Roughing it de luxe

ROUGHING IT

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THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

IRVINE

Gift of
THE HONNOLD LIBRARY

Roughing It De Luxe

BY COMMON CONSENT \VE HAD NAMED THEM
CLARENCE AND CLARICE

Rough in git De Luxe^

By

Irvin S. Cobb

Author of "Back Home,"

"The Escape of Mr. Trimm," "Cobb's Anatomy"
"Cob Vs Bill of Fare ," etc.

Illustrated by John T. McCutcheon

New York
George H. Doran Company

COPYRIGHT, 1913,
BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1914,
BY GKORGE FT. DORAN COMPANY

Roughing It De Luxe

To GEORGE H. DOR AN, ESQ.

MY FRIEND AND STILL MY PUBLISHER;

MY PUBLISHER AND STILL

MY FRIEND

Roughing It De Luxe

THE TIME TABLE

PAGE

A PILGRIM CANONIZED . . . .15
RABID AND His FRIENDS . . . .55
How Do You LIKE THE CLIMATE? . 97

IN THE HAUNT OF THE NATIVE SON . 135

LOOKING FOR Lo .175

Roughing It De Luxe

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

By common consent we had named them Clarence
and Clarice Frontispiece

Evidently he believed the conspiracy against him
was widespread 21

There was not a turkey trotter in the bunch. ... 35

He'd garner in some fellows that wasn't sheep-
herders 61

Because a man has a soul is no reason he shouldn't
have an appetite 73

He was a regular moving picture cowboy and gave
general satisfaction 87

The boy who sells you a paper and the youth who
blackens your shoes both show solicitude 101

Out from under a rock somewhere will crawl a
real estate agent 115

He felt that he was properly dressed for the time,
the place and the occasion 127

Even the place where the turkey trot originated
was trotless and quiet 143

The woman nearest the wall has on her furs — it is
always cool in the shade 155

Roughing It De Luxe

PAGE

It's a great thing out there to be a native son. ... 169

Each Navajo squaw weaves on an average nine
thousand blankets a year 179

As she leveled the lens a yell went up from some-
where 1 93

As the occupants spilled sprawlingly through the
gap, a front tire exploded with a loud report .... 207

Roughing It De Luxe

A PILGRIM CANONIZED

Roughing It De Luxe

A Pilgrim Canonized

IT is generally conceded that the Grand
Canon of Arizona beggars description.
I shall therefore endeavor to refrain
from doing so. I realize that this is going
to be a considerable contract. Nearly every-
body, on taking a first look at the Grand
Canon, comes right out and admits its won-
ders are absolutely indescribable — and then
proceeds to write anywhere from two thou-
sand to fifty thousand words, giving the full
details. Speaking personally, I wish to say
that I do not know anybody who has yet
succeeded in getting away with the job.

In the old days when he was doing the
literature for the Barnum show, Tody
Hamilton would have made the best nom-
inee I can think of. Remember, don't you,
how when Tody started in to write about
the elephant quadrille you had to turn over

16 Roughing It De Luxe

to the next page to find the verb? And
almost any one of those young fellows who
write advertising folders for the railroads
would gladly tackle the assignment; in
fact, some of them already have — but not
with any tumultuous success.

In the presence of the Grand Canon,
language just simply fails you and all the
parts of speech go dead lame. When the
Creator made it He failed to make a word
to cover it. To that extent the thing is
incomplete. If ever I run across a person
who can put down on paper what the
Grand Canon looks like, that party will
be my choice to do the story when the
Crack of Doom occurs. I can close my
eyes now and see the headlines: Judgment
Day a Complete Success! Replete with
Incident and Abounding in Surprises-
Many Wealthy Families Disappointed-
Full Particulars from our Special Corre-
spondent on the Spot!

Starting out from Chicago on the Santa
Fe, we had a full trainload. We came from
everywhere: from peaceful New England
towns full of elm trees and oldline Republi-

A Pilgrim Canonized 17

cans; from the Middle States; and from the
land of chewing tobacco, prominent Adam's
apples and hot biscuits — down where the
r is silent, as in No'th Ca'lina. And all of
us — Northerners, Southerners, Easterners
alike — were actuated by a common purpose
— we were going West to see the country
and rough it — rough it on overland trains
better equipped and more luxurious than
any to be found in the East; rough it at
ten-dollar-a-day hotels; rough it by tour-
ing car over the most magnificent auto-
mobile roads to be found on this continent.
We were a daring lot and resolute; each
and every one of us was brave and blithe
to endure the privations that such an expe-
dition must inevitably entail. Let the
worst come; we were prepared! If there
wasn't any of the hothouse lamb, with
imported green peas, left, we'd worry along
on a little bit of the fresh shad roe, and
a few conservatory cucumbers on the side.
That's the kind of hardy adventurers we
were!

Conspicuous among us was a distin-
guished surgeon of Chicago; in fact, so

18 Roughing It De Luxe

distinguished that he has had a very rare
and expensive disease named for him,
which is as distinguished as a physician
ever gets to be in this country. Abroad
he would be decorated or knighted. Here
we name something painful after him and
it seems to fill the bill just as well. This
surgeon was very distinguished and also
very exclusive. After you scaled down
from him, riding in solitary splendor in his
drawing room, with kitbags full of symp-
toms and diagnoses scattered round, we
became a mixed tourist outfit. I would
not want to say that any of the persons
on our train were impossible, because that
sounds snobbish; but I will say this — some
of them were highly improbable.

There was the bride, who put on her
automobile goggles and her automobile
veil as soon as we pulled out of the Chi-
cago yards and never took them off again
—except possibly when sleeping. I pre-
sume she wanted to show the rest of us
that she was accustomed to traveling at a
high rate of speed. If the bridegroom had
only bethought him to carry one of those

A Pilgrim Canonized 19

siren horns under his arm, and had tooted
it whenever we went around a curve, the
illusion would have been complete.

There was also the middle-aged lady
with the camera habit. Any time the train
stopped, or any time it behaved as though
it thought of stopping, out on the platform
would pop this lady, armed with her little
accordion-plaited camera, with the lens fo-
cused and the little atomizer bulb dangling
down, all ready to take a few pictures.
She snapshotted watertanks, whistling posts,
lunch stands, section houses, grade crossings
and holes in the snowshed — also scenery,
people and climate. A two-by-four photo-
graph of a mountain that's a mile high
must be a most splendid reminder of the
beauties of Nature to take home with you
from a trip.

There was the conversational youth in the
Norfolk jacket, who was going out West
to fill an important vacancy in a large
business house — he told us so himself. It
was a good selection, too. If I had a va-
cancy that I wanted filled in such a way
that other people would think the vacancy

20 Roughing It De Luxe

was still there, this youth would have been
my candidate.

And finally there was the corn-doctor
from a town somewhere in Indiana, who
had the upper berth in Number Ten. It
seemed to take a load off his mind, on the
second morning out, when he learned that
he would not have to spend the day up
there, but could come down and mingle
with the rest of us on a common footing;
but right up to the finish of the journey
he was uncertain on one or two other
points. Every time a conductor came
through — Pullman conductor, train con-
ductor or dining-car conductor — he would
hail him and ask him this question: "Do
I or do I not have to change at Williams
for the Grand Canon?" The conductor—
whichever conductor it was — always said,
Yes, he would have to change at Williams.
But he kept asking them — he seemed to
regard a conductor as a functionary who
would deliberately go out of his way to
mislead a passenger in regard to an impor-
tant matter of this kind. After a while
the conductors took to hiding out from him

AREYOUSUR

WE. CHANGE A

WILLIAMS?

EVIDENTLY HE BELIEVED THE CONSPIRACY
AGAINST HIM WAS WIDESPREAD

A Pilgrim Canonized 23

and then he began cross-examining the
porters, and the smoking-room attendant,
and the baggageman, and the flagmen, and
the passengers who got aboard down the
line in Colorado and New Mexico.

At breakfast in the dining car you would
hear his plaintive, patient voice lifted.
"Yes, waiter," he would say; "fry 'em on
both sides, please. And say, waiter, do
you know for sure whether we change at
Williams for the Grand Canon?" He put
a world of entreaty into it; evidently he
believed the conspiracy against him was
widespread. At Albuquerque I saw him
leading off on one side a Pueblo Indian who
was peddling bows and arrows, and heard
him ask the Indian, as man to man, if he
would have to change at Williams for the
Grand Canon.

When he was not worrying about chang-
ing at Williams he showed anxiety upon
the subject of the proper clothes to be
worn while looking at the Grand Canon.
Among others he asked me about it. I
could not help him. I had decided to
drop in just as I was, and then to be

24 Roughing It De Luxe

governed by circumstances as they might
arise; but he was not organized that way.
On the morning of the last day, as we
rolled up through the pine barrens of
Northern Arizona toward our destination,
those of us who had risen early became
aware of a terrific struggle going on be-
hind the shrouding draperies of that upper
berth of his. Convulsive spasms agitated
the green curtains. Muffled swear words
uttered in a low but fervent tone filtered
down to us. Every few seconds a leg or
an arm or a head, or the butt-end of a
suitcase, or the bulge of a valise, would
show through the curtains for a moment,
only to be abruptly snatched back.

Speculation concerning the causes of
these strange manifestations ran — as the
novelists say — rife. Some thought that,
overcome with disappointment by the dis-
covery that we had changed at Williams
in the middle of the night, without his
knowing anything about it, he was having
a fit all alone up there. Presently the ex-
citement abated; and then, after having
first lowered his baggage, our friend de-

A Pilgrim Canonized 25

scended to the aisle and the mystery was
explained. He had solved the question of
what to wear while gazing at the Grand
Canon. He was dressed in a new golf
suit, complete — from the dinky cap to the
Scotch plaid stockings. If ever that man
visits Niagara, I should dearly love to be
on hand to see him when he comes out to
view the Falls, wearing his bathing suit.

Some of us aboard that train did not
seem to care deeply for the desert; the cac-
tus possibly disappointed others; and the
mesquit failed to give general satisfaction,
though at a conservative estimate we passed
through nine million miles of it. A few
of the delegates from the Eastern seaboard
appeared to be irked by the tribal dancing
of the Hopi Indians, for there was not a
turkey-trotter in the bunch, the Indian set-
tlements of Arizona being the only terpsi-
chorean centers in this country to which
the Young Turk movement had not pene-
trated yet. Some objected to the plains
because they were so flat and plainlike, and
some to the mountains because of their ex-
ceedingly mountainous aspect; but on one

26 Roughing It De Luxe

point we all agreed — on the uniform ex-
cellence of the dining-car service.

It is a powerfully hard thing for a man
to project his personality across the grave.
In making their wills and providing for
the carrying on of their pet enterprises a
number of our richest men have endeav-
ored from time to time to disprove this;
but, to date, the percentage of successes has
not been large. So far as most of us are
concerned the burden of proof shows that
in this regard we are one with the famous
little dog whose name was Rover — when
we die, we die all over. Every big success
represents the personality of a living man;
rarely ever does it represent the person-
ality of a dead man.

The original Fred Harvey is dead — has
been dead, in fact, for several years; but
his spirit goes marching on across the
southwestern half of this country. Two
thousand miles from salt water, the oysters
that are served on his dining cars do not
seem to be suffering from car-sickness.
And you can get a beefsteak measuring
eighteen inches from tip to tip. There are

A Pilgrim Canonized 21

spring chickens with the most magnificent
bust development I ever saw outside of a
burlesque show; and the eggs taste as
though they might have originated with a
hen instead of a cold-storage vault. If
there was only a cabaret show going up
and down the middle of the car during
meals, even the New York passengers
would be satisfied with the service, I think.
There is another detail of the Harvey
system that makes you wonder. Out on
the desert, in a dead-gray expanse of si-
lence and sagebrush, your train halts at a
junction- point that you never even heard
of before. There is not much to be seen
—a depot, a 'dobe cabin or so, a few
frame shacks, a few natives, a few Indians
and a few incurably languid Mexicans—
and that is positively all there is except
that, right out there in the middle of no-
where, stands a hotel big enough and hand-
some enough for Chicago or New York,
built in the Spanish style, with wide patios
and pergolas — where a hundred persons
might perg at one time — and gay-striped
awnings. It is flanked by flower-beds and

28 Roughing It De Luxe

refreshingly green strips of lawn, with
spouting fountains scattered about.

You go inside to a big, spotlessly bright
dining room and get as good a meal as you
can get anywhere on earth — and served in
as good style, too. To the man fresh from
the East, such an establishment reminds
him vividly of the hurry-up railroad lunch
places to which he has been accustomed
back home — places where the doughnuts
are dornicks and the pickles are fossils,
and the hard-boiled egg got up out of a
sick bed to be there, and on the pallid
yellow surface of the official pie a couple
of hundred flies are enacting Custard's
Last Stand. It reminds him of them be-
cause it is so different. Between Kansas
City and the Coast there are a dozen or
more of these hotels scattered along the
line.

And so, with real food to stay you and
one of Tuskegee's bright, straw-colored
graduates to minister to your wants in the
sleeper, you come on the morning of the
third day to the Grand Canon in northern
Arizona; you take one look — and instantly

A Pilgrim Canonized 29

you lose all your former standards of com-
parison. You stand there gazing down
the raw, red gullet of that great gosh-
awful gorge, and you feel your self-impor-
tance shriveling up to nothing inside of
you. You haven't an adjective left to your
back. It makes you realize what the sensa-
tions would be of one little microbe lost
inside of Barnum's fat lady.

I think my preconceived conception of
the Canon was the same conception most
people have before they come to see it for
themselves — a straight up-and-down slit in
the earth, fabulously steep and fabulously
deep ; nevertheless merely a slit. It is no
such thing.

Imagine, if you can, a monster of a
hollow approximately some hundreds of
miles long and a mile deep, and anywhere
from ten to sixteen miles wide, with a
mountain range — the most wonderful
mountain range in the world — planted in
it; so that, viewing the spectacle from
above, you get the illusion of being in a
stationary airship, anchored up among the
clouds; imagine these mountain peaks —

30 Roughing It De Luxe

hundreds upon hundreds of them — rising
one behind the other, stretching away in
endless, serried rank until the eye swims
and the mind staggers at the task of trying
to count them; imagine them splashed and
splattered over with all the earthly colors
you ever saw and a lot of unearthly colors
you never saw before; imagine them carved
and fretted and scrolled into all shapes — •
tabernacles, pyramids, battleships, obelisks,
Moorish palaces — the Moorish suggestion
is especially pronounced both in colorings
and in shapes — monuments, minarets, tem-
ples, turrets, castles, spires, domes, tents,
tepees, wigwams, shafts.

Imagine other ravines opening from the
main one, all nuzzling their mouths in her
flanks like so many sucking pigs; for there
are hundreds of these lesser canons, and
any one of them would be a marvel were
they not dwarfed into relative puniness by
the mother of the litter. Imagine walls
that rise sheer and awful as the Wrath of
God, and at their base holes where you
might hide all the Seven Wonders of the
Olden World and never know they were

A Pilgrim Canonized 31

there — or miss them either. Imagine a
trail that winds like a snake and climbs
like a goat and soars like a bird, and finally
bores like a worm and is gone.

Imagine a great cloud-shadow cruising
along from point to point, growing smaller
and smaller still, until it seems no more
than a shifting purple bruise upon the
cheek of a mountain, and then, as you
watch it, losing itself in a tiny rift which
at that distance looks like a wrinkle in the
seamed face of an old squaw, but which
is probably a huge gash gored into the
solid rock for a thousand feet of depth and
more than a thousand feet of width.

Imagine, way down there at the bottom,
a stream visible only at certain favored
points because of the mighty intervening
ribs and chines of rock — a stream that ap-
pears to you as a torpidly crawling yellow
worm, its wrinkling back spangled with
tarnished white specks, but which is really
a wide, deep, brawling, rushing river — the
Colorado — full of torrents and rapids; and
those white specks you see are the tops of
enormous rocks in its bed.

32 Roughing It De Luxe

Imagine — if it be winter — snowdrifts
above, with desert flowers blooming along-
side the drifts, and down below great
stretches of green verdure; imagine two
or three separate snowstorms visibly raging
at different points, with clear, bright
stretches of distance intervening between
them, and nearer maybe a splendid rain-
bow arching downward into the great
void; for these meteorological three-ring
circuses are not uncommon at certain
seasons.

Imagine all this spread out beneath the
unflawed turquoise of the Arizona sky and
washed in the liquid gold of the Arizona
sunshine — and if you imagine hard enough
and keep it up long enough you may be-
gin, in the course of eight or ten years,
to have a faint, a very faint and shadowy
conception of this spot where the shamed
scheme of creation is turned upside down
and the very womb of the world is laid
bare before our impious eyes. Then go to
Arizona and see it all for yourself, and you
will realize what an entirely inadequate
and deficient thing the human imagina-
tion is.

A Pilgrim Canonized 33

It is customary for the newly arrived
visitor to take a ride along the edge of the
canon — the rim-drive, it is called — with
stops at Hopi Point and Mohave Point and
Pima Point, and other points where the
views are supposed to be particularly good.
To do this you get into a smart coach drawn
by horses and driven by a competent young
man in a khaki uniform. Leaving behind
you a clutter of hotel buildings and station
buildings, bungalows and tents, you go
winding away through a Government for-
est reserve containing much fine standing
timber and plenty more that is not so fine,
it being mainly stunted pinon and gnarly
desert growths.

Presently the road, which is a fine, wide,
macadamized road, skirts out of the trees
and threads along the canon until it comes
to a rocky flange that juts far over. You
climb out there and, instinctively treading
lightly on your tiptoes and breathing in
syncopated breaths, you steal across the
ledge, going slowly and carefully until you
pause finally upon the very eyelashes of
eternity and look down into that great
inverted muffin-mold of a canon.

34 Roughing It De Luxe

You are at the absolute jumping-off
place. There is nothing between you and
the undertaker except six thousand feet,
more or less, of dazzling Arizona climate.
Below you, beyond you, stretching both
ways from you, lie those buried mountains,
the eternal herds of the Lord's cattlefold;
there are scars upon their sides, like the
marks of a mighty branding iron, and in
the distance, viewed through the vapor-
waves of melting snow, their sides seem to
heave up and down like the flanks of pant-
ing cattle. Half a mile under you, straight
as a man can spit, are gardens of willows
and grasses and flowers, looking like tiny
green patches, and the tents of a camp
looking like scattered playing cards; and
there is a plateau down there that appears
to be as flat as your hand and is seemingly
no larger, but actually is of a size sufficient
for the evolutions of a brigade of cavalry.

When you have had your fill of this the
guide takes you and leads you — you still
stepping lightly to avoid starting anything
— to a spot from which he points out to
you, riven into the face of a vast perpen-

A Pilgrim Canonized 37

dicular chasm above a cave like a mon-
strous door, a tremendous and perfect fig-
ure seven — the house number of the Al-
mighty Himself. By this I mean no irrev-
erence. If ever Jehovah chose an earthly
abiding-place, surely this place of awful,
unutterable majesty would be it. You
move a few yards farther along and in-
stantly the seven is gone — the shift of shad-
ow upon the rock wall has wiped it out
and obliterated it — but you do not mourn
the loss, because there are still upward of
a million things for you to look at.

And then, if you have timed wisely the
hour of your coming, the sun pretty soon
goes down; and as it sinks lower and lower
out of titanic crannies come the thickening
shades, making new plays and tricks of
painted colors upon the walls — purples and
reds and golds and blues, ambers and um-
bers and opals and ochres, yellows and tans
and tawnys and browns — and the canon
fills to its very brim with the silence of
oncoming night.

You stand there, stricken dumb, your
whole being dwarfed yet transfigured; and

38 Roughing It De Luxe

in the glory of that moment you can even
forget the gabble of the lady tourist along-
side of you who, after searching her soul
for the right words, comes right out and
gives the Grand Canon her cordial in-
dorsement. She pronounces it to be just
perfectly lovely! But I said at the outset
I was not going to undertake to describe
the Grand Canon — and I'm not. These
few remarks were practically jolted out of
me and should not be made to count in the
total score.

Having seen the canon — or a little bit of
it — from the top, the next thing to do is to
go down into it and view it from the sides
and the bottom. Most of the visitors fol-
low the Bright Angel Trail which is hand-
ily near by and has an assuring name.
There are only two ways to do the inside
of the Grand Canon — afoot and on mule-
back. El Tovar hotel provides the necessary
regalia, if you have not come prepared — •
divided skirts for the women and leggings
for the men, a mule apiece and a guide to
every party of six or eight.

At the start there is always a lot of ner-

A Pilgrim Canonized 39

vous chatter — airy persiflage flies to and
fro and much laughing is indulged in.
But it has a forced, strained sound, that
laughter has; it does not come from the
heart, the heart being otherwise engaged
for the moment. Down a winding footpath
moves the procession, with the guide in
front, and behind him in single file his
string of pilgrims — all as nervous as cats
and some holding to their saddle-pommels
with death-grips. Just under the first ter-
race a halt is made while the official pho-
tographer takes a picture; and when you
get back he has your finished copy ready
for you, so you can see for yourself just
how pale and haggard and wall-eyed and
how much like a typhoid patient you
looked.

The parade moves on. All at once you
notice that the person immediately ahead
of you has apparently ridden right over the
wall of the canon. A moment ago his
arched back loomed before you; now he
is utterly gone. It is at this point that
some tourists tender their resignations — to
take effect immediately. To the credit of

40 Roughing It De Luxe

the sex, be it said, the statistics show that
fewer women quit here than men. But
nearly always there is some man who re-
members where he left his umbrella or
something, and he goes back after it and
forgets to return.

In our crowd there was one person who
left us here. He was a circular person;
about forty per cent of him, I should say,
rhymed with jelly. He climbed right down
off his mule. He said:

"I'm not scared myself, you understand,
but I've just recalled that my wife is a ner-
vous woman. She'd have a fit if she knew I
was taking this trip! I love my wife, and
for her sake I will not go down this canon,
dearly as I would love to." And with
that he headed for the hotel. I wanted to
go with him. I wanted to go along with
him and comfort him and help him have
his chill, and if necessary send a telegram
for him to his wife — she was in Pittsburgh
— telling her that all was well. But I did
not. I kept on. I have been trying to
figure out ever since whether this showed
courage on my part, or cowardice.

A Pilgrim Canonized 41

Over the ridge and down the steep de-
clivity beyond goes your mule, slipping a
little. He is reared back until his rump
almost brushes the trail; he grunts mild
protests at every lurching step and grips
his shoecalks into the half-frozen path.
You reflect that thousands of persons have
already done this thing; that thousands of
others — men, women and children — are go-
ing to do it, and that no serious accident
has yet occurred — which is some comfort,
but not much. The thought comes to you
that, after all, it is a very bright and beau-
tiful world you are leaving behind. You
turn your head to give it a long, lingering
farewell, and you try to put your mind
on something cheerful — such as your life
insurance. Then something happens.

The trail, that has been slanting at a
downward angle which is a trifle steeper
than a ship's ladder, but not quite so steep
perhaps as a board fence, takes an abrupt
turn to the right. You duck your head
and go through a little tunnel in the rock,
patterned on the same general design of the
needle's eye that is going to give so many

42 Roughing It De Luxe

of our prominent captains of industry trou-
ble in the hereafter. And as you emerge
on the lower side you forget all about your
life-insurance papers and freeze to your
pommel with both hands, and cram your
poor cold feet into the stirrups — even in
warm weather they'll be good and cold—
and all your vital organs come up in your
throat, where you can taste them. If any-
body had shot me through the middle just
about then he would have inflicted only
a flesh wound.

You have come out on a place where the
trail clings to the sheer side of the dizziest,
deepest chasm in the known world. One
of your legs is scraping against the ever-
lasting granite; the other is dangling over
half a mile of fresh mountain air. The
mule's off hind hoof grates and grinds on
the flinty trail, dislodging a fair-sized stone
that flops over the verge. You try to look
down and see where it is going and find
you haven't the nerve to do it — but you
can hear it falling from one narrow ledge
to another, picking up other boulders as it
goes until there must be a fair-sized little

A Pilgrim Canonized 43

avalanche of them cascading down. The
sound of their roaring, racketing passage
grows fainter and fainter, then dies almost
out, and then there rises up to you from
those unutterable depths a dull, thuddy
little sound — those stones have reached the
cellar! Then to you there comes the pleas-
ing reflection that if your mule slipped
and you fell off and were dashed to frag-
ments, they would not be large, mussy,
irregular fragments, but little teeny-weeny
fragments, such as would not bring the
blush of modesty to the cheek of the most
fastidious.

Only your mule never slips off! It is
contrary to a mule's religion and politics,
and all his traditions and precedents, to
slip off. He may slide a little and stumble
once in a while, and he may, with malice
aforethought, try to scrape you off against
the outjutting shoulders of the trail; but he
positively will not slip off. It is not be-
cause he is interested in you. A tourist on
the canon's rim a simple tourist is to him
and nothing more; but he has no intention
of getting himself hurt. Instinct has taught

44 Roughing It De Luxe

that mule it would be to him a highly
painful experience to fall a couple of thou-
sand feet or so and light on a pile of rocks;
and therefore, through motives that are
purely selfish, he studiously refrains from
so doing. When the Prophet of old wrote,
"How beautiful upon the mountains are
the feet of him," and so on, I judge he
had reference to a mule on a narrow trail.
My mule had one very disconcerting
way about him — or, rather, about her, for
she was of the gentler sex. When she came
to a particularly scary spot, which was
every minute or so, she would stop dead
still. I concurred in that part of it heart-
ily. But then she would face outward and
crane her neck over the fathomless void
of that bottomless pit, and for a space of
moments would gaze steadily downward,
with a despondent droop of her fiddle-
shaped head and a suicidal gleam in her
mournful eyes. It worried me no little;
and if I had known, at the time, that she
had a German name it would have worried
me even more, I guess. But either the
time was not ripe for the rash act or else

A Pilgrim Canonized 45

she abhorred the thought of being found
dead in the company of a mere tourist, so
she did not leap off into space, but re-
strained herself; and I was very grateful
to her for it. It made a bond of sympathy
between us.

On you go, winding on down past the
red limestone and the yellow limestone
and the blue sandstone, which is green
generally; past huge bat caves and the
big nests of pack-rats, tucked under shelves
of Nature's making; past stratified mill-
ions of crumbling seashells that tell to
geologists the tale of the salt-water ocean
that once on a time, when the world was
young and callow, filled this hole brim
full; and presently, when you have begun
to piece together the tattered fringes of
your nerves, you realize that the canon is
even more wonderful when viewed from
within than it is when viewed from with-
out. Also, you begin to notice now that it
is most extensively autographed.

Apparently about every other person
who came this way remarked to himself
that this canon was practically completed

46 Roughing It De Luxe

and only needed his signature as collab-
orator to round it out — so he signed it and
after that it was a finished job. Some of
them brought down colored chalk and sten-
cils, and marking pots, and paints and
brushes, and cold chisels to work with,
which must have been a lot of trouble, but
was worth it — it does add so greatly to the
beauty of the Grand Canon to find it span-
gled over with such names as you could
hear paged in almost any dollar-a-day
American-plan hotel. The guide pointed
out a spot where one of these inspired
authors climbed high up the face of a
white cliff and, clinging there, carved out
in letters a foot long his name; and it
was one of those names that, inscribed
upon a register, would instinctively cause
any room clerk to reach for the key to an
inside one, without bath. I regret to state
that nothing happened to this person. He
got down safe and sound; it was a great
pity, too.

By the Bright Angel Trail it is three
hours on a mule to the plateau, where there
are green summery things growing even in

A Pilgrim Canonized 47

midwinter, and where the temperature is
almost sultry; and it is an hour or so more
to the riverbed, down at the very bottom.
When you finally arrive there and look up
you do not see how you ever got down, for
the trail has magically disappeared; and
you feel morally sure you are never going
to get back. If your mule were not under
you pensively craning his head rearward in
an effort to bite your leg off, you would
almost be ready to swear the whole thing
was an optical illusion, a wondrous dream.
Under these circumstances it is not so
strange that some travelers who have been
game enough until now suddenly weaken.
Their nerves capsize and the grit runs out
of them like sand out of an overturned
pail.

All over this part of Arizona they tell
you the story of the lady from the southern
part of the state — she was a school teacher
and the story has become an epic — who
went down Bright Angel one morning and
did not get back until two o'clock the fol-
lowing morning; and then she came against
her will in a litter borne by two tired

48 Roughing It De Luxe

guides, while two others walked beside her
and held her hands; and she was protest-
ing at every step that she positively could
not and would not go another inch; and
she was as hysterical as a treeful of chick-
adees; her hat was lost, and her glasses
were gone, and her hair hung down her
back, and altogether she was a mournful
sight to see.

Likewise the natives will tell you the
tale of a man who made the trip by crawl-
ing round the more sensational corners
upon his hands and knees; and when he
got down he took one look up to where, a
sheer mile above him, the rim of the canon
showed, with the tall pine trees along its
edge looking like the hairs upon a cater-
pillar's back, and he announced firmly that
he wished he might choke if he stirred
another step. Through the miraculous in-
dulgence of a merciful providence he was
down, and that was sufficient for him; he
wasn't going to trifle with his luck. He
would stay down until he felt good and
rested, and then he would return to his
home in dear old Altoona by some other

A Pilgrim Canonized 49

route. He was very positive about it.
There were two guides along, both of them
patient and forbearing cowpunchers, and
they argued with him. They pointed that
there was only one suitable way for him
to get out of the canon, and that was the
way by which he had got into it.

"The trouble with you fellows," said the
man, "is that you are too dad-blamed tech-
nical. The point is that I'm here, and
here I'm going to stay."

"But," they told, him, "you can't stay
here. You'd starve to death like that poor
devil that some prospectors found in that
gulch yonder — turned to dusty bones, with
a pack rat's nest in his chest and a rock
under his head. You'd just naturally
starve to death."

"There you go again," he said, "import-
ing these trivial foreign matters into the
discussion. Let us confine ourselves to the
main issue, which is that I am not going
back. This rock shall fly from its firm
base as soon as I," he said, or words to that
effect.

So insisting, he sat down, putting his

50 Roughing It De Luxe

own firm base against the said rock, and
prepared to become a permanent resident.
He was a grown man and the guides were
less gentle with him than they had been
with the lady school teacher. They roped
his arms at the elbows and hoisted him
upon a mule and tied his legs together
under the mule's belly, and they brought
him out of there like a sack of bran — only
he made more noise than any sack of bran
has ever been known to make.

Coming back up out of the Grand Canon
is an even more inspiring and amazing
performance than going down. But by
now — anyhow this was my experience, and
they tell me it is the common experience
— you are beginning to get used to the
sensation of skirting along the raw and
ragged verge of nothing. Narrow turns
where, going down, your hair pushed your
hat off, no longer affright you; you take
them jauntily — almost debonairly. You
feel that you are now an old mountain-
sealer, and your soul begins to crave for a
trip with a few more thrills to the square
inch in it. You get your wish. You go

A Pilgrim Canonized 51

down Hermit Trail, which its middle
name is thrills; and there you make the
acquaintance of the Hydrophobic Skunk.
The Hydrophobic Skunk is a creature of
such surpassing accomplishments and vivid
personality that I feel he is entitled to a
new chapter. The Hydrophobic Skunk
will be continued in our next.

52 Roughing It De Luxe

Roughing It De Luxe

RABID AND HIS FRIENDS

Roughing It De Luxe

Rabid and His Friends

THE Hydrophobia Skunk resides at
the extreme bottom of the Grand
Canon and, next to a Southern Re-
publican who never asked for a Federal
office, is the rarest of living creatures. He
is so rare that nobody ever saw him — that
is, nobody except a native. I met plenty
of tourists who had seen people who had
seen him, but never a tourist who had seen
him with his own eyes. In addition to
being rare, he is highly gifted.

I think almost anybody will agree with
me that the common, ordinary skunk has
been most richly dowered by Nature. To
adorn a skunk with any extra qualifications
seems as great a waste of the raw material
as painting the lily or gilding refined gold.
He is already amply equipped for outdoor
pursuits. Nobody intentionally shoves him

56 Roughing It De Luxe

round; everybody gives him as much room
as he seems to need. He commands respect
—nay, more than that, respect and venera-
tion— wherever he goes. Joy-riders never
run him down and foot passengers avoid
crowding him into a corner. You would
think Nature had done amply well by the
skunk; but no — the Hydrophobic Skunk
comes along and upsets all these calcula-
tions. Besides carrying the traveling cre-
dentials of an ordinary skunk, he is rabid
in the most rabidissimus form. He is not
mad just part of the time, like one's rela-
tives by marriage — and not mad most of
the time, like the old-fashioned railroad
ticket agent — but mad all the time — incura-
bly, enthusiastically and unanimously mad!
He is mad and he is glad of it.

We made the acquaintance of the Hy-
drophobic Skunk when we rode down Her-
mit Trail. The casual visitor to the Grand
Canon first of all takes the rim drive; then
he essays Bright Angel Trail, which is
sufficiently scary for his purposes until he
gets used to it; and after that he grows
more adventurous and tackles Hermit

Rabid and His Friends 57

Trail, which is a marvel of corkscrew con-
volutions, gimleting its way down this red
abdominal wound of a canon to the very
gizzard of the world.

Alongside the Hermit, traveling the
Bright Angel is the same as gathering the
myrtles with Mary; but the civil engineers
who worked out the scheme of the Hermit
and made it wide and navigable for ordi-
nary folks were bright young men. They
laid a wall along its outer side all the
way from the top to the bottom. Now
this wall is made of loose stones racked
up together without cement, and it is no-
where more than a foot or a foot and a half
high. If your mule ever slipped — which
he never does — or if you rolled off on your
own hook — which has not happened to date
—that puny little wall would hardly stop
you — might not even cause you to hesitate.
But some way, intervening between you
and a thousand feet or so of uninterrupted
fresh air, it gives a tremendous sense of
security. Life is largely a state of mind,
anyhow, I reckon.

As a necessary preliminary to going

58 Roughing It L)e Luxe

down Hermit Trail you take a buckboard
ride of ten miles — ten wonderful miles!
Almost immediately the road quits the
rocky, bare parapet of the gorge and winds
off through the noble, big forest that is a
part of the Government reserve. Jays that
are twice as large and three times as vocal
as the Eastern variety weave blue threads
in the green background of the pines; and
if there is snow upon the ground its bil-
lowy white surface is crossed and criss-
crossed with the dainty tracks of coyotes,
and sometimes with the broad, furry marks
of the wildcat's pads. The air is a blessing
and the sunshine is a benediction.

Away off yonder, through a break in the
conifers, you see one lone and lofty peak
with a cap of snow upon its top. The
snow fills the deeper ravines that furrow
its side downward from the summit so that
at this distance it looks as though it were
clutched in a vast white owl's claw; and
generally there is a wispy cloud caught on
it like a white shirt on a poor man's Mon-
day washpole. Or, huddled together in a
nest formation like so many speckled eggs,

Rabid and His Friends 59

you see the clutch of little mottled moun-
tains for which nobody seems to have a
name. If these mountains were in Scot-
land, Sir Walter Scott and Bobby Burns
would have written about them and they
would be world-famous, and tourists from
America would come and climb their
slopes, and stand upon their tops, and sop
up romance through all their pores. But
being in Arizona, dwarfed by the heaven-
reaching ranges and groups that wall them
in north, south and west, they have not
even a Christian name to answer to.

Anon — that is to say, at the end of those
ten miles — you come to the head of Her-
mit Trail. There you leave your buck-
board at a way station and mount your
mule. Presently you are crawling down-
ward, like a fly on a board fence, into the
depths of the chasm. You pass through
rapidly succeeding graduations of geology,
verdure, scenery and temperature. You
ride past little sunken gardens full of wild
flowers and stunty fir trees, like bits of Old
Japan; you climb naked red slopes crowned
with the tall cactus, like Old Mexico; you

60 Roughing It De Luxe

skirt bald, bare, blistered vistas of deso-
lation, like Old, Perdition. You cross
Horsethief's Trail, which was first traced
out by the moccasined feet of marauding
Apaches and later was used by white out-
laws fleeing northward with their stolen
pony herds.

You pass above the gloomy shadows of
Blythe's Abyss and wind beneath a great
box-shaped formation of red sandstone set
on a spindle rock and balancing there in
dizzy space like Mohammed's coffin; and
then, at the end of a mile-long jog along
a natural terrace stretching itself midway
between Heaven and the other place, you
come to the residence of Shorty, the official
hermit of the Grand Canon.

Shorty is a little, gentle old man, with
warped legs and mild blue eyes and a set
of whiskers of such indeterminate aspect
that you cannot tell at first look whether
they are just coming out or just going back
in. He belongs — or did belong — to the
vast vanishing race of oldtime gold pros-
pectors. Halfway down the trail he does
light housekeeping under an accommodat-

HE'D GARNER IN SOME FELLOWS
THAT WASN'T SHEEPHERDERS

Rabid and His Friends 63

ing flat ledge that pouts out over the path-
way like a snuffdipper's under lip. He has
a hole in the rock for his chimney, a
breadth of weathered gray canvas for his
door and an eighty-mile stretch of the most
marvelous panorama on earth for his front
yard. He minds the trail and watches out
for the big boulders that sometimes fall in
the night; and, except in the tourist season,
he leads a reasonably quiet existence.

Alongside of Shorty, Robinson Crusoe
was a tenement-dweller, and Jonah, week-
ending in the whale, had a perfectly up-
roarious time; but Shorty thrives on a
solitude that is too vast for imagining. He
would not trade jobs with the most potted
potentate alive — only sometimes in mid-
summer he feels the need of a change
stealing over him, and then he goes afoot
out into the middle of Death Valley and
spends a happy vacation of five or six
weeks with the Gila monsters and the heat.
He takes Toby with him.

Toby is a gentlemanly little woolly dog
built close to the earth like a carpet sweep-
er, with legs patterned crookedly — after

64 Roughing It De Luxe

the model of his master's. Toby has one
settled prejudice: he dislikes Indians. You
have only to whisper the word "Injun" and
instantly Toby is off, scuttling away to the
highest point that is handy. From there
he peers all round looking for red invaders.
Not rinding any he comes slowly back,
crushed to the earth with disappointment.
Nobody has ever been able to decide what
Toby would do with the Indians if he
found them; but he and Shorty are in per-
fect accord. They have been associated
together ever since Toby was a pup and
Shorty went into the hermit business, and
that was ten years ago. Sitting cross-
legged on a flat rock like a little gnome,
with his puckered eyes squinting off at
space, Shorty told us how once upon a time
he came near losing Toby.

"Me and Toby," he said, "was over to
Flagstaff, and that was several years
ago. There was a saloon man over there
owned a bulldog and he wanted that his
bulldog and Toby should fight. Toby can
lick mighty nigh any dog alive; but I
didn't want that Toby should fight. But

Rabid and His Friends 65

this here saloon man wouldn't listen. He
sicked his bulldog on to Toby and in about
a minute Toby was taking that bulldog all
apart.

"This here saloon man he got mad then
—he got awful mad. He wanted to kill
Toby and he pulled out his pistol. I
begged him mighty hard please not to
shoot Toby — I did so! I stood in front
of Toby to protect him and I begged that
man not to do it. Then some other fellows
made him put up his gun, and me and
Toby came on away from there." His
voice trailed off. "I certainly would 'a'
hated to lose Toby. We set a heap of store
by one another — don't we, dog?" And
Toby testified that it was so — testified with
wriggling body and licking tongue and
dancing eyes and a madly wagging stump
tail.

As we mounted and jogged away we
looked back, and the pair of them — Shorty
and Toby — were sitting there side by side
in perfect harmony and perfect content;
and I could not help wondering, in a coun-
try where we sometimes hang a man for

66 Roughing It De Luxe

killing a man, what would have been ade-
quate punishment for a brute who would
kill Toby and leave Shorty without his
partner! In another minute, though, we
had rounded a jagged sandstone shoulder
and they were out of sight.

About that time Johnny, our guide, felt
moved to speech, and \ve hearkened to his
words and hungered for more, for Johnny
knows the ranges of the Northwest as a
city dweller knows his own little side street.
In the fall of the year Johnny comes down
to the Canon and serves as a guide a while;
and then, when he gets so he just can't
stand associating with tourists any longer,
he packs his warbags and journeys back
to the Northern Range and enjoys the
company of cows a spell. Cows are not
exactly exciting, but they don't ask fool
questions.

A highly competent young person is
Johnny and a cowpuncher of parts. Most
of the Canon guides are cowpunchers—
accomplished ones, too, and of high stand-
ing in the profession. With a touch of rev-
erence Johnny pointed out to us Sam Sco-

Rabid and His Friends 6 7

vel, the greatest bronco buster of his time,
now engaged in piloting tourists.

"Can he ride?" echoed Johnny in an-
swer to our question. "Scovel could ride
an earthquake if she stood still long enough
for him to mount! He rode Steamboat —
not Young Steamboat, but Old Steamboat!
He rode Rocking Chair, and he's the only
man that ever did do that and not be called
on in a couple of days to attend his own
funeral."

This day he told us about one Tom, who
lived up in Wyoming, where Johnny came
from. It appeared that in an easier day
Tom was hired by some cattle men to thin
out the sheep herders who insisted upon in-
vading the public ranges. By Johnny's
account Tom did the thinning with con-
scientious attention to detail and gave gen-
eral satisfaction for a while; but eventually
he grew careless in his methods and took to
killing parties who were under the protec-
tion of the game laws. Likewise his own
private collection of yearlings began to in-
crease with a rapidity which was only to be
accounted for on the theory that a large

68 Roughing It De Luxe

number of calves were coming into the
world with Tom's brand for a birthmark.
So he lost popularity. Several times his
funeral was privily arranged, but on each
occasion was postponed owing to the fail-
ure of the corpse to be present. Finally he
killed a young boy and was caught and
convicted, and one morning they took him
out and hanged him rather extensively.

"Torn was mighty methodical," said
Johnny. "He got five hundred a head for
killing sheep herders — that was the regu-
lar tariff. Every time he bumped one off
he'd put a stone under his head, which
was his private mark — a kind of a duebill,
as you might say. And when they'd find
that dead herder with the rock under his
head they'd know there was another five
hundred comin' to Tom on the books; they
always paid it, too. Once in a while,
though, he'd cut loose in a saloon and gar-
ner in some fellows that wasn't sheep herd-
ers. There was quite a number that
thought Tom acted kind of ungentlemanly
when he was drinkin'."

We went on and on at a lazy mule-trot,

Rabid and His Friends 6 9

hearing the unwritten annals of the range
from one who had seen them enacted at
first hand. Pretty soon we passed a herd
of burros with mealy, dusty noses and
spotty hides, feeding on prickly pears and
rock lichens; and just before sunset we slid
down the last declivity out upon the pla-
teau and came to a camp as was a camp!

This was roughing it de luxe with a
most de-luxey vengeance! Here were three
tents, or rather three canvas houses, with
wooden half-walls; and they were spick-
and-span inside and out, and had glass
windows in them and doors and matched
wooden floors. The one that was a bed-
room had gay Navajo blankets on the floor,
and a stove in it, and a little bureau, and
a washstand with white towels and good
lathery soap. And there were two beds—
not cots or bunks, but regular beds — with
wire springs and mattresses and white
sheets and pillowslips. They were not vet-
eran sheets and vintage pillowslips either,
but clean and spotless ones. The mess tent
was provided with a table with a clean
cloth to go over it, and there were china

70 Roughing It De Luxe

dishes and china cups and shiny knives,
forks and spoons. Every scrap of this
equipment had been brought down from
the top on burro packs. The Grand Canon
is scenically artistic, but it is a non-pro-
ducing district. And outside there was a
corral for the mules; a canvas storehouse;
hitching stakes for the burros; a Dutch
oven, and a little forge where the guides
sometimes shoe a mule. They aren't black-
smiths; they merely have to be. Bill was
in charge of the camp — a dark, rangy,
good-looking young leading man of a cow-
boy, wearing his blue shirt and his red
neckerchief with an air. He spoke with
the soft Texas drawl and in his way was as
competent as Johnny.

The sun, which had been winking fare-
wells to us over the rim above, dropped
out of sight as suddenly as though it had
fallen into a well. From the bottom the
shadows went slanting along the glooming
walls of the gorges, swallowing up the yel-
low patches of sunlight that still lingered
near the top like blacksnakes swallowing
eggs. Every second the colors shifted and

Rabid and His Friends 71

changed; what had been blue a moment
before was now purple and in another
minute would be a velvety black. A little
lost ghost of an echo stole out of a hole
and went straying up and down, feebly
mocking our remarks and making them
sound cheap and tawdry.

Then the new moon showed as a silver
fish, balancing on its tail and arching itself
like a hooked skipjack. In a purpling sky
the stars popped out like pinpricks and the
peace that passes all understanding came
over us. I wish to take advantage of this
opportunity to say that, in my opinion,
David Belasco has never done anything in
the way of scenic effects to beat a moon-
rise in the Grand Canon.

I reckon we might have been there un-
til now — my companion and I — soaking
our souls in the unutterable beauty of that
place, only just about that time we smelled
something frying. There was also a most
delectable sputtering sound as of fat meat
turning over on a hot skillet; but just the
smell alone was a square meal for a poor
family. The meeting adjourned by ac-

12 Roughing It De Luxe

clamation. Just because a man has a soul
is no reason he shouldn't have an appetite.

That Johnny certainly could cook!
Served on china dishes upon a cloth-cov-
ered table, we had mounds of fried steaks
and shoals of fried bacon; and a bushel,
more or less, of sheepherder potatoes; and
green peas and sliced peaches out of cans;
and sourdough biscuits as light as kisses
and much more filling; and fresh butter
and fresh milk; and coffee as black as your
hat and strong as sin. How easy it is for
civilized man to become primitive and
comfortable in his way of eating, especially
if he has just ridden ten miles on a buck-
board and nine more on a mule and is
away down at the bottom of the Grand
Canon — and there is nobody to look on
disapprovingly when he takes a bite that
would be a credit to a steam shovel!

Despite all reports to the contrary, I
wish to state that it is no trouble at all to
eat green peas off a knifeblade — you
merely mix them in with potatoes for a ce-
ment; and fried steak — take it from an old
steak-eater — tastes best when eaten with

BECAUSE A MAN HAS A SOUL IS NO REASON
HE SHOULDN'T HAVE AN APPETITE

Rabid and His Friends 75

those tools of Nature's own providing,
both hands and your teeth. An hour passed
—busy, yet pleasant — and we were both
gorged to the gills and had reared back
with our cigars lit to enjoy a third jorum
of black coffee apiece, when Johnny, speak-
ing in an offhand way to Bill, who was
still hiding away biscuits inside of himself
like a parlor prestidigitator, said:

"Seen any of them old hydrophobies the
last day or two?"

"Not so many," said Bill casually.
"There was a couple out last night piroot-
in' round in the moonlight. I reckon,
though, there'll be quite a flock of 'em out
tonight. A new moon always seems to
fetch 'em up from the river."

Both of us quit blowing on our coffee
and we put the cups down. I think I was
the one who spoke.

"I beg your pardon," I asked, "but what
did you say would be out tonight?"

"We were just speakin' to one another
about them Hydrophoby Skunks," said
Bill apologetically. "This here Canon is
where they mostly hang out and frolic
'round."

76 Roughing It De Luxe

I laid down my cigar, too. I admit I
was interested.

"Oh!" I said softly— like that. "Is it?
Do they?"

"Yes," said Johnny. "I reckin there's
liable to be one come shovin' his old nose
into that door any minute. Or probably
two — they mostly travels in pairs — sets, as
you might say."

"You'd know one the minute you saw
him, though," said Bill. "They're smaller
than a regular skunk and spotted where
the other kind is striped. And they got lit-
tle red eyes. You won't have no trouble at
all recognizin' one."

It was at this juncture that we both got
up and moved back by the stove. It was
warmer there and the chill of evening
seemed to be settling down noticeably.

"Funny thing about Hydrophoby
Skunks," went on Johnny after a moment
of pensive thought — "mad, you know!"

"What makes them mad?" The two of
us asked the question together.

"Born that way!" explained Bill — "mad
from the start, and won't never do nothin'
to get shut of it"

Rabid and His Friends 7 7

"Ahem — they never attack humans, I
suppose?"

"Don't they?" said Johnny, as if sur-
prised at such ignorance. "Why, humans
is their favorite pastime! Humans is just
pie to a Hydrophoby Skunk. It ain't really
any fun to be bit by a Hydrophoby Skunk
neither." He raised his coffee cup to his
lips and imbibed deeply.

"Which you certainly said something
then, Johnny," stated Bill. "You see," he
went on, turning to us, "they aim to catch
you asleep and they creep up right soft
and take holt of you — take holt of a year
usually — and clamp their teeth and just
hang on for further orders. Some says
they hang on till it thunders, same as snap-
pin' turtles. But that's a lie, I judge, be-
cause there's weeks on a stretch down here
when it don't thunder. All the cases I ever
heard of they let go at sun-up."

"It is right painful at the time," said
Johnny, taking up the thread of the nar-
rative; "and then in nine days you go mad
yourself. Remember that fellow the Hy-
drophoby Skunk bit down here by the

18 Roughing It De Luxe

rapids, Bill? Let's see now — what was
that hombre's name?"

"Williams," supplied Bill— "Heck Will-
iams. I saw him at Flagstaff when they
took him there to the hospital. That guy
certainly did carry on regardless. First he
went mad and his eyes turned red, and he
got so he didn't have no real use for water
—well, them prospectors don't never care
much about water anyway — and then he
got to snappin' and bitin' and foamin' so's
they had to strap him down to his bed.
He got loose though."

"Broke loose, I suppose?" I said.

"No, he bit loose," said Bill with the air
of one who would not deceive you even in
a matter of small details.

"Do you mean to say he bit those leather
straps in two?"

"No, sir; he couldn't reach them," ex-
plained Bill, "so he bit the bed in two.
Not in one bite, of course," he went on.
"It took him several. I saw him after he
was laid out. He really wasn't no credit
to himself as a corpse."

I'm not sure, but I think my companion

Rabid and His Friends 79

and I were holding hands by now. Out-
side we could hear that little lost echo
laughing to itself. It was no time to be
laughing either. Under certain circum-
stances I don't know of a lonelier place
anywhere on earth than that Grand Canon.

Presently my friend spoke, and it seemed
to me his voice was a mite husky. Well,
he had a bad cold.

"You said they mostly attack persons
who are sleeping out, didn't you?"

"That's right, too," said Johnny, and Bill
nodded in affirmation.

"Then, of course, since we sleep indoors
everything will be all right," I put in.

"Well, yes and no," answered Johnny.
"In the early part of the evening a hydro-
phoby is liable to do a lot of prowlin'
round outdoors; but toward mornin' they
like to get into camps — they dig up under
the side walls or come up through the
floor — and they seem to prefer to get in
bed with you. They're cold-blooded, I
reckin, same as rattlesnakes. Cool nights
always do drive 'em in, seems like."

"It's going to be sort of coolish to-night,"
said Bill casually.

80 Roughing It De Luxe

It certainly was. I don't remember a
chillier night in years. My teeth were
chattering a little — from cold — before we
turned in. I retired with all my clothes
on, including my boots and leggings, and
I wished I had brought along my ear-
muffs. I also buttoned my watch into my
lefthand shirt pocket, the idea being if for
any reason I should conclude to move dur-
ing the night I would be fully equipped
for traveling. The door would not stay
closely shut — the doorjamb had sagged a
little and the wind kept blowing the door
ajar. But after a while we dozed off.

It was one-twenty-seven A.M. when I
woke with a violent start. I know this
was the exact time because that was when
my watch stopped. I peered about me in
the darkness. The door was wide open—
I could tell that. Down on the floor there
was a dragging, scuffling sound, and from
almost beneath me a pair of small red eyes
peered up phosphorescently.

"He's here!" I said to my companion as
I emerged from my blankets; and he, wak-
ing instantly, seemed instinctively to know

Rabid and His Friends 81

whom I meant. I used to wonder at the
ease with which a cockroach can climb a
perfectly smooth wall and run across the
ceiling. I know now that to do this is the
easiest thing in the world— if you have the
proper incentive behind you. I had gone
up one wall of the tent and had crossed
over and was in the act of coming down
the other side when Bill burst in, his eyes
blurred with sleep, a lighted lamp in one
hand and a gun in the other.

I never was so disappointed in my life
because it wasn't a Hydrophobic Skunk at
all. It was a pack rat, sometimes called
a trade rat, paying us a visit. The pack
or trade rat is also a denizen of the Grand
Canon. He is about four times as big as
an ordinary rat and has an appetite to
correspond. He sometimes invades your
camp and makes free with your things, but
he never steals anything outright — he mere-
ly trades with you; hence his name. He
totes off a side of meat or a bushel of meal
and brings a cactus stalk in; or he will con-
fiscate your saddlebags and leave you in
exchange a nice dry chip. He is honest,

82 Roughing It De Luxe

but from what I can gather he never gets
badly stuck on a deal.

Next morning at breakfast Johnny and
Bill were doing a lot of laughing between
them over something or other. But we had
our revenge! About noon, as we were
emerging at the head of the trail, we met
one of the guides starting down with a
couple that, for the sake of convenience,
we had christened Clarence and Clarice.
Shorty hailed us.

"How's everything down at the camp?"
he inquired.

"Oh, all right!" replied Bill— "only
there's a good many of them Hydrophoby
Skunks pesticatin' about. Last night we
seen four."

Clarence and Clarice crossed startled
glances, and it seemed to me that Clarice's
cheek paled a trifle; or it may have been
Clarence's cheek that paled. He bent
forward and asked Shorty something, and
as we departed full of joy and content we
observed that Shorty was composing him-
self to unload that stock horror tale. It
made us very happy.

Rabid and His Friends 83

By common consent we had named them
Clarence and Clarice on their arrival the
day before. At first glance we decided
they must have come from Back Bay, Bos-
ton— probably by way of Lenox, Newport
and Palm Beach; if Harvard had been a
co-educational institution we should have
figured them as products of Cambridge.
It was a shock to us all when we learned
they really hailed from Chicago. They
were nearly of a height and a breadth, and
similar in complexion and general expres-
sion; and immediately after arriving they
had appeared for the ride down the Bright
Angel in riding suits that were identical
in color, cut and effect — long-tailed, tight-
buttoned coats; derby hats; stock collars;
shiny top boots; cute little crops, and
form-fitting riding trousers with those
Bartlett pear extensions midships and aft
— and the prevalent color was a soft, melt-
ing, misty gray, like a cow's breath on a
frosty morning. Evidently they had both
patronized the same tailor.

He was a wonder, that tailor. Using
practically the same stage effects, he had,

84 Roughing It De Luxe

nevertheless, succeeded in making Clarence
look feminine and Clarice look masculine.
We had gone down to the rim to see them
off. And when they passed us in all the
gorgeousness of their city bridle-path re-
galia, enthroned on shaggy mules, behind
a flock of tourists in nondescript yet appro-
priate attire, and convoyed by a cowboy
who had no reverence in his soul for the
good, the sweet and the beautiful, but kept
sniggering to himself in a low, coarse way,
we felt — all of us — that if we never saw
another thing we were amply repaid for
our journey to Arizona.

The exactly opposite angle of this phe-
nomenon was presented by a certain East-
ern writer, a member, as I recall, of the
Jersey City school of Wild West story
writers, who went to Arizona about two
years ago to see if the facts corresponded
with his fiction; if not he would take steps
to have the facts altered — I believe that
was the idea. He reached El Tovar at
Grand Canon in the early morning, hur-
ried at once to his room and presently
appeared attired for breakfast. Compe-

Rabid and His Friends 85

tent eyewitnesses gave me the full details.
He wore a flannel shirt that was unbut-
toned at the throat to allow his Adam's
apple full sweep, a hunting coat, buckskin
pants and high boots, and about his waist
was a broad belt supporting on one side a
large revolver — one of the automatic kind,
which you start in to shooting by pulling
the trigger merely and then have to throw
a bucket of water on it to make it stop —
and on the other side, as a counterpoise,
was a buck-handled bowie knife such as
was so universally ' not used by the early
pioneers of our country.

As he crossed the lobby, jangling like a
milk wagon, he created a pronounced im-
pression upon all beholders. The hotel is
managed by an able veteran of the hotel
business, assisted by a charming and ac-
complished wife; it is patronized by scien-
tists, scholars and cosmopolitans, who come
from all parts of the world to see the
Grand Canon; and it is as up-to-the-minute
in its appointments and service as though
it fronted on Broadway, or Chestnut Street,
or Pennsylvania Avenue.

86 Roughing It De Luxe

Our hero careened across the interven-
ing space. On reaching the dining room
he snatched off his coat and, with a gesture
that would have turned Hackett or Faver-
sham as green with envy as a processed
stringbean, flung it aside and prepared to
enter. It was plain that he proposed to put
on no airs before the simple children of the
desert wilds. He would eat his antelope
steak and his grizzly b'ar chuck in his shirt-
sleeves, the way Kit Carson and Old Man
Bridger always did.

The young woman who presides over the
dining room met him at the door. In the
cool, clarified accents of a Wellesley grad-
uate, which she is, she invited him to have
on his things if he didn't mind. She also
offered to take care of his hardware for
him while he was eating. He consented to
put his coat back on, but he clung to his
weapons — there was no telling when the
Indians might start an uprising. Probably
at the moment it would have deeply pained
him to learn that the only Indian uprising
reported in these parts in the last forty
years was a carbuncle on the back of the

i H

Rabid and His Friends 89

neck of Uncle Hopi Hooligan, the gentle
copper-colored floorwalker of the white-
goods counter in the Hopi House, adjacent
to the hotel!

However, he stayed on long enough to
discover that even this far west ordinary
human garments make a most excellent
protective covering for the stranger. Many
of the tourists do not do this. They arrive
in the morning, take a hurried look at the
Canon, mail a few postal cards, buy a
Navajo blanket or two and are out again
that night. Yet they could stay on for a
month and make every hour count. To
begin with, there is the Canon, worth a
week of anybody's undivided attention.
Within easy reach are the Painted Desert
and the Petrified Forests — thousands of
acres of trees turned to solid agate. If
these things were in Europe they would be
studded thick with hotels and American
by the thousand would flock across the
seas to look at them. There are cliff-
dwellers' ruins older than ancient Babylon
and much less expensive.

The reservations of the Hopis and the

90 Roughing It De Luxe

Navajos, most distinctive of all the South-
ern tribes, are handy, while all about
stretches a big Government reserve full
of natural wonders and unnatural ones,
too — everything on earth except a Lover's
Leap. There are unexcelled facilities for
Lover's Leaps, too — thousands of appro-
priate places are within easy walking dis-
tance of the hotel; but no lover ever yet
cared to leap where he would have to drop
five or six thousand feet before he landed.
He'd be such a mussy lover; no satisfac-
tion to himself then — or to the undertaker,
either.

However, as I was saying, most of the
tourists run in on the morning train and
out again on the evening train. To this
breed belonged a youth who dropped in
during our stay; I think he must have fol-
lowed the crowd in. As he came out from
breakfast I chanced to be standing on the
side veranda and I presume he mistook me
for one of the hired help. This mistake
has occurred before when I was stopping
at hotels.

"My friend," he said to me in the pat-

Rabid and His Friends 91

ronizing voice of an experienced traveler,
"is there anything interesting to see round
here at this time of day?"

Either he had not heard there was a
Grand Canon going on regularly in that
vicinity or he may have thought it was
open only for matinees and evenings. So
I took him by the hand and led him over
to the curio store and let him look at the
Mexican drawnwork. It seemed to satisfy
him, too — until by chance he glanced out
of a window and discovered that the Canon
was in the nature of a continuous per-
formance.

The same week there arrived a party of
six or eight Easterners who yearned to see
some of those real genuine Wild Western
characters such as they had met so often in
a film. The manager trotted out a troupe of
trail guides for them — all ex-cowboys; but
they, being merely half a dozen sunburned,
quiet youths in overalls, did not fill the
bill at all. The manager hated to have his
guests depart disappointed. Privately he
called his room clerk aside and told him
the situation and the room clerk offered to
oblige.

92 Roughing It De Luxe

The room clerk had come from Ohio
two years before and was a mighty accom-
modating young fellow. He slipped across
to the curio store and put on a big hat
and some large silver spurs and a pair of
leather chaps made by one of the most
reliable mail-order houses in this country.
Thus caparisoned, he mounted a pony and
came charging across the lawn, uttering
wild ki-yis and quirting his mount at every
jump. He steered right up the steps to
the porch where the delighted Easterners
were assembled, and then he yanked the
pony back on his haunches and held him
there with one hand while with the other
he rolled a brown-paper cigarette — which
was a trick he had learned in a high-school
frat at Cincinnati — and altogether he was
the picture of a regular moving-picture
cowboy and gave general satisfaction.

If the cowboys are disappointing in their
outward aspect, however, Captain Jim
Hance is not. The captain is the official
prevaricator of the Grand Canon. It is
probably the only salaried job of the sort
in the world — his competitors in the same

Rabid and His Friends 93

line of business mainly work for the love
of it. He is a venerable retired prospector
who is specially retained by the Santa Fe
road for the sole purpose of stuffing the
casual tourist with the kind of fiction the
casual tourist's system seems to crave. He
just moons round from spot to, spot, ro-
mancing as he goes.

Two of the captain's standbys have been
advertised to the world. One of them deals
with the sad fate of his bride, who on her
honeymoon fell off into the Canon and
lodged on a rim three hundred feet below.
"I was two days gettin' down to the poor
little thing," he tells you, "and then I seen
both her hind legs was broke." Here the
captain invariably pauses and looks out
musingly across the Canon until the victim
bites with an impatient "What happened
then?" "Oh, I knew she wouldn't be no
use to me any more as a bride — so I shot
her!" The other tale he saves up until
some tenderfoot notices the succession of
blazes upon the treetrunks along one of the
forest trails and wants to know what made
those peculiar marks upon the bark all at

94 Roughing It De Luxe

the same height from the earth. Captain
Hance explains that he himself did it—
with his elbows and knees — while fleeing
from a war party of Apaches.

His newest one, though — the one he is
featuring this year — is, in the opinion of
competent judges, the gem of the Hance
collection. It concerns the fate of one
Total Loss Watkins, an old and devoted
friend of the captain. As a preliminary
he leads a group of wide-eared, doe-eyed
victims to the rim of the Canon. "Right
here," he says sorrowfully, "was where
poor old Total slipped off one day. It's
two thousand feet to the first ledge and we
thought he was a gone fawnskin, sure!
But he had on rubber boots, and he had
the presence of mind to light standing up.
He bounced up and down for two days
and nights without stoppin', and then we
had to get a wingshot to kill him in order
to keep him from starvin' to death."

The next stop will be Southern Califor-
nia, the Land of Perpetual Sunshine — ex-
cept when it rains!

Roughing It De Luxe

HOW" DO YOU LIKE
THE CLIMATE?

Roughing It De Luxe

How Do You Like the
Climate?

ONCE upon a time a stranger went
to Southern California; and when
he was asked the customary ques-
tion— to wit: "How do you like the cli-
mate?" he said: "No, I don't like it!" So
they destroyed him on the spot. I have
forgotten now whether they merely hanged
him on the nearest tree or burned him at
the stake; but they destroyed him utterly
and hid his bones in an unmarked grave.

History, that lying jade, records that
when Balboa first saw the Pacific he
plunged breast-deep into the waves, drew
his sword and waved it on high, probably
using for that purpose the Australian
crawl stroke; and then, in that generous
and carefree way of the early discoverers,
claimed the ocean and all points west in

98 Roughing It De Luxe

the name of his Catholic Majesty, Carlos
the Cutup, or Pedro the Impossible, or
whoever happened to be the King of Spain
for the moment. Personal investigation
convinces me that the current version of
the above incident was wrong.

What Balboa did first was to state that
he liked the climate better than any cli-
mate he'd ever met; was perfectly crazy
about it, in fact, and intended to sell out
back East and move West just as soon as
he could get word home to his folks; after
which, still following the custom of the
country, he bought a couple of Navajo
blankets and some moccasins with blue
beadwork on the toes, mailed a few souve-
nir postcards to close friends, and had his
photograph taken showing him standing
in the midst of the tropical verdure, with
a freshly picked orange in his hand. And
if he waved his sword at all it was with
the idea of forcing the real-estate agents
to stand back and give him air. I am sure
that these are the correct details, because
that is what every round-tripper does upon
arriving in Southern California; and,

Climate 99

though Balboa finished his little jaunt of
explorations at a point some distance below
the California state line, he was still in
the climate belt. Life out there in that
fair land is predicated on climate; out
there climate is capitalized, organized and
systematized. Every native is a climate
booster; so is every newcomer as soon as
he has stuck round long enough to get the
climate habit, which is in from one to
three days. They talk climate; they think
climate; they breathe it by day; they snore
it by night; and in between times they live
on it. And it is good living, too — espe-
cially for the real-estate people and the
hotel-keepers.

Southern Californians brag of their cli-
mate just as New York brags of its wick-
edness and its skyscrapers, and as Rich-
mond brags of its cooking and its war
memories. I don't blame them either; the
California climate is worth all the brags
it gets. Back East in the wintertime we
have weather; out in Southern California
they never have weather — nothing but cli-
mate. For hours on hours a native will

100 Roughing It De Luxe

stand outdoors, with his hat off and his
head thrown back, inhaling climate until
you can hear his nostrils smack. And after
you've been on the spot a day or two you're
doing the same thing yourself, for, in addi-
tion to being salubrious, the California cli-
mate is catching.

Just as soon as you cross the Arizona
line you discover that you have entered
the climate belt. As your train whizzes
past the monument that marks the bound-
ary an earnest-minded passenger leans over,
taps you on the breastbone and informs
you that you are now in California, and
wishes to know, as man to man, whether
you don't regard the climate as about the
niftiest article in that line you ever experi-
enced! At the hotel the young lady of the
telephone switchboard, who calls you in
the morning, plugs in the number of your
room; and when you drowsily answer the
bell she informs you that it is now eight-
thirty and— What do you think of the cli-
mate? The boy who sells you a paper
and the youth who blackens your shoes
both show solicitude to elicit your views
upon this paramount subject.

Climate 103

At breakfast the waiter finds out — if he
can — how you like the climate before find-
ing out how you like your eggs. When
you pay your bill on going away the clerk
somehow manages to convey the impression
that the charges have been remarkably
moderate considering what you have en-
joyed in the matter of climate. Punching
your round-trip ticket on the train starting
East, the conductor has a few well-merited
words to speak on behalf of the climate
of the Glorious Southland, the same being
the favorite pet name of the resident classes
for the entire lower end of the state of
California.

Everybody is doing it, including press,
pulpit and general public. The weather
story — beg pardon, the climate story — is
the most important thing in the daily pa-
per, especially if a blizzard has oppor-
tunely developed back East somewhere and
is available for purposes of comparison.
At Los Angeles, which is the great throb-
bing heart of the climate belt, I went as
a guest to a stag given at the handsome
new clubhouse of a secret order renowned

104 Roughing It De Luxe

the continent over for its hospitality and
its charities. We sat, six or seven hundred
of us, in a big assembly hall, smoked cigars
and drank light drinks, and witnessed some
corking good sparring bouts by non-profes-
sional talent. There were two or three
ministers present — fine, alert representa-
tives of the modern type of city clergymen.
When eleven o'clock came the master of
ceremonies announced the toast, To Our
Absent Brothers! and called upon one of
those clergymen to respond to it.

The minister climbed up on the platform
— a tall man, with a thick crop of hair
and a profile as clean cut as a cameo and
as mobile as an actor's, the face of a born
orator. He could talk, too, that preacher!
In language that was poetic without being
sloppy he paid a tribute to the spirit of
fraternity that fairly lifted us out of our
chairs. Every man there was touched, I
think — and deeply touched; no man who
believed in the brotherhood of man,
whether he practiced it or not, could have
listened unmoved to that speech. He spoke
of the absent ones. Some of them he said

Climate 105

had answered the last rollcall, and some
were stretched upon the bed of affliction,
and some were unavoidably detained by
business in the East; and he intimated that
those in the last category who had been
away for as long as three weeks wouldn't
know the old place when they got back!
—Applause.

This naturally brought him round to the
subject of Los Angeles as a city of business
and homes. He pointed out its marvelous
growth — quoting freely from the latest is-
sue of the city directory and other reliable
authorities to prove his figures; he made
a few heartrousing predictions touching
on its future prospects, as tending to show
that in a year or less San Francisco and
other ambitious contenders along the Coast
would be eating at the second table; he
peopled the land clear back to the moun-
tains with new homes and new neighbors;
and he wound up, in a burst of vocal glory,
with the most magnificent testimonial for
the climate I ever heard any climate get.
Did he move his audience then? Oh, but
didn't he move them, though! Along

106 Roughing It De Luxe

toward the close of the third minute of
uninterrupted cheering I thought the roof
was gone.

On the day after my arrival I made one
very serious mistake; in fact, it came near
to being a fatal one. I met a lady, and
naturally right away she asked me the
customary opening question. Every con-
versation between a stranger and a resident
begins according to that formula. Still it
seemed to me an inopportune hour for
bringing up the subject. It was early in
March and the day was one of those days
which a greenhorn from the East might
have been pardoned for regarding as verg-
ing upon the chilly — not to say the raw.
Also, it seemed to be raining. I say it
seemed to be raining, because no true
Southern Californian would admit any
actual defects in the climatic arrangements.
If pressed he might concede that ostensibly
an infinitesimal percentage of precipita-
tion was descending, and that apparently
the mercury had descended a notch or two
in the tube. Further than that, in the
absence of the official reports, he would
not care to commit himself.

Climate 107

You never saw such touching loyalty
anywhere! Those scoffing neighbors of
Noah who kept denying on there was
going to be any flood right up to the mo-
ment when they went down for the third
time were rank amateurs alongside a sea-
soned resident of Los Angeles. I was
newly arrived, however, and I hadn't ac-
quired the ethics yet; and, besides, I had
contracted a bad cold and had been taking
a number of things for it and for the
moment was, as you might say, full of
conflicting emulsions. So, in reply to this
lady's question, I said it occurred to me
that the prevalent atmospheric conditions
might for the nonce stand a few trifling
alterations without any permanent ill ef-
fects.

I repeat that this was a mistake; for this
particular lady was herself a recent arrival,
and of all the incurable Californians, the
new ones are the most incurable. She gave
me one look — but such a look! From
a reasonably solid person I became first a
pulp and then a pap; and then, reversing
the processes of creation as laid down in

108 Roughing It De Luxe

Genesis, first chapter, and first to fifth
verses, I liquefied and turned to gas, and
darkness covered me, and I became void
and without form, and passed off in the
form of a vapor, leaving my clothes in-
habited only by a blushing and embar-
rassed emptiness. When the outraged lady
abated the intensity of her scornful gaze
and I painfully reassembled my astral
body out of space and projected it back
into my earthly tenement again, I found
I'd shrunk so in these various processes
that nothing I wore fitted me any longer.

I shall never commit that error again.
I know better now. If I were a con-
demned criminal about to die on a gal-
lows at the state penitentiary, I would
make the customary announcement touch-
ing on my intention of going straight to
Heaven — condemned criminals never seem
to have any doubt on that point — and then
in conclusion I would add that after South-
ern California, I knew I wouldn't care for
the climate Up There. Then I would step
serenely off into eternity, secure in the be-
lief that, no matter how heinous my crime

Climate 109

might have been, all the local papers would
give me nice obituary notices.

I'd be absolutely sure of the papers, be-
cause the papers are the last to concede
that there ever was or ever will be a flaw
in the climate anywhere. In a certain city
out on the Coast there is one paper that
refuses even to admit that a human being
can actually expire while breathing the
air of Southern California. It won't go
so far as to say that anybody has died—
"passed away" is the term used. You read
in its columns that Medulla Oblongata, the
Mexican who was kicked in the head by
a mule last Sunday afternoon, has passed
away at the city hospital; or that, during
yesterday's misunderstanding in Chinatown
between the Bing Bangs and the Ok Lou-
ies, two Tong men were shot and cut in
such a manner that they practically passed
away on the spot. When I was there I
traveled all one day over the route of an
unprecedented cold snap that had hap-
pened along a little earlier and mussed up
the citrus groves; and, though I will not
go so far as to say that the orange crop

110 Roughing It De Luxe

had died or that it had been killed, it did
look to me as though it had passed away
to a considerable extent

This sort of visitation, however, doesn't
occur often; in fact, it never had occurred
before — and the chances are it never will
occur again. Next to taxes and the high
cost of living, I judge the California cli-
mate to be about the most dependable
institution we have in this country — yes,
and one of the most satisfactory, too. To
its climate California is indebted for being
the most extravagantly beautiful spot I've
seen on this continent. It isn't just beau-
tiful in spots — it is beautiful all over; it
isn't beautiful in a sedate, reserved way-
there is a prodigal, riotous, abandoned
spendthriftiness to its beauty.

I don't know of anything more wonder-
ful than an automobile ride through one
of the fruit valleys in the Mission coun-
try. In one day's travel — or, at most, two
—you can get a taste of all the things that
make this farthermost corner of the United
States at once so diversified and so indi-
vidual— sky-piercing mountain and mirage-

Climate 111

painted desert; seashore and upland; ranch
lands, farm lands and fruit lands; city and
town; traces of our oldest civilization and
stretches of our newest; wilderness and
jungle and landscape garden; the pines of
the snows, the familiar growths of the
temperate zone, the palms of the tropics;
and finally — which is California's own —
the Big Trees. All day you may ride and
never once will your eye rest upon a pic-
ture that is commonplace or trumpery.

Going either North or South, your
road lies between mountains. To the east-
ward, shutting out the deserts from this
domain of everlasting summer, are the
Sierras — great saw-edged old he-moun-
tains, masculine as bulls or bucks, all rug-
ged and wrinkled, bearded with firs and
pines upon their jowls, but bald-headed
and hoar with age atop like the Prophets
of old. But the mountains of the Coast
Range, to the westward, are full-bosomed
and maternal, mothering the valleys up to
them; and their round-uddered, fecund
slopes are covered with softest green. Only
when you come closer to them you see

112 Roughing It De Luxe

that the garments on their breasts are not
silky-smooth as they looked at a distance,
but shirred and gored, gathered and
smocked. I suppose even a lady moun-
tain never gets too old to follow the
fashions!

Now you pass an orchard big enough to
make a hundred of your average Eastern
orchards; and if it be of apples or plums
or cherries, and the time be springtime,
it is all one vast white bridal bouquet; but
if it be of almonds or peaches the whole
land, maybe for miles on end, blazes with
a pink flame that is the pinkest pink in
the world — pinker than the heart of a ripe
watermelon; pinker than the inside of a
blond cow.

Here is a meadowland of purest, deep-
est green; and flung across it, like a streak
of sunshine playing hooky from Heaven, is
a slash of wild yellow poppies. There,
upon a hillside, stands a clump of gnarly,
dwarfed olives, making you think of Bible
times and the Old Testament. Or else it
is a great range, where cattle by thousands
feed upon the slopes. Or a crested ridge,

Climate 113

upon which the gum trees stand up in long
aisles, sorrowful and majestic as the fune-
real groves of the ancient Greeks — that is,
provided it was the ancient Greeks who
had the funereal groves.

Or, best of all and most striking in its
contrasts, you will see a hill all green,
with a nap on it like a family album; and
right on the top of it an old, crumbly gray
mission, its cross gleaming against the sky-
line; and, down below, a modern town,
with red roofs and hipped windows, its
houses buried to their eaves in palms and
giant rose bushes, and huge climbing ge-
raniums, and all manner of green tropical
growths that are Nature's own Christmas
trees, with the red-and-yellow dingle-dan-
gles growing upon them. Or perhaps it
is a gorge choked with the enormous red-
woods, each individual tree with a trunk
like the Washington Monument. And, if
you are only as lucky as we were, up
overhead, across the blue sky, will be drift-
ing a hundred fleecy clouds, one behind
the other, like woolly white sheep grazing
upon the meadows of the firmament.

114 Roughing It De Luxe

Everywhere the colors are splashed on
with a barbaric, almost a theatrical, touch.
It's a regular backdrop of a country; its
scenery looks as though it belonged on a
stage — as though it should be painted on
a curtain. You almost expect to see a
chorus of comic-opera brigands or a bevy
of stage milkmaids come trooping out of
the wings any minute. Who was the libel-
ous wretch who said that the flowers of
California had no perfume and the birds
there had no song? Where we passed
through tangled woods the odors distilled
from the wild flowers by the sun's warmth
were often almost suffocating in their
sweetness; and in a yellow-tufted bush
on the lawn at Coronado I came upon a
mocking-bird singing in a way to make
his brother minstrel of Mobile or Savan-
nah feel like applying for admission to a
school of expression and learning the sing-
ing business all over again.

At the end of the valley — top end or
bottom end as the case may be — you come
to a chain of lesser mountains, dropped
down across your path like a trailing wing

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Climate 11 7

of the Indians' fabled thunder-bird, vainly
trying to shut you out from the next valley.
You climb the divide and run through the
pass, with a brawling river upon one side
and tall cliffs upon the other; and then
all of a sudden the hills magically part
and you are within sight — almost within
touch — of the ocean; for in this favored
land the mountains come right down to
the sea and the sea comes right up to the
mountains. It may be upon a tiny bay that
you have emerged, with the meadows slop-
ing straight to tidemark, and out beyond
the wild fowl feeding by the kelp beds.

Or perhaps you have come out upon a
ragged, rugged headland, crowned belike
with a single wind-twisted tree, grotesquely
suggesting a frizzly chicken; and away
below, straight and sheer, are the rocks
rising out of the water like the jaws of a
mangle. Down there in that ginlike reef
Neptune is forever washing out his shirt
in a smother of foamy lather. And he has
spilled his bluing pot, too — else how could
all the sea be so blue? On the outermost
rocks the sea-lions have stretched them-

118 Roughing It De Luxe

selves, looking like so many overgrown
slugs; and they lie for hours and sun
themselves and bellow — or, at least, I am
told they do so on occasion. There was
unfortunately no bellowing going on the
day I was there.

.The unearthly beauty of the whole thing
overpowers you. The poet that lives in
nearly every human soul rouses within you
and you feel like withdrawing to yon dense
grove or yon peaked promontory to com-
mune with Nature. But be advised in
season. Restrain yourself! Carefully re-
frain! Do not do so! Because out from
under a rock somewhere will crawl a real-
estate agent to ask you how you like the
climate and take a dollar down as first
payment on a fruit ranch, or a suburban
lot, or a seaside villa — or something.

Climate did it and he can prove it.
Only he doesn't have to prove it — you
admit it. I had never seen the Mediter-
ranean when I went West; but I saw the
cypresses of Del Monte, and the redwood
grove in the canon just below Harry Leon
Wilson's place, down past Carmel-by-the-

Climate 119

Sea ; and that was sufficient. I had no burn-
ing yearning to see Naples and die, as the
poet suggested. I felt that I would rather
see Monterey Bay again on a bright March
day and live I

And for all of this — for fruit, flowers
and scenery, for real-estate agents, and for
a race of the most persistent boosters under
the sun — the climate is responsible. Cli-
mate advertised is responsible for the rush
of travel from the East that sets in with
the coming of winter and lasts until well
into the following spring; and climate real-
ized is responsible for the string of tourist
hotels that dot the Coast all along from
just below San Francisco to the Mexican
border.

Both externally and internally the ma-
jority of these hotels are singularly alike.
Mainly they are rambling frame structures
done in a modified Spanish architecture-
late Spanish crossed on Early Peoria — with
a lobby so large that, loafing there, you
feel as though you were in the waiting-room
of the Grand Central Terminal, and with
a dining room about the size of the state

120 Roughing It De Luxe

of Rhode Island, and a sun parlor that has
windows all round, so as to give its occu-
pants the aspect, when viewed from with-
out, of being inmates of an aquarium; and
a gorgeous tea room done in the style of
one of the French Louies — Louie the
Limit, I guess. There are some notable
exceptions to the rule — some of the places
have pleasing individualities of their own,
but most of them were cut off the same
pattern. Likewise the bulk of their winter
patrons are cut off the same pattern.

The average Eastern tourist is a funny
biped anyhow, and he is at his funniest
out in California. Living along the East-
ern seaboard are a large number of well-
to-do people who barken not to the slogan
of See America First, because many of
them cannot see America at any price;
they can just barely recognize its exist-
ence as a suitable place for making money,
but no place for spending it. What makes
life worth living to them is the fact that
Europe is distant only a four-day run by
the four-day boat, the same being known
as a four-day boat because only four days

Climate 121

are required for the run between Daunt's
Rock and Ambrose Channel, which is a
very convenient arrangement for deep-sea
divers and long-distance swimmers desir-
ing to get on at Daunt's Rock and get off
in Ambrose Channel, but slightly extend-
ing the journey for passengers who are less
amphibious by nature.

These people constitute one breed of
Eastern tourists. There is the other breed,
who are willing to see America provided
it is made over to conform with the ac-
cepted Eastern model. Those who can
afford the expense go to Florida in the
winter; but it requires at least a million in
small change to feel at home in that set-
ting, and so a good many who haven't quite
a million to spare, head for Southern Cali-
fornia as the next best spot on the map.
Arriving there, they endeavor to reproduce
on as exact a scale as possible the life of
the ultra fashionable Florida resorts; the
result is what a burlesque manager would
call a Number Two Palm Beach company
playing the Western Wheel.

Up and down the Coast these tourists

122 Roughing It De Luxe

traipse for months on end, spending a week
here and two weeks there, and doing the
same things in the same way at each new
stopping place. You meet them, part from
them, and meet them again at the next
stand, until the monotony of it grows mad-
dening; and always they are intently fol-
lowing the routine you saw them following
last week or the week before, or the week
before that. They have traveled clear
across the continent to practice such diver-
sions as they might have had within two
hours' ride of Philadelphia or New York;
and they are going to practice them, too,
or know the reason why.

Of course they are not all constituted
this way; I am speaking now of the im-
pression created in California by tourists
in bulk. They decline to do the things
for which this country is best adapted;
they will not see the things for which it is
most famous. Few of them take the rough-
ing trips up into the mountains; fewer still
visit the desert country. All about them
the tremendous engineering contracts that
have made this land a commercial Arabian

Climate 123

Nights' Entertainment are being carried
out — the mighty reclamation schemes; the
irrigation projects; the damming up of
canons and the shoveling away of moun-
tains— but your average group of Eastern
tourists pass these by with dull and glazed
eyes, their souls being bound up in the
desire to reach the next hotel on the route
with the least possible waste of time, and
take up the routine where it was broken
off at the last hotel.

They tennis and they golf, and some go
horseback riding and some take drives;
and at one or two places there is polo in
the season. Likewise, in accordance with
the rules laid down by the Palm Beach
authorities, the women change clothes as
often as possible during the course of the
day; and in the evening all hands appear
in full dress for dinner, the same being
very wearing on men and very pleasing
to women — that is, all of them do except
a few obstinate persons who defy conven-
tion and remain comfortable. After dinner
some of the younger people dance and
some of the older ones play bridge; but

124 Roughing It De Luxe

the vast majority sit round — and then sit
round some more and wonder whether
eleven o'clock will ever come so they can
go to bed!

A good many take the wrong kind of
clothes out there with them. They have
read in the advertisements that Southern
California is a land of perpetual balm,
where flowers bloom the year round; and
they pack their trunks with the lightest
and thinnest wearing apparel they own,
which is a mistake. The natives know
better than that. The all-wool sweater is
the national garment of the Western Coast
—both sexes and all ages go to it unani-
mously. Experience proves it the ideal
thing to wear; for in Southern California
in the winter it is never really hot in the
sun and it is often exceedingly cool in the
shade. Besides, there is a sea wind that
blows pretty regularly and which makes
a specialty of working through the cran-
nies in a silk shirt or a lingerie blouse.
The chilliest, most pallid-looking things I
ever saw in my life were a pair of white
linen trousers I found in the top tray of

Climate 125

my trunk when I reached the extreme
lower end of California. I had to cover
them under two blankets and a bedspread
that night to keep the poor things from
freezing stiff.

The medium-weight garments an East-
erner wears between seasons are admirably
suited for the West Coast in the winter;
but the guileless tenderfoot who is making
his first trip to California usually doesn't
learn this until it is too late If he is wise
he studies out the situation on his arrival,
and thereafter takes his overcoat with him
when he goes riding and his sweater when
he goes walking; but there are many others
who will be summer boys and girls though
they perish in the attempt.

At Coronado I witnessed a mighty piti-
able sight. It was a cool day, cooler than
ordinary even, with a stiff wind blowing
skeiny shreds of sea fog in off the gray
ocean; and a beating rain was falling at
frequent intervals. The veranda was full
of Easterners trying to look comfortable in
summer clothes and not succeeding, while
the road in front was dotted with Western-

126 Roughing It De Luxe

ers, comfortable and cozy in their thick
sweaters. There emerged upon the wind-
swept porch a youth who would have been
a sartorial credit to himself on a Florida
beach in February or upon a Jersey board-
walk in August; but he did not coincide
with the atmospheric scheme of things on a
rainy March day down in Southern Cali-
fornia.

To begin with, he was a spindly and
fragile person, with a knobby forehead and
a fade-away face. Dressed in close-fitting
black and turned sidewise, with his profile
to you, he would instantly suggest a neatly
rolled umbrella with a plain bone handle.
But he was not dressed in black; he was
dressed in white — all white, like a bride
or a bandaged thumb; white silk shirt;
white flannel coat, with white pearl but-
tons spangled freely over it; white trou-
sers; white Panama hat; white socks; white
buckskin shoes, with white rubber soles on
them. He was, in short, all white except
his face, which was a pinched, wan blue,
and his nose, which was a suffused and
chilly red. If my pencil had had an eraser

Climate 129

on it I'm satisfied I could have backed him
up against the wall and rubbed him right
out; but he bore up splendidly.

It was plain he felt that he was properly
dressed for the time, the place and the oc-
casion; and to him that was ample compen-
sation for his suffering. I heard afterward
that he lost three sets of tennis and had a
congestive chill — all in the course of the
same afternoon.

The unconquerable determination of the
Eastern tourist to have Southern Califor-
nia conform to his back-home standards is
responsible for the fact that many of the
tourist hotels out there are not so typical
of the West as they might be — and as in my
humble judgment they should be — but are
as Eastern as it is possible to make them —
Eastern in cuisine, in charges and in their
operating schedules. Here, again, there
are some notable exceptions.

In the supposedly wilder sections of the
West, lying between the Rockies and the
Sierras, the situation is different. It is
notably different in Arizona and New
Mexico in the South, and in Utah, Mon-

130 Roughing It De Luxe

tana and Wyoming in the North. There
the person who serves you for hire is
neither your menial nor your superior;
whereas in the East he or she is nearly al-
ways one or the other, and sometimes both
at once. This particular type of West-
erner doesn't patronize you; neither does
he cringe to you in expectation of a tip.
He gives you the best he has in stock,
meanwhile retaining his own self-respect
and expecting you to do the same. He en-
nobles and dignifies personal service.

Out on the Coast, however — or at least
at several of the big hotels out on the
Coast — the system, thanks to Eastern in-
fluence, has been changed. The whole
scheme is patterned after the accepted
New York model. The charges for small
services are as exorbitant as in New York,
and the iniquities of the tipping system are
worked out as amply and as wickedly as
in the city where they originated.

Somebody with a taste for statistics fig-
ured it out once that if a man owned a
three-dollar hat and wore it for two
months, lunching every day at a New York

Climate 131

cafe, and if he dined four nights a week at
a New York restaurant and attended the
theater twice a week, his hat at the end of
those two months would cost him in tips
eighteen dollars and seventy cents! No,
on second thought, I guess it was a pair of
earmuffs that would have cost him eigh-
teen-seventy.

A hat would have been more.

It would be more in Southern Califor-
nia— I'm sure of that. There the tipping
habit is made more expensive by reason of
the prevalent spirit of Western generosity.
The born Westerner never has got used to
dimes and nickels. To him quarters are
still chicken-feed and a half dollar is small
change. So the tips are just as numerous
as in New York and for the same service
they are frequently larger.

A lot has been said and written about
the marvelous palms of Lower California
and a lot more might be said — for they are
outstretched everywhere; and if you don't
cross them with silver at frequent intervals
you would do well to try camping out for
a change. Likewise a cursory glance at the

132 Roughing It De Luxe

prices on some of the menus is calculated
to make a New Yorker homesick — they're
so familiarly and unreasonably steep. And
frequently the dishes you get aren't typical
of the country; they are — thanks again be
to the Easterner — mostly transplanted imi-
tations of the concoctions of the Broadway
and the Fifth Avenue chefs.

There are compensations, though. There
are some hotels that are operated on admir-
ably different lines, and there are abundant
opportunities for escaping altogether from
hotel life and seeing this Land of the Liv-
ing Backdrop where it is untainted and
unspoiled; where the hills are clothed in
green and yellow; where little Spanishy
looking towns nestle below the Missions,
and the mocking-birds sing, and the real-
estate boomer leaps from crag to crag,
sounding his flute-like note. And don't
forget the climate! But that is unneces-
sary advice. You won't have a chance to
forget it — not for a minute you won't!

Roughing It De Luxe

IN THE HAUNT OF THE
NATIVE SON

Roughing It De Luxe

In the
Haunt of the Native Son

THERE are various ways of entering
San Francisco, and the traveling
general passenger agent of any one
of half a dozen trunklines stands ready to
prove to you — absolutely beyond the perad-
venture of a doubt— that his particular way
is incomparably the best one; but to my
mind a very satisfactory way is to go over-
land from Monterey.

The route we followed led us lengthwise
through the wonderful Santa Clara coun-
try, straight up a wide box plait of valley
tucked in between an ornamental double
ruffle of mountains. I suppose if we passed
one ranch we passed a thousand — cattle
ranches, fruit ranches, hen ranches, chicken
ranches, bee ranches — all the known varie-
ties and subvarieties.

136 Roughing It De Luxe

In California you mighty soon get out of
the habit of speaking of farms; for there
are no farms — only ranches. The particu-
lar ranch to which you have reference may
be a ten-thousand-acre ranch, where they
raise enough beef critters to feed a standing
army, or it may be a half-acre ranch, where
somebody is trying to make things home-
like and happy for eight hens and a
rooster; but a ranch it always is, and usu-
ally it is a model of its kind, too. The
birds in California do not build nests.
They build ranches.

Most of the way along the Santa Clara
Valley our tires glided upon an arrow-
straight, unbelievably smooth stretch of
magnificent automobile road, which -
when it is completed — will extend with-
out a break from the Oregon line to the
Mexican line, and will be the finest, cost-
liest, best thoroughfare to be found within
the boundaries of any state of the Union,
that being the scale upon which they work
out their public-utility plans in the West.

Eventually the road changes into a paved
and curbed avenue, lined with seemingly

The Native Son 137

unending aisles of the tall gum trees. Soon
you begin to skitter past the suburban vil-
las of rich men, set back in ornamental
landscape effects of green lawns and among
tropical verdure. You emerge from this
into a gently rolling plateau, upon which
flower gardens of incomparable richness
are interspersed with the homely structures
that inevitably mark the proximity of any
great city. There, rising ahead of you,
are the foothills that protect, upon its land-
ward side, San Francisco, the city that has
produced more artists, more poets, more
writers, more actors, more pugilists, more
sudden millionaires — cries of Question!
Question! from the Pittsburgh delegation
—more good fiction and more Native Sons
than any community in the Western Hem-
isphere.

You aren't there yet, however. Next
you round a sloping shoulder of a hill and
slide down into a shore road, with the beat-
ing, creaming surf on one side, and on the
other a long succession of the sort of archi-
tectural triumphs that have made Coney
Island famous. You negotiate another

138 Roughing It De Luxe

small ridge and there, suddenly spread out
before you, is the Golden Gate, with the
city itself cuddled in between the ocean
and the friendly protecting mountains at its
back. The Seal Rocks are there, and the
Cliff House, and the Presidio, and all.
New York has a wonderful harbor en-
trance; Nature did some of it and man did
the rest. San Francisco has an even more
wonderful one, and the hand of man did
not need to touch it. When Nature got
through with it, it was a complete and sat-
isfactory job.

The first convincing impression the new-
comer gets of San Francisco is that here is
a permanent city — a city that has found
itself, has achieved its own personality,
and is satisfied with it. Perhaps, because
they are growing so fast, certain of the
other Coast cities strike the casual observer
as having just been put up. I was told
that a man who lives on a residential street
of San Diego has to mark his house with
chalk when he leaves of a morning in or-
der to know it when he gets home at night.
A real-estate agent told me so, and I do

The Native Son 139

not think a Southern California real-estate
agent would deceive anybody — more par-
ticularly a stranger from the East. So it
must be true. And Los Angeles' main
business district is like a transverse slice
chopped out of the middle of Manhattan
Island. It isn't Western. It is typically
New Yorky — as alive as New York and as
handsomely done. You can almost imag-
ine you are at the corner of Broadway and
Forty-second Street.

San Francisco, it seems to me, isn't like
any city on earth except San Francisco.
Once you get away from the larger hotels,
which are accurate copies of the metro-
politan article of the East, even to the
afternoon tea-fighting melees of the women,
you find yourself in a city that is abso-
lutely individual and distinctive. It im-
presses its originality upon you; it presents
itself with an air of having been right there
from the beginning — and this, too, in spite
of the fact that the ravages of the great fire
are still visible in old cellar excavations
and piles of debris. Practically every
building in the main part of the town has

140 Roughing It De Luxe

been rebuilt within eight years and is still
new. The scars are fresh, but the spirit is
old and abides.

This same essence of individuality tinc-
tures the lives, the manners and the con-
versations of the people. They do not strike
you as being Westerners or as being trans-
planted Easterners; they are San Francis-
cans. Even when all other signs fail you
may, nevertheless, instantly discern cer-
tain unfailing traits — to wit, as follows:
i — A San Franciscan shudders with ill-
concealed horror when anybody refers to
his beloved city as Frisco — which nobody
ever does unless it be a raw alien from the
other side of the continent; 2 — He does
not brag of the climate with that con-
stancy which provides his neighbor of
Los Angeles a never-failing topic of con-
genial conversation; and 3 — He assures
you with a regretful sighing note in his
voice that the old-time romance disap-
peared with the destruction of the old-time
buildings, the old-time resorts and the old-
time neighborhoods.

It has been my experience that romance

The Native Son 141

is always in the past tense anyhow. Ro-
mance is a commodity that was extremely
plentiful last week or last year or last cen-
tury, but for the moment they are entirely
out of it, and can't say with any degree of
certainty when a fresh stock will be com-
ing in. This is largely true of all the for-
merly romantic cities I know anything
about, and it appears to be especially true
of San Francisco. Romance invariably
acquires added value after it has vanished;
in this respect it is very much like a his-
tory-making epoch. An epoch rarely
seems to create any great amount of excite-
ment when it is in process of epoching, or
at least the excitement is only temporary
and soon abates. Afterward we look back
upon it with a feeling of longing, but when
it was actually coming to pass we took it —
after the first shock of surprise — as a mat-
ter of course.

No doubt our children and our chil-
dren's children will read in the text-books
that the first decade of the twentieth cen-
tury was distinguished as the age when the
auto and tango came into use, and people

142 Roughing It De Luxe

learned to fly, and grown men wore brace-
let watches and carried their handker-
chiefs up their cuffs; and they will repine
because they, too, did not live in those
stirring times. But we of the present gen-
eration who recently passed through these
experiences have already accepted them
without undue excitement, just as our fore-
fathers in their day accepted the submarine
cable, the galvanic battery and the congress
gaiter.

Age and antiquity give an added value
to everything except an egg. In my own
case I know how it was with regard to the
Egyptian scarab. For years I felt that I
could never rest satisfied until I had gone
to Egypt and had personally broken into
the tomb of some sleeping Pharaoh or some
crumbly old Rameses, and with my own
hands had ravished from it a mummified
specimen of that fabled beetle which the
ancients worshiped and buried with them
in their tombs. But not long ago I made
the discovery that, in coloring, habits, cus-
toms and general walk and conversation,
the scarab of the Egyptians was none

The Native Son 145

other than the common tumblebug of the
Southern dirt roads. Right there was
where I lost interest in the scarab. He
was no novelty to me — not after that he
wasn't. As a boy I had known him in-
timately.

So, when I was repeatedly assured that
the old-time romance had vanished from
San Francisco, and with it the atmosphere
that bred Bohemianism and developed lit-
erature and art, and kept alive the spirit of
the Forty-niner times, and all that, I made
my own allowances. Those who mourned
for the fire-blasted past may have been
right, in a measure. Certainly the old-time
Chinatown isn't there any more — or, at
any rate, isn't there in its physical aspects.
The rebuilt Chinatown of San Francisco,
though infinitely larger, isn't so picturesque
really or so Chinesey looking as New
York's Chinatown.

I did not dare to give utterance to this
treasonable statement until I was well away
from San Francisco, but it is true all the
same. I cruised the shores of the far-
famed and much-written-about Barbary

146 Roughing It De Luxe

Coast; and it seemed to me that in its dun-
colored tiresomeness and in its miserable
transparent counterfeit of joy it was up to
the general metropolitan average — that it
was just as tiresome and humdrum as the
avowedly wicked section of any city al-
ways "is.

However, I was told that I had arrived
just one week too late to see the Barbary
Coast at its best — meaning by that its
worst; for during the week before the po-
lice, growing virtuous, had put the crusher
on the dance-halls and the hobble on the
tango-twisters. Even the place where the
turkey trot originated — a place that would
naturally be a shrine to a New Yorker-
was trotless and quiet — in mourning for its
firstborn.

The so-called French restaurants, which
for years gave an unwholesome savor to
certain phases of San Francisco life, had
likewise been sterilized and purified. I
wished I might have got there before the
housecleaning took place; but, even so, I
should probably have been disappointed.
What makes the vice of ancient Babylon

The Native Son 147

seem by contrast more seductive to us than
the vice of the Bowery is that Babylon is
gone and the Bowery isn't.

Likewise the night life of San Francisco,
of which in times past I had read so much,
was disillusionizing, because it wasn't vis-
ible to the naked eye. On this proposition
Los Angeles puts it all over San Francisco;
for this, though, there is an easy explana-
tion. Los Angeles boasts what is said to
be the completest trolley system in the
world; undoubtedly it is the noisiest in the
world. The tracks seem to run through
every street; there is a curve at every cor-
ner, I think, and a switch in the middle of
every block. Every thirty seconds or so a
car comes along, and it always comes at top
speed and takes the curve without slacken-
ing up; and the motorman is always clang-
ing his gong in a whole-souled manner that
would entitle him to membership in the
Swiss Bellringers.

Naturally the folks in Los Angeles stay
up late — they can't figure on doing much
sleeping anyhow; but either San Francisco
has fewer trolley cars to the acre or else

148 Roughing It De Luxe

the motormen are not quite so musically
inclined, and people may get to bed at a
Christian hour. Most of them do it, too, if
I am one to judge. At night in San Fran-
cisco I didn't see a single owl lunch wagon
or meet a single beggar. Newsboys were
remarkably scarce and taxicabs seemed to
be few and far between. These things
help to make any other city; without them
San Francisco still manages to be a city—
another proof of her individuality.

The old romance of the Old San Fran-
cisco may be dead and buried — the resi-
dents unite in saying that it is, and they
ought to know; but, even so, New San
Francisco may well brag today of a greater
romance than any it ever knew — the ro-
mance of achievement. Somebody said
not long ago that the greatest of all monu-
ments to American pluck was San Fran-
cisco rebuilt; but if there was pluck in it
there was romance too. And there is ro-
mance, plenty of it, in the exposition these
people have planned and are now carrying
out to commemorate the opening of the
Panama Canal.

The Native Son 149

To begin with, citizens of San Francisco
and of the state of California are paying
the whole bill themselves — they did not
ask the Federal Government to contribute
a red cent of the millions being spent and
that will be spent, and to date the Federal
Government has not contributed a red cent
either. Climatic conditions are in their fa-
vor. Other expositions have had to contend
with hot weather — sometimes with beastly
hot weather; those other expositions could
not open up until well into the spring, and
they closed perforce with the coming of
cold weather in the fall. But San Fran-
cisco is never very hot and never really
cold, and California becomes an out-of-
door land as soon as the rains end; so this
fair will be actively and continuously in
operation for nine months instead of being
limited to four or five months as the period
of its greatest activities.

Then, again, there is another advantage
— the exposition grounds are situated well
within the city; the site is within easy rid-
ing distance of the civic center and not
miles away from the middle of town, as

150 Roughing It De Luxe

has been the case in certain other instances
in this country where big expositions were
held. It is a place admirably devised by
Nature for the purposes to which it is
now being put — a six-hundred-acre tract
stretching along the water-front, with the
Presidio at its farther end, the high hills
behind it, and in front of it the exquisite
panorama of the Golden Gate, with emer-
ald islands rising beyond; and Berkeley
and Oakland just across the way; and on
beyond, northward across the narrowing
portals of the harbor, the big green moun-
tain of Tamalpais, rising sheer out of the
sea.

Moreover, the president of the exposi-
tion and his aides promised that the whole
thing, down to the minutest detail, would be
completed and ready months before the
date set for opening the gates — which fur-
nishes another strikingly novel note in ex-
positions, if their words come true; and
they declared that, for beauty of conception
and harmony of design, their exposition of
1915 would surpass any exposition ever seen
in this country or in any other country.

The Native Son 151

Probably they are right. I know that,
when I was there, the view from the first
rise back of the grounds, looking down
upon that long flat where men by thousands
were toiling, and building after building
was rising, made a picture sufficiently in-
spiring to warm the enthusiasm and brisken
the imagination of any man, be he alien or
native.

There isn't any doubt, though, that the
people of San Francisco are going to have
their hands full when the exposition visit-
ors begin to pile in. By that I do not mean
that the housing and feeding accommoda-
tions and the transit facilities will be de-
ficient; but it is going to be a most over-
poweringly big job to educate the pilgrims
up to the point where they will call San
Francisco by its full name. All true San
Franciscans are very touchy on this point —
touchy as hedgehogs, they are; the preju-
dice extends to all classes, with the possible
exception of the Chinese.

I heard a story of a seafaring person,
ignorant and newly arrived, who drifted
into a waterfront saloon, called for a sim-

152 Roughing It De Luxe

pie glass of beer and spoke a few casual
words of greeting to the barkeeper — and
woke up the next morning in the hospital
with a very bad headache and a bandage
round his throbbing brows. It developed
that he had three times in rapid succession
referred to the city as Frisco, and on being
warned against this practice had inquired:

"Well, wot do you want me to call her
— plain Fris?"

That was the last straw. The barkeeper
took a bung-starter and felled him as flat
as a felled seam — and all present agreed
that it served him right.

An even worse breach of etiquette on the
part of the outlander is to intimate that an
earthquake preceded the great fire. That
is positively the unforgivable sin! In any
quarter of the city you could get many sub-
scriptions for a fund to buy something
with silver handles on it for any man who
would insist upon talking of earthquakes.
To make my meaning clearer, I will state
that there are only two objects of general
use in the civilized world that have silver
handles on them, and one of them is a lov-

The Native Son 153

ing cup; but this article would not be a
loving cup. A native will willingly con-
cede that there was a fire, which burned
its memories deep into the consciousness
of the city that recovered from it with
such splendid courage and such incon-
ceivable rapidity; but by common consent
there was nothing else. It does not take
the stranger long to get this point of view,
either.

If I were in charge of the publicity
work of the San Francisco Fair I should
advertise two attractions that would surely
appeal to all the women in this country,
and to most of the men. In my press work
I would dwell at length upon the fact that
in this part of California a woman may
wear any weight and any style of clothes
— spring clothes, summer clothes, fall
clothes or winter clothes — and not only be
perfectly comfortable while so doing, but
be in the fashion besides; and to be in the
fashion is a thing calculated to make a
woman comfortable whether she otherwise
is or not.

To see a group of four women prome-

154 Roughing It De Luxe

nading a San Francisco street on a pleas-
ant morning is to be reminded of that bal-
let representing the Four Seasons, which
we used to see in the second act of every
well-regulated extravaganza. The woman
nearest the walls has on her furs — it is al-
ways cool in the shade; the one next to her
is wearing the very latest wrinkles in
spring garniture; the third one, let us say,
is dressed in the especially becoming frock
she bought last October; and the one on the
outside, where the sun shines the bright-
est, is as summery in her white ducks and
her white slippers as though she had just
stepped off the cover of the August num-
ber of a magazine. There is something,
too, about the salt-laden breezes of San
Francisco that gives women wonderful
complexions; that detail, properly press-
agented, ought to fetch the entire female
population of the United States.

For drawing the men, I would exploit
the great cardinal fact that nowhere in the
country — not even in Norfolk or Baltimore
or New Orleans — can you get better things
to eat than in San Francisco. For its size,

The Native Son 157

I believe there are more good clubs and
more good restaurants right there than in
any other spot on the habitable globe. Par-
ticularly in the preparation of the typical
dishes of the Coast do the San Francisco
cooks excel; their cuisine is based on a sane
American foundation, with a delectable
suggestion of the Spanish in it, and some-
times with a traceable suggestion of the
best there is in the Italian and the Chinese
schools of cookery.

To one whose taste in oysters has been
developed by eating the full-chested bi-
valve of the Eastern seaboard and the
deep-lunged, long-bodied product of the
Louisiana bayous, the native oyster does
not greatly appeal. A lot has been written
and printed about the California oyster,
but in my opinion he will always have con-
siderable difficulty in living up to his press
notices. It takes about a thousand of him
to make a quart and about a hundred of
him to make a taste. Even then he doesn't
taste much like a real oyster, but more like
an infinitesimal scrap of sponge where a
real oyster camped out overnight once.

158 Roughing It De Luxe

There is a dream of a little fish, how-
ever, called a sand dab — he is a tiny, floun-
der-shaped titbit hailing from deep water;
and for eating purposes he is probably the
best fish that swims — better even than the
pompano of the Gulf — and when you say
that you are saying about all there is to be
said for a fish. And the big crabs of the
Pacific side are the hereditary princes of
the crab family. They look like spread-
eagles; and properly prepared they taste
like Heaven. I often wonder what the
crabsters buy one-half so precious as the
stuff they sell — which is a quotation from
Omar, with original interpolations by me.
The domestic cheese of the Sierras is not
without its attractions also, whether you eat
it fresh or whether you keep it until its
general aspect and prevalent atmosphere
are such as to satisfy even one of those
epicurean cheese-eaters who think that no
cheese is fit to eat until you can't.

Another thing worthy of mention in con-
nection with this California school of cook-
ery is that you can pay as little as you
please for your dinner or as much as you

The Native Son 159

please. There are three standbys of the
exchange editor that may be counted upon
to appear in the newspapers about once in
so often. One is the hoary-headed and
toothless tale regarding the artist who was
hired to renovate religious paintings in a
church in Brussels, and turned in an item-
ized account including such entries as—
"Correcting the Ten Commandments";
"Restoring the Lost Souls"; "Renewing
Heaven"; and winding up with "Doing
Several Odd Jobs for the Damned."

The second of the set comes out of retire-
ment at frequent intervals — whenever some
trusting soul runs across a time-stained
number of the Ulster Gazette giving de-
tails of the death of George Washington—
I wonder how many million copies of that
venerable counterfeit were printed — and
writes in to his home editor about it.

And the third, the most popular clipping
of the three, concerns the prices that used
to govern at the mining camps in the days
of the early gold rush. The story that is
most commonly quoted has to do with the
menu of the El Dorado Hotel, at Placer-

160 Roughing It De Luxe

ville, where bean soup was a dollar a plate;
hash, lowgrade, seventy-five cents; hash,
eighteen-carat, a dollar — and so on down
the list to seventy-five cents for two Irish
potatoes, peeled.

The cost of living may have gone down
subsequently in those parts, but it has gone
back up again — at certain favored spots.
If the Argonauts, those hardy adventurers
who flung their gold round so regardlessly
and were not satisfied unless they paid out-
rageously big prices for everything, could
come back today they would have no cause
to complain at the contemptible paucity of
the bill after they had dined at any one of
half a dozen ultra-expensive hotels that are
to be found dotted along the Coast.

I append herewith a few items selected
at random from the price card of a fash-
ionable establishment in one of the larger
Coast cities: caviar imperial d'Astracan,
two dollars for a double portion; buffet
Russe — whatever that is — ninety cents;
German asparagus, a single helping, one
dollar and forty cents; blue-point oysters,
fifty cents; fifty cents for clams; Gorgon-

The Native Son 161

zola cheese, fifty cents a portion; and, in a
land where peaches and figs grow any-
where and everywhere, seventy-five cents
for an order of brandied peaches and fifty
cents for an order of spiced figs. Even sea-
soned New Yorkers have been known to
breathe hard on receiving a check for a
full meal at certain restaurants in Los An-
geles and San Francisco.

On the other hand, you can step round
any corner in San Francisco and walk into
that institution which people in other large
cities are forever seeking and never finding
— a table-d'hote restaurant where a perfect
meal is to be had at a most moderate price.
The best Italian restaurant in the world—
and I wish to say, after personal experience,
that Sunny Italy itself is not barred — is a
little place on the fringe of the Barbary
Coast.

There is another place not far away
where, for a dollar, you get a bottle of
good domestic wine and a selection from
the following range of dishes: Celery, ripe
olives, green olives, radishes, onions, let-
tuce, sliced tomatoes, combination salad

162 Roughing It De Luxe

or crab-meat salad; soup — onion or con-
somme; fish — sole, salmon, bass, sand dabs,
mussels or clams; entrees — sweetbreads
with mushrooms, curry of lamb, calf's
tougue, tripe with peppers, tagliatini a
1'Italienne, or boiled kidney with bacon;
vegetables — asparagus, string-beans and
cauliflower; roast — spring lamb with green
peas, broiled chicken or broiled pig's feet;
dessert — rhubarb pie, ice cream and cake,
apple sauce, stewed fruits, baked pear or
baked apple, mixed fruits; cheese of three
varieties, and coffee to wind up on.

The proprietor doesn't cut out his por-
tions with a pair of buttonhole scissors,
either, or sauce them with a medicine-
dropperful of gravy. He gives a big, full,
satisfying helping, well cooked and well
served. There is some romance in the San
Francisco cooking, too, if the oldtimers
who bemourn the old days only realized it.

If this seeming officiousness on the part
of a passing wayfarer may be excused there
is one more suggestion I should like to
throw off for the benefit of the promoters
of the exposition. Living somewhere in

The Native Son 163

California is a man who should be looked
up before the gates are opened, and he
should be retained at a salary and staked
out in suitable quarters as a special and
added attraction. He is the most mag-
nificent fish-liar in the known world! I
do not know his name — he was so busy
pouring fish stories down a party of us
that he didn't take time to stop and tell his
name — but no great difficulty should be ex-
perienced in finding him. There is only
one of him alive — these world's wonders
never occur in pairs. That would cheapen
them and make them commonplace.

He swam into our ken — if a mixed meta-
phor may be pardoned — on a train leav-
ing Oakland for the East. We were sit-
ting in the club car — half a dozen or so of
us — when he drifted along. At first look no
one would have suspected him of being so
gifted a creature as he proved himself to
be. He was a round, short, tub-shaped
man, with a button nose, and a double chin
that ran all the way round and lapped over
at the back. But, though his appearance was
deceiving, anybody could tell with half an

164 Roughing It De Luxe

eye that he excelled in extemporaneous
conversation. Right off he began shadow-
boxing and sparring about, waiting for an
opening. In a minute he got it.

The tall man with the long face and the
stiff white pompadour, who looked like a
patent toothbrush, gave him his chance.
The tall man happened to look out of the
car window and see in an inlet a fleet of
beached fishing boats, and he remarked on
their picturesqueness. That was the cue.

"Speaking of fishing," said the button-
nosed man, "I'll tell you people something
that'll maybe interest you. You may not
believe it, either, me being a stranger to
you; but it's the Gospel truth or I wouldn't
be sitting here a-telling it. I reckon I've
done more fishing in my day and more dif-
ferent kinds of fishing than any man alive.
I come originally from a prime fishing
state — Michigan — and I've lived in Colo-
rado and Montana and Oregon and all the
other good fishing states out West. But,
take it from me, friends, California is the
best fishing state there is. Yes, sir; when
it comes to fishing, old California lays it

The Native Son 165

over 'em all — she takes the rag right off
the bush! I'm the one that oughter know
because I've fished her from end to end
and crossways — sea fishing, creek fishing,
lake fishing and all.

"Down at Catalina they'll tell you, if
you ask 'em, that I'm the man that ketched
the biggest tuna that ever come out of that
ocean. It took me fourteen hours and
forty-five minutes to land him, and during
that time he towed me and an eighteen-
foot boat, and the fellow I had along for
boatman, over forty-four miles — I meas-
ured it afterward to be sure — and the fric-
tion of the reel spinning round wore my
line down till it wasn't no thicker in places
than a cobweb. But tunas ain't my regu-
lar specialty — trouts and basses are my
special favorites; and up in the mountains
is where I mostly do my fishing.

"I'm just sort of hanging round now
waiting for the snow to move out so's I can
go up there and start fishing.

"Well, sirs, it's funny, ain't it, the way
luck will run fishing? Oncet when I was
living up there I fished stiddy, day in and

166 Roughing It De Luxe

day out, for two seasons and never got a
bite that you could rightly call a bite. And
then all of a sudden one afternoon the luck
switched and in exactly forty-five minutes
by the watch — by this here very watch I'm
carrying now in my pocket — I ketched
seventy-two of them big old black basses
out of one hole; and they averaged five
pounds apiece!"

We looked at one another silently. A
total of seventy-two five-pound bass in
three-quarters of an hour seemed a little
too much to be taken as a first dose from a
strange practitioner. And it was hard to
believe they had all been basses; if only
for the sake of variety there should have
been at least one barytone. We felt that
we needed time for reflection — and di-
gestion.

Evidently realizing this, one of our num-
ber undertook to throw himself into the
breach. As I recollect, this volunteer was
the fat coffin drummer from Des Moines
who had the round, smooth face and the
round, bald head, and wore the fuzzy
green hat with the bow at the back. I

The Native Son 167

think he wore the bow there purposely—
it simplified matters so when you were try-
ing to decide which side of his head his
face grew on. He heaved a pensive sigh
out of his system and remarked upon the
clearness of the air in these parts.

"You're right there, mister," broke in
the button-nosed man, snapping him up
instantly. "The air is tolerable clear here
today; but you oughter to see the air up in
the mountains! Why, it's so clear up there
it would make this here hill-country air
look like a fog. I remember oncet I was
browsing along a cliff up in that country,
toting my fishpole, and I happened to look
over the bluff — just so — and down below I
saw a hole in the creek that was just crawl-
ing with them big trouts — steel-head trouts
and rainbow trouts. I could see the spots
on their sides and their fins waving, and
their gills working up and down.

"I figured out that it was fully a hun-
dred feet down to the water and the water
would natchelly be tolerable deep; so I let
all my line run off the reel, a hundred and
sixty feet of it; and I fished and fished and

168 Roughing It De Luxe

fished — and didn't get a strike, let alone a
nibble. Yet I could look over and see all
these hungry trouts down below looking up
with expectant looks in their eyes — I could
see their eyes — and jumping round regard-
less; and yet not a bite! So I changed bait
—changed from live bait to dead bait, and
back again to live — and still there wasn't
nothing doing. So I says to myself: 'Some-
thing's wrong, sure! This thing'll stand
looking into.'

"So I snoops round and finds a place
where there's a sort of a sloping place in
the bluff; and I braces my pole in a rock
and leaves it there; and I climbs down—
and then I sees what's the matter. It was
that there clear air that had fooled me!
It was three hundred feet if it was an inch
down from the top of that there bluff to
the creek, and the hole was fully a hun-
dred feet deep — maybe more; and away
down at the plumb bottom all them trouts
was congregated in a circlelike, looking up
mighty greedy and longing at my bait,
which was a live frog, dangling two hun-
dred and forty-odd feet up in the air. But,

IT'S A GREAT THING OUT THERE
TO BE A NATIVE SON

The Native Son 111

speaking of clear air, that wasn't nothing
at all compared to some other things I
could tell you about. Another time—

At this point I rose and escaped to the
diner. When I got back at the end of an
hour the other survivors told me that, up
to the time he got off at Sacramento, the
button-nosed man had been getting better
and better all the time. He certainly
ought to be rounded up and put on exhibit-
ion at the Fair to show those puny and
feeble Eastern fish-liars what the incom-
parable Western climate can produce.

I almost forgot to mention San Fran-
ciso's chief product — Native Sons. A Na-
tive Son is one who has acquired special
merit by being born in the state. You
would think credit would be given to the
subject's parents, where it belongs; but, no
—that is not the California way. It's a
great thing out there to be a Native Son.
It counts in politics, and in society, and at
the clubs.

And, after that, the next best thing is to
be a Southerner, either by birth or descent.
People who have Southern blood in their

1 12 Roughing It De Luxe

veins are very proud of it and can join a
club on the strength of it; and some of
them do a lot of talking about it. The
definition is rather elastic — anybody whose
ancestors worked on the Southern Pacific
is eligible, I think.

Of course, there are a lot of real South-
erners; but there are a whole lot more who
— so it seemed to me — are giving remark-
ably realistic imitations of the type known
in New York as the Professional South-
erner. San Francisco excels in Southerners
—the regular kind and the self-made kind
both.

I was out there too early in the year to
meet the justly celebrated San Francisco
flea. He's a Native Son, too; but there
isn't so much bragging being done on his
account.

Roughing It De Luxe

LOOKING FOR LO

Roughing It De Luxe

Looking for Lo

IF it is your desire to observe the Red
Indian of the Plains engaged in his
tribal sports and pastimes wait for the
Wild West Show; there is sure to be one
coming to your town before the season is
over. Or if you are bloodthirsty by nature
and yearn to see him prancing round upon
the warpath, destroying the hated paleface
and strewing the soil with his shredded
fragments, restrain your longings until next
fall and then arrange to take in the foot-
ball game between Carlisle and Princeton.
But, whatever you do, do not go journey-
ing into the Far West in the hope of find-
ing him in great number upon his native
heath, for the chances are that you won't
find him there in great number; and if you
do he will probably be a considerable dis-
appointment to you; because, unless he is

176 Roughing It De Luxe

paid for it, the red brother absolutely de-
clines to be picturesque.

I am reliably informed that he is still rea-
sonably numerous in Oklahoma, in North
and South Dakota, and in Montana and
Washington; but my itinerary did not in-
clude those states. I did not see a live
Indian — that is to say, a live Indian recog-
nizable as such — in Nevada or in Colorado
or in Utah, or in a four-hour run across
one corner of Wyoming.

In upward of a thousand miles of travel
through California I saw just one Indian
— a bronze youth of perhaps twenty sum-
mers and, I should say, possibly half that
many baths. He was wearing the scenario
of a pair of overalls and a straw hat in an
advanced state of decrepitude, and he was
working in a truckpatch; if a native had
not told me what he was I would have
passed him by for a sunburnt hired hand.

I saw a few Indians in New Mexico and
a few more in Arizona, but not a great
many at that; and these, as I found out
later, were mainly engaged to linger in the
vicinity of stations and hotels along the line

Looking for Lo 111

for the purpose of adding a touch of color
to the surroundings and incidentally selling
souvenirs to the tourists.

Mind you, I'm not saying there are not
plenty of Indians in those states; but they
mostly stay on their reservations and the
reservations unfortunately are not, as a
rule, near the railroad stations. A traveler
going through the average small Southern
town sees practically the entire strength of
the colored citizenry gathered at the depot
and jumps at the conclusion that the popu-
lation is from ninety to ninety-five per cent,
black. In the West he sees maybe one lit-
tle Indian settlement in a stretch of five or
six hundred miles, and he figures that the
Indian is practically an extinct species.

Of course, though, he is not extinct. In
these piping commercial days of acute com-
petition he has no time to be gallivanting
down to the depot every time a through
train rolls in, especially as the depot is fre-
quently eighty or ninety miles distant from
his domicile. He is closely confined at home
turning out souvenirs. It is a pity, too, that
he cannot spare more of his time for this

178 Roughing It De Luxe

simple and inexpensive pleasure. In one
week's study of the passing tourist breed he
could see enough funny sights and hear
enough funny things — unintentionally fun-
ny things — to keep his family entertained
on many a long winter's evening as they
sit peacefully in the wigwam making
knickknacks for the Eastern trade.

No, sirree! Those Southwestern tribes
are far from being extinct — especially the
Navajos. You can, in a way, approximate
the tribal strength of the Navajos by the
number of Navajo blankets you see. From
Colorado to the Coast the Navajo blanket
carpets the earth. I'll bet any amount
within reason that in six weeks' time I saw
ten million Navajo blankets if I saw one.
As for other things — bows and arrows, for
example — well, I do not wish to exagger-
ate; but had I bought all the wooden bows
and arrows that were offered to me I could
take them and build a rustic footbridge
across the Delaware River at Trenton,
with a neat handrail all the way over.
Taking the figures of the last census as a
working basis I calculate that each Navajo

Looking for Lo 181

squaw weaves, on an average, nine thou-
sand blankets a year; and while she is
so engaged her husband, the metal worker
of the establishment, is producing a couple
of tons of silver bracelets set with tur-
quoises. For prolixity of output I know of
no female in the entire animal kingdom
that can compare with the Navajo squaw
—unless it is the lady Potomac shad.

Right here I wish to claim one proud
distinction: I went from the Atlantic to
the Pacific and back again — and I did
not buy a single blanket! Since the return
of the Lewis & Clark expedition I am
probably the only white person who has
ever done this. Goodness knows the call
was strong enough and the opportunities
abundant enough; blankets were available
for my inspection at every railroad station,
at every hotel, and at every one of two
hundred thousand souvenir stores that I
encountered — but I was under orders from
headquarters.

As we were bidding farewell to our
family before starting West, our wife said
to us in firm, decided accents: "I have

182 Roughing It De Luxe

already picked out a place where we can
hide the Cheyenne war-bonnet. We can
get rid of the moccasins and the stone
hatchets and the beadwork breastplates by
storing them in a trunk up in the attic.
But do not bring a Navajo blanket back
to this already crowded establishment!" So
we restrained ourselves. But it was a hard
struggle and took a heroic effort.

I recall one blanket, done in gray and
black and red and white, and decorated
with the figures of the Thunder Bird and
the Swastika, the Rising Sun and the Jig
Saw, and other Indian signs, symbols and
emblems. It was with the utmost diffi-
culty that I wrenched myself away from
the vicinity of this treasure. And then,
when I got back home, feeling proud
as Punch over having withstood tempta-
tion in all its forms, almost the first words
I heard, spoken in tones of deep disap-
pointment, were these: "Well, why didn't
you bring a Navajo blanket for the den?
You know we've always wanted one!"
Wasn't that just like a woman?

Though I refrained from seeking bar-

Looking for Lo 183

gains in the blankets of the aborigine, I
sought diligently enough for the aborigine
himself. I had my first glimpse of him
in Northern New Mexico just after we
had come down out of Colorado. Accom-
panied by his lady, he was languidly re-
posing on the platform in front of a de-
pot, with his wares tastefully arranged at
his feet. As a concession to the acquired
ideals of the Eastern visitor he had a red
sofa tidy draped round his shoulders, and
there was a tired-looking hen-feather
caught negligently in his back hair; and
his squaw displayed ornamented leggings
below the hems of her simple calico walk-
ing skirt. But these adornments, I gath-
ered, constituted the calling costume, so to
speak.

When at home in his village the uni-
versal garment of the Pueblo male is the
black sateen shirt of commerce. He puts
it on and wears it until it is taken up by
absorption, and then it is time to put on
another. These shirts do not require wash-
ing; but, among the best Pueblo families,
I understand it is customary — once in so

184 Roughing It De Luxe

often — to have them searched. And thus
is the wild life of the West kept down.

Farther along the line, in Arizona, we
met the Hopi and the Navajo — delegations
from both of these tribes having been im-
ported from the reservations to give an
added touch of picturesqueness to the prin-
cipal hotel of the Grand Canon. The
Hopi, who excels at snake dancing and pot-
tery work, is a mannerly little chap; and
his daughter, with her hair done up in
elaborate whorl effects in fancied imitation
of the squash blossom — the squash being
the Hopi emblem of purity — is a decidedly
attractive feature of the landscape.

The Hopi women are industrious little
bodies, clever at basket weaving — and the
men work, too, when not engaged in at-
tending lodge; for the Hopis are the rit-
ualists of the Southwest, and every Hopi
is a confirmed joiner. Their secret soci-
eties exist to-day, uncorrupted and un-
changed, just as they have survived for
hundreds and perhaps thousands of years.
In the Hopi House at Grand Canon there
is a reproduction of a kiva or underground

Looking for Lo 185

temple. It isn't underground — it is located
upstairs; but in all other regards it is
supposed to conform exactly to one of the
real ceremonial chambers of the Hopis.
The dried-mud walls are covered thickly
with symbolic devices, painted on; and
there is an altar tricked out with totems
of the Powamu clan, one of the biggest of
these societies.

Just in front of the altar, with its wooden
figures of the War God, the God of Grow-
ing Things, and the God of Thunder, is
a sand painting set in the floor like a
mosaic. When one of the clans is getting
ready for a service the official high priest
or medicine man of that particular clan
sprinkles clean brown sand upon the flat
earth before the altar and upon this found-
ation, by trickling between his thumb and
forefinger tiny streams of sands of other
colors, he makes the mystic figures that he
worships. After the rites are over he ob-
literates the design with his hand, leaving
the space bare for the next clan.

In the Hopi House at Grand Canon a
sand painting sacred to the Antelope clan

186 Roughing It De Luxe

is preserved under glass for the benefit of
visitors. The manager of the establish-
ment, a Mr. Smith, who has spent most
of his life among the tribes of Arizona,
told us a story about this.

Two years ago this summer, a party of
Mystic Shriners on an excursion visited
the canon. Mr. Smith chaperoned one
group of them on their tour through the
Hopi House. In the sand painting of the
kiva they seemed to find something that
particularly interested them. They put
their heads together, talking in undertones
and pointing — so Smith said — first at one
design and then at another. An old Hopi
buck, a priest of the Antelope clan, was
lounging in the low doorway watching
them. What the Shriners said to one an-
other could have had no significance for
him, even admitting that he heard them,
for he did not understand a word of Eng-
lish; but suddenly he reached forth a with-
ered hand and plucked Smith by the sleeve.
I am letting Smith tell the rest of the tale
just as he told it to us :

"The Hopi pointed to one of the Shrin-

Looking for Lo 187

ers, an elderly man who came, I think,
from somewhere in Illinois, and in his
own tongue he said to me : 'That man with
the white hair is a Hopi — and he is a
member of my clan!' I said to him: 'You
speak foolishness — that man comes from the
East and never until to-day saw a Hopi
in his whole life!' The medicine man
showed more excitement than I ever saw
an Indian show.

"'You are lying to me!' he said. 'That
white-haired man is a Hopi, or else his
people long ago were Hopis.' I laughed
at him and that ruffled his dignity and he
turned away, and I couldn't get another
word out of him.

"As the Shriners were passing out I
halted the white-haired man and said to
him: 'The Hopi medicine man insists that
you are a Hopi and that you know some-
thing about his clan.' 'Well,' he said, 'I'm
no Hopi; but I think I do know something
about some of the things he seems to re-
vere. Where is this medicine man?'

"I pointed to where the old Indian was
squatted in a corner, sulking; he walked

188 Roughing It De Luxe

right over to him and motioned to him,
and the Hopi got up and they went into
the kiva together. I do not know what
passed between them — certainly no words
passed — but in about ten minutes the
Shriner came out, and he had a puzzled
look on his face.

" 'I've just had the most wonderful ex-
perience,' he said to me, 'that I've ever had
in my whole life. Of course that Indian
isn't a Mason, but in a corrupted form he
knows something about Masonry; and
where he learned it I can't guess. Why,
there are lodges in this country where I
actually believe he could work his way

in.'

Not being either a Mason or a Hopi,
I cannot undertake to vouch for the story
or to contradict it; but Smith has the repu-
tation of being a truthful man.

The Navajos are the aristocrats of the
Southwestern country. They are dignified,
cleanly in their personal habits, and or-
derly; and they are wonderful artisans.
In addition to being wonderful weavers
and excellent silversmiths, they shine at

Looking for Lo 189

agriculture and at stock raising and sheep
raising. They are born horse-traders, too,
and at driving a bargain it is said a buck
Navajo can spot a Scotchman five balls
any time and beat him out; but they have
the name of being absolutely honest and
absolutely truthful.

This same Mr. Smith, who has lived
several years on the Navajo reservation and
who is an adopted member of the tribe,
took several of us to pay a formal call
upon a Navajo subchief, who spends the
tourist season at the Grand Canon. The
old chap, long-haired and the color of a
prime smoke-cured ham, received us with
perfect courtesy into his winter residence,
the same being a circular hut contrived
by overlapping timbers together in a kind
of basket design and then coating the logs
inside and out with adobe clay.

The place was clean and free from all
unpleasant odors. In the middle of the
floor a fire burned, the smoke escaping
through a hole in the roof. At one side
was the primitive forge, where the head
of the house worked in metals; and against

190 Roughing It De Luxe

the far wall his squaw was hunkered down,
weaving a blanket on her wooden loom.
A couple of his young offspring were
playing about, dressed simply in their little
negligee-strings. The mud walls were
hung with completed blankets. Long,
stringy strips of dried beef and mutton—
the national dishes of the tribe — were
dangling from cross-pieces overhead; and
on a rug upon the earthen floor lay a glit-
tering pile of bracelets and brooches that
had been made by the old man out of
Mexican dollars. When we came away,
after spending fifteen minutes or so as their
guests, the whole family came with us;
but the old man tarried a minute to fasten
a small brass padlock through a hasp upon
his wattled wooden door.

"Up on the reservation, away from the
railroads and the towns, there are no locks
upon the doors," Smith said.

"Why is that?" I asked.

Smith grinned. "I'll tell the old man
what you said and let him answer."

He clucked in guttural monosyllables to
the chief, and the chief clucked back

Looking for Lo 191

briefly, meanwhile eyeing me with a whim-
sical squint out of his puckered old eyes.
And then Smith translated :

"Why should we lock our doors in the
place where we live? There are no white
men there!"

I will confess that as a representative of
the dominant Caucasian stock I had, for
the moment, no apt reply ready. Later I
thought of a very fitting retort, which un-
doubtedly would have flattened that im-
pertinent Indian as flat as a flounder;
unfortunately, though, it only came to me
after several days of study, and by that time
I was upward of a thousand miles away
from him. But I am saving it to use on
him the next time I go back to the Grand
Canon. No mere Indian can slander our
race, even if he is telling the truth — not
while I'm around!

Down in Southern California I rather
figured on finding a large swarm of Mis-
sion Indians clustering about every Mis-
sion; but, alas! they weren't there, either.
We saw a few worshipers and plenty of
tourists, but no Indians — at least, I didn't

192 Roughing It De Luxe

see any personally. There is something
wonderfully impressive about a first trip
to any one of those old gray churches;
everything about it is eloquent with memo-
ries of that older civilization which this
Western country knew long before the Celt
and the Anglo-Saxon breeds came over the
Divide and down the Pacific Slope, filled
with their lust for gold and lands, craving
ever more power and more territory over
which to float the Stars and Stripes.

The vanished day of the Spaniard now
lives only within the walls of the early
Missions, but it invests them with that
added veneration which attaches to what-
ever is old and traditional and historic.
We haven't a great deal that is very old
in our own country; maybe that explains
why we fuss over it so when we come
across it in Europe.

There is one Mission which in itself, it
seemed to me, is almost worth a trip clear
across the continent to see — the one at San-
ta Barbara. It is up the side of a gentle
foothill, with the mountains of the Coast
Range behind it. Down below the roofs

Looking for Lo 195

and spires of a brisk little city show
through green clumpage, and still farther
beyond the blue waters of the Pacific may
be seen.

Parts of this Mission are comparatively
new; there are retouchings and restorations
that date back only sixty or seventy years,
but most of it speaks to you of an earlier
century than this and an earlier race than
the one that now peoples the land. You
pass through walls of solid masonry that
are sixteen feet thick and pierced by nar-
row passages; you climb winding stairs to
a squat tower where sundry cracked brazen
bells, the gifts of Spanish gentlemen who
died a hundred years ago perhaps, swing
by withes of ancient rawhide from great,
worm-gnawed, hand-riven beams; you walk
through the Mission burying-ground, past
crumbly old family vaults with half-oblit-
erated names and titles and dates upon
their ovenlike fronts, and you wander at
will among the sunken individual graves
under the palms and pepper trees.

Most convincing of all to me were the
stone-flagged steps at the door of the

196 Roughing It De Luxe

church itself, for they are all worn down
like the teeth of an old horse — in places
they are almost worn in two. Better than
any guidebook patter of facts and figures
—better than the bells and the graves and
the hand-made beams — these steps convey
to the mind a sense of age.

You stand and look at them, and you
see there the tally of vanished generations
— the heavy boot of the conquistador; the
sandaled foot of the old padre; the high
heel of a dainty Spanish-born lady; the
bare, horny sole of the Indian convert-
each of them taking its tiny toll out of
stone and mortar — each of them wearing
away its infinitesimal mite — until through
years and years the firm stone was scored
away and channeled out and left at it is
now, with curves in it and deep hollows.

Given a dime's worth of imagination to
start on, almost any one could people that
spot with the dead-and-gone figures of that
shadowy past; could forget the trolley cars
curving right up to the walls; the electric
lights strung in globular festoons along the
ancient ceilings of the porticoes; the roofs

Looking for Lo 197

of the new, shiny modern bungalows dot-
ting the gentle slopes below — could forget
even that the brown-cowled, rope-girthed
father who served as guide spoke with a
strong German accent; could almost for-
give the impious driver of the rig that
brought one here for referring to this place
as the Mish. But be sure there would be
one thing to bring you hurtling back again
to earth, no matter how far aloft your fancy
soared — and that would be the ever-present
souvenir-collecting tourist, to whom no
shrine is holy and no memory is sacred.

There is no charge for admission to the
Mission. All comers, regardless of breed
or creed, are welcomed; and on constant
duty is a gentle-voiced priest, ready to lead
the way to the inner rooms where priceless
relics of the day when the Spaniards first
came to California are displayed; and into
the church itself, with its candles burning
before the high altar and the quaint old
holy pictures ranged thick upon the walls;
and through the burying-ground — and to
all the rest of it; and for this service there
is nothing to pay. On departing the vis-

198 Roughing It De Luxe

itor, if he chooses, may leave a coin be-
hind; but he doesn't have to — it isn't com-
pulsory.

There is a kind of traveler who repays
this hospitality by defiling the walls with
his inconsequential name, scratched in or
scrawled on, and by toting away as a sou-
venir whatever portable object he can con-
fiscate when nobody is looking. Up in the
bell tower the masonry is all defaced and
pocked where these vandals have dug at it
with pocketknives; and as we were coming
away, one of them — a typical specimen —
showed me- with deep pride half of a brick
pouched in his coat pocket. It seemed that
while the priest's back was turned he had
pried it loose from the frilled ornamenta-
tion of a vault in the burying-ground at the
cost only of his self-respect — admitting that
he had any of that commodity in stock—
and a broken thumbnail. It was, indeed,
a priceless treasure and he valued it ac-
cordingly. And yet, at a distance of ten
feet in an ordinary light, no one not in the
secret could have said offhand whether
that half-brick came out of a Mission tomb

Looking for Lo 199

in California or a smokehouse in Arkansas.

We didn't see any Indians when we ran
down into Mexico. However, we only
ran into Mexico for a distance of a mile
and a half below the California state
boundary, and maybe that had something
to do with it. By automobile we rode
from San Diego over to the town of Tia
Juana, signifying, in our tongue, Aunt
Jane. Ramona, heroine of Helen Hunt
Jackson's famous novel, had an aunt called
Jane. I guess they had a grudge against
the lady; they named this town after her.

Selling souvenirs to tourists, who come
daily on sightseeing coaches from Coro-
nado Beach and San Diego, is the princi-
pal pastime of the natives of Tia Juana.
Weekdays they do this; and sometimes on
a Sunday afternoon they have a bullfight
in their little bullring. On such an occa-
sion the bullfighting outfit is specially im-
ported from one of the larger towns farther
inland. Sometimes the whole troupe comes
from Juarez and puts on a regular metro-
politan production, with the original all-
star cast. There is the gallant performer

200 Roughing It De Luxe

known as the armadilla, who teases the bull
to desperation by waving a red shawl at
him; the no less daring parabola, sticking
little barbed boleros in the bull's withers;
and, last of all, the intrepid mantilla, who
calmly meets the final rush of the infuri-
ated beast and, with one unerring thrust
of his trusty sword, delivers the porte-
cochere, or fatal stroke, just behind the
left shoulder-blade, while all about the
assembled peons and pianolas rend the am-
bient air with their delighted cry: "Hoi
Polloi! Hoi Polloi! Dolce far niente!"

Isn't it remarkable how readily the sea-
soned tourist masters the difficulties of a
foreign language? Before I had been in
Mexico an hour I had picked up the in-
tricate phraseology of the bullfight; and I
was glad afterward that I took the trouble
to get it all down in my mind correctly,
because such knowledge always comes in
handy. You can use it with effect in com-
pany— it stamps you as a person of culture
and travel — and it impresses other people;
but then I always could pick up foreign
languages easily. I do not wish to boast —
but with me it amounts to a positive gift.

Looking for Lo 201

It was a weekday when we visited Tia
Juana, and so there was no bullfight going
on; in fact, there didn't seem to be much
of anything going on. Once in a while
a Spigotty lady would pass, closely fol-
lowed by a couple of little Spigots, and
occasionally the postmaster would wake up
long enough to accept a sheaf of post-
cards from a tourist and then go right back
to sleep again. We had sampled the ta-
males of the country, rinding them only
slightly inferior to the same article as sold
in Kansas City, Kansas; and we had drifted
—three of us — into a Mexican cafe. It was
about ten feet square and was hung with
chromos furnished by generous Milwaukee
brewers and other decorations familiar to
all who have ever visited a crossroads bar-
room on our own side of the line. Bottled
beer appeared to be the one best bet in
the drinking line, and the safest one, too;
but somehow I hated — over here upon the
soil of another country — to be calling for
the domestic brews of our own St. Louis!
Personally I desired to conform my thirst
to the customs of the country — only I

202 Roughing It De Luxe

didn't know what to ask for. I had learned
the bullfighting language, but I hadn't
progressed very far beyond that point.
While I was deliberating a Mexican came
in and said something in Spanish to the
barkeeper and the barkeeper got a bottle
of a clear, almost colorless fluid out from
under the counter and poured him a sherry
glassful of it. So then, by means of a ges-
ture that is universal and is understood in
all climes, I indicated to the barkeeper
that I would take a little of the same.

The moment, though, that I had swal-
lowed it I realized I had been too hasty.
It was mescal — an explosive in liquid form
that is brewed or stilled or steeped, or
something, from the juices of a certain
variety of cactus, according to a favorite
family prescription used by Old Nick sev-
eral centuries ago when he was residing
in this section. For its size and complex-
ion I know of nothing that is worthy to be
mentioned in the same breath with mescal,
unless it is the bald-faced hornet of the
Sunny South. It goes down easily enough
— that is not the trouble — but as soon as it

Looking for Lo 203

gets down you have the sensation of having
swallowed a comet.

As I said before, I didn't see any Indians
in Old Mexico, but if I had taken one more
swig of the national beverage I am satisfied
that not only would I have seen a great
number of them, but, with slight encour-
agement, might have been one myself. For
the purpose of assuaging the human thirst
I would say that it is a mistake on the
part of a novice to drink mescal — he should
begin by swallowing a lighted kerosene
lamp for practice and work up gradually;
but the experience was illuminating as
tending to make me understand why the
Mexicans are so prone to revolutions. A
Mexican takes a drink of mescal before
breakfast, on an empty stomach, and then
he begins to revolute round regardless.

On leaving Tia Juana we stopped to view
the fort, which was the principal attraction
of the place. It was located in the out-
skirts just back of the cluster of adobe
houses and frame shacks that made up the
town. The fort proper consisted of a mud
wall about three feet high, inclosing per-

204 Roughing It De Luxe

haps half an acre of bare clayey soil. Out-
side the wall was a moat, upward of a foot
deep, and inside was a barrack. This bar-
rack— I avoid using the plural purposely —
was a wooden shanty that had been white-
washed once, but had practically recovered
from it since; and its walls were pierced —
for artillery-fire, no doubt — with two win-
dows, to the frames of which a few frag-
ments of broken glass still adhered. Over-
head the flag of the republic was flying;
and every half-minute, so it seemed to us,
a drum would beat and a bugle would
blow and the garrison would turn out, look-
ing— except for their guns — very much like
a squad of district-telegraph messengers.
They would evolute across the parade
ground a bit and then retire to quarters
until the next call to arms should sound.

We could not get close enough to ascer-
tain what all the excitement was about,
because they would not let us. We were
not allowed to venture within fifty yards of
the outer breastworks, or kneeworks; and
even then, so the village authorities warned
us, we must keep moving. A woman cam-

Looking for Lo 205

era fiend from Coronado was along, and
she unlimbered her favorite instrument
with the idea of taking a few snapshots
of this martial scene.

As she leveled the lens a yell went up
from somewhere, and out of the barrack
and over the wall came skipping a little
officer, leaving a trail of inflammatory
Spanish behind him in a way to remind
you of the fireman cleaning out the firebox
of the Through Limited. He was not
much over five feet tall and his shabby
little uniform needed the attention of the
dry cleanser, but he carried a sword and
two pistols, and wore a brass gorget at his
throat, a pair of huge epaulets and a belt;
and he had gold braid and brass buttons
spangled all over his sleeves and the front
of his coat, and a pair of jingling spurs
were upon his heels. There was a long
feather in his cap, too — and altogether, for
his size, he was most impressive to behold.
He charged right up to the abashed camera
lady and, through an interpreter, explained
to her that it was strictly against the rules
to permit a citizen of a foreign power to

206 Roughing It De Luxe

make any pictures of the fortifications what-
soever. He appeared to nurse a horrid
fear that the secret of the fortifications
might become known above the line, and
that some day, armed with this information,
the Boy Scouts or a Young Ladies' High
School might swoop down and capture the
whole works. He explained to the lady,
that, much as he regretted it, if she per-
sisted in her suspicious and spylike conduct,
he would have to smash her camera for
her. So she desisted.

The little officer and his merry men had
ample reason for being a mite nervous just
then. Their country was in the midst of its
spring revolution. The Madero family had
just been thinned out pretty extensively,
and it was not certain yet whether the Diaz
faction or the Huerta faction, or some other
faction, would come out on top. Besides,
these gallant guardians of the frontier were
a long way from headquarters and in no
position to figure out in advance which
way the national cat would jump next. All
they knew was that she was jumping.

Every morning, so we heard, they were

Looking for Lo 209

taking a vote to decide whether they would
be Federalists that day or Liberalists, or
what not; and the vote was invested with a
good deal of personal interest, too, because
there was no telling when a superior force
might arrive from the interior; and if they
had happened to vote wrong that day there
was always the prospect of their being
backed up against a wall, with nothing
to look at except a firing squad and a row
of newmade graves.

We were told that one morning, about
three or four weeks before the date of our
visit, the garrison had been in the barrack
casting their usual ballot. They were
strong Huertaists that morning — it was
Viva Huerta! all the way. Just about the
time the vote was being announced a couple
of visiting Americans in an automobile
came down the road flanking the fort.
There had been a rain and the road was
slippery with red mud. As the driver took
the turn at the corner his wheels began
skidding and he lost control. The car
skewed off at a tangent, hurdled the moat,
and tore a hole in the mud wall; and, as

210 Roughing It De Luxe

the occupants spilled sprawlingly through
the gap, a front tire exploded with a loud
report. The garrison took just one look
out the front door, jumped to the conclu-
sion that the Villa crowd had arrived and
were shooting automobiles at them, and
unanimously adjourned by the back way
into the woods. Some of them did not get
back until the shades of night had de-
scended upon the troubled land.

Such is military life in our sister repub-
lic in times of war, and yet they sometimes
have a very realistic imitation of the real
thing over there. Revolution before last
there were two separate engagements in
this little town of Tia Juana. A lot of
belligerents were killed and a good many
more were wounded.

In an iron letter box in front of the
post-office we saw a round hole where a
steel-jacketed bullet had passed through
after first passing through a prominent
citizen. We did not see this citizen. It
became necessary to bury him shortly after
the occurrence referred to.

In vain I sought the red brother on my

Looking for Lo 211

saunterings through California. In San
Francisco I once thought I had him treed.
On Pacific Street, a block ahead of me, I
saw a group of pedestrians, wrapped in
loose flowing garments of many colors.
Even at that distance I could make out
that they were dark-skinned and had long
black hair. I said to myself: "It is prob-
able that these persons are connected with
Doctor Somebody's Medicine Show; but
I don't care if they are. They are Indians
— more Indians than I have seen in one
crowd at one time since Buffalo Bill was
at Madison Square Garden last spring. I
shall look them over."

So I ran and caught up with them — but
they were not Indians. They were genu-
ine Egyptian acrobats, connected with a
traveling carnival company. When Moses
transmitted the divine command to the
Children of Israel that they should spoil
the Egyptians, the Children of Israel cer-
tainly did a mighty thorough job of it.
That was several thousand years ago and
those Egyptians I saw were still spoiled.
I noticed it as soon as I got close to them.

212 Roughing It De Luxe

In Salt Lake City I saw half a dozen
Indians, but in a preserved form only.
They were on display in a museum devoted
to relics of the early days. In my opinion
Indians do not make very good preserves,
especially when they have been in stock
a long time and have become shopworn, as
was the case with these goods. Personally,
I would not care to invest. Besides, there
was no telling how old they were. They
had been dug out, mummified, from the
cliff- dwellers' ruins in the southern part of
the state, along with their household goods,
their domestic utensils, their weapons of
war and their ornaments; and there they
were laid out in glass cases for modern eyes
to see. There were plenty of other inter-
esting exhibits in this museum, including
several of Brigham Young's suits of clothes.
For a man busied with statecraft and mili-
tary affairs and domestic matters, Brigham
Young must have changed clothes pretty
}ften. I couldn't keep from wondering how
a man with a family like his was found the
time for it.

To my mind the most interesting relic

Looking for Lo 213

in the whole collection was the spry octo-
genarian who acted as guide and showed us
through the place — for he was one of the
few living links between the Old West and
the New. As a boy-convert to Mormonism
he came across the desert with the second
expedition that fled westward from Gentile
persecution after Brigham Young had
blazed the trail. He was a pony express
rider in the days of the overland mail ser-
vice. He was also an Indian fighter — one
of the trophies he showed was a scalp of
his own raising practically, he having been
present when it was raised by a friendly
Indian scout from the head of the hostile
who originally owned it — and he had lived
in Salt Lake City when it was a collection
of log shanties within the walls of a wood-
en stockade. And now here he was, a man
away up in his eighties, but still brisk and
bright, piloting tourists about the upper
floor of a modern skyscraper.

We visited the museum after we had in-
spected the Mormon Tabernacle and had
looked at the Mormon Temple — from the
outside — and had seen the Beehive and the

214 Roughing It De Luxe

Lion House and the Eagle Gate and the
painfully ornate mansion where Brigham
Young kept his favorite wife, Amelia. The
Tabernacle is famous the world over for
its choir, its organ and its acoustics — par-
ticularly its acoustics. The guide, who is
a Mormon elder detailed for that purpose,
escorts you into the balcony, away up under
the domed wooden roof; and as you wait
there, listening, another elder, standing
upon a platform two hundred feet away,
drops an ordinary pin upon the floor — and
you can distinctly hear it fall. At first
you are puzzled to decide exactly what it
sounds like; but after a while the correct
solution comes to you — it sounds exactly
like a pin falling. Next to the Whispering
Gallery in the Capitol at Washington, I
don't know of a worse place to tell your
secrets to a friend than the Mormon Taber-
nacle. You might as well tell them to a
woman and be done with it!

In Salt Lake City I had rather counted
upon seeing a Mormon out walking with
three or four of his wives — all at one time.
I felt that this would be a distinct novelty

Looking for Lo 215

to a person from New York, where the
only show one enjoys along this line is the
sight of a chap walking with three or four
other men's wives — one at a time. But
here, as in my quest for the Indian, I was
disappointed some more. Once I thought
I was about to score. I was standing in
front of the Zion Cooperative Mercantile
Establishment, which is a big department
store owned by the Church, but having all
the latest improvements, including bargain
counters and special salesdays. Out of the
door came an elderly gentleman attired in
much broadcloth and many whiskers, and
behind him trailed half a dozen soberly
dressed women of assorted ages.

Filled with hope, I fell in behind the
procession and followed it across to the
hotel. There I learned the disappointing
truth. The broadclothed person was not a
Mormon at all.

He was a country bank president from
somewhere back East and the women of
his party were Ohio school-teachers. Any-
where except in Utah I doubt if he could
have fooled me, either, for he had the kind

216 Roughing It De Luxe

of whiskers that go with the banking pro-
fession. For some reason whiskers are
associated with the practice of banking all
over this country; hallowed by custom,
they have come to stand for financial re-
sponsibility. A New York banker wears
those little jib-boom whiskers on the sides
of his head and sometimes a pennon on
his chin, whereas a country banker usually
has a full-rigged face. This man's whisk-
ers were of the old square barkentine cut.
I should have known who he was by his
sailing gear.

And so, disappointed in my dreams of
seeing Indians on the hoof and Mormon
households taking the air in family groups,
I left Salt Lake City, with its fine wide
streets and its handsome business district
and its pure air and its background of
snow-topped mountains, and started on the
long homebound hike. It was late in the
afternoon. We had quit Utah, with its flat
plains, its garden spots reclaimed from the
desert, and its endless succession of trim
red-brick farmhouses, which seem to be
the universal dwelling-places of the pros-
perous Mormon farmer.

Looking for Lo 21 7

We had departed from the old trail that
Mark Twain crawled over in a stage-
coach and afterward wrote about in his
immortal Roughing It. The Limited,
traveling forty-odd miles an hour, was
skipping through the lower part of Wy-
oming before turning southward into Colo-
rado. We were in the midst of an expanse
of desolation and emptiness, fifteen miles
from anywhere, and I was sitting on the
observation platform of the rear car, watch-
ing how the shafts of the setting sun made
the colors shift and deepen in the canons
and upon the sides of the tall red mesas,
when I became aware that the train was
slowing down.

Through the car came the conductor,
with a happy expression upon his face.
Behind him was a pleased-looking flagman
leading by the arm a ragged tramp who
had been caught, up forward somewhere,
stealing a free ride.

The tramp was not resisting exactly, but
at every step he said:

"You can't put me off the train between
stations! It's the law that you can't put
me off the train between stations!"

218 Roughing It De Luxe

Neither the conductor nor the flagman
said a word in answer. As the conductor
reached up and jerked the bellcord the
tramp, in the tone and manner of one who
advances an absolutely unanswerable argu-
ment, said:

"You know, don't you, you can't put me
off the train between stations?"

The train halted. The conductor un-
fastened a tail-gate in the guard-rail, and
the flagman dropped his prisoner out
through the opening. As the tramp flopped
off into space I caught this remark:

"You can't put me off the train between
stations."

The conductor tugged another signal on
the bellcord, and the wheels began to turn
faster and faster. The tramp picked him-
self up from between the rails. He brushed
some adhering particles of roadbed off
himself and, facing us, made a megaphone
of his hands and sent a message after our
diminishing shapes. By straining my ears
I caught his words. He spoke as follows:

"You can't put me off the train between
stations!"

Looking for Lo 219

In my whole life I never saw a man who
was so hard to convince of a thing as that
tramp was.

DE LUXE