Jake ran off after his music. We heard them, still disdaining time, march around the camp announcing the fandango.
“This helps us,” said Brent. “Our friends, of course, will not join the riot. When the Mormons are fairly engaged, we will make our visit.”
“It is a good night for a gallop,” said I.
He nodded, but said nothing.
Presently Jake, still supported by his pair of melodists, reappeared. A straggling procession of Saints followed him. They trooped into the enclosure, a motley throng indeed. Even that dry husk of music, hardly even cadence, had put some spirits into them. Noise, per se, is not without virtue; it means life. Shamberlain’s guests came together, laughing and talking. Their laughter was not liquid. But swallowing prairie-dust does not instruct in dulcet tones. Rather wrinkled merriment; but still better than no merriment at all.
We entered with the throng. Within was a bizarre spectacle. A strange night-scene for a rough-handed Flemish painter of low life to portray.
The palisades of old Bridger’s Malakoff enclosed a space of a hundred feet square. A cattle-shed, house, and trading-shop surrounded three sides of the square. The rest was open court, paved with clod, the native carpet of the region. Adobes, crumbling as the most strawless bricks ever moulded by a grumbling Hebrew with an Egyptian taskmaster, were the principal material of Bridger’s messuage. The cattle on Mr. Mechi’s model farm would have whisked their tails and turned away in utter contempt from these inelegant accommodations. No high-minded pig would have consented to wallow there. The khan of Cheronæa, abhorred of Grecian travellers, is a sweeter place. The khan of Tiberias, terror of pilgrims, is a cleaner refuge. Bridger’s Fort was as musty and infragrant a caravansary as any of those dirty cloisters of the Orient, where the disillusioned howadji sinks into the arms of that misery’s bedfellow, the King of the Fleas,—which kangaroo-legged caliph, let me say, was himself, or in the person of a vigorous vizier, on the spot at the Fort, entertaining us strangers according to his royal notions of hospitality.
Into this Court of Dirt thronged the Latter-Day Saints, in raiment also in its latter day.
“The ragamuffin brigade,” whispered I to Brent. “Jake Shamberlain’s red-flannel shirts and yaller-topped boots would be better than this seediness of the furbelowed nymphs and ole clo’ swains. Evidently suits of full dress are not to be hired at a pinch on the boulevards of Sizzumville.”
Brent made no answer, and surveyed the throng anxiously.