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Drift from Two Shores

by Bret Harte

May, 2000  [Etext #2179]


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DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES

by BRET HARTE




CONTENTS


DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES

  THE MAN ON THE BEACH

  TWO SAINTS OF THE FOOT-HILLS

  "JINNY"

  ROGER CATRON'S FRIEND

  "WHO WAS MY QUIET FRIEND?"

  A GHOST OF THE SIERRAS

  THE HOODLUM BAND

  THE MAN WHOSE YOKE WAS NOT EASY

  MY FRIEND, THE TRAMP

  THE MAN FROM SOLANO

  THE OFFICE SEEKER

  A SLEEPING-CAR EXPERIENCE

  MORNING ON THE AVENUE

  WITH THE ENTREES




DRIFT FROM TWO SHORES



THE MAN ON THE BEACH


I


He lived beside a river that emptied into a great ocean.  The
narrow strip of land that lay between him and the estuary was
covered at high tide by a shining film of water, at low tide with
the cast-up offerings of sea and shore.  Logs yet green, and
saplings washed away from inland banks, battered fragments of
wrecks and orange crates of bamboo, broken into tiny rafts yet
odorous with their lost freight, lay in long successive curves,--
the fringes and overlappings of the sea.  At high noon the shadow
of a seagull's wing, or a sudden flurry and gray squall of sand-
pipers, themselves but shadows, was all that broke the monotonous
glare of the level sands.

He had lived there alone for a twelvemonth.  Although but a few
miles from a thriving settlement, during that time his retirement
had never been intruded upon, his seclusion remained unbroken.  In
any other community he might have been the subject of rumor or
criticism, but the miners at Camp Rogue and the traders at Trinidad
Head, themselves individual and eccentric, were profoundly
indifferent to all other forms of eccentricity or heterodoxy that
did not come in contact with their own.  And certainly there was no
form of eccentricity less aggressive than that of a hermit, had
they chosen to give him that appellation.  But they did not even do
that, probably from lack of interest or perception.  To the various
traders who supplied his small wants he was known as "Kernel,"
"Judge," and "Boss."  To the general public "The Man on the Beach"
was considered a sufficiently distinguishing title.  His name, his
occupation, rank, or antecedents, nobody cared to inquire.  Whether
this arose from a fear of reciprocal inquiry and interest, or from
the profound indifference before referred to, I cannot say.

He did not look like a hermit.  A man yet young, erect, well-
dressed, clean-shaven, with a low voice, and a smile half
melancholy, half cynical, was scarcely the conventional idea of a
solitary.  His dwelling, a rude improvement on a fisherman's cabin,
had all the severe exterior simplicity of frontier architecture,
but within it was comfortable and wholesome.  Three rooms--a
kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom--were all it contained.

He had lived there long enough to see the dull monotony of one
season lapse into the dull monotony of the other.  The bleak
northwest trade-winds had brought him mornings of staring sunlight
and nights of fog and silence.  The warmer southwest trades had
brought him clouds, rain, and the transient glories of quick
grasses and odorous beach blossoms.  But summer or winter, wet or
dry season, on one side rose always the sharply defined hills with
their changeless background of evergreens; on the other side
stretched always the illimitable ocean as sharply defined against
the horizon, and as unchanging in its hue.  The onset of spring and
autumn tides, some changes among his feathered neighbors, the
footprints of certain wild animals along the river's bank, and the
hanging out of party-colored signals from the wooded hillside far
inland, helped him to record the slow months.  On summer
afternoons, when the sun sank behind a bank of fog that, moving
solemnly shoreward, at last encompassed him and blotted out sea and
sky, his isolation was complete.  The damp gray sea that flowed
above and around and about him always seemed to shut out an
intangible world beyond, and to be the only real presence.  The
booming of breakers scarce a dozen rods from his dwelling was but a
vague and unintelligible sound, or the echo of something past
forever.  Every morning when the sun tore away the misty curtain he
awoke, dazed and bewildered, as upon a new world.  The first sense
of oppression over, he came to love at last this subtle spirit of
oblivion; and at night, when its cloudy wings were folded over his
cabin, he would sit alone with a sense of security he had never
felt before.  On such occasions he was apt to leave his door open,
and listen as for footsteps; for what might not come to him out of
this vague, nebulous world beyond?  Perhaps even SHE,--for this
strange solitary was not insane nor visionary.  He was never in
spirit alone.  For night and day, sleeping or waking, pacing the
beach or crouching over his driftwood fire, a woman's face was
always before him,--the face for whose sake and for cause of whom
he sat there alone.  He saw it in the morning sunlight; it was her
white hands that were lifted from the crested breakers; it was the
rustling of her skirt when the sea wind swept through the beach
grasses; it was the loving whisper of her low voice when the long
waves sank and died among the sedge and rushes.  She was as
omnipresent as sea and sky and level sand.  Hence when the fog
wiped them away, she seemed to draw closer to him in the darkness.
On one or two more gracious nights in midsummer, when the influence
of the fervid noonday sun was still felt on the heated sands, the
warm breath of the fog touched his cheek as if it had been hers,
and the tears started to his eyes.

Before the fogs came--for he arrived there in winter--he had found
surcease and rest in the steady glow of a lighthouse upon the
little promontory a league below his habitation.  Even on the
darkest nights, and in the tumults of storm, it spoke to him of a
patience that was enduring and a steadfastness that was immutable.
Later on he found a certain dumb companionship in an uprooted tree,
which, floating down the river, had stranded hopelessly upon his
beach, but in the evening had again drifted away.  Rowing across
the estuary a day or two afterward, he recognized the tree again
from a "blaze" of the settler's axe still upon its trunk.  He was
not surprised a week later to find the same tree in the sands
before his dwelling, or that the next morning it should be again
launched on its purposeless wanderings.  And so, impelled by wind
or tide, but always haunting his seclusion, he would meet it
voyaging up the river at the flood, or see it tossing among the
breakers on the bar, but always with the confidence of its
returning sooner or later to an anchorage beside him.  After the
third month of his self-imposed exile, he was forced into a more
human companionship, that was brief but regular.  He was obliged to
have menial assistance.  While he might have eaten his bread "in
sorrow" carelessly and mechanically, if it had been prepared for
him, the occupation of cooking his own food brought the vulgarity
and materialness of existence so near to his morbid sensitiveness
that he could not eat the meal he had himself prepared.  He did not
yet wish to die, and when starvation or society seemed to be the
only alternative, he chose the latter.  An Indian woman, so hideous
as to scarcely suggest humanity, at stated times performed for him
these offices.  When she did not come, which was not infrequent, he
did not eat.

Such was the mental and physical condition of the Man on the Beach
on the 1st of January, 1869.


It was a still, bright day, following a week of rain and wind.  Low
down the horizon still lingered a few white flecks--the flying
squadrons of the storm--as vague as distant sails.  Southward the
harbor bar whitened occasionally but lazily; even the turbulent
Pacific swell stretched its length wearily upon the shore.  And
toiling from the settlement over the low sand dunes, a carriage at
last halted half a mile from the solitary's dwelling.

"I reckon ye'll hev to git out here," said the driver, pulling up
to breathe his panting horses.  "Ye can't git any nigher."

There was a groan of execration from the interior of the vehicle, a
hysterical little shriek, and one or two shrill expressions of
feminine disapprobation, but the driver moved not.  At last a
masculine head expostulated from the window: "Look here; you agreed
to take us to the house.  Why, it's a mile away at least!"

"Thar, or tharabouts, I reckon," said the driver, coolly crossing
his legs on the box.

"It's no use talking; I can never walk through this sand and horrid
glare," said a female voice quickly and imperatively.  Then,
apprehensively, "Well, of all the places!"

"Well, I never!"

"This DOES exceed everything."

"It's really TOO idiotic for anything."

It was noticeable that while the voices betrayed the difference of
age and sex, they bore a singular resemblance to each other, and a
certain querulousness of pitch that was dominant.

"I reckon I've gone about as fur as I allow to go with them
hosses," continued the driver suggestively, "and as time's
vallyble, ye'd better unload."

"The wretch does not mean to leave us here alone?" said a female
voice in shrill indignation.  "You'll wait for us, driver?" said a
masculine voice, confidently.

"How long?" asked the driver.

There was a hurried consultation within.  The words "Might send us
packing!" "May take all night to get him to listen to reason,"
"Bother! whole thing over in ten minutes," came from the window.
The driver meanwhile had settled himself back in his seat, and
whistled in patient contempt of a fashionable fare that didn't know
its own mind nor destination.  Finally, the masculine head was
thrust out, and, with a certain potential air of judicially ending
a difficulty, said:--

"You're to follow us slowly, and put up your horses in the stable
or barn until we want you."

An ironical laugh burst from the driver.  "Oh, yes--in the stable
or barn--in course.  But, my eyes sorter failin' me, mebbee, now,
some ev you younger folks will kindly pint out the stable or barn
of the Kernel's.  Woa!--will ye?--woa!  Give me a chance to pick
out that there barn or stable to put ye in!"  This in arch
confidence to the horses, who had not moved.

Here the previous speaker, rotund, dignified, and elderly, alighted
indignantly, closely followed by the rest of the party, two ladies
and a gentleman.  One of the ladies was past the age, but not the
fashion, of youth, and her Parisian dress clung over her wasted
figure and well-bred bones artistically if not gracefully; the
younger lady, evidently her daughter, was crisp and pretty, and
carried off the aquiline nose and aristocratic emaciation of her
mother with a certain piquancy and a dash that was charming.  The
gentleman was young, thin, with the family characteristics, but
otherwise indistinctive.

With one accord they all faced directly toward the spot indicated
by the driver's whip.  Nothing but the bare, bleak, rectangular
outlines of the cabin of the Man on the Beach met their eyes.  All
else was a desolate expanse, unrelieved by any structure higher
than the tussocks of scant beach grass that clothed it.  They were
so utterly helpless that the driver's derisive laughter gave way at
last to good humor and suggestion.  "Look yer," he said finally, "I
don't know ez it's your fault you don't know this kentry ez well ez
you do Yurup; so I'll drag this yer team over to Robinson's on the
river, give the horses a bite, and then meander down this yer
ridge, and wait for ye.  Ye'll see me from the Kernel's."  And
without waiting for a reply, he swung his horses' heads toward the
river, and rolled away.

The same querulous protest that had come from the windows arose
from the group, but vainly.  Then followed accusations and
recrimination.  "It's YOUR fault; you might have written, and had
him meet us at the settlement."  "You wanted to take him by
surprise!"  "I didn't.  You know if I'd written that we were
coming, he'd have taken good care to run away from us."  "Yes, to
some more inaccessible place."  "There can be none worse than
this," etc., etc.  But it was so clearly evident that nothing was
to be done but to go forward, that even in the midst of their
wrangling they straggled on in Indian file toward the distant
cabin, sinking ankle-deep in the yielding sand, punctuating their
verbal altercation with sighs, and only abating it at a scream from
the elder lady.

"Where's Maria?"

"Gone on ahead!" grunted the younger gentleman, in a bass voice, so
incongruously large for him that it seemed to have been a
ventriloquistic contribution by somebody else.

It was too true.  Maria, after adding her pungency to the general
conversation, had darted on ahead.  But alas! that swift Camilla,
after scouring the plain some two hundred feet with her demitrain,
came to grief on an unbending tussock and sat down, panting but
savage.  As they plodded wearily toward her, she bit her red lips,
smacked them on her cruel little white teeth like a festive and
sprightly ghoul, and lisped:--

"You DO look so like guys!  For all the world like those English
shopkeepers we met on the Righi, doing the three-guinea excursion
in their Sunday clothes!"

Certainly the spectacle of these exotically plumed bipeds, whose
fine feathers were already bedrabbled by sand and growing limp in
the sea breeze, was somewhat dissonant with the rudeness of sea and
sky and shore.  A few gulls screamed at them; a loon, startled from
the lagoon, arose shrieking and protesting, with painfully extended
legs, in obvious burlesque of the younger gentleman.  The elder
lady felt the justice of her gentle daughter's criticism, and
retaliated with simple directness:--

"Your skirt is ruined, your hair is coming down, your hat is half
off your head, and your shoes--in Heaven's name, Maria! what HAVE
you done with your shoes?"

Maria had exhibited a slim stockinged foot from under her skirt.
It was scarcely three fingers broad, with an arch as patrician as
her nose.  "Somewhere between here and the carriage," she answered;
"Dick can run back and find it, while he is looking for your
brooch, mamma.  Dick's so obliging."

The robust voice of Dick thundered, but the wasted figure of Dick
feebly ploughed its way back, and returned with the missing buskin.

"I may as well carry them in my hand like the market girls at
Saumur, for we have got to wade soon," said Miss Maria, sinking her
own terrors in the delightful contemplation of the horror in her
parent's face, as she pointed to a shining film of water slowly
deepening in a narrow swale in the sands between them and the
cabin.

"It's the tide," said the elder gentleman.  "If we intend to go on
we must hasten; permit me, my dear madam," and before she could
reply he had lifted the astounded matron in his arms, and made
gallantly for the ford.  The gentle Maria cast an ominous eye on
her brother, who, with manifest reluctance, performed for her the
same office.  But that acute young lady kept her eyes upon the
preceding figure of the elder gentleman, and seeing him suddenly
and mysteriously disappear to his armpits, unhesitatingly threw
herself from her brother's protecting arms,--an action which
instantly precipitated him into the water,--and paddled hastily to
the opposite bank, where she eventually assisted in pulling the
elderly gentleman out of the hollow into which he had fallen, and
in rescuing her mother, who floated helplessly on the surface,
upheld by her skirts, like a gigantic and variegated water-lily.
Dick followed with a single gaiter.  In another minute they were
safe on the opposite bank.

The elder lady gave way to tears; Maria laughed hysterically; Dick
mingled a bass oath with the now audible surf; the elder gentleman,
whose florid face the salt water had bleached, and whose dignity
seemed to have been washed away, accounted for both by saying he
thought it was a quicksand.

"It might have been," said a quiet voice behind them; "you should
have followed the sand dunes half a mile further to the estuary."

They turned instantly at the voice.  It was that of the Man on the
Beach.  They all rose to their feet and uttered together, save one,
the single exclamation, "James!"  The elder gentleman said "Mr.
North," and, with a slight resumption of his former dignity,
buttoned his coat over his damp shirt front.

There was a silence, in which the Man on the Beach looked gravely
down upon them.  If they had intended to impress him by any
suggestion of a gay, brilliant, and sensuous world beyond in their
own persons, they had failed, and they knew it.  Keenly alive as
they had always been to external prepossession, they felt that they
looked forlorn and ludicrous, and that the situation lay in his
hands.  The elderly lady again burst into tears of genuine
distress, Maria colored over her cheek-bones, and Dick stared at
the ground in sullen disquiet.

"You had better get up," said the Man on the Beach, after a
moment's thought, "and come up to the cabin.  I cannot offer you a
change of garments, but you can dry them by the fire."

They all rose together, and again said in chorus, "James!" but this
time with an evident effort to recall some speech or action
previously resolved upon and committed to memory.  The elder lady
got so far as to clasp her hands and add, "You have not forgotten
us--James, oh, James!"; the younger gentleman to attempt a brusque
"Why, Jim, old boy," that ended in querulous incoherence; the young
lady to cast a half-searching, half-coquettish look at him; and the
old gentleman to begin, "Our desire, Mr. North"--but the effort was
futile.  Mr. James North, standing before them with folded arms,
looked from the one to the other.

"I have not thought much of you for a twelvemonth," he said,
quietly, "but I have not forgotten you.  Come!"

He led the way a few steps in advance, they following silently.  In
this brief interview they felt he had resumed the old dominance and
independence, against which they had rebelled; more than that, in
this half failure of their first concerted action they had changed
their querulous bickerings to a sullen distrust of each other, and
walked moodily apart as they followed James North into his house.
A fire blazed brightly on the hearth; a few extra seats were
quickly extemporized from boxes and chests, and the elder lady,
with the skirt of her dress folded over her knees,--looking not
unlike an exceedingly overdressed jointed doll,--dried her flounces
and her tears together.  Miss Maria took in the scant appointments
of the house in one single glance, and then fixed her eyes upon
James North, who, the least concerned of the party, stood before
them, grave and patiently expectant.

"Well," began the elder lady in a high key, "after all this worry
and trouble you have given us, James, haven't you anything to say?
Do you know--have you the least idea what you are doing? what
egregious folly you are committing? what everybody is saying?  Eh?
Heavens and earth!--do you know who I am?"

"You are my father's brother's widow, Aunt Mary," returned James,
quietly.  "If I am committing any folly it only concerns myself; if
I cared for what people said I should not be here; if I loved
society enough to appreciate its good report I should stay with
it."

"But they say you have run away from society to pine alone for a
worthless creature--a woman who has used you, as she has used and
thrown away others--a--"

"A woman," chimed in Dick, who had thrown himself on James's bed
while his patent leathers were drying, "a woman that all the
fellers know never intended"--here, however, he met James North's
eye, and muttering something about "whole thing being too idiotic
to talk about," relapsed into silence.

"You know," continued Mrs. North, "that while we and all our set
shut our eyes to your very obvious relations with that woman, and
while I myself often spoke of it to others as a simple flirtation,
and averted a scandal for your sake, and when the climax was
reached, and she herself gave you an opportunity to sever your
relations, and nobody need have been wiser--and she'd have had all
the blame--and it's only what she's accustomed to--you--you! you,
James North!--you must nonsensically go, and, by this extravagant
piece of idiocy and sentimental tomfoolery, let everybody see how
serious the whole affair was, and how deep it hurt you! and here in
this awful place, alone--where you're half drowned to get to it and
are willing to be wholly drowned to get away!  Oh, don't talk to
me!  I won't hear it--it's just too idiotic for anything!"

The subject of this outburst neither spoke nor moved a single
muscle.

"Your aunt, Mr. North, speaks excitedly," said the elder gentleman;
"yet I think she does not overestimate the unfortunate position in
which your odd fancy places you.  I know nothing of the reasons
that have impelled you to this step; I only know that the popular
opinion is that the cause is utterly inadequate.  You are still
young, with a future before you.  I need not say how your present
conduct may imperil that.  If you expected to achieve any good--
even to your own satisfaction--but this conduct--"

"Yes--if there was anything to be gained by it!" broke in Mrs.
North.

"If you ever thought she'd come back!--but that kind of woman
don't.  They must have change.  Why"--began Dick suddenly, and as
suddenly lying down again.

"Is this all you have come to say?" asked James North, after a
moment's patient silence, looking from one to the other.

"All?" screamed Mrs. North; "is it not enough?"

"Not to change my mind nor my residence at present," replied North,
coolly.

"Do you mean to continue this folly all your life?"

"And have a coroner's inquest, and advertisements and all the facts
in the papers?"

"And have HER read the melancholy details, and know that you were
faithful and she was not?"

This last shot was from the gentle Maria, who bit her lips as it
glanced from the immovable man.

"I believe there is nothing more to say," continued North, quietly.
"I am willing to believe your intentions are as worthy as your
zeal.  Let us say no more," he added, with grave weariness; "the
tide is rising, and your coachman is signaling you from the bank."

There was no mistaking the unshaken positiveness of the man, which
was all the more noticeable from its gentle but utter indifference
to the wishes of the party.  He turned his back upon them as they
gathered hurriedly around the elder gentleman, while the words, "He
cannot be in his right mind," "It's your duty to do it," "It's
sheer insanity," "Look at his eye!" all fell unconsciously upon his
ear.

"One word more, Mr. North," said the elder gentleman, a little
portentously, to conceal an evident embarrassment.  "It may be that
your conduct might suggest to minds more practical than your own
the existence of some aberration of the intellect--some temporary
mania--that might force your best friends into a quasi-legal
attitude of--"

"Declaring me insane," interrupted James North, with the slight
impatience of a man more anxious to end a prolix interview than to
combat an argument.  "I think differently.  As my aunt's lawyer,
you know that within the last year I have deeded most of my
property to her and her family.  I cannot believe that so shrewd an
adviser as Mr. Edmund Carter would ever permit proceedings that
would invalidate that conveyance."

Maria burst into a laugh of such wicked gratification that James
North, for the first time, raised his eyes with something of
interest to her face.  She colored under them, but returned his
glance with another like a bayonet flash.  The party slowly moved
toward the door, James North following.

"Then this is your final answer?" asked Mrs. North, stopping
imperiously on the threshold.

"I beg your pardon?" queried North, half abstractedly.

"Your final answer?"

"Oh, certainly."

Mrs. North flounced away a dozen rods in rage.  This was
unfortunate for North.  It gave them the final attack in detail.
Dick began: "Come along!  You know you can advertise for her with a
personal down there and the old woman wouldn't object as long as
you were careful and put in an appearance now and then!"

As Dick limped away, Mr. Carter thought, in confidence, that the
whole matter--even to suit Mr. North's sensitive nature--might be
settled there.  "SHE evidently expects you to return.  My opinion
is that she never left San Francisco.  You can't tell anything
about these women."

With this last sentence on his indifferent ear, James North seemed
to be left free.  Maria had rejoined her mother; but as they
crossed the ford, and an intervening sand-hill hid the others from
sight, that piquant young lady suddenly appeared on the hill and
stood before him.

"And you're not coming back?" she said directly.

"No."

"Never?"

"I cannot say."

"Tell me! what is there about some women to make men love them so?"

"Love," replied North, quietly.

"No, it cannot be--it is not THAT!"

North looked over the hill and round the hill, and looked bored.

"Oh, I'm going now.  But one moment, Jem!  I didn't want to come.
They dragged me here.  Good-by."

She raised a burning face and eyes to his.  He leaned forward and
imprinted the perfunctory cousinly kiss of the period upon her
cheek.

"Not that way," she said angrily, clutching his wrists with her
long, thin fingers; "you shan't kiss me in that way, James North."

With the faintest, ghost-like passing of a twinkle in the corners
of his sad eyes, he touched his lips to hers.  With the contact,
she caught him round the neck, pressed her burning lips and face to
his forehead, his cheeks, the very curves of his chin and throat,
and--with a laugh was gone.


II


Had the kinsfolk of James North any hope that their visit might
revive some lingering desire he still combated to enter once more
the world they represented, that hope would have soon died.
Whatever effect this episode had upon the solitary,--and he had
become so self-indulgent of his sorrow, and so careless of all that
came between him and it, as to meet opposition with profound
indifference,--the only appreciable result was a greater attraction
for the solitude that protected him, and he grew even to love the
bleak shore and barren sands that had proved so inhospitable to
others.  There was a new meaning to the roar of the surges, an
honest, loyal sturdiness in the unchanging persistency of the
uncouth and blustering trade-winds, and a mute fidelity in the
shining sands, treacherous to all but him.  With such bandogs to
lie in wait for trespassers, should he not be grateful?

If no bitterness was awakened by the repeated avowal of the
unfaithfulness of the woman he loved, it was because he had always
made the observation and experience of others give way to the
dominance of his own insight.  No array of contradictory facts ever
shook his belief or unbelief; like all egotists, he accepted them
as truths controlled by a larger truth of which he alone was
cognizant.  His simplicity, which was but another form of his
egotism, was so complete as to baffle ordinary malicious cunning,
and so he was spared the experience and knowledge that come to a
lower nature, and help debase it.

Exercise and the stimulus of the few wants that sent him hunting or
fishing kept up his physical health.  Never a lover of rude freedom
or outdoor life his sedentary predilections and nice tastes kept
him from lapsing into barbarian excess; never a sportsman he
followed the chase with no feverish exaltation.  Even dumb
creatures found out his secret, and at times, stalking moodily over
the upland, the brown deer and elk would cross his path without
fear or molestation, or, idly lounging in his canoe within the
river bar, flocks of wild fowl would settle within stroke of his
listless oar.  And so the second winter of his hermitage drew near
its close, and with it came a storm that passed into local history,
and is still remembered.  It uprooted giant trees along the river,
and with them the tiny rootlets of the life he was idly fostering.

The morning had been fitfully turbulent, the wind veering several
points south and west, with suspicions lulls, unlike the steady
onset of the regular southwest trades.  High overhead the long
manes of racing cirro stratus streamed with flying gulls and
hurrying water-fowl; plover piped incessantly, and a flock of
timorous sand-pipers sought the low ridge of his cabin, while a
wrecking crew of curlew hastily manned the uprooted tree that
tossed wearily beyond the bar.  By noon the flying clouds huddled
together in masses, and then were suddenly exploded in one vast
opaque sheet over the heavens.  The sea became gray, and suddenly
wrinkled and old.  There was a dumb, half-articulate cry in the
air,--rather a confusion of many sounds, as of the booming of
distant guns, the clangor of a bell, the trampling of many waves,
the creaking of timbers and soughing of leaves, that sank and fell
ere you could yet distinguish them.  And then it came on to blow.
For two hours it blew strongly.  At the time the sun should have
set the wind had increased; in fifteen minutes darkness shut down,
even the white sands lost their outlines, and sea and shore and sky
lay in the grip of a relentless and aggressive power.

Within his cabin, by the leaping light of his gusty fire, North sat
alone.  His first curiosity passed, the turmoil without no longer
carried his thought beyond its one converging centre.  SHE had come
to him on the wings of the storm, even as she had been borne to him
on the summer fog-cloud.  Now and then the wind shook the cabin,
but he heeded it not.  He had no fears for its safety; it presented
its low gable to the full fury of the wind that year by year had
piled, and even now was piling, protecting buttresses of sand
against it.  With each succeeding gust it seemed to nestle more
closely to its foundations, in the whirl of flying sand that
rattled against its roof and windows.  It was nearly midnight when
a sudden thought brought him to his feet.  What if SHE were exposed
to the fury of such a night as this?  What could he do to help her?
Perhaps even now, as he sat there idle, she--Hark! was not that a
gun--No?  Yes, surely!

He hurriedly unbolted the door, but the strength of the wind and
the impact of drifted sand resisted his efforts.  With a new and
feverish strength possessing him he forced it open wide enough to
permit his egress when the wind caught him as a feather, rolled him
over and over, and then, grappling him again, held him down hard
and fast against the drift.  Unharmed, but unable to move, he lay
there, hearing the multitudinous roar of the storm, but unable to
distinguish one familiar sound in the savage medley.  At last he
managed to crawl flat on his face to the cabin, and refastening the
door, threw himself upon his bed.

He was awakened from a fitful dream of his Cousin Maria.  She with
a supernatural strength seemed to be holding the door against some
unseen, unknown power that moaned and strove without, and threw
itself in despairing force against the cabin.  He could see the
lithe undulations of her form as she alternately yielded to its
power, and again drew the door against it, coiling herself around
the log-hewn doorpost with a hideous, snake-like suggestion.  And
then a struggle and a heavy blow, which shook the very foundations
of the structure, awoke him.  He leaped to his feet, and into an
inch of water!  By the flickering firelight he could see it oozing
and dripping from the crevices of the logs and broadening into a
pool by the chimney.  A scrap of paper torn from an envelope was
floating idly on its current.  Was it the overflow of the backed-up
waters of the river?  He was not left long in doubt.  Another blow
upon the gable of the house, and a torrent of spray leaped down the
chimney, scattered the embers far and wide, and left him in utter
darkness.  Some of the spray clung to his lips.  It was salt.  The
great ocean had beaten down the river bar and was upon him!

Was there aught to fly to?  No!  The cabin stood upon the highest
point of the sand spit, and the low swale on one side crossed by
his late visitors was a seething mass of breakers, while the
estuary behind him was now the ocean itself.  There was nothing to
do but to wait.

The very helplessness of his situation was, to a man of his
peculiar temperament, an element of patient strength.  The instinct
of self-preservation was still strong in him, but he had no fear of
death, nor, indeed, any presentiment of it; yet if it came, it was
an easy solution of the problem that had been troubling him, and it
wiped off the slate!  He thought of the sarcastic prediction of his
cousin, and death in the form that threatened him was the
obliteration of his home and even the ground upon which it stood.
There would be nothing to record, no stain could come upon the
living.  The instinct that kept him true to HER would tell her how
he died; if it did not, it was equally well.  And with this simple
fatalism his only belief, this strange man groped his way to his
bed, lay down, and in a few moments was asleep.  The storm still
roared without.  Once again the surges leaped against the cabin,
but it was evident that the wind was abating with the tide.

When he awoke it was high noon, and the sun was shining brightly.
For some time he lay in a delicious languor, doubting if he was
alive or dead, but feeling through every nerve and fibre an
exquisite sense of peace--a rest he had not known since his
boyhood--a relief he scarcely knew from what.  He felt that he was
smiling, and yet his pillow was wet with the tears that glittered
still on his lashes.  The sand blocking up his doorway, he leaped
lightly from his window.  A few clouds were still sailing slowly in
the heavens, the trailing plumes of a great benediction that lay on
sea and shore.  He scarcely recognized the familiar landscape; a
new bar had been formed in the river, and a narrow causeway of sand
that crossed the lagoon and marshes to the river bank and the
upland trail seemed to bring him nearer to humanity again.  He was
conscious of a fresh, childlike delight in all this, and when, a
moment later, he saw the old uprooted tree, now apparently forever
moored and imbedded in the sand beside his cabin, he ran to it with
a sense of joy.

Its trailing roots were festooned with clinging sea-weed and the
long, snaky, undulating stems of the sea-turnip; and fixed between
two crossing roots was a bamboo orange crate, almost intact.  As he
walked toward it he heard a strange cry, unlike anything the barren
sands had borne before.  Thinking it might be some strange sea bird
caught in the meshes of the sea-weed, he ran to the crate and
looked within.  It was half filled with sea-moss and feathery
algae.  The cry was repeated.  He brushed aside the weeds with his
hands.  It was not a wounded sea bird, but a living human child!

As he lifted it from its damp enwrappings he saw that it was an
infant eight or nine months old.  How and when it had been brought
there, or what force had guided that elfish cradle to his very
door, he could not determine; but it must have been left early, for
it was quite warm, and its clothing almost dried by the blazing
morning sun.  To wrap his coat about it, to run to his cabin with
it, to start out again with the appalling conviction that nothing
could be done for it there, occupied some moments.  His nearest
neighbor was Trinidad Joe, a "logger," three miles up the river.
He remembered to have heard vaguely that he was a man of family.
To half strangle the child with a few drops from his whisky flask,
to extricate his canoe from the marsh, and strike out into the
river with his waif, was at least to do something.  In half an hour
he had reached the straggling cabin and sheds of Trinidad Joe, and
from the few scanty flowers that mingled with the brushwood fence,
and a surplus of linen fluttering on the line, he knew that his
surmise as to Trinidad Joe's domestic establishment was correct.

The door at which he knocked opened upon a neat, plainly-furnished
room, and the figure of a buxom woman of twenty-five.  With an
awkwardness new to him, North stammered out the circumstances of
his finding the infant, and the object of his visit.  Before he had
finished, the woman, by some feminine trick, had taken the child
from his hands ere he knew it; and when he paused, out of breath,
burst into a fit of laughter.  North tried to laugh too, but
failed.

When the woman had wiped the tears from a pair of very frank blue
eyes, and hidden two rows of very strong white teeth again, she
said:--

"Look yar!  You're that looney sort a' chap that lives alone over
on the spit yonder, ain't ye?"

North hastened to admit all that the statement might imply.

"And so ye've had a baby left ye to keep you company?  Lordy!"
Here she looked as if dangerously near a relapse, and then added,
as if in explanation of her conduct,--

"When I saw ye paddlin' down here,--you thet ez shy as elk in
summer,--I sez, 'He's sick.'  But a baby,--Oh, Lordy!"

For a moment North almost hated her.  A woman who, in this
pathetic, perhaps almost tragic, picture saw only a ludicrous
image, and that image himself, was of another race than that he had
ever mingled with.  Profoundly indifferent as he had always been to
the criticism of his equals in station, the mischievous laughter of
this illiterate woman jarred upon him worse than his cousin's
sarcasm.  It was with a little dignity that he pointed out the fact
that at present the child needed nourishment.  "It's very young,"
he added.  "I'm afraid it wants its natural nourishment."

"Whar is it to get it?" asked the woman.

James North hesitated, and looked around.  There should be a baby
somewhere! there MUST be a baby somewhere!  "I thought that you,"
he stammered, conscious of an awkward coloring,--"I--that is--I--"
He stopped short, for she was already cramming her apron into her
mouth, too late, however, to stop the laugh that overflowed it.
When she found her breath again, she said,--

"Look yar!  I don't wonder they said you was looney!  I'm Trinidad
Joe's onmarried darter, and the only woman in this house.  Any fool
could have told you that.  Now, ef you can rig us up a baby out o'
them facts, I'd like to see it done."

Inwardly furious but outwardly polite, James North begged her
pardon, deplored his ignorance, and, with a courtly bow, made a
movement to take the child.  But the woman as quickly drew it away.

"Not much," she said, hastily.  "What! trust that poor critter to
you?  No, sir!  Thar's more ways of feeding a baby, young man, than
you knows on, with all your 'nat'ral nourishment.'  But it looks
kinder logy and stupid."

North freezingly admitted that he had given the infant whisky as a
stimulant.

"You did?  Come, now, that ain't so looney after all.  Well, I'll
take the baby, and when Dad comes home we'll see what can be done."

North hesitated.  His dislike of the woman was intense, and yet he
knew no one else and the baby needed instant care.  Besides, he
began to see the ludicrousness of his making a first call on his
neighbors with a foundling to dispose of.  She saw his hesitation,
and said,--

"Ye don't know me, in course.  Well, I'm Bessy Robinson, Trinidad
Joe Robinson's daughter.  I reckon Dad will give me a character if
you want references, or any of the boys on the river."

"I'm only thinking of the trouble I'm giving you, Miss Robinson, I
assure you.  Any expense you may incur--"

"Young man," said Bessy Robinson, turning sharply on her heel, and
facing him with her black brows a little contracted, "if it comes
to expenses, I reckon I'll pay you for that baby, or not take it at
all.  But I don't know you well enough to quarrel with you on
sight.  So leave the child to me, and, if you choose, paddle down
here to-morrow, after sun up--the ride will do you good--and see
it, and Dad thrown in.  Good by!" and with one powerful but well-
shaped arm thrown around the child, and the other crooked at the
dimpled elbow a little aggressively, she swept by James North and
entered a bedroom, closing the door behind her.

When Mr. James North reached his cabin it was dark.  As he rebuilt
his fire, and tried to rearrange the scattered and disordered
furniture, and remove the debris of last night's storm, he was
conscious for the first time of feeling lonely.  He did not miss
the child.  Beyond the instincts of humanity and duty he had really
no interest in its welfare or future.  He was rather glad to get
rid of it, he would have preferred to some one else, and yet SHE
looked as if she were competent.  And then came the reflection that
since the morning he had not once thought of the woman he loved.
The like had never occurred in his twelvemonth solitude.  So he set
to work, thinking of her and of his sorrows, until the word
"Looney," in connection with his suffering, flashed across his
memory.  "Looney!"  It was not a nice word.  It suggested something
less than insanity; something that might happen to a common,
unintellectual sort of person.  He remembered the loon, an ungainly
feathered neighbor, that was popularly supposed to have lent its
name to the adjective.  Could it be possible that people looked
upon him as one too hopelessly and uninterestingly afflicted for
sympathy or companionship, too unimportant and common for even
ridicule; or was this but the coarse interpretation of that vulgar
girl?

Nevertheless, the next morning "after sun up" James North was at
Trinidad Joe's cabin.  That worthy proprietor himself--a long, lank
man, with even more than the ordinary rural Western characteristics
of ill health, ill feeding, and melancholy--met him on the bank,
clothed in a manner and costume that was a singular combination of
the frontiersman and the sailor.  When North had again related the
story of his finding the child, Trinidad Joe pondered.

"It mout hev been stowed away in one of them crates for safe-
keeping," he said, musingly, "and washed off the deck o' one o'
them Tahiti brigs goin' down fer oranges.  Least-ways, it never got
thar from these parts."

"But it's a miracle its life was saved at all.  It must have been
some hours in the water."

"Them brigs lays their course well inshore, and it was just mebbe a
toss up if the vessel clawed off the reef at all!  And ez to the
child keepin' up, why, dog my skin! that's just the contrariness o'
things," continued Joe, in sententious cynicism.  "Ef an able
seaman had fallen from the yard-arm that night he'd been sunk in
sight o' the ship, and thet baby ez can't swim a stroke sails
ashore, sound asleep, with the waves for a baby-jumper."

North, who was half relieved, yet half awkwardly disappointed at
not seeing Bessy, ventured to ask how the child was doing.

"She'll do all right now," said a frank voice above, and, looking
up, North discerned the round arms, blue eyes, and white teeth of
the daughter at the window.  "She's all hunky, and has an appetite--
ef she hezn't got her 'nat'ral nourishment.'  Come, Dad! heave
ahead, and tell the stranger what you and me allow we'll do, and
don't stand there swappin' lies with him."

"Weel," said Trinidad Joe, dejectedly, "Bess allows she can rar
that baby and do justice to it.  And I don't say--though I'm her
father--that she can't.  But when Bess wants anything she wants it
all, clean down; no half-ways nor leavin's for her."

"That's me! go on, Dad--you're chippin' in the same notch every
time," said Miss Robinson, with cheerful directness.

"Well, we agree to put the job up this way.  We'll take the child
and you'll give us a paper or writin' makin' over all your right
and title.  How's that?"

Without knowing exactly why he did, Mr. North objected decidedly.

"Do you think we won't take good care of it?" asked Miss Bessy,
sharply.

"That is not the question," said North, a little hotly.  "In the
first place, the child is not mine to give.  It has fallen into my
hands as a trust,--the first hands that received it from its
parents.  I do not think it right to allow any other hands to come
between theirs and mine."

Miss Bessy left the window.  In another moment she appeared from
the house, and, walking directly towards North, held out a somewhat
substantial hand.  "Good!" she said, as she gave his fingers an
honest squeeze.  "You ain't so looney after all.  Dad, he's right!
He shan't gin it up, but we'll go halves in it, he and me.  He'll
be father and I'll be mother 'til death do us part, or the reg'lar
family turns up.  Well--what do you say?"

More pleased than he dared confess to himself with the praise of
this common girl, Mr. James North assented.  Then would he see the
baby?  He would, and Trinidad Joe having already seen the baby, and
talked of the baby, and felt the baby, and indeed had the baby
offered to him in every way during the past night, concluded to
give some of his valuable time to logging, and left them together.

Mr. North was obliged to admit that the baby was thriving.  He
moreover listened with polite interest to the statement that the
baby's eyes were hazel, like his own; that it had five teeth; that
she was, for a girl of that probable age, a robust child; and yet
Mr. North lingered.  Finally, with his hand on the door-lock, he
turned to Bessy and said,--

"May I ask you an odd question, Miss Robinson?"

"Go on."

"Why did you think I was--'looney'?"

The frank Miss Robinson bent her head over the baby.

"Why?"

"Yes, why?"

"Because you WERE looney."

"Oh!"

"But--"

"Yes--"

"You'll get over it."

And under the shallow pretext of getting the baby's food, she
retired to the kitchen, where Mr. North had the supreme
satisfaction of seeing her, as he passed the window, sitting on a
chair with her apron over her head, shaking with laughter.

For the next two or three days he did not visit the Robinsons, but
gave himself up to past memories.  On the third day he had--it must
be confessed not without some effort--brought himself into that
condition of patient sorrow which had been his habit.  The episode
of the storm and the finding of the baby began to fade, as had
faded the visit of his relatives.  It had been a dull, wet day and
he was sitting by his fire, when there came a tap at his door.
"Flora;" by which juvenescent name his aged Indian handmaid was
known, usually announced her presence with an imitation of a
curlew's cry: it could not be her.  He fancied he heard the
trailing of a woman's dress against the boards, and started to his
feet, deathly pale, with a name upon his lips.  But the door was
impatiently thrown open, and showed Bessy Robinson!  And the baby!

With a feeling of relief he could not understand he offered her a
seat.  She turned her frank eyes on him curiously.

"You look skeert!"

"I was startled.  You know I see nobody here!"

"Thet's so.  But look yar, do you ever use a doctor?"

Not clearly understanding her, he in turn asked, "Why?"

"Cause you must rise up and get one now--thet's why.  This yer baby
of ours is sick.  We don't use a doctor at our house, we don't
beleeve in 'em, hain't no call for 'em--but this yer baby's parents
mebbee did.  So rise up out o' that cheer and get one."

James North looked at Miss Robinson and rose, albeit a little in
doubt, and hesitating.

Miss Robinson saw it.  "I shouldn't hev troubled ye, nor ridden
three mile to do it, if ther hed been any one else to send.  But
Dad's over at Eureka, buying logs, and I'm alone.  Hello--wher yer
goin'?"

North had seized his hat and opened the door.  "For a doctor," he
replied amazedly.

"Did ye kalkilate to walk six miles and back?"

"Certainly--I have no horse."

"But I have, and you'll find her tethered outside.  She ain't much
to look at, but when you strike the trail she'll go."

"But YOU--how will YOU return?"

"Well," said Miss Robinson, drawing her chair to the fire, taking
off her hat and shawl, and warming her knees by the blaze, "I
didn't reckon to return.  You'll find me here when you come back
with the doctor.  Go!  Skedaddle quick!"

She did not have to repeat the command.  In another instant James
North was in Miss Bessy's seat--a man's dragoon saddle,--and
pounding away through the sand.  Two facts were in his mind: one
was that he, the "looney," was about to open communication with the
wisdom and contemporary criticism of the settlement, by going for a
doctor to administer to a sick and anonymous infant in his
possession; the other was that his solitary house was in the hands
of a self-invited, large-limbed, illiterate, but rather comely
young woman.  These facts he could not gallop away from, but to his
credit be it recorded that he fulfilled his mission zealously, if
not coherently, to the doctor, who during the rapid ride gathered
the idea that North had rescued a young married woman from
drowning, who had since given birth to a child.

The few words that set the doctor right when he arrived at the
cabin might in any other community have required further
explanation, but Dr. Duchesne, an old army surgeon, was prepared
for everything and indifferent to all.  "The infant," he said, "was
threatened with inflammation of the lungs; at present there was no
danger, but the greatest care and caution must be exercised.
Particularly exposure should be avoided."  "That settles the whole
matter, then," said Bessy potentially.  Both gentlemen looked their
surprise.  "It means," she condescended to further explain, "that
YOU must ride that filly home, wait for the old man to come to-
morrow, and then ride back here with some of my duds, for thar's no
'day-days' nor picknicking for that baby ontil she's better.  And I
reckon to stay with her ontil she is."

"She certainly is unable to bear any exposure at present," said the
doctor, with an amused side glance at North's perplexed face.
"Miss Robinson is right.  I'll ride with you over the sands as far
as the trail."

"I'm afraid," said North, feeling it incumbent upon him to say
something, "that you'll hardly find it as comfortable here as--"

"I reckon not," she said simply, "but I didn't expect much."

North turned a little wearily away.  "Good night," she said
suddenly, extending her hand, with a gentler smile of lip and eye
than he had ever before noticed, "good night--take good care of
Dad."

The doctor and North rode together some moments in silence.  North
had another fact presented to him, i. e. that he was going a-
visiting, and that he had virtually abandoned his former life; also
that it would be profanation to think of his sacred woe in the
house of a stranger.

"I dare say," said the doctor, suddenly, "you are not familiar with
the type of woman Miss Bessy presents so perfectly.  Your life has
been spent among the conventional class."

North froze instantly at what seemed to be a probing of his secret.
Disregarding the last suggestion, he made answer simply and
truthfully that he had never met any Western girl like Bessy.

"That's your bad luck," said the doctor.  "You think her coarse and
illiterate?"

Mr. North had been so much struck with her kindness that really he
had not thought of it.

"That's not so," said the doctor, curtly; "although even if you
told her so she would not think any the less of you--nor of
herself.  If she spoke rustic Greek instead of bad English, and
wore a cestus in place of an ill-fitting corset, you'd swear she
was a goddess.  There's your trail.  Good night."


III


James North did not sleep well that night.  He had taken Miss
Bessy's bedroom, at her suggestion, there being but two, and "Dad
never using sheets and not bein' keerful in his habits."  It was
neat, but that was all.  The scant ornamentation was atrocious; two
or three highly colored prints, a shell work-box, a ghastly winter
bouquet of skeleton leaves and mosses, a star-fish, and two china
vases hideous enough to have been worshiped as Buddhist idols,
exhibited the gentle recreation of the fair occupant, and the
possible future education of the child.  In the morning he was met
by Joe, who received the message of his daughter with his usual
dejection, and suggested that North stay with him until the child
was better.  That event was still remote; North found, on his
return to his cabin, that the child had been worse; but he did not
know, until Miss Bessy dropped a casual remark, that she had not
closed her own eyes that night.  It was a week before he regained
his own quarters, but an active week--indeed, on the whole, a
rather pleasant week.  For there was a delicate flattery in being
domineered by a wholesome and handsome woman, and Mr. James North
had by this time made up his mind that she was both.  Once or twice
he found himself contemplating her splendid figure with a
recollection of the doctor's compliment, and later, emulating her
own frankness, told her of it.

"And what did YOU say?" she asked.

"Oh, I laughed and said--nothing."

And so did she.

A month after this interchange of frankness, she asked him if he
could spend the next evening at her house.  "You see," she said,
"there's to be a dance down at the hall at Eureka, and I haven't
kicked a fut since last spring.  Hank Fisher's comin' up to take me
over, and I'm goin' to let the shanty slide for the night."

"But what's to become of the baby?" asked North, a little testily.

"Well," said Miss Robinson, facing him somewhat aggressively, "I
reckon it won't hurt ye to take care of it for a night.  Dad can't--
and if he could, he don't know how.  Liked to have pizened me
after mar died.  No, young man, I don't propose to ask Hank Fisher
to tote thet child over to Eureka and back, and spile his fun."

"Then I suppose I must make way for Mr. Hank--Hank--Fisher?" said
North, with the least tinge of sarcasm in his speech.

"Of course.  You've got nothing else to do, you know."

North would have given worlds to have pleaded a previous engagement
on business of importance, but he knew that Bessy spoke truly.  He
had nothing to do.  "And Fisher has, I suppose?" he asked.

"Of course--to look after ME!"

A more unpleasant evening James North had not spent since the first
day of his solitude.  He almost began to hate the unconscious cause
of his absurd position, as he paced up and down the floor with it.
"Was there ever such egregious folly?" he began, but remembering he
was quoting Maria North's favorite resume of his own conduct, he
stopped.  The child cried, missing, no doubt, the full rounded
curves and plump arm of its nurse.  North danced it violently, with
an inward accompaniment that was not musical, and thought of the
other dancers.  "Doubtless," he mused, "she has told this beau of
hers that she has left the baby with the 'looney' Man on the Beach.
Perhaps I may be offered a permanent engagement as a harmless
simpleton accustomed to the care of children.  Mothers may cry for
me.  The doctor is at Eureka.  Of course, he will be there to see
his untranslated goddess, and condole with her over the imbecility
of the Man on the Beach."  Once he carelessly asked Joe who the
company were.

"Well," said Joe, mournfully, "thar's Widder Higsby and darter; the
four Stubbs gals; in course Polly Doble will be on hand with that
feller that's clerking over at the Head for Jones, and Jones's
wife.  Then thar's French Pete, and Whisky Ben, and that chap that
shot Archer,--I disremember his name,--and the barber--what's that
little mulatto's name--that 'ar Kanaka?  I swow!" continued Joe,
drearily, "I'll be forgettin' my own next--and--"

"That will do," interrupted North, only half concealing his disgust
as he rose and carried the baby to the other room, beyond the reach
of names that might shock its ladylike ears.  The next morning he
met the from-dance-returning Bessy abstractedly, and soon took his
leave, full of a disloyal plan, conceived in the sleeplessness of
her own bedchamber.  He was satisfied that he owed a duty to its
unknown parents to remove the child from the degrading influences
of the barber Kanaka, and Hank Fisher especially, and he resolved
to write to his relatives, stating the case, asking a home for the
waif and assistance to find its parents.  He addressed this letter
to his cousin Maria, partly in consideration of the dramatic
farewell of that young lady, and its possible influence in turning
her susceptible heart towards his protege.  He then quietly settled
back to his old solitary habits, and for a week left the Robinsons
unvisited.  The result was a morning call by Trinidad Joe on the
hermit.  "It's a whim of my gal's, Mr. North," he said, dejectedly,
"and ez I told you before and warned ye, when that gal hez an idee,
fower yoke of oxen and seving men can't drag it outer her.  She's
got a idee o' larnin'--never hevin' hed much schoolin', and we ony
takin' the papers, permiskiss like--and she says YOU can teach her--
not hevin' anythin' else to do.  Do ye folly me?"

"Yes," said North, "certainly."

"Well, she allows ez mebbee you're proud, and didn't like her
takin' care of the baby for nowt; and she reckons that ef you'll
gin her some book larnin', and get her to sling some fancy talk in
fash'n'ble style--why, she'll call it squar."

"You can tell her," said North, very honestly, "that I shall be
only too glad to help her in any way, without ever hoping to cancel
my debt of obligation to her."

"Then it's a go?" said the mystified Joe, with a desperate attempt
to convey the foregoing statement to his own intellect in three
Saxon words.

"It's a go," replied North, cheerfully.

And he felt relieved.  For he was not quite satisfied with his own
want of frankness to her.  But here was a way to pay off the debt
he owed her, and yet retain his own dignity.  And now he could tell
her what he had done, and he trusted to the ambitious instinct that
prompted her to seek a better education to explain his reasons for
it.

He saw her that evening and confessed all to her frankly.  She kept
her head averted, but when she turned her blue eyes to him they
were wet with honest tears.  North had a man's horror of a ready
feminine lachrymal gland; but it was not like Bessy to cry, and it
meant something; and then she did it in a large, goddess-like way,
without sniffling, or chocking, or getting her nose red, but rather
with a gentle deliquescence, a harmonious melting, so that he was
fain to comfort her with nearer contact, gentleness in his own sad
eyes, and a pressure of her large hand.

"It's all right, I s'pose," she said, sadly; "but I didn't reckon
on yer havin' any relations, but thought you was alone, like me."

James North, thinking of Hank Fisher and the "mullater," could not
help intimating that his relations were very wealthy and
fashionable people, and had visited him last summer.  A
recollection of the manner in which they had so visited him and his
own reception of them prevented his saying more.  But Miss Bessy
could not forego a certain feminine curiosity, and asked,--

"Did they come with Sam Baker's team?"

"Yes."

"Last July?"

"Yes."

"And Sam drove the horses here for a bite?"

"I believe so."

"And them's your relations?"

"They are."

Miss Robinson reached over the cradle and enfolded the sleeping
infant in her powerful arms.  Then she lifted her eyes, wrathful
through her still glittering tears, and said, slowly, "They don't--
have--this--child--then!"

"But why?"

"Oh, why?  I saw them!  That's why, and enough!  You can't play any
such gay and festive skeletons on this poor baby for flesh and
blood parents.  No, sir!"

"I think you judge them hastily, Miss Bessy," said North, secretly
amused; "my aunt may not, at first, favorably impress strangers,
yet she has many friends.  But surely you do not object to my
cousin Maria, the young lady?"

"What! that dried cuttle-fish, with nothing livin' about her but
her eyes?  James North, ye may be a fool like the old woman,--
perhaps it's in the family,--but ye ain't a devil, like that gal!
That ends it."

And it did.  North dispatched a second letter to Maria saying that
he had already made other arrangements for the baby.  Pleased with
her easy victory, Miss Bessy became more than usually gracious, and
the next day bowed her shapely neck meekly to the yoke of her
teacher, and became a docile pupil.  James North could not have
helped noticing her ready intelligence, even had he been less
prejudiced in her favor than he was fast becoming now.  If he had
found it pleasant before to be admonished by her there was still
more delicious flattery in her perfect trust in his omniscient
skill as a pilot over this unknown sea.  There was a certain
enjoyment in guiding her hand over the writing-book, that I fear he
could not have obtained from an intellect less graciously sustained
by its physical nature.  The weeks flew quickly by on gossamer
wings, and when she placed a bunch of larkspurs and poppies in his
hand one morning, he remembered for the first that it was spring.

I cannot say that there was more to record of Miss Bessy's
education than this.  Once North, half jestingly, remarked that he
had never yet seen her admirer, Mr. Hank Fisher.  Miss Bessy
(coloring but cool)--"You never will!"  North (white but hot)--
"Why?"  Miss Bessy (faintly)--"I'd rather not."  North
(resolutely)--"I insist."  Bessy (yielding)--"As my teacher?"
North (hesitatingly, at the limitation of the epithet)--"Y-e-e-s!"
Bessy--"And you'll promise never to speak of it again?"  North--
"Never."  Bessy (slowly--"Well, he said I did an awful thing to go
over to your cabin and stay."  North (in the genuine simplicity of
a refined nature)--"But how?"  Miss Bessy (half piqued, but
absolutely admiring that nature)--"Quit! and keep your promise!"

They were so happy in these new relations that it occurred to Miss
Bessy one day to take James North to task for obliging her to ask
to be his pupil.  "You knew how ignorant I was," she added; and Mr.
North retorted by relating to her the doctor's criticism on her
independence.  "To tell you the truth," he added, "I was afraid you
would not take it as kindly as he thought."

"That is, you thought me as vain as yourself.  It seems to me you
and the doctor had a great deal to say to each other."

"On the contrary," laughed North, "that was all we said."

"And you didn't make fun of me?"

Perhaps it was not necessary for North to take her hand to
emphasize his denial, but he did.

Miss Bessy, being still reminiscent, perhaps, did not notice it.
"If it hadn't been for that ar--I mean that thar--no, that baby--I
wouldn't have known you!" she said dreamily.

"No," returned North, mischievously, "but you still would have
known Hank Fisher."

No woman is perfect.  Miss Bessy looked at him with a sudden--her
first and last--flash of coquetry.  Then stooped and kissed--the
baby.

James North was a simple gentleman, but not altogether a fool.  He
returned the kiss, but not vicariously.

There was a footstep on the porch.  These two turned the hues of a
dying dolphin, and then laughed.  It was Joe.  He held a newspaper
in his hand.  "I reckon ye woz right, Mr. North, about my takin'
these yar papers reg'lar.  For I allow here's suthin' that may clar
up the mystery o' that baby's parents."  With the hesitation of a
slowly grappling intellect, Joe sat down on the table and read from
the San Francisco "Herald" as follows: "'It is now ascertained
beyond doubt that the wreck reported by the Aeolus was the American
brig Pomare bound hence to Tahiti.  The worst surmises are found
correct.  The body of the woman has been since identified as that
of the beau-ti-ful daughter of--of--of--Terp--Terp--Terpish'--Well!
I swow that name just tackles me."

"Gin it to me, Dad," said Bessy pertly.  "You never had any
education, any way.  Hear your accomplished daughter."  With a mock
bow to the new schoolmaster, and a capital burlesque of a confident
school girl, she strode to the middle of the room the paper held
and folded book-wise in her hands.  "Ahem!  Where did you leave
off?  Oh, 'the beautiful daughter of Terpsichore--whose name was
prom-i-nently connected with a mysterious social scandal of last
year--the gifted but unfortunate Grace Chatterton'--No--don't stop
me--there's some more!  'The body of her child, a lovely infant of
six months, has not been recovered, and it is supposed was washed
overboard.'  There! may be that's the child, Mr. North.  Why, Dad!
Look, O my God!  He's falling.  Catch him, Dad!  Quick!"

But her strong arm had anticipated her father's.  She caught him,
lifted him to the bed, on which he lay henceforth for many days
unconscious.  Then fever supervened, and delirium, and Dr. Duchesne
telegraphed for his friends; but at the end of a week and the
opening of a summer day the storm passed, as the other storm had
passed, and he awoke, enfeebled, but at peace.  Bessy was at his
side--he was glad to see--alone.

"Bessy, dear," he said hesitatingly, "when I am stronger I have
something to tell you."

"I know it all, Jem," she said with a trembling lip; "I heard it
all--no, not from THEM, but from your own lips in your delirium.
I'm glad it came from YOU--even then."

"Do you forgive me, Bessy?"

She pressed her lips to his forehead and said hastily, and then
falteringly, as if afraid of her impulse:--

"Yes.  Yes."

"And you will still be mother to the child?"

"HER child?"

"No dear, not hers, but MINE!"

She started, cried a little, and then putting her arms around him,
said: "Yes."

And as there was but one way of fulfilling that sacred promise,
they were married in the autumn.



TWO SAINTS OF THE FOOT-HILLS


It never was clearly ascertained how long they had been there.  The
first settler of Rough-and-Ready--one Low, playfully known to his
familiars as "The Poor Indian"--declared that the Saints were afore
his time, and occupied a cabin in the brush when he "blazed" his
way to the North Fork.  It is certain that the two were present
when the water was first turned on the Union Ditch and then and
there received the designation of Daddy Downey and Mammy Downey,
which they kept to the last.  As they tottered toward the
refreshment tent, they were welcomed with the greatest enthusiasm
by the boys; or, to borrow the more refined language of the "Union
Recorder,"--"Their gray hairs and bent figures, recalling as they
did the happy paternal eastern homes of the spectators, and the
blessings that fell from venerable lips when they left those homes
to journey in quest of the Golden Fleece on Occidental Slopes,
caused many to burst into tears."  The nearer facts, that many of
these spectators were orphans, that a few were unable to establish
any legal parentage whatever, that others had enjoyed a State's
guardianship and discipline, and that a majority had left their
paternal roofs without any embarrassing preliminary formula, were
mere passing clouds that did not dim the golden imagery of the
writer.  From that day the Saints were adopted as historical lay
figures, and entered at once into possession of uninterrupted
gratuities and endowment.

It was not strange that, in a country largely made up of ambitious
and reckless youth, these two--types of conservative and settled
forms--should be thus celebrated.  Apart from any sentiment or
veneration, they were admirable foils to the community's youthful
progress and energy.  They were put forward at every social
gathering, occupied prominent seats on the platform at every public
meeting, walked first in every procession, were conspicuous at the
frequent funeral and rarer wedding, and were godfather and
godmother to the first baby born in Rough-and-Ready.  At the first
poll opened in that precinct, Daddy Downey cast the first vote,
and, as was his custom on all momentous occasions, became volubly
reminiscent.  "The first vote I ever cast," said Daddy, "was for
Andrew Jackson; the father o' some on your peart young chaps wasn't
born then; he! he! that was 'way long in '33, wasn't it?  I
disremember now, but if Mammy was here, she bein' a school-gal at
the time, she could say.  But my memory's failin' me.  I'm an old
man, boys; yet I likes to see the young ones go ahead.  I recklect
that thar vote from a suckumstance.  Squire Adams was present, and
seein' it was my first vote, he put a goold piece into my hand,
and, sez he, sez Squire Adams, 'Let that always be a reminder of
the exercise of a glorious freeman's privilege!'  He did; he! he!
Lord, boys!  I feel so proud of ye, that I wish I had a hundred
votes to cast for ye all."

It was hardly necessary to say that the memorial tribute of Squire
Adams was increased tenfold by the judges, inspectors, and clerks,
and that the old man tottered back to Mammy, considerably heavier
than he came.  As both of the rival candidates were equally sure of
his vote, and each had called upon him and offered a conveyance, it
is but fair to presume they were equally beneficent.  But Daddy
insisted upon walking to the polls,--a distance of two miles,--as a
moral example, and a text for the California paragraphers, who
hastened to record that such was the influence of the foot-hill
climate, that "a citizen of Rough-and-Ready, aged eighty-four, rose
at six o'clock, and, after milking two cows, walked a distance of
twelve miles to the polls, and returned in time to chop a cord of
wood before dinner."

Slightly exaggerated as this statement may have been, the fact that
Daddy was always found by the visitor to be engaged at his wood-
pile, which seemed neither to increase nor diminish under his axe,
a fact, doubtless, owing to the activity of Mammy, who was always
at the same time making pies, seemed to give some credence to the
story.  Indeed, the wood-pile of Daddy Downey was a standing
reproof to the indolent and sluggish miner.

"Ole Daddy must use up a pow'ful sight of wood; every time I've
passed by his shanty he's been makin' the chips fly.  But what gets
me is, that the pile don't seem to come down," said Whisky Dick to
his neighbor.

"Well, you derned fool!" growled his neighbor, "spose some chap
happens to pass by thar, and sees the old man doin' a man's work at
eighty, and slouches like you and me lying round drunk, and that
chap, feelin' kinder humped, goes up some dark night and heaves a
load of cut pine over his fence, who's got anything to say about
it?  Say?"  Certainly not the speaker, who had done the act
suggested, nor the penitent and remorseful hearer, who repeated it
next day.

The pies and cakes made by the old woman were, I think, remarkable
rather for their inducing the same loyal and generous spirit than
for their intrinsic excellence, and it may be said appealed more
strongly to the nobler aspirations of humanity than its vulgar
appetite.  Howbeit, everybody ate Mammy Downey's pies, and thought
of his childhood.  "Take 'em, dear boys," the old lady would say;
"it does me good to see you eat 'em; reminds me kinder of my poor
Sammy, that, ef he'd lived, would hev been ez strong and beg ez you
be, but was taken down with lung fever, at Sweetwater.  I kin see
him yet; that's forty year ago, dear! comin' out o' the lot to the
bake-house, and smilin' such a beautiful smile, like yours, dear
boy, as I handed him a mince or a lemming turnover.  Dear, dear,
how I do run on! and those days is past! but I seems to live in you
again!"  The wife of the hotel-keeper, actuated by a low jealousy,
had suggested that she "seemed to live OFF them;" but as that
person tried to demonstrate the truth of her statement by reference
to the cost of the raw material used by the old lady, it was
considered by the camp as too practical and economical for
consideration.  "Besides," added Cy Perkins, "ef old Mammy wants to
turn an honest penny in her old age, let her do it.  How would you
like your old mother to make pies on grub wages? eh?"  A suggestion
that so affected his hearer (who had no mother) that he bought
three on the spot.  The quality of these pies had never been
discussed but once.  It is related that a young lawyer from San
Francisco, dining at the Palmetto restaurant, pushed away one of
Mammy Downey's pies with every expression of disgust and
dissatisfaction.  At this juncture, Whisky Dick, considerably
affected by his favorite stimulant, approached the stranger's
table, and, drawing up a chair, sat uninvited before him.

"Mebbee, young man," he began gravely, "ye don't like Mammy
Downey's pies?"

The stranger replied curtly, and in some astonishment, that he did
not, as a rule, "eat pie."

"Young man," continued Dick, with drunken gravity, "mebbee you're
accustomed to Charlotte rusks and blue mange; mebbee ye can't eat
unless your grub is got up by one o' them French cooks'?  Yet WE--
us boys yar in this camp--calls that pie--a good--a com-pe-tent
pie!"

The stranger again disclaimed anything but a general dislike of
that form of pastry.

"Young man," continued Dick, utterly unheeding the explanation,--
"young man, mebbee you onst had an ole--a very ole mother, who,
tottering down the vale o' years, made pies.  Mebbee, and it's like
your blank epicurean soul, ye turned up your nose on the ole woman,
and went back on the pies, and on her!  She that dandled ye when ye
woz a baby,--a little baby!  Mebbee ye went back on her, and shook
her, and played off on her, and gave her away--dead away!  And now,
mebbee, young man--I wouldn't hurt ye for the world, but mebbee,
afore ye leave this yar table, YE'LL EAT THAT PIE!"

The stranger rose to his feet, but the muzzle of a dragoon revolver
in the unsteady hands of Whisky Dick, caused him to sit down again.
He ate the pie, and lost his case likewise, before a Rough-and-
Ready jury.

Indeed, far from exhibiting the cynical doubts and distrusts of
age, Daddy Downey received always with childlike delight the
progress of modern improvement and energy.  "In my day, long back
in the twenties, it took us nigh a week--a week, boys--to get up a
barn, and all the young ones--I was one then--for miles 'round at
the raisin'; and yer's you boys--rascals ye are, too--runs up this
yer shanty for Mammy and me 'twixt sun-up and dark!  Eh, eh, you're
teachin' the old folks new tricks, are ye?  Ah, get along, you!"
and in playful simulation of anger he would shake his white hair
and his hickory staff at the "rascals."  The only indication of the
conservative tendencies of age was visible in his continual protest
against the extravagance of the boys.  "Why," he would say, "a
family, a hull family,--leavin' alone me and the old woman,--might
be supported on what you young rascals throw away in a single
spree.  Ah, you young dogs, didn't I hear about your scattering
half-dollars on the stage the other night when that Eyetalian
Papist was singin'?  And that money goes out of Ameriky--ivry
cent!"

There was little doubt that the old couple were saving, if not
avaricious.  But when it was known, through the indiscreet
volubility of Mammy Downey, that Daddy Downey sent the bulk of
their savings, gratuities, and gifts to a dissipated and prodigal
son in the East,--whose photograph the old man always carried with
him,--it rather elevated him in their regard.  "When ye write to
that gay and festive son o' yourn, Daddy," said Joe Robinson, "send
him this yer specimen.  Give him my compliments, and tell him, ef
he kin spend money faster than I can, I call him!  Tell him, ef he
wants a first-class jamboree, to kem out here, and me and the boys
will show him what a square drunk is!"  In vain would the old man
continue to protest against the spirit of the gift; the miner
generally returned with his pockets that much the lighter, and it
is not improbable a little less intoxicated than he otherwise might
have been.  It may be premised that Daddy Downey was strictly
temperate.  The only way he managed to avoid hurting the feelings
of the camp was by accepting the frequent donations of whisky to be
used for the purposes of liniment.

"Next to snake-oil, my son," he would say, "and dilberry-juice,--
and ye don't seem to pro-duce 'em hereabouts,--whisky is good for
rubbin' onto old bones to make 'em limber.  But pure cold water,
'sparklin' and bright in its liquid light,' and, so to speak,
reflectin' of God's own linyments on its surfiss, is the best,
onless, like poor ol' Mammy and me, ye gets the dumb-agur from
over-use."

The fame of the Downey couple was not confined to the foot-hills.
The Rev. Henry Gushington, D.D., of Boston, making a bronchial tour
of California, wrote to the "Christian Pathfinder" an affecting
account of his visit to them, placed Daddy Downey's age at 102, and
attributed the recent conversions in Rough-and-Ready to their
influence.  That gifted literary Hessian, Bill Smith, traveling in
the interests of various capitalists, and the trustworthy
correspondent of four "only independent American journals," quoted
him as an evidence of the longevity superinduced by the climate,
offered him as an example of the security of helpless life and
property in the mountains, used him as an advertisement of the
Union Ditch, and it is said in some vague way cited him as proving
the collateral facts of a timber and ore-producing region existing
in the foot-hills worthy the attention of Eastern capitalists.

Praised thus by the lips of distinguished report, fostered by the
care and sustained by the pecuniary offerings of their fellow-
citizens, the Saints led for two years a peaceful life of gentle
absorption.  To relieve them from the embarrassing appearance of
eleemosynary receipts,--an embarrassment felt more by the givers
than the recipients,--the postmastership of Rough-and-Ready was
procured for Daddy, and the duty of receiving and delivering the
United States mails performed by him, with the advice and
assistance of the boys.  If a few letters went astray at this time,
it was easily attributed to this undisciplined aid, and the boys
themselves were always ready to make up the value of a missing
money-letter and "keep the old man's accounts square."  To these
functions presently were added the treasurerships of the Masons'
and Odd Fellows' charitable funds,--the old man being far advanced
in their respective degrees,--and even the position of almoner of
their bounties was super-added.  Here, unfortunately, Daddy's
habits of economy and avaricious propensity came near making him
unpopular, and very often needy brothers were forced to object to
the quantity and quality of the help extended.  They always met
with more generous relief from the private hands of the brothers
themselves, and the remark, "that the ol' man was trying to set an
example,--that he meant well,"--and that they would yet be thankful
for his zealous care and economy.  A few, I think, suffered in
noble silence, rather than bring the old man's infirmity to the
public notice.

And so with this honor of Daddy and Mammy, the days of the miners
were long and profitable in the land of the foot-hills.  The mines
yielded their abundance, the winters were singularly open and yet
there was no drouth nor lack of water, and peace and plenty smiled
on the Sierrean foothills, from their highest sunny upland to the
trailing falda of wild oats and poppies.  If a certain superstition
got abroad among the other camps, connecting the fortunes of Rough-
and-Ready with Daddy and Mammy, it was a gentle, harmless fancy,
and was not, I think, altogether rejected by the old people.  A
certain large, patriarchal, bountiful manner, of late visible in
Daddy, and the increase of much white hair and beard, kept up the
poetic illusion, while Mammy, day by day, grew more and more like
somebody's fairy godmother.  An attempt was made by a rival camp to
emulate these paying virtues of reverence, and an aged mariner was
procured from the Sailor's Snug Harbor in San Francisco, on trial.
But the unfortunate seaman was more or less diseased, was not
always presentable, through a weakness for ardent spirits, and
finally, to use the powerful idiom of one of his disappointed
foster-children, "up and died in a week, without slinging ary
blessin'."

But vicissitude reaches young and old alike.  Youthful Rough-and-
Ready and the Saints had climbed to their meridian together, and it
seemed fit that they should together decline.  The first shadow
fell with the immigration to Rough-and-Ready of a second aged pair.
The landlady of the Independence Hotel had not abated her
malevolence towards the Saints, and had imported at considerable
expense her grand-aunt and grand-uncle, who had been enjoying for
some years a sequestered retirement in the poorhouse at East
Machias.  They were indeed very old.  By what miracle, even as
anatomical specimens, they had been preserved during their long
journey was a mystery to the camp.  In some respects they had
superior memories and reminiscences.  The old man--Abner Trix--had
shouldered a musket in the war of 1812; his wife, Abigail, had seen
Lady Washington.  She could sing hymns; he knew every text between
"the leds" of a Bible.  There is little doubt but that in many
respects, to the superficial and giddy crowd of youthful
spectators, they were the more interesting spectacle.

Whether it was jealousy, distrust, or timidity that overcame the
Saints, was never known, but they studiously declined to meet the
strangers.  When directly approached upon the subject, Daddy Downey
pleaded illness, kept himself in close seclusion, and the Sunday
that the Trixes attended church in the school-house on the hill,
the triumph of the Trix party was mitigated by the fact that the
Downeys were not in their accustomed pew.  "You bet that Daddy and
Mammy is lying low jest to ketch them old mummies yet," explained a
Downeyite.  For by this time schism and division had crept into the
camp; the younger and later members of the settlement adhering to
the Trixes, while the older pioneers stood not only loyal to their
own favorites, but even, in the true spirit of partisanship, began
to seek for a principle underlying their personal feelings.  "I
tell ye what, boys," observed Sweetwater Joe, "if this yer camp is
goin' to be run by greenhorns, and old pioneers, like Daddy and the
rest of us, must take back seats, it's time we emigrated and shoved
out, and tuk Daddy with us.  Why, they're talkin' of rotation in
offiss, and of putting that skeleton that Ma'am Decker sets up at
the table, to take her boarders' appetites away, into the post-
office in place o' Daddy."  And, indeed, there were some fears of
such a conclusion; the newer men of Rough-and-Ready were in the
majority, and wielded a more than equal influence of wealth and
outside enterprise.  "Frisco," as a Downeyite bitterly remarked,
"already owned half the town."  The old friends that rallied around
Daddy and Mammy were, like most loyal friends in adversity, in bad
case themselves, and were beginning to look and act, it was
observed, not unlike their old favorites.

At this juncture Mammy died.

The sudden blow for a few days seemed to reunite dissevered Rough-
and-Ready.  Both factions hastened to the bereaved Daddy with
condolements, and offers of aid and assistance.  But the old man
received them sternly.  A change had come over the weak and
yielding octogenarian.  Those who expected to find him maudlin,
helpless, disconsolate, shrank from the cold, hard eyes and
truculent voice that bade them "begone," and "leave him with his
dead."  Even his own friends failed to make him respond to their
sympathy, and were fain to content themselves with his cold
intimation that both the wishes of his dead wife and his own
instincts were against any display, or the reception of any favor
from the camp that might tend to keep up the divisions they had
innocently created.  The refusal of Daddy to accept any service
offered was so unlike him as to have but one dreadful meaning!  The
sudden shock had turned his brain!  Yet so impressed were they with
his resolution that they permitted him to perform the last sad
offices himself, and only a select few of his nearer neighbors
assisted him in carrying the plain deal coffin from his lonely
cabin in the woods to the still lonelier cemetery on the hill-top.

When the shallow grave was filled, he dismissed even these curtly,
shut himself up in his cabin, and for days remained unseen.  It was
evident that he was no longer in his right mind.

His harmless aberration was accepted and treated with a degree of
intelligent delicacy hardly to be believed of so rough a community.
During his wife's sudden and severe illness, the safe containing
the funds intrusted to his care by the various benevolent
associations was broken into and robbed, and although the act was
clearly attributable to his carelessness and preoccupation, all
allusion to the fact was withheld from him in his severe
affliction.  When he appeared again before the camp, and the
circumstances were considerately explained to him, with the remark
that "the boys had made it all right," the vacant, hopeless,
unintelligent eye that he turned upon the speaker showed too
plainly that he had forgotten all about it.  "Don't trouble the old
man," said Whisky Dick, with a burst of honest poetry.  "Don't ye
see his memory's dead, and lying there in the coffin with Mammy?"
Perhaps the speaker was nearer right than he imagined.

Failing in religious consolation, they took various means of
diverting his mind with worldly amusements, and one was a visit to
a traveling variety troupe, then performing in the town.  The
result of the visit was briefly told by Whisky Dick.  "Well, sir,
we went in, and I sot the old man down in a front seat, and kinder
propped him up with some other of the fellers round him, and there
he sot as silent and awful ez the grave.  And then that fancy
dancer, Miss Grace Somerset, comes in, and dern my skin, ef the old
man didn't get to trembling and fidgeting all over, as she cut them
pidgin wings.  I tell ye what, boys, men is men, way down to their
boots,--whether they're crazy or not!  Well, he took on so, that
I'm blamed if at last that gal HERSELF didn't notice him! and she
ups, suddenly, and blows him a kiss--so! with her fingers!"

Whether this narration were exaggerated or not, it is certain that
the old man Downey every succeeding night of the performance was a
spectator.  That he may have aspired to more than that was
suggested a day or two later in the following incident:  A number
of the boys were sitting around the stove in the Magnolia saloon,
listening to the onset of a winter storm against the windows, when
Whisky Dick, tremulous, excited, and bristling with rain-drops and
information, broke in upon them.

"Well, boys, I've got just the biggest thing out.  Ef I hadn't seed
it myself, I wouldn't hev believed it!"

"It ain't thet ghost ag'in?" growled Robinson, from the depths of
his arm-chair; "thet ghost's about played."

"Wot ghost?" asked a new-comer.

"Why, ole Mammy's ghost, that every feller about yer sees when he's
half full and out late o' nights."

"Where?"

"Where?  Why, where should a ghost be?  Meanderin' round her grave
on the hill, yander, in course."

"It's suthin bigger nor thet, pard," said Dick confidently; "no
ghost kin rake down the pot ag'in the keerds I've got here.  This
ain't no bluff!"

"Well, go on!" said a dozen excited voices.

Dick paused a moment, diffidently, with the hesitation of an
artistic raconteur.

"Well," he said, with affected deliberation, "let's see!  It's nigh
onto an hour ago ez I was down thar at the variety show.  When the
curtain was down betwixt the ax, I looks round fer Daddy.  No Daddy
thar!  I goes out and asks some o' the boys.  'Daddy WAS there a
minnit ago,' they say; 'must hev gone home.'  Bein' kinder
responsible for the old man, I hangs around, and goes out in the
hall and sees a passage leadin' behind the scenes.  Now the queer
thing about this, boys, ez that suthin in my bones tells me the old
man is THAR.  I pushes in, and, sure as a gun, I hears his voice.
Kinder pathetic, kinder pleadin', kinder--"

"Love-makin'!" broke in the impatient Robinson.

"You've hit it, pard,--you've rung the bell every time!  But she
says, 'wants thet money down, or I'll--' and here I couldn't get to
hear the rest.  And then he kinder coaxes, and she says, sorter
sassy, but listenin' all the time,--woman like, ye know, Eve and
the sarpint!--and she says, 'I,ll see to-morrow.'  And he says,
'You won't blow on me?' and I gets excited and peeps in, and may I
be teetotally durned ef I didn't see--"

"What?" yelled the crowd.

"Why, DADDY ON HIS KNEES TO THAT THERE FANCY DANCER, Grace
Somerset!  Now, if Mammy's ghost is meanderin' round, why, et's
about time she left the cemetery and put in an appearance in
Jackson's Hall.  Thet's all!"

"Look yar, boys," said Robinson, rising, "I don't know ez it's the
square thing to spile Daddy's fun.  I don't object to it, provided
she ain't takin' in the old man, and givin' him dead away.  But ez
we're his guardeens, I propose that we go down thar and see the
lady, and find out ef her intentions is honorable.  If she means
marry, and the old man persists, why, I reckon we kin give the
young couple a send-off thet won't disgrace this yer camp!  Hey,
boys?"

It is unnecessary to say that the proposition was received with
acclamation, and that the crowd at once departed on their discreet
mission.  But the result was never known, for the next morning
brought a shock to Rough-and-Ready before which all other interest
paled to nothingness.

The grave of Mammy Downey was found violated and despoiled; the
coffin opened, and half filled with the papers and accounts of the
robbed benevolent associations; but the body of Mammy was gone!
Nor, on examination, did it appear that the sacred and ancient form
of that female had ever reposed in its recesses!

Daddy Downey was not to be found, nor is it necessary to say that
the ingenuous Grace Somerset was also missing.

For three days the reason of Rough-and-Ready trembled in the
balance.  No work was done in the ditches, in the flume, nor in the
mills.  Groups of men stood by the grave of the lamented relict of
Daddy Downey, as open-mouthed and vacant as that sepulchre.  Never
since the great earthquake of '52 had Rough-and-Ready been so
stirred to its deepest foundations.

On the third day the sheriff of Calaveras--a quiet, gentle,
thoughtful man--arrived in town, and passed from one to the other
of excited groups, dropping here and there detached but concise and
practical information.

"Yes, gentlemen, you are right, Mrs. Downey is not dead, because
there wasn't any Mrs. Downey!  Her part was played by George F.
Fenwick, of Sydney,--a 'ticket-of-leave-man,' who was, they say, a
good actor.  Downey?  Oh, yes Downey was Jem Flanigan, who, in '52,
used to run the variety troupe in Australia, where Miss Somerset
made her debut.  Stand back a little, boys.  Steady!  'The money?'
Oh, yes, they've got away with that, sure!  How are ye, Joe?  Why,
you're looking well and hearty!  I rather expected ye court week.
How's things your way?"

"Then they were only play-actors, Joe Hall?" broke in a dozen
voices.

"I reckon!" returned the sheriff, coolly.

"And for a matter o' five blank years," said Whisky Dick, sadly,
"they played this camp!"



"JINNY"


I think that the few who were permitted to know and love the object
of this sketch spent the rest of their days not only in an attitude
of apology for having at first failed to recognize her higher
nature, but of remorse that they should have ever lent a credulous
ear to a priori tradition concerning her family characteristics.
She had not escaped that calumny which she shared with the rest of
her sex for those youthful follies, levities, and indiscretions
which belong to immaturity.  It is very probable that the firmness
that distinguished her maturer will in youth might have been taken
for obstinacy, that her nice discrimination might at the same
period have been taken for adolescent caprice, and that the
positive expression of her quick intellect might have been thought
youthful impertinence before her years had won respect for her
judgment.

She was foaled at Indian Creek, and one month later, when she was
brought over to Sawyer's Bar, was considered the smallest donkey
ever seen in the foot-hills.  The legend that she was brought over
in one of "Dan the Quartz Crusher's" boots required corroboration
from that gentleman; but his denial being evidently based upon a
masculine vanity regarding the size of his foot rather than a
desire to be historically accurate, it went for nothing.  It is
certain that for the next two months she occupied the cabin of Dan,
until, perhaps incensed at this and other scandals, she one night
made her way out.  "I hadn't the least idee wot woz comin'," said
Dan, "but about midnight I seemed to hear hail onto the roof, and a
shower of rocks and stones like to a blast started in the canyon.
When I got up and struck a light, thar was suthin' like onto a cord
o' kindlin' wood and splinters whar she'd stood asleep, and a hole
in the side o' the shanty, and--no Jinny!  Lookin' at them hoofs o'
hern--and mighty porty they is to look at, too--you would allow she
could do it!"  I fear that this performance laid the foundation of
her later infelicitous reputation, and perhaps awakened in her
youthful breast a misplaced ambition, and an emulation which might
at that time have been diverted into a nobler channel.  For the
fame of this juvenile performance--and its possible promise in the
future--brought at once upon her the dangerous flattery and
attention of the whole camp.  Under intelligently directed
provocation she would repeat her misguided exercise, until most of
the scanty furniture of the cabin was reduced to a hopeless wreck,
and sprains and callosities were developed upon the limbs of her
admirers.  Yet even at this early stage of her history, that
penetrating intellect which was in after years her dominant quality
was evident to all.  She could not be made to kick at quartz
tailings, at a barrel of Boston crackers, or at the head or shin of
"Nigger Pete."  An artistic discrimination economized her surplus
energy.  "Ef you'll notiss," said Dan, with a large parental
softness, "she never lets herself out to onst like them mules or
any jackass ez I've heerd of, but kinder holds herself in, and, so
to speak, takes her bearings--sorter feels round gently with that
off foot, takes her distance and her rest, and then with that ar'
foot hoverin' round in the air softly, like an angel's wing, and a
gentle, dreamy kind o' look in them eyes, she lites out!  Don't ye,
Jinny?  Thar! jist ez I told ye," continued Dan, with an artist's
noble forgetfulness of self, as he slowly crawled from the
splintered ruin of the barrel on which he had been sitting.  "Thur!
did ye ever see the like!  Did ye dream that all the while I was
talkin' she was a meditatin' that?"

The same artistic perception and noble reticence distinguished her
bray.  It was one of which a less sagacious animal would have been
foolishly vain or ostentatiously prodigal.  It was a contralto of
great compass and profundity--reaching from low G to high C--
perhaps a trifle stronger in the lower register, and not altogether
free from a nasal falsetto in the upper.  Daring and brilliant as
it was in the middle notes, it was perhaps more musically
remarkable for its great sustaining power.  The element of surprise
always entered into the hearer's enjoyment; long after any ordinary
strain of human origin would have ceased, faint echoes of Jinny's
last note were perpetually recurring.  But it was as an
intellectual and moral expression that her bray was perfect.  As
far beyond her size as were her aspirations, it was a free and
running commentary of scorn at all created things extant, with
ironical and sardonic additions that were terrible.  It reviled all
human endeavor, it quenched all sentiment, it suspended frivolity,
it scattered reverie, it paralyzed action.  It was omnipotent.
More wonderful and characteristic than all, the very existence of
this tremendous organ was unknown to the camp for six months after
the arrival of its modest owner, and only revealed to them under
circumstances that seemed to point more conclusively than ever to
her rare discretion.

It was the beginning of a warm night and the middle of a heated
political discussion.  Sawyer's Bar had gathered in force at the
Crossing, and by the light of flaring pine torches, cheered and
applauded the rival speakers who from a rude platform addressed the
excited multitude.  Partisan spirit at that time ran high in the
foot-hills; crimination and recrimination, challenge, reply,
accusation, and retort had already inflamed the meeting, and
Colonel Bungstarter, after a withering review of his opponent's
policy, culminated with a personal attack upon the career and
private character of the eloquent and chivalrous Colonel Culpepper
Starbottle of Siskiyou.  That eloquent and chivalrous gentleman was
known to be present; it was rumored that the attack was expected to
provoke a challenge from Colonel Starbottle which would give
Bungstarter the choice of weapons, and deprive Starbottle of his
advantage as a dead shot.  It was whispered also that the sagacious
Starbottle, aware of this fact, would retaliate in kind so
outrageously as to leave Bungstarter no recourse but to demand
satisfaction on the spot.  As Colonel Starbottle rose, the eager
crowd drew together, elbowing each other in rapt and ecstatic
expectancy.  "He can't get even on Bungstarter, onless he allows
his sister ran off with a nigger, or that he put up his grandmother
at draw poker and lost her," whispered the Quartz Crusher; "kin
he?"  All ears were alert, particularly the very long and hairy
ones just rising above the railing of the speaker's platform; for
Jinny, having a feminine distrust of solitude and a fondness for
show, had followed her master to the meeting and had insinuated
herself upon the platform, where way was made for her with that
frontier courtesy always extended to her age and sex.

Colonel Starbottle, stertorous and purple, advanced to the railing.
There he unbuttoned his collar and laid his neckcloth aside, then
with his eye fixed on his antagonist he drew off his blue frock
coat, and thrusting one hand into his ruffled shirt front, and
raising the other to the dark canopy above him, he opened his
vindictive lips.  The action, the attitude, were Starbottle's.  But
the voice was not.  For at that supreme moment, a bray--so
profound, so appalling, so utterly soul-subduing, so paralyzing
that everything else sank to mere insignificance beside it--filled
woods, and sky, and air.  For a moment only the multitude gasped in
speechless astonishment--it was a moment only--and then the welkin
roared with their shouts.  In vain silence was commanded, in vain
Colonel Starbottle, with a ghastly smile, remarked that he
recognized in the interruption the voice and the intellect of the
opposition; the laugh continued, the more as it was discovered that
Jinny had not yet finished, and was still recurring to her original
theme.  "Gentlemen," gasped Starbottle, "any attempt by [Hee-haw!
from Jinny] brutal buffoonery to restrict the right of free speech
to all [a prolonged assent from Jinny] is worthy only the
dastardly"--but here a diminuendo so long drawn as to appear a
striking imitation of the Colonel's own apoplectic sentences
drowned his voice with shrieks of laughter.

It must not be supposed that during this performance a vigorous
attempt was not made to oust Jinny from the platform.  But all in
vain.  Equally demoralizing in either extremity, Jinny speedily
cleared a circle with her flying hoofs, smashed the speaker's table
and water pitcher, sent the railing flying in fragments over the
cheering crowd, and only succumbed to two blankets, in which, with
her head concealed, she was finally dragged, half captive, half
victor, from the field.  Even then a muffled and supplemental bray
that came from the woods at intervals drew half the crowd away and
reduced the other half to mere perfunctory hearers.  The
demoralized meeting was adjourned; Colonel Starbottle's withering
reply remained unuttered, and the Bungstarter party were
triumphant.

For the rest of the evening Jinny was the heroine of the hour, but
no cajolery nor flattery could induce her to again exhibit her
powers.  In vain did Dean of Angel's extemporize a short harangue
in the hope that Jinny would be tempted to reply; in vain was every
provocation offered that might sting her sensitive nature to
eloquent revolt.  She replied only with her heels.  Whether or not
this was simple caprice, or whether she was satisfied with her
maiden effort, or indignant at her subsequent treatment, she
remained silent.  "She made her little game," said Dan, who was a
political adherent of Starbottle's, and who yet from that day
enjoyed the great speaker's undying hatred, "and even if me and her
don't agree on politics--YOU let her alone."  Alas, it would have
been well for Dan if he could have been true to his instincts, but
the offer of one hundred dollars from the Bungstarter party proved
too tempting.  She passed irrevocably from his hands into those of
the enemy.  But any reader of these lines will, I trust, rejoice to
hear that this attempt to restrain free political expression in the
foot-hills failed signally.  For, although she was again covertly
introduced on the platform by the Bungstarters, and placed face to
face with Colonel Starbottle at Murphy's Camp, she was dumb.  Even
a brass band failed to excite her emulation.  Either she had become
disgusted with politics or the higher prices paid by the party to
other and less effective speakers aroused her jealousy and shocked
her self-esteem, but she remained a passive spectator.  When the
Hon. Sylvester Rourback, who received, for the use of his political
faculties for a single night, double the sum for which she was
purchased outright, appeared on the same platform with herself, she
forsook it hurriedly and took to the woods.  Here she might have
starved but for the intervention of one McCarty, a poor market
gardener, who found her, and gave her food and shelter under the
implied contract that she should forsake politics and go to work.
The latter she for a long time resisted, but as she was considered
large enough by this time to draw a cart, McCarty broke her to
single harness, with a severe fracture of his leg and the loss of
four teeth and a small spring wagon.  At length, when she could be
trusted to carry his wares to Murphy's Camp, and could be checked
from entering a shop with the cart attached to her,--a fact of
which she always affected perfect disbelief,--her education was
considered as complete as that of the average California donkey.
It was still unsafe to leave her alone, as she disliked solitude,
and always made it a point to join any group of loungers with her
unnecessary cart, and even to follow some good-looking miner to his
cabin.  The first time this peculiarity was discovered by her owner
was on his return to the street after driving a bargain within the
walls of the Temperance Hotel.  Jinny was nowhere to be seen.  Her
devious course, however, was pleasingly indicated by vegetables
that strewed the road until she was at last tracked to the veranda
of the Arcade saloon, where she was found looking through the
window at a game of euchre, and only deterred by the impeding cart
from entering the building.  A visit one Sunday to the little
Catholic chapel at French Camp, where she attempted to introduce an
antiphonal service and the cart, brought shame and disgrace upon
her unlucky master.  For the cart contained freshly-gathered
vegetables, and the fact that McCarty had been Sabbath-breaking was
painfully evident.  Father Sullivan was quick to turn an incident
that provoked only the risibilities of his audience into a moral
lesson.  "It's the poor dumb beast that has a more Christian sowl
than Michael," he commented; but here Jinny assented so positively
that they were fain to drag her away by main force.

To her eccentric and thoughtless youth succeeded a calm maturity in
which her conservative sagacity was steadily developed.  She now
worked for her living, subject, however, to a nice discrimination
by which she limited herself to a certain amount of work, beyond
which neither threats, beatings, nor cajoleries would force her.
At certain hours she would start for the stable with or without the
incumbrances of the cart or Michael, turning two long and deaf ears
on all expostulation or entreaty.  "Now, God be good to me," said
Michael, one day picking himself out from a ditch as he gazed
sorrowfully after the flying heels of Jinny, "but it's only the
second load of cabbages I'm bringin' the day, and if she's shtruck
NOW, it's ruined I am entoirely."  But he was mistaken; after two
hours of rumination Jinny returned of her own free will, having
evidently mistaken the time, and it is said even consented to draw
an extra load to make up the deficiency.  It may be imagined from
this and other circumstances that Michael stood a little in awe of
Jinny's superior intellect, and that Jinny occasionally, with the
instinct of her sex, presumed upon it.  After the Sunday episode,
already referred to, she was given her liberty on that day, a
privilege she gracefully recognized by somewhat unbending her usual
austerity in the indulgence of a saturnine humor.  She would visit
the mining camps, and, grazing lazily and thoughtfully before the
cabins, would, by various artifices and coquetries known to the
female heart, induce some credulous stranger to approach her with
the intention of taking a ride.  She would submit hesitatingly to a
halter, allow him to mount her back, and, with every expression of
timid and fearful reluctance, at last permit him to guide her in a
laborious trot out of sight of human habitation.  What happened
then was never clearly known.  In a few moments the camp would be
aroused by shouts and execrations, and the spectacle of Jinny
tearing by at a frightful pace, with the stranger clinging with his
arms around her neck, afraid to slip off, from terror of her
circumvolving heels, and vainly imploring assistance.  Again and
again she would dash by the applauding groups, adding the
aggravation of her voice to the danger of her heels, until suddenly
wheeling, she would gallop to Carter's Pond, and deposit her
luckless freight in the muddy ditch.  This practical joke was
repeated until one Sunday she was approached by Juan Ramirez, a
Mexican vaquero, booted and spurred, and carrying a riata.  A crowd
was assembled to see her discomfiture.  But, to the intense
disappointment of the camp, Jinny, after quietly surveying the
stranger, uttered a sardonic bray, and ambled away to the little
cemetery on the hill, whose tangled chapparal effectually prevented
all pursuit by her skilled antagonist.  From that day she forsook
the camp, and spent her Sabbaths in mortuary reflections among the
pine head-boards and cold "hic jacets" of the dead.

Happy would it have been if this circumstance, which resulted in
the one poetic episode of her life, had occurred earlier; for the
cemetery was the favorite resort of Miss Jessie Lawton, a gentle
invalid from San Francisco, who had sought the foot-hills for the
balsam of pine and fir, and in the faint hope that the freshness of
the wild roses might call back her own.  The extended views from
the cemetery satisfied Miss Lawton's artistic taste, and here
frequently, with her sketch-book in hand, she indulged that taste
and a certain shy reserve which kept her from contact with
strangers.  On one of the leaves of that sketch-book appears a
study of a donkey's head, being none other than the grave features
of Jinny, as once projected timidly over the artist's shoulder.
The preliminaries of this intimacy have never transpired, nor is it
a settled fact if Jinny made the first advances.  The result was
only known to the men of Sawyer's Bar by a vision which remained
fresh in their memories long after the gentle lady and her four-
footed friend had passed beyond their voices.  As two of the
tunnel-men were returning from work one evening, they chanced to
look up the little trail, kept sacred from secular intrusion, that
led from the cemetery to the settlement.  In the dim twilight,
against a sunset sky, they beheld a pale-faced girl riding slowly
toward them.  With a delicate instinct, new to those rough men,
they drew closer in the shadow of the bushes until she passed.
There was no mistaking the familiar grotesqueness of Jinny; there
was no mistaking the languid grace of Miss Lawton.  But a wreath of
wild roses was around Jinny's neck, from her long ears floated Miss
Jessie's hat ribbons, and a mischievous, girlish smile was upon
Miss Jessie's face, as fresh as the azaleas in her hair.  By the
next day the story of this gentle apparition was known to a dozen
miners in camp, and all were sworn to secrecy.  But the next
evening, and the next, from the safe shadows of the woods they
watched and drank in the beauty of that fanciful and all
unconscious procession.  They kept their secret, and never a
whisper or footfall from these rough men broke its charm or
betrayed their presence.  The man who could have shocked the
sensitive reserve of the young girl would have paid for it with his
life.

And then one day the character of the procession changed, and this
little incident having been told, it was permitted that Jinny
should follow her friend, caparisoned even as before, but this time
by the rougher but no less loving hands of men.  When the cortege
reached the ferry where the gentle girl was to begin her silent
journey to the sea, Jinny broke from those who held her, and after
a frantic effort to mount the barge fell into the swiftly rushing
Stanislaus.  A dozen stout arms were stretched to save her, and a
rope skilfully thrown was caught around her feet.  For an instant
she was passive, and, as it seemed, saved.  But the next moment her
dominant instinct returned, and with one stroke of her powerful
heel she snapped the rope in twain and so drifted with her mistress
to the sea.



ROGER CATRON'S FRIEND


I think that, from the beginning, we all knew how it would end.  He
had always been so quiet and conventional, although by nature an
impulsive man; always so temperate and abstemious, although a man
with a quick appreciation of pleasure; always so cautious and
practical, although an imaginative man, that when, at last, one by
one he loosed these bands, and gave himself up to a life, perhaps
not worse than other lives which the world has accepted as the
natural expression of their various owners, we at once decided that
the case was a hopeless one.  And when one night we picked him up
out of the Union Ditch, a begrimed and weather-worn drunkard, a
hopeless debtor, a self-confessed spendthrift, and a half-
conscious, maudlin imbecile, we knew that the end had come.  The
wife he had abandoned had in turn deserted him; the woman he had
misled had already realized her folly, and left him with her
reproaches; the associates of his reckless life, who had used and
abused him, had found him no longer of service, or even amusement,
and clearly there was nothing left to do but to hand him over to
the state, and we took him to the nearest penitential asylum.
Conscious of the Samaritan deed, we went back to our respective
wives, and told his story.  It is only just to say that these
sympathetic creatures were more interested in the philanthropy of
their respective husbands than in its miserable object.  "It was
good and kind in you, dear," said loving Mrs. Maston to her spouse,
as returning home that night he flung his coat on a chair with an
air of fatigued righteousness; "it was like your kind heart to care
for that beast; but after he left that good wife of his--that
perfect saint--to take up with that awful woman, I think I'd have
left him to die in the ditch.  Only to think of it, dear, a woman
that you wouldn't speak to!"  Here Mr. Maston coughed slightly,
colored a little, mumbled something about "women not understanding
some things," "that men were men," etc., and then went comfortably
to sleep, leaving the outcast, happily oblivious of all things, and
especially this criticism, locked up in Hangtown Jail.

For the next twelve hours he lay there, apathetic and half-
conscious.  Recovering from this after a while, he became furious,
vengeful, and unmanageable, filling the cell and corridor with
maledictions of friend and enemy; and again sullen, morose, and
watchful.  Then he refused food, and did not sleep, pacing his
limits with the incessant, feverish tread of a caged tiger.  Two
physicians, diagnosing his case from the scant facts, pronounced
him insane, and he was accordingly transported to Sacramento.  But
on the way thither he managed to elude the vigilance of his guards,
and escaped.  The alarm was given, a hue and cry followed him, the
best detectives of San Francisco were on his track, and finally
recovered his dead body--emaciated and wasted by exhaustion and
fever--in the Stanislaus Marshes, identified it, and, receiving the
reward of $1,000 offered by his surviving relatives and family,
assisted in legally establishing the end we had predicted.

Unfortunately for the moral, the facts were somewhat inconsistent
with the theory.  A day or two after the remains were discovered
and identified, the real body of "Roger Catron, aged 52 years,
slight, iron-gray hair, and shabby in apparel," as the
advertisement read, dragged itself, travel-worn, trembling, and
disheveled, up the steep slope of Deadwood Hill.  How he should do
it, he had long since determined,--ever since he had hidden his
Derringer, a mere baby pistol, from the vigilance of his keepers.
Where he should do it, he had settled within his mind only within
the last few moments.  Deadwood Hill was seldom frequented; his
body might lie there for months before it was discovered.  He had
once thought of the river, but he remembered it had an ugly way of
exposing its secrets on sandbar and shallow, and that the body of
Whisky Jim, bloated and disfigured almost beyond recognition, had
been once delivered to the eyes of Sandy Bar, before breakfast, on
the left bank of the Stanislaus.  He toiled up through the chimisal
that clothed the southern slope of the hill until he reached the
bald, storm-scarred cap of the mountain, ironically decked with the
picked, featherless plumes of a few dying pines.  One, stripped of
all but two lateral branches, brought a boyish recollection to his
fevered brain.  Against a background of dull sunset fire, it
extended two gaunt arms--black, rigid, and pathetic.  Calvary!

With the very word upon his lips, he threw himself, face downwards,
on the ground beneath it, and, with his fingers clutched in the
soil, lay there for some moments, silent and still.  In this
attitude, albeit a skeptic and unorthodox man, he prayed.  I cannot
say--indeed I DARE not say--that his prayer was heard, or that God
visited him thus.  Let us rather hope that all there was of God in
him, in this crucial moment of agony and shame, strove outward and
upward.  Howbeit, when the moon rose he rose too, perhaps a trifle
less steady than the planet, and began to descend the hill with
feverish haste, yet with this marked difference between his present
haste and his former recklessness, that it seemed to have a well-
defined purpose.  When he reached the road again, he struck into a
well-worn trail, where, in the distance, a light faintly twinkled.
Following this beacon, he kept on, and at last flung himself
heavily against the door of the little cabin from whose window the
light had shone.  As he did so, it opened upon the figure of a
square, thickset man, who, in the impetuosity of Catron's onset,
received him, literally, in his arms.

"Captain Dick," said Roger Catron, hoarsely, "Captain Dick, save
me!  For God's sake, save me!"

Captain Dick, without a word, placed a large, protecting hand upon
Catron's shoulder, allowed it to slip to his waist, and then drew
his visitor quietly, but firmly, within the cabin.  Yet, in the
very movement, he had managed to gently and unobtrusively possess
himself of Catron's pistol.

"Save ye!  From which?" asked Captain Dick, as quietly and
unobtrusively dropping the Derringer in a flour sack.

"From everything," gasped Catron, "from the men that are hounding
me, from my family, from my friends, but most of all--from, from--
myself!"

He had, in turn, grasped Captain Dick, and forced him frenziedly
against the wall.  The captain released himself, and, taking the
hands of his excited visitor, said slowly,--

"Ye wan some blue mass--suthin' to unload your liver.  I'll get it
up for ye."

"But, Captain Dick, I'm an outcast, shamed, disgraced--"

"Two on them pills taken now, and two in the morning," continued
the captain, gravely, rolling a bolus in his fingers, "will bring
yer head to the wind again.  Yer fallin' to leeward all the time,
and ye want to brace up."

"But, Captain," continued the agonized man, again clutching the
sinewy arms of his host, and forcing his livid face and fixed eyes
within a few inches of Captain Dick's, "hear me!  You must and
shall hear me.  I've been in jail--do you hear?--in jail, like a
common felon.  I've been sent to the asylum, like a demented
pauper.  I've--"

"Two now, and two in the morning," continued the captain, quietly
releasing one hand only to place two enormous pills in the mouth of
the excited Catron, "thar now--a drink o' whisky--thar, that'll do--
just enough to take the taste out of yer mouth, wash it down, and
belay it, so to speak.  And how are the mills running, gin'rally,
over at the Bar?"

"Captain Dick, hear me--if you ARE my friend, for God's sake hear
me!  An hour ago I should have been a dead man--"

"They say that Sam Bolin hez sold out of the Excelsior--"

"Captain Dick!  Listen, for God's sake; I have suffered--"

But Captain Dick was engaged in critically examining his man.  "I
guess I'll ladle ye out some o' that soothin' mixture I bought down
at Simpson's t' other day," he said, reflectively.  "And I
onderstand the boys up on the Bar think the rains will set in
airly."

But here Nature was omnipotent.  Worn by exhaustion, excitement,
and fever, and possibly a little affected by Captain Dick's later
potion, Roger Catron turned white, and lapsed against the wall.  In
an instant Captain Dick had caught him, as a child, lifted him in
his stalwart arms, wrapped a blanket around him, and deposited him
in his bunk.  Yet, even in his prostration, Catron made one more
despairing appeal for mental sympathy from his host.

"I know I'm sick--dying, perhaps," he gasped, from under the
blankets; "but promise me, whatever comes, tell my wife--say to--"

"It has been lookin' consid'ble like rain, lately, hereabouts,"
continued the captain, coolly, in a kind of amphibious slang,
characteristic of the man, "but in these yer latitudes no man kin
set up to be a weather sharp."

"Captain! will you hear me?"

"Yer goin' to sleep, now," said the captain, potentially.

"But, Captain, they are pursuing me!  If they should track me
here?"

"Thar is a rifle over thar, and yer's my navy revolver.  When I've
emptied them, and want you to bear a hand, I'll call ye.  Just now
your lay is to turn in.  It's my watch."

There was something so positive, strong, assuring, and a little
awesome in the captain's manner, that the trembling, nervously-
prostrated man beneath the blankets forbore to question further.
In a few moments his breathing, albeit hurried and irregular,
announced that he slept.  The captain then arose, for a moment
critically examined the sleeping man, holding his head a little on
one side, whistling softly, and stepping backwards to get a good
perspective, but always with contemplative good humor, as if Catron
were a work of art, which he (the captain) had created, yet one
that he was not yet entirely satisfied with.  Then he put a large
pea-jacket over his flannel blouse, dragged a Mexican serape from
the corner, and putting it over his shoulders, opened the cabin
door, sat down on the doorstep, and leaning back against the door-
post, composed himself to meditation.  The moon lifted herself
slowly over the crest of Deadwood Hill, and looked down, not
unkindly, on his broad, white, shaven face, round and smooth as her
own disc, encircled with a thin fringe of white hair and whiskers.
Indeed, he looked so like the prevailing caricatures in a comic
almanac of planets, with dimly outlined features, that the moon
would have been quite justified in flirting with him, as she
clearly did, insinuating a twinkle into his keen, gray eyes, making
the shadow of a dimple on his broad, fat chin, and otherwise
idealizing him after the fashion of her hero-worshiping sex.
Touched by these benign influences, Captain Dick presently broke
forth in melody.  His song was various, but chiefly, I think,
confined to the recital of the exploits of one "Lorenzo," who, as
related by himself,--


    "Shipped on board of a Liner,
                'Renzo, boys, Renzo,"--


a fact that seemed to have deprived him at once of all metre,
grammar, or even the power of coherent narration.  At times a groan
or a half-articulate cry would come from the "bunk" whereon Roger
Catron lay, a circumstance that always seemed to excite Captain
Dick to greater effort and more rapid vocalization.  Toward
morning, in the midst of a prolonged howl from the captain, who was
finishing the "Starboard Watch, ahoy!" in three different keys,
Roger Catron's voice broke suddenly and sharply from his en-
wrappings:--

"Dry up, you d--d old fool, will you?"

Captain Dick stopped instantly.  Rising to his feet, and looking
over the landscape, he took all nature into his confidence in one
inconceivably arch and crafty wink.  "He's coming up to the wind,"
he said softly, rubbing his hands.  "The pills is fetchin' him.
Steady now, boys, steady.  Steady as she goes on her course," and
with another wink of ineffable wisdom, he entered the cabin and
locked the door.


Meanwhile, the best society of Sandy Bar was kind to the newly-made
widow.  Without being definitely expressed, it was generally felt
that sympathy with her was now safe, and carried no moral
responsibility with it.  Even practical and pecuniary aid, which
before had been withheld, lest it should be diverted from its
proper intent, and, perhaps through the weakness of the wife, made
to minister to the wickedness of the husband,--even that was now
openly suggested.  Everybody felt that somebody should do something
for the widow.  A few did it.  Her own sex rallied to her side,
generally with large sympathy, but, unfortunately, small pecuniary
or practical result.  At last, when the feasibility of her taking a
boarding-house in San Francisco, and identifying herself with that
large class of American gentlewomen who have seen better days, but
clearly are on the road never to see them again, was suggested, a
few of her own and her husband's rich relatives came to the front
to rehabilitate her.  It was easier to take her into their homes as
an equal than to refuse to call upon her as the mistress of a
lodging-house in the adjoining street.  And upon inspection it was
found that she was still quite an eligible partie, prepossessing,
and withal, in her widow's weeds, a kind of poetical and
sentimental presence, as necessary in a wealthy and fashionable
American family as a work of art.  "Yes, poor Caroline has had a
sad, sad history," the languid Mrs. Walker Catron would say, "and
we all sympathize with her deeply; Walker always regards her as a
sister."  What was this dark history never came out, but its very
mystery always thrilled the visitor, and seemed to indicate plainly
the respectability of the hostess.  An American family without a
genteel skeleton in its closet could scarcely add to that gossip
which keeps society from forgetting its members.  Nor was it
altogether unnatural that presently Mrs. Roger Catron lent herself
to this sentimental deception, and began to think that she really
was a more exquisitely aggrieved woman than she had imagined.  At
times, when this vague load of iniquity put upon her dead husband
assumed, through the mystery of her friends, the rumor of murder
and highway robbery, and even an attempt upon her own life, she
went to her room, a little frightened, and had "a good cry,"
reappearing more mournful and pathetic than ever, and corroborating
the suspicions of her friends.  Indeed, one or two impulsive
gentlemen, fired by her pathetic eyelids, openly regretted that the
deceased had not been hanged, to which Mrs. Walker Catron responded
that, "Thank Heaven, they were spared at least that disgrace!" and
so sent conviction into the minds of her hearers.

It was scarcely two months after this painful close of her
matrimonial life that one rainy February morning the servant
brought a card to Mrs. Roger Catron, bearing the following
inscription:--


          "Richard Graeme Macleod."


Women are more readily affected by names than we are, and there was
a certain Highland respectability about this that, albeit, not
knowing its possessor, impelled Mrs. Catron to send word that she
"would be down in a few moments."  At the end of this femininely
indefinite period,--a quarter of an hour by the French clock on the
mantel-piece,--Mrs. Roger Catron made her appearance in the
reception-room.  It was a dull, wet day, as I have said before, but
on the Contra Costa hills the greens and a few flowers were already
showing a promise of rejuvenescence and an early spring.  There was
something of this, I think, in Mrs. Catron's presence, shown
perhaps in the coquettish bow of a ribbon, in a larger and more
delicate ruche, in a tighter belting of her black cashmere gown;
but still there was a suggestion of recent rain in the eyes, and
threatening weather.  As she entered the room, the sun came out,
too, and revealed the prettiness and delicacy of her figure, and I
regret to state, also, the somewhat obtrusive plainness of her
visitor.

"I knew ye'd be sorter disapp'inted at first, not gettin' the
regular bearings o' my name, but I'm 'Captain Dick.'  Mebbe ye've
heard your husband--that is, your husband ez waz, Roger Catron--
speak o' me?"

Mrs. Catron, feeling herself outraged and deceived in belt, ruche,
and ribbon, freezingly admitted that she had heard of him before.

"In course," said the captain; "why, Lord love ye, Mrs. Catron,--ez
waz,--he used to be all the time talkin' of ye.  And allers in a
free, easy, confidential way.  Why, one night--don't ye remember?--
when he came home, carryin', mebbee, more canvas than was
seamanlike, and you shet him out the house, and laid for him with a
broomstick, or one o' them crokay mallets, I disremember which, and
he kem over to me, ole Captain Dick, and I sez to him, sez I, 'Why,
Roger, them's only love pats, and yer condishun is such ez to make
any woman mad-like.'  Why, Lord bless ye! there ain't enny of them
mootool differences you and him hed ez I doesn't knows on, and
didn't always stand by, and lend ye a hand, and heave in a word or
two of advice when called on."

Mrs. Catron, ice everywhere but in her pink cheeks, was glad that
Mr. Catron seemed to have always a friend to whom he confided
EVERYTHING, even the base falsehoods he had invented.

"Mebbe now they WAZ falsehoods," said the captain, thoughtfully.
"But don't ye go to think," he added conscientiously, "that he kept
on that tack all the time.  Why, that day he made a raise,
gambling, I think, over at Dutch Flat, and give ye them bracelets,--
regular solid gold,--why, it would have done your heart good to
have heard him talk about you--said you had the prettiest arm in
Californy.  Well," said the captain, looking around for a suitable
climax, "well, you'd have thought that he was sorter proud of ye!
Why, I woz with him in 'Frisco when he bought that A 1 prize bonnet
for ye for $75, and not hevin' over $50 in his pocket, borryed the
other $25 outer me.  Mebbe it was a little fancy for a bonnet; but
I allers thought he took it a little too much to heart when you
swopped it off for that Dollar Varden dress, just because that
Lawyer Maxwell said the Dollar Vardens was becomin' to ye.  Ye
know, I reckon, he was always sorter jealous of that thar shark--"

"May I venture to ask what your business is with me?" interrupted
Mrs. Catron, sharply.

"In course," said the captain, rising.  "Ye see," he said,
apologetically, "we got to talking o' Roger and ole times, and I
got a little out o' my course.  It's a matter of--" he began to
fumble in his pockets, and finally produced a small memorandum-
book, which he glanced over--"it's a matter of $250."

"I don't understand you," said Mrs. Catron, in indignant
astonishment.

"On the 15th of July," said the captain, consulting his memorandum-
book, "Roger sold his claim at Nye's Ford for $1,500.  Now, le's
see.  Thar was nigh on $350 ez he admitted to me he lost at poker,
and we'll add $50 to that for treating, suppers, and drinks
gin'rally--put Roger down for $400.  Then there was YOU.  Now you
spent $250 on your trip to 'Frisco thet summer; then $200 went for
them presents you sent your Aunt Jane, and thar was $400 for house
expenses.  Well, thet foots up $1,250.  Now, what's become of thet
other $250?"

Mrs. Catron's woman's impulse to retaliate sharply overcame her
first natural indignation at her visitor's impudence.

Therein she lost, woman-like, her ground of vantage.

"Perhaps the woman he fled with can tell you," she said savagely.

"Thet," said the captain, slowly, "is a good, a reasonable idee.
But it ain't true; from all I can gather SHE lent HIM money.  It
didn't go THAR."

"Roger Catron left me penniless," said Mrs. Catron, hotly.

"Thet's jist what gets me.  You oughter have $250 somewhar lying
round."

Mrs. Catron saw her error.  "May I ask what right you have to
question me?  If you have any, I must refer you to my lawyer or my
brother-in-law; if you have none, I hope you will not oblige me to
call the servants to put you from the house."

"Thet sounds reasonable and square, too," said the captain,
thoughtfully; "I've a power of attorney from Roger Catron to settle
up his affairs and pay his debts, given a week afore them
detectives handed ye over his dead body.  But I thought that you
and me might save lawyer's fees and all fuss and feathers, ef, in a
sociable, sad-like way,--lookin' back sorter on Roger ez you and me
once knew him,--we had a quiet talk together."

"Good morning, sir," said Mrs. Catron, rising stiffly.  The captain
hesitated a moment, a slight flush of color came in his face as he
at last rose as the lady backed out of the room.  "Good morning,
ma'am," said the captain, and departed.

Very little was known of this interview except the general
impression in the family that Mrs. Catron had successfully resisted
a vague attempt at blackmail from one of her husband's former
dissolute companions.  Yet it is only fair to say that Mrs. Catron
snapped up, quite savagely, two male sympathizers on this subject,
and cried a good deal for two days afterward, and once, in the
hearing of her sister-in-law, to that lady's great horror, "wished
she was dead."

A week after this interview, as Lawyer Phillips sat in his office,
he was visited by Macleod.  Recognizing, possibly, some practical
difference between the widow and the lawyer, Captain Dick this time
first produced his credentials,--a "power of attorney."  "I need
not tell you," said Phillips, "that the death of your principal
renders this instrument invalid, and I suppose you know that,
leaving no will, and no property, his estate has not been
administered upon."

"Mebbe it is, and mebbe it isn't.  But I hain't askin' for anythin'
but information.  There was a bit o' prop'ty and a mill onto it,
over at Heavytree, ez sold for $10,000.  I don't see," said the
captain, consulting his memorandum-book, "ez HE got anything out of
it."

"It was mortgaged for $7,000," said the lawyer, quickly, and the
interest and fees amount to about $3,000 more."

"The mortgage was given as security for a note?"

"Yes, a gambling debt," said the lawyer, sharply.

"Thet's so, and my belief ez that it wasn't a square game.  He
shouldn't hev given no note.  Why, don't ye mind, 'way back in '60,
when you and me waz in Marysville, that night that you bucked agin
faro, and lost seving hundred dollars, and then refoosed to take up
your checks, saying it was fraud and a gambling debt?  And don't ye
mind when that chap kicked ye, and I helped to drag him off ye--
and--"

"I'm busy now, Mr. Macleod," said Phillips, hastily; "my clerk will
give you all the information you require.  Good morning."

"It's mighty queer," said the captain, thoughtfully, as he
descended the stairs, "but the moment the conversation gets limber
and sociable-like, and I gets to runnin' free under easy sail, it's
always 'Good morning, Captain,' and we're becalmed."

By some occult influence, all the foregoing conversation, slightly
exaggerated, and the whole interview of the captain with the widow
with sundry additions, became the common property of Sandy Bar, to
the great delight of the boys.  There was scarcely a person who had
ever had business or social relations with Roger Catron, whom "The
Frozen Truth," as Sandy Bar delighted to designate the captain, had
not "interviewed," as simply and directly.  It is said that he
closed a conversation with one of the San Francisco detectives, who
had found Roger Catron's body, in these words: "And now hevin' got
throo' bizness, I was goin' to ask ye what's gone of Matt. Jones,
who was with ye in the bush in Austraily.  Lord, how he got me
quite interested in ye, telling me how you and him got out on a
ticket-of-leave, and was chased by them milishy guards, and at last
swam out to a San Francisco bark and escaped;" but here the
inevitable pressure of previous business always stopped the
captain's conversational flow.  The natural result of this was a
singular reaction in favor of the late Roger Catron in the public
sentiment of Sandy Bar, so strong, indeed, as to induce the Rev.
Mr. Joshua McSnagly, the next Sunday, to combat it with the moral
of Catron's life.  After the service, he was approached in the
vestibule, and in the hearing of some of his audience, by Captain
Dick, with the following compliment: "In many pints ye hed jess got
Roger Catron down to a hair.  I knew ye'd do it: why, Lord love ye,
you and him had pints in common; and when he giv' ye that hundred
dollars arter the fire in Sacramento, to help ye rebuild the
parsonage, he said to me,--me not likin' ye on account o' my being
on the committee that invited ye to resign from Marysville all
along o' that affair with Deacon Pursell's darter; and a piece she
was, parson! eh?--well, Roger, he ups and sez to me, 'Every man hez
his faults,' sez he; and sez he, 'there's no reason why a parson
ain't a human being like us, and that gal o' Pursell's is pizen, ez
I know.'  So ye see, I seed that ye was hittin' yourself over
Catron's shoulder, like them early martyrs."  But here, as Captain
Dick was clearly blocking up all egress from the church, the sexton
obliged him to move on, and again he was stopped in his
conversational career.

But only for a time.  Before long, it was whispered that Captain
Dick had ordered a meeting of the creditors, debtors, and friends
of Roger Catron at Robinson's Hall.  It was suggested, with some
show of reason, that this had been done at the instigation of
various practical jokers of Sandy Bar, who had imposed on the
simple directness of the captain, and the attendance that night
certainly indicated something more than a mere business meeting.
All of Sandy Bar crowded into Robinson's Hall, and long before
Captain Dick made his appearance on the platform, with his
inevitable memorandum-book, every inch of floor was crowded.

The captain began to read the expenditures of Roger Catron with
relentless fidelity of detail.  The several losses by poker, the
whisky bills, and the record of a "jamboree" at Tooley's, the vague
expenses whereof footed up $275, were received with enthusiastic
cheers by the audience.  A single milliner's bill for $125 was
hailed with delight; $100 expended in treating the Vestal Virgin
Combination Troupe almost canonized his memory; $50 for a simple
buggy ride with Deacon Fisk brought down the house; $500 advanced,
without security, and unpaid, for the electioneering expenses of
Assemblyman Jones, who had recently introduced a bill to prevent
gambling and the sale of lager beer on Sundays, was received with
an ominous groan.  One or two other items of money loaned
occasioned the withdrawal of several gentlemen from the audience
amidst the hisses or ironical cheers of the others.

At last Captain Dick stopped and advanced to the footlights.

"Gentlemen and friends," he said, slowly.  "I foots up $25,000 as
Roger Catron hez MADE, fair and square, in this yer county.  I
foots up $27,000 ez he has SPENT in this yer county.  I puts it to
you ez men,--far-minded men,--ef this man was a pauper and debtor?
I put it to you ez far-minded men,--ez free and easy men,--ez
political economists,--ez this the kind of men to impoverish a
county?"

An overwhelming and instantaneous "No!" almost drowned the last
utterance of the speaker.

"Thar is only one item," said Captain Dick, slowly, "only one item,
that ez men,--ez far-minded men,--ez political economists,--it
seems to me we hez the right to question.  It's this:  Thar is an
item, read to you by me, of $2,000 paid to certing San Francisco
detectives, paid out o' the assets o' Roger Catron, for the finding
of Roger Catron's body.  Gentlemen of Sandy Bar and friends, I
found that body, and yer it is!"

And Roger Catron, a little pale and nervous, but palpably in the
flesh, stepped upon the platform.

Of course the newspapers were full of it the next day.  Of course,
in due time, it appeared as a garbled and romantic item in the San
Francisco press.  Of course Mrs. Catron, on reading it, fainted,
and for two days said that this last cruel blow ended all relations
between her husband and herself.  On the third day she expressed
her belief that, if he had had the slightest feeling for her, he
would, long since, for the sake of mere decency, have communicated
with her.  On the fourth day she thought she had been, perhaps,
badly advised, had an open quarrel with her relatives, and
intimated that a wife had certain obligations, etc.  On the sixth
day, still not hearing from him, she quoted Scripture, spoke of a
seventy-times-seven forgiveness, and went generally into mild
hysterics.  On the seventh, she left in the morning train for Sandy
Bar.

And really I don't know as I have anything more to tell.  I dined
with them recently, and, upon my word, a more decorous, correct,
conventional, and dull dinner I never ate in my life.



"WHO WAS MY QUIET FRIEND?"


"Stranger!"

The voice was not loud, but clear and penetrating.  I looked vainly
up and down the narrow, darkening trail.  No one in the fringe of
alder ahead; no one on the gullied slope behind.

"O! stranger!"

This time a little impatiently.  The California classical vocative,
"O," always meant business.

I looked up, and perceived for the first time on the ledge, thirty
feet above me, another trail parallel with my own, and looking down
upon me through the buckeye bushes a small man on a black horse.

Five things to be here noted by the circumspect mountaineer.
FIRST, the locality,--lonely and inaccessible, and away from the
regular faring of teamsters and miners.  SECONDLY, the stranger's
superior knowledge of the road, from the fact that the other trail
was unknown to the ordinary traveler.  THIRDLY, that he was well
armed and equipped.  FOURTHLY, that he was better mounted.
FIFTHLY, that any distrust or timidity arising from the
contemplation of these facts had better be kept to one's self.

All this passed rapidly through my mind as I returned his
salutation.

"Got any tobacco?" he asked.

I had, and signified the fact, holding up the pouch inquiringly.

"All right, I'll come down.  Ride on, and I'll jine ye on the
slide."

"The slide!"  Here was a new geographical discovery as odd as the
second trail.  I had ridden over the trail a dozen times, and seen
no communication between the ledge and trail.  Nevertheless, I went
on a hundred yards or so, when there was a sharp crackling in the
underbrush, a shower of stones on the trail, and my friend plunged
through the bushes to my side, down a grade that I should scarcely
have dared to lead my horse.  There was no doubt he was an
accomplished rider,--another fact to be noted.

As he ranged beside me, I found I was not mistaken as to his size;
he was quite under the medium height, and but for a pair of cold,
gray eyes, was rather commonplace in feature.

"You've got a good horse there," I suggested.

He was filling his pipe from my pouch, but looked up a little
surprised, and said, "Of course."  He then puffed away with the
nervous eagerness of a man long deprived of that sedative.
Finally, between the puffs, he asked me whence I came.

I replied, "From Lagrange."

He looked at me a few moments curiously, but on my adding that I
had only halted there for a few hours, he said: "I thought I knew
every man between Lagrange and Indian Spring, but somehow I sorter
disremember your face and your name."

Not particularly caring that he should remember either, I replied
half laughingly, that, as I lived the other side of Indian Spring,
it was quite natural.  He took the rebuff, if such it was, so
quietly that as an act of mere perfunctory politeness I asked him
where he came from.

"Lagrange."

"And you are going to--"

"Well! that depends pretty much on how things pan out, and whether
I can make the riffle."  He let his hand rest quite unconsciously
on the leathern holster of his dragoon revolver, yet with a strong
suggestion to me of his ability "to make the riffle" if he wanted
to, and added: "But just now I was reck'nin' on taking a little
pasear with you."

There was nothing offensive in his speech save its familiarity, and
the reflection, perhaps, that whether I objected or not, he was
quite able to do as he said.  I only replied that if our pasear was
prolonged beyond Heavytree Hill, I should have to borrow his beast.
To my surprise he replied quietly, "That's so," adding that the
horse was at my disposal when he wasn't using it, and HALF of it
when he was.  "Dick has carried double many a time before this," he
continued, "and kin do it again; when your mustang gives out I'll
give you a lift and room to spare."

I could not help smiling at the idea of appearing before the boys
at Red Gulch en croupe with the stranger; but neither could I help
being oddly affected by the suggestion that his horse had done
double duty before.  "On what occasion, and why?" was a question I
kept to myself.  We were ascending the long, rocky flank of the
divide; the narrowness of the trail obliged us to proceed slowly,
and in file, so that there was little chance for conversation, had
he been disposed to satisfy my curiosity.

We toiled on in silence, the buckeye giving way to chimisal, the
westering sun, reflected again from the blank walls beside us,
blinding our eyes with its glare.  The pines in the canyon below
were olive gulfs of heat, over which a hawk here and there drifted
lazily, or, rising to our level, cast a weird and gigantic shadow
of slowly moving wings on the mountain side.  The superiority of
the stranger's horse led him often far in advance, and made me hope
that he might forget me entirely, or push on, growing weary of
waiting.  But regularly he would halt by a bowlder, or reappear
from some chimisal, where he had patiently halted.  I was beginning
to hate him mildly, when at one of those reappearances he drew up
to my side, and asked me how I liked Dickens!

Had he asked my opinion of Huxley or Darwin, I could not have been
more astonished.  Thinking it were possible that he referred to
some local celebrity of Lagrange, I said, hesitatingly:--

"You mean--"

"Charles Dickens.  Of course you've read him?  Which of his books
do you like best?"

I replied with considerable embarrassment that I liked them all,--
as I certainly did.

He grasped my hand for a moment with a fervor quite unlike his
usual phlegm, and said, "That's me, old man.  Dickens ain't no
slouch.  You can count on him pretty much all the time."

With this rough preface, he launched into a criticism of the
novelist, which for intelligent sympathy and hearty appreciation I
had rarely heard equaled.  Not only did he dwell upon the
exuberance of his humor, but upon the power of his pathos and the
all-pervading element of his poetry.  I looked at the man in
astonishment.  I had considered myself a rather diligent student of
the great master of fiction, but the stranger's felicity of
quotation and illustration staggered me.  It is true, that his
thought was not always clothed in the best language, and often
appeared in the slouching, slangy undress of the place and period,
yet it never was rustic nor homespun, and sometimes struck me with
its precision and fitness.  Considerably softened toward him, I
tried him with other literature.  But vainly.  Beyond a few of the
lyrical and emotional poets, he knew nothing.  Under the influence
and enthusiasm of his own speech, he himself had softened
considerably; offered to change horses with me, readjusted my
saddle with professional skill, transferred my pack to his own
horse, insisted upon my sharing the contents of his whisky flask,
and, noticing that I was unarmed, pressed upon me a silver-mounted
Derringer, which he assured me he could "warrant."  These various
offices of good will and the diversion of his talk beguiled me from
noticing the fact that the trail was beginning to become obscure
and unrecognizable.  We were evidently pursuing a route unknown
before to me.  I pointed out the fact to my companion, a little
impatiently.  He instantly resumed his old manner and dialect.

"Well, I reckon one trail's as good as another, and what hev ye got
to say about it?"

I pointed out, with some dignity, that I preferred the old trail.

"Mebbe you did.  But you're jiss now takin' a pasear with ME.  This
yer trail will bring you right into Indian Spring, and ONNOTICED,
and no questions asked.  Don't you mind now, I'll see you through."

It was necessary here to make some stand against my strange
companion.  I said firmly, yet as politely as I could, that I had
proposed stopping over night with a friend.

"Whar?"

I hesitated.  The friend was an eccentric Eastern man, well known
in the locality for his fastidiousness and his habits as a recluse.
A misanthrope, of ample family and ample means, he had chosen a
secluded but picturesque valley in the Sierras where he could rail
against the world without opposition.  "Lone Valley," or "Boston
Ranch," as it was familiarly called, was the one spot that the
average miner both respected and feared.  Mr. Sylvester, its
proprietor, had never affiliated with "the boys," nor had he ever
lost their respect by any active opposition to their ideas.  If
seclusion had been his object, he certainly was gratified.
Nevertheless, in the darkening shadows of the night, and on a
lonely and unknown trail, I hesitated a little at repeating his
name to a stranger of whom I knew so little.  But my mysterious
companion took the matter out of my hands.

"Look yar," he said, suddenly, "thar ain't but one place twixt yer
and Indian Spring whar ye can stop, and that is Sylvester's."

I assented, a little sullenly.

"Well," said the stranger, quietly, and with a slight suggestion of
conferring a favor on me, "ef yer pointed for Sylvester's--why--I
DON'T MIND STOPPING THAR WITH YE.  It's a little off the road--I'll
lose some time--but taking it by and large, I don't much mind."

I stated, as rapidly and as strongly as I could, that my
acquaintance with Mr. Sylvester did not justify the introduction of
a stranger to his hospitality; that he was unlike most of the
people here,--in short, that he was a queer man, etc., etc.

To my surprise my companion answered quietly: "Oh, that's all
right.  I've heerd of him.  Ef you don't feel like checking me
through, or if you'd rather put 'C. O. D.' on my back, why it's all
the same to me.  I'll play it alone.  Only you just count me in.
Say 'Sylvester' all the time.  That's me!"

What could I oppose to this man's quiet assurance?  I felt myself
growing red with anger and nervous with embarrassment.  What would
the correct Sylvester say to me?  What would the girls,--I was a
young man then, and had won an entree to their domestic circle by
my reserve,--known by a less complimentary adjective among "the
boys,"--what would they say to my new acquaintance?  Yet I
certainly could not object to his assuming all risks on his own
personal recognizances, nor could I resist a certain feeling of
shame at my embarrassment.

We were beginning to descend.  In the distance below us already
twinkled the lights in the solitary rancho of Lone Valley.  I
turned to my companion.  "But you have forgotten that I don't even
know your name.  What am I to call you?"

"That's so," he said, musingly.  "Now, let's see.  'Kearney' would
be a good name.  It's short and easy like.  Thar's a street in
'Frisco the same title; Kearney it is."

"But--" I began impatiently.

"Now you leave all that to me," he interrupted, with a superb self-
confidence that I could not but admire.  "The name ain't no
account.  It's the man that's responsible.  Ef I was to lay for a
man that I reckoned was named Jones, and after I fetched him I
found out on the inquest that his real name was Smith, that
wouldn't make no matter, as long as I got the man."

The illustration, forcible as it was, did not strike me as offering
a prepossessing introduction, but we were already at the rancho.
The barking of dogs brought Sylvester to the door of the pretty
little cottage which his taste had adorned.

I briefly introduced Mr. Kearney.  "Kearney will do--Kearney's good
enough for me," commented the soi-disant Kearney half-aloud, to my
own horror and Sylvester's evident mystification, and then he
blandly excused himself for a moment that he might personally
supervise the care of his own beast.  When he was out of ear-shot I
drew the puzzled Sylvester aside.

"I have picked up--I mean I have been picked up on the road by a
gentle maniac, whose name is not Kearney.  He is well armed and
quotes Dickens.  With care, acquiescence in his views on all
subjects, and general submission to his commands, he may be
placated.  Doubtless the spectacle of your helpless family, the
contemplation of your daughter's beauty and innocence, may touch
his fine sense of humor and pathos.  Meanwhile, Heaven help you,
and forgive me."

I ran upstairs to the little den that my hospitable host had kept
always reserved for me in my wanderings.  I lingered some time over
my ablutions, hearing the languid, gentlemanly drawl of Sylvester
below, mingled with the equally cool, easy slang of my mysterious
acquaintance.  When I came down to the sitting-room I was
surprised, however, to find the self-styled Kearney quietly seated
on the sofa, the gentle May Sylvester, the "Lily of Lone Valley,"
sitting with maidenly awe and unaffected interest on one side of
him, while on the other that arrant flirt, her cousin Kate, was
practicing the pitiless archery of her eyes, with an excitement
that seemed almost real.

"Who is your deliciously cool friend?" she managed to whisper to me
at supper, as I sat utterly dazed and bewildered between the enrapt
May Sylvester, who seemed to hang upon his words, and this giddy
girl of the period, who was emptying the battery of her charms in
active rivalry upon him.  "Of course we know his name isn't
Kearney.  But how romantic!  And isn't he perfectly lovely?  And
who is he?"

I replied with severe irony that I was not aware what foreign
potentate was then traveling incognito in the Sierras of
California, but that when his royal highness was pleased to inform
me, I should be glad to introduce him properly.  "Until then," I
added, "I fear the acquaintance must be Morganatic."

"You're only jealous of him," she said pertly.  "Look at May--she
is completely fascinated.  And her father, too."  And actually, the
languid, world-sick, cynical Sylvester was regarding him with a
boyish interest and enthusiasm almost incompatible with his nature.
Yet I submit honestly to the clear-headed reason of my own sex,
that I could see nothing more in the man than I have already
delivered to the reader.

In the middle of an exciting story of adventure, of which he, to
the already prejudiced mind of his fair auditors, was evidently the
hero, he stopped suddenly.

"It's only some pack train passing the bridge on the lower trail,"
explained Sylvester; "go on."

"It may be my horse is a trifle oneasy in the stable," said the
alleged Kearney; "he ain't used to boards and covering."  Heaven
only knows what wild and delicious revelation lay in the statement
of this fact, but the girls looked at each other with cheeks pink
with excitement as Kearney arose, and, with quiet absence of
ceremony, quitted the table.

"Ain't he just lovely?" said Kate, gasping for breath, "and so
witty."

"Witty!" said the gentle May, with just the slightest trace of
defiance in her sweet voice; "witty, my dear? why, don't you see
that his heart is just breaking with pathos?  Witty, indeed; why,
when he was speaking of that poor Mexican woman that was hung, I
saw the tears gather in his eyes.  Witty, indeed!"

"Tears," laughed the cynical Sylvester, "tears, idle tears.  Why,
you silly children, the man is a man of the world, a philosopher,
quiet, observant, unassuming."

"Unassuming!"  Was Sylvester intoxicated, or had the mysterious
stranger mixed the "insane verb" with the family pottage?  He
returned before I could answer this self-asked inquiry, and resumed
coolly his broken narrative.  Finding myself forgotten in the man I
had so long hesitated to introduce to my friends, I retired to rest
early, only to hear, through the thin partitions, two hours later,
enthusiastic praises of the new guest from the voluble lips of the
girls, as they chatted in the next room before retiring.

At midnight I was startled by the sound of horses' hoofs and the
jingling of spurs below.  A conversation between my host and some
mysterious personage in the darkness was carried on in such a low
tone that I could not learn its import.  As the cavalcade rode away
I raised the window.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing," said Sylvester, coolly, "only another one of those
playful homicidal freaks peculiar to the country.  A man was shot
by Cherokee Jack over at Lagrange this morning, and that was the
sheriff of Calaveras and his posse hunting him.  I told him I'd
seen nobody but you and your friend.  By the way, I hope the cursed
noise hasn't disturbed him.  The poor fellow looked as if he wanted
rest."

I thought so, too.  Nevertheless, I went softly to his room.  It
was empty.  My impression was that he had distanced the sheriff of
Calaveras about two hours.



A GHOST OF THE SIERRAS


It was a vast silence of pines, redolent with balsamic breath, and
muffled with the dry dust of dead bark and matted mosses.  Lying on
our backs, we looked upward through a hundred feet of clear,
unbroken interval to the first lateral branches that formed the
flat canopy above us.  Here and there the fierce sun, from whose
active persecution we had just escaped, searched for us through the
woods, but its keen blade was dulled and turned aside by
intercostal boughs, and its brightness dissipated in nebulous mists
throughout the roofing of the dim, brown aisles around us.  We were
in another atmosphere, under another sky; indeed, in another world
than the dazzling one we had just quitted.  The grave silence
seemed so much a part of the grateful coolness, that we hesitated
to speak, and for some moments lay quietly outstretched on the pine
tassels where we had first thrown ourselves.  Finally, a voice
broke the silence:--

"Ask the old Major; he knows all about it!"

The person here alluded to under that military title was myself.  I
hardly need explain to any Californian that it by no means followed
that I was a "Major," or that I was "old," or that I knew anything
about "it," or indeed what "it" referred to.  The whole remark was
merely one of the usual conventional feelers to conversation,--a
kind of social preamble, quite common to our slangy camp
intercourse.  Nevertheless, as I was always known as the Major,
perhaps for no better reason than that the speaker, an old
journalist, was always called Doctor, I recognized the fact so far
as to kick aside an intervening saddle, so that I could see the
speaker's face on a level with my own, and said nothing.

"About ghosts!" said the Doctor, after a pause, which nobody broke
or was expected to break.  "Ghosts, sir!  That's what we want to
know.  What are we doing here in this blanked old mausoleum of
Calaveras County, if it isn't to find out something about 'em, eh?"

Nobody replied.

"Thar's that haunted house at Cave City.  Can't be more than a mile
or two away, anyhow.  Used to be just off the trail."

A dead silence.

The Doctor (addressing space generally) "Yes, sir; it WAS a mighty
queer story."

Still the same reposeful indifference.  We all knew the Doctor's
skill as a raconteur; we all knew that a story was coming, and we
all knew that any interruption would be fatal.  Time and time
again, in our prospecting experience, had a word of polite
encouragement, a rash expression of interest, even a too eager
attitude of silent expectancy, brought the Doctor to a sudden
change of subject.  Time and time again have we seen the unwary
stranger stand amazed and bewildered between our own indifference
and the sudden termination of a promising anecdote, through his own
unlucky interference.  So we said nothing.  "The Judge"--another
instance of arbitrary nomenclature--pretended to sleep.  Jack began
to twist a cigarrito.  Thornton bit off the ends of pine needles
reflectively.

"Yes, sir," continued the Doctor, coolly resting the back of his
head on the palms of his hands, "it WAS rather curious.  All except
the murder.  THAT'S what gets me, for the murder had no new points,
no fancy touches, no sentiment, no mystery.  Was just one of the
old style, 'sub-head' paragraphs.  Old-fashioned miner scrubs along
on hardtack and beans, and saves up a little money to go home and
see relations.  Old-fashioned assassin sharpens up knife, old
style; loads old flint-lock, brass-mounted pistol; walks in on old-
fashioned miner one dark night, sends him home to his relations
away back to several generations, and walks off with the swag.  No
mystery THERE; nothing to clear up; subsequent revelations only
impertinence.  Nothing for any ghost to do--who meant business.
More than that, over forty murders, same old kind, committed every
year in Calaveras, and no spiritual post obits coming due every
anniversary; no assessments made on the peace and quiet of the
surviving community.  I tell you what, boys, I've always been
inclined to throw off on the Cave City ghost for that alone.  It's
a bad precedent, sir.  If that kind o' thing is going to obtain in
the foot-hills, we'll have the trails full of chaps formerly
knocked over by Mexicans and road agents; every little camp and
grocery will have stock enough on hand to go into business, and
where's there any security for surviving life and property, eh?
What's your opinion, Judge, as a fair-minded legislator?"

Of course there was no response.  Yet it was part of the Doctor's
system of aggravation to become discursive at these moments, in the
hope of interruption, and he continued for some moments to dwell on
the terrible possibility of a state of affairs in which a gentleman
could no longer settle a dispute with an enemy without being
subjected to succeeding spiritual embarrassment.  But all this
digression fell upon apparently inattentive ears.

"Well, sir, after the murder, the cabin stood for a long time
deserted and tenantless.  Popular opinion was against it.  One day
a ragged prospector, savage with hard labor and harder luck, came
to the camp, looking for a place to live and a chance to prospect.
After the boys had taken his measure, they concluded that he'd
already tackled so much in the way of difficulties that a ghost
more or less wouldn't be of much account.  So they sent him to the
haunted cabin.  He had a big yellow dog with him, about as ugly and
as savage as himself; and the boys sort o' congratulated
themselves, from a practical view-point, that while they were
giving the old ruffian a shelter, they were helping in the cause of
Christianity against ghosts and goblins.  They had little faith in
the old man, but went their whole pile on that dog.  That's where
they were mistaken.

"The house stood almost three hundred feet from the nearest cave,
and on dark nights, being in a hollow, was as lonely as if it had
been on the top of Shasta.  If you ever saw the spot when there was
just moon enough to bring out the little surrounding clumps of
chapparal until they looked like crouching figures, and make the
bits of broken quartz glisten like skulls, you'd begin to
understand how big a contract that man and that yellow dog
undertook.

"They went into possession that afternoon, and old Hard Times set
out to cook his supper.  When it was over he sat down by the embers
and lit his pipe, the yellow dog lying at his feet.  Suddenly 'Rap!
rap!' comes from the door.  'Come in,' says the man, gruffly.
'Rap!' again.  'Come in and be d--d to you,' says the man, who has
no idea of getting up to open the door.  But no one responded, and
the next moment smash goes the only sound pane in the only window.
Seeing this, old Hard Times gets up, with the devil in his eye, and
a revolver in his hand, followed by the yellow dog, with every
tooth showing, and swings open the door.  No one there!  But as the
man opened the door, that yellow dog, that had been so chipper
before, suddenly begins to crouch and step backward, step by step,
trembling and shivering, and at last crouches down in the chimney,
without even so much as looking at his master.  The man slams the
door shut again, but there comes another smash.

This time it seems to come from inside the cabin, and it isn't
until the man looks around and sees everything quiet that he gets
up, without speaking, and makes a dash for the door, and tears
round outside the cabin like mad, but finds nothing but silence and
darkness.  Then he comes back swearing and calls the dog.  But that
great yellow dog that the boys would have staked all their money on
is crouching under the bunk, and has to be dragged out like a coon
from a hollow tree, and lies there, his eyes starting from their
sockets; every limb and muscle quivering with fear, and his very
hair drawn up in bristling ridges.  The man calls him to the door.
He drags himself a few steps, stops, sniffs, and refuses to go
further.  The man calls him again, with an oath and a threat.
Then, what does that yellow dog do?  He crawls edgewise towards the
door, crouching himself against the bunk till he's flatter than a
knife blade; then, half way, he stops.  Then that d--d yellow dog
begins to walk gingerly--lifting each foot up in the air, one after
the other, still trembling in every limb.  Then he stops again.
Then he crouches.  Then he gives one little shuddering leap--not
straight forward, but up,--clearing the floor about six inches, as
if--"

"Over something," interrupted the Judge, hastily, lifting himself
on his elbow.

The Doctor stopped instantly.  "Juan," he said coolly, to one of
the Mexican packers, "quit foolin' with that riata.  You'll have
that stake out and that mule loose in another minute.  Come over
this way!"

The Mexican turned a scared, white face to the Doctor, muttering
something, and let go the deer-skin hide.  We all up-raised our
voices with one accord, the Judge most penitently and
apologetically, and implored the Doctor to go on.  "I'll shoot the
first man who interrupts you again," added Thornton; persuasively.

But the Doctor, with his hands languidly under his head, had lost
his interest.  "Well, the dog ran off to the hills, and neither the
threats nor cajoleries of his master could ever make him enter the
cabin again.  The next day the man left the camp.  What time is it?
Getting on to sundown, ain't it?  Keep off my leg, will you, you
d--d Greaser, and stop stumbling round there!  Lie down."

But we knew that the Doctor had not completely finished his story,
and we waited patiently for the conclusion.  Meanwhile the old,
gray silence of the woods again asserted itself, but shadows were
now beginning to gather in the heavy beams of the roof above, and
the dim aisles seemed to be narrowing and closing in around us.
Presently the Doctor recommenced lazily, as if no interruption had
occurred.

"As I said before, I never put much faith in that story, and
shouldn't have told it, but for a rather curious experience of my
own.  It was in the spring of '62, and I was one of a party of
four, coming up from O'Neill's, when we had been snowed up.  It was
awful weather; the snow had changed to sleet and rain after we
crossed the divide, and the water was out everywhere; every ditch
was a creek, every creek a river.  We had lost two horses on the
North Fork, we were dead beat, off the trail, and sloshing round,
with night coming on, and the level hail like shot in our faces.
Things were looking bleak and scary when, riding a little ahead of
the party, I saw a light twinkling in a hollow beyond.  My horse
was still fresh, and calling out to the boys to follow me and bear
for the light, I struck out for it.  In another moment I was before
a little cabin that half burrowed in the black chapparal; I
dismounted and rapped at the door.  There was no response.  I then
tried to force the door, but it was fastened securely from within.
I was all the more surprised when one of the boys, who had
overtaken me, told me that he had just seen through a window a man
reading by the fire.  Indignant at this inhospitality, we both made
a resolute onset against the door, at the same time raising our
angry voices to a yell.  Suddenly there was a quick response, the
hurried withdrawing of a bolt, and the door opened.

"The occupant was a short, thick-set man, with a pale, careworn
face, whose prevailing expression was one of gentle good humor and
patient suffering.  When we entered, he asked us hastily why we had
not 'sung out' before.

"'But we KNOCKED!' I said, impatiently, 'and almost drove your door
in.'

"'That's nothing,' he said, patiently.  'I'm used to THAT.'

"I looked again at the man's patient, fateful face, and then around
the cabin.  In an instant the whole situation flashed before me.
'Are we not near Cave City?' I asked.

"'Yes,' he replied, 'it's just below.  You must have passed it in
the storm.'

"'I see.'  I again looked around the cabin.  'Isn't this what they
call the haunted house?'

"He looked at me curiously.  'It is,' he said, simply.

"You can imagine my delight!  Here was an opportunity to test the
whole story, to work down to the bed rock, and see how it would pan
out!  We were too many and too well armed to fear tricks or dangers
from outsiders.  If--as one theory had been held--the disturbance
was kept up by a band of concealed marauders or road agents, whose
purpose was to preserve their haunts from intrusion, we were quite
able to pay them back in kind for any assault.  I need not say that
the boys were delighted with this prospect when the fact was
revealed to them.  The only one doubtful or apathetic spirit there
was our host, who quietly resumed his seat and his book, with his
old expression of patient martyrdom.  It would have been easy for
me to have drawn him out, but I felt that I did not want to
corroborate anybody else's experience; only to record my own.  And
I thought it better to keep the boys from any predisposing terrors.

"We ate our supper, and then sat, patiently and expectant, around
the fire.  An hour slipped away, but no disturbance; another hour
passed as monotonously.  Our host read his book; only the dash of
hail against the roof broke the silence.  But--"

The Doctor stopped.  Since the last interruption, I noticed he had
changed the easy slangy style of his story to a more perfect,
artistic, and even studied manner.  He dropped now suddenly into
his old colloquial speech, and quietly said: "If you don't quit
stumbling over those riatas, Juan, I'll hobble YOU.  Come here,
there; lie down, will you?"

We all turned fiercely on the cause of this second dangerous
interruption, but a sight of the poor fellow's pale and frightened
face withheld our vindictive tongues.  And the Doctor, happily, of
his own accord, went on:--

"But I had forgotten that it was no easy matter to keep these high-
spirited boys, bent on a row, in decent subjection; and after the
third hour passed without a supernatural exhibition, I observed,
from certain winks and whispers, that they were determined to get
up indications of their own.  In a few moments violent rappings
were heard from all parts of the cabin; large stones (adroitly
thrown up the chimney) fell with a heavy thud on the roof.  Strange
groans and ominous yells seemed to come from the outside (where the
interstices between the logs were wide enough).  Yet, through all
this uproar, our host sat still and patient, with no sign of
indignation or reproach upon his good-humored but haggard features.
Before long it became evident that this exhibition was exclusively
for HIS benefit.  Under the thin disguise of asking him to assist
them in discovering the disturbers OUTSIDE the cabin, those inside
took advantage of his absence to turn the cabin topsy-turvy.

"'You see what the spirits have done, old man,' said the arch
leader of this mischief.  'They've upset that there flour barrel
while we wasn't looking, and then kicked over the water jug and
spilled all the water!'

"The patient man lifted his head and looked at the flour-strewn
walls.  Then he glanced down at the floor, but drew back with a
slight tremor.

"'It ain't water!' he said, quietly.

"'What is it, then?'

"'It's BLOOD!  Look!'

"The nearest man gave a sudden start and sank back white as a
sheet.

"For there, gentlemen, on the floor, just before the door, where
the old man had seen the dog hesitate and lift his feet, there!
there!--gentlemen--upon my honor, slowly widened and broadened a
dark red pool of human blood!  Stop him!  Quick!  Stop him, I say!"

There was a blinding flash that lit up the dark woods, and a sharp
report!  When we reached the Doctor's side he was holding the
smoking pistol, just discharged, in one hand, while with the other
he was pointing to the rapidly disappearing figure of Juan, our
Mexican vaquero!

"Missed him! by G-d!" said the Doctor.  "But did you hear him?  Did
you see his livid face as he rose up at the name of blood?  Did you
see his guilty conscience in his face.  Eh?  Why don't you speak?
What are you staring at?"

"Was it the murdered man's ghost, Doctor?" we all panted in one
quick breath.

"Ghost be d--d!  No!  But in that Mexican vaquero--that cursed Juan
Ramirez!--I saw and shot at his murderer!"



THE HOODLUM BAND

OR

THE BOY CHIEF, THE INFANT POLITICIAN, AND THE PIRATE PRODIGY

BY JACK WHACKAWAY

Author of "The Boy Slaver," "The Immature Incendiary," "The
Precocious Pugilist," etc., etc.


CHAPTER I


It was a quiet New England village.  Nowhere in the valley of the
Connecticut the autumn sun shone upon a more peaceful, pastoral,
manufacturing community.  The wooden nutmegs were slowly ripening
on the trees, and the white pine hams for Western consumption were
gradually rounding into form under the deft manipulation of the
hardy American artisan.  The honest Connecticut farmer was quietly
gathering from his threshing floor the shoe-pegs, which, when
intermixed with a fair proportion of oats, offered a pleasing
substitute for fodder to the effete civilizations of Europe.  An
almost Sabbath-like stillness prevailed.  Doemville was only seven
miles from Hartford, and the surrounding landscape smiled with the
conviction of being fully insured.

Few would have thought that this peaceful village was the home of
the three young heroes whose exploits would hereafter--but we
anticipate.

Doemville Academy was the principal seat of learning in the county.
Under the grave and gentle administration of the venerable Doctor
Context, it had attained just popularity.  Yet the increasing
infirmities of age obliged the doctor to relinquish much of his
trust to his assistants, who, it is needless to say, abused his
confidence.  Before long their brutal tyranny and deep-laid
malevolence became apparent.  Boys were absolutely forced to study
their lessons.  The sickening fact will hardly be believed, but
during school hours they were obliged to remain in their seats with
the appearance at least of discipline.  It is stated by good
authority that the rolling of croquet balls across the floor during
recitation was objected to, under the fiendish excuse of its
interfering with their studies.  The breaking of windows by base
balls, and the beating of small scholars with bats, were declared
against.  At last, bloated and arrogant with success, the under-
teachers threw aside all disguise and revealed themselves in their
true colors.  A cigar was actually taken out of a day scholar's
mouth during prayers!  A flask of whisky was dragged from another's
desk, and then thrown out of the window.  And finally, Profanity,
Hazing, Theft, and Lying were almost discouraged!

Could the youth of America, conscious of their power and a
literature of their own, tamely submit to this tyranny?  Never!  We
repeat it firmly.  Never!  We repeat it to parents and guardians.
Never!  But the fiendish tutors, chuckling in their glee, little
knew what was passing through the cold, haughty intellect of
Charles Fanuel Hall Golightly, aged ten; what curled the lip of
Benjamin Franklin Jenkins, aged seven; or what shone in the bold
blue eyes of Bromley Chitterlings, aged six and a half, as they sat
in the corner of the playground at recess.  Their only other
companion and confidant was the negro porter and janitor of the
school, known as "Pirate Jim."

Fitly, indeed, was he named, as the secrets of his early wild
career--confessed freely to his noble young friends--plainly
showed.  A slaver at the age of seventeen, the ringleader of a
mutiny on the African Coast at the age of twenty, a privateersman
during the last war with England, the commander of a fire-ship and
its sole survivor at twenty-five, with a wild intermediate career
of unmixed piracy, until the Rebellion called him to civil service
again as a blockade-runner, and peace and a desire for rural repose
led him to seek the janitorship of the Doemville Academy, where no
questions were asked and references not exchanged: he was, indeed,
a fit mentor for our daring youth.  Although a man whose days had
exceeded the usual space allotted to humanity, the various episodes
of his career footing his age up to nearly one hundred and fifty-
nine years, he scarcely looked it, and was still hale and vigorous.

"Yes," continued Pirate Jim, critically, "I don't think he was any
bigger nor you, Master Chitterlings, if as big, when he stood on
the fork'stle of my ship, and shot the captain o' that East Injymen
dead.  We used to call him little Weevils, he was so young-like.
But, bless your hearts, boys! he wa'n't anything to little Sammy
Barlow, ez once crep' up inter the captain's stateroom on a Rooshin
frigate, stabbed him to the heart with a jack-knife, then put on
the captain's uniform and his cocked hat, took command of the ship
and fout her hisself."

"Wasn't the captain's clothes big for him?" asked B. Franklin
Jenkins, anxiously.

The janitor eyed young Jenkins with pained dignity.

"Didn't I say the Rooshin captain was a small, a very small man?
Rooshins is small, likewise Greeks."

A noble enthusiasm beamed in the faces of the youthful heroes.

"Was Barlow as large as me?" asked C. F. Hall Golightly, lifting
his curls from his Jove-like brow.

"Yes; but then he hed hed, so to speak, experiences.  It was
allowed that he had pizened his schoolmaster afore he went to sea.
But it's dry talking, boys."

Golightly drew a flask from his jacket and handed it to the
janitor.  It was his father's best brandy.  The heart of the honest
old seaman was touched.

"Bless ye, my own pirate boy!" he said, in a voice suffocating with
emotion.

"I've got some tobacco," said the youthful Jenkins, "but it's fine-
cut; I use only that now."

"I kin buy some plug at the corner grocery," said Pirate Jim, "only
I left my port-money at home."

"Take this watch," said young Golightly; "it is my father's.  Since
he became a tyrant and usurper, and forced me to join a corsair's
band, I've began by dividing the property."

"This is idle trifling," said young Chitterlings, mildly.  "Every
moment is precious.  Is this an hour to give to wine and wassail?
Ha, we want action--action!  We must strike the blow for freedom
to-night--aye, this very night.  The scow is already anchored in
the mill-dam, freighted with provisions for a three months' voyage.
I have a black flag in my pocket.  Why, then, this cowardly delay?"

The two elder youths turned with a slight feeling of awe and shame
to gaze on the glowing cheeks, and high, haughty crest of their
youngest comrade--the bright, the beautiful Bromley Chitterlings.
Alas! that very moment of forgetfulness and mutual admiration was
fraught with danger.  A thin, dyspeptic, half-starved tutor
approached.

"It is time to resume your studies, young gentlemen," he said, with
fiendish politeness.

They were his last words on earth.

"Down, tyrant!" screamed Chitterlings.

"Sic him--I mean, Sic semper tyrannis!" said the classical
Golightly.

A heavy blow on the head from a base-ball bat, and the rapid
projection of a base ball against his empty stomach, brought the
tutor a limp and lifeless mass to the ground.  Golightly shuddered.
Let not my young readers blame him too rashly.  It was his first
homicide.

"Search his pockets," said the practical Jenkins.

They did so, and found nothing but a Harvard Triennial Catalogue.

"Let us fly," said Jenkins.

"Forward to the boats!" cried the enthusiastic Chitterlings.

But C. F. Hall Golightly stood gazing thoughtfully at the prostrate
tutor.

"This," he said calmly, "is the result of a too free government and
the common school system.  What the country needs is reform.  I
cannot go with you, boys."

"Traitor!" screamed the others.

C. F. H. Golightly smiled sadly.

"You know me not.  I shall not become a pirate--but a Congressman!"

Jenkins and Chitterlings turned pale.

"I have already organized two caucuses in a base ball club, and
bribed the delegates of another.  Nay, turn not away.  Let us be
friends, pursuing through various ways one common end.  Farewell!"
They shook hands.

"But where is Pirate Jim?" asked Jenkins.

"He left us but for a moment to raise money on the watch to
purchase armament for the scow.  Farewell!"

And so the gallant, youthful spirits parted, bright with the
sunrise of hope.

That night a conflagration raged in Doemville.  The Doemville
Academy, mysteriously fired, first fell a victim to the devouring
element.  The candy shop and cigar store, both holding heavy
liabilities against the academy, quickly followed.  By the lurid
gleams of the flames, a long, low, sloop-rigged scow, with every
mast gone except one, slowly worked her way out of the mill-dam
towards the Sound.  The next day three boys were missing--C. F.
Hall Golightly, B. F. Jenkins, and Bromley Chitterlings.  Had they
perished in the flames who shall say?  Enough that never more under
these names did they again appear in the homes of their ancestors.

Happy, indeed, would it have been for Doemville had the mystery
ended here.  But a darker interest and scandal rested upon the
peaceful village.  During that awful night the boarding-school of
Madam Brimborion was visited stealthily, and two of the fairest
heiresses of Connecticut--daughters of the president of a savings
bank, and insurance director--were the next morning found to have
eloped.  With them also disappeared the entire contents of the
Savings Bank.  and on the following day the Flamingo Fire Insurance
Company failed.


CHAPTER II


Let my young readers now sail with me to warmer and more hospitable
climes.  Off the coast of Patagonia a long, low, black schooner
proudly rides the seas, that breaks softly upon the vine-clad
shores of that luxuriant land.  Who is this that, wrapped in
Persian rugs, and dressed in the most expensive manner, calmly
reclines on the quarter-deck of the schooner, toying lightly ever
and anon with the luscious fruits of the vicinity, held in baskets
of solid gold by Nubian slaves? or at intervals, with daring grace,
guides an ebony velocipede over the polished black walnut decks,
and in and out the intricacies of the rigging.  Who is it? well may
be asked.  What name is it that blanches with terror the cheeks of
the Patagonian navy?  Who but the Pirate Prodigy--the relentless
Boy Scourer of Patagonian seas?  Voyagers slowly drifting by the
Silurian beach, coasters along the Devonian shore, still shudder at
the name of Bromley Chitterlings--the Boy Avenger, late of
Hartford, Connecticut.

It has been often asked by the idly curious, Why Avenger, and of
what?  Let us not seek to disclose the awful secret hidden under
that youthful jacket.  Enough that there may have been that of
bitterness in his past life that he


    "Whose soul would sicken o'er the heaving wave,"


or "whose soul would heave above the sickening wave," did not
understand.  Only one knew him, perhaps too well--a queen of the
Amazons, taken prisoner off Terra del Fuego a week previous.  She
loved the Boy Avenger.  But in vain; his youthful heart seemed
obdurate.

"Hear me," at last he said, when she had for the seventh time
wildly proffered her hand and her kingdom in marriage, "and know
once and forever why I must decline your flattering proposal: I
love another."

With a wild, despairing cry, she leaped into the sea, but was
instantly rescued by the Pirate Prodigy.  Yet, even in that supreme
moment, such was his coolness that on his way to the surface he
captured a mermaid, and, placing her in charge of his steward, with
directions to give her a stateroom, with hot and cold water, calmly
resumed his place by the Amazon's side.  When the cabin door closed
on his faithful servant, bringing champagne and ices to the
interesting stranger, Chitterlings resumed his narrative with a
choking voice:--

"When I first fled from the roof of a tyrannical parent, I loved
the beautiful and accomplished Eliza J. Sniffen.  Her father was
president of the Workingmen's Savings Bank, and it was perfectly
understood that in the course of time the entire deposits would be
his.  But, like a vain fool, I wished to anticipate the future, and
in a wild moment persuaded Miss Sniffen to elope with me; and, with
the entire cash assets of the bank, we fled together."  He paused,
overcome with emotion.  "But fate decreed it otherwise.  In my
feverish haste, I had forgotten to place among the stores of my
pirate craft that peculiar kind of chocolate caramel to which Eliza
Jane was most partial.  We were obliged to put into New Rochelle on
the second day out, to enable Miss Sniffen to procure that delicacy
at the nearest confectioner's, and match some zephyr worsteds at
the first fancy shop.  Fatal mistake.  She went--she never
returned!"  In a moment he resumed in a choking voice, "After a
week's weary waiting, I was obliged to put to sea again, bearing a
broken heart and the broken bank of her father.  I have never seen
her since."

"And you still love her?" asked the Amazon queen, excitedly.

"Aye, forever!"

"Noble youth.  Here take the reward of thy fidelity, for know,
Bromley Chitterlings, that I am Eliza Jane.  Wearied with waiting,
I embarked on a Peruvian guano ship--but it's a long story, dear."

"And altogether too thin," said the Boy Avenger, fiercely,
releasing himself from her encircling arms.  "Eliza Jane's age, a
year ago, was only thirteen, and you are forty, if a day."

"True," she returned, sadly, "but I have suffered much, and time
passes rapidly, and I've grown.  You would scarcely believe that
this is my own hair."

"I know not," he replied, in gloomy abstraction.

"Forgive my deceit," she returned.  "If you are affianced to
another, let me at least be--a mother to you."

The Pirate Prodigy started, and tears came to his eyes.  The scene
was affecting in the extreme.  Several of the oldest seamen--men
who had gone through scenes of suffering with tearless eyes and
unblanched cheeks--now retired to the spirit-room to conceal their
emotion.  A few went into caucus in the forecastle, and returned
with the request that the Amazonian queen should hereafter be known
as the "Queen of the Pirates' Isle."

"Mother!" gasped the Pirate Prodigy.

"My son!" screamed the Amazonian queen.

They embraced.  At the same moment a loud flop was heard on the
quarter-deck.  It was the forgotten mermaid, who, emerging from her
state-room and ascending the companion-way at that moment, had
fainted at the spectacle.  The Pirate Prodigy rushed to her side
with a bottle of smelling-salts.

She recovered slowly.  "Permit me," she said, rising with dignity,
"to leave the ship.  I am unaccustomed to such conduct."

"Hear me--she is my mother!"

"She certainly is old enough to be," replied the mermaid; "and to
speak of that being her own hair!" she added with a scornful laugh,
as she rearranged her own luxuriant tresses with characteristic
grace, a comb, and a small hand-mirror.

"If I couldn't afford any other clothes, I might wear a switch,
too!" hissed the Amazonian queen.  "I suppose you don't dye it on
account of the salt water.  But perhaps you prefer green, dear?"

"A little salt water might improve your own complexion, love."

"Fishwoman!" screamed the Amazonian queen.

"Bloomerite!" shrieked the mermaid.

In another instant they had seized each other.

"Mutiny!  Overboard with them!" cried the Pirate Prodigy, rising to
the occasion, and casting aside all human affection in the peril of
the moment.

A plank was brought and two women placed upon it.

"After you, dear," said the mermaid, significantly, to the
Amazonian queen; "you're the oldest."

"Thank you!" said the Amazonian queen, stepping back.  "Fish is
always served first."

Stung by the insult, with a wild scream of rage, the mermaid
grappled her in her arms and leaped into the sea.

As the waters closed over them forever, the Pirate Prodigy sprang
to his feet.  "Up with the black flag, and bear away for New
London," he shouted in trumpet-like tones.  "Ha, ha!  Once more the
Rover is free!"

Indeed it was too true.  In that fatal moment he had again loosed
himself from the trammels of human feeling, and was once more the
Boy Avenger.


CHAPTER III


Again I must ask my young friends to mount my hippogriff and hie
with me to the almost inaccessible heights of the Rocky Mountains.
There, for years, a band of wild and untamable savages, known as
the "Pigeon Feet," had resisted the blankets and Bibles of
civilization.  For years the trails leading to their camp were
marked by the bones of teamsters and broken wagons, and the trees
were decked with the drying scalp locks of women and children.  The
boldest of military leaders hesitated to attack them in their
fortresses, and prudently left the scalping knives, rifles, powder,
and shot, provided by a paternal government for their welfare,
lying on the ground a few miles from their encampment, with the
request that they were not to be used until the military had safely
retired.  Hitherto, save an occasional incursion into the territory
of the "Knock-knees," a rival tribe, they had limited their
depredations to the vicinity.

But lately a baleful change had come over them.  Acting under some
evil influence, they now pushed their warfare into the white
settlements, carrying fire and destruction with them.  Again and
again had the government offered them a free pass to Washington and
the privilege of being photographed, but under the same evil
guidance they refused.  There was a singular mystery in their mode
of aggression.  School-houses were always burned, the schoolmasters
taken into captivity, and never again heard from.  A palace car on
the Union Pacific Railway, containing an excursion party of
teachers en route to San Francisco, was surrounded, its inmates
captured, and--their vacancies in the school catalogue never again
filled.  Even a Board of Educational Examiners, proceeding to
Cheyenne, were taken prisoners, and obliged to answer questions
they themselves had proposed, amidst horrible tortures.  By degrees
these atrocities were traced to the malign influence of a new chief
of the tribe.  As yet little was known of him but through his
baleful appellations, "Young Man who Goes for his Teacher," and "He
Lifts the Hair of the School Marm."  He was said to be small and
exceedingly youthful in appearance.  Indeed, his earlier
appellative, "He Wipes his Nose on his Sleeve," was said to have
been given to him to indicate his still boy-like habits.

It was night in the encampment and among the lodges of the "Pigeon
Toes."  Dusky maidens flitted in and out among the camp-fires like
brown moths, cooking the toothsome buffalo hump, frying the
fragrant bear's meat, and stewing the esculent bean for the braves.
For a few favored ones spitted grasshoppers were reserved as a rare
delicacy, although the proud Spartan soul of their chief scorned
all such luxuries.

He was seated alone in his wigwam, attended only by the gentle
Mushymush, fairest of the "Pigeon Feet" maidens.  Nowhere were the
characteristics of her great tribe more plainly shown than in the
little feet that lapped over each other in walking.  A single
glance at the chief was sufficient to show the truth of the wild
rumors respecting his youth.  He was scarcely twelve, of proud and
lofty bearing, and clad completely in wrappings of various-colored
scalloped cloths, which gave him the appearance of a somewhat
extra-sized pen-wiper.  An enormous eagle's feather, torn from the
wing of a bald eagle who once attempted to carry him away,
completed his attire.  It was also the memento of one of his most
superhuman feats of courage.  He would undoubtedly have scalped the
eagle but that nature had anticipated him.

"Why is the Great Chief sad?" asked Mushymush, softly.  "Does his
soul still yearn for the blood of the pale-faced teachers?  Did not
the scalping of two professors of geology in the Yale exploring
party satisfy his warrior's heart yesterday?  Has he forgotten that
Hayden and Clarence King are still to follow?  Shall his own
Mushymush bring him a botanist to-morrow?  Speak, for the silence
of my brother lies on my heart like the snow on the mountain, and
checks the flow of my speech."

Still the proud Boy Chief sat silent.  Suddenly he said: "Hist!"
and rose to his feet.  Taking a long rifle from the ground he
adjusted its sight.  Exactly seven miles away on the slope of the
mountain the figure of a man was seen walking.  The Boy Chief
raised the rifle to his unerring eye and fired.  The man fell.

A scout was dispatched to scalp and search the body.  He presently
returned.

"Who was the pale face?" eagerly asked the chief.

"A life insurance agent."

A dark scowl settled on the face of the chief.

"I thought it was a book-peddler."

"Why is my brother's heart sore against the book-peddler?" asked
Mushymush.

"Because," said the Boy Chief, fiercely, "I am again without my
regular dime novel, and I thought he might have one in his pack.
Hear me, Mushymush; the United States mails no longer bring me my
'Young America,' or my 'Boys' and Girls' Weekly.'  I find it
impossible, even with my fastest scouts, to keep up with the rear
of General Howard, and replenish my literature from the sutler's
wagon.  Without a dime novel or a 'Young America,' how am I to keep
up this Injin business?"

Mushymush remained in meditation a single moment.  Then she looked
up proudly.

"My brother has spoken.  It is well.  He shall have his dime novel.
He shall know what kind of a hair-pin his sister Mushymush is."

And she arose and gamboled lightly as the fawn out of his presence.

In two hours she returned.  In one hand she held three small flaxen
scalps, in the other "The Boy Marauder," complete in one volume,
price ten cents.

"Three pale-faced children," she gasped, "were reading it in the
tail end of an emigrant wagon.  I crept up to them softly.  Their
parents are still unaware of the accident," and she sank helpless
at his feet.

"Noble girl!" said the Boy Chief, gazing proudly on her prostrate
form; "and these are the people that a military despotism expects
to subdue!"


CHAPTER IV


But the capture of several wagon-loads of commissary whisky, and
the destruction of two tons of stationery intended for the general
commanding, which interfered with his regular correspondence with
the War Department, at last awakened the United States military
authorities to active exertion.  A quantity of troops were massed
before the "Pigeon Feet" encampment, and an attack was hourly
imminent.

"Shine your boots, sir?"

It was the voice of a youth in humble attire, standing before the
flap of the commanding general's tent.

The General raised his head from his correspondence.

"Ah," he said, looking down on the humble boy, "I see; I shall
write that the appliances of civilization move steadily forward
with the army.  Yes," he added, "you may shine my military boots.
You understand, however, that to get your pay you must first--"

"Make a requisition on the commissary-general, have it certified to
by the quartermaster, countersigned by the post-adjutant, and
submitted by you to the War Department--"

"And charged as stationery," added the General, gently.  "You are,
I see, an intelligent and thoughtful boy.  I trust you neither use
whisky, tobacco, nor are ever profane?"

"I promised my sainted mother--"

"Enough!  Go on with your blacking; I have to lead the attack on
the 'Pigeon Feet' at eight precisely.  It is now half-past seven,"
said the General, consulting a large kitchen clock that stood in
the corner of his tent.

The little boot-black looked up; the General was absorbed in his
correspondence.  The boot-black drew a tin putty blower from his
pocket, took unerring aim, and nailed in a single shot the minute
hand to the dial.  Going on with his blacking, yet stopping ever
and anon to glance over the General's plan of campaign, spread on
the table before him, he was at last interrupted by the entrance of
an officer.

"Everything is ready for the attack, General.  It is now eight
o'clock."

"Impossible!  It is only half-past seven."

"But my watch and the watches of your staff--"

"Are regulated by my kitchen clock, that has been in my family for
years.  Enough!  It is only half-past seven."

The officer retired; the boot-black had finished one boot.  Another
officer appeared.

"Instead of attacking the enemy, General, we are attacked
ourselves.  Our pickets are already driven in."

"Military pickets should not differ from other pickets,"
interrupted the boot-black, modestly.  "To stand firmly they should
be well driven in."

"Ha! there is something in that," said the General, thoughtfully.
"But who are you, who speak thus?"

Rising to his full height, the boot-black threw off his outer rags,
and revealed the figure of the Boy Chief of the "Pigeon Feet."

"Treason!" shrieked the General; "order an advance along the whole
line."

But in vain.  The next moment he fell beneath the tomahawk of the
Boy Chief, and within the next quarter of an hour the United States
Army was dispersed.  Thus ended the battle of Boot-black Creek.


CHAPTER V


And yet the Boy Chief was not entirely happy.  Indeed, at times he
seriously thought of accepting the invitation extended by the Great
Chief at Washington, immediately after the massacre of the
soldiers, and once more revisiting the haunts of civilization.  His
soul sickened in feverish inactivity; schoolmasters palled on his
taste; he had introduced base ball, blind hooky, marbles, and peg-
top among his Indian subjects, but only with indifferent success.
The squaws insisted in boring holes through the china alleys and
wearing them as necklaces; his warriors stuck spikes in their base
ball bats and made war clubs of them.  He could not but feel, too,
that the gentle Mushymush, although devoted to her pale-faced
brother, was deficient in culinary education.  Her mince pies were
abominable; her jam far inferior to that made by his Aunt Sally of
Doemville.  Only an unexpected incident kept him equally from the
extreme of listless Sybaritic indulgence, or of morbid cynicism.
Indeed, at the age of twelve, he already had become disgusted with
existence.

He had returned to his wigwam after an exhausting buffalo hunt in
which he had slain two hundred and seventy-five buffalos with his
own hand, not counting the individual buffalo on which he had
leaped so as to join the herd, and which he afterward led into the
camp a captive and a present to the lovely Mushymush.  He had
scalped two express riders and a correspondent of the "New York
Herald"; had despoiled the Overland Mail Stage of a quantity of
vouchers which enabled him to draw double rations from the
government, and was reclining on a bear skin, smoking and thinking
of the vanity of human endeavor, when a scout entered, saying that
a pale-face youth had demanded access to his person.

"Is he a commissioner?  If so, say that the red man is rapidly
passing to the happy hunting-grounds of his fathers, and now
desires only peace, blankets, and ammunition; obtain the latter and
then scalp the commissioner."

"But it is only a youth who asks an interview."

"Does he look like an insurance agent?  If so, say that I have
already policies in three Hartford companies.  Meanwhile prepare
the stake, and see that the squaws are ready with their implements
of torture."

The youth was admitted; he was evidently only half the age of the
Boy Chief.  As he entered the wigwam and stood revealed to his host
they both started.  In another moment they were locked in each
other's arms.

"Jenky, old boy!"

"Bromley, old fel!"

B. F. Jenkins, for such was the name of the Boy Chief, was the
first to recover his calmness.  Turning to his warriors he said,
proudly--

"Let my children retire while I speak to the agent of our Great
Father in Washington.  Hereafter no latch keys will be provided for
the wigwams of the warriors.  The practice of late hours must be
discouraged."

"How!" said the warriors, and instantly retired.

"Whisper," said Jenkins, drawing his friend aside; "I am known here
only as the Boy Chief of the 'Pigeon toes.'"

"And I," said Bromley Chitterlings, proudly, "am known everywhere
as the Pirate Prodigy--the Boy Avenger of the Patagonian Coast."

"But how came you here?"

"Listen!  My pirate brig, the 'Lively Mermaid,' now lies at
Meiggs's Wharf in San Francisco, disguised as a Mendocino lumber
vessel.  My pirate crew accompanied me here in a palace car from
San Francisco."

"It must have been expensive," said the prudent Jenkins.

"It was, but they defrayed it by a collection from the other
passengers--you understand, an enforced collection.  The papers
will be full of it to-morrow.  Do you take the 'New York Sun'?"

"No; I dislike their Indian policy.  But why are you here?"

"Hear me, Jenk!  'Tis a long and a sad story.  The lovely Eliza J.
Sniffen, who fled with me from Doemville, was seized by her parents
and torn from my arms at New Rochelle.  Reduced to poverty by the
breaking of the savings bank of which he was president,--a failure
to which I largely contributed, and the profits of which I
enjoyed,--I have since ascertained that Eliza Jane Sniffen was
forced to become a schoolmistress, departed to take charge of a
seminary in Colorado, and since then has never been heard from."

Why did the Boy Chief turn pale, and clutch at the tent-pole for
support?  Why, indeed!

"Eliza J. Sniffen," gasped Jenkins, "aged fourteen, red-haired,
with a slight tendency to strabismus?"

"The same."

"Heaven help me!  She died by my mandate!"

"Traitor!" shrieked Chitterlings, rushing at Jenkins with a drawn
poniard.

But a figure interposed.  The slight girlish form of Mushymush with
outstretched hands stood between the exasperated Pirate Prodigy and
the Boy Chief.

"Forbear," she said sternly to Chitterlings; "you know not what you
do."

The two youths paused.

"Hear me," she said rapidly.  "When captured in a confectioner's
shop at New Rochelle, E. J. Sniffen was taken back to poverty.  She
resolved to become a schoolmistress.  Hearing of an opening in the
West, she proceeded to Colorado to take exclusive charge of the
pensionnat of Mad. Choflie, late of Paris.  On the way thither she
was captured by the emissaries of the Boy Chief--"

"In consummation of a fatal vow I made never to spare educational
instructors," interrupted Jenkins.

"But in her captivity," continued Mushymush, "she managed to stain
her face with poke-berry juice, and mingling with the Indian
maidens was enabled to pass for one of the tribe.  Once undetected,
she boldly ingratiated herself with the Boy Chief,--how honestly
and devotedly he best can tell,--for I, Mushymush, the little
sister of the Boy Chief, am Eliza Jane Sniffen."

The Pirate Prodigy clasped her in his arms.  The Boy Chief, raising
his hand, ejaculated:--

"Bless you, my children!"

"There is but one thing wanting to complete this reunion," said
Chitterlings, after a pause, but the hurried entrance of a scout
stopped his utterance.

"A commissioner from the Great Father in Washington."

"Scalp him!" shrieked the Boy Chief; "this is no time for
diplomatic trifling."

"We have, but he still insists upon seeing you, and has sent in his
card."

The Boy Chief took it, and read aloud, in agonized accents:--

"Charles F. Hall Golightly, late Page in United States Senate, and
Acting Commissioner of United States."

In another moment, Golightly, pale, bleeding, and, as it were,
prematurely bald, but still cold and intellectual, entered the
wigwam.  They fell upon his neck and begged his forgiveness.

"Don't mention it," he said, quietly; "these things must and will
happen under our present system of government.  My story is brief.
Obtaining political influence through caucuses, I became at last
Page in the Senate.  Through the exertions of political friends I
was appointed clerk to the commissioner whose functions I now
represent.  Knowing through political spies in your own camp who
you were, I acted upon the physical fears of the commissioner, who
was an ex-clergyman, and easily induced him to deputize me to
consult with you.  In doing so, I have lost my scalp, but as the
hirsute signs of juvenility have worked against my political
progress I do not regret it.  As a partially bald young man I shall
have more power.  The terms that I have to offer are simply this:
you can do everything you want, go anywhere you choose, if you will
only leave this place.  I have a hundred thousand-dollar draft on
the United States Treasury in my pocket at your immediate
disposal."

"But what's to become of me?" asked Chitterlings.

"Your case has already been under advisement.  The Secretary of
State, who is an intelligent man, is determined to recognize you as
de jure and de facto the only loyal representative of the
Patagonian government.  You may safely proceed to Washington as its
envoy extraordinary.  I dine with the secretary next week."

"And yourself, old fellow?"

"I only wish that twenty years from now you will recognize by your
influence and votes the rights of C. F. H. Golightly to the
presidency."

And here ends our story.  Trusting that my dear young friends may
take whatever example or moral their respective parents and
guardians may deem fittest from these pages, I hope in future years
to portray further the career of those three young heroes I have
already introduced in the spring-time of life to their charitable
consideration.



THE MAN WHOSE YOKE WAS NOT EASY


He was a spare man, and, physically, an ill-conditioned man, but at
first glance scarcely a seedy man.  The indications of reduced
circumstances in the male of the better class are, I fancy, first
visible in the boots and shirt; the boots offensively exhibiting a
degree of polish inconsistent with their dilapidated condition, and
the shirt showing an extent of ostentatious surface that is
invariably fatal to the threadbare waist-coat that it partially
covers.  He was a pale man, and, I fancied, still paler from his
black clothes.

He handed me a note.

It was from a certain physician; a man of broad culture and broader
experience; a man who had devoted the greater part of his active
life to the alleviation of sorrow and suffering; a man who had
lived up to the noble vows of a noble profession; a man who locked
in his honorable breast the secrets of a hundred families, whose
face was as kindly, whose touch was as gentle, in the wards of the
great public hospitals as it was beside the laced curtains of the
dying Narcissa; a man who, through long contact with suffering, had
acquired a universal tenderness and breadth of kindly philosophy; a
man who, day and night, was at the beck and call of anguish; a man
who never asked the creed, belief, moral or worldly standing of the
sufferer, or even his ability to pay the few coins that enabled him
(the physician) to exist and practice his calling; in brief, a man
who so nearly lived up to the example of the Great Master that it
seems strange I am writing of him as a doctor of medicine and not
of divinity.

The note was in pencil, characteristically brief, and ran thus:--

"Here is the man I spoke of.  He ought to be good material for
you."

For a moment I sat looking from the note to the man, and sounding
the "dim perilous depths" of my memory for the meaning of this
mysterious communication.  The good "material," however, soon
relieved my embarrassment by putting his hand on his waistcoat,
coming toward me, and saying, "It is just here, you can feel it."

It was not necessary for me to do so.  In a flash I remembered that
my medical friend had told me of a certain poor patient, once a
soldier, who, among his other trials and uncertainties, was
afflicted with an aneurism caused by the buckle of his knapsack
pressing upon the arch of the aorta.  It was liable to burst at any
shock or any moment.  The poor fellow's yoke had indeed been too
heavy.

In the presence of such a tremendous possibility I think for an
instant I felt anxious only about myself.  What I should do; how
dispose of the body; how explain the circumstance of his taking
off; how evade the ubiquitous reporter and the coroner's inquest;
how a suspicion might arise that I had in some way, through
negligence or for some dark purpose, unknown to the jury,
precipitated the catastrophe, all flashed before me.  Even the
note, with its darkly suggestive offer of "good material" for me,
looked diabolically significant.  What might not an intelligent
lawyer make of it?

I tore it up instantly, and with feverish courtesy begged him to be
seated.

"You don't care to feel it?" he asked, a little anxiously.

"No."

"Nor see it?"

"No."

He sighed, a trifle sadly, as if I had rejected the only favor he
could bestow.  I saw at once that he had been under frequent
exhibition to the doctors, and that he was, perhaps, a trifle vain
of this attention.  This perception was corroborated a moment later
by his producing a copy of a medical magazine, with a remark that
on the sixth page I would find a full statement of his case.

"Could I serve him in any way?" I asked.

It appeared that I could.  If I could help him to any light
employment, something that did not require any great physical
exertion or mental excitement, he would be thankful.  But he wanted
me to understand that he was not, strictly speaking, a poor man;
that some years before the discovery of his fatal complaint he had
taken out a life insurance policy for five thousand dollars, and
that he had raked and scraped enough together to pay it up, and
that he would not leave his wife and four children destitute.  "You
see," he added, "if I could find some sort of light work to do, and
kinder sled along, you know--until--"

He stopped, awkwardly.

I have heard several noted actors thrill their audiences with a
single phrase.  I think I never was as honestly moved by any spoken
word as that "until," or the pause that followed it.  He was
evidently quite unconscious of its effect, for as I took a seat
beside him on the sofa, and looked more closely in his waxen face,
I could see that he was evidently embarrassed, and would have
explained himself further, if I had not stopped him.

Possibly it was the dramatic idea, or possibly chance; but a few
days afterward, meeting a certain kind-hearted theatrical manager,
I asked him if he had any light employment for a man who was an
invalid?  "Can he walk?"  "Yes."  "Stand up for fifteen minutes?"
"Yes."  "Then I'll take him.  He'll do for the last scene in the
'Destruction of Sennacherib'--it's a tremendous thing, you know.
We'll have two thousand people on the stage."  I was a trifle
alarmed at the title, and ventured to suggest (without betraying my
poor friend's secret that he could not actively engage in the
"Destruction of Sennacherib," and that even the spectacle of it
might be too much for him.  "Needn't see it at all," said my
managerial friend; "put him in front, nothing to do but march in
and march out, and dodge curtain."

He was engaged.  I admit I was at times haunted by grave doubts as
to whether I should not have informed the manager of his physical
condition, and the possibility that he might some evening
perpetrate a real tragedy on the mimic stage, but on the first
performance of "The Destruction of Sennacherib," which I
conscientiously attended, I was somewhat relieved.  I had often
been amused with the placid way in which the chorus in the opera
invariably received the most astounding information, and witnessed
the most appalling tragedies by poison or the block, without
anything more than a vocal protest or command, always delivered to
the audience and never to the actors, but I think my poor friend's
utter impassiveness to the wild carnage and the terrible
exhibitions of incendiarism that were going on around him
transcended even that.  Dressed in a costume that seemed to be the
very soul of anachronism, he stood a little outside the proscenium,
holding a spear, the other hand pressed apparently upon the secret
within his breast, calmly surveying, with his waxen face, the gay
auditorium.  I could not help thinking that there was a certain
pride visible even in his placid features, as of one who was
conscious that at any moment he might change this simulated
catastrophe into real terror.  I could not help saying this to the
Doctor, who was with me.  "Yes," he said with professional
exactitude; "when it happens he'll throw his arms up above his
head, utter an ejaculation, and fall forward on his face,--it's a
singular thing, they always fall forward on their face,--and
they'll pick up the man as dead as Julius Caesar."

After that, I used to go night after night, with a certain hideous
fascination; but, while it will be remembered the "Destruction of
Sennacherib" had a tremendous run, it will also be remembered that
not a single life was really lost during its representation.

It was only a few weeks after this modest first appearance on the
boards of "The Man with an Aneurism," that, happening to be at
dinner party of practical business men, I sought to interest them
with the details of the above story, delivered with such skill and
pathos as I could command.  I regret to say that, as a pathetic
story, it for a moment seemed to be a dead failure.  At last a
prominent banker sitting next to me turned to me with the awful
question: "Why don't your friend try to realize on his life
insurance?"  I begged his pardon, I didn't quite understand.  "Oh,
discount, sell out.  Look here--(after a pause).  Let him assign
his policy to me, it's not much of a risk, on your statement.
Well--I'll give him his five thousand dollars, clear."

And he did.  Under the advice of this cool-headed--I think I may
add warm-hearted--banker, "The Man with an Aneurism" invested his
money in the name of and for the benefit of his wife in certain
securities that paid him a small but regular stipend.  But he still
continued upon the boards of the theatre.

By reason of some business engagements that called me away from the
city, I did not see my friend the physician for three months
afterward.  When I did I asked tidings of The Man with the
Aneurism.  The Doctor's kind face grew sad.  "I'm afraid--that is,
I don't exactly know whether I've good news or bad.  Did you ever
see his wife?"

I never had.

"Well, she was younger than he, and rather attractive.  One of
those doll-faced women.  You remember, he settled that life
insurance policy on her and the children: she might have waited;
she didn't.  The other day she eloped with some fellow, I don't
remember his name, with the children and the five thousand
dollars."

"And the shock killed him," I said with poetic promptitude.

"No--that is--not yet; I saw him yesterday," said the Doctor, with
conscientious professional precision, looking over his list of
calls.

"Well, where is the poor fellow now?"

"He's still at the theatre.  James, if these powders are called
for, you'll find them, here in this envelope.  Tell Mrs. Blank I'll
be there at seven--and she can give the baby this until I come.
Say there's no danger.  These women are an awful bother!  Yes, he's
at the theatre yet.  Which way are you going?  Down town?  Why
can't you step into my carriage, and I'll give you a lift, and
we'll talk on the way down?  Well--he's at the theatre yet.  And--
and--do you remember the 'Destruction of Sennacherib?'  No?  Yes
you do.  You remember that woman in pink, who pirouetted in the
famous ballet scene!  You don't?  Why, yes you do!  Well, I
imagine, of course I don't know, it's only a summary diagnosis, but
I imagine that our friend with the aneurism has attached himself to
her."

"Doctor, you horrify me."

"There are more things, Mr. Poet, in heaven and earth than are yet
dreamt of in your philosophy.  Listen.  My diagnosis may be wrong,
but that woman called the other day at my office to ask about him,
his health, and general condition.  I told her the truth--and she
FAINTED.  It was about as dead a faint as I ever saw; I was nearly
an hour in bringing her out of it.  Of course it was the heat of
the room, her exertions the preceding week, and I prescribed for
her.  Queer, wasn't it?  Now, if I were a writer, and had your
faculty, I'd make something out of that."

"But how is his general health?"

"Oh, about the same.  He can't evade what will come, you know, at
any moment.  He was up here the other day.  Why, the pulsation was
as plain--why, the entire arch of the aorta--  What! you get out
here?  Good-by."

Of course no moralist, no man writing for a sensitive and strictly
virtuous public, could further interest himself in this man.  So I
dismissed him at once from my mind, and returned to the literary
contemplation of virtue that was clearly and positively defined,
and of Sin, that invariably commenced with a capital letter.  That
this man, in his awful condition, hovering on the verge of
eternity, should allow himself to be attracted by--but it was
horrible to contemplate.

Nevertheless, a month afterwards, I was returning from a festivity
with my intimate friend Smith, my distinguished friend Jobling, my
most respectable friend Robinson, and my wittiest friend Jones.  It
was a clear, star-lit morning, and we seemed to hold the broad,
beautiful avenue to ourselves; and I fear we acted as if it were
so.  As we hilariously passed the corner of Eighteenth Street, a
coupe rolled by, and I suddenly heard my name called from its
gloomy depths.

"I beg your pardon," said the Doctor, as his driver drew up by the
sidewalk, "but I've some news for you.  I've just been to see our
poor friend ----.  Of course I was too late.  He was gone in a
flash."

"What! dead?"

"As Pharaoh!  In an instant, just as I said.  You see, the rupture
took place in the descending arch of--"

"But, Doctor!"

"It's a queer story.  Am I keeping you from your friends?  No?
Well, you see she--that woman I spoke of--had written a note to him
based on what I had told her.  He got it, and dropped in his
dressing-room, dead as a herring."

"How could she have been so cruel, knowing his condition?  She
might, with woman's tact, have rejected him less abruptly."

"Yes; but you're all wrong.  By Jove! she ACCEPTED him! was willing
to marry him!"

"What?"

"Yes.  Don't you see?  It was joy that killed him.  Gad, we never
thought of THAT!  Queer, ain't it?  See here, don't you think you
might make a story out of it?"

"But, Doctor, it hasn't got any moral."

"Humph!  That's so.  Good morning.  Drive on, John."



MY FRIEND, THE TRAMP


I had been sauntering over the clover downs of a certain noted New
England seaport.  It was a Sabbath morning, so singularly reposeful
and gracious, so replete with the significance of the seventh day
of rest, that even the Sabbath bells ringing a mile away over the
salt marshes had little that was monitory, mandatory, or even
supplicatory in their drowsy voices.  Rather they seemed to call
from their cloudy towers, like some renegade muezzin: "Sleep is
better than prayer; sleep on, O sons of the Puritans!  Slumber
still, O deacons and vestrymen!  Let, oh let those feet that are
swift to wickedness curl up beneath thee! those palms that are
itching for the shekels of the ungodly lie clasped beneath thy
pillow!  Sleep is better than prayer."

And, indeed, though it was high morning, sleep was still in the
air.  Wrought upon at last by the combined influences of sea and
sky and atmosphere, I succumbed, and lay down on one of the
boulders of a little stony slope that gave upon the sea.  The great
Atlantic lay before me, not yet quite awake, but slowly heaving the
rhythmical expiration of slumber.  There was no sail visible in the
misty horizon.  There was nothing to do but to lie and stare at the
unwinking ether.

Suddenly I became aware of the strong fumes of tobacco.  Turning my
head, I saw a pale blue smoke curling up from behind an adjacent
boulder.  Rising, and climbing over the intermediate granite, I
came upon a little hollow, in which, comfortably extended on the
mosses and lichens, lay a powerfully-built man.  He was very
ragged; he was very dirty; there was a strong suggestion about him
of his having too much hair, too much nail, too much perspiration;
too much of those superfluous excrescences and exudations that
society and civilization strive to keep under.  But it was
noticeable that he had not much of anything else.  It was The
Tramp.

With that swift severity with which we always visit rebuke upon the
person who happens to present any one of our vices offensively
before us, in his own person, I was deeply indignant at his
laziness.  Perhaps I showed it in my manner, for he rose to a half-
sitting attitude, returned my stare apologetically, and made a
movement toward knocking the fire from his pipe against the
granite.

"Shure, sur, and if I'd belaved that I was trispassin on yer
honor's grounds, it's meself that would hev laid down on the say
shore and takin' the salt waves for me blankits.  But it's
sivinteen miles I've walked this blessed noight, with nothin' to
sustain me, and hevin' a mortal wakeness to fight wid in me bowels,
by reason of starvation, and only a bit o' baccy that the Widdy
Maloney gi' me at the cross roads, to kape me up entoirley.  But it
was the dark day I left me home in Milwaukee to walk to Boston; and
if ye'll oblige a lone man who has left a wife and six children in
Milwaukee, wid the loan of twenty-five cints, furninst the time he
gits worruk, God'll be good to ye."

It instantly flashed through my mind that the man before me had the
previous night partaken of the kitchen hospitality of my little
cottage, two miles away.  That he presented himself in the guise of
a distressed fisherman, mulcted of his wages by an inhuman captain;
that he had a wife lying sick of consumption in the next village,
and two children, one of whom was a cripple, wandering in the
streets of Boston.  I remembered that this tremendous indictment
against Fortune touched the family, and that the distressed
fisherman was provided with clothes, food, and some small change.
The food and small change had disappeared, but the garments for the
consumptive wife, where were they?  He had been using them for a
pillow.

I instantly pointed out this fact, and charged him with the
deception.  To my surprise, he took it quietly, and even a little
complacently.

"Bedad, yer roight; ye see, sur" (confidentially), "ye see, sur,
until I get worruk--and it's worruk I'm lukin' for--I have to
desave now and thin to shute the locality.  Ah, God save us! but on
the say-coast thay'r that har-rud upon thim that don't belong to
the say."

I ventured to suggest that a strong, healthy man like him might
have found work somewhere between Milwaukee and Boston.

"Ah, but ye see I got free passage on a freight train, and didn't
sthop.  It was in the Aist that I expected to find worruk."

"Have you any trade?"

"Trade, is it?  I'm a brickmaker, God knows, and many's the lift
I've had at makin' bricks in Milwaukee.  Shure, I've as aisy a hand
at it as any man.  Maybe yer honor might know of a kill hereabout?"

Now to my certain knowledge, there was not a brick kiln within
fifty miles of that spot, and of all unlikely places to find one
would have been this sandy peninsula, given up to the summer
residences of a few wealthy people.  Yet I could not help admiring
the assumption of the scamp, who knew this fact as well as myself.
But I said, "I can give you work for a day or two;" and, bidding
him gather up his sick wife's apparel, led the way across the downs
to my cottage.  At first I think the offer took him by surprise,
and gave him some consternation, but he presently recovered his
spirits, and almost instantly his speech.  "Ah, worruk, is it?  God
be praised! it's meself that's ready and willin'.  'Though maybe me
hand is spoilt wid brickmakin'."

I assured him that the work I would give him would require no
delicate manipulation, and so we fared on over the sleepy downs.
But I could not help noticing that, although an invalid, I was a
much better pedestrian than my companion, frequently leaving him
behind, and that even as a "tramp," he was etymologically an
impostor.  He had a way of lingering beside the fences we had to
climb over, as if to continue more confidentially the history of
his misfortunes and troubles, which he was delivering to me during
our homeward walk, and I noticed that he could seldom resist the
invitation of a mossy boulder or a tussock of salt grass.  "Ye see,
sur," he would say, suddenly sitting down, "it's along uv me
misfortunes beginnin' in Milwaukee that--" and it was not until I
was out of hearing that he would languidly gather his traps again
and saunter after me.  When I reached my own garden gate he leaned
for a moment over it, with both of his powerful arms extended
downward, and said, "Ah, but it's a blessin' that Sunday comes to
give rest fur the wake and the weary, and them as walks sivinteen
miles to get it."  Of course I took the hint.  There was evidently
no work to be had from my friend, the Tramp, that day.  Yet his
countenance brightened as he saw the limited extent of my domain,
and observed that the garden, so called, was only a flower-bed
about twenty-five by ten.  As he had doubtless before this been
utilized, to the extent of his capacity, in digging, he had
probably expected that kind of work; and I daresay I discomfitted
him by pointing him to an almost leveled stone wall, about twenty
feet long, with the remark that his work would be the rebuilding of
that stone wall, with stone brought from the neighboring slopes.
In a few moments he was comfortably provided for in the kitchen,
where the cook, a woman of his own nativity, apparently, "chaffed"
him with a raillery that was to me quite unintelligible.  Yet I
noticed that when, at sunset, he accompanied Bridget to the spring
for water, ostentatiously flourishing the empty bucket in his hand,
when they returned in the gloaming Bridget was carrying the water,
and my friend, the Tramp, was some paces behind her, cheerfully
"colloguing," and picking blackberries.

At seven the next morning he started in cheerfully to work.  At
nine, A. M., he had placed three large stones on the first course
in position, an hour having been spent in looking for a pick and
hammer, and in the incidental "chaffing" with Bridget.  At ten
o'clock I went to overlook his work; it was a rash action, as it
caused him to respectfully doff his hat, discontinue his labors,
and lean back against the fence in cheerful and easy conservation.
"Are you fond uv blackberries, Captain?"  I told him that the
children were in the habit of getting them from the meadow beyond,
hoping to estop the suggestion I knew was coming.  "Ah, but,
Captain, it's meself that with wanderin' and havin' nothin' to pass
me lips but the berries I'd pick from the hedges,--it's meself
knows where to find thim.  Sure, it's yer childer, and foine boys
they are, Captain, that's besaching me to go wid 'em to the place,
known'st only to meself."  It is unnecessary to say that he
triumphed.  After the manner of vagabonds of all degrees, he had
enlisted the women and children on his side--and my friend, the
Tramp, had his own way.  He departed at eleven and returned at
four, P. M., with a tin dinner-pail half filled.  On interrogating
the boys it appeared that they had had a "bully time," but on
cross-examination it came out that THEY had picked the berries.
From four to six, three more stones were laid, and the arduous
labors of the day were over.  As I stood looking at the first
course of six stones, my friend, the Tramp, stretched his strong
arms out to their fullest extent and said: "Ay, but it's worruk
that's good for me; give me worruk, and it's all I'll be askin'
fur."

I ventured to suggest that he had not yet accomplished much.

"Wait till to-morror.  Ah, but ye'll see thin.  It's me hand that's
yet onaisy wid brick-makin' and sthrange to the shtones.  An ye'll
wait till to-morror?"

Unfortunately I did not wait.  An engagement took me away at an
early hour, and when I rode up to my cottage at noon my eyes were
greeted with the astonishing spectacle of my two boys hard at work
laying the courses of the stone wall, assisted by Bridget and
Norah, who were dragging stones from the hillsides, while
comfortably stretched on the top of the wall lay my friend, the
Tramp, quietly overseeing the operation with lazy and humorous
comment.  For an instant I was foolishly indignant, but he soon
brought me to my senses.  "Shure, sur, it's only larnin' the boys
the habits uv industhry I was--and may they niver know, be the same
token, what it is to worruk fur the bread betune their lips.  Shure
it's but makin' 'em think it play I was.  As fur the colleens
beyint in the kitchen, sure isn't it betther they was helping your
honor here than colloguing with themselves inside?"

Nevertheless, I thought it expedient to forbid henceforth any
interruption of servants or children with my friend's "worruk."
Perhaps it was the result of this embargo that the next morning
early the Tramp wanted to see me.

"And it's sorry I am to say it to ye, sur," he began, "but it's the
handlin' of this stun that's desthroyin' me touch at the brick-
makin', and it's better I should lave ye and find worruk at me own
thrade.  For it's worruk I am nadin'.  It isn't meself, Captain, to
ate the bread of oidleness here.  And so good-by to ye, and if it's
fifty cints ye can be givin' me ontil I'll find a kill--it's God
that'll repay ye."

He got the money.  But he got also conditionally a note from me to
my next neighbor, a wealthy retired physician, possessed of a large
domain, a man eminently practical and businesslike in his
management of it.  He employed many laborers on the sterile waste
he called his "farm," and it occurred to me that if there really
was any work in my friend, the Tramp, which my own indolence and
preoccupation had failed to bring out, he was the man to do it.

I met him a week after.  It was with some embarrassment that I
inquired after my friend, the Tramp.  "Oh, yes," he said,
reflectively, "let's see: he came Monday and left me Thursday.  He
was, I think, a stout, strong man, a well-meaning, good-humored
fellow, but afflicted with a most singular variety of diseases.
The first day I put him at work in the stables he developed chills
and fever caught in the swamps of Louisiana--"

"Excuse me," I said hurriedly, "you mean in Milwaukee!"

"I know what I'm talking about," returned the Doctor, testily; "he
told me his whole wretched story--his escape from the Confederate
service, the attack upon him by armed negroes, his concealment in
the bayous and swamps--"

"Go on, Doctor," I said, feebly; "you were speaking of his work."

"Yes.  Well, his system was full of malaria; the first day I had
him wrapped up in blankets, and dosed with quinine.  The next day
he was taken with all the symptoms of cholera morbus, and I had to
keep him up on brandy and capsicum.  Rheumatism set in on the
following day, and incapacitated him for work, and I concluded I
had better give him a note to the director of the City Hospital
than keep him here.  As a pathological study he was good; but as I
was looking for a man to help about the stable, I couldn't afford
to keep him in both capacities."

As I never could really tell when the Doctor was in joke or in
earnest, I dropped the subject.  And so my friend, the Tramp,
gradually faded from my memory, not however without leaving behind
him in the barn where he had slept a lingering flavor of whisky,
onions, and fluffiness.  But in two weeks this had gone, and the
"Shebang" (as my friends irreverently termed my habitation) knew
him no more.  Yet it was pleasant to think of him as having at last
found a job at brick-making, or having returned to his family at
Milwaukee, or making his Louisiana home once more happy with his
presence, or again tempting the fish-producing main--this time with
a noble and equitable captain.

It was a lovely August morning when I rode across the sandy
peninsula to visit a certain noted family, whereof all the sons
were valiant and the daughters beautiful.  The front of the house
was deserted, but on the rear veranda I heard the rustle of gowns,
and above it arose what seemed to be the voice of Ulysses, reciting
his wanderings.  There was no mistaking that voice, it was my
friend, the Tramp!

From what I could hastily gather from his speech, he had walked
from St. John, N. B., to rejoin a distressed wife in New York, who
was, however, living with opulent but objectionable relatives.
"An' shure, miss, I wouldn't be askin' ye the loan of a cint if I
could get worruk at me trade of carpet-wavin'--and maybe ye know of
some mannfacthory where they wave carpets beyant here.  Ah, miss,
and if ye don't give me a cint, it's enough for the loikes of me to
know that me troubles has brought the tears in the most beautiful
oiyes in the wurruld, and God bless ye for it, miss!"

Now I knew that the Most Beautiful Eyes in the World belonged to
one of the most sympathetic and tenderest hearts in the world, and
I felt that common justice demanded my interference between it and
one of the biggest scamps in the world.  So, without waiting to be
announced by the servant, I opened the door, and joined the group
on the veranda.

If I expected to touch the conscience of my friend, the Tramp, by a
dramatic entrance, I failed utterly; for no sooner did he see me,
than he instantly gave vent to a howl of delight, and, falling on
his knees before me, grasped my hand, and turned oratorically to
the ladies.

"Oh, but it's himself--himself that has come as a witness to me
carrakther!  Oh, but it's himself that lifted me four wakes ago,
when I was lyin' with a mortal wakeness on the say-coast, and tuk
me to his house.  Oh, but it's himself that shupported me over the
faldes, and whin the chills and faver came on me and I shivered wid
the cold, it was himself, God bless him, as sthripped the coat off
his back, and giv it me, sayin', 'Take it, Dinnis, it's shtarved
with the cowld say air ye'll be entoirely.'  Ah, but look at him--
will ye, miss!  Look at his swate, modist face--a blushin' like
your own, miss.  Ah! look at him, will ye?  He'll be denyin' of it
in a minit--may the blessin' uv God folly him.  Look at him, miss!
Ah, but it's a swate pair ye'd make! (the rascal knew I was a
married man).  Ah, miss, if you could see him wroightin' day and
night with such an illigant hand of his own--(he had evidently
believed from the gossip of my servants that I was a professor of
chirography)--if ye could see him, miss, as I have, ye'd be proud
of him."

He stopped out of breath.  I was so completely astounded I could
say nothing: the tremendous indictment I had framed to utter as I
opened the door vanished completely.  And as the Most Beautiful
Eyes in the Wurruld turned gratefully to mine--well--

I still retained enough principle to ask the ladies to withdraw,
while I would take upon myself the duty of examining into the case
of my friend, the Tramp, and giving him such relief as was
required.  (I did not know until afterward, however, that the
rascal had already despoiled their scant purses of three dollars
and fifty cents.)  When the door was closed upon them I turned upon
him.

"You infernal rascal!"

"Ah, Captain, and would ye be refusin' ME a carrakther and me
givin' YE such a one as Oi did!  God save us! but if ye'd hav' seen
the luk that the purty one give ye.  Well, before the chills and
faver bruk me spirits entirely, when I was a young man, and makin'
me tin dollars a week brick-makin', it's meself that wud hav'
given--"

"I consider," I broke in, "that a dollar is a fair price for your
story, and as I shall have to take it all back and expose you
before the next twenty-four hours pass, I think you had better
hasten to Milwaukee, New York, or Louisiana."

I handed him the dollar.  "Mind, I don't want to see your face
again."

"Ye wun't, captain."

And I did not.

But it so chanced that later in the season, when the migratory
inhabitants had flown to their hot-air registers in Boston and
Providence, I breakfasted with one who had lingered.  It was a
certain Boston lawyer,--replete with principle, honesty, self-
discipline, statistics, aesthetics, and a perfect consciousness of
possessing all these virtues, and a full recognition of their
market values.  I think he tolerated me as a kind of foreigner,
gently but firmly waiving all argument on any topic, frequently
distrusting my facts, generally my deductions, and always my ideas.
In conversation he always appeared to descend only half way down a
long moral and intellectual staircase, and always delivered his
conclusions over the balusters.

I had been speaking of my friend, the Tramp.  "There is but one way
of treating that class of impostors; it is simply to recognize the
fact that the law calls him a 'vagrant,' and makes his trade a
misdemeanor.  Any sentiment on the other side renders you particeps
criminis.  I don't know but an action would lie against you for
encouraging tramps.  Now, I have an efficacious way of dealing with
these gentry."  He rose and took a double-barreled fowling-piece
from the chimney.  "When a tramp appears on my property, I warn him
off.  If he persists, I fire on him--as I would on any criminal
trespasser."

"Fire on him?" I echoed in alarm.

"Yes--BUT WITH POWDER ONLY!  Of course HE doesn't know that.  But
he doesn't come back."

It struck me for the first time that possibly many other of my
friend's arguments might be only blank cartridges, and used to
frighten off other trespassing intellects.

"Of course, if the tramp still persisted, I would be justified in
using shot.  Last evening I had a visit from one.  He was coming
over the wall.  My shot gun was efficacious; you should have seen
him run!"

It was useless to argue with so positive a mind, and I dropped the
subject.  After breakfast I strolled over the downs, my friend
promising to join me as soon as he arranged some household
business.

It was a lovely, peaceful morning, not unlike the day when I first
met my friend, the Tramp.  The hush of a great benediction lay on
land and sea.  A few white sails twinkled afar, but sleepily; one
or two large ships were creeping in lazily, like my friend, the
Tramp.  A voice behind me startled me.

My host had rejoined me.  His face, however, looked a little
troubled.

"I just now learned something of importance," he began.  "It
appears that with all my precautions that Tramp has visited my
kitchen, and the servants have entertained him.  Yesterday morning,
it appears, while I was absent, he had the audacity to borrow my
gun to go duck-shooting.  At the end of two or three hours he
returned with two ducks and--the gun."

"That was, at least, honest."

"Yes--but!  That fool of a girl says that, as he handed back the
gun, he told her it was all right, and that he had loaded it up
again to save the master trouble."

I think I showed my concern in my face, for he added, hastily: "It
was only duck-shot; a few wouldn't hurt him!"

Nevertheless, we both walked on in silence for a moment.  "I
thought the gun kicked a little," he said at last, musingly; "but
the idea of--  Hallo! what's this?"

He stopped before the hollow where I had first seen my Tramp.  It
was deserted, but on the mosses there were spots of blood and
fragments of an old gown, blood-stained, as if used for bandages.
I looked at it closely: it was the gown intended for the
consumptive wife of my friend, the Tramp.

But my host was already nervously tracking the bloodstains that on
rock, moss, and boulder were steadily leading toward the sea.  When
I overtook him at last on the shore, he was standing before a flat
rock, on which lay a bundle I recognized, tied up in a
handkerchief, and a crooked grape-vine stick.

"He may have come here to wash his wounds--salt is a styptic," said
my host, who had recovered his correct precision of statement.

I said nothing, but looked toward the sea.  Whatever secret lay hid
in its breast, it kept it fast.  Whatever its calm eyes had seen
that summer night, it gave no reflection now.  It lay there
passive, imperturbable, and reticent.  But my friend, the Tramp,
was gone!



THE MAN FROM SOLANO


He came toward me out of an opera lobby, between the acts,--a
figure as remarkable as anything in the performance.  His clothes,
no two articles of which were of the same color, had the appearance
of having been purchased and put on only an hour or two before,--a
fact more directly established by the clothes-dealer's ticket which
still adhered to his coat-collar, giving the number, size, and
general dimensions of that garment somewhat obtrusively to an
uninterested public.  His trousers had a straight line down each
leg, as if he had been born flat but had since developed; and there
was another crease down his back, like those figures children cut
out of folded paper.  I may add that there was no consciousness of
this in his face, which was good-natured, and, but for a certain
squareness in the angle of his lower jaw, utterly uninteresting and
commonplace.

"You disremember me," he said, briefly, as he extended his hand,
"but I'm from Solano, in Californy.  I met you there in the spring
of '57.  I was tendin' sheep, and you was burnin' charcoal."

There was not the slightest trace of any intentional rudeness in
the reminder.  It was simply a statement of fact, and as such to be
accepted.

"What I hailed ye for was only this," he said, after I had shaken
hands with him.  "I saw you a minnit ago standin' over in yon box--
chirpin' with a lady--a young lady, peart and pretty.  Might you be
telling me her name?"

I gave him the name of a certain noted belle of a neighboring city,
who had lately stirred the hearts of the metropolis, and who was
especially admired by the brilliant and fascinating young
Dashboard, who stood beside me.

The Man from Solano mused for a moment, and then said, "Thet's so!
thet's the name!  It's the same gal!"

"You have met her, then?" I asked, in surprise.

"Ye-es," he responded, slowly: "I met her about fower months ago.
She'd bin makin' a tour of Californy with some friends, and I first
saw her aboard the cars this side of Reno.  She lost her baggage-
checks, and I found them on the floor and gave 'em back to her, and
she thanked me.  I reckon now it would be about the square thing to
go over thar and sorter recognize her."  He stopped a moment, and
looked at us inquiringly.

"My dear sir," struck in the brilliant and fascinating Dashboard,
"if your hesitation proceeds from any doubt as to the propriety of
your attire, I beg you to dismiss it from your mind at once.  The
tyranny of custom, it is true, compels your friend and myself to
dress peculiarly, but I assure you nothing could be finer than the
way that the olive green of your coat melts in the delicate yellow
of your cravat, or the pearl gray of your trousers blends with the
bright blue of your waistcoat, and lends additional brilliancy to
that massive oroide watch-chain which you wear."

To my surprise, the Man from Solano did not strike him.  He looked
at the ironical Dashboard with grave earnestness, and then said
quietly:--

"Then I reckon you wouldn't mind showin' me in thar?"

Dashboard was, I admit, a little staggered at this.  But he
recovered himself, and, bowing ironically, led the way to the box.
I followed him and the Man from Solano.

Now, the belle in question happened to be a gentlewoman--descended
from gentlewomen--and after Dashboard's ironical introduction, in
which the Man from Solano was not spared, she comprehended the
situation instantly.  To Dashboard's surprise she drew a chair to
her side, made the Man from Solano sit down, quietly turned her
back on Dashboard, and in full view of the brilliant audience and
the focus of a hundred lorgnettes, entered into conversation with
him.

Here, for the sake of romance, I should like to say he became
animated, and exhibited some trait of excellence,--some rare wit or
solid sense.  But the fact is he was dull and stupid to the last
degree.  He persisted in keeping the conversation upon the subject
of the lost baggage-checks, and every bright attempt of the lady to
divert him failed signally.  At last, to everybody's relief, he
rose, and leaning over her chair, said:--

"I calklate to stop over here some time, miss, and you and me bein'
sorter strangers here, maybe when there's any show like this goin'
on you'll let me--"

Miss X. said somewhat hastily that the multiplicity of her
engagements and the brief limit of her stay in New York she feared
would, etc., etc.  The two other ladies had their handkerchiefs
over their mouths, and were staring intently on the stage, when the
Man from Solano continued:--

"Then, maybe, miss, whenever there is a show goin' on that you'll
attend, you'll just drop me word to Earle's Hotel, to this yer
address," and he pulled from his pocket a dozen well-worn letters,
and taking the buff envelope from one, handed it to her with
something like a bow.

"Certainly," broke in the facetious Dashboard, "Miss X. goes to the
Charity Ball to-morrow night.  The tickets are but a trifle to an
opulent Californian, and a man of your evident means, and the
object a worthy one.  You will, no doubt, easily secure an
invitation."

Miss X. raised her handsome eyes for a moment to Dashboard.  "By
all means," she said, turning to the Man from Solano; "and as Mr.
Dashboard is one of the managers and you are a stranger, he will,
of course, send you a complimentary ticket.  I have known Mr.
Dashboard long enough to know that he is invariably courteous to
strangers and a gentleman."  She settled herself in her chair again
and fixed her eyes upon the stage.

The Man from Solano thanked the Man of New York, and then, after
shaking hands with every body in the box, turned to go.  When he
had reached the door he looked back to Miss X., and said,--

"It WAS one of the queerest things in the world, miss, that my
findin' them checks--"

But the curtain had just then risen on the garden scene in "Faust,"
and Miss X. was absorbed.  The Man from Solano carefully shut the
box door and retired.  I followed him.

He was silent until he reached the lobby, and then he said, as if
renewing a previous conversation, "She IS a mighty peart gal--
that's so.  She's just my kind, and will make a stavin' good wife."

I thought I saw danger ahead for the Man from Solano, so I hastened
to tell him that she was beset by attentions, that she could have
her pick and choice of the best of society, and finally, that she
was, most probably, engaged to Dashboard.

"That's so," he said quietly, without the slightest trace of
feeling.  "It would be mighty queer if she wasn't.  But I reckon
I'll steer down to the ho-tel.  I don't care much for this
yellin'."  (He was alluding to a cadenza of that famous cantatrice,
Signora Batti Batti.)  "What's the time?"

He pulled out his watch.  It was such a glaring chain, so obviously
bogus, that my eyes were fascinated by it.  "You're looking at that
watch," he said; "it's purty to look at, but she don't go worth a
cent.  And yet her price was $125, gold.  I gobbled her up in
Chatham Street day before yesterday, where they were selling 'em
very cheap at auction."

"You have been outrageously swindled," I said, indignantly.  "Watch
and chain are not worth twenty dollars."

"Are they worth fifteen?" he asked, gravely.

"Possibly."

"Then I reckon it's a fair trade.  Ye see, I told 'em I was a
Californian from Solano, and hadn't anything about me of
greenbacks.  I had three slugs with me.  Ye remember them slugs?"
(I did; the "slug" was a "token" issued in the early days--a
hexagonal piece of gold a little over twice the size of a twenty-
dollar gold piece--worth and accepted for fifty dollars.)

"Well, I handed them that, and they handed me the watch.  You see
them slugs I had made myself outer brass filings and iron pyrites,
and used to slap 'em down on the boys for a bluff in a game of draw
poker.  You see, not being reg'lar gov-ment money, it wasn't
counterfeiting.  I reckon they cost me, counting time and anxiety,
about fifteen dollars.  So, if this yer watch is worth that, it's
about a square game, ain't it?"

I began to understand the Man from Solano, and said it was.  He
returned his watch to his pocket, toyed playfully with the chain,
and remarked, "Kinder makes a man look fash'nable and wealthy,
don't it?"

I agreed with him.  "But what do you intend to do here?" I asked.

"Well, I've got a cash capital of nigh on seven hundred dollars.  I
guess until I get into reg'lar business I'll skirmish round Wall
Street, and sorter lay low."  I was about to give him a few words
of warning, but I remembered his watch, and desisted.  We shook
hands and parted.

A few days after I met him on Broadway.  He was attired in another
new suit, but I think I saw a slight improvement in his general
appearance.  Only five distinct colors were visible in his attire.
But this, I had reason to believe afterwards, was accidental.

I asked him if he had been to the ball.  He said he had.  "That
gal, and a mighty peart gal she was too, was there, but she sorter
fought shy of me.  I got this new suit to go in, but those waiters
sorter run me into a private box, and I didn't get much chance to
continner our talk about them checks.  But that young feller,
Dashboard, was mighty perlite.  He brought lots of fellers and
young women round to the box to see me, and he made up a party that
night to take me round Wall Street and in them Stock Boards.  And
the next day he called for me and took me, and I invested about
five hundred dollars in them stocks--may be more.  You see, we
sorter swopped stocks.  You know I had ten shares in the Peacock
Copper Mine, that you was once secretary of."

"But those shares are not worth a cent.  The whole thing exploded
ten years ago."

"That's so, may be; YOU say so.  But then I didn't know anything
more about Communipaw Central, or the Naphtha Gaslight Company, and
so I thought it was a square game.  Only I realized on the stocks I
bought, and I kem up outer Wall Street about four hundred dollars
better.  You see it was a sorter risk, after all, for them Peacock
stocks MIGHT come up!"

I looked into his face: it was immeasurably serene and commonplace.
I began to be a little afraid of the man, or, rather, of my want of
judgment of the man; and after a few words we shook hands and
parted.

It was some months before I again saw the Man from Solano.  When I
did, I found that he had actually become a member of the Stock
Board, and had a little office on Broad Street, where he transacted
a fair business.  My remembrance going back to the first night I
met him, I inquired if he had renewed his acquaintance with Miss X.
"I heerd that she was in Newport this summer, and I ran down there
fur a week."

"And you talked with her about the baggage-checks?"

"No," he said, seriously; "she gave me a commission to buy some
stocks for her.  You see, I guess them fash'nable fellers sorter
got to runnin' her about me, and so she put our acquaintance on a
square business footing.  I tell you, she's a right peart gal.  Did
ye hear of the accident that happened to her?"

I had not.

"Well, you see, she was out yachting, and I managed through one of
those fellers to get an invite, too.  The whole thing was got up by
a man that they say is going to marry her.  Well, one afternoon the
boom swings round in a little squall and knocks her overboard.
There was an awful excitement,--you've heard about it, may be?"

"No!"  But I saw it all with a romancer's instinct in a flash of
poetry!  This poor fellow, debarred through uncouthness from
expressing his affection for her, had at last found his fitting
opportunity.  He had--

"Thar was an awful row," he went on.  "I ran out on the taffrail,
and there a dozen yards away was that purty creature, that peart
gal, and--I--"

"You jumped for her," I said, hastily.

"No!" he said gravely.  "I let the other man do the jumping.  I
sorter looked on."

I stared at him in astonishment.

"No," he went on, seriously.  "He was the man who jumped--that was
just then his 'put'--his line of business.  You see, if I had
waltzed over the side of that ship, and cavoorted in, and flummuxed
round and finally flopped to the bottom, that other man would have
jumped nateral-like and saved her; and ez he was going to marry her
anyway, I don't exactly see where I'D hev been represented in the
transaction.  But don't you see, ef, after he'd jumped and hadn't
got her, he'd gone down himself, I'd hev had the next best chance,
and the advantage of heving him outer the way.  You see, you don't
understand me--I don't think you did in Californy."

"Then he did save her?"

"Of course.  Don't you see she was all right.  If he'd missed her,
I'd have chipped in.  Thar warn't no sense in my doing his duty
onless he failed."

Somehow the story got out.  The Man from Solano as a butt became
more popular than ever, and of course received invitations to
burlesque receptions, and naturally met a great many people whom
otherwise he would not have seen.  It was observed also that his
seven hundred dollars were steadily growing, and that he seemed to
be getting on in his business.  Certain California stocks which I
had seen quietly interred in the old days in the tombs of their
fathers were magically revived; and I remember, as one who has seen
a ghost, to have been shocked as I looked over the quotations one
morning to have seen the ghostly face of the "Dead Beat Beach
Mining Co.," rouged and plastered, looking out from the columns of
the morning paper.  At last a few people began to respect, or
suspect, the Man from Solano.  At last, suspicion culminated with
this incident:--

He had long expressed a wish to belong to a certain "fash'n'ble"
club, and with a view of burlesque he was invited to visit the
club, where a series of ridiculous entertainments were given him,
winding up with a card party.  As I passed the steps of the club-
house early next morning, I overheard two or three members talking
excitedly,--

"He cleaned everybody out."  "Why, he must have raked in nigh on
$40,000."

"Who?" I asked.

"The Man from Solano."

As I turned away, one of the gentlemen, a victim, noted for his
sporting propensities, followed me, and laying his hand on my
shoulders, asked:--

"Tell me fairly now.  What business did your friend follow in
California?"

"He was a shepherd."

"A what?"

"A shepherd.  Tended his flocks on the honey-scented hills of
Solano."

"Well, all I can say is, d--n your California pastorals!"



THE OFFICE SEEKER


He asked me if I had ever seen the "Remus Sentinel."

I replied that I had not, and would have added that I did not even
know where Remus was, when he continued by saying it was strange
the hotel proprietor did not keep the "Sentinel" on his files, and
that he, himself, should write to the editor about it.  He would
not have spoken about it, but he, himself, had been an humble
member of the profession to which I belonged, and had often written
for its columns.  Some friends of his--partial, no doubt--had said
that his style somewhat resembled Junius's; but of course, you
know--well, what he could say was that in the last campaign his
articles were widely sought for.  He did not know but he had a copy
of one.  Here his hand dived into the breast-pocket of his coat,
with a certain deftness that indicated long habit, and, after
depositing on his lap a bundle of well-worn documents, every one of
which was glaringly suggestive of certificates and signatures, he
concluded he had left it in his trunk.

I breathed more freely.  We were sitting in the rotunda of a famous
Washington hotel, and only a few moments before had the speaker, an
utter stranger to me, moved his chair beside mine and opened a
conversation.  I noticed that he had that timid, lonely, helpless
air which invests the bucolic traveler who, for the first time,
finds himself among strangers, and his identity lost, in a world so
much larger, so much colder, so much more indifferent to him than
he ever imagined.  Indeed, I think that what we often attribute to
the impertinent familiarity of country-men and rustic travelers on
railways or in cities is largely due to their awful loneliness and
nostalgia.  I remember to have once met in a smoking-car on a
Kansas railway one of these lonely ones, who, after plying me with
a thousand useless questions, finally elicited the fact that I knew
slightly a man who had once dwelt in his native town in Illinois.
During the rest of our journey the conversation turned chiefly upon
his fellow-townsman, whom it afterwards appeared that my Illinois
friend knew no better than I did.  But he had established a link
between himself and his far-off home through me, and was happy.

While this was passing through my mind I took a fair look at him.
He was a spare young fellow, not more than thirty, with sandy hair
and eyebrows, and eyelashes so white as to be almost imperceptible.
He was dressed in black, somewhat to the "rearward o' the fashion,"
and I had an odd idea that it had been his wedding suit, and it
afterwards appeared I was right.  His manner had the precision and
much of the dogmatism of the country schoolmaster, accustomed to
wrestle with the feeblest intellects.  From his history, which he
presently gave me, it appeared I was right here also.

He was born and bred in a Western State, and, as schoolmaster of
Remus and Clerk of Supervisors, had married one of his scholars,
the daughter of a clergyman, and a man of some little property.  He
had attracted some attention by his powers of declamation, and was
one of the principal members of the Remus Debating Society.  The
various questions then agitating Remus,--"Is the doctrine of
immortality consistent with an agricultural life?" and, "Are round
dances morally wrong?"--afforded him an opportunity of bringing
himself prominently before the country people.  Perhaps I might
have seen an extract copied from the "Remus Sentinel" in the
"Christian Recorder" of May 7, 1875?  No?  He would get it for me.
He had taken an active part in the last campaign.  He did not like
to say it, but it had been universally acknowledged that he had
elected Gashwiler.

Who?

Gen. Pratt C. Gashwiler, member of Congress from our deestrict.

Oh!

A powerful man, sir--a very powerful man; a man whose influence
will presently be felt here, sir--HERE!  Well, he had come on with
Gashwiler, and--well, he did not know why--Gashwiler did not know
why he should not, you know (a feeble, half-apologetic laugh here),
receive that reward, you know, for these services which, etc., etc.

I asked him if he had any particular or definite office in view.

Well, no.  He had left that to Gashwiler.  Gashwiler had said--he
remembered his very words: "Leave it all to me; I'll look through
the different departments, and see what can be done for a man of
your talents."

And--

He's looking.  I'm expecting him back here every minute.  He's gone
over to the Department of Tape, to see what can be done there.  Ah!
here he comes.

A large man approached us.  He was very heavy, very unwieldy, very
unctuous and oppressive.  He affected the "honest farmer," but so
badly that the poorest husbandman would have resented it.  There
was a suggestion of a cheap lawyer about him that would have
justified any self-respecting judge in throwing him over the bar at
once.  There was a military suspicion about him that would have
entitled him to a court-martial on the spot.  There was an
introduction, from which I learned that my office-seeking friend's
name was Expectant Dobbs.  And then Gashwiler addressed me:--

"Our young friend here is waiting, waiting.  Waiting, I may say, on
the affairs of State.  Youth," continued the Hon. Mr. Gashwiler,
addressing an imaginary constituency, "is nothing but a season of
waiting--of preparation--ha, ha!"

As he laid his hand in a fatherly manner--a fatherly manner that
was as much of a sham as anything else about him--I don't know
whether I was more incensed at him or his victim, who received it
with evident pride and satisfaction.  Nevertheless he ventured to
falter out:--

"Has anything been done yet?"

"Well, no; I can't say that anything--that is, that anything has
been COMPLETED; but I may say we are in excellent position for an
advance--ha, ha!  But we must wait, my young friend, wait.  What is
it the Latin philosopher says?  'Let us by all means hasten
slowly'--ha, ha!" and he turned to me as if saying confidentially,
"Observe the impatience of these boys!"  "I met, a moment ago, my
old friend and boyhood's companion, Jim McGlasher, chief of the
Bureau for the Dissemination of Useless Information, and," lowering
his voice to a mysterious but audible whisper, "I shall see him
again to-morrow."

The "All aboard!" of the railway omnibus at this moment tore me
from the presence of this gifted legislator and his protege; but as
we drove away I saw through the open window the powerful mind of
Gashwiler operating, so to speak, upon the susceptibilities of Mr.
Dobbs.

I did not meet him again for a week.  The morning of my return I
saw the two conversing together in the hall, but with the palpable
distinction between this and their former interviews, that the
gifted Gashwiler seemed to be anxious to get away from his friend.
I heard him say something about "committees" and "to-morrow," and
when Dobbs turned his freckled face toward me I saw that he had got
at last some expression into it--disappointment.

I asked him pleasantly how he was getting on.

He had not lost his pride yet.  He was doing well, although such
was the value set upon his friend Gashwiler's abilities by his
brother members that he was almost always occupied with committee
business.  I noticed that his clothes were not in as good case as
before, and he told me that he had left the hotel, and taken
lodgings in a by-street, where it was less expensive.  Temporarily
of course.

A few days after this I had business in one of the great
departments.  From the various signs over the doors of its various
offices and bureaus it always oddly reminded me of Stewart's or
Arnold and Constable's.  You could get pensions, patents, and
plants.  You could get land and the seeds to put in it, and the
Indians to prowl round it, and what not.  There was a perpetual
clanging of office desk bells, and a running hither and thither of
messengers strongly suggestive of "Cash 47."

As my business was with the manager of this Great National Fancy
Shop, I managed to push by the sad-eyed, eager-faced crowd of men
and women in the anteroom, and entered the secretary's room,
conscious of having left behind me a great deal of envy and
uncharitableness of spirit.  As I opened the door I heard a
monotonous flow of Western speech which I thought I recognized.
There was no mistaking it.  It was the voice of the Gashwiler.

"The appointment of this man, Mr. Secretary, would be most
acceptable to the people in my deestrict.  His family are wealthy
and influential, and it's just as well in the fall elections to
have the supervisors and county judge pledged to support the
administration.  Our delegates to the State Central Committee are
to a man"--but here, perceiving from the wandering eye of Mr.
Secretary that there was another man in the room, he whispered the
rest with a familiarity that must have required all the politician
in the official's breast to keep from resenting.

"You have some papers, I suppose?" asked the secretary, wearily.

Gashwiler was provided with a pocketful, and produced them.  The
secretary threw them on the table among the other papers, where
they seemed instantly to lose their identity, and looked as if they
were ready to recommend anybody but the person they belonged to.
Indeed, in one corner the entire Massachusetts delegation, with the
Supreme Bench at their head, appeared to be earnestly advocating
the manuring of Iowa waste lands; and to the inexperienced eye, a
noted female reformer had apparently appended her signature to a
request for a pension for wounds received in battle.

"By the way," said the secretary, "I think I have a letter here
from somebody in your district asking an appointment, and referring
to you?  Do you withdraw it?"

"If anybody has been presuming to speculate upon my patronage,"
said the Hon. Mr. Gashwiler, with rising rage.

"I've got the letter somewhere here," said the secretary, looking
dazedly at his table.  He made a feeble movement among the papers,
and then sank back hopelessly in his chair, and gazed out of the
window as if he thought and rather hoped it might have flown away.
"It was from a Mr. Globbs, or Gobbs, or Dobbs, of Remus," he said
finally, after a superhuman effort of memory.

"Oh, that's nothing--a foolish fellow who has been boring me for
the last month."

"Then I am to understand that this application is withdrawn?"

"As far as my patronage is concerned, certainly.  In fact, such an
appointment would not express the sentiments--indeed, I may say,
would be calculated to raise active opposition in the deestrict."

The secretary uttered a sigh of relief, and the gifted Gashwiler
passed out.  I tried to get a good look at the honorable scamp's
eye, but he evidently did not recognize me.

It was a question in my mind whether I ought not to expose the
treachery of Dobbs's friend, but the next time I met Dobbs he was
in such good spirits that I forebore.  It appeared that his wife
had written to him that she had discovered a second cousin in the
person of the Assistant Superintendent of the Envelope Flap
Moistening Bureau of the Department of Tape, and had asked his
assistance; and Dobbs had seen him, and he had promised it.  "You
see," said Dobbs, "in the performance of his duties he is often
very near the person of the secretary, frequently in the next room,
and he is a powerful man, sir--a powerful man to know, sir--a VERY
powerful man."

How long this continued I do not remember.  Long enough, however,
for Dobbs to become quite seedy, for the giving up of wrist cuffs,
for the neglect of shoes and beard, and for great hollows to form
round his eyes, and a slight flush on his cheek-bones.  I remember
meeting him in all the departments, writing letters or waiting
patiently in anterooms from morning till night.  He had lost all
his old dogmatism, but not his pride.  "I might as well be here as
anywhere, while I'm waiting," he said, "and then I'm getting some
knowledge of the details of official life."

In the face of this mystery I was surprised at finding a note from
him one day, inviting me to dine with him at a certain famous
restaurant.  I had scarce got over my amazement, when the writer
himself overtook me at my hotel.  For a moment I scarcely
recognized him.  A new suit of fashionably-cut clothes had changed
him, without, however, entirely concealing his rustic angularity of
figure and outline.  He even affected a fashionable dilettante air,
but so mildly and so innocently that it was not offensive.

"You see," he began, explanatory-wise, "I've just found out the way
to do it.  None of these big fellows, these cabinet officers, know
me except as an applicant.  Now, the way to do this thing is to
meet 'em fust sociably; wine 'em and dine 'em.  Why, sir,"--he
dropped into the schoolmaster again here,--"I had two cabinet
ministers, two judges, and a general at my table last night."

"On YOUR invitation?"

"Dear, no! all I did was to pay for it.  Tom Soufflet gave the
dinner and invited the people.  Everybody knows Tom.  You see, a
friend of mine put me up to it, and said that Soufflet had fixed up
no end of appointments and jobs in that way.  You see, when these
gentlemen get sociable over their wine, he says carelessly, 'By the
way, there's So-and-so--a good fellow--wants something; give it to
him.'  And the first thing you know, or they know, he gets a
promise from them.  They get a dinner--and a good one--and he gets
an appointment."

"But where did you get the money?"

"Oh,"--he hesitated,--"I wrote home, and Fanny's father raised
fifteen hundred dollars some way, and sent it to me.  I put it down
to political expenses."  He laughed a weak, foolish laugh here, and
added, "As the old man don't drink nor smoke, he'd lift his
eyebrows to know how the money goes.  But I'll make it all right
when the office comes--and she's coming, sure pop."

His slang fitted as poorly on him as his clothes, and his
familiarity was worse than his former awkward shyness.  But I could
not help asking him what had been the result of this expenditure.

"Nothing just yet.  But the Secretary of Tape and the man at the
head of the Inferior Department, both spoke to me, and one of them
said he thought he'd heard my name before.  He might," he added,
with a forced laugh, "for I've written him fifteen letters."

Three months passed.  A heavy snow-storm stayed my chariot wheels
on a Western railroad, ten miles from a nervous lecture committee
and a waiting audience; there was nothing to do but to make the
attempt to reach them in a sleigh.  But the way was long and the
drifts deep, and when at last four miles out we reached a little
village, the driver declared his cattle could hold out no longer,
and we must stop there.  Bribes and threats were equally of no
avail.  I had to accept the fact.

"What place is this?"

"Remus."

"Remus, Remus," where had I heard that name before?  But while I
was reflecting he drove up before the door of the tavern.  It was a
dismal, sleep-forbidding place, and only nine o'clock, and here was
the long winter's night before me.  Failing to get the landlord to
give me a team to go further, I resigned myself to my fate and a
cigar, behind the red-hot stove.  In a few moments one of the
loungers approached me, calling me by name, and in a rough but
hearty fashion condoled with me for my mishap, advised me to stay
at Remus all night, and added: "The quarters ain't the best in the
world yer at this hotel.  But thar's an old man yer--the preacher
that was--that for twenty years hez taken in such fellers as you
and lodged 'em free gratis for nothing, and hez been proud to do
it.  The old man used to be rich; he ain't so now; sold his big
house on the cross roads, and lives in a little cottage with his
darter right over yan.  But ye couldn't do him a better turn than
to go over thar and stay, and if he thought I'd let ye go out o'
Remus without axing ye, he'd give me h-ll.  Stop, I'll go with ye."

I might at least call on the old man, and I accompanied my guide
through the still falling snow until we reached a little cottage.
The door opened to my guide's knock, and with the brief and
discomposing introduction, "Yer, ole man, I've brought you one o'
them snow-bound lecturers," he left me on the threshold, as my
host, a kindly-faced, white-haired man of seventy, came forward to
greet me.

His frankness and simple courtesy overcame the embarrassment left
by my guide's introduction, and I followed him passively as he
entered the neat, but plainly-furnished sitting-room.  At the same
moment a pretty, but faded young woman arose from the sofa and was
introduced to me as his daughter.  "Fanny and I live here quite
alone, and if you knew how good it was to see somebody from the
great outside world now and then, you would not apologize for what
you call your intrusion."

During this speech I was vaguely trying to recall where and when
and under what circumstances I had ever before seen the village,
the house, the old man or his daughter.  Was it in a dream, or in
one of those dim reveries of some previous existence to which the
spirit of mankind is subject?  I looked at them again.  In the
careworn lines around the once pretty girlish mouth of the young
woman, in the furrowed seams over the forehead of the old man, in
the ticking of the old-fashioned clock on the shelf, in the faint
whisper of the falling snow outside, I read the legend, "Patience,
patience; Wait and Hope."

The old man filled a pipe, and offering me one, continued,
"Although I seldom drink myself, it was my custom to always keep
some nourishing liquor in my house for passing guests, but to-night
I find myself without any."  I hastened to offer him my flask,
which, after a moment's coyness, he accepted, and presently under
its benign influence at least ten years dropped from his shoulders,
and he sat up in his chair erect and loquacious.

"And how are affairs at the National Capital, sir?" he began.

Now, if there was any subject of which I was profoundly ignorant,
it was this.  But the old man was evidently bent on having a good
political talk.  So I said vaguely, yet with a certain sense of
security, that I guessed there wasn't much being done.

"I see," said the old man, "in the matters of resumption; of the
sovereign rights of States and federal interference, you would
imply that a certain conservative tentative policy is to be
promulgated until after the electoral committee have given their
verdict."  I looked for help towards the lady, and observed feebly
that he had very clearly expressed my views.

The old man, observing my look, said: "Although my daughter's
husband holds a federal position in Washington, the pressure of his
business is so great that he has little time to give us mere
gossip--I beg your pardon, did you speak?"

I had unconsciously uttered an exclamation.  This, then, was Remus--
the home of Expectant Dobbs--and these his wife and father; and
the Washington banquet-table, ah me! had sparkled with the yearning
heart's blood of this poor wife, and had been upheld by this
tottering Caryatid of a father.

"Do you know what position he has?"

The old man did not know positively, but thought it was some
general supervising position.  He had been assured by Mr. Gashwiler
that it was a first-class clerkship; yes, a FIRST class.

I did not tell him that in this, as in many other official
regulations in Washington, they reckoned backward, but said:--

"I suppose that your M. C., Mr.--Mr. Gashwiler--"

"Don't mention his name," said the little woman, rising to her feet
hastily; "he never brought Expectant anything but disappointment
and sorrow.  I hate, I despise the man."

"Dear Fanny," expostulated the old man, gently, "this is
unchristian and unjust.  Mr. Gashwiler is a powerful, a very
powerful man!  His work is a great one; his time is preoccupied
with weightier matters."

"His time was not so preoccupied but he could make use of poor
Expectant," said this wounded dove, a little spitefully.

Nevertheless it was some satisfaction to know that Dobbs had at
last got a place, no matter how unimportant, or who had given it to
him; and when I went to bed that night in the room that had been
evidently prepared for their conjugal chamber, I felt that Dobbs's
worst trials were over.  The walls were hung with souvenirs of
their ante-nuptial days.  There was a portrait of Dobbs, aetat. 25;
there was a faded bouquet in a glass case, presented by Dobbs to
Fanny on examination-day; there was a framed resolution of thanks
to Dobbs from the Remus Debating Society; there was a certificate
of Dobbs's election as President of the Remus Philomathean Society;
there was his commission as Captain in the Remus Independent
Contingent of Home Guards; there was a Freemason's chart, in which
Dobbs was addressed in epithets more fulsome and extravagant than
any living monarch.  And yet all these cheap glories of a narrow
life and narrower brain were upheld and made sacred by the love of
the devoted priestess who worshiped at this lonely shrine, and kept
the light burning through gloom and doubt and despair.  The storm
tore round the house, and shook its white fists in the windows.  A
dried wreath of laurel that Fanny had placed on Dobbs's head after
his celebrated centennial address at the school-house, July 4,
1876, swayed in the gusts, and sent a few of its dead leaves down
on the floor, and I lay in Dobbs's bed and wondered what a first-
class clerkship was.

I found out early the next summer.  I was strolling through the
long corridors of a certain great department, when I came upon a
man accurately yoked across the shoulders, and supporting two huge
pails of ice on either side, from which he was replenishing the
pitchers in the various offices.  As I passed I turned to look at
him again.  It was Dobbs!

He did not set down his burden; it was against the rules, he said.
But he gossiped cheerily, said he was beginning at the foot of the
ladder, but expected soon to climb up.  That it was Civil Service
Reform, and of course he would be promoted soon.

"Had Gashwiler procured the appointment?"

No.  He believed it was ME.  I had told his story to Assistant-
secretary Blank, who had, in turn related it to Bureau-director
Dash--both good fellows--but this was all they could do.  Yes, it
was a foothold.  But he must go now.

Nevertheless, I followed him up and down, and, cheered up with a
rose-colored picture of his wife and family, and my visit there,
and promising to come and see him the next time I came to
Washington, I left him with his self-imposed yoke.

With a new administration, Civil Service Reform came in, crude and
ill-digested, as all sudden and sweeping reforms must be; cruel to
the individual, as all crude reforms will ever be; and among the
list of helpless men and women, incapacitated for other work by
long service in the dull routine of federal office, who were
decapitated, the weak, foolish, emaciated head of Expectant Dobbs
went to the block.  It afterward appeared that the gifted Gashwiler
was responsible for the appointment of twenty clerks, and that the
letter of poor Dobbs, in which he dared to refer to the now
powerless Gashwiler, had sealed his fate.  The country made an
example of Gashwiler and--Dobbs.

From that moment he disappeared.  I looked for him in vain in
anterooms, lobbies, and hotel corridors, and finally came to the
conclusion that he had gone home.

How beautiful was that July Sabbath, when the morning train from
Baltimore rolled into the Washington depot.  How tenderly and
chastely the morning sunlight lay on the east front of the Capitol
until the whole building was hushed in a grand and awful repose.
How difficult it was to think of a Gashwiler creeping in and out of
those enfiling columns, or crawling beneath that portico, without
wondering that yon majestic figure came not down with flat of sword
to smite the fat rotundity of the intruder.  How difficult to think
that parricidal hands have ever been lifted against the Great
Mother, typified here in the graceful white chastity of her
garments, in the noble tranquillity of her face, in the gathering
up her white-robed children within her shadow.

This led me to think of Dobbs, when, suddenly a face flashed by my
carriage window.  I called to the driver to stop, and, looking
again, saw that it was a woman standing bewildered and irresolute
on the street corner.  As she turned her anxious face toward me I
saw that it was Mrs. Dobbs.

What was she doing here, and where was Expectant?

She began an incoherent apology, and then burst into explanatory
tears.  When I had got her in the carriage she said, between her
sobs, that Expectant had not returned; that she had received a
letter from a friend here saying he was sick,--oh very, very sick,--
and father could not come with her, so she came alone.  She was so
frightened, so lonely, so miserable.

Had she his address?

Yes, just here!  It was on the outskirts of Washington, near
Georgetown.  Then I would take her there, if I could, for she knew
nobody.

On our way I tried to cheer her up by pointing out some of the
children of the Great Mother before alluded to, but she only shut
her eyes as we rolled down the long avenues, and murmured, "Oh,
these cruel, cruel distances!"

At last we reached the locality, a negro quarter, yet clean and
neat in appearance.  I saw the poor girl shudder slightly as we
stopped at the door of a low, two-story frame house, from which the
unwonted spectacle of a carriage brought a crowd of half-naked
children and a comely, cleanly, kind-faced mulatto woman.

Yes, this was the house.  He was upstairs, rather poorly, but
asleep, she thought.

We went upstairs.  In the first chamber, clean, though poorly
furnished, lay Dobbs.  On a pine table near his bed were letters
and memorials to the various departments, and on the bed-quilt,
unfinished, but just as the weary fingers had relaxed their grasp
upon it, lay a letter to the Tape Department.

As we entered the room he lifted himself on his elbow.  "Fanny!" he
said, quickly, and a shade of disappointment crossed his face.  "I
thought it was a message from the secretary," he added,
apologetically.

The poor woman had suffered too much already to shrink from this
last crushing blow.  But she walked quietly to his side without a
word or cry, knelt, placed her loving arms around him, and I left
them so together.

When I called again in the evening he was better; so much better
that, against the doctor's orders, he had talked to her quite
cheerfully and hopefully for an hour, until suddenly raising her
bowed head in his two hands, he said, "Do you know, dear, that in
looking for help and influence there was one, dear, I had
forgotten; one who is very potent with kings and councilors, and I
think, love, I shall ask Him to interest Himself in my behalf.  It
is not too late yet, darling, and I shall seek Him to-morrow."

And before the morrow came he had sought and found Him, and I doubt
not got a good place.



A SLEEPING-CAR EXPERIENCE


It was in a Pullman sleeping-car on a Western road.  After that
first plunge into unconsciousness which the weary traveler takes on
getting into his berth, I awakened to the dreadful revelation that
I had been asleep only two hours.  The greater part of a long
winter night was before me to face with staring eyes.

Finding it impossible to sleep, I lay there wondering a number of
things: why, for instance, the Pullman sleeping-car blankets were
unlike other blankets; why they were like squares cut out of cold
buckwheat cakes, and why they clung to you when you turned over,
and lay heavy on you without warmth; why the curtains before you
could not have been made opaque, without being so thick and
suffocating; why it would not be as well to sit up all night half
asleep in an ordinary passenger-car as to lie awake all night in a
Pullman.  But the snoring of my fellow-passengers answered this
question in the negative.

With the recollection of last night's dinner weighing on me as
heavily and coldly as the blankets, I began wondering why, over the
whole extent of the continent, there was no local dish; why the
bill of fare at restaurant and hotel was invariably only a weak
reflex of the metropolitan hostelries; why the entrees were always
the same, only more or less badly cooked; why the traveling
American always was supposed to demand turkey and cold cranberry
sauce; why the pretty waiter-girl apparently shuffled your plates
behind your back, and then dealt them over your shoulder in a
semicircle, as if they were a hand at cards, and not always a good
one?  Why, having done this, she instantly retired to the nearest
wall, and gazed at you scornfully, as one who would say, "Fair sir,
though lowly, I am proud; if thou dost imagine that I would permit
undue familiarity of speech, beware!"  And then I began to think of
and dread the coming breakfast; to wonder why the ham was always
cut half an inch thick, and why the fried egg always resembled a
glass eye that visibly winked at you with diabolical dyspeptic
suggestions; to wonder if the buckwheat cakes, the eating of which
requires a certain degree of artistic preparation and deliberation,
would be brought in as usual one minute before the train started.
And then I had a vivid recollection of a fellow-passenger who, at a
certain breakfast station in Illinois, frantically enwrapped his
portion of this national pastry in his red bandana handkerchief,
took it into the smoking-car, and quietly devoured it en route.

Lying broad awake, I could not help making some observations which
I think are not noticed by the day traveler.  First, that the speed
of a train is not equal or continuous.  That at certain times the
engine apparently starts up, and says to the baggage train behind
it, "Come, come, this won't do!  Why, it's nearly half-past two;
how in h-ll shall we get through?  Don't you talk to ME.  Pooh,
pooh!" delivered in that rhythmical fashion which all meditation
assumes on a railway train.  Exempli gratia:  One night, having
raised my window-curtain to look over a moonlit snowy landscape, as
I pulled it down the lines of a popular comic song flashed across
me.  Fatal error!  The train instantly took it up, and during the
rest of the night I was haunted by this awful refrain: "Pull down
the bel-lind, pull down the bel-lind; simebody's klink klink, O
don't be shoo-shoo!"  Naturally this differs on the different
railways.  On the New York Central, where the road-bed is quite
perfect and the steel rails continuous, I have heard this
irreverent train give the words of a certain popular revival hymn
after this fashion: "Hold the fort, for I am Sankey; Moody slingers
still.  Wave the swish swash back from klinky, klinky klanky kill."
On the New York and New Haven, where there are many switches, and
the engine whistles at every cross road, I have often heard, "Tommy
make room for your whooopy! that's a little clang; bumpity,
bumpity, boopy, clikitty, clikitty, clang."  Poetry, I fear, fared
little better.  One starlit night, coming from Quebec, as we
slipped by a virgin forest, the opening lines of Evangeline flashed
upon me.  But all I could make of them was this: "This is the
forest primeval-eval; the groves of the pines and the hemlocks-
locks-locks-locks-loooock!"  The train was only "slowing" or
"braking" up at a station.  Hence the jar in the metre.

I had noticed a peculiar Aeolian harp-like cry that ran through the
whole train as we settled to rest at last after a long run--an
almost sigh of infinite relief, a musical sigh that began in C and
ran gradually up to F natural, which I think most observant
travelers have noticed day and night.  No railway official has ever
given me a satisfactory explanation of it.  As the car, in a rapid
run, is always slightly projected forward of its trucks, a
practical friend once suggested to me that it was the gradual
settling back of the car body to a state of inertia, which, of
course, every poetical traveler would reject.  Four o'clock the
sound of boot-blacking by the porter faintly apparent from the
toilet-room.  Why not talk to him?  But, fortunately, I remembered
that any attempt at extended conversation with conductor or porter
was always resented by them as implied disloyalty to the company
they represented.  I recalled that once I had endeavored to impress
upon a conductor the absolute folly of a midnight inspection of
tickets, and had been treated by him as an escaped lunatic.  No,
there was no relief from this suffocating and insupportable
loneliness to be gained then.  I raised the window-blind and looked
out.  We were passing a farm-house.  A light, evidently the lantern
of a farm-hand, was swung beside a barn.  Yes, the faintest tinge
of rose in the far horizon.  Morning, surely, at last.

We had stopped at a station.  Two men had got into the car, and had
taken seats in the one vacant section, yawning occasionally and
conversing in a languid, perfunctory sort of way.  They sat
opposite each other, occasionally looking out of the window, but
always giving the strong impression that they were tired of each
other's company.  As I looked out of my curtains at them, the One
Man said, with a feebly concealed yawn:--

"Yes, well, I reckon he was at one time as poplar an ondertaker ez
I knew."

The Other Man (inventing a question rather than giving an answer,
out of some languid, social impulse): "But was he--this yer
ondertaker--a Christian--hed he jined the church?"

The One Man (reflectively): "Well, I don't know ez you might call
him a purfessin' Christian; but he hed--yes, he hed conviction.  I
think Dr. Wylie hed him under conviction.  Et least that was the
way I got it from HIM."

A long, dreary pause.  The Other Man (feeling it was incumbent upon
him to say something): "But why was he poplar ez an ondertaker?"

The One Man (lazily): "Well, he was kinder poplar with widders and
widderers--sorter soothen 'em a kinder, keerless way; slung 'em
suthin' here and there, sometimes outer the Book, sometimes outer
hisself, ez a man of experience as hed hed sorror.  Hed, they say
(VERY CAUTIOUSLY), lost three wives hisself, and five children by
this yer new disease--dipthery--out in Wisconsin.  I don't know the
facts, but that's what's got round."

The Other Man: "But how did he lose his poplarity?"

The One Man: "Well, that's the question.  You see he interduced
some things into ondertaking that waz new.  He hed, for instance, a
way, as he called it, of manniperlating the features of the
deceased."

The Other Man (quietly): "How manniperlating?"

The One Man (struck with a bright and aggressive thought): "Look
yer, did ye ever notiss how, generally speakin', onhandsome a
corpse is?"

The Other Man had noticed this fact.

The One Man (returning to his fact): "Why there was Mary Peebles,
ez was daughter of my wife's bosom friend--a mighty pooty girl and
a professing Christian--died of scarlet fever.  Well, that gal--I
was one of the mourners, being my wife's friend--well, that gal,
though I hedn't, perhaps, oughter say--lying in that casket,
fetched all the way from some A1 establishment in Chicago, filled
with flowers and furbelows--didn't really seem to be of much
account.  Well, although my wife's friend, and me a mourner--well,
now, I was--disappointed and discouraged."

The Other Man (in palpably affected sympathy): "Sho! now!"

"Yes, SIR!  Well, you see, this yer ondertaker, this Wilkins, hed a
way of correctin' all thet.  And just by manniperlation.  He worked
over the face of the deceased ontil he perduced what the survivin'
relatives called a look of resignation,--you know, a sort of smile,
like.  When he wanted to put in any extrys, he perduced what he
called--hevin' reglar charges for this kind of work--a Christian's
hope."

The Other Man: "I want to know."

"Yes.  Well, I admit, at times it was a little startlin'.  And I've
allers said (a little confidentially) that I had my doubts of its
being Scriptoorl, or sacred, we being, ez you know, worms of the
yearth; and I relieved my mind to our pastor, but he didn't feel
like interferin', ez long ez it was confined to church membership.
But the other day, when Cy Dunham died--you disremember Cy Dunham?"

A long interval of silence.  The Other Man was looking out of the
window, and had apparently forgotten his companion completely.  But
as I stretched my head out of the curtain I saw four other heads as
eagerly reached out from other berths to hear the conclusion of the
story.  One head, a female one, instantly disappeared on my looking
around, but a certain tremulousness of her window-curtain showed an
unabated interest.  The only two utterly disinterested men were the
One Man and the Other Man.

The Other Man (detaching himself languidly from the window): "Cy
Dunham?"

"Yes; Cy never hed hed either convictions or purfessions.  Uster
get drunk and go round with permiscous women.  Sorter like the
prodigal son, only a little more so, ez fur ez I kin judge from the
facks ez stated to me.  Well, Cy one day petered out down at Little
Rock, and was sent up yer for interment.  The fammerly, being
proud-like, of course didn't spare no money on that funeral, and it
waz--now between you and me--about ez shapely and first-class and
prime-mess affair ez I ever saw.  Wilkins hed put in his extrys.
He hed put onto that prodigal's face the A1 touch,--hed him fixed
up with a 'Christian's hope.'  Well, it was about the turning-
point, for thar waz some of the members and the pastor hisself
thought that the line oughter to be drawn somewhere, and thar was
some talk at Deacon Tibbet's about a reg'lar conference meetin'
regardin' it.  But it wasn't thet which made him onpoplar."

Another silence; no expression nor reflection from the face of the
Other Man of the least desire to know what ultimately settled the
unpopularity of the undertaker.  But from the curtains of the
various berths several eager and one or two even wrathful faces,
anxious for the result.

The Other Man (lazily recurring to the fading topic): "Well, what
made him onpoplar?"

The One Man (quietly): "Extrys, I think--that is, I suppose, not
knowin'" (cautiously) "all the facts.  When Mrs. Widdecombe lost
her husband, 'bout two months ago, though she'd been through the
valley of the shadder of death twice--this bein' her third
marriage, hevin' been John Barker's widder--"

The Other Man (with an intense expression of interest): "No, you're
foolin' me!"

The One Man (solemnly): "Ef I was to appear before my Maker to-
morrow, yes! she was the widder of Barker."

The Other Man: "Well, I swow."

The One Man: "Well, this Widder Widdecombe, she put up a big
funeral for the deceased.  She hed Wilkins, and thet ondertaker
just laid hisself out.  Just spread hisself.  Onfort'natly,--
perhaps fort'natly in the ways of Providence,--one of Widdecombe's
old friends, a doctor up thar in Chicago, comes down to the
funeral.  He goes up with the friends to look at the deceased,
smilin' a peaceful sort o' heavinly smile, and everybody sayin'
he's gone to meet his reward, and this yer friend turns round,
short and sudden on the widder settin' in her pew, and kinder
enjoyin, as wimen will, all the compliments paid the corpse, and he
says, says he:--

"'What did you say your husband died of, marm?'

"'Consumption,' she says, wiping her eyes, poor critter.
'Consumption--gallopin' consumption.'

"'Consumption be d--d,' sez he, bein' a profane kind of Chicago
doctor, and not bein' ever under conviction.  'Thet man died of
strychnine.  Look at thet face.  Look at thet contortion of them
fashal muscles.  Thet's strychnine.  Thet's risers Sardonikus'
(thet's what he said; he was always sorter profane).

"'Why, doctor,' says the widder, 'thet--thet is his last smile.
It's a Christian's resignation.'

"'Thet be blowed; don't tell me,' sez he.  'Hell is full of thet
kind of resignation.  It's pizon.  And I'll--'  Why, dern my skin,
yes we are; yes, it's Joliet.  Wall, now, who'd hey thought we'd
been nigh onto an hour."

Two or three anxious passengers from their berths: "Say; look yer,
stranger!  Old man!  What became of--"

But the One Man and the Other Man had vanished.



MORNING ON THE AVENUE


NOTES BY AN EARLY RISER.


I have always been an early riser.  The popular legend that "Early
to bed and early to rise," invariably and rhythmically resulted in
healthfulness, opulence, and wisdom, I beg here to solemnly protest
against.  As an "unhealthy" man, as an "unwealthy" man, and
doubtless by virtue of this protest an "unwise" man, I am, I think,
a glaring example of the untruth of the proposition.

For instance, it is my misfortune, as an early riser, to live upon
a certain fashionable avenue, where the practice of early rising is
confined exclusively to domestics.  Consequently, when I issue
forth on this broad, beautiful thoroughfare at six A. M., I cannot
help thinking that I am, to a certain extent, desecrating its
traditional customs.

I have more than once detected the milkman winking at the maid with
a diabolical suggestion that I was returning from a carouse, and
Roundsman 9999 has once or twice followed me a block or two with
the evident impression that I was a burglar returning from a
successful evening out.  Nevertheless, these various indiscretions
have brought me into contact with a kind of character and phenomena
whose existence I might otherwise have doubted.

First, let me speak of a large class of working-people whose
presence is, I think, unknown to many of those gentlemen who are in
the habit of legislating or writing about them.  A majority of
these early risers in the neighborhood of which I may call my
"beat" carry with them unmistakable evidences of the American type.
I have seen so little of that foreign element that is popularly
supposed to be the real working class of the great metropolis, that
I have often been inclined to doubt statistics.  The ground that my
morning rambles cover extends from Twenty-third Street to
Washington Park, and laterally from Sixth Avenue to Broadway.  The
early rising artisans that I meet here, crossing three avenues,--
the milkmen, the truck-drivers, the workman, even the occasional
tramp,--wherever they may come from or go to, or what their real
habitat may be,--are invariably Americans.  I give it as an honest
record, whatever its significance or insignificance may be, that
during the last year, between the hours of six and eight A. M., in
and about the locality I have mentioned, I have met with but two
unmistakable foreigners, an Irishman and a German.  Perhaps it may
be necessary to add to this statement that the people I have met at
those early hours I have never seen at any other time in the same
locality.

As to their quality, the artisans were always cleanly dressed,
intelligent, and respectful.  I remember, however, one morning,
when the ice storm of the preceding night had made the sidewalks
glistening, smiling and impassable, to have journeyed down the
middle of Twelfth Street with a mechanic so sooty as to absolutely
leave a legible track in the snowy pathway.  He was the fireman
attending the engine in a noted manufactory, and in our brief
conversation he told me many facts regarding his profession which I
fear interested me more than the after-dinner speeches of some
distinguished gentlemen I had heard the preceding night.  I
remember that he spoke of his engine as "she," and related certain
circumstances regarding her inconsistency, her aberrations, her
pettishnesses, that seemed to justify the feminine gender.  I have
a grateful recollection of him as being one who introduced me to a
restaurant where chicory, thinly disguised as coffee, was served
with bread at five cents a cup, and that he honorably insisted on
being the host, and paid his ten cents for our mutual entertainment
with the grace of a Barmecide.  I remember, in a more genial
season,--I think early summer,--to have found upon the benches of
Washington Park a gentleman who informed me that his profession was
that of a "pigeon catcher"; that he contracted with certain parties
in this city to furnish these birds for what he called their
"pigeon-shoots"; and that in fulfilling this contract he often was
obliged to go as far west as Minnesota.  The details he gave--his
methods of entrapping the birds, his study of their habits, his
evident belief that the city pigeon, however well provided for by
parties who fondly believed the bird to be their own, was really
ferae naturae, and consequently "game" for the pigeon-catcher--were
all so interesting that I listened to him with undisguised delight.
When he had finished, however, he said, "And now, sir, being a poor
man, with a large family, and work bein' rather slack this year, if
ye could oblige me with the loan of a dollar and your address,
until remittances what I'm expecting come in from Chicago, you'll
be doin' me a great service," etc., etc.  He got the dollar, of
course (his information was worth twice the money), but I imagine
he lost my address.  Yet it is only fair to say that some days
after, relating his experience to a prominent sporting man, he
corroborated all its details, and satisfied me that my pigeon-
catching friend, although unfortunate, was not an impostor.

And this leads me to speak of the birds.  Of all early risers, my
most importunate, aggressive, and obtrusive companions are the
English sparrows.  Between six and seven A. M. they seem to possess
the avenue, and resent my intrusion.  I remember, one chilly
morning, when I came upon a flurry of them, chattering, quarreling,
skimming, and alighting just before me.  I stopped at last, fearful
of stepping on the nearest.  To my great surprise, instead of
flying away, he contested the ground inch by inch before my
advancing foot, with his wings outspread and open bill
outstretched, very much like that ridiculous burlesque of the
American eagle which the common canary-bird assumes when teased.
"Did you ever see 'em wash in the fountain in the square?" said
Roundsman 9999, early one summer morning.  I had not.  "I guess
they're there yet.  Come and see 'em," he said, and complacently
accompanied me two blocks.  I don't know which was the finer
sight,--the thirty or forty winged sprites, dashing in and out of
the basin, each the very impersonation of a light-hearted,
mischievous puck, or this grave policeman, with badge and club and
shield, looking on with delight.  Perhaps my visible amusement, or
the spectacle of a brother policeman just then going past with a
couple of "drunk and disorderlies," recalled his official
responsibilities and duties.  "They say them foreign sparrows drive
all the other birds away," he added, severely; and then walked off
with a certain reserved manner, as if it were not impossible for
him to be called upon some morning to take the entire feathered
assembly into custody, and if so called upon he should do it.

Next, I think, in procession among the early risers, and surely
next in fresh and innocent exterior, were the work-women or shop-
girls.  I have seen this fine avenue on gala afternoons bright with
the beauty and elegance of an opulent city, but I have see no more
beautiful faces than I have seen among these humbler sisters.  As
the mere habits of dress in America, except to a very acute critic,
give no suggestion of the rank of the wearer, I can imagine an
inexperienced foreigner utterly mystified and confounded by these
girls, who perhaps work a sewing-machine or walk the long floors of
a fashionable dry-goods shop.  I remember one face and figure,
faultless and complete,--modestly yet most becomingly dressed,--
indeed, a figure that Compte-Calix might have taken for one of his
exquisite studies, which, between seven and eight A. M. passed
through Eleventh Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway.  So
exceptionally fine was her carriage, so chaste and virginal her
presence, and so refined and even spiritual her features, that, as
a literary man, I would have been justified in taking her for the
heroine of a society novel.  Indeed, I had already woven a little
romance about her, when one morning she overtook me, accompanied by
another girl--pretty, but of a different type--with whom she was
earnestly conversing.  As the two passed me, there fell from her
faultless lips the following astounding sentence: "And I told him,
if he didn't like it he might lump it, and he traveled off on his
left ear, you bet!"  Heaven knows what indiscretion this speech
saved me from; but the reader will understand what a sting the pain
of rejection might have added to it by the above formula.

The "morning-cocktail" men come next in my experience of early
rising.  I used to take my early cup of coffee in the cafe of a
certain fashionable restaurant that had a bar attached.  I could
not help noticing that, unlike the usual social libations of my
countrymen, the act of taking a morning cocktail was a solitary
one.  In the course of my experience I cannot recall the fact of
two men taking an ante-breakfast cocktail together.  On the
contrary, I have observed the male animal rush savagely at the bar,
demand his drink of the bar-keeper, swallow it, and hasten from the
scene of his early debauchery, or else take it in a languid,
perfunctory manner, which, I think, must have been insulting to the
bar-keeper.  I have observed two men, whom I had seen drinking
amicably together the preceding night, standing gloomily at the
opposite corners of the bar, evidently trying not to see each other
and making the matter a confidential one with the bar-keeper.  I
have seen even a thin disguise of simplicity assumed.  I remember
an elderly gentleman, of most respectable exterior, who used to
enter the cafe as if he had strayed there accidentally.  After
looking around carefully, and yet unostentatiously, he would walk
to the bar, and, with an air of affected carelessness, state that
"not feeling well this morning, he guessed he would take--well, he
would leave it to the bar-keeper."  The bar-keeper invariably gave
him a stiff brandy cocktail.  When the old gentleman had done this
half a dozen times, I think I lost faith in him.  I tried
afterwards to glean from the bar-keeper some facts regarding those
experiences, but I am proud to say that he was honorably reticent.
Indeed, I think it may be said truthfully that there is no record
of a bar-keeper who has been "interviewed."  Clergymen and doctors
have, but it is well for the weakness of humanity that the line
should be drawn somewhere.

And this reminds me that one distressing phase of early rising is
the incongruous and unpleasant contact of the preceding night.  The
social yesterday is not fairly over before nine A. M. to-day, and
there is always a humorous, sometimes a pathetic, lapping over the
edges.  I remember one morning at six o'clock to have been
overtaken by a carriage that drew up beside me.  I recognized the
coachman, who touched his hat apologetically, as if he wished me to
understand that he was not at all responsible for the condition of
his master, and I went to the door of the carriage.  I was
astonished to find two young friends of mine, in correct evening
dress, reclining on each other's shoulders and sleeping the sleep
of the justly inebriated.  I stated this fact to the coachman.  Not
a muscle of his well-trained face answered to my smile.  But he
said: "You see, sir, we've been out all night, and more than four
blocks below they saw you, and wanted me to hail you, but you know
you stopped to speak to a gentleman, and so I sorter lingered, and
I drove round the block once or twice, and I guess I've got 'em
quiet again."  I looked in the carriage door once more on these
sons of Belial.  They were sleeping quite unconsciously.  A
bouttonniere in the lappel of the younger one's coat had shed its
leaves, which were scattered over him with a ridiculous suggestion
of the "Babes in the Wood," and I closed the carriage door softly.
"I suppose I'd better take 'em home, sir?" queried the coachman,
gravely.  "Well, yes, John, perhaps you had."

There is another picture in my early rising experience that I wish
was as simply and honestly ludicrous.  It was at a time when the
moral sentiment of the metropolis, expressed through ordinance and
special legislation, had declared itself against a certain form of
"variety" entertainment, and had, as usual, proceeded against the
performers, and not the people who encouraged them.  I remember,
one frosty morning, to have encountered in Washington Park my
honest friend Sergeant X. and Roundsman 9999 conveying a party of
these derelicts to the station.  One of the women, evidently, had
not had time to change her apparel, and had thinly disguised the
flowing robe and loose cestus of Venus under a ragged "waterproof";
while the other, who had doubtless posed for Mercury, hid her
shapely tights in a plaid shawl, and changed her winged sandals for
a pair of "arctics."  Their rouged faces were streaked and stained
with tears.  The man who was with them, the male of their species,
had but hastily washed himself of his Ethiopian presentment, and
was still black behind the ears; while an exaggerated shirt collar
and frilled shirt made his occasional indignant profanity
irresistibly ludicrous.  So they fared on over the glittering snow,
against the rosy sunlight of the square, the gray front of the
University building, with a few twittering sparrows in the
foreground, beside the two policemen, quiet and impassive as fate.
I could not help thinking of the distinguished A., the most
fashionable B., the wealthy and respectable C., the sentimental D.,
and the man of the world E., who were present at the performance,
whose distinguished patronage had called it into life, and who were
then resting quietly in their beds, while these haggard servants of
their pleasaunce were haled over the snow to punishment and
ignominy.

Let me finish by recalling one brighter picture of that same
season.  It was early; so early that the cross of Grace Church had,
when I looked up, just caught the morning sun, and for a moment
flamed like a crusader's symbol.  And then the grace and glory of
that exquisite spire became slowly visible.  Fret by fret the
sunlight stole slowly down, quivering and dropping from each, until
at last the whole church beamed in rosy radiance.  Up and down the
long avenue the street lay in shadow; by some strange trick of the
atmosphere the sun seemed to have sought out only that graceful
structure for its blessing.  And then there was a dull rumble.  It
was the first omnibus,--the first throb in the great artery of the
reviving city.  I looked up.  The church was again in shadow.



WITH THE ENTREES


"Once, when I was a pirate--!"

The speaker was an elderly gentleman in correct evening dress, the
room a tasteful one, the company of infinite respectability, the
locality at once fashionable and exclusive, the occasion an
unexceptionable dinner.  To this should be added that the speaker
was also the host.

With these conditions self-evident, all that good breeding could do
was to receive the statement with a vague smile that might pass for
good-humored incredulity or courteous acceptation of a simple fact.
Indeed, I think we all rather tried to convey the impression that
our host, when he WAS a pirate,--if he ever really was one,--was
all that a self-respecting pirate should be, and never violated the
canons of good society.  This idea was, to some extent,
crystallized by the youngest Miss Jones in the exclamation, "Oh,
how nice!"

"It was, of course, many years ago, when I was quite a lad."

We all murmured "Certainly," as if piracy were a natural expression
of the exuberance of youth.

"I ought, perhaps, explain the circumstances that led me into this
way of life."

Here Legrande, a courteous attache of the Patagonian legation,
interposed in French and an excess of politeness, "that it was not
of a necessity," a statement to which his English neighbor
hurriedly responded, "Oui, oui."

"There ess a boke," he continued, in a well-bred, rapid whisper,
"from Captain Canot,--a Frenchman,--most eenteresting--he was--oh,
a fine man of education--and what you call a 'slavair,'" but here
he was quietly nudged into respectful silence.

"I ran away from home," continued our host.  He paused, and then
added, appealingly, to the two distinguished foreigners present: "I
do not know if I can make you understand that this is a peculiarly
American predilection.  The exodus of the younger males of an
American family against the parents' wishes does not, with us,
necessarily carry any obloquy with it.  To the average American the
prospect of fortune and a better condition lies OUTSIDE of his
home; with you the home means the estate, the succession of honors
or titles, the surety that the conditions of life shall all be kept
intact.  With us the children who do not expect, and generally
succeed in improving the fortunes of the house, are marked
exceptions.  Do I make myself clear?"

The French-Patagonian attache thought it was "charming and
progressif."  The Baron Von Pretzel thought he had noticed a
movement of that kind in Germany, which was expressed in a single
word of seventeen syllables.  Viscount Piccadilly said to his
neighbor: "That, you know now, the younger sons, don't you see, go
to Australia, you know in some beastly trade--stock-raising or
sheep--you know; but, by Jove! them fellahs--"

"My father always treated me well," continued our host.  "I shared
equally with my brothers the privileges and limitations of our New
England home.  Nevertheless, I ran away and went to sea--"

"To see--what?" asked Legrande.

"Aller sur mer," said his neighbor, hastily.

"Go on with your piracy!" said Miss Jones.

The distinguished foreigners looked at each other and then at Miss
Jones.  Each made a mental note of the average cold-blooded
ferocity of the young American female.

"I shipped on board of a Liverpool 'liner,'" continued our host.

"What ess a 'liner'?" interrupted Legrande, sotto voce, to his next
neighbor, who pretended not to hear him.

"I need not say that these were the days when we had not lost our
carrying trade, when American bottoms--"

"Que est ce, 'bot toom'?" said Legrande, imploringly, to his other
friend.

"When American bottoms still carried the bulk of freight, and the
supremacy of our flag--"

Here Legrande recognized a patriotic sentiment and responded to it
with wild republican enthusiasm, nodding his head violently.
Piccadilly noticed it, too, and, seeing an opening for some general
discussion on free trade, began half audibly to HIS neighbor: "Most
extraordinary thing, you know, your American statesmen--"

"I deserted the ship at Liverpool--"

But here two perfunctory listeners suddenly turned toward the other
end of the table, where another guest, our Nevada Bonanza lion, was
evidently in the full flood of pioneer anecdote and narration.
Calmly disregarding the defection, he went on:--

"I deserted the ship at Liverpool in consequence of my ill-
treatment by the second mate,--a man selected for his position by
reason of his superior physical strength and recognized brutality.
I have been since told that he graduated from the state prison.  On
the second day out I saw him strike a man senseless with a belaying
pin for some trifling breach of discipline.  I saw him repeatedly
beat and kick sick men--"

"Did you ever read Dana's 'Two Years before the Mast'?" asked
Lightbody, our heavy literary man, turning to HIS neighbor, in a
distinctly audible whisper.  "Ah! there's a book!  Got all this
sort of thing in it.  Dev'lishly well written, too."

The Patagonian (alive for information): "What ess this Dana, eh?"

His left hand neighbor (shortly): "Oh, that man!"

His right hand neighbor (curtly): "The fellah who wrote the
Encyclopaedia and edits 'The Sun'? that was put up in Boston for
the English mission and didn't get it."

The Patagonian (making a mental diplomatic note of the fact that
the severe discipline of the editor of "The Sun," one of America's
profoundest scholars, while acting from patriotic motives, as the
second mate of an American "bottom," had unfitted him for
diplomatic service abroad): "Ah, ciel!"

"I wandered on the quays for a day or two, until I was picked up by
a Portuguese sailor, who, interesting himself in my story, offered
to procure me a passage to Fayal and Lisbon, where, he assured me,
I could find more comfortable and profitable means of returning to
my own land.  Let me say here that this man, although I knew him
afterward as one of the most unscrupulous and heartless of
pirates,--in fact the typical buccaneer of the books,--was to me
always kind, considerate, and, at times, even tender.  He was a
capital seaman.  I give this evidence in favor of a much ridiculed
race, who have been able seamen for centuries."

"Did you ever read that Portuguese Guide-book?" asked Lightbody of
his neighbor; "it's the most exquisitely ridiculous thing--"

"Will the great American pirate kindly go on, or resume his
original functions," said Miss Jones, over the table, with a
significant look in the direction of Lightbody.  But her anxiety
was instantly misinterpreted by the polite and fair-play loving
Englishman: "I say, now, don't you know that the fact is these
Portuguese fellahs are always ahead of us in the discovery
business?  Why, you know--"

"I shipped with him on a brig, ostensibly bound to St. Kitts and a
market.  We had scarcely left port before I discovered the true
character of the vessel.  I will not terrify you with useless
details.  Enough that all that tradition and romance has given you
of the pirate's life was ours.  Happily, through the kindness of my
Portuguese friend, I was kept from being an active participant in
scenes of which I was an unwilling witness.  But I must always bear
my testimony to one fact.  Our discipline, our esprit de corps, if
I may so term it, was perfect.  No benevolent society, no moral
organization, was ever so personally self-sacrificing, so honestly
loyal to one virtuous purpose, as we were to our one vice.  The
individual was always merged in the purpose.  When our captain blew
out the brains of our quartermaster, one day--"

"That reminds me--DID you read of that Georgia murder?" began
Lightbody; "it was in all the papers I think.  Oh, I beg pardon--"

"For simply interrupting him in a conversation with our second
officer," continued our host, quietly.  "The act, although harsh
and perhaps unnecessarily final, was, I think, indorsed by the
crew.  James, pass the champagne to Mr. Lightbody."

He paused a moment for the usual casual interruption, but even the
active Legrande was silent.

Alas! from the other end of the table came the voice of the Bonanza
man:--

"The rope was around her neck.  Well, gentlemen, that Mexican woman
standing there, with that crowd around her, eager for her blood,
dern my skin! if she didn't call out to the sheriff to hold on a
minit.  And what fer?  Ye can't guess!  Why, one of them long
braids she wore was under the noose, and kinder in the way.  I
remember her raising her hand to her neck and givin' a spiteful
sort of jerk to the braid that fetched it outside the slip-knot,
and then saying to the sheriff: 'There, d--n ye, go on.'  There was
a sort o' thoughtfulness in the act, a kind o' keerless, easy way,
that jist fetched the boys--even them thet hed the rope in their
hands, and they--" (suddenly recognizing the silence): "Oh, beg
pardon, old man; didn't know I'd chipped into your yarn--heave
ahead; don't mind me."

"What I am trying to tell you is this:  One night, in the Caribbean
Sea, we ran into one of the Leeward Islands, that had been in olden
time a rendezvous for our ship.  We were piloted to our anchorage
outside by my Portuguese friend, who knew the locality thoroughly,
and on whose dexterity and skill we placed the greatest reliance.
If anything more had been necessary to fix this circumstance in my
mind, it would have been the fact that two or three days before he
had assured me that I should presently have the means of honorable
discharge from the pirate's crew, and a return to my native land.
A launch was sent from the ship to communicate with our friends on
the island, who supplied us with stores, provisions, and general
information.  The launch was manned by eight men, and officered by
the first mate,--a grim, Puritanical, practical New Englander, if I
may use such a term to describe a pirate, of great courage,
experience, and physical strength.  My Portuguese friend, acting as
pilot, prevailed upon them to allow me to accompany the party as
coxswain.  I was naturally anxious, you can readily comprehend, to
see--"

"Certainly," "Of course," "Why shouldn't you?" went round the
table.

"Two trustworthy men were sent ashore with instructions.  We,
meanwhile, lay off the low, palm-fringed beach, our crew lying on
their oars, or giving way just enough to keep the boat's head to
the breakers.  The mate and myself sat in the stern sheets, looking
shoreward for the signal.  The night was intensely black.  Perhaps
for this reason never before had I seen the phosphorescence of a
tropical sea so strongly marked.  From the great open beyond,
luminous crests and plumes of pale fire lifted themselves, ghost-
like, at our bows, sank, swept by us with long, shimmering,
undulating trails, broke on the beach in silvery crescents, or
shattered their brightness on the black rocks of the promontory.
The whole vast sea shone and twinkled like another firmament,
against which the figures of our men, sitting with their faces
toward us, were outlined darkly.  The grim, set features of our
first mate, sitting beside me, were faintly illuminated.  There was
no sound but the whisper of passing waves against our lap-streak,
and the low, murmuring conversation of the men.  I had my face
toward the shore.  As I looked over the glimmering expanse, I
suddenly heard the whispered name of our first mate.  As suddenly,
by the phosphorescent light that surrounded it, I saw the long
trailing hair and gleaming shoulders of a woman floating beside us.
Legrande, you are positively drinking nothing.  Lightbody, you are
shirking the Burgundy--you used to like it!"

He paused, but no one spoke.

"I--let me see! where was I?  Oh, yes!  Well, I saw the woman, and
when I turned to call the attention of the first mate to this fact,
I knew instantly, by some strange instinct, that he had seen and
heard her, too.  So, from that moment to the conclusion of our
little drama, we were silent, but enforced spectators.

"She swam gracefully--silently!  I remember noticing through that
odd, half-weird, phosphorescent light which broke over her
shoulders as she rose and fell with each quiet stroke of her
splendidly rounded arms, that she was a mature, perfectly-formed
woman.  I remember, also, that when she reached the boat, and,
supporting herself with one small hand on the gunwale, she softly
called the mate in a whisper by his Christian name, I had a boyish
idea that she was--the--er--er--female of his species--his--er--
natural wife!  I'm boring you--am I not?"

Two or three heads shook violently and negatively.  The youngest,
and, I regret to say, the OLDEST, Miss Jones uttered together
sympathetically, "Go on--please; do!"

"The--woman told him in a few rapid words that he had been
betrayed; that the two men sent ashore were now in the hands of the
authorities; that a force was being organized to capture the
vessel; that instant flight was necessary, and that the betrayer
and traitor was--my friend, the Portuguese, Fernandez!

"The mate raised the dripping, little brown hand to his lips, and
whispered some undistinguishable words in her ear.  I remember
seeing her turn a look of ineffable love and happiness upon his
grim, set face, and then she was gone.  She dove as a duck dives,
and I saw her shapely head, after a moment's suspense, reappear a
cable's length away toward the shore.

"I ventured to raise my eyes to the mate's face; it was cold and
impassive.  I turned my face toward the crew; they were conversing
in whispers with each other, with their faces toward us, yet
apparently utterly oblivious of the scene that had just taken place
in the stern.  There was a moment of silence, and then the mate's
voice came out quite impassively, but distinctly:--

"'Fernandez!'

"'Aye, aye, sir!'

"'Come aft and--bring your oar with you.'

"He did so, stumbling over the men, who, engaged in their whispered
yarns, didn't seem to notice him.

"'See if you can find soundings here.'

"Fernandez leaned over the stern and dropped his oar to its shaft
in the phosphorescent water.  But he touched no bottom; the current
brought the oar at right angles presently to the surface.

"'Send it down, man,' said the mate, imperatively; 'down, down.
Reach over there.  What are you afraid of?  So; steady there; I'll
hold you.'

"Fernandez leaned over the stern and sent the oar and half of his
bared brown arm into the water.  In an instant the mate caught him
with one tremendous potential grip at his elbows, and forced him
and his oar head downward in the waters.  The act was so sudden,
yet so carefully premeditated, that no outcry escaped the doomed
man.  Even the launch scarcely dipped her stern to the act.  In
that awful moment I heard a light laugh from one of the men in
response to a wanton yarn from his comrade,--James, bring the vichy
to Mr. Lightbody!  You'll find that a dash of cognac will improve
it wonderfully.

"Well--to go on--a few bubbles arose to the surface.  Fernandez
seemed unreasonably passive, until I saw that when the mate had
gripped his elbows with his hands he had also firmly locked the
traitor's knees within his own.  In a few moments--it seemed to me,
then, a century--the mate's grasp relaxed; the body of Fernandez, a
mere limp, leaden mass, slipped noiselessly and heavily into the
sea.  There was no splash.  The ocean took it calmly and quietly to
its depths.  The mate turned to the men, without deigning to cast a
glance on me.

"'Oars!'  The men raised their oars apeak.

"'Let fall!'  There was a splash in the water, encircling the boat
in concentric lines of molten silver.

"'Give way!'

"Well, of course, that's all.  WE got away in time.  I knew I bored
you awfully!  Eh?  Oh, you want to know what became of the woman--
really, I don't know!  And myself--oh, I got away at Havana!  Eh?
Certainly; James, you'll find some smelling salts in my bureau.
Gentlemen, I fear we have kept the ladies too long."

But they had already risen, and were slowly filing out of the room.
Only one lingered--the youngest Miss Jones.

"That was a capital story," she said, pausing beside our host, with
a special significance in her usual audacity.  "Do you know you
absolutely sent cold chills down my spine a moment ago.  Really,
now, you ought to write for the magazines!"

Our host looked up at the pretty, audacious face.  Then he said,
sotto voce,--

"I do!"





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext Drift from Two Shores, by Bret Harte