Part 11 (1/2)

Then I looked back the barometer and saw the hand had stopped--at 10,200 feet! How long we were ascending we did not know. Certain it is that the impressions described were all there was time for, and that when Donaldson turned and spoke we saw his lips move but could hear no sound. Our speed had been such that the pressure of the air upon the tympanum of the ear left us deaf for some minutes. We had made a dash of two miles into cloudland and had accomplished it, we three firmly believed, in little more than a minute.

Presently Donaldson observed the anchor and grapnel had come up badly clogged with sod, and a good heavy tug he and I had of it to pull them in, for Lyons was still much too busy with his currant pie to help us.

Nor indeed were the currant pies yet done with us, for at the end of our tug at the anchor rope, I found| had been kneeling very precisely in the middle of pie No. 2, and had contrived to absorb most of it into the knees of my trousers. Thus at the end of the day, come to Saratoga after all shops were closed, I had to run the gauntlet of the porch and office crowd of visitors at the United States Hotel in a condition that only needed moccasins and a war bonnet to make me a tolerable imitation of an Indian.

We remained aloft at an alt.i.tude of one or two and one half miles for three hours and a half, stayed there until the silence became intolerable, until the buzz of a fly or the croak of a frog would have been music to our ears. Here was _absolute silence_, the silence of the grave and death, a silence never to be experienced by living man in any terrestrial condition.

Occasionally the misty clouds in which we hung enshrouded parted beneath us and gave us glimpses of distant earth, opened and disclosed landscapes of infinite beauty set in grey nebulous frames. Once we pa.s.sed above a thunderstorm, saw the lightning play beneath us, felt our whole fabric tremble at its shock--and were glad enough when we had left it well behind. Seen from a great height, the earth looked to be a vast expanse of dark green velvet, sometimes shaded to a deeper hue by cloudlets floating beneath the sun, splashed here with the silver and there with the gold garniture reflected from rippling waters.

Toward noon we descended beneath the region of clouds into the realm of light and life, and found ourselves hovering above the Mountain House of the Catskills. And thereabouts we drifted in cross-currents until nearly 4.00 p.m., when a heavy southerly gale struck us and swept us rapidly northward past Albany at a pace faster than I have ever travelled on a railway.

We still had ballast enough left to a.s.sure ten or twelve hours more travel. But we did not like our course. The prospects were that we would end our voyage in the wilderness two hundred or more miles north of Ottawa. So we rose to 12,500 feet, seeking an easterly or westerly current, but without avail. We could not escape the southerly gale.

Prudence, therefore, dictated a landing before nightfall. Landing in the high gale was both difficult and dangerous, and was not accomplished until we were all much bruised and scratched in the oak thicket Donaldson chose for our descent.

Thus the first voyage of the good airs.h.i.+p _Barnum_ ended at 6.07 p.m.

on the farm of E. R. Young, nine miles north of Saratoga.

A year later the _Barnum_ rose for the last time--from Chicago--and to this day the fate of the stanch craft and her brave captain remains an unsolved mystery.

CHAPTER VII

THE EVOLUTION OF A TRAIN ROBBER

Life was never dull in Grant County, New Mexico, in the early eighties.

There was always something doing--usually something the average law-abiding, peace-loving citizen would have been glad enough to dispense with. To say that life then and there was insecure is to describe altogether too feebly a state of society and an environment wherein Death, in one violent form or another, was ever abroad, seldom long idle, always alert for victims.

When the San Carlos Apaches, under Victoria, Ju, or Geronimo, were not out gunning for the whites, the whites were usually out gunning for one another over some trivial difference. Everybody carried a gun and was more or less handy with it. Indeed, it was a downright bad plan to carry one unless you were handy. For with gunning--the game most played, if not precisely the most popular--every one was supposed to be familiar with the rules and to know how to play; and in a game where every hand is sure to be ”called,” no one ever suspected another of being out on a sheer ”bluff.” Thus the coroner invariably declared it a case of suicide where one man drew a gun on another and failed to use it.

This highly explosive state of society was not due to the fact that there were few peaceable men in the country for there were many of them, men of character and education, honest, and as law-abiding as their peculiar environment would permit. Moreover, the percentage of professional ”bad men”--and this was a profession then--was comparatively small. It was due rather to the fact that every one, no matter how peaceable his inclinations, was compelled to carry arms habitually for self-defence, for the Apaches were constantly raiding outside the towns, and white outlaws inside. And with any cla.s.s of men who constantly carry arms, it always falls out that a weapon is the arbiter of even those minor personal differences which in the older and more effete civilization of the East are settled with fists or in a petty court.

The prevailing local contempt for any man who was too timid to ”put up a gun fight” when the etiquette of a situation demanded it, was expressed locally in the phrase that one ”could take a corncob and a lightning bug and make him run himself to death trying to get away.” It is clearly unnecessary to explain why the few men of this sort in the community did not occupy positions of any particular prominence. Their opinions did not seem to carry as much weight as those of other gentlemen who were known to be notably quick to draw and shoot.

I even recall many instances where the pistol entered into the pastimes of the community. One instance will stand telling:

A game of poker (rather a stiff one) had been going on for about a fortnight in the Red Light Saloon. The same group of men, five or six old friends, made up the game every day. All had varying success but one, who lost every day. And, come to think of it, his luck varied too, for some days he lost more than others. While he did not say much about his losings, it was observed that temper was not improving.

This sort of thing went on for thirteen days. The thirteenth day the loser happened to come in a little late, after the game was started. It also happened that on this particular day one of the players had brought in a friend, a stranger in the town, to join the game, When the loser came in, therefore, he was introduced to the stranger and sat down. A hand was dealt him. He started to play it, stopped, rapped on the table attention, and said:

”Boys, I want to make a personal explanation to this yere stranger.

Stranger, this yere game is sure a tight wad for a smoothbore. I'm loser in it, an' a heavy one, for exactly thirteen days, and these boys all understand that the first son of a gun I find I can beat, I'm going to take a six-shooter an' make him play with me a week. Now, if you has no objections to my rules, you can draw cards.”

Luckily for the stranger, perhaps, the thirteenth was as bad for the loser as its predecessors.

Outside the towns there were only three occupations in Grant County in those years, cattle ranching, mining and fighting Apaches, all of a sort to attract and hold none but the st.u.r.diest types of real manhood, men inured to danger and reckless of it. In the early eighties no faint-heart came to Grant County unless he blundered in--and any such were soon burning the shortest trail out. These men were never better described in a line than when, years ago, at a banquet of California Forty-niners, Joaquin Miller, the poet of the Sierras, speaking of the splendid types the men of forty-nine represented, said:

”The cowards never started, and all the weak died on the road!”

Within the towns, also, there were only three occupations: first, supplying the cowmen and miners whatever they needed, merchandise wet and dry, law mundane and spiritual, for although neither court nor churches were working overtime, they were available for the few who had any use for them; second, gambling, at monte, poker, or faro; and, third, figuring how to slip through the next twenty-four hours without getting a heavier load of lead in one's system than could be conveniently carried, or how to stay happily half shot and yet avoid coming home on a shutter, unhappily shot, or, having an active enemy on hand, how best to ”get” him.

Thus, while plainly the occupations of Grant County folk were somewhat limited in variety, in the matter of interest and excitement their games were wide open and the roof off.