to swarm over the earth, wrote back that they had met Joe in Dodge
City, in Leoti, in No-Man's-Land, in Texas, in Arizona--wherever there
was trouble. Sometimes he was the hired bad man of a desert town, whose
business it was to shoot terror into the hearts of disturbers from rival
towns; sometimes he was a free lance--living the devil knows how--always
dressed like a fashion-plate of the plains in high-heeled boots, wide
felt hat, flowing necktie, flannel shirt and velvet trousers. They say
that he did not gamble more than was common among the sporting men of
his class, and that he never worked. Sometimes we heard of him
adventuring as a land dealer, sometimes as a cattleman, sometimes as a
mining promoter, sometimes as a horseman, but always as the sharper, who
rides on the crest of the forward wave of civilization, leaving a town
when it tears down its tents and puts up brick buildings, and then
appearing in the next canvas community, wherein the night is filled with
music, and the cares that infest the day are drowned in bad whiskey or
winked out with powder and shot. And thus Joe Nevison closed his
twenties--a desert scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it. As he
passed into his thirties he left the smoky human crystals that formed on
the cow trails and at the mountain gold camps. Cripple Creek became too
effete for him, and an electric light in a tent became a target he could
not resist; wherefore he went into the sage brush and the short grass,
seeking others of his kind, the human rattlesnake, the ranging coyote
and the outlawed wolf. Joe Nevison rode with the Dalton gang, raided
ranches and robbed banks with the McWhorters and held up stages as a
lone highwayman. At least, so men said in the West, though no one could
prove it, and at the opening of Lawton he appeared at the head of a band
of cutthroats, who were herded out of town by the deputy United States
marshals before noon of the first day. Not until popular government was
established could they get in to open their skin-game, which was better
and safer for them than ordinary highway faring. At Lawton our people
saw Joe and he asked about the home people, asked about the boys--the
old boys he called them--and becoming possessed of a post-office
address, Joe wrote a long letter to George Kirwin, the foreman of our
office. We call him old George, because he is still under forty. Joe
being in an expansive mood, and with more money on his clothes than he
cared for, sent old George ten dollars to pay for a dollar Joe had
borrowed the day he left town in the eighties. We printed Joe's letter
in our paper, and it pleased his mother. That was the beginning of a
regular correspondence between the rover and the home-stayer. George
Kirwin, gaunt, taciturn, and hard-working, had grown out of the dreamy,
story-loving boy who had been one of the Slaves of the Magic Tree and
into a shy old bachelor who wept over "East Lynne" whenever it came to
the town opera house, and asked for a lay-off only when Modjeska
appeared in Topeka, or when there was grand opera at Kansas City. But he
ruled the back office with an iron hand and superintended the Mission
Sunday-School across the track, putting all his spare money into
Christmas presents for his pupils. After that first letter that came
from Joe Nevison, no one had a hint of what passed between the two men.
But a month never went by that Joe's letter missed. When Lawton began
to wane, Joe Nevison seemed to mend his wayward course. He moved to
South McAlester and opened a faro game--a square game they said it
was--for the Territory! This meant that unless Joe was hard up every man
had his chance before the wheel. Old George took the longest trip of his
life, when we got him a pass to South McAlester and he put on his black
frock coat and went to visit Joe. All that we learned from him was that
Joe "had changed a good deal," and that he was "taking everything in the
drug store, from the big green bottle at the right of the front door
clear around past the red prescription case, and back to the big blue
bottle at the left of the door." But after George came home the Mission
Sunday-School began to thrive. George was not afraid of tainted money,
and the school got a new library, which included "Tom Sawyer" and
"Huckleberry Finn," as well as "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates" for
the boys, and all the "Pansy" books for the girls. It was a quaint old
lot of books, and George Kirwin was nearly a year getting it together.
Also he bought a new stove for his Sunday-School room, and a lot of
pictures for the church walls, among others "Wide Awake and Fast
Asleep," "Simply to Thy Cross," and "The Old Oaken Bucket." He gave to
the school a cabinet organ with more stops than most of the children
could count.
[Illustration: A desert Scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it]
A year ago a new reporter brought in this item: "Joseph Nevison, of
South McAlester, I. T., is visiting his mother, Mrs. Julia Nevison, at
234 South Fifth Street."
We sent the reporter out for more about Joe Nevison and at noon George
Kirwin hurried down to the little home below the tracks. From these two
searchers after truth we learned that Joe Nevison's mother had brought
him home from the Indian Territory mortally sick. Half-a-dozen of us who
had played with him as boys went to see him that evening, and found a
wan, haggard man with burned-out black eyes, lying in a clean white bed.
He seemed to know each of us for a moment and spoke to us through his
delirium in a tired, piping voice--like the voice of the little boy who
had been our leader. He called us by forgotten nicknames, and he hummed
at a tune that we had not heard for a score of years. Then he piped out
"While the Landlubbers Lie Down Below, Below, Below," and followed that
with "Green Grass Growing all Around, all Around," and that with the
song about the "Tonga Islands," his voice growing into a clearer alto as
he sang. His mother tried to quiet him, but he smiled his dead smile at
her through his cindery eyes, shook his head and went on. When he had
lain quiet for a moment, he turned to one of us and said: "Dock, I'm
goin' up and dive off that stump--a back flip-flop--you dassent!" Pretty
soon he seemed to come up snuffing and blowing and grinning and said,
"Last man dressed got to chaw beef." Then he cried: "Dock's it--Dock's
it; catch 'im, hold him--there he goes--duck him, strip him. O well, let
him go if he's go'n' to cry. Say, boys, I wish you fellers'd come over
t' my stick horse livery stable--honest I got the best hickory horse you
ever see. Whoa, there--whoa now, I tell you. You Pilliken Dunlevy let me
harness you; there, put it under your arm, and back of your neck--no I
ain't go'n' to let you hold it--I'll jerk the tar out of you if you
don't go. Whe-e-e that's the way to go, hol--hold on, whoa there. Back
up. Let's go over to Jim's and run on his track. Say, Jim, I got the
best little pacer in the country here--get up there, Pilliken," and he
clucked and sawed his arms, and cracked an imaginary whip. When George
came in, the face on the bed brightened and the treble voice said:
"Hello Fatty--we've been waitin' for you. Now let's go on. What you got
in your wagon--humph--bet it's a pumpkin. Did old Boswell chase you?"
and then he laughed, and turned away from us. His trembling hands seemed
to be fighting something from his face. "Bushes," whispered Enoch Haver,
and then added, "Now he's climbing up the bank of the ravine." And we
saw the lean hands on the bed clutch up the wall, and then the voice
broke forth: "Me first--first up--get away from here, Dock--I said
first," and we could see his hands climbing an imaginary tree.
His face glowed with the excitement of his delirium as he climbed, and
then apparently catching his breath he rested before he called out: "I'm
comin' down, clear the track for old Dan Tucker," and from the
convulsive gripping of his hands and arms and the hysterical intake of
his breath we who had seen Joe Nevison dive from the top of the old
tree, from limb to limb to the bottom, knew what he was doing. His heart
was thumping audibly when he finished, and we tried to calm him. For a
while we all sat about him in silence--forgetting the walls that shut us
in, and living with him in the open, Slaves of the Magic Tree. Then one
by one we left and only George Kirwin stayed with the sick man.
Joe Nevison had lived a wicked life. He had been the friend and
companion of vile men and the women whom such men choose, and they had
lived lives such as we in our little town only read about--and do not
understand. Yet all that night Joe Nevison roamed through the woods by
the creek, a little child, and no word passed his lips that could have
brought a hint of the vicious life that his manhood had known.
In that long night, while George Kirwin sat by his dying friend,
listening to his babble, two men were in the genii's hands. They put off
their years as a garment. Together they ran over the roofs of buildings
on Main Street that have been torn down for thirty years; they played
in barns and corncribs burned down so long ago that their very site is
in doubt; they romped over prairies where now are elm-covered streets;
and they played with boys and girls who have lain forgotten in little
sunken graves for a quarter of a century, out on the hill; or they
called from the four winds of heaven playmates who left our town at a
time so remote that to the watcher by the bed it seemed ages ago. The
games they played were of another day than this. When Joe began crying
"Barbaree," he summoned a troop of ghosts, and the pack went scampering
through the spectre town in the starlight; and when that game had tired
him the voice began to chatter of "Slap-and-a-kick," and
"Foot-and-a-half," and of "Rolly-poley," and of the ball games--"Scrub,"
and "Town-ball," and "Anteover," each old game conjuring up spirits from
its own vasty deep until the room was full of phantoms and the watcher's
memory ached with the sweet sorrow of old joys.
George Kirwin says that long after midnight Joe awakened from a doze,
fumbling through the bedclothes, looking for something. Finally he
complained that he could not find his mouth-harp. They tried to make him
forget it, but when they failed, his mother went to the bureau and
pulling open the lower drawer found a little varnished box; under the
shaded lamp she brought out a sack of marbles, a broken bean-shooter,
with whittled prongs, a Barlow knife, a tintype picture of a boy, and
the mouth-organ. This she gave to the hands that fluttered about the
face on the pillow. He began to play "The Mocking Bird," opening and
shutting his bony hands to let the music rise and fall. When he closed
that tune he played "O the Mistletoe Bough," and after that over and
over again he played "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground." When he dropped
the mouth-harp, he lay very still for a time, though his lips moved
incessantly. The morning was coming, and he was growing weak. But when
his voice came back they knew that he was far afield again; for he said,
"Come on, fellers, let's set down here under the hill and rest. It's a
long ways back." When he had rested he spoke up again, "Say, fellers,
what'll we sing?" George tried him with a gospel hymn, but Joe would
have none of it, and reviled the song and the singer after the fashion
of boys. In a moment he exclaimed: "Here--listen to me. Let's sing
this," and his alto voice came out uncertainly and faintly: "Wrap Me up
in My Tarpaulin Jacket."
George Kirwin's rough voice joined the song and the mother listened and
wept. Other old songs followed, but Joe Nevison, the man, never woke up.
It was the little boy full of the poetry and sweetness of a child at
play, the boy who had turned the poetry of his boyish soul into a life
of adventure unchecked by moral restraint, whose eyes they closed that
morning.
And George Kirwin explained to us when he came down to work that
afternoon, that maybe the bad part of Joe Nevison's soul had shrivelled
away during his sickness, instead of waiting for death. George told us
that what made him sad was that a soul in which there was so much that
might have been good had been stunted by life and was entering eternity
with so little to show for its earthly journey.
When one considers it, one finds that Joe Nevison wasted his life most
miserably. There was nothing to his credit to say in his obituary--no
good deed to recount and there were many, many bad ones. Moreover, the
sorrow and bitterness that he brought into his father's last days, and
the shame that he put upon his mother, who lived to see his end, made it
impossible for our paper to say of him any kind thing that would not
have seemed maudlin.
Yet at Joe Nevison's funeral the old settlers, many of them broken in
years and by trouble, gathered at the little wooden church in the hollow
below the track, to see the last of him, though certainly not to pay him
a tribute of respect. They remembered him as the little boy who had
trudged up the hill to school when the old stone schoolhouse was the
only stone building in town; they remembered him as he was in the days
when he began to turn Marshal Furgeson's hair grey with wild pranks.
They remembered the boy's childish virtues, and could feel the remorse
that must at times have gnawed his heart. Also these old men and women
knew of the devil of unbridled passion that the child's father had put
into Joe's blood. And when he started down the broad road they had seen
his track beyond him. So as the little gathering of old people filed
through the church door and lined up on the sidewalk waiting for the
mourners to come out, we heard through the crowd white haired men
sighing: "Poor Joe; poor fellow." Can one hope that God's forgiveness
will be fuller than that!
XIII
A Pilgrim in the Wilderness
A few years ago we were getting out a special edition of our paper,
printed on book-paper, and filled with pictures of the old settlers, and
we called it "the historical edition." In preparing the historical
edition we had to confer with "Aunt" Martha Merrifield so often that
George Kirwin, the foreman, who was kept trotting to her with
proof-slips and copy for her to revise, remarked, as he was making up
the last form of the troublesome edition, that, if the recording angel
ever had a fire in his office, he could make up the record for our town
from "Aunt" Martha's scrapbook. In that big, fat, crinkly-leafed book,
she has pasted so many wedding notices and birth notices and death
notices that one who reads the book wonders how so many people could
have been born, married and died in a town of only ten thousand
inhabitants. One evening, while the historical edition was growing, a
reporter spent the evening with "Aunt" Martha. The talk drifted back to
the early days, and "Aunt" Martha mentioned Balderson. To identify him
she went to her scrapbook, and as she was turning the pages she said:
"In those days of the early seventies, before the railroad came, when
the town awoke in the morning and found a newly arrived covered waggon
near a neighbour's house, it always meant that kin had come. If at
school that day the children from the house of visitation bragged about
their relatives, expatiating upon the power and riches that they left
back East, the town knew that the visitors were ordinary kin; but if the
children from the afflicted household said little about the visitors and
evidently tried to avoid telling just who they were, then the town knew
that the strangers were poor kin--probably some of "his folks"; for it
was well understood that the women in this town all came from high
connections 'back East' in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. Newcomers
sometimes wondered how such a galaxy of princesses and duchesses and
ladyships happened to marry so far beneath their station.
"But the Dixons had no children, so when a covered waggon drove up to
their place in the night, and a fussy, pussy little man with a dingy,
stringy beard, appeared in the Dixons' back yard in the morning, looking
after the horses hitched to the strange waggon; the town had to wait
until the next week's issue of the _Statesman_ to get reliable news
about their prospective fellow-citizen." With that "Aunt" Martha opened
her scrapbook and read a clipping from the _Statesman_, under the head,
"A Valuable Acquisition to Our City." It ran:
"It has been many months since we have been favoured with a call from so
cultured and learned a gentleman as the Hon. Andoneran P. Balderson,
late of Quito, Hancock County, Iowa, who has finally determined to
settle in our midst. Cramped by the irritating conventionalities of an
effete civilisation, Colonel Balderson comes among us for that larger
freedom and wider horizon which his growing powers demand. He comes with
the ripened experience of a jurist, a soldier, and a publicist, and,
when transportation facilities have been completed between this and the
Missouri River, Judge Balderson will bring to our little city his
magnificent law library; but until then he will be found over the Elite
Oyster Bay, where he will be glad to welcome clients and others.
"Having participated in the late War of the Rebellion, as captain in
Company G of Colonel Jennison's famous and invincible army of the
border, Colonel Balderson will give special attention to pension
matters. He also will set to work to obtain a complete set of abstracts,
and will be glad to give advice on real-estate law and the practice of
eminent domain, to which subject he has given deep study. All business
done with neatness and despatch.
"Before leaving Iowa, and after considerable pressure, Judge Balderson
consented to act as agent for a number of powerful Eastern fire
insurance companies, and has in contemplation the establishment of the
Southwestern distributing point for the Multum in Parvo Farm Gate
Company, of which corporation Colonel Balderson owns the patent right
for Kansas. This business, however, he would be willing to dispose of to
proper parties. Terms on application.
"The colonel desires us to announce that there will be a meeting of the
veterans of the late war at the schoolhouse next Saturday night, for the
purpose of organising a society to refresh and perpetuate the sacred
memories of that gigantic struggle, and to rally around the old flag,
touch shoulders again, and come into a closer fellowship for benevolent,
social, and other purposes. The judge, on that occasion, will deliver
his famous address on the 'Battle of Look Out Mountain,' in which battle
Colonel Balderson participated as a member of an Iowa regiment.
Admission free. Silver collection to defray necessary expenses."
Accompanying this article was a slightly worn woodcut of the colonel in
his soldier garb, a cap with the top drawn forward, the visor low over
his eyes, and a military overcoat thrown gaily back, exposing his
shoulder. The picture showed the soldier in profile, with a fierce
military moustache and a stubby, runty goatee, meant to strike terror to
the civilian heart.
From "Aunt" Martha we learned that before Judge Balderson had been in
town a week he had dyed his whiskers and had taken command of our forces
in the county-seat war then brewing. During the judge's first month in
the county the campaign for the county-seat election was opened, and he
canvassed the north end of the county for our town, denouncing, with
elaborate eloquence, as horse thieves, mendicants, and renegades from
justice, the settlers in the south end of the county who favoured the
rival town. The judge organised a military company and picketed the
hills about our town day and night against a raid from the Southenders;
and, having stirred public passion deeply, he turned his pickets loose
on the morning of election day to set prairie fires all over the south
end of the county to harass the settlers who might vote for the rival
town and keep them away from the polls fighting fire.
Our people won; "the hell-hounds of disorder and anarchy"--as Judge
Balderson called the rival townspeople--were "rebuked by the stern hand
of a just and terrible Providence." Balderson was a hero, and our people
sent him to the legislature. "Aunt" Martha added:
"He went to Topeka in his blue soldier clothes, his campaign hat, and
brass buttons; but he came back, at the first recess, in diamonds and
fine linen, and the town sniffed a little." Having learned this much of
Balderson our office became interested in him, and a reporter was set to
work to look up Balderson. The reporter found that according to Wilder's
"Annals," Balderson hustled himself into the chairmanship of the
railroad committee and became a power in the State. The next time
Colonel "Alphabetical" Morrison came to the office he was asked for
further details about Balderson. The Colonel told us that when the
legislature finally adjourned, very proud and very drunk, in the bedlam
of the closing hours, Judge Balderson mounted a desk, waved the Stars
and Stripes, and told of the Battle of Look Out Mountain. Colonel
Morrison chuckled as he added: "The next day the _State Journal_ printed
his picture--the one with the slouching cap, the military moustache, the
fierce goatee, and the devil-may-care cape--and referred to the judge as
'the silver-tongued orator of the Cottonwood,' a title which began to
amuse the fellows around town."
Naturally he was a candidate for Congress. Colonel Morrison says that
Balderson became familiarly known in State politics as Little Baldy,
and was in demand at soldiers' meetings and posed as the soldier's
friend.
Wilder's "Annals" records the fact that Balderson failed to go to
Congress, but went to the State Senate. He waxed fat. We learned that he
bought a private bank and all the books recording abstracts of title to
land in his county, and that he affected a high silk hat when he went to
Chicago, while his townsmen were inclined to eye him askance. The lack
of three votes from his home precinct kept him from being nominated
lieutenant-governor by his party, but Colonel Morrison says that
Balderson soon took on the title of governor, and was unruffled by his
defeat. The Colonel describes Balderson as assuming the air of a kind of
sacred white cow, and putting much hair-oil and ointment and
frankincense upon his carcass. Other old settlers say that in those days
his dyed whiskers fairly glistened. And when, at State conventions, in
the fervour of his passion he unbent, unbuttoned his frock-coat, grabbed
the old flag, and charged up and down the platform in an oratorical
frensy, it seemed that another being had emerged from the greasy little
roll of adipose in which "Governor" Balderson enshrined himself. His
climax was invariably the wavering battle-line upon the mountain, the
flag tottering and about to fall, "when suddenly it rises and goes
forward, up--up--up the hill, through the smoke of hell, and full and
fair into the teeth of death, with ten thousand cheering, maddened
soldiers behind it. And who carried that flag--who carried that flag?"
he would scream, in a tremulous voice, repeating his question over and
over, and then answer himself in tragic bass: "The little corporal of
Company B!" And, "Who fell into the arms of victory that great day, with
four wounds upon his body? The little corporal of Company B!" It is
hardly necessary to add that Governor Balderson was the little corporal.
After the failure of his bank, when rumour accused him of burning the
court-house that he might sell his abstracts to the county at a fabulous
price, he called a public meeting to hear his defence, and repeated to
his townsmen that query, "Who carried the flag?" adding in a hoarse
whisper: "And yet--great God!--they say that the little corporal is an
in-cen-di-ary. Was this great war fought in vain, that tr-e-e-sin should
lift her hydra head to hiss out such blasphemy upon the boys who wore
the blue?"
However, the evidence was against him, and as our people had long since
lost interest in the flag-bearer, the committee gave him five minutes to
leave. He returned three minutes in change and struck out over the hill
towards the west, afoot, and the town knew him no more forever.
Where Balderson went after leaving town no one seems to know. The earth
might have swallowed him up. But in 1882 someone sent a marked copy of
the _Denver Tribune_ to the _Statesman_ office, the _Statesman_
reprinted it, and "Aunt" Martha filed it away in her book. Here is it: