 | The luck of Roaring Camp, and other sketches |  |
STORIES.
MLISS.
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.
2. CHAPTER II.
The opinion which McSnagley expressed in
reference to a “change of heart” supposed to
be experienced by Mliss was more forcibly described
in the gulches and tunnels. It was
thought there that Mliss had “struck a good
lead.” So when there was a new grave added to
the little enclosure, and at the expense of the
master a little board and inscription put above it,
the Red Mountain Banner came out quite handsomely,
and did the fair thing to the memory of
one of “our oldest Pioneers,” alluding gracefully
genteelly shelving our dear brother with the past.
“He leaves an only child to mourn his loss,” says
the Banner, “who is now an exemplary scholar,
thanks to the efforts of the Rev. Mr. McSnagley.”
The Rev. McSnagley, in fact, made a strong point
of Mliss's conversion, and, indirectly attributing to
the unfortunate child the suicide of her father,
made affecting allusions in Sunday school to the
beneficial effects of the “silent tomb,” and in this
cheerful contemplation drove most of the children
into speechless horror, and caused the pink-and-white
scions of the first families to howl dismally
and refuse to be comforted.
The long dry summer came. As each fierce day
burned itself out in little whiffs of pearl-gray
smoke on the mountain summits, and the up-springing
breeze scattered its red embers over the
landscape, the green wave which in early spring
upheaved above Smith's grave grew sere and dry
and hard. In those days the master, strolling in
the little churchyard of a Sabbath afternoon, was
sometimes surprised to find a few wild-flowers
plucked from the damp pine-forests scattered
there, and oftener rude wreaths hung upon the
little pine cross. Most of these wreaths were
formed of a sweet-scented grass, which the children
loved to keep in their desks, intertwined
with the plumes of the buckeye, the syringa,
master noticed the dark blue cowl of the monk's-hood,
or deadly aconite. There was something
in the odd association of this noxious plant with
these memorials which occasioned a painful sensation
to the master deeper than his esthetic sense.
One day, during a long walk, in crossing a wooded
ridge he came upon Mliss in the heart of the forest,
perched upon a prostrate pine, on a fantastic
throne formed by the hanging plumes of lifeless
branches, her lap full of grasses and pine-burrs,
and crooning to herself one of the negro melodies
of her younger life. Recognizing him at a distance,
she made room for him on her elevated
throne, and with a grave assumption of hospitality
and patronage that would have been ridiculous
had it not been so terribly earnest, she fed him
with pine-nuts and crab-apples. The master took
that opportunity to point out to her the noxious
and deadly qualities of the monk's-hood, whose
dark blossoms he saw in her lap, and extorted
from her a promise not to meddle with it as long
as she remained his pupil. This done, — as the
master had tested her integrity before, — he rested
satisfied, and the strange feeling which had overcome
him on seeing them died away.
Of the homes that were offered Mliss when her
conversion became known, the master preferred
that of Mrs. Morpher, a womanly and kind-hearted
her maidenhood as the “Per-rairie Rose.” Being
one of those who contend resolutely against their
own natures, Mrs. Morpher, by a long series of self-sacrifices
and struggles, had at last subjugated her
naturally careless disposition to principles of “order,”
which she considered, in common with Mr.
Pope, as “Heaven's first law.” But she could not
entirely govern the orbits of her satellites, however
regular her own movements, and even her own
“Jeemes” sometimes collided with her. Again
her old nature asserted itself in her children. Lycurgus
dipped into the cupboard “between meals,”
and Aristides came home from school without
shoes, leaving those important articles on the
threshold, for the delight of a barefooted walk
down the ditches. Octavia and Cassandra were
“keerless” of their clothes. So with but one exception,
however much the “Prairie Rose” might
have trimmed and pruned and trained her own
matured luxuriance, the little shoots came up
defiantly wild and straggling. That one exception
was Clytemnestra Morpher, aged fifteen. She was
the realization of her mother's immaculate conception,
— neat, orderly, and dull.
It was an amiable weakness of Mrs. Morpher
to imagine that “Clytie” was a consolation and
model for Mliss. Following this fallacy, Mrs. Morpher
threw Clytie at the head of Mliss when she
adoration in her penitential moments. It was not,
therefore, surprising to the master to hear that
Clytie was coming to school, obviously as a favor
to the master and as an example for Mliss and
others. For “Clytie” was quite a young lady.
Inheriting her mother's physical peculiarities, and
in obedience to the climatic laws of the Red
Mountain region, she was an early bloomer. The
youth of Smith's Pocket, to whom this kind of
flower was rare, sighed for her in April and languished
in May. Enamored swains haunted the
school-house at the hour of dismissal. A few
were jealous of the master.
Perhaps it was this latter circumstance that
opened the master's eyes to another. He could
not help noticing that Clytie was romantic; that
in school she required a great deal of attention;
that her pens were uniformly bad and wanted fixing;
that she usually accompanied the request
with a certain expectation in her eye that was
somewhat disproportionate to the quality of service
she verbally required; that she sometimes
allowed the curves of a round, plump white arm
to rest on his when he was writing her copies;
that she always blushed and flung back her blond
curls when she did so. I don't remember whether
I have stated that the master was a young man, —
it 's of little consequence, however; he had been
was taking her first lesson, and, on the whole,
withstood the flexible curves and factitious glance
like the fine young Spartan that he was. Perhaps
an insufficient quality of food may have tended to
this asceticism. He generally avoided Clytie; but
one evening, when she returned to the school-house
after something she had forgotten, and did
not find it until the master walked home with
her, I hear that he endeavored to make himself
particularly agreeable, — partly from the fact, I
imagine, that his conduct was adding gall and
bitterness to the already overcharged hearts of
Clytemnestra's admirers.
The morning after this affecting episode Mliss
did not come to school. Noon came, but not Mliss.
Questioning Clytie on the subject, it appeared that
they had left the school together, but the wilful
Mliss had taken another road. The afternoon
brought her not. In the evening he called on Mrs.
Morpher, whose motherly heart was really alarmed.
Mr. Morpher had spent all day in search of her,
without discovering a trace that might lead to her
discovery. Aristides was summoned as a probable
accomplice, but that equitable infant succeeded
in impressing the household with his innocence.
Mrs. Morpher entertained a vivid impression that
the child would yet be found drowned in a ditch,
or, what was almost as terrible, muddied and soiled
at heart, the master returned to the school-house.
As he lit his lamp and seated himself at his desk,
he found a note lying before him addressed to himself,
in Mliss's handwriting. It seemed to be written
on a leaf torn from some old memorandum-book,
and, to prevent sacrilegious trifling, had been
sealed with six broken wafers. Opening it almost
tenderly, the master read as follows:—
Respected Sir, — When you read this, I am run
away. Never to come back. Never, Never, NEVER.
You can give my beeds to Mary Jennings, and my
Amerika's Pride [a highly colored lithograph from a
tobacco-box] to Sally Flanders. But don't you give
anything to Clytie Morpher. Don't you dare to. Do
you know what my oppinion is of her, it is this, she is
perfekly disgustin. That is all and no more at present
from
The master sat pondering on this strange epistle
till the moon lifted its bright face above the distant
hills, and illuminated the trail that led to the
school-house, beaten quite hard with the coming
and going of little feet. Then, more satisfied in
mind, he tore the missive into fragments and scattered
them along the road.
At sunrise the next morning he was picking his
way through the palm-like fern and thick underbrush
form, and awakening a querulous protest from a
few dissipated crows, who had evidently been making
a night of it, and so came to the wooded ridge
where he had once found Mliss. There he found
the prostrate pine and tasselled branches, but the
throne was vacant. As he drew nearer, what might
have been some frightened animal started through
the crackling limbs. It ran up the tossed arms of
the fallen monarch, and sheltered itself in some
friendly foliage. The master, reaching the old seat,
found the nest still warm; looking up in the intertwining
branches, he met the black eyes of the
errant Mliss. They gazed at each other without
speaking. She was first to break the silence.
“What do you want?” she asked curtly.
The master had decided on a course of action.
“I want some crab-apples,” he said humbly.
“Sha' n't have 'em! go away. Why don't you
get 'em of Clytemnerestera?” (It seemed to be a
relief to Mliss to express her contempt in additional
syllables to that classical young woman's
already long-drawn title.) “O you wicked thing!”
“I am hungry, Lissy. I have eaten nothing
since dinner yesterday. I am famished!” and the
young man in a state of remarkable exhaustion
leaned against the tree.
Melissa's heart was touched. In the bitter days
of her gypsy life she had known the sensation he
tone, but not entirely divested of suspicion,
she said,—
“Dig under the tree near the roots, and you 'll
find lots; but mind you don't tell,” for Mliss had
her hoards as well as the rats and squirrels.
But the master, of course, was unable to find
them; the effects of hunger probably blinding his
senses. Mliss grew uneasy. At length she peered
at him through the leaves in an elfish way, and
questioned,—
“If I come down and give you some, you 'll
promise you won't touch me?”
The master promised.
“Hope you 'll die if you do!”
The master accepted instant dissolution as a
forfeit. Mliss slid down the tree. For a few moments
nothing transpired but the munching of the
pine-nuts. “Do you feel better?” she asked, with
some solicitude. The master confessed to a recuperated
feeling, and then, gravely thanking her,
proceeded to retrace his steps. As he expected, he
had not gone far before she called him. He turned.
She was standing there quite white, with tears in
her widely opened orbs. The master felt that the
right moment had come. Going up to her, he took
both her hands, and, looking in her tearful eyes,
said, gravely, “Lissy, do you remember the first
evening you came to see me?”
Lissy remembered.
“You asked me if you might come to school,
for you wanted to learn something and be better,
and I said —”
“Come,” responded the child, promptly.
“What would you say if the master now came
to you and said that he was lonely without his little
scholar, and that he wanted her to come and teach
him to be better?”
The child hung her head for a few moments in
silence. The master waited patiently. Tempted
by the quiet, a hare ran close to the couple, and
raising her bright eyes and velvet forepaws, sat and
gazed at them. A squirrel ran half-way down
the furrowed bark of the fallen tree, and there
stopped.
“We are waiting, Lissy,” said the master, in a
whisper, and the child smiled. Stirred by a passing
breeze, the tree-tops rocked, and a long pencil
of light stole through their interlaced boughs full
on the doubting face and irresolute little figure.
Suddenly she took the master's hand in her quick
way. What she said was scarcely audible, but the
master, putting the black hair back from her forehead,
kissed her; and so, hand in hand, they passed
out of the damp aisles and forest odors into the
open sunlit road.
3. CHAPTER III.
Somewhat less spiteful in her intercourse with
other scholars, Mliss still retained an offensive
attitude in regard to Clytemnestra. Perhaps the
jealous element was not entirely lulled in her
passionate little breast. Perhaps it was only that
the round curves and plump outline offered more
extended pinching surface. But while such ebullitions
were under the master's control, her enmity
occasionally took a new and irrepressible
form.
The master in his first estimate of the child's
character could not conceive that she had ever
possessed a doll. But the master, like many other
professed readers of character, was safer in a posteriori
than a priori reasoning. Mliss had a doll,
but then it was emphatically Mliss's doll, — a smaller
copy of herself. Its unhappy existence had
been a secret discovered accidentally by Mrs. Morpher.
It had been the old-time companion of
Mliss's wanderings, and bore evident marks of
suffering. Its original complexion was long since
washed away by the weather and anointed by the
slime of ditches. It looked very much as Mliss
had in days past. Its one gown of faded stuff was
dirty and ragged as hers had been. Mliss had
term of endearment. She never exhibited it in
the presence of other children. It was put severely
to bed in a hollow tree near the school-house, and
only allowed exercise during Mliss's rambles. Fulfilling
a stern duty to her doll, as she would to
herself, it knew no luxuries.
Now Mrs. Morpher, obeying a commendable
impulse, bought another doll and gave it to Mliss.
The child received it gravely and curiously. The
master on looking at it one day fancied he saw a
slight resemblance in its round red cheeks and
mild blue eyes to Clytemnestra. It became evident
before long that Mliss had also noticed the
same resemblance. Accordingly she hammered its
waxen head on the rocks when she was alone, and
sometimes dragged it with a string round its neck
to and from school. At other times, setting it up
on her desk, she made a pin-cushion of its patient
and inoffensive body. Whether this was done in
revenge of what she considered a second figurative
obtrusion of Clytie's excellences upon her, or
whether she had an intuitive appreciation of the
rites of certain other heathens, and, indulging in
that “Fetish” ceremony, imagined that the original
of her wax model would pine away and finally die, is
a metaphysical question I shall not now consider.
In spite of these moral vagaries, the master
could not help noticing in her different tasks the
She knew neither the hesitancy nor the
doubts of childhood. Her answers in class were
always slightly dashed with audacity. Of course
she was not infallible. But her courage and daring
in passing beyond her own depth and that
of the floundering little swimmers around her, in
their minds outweighed all errors of judgment.
Children are not better than grown people in this
respect, I fancy; and whenever the little red hand
flashed above her desk, there was a wondering
silence, and even the master was sometimes oppressed
with a doubt of his own experience and
judgment.
Nevertheless, certain attributes which at first
amused and entertained his fancy began to afflict
him with grave doubts. He could not but see that
Mliss was revengeful, irreverent, and wilful. That
there was but one better quality which pertained
to her semi-savage disposition, — the faculty of
physical fortitude and self-sacrifice, and another,
though not always an attribute of the noble savage,
— Truth. Mliss was both fearless and sincere;
perhaps in such a character the adjectives were
synonymous.
The master had been doing some hard thinking
on this subject, and had arrived at that conclusion
quite common to all who think sincerely, that he
was generally the slave of his own prejudices,
for advice. This decision was somewhat
humiliating to his pride, as he and McSnagley were
not friends. But he thought of Mliss, and the
evening of their first meeting; and perhaps with
a pardonable superstition that it was not chance
alone that had guided her wilful feet to the school-house,
and perhaps with a complacent consciousness
of the rare magnanimity of the act, he choked
back his dislike and went to McSnagley.
The reverend gentleman was glad to see him.
Moreover, he observed that the master was looking
“peartish,” and hoped he had got over the “neuralgy”
and “rheumatiz.” He himself had been
troubled with a dumb “ager” since last conference.
But he had learned to “rastle and pray.”
Pausing a moment to enable the master to write
his certain method of curing the dumb “ager”
upon the book and volume of his brain, Mr. McSnagley
proceeded to inquire after Sister Morpher.
“She is an adornment to Christewanity, and has a
likely growin' young family,” added Mr. McSnagley;
“and there 's that mannerly young gal, — so
well behaved, — Miss Clytie.” In fact, Clytie's
perfections seemed to affect him to such an extent
that he dwelt for several minutes upon them. The
master was doubly embarrassed. In the first place,
there was an enforced contrast with poor Mliss
in all this praise of Clytie. Secondly, there was
speaking of Mrs. Morpher's earliest born. So that
the master, after a few futile efforts to say something
natural, found it convenient to recall another
engagement, and left without asking the
information required, but in his after reflections
somewhat unjustly giving the Rev. Mr. McSnagley
the full benefit of having refused it.
Perhaps this rebuff placed the master and pupil
once more in the close communion of old. The
child seemed to notice the change in the master's
manner, which had of late been constrained, and in
one of their long post-prandial walks she stopped
suddenly, and, mounting a stump, looked full in
his face with big, searching eyes. “You ain't mad?”
said she, with an interrogative shake of the black
braids. “No.” “Nor bothered?” “No.” “Nor
hungry?” (Hunger was to Mliss a sickness that
might attack a person at any moment.) “No.”
“Nor thinking of her?” “Of whom, Lissy?”
“That white girl.” (This was the latest epithet
invented by Mliss, who was a very dark brunette,
to express Clytemnestra.) “No.” “Upon your
word?” (A substitute for “Hope you 'll die!”
proposed by the master.) “Yes.” “And sacred
honor?” “Yes.” Then Mliss gave him a fierce
little kiss, and, hopping down, fluttered off. For
two or three days after that she condescended to
appear more like other children, and be, as she
expressed it, “good.”
Two years had passed since the master's advent
at Smith's Pocket, and as his salary was not large,
and the prospects of Smith's Pocket eventually becoming
the capital of the State not entirely definite,
he contemplated a change. He had informed
the school trustees privately of his intentions, but,
educated young men of unblemished moral character
being scarce at that time, he consented to continue
his school term through the winter to early
spring. None else knew of his intention except
his one friend, a Dr. Duchesne, a young Creole
physician known to the people of Wingdam as
“Duchesny.” He never mentioned it to Mrs. Morpher,
Clytie, or any of his scholars. His reticence
was partly the result of a constitutional indisposition
to fuss, partly a desire to be spared the questions
and surmises of vulgar curiosity, and partly
that he never really believed he was going to do
anything before it was done.
He did not like to think of Mliss. It was a
selfish instinct, perhaps, which made him try to
fancy his feeling for the child was foolish, romantic,
and unpractical. He even tried to imagine
that she would do better under the control of an
older and sterner teacher. Then she was nearly
eleven, and in a few years, by the rules of Red
Mountain, would be a woman. He had done his
duty. After Smith's death he addressed letters to
Smith's relatives, and received one answer from a
she stated her intention of leaving the Atlantic
States for California with her husband in a few
months. This was a slight superstructure for the
airy castle which the master pictured for Mliss's
home, but it was easy to fancy that some loving,
sympathetic woman, with the claims of kindred,
might better guide her wayward nature. Yet, when
the master had read the letter, Mliss listened to it
carelessly, received it submissively, and afterwards
cut figures out of it with her scissors, supposed to
represent Clytemnestra, labelled “the white girl,”
to prevent mistakes, and impaled them upon the
outer walls of the school-house.
When the summer was about spent, and the
last harvest had been gathered in the valleys, the
master bethought him of gathering in a few ripened
shoots of the young idea, and of having his
Harvest-Home, or Examination. So the savans
and professionals of Smith's Pocket were gathered
to witness that time-honored custom of placing
timid children in a constrained position, and bullying
them as in a witness-box. As usual in such
cases, the most audacious and self-possessed were
the lucky recipients of the honors. The reader
will imagine that in the present instance Mliss
and Clytie were pre-eminent, and divided public
attention; Mliss with her clearness of material
perception and self-reliance, Clytie with her placid
The other little ones were timid and blundering.
Mliss's readiness and brilliancy, of course,
captivated the greatest number and provoked the
greatest applause. Mliss's antecedents had unconsciously
awakened the strongest sympathies of a
class whose athletic forms were ranged against the
walls, or whose handsome bearded faces looked in
at the windows. But Mliss's popularity was over-thrown
by an unexpected circumstance.
McSnagley had invited himself, and had been
going through the pleasing entertainment of frightening
the more timid pupils by the vaguest and most
ambiguous questions delivered in an impressive funereal
tone; and Mliss had soared into Astronomy,
and was tracking the course of our spotted ball
through space, and keeping time with the music of
the spheres, and defining the tethered orbits of
the planets, when McSnagley impressively arose.
“Meelissy! ye were speaking of the revolutions
of this yere yearth and the move-ments of the sun,
and I think ye said it had been a doing of it since
the creashun, eh?” Mliss nodded a scornful affirmative.
“Well, war that the truth?” said McSnagley,
folding his arms. “Yes,” said Mliss, shutting
up her little red lips tightly. The handsome outlines
at the windows peered further in the school-room,
and a saintly Raphael-face, with blond beard
and soft blue eyes, belonging to the biggest scamp
“Stick to it, Mliss!” The reverend gentleman
heaved a deep sigh, and cast a compassionate
glance at the master, then at the children, and
then rested his look on Clytie. That young woman
softly elevated her round, white arm. Its seductive
curves were enhanced by a gorgeous and massive
specimen bracelet, the gift of one of her humblest
worshippers, worn in honor of the occasion.
There was a momentary silence. Clytie's round
cheeks were very pink and soft. Clytie's big eyes
were very bright and blue. Clytie's low-necked
white book-muslin rested softly on Clytie's white,
plump shoulders. Clytie looked at the master, and
the master nodded. Then Clytie spoke softly:—
“Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and
it obeyed him!” There was a low hum of applause
in the school-room, a triumphant expression
on McSnagley's face, a grave shadow on the master's,
and a comical look of disappointment reflected
from the windows. Mliss skimmed rapidly
over her Astronomy, and then shut the book with
a loud snap. A groan burst from McSnagley, an
expression of astonishment from the school-room,
a yell from the windows, as Mliss brought her red
fist down on the desk, with the emphatic declaration,—
“It 's a d—n lie. I don't believe it!”
4. CHAPTER IV.
The long wet season had drawn near its close.
Signs of spring were visible in the swelling buds
and rushing torrents. The pine-forests exhaled
the fresher spicery. The azaleas were already budding,
the Ceanothus getting ready its lilac livery
for spring. On the green upland which climbed
Red Mountain at its southern aspect the long
spike of the monk's-hood shot up from its broad-leaved
stool, and once more shook its dark-blue
bells. Again the billow above Smith's grave was
soft and green, its crest just tossed with the foam
of daisies and buttercups. The little graveyard
had gathered a few new dwellers in the past year,
and the mounds were placed two by two by the
little paling until they reached Smith's grave, and
there there was but one. General superstition
had shunned it, and the plot beside Smith was
vacant.
There had been several placards posted about
the town, intimating that, at a certain period, a
celebrated dramatic company would perform, for
a few days, a series of “side-splitting” and
“screaming farces”; that, alternating pleasantly
with this, there would be some melodrama and a
grand divertisement, which would include singing,
great fluttering among the little folk, and were
the theme of much excitement and great speculation
among the master's scholars. The master
had promised Mliss, to whom this sort of thing
was sacred and rare, that she should go, and on
that momentous evening the master and Mliss
“assisted.”
The performance was the prevalent style of
heavy mediocrity; the melodrama was not bad
enough to laugh at nor good enough to excite.
But the master, turning wearily to the child, was
astonished, and felt something like self-accusation
in noticing the peculiar effect upon her excitable
nature. The red blood flushed in her cheeks at
each stroke of her panting little heart. Her small
passionate lips were slightly parted to give vent
to her hurried breath. Her widely opened lids
threw up and arched her black eyebrows. She did
not laugh at the dismal comicalities of the funny
man, for Mliss seldom laughed. Nor was she discreetly
affected to the delicate extremes of the
corner of a white handkerchief, as was the tender-hearted
“Clytie,” who was talking with her “feller”
and ogling the master at the same moment. But
when the performance was over, and the green
curtain fell on the little stage, Mliss drew a long
deep breath, and turned to the master's grave face
with a half-apologetic smile and wearied gesture.
the lids of her black eyes, as if to dwell once more
in fancy on the mimic stage.
On their way to Mrs. Morpher's the master
thought proper to ridicule the whole performance.
Now he should n't wonder if Mliss thought that
the young lady who acted so beautifully was
really in earnest, and in love with the gentleman
who wore such fine clothes. Well, if she were in
love with him it was a very unfortunate thing!
“Why?” said Mliss, with an upward sweep of the
drooping lid. “Oh! well, he could n't support his
wife at his present salary, and pay so much a week
for his fine clothes, and then they would n't receive
as much wages if they were married as if
they were merely lovers, — that is,” added the
master, “if they are not already married to somebody
else; but I think the husband of the pretty
young countess takes the tickets at the door, or
pulls up the curtain, or snuffs the candles, or does
something equally refined and elegant. As to the
young man with nice clothes, which are really nice
now, and must cost at least two and a half or
three dollars, not to speak of that mantle of
red drugget which I happen to know the price of,
for I bought some of it for my room once, — as to
this young man, Lissy, he is a pretty good fellow,
and if he does drink occasionally, I don't think
people ought to take advantage of it and give him
I am sure he might owe me two dollars and a half
a long time, before I would throw it up in his face,
as the fellow did the other night at Wingdam.”
Mliss had taken his hand in both of hers and
was trying to look in his eyes, which the young
man kept as resolutely averted. Mliss had a
faint idea of irony, indulging herself sometimes in
a species of sardonic humor, which was equally
visible in her actions and her speech. But the
young man continued in this strain until they had
reached Mrs. Morpher's, and he had deposited
Mliss in her maternal charge. Waiving the invitation
of Mrs. Morpher to refreshment and rest, and
shading his eyes with his hand to keep out the
blue-eyed Clytemnestra's siren glances, he excused
himself, and went home.
For two or three days after the advent of the
dramatic company, Mliss was late at school, and
the master's usual Friday afternoon ramble was
for once omitted, owing to the absence of his
trustworthy guide. As he was putting away his
books and preparing to leave the school-house, a
small voice piped at his side, “Please, sir?” The
master turned and there stood Aristides Morpher.
“Well, my little man,” said the master, impatiently,
“what is it? quick!”
“Please, sir, me and `Kerg' thinks that Mliss
is going to run away agin.”
“What 's that, sir?” said the master, with that
unjust testiness with which we always receive disagreeable
news.
“Why, sir, she don't stay home any more, and
`Kerg' and me see her talking with one of those
actor fellers, and she 's with him now; and please,
sir, yesterday she told `Kerg' and me she could
make a speech as well as Miss Cellerstina Montmoressy,
and she spouted right off by heart,” and
the little fellow paused in a collapsed condition.
“What actor?” asked the master.
“Him as wears the shiny hat. And hair. And
gold pin. And gold chain,” said the just Aristides,
putting periods for commas to eke out his breath.
The master put on his gloves and hat, feeling an
unpleasant tightness in his chest and thorax, and
walked out in the road. Aristides trotted along
by his side, endeavoring to keep pace with his
short legs to the master's strides, when the master
stopped suddenly, and Aristides bumped up against
him. “Where were they talking?” asked the master,
as if continuing the conversation.
“At the Arcade,” said Aristides.
When they reached the main street the master
paused. “Run down home,” said he to the boy.
“If Mliss is there, come to the Arcade and tell me.
If she is n't there, stay home; run!” And off
trotted the short-legged Aristides.
The Arcade was just across the way, — a long,
and restaurant. As the young man crossed
the plaza he noticed that two or three of the passers-by
turned and looked after him. He looked at his
clothes, took out his handkerchief and wiped his
face, before he entered the bar-room. It contained
the usual number of loungers, who stared at him as
he entered. One of them looked at him so fixedly
and with such a strange expression that the master
stopped and looked again, and then saw it was only
his own reflection in a large mirror. This made the
master think that perhaps he was a little excited,
and so he took up a copy of the Red Mountain
Banner from one of the tables, and tried to recover
his composure by reading the column of advertisements.
He then walked through the bar-room, through
the restaurant, and into the billiard-room. The
child was not there. In the latter apartment a
person was standing by one of the tables with a
broad-brimmed glazed hat on his head. The master
recognized him as the agent of the dramatic
company; he had taken a dislike to him at their
first meeting, from the peculiar fashion of wearing
his beard and hair. Satisfied that the object of his
search was not there, he turned to the man with a
glazed hat. He had noticed the master, but tried
that common trick of unconsciousness, in which
vulgar natures always fail. Balancing a billiard-cue
in the centre of the table. The master stood opposite
to him until he raised his eyes; when their
glances met, the master walked up to him.
He had intended to avoid a scene or quarrel, but
when he began to speak, something kept rising in
his throat and retarded his utterance, and his own
voice frightened him, it sounded so distant, low,
and resonant. “I understand,” he began, “that
Melissa Smith, an orphan, and one of my scholars,
has talked with you about adopting your profession.
Is that so?”
The man with the glazed hat leaned over the
table, and made an imaginary shot, that sent the
ball spinning round the cushions. Then walking
round the table he recovered the ball and placed
it upon the spot. This duty discharged, getting
ready for another shot, he said, —
“S'pose she has?”
The master choked up again, but, squeezing the
cushion of the table in his gloved hand, he went
on: —
“If you are a gentleman, I have only to tell you
that I am her guardian, and responsible for her career.
You know as well as I do the kind of life
you offer her. As you may learn of any one here,
I have already brought her out of an existence
worse than death, — out of the streets and the contamination
of vice. I am trying to do so again.
mother, sister, or brother. Are you seeking to give
her an equivalent for these?”
The man with the glazed hat examined the point
of his cue, and then looked around for somebody
to enjoy the joke with him.
“I know that she is a strange, wilful girl,” continued
the master, “but she is better than she was.
I believe that I have some influence over her still.
I beg and hope, therefore, that you will take no
further steps in this matter, but as a man, as a gentleman,
leave her to me. I am willing —” But
here something rose again in the master's throat,
and the sentence remained unfinished.
The man with the glazed hat, mistaking the
master's silence, raised his head with a coarse,
brutal laugh, and said in a loud voice, —
“Want her yourself, do you? That cock won't
fight here, young man!”
The insult was more in the tone than the words,
more in the glance than tone, and more in the
man's instinctive nature than all these. The
best appreciable rhetoric to this kind of animal is
a blow. The master felt this, and, with his pent-up,
nervous energy finding expression in the one
act, he struck the brute full in his grinning face.
The blow sent the glazed hat one way and the cue
another, and tore the glove and skin from the
master's hand from knuckle to joint. It opened
the peculiar shape of his beard for some time to
come.
There was a shout, an imprecation, a scuffle, and
the trampling of many feet. Then the crowd
parted right and left, and two sharp quick reports
followed each other in rapid succession. Then
they closed again about his opponent, and the master
was standing alone. He remembered picking
bits of burning wadding from his coat-sleeve with
his left hand. Some one was holding his other
hand. Looking at it, he saw it was still bleeding
from the blow, but his fingers were clenched
around the handle of a glittering knife. He could
not remember when or how he got it.
The man who was holding his hand was Mr.
Morpher. He hurried the master to the door, but
the master held back, and tried to tell him as well
as he could with his parched throat about “Mliss.”
“It 's all right, my boy,” said Mr. Morpher. “She 's
home!” And they passed out into the street together.
As they walked along Mr. Morpher said
that Mliss had come running into the house a few
moments before, and had dragged him out, saying
that somebody was trying to kill the master at the
Arcade. Wishing to be alone, the master promised
Mr. Morpher that he would not seek the Agent
again that night, and parted from him, taking the
road toward the school-house. He was surprised
surprised to find Mliss sitting there.
The master's nature, as I have hinted before,
had, like most sensitive organizations, a selfish
basis. The brutal taunt thrown out by his late
adversary still rankled in his heart. It was possible,
he thought, that such a construction might
be put upon his affection for the child, which
at best was foolish and Quixotic. Besides, had
she not voluntarily abnegated his authority and
affection? And what had everybody else said
about her? Why should he alone combat the
opinion of all, and be at last obliged tacitly to
confess the truth of all they had predicted? And
he had been a participant in a low bar-room fight
with a common boor, and risked his life, to prove
what? What had he proved? Nothing? What
would the people say? What would his friends
say? What would McSnagley say?
In his self-accusation the last person he should
have wished to meet was Mliss. He entered the
door, and, going up to his desk, told the child, in a
few cold words, that he was busy, and wished to
be alone. As she rose he took her vacant seat, and,
sitting down, buried his head in his hands. When
he looked up again she was still standing there.
She was looking at his face with an anxious expression.
“Did you kill him?” she asked.
“No!” said the master.
“That 's what I gave you the knife for!” said
the child, quickly.
“Gave me the knife?” repeated the master, in
bewilderment.
“Yes, gave you the knife. I was there under the
bar. Saw you hit him. Saw you both fall. He
dropped his old knife. I gave it to you. Why
did n't you stick him?” said Mliss rapidly, with an
expressive twinkle of the black eyes and a gesture
of the little red hand.
The master could only look his astonishment.
“Yes,” said Mliss. “If you 'd asked me, I 'd
told you I was off with the play-actors. Why
was I off with the play-actors? Because you
would n't tell me you was going away. I knew
it. I heard you tell the Doctor so. I was n't
a goin' to stay here alone with those Morphers.
I 'd rather die first.”
With a dramatic gesture which was perfectly
consistent with her character, she drew from her
bosom a few limp green leaves, and, holding them
out at arm's-length, said in her quick vivid way,
and in the queer pronunciation of her old life,
which she fell into when unduly excited, —
“That 's the poison plant you said would kill
me. I 'll go with the play-actors, or I 'll eat this
and die here. I don't care which. I won't stay
here, where they hate and despise me! Neither
me too!”
The passionate little breast heaved, and two big
tears peeped over the edge of Mliss's eyelids, but
she whisked them away with the corner of her
apron as if they had been wasps.
“If you lock me up in jail,” said Mliss, fiercely,
“to keep me from the play-actors, I 'll poison
myself. Father killed himself, — why should n't
I? You said a mouthful of that root would kill
me, and I always carry it here,” and she struck
her breast with her elenched fist.
The master thought of the vacant plot beside
Smith's grave, and of the passionate little figure
before him. Seizing her hands in his and looking
full into her truthful eyes, he said, —
“Lissy, will you go with me?”
The child put her arms around his neck, and
said joyfully, “Yes.”
“But now — to-night?”
“To-night.”
And, hand in hand, they passed into the road,
— the narrow road that had once brought her
weary feet to the master's door, and which it
seemed she should not tread again alone. The
stars glittered brightly above them. For good or
ill the lesson had been learned, and behind them
the school of Red Mountain closed upon them forever.
THE RIGHT EYE OF THE COMMANDER.
The year of grace 1797 passed away on the
coast of California in a southwesterly gale.
The little bay of San Carlos, albeit sheltered by
the headlands of the blessed Trinity, was rough
and turbulent; its foam clung quivering to the
seaward wall of the Mission garden; the air
was filled with flying sand and spume, and as
the Señor Comandante, Hermenegildo Salvatierra,
looked from the deep embrasured window of the
Presidio guard-room, he felt the salt breath of the
distant sea buffet a color into his smoke-dried
cheeks.
The Commander, I have said, was gazing thoughtfully
from the window of the guard-room. He
may have been reviewing the events of the year
now about to pass away. But, like the garrison
at the Presidio, there was little to review;
the year, like its predecessors, had been uneventful,
— the days had slipped by in a delicious monotony
of simple duties, unbroken by incident
or interruption. The regularly recurring feasts
and saints' days, the half-yearly courier from San
Diego, the rare transport-ship and rarer foreign
life. If there was no achievement, there was certainly
no failure. Abundant harvests and patient
industry amply supplied the wants of Presidio and
Mission. Isolated from the family of nations, the
wars which shook the world concerned them not
so much as the last earthquake; the struggle that
emancipated their sister colonies on the other side
of the continent to them had no suggestiveness.
In short, it was that glorious Indian summer of
California history, around which so much poetical
haze still lingers, — that bland, indolent autumn
of Spanish rule, so soon to be followed by the
wintry storms of Mexican independence and the
reviving spring of American conquest.
The Commander turned from the window and
walked toward the fire that burned brightly on
the deep oven-like hearth. A pile of copy-books,
the work of the Presidio school, lay on the table.
As he turned over the leaves with a paternal
interest, and surveyed the fair round Scripture
text, — the first pious pot-hooks of the pupils of
San Carlos, — an audible commentary fell from
his lips: “`Abimelech took her from Abraham' —
ah, little one, excellent!— `Jacob sent to see his
brother' — body of Christ! that up-stroke of
thine, Paquita, is marvellous; the Governor shall
see it!” A film of honest pride dimmed the Commander's
left eye, — the right, alas! twenty years
rubbed it softly with the sleeve of his leather
jacket, and continued: “`The Ishmaelites having
arrived — ”'
He stopped, for there was a step in the courtyard,
a foot upon the threshold, and a stranger
entered. With the instinct of an old soldier,
the Commander, after one glance at the intruder,
turned quickly toward the wall, where his trusty
Toledo hung, or should have been hanging. But
it was not there, and as he recalled that the last
time he had seen that weapon it was being ridden
up and down the gallery by Pepito, the infant son
of Bautista, the tortilio-maker, he blushed and
then contented himself with frowning upon the
intruder.
But the stranger's air, though irreverent, was
decidedly peaceful. He was unarmed, and wore
the ordinary cape of tarpauling and sea-boots of a
mariner. Except a villanous smell of codfish,
there was little about him that was peculiar.
His name, as he informed the Commander, in
Spanish that was more fluent than elegant or precise,
— his name was Peleg Scudder. He was master
of the schooner “General Court,” of the port
of Salem, in Massachusetts, on a trading-voyage
to the South Seas, but now driven by stress of
weather into the bay of San Carlos. He begged
permission to ride out the gale under the headlands
he did not need, having taken in a supply at
Bodega. He knew the strict surveillance of the
Spanish port regulations in regard to foreign vessels,
and would do nothing against the severe discipline
and good order of the settlement. There
was a slight tinge of sarcasm in his tone as he
glanced toward the desolate parade-ground of the
Presidio and the open unguarded gate. The fact
was that the sentry, Felipe Gomez, had discreetly
retired to shelter at the beginning of the storm,
and was then sound asleep in the corridor.
The Commander hesitated. The port regulations
were severe, but he was accustomed to exercise
individual authority, and beyond an old order
issued ten years before, regarding the American
ship “Columbia,” there was no precedent to guide
him. The storm was severe, and a sentiment of
humanity urged him to grant the stranger's request.
It is but just to the Commander to say, that his
inability to enforce a refusal did not weigh with
his decision. He would have denied with equal
disregard of consequences that right to a seventy-four
gun ship which he now yielded so gracefully
to this Yankee trading-schooner. He stipulated
only, that there should be no communication
between the ship and shore. “For yourself,
Señor Captain,” he continued, “accept my hospitality.
The fort is yours as long as you shall
with old-fashioned courtesy, he made the semblance
of withdrawing from the guard-room.
Master Peleg Scudder smiled as he thought of
the half-dismantled fort, the two mouldy brass
cannon, cast in Manila a century previous, and the
shiftless garrison. A wild thought of accepting
the Commander's offer literally, conceived in the
reckless spirit of a man who never let slip an
offer for trade, for a moment filled his brain, but a
timely reflection of the commercial unimportance
of the transaction checked him. He only took
a capacious quid of tobacco, as the Commander
gravely drew a settle before the fire, and in honor
of his guest untied the black silk handkerchief that
bound his grizzled brows.
What passed between Salvatierra and his guest
that night it becomes me not, as a grave chronicler
of the salient points of history, to relate. I have
said that Master Peleg Scudder was a fluent talker,
and under the influence of divers strong waters,
furnished by his host, he became still more loquacious.
And think of a man with a twenty years'
budget of gossip! The Commander learned, for
the first time, how Great Britain lost her colonies;
of the French Revolution; of the great Napoleon,
whose achievements, perhaps, Peleg colored more
highly than the Commander's superiors would have
liked. And when Peleg turned questioner, the
himself master of the gossip of the Mission and
Presidio, the “small-beer” chronicles of that pastoral
age, the conversion of the heathen, the Presidio
schools, and even asked the Commander how
he had lost his eye! It is said that at this point
of the conversation Master Peleg produced from
about his person divers small trinkets, kick-shaws
and new-fangled trifles, and even forced some of
them upon his host. It is further alleged that
under the malign influence of Peleg and several
glasses of aguardiente, the Commander lost somewhat
of his decorum, and behaved in a manner
unseemly for one in his position, reciting high-flown
Spanish poetry, and even piping in a thin,
high voice, divers madrigals and heathen canzonets
of an amorous complexion; chiefly in regard to a
“little one” who was his, the Commander's, “soul”!
These allegations, perhaps unworthy the notice of
a serious chronicler, should be received with great
caution, and are introduced here as simple hearsay.
That the Commander, however, took a handkerchief
and attempted to show his guest the mysteries of
the sembi cuacua, capering in an agile but indecorous
manner about the apartment, has been
denied. Enough for the purposes of this narrative,
that at midnight Peleg assisted his host to
bed with many protestations of undying friendship,
and then, as the gale had abated, took his
“General Court.” When the day broke the ship
was gone.
I know not if Peleg kept his word with his
host. It is said that the holy fathers at the Mission
that night heard a loud chanting in the plaza,
as of the heathens singing psalms through their
noses; that for many days after an odor of salt
codfish prevailed in the settlement; that a dozen
hard nutmegs, which were unfit for spice or seed,
were found in the possession of the wife of the
baker, and that several bushels of shoe-pegs, which
bore a pleasing resemblance to oats, but were quite
inadequate to the purposes of provender, were
discovered in the stable of the blacksmith. But
when the reader reflects upon the sacredness of a
Yankee trader's word, the stringent discipline of
the Spanish port regulations, and the proverbial
indisposition of my countrymen to impose upon
the confidence of a simple people, he will at once
reject this part of the story.
A roll of drums, ushering in the year 1798,
awoke the Commander. The sun was shining
brightly, and the storm had ceased. He sat up in
bed, and through the force of habit rubbed his left
eye. As the remembrance of the previous night
came back to him, he jumped from his couch and
ran to the window. There was no ship in the
he rubbed both of his eyes. Not content with
this, he consulted the metallic mirror which hung
beside his crucifix. There was no mistake; the
Commander had a visible second eye, — a right
one, — as good, save for the purposes of vision, as
the left.
Whatever might have been the true secret of this
transformation, but one opinion prevailed at San
Carlos. It was one of those rare miracles vouchsafed
a pious Catholic community as an evidence
to the heathen, through the intercession of the
blessed San Carlos himself. That their beloved
Commander, the temporal defender of the Faith,
should be the recipient of this miraculous manifestation
was most fit and seemly. The Commander
himself was reticent; he could not tell a
falsehood, — he dared not tell the truth. After all,
if the good folk of San Carlos believed that the
powers of his right eye were actually restored,
was it wise and discreet for him to undeceive
them? For the first time in his life the Commander
thought of policy, — for the first time he
quoted that text which has been the lure of so
many well-meaning but easy Christians, of being
“all things to all men.” Infeliz Hermenegildo
Salvatierra!
For by degrees an ominous whisper crept through
the little settlement. The Right Eye of the Commander,
baleful effect upon the beholder. No one could
look at it without winking. It was cold, hard,
relentless and unflinching. More than that, it
seemed to be endowed with a dreadful prescience,
— a faculty of seeing through and into the inarticulate
thoughts of those it looked upon. The soldiers
of the garrison obeyed the eye rather than
the voice of their commander, and answered his
glance rather than his lips in questioning. The
servants could not evade the ever-watchful, but
cold attention that seemed to pursue them. The
children of the Presidio School smirched their
copy-books under the awful supervision, and poor
Paquita, the prize pupil, failed utterly in that
marvellous up-stroke when her patron stood beside
her. Gradually distrust, suspicion, self-accusation,
and timidity took the place of trust, confidence,
and security throughout San Carlos. Whenever the
Right Eye of the Commander fell, a shadow fell
with it.
Nor was Salvatierra entirely free from the baleful
influence of his miraculous acquisition. Unconscious
of its effect upon others, he only saw in
their actions evidence of certain things that the
crafty Peleg had hinted on that eventful New
Year's eve. His most trusty retainers stammered,
blushed, and faltered before him. Self-accusations,
confessions of minor faults and delinquencies, or
inquiries. The very children that he loved — his
pet pupil, Paquita — seemed to be conscious of
some hidden sin. The result of this constant irritation
showed itself more plainly. For the first
half-year the Commander's voice and eye were at
variance. He was still kind, tender, and thoughtful
in speech. Gradually, however, his voice took
upon itself the hardness of his glance and its
sceptical, impassive quality, and as the year again
neared its close it was plain that the Commander
had fitted himself to the eye, and not the eye to
the Commander.
It may be surmised that these changes did not
escape the watchful solicitude of the Fathers. Indeed,
the few who were first to ascribe the right
eye of Salvatierra to miraculous origin and the
special grace of the blessed San Carlos, now talked
openly of witchcraft and the agency of Luzbel,
the evil one. It would have fared ill with Hermenegildo
Salvatierra had he been aught but Commander
or amenable to local authority. But the
reverend father, Friar Manuel de Cortes, had no
power over the political executive, and all attempts
at spiritual advice failed signally. He retired baffled
and confused from his first interview with the
Commander, who seemed now to take a grim satisfaction
in the fateful power of his glance. The
holy father contradicted himself, exposed the fallacies
committed himself to several undoubted
heresies. When the Commander stood up at mass,
if the officiating priest caught that sceptical and
searching eye, the service was inevitably ruined.
Even the power of the Holy Church seemed to be
lost, and the last hold upon the affections of the
people and the good order of the settlement departed
from San Carlos.
As the long dry summer passed, the low hills
that surrounded the white walls of the Presidio
grew more and more to resemble in hue the leathern
jacket of the Commander, and Nature herself
seemed to have borrowed his dry, hard glare. The
earth was cracked and seamed with drought; a
blight had fallen upon the orchards and vineyards,
and the rain, long delayed and ardently prayed for,
came not. The sky was as tearless as the right
eye of the Commander. Murmurs of discontent,
insubordination, and plotting among the Indians
reached his ears; he only set his teeth the more
firmly, tightened the knot of his black silk handkerchief,
and looked up his Toledo.
The last day of the year 1798 found the Commander
sitting, at the hour of evening prayers,
alone in the guard-room. He no longer attended
the services of the Holy Church, but crept away
at such times to some solitary spot, where he spent
the interval in silent meditation. The firelight
the bowed figure of Salvatierra in darkness. Sitting
thus, he felt a small hand touch his arm, and,
looking down, saw the figure of Paquita, his little
Indian pupil, at his knee. “Ah, littlest of all,”
said the Commander, with something of his old
tenderness, lingering over the endearing diminutives
of his native speech, — “sweet one, what
doest thou here? Art thou not afraid of him
whom every one shuns and fears?”
“No,” said the little Indian, readily, “not in the
dark. I hear your voice, — the old voice; I feel
your touch, — the old touch; but I see not your
eye, Señor Comandante. That only I fear, — and
that, O Señor, O my father,” said the child, lifting
her little arms towards his, — “that I know
is not thine own!”
The Commander shuddered and turned away.
Then, recovering himself, he kissed Paquita gravely
on the forehead and bade her retire. A few
hours later, when silence had fallen upon the Presidio,
he sought his own couch and slept peacefully.
At about the middle watch of the night a
dusky figure crept through the low embrasure of
the Commander's apartment. Other figures were
flitting through the parade-ground, which the Commander
might have seen had he not slept so quietly.
The intruder stepped noiselessly to the couch
Something glittered in the firelight as the savage
lifted his arm; another moment and the sore perplexities
of Hermenegildo Salvatierra would have
been over, when suddenly the savage started and
fell back in a paroxysm of terror. The Commander
slept peacefully, but his right eye, widely
opened, fixed and unaltered, glared coldly on the
would-be assassin. The man fell to the earth in a
fit, and the noise awoke the sleeper.
To rise to his feet, grasp his sword, and deal
blows thick and fast upon the mutinous savages
who now thronged the room, was the work of a moment.
Help opportunely arrived, and the undisciplined
Indians were speedily driven beyond the
walls, but in the scuffle the Commander received
a blow upon his right eye, and, lifting his hand
to that mysterious organ, it was gone. Never
again was it found, and never again, for bale or
bliss, did it adorn the right orbit of the Commander.
With it passed away the spell that had fallen
upon San Carlos. The rain returned to invigorate
the languid soil, harmony was restored between
priest and soldier, the green grass presently waved
over the sere hillsides, the children flocked again
to the side of their martial preceptor, a Te Deum
was sung in the Mission Church, and pastoral content
once more smiled upon the gentle valleys of
Court” with its master, Peleg Scudder, trafficking in
beads and peltries with the Indians, and offering
glass eyes, wooden legs, and other Boston notions
to the chiefs.
NOTES BY FLOOD AND FIELD.
1. PART I. — IN THE FIELD.
IT was near the close of an October day that I
began to be disagreeably conscious of the Sacramento
Valley. I had been riding since sunrise,
and my course through the depressing monotony
of the long level landscape affected me more like
a dull dyspeptic dream than a business journey,
performed under that sincerest of natural phenomena,
— a California sky. The recurring stretches of
brown and baked fields, the gaping fissures in the
dusty trail, the hard outline of the distant hills,
and the herds of slowly moving cattle, seemed like
features of some glittering stereoscopic picture that
never changed. Active exercise might have removed
this feeling, but my horse by some subtle
instinct had long since given up all ambitious
effort, and had lapsed into a dogged trot.
It was autumn, but not the season suggested to
the Atlantic reader under that title. The sharply
defined boundaries of the wet and dry seasons were
prefigured in the clear outlines of the distant hills.
In the dry atmosphere the decay of vegetation was
Eastern landscape, or else Nature was too practical
for such thin disguises. She merely turned the
Hippocratic face to the spectator, with the old diagnosis
of Death in her sharp, contracted features.
In the contemplation of such a prospect there
was little to excite any but a morbid fancy. There
were no clouds in the flinty blue heavens, and the
setting of the sun was accompanied with as little
ostentation as was consistent with the dryly practical
atmosphere. Darkness soon followed, with a
rising wind, which increased as the shadows deepened
on the plain. The fringe of alder by the
watercourse began to loom up as I urged my horse
forward. A half-hour's active spurring brought
me to a corral, and a little beyond a house, so low
and broad it seemed at first sight to be half buried
in the earth.
My second impression was that it had grown out
of the soil, like some monstrous vegetable, its
dreary proportions were so in keeping with the
vast prospect. There were no recesses along its
roughly boarded walls for vagrant and unprofitable
shadows to lurk in the daily sunshine. No
projection for the wind by night to grow musical
over, to wail, whistle, or whisper to; only a long
wooden shelf containing a chilly-looking tin basin,
and a bar of soap. Its uncurtained windows were
red with the sinking sun, as though bloodshot and
tracks of cattle led to its front door, firmly closed
against the rattling wind.
To avoid being confounded with this familiar
element, I walked to the rear of the house, which
was connected with a smaller building by a slight
platform. A grizzled, hard-faced old man was
standing there, and met my salutation with a look
of inquiry, and, without speaking, led the way to
the principal room. As I entered, four young men,
who were reclining by the fire, slightly altered
their attitudes of perfect repose, but beyond that
betrayed neither curiosity nor interest. A hound
started from a dark corner with a growl, but was
immediately kicked by the old man into obscurity,
and silenced again. I can't tell why, but I instantly
received the impression that for a long time
the group by the fire had not uttered a word or
moved a muscle. Taking a seat, I briefly stated
my business.
Was a United States surveyor. Had come on
account of the Espíritu Santo Rancho. Wanted
to correct the exterior boundaries of township
lines, so as to connect with the near exteriors of
private grants. There had been some intervention
to the old survey by a Mr. Tryan who had preempted
adjacent — “settled land warrants,” interrupted
the old man. “Ah, yes! Land Warrants,
— and then this was Mr. Tryan?”
I had spoken mechanically, for I was preoccupied
in connecting other public lines with private
surveys, as I looked in his face. It was certainly
a hard face, and reminded me of the singular effect
of that mining operation known as “ground sluicing”;
the harder lines of underlying character
were exposed, and what were once plastic curves
and soft outlines were obliterated by some powerful
agency.
There was a dryness in his voice not unlike the
prevailing atmosphere of the valley, as he launched
into an ex parte statement of the contest, with a
fluency, which, like the wind without, showed frequent
and unrestrained expression. He told me
— what I had already learned — that the boundary
line of the old Spanish grant was a creek, described
in the loose phraseology of the deseño as beginning
in the valda or skirt of the hill, its precise location
long the subject of litigation. I listened and
answered with little interest, for my mind was still
distracted by the wind which swept violently by
the house, as well as by his odd face, which was
again reflected in the resemblance that the silent
group by the fire bore toward him. He was still
talking, and the wind was yet blowing, when my
confused attention was aroused by a remark addressed
to the recumbent figures.
“Now, then, which on ye 'll see the stranger up
the creek to Altascar's, to-morrow?”
There was a general movement of opposition in
the group, but no decided answer.
“Kin you go, Kerg?”
“Who 's to look up stock in Strarberry perar-ie?”
This seemed to imply a negative, and the old
man turned to another hopeful, who was pulling
the fur from a mangy bear-skin on which he was
lying, with an expression as though it were somebody's
hair.
“Well, Tom, wot 's to hinder you from goin'?”
“Man 's goin' to Brown's store at sun-up, and I
s'pose I 've got to pack her and the baby agin.”
I think the expression of scorn this unfortunate
youth exhibited for the filial duty into which he
had been evidently beguiled, was one of the finest
things I had ever seen.
“Wise?”
Wise deigned no verbal reply, but figuratively
thrust a worn and patched boot into the discourse.
The old man flushed quickly.
“I told ye to get Brown to give you a pair the
last time you war down the river.”
“Said he would n't without'en order. Said it
was like pulling gum-teeth to get the money from
you even then.”
There was a grim smile at this local hit at the
old man's parsimony, and Wise, who was clearly
the privileged wit of the family, sank back in honorable
retirement.
“Well, Joe, ef your boots are new, and you are
n't pestered with wimmin and children, p'r'aps
you 'll go,” said Tryan, with a nervous twitching,
intended for a smile, about a mouth not remarkably
mirthful.
Tom lifted a pair of bushy eyebrows, and said
shortly, —
“Got no saddle.”
“Wot 's gone of your saddle?”
“Kerg, there,” — indicating his brother with a
look such as Cain might have worn at the sacrifice.
“You lie!” returned Kerg, cheerfully.
Tryan sprang to his feet, seizing the chair, flourishing
it around his head and gazing furiously in
the hard young faces which fearlessly met his own.
But it was only for a moment; his arm soon
dropped by his side, and a look of hopeless fatality
crossed his face. He allowed me to take the chair
from his hand, and I was trying to pacify him by
the assurance that I required no guide, when the
irrepressible Wise again lifted his voice:—
“Theer 's George comin'! why don't ye ask him?
He 'll go and introduce you to Don Fernandy's
darter, too, ef you ain't pertickler.”
The laugh which followed this joke, which evidently
had some domestic allusion (the general
tendency of rural pleasantry), was followed by a
light step on the platform, and the young man entered.
Seeing a stranger present, he stopped and
then, drawing a box from the corner, sat down, his
hands clasped lightly together and his very handsome
bright blue eyes turned frankly on mine.
Perhaps I was in a condition to receive the romantic
impression he made upon me, and I took
it upon myself to ask his company as guide, and
he cheerfully assented. But some domestic duty
called him presently away.
The fire gleamed brightly on the hearth, and, no
longer resisting the prevailing influence, I silently
watched the spirting flame, listening to the wind
which continually shook the tenement. Besides
the one chair which had acquired a new importance
in my eyes, I presently discovered a crazy
table in one corner, with an ink-bottle and pen; the
latter in that greasy state of decomposition peculiar
to country taverns and farm-houses. A goodly
array of rifles and double-barrelled guns stocked
the corner; half a dozen saddles and blankets lay
near, with a mild flavor of the horse about them.
Some deer and bear skins completed the inventory.
As I sat there, with the silent group around me,
the shadowy gloom within and the dominant wind
without, I found it difficult to believe I had ever
known a different existence. My profession had
often led me to wilder scenes, but rarely among
those whose unrestrained habits and easy unconsciousness
made me feel so lonely and uncomfortable.
doubts — which I think occur naturally to people
in like situations — that this was the general rule
of humanity, and I was a solitary and somewhat
gratuitous exception.
It was a relief when a laconic announcement of
supper by a weak-eyed girl caused a general movement
in the family. We walked across the dark
platform, which led to another low-ceiled room.
Its entire length was occupied by a table, at the
farther end of which a weak-eyed woman was already
taking her repast, as she, at the same time,
gave nourishment to a weak-eyed baby. As the
formalities of introduction had been dispensed
with, and as she took no notice of me, I was enabled
to slip into a seat without discomposing or interrupting
her. Tryan extemporized a grace, and the
attention of the family became absorbed in bacon,
potatoes, and dried apples.
The meal was a sincere one. Gentle gurglings
at the upper end of the table often betrayed the
presence of the “wellspring of pleasure.” The
conversation generally referred to the labors of the
day, and comparing notes as to the whereabouts
of missing stock. Yet the supper was such a vast
improvement upon the previous intellectual feast,
that when a chance allusion of mine to the business
of my visit brought out the elder Tryan, the
interest grew quite exciting. I remember he inveighed
by the “greasers,” as he was pleased to term
the native Californians. As the same ideas have
been sometimes advanced under more pretentious
circumstances, they may be worthy of record.
“Look at 'em holdin' the finest grazin' land that
ever lay outer doors? Whar 's the papers for it?
Was it grants? Mighty fine grants, — most of
'em made arter the 'Merrikans got possession.
More fools the 'Merrikans for lettin' 'em hold 'em.
Wat paid for 'em? 'Merrikan blood and money.
“Did n't they oughter have suthin out of their
native country? Wot for? Did they ever improve?
Got a lot of yaller-skinned diggers, not
so sensible as niggers to look arter stock, and they
a sittin' home and smokin'. With their gold and
silver candlesticks, and missions, and crucifixens,
priests and graven idols, and sich? Them sort
things wurent allowed in Mizzoori.”
At the mention of improvements, I involuntarily
lifted my eyes, and met the half-laughing,
half-embarrassed look of George. The act did
not escape detection, and I had at once the satisfaction
of seeing that the rest of the family had
formed an offensive alliance against us.
“It was agin Nater, and agin God,” added
Tryan. “God never intended gold in the rocks to
be made into heathen candlesticks and crucifixens.
That 's why he sent 'Merrikins here. Nater never
never gin six months' sunshine to be slept and
smoked away.”
How long he continued, and with what further
illustration I could not say, for I took an early opportunity
to escape to the sitting-room. I was
soon followed by George, who called me to an open
door leading to a smaller room, and pointed to a
bed.
“You 'd better sleep there to-night,” he said;
“you 'll be more comfortable, and I 'll call you
early.”
I thanked him, and would have asked him
several questions which were then troubling me,
but he shyly slipped to the door and vanished.
A shadow seemed to fall on the room when he
had gone. The “boys” returned, one by one, and
shuffled to their old places. A larger log was
thrown on the fire, and the huge chimney glowed
like a furnace, but it did not seem to melt or subdue
a single line of the hard faces that it lit. In
half an hour later, the furs which had served as
chairs by day undertook the nightly office of mattresses,
and each received its owner's full-length
figure. Mr. Tryan had not returned, and I missed
George. I sat there, until, wakeful and nervous, I
saw the fire fall and shadows mount the wall.
There was no sound but the rushing of the wind
and the snoring of the sleepers. At last, feeling
the door, ran out briskly into the night.
The acceleration of my torpid pulse in the keen
fight with the wind, whose violence was almost
equal to that of a tornado, and the familiar faces
of the bright stars above me, I felt as a blessed
relief. I ran not knowing whither, and when I
halted, the square outline of the house was lost
in the alder-bushes. An uninterrupted plain
stretched before me, like a vast sea beaten flat by
the force of the gale. As I kept on I noticed a
slight elevation toward the horizon, and presently
my progress was impeded by the ascent of an Indian
mound. It struck me forcibly as resembling
an island in the sea. Its height gave me a better
view of the expanding plain. But even here
I found no rest. The ridiculous interpretation
Tryan had given the climate was somehow sung
in my ears, and echoed in my throbbing pulse,
as, guided by the star, I sought the house again.
But I felt fresher and more natural as I stepped
upon the platform. The door of the lower building
was open, and the old man was sitting beside
the table, thumbing the leaves of a Bible with a
look in his face as though he were hunting up
prophecies against the “Greaser.” I turned to
enter, but my attention was attracted by a blanketed
figure lying beside the house, on the platform.
The broad chest heaving with healthy slumber,
George, who had given up his bed to the stranger
among his people. I was about to wake him, but
he lay so peaceful and quiet, I felt awed and
hushed. And I went to bed with a pleasant impression
of his handsome face and tranquil figure
soothing me to sleep.
I was awakened the next morning from a sense
of lulled repose and grateful silence by the cheery
voice of George, who stood beside my bed, ostentatiously
twirling a “riata,” as if to recall the
duties of the day to my sleep-bewildered eyes. I
looked around me. The wind had been magically
laid, and the sun shone warmly through the windows.
A dash of cold water, with an extra chill
on from the tin basin, helped to brighten me. It
was still early, but the family had already breakfasted
and dispersed, and a wagon winding far in
the distance showed that the unfortunate Tom had
already “packed” his relatives away. I felt more
cheerful, — there are few troubles Youth cannot
distance with the start of a good night's rest.
After a substantial breakfast, prepared by George,
in a few moments we were mounted and dashing
down the plain.
We followed the line of alder that defined the
creek, now dry and baked with summer's heat,
but which in winter, George told me, overflowed
morning's ride, the far-off mountains, like silhouettes,
against the steel-blue sky, the crisp dry air, and
the expanding track before me, animated often by
the well-knit figure of George Tryan, musical with
jingling spurs, and picturesque with flying “riata.”
He rode a powerful native roan, wild-eyed, untiring
in stride and unbroken in nature. Alas!
the curves of beauty were concealed by the cumbrous
machillas of the Spanish saddle, which levels
all equine distinctions. The single rein lay
loosely on the cruel bit that can gripe, and, if need
be, crush the jaw it controls.
Again the illimitable freedom of the valley rises
before me, as we again bear down into sunlit
space. Can this be “Chu-Chu,” staid and respectable
filly of American pedigree, — “Chu-Chu,” forgetful
of plank-roads and cobble-stones, wild with
excitement, twinkling her small white feet beneath
me? George laughs out of a cloud of dust, “Give
her her head; don't you see she likes it?” and
“Chu-Chu” seems to like it, and, whether bitten
by native tarantula into native barbarism or
emulous of the roan, “blood” asserts itself, and
in a moment the peaceful servitude of years is
beaten out in the music of her clattering hoofs.
The creek widens to a deep gully. We dive into
it and up on the opposite side, carrying a moving
cloud of impalpable powder with us. Cattle are
together in vast restless herds. George makes a
wide, indefinite sweep with the “riata,” as if to
include them all in his vaquero's loop, and says,
“Ours!”
“About how many, George?”
“Don't know.”
“How many?”
“Well, p'r'aps three thousand head,” says George,
reflecting. “We don't know, takes five men to
look 'em up and keep run.”
“What are they worth?”
“About thirty dollars a head.”
I make a rapid calculation, and look my astonishment
at the laughing George. Perhaps a recollection
of the domestic economy of the Tryan household
is expressed in that look, for George averts
his eye and says, apologetically, —
“I 've tried to get the old man to sell and
build, but you know he says it ain't no use to
settle down, just yet. We must keep movin'.
In fact, he built the shanty for that purpose, lest
titles should fall through, and we 'd have to get
up and move stakes further down.”
Suddenly his quick eye detects some unusual
sight in a herd we are passing, and with an exclamation
he puts his roan into the centre of the
mass. I follow, or rather “Chu-Chu” darts after
the roan, and in a few moments we are in the
“Toro!” shouts George, with vaquero enthusiasm,
and the band opens a way for the swinging “riata.”
I can feel their steaming breaths, and their spume
is cast on “Chu-Chu's” quivering flank.
Wild, devilish-looking beasts are they; not
such shapes as Jove might have chosen to woo a
goddess, nor such as peacefully range the downs of
Devon, but lean and hungry Cassius-like bovines,
economically got up to meet the exigencies of a
six months' rainless climate, and accustomed to
wrestle with the distracting wind and the blinding
dust.
“That 's not our brand,” says George; “they 're
strange stock,” and he points to what my scientific
eye recognizes as the astrological sign of Venus
deeply seared in the brown flanks of the bull he is
chasing. But the herd are closing round us with
low mutterings, and George has again recourse to
the authoritative “Toro,” and with swinging “riata”
divides the “bossy bucklers” on either side. When
we are free, and breathing somewhat more easily, I
venture to ask George if they ever attack any
one.
“Never horsemen, — sometimes footmen. Not
through rage, you know, but curiosity. They think
a man and his horse are one, and if they meet a
chap afoot, they run him down and trample him
under hoof, in the pursuit of knowledge. But,”
and here 's Altascar's corral, and that white
building you see yonder is the casa.”
A whitewashed wall enclosed a court containing
another adobe building, baked with the solar beams
of many summers. Leaving our horses in the charge
of a few peons in the courtyard, who were basking
lazily in the sun, we entered a low doorway, where
a deep shadow and an agreeable coolness fell upon
us, as sudden and grateful as a plunge in cool
water, from its contrast with the external glare
and heat. In the centre of a low-ceiled apartment
sat an old man with a black silk handkerchief tied
about his head; the few gray hairs that escaped
from its folds relieving his gamboge-colored face.
The odor of cigarritos was as incense added to the
cathedral gloom of the building.
As Señor Altascar rose with well-bred gravity
to receive us, George advanced with such a heightened
color, and such a blending of tenderness and
respect in his manner, that I was touched to the
heart by so much devotion in the careless youth.
In fact, my eyes were still dazzled by the effect of
the outer sunshine, and at first I did not see the
white teeth and black eyes of Pepita, who slipped
into the corridor as we entered.
It was no pleasant matter to disclose particulars
of business which would deprive the old Señor of
the greater part of that land we had just ridden
he listened calmly, — not a muscle of his dark face
stirring, — and the smoke curling placidly from
his lips showed his regular respiration. When I
had finished, he offered quietly to accompany us
to the line of demarcation. George had meanwhile
disappeared, but a suspicious conversation in
broken Spanish and English, in the corridor, betrayed
his vicinity. When he returned again, a
little absent-minded, the old man, by far the coolest
and most self-possessed of the party, extinguished
his black silk cap beneath that stiff, uncomely
sombrero which all native Californians
affect. A serapa thrown over his shoulders hinted
that he was waiting. Horses are always ready
saddled in Spanish ranchos, and in half an hour
from the time of our arrival we were again “loping”
in the staring sunlight.
But not as cheerfully as before. George and
myself were weighed down by restraint, and Altascar
was gravely quiet. To break the silence, and
by way of a consolatory essay, I hinted to him
that there might be further intervention or appeal,
but the proffered oil and wine were returned with
a careless shrug of the shoulders and a sententious
“Que bueno? — Your courts are always
just.”
The Indian mound of the previous night's discovery
was a bearing monument of the new line,
the old man Tryan waiting us. For the first time
during our interview the old Spaniard seemed
moved, and the blood rose in his yellow cheek.
I was anxious to close the scene, and pointed out
the corner boundaries as clearly as my recollection
served.
“The deputies will be here to-morrow to run
the lines from this initial point, and there will be
no further trouble, I believe, gentlemen.”
Señor Altascar had dismounted and was gathering
a few tufts of dried grass in his hands. George
and I exchanged glances. He presently arose from
his stooping posture, and, advancing to within a
few paces of Joseph Tryan, said, in a voice broken
with passion, —
“And I, Fernando Jesus Maria Altascar, put
you in possession of my land in the fashion of my
country.”
He threw a sod to each of the cardinal points.
“I don't know your courts, your judges, or your
corregidores. Take the llano! — and take this
with it. May the drought seize your cattle till
their tongues hang down as long as those of your
lying lawyers! May it be the curse and torment
of your old age, as you and yours have made it of
mine!”
We stepped between the principal actors in this
scene, which only the passion of Altascar made
his triumph, interrupted: —
“Let him curse on. He 'll find 'em coming home
to him sooner than the cattle he has lost through
his sloth and pride. The Lord is on the side of
the just, as well as agin all slanderers and revilers.”
Altascar but half guessed the meaning of the
Missourian, yet sufficiently to drive from his mind
all but the extravagant power of his native invective.
“Stealer of the Sacrament! Open not! — open
not, I say, your lying, Judas lips to me! Ah!
half-breed, with the soul of a cayote! — Car-r-r-ramba!”
With his passion reverberating among the consonants
like distant thunder, he laid his hand
upon the mane of his horse as though it had been
the gray locks of his adversary, swung himself
into the saddle and galloped away.
George turned to me: —
“Will you go back with us to-night?”
I thought of the cheerless walls, the silent figures
by the fire, and the roaring wind, and hesitated.
“Well then, good by.”
“Good by, George.”
Another wring of the hands, and we parted. I
had not ridden far, when I turned and looked back.
The wind had risen early that afternoon, and was
travelled before it, and a picturesque figure occasionally
emerging therefrom was my last indistinct
impression of George Tryan.
2. PART II. — IN THE FLOOD.
Three months after the survey of the Espíritu
Santo Rancho, I was again in the valley of the
Sacramento. But a general and terrible visitation
had erased the memory of that event as completely
as I supposed it had obliterated the boundary
monuments I had planted. The great flood of
1861 - 62 was at its height, when, obeying some
indefinite yearning, I took my carpet-bag and embarked
for the inundated valley.
There was nothing to be seen from the bright
cabin windows of the “Golden City” but night
deepening over the water. The only sound was
the pattering rain, and that had grown monotonous
for the past two weeks, and did not disturb
the national gravity of my countrymen as they
silently sat around the cabin stove. Some on
errands of relief to friends and relatives wore
anxious faces, and conversed soberly on the one
absorbing topic. Others, like myself, attracted by
curiosity, listened eagerly to newer details. But
circumstance that might give chance event the
exaggerated importance of instinct, I was half
conscious of something more than curiosity as an
impelling motive.
The dripping of rain, the low gurgle of water,
and a leaden sky greeted us the next morning as
we lay beside the half-submerged levee of Sacramento.
Here, however, the novelty of boats to
convey us to the hotels was an appeal that was
irresistible. I resigned myself to a dripping rubber-cased
mariner called “Joe,” and, wrapping myself
in a shining cloak of the like material, about
as suggestive of warmth as court-plaster might
have been, took my seat in the stern-sheets of his
boat. It was no slight inward struggle to part
from the steamer, that to most of the passengers
was the only visible connecting link between us
and the dry and habitable earth, but we pulled
away and entered the city, stemming a rapid current
as we shot the levee.
We glided up the long level of K Street, — once
a cheerful, busy thoroughfare, now distressing in
its silent desolation. The turbid water which seemed
to meet the horizon edge before us flowed at right
angles in sluggish rivers through the streets. Nature
had revenged herself on the local taste by
disarraying the regular rectangles by huddling
houses on street corners, where they presented
in compact ruin. Crafts of all kinds were gliding
in and out of low-arched doorways. The water
was over the top of the fences surrounding well-kept
gardens, in the first stories of hotels and
private dwellings, trailing its slime on velvet carpets
as well as roughly boarded floors. And a
silence quite as suggestive as the visible desolation
was in the voiceless streets that no longer
echoed to carriage-wheel or footfall. The low
ripple of water, the occasional splash of oars, or
the warning cry of boatmen were the few signs of
life and habitation.
With such scenes before my eyes and such
sounds in my ears, as I lie lazily in the boat, is
mingled the song of my gondolier who sings to the
music of his oars. It is not quite as romantic as
his brother of the Lido might improvise, but my
Yankee “Giuseppe” has the advantage of earnestness
and energy, and gives a graphic description
of the terrors of the past week and of noble deeds
of self-sacrifice and devotion, occasionally pointing
out a balcony from which some California Bianca
or Laura had been snatched, half clothed and famished.
Giuseppe is otherwise peculiar, and refuses
the proffered fare, for — am I not a citizen
of San Francisco, which was first to respond to the
suffering cry of Sacramento? and is not he, Giuseppe,
a member of the Howard Society? No!
Still, if I must spend it, there is the Howard
Society, and the women and children without food
and clothes at the Agricultural Hall.
I thank the generous gondolier, and we go to
the Hall, — a dismal, bleak place, ghastly with
the memories of last year's opulence and plenty,
and here Giuseppe's fare is swelled by the stranger's
mite. But here Giuseppe tells me of the “Relief
Boat” which leaves for the flooded district in the
interior, and here, profiting by the lesson he has
taught me, I make the resolve to turn my curiosity
to the account of others, and am accepted of
those who go forth to succor and help the afflicted.
Giuseppe takes charge of my carpet-bag, and does
not part from me until I stand on the slippery
deck of “Relief Boat No. 3.”
An hour later I am in the pilot-house, looking
down upon what was once the channel of a peaceful
river. But its banks are only defined by tossing
tufts of willow washed by the long swell that
breaks over a vast inland sea. Stretches of “tule”
land fertilized by its once regular channel and
dotted by flourishing ranchos are now cleanly
erased. The cultivated profile of the old landscape
had faded. Dotted lines in symmetrical
perspective mark orchards that are buried and
chilled in the turbid flood. The roofs of a few
farm-houses are visible, and here and there the
tenements show an undaunted life within. Cattle
and sheep are gathered on Indian mounds waiting
the fate of their companions whose carcasses drift
by us, or swing in eddies with the wrecks of barns
and out-houses. Wagons are stranded everywhere
where the tide could carry them. As I wipe the
moistened glass, I see nothing but water, pattering
on the deck from the lowering clouds, dashing
against the window, dripping from the willows,
hissing by the wheels, everywhere washing, coiling,
sapping, hurrying in rapids, or swelling at last
into deeper and vaster lakes, awful in their suggestive
quiet and concealment.
As day fades into night the monotony of this
strange prospect grows oppressive. I seek the
engine-room, and in the company of some of the
few half-drowned sufferers we have already picked
up from temporary rafts, I forget the general
aspect of desolation in their individual misery.
Later we meet the San Francisco packet, and
transfer a number of our passengers. From them
we learn how inward-bound vessels report to having
struck the well-defined channel of the Sacramento,
fifty miles beyond the bar. There is
a voluntary contribution taken among the generous
travellers for the use of our afflicted, and we
part company with a hearty “God speed” on
either side. But our signal-lights are not far distant
an indomitable Yankee cheer, — which scatters the
gloom.
Our course is altered, and we are steaming over
the obliterated banks far in the interior. Once or
twice black objects loom up near us, — the wrecks
of houses floating by. There is a slight rift in the
sky towards the north, and a few bearing stars to
guide us over the waste. As we penetrate into
shallower water, it is deemed advisable to divide
our party into smaller boats, and diverge over the
submerged prairie. I borrow a pea-coat of one of
the crew, and in that practical disguise am doubtfully
permitted to pass into one of the boats. We
give way northerly. It is quite dark yet, although
the rift of cloud has widened.
It must have been about three o'clock, and we
were lying upon our oars in an eddy formed by a
clump of cottonwood, and the light of the steamer
is a solitary, bright star in the distance, when the
silence is broken by the “bow oar”: —
“Light ahead.”
All eyes are turned in that direction. In a few
seconds a twinkling light appears, shines steadily,
and again disappears as if by the shifting position
of some black object apparently drifting close
upon us.
“Stern, all; a steamer!”
“Hold hard there! Steamer be d—d!” is the
one too.”
It is a big one, looming in the starlight like a
huge fragment of the darkness. The light comes
from a single candle, which shines through a
window as the great shape swings by. Some
recollection is drifting back to me with it, as I
listen with beating heart.
“There 's some one in it, by Heavens! Give
way, boys, — lay her alongside. Handsomely, now!
The door 's fastened; try the window; no! here 's
another!”
In another moment we are trampling in the
water, which washes the floor to the depth of several
inches. It is a large room, at the further end
of which an old man is sitting wrapped in a
blanket, holding a candle in one hand, and apparently
absorbed in the book he holds with the
other. I spring toward him with an exclamation:
—
“Joseph Tryan!”
He does not move. We gather closer to him,
and I lay my hand gently on his shoulder, and
say: —
“Look up, old man, look up! Your wife and
children, where are they? The boys, — George!
Are they here? are they safe?”
He raises his head slowly, and turns his eyes to
mine, and we involuntarily recoil before his look.
or pain; but it somehow sends the blood curdling
through our veins. He bowed his head over his
book again, taking no further notice of us. The
men look at me compassionately, and hold their
peace. I make one more effort: —
“Joseph Tryan, don't you know me? the surveyor
who surveyed your ranch, — the Espíritu
Santo? Look up, old man!”
He shuddered and wrapped himself closer in his
blanket. Presently he repeated to himself, “The
surveyor who surveyed your ranch, — Espíritu
Santo,” over and over again, as though it were a
lesson he was trying to fix in his memory.
I was turning sadly to the boatmen, when he
suddenly caught me fearfully by the hand and
said, —
“Hush!”
We were silent.
“Listen!” He puts his arm around my neck
and whispers in my ear, “I 'm a moving off!”
“Moving off?”
“Hush! Don't speak so loud. Moving off.
Ah! wot 's that? Don't you hear? — there! listen!”
We listen, and hear the water gurgle and click
beneath the floor.
“It 's them wot he sent! — Old Altascar sent.
They 've been here all night. I heard 'em first in
move farther off. They came nearer and nearer.
They whispered under the door, and I saw their
eyes on the step, — their cruel, hard eyes. Ah,
why don't they quit?”
I tell the men to search the room and see if they
can find any further traces of the family, while
Tryan resumes his old attitude. It is so much
like the figure I remember on the breezy night
that a superstitious feeling is fast overcoming me.
When they have returned, I tell them briefly what
I know of him, and the old man murmurs again, —
“Why don't they quit, then? They have the
stock, — all gone — gone, gone for the hides and
hoofs,” and he groans bitterly.
“There are other boats below us. The shanty
cannot have drifted far, and perhaps the family are
safe by this time,” says the coxswain, hopefully.
We lift the old man up, for he is quite helpless,
and carry him to the boat. He is still grasping
the Bible in his right hand, though its strengthening
grace is blank to his vacant eye, and he cowers
in the stern as we pull slowly to the steamer, while
a pale gleam in the sky shows the coming day.
I was weary with excitement, and when we
reached the steamer, and I had seen Joseph Tryan
comfortably bestowed, I wrapped myself in a
blanket near the boiler and presently fell asleep.
But even then the figure of the old man often started
made a strong undercurrent to my drifting dreams.
I was awakened at about eight o'clock in the
morning by the engineer, who told me one of the
old man's sons had been picked up and was now on
board.
“Is it George Tryan?” I ask quickly.
“Don't know; but he 's a sweet one, whoever he
is,” adds the engineer, with a smile at some luscious
remembrance. “You 'll find him for'ard.”
I hurry to the bow of the boat, and find, not
George, but the irrepressible Wise, sitting on a
coil of rope, a little dirtier and rather more dilapidated
than I can remember having seen him.
He is examining, with apparent admiration, some
rough, dry clothes that have been put out for his
disposal. I cannot help thinking that circumstances
have somewhat exalted his usual cheerfulness.
He puts me at my ease by at once addressing
me: —
“These are high old times, ain't they? I say,
what do you reckon 's become o' them thar
bound'ry moniments you stuck? Ah!”
The pause which succeeds this outburst is the
effect of a spasm of admiration at a pair of high
boots, which, by great exertion, he has at last
pulled on his feet.
“So you 've picked up the ole man in the
shanty, clean crazy? He must have been soft
woman. Did n't know me from Adam; took me
for George!”
At this affecting instance of paternal forgetfulness,
Wise was evidently divided between amusement
and chagrin. I took advantage of the contending
emotions to ask about George.
“Don't know whar he is! If he 'd tended
stock instead of running about the prairie, packin'
off wimmin and children, he might have saved
suthin. He lost every hoof and hide, I 'll bet a
cookey! Say you,” to a passing boatman, “when
are you goin' to give us some grub? I 'm hungry
'nough to skin and eat a hoss. Reckon I 'll turn
butcher when things is dried up, and save hides,
horns, and taller.”
I could not but admire this indomitable energy,
which under softer climatic influences might have
borne such goodly fruit.
“Have you any idea what you 'll do, Wise?” I
ask.
“Thar ain't much to do now,” says the practical
young man. “I 'll have to lay over a spell, I
reckon, till things comes straight. The land ain't
worth much now, and won't be, I dessay, for some
time. Wonder whar the ole man 'll drive stakes
next.”
“I meant as to your father and George, Wise.”
“O, the ole man and I 'll go on to `Miles's,' whar
George 'll turn up somewhar atween this and
Altascar's, ef he ain't thar now.”
I ask how the Altascars have suffered.
“Well, I reckon he ain't lost much in stock. I
should n't wonder if George helped him drive 'em
up the foot-hills. And his `casa' 's built too high.
O, thar ain't any water thar, you bet. Ah,” says
Wise, with reflective admiration, “those greasers
ain't the darned fools people thinks 'em. I 'll bet
thar ain't one swamped out in all 'er Californy.”
But the appearance of “grub,” cut this rhapsody
short.
“I shall keep on a little farther,” I say, “and
try to find George.”
Wise stared a moment at this eccentricity until
a new light dawned upon him.
“I don't think you 'll save much. What 's the
percentage, — workin' on shares, eh!”
I answer that I am only curious, which I feel
lessens his opinion of me, and with a sadder feeling
than his assurance of George's safety might
warrant, I walked away.
From others whom we picked up from time to
time we heard of George's self-sacrificing devotion,
with the praises of the many he had helped
and rescued. But I did not feel disposed to return
until I had seen him, and soon prepared myself
to take a boat to the lower “valda” of the
my arrangements, bade farewell to Wise, and took
a last look at the old man, who was sitting by the
furnace-fires quite passive and composed. Then
our boat-head swung round, pulled by sturdy and
willing hands.
It was again raining, and a disagreeable wind
had risen. Our course lay nearly west, and we
soon knew by the strong current that we were in
the creek of the Espíritu Santo. From time to
time the wrecks of barns were seen, and we
passed many half-submerged willows hung with
farming implements.
We emerge at last into a broad silent sea. It is
the “llano de Espíritu Santo.” As the wind whistles
by me, piling the shallower fresh water into
mimic waves, I go back, in fancy, to the long ride
of October over that boundless plain, and recall
the sharp outlines of the distant hills which are
now lost in the lowering clouds. The men are
rowing silently, and I find my mind, released from
its tension, growing benumbed and depressed as
then. The water, too, is getting more shallow as
we leave the banks of the creek, and with my
hand dipped listlessly over the thwarts, I detect
the tops of chimisal, which shows the tide to have
somewhat fallen. There is a black mound, bearing
to the north of the line of alder, making an
adverse current, which, as we sweep to the right to
I call to the men to stop.
There was a stake driven near its summit with
the initials, “L. E. S. I.” Tied half-way down was
a curiously worked “riata.” It was George's. It
had been cut with some sharp instrument, and the
loose gravelly soil of the mound was deeply dented
with horse's hoofs. The stake was covered with
horse-hairs. It was a record, but no clew.
The wind had grown more violent, as we still
fought our way forward, resting and rowing by
turns, and oftener “poling” the shallower surface,
but the old “valda,” or bench, is still distant.
My recollection of the old survey enables me to
guess the relative position of the meanderings of
the creek, and an occasional simple professional
experiment to determine the distance gives my
crew the fullest faith in my ability. Night overtakes
us in our impeded progress. Our condition
looks more dangerous than it really is, but I urge
the men, many of whom are still new in this mode
of navigation, to greater exertion by assurance of
perfect safety and speedy relief ahead. We go on
in this way until about eight o'clock, and ground
by the willows. We have a muddy walk for a
few hundred yards before we strike a dry trail,
and simultaneously the white walls of Altascar's
appear like a snow-bank before us. Lights are
moving in the courtyard; but otherwise the old
tomb-like repose characterizes the building.
One of the peons recognized me as I entered the
court, and Altascar met me on the corridor.
I was too weak to do more than beg his hospitality
for the men who had dragged wearily with
me. He looked at my hand, which still unconsciously
held the broken “riata.” I began,
wearily, to tell him about George and my fears,
but with a gentler courtesy than was even his
wont, he gravely laid his hand on my shoulder.
“Poco a poco Señor, — not now. You are tired,
you have hunger, you have cold. Necessary it is
you should have peace.”
He took us into a small room and poured out
some French cognae, which he gave to the men
that had accompanied me. They drank and threw
themselves before the fire in the larger room. The
repose of the building was intensified that night,
and I even fancied that the footsteps on the corridor
were lighter and softer. The old Spaniard's
habitual gravity was deeper; we might have been
shut out from the world as well as the whistling
storm, behind those ancient walls with their timeworn
inheritor.
Before I could repeat my inquiry he retired.
In a few minutes two smoking dishes of “chupa”
with coffee were placed before us, and my men
ate ravenously. I drank the coffee, but my excitement
and weariness kept down the instincts
of hunger.
I was sitting sadly by the fire when he re-entered.
“You have eat?”
I said, “Yes,” to please him.
“Bueno, eat when you can, — food and appetite
are not always.”
He said this with that Sancho-like simplicity
with which most of his countrymen utter a
proverb, as though it were an experience rather
than a legend, and, taking the “riata” from the
floor, held it almost tenderly before him.
“It was made by me, Señor.”
“I kept it as a clew to him, Don Altascar,” I
said. “If I could find him — ”
“He is here.”
“Here! and” — but I could not say, “well!”
I understood the gravity of the old man's face, the
hushed footfalls, the tomb-like repose of the building
in an electric flash of consciousness; I held
the clew to the broken riata at last. Altascar took
my hand, and we crossed the corridor to a sombre
apartment. A few tall candles were burning in
sconces before the window.
In an alcove there was a deep bed with its
counterpane, pillows, and sheets heavily edged
with lace, in all that splendid luxury which the
humblest of these strange people lavish upon this
single item of their household. I stepped beside
it and saw George lying, as I had seen him once
than that he had known was here, and his generous
heart was stilled forever.
“He was honest and brave,” said the old man,
and turned away.
There was another figure in the room; a heavy
shawl drawn over her graceful outline, and her
long black hair hiding the hands that buried her
downcast face. I did not seem to notice her, and,
retiring presently, left the loving and loved together.
When we were again beside the crackling fire,
in the shifting shadows of the great chamber, Altascar
told me how he had that morning met the
horse of George Tryan swimming on the prairie;
how that, farther on, he found him lying, quite
cold and dead, with no marks or bruises on his
person; that he had probably become exhausted
in fording the creek, and that he had as probably
reached the mound only to die for want of that
help he had so freely given to others; that, as a
last act, he had freed his horse. These incidents
were corroborated by many who collected in the
great chamber that evening, — women and children,
— most of them succored through the devoted
energies of him who lay cold and lifeless
above.
He was buried in the Indian mound, — the
single spot of strange perennial greenness, which
plain. A little slab of sandstone with the initials
“G. T.” is his monument, and one of the bearings
of the initial corner of the new survey of the
“Espíritu Santo Rancho.”
| The luck of Roaring Camp, and other sketches | |