Chapter 21

Anyway, he got his suffering man back to Horticultural Hall somewhat the worse for being stepped on by the crowd; in fact, the Frenchman is kind of all in when he gets to the auction block. He sets right down on it looking white, and Genevieve May gets him a glass of water to revive him. Pretty soon he says he's nearly as well as ever, but that wasn't much.

Now the patriots for the auction begun to throng in and Genevieve May is once more proud and fluttering. She glances fondly at her noble array of jars, with these illegitimate preserves shining richly through, and she gets the Frenchman on his feet and onto the box; and the crowd cheers like mad and presses close. I was standing close to G.H. Stultz, and he whispers to me:

"My Lord! If there was only some means of getting that stock into the German commissary! But I'm told they analyze everything. Anyway, I got my bidders planted and I'll have to buy up the stock if it breaks me."

Then the Frenchman begun to talk in a very nice way. He said a few words about his country--how they had been fighting all these years, not knowing whether they could win or not, but meaning to fight till there wasn't any fighters left; and how grateful France was for the timely aid of this great country and for the efforts of beautiful ladies like Madam Popper, and so on.

You bet no one laughed, even if he didn't talk such very good English. They didn't even laugh when he said beautiful ladies like Madam Popper, though Cousin Egbert, somewhere off in the crowd, made an undignified sound which he pretended was coughing.

The Frenchman then said he would now ask for bids for these beautiful table delicacies, which were not only of rich food value but were more priceless than gold and jewels because of having been imprisoned in the crystal glass by the fair hands of the beautiful Madam Popper; and what was he offered for six bottles of this unspeakable jelly?

Of course G.H. Stultz would of had 'em in no time if the panic hadn't saved him. Yes, sir; right then something terrible and unforeseen happened to cause a frightful panic. About five of them jars of preserves blew up with loud reports. Of course everyone's first thought was that a German plot was on to lay Horticultural Hall in ruins with dynamite. It sounded such. No one thought it was merely these strange preserves that had been working overtime in that furnace.

Women screamed and strong men made a dash for the door over prostrate bodies. And then a lot more explosions took place. The firing became general, as the reports say. Bottle after bottle shot its dread contents into the fray, and many feeble persons was tromped on by the mob.

It wasn't any joke for a minute. The big jars, mostly loaded with preserves, went off with heavy reports; then there was these smaller bottles, filled with artificial ketchup and corked. They went off like a battery of light field guns, putting down a fierce barrage of ketchup on one and all. It was a good demonstration of the real thing, all right. I ain't never needed any one since that to tell me what war is.

The crowd was two thirds out before any one realized just what kind of frightfulness was going on. Then, amid shot and shell that would still fly from time to time, the bravest, that hadn't been able to fight their way out, stood by and picked up the wounded under fire and helped brush their clothes off. The groans of the sufferers mingled with the hiss of escaping ketchup.

Genevieve May was in hysterics from the minute the first high-powered gun was fired. She kept screaming for everyone to keep cool. And at last, when they got some kind of order, she went into a perfectly new fit because her Frenchman was missing. She kept it up till they found the poor man. He was found, without his crutch, at the far end of the hall, though no one has ever yet figgered how he could get there through the frenzied mob. He was on a chair, weak and trembling, behind a fancy quilt made by Grandma Watkins, containing over ten thousand pieces of silk. He was greenish yellow in colour and his heart had gone wrong.

That'll show you this bombardment wasn't any joke. The poor man had been exhausted by Cousin Egbert's well-meant efforts to show him something exciting, and he was now suffering from sure-enough shell shock, which he'd had before in more official circumstances.

He was a brave man; he'd fought like a tiger in the trenches, and had later been shot down out of the air four times, and was covered with wounds and medals and crosses; but this here enfilade at the fair hands of the beautiful Madam Popper, coming in his weak state, had darn near devastated what few nerves the war had left him.

It was a sad moment. Genevieve May was again exploding, like her own handiwork, which wasn't through itself yet by any means, because a solitary shot would come now and then, like the main enemy had retreated but was leaving rear guards and snipers. Also, people that had had exhibits in the art section and the fancy-work section was now setting up yells of rage over their treasures that had been desecrated by the far-flung ketchup.

But tender hands was leading the stricken Frenchman back of the lines to a dressing station, and all was pretty near calm again, except for G.H. Stultz, who was swearing--or words to that effect.

It really took a good hour to restore perfect calm and figure up the losses. They was severe. Of course I don't mean to say the whole three hundred bottles of this ammunition dump had exploded. Some had been put up only a short while and hadn't had time to go morbid; and even some of the old stuff had remained staunch.

The mincemeat shrapnel had proved fairly destructive, but the turnip marmalade didn't seem to of developed much internal energy. All of them jars of marmalade proved to be what they call "duds." But you bet enough had gone up to make a good battle sketch. The ketchup, especial, was venomous.

I met G.H. Stultz as I left the trenches. He'd been caught in a machine-gun nest of ketchup and had only wiped about half of it off his face. He looked like a contagious disease.

"Say, look here," he says; "you can't tell me there isn't a Providence ever watching over this world to give some of us just what's coming to us!" That was very silly, because I'd never told him anything of the sort.

Then I go out into No Man's Land and meet Cousin Egbert by a lemonade stand. He was one radiant being. He asked me to have a glass of the beverage, and I done so; and while I was sipping it he says brightly:

"Wasn't that some gorgeous display of fireworks? And wasn't it fine to stand there and watch them bottles laugh their heads off at this food profiteer?"

I said he ought to be right sorry for her--after all the work she'd done.

"Not me!" he says firmly. "She never done any work in her life except to boost her own social celebrity."

Then he took another gulp of his lemonade and says, very bitter:

"Madam Peach Blossom! I wonder what that funny little mite of hers will say when she sees her to-night? Something laughable, I bet--like it would be 'Madam Onion Blossom!'--or something comical, just to give her a good laugh after her hard day."

Such is Cousin Egbert, and ever will be. And Genevieve May, having took up things all round the circle, is now back to the dance.

X

AS TO HERMAN WAGNER

It had been a toilsome day for Ma Pettengill and me. Since sunup we had ridden more than a score of mountain miles on horses that could seldom exceed a crawl in pace. At dawn we had left the flatlands along the little timbered river, climbed to the lava beds of the first mesa, traversed a sad stretch of these where even the sage grew scant, and come, by way of a winding defile that was soon a mounting cañon, into big hills unending.

Here for many hours we had laboured over furtive, tortuous trails, aimless and lost, it might have seemed, but that ever and again we came upon small bands of cattle moving one way. These showed that we had a mission and knew, after all, what we were about. These cattle were knowingly bent toward the valley and home. They went with much of a businesslike air, stopping only at intervals to snatch at the sparse short grass that grows about the roots of the sagebrush. They had come a long journey from their grazing places, starting when the range went bad and water holes dried, and now seemed glad indeed to give up the wild free life of a short summer and become tended creatures again, where strangely thoughtful humans would lavish cut grass upon them for certain obscure but doubtless benevolent purposes of their own.

It was our mission this day to have a look-see, mebbe as far as Horsefly Mountain, and get a general idee of how many head was already coming down to eat up the so-and-so shortest hay crop that had ever been stacked on the Arrowhead since the dry winter of '98, when beef fell to two cents a pound, with darned few takers at that.

It was really a day of scenic delight, if one hadn't to reflect sorely upon the exigencies of the beef-cattle profession, and at least one of us was free of this thrall.

What we reached at last were small mountains rather than big hills; vast exclamatory remnants of shattered granite and limestone, thickly timbered, reckless of line, sharp of peak. One minute cañon we viewed from above was quite preposterous in its ambitions, having colour and depth and riot of line in due proportions and quite worthy of the grand scale. It wasn't a Grand Cañon, but at least it was a baby grand, and I loitered on its brink until reminded sharply that I'd better pour leather into that there skate if I wanted to make home that night.

I devoutly did wish to make home that night, for the spot we were on was barren of those little conveniences I am accustomed to. Moreover, the air was keen and a hunger, all day in the building, called for strong meats. So I not too reluctantly passed on from this scenic miniature of parlour dimensions--and from the study of a curious boulder thereby which had intrigued me not a little.

Now we were home and relaxed by the Arrowhead fireside, after a moving repast of baked young sage hens. The already superior dynamics of the meal, moreover, had been appreciably heightened by a bottle of Uncle Henry's homemade grape wine, which he warmly recommends for colds or parties, or anything like that. It had proved to be a wine of almost a too-recent _crû_. Ma Pettengill said that if Uncle Henry was aiming to put it on the market in quantity production he had ought to name it the Stingaree brand, because it was sure some stuff, making for malevolence even to the lengths of matricide, if that's what killing your mother is called. She said, even at a Polish wedding down across the tracks of a big city, it would have the ambulances and patrol wagons clanging up a good half hour quicker than usual.

Be that as it may, or is, when I had expected sleep to steal swiftly to the mending of the day's ravages I merely found myself wakeful and wondering. This stuff of Uncle Henry's is an able ferment. I wondered about a lot of things. And at the same time I wondered interminably about that remarkable boulder at the side of the Tom Thumb Grand Cañon. I was even wakeful enough and discursive enough--my hostess had taken but one glass from the bottle--to wonder delightedly about all rocks and stones, and geology, and that sort of thing. It was almost scientific, the way I wondered, as I sat there idly toying with my half-filled glass.

Take this particular boulder, for example. It had once been mere star dust, hadn't it? Some time ago, I mean, or thereabouts. But it had been star dust; and then, next thing it knew, it got to be a kind of cosmic stew, such as leisurely foreigners patch out highways with, and looking no more like a granite boulder than anything.

Then something happened, like someone letting the furnace fire go out the night of the big freeze; and this stuff I'm talking about grew cold and discouraged, and quit flat, apparently not caring a hoot what shape it would be found in years and years later, the result being that it was found merely in the general shape of rocks or boulders--to use the more scientific term--which is practically no shape at all, as you might say, being quite any shape that happens, or the shape of rocks and boulders as they may be seen on almost every hand by those of us who have learned to see in the true sense of the word.

I have had to be brief in this shorter science course on the earth's history before the time of man, because more important matters claim my attention and other speakers are waiting. The point is that this boulder up there by the dwarf cañon had survived from unremembered chaos; had been melted, stewed, baked, and chilled until it had no mind of its own left; then bumped round by careless glaciers until it didn't care where it came to rest; and at last, after a few hundred million years of stony unconcern for its ultimate fate, here it had been drawn by the cunning hand of man sprang into the complex mechanism of our industrial human scramble.

That is to say, this boulder I speak of, the size of a city hall, lying there in noble neglect since long before wise old water animals were warning their children that this here fool talk about how you could go up out of the water and walk round on dry land would get folks into trouble, because how could a body breathe up there when there wasn't any water to breathe in? And the fools that tried it would soon find out; and serve 'em right! Well, I mean to say, this boulder that had lain inert and indifferent while the ages wrought man from a thing of one cell--and not much of a cell at that--bore across that face of it nearest the winding trail, a lettered appeal, as from one man to another. The letters were large and neatly done in white paint and the brushwork was recent. And the letters said, with a good deal of pathos, it seemed to me:

WAGNER'S SYLVAN GLEN, ONLY THIRTY-TWO MILES. HERMAN WAGNER, SOLE PROP.

Let this teach us, one and all, this morning, that everything in Nature has its use if we but search diligently. I mean, even big rocks like this, which are too big to build homes or even courthouses of. May we not, at least, paint things on them in plain letters with periods and commas, and so on, and so give added impetus to whatever is happening to us?

But the evening wears on and the whipping mental urge of grape juice meddled with by Uncle Henry wears off. And so, before it all ends, what about Herman Wagner, Sole Prop. of Wagner's Sylvan Glen?

I know it has been a hard day, but let us try to get the thing in order. Why not begin cautiously with a series of whys? Why any particular sylvan glen in a country where everything is continuously and overwhelmingly sylvan and you can't heave a rock without hitting a glen? Really, you can't walk fifty yards out there without stepping on a glen--or in a glen; it doesn't matter. What I am earnestly trying to get at is, if this Herman Wagner wanted to be sole prop. of a sylvan glen, why should he have gone thirty-two miles farther for one? Why didn't he have it right there? Why insanely push thirty-two miles on in a country where miles mean something serious? Up-and-down miles, tilted horribly or standing on edge!

It didn't seem astute. And Herman achieved simply no persuasion whatever with me by stocking in that "only." He could have put only all over the rock and it would still have been thirty-two miles, wouldn't it? Only indeed! You might think the man was saying "Only ten minutes' walk from the post office"--or something with a real meaning like that. I claimed then and I claim now that he should have omitted the only and come out blunt with the truth. There are times in this world when the straight and bitter truth is better without any word-lace. This Wagner person was a sophist. So I said to him, now, as a man will at times:

"All right, Herman, old top! But you'll have to think up something better than only to put before those thirty-two miles. If you had said 'Only two miles' it might have had its message for me. But thirty more than that! Be reasonable! Why not pick out a good glen that parties can slip off to for a quiet evening without breaking up a whole week? Frankly, I don't understand you and your glen. But you can bet I'll find out about it!"

So, right away, I said to Ma Pettengill, who by this time had a lot of bills and papers and ledgers and stuff out on her desk, and was talking hotly to all of them--I said to her that there was nearly half a bottle of Uncle Henry's wine left, his rare old grape wine laid down well over a month ago; so she had better toss off a foamy beaker of it--yes, it still foamed--and answer me a few questions.

It was then she said the things about that there wine being able to inflate the casualty lists, even of Polish weddings, which are already the highest known to the society page of our police-court records. She said, further, that she had took just enough of the stuff at dinner to make her think she wasn't entirely bankrupt, and she wanted to give these here accounts a thorough going-over while the sensation lasted.

Not wishing to hurt Uncle Henry's feelings, even if he didn't catch me at it, I partook again of the fervent stuff, and fell into new wonder at the seeming imbecility of Herman Wagner. I found myself not a little moved by the pathos of him. It was little enough I could get from Ma Pettengill at first. She spoke almost shortly to me when I asked her things she had to stop adding silly figures to answer.

What I found out was mostly my own work, putting two and two in their fit relationship. Even the mention of Herman Wagner's full name brought nothing about himself. I found it most annoying. I would say: "Come on, now; what about this Herman Wagner that paints wheedling messages across the face of Nature?" And to this fair, plain query I would merely have more of the woman's endless help troubles. All that come looking for work these days was stormy petrels, not caring if they worked or not--just asking for it out of habit.

Didn't she have a singing teacher, a painless dentist, a crayon-portrait artist and a condemned murderer on her payroll this very minute, all because the able-bodied punchers had gone over to see that nasty little Belgium didn't ever again attack Germany in that ruthless way? She had read that it cost between thirty and thirty-five thousand dollars to wound a soldier in battle. Was that so? Well, she'd tell me that she stood ready to wound any of these that was left behind for between thirty and thirty-five cents, on easy payments. Wound 'em severely, too! Not mere scratches.

Presently again I would utter Herman Wagner, only to be told that these dry cows she was letting go for sixty dollars--you come to cut 'em up for beef and you'd have to grease the saw first. Or I heard what a scandal it was that lambs actually brought five-fifty, and the Government at Washington, D.C., setting back idly under the outrage!

Then I heard, with perfect irrelevance to Herman Wagner, that she wouldn't have a puncher on the place that owned his own horse. Because why? Because he'd use him gentle all day and steal grain for him at night. Also, that she had some kind of rheumatiz in her left shoulder; but she'd rather be a Christian Scientist and fool herself than pay a doctor to do the same. It may all have been true, but it was not important; not germane to the issue, as we so often say in writing editorials.

It looked so much like a blank for Herman Wagner that I quit asking for a time and let the woman toil at her foolish ruinous tasks.

After half an hour of it she began to rumble a stanza of By Cool Siloam's Shady Rill; so I chanced it again, remarking on the sign I had observed that day. So she left her desk for a seat before the fire and said yes, and they was other signs of Herman's hid off in the mountains where no one but cows, that can't read a line, would see 'em. She also divulged that Herman, himself, wasn't anything you'd want a bronze statue of to put up in Courthouse Square.

Well then, come on, now! What about him? No, sir; not by a darned sight! With that there desk full of work, she simply could not stop to talk now. She did.

Is that the only sign of Herman's you saw? He's got others along them trails. You'll see an arrow in white paint, pointing to his sylvan glen, and warnings not to go to other glens till you've tried his. One says: You've tried the rest; now try the best! Another says: Try Wagner's Sylvan Glen for Boating, Bathing, and Fishing. Meals at all hours! And he's got one that shows he studied American advertising as soon as he landed in this country. It says: Wagner's Sylvan Glen--Not How Good, But How Cheap!

I don't know. I ain't made up my mind about Herman, even yet. If it wasn't for why he had to leave Nevada and if I knew there could be more than one kind of German, then I'd almost say Herman was the other kind. But, of course, there can't be but one kind, and he showed the Prussian strain fast enough in why he come up from Reno. Still and all, he's got his engaging points as a pure imbecile or something.

He don't tell me why he left Reno for a long time after he gets here; not till I'd won his confidence by showing I was a German sympathizer. It was when Sandy Sawtelle had a plan for a kind of grand war measure. His grand war measure was to get some secret agents into Germany and kill off all the women under fifty. He said if you done this the stock would die out, because look at the game laws against killing does! He told this to everybody. He told it to Herman; but Herman knew enough to remain noncommittal 'bout it. He told it to me, and I saw right off it probably couldn't be managed right; and, even if it could be, I said to Sandy, it seemed to me somehow like it would be sort of inhuman.

Herman heard me say this and got the idea I was a pacifist and a secret friend of his country; so he confided to me the secret of why he left Reno to keep from having his heart cut out by Manuel Romares. But no matter!

Anyway, last year in the spring this Herman dropped by, looking for work. He hadn't been in America long, having stopped with his uncle in Cincinnati a while, and then coming West on a life of adventure and to take up a career. He said now he'd come up from Nevada, where he'd been working on a sheep ranch, and he acted like he wanted to get into something respectable and lead a decent life again.

Well, it had got so I hired everything that come along; so why not Herman? I grabbed at him. The boys heard he was a German alien and acted, at first, like a bunch of hogs with a bear about; but I'd of hired old Hinderburg himself if he'd offered and put him to doing something worth while.

This Herman was the first man ever worked here in side whiskers. He told me, after I showed myself a German sympathizer, that in the beginning of the war he'd wore one of them moustaches like the Kaiser puts up in tin fasteners every night after he's said his prayers; but this had made him an object of unpleasant remark, including missiles. So he had growed this flowering border round it to take off the curse.

They was beautiful shiny side whiskers and entirely innocent-looking. In the right clothes Herman could of gone into any Sabbath school in the land and said he was glad to see so many bright little faces there this morning, and now what was to-day's golden text, and so on. That's what he looked like. These things fell like portières each side of his face, leaving his chin as naked as the day he was born. He didn't have any too much under his mouth either; so I guess the whiskers was really a mercy to his face.