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Lin McLean’s Honey-Moon
by
“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.
On this Friday noon the appearance of the metal tube above the blind building spread some excitement. It moved several of the citizens to pay the place a visit and ask to see the machine. These callers, of course, sustained a polite refusal, and returned among their friends with a contempt for such quackery, and a greatly heightened curiosity; so that pretty soon you could hear discussions at the street corners, and by Saturday morning Cheyenne was talking of little else. The town prowled about the barn and its oracular metal tube, and heard and saw nothing. The Governor and I (let it be confessed) went there ourselves, since the twenty-four hours of required preparation were now begun. We smelled for chemicals, and he thought there was a something, but having been bred a doctor, distrusted his imagination. I could not be sure myself whether there was anything or not, although I walked three times round the barn, snuffing as dispassionately as I knew how. It might possibly be chlorine, the Governor said, or some gas for which ammonia was in part responsible; and this was all he could say, and we left the place. The world was as still and the hard, sharp hills as clear and near as ever; and the sky over Sahara is not more dry and enduring than was ours. This tenacity in the elements plainly gave Jode a malicious official pleasure. We could tell it by his talk at lunch; and when the Governor reminded him that no rain was contracted for until the next day, he mentioned that the approach of a storm is something that modern science is able to ascertain long in advance; and he bade us come to his office whenever we pleased, and see for ourselves what science said. This was, at any rate, something to fill the afternoon with, and we went to him about five. Lin McLean joined us on the way. I came upon him lingering alone in the street, and he told me that Mrs. McLean was calling on friends. I saw that he did not know how to spend the short recess or holiday he was having. He seemed to cling to the society of others, and with them for the time regain his gayer mind. He had become converted to Ogden, and the New-Yorker, on his side, found pleasant and refreshing this democracy of Governors and cow-punchers. Jode received us at the signal-service office, and began to show us his instruments with the careful pride of an orchid-collector.