the bud on them horses again, and I'll boot the spine of your back
up through the top of your head till it stands out like a
flag-staff. Just one more touch, and you get it!' says I.
"He didn't open his mouth again till we come to the river. Then he
pulled up. 'This is about as far as I care to carry you two gents
for nothin',' he says. 'Of course you're two to one, and I can't
do nothing if you see fit to bull the thing through. But I'll say
this: if either one or both of you roosters has got the least smell
of a gentleman about him, he won't have to be told his company
ain't wanted twice.'
"Now, mind you, Ag and me didn't have the first cussed thing--not
grub, nor blankets, nor gun, nor nothing; and this the feller well
knew.
"'Red,' says Aggy, 'what do you say to pulling this thing apart and
seeing what makes it act so?'
"'No,' says I, 'don't touch it--it might be catching. Now, you
whelp!' says I to the driver, 'you tell us if there's a place where
we can get anything to eat around here?' We'd expected to go
hungry until we hit the camp some forty mile further on, where we
knew there'd be plenty for anybody that wanted it.
"'Yes,' says he; 'there's a man running a shack two mile up the
river.'
"'All right,' says I. 'Drive on. You've played us as dirty a
trick as one man can play another. If we ever get a cinch on you,
you can expect we'll pull her till the latigoes snap.'
"He kept shut till he got across the river, where he felt safe.
"'It's all right about that cinch!' he hollers back, grinning.
'Only wait till you get it, yer suckers! Sponges! Beats!
Dead-heads! Yah!'
"Well, a man can't catch a team of horses, and that's all there is
about it, but I want to tell you he was on the anxious seat for a
quarter of a mile. We tried hard.
"When we got back to where we started and could breathe again, we
held a council of war.
"'Now Aggy,' says I, 'we're dumped--what shall we do?'
He sat there awhile looking around him, snapping pebbles with his
thumb.
"'Tell you what it is, Red,' he says at last, 'we might as well go
mining right here. This is likely gravel, and there's a river. If
that bar in front of you had been further in the mountains, it
would have been punched full of holes. It's only because it's on
the road that nobody's taken the trouble to see what was in it.
This road was made by cattle ranchers, that didn't know nothing
about mining, and every miner that's gone over the trail had his
mouth set to get further along as quick as possible--just like us.
Do you see that little hollow running down to the river? Well you
try your luck there. I give you that place as it's the most
probable, and you as a tenderfoot in the business will have all the
luck. I'll make a stab where I am.'
"Well, sir, it sounds queer to tell it, and it seems queerer still
to think of the doing of it, but I hadn't dug two feet before I
come to bed rock, and there was some heavy black chunks.
"'Aggy,' says I, 'what's these things?' throwing one over to him.
He caught it and Stared at it.
"'Where did you get that?' says he, in almost a whisper.
"'Why, out of the hole, of course!' says I, laughing. 'Come take a
look!'
"Aggy wasn't the kind of man to go off the handle over trifles, but
when he looked into that hole he turned perfectly green. His knees
give out from under him and he sat on the ground like a man in a
trance, wiping the sweat off his face with a motion like a machine.
"'What the devil ails you?' says I astonished. I thought maybe I'd
done something I hadn't ought to do, through ignorance of the rules
and regulations of mining.
"'Red,' says he dead solemn, 'I've mined for twenty year, and from
Old Mexico to Alaska, but I never saw anything that was ace-high to
that before. Gold laying loose in chunks on top of the bed-rock is
too much for me--I wish Hy could see this.'
"'Gold!' says I. 'What you talking about? What have those black
hunks to do with gold?'
"The only answer he made was to lay the one I had thrown to him on
top of a rock and hit her a crack with a pick. Then he handed it
to me. Sure enough! There under the black was the yeller. Of
course, it I'd known more about the business I could have told it
by the weight, but I'd never seen a piece of gold fresh off the
farm before in my life. I hadn't the slightest idea what it looked
like, and I learned afterward it all looks different. Some of it
shines up yaller in the start; some of it's red, and some is like
ours, coated black with iron-crust.
"So I looked at Ag, and Ag looked at me, neither one of us
believing anything at all for awhile. I simply couldn't get hold
of the thing--I ain't yet, for that matter. I expect to wake up
and find it a pipe dream, and in some ways I wouldn't mind if it
was. I never was so completely two men as I was on that occasion.
One of 'em was hopping around and hollering with Ag, yelling
'hooray!' and the other didn't take much interest in the
proceedings at all. And it wasn't until I thought, 'Now I can pay
that cussed cayote of a stage driver what I owe him!' that I got
any good out of it. That brought it home to me. When I spoke to
Ag about paying the driver, he says, 'That's so,' then he takes a
quick look around. 'We can pay him in full, too, old horse!' he
hollers, and there was a most joyful smile on his face.
"'Red,' say he, 'do you know this is the only ford on the river
for--I don't know how many miles--perhaps the whole length of her?'
"'Well?' says I.
"'Our little placer claim,' says Aggy slowly, rubbing his hands
together, 'covers that ford; and by a judicious taking up of claims
for various uncles and brothers and friends of ours along the creek
on the lowlands, we can fix it so they can't even bridge it.'
"'Do you mean they can't cross our claim if we say they can't?'
"'Sure thing!' says Aggy. 'There's you and me and the law to say
"no" to that--I wish I had a gun.'
"'You don't need any gun for that skunk of a driver.'
"'Of course not, but there'll be passengers, and there's no telling
how excited them passengers will be when they find they've got to
go over the hills ford-hunting.'
"'Are you going to send 'em all around, Ag?'
"'The whole bunch. Anybody coming back from the diggings has gold
in his clothes, so it won't hurt 'em none, and I propose to give
that stage line an advertising that won't do it a bit of good.
Come along, Red; let's see that lad that has the shack up the
river. We need something to eat, and maybe he's got a gun. If
he's a decent feller, we'll let him in on a claim. Never mind
about the hole!--it won't run away, and there's nobody to touch
anything--come on.'
"So we went up the river. The man's name was White, and he was a
white man by nature, too. He fed us well, and was just as hot as
us when we told him about the stage driver's trick. Then we told
him about the find and let him in.
"'Now,' says Aggy, 'have you got a gun?'
"'I have _that_,' says the man. 'My dad used to be a duck-hunter
on Chesapeake bay. When you say "gun," _I'll_ show you a gun.' He
dove in under his bunk and fetched out what I should say was a
number one bore shot gun, with barrels six foot long.
"'Gentlemen,' says he, holding the gun up and patting it lovingly,
'if you ram a quarter-pound of powder in each one of them barrels,
and a handful of buck-shot on top of that, you've got an argument
that couldn't be upset by the Supreme Court. I'll guarantee that
when you point her anywheres within ten feet of a man not over a
hundred yards away, and let her do her duty, all the talent that
that man's fambly could employ couldn't gather enough of him to
recognise him by, and you won't be in bed more'n long enough to
heal a busted shoulder.'
"'I hope it ain't going to be my painful line of performance to
pull the trigger,' says Aggy. 'I think the sight of her would have
weight with most people. When's the stage due back?'
"'Day after to-morrow, about noon.'
"'That gives us lots of time to stake, and to salt claims that
can't show cause their own selves,' says Aggy. 'I think we're all
right.'
"The next day we worked like the Old Harry. We had everything
fixed up right by nightfall, and there was nothing to do but dig
and wait.
"Curious folks we all are, ain't we? I should have said my own
self that if I'd found gold by the bucketful, I'd be more
interested in that, than I would be in getting even with a mut that
had done me dirt, but it wasn't so. Perhaps it was because I
hadn't paid much attention to money all my life, and I had paid the
strictest attention to the way other people used me. Living where
there's so few folks accounts for that, I suppose.
"Getting even on our esteemed friend the stage driver was right in
your Uncle Reddy's line, and Aggy and our new pard White seemed to
take kindly to it, also.
"If ever you saw three faces filled with innocent glee, it was when
we heard the wheels of that stage coming--why, the night before I
was woke up by somebody laughing. There was Aggy sound asleep,
sitting up hugging himself in the moonlight.
"'Oh, my! Oh, MY!' says he. 'It's the only ford for four thousand
miles!'
"We planted a sign in the middle of the road with this wording on
it in big letters, made with the black end of a stick.
NOTICE!!
THIS AND ADJOINING CLAIMS ARE THE
PROPERTY OF AGAMEMNON G. JONES,
RED SAUNDERS, JOHN HENRY WHITE,
ET AL.
TRESPASSING DONE AT YOUR OWN
RISK. OWNERS WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE
FOR THE REMAINS.
"There was a stretch of about a mile on the level before us. When
the stage come in plain sight Aggy proceeds to load up 'Old Moral
Suasion,' as he called her, so that the folks could see there was
no attempt at deception. They come pretty fairly slow after that.
At fifty yards, Ag hollers 'Halt!' The team sat right down on
their tails.
"'Now, Mr. Snick'umfritz,' says Aggy, 'you that drives, I mean,
come here and read this little sign.'
"'Suppose I don't?' says the feller, trying to be smart before the
passengers.
"'It's a horrible supposition,' says Aggy, and the innocent will
have to suffer with the guilty.' Then he cocks the gun.
"'God sakes! Don't shoot!' yells one of the passengers. 'Man, you
ought to have more sense than to try and pick him out of a crowd
with a shot-gun! Get down there, you fool, and make it quick!'
"So the driver walked our way, and read. He never said a word. I
reckon he realized it was the only ford for four thousand miles,
more or less, just as Aggy had remarked. There he stood, with his
mouth and eyes wide open.
"'I'd like to have you other gentlemen come up and see our first
clean up, so you won't think we're running in a windy,' says Aggy.
They wanted to see bad, as you can imagine, and when they did see
about fifteen pound of gold in the bottom of my old hat, they
talked like people that hadn't had a Christian bringing up.
"'Oh Lord!' groans one man. 'Brigham Young and all the prophets of
the Mormon religion! This is my tenth trip over this line, and me
and Pete Hendricks played a game of seven-up right on the spot
where that gent hit her, not over a month ago, when the stage broke
down! Somebody just make a guess at the way I feel and give me one
small drink.' And he put his hand to his head. 'Say, boys!' he
goes on, 'you don't want the whole blamed creek, do you? Let _us_
in!'
"'How's that, fellers?' says Ag to me and White. We said we was
agreeable.
"'All right, in you come!' says Aggy. 'There ain't no hog about
our firm--but as for you,' says he, walking on his tip-toes up to
the driver, 'as for you, you cock-eyed whelp, around you go!
Around you go!' he hollers, jamming the end of Moral Suasion into
the driver's trap. 'Oh, and WON'T you go 'round, though!' says he.
'Listen to me, now: if any one of your ancestors for twenty-four
generations back had ever done anything as decent as robbing a
hen-coop, it would have conferred a kind of degree of nobility upon
him. It wouldn't be possible to find an ornerier cuss than you, if
a man raked all hell with a fine-toothed comb. Now, you
stare-coated, mangey, bandy-legged, misbegotten, out-law coyote,
fly!--fly!' whoops Aggy, jumping four foot in the air, 'before I
squirt enough lead into your system to make it a paying job to melt
you down!'
"The stage driver acted according to orders. Three wide steps and
he was in the waggon, and with one screech like a p'izened bob-cat,
he fairly lifted the cayuses over the first ridge. Nobody never
saw him any more, and nobody wanted to.
"So that's the way I hit my stake, son, just as I'd always
expected--by not knowing what I was doing any part of the time--and
now, there comes my iron-horse coughing up the track! I'll write
you sure, boy, and you let old Reddy know what's going on--and on
your life, don't forget to give it to the lads straight why I
sneaked off on the quiet! I've got ten years older in the last six
months. Well, here we go quite fresh, and damned if I altogether
want to, neither--too late to argue though--by-bye, son!"
When the Chinook Struck Fairfield
I
Miss Mattie sat on her little front porch, facing the setting sun.
Across the road, now ankle deep in June dust, was the wreck of the
Peters place: back-broken roof, crumbling chimneys, shutters
hanging down like broken wings, the old house had the pathetic
appeal of ship-wrecked gentility. A house without people in it,
even when it is in repair, is as forlorn as a dog who has lost his
master.
Up the road were more houses of the nondescript village pattern,
made neither for comfort nor looks. God knows why they built such
houses--perhaps it was in accordance with the old Puritan idea that
any kind of physical perfection is blasphemy. Some of these were
kept in paint and window glass, but there were enough poor
relations to spoil the effect.
Down the road, between the arches of the weeping willows, came
first the brook, with the stone bridge--this broken as to coping
and threadbare in general--then on the hither side of the way some
three or four neighbour's houses, and opposite, the blacksmith's
shop and post-office, the latter, of course, in a store, where you
could buy anything from stale groceries to shingles.
In short, Fairfield was an Eastern village whose cause had
departed. A community drained of the male principle, leaving only
a few queer men, the blacksmith, and some halfling boys, to give
tone to the background of dozens of old maids.
An unsympathetic stranger would have felt that nothing was left to
the Fairfieldians but memory, and the sooner they lost that, the
better.
Take a wineglassful of raspberry vinegar, two tablespoonsful of
sugar, half a cup each of boneset and rhubarb, a good full cup of
the milk of human kindness, dilute in a gallon of water, and you
have the flavor of Fairfield. There was just enough of each
ingredient to spoil the taste of all the rest.
Miss Mattie rested her elbow on the railing, her chin in her hand,
and gazed thoughtfully about her. As a matter of fact, she was the
most inspiring thing in view. At a distance of fifty yards she was
still a tall, slender girl. Her body retained the habit, as well
as the lines of youth; a trick of gliding into unexpected, pleasing
attitudes, which would have been awkward but for the suppleness of
limb to which they testified, and the unconsciousness and ease of
their irregularity.
Her face was a child's face in the ennobling sense of the word.
The record of the years written upon it seemed a masquerade--the
face of a clear-eyed girl of fourteen made up to represent her own
aunt at a fancy dress party. A face drawn a trifle fine, a little
ascetic, but balanced by the humour of the large, shapely mouth,
and really beautiful in bone and contour. The beauty of
mignonette, and doves, and gentle things.
You could see that she was thirty-five, in the blatant candor of
noon, but now, blushed with the pink of the setting sun, she was
still in the days of the fairy prince.
Miss Mattie's revery idled over the year upon year of respectable
stupidity that represented life in Fairfield, while her eyes and
soul were in the boiling gold of the sky-glory. She sighed.
A panorama of life minced before Miss Mattie's mind about as vivid
and full of red corpuscles as a Greek frieze. Her affectionate
nature was starved. They visited each other, the ladies of
Fairfield--these women who had rolled on the floor together as
babies--in their best black, or green or whatever it might be, and
gloves! This, though the summer sun might be hammering down with
all his might. And then they sat in a closed room and talked in a
reserved fashion which was entirely the property of the call. Of
course, one could have a moment's real talk by chance meeting, and
there were the natural griefs of life to break the corsets of this
etiquette, although in general, the griefs seemed to be long drawn
out and conventional affairs, as if nature herself at last yielded
to the system, conquered by the invincible conventionality and
stubbornness of the ladies of Fairfield. It was the unspoken but
firm belief of each of these women, that a person of their circle
who had no more idea of respectability than to drop dead on the
public road would never go to Heaven.
Poor Miss Mattie! Small wonder she dropped her hands, sat back and
wondered, with another sigh, if it were for this she was born? She
did not rebel--there was no violence in her--but she regretted
exceedingly. In spite of her slenderness, it was a wide,
mother-lap in which her hands rested, an obvious cradle for little
children. And instinctively it would come to you as you looked at
her, that there could be no more comfortable place for a tired man
to come home to, than a household presided over by this
slow-moving, gentle woman. There was nothing old-maidish about
Miss Mattie but the tale of her years. She had had offers, such as
Fairfield and vicinity could boast, and declined them with tact,
and the utmost gratitude to the suitor for the compliment; but her
"no" though mild was firm, for there lay within her a certain quiet
valiant spirit, which would rather endure the fatigue and
loneliness of old age in her little house, than to take a larger
life from any but the man who was all. A commonplace in fiction;
in real life sometimes quite a strain.
The sun distorted himself into a Rugby football, and hurried down
as though to be through with Fairfield as soon as possible. It was
a most magnificent sun-set; flaming, gorgeous, wild--beyond the
management of the women of Fairfield--and Miss Mattie stared into
the heart of it with a longing for something to happen. Then the
thought came, "What could happen?" she sighed again, and, with eyes
blinded by Heaven-shine, glanced down the village street.
She thought she saw--she rubbed her eyes and looked again--she did
see, and surely never a stranger sight was beheld on Fairfield's
street! Had a Royal Bengal tiger come slouching through the dust
it could not have been more unusual. The spectacle was a man; a
very large and mighty shouldered man, who looked about him with a
bold, imperious, keep-the-change regard. There was something in
the swing of him that suggested the Bengal tiger. He wore
high-heeled boots outside of his trousers, a flannel shirt with a
yellow silk kerchief around his neck, and on his head sat a white
hat which seemed to Miss Mattie to be at least a yard in diameter.
Under the hat was a remarkable head of hair. It hung below the
man's shoulders in a silky mass of dark scarlet, flecked with brown
gold. Miss Mattie had seen red hair, but she remembered no such
color as this, nor could she recall ever having seen hair a
foot-and-a-half long on a man. That hair would have made a fortune
on the head of an actress, but Miss Mattie was ignorant of the
possibilities of the profession.
The face of the man was a fine tan, against which eyes, teeth, and
moustache came out in brisk relief. The moustache avoided the
tropical tint of the upper hair and was content with a modest
brown. The owner came right along, walking with a stiff, strong,
straddling gait, like a man not used to that way of travelling.
Miss Mattie eyed him in some fear. He would be by her house
directly, and it was hardly modest to sit aggressively on one's
front porch, while a strange man went by--particularly, such a very
strange man as this! Yet a thrill of curiosity held her for the
moment, and then it was too late, for the man stopped and asked
little Eddie Newell, who was playing placidly in the dust--all the
children played placidly in Fairfield--asked Eddie, in a voice
which reached Miss Mattie plainly, although the owner evidently
made no attempt to raise it, if he knew where Miss Mattie Saunders
lived?
Eddie had not noticed the large man's approach, and nearly fell
over in a fright; but seeing, with a child's intuition, that there
was no danger in this fierce-looking person, he piped up instantly.
"Y-y-yessir!--I kin tell yer where she lives--Yessir! She lives
right down there in that little house--I kin go down with you jes'
swell 's not! Why, there she is now, on the stoop!"
"Thankee sonny," said the big voice. "Here's for miggles," and
Miss Mattie caught the sparkle of a coin as it flew into the grimy
fists of Eddie.
"Much obliged!" yelled Eddie and vanished up the street.
Miss Mattie sat transfixed. Her breath came in swallows and her
heart beat irregularly. Here was novelty with a vengeance! The
big man turned and fastened his eyes upon her. There was no
retreat. She noticed with some reassurance that his eyes were
grave and kindly.
As he advanced Miss Mattie rose in agitation, unconsciously putting
her hand on her throat--what could it mean?
The gate was opened and the stranger strode up the cinder walk to
the porch. He stopped a whole minute and looked at her. At last.
"Well, Mattie!" he said, "don't you know me?"
A flood of the wildest hypotheses flashed through Miss Mattie's
mind without enlightening her. Who was this picturesque giant who
stepped out of the past with so familiar a salutation? Although
the porch was a foot high, and Miss Mattie a fairly tall woman,
their eyes were almost on a level, as she looked at him in wonder.
Then he laughed and showed his white teeth. "No use to bother and
worry you, Mattie," said he, "you couldn't call it in ten years.
Well, I'm your half-uncle Fred's boy Bill--and I hope you're a
quarter as glad to see me as I am to see you."
"What!" she cried. "Not little Willy who ran away!"
"The same little Willy," he replied in a tone that made Miss Mattie
laugh a little, nervously, "and what I want to know is, are you
glad to see me?"
"Why, of course! But, Will--I suppose I should call you Will? I
am so flustered--not expecting you--and it's been so warm to-day.
Won't you come in and take a chair?" wound up Miss Mattie in
desperation, and fury at herself for saying things so different
from what she meant to say.
There was a twinkle in the man's eye as he replied in an injured
tone:
"Why, good Lord, Mattie! I've come two thousand miles or more to
see you, and you ask me to take a chair. Just as if I'd stepped in
from across the way! Can't you give a man a little warmer welcome
than that?"
"What shall I do?" asked poor Miss Mattie.
"Well, you might kiss me, for a start," said he.
Miss Mattie was all abroad--still one's half-cousin, who has come
such a distance, and been received so very oddly, is entitled to
consideration. She raised her agitated face, and for the first
time in her life realised the pleasure of wearing a moustache.
Then Red Saunders, late of the Chanta Seeche Ranch, North Dakota,
sat him down.
"I'm obliged to you, Mattie," he said in all seriousness. "To tell
you the truth, I felt in need of a little comforting--here I've
come all this distance--and, of course, I _heard_ about father and
mother--but I couldn't believe it was true. Seemed as if they
_must_ be waiting at the old place for me to come back, and when I
saw it all gone to ruin--Well, then I set out to find somebody, and
do you know, of all the family, there's only you and me left?
That's all, Mattie, just us two!--whilst I was growing up out West,
I kind of expected things to be standing still back here, and be
just the same as I left them--hum--Well, how are you anyhow?"
"I'm well, Will, and"--laying her hand upon his, "_don't_ think I'm
not glad to see you--_please_ don't. I'm so glad, Will, I can't
tell you--but I'm all confused--so little happens here."