THE WIDOW IN DISGRACE.
Stick a pin here. Be sure you remember that these settlers of the
Sierras were as distinct a people from the settlers by the sea as you
can conceive. The one was of the West, the other of the East. The one
ate codfish and had a nasal accent and sang hymns. The other had never
seen the ocean, he detested codfish, ate bacon and swore like a pirate.
Years went by and people, strangers, came and went, but our First
Fam'lies of the Sierras remained.
This is history. The Phoenicians landed and left their impress on
Ireland long before England heard of the first Caesar. Their impetuous
blood signalizes the Fenian of to-day.
The Pilgrim Fathers refused to return. A world of immigration flowed to
and fro. But these few gave to the bleak and barren East the sharp nose,
the nationality, good or bad, of the north of North America; while the
few first settlers of the South gave spring to a current that will flow
on for a thousand years.
I am all the time wondering when I think of the people of the Sierras,
what women, or men and women, the traveler of a century hence will find
there.
I think he will not find a coward or a miser. I think he will find a
brave, generous, open-handed and unsuspicious people. A people full of
freedom, of lofty aspiration, of purity, partaking of the awful
sublimity that environs them.
And somewhere in these Sierras will they name the new Parnassus. The
nine sisters, in the far New Day, will have their habitation here when
the gold hunter has gone away, and the last pick lies rusting in the
mine.
The sea of seas shall rave and knock at the Golden Gate, but this shall
be the vine-land, the place of rest, that the old Greeks sought forever
to find. This will be the land of eternal afternoon.
A land born of storm and rounded into shape by the blows of hardy and
enduring men, it shall have its reaction--its rest.
The great singer of the future, born of the gleaming snows and the
gloomy forests of the Sierras, shall some day swing his harp in the wind
and move down these watered and wooded slopes to conquer the world with
a song for Peace.
Now you would have me say that we never once sinned in this Eden of ours
in the Sierras.
There is an old and a beautiful story. You knew it long before you
learned to read. It was in that other Eden. There the living God spake
face to face with man. He visited him every day in his own form. And yet
he fell. We do not claim to be much better than they were in Eden, even
in the Sierras.
The Forks, like every other place in the world, had its little center of
Aristocracy. There was here, as in any other little community, one
leading woman of fashion; the one tyrant who admitted this or that one
to the Social Center. This woman, an ancient "School-marm," had firmly
set her face against the Widow from the first. From this there was no
appeal. The Widow was in disgrace. Still she refused to banish the
boy-poet from her presence.
The old suspicion hung in the minds of the miners at the Forks. One day
there were two old men, made mellow from the juice of grapes they had
planted and grown on the hill-sides about their cabins, who grimly
wagged their heads and looked wise at the mention of "the Widow," as
she was still called, and sympathized with Sandy.
"Yes, pra'ps it was and pra'ps it wasn't," one would say as he thought
of little "Half-a-pint," now a noisy little tom-boy filling the fir
woods with laughter, "but then her having that 'ere poet about her all
the time, that's what sticks in my crop."
"That's what sticks in my crop," echoes his fellow, as he pushes the
bushy beard from his mouth and lifts his gourd of wine.
"The reputation of this ere camp," says another, as he sets down his
empty gourd and lays his fore-finger in his palm, and settles his head
wisely to one side, "the reputation of this ere camp depends on a havin'
of this ere thing cleared up about the Widder."
"It looks pesky black," put in the other garrulous old woman in duck
breeches, "'Cause why? she still sees him."
"And Sandy?"
Three old heads, helpless, good-natured old women, who had spent their
manhood and their strength long before their grape-vines were growing on
the hill-side, huddled close together in half maudlin conversation.
"Sandy!"
"He's a chuckle-headed old idiart."
"He's a gitten old and he can't help hisself."
"He's a gitten old."
"The chuckle-headed old idiart."
"Lookee here!"
An old forty-niner rose half way up, felt that his spine was not very
reliable, and so spread out his two great hands on the two shoulders of
his boon companion, and peered down in his face till their two beards,
white as foam, almost flowed together.
"Let's run 'im out!"
At these words an old crippled man suddenly started up from his place
back in the corner, and tottered forward to where the three old heads
were huddled together.
"Run out Billie! Little Billie Piper, that never gits any older, never
has a beard! that come here, that come--when did little Billie Piper
come? Gintlemen, you listen to me. When you run out little Billie Piper,
by God, you run him out over my bones!" And here the Gopher thundered
his two fists down on to the pine-board table, and turning on his heel
tottered out and up the hill-side to his cabin.