Old Faithful Plot

by Dora Benley

  "Of all the crazy things!" Edward exclaimed in exasperation. "What on earth will the von Wessels think up next?"

  "I can't believe that the von Wessels did this! How would they control the buffalo herd? They aren't farmers or rural types!" Dora objected.

  "Who knows? If they can find a way, I would not put it past them either," Edward commented. "The bison certainly serve their purpose of stopping me cold in my tracks. I cannot emphasize enough that the von Wessels would try to stop me any way they can using whatever means they can find to accomplish their aim."

  How numerous was this buffalo herd anyway? It seemed to keep on coming and coming until it looked like a vast sea spread out around them in every direction as far as the eye could see.

  Edward glanced down at his gold pocket watch. "I have got exactly forty-five minutes to get to the Madison Junction. I do not need a bunch of buffalo to stop me at the last moment."

  He started to lay on his horn. Even that did not do any good. The buffalo ignored the British Colonel and kept on coming by the zillions.

  Then Edward did something very unorthodox. He got out his pistol.

  "Edward, you would not!" Dora protested, scandalized. But she knew Edward. He would. He had one goal in mind and one goal only— to make his rendezvous on time.

  He put his pistol out the window and pointed it up at the sky.

  "Isn't there a danger of making them stampede?" Dora asked, grabbing onto his arm to stop him. She did not know if that were for real or it was just something she had seen in western movies about cattle. She did not want to find out either. It might not be safe.

  "What choice do I have?" he asked fixing her with his eyes.

  "Isn't it illegal to fire pistols in the national park?" Dora thought she had read something about carrying guns in Yellowstone. They had to be broken down and certainly not used.

  "If a park ranger objects, I will show him my military credentials and tell them to call Washington D.C. ," he told her.

  "But you are not really on assignment!" she hissed at him. "The PM would not back you up. And you know as well as I do that Churchill is a backbencher without any seat in the current government."

  "The Yellowstone park rangers do not know that. They would have to find out. It would take a lot of trouble. By then I would hope to be out of here," he vowed.

  Dora swallowed hard. She knew there was no way to stop Edward when he got an idea in his head.

  He fired three times straight up into the air. It had the desired effect. The giant lumbering buffalo — the troll-like, satanic-looking creatures whose faces resembled something from a fantasy nightmare glaring at you and showing their teeth — stopped swarming around their car. They started to disperse and quickly trot off in different directions all at the same time.

  Edward immediately stepped on the gas and steered around them. He even got ahead of the other stunned motorists who kept on staring at them. They finally escaped from the Upper Geyser Basin according to Dora's green park map with the red lettering and all the free information. But it was only to find themselves ensnarled in more traffic in the Lower Geyser Basin just as she had feared. Edward was in a tremendous, appalling hurry. He used his car like a weapon. He inserted himself into every available free space and literally forced others to make way for him.

  "Hey, what kind of driver do you think you are!" One furious other motorist finally rolled down his window and hollered at Edward.

  Another driver laid on the horn. "Slow down! This is a national park, not a highway."

  Edward did not bother to reply. He kept on going. Dora did not know what to say. She could not reveal what they were up to. Short of that they would think Edward was crazy. She would just have to let them think what they would.

  A lady coming in the other direction tried to get out of Edward's way and crashed into a fence separating her from a steaming hot pool. Smoke rose from the flaming hole in the earth that almost appeared to be on fire with smoke billowing all over the place. The brown earth around it bulged here and there as if under tremendous pressure. Orange veins gave way to yellow around the shores of the pool itself. Hot blue waters with purple in the very center belched forth so much steam that it surrounded their car and made the windshield wet. Edward had to turn on the windshield wipers.

  "Edward, maybe you had better slow down. You might be able to control your car, but I do not know about anybody else. Somebody else may get injured," she reminded him to be cautious.

  "If I do not reach that rendezvous on time and the von Wessels capture the maps, a lot more people will get injured in the long run. Hitler will start a war just like the Kaiser did before him. And nobody in England or America will be able to defend themselves and shirk off the Nazi menace." Edward got hot under the collar.

  She could just imagine him running into a park ranger and making a speech like that! Fortunately one did not seem to be around here at the moment and even if the ranger was, she was not sure he could make out their car amidst all the sulfurous clouds.

  She remembered how Edward had once made a speech like that to her years ago in 1915 when he had arrived in Queenstown, Ireland to save her and her parents from the sinking of the Lusitania. He had been behind the map plot that had sunk the ship. A saboteur had exploded a bomb in the engine room after the torpedo had struck because Dora would not give him the Lawrence maps. She had fumed at Edward later that his precious maps were the cause of over one thousand innocent deaths. He had warned her that a lot more than one thousand would be killed otherwise on the battlefields of the Great War.

  In other places the landscape as far as the eye could see looked as white as snow in June. Apparently it was not snow but this silica stuff lying everywhere on top of the ground. Evidence of burned lodgepole pines stuck up through the silica like some sort of charred landscape.

  Geysers, smaller than Old Faithful and not as regular she supposed, spouted up through the ground. She spotted a row of them. In another place she could see people walking across one of the wooden boardwalks over what really did resemble the cone of a volcano. The ground everywhere around was blood red and steaming. Was it safe to be here at all? Dora was beginning to wonder. Yellowstone appeared to be full of nothing but hazards.

  Finally they seemed to escape the geysers all together. They came upon a sign that was the one Edward had been seeking all along. "Edward," Dora pointed it out, "it says Madison Junction!"

  "We do not want to miss that," he exclaimed as he turned sharply to the left. "It may be the only turn off for where we want to go. We do not know the name of this agent Churchill is sending. I do not know what he looks like. Search for somebody who looks British who is waiting around trying to find somebody else —— that is me, of course —— and looks lost. But of course if he is a good agent he will conceal all that and blend in. Look for somebody who is sitting or lounging or in a car by himself pulled over to the side of the road. You know the type."

  She nodded and attempted to comply. Suddenly the landscape changed from hot pools and steam to a river with mountains on either side of the road populated by tall, green lodgepole pines. Near the river lounged all sorts of tourists up on rocks. Some were fishing, Others were playing with their Labrador Retrievers. Still others were having picnics at the picnic tables."

  "Edward, look! Picnic tables! Didn't you originally say we were to meet this agent at at picnic ground?"

  "That is what Winston said," he agreed.

  "Well, here they are! Maybe we should just find an empty one and wait there for the agent to find us. After all, I assume Churchill would show your photo to the agent. The man will probably know what you look like. At least I hope so since we have no idea what he looks like," Dora reasoned out the situation.

  Edward pulled over to claim the first empty picnic area they came to. When they climbed out of the Cadillac for the first time since the Lake Hotel, Dora looked s
traight ahead. What must be the Madison River resembled a thread of blue winding its way through the valley bordered first by a lawn of green grass and then beyond that bounded by rocky mountains with lodgepole pines in front of them. But she did not set eyes on anyone who might remind her of this mysterious, elusive agent who had led them across the country to the mountain west. All their hopes were pinned on this mysterious, unseen, elusive man.

  Edward took out his binoculars and stepped across some big rocks until he came to rest on a particularly big one in the middle of the river. That gave him a vantage point for searching up and down the river banks for the unknown agent Churchill had sent.

  Dora took a blanket out of the picnic basket that Viola had given them in Pittsburgh. She spread it out on the ground and sat down to wait. Indeed most of the time since she had met him in May of 1915 had been spent waiting. Like Penelope of old waiting for her husband to return home from Troy for twenty years, Dora waited, too. Then she waited some more.

  First she had counted the months until Edward returned home from the Great War so that they could finally and at last be married. She had at first thought it would mean waiting only until Christmas, 1915. The wait had had turned into a four year slog until she set eyes upon Edward once again in Paris in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference. Instead of marrying her right away, he had gone underground for the next six months. He had ordered her to go back to Pittsburgh with more Lawrence maps and wait there for him. He resurfaced at the end of the year. He had showed up one day without announcing himself on her doorstep in Oakhurst at 3121 Bethel Church Road. But by then she had already married Michael by mistake, having heard that Edward was killed on February 1. She had received a fake letter planted by spies hired to pursue Dora and Edward over the Lawerence maps even though the Great War was over.

  Now she had to wait for the opportune moment to divorce Michael and finally marry Edward at long last. Fourteen years later she was still waiting to get pregnant so they could throw caution to the winds and tie the knot against all the political calculations about Edward's military career.

  Edward had come to America so that they could make love. It was supposed to be an assignation. Instead it had turned into still another spy romp over the Lawrence maps.

  She pulled her cashmere sweater closer to her and buttoned the pearl studs. It was chilly as she looked around for the missing Churchill contact.

  Chapter 27: Madison Junction

  All of a sudden Dora thought she heard a low growl. Where was it coming from? She looked to her right and left and saw only Edward standing out on the boulder in the stream looking back towards Madison Junction and the geyser basins beyond. She glanced upstream towards what her map indicated was the East Entrance to the park in the Montana town of West Yellowstone. Another one of those red trailers was parked beside another picnic table some distance away. Oddly enough it had not been there only a few moments ago when she and Edward climbed out of the car. It must have just pulled up. Why she was focused on the trailer she did not know. Was that the direction of the growl or what?

  The growl turned into a roar and got louder. Dora jumped. Suddenly a huge bear emerged from behind a nearby lodgepole pine in the direction of the van. The monstrous creature, which looked to be about three to three and a half feet at the shoulders, reared up on its hind legs and stood about seven feet tall. Its bulk was so large that Dora could only imagine the bear must weigh hundreds of pounds, maybe far more than five to seven hundred especially with that monstrous hump on the shoulders. Black-brown in color its guard hairs seemed to be lighter in tone lending it a "silver-tipped" appearance. Its face looked concave. Horrible to behold, the bear's front claws extended about four inches. Dora could picture them hooking into her.

  Dora stumbled to her feet. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. She even fumbled through her purse for her gun, but her fingers would not hold onto it. She dropped her purse. She did not have time to pick it up. She leaped up on top of the picnic table to get away from the fearsome creature. That would be fine if she were attempting to avoid a fox. But this apparition was much, much bigger than a human being and was acting even more malicious if such a thing were possible — even more malicious than the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, or his agents, the von Wessels.

  The hump-backed creature started to advance on her. Without even thinking Dora clutched hold of the trunk of a pine tree beside the picnic table. She got her legs and arms around it. She began to climb it as she had not climbed a tree since the days when she had been about twelve years old at her parents' house back in Oakhurst outside Pittsburgh.

  There had been a very tall oak in the center of the front yard where her mother kept a bird feeder. She had liked to see how far she could scale it. It had been a challenge in those days when she got home from school. Once she had climbed to the first branch about twenty feet off the ground. She had not been able to get down again. She had screamed, and Frank, Viola's husband, had come running. He had fetched a ladder. But she had not been willing to make that final leap. Frank had ended up phoning the fire department to rescue the adolescent girl.

  Dora did not have a fire department at her disposal now. All she could do was hope that she did not fall into the paws of the monster at the base of the tree. She did not have anything else to throw so she took off her shoes and hurled them at the beast. That hardly deterred him. He seemed to be fastening his claws into the bark. Dora could hardly believe it. But the bear was climbing the tree behind her!

  Dora finally found her own voice. She screamed at the top of her lungs, "Edward! Help! Edward!" She screeched.

  She had broken off a small dead branch and was swinging it at the rapidly advancing creature below. It was not a sword, but it was all she had.

  Edward turned to observe the critical situation some distance from where he was standing on the rock in the stream just out of earshot range. She thanked God he was not the type to panic. He had been through she did not know how many harrowing situations in the past with this airplane or that armed assassin advancing on him. He took careful aim, knowing he might not get a second shot before he risked shooting his fiancee. Edward shot the grizzly bear.

  The monster had reached a point only a couple of feet below her stockinged feet that she was constantly drawing up closer and closer to herself. The bear roared even louder yet, looked as if he did not guess who had struck him, and plummeted from the tree.

  Edward had already scrambled out of the stream. On the shoreline he waited until the bear was still to approach any closer, knowing that Dora was no longer in danger. He could not move the monster's body away from the bottom of the tree. It weighed far too much. He stepped on it to give himself a boost as he climbed up to where she was perched clinging for her life to a branch.

  He gripped her hand. She followed him down. A few yards away from the creature she threw herself into his arms. He crushed her to him and kissed her head.

  She wondered seconds ago if she would ever feel his warmth next to her again. But he was running his hands up and down her back reassuring her and kissing her cheeks, her neck, her forehead, and her lips. She clung to him as if she would never let go evermore and to do so meant sudden death.

  "My God, Edward, what a soldier's wife doesn't have to put up with next!" She sighed. She could not ever remember an incident like this before or anything half approaching it.

  "Let's not wait around. I don't see the contact anywhere around here anyway," he said.

  He yanked her back to the blue Cadillac V16 and climbed in behind her. Out of the corner of her eye she looked toward the red van. It was gone! "Edward," she tapped his shoulder, "did you see that red van at the picnic table up there?"

  He shook his head "no". "I was mostly looking the other direction," he told her. "Why? Did you see something? Does this have something to do with the von Wessels?" They were almost foremost in his mind when something strange
or suspicious happened.

  Edward looked from side to side carefully.

  "I — I don't know," she answered. "But when we first got here, the van was not there. A few minutes later it appeared. Then I heard a growl."

  "You mean the bear?" he asked.

  She nodded. "But before I saw the bear I spotted the van parked there. And now that you killed the bear it is gone. Do you think that —"

  "Of course. What else?" he deduced with a groan of disgust as he started up the car. "Bears, especially grizzly bears, do not just appear out of nowhere for no reason when you are minding your own business in what they call the front country near the roads and picnic tables."

  Dora was not aware that Edward knew anything about bears. Had he encountered them in the military? It was hardly likely in the Middle East where he had spent most of his time. Mid-East Headquarters was in Cairo, not the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains in the American West where United States troops once battled Indians and probably grizzly bears, too.

  "The von Wessels must have hired a van and some local help perhaps from an out of work hunter or trapper or whatever and brought the bear here because they had somebody tracking us and knew where we were. For all you know they had been following us all the way from Lake with that creature in the back of the van. They probably put food in there as a bait to attract the creature to begin with," Edward tried to explain what must have happened as he pulled back onto the road, "and when the bear fell for it they slammed the doors behind him and locked the monster up. When they let the bear out again he must have been crazy and enraged, ready to go for the first human he saw. No wonder!"