Kitobni o'qish: «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?"