Having finished staking off his claim Mr. Doman walked back to the
centre of it and stood again at the spot where his search among the
graves had expired in the exclamation, "Scarry." He bent again over the
headboard that bore that name and as if to reinforce the senses of sight
and hearing ran his forefinger along the rudely carved letters.
Re-erecting himself he appended orally to the simple inscription the
shockingly forthright epitaph, "She was a holy terror!"
Had Mr. Doman been required to make these words good with proof--as,
considering their somewhat censorious character, he doubtless should
have been--he would have found himself embarrassed by the absence of
reputable witnesses, and hearsay evidence would have been the best he
could command. At the time when Scarry had been prevalent in the mining
camps thereabout--when, as the editor of the _Hurdy Herald_ would have
phrased it, she was "in the plenitude of her power"--Mr. Doman's
fortunes had been at a low ebb, and he had led the vagrantly laborious
life of a prospector. His time had been mostly spent in the mountains,
now with one companion, now with another. It was from the admiring
recitals of these casual partners, fresh from the various camps, that
his judgment of Scarry had been made up; he himself had never had the
doubtful advantage of her acquaintance and the precarious distinction of
her favor. And when, finally, on the termination of her perverse career
at Hurdy-Gurdy he had read in a chance copy of the _Herald_ her
column-long obituary (written by the local humorist of that lively sheet
in the highest style of his art) Doman had paid to her memory and to her
historiographer's genius the tribute of a smile and chivalrously
forgotten her. Standing now at the grave-side of this mountain Messalina
he recalled the leading events of her turbulent career, as he had heard
them celebrated at his several campfires, and perhaps with an
unconscious attempt at self-justification repeated that she was a holy
terror, and sank his pick into her grave up to the handle. At that
moment a raven, which had silently settled upon a branch of the blasted
tree above his head, solemnly snapped its beak and uttered its mind
about the matter with an approving croak.
Pursuing his discovery of free gold with great zeal, which he probably
credited to his conscience as a grave digger, Mr. Barney Bree had made
an unusually deep sepulcher, and it was near sunset before Mr. Doman,
laboring with the leisurely deliberation of one who has "a dead sure
thing" and no fear of an adverse claimant's enforcement of a prior
right, reached the coffin and uncovered it. When he had done so he was
confronted by a difficulty for which he had made no provision; the
coffin--a mere flat shell of not very well-preserved redwood boards,
apparently--had no handles, and it filled the entire bottom of the
excavation. The best he could do without violating the decent sanctities
of the situation was to make the excavation sufficiently longer to
enable him to stand at the head of the casket and getting his powerful
hands underneath erect it upon its narrower end; and this he proceeded
to do. The approach of night quickened his efforts. He had no thought of
abandoning his task at this stage to resume it on the morrow under more
advantageous conditions. The feverish stimulation of cupidity and the
fascination of terror held him to his dismal work with an iron
authority. He no longer idled, but wrought with a terrible zeal. His
head uncovered, his outer garments discarded, his shirt opened at the
neck and thrown back from his breast, down which ran sinuous rills of
perspiration, this hardy and impenitent gold-getter and grave-robber
toiled with a giant energy that almost dignified the character of his
horrible purpose; and when the sun fringes had burned themselves out
along the crest line of the western hills, and the full moon had climbed
out of the shadows that lay along the purple plain, he had erected the
coffin upon its foot, where it stood propped against the end of the open
grave. Then, standing up to his neck in the earth at the opposite
extreme of the excavation, as he looked at the coffin upon which the
moonlight now fell with a full illumination he was thrilled with a
sudden terror to observe upon it the startling apparition of a dark
human head--the shadow of his own. For a moment this simple and natural
circumstance unnerved him. The noise of his labored breathing frightened
him, and he tried to still it, but his bursting lungs would not be
denied. Then, laughing half-audibly and wholly without spirit, he began
making movements of his head from side to side, in order to compel the
apparition to repeat them. He found a comforting reassurance in
asserting his command over his own shadow. He was temporizing, making,
with unconscious prudence, a dilatory opposition to an impending
catastrophe. He felt that invisible forces of evil were closing in upon
him, and he parleyed for time with the Inevitable.
He now observed in succession several unusual circumstances. The surface
of the coffin upon which his eyes were fastened was not flat; it
presented two distinct ridges, one longitudinal and the other
transverse. Where these intersected at the widest part there was a
corroded metallic plate that reflected the moonlight with a dismal
lustre. Along the outer edges of the coffin, at long intervals, were
rust-eaten heads of nails. This frail product of the carpenter's art had
been put into the grave the wrong side up!
Perhaps it was one of the humors of the camp--a practical manifestation
of the facetious spirit that had found literary expression in the
topsy-turvy obituary notice from the pen of Hurdy-Gurdy's great
humorist. Perhaps it had some occult personal signification impenetrable
to understandings uninstructed in local traditions. A more charitable
hypothesis is that it was owing to a misadventure on the part of Mr.
Barney Bree, who, making the interment unassisted (either by choice for
the conservation of his golden secret, or through public apathy), had
committed a blunder which he was afterward unable or unconcerned to
rectify. However it had come about, poor Scarry had indubitably been put
into the earth face downward.
When terror and absurdity make alliance, the effect is frightful. This
strong-hearted and daring man, this hardy night worker among the dead,
this defiant antagonist of darkness and desolation, succumbed to a
ridiculous surprise. He was smitten with a thrilling chill--shivered,
and shook his massive shoulders as if to throw off an icy hand. He no
longer breathed, and the blood in his veins, unable to abate its
impetus, surged hotly beneath his cold skin. Unleavened with oxygen, it
mounted to his head and congested his brain. His physical functions had
gone over to the enemy; his very heart was arrayed against him. He did
not move; he could not have cried out. He needed but a coffin to be
dead--as dead as the death that confronted him with only the length of
an open grave and the thickness of a rotting plank between.
Then, one by one, his senses returned; the tide of terror that had
overwhelmed his faculties began to recede. But with the return of his
senses he became singularly unconscious of the object of his fear. He
saw the moonlight gilding the coffin, but no longer the coffin that it
gilded. Raising his eyes and turning his head, he noted, curiously and
with surprise, the black branches of the dead tree, and tried to
estimate the length of the weather-worn rope that dangled from its
ghostly hand. The monotonous barking of distant coyotes affected him as
something he had heard years ago in a dream. An owl flapped awkwardly
above him on noiseless wings, and he tried to forecast the direction of
its flight when it should encounter the cliff that reared its
illuminated front a mile away. His hearing took account of a gopher's
stealthy tread in the shadow of the cactus. He was intensely observant;
his senses were all alert; but he saw not the coffin. As one can gaze at
the sun until it looks black and then vanishes, so his mind, having
exhausted its capacities of dread, was no longer conscious of the
separate existence of anything dreadful. The Assassin was cloaking the
sword.
It was during this lull in the battle that he became sensible of a
faint, sickening odor. At first he thought it was that of a
rattle-snake, and involuntarily tried to look about his feet. They were
nearly invisible in the gloom of the grave. A hoarse, gurgling sound,
like the death-rattle in a human throat, seemed to come out of the sky,
and a moment later a great, black, angular shadow, like the same sound
made visible, dropped curving from the topmost branch of the spectral
tree, fluttered for an instant before his face and sailed fiercely away
into the mist along the creek.
It was the raven. The incident recalled him to a sense of the situation,
and again his eyes sought the upright coffin, now illuminated by the
moon for half its length. He saw the gleam of the metallic plate and
tried without moving to decipher the inscription. Then he fell to
speculating upon what was behind it. His creative imagination presented
him a vivid picture. The planks no longer seemed an obstacle to his
vision and he saw the livid corpse of the dead woman, standing in
grave-clothes, and staring vacantly at him, with lidless, shrunken eyes.
The lower jaw was fallen, the upper lip drawn away from the uncovered
teeth. He could make out a mottled pattern on the hollow cheeks--the
maculations of decay. By some mysterious process his mind reverted for
the first time that day to the photograph of Mary Matthews. He
contrasted its blonde beauty with the forbidding aspect of this dead
face--the most beloved object that he knew with the most hideous that he
could conceive.
The Assassin now advanced and displaying the blade laid it against the
victim's throat. That is to say, the man became at first dimly, then
definitely, aware of an impressive coincidence--a relation--a parallel
between the face on the card and the name on the headboard. The one was
disfigured, the other described a disfiguration. The thought took hold
of him and shook him. It transformed the face that his imagination had
created behind the coffin lid; the contrast became a resemblance; the
resemblance grew to identity. Remembering the many descriptions of
Scarry's personal appearance that he had heard from the gossips of his
camp-fire he tried with imperfect success to recall the exact nature of
the disfiguration that had given the woman her ugly name; and what was
lacking in his memory fancy supplied, stamping it with the validity of
conviction. In the maddening attempt to recall such scraps of the
woman's history as he had heard, the muscles of his arms and hands were
strained to a painful tension, as by an effort to lift a great weight.
His body writhed and twisted with the exertion. The tendons of his neck
stood out as tense as whip-cords, and his breath came in short, sharp
gasps. The catastrophe could not be much longer delayed, or the agony of
anticipation would leave nothing to be done by the _coup de grâce_ of
verification. The scarred face behind the lid would slay him through the
wood.
A movement of the coffin diverted his thought. It came forward to within
a foot of his face, growing visibly larger as it approached. The rusted
metallic plate, with an inscription illegible in the moonlight, looked
him steadily in the eye. Determined not to shrink, he tried to brace his
shoulders more firmly against the end of the excavation, and nearly fell
backward in the attempt. There was nothing to support him; he had
unconsciously moved upon his enemy, clutching the heavy knife that he
had drawn from his belt. The coffin had not advanced and he smiled to
think it could not retreat. Lifting his knife he struck the heavy hilt
against the metal plate with all his power. There was a sharp, ringing
percussion, and with a dull clatter the whole decayed coffin lid broke
in pieces and came away, falling about his feet. The quick and the dead
were face to face--the frenzied, shrieking man--the woman standing
tranquil in her silences. She was a holy terror!
V
Some months later a party of men and women belonging to the highest
social circles of San Francisco passed through Hurdy-Gurdy on their way
to the Yosemite Valley by a new trail. They halted for dinner and during
its preparation explored the desolate camp. One of the party had been at
Hurdy-Gurdy in the days of its glory. He had, indeed, been one of its
prominent citizens; and it used to be said that more money passed over
his faro table in any one night than over those of all his competitors
in a week; but being now a millionaire engaged in greater enterprises,
he did not deem these early successes of sufficient importance to merit
the distinction of remark. His invalid wife, a lady famous in San
Francisco for the costly nature of her entertainments and her exacting
rigor with regard to the social position and "antecedents" of those who
attended them, accompanied the expedition. During a stroll among the
shanties of the abandoned camp Mr. Porfer directed the attention of his
wife and friends to a dead tree on a low hill beyond Injun Creek.
"As I told you," he said, "I passed through this camp in 1852, and was
told that no fewer than five men had been hanged here by vigilantes at
different times, and all on that tree. If I am not mistaken, a rope is
dangling from it yet. Let us go over and see the place."
Mr. Porfer did not add that the rope in question was perhaps the very
one from whose fatal embrace his own neck had once had an escape so
narrow that an hour's delay in taking himself out of that region would
have spanned it.
Proceeding leisurely down the creek to a convenient crossing, the party
came upon the cleanly picked skeleton of an animal which Mr. Porfer
after due examination pronounced to be that of an ass. The
distinguishing ears were gone, but much of the inedible head had been
spared by the beasts and birds, and the stout bridle of horsehair was
intact, as was the riata, of similar material, connecting it with a
picket pin still firmly sunken in the earth. The wooden and metallic
elements of a miner's kit lay near by. The customary remarks were made,
cynical on the part of the men, sentimental and refined by the lady. A
little later they stood by the tree in the cemetery and Mr. Porfer
sufficiently unbent from his dignity to place himself beneath the rotten
rope and confidently lay a coil of it about his neck, somewhat, it
appeared, to his own satisfaction, but greatly to the horror of his
wife, to whose sensibilities the performance gave a smart shock.
An exclamation from one of the party gathered them all about an open
grave, at the bottom of which they saw a confused mass of human bones
and the broken remnants of a coffin. Coyotes and buzzards had performed
the last sad rites for pretty much all else. Two skulls were visible and
in order to investigate this somewhat unusual redundancy one of the
younger men had the hardihood to spring into the grave and hand them up
to another before Mrs. Porfer could indicate her marked disapproval of
so shocking an act, which, nevertheless, she did with considerable
feeling and in very choice words. Pursuing his search among the dismal
debris at the bottom of the grave the young man next handed up a rusted
coffin plate, with a rudely cut inscription, which with difficulty Mr.
Porfer deciphered and read aloud with an earnest and not altogether
unsuccessful attempt at the dramatic effect which he deemed befitting to
the occasion and his rhetorical abilities:
MANUELITA MURPHY.
Born at the Mission San Pedro--Died in
Hurdy-Gurdy,
Aged 47.
Hell's full of such.
In deference to the piety of the reader and the nerves of Mrs. Porfer's
fastidious sisterhood of both sexes let us not touch upon the painful
impression produced by this uncommon inscription, further than to say
that the elocutionary powers of Mr. Porfer had never before met with so
spontaneous and overwhelming recognition.
The next morsel that rewarded the ghoul in the grave was a long tangle
of black hair defiled with clay: but this was such an anti-climax that
it received little attention. Suddenly, with a short exclamation and a
gesture of excitement, the young man unearthed a fragment of grayish
rock, and after a hurried inspection handed it up to Mr. Porfer. As the
sunlight fell upon it it glittered with a yellow luster--it was thickly
studded with gleaming points. Mr. Porfer snatched it, bent his head over
it a moment and threw it lightly away with the simple remark:
"Iron pyrites--fool's gold."
The young man in the discovery shaft was a trifle disconcerted,
apparently.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Porfer, unable longer to endure the disagreeable
business, had walked back to the tree and seated herself at its root.
While rearranging a tress of golden hair which had slipped from its
confinement she was attracted by what appeared to be and really was the
fragment of an old coat. Looking about to assure herself that so
unladylike an act was not observed, she thrust her jeweled hand into the
exposed breast pocket and drew out a mouldy pocket-book. Its contents
were as follows: