I am the son of a poor but learned clergyman in the West of
England,--but I am forgetting, these details are not of special
interest. I will briefly state, then, that my father, who was, as I
have said, a learned man, had never learnt the specious arts by which
the great are flattered, and would never condescend to the despicable
pursuit of self-advertisement. Though his fondness for ancient
ceremonies and quaint customs, combined with a kindness of heart that
was unequalled and a primitive and fervent piety, endeared him to his
moor-land parishioners, such were not the steps by which clergy then
rose in the Church, and at sixty my father was still incumbent of the
little benefice he had accepted in his thirtieth year. The income of the
living was barely sufficient to support life in the decencies which are
expected of the Anglican parson; and when my father died a few years
ago, I, his only child, found myself thrown upon the world with a
slender capital of less than a hundred pounds, and all the problem of
existence before me. I felt that there was nothing for me to do in the
country, and as usually happens in such cases, London drew me like a
magnet. One day in August, in the early morning, while the dew still
glittered on the turf, and on the high green banks of the lane, a
neighbor drove me to the railway station, and I bade good-bye to the
land of the broad moors and unearthly battlements of the wild tors. It
was six o'clock as we neared London; the faint sickly fume of the
brickfields about Acton came in puffs through the open window, and a
mist was rising from the ground. Presently the brief view of successive
streets, prim and uniform, struck me with a sense of monotony; the hot
air seemed to grow hotter; and when we had rolled beneath the dismal and
squalid houses, whose dirty and neglected back yards border the line
near Paddington, I felt as if I should be stifled in this fainting
breath of London. I got a hansom and drove off, and every street
increased my gloom; gray houses with blinds drawn down, whole
thoroughfares almost desolate, and the foot-passengers who seemed to
stagger wearily along rather than walk, all made me feel a sinking at
heart. I put up for the night at a small hotel in a street leading from
the Strand, where my father had stayed on his few brief visits to town;
and when I went out after dinner, the real gayety and bustle of the
Strand and Fleet Street could cheer me but little, for in all this great
city there was no single human being whom I could claim even as an
acquaintance. I will not weary you with the history of the next year,
for the adventures of a man who sinks are too trite to be worth
recalling. My money did not last me long; I found that I must be neatly
dressed, or no one to whom I applied would so much as listen to me; and
I must live in a street of decent reputation if I wished to be treated
with common civility. I applied for various posts, for which, as I now
see, I was completely devoid of qualification; I tried to become a clerk
without having the smallest notion of business habits, and I found, to
my cost, that a general knowledge of literature and an execrable style
of penmanship are far from being looked upon with favor in commercial
circles. I had read one of the most charming of the works of a famous
novelist of the present day, and I frequented the Fleet Street taverns
in the hope of making literary friends, and so getting the
introductions which I understood were indispensable in the career of
letters. I was disappointed; I once or twice ventured to address
gentlemen who were sitting in adjoining boxes, and I was answered,
politely indeed, but in a manner that told me my advances were unusual.
Pound by pound, my small resources melted; I could no longer think of
appearances; I migrated to a shy quarter, and my meals became mere
observances. I went out at one and returned to my room at two, but
nothing but a milk-cake had occurred in the interval. In short, I became
acquainted with misfortune; and as I sat amidst slush and ice on a seat
in Hyde Park, munching a piece of bread, I realized the bitterness of
poverty, and the feelings of a gentleman reduced to something far below
the condition of a vagrant. In spite of all discouragement I did not
desist in my efforts to earn a living. I consulted advertisement
columns, I kept my eyes open for a chance, I looked in at the windows of
stationers' shops, but all in vain. One evening I was sitting in a Free
Library, and I saw an advertisement in one of the papers. It was
something like this: "Wanted, by a gentleman a person of literary taste
and abilities as secretary and amanuensis. Must not object to travel."
Of course I knew that such an advertisement would have answers by the
hundred, and I thought my own chances of securing the post extremely
small; however, I applied at the address given, and wrote to Mr. Smith,
who was staying at a large hotel at the West End. I must confess that my
heart gave a jump when I received a note a couple of days later, asking
me to call at the Cosmopole at my earliest convenience. I do not know,
sir, what your experiences of life may have been, and so I cannot tell
whether you have known such moments. A slight sickness, my heart beating
rather more rapidly than usual, a choking in the throat, and a
difficulty of utterance; such were my sensations as I walked to the
Cosmopole. I had to mention the name twice before the hall porter could
understand me, and as I went upstairs my hands were wet. I was a good
deal struck by Mr. Smith's appearance; he looked younger than I did, and
there was something mild and hesitating about his expression. He was
reading when I came in, and he looked up when I gave my name. "My dear
sir," he said, "I am really delighted to see you. I have read very
carefully the letter you were good enough to send me. Am I to understand
that this document is in your own handwriting?" He showed me the letter
I had written, and I told him I was not so fortunate as to be able to
keep a secretary myself. "Then, sir," he went on, "the post I advertised
is at your service. You have no objection to travel, I presume?" As you
may imagine, I closed pretty eagerly with the offer he made, and thus I
entered the service of Mr. Smith. For the first few weeks I had no
special duties; I had received a quarter's salary, and a handsome
allowance was made me in lieu of board and lodging. One morning,
however, when I called at the hotel according to instructions, my master
informed me that I must hold myself in readiness for a sea-voyage, and,
to spare unnecessary detail, in the course of a fortnight we had landed
at New York. Mr. Smith told me that he was engaged on a work of a
special nature, in the compilation of which some peculiar researches had
to be made; in short, I was given to understand that we were to travel
to the far West.
After about a week had been spent in New York we took our seats in the
cars, and began a journey tedious beyond all conception. Day after day,
and night after night, the great train rolled on, threading its way
through cities the very names of which were strange to me, passing at
slow speed over perilous viaducts, skirting mountain ranges and pine
forests, and plunging into dense tracts of wood, where mile after mile
and hour after hour the same monotonous growth of brushwood met the eye,
and all along the continual clatter and rattle of the wheels upon the
ill-laid lines made it difficult to hear the voices of our
fellow-passengers. We were a heterogeneous and ever-changing company;
often I woke up in the dead of night with the sudden grinding jar of the
brakes, and looking out found that we had stopped in the shabby street
of some frame-built town, lighted chiefly by the flaring windows of the
saloon. A few rough-looking fellows would often come out to stare at the
cars, and sometimes passengers got down, and sometimes there was a party
of two or three waiting on the wooden sidewalk to get on board. Many of
the passengers were English; humble households torn up from the moorings
of a thousand years, and bound for some problematical paradise in the
alkali desert or the Rockies. I heard the men talking to one another of
the great profits to be made on the virgin soil of America, and two or
three, who were mechanics, expatiated on the wonderful wages given to
skilled labor on the railways and in the factories of the States. This
talk usually fell dead after a few minutes, and I could see a sickness
and dismay in the faces of these men as they looked at the ugly brush or
at the desolate expanse of the prairie, dotted here and there with
frame-houses, devoid of garden, or flowers or trees, standing all alone
in what might have been a great gray sea frozen into stillness. Day
after day the waving sky line, and the desolation of a land without form
or color or variety, appalled the hearts of such of us as were
Englishmen, and once in the night as I lay awake I heard a woman weeping
and sobbing, and asking what she had done to come to such a place. Her
husband tried to comfort her in the broad speech of Gloucestershire,
telling her the ground was so rich that one had only to plough it up and
it would grow sunflowers of itself, but she cried for her mother and
their old cottage and the beehives, like a little child. The sadness of
it all overwhelmed me, and I had no heart to think of other matters; the
question of what Mr. Smith could have to do in such a country, and of
what manner of literary research could be carried on in the wilderness,
hardly troubled me. Now and again my situation struck me as peculiar; I
had been engaged as a literary assistant at a handsome salary, and yet
my master was still almost a stranger to me; sometimes he would come to
where I was sitting in the cars and make a few banal remarks about the
country, but for the most part of the journey he sat by himself, not
speaking to any one, and so far as I could judge, deep in his thoughts.
It was I think on the fifth day from New York when I received the
intimation that we should shortly leave the cars; I had been watching
some distant mountains which rose wild and savage before us, and I was
wondering if there were human beings so unhappy as to speak of home in
connection with those piles of lumbered rock, when Mr. Smith touched me
lightly on the shoulder. "You will be glad to be done with the cars, I
have no doubt, Mr. Wilkins," he said. "You were looking at the
mountains, I think? Well, I hope we shall be there to-night. The train
stops at Reading, and I dare say we shall manage to find our way."
A few hours later the brakeman brought the tram to a standstill at the
Reading depot and we got out. I noticed that the town, though of course
built almost entirely of frame-houses, was larger and busier than any we
had passed for the last two days. The depot was crowded, and as the bell
and whistle sounded, I saw that a number of persons were preparing to
leave the cars, while an even greater number were waiting to get on
board. Besides the passengers, there was a pretty dense crowd of people,
some of whom had come to meet or to see off their friends and relatives,
while others were mere loafers. Several of our English fellow passengers
got down at Reading, but the confusion was so great that they were lost
to my sight almost immediately. Mr. Smith beckoned to me to follow him,
and we were soon in the thick of the mass; and the continual ringing of
bells, the hubbub of voices, the shrieking of whistles, and the hiss of
escaping steam, confused my senses, and I wondered dimly as I struggled
after my employer, where we were going, and how we should be able to
find our way through an unknown country. Mr. Smith had put on a
wide-brimmed hat, which he had sloped over his eyes, and as all the men
wore hats of the same pattern, it was with some difficulty that I
distinguished him in the crowd. We got free at last, and he struck down
a side street, and made one or two sharp turns to right and left. It was
getting dusk, and we seemed to be passing through a shy portion of the
town, there were few people about in the ill-lighted streets, and these
few were men of the most unprepossessing pattern. Suddenly we stopped
before a corner house, a man was standing at the door, apparently on the
look-out for some one, and I noticed that he and Smith gave sharp
glances one to the other.
"From New York City, I expect, mister?"
"From New York!"
"All right; they're ready, and you can have 'em when you choose. I know
my orders, you see, and I mean to run this business through."
"Very well, Mr. Evans, that is what we want. Our money is good, you
know. Bring them round."
I had stood silent, listening to this dialogue, and wondering what it
meant. Smith began to walk impatiently up and down the street, and the
man Evans was still standing at his door. He had given a sharp whistle,
and I saw him looking me over in a quiet leisurely way, as if to make
sure of my face for another time. I was thinking what all this could
mean, when an ugly, slouching lad came up a side passage, leading two
raw-boned horses.
"Get up, Mr. Wilkins, and be quick about it," said Smith. "We ought to
be on our way."
We rode off together into the gathering darkness, and before long I
looked back and saw the far plain behind us, with the lights of the town
glimmering faintly; and in front rose the mountains. Smith guided his
horse on the rough track as surely as if he had been riding along
Piccadilly, and I followed him as well as I could. I was weary and
exhausted, and scarcely took note of anything; I felt that the track was
a gradual ascent, and here and there I saw great boulders by the road.
The ride made but little impression on me; I have a faint recollection
of passing through a dense black pine forest, where our horses had to
pick their way among the rocks, and I remember the peculiar effect of
the rarefied air as we kept still mounting higher and higher. I think I
must have been half asleep for the latter half of the ride, and it was
with a shock that I heard Smith saying--
"Here we are, Wilkins. This is Blue-Rock Park. You will enjoy the view
to-morrow. To-night we will have something to eat, and then go to bed."
A man came out of a rough-looking house and took the horses, and we
found some fried steak and coarse whiskey awaiting us inside. I had come
to a strange place. There were three rooms,--the room in which we had
supper, Smith's room and my own. The deaf old man who did the work slept
in a sort of shed, and when I woke up the next morning and walked out I
found that the house stood in a sort of hollow amongst the mountains;
the clumps of pines and some enormous bluish-gray rocks that stood here
and there between the trees had given the place the name of Blue-Rock
Park. On every side the snow-covered mountains surrounded us, the breath
of the air was as wine, and when I climbed the slope and looked down, I
could see that, so far as any human fellowship was concerned I might as
well have been wrecked on some small island in mid-Pacific. The only
trace of man I could see was the rough log-house where I had slept, and
in my ignorance I did not know that there were similar houses within
comparatively easy distance, as distance is reckoned in the Rockies. But
at the moment, the utter, dreadful loneliness rushed upon me, and the
thought of the great plain and the great sea that parted me from the
world I knew, caught me by the throat, and I wondered if I should die
there in that mountain hollow. It was a terrible instant, and I have not
yet forgotten it. Of course I managed to conquer my horror; I said I
should be all the stronger for the experience, and I made up my mind to
make the best of everything. It was a rough life enough, and rough
enough board and lodging. I was left entirely to myself. Smith I
scarcely ever saw, nor did I know when he was in the house. I have often
thought he was far away, and have been surprised to see him walking out
of his room, locking the door behind him and putting the key in his
pocket; and on several occasions when I fancied he was busy in his room,
I have seen him come in with his boots covered with dust and dirt. So
far as work went I enjoyed a complete sinecure; I had nothing to do but
to walk about the valley, to eat, and to sleep. With one thing and
another I grew accustomed, to the life, and managed to make myself
pretty comfortable, and by degrees I began to venture farther away from
the house, and to explore the country. One day I had contrived to get
into a neighboring valley, and suddenly I came upon a group of men
sawing timber. I went up to them, hoping that perhaps some of them might
be Englishmen; at all events they were human beings, and I should hear
articulate speech, for the old man I have mentioned, besides being half
blind and stone deaf, was wholly dumb so far as I was concerned. I was
prepared to be welcomed in a rough and ready fashion, without much of
the forms of politeness, but the grim glances and the short gruff
answers I received astonished me. I saw the men glancing oddly at each
other, and one of them who had stopped work began fingering a gun, and I
was obliged to return on my path uttering curses on the fate which had
brought me into a land where men were more brutish than the very brutes.
The solitude of the life began to oppress me as with a nightmare, and a
few days later I determined to walk to a kind of station some miles
distant, where a rough inn was kept for the accommodation of hunters and
tourists. English gentlemen occasionally stopped there for the night,
and I thought I might perhaps fall in with some one of better manners
than the inhabitants of the country. I found as I had expected a group
of men lounging about the door of the log-house that served as a hotel,
and as I came nearer I could see that heads were put together and looks
interchanged, and when I walked up the six or seven trappers stared at
me in stony ferocity, and with something of the disgust that one eyes a
loathsome and venomous snake. I felt that I could bear it no longer, and
I called out:--
"Is there such a thing as an Englishman here, or any one with a little
civilization?"
One of the men put his hand to his belt, but his neighbor checked him
and answered me.
"You'll find we've got some of the resources of civilization before very
long, mister, and I expect you'll not fancy them extremely. But anyway,
there's an Englishman tarrying here, and I've no doubt he'll be glad to
see you. There you are, that's Mr. D'Aubernoun."
A young man, dressed like an English country squire, came and stood at
the door, and looked at me. One of the men pointed to me and said:--
"That's the individual we were talking about last night. Thought you
might like to have a look at him, squire, and here he is."
The young fellow's good-natured English face clouded over, and he
glanced sternly at me, and turned away with a gesture of contempt and
aversion.
"Sir," I cried, "I do not know what I have done to be treated in this
manner. You are my fellow-countryman, and I expected some courtesy."
He gave me a black look and made as if he would go in, but he changed
his mind, and faced me.
"You are rather imprudent, I think, to behave in this manner. You must
be counting on a forbearance which cannot last very long; which may last
a very short time, indeed. And let me tell you this, sir, you may call
yourself an Englishman and drag the name of England through the dirt,
but you need not count on any English influence to help you. If I were
you, I would not stay here much longer."
He went into the inn, and the men quietly watched my face, as I stood
there, wondering whether I was going mad. The woman of the house came
out and stared at me as if I were a wild beast or a savage, and I turned
to her, and spoke quietly.
"I am very hungry and thirsty, I have walked a long way. I have plenty
of money. Will you give me something to eat and drink?"
"No, I won't," she said. "You had better quit this."
I crawled home like a wounded beast, and lay down on my bed. It was all
a hopeless puzzle to me. I knew nothing but rage and shame and terror,
and I suffered little more when I passed by a house in an adjacent
valley, and some children who were playing outside ran from me
shrieking. I was forced to walk to find some occupation. I should have
died if I had sat down quietly in Blue Rock Park and looked all day at
the mountains; but wherever I saw a human being I saw the same glance of
hatred and aversion, and once as I was crossing a thick brake I heard a
shot, and the venomous hiss of a bullet close to my ear.
One day I heard a conversation which astounded me; I was sitting behind
a rock resting, and two men came along the track and halted. One of them
had got his feet entangled in some wild vines, and swore fiercely, but
the other laughed, and said they were useful things sometimes.
"What the hell do you mean?"
"Oh, nothing much. But they're uncommon tough, these here vines, and
sometimes rope is skerse and dear."
The man who had sworn chuckled at this, and I heard them sit down and
light their pipes.
"Have you seen him lately?" asked the humorist.
"I sighted him the other day, but the darned bullet went high. He's got
his master's luck, I expect, sir, but it can't last much longer. You
heard about him going to Jinks's and trying his brass, but the young
Britisher downed him pretty considerable, I can tell you."
"What the devil is the meaning of it?"
"I don't know, but I believe it'll have to be finished, and done in the
old style, too. You know how they fix the niggers?"
"Yes, sir, I've seen a little of that. A couple of gallons of
kerosene'll cost a dollar at Brown's store, but I should say it's cheap
anyway."
They moved off after this, and I lay still behind the rock, the sweat
pouring down my face. I was so sick that I could barely stand, and I
walked home as slowly as an old man, leaning on my stick. I knew that
the two men had been talking about me, and I knew that some terrible
death was in store for me. That night I could not sleep. I tossed on the
rough bed and tortured myself to find out the meaning of it all. At last
in the very dead of night I rose from the bed, and put on my clothes,
and went out. I did not care where I went, but I felt that I must walk
till I had tired myself out. It was a clear moonlight night, and in a
couple of hours I found I was approaching a place of dismal reputation
in the mountains, a deep cleft in the rocks, known as Black Gulf Cañon.
Many years before, an unfortunate party of Englishmen and Englishwomen
had camped here and had been surrounded by Indians. They were captured,
outraged, and put to death with almost inconceivable tortures, and the
roughest of the trappers or woodsmen gave the cañon a wide berth even in
the day-time. As I crushed through the dense brushwood which grew above
the cañon, I heard voices, and wondering who could be in such a place at
such a time, I went on, walking more carefully and making as little
noise as possible. There was a great tree growing on the very edge of
the rocks, and I lay down and looked out from behind the trunk. Black
Gulf Cañon was below me, the moonlight shining bright into its very
depths from midheaven, and casting shadows as black as death from the
pointed rock, and all the sheer rock on the other side, overhanging the
cañon, was in darkness. At intervals a light veil obscured the
moonlight, as a filmy cloud fleeted across the moon; and a bitter wind
blew shrill across the gulf. I looked down as I have said, and saw
twenty men standing in a semicircle round a rock; I counted them one by
one, and knew most of them. They were the very vilest of the vile, more
vile than any den in London could show, and there was murder and worse
than murder on the heads of not a few. Facing them and me stood Mr.
Smith with the rock before him, and on the rock was a great pair of
scales, such as are used in the stores. I heard his voice ringing down
the cañon as I lay beside the tree, and my heart turned cold as I heard
it.
"Life for gold," he cried, "a life for gold. The blood and the life of
an enemy for every pound of gold."
A man stepped out and raised one hand, and with the other flung a bright
lump of something into the pan of the scales, which clanged down, and
Smith muttered something in his ear. Then he cried again:--
"Blood for gold; for a pound of gold, the life of an enemy. For every
pound of gold upon the scales, a life."
One by one the men came forward, each lifting up his right hand; and the
gold was weighed in the scales, and each time Smith leaned forward and
spoke to each man in his ear. Then he cried again:--
"Desire and lust, for gold on the scales. For every pound of gold,
enjoyment of desire."
I saw the same thing happen as before; the uplifted hand, and the metal
weighed, and the mouth whispering, and black passion on every face.
Then, one by one, I saw the men again step up to Smith. A muttered
conversation seemed to take place; I could see that Smith was explaining
and directing, and I noticed that he gesticulated a little as one who
points out the way, and once or twice he moved his hands quickly as if
he would show that the path was clear and could not be missed. I kept my
eyes so intently on his figure that I noted little else, and at last it
was with a start that I realized that the cañon was empty. A moment
before I thought I had seen the group of villainous faces, and the two
standing, a little apart by the rock; I had looked down a moment, and
when I glanced again into the cañon there was no one there. In dumb
terror I made my way home, and I fell asleep in an instant from
exhaustion. No doubt I should have slept on for many hours, but when I
woke up, the sun was only rising, and the light shone in on my bed. I
had started up from sleep with the sensation of having received a
violent shock, and as I looked in confusion about me I saw to my
amazement that there were three men in the room. One of them had his
hand on my shoulder and spoke to me.
"Come, mister, wake up. Your time's up now, I reckon, and the boys are
waiting for you outside, and they're in a big hurry. Come on; you can
put on your clothes, it's kind of chilly this morning."
I saw the other two men smiling sourly at each other, but I understood
nothing. I simply pulled on my clothes, and said I was ready.
"All right, come on then. You go first, Nichols, and Jim and I will give
the gentleman an arm."
They took me out into the sunlight, and then I understood the meaning of
a dull murmur that had vaguely perplexed me while I was dressing. There
were about two hundred men waiting outside, and some women too, and when
they saw me there was a low muttering growl. I did not know what I had
done, but that noise made my heart beat and the sweat come out on my
face. I saw confusedly, as through a veil, the tumult and tossing of the
crowd, discordant voices were speaking, and amongst all those faces
there was not one glance of mercy, but a fury of lust that I did not
understand. I found myself presently walking in a sort of procession up
the slope of the valley, and on every side of me there were men with
revolvers in their hands. Now and then a voice struck me, and I heard
words and sentences of which I could form no connected story. But I
understood that there was one sentence of execration; I heard scraps of
stories that seemed strange and improbable. Some one was talking of men,
lured by cunning devices from their homes and murdered with hideous
tortures, found writhing like wounded snakes in dark and lonely places,
only crying for some one to stab them to the heart, and so end their
torments; and I heard another voice speaking of innocent girls who had
vanished for a day or two, and then had come back and died, blushing red
with shame even in the agonies of death. I wondered what it all meant,
and what was to happen, but I was so weary that I walked on in a dream,
scarcely longing for anything but sleep. At last we stopped. We had
reached the summit of the hill, overlooking Blue Rock Valley, and I saw
that I was standing beneath a clump of trees where I had often sat. I
was in the midst of a ring of armed men, and I saw that two or three men
were very busy with piles of wood, while others were fingering a rope.
Then there was a stir in the crowd, and a man was pushed forward. His
hands and feet were tightly bound with cord, and though his face was
unutterably villainous I pitied him for the agony that worked his
features and twisted his lips. I knew him; he was amongst those that had
gathered round Smith in Black Gulf Cañon. In an instant he was unbound,
and stripped naked; and borne beneath one of the trees, and his neck
encircled by a noose that went around the trunk. A hoarse voice gave
some kind of order; there was a rush of feet, and the rope tightened;
and there before me I saw the blackened face and the writhing limbs and
the shameful agony of death. One after another, half a dozen men, all of
whom I had seen in the cañon the night before, were strangled before me,
and their bodies were flung forth on the ground. Then there was a pause,
and the man who had roused me a short while before, came up to me and
said:--
"Now, mister, it's your turn. We give you five minutes to cast up your
accounts, and when that's clocked, by the living God we will burn you
alive at that tree."