Chapter 5

He wanted them to listen to him carefully, to remember what he said, for it was important; it might be a matter of “lawing” hereafter,--and he couldn't be always repeating it to them,--he would have enough to do. There was a heap of it that, as women-folks, they couldn't understand, and weren't expected to. But he'd got it all clear now, and what he was saying was gospel. He'd always known to himself that the only good that could ever come to Sidon would come by railroad. When those fools talked wagon road he had said nothing, but he had his own ideas; he had worked for that idea without saying anything to anybody; that idea was to get possession of all the land along the embarcadero, which nobody cared for, and 'Lige Curtis was ready to sell for a song. Well, now, considering what had happened, he didn't mind telling them that he had been gradually getting possession of it, little by little, paying 'Lige Curtis in advances and installments, until it was his own! They had heard what those surveyors said; how that it was the only fit terminus for the railroad. Well, that land, and that water-front, and the terminus were HIS! And all from his own foresight and prudence.

It is needless to say that this was not the truth. But it is necessary to point out that this fabrication was the result of his last night's cogitations and his morning's experience. He had resolved upon a bold course. He had reflected that his neighbors would be more ready to believe in and to respect a hard, mercenary, and speculative foresight in his taking advantage of 'Lige's necessities than if he had--as was the case--merely benefited by them through an accident of circumstance and good humor. In the latter case he would be envied and hated; in the former he would be envied and feared. By logic of circumstance the greater wrong seemed to be less obviously offensive than the minor fault. It was true that it involved the doing of something he had not contemplated, and the certainty of exposure if 'Lige ever returned, but he was nevertheless resolved. The step from passive to active wrong-doing is not only easy, it is often a relief; it is that return to sincerity which we all require. Howbeit, it gave that ring of assertion to Daniel Harkutt's voice already noted, which most women like, and only men are prone to suspect or challenge. The incompleteness of his statement was, for the same reason, overlooked by his feminine auditors.

“And what is it worth, dad?” asked Phemie eagerly.

“Grant says I oughter get at least ten thousand dollars for the site of the terminus from the company, but of course I shall hold on to the rest of the land. The moment they get the terminus there, and the depot and wharf built, I can get my own price and buyers for the rest. Before the year is out Grant thinks it ought to go up ten per cent on the value of the terminus, and that a hundred thousand.”

“Oh, dad!” gasped Phemie, frantically clasping her knees with both hands as if to perfectly assure herself of this good fortune.

Mrs. Harkutt audibly murmured “Poor dear Dan'l,” and stood, as it were, sympathetically by, ready to commiserate the pains and anxieties of wealth as she had those of poverty. Clementina alone remained silent, clear-eyed, and unchanged.

“And to think it all came through THEM!” continued Phemie. “I always had an idea that Mr. Grant was smart, dad. And it was real kind of him to tell you.”

“I reckon father could have found it out without them. I don't know why we should be beholden to them particularly. I hope he isn't expected to let them think that he is bound to consider them our intimate friends just because they happened to drop in here at a time when his plans have succeeded.”

The voice was Clementina's, unexpected but quiet, unemotional and convincing. “It seemed,” as Mrs. Harkutt afterwards said, “as if the child had already touched that hundred thousand.” Phemie reddened with a sense of convicted youthful extravagance.

“You needn't fear for me,” said Harkutt, responding to Clementina's voice as if it were an echo of his own, and instinctively recognizing an unexpected ally. “I've got my own ideas of this thing, and what's to come of it. I've got my own ideas of openin' up that property and showin' its resources. I'm goin' to run it my own way. I'm goin' to have a town along the embarcadero that'll lay over any town in Contra Costa. I'm goin' to have the court-house and county seat there, and a couple of hotels as good as any in the Bay. I'm goin' to build that wagon road through here that those lazy louts slipped up on, and carry it clear over to Five Mile Corner, and open up the whole Tasajara Plain!”

They had never seen him look so strong, so resolute, so intelligent and handsome. A dimly prophetic vision of him in a black broadcloth suit and gold watch-chain addressing a vague multitude, as she remembered to have seen the Hon. Stanley Riggs of Alasco at the “Great Barbecue,” rose before Phemie's blue enraptured eyes. With the exception of Mrs. Harkutt,--equal to any possibilities on the part of her husband,--they had honestly never expected it of him. They were pleased with their father's attitude in prosperity, and felt that perhaps he was not unworthy of being proud of them hereafter.

“But we're goin' to leave Sidon,” said Phemie, “ain't we, paw?”

“As soon as I can run up a new house at the embarcadero,” said Harkutt peevishly, “and that's got to be done mighty quick if I want to make a show to the company and be in possession.”

“And that's easier for you to do, dear, now that 'Lige's disappeared,” said Mrs. Harkutt consolingly.

“What do ye mean by that? What the devil are ye talkin' about?” demanded Harkutt suddenly with unexpected exasperation.

“I mean that that drunken 'Lige would be mighty poor company for the girls if he was our only neighbor,” returned Mrs. Harkutt submissively.

Harkutt, after a fixed survey of his wife, appeared mollified. The two girls, who were mindful of his previous outburst the evening before, exchanged glances which implied that his manners needed correction for prosperity.

“You'll want a heap o' money to build there, Dan'l,” said Mrs. Harkutt in plaintive diffidence.

“Yes! Yes!” said Harkutt impatiently. “I've kalkilated all that, and I'm goin' to 'Frisco to-morrow to raise it and put this bill of sale on record.” He half drew Elijah Curtis's paper from his pocket, but paused and put it back again.

“Then THAT WAS the paper, dad,” said Phemie triumphantly.

“Yes,” said her father, regarding her fixedly, “and you know now why I didn't want anything said about it last night--nor even now.”

“And 'Lige had just given it to you! Wasn't it lucky?”

“He HADN'T just given it to me!” said her father with another unexpected outburst. “God Amighty! ain't I tellin' you all the time it was an old matter! But you jabber, jabber all the time and don't listen! Where's John Milton?” It had occurred to him that the boy might have read the paper--as his sister had--while it lay unheeded on the counter.

“In the store,--you know. You said he wasn't to hear anything of this, but I'll call him,” said Mrs. Harkutt, rising eagerly.

“Never mind,” returned her husband, stopping her reflectively, “best leave it as it is; if it's necessary I'll tell him. But don't any of you say anything, do you hear?”

Nevertheless a few hours later, when the store was momentarily free of loungers, and Harkutt had relieved his son of his monotonous charge, he made a pretense, while abstractedly listening to an account of the boy's stewardship, to look through a drawer as if in search of some missing article.

“You didn't see anything of a paper I left somewhere about here yesterday?” he asked carelessly.

“The one you picked up when you came in last night?” said the boy with discomposing directness.

Harkutt flushed slightly and drew his breath between his set teeth. Not only could he place no reliance upon ordinary youthful inattention, but he must be on his guard against his own son as from a spy! But he restrained himself.

“I don't remember,” he said with affected deliberation, “what it was I picked up. Do you? Did you read it?”

The meaning of his father's attitude instinctively flashed upon the boy. He HAD read the paper, but he answered, as he had already determined, “No.”

An inspiration seized Mr. Harkutt. He drew 'Lige Curtis's bill of sale from his pocket, and opening it before John Milton said, “Was it that?”

“I don't know,” said the boy. “I couldn't tell.” He walked away with affected carelessness, already with a sense of playing some part like his father, and pretended to whistle for the dog across the street. Harkutt coughed ostentatiously, put the paper back in his pocket, set one or two boxes straight on the counter, locked the drawer, and disappeared into the back passage. John Milton remained standing in the doorway looking vacantly out. But he did not see the dull familiar prospect beyond. He only saw the paper his father had opened and unfolded before him. It was the same paper he had read last night. But there were three words written there THAT WERE NOT THERE BEFORE! After the words “Value received” there had been a blank. He remembered that distinctly. This was filled in by the words, “Five hundred dollars.” The handwriting did not seem like his father's, nor yet entirely like 'Lige Curtis's. What it meant he did not know,--he would not try to think. He should forget it, as he had tried to forget what had happened before, and he should never tell it to any one!

There was a feverish gayety in his sisters' manner that afternoon that he did not understand; short colloquies that were suspended with ill concealed impatience when he came near them, and resumed when he was sent, on equally palpable excuses, out of the room. He had been accustomed to this exclusion when there were strangers present, but it seemed odd to him now, when the conversation did not even turn upon the two superior visitors who had been there, and of whom he confidently expected they would talk. Such fragments as he overheard were always in the future tense, and referred to what they intended to do. His mother, whose affection for him had always been shown in excessive and depressing commiseration of him in even his lightest moments, that afternoon seemed to add a prophetic and Cassandra-like sympathy for some vague future of his that would require all her ministration. “You won't need them new boots, Milty dear, in the changes that may be comin' to ye; so don't be bothering your poor father in his worriments over his new plans.”

“What new plans, mommer?” asked the boy abruptly. “Are we goin' away from here?”

“Hush, dear, and don't ask questions that's enough for grown folks to worry over, let alone a boy like you. Now be good,”--a quality in Mrs. Harkutt's mind synonymous with ceasing from troubling,--“and after supper, while I'm in the parlor with your father and sisters, you kin sit up here by the fire with your book.”

“But,” persisted the boy in a flash of inspiration, “is popper goin' to join in business with those surveyors,--a surveyin'?”

“No, child, what an idea! Run away there,--and mind!--don't bother your father.”

Nevertheless John Milton's inspiration had taken a new and characteristic shape. All this, he reflected, had happened since the surveyors came--since they had weakly displayed such a shameless and unmanly interest in his sisters! It could have but one meaning. He hung around the sitting-room and passages until he eventually encountered Clementina, taller than ever, evidently wearing a guilty satisfaction in her face, engrafted upon that habitual bearing of hers which he had always recognized as belonging to a vague but objectionable race whose members were individually known to him as “a proudy.”

“Which of those two surveyor fellows is it, Clemmy?” he said with an engaging smile, yet halting at a strategic distance.

“Is what?”

“Wot you're goin' to marry.”

“Idiot!”

“That ain't tellin' which,” responded the boy darkly.

Clementina swept by him into the sitting-room, where he heard her declare that “really that boy was getting too low and vulgar for anything.” Yet it struck him, that being pressed for further explanation, she did NOT specify why. This was “girls' meanness!”

Howbeit he lingered late in the road that evening, hearing his father discuss with the search-party that had followed the banks of the creek, vainly looking for further traces of the missing 'Lige, the possibility of his being living or dead, of the body having been carried away by the current to the bay or turning up later in some distant marsh when the spring came with low water. One who had been to his cabin beside the embarcadero reported that it was, as had been long suspected, barely habitable, and contained neither books, papers, nor records which would indicate his family or friends. It was a God-forsaken, dreary, worthless place; he wondered how a white man could ever expect to make a living there. If Elijah never turned up again it certainly would be a long time before any squatter would think of taking possession of it. John Milton knew instinctively, without looking up, that his father's eyes were fixed upon him, and he felt himself constrained to appear to be abstracted in gazing down the darkening road. Then he heard his father say, with what he felt was an equal assumption of carelessness: “Yes, I reckon I've got somewhere a bill of sale of that land that I had to take from 'Lige for an old bill, but I kalkilate that's all I'll ever see of it.”

Rain fell again as the darkness gathered, but he still loitered on the road and the sloping path of the garden, filled with a half resentful sense of wrong, and hugging with gloomy pride an increasing sense of loneliness and of getting dangerously wet. The swollen creek still whispered, murmured and swirled beside the bank. At another time he might have had wild ideas of emulating the surveyors on some extempore raft and so escaping his present dreary home existence; but since the disappearance of 'Lige, who had always excited an odd boyish antipathy in his heart, although he had never seen him, he shunned the stream contaminated with the missing man's unheroic fate. Presently the light from the open window of the sitting-room glittered on the wet leaves and sprays where he stood, and the voices of the family conclave came fitfully to his ear. They didn't want him there. They had never thought of asking him to come in. Well!--who cared? And he wasn't going to be bought off with a candle and a seat by the kitchen fire. No!

Nevertheless he was getting wet to no purpose. There was the tool-house and carpenter's shed near the bank; its floor was thickly covered with sawdust and pine-wood shavings, and there was a mouldy buffalo skin which he had once transported thither from the old wagon-bed. There, too, was his secret cache of a candle in a bottle, buried with other piratical treasures in the presence of the youthful Peters, who consented to be sacrificed on the spot in buccaneering fashion to complete the unhallowed rites. He unearthed the candle, lit it, and clearing away a part of the shavings stood it up on the floor. He then brought a prized, battered, and coverless volume from a hidden recess in the rafters, and lying down with the buffalo robe over him, and his cap in his hand ready to extinguish the light at the first footstep of a trespasser, gave himself up--as he had given himself up, I fear, many other times--to the enchantment of the page before him.

The current whispered, murmured, and sang, unheeded at his side. The voices of his mother and sisters, raised at times in eagerness or expectation of the future, fell upon his unlistening ears. For with the spell that had come upon him, the mean walls of his hiding-place melted away; the vulgar stream beside him might have been that dim, subterraneous river down which Sindbad and his bale of riches were swept out of the Cave of Death to the sunlight of life and fortune, so surely and so simply had it transported him beyond the cramped and darkened limits of his present life. He was in the better world of boyish romance,--of gallant deeds and high emprises; of miraculous atonement and devoted sacrifice; of brave men, and those rarer, impossible women,--the immaculate conception of a boy's virgin heart. What mattered it that behind that glittering window his mother and sisters grew feverish and excited over the vulgar details of their real but baser fortune? From the dark tool-shed by the muddy current, John Milton, with a battered dogs'-eared chronicle, soared on the wings of fancy far beyond their wildest ken!

CHAPER V.

Prosperity had settled upon the plains of Tasajara. Not only had the embarcadero emerged from the tules of Tasajara Creek as a thriving town of steamboat wharves, warehouses, and outlying mills and factories, but in five years the transforming railroad had penetrated the great plain itself and revealed its undeveloped fertility. The low-lying lands that had been yearly overflowed by the creek, now drained and cultivated, yielded treasures of wheat and barley that were apparently inexhaustible. Even the helpless indolence of Sidon had been surprised into activity and change. There was nothing left of the straggling settlement to recall its former aspect. The site of Harkutt's old store and dwelling was lost and forgotten in the new mill and granary that rose along the banks of the creek. Decay leaves ruin and traces for the memory to linger over; prosperity is unrelenting in its complete and smiling obliteration of the past.

But Tasajara City, as the embarcadero was now called, had no previous record, and even the former existence of an actual settler like the forgotten Elijah Curtis was unknown to the present inhabitants. It was Daniel Harkutt's idea carried out in Daniel Harkutt's land, with Daniel Harkutt's capital and energy. But Daniel Harkutt had become Daniel Harcourt, and Harcourt Avenue, Harcourt Square, and Harcourt House, ostentatiously proclaimed the new spelling of his patronymic. When the change was made and for what reason, who suggested it and under what authority, were not easy to determine, as the sign on his former store had borne nothing but the legend, Goods and Provisions, and his name did not appear on written record until after the occupation of Tasajara; but it is presumed that it was at the instigation of his daughters, and there was no one to oppose it. Harcourt was a pretty name for a street, a square, or a hotel; even the few in Sidon who had called it Harkutt admitted that it was an improvement quite consistent with the change from the fever-haunted tules and sedges of the creek to the broad, level, and handsome squares of Tasajara City.

This might have been the opinion of a visitor at the Harcourt House, who arrived one summer afternoon from the Stockton boat, but whose shrewd, half-critical, half-professional eyes and quiet questionings betrayed some previous knowledge of the locality. Seated on the broad veranda of the Harcourt House, and gazing out on the well-kept green and young eucalyptus trees of the Harcourt Square or Plaza, he had elicited a counter question from a prosperous-looking citizen who had been lounging at his side.

“I reckon you look ez if you might have been here before, stranger.”

“Yes,” said the stranger quietly, “I have been. But it was when the tules grew in the square opposite, and the tide of the creek washed them.”

“Well,” said the Tasajaran, looking curiously at the stranger, “I call myself a pioneer of Tasajara. My name's Peters,--of Peters and Co.,--and those warehouses along the wharf, where you landed just now, are mine; but I was the first settler on Harcourt's land, and built the next cabin after him. I helped to clear out them tules and dredged the channels yonder. I took the contract with Harcourt to build the last fifteen miles o' railroad, and put up that depot for the company. Perhaps you were here before that?”

“I was,” returned the stranger quietly.

“I say,” said Peters, hitching his chair a little nearer to his companion, “you never knew a kind of broken-down feller, called Curtis--'Lige Curtis--who once squatted here and sold his right to Harkutt? He disappeared; it was allowed he killed hisself, but they never found his body, and, between you and me, I never took stock in that story. You know Harcourt holds under him, and all Tasajara rests on that title.”

“I've heard so,” assented the stranger carelessly, “but I never knew the original settler. Then Harcourt has been lucky?”

“You bet. He's got three millions right about HERE, or within this quarter section, to say nothing of his outside speculations.”

“And lives here?”

“Not for two years. That's his old house across the plaza, but his women-folks live mostly in 'Frisco and New York, where he's got houses too. They say they sorter got sick of Tasajara after his youngest daughter ran off with a feller.”

“Hallo!” said the stranger with undisguised interest. “I never heard of that! You don't mean that she eloped”--he hesitated.

“Oh, it was a square enough marriage. I reckon too square to suit some folks; but the fellow hadn't nothin', and wasn't worth shucks,--a sort of land surveyor, doin' odd jobs, you know; and the old man and old woman were agin it, and the tother daughter worse of all. It was allowed here--you know how women-folks talk!--that the surveyor had been sweet on Clementina, but had got tired of being played by her, and took up with Phemie out o' spite. Anyhow they got married, and Harcourt gave them to understand they couldn't expect anything from him. P'raps that's why it didn't last long, for only about two months ago she got a divorce from Rice and came back to her family again.”

“Rice?” queried the stranger. “Was that her husband's name, Stephen Rice?”

“I reckon! You knew him?”

“Yes,--when the tide came up to the tules, yonder,” answered the stranger musingly. “And the other daughter,--I suppose she has made a good match, being a beauty and the sole heiress?”

The Tasajaran made a grimace. “Not much! I reckon she's waitin' for the Angel Gabriel,--there ain't another good enough to suit her here. They say she's had most of the big men in California waitin' in a line with their offers, like that cue the fellows used to make at the 'Frisco post-office steamer days--and she with nary a letter or answer for any of them.”

“Then Harcourt doesn't seem to have been as fortunate in his family affairs as in his speculations?”

Peters uttered a grim laugh. “Well, I reckon you know all about his son's stampeding with that girl last spring?”

“His son?” interrupted the stranger. “Do you mean the boy they called John Milton? Why, he was a mere child!”