Down the Yellowstone

by Lewis R. Freeman

Having over-sailed the mark by a mile, I hastened to trim in canvas and beat back onto the course as originally charted. The last year or two in California hadn't been so bad, I admitted. I had even made quite a bit of money, so that this little river jaunt of mine on the Yellowstone was really almost in the nature of a pleasure trip. (Funny thing, but that river-pleasure-jaunt assertion was the only statement I made at which she seemed inclined to lift an eyebrow.) I had brought a few of my California home-dried apricots along, I continued. Perhaps they would enjoy a few for a change. That was the point I had been manœuvring to. Now I would play my comforter rôle.

Spreading the last of my bag of sticky slabs out before the fire, I started to tell how they were made. First there was the picking by men and the cutting and pitting by Mexican girls. She interrupted to ask what the girls were paid. I told her about fifteen cents a box, adding that some of the defter fingered of them often made three and four dollars a day. She sighed at that, and wished she had a chance to earn that much—sure and safe where the hail couldn't get it.

Solberg came in with her husband at this juncture. He was a good-looking young chap, well set up and with the right kind of an eye. There was no doubt of the depth of his discouragement and depression, but he was plainly too good stuff to sulk for long. He shook hands warmly enough, but there was a trace of bitterness in the smile with which he remarked that he was glad to see that I had survived the hail better than had his oats and corn. I rattled right on about the apricots, telling of the sulphuring, sunning, stacking, binning and packing, adding—in a convenient moment when the wife had stepped out to shake the tablecloth—that ever effective little capsule about the Mexican señoritas, all young, dark-eyed and beautiful. The good chap actually lifted his head and took a deep, shoulder-squaring breath at that. He relapsed again when I failed to develop the theme, but it was only temporary. Ten minutes later, with great inconsequentiality, I heard him asking his wife how she would like to go to California and work in the apricots. Then he went over, wound up the Victrola and put on "Smiles! Smiles! Smiles!" What a lot of latent good there was in those California home-dried apricots, I reflected as we splashed along homeward! Surely I must not fail to renew my supply at the next town.

As we were preparing to turn in for the night, I took Solberg to task for his remark earlier in the evening to the effect that a woman and kiddies didn't make it any easier for a man who had been hailed-out. "Don't you think," I asked, "that a plucky little woman like that comes in pretty handy to buffer the bumps in a time of trouble like this?" For the first and only time my host was guilty of sarcasm. "Well," he said with a cynical glint in his blue eye, "if I had been in your place down there on the sand-bar I daresay I would have been glad of almost anything to buffer the bumps of the hail-stones. As it is, I reckon I can do my own buffering."

Recognizing the familiar symptoms of an ancient but still unhealed wound, I thought the best thing I could do under the circumstances was to concentrate on blowing up my sleeping-bag and turning in. Funny how imagination works in a man who is much alone. Given a pin-prick over the heart, with ten years of solitude to brood over it, and he'll convince himself that the original wound was from nothing of less calibre than a "Big Bertha."

The next morning was bright and clear, with no signs of any menace lurking under the northeastern horizon. Solberg accompanied me across his ruined fields to my boat. His corn and oats, he admitted, were a total loss, but he thought there were signs that the tough, stringy stalks of the sweet clover had some vitality left in them. He seemed especially attached to this beautiful plant, calling it "The Friend of Man" and saying that he had experimented with several foods and drinks from it that promised well for human consumption. There was something particularly appealing to me in this fine, and bluff, if slightly eccentric, chap. I think it was his wholesomeness—the firmness with which he seemed to have his feet planted on the earth. One who has been attracted to the French peasant for his love of the land from which he draws his life will know what I mean.

I pushed off into a quiet current that was in strange contrast to the wind-torn welter of white I had seen at that bend the evening before. The air on the river was fairly drenched with the heavy odour of crushed vegetation, which seemed to have drained there from higher levels. This was pronounced at all times, but where I skirted fields of sweet clover there was a palpability to the perfume which suggested that one might almost gather it in his hands and allow it to pour through his fingers. In the Marquesas there is a little yellow-blossomed bush called the cassi, the pollen from which blows far to leeward before the South-east Trade. At times I have thought that I could detect the delicate odour of blown-cassi ten miles at sea, yet never even in kicking my way through a copse of the fragrant little bush have I been assailed with such a veritable flow of perfume as coiled and streamed about me as I drifted down toward the mouth of the Yellowstone that morning after the great hail-storm. Doubtless, indeed, the hail was responsible. Crushed and dying, the voiceless "Friend of Man" was chanting its "Swan Song" in the only medium at its command.

A couple of miles below the bend where the storm had caught me I passed into North Dakota at a point called the State Line Ferry. An hour later I ran under the bridge of a branch of the Great Northern. It was a fine, bold piece of construction, and it was in my mind at the time that its builder must be an outstanding man in his line. This surmise was vindicated a month later when I found him putting in the first piers of a bridge to span the Missouri at Yankton. Incidentally, some of his false-work got in the way of my skiff and all but dumped me out into the "Big Muddy."

THE BROAD STREAM OF THE YELLOWSTONE BELOW GLENDIVE

THE LAST BRIDGE ABOVE THE MISSOURI