under his detaining hand, stopped long enough to shake his head with a
stolid "_No sabe_," and then dodged away.
Annie had heard the little dialogue and now turned to Ellison with a
merry laugh. Her friend had not come, and as they walked back together
she began to rally him about Wing's refusal to understand anything he
said. It nettled him slightly and he replied that people made entirely
too much of the little ape, and that if they would teach him better
manners instead of petting him so much, it would be a good thing for
him as well as for the public comfort.
Then Annie took up his case rather warmly and declared that he was a
cute little thing, and that his manners were all right if he was
treated with good manners in the first place. The consequence was that
by the time they reached her gate they were deep in the lurid
entanglements of a lovers' quarrel.
The previous day she had taken a horseback ride with a man of whom
Ellison strongly disapproved. He had intended to explain the matter to
her calmly and tell her just what kind of man the other was, and why it
was unwise for her to accept his attentions. But in the heat of temper
engendered by their quarrel about Wing, he lost his bearings, and what
he had meant should be a request for her not to show the man any favor
again became very like an explicit command.
Annie asked him sarcastically if he thought he had bought with his
engagement ring a slave who was never to open her mouth unless he gave
her leave. Then, feeling a bit ashamed of his vehemence and mentally
fumbling for words of explanation, he began to say something about what
"self-respecting girls" should do. Annie flashed a blazing look at
him, slammed the gate, and left him alone on the sidewalk. A little
later he saw the objectionable man making a bargain with Wing about
carrying a note, and with a sore and angry heart he watched the shabby
hat and the long queue travel up the hill to the Millner home.
While he was at work among his trees that afternoon he saw them ride
past. He noted the defiant poise of Annie's head, which did not turn
by so much as a hair's breadth toward the cottage and the trees and
him, but he was not near enough to see that her eyes were red and that
she bit her lip to control its trembling. So he wrote a letter to her
that evening saying that evidently they had made a mistake; and an hour
later he had the engagement ring in his pocket and a great bitterness
in his heart.
Two days afterward, as Annie sat on the veranda of a friend's house
near the depot she saw the hotel omnibus coming down the street with
Ellison in it. "Why, there's Robert!" she exclaimed.
"Yes," said her friend, looking at her curiously, "he 's going East.
Did n't you know it?"
Instantly all of Annie's pride gave way. She was in the wrong, she
told herself, and she would ask him to forgive her. She would send a
note to him at the station and ask him not to go away without seeing
her.
"I 'll have time," she thought, "for they said the train is a few
minutes late to-day and I 'll get Wing to carry it over to the station.
There he is now, waiting at the curve."
She hurriedly pencilled a few words upon a scrap of paper and, folding
it as she went, ran down the steps and up a side street parallel with
the railroad, and then climbed the low embankment upon which the boy
stood.
Wing was waiting in the middle of the track for the train and the
ecstasy of his daily performance. In the meantime he was holding out
at arm's length and considering with proud and satisfied eyes a big,
artificial spider and web which had that morning been given to him by
one of the ladies at the hotel.
"Wing," she called, "I want you to run back to the station and give
this note to Mr. Ellison. You 'll see him there on the platform, or,
perhaps, in the baggage room. You 'll have plenty of time, for the
train 's late today. Please go quickly, Wing, for I want him to have
the note at once."
The train was already rumbling in the deep cut just beyond the turn,
but the wind was blowing strongly toward it, and neither of them heard
the fateful sound. The high wind caught her dress and blew it against
the spider in the boy's hand. It tangled the toy in the folds and
wrenched it from his fingers and then caught the hem of her gown upon
the splitting edge of a worn rail. As she stooped to loose it the
terrible front of the engine appeared, rounding the curve.
Wing looked in blank amazement at his empty fingers and then, as he saw
his plaything hanging to the folds of her dress, he sprang after it
exclaiming, "My bug! My bug!" As he seized it again he saw the
approaching train, and, his mind bent on what he was intending to do,
turned to begin his usual backward race. Annie, stooping to loose her
dress, with her back to the approaching train, was not yet aware of the
oncoming doom. Her gown blew again across his legs, and to free
himself he gave her a little push. With the warning shriek of the
engine in her ears and darkness surging over her brain she fell just
outside the track and rolled down the sloping embankment as far as her
skirt, held beneath the wheels of the engine, allowed.
But for the Chinee Kid there was no such escape. The iron hoof of the
engine was upon him as he made his first backward leap. When they
picked up his little, mangled body the spider was still grasped in his
brown fist.
The crowd on the station platform had seen it all--had seen him, as the
engine rounded the curve, turn to Annie and push her off the track,
thus saving her life at the cost of his own.
The townspeople persuaded his parents to let them give him a public
funeral, to which all Tobin turned out, with tears and flowers and
resolutions praising the little boy in high-sounding words for his
heroic deed. A public subscription was taken up for the benefit of
Wing's parents, to which Annie's father and lover and all her friends
and everybody who had liked and petted the child contributed so
liberally that his father and mother took his remains and sailed back
to China.
When Ellison, from the platform, saw Annie's danger everything left his
heart save absorbing love for her, and with a white face and
alarm-distended eyes he dashed across the track and had her in his arms
before the others had recovered from their brief paralysis of horror.
They were married as soon as Wing's obsequies were over. And now, if
you ever pass through Tobin and will look for that sunny hillside with
the olive and orange trees climbing its slope and the pretty cottage on
its crest, you will see a home in which Wing's memory is enshrined with
all possible love and honor and gratitude.
You see, they do not know that it was all on account of his "bug."
Neither do they know that, small, brown, Chinee Kid though he was, he
had stood in their lives for Fate.
OUT OF SYMPATHY
"Sympathy with his kind and well-doing for its
welfare, direct or indirect, are the essential conditions of
the existence and development of the more complex
social organism; and no mortal can transcend these
conditions with any success."--HENRY MAUDSLEY.
Our party was going from the Yosemite Valley to Lake Tenaiya--that
beautiful bit of shining, liquid sapphire ringed by its mighty setting
of granite peaks and domes--by the long and roundabout way of Cloud's
Rest. It would be an all-day trip, but we knew that at the end would
be the cabin of Henry Moulton, a lone mountaineer, to receive us, with
such comfort as it could give, and Henry Moulton himself to cook for
us a supper of fresh fish and game. The thoughts of the whole party
began to turn longingly in that direction as the afternoon of the late
summer day waned, and in straggling, silent file we hurried our
horses, with such speed as was possible, over the blind trail. The
Artist, who was next in front of me, turned in his saddle and said:
"We ought to get a warm welcome at Moulton's cabin. For this is the
first party that has been up here for two months, and it's not likely
that he has seen another human being in all that time."
"Does he live all alone, then?"
"Absolutely alone. He has a cabin on the banks of Lake Tenaiya--it
is only about three or four miles farther, now--and whenever parties
of tourists come up from the Valley to stay a day or two, he cooks
for them and lets them sleep in his shanty if they wish. He is
a very strange man, and I hope you will be able to draw him into
conversation, for I 'm sure you would find him an interesting
character. His life story is the queerest thing I 've run across on
the Pacific Coast, and if you won't give away to him that you know
anything about it, I 'll tell it to you."
At once I scented big game, for the Artist had spent many summers in
that region and knew all that was strange or weird or startling in its
history. Already he had told me many tales, and if this was to be
the strangest of them all I wanted to hear it. So I urged my horse
on and by dint of circling around trees and jumping over logs and
occasionally falling into single file, we managed to keep within
talking distance of each other while he told me this tale of the lone
man at Lake Tenaiya:
"I knew Moulton years ago--thirty, yes, thirty-five of them--in
Cambridge, where we were boys together. He went to Harvard and was
graduated from both the academic and the law departments, and was
looked upon as a promising young man. If any prophet had foretold to
me, in those days, that Henry Moulton would become a hermit in the
Sierras and do cooking for tourists, I would have told him he was the
father of lies, and had better retreat to his natural home. Moulton
married a handsome young woman of an influential family--his own
people were poor--and all his friends were confident that a brilliant
future awaited him.
"A few years after his marriage he came West, intending to settle in
San Francisco and practise law. His wife stayed behind until he
should get a start. The gold fever was n't dead yet in those days,
and Moulton had a bad attack of it. When I came to the Coast he was
working in some played-out placer mines, and feeling perfectly sure
that he was going to strike a fortune almost any day. When a man has
once dug gold out of the ground with his own hands, he seems to be
unfitted for doing anything else. It's as bad as the gambler's mania.
Well, the fever got into Moulton's blood, and he gave himself up to
it, drifting about, prospecting, and sometimes striking a good thing,
but often quite the contrary.
"Finally his wife came on, and she persuaded him to give up the gold
hunt and his roving life and settle down in San Francisco to the
practice of his profession. He got on remarkably well, had all the
business he could attend to, and was making a heap more money than
there was the slightest probability of his ever digging out of the
ground. But the fever of his vagrant, irresponsible life was still in
his veins, and with all that promise of a successful career before him
he was restless and unhappy. He could not forget the camp fire in the
mountains and the whispering of the pine trees and the life of the
woods. I don't know if you understand--" and the Artist hesitated,
turning upon me an uncertain, questioning glance.
"I know what you mean," I answered. "Go on and say what you had in
mind. It's a fascinating question."
"That it is," he replied, "and I never can decide whether it is
something fine and high in a man's nature which makes him want to
yield to that sort of a yearning, or whether it is mere latent
savagery, coming out all the stronger for having been long repressed.
"But what's the use of speculating? The bald truth is that if a man
has a strong feeling for Nature and once knows the charm of wandering
alone in wild places, he 'll have a string tied to him forever after,
that will give him some mighty hard jerks.
"Moulton felt all that fascination very keenly, and the mountains and
the forests seemed to be always calling him and commanding him to
return to them. The follies and the faults of men and the baseness of
human nature, of which, of course, the practice of his profession gave
him special knowledge, irritated him, and every new case made him more
impatient with civilization and more contemptuous of his fellow men.
"I was in the courtroom once when he won a big case which had been
bitterly contested. A crowd of lawyers was there, and they were all
enthusiastic about the way he had conducted it and the brilliant
victory he had won. They pressed around to congratulate him, but he
got away from them as soon as he could and went into the street with
me. We walked a block or more before he spoke, and then he burst out
bitterly:
"'I 've won some thousands of dollars and a lot of prestige in this
case, but what is it all worth? I 'd give it all to lie just one
night, perfectly free, under the pine trees in the mountains, beside a
worthless prospect hole, watching a bear shambling through the brush,
and listening to the coyotes yelping in the distance. Even a coyote
is better than most men, and a bear is noble company beside them!'
"Moulton's wife was as dissatisfied as he, but in a different way.
She was of Puritan stock--and the sturdy moral sense of those old
fellows, their rock-ribbed principles, and their determination to make
other people think as they thought, came out strong in her character.
"Of course, that kind of a woman was bound to be shocked by the more
free and easy life of the Pacific Coast. Her constant mental state
was one of stern disapproval. And the gypsy outcropping in her
husband's nature filled her with anxiety. It was quite impossible for
her to understand it or to sympathize with it in the least.
"Their marriage had been an ardent love match, and notwithstanding
the way their natures had been drifting apart they still loved each
other devotedly. At home, where she had been in harmony with her
surroundings, she had been a very charming woman. And so she was
still--only--well, I must admit that she did seem out of place here.
She was so uncompromising, you know.
"I did n't wonder, though, that she was amazed and confounded by the
change in her husband's character. It would have shocked any of his
old friends and it must have been an awful blow to his wife, who was
still as ambitious for him as he had once been for himself.
"She had one general name for this unexpected development in him and
called it all his 'bearism.' At first she applied it in fun, when he
told her how much he had enjoyed watching and hunting the wild animals
in the mountains, but she soon decided that it was a pretty good name
for his new characteristics. And so his 'bearism' came to be more and
more of a division between them. Not that they ever quarrelled--I am
sure they did not. They just agonized over the hopeless state of
affairs, and each one seemed to be always pained and grieved because
it was impossible to come round to the other one's way of thinking.
"Finally, Dorothy--his wife--went home on a visit. I think she did it
in a last desperate hope that she might induce him to follow her and
stay in the East. For a little while after she left, Moulton braced
up and put more heart into his work. He seemed to feel, at last, some
pride in his really splendid capacities, and to have some revival of
his old ambitions.
"I thought he had overcome the gypsy longing, and had buckled down to
work for good. And so I was much surprised one day, when I found him
in an unusually gloomy mood, to see him take down both of his diplomas
and fling them into the fire.
"'Gewgaws!' he exclaimed, contemptuously. 'Trinkets! No sensible man
ought to care a snap of his finger either for them or for what they
represent.'
"We had a long talk after that, and he told me fully what shape his
thoughts had been taking. It was that same story, which so many
people have been telling of late years, of sneering pessimism as to
the human race and its possibilities, and of contempt for the labors
and rewards of life. We argued the matter for hours, and each one of
us convinced himself that the other was entirely wrong.
"Moulton was then finishing up an important case, and as soon as it
was concluded, he and some friends went away to have a few days of
hunting in the mountains. He did not return with the others, who said
that he had not quite finished his hunt, but that he expected to be
back within a week. I went East just then and stayed a year, and when
I reached San Francisco again I found he had not yet returned. And he
has not been back to this day.
"I heard of him occasionally, sometimes in one part of the State,
sometimes in another, prospecting, hunting, trapping, roaming about,
but always in the mountains, and always keeping pretty well away from
signs of civilization.
"Six years ago, when I first came to the Yosemite, I found Moulton
here, acting as a guide. The loveliness and the majesty of the place
had entranced him, just as they have entranced many another, and he
stayed here, working as a guide, for several years. But he let me
know at once that he did n't want me to speak about his past life,
either to him or to others, and so no one here ever knew that we were
anything more than the merest roadside acquaintances.
"Four or five years ago he tired of even the civilization of the
Valley, and built a cabin up here at Lake Tenaiya, so that he would
not see so many people. He is willing to cook for the occasional
parties that go up to the lake, and very glad, I guess, when they
leave him alone again with the trees and the mountains. When the snow
drives him out in the fall he goes down to the Valley and lives as
caretaker during the winter in one of the hotels--which is quite as
lonely as his summer life--until it is possible to come up to his
cabin again in the spring."
"And his wife?" I asked. "What has become of her?"
"After she found that she could not induce him to return to
civilization she got a divorce; and the last I knew of her she was
devoting herself to the advancement--Whoa, there! What's the matter
with you?"
Both his horse and mine gave a sudden snort and a bound, and started
to run. We checked them at the second leap and peered through the
underbrush to see what had frightened them. A dark object was
rustling the leaves on the ground beside a clump of bushes.
"It's a bear!" the Artist whispered excitedly, drawing his revolver.
"I know this is reckless, but--you are n't afraid, are you?--the
temptation is too much for my prudence. If he comes for us we 'll
give our horses the rein and they 'll outrun him."
I leaned forward, trying to get a better view, and just as I heard the
click of the trigger I caught a glimpse of a white human foot.
"Stop!" I cried. "It's a man!"
It was too late to stop the discharge, but a quick turn of his wrist
sent the bullet whistling harmlessly through the trees. The creature
scrambled hurriedly away through the dead leaves, and our horses,
trembling and snorting, tried again to run.
"It is a bear!" he cried as we saw its shaggy bulk awkwardly climbing
the slope between two clumps of bushes. "No, by Jove, it's got hands
and feet! Now, what in the--"
Then the thing half turned toward us, and we saw that it had a man's
head and face, covered with hair and beard.
"Good God! It's Henry Moulton!" cried the Artist. "Moulton!
Moulton! Come back here! What's the matter with you!"
At the sound of his name the man sprang to his feet, facing us. The
bearskin which wrapped his body slipped down and left him entirely
nude. In an instant he dropped upon all fours again, drew the skin
over him and shambled away.
We turned our staring eyes upon each other, and there was no need to
speak the appalling thought that was in both our minds. With one
accord we plied our whips and drove our unwilling and terrified horses
in the direction he had taken. We came near enough to see that he was
digging among the dry leaves for acorns, and that his beard and mouth
were defiled with earth, and full of fragments of leaves and acorn
shells. But as soon as he saw us he darted off into the thick
underbrush, whither we could not follow him.
We hurried on to his shack, where the rest of the party had already
arrived, and the men all started back at once with ropes and lariats
for Moulton's capture and garments for his covering.
The cabin was a rough affair, made of logs and chinked with fir
boughs, and having an earthen floor. A bunk made of rough timbers
and mattressed with twigs of fur was covered with some blankets and
clothing, tossed into heaps. Under the blankets at the head of the
bunk I found a little pile of books--a Shakespeare, a volume of
Emerson's essays, Thoreau's "Walden," and a well-worn "Iliad," in the
Greek text.
"How queer," said one of the women, as she looked curiously at the
volumes, "that an ignorant creature such as this crazy mountaineer
must be should have such books as these in his cabin! They must have
been left here by some tourist, and he has put them away and kept
them. It shows how much respect even the ignorant have for learning."
Some torn scraps of paper were scattered over the floor, and I picked
them all up and tried to piece them together.
When the men returned with the lunatic he was quiet and obedient,
except when they tried to substitute proper clothing for his bearskin.
Against this he fought with all his strength, striking, scratching,
and kicking with hands and feet, snapping and biting viciously, and
all the time either roaring with fury, or, when they succeeded in
pulling the hide a little away from him, groaning, shrieking, and
writhing as if he were being flayed.
So they desisted and left him wrapped in the skin and tied to a tree
near the cabin door. There he constantly walked back and forth on all
fours, the length of his rope, restlessly and in silence, as caged
animals do. If any one approached too near he sprang at the intruder
with a savage growl and a snap of his jaws. But otherwise he paid
no attention to any of those who had expected to be his guests. He
refused to eat, unless they offered him acorns or dry oak leaves.
These he devoured voraciously.
There was some scrawled writing on the scraps of paper I had pieced
together and the Artist and I made out some disjointed sentences. We
agreed that the lunatic must have written them himself, in the first
beclouding of his mind, and we thought the words might have some
effect upon him. So we went out to where the poor, crazed creature
was tied, and, looking him squarely in the eyes, the Artist spoke very
slowly:
"Dorothy. Dorothy. She said I am a bear. Where is Dorothy?"
He stopped and stared and a puzzled, human look came into his eyes.
He rose slowly to his feet and stood upright, leaning against the
tree. For the moment he forgot his bearskin covering and it half
fell off. He stared at us, mumbling strange sounds, which presently
became incoherent words of human speech. But he spoke thickly and
uncertainly, like one long unused to the sound of his voice:
"Where is--Dorothy? I want--she said--Dorothy--Dorothy--she said--I
--a bear--I--I--am--a bear."
Then he dropped to all fours again and drew his bearskin closely
about him and that was the last flicker of human intelligence that he
showed.
The next morning the men made a small platform of some loose boards to
which they tied the lunatic. He fought desperately against his bonds,
and it required the combined strength of all the men of the party to
fasten him securely to the platform. Then the guide improvised a
harness of ropes and hitched to this primitive sled the horse which he
himself rode. Watching the poor creature closely, our little party
went slowly back to the Valley, whence he was sent to an asylum. The
Artist wrote to Mrs. Moulton an account of his condition, and told her
also its probable cause.
Some months afterward I went to the asylum, purposely to learn what
had become of him. The physician said his mental condition was
steadily improving, that there was a pretty sure prospect of his
recovery, and that he would probably be sane all the rest of his
life, if--and the doctor put a significant emphasis upon that little
word--"if he lives as a sane man should, among men, and busies himself
as other men do."
Then the man of healing took from a shelf a book and read to me the
words which I have put at the beginning of this account.
He told me also that Mrs. Moulton was there, that she had been there
almost from the first, and that she spent all the time with the
unfortunate man that the physicians would allow.
"Her presence," the doctor added, "has had a singularly helpful effect
upon him."
AN OLD ROMAN OF MARIPOSA