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Title: John Brent

Author: Theodore Winthrop

Release date: May 31, 2024 [eBook #73738]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Dodd, Mead and Company

Credits: Tim Lindell, Carol Brown and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOHN BRENT ***



[Illustration]




John Brent

By

THEODORE WINTHROP

[Illustration]




New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
Publishers




COPYRIGHT, 1861,
BY
TICKNOR & FIELDS.




                               CONTENTS.


              CHAP.                                     PAGE

                I. AURI SACRA FAMES                        5

               II. GERRIAN’S RANCH                        13

              III. DON FULANO                             23

               IV. JOHN BRENT                             36

                V. ACROSS COUNTRY                         49

               VI. JAKE SHAMBERLAIN                       59

              VII. ENTER, THE BRUTES!                     67

             VIII. A MORMON CARAVAN                       79

               IX. SIZZUM AND HIS HERETICS                90

                X. “ELLEN! ELLEN!”                       101

               XI. FATHER AND DAUGHTER                   113

              XII. A GHOUL AT THE FEAST                  125

             XIII. JAKE SHAMBERLAIN’S BALL               136

              XIV. HUGH CLITHEROE                        146

               XV. A LOVER                               166

              XVI. ARMSTRONG                             181

             XVII. CAITIFF BAFFLES OGRE                  193

            XVIII. A GALLOP OF THREE                     200

              XIX. FASTER                                207

               XX. A HORSE                               218

              XXI. LUGGERNEL SPRINGS                     225

             XXII. CHAMPAGNE                             238

            XXIII. AN IDYL OF THE ROCKYS                 247

             XXIV. DRAPETOMANIA                          254

              XXV. NOBLESSE OBLIGE                       264

             XXVI. HAM                                   274

            XXVII. FULANO’S BLOOD-STAIN                  284

           XXVIII. SHORT’S CUT-OFF                       294

             XXIX. A LOST TRAIL                          301

              XXX. LONDON                                313

             XXXI. A DWARF                               321

            XXXII. PADIHAM’S SHOP                        335

           XXXIII. “CAST THY BREAD UPON THE WATERS”      343

            XXXIV. THE LAST OF A LOVE-CHASE              354




JOHN BRENT.




CHAPTER I.

AURI SACRA FAMES.


I write in the first person; but I shall not maunder about myself. I am
in no sense the hero of this drama. Call me Chorus, if you please,--not
Chorus merely observant and impassive; rather Chorus a sympathizing
monitor and helper. Perhaps I gave a certain crude momentum to the
movement of the play, when finer forces were ready to flag; but others
bore the keen pangs, others took the great prizes, while I stood by to
lift the maimed and cheer the victor.

It is a healthy, simple, broad-daylight story. No mystery in it. There
is action enough, primeval action of the Homeric kind. Deeds of the
heroic and chivalric times do not utterly disdain our day. There are
men as ready to gallop for love and strike for love now, as in the age
of Amadis.

Roughs and brutes, as well as gentlemen, take their places in this
drama. None of the characters have scruples or qualms. They act
according to their laws, and are scourged or crowned, as their laws
suit Nature’s or not.

To me these adventures were episode; to my friend, the hero, the very
substance of life.

But enough backing and filling. Enter Richard Wade--myself--as Chorus.

       *       *       *       *       *

A few years ago I was working a gold-quartz mine in California.

It was a worthless mine, under the conditions of that time. I had been
dragged into it by the shifts and needs of California life. Destiny
probably meant to teach me patience and self-possession in difficulty.
So Destiny thrust me into a bitter bad business of QUARTZ MINING.

If I had had countless dollars of capital to work my mine, or
quicksilver for amalgamation as near and plenty as the snow on the
Sierra Nevada, I might have done well enough.

As it was, I got but certain pennyworths of gold to a most intolerable
quantity of quartz. The precious metal was to the brute mineral in the
proportion of perhaps a hundred pin-heads to the ton. My partners, down
in San Francisco, wrote to me: “Only find twice as many pin-heads, and
our fortune is made.” So thought those ardent fellows, fancying that
gold would go up and labor go down,--that presently I would strike
a vein where the mineral would show yellow threads and yellow dots,
perhaps even yellow knobs, in the crevices, instead of empty crannies
which Nature had prepared for monetary deposits and forgotten to fill.

So thought the fellows in San Francisco. They had been speculating in
beef, bread-stuffs, city lots, Rincon Point, wharf property, mission
lands, Mexican titles, Sacramento boats, politics, Oregon lumber. They
had been burnt out, they had been cleaned out, they had been drowned
out. They depended upon me and the quartz mine to set them up again. So
there was a small, steady stream of money flowing up from San Francisco
from the depleted coffers of those sanguine partners, flowing into our
mine, and sinking there, together with my labor and my life.

Our ore--the San Francisco partners liked to keep up the complimentary
fiction of calling it ore--was pretty stuff for an amateur
mineralogical cabinet. A professor would have exhibited specimens to a
lecture-room with delight. There never was any quartz where the matrix
was better defined, better shaped to hold the gold that was not in it.
For Macadam, what royal material it would have been! Park roads made
of it would have glittered gayer than marble. How brilliantly paths
covered with its creamy-white fragments would have meandered through
green grass!

If I had had no fond expectations of these shining white and yellow
stones, I should have deemed their mass useful and ornamental
enough,--useful skeleton material to help hold the world together,
ornamental when it lay in the sun and sparkled. But this laughing
sparkle had something of a sneer in it. The stuff knew that it had
humbugged me. Let a man or a woman be victor over man or woman, and
the chances are that generosity will suppress the pæan. But matter is
so often insulted and disdained, that when it triumphs over mind it is
merciless.

Yes; my quartz had humbugged me. Or rather--let me not be unjust
even to undefended stone, not rich enough to pay an advocate--I had
humbugged myself with false hopes. I have since ascertained that my
experience is not singular. Other men have had false hopes of other
things than quartz mines. Perhaps it was to teach me this that the
experience came. Having had my lesson, I am properly cool and patient
now when I see other people suffering in the same way,--whether they
dig for gold, fame, or bliss; digging for the bread of their life, and
getting only a stone. The quartz was honest enough as quartz. It was my
own fault that I looked for gold-bearing quartz, and so found it bogus
and a delusion. What right have we to demand the noble from the ignoble!

I used sometimes fairly to shake my fist at my handsome pile of
mineral, my bullionless pockets of ore. There was gold in the quartz;
there are pearls in the Jersey muds; there are plums in boarding-house
puddings; there are sixpences in the straw of Broadway omnibuses.

Steady disappointment, by and by, informs a man that he is in the wrong
place. All work, no play, no pay, is a hint to work elsewhere. But men
must dig in the wrong spots to learn where these are, and so narrow
into the right spot at last. Every man, it seems, must waste so much
life. Every man must have so much imprisonment to teach him limits and
fit him for freedom.

Nearly enough, however of _Miei Prigioni_. A word or two of my
companions in jail. A hard lot they were, my neighbors within twenty
miles! Jail-birds, some of them, of the worst kind. It was as well,
perhaps, that my digging did not make money, and theirs did. They would
not have scrupled to bag my gold and butcher me. But they were not all
ruffians; some were only barbarians.

PIKES, most of these latter. America is manufacturing several new
types of men. The Pike is one of the newest. He is a bastard pioneer.
With one hand he clutches the pioneer vices; with the other he beckons
forward the vices of civilization. It is hard to understand how a man
can have so little virtue in so long a body, unless the shakes are foes
to virtue in the soul, as they are to beauty in the face.

He is a terrible shock, this unlucky Pike, to the hope that the new
race on the new continent is to be a handsome race. I lose that faith,
which the people about me now have nourished, when I recall the Pike.
He is hung together, not put together. He inserts his lank fathom of a
man into a suit of molasses-colored homespun. Frowzy and husky is the
hair Nature crowns him with; frowzy and stubby the beard. He shambles
in his walk. He drawls in his talk. He drinks whiskey by the tank.
His oaths are to his words as Falstaff’s sack to his bread. I have
seen Maltese beggars, Arab camel-drivers, Dominican friars, New York
Aldermen, Digger Indians; the foulest, frowziest creatures I have ever
seen are thorough-bred Pikes. The most vigorous of them leave their
native landscape of cottonwood and sand-bars along the yellow ditches
of the West, and emigrate with a wagon-load of pork and pork-fed
progeny across the plains to California. There the miasms are roasted
out of them; the shakes warmed away; they will grow rich, and possibly
mellow, in the third or fourth generation. They had not done so in my
time, I lived among them _ad nauseam_, month after month, and I take
this opportunity to pay them parting compliments.

I went on toiling, day after day, week after week, two good years of
my life, over that miserable mine. Nothing came of it. I was growing
poorer with every ton we dug, poorer with every pound we crushed. In
a few months more, I should have spent my last dollar and have gone
to day labor, perhaps among the Pikes. The turnpike stuff refused to
change into gold. I saw, of course, that something must be done. What,
I did not know. I was in that state when one needs an influence without
himself to take him by the hand gently, by the shoulder forcibly, by
the hair roughly, or even by the nose insultingly, and drag him off
into a new region.

The influence came. Bad news reached me. My only sister, a widow, my
only near relative, died, leaving two young children to my care. It was
strange how this sorrow made the annoyance and weariness of my life
naught! How this responsibility cheered me! My life seemed no longer
lonely and purposeless. Point was given to all my intentions at once.
I must return home to New York. Further plans when I am there! But
now for home! If any one wanted my quartz mine, he might have it. I
could not pack it in my saddle-bags to present to a college cabinet of
mineralogy.

I determined, as time did not absolutely press, to ride home across
the plains. It is a grand journey. Two thousand miles, or so, on
horseback. Mountains, deserts, prairies, rivers, Mormons, Indians,
buffalo,--adventures without number in prospect. A hearty campaign, and
no carpet knighthood about it.

It was late August. I began my preparations at once.




CHAPTER II.

GERRIAN’S RANCH.


It happened that, on a journey, early in the same summer, some twenty
miles from my mine, I had come upon a band of horses feeding on the
prairie. They cantered off as I went riding down the yellow slope,
and then, halting just out of lasso reach, stopped to reconnoitre
me. Animals are always eager to observe man. Perhaps they want ideas
against the time of their promotion to humanity, so that they need not
be awkward, and introduce quadruped habits into biped circles.

The mass of the herd inspected me stupidly enough. Man to them was
power, and nothing else,--a lasso-throwing machine,--something that put
cruel bits into equine mouths, got on equine backs, and forced equine
legs to gallop until they were stiff. Man was therefore something to
admire, but to avoid,--so these horses seemed to think; and if they had
known man as brother man alone knows him, perhaps their opinion would
have been confirmed.

One horse, however, among them, had more courage, or more curiosity, or
more faith. He withdrew from the gregarious commonalty,--the haughty
aristocrat!--and approached me, circling about, as if he felt a certain
centripetal influence,--as if he knew himself a higher being than
his mustang comrades,--nearer to man, and willing to offer him his
friendship. He and I divided the attention of the herd. He seemed to
be, not their leader, but rather one who disdained leadership. _Facile
princeps!_ He was too far above the noblest of the herd to care for
their unexciting society.

I slipped quietly down from my little Mexican caballo, and, tethering
him to a bush with the lariat, stood watching the splendid motions of
this free steed of the prairie.

He was an American horse,--so they distinguish in California one
brought from the old States,--A SUPERB YOUNG STALLION, PERFECTLY
BLACK, WITHOUT MARK. It was magnificent to see him, as he circled
about me, fire in his eye, pride in his nostril, tail flying like a
banner power and grace from tip to tip. No one would ever mount him,
or ride him, unless it was his royal pleasure. He was conscious of his
representative position, and showed his paces handsomely. It is the
business of all beautiful things to exhibit.

Imagine the scene. A little hollow in the prairie, forming a perfect
amphitheatre; the yellow grass and wild oats grazed short; a herd of
horses staring from the slope, myself standing in the middle, like the
ring-master in a circus, and this wonderful horse performing at his own
free will. He trotted powerfully, he galloped gracefully, he thundered
at full speed, he lifted his fore-legs to welcome, he flung out his
hind-legs to repel, he leaped as if he were springing over bayonets,
he pranced and curvetted as if he were the pretty plaything of a girl;
finally, when he had amused himself and delighted me sufficiently, he
trotted up and snuffed about me, just out of reach.

A horse knows a friend by instinct. So does a man. But a man, vain
creature! is willing to repel instinct and trust intellect, and so
suffers from the attempt to revise his first impressions, which, if he
is healthy, are infallible.

The black, instinctively knowing me for a friend, came forward and
made the best speech he could of welcome,--a neigh and no more.
Then, feeling a disappointment that his compliment could not be more
melodiously or gracefully turned, he approached nearer, and, not
without shying and starts, of which I took no notice, at last licked my
hand, put his head upon my shoulder, suffered me to put my arm round
his neck, and in fact lavished upon me every mark of confidence. We
were growing fast friends, when I heard a sound of coming hoofs. The
black tore away with a snort, and galloped off with the herd after him.
A Mexican vaquero dashed down the slope in pursuit. I hailed him.

“A quien es ese caballo--el negrito?”

“Aquel diablo! es del Señor Gerrian.” And he sped on.

I knew Gerrian. He was a Pike of the better class. He had found his way
early to California, bought a mission farm, and established himself
as a ranchero. His herds, droves, and flocks darkened the hills. The
name reminded me of the giant Geryon of old. Were I an unscrupulous
Hercules, free to pillage and name it protection, I would certainly
drive off Gerrian’s herds for the sake of that black horse. So I
thought, as I watched them gallop away.

It chanced that, when I was making my arrangements to start for home,
business took me within a mile of Gerrian’s ranch. I remembered my
interview with the black. It occurred to me that I would ride down and
ask the ranchero to sell me his horse for my journey.

I found Gerrian, a lank, wire-drawn man, burnt almost Mexican color,
lounging in the shade of his adobe house. I told him my business in a
word.

“No bueno, stranger!” said he.

“Why not? Do you want to keep the horse.”

“No, not partickler. Thar ain’t a better stallion nor him this side the
South Pass; but I can’t do nothing with him no more ’n yer can with a
steamboat when the cap’n says, ‘Beat or bust!’ He’s a black devil, ef
thar ever was a devil into a horse’s hide. Somebody’s tried to break
him down when he was a colt, an now he wont stan’ nobody goan near him.”

“Sell him to me, and I’ll try him with kindness.”

“No, stranger. I’ve tuk a middlin’ shine to you from the way you got
off that Chinaman them Pikes was goan to hang fur stealing the mule
what he hadn’t stoled. I’ve tuk a middlin’ kind er shine to you, and I
don’t want to see yer neck broke, long er me. That thar black’ll shut
up the hinge in yer neck so tight that yer’ll never look up to ther top
of a red-wood again. Allowin’ you haint got an old ox-yoke into yer fur
backbone, yer’ll keep off that thar black kettrypid, till the Injins
tie yer on, and motion yer to let him slide or be shot.”

“My backbone is pretty stiff,” said I; “I will risk my neck.”

“The Greasers is some on hosses, you’ll give in, I reckon. Well, thar
ain’t a Greaser on my ranch that’ll put leg over that thar streak er
four-legged lightning; no, not if yer’d chain off for him a claim six
squar leagues in the raal old Garden of Paradise, an stock it with ther
best gang er bullocks this side er Santer Fee.”

“But I’m not a Mexican; I’m the stiffest kind of Yankee. I don’t give
in to horse or man. Besides, if he throws me and breaks my neck I get
my claim in Paradise at once.”

“Well, stranger, you’ve drawed yer bead on that thar black, as anybody
can see. An ef a man’s drawed his bead, thar ain’t no use tellin’ him
to pint off.”

“No. If you’ll sell, I’ll buy.”

“Well, if you wunt go fur to ask me to throw in a coffin to boot, praps
we ken scare up a trade. How much do you own in the Foolonner Mine?”

I have forgotten to speak of my mine by its title. A certain Pike named
Pegrum, Colonel Pegrum, a pompous Pike from Pike County, Missouri,
had once owned the mine. The Spaniards, finding the syllables Pegrum
a harsh morsel, spoke of the colonel, as they might of any stranger,
as Don Fulano,--as we should say, “John Smith.” It grew to be a
nickname, and finally Pegrum, taking his donship as a title of honor,
had procured an act of the legislature dubbing him formally Don Fulano
Pegrum. As such he is known, laughed at, become a public man and
probable Democratic Governor of California. From him our quartz cavern
had taken its name.

I told Gerrian that I owned one quarter of the Don Fulano Mine.

“Then you’re jess one quarter richer ’n ef you owned haff, and jess
three quarters richer ’n ef you owned the hull kit and boodle of it.”

“You are right,” said I. I knew it by bitter heart.

“Well stranger, less see ef we can’t banter fur a trade. I’ve got a
hoss that ken kill ayry man. That’s so; ain’t it?”

“You say so.”

“You’ve got a mine, that’ll break ayry man, short pocket or long
pocket. That’s so; ain’t it?”

“No doubt of that.”

“Well now; my curwolyow’s got grit into him, and so’s that thar pile
er quartz er yourn got gold into it. But you cant git the slugs out
er your mineral; and I can get the kicks a blasted sight thicker ’n
anything softer out er my animal. Here’s horse agin mine,--which ’d yer
rether hev, allowin’ ’twas toss up and win.”

“Horse!” said I. “I don’t know how bad he is, and I do know that the
mine is worse than nothing to me.”

“Lookerhere, stranger! You’re goan home across lots. You want a horse.
I’m goan to stop here. I’d jess as lives gamble off a hundred or two
head o’ bullocks on that Foolonner Mine. You can’t find ayry man round
here to buy out your interest in that thar heap er stun an the hole it
cum out of. It’ll cost you more ’n the hul’s wuth ef you go down to San
Frisco and wait tell some fool comes along what’s got gold he wants to
buy quartz with. Take time now, I’m goan to make yer a fair banter.”

“Well, make it.”

“I stump you to a clean swap. My hoss agin your mine.”

“Done,” said I.

“I allowed you’d do it. This here is one er them swaps, when both sides
gits stuck. I git the Foolonner Mine, what I can’t make go, and you’ll
be a fool on a crittur what’ll go a heap more ’n you’ll want. Haw! haw!”

And Gerrian laughed a Pike’s laugh at his pun. It was a laugh that had
been stunted in its childhood by the fever and ague, and so had grown
up husk without heart.

“Have the black caught,” said I, “and we’ll clinch the bargain at once.”

There was a Mexican vaquero slouching about. Gerrian called to him.

“O Hozay! kesty Sinyaw cumprader curwolyow nigereeto. Wamos addelanty!
Corral curwolyose toethoso!”

Pike Spanish that! If the Mexicans choose to understand it, why
should Pikes study Castilian? But we must keep a sharp look-out on
the new words that come to us from California, else our new language
will be full of foundlings with no traceable parentage. We should
beware of heaping up problems for the lexicographers of the twentieth
century: they ought to be free for harmonizing the universal language,
half-Teutonic, half-Romanic, with little touches of Mandingo and Mandan.

The bukkarer, as Gerrian’s Spanish entitled Hozay, comprehended enough
of the order to know that he was to drive up the horses. He gave me a
Mexican’s sulky stare, muttered a caramba at my rashness, and lounged
off, first taking a lasso from its peg in the court.

“Come in, stranger,” said Gerrian, “before we start, and take a drink
of some of this here Mission Dolorous wine.”

“How does that go down?” said he, pouring out golden juices into a
cracked tumbler.

It was the very essence of California sunshine,--sherry with a richness
that no sherry ever had,--a somewhat fiery beverage, but without any
harshness or crudity. Age would better it, as age betters the work of a
young genius; but still there is something in the youth we would not
willingly resign.

“Very fine,” said I; “it is romantic old Spain, with ardent young
America interfused.”

“Some likes it,” says Gerrian; “but taint like good old Argee to me.
I can’t git nothin’ as sweet as the taste of yaller corn into sperit.
But I reckon thar ken be stuff made out er grapes what’ll make all
owdoors stan’ round. This yer wuz made by the priests. What ken you
spect of priests? They ain’t more ’n haff men nohow. I’m goan to plant
a wineyard er my own, and ’fore you cum out to buy another quartz mine,
I’ll hev some of ther strychnine what’ll wax Burbon County’s much’s
our inyans here ken wax them low-lived smellers what they grow to old
Pike.”




CHAPTER III.

DON FULANO.


Hector of Troy, Homer’s Hector, was my first hero in literature. Not
because he loved his wife and she him, as I fancy that noble wives and
husbands love in the times of trial now; but simply because he was
Hippodamos, one that could master the horse.

As soon as I knew Hector, I began to emulate him. My boyish experiments
were on donkeys, and failed. “I couldn’t wallop ’em. O no, no!” That
was my difficulty. Had I but met an innocent and docile donkey in his
downy years! Alas! only the perverted donkey, bristly and incorrigible,
came under my tutorship. I was too humane to give him stick enough, and
so he mastered me.

Horses I learned to govern by the law of love. The relation of
friendship once established between man and horse, there is no trouble.
A centaur is created. The man wills whither; the horse, at the will of
his better half, does his best to go thither. I became, very early,
Hippodamos, not by force, but by kindness. All lower beings,--fiendish
beings apart,--unless spoilt by treachery, seek the society of the
higher; as man, by nature, loves God. Horses will do all they know for
men, if man will only let them. All they need is a slight hint to help
their silly willing brains, and they dash with ardor at their business
of galloping a mile a minute, or twenty miles an hour, or of leaping a
gully, or pulling tonnage. They put so much reckless, break-neck frenzy
in their attempt to please and obey the royal personage on their back,
that he needs to be brave indeed to go thoroughly with them.

The finer the horse, the more delicate the magnetism between him and
man. Knight and his steed have an affinity for each other. I fancied
that Gerrian’s black, after our mutual friendly recognition on the
prairie, would like me better as our intimacy grew.

After hobnobbing with cracked tumblers of the Mission Dolores wine,
Gerrian and I mounted our mustangs and rode toward the corral.

All about on the broad slopes, the ranchero’s countless cattle were
feeding. It was a patriarchal scene. The local patriarch, in a red
flannel shirt purpled by sun and shower, in old buckskin breeches with
the fringe worn away and decimated along its files whenever a thong
was wanted, in red-topped boots with the maker’s name, Abel Cushing,
Lynn, Mass., stamped in gilt letters on the red,--in such costume the
local patriarch hardly recalled those turbaned and white-robed sheiks
of yore, Abraham and his Isaac. But he represented the same period of
history modernized, and the same type of man Americanized; and I have
no doubt his posterity will turn out better than Abraham’s, and scorn
peddling, be it Austrian loans or “ole do’.”

The cattle scampered away from us, as we rode, hardly less wild
than the buffaloes on the Platte. Whenever we rose on the crest
of a hillock, we could see several thousands of the little fierce
bullocks,--some rolling away in flight, in a black breadth, like a
shaken carpet; some standing in little groups, like field officers at a
review, watching the movements as squadron after squadron came and went
over the scene; some, as arbitrators and spectators, surrounding a pair
of champion bulls butting and bellowing in some amphitheatre among the
swells of land.

“I tell you what it is, stranger,” said Gerrian, halting and looking
proudly over the landscape, “I wouldn’t swop my place with General
Price at the White House.”

“I should think not,” said I; “bullocks are better company than
office-seekers.”

It was a grand, simple scene. All open country, north and south, as
far as the eye could see. Eastward rose the noble blue barrier of the
Sierra, with here and there a field, a slope, a spot, or a pinnacle of
the snow that names it Nevada. A landscape of larger feeling than any
we can show in the old States, on the tame side of the continent. Those
rigorous mountain outlines on the near horizon utterly dwarf all our
wooded hills, Alleghanies, Greens, Whites. A race trained within sight
of such loftiness of nature must needs be a loftier race than any this
land has yet known. Put cheap types of mankind within the influence
of the sublimities, and they are cowed; but the great-hearted expand
with vaster visions. A great snow-peak, like one of the Tacomas of
Oregon, is a terrible monitor over a land; but it is also a benignant
sovereign, a presence, calm, solemn, yet not without a cheering and
jubilant splendor. A range of sharp, peremptory mountains, like the
Sierra Nevada, insists upon taking thought away from the grovelling
flats where men do their grubbing for the bread of daily life, and up
to the master heights, whither in all ages seers have gone to be nearer
mystery and God.

It was late August. All the tall grass and wild oats and barley, over
lift, level, and hollow, were ripe yellow or warm brown,--a golden
mantle over the golden soil. There were but two colors in the simple,
broad picture,--clear, deep, scintillating blue in the sky, melting
blue in the mountains, and all the earth a golden surging sea.

“It’s a bigger country’n old Pike or Missourer anywhar,” says Gerrian,
giving his ‘curwolyow’ the spur. “I’d ruther hev this, even ef the
shakes wuz here instidd of thar, and havin’ their grab reglar twicet a
day all the year round.”

As we rode on, our ponies half hidden in the dry, rustling grass of a
hollow, a tramp of hoofs came to us with the wind,--a thrilling sound!
with something free and vigorous in it that the charge of trained
squadrons never has.

“Thar they come!” cried Gerrian; “thar’s a rigiment wuth seeing. They
can’t show you a eight like that to the old States.”

“No indeed. The best thing to be hoped there in the way of stampede is
when a horse kicks through a dash-board, kills a coachman, shatters a
carriage, dissipates a load of women and children, and goes tearing
down a turnpike, with ‘sold to an omnibus’ awaiting him at the end of
his run-away!”

We halted to pass the coming army of riderless steeds in review.

There they came! Gerrian’s whole band of horses in full career! First,
their heads suddenly lifted above a crest of the prairie, then they
burst over, like the foam and spray of a black, stormy wave when a
blast strikes it, and wildly swept by us with manes and tails flaring
in the wind. It was magnificent. My heart of a horseman leaped in my
breast. “Hurrah!” I cried.

“Hurrah ’tis!” said Gerrian.

The herd dashed by in a huddle, making for the corral.

Just behind, aloof from the rush and scamper of his less noble
brethren, came the black, my purchase, my old friend.

“Ef you ever ride or back that curwolyow,” says Gerrian, “I’ll eat a
six-shooter, loaded and capped.”

“You’d better begin, then, at once,” rejoined I, “whetting your teeth
on Derringers. I mean to ride him, and you shall be by when I do it.”

It was grand to see a horse that understood and respected himself so
perfectly. One, too, that meant the world should know that he was the
very chiefest chief of his race, proud with the blood of a thousand
kings. How masterly he looked! How untamably he stepped! The herd was
galloping furiously. He disdained to break into a gallop. He trotted
after, a hundred feet behind the hindmost, with large and liberal
action. And even at this half speed easily overtaking his slower
comrades, he from time to time paused, bounded in the air, tossed his
head, flung out his legs, and then strode on again, writhing all over
with suppressed power.

There was not a white spot upon him, except where a flake of foam
from his indignant nostril had caught upon his flank. A thorough-bred
horse, with the perfect tail and silky mane of a noble race. His coat
glistened, as if the best groom in England had just given him the final
touches of his toilette for a canter in Rotten Row. But it seems a
sin to compare such a free rover of the prairie with any less favored
brother, who needs a groom, and has felt a currycomb.

Hard after the riderless horses came José, the vaquero, on a fast
mustang. As he rode, he whirled his lasso with easy turn of the wrist.

The black, trotting still, and halting still to curvet and caracole,
turned back his head contemptuously at his pursuer. “Mexicans may chase
their own ponies and break their spirit by brutality; but an American
horse is no more to be touched by a Mexican than an American man. Bah!
make your cast! Dont trifle with your lasso! I challenge you. Jerk
away, Señor Greaser! I give you as fair a chance as you could wish.”

So the black seemed to say, with his provoking backward glance and his
whinny of disdain.

José took the hint. He dug cruel spurs into his horse. The mustang
leaped forward. The black gave a tearing bound and quickened his pace,
but still waited the will of his pursuer.

They were just upon us, chased and chaser, thundering down the slope,
when the vaquero, checking his wrist at the turn, flung his lasso
straight as an arrow for the black’s head.

I could hear the hide rope sing through the summer air, for a moment
breezeless.

Will he be taken! Will horse or man be victor!

The loop of the lasso opened like a hoop. It hung poised for one
instant a few feet before the horse’s head, vibrating in the air,
keeping its circle perfect, waiting for the vaquero’s pull to tighten
about that proud neck and those swelling shoulders.

Hurrah!

THROUGH IT WENT THE BLACK.

With one brave bound he dashed through the open loop. He touched only
to spurn its vain assault with his hindmost hoof.

“Hurrah!” I cried.

“Hurrah! ’tis,” shouted Gerrian.

José dragged in his spurned lasso.

The black, with elated head, and tail waving like a banner, sprang
forward, closed in with the caballada; they parted for his passage, he
took his leadership, and presently was lost with his suite over the
swells of the prairie.

“Mucho malicho!” cried Gerrian to José, not knowing that his
Californian Spanish was interpreting Hamlet. “He ought to hev druv ’em
straight to corral. But I don’t feel so sharp set on lettin’ you hev
that black after that shine. Reg’lar circus, only thar never was no
sich seen in no circus! You’ll never ride him, allowin’ he’s cotched,
no more ’n you’ll ride a alligator.”

Meantime, loping on, we had come in sight of the corral. There, to our
great surprise, the whole band of horses had voluntarily entered. They
were putting their heads together as the manner of social horses is,
and going through kissing manœuvres in little knots, which presently
were broken up by the heels of some ill-mannered or jealous brother.
They were very probably discussing the black’s act of horsemanship, as
men after the ballet discuss the first _entrechat_ of the danseuse.

We rode up and fastened our horses. The black was within the corral,
pawing the ground, neighing, and whinnying. His companions kept at a
respectful distance.

“Don’t send in José!” said I to Gerrian. “Only let him keep off the
horses, so that I shall not be kicked, and I will try my hand at the
black alone.”

“I’ll hev ’em all turned out except that black devil, and then you ken
go in and take your own resk with him. Akkee José!” continued the
ranchero, “fwarer toethose! Dayher hel diablo!”

José drove the herd out of the staked enclosure. The black showed no
special disposition to follow. He trotted about at his ease, snuffing
at the stakes and bars.

I entered alone. Presently he began to repeat the scene of our first
meeting on the prairie. It was not many minutes before we were good
friends. He would bear my caresses and my arm about his neck, and that
was all for an hour. At last, after a good hour’s work, I persuaded him
to accept a halter. Then by gentle seductions I induced him to start
and accompany me homeward.

Gerrian and the Mexican looked on in great wonderment.

“Praps that is the best way,” said the modern patriarch, “ef a man has
got patience. Looker here, stranger, ain’t you a terrible fellow among
women?”

I confessed my want of experience.

“Well, you will be when your time comes. I allowed from seeing you
handle that thar hoss, that you had got your hand in on women,--they is
the wust devils to tame I ever seed.”

       *       *       *       *       *

I had made my arrangements to start about the first of September, with
the Sacramento mail-riders, a brace of jolly dogs, brave fellows, who,
with their scalps as well secured as might be, ran the gauntlet every
alternate month to Salt Lake. That was long before the days of coaches.
No pony express was dreamed of. A trip across the plains, without
escort or caravan, had still some elements of heroism, if it have not
to-day.

Meantime one of my ardent partners from San Francisco arrived to take
my place at the mine.

“I don’t think that quartz looks quite so goldy as it did at a
distance,” said he.

“Well,” said old Gerrian, who had come over to take possession of his
share of our bargain; “it _is_ whiter ’n it’s yaller. It _does_ look
about as bad off fur slugs as the cellar of an Indiana bank. But I
b’leeve in luck, and luck is olluz comin’ at me with its head down and
both eyes shet. I’m goan to shove bullocks down this here hole, or the
price of bullocks, until I make it pay.”

And it is a fact, that by the aid of Gerrian’s capital, and improved
modern machinery, after a long struggle, the Fulano mine has begun to
yield a sober, quiet profit.

My wooing of the black occupied all my leisure during my last few days.
Every day, a circle of Pikes collected to see my management. I hope
they took lessons in the law of kindness. The horse was well known
throughout the country, and my bargain with Gerrian was noised abroad.

The black would tolerate no one but me. With me he established as
close a brotherhood as can be between man and beast. He gave me to
understand, by playful protest, that it was only by his good pleasure
that I was permitted on his back, and that he endured saddle and
bridle; as to spur or whip, they were not thought of by either. He did
not obey, but consented. I exercised no control. We were of one mind.
We became a Centaur. I loved that horse as I have loved nothing else
yet, except the other personages with whom and for whom he acted in
this history.

I named him DON FULANO.

I had put my mine into him. He represented to me the whole visible,
tangible result of two long, workaday years, dragged out in that dreary
spot among the Pikes, with nothing in view except barren hill-sides
ravaged by mines, and the unbeautiful shanties of miners as rough as
the landscape.

Don Fulano, a horse that would not sell, was my profit for the sternest
and roughest work of my life! I looked at him, and looked at the
mine, that pile of pretty pebbles, that pile of bogus ore, and I did
not regret my bargain. I never have regretted it. “My kingdom for a
horse,”--so much of a kingdom as I had, I had given.

But was that all I had gained,--an unsalable horse for two years’ work?
All,--unless, perhaps, I conclude to calculate the incalculable; unless
I estimate certain moral results I had grasped, and have succeeded in
keeping; unless I determine to value patience, purpose, and pluck by
dollars and cents. However, I have said enough of myself, and my share
in the preparations for the work of my story.

Retire, then, Richard Wade, and enter the real hero of the tale.




CHAPTER IV.

JOHN BRENT.


A man who does not love luxury is merely an incomplete man, or, if
he prefers, an ignoramus. A man who cannot dispense with luxury, and
who does not love hard fare, hard bed, hard travel, and all manner of
robust, vigorous, tense work, is a weakling and a soft. Sybaris is
a pretty town, rose-leaves are a delicate mattrass, Lydian measures
are dulcet to soul and body: also, the wilderness is “no mean city”;
hemlock or heather for couch, brocken for curtain, are not cruelty;
prairie gales are a brave lullaby for adults.

Simple furniture and simple fare a campaigner needs for the
plains,--for chamber furniture, a pair of blankets; for kitchen
furniture, a frying-pan and a coffee-pot; for table furniture, a tin
mug and his bowie-knife: Sybaris adds a tin plate, a spoon, and even
a fork. The list of provisions is as short,--pork, flour, and coffee;
that is all, unless Sybaris should indulge in a modicum of tea, a dose
or two of sugar, and a vial of vinegar for holidays.

I had several days for preparation, until my companions, the
mail-riders, should arrive. One morning I was busy making up my packs
of such luxuries as I have mentioned for the journey, when I heard the
clatter of horses’ feet, and observed a stranger approach and ride up
to the door of my shanty. He was mounted upon a powerful iron-gray
horse, and drove a pack mule and an Indian pony.

My name was on an elaborately painted shingle over the door. It was
my own handiwork, and quite a lion in that region. I felt, whenever
I inspected that bit of high art, that, fail or win at the mine, I
had a resource. Indeed, my Pike neighbors seemed to consider that I
was unjustifiably burying my artistic talents. Many a not unseemly
octagonal slug, with Moffatt & Co.’s imprimatur of value, had been
offered me if I would paint up some miner’s hell, as “The True
Paradise,” or “The Shades and Caffy de Paris.”

The new-comer read my autograph on the shingle, looked about, caught
sight of me at work in the hot shade, dismounted, fastened his horses,
and came toward me. It was not the fashion in California, at that time,
to volunteer civility or acquaintance. Men had to announce themselves,
and prove their claims. I sat where I was, and surveyed the stranger.

“The Adonis of the copper-skins!” I said to myself. “This is the ‘Young
Eagle,’ or the ‘Sucking Dove,’ or the ‘Maiden’s Bane,’ or some other
great chief of the cleanest Indian tribe on the continent. A beautiful
youth! O Fenimore, why are you dead! There are a dozen romances in one
look of that young brave. One chapter might be written on his fringed
buckskin shirt; one on his equally fringed leggings, with their stripe
of porcupine-quills; and one short chapter on his moccasons, with their
scarlet cloth instep-piece, and his cap of otter fur decked with an
eagle’s feather. What a poem the fellow is! I wish I was an Indian
myself for such a companion; or, better, a squaw, to be made love to by
him.”

As he approached, I perceived that he was not copper, but bronze. A
pale-face certainly! That is, a pale-face tinged by the brazen sun of
a California summer. Not less handsome, however, as a Saxon, than an
Indian brave. As soon as I identified him as one of my own race, I
began to fancy I had seen him before.

“If he were but shaved and clipped, black-coated, booted, gloved,
hatted with a shiny cylinder, disarmed of his dangerous looking
arsenal, and armed with a plaything of a cane,--in short, if he were
metamorphosed from a knight-errant into a carpet-knight, changed from a
smooth rough into a smooth smooth,--seems to me I should know him, or
know that I had known him once.”

He came up, laid his hand familiarly on my arm, and said, “What, Wade?
Don’t you remember me? John Brent.”

“I hear your voice. I begin to see you now. Hurrah!”

“How was it I did not recognize you,” said I, after a fraternal
greeting.

“Ten years have presented me with this for a disguise,” said he, giving
his moustache a twirl. “Ten years of experience have taken all the girl
out of me.”

“What have you been doing these ten years, since College, O many-sided
man?”

“Grinding my sides against the Adamant, every one.”

“Has your diamond begun to see light, and shine?”

“The polishing-dust dims it still.”

“How have you found life, kind or cruel?”

“Certainly not kind, hardly cruel, unless indifference is cruelty.”

“But indifference, want of sympathy, must have been a positive relief
after the aggressive cruelty of your younger days.”

“And what have you been doing, Richard?”

“Everything that Yankees do,--digging last.”

“That has been my business, too, as well as polishing.”

“The old work, I suppose, to root out lies and plant in truth.”

“That same slow task. Tunnelling too, to find my way out of the prison
of doubt into the freedom of faith.”

“You are out, then, at last. Happy and at peace, I hope.”

“At peace, hardly happy. How can such a lonely fellow be happy?”

“We are peers in bereavement now. My family are all gone, except two
little children of my sister.”

“Not quite peers. You remember your relatives tenderly. I have no such
comfort.”

Odd talk this may seem, to hold with an old friend. Ten years apart!
We ought to have met in merrier mood. We might, if we had parted
with happy memories. But it was not so. Youth had been a harsh
season to Brent. If Fate destines a man to teach, she compels him to
learn,--bitter lessons, too, whether he will or no. Brent was a man of
genius. All experience, therefore, piled itself upon him. He must learn
the immortal consolations by probing all suffering himself.

Brent’s story is a short one or a long one. It can be told in a page,
or in a score of volumes. We had met fourteen years before in the same
pew of Berkeley College Chapel, grammars by our side and tutors before
us, two well-crammed candidates for the Freshman Class. Brent was a
delicate, beautiful, dreamy boy. My counterpart. I was plain prose,
and needed the poetic element. We became friends. I was steady; he was
erratic. I was calm; he was passionate. I was reasonably happy; he was
totally miserable. For good cause.

The cause was this; and it has broken weaker hearts than Brent’s. His
heart was made of stuff that does not know how to break.

Dr. Swerger was the cause of Brent’s misery. The Reverend Dr. Swerger
was a brutal man. One who believes that God is vengeance naturally
imitates his God, and does not better his model.

Swerger was Brent’s step-father. Mrs. Brent was pretty, silly, rich,
and a widow. Swerger wanted his wife pretty, and not too wise; and that
she was rich balanced, perhaps a little more than balanced, the slight
objection of widowhood.

Swerger naturally hated his step-son. One intuition of Brent’s was
worth all the thoughts of Swerger’s life-time. A clergyman who starts
with believing in hells, devils, original sin, and such crudities,
can never be anything in the nineteenth century but a tyrant or a
nuisance, if he has any logic, as fortunately few of such misbelievers
have. Swerger had logic. So had the boy Brent,--the logic of a true,
pure, loving heart. He could not stand Swerger’s coming into his dead
father’s house and deluding his mother with a black fanaticism.

So Swerger gave him to understand that he was a child of hell. He won
his wife to shrink from her son. Between them they lacerated the boy.
He was a brilliant fellow, quite the king of us all. But he worked
under a cloud. He could not get at any better religion than Swerger’s;
and perhaps there was none better--or much better--to be had at that
time.

One day matters came to a quarrel. Swerger cursed his step-son; of
course not in the same terms the sailors used on Long Wharf, but with
no better spirit. The mother, cowed by her husband, backed him, and
abandoned the boy. They drove him out of the house, to go where he
would. He came to me. I gave him half my quarters, and tried to cheer
him. No use. This bitter wrong to his love to God and to man almost
crushed him. He brooded and despaired. He began to fancy himself the
lost soul Swerger had called him. I saw that he would die or go mad;
or, if he had strength enough to react, it would be toward a hapless
rebellion against conventional laws, and so make his blight ruin. I
hurried him off to Europe, for change of scene. That was ten years
ago, and I had not seen him since. I knew, however, that his mother
was visited by compunctions; that she wished to be reconciled to her
son; that Swerger refused, and renewed his anathemas; that he bullied
the poor little woman to death; that Brent had to wring the property
out of him by a long lawsuit, which the Swergerites considered an
unconstitutional and devilish proceeding, another proof of total
depravity. Miserable business! It went near to crush all the innocence,
faith, hope, and religion out of my friend’s life.

Of course this experience had a tendency to drive Brent out of the
common paths, to make him a seer instead of a doer. The vulgar cannot
comprehend that, when a man is selected by character and circumstance,
acting together under the name of destiny, to be a seer, he must see to
the end before he begins to say what he sees, to be a guide, a monitor,
and a helper. The vulgar, therefore, called Brent a wasted life, a man
of genius _manqué_, a pointless investigator, a purposeless dreamer.
The vulgar loves to make up its mind prematurely. The vulgar cannot
abide a man who lives a blameless life so far as personal conduct goes,
and yet declines to accept worldly tests of success, worldly principles
of action. If a man rebels against laws, and takes the side of vice,
_that_ the vulgar can comprehend; but rebellion on the side of virtue
is revolutionary, destroys all the old landmarks, must be crucified.

Brent, therefore, boy and man, had had tough experience. I knew of his
career, though we had not met. He had wished and attempted, perhaps
prematurely, to make his fine genius of definite use. He wanted to
make the nation’s prayers; but the Swergerites pronounced his prayers
Paganism. He wanted to put the nation’s holiest thoughts into poetry;
they called his poetry impious. He wanted to stir up the young men of
his day to a franker stand on the side of genuine liberty, and a keener
hatred of all slavery, and so to uphold chivalry and heroism; the
cynical people scoffed, they said he would get over his boyish folly,
that he ought to have lived before Bayard, or half-way through the
millennium, but that the kind of stuff he preached and wrote with such
unnecessary fervor did not suit the nineteenth century, a practical
country and a practical age.

So Brent paused in his work. The boyhood’s unquestioning ardor went
out of him. The interregnum between youth and complete manhood came.
He gave up his unripe attempt to be a doer, and turned seer again.
Observation is the proper business of a man’s third decade; the less a
spokesman has to say about his results until thirty, the better, unless
he wants to eat his words, or to sustain outgrown formulas. Brent
discovered this, and went about the world still pointless, purposeless,
_manqué_, as they said,--minding his own business, getting his facts.
His fortune made him independent. He could go where he pleased.

This was the man who rode up on the iron-gray horse. This was the
Indianesque Saxon who greeted me. It put color and poetry into my sulky
life to see him.

“Off, old fellow?” said Brent, pointing his whip at my traps. “I can’t
hear him squeak, but I’m sure there is pig in that gunny-bag, and flour
in that sack. I hope you’re not away for a long trip just as I have
come to squat with you.”

“No longer than home across the plains.”

“Bravo! then we’ll ride together, instead of squatting together.
Instead of your teaching me quartz-mining, I’ll guide you across the
Rockys.”

“You know the way, then.”

“Every foot of it. Last fall I hunted up from Mexico and New Mexico
with an English friend. We made winter head-quarters with Captain Ruby
at Fort Laramie, knocking about all winter in that neighborhood, and
at the North among the Wind River Mountains. Early in the spring we
went off toward Luggernel Alley and the Luggernel Springs, and camped
there for a month.”

“Luggernel Alley! Luggernel Springs! Those are new names to me; in
fact, my Rocky Mountain geography is naught.”

“You ought to see them. Luggernel Alley is one of the wonders of this
continent.”

So _I_ think now that I have seen it. It was odd too, what afterward I
remembered as a coincidence, that our first talk should have turned to
a spot where we were to do and to suffer, by and by.

“There is something Frenchy in the name Luggernel,” said I.

“Yes; it is a corruption of La Grenouille. There was a famous Canadian
trapper of that name, or nickname. He discovered the springs. The
Alley, a magnificent gorge, grand as the Via Mala, leads to them. I
will describe the whole to you at length, some time.”

“Who was your English friend?”

“Sir Biron Biddulph,--a capital fellow, pink in the cheeks, warm in the
heart, strong in the shanks, mighty on the hunt.”

“Hunting for love of it?”

“No; for love itself, or rather the lack of love. A lovely lady in his
native Lancashire would not smile; so he turned butcher of buffalo,
bears, and big-horn.”

“Named he the ‘fair but frozen maid’?”

“Never. It seems there is something hapless or tragic about her
destiny. She did not love him; so he came away to forget her. He made
no secret of it. We arrived in Utah last July, on our way to see
California. There he got letters from home, announcing, as he told me,
some coming misfortune to the lady. As a friend, no longer a lover, he
proposed to do what he could to avert the danger. I left him in Salt
Lake, preparing to return, and came across country alone.”

“Alone! through the Indian country, with that tempting iron-gray,
those tempting packs, that tempting scalp, with its love-locks! Why,
the sight of your scalp alone would send a thrill through every Indian
heart from Bear River to the Dalles of the Columbia! Perhaps, by the
way, you’ve been scalped already, and are safe?”

“No; the mop’s my own mop. Scalp’s all right. Wish I could say the
same of the brains. The Indians would not touch me. I am half savage,
you know. In this and my former trip, I have become a privileged
character,--something of a medicine-man.”

“I suppose you can talk to them. You used to have the gift of tongues.”

“Yes; I have choked down two or three of their guttural lingos, and
can sputter them up as easily as I used to gabble iambic trimeters. I
like the fellows. They are not ideal heroes; they have not succeeded in
developing a civilization, or in adopting ours, and therefore I suppose
they must go down, as pine-trees go down to make room for tougher
stalks and fruitier growth: but I like the fellows, and don’t believe
in their utter deviltry. I have always given the dogs a good name, and
they have been good dogs to me. I like thorough men, too; and what
an Indian knows, he knows, so that it is a part of him. It is a good
corrective for an artificial man to find himself less of a man, under
certain difficulties, than a child of nature. You know this, of course,
as well as I do.”

“Yes; we campaigners get close to the heart of Mother Nature, and she
teaches us, tenderly or roughly, but thoroughly. By the way, how did
you find me out?”

“I heard some Pikes, at a camp last night, talking of a person who had
sold a quartz mine for a wonderful horse. I asked the name. They told
me yours, and directed me here. Except for this talk, I should have
gone down to San Francisco, and missed you.”

“Lucky horse! He brings old friends together,--a good omen! Come and
see him.”




CHAPTER V.

ACROSS COUNTRY.


I led my friend toward the corral.

“A fine horse that gray of yours,” said I.

“Yes; a splendid fellow,--stanch and true. He will go till he dies.”

“In tip-top condition, too. What do you call him?”

“Pumps.”

“Why Pumps? Why not Pistons? or Cranks? or Walking-Beams? or some part
of the steam-engine that does the going directly?”

“You have got the wrong clue. I named him after our old dancing-master.
Pumps the horse has a favorite amble, precisely like that skipping walk
that Pumps the man used to set us for model,--a mincing gait, that
prejudiced me, until I saw what a stride he kept for the time when
stride was wanting.”

“Here is my black gentleman. What do you think of him?”

Don Fulano trotted up and licked a handful of corn from my hand. Corn
was four dollars a bushel. The profits of the “Foolonner” Mine did not
allow of such luxuries. But old Gerrian had presented me with a sack of
it.

Fulano crunched his corn, snorted his thanks, and then snuffed
questioningly, and afterwards approvingly, about the stranger.

“Soul and body of Bucephalus!” says Brent. “There is a quadruped that
is a HORSE.”

“Isn’t he?” said I, thrilling with pride for him.

“To look at such a fellow is a romance. He is the most beautiful thing
I ever saw.”

“No exceptions?”

“Not one.”

“Woman! lovely woman!” I cried, with mock enthusiasm.

“If I had ever seen a woman to compare with that horse, after her kind,
I should not be here.”

“Where then?”

“Wherever she was. Living for her. Dying for her. Chasing her if she
were dragged from me. Snatching her from the jaws of death.”

“Hold hard! You talk as furiously as if you saw such a scene before
your eyes.”

“Your horse brings up all the chivalric tales I have ever read. If
these were knightly days, and two brothers in arms, like you and
myself, ever rescued distressed damsels from the grip of caitiffs vile,
we ought to be mounted upon a pair of Don Fulanos when we rode the
miscreants down.”

The fine sensitiveness of a poetic man like Brent makes a prophet of
him,--that is to say, a man who has the poet’s delicate insight into
character anticipates everything that character will do. So Brent was
never surprised; though I confess I was, when I found men, horses, and
places doing what he had hinted long before.

“Well,” continued I, “I paid two years’ work for my horse. Was it too
much? Is he worth it?”

“Everything is worth whatever one gives for it. The less you get, the
more you get. Proved by the fact that the price of all life is death.
Jacob served seven years for an ugly wife; why shouldn’t an honester
man serve two for a beautiful horse?”

“Jacob, however, had a pretty wife thrown in when he showed discontent.”

“Perhaps you will. If the Light of the Harem of Sultan Brigham should
see you prancing on that steed, she would make one bound to your
crupper and leave a dark where the Light was.”

“I do not expect to develop a taste for Mormon ladies.”

“It is not very likely. They are a secondhand set. But still one can
imagine some luckless girl with a doltish father; some old chap
who had outlived his hopes at home, and fancied he was going to be
Melchisedec, Moses, and Abraham, rolled into one, in Utah, toted
out there by some beastly Elder, who wanted the daughter for his
thirteenth. That would be a chance for you and Don Fulano to interfere.
I’ll promise you myself and Pumps, if you want to stampede anybody’s
wives from the New Jerusalem as we go through.”

“I suppose we have no time to lose, if we expect to make Missouri
before winter.”

“No. We will start as soon as you are ready.”

“To-morrow morning, if you please.”

“To-morrow it is.”

       *       *       *       *       *

To-morrow it was. Having a comrade, I need not wait for the
mail-riders. Lucky that I did not. They came only three days after us.
But on the Humboldt, the Indians met them, and obliged them to doff the
tops of their heads, as a mark of respect to Indian civilization.

We started, two men and seven animals. Each of us had a pack mule and a
roadster pony, with a spare one, in case accident should befall either
of his wiry brethren.

Pumps and Fulano, as good friends as their masters, trotted along
without burden. We rode them rarely. Only often enough to remind them
how a saddle feels, and that dangling legs are not frightful. They must
be fresh, if we should ever have to run for it. We might; Indians might
cast fanciful glances at the tops of our heads. The other horses might
give out. So Pumps, with his fantastic dancing-step, that would not
crush a grasshopper, and Fulano, grander, prouder, and still untamable
to any one but me, went on waiting for their time of action.

I skip the first thousand miles of our journey. Not that it was not
exciting, but it might be anybody’s journey. Myriads have made it. It
is an old story. I might perhaps make it a new story; but I crowd on
now to the proper spot where this drama is to be enacted. The play
halts while the scenes shift.

One figure fills up to my mind this whole hiatus of the many-leagued
skip. I see Brent every step and every moment. He was a model comrade.

Camp-life tests a man thoroughly. Common toil, hardship, peril, and
sternly common _viaticum_ of pork, dough-cakes, and coffee _sans_
everything, are a daily ordeal of good-nature. It is not hard for two
men to be civil across a clean white tablecloth at a club. If they
feel dull, they can study the _carte_; if spiteful, they can row the
steward; if surly, they can muddle themselves cheerful if they bore
each other, finally and hopelessly they can exchange cigars and part
for all time, and still be friends, not foes. But the illusions of
sham good-fellowship vanish when the _carte du jour_ is _porc frit au
naturel_, _damper à discretion_, and _café à rien_, always the same
fare, plain days or lucky days, served on a blanket, on the ground.

Brent and I stood the test. He was a model comrade, cavalier, poet,
hunter, naturalist, cook. If there was any knowledge, skill, craft, or
sleight of hand or brain wanted, it always seemed as if his whole life
had been devoted to the one study to gain it. He would spring out of
his blankets after a night under the stars, improvise a matin song to
Lucifer, sketch the morning’s view into cloudland and the morning’s
earthly horizon, take a shot at a gray wolf, book a new plant, bag
a new beetle, and then, reclining on the lonely prairie, talk our
breakfast, whose Soyer he had been, so full of Eden, Sybaris, the
holocausts of Achilles, the triclinia of Lucullus, the automaton tables
of the Œil de Bœuf, the cabinets of the Frères Provençaux, and the
dinners of civilization where the wise and the witty meet to shine and
sparkle for the beautiful, that our meagre provender suffered “change
into something rich and strange”; the flakes of fried pork became
peacocks’ tongues, every quoit of tough toasted dough a _vol au vent_,
and the coffee that never saw milk or muscovado a diviner porridge than
ever was sipped on the sunny summits of Olympus. Such a magician is
priceless. Every object, when he looked at it, seemed to revolve about
and exhibit its bright side. Difficulty skulked away from him. Danger
cowered under his eye.

Nothing could damp his enthusiasm. Nothing could drench his ardor. No
drowning his energy. He never growled, never sulked, never snapped,
never flinched. Frosty nights on the Sierra tried to cramp him; foggy
mornings in the valleys did their worst to chill him; showers shrank
his buckskins and soaked the macheers of his saddle to mere pulp; rain
pelted his blankets in the bivouac till he was a moist island in a
muddy lake. Bah, elements! try it on a milksop! not on John Brent, the
invulnerable. He laughs in the ugly phiz of Trouble. Hit somebody else,
thou grizzly child of Erebus!

Brent was closer to Nature than any man I ever knew. Not after
the manner of an artist. The artist can hardly escape a certain
technicality. He looks at the world through the spectacles of his
style. He loves mist and hates sunshine, or loves brooks and shrinks
from the gloom of forests primeval, or adores meadows and haystacks,
and dreads the far sweeping plain and the sovran snow-peak. Even the
greatest artist runs a risk, which only the greater than greatest
escape, of suiting Nature to themselves, not themselves to Nature.
Brent with Nature was like a youth with the maiden he loves. She was
always his love, whatever she could do; however dressed, in clouds or
sunshine, unchanging fair; in whatever mood, weeping or smiling, at her
sweetest; grand, beautiful for her grandeur; tender, beautiful for her
tenderness; simple, lovely for her simplicity; careless, prettier than
if she were trim and artful; rough, potent, and impressive, a barbaric
queen.

It is not a charming region, that breadth of the world between the
Foolonner Mine and the Great Salt Lake. Much is dusty desert; much is
dreary plain, bushed with wild sage, the wretchedest plant that grows;
much is rugged mountain. A grim and desolate waste. But large and
broad. Unbroken and undisturbed, in its solemn solitude, by prettiness.
No thought of cottage life there, or of the tame, limited, submissive
civilization that hangs about lattices and trellises, and pets its
chirping pleasures, keeping life as near the cradle as it may. It is
a region that appeals to the go and the gallop, that even the veriest
cockney, who never saw beyond a vista of blocks, cannot eliminate from
his being. It does not order man to sink into a ploughman. Ploughmen
may tarry in those dull, boundless plough-fields, the _prairie_ lands
of _mid_-America. These desert spaces, ribbed with barren ridges,
stretch for the Bedouin tread of those who

                      “Love all waste
    And solitary places, where we taste
    The pleasure of believing what we see
    Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.”

It may be a dreary region; but the great white clouds in the noons of
that splendid September, the red dawns before us, the red twilights
behind, the vague mountain lines upon the far horizon, the sharp crag
lines near at hand, the lambent stars that lit our bivouacs, the moon
that paled the lambent stars,--all these had their glory, intenser
because each fact came simple and alone, and challenged study and
love with a force that shames the spendthrift exuberance of fuller
landscapes.

In all this time I learned to love the man John Brent, as I had
loved the boy; but as mature man loves man. I have known no more
perfect union than that one friendship. Nothing so tender in any of
my transitory loves for women. We were two who thought alike, but saw
differently, and never quarrelled because the shield was to him gold
and to me silver. Such a friendship justifies life. All bad faith is
worth encountering for the sake of such good faith,--all cold shoulder
for such warm heart.

And so I bring our little party over the first half of its journey.

I will not even delay to describe Utah, not even for its water-melons’
sake, though that tricolor dainty greatly gladdened our dry jaws, as we
followed the valley from Box Elder, the northernmost settlement, to the
City of the Great Salt Lake.

In a few days of repose we had exhausted Mormon civilization, and,
horses and men fresh and in brave heart, we rode out of the modern
Mecca, one glorious day of early October.




CHAPTER VI.

JAKE SHAMBERLAIN.


If Heaven’s climate approaches the perfect charm of an American
October, I accept my place in advance, and book my lodgings for
eternity.

The climate of the best zone in America is transcendent for its
purpose. Its purpose is to keep men at their keenest, at high edge
and high ardor all the time. Then, for enchanting luxury of repose,
when ardent summer has achieved its harvest, and all the measure of
the year is full, comes ripe October, with its golden, slumberous air.
The atmosphere is visible sunshine. Every leaf in the forest changes
to a resplendent blossom. The woods are rich and splendorous, but not
glaring. Nothing breaks the tranquil _wealthy_ sentiment of the time.
It is the year’s delightful holiday.

In such a season we rode through the bare defiles of the Wasatch
Mountains, wall of Utah on the east. We passed Echo Cañon, and the
other strait gates and rough ways through which the Latter-Day Saints
win an entrance to their Sion.

We met them in throngs, hard at work at such winning. The summer
emigration of Mormons was beginning to come in. No one would have
admitted their claim to saintship from their appearance. If they had no
better passport than their garb, “Avaunt! _Procul este profani!_” would
have cried any trustworthy janitor of Sion. Saints, if I know them,
are clean,--are not ragged, are not even patched. Their garments renew
themselves, shed rain like Macintosh, repel dust, sweeten unsavoriness.
These sham saints needed unlimited scouring, persons and raiment. We
passed them, when we could, to windward. Poor creatures! we shall see
more of their kindred anon.

We hastened on, for our way was long, and autumn’s hospitable days
were few. Just at the foot of those bare, bulky mounds of mountain by
which the Wasatch range tones off into the great plains between it and
the Rockys, we overtook the Salt Lake mail party going eastward. They
were travelling eight or ten men strong, with a four-mule wagon, and
several horses and mules driven beside for relays.

“If Jake Shamberlain is the captain of the party,” said Brent, when we
caught sight of them upon the open, “we’ll join them.”

“Who is Jake Shamberlain?”

“A happy-go-lucky fellow, whom I have met and recognized all over
the world. He has been a London policeman. He was pulling stroke-oar
in the captain’s gig that took me ashore from a dinner on board the
Firefly, British steamer, at the Piræus. He has been a lay brother in
a Carthusian convent. He married a pretty girl in Boston once, went
off on a mackerel trip, and when he came back the pretty girl had
bigamized. That made Mormon and polygamist of him. He came out two or
three years ago, and, being a thriving fellow, has got to himself lands
and beeves and wives without number. Biddulph and I stayed several days
with him when we came through in the summer. His ranch is down the
valley, toward Provo. He owns half the United States mail contract.
They told me in the city that he intended to run this trip himself. You
will see an odd compound of a fellow.”

“I should think so; policeman, acolyte, man-of-war’s-man, Yankee
husband, Mormon! Has he come to his finality?”

“He thinks so. He is a shrewd fellow of many smatterings. He says there
are only two logical religions in the civilized world,--the Popish
and the Mormon. Those two are the only ones that have any basis in
authority. His convent experience disenchanted him with Catholicism. He
is quite irreverent, is the estimable Jake. He says monks are a set
of snuffy old reprobates. He says that he found celibacy tended to all
manner of low vice; that monogamy disappointed him; so he tried the New
Revelation, polygamy and all, and has become an ardent propagandist and
exhorter. Take the man as he is, and he has plenty of brave, honest
qualities.”

We had by this time ridden up to the mail party. They were moving
slowly along. The night’s camping-spot was near. It was a bit of grassy
level on the bank of a river, galloping over the pebbles with its
mountain impetus still in it,--Green River, perhaps; Green, or White,
or Big Sandy, or Little Stony. My map of memory is veined with so many
such streams, all going in a hurry through barren plains, and no more
than drains on a water-shed, that I confuse their undistinguishing
names. Such mere business-like water-courses might as well be numbered,
after the fashion of the monotonous streets of a city, too new for the
consecration of history. Dear New England’s beloved brooks and rivers,
slow through the meadows and beneath the elms, tumbling and cascading
down the mountain-sides from under the darkling hemlocks into the
sparkle of noon, and leaping into white water between the files of
Northern birches,--they have their well-remembered titles, friendly and
domestic, or of sturdy syllables and wilderness sound. Such waters
have spoiled me for gutters,--Colorados, Arkansaws, Plattes, and
Missouris.

“Hillo, Shamberlain!” hailed Brent, riding up to the train.

“Howdydo? Howdydo? No swap!” responded Jake, after the Indian fashion.
“Bung my eyes! ef you’re not the mate of all mates I’m glad to see.
Pax vobiscrum, my filly! You look as fresh as an Aperel shad. Praisèd
be the Lord!” continued he, relapsing into Mormon slang, “who has
sent thee again, like a brand from the burning, to fall into paths of
pleasantness with the Saints, as they wander from the Promised Land to
the mean section where the low-lived Gentiles ripen their souls for
hell.”

Droll farrago! but just as Jake delivered it. He had the slang and the
swearing of all climes and countries at his tongue’s end.

“Hello, stranger!” said he, turning to me. “I allowed you was the
Barrownight.”

“It’s my friend, Richard Wade,” said Brent.

“Yours to command, Brother Wade,” Jake says hospitably. “Ef you turn
out prime, one of the out and outers, like Brother John Brent, I’ll tip
’em the wink to let you off easy at the Judgment Day, Gentile or not.
I’ve booked Brother John fur Paradise; Brother Joseph’s got a white
robe fur him, blow high, blow low!”

We rode along beside Shamberlain.

“What did you mean just now?” asked my friend. “You spoke of Wade’s
being the baronet.”

“I allowed you wouldn’t leave him behind.”

“I don’t understand. I have not seen him since we left you in the
summer. I’ve been on to California and back.”

“The Barrownight’s ben stoppin’ round in the Valley ever since. He
seems to have a call to stop. Prehaps his heart is tetched, and he is
goan to jine the Lord’s people. I left him down to my ranch, ten days
ago, playing with a grizzly cub, what he’s trying to make a gentleman
of. A pooty average gentleman it’ll make too.”

“Very odd!” says Brent to me. “Biddulph meant to start for home, at
once, when we parted. He had some errand in behalf of the lady he had
run away from.”

“Probably he found he could not trust his old wounds under her eyes
again. Wants another year’s crust over his scarified heart.”

“Quite likely. Well, I wish we had known he was in the Valley. We would
have carried him back with us. A fine fellow! Couldn’t be a better!”

“Not raw, as Englishmen generally are?”

“No; well ripened by a year or so in America.”

“Individuals need that cookery, as the race did.”

“Yes; I wish our social cuisine were a thought more scientific.”

“All in good time. We shall separate sauces by and by, and not compel
beef, mutton, and turkey to submit to the same gravy.”

“Meanwhile some of my countrymen are so under-done, and some so
over-done, that I have lost my taste for them.”

“Such social dyspepsia is soon cured on the plains. You will go back
with a healthy appetite. Did your English friend describe the lady of
his love?”

“No; it was evidently too stern a grief to talk about. He could keep up
his spirits only by resolutely turning his back on the subject.”

“It must needs have been a weak heart or a mighty passion.”

“The latter. A brave fellow like Biddulph does not take to his heels
from what he can overcome.”

By this time we had reached camp.

Horses first, self afterwards, is the law of the plains travel. A camp
must have,--

  1. Water.
  2. Fodder.
  3. Fuel.

Those are the necessities. Anything else is luxury.

The mail party were a set of jolly roughs. Jake Shamberlain was
the type man. To encounter such fellows is good healthy education.
As useful in kind, but higher in degree, as going to a bear
_conversazione_ or a lion and tiger concert. Civilization mollifies the
race. It is not well to have hard knocks and rough usage for mind or
body eliminated from our training.

We joined suppers with our new friends. After supper we sat smoking our
pipes, and talking horse, Indians, bear-fights, scalping, and other
brutal business, such as the world has not outgrown.




CHAPTER VII.

ENTER, THE BRUTES!


The sun had just gone down. There was a red wrangle of angry vapors
over the mounds of mountain westward. A brace of travellers from Salt
Lake way rode up and lighted their camp fire near ours. More society in
that lonely world. Two families, with two sets of Lares and Penates.

Not attractive society. They were a sinister-looking couple of hounds.
A lean wolfish and a fat bony dog.

One was a rawboned, stringy chap,--as gaunt, unkempt, and cruel a Pike
as ever pillaged the cabin, insulted the wife, and squirted tobacco
over the dead body of a Free State settler in Kansas. The other was
worse, because craftier. A little man, stockish, oily, and red in the
face. A jaunty fellow, too, with a certain shabby air of coxcombry even
in his travel-stained attire.

They were well mounted, both. The long ruffian rode a sorrel, big and
bony as himself, and equally above such accidents as food or no food.
The little villain’s mount was a red roan, a Flathead horse, rather
naggy, but perfectly hardy and wiry,--an animal that one would choose
to do a thousand miles in twenty days, or a hundred between sunrise and
sunset. They had also two capital mules, packed very light. One was
branded, “A. & A.”

Distrust and disgust are infallible instincts. Men’s hearts and lives
are written on their faces, to warn or charm. Never reject that divine
or devilish record!

Brent read the strangers, shivered at me, and said, _sotto voce_, “What
a precious pair of cut-throats! We must look sharp for our horses while
they are about.”

“Yes,” returned I, in the same tone; “they look to me like Sacramento
gamblers, who have murdered somebody, and had to make tracks for their
lives.”

“The Cassius of the pair is bad enough,” said Brent; “but that oily
little wretch sickens me. I can imagine him when he arrives at St.
Louis, blossomed into a purple coat with velvet lappels, a brocaded
waistcoat, diamond shirt-studs, or a flamboyant scarf pinned with a
pinchbeck dog, and red-legged patent-leather boots, picking his teeth
on the steps of the Planters’ House. Faugh! I feel as if a snake were
crawling over me, when I look at him.”

“They are not very welcome neighbors to our friends here.”

“No. Roughs abhor brutes as much as you or I do. Roughs are only
nature; brutes are sin. I do not like this brutal element coming in. It
portends misfortune. You and I will inevitably come into collision with
those fellows.”

“You take your hostile attitude at once, and without much reluctance.”

“You know something of my experience. I have had a struggle all my life
with sin in one form or other, with brutality in one form or other. I
have been lacerated so often from unwillingness to strike the first
blow, that I have at last been forced into the offensive.”

“You believe in flooring Apollyon before he floors you.”

“There must be somebody to do the merciless. It’s not my business--the
melting mood--in my present era.”

“We are going off into generalities, _à propos_ of those two brutes.
What, O volunteer champion of virtue, dost thou propose in regard to
them? When will you challenge them to the ordeal, to prove themselves
honest men and good fellows?”

“Aggression always comes from evil. They are losels, we are true
knights. They will do some sneaking villany. You and I will thereupon
up and at ’em.”

“Odd fellow are you, with your premonitions!”

“They are very vague, of course, but based on a magnetism which I have
learnt to trust, after much discipline, because I refused to obey it.
Look at that big brute, how he kicks and curses his mule!”

“Perhaps he has stolen it, and is revenging his theft on its object.
That brand ‘A. & A.’ may remind him what a thief he is.”

“Here comes the fat brother. He’ll propose to camp with us.”

“It is quite natural he should, saint or sinner,--all the more if he is
sinner. It must be terrible for a man who has ugly secrets to wake up
at night, alone in bivouac, with a grisly dream, no human being near,
and find the stars watching him keenly, or the great white, solemn moon
pitying him, yet saying, with her inflexible look, that, moan and curse
as he may, no remorse will save him from despair.”

“Yes,” said Brent, knocking the ashes out of his pipe; “night always
seems to judge and sentence the day. A foul man, or a guilty man, so
long as he intends to remain foul and guilty, dreads pure, quiet,
orderly Nature.”

The objectionable stranger came up to our camp-fire.

“Hello, men!” said he, with a familiar air, “it’s a fine night”; and
meeting with no response, he continued: “But, I reckon, you don’t
allow nothin’ else but fine nights in this section.”

“Bad company makes all nights bad,” says Jake Shamberlain, gruffly
enough.

“Ay; and good company betters the orneriest sort er weather. The more
the merrier, eh?”

“Supposin’ it’s more perarer wolves, or more rattlesnakes, or more
horse-thieving, scalpin’ Utes!” says Jake, unpropitiated.

“O,” said the new-comer a little uneasily, “I don’t mean sech. I mean
jolly dogs, like me and my pardener. We allowed you’d choose company
in camp. We’d like to stick our pegs in alongside of yourn, ef no gent
haint got nothin’ to say agin it.”

“It’s a free country,” Jake said, “and looks pooty roomy round here.
You ken camp whar you blame please,--off or on.”

“Well,” says the fellow, laying hold of this very slight encouragement,
“since you’re agreeable, we’ll fry our pork over your fire, and hev a
smoke to better acquaintance.”

“He ain’t squimmidge,” said Jake to us, as the fellow walked off to
call his comrade. “He’s bound to ring himself into this here party,
whoever says stickleback. He’s one er them Algerines what don’t know a
dark hint, till it begins to make motions, and kicks ’em out. Well, two
more men, with two regiments’ allowance of shootin’ irons won’t do no
harm in this Ingine country.”

“Well, boys!” said the unpleasant fatling, approaching again. “Here is
my pardener, Sam Smith, from Sacramenter; what he don’t know about a
horse ain’t worth knowin’. My name is Jim Robinson. I ken sing a song,
tell a story, or fling a card with any man, in town or out er town.”

While the strangers cooked their supper, my friend and I lounged off
apart upon the prairie. A few steps gave us a capital picture. The
white wagon; the horses feeding in the distance, a dusky group; the men
picturesquely disposed about the fire, now glowing ruddy against the
thickening night. A Gypsy scene. Literal “Vie de Bohême.”

“I am never bored,” said Brent to me, “with the company or the talk of
men like those, good or bad. _Homo sum; nil humani_, and so forth,--a
sentiment of the late Plautus, now first quoted.”

“You do not yet feel a reaction toward scholarly society.”

“No; this Homeric life, with its struggle against elements, which I can
deify if I please, and against crude forces in man or nature, suits the
youth of my manhood, my Achilles time. The world went through an epoch
of just such life as we are leading. Every man must, to be complete
and not conventional.”

“A man who wants to know his country and his age must clash with all
the people and all the kinds of life in it. You and I have had the
college, the _salon_, the club, the street, Europe, the Old World, and
Yankeedom through and through; when do you expect to outgrow Ishmael,
my Jonathan?”

“Whenever Destiny gives me the final accolade of merit, and names me
Lover.”

“What! have you never been that happy wretch?”

“Never. I have had transitory ideals. I have been enchanted by women
willowy and women dumpy; by the slight and colorless mind and body, by
the tender and _couleur de rose_, and by the buxom and ruddy. I have
adored Zobeide and Hildegarde, Dolores and Dorothy Ann, imp and angel,
sprite and fiend. I have had my little irritation of a foolish fancy,
my sharp scourge of an unworthy passion. I am heart-whole still, and
growing a little expectant of late.”

“You are not cruising the plains for a lady-love! It is not, ‘I will
wed a savage woman’? It is not for a Pawnee squaw that you go clad in
skins and disdain the barber?”

“No. My business in Cosmos is not to be the father of half-breeds. But
soberly, old fellow, I need peace after a life driven into premature
foemanship. I need tranquillity to let my character use my facts. I
want the bitter drawn out of me, and the sweet fostered. I yearn to be
a lover.”

As he said this, we had approached the camp-fire. Jim Robinson, by
this time quite at home, was making his accomplishments of use. He was
debasing his audience with a vulgar song. The words and air jarred upon
both of us.

“_Nil humani a me alienum puto_, I repeat,” said Brent, “but that
foul stuff is not the voice of humanity. Let’s go look at the horses.
They do not belie their nobler nature, and are not in the line of
degradation. I cannot harden myself not to shrink from the brutal
element wherever I find it; whether in two horse-thieves on the plains,
or in a well-dressed reprobate of society at the club in New York.”

“Brutes in civilization are just as base, but not so blatant.”

“Old Pumps and the Don, here, are a gentler and more honorable pair
than these strangers.”

“They are the gentlemen of their race.”

“It’s not their cue to talk; but if the gift of tongues should come to
them, they would disdain all unchivalric and discourteous words. They
do now, with those brave eyes and scornful nostrils, rebuke whatever is
unmanly in men.”

“Yes; they certainly look ready to co-operate in all knightly duties.”

“One of those, as I hinted before, is riding down caitiffs.”

We left our horses, busy at their suppers, beside the brawling river,
and walked back to camp. It was a Caravaggio scene by the firelight.
Jim Robinson had produced cards. The men of the mail party were intent
over the game. Even Jake Shamberlain had easily forgotten his distrust
of the strangers. The two suspects, whether with an eye to future
games, or because they could not offend their comrades and protectors
for this dangerous journey, were evidently playing fair. Robinson
would sometimes exhibit a winning hand, and say, with an air of large
liberality, “Ye see, boys, I ked rake down yer dimes, ef I chose; but
this here is a game among friends. I’m playin’ for pastime. I’ve made
my pile olreddy, and so’s my pardener.”

The gambler’s face and the gambler’s manner are the same all over
the world. Always the same impassible watchfulness. Always the same
bullying cruelty or feline cruelty. Always the same lurking triumph,
and the same lurking sneer at the victim. The same quiet satisfaction
that gamesters will be geese, and gamblers are deputed to pluck them;
the same suppressed chuckle over the efforts of the luckless to
retrieve bad luck; the same calm confidence that the lucky player will
by and by back the wrong card, the wrong color, or the wrong number,
and the bank will take back its losses. What hard faces they wear!
Wear,--for their faces seem masks merely, dropped only at stealthy
moments. Always the same look and the same manner. Young and beautiful
faces curdle into it. Women’s even. I have seen women, the slaves of
the hells their devils kept, whose faces would have been fair and
young, if this ugly mask could but be torn away. All men and all women
who make prey of their fellows, who lie in wait to seize and dismember
brothers and sisters, get this same relentless expression. It fixes
itself deepest on a gambler; he must hold the same countenance from
the first lamp-lighting until indignant dawn pales the sickly light of
lamps, and the first morning air creeps in to stir the heavy-hearted
atmosphere, and show that it is poison.

“I’ve seen villains just like those two,” said Brent, “in every hell
in Europe and America. They always go in pairs; a tiger and a snake; a
bully and a wheedler.

“Mind and matter. The old partnership, like yours and mine.”

Next morning the two strangers were free and accepted members of the
party. They travelled on with us without question. Smith the gaunt
affected a rough frankness of manner. Robinson was low comedy. His head
was packed with scurvy jokes and stories. He had a foul leer on his
face whenever he was thinking his own thoughts. But either, if suddenly
startled, showed the unmistakable look that announces worse crime than
mere knavery.

They tangled their names so that we perceived each was an _alias_
hastily assumed. Smith compared six-shooters with me. I detected on his
the name Murker, half erased. Once, too, Brent heard Murker, _alias_
Smith, call his partner Larrap.

“Larrap is appropriate,” said I, when Brent told me this; “just the
name for him, as that unlucky mule branded ‘A. & A.’ could testify.”

“The long ruffian studied my face, when he made that slip, to see if I
had heard. He might as well have inspected the air for the mark of his
traitorous syllables.”

“You claim that your phiz is so covered with hieroglyphs, inscriptions
of fine feeling, that there is no room to write suspicions of other
men’s villany?”

“A clean heart keeps a clean face. A guilty heart will announce itself
at eyes and lips and cheeks, and by a thousand tremors of the nerves.
I have no prejudices against the family Larrap. But when Larrap’s mate
spoke the name, he looked at me as if he had been committing a murder,
and had by an irresistible impulse proclaimed the fact. Look at him
now! how he starts and half turns whenever one of our horses makes a
clatter. He dares not quite look back. He knows there is something
after him.”

“The dread of a vengeance, you think. That a blacker follower than
‘_Atra cura post equitem._’”

I tire of these unwholesome characters I am describing. But I did not
put them into the story. They took their places themselves. I find that
brutality interferes in most dramas and most lives. Brutality the male
sin, disloyalty the female sin,--these two are always doing their best
to baffle and blight heroism and purity. Often they succeed. Oftener
they fail. And so the world exists, and is not annulled; its history is
the history of the struggle and the victory. This episode of my life is
a brief of the world’s complete experience.




CHAPTER VIII.

A MORMON CARAVAN.


Still, as we rode along, the same rich, tranquil days of October; the
air always potable gold, and every breath nepenthe.

Early on one of the fairest of afternoons when all were fairest, we
reached Fort Bridger. Bridger had been an old hunter, trapper, and
by and by that forlorn hope of civilization, the holder of an Indian
trading-post. The spot is better known now. It was there that that
miserable bungle and blunder of an Administration more fool, if that
be possible, than knave,--the Mormon Expedition in 1858,--took refuge,
after its disasters on the Sweetwater.

At the moment of our arrival, Bridger’s Fort had just suffered capture.
Its owner was missing. The old fellow had deemed himself the squatter
sovereign of that bleak and sere region. He had built an adobe mud
fort, with a palisade, on a sweep of plain a degree less desert than
the deserts hard by. That oasis was his oasis, so he fondly hoped; that
mud fort, his mud fort; those willows and alders, his thickets; and
that trade, his trade.

But Bridger was one man, and he had powerful neighbors. It was a case
of “_O si annulus iste!_”--a Naboth’s-vineyard case. The Mormons did
not love the rugged mountaineer; that worthy Gentile, in turn, thought
the saints no better than so many of the ungodly. The Mormons coveted
oasis, fort, thicket, and trade. They accused the old fellow of selling
powder and ball to hostile Indians,--to Walker, chief of the Utes,
a scion, no doubt, of the Hookey Walker branch of that family. Very
likely he had done so. At all events, it was a good pretext. So, in
the name of the Prophet, and Brigham, successor of the Prophet, the
Latter-Day Saints had made a raid upon the post. Bridger escaped to the
mountains. The captors occupied the Gentile’s property, and spoiled his
goods.

Jake Shamberlain told us this story, not without some sympathy for the
exile.

“It’s olluz so,” says Jake; “Paul plants, and Apollyon gets the
increase. Not that Bridger’s like Paul, any more’n we’re like Apollyon;
but we’re goan to have all the cider off his apple trees.”

“I’m sorry old Bridger has come to grief,” said Brent to me, as we rode
over the plain toward the fort. “He was a rough, but worth all the
Latter-Day Saints this side of Armageddon. Biddulph and I stayed a week
with him last summer, when we came from the mountains about Luggernel
Alley.”

“How far is Luggernel Alley from this spot?”

“Fifty miles or so to the south and east. I almost fancy I recognize it
in that slight notch in the line of the blue sierra on the horizon. I
wonder if I shall ever see it again! If it were not so late, I should
insist upon taking you there now. There is no such gorge in the world.
And the springs, bold, liberal fountains, gushing out on a glittering
greensward! There are several of them, some boiling, some cold as
ice; and one, the Champagne Spring, wastes in the wilderness the most
delicate, sparkling, exhilarating tipple that ever reddened a lip or
freshened a brain.”

“Wait half a century; then you and I will go there by rail, with our
grandchildren, for draughts of the Fountain of Youth.”

“I should like to spend a honeymoon there, if I could find a wife
plucky enough to cross the plains.”

How well I remembered all this conversation afterwards, and not long
afterwards!

We rode up to the fort. A dozen or so of somewhat rubbishy soldiers,
the garrison, were lounging about.

“Will they expect a countersign,” asked I,--“some slogan of their
vulgarized Islamism?”

“Hardly!” replied Brent. “Only one man in the world can care about
assailing this dismal den. They need not be as ceremonious with
strangers as the Dutchmen are at Ehrenbreitstein and Verona.”

Jake and the main party stopped at the fort. We rode on a quarter of a
mile farther, and camped near a stream, where the grass was plenteous.

“Fulano and Pumps are in better condition than when we started,” said
I, while we were staking them out for a long feed. “The mustangs have
had all the drudgery; these aristocrats must be set to do their share
soon.”

“They are in prime racing order. If we had had them in training for
three months for a steeple-chase, or a flight, or a Sabine adventure,
or a rescue, they could not be in better trim than this moment. I
suppose their time to do their duty must be at hand, they seem so
ardent for it.”

We left our little caballada nibbling daintily at the sweetest spires
of self-cured hay, and walked back to the fort.

We stood there chatting with the garrison. Presently Brent’s quick eye
caught some white spots far away on the slope of the prairie, like
sails on the edge of a dreamy, sunny sea.

“Look!” said he, “there comes a Salt Lake emigration train.”

“Yes,” said a Mormon of the garrison, “that’s Elder Sizzum’s train.
Their forerunner came in this morning to choose the camping-spot.
There they be! two hundred ox-teams, a thousand Saints, bound for the
Promised Land.”

He walked off to announce the arrival, whistling, “Jordan is a hard
road to travel.”

I knew of Sizzum as the most seductive orator and foreign propagandist
of Mormonism. He had been in England some time, very successful at the
good work. The caravans we had already met were of his proselytes. He
himself was coming on with the last train, the one now in view, and
steering for Fort Bridger.

As we stood watching, the lengthening file of white-hooded wagons
crept slowly into sight. They came forward diagonally to our line of
view, travelling apart at regular intervals, like the vessels of a
well-ordered convoy. Now the whole fleet dipped into a long hollow, and
presently the leader rose slowly up over the ridge, and then slid over
the slope, like a sail winging down the broad back of a surge. So they
made their way along over the rolling sweep of the distance.

“Beautiful!” said Brent. “See how the white canvas goldens in this rich
October haze. Such scenes are the poetry of prairie life.”

“I am too sorry for the crews, to enjoy the sunlit sails.”

“Yes, the safer their voyage, the surer their wreck in that gulf of
superstition beyond the mountains.”

“Perhaps we waste sympathy. A man who has no more wit than to believe
the trash they teach, has no business with anything but stupid
drudgery. He will never suffer with discovering his faith to be a
delusion.”

“You may say that of a grown man; but think of the children,--to grow
up in desecrated homes, and never know the close and tender influence
of family nurture.”

“The state owes them an interference and an education.”

“So it does; and the women protection from polygamy, whether they will
or no.”

“Certainly. Polygamy makes woman a slave either by force, or influence
stronger than force. The state exists only to secure the blessings of
liberty to every soul within its borders, and so must free her.”

“Good logic, but not likely, quite yet, to guide legislation in our
country.”

“This is Sizzum’s last train; if the women here are no more fascinating
than their shabby sisters of its forerunners, we shall carry our hearts
safe home.”

“I cannot laugh about that,” said Brent. “My old dread revives,
whenever I see one of these caravans, that there may be in it some
innocent girl too young to choose, carried off by a fanatic father or
guardian. Think of the misery to a woman of any refinement!”

“But we have not seen any such.”

Larrap and Murker here joined us, and, overhearing the last remarks,
began to speak in a very disgusting tone of the women we had seen in
previous trains.

“I don’t wish to hear that kind of stuff,” said Brent, turning sternly
upon Larrap.

“It’s a free country, and I shall say what I blame please,” the fellow
said, with a grin.

“Then say it by yourself, and away from me.”

“You’re blame squimmidge,” said Larrap, and added a beastly remark.

Brent caught him by the collar, and gave him a shake.

Murker put his hand to a pistol and looked “Murder, if I dared!”

“None of that,” said I, stepping before him.

Jake Shamberlain, seeing the quarrel, came running up. “Now, Brother
Brent,” said Jake, “no shindies in this here Garden of Paradise. If the
gent has made a remark what teches you apologies is in order, an he’ll
make all far and squar.”

Brent gave the greasy man a fling.

He went down. Then he got up, with a trace of Bridger’s claim on his
red shirt.

“Yer needn’t be so blame hash with a feller,” said he. “I didn’t mean
no offence.”

“Very well. Learn to talk like a man, and not like a brute!” said Brent.

The two men walked off together, with black looks.

“You look disappointed, Shamberlain,” said I. “Did you expect a battle?”

“Ther’s no fight in them fellers,” said Jake; “but ef they can serve
you a mean trick they’ll do it; and they’re ambushin’ now to look in
the dixonary and see what it is. You’d better keep the lariats of that
black and that gray tied round your legs to-night, and every good
horsethief night while they’re along. They may be jolly dogs, and let
their chances slide at cards, but my notion is they’re layin’ low for
bigger hauls.”

“Good advice, Jake; and so we will.”

By this time the head wagons of Elder Sizzum’s train had crept down
upon the level near us. For the length of a long mile behind, the
serpentine line held its way. On the yellow rim of the world, with
softened outlines against the hazy horizon, the rear wagons were still
climbing up into view. The caravan lay like a slowly writhing hydra
over the land. Along its snaky bends, where dragon-wings should be,
were herds of cattle, plodding beside the “trailing-footed” teams, and
little companies of Saints lounging leisurely toward their evening’s
goal, their unbuilt hostelry on the plain.

Presently the hydra became a two-headed monster. The foremost wagon
bent to the right, the second led off to the left. Each successor,
as it came to the point of divergence, filed to the right or left
alternately. The split creature expanded itself. The two wings moved
on over a broad grassy level north of the fort, describing in regular
curve a great ellipse, a third of a mile long, half as much across.

On either flank the march was timed and ordered with the precision of
practice. This same manœuvre had been repeated every day of the long
journey. Precisely as the foremost teams met at the upper end of the
curve, the two hindmost were parting at the lower. The ellipse was
complete. It locked itself top and bottom. The train came to a halt.
Every wagon of the two hundred stopped close upon the heels of its file
leader.

A tall man, half pioneer, half deacon, in dress and mien, galloped up
and down the ring. This was Sizzum, so the by-standers informed us.
At a signal from him, the oxen, two and three yoke to a wagon, were
unyoked, herded, and driven off to wash the dust from their protestant
nostrils, and graze over the russet prairie. They huddled along, a
great army, a thousand strong. Their brown flanks grew ruddy with the
low sunshine. A cloud of golden dust rose and hung over them. The air
was loud with their lowing. Relieved from their drags, the herd frisked
away with unwieldy gambolling. We turned to the camp, that improvised
city in the wilderness.

Nothing could be more systematic than its arrangement. Order is welcome
in the world. Order is only second to beauty. It is, indeed, the
skeleton of beauty. Beauty seeks order, and becomes its raiment. Every
great white-hooded, picturesque wagon of the Mormon caravan was in its
place. The tongue of each rested on the axle of its forerunner, or was
ranged upon the grass beneath. The ellipse became a fort and a corral.
Within, the cattle could be safely herded. Marauding Redskins would
gallop about in vain. Nothing stampedable there. Scalping Redskins,
too, would be baffled. They could not make a dash through the camp,
whisk off a scalp, and vanish untouched. March and encampment both had
been marshalled with masterly skill.

“Sizzum,” Brent avowed to me, _sotto voce_, “may be a blind guide
with ditchward tendencies in faith. He certainly knows how to handle
his heretics in the field. I have seen old tacticians, Maréchales and
Feldzeugmeisters, in Europe, with El Dorado on each shoulder, and
Golconda on the left breast, who would have tied up that train into
knots that none of them would be Alexander enough to cut.”




CHAPTER IX.

SIZZUM AND HIS HERETICS.


No sooner had this nomad town settled itself quietly for the night,
than a town-meeting collected in the open of the amphitheatre.

“Now, brethren,” says Shamberlain to us, “ef you want to hear exhortin’
as runs without stoppin’, step up and listen to the Apossle of the
Gentiles. Prehaps,” and here Jake winked perceptibly, “you’ll be
teched, and want to jine, and prehaps you wont. Ef you’re docyle you’ll
be teched, ef you’re bulls of Bashan you wont be teched.”

“How did you happen to be converted yourself, Jake?” Brent asked.
“You’ve never told me.”

“Why, you see I was naturally of a religious nater, and I’ve tried ’em
all, but I never fell foul of a religion that had real proved miracles,
till I seed a man, born dumb, what was cured by the Prophet Joseph
looking down his throat and tellin’ his palate to speak up,--and it did
speak up, did that there palate, and went on talkin’ most oncommon.
It’s onbeknown tongues it talks, suthin like gibberidge; but Joseph
said that was how the tongues sounded in the Apossles’ time to them
as hadn’t got the interruption of tongues. I struck my flag to that
there miracle. I’d seen ’em gettin’ up the sham kind, when I was to
the Italian convent, and I knowed the fourth-proof article. I may talk
rough about this business, but Brother Brent knows I’m honest about it.”

Jake led us forward, and stationed us in posts of honor before the
crowd of auditors.

Presently Sizzum appeared. He had taken time to tone down the pioneer
and develop the deacon in his style, and a very sleek personage he
had made of himself. He was clean shaved; clean shaving is a favorite
coxcombry of the deacon class. His long black hair, growing rank from
a muddy skin, was sleekly put behind his ears. A large white blossom
of cravat expanded under his nude, beefy chin, and he wore a black
dress-coat, creased with its recent packing. Except that his pantaloons
were thrust into boots with the maker’s name (Abel Cushing, Lynn,
Mass.) stamped in gold on a scarlet morocco shield in front, he was in
correct go-to-meetin’ costume,--a Chadband of the plains.

He took his stand, and began to fulmine over the assemblage. His manner
was coarse and overbearing, with intervals of oily persuasiveness. He
was a big, powerful man, without one atom of delicacy in him,--a fellow
who never could take a flower or a gentle heart into his hand without
crushing it by a brutal instinct. A creature with such an amorphous
beak of a nose, such a heavy-lipped mouth, and such wilderness of jaw,
could never perceive the fine savor of any delicate thing. Coarse joys
were the only joys for such a body; coarse emotions, the pleasures of
force and domination, the only emotions crude enough for such a soul.

His voice was as repulsive as his mien and manner. That badly modelled
nose had an important office in his oratory. Through it he hailed his
auditors to open their hearts, as a canal-boatman hails the locks with
a canal horn of bassoon calibre. But sometimes, when he wished to be
seductive, his sentences took the channel of his mouth, and his great
lips rolled the words over like fat morsels. Pah! how the recollection
of the fellow disgusts me! And yet he had an unwholesome fascination,
which compelled us to listen. I could easily understand how he might
overbear feeble minds, and wheedle those that loved flattery. He had
some education. Travel had polished his base metal, so that it shone
well enough to deceive the vulgar or the credulous. He did not often
allow himself the broad coarseness of his brother preachers in the
church.

Shall I let him speak for himself? Does any one wish to hear the
inspirations of the last faith humanity has chosen for its guide?

No. Such travesty of true religion is very sorry comedy, very tragical
farce. Vulgar rant and cant, and a muddle of texts and dogmas, are
disgusting to hear, and would be weariness to repeat.

Sizzum’s sermon suited his mixed character. He was Aaron and Joshua,
high-priest and captain combined. He made his discourse bulletin for
to-day, general orders for to-morrow. He warned against the perils
of disobedience. He raved of the joys and privileges of Latter-Day
Saintship on earth and in heaven. He heaped vindictive and truculent
anathemas upon Gentiles. He gave his audience to understand that he
held the keys of the kingdom; if they yielded to him without question,
they were safe in life and eternity; if they murmured, they were cast
into outer darkness. It was terrible to see the man’s despotism over
his proselytes. A rumble of Amens from the crowd greeted alike every
threat and every promise.

Sizzum’s discourse lasted half an hour. He dismissed his audience with
an Amen, and an injunction to keep closer to the train on the march
to-morrow, and not be “rabbling off to catch grasshoppers because they
were bigger and handsomer than the Lancashire kind.”

“And this is one of the religions of the nineteenth century, and such a
man is its spokesman,” said Brent to me, as the meeting broke up, and
we strolled off alone to inspect the camp.

“It is a shame to all churches that they have not trained men to judge
of evidence, and so rendered such a delusion impossible.”

“But Christianity tolerates, and ever reveres, myths and mythic
histories; and such toleration and reverence offer premiums on the
invention of new mythologies like this.”

“We, in our churches, teach that phenomena can add authority to truth;
we necessarily invite miracle-mongers, Joe Smiths, Pio Nonos, to
produce miracles to sustain lies.”

“I suppose,” said Brent, “that superstition must be the handmaid of
religion, except in minds very holy, or very brave and thorough in
study. By and by, when mankind is educated to know that theology is a
science, to be investigated and tested like a science, Mormonism and
every like juggle will become forever impossible.”

“Certainly; false religions always pretend to a supernatural origin and
a fresh batch of mysteries. Let Christianity discard its mysteries, and
impostors will have no educated credulity to aid them.”

So Brent and I commented upon the Sizzum heresy and its mouthpiece. We
abhorred the system, and were disgusted with its apostle, as a tempter
and a knave. Yet we could not feel any close personal interest in the
class he deluded. They seemed too ignorant and doltish to need purer
spiritual food.

Bodily food had been prepared by the women while the men listened to
Sizzum’s grace before meat. A fragrance of baking bread had pervaded
the air. A thousand slices of fat pork sizzled in two hundred
frying-pans, and water boiled for two hundred coffee or tea pots.
Saints cannot solely live on sermons.

Brent and I walked about to survey the camp. We stopped wherever we
found the emigrants sociable, and chatted with them. They were all
eager to know how much length of journey remained.

“We’re comin’ to believe, some of us,” said an old crone, with a
wrinkle for every grumble of her life, “that we’re to be forty year
in the wilderness, like the old Izzerullites. I wouldn’t have come,
Samwell, if I’d known what you was bringin’ me to.”

“There’s a many of us wouldn’t have come, mother,” rejoined “Samwell,”
a cowed man of anxious look, “if we’d known as much as we do now.”

Samwell glanced sadly at his dirty, travel-worn children, at work at
mud pies and dust _vol-au-vents_. His dowdy wife broke off the colloquy
by announcing, in a tone that she must have learned from a rattlesnake,
that the loaf was baked, the bacon was fried, and supper shouldn’t wait
for anybody’s talking.

All the emigrants were English. Lancashire their accent and dialect
announced, and Lancashire they told us was their home in the old
step-mother country.

Step-mother, indeed, to these her children! No wonder that they
had found life at home intolerable! They were the poorest class of
townspeople from the great manufacturing towns,--penny tradesmen,
indoor craftsmen, factory operatives,--a puny, withered set of beings;
hardly men, if man means strength; hardly women, if woman means beauty.
Their faces told of long years passed in the foul air of close shops,
or work-rooms, or steamy, oily, flocculent mills. All work and no
play had been their history. No holidays, no green grass, no flowers,
no freshness,--nothing but hard, ill-paid drudgery, with starvation
standing over the task and scourging them on. There were children among
them already aged and wrinkled, ancient as the crone, Samwell’s mother,
for any childish gayety they showed. Poor things! they had been for
years their twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours at work in stifling mills,
when they should have been tumbling in the hay, chasing butterflies,
expanding to sunshine and open air.

“We have not seen,” said Brent, “one hearty John Bull, or buxom Betsy
Bull, in the whole caravan.”

“They look as if husks and slops had been their meat and drink, instead
of beef and beer.”

“Beef and beer belong to fellows that have red in their cheeks and
guffaws in their throats, not to these lean, pale, dreary wretches.”

“The saints’ robes seem as sorry as their persons,” said I. “No
watchman on the hill-tops of their Sion will hail, ‘Who are these in
bright array?’ when they heave in sight!”

“They have a right to be way-worn, after their summer of plodding over
these dusty wastes.”

“Here comes a group in gayer trim. See!--actually flounces and
parasols!”

Several young women of the Blowsalind order, dressed in very
incongruous toggery of stained and faded silks, passed us. They seemed
to be on a round of evening visits, and sheltered their tanned faces
against the October sunshine with ancient fringed parasols. Their
costume had a queer effect in the camp of a Mormon caravan at Fort
Bridger. They were in good spirits, and went into little panics when
they saw Brent in his Indian rig, and then into “Lor me!” and “Bless
us!” when the supposed Pawnee was discovered to be a handsome pale-face.

“Perhaps we waste sympathy,” said Brent, “on these people. Why are not
they better off here, and likely to be more comfortable in Utah than in
the slums of Manchester?”

“Drudgery for drudgery, slavery for slavery, barren as the Salt Lake
country is, and rough the lot of pioneers, I have no doubt they will
be. But then the religion!”

“I do not defend that; but what has England’s done for them to make
them regret it? Of what use to these poor proletaires have the
cathedrals been, or the sweet country churches, or the quiet cloisters
of Oxford and Cambridge? I cannot wonder that they have given an easy
belief to Mormonism,--an energetic, unscrupulous propagandism, offering
escape from poverty and social depression, offering acres for the mere
trouble of occupying; promising high thrones in heaven, and on earth
also, if the saints will only gather, march back, and take possession
of their old estates in Illinois and Missouri.”

We had by this time approached the upper end of the ellipse. Sizzum, as
quartermaster, had done his duty well. The great blue land-arks, each
roofed with its hood of white canvas stretched on hoops, were in stout,
serviceable order, wheels, axles, and bodies.

Within these nomad cottages order or chaos reigned, according to the
tenants. Some people seem only to know the value of rubbish. They
guard old shoes, old hats, cracked mugs, battered tins, as articles of
_virtu_. Some of the wagons were crowded with such cherished trash.
Some had been lightened of such burdens by the wayside, and so were
snug and orderly nestling-places; but the rat’s-nests quite outnumbered
the wren’s-nests.

A small, neat wagon stood near the head of the train. We might have
merely glanced at it, and passed by, as we had done elsewhere along the
line; but, as we approached, our attention was caught by Murker and
Larrap. They were nosing about, prying into the wagon, from a little
distance. When they caught sight of us, they turned and skulked away.

“What are those vermin about?” said Brent.

“Selecting, perhaps, a Mormoness to kidnap to-night, or planning a
burglary.”

“I hate to loathe any one as I loathe those fellows. I have known
brutes enough in my life to have become hardened or indifferent by this
time, but these freshen my disgust every time I see them.”

“I thought we had come to a crisis with them this afternoon, when you
collared Larrap.”

“You remember my presentiments about them the night they joined us. I
am afraid they will yet serve us a shabby trick. Their ‘dixonary,’ as
Shamberlain called it, of rascality is an unabridged edition.”

“Such carrion creatures should not be allowed about such a pretty cage.”

“It is, indeed, a pretty cage. Some neater-handed Phyllis than we have
seen has had the arranging of the household gear within.”

“Yes; the mistress of this rolling mansion has not lost her domestic
ambition. This is quite the model wagon of the train. Refinement does
not disdain Sizzum’s pilgrims; as _ecce signum_ here!”

“The pretty cage has its bird,--pretty too, perhaps. See! there is some
one behind that shawl screen at the back of the wagon.”

“The bird has divined Murker and Larrap, and is hiding, probably.”

“Come; we have stared long enough; let us walk on.”




CHAPTER X.

“ELLEN! ELLEN!”


We were turning away from the pretty cage, in order not to frighten
the bird, pretty or not, when an oldish man, tending his fire at the
farther side of the wagon, gave us “Good evening!”

There is a small but ancient fraternity in the world, known as the
Order of Gentlemen. It is a grand old order. A poet has said that
Christ founded it; that he was “the first true gentleman that ever
lived.”

I cannot but distinguish some personages of far-off antiquity as worthy
members of this fellowship. I believe it coeval with man. But Christ
stated the precept of the order, when he gave the whole moral law
in two clauses,--Love to God, and Love to the neighbor. Whoever has
this precept so by heart that it shines through into his life, enters
without question into the inner circles of the order.

But to protect itself against pretenders, this brotherhood, like any
other, has its formulas, its passwords, its shibboleths, even its
uniform. These are external symbols. With some, the symbol is greater
than the thing signified. The thing signified, the principle, is so
beautiful, that the outward sign is enough to glorify any character.
The demeanor of a gentleman--being art, the expression of an idea in
form--can become property, like any art. It may be an heirloom in an
ancient house, like the portrait of the hero who gave a family name and
fame, like the portrait of the maiden martyr or the faithful wife who
made that name beloved, that fame poetry, to all ages. This precious
inheritance, like anything fine and tender, has sometimes been treated
with over care. Guardians have been so solicitous that a neophyte
should not lose his inherited rank in the order of gentlemen, that they
have forgotten to make a man of him. Culturing the flower, they have
not thought to make the stalk sturdy, or even healthy. The demeanor of
a gentleman may be possessed by a weakling, or even inherited by one
whose heart is not worthy of his manners.

The formulas of this order are not edited; its passwords are not
syllabled; its uniform was never pictured in a fashion-plate, or so
described that a snob could go to his tailor, and say, “Make me the
habit of a gentleman.” But the brothers know each other unerringly
wherever they meet; be they of the inner shrine, gentlemen heart and
life; be they of the outer court, gentlemen in feeling and demeanor.

No disguise delays this recognition. No strangeness of place and
circumstances prevents it. The men meet. The magnetism passes between
them. All is said without words. Gentleman knows gentleman by what we
name instinct. But observe that this thing, instinct, is character in
its finest, keenest, largest, and most concentrated action. It is the
spirit’s touch.

John Brent and I, not to be deemed intruders, were walking away from
the neat wagon at the upper end of the Mormon camp, when an oldish man
beside the wagon gave us “Good evening.”

“Good evening, gentlemen,” said the wan, gray-haired, shadowy man
before us.

And that was all. It was enough. We knew each other; we him and he us.
Men of the same order, and so brothers and friends.

Here was improbability that made interest at once. Greater to us than
to him. We were not out of place. He was, and in the wrong company.

Brent and I looked at each other. We had half divined our new brother’s
character at the first glance.

How legible are some men! All, indeed, that have had, or are to have,
a history, are books in a well-known tongue to trained decipherers.
But some tragedies stare at us with such an earnest dreariness from
helpless faces, that we read with one look. We turn away sadly. We have
comprehended the whole history of past sorrow; we prophesy the coming
despair.

I will not now anticipate the unfinished, melancholy story we read
in this new face. An Englishman, an unmistakable gentleman, and in a
Mormon camp,--there was tragedy enough. Enough to whisper us both to
depart, and not grieve ourselves with vain pity; enough to imperatively
command us to stay and see whether we, as true knights, foes of wrong,
succorers of feebleness, had any business here. The same instinct that
revealed to us one of our order where he ought not to be, warned us
that he might have claims on us, and we duties toward him.

We returned his salutation.

We were about to continue the conversation, when he opened a fresh
page of the tragedy. He called, in a voice too sad to be querulous,--a
flickering voice, never to be fed vigorous again by any lusty hope,--

“Ellen! Ellen!”

“What, father dear?”

“The water boils. Please bring the tea, my child.”

“Yes, father dear.”

The answers came from within the wagon. They were the song of the
bird whose nest we had approved. A sad song. A woman’s voice can tell
a long history of sorrow in a single word. This wonderful instrument,
our voice, alters its _timbre_ with every note it yields, as the face
changes with every look, until at last the dominant emotion is master,
and gives quality to tone and character to expression.

It was a sad, sweet voice that answered the old gentleman’s call. A
lady’s voice,--the voice of a high-bred woman, delicate, distinct,
self-possessed. That sound itself was tragedy in such a spot. No
transitory disappointment or distress ever imprinted its mark so
deeply upon a heart’s utterance. The sadness here had been life-long,
had begun long ago, in the days when childhood should have gone
thoughtless, or, if it noted the worth of its moments, should have
known them as jubilee every one;--a sadness so habitual that it had
become the permanent atmosphere of the life. The voice announced the
person, and commanded all the tenderest sympathy brother-man can give
to any sorrowful one in the sisterhood of woman.

And yet this voice, that with so subtle a revelation gave us the key of
the unseen lady’s history, asked for no pity. There was no moan in it,
and no plaint. Not even a murmur, nor any rebel bitterness or sourness
for defeat. The undertone was brave. If not hopeful, still resolute.
No despair could come within sound of that sweet music of defiance.
The tones that challenge Fate were subdued away; but not the tones
that calmly answer, “No surrender,” to Fate’s untimely pæan. It was a
happy thing to know that, sorrowful as the life might be, here was an
impregnable soul.

There was a manner of half command and half dependence in the father’s
call to his daughter,--a weak nature, still asserting the control it
could not sustain over a stronger. And in her response an indulgence of
this feeble attempt at authority.

Does all this seem much to find in the few simple words we had heard?
The analysis might be made infinitely more thorough. Every look, tone,
gesture of a man is a symbol of his complete nature. If we apply the
microscope severely enough, we can discern the fine organism by which
the soul sends itself out in every act of the being. And the more
perfectly developed the creature, the more significant, and yet the
more mysterious, is every habit, and every motion mightier than habit,
of body or soul.

In an instant, the lady so sweetly heralded stepped from beneath the
hood of the wagon, and sprang to the ground in more busy and cheerful
guise than her voice had promised.

Again the same subtle magnetism between her and us. We could not have
been more convinced of her right to absolute respect and consideration
if she had entered to us in the dusky light of a rich drawing-room,
or if we had been presented in due form at a picnic of the grandest
world, with far other scenery than this of a “desart idle,” tenanted
for the moment by a Mormon caravan. The lady, like her father, felt
that we were gentlemen, and therefore would comprehend her. She saluted
us quietly. There was in her manner a tacit and involuntary protest
against circumstances, just enough for dignity. A vulgar woman would
have snatched up and put on clumsily a have-seen-better-days air. This
lady knew herself, and knew that she could not be mistaken for other
than she was. Her base background only made her nobility more salient.

She did not need any such background, nor the contrast of the drudges
and meretricious frights of the caravan. She could have borne full
light without any shade. A woman fit to stand peer among the peerless.

We could not be astonished at this apparition. We had divined her
father rightly, as it afterward proved. Her voice has already half
disclosed her character. Let her face continue the development. We had
already heard her called by her Christian name, Ellen. That seemed to
bring us, from the beginning, into a certain intimacy with the woman as
woman, sister, daughter, and to subordinate the circumstances of the
life, to be in future suggested by the social name, to the life itself.

Ellen, then, the unknown lady of the Mormon caravan, was a high-bred
beauty. Englishwomen generally lack the fine edge of such beauty
as hers. She owed her dark fairness, perhaps, to a Sicilian bride,
whom her Norman ancestor had pirated away from some old playground
of Proserpine, and brought with him to England when he came there as
conqueror. Her nose was not quite aquiline.

Positive aquiline noses should be cut off. They are ugly; they are
immoral; they are sensual; they love money; they enjoy others’ misery.
The worst birds have hooked beaks; and so the worst men, the eagles and
vultures of the race. Cut off the beaks; they betoken a cruel pounce,
a greedy clutch, and a propensity to carrion. Save the exceptions, but
extirpate the brood.

This lady’s nose was sensitive and proud. It is well when a face has
its share of pride in the nose. Then the lips can give themselves
solely to sweetness and archness. Besides, pride, or, if the word
is dreaded, a conscious and resolute personality, should be the
characteristic of a face. The nose should express this quality. Above,
the eyes may changefully flash intelligence; below, the mouth may smile
affection; the cheeks may give balance and equability; the chin may
show the cloven dimple of a tender and many-sided, or the point of
a single-hearted and concentrated nature; the brow, a non-committal
feature, may look wise or wiseacre; but every one of them is only
tributary to the nose, standing royally in the midst, and with dignity
presiding over its wayward realm.

Halt! My business is to describe a heroine,--not to discuss
physiognomy, with her face for a type.

As I said, her nose was sensitive and proud. There might have once
been scorn in the curve of her nostril. Not now. Sorrow and pity had
educated away the scorn, as they had the tones of challenge from her
voice. Firmness, self-respect, latent indignation, remained untouched.
A strong woman, whose power was intense and passionate. Calm, till the
time came, and then flame. Beware of arousing her! Not that there was
revenge in her face. No; no stab or poison there. But she was a woman
to die by an act of will, rather than be wronged. She was one who
could hold an insulter by a steady look, while she grew paler, paler,
purer, purer, with a more unearthly pureness, until she had crushed the
boiling blood back into her heart, and stood before the wretch white
and chill as a statue, marble-dead.

What a woman to meet in a Mormon caravan! And yet how able to endure
whatever a dastard Fate might send to crush her there!

Her hair was caught back, and severely chided out of its wish to rebel
and be as beautiful as it knew was its desert. It was tendril hair,
black enough to show blackness against Fulano’s shoulder. Chide her
locks as she might, they still insisted upon flinging out here and
there a slender curling token of their gracefulness, to prove what it
might be if she would but let them have their sweet and wilful will.

Her eyes were gray, with violet touches. Her eyebrows defined and
square. If she had had passionate or pleading dark eyes,--the eyes that
hardly repress their tears for sorrow or for joy,--and the temperament
that such eyes reveal, she would long ago have fevered or wept herself
to death. No woman could have looked at the disgusts of that life
of hers through tears, and lived. The gray eyes meant steadiness,
patience, hope without flinching, and power to master fate, or if not
to master, to defy.

She was somewhat pale, thin, and sallow. Plodding wearily and drearily
over those dusty wastes toward exile could not make her a merry
Nut-Brown Maid. Only her thin, red lips proved that there were still
blushes lurking out of sight.

A mature woman; beyond girlhood, body and soul. With all her grave
demeanor, she could not keep down the wiles of gracefulness that ever
bubbled to the surface. If she could but be her happy self, what a fair
world she would suddenly create about her!

She was dressed in rough gray cloth, as any lady might be for a
journey. She was evidently one whose resolute neatness repels
travel-stains. After the tawdry, draggled silks of the young women we
had just seen, her simplicity was charmingly fresh. Could she and they
be of the same race of beings? They were apart as far as coarse from
fine, as silvern from brazen. To see her here among this horde was a
horror in itself. No horror the less, that she could not blind herself
to her position and her fate. She could not fail to see what a bane
was beauty here. That she had done so was evident. She had essayed by
severe plainness of dress to erase the lady from her appearance. A very
idle attempt! There she was, do what she would, her beauty triumphing
over all the wrong she did to it for duty’s sake.

All these observations I made with one glance. Description seems idle
when one remembers how eyes can see at a flash what it took æons to
prepare for and a lifetime to form.

Brent and I exchanged looks. This was the result of our fanciful
presentiments. Here was visible the woman we had been dreading to find.
It still seemed an impossible vision. I almost believed that the old
gentleman’s blanket would rise with him and his daughter, like the
carpet of Fortunatus, and transport them suddenly away, leaving us
beside a Mormon wagon in Sizzum’s camp and in the presence of a frowzy
family cooking a supper of pork.

I looked again and again. It was all real. There was the neat,
comfortable wagon; there was the feeble, timid old gentleman, pottering
about; there was this beautiful girl, busy with her tea, and smiling
tenderly over her father.




CHAPTER XI.

FATHER AND DAUGHTER.


“Come, gentlemen,” said the father, in a lively way. “We are all
campaigners. Sit down and take a cup of tea with us. No ceremony. _A
la guerre, comme à la guerre._ I cannot give you Sèvres porcelain. I
am afraid even my delf is a little cracked; but we’ll fancy it whole
and painted with roses. Now plenty of tea, Ellen dear. Guests are too
rare not to be welcomed with our very best. Besides, I expect Brother
Sizzum, after his camp duties are over.”

It was inexpressibly dreary, this feeble conviviality. In the old
gentleman’s heart it was plain that disappointment and despondency
were the permanent tenants. His gayety seemed only a mockery,--a
vain essay to delude himself into the thought that he could be happy
even for a moment. His voice, even while he jested, was hollow and
sorrowful. There was a trepidation in his manner, half hope, half
fear, as if he dreaded that some one would presently announce to him
a desperate disaster, or fancied that some sudden piece of good luck
was about to befall him, and he must be all attention lest it pass to
another. Nothing of the anxiety of a guilty man about him,--of one who
hears pursuit in the hum of a cricket or the buzz of a bee; only the
uneasiness of one flying forever from himself, and hoping that some
chance bliss will hold his flight and give him a moment’s forgetfulness.

We of course accepted the kindly invitation. Civilization was the
novelty to us. Tea with a gentleman and lady was a privilege quite
unheard of. We should both have been ready to devote ourselves to a
woman far less charming than our hostess. But here was a pair--the
beautiful daughter, the father astray--whom we must know more of. I
felt myself taking a very tender interest in their welfare, revolving
plans in my mind to learn their history, and, if it might be done, to
persuade the father out of his delusion.

“Now, gentlemen,” said our friend, playing his part with mild
gracefulness, like an accomplished host; “sit down on the blankets. I
can not give you grand arm-chairs, as I might have done once in Old
England, and hope to do if you ever come to see me at my house in
Deseret. But really we are forgetting something very important. We have
not been formally introduced. Bless me! that will never do. Allow me
gentlemen to present myself, Mr. Hugh Clitheroe, late of Clitheroe
Hall, Clitheroe, Lancashire,--a good old name, you see. And this is my
daughter, Miss Ellen Clitheroe. These gentlemen, my dear, will take the
liberty to present themselves to you.”

“Mr. Richard Wade, late of California; Mr. John Brent, a roving Yankee.
Pray let me aid you Miss Clitheroe.”

Brent took the teakettle from her hand, and filled the teapot. This
little domestic office opened the way to other civil services.

It was like a masquerading scene. My handsome friend and the elegant
young lady bending together over four cracked cups and as many plates
of coarse earthenware, spread upon a shawl, on the dry grass. The
circle of wagons, the groups of Saints about their supper fires, the
cattle and the fort in the distance, made a strangely unreal background
to a woman whose proper place, for open air, was in the ancient avenue
of some ancestral park, or standing on the terrace to receive groups
of brilliant ladies coming up the lawn. But character is superior to
circumstance, and Miss Clitheroe’s self-possession controlled her
scenery. Her place, wherever it was, became her right place. The
prairie, and the wagons, and the rough accessories, gave force to her
refinement.

Mr. Clitheroe regarded the pair with a dreamy pleasure.

“Quite patriarchal, is it not?” said he to me. “I could fancy myself
Laban, and my daughter Rachel. There is a trace of the Oriental in her
looks. We only need camels, and this would be a scene worthy of the
times of the Eastern patriarchs and the plains of the old Holy Land.
We of the Latter Day Church think much of such associations; more I
suppose than you world’s people.”

And here the old gentleman looked at me uneasily, as if he dreaded lest
I should fling in a word to disturb his illusion, or perhaps ridicule
his faith.

“I have often been reminded here of the landscape of Palestine,” said
I, “and those bare regions of the Orient. Your friends in Utah, too,
refresh the association by their choice of Biblical names.”

“Yes; we love to recall those early days when Jehovah was near to his
people, a chosen people, who suffered for faith’s sake, as we have
done. In fact, our new faith and new revelation are only revivals and
continuations of the old. Our founder and our prophets give us the
doctrines of the earliest Church, with a larger light and a surer
confidence.”

He said this with the manner of one who is repeating for the
thousandth time a lesson, a formula which he must keep constantly
before him, or its effect will be gone. In fact, his resolute assertion
of his creed showed the weak belief. As he paused, he looked at me
again, hoping, as I thought, that I would dispute or differ, and so he
might talk against contradiction, a far less subtle enemy than doubt.
As I did not immediately take up the discussion, he passed lightly,
and with the air of one whose mind does not love to be consecutive, to
another subject.

“Hunters, are you not?” said he, turning to Brent. “I am astonished
that more of you American gentlemen do not profit by this great
buffalo-preserve and deer-park. We send you a good shot occasionally
from England.”

“Yes,” said my friend. “I had a capital shot, and capital fellow too
for comrade, this summer, in the mountains. A countryman of yours, Sir
Biron Biddulph. He was wretchedly out of sorts, poor fellow, when we
started. Fresh air and bold life quite set him up. A month’s galloping
with the buffalo, and a fortnight over the cliffs, after the big-horn,
would ‘put a soul under the ribs of death.’ Biddulph left me to go
home, a new man. I find that he has stayed in Utah, for more hunting, I
suppose.”

Brent was kneeling at Miss Clitheroe’s feet, holding a cup for her to
fill. He turned toward her father as he spoke. At the name of Biddulph,
I saw that her red lips’ promise of possible blushes was no false one.

“Ah!” thought I; “here, perhaps, is the romance of the Baronet’s
history. No wonder he found England too narrow for him, if this noble
woman would not smile! Perhaps he has stopped in Utah to renew his
suit, or volunteer his services. A strange drama! with new elements of
interest coming in.”

I could not refrain from studying Miss Clitheroe with some curiosity as
I thought thus.

She perceived my inquisitive look. She made some excuse, and stepped
into the wagon.

“Biddulph!” said the father. “Ellen dear, Mr. Brent knows our old
neighbor, Biron Biddulph. O, she has disappeared, ‘on hospitable
thoughts intent.’ I shall be delighted to meet an old friend in
Deseret. We knew him intimately at home in better days,--no! in those
days I blindly deemed better, before I was illumined with the glories
of the new faith, and saw the New Jerusalem with eyes of hope.”

Miss Clitheroe rejoined us. She had been absent only a moment, but,
as I could see, long enough for tears, and the repression of tears.
I should have pitied her more; but she seemed, in her stout-hearted
womanhood, above pity, asking no more than the sympathy the brave have
always ready for the sorrowful brave.

Evidently to change the subject, she engaged Brent again in his
tea-table offices. I looked at that passionate fellow with some
anxiety. He was putting a large share of earnestness in his manner
of holding cups and distributing hardtack. Why so much fervor and
devotion, my friend? Seems to me I have seen cavaliers before, aiding
beauties with like ardor, on the carpet, in the parlor, over the Sèvres
and the silver. And when I saw it, I thought, “O cavalier! O beauty!
beware, or do not beware, just as you deem best, but know that there is
peril!” For love can improvise out of the steam of a teapot a romance
as big and sudden and irrepressible as the Afreet that swelled from the
casket by the sea-shore in the Arabian story.

We sat down upon the grass for our picnic. I should not invite the
late Mr. Watteau, or even the extant Mr. Diaz, to paint us. The late
Mr. Watteau’s heroes and heroines were silk and satin Arcadians; they
had _valets de chambre_ and _filles de chambre_, and therefore could
be not fully heroes and heroines, if proverbs be true. The present Mr.
Diaz, too, charming and pretty as he is, has his place near parterres
and terraces, within the reach of rake and broom. Mr. Horace Vernet
is equally inadmissible, since that martial personage does not
comprehend a desert, except with a foreground of blood, smoke, baggy
red pantaloons, and _mon General_ on a white horse giving the Legion of
Honor to _mon enfant_ on his last legs. But I must wait for some artist
with the gayety of Mr. Watteau, the refinement of Mr. Diaz, and the
soldierly force of Mr. Vernet, who can perceive the poetry of American
caravan-life, and can get the heroine of our picnic at Fort Bridger
to give him a sitting. Art is unwise not to perceive the materials it
neglects in such scenes.

Mr. Clitheroe grew more and more genial as we became better acquainted.
He praised the sunshine and the climate. England had nothing like it,
so our host asserted. The atmosphere of England crushed the body, as
its moral atmosphere repressed perfect freedom of thought and action.

“Yes, gentlemen,” said he, “I have escaped at last into the region I
have longed for. I mean to renew my youth in the Promised Land,--to
have my life over again, with a store of the wisdom of age.”

Then he talked pleasantly of the incidents of his journey,--an
impressible being, taking easily the color of the moment, like a child.
He liked travel, he said; it was dramatic action and scene-shifting,
without the tragedy or the over-absorbing interest of dramatic plot.
He liked to have facts come to him without being laboriously sought
for, as they do in travel. The eye, without trouble, took in whatever
appeared, and at the end of the day a traveller found himself expanded
and educated without knowing it. There was a fine luxury in this, for a
mature man to learn again, just as a child does, and find his lessons
play. He liked this novel, adventurous life.

“Think of it, sir,” he said, “I have seen real Indians, splendid
fellows, all in their war-paint; just such as I used to read of with
delight in your Mr. Fenimore’s tales. And these prairies too,--I
seem to have visited them already in the works of your charming Mr.
Irving,--a very pleasant author, very pleasant indeed, and quite
reminding me of our best essayists; though he has an American savor
too. Mr. Irving, I think, did not come out so far as this. This region
has never been described by any one with a poetic eye. My brethren in
the Church of the Latter Day have their duties of stern apostleship;
they cannot turn aside to the right hand nor to the left. But when the
Saints are gathered in, they will begin to see the artistic features
of their land. Those Wind River Mountains--fine name, by the way--that
I saw from the South Pass,--they seem to me quite an ideal Sierra.
Their blue edges and gleaming snow-peaks were great society for us as
we came by. We are very fond of scenery, sir, my daughter and I, and
this breadth of effect is very impressive after England. England, you
know, sir, is tame,--a snug little place, but quite a prison for people
of scope. Lancashire, my old home, is very pretty, but not grand;
quite the contrary. I have grown really quite tired of green grass,
and well-kept lawns, and the shaved, beardless, effeminate look of my
native country. This rough nature is masculine. It reminds me of the
youth of the world. I like to be in the presence of strong forces. I am
not afraid of the Orson feeling. Besides, in Lancashire, particularly,
we never see the sun; we see smoke; we breathe smoke; smoke spoils the
fragrance and darkens the hue of all our life. I hate chimneys, sir; I
have seen great fortunes go up them. I might perhaps tell you something
of my own experience in looking up a certain tall chimney not a hundred
miles from Clitheroe, and seeing ancestral acres fly up it, and
ancestral pictures and a splendid old mansion all going off in smoke.
But you are a stranger, and do not care about hearing my old gossip.
Besides, what is the loss of houses and lands, if one finds the pearl
of great price, and wins the prophet’s crown and the saint’s throne?”

And here the gray-haired, pale, dreamy old gentleman paused, and a
half-quenched fire glimmered in his eye. His childish, fanatical
ambition stirred him, and he smiled with a look of triumph.

I was silent in speechless pity.

His daughter turned, and smiled with almost tearful tenderness upon her
father.

“I have not heard you so animated for a long time, dear father,” she
said. “Mr. Wade seems quite to inspire you.”

“Yes, my dear, he has been talking on many very interesting topics.”

I had really done nothing except to bow, and utter those civil
monosyllables which are the “Hear! hear!” of conversation.

If I had been silent, Brent had not. While the garrulous old gentleman
was prattling on at full speed, I had heard all the time my friend’s
low, melodious voice, as he talked to the lady. He was a trained
artist in the fine art of sympathy. His own early sorrows had made him
infinitely tender with all that suffer. To their hearts he came as
one that had a right to enter, as one that knew their malady, and was
commanded to lay a gentle touch of soothing there. It is a great power
to have known the worst and bitterest that can befall the human life,
and yet not be hardened. No sufferer can resist the fine magnetism
of a wise and unintrusive pity. It is as mild and healing as music by
night to fevered sleeplessness.

The lady’s protective armor of sternness was presently thrown aside.
She perceived that she need not wear it against a man who was brother
to every desolate soul,--sisterly indeed, so delicate was his
comprehension of the wants of a woman’s nature. In fact, both father
and daughter, as soon as they discovered that we were ready to be
their friends, met us frankly. It was easy to see, poor souls! that it
was long since they had found any one fit company for them, any one
whose presence could excite the care-beguiling exhilaration of worthy
society. They savored the aroma of good-breeding with appetite.




CHAPTER XII.

A GHOUL AT THE FEAST.


Mr. Clitheroe’s thoughts loved to recur to his native Lancashire, smoky
though its air might be, and clean-shaved the grass of its lawns. I
could not help believing that all the enthusiasm of this weak, gentle
nature for the bleak plains and his pioneer life was a delusion. It
would have been pretty talk for an after-dinner rhapsody at the old
mansion he had spoken of in England. There, as he paced with me, a
guest, after pointing out the gables, wings, oriels, porches, that had
clustered about the old building age after age, he might have waved
it away into a vision, and spoken with disdain of civilization, and
with delight of the tent and the caravan. It had the flavor of Arcady,
and the Golden Age, and the simple childhood of the world, when an
enthusiastic Rousseauist Marquis talked in ’89 of the rights of man
and universal fraternity; it would seem a crazy mockery if the same
enthusiast had held the same strain a few years later, in the tumbril,
as he rolled slowly along through cruel crowds to the guillotine.

Speaking of Lancashire, we fell upon the subject of coal-mining. I was
surprised to find that Mr. Clitheroe had a practical knowledge of that
business. He talked for the first time without any of his dreamy, vague
manner. His information was full and clear. He let daylight into those
darksome pits.

“I am a miner, too,” said I, “but only of gold, a baser and less
honorable substance than coal. Your account has a professional interest
to me. You talk like an expert.”

“I ought to be. If I once saw half my fortune fly up a factory chimney,
I saw another half bury itself in a coal-pit. I have been buried myself
in one. I am not ashamed to say it; I have made daily bread for myself
and my daughter with pick, shovel, and barrow, in a dark coal-mine, in
the same county where I was once the head of the ancient gentry, and
where I saw the noblest in the land proud to break my bread and drink
my wine. I am not ashamed of it. No, I glory that in that black cavern,
where day light never looked, the brightness of the new faith found me,
and showed the better paths where I now walk, and shall walk upward and
onward until I reach the earthly Sion first, and then the heavenly.”

Again the old gentleman’s eye kindled, and his chest expanded. What a
tragic life he was hinting! My heart yearned toward him. I had never
known what it was to have the guidance and protection of a father. Mine
died when I was a child. I longed to find a compensation for my own
want,--and a bitter one it had sometimes been,--in being myself the
guardian of this errant wayfarer, launched upon lethal currents.

“Your faith is as bright as ever, Brother Hugh,” said a rasping voice
behind me, as Mr. Clitheroe was silent. “You are an example to us all.
The Church is highly blessed in such an earnest disciple.”

Elder Sizzum was the speaker. He smiled in a wolfish fashion over the
group, and took his seat beside the lady, like a privileged guest.

“Ah, Brother Sizzum!” said Mr. Clitheroe, with a cheerless attempt at
welcome, very different from the frank courtesy he had showed toward
us, “we have been expecting you. Ellen dear, a cup of tea for our
friend.”

Miss Clitheroe rose to pour out tea for him. Sheep’s clothing instantly
covered the apostle’s rather wolfish demeanor. He assumed a manner of
gamesome, sheepish devotion. When he called her Sister Ellen, with a
familiar, tender air, I saw painful blushes redden the lady’s cheeks.

Brent noticed the pain and the blush. He looked away from the group
toward the blue sierra far away to the south; a hard expression came
into his face, such as I had not seen there since the old days of his
battling with Swerger. Trouble ahead!

Sizzum’s presence quenched the party. And, indeed, our late
cheerfulness was untimely, at the best. It was mockery,--as if the
Marquis should have sung merry chansons in the tumbril.

Miss Clitheroe at once grew cold and stern. Nothing could be more
distant than her manner toward the saint. She treated him as a
high-bred woman can treat a scrub,--sounding with every gesture, and
measuring with every word, the ineffaceable gulf between them. Yet
she was thoroughly civil as hostess. She even seemed to fight against
herself to be friendly. But it was clear to a by-stander that she
loathed the apostle. That she was not charmed with his society, even
his coarse nature could not fail to discover. Anywhere else the scene
would have been comic. Here he had the power. No escape; no refuge.
That thrust all comedy out of the drama, and left only very hateful
tragedy. Still it was a cruel semblance of comedy over a tragic
under-plot, to see the Mormon’s cringing approaches, and that exquisite
creature’s calm rebuffs. Sizzum felt himself pinned in his proper
place, and writhed there, with an evil look, that said he was noting
all and treasuring all against his day of vengeance.

And the poor, feeble old father,--how all his geniality was blighted
and withered away! He was no more the master of revels at a festival,
but the ruined man, with a bailiff in disguise at his dinner-table.
Querulous tones murmured in his voice. The decayed gentleman
disappeared; the hapless fanatic took his place. Phrases of cant,
and the peculiar Mormon slang and profanity, gave the color to his
conversation. He appealed to Sizzum constantly. He was at once the
bigoted disciple and the cowed slave. Toward his daughter his manner
was sometimes timorously pleading, sometimes almost surly. Why could
she not repress her disgust at the holy man, at least in the presence
of strangers?--that seemed to be his feeling; and he strove to withdraw
attention from her by an eager, trepidating attempt to please his
master. In short, the vulgar, hard-headed knave had this weak, lost
gentleman thoroughly in his power. Mr. Clitheroe was like a lamb whom
the shepherd intends first to shear close, then to worry to death with
curs, and at last to cut up into keebaubs.

Brent and I kept aloof as much as we might. We should only have
insulted the chosen vessel, and so injured our friends. Indeed,
our presence seemed little welcome to Sizzum. He of course knew
that the Gentiles saw through him, and despised him frankly. There
is nothing more uneasy than a scrub hard at work to please a woman,
while by-standers whom he feels to be his betters observe without
interference. But we could not amuse ourselves with the scene; it
sickened us more and more.

Sunset came speedily,--the delicious, dreamy sunset of October. In the
tender regions of twilight, where the sky, so mistily mellow, met the
blue horizon, the western world became a world of happy hope. Could it
be that wrong and sin dwelt there in that valley far away among the
mountains! Baseness where that glory rested! Foulness underneath that
crescent moon! Could it be that there was one unhappy, one impure heart
within the cleansing, baptismal flow of that holy light of evening!

With sunset, Elder Sizzum, after some oily vulgarisms of compliment to
the lady, walked off on camp duty.

We also rose to take our leave. We must look after our horses.

Mr. Clitheroe’s old manner returned the instant his spiritual guide
left us.

“Pray come and see us again this evening gentlemen,” said he.

“We will certainly,” said Brent, looking toward Miss Clitheroe for her
invitation.

It did not come. And I, from my position as Chorus, thought, “She is
wise not to encourage in herself or my friend this brief intimacy.
Mormons will not seem any the better company to-morrow for her relapse
into the society of gentlemen to-night.”

“O yes!” said Mr. Clitheroe, interpreting Brent’s look; “my daughter
will be charmed to see you. To tell you the truth, our brethren in
the camp are worthy people; we sympathize deeply in the faith; but
they are not altogether in manners or education quite such as we have
been sometimes accustomed to. It is one of the infamous wrongs of
our English system of caste that it separates brother men, manners,
language, thought, and life. We have as yet been able to have little
except religious communion with our fellow-travellers toward the
Promised Land,--except, of course, with Brother Sizzum, who is, as you
see, quite a man of society, as well as an elect apostle of a great
cause. We are quite selfish in asking you to repeat your visit. Besides
the welcome we should give you for yourselves, we welcome you also as
a novelty.” And then he muttered, half to himself, “God forgive me for
speaking after the flesh!”

“Come, Wade,” said my friend. And he griped my arm almost savagely.
“Until this evening then, Mr. Clitheroe.”

As we moved away from the wagon, where the lady stood, so worn and sad,
and yet so lovely, her poor father’s only guard and friend, we met
Murker and Larrap. They were sauntering about, prying into the wagons,
inspecting the groups, making observations--that were perhaps only
curiosity--with a base, guilty, burglarious look.

“He, he!” laughed Larrap, leering at Brent. “I’ll be switched ef you’re
not sharp. You know where to look for the pooty gals, blowed ef yer
don’t!”

“Hold your tongue!” Brent made a spring at the fellow.

“No offence! no offence!” muttered he, shrinking back, with a cowardly,
venomous look.

“Mind your business, and keep a civil tongue in your head, or there
will be offence!” Brent turned and walked off in silence. Neither of us
was yet ready to begin our talk on this evening’s meeting.

Our horses, if not their masters, were quite ready for joyous
conversation. They had encountered no pang in the region of Fort
Bridger. Grass in plenty was there, and they neighed us good evening
in their most dulcet tones. They frisked about, and, neighing and
frisking, informed us that, in their opinion, the world was all
right,--a perfectly jolly place, with abundance to eat, little to do,
and everybody a friend. A capital world! according to Pumps and Don
Fulano. They felt no trouble, and saw none in store. Who would not be
an animal and a horse, unless perchance an omnibus horse sprawling on
the Russ pavement, or a family horse before a carryall, or in fact any
horse in slavish position, as most horses are.

We shifted our little caballada to fresh grazing-spots sheltered by a
brake. We meant to camp there apart from the Mormon caravan. The talk
of our horses had not cheered us. We still busied ourselves in silence.
Presently, as I looked toward the train, I observed two figures in the
distance lurking about Mr. Clitheroe’s wagon.

“See,” said I; “there are those two gamblers again. I don’t like such
foul vultures hanging about that friendless dove. They look villains
enough for any outrage.”

“But they are powerless here.”

“In the presence of a steadier villany they are. That foul Sizzum is
quite sure of his prey. John Brent, what can be done? I do not know
which I feel most bitterly for, the weary, deluded old gentleman,
doubting his error, or that noble girl. Poor, friendless souls!”

“Friendless!” said Brent. “She has made a friend in me. And in you too,
if you are the man I know.”

“But what can we do?”

“I will never say that we can do nothing until she repels our aid. If
she wants help, she must have it.”

“Help! how?”

“I will find a way or make one. Sidney’s thought is always good. You
and I can never die in a better cause than this. And now, Dick, do not
let us perplex ourselves with baseless talk and plans. We will see them
again to-night, when Sizzum is not by. It cannot be that _she_ is in
sympathy with these wretches.”

“No; that horrible ogre, Sizzum, is evidently disgusting to her; but
here he has her in his den. It is stronger than any four walls in the
world,--all this waste of desert.”

“Don’t speak of it; you sicken me.”

Something more in earnest than the tenderest pity here. I saw that the
sudden doom of love had befallen my friend. In fact, I have never been
quite sure but that the same would have been my fate, if I had not seen
him a step in advance, and so checked myself. His time had come. Mine
had not. Will it ever?

But love here was next to despair. That consciousness quickened the
passion. A man must put his whole being into the cause, or the cause
was hopeless,--must act intensely, as only a lover acts, or not at all.

I determined not to perplex myself yet with schemes. I knew my friend’s
bold genius and cool judgment. When he was ready to act, I would back
him.




CHAPTER XIII.

JAKE SHAMBERLAIN’S BALL.


It grew dusk. Glimmering camp-fires marked the circle of the Mormon
caravan. The wagons seemed each one, in the gloaming, a giant white
nightcap of an ogress leaning over her coals. The world looked drowsy,
and invited the pilgrims toward the Mecca of the new Thingamy to
repose. They did not seem inclined to accept. The tramping and lowing
cattle kept up a tumult like the noise of a far city. And presently
another din!

As Brent and I approached the fort, forth issued Jake Shamberlain, with
a drummer on this side and a fifer on that. “Pop goes the Weasel,” the
fifer blew. A tuneless bang resounded from the drum. If there was one
thing these rival melodists scorned, time was that one thing. They
might have been beating and blowing with the eight thousand miles
of the globe’s diameter between them, instead of Jake Shamberlain’s
person, for any consideration they showed to each other.

Jake, seeing us, backed out from between his orchestra, who continued
on, beating and blowing in measureless content.

“We’re going to give a ball, gentlemen, and request the honor of your
company in ten minutes, precisely. Kids not allowed on account of
popular prejudice. Red-flannel shirts and boots with yaller tops is
rayther the go fur dress.”

“A ball, Jake! Where?”

“Why, in that rusty hole of old Bridger’s. Some of them John Bulls has
got their fiddles along. I allowed ’t would pay to scare up a dance.
Guess them gals wont be the wus fur a break-down or an old-fashioned
hornpiper. They hain’t seen much game along back, ef their looks tells
the story. I never seed sech a down-heel lot.”

Jake ran off after his music. We heard them, still disdaining time,
march around the camp announcing the fandango.

“This helps us,” said Brent. “Our friends, of course, will not join the
riot. When the Mormons are fairly engaged, we will make our visit.”

“It is a good night for a gallop,” said I.

He nodded, but said nothing.

Presently Jake, still supported by his pair of melodists, reappeared.
A straggling procession of Saints followed him. They trooped into the
enclosure, a motley throng indeed. Even that dry husk of music, hardly
even cadence, had put some spirits into them. Noise, _per se_, is not
without virtue; it means life. Shamberlain’s guests came together,
laughing and talking. Their laughter was not liquid. But swallowing
prairie-dust does not instruct in dulcet tones. Rather wrinkled
merriment; but still better than no merriment at all.

We entered with the throng. Within was a bizarre spectacle. A strange
night-scene for a rough-handed Flemish painter of low life to portray.

The palisades of old Bridger’s Malakoff enclosed a space of a hundred
feet square. A cattle-shed, house, and trading-shop surrounded three
sides of the square. The rest was open court, paved with clod, the
native carpet of the region. Adobes, crumbling as the most strawless
bricks ever moulded by a grumbling Hebrew with an Egyptian taskmaster,
were the principal material of Bridger’s messuage. The cattle on Mr.
Mechi’s model farm would have whisked their tails and turned away in
utter contempt from these inelegant accommodations. No high-minded pig
would have consented to wallow there. The khan of Cheronæa, abhorred of
Grecian travellers, is a sweeter place. The khan of Tiberias, terror
of pilgrims, is a cleaner refuge. Bridger’s Fort was as musty and
infragrant a caravansary as any of those dirty cloisters of the Orient,
where the disillusioned howadji sinks into the arms of that misery’s
bedfellow, the King of the Fleas,--which kangaroo-legged caliph, let me
say, was himself, or in the person of a vigorous vizier, on the spot at
the Fort, entertaining us strangers according to his royal notions of
hospitality.

Into this Court of Dirt thronged the Latter-Day Saints, in raiment also
in its latter day.

“The ragamuffin brigade,” whispered I to Brent. “Jake Shamberlain’s
red-flannel shirts and yaller-topped boots would be better than this
seediness of the furbelowed nymphs and ole clo’ swains. Evidently suits
of full dress are not to be hired at a pinch on the boulevards of
Sizzumville.”

Brent made no answer, and surveyed the throng anxiously.

“They have not come,--the father and daughter,” he said. “I cannot
think of the others now.”

“Shall we go to them?”

“Not yet. Sizzum sees us and will suspect.”

We stood by regarding, too much concerned for our new friends to feel
thoroughly the humor of the scene. But it made its impression.

For lights at the Shamberlain ball, instead of the gas and wax of
civilization, a fire blazed in one corner of the court, and sundry
dips of unmitigated tallow, with their perfume undiluted, flared from
perches against the wall. Overhead, up in the still, clear sky, the
barefaced stars stared at the spectacle, and shook their cheeks over
the laughable manœuvres of terrestrials.

The mundane lights, fire and dips, flashed and glimmered; the skylights
twinkled merrily; the guests were assembled; the ball waited to begin.

Jake Shamberlain, the master of ceremonies, cleared a space in the
middle, and “called for his fiddlers three.”

A board was laid across two barrels, and upon it Jake arrayed his
orchestra, with Brother Bottery, so called, for leader. Twang went the
fiddles. “Pardners for a kerdrille!” cried Jake.

Sizzum led off the ball with one of the Blowsalinds before mentioned.
Dancing is enjoined in the Latter-Day Church. They cite Jephthah’s
daughter and David dancing by the ark as good Scriptural authority for
the custom.

“Right and left!” cried Jake Shamberlain. “Forrud the gent! The lady
forrud! Forrud the hull squad. Jerk pardners! Scrape away Bottery! Kick
out and no walkin’! Prance in gals! Lamm ahead, boys! Time, Time! All
hands round! Catch a gal and spin her! Well, that was jest as harnsome
a kerdrille as ever I seed.”

And so on with another quadrille, minuet, and quadrille again. But
the subsequent dances were not so orderly as the first. Filled with
noise and romping, they frequently ended in wild disorder. The figures
tangled themselves into a labyrinth, and the music, drowned by the
tumult, ceased to be a clew of escape. Nor could Jake’s voice, half
suffocated by the dust, be heard above the din, until, having hushed
his orchestra, he had called “Halt!” a dozen times.

In the intervals between the dances we observed Larrap distributing
whiskey to the better class of the emigrants. Sizzum did not disdain to
accept the hospitality of the stranger. Old Bridger’s liquid stores,
now Mormon property, and for sale at the price of Johannisberger,
diminished fast on this festal night.

“Shall we go?” whispered I to Brent, after a while.

“Not quite yet. Old Bottery announces that he is going to play a polka.
Fancy a polka here! That will engage Sizzum after his potations, so
that he will forget our friends.”

“Now, brethren and saints,” cried Jake, “attention for the polky! Pipe
up, Bottery!”

Evidently not the first time that this Strauss of some Manchester
casino had played the very rollicking polka he now rattled off from
his strings. How queerly ignoble those strident notes sounded in the
silence of night in the great wilderness. For loud as was the uproar
in the court, overhead were the stars, quiet and amazed, and, without,
the great, still prairie protested against the discordant tumult. Some
barbaric harmony, wild and thrilling, poured forth from strong-lunged
brass, or a strain like that of the horns in Der Freischutz, would have
chimed with the spirit of the desert. But Bottery’s mean twang suited
better the bastard civilization that had invaded this station of the
banished pioneer.

At the sound of the creaking polka, a youth, pale and unwholesome as
a tailor’s apprentice, led out a sister saint. Others followed. Some
danced teetotum fashion. Others bounced clumsily about. Around them all
stood an applauding circle. The fiddles scraped; the dust flew. Sizzum
and Larrap, two bad elements in combination, stood together, cheering
the dancers.

“Come,” said Brent, “let us get into purer air and among nobler
creatures. How little we thought,” he continued, “when we were
speaking of such scenes and people as we have just left as a possible
background, what figures would stand in the foreground!”

“I am glad to be out of that noisy rabble,” said I, as we passed from
the gate. “The stars seem to look disdainfully on them. I cannot
be entertained by that low comedy, with tragedy sitting beside our
friends’ wagon.”

“The stars,” said Brent, bitterly, “are cold and cruel as destiny.
There is heaven overhead, pretending to be calming and benignant, and
giving no help, while I am thinking in agony what can be done to save
from any touch of shame or deeper sorrow that noble daughter.”

“It is a fine night for a gallop,” I repeated.

“There they are. We must keep them out of the fort, Wade. If you love
me, detain the old man in talk for half an hour.”

“Certainly; half a century, if it will do any good.”

Mr. Clitheroe and his daughter were walking slowly toward the fort. He
appealed to us as we approached.

“I am urging my daughter to join in the amusements of the evening,”
said he. “You know, my dear, that many of our old Lancashire neighbors
still would be pleased to see you a lady patroness of their innocent
sports, and lending your countenance to their healthy hilarity. A
little gayety will do you good, I am sure. This ball may not be
elegant; but it will be cheerful, and of course conducted with great
propriety, since Brother Sizzum is present. I am afraid he will miss
us, and be offended. That must not be, Ellen dear. We must not offend
Brother Sizzum in any way whatever. We must consider that his wishes
are sovereign; for is he not the chosen apostle?”

Brent and I could both have wept to hear this crazy, senile stuff.

“Pray, father dear,” said Miss Clitheroe, “do not insist upon it. We
shall both be wearied out, if we are up late after our day’s march.”

It was clearly out of tenderness to him that she avoided the real
objections she must have to such a scene.

“It is quite too noisy and dusty for Miss Clitheroe in the fort,” said
I, and I took his arm. “Come, sir, let us walk about and have a chat in
the open air.”

I led him off, poor old gentleman, facile under my resolute control.
All he had long ago needed was a firm man friend to take him in hand
and be his despot; but the weaker he was, the less he could be subject
to his daughter. It is the feeble, unmasculine men who fight most
petulantly against the influence and power of women.

“Well, Mr. Wade,” said he, “perhaps you are right. We have only
to fancy this the terrace outside the chateau, and it is as much
according to rule to promenade here, as to stifle in the ballroom.
You are very kind, gentlemen, both, to prefer our society to the
entertainment inside. Certainly Brother Bottery’s violin is not like
one of our modern bands; but when I was your age I could dance to
anything and anywhere. I suppose young men see so much more of the
world now, that they outgrow those fancies sooner.”

So we walked on, away from the harsh sounds of the ball. Brent dropped
behind, talking earnestly with the lady. How sibylline she looked in
that dim starlight! How Cassandra-like,--as one dreams that heroic and
unflinching prophetess of ills unheeded or disdained!




CHAPTER XIV.

HUGH CLITHEROE.


Mr. Clitheroe grew more and more communicative, as we wandered
about over the open. I drew from him, or rather, with few words of
guidance now and then, let him impart, his history. He seemed to
feel that he had an explanation to offer. Men whose life has been
error and catastrophe rarely have much pride of reticence. Whatever
friendly person will hear their apology can hear it. That form of more
lamentable error called Guilt is shyer of the confessional; but it also
feels its need of telling to brother man why it was born in the heart
in the form of some small sin.

Again Mr. Clitheroe talked of the scenes of his youth and prosperity.
He “babbled of green fields,” and parks, and great country-houses, and
rural life. So he went on to talk of himself, and, leaving certain
blanks, which I afterward found the means of filling, told me his
story. A sad story! A pitiful story! Sadder and more pitiful to me
because a filial feeling toward this hapless gentleman was all the
while growing stronger in my heart. I have already said that I was
fatherless from infancy. This has left a great want in my life. I
cannot find complete compensation for the lack of a father’s love in
my premature manhood and my toughening against the world too young. I
yearned greatly toward the feeble old man, my companion in that night
walk on the plain of Fort Bridger. I longed to do by him the duties of
sonship; as, indeed, having no such duties, I have often longed when I
found age weak and weary. And as I began to feel son-like toward the
father, a sentiment simply brotherly took its place in my heart for the
daughter, whose love my friend, I believe, was seeking.

A sad history was Mr. Clitheroe’s. He was a prosperous gentleman once,
of one of the ancient families of his country.

“We belong,” he said, “to the oldest gentry of England. We have been
living at Clitheroe Hall, and where the Hall now stands, for centuries.
Our family history goes back into the pre-historic times. We have never
been very famous; we have always sustained our dignity. We might have
had a dozen peerages; but we were too much on the side of liberty, of
free speech and free thought, to act with the powers that be.

“There was never a time, until my day, when one of us was not in
Parliament for Clitheroe. Clitheroe had two members, and one of the old
family that gave its name to the town, and got for it its franchises,
was always chosen without contest.

“It is a lovely region, sir, where the town, of Clitheroe and the
old manor-house of my family stand,--the fairest part of Lancashire.
If you have only seen, as you say, the flat country about Liverpool
and Manchester, you do not know at all what Lancashire can do in
scenery. Why, there is Pendle Hill,--it might better be called a
mountain,--Pendle Hill rises almost at my door-step, at the door of
Clitheroe Hall. Pendle Hill, sir, is eighteen hundred and odd feet
high. And a beautiful hill it is. I talked of the Wind River Mountains
this afternoon; they are very fine; but I never should have learned to
love heights, if my boyhood had not been trained by the presence of
Pendle Hill.

“And there is the Ribble, too. A lovely river, coming from the
hills;--such a stream as I have not seen on this continent. I do not
wish to make harsh comparisons, but your Mississippi and Missouri are
more like ditches than rivers, and as to the Platte, why, sir, it seems
to me no better than a chain of mud-pools. But the Ribble is quite
another thing. I suppose I love it more because I have dabbled in it a
boy, and bathed in it a man, and have seen it flow on always a friend,
whether I was rich or poor. Nature, sir, does not look coldly on a
poor man, as humanity does. The river Ribble and Pendle Hill have been
faithful to me,--they and my dear Ellen, always.

“Perhaps I tire you with this chat,” he said.

“O no!” replied I. “I should be a poor American if I did not love to
hear of Mother England everywhere and always.”

“I almost fear to talk about home--our old home, I mean--to my dear
child. She might grow a little homesick, you know. And how could she
understand, so young and a woman too, that duty makes exile needful?
Of course I do not mean to suggest that we deem our new home in the
Promised Land an exile.”

And here he again gave the same anxious look I had before observed;
as if he dreaded that I had the power to dissolve an unsubstantial
illusion.

“I wish I had thought,” he continued, “to show you, when you were at
tea, a picture of Clitheroe Hall I have. It is my daughter Ellen’s
work. She has a genius for art, really a genius. We have been living
in a cottage near there, where she could see the Hall from her
window,--dear old place!--and she has made a capital drawing of it.”

“You had left it?” I asked. He had paused, commanded by his melancholy
recollections.

“O yes! Did I not tell you about my losses? I was a rich man and
prosperous once. I kept open house, sir, in my wife’s lifetime. She was
a great beauty. My dear Ellen is like her, but she has no beauty,--a
good girl and daughter, though, like all young people, she has a
juvenile wish to govern,--but no beauty. Perhaps she will grow handsome
when we grow rich again.”

“Few women are so attractive as Miss Clitheroe,” I said, baldly enough.

“I have tried to be a good father to her, sir. She should have had
diamonds and pearls, and everything that young ladies want, if I had
succeeded. But you ought to have seen Clitheroe Hall, sir, in its best
days. Such oaks as I had in my park! One of those oaks is noticed in
Evelyn’s Silva. One day, a great many years ago, I found a young man
sitting under that oak writing verses. I was hospitable to him, and
gave him luncheon, which he ate with very good appetite, if he was a
poet. I did not ask his name; but not three months after I received a
volume of poems, with a sonnet among them, really very well done, very
well done indeed, inscribed to the Clitheroe Oak. The volume, sir, was
by Mr. Wordsworth, quite one of our best poets, in his way, the founder
of a new school.”

“A very pleasant incident!”

“Yes indeed. The poet was fortunate, was he not? But if you are fond
of pictures, I should have liked to show you my Vandykes. We had the
famous Clitheroe Beauty, an earl’s daughter, maid of honor to Queen
Henrietta Maria. She chose plain Hugh Clitheroe before all the noblemen
of the court;--we Clitheroes have always been fortunate in that way.
I said plain Hugh, but he was as handsome a cavalier as ever wore
rapier. He might have been an earl himself, but he took the part of
liberty, and was killed on the Parliament side at Edgemoor. I had his
portrait too, a Vandyke, and one of the best pictures he ever painted,
as I believe is agreed by connoisseurs. You should have seen the white
horse, sir, in that picture,--full of gentleness and spirit, and worthy
the handsome cavalier just ready to mount him.”

As the old gentleman talked of his heroic ancestor, a name not unknown
to history, he revived a little, and I saw an evanescent look of his
daughter’s vigor in his eye. It faded instantly; he sighed, and went on.

“I should almost have liked to live in those days. It is easier to die
for a holy cause than to find one’s way along through life. I have
found it pretty hard, sir,--pretty hard,--and I hope my day of peace is
nearly come.”

How could I shatter his delusion, and thunder in his ear that this hope
was a lie?

“I had a happy time of it,” he continued, “till after my Ellen’s birth,
and I ought to be thankful for that. I had my dear wife and hosts of
friends,--so I thought them. To be sure I spent too much money, and
sometimes had rather too gay an evening over the claret at my old oak
dining-table. But that was harmless pleasure, sir. I was always a
kind landlord. I never could turn out a tenant nor arrest a poacher.
I suppose I was too kind. I might better have saved some of the money
I gave to my people in beef and beer on holidays. But it made them
happy. I like to see everybody happy. That was my chief pleasure. The
people were very poor in England then, sir,--not that they are not poor
now,--and I used to be very glad when a good old English holiday or a
birthday, gave me a chance to give them a little festival.”

I could imagine him the gentle, genial host. Fate should have left
him there in the old hall, dispensing frank hospitality all his sunny
days and bland seasons through, lunching young poets, and showing his
Vandykes with proper pride to strangers. His story carried truth on its
face. In fact, the man was all the while an illustration of his own
tale. Every tone and phrase convicted him of his own character.

“It sometimes makes me a little melancholy,” he continued, “to speak of
those happy days. Not that I regret the result I have at last attained!
Ah, no! But the process was a hard one. I have suffered, sir, suffered
greatly on my way to the peace and confidence I have attained.”

“You have attained these?” I said.

“Yes; thank God and this Latter-Day revelation of his truth! I used
to think rather carelessly of religion in those times. I suppose it
is only the contact with sin and sorrow that teaches a man to look
from the transitory to the eternal. Shade makes light precious, as
an artist would say. I was brought up, you know, sir, in the Church
of England; but when I began to think, its formalism wearied me. I
could not understand what seemed to me then the complex machinery of
its theology. I thought, sir, as no doubt many people of the poetic
temperament and little experience think, that God deals with men
without go-betweens; that he acts directly on the character by the
facts of nature and the thoughts in every soul. It was not until I
grew old and sad that I began to feel the need of something distinct
and tangible to rest my faith upon, and even then, sir, I was
sceptical of the need of revelations and Messiahs and miracles, until
I learnt through the testimony of living witnesses--yes, of living
witnesses--that such things have come in the Latter Day. Yes, sir, the
facts of what you call Mormonism, its miracles, its revelations, which
do not cease, and its new Messiah, have proved to me the necessity of
other like supernatural systems in the past, and given me faith in
their evidences, which before seemed scanty.”

“Ah! old Mother Church of England!” I thought, “could you do no better
by your son than this? Whose fault is this credulity? How is it that he
needs phenomena to give him faith in truth?”

“But I have not told you,” the old gentleman went on, “about my
disasters. Perhaps you are getting tired of my prattle, sir, my old
man’s talk. I am really not so very old, if my hair is thin, and my
beard gray,--barely fifty, and after this journey I expect to be quite
a boy again. I suppose you were surprised this afternoon, when I spoke
of having worked in a coal-mine, were you not?”

The old man seemed to have some little pride in this singularity of
fortune. I expressed the proper interest in such a change of destiny.

“You shall hear how it happened,” he said. “You remember,--no, you are
too young to remember, but you have heard how we all went mad about
mills and mines in Lancashire some twenty years ago.”

“Yes,” said I, “it was then that steam and cotton began to understand
each other, and coal and negroes became important.”

“What a panic of speculation we all rushed into in Lancashire!” said
the old gentleman. “We all felt, we gentlemen, that we were mere
idlers, not doing our duty, as England expects every man to do, unless
we were building chimneys, or digging pits. We were all either grubbing
down in the bowels of the earth for coal, or rearing great chimneys up
in the air to burn it. I really think most of us began to like smoke
better than blue sky; certainly it tasted sweeter to us than our good
old English fog.

“Well, sir,” continued he, “I was like my neighbors. I must dabble in
milling and mining. I was willing to be richer. Indeed, as soon as I
began to speculate, I thought myself richer. I spent more money. I
went deeper into my operations. One can throw a great treasure into a
coal-mine without seeing any return, and can send a great volume of
smoke up a chimney before the mill begins to pay. It is an old story. I
will not tire you with it. I was all at once a ruined man.”

He paused a moment, and looked about the dim, star-lit prairie, with
the white wagons and the low fort in the distance.

“Well,” said he, in the careless, airy manner which seemed his
characteristic one, “if I had not been ruined, I should have stayed
stupidly at home, and never worked in a coal-mine, or travelled on the
plains, or had the pleasure of meeting you and your friend here. It is
all fresh and novel. If it were not for my daughter and my duties to
the church, I should take my adventures as lightly as you do when your
gun misses fire and you lose a dinner.

“The thing that troubled me most at the time of my disasters,” he
resumed, “was being defeated for Parliament. There had always been a
Clitheroe there. When my father died, I took his seat. I used to spend
freely on elections; but I thought they sent me because they liked me,
or for love of the old name. When I lost my fortune there came a snob,
sir, and stood against me. He accused me of being a free-thinker,--as
if the Clitheroes had not always been liberal! He got up a cry, and
bought votes. My own tenants, my old tenants, whom I had feasted out of
pure good-will a hundred times, turned against me. I lost my election
and my last shilling.

“It was just then, sir, that my dear wife died, and my dear Ellen was
born.”

He turned sadly around to look at his daughter. She was walking at
some distance with Brent. The earnest murmur of their voices came to
us through the stillness. I felt what my friend must be saying in that
pleading tone.

“Everything went disastrously with me,” continued Mr. Clitheroe. “I
tried to recover my fortunes, fairly and honestly, but it was too late.
My creditors took the old Hall. Hugh Clitheroe in Harry the Eighth’s
time built it, on land where the family had lived from before Egbert.
I lost it, sir. The family came to an end with me. I found sheriff’s
officers making beer rings on my old oak dining-table. The Vandykes
went. Hugh of Cromwell’s days was divorced from his wife, the Beauty. I
tried to keep them together; but scrubs bought them, and stuck them up
in their vulgar parlors. Sorry business! Sorry business!”

“You kept a brave heart through it all.”

“Yes, until they accused me of dishonesty. That I felt bitterly. And
everybody gave me the cold shoulder. I could get nothing to do. There
is not much that a broken-down gentleman can do; but no one would trust
me. I grew poorer than you can conceive. I lost all heart. Men are poor
creatures,--as a desolate man finds.”

“Not all, I hope,” was my protest.

“Truly not all. But the friends of prosperity are birds that come to
be fed, and fly away when the crumbs give out. All are not base and
timeserving; but men are busy and careless, and fancy that others
can always take care of themselves. I could not beg, sir; but it
came near starvation to me in Christian England,--to me and my young
daughter, within a year after my misfortunes. Perhaps I was over-proud
or over-vain; but I grew tired of the slights of people that had known
me in my better days, and now dodged me because I was shabby and poor.
I wanted to get out of sight of the ungrateful, ungracious world. The
blue sky grew hateful to me. I must live, or, if life was nothing to
me, my daughter must not starve. I had a choice of factory or coal-mine
to hide myself in. I sank into a coal-mine.”

“A strange contrast!” I said, after a pause.

“I am trying to make the whole history less dreamy. Each seems
unreal,--my luxurious life at Clitheroe Hall, and my troglodyte life
down in the coal-pit. Idler and slave; either extreme had its own
special unhappiness and unhealthiness.”

How much wisdom there was in the weakness of the old man’s character!
The more I talked with him, the more pitiable seemed his destiny. “O
John Brent!” I groaned in my heart, “plead with the daughter as man
never pleaded before. We must save them from the dismal fate before
them. And if she cannot master her father, and you, John Brent, cannot
master her, there is no hope.”

My friend made no sign that he was ready to close his interview with
the lady. The noise of the ball still came to us with the puffs of the
evening wind. I prompted the communicative old gentleman to renew his
story.

“I have seen the interior of some of the Lancashire mines; I have read
the Blue Book upon them,” I said. “You must have been in a rough place,
with company as rough.”

“It was hard for a man of delicate nurture. But the men liked me. They
were not brutes,--not all,--if they were roughs. Brutes get away from
places where hard work is done. My mates down in the mine made it
easy for me. They called me Gentleman Hugh. I was rather proud, sir,
I confess, to find myself liked and respected for what I was, not for
what I had. It was a hard life and a rough life; but it was an honest
life, and my child was too young to miss what her birth entitled her to.

“It was in our mine that I first knew of the Latter-Day Church. For
years I had drudged there, and never thought, or in fact, for myself,
much cared, to come out. I had tried the pleasures and friendships of
gay life; they had nothing new or good to give me. For years I had
toiled, when the first apostle came out and began to make proselytes to
the faith in our country. They have never disdained the mean and the
lowly. I tell you, sir, that we in our coal-pit, and our brothers in
the factories, listened to apostles who came across seas and labored
among us as if they loved our souls. The false religions and outgrown
religions left us in the dark; but the true light came to us. My mates
in the Lancashire mine joined the church by hundreds. I was still blind
and careless. It was not until long afterwards that the time for my
conversion came.

“As my daughter grew up, I felt that I ought to be by her. I had worked
a long time in the mine, and was known to have some education. The
company gave me a clerkship in their office, and there I drudged again
for years, asking no help or favor. It was in another part of the
county from my old residence, where nobody knew me. My dear child,--she
has always been a good child to me, except that she sometimes wishes to
rule a little too much,--my dear Ellen became almost a woman, and all I
lacked was the means of giving her the position of her rank. Education
she got herself. We were not unhappy, she and I together, lonely as we
might be, and out of place.”

The old gentleman had been talking of himself in such a cheerful,
healthy way, and showed that he had borne such a brave heart through
his troubles, that I began to puzzle myself what could have again
changed his character, and made of him the weakling I had recognized in
the interview with Sizzum.

“It is very kind of you,” he said, “to listen to a garrulous old
fellow. Your sympathy is very pleasant; but I must not test it too far.
I will end my long story presently.

“I supposed myself entirely forgotten, as I was quite willing to be.
By and by I was remembered and sought. A far-away kinsman had left me
a legacy. It was enough for a quiet subsistence for us two, for Ellen
and me. I returned to the neighborhood of my old home. I found a little
cottage on the banks of Ribble, within sight of my old friend, Pendle
Hill. There we lived.”

From this point Mr. Clitheroe’s manner totally changed. His voice grew
peevish and complaining. All the manly feeling he had showed in briefly
describing his day-laborer’s life passed away. He detailed to me how
the new proprietor at Clitheroe Hall patronized him insufferably; how
his old neighbors turned up their noses at him, and insulted him by
condescension. How miserable he found it to cramp himself and save
shillings in a cottage, with the house in sight where he had lavished
pounds as Lord of the Manor! How he longed to have his daughter as
well dressed as any of the young ladies about, her inferiors in
blood,--for no one there could rival the Clitheroes’ lineage. How he
wished himself back in his mine, in his industrious clerkship, and how
time hung drearily on his hands, with nothing to do except dream of
bygone glories. I saw that he had sighed to be a great man again, and
had a morbid sense of his insignificance, and that this had made him
touchy, and alienated well-meaning people about him. He spoke with some
triumph of his arguments with the rector of his parish, who endeavored
to check him when he lent what influence he had, as a gentleman, to get
the Mormons a hearing about Clitheroe. He did not, as he said, as yet
feel any great interest in their doctrines; but he remembered them with
good-will from his coal-pit days, and whenever an emissary of the faith
came by, he always found a friend in Hugh Clitheroe. They had evidently
flattered him. It was rare, of course, to find a protector among the
gentry, and they made the most of the chance.

Poor old man! I could trace the progress of his disappointment,
and his final fall into that miserable superstition. He had been a
free-thinker; never industrious or self-possessed enough to become a
fundamental thinker. No man can stand long on nothing,--he must think
out a religion, or accept a theology. Now that busy days were over,
and careless youth gone by, Mr. Clitheroe began to be uneasy, and was
ready to listen to any scheme which promised peace. If a Jesuit had
happened to find him at this period, Rome would have got a recruit
without difficulty. The Pope and Brigham Young are the rival bidders
for such weaklings in the nineteenth century. Brigham with polygamy is
the complement of Pio with celibacy.

Instead of Jesuit, Sizzum arrived. Sizzum was far abler than any of his
Mormon compeers. He was proselyting about Clitheroe, where he found it
not difficult to persuade the poor slaves up in the mill and down in
the mine to accept a faith that offered at once a broad range on earth,
and, in good time, a high seat in heaven.

Sizzum was the guest of the discontented and decayed gentleman. He
saw the opportunity. There was an old name and a man of gentle birth
to rally followers about. It would be a triumph for the Latter-Day
Saints to march away from Clitheroe, a thousand strong, headed by the
representative of the family who named the place, and had once been in
Parliament for it. Here was a proselyte in a class which no Mormon had
dreamed of approaching. Here too was some little property. And here was
a beautiful daughter.

I could divine the astute Sizzum’s method and success with his victim,
enfeebled in body and spirit. How, seeing his need of something final
and authoritative in religion, Sizzum showed him the immanence of
inspiration in his church. How he threatened him with wrath to come,
unless he was gathered from among the Gentiles. How he persuaded him
that a man of his education and station would be greater among the
saints than ever in his best days in England. How he touched the old
man’s enthusiasm with tales of caravan life, with the dust of the
desert and the pork of the pan quite left out of view. How, with his
national exaggeration run riot, he depicted the valley of the Great
Salt Lake as a Paradise, and the City as an apocalyptic wonder, all
jasper and sardonyx, all beryl and chrysoprase; and no mud and no
adobe. How he suggested that in a new country, under his advice, the
old man’s little capital would soon swell to a great inheritance for
his daughter.

By the light of that afternoon’s scene, over the tea, I could
comprehend the close of Mr. Clitheroe’s dreary story, and see how at
last Sizzum had got him in his gripe, property, person, and soul.

Did he wish to escape?

No. On! on! he must go on. Only some force without himself,
interposed, could turn him aside.

What was this force to be?

Nothing that I could say or do; _that_ I saw clearly. His illusions
might be nearly gone; but he would hate and distrust any one who
ventured to pull the scales from his eyes, and show him his crazy
folly. Indeed, I dreaded lest any attempt to enlighten him would drive
him into actual madness by despair. If he had given me a shadow of
encouragement, I was ready to follow out the hint I had dropped when I
said to Brent, “What a night for a gallop!” My own risk I was willing
to take. But escape for the lady, without him, was barbarous, and we
could not treat him like a Sabine damsel, and lug him off by the hair.

What could his daughter do? Clearly nothing. He had evidently long ago
revolted against her. If I did not mistake her faithful face, she would
stand by her father to the last. Plead as he might, John Brent would
never win her to save herself and lose her father; and indeed that was
a desertion he could never recommend.

A dark look for all parties.

Whence was the force to come that should solve the difficulty?




CHAPTER XV.

A LOVER.


Two long hours I had kept Mr. Clitheroe in talk. For my friend’s sake
I would have prolonged the interview indefinitely. For my own, too. He
was a new character to me, this gentle soul, so sadly astray. My filial
feeling for him deepened momently. And as my pity grew more exquisitely
painful, I shrank still from quitting him, and so acknowledging that
the pity was hopeless.

We approached the fort. The fiddlers three were dragging their last
grumbling notes out of drowsy strings. The saints began to stream by
toward their wagons. We turned away to avoid recognition.

Miss Clitheroe and Brent joined us,--a sadder pair than we. The stars
showed me the glimmer of tears in her eyes. But her look was brave and
steady. She left my friend, and laid her hand on her father’s arm. A
marked likeness, and yet a contrast more marked, between these two.
He had given her his refinement, a quality so in him and of him that
he colored whatever came near him with an emanation from himself, and
so was blinded to its real crude tints. By this medium he made in his
description that black hole of a coal mine, where so many of his years
had been buried, a grotto of enchantment. He filled the world with
illusions. Whatever was future and whatever was past, seen through
his poetic imagination, seemed to him so beautiful, or so strange and
interesting, that he lost all care for the discomforts of the present.
And this same refinement of nature deluded him in judging character.
Bad and base motives seemed to him so ugly, that he refused to see
them, shrank from belief in them, and insisted upon trusting that men
were as honorable as himself. He was a man for prosperity. What did
fate mean by maltreating him with the manifold adversities of his life?
To what end was this sad error?

A strange contrast, with all the likeness, between his daughter and
him. A more vigorous being had mingled its life with hers. Or perhaps
the stern history of her early days had taught her to forge the armor
of self-protection. She seemed to have all her father’s refinement, but
she used it to surround and seclude herself, not to change and glorify
others. Godiva was not more delicately hidden from the vulgar world by
the mantle of her own golden hair, than this sweet lady by her veil of
gentle breeding.

As she took her father’s arm to lead him away to the camp, I could read
in her look that there were no illusions for her. But she clave to her
father,--the blinder and more hopelessly errant he might be, the closer
she clave. He might reject her guidance; she still stood by to protect
him, to sweeten his life, and when the darkness came, which she could
not but foresee, to be a light to him. However adversity had thus far
failed to teach him self-possession, it had made her a heroine and a
martyr,--a noble and unselfish soul, such as, one among the myriads,
God educates to shame the base and the trifling, and to hearten and
inspire the true.

“Now, dear father,” she said, “we must bid these kind friends good
night. We start early. We need rest.”

She held out her hand to me.

“Dear lady,” said I, taking her aside a moment while Brent spoke to
Mr. Clitheroe, “we are acquaintances of to-day; but campaigners must
despise ceremony. Your father has told me much of your history. I infer
your feelings. Consider me as a brother. Nothing can be done to aid
you?”

“Your kindness and your friend’s kindness touch me greatly. Nothing can
be done.”

She sobbed a little. I still held her hand.

“Nothing!” said I, “nothing! Will you go on with these people? you, a
lady! with your fate staring you in the face!”

She withdrew her hand and looked at me steadily with her large gray
eyes. What a woman to follow into the jaws of death!

“My fate,” she said, “can be no worse than the old common fate of
death. That I accept, any other I defy. God does not leave the worthy
to shame.”

“We say so, when we hope.”

“I say it and believe.”

“Come, Ellen dear,” called her father.

There was always between them, whenever they spoke, by finer gentleness
of tone and words of endearment, a recognition of how old and close
and exclusive was their union. Only when Sizzum was present at tea,
the tenderness, under that coarsening influence, passed away from the
father’s voice and manner, making the daughter’s more and more tender,
that she might win him back to her.

“Good bye!” she said. “We shall remember each other kindly.”

“Yes, gentlemen,” said Mr. Clitheroe. “This has been quite the
pleasantest episode of our journey. You must not forget us when you are
roaming through this region again.”

He said this with his light, cheerful manner. They turned away. It
seemed as if Death arose and parted us. We followed at a distance and
watched them safe to their wagon. The night wind had risen, and went
sighing over the desert reaches, bringing with it the distant howling
of wolves.

“Do not speak to me,” said Brent, “I will talk to you by and by.”

He left me and went toward our horses. It had been imprudent to leave
them so long at night, with bad spirits about.

I looked into the fort again. The dancers had gone. Bottery was
fumbling drunkenly over his fiddle. A score of men were within the
house carousing. Old Bridger’s whiskey had evidently flowed freely. In
one corner Larrap had unrolled a greasy faro-cloth and was dealing.
Murker backed him. They were winning largely. They bagged their
winnings out of sight, as fast as they fell in. Sizzum, rather to my
surprise, was a little excited with liquor, and playing recklessly,
losing sovereigns by the handful. As he lost, he became furious. He
struck Larrap in the face and called him a cheat. Larrap gave him an
ugly look, and then, assuming a boozy indifference, caught Sizzum by
the hand and vowed he was his best friend. Murker kept aloof from the
dispute. The game began again. Again Sizzum and the Mormons lost.
Again Sizzum slapped the dealer, and, catching the faro-cloth, tore
it in two. The two gamblers saw that they were in danger. They had
kept themselves sober and got the others drunk for such a crisis. They
hurried out of the way. Sizzum and his brother saints chased them; but
presently, losing sight of them in the dusk, they staggered off toward
camp, singing uproariously. Their leader on this festival had somewhat
forgotten the dignity of the apostle and captain.

This low rioting was doubly disgusting to me, after the sad evening
with our friends. I found Sizzum more offensive as a man of the world
than as a saint. I say man of the world, because the gambling scenes
of nominal gentlemen are often just as hateful, if more decorous, than
those of that night. I walked slowly off toward camp, sorrowful and
sick at heart. Baseness and vulgarity had never seemed to me so base
and vulgar till now.

I suddenly heard a voice in the bushes. It was Larrap. He was evidently
persuading his comrade to some villany. I caught a suspicious word or
two.

“Ah!” thought I, “you want our horses. We will see to that.”

I walked softly by. Brent was seated by the embers of a camp-fire,
cowered in a heap, like a cold Indian. He raised his face. All the
light had gone out of him. This trouble had suddenly worn into his
being, like the shirt of Nessus, and poisoned his life.

“John,” said I, “I never knew you despondent before.”

“This is not despondency.”

“What then?”

“Despair.”

“I cannot offer to cheer you.”

“It is bitter, Wade. I have yearned to be a lover for years. All at
once I find the woman I have seen and thought of, and known from my
first conscious moment. The circumstances crowded my love into sudden
intensity. I made the observations and did the work of months of
acquaintance in those few moments while we were at tea. My mind always
acts quick. I seem always to have been discussing my decisions with
myself, years before the subject of decision comes to me. Whatever
happens, falls on me with the force of a doom. I loved Miss Clitheroe’s
voice the instant I heard its brave tenderness answering her father.
I loved her unseen, and would have died for her that moment. When she
appeared, and I saw her face and read her heart, I knew that it was the
old dream,--the old dream that I never thought would be other than
a dream. The ancient hope and expectation, coeval with my life, was
fulfilled. She is the other self I have been waiting for and seeking
for.”

“Have you told her so?”

“Can a man stop the beating of his heart? Can a man not breathe? Not in
words, perhaps I did not use the lover words. But she understood me.
She did not seem surprised. She recognizes such a passion as her right
and desert.”

“A great-hearted woman can see how a man worthy of her can nullify time
and space, and meet her, soul to soul, in eternity from the first.”

“So I meet her; but circumstances here are stronger than love.”

“Can she do nothing with her father?”

“Nothing. She failed in England when this delusion first fell upon him.”

“Did she know what it meant for her and him?”

“Hardly. She even fancied that they would be happier in America than at
home, where she saw that his old grandeur was always reproaching him.”

“Did he conceal from her the goal and object of his emigration?”

“She knew he was, or supposed himself to be, a Mormon. But Mormonism
was little more than a name to her. She believed his perversion only
a transitory folly. It is but recently, only since they were away from
succor, off in the desert, that she has perceived her own risk. She
hoped that the voyage from England would disenchant her father, and
that she could keep him in the States. No; he was committed; he was
impracticable. You have seen yourself how far his faith is shaken. Just
so far that his crazy cheerfulness has given place to moping; but he
will hear nothing of reason.”

“What does she anticipate?”

“She says she only dares to endure. Day by day they both wear away. Day
by day her father’s bright hope dwindles away. Day by day she perceives
the moment of her own danger approaching. She could not speak to me of
it; but I could feel by her tone her disgust and disdain of Sizzum. O,
how steady and noble she is! All for her father! All to guide him with
the fewest pangs to that desolate death she knows must come! She gave
me a few touches of their past history, so that I could see how much
closer and tenderer than the common bond of parent and child theirs had
been.”

“That I saw, from the old gentleman’s story. Sorrow and poverty ennoble
love.”

“She thanked me and you so sweetly for our society, and the kind words
we had given them. She had not seen her father so cheerful, so like
himself, since they had left England.”

“What a weary pilgrimage they must have had, poor errant souls!”

“O Wade, Wade! how this tragedy of theirs cures me forever of any
rebellion against my own destiny. A helpless woman’s tragedy is so much
bitterer than anything that can befall a man.”

“Must we say helpless, John?”

“Are we two an army, that we can take them by force? She has definitely
closed any further communication on our part. She said that I could not
have failed to notice how Elder Sizzum disliked our presence. I must
promise her not to be seen with them in the morning. Sizzum would find
some means to punish her father, and that would be torture to her. It
seems that villain plays on the old man’s religious superstitions, and
can terrify him almost to madness.”

“The villain! And yet how far back of him lies the blame, that such
terrors can exist in any man’s mind, when God is Love.”

“I promised her not to see her again--for you and myself; to see her no
more. That good-bye was final. Now let me alone for a while, my dear
old boy; I am worn out and heart-broken.”

He mummied himself in his blankets, and lay on the grass, motionless
as a dead man. It was not his way to shirk camp duties. Indeed, his
volunteer services had left me in arrears.

I put our fire-arms in order in case of attack, and extinguished
our fire. Our horses, too, I drove in and tethered close by. My old
suspicion of Murker and Larrap had revived from their mutterings.
I thought that, after their great winnings of to-night, they would
feel that they could make nothing more of the mail party, and might
seize the chance to stampede or steal some of the Mormon horses or
ours. It was a capital chance in the sleepy hours after the revel.
Horse-stealing, since the bad example of Diomed, has never gone out of
fashion. Fulano and Pumps were great prizes. I knew that Larrap hated
Brent for his undisguised abhorrence and the ugly words and collision
of to-day. The pair bore good-will to neither of us. Their brutality
had jarred with us from the beginning. I knew they would take personal
pleasure in serving us a shabby trick out of their dixonary. On the
whole, I determined to watch all night.

Easy to purpose; hard to perform. I leaned against my saddle and
thought over the day. How I pitied poor Brent! Pitied him the more
thoroughly, since I was hardly less a lover than he. Long afterwards,
long after the misery of love dead in despair, comes the time when one
can say, “Ich habe gelebt und geliebet”; can know, “’Tis better to have
loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” But no such soothing
poetry could sing resignation to my friend in his unselfish misery. All
he could do--all I could do--was to bear the agony of this sudden cruel
wrong; to curse the chances of life that had so weakened the soul of
our new friend and so darkened his sight that he could not know truth
from falsehood. Doubly to curse the falsehood. Before, it had only
been something to scorn. Here tragedy entered. The mean, miserable,
ludicrous invention of Mormonism, the foolish fable of an idler, had
grown to be a great masterly tyranny. These two souls were clutched
by this foul ogre, and locked up in an impregnable prison. And we two
were baffled. Of what use was our loyalty to woman? What vain words
those unuttered words of our knightly vow to succor all distressed
damsels,--the vow that every gentleman takes upon himself, as earnestly
now, and wills to keep as faithfully, as any Artegall in the days gone
by, when wrong took cruder and more monstrous form! More monstrous
form! Could any wrong be more detestable! Did knight, who loved God and
honored his lady, ever encounter more paynim-like horde than this,--the
ignorant misled by the base?

In such dreary protest and pity I passed an hour. The evening breeze
had strengthened into a great gusty wind, blowing from the mountains to
the southward. I drowsed a little. A perturbed slumber overcame me. The
roaring night-wind aroused me at intervals with a blast more furious,
and I woke to perceive ominous and turbulent dreams flitting from my
brain,--dreams of violence, tyranny, and infamous outrage.

Suddenly another sensation went creeping along my nerves. I sat bolt
upright. There was a feeling of human presence, of stealthy approach
coming up against the night-wind and crushing its roar with a sound
more penetrating.

Brent, too, was on the alert.

“Some one at our horses,” he whispered.

We dashed forward. There was a rustle of flight through the bushes. We
each fired a shot. The noise ceased.

“Stop!” said my friend, as I was giving chase. “We must not leave the
horses. They will stampede them while we are off.”

“They? perhaps it was only a cayote or a wolf. Why, Fulano! old fellow!”

Fulano trotted up, neighing, and licked my hand. His lariat had been
cut,--a clean cut with a knife. We were only just in time.

“We must keep watch till morning,” said I. “I have been drowsing. I
will take the first hour.”

Brent, with a moan of weariness, threw himself down again on the grass.
I sat watchful.

The night-wind went roaring on. It loves those sweeps and surges of
untenanted plain, as it loves the lifts and levels of the barren sea.
The fitful gale rushed down as if it boiled over the edge of some great
hollow in the mountains, and then stayed to gather force for another
overflow. In its pauses I could hear the stir and murmur of the Mormon
cattle, a thousand and more. But once there came a larger pause; the
air grew silent, as if it had never known a breeze, or as if all life
and motion between earth and sky were utterly and forever quelled.

In that one instant of dead stillness, when the noise of the cattle was
hushed, and our horses ceased champing to listen, I seemed to hear the
clang of galloping hoofs, not far away to the southward.

Galloping hoofs, surely I heard them. Or was it only the charge of
a fresh blast down the mountain-side, uprooting ancient pines, and
flinging great rocks from crag to chasm?

And that strange, terrible, human, inhuman sound, outringing the noise
of the hoofs, and making the silence a ghastly horror,--was it a
woman’s scream?

No; it could only be my fevered imagination, that found familiar sounds
in the inarticulate voices of the wilderness. I listened long and
intently. The wind sighed, and raved, and threatened again. I heard the
dismal howling of wolves far away in the darkness.

I kept a double watch of two hours, and then, calling Brent to do his
share, threw myself on the grass and slept soundly.




CHAPTER XVI.

ARMSTRONG.


I awoke in the solemn quiet dawn of the next morning with my
forebodings of ill gone, and in their stead what I could not but deem a
baseless hopefulness for our new friends’ welfare.

Brent did not share it. His usual gay matin-song was dumb. He cowered,
chilled and spiritless, by our camp-fire. Breakfast was an idle
ceremony to both. We sat and looked at each other. His despair began to
infect me. This would not do.

I left my friend, sitting unnerved and purposeless, and walked to the
mail-riders’ camp.

Jake Shamberlain was already stirring about, as merry as a grig,--and
that is much to say on the Plains. There are two grigs to every blade
of grass from Echo Cañon to the South Pass, and yet every one sings and
skips, as gay as if merriment would make the desert a meadow.

“You are astir early after the ball, Jake,” said I.

“Ef I wait till the gals in the train begins to polky round, I shan’t
git my men away nayry time. They olluz burr to gals, like all young
fellers. We’ll haul off jest as soon as you’re ready.”

“We are ready,” I said.

I made our packs, and saddled the mustangs.

“Come, Brent,” said I, shaking him by the shoulder, “start, old fellow!
Your ride will rouse you.”

He obeyed, and mounted. He was quite cowed and helpless. I did not know
my brave, cheerful friend in this weak being. He seemed to me as old
and dreary as Mr. Clitheroe. Love must needs have taken a very cruel
clutch upon his heart. Indeed, to the delicate nature of such a man,
love is either life of life, or a murderous blight worse than death.

As we started, a gray dawn was passing into the violet light just
before sunrise. The gale had calmed itself away. The tender hues of
morning glorified the blue adobes of Bridger’s shabby fort. It rested
on the plain, still as the grave,--stiller for the contrast of this
silent hour with last night’s riot. A deathly quiet, too, dwelt upon
the Mormon caravan. There were the white-topped wagons just growing
rosy with the fond colors of early day. No abandoned camp of a fled
army could have looked more lonely. Half a mile from the train were
the cattle feeding quietly in a black mass, like a herd of buffalo.
There was not one man, out of our own party, to be seen.

“Where are their sentinels, Jake?” said I.

“Too much spree for good watch,” says he.

“Elder Sizzum ought to look sharper.”

“He’s a prime leader. But he tuk dance, argee, and faro last night with
a perfect looseness. I dunno what’s come over Sizzum; bein’ a great
apossle’s maybe too much for him. But then he knows ther ain’t no Utes
round here, to stampede his animals or run off any of his gals. Both
er you men could have got you a wife apiece last night, and ben twenty
miles on the way, and nobody the wiser. Now, boys, be alive with them
mules. I want to be off.”

“Where are Smith and Robinson?” I asked, missing the two gamblers as we
started.

“Let ’em slide, cuss ’em!” said Jake. “’Taint my business to call ’em
up, and fetch ’em hot water, and black their boots. They moved camp
away from us, over into the brush by you. Reckon they was afeard some
on us would be goin’ halves with ’em in the pile they raked last night.
Let ’em slide, the durn ripperbits! Every man for hisself, I say. They
snaked me to the figure of a slug at their cheatin’ game; an’ now they
may sleep till they dry and turn to grasshopper pie, for _me_.”

Jake cracked his long whip. The mules sprang forward together. We
started.

I gave one more look at the caravan we had seen winding so beautifully
down on the plain, no longer ago than yesterday evening. Rosy morning
brightened on every wagon of the great ellipse. Not a soul was to be
seen of all their tenants. I recognized Mr. Clitheroe’s habitation at
the farther end. That, too, had the same mysterious, deserted air, as
if the sad pair who dwelt in it had desperately wandered away into the
desert by night.

Brent would not turn. He kept his haggard face bent eastward, toward
the horizon, where an angry sunrise began to thrust out the quiet hues
of dawn.

I followed the train, doggedly refusing to think more of those desolate
friends we were leaving. Their helpless fate made all the beauty of
the scene only crueller bitterness. What right had dawn to tinge with
sweetest violet and with hopeful rose the shelters of that camp of
delusion and folly!

We rode steadily on through the cool haze, and then through the warm,
sunny haze, of that October morning. Brent hardly uttered a word. He
left me the whole task of driving our horses. A difficult task this
morning. Their rest and feast of yesterday had put Pumps and Fulano in
high spirits. I had my hands full to keep them in the track.

We had ridden some eighteen miles, when Brent fell back out of the dust
of our march, and beckoned me.

“Dick,” said he, “I have had enough of this.”

He grew more like himself as he spoke.

“I was crushed and cowardly last night and this morning,” he
continued. “For the first time in my life, my hope and judgment failed
me together. You must despise me for giving up and quitting Miss
Clitheroe.”

“My dear boy,” said I, “we were partners in our despair.”

“Mine is gone. I have made up my mind. I will not leave her. I will
ride on with you to the South Pass. That will give the caravan a
start, so that I can follow unobserved. Then I will follow, and let
her know in some way that she has a friend within call. She must be
saved, sooner or later, whether she will or no. Love or no love, such
a woman shall not be left to will herself dead, rather than fall into
the hands of a beast like Sizzum. I have no mission, you know,” and he
smiled drearily; “I make one now. I cannot fight the good fight against
villany and brutishness anywhere better than here. When I get into the
valley, I will camp down at Jake’s. I can keep my courage up hunting
grizzlys until she wants me. Perhaps I may find Biddulph there still.
What do you say, old fellow? I am bound to you for the journey. Will
you forgive me for leaving you?”

“You will find it hard work to leave me. I go with you and stand by you
in this cause, life or death.”

“My dear friend! my brother!”

We took hands on this.

Our close friendship passed into completed brotherhood. Doubts and
scruples vanished. We gave ourselves to our knight-errantry.

“We will save her, John,” said I. “She is my sister from this moment.”

His face lighted up with the beauty of his boyish days. He straightened
himself in his saddle, gave his fair moustache a twirl, and hummed, for
gayety of heart, “Ah non giunge!” to the beat of his mustang’s hoofs.

We were riding at the bottom of a little hollow. The dusty trail across
the unfenced wilderness, worn smooth and broad as a turnpike by the
march of myriad caravans, climbed up the slopes before and behind us,
like the wake of a ship between surges. The mail train had disappeared
over the ridge. Our horses had gone with it. Brent and I were alone, as
if the world held no other tenants.

Suddenly we heard the rush of a horseman after us.

Before we could turn he was down the hillock,--he was at our side.

He pulled his horse hard upon his haunches and glared at us. A fierce
look it was; yet a bewildered look, as of one suddenly cheated of a
revenge he had laid finger on.

He glared at us, we gazed at him, an instant, without a word.

A ghastly pair--this apparition--horse and man! The horse was a tall,
gaunt white. There were the deep hollows of age over his bloodshot
eyes. His outstretched head showed that he shared his master’s
eagerness of pursuit. Death would have chosen such a steed for a gallop
on one of death’s errands.

Death would have commissioned such a rider to bear a sentence of death.
A tall, gaunt man, with the loose, long frame of a pioneer. But the
brown vigor of a pioneer was gone from him. His face was lean and
bloodless. It was clear where some of his blood had found issue. A
strip of old white blanket, soiled with dust and blood, was turbaned
askew about his head, and under it there showed the ugly edges of a
recent wound.

When he pulled up beside us, his stringy right hand was ready upon the
butt of a revolver. He dropped the muzzle as he looked at us.

For what horror was this man the embodied Nemesis!

“Where are they?”

He whispered this question in a voice thick with stern purpose, and
shuddering with some recollection that inspired the purpose.

“They! who?”

“The two murderers.”

“They stayed behind at Bridger.”

“No. The Mormons told me they were here. Don’t hide them! Their time is
come.”

Still in the same curdling whisper. He crushed his voice, as if he
feared the very hillocks of the prairie would reverberate his words,
and earth would utter a warning cry to those he hunted to fly, fly, for
the avenger of blood was at hand.

No need to be told whom he sought. The two gamblers--the two
murderers--the brutes we had suspected; but where were they? Where to
be sought?

We hailed the mail train. It was but a hundred yards before us over the
ridge. Jake Shamberlain and his party returned to learn what delayed us.

The haggard horsemen stared at them all, in silence.

“I’ve seen you before, stranger,” said Shamberlain.

“Yes,” said the man, in his shuddering whisper.

“It’s Armstrong from Oregon, from the Umpqua, aint it? You don’t look
as if you were after cattle this time. Where’s your brother?”

“Murdered.”

“I allowed something had happened, because he warnt along. I never seed
two men stick so close as you and he did. They didn’t kill him without
gettin’ a lick at you, I see. Who was it? Indians?”

“Worse.”

“I reckon I know why you’re after us, then.”

“I can’t waste time, Shamberlain,” said Armstrong, in a hurried
whisper. “I’ll tell you in two words what’s happened to me, and p’r’aps
you can help me to find the men I mean to find.”

“I’ll help you, if I know how, Armstrong. I haint seen no two in
my life, old country or new country, saints or gentiles, as I’d do
more for ’n you and your brother. I’ve olluz said, ef the world was
chock full of Armstrongs, Paradise wouldn’t pay, and Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob mout just as well blow out their candle and go under a
bushel-basket, unless a half-bushel would kiver ’em.”

The stranger seemed insensible to this compliment. He went on in the
same whisper, full of agony, pain, and weariness. While he talked, his
panting horse drew up his lip and whinnied, showing his long, yellow
teeth. The spirit of his rider had entered him. He was impatient of
this dalliance.

“We were coming down from the Umpqua, my brother and I,” says
Armstrong, “goan across to the States, to drive out cattle next summer.
We was a little late one morning, along of our horses havin’ strayed
off from camp, and that was how we met them men. Two on ’em ther’
was,--a tall, most ungodly Pike, and a little fat, mean-lookin’ runt.
We lighted on ’em jest to the crossin’ of Bear River. They was comin’
from Sacramenter, they said. I kinder allowed they was horse-thieves,
and wanted to shy off. But Bill--that was my brother----”

Here the poor fellow choked a little.

“Bill, he never couldn’t think wrong of nobody. Bill, he said, ‘No.
Looks was nothin’,’ he said, ‘and we’d jine the fellers.’ So we did,
and rode together all day, and camped together on a branch we cum to.
I reckon we talked too much about the cattle we was goan to buy, and
I suppose ther’ aint many on the Pacific side that aint heard of the
Armstrongs. They allowed we had money,--them murderers did. Well, we
camped all right, and went to sleep, and I never knowed nothin’, ef it
warnt a dream that a grizzly had wiped me over the head, till I woke
up the next day with the sun brilin’ down on my head, and my head all
raw and bloody, as ef I’d been scalped. And there was Bill--my brother
Bill--lyin’ dead in his blankets.”

A shudder passed through our group. These were the men we had
tolerated, sat with at the camp-fire, to whose rough stories and foul
jokes we had listened. Brent’s instinct was true.

Armstrong was evidently an honest, simple, kindly fellow. His eyes
were pure, gentle blue. They filled with tears as he spoke. But the
stern look remained, the Rhadamanthine whisper only grew thicker with
vengeance.

“Bill was dead,” he continued. “The hatchet slipped when they come to
hit me, and they was too skeared, I suppose, to go on choppin’ me,
as they had him. P’r’aps his ghost cum round and told ’em ’t warnt
the fair thing they’d ben at, and ’twarnt. But they got our horses,
Bill’s big sorrel and my Flathead horse, what’s made a hunderd and
twenty-three miles betwixt sunrise and sunset of a September day, goan
for the doctor, when Ma Armstrong was tuk to die. They got the horses,
and our money belts. So when I found Bill was dead, I knowed what
my life was left me for. I tied up my head, and somehow I crep, and
walked, and run, and got to Box Elder. I don’t know how long it took,
nor who showed me the way; but I got there.”

Box Elder is the northernmost Mormon settlement, or was, in those days.

“I’ll never say another word agin the Mormon religion, Jake,” Armstrong
went on. “They treated me like a brother to Box Elder. They outfitted
me with a pistol, and this ere horse. They said he’d come in from a
train what the Indians had cut off, and was a terrible one to go. He
is; and I believe he knows what he’s goan for. I’ve ben night and day
ridin’ on them murderers’ trail. Now, men, give me time to think.
Bill’s murderers aint at Bridger. They was there last midnight. They
must be somewheres within fifty miles, and I’ll find ’em, so help me
God!”

His hoarse whisper was still. No one spoke.

Another rush of hoofs down the slope behind!




CHAPTER XVII.

CAITIFF BAFFLES OGRE.


Another rush of horses’ feet behind us.

What?

Elder Sizzum!

And that pale, gray shadow of a man, whose pony the Elder drags by the
bridle, and lashes cruelly forward,--who?

Mr. Clitheroe.

Sizzum rode straight up to Brent.

The two men faced each other,--the big, hulking, bullying saint; the
slight, graceful, self-possessed gentile. Sizzum quailed a little when
he saw the other did not quail. He seemed to change his intended form
of address.

“Brother Clitheroe wants his daughter,” said Sizzum.

“Yes, yes, gentlemen,” said Mr. Clitheroe in feeble echo, “I want my
daughter.”

Brent ignored the Mormon. He turned to the father, and questioned
eagerly.

“What is this, dear sir? Is Miss Ellen missing? She is not here.
Speak, sir! Tell us at once how she was lost. We must be on her track
instantly. Wade, shift the saddles to Fulano and Pumps, while I make up
our packs. Speak, sir! Speak!”

Brent’s manner carried conviction, even to Sizzum.

“I did not like to suspect you, gentlemen,” said Mr. Clitheroe, “after
our pleasant evening and your kindness; but Brother Sizzum said it
could not be any one else.”

“Get the facts, Wade,” said Brent, “I cannot trust myself to ask.”

Sizzum smiled a base, triumphant smile over the agony of my friend.

“Tell us quick,” said I, taking Mr. Clitheroe firmly by the arm, and
fixing his eye.

“In the night, an hour or more after you left us, I was waked up by
two men creeping into the wagon. They whispered they would shoot, if I
breathed. They passed behind the curtain. My daughter had sunk on the
floor, tired out, poor child! without undressing. They threw a blanket
over her head, and stifled her so that she could not utter a sound.
They tied me and gagged me. Then they dragged her off. God forgive me,
gentlemen, for suspecting you of such brutality! I lay in the wagon
almost strangled to death until the teamster came to put to the oxen
for our journey. That is all I know.”

“The two gamblers, murderers, have carried her off,” said I; “but we’ll
save her yet, please God!”

“O,” said Sizzum, “ef them devils has got her, that’s the end of her.
I haint got no more interest in _her_ case. I believe I’ll go. I’ve
wasted too much time now from the Lord’s business.”

He moved to go.

“What am I to do?” said Mr. Clitheroe.

Forlorn, bereaved, perplexed old man! Any but a brute would have
hesitated to strike him another blow. Sizzum did not hesitate.

“You may go to the devil across lots, on that runt pony of yourn, with
your new friends, for all I care. I’ve had enough of your daughter’s
airs, as if she was too good to be teched by one of the Lord’s chosen.
But she’ll get the Lord’s vengeance now, because she wouldn’t see what
was her place and privileges. And you’re no better than a backslider.
You’ve been grumblin’ and settin’ yourself up for somebody. I would
cuss you now with the wrath to come if such a poor-spirited granny was
wuth cussin’.”

The base wretch lashed his horse and galloped off.

Even his own people of the mail party looked and muttered contempt.

Mr. Clitheroe seemed utterly stunned. Guide, Faith, Daughter, all gone!
What was he to do, indeed!

“Never mind, Mr. Clitheroe,” said Brent, tenderly, “I hope you have not
lost a daughter. I know you have gained a son,--yes, two of them. Here,
Jake Shamberlain!”

“Here, sir! Up to time! Ready to pull my pound!”

“Wade and I are going after the lady. Do you take this gentleman, and
deliver him safe and sound to Captain Ruby at Fort Laramie. Tell Ruby
to keep him till we come, and treat him as he would General Scott.
Drive our mules and the mustangs to Laramie, and leave them there. We
trust the whole to you. There’s no time to talk. Tell me what money you
want for the work, and I’ll pay you now in advance, whatever you ask.”

“I’ll be switched round creation ef you do. Not the first red! You
think, bekase I’m a Mormon, as you call it, I haint got no nat’ral
feelin’s. Why, boys, I’d go with you myself after the gal, and let
Uncle Sam’s mail lie there and wait till every letter answered itself,
ef I had a kettrypid what could range with yourn. No, no, Jake
Shamberlain aint a hog, and his mail boys aint of the pork kind. I’ll
take keer of the old gentleman, and put him through jest ’z if he was
my own father, and wuth a million slugs. And ef that aint talkin’ fair,
I dunno what is.”

We both griped Jake Shamberlain’s friendly fist.

Mr. Clitheroe, weary with his morning’s ride, faint and sick after his
bonds of the night, and now crushed in spirit and utterly bewildered
with these sudden changes, was handed over to his new protector.

The emancipating force had found him. He was free of his Mormonism. His
delusion had discarded him. A rough and cruel termination of his hopes!
How would he bear this disappointment? Would his heart break? Would his
mind break? his life break?

We could not check ourselves to think of him. Our thoughts were
galloping furiously on in succor of the daughter, fallen on an evil
fate.

While this hasty talk had been going on, I had shifted our saddles to
Pumps and Fulano. Noble fellows! they took in the calm excitement of
my mood. They grew eager as a greyhound when he sees the hare break
cover. They divined that THEIR MOMENT HAD COME! Now their force was to
be pitted against brutality. Horse against brute,--which would win? I
dared not think of the purpose of our going. Only, Begone! Begone! was
ringing in my ears, and a figure I dared not see was before my eyes.

I was frenzied with excitement; but I held myself steady as one holds
his rifle when a buck comes leaping out of the forest into the prairie,
where rifle and man have been waiting and trembling, while the hounds’
bay came nearer, nearer. I drew strap and tied knot of our girths, and
doubled the knot. There must be no chafing of saddles, no dismounting
to girth up. That was to be a gallop, I knew, where a man who fell to
the rear would be too late for the fight.

Brent, meantime, had rolled up a little stock of provisions in each
man’s double blanket. We were going we knew not how far. We must be
ready for work of many days. A moment’s calmness over our preparations
now might save desolate defeat or death hereafter. We lashed our
blankets with their contents on firmly by the buckskin thongs which are
attached to the cantle of a California saddle,--the only saddle for
such work as we--horses and men--have on the plains.

“Rifles?” said I.

“No. Knives and six-shooters are enough,” said Brent, as cool as if our
ride were an ornamental promenade _à cheval_. “We cannot carry weight
or clumsy weapons on this journey.”

We mounted and were off, with a cheer from Jake Shamberlain and his
boys.

All this time, we had not noticed Armstrong. As we struck off southward
upon the trackless prairie, that ghastly figure upon the gaunt white
horse was beside us.

“We’re bound on the same arrant,” whispered he. “Only the savin’s yourn
and the killin’s mine.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Did my hope awake, now that the lady I had chosen for my sister was
snatched from that monstrous ogre of Mormonism?

Yes; for now instant, urgent action was possible. We could do
something. Gallop, gallop,--that we could do.

God speed us!--and the caitiffs should only have baffled the ogre, and
the lady should be saved.

If not saved, avenged!




CHAPTER XVIII.

A GALLOP OF THREE.


We were off, we Three on our Gallop to save and to slay.

Pumps and Fulano took fire at once. They were ready to burst into their
top speed, and go off in a frenzy.

“Steady, steady,” cried Brent. “Now we’ll keep this long easy lope for
a while, and I’ll tell you my plan.

“They have gone to the southward,--those two men. They could not get
away in any other direction. I have heard Murker say he knows all the
country between here and the Arkansaw. Thank Heaven! so do I, foot by
foot.”

I recalled the sound of galloping hoofs I had heard in the night to the
southward.

“I heard them, then,” said I, “in my watch after Fulano’s lariat was
cut. The wind lulled, and there came a sound of horses, and another
sound, which I then thought a fevered fancy of my own, a far-away
scream of a woman.”

Brent had been quite unimpassioned in his manner until now. He
groaned, as I spoke of the scream.

“O Wade! O Richard!” he said, “why did you not know the voice? It was
she. They have terrible hours the start.”

He was silent a moment, looking sternly forward. Then he began again,
and as he spoke, his iron gray edged on with a looser rein.

“It is well you heard them; it makes their course unmistakable. We know
we are on their track. Seven or eight full hours! It is long odds of a
start. But they are not mounted as we are mounted. They did not ride
as we shall ride. They had a woman to carry, and their mules to drive.
They will fear pursuit, and push on without stopping. But we shall
catch them; we shall catch them before night, so help us God!”

“You are aiming for the mountains?” I asked.

“For Luggernel Alley,” he said.

I remembered how, in our very first interview, a thousand miles away at
the Fulano mine, he had spoken of this spot. All the conversation then,
all the talk about my horse, came back to me like a Delphic prophecy
suddenly fulfilled. I made a good omen of this remembrance.

“For Luggernel Alley,” said Brent. “Do you recollect my pointing out a
notch in the Sierra, yesterday, when I said I would like to spend a
honeymoon there, if I could find a woman brave enough for this plains’
life?”

He grew very white as he spoke, and again Pumps led off by a neck, we
ranging up instantly.

“They will make for the Luggernel Springs. The Alley is the only gate
through the mountains towards the Arkansaw. If they can get by there,
they are safe. They can strike off New Mexico way; or keep on to the
States out of the line of emigration or any Mormon pursuit. The Springs
are the only water to be had at this season, without digging, anywhere
in that quarter. They must go there. We are no farther from the spot
than we were at Bridger. We have been travelling along the base of
the triangle. We have only lost time. And, now that we are fairly
under way, I think we might shake out another reef. A little faster,
friends,--a little faster yet!”

It was a vast desert level where we were riding. Here and there a
scanty tuft of grass appeared, to prove that Nature had tried her
benign experiment, and wafted seeds hither to let the scene be verdant,
if it would. Nature had failed. The land refused any mantle over its
brown desolation. The soil was disintegrated, igneous rock, fine and
well beaten down as the most thoroughly laid Macadam.

Behind was the rolling region where the Great Trail passes; before and
far away, the faint blue of the Sierra. Not a bird sang in the hot
noon; not a cricket chirped. No sound except the beat of our horses’
hoofs on the pavement. We rode side by side, taking our strides
together. It was a waiting race. The horses travelled easily. They
learned, as a horse with a self-possessed rider will, that they were
not to waste strength in rushes. “Spend, but waste not,”--not a step,
not a breath, in that gallop for life! This must be our motto.

We three rode abreast over the sere brown plain on our gallop to save
and to slay.

Far--ah, how terribly dim and distant!--was the Sierra, a slowly
lifting cloud. Slowly, slowly they lifted, those gracious heights,
while we sped over the harsh levels of the desert. Harsh levels,
abandoned or unvisited by verdancy. But better so; there was no long
herbage to check our great pace over the smooth race-course; no
thickets here to baffle us; no forests to mislead.

We galloped abreast,--Armstrong at the right. His weird, gaunt white
held his own with the best of us. No whip, no spur, for that deathly
creature. He went as if his master’s purpose were stirring him through
and through. That stern intent made his sinews steel, and put an agony
of power into every stride. The man never stirred, save sometimes to
put a hand to that bloody blanket bandage across his head and temple.
He had told his story, he had spoken his errand, he breathed not a
word; but with his lean, pallid face set hard, his gentle blue eyes
scourged of their kindliness, and fixed upon those distant mountains
where his vengeance lay, he rode on like a relentless fate.

Next in the line I galloped. O my glorious black! The great, killing
pace seemed mere playful canter to him,--such as one might ride beside
a timid girl, thrilling with her first free dash over a flowery common,
or a golden beach between sea and shore. But from time to time he
surged a little forward with his great shoulders, and gave a mighty
writhe of his body, while his hind legs came lifting his flanks under
me, and telling of the giant reserve of speed and power he kept easily
controlled. Then his ear would go back, and his large brown eye, with
its purple-black pupil, would look round at my bridle hand and then
into my eye, saying as well as words could have said it, “This is mere
sport, my friend and master. You do not know me. I have stuff in me
that you do not dream. Say the word, and I can double this, treble it.
Say the word! let me show you how I can spurn the earth.” Then, with
the lightest love pressure on the snaffle, I would say, “Not yet! not
yet! Patience, my noble friend! Your time will come.”

At the left rode Brent, our leader. He knew the region; he made the
plan; he had the hope; his was the ruling passion,--stronger than
brotherhood, than revenge. Love made him leader of that galloping
three. His iron-gray went grandly, with white mane flapping the air
like a signal-flag of reprieve. Eager hope and kindling purpose made
the rider’s face more beautiful than ever. He seemed to behold Sidney’s
motto written on the golden haze before him, “_Viam aut inveniam
aut faciam._” I felt my heart grow great, when I looked at his calm
features, and caught his assuring smile,--a gay smile but for the dark,
fateful resolve beneath it. And when he launched some stirring word of
cheer, and shook another ten of seconds out of the gray’s mile, even
Armstrong’s countenance grew less deathly, as he turned to our leader
in silent response. Brent looked a fit chieftain for such a wild charge
over the desert waste, with his buckskin hunting-shirt and leggins
with flaring fringes, his otter cap and eagle’s plume, his bronzed
face, with its close, brown beard, his elate head, and his seat like a
centaur.

So we galloped three abreast, neck and neck, hoof with hoof, steadily
quickening our pace over the sere width of desert. We must make the
most of the levels. Rougher work, cruel obstacles were before. All the
wild, triumphant music I had ever heard came and sang in my ears to
the flinging cadence of the resonant feet, tramping on hollow arches
of the volcanic rock, over great, vacant chasms underneath. Sweet and
soft around us melted the hazy air of October, and its warm, flickering
currents shook like a veil of gauzy gold, between us and the blue bloom
of the mountains far away, but nearing now and lifting step by step.

On we galloped, the avenger, the friend, the lover, on our errand, to
save and to slay.




CHAPTER XIX.

FASTER.


It came afternoon, as we rode on steadily. The country grew rougher.
The horses never flinched, but they sweated freely, and foam from their
nostrils flecked their shoulders. By and by, with little pleasant
admonitory puffs, a breeze drew down from the glimmering frosty edges
of the Sierra and cooled us. Horses and men were cheered and freshened,
and lifted anew to their work.

We had seen and heard no life on the desert. Now in the broken country,
a cayote or two scuttled away as we passed. Sometimes a lean gray wolf
would skulk out of a brake, canter after us a little way, and then
squat on his haunches, staring at our strange speed. Flight and chase
he could understand, but ours was not flight for safety, or chase
for food. Men are queer mysteries to beasts. So our next companions
found. Over the edge of a slope, bending away to a valley of dry scanty
pasture at the left, a herd of antelopes appeared. They were close
to us, within easy revolver shot. They sprang into graceful flight,
some score of them, with tails up and black hoofs glancing. Presently,
pausing for curiosity, they saw that we fled, not followed, and they in
turn became pursuers, careering after us for a mile or more, until our
stern business left their gambolling play far behind.

We held steadily for that notch in the blue Sierra. The mountain lines
grew sharper; the country where we travelled, rougher, every stride.
We came upon a wide tract covered with wild-sage bushes. These delayed
and baffled us. It was a pigmy forest of trees, mature and complete,
but no higher than the knee. Every dwarfed, stunted, gnarled bush, had
the trunk, limbs, twigs, and gray, withered foliage, all in miniature,
of some tree, hapless but sturdy, that has had a weatherbeaten struggle
for life on a storm-threshed crag by the shore, or on a granite side
of a mountain, with short allowance of soil to eat and water to
drink. Myriads of square miles of that arid region have no important
vegetation except this wild-sage, or Artemisia, and a meaner brother,
not even good to burn, the greasewood.

One may ride through the tearing thickets of a forest primeval, as one
may shoulder through a crowd of civilized barbarians at a spectacle.
Our gallop over the top of this pigmy wood was as difficult as to find
passage over the heads of the same crowd, tall men and short, men
hatted with slouched hats, wash-bowls, and stove-pipes. It was a rough
scramble. It checked our speed and chafed our horses. Sometimes we
could find natural pathways for a few rods. Then these strayed aside
or closed up, and we must plunge straight on. We lost time; moments
we lost, more precious than if every one were marked by a drop in a
clepsydra, and each drop as it fell changed itself and tinkled in the
basin, a priceless pearl.

“It worries me, this delay,” I said to Brent.

“They lost as much--more time than we,” he said.

And he crowded on, more desperately, as a man rides for dearer than
life,--as a lover rides for love.

We tore along, breaking through and over the sage-bushes, each man
where best he could. Fulano began to show me what leaps were in him.
I gave him his head. No bridle would have held him. I kept my mastery
by the voice, or rather by the perfect identification of his will with
mine. Our minds acted together. “Save strength,” I still warned him,
“save strength, my friend, for the mountains and the last leaps!”

A little pathway in the sage-bushes suddenly opened before me, as a
lane rifts in the press of hurrying legions ’mid the crush of a city
thoroughfare. I dashed on a hundred yards in advance of my comrades.

What was this? The bushes trampled and broken down, just as we in our
passage were trampling and breaking them. What?

Hoof-marks in the dust!

“The trail!” I cried, “the trail!”

They sprang toward me. Brent followed the line with his eye. He
galloped forward, with a look of triumph.

Suddenly I saw him fling himself half out of his saddle, and clutch at
some object. Still going at speed, and holding on by one leg alone,
after the Indian fashion for sport or shelter against an arrow or a
shot, he picked up something from the bushes, regained his seat, and
waved his treasure to us. We ranged up and rode beside him over a gap
in the sage.

A lady’s glove!--that was what he had stooped to recover. An old
buckskin riding gauntlet, neatly stitched about the wrist, and pinked
on the wristlet. A pretty glove, strangely, almost tragically, feminine
in this desolation. A well-worn glove, that had seen better days, like
its mistress, but never any day so good as this, when it proved to us
that we were on the sure path of rescue.

“I take up the gauntlet,” said Brent. “Gare a qui le touche!”

We said nothing more; for this unconscious token, this silent cry for
help, made the danger seem more closely imminent. We pressed on. No
flinching in any of the horses. Where we could, we were going at speed.
Where they could, the horses kept side by side, nerving each other.
Companionship sustained them in that terrible ride.

And now in front the purple Sierra was growing brown, and rising up
a distinct wall, cleft visibly with dell, gully, ravine, and cañon.
The saw-teeth of the ridge defined themselves sharply into peak and
pinnacle. Broad fields of cool snow gleamed upon the summits.

We were ascending now all the time into subalpine regions. We crossed
great sloping savannas, deep in dry, rustling grass, where a nation of
cattle might pasture. We plunged through broad wastes of hot sand. We
flung ourselves down and up the red sides of water-worn gullies. We
took breakneck leaps across dry quebradas in the clay. We clattered
across stony arroyos, longing thirstily for the gush of water that had
flowed there not many months before.

The trail was everywhere plain. No prairie craft was needed to trace
it. Here the chase had gone, but a few hours ago; here, across grassy
slopes, trampling the grass as if a mower had passed that way; here,
ploughing wearily through the sand; here, treading the red, crumbling
clay; here, breaking down the side of a bank; here, leaving a sharp
hoof-track in the dry mud of a fled torrent. Everywhere a straight
path, pointing for that deepening gap in the Sierra, Luggernel Alley,
the only gate of escape.

Brent’s unerring judgment had divined the course aright. On he led,
charging along the trail, as if he were trampling already on the
carcasses of the pursued. On he led and we followed, drawing nearer,
nearer to our goal.

Our horses suffered bitterly for water. Some five hours we had ridden
without a pause. Not one drop or sign of water in all that arid waste.
The torrents had poured along the dry water-courses too hastily to let
the scanty alders and willows along their line treasure up any sap
of growth. The wild-sage bushes had plainly never tasted fluid more
plenteous than seldom dewdrops doled out on certain rare festal days,
enough to keep their meagre foliage a dusty gray. No pleasant streamlet
lurked anywhere under the long dry grass of the savannas. The arroyos
were parched and hot as rifts in lava.

It became agonizing to listen to the panting and gasping of our horses.
Their eyes grew staring and bloodshot. We suffered, ourselves, hardly
less than they. It was cruel to press on. But we must hinder a crueller
cruelty. Love against Time,--Vengeance against Time! We must not flinch
for any weak humanity to the noble allies that struggled on with us,
without one token of resistance.

Fulano suffered least. He turned his brave eye back, and beckoned
me with his ear to listen, while he seemed to say: “See, this is my
Endurance! I hold my Power ready still to show.”

And he curved his proud neck, shook his mane like a banner, and
galloped the grandest of all.

We came to a broad strip of sand, the dry bed of a mountain-torrent.
The trail followed up this disappointing path. Heavy ploughing for the
tired horses! How would they bear the rough work down the ravine yet to
come?

Suddenly our leader pulled up and sprang from the saddle.

“Look!” he cried, “how those fellows spent their time, and saved ours.
Thank Heaven for this! We shall save her, surely, now.”

It was WATER! No need to go back to Pindar to know that it was “the
Best.”

They had dug a pit deep in the thirsty sand, and found a lurking river
buried there. Nature never questioned what manner of men they were
that sought. Murderers flying from vengeance and planning now another
villain outrage,--still impartial Nature did not change her laws for
them. Sunshine, air, water, life,--these boons of hers,--she gave them
freely. That higher boon of death, if they were to receive, it must
be from some other power, greater than the undiscriminating force of
Nature.

Good luck and good omen, this well of water in the sand! It proved
that our chase had suffered as we, and had been delayed as we. Before
they had dared to pause and waste priceless moments here, their horses
must have been drooping terribly. The pit was nearly five feet deep.
A good hour’s work, and no less, had dug it with such tools as they
could bring. I almost laughed to think of the two, slowly bailing out
the sliding sand with a tin plate, perhaps, and a frying-pan, while
a score of miles away upon the desert we three were riding hard upon
their tracks to follow them the fleeter for this refreshment they had
left. “Sic vos non vobis!” I was ready to say triumphantly; but then
I remembered the third figure in their group,--a woman, like a Sibyl,
growing calmer as her peril grew, and succor seemed to withdraw. And
the pang of this picture crushed back into my heart any thoughts but a
mad anxiety and a frenzy to be driving on.

We drank thankfully of this well by the wayside. No gentle beauty
hereabouts to enchant us to delay. No grand old tree, the shelter and
the landmark of the fountain, proclaiming an oasis near. Nothing but
bare, hot sand. But the water was pure, cool, and bright. It had come
underground from the Sierra, and still remembered its parent snows.
We drank and were grateful, almost to the point of pity. Had we been
but avengers, like Armstrong, my friend and I could wellnigh have felt
mercy here, and turned back pardoning. But rescue was more imperative
than vengeance. Our business tortured us, as with the fanged scourge of
Tisiphone, while we dallied. We grudged these moments of refreshment.
Before night fell down the west, and night was soon to be climbing up
the east, we must overtake,--and then?

I wiped the dust and spume away from Fulano’s nostrils and breathed
him a moment. Then I let him drain deep, delicious draughts from the
stirrup-cup. He whinnied thanks and undying fealty,--my noble comrade!
He drank like a reveller. When I mounted again, he gave a jubilant
curvet and bound. My weight was a feather to him. All those leagues of
our hard, hot gallop were nothing.

The brown Sierra here was close at hand. Its glittering, icy summits,
above the dark and sheeny walls, far above the black phalanxes of
clambering pines, stooped forward and hung over us as we rode. We were
now at the foot of the range, where it dipped suddenly down upon the
plain. The gap, our goal all day, opened before us, grand and terrible.
Some giant force had clutched the mountains, and riven them narrowly
apart. The wild defile gaped, and then wound away and closed, lost
between its mighty walls, a thousand feet high, and bearing two brother
pyramids of purple cliffs aloft far above the snow line. A fearful
portal into a scene of the throes and agonies of earth! and my excited
eyes seemed to read, gilded over its entrance, in the dead gold of that
hazy October sunshine, words from Dante’s inscription,--

    “Per me si va tra la perduta gente;
    Lasciate ogni speranza voi, ch’ entrate!”

“Here we are,” said Brent, speaking hardly above his breath. “This is
Luggernel Alley at last, thank God! In an hour, if the horses hold
out, we shall be at the Springs; that is, if we can go through this
breakneck gorge at the same pace. My horse began to flinch a little
before the water. Perhaps that will set him up. How are yours?”

“Fulano asserts that he has not begun to show himself yet. I may have
to carry you _en croupe_, before we are done.”

Armstrong said nothing, but pointed impatiently down the defile.
The gaunt white horse moved on quicker at this gesture. He seemed a
tireless machine, not flesh and blood,--a being like his master, living
and acting by the force of a purpose alone.

Our chief led the way into the cañon.




CHAPTER XX.

A HORSE.


Yes, John Brent, you were right when you called Luggernel Alley a
wonder of our continent.

I remember it now,--I only saw it then;--for those strong scenes
of nature assault the soul whether it will or no, fight in against
affirmative or negative resistance, and bide their time to be admitted
as dominant over the imagination. It seemed to me then that I was not
noticing how grand the precipices, how stupendous the cleavages, how
rich and gleaming the rock faces in Luggernel Alley. My business was
not to stare about, but to look sharp and ride hard; and I did it.

Yet now I can remember, distinct as if I beheld it, every stride of
that pass; and everywhere, as I recall foot after foot of that fierce
chasm, I see three men with set faces,--one deathly pale and wearing a
bloody turban,--all galloping steadily on, on an errand to save and to
slay.

Terrible riding it was! A pavement of slippery, sheeny rock; great
beds of loose stones; barricades of mighty boulders, where a cliff had
fallen an æon ago, before the days of the road-maker race; crevices
where an unwary foot might catch; wide rifts where a shaky horse might
fall, or a timid horseman drag him down. Terrible riding! A pass where
a calm traveller would go quietly picking his steps, thankful if each
hour counted him a safe mile.

Terrible riding! Madness to go as we went! Horse and man, any moment
either might shatter every limb. But man and horse neither can know
what he can do, until he has dared and done. On we went, with the old
frenzy growing tenser. Heart almost broken with eagerness.

No whipping or spurring. Our horses were a part of ourselves. While
we could go, they would go. Since the water, they were full of leap
again. Down in the shady Alley, too, evening had come before its time.
Noon’s packing of hot air had been dislodged by a mountain breeze
drawing through. Horses and men were braced and cheered to their work;
and in such riding as that, the man and the horse must think together
and move together,--eye and hand of the rider must choose and command,
as bravely as the horse executes. The blue sky was overhead, the red
sun upon the castellated walls a thousand feet above us, the purpling
chasm opened before. It was late, these were the last moments. But we
should save the lady yet.

“Yes,” our hearts shouted to us, “we shall save her yet.”

An arroyo, the channel of a dry torrent, followed the pass. It had made
its way as water does, not straightway, but by that potent feminine
method of passing under the frowning front of an obstacle, and leaving
the dull rock staring there, while the wild creature it would have held
is gliding away down the valley. This zigzag channel baffled us; we
must leap it without check wherever it crossed our path. Every second
now was worth a century. Here was the sign of horses, passed but now.
We could not choose ground. We must take our leaps on that cruel rock
wherever they offered.

Poor Pumps!

He had carried his master so nobly! There were so few miles to do! He
had chased so well; he merited to be in at the death.

Brent lifted him at a leap across the arroyo.

Poor Pumps!

His hind feet slipped on the time-smoothed rock. He fell short. He
plunged down a dozen feet among the rough boulders of the torrent-bed.
Brent was out of the saddle almost before he struck, raising him.

No, he would never rise again. Both his fore-legs were broken at the
knee. He rested there, kneeling on the rocks where he fell.

Brent groaned. The horse screamed horribly, horribly,--there is no more
agonized sound,--and the scream went echoing high up the cliffs where
the red sunlight rested.

It costs a loving master much to butcher his brave and trusty horse,
the half of his knightly self; but it costs him more to hear him shriek
in such misery. Brent drew his pistol to put poor Pumps out of pain.

Armstrong sprang down and caught his hand.

“Stop!” he said in his hoarse whisper.

He had hardly spoken, since we started. My nerves were so strained,
that this mere ghost of a sound rang through me like a death yell, a
grisly cry of merciless and exultant vengeance. I seemed to hear its
echoes, rising up and swelling in a flood of thick uproar, until they
burst over the summit of the pass and were wasted in the crannies of
the towering mountain-flanks above.

“Stop!” whispered Armstrong. “No shooting! They’ll hear. The knife!”

He held out his knife to my friend.

Brent hesitated one heart-beat. Could he stain his hand with his
faithful servant’s blood?

Pumps screamed again.

Armstrong snatched the knife and drew it across the throat of the
crippled horse.

Poor Pumps! He sank and died without a moan. Noble martyr in the old,
heroic cause.

I caught the knife from Armstrong. I cut the thong of my girth. The
heavy California saddle, with its macheers and roll of blankets, fell
to the ground. I cut off my spurs. They had never yet touched Fulano’s
flanks. He stood beside me quiet, but trembling to be off.

“Now Brent! up behind me!” I whispered,--for the awe of death was upon
us.

I mounted. Brent sprang up behind. I ride light for a tall man. Brent
is the slightest body of an athlete I ever saw.

Fulano stood steady till we were firm in our seats.

Then he tore down the defile.

Here was that vast reserve of power; here the tireless spirit; here the
hoof striking true as a thunderbolt, where the brave eye saw footing;
here that writhing agony of speed; here the great promise fulfilled,
the great heart thrilling to mine, the grand body living to the beating
heart. Noble Fulano!

I rode with a snaffle. I left it hanging loose. I did not check or
guide him. He saw all. He knew all. All was his doing.

We sat firm, clinging as we could, as we must. Fulano dashed along the
resounding pass.

Armstrong pressed after,--the gaunt white horse struggled to emulate
his leader. Presently we lost them behind the curves of the Alley. No
other horse that ever lived could have held with the black in that
headlong gallop to save.

Over the slippery rocks, over the sheeny pavement, plunging through the
loose stones, staggering over the barricades, leaping the arroyo, down,
up, on, always on,--on went the horse, we clinging as we might.

It seemed one beat of time, it seemed an eternity, when between the
ring of the hoofs I heard Brent whisper in my ear.

“We are there.”

The crags flung apart, right and left. I saw a sylvan glade. I saw the
gleam of gushing water.

Fulano dashed on, uncontrollable!

There they were,--the Murderers.

Arrived but one moment!

The lady still bound to that pack-mule branded A. & A.

Murker just beginning to unsaddle.

Larrap not dismounted, in chase of the other animals as they strayed to
graze.

The men heard the tramp and saw us, as we sprang into the glade.

Both my hands were at the bridle.

Brent, grasping my waist with one arm, was awkward with his pistol.

Murker saw us first. He snatched his six-shooter and fired.

Brent shook with a spasm. His pistol arm dropped.

Before the murderer could cock again, Fulano was upon him!

He was ridden down. He was beaten, trampled down upon the
grass,--crushed, abolished.

We disentangled ourselves from the _mêlée_.

Where was the other?

The coward, without firing a shot, was spurring Armstrong’s Flathead
horse blindly up the cañon, whence we had issued.

We turned to Murker.

Fulano was up again, and stood there shuddering. But the man?

A hoof had battered in the top of his skull; blood was gushing from
his mouth; his ribs were broken; all his body was a trodden, massacred
carcass.

He breathed once, as we lifted him.

Then a tranquil, childlike look stole over his face,--that well-known
look of the weary body, thankful that the turbulent soul has gone.
Murker was dead.

Fulano, and not we, had been executioner. _His_ was the stain of blood.




CHAPTER XXI.

LUGGERNEL SPRINGS.


“I am shot,” gasped Brent, and sank down fainting.

Which first? the lady, or my friend, slain perhaps for her sake?

“Her! see to her!” he moaned.

I unbound her from the saddle. I could not utter a word for pity.
She essayed to speak; but her lips only moved. She could not change
her look. So many hours hardening herself to repel, she could not
soften yet, even to accept my offices with a smile of gratitude. She
was cruelly cramped by her lashings to the rough pack-saddle, rudely
cushioned with blankets. But the horror had not maddened her; the
torture had not broken her; the dread of worse had not slain her. She
was still unblenching and indomitable. And still she seemed to rule her
fate with quiet, steady eyes,--gray eyes with violet lights.

I carried her a few steps to the side of a jubilant fountain lifting
beneath a rock, and left her there to Nature, kindliest leech.

Then I took a cup of that brilliant water to my friend, my brother.

“I can die now,” he said feebly.

“There is no death in you. You have won the right to live. Keep a brave
heart. Drink!”

And in that exquisite spot, that fair glade of the sparkling fountains,
I gave the noble fellow long draughts of sweet refreshment. The rescued
lady trailed herself across the grass and knelt beside us. My horse,
still heaving with his honorable gallop, drooped his head over the
group. A picture to be remembered!

Who says that knighthood is no more? Who says the days of chivalry are
past? Who says it, is a losel.

Brent was roughly, but not dangerously, shot along the arm. The bullet
had ploughed an ugly path along the muscles of the fore-arm and
upper-arm, and was lodged in the shoulder. A bad wound; but no bones
broken. If he could but have rest and peace and surgery! But if not,
after the fever of our day, after the wearing anguish of our doubtful
gallop; if not?--

Ellen Clitheroe revived in a moment, when she saw another needed her
care. Woman’s gentle duty of nurse found her ready for its offices.
My blundering good-will gave place willingly to her fine-fingered
skilfulness. She forgot her own weariness, while she was magnetizing
away the pangs of the wounded man by her delicate touch.

He looked at me, and smiled with total content.

“My father?” asked the lady, faintly, as if she dreaded the answer.

“Safe!” said I. “Free from the Mormons. He is waiting for you with a
friend.”

Her tears began to flow. She was busy bandaging the wound. All was
silent about us, except the pleasant gurgle of the fountains, when we
heard a shot up the defile.

The sharp sound of a pistol-shot came leaping down the narrow chasm,
flying before the pursuit of its own thundering echoes. Those grand
old walls of the Alley, facing each other there for the shade and
sunshine of long, peaceful æons, gilded by the glow of countless
summers, splashed with the gray of antique lichens on their purple
fronts, draped for unnumbered Octobers with the scarlet wreaths of
frost-ripened trailers,--those solemn walls standing there in old
silence, unbroken save by the uproar of winter floods, or by the
humming flight of summer winds, or the louder march of tempests
crowding on,--those silent walls, written close with the record of
God’s handiwork in the long cycles of creation, lifted up their
indignant voices when the shot within proclaimed to them the undying
warfare of man with man, and, roaring after, they hurled that murderous
noise forth from their presence. The quick report sprang out from the
chasm into the quiet glade, where the lady knelt, busy with offices of
mercy, and there it lost its vengeful tone, and was blended with the
rumble of the mingled rivulets of the springs. The thundering echoes
paused within, slowly proclaiming quiet up from crag to crag, until one
after another they whispered themselves to silence. No sound remained,
save the rumble of the stream, as it flowed away down the opening
valley into the haze, violet under gold, of that warm October sunset.

I sprang up when I heard the shot, and stood on the alert. There were
two up the Alley; which, after the shot, was living, and which dead?

Not many moments had passed, when I heard hoofs coming, and Armstrong
rode into view. The gaunt white horse galloped with the long, careless
fling I had noticed all day. He moved machine-like, as if without
choice or volition of his own, a horse commissioned to carry a Fate.
Larrap’s stolen horse trotted along by his old master.

Armstrong glanced at Murker’s body lying there, a battered mass.

“Both!” he whispered. “The other was sent right into my hands to be put
to death. I knew all the time it would be sent to me to do killing. He
was spurring up the Alley on my own horse. He snapped at me. My pistol
did not know how to snap. See here!”

And he showed me, hanging from his saddle horn, that loathliest of all
objects a man’s eyes ever lighted upon, a fresh scalp. It sickened me.

“Shame!” said I. “Do you call yourself a man, to bring such a thing
into a lady’s presence?”

“It was rather mean to take the fellow’s hair,” says Armstrong. “I
don’t believe brother Bill would have did it. But I felt orful ugly,
when I saw that fat, low-lived devil, and thought of my brother, a big,
hul-hearted man as never gave a bad word to nobody, and never held on
to a dollar or a slug when ayry man wanted it more ’n him. Come, I’ll
throw the nasty thing away, if you say so.”

“Help me drag off this corpse, and we’ll bury man and scalp together,”
I said.

We buried him at the gate of the Alley, under a great cairn of stones.

“God forgive them both,” said I, as I flung the last stone, “that they
were brutes, and not men.”

“Brutes they was, stranger,” says Armstrong, “but these things is
ordered somehow. I allow your pardener and you is glad to get that gal
out of a Mormon camp, ef it did cost him a horse and both on you an all
day’s tremble. Men don’t ride so hard, and look so wolfish, as you two
men have did, onless their heart is into it.”

“It is, indeed, strange,” said I, rather thinking aloud than addressing
my companion, “that this brute force should have achieved for us by
outrage what love failed in. Fate seems to have played Brute against
Brute, that Love might step between and claim the victory. The lady is
safe; but the lover may have won her life and lost his own.”

“Look here, stranger,” says Armstrong, “part of this is yourn,”
pointing to the money-belt, which, with the dead man’s knife and
pistol, he had taken from the corpse. “Halves of this and the other
fellow’s plunder belongs to your party.”

I suppose I looked disgusted; yet I have seen gentle ladies wearing
boastfully brooches that their favorite heroes had taken from Christian
men dead on the field at Inkermann, and shawls of the loot of Delhi
cover many shoulders that would shudder over a dead worm.

“I’m not squimmidge,” said Armstrong. “It’s my own and my brother’s
money in them belts. I’ll count that out, and then, ef you wont take
your part, I’ll pass it over to the gal’s father. I allowed from signs
ther was, that that thar boss Mormon had about tuk the old man’s pile.
Most likely these shiners they won last night is some of the very
sufferins Sizzum got from him. It’s right he should hev ’em back.”

I acknowledged the justice of this restitution.

“Now,” said Armstrong again, “you want to stay by your friend and the
gal, so I’ll take one of the pack mules and fetch your two saddles
along before dark lights down. It was too bad to lose that iron gray;
but there’s more ’n two horses into the hide of that black of yourn. He
was the best man of the lot for the goin’, the savin’, and the killin’.
Stranger, I’ve ben byin’ and sellin’ and breedin’ kettrypids ever since
I was raised myself; but I allow I never seed a HORSE till I seed him
lunge off with you two on his back.”

Armstrong rode up the Alley again. Another man he was since his
commission of vengeance had been accomplished. In those lawless
wilds, _vendetta_ takes the place of justice, becomes justice indeed.
Armstrong, now that his stern duty was done, was again the kindly,
simple fellow nature made him, the type of a class between pioneer
and settler, and a strong, brave, effective class it is. It was the
education, in youth, in the sturdy habits of this class, that made our
Washington the manly chief he was.

I returned to my friends by the Springs.

Emerging from the austere grandeur of the Alley, dim with the shadows
of twilight, the scene without was doubly sweet and almost domestic.
The springs, four or five in number, and one carrying with it a thread
of hot steam, sprang vigorously out along the bold edges of the cliffs.
All the ground was verdure,--green, tender, and brilliant, a feast to
the eyes after long staring over sere deserts. The wild creatures that
came there every day for refreshment, and perhaps for intoxication
in the aerated tipple of the Champagne Spring, kept the grass grazed
short as the turf of a park. Two great spruce-trees, each with one
foot under the rocks, and one edging fountainward, stood, pillar under
pyramid. Some wreaths of drooping creepers, floating from the crags,
had caught and clung, and so gone winding among the dark foliage of
the twin trees; and now their leaves, ripened by autumn, shook amid
the dusky green like an alighting of orioles. Except for the spruces
posted against the cliffs, the grassy area of an acre about the springs
was clear of other growth than grass. Below, the rivulet disappeared
in a green thicket, and farther down were large cottonwoods, and one
tall stranger tree, the feminine presence of a drooping elm, as much
unlooked-for here as the sweet, delicate woman whom strange chances
had brought to dignify and grace the spot. This stranger elm filled my
heart with infinite tender memories of home, and of those early boyish
days when Brent and I lay under the Berkeley College elms, or strayed
beneath the elm-built arches up and down the avenues of that fair
city clustered round the College. In those bright days, before sorrow
came to him, or to me my harsh necessity, we two in brotherhood had
trained each other to high thoughts of courtesy and love,--a dreamed-of
love for large heroic souls of women, when our time of full-completed
worthiness should come. And his time had come. And yet it might be
that the wounded knight would never know his lady, as much loving as
beloved; it might be that he would never find a sweeter soothing in her
touch, than the mere touch of gratitude and common charity; it might
be that he would fever away his beautiful life with the fever of his
wound, and never feel the holy quiet of a lover’s joy when the full
bliss of love returned is his.

I gave a few moments to the horses and mules. They were still to be
unsaddled. Healthy Fulano had found his own way to water, and now was
feasting on the crisp, short grass along the outlet of the Champagne
Spring, tickling his nose with the bubbles of gas as they sped by. Sup,
Fulano! This spot was worth the gallop to see Sup, Fulano, the brave,
and may no stain of this day’s righteous death-doing rest upon your
guiltless life!

Brent was lying under the spruces, drowsing with fatigue, reaction, and
loss of blood. Miss Clitheroe sat by watching him. These fine beings
have an exquisitely tenacious vitality. The happiness of release had
suddenly kindled all her life again. As she rose to meet me, there was
light in her eyes and color in her cheeks. Her whole soul leaped up and
spoke its large gratitude in a smile.

“My dear friend,” she said; and then, with sudden tearfulness, “God be
thanked for your heroism!”

“God be thanked!” I repeated. “We have been strangely selected and
sent,--you from England, my friend and I, and my horse, the hero of the
day, from the Pacific,--to interfere here in each other’s lives.”

“It would seem romance, but for the sharp terror of this day, coming
after the long agony of my journey with my poor, errant father.”

“A sharp terror, indeed!”

“But only terror!” and a glow of maidenly thankfulness passed over her
face. “Except one moment of rough usage, when I slipped away my gag and
screamed as they carried me off, those men were considerate to me. They
never halted except to dig a well in the sand of a riverbed. I learned
from their talk that they had made an attempt to steal your horses in
the night, and, failing, dreaded lest you, and especially Mr. Brent,
would follow them close. So they rode hard. They supposed that, when I
was found missing, whoever went in pursuit, and you they always feared,
would lose time along the emigrant road, searching eastward.”

“We might have done so; but we had ourselves ridden off that way in
despair of aiding you,”--and I gave her a sketch of the events of the
morning.

“It was the hope of succor from you that sustained me. After what your
friend said to me last evening, I knew he could not abandon me, if he
had power to act.” And she looked very tenderly at the sleeper,--a look
to repay him for a thousand wounds.

“Did you find my glove?” she asked.

“He has it. That token assured us. Ah! you should have seen that dear
wounded boy, our leader, when he knew we were not astray.”

I continued my story of our pursuit,--the lulling beat of the stream
undertoning my words in the still twilight. When I came to that last
wild burst of Fulano, and told how his heroic charge had fulfilled
his faithful ardor of the day, she sprang up, thrilled out of all
weariness, and ran to the noble fellow, where he was taking his dainty
banquet by the brookside.

She flung her arms around his neck and rested her head upon his
shoulder. Locks of her black hair, escaping into curls, mingled with
his mane.

Presently Miss Clitheroe seemed to feel a maidenly consciousness that
her caresses of the horse might remind the horse’s master that he
was not unworthy of a like reward. She returned to my friend. He was
stirring a little in pain. She busied herself about him tenderly, and
yet with a certain distance of manner, building a wall of delicate
decorum between him and herself. Indeed, from the beginning of our
acquaintance yesterday, and now in this meeting of to-day, she had
drawn apart from Brent, and frankly approached me. Her fine instinct
knew the brother from the lover.

Armstrong presently rode out again.

When he saw his brother’s sorrel horse feeding with the others, he wept
like a child.

We two, the lady and I, were greatly touched.

“I’ve got a daughter myself, to home to the Umpqua,” said Armstrong,
turning to Miss Clitheroe; “jest about your settin’ up, and jest about
as many corn shuckins old. Ellen is her name.”

“Ellen is my name.”

“That’s pretty” (pooty he pronounced it). “Well, I’ll stand father to
you, just as ef you was my own gal. I know what a gal in trouble wants
more ’n young fellows can.”

Ellen Clitheroe gave her hand to Armstrong in frank acceptance of his
offer. He became the paternal element in our party,--he protecting her
and she humanizing him.

We lighted our camp-fire and supped heartily. Except for Brent’s uneasy
stir and unwilling moans, we might have forgotten the deadly business
of that day.

We made the wounded man comfortable as might be with blankets, under
the sheltering spruces. After all, if he must be hurt, he could not
have fallen upon a better hospital than the pure open air of this
beautiful shelter; and surely nowhere was a gentler nurse than his.

Armstrong and I built the lady a bower, a little lodge of bushes from
the thicket.

Then he and I kept watch and watch beneath the starlight.

Sleeping or waking, our souls and our bodies thanked God for this peace
of a peaceful night, after the terror and tramp and battle of that
trembling day.




CHAPTER XXII.

CHAMPAGNE.


How soundly I slept, in my sleeping hours, after our great
victory,--Courage over Space, Hope over Time, Love over Brutality, the
Heavenly Powers over the Demon Forces!

I sprang up, after my last morning slumber, with vitality enough
for my wounded friend and myself. I felt that I could carry double
responsibility, as Fulano had carried double weight. God has given
me the blessing of a great, vigorous life. My body has always been a
perfect machine for my mind’s work, such as that may be; and never a
better machine, with every valve, crank, joint, and journal in good
order, than on that dawn at Luggernel Springs.

If I had not awaked alive from top to toe, from tip to tip, from end to
end, alive in muscle, nerve, and brain, the Luggernel Champagne Spring
would have put life into me.

Champagne of Rheims and Epernay! Bah!

Avaunt, Veuve Clicquot, thou elderly Hebe! Avaunt, with thy besugared,
begassed, bedevilled, becorked, bewired, poptious manufacture! Some
day, at a dull dinner-party, I will think of thee and poison myself
with thy poison, that I may become deaf to the voice of the vulgar
woman to whom some fatal hostess may consign me. But now let no thought
of Champagne, even of that which the Veuve may keep for her moment most
lacrymose of “veuvage,” interfere with my remembrance of the Luggernel
Spring.

Champagne to that! More justly a Satyr to Hyperion; a stage-moon to
Luna herself; an Old-World peach to a peach of New Jersey; a Democratic
Platform to the Declaration of Independence; a pinching, varnished
boot to a winged sandal of Mercury; Faustina to Charlotte Corday; a
senatorial speech to a speech of Wendell Phillips; anything crude,
base, and sham to anything fine, fresh, and true.

Ah, poor Kissingen! Alas, unfragrant Sharon! Alack, stale Saratoga!
Ichabod! Adieu to you all when the world knows the virtues of Luggernel!

But never when the _O-fartunatus-nimium_ world has come into this new
portion of its heritage,--never when Luggernel is renowned and fashion
blooms about its brim,--never when gentlemen of the creamiest cream
in the next half-century offer to ladies as creamy beakers bubbling
full of that hypernectareous tipple,--never will any finer body or
fairer soul of a woman be seen there about than her whom I served that
morning. And, indeed, among the heroic gentlemen of the riper time
to come, I cannot dream that any will surpass in all the virtues and
courtesies of the cavalier my friend John Brent, now dismounted and
lying there wounded and patient.

Oranges before breakfast are good. There be who on awakening gasp for
the cocktail. And others, who, fuddled last night, are limp in their
lazy beds, till soda-water lends them its fizzle. Eye-openers these of
moderate calibre. But, with all the vigorous vitality I have claimed,
perhaps I might still have remembered yesterday with its Gallop of
Three, its suspense, its eager dash and its certainty, and remembered
them with new anxieties for to-day, except for my morning draught of
exhilaration from the unbottled, unmixed sources of Luggernel. Thanks
La Grenouille, rover of the wilderness, for thy froggish instinct and
this blissful discovery!

I stooped and lapped. Long ago Gideon Barakson recognized the
thorough-going braves because they took their water by the throatful,
not by the palmful. And when I had lapped enough, and let the great
bubbles of laughing gas burst in my face, I took a beaker,--to be sure
it was battered tin, and had hung at the belt of a dastard,--a beaker
of that “cordial julep” to my friend. He was awake and looking about
him, seeking for some one.

“Come to your gruel, old fellow!” said I.

He drank the airy water and sat up revived.

“It is like swallowing the first sunbeam on the crown of a snow-peak,”
he said.

Miss Clitheroe dawned upon us with this. She came forth from her lodge,
fresh and full of cheer.

Brent stopped looking about for some one. The One had entered upon the
scene.

I dipped for her also that poetry in a tin pot.

“This,” said she, “is finer balm than the enchanted cup of Comus; never
did lips touch a draught

    ‘To life so friendly, or so cool to thirst.’

To-day my life is worthy of this nepenthe. My dear friend, this is the
first night of peaceful, hopeful rest I have had, since my poor father
was betrayed into his delusion. Thank you and God for it!”

And again her eyes filled with happy tears, and she knelt by her
patient. While she was tenderly and deftly renewing the bandages,
Armstrong stood by, and inspected the wound in silence. Presently he
walked off and called me to help him with our camp-fire.

“Pretty well ploughed up, that arm of his’n,” said he.

“I have seen amputation performed for less.”

“Then I’m dum glad there’s no sawbones about. I don’t believe Nater
means a man’s leg or arm to go, until she breaks the solid bone, so
that it ain’t to be sot nohow. But what do you allow to do? Lamm ahead
or squat here?”

“You are the oldest; you have most experience; I will take your advice.”

“October is sweet as the smile of a gal when she hears that her man has
made fifteen hundred dollars off the purceeds of a half-acre of onions,
to the mines; but these yer fall storms is reg’lar Injuns; they light
down ’thout sendin’ on handbills. We ought to be p’intin’ for home if
we can.”

“But Brent’s wound! Can he travel?”

“Now, about that wound, there’s two ways of lookin’ at it. We ken stop
here, or we ken poot for Laramie. I allow that it oughter take that
arm of his’n a month to make itself right. Now in a month ther’ll be
p’r’aps three feet of snow whar we stand.”

“We must go on.”

“Besides, lookerhere! Accordin’ to me the feelin’s mean suthin’,
when a man’s got any. He’ll be all the time worryin’ about the gal
till he gets her to her father. It’s my judgment she’d better never
see the old man agin; but I wouldn’t want my Ellen to quit me, of I
was an unhealthy gonoph like him. Daughters ought to stick closer ’n
twitch-grass to their fathers, and sons to their mothers, and she ain’t
one to knock off lovin’ anybody she’s guv herself to love. No, she’s
one of the stiddy kind,--stiddy as the stars. He knows that, that there
pardener of yourn knows it, and his feelin’s won’t give his arm no rest
until she’s got the old man to take care of and follow off on his next
streak. So we must poot for Laramie, live or die. Thar’ll be a doctor
there. Ef we ken find the way, it shouldn’t take us more ’n ten days.
I’ll poot him on Bill’s sorrel, jest as gentle a horse as Bill was that
rode him, and we’ll see ef we hain’t worked out the bad luck out of all
of us, for one while.”

Armstrong’s opinion was only my own, expressed Oregonly. We went on
preparing breakfast.

“That there A. & A. mule,” says Armstrong, “was Bill’s and mine, and
this stuff in the packs was ours. I don’t know what the fellers did
with the two mean mustangs they was ridin’ when they found us fust on
Bear River,--used ’em up, I reckon.”

Here Brent hailed us cheerily.

“Look alive there, you two cooks! We idlers here want to be
travelling.”

“I told you so,” said Armstrong. “He understands this business jest as
well as we do. He’ll go till he draps. Thar’s grit into him, ef I know
grit.”

Yes; but when I saw him sit still with his back against the
spruce-tree, and remembered his exuberant life of other days, I
desponded. He soon took occasion to speak to me apart.

“Dick,” said he, “you see how it is. I am not good for much. If we
were alone, you and I might settle here for a month or so, and write
‘Bubbles from the Brünnen.’ But there is a lady in the case. It is
plain where she belongs. I know every inch of the way to Laramie. I can
take you through in a week”--he paused and quavered a little, as he
continued--“if I live. But don’t look so anxious. I shall.”

“It would be stupid for you to die now, John Brent the Lover, with the
obstacles cut away and an heroic basis of operations.”

“A wounded man, perhaps a dying man, has no business with love. I will
never present her my services and ask pay. But, Dick, if I should wear
out, you will know what to say to her for me.”

At this she joined us, her face so illumined with resolution and hope
that we both kindled. All doubt skulked away from her presence. Brent
was nerved to rise and walk a few steps to the camp-fire, supported by
her arm and mine.

Armstrong had breakfast ready, such as it was. And really, the brace of
wood grouse he had shot that morning, not a hundred yards from camp,
were not unworthy of a lady’s table, though they had never made journey
in a crowded box, over a slow railroad, from Chicago to New York, in a
January thaw, and then been bought at half price of a street pedler, a
few hours before they dropped to pieces.

We grouped to depart.

“I shall remember all this for scores of sketches,” said Miss Clitheroe.

And indeed there was material. The rocks behind threading away and
narrowing into the dim gorge of the Alley; the rushing fountains, one
with its cloud of steam; the two great spruces; the greensward; the
thickets; and above them a far-away glimpse of a world, all run to top
and flinging itself up into heaven, a tumult of crag and pinnacle. So
much for the scenery. And for personages, there was Armstrong, with
his head turbaned, saddling the white machine; the two mules, packed
and taking their last nibbles of verdure; Miss Clitheroe, in her round
hat and with a green blanket rigged as riding-skirt, mounted upon the
sturdy roan; Brent resting on my shoulder, and stepping on my knee,
as he climbed painfully to his seat on the tall sorrel; Don Fulano
waiting, proud and eager. And just as we were starting, a stone fell
from overhead into the water; and looking up, we saw a bighorn studying
us from the crags, wishing, no doubt, that his monster horns were ears
to comprehend our dialect.

I gave the party their stirrup-cup from the Champagne Spring. The
waters gurgled adieu. Rich sunrise was upon the purple gates of the
pass. We struck a trail through the thicket.

Good bye to the Luggernel Springs and Luggernel Alley! to that scene of
tragedy and tragedy escaped!




CHAPTER XXIII.

AN IDYL OF THE ROCKYS.


I shall make short work of our journey to Laramie.

We bent northeastwardly by ways known to our leader,--alas! leader no
more. He could guide, but no more gallop in front and beckon on the
cavalcade.

It was a grand journey. A wild one, and rough for a lady. But this lady
was made of other stuff than the mistresses of lapdogs.

We crossed the backbone of the continent, climbing up the clefts
between the ragged vertebræ, and over the top of that meandering spine,
fleshed with great grassy mounds; then plunging down again among the
rifts and glens.

A brilliant quartette ours would have been, but for my friend’s wound.
Four people, all with fresh souls and large and peculiar experience.

Except for my friend’s wound!

My friend, closer than a brother, how I felt for him every mile of that
stern journey! He never complained. Only once he said to me, “Bodily
agony has something to teach, I find, as well as mental.”

Never one word of his suffering, except that. He wore slowly away.
Every day he grew a little weaker in body; but every day the strong
spirit lifted the body to its work. He must live to be our guide, that
he felt. He must be cheerful, gay even, lest the lady he had saved
should too bitterly feel that her safety was daily paid for by his
increasing agony. Every day that ichor of love baptized him with new
life. He breathed love and was strong. But it was love confined to his
own consciousness. Wounded, and dying perhaps, unless his life could
beat time by a day or an hour, he would not throw any share of his
suffering on another, on her, by calling for the sympathy which a woman
gives to her lover.

Did she love him? Ah! that is the ancient riddle. Only the Sphinx
herself can answer. Those fair faces of women, with their tender
smiles, their quick blushes, their starting tears, still wear a mask
until the moment comes for unmasking. If she did not love him,--this
man of all men most lovable, this feminine soul in the body of a hero,
this man who had spilled his blood for her, whose whole history had
trained him for those crowning hours of a chivalric life when the
lover led our Gallop of Three; if she did not love him, she must be, I
thought, some bloodless creature of a type other than human, an angel
and no woman, a creature not yet truly embodied into the body of love
we seemed to behold.

She was sweetly tender to him; but that the wound, received for her
sake, merited; _that_ was hardly more than the gracious thankfulness
she lavished upon us all. What an exquisite woman! How calmly she took
her place, lofty and serene, above all the cloudy atmosphere of such a
bewildering life as hers had been! How large and deep and mature the
charity she had drawn, even so young, from the strange contrasts of her
history! How her keen observation of a woman of genius had grasped and
stored away the diamond, or the dust of diamond, in every drift across
her life!

She grew more beautiful daily. Those weary days when, mile after dreary
mile, the listless march of the Mormon caravan bore her farther and
farther away into hopeless exile, were gone forever. She breathed ruddy
hope now. Before, she had filtered hope from every breath and only
taken the thin diet of pale endurance. All future possibility of trial,
after her great escape, seemed nothing. She was confident of Brent’s
instant recovery, with repose, and a surgeon more skilful than she,
at Fort Laramie. She was sure that now her father’s wandering life was
over, and that he would let her find him a home and win him a living in
some quiet region of America, where all his sickly fancies would pass
away, and his old age would glide serenely.

It would be long, too long, for the movement of this history, should I
attempt to detail the talks and minor adventures of that trip by which
the character of all my companions became better known to me.

For the wounded man’s sake we made lengthened rests at noonday, and
camped with the earliest coming of twilight. Those were the moonlight
nights of brilliant October. How strange and solemn and shadowy the
mountains rose about our bivouacs! It was the poetry of camp life,
and to every scene by a fountain, by a torrent, in a wild dell, on a
mountain meadow with a vision of a snow-peak watching us all the starry
night and passing through rosiness into splendor at sunrise,--to every
scene, stern or fair, our comrade gave the poetry of a woman’s presence
and a woman’s fine perception of the minuter charm of nature.

And then--think of it!--she had a genius for cookery. I have known this
same power in other fine poetic and artistic beings. She had a genius
for imaginative cookery,--a rich inheritance from her father’s days
of poverty and coal-mining. She insisted upon her share of camp-duty;
and her great gray eyes were often to be seen gravely fixed upon a
frying-pan, or watching a roasting bird, as it twirled slowly before
the fire, with a strip of pork featly disposed overhead to baste that
succulent revolver; while Brent, poor fellow, lay upon the grass,
wrapped in blankets, slowly accumulating force for the next day’s
journey, and watched her with wonderment and delight that she could
condescend to be a household goddess.

“Ther ain’t her ikwill to be scared up,” would Armstrong say on these
occasions. “I’m gittin’ idees to make my Ellen the head woman on all
the Umpqua. I wish I had her along; for she’s a doughcyle gal, and
takes nat’ral to pooty notions in thinkin’ and behavior and fixin’ up
things ginerally.”

Armstrong became more and more the paternal element in our party.
Memory of the Ellen on the Umpqua made him fatherly thoughtful for the
Ellen here, a wanderer across the Rocky Mountains. And she returned
more than he gave, in the sweet civilizing despotism of a lady. That
grizzly turban presently disappeared from his head. Decorous bandages
replaced it. With that token went from him the sternness. He was a
frank, honest, kindly fellow, shrewd and unflinching, but one who
would never have lifted his hand against a human being except for that
great, solemn duty of an exterminating vengeance. That done, he was his
genial self again. We never tired of his tales of plains and Oregon
life, told in his own vivid dialect. He was the patriarchal pioneer,
a man with the personal freedom of a nomad, and the unschooled wisdom
of a founder of states in the wilderness. A mighty hunter, too, was
Armstrong. No day passed that we did not bag an antelope, a deer, or
a big-horn. It was the very land of Cocaigne for game. The creatures
were so hospitable that it hardly seemed proper gratitude to kill them;
even that great brown she-bear, who one night “popped her head into the
shop,” and, muttering something which in the Bruin lingo may have been,
“What! no soap!” smote Armstrong with a paw which years of sucking had
not made tender.

Except for Brent’s wound, we four might have had a joyous journey, full
of the true savor of brave travel. But that ghastly, murderous hurt of
his needed most skilful surgery, and needed most of all repose with a
mind at peace. He did not mend; but all the while

                              “The breath
    Of her sweet tendance hovering over him
    Filled all the genial courses of his blood
    With deeper and with ever deeper love.”

But he did not mend. He wasted daily. His sleeps became deathly
trances. We could not wear him out with haste. Brave heart! he bore up
like a brave.

And at last one noon we drew out of the Black Hills, and saw before us,
across the spurs of Laramie Peak, the broad plain of Fort Laramie.

Brent revived. We rode steadily. Just before sunset, we pulled up at
our goal.




CHAPTER XXIV.

DRAPETOMANIA.


For the last hour I had ridden close to Brent. I saw that it was almost
up with him. He swayed in his saddle. His eye was glazed and dull. But
he kept his look fixed on the little group of Laramie Barracks, and let
his horse carry him.

I lifted up my heart in prayer that this noble life might not be
quenched. He must not die now that he was enlarged and sanctified by
truest love.

At last we struck open country. Bill Armstrong’s sorrel took a cradling
lope; we rode through a camp of Sioux “tepees,” like so many great
white foolscaps; we turned the angle of a great white wooden building,
and halted. I sprang from Fulano, Brent quietly drooped down into my
arms.

“Just in time,” said a cheerful, manly voice at my ear.

“I hope so,” said I. “Is it Captain Ruby?”

“Yes. We’ll take him into my bed. Dr. Pathie, here’s a patient for you.”

We carried Brent in. As we crossed the veranda, I saw Miss Clitheroe’s
meeting with her father. He received her almost peevishly.

We laid the wounded man in Ruby’s hospital bed. Evidently a fine
fellow, Ruby; and, what was to the point, fond of John Brent.

Dr. Pathie shook his head.

So surgeons are wont to do when they study sick men. It is a tacit
recognition of the dark negative upon which they are to turn the
glimmer of their positive,--a recognition of the mystery of being. They
are to experiment upon life, and their chief facts are certain vaguish
theories why some men die.

The surgeon shook his head. It was a movement of sympathy for the
man, as a man. Then he proceeded to consider him as a machine, which
it was a surgeon’s business to repair. Ruby and I stood by anxiously,
while the skilled craftsman inspected. Was this insensible, but still
breathing creature, only panting away the last puffs of his motive
power? or was it capable mechanism still?

“Critical case,” said Dr. Pathie, at last. He had great, umbrageous
eyebrows, and a gentle, peremptory manner, as of one who had done much
merciful cruelty in his day. “Ugly wound. Never saw a worse furrow.
Conical ball. He must have been almost at the muzzle of the pistol. He
ought not to have stirred for a month. How he has borne such a journey
with that arm, I cannot conceive. Strong character, eh? Passionate
young fellow? Life means something to him. Well, Nature nominates such
men to get into scrapes for other people; she gets them wounded, and
drains them of their blood. Lying on their backs is good for them, and
so is feeling weak. They take in more emotion than they can assimilate
while they are wide awake. They would go frenzied with overcrowded
brain, if they were not shut up into themselves sometimes, by sickness
or sorrow. There’s not much to do for him. A very neat hand has been
at his bandages. Now, if he is a man with a distinct and controlling
purpose in his life,--if he has words to say, or deeds, or duties to
do, and knows it,--he will hold by his life; if not, not. Keep him
quiet. And do not let him see, or hear, or feel the presence of that
beautiful young woman. She is not his sister, and she will have too
much trouble herself to be a tranquil nurse for him here.”

I left him with his patient, and went out to care for our horses. Ruby,
model host, had saved me all trouble.

“I have given Miss Clitheroe my sole guest-chamber,” he said. “She
has a lady’s-maid in the brawny person of an Irish corporaless. What a
transcendent being she is! I don’t wonder Brent loves her, as I divined
he did from what Jake Shamberlain--shrewd fellow Jake--said when he
consigned the father to me.”

“I must have a talk with the old gentleman. O, there he is with
Armstrong.”

Armstrong was handing him the money-belt. His eyes gleamed as he
clutched it.

“Walk off with me a step,” said Ruby, “before you speak to him.”

We strolled off through the Sioux encampment. The warriors, tall
fellows with lithe forms, togaed in white blankets, were smoking in
a circle. Only the great chiefs were in toggery of old uniforms,
blossoming into brass buttons wherever a button could bourgeon.
And only the great chiefs resembled frowzy scarecrows. The women,
melancholy, as the abused women of barbarians always are, were
slouching about at slave work. All greeted Ruby as a friend, with
sonorous grunts.

Society, even of Sioux, dwelling under buffalo hide foolscaps, was
humane after our journey. The barracks of Laramie, lonely outpost on a
bleak plain, were fairly beautiful in their homelike homeliness. Man
without a roof is mere chaos.

“Trouble in store, I fear,” said Captain Ruby, “for Mr. Clitheroe and
all who care for him.”

“He ought to be at peace at last.”

“He is not. Dr. Pathie says he is a case of DRAPETOMANIA.”

“I have heard that outlandish word used to express the tendency--diseased
of course--that negroes have to run away from their masters.”

“Mr. Clitheroe is wild to get away from his proper master, namely,
himself.”

“A desperate malady! At his age almost fatal.”

“So Pathie says. When a man of Mr. Clitheroe’s age is not at peace
within, he goes into war with his circumstances. He cannot conquer
them, so he runs away. He has always before him a shadow of a dream
of what he might have been, and that ghost drives him and chases him,
until it wears him out.”

“Yes; but it is not only the forlorn and disappointed that this
pitiable disease attacks. Very rich and prosperous suffer, become
drapetomaniacs, sell houses and build new, change neighborhoods, travel
furiously, never able to escape from that inevitable companion of a
reproaching self.”

“Mr. Clitheroe is chafing to be gone. I start a train for the States
to-morrow,--the last chance to travel with escort this season,--a small
topographical party going back. He has been for the last few days in a
passion of impatience, almost scolding me and your party, his daughter,
and circumstances, lest you should not arrive in time for him to go.”

“To go where? What does he intend?”

“He is full of great schemes. I do not know, of course, anything of him
except what I have picked up from his communicativeness; but you would
suppose him a duke from his talk. He speaks of his old manor-house,--I
should know it by sight now,--and says he intends to repurchase it and
be a great man again. He is constantly inviting me to share his new
splendors. Really, his pictures of life in England will quite spoil me
for another winter of cooling my heels in this dismal place, with a
scalp on my head and a hundred Sioux looking at it hungrily.”

“He must be deranged by his troubles. I am sure he has no basis for any
hopes in England. Sizzum stripped him. He has alienated his friends at
home. His daughter is his only friend and guardian, except ourselves.”

“He sprang up when he saw you coming, and was frantic with joy,--not
for his daughter’s safety, but because he could start with the train
to-morrow. I suppose she is a tested traveller by this time.”

“As thoroughly as any man on the plains.”

“She can go very comfortably in the train. Two or three soldiers’ wives
go. Females, I believe; at least their toggery alleges the softer sex,
whatever their looks and voices do.”

“The chance is clearly not to be lost. I do not like to part with my
fascinating comrade. It was poetry to camp with such a woman. Travel
will seem stale henceforth. I wish we could keep her, for Brent’s sake.”

“Poor fellow! Pathie looks very doubtful. You must tell me your story
more fully after supper.”

I found Mr. Clitheroe in a panic to be moving. He thanked me in a grand
manner for our services. But he seemed willing to avoid me. He could
not forget the pang of his disenchantment from Mormonism. I belonged
to the _dramatis personæ_ of a period he would willingly banish. He
regarded me with a suspicious look, as if he feared again that my
coming would break up new illusions as baseless as the old. He was full
of large, vague plans. England now; he must be back in England again.
His daughter must be reinstated in her place. He treated her coldly
enough; but still all his thought seemed to be ambition for her. The
money Armstrong had given him, too, seemed to increase his confidence
in the future. That was wealth for the moment. Other would come.

Miss Clitheroe had yielded to fatigue. I did not see her that night. In
fact, after all the wearing anxiety of our trip, I was glad to lie down
on a white buffalo-robe, with the Sybaritic luxury of a pair of clean
sheets, and show my gratitude to Ruby by twelve hours’ solid sleep.

A drum-beat awaked me next morning. It was not reveille, it was not
breakfast, it was not guard mounting. I sprang up, and looked from the
window. How odd it seemed to peer from a window, after the unwindowed
wilderness!

The four white-hooded wagons of the little homeward train were ready
to start. The drum was calling in the escort. The fifty soldiers of
Ruby’s garrison were grouped about, lending a hand to their luckier
comrades, homeward bound. Ruby was taking leave of his brother
officers. Armstrong stood a little apart with his horses. A busy scene,
and busier when some vixenish pack-mule shook heels, and scattered the
by-standers into that figure known to packers as the Blazing Star.

Aloof from the crowd, Mr. Clitheroe was striding up and down beside
the wagons, with the eager, unobserving tramp of a man concerned
with nothing but a morbid purpose of his own. He had bought of some
discharged soldier a long military surtout, blue-gray, with a cape.
Wearing this, he marched to and fro like a sentry. His thin, gray hair
and long, bifid beard gave him a ghastly look; and then he trod his
beat as if it were a doom,--as if he were a sentinel over his own last
evasive hope.

“Drapetomania!” I thought, “and a hopeless case.”

A knock at my door, and the brawny corporaless summoned me to Miss
Clitheroe.

“We are going,” she said. “Take me to him!”

Did she love him?

I braved Dr. Pathie’s displeasure, and led her to the bedside of the
lover.

Brent was still in a stupor. We were alone.

She stood looking at him a moment. He was breathing, but unconscious;
dead to the outer world and her presence. She stood looking at him, and
seeming with her large, solemn eyes to review those scenes of terror
and of relief since she had known him. Tears gathered in the brave,
quiet eyes.

Suddenly she stooped and kissed his forehead. Then she passionately
kissed his lips. She grew to him as if she would interfuse anew that
ichor of love into his being.

She turned to me, all crimsoned, but self-possessed.

“I meant you should see me prove my love,” she said. “I am proud
of myself for it,--proud of my heart that it can know and love
this noblest and tenderest nature. Tell him so. Tell him it is not
gratitude, but love. He will know that I could not stay. My life
belongs to my father. Where he goes, I must go. What other friend has
he than me? I go with my father, but here my heart remains. Tell him
so. Please let me write to you. You will not forget your comrade. I owe
more than life to you. Do let me keep myself in your memory. I dread my
life before me. I will keep you informed of my father’s plans. And when
this dearest one is well again, if he remembers me, tell him I love
him, and that I parted from him--so.”

She bent again, and kissed him passionately,--then departed, and her
tears were on his cheek.




CHAPTER XXV.

NOBLESSE OBLIGE


Brent’s stupor lasted many days. Life had been strained to its utmost.
Body, brain, heart, all had had exhausting taxes to pay. The realm must
rest.

While his mind slept, Nature was gently renewing him. Quiet is cure to
an untainted life. There was no old fever of discontent in his brain.
He had regrets, but no remorses. Others had harmed him; his life had
been a sad one; he had never harmed himself. The thoughts and images
tangled in his brain, the “stuff that dreams are made of,” were of
happy omen. No Stygian fancies made his trance unrest. Life did not
struggle for recovery that it might plunge again into base or foul
pursuits, or the scuffles of selfishness. A man whose life is for
others is safe from selfish disappointment when he is commanded to
stand aside and be naught for a time.

I knew the images that hovered about my sleeping friend’s mind, for
I knew the thoughts that were the comrades of his waking life. His
memory was crowded full of sights and sounds of beauty, and those
thoughts that are the emanations of fair visions and sweet tones, and
dwell unuttered poetry in the soul. I knew how, long ago in childhood,
he had made Nature friend, and found his earliest comrades among
flowers and birds. I knew, for he had been my teacher, how, when youth
first looked widely forth for visions of the Infinite, he had learned
to comprehend, day after day, night after night, the large delight of
heaven; whether the busy heaven, when the golden sun makes our sky
blue above us, and reveals on earth the facts that we must deal with
and by which we must be taught our laws, or the quiet heaven of night,
with its starry tokens of grander fruition, when we shall live for
grander days. Sky and clouds, sun and stars, brooks and rivers, forests
and hills, waves and winds,--these had received him to their sweet
companionship, as his mind could gradually grasp the larger conceptions
of beauty. And so, when his time came to perceive the higher
significance of Art, as man’s rudimentary efforts toward creations
diviner and more orderly than those of earth, he had gone to Art with
the unerring eye and interpreting love of a fresh soul, schooled by
Nature only, blind to Art’s baser fancies, and hospitable to its holier
dreams. No ugly visions could visit the uncontrolled hours of a brain
so stored. His trance was peace.

More than peace; for as I watched his quiet face, I knew that his
spirit was conscious of a spiritual presence, and Love was hovering
over him, a healing element.

At last he waked. He threw volition into the scale of recovery. He was
well in a trice.

Captain Ruby and Doctor Pathie were disposed to growl at the rapidity
of Brent’s cure.

“I have half a mind to turn military despot, and arrest you,” said
Ruby. “A pair of muffs, even, would be welcome in the winter at
Laramie. You have made a wretched bungle of it, Pathie. Why didn’t you
mend your man deliberately, a muscle a week, a nerve a month, and so
make it a six months’ job?”

“He took the matter out of my hands, and mended himself. There’s cool,
patient, determined vitality in him, enough to set up a legion, or
father a race. Which is it, Mr. Wade, words to say or duties to do,
that has made him condense his being on recovery?”

“Both, I believe. He is mature now, and wants, no doubt, to be at his
business of saying and doing.”

“And loving,” said Ruby.

“Ay,” said Pathie. “That has had more to do with it. I hope he will
overtake and win, for I love the boy. I keep my oldish heart pretty
well locked against strangers; but there is a warm cell in it, and in
that cell he has, sleeping and waking, made himself a home.”

“Ah, Doctor,” said Ruby, “you and I, for want of women to love, have to
content ourselves with poetic rovers like Brent. He and Biddulph were
balls, operas, champagne on tap, new novels, flirtations, and cigars to
me last winter.”

We were smoking our pipes on the veranda one warm November day, when
this conversation happened.

I had not quite forgotten the Barrownight, as Jake Shamberlain
pronounced him, nor quite forgotten, in grave cares, my fancy that his
stay in Utah was for Miss Clitheroe’s sake.

I was hardly surprised when, that very evening, a bronzed traveller,
face many shades darker than hair and beard, rode up to the post with a
Delaware Indian, and was hailed by Ruby as Biddulph.

“We were talking of you not an hour ago,” said Ruby, greeting him.
“Wishing you would come to make last winter’s party complete. Brent is
here, wounded.”

“Has he a lady with him?” said the new-comer. His voice and manner were
manly and frank,--a chivalrous fellow, one of us, one of the comradry
of knights errant.

“Mr. Wade will give an account of her.”

“Come in to Brent,” said I, “and we will talk matters over.”

Ruby, model host, cleared the way for a parley whose interest he
divined.

“I will see after your horses. Don’t lose your appetite for supper. We
have potatoes!”

“Potatoes!!” cried Biddulph. “Not I!”

“Yes, and flapjacks and molasses, ready in half an hour.”

“Flapjacks and molasses! Potatoes and flapjacks!--Yes, and molasses!”
Biddulph again exclaimed. “Jewel of a Ruby! This is the Ossa on
Pelion of _gourmandise_. How underdone and overdone all the banquets
of civilization seem! I charge thee, Ruby, when the potatoes and the
flapjacks and molasses are ready, that thou peal a jubilee upon the
bell. Now, Mr. Wade, let me see this wounded friend, and hear and tell.”

The two gentlemen met with cordiality. Brent, I believe, had never
identified Miss Clitheroe with the lady Biddulph fled from, and I had
never mentioned my suspicions.

“Not one word, John!” said the Briton, “until I know what you have done
with Ellen Clitheroe. Is she safe?”

Brent comprehended the Baronet’s heart and mind at the word. The
other, I think, saw as plainly on Brent’s face that he was a lover,
and perhaps the more fortunate one. These two loyal men drew closer at
this, as wholly loyal souls will do, for all the pang of knowing that
one has loved and lost.

Brent told our story in brief.

“I divined that you were one of the pair who had started on the rescue.
I could not mistake you, man and horse and dress, from the Mormon’s
description.”

“You saw Sizzum, then?”

“I saw his dead body.”

“What? Dead!” A sense of relief, that the world had one tempter the
less, passed through our minds.

“Yes, shot dead, just where the Wasatch Mountains open, and there is
that wonderful view of Salt Lake City. His Nemesis met him there. I
heard the shot fired, as I was riding out to meet the train, and saw
him fall!”

“Who shot him, of the many that had a right?”

“As mild a mannered man as ever shuddered at the crack of an egg-shell.”

“Vendetta for woman-stealing?”

“Wife-stealing. The man was a poor music-teacher, with a pretty spouse
in Quincy, Illinois. He had told me his own story, without proclaiming
his purpose, though I conjectured it. The pretty spouse grew tired of
poverty and five children. She went off with Sizzum. The music master
hired himself to a drover, named Armstrong, and plodded out to Utah.
When he got there, he found Sizzum gone. He turned hunter. I met him in
the mountains, a crack shot. He waited his time, ambushed the train,
and shot Sizzum dead, as he first caught sight of the Valley.”

“A thought of poetry in his justice. What then?”

“I could see him creeping away among the rocks, while the Mormons were
getting their rifles. They opened fire, a hundred of them. Ring, ping!
the balls tapped all about him. He was just clear, just springing over
a little ridge of shelter, when a shot struck him. He flung out his
arms in an attitude of imprecation, and fell over the rocks. Dead, and
doubly dead from the fall.”

“Our two evil forces are erased from the world, Wade,” said Brent.

“May it be good omen for coming difficulties! But how did you learn of
the events at Fort Bridger?” I asked the Baronet.

“The Lancashire people in the train all took an interest in the
Clitheroes. They knew from Sizzum what happened when he followed you,
and your purpose to give chase. I knew John Brent well enough to
believe that he would achieve the rescue. Happy fellow! I forgive you,
John; hard it is, but I forgive you for stepping in before me. I was
waiting there in Utah to do what I could for my old love and my old
friend. I should like to have had a bullet in my arm in the cause; but
the result is good, whether I gain or lose.”

“I never thought of you, Biron. In fact, from the moment I saw her, I
thought of no one else.”

“Yes; that is her power. We were old neighbors in Lancashire. My father
bought the old Hall after Mr. Clitheroe’s disasters. The disappearance
and the mysterious reappearance of the old gentleman and his beautiful
daughter were the romance of the region. No one knew where they had
been. My father was dead. My mother tried to befriend them. But the
old gentleman was soured and disappointed. He could not forgive us for
inhabiting the old mansion of his happier days. God knows how gladly I
would have reinstated him there. But she could not love me; so I came
away, and we looked up Luggernel Springs and the Alley together, John,
to give you a chance to snatch my destiny away from me.”

Brent, in his weakness, had no answer to make, except to give his hand
to this gentle rival.

“How did you learn of their Mormon error?” I asked.

“My mother wrote me. She loves Miss Clitheroe like a daughter. She
pities the father. His wife was her friend. A genial, lovable man he
was, she says, until, after his losses, people whom he had aided turned
and accused him of recklessness and dishonesty,--a charge as false and
cruel as could be made. My mother wrote, told me of Sizzum’s success
in Clitheroe, and of our friends’ departure. She ordered me, on my
obedience, never to come back to England until I could tell her that
Ellen was safe out of Sizzum’s power. She had gone to hear him preach,
and abhorred him. I received her letter after we had parted, John, and
I camped with Jake Shamberlain, waiting for the train. What I could
have done, I do not know; but my life was Miss Clitheroe’s.”

How easy his chivalry seemed to this noble fellow! “_Noblesse obligé_”;
but the obligation was no burden.

“You are a stanch friend, Biron,” said Brent. “She may need you yet.”

“Yes,” said he; “Christian England is a savage, cruel as any of these
brutes she has encountered here, to a beautiful girl with a helpless,
crazy father. When can you travel, John?”

“Nearly a month I have been here fighting death and grasping at life.
Give me two days more to find a horse and ride about a little, and we
are off.”

“Armstrong, fine old fellow, left the sorrel for you,” I said. “He is
in racing trim now.”

“Capital!” said Brent. “One Armstrong is a brave weight on the true
side of the balance, against an army of pioneers who have gone
barbarous.”

“I have something to show you, John,” said Biddulph. “See here.
I bought this of a Mormon. He had very likely stolen it from Mr.
Clitheroe’s wagon. It was the only relic I could get of them.”

The very drawing of Clitheroe Hall its former owner had wished to show
me at Fort Bridger. An able sketch of a thoroughly English house. If
England were sunk in the sea, and its whole history perished, English
life, society, and manners could be reconstructed from the inspection
of such a drawing, as a geologist recalls an æon from a trilobite. I
did not wonder that it had been heart-breaking to quit the shelter of
that grand old roof. I fixed the picture in my mind. The time came when
that remembrance was precious.

“Now, Biddulph!” called Ruby, “supper waits. Potatoes! Flapjacks and
molasses!”

“They shall be a part of me instantly.”




CHAPTER XXVI.

HAM.


Two days Biddulph solaced himself on those rare luxuries of Ruby’s
_ménage_; the third, we started.

Ruby and the surgeon rode with us a score of miles. It was hard to say
good-bye. We were grateful, and they were sorry.

“What can we do for you, Ruby?”

“Raze Laramie, abolish the plains, level the Rockys, nullify the Sioux,
and disband the American army.”

“What can we do for you, Doctor?”

“Find me a wife, box her up so that no one will stop her _in transitu_,
mark Simeon Pathie, M. D., U. S. A., and ship to Fort Vancouver,
Oregon, where I shall be stationed next summer. Your English lady in
half a day has spoiled my philosophy of a life.”

“Good-bye and good luck!”

It was late travelling through that houseless waste. Deep snow
already blanched the Black Hills, and Laramie Peak, their chief. Mr.
Bierstadt, in his fine picture in this year’s Academy, has shown them
as they are in the mellow days of summer. Now, cold and stern, they
warned us to hasten on.

We did hasten. We crowded through the buffalo; we crossed and recrossed
the Platte, already curdling with winter; we dashed over the prairies
of Kansas, blackened by fire and whitened by snow, but then unstained
by any peaceful settler’s blood.

Jake Shamberlain, returning with his party, met us on the way.

“I passed the train with the young woman and her father,” said he. “We
camped together one night, and bein’ as I was a friend of your’n, she
give me a talk. Pooty tall talkin’ ’t wuz, and I wuz teched in a new
spot. I’ve felt mean as muck ever sence she opened to me on religion,
and when I git home I’m goan to swing clear of the Church, ef I ken cut
clear, and emigrate to Oregon. So, Barrownight, next time you come out,
you’ll find me on a claim there, out to the Willamette or the Umpqua,
just as much like a gentleman’s park in England as one grasshopper is
to another, only they hain’t got no such mountains to England as I’ll
show you thar.”

“Well, Jake, we’ll try to pay you our respects.”

We hastened on. Why pause for our adventures? They were but episodes
along our new gallop of three. This time it was not restless, anxious
gallop. We had no doubt but that in good time we should overtake our
friends, in regions where men are not shot along the right arm when
they protect insulted dames.

Brent was himself again. We rode hard. Biddulph was as fine a fellow as
my grandmother England has mothered. Find an Englishman vital enough
to be a Come-outer, and you have found a man worthy to be the peer
of an American with Yankee education, Western scope, and California
irrepressibility.

Winter chased us close. Often we woke at night, and found our bivouac
sheeted with cold snow,--a cool sheet, but luckily outside our warm
blankets. It was full December when the plains left us, fell back,
and beached us upon the outer edge of civilization, at Independence,
Missouri.

The muddy Missouri was running dregs. Steamboats were tired of skipping
from sand-bar to sand-bar. Engineer had reported to Captain, that
“Kangaroo No. 5 would bust, if he didn’t stop trying to make her lift
herself over the damp country by her braces.” No more steamboating on
the yellow ditch until there was a rise; until the Platte sent down
sand three and water one, or the Yellowstone mud three and water one,
or the Missouri proper grit three and water one. We must travel by land
to St. Louis and railroads.

We could go with our horses as fast as the stage-coaches. So we sold
our pack beasts, and started to continue our gallop of three across
Missouri.

Half-way across, we stopped one evening at the mean best tavern in a
mean town,--a frowzy county town, with a dusty public square, a boxy
church, and a spittley court-house.

Fit entertainment for beast the tavern offered. We saw our horses
stabled, and had our supper.

“Shall we go into the Spittoon?” said Biddulph.

“Certainly,” said Brent. “The bar-room--I am sorry to hear you speak of
it with foreign prejudice--is an institution, and merits study. Argee,
upon the which the bar-room is based, is also an institution.”

“Well, I came to study American institutions. Let us go in and take a
whiff of disgust.”

Fit entertainment for brute the bar-room offered. In that club-room we
found the brute class drinking, swearing, spitting, squabbling over the
price of hemp and the price of “niggers,” and talking what it called
“politics.”

One tall, truculent Pike, the loudest of all that blatant crew, seemed
to Brent and myself an old acquaintance. We had seen him or his double
somewhere. But neither of us could fit him with a pedestal in our
long gallery of memory. Saints one takes pains to remember, and their
scenes; but satyrs one endeavors to lose.

“Have you had enough of the Spittoon?” I asked Biddulph. “Shall we go
up? They’ve put us all three in the same room; but bivouacs in the same
big room--Out-Doors--are what we are best used to.”

Two and a half beds, one broken-backed chair, a wash-stand decked
with an ancient fringed towel and an abandoned tooth-brush, one torn
slipper, and a stove-pipe hole, furnished our bedchamber.

We were about to cast lots for the half-bed, when we heard two men
enter the next room. The partition was only paper pasted over lath, and
cut up as if a Border Ruffian member of Congress had practised at it
with a bowie-knife before a street-fight. Every word of our neighbors
came to us. They were talking of a slave bargain. I eliminate their
oaths, though such filtration does them injustice.

“Eight hundred dollars,” said the first speaker, and his voice startled
us as if a dead man we knew had spoken. “Eight hundred,--that’s the top
of my pile fur that boy. Ef he warn’t so old and hadn’t one eye poked
out, I agree he’d be wuth a heap more.”

“Waal, a trade’s a trade. I’ll take yer stump. Count out yer dimes, and
I’ll fill out a blank bill of sale. Murker, the boy’s yourn.”

“Murker!”--we both started at the name. This was the satyr we had
observed in the bar-room. Had Fulano’s victim crept from under his
cairn in Luggernel Alley, and chased us to take flesh here and harm us
again. Such a superstitious thought crossed my mind.

The likeness--look, voice, and name--was presently accounted for.

“You’re lookin’ fur yer brother out from Sacramenter, ’bout now, I
reckon,” said the trader.

“He wuz comin’ cross lots with a man named Larrap, a pardener of his’n.
Like enough they’ve stayed over winter in Salt Lake. They oughter rake
down a most a mountainious pile thar.”

“Mormons is flush and sarcy with their dimes sence the emigration. Now
thar’s yer bill of sale, all right.”

“And thar’s yer money, all right.”

“That are’s wut I call a screechin’ good price fur an old one-eyed
nigger. Fourteen hundred dollars,--an all-fired price.”

“Eight hundred, you mean.”

“No; fourteen. Yer see, you’re not up ter taime on the nigger
question. I know ’em like a church-steeple. When I bought that are
boy, now comin’ three year, I seed he wuz a sprightly nigger, one
er yer ambitious sort, what would be mighty apt to git fractious,
an’ be makin’ tracks, onless I got a holt on him. So sez I to him,
‘Ham, you’re a sprightly nigger, one of the raal ambitious sort, now
aincher?’ He allowed he warnt nothin’ else. ‘Waal,’ sez I, ‘Ham, how’d
you like to buy yerself, an’ be a free nigger, an’ hev a house of yer
own, an’ a woman of yer own, all jess like white folks?’ ‘Lor,’ sez he,
‘Massa, I’d like it a heap.’ ‘Waal,’ sez I, ‘you jess scrabble round
an’ raise me seven hundred dollars, an’ I’ll sell you to yerself, an’
cheap at that.’ So yer see he began to pay up, an’ I got a holt on him.
He’s a handy nigger, an’ a likely nigger, an’ a pop’lar nigger. He ken
play on ther fiddle like taime,--pooty nigh a minstril is that are
nigger. He ken cut hair an’ fry a beefsteak with ayry man. He ken drive
team, an’ do a little j’iner work, an’ shoe a mule when thar ain’t no
reg’lar blacksmith round. He made these yer boots, an’ reg’lar stompers
they is. He’s one er them chirrupy, smilin’ niggers, with white teeth
an’ genteel manners, what critturs an’ foaks nat’rally takes to. Waal,
he picked up the bits and quarters right smart. He’s ben at it, lammin’
ahead raal ambitious, for ’bout three year. Last Sunday, after church,
he pinted up the last ten of the six hundred. So I allowed ’t wuz come
time to sell him. He wuz gettin’ his bead drawed, an’ his idees sot on
freedom very onhealthy. I didn’t like to disapp’int him to ther last;
so I allowed ’t wuz jest as well to let you hev him cheap to go down
River. That’s how to work them fractious runaway niggers. That are’s my
patent. You ken hev it for nothin’. Haw! haw!”

“Haw, haw, haw! You are one er ther boys. I’m dum sorry that are trick
can’t be did twicet on the same nigger. I reckon he knows too much for
that. Waal, s’pose we walk round to the calaboose, ’fore we go to bed,
an’ see ef he’s chained up all right.”

They went out.

Biddulph spoke first.

“Shame!”

“Yes,” said Brent; “do you wonder that we have to run away to the
Rockys and spend our indignation on grizzlys?”

“What are we going to do now?”

“Try to abolish slavery in Ham’s case. Come; we’ll go buy him a file.”

“We seem to have business with the Murker family,” said I.

“A hard lot they are. Representative brutes!”

“I am getting a knowledge of all classes on your continent,” said
Biddulph. “Some I like better than others!”

“Don’t be too harsh on us malecontents for the sin of slavery. It is an
ancestral taint. We shall burn it out before many decades.”

“You had better, or it will set your own house on fire.”

It was late as we walked along the streets, channels of fever and ague
now frozen up for the winter. We saw a light through a shop door, and
hammered stoutly for admission.

A clerk, long-haired and frowzy, opened ungraciously. In the back shop
were three others, also long-haired and frowzy, dealing cards and
drinking a dark compost from tumblers.

“Port wine,” whispered Brent. “Fine Old London Dock Port is the
favorite beverage, when the editor, the lawyer, the apothecary, and the
merchant meet to play euchre in Missouri.”

We bought our files from the surly clerk, and made for the calaboose.
It was a stout log structure, with grated windows. At one of these, by
the low moonlight, we saw a negro. It was cold and late. Nobody was
near. We hailed the man.

“Ham.”

“That’s me, Massa.”

“You’re sold to Murker, to go south to-morrow morning. If you want to
get free, catch!”

Brent tossed him up the files.

“Catch again!” said Biddulph, and up went a rattling purse, England’s
subsidy.

Ham’s white teeth and genteel manners appeared at once. He grinned, and
whispered thanks.

“Is that all we can do?” asked the Baronet, as we walked off.

“Yes,” said Brent, taking a nasal tone. “Ham’s a pop’lar nigger, a
handy nigger, one er your raal ambitious sort. He ken cut hair, fry
a beefsteak, and play on the fiddle like a minstril. He ken shoe
a mule, drive a team, do a little j’iner work, and make stompers.
Yes, Biddulph, trust him to gnaw himself free with that Connecticut
rat-tail.”

“Ham against Japhet; I hope he’ll win.”

“Now,” said Brent, “that we’ve put in action Christ’s Golden Rule,
Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and All-the-wisdom’s Preamble
to the Constitution, we can sleep the sleep of welldoers, if we have
two man-stealers--and one the brother of a murderer--only papered off
from us.”




CHAPTER XXVII.

FULANO’S BLOOD-STAIN.


“What a horse beyond all horses yours is!” said Biddulph to me next
morning, as we rode along cheerily through the fresh, frosty air
of December. “I think, when your continent gets to its finality in
horse-flesh, you will beat our island.”

“Think what training such a trip is! This comrade of mine has come two
thousand miles with me,--big thought, eh!--and he freshens up with the
ozone of this morning, as if he had been in the stable a week, champing
asphodel.”

Fulano felt my commendation. He became electrified. He stirred under
me. I gave him rein. He shook himself out, and began to recite his
accomplishments.

Whatever gait he had in his legs together, or portion of a leap in
either pair of them; whatever gesticulations he considered graceful,
with toes in the air before, or heels in the air behind; whatever
serpentine writhe or sinewy bend of the body, whatever curve of the
proud neck, fling of the head, signal of the ear, toss of the mane,
whisk of the tail, he knew,--all these he repeated, to remind me what a
horse he was, and justify my praise.

What a HORSE, indeed!

How far away from him every lubberly roadster, every hack that endures
the holidays of a tailor, every grandpapa’s cob, every sloucher in a
sulky! Of other race and other heart was this steed, both gentle and
proud. He was still able to be the better half of a knight-errant when
a charger worth a kingdom must be had,--when Love needed his mighty
alliance in the battle with Brutality. He was willing now, in piping
times of peace, to dance along his way, a gay comrade to the same
knight-errant, riding homeward a quiet gentleman, with armor doffed and
unsuspecting further war.

What sport we had together that morning! We were drawing near the end
of our journey. Not that that was to part us! No, he was to be my
companion still. I had a vision of him in a paddock, with a fine young
fellow, not unlike myself, patting his head, while an oldish fellow,
not unlike myself, in fact very me with another quarter of a century on
my head, told the story of the Gallop of Three and the wild charge down
Luggernel Alley to that unwearying auditor, while a lady, very like
my ideal of a wife, stood by and thrilled again to the tale. Such a
vision I had of Fulano’s future.

But now that our journey was ending, he and I were willing, on this
exhilarating winter’s day, to talk it over. What had he gained by the
chances by flood and field we had encountered together?

“I have not gone,” Fulano notified me, “two thousand miles, since my
lonely, riderless days among the herds of Gerrian, since our first
meeting on the prairie and my leap through the loop of Jose’s lasso,--I
have not gone my leagues of continent for nothing.

“See what lessons I have learnt, thanks to you, my schoolmaster! This
is my light step for heavy sand; this is my cautious step over pebbles;
my high step over boulders; my easy, unwasteful travelling gait; my
sudden stop without unseating my rider; so I swerve without shying;
and so I spring into top speed without a strain. Your lady-love could
canter me; your baby could walk me; because I please to be your friend,
my friend. But you know me; I am the untamable still, except by love.”

And then he rehearsed the gaits he had studied from the creatures on
the plains.

“Look, upper half of the Centaur,” he said, in the Centaur language;
“see how an antelope goes!”

He doubled his legs under him and went off in high, jerky leaps, twice
his length every one.

“Look! A buffalo!”

He lumbered along, shoulders low, head handled like a battering-ram,
and tail stiff out like a steering-oar.

“Here’s a gray wolf.”

And he shambled forward in a loose-jointed canter, looking back
furtively, like a thief, sorry he didn’t stop to steal the other goose,
but expecting Stop thief! every minute.

“And so go I, Don Fulano, the Indomitable, a chieftain of the chiefest
race below the man,--so go I when walk, pace, gallop, run, leap,
career, tread space and time out of being, to show the other half of
the Centaurship what my half can do for the love of his.”

“Magnificent!” applauded Biddulph at this display.

“His coquetries are as beautiful as a woman’s,” said Brent. “One whose
sweet wiles are nature, not artifice.”

And I--but lately trained to believe that a woman may have the myriad
charm of coy withdrawal, and yet not be the traitress youth learns from
ancient cynics to fear--accepted the comparison.

Ah, peerless Fulano! that was our last love-passage!

The day, after the crisp frostiness of its beginning, was a belated day
of Indian summer; mild as the golden mornings of that calm, luxurious
time. We stopped to noon in a sunny spot of open pasture near a wide
muddy slough of the Missouri. This reservoir for the brewage of shakes
for Pikes had been refilled in some autumn rise of the river, and lay a
great stagnant lake along the road-side, a mile or so long, two hundred
yards broad. Not very exhilarating tipple, but still water; the horses
would not disdain it, after their education on the plains; we could
qualify it with argee from our flasks, and ice it with the little films
of ice unmelted along the pool’s edges. We were fortified with a bag of
corn for the horses, and a cold chicken for the men.

We camped by a fallen cottonwood near the slough. The atmosphere was
hopeful. We picnicked merrily, men and beasts. “Three gentlemen at
once” over a chicken soon dissipated this and its trimmings. We lighted
the tranquil calumet, and lounged, watching our horses at their corn.

Presently we began to fancy we heard, then to think we heard, at last
to be sure we heard the baying of hounds through the mild, golden air.

“Tally-ho!” cried Biddulph, “what a day for a fox-hunt! This haze will
make the scent lie almost as well as the clouds.”

“Music! Music!” cried he again, springing up, as the sound, increasing,
rose and fell along the peaceful air that lay on earth so lovingly.

“Music, if it were in Merrie England, where the hunt are gentlemen. A
cursed uproar here, where the hunt are man-stealers,” said Brent.

“No,” said Biddulph. “Those are fables of the old, barbarous days of
the Maroons. I can’t believe in dogs after men, until I see it.”

“I’m afraid it’s our friend Ham they are after. This would be his line
of escape.”

At the word, a rustling in the bushes along the slough, and Ham burst
through. He turned to run. We shouted. He knew us, and flung himself,
livid with terror and panting with flight, on the ground at our
feet,--the “pop’lar nigger”!

“O Massa!” he gasped. “Dey’s gone sot de dogs on me. What’ll I do!”

“Can you swim,” said I,--for to me he was kneeling.

“No, Massa; or I’d been across thisyer sloo fore dis.”

“Can you ride!”

“Reck’n I kin, Massa.”

A burst of baying from the hounds.

The black shook with terror.

I sprang to Fulano. “Work for you, old boy!” said I to him, as I flung
the snaffle over his head.

“Take mine!” said my two friends at a breath.

“No; Fulano understands this business. Chase or flight, all one to him,
so he baffles the Brutes.”

Fulano neighed and beat the ground with eager hoofs as I buckled the
bridle.

“Can’t we show fight?” said Biddulph.

“There’ll be a dozen on the hunt. It is one of the entertainments
hereabouts. Besides, they would raise the posse upon us. You forget
we’re in a Slave State, an enemy’s country.”

I led Fulano to the brink. He stood motionless, eying me, just as he
eyed me in that terrible pause in Luggernel Alley.

“Here, Ham, up with you! Put across the slough. He swims like an
alligator. Then make for the north star, and leave the horse for Mr.
Richard Wade, at the Tremont House, Chicago. Treat him like a brother,
Ham!”

“Lor bress you, Massa! I will dat.”

He vaulted up, like “a sprightly nigger, one of the raal ambitious
sort.”

The baying came nearer, nearer, ringing sweetly through the golden
quiet of noon.

I launched Fulano with an urgent whisper.

Two hundred yards to swim! and then all clear to Freedom!

Fulano splashed in and took deep water magnificently.

What a sight it is to see a noble horse nobly breast the flood,--to see
his shoulders thrust aside the stream, his breath come quick, his eyes
flash, his haunches lift, his wake widen after him!

And then--Act 2--how grand it is to see him paw and struggle up with
might and main upon the farther bank,--to see him rise, all glossy and
reeking, shake himself, and, with a snort, go galloping free and away!
Aha! a sight to be seen!

We stood watching Act 1. The fugitive was half-way across. The baying
came closer, closer on his trail.

Two thirds across.

The baying ceased. The whole pack drew a long wail.

“They see him,” said Biddulph.

Almost across! A dozen more plunges, Fulano!

A crowd of armed men on horseback dashed up to the bank two hundred
yards above us. It was open where they halted. They could not see us
among the bushes on the edge of the slough.

One of them--it was Murker--sprang from his saddle. He pointed his
rifle quick and steady. Horse and man, the fugitives, were close to
the bank and the thicket of safety.

Ping!

Almost over, as the rifle cracked, Ham had turned at the sound of his
pursuers crashing through the bushes. Fulano swam high. He bore a proud
head aloft, conscious of his brave duty. It was but a moment since he
had dashed away, and the long lines of his wake still rippled against
the hither bank.

We heard the bullet sing. It missed the man as he turned. It struck
Fulano. Blood spirted from a great artery. He floundered forward.

Ham caught the bushes on the bank, pulled himself ashore, and clutched
for the bridle.

Poor Fulano! He flung his head up and pawed the surface with a great
spasm. He screamed a death-scream, like that terrible cry of anguish
of his comrade martyred in the old heroic cause in Luggernel Alley. We
could see his agonized eye turn back in the socket, sending toward us a
glance of farewell.

Noble horse! again a saviour. He yielded and sank slowly away into that
base ditch.

But Ham, was he safe? He had disappeared in the thicket. His pursuers
called the hounds and galloped off to chase him round the slough.

Ham was safe. He got off to freedom. From his refuge in Chicago
he writes me that he is “pop’lar”; that he has “sot up a Livery
Institootion, and has a most a bewterful black colt a grownin’ up fur
me.”

Ham was saved; but Fulano gone. Dead by Murker’s rifle. The brother
had strangely avenged his brother, trampled to death in the far-away
cañon of the Rocky Mountains. Strange Nemesis for a guiltless crime!
That blood-stain for a righteous execution clung to him. Only his own
blood-shedding could cleanse him.

We three on the bank looked at each other forlornly. The Horse, our
Hero, had passed away from the scene, a martyr.

We turned to our journey with premonitions of sorrowful ill.




CHAPTER XXVIII.

SHORT’S CUT-OFF.


    “DEAR MR. WADE:--

    “We are hastening on. I can write you but one word. Our
     journey has been prosperous. Mr. Armstrong is very kind. My
     dear father, I fear, is shattered out of all steadiness.
     God guard him, and guide me! My undying love to your friend.

                             “Your sister,
                                         “ELLEN CLITHEROE.”

Armstrong handed us this note at St. Louis. Biddulph, once a
sentimental pinkling, now a bronzed man of the wilds, exhibited for
this occasion only the phenomenon of a brace or so of tears. I loved
him for his strong sorrow.

“It’s not for myself, Wade,” he said. “I can stand her loving John,
and not knowing that she has me for brother too; I’m not of the
lacrymose classes; but this mad error of the father and this hopeless
faithfulness of the daughter touches me tenderly. And here we are three
weeks or more behind them.”

“Yes,” said Armstrong, “full three weeks to the notch; an ef ayry one
of you boys sets any store by ’em, you’d better be pintin’ along their
trail afore it gets cold. That’s what I allow. He’s onsafe,--the old
man is. As fine-hearted a bein’ as ever was; but luck has druv him out
of hisself and made a reg’lar gonoph of him.”

“GONOPH is vernacular for Drapetomaniac, I suppose,” said I; “and a
better word it is. Miss Ellen bore the journey well, Armstrong?”

“That there young woman is made out of watch-spring. Ther ain’t no
stop to her. The more you pile on, the springier she gits. She was
a mile an hour more to the train comin’ on. We didn’t have anything
ugly happen until we got to the river. We cum down from Independence
in the Floatin’ Pailis, No. 5. Some er them gamblin’ Pikes on board
got a holt on the old man. He’s got his bead drawed on makin’ a pile
again, and allows that gamblin’ with Pikes on a riverboat is one of
the ways. He sot his white head down to the poker-table, and stuck
thar, lookin’ sometimes sly as a kioty, sometimes mean and ugly as a
gray wolf, and sometimes like a dead ephergee cut out er chalked wax.
She nor I couldn’t do nothin’ with him. So I ambushed the gamblers,
an twarn’t much arter midnight when I cotched ’em cheatin’ the old
man. They couldn’t wait to take his pile slow an’ sure. So I called
an indignation meetin’ and when I told the boys aboard I was Luke
Armstrong from Oregon, they made me chairman, an’ guv me three cheers.
I know’d it warn’t pollymentary for the chairman to make motions, but
I motioned we shove the hul kit an boodle of the gamblers ashore on
logs. ’Twas kerried, quite you-an-I-an-a-muss. So we guv ’em a fair
show, with a big stick of cottonwood and a shingle apiece, and told
’em to navigate. The Cap’n slewed the Pallis’s head round and opened
the furnace-doors to light ’em across, and they poot for shore, with
everybody yellin’, and the Pallis blowin’ her whistle like all oudoors.”

“That’s the American method, Biddulph,” said I. “Lynch-law is nothing
but the sovereign people’s law, executed without the intervention of
the forms the people usually adopt for convenience.”

“With Armstrong for judge, it may do,” said Biddulph.

“After that,” continued Armstrong, “we got on well, except that the
old man kep on the stiddy tramp up an’ down the boat, when he warn’t
starin’ at the engyne, and Ellen couldn’t quiet him down. He got hash
with her, too, and that ain’t like his nater. His nater is a sweet
nater, with considerable weakenin’ into it. Well, when we got here, I
paid their ticket plum through to York out of my own belt, and shoved
a nest er dimes into the carpet-bag she asked me to buy her. But money
wunt help the old man. I don’t believe anything but dyin’ will. I never
would have let ’em go on alone ef I hadn’t had my own Ellen, and all my
brother Bill’s big and little ones to keep drivin’ for. Now, boys, I
git more ’n more oneasy the more I talk about ’em; but I ken put you on
the trail, and if Mr. Brent is as sharp on trails where men is thick,
as he is where men is scerce, and if she’s got a holt on him still,
he’ll find ’em, and help ’em through.”

“That I will, Armstrong,” said Brent.

And next morning we three pursued our chase across the continent.

At New York another hurried note for me.

    “We sail at once for home. My father cannot be at peace
     until he is in Lancashire again. Don’t forget me, dear
     friends. I go away sick at heart.

                                     “ELLEN CLITHEROE.”

They left me,--the lover and the ex-lover,--and followed on over seas.

I had my sister’s orphans to protect and my bread to win. The bigger
the crowd, the more to pay tribute to an Orson like myself. I fancied
that I could mine to more advantage in New York than at the Foolonner.
There are sixpences in the straw of every omnibus for somebody to find.

I am not to maunder about myself. So I omit the story how I saw a vista
in new life, hewed in and took up a “claim,” which I have held good and
am still improving.

Meantime nothing from Brent,--nothing from Miss Clitheroe. I grew
bitterly anxious for both,--the brother and the sister of my adoption.
These ties of choice are closer than ties of blood, unless the hearts
are kindred as well as the bodies. My sister Ellen, chosen out of all
womanhood and made precious to me by the agony I had known for her
sake,--I could not endure the thought that she had forgotten me; still
less the dread that her father had dragged her into some voiceless
misery.

And Brent. I knew that he did not write, because he must thus set
before his eyes in black, cruel words that his pursuit had been vain.
The love that conquered time and space had beaten down and slain
Brutality,--was it to be baffled at last? I longed to be with him,
lending my cruder force to his finer skill in the search. Together
we might prevail, as we had before prevailed. But I saw no chance of
joining him. I must stay and earn my bread at my new business.

Nothing, still nothing from the lady or the lover, and I suffered for
both. I wrote Brent, and re-wrote him; but no answer.

That winter, my old friend Short perfected his famous Cut-off.
Everybody now knows Short’s Cut-off. It saves thirty per cent of steam
and fifty per cent of trouble and wear and tear to engineer and engine.

Short burst into my office one morning. He and Brent and I, and a set
of other fellows worth knowing, had been comrades in our younger days.
We still hold together, with a common purpose to boost civilization, so
far as our shoulders will do it.

“Look at that,” cried Short, depositing a model and sheets of drawings
on my table. “My Cut-off. What do you think of it?”

I looked, and was thrilled. It was a simple, splendid triumph of
inventive genius,--a difficulty solved so easily, that it seemed
laughable that no one had ever thought of this solution.

“Short,” said I, “this is Fine Art. Hurrah for the nineteenth century!
How did you happen to hit it? It is an inspiration.”

“It was love that revealed it,” said Short. “I have been pottering over
that cut-off for years, while SHE did not smile; when SHE smiled, it
came to me like a sneeze.”

“Well, you have done the world good, and made your fortune.”

“Yours too, old fellow, if you like. Pack up that model and the
drawings, go to England. France, Germany, wherever they know steam
from tobacco-smoke, take out patents, and introduce it. Old Churm says
he will let me have half a million dollars, if I want it. You shall
have free tap of funds, and charge what percentage you think proper.”

So I took steamer for England, with Short’s Cut-off to make known.




CHAPTER XXIX.

A LOST TRAIL.


It was June when I reached London. Business, not fashion, was my
object. I wished to be at a convenient centre of that mighty huddle of
men and things; so I drove to Smorley’s Hotel, Charing Cross.

In America, landlords dodge personal responsibility. They name their
hotels after men of letters, statesmen, saints, and other eminent
parties. Guests will perhaps find a great name compensation for
infinitesimal comfort.

They do these things differently in England. Smorley does not dodge.
Not Palmerston, nor Wordsworth, nor Spurgeon, is emblazoned in smoky
gold on Smorley’s sign; but Smorley. Curses or blessings, therefore,
Smorley himself gets them. Nobody scowls at the sirloin, and grumbles,
_sotto voce_, “Palmerston has cut it too fat to-day”; nobody tosses
between the sheets and prays, “O Wordsworth, why didst thou begrudge
me the Insect-Exterminator?” Nobody complains, “Spurgeon’s beer is all
froth, and small at that.” Smorley, and Smorley alone, gets credit for
beef, beds, and beer.

Smorley’s Hotel stands at the verge of the East, and looks toward the
West End of London. The Strand passes by its side, so thick with men,
horses, and vehicles, that only a sharp eye viewing it from above
detects the pavement. The mind wearies with the countless throng, going
and coming in that narrow lane, and turns to look on the permanent
features of Smorley’s landscape.

The chief object in the view is a certain second-rate square, named to
commemorate a certain first-rate victory. But the square, second-rate
though it be, is honored by a first-rate railing, a balustrade of bulky
granite, which may be valuable for defence when Crapaud arrives to
avenge Trafalgar. Inside the stone railing, which is further protected
by a barricade of cabs, with drivers asleep and horses in nose-bags,
are sundry very large stone fountains, of very smoky granite, trickling
with very small trickles of water, which channel the basins as tears
channel the face of a dirty boy. The square is on a slope, and seems to
be sliding away, an avalanche of water-basins, cabs, and balustrade,
from a certain very ugly edifice, severely classic in some spots,
classic as a monkish Latin ballad in others, and well sprouted at the
top with small sentry-boxes, perhaps shelters for sharp-shooters,
should anybody venture to look mustard at the building. A bronze
horseman, on a bronze horse sixteen hands high, is at work at the
upper corner of the square, trying to drive it down hill. A bronze
footman, on a column sixteen hundred feet high, or thereabouts, stands
at the foot of the square, hailing that fugacious enclosure from under
a nautical cocked hat to do its duty, as England expects everything
English will, and not to run away from the ugly edifice above.

Such is the square at the very centre of the centre of the world, as I
saw it from Smorley’s corner window, while dining in the June twilight,
the evening of my arrival in London.

I sat after dinner looking complacently out upon the landscape. A man
never attains to that stolidity of content except in England, where
the air’s exciting oxygen is well weakened with fog, and the air’s
exhilarating ozone is quite discharged from dancing attendance. London
and England were not strange to me; but a great city is ever new, and
after two years’ inane staring at a quartz-mine, town and townsfolk
were still lively contrast to my mind.

I was quietly entertaining myself, sipping meanwhile my pint of
Port,--Fine old Crusty, it was charged in the bill, when I saw coming
down St. Martin’s Lane, between the cabs and the balustrade of the
square, two gentlemen I knew.

Brent and Biddulph! Biddulph, surely. There could be no mistaking that
blonde, manly giant, relapsed again into modified Anglicism of dress;
but walking freely along, with a step that remembered the prairie.

But that pale, feeble fellow hanging on the other’s arm! Could that
be John Brent? He was slouching along, looking upon the ground, a
care-worn, dejected man. It cost me a sharp pang to see my brilliant
friend so vanquished by a sorrow I could comprehend.

I sprang up, snatched my hat, and rushed out. Eight quiet men, dining
systematically at eight tables in the coffee-room, were startled at a
rapidity of movement quite unknown to the precincts of Smorley, and
each of the eight choked over his mouthful, were it ox-tail, salmon,
mutton, bread, or Fine old Crusty. Eight waiters, caught in the act of
saying “Yessir! D’rectly Sir!” were likewise shocked into momentary
paralysis.

I dashed across the street, knocking the nose-bag off the forlorn
nose of a hungry cab-horse, and laid my hand on my friend’s shoulder.
He turned, in the hasty, nervous manner of a man who is expecting
something, and excited with waiting.

“I was half inclined to let you pass,” said I. “You have not written. I
had no right to suppose you alive.”

“I could only write to pain you and myself. I have not found her. I am
hardly alive. I shall not long be.”

“Come,” said Biddulph, with his old friendly, cheery manner; “now that
Wade has joined us, we will have a fresh start, and better luck. Walk
on with us, Wade, and Brent will tell you what we have been doing.”

“Why should I tire him with the weary story of a fruitless search?”
said Brent.

It was the same utterly disheartened manner, the same tone of despair,
that had so affected me that evening on the plain of Fort Bridger. Not
finding whom he sought was crushing him now, as losing her crushed him
then. But I thought by what a strange and fearful mercy our despair of
that desolate time had been changed to joy. Coming newly to the fact of
loss, I could not see it so darkly as it was present to him. A great
confidence awoke in me that our old partnership renewed would prosper.
I determined not to yield to his mood.

“Your search, then, is absolutely fruitless,” said I. “Well, if she is
not dead, she must have forgotten us?”

“Is she a woman to forget?” said Brent, roused a little by my wilful
calumny.

“Like other women, I suppose.”

“You must have forgotten the woman we met and saved, and had for our
comrade, to think so.”

I rejoiced at the indignation I had stirred.

“Why, then, has she never written?” I queried.

“I am sure as faith that she has, but that her father has cunningly
suppressed her letters.”

“The same has occurred to me. The poor old fellow, ashamed of his
Mormon life, would very likely be unwilling that any one who knew of it
should be informed of his whereabouts.”

“He might, too, have an undiscriminating, senile terror of any letter
going to America, lest it should set Danites upon his track, as a
renegade. He might fear that we would take his daughter from him. There
are twenty suppositions to make. I will not accept that of death nor of
neglect.”

“No,” said Biddulph; “dead people cannot hide away their bodies, as
living can.”

“You know that they are in England?”

“They landed in Liverpool from the Screw. There they disappeared.
Biddulph took me to Clitheroe, up to the old Hall. A noble place it is.
It is poetry to have been born there. I do not wonder Mr. Clitheroe
loved it.”

“You must go down with me, Wade, as soon as the season is over,” said
Biddulph. “I wish I could quarter you in town. Brent is with me. But
you will dine with us every day, when you have nothing better to do,
and be at home with us always. I can give you flapjacks and molasses,
Laramie fashion.”

“Thank you, my dear fellow!”

“You must not think,” says Brent, “that I went up to Clitheroe even
for Biron’s hospitality. We were both on the search all through the
country. We thought Mr. Clitheroe might have betaken himself to
a coal-mine again. We discovered the very mine where he formerly
worked. They remembered him well. The older generation of those grimy
troglodytes well remembered Gentleman Hugh and his daughter, little
Lady Ellen, and the rough fellows and their rough wives had a hundred
stories to tell of the beautiful, gentle child,--how she had been a
good angel to them, and already a protectress to her father. In the
office, too, of the coal-mine, we found traces of him under another
name, always faithful, honest, respected, and a gentleman. It was
interesting to have all his sad story confirmed, just as he told it
to you the night of Jake Shamberlain’s ball; but it did not help our
search. Then we enlarged its scope, and followed out every line of
travel from Liverpool and to London, the great monster, that draws in
all, the prosperous and the ruined, the rich to spend and the poor to
beg.

“We have had some queer and some romantic adventures in our search, eh,
Brent? Some rather comic runaways we’ve overhauled,” said Biddulph;
“but we’ll tell you of them, Wade, when we are in good spirits again,
and with our fugitives by us to hear what pains we took for their sake.”

“And all this while you have found no trace?” I said.

“One slight trace only,” replied my friend; “enough to identify them
disappearing among these millions of London. We found a porter at the
Paddington station, who had seen a young lady and an old man stepping
from a third-class carriage of a night-train. ‘You see, sir,’ said
the man,--he evidently had a heart under his olive corduroys,--‘I
marked the old gent and the young woman, she was so daughterly with
him. I’ve got a little girl of my own, and mayhap I shall come out old
and weakly, and she’ll have to look after me. It was the gray of the
morning when the train come in. There warn’t many passengers. It was
cold winter weather,--the month of February, I should say. The young
woman,--she had dark hair, and looked as if she was one to go through
thick and thin,--she jumped out of the carriage, where she had been
settin’ all that cold night, and gave the old gent her hand. I heard
her call him “Father,” and tell him to take care; and he had need. He
seemed to be stiff with cold. He was an old gent, such as you don’t see
every day. He had a long white beard,--a kind of swallow-tail beard.
His clothes, too, was strange. He had a long gray top-coat, grayish and
bluish, with a cape of the same over his shoulders, and brass buttons
stamped with an eagle. A milingtary coat it was. I used to see such
coats on the sentinels in France when I went over to dig on the Chalong
Railway. The old gent looked like a foreigner, with his swallow-tail
beard and that milingtary coat; but there was an Englishman under the
coat, if I knows ’em. And the young woman, sir, was English,--I don’t
believe there’s any such out of Old England.’”

“It must be they,” cried I. “I saw him in that very coat, tramping up
and down like a hunted man, beside the wagons that were to take him
from Fort Laramie.”

“You did? That completes the identification. But what good? This was a
trace of them in London; so is a sailor’s cap on a surge a token of a
sailor sunk and lying somewhere under the gray waste of sea. We lost
them again utterly.”

With such talk, we had descended from Trafalgar Square, gone down
Whitehall, turned in at the Horse Guards, and, crossing Green Park,
had come out upon Hyde Park Corner. It was the very top moment of the
London season. The world, all sunshine and smiles and splendor, was
eddying about the corner of Apsley House. Piccadilly was a flood of
eager, busy people. The Park blossomed with gay crowds. But under all
this laughing surface, I saw with my mind’s eye two solitary figures
slowly sinking away and drowning drearily,--two figures solitary except
for each other,--a pale, calm woman, with gray, steady eyes, leading a
vague old man, with a white beard and a long military surtout.

“Lost utterly!” said Brent again, as if in answer to my thought.

“No,” said I, shaking off this despondency. “We have seemed to lose her
twice more desperately than now. It looked darker when we left them at
Fort Bridger; much darker when we knew that those ruffians had got time
and space the start of us; darkest of all when poor Pumps fell dead in
Luggernel Alley. Searching in a Christian city is another thing than
our agonized chase in the wilderness.”

“A Christian city!” said Brent, with a slight shudder. “You do not
know what this Christian city is for a friendless woman. There are
brutes here as evil and more numerous than in all barbarism together.
Many times, in my searches up and down the foul slums of London, I
have longed to exchange their walls for the walls of Luggernel Alley,
and endure again the frenzy of our gallop there. You think me weak,
perhaps, Wade, for my doubt of success; but remember that I have been
at this vain search over England and on the Continent for five months.”

“But understand, Wade,” said Biddulph, “that we do not give it up,
although we have found no clew.”

“Give it up!” cried Brent with fervor. “I live for that alone. When the
hope ends, I end.”

How worn he looked, “with grief that’s beauty’s canker!” Life was
wasting from him, as it ever does when man pursues the elusive and
unattained. When a man like Brent once voluntarily concentrates all his
soul on one woman, worthy of his love, thenceforth he must have love
for daily food, or life burns dim and is a dying flame.

“To-morrow,” said I, halting at the Park corner, “I must be at work
setting my business in motion. I have letters to write this evening,
and a dozen of famous mechanicians to see to-morrow. In the evening we
will put our heads together again.”

“Over my claret and a weed after it, understand,” said Biddulph.

“Yes, I’ll try whether you can take the taste of Missouri argee and
pigtail out of my mouth.”

“You must be prepared to be made a lion of by my mother and cousins.
They know the history of Don Fulano as well as a poet knows the
pedigree of Pegasus. I have brought tears to many gentle eyes with the
story of his martyrdom for liberty.”

“Ah, Fulano! if we only had him here! He would know how to aid us.”

I left them, and walked down Piccadilly to Smorley’s. Some of the eight
waiters, who had seen me bolt, still regarded me with affright. I wrote
my letters and went to bed.

My brain was still rolling in my skull with the inertia of its sea
voyage. The blur and bustle of London perplexed me. I slept; but in
my worried sleep I seemed to hear, above the roar in the streets, a
far-away scream of a woman, as I had heard it in the pause of the gale
at Fort Bridger. Then I seemed to have unhorsed the Iron Duke from his
seat at Hyde Park Corner, and, mounted in his place and armed with
the Nelson Column for a lance, to be charging along the highways and
by-ways of London in chase of two dim, flying figures,--a lady pale as
death, and a weary man in a long gray surtout.




CHAPTER XXX.

LONDON.


Short’s Cut-off shut out all other subjects from my head next morning.

It was an innovation, a revolution. Mankind objects to both. It came
from America, and though America has given tobacco, woman’s rights,
the potato, model yachts, model States, and trotting horses to the Old
World, that World still distrusts our work as boyish. We in turn deem
the Old World a mere child, and our youth based on a completer maturity
than they will attain for half a millennium.

Short’s Cut-off was so simple that it puzzled everybody.

I consulted half a dozen eminent engineers.

“Very pretty, indeed!” they said, and at once turned the conversation
to the explosions on Western rivers. “Had I ever been blown up? How did
it feel?”

But as to Short’s Cut-off, they only thought it a neat contrivance, but
evidently by a person who did not comprehend intricate machinery.

I took it to a man of another order. England is the world’s
machine-shop; he was England’s chief engineer. A great man he was,
dead, alas! now. A freeman, who recognized the world as his country,
and genius everywhere as his brother.

He understood Short’s Cut-off at a glance.

How I wish old Short could have been there, to see this great man’s
eye glow with enthusiasm as he said: “Admirable! This is what we have
all been waiting for. Padiham must see this. We must have it in every
engine in England. Command my services to aid in making it known.”

“Can you recommend me,” said I, presently, “a thorough mechanic. I want
some more models made of these valves and machinery, to illustrate
their action.”

“You must go to Padiham, the best artisan I know in all England.”

“Worth seeing for himself, as the man whom you name best among these
millions of craftsmen.”

“Padiham is the man.”

“He ought to have name and fame.”

“He might if he chose.”

“Worth knowing, again, for this rare abnegation.”

“He is an oddity. Some unlucky mode of life stunted him, mind and body,
until he was a mature man. He is dwarfed in person, and fancies his
mind suffers too. It makes him a little gruff to feel that he is a man
of tools, and not of principles,--a mechanic, not a philosopher. There
is nothing of morbidness or disappointment in him. Only he underrates
himself, and fancies his powers blunted by his deformity. He keeps out
of the way, and works alone in a little shop. He will only do special
jobs for me and one or two others. He says he would be our equal, if he
were full-grown. We deem him our peer, and treat him as such; but he
will not come out and take the place he could have at once before the
world. I thought of him, and wished him to see this Cut-off, as soon as
you showed it to me. You must tell him I sent you, or he may be surly
at first, and so drive you away, or perhaps refuse to do your work.”

“I think I can make my way with such a person; but if not, I will use
your name. Where is he to be found?”

“This is his address. An out-of-the-way place, you see, if you know
London. A by-street on the Surrey side of the Thames. He is well to
do; but lives there for a special economy. He has a method of charity,
which is like himself thoroughly original. More good he does in his odd
way than any man I know. He owns the whole house over his shop, and
uses it as a private hospital or hospice for poor but worthy sick and
broken-down people.”

“His own dwarfishness makes him sympathetic?”

“Yes; instead of souring, it softens him to the feeble. He may perhaps
feel a transitory resentment at big, strong fellows like you and
me; but he is always tender to the weak. His wonderful knowledge of
machinery comes into play in his hospital. From the machines man makes,
he has passed to a magical knowledge of the finest machine of all.”

“The human body?”

“The machine that invents and executes machines, the human body,--the
most delicate mechanism of all, the type of all its own inventions.
Padiham achieves magical cures. He is working by practice, and lately
by study, into profound surgical skill. There is no man in England whom
I would trust to mend me if I broke, as I would Padiham.”

“He avenges himself upon Nature for not perfecting him, by restoring
her breakages. Why do you not suggest to him to become a professed
repairer of mankind?”

“I have suggested it. He says he must take his own way. Besides,
mechanics can hardly spare him. Many of my own inventions would have
stayed in embryo in my brain, if Padiham had not played Vulcan, and
split a passage for them. I talk over my schemes to him; he catches the
idea and puts it into form at once.”

“You interest me very much,” said I. “I must see the man and know him,
for my own sake as well as for Short’s Cut-off.”

“Take care he does not drive you away in a huff. You’ll find him a
rough-hewn bit.”

I went at once. A man who had warred with Pikes at the Foolonner Mine,
to say nothing of other ruder characters, was not to be baffled, so he
trusted, by a surly genius.

As I walked through the crush of the streets, again there came to me
that vision of the old man and his daughter lost in the press,--more
sadly lost, more vainly seeking refuge here, than in the desert
solitudes where we had found them.

Every one familiar with great cities knows of strange rencounters
there, and at every turn I looked narrowly about, fancying that I
should see the forms I sought, just vanishing, but leaving me a clew of
pursuit. This expectation grew so intense, that I exaggerated slight
resemblances of costume or of port, and often found myself excitedly
hurrying quite out of my way, and shouldering through huddles of
people, to come at some figure in the distance. But when I overtook
the old man of feeble step, or the young woman moving fearlessly amid
the pitiless crowd, or the pair I had followed, and stared at them
eagerly, strange and offended looks met me instead of the familiar,
perhaps the welcome, look I had hoped; and I turned away forlornly
exaggerating the disappointment as I had the fancy.

I cooled at last from this flurry. Nothing but blanks in the lottery.
It was folly to be wasting my energy in this way. Trusting Providence,
or rather this semblance of Providence, this mere chance, was thin
basis for action. So I resumed my proper course, and turned my steps
quietly toward Padiham’s shop.

But when presently I stood upon London Bridge, between two cities of
men, between the millions I had escaped and the million I was to plunge
among, a great despair grew heavier and heavier upon me.

This terrible throng, here as everywhere hurrying by me! And I
compelled to note every man and every woman, and to say to myself,
“This is not he,”--“This is not she,”--“These are not they!” All the
while this stream of negatives rushing by, and every one bearing a
little fraction of hope away.

In that great city--in its nests and its prisons--were people who had
been living side by side for a life-time, and yet had never had one
glimpse of each other’s form or feature; who were, each to each, but
a name on a door, a step overhead, a tread on the stair, a moan of
anguish, a laugh, or a curse. There were parallel streets, too, whose
tenants moved parallel and never met, and never would meet. There were
neighborhoods farther distant than Cornhill is from Cairo, or Pimlico
from Patagonia. It was a dark den--that monster city--for any one who
loved to lurk, or be buried away from sight of friend or foe; it was
a maze, a clewless labyrinth for one who sought a foe to punish or a
friend to save.

Evening was approaching. I must consider Short and his Cut-off, and all
England wasting steam at the rate of millions of pounds a year (enough
to save the income tax) until that Cut-off should be applied. In that
populous realm were ten thousand cylinders devouring one third more
steam than was healthy working allowance; and I was halting on London
Bridge, staring like a New-Zealander at the passers, a mere obstacle
to progress, a bad example, a stationary nuisance now, as I had been a
mobile and intrusive one before.

I had some little difficulty in finding Padiham’s retiring-place. I had
already dissected it out on the map, identified it by its neighborhood
to a certain artery and its closer neighborhood to a certain ganglion.
It was Lamely Court, a quiet retreat in a busy region. It looked,
indeed, as if it had never taken a very active part in the world, or as
if, when it offered itself to bustle and traffic, more enterprising
localities had hustled it aside, and bade it decline into a lethargy.
The withered brick houses had the air and visage of people who have
seen better days, and subsided into the desponding by-ways, apart from
the thoroughfares of the bold and sturdy. Mean misery and squalor did
not abide there. It was not a den for the ragged, but a shy retreat for
the patched,--for the decent and decorous poor.

Half-way down the court, on the sunny side, I found Padiham’s house. It
was quietly, not obtrusively, neater and fresher than its neighbors.
Its bricks had a less worm-eaten look, and its window-panes were all
of glass and none of newspaper. The pot roses in an upper story window
were in bloom, and had life enough to welcome the June sunshine,
while sister plants in other garrets all about the court were too far
blighted ever to dream of gayer product than some poor jaundiced bud.
These roses up in Padiham’s window cheered the whole neighborhood
greatly, with their lively coloring. It was as if some pretty maiden,
with rosy cheeks and riper rosy lips, were looking down into that
forlorn retreat, and warming every old, faded soul, within every shabby
tenement, with bright reminiscence of days when life was in its perfume
and its flower.

Such was the aspect of Padiham’s abode. His shop lurked in the
basement.




CHAPTER XXXI.

A DWARF.


It was with much curiosity and interest in Padiham that I stepped
down into the basement, and entered his shop. I reverence as much a
great mechanic, in degree, perhaps in kind, as I do any great seer
into the mysteries of Nature. He is a king, whoever can wield the
great forces where other men have not the power. And none can control
material forces without a profound knowledge, stated or unstated, of
the great masterly laws that order every organism, from dust to man and
a man-freighted world. A great mechanic ranks with the great chiefs of
his time, prophets, poets, orators, statesmen.

Padiham was in his shop at work. No mistaking him. A stunted, iron-gray
man, not misshapen, but only shut together, like a one-barrelled
opera-glass.

A very impressive head was Padiham’s. No harm had been done to that
by whatever force had driven in his legs and shut his ribs together.
His head was full grown. In contrast with his body, it seemed even
overgrown. His hair and beard were iron-gray. He had those heavy,
square eyebrows that compel the eyes from roving, and shut them down
upon the matter in hand, so that it cannot escape. Not a man, this, to
err on facts or characters. A pretender person, a sham fact, he would
test at once and dismiss. Short’s Cut-off had never met a sterner
critic than this man with the square forehead and firm nose.

He was hard at work at a bench, low according to his stature, filing at
some fine machinery. The shop was filled with a rich sunny duskiness.
Here and there surfaces of polished brass sparkled. Sunbeams, striking
through the dim windows, glinted upon bits of bright steel strewn
about. I perceived the clear pungent odor of fresh steel filings, very
grateful after the musty streets, seething in June sunshine and the
exhalations of the noisome Thames. It was a scene of orderly disorder,
ruled by the master-workman there.

Padiham had, of course, observed my entrance. He took no notice of me,
and continued his work.

I held my station near the door. I did not wish to spoil his job by the
jar of an interruption. Besides, I thought it as well to let him speak
first. I was prepared for an odd man; he might make the advances, if he
pleased.

Padiham went on filing, in a grim, intelligent way. I glanced about the
shop.

There were models all about of machines, some known, some strange to
me; disconnected portions of inventions lying side by side, and wanting
only a bolt or a screw to be organized and ready to rush at pumping,
or lifting, or dragging, or busy duty of some useful kind. There
was store, too, of interesting rubbish,--members of futile models,
that could not do busy duty of their kind for some slight error, and
worth careful study as warnings; for failure with mechanics is the
schoolmaster of success. Drawings of engines hung all about the walls.
As guardian genius of the spot, there was a portrait of that wise,
benignant face of my friend of this morning, that great engineer who
had directed me hither.

Apart in a dusky corner, by the chimney and forge, hung two water-color
drawings in neat gilt frames. They were perhaps a little incongruous
with the scenery of the gnome’s cavern. I did not, of course, expect
to find here a portrait of a truculent bruiser or a leering bar-maid.
Beery journeymen keep such low art hanging before them to seduce them
from any ambition to become master hands and beguile them back of beer.
Padiham would of course need drawings of models and machines, and enjoy
them; but I did not look for Art proper in his shop. There, however,
in the dim background, hung the two cheerful drawings, in their neat
frames. They renewed and repeated the feeling which the gay roses in
the upper windows had given me. My fancy supplied a link between the
drawings and the flowers. They infused a pleasant element of refinement
into the work-a-day atmosphere of the shop.

One of these drawings--I could just faintly distinguish their subject,
and not the skill, greater or less, of their handling--was a view of an
old brick many-gabled manor-house on a lawn dotted with stately oaks.
Its companion--and the light hardly permitted me to decipher it--seemed
to be a group of people seated on the grass, and a horse bending over
them. I glanced at these objects as my eye made the tour of the shop;
but my head was filled with Short’s Cut-off and this grim dwarf before
me.

Presently Padiham laid down his file, and took up a pair of pincers
from the confusion on his bench. He gave a bit of wire a twist, and, as
he did so, looked at me. The square eyebrows seemed to hold me stiff,
while he inspected. He studied my face, and then measured me from top
to toe. There was a slight expression of repellence in his features,
as if he thought, “This big fellow probably fancies that his long legs
make him my master; we’ll try a match.”

He addressed me in a sweet, hearty voice, quite in discord with his
gruff manner. No man could be a bear and roar so gently. I perceived
the Lancashire accent. The dialect, if it had ever been there, was worn
away. Tones are older in a man than words. He can learn a new tongue;
his organ he hardly alters. If Nature has ordained a voice to howl, or
snarl, or yelp, or bray, it will do so now and then, stuff our mouths
with pebbles as we may.

Padiham’s frank, amiable voice neutralized his surly manner, as he
said: “Now then, young man, what are you staring at? Do you want
anything with me? Say so, if you do. If not, don’t stand idling here;
but go about your business.”

“I want you to do a job for me.”

“Suppose I say, I don’t want to do it?”

“Then I’ll try to find a better man.”

“Umph! where’ll you look for him?”

“In the first shop where there’s one that knows enough to give good
words to a stranger.”

“Well; say what your job is.”

“You’re ready to do it then?”

“I’m not ready to waste any more time in talk.”

“Nor I. I want some working models of a new patent Cut-off.”

“I wont undertake any tom-foolery.”

“If you can make tom-foolery out of this, you’re a cleverer man than I
am.”

“That may not be much to say. I’ve had so many shams brought to me in
the way of cut-offs that I shall not spend time on yours unless it
looks right at first glance.”

“You’ll see with half an eye that this means something.”

“Show me your drawings; that will settle it.”

I produced the working drawings.

Padiham studied them a few moments. I volunteered no explanation.

Presently he looked up, and fixed me with his square eyebrows, while he
examined me from head to foot again.

“Did you invent this?” said he.

“No.”

“Umph! Thought not. Too tall. Who did?”

“Mr. Short.”

“Don’t Mister the man that thought out this. His whole name I want,
without handles. He don’t need ’em.”

“George Short.”

“George,--that’s my name too. I suppose he is a Yankee. I know every
man in England likely to have contrived this; but none of them have
quite head enough.”

“He is an American.”

“Is he a Mormon?”

“No.”

“Are you?”

“No. It is an odd question.”

“I don’t know much about your country, except that you invent machines,
keep slaves, blow up steamboats, and beguile off Englishmen with
your damned Mormonism. The Mormons have done so much harm in my
country,--Lancashire that is,--that I’ve sworn I’d never have anything
to do with any Yankee, unless I first knew he was not one of those
wolves. But if you’re not, and George Short is not, I’ll do your job.
Now tell me precisely what you want made, for I can’t spend time with
you.”

“I want six sets of these models at once.”

“I’ll order the castings this evening. I have materials here for the
fine parts. Can you handle tools?--I mean useful tools,--files and saws
and wrenches, not pens and sand-boxes.”

“I’m a fair workman with your tools.”

“You can help me then. Come over to-morrow morning at seven. No; you’re
an idler, and I’ll give you till eight. If you’re not here by that time
you’ll find me busy for the day.”

So saying, Padiham turned off to his work. He gave me no further
attention; but filed away grimly. I watched him a moment. What
intensity and earnestness were in this man! Like other great artists,
who see form hidden within a mass of brute matter, he seemed to be
urged to give himself, body and soul, to releasing the form from its
cell, to setting free the elemental spirit of order and action locked
up in the stuff before him.

His brief verdict upon my friend’s invention settled its success in my
mind. Not that I doubted before; but the man’s manner was conclusive.
He pronounced the fiat of the practical world, as finally as the great
engineer had done of the theoretical. I thrilled for old Short, when
this Dwarf, lurking away in a by-court of London, accepted him as his
peer. The excitement of this interview had for a time quite expelled
my anxieties. For a time I had lost sight of the two figures that
haunted me, and ever vanished as I pursued. They took their places
again as I left the shop and issued from Lamely Court into the crowded
thoroughfare at hand.

I took a cab, and drove to my hotel, and so to Biddulph’s. The dinner
at the Baronet’s shall not figure in these pages. It was my first
appearance as hero. I and my horse were historic characters in this
new circle. I was lionized by Lady Biddulph, a stately personage,
inheritress of a family rustle,--a rustle as old as the Plantagenets,
and grander now by the accumulations of ages. A lovely young lady,
with dark hair, who blushed when I took my cue and praised Biddulph,
she also lionized me. A thorough-bred American finds English life
charming, especially if he is agreeably _lionné_; a scrubby American
considers England a region of cold shoulder, too effete to appreciate
impertinence.

Lady Biddulph gave me further facts of the history of the Clitheroes.

“Our dear Ellen!” she concluded. “If she had known how much I loved
her, she would have disregarded her natural scruples,”--and she glanced
at her son,--“and let me befriend and protect her. It goes to my heart
to see Mr. Brent so worn and sad. He, too, has become very dear to us
all. I have adopted him as my son as long as he pleases, and try to
give him a mother’s sympathy.”

Brent walked back with me to Smorley’s.

“How different we are!” he said, as we parted. “I am all impulse; you
are all steadiness.”

“Suffering might throw me off my balance. Remember that I have had
trial and experience, but no torture.”

“Torture, that is the word; and it has unmanned me like a wearing
disease. Your coming makes a man of me again.”

“Give me a day or two for Short’s Cut-off and the mechanical
nineteenth century, and we will take our knight-errantry upon us again.
We are dismounted cavaliers now, to be sure,--no Pumps or Fulano to
help us,--but we shall find, I will not doubt, some other trusty aid
against the demon forces.”

Brent bade me good night with a revival of his old self. We were to
meet again to-morrow.

I sat down to gladden Short with the story of my success to-day, and
wrote hard and fast to catch to-morrow’s steamer.

The dwarf, I knew, would be a man after Short’s own heart,--these men
of iron and steel are full of magnetism for each other. I gave Short a
minute description of Padiham’s shop.

As I described, I found that my observation had been much keener than
I supposed. Every object in the shop came back to me distinctly. I saw
the Rembrandt interior, barred with warm sunbeams; the grim master
standing there over his vice; the glinting steel; the polished brass;
the intelligent tools, ready to spring up and do their duty in the
craftsman’s hands; that little pretty plaything of a steam-engine, at
rest, but with its pocket-piece of an oscillating cylinder hanging
alert, so that it could swing off merrily at a moment’s notice, and its
piston with a firm grip on the crank, equally eager to skip up and down
in the cylinder on its elastic cushion of steam.

All the objects in Padiham’s shop, one after another, caught my look,
as I reviewed the whole in memory. Suddenly I found myself gazing
intently at my image of those two water-color drawings in neat gilt
frames, hanging in a dusky corner by the chimney,--those two drawings
which had revived in my mind the sentiment of the bright, healthy roses
in the upper windows.

Suddenly these drawings recurred to me. They stared at me like an
old friend neglected. They insisted upon my recognition. There was a
personality in them which gazed at me with a shy and sad reproach, that
I had given them only a careless glance, and so passed them by.

The drawings stared at me and I at them.

An ancient, many-gabled brick manor-house, on a fair lawn dotted with
stately oaks,--that was the first.

Had I not already seen a drawing, the fellow of this? Yes. In
Biddulph’s hands at Fort Laramie. The same gables, the same sweet slope
of lawn, the same broad oaks, and one the monarch of them all,--perhaps
the very one Wordsworth had rounded into a sonnet.

And the companion drawing that I hardly deciphered in the
dimness,--that group of figures and a horse bending over them?

How blind I was!

Fulano!

Fulano surely. He and no other.

And that group?

Ourselves at the Luggernel Springs. Brent lying wounded, while I gave
him water, and a lady bound up his wounds.

Can this be so? Am I not the victim of a fancy? Is this indeed my noble
horse? Is he again coming forward to bear us along the trail of our
lost friend.

I stared again at my mental image of the two drawings. I recalled again
every word of my interview with Padiham.

The more I looked, the more confident I became. Short’s Cut-off had
held such entire possession of me in the afternoon, that I could only
observe with eyes, not with volition, could not value the treasure I
was grasping ignorantly. But I had grasped it. This is Fulano! Except
for him, I might doubt. Except for his presence, the other drawing of
an old brick manor-house would be a commonplace circumstance.

“Now let me see,” I thought, pushing aside my letter to Short for a
moment, “what are my facts?

“Mr. Clitheroe and his daughter have disappeared, and are probably in
London.

“I have found--God be thanked!--a clew, perhaps a clew. Work by the
lady’s hand.

“And where? In Padiham’s shop.

“Padiham is a Lancashire man. So is Mr. Clitheroe.

“Padiham has a horror of Mormons. Why was I so hurried as not to pursue
the conversation, and discover what special cause he had for his
disgust?

“Padiham, in a secluded part of London, keeps a hospital for the poor
and the sick.

“There are bright roses in the upper windows. No masculine fingers know
how to lure blossoms into being so tenderly.

“Bright roses in the rooms above; able drawings giving refinement to
the rusty shop below.

“Can it be that they are there, under the very roof of that grim good
Samaritan?

“In the three millions have I come upon my two units?

“Going straight forward and minding my own business, have I effected in
one day what Brent has failed in utterly after a search of months?

“But let me not neglect the counter facts?

“I did not recognize these pictures when I saw them. Perhaps what I
find in them now is fancy. My own vivid remembrance of the scene at
Luggernel may be doing artist-work, and dignifying some commonplace
illustration of an old ballad. Ours was not the first such group since
men were made and horses made for them. Fulano has had no lack of
forefathers in heroism.

“And the manor-house? There are, perhaps, in Padiham’s own county, a
hundred such ancient many-gabled brick halls, a hundred lawns fair as
the one that falls away gently from Mr. Clitheroe’s ancestral mansion,
scores of oaks as stately as the one that was lucky enough to shadow
Wordsworth, and so cool his head for a sonnet in grateful recompense.

“Padiham may have a daughter who draws horses and houses to delude
me,--imaginative fellow that I am becoming!

“Or, what do I know? Suppose these fugitives have taken refuge with
Padiham,--it may be to escape pursuit. Poor Mr. Clitheroe! Who knows
what poverty may have permitted him to do? Better to hide in Lamely
Court than to be stared at in a prison!

“My facts are slender basis for conclusion,”--so I avowed to myself on
this review.

“But I would rather have a hope than no hope. The filmiest clew is
kinder than no clew.

“I will finish my letter to old Short, dear boy, inventor of a
well-omened Cut-off; I will sleep like a top, with no mysterious
disappearances to disturb me; I will be with the Dwarf by seven. If
that is Fulano in the drawing, he shall carry double again. He shall
conduct the Lover and Friend to the Lady.”




CHAPTER XXXII.

PADIHAM’S SHOP.


How jubilant I felt the next morning as I made my way toward Lamely
Court! The Thames really seemed to me a pure and lucent current. I
began to fancy that there might be a stray whiff of ozone in the
breezes of Albion.

What a cheerful clock it was, in some steeple near at hand, that
struck seven as I set foot upon Padiham’s steps! What a blessing to a
neighborhood to have a clock so utterly incredulous of dolefulness,--a
clock that said All’s well to the past hour, and prophesied All’s well
to the coming!

“Now,” I thought, “I must have my wits about me. My business is with
Padiham the mechanic, not with Padiham the good Samaritan. My time and
mind belong to Short’s Cut-off. I must not dash off into impertinent
queries about people the dwarf may know nothing of, may wish to tell
nothing of. Keep cool, Richard Wade! mind your own business, and then
you can mind other people’s. Be ready to be disappointed! Destiny is
not so easy to propitiate as you seemed to believe last night.”

As the clock dallied on its last stroke of seven, I entered Padiham’s
shop.

My first glance--eyes never looked more earnestly--was toward the two
drawings.

There they were,--fact not fancy.

I could still hold to the joy of a hope.

They were too far away in this dusky corner for absolute recognition;
but there were the familiar gables of the old hall; and there was my
horse, yes, himself, bending over that very group of Luggernel Springs.
I must cling to my confidence; I would not doubt. If I doubted, I
should become a stupid bungler over the models, and probably disgust
Padiham by my awkwardness.

“Good morning, Mr. Padiham.”

“Good morning,” said he, in that hearty voice which resolutely declined
being surly.

He was standing, filing away, just where I had left him yesterday. Put
him on a pair of properly elongated legs, shake the reefs out of his
ribs, in short, let Procrustes have half an hour at him, and a very
distinguished-looking man would be George Padiham. In fact, as he was,
his remarkable head raised him above pity. Many of us would consent
to be dwarfed, to be half man below the Adam’s apple, if above it we
could wear the head of a Jupiter Tonans, such a majestic head as this
stunted man, the chief artisan of all England.

Padiham was as gruff as yesterday, but his gruffness gave him flavor.
Better a boor than a flunkey. There is excitement in talking with a man
who respects you exactly in proportion to your power, and ignores you
if you are a muff.

We went at our work without delay. For nearly two hours I put myself
and kept myself at Short’s Cut-off. Padiham’s skill and readiness
astonished me. Great artists are labor-saving machines to themselves;
they leap to a conclusion in a moment, where a potterer would be
becalmed for a tide.

By and by, I found that I could be of no further use to this master
craftsman.

“You understand this job better than I do,” said I.

“I understand it,” said he.

“I’ll take a short spell,” said I, “and look about the shop a little.”

“Don’t be setting my tools by the ears.”

“No; I want to see those pictures by the chimney.”

He said nothing. His lathe buzzed. His chisel tortured bars of metal
until they shrieked. The fragrance of fresh-cut steel filled the shop.

I sprang to the dusky corner. My heart choked me. I wanted to shout so
that John Brent, miles away across the wilderness of the great city,
could hear and come with one step.

For here was what I hoped.

Here we were, our very selves, in this bold, masterly drawing. John
Brent himself, the wounded knight; myself, bringing him water from the
fountain; our dear Ellen, kneeling beside; and bending over us, Don
Fulano, the chiefest hero of that terrible ride through the cañon.

And more, if I needed proof. For here, in among the water-plants by the
spring, there in the grass under Wordsworth’s oak, lurked the initials,
E. C.

Found! Ah, not yet. A clew; but perhaps a clew that would break in my
hands, as I traced it.

I lost no time.

“These are pretty pictures,” said I, crushing myself into
self-possession.

“What has that got to do with this job?”

“You think I’m a pretty good mechanic?”

“Middling. You handle tools well enough for a gentleman.”

“Well, if I were not a bit of an artist, I should not even be a
middling mechanic. I like to see fine art, such as these drawings, hung
up before a working man. I can understand how appreciating such things
has helped you to become the first mechanic in England.”

“Who says I am that?”

“So the first engineer in England told me when he sent me here.”

“O, he sent you! I supposed you did not find your own way.”

“There has been no chance in my coming here,” said I, and my heart
thanked God.

“You’re right about those drawings, young man,” Padiham said, and his
voice seemed to find a sweeter tone even than before. “They do me good,
and put a finer edge on my work. They’re good work, and by a good hand.”

“Whose?”

The dwarf turned about and surveyed me strictly. Then he started his
lathe again, tore off a narrow ringlet of steel from a bit he was
shaping, and flung another stream of steely perfume into the air.

“Whose hand?” I asked again.

“Do you ask because you want to know, or only to make idle talk?”

“I want to know.”

“What for?”

“I think the drawings are good. I should like a pair by the same hand.
Can you direct me to the artist?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“The artist don’t like strangers. I will order you what you want.”

“That will not do. I prefer to talk over the subjects with the painter.”

The dwarf turned again and gave me a probing look, and again took up
his chisel and cut shining curls without reply.

I grew impatient of this parley. He knew something, and it must out.

“Look at me, George Padiham!” I said. “Stop your lathe a minute, and
charge me for the time a hundred times over! I know the hand that
painted these pictures. My portrait and my friend’s, and my horse’s
portrait, are here on your wall. Only one person in the world can have
painted them, Ellen Clitheroe. Here are her initials in the corner. You
know where she is. I wish to see her. I must see her, at once, now!”

“Keep cool, young man! This is my shop. I’m master here. I’ve put
bigger men than you out of this door before. What’s all this must and
shall about? What’s your name?”

“Richard Wade.”

Padiham left his lathe, came toward me, surveyed me earnestly again,
and then took down the drawing wherein I appeared. He compared the man
standing before him with his counterfeit presentment. There could be
no mistaking me. I had the honor to resemble myself, as the artist had
remembered me.

“You’re the man,” said Padiham. “I’ve heard of you. I wasn’t looking
sharp not to have known you when you first came in and stood there by
the door waiting for me to speak first. Richard Wade, give me your
hand! I suppose if I am the best mechanic in England, called so on good
authority, you wont mind striking palms with me.”

I shook him by the hand pretty vigorously.

“You’ve got a middling strong grip of your fist for one of the
overgrown sort,” said he. “Where’s your friend, John Brent?”

“Here in London, searching for Miss Clitheroe!”

“Where’s your horse?--the Black?”

“Dead! Shot and drowned in the Missouri, helping off a fugitive slave.”

“That’s brave. Well, Richard Wade, my dear child Ellen Clitheroe and
her father are here in my house. They are safe here, after all their
troubles, up in that room where perhaps you marked the roses in the
window. She has been sick at heart to have heard nothing from you since
she came to England. It will be the one thing she lacks to see you,
and if you will let me say a few words to you first, I’ll take you to
them.”

“Go on. If you have protected my friends, you are my friend, and I want
to hear what you have to say.”




CHAPTER XXXIII.

“CAST THY BREAD UPON THE WATERS.”


“I am short, and I shall try to make a long story short,” said Padiham.
“I wish to tell you, in as few words as I may, why Mr. Clitheroe and
his daughter are in my house.

“Look at me, a stunted man! Life in a coal-mine stunted me. I suppose
I was born underground. I know that I never remember when I was not at
work, either harnessed like a dog, and dragging coals through a shop
where I could not stand upright, or, when I grew stronger,--bigger I
was not to grow,--down in the darkest holes, beating out with a pickaxe
stuff to make other men’s houses warm and cheery. If I had had air and
sun and light and hope, I might have been a shapely man.

“It was in Lancashire, the coal-mine where I had been shut up, boy
and man, some twenty years, as I reckon. There came one day a weakly
man, who hadn’t been used to work hard, into the shaft, and they put
him at drawing out the coals I dug. Hugh was the name he gave, and he
hadn’t been long enough underground to get his face black, before we’d
baptized him Gentleman Hugh. I had never seen a gentleman to know him,
but I had a feeling of what one ought to be, and so had my mates in
the pit. Gentleman Hugh seemed to us to suit the nickname we gave him.
We’re roughs down in the coal-pits, and some of us are brutes enough;
but Gentleman Hugh managed to get us all on his side, and there wasn’t
a man of us that wouldn’t give him a lift.

“Gentleman Hugh took a fancy to me, and so did I to him. Nature had
misused me, and life had misused him. We had something to pity each
other for. But I had the advantage in the dark damp hole where we
worked. I had lost nothing; I knew of nothing better; I was healthy and
strong, if I was stunted; I could help Gentleman Hugh, and save him
wearing himself out. And so I did. He was the first person or creature
I had ever cared for.

“I did what I could for him in lightening his work; but he gave me back
a hundred times what I could give. I was hands without head, or without
any head that could make my hands of use. He had head enough, and
things in his head, but his hands were never meant for tools to get a
living. Gentleman Hugh waked up my brains. I knew how to pick and dig,
and sometimes wondered if that was all I should ever be at. But air
and daylight seemed as if they did not belong to me. I was a drudge,
and never thought of anything but drudging, until Gentleman Hugh came
down into my shaft and began to tell me what there was outside of
coal-mines.

“He told me about himself; that he was Hugh Clitheroe, a gentleman,
and how he had been ruined by factories and coal speculations. It was
his losing his fortune in a coal-mine that set him on coming into ours
to make his bread, and poor bread too, for a gentleman. He said he was
sick of daylight. It was better to be a drudge, so he said, down in the
blackest and wettest hole of any coal-pit in Lancashire, than to beg
bread of men that pretended to be his friends when he was rich, and
sneered at him for his folly in losing his wealth. I found out that
there were wrongs and brutality above ground as well as under it.

“By and by, when Gentleman Hugh and I had got to be friends, he took me
one holiday and showed me his daughter. She was a sweet little lass. He
had left her with the rough women, the miners’ wives. But she had her
own way with them, just as he had had with us. They called her little
Lady Ellen, and would have cut up their own brats, if they hadn’t been
too tough, if she had wanted such diet. Little Ellen, sweet lass!
was not afraid of me, Dwarf George and Runt George as they called me.
She did not run away and cry, or point and laugh at me as the other
children did. She was picking daisies on the edge of an old coal-pit
when we first saw her,--a little curly-haired lass of five years old.
She was crowned with daisies, and she didn’t seem to me to belong to
the same class of beings as the grimy things I had been among all my
days. She gave me a daisy, and asked me if I knew who made it. And when
I said I didn’t know, unless it came of itself, she named God to me.
Nobody had named God to me before except in oaths.

“Do I tire you, sir,” said Padiham, “with this talk about myself?”

“Certainly not; you interest me greatly.”

“The old gentleman will hardly be ready to see you yet. It is almost
nine, and at the stroke of nine he has his breakfast. I always go up
then to give him good morning. You can go with me.”

“Meantime, tell me how you found them again.”

“I found them by a drawing of hers. But I will go on straightforward
with my story.

“I couldn’t stay a dolt, though I had to drudge for many a day after
I first saw little Ellen, and she gave me the daisy and named God to
me. Whenever I could get away, and that was only once a quarter or a
half-year, I went up to see her. She made a friend of me, and told me
to take care of her father. He was very much down, quite broken and
helpless, with just enough strength to do half his appointed work. So I
helped him with the rest.

“After a long time the owners found out that he had education, and they
took him into the office. All the men were sorry to lose Gentleman
Hugh, and when he went, I lost heart, and took to drinking up my
miserable earnings with the rest. There I was, a drudge in the dark,
and getting to be a drunkard, when Gentleman Hugh came to me and told
me how some one had left him a legacy, and I must get out of the pit
and share with him. He said little Ellen would not be happy unless she
had me.

“So he took me up into the air and sun, and put me to school. But I
could never learn much out of books. Put tools in my hands and I can
make _things_, and that is what my business is in the world. You see
those arms, well made as your own. You see those hands, strong as a
vice, and those fingers, fine as a woman’s. They are tools, and able
to handle tools. The rest of my body is stunted; my brain is stunted.
I’m no fool; but I’m not the man I ought to be. Every day I feel that I
cannot put my thoughts into the highest form.”

“Every man of any power feels that,” I said, “by whatever machinery his
power finds expression.”

“Perhaps so. Well, when Mr. Clitheroe had once given me a start in the
open air, and I had got tools in my hands, pretty soon they began to
talk of me as one of the masters in Lancashire. There’s a great call in
England for thorough workmen. I came up to London. I fell in with the
gentleman who sent you here, and I got on well. There’s as much good
work goes out of this little shop as out of some big establishments
with great names over the door. People try to get me to start a great
shop, and make a great fortune, and have George Padiham talked about.
But I’m Dwarf George, born in a coal-mine and stunted in a coal-mine;
and Lamely Court, with my little shop in the basement, suits me best.

“I never forgot how I owed all my good luck to Gentleman Hugh and my
dear little Ellen. If it had not been for them, I should have died
underground of hard work, before thirty, as most of my mates did. Their
help of me gave me a kindly feeling toward broken-down gentlefolks.
I owed the class my luck, and when I got on and had money to spend,
having no one of my own to spend it for, I looked up people as badly
off as Gentleman Hugh was when I first knew him, and helped them. They
are a hard class to help--proud as Lucifer sometimes, with their own
kind. I took this house here, out of the way as much as any spot in
London. Whenever I knew of a gentleman, or a gentlewoman, given out,
or worn out, so that they couldn’t take care of themselves, I brought
them in here. If they were only given out, I put stuff into them again,
cheered them up, and found some work for them to do. Gentlefolks
are not such fools, if they only had education. If I found one that
was worn out beyond all patching, I packed him into a snug corner
up-stairs, and let him lie there. They like it better than public
hospitals and retreats.

“All the while I was getting on and getting rich in a small way, with
some small shares in patents I own. But I kept my eye on Gentleman
Hugh. I knew what would come to him, and I never took in ten shillings
that I did not put away one for him and his daughter.

“I knew of his going to America with the Mormons,--damn ’em! I went
down to Clitheroe to persuade him to give up the plan. He would not. He
quarrelled with me,--our first hard words. He forbade his daughter to
write to me.

“I knew he would come back some time or other, stripped and needy. I
watched the packet’s lists of passengers. He did not come under his
own name; but I saw last winter an old Lancashire name on a list of
arrivals,--the name of that worn-out shaft where Ellen had picked the
daisy for me. It was a favorite spot of his. Part of his money had gone
down it, and he used to sit and stare into it as if the money was going
to bubble up again. I traced them by that to London. Here for a time I
lost them.

“He got very low in London,--poor old man!” continued Padiham.

“Nothing dishonest, I hope,” said I.

“No, no. Only gambling, with a crazy hope of getting even with the
world again. In this way he spent all that he had left, and Ellen’s
hard earnings beside. It made him wild for her to refuse him; so she
was forced to give him all that she could spare,--all except just
enough to pay for a poor place to live in and poorer fare. She never
knew where he spent the long nights; she only saw him creep back to his
garret in the early morning destitute and half alive. Richard Wade, you
may read books, and hear tales, and go through the world looking for
women that help and hope, and never give up helping and hoping; but
you’ll never find another like her,--no, not like my dear lass,--as
grand a beauty, too, as any at the Queen’s court.”

“You are right, Padiham. None like her.”

“But I promised you to talk as short as I could. I must tell you how
I found them. The poor gentle-folks that I take care of generally
know something of ornamental work that they learnt to do, for play,
when they were better off. I set them at doing what they can do best,
and sell it for them. There is always some one among my family can
draw. What of their drawings I can’t dispose of at the print-shops I
buy myself, and scatter ’em round among mechanics to light up their
benches. You were right when you said a man cannot be a good artisan
unless he has a bit of the artist in him.

“It was by going to a print-shop with drawings to sell that I found my
dear lass. She had painted me, and sold the picture to the dealer for
bread. I wouldn’t have noticed the picture except for the dwarf in it,
and now I wouldn’t be a finished man for the world. Yes, there I was,
Dwarf George, picking daisies on the edge of a coal-pit; there I was,
just as I used to look, with the coal-dust ground into me, trying to
make friends with the fresh innocent daisies in the sunshine.

“By that picture I found them just in time. When I got to their garret,
Ellen was lying sick, ill in body, and tired and sorrowed out. Their
money was all gone, for Gentleman Hugh had been robbed of his last the
night before. I brought my dear child and her father here. What I had
was theirs.

“As soon as her father was safe with me, his old friend, she got well.
As soon as his daughter was out of the way of harm and want, and the
old gentleman had nothing to be crazy about and nothing to run away
from, he stopped dead. He fell into a palsy.

“There he is now up-stairs. Ellen chose the upper room, where they
could look over the house-tops and of clear days see the Surrey Hills.
I’ve got some skill in my fingers for mending broken men, but Hugh
Clitheroe can’t be mended. It’s as well for him that he can’t. He’s
been off track too long ever to run steady in this world. But he
has come to himself, and sees things clearer at last. He lies there
contented and patient, waiting for his end. He sees his daughter, who
has gone with him though thick and thin, by his side, and knows she
will love him closer every day. And he knows that his old mate, Dwarf
George, is down here in the basement, strong enough to keep all up and
all together.”

“Let me be the one, Mr. Padiham;” said I, “to ask the honor of shaking
hands with you. I think better of the world for your sake.”

“Young man,” said he, with his clear, frank voice, “a noble woman
like my Ellen betters every true man. There strikes nine. A pleasant
church-clock that! I gave it to ’em. Now you’re well tired of my talk,
I dare say. Come, Ellen will have all she has missed when she sees you
and your friend. Many times she has told me of that ride of yours. Many
times she has cried, as a woman only cries for one loss, when she told
me how day after day she waited to hear from you, and had never heard.”

“She wrote?”

“Repeatedly.”

“We never heard.”

“Her father took her letters from her to post.”

“And kept them or destroyed them for some crazy suspicion.”

“She dreaded you might have been chased and cut off by the Mormons. She
would not believe that you had forgotten her.”

“Forgotten! Come, I’ll follow you.”




CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE LAST OF A LOVE-CHASE.


“How easy it seems for noble souls to be noble!” thought I, as I
followed Padiham up the neat staircase of his House of Charity. “What a
beautiful vengeance it is of this man upon nature for blighting him! A
meaner being would be soured, and turn cynic, and perhaps chuckle that
others were equalized with him by suffering. He simply, and as if it
were a matter of course, gives himself to baffling sorrow and blight.
It is Godlike.” And I looked with renewed admiration at the strange
figure climbing the stairs before me.

He was all head and shoulders, and his motions were like a clumsy
child’s. I went slowly after him. Was it true that this long
love-chase over land and sea was at its ending? Joy is always a giant
surprise,--success a disappointment among the appointed failures. Was
this grim dwarf to be a conjurer of happiness?

Padiham tapped at a door in the upper story.

A voice said, “Come in.”

Her voice! That sweet, sad voice! That unmurmuring, unrebellious voice!
That voice of gentle defiance, speaking a soul impregnable! How full of
calm hopefulness! while yet I could detect in it the power of bursting
into all the horror of that dread scream that had come through the
stillness to our camp at Fort Bridger.

The dwarf opened the door quietly.

The sunshine of that fresh June morning lay bright upon the roses in
the window. My glance perceived the old blue-gray infantry surtout
hanging in a corner. Mr. Clitheroe was sitting up in bed, lifting a
tea-cup with his left hand. His long white beard drifted over the cool
bedclothes. An appetizing breakfast, neatly served, was upon a table
beside him. And there in this safe haven, hovering about him tenderly
as ever in the days of his errant voyaging in the hapless time gone by,
was his ministering angel, that dear daughter, the sister of my choice.

She turned as we entered.

The old steady, faithful look in the gray eyes. The same pale, saddened
beauty. The unblenching gaze of patient waiting.

She looked at me vaguely, while life paused one pulse. Then, as I
stepped forward, the eloquent blood gushed into her face,--for she
knew that the friend could not long outrun the lover. She sprang into
my arms. Forgive me, John Brent, if I did put my lips close to her
burning cheek. It was only to whisper, “He is in London, searching for
you. He has never rested one moment since you were lost to us. In an
hour he will be here.”

“Dear father,” she said, drawing herself away, and smiling all aglow,
while tears proclaimed a joy too deep for any surface smile to speak,
“this is our dear friend, my preserver, Mr. Wade.”

Mr. Clitheroe studied me with a bewildered look, as I have seen an old
hulk of a mariner peer anxiously into a driving sea-fog from the shore,
while he talked of shipmates shaken from the yard, or of brave ships
that sunk in unknown seas. Then the mist slowly cleared away from the
old gentleman’s dim eyes, and he saw me in the scenery of my acting
with him.

“Ah yes!” he said, in a mild, dreamy voice, “I see it all. Sizzum’s
train, Fort Bridger, the Ball, the man with a bloody blanket on his
head, you and your friend galloping off over the prairie,--I see it
all.”

He paused, and seemed to review all that wild error of his into the
wilderness.

“Yes, I see it all,” he continued. “My dear Mr. Wade, I remember you
with unspeakable gratitude. You and your friend saved me this dearest
daughter. I have suffered wearing distress since then, and you must
pardon me for forgetting you one instant. Excuse my left hand! Dwarf
George is a capital machinist, but he says he cannot put new springs
into my right. That is nothing, my dear Mr. Wade, that is nothing. God
has given me peace of mind at last, my dear daughter has forgiven me
all my old follies, and my stanch old mate will never let me want a
roof over my head, or a crust of his bread and a sup of his can.”

       *       *       *       *       *

There is a Hansom cab-horse, now or late of London, who must remember
me with asperity.

But then there is a cabman who is my friend for life, if a giant fare
can win a cabman’s heart.

By the side of the remembrance of my gallop down Luggernel Alley,
I have a picture in my mind of myself, in a cab, cutting furiously
through the cañons of London in chase of a lover. The wolves and
cayotes of the by-streets--there are no antelopes in London--did not
attempt to follow our headlong speed. We rattled across Westminster
Bridge, up Whitehall, and so into May Fair to Lady Biddulph’s door.

The footman--why did he grin when he saw me?--recognized me as the
family friend of yesterday, and ushered me without ceremony into the
breakfast-room, where the family were all assembled.

Why did the footman grin? I perceived, as I entered. A mirror fronted
me. My face was like a Sioux’s in his war-paint. There had been flies
in Padiham’s shop, and I had brushed them away from my face, alas! with
hands blackened over the lathe.

All looked up amazed at this truculent intruder. It was,--

“_Enter Orlando, with his sword drawn._”

“Forbear, and eat no more!”

An injunction not necessary for poor Brent, who sat dreary and listless.

The rest forbore at my apparition. Egg-spoon paused at egg’s mouth.
Sugar sank to the floor of coffee-cup. Toast silenced its crackle.

Brent recognized me in the grimy pirate before him.

He sprang to his feet. “You have found her!” cried he.

“Yes.”

He looked at me eagerly.

“Well and happy,” I said; “in a safe haven with a faithful friend. Lady
Biddulph will pardon me, bringing such tidings, for rushing in in my
war-paint, American fashion.”

“You are always welcome, Mr. Wade, in what costume you please,” said
she. “Doubly so with this happy news. My dear Ellen! I must see her at
once,--as soon as closer friends have had their hour. But, Mr. Brent,
you are not going without your breakfast!”

Everybody smiled.

“Come! Come!” cried Brent.

“Come!” and as we hurried away, there was again the same light in his
eye,--the same life and ardor in his whole being, as when, in that wild
Love-Chase on the Plains, we galloped side by side.


                               THE END.




Transcriber’s Note:

Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation
in the text. These have been left unchanged. Jargon, dialect, obsolete
and alternative spellings were left unchanged. Three misspelled words
were corrected.

Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, or
partially printed letters and punctuation, were corrected. Final stops
missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations were added. Duplicate
words at line endings or page breaks were removed.





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