Down the Yellowstone - Lewis R. Freeman

CHAPTER V

BILLINGS TO GLENDIVE

Getting round the power-dam did not prove a serious problem. The night man at the power-house told me it would be possible to land on the right side and let the boat down over a series of "steps" that had been built at that end of the dam. This was probably true, but as landing on the almost perpendicular cliff immediately above the drop-off looked a bit precarious I decided in favour of being safe by portaging rather than run the chance of being sorry through trying to line down. It was against just such emergencies as this that I had provided my feather-weight outfit.

A wooden skiff of the size of my steel one would have required at least four men to lift it up the forty-five degree slope of the bank above the intake of the power canal. It was not an easy task with my little shallop, but I managed it alone without undue exertion. Five minutes more sufficed to drag it a couple of hundred feet along the levee and launch it at the head of the rapid below the dam. Two trips brought down my outfit, and I was off into the river again.

Running at a slashing rate round the bend of the bluff, I kept on for a couple of miles or more to where the Northern Pacific and a highway bridge span the river a couple of miles from the centre of Billings. Leaving the boat and my outfit in the care of a genial pumping-house engineer, I phoned for a taxi and went up to the hotel behind closed curtains. To return to the scene of my last night's triumph as a mere river-rat and hack writer was a distinct anti-climax. As I had been warned by wire that a hundred pages of urgently needed proofs from New York would await me in Billings for correction, there was no side-stepping the necessity. The risk would have to be run, but to minimize it as far as was humanly possible I planned to keep to my room as much as I could, and to disguise myself by dressing as a gentleman or a drummer when I had to venture upon the streets. Then by keeping to the more refined parts of towns it seemed to me that I ought to stand a reasonably good chance of avoiding the poignancy of humiliation that would inevitably follow recognition by any of those fine fellows who had sat at my feet the night before. It was a well devised plan, and so came pretty near to succeeding.

I tumbled out of my bath into bed, stayed there an hour, got up, dressed in immaculate flannels and started in on the proofs. A reporter from the Gazette called up about noon to say he had been lying in ambush for me ever since the Livingston papers had warned him of my departure. Could he come over for a story? I couldn't very well refuse that, but took the precaution of throwing my "Indian Police" uniform in the closet before he arrived. Then I made a special point of telling him I always wore flannels and duck on my river trips—sort of survival of my South Sea yatching days. If he would only put that in, I reckoned, it would effectually drag a red herring across any suspicions that might be aroused by a reading of the story in the minds of my late subjects. He forgot it as a matter of fact, but it wasn't that that did the harm. It was just hard luck—Joss, as the sailors say.

The next day was the Fourth of July, a holiday, but a very obliging express agent, who came down town and opened up his office to let me get out a sleeping bag, made it unnecessary to hang on another night in Billings. The Gazette story brought no demonstrations—that is, of a hostile nature. Calls from scouting secretaries searching for a fatted calf to butcher for club holidays were the only ripples on the surface. Still with my fingers crossed, I ordered a closed taxi for the run down to my boat. It would have been a perfectly clean get-away had not Joss decreed that I should leave my package at the railway station to be picked up as I went by. Returning to the taxi from the check-room a man was waiting for me outside of the door.

"My name is Allstein," he began; but I had observed that before he opened his hard-set jaw. Without waiting for him to go on I made one wild, despairing bid to keep my honour white. I feel to this day that it deserved to have succeeded.