The invitations were always purposely sent out so late that only people who lived right near Seattle could hope to get there in time, and they were not invited. You may imagine that our home was a scene of bustling activity from the instant the card reached us till it was time to board the train for Duluth. I was taken along because there was no one to leave me with, and to help open the car windows.
We left Niles at noon on the third day of March and did not reach Duluth till the morning of the sixth. This was before the era of patent couplers and the cars of a train were fastened to one another with gay ribbons. (It was in 1895 that the Santa Fe adopted hooks and eyes.) The result was that every mile or so, the engineer would feel a lightening of the pull on his “iron horse” and would find on investigating that two or more cars or even the entire train had been left far behind, in fact four hours after the “start” of the trip it was discovered that the engine was way up in Wisconsin while the train was still standing in the station at Chicago with the conductor hoarse from shouting “What’s the matter?”
Everybody felt kind of blue when we arrived in Duluth at last and realized that we were already thirty-six hours late for the ball and with at least three weeks separating us from Seattle. Some were in favor of returning at once to Niles, but wiser counsel prevailed and we prepared to complete the trip in the hope that the difference in time between Minnesota and the Coast would work to our advantage.
III
Young Man Goes West
The trip from Duluth to Seattle was rather uneventful and can be dismissed in a few well rounded paragraphs. In those days, as I pointed out in the preceding chapter, no trains ran west of Minnesota and neither boats nor horses had been invented. It was believed that the only possible way to cover the mileage between the new Scandinavia and the Pacific Coast was afoot or on all fours. But a few moments before we were about to set out by one of the last named methods, my Uncle Walrus learned from the telephone girl at the hotel, a Miss Scurvy, that other travelers had successfully negotiated the distance on sleds drawn by teams of dogs and we decided that nothing could be lost by trying this innovation, for if it proved a flop (an expression of my grandfather’s) we could still get off and walk or crawl.
So many of the other guests had been tipped off to the sled gag that all but one of the dogs in Duluth were already chartered by that time, so we had no choice but to engage the remaining one, which turned out, to his mother’s surprise, to be a four months old Sealyham. We hitched him up to two sleds, the front one for our party and the trailer for suitcases, mess kits, golf bags, etc. We were insured against thirst by Uncle Walrus, who in playing thirty-six holes of golf during our stay in Duluth, had luckily acquired a handful of water blisters.
It was a gay crowd for the first two hundred miles. My sister Ann, an accomplished musician though otherwise an oaf, played chords on the dulcimer to such songs as “Promise Me,” “Killarney” and “What’ll I Do?” and my fresh young voice made the welcome ring and the Ring welcome all through the Dakotas. We stopped for the night at Bismarck, where my little brother Croup insisted on fishing for herring. Luck was with us and we didn’t have a bite, though the Sealyham kept scratching himself.
Next morning the latter began to complain of glanders, brought on, he said, by working like a horse, and it was a relief to him and the rest of us when Uncle Walrus and Aunt Chloe and their two children died of exposure and had to be pushed off the sled. With the load thus lightened, we made Butte the second night and registered at the Montana-Biltmore, where Jack Bowman was then head bell beagle. News got out that I was in the city and the fire whistle blew from eleven o’clock till ten minutes after. We learned in the morning that it was just a grass fire.
“It was just a grass fire,” Jack told us.
On Saturday night, March 9, we arrived in Seattle and found with joy that, through a stroke of good fortune, the ball was still in progress. It seems that Young Stribling was dancing with Dolly Madison, had been dancing with her, in fact, since the night of the fourth, and they couldn’t end the ball because they couldn’t make him let go.
I was recognized by Texas Guinan, led to the middle of the floor and introduced to Mrs. Madison. “And,” said the latter, “I want you to shake hands with my partner, whom I have nicknamed the Georgia Clinging Vine.”
Without thinking, Stribling loosened his hold with his right arm to shake hands with me and Miss Guinan at the same time grabbed his left and jerked it away. Mrs. Madison was free and I whirled her away to the strains of “Nervous Breakdown.” Paul Whiteman2 was leading the orchestra.
“Well, Mrs. Madison,” I said, “you look kind of peaked. You look like you was suffering from the grip.”
“Anybody that battles with Young Stribling suffers from the grip,” was the reply of Old Hickory’s madam.3
Before the second encore, I was calling my partner “Dolly” and she was calling me “Lard” and that night marked
