In Search of the Unknown by Robert W. Chambers (ereader ebook TXT) 📗
- Author: Robert W. Chambers
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Instantly it occurred to me that they had followed us, and at the same moment I knew who the stony-faced lady was. Angry, but polite, I lifted my hat and saluted her, and she, probably furious at having been caught tip-toeing after me, cut me dead. The younger lady passed me with face averted, but even in the dusk I could see the tip of one little ear turn scarlet.
Walking on hurriedly, I entered the Administration Building, and found Professor Lesard, of the reptilian department, preparing to leave.
"Don't you do it," I said, sharply; "I've got exciting news."
"I'm only going to the theatre," he replied. "It's a good show—Adam and Eve; there's a snake in it, you know. It's in my line."
"I can't help it," I said; and I told him briefly what had occurred in the arbor.
"But that's not all," I continued, savagely. "Those women followed us, and who do you think one of them turned out to be? Well, it was Professor Smawl, of Barnard College, and I'll bet every pair of boots I own that she starts for the Graham Glacier within a week. Idiot that I was!" I exclaimed, smiting my head with both hands. "I never recognized her until I saw her tip-toeing and craning her neck to listen. Now she knows about the glacier; she heard every word that young ruffian said, and she'll go to the glacier if it's only to forestall me."
Professor Lesard looked anxious. He knew that Miss Smawl, professor of natural history at Barnard College, [44]had long desired an appointment at the Bronx Park gardens. It was even said she had a chance of succeeding Professor Farrago as president, but that, of course, must have been a joke. However, she haunted the gardens, annoying the keepers by persistently poking the animals with her umbrella. On one occasion she sent us word that she desired to enter the tigers' enclosure for the purpose of making experiments in hypnotism. Professor Farrago was absent, but I took it upon myself to send back word that I feared the tigers might injure her. The miserable small boy who took my message informed her that I was afraid she might injure the tigers, and the unpleasant incident almost cost me my position.
"I am quite convinced," said I to Professor Lesard, "that Miss Smawl is perfectly capable of abusing the information she overheard, and of starting herself to explore a region that, by all the laws of decency, justice, and prior claim, belongs to me."
"Well," said Lesard, with a peculiar laugh, "it's not certain whether you can go at all."
"Professor Farrago will authorize me," I said, confidently.
"Professor Farrago has resigned," said Lesard. It was a bolt from a clear sky.
"Good Heavens!" I blurted out. "What will become of the rest of us, then?"
"I don't know," he replied. "The trustees are holding a meeting over in the Administration Building to elect a new president for us. It depends on the new president what becomes of us."
"Lesard," I said, hoarsely, "you don't suppose that [45]they could possibly elect Miss Smawl as our president, do you?"
He looked at me askance and bit his cigar.
"I'd be in a nice position, wouldn't I?" said I, anxiously.
"The lady would probably make you walk the plank for that tiger business," he replied.
"But I didn't do it," I protested, with sickly eagerness. "Besides, I explained to her—"
He said nothing, and I stared at him, appalled by the possibility of reporting to Professor Smawl for instructions next morning.
"See here, Lesard," I said, nervously, "I wish you would step over to the Administration Building and ask the trustees if I may prepare for this expedition. Will you?"
He glanced at me sympathetically. It was quite natural for me to wish to secure my position before the new president was elected—especially as there was a chance of the new president being Miss Smawl.
"You are quite right," he said; "the Graham Glacier would be the safest place for you if our next president is to be the Lady of the Tigers." And he started across the park puffing his cigar.
I sat down on the doorstep to wait for his return, not at all charmed with the prospect. It made me furious, too, to see my ambition nipped with the frost of a possible veto from Miss Smawl.
"If she is elected," thought I, "there is nothing for me but to resign—to avoid the inconvenience of being shown the door. Oh, I wish I had allowed her to hypnotize the tigers!"
[46]Thoughts of crime flitted through my mind. Miss Smawl would not remain president—or anything else very long—if she persisted in her desire for the tigers. And then when she called for help I would pretend not to hear.
Aroused from criminal meditation by the return of Professor Lesard, I jumped up and peered into his perplexed eyes. "They've elected a president," he said, "but they won't tell us who the president is until to-morrow."
"You don't think—" I stammered.
"I don't know. But I know this: the new president sanctions the expedition to the Graham Glacier, and directs you to choose an assistant and begin preparations for four people."
Overjoyed, I seized his hand and said, "Hurray!" in a voice weak with emotion. "The old dragon isn't elected this time," I added, triumphantly.
"By-the-way," he said, "who was the other dragon with her in the park this evening?"
I described her in a more modulated voice.
"Whew!" observed Professor Lesard, "that must be her assistant, Professor Dorothy Van Twiller! She's the prettiest blue-stocking in town."
With this curious remark my confrère followed me into my room and wrote down the list of articles I dictated to him. The list included a complete camping equipment for myself and three other men.
"Am I one of those other men?" inquired Lesard, with an unhappy smile.
Before I could reply my door was shoved open and a figure appeared at the threshold, cap in hand.
[47]"What do you want?" I asked, sternly; but my heart was beating high with triumph.
The figure shuffled; then came a subdued voice:
"Mister, I guess I'll go back to the Graham Glacier along with you. I'm Billy Spike, an' it kinder scares me to go back to them Hudson Mountains, but somehow, mister, when you choked me and kinder walked me off on my ear, why, mister, I kinder took to you like."
There was absolute silence for a minute; then he said:
"So if you go, I guess I'll go, too, mister."
"For a thousand dollars?"
"Fur nawthin'," he muttered—"or what you like."
"All right, Billy," I said, briskly; "just look over those rifles and ammunition and see that everything's sound."
He slowly lifted his tough young face and gave me a doglike glance. They were hard eyes, but there was gratitude in them.
"You'll get your throat slit," whispered Lesard.
"Not while Billy's with me," I replied, cheerfully.
Late that night, as I was preparing for pleasant dreams, a knock came on my door and a telegraph-messenger handed me a note, which I read, shivering in my bare feet, although the thermometer marked eighty Fahrenheit:
"You will immediately leave for the Hudson Mountains via Wellman Bay, Labrador, there to await further instructions. Equipment for yourself and one assistant will include following articles" [here began a list of camping utensils, scientific paraphernalia, and provisions]. "The steamer Penguin sails at five o'clock to-morrow morning. Kindly find yourself on board at that hour. Any excuse for not complying with these orders will be accepted as your resignation.
"Susan Smawl,
"President Bronx Zoological Society."
[48]"Lesard!" I shouted, trembling with fury.
He appeared at his door, chastely draped in pajamas; and he read the insolent letter with terrified alacrity.
"What are you going to do—resign?" he asked, much frightened.
"Do!" I snarled, grinding my teeth; "I'm going—that's what I'm going to do!"
"But—but you can't get ready and catch that steamer, too," he stammered.
He did not know me.
[49]
VIIToC
And so it came about that one calm evening towards the end of June, William Spike and I went into camp under the southerly shelter of that vast granite wall called the Hudson Mountains, there to await the promised "further instructions."
It had been a tiresome trip by steamer to Anticosti, from there by schooner to Widgeon Bay, then down the coast and up the Cape Clear River to Port Porpoise. There we bought three pack-mules and started due north on the Great Fur Trail. The second day out we passed Fort Boisé, the last outpost of civilization, and on the sixth day we were travelling eastward under the granite mountain parapets.
On the evening of the sixth day out from Fort Boisé we went into camp for the last time before entering the unknown land.
I could see it already through my field-glasses, and while William was building the fire I climbed up among the rocks above and sat down, glasses levelled, to study the prospect.
There was nothing either extraordinary or forbidding in the landscape which stretched out beyond; to the right the solid palisade of granite cut off the view; to the left the palisade continued, an endless barrier of sheer cliffs crowned with pine and hemlock. But the [50]interesting section of the landscape lay almost directly in front of me—a rent in the mountain-wall through which appeared to run a level, arid plain, miles wide, and as smooth and even as a highroad.
There could be no doubt concerning the significance of that rent in the solid mountain-wall; and, moreover, it was exactly as William Spike had described it. However, I called to him and he came up from the smoky camp-fire, axe on shoulder.
"Yep," he said, squatting beside me; "the Graham Glacier used to meander through that there hole, but somethin' went wrong with the earth's in'ards an' there was a bust-up."
"And you saw it, William?" I said, with a sigh of envy.
"Hey? Seen it? Sure I seen it! I was to Spoutin' Springs, twenty mile west, with a bale o' blue fox an' otter pelt. Fust I knew them geysers begun for to groan egregious like, an' I seen the caribou gallopin' hell-bent south. 'This climate,' sez I, 'is too bracin' for me,' so I struck a back trail an' landed onto a hill. Then them geysers blowed up, one arter the next, an' I heard somethin' kinder cave in between here an' China. I disremember things what happened. Somethin' throwed me down, but I couldn't stay there, for the blamed ground was runnin' like a river—all wavy-like, an' the sky hit me on the back o' me head."
"And then?" I urged, in that new excitement which every repetition of the story revived. I had heard it all twenty times since we left New York, but mere repetition could not apparently satisfy me.
"Then," continued William, "the whole world kinder [51]went off like a fire-cracker, an' I come too, an' ran like—"
"I know," said I, cutting him short, for I had become wearied of the invariable profanity which lent a lurid ending to his narrative.
"After that," I continued, "you went through the rent in the mountains?"
"Sure."
"And you saw a dingue and a creature that resembled a mammoth?"
"Sure," he repeated, sulkily.
"And you saw something else?" I always asked this question; it fascinated me to see the sullen fright flicker in William's eyes, and the mechanical backward glance, as though what he had seen might still be behind him.
He had never answered this third question but once, and that time he fairly snarled in my face as he growled: "I seen what no Christian oughter see."
So when I repeated: "And you saw something else, William?" he gave me a wicked, frightened leer, and shuffled off to feed the mules. Flattery, entreaties, threats left him unmoved; he never told me what the third thing was that he had seen behind the Hudson Mountains.
William had retired to mix up with his mules; I resumed my binoculars and my silent inspection of the great, smooth path left by the Graham Glacier when something or other exploded that vast mass of ice into vapor.
The arid plain wound out from the unknown country like a river, and I thought then, and think now, that when [52]the glacier was blown into vapor the vapor descended in the most terrific rain the world has ever seen, and poured through the newly blasted mountain-gateway, sweeping the earth to bed-rock. To corroborate this theory, miles to the southward I could see the débris winding out across the land towards Wellman Bay, but as the terminal moraine of the vanished glacier formerly ended there I could not be certain that my theory was correct.
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