the tale of the trained pig

“do you remember red’s pig, foxy bill?” said hydraulic smith. “well, i was in a camp that had a pig for its chief feature, myself. he wasn’t a fat, comfortable old lad like foxy bill, but a sort of cross between a razor-back and a buffalo. he was a little feller, with a mane on his head and on his shoulders. he had high shoulders on him, like a buffalo, but, as for the rest of him, he was that thin you wouldn’t have known him for a pig, except for the curly tail at the end.

“he was our sole and only pet. we was too high in the air for cats. they died of heart disease. nobody owned a dog. we called192 piggie johanus eliphas hohankton for a noted statesman in that part of the country, a great man on the pension vote (believe he drew three himself), that told us politics with one wooden leg and a mouthful of language trying to gurgle through greaser pepe’s gin.

“i think hohankton discovered the lack of dogs in town, for he tried to act the part as much as he could. he’d go trotting up main street, kind of sniffing at you and rolling his eyes, give two or three squeals like a dog, when you called to him, then sometimes he’d go mosying around important, full of his own business, just as you see dogs do.

“he took care of the coats and the lunch-boxes. if a stranger came around he’d show his tusk with his lip all curled up, and growl something ferocious. he was a right smart animal. i can see him now, going the lengths of main street, sounding like a busted clarinet player telling his woes in music, to let you193 know he was there, and that if there was a doughnut or some apple-sass, or, in fact, almost anything that a hog might like, you could please your friend hohankton by putting it forth.

“but nothing in the world would get him fat. he was built like a fish, fore and aft, and in a straightaway i think he could hold a jack-rabbit.

“the judge, he was a heavy-built old man who wore his chin on his breast most of the time. when hank walked alongside of him he hunched up his back like the judge, and put on much the same expression, until the judge rumbled out, ‘durn that hawg!’ and give him a scratch on the back with his cane.

“then, if there was a lively bunch, why, hank was merry, too. he would trot and amble with one side, and gallop with the other, make prancing steps, biting at his own tail till an oyster’d laugh.

194 “we had miles of claims on the bank. the pay was light, howsomever, and you had to send about twenty acres down the stream to get enough to pay the hands off. we had plenty of water on a two-hundred-foot fall, or it wouldn’t have paid for the trouble.

“howsomever, we sent an almighty lot of farm land down where the ranchers didn’t want it. they objected to our covering their vegetables with four solid foot of tailings, consequently they kicked like anything, but it was just mine job against vegetable job, and after the law courts had been worn out and decided:

the rose is red, the sky is blue; we don’t know nothing, no more’n you,

and everybody had an injunction out against somebody else, which he couldn’t enforce, why it came back to our old friend, physical trouble, again. the farmers outnumbered us, but we ranked in the first class for physical195 trouble, so there hadn’t been anything but an exchange of personal remarks.

“there was just one rancher, who grew too fast when he was young, and then stopped too quick after he grew up, came at us fierce. he called us all kinds of twisted crooks and straight-out thieves he could think of. he had it in for me particular. once, as he got to putting it on me, he grew excited, and began to swing an ax around. he came nigh hitting the stream one or two passes, and i told him:

“‘you jay bird, you’ll be a-sitting and a-singing on a limb if you monkey with that little squirt of water. you are perfectly safe from me during working-hours, but don’t fool with our piping lay.’

“not one man in a million knows what a stream of water can do, and he was one of the million that didn’t. so he r’ared up and said he would splash the water over me, and he196 raised his ax. i had half a mind to turn the lever and squirt him over the neighboring bluff, but i had pity in my soul, so i hollers, ‘don’t!’

“but them words was too late. he is one of the very few men who will ever tell anybody how he tried cutting a hydraulic stream in two. while he was blasting me he wandered about, sitting on his horse loose; the ax came down. i was looking right plumb at him, but just how, when and in what way he disappeared i will never tell you.

“i followed the direction of the stream until i found him. he was curled up on his back, about half the ax handle in his hand. soon as i came in sight he hollered, ‘whoa!’ i stared at him. i come a little nearer, and he yelled ‘whoa!’ again, and tried to scramble to his feet. i learned afterward that he’d been a mule-skinner for a while and thought his team had turned on him.

197 “i grabbed him by the neck. ‘now, you horny-headed son of toil,’ i said to him, ‘you’ve learned one thing to-day. keep on doing that for three thousand, six hundred and seventy-five days in the year and by the end of that time you won’t put your thumb on the buzz-saw.’

“‘you don’t mean to tell me a stream of water done that!’ he gasps out.

“‘you have three shies at it,’ i said. ‘i’ll furnish the axes, and every time that stream doesn’t knock you one hundred and fifty feet you get a new cigar. want to buy in the game?’ i shambled him off to his wagon and dumped him in.

“he laid low for his revenge, like the darned farmer he was, and meanwhile hohankton was the cause of our undoing. animals have a heap more sense about natural things than men has. hank got in the way of following the boys over to the side of the198 creek. you know i used to undercut the bank while the boys worked the big stone out for me and loosened up the dirt here and there. they was as careless fellows as you’d see. yet, at the same time, no man wants an eighty-foot bank of dirt on top of him, and so they’d be quite anxious in their minds for about five minutes before the slide came.

“the first day hank went over there he threw up his head as though he smelled something, straightened his tail, grunted loud and away he went. the boys near got pinched looking at him and laughing. when they went back, hank went back, and the next time he blew his signal everybody departed. we were not such a swell-headed crowd we couldn’t learn a thing from an animal. hank, old boy rocks, was just as right as he was before, and after that he took up his position as official notifier and he never went wrong. the boys could work right along till they199 heard that squeal, and then do fast time to the creek.

“we was proud enough of hanky before, but now he had this actual stunt of his that we could prove to any or all lookers-on, our chests stuck out till the buttons popped off. other fellows would drop in with stories of dogs that had done all the wonderful things that you have heard tell of, and cats that used to milk cows, and horses that could figure up to six times six, and all them lovely relations that gets to be natural history around the camps, and we could stand for it and say ‘yes,’ just as if we believed it.

“then we’d remark we had a pig in camp; and wouldn’t say anything more until hank signaled, and the visitor would begin to open his mouth to see everybody a-running, asking why. then down come the bank!

“usually the stranger went and put up money that it wouldn’t happen again. after200 three times, though, he’d let go, scratching his head and meditating: ‘it’s so—i see it’s so, but how the blazes a pig knows more about the acts of gravitation than a white man—you tell me now?’ and we’d answer we weren’t going to tell him. let him find out, same as we did.

“well, he’d admit in a kind of grudging way that that pig of ours was quite a curiosity. yes, he’d admit it, in a sort of easy, offhand style, that old hank was quite a curiosity, and we didn’t have to say anything.

“they would go on from placerville, working the yarn up, until fifty mile away it seemed we had a pig that could smell a pay streak, always pointing, like a pointer dog, when he smelled the gold; that he usually walked back home on the hydraulic stream, and that when it was time for a bank to fall he would make sounds that sounded so much like ‘look out!’ that you couldn’t hardly tell201 the difference from a man’s yelling it, except that it had a kind of pig brogue to it, as it were, and so forth.

“we didn’t have to advertise hank one particle; even that gol-darned farmer heard of it, and slouched around on the quiet till he see how things lay.

“well, here’s the way he come near getting even. if there’s anything i ever really did love it is to get my hands on a monitor lever and just feel that old streak of water flying across, smacking, gargling and gurgling in the earth, ripping her out, mud and suds a-flying all over, rocks going, too, and just a little touch bringing the blade in the stream and swinging her around, because, you know, four men couldn’t turn that nozzle by bull strength, where just a little blade that cut into it at each side made it turn like a delicate vine.

“now, i liked that as well as when i used202 to live back east in a little old town up in new york, and it was my job to water the front street, and when there come a carriage along i always used to be absent-minded somehow, and that carriage would run right into the water, and then them good old aunts of mine used to explain it, how absent-minded i was, and the ladies that got wet wouldn’t listen to it, and the nigger coachman and i had it around the barn fast. well, i was just the same kind of kid again when the monitor was playing, and the sun was shining, and the clouds was sailing, and the grass was growing, and everything that ought to happen was happening.

“yes, my mind was in an a-1 condition, peace and good-will toward men, and everything else, when all of a sudden hank gives his three locomotive whistles, and pulls for the shore, followed by twenty grown-up men, falling over bushes, jumping over boulders,203 galloping and waving their arms in wild excitement, hank far in the lead.

“‘what in thunder?’ i said to myself. ‘that bank ain’t nowise loosening;’ when i happened to look down, and there, on a little bench, clapping his hands, sat that guerrilla-faced, swivel-jointed rancher, and there was coming up to him a black-and-tan dog, no bigger’n three rats. he couldn’t see me, and the boys couldn’t see him. they watched for that bank to fall, and there wasn’t any fall, and they waited, and they began cussing their good old friend hank, that had never failed them once before.

“when i thought of hank being thus abused, just because a cussed little dog—a kind of beast he ain’t never seen in his life before—has run him out, my fighting-blood began to run quick all around my veins and arteries, and i thinks to myself, ‘oh, you gol-darn potato-bug assassin! you slayer of squ’sh bugs!204 here’s where you get the thirty-third degree of free and accepted masonry with all its tips, spurs, right-angles and variations—so mote it be!’

“it wasn’t the hour for blue checks to run in my direction. i grabbed the elevator wheel and sent the stream heavenward, started her swinging, hoping to drop it right on the back of mr. rancher’s neck. i didn’t intend to push him into the bank and hold him there. no, i was the slickest boy handling a stream the country contained, and i thought, perhaps, i could hit him in the neck with about seven hundred assorted tons of water, and leave his hat hanging in the air. i wanted to do something real nice to him.

“well, it was me that got it. i always told the boss he didn’t load the tripod heavy enough. when i sent the stream up she teetered for fair. it was like a camel buck-jumping. there ain’t much give to three iron205 legs, and so, friends, i was sitting up and down times oftener than i could realize.

“there wasn’t a bronc’ buster that wouldn’t have yelled, ‘he’s a rider!’ if he’d seen me stick to that machine. we crow-hopped on the rocks back and forwards, and alleman’ all. we pitched forward and back, and we did the double teeter, and as for the stream—the smack when she hit things sounded just like a little small giant baby, nine hundred feet high, clapping his hands with glee. sometimes through the whiz and howl i could hear men’s voices asking why i done so, and they no longer sounded like the voices of comrades and friends.

“i was helpless as a child; couldn’t grab lever, wheel nor nothing. finally one leg toppled off an edge of rock and then—! well, she shot the cook’s shanty across the stream two hundred yards first whack. it was so sudden it didn’t even put the fire out. the206 boys took their solemn oaths the kitchen stove went across, smoking as calm and peaceful as anything, just like it had decided to take a little fly. nothing to interrupt business, but just the kind of exercise you would think a cook-stove would take. yet they was astonished that i should shoot a cook-stove across the stream.

“while they was standing there astonished, the old nozzle bucked ’way back, and plowed a well in a bank ten feet away. i bet you that stream could shoot a hole right up niagara falls, and when she mixed it with the mess of dirt and rock in that bank, kicking it backwards at me, old napoleon at waterloo was a dum poor effigy for hy smith. i couldn’t see how it was ever going to be possible for me to breathe again, and the awful roar and swatting and smashing makes it queer how i ever got to hear or think again.

“but she passed through that bank of207 dirt in no time, and all the fellows that was asking, ‘where’s he gone?’ found out. they got the last of the bank. men could show you dents where pebbles no bigger’n buckshot had been blown into them.

“the old monitor got real gay, and thought she was a fourth of july pin-wheel, and after that there was nothing but water-works on the whole cussed creek. she took from one side to the other in quick swings. billy, the cook, said he saw a block of boards take wings and sail right over hooker’s mountain.

“i was dumbfuzzled and geewhizzled, till my head was full of curled hair and insect powder. i hung on with all hands and feet by instinct, like an insect, until finally we steadied down and played in the same place for half a minute, and i brushed some of the water out of my eyes.

“beside me was hank, looking reproachful, as much as to say, ‘i thought you knew your208 limit, hy—but you must have stayed in town too long last time.’

“then the next thing that appeared was that darned little black-and-tan dog that had caused the whole trouble, followed by our friend, the rancher. i pined to wash his whiskers. but it was not to be. the monitor had jacked all her levers and cogs by knocking around.

“‘come on,’ i yelped to the crowd—‘come on, you flapjack faces! help me hold this critter down.’

“they got a move on. we tied the monitor and sent word to shut off the water. whilst we was all stepping on each other’s feet, i thought i heard a mixture of sounds like small roars and large ‘ki-yi’s,’ but the farmer, he was very busy, thinking we might catch on to who did all this, and come down to his cabin some night and take his whiskers as a momentum.

209 “i had been pounded enough, so one of the lads took my place. i stepped out. there was a battle going on. that cussed little black-and-tan terrier was snapping and flying around poor old hohankton, that had never received anything but kind treatment in his life, and scarcely knew what to make of this. i hate a black-and-tan dog, anyway. i like to see a dog with legs big enough and long enough to support his body, and with a body hefty enough to give the legs something to do. this yapping little devil didn’t have none of my sympathies. when i looked at the miserable beast i felt something had to happen to him.

“just then he made a quick jump and nailed old hank by the nose, and at the very same minute somebody hollered for me to come and fix something.

“after i pounded my thumb and wrenched my wrist getting the lever back in some shape210 again, they stopped the water off, and the country was saved!

“then i grabbed that farmer and began to recite facts about his career, while the boys spit on their hands and took hold of shovels. it looked like uncle farmer would lead an upright life for some time, but he begged and hollered and pled, so the fellows loosed him from the position where we could best apply shovels, and he explained that he didn’t go for to do all this when he started, and we let him up.

“he rose to his feet and apologized to us, singly and collectively, and then he says, ‘now i’ll just get little pettie and ride right along home,’ and he began to holler, ‘pettie! pettie! pettie!’ and all that come was old hank, who looked him straight in the face.

“little pettie has departed,” i said. page 211

“‘well, what has become of the durn little coyote?’ says everybody, and then it just occurred to me that i knew, so i went back to211 where i had seen little pettie grab old hank by the nose, and, sure enough, there was a lovely little black tail!

“i brought it down to the rancher and i said, ‘little pettie has departed, but he, she or it leaves this for you as a souvenir.’

“the rancher says, ‘gosh almighty!’ as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. i held up the tail, and i asked hank:

“‘here, little hanky-panky, did it eat the rest of little pettie?’ and hank looked at the tail and slouched off, with a kind of long and non-complaining squeal.

“‘well,’ says the boss, brisk, ‘if we find any more of little pettie we’ll send it down to you, but i guess that’s all you can collect of him now.’

“‘well, darnation!’ said the farmer, and he brushed off the dust and dirt of his hands on his trousers’ leg. ‘well, say,’ says he, ‘i don’t know whether to weep or to yell hosanna!212 as for me, personally,’ he said, ‘that cussed little dog has nigh chewed my fingers off,’ and he showed us all kinds of bites on his fingers; ‘but,’ he says, ‘on the other hand, it’s my wife’s pet, and every time one of the children lets itself get bit by it, why, their mother raises sin with them for tormentin’ it. if i had a good lie ready i wouldn’t weep one bit. but the circumstances and hullabaloos and waterfalls and geysers i have seen in the last twenty minutes have left my mind running in streaks.’

“we all looked at one another. we couldn’t think of anything, so we shook our heads.

“‘well,’ said he, ‘perhaps by the time i get home i will be able to explain how little pettie separated himself from this,’ and he twirled the last remains. ‘perhaps i can,’ he said. ‘i don’t bear you boys the slightest grudge no more. i can’t. i set this dog on your pig a-purpose, and i can’t pretend to be at all213 sorry that your pig et him up.’ he shook his head again, and fixed his hat on.

“‘well,’ says he, ‘matrimony is the mother of invention. i reckon i’ll get out of it somehow. good-by, boys!’ and he took one more look at pettie’s tail and put it in his pocket. ‘if anything happens to me you will know who it is by that,’ said he.

“as for the rest of us, we enjoyed ourselves figuring on just what that rancher could explain. you can bring home a dog and say its tail has been cut off someway, but to bring home a tail and say the dog has been cut off someway is a hard proposition to work on the female mind that has lived on a ranch twenty years or so.”