A SCENE IN THE SIERRAS.
To the amazement of all the Forks, one day, when a bearded man in gum
boots, slouch hat, and blue shirt, reached in at the Widow's for his
washing, the hand that reached it out was not the Widow's. It was the
little brown lazy hand of Washee-Washee.
Of course the camp did not like this. This Chinaman to them was a sort
of eclipse, a dark body passing between the miners and their sun. They
remonstrated, and the Parson bore the remonstrance to the Widow in a
speech of his own; and, to his own great surprise it was not ornamented
with a single oath.
"The Forks began his reformation; let me go on with it. Why not?"
answered the woman.
"You will be plundered."
"Of what?"
The Parson looked at the gold nuggets on the mantel-piece, and shifted
the quid of tobacco from right to left.
"Washee-Washee will lie," began the Widow soberly. "He can lie, and he
does lie, very cheerfully and very rapidly, in spite of his name, which
might suggest better things; but he steals no more--do you, little
brownie?"
Washee-Washee's little black eyes glistened with gratitude. The little
pagan was coming up in the social scale. The Widow had begun her
missionary business where all the world ought to begin it--at home.
The Parson went away. He felt that somehow his footing with the Widow
was shaken, and that he must do something to redeem the day.
The Parson was always trying to do something original. He concluded to
"lay for" the Chinaman.
He took a fresh quid of tobacco, stowed himself away in the bush, and
waited.
In the twilight, the mournful, the sad, but beautiful ghost of the great
golden days of the Sierras, a hand reached out and took Washee-Washee by
the queue as a man would take a tethered horse by the lariat.
The little man did not smile as before. He even struck back with his
little brown bony hands. He wound one of them in the Parson's beard, and
shouted aloud to the empty woods. The valor of honesty was on him.
However, kick as he might and shout as he could, it all did but little
good, and the Parson proceeded very coolly to take him by the two heels,
hold him up in the trail, and shake him in a smooth level part of it,
just as if he was about to empty a bag, and did not wish to waste the
contents.
Now the Parson was not at all vicious on this occasion; he had no wish
to harm the Chinaman: he only wished to help the Widow. He shook
Washee-Washee in perfect confidence that he would find all the gold
nuggets, half the spoons, and nearly all the household goods in the
little Widow's warm and sparely furnished room. He had not been a bit
surprised if he had shaken out the Widow's goods and wares, her
wash-tub, and clothes-line. "Ah, certainly," said the Parson, pausing,
to himself, "for is not Washee-Washee's line the clothes-line?"
Shake, shake, shake. It was of no use. Something had fallen from his
blue blouse, but it was not gold. He stood the little man down, with the
other end up, and was a bit angry that he did not go on smiling as
before.
He stooped, and picked up the little black object that had been shaken
from the brown little fellow before him. The Parson began to swear. It
was only a little ten-cent Testament, in diamond type, with a cloth
cover. The Parson put his head to one side, filliped the leaves with
his thumb and finger, and then, feeling perfectly certain that it did
not belong to any of the boys in the camp, and equally certain that it
was not an article that he cared to carry around loose with him, he
filliped the leaves again, and, handing it back to Washee-Washee, said,
"Git!"
The Parson took one end of the trail, and the little pagan the other.
A Missourian who lay in his bunk up against the wall, smoking his pipe
of "pigtail" after supper, looked out from his cabin window through the
wood and up towards the Parson's cabin, where the trail wound on the
hill-side above him.
"It's a thunderin' and a lightnin' like cats and dogs. There's a-gwyne
to be a storm to-night."
But it was only the Parson swearing at his bad luck and that Chinaman.
"Only a Testament!" Then an idea struck him like an inspiration. Did not
the good little Widow give the brown wretch this thing?
He stopped swearing, stood still in the trail a moment, and then, giving
a long whistle as he drew a long breath, he went on to his cabin in
silence.
That Testament troubled the Parson. There was not much religion in the
Forks. There was little sign of anything of that kind among the men of
the Sierras. Perhaps there were other Testaments hidden away under the
bunks of the miners, but they were never visible. I know of one, the
gift of a good mother, that forever refused to get lost, or wear out, or
disappear under any circumstances. Other books would get themselves
borrowed and never come back, other books would get themselves thrummed
and thumbed, the backs torn off, and the leaves torn out, but this one
little book with its black, modest cover was always the same. It looked
as new and nice, as ready to be read, as full of hope and promise, after
ten years of service in the Sierras, as it did the day it first nestled
down in the bottom of the carpet-bag to wait patiently for the prodigal
to return and feed upon its glorious promises.
But the presence of this book had a wider meaning than all this to the
Parson.
Williams had been a sort of Calvin. He was a terrible religious
enthusiast. It was his devotion, his misled enthusiasm, that made him
take part in the persecution and death of the so-called prophet. It was
that which brought the awful persecution upon him and his. The children,
it was said, inherited their father's religious zeal.
This Testament was to the Parson only another evidence that the Widow
was indeed the missing Nancy Williams. He told all this in confidence to
a knot of friends the next day.
Deboon only brushed and brushed, with both hands, a pet fox which
perched friskily on his shoulder, but said nothing.
The Gopher slowly arose and shook himself. Then he reached out his fist
and shook it in the air.
"What if she is? By the eternal Tom Cats! What if she is the real living
and breathing Nancy Williams? And what if they do say she killed one of
'em the night before she got away, eh? Here she is and here she stays,
and let me see the Destroying Angel, Danite or Devil, that dares to
interfere."
The man strode out of the cabin like a king, and Deboon only stroked his
frisky fox and walked on after him, looking back quietly at the little
crowd over his shoulder.
Yet for all that, these men who were so brave and defiant in open fight,
were awed and almost terrified by the strange and mysterious order that
moved so secretly and so certainly upon its victims, and no other man
there gave any expression to his thoughts.