Portland and I assisted at the capture, and the
fish dragged the spring balance out by the roots. It was only
constructed to weigh up to fifteen pounds. We stretched the
three fish on the grass - the eleven and a half, the twelve and
fifteen pounder - and we gave an oath that all who came after
should merely be weighed and put back again.
How shall I tell the glories of that day so that you may be
interested? Again and again did California and I prance down
that reach to the little bay, each with a salmon in tow, and land
him in the shallows. Then Portland took my rod and caught some
ten-pounders, and my spoon was carried away by an unknown
leviathan. Each fish, for the merits of the three that had died
so gamely, was hastily hooked on the balance and flung back.
Portland recorded the weight in a pocket-book, for he was a
real-estate man. Each fish fought for all he was worth, and none
more savagely than the smallest, a game little six-pounder. At
the end of six hours we added up the list. Read it. Total:
Sixteen fish; aggregate weight, one hundred and forty pounds.
The score in detail runs something like this - it is only
interesting to those concerned: fifteen, eleven and a half,
twelve, ten, nine and three quarters, eight, and so forth; as I
have said, nothing under six pounds, and three ten-pounders.
Very solemnly and thankfully we put up our rods - it was glory
enough for all time - and returned weeping in each other's arms,
weeping tears of pure joy, to that simple, bare-legged family in
the packing-case house by the water-side.
The old farmer recollected days and nights of fierce warfare with
the Indians "way back in the fifties," when every ripple of the
Columbia River and her tributaries hid covert danger. God had
dowered him with a queer, crooked gift of expression and a fierce
anxiety for the welfare of his two little sons - tanned and
reserved children, who attended school daily and spoke good
English in a strange tongue.
His wife was an austere woman, who had once been kindly, and
perhaps handsome.
Very many years of toil had taken the elasticity out of step and
voice. She looked for nothing better than everlasting work - the
chafing detail of housework - and then a grave somewhere up the
hill among the blackberries and the pines.
But in her grim way she sympathized with her eldest daughter, a
small and silent maiden of eighteen, who had thoughts very far
from the meals she tended and the pans she scoured.
We stumbled into the household at a crisis, and there was a deal
of downright humanity in that same. A bad, wicked dress-maker
had promised the maiden a dress in time for a to-morrow's
rail-way journey, and though the barefooted Georgy, who stood in
very wholesome awe of his sister, had scoured the woods on a pony
in search, that dress never arrived. So, with sorrow in her
heart and a hundred Sister-Anne glances up the road, she waited
upon the strangers and, I doubt not, cursed them for the wants
that stood between her and her need for tears. It was a genuine
little tragedy. The mother, in a heavy, passionless voice,
rebuked her impatience, yet sat up far into the night, bowed over
a heap of sewing for the daughter's benefit.
These things I beheld in the long marigold-scented twilight and
whispering night, loafing round the little house with California,
who un-folded himself like a lotus to the moon, or in the little
boarded bunk that was our bedroom, swap-ping tales with Portland
and the old man.
Most of the yarns began in this way: - "Red Larry was a
bull-puncher back of Lone County, Montana," or "There was a man
riding the trail met a jack-rabbit sitting in a cactus," or
"'Bout the time of the San Diego land boom, a woman from
Monterey," etc.
You can try to piece out for yourselves what sort of stories they
were.
IV
The Yellowstone
ONCE upon a time there was a carter who brought his team and a
friend into the Yellowstone Park without due thought. Presently
they came upon a few of the natural beauties of the place, and
that carter turned his team into his friend's team,
howling: - "Get out o' this, Jim. All hell's alight under our
noses!"
And they called the place Hell's Half-Acre to this day to witness
if the carter lied.
We, too, the old lady from Chicago, her husband, Tom, and the
good little mares, came to Hell's Half-Acre, which is about sixty
acres in extent, and when Tom said: - "Would you like to drive
over it?"
We said: - "Certainly not, and if you do we shall report you to
the park authorities."
There was a plain, blistered, peeled, and abominable, and it was
given over to the sportings and spoutings of devils who threw
mud, and steam, and dirt at each other with whoops, and halloos,
and bellowing curses.
The places smelled of the refuse of the pit, and that odor mixed
with the clean, wholesome aroma of the pines in our nostrils
throughout the day.
This Yellowstone Park is laid out like Ollendorf, in exercises of
progressive difficulty. Hell's Half-Acre was a prelude to ten or
twelve miles of geyser formation.
We passed hot streams boiling in the forest; saw whiffs of steam
beyond these, and yet other whiffs breaking through the misty
green hills in the far distance; we trampled on sulphur in
crystals, and sniffed things much worse than any sulphur which is
known to the upper world; and so journeying, bewildered with the
novelty, came upon a really park-like place where Tom suggested
we should get out and play with the geysers on foot.
