WHAT'S THE MATTER NOW!
Just exactly how many days or weeks or even months had blown over the
Forks through the long bleak winter since the wedding no man knew. These
men in the mountains, snowed up for half-a-year, where there is no
business, where there is no law, no church, nothing but half-wild men
hard at work--these men, I say, sometimes forget the day, the week, even
the month. Yet the Day of the week is always kept. Six days they labor
in the mine; the seventh, they do not rest, but they at least do not
mine.
Certainly there was snow on the day of the wedding, and certain it was
that there was a little fall of snow on the high hill-sides, and in the
black fir tops, and the great pines were tipped in white, as Sandy
hurried from his cabin down to the Forks in search of his now divorced
and forgotten Limber Tim. He was pale and excited. He pushed his great
black, broad hat down over his eyes as he hurried on down the trail,
slipping and sliding over the worn walk, over the new sprinkle of snow,
in his great big gum boots. Then he pushed his hat back so as to get the
cool wind of March in his face and even the blustering snow in his
beard.
He found Limber at last standing on one leg by the great log fire in the
Howling Wilderness, lonesome as a crow in March. He pulled his hat again
down over his eyes as he approached his old partner, and stooped his
shoulders and looked out from under its rim, as if he was half afraid or
else was half ashamed.
In all western towns, in all mines, in all cities, great or small for
that matter, there is always one common center. Here it was the Howling
Wilderness. If a man felt sad, what better place than the Howling
Wilderness saloon to go to for distraction? If a man felt glad, where
else could he go to share his mirth.
Here was happiness or unhappiness. All great extremes run together.
Tears flow as freely for joy as for grief. Between intense delight or
deepest sorrow the wall is so thin you can whisper through it and be
heard.
Here, at fifty cents a glass, you had dealt out to you over a great
plank laid up upon a barricade of sand-bags, that were laid there to
intercept any stray bullet that might be making its way towards the
crimson-headed vendor of poisons, almost any drink that you might name.
And it is safe to say that all of the following popular drinks, that is
Old Tiger, Bad Eye, Forty Rod, Rat Pizen, Rot Gut, Hell's Delight, and
Howling Modoc, were all made from the same decoction of bad rum, worse
tobacco, and first-class cayenne pepper. The difference in proportion of
ingredients made the difference in the infernal drinks.
If one of those splendid, misled fellows, who really knew no better,
felt very sad, he took one of these drinks; if he felt very glad he took
two.
Sandy wheeled on his heel the moment he found his old friend, and went
out without saying a word. He stood there in the snow, the wind twisting
about his beard, blowing his old hat-rim up and down, and he seemed as
one lost. At length he lifted the latch again hastily, hesitated, looked
back, around, up towards his cabin on the hill, and then suddenly
pushing his hat back again, as if he wanted room to breathe, he tumbled
into the saloon, went right up before Limber Tim, and bringing his two
hands down on his two shoulders, said tremulously, "Limber Tim."
Sandy had laid hold of him as if he had determined to never let him go
again, and the man fairly winced under his great vice-like grasp. He
looked at the back log on the fire, looked left and right, but did not
look Sandy in the face. If he had, he would for the first time in all
his timid experience have been able to have had it all his own way.
"O Limber!"
Sandy had fished up one of his hands high enough to pull his hat down
over his eyes, and now nothing was to be seen but a hat rim and the
fringe of a grizzly beard.
Limber Tim looked up. He never before had heard his old partner's voice
troubled, and he was very sorry, and began to look, or to try to look,
Sandy in the face. Up went a big hand from a shoulder, back went the old
hat, and then Limber Tim looked to the left at a lot of picks and pans,
and tom irons, and crevicing spoons, that lay up against the wall, but
did not speak.
"Limber Tim! I tell you. My--my--"
Sandy choked. He never had yet been able to call her his wife. He had
tried to do so over and over again. His dear little wife had taught him
many things--had made him, in fact, another man, but she never could get
him to speak of her to the other miners but as "the Widow." He had gone
out by himself and practiced it in the dark to himself; he was certain
he could say it in the crowd, but somehow just at the moment he tried to
say it he was certain some one was thinking about it just as he was,
was watching him, and so it always and for ever stuck in his throat. How
he loved her! How tender he was to her all the time! How he did little
else but think of her and her happiness day and night; but he had been a
savage so long, had been with the "boys" so much, that he could not find
it in his power to say that one dear word. It was like a new convert
trying to pray in public in one of the great camp meetings of the West;
or to stand up before all his neighbors and confess his sins.
He stood still only a second; in fact, all this took but a moment, for
Sandy was in a terrible hurry. Limber Tim had never seen him in such a
hurry before. Up shot the hand, down slid the hat, and Sandy was quite
hidden away again. It was a moment of terrible embarrassment. When an
Englishman is embarrassed he takes snuff; when a Yankee is embarrassed
he whips out a jack-knife and falls to whittling anything that he can
find, not excepting the ends of his fingers; but a true Californian of
Sierras jerks his head at the boys, heads straight up to the bar, knocks
his knuckles on the board, winks at the bar-keeper, pecks his nose at
his favorite bottle, fills to the brim, nods his head down the line to
the left, then to the right, hoists his Poison, throws back his head,
and then falls back wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, quite
recovered from his confusion.
Sandy backed his partner into a corner rapidly, and then, laying his
hands again on his shoulders, said: "Limber Tim! she's sick!"
He had to throw his head forward to say it. It came out as if jerked
from his throat by a thousand fish-hooks.
He raised his two great hands, and reaching out his face again clutched
the two shoulders, and said, "She's d--d sick!"
Up went the hands, back went the hat, the door was jerked open, a man
whirled out of the door as if he had been a whirlwind, up the trail, up
over the stones and snow and logs. Sandy climbed to his cabin on the
hill, while the boys followed him with their eyes; and then stood
looking at each other in wonder as he disappeared in the door.
Through the cabin burst the man, and back to the little bed-room, as if
he had been wild as the north wind that whistled and whirled about
without.
The little lady lay there, quiet now, but her face was white as ashes.
The blood had gone out from her face like a falling tide; the pain was
over, but only, like a tide, to return.
How white she was, and how beautiful she was! How helpless she was down
there in the deep, hidden in a crack of the world, away from all old
friends, away from all her kindred, all her sex and kind. She was very
ill, so alone was she; not a doctor this side of that great impassable
belt of snow that curved away like a deep white wave around and above
the heads of the three little rivers. Sandy saw all this, felt all this.
It cut him to the core, and he shook like a leaf.
What a pretty nest of a bed-room! How fragrant it was from the
fir-boughs that were gathered under foot. There were little curtains
about this bed, there deep in the Sierras. Coarse they were, it is true,
very coarse, but white as the snow that whirled about without the cabin.
Still, you might have seen here and there that there were cloudy spots
that had refused all the time to be quite washed out, rub and soak and
soap and boil them as the Widow and Washee-Washee would.
If you had lain in that bed through a spell of sickness, and looked and
looked at the curtains and all things as sick people will all the time
look and look when they lie there and can do nothing else, you would at
last have noticed that these coarse but snowy curtains had been made of
as many pieces as Jacob's coat. And lying there and looking and looking,
you would have at last in the course of time read there in one of the
many cloudy spots, these words stamped in bended rows of fantastic
letters:
SELF-RISING FLOUR
WARRANTED SUPERFINE.
50 LBS.
There was a little cracked piece of looking-glass on the wall, no bigger
than your palm. It was fastened on the wall, over, perhaps, the only
illustrated paper that had ever found its way to the Forks. There were
little rosettes around this little glass that had been made from leaves
of every color by the cunning hand of the Widow. There were great
maple-leaves, and leaves of many trees in all the hues of Summer, hung
up here and there, sewn together, and made to make the little bed-room
beautiful. And what a treasure the little glass was! It seemed to be the
great little center of the house. All things rallied, or seemed to be
trying to rally, around it. To be sure, the Widow was not at all plain.
Plain! to Sandy she was the center of the world. The rising and the
setting of the sun.
The carpet had been finished by the same cunning hand. This had been
made of gunny bags sewn together with twine; and under this carpet there
was a thick coat of fine fir-boughs that left the room all the time
sweet and warm, and fragrant as a forest in the Spring. There were
little three-legged benches waiting about in the corners; but by the
bedside sat the great work of art in the camp, a rocking-chair made of
elk horns. This was the gift of a rejected but generous lover.
On the little wooden mantel-piece above the fire-place there stood a row
of nuggets. They lay there as if they were a sort of Winter fruit put by
to ripen. They were like oranges which you see lying about the peasants'
houses in Italy, and almost as large. These were the gifts of the hardy
miners of the Forks to their patron saint; gifts given at such times and
in such ways that they could not be well refused.
Once there had been, late in the night, a heavy stone thrown against the
door, while the two "turtle doves," as the camp used to call its lovers,
sat by the fire.
In less than a second Sandy's pistol stuck its nose out like a little
bull-dog and began to look down the hill in the darkness.
A man leaned over the fence and laughed in his face. "Now don't do that,
Sandy! now don't." Sandy let his pistol fall half ashamed; for it was
the voice of a friend.
"Good-bye, Sandy!" the man called back up the trail in the dark.
"Good-bye. That's for the Widder. Made my pile and off for Pike.
Good-bye!"
When Washee-Washee went out next morning for wood, there he found lying
at the door the cause of the trouble in the night. It was a great nugget
of gold that the rough Missourian had thrown to his patron saint as he
passed.
Once a miner sent them a great fine salmon. The Widow on opening it
found it half full of gold. She took all this back to the man, whom she
found seated at the green table at the Howling Wilderness, behind a
silver faro box; for to mining the man also attached the profession of
gambler. She laid this heap of gold down on the table before the man
with the faro box and cards. The miners gathered around. The man with
the silver box began to deal his cards.
"All on the single turn, Missus Sandy?"
The Judge came forward, "Don't bet it all on the first deal, do you?
That's pretty steep, even for the oldest of us!"
"Bet! I don't bet at all. I bring Poker Jake his money back. I found
this all in the fish he sent us. It is his. It is a trick, perhaps. Fish
don't eat gold, you know."
"O yes they dus, Missus Sandy."
Poker Jake stopped with the card half turned in the air. The Widow held
up her pretty finger and her pretty lips pouted as she made her little
speech to the gambler, and told him she could not keep the gold. The
miners gathered around in wonder and admiration.
Jake laid down his card.
"Well, can't a salmon eat gold if he likes?"
"No."
"There, Missus Sandy, y'er wrong!" argued the little Judge, and then he
began to tell her the story of Jonah and the whale, and wound up with
the declaration that there was nothing at all unnatural in a fish eating
gold in "this glorious climate of Californy."
"Will you not take back your gold?"
"Nary a red."
There was a pale thoughtful young man, half ill, too feeble to work, to
leave, to retreat from the mountains, standing by the fire when the
Widow had entered the saloon. It was the boy poet.
She took up the bag of gold, turned around, looked back in the corner of
the saloon, for he had retreated out of sight as she entered, saw the
young man hiding back in the shade, leaning over the bunk, caressing the
dog; possibly he was crying. Her face lighted with a light that was high
and beautiful and half divine.
She turned, held the gold out to Poker Jake.
"No!"
"And then is it mine? all mine, to do as I like with it?"
"Yours, lady. Yours to take and go home and git from out of the canon,
out of this hole in the ground, and live like a Christian, as yer are,
and not live here like a wild beast in a carawan."
The man stood up as he spoke, and was proud of his speech, and the men
cheered and cheered and said:
"Bully for Poker Jake!"
Then the little Widow turned again, went back to the boy leaning over
the bull-dog, thrust it in his arms as he rose to look at her, and
turning to the men was gone.
They looked at each other in amazement and disgust. They could hardly
believe their senses.
"How dare she do it before us all?" said one.