Part 7

A trickle of blood from a cut in his head bore witness that this was not a figure of speech. Let any one who doubts the Lethal quality of a Dakota hail-storm stand out in the open while a dozen or so expert ball-pitchers open fire on him with pieces of ice, weighing up to half a pound (the actual conditions of the storms are sometimes a worse matter than this comes to), and I fancy he will soon be changed from a skeptic to a fanatic.

If I had any doubts they were instantly removed by a rap on the arm which numbed it to the finger-tips. For a moment we hesitated, but it was too far back to the ranch, so we broke for the scant cover of some bullberry bushes on the hitherside of Cunningham’s coulée.

As we flattened ourselves behind these the real storm was on us in a breath. We were stunned by the uproar; the all-pervading heavy drumming of rain and hail, and the hiss of their passage; the yelling and booming of the wind, and the thunder that smote the earth, crash upon crash, like the blows of a hammer. We did not think--we held on tight and waited. One could not see ten feet into the gray of falling ice and water, and the rush of it nearly took one’s senses away. It all but turned the level prairie into a seething lake, and the slopes into rapids. Suddenly the downpour ceased almost as abruptly as it began, and nothing remained but the wind. I say “nothing,” because that is our idiom. I do not use the word in a depreciatory sense, for we had full realization of what force there is in mere air in motion that morning. It swept across the prairie in one great tide of power. There was not a flutter nor break in it. It jammed us down in the mud, and then held us there. At first it seemed as if our heads would be whipped off our shoulders if we dared lift them up into the full swing of it. But this acme of energy passed at last, and we turned our eyes down the coulée to see how our friend had fared.

Tent Cunningham had so far fulfilled its architect’s expectations. A swollen yellow river from the coulée washed its edge and it was plastered with mud by the hailstones, but otherwise uninjured.

“He’s--weathered--it!” roared Billy in my ear. “Yes,” I answered, “coulée--bank--protected--him. He’s--all--right--if--”

I was going to say “if the wind doesn’t shift.” But before the words were out the wind had shifted.

Rrrr-oooo-oof! It shrieked down the coulée and with a snapping and a cracking, like a small Fourth of July celebration, away went Tent Cunningham. The canvas rose in the air, flapping tragically; and beneath it, galloping in frantic haste, were the longest and thinnest legs in the world, as poor Cunningham, caught in the folds, was hustled onward. We could see nothing of him but legs, and as the flying tent bore a rude semblance to the human figure, the combination looked like a gigantic ghost, with slender black legs, hurrying off to haunt somebody.

Such leaps and bounds as Cunningham made were never equaled by the winner of any Olympia, ancient or modern; and such another vision never was beheld outside the course of a nightmare. There was a fever of madness in its curvetings, its gesticulations, its wild plunges.

Down into the Chantay Seeche, all a-suds from the recent bombardment, the specter swooped, and then came a mighty struggling and floundering.

Surely no more ignominious death could be furnished the offspring of a noble house than to be held down by a tent and drowned in two feet of water!

We sprang, nay, we flew to his assistance, for once on our feet the wind scurried us ahead whether we would or no. We spaudered and slid over the slippery mud, like novices on skates, and we should have over-shot our quarry but that we grabbed at the tent in passing.

Now, it turned out to be in nowise so easy to get the man out as you might think, for the moment we lifted a fold of the canvas it caught the air like a kite, and down we went, under it, or over it, as the case appeared. In the former instance, it was no small job for us to get ourselves out again, let alone helping Cunningham. The very devil was in the tent, and it began to look as if the man would be drowned right under our hands, when it occurred to me to cut the knot of our complications.

I passed my knife over a bulging place which I judged held some part of the victim, and instantly the head of James Cecil R. DeG. Cunningham popped through the opening--a head from whose mouse-colored whiskers and long nose the water dripped pathetically, and which regarded us with injured but vacant near-sighted eyes.

Poor Cunny! His mind must have been thoroughly addled by the events of the morning, for the first words he spoke--in the tone of one declining an ice--were: “I don’t like this kind of thing at all, y’ know!”

“You don’t, eh?” said Billy. “Well, if it’s the last act, I’m going to 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.