He was walking alone. "How's Mrs. McLean to-day?" I inquired.
"She's well," said Lin, turning his eye from mine. "Who's your friend all bugged up in English clothes?"
"About as good a man as you," said I, "and more cautious."
"Him and his eye-glasses!" said the sceptical puncher, still looking away from me and surveying Ogden, who was approaching with the Governor. That excellent man, still at long range, broke out smiling till his teeth shone, and he waved a yellow paper at us.
"Telegram from Hilbrun," he shouted; "be here to-morrow"; and he hastened up.
"Says he wants a cart at the depot, and a small building where he can be private," added Ogden. "Great, isn't it?"
"You bet!" said Lin, brightening. The New Yorker's urbane but obvious excitement mollified Mr. McLean. "Ever seen rain made, Mr. Ogden?" said he.
"Never. Have you?"
Lin had not. Ogden offered him a cigar, which the puncher pronounced excellent, and we all agreed to see Hilbrun arrive.
"We're going to show the telegram to Jode," said the Governor; and he and Ogden departed on this mission to the signal service.
"Well, I must be getting along myself," said Lin; but he continued walking slowly with me. "Where're yu' bound?" he said.
"Nowhere in particular," said I. And we paced the board sidewalks a little more.
"You're going to meet the train to-morrow?" said he.
"The train? Oh yes. Hilbrun's. To-morrow. You'll be there?"
"Yes, I'll be there. It's sure been a dry spell, ain't it?"
"Yes. Just like last year. In fact, like all the years."
"Yes. I've never saw it rain any to speak of in summer. I expect it's the rule. Don't you?"
"I shouldn't wonder."
"I don't guess any man knows enough to break such a rule. Do you?"
"No. But it'll be fun to see him try."
"Sure fun! Well, I must be getting along. See yu' to-morrow."
"See you to-morrow, Lin."
He left me at a corner, and I stood watching his tall, depressed figure. A hundred yards down the street he turned, and seeing me looking after him, pretended he had not turned; and then I took my steps toward the club, telling myself that I had been something of a skunk; for I had inquired for Mrs. McLean in a certain tone, and I had hinted to Lin that he had lacked caution; and this was nothing but a way of saying "I told you so" to the man that is down. Down Lin certainly was, although it had not come so home to me until our little walk together just now along the boards.
At the club I found the Governor teaching Ogden a Cheyenne specialty — a particular drink, the Allston cocktail. "It's the bitters that does the trick," he was saying, but saw me and called out: "You ought to have been with us and seen Jode. I showed him the telegram, you know. He read it through, and just handed it back to me, and went on monkeying with his anemometer. Ever seen his instruments? Every fresh jigger they get out he sends for. Well, he monkeyed away, and wouldn't say a word, so I said, 'You understand, Jode, this telegram comes from Hilbrun.' And Jode, he quit his anemometer and said, 'I make no doubt, sir, that your despatch is genuwine.' Oh, South Carolina's indignant at me!" And the Governor slapped his knee. "Why, he's so set against Hilbrun," he continued, "I guess if he knew of something he could explode to stop rain he'd let her fly!"
"No, he wouldn't," said I. "He'd not consider that honorable."
"That's so," the Governor assented. "Jode'll play fair."
It was thus we had come to look at our enterprise — a game between a well-established, respectable weather bureau and an upstart charlatan. And it was the charlatan had our sympathy — as all charlatans, whether religious, military, medical, political, or what not, have with the average American. We met him at the station. That is, Ogden, McLean, and I; and the Governor, being engaged, sent (unofficially) his secretary and the requested cart. Lin was anxious to see what would be put in the cart, and I was curious about how a rain-maker would look. But he turned out an unassuming, quiet man in blue serge, with a face you could not remember afterwards, and a few civil, ordinary remarks. He even said it was a hot day, as if he had no relations with the weather; and what he put into the cart were only two packing-boxes of no special significance to the eye. He desired no lodging at the hotel, but to sleep with his apparatus in the building provided for him; and we set out for it at once. It was an untenanted barn, and he asked that he and his assistant might cut a hole in the roof, upon which we noticed the assistant for the first time — a tallish, good-looking young man, but with a weak mouth. "This is Mr. Lusk," said the rain-maker; and we shook hands, Ogden and I exchanging a glance. Ourselves and the cart marched up Hill Street — or Capitol Avenue, as it has become named since Cheyenne has grown fuller of pomp and emptier of prosperity — and I thought we made an unusual procession: the Governor's secretary, unofficially leading the way to the barn; the cart, and the rain-maker beside it, guarding his packed-up mysteries; McLean and Lusk, walking together in unconscious bigamy; and in the rear, Odgen nudging me in the ribs. That it was the correct Lusk we had with us I felt sure from his incompetent, healthy, vacant appearance, strong-bodied and shiftless — the sort of man to weary of one trade and another, and make a failure of wife beating between whiles. In Twenty-fourth Street — the town's uttermost rim — the Governor met us, and stared at Lusk. "Christopher!" was his single observation; but he never forgets a face — cannot afford to, now that he is in politics; and, besides, Lusk remembered him. You seldom really forget a man to whom you owe ten dollars.
"So you've quit hauling poles?" said the Governor.
"Nothing in it, sir," said Lusk.
"Is there any objection to my having a hole in the roof?" asked the rain-maker; for this the secretary had been unable to tell him.
"What! going to throw your bombs through it?" said the Governor, smiling heartily.
But the rain-maker explained at once that his was not the bomb system, but a method attended by more rain and less disturbance. "Not that the bomb don't produce first-class results at times and under circumstances," he said, "but it's uncertain and costly."
The Governor hesitated about the hole in the roof, which Hilbrun told us was for a metal pipe to conduct his generated gases into the air. The owner of the barn had gone to Laramie. However, we found a stove-pipe hole, which saved delay. "And what day would you prefer the shower?" said Hilbrun, after we had gone over our contract with him.
"Any day would do," the Governor said.
This was Thursday; and Sunday was chosen, as a day when no one had business to detain him from witnessing the shower — though it seemed to me that on week-days, too, business in Cheyenne was not so inexorable as this. We gave the strangers some information about the town, and left them. The sun went away in a cloudless sky, and came so again when the stars had finished their untarnished shining. Friday was clear and dry and hot, like the dynasty of blazing days that had gone before.
I saw a sorry spectacle in the street — the bridegroom and the bride shopping together; or, rather, he with his wad of bills was obediently paying for what she bought; and when I met them he was carrying a scarlet parasol and a bonnet-box. His biscuit-shooter, with the lust of purchase on her, was brilliantly dressed, and pervaded the street with splendor, like an escaped parrot. Lin walked beside her, but it might as well have been behind, and his bearing was so different from his wonted happy-go-luckiness that I had a mind to take off my hat and say, "Good-morning, Mrs. Lusk." But it was "Mrs. McLean" I said, of course. She gave me a remote, imperious nod, and said, "Come on, Lin," something like a cross nurse, while he, out of sheer decency, made her a good-humored, jocular answer, and said to me, "It takes a woman to know what to buy for house-keepin,"; which poor piece of hypocrisy endeared him to me more than ever. The puncher was not of the fibre to succeed in keeping appearances, but he deserved success, which the angels consider to be enough. I wondered if disenchantment had set in, or if this were only the preliminary stage of surprise and wounding, and I felt that but one test could show, namely, a coming face to face of Mr. and Mrs. Lusk, perhaps not to be desired. Neither was it likely. The assistant rain-maker kept himself steadfastly inside or near the barn, at the north corner of Cheyenne, while the bride, when she was in the street at all, haunted the shops clear across town diagonally.