"And human nature! Yes, poor things: they see the American buying-woman, and that is a discipline more trying than any you West Pointers know about! Oh, yes, I see your point. If the fathers of the big family ARE fathers, and the children ARE children to them . . . All the same, I fancy the young ladies, when they marry into the higher social circles, as you say they do, don't, as a rule, make their shop girl days a topic of conversation at five-o'clock teas, or put 'Ex-shop-girl to So-and-so' at the bottom of their visiting-cards."
"I believe, after all, you're a snob, Meschines," said the general, pensively. "But, as I was about to say, when you interrupted me ten minutes ago, Grace Parsloe is coming on here to make us a visit. She fell ill, and her employers, after doing what could be done for her in the way of medical attendance, made up their minds to give her a change of climate. Now, you know, as she had originally gone to them with a letter from me, and as I live out here, on the borders of the Southern desert, in a climate that has no equal, they naturally thought of writing to me about it. And of course I said I'd be delighted to have her here, for a month, or a year, or whatever time it may be. She will be a pleasure to me, and a friend for Miriam, and she may find a husband somewhere up or down the coast, who will give her a fortune, and think all the better of her because she, like him, had the ability and the pluck to make her own way in the world."
"Humph! When do you expect her?"
"She may turn up any day. She is coming round by way of the Isthmus.
From what I hear, she is really a very fine, clever girl. She held a responsible position in the shop, and----"
"Well, let us sink the shop, and get back to the rational and instructive conversation that we--or, to be more accurate, that I was engaged in when this digression began. I presume you are aware that all the indications are lacustrine?"
Hereupon, a hammock, suspended near the talkers, and filled with what appeared to be a bundle of lace and silken shawls, became agitated, and developed at one end a slender arched foot in an open-work silk stocking and sandal-slipper, and at the other end a dark, youthful, oval face, with glorious eyes and dull black hair. A voice of music asked,--
"What is lacustrine, papa?"
"Oh, so you are awake again, Senorita Miriam?"
"I haven't been asleep. What is lacustrine?"
"Ask the professor."
"Lacus, you know, my dear," said the latter, "means fresh-water indications as against salt."
"Then how does Great Salt Lake----"
"Oh, for that matter, the whole ocean was fresh originally. Moisture, evaporation, precipitation. Water is a great solvent: earthquakes break the crust, and there you are!"
"Then, before the earthquakes, the Salt Lakes were fresh?" rejoined the hammock.
"There was fresh water west of the Rockies and south of---- Why," cried the professor, interrupting himself, "when I was in Wyoming and around there, this spring, in what they call the Bad Lands,-- cliffs and buttes of indurated yellow clay and sandstone, worn and carved out by floods long before the Aztecs started to move out of Canada,--I saw fossil bones sticking out of the cliffs, the least of which would make the fortune of a museum. That was between the Rockies and the Wahsatch."
"People's bones?" asked the hammock, agitating itself again, and showing a glimpse of a smooth throat and a slender ankle.
"Bless my soul! If there were people in those days they must have had an anxious time of it!" returned the sage. "No, no, my dear. There was brontosaurus, and atlantosaurus, and hydrosaurus, and iguanodon, --lizards, you know, not like these little black fellows that run about in the pulverized feldspar here, but chaps eighty or a hundred feet long, and twenty or thirty high; and turtles, as big as a house."
"How did they get there?"
"Got mired while they were feeding, perhaps; or the water drained off and left them high and dry."
"But where did the water go to?"
The general chuckled at this juncture, and lit another cigar. "She knows more questions than you do the answers to them," quoth he. "But I wouldn't mind hearing where the water went to, myself. I should like to see some of it back again."
"Ask the earthquakes, and the sun.
There's a hundred and thirty degrees of heat in some of these valleys,--abysses, rather, three or four hundred feet below sea- level. The earth is very thin-skinned in this region, too, and whatever water wasn't evaporated from above would be likely to come to grief underneath."
"But, professor," said the musical voice, "I thought there was a law that water always seeks its own level. So how can there be empty places below sea-level?"
"It's the fault of the aneroid barometer, my dear. We were very comfortable and commonplace until that came along and revealed anomalies. The secret lies, I suppose, in the trend of the strata, which is generally north and south. You see the ridges cropping out all through the desert; and there's a good deal of lava oozing over them, too. They probably act as walls, to prevent the sea getting in from the west, or the Colorado leaking in from the east."
"In that case," remarked the general, "a little more seismic disturbance might produce a change."
"It would have to be more than a little, I suspect," returned Meschines.
"Kamaiakan told me that the Indians have a prophecy that a great lake will come back and make the desert fruitful, and that there are some who know the very place where the water will begin to flow." And here the hammock, with a final convulsion, gave birth to a beautiful young woman, in a diaphanous silk dress and a white lace mantilla. She crossed the veranda, and seated herself on the broad arm of her father's chair.
"Why, that's important!" said the general, arching his brows. "I wonder if Kamaiakan is one of those who know the place? If so, it might be worth his while to let me into the secret."
"Oh, you couldn't go there! It's enchanted, and people who go near it die.
There are bones all about there, now."
