Down the Yellowstone Part 12

I overslept the next morning and so did not carry out my over-night resolution of pulling across to the ranch and thanking the "Good-Bye"

girl. Or rather, I did start and then changed my mind. She was on the upper verandah recuperating from a shampoo. Scarlet kimono and bobbed hair! No, not with a river to escape by. Stifling my _au revoir_ impulse I decided to leave well enough alone by taking that "Good-bye"

literally. Abandoning the boat to the will of the current I departed via the lines of white under the sullen cliff.

At the end of a couple of hours' run in a slackening current I landed in an eddy above Pompey's Pillar, quite the most outstanding landmark on the Yellowstone. Clark describes how he halted "to examine a very remarkable rock situated in an extensive bottom on the right, about two hundred and fifty paces from the sh.o.r.e. It is nearly four hundred paces in circ.u.mference, two hundred feet high and accessible from the north-east, the other sides being a perpendicular cliff of a light-coloured, gritty rock.... The Indians have carved the figures of animals and other objects on the sides of the rock, and on the top are raised two piles of stones." Captain Clark, after writing down a careful description of the country on all sides, marked his name and the date on the rock and went on his way.

This was the first point at which I had opportunity to make accurate comparison of the respective stages of water encountered by Clark and myself. I found the base of the rock less than a hundred paces from the river, which indicated--as the channel seems to have been well fixed here--that I was enjoying three or four feet more water than did my ill.u.s.trious predecessor. This would seem to be just about accounted for by the fact that I was voyaging three weeks earlier in the season than he--that much nearer the high water of early June, at which time it was apparent that the river backed up right to the cliff.

Add the telegraph poles of a distant railway line and a picnic booth littered with papers and watermelon rinds, and Clark's description of what was unrolled to him from the top of Pompey's Pillar would stand today. I located the place where his name had been carved by a grating which the Northern Pacific engineers had erected to protect it from vandals, but the most careful scrutiny failed to reveal any trace of the letters themselves. The practical obliteration of what is probably the only authentic physical mark of their pa.s.sing that either Lewis or Clark left between St. Louis and the mouth of the Columbia is hardly compensated for by the presence of several hundred somewhat later and rather less important signatures at this point. Several of these latter bore the date of the previous day--July 4th, 1921,--and so represented a bold bid for fame on the part of some of the watermelon guzzling picnickers. One of these had even pried a bar aside in a not entirely successful endeavour to emblazon his name in the protected area. It was all rather annoying. These new names are piling up very fast with the coming of the flivver, but it is going to take a lot of them to make up for the one they have blotted out.

Clark's apparent mental processes in the christening of Pompey's Pillar are rather amusing. Neither a profound historian nor a cla.s.sicist, the Captain still had a sort of vague idea in his head that there was some kind of a rocky erection out Nile-way named after Pompey. That being so, what could be more fitting--since the names of all of the members of his own party had been used a half dozen times over first and last--than that this rocky eminence by the Yellowstone should be called after Pompey. That he was not clear in his mind as to the character of the historic original at Alexandria is evidenced by the fact that he first called the Yellowstone prototype "Pompy's Tower." Whether he or his publisher was responsible for the subsequent change to "Pillar" is not clear. As a matter of fact the latter is only a detached fragment of "the high romantic clifts" that Clark observed jutting over the water on the opposite side of the river. It bears about as much actual resemblance to the real Pompey's Pillar as the Enchanted Mesa does to Cleopatra's Needle.

The river was broader and slower below Pompey's Pillar, with the rapids shorter and farther between. At five I landed at a very pretty alfalfa ranch on the left bank to inquire about pa.s.sing what appeared to be a submerged dam some hundreds of yards ahead. Only two women were at home--a beaming old lady and her very stout daughter. They insisted on my staying to tea, which required no great persuasiveness on their part after Joanna remarked that she was out of breath from turning the ice-cream freezer. The girl was astonis.h.i.+ngly red, round and sweet--a veritable bifurcated apple. She seemed to have a very good knowledge of the river, and a.s.sured me I should have no trouble at the diversion dam provided I kept well toward the left bank. Indeed, if I thought it would help at all, she would ride down with me and show the way. There was a path back home from their lower pasture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CUSTER'S PILLAR, BAD LANDS]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GRATING WHICH PROTECTS THE INITIALS CARVED BY CAPTAIN CLARK ON THE SIDE OF POMPEY'S PILLAR]

Considering how shy I had found most of the rancher folk to be of the river, this game offer pretty nearly took my breath away. I would have been all for accepting it save for one very good and sufficient reason--it was physically impossible. I had noticed that Joanna's personal chair was of home construction, and considerable amplitude of beam--certainly six inches more than the stern-sheets of my slender shallop. She could wedge in sidewise, of course, but that still left the matter of a life-preserver. I didn't feel it was quite the thing to take an only child into a rapid without some provision for floating her out in case of an upset. And my Gieve wouldn't do. The inflated "doughnut"

that slipped so easily up and down my own brawny brisket would just about have served Joanna as an armlet. So I declined with what grace I could, and we all parted on the best of terms--I with a fragrant flitch of their home-cured bacon, they with three double handfuls of my California home-dried apricots.

I had no trouble at the dam, which was only on the right side, where it had been erected to divert the water into the head of an irrigation ditch. Running until nearly dark, I landed and made camp on a breeze-swept bar away from the mosquitos.

I pa.s.sed the mouth of the Big Horn in mid-forenoon of the following day.

I should have liked to land but was fearful I would get out of hand and take too much time once I turned myself loose at the one point above all others where the most Yellowstone history has been made. The Big Horn was known in a vague way through the Indian accounts of it even before the time of Lewis and Clark, but the first permanent establishment upon it was the trading post which Manuel Lisa erected there in 1807. It was to this point that John Colter fled after being chased by the Blackfeet across Yellowstone Park, and it was his point of departure in a canoe on a voyage to St. Louis which he claimed to have made in thirty days.

Colter's account of how he ran down several black-tail deer and bighorn before relaxing the tremendous burst of speed he had put on to distance the Redskins never bothered me much, but that average of close to a hundred miles a day--most of it down the languid Missouri--somehow won't stick. I found I couldn't keep it up even after I put on my engine.

Colter undoubtedly exaggerated about his time on this trip, and that being true, doubtless, also, about trampling underfoot the deer and bighorn. Colter was a liar but not an artistic one. Now if old Jim Bridger had been telling that canoe-voyage yarn he would doubtless have hung a bag of alum over the bow and shrunk the distance as a starter, and then probably used a trained catfish for auxiliary power. _That's_ the kind of liar that makes the world safe for democracy.

Post after post was founded at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Big Horn until, in the 'seventies, it became the centre of operations for the Army in the greatest of our Indian wars. In comparison with the broad, rolling tide of the Yellowstone the turbid current of the tributary appeared shallow and of no great volume--the last place in the world for a river steamer to venture with any hope of going its own length without grounding. And yet, I reflected, the Big Horn could have been scarcely higher on that sultry Sunday of June 25th, 1876, when Captain Grant Marsh, acting on orders from General Terry, sparred and warped and crabbed the wonderful old _Far West_ up twenty-five miles of those rock-choked, foam-white rapids. The skies to the south were black with rolling smoke clouds, but with nothing to indicate that under their shadows five companies of the 7th Cavalry were paying with their lives for the precipitancy of their brave but hot-headed commander. The next day the _Far West_ reached, pa.s.sed and returned to the mouth of the Little Big Horn, and it was there that a half-crazed Crow scout, all but speechless with terror, brought on the first lap of its way to the outer world the story of the Custer Ma.s.sacre.

On the morning of June 30th, with Major Reno's wounded aboard, the _Far West_ cast off for the start of her epic run to Fort Lincoln. Major Joseph Hanson records that that Captain Marsh all but collapsed in the pilot-house as the terrible responsibility of that fifty-three-mile run down the rock-paved channel of the Big Horn suddenly a.s.sailed him on stepping to the wheel. General Terry had just said to him: "Captain, you have on board the most precious cargo a boat ever carried. Every soldier here who is suffering with wounds is the victim of a terrible blunder; a sad and terrible blunder." Crabbing up stream with supplies was one thing, floundering down with a shattered human cargo of that kind, quite another. Captain Marsh declared the moment the most sickening of his life. Then he pulled himself together and drove her through. I tried to imagine the relief her skipper must have felt as he rounded that last bend above where I now saw a railway bridge and headed the _Far West_ into the deep, clear channel of the Yellowstone, but couldn't come near to compa.s.sing it. A man has to have carried a load of that kind to know what it means to put it down. The _Far West_ broke all upper river records for speed in her run to Fort Lincoln, below Bismarck, the nearest hospital. Captain Marsh's splendid achievement in saving Reno's wounded by his masterly navigation is the one bright bit of silver lining on the sodden black cloud of the Ma.s.sacre of the Little Big Horn.

At the mouth of the Rosebud I pa.s.sed another important rendezvous of the Sioux campaign. From here, after taking his final orders from General Terry, Custer had departed on the march that was to finish upon the Little Big Horn. Major Hanson relates an incident that occurred here an hour or two after the ill-fated command had disappeared up the valley, and which was particularly interesting to me at the moment as it involved the upset of a skiff in a riffle I was about to run. All of the letters written by Custer's men since leaving Fort Lincoln were put in a bag and started by boat for Fort Buford. "Sergeant Fox and two privates of the escort were detailed to carry the precious cargo down," wrote Major Hanson. "Amid a chorus of hearty cheers from the people on the steamer, they started out. But they were totally unfamiliar with the handling of a small boat in the swirling current of the Yellowstone.

Before they had gone fifty feet their skiff overturned. There, in full view of all their comrades, who could not reach them in time to save, all three of the unfortunate fellows sank from sight, while the mail sack went to the bottom of the river."

The soldiers were drowned, but persistent dragging of the river under the direction of Captain Marsh finally brought up the mail sack, thus saving for their relatives and friends the last letters of the men who were to fall before the Sioux a few days later. These included Custer's note to his wife as well as young Boston Custer's letter to his mother.

Sending three inexperienced soldiers to boat down the Yellowstone with so humanly precious a freight in their care cannot but strike one as about on all fours with other blunders that led up to the tragic climax of that disastrous campaign.

I found a shallow bar clawed with sprawling channels but no riffles to speak of below the Rosebud. There could hardly have been bad water there at any time.

Landing at a gra.s.sy point to make camp about seven-thirty I found the mosquitos so thick that I beat a hasty retreat to the boat and pushed off again in search of a gravel bar in midstream. The sight of new and comfortable ranch buildings lured me to land a half mile below, however, where an invitation to spend the night in the screened bunk-house was promptly forthcoming. The ranch turned out to be a part of an extensive irrigation enterprise, promoted and managed by a chap named c.u.mmings from Minneapolis, who chanced to be on the place at the time. Except for the general farming depression, prospects were good, he said--better than in the dry farming sections, where crops, already very short, were being still further shortened by gra.s.shoppers. He was rather more optimistic than the run of Montanan pastoralists and agriculturalists I had met, all of whom had been having terribly hard sledding.

A leisurely three-hour's run in the morning brought me to Fort Keogh and Miles City, respectively above and below the Tongue. The red-brown current of the latter tinged the Yellowstone for a mile below their confluence. Clark camped at the mouth of the Tongue, and his painstaking description of the second in size of the Yellowstone's tributaries might have been written today.

"It has a very wide bed.... The water is of a light-brown colour and nearly milk-warm; it is shallow and its rapid current throws out great quant.i.ties of mud and some coa.r.s.e gravel.... The warmth of the water would seem to indicate that the country through which it pa.s.ses is open and without shade."

Captain Clark was a splendid geographer, even if he did run amuck a bit with his historical nomenclature.

The annual Round-up had come to an end the previous day, so that I found Miles City, if not quite a banquet hall deserted, at least in something of a morning-after frame of mind. It rather warmed one's heart to see so many people rubbing throbbing temples, and I seemed to see in it some explanation of what a cowboy meant when he told me that the only critter at the Round-up that he couldn't ride was the "White Mule."

All the cities of the Yellowstone have character and individuality, and none more than Miles City. Not so beautifully located as Livingston, not quite so metropolitan as Billings, there is something in the fine, broad streets of Miles that suggests the frank, bluff, open-heartedness of a cowboy straight from the ranges. The town looks you squarely between the eyes and says "Put it there"! in a deep, mellow voice that goes straight to the heart. That voice and that look embody the quintessence of rea.s.surance. You know in an instant that you are face to face with the kind of a town that couldn't play a mean trick on a man if it tried--that there isn't going to be any need of slinking around with one hand on your wallet and the other on your hip-pocket. Even though you may have been warned that various sorts of rough stuff have been pulled in Miles, you are certain that outsiders will have been found at the bottom of it if all the facts were known. (My over-night stop in Miles was hardly sufficient to prove out the truth of all this. Just the same, that's the way I felt about the town, and that's the way I still feel.)

[Ill.u.s.tration: _By Haynes, St. Paul_

STOCKYARDS, MILES CITY]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _L. A. Huffman_

"FREIGHTIN'"]

Miles City owed its early importance to sheep and cattle, and still has the distinction of being the principle horse market of America.

Agriculture has played an increasingly important part in its later growth. The splendid valleys of the Powder and the Tongue are both tributary territory, while the irrigation of the rich lands of the Yellowstone is bringing year by year an augmented flow of wealth to the city's gates. (Darn it! I wonder if I have cribbed that last sentence from Chamber of Commerce literature. In any event, it is quite true in this case.)

Besides its extensive cattle and sheep ranges, the Miles City region distinguishes itself by having the greatest range of temperature of any place in the world. The Government Weather Bureau is authority for the fact that a winter temperature of sixty-five degrees below Zero has been balanced by a summer one of one hundred and fifteen above. Neither California nor the Riviera can give the tourist anything like that variety to choose from. From Esquimo to Hottentot, what race couldn't establish itself right there by the Yellowstone under almost normal home weather conditions? Of course, if they were going to establish themselves for long some kind of a meteorological Joshua would be needed to command the thermometer to stand still; also some one to see that the command was carried out. And there would lie the way to complications and friction, for one can hardly imagine a Hottentot Joshua quite in agreement with an Esquimo Joshua as to just what point the thermometer should be commanded to stand at. That might be solved by the establishment of thermostat villages, but then would arise the endless train of legal complications inevitably following in the wake of infringing on the riparian rights (whatever they are) of the irrigation people. No, probably Miles had best be left to its present inhabitants, who appear to have waxed both amiable and prosperous by browsing on their temperature ranges just as Nature provided them.

I made special inquiry about Buffalo Rapids while in Miles City. This was for two reasons. Reading that Clark had been compelled to let down his boats over an abrupt fall of several feet at that point, I thought it just as well not to go blundering into it myself without further information. I also heard that there was a project for developing extensive power at this series of riffles. I spent a pleasant and profitable afternoon with Mr. Doane, the engineer of the project. He said that I ought to have little trouble in running right through all of the rapids, but suggested it might be well to land at a farmhouse near the head and see for myself. He also gave me a few facts about the power project. I would have to refer to my notes (which I never do if at all avoidable) to recall the hydro-electric data; but I need no such advent.i.tious aid to remember Mrs. Doane's freshly distilled "Essence of Dandelion." Literal liquid golden suns.h.i.+ne it was, with a bouquet recalling to me that of an ambrosial decoction made by the monks of Mount Athos from buds of asphodel, and which a masked hermit lets down to you on a string from the tower in which he is supposed to be walled up with the makings and his retorts. Buffalo Rapids never troubled me again.

I pushed off about eleven in the forenoon of July 8th, and an hour's run in moderately fast water took me within sight and sound of the white caps of the first pitch of Buffalo Rapids. Clark had originally named these riffles "Buffaloe Shoal, from the circ.u.mstance of one of these animals being found in them." He describes it further as a "succession of bad shoals, interspersed with hard, brown, gritty rock, extending for six miles; the last shoal stretches nearly across the river, and has a descent of about three feet. At this place we were obliged to let the canoes down by hand, for fear of their splitting on a concealed rock; though when the shoals are known a large canoe could pa.s.s with safety through the worst of them. This is the most difficult part of the whole Yellowstone River...."

Captain Clark would hardly have registered the latter verdict had he run the Yellowstone all the way from the Big Bend, where he first came upon it. Indeed, it seems to me that he must have run rapids above Billings that were quite as menacing as the one which now put his party to so much trouble to avoid. I would not be too dogmatic on that point, however. A hundred years of time bring great changes even to bedrock riffles, and these latter themselves also vary greatly according to the stage of water. I was a.s.sured that from August on there is still a nearly abrupt drop of several feet at one point in Buffalo Rapids.

Although I was sure I could see my way past the first riffle without serious difficulty, I still thought it best to learn what I could at the farmhouse Doane had indicated. This proved to be a comfortable old log structure at a point where the right bank was being rapidly torn down by the swift current. A very deaf chap at the first door I approached strongly urged that I line all the way down, saying that there was at least one point where my boat could not possibly live. As that wasn't quite what I wanted to hear, I went round the house and tried another door. Here, in a big, fragrant kitchen, I found a family at lunch, but with one nice, juicy helping of cream-splashed tapioca pudding still unconsumed. I helped them out with that, and in return asked for information about the rapids. None of them was river-broke, but they said they had seen a rowboat run down the left side of the first riffle the previous summer and that they afterwards heard it was not upset until it got to Wolf Rapids, down Terry-way. That was more encouraging, at least as far as Buffalo Rapids were concerned, and I decided to push off and let Nature take its course. All of them, including the careful deaf brother, came down to speed me on. Rather anxious for a bit more weight aft to bring the head higher, I asked if any of them cared to run through with me to the railway bridge below the bend. All of them shook their heads save a flower-like slip of a girl of fourteen or thereabouts. She would have been game, I think--had the proper encouragement from her mother been forthcoming. What a handicap a solicitous mother is to a flower-like child! This mother was rather an old dear, too. All I really held against her at the last was on the score of letting her emergency reserve of tapioca and cream sink so low.

The way past the worst of the first riffle looked so clear on the right that I did not trouble to pull across to the other side. I ran through in easy, undulant water, without being forced uncomfortably close to some patches of rather savage looking white where the teeth of the bedrock were flecked with tossing foam. Rounding a wide bend, I found myself drifting down onto the main run of riffles, the pa.s.sing of one of which caused Clark's party some trouble. These filled the channel much more completely than did those above, and it hardly looked possible to avoid bad water all of the way through. Even so, there was nothing that looked wicked enough to be worth landing to avoid.

Pulling hard to the right, I gave good berth to a line of badly messed up combers with not enough foam on them to cover all of the black-rock ledge beneath. Then, feeling more or less on easy street, I let the skiff slowly draw in toward the middle of a long, straight line of smoothly-running rollers that extended to and under the long railway bridge. I could have kept clear of the worst of this water by hard work, but with the beautifully rounded waves signalling "All clear"! as far as snags and really hostile rocks were concerned it seemed too bad to miss the fun. Wallowing somewhat wildly now and then and s.h.i.+pping a good bit of water in her dives, my little tin shallop went through like a duck. I knew I was getting down toward the end of that kind of thrills and it was well to make hay while the sun shone.

Before I was out of the rapid a long overland rolled out upon and over the bridge below. The engine gave me a friendly toot and waving hands down the winding line of coaches gave the train the look of a giant centipede trying to pirouette with all of its port-side legs. Warned by what had happened to me under similar circ.u.mstances in the riffle under Rapids Station, I kept my eye right on the ball to the end of the swing.

A few days later, in the hotel at Glendive, a notions drummer told me he had been on the observation platform on the occasion in question, adding jocularly that every one there had been wis.h.i.+ng I would pull a spill for them. "Cose why?" I asked him just a bit bluntly; "those rapids have been known to drown a buffalo."

Perhaps I should not have been quite so abrupt, for that was what cramped the delightfully drummeresque ingenuousness with which he had begun. Muttering something about "breaking the monotony of a run through the Bad Lands," the good chap backed off and out of my life. I was sorry for that, sorry to have embarra.s.sed him, and especially sorry I didn't have the _savoir faire_ to make it easy for him to finish as frankly as he opened up. I didn't blame him and his friends for wis.h.i.+ng for that spill. I know perfectly well I would have hoped for it myself had our positions been reversed. Almost any good red-blooded human would get a kick out of watching, from a nice, dry car platform, another good red-blooded human b.u.mping-the-b.u.mps down a rocky riffle. But I would never have been honest enough to confess my hopes--to the man who might have figured in the spill, that is. That was where this chap with the notions line would always have me one down. And what a shame it was I couldn't hold him long enough to learn how he made himself that way.

"Buffaloe Shoal" was the first of what one might call Clark's "Menagerie Series" of rapids. The next, twenty miles below, was named Bear Rapid, because they saw a bear standing there. The third, two miles below the mouth of the Powder, was christened Wolf Rapid, "from seeing a wolf there." Clark describes Bear Rapids as "a shoal, caused by a number of rocks strewed over the river; but though the waves are high, there is a very good channel to the left, which renders the pa.s.sage secure." Wolf is dismissed as "a rapid of no great danger." A hundred spring floods have doubtless had the effect of worsening Wolf--a bedrock rapid--somewhat, and of scouring out the worst of the boulders in Bear.

I found the latter only an inconsiderable riffle, but the Wolf still showed some mighty vicious fangs. They were easy enough to avoid in a light skiff, but the old steamboat skippers always reckoned there was more potential trouble lying in ambush in the cracks of these shallowly submerged reefs of black rock than at any other place on the navigated Yellowstone or Missouri.

The Powder is the last of the great southerly tributaries of the Yellowstone. Sprawling over a s.h.i.+fting estuary in several runlets, it looked much as it must have appeared to Clark when he wrote: "The water is very muddy, and like its banks of a dark brown colour. Its current throws out great quant.i.ties of red stones; which circ.u.mstances, with the appearance of the distant hills, induced Captain Clark to call it the Redstone, which he afterward found to be the meaning of its Indian name, _Wahasah_." At his camp here Clark found the buffalo prowling so close during the night that "they excited much alarm, lest in crossing the river they should tread on the boats and split them to pieces."

Below the Powder the river flows for some distance through an extensive belt of Bad Lands, a burnt, barren, savage-looking country with little vegetation, few streams, and miles of fantastic castles, kiosks and minarets of black and red rock. It is desolate in the extreme even when viewed from the cool current of the river, but surely in no wise so sinister and forbidding as those terrible stretches of Bad Lands between the Yellowstone and Little Missouri which grim old General Sully, after pursuing the Sioux over their scorched rocks for a season, so aptly described as "h.e.l.l-With-the-Lights-Out."

Finding Terry was out of sight behind the hills, I landed about eight o'clock to make camp on a gravel bar. A grizzled old codger, across whose fish-lines I came crabbing in, seemed more pleased than put out over the diversion. He could fish twenty-four hours a day, he explained, but a man willing to be talked to wasn't the sort of a bird that came along to that neck of the river every day. So he went up to his cabin, brought down some eggs and milk, and we pooled grub and suppered together there under the cottonwoods by the river. He had hunted, trapped, prospected and searched for agates for fifty years, and it was well into the night before he had told me all about it. A confession of my old love for "Calamity Jane" broke down his reserve at the outset. He had seen a lot of the dear old girl at the very zenith of her career. He told a delicious story of how "Calamity," her paprika temperament ruffled by a dude's red necktie, had tried to make that unfortunate _eat_ the offending rag at the point of a pistol. The advice with which she had endeavoured to sauce the untoothsome morsel was rather the best part of the yarn, but it was hardly sufficiently "drawing-room" to find place in these chaste chronicles.

There was a strong up-river breeze blowing when I got under way at six the next morning. When this came dead ahead it had no effect other than slowing down my progress greatly, but when the direction of the channel brought it more or less abeam I had great difficulty in keeping from being blown under the caving banks. This was, as I remember it, my first experience of what later became perhaps the most annoyingly persistent difficulty attending my progress down both the Missouri and Mississippi.

After getting in trouble two or three times and having to stop to bail out and recover my wind, I gave up the fight about noon and landed at a highly picturesque old ranch twenty-five miles above Glendive. The clanging of a dinner gong was not the least pleasant sound that a.s.sailed my ears as I climbed the bank.

Belonging to Charley Krug of Glendive, the place was one of the oldest and most historic of Montana cattle ranches. Built in the Indian days, and in an extremely windy section of country, the buildings appeared to be something of a compromise between forts and cyclone cellars. Nothing short of a "Big Bertha" could have made much impression upon the enormous cottonwood logs--and the Sioux, I believe, had nothing heavier than Springfields.

The professional personnel of the outfit was wrapped in gloom over the advent of a devastating light of gra.s.shoppers that was rapidly cleaning up the ranges down to the gravel. This sodden shroud, however, did not blanket the cook--an exception of importance from my standpoint. This individual was a part-time wrestler and prize-fighter, abandoning the squared-circle for the pots and pans only in the off seasons. He introduced himself to me as "Happy" Coogan, and then proceeded to show why he was so called. Backing me up behind a food barrage, he sang a song, danced a jig, ill.u.s.trated Jack Dempsey's left hook and Gotch's "toe-hold" on a half-breed cow-puncher, and then challenged all-comers at a "catch-as-catch-can" rough-and-tumble with nothing barred but gouging and biting. Now who could worry about gra.s.shoppers with a man like that around?

"Happy" recited excerpts from his ring career all afternoon while I ate apple pie with cream poured over it and waited for the wind to cease. It was falling lighter by five, but my host would not hear of my leaving before supper. Impromptu cabaret work lengthened that banquet out to eight o'clock, and it was early twilight before I finally broke away and went down to push off. "Happy" followed me down, his arms filled with eggs, milk, jams, pies and various other comestibles. "Don't like to let a man go off hungry," he explained. "Never know when I may be needing a hand-out myself."