"Giddap!" said Colonel Baggs to the horses. "Time to be on our way."
"After all," said the Poet, "we may not have lost the power to create a mythology."
"Bridger for my money," said the Artist, with conviction.
"Jim Bridger said that," asserted Aconite, "an' I believe him. They found Great Salt Lake where he said it was, all right, an' Bridger's Peak, an' the few things we've run across here. You wouldn't believe a mountain would whistle like a steam engine, would yeh? Well, I'll show you one – Roarin' Mountain – in less'n four miles ahead – in the actual act of tootin'."
"I believe all you said, Mr. Driscoll," said the Bride as they sat about the fire that night. "The glass mountain, the elk and all. After those indescribable Twin Lakes, the Roaring Mountain, and the Devil's Frying Pan, stewing, stewing, century after century – that's what makes it so inconceivable – the thought of time and eternity. The mountains are here for ever – that's plain; but these things in action – to think that they were sizzling and spouting just the same when Mr. Bridger was here ninety years ago, and a million years before that, maybe – it flabbergasts me!"
"Yes'm," said Aconite. "It shore do."
"You're it, Bride!" said the Hired Man, handing her a slip with "Bride" written upon it.
"I'm what?" asked the Bride.
"They've sawed the story off on you," returned the Hired Man. "I hope you'll give a better one than that there Poet told. I couldn't make head nor tail to that."
"It was rotten," said the Poet, looking at the Bride, "wasn't it?"
"I'm still living in a glass house," said the Bride. "Don't you know there's only one story a bride can tell?"
"Tell it, tell it!" was the cry – from all but the Poet and the Groom.
"I think I'll retire," said the Groom.
"Off with you into the shadows," said the Poet. "I'll contribute my last cigar – and we'll smoke the calumet on the other side of the tree where we can hear unseen."
About them the earth boiled and quivered and spouted. Little wisps of steam floated through the treetops. There were rushings and spoutings in the air – for they were in the Norris Geyser Basin. And here the Bride, sitting in the circle of men, her feet curled under her on a cushion of the surrey laid on the geyser-heated ground, fixed her eyes on the climbing moon and told her story.
THE TRIUMPH OF BILLY HELL
Now that so many of the girls are writing, the desire to express myself in that way comes upon me awfully strongly, sometimes.
She looked at the Poet, who nodded encouragement and understanding.
And yet a novel seems so complex and poky in the writing, as compared with a play, which brings one ever so much more exciting success. Louise Amerland says that all literature is autobiographical. If this is so, why can't I use my own romance in making a play? I think I could, if I could once get the scenario to – to discharge, as Billy says. He calls me a million M. F. condenser of dramatic electricity, but says that it's all statical, when it ought to flow. But the scenario must be possible, if I could only get the figures and events juggled about into place. There's Billy for the hero, and Pa, and the Pruntys, and me for the heroine, and comic figures like the butler and Miss Crowley and Atkins, and the crowds in Lincoln Park. I want the statue of Lincoln in it for one scene.
"That would be great," said the Artist.
After I was "finished" at St. Cecilia's I went into Pa's office as his secretary. He wasn't very enthusiastic, but I insisted on account of the sacredness of labor and its necessity in the plan of woman's life having revealed themselves to me as I read one of Mrs. Stetson's books. Pa fumed, and said I bothered him; but I insisted, and after a while I became proficient as a stenographer, and spelled such terms as "kilowatt," and "microfarad," and "electrolyte," in a way that forced encomiums from even Pa. Upon this experience I based many deductions as to the character of our captains of industry, one of which is that they are the most illogical set in the world, and the more illogical they are the more industry they are likely to captain.
Take Pa, for instance. He began with a pair of pliers, a pair of climbers, a lineman's belt, and a vast store of obstinacy; and he has built up the Mid-Continent Electric Company – for we are an electric family, though Billy says magnetic is the term.
"Spare me!" prayed the Groom.
But how does Pa order his life? He sends me to St. Cecilia's, which has no function but to prepare girls for the social swim, and is so exclusive that he had to lobby shamefully to get me in: and all the time he gloats – simply gloats– over the memory of the pliers, the climbers, the lineman's belt, and the obstinacy – no, not over the obstinacy, of course: that is merely what makes him gloat. And he hates Armour Institute graduates and Tech men poisonously, and wants his force made up of electricians who have come up, as he says, by hard knocks, and know the practical side. As if Billy Helmerston – but let me begin at the beginning.
I was in the office one day superintending Miss Crowley, the chief stenographer, in getting together the correspondence about an electric light and power installation in Oklahoma, when, just at the door of the private office, I met a disreputable figure which towered above me so far that I could barely make out that it had good anatomical lines and a black patch over one eye.
I will here deceive no one: it was Billy. He explained afterward that he possessed better clothes, but had mislaid them somehow, and that the cut over his eye he got in quelling a pay-night insurrection in his line-gang out in Iowa, one of whom struck him with a pair of four-hole connectors. I am sorry to confess that I once felt pride in the fact that Billy knocked the linemen's heads together – and yet Pa talks of hard knocks! – until they subsided, the blood, meanwhile, running all down over his face and clothing and theirs. It was very brutal, in outward seeming, no matter what plea of necessity may be urged for it.
I almost fell back into the doorway, he was so near and so big. His way of removing his abominable old hat, and his bow, gave me a queer little mental jolt, it was so graceful and elegant, in spite of the overalls and the faded shirt.
"I was referred to this place as Mr. Blunt's office," said he. "Can you direct me to him?"
Now Pa is as hard to approach as any Oriental potentate; but I supposed that Billy was one of the men from the factory, and had business, and I was a little fluttered by the wonderful depth and sweetness of his voice; so I just said: "This way, please" – and took him in to where Pa was sawing the air and dictating a blood-curdling letter to a firm of contractors in San Francisco, who had placed themselves outside the pale of humanity by failing to get results from our new Polyphase Generator. (Billy afterward told them what was the matter with it.) I saw that my workman had picked out an exceedingly unpsychological moment, if he expected to make a very powerful appeal to Pa's finer instincts.
"Well," roared Pa, turning on him with as much ferocity as if he had been a San Francisco contractor of the deepest dye, "what can I do for you, sir?"
"My name is Helmerston," started Billy.
"I'm not getting up any directory," shouted Pa. "What do you want?"
"I'm just through with a summer's line-work in the West," answered Billy, "and I took the liberty of applying for employment in your factory. I have – "
"The blazes you did!" ejaculated Pa, glaring at Billy from under his eyebrows. "How did you get in here?"
I was over