Well, sir, I wish I could get along some way without telling the rest of this sad story, but if I am going to be a historian I have got to tell the whole blame thing.
[Illustration: And she was stroking his hair 217]
When I left dad and the Chicago woman she had produced a lunch from somewhere about her person, and a small bottle, and they were eating and drinking, and dad was laughing more natural than I had seen him laugh since we run over the old woman with the automobile at Nice, and she was smiling on dad just as though she was his sweetheart. (As I went around the crater, a couple of blocks away, I looked back and dad had laid his head in her lap, and she was stroking his hair. )
Well, I picked up specimens, burned the soles off my shoes wading in the lava, and took in the volcano from all sides, and after an hour I went back to where dad and the woman were lunching, but the woman was gone, and dad acted as though he had been hit by an express train, his eyes were wild, his collar was gone, his pocketbook was on the ground, empty, his coat was gone, his scarf-pin had disappeared and the $11 watch he bought when he was robbed the other time was missing, and dad's tongue was run out, and he was yelling for water. I thought he had been trying to drink some lava.
[Illustration: He was yelling for water 223]
“Dad, what in the world has happened to you?” said I, as I rushed up to him.
“That woman has happened to me, that is all,” said dad, as he took a swallow of water out of a canteen one of the dagoes had.
“Tell me about it, dad,” said I, trying to keep from laughing, when I saw that he was not hurt.
“Say, let this be a lesson to you,” said dad, “and don't you steer another woman to me on this trip. Do you know you hadn't more than got around that big rock when she said she was tired and was going to faint, for the altitude was too high for her, and I tried to soothe her, and she did look pale, and, by gosh, I thought she was going to die on my hands, and I would have to carry her corpse down the mountain. I heard a scuffling on the rocks, and she looked up and saw a man not ten feet away, and she said: 'Me husband!' and then she fainted and grabbed me around the neck, and I couldn't get her loose. She just froze to me like a person drowning, and that husband of hers, who had come up on the last car, hunting for his wife, who had eloped, pulled a long blue gun and told me he would give me five minutes to pray, and then he would kill me and throw my body down in the creater, to sizzle.”