"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. Canons, 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 Perce 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 Perce 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 Perce 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 Perces 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 Perce 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 mediaeval 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.