laugh.”
He surely did laugh, and I with him. We howled, and splashed, and
slapped our legs until we were too weak to stand up, and then we sat
right down in the water. Cunny set up a stentorian “haw-haw” out of
pure good nature, and the sight of him, with his tent around him like
a toga, full of dignity, but willing to oblige, as usual, went near to
finish us.
“Don’t look at me, Cunny, don’t!” begged Billy. “If you look at me
again like that, I’ll die right here!”
“Very good! Very good, indeed! Haw, haw, haw!” replied Cunningham.
In the middle of the hilarity there came a hail from the river bank
in a voice of wonder. It was Antelope Pete, mounted, on his way to
Billy’s to compare notes on the morning’s flood.
Now, Antelope is a very serious-minded man for the country, and it
wouldn’t be well to repeat all the different things he said might
happen him if he ever saw the like of this before.
“Do you fellows always go out in the middle of the river to crack jokes
in thunder-storms?” he demanded. “What in blazes is the matter with
you, anyhow?”
We tried to explain, but we couldn’t get three words out before we were
in roars again, and Pete was perfectly disgusted.
“Well, I’m going to leave,” said he. “I’ve got something else better to
do besides sitting here watching the most all-fired, copper-riveted,
three-ply, double-backed-action damn fools that it was ever my luck to
come acrost.”
We prevailed upon him, however, to throw us his rope, and as
Cunningham was so fearfully and wonderfully entangled in the tent
that it would have been next to impossible to extricate him, we tied
the line to a corner of the tent. Antelope then laid the quirt on his
cayuse, and man and mansion were hauled up the bank together.
When we reached a state of mind where we could discuss the matter
calmly, we asked Cunningham if he still intended to live in the tent.
Oh, yes, yes, indeed! The tent was all right; it was the wind that was
wrong. Then followed a learned disquisition on vacuums, and worlds, and
other meteorological phenomena which stumped us completely. Indeed,
it came to my mind that Cunningham almost proved that he and the tent
never went into the Chantay Seeche.
Part of his theory which I can remember is that the wind, in passing
over the coulée, partially exhausted the air beneath it, like the
action of an atomizer, he explained to our unscientific minds. And thus
Tent Cunningham was drawn up and on to disaster most unlawfully. The
idea of Cunningham and the tent being “atomized” into the creek strikes
me as being particularly good. I feel still more entertained when I
think of the tin cans, the ham, the bacon, the lantern, the little
sheet-iron cooking-stove, various articles of clothing, et cetera,
which were included in the spray.
It is perhaps needless to add that the gathering of all these was the
work of most of a morning. I don’t believe I ever saw anything more
pathetic than the little stove stranded on a bar some distance down the
river, its tiny legs lifted in appeal to the now speckless heavens.
Perhaps it was thinking of the untimely fate of the frying pan and
kettle that had warmed themselves at its fires so often.
When Cunningham gazed upon this jettisoned cargo his face betrayed his
feelings. His soul, which loved cleanliness, order, and system with
a blind worship, revolted. One could see that it was in his mind for
the moment to “jump the country,” but it passed. The determination and
courage which were at the bottom of the man’s nature rose in force, and
he busied himself in restoring the former status, singing a loud air
without any tune to it, the while. The territory of Dakota was a large
country--some of the belongings never appeared again. It is pleasant to
think that Cunningham’s card-case may have fallen into the hands of a
wandering Indian, and thus spread the refinements of civilization.
It seemed that our friend was going to buck the elements on first
principles--put up the tent in the same old way, and have it blown to
Halifax in the same old way to a dead certainty. There was no more use
in trying to argue with him on the subject than if it were a question
of politics; but Billy, who used more tact in one minute than I could
understand in ten, turned the point without the least friction.
He asked Cunningham to expound the theory of the levitation of the tent
again. It was done, at length, and breadth, and thickness.
“Now, as I understand it,” said Billy, “a vacuum’s a place where there
ain’t anything, and when things try to get in it makes trouble--are my
sights at the right elevation?”
I assured him he was correct so far.
“Well, then, see here, Cunny, why don’t you kind of fill in around the
tent with sods? You can’t make much of a vacuum out of good deep-cut
sods, I’ll bet my wardrobe. You see the place where the vacuum would
have to be, to do you dirt, will be occupied and it can vacuumize all
it wants to around the prairie after that, and you needn’t care.”
“An ex-cellent idea! “cried Cunningham. “I thank you very much, Mr.
Wykam.”
So it came to pass that Tent Cunningham was surrounded by a wall of sod
eight feet high and four feet thick. The only criticism I heard was
from a stranger who put up at Billy’s for a while.
One morning he came in and took me by the shoulder, “Come with me,” he
said. We went on until Tent Cunningham hove in sight.
“I’ve seen lots of what strikes me as strange things in this
country,” the stranger said, “but that place knocks the spots
off the cards. Would you be kind enough to tell me what that
wild-Injun-peaceful-settler contraption is?”
“That?” I asked with a sober face. “Why, that’s Camp Cunningham.”
“I dare say it is,” he returned. “But that ain’t the point I was
looking for. What I want to know is, why did the population go to all
the trouble of building a sod house, and then put up a tent inside of
it?”
“Merely a question of taste--it’s his hundred and sixty; why shouldn’t
he build what he likes on it?”
“That’s so, too,” replied the stranger. “Excuse me for meddling; it’s a
free country, if ever there was one.”
So the matter dropped right there.
IX
HOHANKTON, PETTIE AND OTHERS
THE TALE OF THE TRAINED PIG
“Do you remember Red’s pig, Foxy Bill?” said Hydraulic Smith. “Well, I
was in a camp that had a pig for its chief feature, myself. He wasn’t
a fat, comfortable old lad like Foxy Bill, but a sort of cross between
a razor-back and a buffalo. He was a little feller, with a mane on
his head and on his shoulders. He had high shoulders on him, like a
buffalo, but, as for the rest of him, he was that thin you wouldn’t
have known him for a pig, except for the curly tail at the end.
“He was our sole and only pet. We was too high in the air for cats.
They died of heart disease. Nobody owned a dog. We called piggie
Johanus Eliphas Hohankton for a noted statesman in that part of the
country, a great man on the pension vote (believe he drew three
himself), that told us politics with one wooden leg and a mouthful of
language trying to gurgle through Greaser Pepe’s gin.
“I think Hohankton discovered the lack of dogs in town, for he tried to
act the part as much as he could. He’d go trotting up Main Street, kind
of sniffing at you and rolling his eyes, give two or three squeals like
a dog, when you called to him, then sometimes he’d go mosying around
important, full of his own business, just as you see dogs do.
“He took care of the coats and the lunch-boxes. If a stranger came
around he’d show his tusk with his lip all curled up, and growl
something ferocious. He was a right smart animal. I can see him now,
going the lengths of Main Street, sounding like a busted clarinet
player telling his woes in music, to let you know he was there, and
that if there was a doughnut or some apple-sass, or, in fact, almost
anything that a hog might like, you could please your friend Hohankton
by putting it forth.
“But nothing in the world would get him fat. He was built like a fish,
fore and aft, and in a straightaway I think he could hold a jack-rabbit.
“The Judge, he was a heavy-built old man who wore his chin on his
breast most of the time. When Hank walked alongside of him he hunched
up his back like the Judge, and put on much the same expression, until
the Judge rumbled out, ‘Durn that hawg!’ and give him a scratch on the
back with his cane.
“Then, if there was a lively bunch, why, Hank was merry, too. He would
trot and amble with one side, and gallop with the other, make prancing
steps, biting at his own tail till an oyster’d laugh.
“We had miles of claims on the bank. The pay was light, howsomever, and
you had to send about twenty acres down the stream to get enough to pay
the hands off. We had plenty of water on a two-hundred-foot fall, or it
wouldn’t have paid for the trouble.
“Howsomever, we sent an almighty lot of farm land down where the
ranchers didn’t want it. They objected to our covering their vegetables
with four solid foot of tailings, consequently they kicked like
anything, but it was just mine job against vegetable job, and after the
law courts had been worn out and decided:
The rose is red, the sky is blue;
We don’t know nothing, no more’n you,
and everybody had an injunction out against somebody else, which he
couldn’t enforce, why it came back to our old friend, physical trouble,
again. The farmers outnumbered us, but we ranked in the first class for
physical trouble, so there hadn’t been anything but an exchange of
personal remarks.
“There was just one rancher, who grew too fast when he was young, and
then stopped too quick after he grew up, came at us fierce. He called
us all kinds of twisted crooks and straight-out thieves he could think
of. He had it in for me particular. Once, as he got to putting it on
me, he grew excited, and began to swing an ax around. He came nigh
hitting the stream one or two passes, and I told him:
“‘You jay bird, you’ll be a-sitting and a-singing on a limb if you
monkey with that little squirt of water. You are perfectly safe from me
during working-hours, but don’t fool with our piping lay.’
“Not one man in a million knows what a stream of water can do, and he
was one of the million that didn’t. So he r’ared up and said he would
splash the water over me, and he raised his ax. I had half a mind to
turn the lever and squirt him over the neighboring bluff, but I had
pity in my soul, so I hollers, ‘Don’t!’
“But them words was too late. He is one of the very few men who will
ever tell anybody how he tried cutting a hydraulic stream in two. While
he was blasting me he wandered about, sitting on his horse loose; the
ax came down. I was looking right plumb at him, but just how, when and
in what way he disappeared I will never tell you.
“I followed the direction of the stream until I found him. He was
curled up on his back, about half the ax handle in his hand. Soon as I
came in sight he hollered, ‘_Whoa!_’ I stared at him. I come a little
nearer, and he yelled ‘_Whoa!_’ again, and tried to scramble to his
feet. I learned afterward that he’d been a mule-skinner for a while and
thought his team had turned on him.
“I grabbed him by the neck. ‘Now, you horny-headed son of toil,’ I said
to him, ‘you’ve learned one thing to-day. Keep on doing that for three
thousand, six hundred and seventy-five days in the year and by the end
of that time you won’t put your thumb on the buzz-saw.’
“‘You don’t mean to tell me a stream of water done that!’ he gasps out.
“‘You have three shies at it,’ I said. ‘I’ll furnish the axes, and
every time that stream doesn’t knock you one hundred and fifty feet you
get a new cigar. Want to buy in the game?’ I shambled him off to his
wagon and dumped him in.
“He laid low for his revenge, like the darned farmer he was, and
meanwhile Hohankton was the cause of our undoing. Animals have a heap
more sense about natural things than men has. Hank got in the way of
following the boys over to the side of the creek. You know I used to
undercut the bank while the boys worked the big stone out for me and
loosened up the dirt here and there. They was as careless fellows as
you’d see. Yet, at the same time, no man wants an eighty-foot bank of
dirt on top of him, and so they’d be quite anxious in their minds for
about five minutes before the slide came.
“The first day Hank went over there he threw up his head as though
he smelled something, straightened his tail, grunted loud and away
he went. The boys near got pinched looking at him and laughing. When
they went back, Hank went back, and the next time he blew his signal
everybody departed. We were not such a swell-headed crowd we couldn’t
learn a thing from an animal. Hank, old boy Rocks, was just as right
as he was before, and after that he took up his position as Official
Notifier and he never went wrong. The boys could work right along till
they heard that squeal, and then do fast time to the creek.
“We was proud enough of Hanky before, but now he had this actual stunt
of his that we could prove to any or all lookers-on, our chests stuck
out till the buttons popped off. Other fellows would drop in with
stories of dogs that had done all the wonderful things that you have
heard tell of, and cats that used to milk cows, and horses that could
figure up to six times six, and all them lovely relations that gets to
be natural history around the camps, and we could stand for it and say
‘Yes,’ just as if we believed it.
“Then we’d remark we had a pig in camp; and wouldn’t say anything more
until Hank signaled, and the visitor would begin to open his mouth to
see everybody a-running, asking why. Then down come the bank!
“Usually the stranger went and put up money that it wouldn’t happen
again. After three times, though, he’d let go, scratching his head and
meditating: ‘It’s so--I see it’s so, but how the blazes a pig knows
more about the acts of gravitation than a white man--you tell me now?’
And we’d answer we weren’t going to tell him. Let him find out, same as
we did.
“Well, he’d admit in a kind of grudging way that that pig of ours was
quite a curiosity. Yes, he’d admit it, in a sort of easy, offhand
style, that old Hank was quite a curiosity, and we didn’t have to say
anything.
“They would go on from Placerville, working the yarn up, until fifty
mile away it seemed we had a pig that could smell a pay streak, always
pointing, like a pointer dog, when he smelled the gold; that he usually
walked back home on the hydraulic stream, and that when it was time
for a bank to fall he would make sounds that sounded so much like
‘Look out!’ that you couldn’t hardly tell the difference from a man’s
yelling it, except that it had a kind of pig brogue to it, as it were,
and so forth.
“We didn’t have to advertise Hank one particle; even that gol-darned
farmer heard of it, and slouched around on the quiet till he see how
things lay.
“Well, here’s the way he come near getting even. If there’s anything I
ever really did love it is to get my hands on a monitor lever and just
feel that old streak of water flying across, smacking, gargling and
gurgling in the earth, ripping her out, mud and suds a-flying all over,
rocks going, too, and just a little touch bringing the blade in the
stream and swinging her around, because, you know, four men couldn’t
turn that nozzle by bull strength, where just a little blade that cut
into it at each side made it turn like a delicate vine.
“Now, I liked that as well as when I used to live back East in a
little old town up in New York, and it was my job to water the front
street, and when there come a carriage along I always used to be
absent-minded somehow, and that carriage would run right into the
water, and then them good old aunts of mine used to explain it, how
absent-minded I was, and the ladies that got wet wouldn’t listen to it,
and the nigger coachman and I had it around the barn fast. Well, I was
just the same kind of kid again when the monitor was playing, and the
sun was shining, and the clouds was sailing, and the grass was growing,
and everything that ought to happen was happening.
“Yes, my mind was in an A-1 condition, peace and good-will toward
men, and everything else, when all of a sudden Hank gives his three
locomotive whistles, and pulls for the shore, followed by twenty
grown-up men, falling over bushes, jumping over boulders, galloping
and waving their arms in wild excitement, Hank far in the lead.
“‘What in thunder?’ I said to myself. ‘That bank ain’t nowise
loosening;’ when I happened to look down, and there, on a little bench,
clapping his hands, sat that guerrilla-faced, swivel-jointed rancher,
and there was coming up to him a black-and-tan dog, no bigger’n three
rats. He couldn’t see me, and the boys couldn’t see him. They watched
for that bank to fall, and there wasn’t any fall, and they waited, and
they began cussing their good old friend Hank, that had never failed
them once before.
“When I thought of Hank being thus abused, just because a cussed little
dog--a kind of beast he ain’t never seen in his life before--has run
him out, my fighting-blood began to run quick all around my veins
and arteries, and I thinks to myself, ‘Oh, you gol-darn potato-bug
assassin! You slayer of squ’sh bugs! Here’s where you get the
thirty-third degree of Free and Accepted Masonry with all its tips,
spurs, right-angles and variations--so mote it be!’
“It wasn’t the hour for blue checks to run in my direction. I grabbed
the elevator wheel and sent the stream heavenward, started her
swinging, hoping to drop it right on the back of Mr. Rancher’s neck.
I didn’t intend to push him into the bank and hold him there. No, I
was the slickest boy handling a stream the country contained, and I
thought, perhaps, I could hit him in the neck with about seven hundred
assorted tons of water, and leave his hat hanging in the air. I wanted
to do something real nice to him.
“Well, it was _me_ that got it. I always told the Boss he didn’t load
the tripod heavy enough. When I sent the stream up she teetered for
fair. It was like a camel buck-jumping. There ain’t much give to three
iron legs, and so, friends, I was sitting up and down times oftener
than I could realize.
“There wasn’t a bronc’ buster that wouldn’t have yelled, ‘He’s a
rider!’ if he’d seen me stick to that machine. We crow-hopped on the
rocks back and forwards, and alleman’ all. We pitched forward and back,
and we did the double teeter, and as for the stream--the smack when she
hit things sounded just like a little small giant baby, nine hundred
feet high, clapping his hands with glee. Sometimes through the whiz and
howl I could hear men’s voices asking why I done so, and they no longer
sounded like the voices of comrades and friends.
“I was helpless as a child; couldn’t grab lever, wheel nor nothing.
Finally one leg toppled off an edge of rock and then--! Well, she shot
the cook’s shanty across the stream two hundred yards first whack.
It was so sudden it didn’t even put the fire out. The boys took
their solemn oaths the kitchen stove went across, smoking as calm and
peaceful as anything, just like it had decided to take a little fly.
Nothing to interrupt business, but just the kind of exercise you would
think a cook-stove would take. Yet they was astonished that I should
shoot a cook-stove across the stream.
“While they was standing there astonished, the old nozzle bucked ’way
back, and plowed a well in a bank ten feet away. I bet you that stream
could shoot a hole right up Niagara Falls, and when she mixed it with
the mess of dirt and rock in that bank, kicking it backwards at me, old
Napoleon at Waterloo was a dum poor effigy for Hy Smith. I couldn’t see
how it was ever going to be possible for me to breathe again, and the
awful roar and swatting and smashing makes it queer how I ever got to
hear or think again.
“But she passed through that bank of dirt in no time, and all the
fellows that was asking, ‘Where’s he gone?’ found out. They got the
last of the bank. Men could show you dents where pebbles no bigger’n
buckshot had been blown into them.
“The old monitor got real gay, and thought she was a Fourth of July
pin-wheel, and after that there was nothing but water-works on the
whole cussed creek. She took from one side to the other in quick
swings. Billy, the cook, said he saw a block of boards take wings and
sail right over Hooker’s Mountain.
“I was dumbfuzzled and geewhizzled, till my head was full of curled
hair and insect powder. I hung on with all hands and feet by instinct,
like an insect, until finally we steadied down and played in the same
place for half a minute, and I brushed some of the water out of my eyes.
“Beside me was Hank, looking reproachful, as much as to say, ‘I
_thought_ you knew your limit, Hy--but you must have stayed in town
_too_ long last time.’
“Then the next thing that appeared was that darned little black-and-tan
dog that had caused the whole trouble, followed by our friend, the
rancher. I pined to wash his whiskers. But it was not to be. The
monitor had jacked all her levers and cogs by knocking around.
“‘Come on,’ I yelped to the crowd--‘Come on, you flapjack faces! Help
me hold this critter down.’
“They got a move on. We tied the monitor and sent word to shut off the
water. Whilst we was all stepping on each other’s feet, I thought I
heard a mixture of sounds like small roars and large ‘Ki-yi’s,’ but the
farmer, he was very busy, thinking we might catch on to who did all
this, and come down to his cabin some night and take his whiskers as a
momentum.
“I had been pounded enough, so one of the lads took my place. I stepped
out. There was a battle going on. That cussed little black-and-tan
terrier was snapping and flying around poor old Hohankton, that had
never received anything but kind treatment in his life, and scarcely
knew what to make of this. I hate a black-and-tan dog, anyway. I like
to see a dog with legs big enough and long enough to support his body,
and with a body hefty enough to give the legs something to do. This
yapping little devil didn’t have none of my sympathies. When I looked
at the miserable beast I felt something _had_ to happen to him.
“Just then he made a quick jump and nailed old Hank by the nose, and at
the very same minute somebody hollered for me to come and fix something.
“After I pounded my thumb and wrenched my wrist getting the lever back
in some shape again, they stopped the water off, and the country was
saved!
“Then I grabbed that farmer and began to recite facts about his career,
while the boys spit on their hands and took hold of shovels. It looked
like uncle farmer would lead an upright life for some time, but he
begged and hollered and pled, so the fellows loosed him from the
position where we could best apply shovels, and he explained that he
didn’t go for to do all this when he started, and we let him up.
“He rose to his feet and apologized to us, singly and collectively, and
then he says, ‘Now I’ll just get little Pettie and ride right along
home,’ and he began to holler, ‘Pettie! Pettie! Pettie!’ and all that
come was old Hank, who looked him straight in the face.
[Illustration: “Little Pettie has departed,” I said. Page 211]
“‘Well, what has become of the durn little coyote?’ says everybody, and
then it just occurred to me that I knew, so I went back to where I
had seen little Pettie grab old Hank by the nose, and, sure enough,
there was a lovely little black tail!
“I brought it down to the rancher and I said, ‘Little Pettie has
departed, but he, she or it leaves this for you as a souvenir.’
“The rancher says, ‘Gosh almighty!’ as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.
I held up the tail, and I asked Hank:
“‘Here, little Hanky-Panky, did it eat the rest of little Pettie?’
and Hank looked at the tail and slouched off, with a kind of long and
non-complaining squeal.
“‘Well,’ says the Boss, brisk, ‘if we find any more of little Pettie
we’ll send it down to you, but I guess that’s all you can collect of
him now.’
“‘Well, darnation!’ said the farmer, and he brushed off the dust and
dirt of his hands on his trousers’ leg. ‘Well, say,’ says he, ‘I don’t
know whether to weep or to yell Hosanna! As for me, personally,’ he
said, ‘that cussed little dog has nigh chewed my fingers off,’ and he
showed us all kinds of bites on his fingers; ‘but,’ he says, ‘on the
other hand, it’s my wife’s pet, and every time one of the children
lets itself get bit by it, why, their mother raises sin with them for
tormentin’ it. If I had a good lie ready I wouldn’t weep one bit. But
the circumstances and hullabaloos and waterfalls and geysers I have
seen in the last twenty minutes have left my mind running in streaks.’