News Item: Mrs. Rinehart has gone to her ranch in Wyoming to spend the summer.
IT HAS A FINE sound, that. I like to read it; I can see myself getting off the train and being whisked to my broad ancestral acres. And later, in riding garb, calling for my horse and going over the property; looking at the ditches, inspecting the beef and dairy herds, then conferring with my foreman and the corral boss, going over the books and generally taking stock.
But, as it happens, I haven’t any ranch. All I have out here, in this country where men are men and all Easterners are dudes, is a two-roomed log cabin. And even this only by grace of repeated occupancy, not ownership.
It is a very little log cabin indeed. Not enough, one would think, to draw one all the way from the Eastern seaboard. And yet, from the time I cross the Mississippi I begin to feel the preliminary welcome it extends. The very atmosphere of the train service commences to change at Omaha; the conductors cease to be haughty persons who do heavy bookkeeping in unoccupied drawing rooms, and by the time we start up north are pointing out a herd of antelope which has wintered near the line. The dining-car stewards wander in to say that they have picked up some fresh mountain trout. And in the observation car men with broad-brimmed hats break through the frozen reserve of the Easterners, and conversation becomes general.
For the Northwest still believes that proud statement of our Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. We are moving, at something like twenty miles an hour, into the land of the open door and the homely greeting:
“Tie up your horse, stranger, and come right in.”
The cabin is unchanged, after two years of absence.
The horseshoe is still fastened to the front door in the proper position, which is of course open side up, so the luck cannot run out. It is loose-hung to two staples, and is our door knocker; not, naturally, that one really requires a door knocker, because in this country it is the custom to walk in and then raise your voice in a sort of view halloo. Nor is the interior altered save in one particular, which I shall come to later on.
This is a great relief. I had had a terrible fear, for instance, that they might have put a new floor in the porch, and thus shut away forever the treasure-trove beneath it. The lost knitting needles which had slipped between its weathered boards; the letters, which one had no time to answer anyhow; the trout flies and fishhooks, the scissors and nail files, the penknives and camera pictures. And especially the ground squirrels that came up for crumbs, and the small baby garter snakes that once in a while crept up to sun themselves on the warm old planks.
But no, there has been no change, outside or in. Except the one which I am coming to later. I am not sure I like it. It reeks of civilization. No, not a bathroom. The pipe in the ceiling of the side porch is still there, ready at the turning of a lever to deluge us with icy water from the creek; even the battered sail cloth still hangs there, an inadequate protection at the best of times, and on windy days none at all unless weighted down with heavy stones. No, not a bathroom.
The creek still roars beneath the sleeping-porch at the rear, after its fall of three thousand feet down the mountain; the steep path still leads to it, down which once, brought here to recover from a grave operation, I crawled feebly on my hands and knees with a fishing rod in my teeth, to surprise the family almost into hysterics later by producing a small limp trout.
The mountains still rise beyond it, so near that I can gaze up and watch the deer overhead come down from the snow mountains of the interior of the range for the spring grass of the upland meadows.
Mine, too, for the looking are the straight cliffs, towering thousands of feet in the air; the more gradual slopes, up which mount evergreen forests, thick at the base, but gradually attenuating until at last only a few venturesome firs have climbed to the upper reaches; the thin and temporary cascades, sunborn children of the winter snow which still lies stirrup-deep at the top; and the canon, down which in a series of leaps dashes the creek.
A two-roomed log cabin! What nonsense! A kingdom. An empire.
Still, one must have the cabin.
First, the living room. It is perhaps thirty by fifteen feet. The logs of the cottage form its walls, but where on the outside the bark has been left on, here they are roughly skinned and the interstices filled with mortar. It extends across the entire front of the cottage, and opposite the door is a great fireplace, built of field stone.
In this all day long burns a huge fire, for the spring days are still cold, although the sun is brilliant. But so large is the fireplace that most of the heat escapes up the flue. Sometimes I think the only way to utilize that fire would be to climb the roof and sit on the chimney. However, it has its uses; a white-enameled pitcher sits on the hearth, an automatic water-heating plant of my own devising, in which I have an inventor’s pride. Of course there is hot water—hot water and bathrooms—at the main ranch house, but it is the essence of being a cabin dweller to be on one’s own.
There is an active pioneer streak in most of us; we number our ancestral log cabins as the overlords of the Old World list their family castles, and that individual is clearly parvenu who does not thrill at the sight of one. He has no family and no traditions.
The living room has not been changed; it still contains the wicker rocking-chair of tender memory, and the solid-oak-and-leather one which has been here from time immemorial, and which seems so magnificent in its humble surroundings. On the table is still that piece of petrified wood which has been my paper weight for many a bit of writing, and the log bookshelves are still filled with their miscellaneous collection of books; Vergil's Aeneid, a chemistry, and a 1918 Social Register among them! Rag rugs on the floor, a log wood box in the corner, a framed photograph of Sitting Bull and one of Wolf Creek Falls on the wall, and hung about on various nails our fancy bridles, our fishing rods in their cases, and two Zulu war shields and lances.
Strange and incomprehensible, these latter, until one learns that they once played a part in a moving picture of mine; that they have been no nearer to Africa than Hollywood, and that they were brought here to help two young Rineharts to be savages for a fancy-dress party.
In the one bedroom, two white iron beds, now smothered under their weight of bedding. At night I crawl down into one of them with a hot-water bottle and defy the winds from the snow fields above. But getting out in the morning is still a sad story. However, at seven-thirty comes Charley, who builds the living-room fire, so that dressing becomes a matter of a mad dash for the front room, garments in hand. One dresses first and washes afterward in May on “my ranch” in Wyoming.
But two beds, you say, and five Rineharts? Not to mention their sisters and their cousins and their aunts? Ah, but we have not come to the back porch, that high log structure just over the creek. Time was when five white beds stood in a row there, for all the world like a hospital ward, and early deer coming to drink might have heard four different varieties of sleeping noises. The author firmly refuses to make the fifth. And when the early sun used to strike through the evergreens, the cottonwoods and box elder, onto a medley of old cowboy boots and breeches, sombreros and spurs, scattered on the floor of the old porch just over the creek. And when, later on, around the corner of the porch wild shrieks were heard as the cold shower was turned on.
“For heaven’s sake, somebody, come out and fasten this sail cloth. It’s blowing straight out!”
“Fasten it yourself.”
“How can I, you dumbbell? And bring some soap. The pack rats have carried it off again.”
The pack rats had done it. They were always doing it. Perhaps they were, really trade rats, for they would bring something else in its place; acorns, perhaps, or a little heap of sticks. Polite thieves, these. I have known them to strip every button off a riding coat in one night, and leave a tribute of moth balls, stolen somewhere else, on the floor beneath as a peace offering.
But life does queer things to us. Like the trade rats, it takes away certain things and brings us something else in their stead. So now there are but two beds on the back porch that hangs over the creek, and they are not often occupied. Now and then comes one of the boys, but hardly again, I think, will there be five beds on that shabby porch, and four varieties of sleeping noises in the dawn when the deer come down to drink.