returned with--an empty bottle! Dick would have sworn, but his strength
was not equal to the occasion. He staggered, caught at the handle of the
door, and motioned to the Old Man.
“Thar's suthin' in my pack yer for Johnny. Take it off. I can't.”
The Old Man unstrapped the pack and laid it before the exhausted man.
“Open it, quick!”
He did so with trembling fingers. It contained only a few poor
toys,--cheap and barbaric enough, goodness knows, but bright with paint
and tinsel. One of them was broken; another, I fear, was irretrievably
ruined by water; and on the third--ah me! there was a cruel spot.
“It don't look like much, that's a fact,” said Dick, ruefully . . . .
“But it's the best we could do. . . . Take 'em, Old Man, and put 'em in
his stocking, and tell him--tell him, you know--hold me, Old Man--” The
Old Man caught at his sinking figure. “Tell him,” said Dick, with a weak
little laugh,--“tell him Sandy Claus has come.”
And even so, bedraggled, ragged, unshaven and unshorn, with one arm
hanging helplessly at his side, Santa Claus came to Simpson's Bar and
fell fainting on the first threshold. The Christmas dawn came slowly
after, touching the remoter peaks with the rosy warmth of ineffable
love. And it looked so tenderly on Simpson's Bar that the whole mountain
as if caught in a generous action, blushed to the skies.
THE PRINCESS BOB AND HER FRIENDS.
She was a Klamath Indian. Her title was, I think, a compromise between
her claim as daughter of a chief, and gratitude to her earliest white
protector, whose name, after the Indian fashion, she had adopted. “Bob”
Walker had taken her from the breast of her dead mother at a time when
the sincere volunteer soldiery of the California frontier were impressed
with the belief that extermination was the manifest destiny of the
Indian race. He had with difficulty restrained the noble zeal of his
compatriots long enough to convince them that the exemption of one
Indian baby would not invalidate this theory. And he took her to his
home,--a pastoral clearing on the banks of the Salmon River,--where she
was cared for after a frontier fashion.
Before she was nine years old, she had exhausted the scant kindliness of
the thin, overworked Mrs. Walker. As a playfellow of the young Walkers
she was unreliable; as a nurse for the baby she was inefficient. She
lost the former in the trackless depths of a redwood forest; she basely
abandoned the latter in an extemporized cradle, hanging like a chrysalis
to a convenient bough. She lied and she stole,--two unpardonable sins
in a frontier community, where truth was a necessity and provisions were
the only property. Worse than this, the outskirts of the clearing
were sometimes haunted by blanketed tatterdemalions with whom she
had mysterious confidences. Mr. Walker more than once regretted his
indiscreet humanity; but she presently relieved him of responsibility,
and possibly of bloodguiltiness, by disappearing entirely.
When she reappeared, it was at the adjacent village of Logport, in
the capacity of housemaid to a trader's wife, who, joining some little
culture to considerable conscientiousness, attempted to instruct her
charge. But the Princess proved an unsatisfactory pupil to even so
liberal a teacher. She accepted the alphabet with great good-humor,
but always as a pleasing and recurring novelty, in which all interest
expired at the completion of each lesson. She found a thousand uses
for her books and writing materials other than those known to civilized
children. She made a curious necklace of bits of slate-pencil, she
constructed a miniature canoe from the pasteboard covers of her primer,
she bent her pens into fish-hooks, and tattooed the faces of her
younger companions with blue ink. Religious instruction she received as
good-humoredly, and learned to pronounce the name of the Deity with
a cheerful familiarity that shocked her preceptress. Nor could her
reverence be reached through analogy; she knew nothing of the Great
Spirit, and professed entire ignorance of the Happy Hunting-Grounds.
Yet she attended divine service regularly, and as regularly asked for a
hymn-book; and it was only through the discovery that she had collected
twenty-five of these volumes and had hidden them behind the woodpile,
that her connection with the First Baptist Church of Logport ceased. She
would occasionally abandon these civilized and Christian privileges, and
disappear from her home, returning after several days of absence with an
odor of bark and fish, and a peace-offering to her mistress in the shape
of venison or game.
To add to her troubles, she was now fourteen, and, according to the laws
of her race, a woman. I do not think the most romantic fancy would have
called her pretty. Her complexion defied most of those ambiguous similes
through which poets unconsciously apologize for any deviation from the
Caucasian standard. It was not wine nor amber colored; if anything, it
was smoky. Her face was tattooed with red and white lines on one cheek,
as if a duo-toothed comb had been drawn from cheek-bone to jaw, and, but
for the good-humor that beamed from her small berry-like eyes and shone
in her white teeth, would have been repulsive. She was short and stout.
In her scant drapery and unrestrained freedom she was hardly statuesque,
and her more unstudied attitudes were marred by a simian habit of softly
scratching her left ankle with the toes of her right foot, in moments of
contemplation.
I think I have already shown enough to indicate the incongruity of her
existence with even the low standard of civilization that obtained
at Logport in the year 1860. It needed but one more fact to prove the
far-sighted poetical sagacity and prophetic ethics of those sincere
advocates of extermination, to whose virtues I have done but scant
justice in the beginning of this article. This fact was
presently furnished by the Princess. After one of her periodical
disappearances,--this time unusually prolonged,--she astonished Logport
by returning with a half-breed baby of a week old in her arms. That
night a meeting of the hard-featured serious matrons of Logport was held
at Mrs. Brown's. The immediate banishment of the Princess was demanded.
Soft-hearted Mrs. Brown endeavored vainly to get a mitigation or
suspension of the sentence. But, as on a former occasion, the Princess
took matters into her own hands. A few mornings afterwards, a wicker
cradle containing an Indian baby was found hanging on the handle of
the door of the First Baptist Church. It was the Parthian arrow of the
flying Princess. From that day Logport knew her no more.
It had been a bright clear day on the upland, so clear that the ramparts
of Fort Jackson and the flagstaff were plainly visible twelve miles away
from the long curving peninsula that stretched a bared white arm around
the peaceful waters of Logport Bay. It had been a clear day upon the
sea-shore, albeit the air was filled with the flying spume and shifting
sand of a straggling beach whose low dunes were dragged down by the long
surges of the Pacific and thrown up again by the tumultuous trade-winds.
But the sun had gone down in a bank of fleecy fog that was beginning to
roll in upon the beach. Gradually the headland at the entrance of the
harbor and the lighthouse disappeared, then the willow fringe that
marked the line of Salmon River vanished, and the ocean was gone. A
few sails still gleamed on the waters of the bay; but the advancing
fog wiped them out one by one, crept across the steel-blue expanse,
swallowed up the white mills and single spire of Logport, and, joining
with reinforcements from the marshes, moved solemnly upon the hills. Ten
minutes more and the landscape was utterly blotted out; simultaneously
the wind died away, and a death-like silence stole over sea and shore.
The faint clang, high overhead, of unseen brent, the nearer call of
invisible plover, the lap and wash of undistinguishable waters, and the
monotonous roll of the vanished ocean, were the only sounds. As night
deepened, the far-off booming of the fog-bell on the headland at
intervals stirred the thick air.
Hard by the shore of the bay, and half hidden by a drifting sand-hill,
stood a low nondescript structure, to whose composition sea and shore
had equally contributed. It was built partly of logs and partly of
driftwood and tarred canvas. Joined to one end of the main building--the
ordinary log-cabin of the settler--was the half-round pilot-house of
some wrecked steamer, while the other gable terminated in half of a
broken whale-boat. Nailed against the boat were the dried skins of wild
animals, and scattered about lay the flotsam and jetsam of many years'
gathering,--bamboo crates, casks, hatches, blocks, oars, boxes, part of
a whale's vertebrae, and the blades of sword-fish. Drawn up on the beach
of a little cove before the house lay a canoe. As the night thickened
and the fog grew more dense, these details grew imperceptible, and only
the windows of the pilot-house, lit up by a roaring fire within the hut,
gleamed redly through the mist.
By this fire, beneath a ship's lamp that swung from the roof, two
figures were seated, a man and a woman. The man, broad-shouldered and
heavily bearded, stretched his listless powerful length beyond a broken
bamboo chair, with his eyes fixed on the fire. The woman crouched
cross-legged upon the broad earthen hearth, with her eyes blinkingly
fixed on her companion. They were small, black, round, berry-like eyes,
and as the firelight shone upon her smoky face, with its one striped
cheek of gorgeous brilliancy, it was plainly the Princess Bob and no
other.
Not a word was spoken. They had been sitting thus for more than an
hour, and there was about their attitude a suggestion that silence was
habitual. Once or twice the man rose and walked up and down the narrow
room, or gazed absently from the windows of the pilot-house, but never
by look or sign betrayed the slightest consciousness of his companion.
At such times the Princess from her nest by the fire followed him with
eyes of canine expectancy and wistfulness. But he would as inevitably
return to his contemplation of the fire, and the Princess to her
blinking watchfulness of his face.
They had sat there silent and undisturbed for many an evening in fair
weather and foul. They had spent many a day in sunshine and storm,
gathering the unclaimed spoil of sea and shore. They had kept these mute
relations, varied only by the incidents of the hunt or meagre household
duties, for three years, ever since the man, wandering moodily over the
lonely sands, had fallen upon the half-starved woman lying in the little
hollow where she had crawled to die. It had seemed as if they would
never be disturbed, until now, when the Princess started, and, with the
instinct of her race, bent her ear to the ground.
The wind had risen and was rattling the tarred canvas. But in another
moment there plainly came from without the hut the sound of voices.
Then followed a rap at the door; then another rap; and then, before they
could rise to their feet, the door was flung briskly open.
“I beg your pardon,” said a pleasant but somewhat decided contralto
voice, “but I don't think you heard me knock. Ah, I see you did not. May
I come in?”
There was no reply. Had the battered figurehead of the Goddess of
Liberty, which lay deeply embedded in the sand on the beach, suddenly
appeared at the door demanding admittance, the occupants of the cabin
could not have been more speechlessly and hopelessly astonished than at
the form which stood in the open doorway.
It was that of a slim, shapely, elegantly dressed young woman. A
scarlet-lined silken hood was half thrown back from the shining mass of
the black hair that covered her small head; from her pretty shoulders
dropped a fur cloak, only restrained by a cord and tassel in her small
gloved hand. Around her full throat was a double necklace of large white
beads, that by some cunning feminine trick relieved with its infantile
suggestion the strong decision of her lower face.
“Did you say yes? Ah, thank you. We may come in, Barker.” (Here a shadow
in a blue army overcoat followed her into the cabin, touched its cap
respectfully, and then stood silent and erect against the wall.) “Don't
disturb yourself in the least, I beg. What a distressingly unpleasant
night! Is this your usual climate?”
Half graciously, half absently overlooking the still embarrassed silence
of the group, she went on: “We started from the fort over three hours
ago,--three hours ago, wasn't it, Barker?” (the erect Barker touched his
cap,)--“to go to Captain Emmons's quarters on Indian Island,--I think
you call it Indian Island, don't you?” (she was appealing to the
awe-stricken Princess,)--“and we got into the fog and lost our way; that
is, Barker lost his way,” (Barker touched his cap deprecatingly,) “and
goodness knows where we didn't wander to until we mistook your light
for the lighthouse and pulled up here. No, no, pray keep your seat, do!
Really I must insist.”
Nothing could exceed the languid grace of the latter part of this
speech,--nothing except the easy unconsciousness with which she glided
by the offered chair of her stammering, embarrassed host and stood
beside the open hearth.
“Barker will tell you,” she continued, warming her feet by the fire,
“that I am Miss Portfire, daughter of Major Portfire, commanding the
post. Ah, excuse me, child!” (She had accidentally trodden upon the bare
yellow toes of the Princess.) “Really, I did not know you were there. I
am very near-sighted.” (In confirmation of her statement, she put to
her eyes a dainty double eyeglass that dangled from her neck.) “It's a
shocking thing to be near-sighted, isn't it?”
If the shamefaced uneasy man to whom this remark was addressed could
have found words to utter the thought that even in his confusion
struggled uppermost in his mind, he would, looking at the bold, dark
eyes that questioned him, have denied the fact. But he only stammered,
“Yes.” The next moment, however, Miss Portfire had apparently forgotten
him and was examining the Princess through her glass.
“And what is your name, child?”
The Princess, beatified by the eyes and eyeglass, showed all her white
teeth at once, and softly scratched her leg.
“Bob?”
“Bob? What a singular name!”
Miss Portfire's host here hastened to explain the origin of the
Princess's title.
“Then YOU are Bob.” (Eye-glass.)
“No, my name is Grey,--John Grey.” And he actually achieved a bow where
awkwardness was rather the air of imperfectly recalling a forgotten
habit.
“Grey?--ah, let me see. Yes, certainly. You are Mr. Grey the recluse,
the hermit, the philosopher, and all that sort of thing. Why, certainly;
Dr. Jones, our surgeon, has told me all about you. Dear me, how
interesting a rencontre! Lived all alone here for seven--was it seven
years?--yes, I remember now. Existed quite au naturel, one might say.
How odd! Not that I know anything about that sort of thing, you know.
I've lived always among people, and am really quite a stranger, I assure
you. But honestly, Mr.--I beg your pardon--Mr. Grey, how do you like
it?”
She had quietly taken his chair and thrown her cloak and hood over its
back, and was now thoughtfully removing her gloves. Whatever were the
arguments,--and they were doubtless many and profound,--whatever the
experience,--and it was doubtless hard and satisfying enough,--by which
this unfortunate man had justified his life for the last seven years,
somehow they suddenly became trivial and terribly ridiculous before this
simple but practical question.
“Well, you shall tell me all about it after you have given me something
to eat. We will have time enough; Barker cannot find his way back
in this fog to-night. Now don't put yourselves to any trouble on my
account. Barker will assist?”
Barker came forward. Glad to escape the scrutiny of his guest, the
hermit gave a few rapid directions to the Princess in her native tongue,
and disappeared in the shed. Left a moment alone, Miss Portfire took
a quick, half-audible, feminine inventory of the cabin. “Books, guns,
skins, ONE chair, ONE bed, no pictures, and no looking-glass!” She took
a book from the swinging shelf and resumed her seat by the fire as the
Princess re-entered with fresh fuel. But while kneeling on the hearth
the Princess chanced to look up and met Miss Portfire's dark eyes over
the edge of her book.
“Bob!”
The Princess showed her teeth.
“Listen. Would you like to have fine clothes, rings, and beads like
these, to have your hair nicely combed and put up so? Would you?”
The Princess nodded violently.
“Would you like to live with me and have them? Answer quickly. Don't
look round for HIM. Speak for yourself. Would you? Hush; never mind
now.”
The hermit re-entered, and the Princess, blinking, retreated into the
shadow of the whale-boat shed, from which she did not emerge even when
the homely repast of cold venison, ship biscuit, and tea was served.
Miss Portfire noticed her absence: “You really must not let me interfere
with your usual simple ways. Do you know this is exceedingly interesting
to me, so pastoral and patriarchal and all that sort of thing. I must
insist upon the Princess coming back; really, I must.”
But the Princess was not to be found in the shed, and Miss Portfire, who
the next minute seemed to have forgotten all about her, took her place
in the single chair before an extemporized table. Barker stood behind
her, and the hermit leaned against the fireplace. Miss Portfire's
appetite did not come up to her protestations. For the first time in
seven years it occurred to the hermit that his ordinary victual might be
improved. He stammered out something to that effect.
“I have eaten better, and worse,” said Miss Portfire, quietly.
“But I thought you--that is, you said--”
“I spent a year in the hospitals, when father was on the Potomac,”
returned Miss Portfire, composedly. After a pause she continued: “You
remember after the second Bull Run--But, dear me! I beg your pardon; of
course, you know nothing about the war and all that sort of thing, and
don't care.” (She put up her eye-glass and quietly surveyed his broad
muscular figure against the chimney.) “Or, perhaps, your prejudices--But
then, as a hermit you know you have no politics, of course. Please don't
let me bore you.”
To have been strictly consistent, the hermit should have exhibited no
interest in this topic. Perhaps it was owing to some quality in the
narrator, but he was constrained to beg her to continue in such phrases
as his unfamiliar lips could command. So that, little by little, Miss
Portfire yielded up incident and personal observation of the contest
then raging; with the same half-abstracted, half-unconcerned air that
seemed habitual to her, she told the stories of privation, of suffering,
of endurance, and of sacrifice. With the same assumption of timid
deference that concealed her great self-control, she talked of
principles and rights. Apparently without enthusiasm and without effort,
of which his morbid nature would have been suspicious, she sang the
great American Iliad in a way that stirred the depths of her solitary
auditor to its massive foundations. Then she stopped and asked quietly,
“Where is Bob?”
The hermit started. He would look for her. But Bob, for some reason,
was not forthcoming. Search was made within and without the hut, but in
vain. For the first time that evening Miss Portfire showed some anxiety.
“Go,” she said to Barker, “and find her. She MUST be found; stay, give
me your overcoat, I'll go myself.” She threw the overcoat over her
shoulders and stepped out into the night. In the thick veil of fog that
seemed suddenly to inwrap her, she stood for a moment irresolute, and
then walked toward the beach, guided by the low wash of waters on the
sand. She had not taken many steps before she stumbled over some dark
crouching object. Reaching down her hand she felt the coarse wiry mane
of the Princess.
“Bob!”
There was no reply.
“Bob. I've been looking for you, come.”
“Go 'way.”
“Nonsense, Bob. I want you to stay with me to-night, come.”
“Injin squaw no good for waugee woman. Go 'way.”
“Listen, Bob. You are daughter of a chief: so am I. Your father had many
warriors: so has mine. It is good that you stay with me. Come.”
The Princess chuckled and suffered herself to be lifted up. A few
moments later and they re-entered the hut, hand in hand.
With the first red streaks of dawn the next day the erect Barker touched
his cap at the door of the hut. Beside him stood the hermit, also just
risen from his blanketed nest in the sand. Forth from the hut, fresh
as the morning air, stepped Miss Portfire, leading the Princess by the
hand. Hand in hand also they walked to the shore, and when the Princess
had been safely bestowed in the stern sheets, Miss Portfire turned and
held out her own to her late host.
“I shall take the best of care of her, of course. You will come and see
her often. I should ask you to come and see me, but you are a hermit,
you know, and all that sort of thing. But if it's the correct anchorite
thing, and can be done, my father will be glad to requite you for this
night's hospitality. But don't do anything on my account that interferes
with your simple habits. Good by.”
She handed him a card, which he took mechanically.
“Good by.”
The sail was hoisted, and the boat shoved off. As the fresh morning
breeze caught the white canvas it seemed to bow a parting salutation.
There was a rosy flash of promise on the water, and as the light craft
darted forward toward the ascending sun, it seemed for a moment uplifted
in its glory.
Miss Portfire kept her word. If thoughtful care and intelligent kindness
could regenerate the Princess, her future was secure. And it really
seemed as if she were for the first time inclined to heed the lessons
of civilization and profit by her new condition. An agreeable change was
first noticed in her appearance. Her lawless hair was caught in a net,
and no longer strayed over her low forehead. Her unstable bust was
stayed and upheld by French corsets; her plantigrade shuffle was limited
by heeled boots. Her dresses were neat and clean, and she wore a double
necklace of glass beads. With this physical improvement there also
seemed some moral awakening. She no longer stole nor lied. With the
possession of personal property came a respect for that of others. With
increased dependence on the word of those about her came a thoughtful
consideration of her own. Intellectually she was still feeble, although
she grappled sturdily with the simple lessons which Miss Portfire set
before her. But her zeal and simple vanity outran her discretion, and
she would often sit for hours with an open book before her, which she
could not read. She was a favorite with the officers at the fort, from
the Major, who shared his daughter's prejudices and often yielded to her
powerful self-will, to the subalterns, who liked her none the less that
their natural enemies, the frontier volunteers, had declared war
against her helpless sisterhood. The only restraint put upon her was the
limitation of her liberty to the enclosure of the fort and parade; and
only once did she break this parole, and was stopped by the sentry as
she stepped into a boat at the landing.
The recluse did not avail himself of Miss Portfire's invitation. But
after the departure of the Princess he spent less of his time in the
hut, and was more frequently seen in the distant marshes of Eel River
and on the upland hills. A feverish restlessness, quite opposed to his
usual phlegm, led him into singular freaks strangely inconsistent with
his usual habits and reputation. The purser of the occasional steamer
which stopped at Logport with the mails reported to have been boarded,
just inside the bar, by a strange bearded man, who asked for a newspaper
containing the last war telegrams. He tore his red shirt into narrow
strips, and spent two days with his needle over the pieces and the
tattered remnant of his only white garment; and a few days afterward
the fishermen on the bay were surprised to see what, on nearer approach,
proved to be a rude imitation of the national flag floating from a spar
above the hut.