Would you believe that even these terrible creatures have to be
guarded by the troopers to prevent the irreverent Americans from
chipping the cones to pieces, or, worse still, making the geyser
sick? If you take a small barrel full of soft-soap and drop it
down a geyser's mouth, that geyser will presently be forced to
lay all before you, and for days afterward will be of an
irritated and inconstant stomach.
When they told me the tale I was filled with sympathy. Now I
wish that I had soft-soap and tried the experiment on some lonely
little beast far away in the woods. It sounds so probable and so
human.
Yet he would be a bold man who would administer emetics to the
Giantess. She is flat-lipped, having no mouth; she looks like a
pool, fifty feet long and thirty wide, and there is no
ornamentation about her. At irregular intervals she speaks and
sends up a volume of water over two hundred feet high to begin
with, then she is angry for a day and a half - sometimes for two
days.
Owing to her peculiarity of going mad in the night, not many
people have seen the Giantess at her finest; but the clamor of
her unrest, men say, shakes the wooden hotel, and echoes like
thunder among the hills.
The congregation returned to the hotel to put down their
impressions in diaries and note-books, which they wrote up
ostentatiously in the verandas. It was a sweltering hot day,
albeit we stood some-what higher than the level of Simla, and I
left that raw pine creaking caravansary for the cool shade of a
clump of pines between whose trunks glimmered tents.
A batch of United States troopers came down the road and flung
themselves across the country into their rough lines. The
Melican cavalryman can ride, though he keeps his accoutrements
pig-fashion and his horse cow-fashion.
I was free of that camp in five minutes - free to play with the
heavy, lumpy carbines, have the saddles stripped, and punch the
horses knowingly in the ribs. One of the men had been in the
fight with "Wrap-up-his-Tail," and he told me how that great
chief, his horse's tail tied up in red calico, swaggered in front
of the United States cavalry, challenging all to single combat.
But he was slain, and a few of his tribe with him.
"There's no use in an Indian, anyway," concluded my friend.
A couple of cow-boys - real cow-boys - jingled through the camp
amid a shower of mild chaff. They were on their way to Cook
City, I fancy, and I know that they never washed.
