But he turned
out an unassuming, quiet man in blue serge, with a face you could not
remember afterwards, and a few civil, ordinary remarks. He even said it
was a hot day, as if he had no relations with the weather; and what he
put into the cart were only two packing-boxes of no special significance
to the eye. He desired no lodging at the hotel, but to sleep with his
apparatus in the building provided for him; and we set out for it at
once. It was an untenanted barn, and he asked that he and his assistant
might cut a hole in the roof, upon which we noticed the assistant for
the first time--a tallish, good-looking young man, but with a weak
mouth. "This is Mr. Lusk," said the rain-maker; and we shook hands,
Ogden and I exchanging a glance. Ourselves and the cart marched up Hill
Street--or Capitol Avenue, as it has become named since Cheyenne has
grown fuller of pomp and emptier of prosperity--and I thought we made an
unusual procession: the Governor's secretary, unofficially leading the
way to the barn; the cart, and the rain-maker beside it, guarding his
packed-up mysteries; McLean and Lusk, walking together in unconscious
bigamy; and in the rear, Odgen nudging me in the ribs. That it was the
correct Lusk we had with us I felt sure from his incompetent, healthy,
vacant appearance, strong-bodied and shiftless--the sort of man to weary
of one trade and another, and make a failure of wife beating between
whiles. In Twenty-fourth Street--the town's uttermost rim--the Governor
met us, and stared at Lusk. "Christopher!" was his single observation;
but he never forgets a face--cannot afford to, now that he is in
politics; and, besides, Lusk remembered him. You seldom really forget a
man to whom you owe ten dollars.

"So you've quit hauling poles?" said the Governor.

"Nothing in it, sir," said Lusk.

"Is there any objection to my having a hole in the roof?" asked the
rain-maker; for this the secretary had been unable to tell him.

"What! going to throw your bombs through it?" said the Governor, smiling
heartily.

But the rain-maker explained at once that his was not the bomb system,
but a method attended by more rain and less disturbance. "Not that
the bomb don't produce first-class results at times and under
circumstances," he said, "but it's uncertain and costly."

The Governor hesitated about the hole in the roof, which Hilbrun told
us was for a metal pipe to conduct his generated gases into the air. The
owner of th