possessed by an uneasy feeling that something unusual was taking place.
They were living then in the ancient adobe "Governor's palace," with
its four-foot walls and its eventful history ante-dating the landing at
Plymouth Rock, and for a half-waking instant she wondered if some
unshriven victim of century-gone enmity and revenge still walked those
old halls or sought its mortal habiliments among the rotting bones in
the _placita_. She listened and heard whispering voices and cautious
movements in the _portal_ that fronted the entire length of the
building. Then she arose, wrapped a long, dark cloak about her, and
peeped out of the window. Directly in front of their bedroom, in the
_portal_, were three or four men who bore among them some long and
heavy burden. She drew her dark hair across her face, that there might
be no white gleam to attract their attention, and crouched beside the
window to watch.
One of the men, who was apparently a leader, mounted the shoulders of
two others and seemed to be feeling for something in the wall above the
window. The dim rays of an old moon, which showed that the time must
be near morning, did not afford as much light as he needed, and he
fumbled for some time before he found the hook in the wall for which he
was looking. Over it he passed the end of a rope and then jumped to
the ground. They pulled together on the rope, and the long, dark
burden, which had been left lying on the ground, was drawn upward until
it hung in front of the window beside which Mrs. Coolidge was watching,
and she saw that it was a human body. Then they fastened the rope to
one of the iron bars across the window and stood for a few moments
looking at the swaying body and chuckling together. The one who seemed
to be the leader rolled a cigarette and lighted it, and by the glare of
the match she recognized him. He was a man of prominence in Santa Fe
and the leader of the opposing party, not only locally but for the
whole Territory as well.
Mrs. Coolidge's first impulse was to awaken her husband, but a swift
intuition warned her that that would not be wise. So she controlled
her horror and indignation, and, as she stared at the poor, lifeless
thing swaying outside, she did some very rapid thinking. She
understood that there had been a lynching and that the corpse had been
brought there and hung in front of her husband's bedroom window, where
his first waking glance would fall upon it, as a sign of how public
opinion regarded his ideas and intentions on the subject of lynch law.
She saw that it was intended as a warning and a contemptuous defiance,
and her spirit rose high in righteous wrath. She knew well that this
event presaged for the Governor trouble and humiliation, and probably,
if a conflict were precipitated at once, an early defeat, and she
quickly decided that he must not see the body or know what had
happened. But what could she do with it?
Then an idea occurred to her and she smiled and said to herself that it
was impossible. But it seemed such a good idea, and it pleased her so
much, that she kept on thinking about it. Presently she assured
herself that her husband was still sleeping quietly; then she put on
some clothes, and, laughing softly, went out on the _portal_.
The man who had been the leader in the affair that night, and whom Mrs.
Coolidge had recognized, was awakened early the next morning by the
sound of voices in front of his house. It was barely dawn, but already
a little group of Mexicans were staring at his door and talking with
much excitement. Wondering what it could mean he hastily dressed
himself and went out. As he opened the front door he ran into the body
of the man, swinging above his own threshold, which he had left a few
hours before hanging at the Governor's window.
"My jaw dropped and I shut the door mighty quick, when I saw that," he
told me, with a reminiscent, amused chuckle at himself. "I knew in a
second that the Governor was onto us, that he must have seen us in
front of his window, and that it was up to me to do some lively pullin'
of freight. As a matter of fact, I had n't had anything to do with the
lynching. That had been done by some cowboys who were in town the day
before, and the fellow they 'd done for was an ornery cuss of a
half-breed Mexican, who was a whole lot better off dead than alive,
anyway. He tried to play some low-down game on 'em at poker, and they
just strung him up and rode off. Some of our fellows heard about it,
and three or four of us decided it would be a good thing to let
Coolidge know what our sentiments were.
"We were in dead earnest, and we meant to get his political scalp and
drive him out of the Territory with his tail between his hind legs,
before he knew what had happened to him. I won't say," and the man
grinned and his eyes twinkled, "I was n't expecting to be appointed
Governor myself afterwards. Anyway, I did n't care to be roped into a
trial for murder just then. It would have interfered with my plans.
And if the Governor had seen us apparently lynching a man right under
his eyes, he could cinch us if he wanted to.
"I called the Mexicans up to the door, told them I didn't know how the
body got there (I didn't, either), but it must have been put there by
some of my enemies. Then I gave them money to take charge of it, say
the dead man was a friend of theirs, and do the proper thing. So the
poor cuss was in luck by the affair after all, for he got a mass said
over him. Then I sent word to my friends who 'd been with me, and we
all just quietly skipped, on the minute. At sun-up that morning there
was n't one of us in town. I had urgent business in Texas for the next
week.
"You see, we 'd all of us thought our new Governor was just a
highfalutin' tenderfoot, and it would n't be any job at all to buffalo
him. But this move of his gave us a suspicion that maybe we 'd sized
him up wrong. It was just the kind of quiet warning that we 'd be
likely to give if we had cards up our sleeve that the other fellow did
n't know about. It looked as if he really could and would strike back
good and plenty if we pushed him too hard. So we sent word to our
crowd all over the Territory to keep quiet a while. And let me tell
you, life in New Mexico was not nearly so exciting for the next few
weeks as some of us had planned it should be.
"Still, I was n't quite satisfied about it. Somehow, the Governor did
n't seem to pan out to be just the kind of man who would give that kind
of a jolt to his enemies. He was too Eastern. I was still chawin' it
over in my mind, when one day I met Mrs. Coolidge, two or three weeks
after it happened and the first time I 'd seen her since. She was
lively and cordial, as she always was, and is; but as I shook hands
with her and looked her in the eyes she suddenly dropped her eyelids,
and a queer expression crossed her face. She had hold of herself again
in a second and was looking at me and smiling and talking. But that
second was enough. It flashed into my mind that she was the one who 'd
done it. I reckon I would n't have dared to bone her about it if I 'd
waited two minutes. But the impulse took me, and I just asked her
bluntly right then and there if it was she who had transferred that
Greaser from her husband's window to my door.
"She threw up her head and looked me square in the eyes--you know that
straight, frank gaze she has--frowned a little and said, 'Yes, I did
it. I thought your doorway was the rightful place for that corpse to
be found in.'
"Well, the joke of it and the pluck of her just struck me right where I
lived, and I fairly roared. 'Put it there, Mrs. Coolidge,' I said, and
stuck out my hand, as soon as I could speak. 'You 're a regular
captain! No, you 're bigger than that--you 're a colonel! Shake, and
let's be friends!'
"Well, I just thought it would be a shame to drive a woman with as much
pluck and _sabe_ as that back East to live. So I passed the word down
the line in our party that we 'd give the Governor a show--let him have
fair play anyhow, and, if he could make good, all right, the pot should
be his. I was so tickled by Mrs. Coolidge's trick and the way she won
out on it that I never called her anything but 'Colonel' after that,
and, somehow, the title stuck. Anyway, she deserves it."
For a long time after this affair, so I learned from Mrs. Coolidge when
I asked her about the story her friend had told me, the Governor
thought it was that interview and the stern spirit he displayed in it
that had made the change in the opposition's attitude toward him and
had seemed to affect the feeling of the whole Territory. For his
official path became unexpectedly easy. There were few attempts to
balk him in his administration of affairs and there was a general
manifestation of tolerance, and even of willingness to see how his
ideas would work out.
But the time came when, understanding better the people with whom he
had to deal, he knew that that interview ought to have had just the
opposite result. One day he said to his wife how surprising it was
that it had not landed him in the hottest of hot water, and how puzzled
he was to account for what seemed to have been its effect. Then she
confessed to him what had happened on that crucial night, how she had
taken the body away and hung it in front of the other house, and what
she partly knew and partly guessed about the results of the affair. At
once he realized that her instant and audacious retaliation was what
had made possible his success and his growing popularity.
Nevertheless, he was shocked at first, for New England was still but a
little way behind him. But amusement soon overcame every other
feeling, and he laughed heartily in admiration of her daring, just as
his opponent had done. After that, he seemed to take particular pride
in her sobriquet, and himself often called her "Colonel Kate."
HOLLYHOCKS
Green and peaceful, the long, low undulations of the prairie sea of
southern Kansas spread away to the horizon in lines as graceful and
pleasing as those of a reclining Venus. Here and there against a
hillside the emerald waves broke in a bright foam of many-colored
flowers. In all that vast extent over which I could look, there was
visible no living creature save the tiny furred and feathered things
whose home it was. The soft prairie wind blew caressingly against my
cheek and seemed to whisper in my ear: "Why do men cling to the
boisterous, cruel, lying sea as the emblem of freedom? Is not here
beauty that allures with freedom's own charms? Is not here freedom
herself, serene, smiling, constant, and blessed with a blessedness the
sea knows not?"
The prairie wind blew the freedom it sang of into my heart, and it
dwelt there with joy and exultation as I drove on and on over the waves
of that smiling emerald sea. I salved my eyes, wearied and scorched by
brick walls and city pavements, with those long, swinging reaches of
green, and their silent benediction filled and soothed my very soul.
At last, when the low-lying hills began to cast cool shadows down their
eastern slopes, there appeared against the velvet green of the distance
the sprawling blotch of a little town, ugly, naked, and unashamed in
its bustling newness. And nearer, by a mile or more, on a green slope
which caught the golden-red rays of the sinking sun, was a little
enclosure, naked and ugly as the town itself, but silent and
awe-inspiring with the silence and awe of death. A barbed-wire fence
enclosed it, and the prairie turf still covered much of its space.
There were here no sunken mounds, no reeling headstones, no discolored
marbles. The grave heaps were trimly rounded, the wooden crosses which
marked most of them grinned their newness, and the few headstones and
monuments shone upstartishly white in the sun. Barren of that curtain
of verdure with which love strives to conceal the footprints of death,
the little cemetery lay there against the green hillside like some
fresh, gaping, ghastly wound in the face of a loved one.
One grave stood out startlingly from the rest. On the others only an
infrequent trailing vine or a faded bunch of flowers told of loving
effort to cover death's nakedness. But this one, which lay in the
centre of the enclosure, was covered from headstone to foot-cross with
a dense growth of hollyhocks. Their tall shafts were clothed with a
luxuriance of vivid red bloom, as if they had sucked into their petals
the life blood of the sleeper below. In the level red sun-rays they
glowed with lusty contempt of the silent impotence beneath them.
A woman in a white dress, with her hands full of the red hollyhock
blooms, walked between the graves down to the barred gate and came out
upon the road as I drove up. I recognized her as the woman whose
acquaintance I had made in the train a few days previously, and in
whose company I had travelled from Chicago hither. She had been a
pleasant chance acquaintance--intelligent, gentle, and refined.
"Will you ride back to town with me?" I said.
She accepted the offer of the seat beside me, carefully holding her
flowers.
"How odd that grave looks with its marshalled array of hollyhocks!" I
said, by way of opening conversation, for she sat there silent. "What
a peculiar taste, to adorn a loved one's last resting-place in that
way!"
She looked up at me silently, and I noticed that her eyes were hollow,
and her face sad. Then she turned toward the graveyard and the tall
red hollyhocks standing out so vividly in the sunset glow, and said
quietly:
"It is my mother's grave. I planted the hollyhocks upon it."
She was silent again, looking sadly and tenderly at the flowers in her
lap, but presently she went on:
"I do not mind telling you why I did it. Perhaps talking about it will
lessen the heaviness of my heart. No one but my sister knows why I
planted them there, and she has never seen the grave, nor have I seen
her, since our mother died. When we were young girls at home, our
mother loved hollyhocks. She had the yard filled with great clumps of
them. We were away at school for a few years and when we went home
again they quite horrified our advanced, young ladyish taste. We
thought them vulgar, and between ourselves we fretted and scolded about
them and declared to each other that they were horrid, and that we were
ashamed to have any one visit us while those great, ugly, coarse things
filled the yard. We apologized for them to visitors and said they were
mother's flowers, but we hated them. And after a while we complained
about them to mother and said before her how common and coarse and
old-fashioned they were. And she, dear, gentle soul, said not a word,
but looked sadly out at the flowers she loved so well and had cared for
so long and so tenderly. And one day, after we had fretted and worried
her a long time about them, she said to us--I can see yet how she tried
to smile and disguise the sadness in her heart--that we might dig up
all the hollyhocks and plant other flowers in their places. And we
did. It stabs me to the heart now to think of it,--but we did it
joyfully.
"After we were married and went away from home--my sister to London and
I to Chicago--our mother came here to this town and soon died. In the
sorrow of that time, when first I knew how much and how tenderly I
loved her, I remembered about the hollyhocks, and at last realized how
brutally thoughtless and unfeeling we had been. So, in shame and
remorse, I did the one little thing that was all I could do, and
covered the grave of our dear, patient, gentle, saint-like mother with
the flowers she loved the best of all, but which we had not let her
gladden her life with. I do not pretend to know whether or not there
is a hereafter, or whether there is anything more of her than what lies
under those red flowers back there. But often I wish--oh, how I
wish!--that it may be so, and that from somewhere her spirit may look
down and see and be pleased by the atonement I have tried to make!
"I wrote to my sister what I had done, and I found that she also felt
as I did about it. Every summer I come here and see that the
hollyhocks grow and flourish as we wish them to; and, at her request, I
gather and send to her some of the blooms. These in my lap are for
that purpose, and two weeks from now she will be weeping over them in
her London home. If we could only have known--then--how we should feel
about it now!"
THE RISE, FALL, AND REDEMPTION OF JOHNSON SIDES
The day was hot, and the wind was high, and the alkali dust from the
sagebrush plains sifted into the car, and whitened the stuffy
upholstering, and burrowed into the nerves of the passengers.
Everybody longed for the coming of night, and the relief of the climb
up the cool heights of the Sierras.
I looked out on the sun-flooded platform at Winnemucca and wondered,
with a feeling of irritation against all things earthly, what I should
do with myself during all the long, hot, and uncomfortable hours that
were still to be endured. And then I saw the big, broad-shouldered
figure and the round, good-natured face of the Nevadan enter the car
and come straight toward my section. At once I forgot the heat and the
alkali dust, and my heart sang with joy, for I knew the Nevadan of old,
and knew him for the prince of story tellers. So there was content in
my soul and foreknowledge of delightful entertainment with tales new
and old. For the Nevadan's old stories are just as interesting as his
new ones, because you never recognize them as anything you ever heard
before. His store of yarns is limitless and needs only a listener to
set it unwinding, like an endless cable, warranted to run as long as
his audience laughs.
So the Nevadan talked, and I listened and felt at peace with the world.
And presently he began to tell me about Johnson Sides.
"Of course, you 've heard about him, have n't you?" he asked.
"Everybody who has lived on either slope of the Sierras must have heard
about Johnson. Well, Johnson Sides is a whole lot of a man, even if he
is only a Piute Indian. It ain't quite fair, though, to speak of him
as only an Indian, for he has developed into an individual and wears
store clothes.
"The first time I ever saw Johnson was away back, years ago, when I
first went to Virginia City. Going down C Street one day I stopped to
look at some workmen who were excavating for the foundation of a house.
They had been blasting, and were working away like good fellows getting
the pieces of rock off the site. On the south side of the biggest
stone they had removed, where the sun shone on him and he was sheltered
from the wind, a big Piute was lying on the ground and watching the
workmen as if he had been their boss. He was wrapped in an army
blanket, new but dirty, and he wore a fairly good hat and a pair of
boots without holes. His face and hands were dirty, and his hair hung
around his ears and neck and eyes in that fine disorder which the
Piutes admire.
"I wondered why he was watching the workmen, for it is little short of
a miracle for a Piute to take any interest whatever in manual labor.
So I spoke to him. Without paying any attention to me or what I had
said, or even seeming to be conscious of my presence, he rose,
straightened himself up, threw his head back, and said, as if he were
addressing the world in general: 'White man work, white man eat; Injun
no work, Injun eat; white man damn fool.'
"I laughed and said, 'You 've struck it, right at the bottom. Anybody
with as much wisdom as that deserves to be supported by the community.
Here 's a dollar for you.'
"He took the money as disdainfully as if he had been a prince and I a
subject paying back taxes, and without once looking at me stalked off
down the street. An hour afterwards I ran across Johnson, two other
bucks, and a squaw, sitting on the ground in the sun behind a barn,
playing poker. Johnson must have raked in everything the whole party
had, for that night the rest of them were sober and he was whooping
drunk. In consequence, he got locked up for a while. The police of
Virginia City always paid Johnson the compliment of locking him up when
he got drunk, for with whiskey inside of him he was more like a mad
devil than anything else.
"After he got out of jail I saw him standing around for several days
looking as lordly and unconscious as if he had been worth a million.
But the pangs of hunger must have set his wits to work. For pretty
soon he appeared on the streets with a wrinkled, decrepit, old Piute
tied to a string. He had fastened the string to the old fellow's arm
and he walked behind, holding the other end, but apparently as
unconscious of the whole business as if he 'd been the sole inhabitant
of Virginia City. He stalked along with his head in the air, and the
old fellow trotted out in front until Johnson yanked the string. Then
they stopped and the old man began to beg money of the passers-by, and
Johnson turned his back on his companion and looked off down the
street, proudly pretending that they weren't together. If any one gave
the old man money Johnson took it at once and it disappeared somewhere
inside his blanket. Johnson and his prime minister, we used to call
the combination. But Johnson would n't beg for himself. Oh, no! He
was too proud. It's a fact, I never knew or heard of Johnson Sides
himself asking for money. But he kept his prime minister trotting
around for several weeks, and he never let go the string or let the old
fellow keep a two-bit piece.
"But Johnson was reformed at last; and it was the power of the press
that did it. Talk about the press as a moral agent! Why, bless your
soul, when one newspaper can reform a whole Piute Indian and make a man
of him--well, the question's settled, then and there, and the pulpit
and the platform ain't in it after that.
"We did n't try to reform him--in fact, we 'd rather have kept him as
he was at first. He was more amusing. But the aspirations of
Johnson's soul were too much for us. I used to give him money
sometimes--he was sure to do something if he got drunk that was worth
writing up--and so he got into the habit of coming to our newspaper
office whenever he felt the need of more cash. He did n't ask for
anything, and he always made you feel that he was doing you a great
favor in accepting any stray chicken-feed you might have about your
clothes. He just sat around like a bronzed and blanketed statue of
Caesar, or Alexander, or Napoleon Bonaparte. Not one of the whole lot
of them ever looked more as if he owned the whole earth than Johnson
did after he 'd sat there three hours waiting for somebody to give him
two bits or a chew of tobacco.
"I found out after a while that he could give me scraps of news about
the Indians over at Pyramid Lake or in the city that were worth making
into local items, and I always paid him for them. Nobody ever saw a
prouder Indian than Johnson was the first day I did that. I marked the
paragraphs with a blue pencil and gave him a copy of the paper, and he
carried it around with him until it was worn out. The money I gave him
for them he kept in his pocket for two whole days. But at last there
was a big poker game behind a barn--six bucks down from Pyramid Lake
with five dollars apiece, and it was too much for Johnson. His proudly
earned silver went into the pot with the rest.
"Johnson brought up items every day after that, and soon began to feel
himself one of the profession and a man of consequence. He always
brought two or three other bucks with him to see his importance and be
impressed by his superiority. While they stood against the wall or
squatted in a corner Johnson would take a chair at a dignified distance
from me and begin, 'Now, you make 'um paper talk.' And he always ended
his account with the emphatic command, 'Now, you make 'um paper talk
straight.'
"But his information was not always 'straight.' He had all the
instincts of the modern and progressive journalist, and he did n't
hesitate to fake when news was scarce and he wanted money. For after
he joined the newspaper profession he gave up begging by proxy and
allowed his prime minister to beg on his own account and keep his own
earnings.