Roughing it De Luxe Part 7

In an iron letter box in front of the post-office we saw a round hole where a steel-jacketed bullet had pa.s.sed through after first pa.s.sing 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 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 probable 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 genuine 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 certainly 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.

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 gla.s.s cases for modern eyes to see. There were plenty of other interesting exhibits in this museum, including several of Brigham Young's suits of clothes. For a man busied with statecraft and military affairs and domestic matters, Brigham Young must have changed clothes pretty often. 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 in the whole collection was the spry octogenarian 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 service. 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 wooden 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 skysc.r.a.per.

We visited the museum after we had inspected the Mormon Tabernacle and had looked at the Mormon Temple--from the outside--and had seen the Beehive and the 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--particularly 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 Tabernacle. 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 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 a.s.sorted 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. Anywhere except in Utah I doubt if he could have fooled me, either, for he had the kind of whiskers that go with the banking profession. For some reason whiskers are a.s.sociated with the practice of banking all over this country; hallowed by custom, they have come to stand for financial responsibility. 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 whiskers 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 prosperous Mormon farmer.

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 Wyoming before turning southward into Colorado. 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, watching 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!"

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 argument, said:

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

The train halted. The conductor unfastened a tail-gate in the guard-rail, and the flagman dropped his prisoner out through the opening. As the tramp flopped off into s.p.a.ce 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 himself 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!"

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