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.
“Y............