University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
THE AUTOCRAT OF THE STAGE-COACH.

“GIT up!”

No leader of a cavalry charge ever put more
authority into his tones than did Whisky Jim,
as he drew the lines over his four bay horses
in the streets of Red Owl Landing, a village
two years old, boasting three thousand inhabitants, and a certain
prospect of having four thousand a month later.

Even ministers, poets, and writers of unworldly romances
are sometimes influenced by mercenary considerations. But
stage-drivers are entirely consecrated to their high calling. Here
was Whisky Jim, in the very streets of Red Owl, in the spring
of the year 1856, when money was worth five and six per cent
a month on bond and mortgage, when corner lots doubled in
value over night, when everybody was frantically trying to
swindle everybody else—here was Whisky Jim, with the infatuation
of a life-long devotion to horse-flesh, utterly oblivious
to the chances of robbing green emigrants which a season
of speculation affords. He was secure from the infection.
You might have shown him a gold-mine under the very feet
of his wheel-horses, and he could not have worked it twenty-four
hours. He had an itching palm, which could be satisfied

with nothing but the “ribbons” drawn over the backs of a four-in-hand.

“Git up!”

The coach moved away—slowly at first—from the front-door
of the large, rectangular, unpainted Red Owl Hotel, dragging
its wheels heavily through the soft turf of a Main street
from which the cotton-wood trees had been cut down, but in
which the stumps were still standing, and which remained as
innocent of all pavement as when, three years before, the chief
whose name it bore, loaded his worldly goods upon the back
of his oldest and ugliest wife, slung his gun over his shoulder,
and started mournfully away from the home of his fathers,
which he, shiftless fellow, had bargained away to the white
man for an annuity of powder and blankets, and a little money,
to be quickly spent for whisky. And yet, I might add digressively,
there is comfort in the saddest situations. Even
the venerable Red Owl bidding adieu to the home of his ancestors
found solace in the sweet hope of returning under favorable
circumstances to scalp the white man's wife and children.

“Git up, thair! G'lang!” The long whip swung round
and cracked threateningly over the haunches of the leaders,
making them start suddenly as the coach went round a corner
and dipped into a hole at the same instant, nearly throwing
the driver, and the passenger who was enjoying the outride
with him, from their seats.

“What a hole!” said the passenger, a studious-looking
young man, with an entomologist's tin collecting-box slung
over his shoulders.

The driver drew a long breath, moistened his lips, and said
in a cool and aggravatingly deliberate fashion:

“That air blamed pollywog puddle sold las' week fer tew
thaousand.”

“Dollars?” asked the young man.

Jim gave him an annihilating look, and queried: “Didn'
think I meant tew thaousand acorns, did ye?”

“It's an awful price,” said the abashed passenger, speaking
as one might in the presence of a superior being.

Jim was silent awhile, and then resumed in the same slow
tone, but with something of condescension mixed with it:

“Think so, do ye? Mebbe so, stranger. Fool what bought
that tadpole lake done middlin' well in disposin' of it, howsumdever.”

Here the Superior Being came to a dead pause, and waited
to be questioned.

“How's that?” asked the young man.

After a proper interval of meditation, Jim said: “Sol' it this
week. Tuck jest twice what he invested in his frog-fishery.”

“Four thousand?” said the passenger with an inquisitive
and surprised rising inflection.

“Hey?” said Jim, looking at him solemnly. “Tew times
tew use to be four when I larnt the rewl of three in old
Varmount. Mebbe 'taint so in the country you come from,
where they call a pail a bucket.”

The passenger kept still awhile. The manner of the Superior
Being chilled him a little. But Whisky Jim graciously broke
the silence himself.

“Sell nex' week fer six.”

The young man's mind had already left the subject under
discussion, and it took some little effort of recollection to bring
it back.

“How long will it keep on going up?” he asked.

“Tell it teches the top. Come daown then like a spile-driver
in a hurry. Higher it goes, the wuss it'll mash anybody
what happens to stan' percisely under it.”

“When will it reach the top?”

The Superior Being turned his eyes full upon the student,
who blushed a little under the half-sneer of his look.

“Yaou tell! Thunder, stranger, that's jest what everybody'd
pay money tew find out. Everybody means to git aout in
time, but—thunder!—every piece of perrary in this territory's
a deadfall. Somebody'll git catched in every one of them air
traps. Gee up! G'lang! Git up, won't you? Hey?” And
this last sentence was ornamented with another magnificent
writing-master flourish of the whip-lash, and emphasized by an
explosive crack at the end, which started the four horses off
in a swinging gallop, from which Jim did not allow them to
settle back into a walk until they had reached the high prairie
land in the rear of the town.

“What are those people living in tents for?” asked the
student as he pointed back to Red Owl, now considerably
below them, and which presented a panorama of balloon-frame
houses, mostly innocent of paint, with a sprinkling of tents
pitched here and there among the trees; on lots not yet redeemed
from virgin wildness, but which possessed the remarkable
quality of “fetching” prices that would have done honor
to well-located land in Philadelphia.

“What they live that a-way fer? Hey? Mos'ly 'cause they
can't live no other.” Then, after a long pause, the Superior
Being resumed in a tone of half-soliloquy: “A'n't a bed nur a
board in the hull city of Red Owl to be had for payin' nur

coaxin'. Beds is aces. Houses is trumps. Landlords is got
high, low, Jack, and the game in ther hands. Looky there!
A bran-new lot of fools fresh from the factory.” And he
pointed to the old steamboat “Ben Bolt,” which was just coming
up to the landing with deck and guards black with eager
immigrants of all classes.

But Albert Charlton, the student, did not look back any
longer. It marks an epoch in a man's life when he first
catches sight of a prairie landscape, especially if that landscape
be one of those great rolling ones to be seen nowhere so well
as in Minnesota. Charlton had crossed Illinois from Chicago
to Dunleith in the night-time, and so had missed the flat
prairies. His sense of sublimity was keen, and, besides his
natural love for such scenes, he had a hobbyist passion for
virgin nature superadded.

“What a magnificent country!” he cried.

“Talkin' sense!” muttered Jim. “Never seed so good a
place fer stagin' in my day.”

For every man sees through his own eyes. To the emigrants
whose white-top “prairie schooners” wound slowly along
the road, these grass-grown hills and those far-away meadowy
valleys were only so many places where good farms could be
opened without the trouble of cutting off the trees. It was not
landscape, but simply land where one might raise thirty or
forty bushels of spring wheat to the acre, without any danger
of “fevernager;” to the keen-witted speculator looking sharply
after corner stakes, at a little distance from the road, it was
just so many quarter sections, “eighties,” and “forties,” to be
bought low and sold high whenever opportunity offered; to
Jim it was a good country for staging, except a few “blamed

sloughs where the bottom had fell out.” But the enthusiastic
eyes of young Albert Charlton despised all sordid and “culinary
uses” of the earth; to him this limitless vista of waving
wild grass, these green meadows and treeless hills dotted everywhere
with purple and yellow flowers, was a sight of Nature
in her noblest mood. Such rolling hills behind hills! If those
rolls could be called hills! After an hour the coach had gradually
ascended to the summit of the “divide” between Purple
River on the one side and Big Gun River on the other, and
the rows of willows and cotton-woods that hung over the
water's edge—the only trees under the whole sky—marked distinctly
the meandering lines of the two streams. Albert
Charlton shouted and laughed; he stood up beside Jim, and
cried out that it was a paradise.

“Mebbe 'tis,” sneered Jim. “Anyway, it's got more'n one
devil into it. Gil—lang!”

And under the inspiration of the scenery, Albert, with the
impulsiveness of a young man, unfolded to Whisky Jim all the
beauties of his own theories: how a man should live naturally
and let other creatures live; how much better a man was without
flesh-eating; how wrong it was to speculate, and that a
speculator gave nothing in return; and that it was not best to
wear flannels, seeing one should harden his body to endure
cold and all that; and how a man should let his beard grow,
not use tobacco nor coffee nor whisky, should get up at four
o'clock in the morning and go to bed early.

“Looky here, mister!” said the Superior Being, after a
while. “I wouldn't naow, ef I was you!”

“Wouldn't what?”

“Wouldn't fetch no sich notions into this ked'ntry. Can't

afford tew. 'Taint no land of idees. It's the ked'ntry of
corner lots. Idees is in the way—don't pay no interest. Haint
had time to build a 'sylum fer people with idees yet, in this
territory. Ef you must have 'em, why let me rec-ommend
Bost'n. Drove hack there wunst, myself.” Then after a pause
he proceeded with the deliberation of a judge: “It's the best
village I ever lay eyes on fer idees, is Bost'n. Thicker'n hops!
Grow single and in bunehes. Have s'cieties there fer idees.
Used to make money outen the fellows with idees, cartin 'em
round to anniversaries and sich. Ef you only wear a nice
slick plug-hat there, you kin believe anything you choose or
not, and be a gentleman all the same. The more you believe
or don't believe in Bost'n, the more gentleman you be. The
don't-believers is just as good as the believers. Idees inside
the head, and plug-hats outside. But idees out here! I tell
you, here it's nothin' but per-cent.” The Superior Being
puckered his lips and whistled. “Git up, will you! G'lang!
Better try Bost'n.”

Perhaps Albert Charlton, the student passenger, was a little
offended with the liberty the driver had taken in rebuking his
theories. He was full of “idees,” and his fundamental idea
was of course his belief in the equality and universal
brotherhood of men. In theory he recognized no social distinctions.
But the most democratic of democrats in theory is
just a little bit of an aristocrat in feeling—he doesn't like to
be patted on the back by the hostler; much less does he like
to be reprimanded by a stage-driver. And Charlton was all
the more sensitive from a certain vague consciousness that
he himself had let down the bars of his dignity by unfolding
his theories so gushingly to Whisky Jim. What did Jim

know—what could a man who said “idees” know—about the
great world-reforming thoughts that engaged his attention?
But when dignity is once fallen, all the king's oxen and all
the king's men can't stand it on its legs again. In such a
strait, one must flee from him who saw the fall.

Albert Charlton therefore determined that he would change
to the inside of the coach when an opportunity should offer,
and leave the Superior Being to sit “wrapped in the solitude
of his own originality.”