned the Groom, kissing the back of her neck. "Don't you
think we'd better take the rear seat to-morrow?"




CHAPTER II


"I shall never, never be able to feel anything like astonishment again!"

So said the Bride as the party took the road again after two days at
Mammoth Hot Springs. Bunsen Mountain had been circumnavigated. Cupid's
Cave had charmed. The Devil's Kitchen had stimulated a flagging faith in
a Personal Adversary, dealing with material utensils of vengeance. The
Stygian Cave, whose deadly vapors had strewed its floor with dead birds,
had been pronounced another of his devices and satanically "horrid." The
iridescent springs, each of which has built up its own basin, like
hanging fountains, were compared to the hanging gardens of Babylon, and
pronounced far more worthy of place among the wonders of the world. The
lovely Undine Falls had comforted them with prettiness after wildness;
and the ogreous Hoodoo Rocks had turned them back to the realm of
shivers. The Professor's note-books were overflowing with memoranda;
and Colonel Baggs alone went unastounded.

"If the place only had a history," said the Minor Poet, "like the
Venusberg, or almost any spot in Europe--"

"Well," said the Colonel, "it's got some history, anyhow. When I was
here before--"

"When was that?" asked the Artist, adding a line or two to a
surreptitious sketch of the Colonel.

"It was thirty-three years ago the latter part of this month," said the
Colonel. "I carried a knapsack in the chase after Chief Joseph and the
Nez Percès. There were pretty average lively times right in this
vicinity with the first tourists, so far as I know, that ever came into
the Park. Some fellows had been up in the Mount Everts country, and to
the lower falls. The Nez Percès rushed them. A fellow named Stewart
found himself looking into the muzzle of the rifle of a Nez Percè, and
made the sign of the cross. The red with the gun, being a pretty fair
Christian as Christians go--the tribe had been converted for thirty
years--as conversions go--refrained from shooting when he saw the sign.
Stewart had a horse that was wild and hard to catch--was wounded and had
no idea he could get within reach of the steed; but when he called, the
horse came to him and stood for him to climb on, for the first and last
time in the history of their relations. Stewart got off with his life."

"Very remarkable," said the Professor, jotting down a note. "Now, how do
you account for that on any known scientific law?"

"It simply wasn't Stewart's time," said the Colonel. "Or there's an
intelligence that operates on other intelligences--even those of
beasts--for our protection. Or we have guardian spirits that can tame
horses. Take your choice, Professor. And right here--maybe where we are
camped--another bit of history was enacted that in the childhood of the
race might ripen into one of those legends the artists deplore the lack
of. The campers here had a nigger cook named Stone--Ben Stone--I
arrested and confined for giving thanks to the Lord after we picked him
up. He was here at Mammoth Hot Springs when a fellow--I forget his
name--was shot. The Nez Percès went by one day and saw him here. Next
day they came back more peeved than before and shot the man. Ben, the
cook, ran, and they after him. He shinned up into one of these
trees--maybe that one there. The Indians lost sight of him, and stopped
under the tree for a conference. Stone nearly died of fright for fear
they would hear his heart beating. He said it sounded like a horse
galloping over rocks. They gave him up and went away. The coast being
clear, a bear--probably an ancestor of these half-tamed beasts that the
Bride photographed last evening--came along and began snuffing about the
trees. Ben's heart began galloping again. The bear reared up and
stretched as if he meant to climb the tree. Ben's heart stopped. After a
while the bear went away. After a day or so the cook came into our camp
and went about giving thanks to the Lord continually, and howling
hallelujahs until nobody could sleep. So we put him under guard, and I
watched him under orders to bust his head if he bothered the throne of
grace any more."

"The army is an irreverent organization," said the Professor.

"It isn't what you'd call devout," assented the Colonel.

"Confound this modern world, anyway!" complained the Poet. "Five hundred
years ago, we'd have evolved a cycle of legends out of those
occurrences!"

"The tales are just as astonishing without legends," insisted the Bride,
"as anything in the world, no matter how deep in fable."

Faring on southward, they passed toward Norris Basin in unastonished
quietude. A flock of pelicans on Swan Lake created no sensation. A trio
of elk in Willow Park crossed the road ahead of the surrey with no
further effect than to arouse the Artist to some remarks on their
anatomical perfection, and to bring to the surface the buried note-book
of Professor Boggs. They stopped at Apollinaris Spring for refreshment,
where the Groom held forth on the commercial possibilities of the
waters, if the government would get off the lid, and let the country be
developed.

"Nix on this conservation game," said he; and nobody argued with him.

At Obsidian Cliff, Mr. Driscoll whoaed up his cayuses to call the
attention of his fares to the fact that here is the only glass road in
the world.

"Glass?" queried the Professor, alighting, microscope in hand. "Really?"

"Shore," assured Aconite. "They cracked the road out of the cliff by
building fires to heat the glass and splashin' cold water to make the
chunks pop out--jelluk breakin' a tumbler washin' up the dishes."

"Oh, I see," said Professor Boggs. "Merely obsidian."

"Merely!" repeated Aconite. "Some folks always reminds me of the folks
that branded old Jim Bridger as a liar becuz o' what he told of this
here region eighty or ninety years ago. He built Fort Bridger, and
Bridger's Peak was named after him, and he discovered Great Salt Lake,
and I guess he wouldn't lie. He found this glass cliff and told about it
then--and everybody said he was a liar. An' he found lots o' things that
ain't on the map. We see a little thread o' country along this road, but
the reel wonders of this Park hain't been seen sence Jim Bridger's
time--an' not then. W'y, once back in this glass belt, he saw an elk
feedin' in plain sight. Blazed away an' missed him. Elk kep' on feedin'.
Blazed away ag'in. Elk unmoved. Bridger made a rush at the elk with his
knife, and run smack into a mountain of this glass so clear that he
couldn't see it, and shaped like a telescope glass that brought things
close. That elk was twenty-five miles off."

"Giddap!" said Colonel Baggs to the horses. "Time to be on our way."

"After all," said the Poet, "we may not have lost the power to create a
mythology."

"Bridger for my money," said the Artist, with conviction.

"Jim Bridger said that," asserted Aconite, "an' I believe him. They
found Great Salt Lake where he said it was, all right, an' Bridger's
Peak, an' the few things we've run across here. You wouldn't believe a
mountain would whistle like a steam engine, would yeh? Well, I'll show
you one--Roarin' Mountain--in less'n four miles ahead--in the actual act
of tootin'."

"I believe all you said, Mr. Driscoll," said the Bride as they sat about
the fire that night. "The glass mountain, the elk and all. After those
indescribable Twin Lakes, the Roaring Mountain, and the Devil's Frying
Pan, stewing, stewing, century after century--that's what makes it so
inconceivable--the thought of time and eternity. The mountains are here
for ever--that's plain; but these things in action--to think that they
were sizzling and spouting just the same when Mr. Bridger was here
ninety years ago, and a million years before that, maybe--it
flabbergasts me!"

"Yes'm," said Aconite. "It shore do."

"You're it, Bride!" said the Hired Man, handing her a slip with "Bride"
written upon it.

"I'm what?" asked the Bride.

"They've sawed the story off on you," returned the Hired Man. "I hope
you'll give a better one than that there Poet told. I couldn't make head
nor tail to that."

"It _was_ rotten," said the Poet, looking at the Bride, "wasn't it?"

"I'm still living in a glass house," said the Bride. "Don't you know
there's only one story a bride can tell?"

"Tell it, tell it!" was the cry--from all but the Poet and the Groom.

"I think I'll retire," said the Groom.

"Off with you into the shadows," said the Poet. "I'll contribute my last
cigar--and we'll smoke the calumet on the other side of the tree where
we can hear unseen."

About them the earth boiled and quivered and spouted. Little wisps of
steam floated through the treetops. There were rushings and spoutings in
the air--for they were in the Norris Geyser Basin. And here the Bride,
sitting in the circle of men, her feet curled under her on a cushion of
the surrey laid on the geyser-heated ground, fixed her eyes on the
climbing moon and told her story.


THE TRIUMPH OF BILLY HELL

THE STORY TOLD BY THE BRIDE

Now that so many of the girls are writing, the desire to express myself
in that way comes upon me awfully strongly, sometimes.

She looked at the Poet, who nodded encouragement and understanding.

And yet a novel seems so complex and poky in the writing, as compared
with a play, which brings one ever so much more exciting success. Louise
Amerland says that all literature is autobiographical. If this is so,
why can't I use my own romance in making a play? I think I could, if I
could once get the scenario to--to discharge, as Billy says. He calls me
a million M. F. condenser of dramatic electricity, but says that it's
all statical, when it ought to flow. But the scenario must be possible,
if I could only get the figures and events juggled about into place.
There's Billy for the hero, and Pa, and the Pruntys, and me for the
heroine, and comic figures like the butler and Miss Crowley and Atkins,
and the crowds in Lincoln Park. I want the statue of Lincoln in it for
one scene.

"That would be great," said the Artist.

After I was "finished" at St. Cecilia's I went into Pa's office as his
secretary. He wasn't very enthusiastic, but I insisted on account of the
sacredness of labor and its necessity in the plan of woman's life having
revealed themselves to me as I read one of Mrs. Stetson's books. Pa
fumed, and said I bothered him; but I insisted, and after a while I
became proficient as a stenographer, and spelled such terms as
"kilowatt," and "microfarad," and "electrolyte," in a way that forced
encomiums from even Pa. Upon this experience I based many deductions as
to the character of our captains of industry, one of which is that they
are the most illogical set in the world, and the more illogical they are
the more industry they are likely to captain.

Take Pa, for instance. He began with a pair of pliers, a pair of
climbers, a lineman's belt, and a vast store of obstinacy; and he has
built up the Mid-Continent Electric Company--for we are an electric
family, though Billy says magnetic is the term.

"Spare me!" prayed the Groom.

But how does Pa order his life? He sends me to St. Cecilia's, which has
no function but to prepare girls for the social swim, and is so
exclusive that he had to lobby shamefully to get me in: and all the time
he gloats--simply _gloats_--over the memory of the pliers, the climbers,
the lineman's belt, and the obstinacy--no, not over the obstinacy, of
course: that is merely what makes him gloat. And he hates Armour
Institute graduates and Tech men poisonously, and wants his force made
up of electricians who have come up, as he says, by hard knocks, and
know the practical side. As if Billy Helmerston--but let me begin at the
beginning.

I was in the office one day superintending Miss Crowley, the chief
stenographer, in getting together the correspondence about an electric
light and power installation in Oklahoma, when, just at the door of the
private office, I met a disreputable figure which towered above me so
far that I could barely make out that it had good anatomical lines and a
black patch over one eye.

I will here deceive no one: it was Billy. He explained afterward that he
possessed better clothes, but had mislaid them somehow, and that the cut
over his eye he got in quelling a pay-night insurrection in his
line-gang out in Iowa, one of whom struck him with a pair of four-hole
connectors. I am sorry to confess that I once felt pride in the fact
that Billy knocked the linemen's heads together--and yet Pa talks of
hard knocks!--until they subsided, the blood, meanwhile, running all
down over his face and clothing and theirs. It was very brutal, in
outward seeming, no matter what plea of necessity may be urged for it.

I almost fell back into the doorway, he was so near and so big. His way
of removing his abominable old hat, and his bow, gave me a queer little
mental jolt, it was so graceful and elegant, in spite of the overalls
and the faded shirt.

"I was referred to this place as Mr. Blunt's office," said he. "Can you
direct me to him?"

Now Pa is as hard to approach as any Oriental potentate; but I supposed
that Billy was one of the men from the factory, and had business, and I
was a little fluttered by the wonderful depth and sweetness of his
voice; so I just said: "This way, please"--and took him in to where Pa
was sawing the air and dictating a blood-curdling letter to a firm of
contractors in San Francisco, who had placed themselves outside the pale
of humanity by failing to get results from our new Polyphase Generator.
(Billy afterward told them what was the matter with it.) I saw that my
workman had picked out an exceedingly unpsychological moment, if he
expected to make a very powerful appeal to Pa's finer instincts.

"Well," roared Pa, turning on him with as much ferocity as if he had
been a San Francisco contractor of the deepest dye, "what can I do for
you, sir?"

"My name is Helmerston," started Billy.

"I'm not getting up any directory," shouted Pa. "What do you want?"

"I'm just through with a summer's line-work in the West," answered
Billy, "and I took the liberty of applying for employment in your
factory. I have--"

"The blazes you did!" ejaculated Pa, glaring at Billy from under his
eyebrows. "How did you get in here?"

I was over at the filing-cases, my face just burning, for I was
beginning to see what I had done. Billy looked in my direction, and as
our eyes met he smiled a little.

"I hardly know, Mr. Blunt," said he. "I just asked my way and followed
directions. Is it so very difficult to get in?"

I saw at once that he was a good deal decenter than he looked.

"Well, what can you do?" shouted Pa.

"Almost anything, I hope," answered Billy. "I've had no practical
experience with inside work; but I have--"

"Oh, yes, I know!" said Pa, in that unfeeling way which experience and
success seem to impart to the biggest-hearted men--and Pa is surely one
of these. "It's the old story. As soon as a dub gets so he can cut over
a rural telephone, or put in an extension-bell, or climb a twenty-five
without getting seasick, he can do 'almost anything.' What one,
definite, concrete thing can you do?"

"For one thing," said Billy icily, "I think I could help some by taking
a broom to this factory floor out here."

"All right," said Pa, after looking at him a moment. "The broom goes!
Give this man an order for a broom. Put him on the pay-roll at seven
dollars a week. Find out who let him in here, and caution whoever it was
against letting it occur again. Call up Mr. Sweet, and tell him I want a
word with him on those Winnipeg estimates. Make an engagement with Mr.
Bayley of the street-car company to lunch with me at the club at two."
And Pa was running in his groove again.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, as he passed me going out.

"Thank you," I answered. "It's of no consequence--"

And then I noticed that he was looking into my eyes in a wistful and
pathetic way, as if protesting against going out. I blushed as I showed
him to the door: and he wasn't the first whose eyes had protested,
either.

"You mustn't violate the rules, Dolly," said Pa, as we crossed the
bridge in the bubble, going home. "You know perfectly well that I can't
say 'no' to these tramps--"

"He wasn't a tramp," said I.

"A perfect hobo," answered Pa. "I know the type well. I have to let
Burns handle them."

"He was very graceful," said I.

"Any lineman is," replied Pa. "They have the best exercise in the world.
If he steals anything, you're responsible, my dear."

I supposed the incident to be closed with my statement that he had nice
eyes, and Pa's sniff; but, in a few days, Pa, who watches the men like a
cat, surprised me by saying that my graceful hobo was all right.

"He gathered up and saved three dollars' worth of beeswax the other men
were wasting, the first day," said Pa. "Melted and strained and put it
in the right place without asking any questions. And then he borrowed a
blow-torch and an iron, and began practising soldering connections. He
looks good to me."

"Me, too," said I.

"Blessed be the hobo," said the Colonel, "for he shall reach paradise!"

It seems strange, now, to think of my hearing these things unmoved. The
dreadful humiliation to which Billy was subjected, the noble fortitude
with which he bore it, and the splendid way in which he uplifted the
menial tasks to which he was assigned, have always reminded me of Sir
Gareth serving as a scullion in Arthur's kitchen. It is not alone in the
chronicles of chivalry--but I must hasten this narrative.

I must not delay even to inform you of the ways in which it was
discovered that Billy could do all sorts of things; that there was no
blue-print through which his keen eye could not see, and no engineering
error--like that in the Polyphase Generator--that he couldn't detect; or
how he was pushed up and up by force of sheer genius, no one knowing
who he was until he found himself, like an eagle among buzzards, at the
head of a department, and coming into the office to see Pa quite in a
legitimate way.

"Hooray! Hooray!" came from behind the tree.

"Shut up, Poet!" commanded the Artist, "or I'll come back there!"

I didn't know these things personally, because I had left the office. I
had found out that there seemed to be more soul-nurture in artistic
metal work than in typewriting, and had fitted up a shop in the Fine
Arts Building, where Louise Amerland and I were doing perfectly
enchanting stunts in hammered brass and copper--old Roman lamps and
Persian lanterns, after designs we made ourselves. Pa parted with his
secretary with a sigh, the nature of which may be a question better left
unsettled.

This romance really begins with my visit, after months and months of
absence, to the restaurant which I had dinged at Pa until he had
instituted for the help. I told him that the social side of labor was
neglected shamefully, and for the work people to eat at the same table
with their superintendents and employers would be just too dear and
democratic, and he finally yielded growlingly. He was awfully pleased
afterward when the papers began to write the thing up. He said it was
the cheapest advertising he ever got, and patted me on the shoulder and
asked me if I wasn't ashamed to be so neglectful of my great invention.
So one day I got tired of working out Rubáiyát motifs in brass, and I
went over to the café for luncheon, incog. And what do you think? Billy
came in and sat down very informally right across from me!

"Hello!" said he, putting out his hand. "I've been looking for you for
eons, to--to thank you, you know. Don't you remember me?"

Before I knew it I had blushingly given him my hand for a moment.

"Yes," I replied, taking it away, and assuming a more properly dignified
air. "I hope you have risen above seven a week and a broom; and I am
glad to see that your head has healed up."

"Thank you," he replied. "I am running the installation department of
the dynamo end of the business. And you? I'm no end glad to see you
back. Did you get canned for letting me in? I've had a good many bad
half-hours since I found you gone, thinking of you out hunting a job
on--on my account. You--pardon me--don't look like a girl who would
have the E. M. F. in the nerve-department to go out and compete, you
know."

I was amazed at the creature's effrontery, at first; and then the whole
situation cleared up in my mind. I saw that I had an admirer (_that_ was
plain) who didn't know me as Rollin Blunt's heiress at all, but only as
a shop-mate in the Mid-Continent Electric Company's factory--a
stenographer who had done him a favor. It was more fun than most girls
might think.

"How did you find out," said I, "that I had been--ah--canned?"

"I watched for you," he replied. "Began as soon as my promotion to the
switchboard work made it so I could. After a couple of months'
accumulation of data I ventured upon the generalization that the old
man--"

"The who?"

"Mr. Blunt, I mean, of course," he amended, "had fired you for letting
me in. Out of work long?"

"N-no," said I; "hardly a week."

"Where are you now?" he asked.

"I'm in a shop," I stammered, "in Michigan Avenue."

I looked about to see if any of the employees who knew me were present,
but could see none except Miss Crowley, who wouldn't meet a man in the
same office in a year, and a dynamo-man never, and who is near-sighted,
anyhow. So I felt safe in permitting him to deceive himself. It is thus
that the centuries of oppression which women have endured impress
themselves on our more involuntary actions in little bits of
disingenuousness against which we should ever struggle. At the time,
though, to sit chatting with him in the informal manner of co-laborers
at the noon intermission was great fun. It was then that I began to
notice more fully what a really fine figure he had, and how brown and
honest and respectful his eyes were, even when he said "Hello" to me; as
if I were a telephone, and how thrilling was his voice.

"I'd like," said he, "to call on you--if I might."

I was as fluttered as the veriest little chit from the country.

"I--I can't very well receive you," said I. "My--the people where I--I
stop wouldn't like it."

"I'm quite a respectable sort of chap," said he. "My name's Helmerston,
and my people have been pretty well known for two or three hundred years
up in Vermont, where we live--in a teaching, preaching, book-writing,
rural sort of way, you know. I'm a Tech man--class of '08--but I haven't
anything to boast of on any score, I'm merely telling you these things,
because--because there seems to be no one else to tell you, and--and I
want you to know that I'm not so bad as I looked that morning."

"Oh, this is quite absurd!" cried I. "I really--it doesn't make any
difference; but I'm quite ready to believe it! I must go, really!"

"May I see you to your car?" said he; and I started to tell him that I
was there in the victoria, but pulled up, and took the street-car, after
he had extracted from me the information that I lived close to Lincoln
Park. But when he asked if I ever walked in the park, I just refused to
say any more. One really must save one's dignity from the attacks of
such people. I had to telephone Roscoe where to come with the victoria.

Soon after, quite by accident, I saw him on two successive evenings in
Lincoln Park, both times near the Lincoln statue. I wondered if my
mentioning the south entrance had anything to do with this. He never
once looked at the motorists, and so failed to see me; but I could see
that he took a deep interest in the promenaders--especially slender
girls with dainty dresses and blond hair. It appeared almost as if he
were looking for some one in particular, and I smiled at the thought of
any one being so silly as to search those throngs on the strength of any
chance hint any person might have dropped. I was affected by the pathos
of it, though. It seemed so much like the Saracen lady going from port
to port hunting for Thomas à Becket's father--though, of course, he
wasn't any one's father then, but I can't think of his name.

The next evening I took Atkins, my maid, and walked down by the Lincoln
monument to look at some flowers. It seems to me that we Chicagoans owe
it to ourselves to become better acquainted with one another--I mean, of
course, better acquainted with our great parks and public places and
statues. They are really very beautiful, and something to be proud of,
provided as they are for rich and poor alike by a paternal government.

Strangely fortuitous chance: we met Billy!

"Well, _well_!" exclaimed Aconite.

He came striding down the path to meet me--Atkins had fallen behind--his
face perfectly radiant with real joy.

"At last!" he ejaculated. "I wondered if we were _ever_ to meet again,
Miss--Miss--"

"Blunt," said I, heroically truthful, and suppressing one of those
primordial impulses which urged me to say Wilkinson--now, as a
scientific problem, why Wilkinson? But I did not wish to lose Atkins'
respect by conversing with a man who did not know my name.

"Miss Blunt?" cried he interrogatively. "That's rather odd, you know.
It's not a very common name."

"Oh, I don't know," said I, uncandid again, as soon as I saw a chance to
get through with it--little cat. "It seems awfully common to me. Why do
you say that it's odd?"

"Because I happen to have a letter of introduction to Miss Blunt,
daughter of the old--of Mr. Blunt of the Mid-Continent--"

"You have?" I broke in. "From whom?"

"From my cousin, Amelia Wyckoff," said he, "who went to school with her
at St. Cecilia's."

"Well, of all things!" I began; and then, with a lot of presence of
mind, I think, I paused. "Why don't you present it?" I asked.

"Well, it's this way," said Billy. "You saw how Mr. Blunt sailed into
me and put me in the broom-brigade without a hearing? I didn't have the
letter then, and when I got it I didn't feel like pulling on the social
strings when I was coming on pretty well for a dub lineman and learning
the business from the solder on the floor to the cupola, by actual
physical contact. And then there's another thing, if you'll let me say
it: since that morning I've had no place in my thoughts for any girl's
face but one."

We were sitting on a bench. Atkins was looking at the baby leopards in
the zoo, ever so far away. Billy didn't seem to miss her. He was looking
right at me. My heart fluttered so that I knew my voice would quiver if
I spoke, and I didn't dare to move my hands for fear he might notice
their trembling. The idea of _my_ behaving in that way!

I was glad to find out that he was Amelia's cousin; for that insured his
social standing. That was what made me feel so sort of agitated. One
laborer ought not to feel so of another, for we are all equal; but it
_was_ a relief to know that he was Amelia's aunt's son, and not a tramp.

"I must be allowed to call on you!" he said with suppressed intensity.
"You don't dislike me very much, do you?"

"I--I don't like cuts over the eye," said I, evading the question.

"I don't have 'em any more," he urged.

And then he explained about the émeute in the line-gang, and the
four-hole connectors, and confessed to the violent and sanguinary manner
in which he had felt called upon to put down the uprising. I could feel
my face grow hot and cold by turns, like Desdemona's while Othello was
telling the same kind of things; and when I looked for the scar on his
forehead he bowed his head, and I put the curls aside and found it. I
would have given worlds to--it was so much like a baby coming up to you
and crying about thumping its head and asking you to kiss it well. Once
I had my lips all puckered up--but I had the self-control to refrain--I
was so afraid.

It was getting dusk now, and Billy seized my hand and kissed it. I was
quite indignant until he explained that his motives were perfectly
praise-worthy. Then I led him to talk of the rich Miss Blunt to whom he
had a letter of introduction, and advised him to present it, and argued
with appalling cogency that one ought to marry in such a way as to
better one's prospects, and Billy got perfectly furious at such a view
of love and marriage--explaining, when I pretended to think he was mad
at me, that he knew I was just teasing. And then he began again about
calling on me, and seeing my parents, or guardians, or assigns, or _any
one_ that he ought to see.

"Because," said he, "you're a perfect baby, with a baby's blue eyes and
hair of floss, and tender skin, and trustfulness; and I ought to be
horsewhipped for sitting here in the park with you in--in this way, with
no one paying any attention but Mr. Lincoln, up there."

Then I did feel deeply, darkly crime-stained; and I could have hugged
the dear fellow for his simplicity--_me_ helpless, with Atkins, and the
knowledge of Amelia Wyckoff's letter; not to mention Mr. Lincoln--bless
him!--or a park policeman who had been peeking at us from behind a bunch
of cannas! I could have given him the addresses of several gentlemen who
might have certified to the fact that I wasn't the only one whose peace
of mind might have been considered in danger.

I grew portentously serious just before I went home, and told Billy that
he must see me on my own terms or not at all, and that he mustn't follow
me, or try to find out where I lived, but must walk around the curve to
the path and let me mingle with the landscape.

"May I not hope," said he, "to see you again soon?"

"I may feed the elephant some peanuts," said I, "on Thursday
evening--no, I shall play in a mixed foursome, and then dine on Thursday
afternoon at the Onwentsia--"

"Where?" said he, in a sort of astonished way.

"I believe I could make you believe it," said I with more presence of
mind, "if I stuck to it. But I can't come on Thursday. Let us say on
Friday evening."

He insisted that Friday is unlucky, and we compromised on Wednesday.
This conversation was on Tuesday.

"May I turn for just one look at my little wood nymph," said he, "when I
get to the curve?"

Of course I said "Yes"--and he turned at the curve, and came striding
back with such a light in his eyes that I had to allow him to kiss my
hand again, under the pretense that I had got a sliver in my finger.

I went back Wednesday, and again and again, and sneaked off once with
him to an orchestra concert, and it wasn't long before Billy knew that
his little stenographer was willing to allow him to hope. But I refused
to let him call it an engagement until he promised me that he would
present the letter to the other Miss Blunt.

"Why, Dolly? Why, sweetheart?" he asked; for it had got to that stage
now. Oh, it progressed with dizzying rapidity!

"Because," I replied, "you may like her better than you do me."

"Impossible!" he cried with a gesture absolutely tragic in its
intensity. "I dislike her very name--'Miss Aurelia Blunt!'"

"That's unjust!" I cried, really angry, "Aurelia is a fine name; and she
may have a pet name, you know."

"Only one Miss Blunt with a pet name for little Willie!" said he. "My
little Dolly!"

But I tied him down with a promise that before he saw me again he'd call
on Aurelia. When I saw him next he looked guilty, and said he had found
her out when he called. I scolded him cruelly, and made him promise
again. The fact was that when he called I couldn't find it in my heart
to sink to the prosaic level of Miss Aurelia Blunt. I had had the
sweetest, most delicious courtship that any girl _ever_ had, up to this
time, and I was afraid of spoiling it all. I was afraid sort of on
general principles, you know, and so was "out." And after he went away I
stole down into the park in my electric runabout and talked to Mr.
Lincoln about it. He seemed to know. When I went away, I left a little
kiss on the monument.

Billy was perfectly cringing that next day when he had to confess that
he had failed on what he called "this Aurelia proposition." He begged to
be let off.

"You see," said he, "she may give me a frigid reception, and take
offense at my delay in presenting this letter. Amelia may have written
her, and she may be furious. There may be some sort of social statute of
limitations on letters of introduction, and the thing may have run out,
so that I'll be ejected by the servants, dearie. And, anyhow, it will
place me in an equivocal position with Mr. Blunt--my coming to him as a
tramp, and holding so very lightly the valuable social advantage of an
acquaintance with the family. He won't remember that he jumped on me
with both feet and gave me six months on bread and water. It--it may
queer me in the business."

I here drew myself up to my full height, and froze him as I have seldom
done.

"Mr. Helmerston," said I, "I have indicated to you a fact which I had
supposed might have some weight with you as against sordid and merely
prudential considerations--I mean my preferences in this matter. It
seems, however, that--that you don't care the least little bit what _I_
want, and I just know that you don't--care for me at all as you say you
do; and I'm going home at once!"

Well, he was so abject, and so sorry to have given me pain, that I
wanted to hug him, but I didn't.

Oh, I almost neglected to say that all our behavior had been of the most
proper and self-contained sort. I would almost be willing to have Miss
Featherstonehaugh at St. Cecilia's use a kinetoscope picture of all our
meetings in marking me in deportment. Of course, conversations in parks
and at concerts do not lend themselves to transports very well, and the
kinetoscopes do not reproduce what is said, do they? Or the way one
feels when one is grinding into the dust, in that manner, the most
splendid fellow in the whole terrestrial and stellar universe.

"I'll go, by George!" he vowed. "And I'll sit on Aurelia's doorstep
without eating or drinking until she comes home and kicks me down the
stairs!" I was wondering as I went home how soon he would come; but I
was astonished to learn that Mr. Helmerston was in my reception-room.

"Hi informed 'im," said the footman, "that you would 'ardly be 'ome
within a reasonable time of waiting; but 'e said 'e would remain until
you came, Miss, nevertheless."

I went down to him just as I was, in my simple piqué dress, wearing the
violets he had given me. "Mr. Helmerston," said I, "I must apologize for
the difficulty I have given you in obtaining the very slight boon of
meeting me, and say how good you are to come again--and wait. Any friend
of dearest Amelia's, not to mention her cousin, is--"

He had stood in a state of positive paralysis until now.

"Dolly! Dolly! Dearest, dearest Dolly!" he cried, coming up to me and
taking--and doing what he hadn't had a chance to do before. "Oh, my
darling, are _you_ here?"

After quite a while he started up as if he had forgotten something.

"What is it?" said I. "There isn't a promenader or a policeman this side
of the park, sweetheart!"

"No," he answered after another interval--for I hadn't called him
anything like that before--"but I was thinking that--that Aurelia--is a
long time in coming home."

"Why, don't you know _yet_, you goosey," said I. "_I'm_ Aurelia!"

       *       *       *       *       *

And this brings me to the point where dalliance must cease--most of the
time--while the drama takes on the darker tinge given it by Pa's cruel
obstinacy, and the misdeeds of the Pruntys--whom I should have brought
on in the first act, somehow, on a darkened stage, conspiring across it
over a black bottle, and once in a while getting up to peek up and down
the flies, meanwhile uttering the villain's sibilant "Sh!" I don't
suppose it is artistic, from the Augustus Thomas viewpoint, but I wanted
the honeyed sweets of this courtship of mine without a tang of bitter;
and, honestly now, isn't it a lovely little plot for a love-drama?

       *       *       *       *       *

"Gee!" exclaimed the Hired Man. "I was afraid you was through!"

"I am," said the Bride softly, "for to-night. If you'll excuse me now.
Maybe I'll tell the rest of it at the next camp--if you want me to."

"I assure you," said the Professor, "that your tale does credit to your
teachers in elocution."

"We all thank you," said the Artist, "for what we've had--and won't you
continue at the next session--Scheherazade?"

"I'll see," said she. "Billy! Where are you!"

"I have mysteriously disappeared," replied the Groom from behind the
tree. "Come hunt me!"




CHAPTER III


At the behest of Aconite, the party refrained from expressions of more
than mild interest at the Norris Basin. Aconite assured them that they
ought to save their strong expressions for things farther on. The Poet
wrote some verses for the purpose of creating a legend to account for
the fact that the Monarch Geyser ceased to spout some ten years ago. But
when he came to the Growler, and the Hurricane, and the new Roaring
Holes, which are really gigantic steam whistles, he dismounted from his
Pegasus and threaded his way through the dead forest--killed by escaping
steam--in a trance of wonder. But Aconite's advice to economize language
until the Lower Geyser Basin should be reached was followed so far as
superlatives were concerned. Night found them scattered, and it was only
when they took the road once more that the party was whole again. The
Artist stopped the surrey at the Gibbon Paint Pots so that he might use
some of their bubbling sediment as a pigment with which to paint a
souvenir picture for each of the party. Cañons, boiling springs and
waterfalls--rocks, mountains, wild beauty on every hand--all these they
were assured were inconsiderable parts of the prelude to the marvels
awaiting them at the next halt. But when they came to the crossing of
Nez Percè Creek, the Bride expressed a desire to wait, to stop, to rest
her eyes and quiet her spirits before anything more striking should be
imposed upon her powers of observation.

"I fell like Olger the Dane and King Desiderio, when they watched on the
tower for Charlemagne; and if we go on, I shall, like Olger, fall 'as
one dead at Desiderio's feet!'"

The Poet looked in the Bride's eyes, and nodded sympathetically. Mr.
Driscoll pondered the mysteries of the Bride's statement for a while,
and threw down his lines.

"If that's the way the Bride feels," said he, "we'll stop here and grub
our systems up a little."

"The champion hard-luck story of this or any other age," said the
Colonel, as they lighted their pipes after dinner, "was enacted right up
this creek in that Nez Percè uprising wherein I fought and bled and
died."

"More matter for myths," said the Artist. "Let's have it, e'en though it
be as dolorous as the tale of the Patient Griselda."

"I don't recall more of Griselda's story," said the Colonel, "than that
she was given the worst of it by her husband, the king. But this Nez
Percè Creek story isn't any tale of the perfidy of our nearest and
dearest, but of things just unanimously breaking bad for a man from
Radersburg, Mr. Cowan. He and his wife and some friends were camped down
here a couple of miles at the Lower Geyser Basin, right close by the
Fountain Geyser, just beyond the hotel--only there wasn't any hotel yet
for thirty years. Chief Joseph and his Nez Percès came through trying to
get away from the United States. They picked up the Cowan party, and
brought them right along where we now are, and a few miles up this
creek, where Joseph, Looking-Glass, and the other chiefs held a
conference and decided to let the Cowan party go, after destroying their
transportation system by cutting the spokes out of their buggies. This
they did, and the Indians went on. Some of the bucks, feeling that it
was careless of the chiefs to overlook a bet like this, came back, and
in process of correcting their leaders' mistake shot Mr. Cowan in the
thigh--which was bad luck Item one. He slipped from his horse, stunned
by the shock, and his wife ran to him and tried to shelter him from
further harm. But in spite of her efforts another Indian shot him in the
head, holding his rifle so close that the powder burned the flesh. He
was not killed, however, though all parties to the affair supposed he
was, and Mrs. Cowan was removed from the corpse to which she clung, and
carried away by her friends. You see, the Indians were not unanimously
for these killings, and allowed most of the whites to go. The Indians
threw a cord or so of rocks on Cowan's head and went on with a
consciousness of good work well and thoroughly done.

"Cowan revived, pulled his head from among the rocks, and drew himself
to a standing posture by the limb of a tree. An Indian happening along,
shot him with much care in the back, and left him for dead again.

"Cowan, however, refused to die, and though without food, and wounded in
the thigh, the head, and the back, and with his head hammered to a jelly
by the rocks thrown on it, started to crawl back to camp. He met
Indians, and hid from them. He crawled day after day--being unable to
walk a step. He had a chance--for an uninjured man--to catch a Nez
Percè pony which had been abandoned, but could not walk. Hard luck,
indeed! He met a body of friendly Bannock scouts who would have taken
care of him, but he supposed them to be hostiles and hid from them.
Harder luck still! After crawling seven or eight miles, which took
several days, he reached his old camp and there was reunited to his
faithful dog, which at first snapped at and then welcomed him.

"At the camp his first good luck came--he found matches, coffee and some
food--not to mention the dog, which I venture to state helped him almost
as much as the provisions. Next day he met some scouts sent out to trail
the hostiles and incidentally with instructions to bury Cowan--but they
praised him instead. They fixed him up as well as they could, and left
him by their camp-fire to await the coming of General Howard with the
main body of troops. The ground was peaty, and full of dead vegetable
matter, and after a nap, Cowan awakened to find that the earth all about
him was on fire, and wounded as he was he had to roll out of the fire
zone, getting burned scandalously as he rolled."

"Here," said the Hired Man. "You tell the rest of this to marines!"

"I'm telling you," said the Colonel, "the historic truth. General Howard
came along and the surgeons gave Cowan all the care they were able to
afford him. They took him up to Bottler's Ranch, north of the Park, and
there Mrs. Cowan rejoined the remains and fragments of her still living
spouse. They went to Bozeman after a while, carrying Cowan in a wagon.
At the top of the hill down which they had to go, the neck-yoke broke
and the horses ran away, and spilled Cowan out on the rocks and the
generally unyielding surface of Montana. A conveyance was brought from
Bozeman, and the much-murdered man was taken to a hotel."

"Thank God!" breathed the Poet. "Even a Montana hotel was a sweet boon
as bringing the end of these troubles."

"Who said it was the end?" inquired the Colonel. "It wasn't. In the
hotel at Bozeman his hoodoo haunted him. People flocked to the hotel to
see him. If the vaudeville stage had been invented then in its present
form, he could have made a fortune. They crowded into his room and sat
on his bed. The bed collapsed, and Cowan was hurled to the floor and
killed again. The hotel-keeper, seeing that even a cat's supply of lives
must be about used up, ordered the crowd out of the place. He said he
thought of throwing Cowan out, too, being afraid his hotel would burn
up, or be blown away, or something, with such a Jonah aboard. But Cowan
succeeded in getting home. They asked him if he didn't often think of
his soul's salvation while enduring all these sufferings and passing
through all these perils. 'Not by a damned sight!' said the
unreconstructed sinner. 'I had more important things to think of!'"

"And all that took place right here?" asked the Bride.

"Here and hereabouts," answered the Colonel. "I was here about the time,
and I know."

"If Jim Bridger," said Aconite, "had narrated them adventures, what
would folks have said? And yet, the Colonel's correct. The tale are
true!"

"Here's where you can sleep under a roof, Bride," said the Hired Man, as
they made camp at the Lower Geyser Basin.

"So you don't want the rest of the story?" she queried.

"Ma'am," said the Hired Man. "We should all be darned sorry to lose you
from the camp; but--"

"But me no buts," said the Bride. "I stay with the--with--the what do
you call it, Mr. Driscoll, that I'm staying with?"

"The outfit, Miss Bride," said Aconite. "And the outfit's shore
honored." And after the tasks of camp had been done, amid the strange
and daunting surroundings of the wonderful geyser basin, when the camp
reached that lull that precedes slumber, and which over all the world,
whether on prairie, in forest, or on desert, is devoted to tobacco,
music and tales, the Bride went on with her story.


THE TRIUMPH OF BILLY HELL

THE SECOND PART OF THE BRIDE'S STORY

The Pruntys live near Saint Joe, where they have a town and stockyards
and grain-elevators, and thousands and thousands of acres of land all of
their own, just like mediæval barons--only instead of having a castle
with a donjon-keep with battlements and mysterious oubliettes and
drizzly cells and a moat, they live in a great wooden house with
verandas all round, and of a sort of composite architecture--Billy says
that it is Queen Anne in front and Mary Ann at the rear--and hot and
cold water in every room, and with a stone windmill-tower with a wheel
on the top that you couldn't possibly put in a picture, it is so round
and machiney-looking. Old Mr. Prunty says it cost twenty-seven thousand
five hundred and eighty-three dollars and thirty-six cents--says it
every chance he gets, without the variation of a cent. The Pruntys are
scandalously rich. Their riches bought them a place in this play.

When Pa had begun to forge to the front in Peoria, where he began, he
had all the knack he ever possessed for getting business, but he didn't
have much money. I don't see any reason why we shouldn't confess this
here. So he went to old Mr. Prunty, with whom he had become acquainted
while he was putting in a town lighting-plant in the Prunty private
village, and showed him how remunerative it would be to put money into
Pa's business. This Mr. Prunty did, and I once saw the balance-sheet
showing the profits he made. They were something frightful to a mind
alive to the evils of the concentration of wealth--and the necessity of
dividing with other people; but I shouldn't care so much for _that_, I
am afraid, if it hadn't brought us into relations with Enos Prunty,
Junior, who was brought up to the business of taking over the
Mid-Continent Electric Company, and incidentally, me. The very idea!

I must not be disingenuous any more, and therefore I will admit that at
one time I should have consented to the merger if it hadn't been for
Enos' perfectly impossible name. Not that I loved him; not at all. But
he wasn't bad looking, and he had overcome a good deal of the Prunty
_gaucherie_--I should think he ought to, the schools he had been
through--and a girl really does like to think of trousseaux, and
establishments and the like. One day, though, I hired a card-writer on
the street to write out for me the name, "Mrs. Enos Prunty, Jr.," upon
looking at which I fled as from a pestilence, and threw it into the
grate, and had a fire kindled, although it was one of those awful days
when the coroner never can tell whether it was the heat or the humidity.

I had met Billy in the restaurant the day before.

But Pa liked Enos, and sort of treated the matter as if it were all
arranged; and when Billy came into the spotlight as our social
superior--which the Helmerstons would be by any of the old and outworn
standards--I began to pet Pa one evening, and ask him how he liked Mr.
Helmerston; whereupon Pa exploded with a terrific detonation, and said
he wanted the relations of Mr. Helmerston with the Blunt family confined
strictly to the field of business; that he hated and despised all the
insufferable breed of dubs--I never could get Pa to say "cad"--who crept
into employments like spies, under false pretenses, and called an
Institute of Technology a "Tech," and looked down on better electricians
who had come up by hard knocks. And Pa insisted that a man must have
been pretty tough who had acquired in college circles from the Atlantic
to the Missouri the _nom de guerre_ of "Billy Hell."

Pa is a good business man, and has exceptional facilities for looking up
people's records; but it seemed a little sneaky to use them on Billy,
and to know so much, when we were so sure he never suspected a thing. I
told him so, too, but all he said was "Huh." I was very angry, and when
Mr. Prunty, Junior, came to see me next time I repulsed his addresses
with such scorn that he went away in a passion. He said he laid no claim
to being a human being, but he was, at least, a member of the animal
kingdom, and that my way of treating him would have been inhuman had he
been a toadstool. I retorted that I'd concede him a place among the
mushrooms--fancy _my_ twitting any one of mushroomery! But the
old-family attitude of the Helmerstons was getting into my mental
system.

Pa, in the meantime, was preparing to shunt Billy off to Mexico to
superintend the installation of the Guadalanahuato power plant--a two
years' job--at a splendid salary. But our Mr. Burns went over to the
Universal Electric Company (after we had made him what he was!) and Mr.
Aplin proved quite incapable of running the business, although he was
_such_ a genius in watts and farads and ohms and the coefficient of
self-induction, and Billy was simply forked into the general charge of
the main office, against his will, and shockingly against Pa's.

I forgot to say that Pa was ill, and confined to his room for a long
time. This touches a tender spot in Pa's feelings, but the truth must be
told; and you must understand that all his illness came from an
ingrowing toe-nail. He had to have an operation, and then he had to stay
in the house because it wouldn't heal; and there he was, using language
which is really scandalous for a good church-worker like Pa, while Billy
attended to the business.

I heaped coals of fire on Pa's head by staying with him hours and hours
every day, and reading to him, until he asked me for goodness' sake to
stop until he got the cross-talk out of his receiver. I said I'd be glad
to dispense with all his cross talk, and he said: "There, now, don't
cry"--and we had a regular love feast. Pa was a little difficult at this
period. However, that day he got more confidential than he ever was
before, and told me that serious business troubles were piling up, and
worried him. We were likely, he said, to be spared the disgrace of dying
rich. This was irony, for Pa despises this new idea that one should
apologize for one's success.

He went on to tell me that Mr. Prunty had always had the most stock in
the Mid-Continent, and that now that Enos had got so conceited about
being able to run the business, and not being allowed to, the Pruntys
seemed to want the whole thing, and hinted around about withdrawing, or
buying Pa out.

I have this scene all in my mind for the play, with me sitting in "a dim
religious light" and listening to the recital of our ruin and crying
over Pa's sore foot. I did cry a good deal about this, truly, for I knew
perfectly well that it was the nasty way I had treated Enos that made
them so mean; but I still wished from the bottom of my heart that he
would come back so I could search my soul for worse things to do to
him. I told Billy about this trouble, and explained that Pa couldn't
possibly raise money to buy out the Pruntys, and that they could be
calculated upon not to pay Pa anything like what his stock was worth.

"I see," said Billy, "you are being squeezed by the stronger party."

He was looking out of the window in an abstracted sort of way, but he
came to when I answered that, personally, I hadn't been conscious of
anything of the sort.

When the conversation got around to the business again, Billy told me
that Goucher--a Missourian that the Pruntys had injected into the
business, and who was perfectly slavish in his subserviency to Enos--had
been quizzing around Billy, trying to find out what ailed Pa, and if it
was anything serious.

"I didn't like the little emissary," said Billy, "and so I told him that
Mr. Blunt was precariously ill, with a complication of Bright's disease
in its tertiary stage, and locomotor ataxia. He wrote down the Bright's
disease and asked me how to spell the other. I told him that the
Bright's disease would probably terminate fatally before he could master
so much orthography; and still he didn't tumble! Goucher went away
conscious of having performed well an important piece of work. I can't
help thinking now that this incident has more significance than I then
supposed."

He sat puckering up his brows for a long time, and I let him pucker.

At last he said: "Dolly, I shouldn't a bit wonder if they are trying to
take some advantage of a dying man. I can see how they work the problem
out. 'Here is a sick man,' they say, 'who has been doing the work of
half a dozen for twenty years. He is going to pieces physically. If he
has some fatal disease, and knows it, we can settle with him, and make
him pay a few hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of getting his
daughter's inheritance disentangled from a business which she can't run,
and in which she will be at the mercy of--of people with whom her
relations are a little strained. But first, we'll find out just how sick
he is, and whether he's likely to get well soon, or at all.' And so they
send Goucher mousing about; and he reports Bright's disease, and
something else he can't spell, and they make an appointment with
Helmerston for to-morrow morning to find out more about it, Mr. Goucher
not being very clear. And your father's rather fierce manner of hiding
what his ailment really is makes them all the more suspicious."

"You tell them," said I, firing up, "that Pa is still able--"

But I saw that Billy had one of those epoch-making ideas which mark the
crises of history, and I stopped spellbound. He finally struck himself a
fearful blow upon the knee, and said that he had it, and one looking at
him could easily believe it. Then he explained to me his plan for
discomfiting the Pruntys and hoisting them by their own petard. This is
deeply psychological, being based upon an intuitive perception of what a
Prunty would do when he believed certain things and had money at stake.

"I must take responsibility in this," said Billy, squaring his
shoulders, "and bet my job on my success, and put our happiness in
jeopardy. But, if we win, Mr. Blunt can never again say that I am an
engineer only, with no head for practical business; and I shall have
outlived the disgrace of my Tech training--and the nickname. You must
handle your father, and keep me informed of any engagement the Pruntys
make with him. I must do the rest. And, if I lose, it's back to climbing
poles again!"

I asked Billy if I couldn't do something in line work, and he said I
might carry the pliers. And when I said I meant it, he behaved
beautifully, and called me his angel, and--and violated the rules, you
know--and went away in a perfect frenzy of determination. I felt a
solemn joy in spying on Pa and reporting to Billy. It seemed like a
foretaste of a life all bound up and merged with his. And this is what
took place:

The elder Mr. Prunty called on Billy and said he was appalled at the
news Mr. Goucher brought that Mr. Blunt had Bright's disease; and was
there any hope that the doctors might be mistaken?

Billy told him that the recent progress in bacteriological science, with
which Mr. Prunty was no doubt fully conversant, seemed to make the
diagnosis a cinch. By this he meant that they were sure about it.

"I see," said the driver. "I've heared the word afore."

He used a term that Mr. Prunty understood, Billy said, owing to his
having done business all his life with reference to it.

Mr. Prunty suggested that people live a long time with Bright's disease,
sometimes.

Billy, who is really a great actor, here grew mysterious, and told Mr.
Prunty that, being mixed up with Mr. Blunt in business, it seemed a pity
that he, Mr. Prunty, should have the real situation concealed from him,
and that, as a matter of fact, Mr. Blunt's most pronounced outward
symptom was a very badly ulcerated index toe. This of Billy's own
knowledge, and Mr. Prunty might depend upon it.

Mr. Prunty studied on this for a long time, and then remarked that he
had known several people to recover from sore toes.

Billy then pulled a book--a medical work he had borrowed--from under the
desk, and showed Mr. Prunty a passage in which it was laid down that
people's toes come off sometimes, in a most inconvenient way, in the
last stages of Bright's disease. Mr. Prunty read the whole page,
including a description of the way that dread disease ruins the
complexion, by making it pasty and corpselike, and then laid the book
down with conviction in his eyes.

"From this," said he, motioning at the book with his glasses, "it would
seem to be all off."

"If it's Bright's disease," said Billy, "that causes this lesion of the
major lower digit, the prognosis is, no doubt, extremely grave. But
while there's life, you know--"

"Yes," answered Mr. Prunty, "that is a comfort, of course. Does he know
what ails him?"

"He is fully aware of his condition," said Billy, "but, unfortunately,
not yet resigned to it." (I should think not.)

"I see you have been studying this thing out," said Mr. Prunty, "as
exactly as if it had been an engineering problem; and I want to say, Mr.
Helmerston, that I like your style. If we ever control this business the
future of such careful and competent and far-sighted men as yourself--in
fact, I may say _your_ future--will be bright and assured. Have you any
more information for me as to this--this sad affair of Blunt's?"

Billy thanked him, and said he hadn't, at present, and Mr. Prunty went
away, trying to look sad. Billy went to the bank in Pa's name and
arranged for a lot of money to be used in acquiring the Prunty stock, if
it should be needed. The stock was worth twice as much, and the bank
people knew it, and couldn't have believed, of course, that we would get
it for _that_. Then the Pruntys made an engagement with me for Pa over
the telephone, for a certain hour of a certain day, and I told Billy.

"The time has come," said Billy, when the plot began thickening in this
way, "for Little Willie to beard the lion in his den. Smuggle me into
the room an hour before the Pruntys are due, darling, and we'll cast the
die."

I was all pale and quivery when I kissed Billy--in that sort of serious
way in which we women kiss people we like, when we tell them to come
back with their shields or on them--and pushed him into the room.

I heard all they said. It was dark in there, and Pa thought at first
that it was a Prunty. Pa was sitting in the Morris chair, with his foot
on a rest.

"That you, Enos?" said he. "Help yourself to a chair. I'm kind of laid
up for repairs."

"It's Helmerston," said Billy. "I called to talk to you about this
affair with Mr. Prunty. I have some information which may be of value to
you."

Pa sat as still as an image for perhaps a minute. I could almost hear
his thoughts. He was anathematizing Billy mentally for butting in, but
he was too good a strategist to throw away any valuable knowledge.

"Well," said he at last, "I'm always open to valuable information. Turn
it loose!"

Then Billy told him all you know, and a good deal more, which I shall
not here state, because it is not necessary to the scenario, and I did
not understand it, anyhow. There was some awfully vivid conversation at
times, though, when Pa went up into the air at what Billy had done, and
Billy talked him down.

"Do you mean to say, you--you young lunatic," panted Pa, "that you've
told Prunty that he's got a living corpse to deal with, when I need all
the prestige I've won with him to hold my own?"

But Billy explained that he'd taken the liberty of thinking the whole
thing out; and, anyhow, had merely refrained from removing a mistaken
notion from Prunty's mind.

"But," said he, "you can assure him when he gets here that you are
really in robust health."

"Assure him!" roared Pa. "He'd be dead sure I was trying to put myself
in a better light for the dicker. I couldn't make him believe anything
at all. I know Prunty."

Billy said that the psychology of the situation was plain. Mr. Prunty
was convinced that Pa was in such a condition that he never could go
back to the office, and could no more take sole ownership of the
Mid-Continent than a baby could enter a shot-putting contest. What would
they do when it came to making propositions? They would offer something
that they were sure a case in the tertiary stage couldn't accept. They
would probably offer to give or take a certain price for the stock.
Believing that Pa wasn't in position to buy, but was really forced to
sell, they would name a frightfully low price, so that when Pa accepted
it perforce they would be robbing him out of house and home, almost.
This was the way with these shrewd traders always, and to whipsaw a
dying man would be nuts for a man like Prunty. (I am here falling into
Billy's dialect when he was in deadly earnest.) Then the conversation
grew mysterious again with Pa listening, and once admitting that "that
would be like old Enos."

"But he'll back out," said Pa, "if he's thief enough ever to start in."

"Have him make a memorandum in writing, and sign it," answered Billy.

"But," rejoined Pa, in a disgusted way, as if to ask why he condescended
to argue with this young fool, "you don't know Prunty. Unless he has
the cash in hand he'll go to some lawyer and find a way out."

"I thought of that, too," said Billy; "and so I took the liberty of
going to the bank and getting the cash--for temporary use, you know."

"I like your nerve!" moaned Pa angrily. "Do you know, young man, that
you've built up a situation that absolutely forces me to adopt your fool
plans? Absolutely infernal nonsense! To imagine it possible to get the
Prunty stock at any such figures is--" And Pa threw up wild hands of
desperation to an unpitying sky.

"Is it possible to imagine," said Billy, "such a thing as the Pruntys
trying to get your stock at that figure? That's the thing I'm looking
for and counting on." And when Pa failed to reply, but only chewed his
mustache, Billy went on: "I thought the logic of the situation would
appeal to you," said he. "And now let us set the stage. The time is
short."

And then came the most astounding thing, and the thing that showed
Billy's genius. First he took out the electric-light bulbs of the
electrolier, and screwed in others made of a sort of greenish
glass--just a little green tinge in it. He took some stage appliances
and put just a little shade of dark under Pa's eyes, and at the corners
of his mouth; and when the green lights were turned on Pa had the most
ghastly, ghostly, pasty, ghoulish look any one ever saw. I was actually
frightened when I came in: it was as bad as Doctor Jekyll turned to Mr.
Hyde. Pa looked rather cheap while Billy was doing this, but the time
was getting short, and he was afraid the Pruntys would come bursting in
and catch them at it. Billy placed Pa right under the green lights, and
shaded them so that the rest of us received only the unadulterated
output of the side lamps. Then they arranged their cues, and Billy
stepped into the next room. As he went, Pa swore for the first time
since he quit running the line-gang, when, he claims, it was necessary.

"If this goes wrong, as it will," he hissed through his livid lips,
"I'll kick you from here to the city-limits if it blows the plug in the
power-house!"

"Very well, sir," answered Billy--and the footman announced the Pruntys.

I was as pale as a ghost, and my eyes were red, and the look of things
was positively sepulchral when they came in, Enos tagging at his
father's heels as if he was ashamed. The footman turned on the light,
and almost screamed as he looked at poor Pa, with the pasty green in
his complexion, and the cavernous shadows under his eyes. Billy had seen
to it that the Pruntys had had plenty of literature on the symptoms of
Bright's disease, and I could see them start and exchange looks as Pa's
state dawned on them.

"I'm sorry to see you in this condition," said Mr. Prunty, after Pa had
weakly welcomed them and told them to sit down.

"What condition?" snapped Pa, the theatricality wearing off. "I'm all
right, if it wasn't for this blamed toe!"

"Is it very bad?" asked Mr. Prunty.

"It won't heal," growled Pa, and the visitors exchanged glances again.
"But you didn't come here to discuss sore toes. Let's get down to
business."

Then Mr. Prunty, in a subdued and sort of ministerial voice, explained
to Pa that he was getting along in years, and that Pa wasn't long--that
is, that Pa was getting along in years, too--and both parties would, no
doubt, be better satisfied if their interests were separated. Therefore
he had decided to withdraw his capital from the business, and place it
in some other enterprise which would give his son a life work along
lines laid out in his education and training. He didn't want to sell
his stock to the Universal Electric Company as he had a chance to do (Pa
started fiercely here, for he was afraid of the Universal Electric);
although the old agreement by which neither party was to sell out to a
competitor was probably no longer binding; and so they had come as man
to man to talk adjustment.

"But," says Pa, "this takes me by surprise. I don't quite see my way
clear to taking on such a load as carrying all the stock would be.
Mid-Continent stock is valuable."

They exchanged glances again, as much as to say that Pa was evidently
anxious to sell rather than buy, and was crying the stock up
accordingly, so as to get as much money as he could for me before he
died.

"We may not be so grasping as you think," said Mr. Prunty; and then
nothing was said for quite a while.

Pa was looking awfully sick, and Mr. Prunty was just exuding love and
kindness and magnanimity from every pore.

"You had some proposition thought out," interrogated Pa, feeling
anxiously for his own pulse, "or you wouldn't have come. What is it,
Prunty?"

"Well," answered Mr. Prunty, gazing piercingly at Pa, as if to ask if
such a cadaverous person _could_ possibly take on the sole control of
the Mid-Continent even if he had the money--"well, we had thought of it
a little, that's a fact. We thought we'd make you an offer to buy or
sell--"

"Hurrah for Billy!" my heart shouted. For this was just what he said
would happen. But, instead of hurrahing, I came to the front and gave Pa
a powder. It was mostly quinine, and was dreadfully bitter.

"To buy or sell," went on Mr. Prunty, "at a price to be named by us. If
it's a reasonable figure, take our stock and give us our money. If it's
too high, why, sell us yours. That's fair, ain't it?"

Pa lay back and looked green and groaned. He was doing it nobly.

"What is fair in some circumstances," he moaned, "is extortion in
others; and I--er--yes, I suppose it would be called fair. What's your
give-or-take price, Prunty?"

"We are willing," said Mr. Prunty, "to give or take seventy-five for the
stock."

Pa was so still that I had to rouse him, and Mr. Prunty repeated his
offer.

"I--I'm getting a little forgetful," said Pa, "and I'd like to have you
put it in writing, so I can consider it, and be sure I have it right,
you know."

The Pruntys consulted again, and again they came forward. Enos wrote
down the proposition, and Mr. Prunty signed it. I didn't understand it
very well, and the strain was so frightful that I expected to fly all to
pieces every instant, but I didn't.

When Enos handed the paper to Pa, Pa cleared his throat in a kind of
scraping way, and in stepped Billy with a great box under his arm.

"Mr. Helmerston," said Pa, as calmly as General Grant at--any place
where he was especially placid--"I want you and my daughter to be
witnesses to the making of the proposition in this writing, from Mr.
Prunty to me."

Billy read the paper, and said he understood that it was a give-or-take
offer of seventy-five for all the stock of the Mid-Continent. Mr. Prunty
said yes, looking rather dazed, and not so sympathetic.

"I accept the proposition," snapped Pa, his jaw setting too awfully firm
for the tertiary stage. "I'll take your stock at seventy-five.
Helmerston, pay 'em the money!"

Billy had the cash in ten-thousand-dollar bundles; and I was so
fascinated at the sight of so much treasure being passed over like
packages of bonbons, that for a while I didn't see how funny Mr. Prunty
was acting. When I did look, he was holding his nose in the air and
gasping like one of Aunt Maria's little chickens with the pip. He seemed
to have a sort of progressive convulsions, beginning low down in
wrigglings of the legs, and gradually moving upward in jerks and gurgles
and gasps, until it went off into space in twitchings of his mouth and
eyes and nose and forehead. Enos had the bundles of money counted, and a
receipt written, before he noticed that his father was having these
fits, and then _he_ seemed scared. I suppose these people have a sort of
affection for each other, after all.

"Father," said he--"Father, what's the matter?"

"Matter?" roared Mr. Prunty. "Does the fool ask what's the matter? Don't
you see we're done brown? Look at the basketful they brought, that we
might just as well have had as not, if it hadn't been for--Blast you,
Blunt, I'll show you you can't chisel old Enos Prunty out of his good
money like this, I will! I'll put the whole kit and boodle of yeh in
jail! That stock is worth a hundred and fifty, if it's worth a cent.
Ene, if you'll stand by like a stoughton bottle and see your old father
hornswoggled out of his eye-teeth by a college dude and this old
confidence-man, you'll never see a cent of my money, never! Do you hear,
you ass? He's no more sick than I am! That's false pretenses, ain't it?
He's got some darned greenery-yallery business on that face of his!
Ain't that false? Blunt, if you don't give me the rest in the basket
there I'll law you to the Supreme Court!"

"Hush, father," said Enos; "Aurelia's here."

"When you get everything set," said Pa, with a most exasperating smile,
"just crack ahead with your lawsuit. We'll trot you a few heats, anyhow.
You'd better take your pa away, Enos, and buy him a drink of something
cool."

"I want to compliment you, Mr. Helmerston," said Enos, quite like a
gentleman, "on the success of your little stage-business, and especially
on your careful forecast of the play of human motives. I can see that a
man with only ordinary business dishonesty, like myself, need not be
surprised at defeat by such a master of finesse as you."

He bowed toward me. Billy flushed.

"If you mean, sir--" he began.

"Oh, I mean nothing offensive," answered Enos. "I will be in the office
in the morning, and shall be ready, as secretary, to transfer this stock
on the books, previous to resigning. Come, father, we've got our
beating; but we can still have the satisfaction of being good losers.
Good-by, Miss Blunt; I wish you joy!"

Pa came out of the green light as they disappeared, limping on his
wrapped-up foot, and shouted that he had always said that Enos was a
brick, and now he knew it. I ran up to him and kissed him. Then I threw
myself into Billy's arms.

"Aurelia!" said Pa, looking as cross as a man _could_ look in such
circumstances, "I should think you'd be ashamed of yourself!"

I dropped into a chair and covered up my face, while Pa went on
addressing Billy, trying to be severe on him for letting me kiss him,
and to beam on him at the same time for helping him with the Pruntys.

"Young man," said he, "I owe you a great deal. This tomfoolery happened
to work. Please to consider yourself a part of the Mid-Continent
Electric Company in any capacity you choose."

"Yes, sir," said Billy, gathering up the money. "Is that all, sir?"

"I should like to have you take Enos' place as secretary," added Pa.

"Thank you," said Billy. "I shall be pleased and honored. Is that all?
Do I still go to Mexico?"

Pa pondered and fidgeted, and acted awfully ill at ease.

"Yes," said he at last. "You're the only competent engineer we've got
who understands the plans. You'll have to go for a few months--if you
don't mind--anyhow."

"Pa," said I, "I'm tired of metal work, and I need a vacation in new and
pleasant surroundings, and--and associations. Billy is awfully pleasant
to associate with, and--and be surrounded by; and I've never, never been
in Guadalanawhat-you-may-call-it; and--and--may we Pa?"

"Young woman!" glared Pa, "who have you the effrontery to call
'Billy'?"--Pa could never acquire what he calls "the 'whom' habit."

Billy stepped manfully forward.

"You would recognize the name 'Billy,'" said he, "if it were joined with
the rather profane surname with which it is, unfortunately, connected,
'from the Atlantic to the Missouri.' Mr. Blunt, you can not be ignorant
of the sweet dream in which I have indulged myself with reference to
your daughter. I know I am unworthy of her--"

"Oh, cut that short!" said Pa. "Take this grease off my face, and remove
these infernal stage lights! There, Dolly--there! Mr. Helmerston,
er--Billy--will start for Mexico within a month. If you--if you really
want to go with him, why go!"

And so we're going, by way of Yellowstone Park.




CHAPTER IV


"You see," said Mr. Driscoll, when, after three days of independent
wonder-gazing in the thirty square miles of the Lower Geyser Basin, his
seven fares came together for departure, "as I told yeh, this trip is
just gettin' good."

"I have seen," said the Poet, "a spring from the bottom of which fires
leap in lambent flames, to be quenched by the air when they reach the
surface. Let me die, now!"

"I have seen," said the Artist, "the Mammoth Paint Pots from which we
may dip our colors in that day 'when earth's last picture is painted,
and the tubes are twisted and dried.'"

"I have seen," said the Bride, "a lake perched upon a marble platform,
the slopes of which it drapes with a lace of runnels--like the web that
was woven by the Lady of Shalott while she looked in her magic mirror."

"In that day when we perfect our mythology," said the Poet, "we shall
know of the nymph of this lake, who uses it as a mirror, and will die if
she looks away from the image to gaze on the real knight as he passes."

"I question that, really," said the Professor. "In an age of pure
science--"

"Scat!" said the Colonel. "I have seen a pool that goes mad when any
passing idiot throws gross material into its pure idealism--and I
sympathize with it."

"I have seen," went on Professor Boggs, "a natural object--I refer to
the Fountain Geyser--which gives us a valuable lesson in steady
performance, with no eccentricities. Every four hours it plays for
fifteen minutes, shooting its water to a height of sixty feet. Note the
mathematical correspondence--the feet correspond to the minutes in the
hour--the hours are four--four into sixty goes fifteen times, the number
of minutes the geyser plays--I shall work this out in an essay--it seems
very significant."

"I have seen," said the Groom, "in the Great Fountain Geyser, a natural
power installation. It throws its huge volume of water to a height of
one hundred feet. It is on a pedestal like an emplacement for a
monument, and its crater looks like the hole in which to set the shaft.
That makes the matter of utilizing the power a cinch. I figure--"

"Billy!" said the Bride. "Aren't you ashamed?"

"The Professor and myself," answered the Groom, "represent the spirit of
the age. We only are sane."

"You, Billy Helmerston," said the Bride, "are a fraud!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Nine miles to the Upper Geyser Basin--passing the Midway Basin
half-way--and the tourists found their tents already pitched by Aconite
who had preceded them with the impedimenta, and returned light for the
drive. They took a whole day for the journey, and even so felt as if
they were committing an atrocity in negligence. The Jewell Geyser, the
Sapphire Pool and the Mystic Falls seemed small by comparison with the
gigantic phenomena of the Lower Basin, and smaller still next day
compared with the stupendous marvels of the Upper Basin. At the Mystic
Falls, the Bride insisted on taking luncheon.

"It's like the really normal loveliness of earth," said she. "It goes
better with humanity, and luncheon, and flowers and fairies and gentle
things. I want to eat a meal in neither Paradise nor the Inferno--and we
seem to be in one or the other most of the time."

At luncheon, Professor Boggs came forward with an original and practical
idea with relation to the Yellowstone Nights' Entertainment, as they had
come to call their camp-fire stories.

"I hold," said he, "that one is entitled to time for putting his
thoughts in order before presuming to deliver an address, even of the
narrative sort. I find myself apprehensive of being called upon next,
and this interferes with my powers of observation. I suggest that we
cast lots for the next tale now, and thus free the minds of all but the
narrator, who may retire if he choose, and collate his data."

"It's a good thought," said the Groom. "Poet, perform your office!"

The Poet passed the hat to the Bride, who closed her eyes and felt about
discriminatingly, saying she was trying to find Billy in the hat. The
Poet read the ballot and handed it to the Artist.

"Groom!" read the Artist, handing the slip of paper to Billy. "You're
nominated."

"Stung!" ejaculated Billy.


THE HEART OF GOLIATH

THE STORY TOLD BY THE GROOM

"I often think," said the Groom, in beginning his tale that night, "when
this adventure recurs to me, what a different world it would be if we
could see into one another's minds, and telepathically search one
another's hearts. I don't know whether it would be better or not; but
that it would be different, this story proves. It is a tale that came to
me when I was traveling about in the Missouri Valley, earning the money
for my Tech course, and long before my time with the Mid-Continent
Electric Company. It shows how a soul that is pitchy darkness to its
nearest and dearest, may be illumined by the electric light of
self-revelation to the eye of the chance-met stranger."

       *       *       *       *       *

I first saw him on the platform just before my train pulled out from
Sioux City to Aberdeen. He was a perfect mountain--an Alp, a
Himalaya--of man. He must have been well toward seven feet tall; and so
vast were his proportions that as he stooped to the window to buy his
ticket he reminded me of a mastiff peering into a mouse's hole. From a
distance--one could scarcely take in the details at close range--I
studied him as a remarkable specimen of the brawny western farmer, whose
score in any exhibition would be lowered by one fact only: lofty as his
height was, he was getting too heavy for it.

I had to go into the smoking-car to find a vacant seat, and there I
could see but one. I had but just slipped into it when in came the
Gargantuan farmer and sat down all over me, in a seemingly ruthless
exercise of his undoubted right to half the seat, and his unquestionable
ability to appropriate as much more as his dimensions required. Falstaff
with his page reminded himself of a sow that had overwhelmed all her
litter save one: I felt like the last of the litter in process of
smothering. And he was as ignorant of my existence, apparently, as could
possibly be required by the comparison.

He wore with bucolic negligence clothes of excellent quality. His hat
was broad as a prairie. I have no idea where such hats are bought. I am
sure I never saw one of such amplitude of brim on sale anywhere. It was
of the finest felt, and had a band of heavy leather pressed into a
design in bas-relief. A few dried alfalfa leaves had lodged in the
angle between the crown and the brim, and clung there, even when he took
the hat off to wipe his brow, thus giving me a view of the plateau of
felt, which I should never have obtained otherwise.

His face was enormous but not puffy; and the red veinlets on the cheek
and nose had acquired their varicosity by weathering rather than by
indulgence. His hair was clipped short, as though he had had a complete
job done as a measure of economizing time. He had a high beak of a nose,
with rugged promontories of bone at the bridge, like the shoulders of a
hill; and his mouth was a huge but well-shaped feature, hard and
inflexible like the mouth of a cave.

His shirt was of blue flannel, clean and fine, and its soft roll collar
fell away from his great muscular neck unconfined and undecorated by any
sort of cravat. His tun of a torso bulged roundly out in front of me
like the sponson of a battleship. Stretched across the immense waistcoat
was a round, spirally-fluted horsehair watchguard as big as a rope, with
massive golden fastenings; and suspended from it was a golden steer made
by some artificer who had followed Cellini afar off, if at all, and
which gave the area (one must use geographical terms in describing the
man), an auriferous and opulent appearance.

His trousers were spotted with the stains of stables; and his huge
boots, like barges, had similar discolorations overlaying a brilliant
shine. He carried one of those heavy white sticks with which the drovers
and dealers at the Sioux City stockyards poke the live stock and take
the liberties accorded to prospective purchasers with pigs and bullocks.
On the crook of this he rested his great hands, one piled upon the
other, and stared, as if fascinated by them, at four soldiers returning
from service in the Philippines, who had two seats turned together, and
were making a gleeful function of their midday meal, startling the South
Dakota atmosphere with the loud use of strange-sounding expressions in
Tagalog and Spanish, and, with military brutality, laughing at the dying
struggles of a fellow-man being slowly pressed to death under that human
landslide. I resented their making light of such a subject.

My oppressor stared at them with a grim and unwavering gaze that finally
seemed to put them out and set them ill at ease; for they became so
quiet that we could hear noises other than theirs. Once in a while,
however, they winked at me to show their appreciation of my agonies,
and made remarks about the water-cure and the like, meant for my ears.
My incubus seemed not to hear a word of this badinage. I wondered if he
were not deaf, or a little wrong in his intellect. The train stopped at
a little station just as I had become quite desperate, and two men
sitting in front of us got off. With the superhuman strength of the last
gasp I surged under my tormentor--and he noticed me. I verily believe
that until that instant he had not known of my presence; he gave such a
deliberate sort of start.

"Excuse me!" said he. "Forgot they was any one here--let me fix you!"

He had already almost done so; but he meant well. He rose to take the
vacated seat; but with a glance at the soldiers he threw the back over,
turned his back to them and his face to me, and sat down. His ponderous
feet like valises rested on each side of mine, his body filled the seat
from arm to arm. For a while, even after discovering me, he stared past
me as if I had been quite invisible. I saw a beady perspiration on his
brow as if he were under some great stress of feeling. It was getting
uncanny. I understood now how the soldiers, now breaking forth into riot
again, had been suppressed by that stony regard. When he spoke,
however, it was in commonplaces.

"They're lots of 'em comin' back," said he.

A slow thrust of the bulky thumb over his shoulder indicated that he
meant soldiers. I nodded assent. A great many were returning just then.

"Jack's come back," said he; "quite a while."

His voice was in harmony with his physique--deep, heavy, rough. Raised
in rage it might have matched the intonations of Stentor, and terrified
a thousand foes; for it was a phenomenal voice. The rumble of the train
was a piping treble compared with it.

"You don't know Jack, do yeh?" he asked.

"I think not," said I.

"Course not," he replied. "Fool question! An' yit, he used to know most
of you fellers."

I wondered just what he might mean by "you fellows," but he was silent
again.

"You don't live near here," he stated at last.

"No," said I. "I am just passing through."

"If you lived in these parts," said he, "you'd know him."

"I dare say," I replied. "Who is Jack?"

I was a little piqued at his rudeness; for he returned no reply. Then I
saw that he was gazing into vacancy again so absently that I should have
pronounced his case one of mental trouble if his appearance had not been
so purely physical. He took from a cigar-case a big, dark, massive
cigar, clubhouse shape like himself, gave it to me and lighted the twin
of it. I thought myself entitled to reparation for his maltreatment of
me, and, seeing that it was a good cigar, I took it. As for any further
converse, I had given that up, when there rumbled forth from him a
soliloquy rather than a story. He appeared to have very little
perception of me as an auditor. I think now that he must have been in
great need of some one to whom he might talk, and that his relations to
those about him forbade any outpouring of expression. He seemed all the
time in the attitude of repelling attack. He did not move, save as he
applied the cigar to his lips or took it away; and his great voice
rolled forth in subdued thunder.

"I've got four sections of ground," said he, "right by the track....
Show you the place when we go through. Of course I've got a lot of other
truck scattered around.... Land at the right figger you've got to
buy--got to.... But when I hadn't but the four sections--one section
overruns so they's a little over twenty-six hundred acres--I thought
'twas about the checker f'r a man with three boys.... One f'r each o'
them, you understand, an' the home place f'r mother if anything
happened.... Mother done jest as much to help git the start as I did....
Plumb as much--if not more.

"Tom an' Wallace is good boys--none better. I'd about as quick trust
either of 'em to run the place as to trust myself."

There was a candid self-esteem in the word "about" and his emphasis on
it.

"I sent Wallace," he resumed, "into a yard of feeders in Montana to pick
out a trainload o' tops with a brush and paint-pot, an' I couldn't 'a'
got a hundred dollars better deal if I'd spotted 'em myself.... That's
goin' some f'r a kid not twenty-five. Wallace knows critters ... f'r a
boy ... mighty well.... An' Tom's got a way of handlin' land to get the
last ten bushel of corn to the acre that beats me with all my
experience.... These colleges where they study them things do some good,
I s'pose; but it's gumption, an' not schoolin', that makes boys like Tom
an' Wallace.... They're all right.... They'd 'a' made good anyhow."

I could feel an invidious comparison between Tom and Wallace, of whom he
spoke with such laudatory emphasis, and some one else whom I suspected
to be the Jack who had come back from the Philippines; and his next
utterance proved this instinctive estimate of the situation to be
correct. He went on, slower than before, with long pauses in which he
seemed lost in thought, and in some of which I gave up, without much
regret, I confess, the idea of ever hearing more of Jack or his
brothers.

"Jack was always mother's boy," said he. "Mother's boy ... you know how
it is.... Make beds, an' dust, an' play the pianah, an' look after the
flowers!... Wasn't bigger'n nothin', either.... Girl, I always thought,
by good rights. I remember ... mother wanted him to be a girl.... She
was on the square with the children ... but if any boy got a shade the
best of it anywhere along the line, it was Jack.... I don't guess Tom
an' Wallace ever noticed; but maybe Jack got a leetle the soft side o'
things from mother.... Still, she's al'ays been dumbed square....

"I seen as soon as he got old enough to take holt, an' didn't, that he
wasn't wuth a cuss.... Never told mother, an' never let on to the boys;
but I could see he was no good, Jack wasn't.... Some never owns up when
it's their own folks ... but what's the use lyin'?... Hed to hev a
swaller-tail coat, an' joined a 'country club' down to town--an' him
a-livin' in the middle of a strip o' country a mile wide an' four long,
wuth a hundred dollars an acre ... all ourn ... goin' out in short pants
to knock them little balls around that cost six bits apiece. I didn't
let myself care much about it; but 'country club!'--Hell!"

He had visualized for me the young fellow unfitted to his surroundings,
designed on a scale smaller than the sons of Anak about him, deft in
little things, finical in dress, fond of the leisure and culture of the
club, oppressed with the roughnesses and vastnesses about his father's
farms, too tender for the wild winds and burning suns, with nerves
attuned to music and art rather than to the crushing of obstacles and
the defeat of tasks: and all the while the image of "mother" brooded
over him. All this was vividly in the picture--very vividly, considering
the unskilful brush with which it had been limned--but just as it began
to appeal to me, Anak fell quiescent.

"I never thought he was anything wuss than wuthless," he went on, at
last, "till he come to me to git some money he'd lost at this here
club.... Thirty-seven dollars an' fifty cents.... Gamblin'.... I told
him not by a damned sight; an' he cried--cried like a baby.... I'd 'a'
seen him jugged 'fore I'd 'a' give him thirty-seven fifty of my good
money lost that way.... Not me.

"... Wallace give him the money f'r his shotgun.... An' mother--she
al'ays knowed when Jack had one o' his girl-cryin' fits--she used to go
up after Jack come in them nights, an' when he got asleep so he wouldn't
know it she'd go in and kiss him.... Watched and ketched her at it, but
never let on.... She run down bad--gittin' up before daylight an' broke
of her rest like that.... I started in oncet to tell her he was no good,
but I jest couldn't.... Turned it off on a hoss by the name o' Jack we
had, an' sold him to make good f'r twenty-five dollars less'n he was
wuth, ruther'n tell her what I started to.... She loved that wuthless
boy, neighbor--there ain't no use denyin' it, she did love him."

He paused a long while, either to ponder on the strange infatuation of
"mother" for "Jack" or to allow me to digest his statement. A dog--one
of the shaggy brown enthusiasts that chase trains--ran along by the cars
until distanced, and then went back wagging his tail as if he had
expelled from the neighborhood some noxious trespasser--as he may have
conceived himself to have done. Goliath watched him with great apparent
interest.

"Collie," said he, at last. "Know anything about collies? Funny dogs!
Lick one of 'em oncet an' he's never no good any more.... All kind o'
shruvle up by lickin', they're that tender-hearted.... Five year ago
this fall Tom spiled a fifty-dollar pedigreed collie by jest slappin'
his ears an' jawin' him.... Some critters is like that ... Jack ...
was!"

He faltered here, and then flamed out into pugnacity, squaring his huge
jaw as if I had accused him--as I did in my heart, I suspect.

"But the dog," he rumbled, "was wuth somethin'--Jack never was....
Cryin' around f'r thirty-seven fifty!... Talkin' o' debts o' honor!...
That showed me plain enough he wasn't wuth botherin' with.... Got his
mother to come an' ask f'r an allowance o' money--so much a month....
Ever hear of such a thing? An' him not turnin' his hand to a lick of
work except around the house helpin' mother.... Tom an' Wallace bed
quite a little start in live stock by this time, an' money in bank....
Jack hed the same lay, but he fooled his away--fooled it away.... Broke
flat all the time, an' wantin' an allowance.... Mother said the young
sprouts at the club had allowances ... an' he read in books that laid
around the house about fellers in England an' them places havin'
allowances an' debts of honor.... Mother seemed to think one while that
we was well enough off so we could let Jack live like the fellers in the
books.... He lived more in them books than he did in South Dakoty, an'
talked book lingo all the time.... Mother soon seen she was wrong.

"She was some hurt b'cause I talked to the neighbors about Jack bein'
plumb no good.... I don't know who told her.... I didn't want the
neighbors to think I was fooled by him.... I never said nothing to
mother, though.... She couldn't f'rgit thet he was her boy, an' she kep'
on lovin' him.... Nobody orto blame her much f'r that, no matter what
he done.... You know how it is with women.

"One time purty soon after the thirty-seven fifty deal a bad check f'r
two hundred come into my bundle o' canceled vouchers at the bank, an' I
knowed in a minute who'd done it.... Jack had been walkin' the floor
nights f'r quite a spell, an' his eyes looked like a heifer's that's
lost her calf.... He hed a sweetheart in town.... Gal from the East ...
big an' dark an' strong enough to take Jack up an' spank him.... It was
her brother Jack had lost the money to. Jack jest wrote my name on a
check--never tried to imitate my fist much--an' the bank paid it....
When I come home a-lookin' the way a man does that's been done that way
by a boy o' his'n, mother told me Jack was gone, an' handed me a letter
he left f'r me.... I never read it.... Went out to the barn so mother
wouldn't see me, an' tore it up.... I'd 'a' been damned before I'd 'a'
read it!"

He gloomed out over my head in an expressionless way that aroused all
the curiosity I am capable of feeling as to the actual workings of
another's mind. He seemed to be under the impression that he had said a
great many things in the pause that ensued; or he regarded my
understanding as of small importance; for he recommenced at a point far
advanced in his narrative.

"--'N' finely," said he very calmly, "we thought she was goin' to die. I
asked the doctor what we could do, an' he told me what.... Knowed all
the boys since he helped 'em into the world, you know--a friend more'n a
doctor--an' he allowed it was Jack she was pinin' f'r. So I goes to her,
a-layin' in bed as white as a sheet, an' I says, 'Mother, if they's
anything you want, you can hev it, if it's on earth, no matter how
no-account I think it is!' ... A feller makes a dumb fool of himself
such times, neighbor; but mother was good goods when we was poor an'
young--any one of the neighbors can swear to that.... She looks up at
me ... an' whispers low ... 'Go an' find him!' ... An' I went.

"I knowed purty nigh where to look. I went to Chicago. He'd dropped
clean down to the bottom, neighbor.... Playin' a pianah ... f'r his
board an' lodgin' an' beer ... in ... in a beer hall."

I was quite sure, he paused so long, that he had told all he had to
narrate of this history of the boy who could not stand punishment, and
was so much like a collie; and I knew from the manner in which he had
lapsed into silence, more than from what he had said, what a dark
passage it was.

"Well," he resumed finally, "I hed my hands spread to strangle him right
there.... I could 'a' done it all right--he was that peaked an'
little.... He wouldn't 'a' weighed more'n a hundred an' fifty--an' _my_
son!... I could 'a' squushed the life out of him with my hands--an' it
was all right if I hed.... You bet it was!... Not that I cared f'r the
two hundred dollars. I could spare that all right. I'll lose that much
on a fair proposition any time.... But to take that thing back to
mother ... from where I picked it up from!

"I reckon I was ruther more gentle with Jack goin' home than I ever was
before.... I hed to be. They was no way out of it except to be easy with
him--'r lam the life out of him an' take him home on a cot ... an'
mother needed him in runnin' order. So I got him clothes, an' had him
bathed, an' he got shaved as he used to be--he had growed a beard--an' I
rode in one car and him in another.... When mother seed him, her an'
him cried together f'r I suppose it might have been two hours 'r two and
a quarter, off an' on, an' whispered together, an' then she went to
sleep holdin' his hand, an' begun to pick up, an' Jack went back to his
own ways, an' the rest of us to ourn, an' it was wuss than ever.... An'
when he sold a team o' mine and skipped ag'in, I was glad, I tell you,
to be shet of him.... An' they could do the mile to the pole in twenty,
slick as mice.

"Next time mother and Wallace went an' got him.... Mother found out some
way that he was dyin' in a horsepittle in Minneapolis.... He claimed
he'd been workin f'r a real estate firm; but I had the thing looked
up ... an' I couldn't find where any of our name had done nothing.... An'
it seemed as ef we'd never git shet of him.... That sounds hard; but he
was a kind of a disease by this time--a chronic, awful painful, worryin'
disease, like consumption.... An' we couldn't git cured of him, an' we
couldn't die.... It was kind o' tough. He moped around, an' mother had
some kind o' promise out of him that he wouldn't leave her no more, an'
he was pleadin' with her to let him go, an' Tom an' Wallace an' me
never sayin' a word to him, when this here Philippine War broke out ...
you know what it's about--I never did ... an' Jack wanted to enlist.

"'I can't let him go!' says mother.

"'Let him go,' says I. 'If he'll go, let him!'

"Mother looks at me whiter'n I ever expect to see her again but once,
maybe; an' the next morning she an' Jack goes to the county seat an' he
enlists. I went down when the rig'ment was all got together. Mother an'
me has always had a place where we kep' all the money they was in the
house, as much hern as mine, an' she took five twenty-dollar gold pieces
out of the pile, an' sewed 'em in a chamois-skin bag all wet with her
cryin' ... an' never sayin' a word ... an' she hangs it round his neck,
an' hung to him an' kissed him till it sorter bothered the boss of the
rig'ment--some kind of colonel--because he wanted the men to march, you
know, an' didn't seem to like to make mother fall back.... She seemed to
see how it was, finely, an' fell back, an' this colonel made the motion
to her with his sword they do to their superiors, an' they marched....
Jack stood straighter than any one in the line, an' he had a new sort of
look to him. He everidged up purty good, too, in hithe ... I don't see
much to this soldier business.... Maybe that's why he looked the part so
well.... I give the captain a hundred f'r him.... Jack sent it back from
a place called Sanfrisco, without a word. 'So much saved!' says I. He
was wuthless as ever."

The immense voice labored, broke, stopped--the man seemed weary and
overcome. To afford him an escape from the story that seemed to have
mastered him, like the Ancient Mariner's, I called his attention to what
the four soldiers were doing. They had dressed as if for inspection, and
were evidently going out upon the platform. The noticeable thing in
their appearance was the change in their expressions from the hilarity
and riotousness of a few moments ago, to a certain solemnity. One of
them carried a little box carefully wrapped up, as a devotee might carry
an offering to a shrine. The huge farmer glanced casually at them as if
with full knowledge of what they were doing, and, ignoring my
interruption, seemed to resume his monologue--as might the habitué of a
temple pass by the question of a stranger concerning a matter related to
the mysteries--something not to be discussed, difficult to be explained,
or not worth mention. He pointed out of the window.

"Our land," said he; "both sides ... tiptop good ground.... Didn't look
much like this when mother an' me homesteaded the first
quarter-section.... See that bunch of box-elders? Me an' her camped
there as we druv in.... Never cut 'em down.... Spoil an acre of good
corn land, too; to say nothin' o' the time wasted cultivatin' 'round
'em.... Well, a man's a fool about some things!"

It was a picture of fulsome plenty and riotous fertility. Straight as
the stretched cord by which they had been dropped ran the soldierly rows
of corn, a mile along, their dark blades outstretched in the unwavering
prairie wind, as if pointing us on to something noteworthy or mysterious
beyond. Back and forth along the rows plodded the heavy teams of the
cultivators, stirring the brown earth to a deeper brownness. High fences
of woven wire divided the spacious fields. On a hundred-acre meadow, as
square and level as a billiard table, were piled the dark cocks of a
second crop of alfalfa. One, two, three farmsteads we passed, each with
its white house hidden in trees, its big red barns, its low hog-houses,
its feed yards, with their racks polished by the soft necks of feasting
steers. And everywhere was the corn--the golden corn of last year in
huge cribs like barracks; the emerald hosts of the new crop in its ranks
like green-suited lines-of-battle arrested in full career and held as by
some spell, leaning onward in act of marching, every quivering sword
pointing mysteriously forward. My heart of a farmer swelled within me at
the scene, which had something in it akin to its owner, it was so huge,
so opulent, so illimitable. Somehow, it seemed to interpret him to me.

"Purty good little places," said he; "but the home place skins 'em all.
We'll be to it in a minute. Train slows up f'r a piece o' new track
work. We'll git a good view of it."

Heaving himself up, he went before me down the aisle of the slowing
train. There stood the soldiers on the steps and the platform. We took
our places back of them. I was absorbed in the study of the splendid
farm, redeemed from the lost wilderness by this man who had all at once
become worth while to me. Back at the rear of the near-by fields was a
row of lofty cottonwoods, waving their high crests in the steady wind.
All about the central grove were pastures, meadows, gardens and
orchards. A dense coppice of red cedars enclosed on three sides a big
feed-yard, in which, stuffing themselves on corn and alfalfa, or lying
in the dusty straw, were grouped a hundred bovine aristocrats in stately
unconcern of the rotund Poland-Chinas about them. In the pastures were
colts as huge as dray-horses, shaking the earth in their clumsy play.
There were barns and barns and barns--capacious red structures, with
hay-forks rigged under their projecting gables; and, in the midst of all
this foison, stood the house--square, roomy, of red brick, with a broad
porch on two sides covered with climbing roses and vines.

On this veranda was a thing that looked like a Morris chair holding a
figure clad in khaki. A stooped, slender, white-haired woman hovered
about the chair; and down by the track, as if to view the passing train,
stood a young woman who was tall and swarthy and of ample proportions.
Her dress was artistically adapted to country wear; she looked
well-groomed and finished. She was smiling as the train drew slowly
past, but I was sure that her eyes were full of tears. I wondered why
she looked with such intentness at the platform--until I saw what the
soldiers were doing. They stood at attention, their hands to their
service-hats, stiff, erect, military. The girl returned the salute, and
pointed to the chair on the veranda, put her handkerchief to her eyes,
and shook her head as if in apology for the man in khaki. And while she
stood thus the man in khaki leaned forward in the Morris chair, laid
hold of the column of the veranda, pulled himself to his feet, staggered
forward a step, balanced himself as if with difficulty, and--saluted.

The soldiers on the platform swung their hats and cheered, and I joined
in the cheer. One of the good fellows wiped his eyes. The big farmer
stood partly inside the door, effectually blocking it, and quite out of
the girl's sight, looking on, as impassive as a cliff. The pretty young
woman picked up a parcel--the offering--which one of the soldiers tossed
to her feet, looked after us smiling and waving her handkerchief, and
ran back toward the house. The train picked up speed and whisked us out
of sight just as the khaki man sank back into the chair, eased down by
the woman with the white hair. I seemed to have seen a death.

"That was mother," said the man of the broad farms, as we resumed our
seats--"mother and Jack ... jest as it always hes been.... Al'ays
mother's boy.... The soldiers comin' from the war al'ays stand on the
platform as they go by--if they's room enough--with their fingers to
their hats in that fool way.... All seem to know where Jack is someway,
no matter what rig'ment they belong to.... Humph!

"It's something he done in the Philippines ... in the islands.... I
don't know where they are.... Off Spain way, I guess.... They's a kind
of yellow nigger there, an' Jack seemed to do well fightin' 'em....
They're little fellers something like his size, you know.... Some high
officer ordered him to take a nigger king on an island once; an' as I
understand it, the niggers was too many f'r his gang o' soldiers. So
Jack went alone an' took him right out of his own camp.... I reckon any
one could 'a' done the same thing with Uncle Sam backin' him; but the
president, 'r congress, 'r the secretary of war thought it was quite a
trick.... I s'pose Jack's shootin' a nigger officer right under the
king's nose made it a better grand-stand play.... Anyhow, Jack went out
a private, an' come back a captain; an' every soldier that rides these
cars salutes as he passes the house, whuther Jack's in sight 'r not....
Funny!... All kinds o' folks to make a world!"

"Then," said I, for I knew the story, of course, when he mentioned the
circumstances, "your son Jack is Captain John Hawes?"

He nodded slowly, without looking at me.

"And that beautiful, strong girl?" I inquired.

"Jack's wife," said he. "All right to look at, ain't she? Lived in New
York ... 'r Boston, I f'rgit which.... Folks well fixed.... Met Jack in
Sanfrisco and married him when he couldn't lift his hand to his head....
She'd make a good farm woman.... Good stuff in her.... What ails him?
Some kind o' poison that was in the knife the nigger soaked him with
when he took that there king ... stabbed Jack jest before Jack shot....
Foolish to let him git in so clost; but Jack never hed no decision....
Al'ays whifflin' around.... If he pulls through, though, that girl'll
make a man of him if anything kin.... She thinks he's all right now ...
proud of him as Chloe of a yaller dress.... Went to Sanfrisco when he
was broke an' dyin', they thought, an' all that, an' begged him as an
honor to let her bear his name an' nuss him.... And she knew how
wuthless he was before the war, an' throwed him over.... Sensible
girl ... then ... I--"

He was gazing at nothing again, and I thought the story ended, when he
began on an entirely new subject, as it seemed to me, until the relation
appeared.

"Religion," said he, "is something I don't take no stock in, an' never
did.... Religious folks don't seem any better than the rest.... But
mother al'ays set a heap by religion.... I al'ays paid my dues in the
church and called it square.... May be something in it f'r some, but not
f'r me. I got to hev something I can git a-holt of.... Al'ays looked a
good deal like graft to me ... but I pay as much as any one in the
congregation, an' maybe a leetle more--it pleases mother.... An' so does
Jack's gittin' religion.... Got it, all right.... Pleases mother,
too.... Immense!... But I don't take no stock in it.

"The doc says he's bad off."

I had not asked the question; but he seemed to feel a necessary inquiry
in the tableau I had seen.

"He used to come down to the track when he first got back an' perform
that fool trick with his hand to his hat when the soldiers went by an'
they let him know.... Too weak, now; ... failin'.... Girl's al'ays
there, though, when she knows.... Kind o' hope he'll--he'll--he'll ...
You know, neighbor, from what she's done f'r him, how mother must love
him!"

We had come to the end of his journey, now--a little country
station--and he left the train without a word to me or a backward look,
his huge hat drawn down over his eyes. I felt that I had seen a curious,
dark, dramatic, badly-drawn, wildly-conceived and Dantesque painting. He
climbed into a carriage which stood by the platform, and to which was
harnessed a pair of magnificent coach-bred horses which plunged and
reared fearfully as the train swept into the station, and were held,
easily and by main strength, like dogs or sheep, by a giant in the
conveyance who must have been Tom or Wallace. From time to time, the
steeds gathered their feet together, trampled the earth in terror, and
then surged on the bits. The giant never deigned even to look at them.
He held the lines, stiff as iron straps, in one hand, took his father's
bag in the other, threw the big horses to the right by a cruel wrench of
the lines to make room for his father to climb in, which he did without
a word. As the springs went down under the weight the horses dashed away
like the wind, the young man guiding them by that iron right hand with
facile horsemanship, and looking, not at the road, but at his father. As
they passed out of sight the father of Captain Hawes turned, looked at
me, and waved his hand. I thought I had seen him for the last time, and
went back to get the story from the soldiers.

"It wasn't so much the way he brought the datto into camp," said one of
them, "or the way he always worked his way to the last bally front peak
of the fighting line. It takes a guy with guts to do them things; but
that goes with the game--understand? But he knew more'n anybody in the
regiment about keepin' well. He made the boys take care of themselves.
When a man is layin' awake scheming to keep the men busy and healthy,
there's always a job for him.... And he had a way of making the boys
keep their promises.... And he's come home to die, and leave that girl
of his--and all the chances he's had in a business way if he wants to
leave the army. It don't seem right! The boys say the president has
invited him to lunch; and he's got sugar-plantation and minin' jobs open
to him till you can't rest.... And to be done by a cussed poison Moro
kris! But he got Mr. Moro--played even; an' that's as good as a man can
ask, I guess. Hell, how slow this train goes!"

As I have said, I never expected to see my big farmer again; but I did.
I completed my business; returned the way I came, passed the great farm
after dusk, and the next morning was in the city where I first saw him.
Looking ahead as I passed along the street I noticed, towering above
every form, and moving in the press like a three-horse van among baby
carriages, the vast bulk of the captain's father. He turned aside into a
marble-cutter's yard, and stood, looking at the memorial monuments which
quite filled it until it looked like a cemetery vastly overplanted. I
felt disposed to renew our acquaintance, and spoke to him. He offered me
his hand, and when I accepted it he stood clinging to mine, standing a
little stooped, the eyes bloodshot, the iron mouth pitifully drooped at
the corners, the whole man reminding me of a towering cliff shaken by an
earthquake, but mighty and imposing still. He held a paper in his free
hand, which he examined closely while retaining the handclasp, and in a
way I had come to expect of him, he commenced in the midst of his
thought and without verbal salutation.

"We've buried Jack!" said he.

"I'm deeply sorry!" said I.

"Well," said he, "maybe it's just as well.... He was ... you know!...
But mother takes it hard--hard!... I'm contractin' f'r a tombstun.... He
wanted to see me ... at the last.... 'Dad,' says he, jest as he used to
when he was ... was a little feller, ... 'I want you to forgive me
before I die.... It's a big country where I'm going, ... an' ... you and
I may never run into each other--so forgive me! Mother'll find
me--wherever I go ... but you, Dad, ... for fear it's our last chance,
let's square up now!' ... I ... I ..."

He went out among the stones and seemed to be looking the stock over.
Presently, he returned and showed me the paper. It was what a printer
would call "copy" for an inscription--the name, the dates, the age of
Captain John Hawes--severe, laconic. At the bottom were two or three
lines scrawled in a heavy, ponderous hand, with the half-inch lead of a
lumber pencil. Only one fist could produce that Polyphemus chirography.

"_He went out a private_," it read, "_and came back a captain._" And
then, as if by afterthought, and in huge capitals, came the line: "_And
died a Christian._"

"Is that all right?" he asked. "Is the spellin' all right?... I
don't care much about this soldier business ... an' the
Christian game ... don't interest me ... a little bit, ... but,
neighbor, you don't know how that'll please mother! 'Died a
Christian!' ... Someway ... mother ... always loved Jack!"

At the turning of the street I looked and saw the last scene of the
drama--one that will play itself before me from time to time in
retrospect for ever. The great, unhewn, mountainous block was still
there, standing among his more shapely and polished brother stones, a
human monolith, the poor, pitiful paper in his trembling hand.




CHAPTER V


"I find myself," said the Driver, at the next session of the
Scheherazade Society, as Colonel Baggs called their camp-fires, "in a
whale of a dilemmer. I have never had nothin' happen to me worth
tellin'. I have punched cows till this dry farmin' made it necessary to
take to some more humble callin', and there's nothin' to cow-punchin'
that is interestin'.

"I have showed you here in the Upper Geyser Basin fifteen geysers of the
first magnitude, an' a hundred smaller ones; I have showed you Old
Faithful, the Giant, the Giantess, the Fan and the Riverside. I have
showed you the Grotto Geyser, which is a cross between a geyser and a
cave. I have showed you the quiescent spring at its best--the Morning
Glory pool with more colors than any rainbow ever had. I've showed you
jewels and giants and ogres and sprites, and--"

"Here!" shouted the Groom. "Saw off on that professional patter! You're
not the driver now, but Aconite Driscoll, the Cow-boy, and telling us
the story of your life. We have seen more things here than Münchhausen,
Gulliver, Mandeville, Old Jim Bridger and the whole brood of romancers
ever could imagine. Give us some North American facts, now."

"Well, if I must, I must," said poor Aconite. "But there's nothin' to
it. I reckon I'd better narrate to you some of the humble doin's of the
J-Up-And-Down Ranch over on Wolf Nose Crick, in the foot-hills of the
Black Hills--in the dear, dead past beyond recall--thanks to the
Campbell method of dry farmin'."


THE TALE OF TEN THOUSAND DOGIES

THE TALE TOLD BY THE DRIVER

The way I gets into this story is a shame an' disgrace, an' is
incompetent, irreverent, an' immaterial, an' not of record in this case.

Eh? Adds color to the--which? Narrative! Well, I d'n' know about that. I
reely couldn't say as it does.

But mentionin' color, the thought of that little affair do make my face
as red as a cow-town on pay-day. When I turn that tale loose we'll make
a one-night stand of it by the grub-wagon. It comprises a shipper's pass
to Sioux City, a sure-thing game in that moral town, which I win out by
backin' my judgment with my Colt, an' a police court wherein the bank
roll and my pile was rake-off for the court. Charge, gamblin'. All hands
plead guilty. All correct says you, an' quite accordin' to the statues
made an' pervided; an' so says I, ontil I casually picks up a paper in
Belle Fourche, an' sees that it was a phoney police court, not only
owned and controlled by the shell men, which wouldn't be surprisin', but
privately installed as a sort of accident insurance on their other game.

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," Mr. Elkins remarks to me one
day, but all that is goin' to be changed when I ketch up with that
police judge.

Ridin' the range makes a man talkative with the scenery, an' when I sees
that Sioux City paper, I turns loose some remarks in the presence of a
gentleman who subsequently turns out to be Mr. Elkins.

"Thanks," says he.

"When did you acquire any chips in this little solitaire blasphemy
game?" says I, mad, as a man allus is if he's ketched solloloquisin' to
himself.

"A man," says he, "with all the sidetracks filled with cars o' cattle
an' more comin', an' no gang, is in, _ex proprio vigore_," says he,
whatever that means, "anywhere where cuss-words is trumps."

He never smiled except back in his eyes, an' I, likin' his style, hires
out to him, an' was third man on the J-Up-And-Down Ranch from the day
the dogies begun to be unloaded, till James R. Elkins went to New York,
with a roll that would choke a blood-sweatin' hippopotamus.

Third man, says I, an' if you think the first was the Old Man, J. R. E.,
you know, you've got another conjecture comin'. Number One was Mrs.
Elkins, an' I reckon some of her New York friends'll enter into
conniptions to know that, in lessn' a year, half the boys called her
Josie--in their dreams, at least--an' some on 'em to her face; but none
to her back, by a damsite! The Old Man--a lot of us called him Jim
habitual--was a one-lunger when this dogie enterprise started, all
mashed in body in the collapse of the boom at Lattimore; an' them as
thinks I refer to any loggin' accident is informed that I mean the
town-lot boom in the city of Lattimore, as is more fully set forth
elsewhere, the same bein' made by reference a part hereof, marked
"Exhibit A," which explains the broken bones aforesaid--

"If there's no objection," said Colonel Baggs, in a high court-room
singsong, "'Exhibit A' will be received in evidence. G'long, Aconite!"

Financially, he was millions worse than nothing, if you can understand
that. Personally, I caint. Zero is the bottom of the spondulix scale fer
me, although the thummometer seems to prove it ain't necessarily thus.
Anyhow, the Old Man had Josie, an' any man from Sturgis to Dog Den
Buttes would have shouldered all Mr. Elkins' shrinkages, especially the
below-zero part, to've had her jest once smooth the hair off his beaded
brow, let alone take charge of him like a Her'ford heifer does her fust
calf. Which is sure the manner Josie took a-holt and managed the Old
Man. But this hain't no love story. Quite the reverse. It's the "Tale of
Ten Thousand Dogies."

I found out that when Mr. E. went into the bulb in a business way, this
Wolf Nose Crick Ranch went around bankruptcy, instid of through it,
becuz, mostly, nobody thought it wuth a--a thought. An' to them as
think strange of ten thousand steers, even dogies, bein' bought by a
busted boomer, I'll state that any man with the same range, an' not
absolutely a convicted hoss-thief, could've got 'em by givin' the same
cutthroat chattel mawgitch. Old Aleck Macdonald did sure sell 'em to Mr.
Elkins reasonable, though, because James R. had made him a good deal of
money in this boom, an' they was only dogies anyhow.

Now, this bein' my evenin' fer tellin' the truth, I'll state that ten
thousand dogies is sure a complicated problem on the range. The
distinction between them an' reg'lar native range cows lays in the lap
o' luxury in which the dogies is dangled in the farmin' regions where
they originate. The first little blizzard, they'll hump up an' blat fer
home an' mother. They'll gaze fondly at a butte ten mile off, expectin'
doors in it to slide open, an' racks full of clover an' timothy to pull
out an' be forked out to 'em. They look grieved an' wring their jaws
becuz water with the chill took off ain't piped to their stalls, an'
they moan 'cause they ain't no stalls. I'd as soon run a Women's an'
Babies' Home. You cain't get it into their heads where the water-holes
is, an' it's allus an even break whuther they'll stan' an' freeze in
their tracks, or chase after some bunch of 2:10 natives ontil their
hooves drop off. That's why Macdonald talked as he did about 'em, as I'm
informed.

"Take 'em," says he, "an' don't flatter yourself I'm donatin' anything.
They's no feed fer 'em in their native Iowa at any livin' price, an' on
the other hand, fifty per cent. of 'em'll die gettin' over their
homesickness on the range. You'll have it in fer me fer stickin' you,
when you know more about the cattle business. Fer the Lord's sake take
'em before they eat me out of every dollar I've got left!"

Some of this was straight goods, an' some stall; but that first winter
was a special providence if they ever was one. So mild and barmy from
September to March that the prairie-dogs forgot to hole up, an' Mrs.
Elkins served Thanksgivin' dinner in the open air on the pizziazzy at
the Ranch. An' she rode the range with Jim consecutively, an' said she'd
found her 'finity in this cattle biz. As for him, the main thing the
matter was that failure o' his a-millin' through his mental facilities.
But this was their honeymoon, we found, an' that, an' no losses on the
range, helped his case, an' by spring he begun to shoot the persiflage
into the gang, an' set up an' reach for things to beat fours. As for
the dogies, none of 'em had the faintest show fer a beller. The grass
was like new-mown hay; every little snow was follered by a chinook; the
water-holes was brimmin'; an' all went merry as a marriage bell.

"The fact is, Aconite," says Mr. Elkins, addressin' me, "I knew when I
heard that burst of phonetic lava from your lips at Belle Fourche, that
there'd be no fear of low temperatures if you could be induced to stay
by the cows, and blow off once in a while."

He had the hot air under wonderful control, hisself, an' felt good at
the way the stock was comin' on--March, April, May, an' fresh feed,
ponds full o' ducks, cute little young wolves about the dens, an' every
one o' the ten thousand dogies stretchin' to see hisself grow. But the
fall--the fall was sure a bad one fer both feed an' water. The dogies,
however, couldn't fairly be called such any longer, havin' recovered
from what Jim called their acute nostalgia, an' bein' pret' near's good
rustlers as natives. An' well it was fer 'em, fer grass was sca'ce, an'
a son-of-a-gun of a while between drinks. After you got away from the
crick--an' you jist _had_ to git away f'r grass--it was a good day's
ride to water, east, west, north, south, up'r down. On the hay-slews we
had to prime the rake with old hay 'fore we could make a windrow. Laff
if you want to, but they was whole outfits with less hay than some folks
has gover'ment bonds. We had about enough to wad a shotgun, an' was
merchant princes in the fodder line. The steers, lookin' like
semi-animated hat-racks, as the Old Man said, come through the cold
weather in a shrinkin' an' sylph-like way, so thin that you could throw
a bull by the tail a dum sight furder'n I'd trust some folks, an' that's
no dream!

By this time Mr. Elkins was a sure-enough cow-man, president of the
Association and the biggest man from Spearfish to Jackson's Hole. He
knew some confounded joke on every man in the cow-country, an' not only
called 'em all by their fust name, but had one of his own f'r most of
'em. Mrs. Elkins, havin' pulled him through his own dogy stage, dropped
out of the cow business, an' devoted herself to kids. I knew that this
dogy proposition was a sort of a straw that Jim Elkins grabbed at as he
went under, an' it done me an' all the fellers good to see the
percentage of loss so small, even if the brutes wasn't puttin' on weight
as they orto, an' the price was away down, an' we knew we shouldn't be
ready to sell when the mawgitch got ripe. Old Macdonald was Jim's
friend, though, an' would sure extend the note when it come of age; an'
fur's we could see, these dry seasons was only delayin' the clean-up.

So I thought, an' so thought the Elkins family, as peaceful as a Injun
summer morn, an' as happy as skunks. But along in June of the third
year, just in the last of the round-up, out comes what Elkins called our
Nemmysis in the form of a jackleg lawyer with news of Macdonald's death,
and papers to prove it, an' him appointed executioner of the estate of
A. Macdonald, diseased. He wanted to see the cattle the estate had a
mawgitch on. I was app'inted as his chaperon to show him the stock, an'
it bein' a hurryin' time o' year, I exhibited to him ten 'r 'leven
thousand head of mixed pickles, and called it square. He didn't know a
cow-brand from one plucked from the burnin', an' credited us with a
township or two of O-Bar-X cow stuff I run him into the first day out. I
didn't feel that he was wuth payin' much notice to, if he hadn't had the
say about the Old Man's mawgitch.

I gathered from him that he was goin' to rearlize on the outfit in the
fall. I went so fur as to p'int out what a grave-robbin' scheme this
was, an' how this dogy stuff had been kep' in the livin' skelliton
department f'r two years by drouth an' a hell-slew of other troubles,
an' couldn't possibly do more than pay off the mawgitch, an' leave us
holdin' the bag in the wust country f'r snipe outside of the Mojave
desert.

"They'll pay out," says he, "an' that's all I'm required to look out
fer."

I swear, I was prospectin' f'r a good hole to plant him in all the rest
o' the trip. I goes right to the ranch when we pulled in. The Old Man
an' Josie was a-sittin' in the firelight, an' she had the baby, a
yearlin' on her lap, and the boy, a long two-year-old, in the crib.
Outside of a nest o' young wild ducks, I never seen anything softer and
cuter. I reports an' asks instructions as to the best way of disposin'
of Mr. Jackleg's remains.

"Quicklime," says he ruminatin'ly, "is a good and well-recognized
scheme; but we haven't any, Aconite, have we? Or we might incorporate
him into that burnin' lignite bed over in the butte. Boxin' him up an'
shippin' him to fictitious consignees involves a trip to the railroad,
an' creatin', as it does, a bad odor, an' stickin' a strugglin' railroad
company for the freight, it never seemed to me quite the Christian
thing. Don't you agree with me, Aconite?"

"Now, the God's truth is, I was speakin' parabolically about this
projected homicide, but no man can bluff _me_, an' when the Old Man
seemed to fall in with it in that heart-to-heart way, I made a lightnin'
cat-hop, an' told him as sober as a Keeley alumnus that the lignite bed
seemed most judicious to me, an' when should we load up the catafalque?
Then Mrs. E. breaks in with a sort o' gugglin' laugh.

"Jim," says she, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself! Mr. Driscoll,"
addressin' me by my name, which never was Aconite, reely, "Mr. Driscoll,
Mr. Elkins is not serious in his remarks."

"Neither'm I," says I.

"Of course not," says she. "We fully understand that."

"Sure," says the Old Man. "Let the lawyer take its course. Which will be
assumin' possession of the ten thousand dogies; and I feel sure he'll
want to leave you in charge of 'em. He's stuck on you, Aconite."

"See him in Helena fust," says I.

"But wait a minute," says Mr. Elkins. "Somebody's got to take charge of
this stuff for the mortgagee, if he keeps on thinkin' as he does now.
You're our friend. It'll be more agreeable in every way to have you
than, say, Bill Skeels, of the O-Bar-X."

Of course I gets roped, throwed an' branded at last, an' Mr. Jackleg
goes away takin' my receipt f'r ten thousand head, more or less, of
steers branded "J" known in the cattle business as "J-Up-And-Down," the
same bein' on the ranges at the head-waters of the Cheyenne, Moreau,
Little Missouri, an' other streams, an' God knows where else, more
definitely described in a certain indenture of mawgitch, and so forth
and so on, till death comes to your relief. An' James R. Elkins was
reduced to a few hundred white faces he'd put in as a side-line, an' I
feelin' like a sheepman unmasked!

Mr. Jackleg--his real name turned out to be Witherspoon--give me his
instructions from the buckboard as he prepares to pull out, in the
presence of the Old Man an' Mrs. E.

"I was fetched up on a farm," says he, an' he looked the part, "an' I
know a good deal about cattle. Every animal should hev water at least
twice a day."

"I'll personally see to it," says I, winkin' at the Old Man, "that
every steer has a crack at the growler at least semi-daily."

"Another thing," says he; "I knew a herd-boy that run a bunch of fifty
cows practically dry by holdin' 'em in too close a bunch on the prairie.
Let 'em spread out so's to give 'em room to graze."

"Well, fer Gawd's sake!" says I, thinkin' of the feller's sanity; an'
before I could finish my yawp, off he pelts, leavin' me gaspin'.

"Wake up," says Elkins, shakin' me by the shoulder. "If you git 'em all
watered by bed-time, you'll have to git busy."

He sure is a good loser, thinks I, ontil I figgered that with Josie an'
the kids counted in, he hadn't been pried loose from any great
percentage of his holdin's after all.

Now, the idee was to round up an' ship about the first of December, so
the estate could be wound up at the January term o' court. Pretty soon
things seemed about as they was before. I went to the Old Man for
orders, an' Mr. Jackleg's visit seemed, as Mrs. E. once said, like a
badly-drawn dream. Every time I went to J. R. E. he says to me that I'm
boss, an' to remember my instructions.

"Obey orders," says he, "if it busts owners."

Grass an' water was plenty ag'in, and the dogies was fattin' up.
Round-up was drawin' on just as prospects f'r profit begins to brighten.
It seemed a sort of a hash of midnight assassination, poisonin'
water-holes, givin' away a podner, an' keepin' sheep, to ship them ten
thousand then. An' all the time the Old Man was a-bearin' down about
obeyin' orders, and beggin' me to remember Mr. Jackleg's partin' words,
an' repeatin' that sayin' about obeyin' orders if it busted owners. The
thing kep' millin' an' millin' in my brain till I got into the habit of
settin' around an' sweatin' heinyous, ontil I'd come to with a start, in
the middle of a pool of self-evolved moisture filled with wavin' rushes,
an' embosomin' acres of floatin' water-lilies! That's the sort of
sweater I am when a little worried. Fin'ly I turned on the Old Man like
a worm--a reg'lar spiral still-worm.

"How in everlastin' fire," says I, not just like that, "am I to see that
every dogy gits two swigs a day on these prairies, an' wherein am I to
take any notice of that shyster's fool talk about rangin' wide?"

"Well," says he, "you know there's pools an' water-holes scattered from
here to the Canada line, an' from the Missouri to the Continental
Divide. A few head, dropped here an' there, handy to water, would be
apt to live more accordin' to the hydropathic ideas of the executor of
the will of A. Macdonald, diseased. At the same time you would be
conformin' to his remarkable correct hyjeenic notions as to
segregation."

"Hyjeenic y'r grandmother!" says I, f'r the sitiwation called f'r strong
language. "They couldn't be rounded up in a year; an' it's damn
nonsense, anyhow, to foller the so-called idees of a--"

"Oh, I see," says he, in a sort of significant way. "I see: it would be
a slow round-up. Maybe my intrusts blinds me to those of the people you
represent. A slow round-up wouldn't hurt me any! But, of course, you
stan' f'r the mawgitchee's intrusts, an' are nat'rally hostyle--"

I set sort o' numbed f'r a minute. A new thing was a-happenin' to me, to
wit, an idee was workin' itself into my self-sealin', air-tight,
shot-proof, Harveyized skull. Talk about your floods o' light! I got
what Doc calls a Noachian deluge of it right then.

"Sir," says I, "'an' Madam, truly'"--quotin' from a pome Mrs. E. had
been readin'--"I _think_ I see my duty clear at last! If I fin'ly _hev_
grasped it, my labors requires my absence," says I, "an' I'll see you
later."

Mr. Elkins laughed a sort of a Van Triloquist's chuckle. Josie Elkins
comes up, an' stannin' close to me in that maddenin' way o' hern, sort
o's if she's climbin' into your vest pocket, she squose my hand, an'
says she, "Mr. Driscoll, we know that you'll be true to any trust
reposed in you! An' to your friends!" An' at the word "friends" she sort
of made sunbeams from her eyes to mine, an' pressed my hand before
breakin' away, as much as to say that, speakin' o' friends, the ones
that had reely drunk from the same canteen an' robbed watermelon patches
together from earliest infancy was her an' me. Holy Mackinaw! I went out
into the wilderness givin' thanks an' singin' an' cussin' myself, at
peace with all the world.

I flatter myself that the work done upon, or emanatin' from the
J-Up-And-Down Ranch from that time, f'r a spell, stands in a class by
itself in cow-country annuals. It begins with a sort o' quarterly
conference of the punchers. I gives 'em a sermon something as follers:

"Fellers," says I, "it's been borne in upon me that these dogies need
drivin' where they's fewer cows to the cubic inch o' water. Moreover,
they're in too much of a huddle. Here's the hull ten thousand cooped up
within twenty to thirty mile of the spot whereon we stand. You cain't
swing a bob-cat by the tail," says I, "without scratchin' their eyes
out. It vi'lates the crowded tenement laws. It corrupts the poor little
innercent calves. It's a Mulberry Street shame. You are therefore
ordered an' directed to disseminate these beeves over a wider expanse of
the moral heritage. You, Doc, take Ole an' the Greaser, an' goin' south
an' west with as many as you can round up, drop off a carload 'r so at
every waterin' place an' summer resort up the Belle Fourche an' the
North Fork, over onto the Powder, an' as fur as Sheridan. When yeh git
short o' cows, come back f'r more. There ain't no real limits to yer
efforts short o' the Yellowstone. We must obey Mr. Jackleg's orders
about huddlin'. I'll give Absalom an' Pike the Little Missouri, the
Cannon Ball and the Grand valleys. Git what help you need; I grant power
to each of yeh to send f'r persons an' papers an' administer oaths, if
necessary. I'll take my crew an' try to gladden the waste places along
the Moreau an' Cheyenne an' White Rivers with dogies. Get your gangs,
an' scatter seeds o' kindness an' long four-year-olds from hell to
breakfast. For as yeh sow even shall yeh reap. If a critter smothers
from crowdin' sev'ral to a township these hot nights, somebody's goin'
to be held personally responsible to me. You hear, I s'pose?"

"Is this straight goods, Aconite?" says Doc.

"Am I a perfessional humorist," says I, "or am I the combined Fresh Air
Fund, S. P. C. A., and Jacob A. Riis of these yere hills? Am I the main
squeeze of this outfit, an' the head of a responsible gover'ment, or am
I not? Hit the grit," says I, "an' begin irradiatin' steers."

Obedience is a lovely thing, fellers, an' a man poised in an air-ship a
few thousan' feet above a given pi'nt som'eres in the neighborhood o'
the Hay Stack Buttes, armed with a good long-range peekeriscope, might
have observed a beautiful outbust of it, all that golding autumn, on the
part of a class of men presumably onsubordinate--the ungrammatical but
warm-hearted cow-boys. They preached a mixed assortment o'
fair-to-middlin' steers unto all men. The Ten Thousand was absorbed into
the landscape of four great states, like a ship-load o' Swedes into the
Republican party. The brethren of the ranches heared gladly the gospel
of obeyin' orders, an' wherever a wisp of cows amountin' to more than a
double handful congregated together in one place, there was some
obejient son of a gun in the midst of 'em, movin' 'em along towards the
bubblin' springs, green fields an' pastors new of Mr. Jackleg's orders.
It was touchin'. I never felt so good, so sort o' glory-hallelujahish in
my life, as I did a-ridin' back to Wolf Nose Crick in the brown October
weather, with the dogies off my mind an' the map, thinkin' of how Mrs.
E. had squoze my hand, sort o' weepful on moonlight nights, but
stronger'n onions in a sense o' juty well performed.

You can sort o' dimly ketch onto the shock it was to me, a-drillin' into
camp at Wolf Nose Crick in this yere peaceful frame of mind, to find Mr.
Jackleg there, madder'n a massasauga, an' perfec'ly shameful in his
feelin's towards _me_.

"Where's these ten thousand head o'cattle, Driscoll?" he hollers on
seein' me. "Here's your receipt for 'em; where's the stock?"

"Calm yourself," says I, droppin' my hand to my gun; "the dogies is all
right. The dogies is out yan in the most unhuddled state of any outfit
on the range, fur from the slums of Wolf Nose Crick an' their corruptin'
influences, drinkin' at the pure springs o' four great American
commonwealths, layin' on fat like aldermen, an' in a advanced state of
segregation. Your orders," says I, tickled to think how I'd remembered
langwidge so fur above my station in life, "your orders was to put 'em
next to the damp spots, an' keep 'em fur apart, an' has been obeyed
regardless."

Up to that time I had looked upon him with contempt; but the way he
turned in an' damned me showed how sorely I'd misjudged him. As my
respect fer him riz, it grew important not to let him go on so, f'r I
couldn't let any reel man talk to me that-a-way, an' in less time than
it takes to mention it, I had the boys a-holdin' me, and Mr. Jackleg
stannin' without hitchin'.

"I may hev been hasty in my remarks," says he; "but I've been out with
all the men I could git f'r two weeks, an' how many of our herd do you
s'pose I have been enabled to collect?"

"Not knowin', cain't say," says I.

"Just a hundred an' fifty-seven!" says he.

"Good!" says I. "You've got no kick comin'. I couldn't have done better
myself. But you won't git as many in the next two weeks! Cheer up; the
wust is yet to come!"

An' at that he flies off the handle ag'in, an' lights out f'r the East,
with the estate all unwound, I s'pose.

Now, everybody knows the rest of this story. Everybody knows how grass
an' water an' winters favored the range-stuff f'r the next two years.
Them dogies was as well off 's if they'd been in upholstered sheds
eatin' gilded hay. When ol' Dakoty starts out to kill stock, she reg'lar
Mountain-Medders-Massacres 'em; but when she turns in to make a
feed-yard of herself, she's a cow paradise without snakes. The hist'ry
of these dogies illustrates this p'int, an' shows our beautiful system
of enforcin' honesty in marketin' range cattle whereby the active
robbery is confined to the stockyards folks and the packers, where it
won't do no moral harm. As was perfec'ly square an' right, the brand
inspectors at Omaha, Sioux City, Chicago an' Kansas City was on the
lookout f'r J-Up-And-Down steers in the intrusts of Mr. Jackleg's
mawgitch; an' after every round-up, some on 'em would dribble in with
the shipments, an' be sold an' proceeds gobbled accordin' to Hoyle. An'
when things got good--dogies about the size of Norman hosses, an' as fat
as Suffolk pigs--the word goes out from Wolf Nose Crick to every ranch
on the range, that the anti-slum crusade was off, an' J-Up-And-Down
stuff was to be shipped as rounded up. F'r weeks an' months, I'm told,
pret' near every car had some of 'em. Top grassers, they was at last, in
weight an' price, an' when the half of 'em was in, the estate of A.
Macdonald, diseased, was wound up, tight as a drum, intrust an'
principal, an' Jim Elkins had left a little trifle o' five thousand
beeves, wuth around a hundred apiece, free an' clear, an' the record of
Aconite Driscoll, as a philanthropist, a humannytarian, an' a
practical-cow-puncher, was once more as clear as a Christian's eye.

An' this is how Jim Elkins got his ante in this New York game he's
a-buckin' so successful. An' so it was that my little meet-up with a
Sioux City shell-man, which I'm lookin' fer yit, results in a reg'lar
Pullman sleeper trip to Chicago, where I'm the guest of honor at a
feedin' contest instituted by Mr. James R. Elkins, whereat Mr.
Jackleg--Witherspoon, I mean, and dead game after all, if any one should
inquire--makes a talk about the pleasure it affords all of us to see our
old friend Elkins restored to those financial circulars where he was so
well known, an' so much at home; an' alludin' to me as restorer-in-chief
by virtoo of my great feet, an' losin' ten thousand dogies so that
Pinkerton himself couldn't find 'em ontil the wilderness saw fit to
disgorge 'em in its own wild an' woolly way. An' fin'ly I'm called on
an' made to git up, locoed at the strange grazin' ground, but game to do
my best, an' after millin' awhile, "I'm here," says I, "owin' to my
eckstrordinary talent f'r obeyin' orders. I'm told to come hither, an' I
at once set out to prove my effectiveness as a come-hitherer. As f'r
losin' ten thousand dogies, I cain't see what that has to do with my
great feet. An' right here," I says, "I wish to state that I onst lost
something else, to wit, my val'able temper at something done 'r said by
a gentleman now present, for all of which I begs pardon of Mr.
Jackleg--Mr. Witherspoon, I means," says I, an' everybody hollers an'
pounds, him most of all, but redder'n a turkey, "an' I wish to state
that it does me good to feel that harmony and peace between him an' me
is restored. Here in Chicago," says I, "him an' me can git together on
the platform of feedin' in bunches, without dehornin'; with the
paramount issue to go before the people on, however, that old plank o'
his'n declarin' f'r frekent drinks!"

After that, I don't remember what eventuated--not quite so clear.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I told you," said the Bride, as the party broke up for the night, "that
we'd get some local color."

"Alas!" replied the Artist. "This is like the local color of Babylon and
the Shepherd Kings--a tradition and a whisper borne on the night breeze,
of things that were. O, Remington! Remington!"




CHAPTER VI


Professor Boggs was in a brown study from the time his name emerged from
the hat on starting from the Upper Geyser Basin, until the equipage of
the Seven Wonderers, as the Poet called the party, reached the Thumb
Lunch Station on Yellowstone Lake, nineteen miles to the east--which
drive they made between breakfast and luncheon. The Colonel had
telephoned ahead for a special banquet for the eight that night, at
which Professor Boggs was to tell his story, and civilized life was to
be resumed for the nonce--"To prevent," as the Colonel explained, "our
running wild so that we'll have to be blindfolded and backed onto the
cars when we get back to Gardiner." All up the pleasant Firehole Valley,
the Professor worked at a packet of papers which he took from his bag.

"I'll bet he gives us an essay on some phase of rural education,"
challenged the Artist, with no takers.

Past the exquisite Kepler Cascade they went, after a stop which filled
all except the Hired Man and the Professor with delight. When the party
alighted for the walk of half a mile to the Lone Star Geyser, these two
remained with the surrey--the Professor busy, the Hired Man lazily
smoking. His mental film-pack was exhausted. Spring Creek Cañon proved
another of those comforting features which relieve the strain of
constant astonishment in the Park--the narrow and winding cañon, with
its homelike rocks and cliffs, topped by inky evergreens, shut them in
like some comforting shelter against the tempest of the marvelous. Down
this wild glen tumbled a clear stream of cold water, bordered with
ferns, willows and alders. The Bride scooped up a little of the water in
her hand and drank it.

"Isn't it funny?" she asked.

"Isn't what funny?" asked the Groom.

"To find water actually cool and clear, and flowing down a glen of just
rocks, with no steam, or rainbow colors, or anything but good earth and
stones? I feel like one just out of some sort of inferno."

"The first feller to roam these here hollers," said Aconite, "was a guy
named John Colter. He came out with the Lewis and Clark expedition, and
stopped on the way back to trap. That was about 1807. He got into the
Park some way, and when he emerged he told of it. And there was where
the fust reppytation for truth an' veracity was blighted by the
p'isenous exhalations of this region of wonders."

"Was he Jimbridgered?" asked the Artist.

"Was he whiched?"

"Jimbridgered; Marcopoloed; Münchhausened; Mandevilled; Driscolled;
placed in the Ananias Club?"

"He shore was," replied Aconite. "W'y this place was called Colter's
Hell from Saint Joe to Salt Lake by them as didn't believe in it.
'Whar'd this eventuate?' a puncher'd say to a feller that had seen
something. 'In Colter's Hell' another would say, meanin' that it never
did occur--an' if he didn't smile when he said it, there'd be gun play.
An' hyar was all them marvels that Colter'd seen, and more, all the
time!"

At Craig Pass, the cayuses were stopped so that all might feast their
eyes on the little Isa Lake, frowned on by stern precipices, but smiling
up into the blue, its surface flecked with water-lilies.

"An' hyar," said Aconite, "we hev a body of water that at one end
empties into the Atlantic Ocean's tributaries, an' at the other waters
the Pacific slope."

"Which is which?" asked the Colonel.

"The east end runs into the Pacific, and the west into the Atlantic,"
replied Aconite, quite truthfully.

"What's that!" exclaimed the Hired Man. "Do yeh mean to say we've got
over on the coast by drivin' east--toward Ioway?"

"You've said 'er," said Aconite.

"I tell you," said the Hired Man, as the others began studying their
maps to clear up this geographic anomaly, "I tell you that there ain't
no way of understandin' the 'tother-end-toness of this place, except by
sayin' that the hull thing is a gigantic streak of nature."

"The most rational explanation," said the Groom, "that I've heard. Mr.
Hired Man sets us all right. Drive on, Aconite!"

Down Corkscrew Hill they volplaned, thrilled and somewhat scared by the
speed of the cayuses, which flew downward in joyful relief at the
cessation of the uphill pull to the pass. At the bottom there was a
halt to afford a glimpse of Shoshone Lake, and far off to the south the
exquisite Tetons, their summits capped with pearl. The visit to Shoshone
Lake with its gorgeous geysers was to be postponed until after they
should arrive at the thumb of Yellowstone Lake, and make camp.

An hour of steady driving succeeded. They drowsed in their seats, torpid
from the early start and the days of strenuous sight-seeing. The road
ran through a quiet forest, and there was something not unpleasant in
the fact that the curtain of trees shut off the view--until suddenly at
a turn in the highway, there burst upon their sight that most marvelous
of inland seas, Yellowstone Lake. Straight away extended its waters, for
twenty miles, to the dim shores of Elk Point, where the pines carried
the wonderful landscape upward, their gloom cutting straight across the
view, between the mirror-like sheen of the lake, to timber-line on the
azure Absarokas, standing serenely across the eastern sky, their
serrated summits picked out with snow against the blue.

A huge chalice lay the lake, reared to a height of a mile and a half
above the dusty and furrowed earth where folk plow and dig and make
their livings, the crown jewel of the continent's diadem, unutterably,
indescribably lovely, filled with crystalline dew. The tourists caught
their breaths. Aconite said nothing. For a long time they stood, until
the horses began to move backward and forward, uneasy at the unwonted
stay. The Bride was holding the Groom's hand, her eyes glistening with
tears.

They passed the lovely little Duck Lake, unmindful of its prettiness,
and drew up at the lunch station, where they remained unconscious of
their hunger until the memory of the splendors of the lake were first
dulled, and then obliterated by the scent of the bacon which Aconite was
frying. The Hired Man ate valiantly, lighted his pipe, and sighed.

"That was all right," said he.

"Thanks," said Aconite. "It cost forty cents a pound, an' orto be good."

"I meant," said the Hired Man, "that view o' the lake from back yonder."

       *       *       *       *       *

Night brought dinner, and that appetite for it which outdoors gives to
healthy folk, at eight thousand feet above the sea. After the eating was
well and thoroughly done, the Professor responded to the call for his
story. He rose solemnly, bowed to the assemblage, arranged his papers,
cleared his throat, and began.


A BELATED REBEL INVASION

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY

Unlike the rest of you, I am no mere seeker after pleasure. I am an
outcast from my native Iowa. I have held high and honorable office, and
I have been treated as was Coriolanus of old. I am the victim of the
ingratitude of republics, as expressed in a direct primary in Stevens
County, Iowa. I am on my way to the great new West, where I shall seek
to serve newer communities where perfidy may not be so ingrained in the
nature of the body politic. And I shall shun relations other than
professional ones, with persons of youth, beauty, charm, and feminine
gender. For by these I am a sufferer. I have with me my notes, and to
you is given the first hearing of my side of a case which may become
historic.

"The contest is unequal," says Epictetus, "between a charming young girl
and a beginner in philosophy." Let this be remembered when I am blamed
for the havoc wrought upon my political educational career in Stevens
County, Iowa, by Miss Roberta Lee Frayn of Tennessee. Not that I am a
beginner in philosophy. The man who, at my age, has been elected county
superintendent of schools is no mere tyro in the field wherein Epictetus
so distinguished himself. But neither does the word "charming"
adequately describe Miss Frayn, unless one trace back the word "charm"
to its more diabolically significant root. I expect to write this, my
_apologia_, and leave the verdict to posterity.

No citizen of Stevens County is likely to be ignorant of the manner in
which Miss Frayn was deposited in my mother's farmyard by the wrecking
of a railway train, or how her grandfather, Colonel Kenton Yell Frayn,
died there in her arms and left the young girl penniless. Judge
Worthington, hereafter to be mentioned, was on the train and doubtless
assisted in extricating Miss Frayn and her grandfather from the
wreckage, but I feel that my own efforts were more effective than was
reported. We left the young woman in the care of my mother, and I took
the judge with me in my buggy.

He was much distraught as we rode along. I tried to say something in the
way of furthering my candidacy for the office I now hold; but he
repulsed me.

"For God's sake, Oscar," I remember him to have said, "don't try to
electioneer me until I can get out of my mind the image of that poor
young girl and her dying grandfather!"

I do not care to criticize the judiciary, but will say that Judge
Worthington's early promotion to the bench and his undeniable comeliness
of person have in a measure induced in him a certain arrogance.

I was triumphantly elected. I went to Boston and won recognition so far
as to be placed on the sub-committee for the investigation of
Tone-Deafness in the rural schools, in the superintendents' section of
the National Teachers' Association.

"Gee!" ejaculated the Hired Man.

Feeling the growing breadth and fullness of life I returned and assumed
my office. Then it was that the Frayn episode may be said to have begun,
in a letter from my brother Chester, which I have here, and which runs,
using an undignified diminutive:

     "DEAR OC:

     "We would like to see you. Mother and all are well, and glad you
     pulled through, even if you did run behind the ticket so. Am
     feeding three loads of steers, and they are making a fine gain.
     Middlekauff's look rough, and all the feeders think he'll lose
     money on them. He paid four cents for them. This is about all the
     news. Can't you appoint me your deputy down here to examine Miss
     Frayn, whose grandfather got killed in that wreck? She wants to
     teach. She is a Southerner, but an awful nice lady, and just as
     smart as one of us. She dreads to go to Pacific City to be
     examined, as she won't let ma get her hardly any clothes. She is
     very sensitive about money matters, and I had to lie to her about
     the funds to bury her grandfather with, and tried to slip in $250
     more, but she caught me at it and cried. I will be strict and make
     her write out the examination properly; so send along the
     questions, and the appointment.

     "Yours truly, CHET.

     "P. S.--Judge Worthington's office is so near yours, you might
     leave the appointment and the questions in there. The judge will
     bring them down. He comes down quite often now, because he says
     that the Boggses and the Worthingtons moved into Iowa in the same
     wagon train in an early day, and he thinks it strange that that
     accident that killed Colonel Frayn should have brought the families
     together again. He thinks that Miss Frayn will make a first-rate
     teacher, so you need not be backward about the appointment and the
     questions."

Not abating one jot or tittle of my official strictness, I informed
Chester that Miss Frayn must appear and be examined as did others in the
same situation. Chester is an Ames man, and a fine judger and feeder of
cattle, but not fitted for responsibility in _belles-lettres_.

Professor Dustin, an elderly and myopic educator and the author of a
monograph on the Grübe method, had charge of the examination when Miss
Frayn appeared. I found Chester smoking a vile pipe in my lodgings when
I came home.

"Say, Oc," said he, "this four-eyed old trilobite won't do. You've got
to get in here and do business yourself."

Conjecturing that he meant Professor Dustin, I inferred that Miss
Frayn's papers had been rejected. A glance justified the professor. She
had given Richmond as the capital of the United States. A question in
physiology called for a description of the iris, and Miss Frayn had
answered that, further than that, "she" was a naiad, a dryad, or a
nymph, and was pursued by Boreas, or Eolus, or Zephyrus until, turned
into a flower, she could say nothing about Iris. The handwriting and
drawing were beautiful; but the pages of mathematics were mostly blank,
save for certain splashy discolorations presumably of lachrymatory
origin, denoting lack of self-control and scholastic weakness.

"It is absurd," said I, "to think of certifying her. While she has a
certain measure of intelligence--"

"A certain measure!" shouted Chester. "If you weren't a natural-born
saphead, I'd--! Come up to Aunt Judith's!"

I went with him, firm in that solid self-control which gives fixity of
character to my nature. I saw in its true light the amiable weakness of
my relatives which made them slaves to this girl. I felt as stern and
austere as a public officer should, and looked it, I believe, for mother
was quite in a flutter as she asked me to read a clipping from an
eastern Tennessee paper describing the departure from that region of the
Frayns.

From this I learned that Miss Frayn and the colonel had been the last of
the Frayns, the family having been exterminated in the Frayn-Harrod
feud. The colonel had been an engineer in Lee's army. He had given
public notice on leaving that at noon he would nail to the front door of
the court-house, with the revolver of Boone Harrod, the last enemy shot
by the colonel, his version of the origin of the feud. He had carried
out this parting piece of bravado with no disturbance except an exchange
of shots as the train moved away from the station. I was horrified. Was
a person in this barbarous state of culture asking me, Oscar Boggs,
member of the National Sub-Committee on Tone-Deafness--!

"Okky," said my mother, from behind, "this is Miss Frayn!"

I looked at her, and was suddenly impressed with the non-existence of
the material universe, except as centered in and consisting of eyes of a
ruddy brown like those of fine horses, rufous hair surrounding the small
head like a nimbus, and a fused mass of impressions made up of the
abstract concepts of trimness, fire, elegance, and unconquerability. I
have reported the matter to the society for psychical research, but have
received no answer as yet. It was clearly abnormal.

She placed her arm about my mother's waist and looked most respectfully
at me.

"You ah the great man," said she, "of the family Ah have so much cause
to love." Here she stopped as if to regain self-control. "Ah wish mah
po' papahs," she went on, "had--"

"There, there!" said my mother, patting her arm. "It'll be all right
anyway, dear!"

I was considering what to say. Her skin was clear, white, daintily
transparent, and of a delicacy our western girls seldom display (owing,
I surmise, to climatic influences); she stood there on Aunt Judith's
Persian rug, her petite figure with its rounded curves, half-levitated,
like Atalanta upon the oat-heads--and there returned upon me the mental
vertigo, the lack of cerebral coördination, and the obliteration of the
material universe.

"Am Ah so igno'ant, really?" said she. "Ah'm fond of children; and Ah
_must_ find wohk!"

Why did I hate Dustin? Why could I not command my speech? I always rally
at the crises, however, and did so in this instance.

"As for ignorance," said I, "Sir John Lubbock says: 'Studies are a
means, not an end.' And Lord Bacon hath it: 'To spend too much time in
studies is sloth.' I see that you have acted on these maxims. Professor
Dustin's astigmatism and myopia rendered it impossible for him to see
you."

I stopped in some returning confusion.

"Those dreadful cube roots and quadratics--" said she.

"The personality of the teacher," said I, "controls the matter."

I heard her laugh, a little delighted laugh, and found myself agreeing
to the heresy that, after all, the chief thing is to train the girls to
be gentle, and the boys brave! Then I gave her my arm in to dinner.
Chester, who had never offered a girl his arm except at a dance or
after dark, glared at me. Mother was uneasy at the stirring of the old
brotherly antagonisms. I expanded, and told Miss Frayn that if all
southern women were like the only one I had met, I didn't wonder at the
feuds. Then seeing whither I was drifting, I asked her plans as to the
school she would take, when I sent her her certificate. She said that
"Mistah Chestah" was going to let her have the home school.

"A boy like Chester," said I, "will have little influence with Mr.
Middlekauff, the director."

"Oh, cut it out, Oc!" burst in Chester. "I've got it all framed up to be
elected director!"

"My political plans," said I, "will not allow of a breach between my
family and Mr. Middlekauff."

"Well, mine do," retorted Chester. "You'll take your chances with the
Middlekauffs, just as I do!"

It was not the occult influence, but a desire to benefit educational
conditions, that led me to visit Miss Frayn's school the week Chester's
insurgency placed her in it. My memory is hazy as to the matter, but my
notes show that her weakness was in the matter of organization.

"Oh," said she, when I mentioned this, "do you all prefeh things so
regulah and poky? It's so much mo' pleasant foh the little things to be
free!" She called most of the little ones "Honey," and allowed much
latitude in whispering and moving about. They crowded around her like
ants to a lump of sugar. Some of them were beginning to evince a laxity
of pronunciation, sounding the personal pronoun "I" like the
interjection "Ah."

In a few days I went back--Chester sneered at me as I went by--to tell
Miss Frayn of the necessity of teaching the effects of stimulants and
narcotics according to the Iowa law. She was greatly surprised when I
told her of this requirement.

"What, _daily_, Mr. Supe'intendent!" she exclaimed.

"Daily teaching," said I. "Our law requires it."

"It seems _so_ unnecessa'y," she said in perplexity. "The young
gentlemen will find out all about it in due time: and is it raght to
expe'iment with the littlest ones? And wheiah shall I obtain the liquoh
foh the demonstrations?"

I felt strangely overcome at this astounding speech, by an indescribable
mixture of tender solicitude for her welfare, and horror at her fearful
mistake; but I reproved her for jesting at the vice of drinking.

"Vice!" said she, with a bubbling laugh. "Why, down home we-all regyahd
it as an accomplishment! But Ah reckon you ah jokin' about teachin' it.
Youah jokes and use of the lettah 'ah' ah things Ah shall nevah get used
to, Ah'm afraid; but Ah'm glad you don't mean that about the drinkin'."

Despairing of making her understand, I left her, again conscious of
being under occult and abnormal control. I was astonished to see in the
school several large boys who must have been greatly needed in the
fields. They looked at each other sheepishly as I came in, but most of
the time they gazed at the teacher, rather than at their books. Not
having the gift of prophecy, I could not see in their presence the cloud
that would soon overshadow my official life. I took their attendance as
proof of the popularity of the school. I studied the philosophers, and
sought calm of spirit. Learning from Epictetus that the earthen pitcher
and the rock do not agree, and from Lubbock that love at first sight is
thought by great minds actually to occur, I reëxamined my abnormal
psychic symptoms in Miss Frayn's presence, and prudently refrained from
seeking her society. Poise alone makes possible a consistent career, and
this I had in large measure reconquered, when, like a bolt from the
blue--or at least with much abruptness--into my quiet office burst a
committee from the Teal Lake Township School Board, accompanied by a
number of patrons of the Boggs school--all old neighbors of ours--headed
by the defeated Mr. Elizur Middlekauff. This could mean but one
thing--Miss Frayn! The rebel invasion was at the door.

"Mr. Middlekauff," said one, "is the spokesman."

"We've got a grievyance," said Mr. Middlekauff, "a whale of a grievyance
in our deestrict; and we've come right to the power-house to fix it."

"It shall command my most careful consideration," said I. "Please state
the case."

"That 'ere railroad wreck," said Mr. Middlekauff, who was a very
forcible speaker at caucuses, "let loose on our people a scourge in
caliker more pestilential than the Huns and Vandals. We come to you as
clothed with a little brief authority, an' accessory after the fact to
this scourge business."

"I fail," said I, "to catch your meaning."

"I mean," said he, growing loud, "that peaches-an'-cream invader from
the states lately in rebellion that you've give a stiffkit, an' your
brother Chet by stratagems an' spiles has got himself elected an' put
into our school. That's what I mean!"

"I infer," said I, "some implied strictures upon the character or school
management or educational qualifications of Miss Roberta Lee Frayn."

"W'l you infer surprisin'ly clus to the truth!" replied Mr. Middlekauff
offensively. "We're a-complainin' of this schoolma'am with the rebil
name; and of her onrivaled facilities f'r spreadin' treason an'
emotional insanity! Try to git that through your hair!"

Like lightning a course of policy occurred to me.

"Are the defendant," said I, looking them over, "and Mr. Boggs, the
director, among your numbers?"

"No," said Mr. Middlekauff. "This is kinder informal. An' besides, we'd
crawl out right where we went in if she was here. I tell you she's
a--a--irresistible force."

"It is elementary," said I, "that no _ex parte_ investigation can have
any validity."

"Now, see here, Oc Boggs!" hissed he, "I don't take any high-an'-mighty
stand-off from a lunkhead that's stole my melons when he was a kid!
You'll hear this complaint, see?"

I did not weaken, but I allowed his standing in the community and party
to outweigh offensive orthoepy, rhetoric, and manners. Unofficially, I
took down the complaint, reserving my ruling. As the horrid tale was
told I grew sick at the problem before me. I glean the details of the
situation from my notes:

Miss Frayn (all these things are set down as _asserted_) had assigned
William Middlekauff, whose father was a member of the G. A. R., the
Confederate side of a debate on the comparative greatness of Washington
and Robert E. Lee, and had said: "She reckoned Mr. William ought to have
won, as he had the strong side." Complained of as against public policy,
adhering to armed insurrection, and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
_Quoere_ (per O. B.): Is complaint good after forty years of peace,
and Reconstruction?

All members of the committee said that every boy in the district of more
than sixteen years of age was irresistibly attracted to her (exact
language, "be-daddled over her," O. B.). Hence, her character must be
"wrong" somehow. Two boys, each claiming an exclusive franchise to sweep
out for her, had met in Allen's feed-lot to fight a duel, and been
discovered in the act of firing and tied to the feed-rack by Allen's
hired man, and spanked with the end-gate of his wagon. Clarence Skeen
was poorly, and had been found kneeling before a bench calling it his
darling Roberta and begging it to be his. Columbus Smith had turned
somnambulist, and his father had lost ten tons of timothy which "Clumb"
had failed to put up in cock. When sleep-walking Clumb had been heard by
Vespucci, his brother (known as "Spootch"), to protest with sighs and
groans that his heart was broken and to ask "Roberta" to shed one tear
over his grave. Twitted of this by his young sister, Semiramis, Clumb
had slapped her and, cursing profanely, had assaulted Spootch, who
reproved him, and had fled to the Wiggly Creek woods with no subsistence
but a loaf of salt-rising bread, a box of paper collars, and a book of
poems. Letter from Mrs. Smith asking that this Jezebel's certificate be
revoked before all should be lost.

Whipple Cavanaugh had been idle and "lawless" since attending school.
Refused nourishment. Pillow wet with tears. Kissed Cavanaugh's mare,
"Old Flora," on nose after Miss Frayn had patted her on said spot. Had
written a poem to Roberta, and rather than have it read publicly by the
hired girl, who had found it under his pillow, had eaten it, paper, ink,
and all. Doctor Dilworthy called in; pronounced him in danger of
gastritis and love-sickness with grave prognosis.

Names of fifteen boys given, known as "Frayn Mooners," who haunted the
shrubbery about the home of Mrs. Jane D. Boggs, where the teacher
boarded. Six fights were known to have occurred among them. Tension in
the neighborhood was unbearable because of the loosing by Chester Boggs,
"in violation of his official oath," of a bulldog which had bitten
Albert Boyer, and thrown his mother into nervous prostration.

This epidemic of "worthlessness and sentimentality" was spreading
outside the district, as evidenced by an excerpt found in the dog's
possession, from the upper rear elevation of the Sunday trousers of
Boliver Fromme, living in District No. 4. Progress in the studies of the
boys confined to amatory poetry and pugilism, both unrelated to their
life work. _Iowa, My Iowa_, Major Byers' stirring lyric, had been
supplanted by _Maryland, My Maryland_, in school singing. Chester Boggs,
the director, refused to receive complaints, and was condemned as
equally affected with the disease, and probably a "Mooner" himself.
There was a certificate of Doctor Dilworthy of Teal Lake as to the
existence of many cases of "extreme mental exaltation accompanied by
explosive and fulminant cerebral disturbances traceable to mediate or
immediate association with one Roberta Lee Frayn, an individual
seemingly possessed of an abnormal power in the way of causing
obsessions, fixed ideas, aberrant cranio-spinal functionings, and
cranial tempests, in those of her associates resembling her in the
matter of age, and differing from her in social habits, hereditary
constitution, and sex."

I sank back in my chair horrified, with a sinking in the region of the
epigastric plexus.

"We kind o' thought, Oc," said Mr. Middlekauff, "that thet would hold
yeh f'r a while."

I saw the muddled political relations with which this imbroglio teemed,
and clung to delay as my sole hope.

"I am inexpressibly shocked," said I, "and as soon as we can meet with
the defendant and the director--"

"What!" shrieked Mr. Middlekauff. "_Her_ present! Arter what them papers
says? And everybody follerin' her, if she jest smiles, like a caff arter
salt! Why, dad ding me, if I'd trust _myself_ f'r more'n a smile or two.
She'll bamboozle the hull thing if she's there. I b'lieve _you've_ got
it, you conceited young sprout! No, sir; decide this thing now!"

"I regret the necessity," said I, "of asking time to get the opinion of
the county attorney, and to--to--"

"Not by a dum sight!" roared Mr. Middlekauff. "We'll see what the court
has to say on this. An' when you're up f'r election ag'in, come round,
an' we'll consider it f'r a while--an' then you won't know you're
runnin'!"

I was torn by conflicting emotions when they went away. I knew that
Middlekauff was a man of influence. I was not averse to seeing Chester
rebuked for his fatuous behavior, and for tempting me to a deviation
from strict duty. I felt that in taking my stand with the "Mooners" I
might be siding with the heaviest body of voters after all. By these
whiffling winds of the mind was I baffled, finding no rest in my works
on didactics and pedagogics, wondering what Middlekauff would do--until
all doubts were settled by the filing of the case of The School Board of
Teal Lake versus Frayn; and in a few days it came on for trial before
Judge Worthington.

Chester telephoned, asking to see me. He came in looking thinner than I
had ever seen him.

"Do you know," said he, "that this case old Middlekauff's got plugged up
comes off this morning?"

"Having been summonsed by writ of subpoena," said I severely, "I am
aware that your wilfulness in placing an untried importation in charge
of our school, regardless of her unfitness, or of my political
well-being, is this morning bearing its legitimate fruit in the hearing
which comes _on_--not _off_! And I hope your lack of consideration for
the welfare of the school system, so largely wrapped up in my career,
will--"

That Chester was temporarily insane is clear. He flew at me, seized my
trachea in his iron hands, compressed it so as greatly to impede
respiration, and knocked my head against the wall, using incoherently
certain technical terms he had learned at Ames.

"Shut up!" he cried. "You
duplex--polyphase--automatic--back-action--compound-wound--multipolar
_Ass_! Shut up!"

An anatomical chart on the wall preserved my head, and I retained my
self-possession. When he let me down I took my station on the other side
of a table and looked him in the eye, strongly willing that he quiet
down.

"Forgive me, Oc," said he humbly, "I promised myself eight years ago
not to lick you any more! Pardon me."

I forgave him, and we have ever since remained reconciled. He explained
that he wanted to consult as to methods of concealing from Miss Frayn
the nature of the suit.

"Am I to understand," said I, "that she does not know that the relief
sought is her expulsion from the school?"

"Of course she don't!" replied Chester. "Do you think I'd let her know?
She thinks everybody loves her. Nobody ever dared tell her anything
else, either here or down where she was raised. The boys down there
always were in love with her. She don't see anything strange in it--and
there isn't."

"A change," said I, "would be wholesome for her."

"She wouldn't know what to do," replied Chester. "And if she were to
hear these charges--against herself! Why, I don't know what she might
not do! She'd be absolutely desperate. She'd think she had no one to
defend her--and you know the Frayn way."

"I shall not endeavor," said I, after consideration, "to reconcile
medieval notions of honor and personal dignity with proceedings under
the Iowa Code. Neither do I feel it prudent for me to see this person."

For a few minutes Chester sat grinding his teeth and gripping the desk,
and then rushed from the office calling me a white-livered dub, and
telling me to go plumb to some place the name of which was cut off by
the door's slamming. I sat in the office feeling a sense of unrest,
until the time for going to court, where I found Judge Worthington on
the bench, Chester sitting at the defendant's table, and no Miss Frayn.

"Are both sides ready in the next case?" asked the judge, without
looking at the calendar.

"We wish to put the defendant on the stand for a few questions," said
Beasley, Middlekauff's lawyer. "I don't see her in court, your Honor."

"Call the witness!" said the judge; and the bailiff shouted three times:
"Robert Lefrayne!"

"Has this man Lefrayne been subpoenaed?" asked the judge; "as he is
defendant, I don't suppose you thought it necessary, Mr. Beasley."

We could all see that the mispronunciation of the name had misled the
judge as to the identity of the defendant.

"To make sure," said Beasley, "we subpoenaed the party. Here is the
writ, your Honor, with proof of service."

"Mr. Clerk," said the judge, frowning sternly, "issue a bench warrant!
Mr. Sheriff, attach this witness, and produce him at two. Some of these
tardy witnesses will go to jail for contempt if this is repeated! Call
your next!"

Chester was pale as a ghost, and accosted the bailiff as he went out
with the warrant. Then he came back and listened with flushes of anger
and clenched teeth to the reading of the pleadings, to which the judge
seemed to pay no attention. At two, after the intermission, the bailiff,
Captain Winfield, an old G. A. R. man, appeared with Miss Frayn on his
arm. He was blushing and fumbling his bronze button, while she smiled up
at him in a charming, daughterly way that brought back dangerous
symptoms of relapse in my psychic nature.

"Call the witness Lefrayne!" cried the judge.

Light, airy, daintily flushed, she floated up to the bench. The fine for
contempt died in Forceythe Worthington's breast, as he stared in a sort
of delighted embarrassment.

"It was raght kahnd of you, Judge Wo'thin'ton," she said, looking up
into his face, "to send Captain Winfield to remahnd me of mah
engagement hyah. Why, he was at Franklin, and Chickamauga, and knows
Tennessee! And now, gentlemen, what can Ah do foh you-all?"

The judge stepped down from the bench and handed Miss Frayn to the
witness chair like a lord chancellor placing a queen on her throne.
Beasley looked at the witness as if fascinated. Middlekauff seized him
by the lapel of his coat.

"Don't look at her, Beasley, more'n yeh c'n help!" he whispered. "I tell
yeh, it's dangerous!"

And yet _I_ am selected to bear blame for a momentary weakness of the
prevailing sort!

"Proceed, gentlemen!" said Judge Worthington.

Beasley gathered up his papers. "Are you the defendant?" asked he.

"Ah don't quite gathah youah meanin' suh," said she, "but Ah think not,
suh."

"You're the teacher of the Boggs School, in Teal Lake Township?"

"Oh, yes, suh!" said she. "Pahdon me! I thought you inquiahed about
something else."

Judge Worthington started as if struck by a dart.

"Let me see the papers in the case," said he excitedly.

Beasley handed them up, and the judge examined them carefully. Then he
handed them down, turned his back on Miss Frayn, and spoke in a low
tone, like one greatly shocked.

"Proceed!" said he.

Something in his tone or in the turning of his back seemed to strike
upon the senses of Miss Frayn as unpleasant or hostile. The few
questions put to her by the lawyer to lay the foundation for some other
bit of evidence did not appear to affect her at all; and when she took
her seat between Chester and my mother, and was reassured by their
whispered communications, she looked serene, save when she noted the
judge's averted face. Chester's lawyer spoke insinuatingly of spite,
prejudice, and unreasonable provincialism as being at the bottom of the
case.

"And," he added, "I may add jealousy--jealousy, your Honor, of the
defendant's charms of person, which, as a part of the _res gestæ_, are
evidence in this case, if your honor only would observe them."

The judge started and blushed, but still looked steadily away. Mr.
Middlekauff looked relieved. Miss Frayn fretted the linoleum with little
taps of her toe, and her delicate nostrils fluttered. There was a mystic
tension in the air.

"Mr. Chestah," said the girl, in a low voice, "he seems to be alludin'
to--what does he mean?"

Judge Worthington rapped for silence. Miss Frayn's eyes grew bright, and
her cheek showed a spot of crimson which deepened as the reading of the
affidavit went on. As the legal verbiage droned through the story of the
boys' infatuation, I looked at her, and knew that her indignation was
swelling fiercely at she scarcely knew what. I began repeating to myself
a passage from Seneca.

"Objected to," roared Chester's lawyer, "as incompetent, irrelevant,
immaterial, impertinent, and grossly scandalous!"

Miss Frayn clenched her hands and held her breath as if at the
realization of her worst fears. Then the judge spoke. "The affidavit,"
said he, "attributes to Miss Frayn a malign and corrupting influence
over the whole neighborhood, and--"

"Suh!" she gasped.

Again did the judge rap for order.

"Ruling reserved," said he. "Proceed."

Triumphantly Beasley went on with the resolutions. At last Miss Frayn
seemed to understand. She rose, stilled Beasley with a gesture, and in
frozen dignity addressed the court.

"Judge Wo'thin'ton," said she, "Ah'm not quite ce'tain Ah get the full
meanin' of this, but Ah feel that Ah cain't pe'mit it to go fu'thah. Ah
desiah to say to you as a gentleman and an acquaintance, if not a
friend, that these ah things that can not be said of a lady, suh!"

"The defendant," said th

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