down to Rufe’s and consulted him on the subject. It was a very droll
interview, in the large, bare north room of the Silverado Hotel, Mrs.
Hanson’s patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and his wife, and I, and the oaf
himself, all more or less embarrassed. Rufe announced there was nobody
in the neighbourhood but Irvine who could do a day’s work for anybody.
Irvine, thereupon, refused to have any more to do with my service; he
“wouldn’t work no more for a man as had spoke to him’s I had done.” I
found myself on the point of the last humiliation—driven to beseech the
creature whom I had just dismissed with insult: but I took the high hand
in despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine coming back unless
matters were to be differently managed; that I would rather chop firewood
for myself than be fooled; and, in short, the Hansons being eager for the
lad’s hire, I so imposed upon them with merely affected resolution, that
they ended by begging me to re-employ him again, on a solemn promise that
he should be more industrious. The promise, I am bound to say, was kept.
We soon had a fine pile of firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave me
the cold shoulder and spared me his conversation, I thought none the
worse of him for that, nor did I find my days much longer for the
deprivation.
The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy, Mrs.
Hanson. Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she had
more of the small change of sense. It was she who faced Kelmar, for
instance; and perhaps, if she had been alone, Kelmar would have had no
rule within her doors. Rufe, to be sure, had a fine, sober, open-air
attitude of mind, seeing the world without exaggeration—perhaps, we may
even say, without enough; for he lacked, along with the others, that
commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and money. Sanity
itself is a kind of convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on
life plainly, he was unable to perceive that croquet or poker were in any
way less important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even his own
profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play; even that
he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his imagination. His
hunting-suit, for instance, had cost I should be afraid to say how many
bucks—the currency in which he paid his way: it was all befringed, after
the Indian fashion, and it was dear to his heart. The pictorial side of
his daily business was never forgotten. He was even anxious to stand for
his picture in those buckskin hunting clothes; and I remember how he once
warmed almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly
larger, as he planned the composition in which he should appear, “with
the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a crick”
(creek, stream).
There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry. He did not care
for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits. He had never observed scenery.
The world, as it appeared to him, was almost obliterated by his own great
grinning figure in the foreground: Caliban Malvolio. And it seems to me
as if, in the persons of these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides of
rusticity fairly well represented: the hunter living really in nature;
the clodhopper living merely out of society: the one bent up in every
corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing
keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches it; the
other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint dream, and
taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life that he is truly
conscious of nothing but himself. It is only in the fastnesses of
nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man’s beyond, that a creature
endowed with five senses can grow up into the perfection of this crass
and earthy vanity. In towns or the busier country sides, he is roughly
reminded of other men’s existence; and if he learns no more, he learns at
least to fear contempt. But Irvine had come scatheless through life,
conscious only of himself, of his great strength and intelligence; and in
the silence of the universe, to which he did not listen, dwelling with
delight on the sound of his own thoughts.
THE SEA FOGS
A CHANGE in the colour of the light usually called me in the morning. By
a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where the
boards had shrunk and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as stripes
of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to marvel how
the qualities could be combined. At an earlier hour, the heavens in that
quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of the mountain
which shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight in a wonderful
compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would kindle, although
more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our crazy gable. If
I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that struck me awake; if
more lightly, then I would come to myself in that earlier and fairier
fight.
One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me. I rose
and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air. The night had
been very still. The little private gale that blew every evening in our
canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly
blown itself out; in the hours that followed not a sigh of wind had
shaken the treetops; and our barrack, for all its breaches, was less
fresh that morning than of wont. But I had no sooner reached the window
than I forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two
bounds into my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.
The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it was
shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain
slope. But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely changed.
Napa valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody foothills
of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rolled a
great level ocean. It was as though I had gone to bed the night before,
safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the
coast. I had seen these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had risen
and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under
fathoms on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky—a dull sight for
the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid. But to sit aloft
one’s self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of heaven, and
thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was strangely different
and even delightful to the eyes. Far away were hilltops like little
islands. Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices and
poured into all the coves of these rough mountains. The colour of that
fog ocean was a thing never to be forgotten. For an instant, among the
Hebrides and just about sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea
itself. But the white was not so opaline; nor was there, what
surprisingly increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness
over all. Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning
among the weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a
trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble with a
sound.
As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this sea was
not so level as at first sight it appeared to be. Away in the extreme
south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above the general
surface, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone on the horizon
like the topsails of some giant ship. There were huge waves, stationary,
as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea; and yet, as I looked again, I
was not sure but they were moving after all, with a slow and august
advance. And while I was yet doubting, a promontory of the some four or
five miles away, conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single
instant overtaken and swallowed up. It reappeared in a little, with its
pines, but this time as an islet, and only to be swallowed up once more
and then for good. This set me looking nearer, and I saw that in every
cove along the line of mountains the fog was being piled in higher and
higher, as though by some wind that was inaudible to me. I could trace
its progress, one pine tree first growing hazy and then disappearing
after another; although sometimes there was none of this fore-running
haze, but the whole opaque white ocean gave a start and swallowed a piece
of mountain at a gulp. It was to flee these poisonous fogs that I had
left the seaboard, and climbed so high among the mountains. And now,
behold, here came the fog to besiege me in my chosen altitudes, and yet
came so beautifully that my first thought was of welcome.
The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the hills
it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean. An eagle, or some
other very great bird of the mountain, came wheeling over the nearer
pine-tops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as if to look abroad
on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with terror, for the eyries
of her comrades. Then, with a long cry, she disappeared again towards
Lake County and the clearer air. At length it seemed to me as if the
flood were beginning to subside. The old landmarks, by whose
disappearance I had measured its advance, here a crag, there a brave pine
tree, now began, in the inverse order, to make their reappearance into
daylight. I judged all danger of the fog was over. This was not Noah’s
flood; it was but a morning spring, and would now drift out seaward
whence it came. So, mightily relieved, and a good deal exhilarated by
the sight, I went into the house to light the fire.
I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform to
look abroad. The fog ocean had swelled up enormously since last I saw
it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where the Toll House
stands and the road runs through into Lake County, it had already topped
the slope, and was pouring over and down the other side like driving
smoke. The wind had climbed along with it; and though I was still in
calm air, I could see the trees tossing below me, and their long,
strident sighing mounted to me where I stood.
Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the opposite
side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still warded it out of
our canyon. Napa valley and its bounding hills were now utterly blotted
out. The fog, sunny white in the sunshine, was pouring over into Lake
County in a huge, ragged cataract, tossing treetops appearing and
disappearing in the spray. The air struck with a little chill, and set
me coughing. It smelt strong of the fog, like the smell of a
washing-house, but with a shrewd tang of the sea salt.
Had it not been for two things—the sheltering spur which answered as a
dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly engulfed
whatever mounted—our own little platform in the canyon must have been
already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous air. As it was, the
interest of the scene entirely occupied our minds. We were set just out
of the wind, and but just above the fog; we could listen to the voice of
the one as to music on the stage; we could plunge our eyes down into the
other, as into some flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge;
thus we looked on upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition
of the powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape changing from
moment to moment like figures in a dream.
The imagination loves to trifle with what is not. Had this been indeed
the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the emotion would have
been similar in kind. I played with the idea, as the child flees in
delighted terror from the creations of his fancy. The look of the thing
helped me. And when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it was
indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept me coughing, but it
was also part in play.
As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook the upper
surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from what I had
beheld at daybreak. For, first, the sun now fell on it from high
overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a great nor’land moor
country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow. And next the new level
must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred feet higher than the old, so
that only five or six points of all the broken country below me, still
stood out. Napa valley was now one with Sonoma on the west. On the
hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and
through all the gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean, into the
blue clear sunny country on the east. There it was soon lost; for it
fell instantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed;
and the hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the eastern
sky.
Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other side,
the deluge was immense. A spray of thin vapour was thrown high above it,
rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes. The speed of its
course was like a mountain torrent. Here and there a few treetops were
discovered and then whelmed again; and for one second, the bough of a
dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a drowning man. But
still the imagination was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for
something more. Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the
eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled
upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines! And
yet water it was, and sea-water at that—true Pacific billows, only
somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid air among the hilltops.
I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf underwood
of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon Silverado, and
admire the favoured nook in which it lay. The sunny plain of fog was
several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting spur a gigantic
accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with every second, to blow
over and submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past the Toll
House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in the arms of
the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine. About eleven,
however, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress, and I began
to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all. But it was the last
effort. The wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to blow
squally from the mountain summit; and by half-past one, all that world of
sea-fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the south in
little rags of cloud. And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found
ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountainside, with the clear green
country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga blowing in the
air.
This was the great Russian campaign for that season. Now and then, in
the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be seen far down
in Napa Valley; but the heights were not again assailed, nor was the
surrounding world again shut off from Silverado.
THE TOLL HOUSE
THE Toll House, standing alone by the wayside under nodding pines, with
its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and well trodden
croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable door, chewing a straw;
a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the
bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and equally anxious to lend or borrow
books;—dozed all day in the dusty sunshine, more than half asleep. There
were no neighbours, except the Hansons up the hill. The traffic on the
road was infinitesimal; only, at rare intervals, a couple in a waggon, or
a dusty farmer on a springboard, toiling over “the grade” to that
metropolitan hamlet, Calistoga; and, at the fixed hours, the passage of
the stages.
The nearest building was the school-house, down the road; and the
school-ma’am boarded at the Toll House, walking thence in the morning to
the little brown shanty, where she taught the young ones of the district,
and returning thither pretty weary in the afternoon. She had chosen this
outlying situation, I understood, for her health. Mr. Corwin was
consumptive; so was Rufe; so was Mr. Jennings, the engineer. In short,
the place was a kind of small Davos: consumptive folk consorting on a
hilltop in the most unbroken idleness. Jennings never did anything that
I could see, except now and then to fish, and generally to sit about in
the bar and the verandah, waiting for something to happen. Corwin and
Rufe did as little as possible; and if the school-ma’am, poor lady, had
to work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it was over into much
the same dazed beatitude as all the rest.
Her special corner was the parlour—a very genteel room, with Bible
prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Corwin in the height of fashion, a few
years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was not represented), a mirror,
and a selection of dried grasses. A large book was laid religiously on
the table—“From Palace to Hovel,” I believe, its name—full of the raciest
experiences in England. The author had mingled freely with all classes,
the nobility particularly meeting him with open arms; and I must say that
traveller had ill requited his reception. His book, in short, was a
capital instance of the Penny Messalina school of literature; and there
arose from it, in that cool parlour, in that silent, wayside, mountain
inn, a rank atmosphere of gold and blood and “Jenkins,” and the
“Mysteries of London,” and sickening, inverted snobbery, fit to knock you
down. The mention of this book reminds me of another and far racier
picture of our island life. The latter parts of _Rocambole_ are surely
too sparingly consulted in the country which they celebrate. No man’s
education can be said to be complete, nor can he pronounce the world yet
emptied of enjoyment, till he has made the acquaintance of “the Reverend
Patterson, director of the Evangelical Society.” To follow the
evolutions of that reverend gentleman, who goes through scenes in which
even Mr. Duffield would hesitate to place a bishop, is to rise to new
ideas. But, alas! there was no Patterson about the Toll House. Only,
alongside of “From Palace to Hovel,” a sixpenny “Ouida” figured. So
literature, you see, was not unrepresented.
The school-ma’am had friends to stay with her, other school-ma’ams
enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of damsels. They seemed never to
go out, or not beyond the verandah, but sat close in the little parlour,
quietly talking or listening to the wind among the trees. Sleep dwelt in
the Toll House, like a fixture: summer sleep, shallow, soft, and
dreamless. A cuckoo-clock, a great rarity in such a place, hooted at
intervals about the echoing house; and Mr. Jenning would open his eyes
for a moment in the bar, and turn the leaf of a newspaper, and the
resting school-ma’ams in the parlour would be recalled to the
consciousness of their inaction. Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman
might be heard indeed, in the penetralia, pounding dough or rattling
dishes; or perhaps Rufe had called up some of the sleepers for a game of
croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet sounded far away among the
woods: but with these exceptions, it was sleep and sunshine and dust, and
the wind in the pine trees, all day long.
A little before stage time, that castle of indolence awoke. The ostler
threw his straw away and set to his preparations. Mr. Jennings rubbed
his eyes; happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had been waiting for all
day about to happen at last! The boarders gathered in the verandah,
silently giving ear, and gazing down the road with shaded eyes. And as
yet there was no sign for the senses, not a sound, not a tremor of the
mountain road. The birds, to whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is
unknown, must have set down to instinct this premonitory bustle.
And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll House with a
roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not yet time to subside,
before the second was abreast of it. Huge concerns they were,
well-horsed and loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves, the women swathed
in veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol; and as they charged upon
that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding a dust storm, the dead place
blossomed into life and talk and clatter. This the Toll House?—with its
city throng, its jostling shoulders, its infinity of instant business in
the bar? The mind would not receive it! The heartfelt bustle of that
hour is hardly credible; the thrill of the great shower of letters from
the post-bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all
these strangers’ eyes. They paused there but to pass: the blue-clad
China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in the dust coat, the
secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod lady with her troop of
girls; they did but flash and go; they were hull-down for us behind
life’s ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the line. Yet, out of
our great solitude of four and twenty mountain hours, we thrilled to
their momentary presence gauged and divined them, loved and hated; and
stood light-headed in that storm of human electricity. Yes, like
Piccadilly circus, this is also one of life’s crossing-places. Here I
beheld one man, already famous or infamous, a centre of pistol-shots: and
another who, if not yet known to rumour, will fill a column of the Sunday
paper when he comes to hang—a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese
desperado, six long bristles upon either lip; redolent of whiskey,
playing cards, and pistols; swaggering in the bar with the lowest
assumption of the lowest European manners; rapping out blackguard English
oaths in his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one person the
depravities of two races and two civilizations. For all his lust and
vigour, he seemed to look cold upon me from the valley of the shadow of
the gallows. He imagined a vain thing; and while he drained his
cock-tail, Holbein’s death was at his elbow. Once, too, I fell in talk
with another of these flitting strangers—like the rest, in his
shirt-sleeves and all begrimed with dust—and the next minute we were
discussing Paris and London, theatres and wines. To him, journeying from
one human place to another, this was a trifle; but to me! No, Mr.
Lillie, I have not forgotten it.
And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began to ebb. Life runs
in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then, there also, ebbs
into the small hours of the echoing policeman and the lamps and stars.
But the Toll House is far up stream, and near its rural springs; the
bubble of the tide but touches it. Before you had yet grasped your
pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud whips volleyed, and the tide
was gone. North and south had the two stages vanished, the towering dust
subsided in the woods; but there was still an interval before the flush
had fallen on your cheeks, before the ear became once more contented with
the silence, or the seven sleepers of the Toll House dozed back to their
accustomed corners. Yet a little, and the ostler would swing round the
great barrier across the road; and in the golden evening, that dreamy inn
begin to trim its lamps and spread the board for supper.
As I recall the place—the green dell below; the spires of pine; the
sun-warm, scented air; that gray, gabled inn, with its faint stirrings of
life amid the slumber of the mountains—I slowly awake to a sense of
admiration, gratitude, and almost love. A fine place, after all, for a
wasted life to doze away in—the cuckoo clock hooting of its far home
country; the croquet mallets, eloquent of English lawns; the stages daily
bringing news of—the turbulent world away below there; and perhaps once
in the summer, a salt fog pouring overhead with its tale of the Pacific.
A STARRY DRIVE
IN our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy interregnum. The queen
and the crown prince with one accord fell sick; and, as I was sick to
begin with, our lone position on Mount Saint Helena was no longer
tenable, and we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage on the
green. By that time we had begun to realize the difficulties of our
position. We had found what an amount of labour it cost to support life
in our red canyon; and it was the dearest desire of our hearts to get a
China-boy to go along with us when we returned. We could have given him
a whole house to himself, self-contained, as they say in the
advertisements; and on the money question we were prepared to go far.
Kong Sam Kee, the Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and
from day to day it languished on, with protestations on our part and
mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee.
At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the waggon
ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman, with a somewhat
sneering air, produced the boy. He was a handsome, gentlemanly lad,
attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy white; but, alas! he had
heard rumours of Silverado. He know it for a lone place on the
mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house near by, where he might smoke
a pipe of opium o’ nights with other China-boys, and lose his little
earnings at the game of tan; and he first backed out for more money; and
then, when that demand was satisfied, refused to come point-blank. He
was wedded to his wash-houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and we
must go to our mountain servantless. It must have been near half an hour
before we reached that conclusion, standing in the midst of Calistoga
high street under the stars, and the China-boy and Kong Sam Kee singing
their pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the most musical
inflections.
We were not, however, to return alone; for we brought with us Joe Strong,
the painter, a most good-natured comrade and a capital hand at an
omelette. I do not know in which capacity he was most valued—as a cook
or a companion; and he did excellently well in both.
The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly; it must have been
half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully ere we
struck the bottom of the grade. I have never seen such a night. It
seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters that ever
dabbled in starlight. The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless,
changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent’s back. The stars, by
innumerable millions, stuck boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was
bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way. The greater
luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter’s moon. Their light was
dyed in every sort of colour—red, like fire; blue, like steel; green,
like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own
lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch we
know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos of
contesting luminaries—a hurry-burly of stars. Against this the hills and
rugged treetops stood out redly dark.
As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways first grew
pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven dwindled in number
by successive millions; those that still shone had tempered their
exceeding brightness and fallen back into their customary wistful
distance; and the sky declined from its first bewildering splendour into
the appearance of a common night. Slowly this change proceeded, and
still there was no sign of any cause. Then a whiteness like mist was
thrown over the spurs of the mountain. Yet a while, and, as we turned a
corner, a great leap of silver light and net of forest shadows fell
across the road and upon our wondering waggonful; and, swimming low among
the trees, we beheld a strange, misshapen, waning moon, half-tilted on
her back.
“Where are ye when the moon appears?” so the old poet sang,
half-taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly purpose.
“As the sunlight round the dim earth’s midnight tower of shadow
pours,
Streaming past the dim, wide portals,
Viewless to the eyes of mortals,
Till it floods the moon’s pale islet or the morning’s golden shores.”
So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration. And so had the
sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her lit face put out,
one after another, that galaxy of stars. The wonder of the drive was
over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in the air and fit
shadow in the valley where we travelled, we had seen for a little while
that brave display of the midnight heavens. It was gone, but it had
been; nor shall I ever again behold the stars with the same mind. He who
has seen the sea commoved with a great hurricane, thinks of it very
differently from him who has seen it only in a calm. And the difference
between a calm and a hurricane is not greatly more striking than that
between the ordinary face of night and the splendour that shone upon us
in that drive. Two in our waggon knew night as she shines upon the
tropics, but even that bore no comparison. The nameless colour of the
sky, the hues of the star-fire, and the incredible projection of the
stars themselves, starting from their orbits, so that the eye seemed to
distinguish their positions in the hollow of space—these were things that
we had never seen before and shall never see again.
Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our way among the
scents and silence of the forest, reached the top of the grade, wound up
by Hanson’s, and came at last to a stand under the flying gargoyle of the
chute. Sam, who had been lying back, fast asleep, with the moon on his
face, got down, with the remark that it was pleasant “to be home.” The
waggon turned and drove away, the noise gently dying in the woods, and we
clambered up the rough path, Caliban’s great feat of engineering, and
came home to Silverado.
The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows, and over the lumber
on the platform. The one tall pine beside the ledge was steeped in
silver. Away up the canyon, a wild cat welcomed us with three discordant
squalls. But once we had lit a candle, and began to review our
improvements, homely in either sense, and count our stores, it was
wonderful what a feeling of possession and permanence grow up in the
hearts of the lords of Silverado. A bed had still to be made up for
Strong, and the morning’s water to be fetched, with clinking pail; and as
we set about these household duties, and showed off our wealth and
conveniences before the stranger, and had a glass of wine, I think, in
honour of our return, and trooped at length one after another up the
flying bridge of plank, and lay down to sleep in our shattered,
moon-pierced barrack, we were among the happiest sovereigns in the world,
and certainly ruled over the most contented people. Yet, in our absence,
the palace had been sacked. Wild cats, so the Hansons said, had broken
in and carried off a side of bacon, a hatchet, and two knives.
EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE
NO one could live at Silverado and not be curious about the story of the
mine. We were surrounded by so many evidences of expense and toil, we
lived so entirely in the wreck of that great enterprise, like mites in
the ruins of a cheese, that the idea of the old din and bustle haunted
our repose. Our own house, the forge, the dump, the chutes, the rails,
the windlass, the mass of broken plant; the two tunnels, one far below in
the green dell, the other on the platform where we kept our wine; the
deep shaft, with the sun-glints and the water-drops; above all, the
ledge, that great gaping slice out of the mountain shoulder, propped
apart by wooden wedges, on whose immediate margin, high above our heads,
the one tall pine precariously nodded—these stood for its greatness;
while, the dog-hutch, boot-jacks, old boots, old tavern bills, and the
very beds that we inherited from bygone miners, put in human touches and
realized for us the story of the past.
I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas near the forge,
with just a look over the dump on the green world below, and seen the sun
lying broad among the wreck, and heard the silence broken only by the
tinkling water in the shaft, or a stir of the royal family about the
battered palace, and my mind has gone back to the epoch of the Stanleys
and the Chapmans, with a grand _tutti_ of pick and drill, hammer and
anvil, echoing about the canyon; the assayer hard at it in our
dining-room; the carts below on the road, and their cargo of red mineral
bounding and thundering down the iron chute. And now all gone—all fallen
away into this sunny silence and desertion: a family of squatters dining
in the assayer’s office, making their beds in the big sleeping room
erstwhile so crowded, keeping their wine in the tunnel that once rang
with picks.
But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its turn into decay, was
once but a mushroom, and had succeeded to other mines and other flitting
cities. Twenty years ago, away down the glen on the Lake County side
there was a place, Jonestown by name, with two thousand inhabitants
dwelling under canvas, and one roofed house for the sale of whiskey.
Round on the western side of Mount Saint Helena, there was at the same
date, a second large encampment, its name, if it ever had one, lost for
me. Both of these have perished, leaving not a stick and scarce a memory
behind them. Tide after tide of hopeful miners have thus flowed and
ebbed about the mountain, coming and going, now by lone prospectors, now
with a rush. Last, in order of time came Silverado, reared the big mill,
in the valley, founded the town which is now represented, monumentally,
by Hanson’s, pierced all these slaps and shafts and tunnels, and in turn
declined and died away.
“Our noisy years seem moments in the wake
Of the eternal silence.”
As to the success of Silverado in its time of being, two reports were
current. According to the first, six hundred thousand dollars were taken
out of that great upright seam, that still hung open above us on crazy
wedges. Then the ledge pinched out, and there followed, in quest of the
remainder, a great drifting and tunnelling in all directions, and a great
consequent effusion of dollars, until, all parties being sick of the
expense, the mine was deserted, and the town decamped. According to the
second version, told me with much secrecy of manner, the whole affair,
mine, mill, and town, were parts of one majestic swindle. There had
never come any silver out of any portion of the mine; there was no silver
to come. At midnight trains of packhorses might have been observed
winding by devious tracks about the shoulder of the mountain. They came
from far away, from Amador or Placer, laden with silver in “old cigar
boxes.” They discharged their load at Silverado, in the hour of sleep;
and before the morning they were gone again with their mysterious drivers
to their unknown source. In this way, twenty thousand pounds’ worth of
silver was smuggled in under cover of night, in these old cigar boxes;
mixed with Silverado mineral; carted down to the mill; crushed,
amalgated, and refined, and despatched to the city as the proper product
of the mine. Stock-jobbing, if it can cover such expenses, must be a
profitable business in San Francisco.
I give these two versions as I got them. But I place little reliance on
either, my belief in history having been greatly shaken. For it chanced
that I had come to dwell in Silverado at a critical hour; great events in
its history were about to happen—did happen, as I am led to believe; nay,
and it will be seen that I played a part in that revolution myself. And
yet from first to last I never had a glimmer of an idea what was going
on; and even now, after full reflection, profess myself at sea. That
there was some obscure intrigue of the cigar-box order, and that I, in
the character of a wooden puppet, set pen to paper in the interest of
somebody, so much, and no more, is certain.
Silverado, then under my immediate sway, belonged to one whom I will call
a Mr. Ronalds. I only knew him through the extraordinarily distorting
medium of local gossip, now as a momentous jobber; now as a dupe to point
an adage; and again, and much more probably, as an ordinary Christian
gentleman like you or me, who had opened a mine and worked it for a while
with better and worse fortune. So, through a defective window-pane, you
may see the passer-by shoot up into a hunchbacked giant or dwindle into a
potbellied dwarf.
To Ronalds, at least, the mine belonged; but the notice by which he held
it would ran out upon the 30th of June—or rather, as I suppose, it had
run out already, and the month of grace would expire upon that day, after
which any American citizen might post a notice of his own, and make
Silverado his. This, with a sort of quiet slyness, Rufe told me at an
early period of our acquaintance. There was no silver, of course; the
mine “wasn’t worth nothing, Mr. Stevens,” but there was a deal of old
iron and wood around, and to gain possession of this old wood and iron,
and get a right to the water, Rufe proposed, if I had no objections, to
“jump the claim.”
Of course, I had no objection. But I was filled with wonder. If all he
wanted was the wood and iron, what, in the name of fortune, was to
prevent him taking them? “His right there was none to dispute.” He
might lay hands on all to-morrow, as the wild cats had laid hands upon
our knives and hatchet. Besides, was this mass of heavy mining plant
worth transportation? If it was, why had not the rightful owners carted
it away? If it was, would they not preserve their title to these
movables, even after they had lost their title to the mine? And if it
were not, what the better was Rufe? Nothing would grow at Silverado;
there was even no wood to cut; beyond a sense of property, there was
nothing to be gained. Lastly, was it at all credible that Ronalds would
forget what Rufe remembered? The days of grace were not yet over: any
fine morning he might appear, paper in hand, and enter for another year
on his inheritance. However, it was none of my business; all seemed
legal; Rufe or Ronalds, all was one to me.
On the morning of the 27th, Mrs. Hanson appeared with the milk as usual,
in her sun-bonnet. The time would be out on Tuesday, she reminded us,
and bade me be in readiness to play my part, though I had no idea what it
was to be. And suppose Ronalds came? we asked. She received the idea
with derision, laughing aloud with all her fine teeth. He could not find
the mine to save his life, it appeared, without Rufe to guide him. Last
year, when he came, they heard him “up and down the road a hollerin’ and
a raisin’ Cain.” And at last he had to come to the Hansons in despair,
and bid Rufe, “Jump into your pants and shoes, and show me where this old
mine is, anyway!” Seeing that Ronalds had laid out so much money in the
spot, and that a beaten road led right up to the bottom of the clump, I
thought this a remarkable example. The sense of locality must be
singularly in abeyance in the case of Ronalds.
That same evening, supper comfortably over, Joe Strong busy at work on a
drawing of the dump and the opposite hills, we were all out on the
platform together, sitting there, under the tented heavens, with the same
sense of privacy as if we had been cabined in a parlour, when the sound
of brisk footsteps came mounting up the path. We pricked our ears at
this, for the tread seemed lighter and firmer than was usual with our
country neighbours. And presently, sure enough, two town gentlemen, with
cigars and kid gloves, came debauching past the house. They looked in
that place like a blasphemy.
“Good evening,” they said. For none of us had stirred; we all sat stiff
with wonder.
“Good evening,” I returned; and then, to put them at their ease, “A stiff
climb,” I added.
“Yes,” replied the leader; “but we have to thank you for this path.”
I did not like the man’s tone. None of us liked it. He did not seem
embarrassed by the meeting, but threw us his remarks like favours, and
strode magisterially by us towards the shaft and tunnel.
Presently we heard his voice raised to his companion. “We drifted every
sort of way, but couldn’t strike the ledge.” Then again: “It pinched out
here.” And once more: “Every minor that ever worked upon it says there’s
bound to be a ledge somewhere.”
These were the snatches of his talk that reached us, and they had a
damning significance. We, the lords of Silverado, had come face to face
with our superior. It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways
of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation. I
liked well enough to be a squatter when there was none but Hanson by;
before Ronalds, I will own, I somewhat quailed. I hastened to do him
fealty, said I gathered he was the Squattee, and apologized. He
threatened me with ejection, in a manner grimly pleasant—more pleasant to
him, I fancy, than to me; and then he passed off into praises of the
former state of Silverado. “It was the busiest little mining town you
ever saw:” a population of between a thousand and fifteen hundred souls,
the engine in full blast, the mill newly erected; nothing going but
champagne, and hope the order of the day. Ninety thousand dollars came
out; a hundred and forty thousand were put in, making a net loss of fifty
thousand. The last days, I gathered, the days of John Stanley, were not
so bright; the champagne had ceased to flow, the population was already
moving elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to wither in the branch before
it was cut at the root. The last shot that was fired knocked over the
stove chimney, and made that hole in the roof of our barrack, through
which the sun was wont to visit slug-a-beds towards afternoon. A noisy,
last shot, to inaugurate the days of silence.
Throughout this interview, my conscience was a good deal exercised; and I
was moved to throw myself on my knees and own the intended treachery.
But then I had Hanson to consider. I was in much the same position as
Old Rowley, that royal humourist, whom “the rogue had taken into his
confidence.” And again, here was Ronalds on the spot. He must know the
day of the month as well as Hanson and I. If a broad hint were
necessary, he had the broadest in the world. For a large board had been
nailed by the crown prince on the very front of our house, between the
door and window, painted in cinnabar—the pigment of the country—with
doggrel rhymes and contumelious pictures, and announcing, in terms
unnecessarily figurative, that the trick was already played, the claim
already jumped, and Master Sam the legitimate successor of Mr. Ronalds.
But no, nothing could save that man; _quem deus vult perdere_, _prius
dementat_. As he came so he went, and left his rights depending.
Late at night, by Silverado reckoning, and after we were all abed, Mrs.
Hanson returned to give us the newest of her news. It was like a scene
in a ship’s steerage: all of us abed in our different tiers, the single
candle struggling with the darkness, and this plump, handsome woman,
seated on an upturned valise beside the bunks, talking and showing her
fine teeth, and laughing till the rafters rang. Any ship, to be sure,
with a hundredth part as many holes in it as our barrack, must long ago
have gone to her last port. Up to that time I had always imagined Mrs.
Hanson’s loquacity to be mere incontinence, that she said what was
uppermost for the pleasure of speaking, and laughed and laughed again as
a kind of musical accompaniment. But I now found there was an art in it,
I found it less communicative than silence itself. I wished to know why
Ronalds had come; how he had found his way without Rufe; and why, being
on the spot, he had not refreshed his title. She talked interminably on,
but her replies were never answers. She fled under a cloud of words; and
when I had made sure that she was purposely eluding me, I dropped the
subject in my turn, and let her rattle where she would.
She had come to tell us that, instead of waiting for Tuesday, the claim
was to be jumped on the morrow. How? If the time were not out, it was
impossible. Why? If Ronalds had come and gone, and done nothing, there
was the less cause for hurry. But again I could reach no satisfaction.
The claim was to be jumped next morning, that was all that she would
condescend upon.
And yet it was not jumped the next morning, nor yet the next, and a whole
week had come and gone before we heard more of this exploit. That day
week, however, a day of great heat, Hanson, with a little roll of paper
in his hand, and the eternal pipe alight; Breedlove, his large, dull
friend, to act, I suppose, as witness; Mrs. Hanson, in her Sunday best;
and all the children, from the oldest to the youngest;—arrived in a
procession, tailing one behind another up the path. Caliban was absent,
but he had been chary of his friendly visits since the row; and with that
exception, the whole family was gathered together as for a marriage or a
christening. Strong was sitting at work, in the shade of the dwarf
madronas near the forge; and they planted themselves about him in a
circle, one on a stone, another on the waggon rails, a third on a piece
of plank. Gradually the children stole away up the canyon to where there
was another chute, somewhat smaller than the one across the dump; and
down this chute, for the rest of the afternoon, they poured one avalanche
of stones after another, waking the echoes of the glen. Meantime we
elders sat together on the platform, Hanson and his friend smoking in
silence like Indian sachems, Mrs. Hanson rattling on as usual with an
adroit volubility, saying nothing, but keeping the party at their ease
like a courtly hostess.
Not a word occurred about the business of the day. Once, twice, and
thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was discouraged by the stoic
apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring verbiage of his wife.
There is nothing of the Indian brave about me, and I began to grill with
impatience. At last, like a highway robber, I cornered Hanson, and bade
him stand and deliver his business. Thereupon he gravely rose, as though
to hint that this was not a proper place, nor the subject one suitable
for squaws, and I, following his example, led him up the plank into our
barrack. There he bestowed himself on a box, and unrolled his papers
with fastidious deliberation. There were two sheets of note-paper, and
an old mining notice, dated May 30th, 1879, part print, part manuscript,
and the latter much obliterated by the rains. It was by this identical
piece of paper that the mine had been held last year. For thirteen
months it had endured the weather and the change of seasons on a cairn
behind the shoulder of the canyon; and it was now my business, spreading
it before me on the table, and sitting on a valise, to copy its terms,
with some necessary changes, twice over on the two sheets of note-paper.
One was then to be placed on the same cairn—a “mound of rocks” the notice
put it; and the other to be lodged for registration.
Rufe watched me, silently smoking, till I came to the place for the
locator’s name at the end of the first copy; and when I proposed that he
should sign, I thought I saw a scare in his eye. “I don’t think that’ll
be necessary,” he said slowly; “just you write it down.” Perhaps this
mighty hunter, who was the most active member of the local school board,
could not write. There would be nothing strange in that. The constable
of Calistoga is, and has been for years, a bed-ridden man, and, if I
remember rightly, blind. He had more need of the emoluments than
another, it was explained; and it was easy for him to “depytize,” with a
strong accent on the last. So friendly and so free are popular
institutions.
When I had done my scrivening, Hanson strolled out, and addressed
Breedlove, “Will you step up here a bit?” and after they had disappeared
a little while into the chaparral and madrona thicket, they came back
again, minus a notice, and the deed was done. The claim was jumped; a
tract of mountain-side, fifteen hundred feet long by six hundred wide,
with all the earth’s precious bowels, had passed from Ronalds to Hanson,
and, in the passage, changed its name from the “Mammoth” to the
“Calistoga.” I had tried to get Rufe to call it after his wife, after
himself, and after Garfield, the Republican Presidential candidate of the
hour—since then elected, and, alas! dead—but all was in vain. The claim
had once been called the Calistoga before, and he seemed to feel safety
in returning to that.
And so the history of that mine became once more plunged in darkness, lit
only by some monster pyrotechnical displays of gossip. And perhaps the
most curious feature of the whole matter is this: that we should have
dwelt in this quiet corner of the mountains, with not a dozen neighbours,
and yet struggled all the while, like desperate swimmers, in this sea of
falsities and contradictions. Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.
TOILS AND PLEASURES
I MUST try to convey some notion of our life, of how the days passed and
what pleasure we took in them, of what there was to do and how we set
about doing it, in our mountain hermitage. The house, after we had
repaired the worst of the damages, and filled in some of the doors and
windows with white cotton cloth, became a healthy and a pleasant
dwelling-place, always airy and dry, and haunted by the outdoor perfumes
of the glen. Within, it had the look of habitation, the human look. You
had only to go into the third room, which we did not use, and see its
stones, its sifting earth, its tumbled litter; and then return to our
lodging, with the beds made, the plates on the rack, the pail of bright
water behind the door, the stove crackling in a corner, and perhaps the
table roughly laid against a meal,—and man’s order, the little clean
spots that he creates to dwell in, were at once contrasted with the rich
passivity of nature. And yet our house was everywhere so wrecked and
shattered, the air came and went so freely, the sun found so many
portholes, the golden outdoor glow shone in so many open chinks, that we
enjoyed, at the same time, some of the comforts of a roof and much of the
gaiety and brightness of al fresco life. A single shower of rain, to be
sure, and we should have been drowned out like mice. But ours was a
Californian summer, and an earthquake was a far likelier accident than a
shower of rain.
Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house for kitchen and bedroom,
and used the platform as our summer parlour. The sense of privacy, as I
have said already, was complete. We could look over the clump on miles
of forest and rough hilltop; our eyes commanded some of Napa Valley,
where the train ran, and the little country townships sat so close
together along the line of the rail. But here there was no man to
intrude. None but the Hansons were our visitors. Even they came but at
long intervals, or twice daily, at a stated hour, with milk. So our
days, as they were never interrupted, drew out to the greater length;
hour melted insensibly into hour; the household duties, though they were
many, and some of them laborious, dwindled into mere islets of business
in a sea of sunny day-time; and it appears to me, looking back, as though
the far greater part of our life at Silverado had been passed, propped
upon an elbow, or seated on a plank, listening to the silence that there
is among the hills.
My work, it is true, was over early in the morning. I rose before any
one else, lit the stove, put on the water to boil, and strolled forth
upon the platform to wait till it was ready. Silverado would then be
still in shadow, the sun shining on the mountain higher up. A clean
smell of trees, a smell of the earth at morning, hung in the air.
Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not singing, but awkwardly
chirruping among the green madronas, and the sound was cheerful, natural,
and stirring. It did not hold the attention, nor interrupt the thread of
meditation, like a blackbird or a nightingale; it was mere woodland
prattle, of which the mind was conscious like a perfume. The freshness
of these morning seasons remained with me far on into the day.
As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and that,
beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of kindling,
which it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of wood, ended my
domestic duties for the day. Thenceforth my wife laboured single-handed
in the palace, and I lay or wandered on the platform at my own sweet
will. The little corner near the forge, where we found a refuge under
the madronas from the unsparing early sun, is indeed connected in my mind
with some nightmare encounters over Euclid, and the Latin Grammar. These
were known as Sam’s lessons. He was supposed to be the victim and the
sufferer; but here there must have been some misconception, for whereas I
generally retired to bed after one of these engagements, he was no sooner
set free than he dashed up to the Chinaman’s house, where he had
installed a printing press, that great element of civilization, and the
sound of his labours would be faintly audible about the canyon half the
day.
To walk at all was a laborious business; the foot sank and slid, the
boots were cut to pieces, among sharp, uneven, rolling stones. When we
crossed the platform in any direction, it was usual to lay a course,
following as much as possible the line of waggon rails. Thus, if water
were to be drawn, the water-carrier left the house along some tilting
planks that we had laid down, and not laid down very well. These carried
him to that great highroad, the railway; and the railway served him as
far as to the head of the shaft. But from thence to the spring and back
again he made the best of his unaided way, staggering among the stones,
and wading in low growth of the calcanthus, where the rattlesnakes lay
hissing at his passage. Yet I liked to draw water. It was pleasant to
dip the gray metal pail into the clean, colourless, cool water; pleasant
to carry it back, with the water ripping at the edge, and a broken
sunbeam quivering in the midst.
But the extreme roughness of the walking confined us in common practice
to the platform, and indeed to those parts of it that were most easily
accessible along the line of rails. The rails came straight forward from
the shaft, here and there overgrown with little green bushes, but still
entire, and still carrying a truck, which it was Sam’s delight to trundle
to and fro by the hour with various ladings. About midway down the
platform, the railroad trended to the right, leaving our house and
coasting along the far side within a few yards of the madronas and the
forge, and not far of the latter, ended in a sort of platform on the edge
of the dump. There, in old days, the trucks were tipped, and their load
sent thundering down the chute. There, besides, was the only spot where
we could approach the margin of the dump. Anywhere else, you took your
life in your right hand when you came within a yard and a half to peer
over. For at any moment the dump might begin to slide and carry you down
and bury you below its ruins. Indeed, the neighbourhood of an old mine
is a place beset with dangers. For as still as Silverado was, at any
moment the report of rotten wood might tell us that the platform had
fallen into the shaft; the dump might begin to pour into the road below;
or a wedge slip in the great upright seam, and hundreds of tons of
mountain bury the scene of our encampment.
I have already compared the dump to a rampart, built certainly by some
rude people, and for prehistoric wars. It was likewise a frontier. All
below was green and woodland, the tall pines soaring one above another,
each with a firm outline and full spread of bough. All above was arid,
rocky, and bald. The great spout of broken mineral, that had dammed the
canyon up, was a creature of man’s handiwork, its material dug out with a
pick and powder, and spread by the service of the tracks. But nature
herself, in that upper district, seemed to have had an eye to nothing
besides mining; and even the natural hill-side was all sliding gravel and
precarious boulder. Close at the margin of the well leaves would decay
to skeletons and mummies, which at length some stronger gust would carry
clear of the canyon and scatter in the subjacent woods. Even moisture
and decaying vegetable matter could not, with all nature’s alchemy,
concoct enough soil to nourish a few poor grasses. It is the same, they
say, in the neighbourhood of all silver mines; the nature of that
precious rock being stubborn with quartz and poisonous with cinnabar.
Both were plenty in our Silverado. The stones sparkled white in the
sunshine with quartz; they were all stained red with cinnabar. Here,
doubtless, came the Indians of yore to paint their faces for the
war-path; and cinnabar, if I remember rightly, was one of the few
articles of Indian commerce. Now, Sam had it in his undisturbed
possession, to pound down and slake, and paint his rude designs with.
But to me it had always a fine flavour of poetry, compounded out of
Indian story and Hawthornden’s allusion:
“Desire, alas! I desire a Zeuxis new,
From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies
Most bright cinoper . . .”
Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado platform has another side
to it. Though there was no soil, and scarce a blade of grass, yet out of
these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken boulders, a flower garden bloomed
as at home in a conservatory. Calcanthus crept, like a hardy weed, all
over our rough parlour, choking the railway, and pushing forth its rusty,
aromatic cones from between two blocks of shattered mineral. Azaleas
made a big snow-bed just above the well. The shoulder of the hill waved
white with Mediterranean heath. In the crannies of the ledge and about
the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung in clusters.
Even the low, thorny chaparral was thick with pea-like blossom. Close at
the foot of our path nutmegs prospered, delightful to the sight and
smell. At sunrise, and again late at night, the scent of the sweet bay
trees filled the canyon, and the down-blowing night wind must have borne
it hundreds of feet into the outer air.
All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted. The madrona was here no
bigger than the manzanita; the bay was but a stripling shrub; the very
pines, with four or five exceptions in all our upper canyon, were not so
tall as myself, or but a little taller, and the most of them came lower
than my waist. For a prosperous forest tree, we must look below, where
the glen was crowded with green spires. But for flowers and ravishing
perfume, we had none to envy: our heap of road-metal was thick with
bloom, like a hawthorn in the front of June; our red, baking angle in the
mountain, a laboratory of poignant scents. It was an endless wonder to
my mind, as I dreamed about the platform, following the progress of the
shadows, where the madrona with its leaves, the azalea and calcanthus
with their blossoms, could find moisture to support such thick, wet, waxy
growths, or the bay tree collect the ingredients of its perfume. But
there they all grew together, healthy, happy, and happy-making, as though
rooted in a fathom of black soil.
Nor was it only vegetable life that prospered. We had, indeed, few
birds, and none that had much of a voice or anything worthy to be called
a song. My morning comrade had a thin chirp, unmusical and monotonous,
but friendly and pleasant to hear. He had but one rival: a fellow with
an ostentatious cry of near an octave descending, not one note of which
properly followed another. This is the only bird I ever knew with a
wrong ear; but there was something enthralling about his performance.
You listened and listened, thinking each time he must surely get it
right; but no, it was always wrong, and always wrong the same way. Yet
he seemed proud of his song, delivered it with execution and a manner of
his own, and was charming to his mate. A very incorrect, incessant human
whistler had thus a chance of knowing how his own music pleased the
world. Two great birds—eagles, we thought—dwelt at the top of the
canyon, among the crags that were printed on the sky. Now and again, but
very rarely, they wheeled high over our heads in silence, or with a
distant, dying scream; and then, with a fresh impulse, winged fleetly
forward, dipped over a hilltop, and were gone. They seemed solemn and
ancient things, sailing the blue air: perhaps co-oeval with the mountain
where they haunted, perhaps emigrants from Rome, where the glad legions
may have shouted to behold them on the morn of battle.
But if birds were rare, the place abounded with rattlesnakes—the
rattlesnake’s nest, it might have been named. Wherever we brushed among
the bushes, our passage woke their angry buzz. One dwelt habitually in
the wood-pile, and sometimes, when we came for firewood, thrust up his
small head between two logs, and hissed at the intrusion. The rattle has
a legendary credit; it is said to be awe-inspiring, and, once heard, to
stamp itself for ever in the memory. But the sound is not at all
alarming; the hum of many insects, and the buzz of the wasp convince the
ear of danger quite as readily. As a matter of fact, we lived for weeks
in Silverado, coming and going, with rattles sprung on every side, and it
never occurred to us to be afraid. I used to take sun-baths and do
calisthenics in a certain pleasant nook among azalea and calcanthus, the
rattles whizzing on every side like spinning-wheels, and the combined
hiss or buzz rising louder and angrier at any sudden movement; but I was
never in the least impressed, nor ever attacked. It was only towards the
end of our stay, that a man down at Calistoga, who was expatiating on the
terrifying nature of the sound, gave me at last a very good imitation;
and it burst on me at once that we dwelt in the very metropolis of deadly
snakes, and that the rattle was simply the commonest noise in Silverado.
Immediately on our return, we attacked the Hansons on the subject. They
had formerly assured us that our canyon was favoured, like Ireland, with
an entire immunity from poisonous reptiles; but, with the perfect
inconsequence of the natural man, they were no sooner found out than they
went off at score in the contrary direction, and we were told that in no
part of the world did rattlesnakes attain to such a monstrous bigness as
among the warm, flower-dotted rocks of Silverado. This is a contribution
rather to the natural history of the Hansons, than to that of snakes.
One person, however, better served by his instinct, had known the rattle
from the first; and that was Chuchu, the dog. No rational creature has
ever led an existence more poisoned by terror than that dog’s at
Silverado. Every whiz of the rattle made him bound. His eyes rolled; he
trembled; he would be often wet with sweat. One of our great mysteries
was his terror of the mountain. A little away above our nook, the
azaleas and almost all the vegetation ceased. Dwarf pines not big enough
to be Christmas trees, grew thinly among loose stone and gravel scaurs.
Here and there a big boulder sat quiescent on a knoll, having paused
there till the next rain in his long slide down the mountain. There was
here no ambuscade for the snakes, you could see clearly where you trod;
and yet the higher I went, the more abject and appealing became Chuchu’s
terror. He was an excellent master of that composite language in which
dogs communicate with men, and he would assure me, on his honour, that
there was some peril on the mountain; appeal to me, by all that I held
holy, to turn back; and at length, finding all was in vain, and that I
still persisted, ignorantly foolhardy, he would suddenly whip round and
make a bee-line down the slope for Silverado, the gravel showering after
him. What was he afraid of? There were admittedly brown bears and
California lions on the mountain; and a grizzly visited Rufe’s poultry
yard not long before, to the unspeakable alarm of Caliban, who dashed out
to chastise the intruder, and found himself, by moonlight, face to face
with such a tartar. Something at least there must have been: some hairy,
dangerous brute lodged permanently among the rocks a little to the
north-west of Silverado, spending his summer thereabout, with wife and
family.
And there was, or there had been, another animal. Once, under the broad
daylight, on that open stony hillside, where the baby pines were growing,
scarcely tall enough to be a badge for a MacGregor’s bonnet, I came
suddenly upon his innocent body, lying mummified by the dry air and sun:
a pigmy kangaroo. I am ingloriously ignorant of these subjects; had
never heard of such a beast; thought myself face to face with some
incomparable sport of nature; and began to cherish hopes of immortality
in science. Rarely have I been conscious of a stranger thrill than when
I raised that singular creature from the stones, dry as a board, his
innocent heart long quiet, and all warm with sunshine. His long hind
legs were stiff, his tiny forepaws clutched upon his breast, as if to
leap; his poor life cut short upon that mountain by some unknown
accident. But the kangaroo rat, it proved, was no such unknown animal;
and my discovery was nothing.
Crickets were not wanting. I thought I could make out exactly four of
them, each with a corner of his own, who used to make night musical at
Silverado. In the matter of voice, they far excelled the birds, and
their ringing whistle sounded from rock to rock, calling and replying the
same thing, as in a meaningless opera. Thus, children in full health and
spirits shout together, to the dismay of neighbours; and their idle,
happy, deafening vociferations rise and fall, like the song of the
crickets. I used to sit at night on the platform, and wonder why these
creatures were so happy; and what was wrong with man that he also did not
wind up his days with an hour or two of shouting; but I suspect that all
long-lived animals are solemn. The dogs alone are hardly used by nature;
and it seems a manifest injustice for poor Chuchu to die in his teens,
after a life so shadowed and troubled, continually shaken with alarm, and
the tear of elegant sentiment permanently in his eye.
There was another neighbour of ours at Silverado, small but very active,
a destructive fellow. This was a black, ugly fly—a bore, the Hansons
called him—who lived by hundreds in the boarding of our house. He
entered by a round hole, more neatly pierced than a man could do it with
a gimlet, and he seems to have spent his life in cutting out the interior
of the plank, but whether as a dwelling or a store-house, I could never
find. When I used to lie in bed in the morning for a rest—we had no
easy-chairs in Silverado—I would hear, hour after hour, the sharp cutting
sound of his labours, and from time to time a dainty shower of sawdust
would fall upon the blankets. There lives no more industrious creature
than a bore.
And now that I have named to the reader all our animals and insects
without exception—only I find I have forgotten the flies—he will be able
to appreciate the singular privacy and silence of our days. It was not
only man who was excluded: animals, the song of birds, the lowing of
cattle, the bleating of sheep, clouds even, and the variations of the
weather, were here also wanting; and as, day after day, the sky was one
dome of blue, and the pines below us stood motionless in the still air,
so the hours themselves were marked out from each other only by the
series of our own affairs, and the sun’s great period as he ranged
westward through the heavens. The two birds cackled a while in the early
morning; all day the water tinkled in the shaft, the bores ground sawdust
in the planking of our crazy palace—infinitesimal sounds; and it was only
with the return of night that any change would fall on our surroundings,
or the four crickets begin to flute together in the dark.
Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the pleasure that we took in the
approach of evening. Our day was not very long, but it was very tiring.
To trip along unsteady planks or wade among shifting stones, to go to and
fro for water, to clamber down the glen to the Toll House after meat and
letters, to cook, to make fires and beds, were all exhausting to the
body. Life out of doors, besides, under the fierce eye of day, draws
largely on the animal spirits. There are certain hours in the afternoon
when a man, unless he is in strong health or enjoys a vacant mind, would
rather creep into a cool corner of a house and sit upon the chairs of
civilization. About that time, the sharp stones, the planks, the
upturned boxes of Silverado, began to grow irksome to my body; I set out
on that hopeless, never-ending quest for a more comfortable posture; I
would be fevered and weary of the staring sun; and just then he would
begin courteously to withdraw his countenance, the shadows lengthened,
the aromatic airs awoke, and an indescribable but happy change announced
the coming of the night.
The hours of evening, when we were once curtained in the friendly dark,
sped lightly. Even as with the crickets, night brought to us a certain
spirit of rejoicing. It was good to taste the air; good to mark the
dawning of the stars, as they increased their glittering company; good,
too, to gather stones, and send them crashing down the chute, a wave of
light. It seemed, in some way, the reward and the fulfilment of the day.
So it is when men dwell in the open air; it is one of the simple
pleasures that we lose by living cribbed and covered in a house, that,
though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day’s
departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us;
and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the
absence of the load.
Our nights wore never cold, and they were always still, but for one
remarkable exception. Regularly, about nine o’clock, a warm wind sprang
up, and blew for ten minutes, or maybe a quarter of an hour, right down
the canyon, fanning it well out, airing it as a mother airs the night
nursery before the children sleep. As far as I could judge, in the clear
darkness of the night, this wind was purely local: perhaps dependant on
the configuration of the glen. At least, it was very welcome to the hot
and weary squatters; and if we were not abed already, the springing up of
this lilliputian valley-wind would often be our signal to retire.
I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first to rise. Many a
night I have strolled about the platform, taking a bath of darkness
before I slept. The rest would be in bed, and even from the forge I
could hear them talking together from bunk to bunk. A single candle in
the neck of a pint bottle was their only illumination; and yet the old
cracked house seemed literally bursting with the light. It shone keen as
a knife through all the vertical chinks; it struck upward through the
broken shingles; and through the eastern door and window, it fell in a
great splash upon the thicket and the overhanging rock. You would have
said a conflagration, or at the least a roaring forge; and behold, it was
but a candle. Or perhaps it was yet more strange to see the procession
moving bedwards round the corner of the house, and up the plank that
brought us to the bedroom door; under the immense spread of the starry
heavens, down in a crevice of the giant mountain these few human shapes,
with their unshielded taper, made so disproportionate a figure in the eye
and mind. But the more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his
doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men. Miles and miles away
upon the opposite hill-tops, if there were any hunter belated or any
traveller who had lost his way, he must have stood, and watched and
wondered, from the time the candle issued from the door of the assayer’s
office till it had mounted the plank and disappeared again into the
miners’ dormitory.