 | CHAPTER I. The luck of Roaring Camp, and other sketches |  |
1. CHAPTER I.
JUST where the Sierra Nevada begins to subside
in gentler undulations, and the rivers
grow less rapid and yellow, on the side of a
great red mountain, stands “Smith's Pocket.”
Seen from the red road at sunset, in the red
light and the red dust, its white houses look like
the outcroppings of quartz on the mountain-side.
The red stage topped with red-shirted passengers
is lost to view half a dozen times in the tortuous
descent, turning up unexpectedly in out-of-the-way
places, and vanishing altogether within a
hundred yards of the town. It is probably owing
to this sudden twist in the road that the advent
of a stranger at Smith's Pocket is usually attended
with a peculiar circumstance. Dismounting from
the vehicle at the stage-office, the too confident
traveller is apt to walk straight out of town under
the impression that it lies in quite another direction.
It is related that one of the tunnel-men,
two miles from town, met one of these self-reliant
Harper's Magazine, and other evidences of “Civilization
and Refinement,” plodding along over the
road he had just ridden, vainly endeavoring to
find the settlement of Smith's Pocket.
An observant traveller might have found some
compensation for his disappointment in the weird
aspect of that vicinity. There were huge fissures
on the hillside, and displacements of the red
soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary
elemental upheaval than the work of man; while,
half-way down, a long flume straddled its narrow
body and disproportionate legs over the chasm,
like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian.
At every step smaller ditches crossed
the road, hiding in their sallow depths unlovely
streams that crept away to a clandestine union
with the great yellow torrent below, and here and
there were the ruins of some cabin with the
chimney alone left intact and the hearthstone open
to the skies.
The settlement of Smith's Pocket owed its
origin to the finding of a “pocket” on its site
by a veritable Smith. Five thousand dollars
were taken out of it in one half-hour by Smith.
Three thousand dollars were expended by Smith
and others in erecting a flume and in tunnelling.
And then Smith's Pocket was found to be only
a pocket, and subject like other pockets to depletion.
the great red mountain, that five thousand dollars
was the first and last return of his labor. The
mountain grew reticent of its golden secrets, and
the flume steadily ebbed away the remainder of
Smith's fortune. Then Smith went into quartzmining;
then into quartz-milling; then into hydraulics
and ditching, and then by easy degrees
into saloon-keeping. Presently it was whispered
that Smith was drinking a great deal; then it
was known that Smith was a habitual drunkard,
and then people began to think, as they are apt
to, that he had never been anything else. But
the settlement of Smith's Pocket, like that of
most discoveries, was happily not dependent on
the fortune of its pioneer, and other parties projected
tunnels and found pockets. So Smith's
Pocket became a settlement with its two fancy
stores, its two hotels, its one express-office, and its
two first families. Occasionally its one long straggling
street was overawed by the assumption of
the latest San Francisco fashions, imported per
express, exclusively to the first families; making
outraged Nature, in the ragged outline of her furrowed
surface, look still more homely, and putting
personal insult on that greater portion of the population
to whom the Sabbath, with a change of
linen, brought merely the necessity of cleanliness,
without the luxury of adornment. Then there
Bank, and a little beyond, on the mountain-side, a
graveyard; and then a little school-house.
“The Master,” as he was known to his little
flock, sat alone one night in the school-house,
with some open copy-books before him, carefully
making those bold and full characters which are
supposed to combine the extremes of chirographical
and moral excellence, and had got as far as
“Riches are deceitful,” and was elaborating the
noun with an insincerity of flourish that was quite
in the spirit of his text, when he heard a gentle
tapping. The woodpeckers had been busy about
the roof during the day, and the noise did not disturb
his work. But the opening of the door, and
the tapping continuing from the inside, caused him
to look up. He was slightly startled by the figure
of a young girl, dirty and shabbily clad. Still, her
great black eyes, her coarse, uncombed, lustreless
black hair falling over her sun-burned face, her red
arms and feet streaked with the red soil, were all
familiar to him. It was Melissa Smith, — Smith's
motherless child.
“What can she want here?” thought the master.
Everybody knew “Mliss,” as she was called,
throughout the length and height of Red Mountain.
Everybody knew her as an incorrigible girl.
Her fierce, ungovernable disposition, her mad freaks
and lawless character, were in their way as proverbial
philosophically accepted by the townsfolk. She
wrangled with and fought the school-boys with
keener invective and quite as powerful arm. She
followed the trails with a woodman's craft, and the
master had met her before, miles away, shoeless,
stockingless, and bareheaded on the mountain
road. The miners' camps along the stream supplied
her with subsistence during these voluntary
pilgrimages, in freely offered alms. Not but that
a larger protection had been previously extended
to Mliss. The Rev. Joshua McSnagley, “stated”
preacher, had placed her in the hotel as servant,
by way of preliminary refinement, and had introduced
her to his scholars at Sunday school.
But she threw plates occasionally at the landlord,
and quickly retorted to the cheap witticisms of the
guests, and created in the Sabbath school a sensation
that was so inimical to the orthodox dulness
and placidity of that institution, that, with a decent
regard for the starched frocks and unblemished
morals of the two pink-and-white-faced children
of the first families, the reverend gentleman
had her ignominiously expelled. Such were the
antecedents, and such the character of Mliss, as she
stood before the master. It was shown in the
ragged dress, the unkempt hair, and bleeding feet,
and asked his pity. It flashed from her black,
fearless eyes, and commanded his respect.
“I come here to-night,” she said rapidly and
boldly, keeping her hard glance on his, “because I
knew you was alone. I would n't come here when
them gals was here. I hate 'em and they hates me.
That 's why. You keep school, don't you? I want
to be teached!”
If to the shabbiness of her apparel and uncomeliness
of her tangled hair and dirty face she had
added the humility of tears, the master would have
extended to her the usual moiety of pity, and
nothing more. But with the natural, though illogical
instincts of his species, her boldness awakened
in him something of that respect which
all original natures pay unconsciously to one another
in any grade. And he gazed at her the more
fixedly as she went on still rapidly, her hand on
that door-latch and her eyes on his: —
“My name 's Mliss, — Mliss Smith! You can bet
your life on that. My father 's Old Smith, — Old
Bummer Smith, — that 's what 's the matter with
him. Mliss Smith, — and I 'm coming to school!”
“Well?” said the master.
Accustomed to be thwarted and opposed, often
wantonly and cruelly, for no other purpose than to
excite the violent impulses of her nature, the master's
phlegm evidently took her by surprise. She
stopped; she began to twist a lock of her hair between
her fingers; and the rigid line of upper lip,
drawn over the wicked little teeth, relaxed and
something like a blush struggled up to her cheek,
and tried to assert itself through the splashes of
redder soil, and the sunburn of years. Suddenly
she threw herself forward, calling on God to strike
her dead, and fell quite weak and helpless, with
her face on the master's desk, crying and sobbing
as if her heart would break.
The master lifted her gently and waited for the
paroxysm to pass. When with face still averted,
she was repeating between her sobs the mea culpa
of childish penitence, — that “she 'd be good, she
did n't mean to,” etc., it came to him to ask her
why she had left Sabbath school.
Why had she left the Sabbath school? — why?
O yes. What did he (McSnagley) want to tell
her she was wicked for? What did he tell her
that God hated her for? If God hated her, what
did she want to go to Sabbath school for? She
did n't want to be “beholden” to anybody who
hated her.
Had she told McSnagley this?
Yes, she had.
The master laughed. It was a hearty laugh,
and echoed so oddly in the little school-house, and
seemed so inconsistent and discordant with the
sighing of the pines without, that he shortly
corrected himself with a sigh. The sigh was
quite as sincere in its way, however, and after a
father.
Her father? What father? Whose father?
What had he ever done for her? Why did the
girls hate her? Come now! what made the
folks say, “Old Bummer Smith's Mliss!” when she
passed? Yes; O yes. She wished he was dead,
— she was dead, — everybody was dead; and her
sobs broke forth anew.
The master then, leaning over her, told her as
well as he could what you or I might have said
after hearing such unnatural theories from childish
lips; only bearing in mind perhaps better than
you or I the unnatural facts of her ragged dress,
her bleeding feet, and the omnipresent shadow of
her drunken father. Then, raising her to her feet,
he wrapped his shawl around her, and, bidding her
come early in the morning, he walked with her
down the road. There he bade her “good night.”
The moon shone brightly on the narrow path before
them. He stood and watched the bent little
figure as it staggered down the road, and waited
until it had passed the little graveyard and
reached the curve of the hill, where it turned and
stood for a moment, a mere atom of suffering outlined
against the far-off patient stars. Then he
went back to his work. But the lines of the copy-book
thereafter faded into long parallels of neverending
road, over which childish figures seemed to
little school-house seeming lonelier than before, he
shut the door and went home.
The next morning Mliss came to school. Her
face had been washed, and her coarse black hair
bore evidence of recent struggles with the comb,
in which both had evidently suffered. The old
defiant look shone occasionally in her eyes, but her
manner was tamer and more subdued. Then began
a series of little trials and self-sacrifices, in
which master and pupil bore an equal part, and
which increased the confidence and sympathy between
them. Although obedient under the master's
eye, at times during recess, if thwarted or
stung by a fancied slight, Mliss would rage in ungovernable
fury, and many a palpitating young
savage, finding himself matched with his own
weapons of torment, would seek the master with
torn jacket and scratched face, and complaints of
the dreadful Mliss. There was a serious division
among the townspeople on the subject; some
threatening to withdraw their children from such
evil companionship, and others as warmly upholding
the course of the master in his work of reclamation.
Meanwhile, with a steady persistence
that seemed quite astonishing to him on looking
back afterward, the master drew Mliss gradually
out of the shadow of her past life, as though it
were but her natural progress down the narrow
night of their first meeting. Remembering the
experience of the evangelical McSnagley, he carefully
avoided that Rock of Ages on which that
unskilful pilot had shipwrecked her young faith.
But if, in the course of her reading, she chanced
to stumble upon those few words which have lifted
such as she above the level of the older, the wiser,
and the more prudent, — if she learned something
of a faith that is symbolized by suffering, and the
old light softened in her eyes, it did not take
the shape of a lesson. A few of the plainer people
had made up a little sum by which the ragged
Mliss was enabled to assume the garments of respect
and civilization; and often a rough shake of
the hand, and words of homely commendation from
a red-shirted and burly figure, sent a glow to the
cheek of the young master, and set him to thinking
if it was altogether deserved.
Three months had passed from the time of their
first meeting, and the master was sitting late one
evening over the moral and sententious copies,
when there came a tap at the door, and again Mliss
stood before him. She was neatly clad and clean-faced,
and there was nothing perhaps but the long
black hair and bright black eyes to remind him of
his former apparition. “Are you busy?” she
asked. “Can you come with me?” — and on his
signifying his readiness, in her old wilful way she
said, “Come, then, quick!”
They passed out of the door together and into
the dark road. As they entered the town the
master asked her whither she was going. She replied,
“To see my father.”
It was the first time he had heard her call him
by that filial title, or indeed anything more than
“Old Smith” or the “Old Man.” It was the first
time in three months that she had spoken of him
at all, and the master knew she had kept resolutely
aloof from him since her great change.
Satisfied from her manner that it was fruitless to
question her purpose, he passively followed. In
out-of-the-way places, low groggeries, restaurants,
and saloons; in gambling-hells and dance-houses,
the master, preceded by Mliss, came and went. In
the reeking smoke and blasphemous outcries of
low dens, the child, holding the master's hand,
stood and anxiously gazed, seemingly unconscious
of all in the one absorbing nature of her pursuit.
Some of the revellers, recognizing Mliss, called to
the child to sing and dance for them, and would
have forced liquor upon her but for the interference
of the master. Others, recognizing him mutely,
made way for them to pass. So an hour slipped
by. Then the child whispered in his ear that there
was a cabin on the other side of the creek crossed
by the long flume, where she thought he still might
be. Thither they crossed, — a toilsome half-hour's
walk, — but in vain. They were returning by the
lights of the town on the opposite bank, when,
suddenly, sharply, a quick report rang out on the
clear night air. The echoes caught it, and carried
it round and round Red Mountain, and set the dogs
to barking all along the streams. Lights seemed
to dance and move quickly on the outskirts of the
town for a few moments, the stream rippled quite
audibly beside them, a few stones loosened themselves
from the hillside and splashed into the
stream, a heavy wind seemed to surge the branches
of the funereal pines, and then the silence seemed
to fall thicker, heavier, and deadlier. The master
turned towards Mliss with an unconscious gesture
of protection, but the child had gone. Oppressed
by a strange fear, he ran quickly down the trail to
the river's bed, and, jumping from boulder to boulder,
reached the base of Red Mountain and the
outskirts of the village. Midway of the crossing
he looked up and held his breath in awe. For
high above him on the narrow flume he saw the
fluttering little figure of his late companion crossing
swiftly in the darkness.
He climbed the bank, and, guided by a few lights
moving about a central point on the mountain,
soon found himself breathless among a crowd of
awe-stricken and sorrowful men. Out from among
them the child appeared, and, taking the master's
hand, led him silently before what seemed a ragged
but her excited manner gone, and her look that of
one to whom some long-expected event had at last
happened, — an expression that to the master in
his bewilderment seemed almost like relief. The
walls of the cavern were partly propped by decaying
timbers. The child pointed to what appeared
to be some ragged, cast-off clothes left in the hole
by the late occupant. The master approached
nearer with his flaming dip, and bent over them.
It was Smith, already cold, with a pistol in his
hand and a bullet in his heart, lying beside his
empty pocket.
| CHAPTER I. The luck of Roaring Camp, and other sketches | |