TWO MEDICINE LAKE, GLACIER PARK, MONTANA.
WRANGLING HORSES, GLACIER PARK, MONTANA.
But see how much longer it takes a story Eastern fashion. Once you have the key to the Westerner’s narrative, you get the vividness of these compressed facts. If you have not, he might as well be talking Sanscrit as colloquial English of one and two syllables. You listen and wonder what has happened to your mind: you seem to understand everything he is saying, yet you understand nothing.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE NAIL-FILE AND THE CHIPPEWA
AT Many Glaciers they advised us to visit the lovely Waterton Lakes lying in the Canadian extension of Glacier Park.
“There’s only one bad place,—north of Babb. It’s flooded for some miles, but all you have to do is climb the canal bank, and run along the top.”
As people were always advising us to undertake some form of acrobatics, we stored the canal bank in the back of our minds, and started for Babb and Canada.
Babb proved as short of population as of syllables. We went the length of the town, and encountered only one building,—the postoffice and store. That its populace was treated more generously in the matter of syllables we discovered by idly reading the mailing list of Blackfeet citizens, pasted on the wall. Among Babb’s most prominent residents are Killfirst Stingy, Mary Earrings, Susie Swimsunder, Ada Calflooking, Cecile Weaselwoman, Xavier Billetdoux, Joe Scabbyrobe, Alex Biglodgepole and Josephine Underotter Owlchild.