Part 7 (2/2)
Holt's furious pace on ski had resulted in my leaving jagged fragments of cuticle on most of the trees and much of the crust along the Yellowstone Grand Tour. Here was a chance to lead a measure or two of the dance myself. Pete had ideas of his own about the looseness with which the water was packed below Livingston, but was too good a sport to let that interfere with my pleasure. Indeed, he even went out of his way to make his trip official. Two people--a man and a woman--had been drowned in the Yellowstone the previous week. He ordered himself to go in search of them in my boat, hiring Joe Evans, with his canvas canoe, to accompany us as scout and pilot. The arrangement was ideal. Joe knew the best channel--so I took it for granted,--which would leave me nothing to do but trail his wake and manage my new and untried boat.
Holt's hundred and eighty pounds in the stern would give that ballast just where I needed it. The lack of serious responsibilities would give us a chance for a good old yarn while, watching my chances, I could pick favourable riffles and pay back my friend in his own coin the debt of twenty years standing.
It was a great disappointment to find no one of my old baseball team-mates still in Livingston. Jack Mjelde, Captain and second-baseman, had been killed in an electrical accident. That was a typically capricious trick of Fate. As I recall things now, Jack--a family man with a real job, and a legitimate resident of Livingston--was about the most worth preserving of the lot of us. Ed Ray had dropped in and out of town on brake-beams every now and then, and so had two or three others.
Paddy Ryan, pitcher and the gentlest mannered of us all, was believed to be still a bar-keeper--somewhat surrept.i.tiously of course. Riley, the never more than semi-Keeley-cured catcher, had last been heard of over Missoula way, and looking rather fit now that there was a more or less closed season on his favourite quarry--mauve mice.
And so it went. A score or more of old-timers who had seen me play turned up at the hotel, but only one of these brought a real thrill.
That was a husky chap of about thirty, who said he had been admitted to the park once for retrieving a home-run I had swatted over the fence in a game against Anaconda. ”Gosh, how you could line 'em out, boy,”
volunteered some one, and grunts of a.s.sent ran back and forth through the crowd. That was all very nice, of course; but I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I could have been quite sure that none of them had been present the time we played Red Lodge on Miner's Union Day. This was the morning after the Fireman's Ball of the night before. I believe I could _see_ the ball all right. Indeed, that was just the trouble. I saw too many b.a.l.l.s and couldn't swing my bat against the right one. I struck out three times running. The fourth time up I connected for a mighty wallop, but only to get put out through starting for third base instead of first!
Pete Nelson, Sheriff of my former visit and now State Game Warden, called for me at the hotel and together we strolled down the old main street to the river. We had dubbed it ”The-Street-That-is-Called-Straight.” Just why I fail to remember, but probably some of us wanted to show his biblical learning. Riley, the Keeley-ed catcher, confessed it never had looked straight to him, and there were times--especially late on the nights we had won games--that I had doubts on that score myself. But if there had been crooks in or upon it in the old days, time had ironed them out. I especially called Nelson's attention to the Northern Pacific station at one end of the vista, the nodding cottonwoods at the other, and the glaring new concrete pavement, stretching straight as a white ribbon, connecting them up.
Pete Nelson sadly called my attention to the manner in which all the gay old palaces of carousal had been converted, and said he reckoned that perhaps every one that had patronized them had undergone the same change. I was also sad, but less optimistic than Pete respecting the increasing purpose of the ages. As we leaned on the rail of the river bridge and gazed at the swift green current I tried to recall those lines of Stevenson's which began:
”Sing me a song of a boy that is gone-- Ah, could that lad be I!”
and which conclude:
”All that was good, all that was fair, All that was me is gone.”
I couldn't remember the part that I craved, and so fell back on:
”Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depths of some divine despair Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.”
That didn't quite do, either, for Tennyson was gazing on fading fields and thinking of Autumn, and I was gazing on budding cottonwoods and thinking of Spring--Spring! And yet it was a Spring that was gone.
”Pete,” I said moodily, turning a gloomy eye to the seaward-rus.h.i.+ng flood, ”there's a lot of water gone under this bridge never to return, since you and I stood here last.” The ex-Sheriff nodded in dreary acquiescence. ”And, boy,” he remarked with the weariness of the ages in his voice as he rubbed a finger up and down the bridge of a blue, cold nose that I remembered as having once glowed with all the hues of a sunset over the colour-splashed gorge of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone; ”boy, water ain't the only thing that's gone never to return.”
Arm in arm, as we had navigated ”The-Street-That-is-Called-Straight” in ancient of days, we wended our way back town-ward through the gloom-drenched dusk. By devious ways and obscure Pete piloted, stopping every now and then to introduce me to certain friends as the boy who helped Livingston cop the state champeens.h.i.+p twenty years ago. We were treated with great deference all along the way. There was the glint of a twinkle in the ex-Sheriffian eye as Pete delivered me at the hotel.
”That was just to show you, boy, that Gilead is not yet quite drained of Balm,” he said, patting me on the back. ”Until they give the screw a few more turns, life in little old Livingston will not be entirely without its compensayshuns.”
I had dinner and spent the evening with Pete Holt's family, and a mighty wholesome interval it was after an afternoon so wild with old regrets.
Holt had always been a teetotaler, and so, with nothing much to lose, faced an unclouded future. Whether, as Chief of Police, he has ever given those much-dreaded turns to the screws that would crush the last lees of pleasure from sanguine grapes of pain I have never heard. It made me think of Guelph and Ghibelline, this finding my old-time friends thus arrayed against one another. And good old Peter Nelson--I am wondering, when c.o.c.k-crow sounds, if he will be found denying or denied.
”Buckskin Jim” Cutler, premier river man of the upper Yellowstone, came down to Livingston the evening before the morning I had scheduled for my departure. It had been rumoured for a couple of days that he would arrive--some said to respond to a legal summons, others that he had heard I had inquired for him and was hoping to sign on with me for my river voyage. I have never been able to make sure either way. Certainly he had been summoned to court over some dispute with a neighbour, while I have never had definite a.s.surance that he had received any word of my trip. I could not have taken him far in any event, as I had no need of help once my boat was given a thorough trying out.
Cutler's arrival in Livingston was sudden and tragic, as is always the case when the Yellowstone takes a hand in real earnest. My boat had been set up in a blacksmith shop on the river, at the foot of the main street. Going down there just before dinner to make sure that everything was s.h.i.+p-shape for the start on the morrow, I found the place deserted, while there was a considerable gathering of people on the next bridge below. Starting in that direction, I met one of the helpers, breathing hard and deathly white, hurrying back to the deserted shop.
”Mighty hard luck,” he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed brokenly between breaths. ”Man just came down past shop--in river--yelling for help. Didn't hear him till he got by. Half a minute sooner, and I could have yanked out your light boat--all set up--and picked him up. Hear they've just got him down by the next bridge--but 'fraid he's croaked. Cussed hard luck.”
They were carrying a man to a waiting auto as I approached the crowd.
”Yep--drowned,” I heard some one say; ”but he made a h.e.l.l of a fight.
That was old 'Buckskin Jim' to the last kick--always fighting.” My glimpse of the rugged face and dripping form was of the briefest, but amply rea.s.suring as to the truth of the statement I had overheard. It was the frame of a man that could put up a h.e.l.l of a fight, and the face of a man who would--a real river-rat if there ever was one.
Next morning's issue of the Livingston _Enterprise_, which bore in the lower left-hand corner of its front page a modest announcement of my departure, on its upper right-hand corner carried a prominently featured account of Jim Cutler's last run on the Yellowstone. As it contains about all I have ever been able to learn in connection with the tragic finish of a character who, in 1901 as in 1921, was recommended to me as the best river hand on the upper Yellowstone, I reproduce the latter in full herewith.
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