Ladies and Gentlemen

by Irvin S. Cobb

For him, the lone survivor of this quick catastrophe, there was nothing to do except to get out. That part of it didn’t worry Chaney much. He was at home in this high country. He had hunted and fished and ranged over a good part of it. With the taller peaks to guide him and the water courses to follow—on this side of the Continental Divide they nearly all ran west or southwest—a man could hold to his compass points even through unfamiliar going.

He would scale the wall of the bowl right away. He didn’t want darkness to catch up with him before he was over the top; the place already was beginning to be haunted. Except on the eastern slopes night came late in these altitudes; it would be after nine o’clock before the sunset altogether failed him. He would lie down until morning came, then shove ahead, holding to the trail over which he and Hurley had traveled in until it brought him out on the Flathead plateau. To save time and boot-leather, he might even take a short cut down through the timber to the foot-hills; there were ranches and ranger stations and fire-watchers’ lookouts scattered at intervals of every few miles along the river flats.

He might be footsore by the time he struck civilization with word of the killing and certainly he would be pretty hungry, but that was all. He wouldn’t get cold when the evening chill came on. He had on a coat and it was a heavy blanket coat, which was lucky, and he had matches, plenty of them. He had loose matches in the breast pocket of his shirt and a waterproof box of matches in the fob pocket of his riding-breeches. He even had two knives; a hunting-knife in a sheath on his belt, a penknife in his pocket.

Chaney was a great one for doubling up on the essentials whenever he took to the woods. He’d have a small comb and toothbrush in his folding pocket kit; another comb and another toothbrush tucked away somewhere in his saddle-bags or his blanket roll. He always carried two pairs of boots too.

It was a regular passion with him, this fad for taking along spares and extras on a camping trip or, for that matter, on any sort of trip. People had laughed at him for being so old-maidish, as they put it. Chaney let them laugh; the blamed fools! It was his business, wasn’t it, if he chose to be methodical about these small private duplications? More than once his care had been repaid in dividends of comfort. And anyhow the thing had come to be a part of him. He was forty-five, at the age when men turn systematic and set in their ways.

The only salvage left out of the disaster was his rod. He might as well take that along. Uncoupled and with the links tied together, it would not encumber him on the hike. He descended from the cairn and, finding the rod uninjured, was in the act of freeing the leader from its entanglement in the brushy top of an aspen when all at once his nervous hands became idle while his brain became active over a new thought.

It was a big notion and in that same instant he decided to follow after the impulse of it.

Suppose, just suppose now for the sake of argument, that he went away from this spot leaving no trace behind to betray that he had gone away alive and sound? He canvassed the contingency from this angle and that, his imagination busy with one conjecture, one speculation, one eventuality after another, and nowhere found a flaw in the prospect.

This is what would happen—it morally was bound to happen, unless he made a false step: Sooner or later and in all probability before a week was up, a rescue party would come into Cache Creek looking for him and Hurley. They were due out in four days to refit with fresh supplies for another journey down on Pronghorn Lake, twenty miles to the southwest. Within five days or six their prolonged absence, coupled with their failure to send back word of their whereabouts by some passing tourist, would be enough to cause alarm at Polebridge, where Hurley’s people lived. Besides, the earthquake surely would make the natives apprehensive of accidents in the mountains.