 | The luck of Roaring Camp, and other sketches |  |
THE IDYL OF RED GULCH.
SANDY was very drunk. He was lying under
an azalea-bush, in pretty much the same attitude
in which he had fallen some hours before.
How long he had been lying there he could not
tell, and did n't care; how long he should lie
there was a matter equally indefinite and unconsidered.
A tranquil philosophy, born of his
physical condition, suffused and saturated his
moral being.
The spectacle of a drunken man, and of this
drunken man in particular, was not, I grieve to
say, of sufficient novelty in Red Gulch to attract
attention. Earlier in the day some local satirist
had erected a temporary tombstone at Sandy's
head, bearing the inscription, “Effects of McCorkle's
whiskey, — kills at forty rods,” with a hand
pointing to McCorkle's saloon. But this, I imagine,
was, like most local satire, personal; and
was a reflection upon the unfairness of the process
rather than a commentary upon the impropriety
of the result. With this facetious exception, Sandy
had been undisturbed. A wandering mule, released
from his pack, had cropped the scant herbage beside
man; a vagabond dog, with that deep sympathy
which the species have for drunken men, had
licked his dusty boots, and curled himself up at
his feet, and lay there, blinking one eye in the
sunlight, with a simulation of dissipation that was
ingenious and dog-like in its implied flattery of
the unconscious man beside him.
Meanwhile the shadows of the pine-trees had
slowly swung around until they crossed the road,
and their trunks barred the open meadow with
gigantic parallels of black and yellow. Little
puffs of red dust, lifted by the plunging hoofs of
passing teams, dispersed in a grimy shower upon
the recumbent man. The sun sank lower and
lower; and still Sandy stirred not. And then the
repose of this philosopher was disturbed, as other
philosophers have been, by the intrusion of an
unphilosophical sex.
“Miss Mary,” as she was known to the little
flock that she had just dismissed from the log
school-house beyond the pines, was taking her
afternoon walk. Observing an unusually fine
cluster of blossoms on the azalea-bush opposite,
she crossed the road to pluck it, — picking her way
through the red dust, not without certain fierce little
shivers of disgust, and some feline circumlocution.
And then she came suddenly upon Sandy!
Of course she uttered the little staccato cry of
her physical weakness she became overbold, and
halted for a moment, — at least six feet from this
prostrate monster, — with her white skirts gathered
in her hand, ready for flight. But neither
sound nor motion came from the bush. With
one little foot she then overturned the satirical
head-board, and muttered “Beasts!” — an epithet
which probably, at that moment, conveniently
classified in her mind the entire male population
of Red Gulch. For Miss Mary, being possessed
of certain rigid notions of her own, had not, perhaps,
properly appreciated the demonstrative gallantry
for which the Californian has been so justly
celebrated by his brother Californians, and had, as
a new-comer, perhaps, fairly earned the reputation
of being “stuck up.”
As she stood there she noticed, also, that the
slant sunbeams were heating Sandy's head to what
she judged to be an unhealthy temperature, and
that his hat was lying uselessly at his side. To
pick it up and to place it over his face was a work
requiring some courage, particularly as his eyes
were open. Yet she did it and made good her retreat.
But she was somewhat concerned, on looking
back, to see that the hat was removed, and
that Sandy was sitting up and saying something.
The truth was, that in the calm depths of Sandy's
mind he was satisfied that the rays of the
childhood he had objected to lying down in a
hat; that no people but condemned fools, past redemption,
ever wore hats; and that his right to
dispense with them when he pleased was inalienable.
This was the statement of his inner consciousness.
Unfortunately, its outward expression
was vague, being limited to a repetition of the
following formula, — “Su'shine all ri'! Wasser
maär, eh? Wass up, su'shine?”
Miss Mary stopped, and, taking fresh courage
from her vantage of distance, asked him if there
was anything that he wanted.
“Wass up? Wasser maär?” continued Sandy,
in a very high key.
“Get up, you horrid man!” said Miss Mary,
now thoroughly incensed; “get up, and go home.”
Sandy staggered to his feet. He was six feet
high, and Miss Mary trembled. He started forward
a few paces and then stopped.
“Wass I go home for?” he suddenly asked,
with great gravity.
“Go and take a bath,” replied Miss Mary, eying
his grimy person with great disfavor.
To her infinite dismay, Sandy suddenly pulled
off his coat and vest, threw them on the ground,
kicked off his boots, and, plunging wildly forward,
darted headlong over the hill, in the direction of
the river.
“Goodness Heavens! — the man will be
drowned!” said Miss Mary; and then, with feminine
inconsistency, she ran back to the school-house,
and locked herself in.
That night, while seated at supper with her
hostess, the blacksmith's wife, it came to Miss
Mary to ask, demurely, if her husband ever got
drunk. “Abner,” responded Mrs. Stidger, reflectively,
“let 's see: Abner has n't been tight
since last 'lection.” Miss Mary would have liked
to ask if he preferred lying in the sun on these
occasions, and if a cold bath would have hurt him;
but this would have involved an explanation,
which she did not then care to give. So she contented
herself with opening her gray eyes widely
at the red-cheeked Mrs. Stidger, — a fine specimen
of Southwestern efflorescence, — and then dismissed
the subject altogether. The next day she
wrote to her dearest friend, in Boston: “I think
I find the intoxicated portion of this community
the least objectionable. I refer, my dear, to the
men, of course. I do not know anything that
could make the women tolerable.”
In less than a week Miss Mary had forgotten
this episode, except that her afternoon walks took
thereafter, almost unconsciously, another direction.
She noticed, however, that every morning
a fresh cluster of azalea-blossoms appeared
among the flowers on her desk. This was not
for flowers, and invariably kept her desk
bright with anemones, syringas, and lupines; but,
on questioning them, they, one and all, professed
ignorance of the azaleas. A few days later, Master
Johnny Stidger, whose desk was nearest to
the window, was suddenly taken with spasms
of apparently gratuitous laughter, that threatened
the discipline of the school. All that Miss Mary
could get from him was, that some one had been
“looking in the winder.” Irate and indignant, she
sallied from her hive to do battle with the intruder.
As she turned the corner of the school-house
she came plump upon the quondam drunkard, —
now perfectly sober, and inexpressibly sheepish
and guilty-looking.
These facts Miss Mary was not slow to take a
feminine advantage of, in her present humor. But
it was somewhat confusing to observe, also, that
the beast, despite some faint signs of past dissipation,
was amiable-looking, — in fact, a kind of
blond Samson, whose corn-colored, silken beard
apparently had never yet known the touch of barber's
razor or Delilah's shears. So that the cutting
speech which quivered on her ready tongue
died upon her lips, and she contented herself with
receiving his stammering apology with supercilious
eyelids and the gathered skirts of uncontamination.
When she re-entered the school-room,
revelation. And then she laughed, and the little
people all laughed, and they were all unconsciously
very happy.
It was on a hot day — and not long after this —
that two short-legged boys came to grief on the
threshold of the school with a pail of water, which
they had laboriously brought from the spring, and
that Miss Mary compassionately seized the pail
and started for the spring herself. At the foot of
the hill a shadow crossed her path, and a blue-shirted
arm dexterously, but gently relieved her
of her burden. Miss Mary was both embarrassed
and angry. “If you carried more of that for yourself,”
she said, spitefully, to the blue arm, without
deigning to raise her lashes to its owner, “you 'd
do better.” In the submissive silence that followed
she regretted the speech, and thanked him
so sweetly at the door that he stumbled. Which
caused the children to laugh again, — a laugh in
which Miss Mary joined, until the color came
faintly into her pale cheek. The next day a barrel
was mysteriously placed beside the door, and
as mysteriously filled with fresh spring-water
every morning.
Nor was this superior young person without
other quiet attentions. “Profane Bill,” driver of
the Slumgullion Stage, widely known in the
newspapers for his “gallantry” in invariably offering
Miss Mary from this attention, on the ground that
he had a habit of “cussin' on up grades,” and gave
her half the coach to herself. Jack Hamlin, a
gambler, having once silently ridden with her in
the same coach, afterward threw a decanter at the
head of a confederate for mentioning her name in
a bar-room. The over-dressed mother of a pupil
whose paternity was doubtful had often lingered
near this astute Vestal's temple, never daring to
enter its sacred precincts, but content to worship
the priestess from afar.
With such unconscious intervals the monotonous
procession of blue skies, glittering sunshine,
brief twilights, and starlit nights passed over Red
Gulch. Miss Mary grew fond of walking in the
sedate and proper woods. Perhaps she believed,
with Mrs. Stidger, that the balsamic odors of the
firs “did her chest good,” for certainly her slight
cough was less frequent and her step was firmer;
perhaps she had learned the unending lesson which
the patient pines are never weary of repeating to
heedful or listless ears. And so, one day, she
planned a picnic on Buckeye Hill, and took the
children with her. Away from the dusty road,
the straggling shanties, the yellow ditches, the
clamor of restless engines, the cheap finery of shop-windows,
the deeper glitter of paint and colored
glass, and the thin veneering which barbarism
relief was theirs! The last heap of ragged rock
and clay passed, the last unsightly chasm crossed,
— how the waiting woods opened their long
files to receive them! How the children — perhaps
because they had not yet grown quite away
from the breast of the bounteous Mother — threw
themselves face downward on her brown bosom
with uncouth caresses, filling the air with their
laughter; and how Miss Mary herself — felinely
fastidious and intrenched as she was in the purity
of spotless skirts, collar, and cuffs — forgot all, and
ran like a crested quail at the head of her brood,
until, romping, laughing, and panting, with a
loosened braid of brown hair, a hat hanging by a
knotted ribbon from her throat, she came suddenly
and violently, in the heart of the forest, upon —
the luckless Sandy!
The explanations, apologies, and not overwise
conversation that ensued, need not be indicated
here. It would seem, however, that Miss Mary
had already established some acquaintance with
this ex-drunkard. Enough that he was soon accepted
as one of the party; that the children, with
that quick intelligence which Providence gives the
helpless, recognized a friend, and played with his
blond beard, and long silken mustache, and took
other liberties, — as the helpless are apt to do.
And when he had built a fire against a tree, and
their admiration knew no bounds. At the close
of two such foolish, idle, happy hours he found
himself lying at the feet of the schoolmistress,
gazing dreamily in her face, as she sat upon the
sloping hillside, weaving wreaths of laurel and
syringa, in very much the same attitude as he
had lain when first they met. Nor was the similitude
greatly forced. The weakness of an easy,
sensuous nature, that had found a dreamy exaltation
in liquor, it is to be feared was now finding
an equal intoxication in love.
I think that Sandy was dimly conscious of this
himself. I know that he longed to be doing something,
— slaying a grizzly, scalping a savage, or
sacrificing himself in some way for the sake of
this sallow-faced, gray-eyed schoolmistress. As I
should like to present him in a heroic attitude, I
stay my hand with great difficulty at this moment,
being only withheld from introducing such an
episode by a strong conviction that it does not
usually occur at such times. And I trust that my
fairest reader, who remembers that, in a real crisis,
it is always some uninteresting stranger or unromantic
policeman, and not Adolphus, who rescues,
will forgive the omission.
So they sat there, undisturbed, — the woodpeckers
chattering overhead, and the voices of the children
coming pleasantly from the hollow below.
— which might have been interesting — did not
transpire. The woodpeckers only learned how
Miss Mary was an orphan; how she left her
uncle's house, to come to California, for the sake
of health and independence; how Sandy was an
orphan, too; how he came to California for excitement;
how he had lived a wild life, and how he
was trying to reform; and other details, which,
from a woodpecker's view-point, undoubtedly must
have seemed stupid, and a waste of time. But
even in such trifles was the afternoon spent; and
when the children were again gathered, and Sandy,
with a delicacy which the schoolmistress well understood,
took leave of them quietly at the outskirts
of the settlement, it had seemed the shortest
day of her weary life.
As the long, dry summer withered to its roots,
the school term of Red Gulch — to use a local
euphuism — “dried up” also. In another day
Miss Mary would be free; and for a season, at
least, Red Gulch would know her no more. She
was seated alone in the school-house, her cheek
resting on her hand, her eyes half closed in one
of those day-dreams in which Miss Mary — I fear,
to the danger of school discipline — was lately in
the habit of indulging. Her lap was full of
mosses, ferns, and other woodland memories. She
was so preoccupied with these and her own
unheard, or translated itself into the remembrance
of far-off woodpeckers. When at last it asserted
itself more distinctly, she started up with a flushed
cheek and opened the door. On the threshold
stood a woman, the self-assertion and audacity of
whose dress were in singular contrast to her timid,
irresolute bearing.
Miss Mary recognized at a glance the dubious
mother of her anonymous pupil. Perhaps she was
disappointed, perhaps she was only fastidious; but
as she coldly invited her to enter, she half unconsciously
settled her white cuffs and collar, and
gathered closer her own chaste skirts. It was,
perhaps, for this reason that the embarrassed
stranger, after a moment's hesitation, left her gorgeous
parasol open and sticking in the dust beside
the door, and then sat down at the farther end
of a long bench. Her voice was husky as she
began: —
“I heerd tell that you were goin' down to the
Bay to-morrow, and I could n't let you go until
I came to thank you for your kindness to my
Tommy.”
Tommy, Miss Mary said, was a good boy, and
deserved more than the poor attention she could
give him.
“Thank you, miss; thank ye!” cried the stranger,
brightening even through the color which
and striving, in her embarrassment, to drag the
long bench nearer the schoolmistress. “I thank
you, miss, for that! and if I am his mother, there
ain't a sweeter, dearer, better boy lives than him.
And if I ain't much as says it, thar ain't a sweeter,
dearer, angeler teacher lives than he 's got.”
Miss Mary, sitting primly behind her desk, with
a ruler over her shoulder, opened her gray eyes
widely at this, but said nothing.
“It ain't for you to be complimented by the like
of me, I know,” she went on, hurriedly. “It
ain't for me to be comin' here, in broad day, to
do it, either; but I come to ask a favor, — not
for me, miss, — not for me, but for the darling
boy.”
Encouraged by a look in the young schoolmistress's
eye, and putting her lilac-gloved hands together,
the fingers downward, between her knees,
she went on, in a low voice: —
“You see, miss, there 's no one the boy has any
claim on but me, and I ain't the proper person to
bring him up. I thought some, last year, of sending
him away to 'Frisco to school, but when they
talked of bringing a schoolma'am here, I waited
till I saw you, and then I knew it was all right,
and I could keep my boy a little longer. And O,
miss, he loves you so much; and if you could
hear him talk about you, in his pretty way, and if
refuse him.
“It is natural,” she went on, rapidly, in a voice
that trembled strangely between pride and humility,
— “it 's natural that he should take to you,
miss, for his father, when I first knew him, was a
gentleman, — and the boy must forget me, sooner
or later, — and so I ain't a goin' to cry about that.
For I come to ask you to take my Tommy, — God
bless him for the bestest, sweetest boy that lives, —
to — to — take him with you.”
She had risen and caught the young girl's hand
in her own, and had fallen on her knees beside her.
“I 've money plenty, and it 's all yours and his.
Put him in some good school, where you can go
and see him, and help him to — to — to forget his
mother. Do with him what you like. The worst
you can do will be kindness to what he will learn
with me. Only take him out of this wicked
life, this cruel place, this home of shame and sorrow.
You will; I know you will, — won't you?
You will, — you must not, you cannot say no!
You will make him as pure, as gentle as yourself;
and when he has grown up, you will tell him his
father's name, — the name that has n't passed my
lips for years, — the name of Alexander Morton,
whom they call here Sandy! Miss Mary! — do
not take your hand away! Miss Mary, speak to
me! You will take my boy? Do not put your
as me. Miss Mary! — my God, be merciful! —
she is leaving me!”
Miss Mary had risen, and, in the gathering twilight,
had felt her way to the open window. She
stood there, leaning against the casement, her eyes
fixed on the last rosy tints that were fading from
the western sky. There was still some of its light
on her pure young forehead, on her white collar,
on her clasped white hands, but all fading slowly
away. The suppliant had dragged herself, still on
her knees, beside her.
“I know it takes time to consider. I will wait
here all night; but I cannot go until you speak.
Do not deny me now. You will! — I see it in
your sweet face, — such a face as I have seen in
my dreams. I see it in your eyes, Miss Mary! —
you will take my boy!”
The last red beam crept higher, suffused Miss
Mary's eyes with something of its glory, flickered,
and faded, and went out. The sun had set on Red
Gulch. In the twilight and silence Miss Mary's
voice sounded pleasantly.
“I will take the boy. Send him to me to-night.”
The happy mother raised the hem of Miss Mary's
skirts to her lips. She would have buried her
hot face in its virgin folds, but she dared not.
She rose to her feet.
“Does — this man — know of your intention?”
asked Miss Mary, suddenly.
“No, nor cares. He has never even seen the
child to know it.”
“Go to him at once, — to-night, — now! Tell
him what you have done. Tell him I have taken
his child, and tell him — he must never see — see
— the child again. Wherever it may be, he must
not come; wherever I may take it, he must not
follow! There, go now, please, — I 'm weary, and
— have much yet to do!”
They walked together to the door. On the
threshold the woman turned.
“Good night.”
She would have fallen at Miss Mary's feet. But
at the same moment the young girl reached out
her arms, caught the sinful woman to her own pure
breast for one brief moment, and then closed and
locked the door.
It was with a sudden sense of great responsibility
that Profane Bill took the reins of the Slumgullion
Stage the next morning, for the schoolmistress
was one of his passengers. As he entered
the high-road, in obedience to a pleasant
voice from the “inside,” he suddenly reined up
his horses and respectfully waited, as “Tommy”
hopped out at the command of Miss Mary.
“Not that bush, Tommy, — the next.”
Tommy whipped out his new pocket-knife, and,
cutting a branch from a tall azalea-bush, returned
with it to Miss Mary.
“All right now?”
“All right.”
And the stage-door closed on the Idyl of Red
Gulch.
| The luck of Roaring Camp, and other sketches | |