I am going to spin you the yarn of the foundering of the _Fortuna_
exactly as an old lake captain on a Huron steamer once span it for me by
Great Manitoulin Island. It is a strange and a weird story; and if I
can't give you the dialect in which he told it, you must forgive an
English tongue its native accent for the sake of the curious Yankee tale
that underlies it.
Captain Montague Beresford Pierpoint was hardly the sort of man you
would have expected to find behind the counter of a small shanty bank at
Aylmer's Pike, Colorado. There was an engaging English frankness, an
obvious honesty and refinement of manner about him, which suited very
oddly with the rough habits and rougher western speech of the mining
population in whose midst he lived. And yet, Captain Pierpoint had
succeeded in gaining the confidence and respect of those strange
outcasts of civilization by some indescribable charm of address and some
invisible talisman of quiet good-fellowship, which caused him to be more
universally believed in than any other man whatsoever at Aylmer's Pike.
Indeed, to say so much is rather to underrate the uniqueness of his
position; for it might, perhaps, be truer to say that Captain Pierpoint
was the only man in the place in whom any one believed at all in any
way. He was an honest-spoken, quiet, unobtrusive sort of man, who walked
about fearlessly without a revolver, and never gambled either in mining
shares or at poker; so that, to the simple-minded, unsophisticated
rogues and vagabonds of Aylmer's Pike, he seemed the very incarnation of
incorruptible commercial honour. They would have trusted all their
earnings and winnings without hesitation to Captain Pierpoint's bare
word; and when they did so, they knew that Captain Pierpoint had always
had the money forthcoming, on demand, without a moment's delay or a
single prevarication.
Captain Pierpoint walked very straight and erect, as becomes a man of
conspicuous uprightness; and there was a certain tinge of military
bearing in his manner which seemed at first sight sufficiently to
justify his popular title. But he himself made no false pretences upon
that head; he freely acknowledged that he had acquired the position of
captain, not in her Britannic Majesty's Guards, as the gossip of
Aylmer's Pike sometimes asserted, but in the course of his earlier
professional engagements as skipper of a Lake Superior grain-vessel.
Though he hinted at times that he was by no means distantly connected
with the three distinguished families whose names he bore, he did not
attempt to exalt his rank or birth unduly, admitting that he was only a
Canadian sailor by trade, thrown by a series of singular circumstances
into the position of a Colorado banker. The one thing he really
understood, he would tell his mining friends, was the grain-trade on the
upper lakes; for finance he had but a single recommendation, and that
was that if people trusted him he could never deceive them.
If any man had set up a bank in Aylmer's Point with an iron strong-room,
a lot of electric bells, and an obtrusive display of fire-arms and
weapons, it is tolerably certain that that bank would have been promptly
robbed and gutted within its first week of existence by open violence.
Five or six of the boys would have banded themselves together into a
body of housebreakers, and would have shot down the banker and burst
into his strong-room, without thought of the electric bells or other
feeble resources of civilization to that end appointed. But when a
quiet, unobtrusive, brave man, like Captain Montague Pierpoint, settled
himself in a shanty in their midst, and won their confidence by his
straightforward honesty, scarcely a miner in the lot would ever have
dreamt of attempting to rob him. Captain Pierpoint had not come to
Aylmer's Pike at first with any settled idea of making himself the
financier of the rough little community; he intended to dig on his own
account, and the _role_ of banker was only slowly thrust upon him by the
unanimous voice of the whole diggings. He had begun by lending men money
out of his own pocket--men who were unlucky in their claims, men who had
lost everything at monte, men who had come penniless to the Pike, and
expected to find silver growing freely and openly on the surface. He had
lent to them in a friendly way, without interest, and had been forced to
accept a small present, in addition to the sum advanced, when the tide
began to turn, and luck at last led the penniless ones to a remunerative
placer or pocket. Gradually the diggers got into the habit of regarding
this as Captain Pierpoint's natural function, and Captain Pierpoint,
being himself but an indifferent digger, acquiesced so readily that at
last, yielding to the persuasion of his clients, he put up a wooden
counter, and painted over his rough door the magnificent notice,
"Aylmer's Pike Bank: Montague Pierpoint, Manager." He got a large iron
safe from Carson City, and in that safe, which stood by his own bedside,
all the silver and other securities of the whole village were duly
deposited. "Any one of the boys could easily shoot me and open that safe
any night," Captain Pierpoint used to say pleasantly; "but if he did,
by George! he'd have to reckon afterwards with every man on the Pike;
and I should be sorry to stand in his shoes--that I would, any time."
Indeed, the entire Pike looked upon Captain Pierpoint's safe as "Our
Bank;" and, united in a single front by that simple social contract,
they agreed to respect the safe as a sacred object, protected by the
collective guarantee of three hundred mutually suspicious
revolver-bearing outcasts.
However, even at Aylmer's Pike, there were degrees and stages of
comparative unscrupulousness. Two men, new-comers to the Pike, by name
Hiram Coffin and Pete Morris, at last wickedly and feloniously conspired
together to rob Captain Pierpoint's bank. Their plan was simplicity
itself. They would go at midnight, very quietly, to the Captain's house,
cut his throat as he slept, rob the precious safe, and ride off straight
for the east, thus getting a clear night's start of any possible
pursuer. It was an easy enough thing to do; and they were really
surprised in their own minds that nobody else had ever been cute enough
to seize upon such an obvious and excellent path to wealth and security.
The day before the night the two burglars had fixed upon for their
enterprise, Captain Pierpoint himself appeared to be in unusual spirits.
Pete Morris called in at the bank during the course of the morning, to
reconnoitre the premises, under pretence of paying in a few dollars'
worth of silver, and he found the Captain very lively indeed. When Pete
handed him the silver across the counter, the Captain weighed it with a
smile, gave a receipt for the amount--he always gave receipts as a
matter of form--and actually invited Pete into the little back room,
which was at once kitchen, bedroom, and parlour, to have a drink. Then,
before Pete's very eyes, he opened the safe, bursting with papers, and
placed the silver in a bag on a shelf by itself, sticking the key into
his waistcoat pocket. "He is delivering himself up into our hands,"
thought Pete to himself, as the Captain poured out two glasses of old
Bourbon, and handed one to the miner opposite. "Here's success to all
our enterprises!" cried the Captain gaily. "Here's success, pard!" Pete
answered, with a sinister look, which even the Captain could not help
noting in a sidelong fashion.
That night, about two o'clock, when all Aylmer's Pike was quietly
dreaming its own sordid, drunken dreams, two sober men rose up from
their cabin and stole out softly to the wooden bank house. Two horses
were ready saddled with Mexican saddle-bags, and tied to a tree outside
the digging, and in half an hour Pete and Hiram hoped to find themselves
in full possession of all Captain Pierpoint's securities, and well on
their road towards the nearest station of the Pacific Railway. They
groped along to the door of the bank shanty, and began fumbling with
their wire picks at the rough lock. After a moment's exploration of the
wards, Pete Morris drew back in surprise.
"Pard," he murmured in a low whisper, "here's suthin' rather
extraordinary; this 'ere lock's not fastened."
They turned the handle gently, and found that the door opened without an
effort. Both men looked at one another in the dim light incredulously.
Was there ever such a simple, trustful fool as that fellow Pierpoint! He
actually slept in the bank shanty with his outer door unfastened!
The two robbers passed through the outer room and into the little back
bedroom-parlour. Hiram held the dark lantern, and turned it full on to
the bed. To their immense astonishment they found it empty.
Their first impulse was to suppose that the Captain had somehow
anticipated their coming, and had gone out to rouse the boys. For a
moment they almost contemplated running away, without the money. But a
second glance reassured them; the bed had not been slept in. The
Captain was a man of very regular habits. He made his bed in civilized
fashion every morning after breakfast, and he retired every evening at a
little after eleven. Where he could be stopping so late they couldn't
imagine. But they hadn't come there to make a study of the Captain's
personal habits, and, as he was away, the best thing they could do was
to open the safe immediately, before he came back. They weren't
particular about murder, Pete and Hiram; still, if you _could_ do your
robbery without bloodshed, it was certainly all the better to do it so.
Hiram held the lantern, carefully shaded by his hand, towards the door
of the safe. Pete looked cautiously at the lock, and began pushing it
about with his wire pick; he had hoped to get the key out of Captain
Pierpoint's pocket, but as that easy scheme was so unexpectedly foiled,
he trusted to his skill in picking to force the lock open. Once more a
fresh surprise awaited him. The door opened almost of its own accord!
Pete looked at Hiram, and Hiram looked at Pete. There was no mistaking
the strange fact that met their gaze--the safe was empty!
"What on airth do you suppose is the meaning of this, Pete?" Hiram
whispered hoarsely. But Pete did not whisper; the whole truth flashed
upon him in a moment, and he answered aloud, with a string of oaths,
"The Cap'n has gone and made tracks hisself for Madison Depot. And he's
taken every red cent in the safe along with him, too! the mean, low,
dirty scoundrel! He's taken even my silver that he give me a receipt for
this very morning!"
Hiram stared at Pete in blank amazement. That such base treachery could
exist on earth almost surpassed his powers of comprehension; he could
understand that a man should rob and murder, simply and naturally, as he
was prepared to do, out of pure, guileless depravity of heart, but that
a man should plan and plot for a couple of years to impose upon the
simplicity of a dishonest community by a consistent show of
respectability, with the ultimate object of stealing its whole wealth at
one fell swoop, was scarcely within the limits of his narrow
intelligence. He stared blankly at the empty safe, and whispered once
more to Pete in a timid undertone, "Perhaps he's got wind of this, and
took off the plate to somebody else's hut. If the boys was to come and
catch us here, it 'ud be derned awkward for you an' me, Pete." But Pete
answered gruffly and loudly, "Never you mind about the plate, pard. The
Cap'n's gone, and the plate's gone with him; and what we've got to do
now is to rouse the boys and ride after him like greased lightnin'. The
mean swindler, to go and swindle me out of the silver that I've been and
dug out of that there claim yonder with my own pick!" For the sense of
personal injustice to one's self rises perennially in the human breast,
however depraved, and the man who would murder another without a scruple
is always genuinely aghast with just indignation when he finds the
counsel for the prosecution pressing a point against him with what seems
to him unfair persistency.
Pete flung his lock-pick out among the agave scrub that faced the bank
shanty and ran out wildly into the midst of the dusty white road that
led down the row of huts which the people of Aylmer's Pike
euphemistically described as the Main Street. There he raised such an
unearthly whoop as roused the sleepers in the nearest huts to turn over
in their beds and listen in wonder, with a vague idea that "the Injuns"
were coming down on a scalping-trail upon the diggings. Next, he hurried
down the street, beating heavily with his fist on every frame door, and
kicking hard at the log walls of the successive shanties. In a few
minutes the whole Pike was out and alive. Unwholesome-looking men, in
unwashed flannel shirts and loose trousers, mostly barefooted in their
haste, came forth to inquire, with an unnecessary wealth of expletives,
what the something was stirring. Pete, breathless and wrathful in the
midst, livid with rage and disappointment, could only shriek aloud,
"Cap'n Pierpoint has cleared out of camp, and taken all the plate with
him!" There was at first an incredulous shouting and crying; then a
general stampede towards the bank shanty; and, finally, as the truth
became apparent to everybody, a deep and angry howl for vengeance on the
traitor. In one moment Captain Pierpoint's smooth-faced villany dawned
as clear as day to all Aylmer's Pike; and the whole chorus of gamblers,
rascals, and blacklegs stood awe-struck with horror and indignation at
the more plausible rogue who had succeeded in swindling even them. The
clean-washed, white-shirted, fair-spoken villain! they would have his
blood for this, if the United States Marshal had every mother's son of
them strung up in a row for it after the pesky business was once fairly
over.
Nobody inquired how Pete and Hiram came by the news. Nobody asked how
they had happened to notice that the shanty was empty and the safe
rifled. All they thought of was how to catch and punish the public
robber. He must have made for the nearest depot, Madison Clearing, on
the Union Pacific Line, and he would take the first cars east for St.
Louis--that was certain. Every horse in the Pike was promptly
requisitioned by the fastest riders, and a rough cavalcade, revolvers in
hand, made down the gulch and across the plain, full tilt to Madison.
But when, in the garish blaze of early morning, they reached the white
wooden depot in the valley and asked the ticket-clerk whether a man
answering to their description had gone on by the east mail at 4.30, the
ticket-clerk swore, in reply, that not a soul had left the depot by any
train either way that blessed night. Pete Morris proposed to hold a
revolver to his head and force him to confess. But even that strong
measure failed to induce a satisfactory retractation. By way of general
precaution, two of the boys went on by the day train to St. Louis, but
neither of them could hear anything of Captain Pierpoint. Indeed, as a
matter of fact, the late manager and present appropriator of the
Aylmer's Pike Bank had simply turned his horse's head in the opposite
direction, towards the further station at Cheyenne Gap, and had gone
westward to San Francisco, intending to make his way back to New York
_via_ Panama and the Isthmus Railway.
When the boys really understood that they had been completely duped,
they swore vengeance in solemn fashion, and they picked out two of
themselves to carry out the oath in a regular assembly. Each contributed
of his substance what he was able; and Pete and Hiram, being more
stirred with righteous wrath than all the rest put together, were
unanimously deputed to follow the Captain's tracks to San Francisco, and
to have his life wherever and whenever they might chance to find him.
Pete and Hiram accepted the task thrust upon them, _con amore_, and went
forth zealously to hunt up the doomed life of Captain Montague Beresford
Pierpoint.