With my wash bowl on my knee.'”
She returned and resumed her position with her hands folded.
“And that,” Jason Burrage told her, “was how I learned gold mining in
California. I sank shafts, too, and worked a windlass till the holes got
so deep they had to be timbered and the ore needed a crusher. But after
the fluming I knew what to wait for. I kept going in a sort of commerce
for a while--buying old outfits and selling them again to the late
comers--a pick or shovel would bring ten dollars and long boots fifty
dollars a pair. I got twenty-four dollars for a box of Seidlitz powders.
Then in 'Fifty-four I went in with three scientific men--one had been
a big chemist at Paris--and things took a turn. We had the dead wood
on gold. Why, we did nothing but re-travel the American Fork and Indian
Bar, the Casumnec and Moquelumne, and work the tailings the earlier
miners had piled up and left, just like I had south. We did some pretty
things with cyanide; yes, and hydraulics and powder.
“Things took a turn,” he repeated; “investments in stampers and so on,
and here I am.”
After he had gone--supper, she had informed him, was at five
exactly--Olive had the bewildered feeling of partially waking from
an extraordinary dream. Yet the buckskin bag on the table possessed a
weighty actuality.
*****
She sat for a long while gazing intently at the gold, which, like a
crystal ball, held for her varied reflections. Then, recalling the
exigencies of the kitchen, she hurried abruptly away. Her thoughts
wheeled about Jason Burrage in a confusion of all the impressions she
had ever had of him. But try as she might she could not picture the
present man as a part of her life in Cottarsport; she could not see
herself married to him, although that event waited just beyond today.
She set her lips in a straight line, a fixed purpose gave her courage
in place of the timidity inspired by Jason's opulent strangeness--she
couldn't allow herself to be turned aside for a moment from the way of
righteousness. The gods of mammon, however they might blackly assault
her spirit, should be confounded.
”... hide me
Till the storm of life is past.”
She sang in a high quavering voice. There was a stir beyond--surely
Jason wasn't back so soon; but it was Jem.
“What's on the table here?” he called.
“You let that be,” she cried back in a panic at having left the gift
so exposed. “That's gold dust; Jason brought it, two thousand dollars'
worth.”
A prolonged whistle followed her announcement. Jem appeared with the
buckskin bag in his hand. “Why, here's two yawls right in my hand,” he
asserted.
“Mind one thing, Jem,” she went on, “he's coming back for supper, and I
won't have you and Rhoda at him about boats and singing the minute he's
in the house.”
Rhoda, with exclamations, and then Hester, inspected the gold. “I'd
slave five years for that,” the latter stated, “and then hardly get it;
and here you, have it for nothing.”
“You'll get the good of it too, Hester,” Olive told her.
“I'll just work for what I get,” she replied fiercely. “I won't take
a penny from Jason, Olive Stanes; you can't hold that over me, and the
sooner you both know it the better.”
“You ought to pray to be saved from pride.”
“I don't ask benefits from any one,” Hester stoutly observed.
“Hester----” Olive commenced, scandalized, but she stopped at Jason's
entrance. “Hester she wanted a share of the gold,” Jem declared with a
light in his slow gaze, “and Olive was cursing at her.”
“Lots more,” said Jason Burrage, “buckets full.” In spite of the efforts
of every one to be completely at ease the supper was unavoidably stiff.
But when Jason had lighted one of his blunt cigars, and begun a vivid
description of western life, the Staneses were transported by the
marvels following one upon another: a nugget had been picked up over
a foot long, it weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, and realized
forty-three thousand dollars. “Why, fifty and seventy-five lumps were
common,” he asserted. “At Ford's Bar a man took out seven hundred
dollars a day for near a month. Another found seventeen thousand dollars
in a gutter two or three feet deep and not a hundred yards long.
“But 'Frisco was the place; you could see it spread in a day with
warehouses on the water and tents climbing up every hill. Happy Valley,
on the beach, couldn't hold another rag house. The Parker House rented
for a hundred and seventy thousand a year, and most of it paid for
gambling privileges; monté and faro, blazing lights and brass bands
everywhere and dancing in the El Dorado saloon. At first the men danced
with each other, but later----”
He stopped; an awkward silence followed. Olive was rigid with
inarticulate protest, a sense of outrage--gambling, saloons, and
dancing! All that she had feared about Jason became more concrete, more
imminent. She saw California as a modern Babylon, a volcano of gold and
vice; already she had heard of great fires that had devastated it.
“We didn't mine on Sunday, Olive,” Jason assured her; “and all the boys
went to the preaching and sang the hymns, standing out on the grass.”
Hester, finally, with a muttered period, rose and disappeared; Jem went
out to consult with a man, his nod to Olive spoke of yawls; and Rhoda,
at last, reluctantly made her way above. Olive's uneasiness increased
when she found herself alone with the man she was to marry.
“I don't like Rhoda and Jem hearing about all that wickedness,” she told
Jason Burrage; “they are young and easy affected. Rhoda gives me a lot
of worry as it is.”
“Suppose we forget them,” he suggested. “I haven't had a word with you
yet; that is, about ourselves. I don't even know but you have gone and
fell in love with some one else.”
“Jason,” she answered, “how can you? I told you I'd marry you, and I
will.”
“Are you glad to see me?” he demanded, coming closer and capturing her
hand.
“Why, what a question. Of course I'm pleased you're back and safe.”
“You haven't got a headache, have you?” he inquired jocularly.
“No,” she replied seriously. His words, his manners, his grasp, worried
her more and more. Still, she reminded herself, she must be patient,
accept life as it had been ordained. There was a slight flutter at her
heart, a constriction of her throat; and she wondered if this were
love. She should, she felt, exhibit more warmth at Jason's return, the
preservation, through such turbulent years of absence, of her image. But
it was beyond her power to force her hand to return his pressure: her
fingers lay still and cool in his grasp.
“You are just the same, Olive,” he told her; “and I'm glad you're what
you are, and that Cottarsport is what it is. That's why I came back: it
was in my blood, the old town and you. All the time I kept thinking of
when I'd come back rich as I made up my mind to be, and get you what
you ought to have--be of some importance in Cottarsport, like the
Canderays. The old captain, too, died while I was away. How's Honora?”
“Honora Canderay is an ungodly woman,” Olive asserted with emphasis.
“I don't know anything about that,” he said; “but I always kind of liked
to look at her. She reminded me of a schooner with everything set coming
up brisk into the wind.” Olive made a motion toward the stove, but he
restrained her; rising, he put in fresh wood. Then he turned and again
seemed lost in a long, contented inspection of the quiet interior. Olive
saw that marks of weariness shadowed his eyes.
“This is what I came back for,” he reiterated; “peaceful as the forests,
and yet warm and human. Blood counts.” He returned to his place by her,
and leaned forward, very earnestly. “California isn't real the way this
is,” he told her; “the women were just paint and powder, like things
you would see in a fever, and then you'd wake up, in Cottarsport, well
again, with you, Olive.”
She managed to smile at him in acknowledgment of this.
“I'm desperately glad I pulled through without many scars. But there are
some, Olive; that was bound to be. I don't know if a man had better say
anything about the past, or just let it be, and go on. Times I think one
and then the other. Yet you are so calm sitting here, and so good, it
would be a big help to tell you... Olive, out on the American, and God
knows how sorry I've been, I killed a man, Olive.”
Slowly she felt herself turning icy cold, except for the hot blood
rushing into her head. She stared at him for a moment, horrified;
and then mechanically drew back, scraping the chair across the floor.
Perhaps she hadn't understood, but certainly he had said----
“Wait till I tell what I can for myself,” he hurried on, following her.
“It was when the four of us were working with a rocker. I was shoveling
the gravel, and every one in California knows that when you're doing
that, and find a nugget over half an ounce, it belongs to you personal
and not to the partnership. Well, I came on a big one, and laid it
away--they all saw it--and then this Eddie Lukens hid it out on me. He
was the only one near where I had it; he broke it up and put it in the
cradle, sure; and in the talk that followed I--I shot him.”
He laid a detaining hand on her shoulder, but she wrenched herself away.
“Don't touch me!” she breathed. She thought she saw him bathed in the
blood of the man he had slain. Her lips formed a sentence, “'Thou shalt
not kill.'”
“I was tried at Spanish Bar,” he continued. “Miners' law is better than
you hear in the East. It's quick, it has to be, but in the main it's
serious and right. I was tried with witnesses and a jury and they let me
off; they justified me. That ought to go for something.”
“Don't come near me,” she cried, choking, filled with dread and utter
loathing. “How can you stand there and--stand there, a murderer, with a
life on your heart!”
His face quivered with concern; in spite of her words he drew near
her again, repeating the fact that he had been judged, released. Olive
Stanes' hysteria vanished before the cold stability which came to her
assistance, the sense of being rooted in her creed.
“'Thou shalt not kill,'” she echoed.
The emotion faded from his features, his countenance once more became
masklike, the jaw was hard and sharp, his eyes narrowed. “It's all over
then?” he asked. She nodded, her lips pinched into a white line.
“What else could be hoped? Blood guiltiness. O Jason, pray to save your
soul.”
He moved over to where his high silk hat reposed, secured it, and
turned. “This will be final.” His voice was hard. Olive stood slightly
swaying, with closed eyes. Then she remembered the buckskin bag of
not yellow but scarlet gold. She stumbled forward to it and thrust the
weight into his hand. Jason Burrage's fingers closed on the gift, while
his gaze rested on her from under contracted brows. He was, it seemed,
about to speak, but instead preserved an intense silence; he looked once
more about the room, still and old in its lamplight. Why didn't he go?
Then she saw that she was alone:
Like the eternal rock outside the door.
From above came the clear, joyous voice of Rhoda singing. Olive crumpled
into a chair. Soon Jem would be back.... She turned and slipped down
upon the floor in an agony of prayer.