sustained a polite refusal, and returned among their friends with a
contempt for such quackery, and a greatly heightened curiosity; so that
pretty soon you could hear discussions at the street corners, and by
Saturday morning Cheyenne was talking of little else. The town prowled
about the barn and its oracular metal tube, and heard and saw nothing.
The Governor and I (let it be confessed) went there ourselves, since the
twenty-four hours of required preparation were now begun. We smelled for
chemicals, and he thought there was a something, but having been bred a
doctor, distrusted his imagination. I could not be sure myself whether
there was anything or not, although I walked three times round the
barn, snuffing as dispassionately as I knew how. It might possibly be
chlorine, the Governor said, or some gas for which ammonia was in part
responsible; and this was all he could say, and we left the place. The
world was as still and the hard, sharp hills as clear and near as ever;
and the sky over Sahara is not more dry and enduring than was ours.
This tenacity in the elements plainly gave Jode a malicious official
pleasure. We could tell it by his talk at lunch; and when the Governor
reminded him that no rain was contracted for until the next day, he
mentioned that the approach of a storm is something that modern science
is able to ascertain long in advance; and he bade us come to his office
whenever we pleased, and see for ourselves what science said. This was,
at any rate, something to fill the afternoon with, and we went to him
about five. Lin McLean joined us on the way. I came upon him lingering
alone in the street, and he told me that Mrs. McLean was calling on
friends. I saw that he did not know how to spend the short recess or
holiday he was having. He seemed to cling to the society of others, and
with them for the time regain his gayer mind. He had become converted
to Ogden, and the New-Yorker, on his side, found pleasant and refreshing
this democracy of Governors and cow-punchers. Jode received us at the
signal-service office, and began to show us his instruments with the
careful pride of an orchid-collector.

"A hair hygrometer," he said to me, waving his wax-like hand over it.
"The indications are obtained from the expansion and contraction of
a prepared human hair, transferred to an index needle traversing the
divided arc of--"

"What oil do you put on the human hair Jode?" called out the Governor,
who had lef