death by apoplexy, caused probably by a paroxysm of rage. The jury
rendered a verdict of "involuntary manslaughter." The sentence was the
lowest the law allows: namely, one day's imprisonment with hard labor.
This unlooked-for clemency staggered the prisoner. Oblivious of every
fact but the terrible one that Dennis Rumpety had died by his hand, he
had nerved himself for what he believed would be his death-blow. The
tension had been too great; he could not bear its sudden removal.
"Say, your honor," he cried, regardless of court etiquette,--"say, your
honor, couldn't you lay it on a little heavier?"
"The court sees no reason for altering its decision," his honor replied,
gravely, passing on to the delivery of the next sentence.
But after the court had adjourned, the judge stepped up to the prisoner
and said, kindly, "I wouldn't take it too hard, if I were you, Rankin.
We all know that there was no murder in your heart."
"Yes, there was, your honor. Yes, there was."
"At any rate, the man's death was clearly not your deed. It was the hand
of the Lord that did it."
"I don't know, your honor," Rankin persisted. "It feels to me as though
it was me that done it."
The judge and the lookers-on were puzzled by this persistency. It did
not seem in character. For the first time in his life, Rankin felt the
need of words. The moral perplexity was too great for him to deal with;
he was reaching out for something to take hold of, a thing which his
self-contained, crudely disciplined nature had never craved before.
"It's an awful thing to send a soul to hell," he muttered.
Then, in his extremity, he felt a soft touch upon his arm. Myra Beckwith
stood beside him.
"Ed," she said, with the sweet seriousness which had first attracted
him, and now at last there was the tone in her voice which he would have
given his life to hear,--"Ed, think of the seven souls you have
delivered out of hell! I was over to see them yesterday."
The consolation of that voice and touch calmed his troubled spirit,
restored him to himself; the nightmare of the last two days faded and
slid away. He stood a moment in awkward silence, while Myra's hand
rested upon his arm; then, before them all, he laid his hand upon it,
and, with the solemnity of a priest before the altar, he said, "I guess
it was the Lord that done it, after all!"
VI
THE LAME GULCH PROFESSOR.
Simon Amberley had never been able to strike root in life, until, some
ten years since, he found a congenial soil in that remote fastness of
the Rocky Mountains known as Lame Gulch. From the first moment of his
arrival there it was borne in upon him that this was the goal of his
long, apparently aimless pilgrimage, and he lost no time in securing to
himself a foothold, by the simple and inexpensive method of taking up a
ranch.
The land he chose was higher up the Gulch than any of the neighboring
ranches, and all that it was rich in was views. It ran up the side of a
hill, seen from the top of which, the whole Rocky Mountain Range had the
appearance of marshalling itself in one grand, exhaustive cyclorama. On
every hand were snowy summits forming a titanic ring which seemed to
concentrate upon Lame Gulch; and much of the sense of aloofness and
security which was the chief element in Amberley's content came from the
illusion which he carefully guarded, that that wall of giants really was
impenetrable. He liked, too, to feel himself at a great altitude above
the lower world where he had so long and vainly toiled.
"Nine thousand feet above sea-level!" he would assure himself in
self-congratulatory mood. "When I come to quit, I sha' n't hev fur to
go!" which confidence in the direction his spirit was destined to take,
may fairly be accepted as indication of a good conscience.
Amberley had not married, and although he felt the omission to be matter
for regret, he had never, as far as his recollection served him, found
his wish to do so particularized in favor of any one woman.
"No, I ain't never married," he reluctantly admitted, when Enoch Baker,
his next-door neighbor at Lame Gulch, pressed the point.
Enoch lived with his wife just round on the other side of Bear Mountain,
only three miles away, and although his now elderly consort was reputed
to be unamiable,--not to say cantankerous,--yet her existence, and the
existence in the world outside, of many children and grandchildren,
conferred upon him the enviable dignity of a man of family. He was a
Yankee, and his thirst for information was not to be lightly appeased.
"Disapp'inted?" he asked, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, and
pulling out a venerable tobacco-pouch, with a view to "fillin' her up"
again. "Disapp'inted?"
"Yes; ruther,--bein' as I was always fond of children."
Amberley was himself a tall, limp-looking downeaster, with pleasant,
unsuspicious eyes, and a guileless spirit. He used to hand his cattle
over to Baker once a year, and let him drive them with his own down the
long mountain road to Springtown, and it was understood than he did not
inquire too curiously in the matter of commissions. The stores and
fodder which Enoch delivered over to him in exchange, together with a
plausibly varying amount of hard cash, seemed to Simon an ample return
for the scrawny cattle he sent to market. And Enoch, for his part, was
always willing to testify that Amberley was a pleasant man to deal with.
"What was she like?" Enoch inquired, in the tone of a connoisseur,
transfixing Amberley with his shrewd eyes.
"Don't know's I could tell you, neighbor, I kind o' fancied the ones
with the snappin' black eyes. But I ruther guess some other kind would
ha' done's well, when it come to the pint."
Enoch raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
"Wouldn't ary one on 'em hev you?" he asked.
"Never asked 'em," was the reply. "It was this way," Amberley went on,
gathering himself together for the unaccustomed effort of expounding a
situation. "I never seemed to feel to hev _gumption_ enough to raise a
family."
Enoch's countenance took on a judicial look. "Yet you've got a good
eddication," he remarked, after thoughtful consideration of the case.
"You've got book larnin' enough to make your way."
"Wall, yes; the eddication's stayed by me. I ruther guess 'twas the
gumption that got knocked out. That was at Antietam."
"Didn't know you was in the war," Enoch exclaimed, with a visible
accession of respect. "Was you hit?"
"Wall, yes; in the head. I wa' n't much more 'n a youngster, and when
they let me loose the doctors said I was good 's new; 'n I ruther guess
I was, all except the gumption. 'T was kind o' curous, too," he went on,
warming to his subject, and fumbling at something on the side of his
head. "When the bullet ploughed through here, the settin' sun was in my
eyes; 'n soon's I got on my feet agin I wanted to go West. I was let go
there in Virginia, 'n though I hankered after my own folks as bad as
anybody, there was nothin' for it, but to turn toward the settin' sun.
'N fust I went to Ohio, 'n then to Illinois, 'n then to Missouri, 'n so
on here. Never could manage to stop more 'n a few years in one place
till I come up agin the Rocky Mountings. Since then I've felt kind o'
settled and satisfied."
But Simon's satisfaction was destined to be rudely broken in upon.
One pleasant September day somebody picked up something in the Gulch
that looked like a dingy bit of quartz, and carried it down to
Springtown, and shortly after that a squad of men appeared upon the
scene. The mountains, faithless to their trust, had let them in. They
gathered together along the Gulch and on the side of Bear Mountain,
where Amberley could see them, little remote groups, sometimes losing
themselves among the pine-trees, sometimes showing plain against the sky
on the exposed comb of the mountain-side. By and by more men came and
rougher ones, bringing mules and oxen with them, and camping in tents
which they deserted by day. When the early snow came, Amberley could
see, more plainly than before, the doings of the encroaching enemy.
Great black scars were made in the snow; sledges, laden with weird,
ungainly masses of wood and iron, were hauled up the mountain-side. Here
and there a structure appeared, that had a grotesque resemblance to a
gallows. The uncouth monsters planted themselves along the hillside,
where they breathed forth smoke and emitted strange noises. Amberley
could hear the rattling of chains, the creaking of timbers; a hoarse
shout would sometimes come ringing across the Gulch through the thin
frosty air, if the wind was that way.
[Illustration. "A TOWN OF RUDE FRAME HUTS HAD SPRUNG UP IN THE HOLLOW
BELOW."]
In September it was that the bit of quartz was carried down to
Springtown; before the winter snows had thought of melting, a town of
rude frame huts had sprung up in the hollow below, and Lame Gulch was a
flourishing mining-camp. All the rough-scuff of the countryside
promptly gathered there, and elbowed, with equal indifference, the
honest miner, the less honest saloon-keeper, and the capitalist, the
degree of whose claim to that laudatory adjective was not to be so
easily fixed. No one seemed out of place in the crazy, zigzag streets,
no sound seemed foreign to this new, conglomerate atmosphere. The fluent
profanity of the mule-driver, the shrill laugh of the dance-hall; the
prolonged rattle and final roar of the ore-chute, the steady pick of the
laborer at the prospect-hole;--each played its part to burden and stain
the pure, high air that had seemed so like the air of Heaven itself.
Amberley stayed on in his lonely lean-to, or roamed over his desecrated
acres, bewildered and aggrieved. What were the mountains thinking of to
admit these savage hordes! Whither should he go, where should he find a
refuge, since his trusted allies had played him false? He loathed it
all, loathed most of all Enoch's exultant suggestion that there might be
gold on their land.
"But we'll lay low for a while," Enoch said, with an air of profound
cunning. "We'll wait till they're plumb crazy, and then we kin git our
own price!"
And Amberley stayed on all through that trying winter, simply because he
knew of no better place to go to, and the spring came and found him
there, unreconciled, to be sure, but leading his usual life. And so it
happened that one day, when the snow had disappeared from all the
southerly slopes, and the wind was toward the Camp, so that the sounds
he hated came dulled and hushed to his ear, Amberley ventured a few rods
down the hillside in search of a missing calf. The truant was a pretty,
white-nosed creature, a special pet of his master's, with great brown,
confiding eyes, and ample ears, and Amberley had named him Simon. Not a
usual name for a calf, as Simon was well aware, but somehow it gave the
lonely man a peculiar pleasure to know that his name was borne by a
cheerful young thing, with frisky tail and active legs, and everything
to live for.
As the elder Simon strolled down the hillside on this particular spring
day, calling and peering from side to side, his eye fell upon the first
daisy of the season, nestling close at his feet,--a single blossom among
a crowded group of little short-stemmed scrubby buds. He stooped to pick
it, and was standing, lost in wonder over its frailty and its hardihood,
when a child's voice struck his ear, calling, "Come Bossie, come!"
Stepping around a projecting rock close at hand, Amberley came upon a
pretty scene. On a wide level sunny space, where young grass was
already springing, stood a little figure in blue, with yellow hair
flying about in the breeze; a tiny hand filled with grass, held out
toward the doubtful yet covetous Simon Jr. The child stood perfectly
still, her square little back turned to her new observer, while the calf
stumped cautiously toward her. At a safe distance he stopped and sniffed
at the tiny hand, then kicked up his heels and pranced away again. The
little drama repeated itself several times, the child standing always
motionless, with extended arm, and calling upon "Bossie" in enticing
tones to come.
Won over at last by her constancy,--or by his own greed,--"Bossie"
ventured near enough to snatch the proffered tidbit; then off he
scampered, in ungrateful haste, mouthing the delicate morsel.
A sigh of relief and satisfaction went up from the little figure, while
one small hand gravely rubbed and kneaded the arm which had so pluckily
maintained its uncomfortable position. Amberley approached with his
short-stemmed daisy.
"How do you do, little girl?" he inquired in his most polite manner.
"Would you like a daisy?"
"Yes," was the reply, spoken with a slight lisp.
"You are very good to feed Simon," Amberley proceeded, quite set at ease
by the gracious acceptance of his offering.
"Yes;" said the child once more, this time with a rising inflection.
"Simon is my calf, you know," Amberley went on. "Here, Simon, come
along."
Simon Jr., was already approaching, with an eye to business, and even as
his master spoke, he had got his nose into a certain wide, baggy pocket
in the old army trousers, and was poking it about in very familiar
fashion.
"Wait a minute, Simon," said Amberley, drawing himself gently away.
"Here, little girl, you take a bit of the salt in your hand and he'll
come for it."
"Yes," came the assenting voice; and Simon Jr., once convinced that the
pocket was closed to him, approached the child with easy confidence, and
not only devoured the proffered salt, but continued to lick the grimy
little palm when it was quite bare of that pleasing stimulant.
Then the child laughed, a queer little short, grown-up laugh, and
declared: "I like Simon."
"So do I," said Amberley, casting about for some new blandishment.
"Let's come up to the shanty and draw a picture of him."
"Yes," the little sphinx replied.
Amberley held out his hand, with a poignant dread lest she should refuse
to take it; a thrill of pleasure, almost as poignant, went up his arm
and so on to his heart, as the tiny hand rested in his own.
"What is your name?" he asked. They were rounding the big boulder and
beginning the short ascent to the cabin.
"Eliza Christie, and I'm six years old," she replied, tugging the while
at his hand, to help herself over a rough place. Then,--"What's yours?"
she asked.
"Simon Amberley."
"Same's the calf," she commented. "Was either of you named for the
other?"
"Yes; the calf was."
"I was named for my sainted grandmother. Bella Jones says Eliza's an
ugly name, but Ma says if 't was good enough for my sainted grandmother
it's good enough for me."
"_I_ think Eliza's a real pretty name," Amberley declared in a tone of
conviction, as he warded off the renewed advances of Simon. "If ever I
have another calf I shall call it Eliza."
"I like both the Simons," Eliza announced, with flattering openness.
To such a declaration as this, modesty forbade any reply, and the two
went on in silence to the cabin door, closely followed by the
white-nosed gourmand.
Outside the lean-to was a bench, roughly modelled on Amberley's
recollection of the settle outside his mother's kitchen door.
"You'd better set there, Eliza," he said; "It's prettier outside than
in;" and he lifted her to the seat, and left her there, with her fat
little legs sticking straight out in front of her.
She seemed to take very naturally to the situation, and indeed her
small, sturdy person looked as much a part of the homely scene as the
stubby little daisy she held in her hand. As she sat there in the
sunshine, placid and self-contained, a mysterious trampling and
crackling began among the trees close at hand, and one after another,
three solemn-eyed cows emerged into the clearing and fixed a wondering
gaze upon the little visitor. She, nothing daunted, calmly returned
their gaze, only holding the daisy a little more tightly, lest one of
the new-comers should take it into her head to dispute the prize; and
Simon found her, upon his return, confronting the horned monsters with
unruffled tranquillity.
Acknowledging the presence of the cows only by a friendly "Shoo, there!"
he established himself beside his waiting guest upon the settle, his
long legs crossed, by way of a table.
"Can you draw?" he asked.
"No; I don't know my letters," she replied, with unconscious
irrelevance.
"How would you like to have me learn you?"
"I'd like it."
"Well; I'll learn you _O_ first. That's the first letter I learned;" and
he made a phenomenally large and round _O_ in the upper left-hand corner
of the sheet. The paper, finding insufficient resting-place upon the
bony knee, took occasion to flap idly in the gentle southerly breeze;
upon which the child took hold of it with a quaint air of helpfulness
which was singularly womanly.
"Now I've learned _O_," she remarked, "I'd like to learn another."
"Well, there's an _I_; see, there?"
"The other one looks more like an eye," she observed critically.
"So it does, so it does!" Amberley admitted, much impressed by the
discovery. "But then it's an _O_ all the same, and this one is an _I_."
"Yes; well, I've learned that. Now, make another."
Thus unheralded and unawares come the great moments of life. When little
Eliza mounted that wooden settle, her mind was innocent of artificial
accomplishments; before she again stood on her round fat legs, she had
begun the ascent of that path which leads away up to the heights of
human knowledge. It is a long ascent and few accomplish it, but the
first essential steps had been taken: little Eliza had become a
_Scholar_!
Not only had she learned to recognize an _O_ and an _I_, an _S_, an _M_,
and an _N_, but she had laboriously made each one of them with her own
hand. And, furthermore, she had seen them combined in a wonderful group
which, if her teacher was to be credited, stood for _Simon_! It was
better than drawing, infinitely better! Anybody could make a round thing
with four crooked legs and a thin tail, and call it a calf--but only a
scholar could put five letters together and make them stand for a man
and a calf beside; a man with a kind voice and a big beard, and a calf
that would lick a person's hand! Oh, but life had grown a wonderful
thing to little Eliza, when she trotted down the hillside, clinging to
the fingers of her new friend, and holding the sturdy little daisy in
the other sturdy little hand.
And life had grown even more wonderful to Simon Amberley. He had not
passed such a pleasant day since he could remember, and he had certainly
never in his life had so much to look forward to; for had not Eliza
promised to come again the next day, and to bring Bella Jones with her?
He went into the cabin after his chores were done, and pulled out an old
cowhide trunk with the hair pretty well worn off it, and there, inside,
he found the battered family Bible which had been sent out, at his
request, when his mother died; and a copy of Shakespeare's _Plays_ in
one volume which he had got as a prize at school. There, too, were Miss
Edgeworth's _Rosamond_, and Nathaniel P. Willis' _Poems_, and one volume
of Dr. Kane's _Explorations at the North Pole_. "Quite a library," he
said to himself, with conscious pride. He had not read in a book for
twenty years; not since the time, back in Ohio, when he had bought
Scott's complete Works at auction, and had to sell them again to pay his
way to Missouri, whither he had gone in obedience to that mysterious
prompting of the setting sun.
By and by he strolled up the hill to get the sunset light. It was very
splendid on the glittering snow of the heights over yonder. After all,
he reflected, the mountains knew pretty well what they were about. If
they had not let the enemy through, those little girls would not have
got in, and he should not have felt as if he were beginning life all
over again.
Before a month had passed, Simon found himself established in the new
character of Lame Gulch Professor. So, at least, Enoch called him, and
it was not displeasing to the subject of Enoch's pleasantry to know that
others had adopted the suggestion and bestowed upon him that honorable
title. His little class numbered fifteen or twenty children of assorted
ages and dispositions, who came, lured by rumors of pleasant things, and
remained to imbibe learning with more or less avidity. There was an
absence of restraint about this novel school which appealed strongly to
the childish heart. The scholars were free to come and go as they
pleased, a privilege which, once established, they were not inclined to
take undue advantage of. They sat on the most amusing seats, improvised
from fallen tree trunks, or small wood-piles, or cocks of hay. They
called their teacher what they pleased: sometimes Simon, sometimes
Teacher, sometimes Mister! Bella Jones always said "Perfessor." They
studied from whatever book they liked best, each child bringing the
"Reader" or "Speller" he could most easily lay hands on. But they
learned more from Simon's books than from their own. That book of
William Shakespeare's stood easily first in their estimation, for when
the "perfessor" read from it, they somehow understood the story, in
spite of the hard words which, taken by themselves, seemed to mean
nothing at all.
If a ground squirrel scuttled across the clearing, no one was so quick
to observe him as the teacher himself, and before Fritz Meyer could
seize a stone to fire at the tame little chap, the young sportsman had
become so interested in something Simon was saying about its ways and
nature, that he forgot what he wanted of the stone.
"How do you spell squirrel?" asked a sharp-featured boy one day, as he
watched the twinkling eyes of one of the tiny creatures.
Simon drew his brows together over his mild eyes, with a mighty effort
at thinking.
"How do you spell squirrel?" he repeated. "How do you spell it? Well;
you begin with an _sk_, of course--and then there's a _w_.--I don't
know, Tim, but that's too hard a word to spell until you're growed up.
But I'll learn you to spell woodchuck! We used to go after woodchucks
when I was a youngster."
What boy could insist upon the spelling of a paltry little ground
squirrel, with beady eyes and nervous, inconsequent motions, when there
was talk of a woodchuck, lowering in his black hole, ready to fix his
sharp teeth in the nose of the first intruding terrier? If they learned
in after years that the spelling-books knew nought of a _k_ or a _w_ in
squirrel,--and some of them never did!--we may be very sure that it was
not Simon Amberley that fell in their estimation!
Sometimes Simon Jr. came to school, and there was a sudden, exhilarating
scramble in pursuit of his tail; now and then a hard-worked mother would
bring her baby and sit as guest of honor in Simon's solitary
"cane-bottom," where she would inadvertently learn items of interest
with regard to "yon Cassius," or "bluff Harry," or a certain young lady
who was described as being "little" but "fierce,"--a good deal like
Molly Tinker whose "man" kept the "Golden Glory Saloon." On one
occasion a rattlesnake lifted its head drowzily from behind a rock near
by, and was despatched offhand by Simon. It was this exploit which
filled the measure of Simon's fame.
"Any fool kin learn readin' an' writin'," said Patsy Linders, the eldest
of the band, who, by the way, had yet to prove himself fool enough to do
so. "But I'll be durned if I ever seen a _stun_ fired as neat as that!"
"Simon's smarter 'n anybody," little Eliza declared in reply. "He's
smarter 'n you nor me, 'n he's smarter 'n David an' Goliath, 'n he's my
Simon!"
No one was disposed to question Eliza's prior claim to Simon. She always
sat beside him on the original settle against the lean-to. She would not
abdicate the seat even when the ground grew hot and pleasant and she saw
half her mates lying on the short sparse grass with their heels in the
air, conning their books, or falling asleep over them, as the case might
be. She felt it her prerogative to sit right there, with her chubby legs
sticking out in front of her; there, where she could pull at Simon's
sleeve and interrupt his discourse as often as she pleased.