following that morgue wagon, a no-end swell trap, with a cob in the
shafts that was worth an independent fortune. There was an old gent in
the trap and a smart Cape boy driving. The old gent was the heaviest
kind of a swell, but I'd never seen him before. The morgue wagon drives
into the yard, and I--the Harvard chap being too far gone--points out
the gryve. The driver of the morgue wagon chucks out the coffin, a bit
of a three-foot box, and drives back to town. Then up comes the trap,
and the old gent gets down--dressed up to the nines he was, in that
heartbreaking ryne--and says he, 'My man, I would like to have that
coffin opened.' By this time the Harvard chap had pulled himself
together. He staggered up to the old gent and says, 'No, can't op'n no
coffin, 'tsgainst all relugations--all regalutions, can't permit no
coffin tobeopp'n.' I wish you would have seen the old gent. Excited!
The man was shaking like a flagstaff in a gyle, talked thick and
stammered, he was so phased. Gawd strike me, what a scene! I can see
it now--that pauper burying ground wye down there in South Africa--no
trees, all open and bleak. The pelting ryne, the open gryve and the
drunken Harvard chap, and the excited old swell arguing over a baby's
coffin."
Pretty soon the old gent brings up a sovereign and gives it to the
Harvard chap.
"'Let her go,' says he then, and with that he gives the top board of the
coffin such a kick as started it an inch or more. With that--now listen
to what I'm telling--with that the old gent goes down on his knees in
the mud and muck, and kneels there waiting and fair gasping with
excitement while the Harvard chap wrenches off the topboard. Before he
had raised it four inches me old gent plunges his hand in quick, gropes
there a second and takes out something--something shut in the palm of
his hand.
"'That's all,' says he: 'Thank you, my man,' and gives us a quid apiece.
We stood there like stuck swine, dotty with the queerness, the
horribleness of the thing.
"'That's all,' he says again, with a long breath of relief, as he climbs
into his trap with his clothes all foul with mud. 'That's all, thank
Gawd.' Then to the Cape boy: 'Drive her home, Jim.' Five minutes later
we lost him in the blur of the rain over Hospital Hill."
"But what was it he took out of the baby's coffin?" said half a dozen
men in a breath at this point. "What was it? What could it have been?"
"Ah, what was it?" said Miller. "I'll be damned if I know what it was.
I never knew, I never will know."
_*A Reversion to Type*_
Schuster was too damned cheeky. He was the floor-walker in a department
store on Kearny street, and I had opportunity to observe his cheek upon
each of the few occasions on which I went into that store with--let us
say my cousin. A floor-walker should let his communications be "first
aisle left," or "elevator, second floor front," or "third counter
right," for whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil. But Schuster
used to come up to--my cousin, and take her gently by the hand and ask
her how she did, and if she was to be out of town much that season, and
tell her, with mild reproach in his eye, that she had been quite a
stranger of late, while I stood in the background mumbling curses not
loud but deep.
However, my cousin does not figure in this yarn, nor myself. Paul
Schuster is the hero--Paul Schuster, floor-walker in a department-store
that sold ribbons and lace and corsets and other things, fancy, now! He
was hopelessly commonplace, lived with a maiden aunt and a parrot in two
rooms, way out in the bleak streets around Lone Mountain. When on duty
he wore a long black cutaway coat, a white pique four-in-hand and
blue-grey "pants" that cost four dollars. Besides this he parted his
hair on the side and entertained ideas on culture and refinement. His
father had been a barber in the Palace Hotel barber shop.
Paul Schuster had never heard anything of a grandfather.
Schuster came to that department-store when he was about thirty. Five
years passed; then ten--he was there yet--forty years old by now. Always
in a black cutaway and white tie, always with his hair parted on one
side, always with the same damned cheek. A floor-walker, respectable as
an English barrister, steady as an eight-day clock, a figure known to
every woman in San Francisco. He had lived a floor-walker; as a
floor-walker he would die. Such he was at forty. At forty-one he fell.
Two days and all was over.
It sometimes happens that a man will live a sober, steady, respectable,
commonplace life for forty, fifty or even sixty years, and then, without
the least sign of warning, suddenly go counter to every habit, to every
trait of character and every rule of conduct he has been believed to
possess. The thing only happens to intensely respectable gentlemen, of
domestic tastes and narrow horizons, who are just preparing to become
old. Perhaps it is a last revolt of a restrained youth--the final
protest of vigorous, heady blood, too long dammed up. This bolting
season does not last very long. It comes upon a man between the ages of
forty and fifty-five, and while it lasts the man should be watched more
closely than a young fellow in his sophomore year at college. The
vagaries of a sophomore need not be taken any more seriously than the
skittishness of a colt, but when a fifty-year-old bolts, stand clear!
On the second of May--two months and a day after his forty-first
birthday--Paul Schuster bolted. It came upon him with the quickness of
a cataclysm, like the sudden, abrupt development of latent mania. For a
week he had been feeling ill at ease--restless; a vague discomfort
hedged him in like an ill-fitting garment; he felt the moving of his
blood in his wrists and his temples. A subtle desire to do something,
he knew not what, bit and nibbled at his brain like the tooth of a tiny
unfamiliar rodent.
On the second of May, at twenty minutes after six, Schuster came out of
the store at the tail end of the little army of home-bound clerks. He
locked the door behind him, according to custom, and stood for a moment
on the asphalt, his hands in his pockets, fumbling his month's pay. Then
he said to himself, nodding his head resolutely:
"To-night I shall get drunk--as drunk as I possibly can. I shall go to
the most disreputable resorts I can find--I shall know the meaning of
wine, of street fights, of women, of gaming, of jolly companions, of
noisy mid-night suppers. I'll do the town, or by God, the town will do
me. Nothing shall stop me, and I will stop at nothing. Here goes!"
Now, if Paul Schuster had only been himself this bolt of his would have
brought him to nothing worse than the Police Court, and would have
lasted but twenty-four hours at the outside. But Schuster, like all the
rest of us, was not merely himself. He was his ancestors as well. In
him as in you and me, were generations--countless generations--of
forefathers. Schuster had in him the characteristics of his father, the
Palace Hotel barber, but also, he had the unknown characteristics of his
grandfather, of whom he had never heard, and his great-grandfather,
likewise ignored. It is rather a serious matter to thrust yourself
under the dominion of unknown, unknowable impulses and passions. This
is what Schuster did that night. Getting drunk was an impulse belonging
to himself; but who knows what "inherited tendencies," until then
dormant, the alcohol unleashed within him? Something like this must
have happened to have accounted for what follows.
Schuster went straight to the Palace Hotel bar, where he had cocktails,
thence to the Poodle Dog, where he had a French dinner and champagne,
thence to the Barbary Coast on upper Kearny street, and drank whiskey
that rasped his throat like gulps of carpet tacks. Then, realising that
San Francisco was his own principality and its inhabitants his vassals,
he hired a carriage and drove to the Cliff House, and poured champagne
into the piano in the public parlor. A waiter remonstrated, and Paul
Schuster, floor-walker and respectable citizen, bowled him down with a
catsup bottle and stamped upon his abdomen. At the beginning of that
evening he belonged to that class whom policemen are paid to protect.
When he walked out of the Cliff House he was a free-booter seven feet
tall, with a chest expansion of fifty inches. He paid the hack-driver a
double fare and strode away into the night and plunged into the waste of
sand dunes that stretch back from the beach on the other side of the
Park.
It never could be found out what happened to Schuster, or what he did,
during the next ten hours. We pick him up again in a saloon on the
waterfront about noon the next day, with thirty dollars in his pocket
and God knows what disorderly notions in his crazed wits. At this time
he was sober as far as the alcohol went. It might be supposed that now
would have been the time for reflection and repentance and return to
home and respectability. Return home! Not much! Schuster had began to
wonder what kind of an ass he had been to have walked the floor of a
department-store for the last score of years. Something was boiling in
his veins. B-r-r-r! Let 'em all stand far from him now.
That day he left San Francisco and rode the blind baggage as far as
Colfax on the Overland. He chose Colfax because he saw the name chalked
on a freight car at the Oakland mole. At Colfax, within three hours
after his arrival, he fought with a restaurant man over the question of
a broken saucer, and the same evening was told to leave the town by the
sheriff.
Out of Colfax, some twenty-eight miles into the mountains, are placer
gold mines, having for headquarters a one-street town called Iowa Hill.
Schuster went over to the Hill the same day on the stage. The stage got
in at night and pulled up in front of the postoffice. Schuster went
into the postoffice, which was also a Wells-Fargo office, a candy store,
a drug store, a cigar store, and a lounging-room, and asked about
hotels.
Only the postmaster was in at that time, but as Schuster leaned across
the counter, talking to him, a young man came in, with a huge spur on
his left boot-heel. He and the postmaster nodded, and the young man
slid an oblong object about the size of a brick across the counter. The
object was wrapped in newspaper and seemed altogether too heavy for
anything but metal--metal of the precious kind, for example.
"He?" answered the postmaster to Schuster, when the young man had gone.
"He's the superintendent of the Little Bear mine on the other side of
the American River, about three miles by the trail."
For the next week Schuster set himself to work to solve the problem of
how a man might obtain a shotgun in the vicinity of Iowa Hill without
the fact being remembered afterward and the man identified. It seemed
good to him after a while to steal the gun from a couple of Chinamen who
were washing gravel along the banks of the American River about two
miles below the Little Bear. For two days he lay in the tarweed and
witch hazel, on the side of the canyon overlooking the cabin, noted the
time when both Chinamen were sufficiently far away, and stole the gun,
together with a saw and a handful of cartridges loaded with buckshot.
Within the next week he sawed off the gun-barrels sufficiently short,
experimented once or twice with the buckshot, and found occasion to
reconnoiter every step of the trail that led from the Little Bear to
Iowa Hill. Also, he found out at the bar of the hotel at the Hill that
the superintendent of the Little Bear amalgamated and reported the
cleanup on Sundays. When he had made sure of this Schuster was seen no
more about that little one-street mining town.
"He says it's Sunday," said Paul Schuster to himself; "but that's why
it's probably Saturday or Monday. He ain't going to have the town know
when he brings the brick over. It might even be Friday. I'll make it a
four-night watch."
There is a nasty bit on the trail from the Little Bear to the Hill,
steep as a staircase, narrow as a rabbit-run, and overhung with
manzanita. The place is trumpet-mouthed in shape, and sound carries
far. So, on the second night of his watch, Schuster could at last
plainly hear the certain sounds that he had been waiting for--sounds
that jarred sharply on the prolonged roll of the Morning Star stamps, a
quarter of a mile beyond the canyon. The sounds were those of a horse
threshing through the gravel and shallow water of the ford in the river
just below. He heard the horse grunt as he took the slope of the nearer
bank, and the voice of his rider speaking to him came distinctly to his
ears. Then silence for one--two--three minutes, while the stamp mill at
the Morning Star purred and rumbled unceasingly and Schuster's heart
pumped thickly in his throat. Then a blackness blacker than that of the
night heaved suddenly against the grey of "the sky, close in upon him,
and a pebble clicked beneath a shod hoof.
"Pull up!" Schuster was in the midst of the trail, his cheek caressing
the varnished stock.
"Whoa! Steady there! What in hell----"
"Pull up. You know what's wanted. Chuck us that brick."
The superintendent chirped sharply to the horse, spurring with his left
heel.
"Stand clear there, God damn you! I'll ride you down!"
The stock leaped fiercely in Schuster's arm-pit, nearly knocking him
down, and, in the light of two parallel flashes, he saw an instantaneous
picture--rugged skyline, red-tinted manzanita bushes, the plunging mane
and head of a horse, and above it a Face with open mouth and staring
eyes, smoke-wreathed and hatless. The empty stirrup thrashed across
Schuster's body as the horse scraped by him. The trail was dark in front
of him. He could see nothing. But soon he heard a little bubbling
noise and a hiccough. Then all fell quiet again.
"I got you, all right!"
Thus Schuster, the ex-floor-walker, whose part hitherto in his little
life-drama had been to say, "first aisle left," "elevator, second
floor," "first counter right."
Then he went down on his knees, groping at the warm bundle in front of
him. But he found no brick. It had never occurred to him that the
superintendent might ride over to town for other reasons than merely to
ship the week's cleanup. He struck a light and looked more
closely--looked at the man he had shot. He could not tell whether it
was the superintendent or not, for various reasons, but chiefly because
the barrels of the gun had been sawn off, the gun loaded with buckshot,
and both barrels fired simultaneously at close range.
Men coming over the trail from the Hill the next morning found the young
superintendent, and spread the report of what had befallen him.
* * * * *
When the Prodigal Son became hungry he came to himself. So it was with
Schuster. Living on two slices of bacon per day (eaten raw for fear of
kindling fires) is what might be called starving under difficulties, and
within a week Schuster was remembering and longing for floor-walking and
respectability. Within a month of his strange disappearance he was back
in San Francisco again knocking at the door of his aunt's house on Geary
street. A week later he was taken on again at his old store, in his old
position, his unexcused absence being at length, and under protest,
condoned by a remembrance of "long and faithful service."
Schuster picked up his old life again precisely where he had left it on
the second of May, six weeks previously--picked it up and stayed by it,
calmly, steadily, uneventfully. The day before he died he told this
story to his maiden aunt, who told it to me, with the remark that it
was, of course, an absurd lie. Perhaps it was.
One thing, however, remains to tell. I repeated the absurd lie to a
friend of mine who is in the warden's office over at the prison of San
Quentin. I mentioned Schuster's name.
"Schuster! Schuster!" he repeated; "why we had a Schuster over here
once--a long time ago, though. An old fellow he was, and a bad egg,
too. Commuted for life, though. Son was a barber at the Palace Hotel."
"What was old Schuster up for?" I asked.
"Highway robbery," said my friend.
*"*_*Boom*_*"*
San Diego in Southern California, is the largest city in the world. If
your geographies and guide-books and encyclopaedias have told you
otherwise, they have lied, or their authors have never seen San Diego.
Why, San Diego is nearly twenty-five miles from end to end! Why, San
Diego has more miles of sidewalk, more leagues of street railways, more
measureless lengths of paved streets, more interminable systems of
sewer-piping, than has London or Paris or even--even--even Chicago (and
I who say so was born in Chicago, too)! There are statelier houses in
San Diego than in any other "of the world's great centres," more
spacious avenues, more imposing business blocks, more delicious parks,
more overpowering public buildings, the pavements are better laid, the
electric lighting is more systematic, the railroad and transportation
facilities more accommodating, the climate is better than the Riviera,
the days are longer, the nights shorter, the men finer, the women
prettier, the theatres more attractive, the restaurants cheaper, the
wines more sparkling, "business opportunities" lie in wait for the
unfortunate at dark street-corners and fly at his throat till he must
fain fight them off. Life is one long, glad fermentation. There is no
darkness in San Diego, nor any more night.
Incidentally corner lots are desirable.
All of this must be so, because you may read it in the green and gold
prospectus of the San Diego Land and Improvement Company (consolidated),
sent free on application--that is, at one time during the boom it was
sent free--but to-day the edition is out of print, and can only be seen
in the collection of bibliophiles and wealthy amateurs, and the boom is
only an echo now. But when the guests of the big Coronado Hotel over on
the island come across to the main land and course jackrabbits with
greyhounds in the country to the north of the town, their horses' hoofs,
as they plunge through the sagebrush and tar weed, will sometimes slide
and clatter upon a bit of concrete sidewalk, half sunk of its own weight
into the sand; or the jack will be started in a low square of bricks,
such as is built for frame house foundations, and which make excellent
jumping for the horses. There is a colony of rattlers on the shores of
a marsh to the southwest (the maps call it Amethyst Lake) and the little
half-breed Indians catch the tarantulas and horned toads that you buy
alive in glass jars on the hotel veranda, near the postoffice site, and
everything is very gay and pleasant and picturesque.
Why I remember it all so well is because I found Steele in this place.
You see, Steele was a very good friend of mine though he was Oxon, and I
only a man from Chicago. When his wife knew I was coming west she gave
me Steele's address, and told me I was to look him up. Since she told
me this with much insistence and reiteration and with tears in her
voice, I made it a point to be particular. She had not heard from
Steele in two years. The address she gave me was "Hon. Ralph
Truax-Steele, Elmwood avenue and One Hundred and Eighty-eighth street,
San Diego, California."
When I arrived at San Diego I found it would be advisable to hire a
horse, for 188th street, instead of waiting for the Elmwood Avenue
electric car, and when I asked for directions a red-headed man whose
father was Irish and whose mother was Chinese, offered to act as guide
for twenty dollars. He said, though, he would furnish his own outfit.
I demurred and he went away. I was told that some eight miles out beyond
the range I would find a water-hole, and that if I held to the southwest
after leaving this hole, keeping my horse's ears between the double peak
of a distant mountain called Little Two Top, I would come after a while
to a lamp-post with a tarantula's nest where the lamp should have been.
It would be hard to miss this lamp-post, they told me, as the desert was
very flat thereabouts, and the lamp-posts could be seen for a radius of
ten miles. Also, there might be water there--the horse would smell it
out if there was. Also, it was a good place to camp, because of a tiny
ledge of shale outcropping there. I was to be particular about this
lamp-post, because it stood at the corner of Elmwood avenue and 188th
street.
When I asked about the Hon. Truax-Steele, Oxon, information was less
explicit. They shook their heads. One of them seemed to recollect a
"shack" about a mile hitherward of Two Top, a statement that was at once
contradicted by someone else. Might have been an old Digger "wicky-up."
Sometimes the Indians camped in the valley on their way to ghost dances
and tribal feasts. It wasn't a place for a white man to live, chiefly
because the climate offered so many advantages and attractions to horned
toads, tarantulas and rattlesnakes. Then the red-headed
Chinese-Irishman came back and said, with an accent that was beyond all
words, that a sheepherder had once told him of a loco-man out beyond
McIntyre's waterhole, and another man said that, "Yes, that was so; he'd
passed flasks with a loco-man out that way once last June, when he was
out looking for a strayed pony. In fact, the loco-man lived out there,
had a son, too, leastways a kid lived with him." This seemed
encouraging. The Hon. Truax-Steele, Oxon, was accredited with a son--so
his wife had said, who should know. So I started out, simultaneously
hoping and dreading that the loco-man and the honourable Truax might be
one flesh.
I left San Diego at four o'clock A.M. to avoid as much as possible the
heat of mid-day, and just at sunset saw what might have been a cactus
plant standing out stark and still on the white blur of sage and alkali
like an exclamation point on a blank page. It was the lamp-post of the
spider's nest that marked the intersection of Elmwood avenue and 188th
street. And then my horse shied, with his hind legs only, in the way
good horses have, and Ralph Truax-Steele rose out of a dried muck-hole
under the bit.
I had expected a madman, but his surprise and pleasure at seeing me were
perfectly sane. After awhile he said: "Sorry, old boy. It's the
hospitality of the Arab I can give you; nothing better. A handful of
dates (we call 'em caned prunes out here), the dried flesh of a kid
(Californian for jerked beef), and a mouthful of cold water, which the
same we will thicken with forty-rod rye; incidentally, coffee, black and
unsweet, and tobacco, which at one time I should have requested my
undergroom to discontinue."
We went to his "shack" (I observed it to be built of discarded bricks,
mortared with 'dobe mud) and I was made acquainted with his boy,
Carrington Truax-Steele, fitting for Oxford under tutelage of his
father.
We had supper, after which the Hon. Truax, Sr. stood forth under the
kindling glory of that desert twilight by that incongruous, reeling
lamp-post, booted, bare-headed and woolen-shirted, and to the low
swinging scimitar of the new welded moon declaimed Creon's speech to
Oedipus in sonorous Greek. When he was done he exclaimed, abruptly:
"Come along, I'll show you 'round."
I looked about that stricken reach of alkali, and followed him
wondering. That evening the Hon. Ralph Truax-Steele, Oxon, showed me
his real estate and also, unwittingly, the disordered workings of his
brain. The rest I guessed and afterwards confirmed.
Steele had gone mad over the real estate "boom" that had struck the town
five years previously, when land was worth as many dollars as could
cover it, and men and women fought with each other to buy lots around
the water hole called Amethyst Lake. The "boom" had collapsed, and with
it Steele's reason, for to him the boom was on the point of
recommencing; sane enough on other points, in this direction the man's
grip upon himself was gone for good.
"There," he said to me that evening as we crushed our way through the
sagebrush, indicating a low roll on the desert surface, "there are my
villa sites, here will run a driveway, and yonder where you see the
skeleton of that steer I'm thinking of putting up a little rustic stone
chapel."
"Ralph, Ralph," I said, "come out of this. Can't you see that the whole
business is dead and done for long since? You're going back with me to
God's country to-morrow--going back to your wife, you and the boy. She
sent me to fetch you."
He stared at me wonderingly.