GLENDIVE TO THE MISSOURI

Glendive, located on the Yellowstone at a point where the Northern Pacific leaves the river to cut across the Bad Lands straight for the plains of North Dakota, owes more to the railroad than perhaps any other town of the valley. Although Glendive Creek was a frequent halt in the steamboat days of the Indian campaigns, there was never much of a settlement there until railway construction commenced in the late 'seventies. The first train pulled into Glendive almost forty years to a day previous to my arrival by boat. I found a fine, clean, prosperous little city of 6000 where my puffing predecessor had drawn up to little more than a typical frontier construction camp. Range stock helped the town along in its earlier days, but the railway shops probably did more. Finally the completion of the dam at Intake and the distribution of water to the most extensive irrigable area in the Yellowstone Valley provided a tributary agricultural territory of great wealth.

There was one thing I was especially interested in seeing in Glendive—a school musical system that is probably without a near rival in any town in America five times as large. I was assured that, of a school enrolment of about a thousand, nearly two hundred pupils played some kind of a musical instrument. There was an orchestra of sixty pieces, and a boy's military band of sixty-five. Each was divided into junior and senior grades, and a member was pushed ahead or dropped back according to talent and effort. At no time did a pupil have a place cinched; nothing but steady conscientious effort, regular attendance at rehearsals, and proper general deportment won promotion, or prevented demotion. Perhaps the finest thing about the whole system, was the fact that it was undertaken entirely apart from the regular curriculum, no school credits whatever being given for the work. I was told the credit for this fine achievement belonged to a principal of one of the grade schools, a Miss Lucille Hennigar, who had put herself behind it purely out of love of music and children.

Glendive School Band ONE OF THE FAMOUS SCHOOL BANDS OF GLENDIVE

I did not have the honour of meeting Miss Hennigar, but I did make the acquaintance of some of her protÉgÉs. First and last, about two score of them must have chanced along in the hour I was tinkering with my boat late Sunday afternoon. They were regular fellows all right (every other one wanted to come down in the morning and sign on with me), but not a hoodlum in the lot. Not a mother's darling of them tried to kick a hole in my little tin shallop. As none of them exhibited any symptoms of infantile paralysis, I decided it must be music—quieting the mean foot as well as soothing the savage breast.

Warned by every authority from Captain Clark to an agate-hunter I had passed at the mouth of the Powder that I was now approaching the "Mosquito Coast" of the Yellowstone, I made special point of preparing to go into battle by getting the best kind of a sleep I could in Glendive. This made it particularly gratifying to find that this good little city had just about the cleanest, most comfortable and best run hotel in the valley. I should have paid it that tribute even had not its genial manager, in company with the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, driven down to see me off—bringing an especially appealing little cold lunch.

It was late in the forenoon before I got away. Just as I was about to push off a telegram was brought down to me from Mr. A. M. Cleland, Passenger Traffic Manager of the Northern Pacific, saying that he had heard of my trip and was wiring all the company's agents along the river to be on the watch to lend me a hand, and to consider any of the N. P.'s shops at my service for repairs. Even though it arrived at the very moment I was turning away from the main line of the Northern Pacific, which I had paralleled all the way from Livingston, I was nevertheless just as appreciative of the spirit that prompted the courteous and kindly message.

Captain Clark had made camp just above Glendive,[1] "where they saw the largest white bear that any of the party had ever before seen, devouring a dead buffalo on a sand bar. They fired two balls into him; he then swam to the mainland and walked along the shore. Captain Clark pursued him and lodged two more balls in his body; but though he bled profusely he made his escape, as night prevented them from following him."

Buffalo Stampede © J. E. Haynes, St. Paul BUFFALO STAMPEDE

As the country below Glendive is probably both the richest and most intensively cultivated in the whole Yellowstone Valley, I was especially struck by the contrast presented by verdant irrigated fields of alfalfa and clover to the howling wilderness Clark described. Nowhere else in all of his journey back and forth across the continent had he seen such a variety and such numbers of animals. It must have been somewhere below the present site of the great Government dam at Intake that the buffalo began to appear in vast numbers. As their boat floated down "a herd happened to be on their way across the river. Such was the multitude of these animals that, though the river, including an island over which they passed, was a mile wide, the herd stretched, as thickly as they could swim, from one side to the other, and the party was obliged to stop for an hour." Forty-five miles below, two other herds as numerous as the first blocked their way again.

The following day they found the "buffalo and elk, as well as the pursuers of both, the wolves, in great numbers." Moreover, "the bears, which gave so much trouble on the head of the Missouri, are equally fierce in this quarter. This morning one of them, which was on a sand-bar as the boat passed, raised himself on his hind legs; and after looking at the party, plunged in and swam toward them. He was received with three balls in the body; he then turned around and made for the shore. Toward evening another entered the water to swim across. Captain Clark ordered the boat toward the shore, and just as the bear landed, shot the animal in the head. It proved to be the largest female they had ever seen, so old that its tusks were worn quite smooth. The boats escaped with difficulty between two herds of buffalo that were crossing the river." On this same day great numbers of bull elk were reported, and also, "on some rugged hills to the southeast," numerous bighorn.

In all the records of western exploration and travel I can recall nothing that suggested such an astonishing plenitude of many kinds of large animals in one region. It would not have been so hard to conjure up the picture along some of the wilder reaches of the upper river, but here—with those pretty little forty and fifty-acre farms, all under ditch and cultivated to their last foot, stretching away mile after mile on my left—it was asking almost too much of the imagination to perform such acrobatics.

In a steady but ever slackening current it took me about four hours to pull the thirty miles to the Intake dam. The town was on the left but the abrupt bluff at that point indicated the right as the easier portage. The smooth green current of the water over the end of the concrete barrier tempted me for a moment to avoid portaging by letting down the empty boat on a line. Sober second thought counselled caution—that water at the end of a twelve-foot drop had too much of a kick in reserve to make it safe to trifle with. Better safe than submerged is a serviceable variation of the old saw for river use.

There was a considerable stretch of rip-raping and other rocky barriers—laid to protect the end of the dam at flood time—to get the boat over, but a young rancher, just driving up to the ferry, kindly volunteered to come up and give me a hand. Carrying the trim little craft bodily for a couple of hundred feet, we put it into his wagon and drove down a hundred yards to the ferry-landing where it was easier launching than near the dam. He was all against being paid for his trouble, but finally suggested twenty-five cents as his idea of what was fair. He looked actually distressed when, with a wristy movie actor's gesture of finality, I gave him the whole of a dollar bill. What wouldn't a farmer on a country highway have charged for half that much labour pulling a Ford out of a mud-hole?

But it appears that even non-river dwelling folk are not mercenary in this neck of Montana. A cowboy-like girl who had just ridden up on a prancing pinto frowned darkly when she saw the greenback pass. Spurring down to the water as I finished trimming the boat, she leaned down close to my ear, whispering stagily through her hollowed gauntlet: "Too bad you didn't see me first, stranger; I'd 'a yanked down that lil' sardine-tin there on the end of my rope for nothin'." That was the first time I ever heard anybody called "stranger" outside of Wild West stories written in the Tame East. Later, down Nebraska and Missouri-way, however, I found that address in common use by people in real life. There's no end of a thrill in finding story-book stuff in real life—I suppose because it happens so darn'd seldom.

Intake Dam THE DAM ACROSS THE YELLOWSTONE AT INTAKE

Portaging Around Intake Dam PORTAGING MY BOAT ROUND THE INTAKE DAM

Completing Portage COMPLETING THE PORTAGE

There were a few flashes of white in the riffle below the dam; then a broadening river and slackening water. Many and unmistakable signs told me that I was now skirting the dread "Mosquito Coast." Cattle nose-deep in the water or rushing blindly through the thorny bull-berry bushes, smudge-barrages round the ranch houses, dark, shifting clouds over the marshes and over-flow lakes—every one of them was a sign of an ancient enemy, an enemy who had drawn first and last blood on every field I had met him from the Amazon to Alaska. Knowing that I was going to run the gauntlet of him for many hundreds of miles, I had come prepared, both mentally and physically. Nevertheless I looked forward with no small apprehension to a contest which could not be other than a losing one—for me. Moreover, I had too many dormant malarial germs in my once-fever thinned blood to care to risk their being driven to the warpath again by too intimate contact with other Bolsheviki of the same breed. Frankly, Herr Mosquito, with his shrecklichkeit, was one thing above all others that had given me pause in planning a voyage that would carry me through so many thousand miles of his Happy Hunting Grounds. Miles and Terry and Crook had driven the Redskin from the Yellowstone and Missouri, Civilization had exterminated the buffalo, but the mosquito still ranged unchecked over his ancient domain. It was just a question of how much blood one was going to have to yield up to get by his toll-gate-keepers.

Some kind of a poor old river-rat—doubtless an agate-hunter,—ringed with smudges and trying to spare time enough from fighting the enemy to hold a frying pan over a smouldering fire gave me a graphic warning of what fate awaited me if I tried to camp by the bank. Forthwith I decided to get my supper in the boat, run till near dark, pick the likeliest-looking ranch, tell them I was a farmer myself, and let human nature take its course. I had had the plan of adding a galley to the boat in mind for some days. Drifting while I munched a cold lunch had already eliminated the noonday halt, and I was now figuring to let the river also go on with its work during breakfast and supper hours as well. My first plan was to make a little stove by cutting holes in an oil-can, setting this on the non-inflammable steel bottom of my boat and cooking with wood in the ordinary way. Then, in a store window in Glendive, I saw a midget of a stove that worked with gasoline pumped under pressure. It was called a "Kampkook," but I could see every reason why it would also make a perfectly good "Boatkook." Drifting just beyond the wall of the coastwise mosquito barrage, I tried it out that evening. Bacon and eggs, petit pois, mulligatawny soup, dried apricots and a pot of cocoa—all these delectables I fried, boiled or stewed without pausing from rowing for more than an occasional prod, stir or shake. When all was ready, I removed the thwart from the forward section, threw my half-inflated sleeping-bag in the bottom, disposed a couple of cushions, and suppered like Cleopatra on her barge, reclining at my ease. With occasional spice-lending-variations, that sybaritic program was followed on many another evening right on to the finish of my voyage. I loved too well the smell of "wood smoke at twilight" to forego entirely the joy of the camp on the bank, but wherever that bank was muddy or infested by mosquitos, I. W. W.'s, or other undesirables, or whenever I was trying to make time, I had a perfectly self-contained ship aboard which I could eat and sleep with entire comfort.

It was early twilight before I came to just the ranch that I was looking for. Distantly at first, like the gold at the end of a rainbow, I saw it transfigured in the sunset glow at the end of the vista of a long wine-dark side-channel. There was a sprawling, broad-eaved bungalow, vine-covered and inviting, big new red barns and a lofty silo that loomed like a tower against the sun-flushed western sky. I named it "Ranch of the Heart's Desire" on the instant, for I knew that it could give all that I most intensely craved—cover from the enemy. I tied up at the landing as a sea-worn skipper drops his anchor in a harbour of the Islands of the Blest.

The long avenue of cottonwoods up to the bungalow seemed to be filled with about equal parts of mosquitos and Jersey cows. Doubtless the mosquitos were much the more numerous. But because it hurts more to hit a running cow than a flying insect I probably was impressed with the Jerseys out of all proportion to their actual numbers. A dash through a "No-Man's-Land" of smouldering smudges and I burst into a Haven of Refuge at the bungalow door. A genial chap with a steady smile met me as I emerged from the smoke, complimented me upon the smartness of my open-field running among the Jerseys, and opined that I must have been a pretty shifty fullback in my day. A youth in greasy overalls who came wiggling out from under a Ford he introduced as "My hired man." But when the latter blushed and protested: "Now there you go again, dear!" he admitted that it was only his wife. They promptly insisted I should have supper, while I had considerable difficulty in making them believe I had a galley functioning in my boat. We finally compromised on ice-cream and strawberries. All the ranchers along the lower Yellowstone and upper Missouri have ice-houses.

They were just the kind of folk one knew he would have to find in a haven called "Ranch of the Heart's Desire." Their name was Patterson, and they had lived most of their lives in Washington—in some kind of departmental service. Becoming tired—or perhaps ashamed—of working six hours a day, they bought a ranch under the Yellowstone project ditch and started working sixteen. So far they had been spending rather more money than they had made but, like all on the threshold of bucolic life, looked confidently to a future rainbow-bright with prospects. They confessed that it awakened a wee bit of nostalgia to meet one who had been in Washington, and so it chanced that it was of "Things Washingtonese" that we talked rather than of our experiences as farmers.

There was something strangely appealing to the imagination in sitting there where the bison in his millions had so lately trod and putting everything and everybody at the Primal Fount in their proper places. Long into the night we rattled on just as though over a table at the Shoreham, the New Williard or Chevy Chase—just as we would have talked in Washington. Knocking Wilson whenever any other subject was exhausted, we bemoaned the predominance of third-class men in Congress, agreed that Harding wouldn't do much harm and might do good, swapped yarns about the funny things Congressmen's wives had said and done, and passed by acclamation a motion that the most unrepresentative institution in America was the House of Representatives. It was highly refreshing to meet people you could be really frank with in discussing the more or less esoteric phases of these and kindred subjects. I enjoyed that evening's yarn only less than I did my couch on a breeze-swept porch that was armoured with a woven copper mesh against the assaults of the common enemy.

Before I pushed off in the morning Mr. Patterson took me around two sides of his ranch and showed me some splendid fields of alfalfa and sweet clover, just ready for cutting. Prices were good, he said, and the prospects were bright for the best clean-up they had known so far. I have often wondered just how those green, fragrant fields looked ten hours later, just how much those optimistic forecasts were modified as a consequence of certain little inequalities of atmospheric pressure that were already making their differences felt in a lightning-shot murkiness hanging low on the northeastern horizon. I did not make sure of the Patterson's address and a postcard of inquiry I subsequently dispatched brought no reply. I was aware of the heavy humidity of the atmosphere the moment I pulled out in the slow current of the still broadening river. There was plenty of air stirring but with no fixed plan of action in its mind. Now it would swoop down over the banks in sudden gusts; now it would blow down river for a few moments and then turn on its heel and come breezing right back, like a commuter who has forgotten his ticket; now it would deliberately "Box-the-Compass" right round the boat, as a cat circles a rat that it is just a bit chary about springing on.

The easterly gusts paved the surface of the water with evanescent patches of floating grasshoppers, evidently part of a flight that had not yet found lodgment in the growing fields under the irrigation project on the other bank. After each gust the fish would rise greedily to the feast for a few minutes. Satiation would come quickly, however, and most of the hoppers were left to drown or perhaps to gain a few hours longer lease on life by drifting to a bar. One gust that came while I was skirting the shore poured a literal grasshopper cataract over the cut-bank into the boat. There was a sharp, rasping contact where the saw-toothed legs side-swiped my arms and face that would undoubtedly have left abrasions on the skin if it had been kept up for any time. For a few moments there was a layer of hoppers two or three inches deep in the bottom of the skiff; then the most of them hurdled out into the water. The dessicated remains of the few ambuscados that took refuge in the grub-box kept turning up in a variety of frys, stews, and fricassees for the next fortnight.

I pulled up to Riverview Ferry, well on toward the North Dakota line, at one o'clock. Mr. and Mrs. Meadows, with whom I had lunch, once operated a pontoon bridge at this point but had given it up on account of the trouble from high water. They wanted to sell the twenty or more pontoons left on their hands but said they could not see where a buyer would come from. It occurred to me that one of these floats would make an ideal hull for a houseboat, for a Missouri-Mississippi voyage, just as Riverview would be an ideal place for launching one. I have not Mr. Meadows' address, but fancy Sidney, Montana, would reach him. I shall not take the responsibility of urging any one to attempt a trip of this kind, but should the urge have developed spontaneously I think there is a chance here to acquire the makings of an extremely serviceable house-boat at a fraction of what it would cost to go about building it in the ordinary way. Starting at high water in June, an outfit of this kind—with luck and in the hands of the right party—might well go through to New Orleans before Christmas. Manned by a party without much common sense and persistence, it might conceivably be abandoned by some wildly regretful people before it swung out into the "Big Muddy." I utterly refuse to pass upon any one's qualification, or to take other than hostile notice of letters charging me with ruining what but for me might have been a comparatively inexpensive and enjoyable holiday in Bermuda or on the Riviera.

The ferryman at Riverview claimed to have made the voyage from Miles City to somewhere on the lower Mississippi in a house-boat, taking two seasons for it. He was the first ferryman I ever met who was full of doleful warnings about troubles ahead. My little tin boat might be all right for the rapids of the Yellowstone, he said, but just wait till it went up against the white caps kicked up by the winds of the Missouri and the Mississippi. He said no word about the winds of the Yellowstone. If he wasn't prepared for them, I only hope his ferryboat was not caught in midstream by a zephyr that breezed up river about three hours later.

Crossing the Powder River © L. A. Huffman THE "OLD N——" CROSSING THE POWDER RIVER

It must have been toward three o'clock that I first noticed how what had been a grey murkiness to the north-east all morning was now rising in a solid bank of swiftly advancing cloud. For a while its front was smooth and rounded, like the rim of a tin-plate. Half-way up to the zenith this front began to reveal itself as a wind-riven line of madly racing nimbus, black, sinister and ominous. And yet, blissfully ignorant of the hell-broth a-brew, I worried not a whit—didn't even begin to edge away from mid-channel for a while, in fact. What a lamb it was! Never again, with so much as a man's-hand-sized cloud blinking on the windward horizon, was I to know the calm, quiet, serenity of a confident soul.

A long, lean, torpedo-like shaft of blue-black cloud, breaking away from the ruck and aiming in a direction that would bring it directly over my head, produced the first splash in the pool of my perfect serenity. That did look just a bit as though I might be running into the centre of a heavy thunder-storm, I confessed to myself. Perhaps, if there was a ranch-house convenient, it might be just as well to be thinking of getting under cover. Yes, there were three or four houses off to the left—places on the irrigation project, doubtless, they were so close together. I started to pull in toward a sandy flat, but sheered off again when it became apparent that a slough and marsh would cut me off from the first of the houses, a place with a silo and the inevitable red barn. Plainly the only way to reach any of the farms would be by landing at the foot of the bluff a quarter of a mile ahead, climbing up and cutting across the fields. That might not be possible before the storm broke—but what did a warm summer rain matter anyhow?

Leaning hard onto my oars, I headed straight down stream for where a coal-streaked yellow bluff blocked the northerly course of the river and bent it off almost directly eastward. Swelling monstrously as it approached, the black arrow-head of the storm, deflecting slightly, began to pass overhead to the left. I distinctly remember thinking how its shape now suggested the picked skeleton of a gigantic mackerel—just a backbone and right-angling ribs. The sun dimmed and reddened as the flying clouds began to drive across its face, and the even ribs barred the dulling glow like a furnace grating. A sulphurous, copperly glare streaming through cast a weird unearthly sheen on the unrhythmically lapping wavelets of the river. My serenity was blotted out with the sun. I recalled only too well now where I had known that ghostly yellow light before—the sullen fore-glow by which the South Sea hurricane slunk upon its helpless prey. It had always been associated in my mind with the shriek of the wind, the roar of the surf and the explosive detonations of snapped coco palm boles. There were no coco palms here to snap, I reflected, but—ah, that was surely a roar, and there came the wind!

Pulling in a dead calm myself, I saw the river and air at the bend turn white almost between one stroke and the next. A tongue of wind seemed to have shot out from behind a point to the right and begun scooping up hunks of the river and throwing them across the flats. This blast was at right angles to my course down stream, but I came parallel to it as I swung and headed for the sand-bar on my left. The air was coiling and twisting upon itself as I landed, but that out-licking tongue of the storm was passing me by and circling the bluffs beyond the flat.

Without unloading the skiff, I dragged her as far in on the bar as I could, threw my stuff together in the forward section and snugged it down under a tarpaulin. Its weight might keep the boat from blowing away, I figured. Then I drove oars in the sand with an ax and ran lines to them from bow and stern—land-moorings, so to speak. The fore-front of the wind hard and solid as the side of a moving barn, caught me from behind as I made fast the bowline. I went forward to my knees, sprawled flat, wiggled round head-on and then, leaning far forward, slowly struggled to my feet. Hanging balanced at angle of forty-five degrees, I started slowly crabbing back to the boat. It wasn't so bad after all, I told myself. The skiff was not giving an inch to the blast, while leaning up against the wind that way was rather good fun. I recalled a stunt something like it that Little Tich used to pull in the London Halls—an eccentric dance with enormously elongated shoes. I decided that perhaps I was even enjoying the diversion a bit. In half-pretended nonchalance I turned my head and cast a side-glance over toward the farmhouses back of the bluffs. That was the last move of even assumed nonchalance I was guilty of for some time.

That side-glance photographed three things on my memory: a grove of willows flattened almost against the earth by the wind, two women, with wondrously billowing skirts, crawling along the side of a house toward a door, and a flimsy unpainted outbuilding resolving into its component parts and pelting across a corral full of horses. Doubtless there was more animated action to be observed had I been spared another hundredth of a second or so to get a line on it. The three things mentioned were as far as I got when the hail opened up.

With the viciousness of spattering shrapnel that first salvo of frozen pellets raked me across the right cheek. The tingle of pain was astonishingly sharp, like that from the blow of a back-snapped thorn branch on an overgrown trail, and I was a bit surprised when an explorative finger revealed no trace of blood. Hunching my neck brought my face under cover, but the batteries of the storm had got my range now and there was a decided sting to the impact of those baby icebergs, even through my slicker and shirt. People are very prone to exaggerate about the size of hail-stones, so I shall endeavour to make a special effort to be conservative about these. They felt a lot bigger when they hit, of course, but as I examined heaps of them afterward the average size seemed to be about that of shrapnel or large marbles. There may have been hail-stones the size of hens' eggs, but no one who was ever exposed to them in the open can have lived to tell the tale. Men looking out through the bars of jail may have seen them and survived to make affidavits; most other authentic reports of egg-sized hail-stones will doubtless be pretty well confined to the minutes of coroners' juries. Indeed, I am inclined to think that a considerable crimp would have been put in my down-river schedule by the comparatively diminutive pellets I faced on this occasion but for the shelter I presently found for my head under the side of the skiff.

As the hail-stones, flying before the wind, were hurtling along almost horizontally, huddling under the lee bow of the skiff protected just about all of me but my feet. Even that was not good enough, however, for the impact of the blows on the tops of my toes left an extraordinary ache behind it—something that I could not contemplate standing for an indefinite number of murderous minutes. Clawing over the side for a canvas or poncho to buffer the worst of the barrage, my hand came in contact with the roll of my sleeping pocket. That gave me an idea. The wind, getting inside the hollow bag, nearly tore it from my hands as I started to unroll it, but once I got it smothered under me the rest was easy. With my legs inside of the bag and the uninflated rubber mattress between my feet and the hail-stones, about all I had to bother about seemed to be a wind strong enough to carry the boat away and me with it.

From the way things developed for the next couple of minutes this appeared to be just about what was going to happen, however. I cannot recall ever having felt more panicky in my life than when I saw that that fore-running tongue of wind, which had originally come charging round the bend from east, had now circled southward along the bluffs below the farmhouses and was heading straight back into the east again. That meant that I was now occupying the almost mathematical centre of the vortex of a real "twister"—that I was about to be rocked on the bosom of a fairly husky young cyclone. Something pronounced in the way of an uplift movement was inevitably due the moment that back-curving tongue of air lapped round to the place it started from. A whimsical comparison flashed across my mind in watching through the crook of my fending arm the witch-dance of that circling blast. In some town up-river I had seen a movie of the Custer Massacre, at the climacteric moment of which the howling hordes of Gall and Rain-in-the-Face and Crazy-Horse whirled in a wide circle round their doomed victims, the mental agonies of which latter were shown in successive cut-ins of close-ups. Now I was once assured by a world-famous movie star that he always actually felt in his heart—to the very depths of his being—the emotion he was called on to register, was it murderous lust, ineffable virtue, mother-love or what-not. Very well. Assuming this to be true of all great movie actors, I have very grave doubt if any of that silver-screen last-stand battalion of Custer's felt any more real a pricking of the scalp in watching the closing circle of dancing Redskins than did I in waiting for that spinning blast of wind to decide whether or not it was going to stage a "Pick-me-up" party.

It is not quite clear in my mind even now why things in my immediate vicinity did not start to aviate. Several loosely built structures on the bluff went flying off like autumn leaves, and wind enough to blow boards into tree-tops would have at least sent my boat rolling if not sky-ing. I am inclined to think, however, that the failure of any marked heliocoptic action to develop was due to a lack of pronounced opposition on the part of a bluffing turncoat of a southwesterly wind. The latter skirmished just long enough to turn in the vanguards of the main storm, but took to its heels the moment the thunderbolt phalanx was launched upon it. It was the advent of this Juggernaut that marked the end of my consecutive impressions. Primal Chaos simply clapped the lid down over me and kept it there for several aeons—fifteen minutes to be exact.

Although it was rapidly getting darker, I had still been able to see not a little of what was going on up to the moment the God of the Thunders uncorked his artillery; after that I simply heard and felt and grovelled in the sand. The big red silo was the last of the old workaday world I remember seeing before my horizon contracted from a quarter of a mile to a scant ten feet. (I don't recall that old Jim Bridger ever made anything shrink as fast and far as that, even with the astringent waters of Alum Creek.) The boat and I were lying in a grey-walled cocktailshaker and being churned up with flying sand, hail and jagged hunks of blown river water. At first the resultant mixture was milk-warm, but presently it became literally ice-cold, so that I shivered in it like a new-shorn lamb. (The warm water was that blown from the river. The subsequent chilling, as I figured out afterwards, was due to the hail banking up against the windward side of the skiff, finally filling the forward section of the latter and drifting right on over to congeal my cowering anatomy.)

The thunder did not come into action battery by battery after its wonted practice, but seemed to open up all of a sudden with a crashing barrage all along the line. Flashes and crashes were simultaneous. The light of the jagged bolts broadened the diameter of my bowl by not a foot. The solid grey walls simply glowed and dulled like a ground-glass bulb when its light is switched on and off. Not one clear-cut flash did I see in the whole bombardment.

I have always been a great believer in whistling to keep up ebbing courage; not necessarily a blowing of air through pursed lips, but any easy and spontaneous action to show nonchalance and sang froid in the face of danger. The particular practice which had always seemed to produce the best results was reciting stirring and appropriate poetry. "Spartacus to the Gladiators" and "Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!" had steadied my faltering nerve in many crises. On this occasion it was when the boat broke loose from its moorings and started to roll over upon me that I began to feel the need of spiritual stiffening. I must have picked on Kipling because "The Song of the Red War Boat" had been running in my head for a day or two.

"Hearken, Thor of the Thunder! (I sputtered) We are not here for a jest."

But that was altogether too obvious. I broke off and began again:

"The thunders bellow and clamour The harm that they mean to do; There goes Thor's own Hammer Cracking the night in two! Close! But the blow has missed her...."

But that was premature. Far from missing her, the blow had at last got a shoulder under the bottom of my poor little skiff and over she came! By Thor's grace she hung there, instead of going on rolling; but those fifteen or twenty gallons of slightly liquefied hail seemed to drain straight from the base of the North Pole. I tried to continue registering nonchalance and sang froid, but accomplished an only too literal rendition of the latter. I was still spitting sand and quavering "There goes Thor's own Hammer" when the walls of my hail-hole began to brighten and recede—and presently it was a warm, soft summer afternoon again. That three-mile-wide Juggernaut of Primal Chaos was rolling away straight across those verdant irrigated farms of the Yellowstone Project and leaving desolation in its wake. I only hope that it chastened the mendacious ferryman at Riverview and made a sharp right-angle bend round the Patterson farm above Savage.

It was a considerably altered world that met the owl-like blink of my still somewhat sand-filled eyes. The big red barn and the silo still loomed against the sky-line above the bluff, and most of the other houses and barns were still standing. All of the windmills had slipped out of the picture, however, and many lesser wooden structures. Trees were broken off or uprooted in all directions. But the strangest effect was from the practical disappearance of the thousands of acres of standing crops—beaten into the earth by the hail. There, I knew, lay the real tragedy of Thor's little field-day. Quite likely no human beings had been killed—but how many human hopes? The American public like to think and talk in millions. Very well. There went a natural mill that was grinding up corn and alfalfa and clover and wheat at the rate of a million dollar's worth a minute. Who said the mills of the gods grind slowly? Much as I was longing for the cheering propinquity of fellow creatures just at that moment, I hated the thought of intruding upon the blank despair that I knew had preceded me as a guest in the farmhouse beyond the big red barn. Laying out a change of dry clothes from one of my water-proof bags, I stripped off my wet ones and freshened up with a plunge into the warm, invigorating current of the river. Thanks to the lightness and simplicity of my outfit, salvage operations were easily and expeditiously effected. The skiff had dumped itself in blowing over and was ready for launching as soon as it was tipped back. Most of my clothes were dry; most of my grub wet. The worst loss in the latter was the sentimental one of the residue of my California home-dried apricots. I didn't care much for the darn things myself, but the people along the river had proved dead keen for the succulent amber slabs. Moreover, it had always lent a pretty touch at parting to hand my host or hostess something produced on my own ranch, with perhaps a few words about how it had been picked, pitted, sulphured, dried and packed by Mexican seÑoritas—all young and dark-eyed and beautiful. That last had been especially effective in lone cow-camps. Yes, I was sorry to be compelled to give the last of those apricots away all at once to prevent their spoiling from dampness. I resolved to buy some more to replace them—for making up intimate little packets of parting—at the first opportunity.

The river had become its own quiet self again within a few moments, and I pulled through a slow current to the foot of the bluff at the bend, which appeared to be the only place one could land and avoid the mud-flats. The long sand-bar on which I had ridden out the storm had been scoured almost beyond recognition by the blown river waters. In a dozen places channels had been scoured straight through it to the slough behind, and the latter, greatly augmented both from the river and from the drainage from the heights above, was pouring a muddy torrent back into the mother stream at the bend. I saw that I was luckier than I had at first appreciated in not having had the bar dissolve beneath my feet.

Fully resolved, if no alternative cover offered, to tunnel into the bluff to avoid exposure to another of Thor's Juggernautic joy-rides, I landed on a jutting ledge of water-soaked lignite at the bend. Stacking up my outfit, I clapped the skiff down upon it, threw a few lashings over the whole, and climbed out up the bluff. With the fields themselves deep in water and liquid mud, I had to zigzag cross-country toward the nearest house by following the embankments of the irrigating ditches. Not a blade of grass was left standing. All that remained of alfalfa, oats and corn was a tangled green mat half covered with slowly melting hail-stones. Half-grown corn had not only been beaten flat, but the very stalks were crushed and shredded as if pounded by hammers.

There was only one cheering thing about that whole sodden field of desolation—millions on millions of mosquitos had been battered to death by the hail. Great masses of them, literally pulped, had been strained out of the water and collected against heaps of dÉbris in the ditches. One could scoop them up by the double handfuls. How often had I bemoaned the fact that every mosquito around some swampy Alaskan or Guinanan camp of mine had not a single head so that I could sever it with one fell swoop of and ax or machete! That was too much to hope for, of course; but right here was a tolerably fair approach to it. I squeezed three or four fistfuls of those pulped tormentors through my fingers and felt appreciably less depressed.

Cut off by a deep-scoured drainage canal from a direct approach to the farm of the big red barn, I fared back for a quarter of a mile to a road and a bridge. Crossing the latter and wading through deep puddles, I came upon what I first took to be a deserted ranch. The corrals were down, the barn partially unroofed, and the windowless house was all but stripped of its shingles. There was a response to my knock, however, and I entered a half-wrecked kitchen to find three men sitting round a table. A lamp was burning on a wall-shelf, but its flickering flame barely threw a glow above the top of the opaquely smoked chimney.

The greeting I received was unconventional—even slightly disconcerting.

"Are you broke?" boomed the blunt query from a big chap with a hammer, evidently just through tacking a blanket over a window. His two companions took pipes from their mouths and hung on my answer as though it might be a matter of considerable importance.

"Not at all...." I began, intending to go on and assure them that, far from being the hobo I looked, I had money in my pocket and a large bag of California home-dried apricots to give away. But they waited only on my denial.

"All right. Move on!" they chorused to the accompaniment of stagy gestures. "This is no place for a man that ain't broke. We are. Went broke half an hour ago. Hailed out!" An old fellow with whiskers added the explanatory trimmings.

I gulped two or three times and was about to frame a minimum demand for an hour to dry my wet togs by the fire when the big chap strode over, clapped me jovially on the shoulder and forced me into a chair by the table. "Don't mind our little joke, friend," he said with a ringing laugh. "Whatever there is left in this shack in the way of comfort is at your disposal for the night, or as long as you want to stay. Where did the storm catch you? Car stalled on the road, I suppose."

"Boat—on river—sand-bar," I replied between gulps from the mug of steaming black coffee the big fellow had poured me.

The three of them exchanged glances, first quizzical and then indicative of dawning comprehension. Finally they threw back their heads and guffawed louder than ever. I finished my coffee and gave them time to finish their laugh. Then I asked, in a slightly hurt tone I fear, just what joke they saw in being caught on a sand-bar by an embryonic cyclone. Perhaps if they had been there themselves....

That set them off again, and I had time to pour and empty another mug of coffee before one of them was sufficiently recovered to reply. The old boy with whiskers was the first to get his merriment under leash, and so it was he who explained: "That wasn't what tickled us; we was only laughin' 'cause youse was already drowned an' had a gang scoutin' for your dead body."

Yellowstone Above Livingston THE YELLOWSTONE JUST ABOVE LIVINGSTON

Yellowstone After Big Horn THE YELLOWSTONE JUST AFTER RECEIVING THE BIG HORN

As that fell well within the compass of my own sense of humour, I joined the mirth party too, and the four of us laughed all together. It appeared that a gang of ditch-hands, before taking to cover, had seen a man pulling down stream into the teeth of the advancing storm. The last they saw of him he was trying to climb out on a sand-bar. The waves were all around him and he appeared to be at his last gasp. When the storm had blown by and they looked again, no trace remained of man nor boat. That was substantially the story the ditch-hands told in recruiting a posse to search for the body. If they had ventured out from cover five minutes sooner they would have seen just what had become of both man and boat, instead of having to have it explained to them by a trio of hilarious farmers who seemed to feel the need of something in the way of comic relief to take the edge off the tragedy of being "hailed out."

The big chap's name was Solberg. He was of Norwegian descent, extremely well educated, and had spent a number of years teaching in the schools of Minnesota. I was only too glad to accept his invitation to stay over-night and dry out, especially as the weather appeared to be far from settled. After calling in my search-party, I returned home with him and we spent the remaining hours of daylight boarding up windows, patching the roof and rendering first-aid generally to his wounded house. The plucky fellow was far from being crushed. He admitted that his crops were a total loss, that he was borrowed up to the limit with the bank, and that he didn't even see just how he was going to pay any of his debts. And yet—if he could only get hold of a bunch of sheep to fatten. Sheep were more in his line. Perhaps, in the long run, he would be all the better off for having to get back to them. Calling over his collie, he took the dog's head between his knees and asked him what he thought about it. The intelligent animal eyed his master seriously for a few moments and then wagged his tail approvingly. "'Shag' thinks it will be best to go back to sheep," pronounced Solberg. Then, musingly. "Yes, I reckon sheep's the answer."

After supper Solberg said that he was a good deal worried about his neighbours to the east—that they were harder hit than any one else, and in rather worse shape to stand it. A woman and kiddies didn't make it any easier when a man was hailed out. X—— had seemed pretty despondent when he had dropped in just after the storm. Talked rather wildly. Said he was through for good. Solberg hadn't been quite sure whether X—— had just meant he was through with farming, or something else. He was rather a moody chap at best.... Perhaps no harm would be done if we took a turn over that way....

The "neighbour to the east" turned out to be the big red barn and silo which, during the storm, had stood to me as the symbols of all that remained stable in the universe. A young woman opened the door of the staunch little farmhouse to us—a girl with a baby in her arms and a couple of youngsters fastened on her skirt. Her face was pretty—decidedly so, as I saw presently,—but at the moment I noticed that less than the courage it expressed. There was a well of tears behind her fine eyes, but I knew the shedding of them was going to be postponed indefinitely. Solberg, after directing a questioning look round the kitchen and sitting-room, asked bluntly where her husband was. With a nervous glance in my direction, she replied evasively that he was "outside walking round," adding that she had milked the cows and done the chores herself. With a keen and sympathetic glance of understanding, my friend turned on his heel and vanished into the darkness.

Never having seen any one hailed-out before, I was somewhat at a loss to know just what form my comforting ought to take. Finally, doubtless subconsciously inspired by "The Greatest Mother in the World" picture, I scooped up all the kiddies in sight and started to dandle them. I had always won approving nods for pulling that kind of a stunt, whether it was in a London Zeppelin raid or a drive of Armenian refugees at Trebizond. Even here it was sound—theoretically at least—for it gave the mother a chance to use her hands and apron to wipe dishes. Where it miscarried was on the practical side—the oldest boy would keep putting his hob-nailed boot in the baby's eye. But when I had cached the baby in its crib and gagged the other two with a handful of wet dried apricots, instinct came to my rescue and headed me off on the proper tack—sympathy stuff. That is, I told her my own troubles and led her to forget hers in sympathizing with them.

Sincerely and unfeignedly sorry as I was for these people, I was (momentarily) almost as sorry for myself before I came to the end of that tale of woe. I was a poor farmer from California. (Just how poor, and in how many senses of the word, I didn't confess.) Of all the farmers in the world, none had so many troubles as the California farmer. Take oranges, for example. If the buds escaped the frost probably the tiny green fruit would succumb to the "June Drop." If the latter was weathered, there were the black scale, the brown rot and the red spider lying in ambush, complicated by the probability of water shortage at the end of the summer. If the fruit ran that gauntlet and came to maturity, then there lurked the worst menace of all—the January frosts. And finally, if the ripe fruit survived the frost barrage and reached the packing-house, it was only to be pushed on into the "No Man's Land" of an overstocked market. No man lived with so many Damoclean swords suspended over him as the California orange grower—unless it was the California peach, prune, apricot, grape, nectarine or olive grower; or the walnut or almond grower; or the alfalfa, barley or wheat farmer; or the truck gardener.

I had been all of these, I said, and was just about to go on particularizing on the diseases and dangers threatening each crop, as I had done with the orange, when the rustle of a skirt caused me to raise my bowed head. There she was, a half-wiped pie-tin still in the bight of her apron, standing over me and looking down with tears a lot nearer to brimming than when we entered.

"And so you have had to come up to Montana looking for work?" she asked in a voice vibrant with sympathy. "What a shame it is we're all hailed-out round here, with no work in sight, and nothing to pay for it with if there was."

Having over-sailed the mark by a mile, I hastened to trim in canvas and beat back onto the course as originally charted. The last year or two in California hadn't been so bad, I admitted. I had even made quite a bit of money, so that this little river jaunt of mine on the Yellowstone was really almost in the nature of a pleasure trip. (Funny thing, but that river-pleasure-jaunt assertion was the only statement I made at which she seemed inclined to lift an eyebrow.) I had brought a few of my California home-dried apricots along, I continued. Perhaps they would enjoy a few for a change. That was the point I had been manoeuvring to. Now I would play my comforter rÔle.

Spreading the last of my bag of sticky slabs out before the fire, I started to tell how they were made. First there was the picking by men and the cutting and pitting by Mexican girls. She interrupted to ask what the girls were paid. I told her about fifteen cents a box, adding that some of the defter fingered of them often made three and four dollars a day. She sighed at that, and wished she had a chance to earn that much—sure and safe where the hail couldn't get it.

Solberg came in with her husband at this juncture. He was a good-looking young chap, well set up and with the right kind of an eye. There was no doubt of the depth of his discouragement and depression, but he was plainly too good stuff to sulk for long. He shook hands warmly enough, but there was a trace of bitterness in the smile with which he remarked that he was glad to see that I had survived the hail better than had his oats and corn. I rattled right on about the apricots, telling of the sulphuring, sunning, stacking, binning and packing, adding—in a convenient moment when the wife had stepped out to shake the tablecloth—that ever effective little capsule about the Mexican seÑoritas, all young, dark-eyed and beautiful. The good chap actually lifted his head and took a deep, shoulder-squaring breath at that. He relapsed again when I failed to develop the theme, but it was only temporary. Ten minutes later, with great inconsequentiality, I heard him asking his wife how she would like to go to California and work in the apricots. Then he went over, wound up the Victrola and put on "Smiles! Smiles! Smiles!" What a lot of latent good there was in those California home-dried apricots, I reflected as we splashed along homeward! Surely I must not fail to renew my supply at the next town.

As we were preparing to turn in for the night, I took Solberg to task for his remark earlier in the evening to the effect that a woman and kiddies didn't make it any easier for a man who had been hailed-out. "Don't you think," I asked, "that a plucky little woman like that comes in pretty handy to buffer the bumps in a time of trouble like this?" For the first and only time my host was guilty of sarcasm. "Well," he said with a cynical glint in his blue eye, "if I had been in your place down there on the sand-bar I daresay I would have been glad of almost anything to buffer the bumps of the hail-stones. As it is, I reckon I can do my own buffering."

Recognizing the familiar symptoms of an ancient but still unhealed wound, I thought the best thing I could do under the circumstances was to concentrate on blowing up my sleeping-bag and turning in. Funny how imagination works in a man who is much alone. Given a pin-prick over the heart, with ten years of solitude to brood over it, and he'll convince himself that the original wound was from nothing of less calibre than a "Big Bertha."

The next morning was bright and clear, with no signs of any menace lurking under the northeastern horizon. Solberg accompanied me across his ruined fields to my boat. His corn and oats, he admitted, were a total loss, but he thought there were signs that the tough, stringy stalks of the sweet clover had some vitality left in them. He seemed especially attached to this beautiful plant, calling it "The Friend of Man" and saying that he had experimented with several foods and drinks from it that promised well for human consumption. There was something particularly appealing to me in this fine, and bluff, if slightly eccentric, chap. I think it was his wholesomeness—the firmness with which he seemed to have his feet planted on the earth. One who has been attracted to the French peasant for his love of the land from which he draws his life will know what I mean.

I pushed off into a quiet current that was in strange contrast to the wind-torn welter of white I had seen at that bend the evening before. The air on the river was fairly drenched with the heavy odour of crushed vegetation, which seemed to have drained there from higher levels. This was pronounced at all times, but where I skirted fields of sweet clover there was a palpability to the perfume which suggested that one might almost gather it in his hands and allow it to pour through his fingers. In the Marquesas there is a little yellow-blossomed bush called the cassi, the pollen from which blows far to leeward before the South-east Trade. At times I have thought that I could detect the delicate odour of blown-cassi ten miles at sea, yet never even in kicking my way through a copse of the fragrant little bush have I been assailed with such a veritable flow of perfume as coiled and streamed about me as I drifted down toward the mouth of the Yellowstone that morning after the great hail-storm. Doubtless, indeed, the hail was responsible. Crushed and dying, the voiceless "Friend of Man" was chanting its "Swan Song" in the only medium at its command.

A couple of miles below the bend where the storm had caught me I passed into North Dakota at a point called the State Line Ferry. An hour later I ran under the bridge of a branch of the Great Northern. It was a fine, bold piece of construction, and it was in my mind at the time that its builder must be an outstanding man in his line. This surmise was vindicated a month later when I found him putting in the first piers of a bridge to span the Missouri at Yankton. Incidentally, some of his false-work got in the way of my skiff and all but dumped me out into the "Big Muddy."

Yellowstone Below Glendive THE BROAD STREAM OF THE YELLOWSTONE BELOW GLENDIVE

Last Bridge Above the Missouri THE LAST BRIDGE ABOVE THE MISSOURI

Yellowstone Takes Possession WHERE THE YELLOWSTONE TAKES POSSESSION OF THE MISSOURI

Below Forsyth's Butte, last of the outstanding landmarks of the Yellowstone, the country on both sides began to smoothen and flatten out and offer less resistance to the spread of the river. The broad over-flow flats offered an ideal breeding ground for mosquitos, recalling to me that a very large portion of Clark's journey of early August was devoted to telling of the mental and physical suffering inflicted upon the members of his party by the swarms of stinging pests they had encountered just above and below the mouth of the Yellowstone. From Clark's time down to the present this particular region has always been regarded as "The Dark and Bloody Ground of the Mosquito Coast of Dakota." I was resolved to put bars between myself and the enemy that night—if not the mosquito bars of a hotel room, then the mid-stream sand-bars of the Missouri.

A broad, sweeping curve to the left, a wide bend, and then an equally broad and sweeping curve to the right opened up a long vista with low, dry, rounded hills at the end of it. With a quick catch of breath I recognized the telegraph poles of the Great Northern Railway and the scattering buildings of Fort Buford—both beyond the Missouri. A swift run under a crumbling cut-bank on the left carried me past an out-reaching tongue of yellow clay and into a quiet, sluggish, dark-stained current that came meandering along from the west.

I have mentioned the quieter, calmer current in which I had been drifting below Glendive. So it had seemed after the tumultuous mountain torrent which I had run from Livingston to Billings; yet in comparison with this decorous bride from the west the Yellowstone came to its marriage bed like a raging lion. Or, to borrow an animal from the next cage in the zoo, the Missouri, in coming down to meet and mingle with the Yellowstone, fared much like the lady who went out to ride on the tiger. If I may paraphrase:

"I finished my ride with the Lady inside, And the smile on the face of the Tiger,"

meaning the Yellowstone. Without even pausing to crouch for a spring, the tawny, impetuous feline on whose back I had ridden all the way down from the Rockies, simply rushed out upon the muddy lamb from the western plains and gobbled it up. Seven or eight weeks later I saw the latter do the same thing to the Mississippi—crowd it right over against the Illinois shore and gulp it down. And along toward the end of October I remember thinking how like the blonde beast of the Yellowstone was a ropy coil of tawny current I found undermining a levee in Louisiana. According to the maps I had been travelling for upwards of three thousand miles on the Missouri and Mississippi, but in fancy it was the tawny tiger of the Yellowstone that had carried me all the way from the borders of Wyoming to the tide-waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

THE END

[1] In reading Clark's notes in the original it should be born in mind that they were written almost entirely in the third person. His spellings were often most originally phonetic, but not always conforming to one system. I have found three distinct spellings of mosquito in a single paragraph, and buffalo was often rendered "buffaloe" and "buffalow." L. R. F.