Down the Yellowstone Part 11

That certainly was not a good start. On the contrary, indeed, it was a perfectly rotten one. Which fact only makes me more proud of the resiliency of spirit I showed in coming right back and a.s.suring them that I was not a Crow Indian, that I did talk 'Merican, and _that I had been one of Jack Dempsey's first sparring partners_. There was coffee-inspired artistry, too, in the inconsequentiality with which I added: "Gave Jack the K. O. once myself. Sort of a flivver ... but knocked him cold just the same."

Dear little old Strawberry Lady, didn't I swear I wouldn't forget the lesson you taught me? That made them take notice of course. For an instant they hung in the balance, searching my scarred and battered visage with awed, troubled eyes. Then dawning wonder replaced doubt in their faces, and they fell--my way. "Darn'd if you don't look the part,"

said one. "My name's Allstein--in hardware line--Shake!" And then they all introduced themselves like that--each with his name and line. I forget just what my name was, but it must have been something like "Spud" Gallagher. Sparring partners never vary greatly from that model of nomenclature.

Finally we retired to a pool-room, where I reminisced to an ever augmenting audience. Alas! and yet Alack-a-day! If it had only been the good old cow-town Billings of those delectable baseball days of twenty years ago, what wouldn't have been mine that night! But it was not bad as it was; not bad at all. I forget just where we were when dawn came, but I do remember I was in the act of showing my punch-damaged hands for the hundredth time when I looked up and saw that a window was growing a glimmering square with the light of the coming day. That was my cue, of course. Excusing myself on some pretext, I slipped out the back way, slunk through an alley, and finally to the street which leads past the sugar refinery down to the power-house and the river. For many days after that I felt less envious of good old Haroun al Raschid.

CHAPTER V

BILLINGS TO GLENDIVE

Getting round the power-dam did not prove a serious problem. The night man at the power-house told me it would be possible to land on the right side and let the boat down over a series of "steps" that had been built at that end of the dam. This was probably true, but as landing on the almost perpendicular cliff immediately above the drop-off looked a bit precarious I decided in favour of being safe by portaging rather than run the chance of being sorry through trying to line down. It was against just such emergencies as this that I had provided my feather-weight outfit.

A wooden skiff of the size of my steel one would have required at least four men to lift it up the forty-five degree slope of the bank above the intake of the power ca.n.a.l. It was not an easy task with my little shallop, but I managed it alone without undue exertion. Five minutes more sufficed to drag it a couple of hundred feet along the levee and launch it at the head of the rapid below the dam. Two trips brought down my outfit, and I was off into the river again.

Running at a slas.h.i.+ng rate round the bend of the bluff, I kept on for a couple of miles or more to where the Northern Pacific and a highway bridge span the river a couple of miles from the centre of Billings.

Leaving the boat and my outfit in the care of a genial pumping-house engineer, I phoned for a taxi and went up to the hotel behind closed curtains. To return to the scene of my last night's triumph as a mere river-rat and hack writer was a distinct anti-climax. As I had been warned by wire that a hundred pages of urgently needed proofs from New York would await me in Billings for correction, there was no side-stepping the necessity. The risk would have to be run, but to minimize it as far as was humanly possible I planned to keep to my room as much as I could, and to disguise myself by dressing as a gentleman or a drummer when I had to venture upon the streets. Then by keeping to the more refined parts of towns it seemed to me that I ought to stand a reasonably good chance of avoiding the poignancy of humiliation that would inevitably follow recognition by any of those fine fellows who had sat at my feet the night before. It was a well devised plan, and so came pretty near to succeeding.

I tumbled out of my bath into bed, stayed there an hour, got up, dressed in immaculate flannels and started in on the proofs. A reporter from the _Gazette_ called up about noon to say he had been lying in ambush for me ever since the Livingston papers had warned him of my departure.

Could he come over for a story? I couldn't very well refuse that, but took the precaution of throwing my "Indian Police" uniform in the closet before he arrived. Then I made a special point of telling him I always wore flannels and duck on my river trips--sort of survival of my South Sea yatching days. If he would only put that in, I reckoned, it would effectually drag a red herring across any suspicions that might be aroused by a reading of the story in the minds of my late subjects. He forgot it as a matter of fact, but it wasn't that that did the harm. It was just hard luck--_Joss_, as the sailors say.

The next day was the Fourth of July, a holiday, but a very obliging express agent, who came down town and opened up his office to let me get out a sleeping bag, made it unnecessary to hang on another night in Billings. The _Gazette_ story brought no demonstrations--that is, of a hostile nature. Calls from scouting secretaries searching for a fatted calf to butcher for club holidays were the only ripples on the surface.

Still with my fingers crossed, I ordered a closed taxi for the run down to my boat. It would have been a perfectly clean get-away had not _Joss_ decreed that I should leave my package at the railway station to be picked up as I went by. Returning to the taxi from the check-room a man was waiting for me outside of the door.

[Ill.u.s.tration:

_L. A. Huffman_

HERD, POWDER RIVER VALLEY]

[Ill.u.s.tration:

_L. A. Huffman_

SHEEP BY THE WATER, BIG POWDER RIVER]

"My name is Allstein," he began; but I had observed that before he opened his hard-set jaw. Without waiting for him to go on I made one wild, despairing bid to keep my honour white. I feel to this day that it deserved to have succeeded.

"Came in on the brake-beams, going out on shank's mare," I chirruped blithely, and forthwith (to the very evident perturbation of the taxi-driver) started as if off for Miles City on foot. Some will say my reasoning was quixotic, but this was the way of it at any rate: I cared no whit if hardware-drummer Allstein believed I was a hobo, just as long as he continued to believe I was an ex-sparring partner of Jack Dempsey.

And what he must be prevented from knowing at any cost was that, far from being even the hammiest of ham-and-sparring partners, I was what the _Gazette_ cub had characterized as a "daring novelist seeking material for new book by running rapids of Yellowstone."

But the fat was already in the fire. Allstein halted my Miles City Marathon with a gesture half weary, half contemptuous. "That taxi looks about as much like you're hoboing as did them three dishes of strawberries at the _Northern_ this morning," he growled, glowering. I caved at once and meekly asked him to get in and come down to see my little steel boat. Lightest outfit that ever went down river.... Boat and all my stuff weighed less than I did myself....

I was in the taxi by that time. Allstein had continued to register "Betrayed! Betrayed!" but had not moved to cut off my retreat. That was something to be thankful for anyhow. Not knowing what else to say, I remarked to the driver that it must be getting along toward boat-time.

And so away we went. Allstein's reproachful gaze bored into my back until we swung out of eye-range into the Custer Trail. I know that I shall be reminded of him every time I see a ruined maiden in the movies or at Drury Lane to the end of my days.

Billings is a fine modern city, which makes me regret all the more that most of my daylight impressions of it had to be gained by peeking under a taxicab curtain. It is by long odds the largest town on the Yellowstone; in fact, I saw no city comparable with it for size and vigour until at Sioux City I came to the first of the packing-house metropolises of the Missouri. Billings owed its first prosperity to cattle and sheep and its fine strategic situation for distribution.

Pastoral industries cut less of a figure today, but the town has continued to gain ground as the princ.i.p.al distributing centre for western Montana. That, with agricultural and power development, has brought mills and factories, and the town now ranks high among the manufacturing centres of the North-west. I shall live in hopes of going back some-day and seeing Billings properly--as a visiting Chamber of Commerce booster or a Rotary excursionist, or something equally _sans reproche_.

The point where the Northern Pacific Railway bridge crosses the Yellowstone below Billings is of considerable interest historically. It was here that Clark ferried Sergeant Pryor and his remaining pack animals across the river, preliminary to the overland journey that was to be attempted with the animals to the Mandan Villages. Here, also, is the point that is popularly credited with being the high-water mark of steamboat navigation on the Yellowstone. On June 6, 1875, Captain Grant Marsh in the _Josephine_, conducting a rough survey of the river under the direction of General J. W. Forsyth, reached a point which he estimated to be forty-six miles above Pompey's Pillar, 250 miles above Powder River and 483 miles above the mouth of the Yellowstone. Major Joseph Mills Hanson, in his "Conquest of the Missouri," stirringly describes the climax of this remarkable voyage.

After leaving Pompey's Pillar "the great river, though apparently undiminished in volume, grew more and more swift, constantly breaking into rapids through which it was necessary to warp and spar the boat, while numberless small islands split the channel into chutes, no one of which was large enough for easy navigation. At times it seemed that a smooth stretch of water had been reached, ... but invariably just beyond another rapid would be encountered.... Before nightfall a tremendous rapid was encountered, and though, after a hard struggle, it was successfully pa.s.sed, so forbidding was its aspect and so savage the resistance it offered, that it was appreciatively named 'h.e.l.l Roaring Rapids.' At the head of it the boat lay up for the night, with a line stretched to the bank ahead to help her forward in the morning. But when dawn came, General Forsyth, seeing the nature of the river in front, ordered out a reconnoitring party who marched up the bank for several miles examining the channel. On their return they reported the whole river ahead so broken up by islands and with so powerful a current that it could not be navigated without constant resort to warping and sparring.... General Forsyth and Captain Marsh held a consultation and decided that no adequate reward for the labour involved could be gained by going further. So, at two o'clock p. m. on June 7th, the boat was turned about and started on her return.... Before leaving this highest point attained, Captain Marsh blazed the trunk of a gigantic cottonwood to which the _Josephine_ was tied, and carved thereon the name of the boat and the date. It is exceedingly improbable that a steam vessel will ever again come within sight of that spot or be ent.i.tled to place her name beneath the _Josephine's_ on that ancient tree trunk, almost under the shadow of the Rocky Mountains."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE COUNTY BRIDGE OVER THE YELLOWSTONE]

The _Josephine's_ farthest west on the Yellowstone stands as the record for steamers by many miles, but what wouldn't I have given to have found that big cottonwood and tied up there myself! No one along the river could tell me anything about it, and there is little doubt that, like so many thousands of its less distinguished brethren, it has been swallowed up by the spring floods. Neither above nor below the bridge for many miles, however, could I locate a riffle sufficiently savage to fit Captain Marsh's description of "h.e.l.l Roaring Rapids." It has occurred to me as just possible that such a rapid was wiped out when the power dam was built, the comparatively short distance the water is backed up at that point suggesting that the original fall was very considerable.

Again, it is possible that to Captain Marsh, after his many years in the comparatively smooth waters of the Missouri, such riffles as still go slap-banging down along the bluffs opposite Billings would appear a lot rougher than they would to one just down from the almost continuously white and rock-torn rapids of the upper river.

At any event it stirred my imagination mightily to locate the _Josephine's_ turning point even approximately. From now on I was going to have a fellow pilot for Captain Clark. Captain Grant Marsh was henceforth at my call at any point I needed him between Billings and St.

Louis. The stout frame of that splendid old river Viking had been tucked under the sod down Bismarck-way for a number of years, but I knew his spirit still took its wonted tricks at the wheel. Captain William Clark and Captain Grant Mars.h.!.+ Could you beat that pair if it came to standing watch-and-watch down the Yellowstone and Missouri? And there were others waiting just round the bend. At the Big Horn I could sign on Manual Lisa if I wanted him; or John Colter, who discovered the Yellowstone Park while flying from the Blackfeet. But Colter was not truthful, which disqualified him for pilotage. I should have to s.h.i.+p him simply as a congenial spirit--one of my own kind.

Returning to my boat, I found that the little daughters of the pumping-station man had roofed it over like a Venetian gondola and moved in with all their worldly goods. They confronted me with the clean-cut alternatives of coming to live with them right there or taking them with me down the river. Fortunately their parents intervened on my side.

With the aid of those two kindly and tactful diplomats--and a lot of milk chocolate and dried apricots--I finally contrived an ejection. The operation delayed me till after four o'clock, though, so there was no hope of making Pompey's Pillar that night.

Though I knew that the fall of the river would be easing off very rapidly from now on, there was little indication of it in the twenty-five-mile stretch I ran before dark that evening. Bouncing back and forth between broken lines of red-yellow bluffs, there were frequent sharp riffles and even two or three corners where considerable water was splashed in. For only the shortest of reaches was the stream sufficiently quiet to allow me to take my eyes off it long enough to enjoy the really entrancing diorama of the scenery. I was especially sorry for this, for on my right was unfolding the verdant loveliness of the Crow Reservation, the very heart of the hunting grounds which the Indians had loved above all others for hundreds of years--the region they had fought hardest to save from relinquishment to the relentless white. Read what, according to Irving in the "Adventures of Captain Bonneville," an Absaroka said about this Red Man's Garden of Eden a hundred years ago:

"The Crow country is a good country. The Great Spirit has put it in exactly the right place; while you are in it you fare well; whenever you go out of it, whichever way you travel, you fare worse." After going on to tell of the unspeakable climatic conditions and the scarcity of game prevailing in the regions to the north, south, east and west, this progenitor of the modern booster goes on: "The Crow country is in exactly the right place. It has snowy mountains and sunny plains; all kinds of climate and good things for every season. When summer heats scorch the prairies, you can draw up under the mountains where the air is sweet and cool, the gra.s.s fresh, and the bright streams come tumbling out of the snowy-banks. There you can hunt the elk, the deer and the antelope, when their skins are fit for dressing; there you will find plenty of white bears and the mountain sheep.

"In the autumn, when your horses are fat and strong from the mountain pastures, you can go down to the plains and hunt buffalo, or trap beaver on the streams. And when winter comes, you can take shelter in the woody bottoms along the rivers; there you will find buffalo meat for yourselves and cottonwood bark for your horses; or you may winter in the Wind River valley, where there is salt weed in abundance.

"The Crow country is exactly in the right place. Everything good is to be found there. There is no country like the Crow country."

Like the scent of fern leaves wafted out of the dear, dead past, those lines awakened in my heart memories of something that had long gone out of my life.

"Something is, or something seems, Which touches me with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams ...

Of something seen, I know not where, Such as no language may declare."

I muttered that in fragments, but the lines only adumbrated the longing without revealing its hidden fount. Still groping mentally, I unwrapped some forks and spoons done up in a page of the Los Angeles _Times_. Ah, that gave me the cue! _Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce tourist literature._ And to think a Crow Indian started that kind of a thing!

Running until the river bottoms were swamped in purple shadows, I landed and made camp in a soft little nest of snowy sand left behind by a high-water eddy. There was an abrupt yellow cliff rising straight out of a woolly-white riffle on the right bank, and beyond a grove of cottonwood to the left were the shadowy buildings of some kind of a ranch. Even in the deepening twilight I could read something of the record of its growth--groups of log cabins, groups of unpainted, rough-sawed lumber and finally a huge red barn and a great square, verandahed house that was all but a mansion. I was wondering if the same pioneering frontiersman who had built the cabins had survived to occupy the big green and white house, when the soft southerly wind brought the scent of sweet clover and the strains of a phonograph.

"_Evening Star_," the _Jocelyn_ Lullaby, the _Baccarole_, wafted me their "convoluted runes" one after the other; then a piano began to strum and a girl, neither mean of voice nor temperament, sang Tosti's "_Good-Bye_." It always had had a softly sentimentalizing effect on me, that "_Lines of white on a sullen Sea_," sung (as it always is) the night before the steamer reaches port. And here it was getting me in the same old place--that mushy spot under the solar plexus that non-anatomically trained poets confuse with the heart. I simply _had_ to hike over and tell that impa.s.sioned songstress how perfectly her song matched the scent of sweet clover. Cleaning up the last of the dried apricot stew in my army mess tin, I pushed southward across the moonlit bar. No luck. I was on an island.

[Ill.u.s.tration:

_L. A. Huffman_

POMPEY'S PILLAR]

[Ill.u.s.tration:

_L. A. Huffman_

THE YELLOWSTONE FROM THE TOP OF POMPEY'S PILLAR]

I tried out my new bed for the first time that night. It turned out to be a combination of a canvas bag and inflatable rubber mattress, called by its makers a "Sleeping Pocket." Here again it transpired I had played in luck in the matter of a pig bought in a poke. I used that precious little ten-pound packet of rubber and canvas all the way to New Orleans without blankets. On wind-blown sand bars, mud-banks, coal barges or the greasy steel decks of engine-rooms it was ever the same--always dry, always soft, always warm. Comfortable sleeping measures just about the whole difference between the success and failure of many a trip. I shudder to think of the messy nights I must inevitably have suffered had all those lurking thunder-storms that I weathered so snugly caught me in blankets.