“I expect we are all right as far as that goes,” replied Jack. “You see there was no sizzling noise about the camp, and the one we heard was caused, I suppose, by the steam squeezing its way out from under the turf. I don’t suppose such a thing happens once in a thousand years.”
“I hope it doesn’t,” Percy put in. “Two or three more of them would turn my hair grey. Come. Let us go to bed. What’s become of old Lyss, I wonder? Oh, there he is by the fire. Here, Lyss!”—whistling.
But Ulysses was not to be persuaded. He stood by the fire wagging his tail when we called to him, but no blandishments could induce him again to approach the place where he had been so nearly scared out of his wits. Scientific explanations were wasted on him.
After sitting around the fire for some time, discussing this strange phenomenon, we retired to bed, not feeling any too sure that we might not be pitched out and parboiled before morning; and though nothing so serious as this occurred, the night was not destined to pass without disturbance. We had been asleep some time when Jack was awakened by Ulysses’ whining and trying to crawl into his bed. This extraordinary behaviour on the part of the usually discreet old dog naturally disturbed Jack’s slumbers, and rousing himself to see what was the cause of it, he heard a strange noise going on somewhere, which caused him to call out:
“Tom! Percy! wake up!”
As we had gone to sleep with our nerves set with a hair-trigger we awoke in a second, and, sitting up on our beds, listened.
From the valley below there came a mixed sound of thumping, roaring, and splashing; and presently in the bright moonlight we saw a great cloud, like a bolster five hundred feet high standing on end, go sailing up the valley, soon to be followed by others, a dozen or two, one behind the other.
It was a strange country indeed that we had come into.
Suddenly Jack startled us by clapping his hands together and shouting out:
“I know! I know what’s the matter. We have crossed the range without knowing it,—it must have been the day we left the lake,—and we have wandered into the geyser basins of the Yellowstone region. That’s what’s the matter.”