"I don't blame her!" interjected the Bride.
I guess she'd have gone on stringing negatives together as long as the depot would have held 'em, if Bob hadn't noticed Ike Witherspoon, the shorthand reporter, diligently taking down her speech and the names of those present. Then he twigged, and, hastily knocking Bill down, he boarded the train with Amelia. He wired me from Fremont that it was all off with the judgment, as they'd tormented Mrs. Fink into making a public speech. I answered, collect, bidding him be as happy as he could in view of the new-found liberty of speech and of the press, and I'd look after the judgment and the appeal.
"Well," said the Groom, "of course you got licked in the Supreme Court.
It was clear proof that she'd been shamming."
"You're about as near right on that as might be expected of a layman,"
retorted the Colonel. "Just about. The law is the perfection of human reason. The jury had found that Amelia Whinnery couldn't speak, and never would be able to. A jury had rendered a verdict to that effect, and judgment for ten thousand dollars had been entered upon it. I merely pointed out to the Supreme Court that they could consider errors in the record only, and that it was the grossest sort of pettifogging and ignorance of the law for Absalom Scales to come in and introduce such an impertinence as evidence--after the evidence was closed--that the fair plaintiff had been shamming and was, in fact, a very free-spoken lady.
The bench saw the overpowering logic of this, and read my authorities, and Bob and Amelia will henceforth live in the best house in their town, built out of the C. & S .W. surplus--and Amelia talking sixteen hours a day. It's locally regarded as a good joke on the railroad."
"But was it honest?" queried the Bride.
"Honest, me lady!" repeated the Colonel, _a la_ Othello. "My dear young lady, the courts are not to be criticized--ever remember that!"
"That makes me think," said the Hired Man, "of the darndest thing--"
"In that case," said the Poet, "your name will be considered drawn for the next number. Save this darndest thing for its own occasion--which will be at our next camp. Oneiros beckons, and I go."
"In that case," said Aconite, "I'd go, you bet!"
CHAPTER IX
Coming in from the right as they took the open trail again, the Cody Road beckoned them eastward, as a side road always beckons to the true wanderer.
"What does it run to?" asked the Groom.
"Wyoming," responded Aconite. "It's nothing but scenery and curiosities."
"Let's follow it a little way," suggested the Bride, "and see how we like it"
Three miles or so on the way, the surrey halted at a beautiful little lake, which lay like a fragment broken off Yellowstone Lake, the shore of which lay only a stone's throw to the right. They walked over to the big lake to bid it farewell. A score of miles to the south lay Frank Island, and still farther away, shut off by the fringe of rain from a thunder shower, the South Arm seemed to run in behind Chicken Ridge and take to the woods. To the southwest stood Mount Sheridan, and peeping over his shoulder the towering Tetons solemnly refused even to glimmer a good-by.
"For all that," said the Bride, "_au revoir_! We'll come back one of these days, won't we, Billy?"
"Sure!" said Billy. "I'm coming up to put in a power plant in the Grand Canon, one of these days. This scenery lacks the refining touch of the spillway and the penstock!"
Fifteen minutes' driving brought them to the second halt, a big basin of water, from which steam issued in a myriad of vents. Aconite suggested that they stroll down to the beach and take a look at the water. They found it in a slow turmoil, the mud rising from the bottom in little fountains of turbidity, the whole effect being that which might be expected if some mud-eating giant were watching his evening porridge, expecting it momentarily to boil.
"I don't care much for this," said the Bride.
"I'm not crazy about it myself," assented the Artist.
"What's the next marvel?" asked the Colonel.
"Wedded trees," said Aconite.
"Getting sated with 'em," said the Poet.
"Apollinaris Springs, Sylvan Lake, fine views of Yellowstone Lake and the mountains, bully rocks and things clear to Cody."
"And on the other hand," said the Professor, "what are the features on the regular road from which we have diverged?"
"Everything you come to see," responded Aconite. "Mud Volcano, with a clear spring in the grotto right by it; Mud Geyser, off watch for a year or more; Trout Creek, doubled around into the N.P. trade-mark; Sulphur Mountain--we can camp right near there, and see it in the morning, when we ought to see it--and on beyond, the Grand Canon and everything.
Besides--unless we go that-a-way, we'll never git back unless we come by the Burlington around by Toluca and Billings. Of course, it's all the same to me--I don't keer if we never go back or git anywhere. I'm havin'
a good time."
"Turn the plugs around," said the Colonel.
In half an hour or so they were back on the great north road again. The horses seemed to feel the pull of the stable--still days ahead, for they trotted briskly along, while the tourists gazed with sated eyes on the beautiful Yellowstone River on the right hand, its pools splashing with the plunges of the great trout; and on their left the charming mountain scenery. Even the grotesque Mud Volcano, with its suggestions of the horrible and uncouth, failed to elicit the screams from the Bride, or the ejaculations of amazement from the men which characterized their deliverances earlier in the journey. Entering Hayden Valley, they were delighted at the sight in the middle distance of a dozen or more buffaloes, which held up their heads for a long look, and disappeared into the bushes. Not ten minutes later, fifty or sixty elk walked down to the Yellowstone to drink, crossing the road within a minute of the tourists' passage. Aconite pulled up in the shadow of Sulphur Mountain, the Hired Man, with the assistance of the party, soon had a fine fire blazing, and presently a pan of trout, hooked by the Bride, the Groom, the Artist and the Poet, and dressed by the skilful Aconite, were doing to a turn on the skillet.
The Hired Man, realizing that he was under obligation to tell his version of the "darndest thing" in his experience, was solemn, as befits a public performer. When the psychological moment was proclaimed by the falling down into a roseate pile of coals of the last log for the night, he discharged his duty and told this unimportant tale:
HENRY PETERS'S SIGNATURE
THE HIRED MAN'S SECOND TALE
The Colonel's story of how the law and the courts work, reminded me of what happened to old Hen Peters and his forty-second nephew, Hank. It all arose from a debate at the literary at the Bollinger school-house back in Iowa.
You see, old Hen's girl Fanny come home from the State Normal at Cedar Falls as full of social uplift as a yeast-cake, and framed up this literary. It was a lulu of a society, and nights when the sledding was good, the teams just surrounded the lot, and the bells jingled as uplifting as you could ask.
The night of the scrap Hank brought Fanny. The debate was on which was the most terrible scourge, fire or water. Hank was on the negative, and Fanny's father on the affirmative. Old Hen spoke of the way prairie fires devastated things in an early day, and read history, and gave a beautiful tribute to the Chicago fire and the O'Leary cow. Hank coughed with the dust kicked up when Hen sat down, but he got back with a rhapsody on the Hoang-Ho floods, and the wet season in Noah's time. He said that his honorable opponent ought to take a moment or two from time to time to ascertain the properties of water as a scourge, as an inward remedy, and as a lotion.
Now besides having an appetite for red-eye, old Hen was whiskery and woolly-necked, and handling lots of tame hay, he looked sort of unwashed. So the crowd yelled shameful and laughed; and when Hen got up to answer, he was so mad his whiskers stood out like a rooster's hackle, his words came out in a string like, all lapped on one another, and blurred, and linked together so you couldn't tell one from the other; and finally they reversed on the bobbin, and gigged back into his system, and rumbled and reverberated around in him like a flock of wild cattle loose in an empty barn; and the crowd got one of those giggly fits when every one makes the other laugh till they are sore and sick.
Asa Wagstaff fell backward out of a window on to a hitching-post, and made Brad Phelps' team break loose. Old Hen stood shaking his fist at them and turning so red in the face that he got blue, and sat down without saying a syllable that any one could understand. You could hear folks hollering and screaming in fits of that laughing disease going home, and getting out and rolling in the snow because they were in agony, and nothing but rolling would touch the spot. But old Hen Peters seemed to be immune.
Now, in a debate, no man is supposed to have friends or relations, and he floors his man with anything that comes handy, and Hank never dreamed that Hen would hold hardness when he got over his mad fit. Hank and Fanny had things all fixed up, and had been pricing things at the Banner Store, and sitting up as late as two o'clock; but the next Sunday night she met him at the door and told him maybe he'd better not come into the sitting-room till her pa cooled off. Hank was knocked off his feet, and they stood out in the hall talking sort of tragic until old Hen yelled "Fanny!" from the sitting-room, and they pretty near jumped out of their skins, and stood farther apart, and Fanny went in. In the spring there was a row over the line fence, ending in a devil's lane. Fanny looked pretty blue, only when she was fighting with her pa. Hen would lecture about the two Peters brothers that came across in 1720, and how all Peterses that were not descended from them were Nimshies and impostors.
"I despise and hate," says he, "a Nimshi and an impostor."
Then Fanny would shoot back a remark about the Iowa _Herald's_ college, and when was her pa going to paint the Peters coat-of-arms on the hay-rake and the hog-house, using sarcasm that no man could understand after being out of school as long as her father had been. Sometimes the old man would forget the spurious registry of the Hank family in the Peters herd-book, and would argue that relations, even the most remote and back-fence kind, ought to be prosecuted if they even dreamed of marrying; and then Fanny would say that it is such a pleasure to know that folks are not always related when they claim to be. Hen would then cuss me for not taking care of my horses' shoulders or something, and things would get no better rapidly.
Young folks need to meet once in a while in order to keep right with each other, and Jim Miller and I often spoke of the way old Hen was splitting Hank and Fanny apart. Then an Illinois man come out and bought Hank out at a hundred an acre, and Hank wadded his money into his pocket, and bid good-by to the neighborhood for good and all. He never crossed the township line again. Fanny flirted like sixty, and cried when she was alone; but old Hen was as tickled as a colt.
It seemed like a judgment on Hen for driving as good a man as Hank to Dakota to have Fillmore Smythe begin yelping on his trail. His first yelp was a letter, asking Hen to call and pay a three-hundred-dollar note Fillmore had for collection. And here's where the law begins to seep into the story. Hen had Fanny type-write a scorching answer, saying that Hen Peters had discounted his bills since before Fillmore Smythe was unfortunately born, and didn't owe no man a cent; and Hen was so mad that he kicked a fifty-dollar collie pup, and hurt its feelings so it never would work, but went to killing young pigs and sheep the way a collie will if you ever sour their nature by licking them. Funny about collies.
One day old Hen come in from the silo, and saw Fillmore Smythe's team tied at the gate, and Fillmore sitting with Fanny on the stoop, reading _Lucile_.
"I hope I see you well, Mr. Peters," said the lawyer, kind of smooth-like.
"None the better for seein' you, sir," said Hen, jamming his mouth shut when he got through so his mustache and whiskers were all inserted into each other.
Now this was no way to treat a person from town, and Fanny began saying how wonderful the sunset was last night, and asking did he ever see the moon-vine flowers pop out in bloom in the gloaming, and to curb her neck and step high the way they do when they're bitted in college.