Then I told them of a night, not long before the war, that I spent with the German archæologists excavating at Babylon. Hearing a scratching on my door, I got up and found a tabby cat there. Entering the room, she nosed about under my mosquito netting for a few moments with ingratiating mewings and purrings, finally to trot out through the open door with an “I’ll-see-you-again-in-a-moment” air. Presently she returned with a new-born kitten in her mouth. Nuzzling under the net and coverlets, she deposited the mewing atom in my bed, and then trotted off after another. When the whole litter of five was there, she crawled in herself and started nursing them. I spent the night on the couch, and without a net.
According to the best of my judgment, that story of mine was the only true one told that night. And yet—confound them—they wouldn’t believe it—any more than I would theirs!
Considerable feeling arose along toward bed-time as to who was going to have “Tommy” to sleep with. Roos—who hadn’t cut much ice in the story-telling—came strong at this juncture by adopting cave-man tactics and simply picking “Tommy” up and walking off with him. Waiting until Roos was asleep, I crept over and, gently extricating the furry pillow from under his downy cheek, carried it off to snuggle against my own ear. Whether Andy adopted the same Sabine methods himself, I never quite made sure. Anyhow, it was out of his blankets that “Tommy” came crawling in the morning.
As we made ready to pack off, Andy was in considerable doubt as to whether it would be best to leave his pet where he was or to take him down to “Wild Bill” again. “Tommy” cut the Gordian Knot himself by following us down to the boat like a dog and leaping aboard. He was horribly upset for a while when he saw the bank slide away from him and felt the motion of the boat, but Roos, muffling the dismal yowls under his coat, kept him fairly quiet until “Wild Bill’s” landing was reached. Here he became his old self again, following us with his quick little canine trot up to the cabin. Outside the door he met his twin brother, and the two, after a swift sniff of identification, slipped away across the clearing to stalk rabbits.
“Wild Bill,” as Andy had anticipated, was still in bed, but got up and welcomed us warmly as soon as he found who it was. He was a small man—much to my surprise, and looked more like a French-Canadian gentleman in reduced circumstances than the most tumultuous booze-fighter on the upper Columbia. I had heard scores of stories of his escapades in the days when Golden and Revelstoke were wide-open frontier towns and life was really worth living. But most of them just miss being “drawing-room,” however, and I refrain from setting them down. There was one comparatively polite one, though, of the time he started the biggest free-for-all fight Revelstoke ever knew by using the white, woolly, cheek-cuddling poodle of a dance-hall girl to wipe the mud off his boots with. And another—but no, that one wouldn’t quite pass censor.
“Bill” had shot a number of bear in the spring, and now asked Andy to take the unusually fine skins to Revelstoke and sell them for him. He also asked if we could let him have any spare provisions, as he was running very short. He was jubilant when I told him he could take everything we had left for what it had cost in Golden. That was like finding money, he said, for packing in his stuff cost him close to ten cents a pound. But it wasn’t the few dollars he saved on the grub that etched a silver—nay, a roseate—lining on the sodden rain clouds for “Wild Bill” that day; rather it was the sequel to the consequences of a kindly thought I had when he came down to the boat to see us off.
“‘Bill,’” I said, as he started to wring our hands in parting, “they tell me you’ve become a comparative teetotaler these last few years. But we have a little ‘thirty per over-proof’ left—just a swallow. Perhaps—for the sake of the old days....”
That quick, chesty cough, rumbling right from the diaphragm, was the one deepest sound of emotion I ever heard—and I’ve heard a fair amount of “emoting,” too. “Don’t mind—if I do,” he mumbled brokenly, with a long intake of breath that was almost a sob. I handed him a mug—a hulking big half-pint coffee mug, it was—and uncorked the bottle. “Say when....”
“Thanks—won’t trouble you,” he muttered, snatching the bottle from me with a hand whose fingers crooked like claws. Then he inhaled another deep breath, took out his handkerchief, brushed off a place on one of the thwarts, sat down, and, pouring very deliberately, emptied the contents of the bottle to the last drop into the big mug. The bottle—a British Imperial quart—had been a little less than a quarter full; the mug was just short of brimming. “Earzow!” he mumbled, with a sweepingly comprehensive gesture with the mug. Then, crooking his elbow, he dumped the whole half pint down his throat. Diluted four-to-one, that liquid fire would have made an ordinary man wince; and “Wild Bill” downed it without a blink. Then he wiped his lips with his sleeve, set mug and bottle carefully down on the thwart, bowed low to each of us, and stepped ashore with dignified tread. Blackmore, checking Roos’ hysterical giggle with a prod of his paddle handle, pushed off into the current. “Wait!” he admonished, eyeing the still figure on the bank with the fascinated glance of a man watching a short length of fuse sputter down toward the end of a stick of dynamite.
We had not long to wait. The detonation of the dynamite was almost instantaneous. The mounting fumes of that “thirty per” fired the slumbering volcano of the old trapper as a dash of kerosene fires a bed of dormant coals. And so “Wild Bill” went wild. Dancing and whooping like an Indian, he shouted for us to come back—that he would give us his furs, his cabin, the Columbia, the Selkirks, Canada.... What he was going to offer next we never learned, for just then a very sobering thing occurred—“Tommy” and his twin brother, attracted by the noise, came trotting down the path from the cabin to learn what it was all about.