Part 11

“What is your father’s name?”

“Dad, you mean?—John.”

“Has he no other name?”

“Not that I knows on.”

“What does your mam call him?”

“Don’t call him at all—she blows the horn.”

Upon further questioning I learned that this scion of a nameless house was a nephew of the young woman who owned the mole. Also that he had been informed that I was “one of them newspaper fellers.” I hastened to convince him that however much I felt honored I could not lay claim to the distinction. At this he wanted to know what I was “givin’” him. I disavowed any intention of giving him anything, unless, indeed, it might be a taste of the quirt my boy used to tickle the pony’s ribs. Not having an appetite for that kind of pabulum, he suddenly slipped off his perch and disappeared; as he did so the sulphurous fumes from the Springs were heavier than I had ever known them. My boy then had an interview with me, amicable, of course, during which we discussed at length the evil influence of miscellaneous associations, the Sunday school mission and kindred subjects. Half an hour afterwards I saw them together again killing water snakes. I went immediately and turned the pony into the pasture, thinking he would need at least three days’ rest; it proved a specific.

That day at dinner I found a glass of milk awaiting me, as well as the young woman, with a smile, instead of the excrescence, being the absorbing feature. Being neither Mexican nor French, the revolution was a surprise; I carried that round with me all the afternoon without knowing what to do with it. Had my boy’s mother been accessible she could have cleared up the surprise in five minutes.

In the evening I sat on the tavern porch, enjoying my brier-root, when I became conscious of the presence of the cotton gown and its owner. She wanted to know of me if I were “star gazing.” I began to think she had taken me for a widower and eligible, so I hastened to tell her that since my fourth marriage I had outgrown the sentiment involved in her inquiry. She nevertheless assured me that she “doted on the study of the heavenly orbs,” and a minute afterwards I learned—“Oh, my prophetic soul”—that poetry was her mission. She said she had been trying to find out the difference between a spondee and a trochee; I told her I knew nothing about the former, being a temperance man; as to the latter, I recommended Brown’s, and offered her one, as she seemed to need it at the moment. But she declined, as I thought, in a manner unnecessarily formal. Then she informed me that she had no reference to bronchial difficulties or their remedies, but to feet. I expected no less than a dissertation on corns, that being a tender subject with me, and hastened to express my interest. I became convinced in a moment that I had verily “put my foot in it” for the second time, when she told me she meant “poetic feet.” I was about to say something, but felt out of my depth, and refrained, lest I might disappear, head and ears. She then informed me that a spondee was a foot, but whether it was a foot of two short syllables and a long one, or two long ones and a short one, was what “bothered” her. I told her the subject was too long for me to get round, and, in short, that I had never read any poetry but that of Walt Whitman. She had never heard of him, and wanted a taste of his quality; I gave it her:

“My head slews round on my neck; Music rolls, but not from the organ; Folks are around me, but they are no household of mine”—

She interrupted me at this point, and wanted to know what I was “giving” her, and whether I called that poetry. It became my duty, of course, to assure her of my utter inability to express an opinion. Thereupon, in a burst of confidence, she informed me that, as I had no appreciation of poetic numbers (though she possessed “piles of manuscript”), she had just finished “An Essay on Time.” The subject being prose, and original, I begged the favor of hearing it. She began without hesitation:

“Once more has the earth completed its circuit round the burning and brilliant luminary of heaven; the wheels of Time still roll on and bury every moment in the dust the wrecks of former revolutions——”

Just then my boy came with the announcement that he was sleepy and wanted to go to bed. It is difficult to resist a boy’s appeal, as a rule; of the sleepy boy an impossibility. If not yielded to at once, he repeats his invocation every half minute until success crowns his efforts. But I could not go without exacting a promise that, at some future time, when she had time, the Essay on Time, “whereof by parcels I had something heard, but not intentively,” she would “dilate” fully. Of course she promised, but the Arctic smile which beamed upon the boy would have made his mother wretched. The next morning at breakfast he complained to me that his coffee tasted salty. I had learned of him that he had already that morning corroborated to the aunt my denial to the nephew of the editorial dignity charged upon me by that youth the day before. I had no milk for dinner that day, nor any day thereafter; the far-away look came back into Merope’s eyes, and, for me, was stereotyped there. The Essay on Time was lost; so were I and the boy—at least we seemed to be the only ones aware of our own presence at meal times. I always have sympathy for those who realize having, as it were, “wasted their sweetness on the desert air.” But the young woman ignored sympathy, and I was made painfully conscious of my inability to eat her pearls. One’s pride may sometimes exert the mastery over one’s appetite, but a boy’s stomach, especially a healthy boy’s, possesses no such armor. His tyrant began to dictate to him, and, as tyranny generally begets rebellion in the subject, there was no alternative but to declare war or vacate. Being always peacefully inclined, I adopted the latter, and the boy, the pony and I took our leave.

“HE’S NO SARDINE.”

Wagon Wheel Gap ought to have been colonized by Frenchmen. Why, did you say? Well, the Gap proper is a few hundred feet long. On the southwest side of the Rio Grande, a cliff, about six hundred feet at the base, reaches heavenward perpendicularly about the same distance. Opposite, and stretching for two miles or more down the stream, is a beetling wall, in some places, they tell me, thirteen hundred feet high. To reach the summit, one must go two miles up the river to Bellows Creek, strike into a game trail that leads through numberless little parks, bordered with mountain pines, and gorgeous with the hues of wild flowers. If a Frenchman should walk to the summit of his ambition, he would be too tired to fall off; if he rode up, being a mercurial creature, he’d have time to, and would, change his mind, go back to his family, if he had any, and wonder why he had ever entertained the notion that this is not a good world to live in. Looked at from below, there would be such a fascination in the absolute magnificence of the means to his end, that when the melancholy fit enraptured him again, he’d go over the same trail, with the same happy result. With those cliffs hanging over him, the consequences of charcoal, morphine, the pistol or the rapier would become coarse. He would abandon all other routes to immortality, and finally die in his bed with the weight of years, like a Christian. That was my explanation to the Captain, and he believed in it, as we lay peering over the edge and looking down at our six-feet friends turned into midgets.

Those friends of ours, good rodsters, all, stood on the bank of the river, evidently predicting what a day might bring forth. The Rio Grande was metamorphosed from a crystal stream into a river of mud. From our dizzy height, it looked like a demoralized rope, the impeding boulders in the current making the frayed patches. We had seen it in that plight and none other for two weeks. But that we had been assured each day that there would certainly be a change on the morrow, we would have sworn its normal condition was “rily.”

Having been lied to daily for the last fourteen days, our hope had ended in the faith that inspired our comforters. “So much a long communion tends to make us what we are:—even I” promised each newcomer, anxious to test his skill, that the river would “clear up to-morrow.” We had heard, too, about four times a day, of the eight-pound trout captured somewhere in Antelope Park, on a seven-ounce rod,—the trout I mean, not the park. I knew all the history of that trout; it had been skinned and the skin stuffed; I saw a woman who saw the trout, and I, of course, had no hesitation in confidently asserting its weight and the details of its capture.

Our hourly routine had been to go to the river, examine the color of the water, and the mark that registered its stage; every fellow said it would “clear up to-morrow;” then we went back to the house and smoked.

Being on higher ground, the Captain thought he would vary the subject, so he said:

“I’d like to catch a pound and a half trout.”

I told him he should have one; that one of eight pounds had been caught somewhere in Antelope Park, and that it had been skinned and the skin stuffed; then he said he felt encouraged. That night the river did clear a little, and notwithstanding we knew that every fish in the river was gorged, we could not resist going down stream. Having floundered round on the slippery boulders for a couple of hours without sitting down, we reached a couple of good-sized pools at the head of a riffle; the Captain took the upper, I the lower. Making my way out near to mid-stream, I took up my station behind a large flat rock that stood about a foot out of water, and busied myself sending a “coachman” and a “professor” out into my domain with a little hope that I might induce something out of the inviting pool. Before I had been there five minutes a yell from the Captain caused me to look his way. His Bethabara was beautifully arched, and at the end of fifty feet of line something was helping itself to silk.

“I’ve got him—he’s a whopper.”

“That’s the pound and a half I promised you,” I answered, as a beautiful fellow shot across stream not three yards above me; “but you’ll lose him in that current.”

“I know it, unless I work him down your way.”

“Come on with him—don’t mind me.” I reeled in, climbed on the rock, and sat down to see the fun. The noble fish made a gallant fight, but the hook was in his upper jaw, and it was only a matter of time when he would turn upon his side. Working him down stream, through my pool and round into the quieter water near shore, was the work of ten minutes at least; the captive, seeming to readily understand that still water was not his best hold, kept making rushes for the swift current; but each time he was brought back, and soon began to weaken under the spring of the lithe toy in the Captain’s hand. Fifteen minutes were exhausted when the scale hook was run under his gills, and he registered one pound twelve ounces.

Apologizing for creating a row in my quarters, the Captain went back to his old place, while I again tried my luck. About five minutes elapsed when I heard another, not to be mistaken yell.

“I’ve got another—he’s bigger than the first.”

“Yes, I see you have—I think it’s infernally mean.”