II
This, then, is how it came about
that “Kitten” Brown and I were seated, one midgeful morning in July, by
the pellucid waters of Lake Susan W. Pillsbury, gnawing sections from a
greasily fried trout, upon which I had attempted culinary operations.
Brown’s baptismal name was William; but the unfortunate young man was once
discovered indiscreetly embracing a pretty assistant in the Administration
Building at Bronx, and, furthermore, was overheard to address her as “Kitten.”
So Kitten Brown it was for him in future. After he had fought all the younger
members of the scientific staff in turn, he gradually became resigned to
this annoying nom d’amour.
Lightly but thoroughly equipped for scientific field research, we had arrived
at the rendezvous in time to bribe the two guides engaged by the Government
to go back to their own firesides.
A week later the formidable expedition of representative ladies arrived;
and now they were sitting on the shore of Lake Susan W. Pillsbury, at a
little distance from us, trying to keep the midges from their features
and attempting to eat the fare provided for them by me.
I myself couldn’t eat it. No wonder they murmured. But hunger goaded them,
to attack the greasy mess of trout and fried cornmeal.
Kitten was saying to me:
“Our medicine chest isn’t very extensive. I hope they brought their own.
If they didn’t, some among us will never again see New York.”
I stole a furtive glance at the unfortunate women. There was one among
them—but let me first enumerate their heavy artillery:
There was the Reverend Dr. Amelia Jones, blond, adipose, and close to the
four-score mark. She stepped high in the Equal Franchise ranks. Nobody
had ever had the temerity to answer her back.
There was Miss Sadie Dingleheimer, fifty, emaciated, anemic, and gauntly
glittering with thick-lensed eye-glasses. She was the President of the
National Prophylactic Club, whatever that may be.
There was Miss Margaret McFadden, a Titian, profusely toothed, muscular,
and President of the Hair Dressers’ Union of the United States.
There was Mrs. Gladys Doolittle Batt, a grass one—Batt being represented
as a vanishing point—President of the National Eugenic and Purity League;
tall, gnarled, sinuously powerful, and prone to emotional attacks. The
attacks were directed toward others.
These, then, composed the heavy artillery. The artillery of the light brigade
consisted only of a single piece. Her name was Angelica White, a delegate
from the Trained Nurses’ Association of America. The nurses had been too
busy with their business to attend such picnics, so one had been selected
by lot to represent the busy Association on this expedition.
Angelica White was a tall, fair, yellow-haired girl of twenty-two or three,
with violet-blue eyes and red lips, and a way of smiling a little when
spoken to—but let that pass. I mean only to be scientifically minute. A
passion for fact has ever obsessed me. I have little literary ability and
less desire to sully my pen with that degraded form of letters known as
fiction. Once in my life my mania for accuracy involved me lyrically. It
was a short poem, but an earnest one:
Truth is mighty and must prevail,
Otherwise it were inadvisable to tell the tale.
I bestowed it upon the New York Evening Post, but declined remuneration.
My message belonged to the world. I don’t mean the newspaper.
Her eyes, then, were tinted with that indefinable and agreeable nuance
which modifies blue to a lilac or violet hue.
Watching her askance, I was deeply sorry that my cooking seemed to pain
her.
“Guide!” said Mrs. Doolittle Batt, in that remarkable, booming voice of
hers.
“Ma’am!” said Kitten Brown and I with spontaneous alacrity, leaping from
the ground as though shot at.
“This cooking,” she said, with an ominous stare at us, “is atrocious. Don’t
you know how to cook?”
I said with a smiling attempt at ease:
“There are various ways of cooking food for the several species of mammalia
which an all-wise Providence—”
“Do you think you’re cooking for wild-cats?” she demanded.
Our smiles faded.
“It’s my opinion that you’re incompetent,” remarked the Reverend Dr. Jones,
slapping at midges with a hand that might have rocked all the cradles of
the nation, but had not rocked any.
“We’re not getting our money’s worth,” said Miss Dingleheimer, “even if
the Government does pay your salaries.”
I looked appealingly from one stony face to another. In Miss McFadden’s
eye there was the sombre glint of battle. She said:
“If you can guide us no better than you cook, God save us all this day
week!” And she hurled the contents of her tin plate into Lake Susan
W. Pillsbury.
Mrs. Doolittle Batt arose:
“Come,” she said; “it is time we started. What is the name of the first
lake we may hope to encounter?”
We knew no more than did they, but we said that Lake Gladys Doolittle Batt
was the first, hoping to placate that fearsome woman.
“Come on, then!” she cried, picking up her carved and varnished mountain
staff. Miss Dingleheimer had brought one, too, from the Catskills.
So Kitten Brown and I loaded our mule, set him in motion, and drove him
forward into the unknown.
Where we were going we had not the slightest idea; the margin of the lake
was easy travelling, so easy that we never noticed that we had already
gone around the lake three times, until Mrs. Batt recognized the fact and
turned on us furiously.
I didn’t know how to explain it, except to say feebly that I was doing
it as a sort of preliminary canter to harden and inure the ladies.
“We don’t need hardening!” she snarled. “Do you understand that!”
I comprehended that at once. But I forced a sickly smile and skipped forward
in the wake of my mule, with something of the same abandon which characterizes
the flight of an unwelcome dog.
In the terrified ear of Kitten I voiced my doubts concerning the prospects
of a pleasant journey.
We marched in the following order: Arthur, the heavily laden mule, led;
then came Kitten Brown and myself, all hung over with stew-pans, shotguns,
rifles, cartridge-belts, ponchos, and the toilet reticules of the ladies;
then marched the Reverend Dr. Jones, and, in order, filing behind her,
Miss Dingleheimer, Mrs. Batt, Miss McFadden, and Miss White—the latter
in her trained nurse’s costume and wearing a red cross on her sleeve—an
idea of Mrs. Batt, who believed in emergency methods.
Mrs. Batt also bore a banner, much interfered with by the foliage, bearing
the inscription:
EQUAL RIGHTS!
EUGENICS OR EXTERMINATION!
After a while she shouted:
“Guide! Here, you may carry this banner for a while! I’m tired.”
Kitten and I took turns with it after that. It was hard work, particularly
as one by one in turn they came up and hung their parasols and shopping
reticules all over us. We plodded forward like a pair of moving department
stores, not daring to shift our burdens to Arthur, because we had already
stuffed into the panniers of that simple and dignified animal all our collecting
boxes, cyanide jars, butterfly nets, note-books, reels of piano wire,
thermometers, barometers, hydrometers,
stereometers, aeronoids, adnoids—everything, in fact, that guides are not
supposed to pack into the woods, but which we had smuggled unbeknown to
those misguided ones we guided.
And, to make room for our scientific paraphernalia, we had been obliged
to do a thing so mean, so inexpressibly low, that I blush to relate it.
But facts are facts; we discarded nearly a ton of feminine impedimenta.
There was fancy work of all sorts in the making or in the raw—materials
for knitting, embroidering, tatting, sewing, hemming, stitching, drawn-work,
lace-making, crocheting. Also we disposed of almost half a ton of toilet
necessities—powder, perfumery, cosmetics, hot-water bags, slippers, negligees,
novels, magazines, bon-bons, chewing-gum, hat-boxes, gloves, stockings,
underwear.
We left enough apparel for each lady to change once. They’d have to do
some scrubbing now. Science can not be halted by hatpins; cosmos can not
be side-tracked by cosmetics.
Toward sunset we came upon a small, crystal clear pond, set between the
bases of several lofty mountains. I was ready to drop with fatigue, but
I nerved myself, drew a deep, exultant breath, and with one of those fine,
sweeping gestures, I cried:
“Lake Mrs. Gladys Doolittle Batt! Eureka! At last! Excelsior!”
There was a profound silence behind me. I turned, striving to mask my apprehension
with a smile. The ladies were regarding the pond in surprise. I admit
that it was a pond, not a lake.
Injecting into my voice the last remnants of glee which I could summon,
I shouted, “Eureka!” and began to caper about as though the size and beauty
of
the pond had affected me with irrepressible enthusiasm, hoping by my emotion
to stampede the convention.
The cold voice of Mrs. Doolittle Batt checked my transports:
“Is that puddle named after me?” she demanded.
“M-ma’am?” I stammered.
“If that wretched frog-pond has been christened with my name, somebody
is going to get into trouble,” she said ominously.
A profound silence ensued. Arthur patiently switched at flies. As for me,
I looked up at the majestic pines, gazed upon the lofty and eternal hills,
then ventured a sneaking glance all around me. But I could discover no
avenue of escape in case Mrs. Batt should charge me.
“I had been informed,” she began dangerously, “that the majestic body of
water, which I understood had been honoured with my name, was twelve miles
long and three miles wide. This appears to be a puddle!”
‘B-b-but it’s very p-pretty,” I protested feebly. “It’s quite round and
clear, and it’s nearly a quarter of a mile in d-diameter—”
“Mind your business!” retorted Mrs. Doolittle Batt. “I’ve been swindled!”
Kitten Brown knew more about women than did I. He said in a fairly steady
voice:
“Madame, it is an outrage! The women of this mighty nation should make
the Government answerable for its duplicity! Your lake should have been
at least twenty miles long!”
Everybody turned and looked at Kitten. He was a handsome dog.
“This young man appears to have some trace of common-sense,” said Mrs.
Batt. “I shall see to it that the Government is held responsible for this
odious act of insulting duplicity. I—I won’t have my name given to this—this
wallow!—”
She advanced toward me, her small eyes blazing: I retreated to leeward
of Arthur.
“Guide!” she said in a voice still trembling with passion. “Are you certain
that you have made no mistake? You appear to be unusually ignorant.”
“I am afraid there can be no room for doubt,” I said, almost scared out
of my senses.
“And on top of this outrage, am I to eat your cooking?” she demanded passionately.
“Did I come here to look at this frog-pond and choke on your cooking? Did
I?”
“I can cook,” said a clear, pleasant voice at my elbow. And Miss White
came forward, cool, clean, fresh as a posy in her uniform and cap. I immediately
got behind her.
“I can cook very nicely,” she said smilingly. “It is part of my profession,
you know. So if you two guides will be kind enough to build the fire and
help me—”
She let her violet eyes linger on me for an instant, then on Brown. A moment
later he and I were jostling each other in our eagerness to obey her slightest
suggestion. It is that way with men.
So we built her a fire and unpacked our provisions, and we waited very
politely on the ladies when dinner was ready.
It was a fine dinner—coffee, bacon, flap-jacks, soup, ash-bread, stewed
chicken.
The heavy artillery, made ravenous by their journey, required vast quantities
of ammunition. They banqueted largely. I gazed in amazement at Mrs. Doolittle
Batt as she swallowed one flap-jack after another, while her eyes bulged
larger and larger.
Nor was the capacity of Miss Dingleheimer and the Reverend Dr. Jones to
be mocked at by pachyderms.
Brown and I left them eating while we erected the row of little tents.
Every lady had demanded a separate tent.
So we cut saplings, set up the silk, drove pegs, and brought armfuls of
balsam boughs.
I was afraid they’d demand their knitting and other utensils, but they
had eaten to repletion, and were sleepy; and as each toilet case or reticule
contained also a nightgown, they drew the flaps of their several tents
without insisting that we unpack Arthur’s panniers.
They all had disappeared within their tents except Miss White, who insisted
on cooking something for us, although we protested that the scraps of the
banquet were all right for mere guides.
She stood beside us for a few minutes, watching us busy with our delicious
dinner.
“You poor fellows,” she said gently. “You are nearly starved.”
It is agreeable to be sympathized with by a tall, fair, fresh young girl.
We looked up, simpering gratefully.
“This is really a most lovely little lake,” she said, gazing out across
the still, crystalline water which was all rose and gold in the sunset,
save where the sombre shapes of the towering mountains were mirrored in
glassy depths.
“It’s odd,” I said, “that no trout are jumping. There ought to be lots
of them there, and this is their jumping hour.”
We all looked at the quiet, oval bit of water. Not a circle, not the slightest
ripple disturbed it.
“It must be deep,” remarked Brown.
We gazed up at the three lofty peaks, the bases of which were the shores
of this tiny gem among lakes. Deep, deep, plunging down into dusky profundity,
the rocks fell away sheer into limpid depths.
“That little lake may be a thousand feet deep,” I said. “In 1903 Professor
Farrago, of Bronx Park, measured a lake in the Thunder Mountains, which
was two thousand seven hundred and sixty-nine feet deep.”
Miss White looked at me curiously.
Into a patch of late sunshine flitted a small butterfly—one of the Grapta
species. It settled on a chip of wood, uncoiled its delicate proboscis,
and spread its fulvous and deeply indented wings.
“Grapta california,” remarked Brown to me.
“Vanessa asteriska,” I corrected him. “Note the anal angle of the secondaries
and the argentiferous discal area bordering the subcostal nervule.”
“The characteristic stripes on the primaries are wanting,” he demurred.
“It is double brooded. The summer form lacks the three darker bands.”
A few moments’ silence was broken by the voice of Miss White.
“I had no idea,” she remarked, “that Alaskan guides were so familiar with
entomological terms and nomenclature.”
We both turned very red.
Brown mumbled something about having picked up a smattering. I added that
Brown had taught me.
Perhaps she believed us; her blue eyes rested on us curiously, musingly.
Also, at moments, I fancied there was the faintest glint of amusement in
them.
She said:
“Two scientific gentlemen from New York requested permission to join this
expedition, but Mrs. Batt refused them.” She gazed thoughtfully upon the
waters of Lake Gladys Doolittle Batt. “I wonder,” she murmured, “what became
of those two gentlemen.”
It was evident that we had betrayed ourselves to this young girl.
She glanced at us again, and perhaps she noticed in our fascinated gaze
an expression akin to terror, for suddenly she laughed—such a clear, sweet,
silvery little laugh!
“For my part,” she said, “I wish they had come with us. I like—men.”
With that she bade us goodnight very politely and went off to her tent,
leaving us with our hats pressed against our stomachs, attempting by the
profundity of our bows to indicate the depth of our gratitude.
“There’s a girl!” exclaimed Brown, as soon as she had disappeared behind
her tent flaps. “She’ll never let on to Medusa, Xantippe, Cassandra and
Company. I like that girl, Smith.”
“You’re not the only one imbued by such sentiments,” said I.
He smiled a fatuous and reminiscent smile. He certainly was good-looking.
Presently he said:
“She has the most delightful way of gazing at a man—”
“I’ve noticed,” I said pleasantly.
“Oh. Did she happen to glance at you that way?” he inquired. I wanted to
beat him.
All I said was:
“She’s certainly some kitten.” Which bottled that young man for a while.
We lay on the bank of the tiny lake, our backs against a huge pine-tree,
watching the last traces of colour fading from peak and tree-top.
“‘Isn’t it queer,” I said, “that not a trout has splashed? It can’t be
that there are no fish in the lake.”
“There are such lakes.”
“Yes, very deep ones. I wonder how deep this is.”
“We’ll be out at sunrise with our reel of piano wire and take soundings,”
he said. “The heavy artillery won’t wake until they’re ready to be loaded
with flap-jacks.”
I shuddered:
“They’re fearsome creatures, Brown. Somehow, that resolute and bony one
has inspired me with a terror unutterable.”
“Mrs. Batt?”
“Yes.”
He said seriously:
“She’ll make a horrid outcry when she asks for her knitting. What are you
going to tell her?”
“I shall say that Indians ambuscaded us while she was asleep, and carried
off all those things.”
“You lie very nicely, don’t you?” he remarked admiringly.
“In vitium ducit culpæ fuga,” said I. “Besides, they don’t really
need those articles.”
He laughed. He didn’t seem to be very much afraid of Mrs. Batt.
It had grown deliciously dusky, and myriads of stars were coming out. Little
by little the lake lost its shape in the darkness, until only an irregular,
star-set area of quiet water indicated that there was any lake there at
all.
I remember that Brown and I, reclining at the foot of the tree, were looking
at the still and starry surface of the lake, over which numbers of bats
were darting after insects; and I recollect that I was just about to speak,
when, of a sudden, the silent and luminous surface of the water was shattered
as with a subterranean explosion; a geyser of scintillating spray shot
upward flashing, foaming, towering a hundred feet into the air. And through
it I seemed to catch a glimpse of a vast, quivering, twisting mass of silver
falling back with a crash into the lake, while the huge fountain rained
spray on every side and the little lake rocked and heaved from shore to
shore, sending great sheets f surf up over the rocks so high that
the very tree-tops dripped.
Petrified, dumb, our senses almost paralyzed by the shock, our ears still
deafened by the watery crash of that gigantic something that had fallen
into the lake, and our eyes starting from their sockets, we stared at the
darkness.
Slap—slash—slush went the waves, hitting the shore with a clashing sound
almost metallic. Vision and hearing told us that the water in the lake
was rocking like the contents of a bath-tub.
“G-g-good Lord!” whispered Brown. “Is there a v-volcano under that lake?”
“Did you see that huge, glittering shape that seemed to fall into the water?”
I gasped.
“Yes. What was it? A meteor?”
“No. It was something that first came out of the lake and fell back—the
way a trout leaps. Heavens! It couldn’t have been alive, could it?”
“W-wh-what do you mean?” stammered Brown.
“It couldn’t have been a f-f-fish, could it?” I asked with chattering teeth.
“No! No! It was as big as a Pullman car! It must have been a falling star.
Did you ever hear of a fish as big as a sleeping car?”
I was too thoroughly unnerved to reply. The roaring of the surf had subsided
somewhat, enough for another sound to reach our ears—a raucous, gallinacious,
squawking sound.
I sprang up and looked at the row of tents. White-robed figures loomed
in front of them. The heavy artillery was evidently frightened.
We went over to them, and when we got nearer they chastely scuttled into
their tents and thrust out a row of heads—heads hideous with curl-papers.
“What was that awful noise? An earthquake?” shrilled the Reverend Dr. Jones.
“I think I’ll go home.”
“Was it an avalanche?” demanded Mrs. Batt, in a deep and shaky voice. “Are
we in any immediate danger, young man?”
I said that it was probably a flying-star which had happened to strike
the lake and explode.
“What an awful region!” wailed Miss Dingleheimer. “I’ve had my money’s
worth. I wish to go back to New York at once. I’ll begin to dress immediately—”
“It might be a million years before another meteor falls in this latitude,”
I said, soothingly.
“Or it might be ten minutes,” sobbed Miss Dingleheimer. “What do you know
about it, anyway! I want to go home. I’m putting on my stockings now. I’m
getting dressed as fast as I can—”
Her voice was blotted out in a mighty crash from the lake. Appalled, I
whirled on my heel, just in time to see another huge jet of water rise
high in the starlight, another, another, until the entire lake was but
a cluster of gigantic geysers exploding a hundred feet in the air, while
through them, falling back into the smother of furious foam, great silvery
bulks dropped crashing, one after another.
I don’t know how long the incredible vision lasted; the woods roared with
the infernal pandemonium, echoed and re-echoed from mountain to
mountain; the tree-tops fairly
stormed spray, driving it in sheets through the leaves; and the shores
of the lake spouted surf long after the last vast, silvery shape had fallen
back again into the water.
As my senses gradually recovered, I found myself supporting Mrs. Batt on
one arm and the Reverend Dr. Jones upon my bosom. Both had fainted.
I released them with a shudder and turned to look for Brown.
Somebody had swooned in his arms, too.
He was not noticing me, and as I approached him I heard him say something
resembling the word “kitten.”
In spite of my demoralization, another fear seized me, and I drew nearer
and peered closely at what he was holding so nobly in his arms. It was,
as I supposed, Angelica White.
I don’t know whether my arrival occultly revived her, for as I stumbled
over a tent-peg she opened her blue eyes, and then disengaged herself from
Brown’s arms.
“Oh, I am so frightened,” she murmured. She looked at me sideways when
she said it.
“Come,” said I coldly to Brown, “let Miss White retire and lie down. This
meteoric shower is over and so is the danger.”
He evinced a desire to further soothe and minister to Miss White, but she
said, with considerable composure, that she was feeling better; and Brown
came unwillingly with me to inspect the heavy artillery lines.
That formidable battery was wrecked, the pieces dismounted and lying tumbled
about in their emplacements.
But a vigorous course of cold water in dippers revived them, and we herded
them into one tent and quieted them with some soothing prevarication, the
details of which I have forgotten; but it was something about a flock of
meteors which hit the earth every twelve billion years, and that it was
now all over for another such interim, and everybody could sleep soundly
with the consciousness of having assisted at a spectacle never before
beheld except by a primordial protoplasmic
cell.
Which flattered them, I think, for, seated once more at the base of our
tree, presently we heard weird noises from the reconcentrados, like the
moaning of the harbour bar.
They slept, the heavy guns, like unawakened engines of destruction all
a-row in battery. But Brown and I, fearfully excited, still dazed and bewildered,
sat with our fascinated eyes fixed on the lake, asking each other what
in the name of miracles it was that we had witnessed and heard.
On one thing we were agreed. A scientific discovery of the most enormous
importance awaited our investigation.
This was no time for temporising, for deception, for any species of polite
shilly-shallying. We must, on the morrow, tear off our masks and appear
before these misguided and feminine victims of our duplicity in our own
characters as scientists. We must boldly avow our identities and flatly
refuse to stir from this spot until the mystery of this astounding lake
had been thoroughly investigated.
And so, discussing our policy, our plans for the morrow, and mutually reassuring
each other concerning our common ability to successfully defy the heavy
artillery, we finally fell asleep.
End of PART TWO..... GO TO PART
THREE..... 
