“Well, it was me that got it. I always told the Boss he didn’t load the tripod heavy enough. When I sent the stream up she teetered for fair. It was like a camel buck-jumping. There ain’t much give to three iron legs, and so, friends, I was sitting up and down times oftener than I could realize.
“There wasn’t a bronc’ buster that wouldn’t have yelled, ‘He’s a rider!’ if he’d seen me stick to that machine. We crow-hopped on the rocks back and forwards, and alleman’ all. We pitched forward and back, and we did the double teeter, and as for the stream—the smack when she hit things sounded just like a little small giant baby, nine hundred feet high, clapping his hands with glee. Sometimes through the whiz and howl I could hear men’s voices asking why I done so, and they no longer sounded like the voices of comrades and friends.
“I was helpless as a child; couldn’t grab lever, wheel nor nothing. Finally one leg toppled off an edge of rock and then—! Well, she shot the cook’s shanty across the stream two hundred yards first whack. It was so sudden it didn’t even put the fire out. The boys took their solemn oaths the kitchen stove went across, smoking as calm and peaceful as anything, just like it had decided to take a little fly. Nothing to interrupt business, but just the kind of exercise you would think a cook-stove would take. Yet they was astonished that I should shoot a cook-stove across the stream.
“While they was standing there astonished, the old nozzle bucked ’way back, and plowed a well in a bank ten feet away. I bet you that stream could shoot a hole right up Niagara Falls, and when she mixed it with the mess of dirt and rock in that bank, kicking it backwards at me, old Napoleon at Waterloo was a dum poor effigy for Hy Smith. I couldn’t see how it was ever going to be possible for me to breathe again, and the awful roar and swatting and smashing makes it queer how I ever got to hear or think again.
“But she passed through that bank of dirt in no time, and all the fellows that was asking, ‘Where’s he gone?’ found out. They got the last of the bank. Men could show you dents where pebbles no bigger’n buckshot had been blown into them.
“The old monitor got real gay, and thought she was a Fourth of July pin-wheel, and after that there was nothing but water-works on the whole cussed creek. She took from one side to the other in quick swings. Billy, the cook, said he saw a block of boards take wings and sail right over Hooker’s Mountain.
“I was dumbfuzzled and geewhizzled, till my head was full of curled hair and insect powder. I hung on with all hands and feet by instinct, like an insect, until finally we steadied down and played in the same place for half a minute, and I brushed some of the water out of my eyes.
“Beside me was Hank, looking reproachful, as much as to say, ‘I thought you knew your limit, Hy—but you must have stayed in town too long last time.’
“Then the next thing that appeared was that darned little black-and-tan dog that had caused the whole trouble, followed by our friend, the rancher. I pined to wash his whiskers. But it was not to be. The monitor had jacked all her levers and cogs by knocking around.
“‘Come on,’ I yelped to the crowd—‘Come on, you flapjack faces! Help me hold this critter down.’