Would you believe that even these terrible creatures have to be guarded by the troopers to prevent the irreverent Americans from chipping the cones to pieces,or,worse still,making the geyser sick?If you take a small barrel full of soft-soap and drop it down a geyser's mouth,that geyser will presently be forced to lay all before you,and for days afterward will be of an irritated and inconstant stomach.
When they told me the tale I was filled with sympathy.Now Iwish that I had soft-soap and tried the experiment on some lonely little beast far away in the woods.It sounds so probable and so human.
Yet he would be a bold man who would administer emetics to the Giantess.She is flat-lipped,having no mouth;she looks like a pool,fifty feet long and thirty wide,and there is no ornamentation about her.At irregular intervals she speaks and sends up a volume of water over two hundred feet high to begin with,then she is angry for a day and a half--sometimes for two days.
Owing to her peculiarity of going mad in the night,not many people have seen the Giantess at her finest;but the clamor of her unrest,men say,shakes the wooden hotel,and echoes like thunder among the hills.
The congregation returned to the hotel to put down their impressions in diaries and note-books,which they wrote up ostentatiously in the verandas.It was a sweltering hot day,albeit we stood some-what higher than the level of Simla,and Ileft that raw pine creaking caravansary for the cool shade of a clump of pines between whose trunks glimmered tents.
A batch of United States troopers came down the road and flung themselves across the country into their rough lines.The Melican cavalryman can ride,though he keeps his accoutrements pig-fashion and his horse cow-fashion.
I was free of that camp in five minutes--free to play with the heavy,lumpy carbines,have the saddles stripped,and punch the horses knowingly in the ribs.One of the men had been in the fight with "Wrap-up-his-Tail,"and he told me how that great chief,his horse's tail tied up in red calico,swaggered in front of the United States cavalry,challenging all to single combat.
But he was slain,and a few of his tribe with him.
"There's no use in an Indian,anyway,"concluded my friend.
A couple of cow-boys--real cow-boys--jingled through the camp amid a shower of mild chaff.They were on their way to Cook City,I fancy,and I know that they never washed.But they were picturesque ruffians exceedingly,with long spurs,hooded stirrups,slouch hats,fur weather-cloth over their knees,and pistol-butts just easy to hand.
"The cow-boy's goin'under before long,"said my friend."Soon as the country's settled up he'll have to go.But he's mighty useful now.What would we do without the cow-boy?""As how?"said I,and the camp laughed.
"He has the money.We have the skill.He comes in winter to play poker at the military posts.We play poker--a few.When he's lost his money we make him drunk and let him go.Sometimes we get the wrong man."And he told me a tale of an innocent cow-boy who turned up,cleaned out,at an army post,and played poker for thirty-six hours.But it was the post that was cleaned out when that long-haired Caucasian removed himself,heavy with everybody's pay and declining the proffered liquor.
"Noaw,"said the historian,"I don't play with no cow-boy unless he's a little bit drunk first."Ere I departed I gathered from more than one man the significant fact that up to one hundred yards he felt absolutely secure behind his revolver.
"In England,I understand,"quoth the limber youth from the South,--"in England a man isn't allowed to play with no fire-arms.He's got to be taught all that when he enlists.Ididn't want much teaching how to shoot straight 'fore I served Uncle Sam.And that's just where it is.But you was talking about your Horse Guards now?"I explained briefly some peculiarities of equipment connected with our crackest crack cavalry.I grieve to say the camp roared.
"Take 'em over swampy ground.Let 'em run around a bit an'work the starch out of 'em,an'then,Almighty,if we wouldn't plug 'em at ease I'd eat their horses."There was a maiden--a very little maiden--who had just stepped out of one of James's novels.She owned a delightful mother and an equally delightful father--a heavy-eyed,slow-voiced man of finance.The parents thought that their daughter wanted change.
She lived in New Hampshire.Accordingly,she had dragged them up to Alaska and to the Yosemite Valley,and was now returning leisurely,via the Yellowstone,just in time for the tail-end of the summer season at Saratoga.
We had met once or twice before in the park,and I had been amazed and amused at her critical commendation of the wonders that she saw.From that very resolute little mouth I received a lecture on American literature,the nature and inwardness of Washington society,the precise value of Cable's works as compared with Uncle Remus Harris,and a few other things that had nothing whatever to do with geysers,but were altogether pleasant.
Now,an English maiden who had stumbled on a dust-grimed,lime-washed,sun-peeled,collarless wanderer come from and going to goodness knows where,would,her mother inciting her and her father brandishing an umbrella,have regarded him as a dissolute adventurer--a person to be disregarded.
Not so those delightful people from New Hampshire.They were good enough to treat him--it sounds almost incredible--as a human being,possibly respectable,probably not in immediate need of financial assistance.
Papa talked pleasantly and to the point.
The little maiden strove valiantly with the accent of her birth and that of her rearing,and mamma smiled benignly in the background.
Balance this with a story of a young English idiot I met mooning about inside his high collar,attended by a valet.He condescended to tell me that "you can't be too careful who you talk to in these parts."And stalked on,fearing,I suppose,every minute for his social chastity.
