Roughing it De Luxe

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 Cañon is where they mostly hang out and frolic 'round."

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 little 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."

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

"Don't they?" said Johnny, as if surprised 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 snappin' turtles. But that's a lie, I judge, because 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 narrative; "and then in nine days you go mad yourself. Remember that fellow the Hydrophoby Skunk bit down here by the rapids, Bill? Let's see now—what was that hombre's name?"

"Williams," supplied Bill—"Heck Williams. 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," explained 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 and I were holding hands by now. Outside we could hear that little lost echo laughing to itself. It was no time to be laughing either. Under certain circumstances I don't know of a lonelier place anywhere on earth than that Grand Cañon.

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 hydrophoby 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.

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 earmuffs. I also buttoned my watch into my lefthand shirt pocket, the idea being if for any reason I should conclude to move during 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, waking instantly, seemed instinctively to know 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 Cañon. 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 merely 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 confiscate your saddlebags and leave you in exchange a nice dry chip. He is honest, 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 himself to unload that stock horror tale. It made us very happy.

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, Boston—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 expression; 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, melting, 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, 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 regalia, enthroned on shaggy mules, behind a flock of tourists in nondescript yet appropriate 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 phenomenon was presented by a certain Eastern 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 Cañon in the early morning, hurried at once to his room and presently appeared attired for breakfast. Competent eyewitnesses gave me the full details. He wore a flannel shirt that was unbuttoned 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 impression upon all beholders. The hotel is managed by an able veteran of the hotel business, assisted by a charming and accomplished wife; it is patronized by scientists, scholars and cosmopolitans, who come from all parts of the world to see the Grand Cañon; 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.

Our hero careened across the intervening space. On reaching the dining room he snatched off his coat and, with a gesture that would have turned Hackett or Faversham 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 graduate, 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 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 Cañon, 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 Cañon, 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 Americans 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 Navajos, most distinctive of all the Southern 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 appropriate places are within easy walking distance 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 satisfaction 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 followed 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 patronizing 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 Cañon 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 Cañon was in the nature of a continuous performance.

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.

The room clerk had come from Ohio two years before and was a mighty accommodating 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 Cañon. It is probably the only salaried job of the sort in the world—his competitors in the same 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, romancing 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 Cañon 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 Cañon 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 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 Cañon. "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 California, the Land of Perpetual Sunshine—except when it rains!

HOW DO YOU LIKE THE CLIMATE?

Once upon a time a stranger went to Southern California; and when he was asked the customary question—to wit: "How do you like the climate?" 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 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 climate 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 souvenir 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, 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—especially for the real-estate people and the hotel-keepers.

Southern Californians brag of their climate just as New York brags of its wickedness and its skyscrapers, and as Richmond 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 climate. For hours on hours a native will 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 addition to being salubrious, the California climate 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 boundary 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 experienced! 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 climate? 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.

At breakfast the waiter finds out—if he can—how you like the climate before finding 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 enjoyed 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 paper, especially if a blizzard has opportunely developed back East somewhere and is available for purposes of comparison. At Los Angeles, which is the great throbbing heart of the climate belt, I went as a guest to a stag given at the handsome new clubhouse of a secret order renowned 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-professional talent. There were two or three ministers present—fine, alert representatives 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 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 issue 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 mountains 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 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 conversation 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 verging 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 precipitation 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.