it, but no man you talked with had been to it. Description of it always
came to me at second hand. Scipio I except; Scipio assured me he had
once been to it. It was no easy spot to find; a man might pass it close
and come back and pass it on the other side, yet never know it was at
his elbow: so they said. The Indians believed a supernatural thing about
it--that it was not there every day, and few of them would talk readily
about it; yet it was they who had first showed it to the white man. And
because they repeated concerning a valley two hundred feet deep, a mile
long, and a quarter-mile wide at its widest, this haunted legend of
presence and absence, its name now possessed my mind. Like a strain of
music it recurred to my thoughts each day of my November hunting in the
mountains of Wind River. Still Hunt Spring; down there, somewhere in
that drowsy distance, it lay. One trail alone led into it; from one end
of the secret ravine to the other--they said--grew a single file of
trees lank and tall as if they stood on stilts to see out over the top,
and at the further end was a spring, small, cold, and sweet; though it
welled up in the midst of sage-brush desert, there was no alkali--they
said--in that water. Still Hunt Spring!
That night I announced to my two camp companions my new project: next
summer I should see Still Hunt Spring for myself.
“Alone?” Scipio inquired.
“Not if you will come.”
“It is no tenderfoot’s trail.”
“Then if I find it I shall cease to be a tenderfoot.”
“Go on,” said Scipio, with indulgence. “We’ll not let you stay lost.”
“It is no tenderfoot’s place,” the cook now muttered.
“Then you have been there?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “I am in this country for my health,” he drawled. On
this a certain look passed between my companions, and a certain laugh. A
sudden suspicion came to me, which I kept to myself until next afternoon
when we had broken this camp where no game save health seemed plentiful,
and were down the mountains at Horse Creek and Wind River.
“I don’t believe there is any such place as Still Hunt Spring.”
This I said sitting with a company in the cabin known later on the
Postal Route map as Dubois. The nearest post-office then was
seventy-five miles away. No one spoke until a minute after, I suppose,
when a man slowly remarked: “Some call that place Blind Spring.”
He was presently followed by another, speaking equally slowly: “I’ve
heard it called Arapaho Spring.”
“Still Hunt Spring is right.” This was a heavy, rosy-faced man, of
hearty and capable appearance. His clothes were strong and good, made
of whipcord, but his maroon-colored straw hat so late in the season was
the noticeable point in his dress. His voice was assertive, having in it
something of authority, if not of menace. “Some claim there’s such a
place,” he continued, eying me steadily and curiously, “and some claim
there’s not.” (Here he made a pause.) “But I tell you there is.”
He still held his eye upon me with no friendliness. Were they all merely
playing on my tenderfoot credulity, or what was it? I was framing a
retort when sounds of trouble came from outside.
“Man down in the corral,” exclaimed somebody. “It’s that wild horse.”
Scipio met us, running. “No doctor here?” he panted. “McDonough has
bruck his leg, looks like.”
But the doctor was seventy-five miles away--like the post-office.
“Who’s McDonough?” inquired the rosy-faced man with the straw hat.
A young fellow from Colorado, they told him, a new settler on Wind River
this summer. He had taken up a ranch on North Fork and built him a
cabin. Hard luck if he had broken his leg; he had a bunch of horses;
was going to raise horses; he had good horses. Hard luck!
We found young McDonough lying in the corral, propped against a
neighbor’s kindly knee. The wild horse was snorting and showing us red
nostrils and white eyes in a far corner; he had reared and fallen
backward while being roped, and the bars had prevented dodging in time.
Dirt was ground into McDonough’s flaxen hair, the skin was tight on his
cheeks, and his tips were as white as his large, thick nails; but he
smiled at us, and his strange blue eyes twinkled with the full spark of
undaunted humor.
“Ain’t I a son of a--?” he began, and shook his head over himself and
his clumsiness. Further speech was stopped by violent retching, and I
was enough of a doctor to fear that this augured a worse hurt than a
broken leg. But no blood came up, and he was soon talking to us again,
applying to himself sundry jocular epithets which were very well in that
rough corral, but must stay there.
He was lifted to the only bed in the cabin, no sound escaping him,
though his lips remained white, and when he thought himself unobserved
he shut his eyes; but kept them open and twinkling at any one’s
approach. They were strange, perplexed eyes, evidently large, but
deep-set, their lids screwed together; later that evening I noticed that
he held his playing-cards close to them, and slightly to one side,
Scipio called him “skew-bald,” but I could see no such defect. He was
not injured internally, it proved later, but his right leg was broken
above the ankle. We had to cut his boot off, so swollen already was the
limb. The heavy man with the straw hat advised getting him to the
hospital at the post without delay, and regretted he himself had not
come up the river in his wagon; he could have given the patient a lift.
With this he departed upon a tall roan horse, with an air about him of
business and dispatch uncommon in these parts. Wind River horsemen
mostly looked and acted as if there was no such thing as being behind
time, there being no such thing as time.
“Who is he?” I asked, looking after the broad back of whipcord and the
unseasonable straw hat.
All were surprised. What? Not know Lem Speed? Biggest cattleman in the
country. Store and a bank in Lander. House in Salt Lake. Wife in Los
Angeles. Son at Yale.
“Up here looking after his interests?” I pursued.
“Up here looking after his interests.” My exact words were repeated in
that particular tone which showed I was again left out of something.
“What’s the matter with my questions?” I asked.
“What’s the matter with our answers?” said a man. Truly, mine had been a
tenderfoot speech, and I sat silent.
McDonough’s white lips regained no color that night, and the skin drew
tighter over the bones of his face as the hours wore on. He was proof
against complaining, but no stoic endurance could hide such pain as he
was in. Beneath the sunburn on his thick hand the flesh was blanched,
yet never did he once ask if the hay wagon was not come for him. They
had expected to get him off in it by seven, but it did not arrive until
ten minutes before midnight; they had found it fifteen miles up the
river, instead of two. Sitting up, twisted uncomfortably, he played
cards until one of the company, with that lovable tact of the frontier,
took the cards from him, remarking, “You’ll lose all you’ve got,” and,
with his consent, played his hand and made bets for him. McDonough then
sank flat, watching the game with his perplexed, half-shut eyes.
What I could do for him I did; it was but little. Finding his leg
burning and his hand cold, I got my brandy--their whiskey was too
doubtful--and laid wet rags on the leg, keeping them wet. He accepted my
offices and my brandy without a sign; this was like most of them, and
did not mean that he was not grateful, but only that he knew no way to
say so. Laudanum alone among my few drugs seemed applicable, and he took
twenty drops with dumb acquiescence, but it brought him neither sleep
nor doze. More I was afraid in my ignorance to give him, and so he bore,
unpalliated, what must have become well-nigh agony by midnight, when we
lifted him into the wagon. So useless had I been, and his screwed-up
eyes, with their valiant sparkle, and his stoic restraint, made me feel
so sorry for him, that while they were making his travelling bed as soft
as they could I scrawled a message to the army surgeon at the Post. “Do
everything you can for him,” I wrote, “and as I doubt if he has five
dollars to his name, hold me responsible.” This I gave McDonough without
telling him its contents. Off they drove him in the cold, mute night; I
could hear the heavy jolts of the wagon a long way. Six rocky fords lay
between here and Washakie, and Scipio thus summed up the seventy-five
miles the patient had before him: “I don’t expect he’ll improve any on
the road.”
In new camps among other mountains I now tried my luck through deeper
snow, thicker ice, and colder days, coming out at length lean and
limber, and ravenous for every good that flesh is heir to, yet reluctant
to turn eastward to that city life which would unfailingly tarnish the
bright, hard steel of health. Of Still Hunt Spring I spoke no more, but
thought often, and with undiscouraged plans to visit it. I mentioned it
but once again. Old Washakie, chief of the Shoshone tribe, did me the
honor to dine with me at the military post which bore his name. Words
cannot describe the face and presence of that old man; ragged clothes
abated nothing of his dignity. A past like the world’s beginning looked
from his eyes; his jaw and long white hair made you silent as tall
mountains make you silent. After we had dined and I had made him
presents, he drew pictures in the sand for me with his finger. Not as I
expected, almost to my disappointment, this Indian betrayed no mystery
concerning the object of my quest.
“Hé!” he said (it was like a shrug). “No hard find. You want see him?
Water pretty good, yes. Trees heap big. You make ranch maybe?”
When he heard my desire was merely to see Still Hunt Spring, I am not
certain he understood me, or if so, believed me. “Hé!” he exclaimed
again, and laughed because I laughed. “You go this way,” he said,
beginning to trace a groove in the sand. “So.” He laid a match here and
there and pinched up little hillocks, and presently he had it all set
forth. I tore off a piece of wrapping-paper from the stove and copied
the map carefully, with his comments. The place was less distant than I
had thought. I thanked him, spoke of returning “after one snow” to see
him and Still Hunt Spring. “Hé!” he shrugged. Then he mounted his pony,
and rode off without any “good-by,” Indian fashion. I counted it a
treasure I had got from him.
McDonough’s leg had knit well, and I met him on crutches crossing the
parade ground. He was discharged from hospital, and (I will not deny it)
his mere nod of greeting seemed somewhat too scant acknowledgment of the
good will I had certainly tried to show him. Yet his smile was very
pleasant, and while I noted his face, no longer embrowned with sun and
riding, but pale from confinement, I noted also the unsubdued twinkle in
his perplexed eyes. After all, why should I need thanks? As he hobbled
away with his yellow hair sticking out in a cowlick under his hat
behind, I smiled at my own smallness, and wished him good luck heartily.
The doctor, whose hospitable acquaintance I had made on first coming
through the Post this year, would not listen to my paying him anything
for his services to McDonough. Army surgeons were expected, he said, to
render what aid they could to civilians, as well as to soldiers, in the
hospital; he good-humoredly forbade all the remonstrance I attempted.
When civilians could pay him themselves, he let them do so according to
their means; it was just as well that the surrounding country should not
grow accustomed to treating “Uncle Sam” as a purely charitable
institution. McDonough had offered to pay, when he could, what he could
afford. The doctor had thought it due to me to let him know the contents
of my note, and that no such arrangement could be allowed.
“And what said he to that?” I asked.
“Nothing, as usual.”
“Disgusted, perhaps?”
“Not in the least. His myopic eyes were just as cheerful then as they
were the second before he fainted away under my surgical attentions. He
scorned ether.”
“Poor fellow! He’s a good fellow!” I exclaimed.
“M’m,” went the doctor, doubtfully.
“Know anything against him?” I asked.
“Know his kind. All the way from Assiniboine to Lowell Barracks.”
“It has made you hard to please,” I declared.
“M’m,” went the doctor again.
“Think he’ll not pay you?”
“May. May not.”
“Well, good-by, Cynic.”
“Good-by, Tenderfoot.”
The next morning, had there been time to catch the doctor, I could have
proved to him that he was hard to please. At the moment of my stepping
into the early stage I had a surprise. McDonough had been at breakfast
at the hotel, and had said nothing to me; a nod sufficed him, as
usual--it was as much social intercourse as
[Illustration: The stage rattled up as I sat]
was customary at breakfast, or, indeed, at any of the meals. The stage
rattled up as I sat, and I, its only passenger, rose and spoke a
farewell syllable to McDonough, who repeated his curt nod. My next few
minutes were spent in paying the bill, seeing my baggage roped on behind
the stage, and in bidding Scipio good-by. One foot was up to get into
the vehicle when a voice behind said, “So you’re going.”
There was McDonough, hobbled out after me to the fence. He stood
awkwardly at the open gate, smiling his pleasant smile. I replied yes,
and still he stood.
“Coming next year?”
Again I said yes, and again he stood silent, smiling and awkward. Then
it was uttered; the difficult word which shyness had choked: “If you
come, you shall have the best horse on the river.”
Before I could answer he was hobbling back to the hotel. Thus from his
heart his untrained lips at last had spoken.
I drove away, triumphing over the doctor, and in my thoughts my holiday
passed in review,--my camps, and Scipio, and Still Hunt Spring, and most
of all this fellow with his broken leg and perplexed eyes.
At Lander, they said, had I come two days earlier, I should have had the
company of Lem Speed. So he and his maroon straw hat came into my
thoughts too. He had started for California, I heard from the driver,
whose society I sought on the box. He assured me that Lem Speed was
rich, but that I carried better whiskey. Trouble was “due” in this
country, he said (after more of my whiskey), “pretty near” the sort of
trouble they were having on Powder River. For his part he did not wonder
that poor men got tired of rich men; not that he objected to riches, but
only to hogs. He had nothing against Lem Speed. Temptation to steal
stock had never come his way, but he could understand how poor men might
get tired of the big cattlemen--some poor men, anyhow. Yes, trouble was
“sure due”; what brought Lem Speed up here so long after the beef
round-up? Still, he “guessed” he hadn’t told Lem Speed anything that
would hurt a poor fellow. Lem Speed had “claimed” he was up here about
his bank. If so, why had he gone up Wind River, and all around Big
Muddy, and over to the Embar? The bank was not there. No, sir; the big
cattlemen were going to “demonstrate” over here as they had on the Dry
Cheyenne and Box Elder. I perceived “demonstration” to be the driver’s
word for the sudden hanging of somebody without due process of law, and
I expressed a doubt as to its being needed here; I had heard nothing of
cattle or horses being stolen. This he received in silence, presently
repeating that Lem Speed hadn’t got anything from _him_. We broke off
this subject for mines, and after mines we touched on topic after topic,
until I confided to him the story of McDonough.
“Of course I would never accept the horse,” I finished.
“Why not?”
“Well--well--it would hardly be suitable.”
“Please yourself,” said the driver, curtly, and looking away. “Such
treatment would not please me.”
“You mean, ‘never look a gift horse in the mouth,’ as we say?”
“I don’t know as I ever said that.” A steep gulley in the road obliged
him to put on the break and release it before he continued: “I’d not
consider I had the right to do a man a good turn if I wasn’t willing for
him to do _me_ one.”
“But I really did nothing for him.”
“Please yourself. Maybe folks are different East.”
“Well,” I ended, laughing, “I understand you, and am not the hopeless
snob I sound like, and I’ll take his horse next summer if you will take
a drink now.”
We finished our journey in amity.
The intervening months, whatever drafts they made upon my Rocky Mountain
health, weakened my designs not a whit; late June found me again in the
stagecoach, taking with eagerness that drive of thirty-two jolting
hours. Roped behind were my camp belongings, and treasured in my pocket
was Chief Washakie’s trail to Still Hunt Spring. My friend, the driver,
was on the down stage; and so, to my regret, we could not resume our
talk where we had left it; but I again encountered at once that
atmosphere of hinted doings and misdoings which had encompassed me as I
went out of the country. At the station called Crook’s Gap I came upon
new rumors of Lem Speed, and asked, had he come about his bank again?
“You and him acquainted?” inquired a man on a horse. And, on my
answering that I was not, he cursed Lem Speed slow and long, looking
about for contradiction; then, as none present took it up, he rode
sullenly away, leaving silence behind him.
When I alighted next afternoon at the Washakie post-trader’s store and
walked back to the private office of the building whither I was wont
always to repair, what I saw in that private room, through a sort of
lattice which screened it off from the general public, was a close-drawn
knot of men round a table, and on a chair a maroon-colored straw hat!
Rather hastily the post-trader came out, and, shaking my hand warmly,
drew me away from the lattice. After a few cordial questions he said:
“Come back this evening.”
“Does he never get a new hat?” I asked.
“Hat? Who? What? Oh; yes, to be sure!” laughed the post-trader. “I’ll
tell him he ought to.”
I sought out the doctor, soon learning from him that McDonough had paid
him for his services. But this had not softened his opinion of the young
fellow, though he had heard nothing against him, nor even any mention of
his name; he repeated his formula that he had known McDonough’s kind all
the way from Assiniboine to Lowell Barracks, whereupon I again called
him “cynic,” and he retorted with “tenderfoot,” and thus amicably I left
him for my postponed gossip with the post-trader. Him I found
hospitable, but preoccupied, holding a long cigar unlighted between his
taciturn lips. Each topic that I started soon died away: my Eastern
news; my summer plans to ramble with Scipio across the Divide on Gros
Ventre and Snake; the proposed extension of the Yellowstone
Park--everything failed.
“That was quite a company you had this afternoon,” I said, reaching the
end of my resources.
“Yes. Nice gentlemen. Yes.” And he rolled the long, unlighted cigar
between his lips.
“Cattlemen, I suppose?”
“Cattlemen. Yes.”
“Business all right, I hope?”
“Well, no worse than usual.”
Here again we came to an end, and I rose to go.
“Seen your friend McDonough yet?” said he, still sitting.
“Why, how do you know he’s a friend of mine?”
“Says so every time he comes into the Post.”
“Well, the doctor’s all wrong about him!” I exclaimed, and gave my
views. The post-trader watched me in his tilted chair, with a
half-whimsical smile, rolling his eternal cigar, and I finished with the
story of the horse. Then the smile left his face. He got up slowly, and
slowly took a number of turns round his office, pottered with some
papers on his desk, and finally looked at me again.
“Tell me if he does,” he said.
“Offer the horse? I shall not remind him--and I should take it only as a
loan.”
“You tell me if he does,” repeated the post-trader, now smiling again,
and so we parted.
“I wonder what he didn’t say?” I thought as I proceeded to the hotel;
for he had plainly pondered some remarks and decided upon silence.
Between them, he and the doctor had driven me to a strong hope that
McDonough would vindicate my opinion of him by making good his word. At
breakfast next morning at the hotel one of the invariable characters at
such breakfasts, an unshaven person in tattered overalls, with
rope-scarred fists and grimy knuckles, to me unknown, asked:--
“Figure on meeting your friend McDonough?”
“Not if he doesn’t figure on meeting me.”
They all took quiet turns at looking at me until some one remarked:--
“He ain’t been in town lately.”
“I’m glad his leg’s all right,” I said.
“Oh, his leg’s all right.”
The tone of this caused me to look at them. “Well, I hope he’s _all_
all-right!”
Not immediately came the answer: “By latest reports he was enjoying good
health.”
Truly they were a hopeless people to get anything direct from.
Indirectness is by some falsely supposed to be a property of only the
highly civilized; but these latter merely put a brighter and harder
polish on it.
That afternoon I drove with my camp things out of town in a
“buggy,”--very different from the Eastern vehicle which bears this
name,--and the next afternoon between Dinwiddie and Red Creek, on a
waste stretch high above the river, who should join me but McDonough. He
was riding down the mountain apparently from nowhere, and my pleasure at
seeing him was keen. His words were few and halting, as they had been
the year before, and in his pleasant, round face the blue eyes twinkled,
screwed up and as perplexed as ever. I abstained from more than
glancing at the fine sorrel that he rode, lest I should seem to be
hinting.
“Water pretty low for this season,” he said.
“Was there not much snow?”
“Next to none, and went early.”
I turned from my direct course and camped at his cabin on North Fork.
“What’s your hurry?” he said next morning, when I was preparing to go.
There was no hurry; those days had no hurry in them, and I bless their
memory for it. I sat on a stump, smoking a “Missouri meerschaum,” and
unfolding to him my plans. To the geography of my route he listened
intently--very intently.
“So you’re going to keep over the other side the mountains?” he said.
“Even to Idaho,” I answered, “and home that way.”
“Not back this way?”
“Not this year.”
He thought a little while. “You’re settled as to that?”
“Quite.”
He rose, and put some wood into the stove in his cabin; then he returned
to me where I sat on the stump. “Sure you’re quite settled you’ll keep
on the west side of the Divide?”
“Goodness!” I laughed, “why should I lie to you?”
Again he pondered in silence, and I could not imagine what he had in his
mind. What had my being east or being west of the mountains to do with
him?
He now jerked his head toward the corral. “Like him?” he inquired
gruffly. It was the sorrel horse that he meant, and I perceived that it
was standing saddled. I said nothing. The fellow’s embarrassment
embarrassed me. “Like him?” he repeated.
“Looks good to me,” I replied, adopting his gruffness.
He rose and brought the horse to me. “Get on.”
“Hulloa! You’ve got my saddle on him.”
“Get on. He ain’t the one that bruck my leg.”
I obeyed. Thus was the gift offered and accepted. I rode the horse down
and up the level river bottom. “How shall I get him back to you?” I
asked.
McDonough’s face fell. “He’ll be all right in the East,” he protested.
I smiled. “No, my good friend. Not that. Let me send him back with the
outfit.”
We compromised on this, and caught trout for the rest of the day, also
shooting some young sage chickens. The sorrel proved a fine animal.
Again McDonough delayed my departure. “I can broil those chickens fine,”
he said, “and--and you’ll not be back this way.”
He would not look at me as he said this, but busied himself with the
fire. He was lonely, and liked my company, and couldn’t say so. Dense
doctor! I reflected, not to have been warmed by this nature. But later
this friendless fellow touched my heart more acutely. A fine thought had
come to me during the evening: to leave my wagon here, to leave a note
for Scipio at the E-A outfit, to descend Wind River to the Sand Gulch,
strike Washakie’s trail to the northeast of Crow Heart Butte, and on my
vigorous sorrel find Still Hunt Spring by myself. The whole ride need
take but two days. I think I must have swelled with pride at the
prospect of this secret achievement, to be divulged, when accomplished,
to the admiring dwellers on Wind River. But I intended to have the
pleasure of divulging it to McDonough at once, and I forthwith composed
a jeering note to Scipio Le Moyne.
“Esteemed friend” (this would anger him immediately); “come and find me
at Still Hunt Spring, if you don’t fear getting lost. If you do, avoid
the risk, and I will tell you all about it Friday evening. Yours,
Tenderfoot.”
I pushed this over to McDonough, who was practising various cuts with a
pack of cards. “That will make Scipio jump,” I said.
Somewhat to my disappointment, it did not have this or any effect upon
McDonough. He held the paper close to his eyes, shutting them still more
to follow the writing, and handed it back to me, saying merely, “Pretty
good.”
“I’ll leave it over at the E-A for him,” I explained. “He thinks I’m
afraid to go there alone.”