[Illustration]
John Brent
By
THEODORE WINTHROP
[Illustration]
New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
Publishers
COPYRIGHT, 1861,
BY
TICKNOR & FIELDS.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. AURI SACRA FAMES 5
II. GERRIAN’S RANCH 13
III. DON FULANO 23
IV. JOHN BRENT 36
V. ACROSS COUNTRY 49
VI. JAKE SHAMBERLAIN 59
VII. ENTER, THE BRUTES! 67
VIII. A MORMON CARAVAN 79
IX. SIZZUM AND HIS HERETICS 90
X. “ELLEN! ELLEN!” 101
XI. FATHER AND DAUGHTER 113
XII. A GHOUL AT THE FEAST 125
XIII. JAKE SHAMBERLAIN’S BALL 136
XIV. HUGH CLITHEROE 146
XV. A LOVER 166
XVI. ARMSTRONG 181
XVII. CAITIFF BAFFLES OGRE 193
XVIII. A GALLOP OF THREE 200
XIX. FASTER 207
XX. A HORSE 218
XXI. LUGGERNEL SPRINGS 225
XXII. CHAMPAGNE 238
XXIII. AN IDYL OF THE ROCKYS 247
XXIV. DRAPETOMANIA 254
XXV. NOBLESSE OBLIGE 264
XXVI. HAM 274
XXVII. FULANO’S BLOOD-STAIN 284
XXVIII. SHORT’S CUT-OFF 294
XXIX. A LOST TRAIL 301
XXX. LONDON 313
XXXI. A DWARF 321
XXXII. PADIHAM’S SHOP 335
XXXIII. “CAST THY BREAD UPON THE WATERS” 343
XXXIV. THE LAST OF A LOVE-CHASE 354
JOHN BRENT.
CHAPTER I.
AURI SACRA FAMES.
I write in the first person; but I shall not maunder about myself. I am
in no sense the hero of this drama. Call me Chorus, if you please,--not
Chorus merely observant and impassive; rather Chorus a sympathizing
monitor and helper. Perhaps I gave a certain crude momentum to the
movement of the play, when finer forces were ready to flag; but others
bore the keen pangs, others took the great prizes, while I stood by to
lift the maimed and cheer the victor.
It is a healthy, simple, broad-daylight story. No mystery in it. There
is action enough, primeval action of the Homeric kind. Deeds of the
heroic and chivalric times do not utterly disdain our day. There are
men as ready to gallop for love and strike for love now, as in the age
of Amadis.
Roughs and brutes, as well as gentlemen, take their places in this
drama. None of the characters have scruples or qualms. They act
according to their laws, and are scourged or crowned, as their laws
suit Nature’s or not.
To me these adventures were episode; to my friend, the hero, the very
substance of life.
But enough backing and filling. Enter Richard Wade--myself--as Chorus.
* * * * *
A few years ago I was working a gold-quartz mine in California.
It was a worthless mine, under the conditions of that time. I had been
dragged into it by the shifts and needs of California life. Destiny
probably meant to teach me patience and self-possession in difficulty.
So Destiny thrust me into a bitter bad business of QUARTZ MINING.
If I had had countless dollars of capital to work my mine, or
quicksilver for amalgamation as near and plenty as the snow on the
Sierra Nevada, I might have done well enough.
As it was, I got but certain pennyworths of gold to a most intolerable
quantity of quartz. The precious metal was to the brute mineral in the
proportion of perhaps a hundred pin-heads to the ton. My partners, down
in San Francisco, wrote to me: “Only find twice as many pin-heads, and
our fortune is made.” So thought those ardent fellows, fancying that
gold would go up and labor go down,--that presently I would strike
a vein where the mineral would show yellow threads and yellow dots,
perhaps even yellow knobs, in the crevices, instead of empty crannies
which Nature had prepared for monetary deposits and forgotten to fill.
So thought the fellows in San Francisco. They had been speculating in
beef, bread-stuffs, city lots, Rincon Point, wharf property, mission
lands, Mexican titles, Sacramento boats, politics, Oregon lumber. They
had been burnt out, they had been cleaned out, they had been drowned
out. They depended upon me and the quartz mine to set them up again. So
there was a small, steady stream of money flowing up from San Francisco
from the depleted coffers of those sanguine partners, flowing into our
mine, and sinking there, together with my labor and my life.
Our ore--the San Francisco partners liked to keep up the complimentary
fiction of calling it ore--was pretty stuff for an amateur
mineralogical cabinet. A professor would have exhibited specimens to a
lecture-room with delight. There never was any quartz where the matrix
was better defined, better shaped to hold the gold that was not in it.
For Macadam, what royal material it would have been! Park roads made
of it would have glittered gayer than marble. How brilliantly paths
covered with its creamy-white fragments would have meandered through
green grass!
If I had had no fond expectations of these shining white and yellow
stones, I should have deemed their mass useful and ornamental
enough,--useful skeleton material to help hold the world together,
ornamental when it lay in the sun and sparkled. But this laughing
sparkle had something of a sneer in it. The stuff knew that it had
humbugged me. Let a man or a woman be victor over man or woman, and
the chances are that generosity will suppress the pæan. But matter is
so often insulted and disdained, that when it triumphs over mind it is
merciless.
Yes; my quartz had humbugged me. Or rather--let me not be unjust
even to undefended stone, not rich enough to pay an advocate--I had
humbugged myself with false hopes. I have since ascertained that my
experience is not singular. Other men have had false hopes of other
things than quartz mines. Perhaps it was to teach me this that the
experience came. Having had my lesson, I am properly cool and patient
now when I see other people suffering in the same way,--whether they
dig for gold, fame, or bliss; digging for the bread of their life, and
getting only a stone. The quartz was honest enough as quartz. It was my
own fault that I looked for gold-bearing quartz, and so found it bogus
and a delusion. What right have we to demand the noble from the ignoble!
I used sometimes fairly to shake my fist at my handsome pile of
mineral, my bullionless pockets of ore. There was gold in the quartz;
there are pearls in the Jersey muds; there are plums in boarding-house
puddings; there are sixpences in the straw of Broadway omnibuses.
Steady disappointment, by and by, informs a man that he is in the wrong
place. All work, no play, no pay, is a hint to work elsewhere. But men
must dig in the wrong spots to learn where these are, and so narrow
into the right spot at last. Every man, it seems, must waste so much
life. Every man must have so much imprisonment to teach him limits and
fit him for freedom.
Nearly enough, however of _Miei Prigioni_. A word or two of my
companions in jail. A hard lot they were, my neighbors within twenty
miles! Jail-birds, some of them, of the worst kind. It was as well,
perhaps, that my digging did not make money, and theirs did. They would
not have scrupled to bag my gold and butcher me. But they were not all
ruffians; some were only barbarians.
PIKES, most of these latter. America is manufacturing several new
types of men. The Pike is one of the newest. He is a bastard pioneer.
With one hand he clutches the pioneer vices; with the other he beckons
forward the vices of civilization. It is hard to understand how a man
can have so little virtue in so long a body, unless the shakes are foes
to virtue in the soul, as they are to beauty in the face.
He is a terrible shock, this unlucky Pike, to the hope that the new
race on the new continent is to be a handsome race. I lose that faith,
which the people about me now have nourished, when I recall the Pike.
He is hung together, not put together. He inserts his lank fathom of a
man into a suit of molasses-colored homespun. Frowzy and husky is the
hair Nature crowns him with; frowzy and stubby the beard. He shambles
in his walk. He drawls in his talk. He drinks whiskey by the tank.
His oaths are to his words as Falstaff’s sack to his bread. I have
seen Maltese beggars, Arab camel-drivers, Dominican friars, New York
Aldermen, Digger Indians; the foulest, frowziest creatures I have ever
seen are thorough-bred Pikes. The most vigorous of them leave their
native landscape of cottonwood and sand-bars along the yellow ditches
of the West, and emigrate with a wagon-load of pork and pork-fed
progeny across the plains to California. There the miasms are roasted
out of them; the shakes warmed away; they will grow rich, and possibly
mellow, in the third or fourth generation. They had not done so in my
time, I lived among them _ad nauseam_, month after month, and I take
this opportunity to pay them parting compliments.
I went on toiling, day after day, week after week, two good years of
my life, over that miserable mine. Nothing came of it. I was growing
poorer with every ton we dug, poorer with every pound we crushed. In
a few months more, I should have spent my last dollar and have gone
to day labor, perhaps among the Pikes. The turnpike stuff refused to
change into gold. I saw, of course, that something must be done. What,
I did not know. I was in that state when one needs an influence without
himself to take him by the hand gently, by the shoulder forcibly, by
the hair roughly, or even by the nose insultingly, and drag him off
into a new region.
The influence came. Bad news reached me. My only sister, a widow, my
only near relative, died, leaving two young children to my care. It was
strange how this sorrow made the annoyance and weariness of my life
naught! How this responsibility cheered me! My life seemed no longer
lonely and purposeless. Point was given to all my intentions at once.
I must return home to New York. Further plans when I am there! But
now for home! If any one wanted my quartz mine, he might have it. I
could not pack it in my saddle-bags to present to a college cabinet of
mineralogy.
I determined, as time did not absolutely press, to ride home across
the plains. It is a grand journey. Two thousand miles, or so, on
horseback. Mountains, deserts, prairies, rivers, Mormons, Indians,
buffalo,--adventures without number in prospect. A hearty campaign, and
no carpet knighthood about it.
It was late August. I began my preparations at once.