similarity between her attitude with the whip and her husband's entrance
with his gun six weeks before forced itself upon him and made her an
invincible presence.
“Then you have returned to your husband?” he said hesitatingly.
“Not much!” she returned, with a slight curl of her lip.
“But you read his advertisement?”
“I saw that column of fool nonsense he put in your paper--ef that's
what you mean,” she said with decision, “but I didn't come here to see
HIM--but YOU.”
The editor looked at her with a forced smile, but a vague misgiving. He
was alone at night in a deserted part of the settlement, with a plump,
self-possessed woman who had a contralto voice, a horsewhip, and--he
could not help feeling--an evident grievance.
“To see me?” he repeated, with a faint attempt at gallantry. “You are
paying me a great compliment, but really”--
“When I tell you I've come three thousand miles from Kansas straight
here without stopping, ye kin reckon it's so,” she replied firmly.
“Three thousand miles!” echoed the editor wonderingly.
“Yes. Three thousand miles from my own folks' home in Kansas, where six
years ago I married Mr. Dimmidge,--a British furriner as could scarcely
make himself understood in any Christian language! Well, he got round
me and dad, allowin' he was a reg'lar out-and-out profeshnal miner,--had
lived in mines ever since he was a boy; and so, not knowin' what kind o'
mines, and dad just bilin' over with the gold fever, we were married and
kem across the plains to Californy. He was a good enough man to look at,
but it warn't three months before I discovered that he allowed a wife
was no better nor a nigger slave, and he the master. That made me open
my eyes; but then, as he didn't drink, and didn't gamble, and didn't
swear, and was a good provider and laid by money, why I shifted along
with him as best I could. We drifted down the first year to Sonora, at
Red Dog, where there wasn't another woman. Well, I did the nigger slave
business,--never stirring out o' the settlement, never seein' a town
or a crowd o' decent people,--and he did the lord and master! We played
that game for two years, and I got tired. But when at last he allowed
he'd go up to Elktown Hill, where there was a passel o' his countrymen
at work, with never a sign o' any other folks, and leave me alone at Red
Dog until he fixed up a place for me at Elktown Hill,--I kicked! I gave
him fair warning! I did as other nigger slaves did,--I ran away!”
A recollection of the wretched woodcut which Mr. Dimmidge had selected
to personify his wife flashed upon the editor with a new meaning.
Yet perhaps she had not seen it, and had only read a copy of the
advertisement. What could she want? The “Calaveras Clarion,” although a
“Palladium” and a “Sentinel upon the Heights of Freedom” in reference to
wagon roads, was not a redresser of domestic wrongs,--except through its
advertising columns! Her next words intensified that suggestion.
“I've come here to put an advertisement in your paper.”
The editor heaved a sigh of relief, as once before. “Certainly,” he said
briskly. “But that's another department of the paper, and the printers
have gone home. Come to-morrow morning early.”
“To-morrow morning I shall be miles away,” she said decisively,
“and what I want done has got to be done NOW! I don't want to see no
printers; I don't want ANYBODY to know I've been here but you. That's
why I kem here at night, and rode all the way from Sawyer's Station,
and wouldn't take the stage-coach. And when we've settled about the
advertisement, I'm going to mount my horse, out thar in the bushes, and
scoot outer the settlement.”
“Very good,” said the editor resignedly. “Of course I can deliver your
instructions to the foreman. And now--let me see--I suppose you wish to
intimate in a personal notice to your husband that you've returned.”
“Nothin' o' the kind!” said Mrs. Dimmidge coolly. “I want to placard him
as he did me. I've got it all written out here. Sabe?”
She took from her pocket a folded paper, and spreading it out on the
editor's desk, with a certain pride of authorship read as follows:--
“Whereas my husband, Micah J. Dimmidge, having given out that I have
left his bed and board,--the same being a bunk in a log cabin and pork
and molasses three times a day,--and having advertised that he'd pay
no debts of MY contractin',--which, as thar ain't any, might be easier
collected than debts of his own contractin',--this is to certify that
unless he returns from Elktown Hill to his only home in Sonora in one
week from date, payin' the cost of this advertisement, I'll know the
reason why.--Eliza Jane Dimmidge.”
“Thar,” she added, drawing a long breath, “put that in a column of the
'Clarion,' same size as the last, and let it work, and that's all I want
of you.”
“A column?” repeated the editor. “Do you know the cost is very
expensive, and I COULD put it in a single paragraph?”
“I reckon I kin pay the same as Mr. Dimmidge did for HIS,” said the lady
complacently. “I didn't see your paper myself, but the paper as copied
it--one of them big New York dailies--said that it took up a whole
column.”
The editor breathed more freely; she had not seen the infamous woodcut
which her husband had selected. At the same moment he was struck with a
sense of retribution, justice, and compensation.
“Would you,” he asked hesitatingly,--“would you like it illustrated--by
a cut?”
“With which?”
“Wait a moment; I'll show you.”
He went into the dark composing-room, lit a candle, and rummaging in a
drawer sacred to weather-beaten, old-fashioned electrotyped advertising
symbols of various trades, finally selected one and brought it to Mrs.
Dimmidge. It represented a bare and exceedingly stalwart arm wielding a
large hammer.
“Your husband being a miner,--a quartz miner,--would that do?” he asked.
(It had been previously used to advertise a blacksmith, a gold-beater,
and a stone-mason.)
The lady examined it critically.
“It does look a little like Micah's arm,” she said meditatively.
“Well--you kin put it in.”
The editor was so well pleased with his success that he must needs make
another suggestion. “I suppose,” he said ingenuously, “that you don't
want to answer the 'Personal'?”
“'Personal'?” she repeated quickly, “what's that? I ain't seen no
'Personal.'” The editor saw his blunder. She, of course, had never seen
Mr. Dimmidge's artful “Personal;” THAT the big dailies naturally had not
noticed nor copied. But it was too late to withdraw now. He brought
out a file of the “Clarion,” and snipping out the paragraph with his
scissors, laid it before the lady.
She stared at it with wrinkled brows and a darkening face.
“And THIS was in the same paper?--put in by Mr. Dimmidge?” she asked
breathlessly.
The editor, somewhat alarmed, stammered “Yes.” But the next moment he
was reassured. The wrinkles disappeared, a dozen dimples broke out where
they had been, and the determined, matter-of-fact Mrs. Dimmidge burst
into a fit of rosy merriment. Again and again she laughed, shaking
the building, startling the sedate, melancholy woods beyond, until the
editor himself laughed in sheer vacant sympathy.
“Lordy!” she said at last, gasping, and wiping the laughter from her wet
eyes. “I never thought of THAT.”
“No,” explained the editor smilingly; “of course you didn't. Don't you
see, the papers that copied the big advertisement never saw that little
paragraph, or if they did, they never connected the two together.”
“Oh, it ain't that,” said Mrs. Dimmidge, trying to regain her composure
and holding her sides. “It's that blessed DEAR old dunderhead of a
Dimmidge I'm thinking of. That gets me. I see it all now. Only, sakes
alive! I never thought THAT of him. Oh, it's just too much!” and she
again relapsed behind her handkerchief.
“Then I suppose you don't want to reply to it,” said the editor.
Her laughter instantly ceased. “Don't I?” she said, wiping her face into
its previous complacent determination. “Well, young man, I reckon that's
just what I WANT to do! Now, wait a moment; let's see what he said,”
she went on, taking up and reperusing the “Personal” paragraph. “Well,
then,” she went on, after a moment's silent composition with moving
lips, “you just put these lines in.”
The editor took up his pencil.
“To Mr. J. D. Dimmidge.--Hope you're still on R. B.'s tracks. Keep
there!--E. J. D.”
The editor wrote down the line, and then, remembering Mr. Dimmidge's
voluntary explanation of HIS “Personal,” waited with some confidence for
a like frankness from Mrs. Dimmidge. But he was mistaken.
“You think that he--R. B.--or Mr. Dimmidge--will understand this?” he at
last asked tentatively. “Is it enough?”
“Quite enough,” said Mrs. Dimmidge emphatically. She took a roll of
greenbacks from her pocket, selected a hundred-dollar bill and then a
five, and laid them before the editor. “Young man,” she said, with a
certain demure gravity, “you've done me a heap o' good. I never spent
money with more satisfaction than this. I never thought much o' the
'power o' the Press,' as you call it, afore. But this has been a right
comfortable visit, and I'm glad I ketched you alone. But you understand
one thing: this yer visit, and WHO I am, is betwixt you and me only.”
“Of course I must say that the advertisement was AUTHORIZED,” returned
the editor. “I'm only the temporary editor. The proprietor is away.”
“So much the better,” said the lady complacently. “You just say you
found it on your desk with the money; but don't you give me away.”
“I can promise you that the secret of your personal visit is safe with
me,” said the young man, with a bow, as Mrs. Dimmidge rose. “Let me see
you to your horse,” he added. “It's quite dark in the woods.”
“I can see well enough alone, and it's just as well you shouldn't know
HOW I kem or HOW I went away. Enough for you to know that I'll be miles
away before that paper comes out. So stay where you are.”
She pressed his hand frankly and firmly, gathered up her riding-skirt,
slipped backwards to the door, and the next moment rustled away into the
darkness.
Early the next morning the editor handed Mrs. Dimmidge's advertisement,
and the woodcut he had selected, to his foreman. He was purposely brief
in his directions, so as to avoid inquiry, and retired to his sanctum.
In the space of a few moments the foreman entered with a slight
embarrassment of manner.
“You'll excuse my speaking to you, sir,” he said, with a singular
mixture of humility and cunning. “It's no business of mine, I know; but
I thought I ought to tell you that this yer kind o' thing won't pay any
more,--it's about played out!”
“I don't think I understand you,” said the editor loftily, but with
an inward misgiving. “You don't mean to say that a regular, actual
advertisement”--
“Of course, I know all that,” said the foreman, with a peculiar smile;
“and I'm ready to back you up in it, and so's the boy; but it won't
pay.”
“It HAS paid a hundred and five dollars,” said the editor, taking the
notes from his pocket; “so I'd advise you to simply attend to your duty
and set it up.”
A look of surprise, followed, however, by a kind of pitying smile,
passed over the foreman's face. “Of course, sir, THAT'S all right, and
you know your own business; but if you think that the new advertisement
will pay this time as the other one did, and whoop up another column
from an advertiser, I'm afraid you'll slip up. It's a little 'off color'
now,--not 'up to date,'--if it ain't a regular 'back number,' as you'll
see.”
“Meantime I'll dispense with your advice,” said the editor curtly, “and
I think you had better let our subscribers and advertisers do the same,
or the 'Clarion' might also be obliged to dispense with your SERVICES.”
“I ain't no blab,” said the foreman, in an aggrieved manner, “and I
don't intend to give the show away even if it don't PAY. But I thought
I'd tell you, because I know the folks round here better than you do.”
He was right. No sooner had the advertisement appeared than the editor
found that everybody believed it to be a sheer invention of his own to
“once more boom” the “Clarion.” If they had doubted MR. Dimmidge, they
utterly rejected MRS. Dimmidge as an advertiser! It was a stale joke
that nobody would follow up; and on the heels of this came a letter from
the editor-in-chief.
MY DEAR BOY,--You meant well, I know, but the second Dimmidge “ad” was
a mistake. Still, it was a big bluff of yours to show the money, and I
send you back your hundred dollars, hoping you won't “do it again.”
Of course you'll have to keep the advertisement in the paper for two
issues, just as if it were a real thing, and it's lucky that there's
just now no pressure in our columns. You might have told a better story
than that hogwash about your finding the “ad” and a hundred dollars
lying loose on your desk one morning. It was rather thin, and I don't
wonder the foreman kicked.
The young editor was in despair. At first he thought of writing to Mrs.
Dimmidge at the Elktown Post-Office, asking her to relieve him of his
vow of secrecy; but his pride forbade. There was a humorous concern, not
without a touch of pity, in the faces of his contributors as he passed;
a few affected to believe in the new advertisement, and asked him vague,
perfunctory questions about it. His position was trying, and he was not
sorry when the term of his engagement expired the next week, and he left
Calaveras to take his new position on the San Francisco paper.
He was standing in the saloon of the Sacramento boat when he felt a
sudden heavy pressure on his shoulder, and looking round sharply, beheld
not only the black-bearded face of Mr. Dimmidge, lit up by a smile, but
beside it the beaming, buxom face of Mrs. Dimmidge, overflowing with
good-humor. Still a little sore from his past experience, he was about
to address them abruptly, when he was utterly vanquished by the hearty
pressure of their hands and the unmistakable look of gratitude in their
eyes.
“I was just saying to 'Lizy Jane,” began Mr. Dimmidge breathlessly,
“if I could only meet that young man o' the 'Clarion' what brought us
together again”--
“You'd be willin' to pay four times the amount we both paid him,”
interpolated the laughing Mrs. Dimmidge.
“But I didn't bring you together,” burst out the dazed young man, “and
I'd like to know, in the name of Heaven, what brought you together now?”
“Don't you see, lad,” said the imperturbable Mr. Dimmidge, “'Lizy Jane
and myself had qua'lled, and we just unpacked our fool nonsense in your
paper and let the hull world know it! And we both felt kinder skeert and
shamed like, and it looked such small hogwash, and of so little account,
for all the talk it made, that we kinder felt lonely as two separated
fools that really ought to share their foolishness together.”
“And that ain't all,” said Mrs. Dimmidge, with a sly glance at her
spouse, “for I found out from that 'Personal' you showed me that this
particular old fool was actooally jealous!--JEALOUS!”
“And then?” said the editor impatiently.
“And then I KNEW he loved me all the time.”
THE SECRET OF SOBRIENTE'S WELL
Even to the eye of the most inexperienced traveler there was no doubt
that Buena Vista was a “played-out” mining camp. There, seamed and
scarred by hydraulic engines, was the old hillside, over whose denuded
surface the grass had begun to spring again in fitful patches; there
were the abandoned heaps of tailings already blackened by sun and rain,
and worn into mounds like ruins of masonry; there were the waterless
ditches, like giant graves, and the pools of slumgullion, now dried into
shining, glazed cement. There were two or three wooden “stores,” from
which the windows and doors had been taken and conveyed to the newer
settlement of Wynyard's Gulch. Four or five buildings that still were
inhabited--the blacksmith's shop, the post-office, a pioneer's
cabin, and the old hotel and stage-office--only accented the general
desolation. The latter building had a remoteness of prosperity far
beyond the others, having been a wayside Spanish-American posada, with
adobe walls of two feet in thickness, that shamed the later shells of
half-inch plank, which were slowly warping and cracking like dried pods
in the oven-like heat.
The proprietor of this building, Colonel Swinger, had been looked
upon by the community as a person quite as remote, old-fashioned, and
inconsistent with present progress as the house itself. He was an old
Virginian, who had emigrated from his decaying plantation on the James
River only to find the slaves, which he had brought with him, freed men
when they touched Californian soil; to be driven by Northern progress
and “smartness” out of the larger cities into the mountains, to fix
himself at last, with the hopeless fatuity of his race, upon an already
impoverished settlement; to sink his scant capital in hopeless shafts
and ledges, and finally to take over the decaying hostelry of Buena
Vista, with its desultory custom and few, lingering, impecunious guests.
Here, too, his old Virginian ideas of hospitality were against his
financial success; he could not dun nor turn from his door those
unfortunate prospectors whom the ebbing fortunes of Buena Vista had left
stranded by his side.
Colonel Swinger was sitting in a wicker-work rocking-chair on the
veranda of his hotel--sipping a mint julep which he held in his hand,
while he gazed into the dusty distance. Nothing could have convinced him
that he was not performing a serious part of his duty as hotel-keeper
in this attitude, even though there were no travelers expected, and the
road at this hour of the day was deserted. On a bench at his side Larry
Hawkins stretched his lazy length,--one foot dropped on the veranda,
and one arm occasionally groping under the bench for his own tumbler
of refreshment. Apart from this community of occupation, there was
apparently no interchange of sentiment between the pair. The silence
had continued for some moments, when the colonel put down his glass and
gazed earnestly into the distance.
“Seein' anything?” remarked the man on the bench, who had sleepily
regarded him.
“No,” said the colonel, “that is--it's only Dick Ruggles crossin' the
road.”
“Thought you looked a little startled, ez if you'd seen that ar
wanderin' stranger.”
“When I see that wandering stranger, sah,” said the colonel decisively,
“I won't be sittin' long in this yer chyar. I'll let him know in about
ten seconds that I don't harbor any vagrants prowlin' about like poor
whites or free niggers on my propahty, sah!”
“All the same, I kinder wish ye did see him, for you'd be settled in
YOUR mind and I'd be easier in MINE, ef you found out what he was doin'
round yer, or ye had to admit that it wasn't no LIVIN' man.”
“What do you mean?” said the colonel, testily facing around in his
chair.
His companion also altered his attitude by dropping his other foot
to the floor, sitting up, and leaning lazily forward with his hands
clasped.
“Look yer, colonel. When you took this place, I felt I didn't have no
call to tell ye all I know about it, nor to pizen yer mind by any darned
fool yarns I mout hev heard. Ye know it was one o' them old Spanish
haciendas?”
“I know,” said the colonel loftily, “that it was held by a grant from
Charles the Fifth of Spain, just as my propahty on the James River was
given to my people by King James of England, sah!”
“That ez as may be,” returned his companion, in lazy indifference;
“though I reckon that Charles the Fifth of Spain and King James of
England ain't got much to do with what I'm goin' to tell ye. Ye see, I
was here long afore YOUR time, or any of the boys that hev now cleared
out; and at that time the hacienda belonged to a man named Juan
Sobriente. He was that kind o' fool that he took no stock in mining.
When the boys were whoopin' up the place and finding the color
everywhere, and there was a hundred men working down there in the gulch,
he was either ridin' round lookin' up the wild horses he owned, or
sittin' with two or three lazy peons and Injins that was fed and looked
arter by the priests. Gosh! now I think of it, it was mighty like YOU
when you first kem here with your niggers. That's curious, too, ain't
it?”
He had stopped, gazing with an odd, superstitious wonderment at the
colonel, as if overcome by this not very remarkable coincidence.
The colonel, overlooking or totally oblivious to its somewhat
uncomplimentary significance, simply said, “Go on. What about him?”
“Well, ez I was sayin', he warn't in it nohow, but kept on his reg'lar
way when the boom was the biggest. Some of the boys allowed it was
mighty oncivil for him to stand off like that, and others--when he
refused a big pile for his hacienda and the garden, that ran right into
the gold-bearing ledge--war for lynching him and driving him outer the
settlement. But as he had a pretty darter or niece livin' with him,
and, except for his partickler cussedness towards mining, was kinder
peaceable and perlite, they thought better of it. Things went along like
this, until one day the boys noticed--particklerly the boys that had
slipped up on their luck--that old man Sobriente was gettin' rich,--had
stocked a ranch over on the Divide, and had given some gold candlesticks
to the mission church. That would have been only human nature and
business, ef he'd had any during them flush times; but he hadn't. This
kinder puzzled them. They tackled the peons,--his niggers,--but it was
all 'No sabe.' They tackled another man,--a kind of half-breed Kanaka,
who, except the priest, was the only man who came to see him, and was
supposed to be mighty sweet on the darter or niece,--but they didn't
even get the color outer HIM. Then the first thing we knowed was that
old Sobriente was found dead in the well!”
“In the well, sah!” said the colonel, starting up. “The well on my
propahty?”
“No,” said his companion. “The old well that was afterwards shut up.
Yours was dug by the last tenant, Jack Raintree, who allowed that he
didn't want to 'take any Sobriente in his reg'lar whiskey and water.'
Well, the half-breed Kanaka cleared out after the old man's death, and
so did that darter or niece; and the church, to whom old Sobriente had
left this house, let it to Raintree for next to nothin'.”
“I don't see what all that has got to do with that wandering tramp,”
said the colonel, who was by no means pleased with this history of his
property.
“I'll tell ye. A few days after Raintree took it over, he was lookin'
round the garden, which old Sobriente had always kept shut up agin
strangers, and he finds a lot of dried-up 'slumgullion' * scattered all
about the borders and beds, just as if the old man had been using it for
fertilizing. Well, Raintree ain't no fool; he allowed the old man wasn't
one, either; and he knew that slumgullion wasn't worth no more than mud
for any good it would do the garden. So he put this yer together with
Sobriente's good luck, and allowed to himself that the old coyote had
been secretly gold-washin' all the while he seemed to be standin' off
agin it! But where was the mine? Whar did he get the gold? That's what
got Raintree. He hunted all over the garden, prospected every part of
it,--ye kin see the holes yet,--but he never even got the color!”
* That is, a viscid cement-like refuse of gold-washing.
He paused, and then, as the colonel made an impatient gesture, he went
on.