The Camp of the Snake
By Harold Lamb
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The Camp of the Snake - Harold Lamb
Harold Lamb
The Camp of the Snake
Published by Good Press, 2022
goodpress@okpublishing.info
EAN 4064066312459
Table of Contents
I. The Beginning of the Trail
II. The First Touch
III. A Watering
IV. An Inn Without a Keeper
V. The Chimney
VI. What Gordon Carnie Saw
VII. A Last Warning
VIII. Moorcroft Makes a Suggestion
IX. The Emerald Casket
X. The Edge of the Cliff
I. The Beginning of the Trail
CHAPTER I
Table of Contents
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL
ONE dusty morning I found a piece of paper on my desk in the offices of Pan American Motors, on Woodward Avenue, Detroit. It was a yellow paper about as big as my hand and what it said was this:
When convenient, Mr. Hacket would like to see Mr. Smith in his office.
Hacket was about third assistant sales manager of Pan Am., and I was general utility man, with a reputation for getting into trouble. It turned out that Hacket had something worse than trouble on his mind, and that was an idea.
Ever been in India, Smith?
he asked.
I told him I didn't think so, and he looked as if I was trying to tell him something that was not so. Said my card—application card, filed with the personnel department on entering Pan Am. Motors—had stated distinctly that I had lived there for three years.
That must be A. L. Smith,
I explained, after thinking it over. He's been laid up for two months with double pneumonia. My name is Alexander McDonald Smith.
This only bothered Hacket for a minute. After all, the idea was not his, and he saw no reason to worry about it. So he explained things in the rapid fire manner of a young fellow who thinks it's business-like to be swift.
The Pan Am. directors had asked our chiefs why we were not selling more cars to the Orient. We had a few sales and a lot of inquiries from Japan, but India was a blank. Someone had dug up figures to prove that there were so many thousand cars in India and practically none of American make. The climate there in a good part of the country was an all-year affair, like southern California; the oil supply was plenteous and convenient, and so forth. Our competitors, for some reason, were not trying to sell cars there.
You remember how the business part of the U. S. of A., shortly after the war, figured out to launch a government merchant marine in all the seven seas, whichever they may be, and to corner the trade of South America, and drill for oil in Alaska and so forth. Well, Pan American Motors was making more money then than it knew what to do with, and starting plants in Canada and England. With trade in general booming and buzzing, nobody thought of the bumps. Nobody ever does.
So Motors was going to send a representative to India, and Hacket picked me, as hereinbefore related, to find out—transportation and ten dollars a day paid—if there was a market for our cars, and if not, why not. He added that I could catch the Soo limited out of Chicago the next day and connect with the Canadian Pacific transcontinental at a place called Moose Jaw.
Which India,
I asked, do you mean?
No, I was not trying to be funny. There is a good deal of Scotch in me under the skin—old, sure-enough stuff, inherited— and I wanted to be certain where I was going before starting. The map of the world has a Dutch East Indies and a West Indies, besides an Indo-China, and men like Hacket have been known to overlook bigger things than that. Sure enough, he pawed over his papers and finally went off to ask about it. When he came back he said it was British India. So I listened to another bunch of instructions and went oft to clear out my desk, and wait for letters of introduction and tickets. Nobody asked if I wanted to go.
As a matter of fact I did, badly. Any other place would have done as well. It was a dusty morning and the office windows were opened wide for the first time that summer. The jangle of the street cars down Woodward was as bad as the clatter of the typewriters, and I had not set foot off pavement for eight months.
Lord, how a fellow gets to hate the streets, when a straw bonnet and a park and open windows are the only things he can see of a change in the season!
If I had known what sort of a camp I was bound for, a couple of months hence, I'd have yelped out loud. I didn't imagine such a thing and you couldn't if you tried. Think of a few tents bunched over a snow-fed river, three thousand feet below. Trees bigger than the California sequoias, and mountains crowding all around that would make the Rockies look like slag heaps. Fishing for what you want, and big game shooting—well, for stags, bear and such-like.
Man, I've sampled a good many kinds of camps, from the week-end auto parking kind to the government A. E. F. brand, and I want to say right now that this camp was in a class by itself.
Sometimes, when the alarm clock does its stunt and I wake up from dreaming about that place, I'm in a fever to pick up again and start off to it. And then come the chills, when I think of all that happened and of the hours when I cursed A. L. Smith for not going instead of me.
AS I said, Pan American Motors started out to sell the world, and before been in Calcutta a week I thanked my stars I was not a salesman. We had as much chance of selling cars in India as I would have of underscoring an opera.
Outside a shipping cost with a duty tacked on that came to about half the selling price of a car, there were only two reasons why Pan American Motors would never flourish in India. Natives—coolies they call 'em—and bullock carts were sit- ting around waiting for a chance to haul loads at about a quarter the cents-per-mile a truck would roll up.
You might investigate Kashmir, Mr. Smith,
someone suggested. A splendid country, you know, just being opened up. It is in the Hills, and I imagine the climate would be a welcome change from this.
Two weeks