It was part of the functions of John Milton Harkutt to take down the
early morning shutters and sweep out the store for his father each day
before going to school. It was a peculiarity of this performance that he
was apt to linger over it, partly from the fact that it put off the
evil hour of lessons, partly that he imparted into the process a purely
imaginative and romantic element gathered from his latest novel-reading.
In this he was usually assisted by one or two school-fellows on their
way to school, who always envied him his superior menial occupation. To
go to school, it was felt, was a common calamity of boyhood that called
into play only the simplest forms of evasion, whereas to take down
actual shutters in a bona fide store, and wield a real broom that raised
a palpable cloud of dust, was something that really taxed the noblest
exertions. And it was the morning after the arrival of the strangers
that John Milton stood on the veranda of the store ostentatiously
examining the horizon, with his hand shading his eyes, as one of his
companions appeared.
“Hollo, Milt! wot yer doin'?”
John Milton started dramatically, and then violently dashed at one of
the shutters and began to detach it. “Ha!” he said hoarsely. “Clear the
ship for action! Open the ports! On deck there! Steady, you lubbers!”
In an instant his enthusiastic school-fellow was at his side attacking
another shutter. “A long, low schooner bearing down upon us! Lively,
lads, lively!” continued John Milton, desisting a moment to take another
dramatic look at the distant plain. “How does she head now?” he demanded
fiercely.
“Sou' by sou'east, sir,” responded the other boy, frantically dancing
before the window. “But she'll weather it.”
They each then wrested another shutter away, violently depositing them,
as they ran to and fro, in a rack at the corner of the veranda. Added
to an extraordinary and unnecessary clattering with their feet, they
accompanied their movements with a singular hissing sound, supposed to
indicate in one breath the fury of the elements, the bustle of the eager
crew, and the wild excitement of the coming conflict. When the last
shutter was cleared away, John Milton, with the cry “Man the starboard
guns!” dashed into the store, whose floor was marked by the muddy
footprints of yesterday's buyers, seized a broom and began to sweep
violently. A cloud of dust arose, into which his companion at once
precipitated himself with another broom and a loud BANG! to indicate the
somewhat belated sound of cannon. For a few seconds the two boys plied
their brooms desperately in that stifling atmosphere, accompanying each
long sweep and puff of dust out of the open door with the report of
explosions and loud HA'S! of defiance, until not only the store, but the
veranda was obscured with a cloud which the morning sun struggled vainly
to pierce. In the midst of this tumult and dusty confusion--happily
unheard and unsuspected in the secluded domestic interior of the
building--a shrill little voice arose from the road.
“Think you're mighty smart, don't ye?”
The two naval heroes stopped in their imaginary fury, and, as the dust
of conflict cleared away, recognized little Johnny Peters gazing at them
with mingled inquisitiveness and envy.
“Guess ye don't know what happened down the run last night,” he
continued impatiently. “'Lige Curtis got killed, or killed hisself!
Blood all over the rock down thar. Seed it, myseff. Dad picked up his
six-shooter,--one barrel gone off. My dad was the first to find it out,
and he's bin to Squire Kerby tellin' him.”
The two companions, albeit burning with curiosity, affected indifference
and pre-knowledge.
“Dad sez your father druv 'Lige outer the store lass night! Dad sez your
father's 'sponsible. Dad sez your father ez good ez killed him. Dad sez
the squire'll set the constable on your father. Yah!” But here the small
insulter incontinently fled, pursued by both the boys. Nevertheless,
when he had made good his escape, John Milton showed neither a
disposition to take up his former nautical role, nor to follow his
companion to visit the sanguinary scene of Elijah's disappearance. He
walked slowly back to the store and continued his work of sweeping and
putting in order with an abstracted regularity, and no trace of his
former exuberant spirits.
The first one of those instinctive fears which are common to imaginative
children, and often assume the functions of premonition, had taken
possession of him. The oddity of his father's manner the evening before,
which had only half consciously made its indelible impression on his
sensitive fancy, had recurred to him with Johnny Peters's speech. He had
no idea of literally accepting the boy's charges; he scarcely understood
their gravity; but he had a miserable feeling that his father's anger
and excitement last night was because he had been discovered hunting in
the dark for that paper of 'Lige Curtis's. It WAS 'Lige Curtis's paper,
for he had seen it lying there. A sudden dreadful conviction came over
him that he must never, never let any one know that he had seen his
father take up that paper; that he must never admit it, even to HIM. It
was not the boy's first knowledge of that attitude of hypocrisy which
the grownup world assumes towards childhood, and in which the innocent
victims eventually acquiesce with a Machiavellian subtlety that at last
avenges them,--but it was his first knowledge that that hypocrisy might
not be so innocent. His father had concealed something from him, because
it was not right.
But if childhood does not forget, it seldom broods and is not above
being diverted. And the two surveyors--of whose heroic advent in a raft
John Milton had only heard that morning with their traveled ways, their
strange instruments and stranger talk, captured his fancy. Kept in
the background by his sisters when visitors came, as an unpresentable
feature in the household, he however managed to linger near the
strangers when, in company with Euphemia and Clementina, after breakfast
they strolled beneath the sparkling sunlight in the rude garden
inclosure along the sloping banks of the creek. It was with the average
brother's supreme contempt that he listened to his sisters' “practicin'”
upon the goodness of these superior beings; it was with an exceptional
pity that he regarded the evident admiration of the strangers in return.
He felt that in the case of Euphemia, who sometimes evinced a laudable
curiosity in his pleasures, and a flattering ignorance of his reading,
this might be pardonable; but what any one could find in the useless
statuesque Clementina passed his comprehension. Could they not see at
once that she was “just that kind of person” who would lie abed in
the morning, pretending she was sick, in order to make Phemie do the
housework, and make him, John Milton, clean her boots and fetch things
for her? Was it not perfectly plain to them that her present sickening
politeness was solely with a view to extract from them caramels,
rock-candy, and gum drops, which she would meanly keep herself, and
perhaps some “buggy-riding” later? Alas, John Milton, it was not! For
standing there with her tall, perfectly-proportioned figure outlined
against a willow, an elastic branch of which she had drawn down by one
curved arm above her head, and on which she leaned--as everybody leaned
against something in Sidon--the two young men saw only a straying
goddess in a glorified rosebud print. Whether the clearly-cut profile
presented to Rice, or the full face that captivated Grant, each
suggested possibilities of position, pride, poetry, and passion that
astonished while it fascinated them. By one of those instincts known
only to the freemasonry of the sex, Euphemia lent herself to this
advertisement of her sister's charms by subtle comparison with her own
prettinesses, and thus combined against their common enemy, man.
“Clementina certainly is perfect, to keep her supremacy over that pretty
little sister,” thought Rice.
“What a fascinating little creature to hold her own against that tall,
handsome girl,” thought Grant.
“They're takin' stock o' them two fellers so as to gabble about 'em when
their backs is turned,” said John Milton gloomily to himself, with a
dismal premonition of the prolonged tea-table gossip he would be obliged
to listen to later.
“We were very fortunate to make a landing at all last night,” said Rice,
looking down upon the still swollen current, and then raising his eyes
to Clementina. “Still more fortunate to make it where we did. I suppose
it must have been the singing that lured us on to the bank,--as,
you know, the sirens used to lure people,--only with less disastrous
consequences.”
John Milton here detected three glaring errors; first, it was NOT
Clementina who had sung; secondly, he knew that neither of his sisters
had ever read anything about sirens, but he had; thirdly, that the
young surveyor was glaringly ignorant of local phenomena and should be
corrected.
“It's nothin' but the current,” he said, with that feverish youthful
haste that betrays a fatal experience of impending interruption. “It's
always leavin' drift and rubbish from everywhere here. There ain't
anythin' that's chucked into the creek above that ain't bound to fetch
up on this bank. Why, there was two sheep and a dead hoss here long
afore YOU thought of coming!” He did not understand why this should
provoke the laughter that it did, and to prove that he had no ulterior
meaning, added with pointed politeness, “So IT ISN'T YOUR FAULT, you
know--YOU couldn't help it;” supplementing this with the distinct
courtesy, “otherwise you wouldn't have come.”
“But it would seem that your visitors are not all as accidental as your
brother would imply, and one, at least, seems to have been expected last
evening. You remember you thought we were a Mr. Parmlee,” said Mr. Rice
looking at Clementina.
It would be strange indeed, he thought, if the beautiful girl were not
surrounded by admirers. But without a trace of self-consciousness, or
any change in her reposeful face, she indicated her sister with a slight
gesture, and said: “One of Phemie's friends. He gave her the accordion.
She's very popular.”
“And I suppose YOU are very hard to please?” he said with a tentative
smile.
She looked at him with her large, clear eyes, and that absence of
coquetry or changed expression in her beautiful face which might have
stood for indifference or dignity as she said: “I don't know. I am
waiting to see.”
But here Miss Phemie broke in saucily with the assertion that Mr.
Parmlee might not have a railroad in his pocket, but that at least he
didn't have to wait for the Flood to call on young ladies, nor did he
usually come in pairs, for all the world as if he had been let out of
Noah's Ark, but on horseback and like a Christian by the front door.
All this provokingly and bewitchingly delivered, however, and with a
simulated exaggeration that was incited apparently more by Mr. Lawrence
Grant's evident enjoyment of it, than by any desire to defend the absent
Parmlee.
“But where is the front door?” asked Grant laughingly.
The young girl pointed to a narrow zigzag path that ran up the bank
beside the house until it stopped at a small picketed gate on the level
of the road and store.
“But I should think it would be easier to have a door and private
passage through the store,” said Grant.
“WE don't,” said the young lady pertly, “we have nothing to do with the
store. I go in to see paw sometimes when he's shutting up and there's
nobody there, but Clem has never set foot in it since we came. It's bad
enough to have it and the lazy loafers that hang around it as near to
us as they are; but paw built the house in such a fashion that we ain't
troubled by their noise, and we might be t'other side of the creek as
far as our having to come across them. And because paw has to sell pork
and flour, we haven't any call to go there and watch him do it.”
The two men glanced at each other. This reserve and fastidiousness were
something rare in a pioneer community. Harkutt's manners certainly did
not indicate that he was troubled by this sensitiveness; it must have
been some individual temperament of his daughters. Stephen felt his
respect increase for the goddess-like Clementina; Mr. Lawrence Grant
looked at Miss Phemie with a critical smile.
“But you must be very limited in your company,” he said; “or is Mr.
Parmlee not a customer of your father's?”
“As Mr. Parmlee does not come to us through the store, and don't talk
trade to me, we don't know,” responded Phemie saucily.
“But have you no lady acquaintances--neighbors--who also avoid the store
and enter only at the straight and narrow gate up there?” continued
Grant mischievously, regardless of the uneasy, half-reproachful glances
of Rice.
But Phemie, triumphantly oblivious of any satire, answered promptly:
“If you mean the Pike County Billingses who live on the turnpike road as
much as they do off it, or the six daughters of that Georgia Cracker who
wear men's boots and hats, we haven't.”
“And Mr. Parmlee, your admirer?” suggested Rice. “Hasn't he a mother or
sisters here?”
“Yes, but they don't want to know us, and have never called here.”
The embarrassment of the questioner at this unexpected reply, which came
from the faultless lips of Clementina, was somewhat mitigated by the
fact that the young woman's voice and manner betrayed neither annoyance
nor anger.
Here, however, Harkutt appeared from the house with the information that
he had secured two horses for the surveyors and their instruments, and
that he would himself accompany them a part of the way on their
return to Tasajara Creek, to show them the road. His usual listless
deliberation had given way to a certain nervous but uneasy energy. If
they started at once it would be better, before the loungers gathered at
the store and confused them with lazy counsel and languid curiosity. He
took it for granted that Mr. Grant wished the railroad survey to be
a secret, and he had said nothing, as they would be pestered with
questions. “Sidon was inquisitive--and old-fashioned.” The benefit its
inhabitants would get from the railroad would not prevent them from
throwing obstacles in its way at first; he remembered the way they
had acted with a proposed wagon road,--in fact, an idea of his own,
something like the railroad; he knew them thoroughly, and if he might
advise them, it would be to say nothing here until the thing was
settled.
“He evidently does not intend to give us a chance,” said Grant
good-humoredly to his companion, as they turned to prepare for their
journey; “we are to be conducted in silence to the outskirts of the town
like horse-thieves.”
“But you gave him the tip for himself,” said Rice reproachfully; “you
cannot blame him for wanting to keep it.”
“I gave it to him in trust for his two incredible daughters,” said Grant
with a grimace. “But, hang it! if I don't believe the fellow has more
concern in it than I imagined.”
“But isn't she perfect?” said Rice, with charming abstraction.
“Who?”
“Clementina, and so unlike her father.”
“Discomposingly so,” said Grant quietly. “One feels in calling her 'Miss
Harkutt' as if one were touching upon a manifest indiscretion. But here
comes John Milton. Well, my lad, what can I do for you?”
The boy, who had been regarding them from a distance with wistful and
curious eyes as they replaced their instruments for the journey, had
gradually approached them. After a moment's timid hesitation he said,
looking at Grant: “You don't know anybody in this kind o' business,”
pointing to the instruments, “who'd like a boy, about my size?”
“I'm afraid not, J. M.,” said Grant, cheerfully, without suspending his
operation. “The fact is, you see, it's not exactly the kind of work for
a boy of your size.”
John Milton was silent for a moment, shifting himself slowly from one
leg to another as he watched the surveyor. After a pause he said, “There
don't seem to be much show in this world for boys o' my size. There
don't seem to be much use for 'em any way.” This not bitterly, but
philosophically, and even politely, as if to relieve Grant's rejection
of any incivility.
“Really you quite pain me, John Milton,” said Grant, looking up as he
tightened a buckle. “I never thought of it before, but you're right.”
“Now,” continued the boy slowly, “with girls it's just different. Girls
of my size everybody does things for. There's Clemmy,--she's only two
years older nor me, and don't know half that I do, and yet she kin lie
about all day, and hasn't to get up to breakfast. And Phemie,--who's
jest the same age, size, and weight as me,--maw and paw lets her do
everything she wants to. And so does everybody. And so would you.”
“But you surely don't want to be like a girl?” said Grant, smiling.
It here occurred to John Milton's youthful but not illogical mind that
this was not argument, and he turned disappointedly away. As his father
was to accompany the strangers a short distance, he, John Milton, was
to-day left in charge of the store. That duty, however, did not involve
any pecuniary transactions--the taking of money or making of change but
a simple record on a slate behind the counter of articles selected by
those customers whose urgent needs could not wait Mr. Harkutt's return.
Perhaps on account of this degrading limitation, perhaps for other
reasons, the boy did not fancy the task imposed upon him. The presence
of the idle loungers who usually occupied the armchairs near the stove,
and occasionally the counter, dissipated any romance with which he
might have invested his charge; he wearied of the monotony of their dull
gossip, but mostly he loathed the attitude of hypercritical counsel and
instruction which they saw fit to assume towards him at such moments.
“Instead o' lazin' thar behind the counter when your father ain't here
to see ye, John,” remarked Billings from the depths of his armchair a
few moments after Harkutt had ridden away, “ye orter be bustlin' round,
dustin' the shelves. Ye'll never come to anythin' when you're a man ef
you go on like that. Ye never heard o' Harry Clay--that was called 'the
Mill-boy of the Slashes'--sittin' down doin' nothin' when he was a boy.”
“I never heard of him loafin' round in a grocery store when he was
growned up either,” responded John Milton, darkly.
“P'r'aps you reckon he got to be a great man by standin' up sassin' his
father's customers,” said Peters, angrily. “I kin tell ye, young man, if
you was my boy”--
“If I was YOUR boy, I'd be playin' hookey instead of goin' to school,
jest as your boy is doin' now,” interrupted John Milton, with a literal
recollection of his quarrel and pursuit of the youth in question that
morning.
An undignified silence on the part of the adults followed, the usual
sequel to those passages; Sidon generally declining to expose itself to
the youthful Harkutt's terrible accuracy of statement.
The men resumed their previous lazy gossip about Elijah Curtis's
disappearance, with occasional mysterious allusions in a lower tone,
which the boy instinctively knew referred to his father, but which
either from indolence or caution, the two great conservators of Sidon,
were never formulated distinctly enough for his relentless interference.
The morning sunshine was slowly thickening again in an indolent mist
that seemed to rise from the saturated plain. A stray lounger shuffled
over from the blacksmith's shop to the store to take the place of
another idler who had joined an equally lethargic circle around
the slumbering forge. A dull intermittent sound of hammering came
occasionally from the wheelwright's shed--at sufficiently protracted
intervals to indicate the enfeebled progress of Sidon's vehicular
repair. A yellow dog left his patch of sunlight on the opposite side
of the way and walked deliberately over to what appeared to be more
luxurious quarters on the veranda; was manifestly disappointed but not
equal to the exertion of returning, and sank down with blinking eyes and
a regretful sigh without going further. A procession of six ducks got
well into a line for a laborious “march past” the store, but fell out
at the first mud puddle and gave it up. A highly nervous but respectable
hen, who had ventured upon the veranda evidently against her better
instincts, walked painfully on tiptoe to the door, apparently was met
by language which no mother of a family could listen to, and retired in
strong hysterics. A little later the sun became again obscured, the
wind arose, rain fell, and the opportunity for going indoors and doing
nothing was once more availed of by all Sidon.
It was afternoon when Mr. Harkutt returned. He did not go into the
store, but entered the dwelling from the little picket-gate and steep
path. There he called a family council in the sitting-room as being
the most reserved and secure. Mrs. Harkutt, sympathizing and cheerfully
ready for any affliction, still holding a dust-cloth in her hand, took
her seat by the window, with Phemie breathless and sparkling at one side
of her, while Clementina, all faultless profile and repose, sat on the
other. To Mrs. Harkutt's motherly concern at John Milton's absence, it
was pointed out that he was wanted at the store,--was a mere boy anyhow,
and could not be trusted. Mr. Harkutt, a little ruddier from weather,
excitement, and the unusual fortification of a glass of liquor, a little
more rugged in the lines of his face, and with an odd ring of defiant
self-assertion in his voice, stood before them in the centre of the
room.
He wanted them to listen to him carefully, to remember what he said, for
it was important; it might be a matter of “lawing” hereafter,--and he
couldn't be always repeating it to them,--he would have enough to do.
There was a heap of it that, as women-folks, they couldn't understand,
and weren't expected to. But he'd got it all clear now, and what he was
saying was gospel. He'd always known to himself that the only good that
could ever come to Sidon would come by railroad. When those fools talked
wagon road he had said nothing, but he had his own ideas; he had worked
for that idea without saying anything to anybody; that idea was to get
possession of all the land along the embarcadero, which nobody
cared for, and 'Lige Curtis was ready to sell for a song. Well, now,
considering what had happened, he didn't mind telling them that he had
been gradually getting possession of it, little by little, paying 'Lige
Curtis in advances and installments, until it was his own! They had
heard what those surveyors said; how that it was the only fit terminus
for the railroad. Well, that land, and that water-front, and the
terminus were HIS! And all from his own foresight and prudence.
It is needless to say that this was not the truth. But it is necessary
to point out that this fabrication was the result of his last night's
cogitations and his morning's experience. He had resolved upon a bold
course. He had reflected that his neighbors would be more ready to
believe in and to respect a hard, mercenary, and speculative foresight
in his taking advantage of 'Lige's necessities than if he had--as was
the case--merely benefited by them through an accident of circumstance
and good humor. In the latter case he would be envied and hated; in
the former he would be envied and feared. By logic of circumstance
the greater wrong seemed to be less obviously offensive than the minor
fault. It was true that it involved the doing of something he had not
contemplated, and the certainty of exposure if 'Lige ever returned,
but he was nevertheless resolved. The step from passive to active
wrong-doing is not only easy, it is often a relief; it is that return to
sincerity which we all require. Howbeit, it gave that ring of assertion
to Daniel Harkutt's voice already noted, which most women like, and
only men are prone to suspect or challenge. The incompleteness of his
statement was, for the same reason, overlooked by his feminine auditors.
“And what is it worth, dad?” asked Phemie eagerly.
“Grant says I oughter get at least ten thousand dollars for the site of
the terminus from the company, but of course I shall hold on to the rest
of the land. The moment they get the terminus there, and the depot and
wharf built, I can get my own price and buyers for the rest. Before the
year is out Grant thinks it ought to go up ten per cent on the value of
the terminus, and that a hundred thousand.”
“Oh, dad!” gasped Phemie, frantically clasping her knees with both hands
as if to perfectly assure herself of this good fortune.
Mrs. Harkutt audibly murmured “Poor dear Dan'l,” and stood, as it were,
sympathetically by, ready to commiserate the pains and anxieties of
wealth as she had those of poverty. Clementina alone remained silent,
clear-eyed, and unchanged.
“And to think it all came through THEM!” continued Phemie. “I always had
an idea that Mr. Grant was smart, dad. And it was real kind of him to
tell you.”
“I reckon father could have found it out without them. I don't know why
we should be beholden to them particularly. I hope he isn't expected to
let them think that he is bound to consider them our intimate friends
just because they happened to drop in here at a time when his plans have
succeeded.”
The voice was Clementina's, unexpected but quiet, unemotional and
convincing. “It seemed,” as Mrs. Harkutt afterwards said, “as if the
child had already touched that hundred thousand.” Phemie reddened with a
sense of convicted youthful extravagance.
“You needn't fear for me,” said Harkutt, responding to Clementina's
voice as if it were an echo of his own, and instinctively recognizing
an unexpected ally. “I've got my own ideas of this thing, and what's
to come of it. I've got my own ideas of openin' up that property and
showin' its resources. I'm goin' to run it my own way. I'm goin' to have
a town along the embarcadero that'll lay over any town in Contra Costa.
I'm goin' to have the court-house and county seat there, and a couple
of hotels as good as any in the Bay. I'm goin' to build that wagon road
through here that those lazy louts slipped up on, and carry it clear
over to Five Mile Corner, and open up the whole Tasajara Plain!”
They had never seen him look so strong, so resolute, so intelligent and
handsome. A dimly prophetic vision of him in a black broadcloth suit and
gold watch-chain addressing a vague multitude, as she remembered to
have seen the Hon. Stanley Riggs of Alasco at the “Great Barbecue,”
rose before Phemie's blue enraptured eyes. With the exception of Mrs.
Harkutt,--equal to any possibilities on the part of her husband,--they
had honestly never expected it of him. They were pleased with their
father's attitude in prosperity, and felt that perhaps he was not
unworthy of being proud of them hereafter.
“But we're goin' to leave Sidon,” said Phemie, “ain't we, paw?”
“As soon as I can run up a new house at the embarcadero,” said Harkutt
peevishly, “and that's got to be done mighty quick if I want to make a
show to the company and be in possession.”
“And that's easier for you to do, dear, now that 'Lige's disappeared,”
said Mrs. Harkutt consolingly.
“What do ye mean by that? What the devil are ye talkin' about?” demanded
Harkutt suddenly with unexpected exasperation.
“I mean that that drunken 'Lige would be mighty poor company for the
girls if he was our only neighbor,” returned Mrs. Harkutt submissively.
Harkutt, after a fixed survey of his wife, appeared mollified. The two
girls, who were mindful of his previous outburst the evening before,
exchanged glances which implied that his manners needed correction for
prosperity.
“You'll want a heap o' money to build there, Dan'l,” said Mrs. Harkutt
in plaintive diffidence.
“Yes! Yes!” said Harkutt impatiently. “I've kalkilated all that, and
I'm goin' to 'Frisco to-morrow to raise it and put this bill of sale on
record.” He half drew Elijah Curtis's paper from his pocket, but paused
and put it back again.
“Then THAT WAS the paper, dad,” said Phemie triumphantly.
“Yes,” said her father, regarding her fixedly, “and you know now why I
didn't want anything said about it last night--nor even now.”
“And 'Lige had just given it to you! Wasn't it lucky?”
“He HADN'T just given it to me!” said her father with another unexpected
outburst. “God Amighty! ain't I tellin' you all the time it was an old
matter! But you jabber, jabber all the time and don't listen! Where's
John Milton?” It had occurred to him that the boy might have read the
paper--as his sister had--while it lay unheeded on the counter.
“In the store,--you know. You said he wasn't to hear anything of this,
but I'll call him,” said Mrs. Harkutt, rising eagerly.
“Never mind,” returned her husband, stopping her reflectively, “best
leave it as it is; if it's necessary I'll tell him. But don't any of you
say anything, do you hear?”
Nevertheless a few hours later, when the store was momentarily free of
loungers, and Harkutt had relieved his son of his monotonous charge, he
made a pretense, while abstractedly listening to an account of the boy's
stewardship, to look through a drawer as if in search of some missing
article.
“You didn't see anything of a paper I left somewhere about here
yesterday?” he asked carelessly.
“The one you picked up when you came in last night?” said the boy with
discomposing directness.
Harkutt flushed slightly and drew his breath between his set teeth. Not
only could he place no reliance upon ordinary youthful inattention,
but he must be on his guard against his own son as from a spy! But he
restrained himself.
“I don't remember,” he said with affected deliberation, “what it was I
picked up. Do you? Did you read it?”
The meaning of his father's attitude instinctively flashed upon the boy.
He HAD read the paper, but he answered, as he had already determined,
“No.”
An inspiration seized Mr. Harkutt. He drew 'Lige Curtis's bill of sale
from his pocket, and opening it before John Milton said, “Was it that?”
“I don't know,” said the boy. “I couldn't tell.” He walked away with
affected carelessness, already with a sense of playing some part like
his father, and pretended to whistle for the dog across the street.
Harkutt coughed ostentatiously, put the paper back in his pocket,
set one or two boxes straight on the counter, locked the drawer, and
disappeared into the back passage. John Milton remained standing in
the doorway looking vacantly out. But he did not see the dull familiar
prospect beyond. He only saw the paper his father had opened and
unfolded before him. It was the same paper he had read last night. But
there were three words written there THAT WERE NOT THERE BEFORE! After
the words “Value received” there had been a blank. He remembered that
distinctly. This was filled in by the words, “Five hundred dollars.” The
handwriting did not seem like his father's, nor yet entirely like 'Lige
Curtis's. What it meant he did not know,--he would not try to think. He
should forget it, as he had tried to forget what had happened before,
and he should never tell it to any one!
There was a feverish gayety in his sisters' manner that afternoon that
he did not understand; short colloquies that were suspended with ill
concealed impatience when he came near them, and resumed when he
was sent, on equally palpable excuses, out of the room. He had been
accustomed to this exclusion when there were strangers present, but it
seemed odd to him now, when the conversation did not even turn upon the
two superior visitors who had been there, and of whom he confidently
expected they would talk. Such fragments as he overheard were always in
the future tense, and referred to what they intended to do. His
mother, whose affection for him had always been shown in excessive
and depressing commiseration of him in even his lightest moments, that
afternoon seemed to add a prophetic and Cassandra-like sympathy for some
vague future of his that would require all her ministration. “You won't
need them new boots, Milty dear, in the changes that may be comin' to
ye; so don't be bothering your poor father in his worriments over his
new plans.”
“What new plans, mommer?” asked the boy abruptly. “Are we goin' away
from here?”
“Hush, dear, and don't ask questions that's enough for grown folks to
worry over, let alone a boy like you. Now be good,”--a quality in Mrs.
Harkutt's mind synonymous with ceasing from troubling,--“and after
supper, while I'm in the parlor with your father and sisters, you kin
sit up here by the fire with your book.”
“But,” persisted the boy in a flash of inspiration, “is popper goin' to
join in business with those surveyors,--a surveyin'?”
“No, child, what an idea! Run away there,--and mind!--don't bother your
father.”
Nevertheless John Milton's inspiration had taken a new and
characteristic shape. All this, he reflected, had happened since the
surveyors came--since they had weakly displayed such a shameless and
unmanly interest in his sisters! It could have but one meaning. He hung
around the sitting-room and passages until he eventually encountered
Clementina, taller than ever, evidently wearing a guilty satisfaction
in her face, engrafted upon that habitual bearing of hers which he had
always recognized as belonging to a vague but objectionable race whose
members were individually known to him as “a proudy.”
“Which of those two surveyor fellows is it, Clemmy?” he said with an
engaging smile, yet halting at a strategic distance.
“Is what?”
“Wot you're goin' to marry.”
“Idiot!”
“That ain't tellin' which,” responded the boy darkly.
Clementina swept by him into the sitting-room, where he heard her
declare that “really that boy was getting too low and vulgar
for anything.” Yet it struck him, that being pressed for further
explanation, she did NOT specify why. This was “girls' meanness!”
Howbeit he lingered late in the road that evening, hearing his father
discuss with the search-party that had followed the banks of the creek,
vainly looking for further traces of the missing 'Lige, the possibility
of his being living or dead, of the body having been carried away by the
current to the bay or turning up later in some distant marsh when the
spring came with low water. One who had been to his cabin beside the
embarcadero reported that it was, as had been long suspected, barely
habitable, and contained neither books, papers, nor records which would
indicate his family or friends. It was a God-forsaken, dreary, worthless
place; he wondered how a white man could ever expect to make a living
there. If Elijah never turned up again it certainly would be a long time
before any squatter would think of taking possession of it. John Milton
knew instinctively, without looking up, that his father's eyes were
fixed upon him, and he felt himself constrained to appear to be
abstracted in gazing down the darkening road. Then he heard his father
say, with what he felt was an equal assumption of carelessness: “Yes, I
reckon I've got somewhere a bill of sale of that land that I had to take
from 'Lige for an old bill, but I kalkilate that's all I'll ever see of
it.”
Rain fell again as the darkness gathered, but he still loitered on the
road and the sloping path of the garden, filled with a half resentful
sense of wrong, and hugging with gloomy pride an increasing sense of
loneliness and of getting dangerously wet. The swollen creek still
whispered, murmured and swirled beside the bank. At another time he
might have had wild ideas of emulating the surveyors on some extempore
raft and so escaping his present dreary home existence; but since the
disappearance of 'Lige, who had always excited an odd boyish antipathy
in his heart, although he had never seen him, he shunned the stream
contaminated with the missing man's unheroic fate. Presently the light
from the open window of the sitting-room glittered on the wet leaves
and sprays where he stood, and the voices of the family conclave came
fitfully to his ear. They didn't want him there. They had never thought
of asking him to come in. Well!--who cared? And he wasn't going to be
bought off with a candle and a seat by the kitchen fire. No!
Nevertheless he was getting wet to no purpose. There was the tool-house
and carpenter's shed near the bank; its floor was thickly covered with
sawdust and pine-wood shavings, and there was a mouldy buffalo skin
which he had once transported thither from the old wagon-bed. There,
too, was his secret cache of a candle in a bottle, buried with other
piratical treasures in the presence of the youthful Peters, who
consented to be sacrificed on the spot in buccaneering fashion to
complete the unhallowed rites. He unearthed the candle, lit it, and
clearing away a part of the shavings stood it up on the floor. He then
brought a prized, battered, and coverless volume from a hidden recess in
the rafters, and lying down with the buffalo robe over him, and his cap
in his hand ready to extinguish the light at the first footstep of a
trespasser, gave himself up--as he had given himself up, I fear, many
other times--to the enchantment of the page before him.
The current whispered, murmured, and sang, unheeded at his side. The
voices of his mother and sisters, raised at times in eagerness or
expectation of the future, fell upon his unlistening ears. For with the
spell that had come upon him, the mean walls of his hiding-place
melted away; the vulgar stream beside him might have been that dim,
subterraneous river down which Sindbad and his bale of riches were swept
out of the Cave of Death to the sunlight of life and fortune, so surely
and so simply had it transported him beyond the cramped and darkened
limits of his present life. He was in the better world of boyish
romance,--of gallant deeds and high emprises; of miraculous atonement
and devoted sacrifice; of brave men, and those rarer, impossible
women,--the immaculate conception of a boy's virgin heart. What mattered
it that behind that glittering window his mother and sisters grew
feverish and excited over the vulgar details of their real but baser
fortune? From the dark tool-shed by the muddy current, John Milton,
with a battered dogs'-eared chronicle, soared on the wings of fancy far
beyond their wildest ken!