Part 5

As to mounting, I had neither tools or metal, nor the genius of Tubal Cain, so I applied to a tinker of watches, made known my difficulty, and he fitted me out with two sets of ferrules and half a dozen guide rings for the modest sum of seven dollars in gold dust.

Drug stores and whisky shops get to the frontier with equal facility, so there was no scarcity of oil, shellac and alcohol. The wrapping of the rings was followed by the oil and shellac, and when I strung that rod together, and, in the privacy of our cabin, submitted it to the inspection of the madam, it was pronounced “just perfect.”

The verdict was no less delightful than the rod and the jury of one.

During the winter that marvel of excellence and beauty was subjected to weekly examinations and comment. The anticipated pleasures of the coming summer, because we were “both going,” were the prime subjects of evening conversations over the kitchen stove. There never had been, nor could there ever be, vouchsafed to any other couple the amount of enjoyment banked up and ready to draw upon, than was stored away during that memorable winter, and the rod was the pole star, so to speak. Everything pointed to that. But disappointments make life worth living; while they are sometimes severe, there is yet a genuine pleasure in setting one’s foot on their necks.

I never flourished my master-piece of mechanical skill over anything save the weeds and the few straggling vegetables that decorated our back yard. The rod was too good to keep. I lost it early, just as the good children die.

I had, and yet have, a friend, whom I’ll call Sam, because that is his name. About a month before the time fixed for our departure to the hills, Sam came over and told me I had a fishing rod, as though I had been the only man in town unacquainted with the fact. He said he wanted to borrow it for a few days, he wanted to go fishing and hoped I’d accommodate him! Think of loaning your watch to a two-year-old for a day or so. He promised, of course, to bring it back in good order; I expected no less—than the promise, I mean, and cheerfully allowed him to walk off with it. I never saw it again, but I am glad to say I saw Sam. He came back in about a week; there was nothing the matter with him, his bones were whole, he hadn’t got drowned, nor been bitten by rattlesnakes, nor chased by bears, nor clawed by mountain lions, nor lost his scalp. The mosquitoes had been a little troublesome; there was some comfort in that, but not enough to speak of. He had come over to see me, he said, about “that fishing rod.”

“Yes, the fact is, I found an old friend on South Boulder, and he took such a fancy to that rod, that I could do no less than make him a present of it. It’s a splendid rod, that’s a fact, and I don’t know exactly how I can replace it, just now; I’m sorry you’re disappointed at my not returning it, but I don’t see—”

We were not a very ceremonious community in those days, though kindly disposed. At the outset I was on the point of telling Sam to say his shortest prayer, if he had more than one, but changed my mind and told him not to say any more about it. It was some time before he would be convinced that I was not mad.

That summer I fished with a clear conscience and a plum bush pole and had a good time.

By the time the season was over Sam came round again. He brought with him a rod; it had four joints and an extra tip; it was of ash and lance wood. Sam had sent to the states for the treasure by ox team, and had ordered a reel in addition. These he informally turned over to me, still doubtful of my condition of mind. I tried to make him understand that from the first I had felt that his love for me had prompted him to treat my property as his own. He finally caught the idea, and the first trout I caught on that rod was twenty inches long.

I have the rod yet, with one of the original tips; I have used it every summer since; if no accident happens it may last forever. A few years since I changed the reel seat, put the whole concern through a whip-wrapping machine, and think I have improved it. I have never weighed it, and I do not intend to say how many pounds of trout it has been fatal to. In accordance with the frontier rule “she” has a name: “the old reliable.”

Since the rod has been put into shape for this summer’s trip I have been made happy—No! it’s not a new baby, but the next thing to it—a split bamboo. I have it in my mind, that an old fellow capable of being made the recipient of a split bamboo, a genuine split bamboo (the donor for my guaranty), with the name of the maker upon it as a warrant to all the world, will be elevated in your estimation. I am that he. With this poem in my hand I yet felt as of the stone age. I have not been educated up to this standard. I don’t know what to do with it. I never felt just exactly the same way but once before, that was a little short of a year after I was married, and I thought I had got used to that sensation, but when my generous friend put into my hands this miracle of grace and artistic skill, the old feeling came back, and I was “two inches taller.” That, I believe, is the orthodox expression for such occasions.

It is said that hope ends in fruition; except in the matter of babies and split bamboos, I believe this to be true.

If you are bored with this effusion, lay it to my split bamboo, upon that hint I spake; for the rod, you know, is an emblem of affliction, save in your own hand.

TROUBLESOME.

Tony Weller tells us of a friend he had, who, becoming misanthrope, went for revenge and kept a “pike,” in this country, commonly called a toll-gate. The frequency of toll-roads and the rates of toll in Colorado would make the state a paradise for misanthropes. One gate may be located every ten miles, so the law provides, and you are sure to find them if you travel ten miles on any road. Some fellow has said that all roads lead to Rome, but in this country all roads lead to turnpikes. It was a delightful conceit of old Tony’s, but if I wanted to reach the seventh heaven of revenge I’d hunt out a location on any road five miles from a toll-gate and open a house of entertainment for man and beast. The entertainment for the beast would be a mere poetic license, a sort of wild fancy, and consist of illimitable acres of rocks and pine brush; a picket pin and a lariat, if the beast was to grow gaunt. Leave out the picket pin and the beast would entertain himself by running away; but it would be my custom, nevertheless, to charge fifty cents per head “all the same,” and get it, because no one in this country ever thinks of disputing the landlord’s demands. I’d say to you, “Thar was the pastur; you turned your hoss in thar; ef he’s strayed, that’s your lookout, not mine; I’ll claim a lien on the one that’s left, for the feed of both.” The law allows it and the court awards it. No use to suggest that the horse may not have been in the “pastur” half an hour; “the pastur was thar, prepared for the hoss, and ef the hoss strayed, that’s your lookout, not mine.” If you were reasonable I would give the remaining horse the run of the “pastur” and charge you for it while you hunted up the stray. If you’d “kick” there might be trouble, and trouble under the circumstances in this country might be serious. But the cream of the business of wayside entertainment would be in the cooking, and the results of it thrown together for the man. I’d fry everything; would rack my ingenuity for a method of frying the chicory. Two dishes for flitch and potatoes, rolling-prairie-dried-apple-pie and griddle cakes would be a red-letter day in the calendar of any tenderfoot who chanced my way. If a man hinted at a teaspoon to eat his blasted blackberries, I’d wither him with a glance of my frontier eye, and ask him if he thought I kept a Denver restaurant. Tony Weller’s friend no doubt did the best “according to his lights,” and opportunities, but the capabilities of my plan, with study, are boundless. Imagination runs riot on the theme, and the only wonder to me is that some fellow, misanthropically inclined, has never adopted this method of making his fellows happy. Perhaps there are no misanthropes in Colorado. At least I am away from them, toll-roads and wayside houses; in the land of the mosquito and the trout; and the meadow larks perch upon my tent top and “give salutation to the morn,” by conjugating the to them familiar Greek verb—at least it strikes me so.

Mosquitoes are among the blessings of this life; they prepare us for the robes of immortality, by teaching us patience under affliction. If there is anything I love better than a mule, it is a mosquito. There is poetry in his flight and music in his song. Never having concealed my love, I think it got abroad and preceded me this trip. I found him and his family here, on the banks of the Troublesome; there is quite a number of him, so to speak, and he keeps one’s five senses actively employed at once, while he inculcates prudence and fortitude. I met a man from the mouth of Troublesome, and he told me he had seen but one mosquito, and “he was very wild.” That is the one I have been looking for; I long to cultivate him, on the same principle that a fellow wants the girl, not the whole family. The Mississippi gallinipper is adolescent compared to the Troublesome mosquito. Yesterday I saw one stick his bill into a gallon jar and take a drink without any apparent effort. If I had anticipated the pleasure, I would have borrowed some foils and got up a few fencing matches. I wouldn’t under any consideration suggest broadswords or cavalry sabres, for that might prove dangerous. I am maturing a plan to submit to the Secretary of War, whereby I think the mosquitoes of this immediate vicinity may be advantageously organized in a campaign against the Utes. Judiciously maneuvered, they’d exterminate the Indian. West Point can boast of no such natural drill-masters. Their individual proficiency in this regard makes me itch to present my project to the department at Washington. All they need for effective service is regimental discipline, and I have no doubt our representatives in Congress can find some of their unemployed military constituents at the Capital who would prove excellent and willing disciplinarians. Salary, of course, would be of no consequence; love of country, something to do except turning up their toes in her service, would be ample pay. The more I reflect upon this project of mine, the better I think of its possibilities, and, but that this world is given to ingratitude, the debt that Belford and our two Senators would owe me for thus opening one channel for their relief would be great. I believe “there’s millions in it.”

But how about the trout fishing? you ask. Well, the trout fishing is good. I have met the usual tourist, with cod hooks, chalk lines and wagon poles, with an occasional hatful of highly colored flies; the fellow with the hundred dollar rig and helmet hat, apparently all “fly,” and I have seen them belabor the beautiful Grand for a mile at a stretch, my mind dwelling on murder. The “swish” of their poles through the air sounds like the sough of an amateur cyclone, and the fall of the lines upon the water as though some indignant father were having an interview in the woodshed with his first born, and nothing handy but a quarter strap. Could the fishing be otherwise than good? Good for the fishermen because it gives them plenty of exercise, and as half at least of the pleasure of this life is made up of anticipation, these fellows keep thinking all the time that they are going to catch something, and they do—cold. Good for the trout because they are never caught, and good for the sportsman who knows their ways, though they be like the “way of the serpent upon the rock”—past finding out. The instinct of the trout is akin to the sense of the human sucker, and I have sometimes wondered if they did not entertain a pretty fair idea of our lunatic asylums, and gain the impression that at certain seasons there was an exodus; that the inmates escaped into the wilderness and deployed along the mountain streams; that these people were the descendants of farmers and laborers opposed to the probable innovations of threshing machines, and esteeming the ancient flail above all other methods, thus expressed their hallucination. It requires no stretch of the imagination to thus consider.

There is no genuine enjoyment in the easy achievement of any purpose; there is no bread so sweet as the hard-earned loaf of the man who works for it. The rule holds good in the school of the sportsman. The fellows I have been writing of, had they their way, would become mere engines of destruction; they would catch, not for the pleasure of catching, but because they could, and a universe of trout would not satiate them. Sportsmen are not made of that kind of material. A little horse sense goes a great way in all things, trouting not excepted; it is an indispensable foundation to success. Avarice must be ruled out; your genuine angler has none of it, but will insist on his neighbor having at least as good as he, if not better.

I said awhile ago that I was away from toll roads and wayside houses of entertainment. I’m stopping with a friend, a genuine angler, whom I have seen walk in the wake of one of those threshing machines, with a rod light as a buggy whip, and with a twist of the wrist drop a fly upon the water thirty or fifty feet away, and as it settled gently down, as falls the snowflake upon the bosom of the stream, there would come a rush and struggle that denoted the fishing was really good to him who had achieved the art of casting a fly. He is no seeker after distinction, and I shall not give you his name. He does not read Horace, nor does he understand the thirty-nine articles of the established church, as some of our amateur Christians do, but he knows how to treat his friends, which is better. I had been tickling my vanity with the belief that I knew something about trout fishing, but I have found out that my acquirements were, by way of comparison, merely with the escaped lunatics. He sends me out to “take the cream off” a pool, or out of it, and when I’d be ready to swear there was not another left, he’ll make me bear witness to my own lack of faith by striking as many, if not more, than I had brought to creel. He thinks I’ll learn to handle a fly rod after awhile, and I have hope; besides I am learning to cultivate all the virtues. Think of me with the mercury at seventy or more at high noon, rubber boots with tops to my hips, thick breeches, woolen shirts and a duck coat, my intellectual head swathed in a net and my horny hands encased in buckskin gauntlets, a ten-ounce fly rod, and ten pounds of trout brought to basket at my back, perspiration exuding in streams; outside that net nine thousand mosquitoes to the square inch, yet I’m happy—going to school, and have the best of the vermin.

METEOROLOGICAL.

Hot weather is pleasant to have—in Denver—and I didn’t escape because of hot weather. But I have lived there a long time and know a number of people, and every time I met a fellow on the street he was sure to say: “Hot, ain’t it?” Five minutes after, if I met the same man, he would pull off his hat, mop his head with a handkerchief, and as if it had just occurred to him, tell me the same thing, with an emphatic prefix. By way of change it is interesting to see a couple of fellows meet on the sidewalk, shake hands, and hear them tell each other “it’s hot.” The amount of information mutually imparted is gratifying, and makes one think, at first, that life is worth living. But when this delight is experienced a hundred times a day for a couple of weeks, one begins to sigh for the old stand-by: “What’s new?” “Nothing.” The monotony becomes exasperating, and even one not given to profanity stands in imminent peril of falling into the prevailing habit. Shakespeare, Mother Goose, or some other mortal plethoric with wisdom, has informed us that evil associations corrupt good manners. I was being led astray; I knew it, in fact.

The air was becoming thickly freighted with expletives; heat and profanity, as I had been taught to believe, before “the new version,” were inseparable. The maternal admonition came back to me in all its bitter sweetness, and I had the fortitude to shun the temptation. In the classic language of this age, “I lit out” for lighter air and a purer atmosphere; I did not find what I wanted until I got beyond Golden. When the train entered the cañon the sublime grandeur of—but I promised not to say anything about Clear Creek Cañon, as that has been written about once before. I took it all in, however, cinders included; all except “that mule.” I have never been able to find “that mule.” Several years since I was advised of the existence of “the mule,” and though I firmly believed at the time that my informant was only trying to make himself agreeable, I have, upon every occasion, faithfully looked out from the mouth of the cañon to Beaver Brook for the picture of that much-abused hybrid. The nearest approach to success in my efforts was a spotted cow, three years ago, browsing among the rocks—but she is not there now.

At Dumont a friend of mine climbed on the train, and the first thing he said to me was: “It’s hot in Denver.” He did not speak interrogatively, but the remark was affirmative, in a tone of defiance. I asked him if he had ever heard of Billy the Kid. He said he had and that he was dead. I told him that was a mistake, “He is not dead,” said I, “he’s on the train with me. I have hired him to go as far as Empire to kill the first man who says the word ‘hot’ to me. There he sits,” and I pointed to our very sedate fellow-townsman, Judge ——, who sat behind us deeply immersed in a formidable bundle of law papers.

“The devil!” said my friend.

“Yes, he is, and a dead shot; let me introduce you—come.”

“Excuse me, my wife is in the other car, just up from Denver, and I havn’t seen her for a week. Some other time I’ll be happy.”

I do not understand why it is that this generation is so given to lying. That friend of mine is not married, and he must know that I am aware of it; yet he slid out of the car with all the bustle of a conscientious man of family. In fact he was too anxious, except for a Benedict in the honey-moon. When he left I went over and sat down by the Judge. In the meantime the latter had folded up his papers and wanted to know of me, first thing, if I had ever read Pompelli or some other fellow, who had traveled in Abyssinia, where the mercury stood habitually at 150°, when you could find a shady place for the thermometer; where the natives cut steaks out of the live oxen, sewed up the wounds and cooked the meat in the sun; where these same natives went about naked with raw hide umbrellas, and each fellow carried a pair of tweezers in his pocket to pull the cactus thorns out of his feet. While being entertained with these veracious statements, I discovered that our car had suddenly become quite full, and that the Judge and I were objects of interest. Just then the engineer sounded the whistle for Empire, and I gathered up my creel and grip-sack of commissaries, and made for the door. As I got off the platform I heard one passenger tell another that “the reward is $2,000,” and as the train started on I noticed the Judge in animated conversation with a burly fellow whose prominent features were a heavy moustache and a square jaw. The Judge is a good man—physically, I mean—but I shall not see him again for a month, and if it comes to the worst, roughing it in the hills has a tendency to take off flesh and put on muscle. I take comfort in the reflection.