Chapter 4

"'Aggy,' says I at last, 'I've got a good notion to lay two violent hands on you, and wind you up like an eight-day clock, but rather than make hard feelings between friends, I'll refrain. Besides you are a funny cuss, that's sure. One thing, boy, you can mark down. We leave here to-morrow morning.'

"'All right,' says Ag. 'This sporting life is the very devil. I like out doors as well as the next man, when I get there.'

"So the morrow morning, away we went. All we had for kit was the picks, shovels, and pans; the rest of our belongings was staying with the Hotel-man until we made a rise.

"Ag said he'd be cussed if he'd walk. A hundred and fifty miles of a stroll was too many.

"'But we ain't got a cent to pay the stage fare,' says I.

"'Borrow it of Uncle Hotel-keep,' says he.

"'Not by a town site,' says I. 'We owe him all we're going to, at this very minute--you'll have to hoof it, that's all.'

"'I tell you I won't. I don't like to have anybody walk on my feet, not even myself. I can stand off that stage driver so easy, that you'll wonder I don't take it up as a profession. Now, don't raise any more objections--please don't,' says he. 'I can't tell you how nervous you make me, always finding some fault with everything I try to do. That's no way for a hired man to act, let alone a pardner.'

"So, of course, he got the best of me as usual, and we climbed into the stage when she come along. Now, our bad luck seemed to hold, because you wouldn't find many men in that country who wouldn't stake two fellers to a waggon ride wherever they wanted to go, and be pleasant about it, I'd have sure seen that the man got paid, even if Aggy forgot it, but the man that drove us was the surliest brute that ever growled. When you'd speak to him, he'd say, 'Unh'--a style of thing that didn't go well in that part of the country. I kept my mouth shut, as knowing that I didn't have the come-up-with weighed on my spirits; but Aggy gave him the jolly. He only meant it in fun, and there was plenty of reason for it, too, for you never seen such a game of driving as that feller put up in all your life. The Lord save us! He cut around one corner of a mountain, so that for the longest second I've lived through, my left foot hung over about a thousand feet of fresh air. I'd have had time to write my will before I touched bottom if we'd gone over. I don't know as I turned pale, but my hair ain't been of the same rosy complexion since.

"'Well!' says Aggy in a surprised tone of voice when we got all four wheels on the ground again. 'Here we are!' says he. 'Who'd have suspected it? I thought he was going to take the short cut down to the creek.'

"The driver turned round with one corner of his lip h'isted--a dead ringer of a mean man--Says he to Aggy, 'Yer a funny bloke, ain't yer?'

"'Why!' says Ag, 'that's for you to say--wouldn't look well coming from me--but if you press me, I'll admit I give birth to a little gem now and then.'

"Our bold buck puts on a great swagger. 'Well yer needn't be funny in this waggon,' says he. 'The pair of yer spongin' a ride! Yer needn't be gay--yer hear me, don't cher?'

"'Why, I hear you as plain as though you set right next me,' says Ag. 'Now, you listen and see if I'm audible at the same range--You're a blasted chump!' he roars, in a tone of voice that would have carried forty mile. Did _you_ hear that, Red?' he asks very innocent. I was so hot at the driver's sass--the cussed low-downness of doing a feller a favour and then heaving it at him--that you could have lit a match on me anywheres, but to save me I couldn't help laughing--Ag had the comicallest way!

"At that the driver begins to larrup the horses. I ain't the kind to feel faint when a cayuse gets what's coming to him for raising the devil, but to see that lad whale his team because there wasn't nothing else he dared hit, got me on my hind legs. I nestled one hand in his hair and twisted his ugly mug back.

"'Quit that!' says I.

"'You let me be--I ain't hurting _you_,' he hollers.

"'That ain't to say I won't be hurting you soon,' says I. 'You put the bud on them horses again, and I'll boot the spine of your back up through the top of your head till it stands out like a flag-staff. Just one more touch, and you get it!' says I.

"He didn't open his mouth again till we come to the river. Then he pulled up. 'This is about as far as I care to carry you two gents for nothin',' he says. 'Of course you're two to one, and I can't do nothing if you see fit to bull the thing through. But I'll say this: if either one or both of you roosters has got the least smell of a gentleman about him, he won't have to be told his company ain't wanted twice.'

"Now, mind you, Ag and me didn't have the first cussed thing--not grub, nor blankets, nor gun, nor nothing; and this the feller well knew.

"'Red,' says Aggy, 'what do you say to pulling this thing apart and seeing what makes it act so?'

"'No,' says I, 'don't touch it--it might be catching. Now, you whelp!' says I to the driver, 'you tell us if there's a place where we can get anything to eat around here?' We'd expected to go hungry until we hit the camp some forty mile further on, where we knew there'd be plenty for anybody that wanted it.

"'Yes,' says he; 'there's a man running a shack two mile up the river.'

"'All right,' says I. 'Drive on. You've played us as dirty a trick as one man can play another. If we ever get a cinch on you, you can expect we'll pull her till the latigoes snap.'

"He kept shut till he got across the river, where he felt safe.

"'It's all right about that cinch!' he hollers back, grinning. 'Only wait till you get it, yer suckers! Sponges! Beats! Dead-heads! Yah!'

"Well, a man can't catch a team of horses, and that's all there is about it, but I want to tell you he was on the anxious seat for a quarter of a mile. We tried hard.

"When we got back to where we started and could breathe again, we held a council of war.

"'Now Aggy,' says I, 'we're dumped--what shall we do?'

He sat there awhile looking around him, snapping pebbles with his thumb.

"'Tell you what it is, Red,' he says at last, 'we might as well go mining right here. This is likely gravel, and there's a river. If that bar in front of you had been further in the mountains, it would have been punched full of holes. It's only because it's on the road that nobody's taken the trouble to see what was in it. This road was made by cattle ranchers, that didn't know nothing about mining, and every miner that's gone over the trail had his mouth set to get further along as quick as possible--just like us. Do you see that little hollow running down to the river? Well you try your luck there. I give you that place as it's the most probable, and you as a tenderfoot in the business will have all the luck. I'll make a stab where I am.'

"Well, sir, it sounds queer to tell it, and it seems queerer still to think of the doing of it, but I hadn't dug two feet before I come to bed rock, and there was some heavy black chunks.

"'Aggy,' says I, 'what's these things?' throwing one over to him. He caught it and Stared at it.

"'Where did you get that?' says he, in almost a whisper.

"'Why, out of the hole, of course!' says I, laughing. 'Come take a look!'

"Aggy wasn't the kind of man to go off the handle over trifles, but when he looked into that hole he turned perfectly green. His knees give out from under him and he sat on the ground like a man in a trance, wiping the sweat off his face with a motion like a machine.

"'What the devil ails you?' says I astonished. I thought maybe I'd done something I hadn't ought to do, through ignorance of the rules and regulations of mining.

"'Red,' says he dead solemn, 'I've mined for twenty year, and from Old Mexico to Alaska, but I never saw anything that was ace-high to that before. Gold laying loose in chunks on top of the bed-rock is too much for me--I wish Hy could see this.'

"'Gold!' says I. 'What you talking about? What have those black hunks to do with gold?'

"The only answer he made was to lay the one I had thrown to him on top of a rock and hit her a crack with a pick. Then he handed it to me. Sure enough! There under the black was the yeller. Of course, it I'd known more about the business I could have told it by the weight, but I'd never seen a piece of gold fresh off the farm before in my life. I hadn't the slightest idea what it looked like, and I learned afterward it all looks different. Some of it shines up yaller in the start; some of it's red, and some is like ours, coated black with iron-crust.

"So I looked at Ag, and Ag looked at me, neither one of us believing anything at all for awhile. I simply couldn't get hold of the thing--I ain't yet, for that matter. I expect to wake up and find it a pipe dream, and in some ways I wouldn't mind if it was. I never was so completely two men as I was on that occasion. One of 'em was hopping around and hollering with Ag, yelling 'hooray!' and the other didn't take much interest in the proceedings at all. And it wasn't until I thought, 'Now I can pay that cussed cayote of a stage driver what I owe him!' that I got any good out of it. That brought it home to me. When I spoke to Ag about paying the driver, he says, 'That's so,' then he takes a quick look around. 'We can pay him in full, too, old horse!' he hollers, and there was a most joyful smile on his face.

"'Red,' say he, 'do you know this is the only ford on the river for--I don't know how many miles--perhaps the whole length of her?'

"'Well?' says I.

"'Our little placer claim,' says Aggy slowly, rubbing his hands together, 'covers that ford; and by a judicious taking up of claims for various uncles and brothers and friends of ours along the creek on the lowlands, we can fix it so they can't even bridge it.'

"'Do you mean they can't cross our claim if we say they can't?'

"'Sure thing!' says Aggy. 'There's you and me and the law to say "no" to that--I wish I had a gun.'

"'You don't need any gun for that skunk of a driver.'

"'Of course not, but there'll be passengers, and there's no telling how excited them passengers will be when they find they've got to go over the hills ford-hunting.'

"'Are you going to send 'em all around, Ag?'

"'The whole bunch. Anybody coming back from the diggings has gold in his clothes, so it won't hurt 'em none, and I propose to give that stage line an advertising that won't do it a bit of good. Come along, Red; let's see that lad that has the shack up the river. We need something to eat, and maybe he's got a gun. If he's a decent feller, we'll let him in on a claim. Never mind about the hole!--it won't run away, and there's nobody to touch anything--come on.'

"So we went up the river. The man's name was White, and he was a white man by nature, too. He fed us well, and was just as hot as us when we told him about the stage driver's trick. Then we told him about the find and let him in.

"'Now,' says Aggy, 'have you got a gun?'

"'I have _that_,' says the man. 'My dad used to be a duck-hunter on Chesapeake bay. When you say "gun," _I'll_ show you a gun.' He dove in under his bunk and fetched out what I should say was a number one bore shot gun, with barrels six foot long.

"'Gentlemen,' says he, holding the gun up and patting it lovingly, 'if you ram a quarter-pound of powder in each one of them barrels, and a handful of buck-shot on top of that, you've got an argument that couldn't be upset by the Supreme Court. I'll guarantee that when you point her anywheres within ten feet of a man not over a hundred yards away, and let her do her duty, all the talent that that man's fambly could employ couldn't gather enough of him to recognise him by, and you won't be in bed more'n long enough to heal a busted shoulder.'

"'I hope it ain't going to be my painful line of performance to pull the trigger,' says Aggy. 'I think the sight of her would have weight with most people. When's the stage due back?'

"'Day after to-morrow, about noon.'

"'That gives us lots of time to stake, and to salt claims that can't show cause their own selves,' says Aggy. 'I think we're all right.'

"The next day we worked like the Old Harry. We had everything fixed up right by nightfall, and there was nothing to do but dig and wait.

"Curious folks we all are, ain't we? I should have said my own self that if I'd found gold by the bucketful, I'd be more interested in that, than I would be in getting even with a mut that had done me dirt, but it wasn't so. Perhaps it was because I hadn't paid much attention to money all my life, and I had paid the strictest attention to the way other people used me. Living where there's so few folks accounts for that, I suppose.

"Getting even on our esteemed friend the stage driver was right in your Uncle Reddy's line, and Aggy and our new pard White seemed to take kindly to it, also.

"If ever you saw three faces filled with innocent glee, it was when we heard the wheels of that stage coming--why, the night before I was woke up by somebody laughing. There was Aggy sound asleep, sitting up hugging himself in the moonlight.

"'Oh, my! Oh, MY!' says he. 'It's the only ford for four thousand miles!'

"We planted a sign in the middle of the road with this wording on it in big letters, made with the black end of a stick.

NOTICE!!

THIS AND ADJOINING CLAIMS ARE THE PROPERTY OF AGAMEMNON G. JONES, RED SAUNDERS, JOHN HENRY WHITE, ET AL.

TRESPASSING DONE AT YOUR OWN RISK. OWNERS WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE REMAINS.

"There was a stretch of about a mile on the level before us. When the stage come in plain sight Aggy proceeds to load up 'Old Moral Suasion,' as he called her, so that the folks could see there was no attempt at deception. They come pretty fairly slow after that. At fifty yards, Ag hollers 'Halt!' The team sat right down on their tails.

"'Now, Mr. Snick'umfritz,' says Aggy, 'you that drives, I mean, come here and read this little sign.'

"'Suppose I don't?' says the feller, trying to be smart before the passengers.

"'It's a horrible supposition,' says Aggy, and the innocent will have to suffer with the guilty.' Then he cocks the gun.

"'God sakes! Don't shoot!' yells one of the passengers. 'Man, you ought to have more sense than to try and pick him out of a crowd with a shot-gun! Get down there, you fool, and make it quick!'

"So the driver walked our way, and read. He never said a word. I reckon he realized it was the only ford for four thousand miles, more or less, just as Aggy had remarked. There he stood, with his mouth and eyes wide open.

"'I'd like to have you other gentlemen come up and see our first clean up, so you won't think we're running in a windy,' says Aggy. They wanted to see bad, as you can imagine, and when they did see about fifteen pound of gold in the bottom of my old hat, they talked like people that hadn't had a Christian bringing up.

"'Oh Lord!' groans one man. 'Brigham Young and all the prophets of the Mormon religion! This is my tenth trip over this line, and me and Pete Hendricks played a game of seven-up right on the spot where that gent hit her, not over a month ago, when the stage broke down! Somebody just make a guess at the way I feel and give me one small drink.' And he put his hand to his head. 'Say, boys!' he goes on, 'you don't want the whole blamed creek, do you? Let _us_ in!'

"'How's that, fellers?' says Ag to me and White. We said we was agreeable.

"'All right, in you come!' says Aggy. 'There ain't no hog about our firm--but as for you,' says he, walking on his tip-toes up to the driver, 'as for you, you cock-eyed whelp, around you go! Around you go!' he hollers, jamming the end of Moral Suasion into the driver's trap. 'Oh, and WON'T you go 'round, though!' says he. 'Listen to me, now: if any one of your ancestors for twenty-four generations back had ever done anything as decent as robbing a hen-coop, it would have conferred a kind of degree of nobility upon him. It wouldn't be possible to find an ornerier cuss than you, if a man raked all hell with a fine-toothed comb. Now, you stare-coated, mangey, bandy-legged, misbegotten, out-law coyote, fly!--fly!' whoops Aggy, jumping four foot in the air, 'before I squirt enough lead into your system to make it a paying job to melt you down!'

"The stage driver acted according to orders. Three wide steps and he was in the waggon, and with one screech like a p'izened bob-cat, he fairly lifted the cayuses over the first ridge. Nobody never saw him any more, and nobody wanted to.

"So that's the way I hit my stake, son, just as I'd always expected--by not knowing what I was doing any part of the time--and now, there comes my iron-horse coughing up the track! I'll write you sure, boy, and you let old Reddy know what's going on--and on your life, don't forget to give it to the lads straight why I sneaked off on the quiet! I've got ten years older in the last six months. Well, here we go quite fresh, and damned if I altogether want to, neither--too late to argue though--by-bye, son!"

When the Chinook Struck Fairfield

I

Miss Mattie sat on her little front porch, facing the setting sun. Across the road, now ankle deep in June dust, was the wreck of the Peters place: back-broken roof, crumbling chimneys, shutters hanging down like broken wings, the old house had the pathetic appeal of ship-wrecked gentility. A house without people in it, even when it is in repair, is as forlorn as a dog who has lost his master.

Up the road were more houses of the nondescript village pattern, made neither for comfort nor looks. God knows why they built such houses--perhaps it was in accordance with the old Puritan idea that any kind of physical perfection is blasphemy. Some of these were kept in paint and window glass, but there were enough poor relations to spoil the effect.

Down the road, between the arches of the weeping willows, came first the brook, with the stone bridge--this broken as to coping and threadbare in general--then on the hither side of the way some three or four neighbour's houses, and opposite, the blacksmith's shop and post-office, the latter, of course, in a store, where you could buy anything from stale groceries to shingles.

In short, Fairfield was an Eastern village whose cause had departed. A community drained of the male principle, leaving only a few queer men, the blacksmith, and some halfling boys, to give tone to the background of dozens of old maids.

An unsympathetic stranger would have felt that nothing was left to the Fairfieldians but memory, and the sooner they lost that, the better.

Take a wineglassful of raspberry vinegar, two tablespoonsful of sugar, half a cup each of boneset and rhubarb, a good full cup of the milk of human kindness, dilute in a gallon of water, and you have the flavor of Fairfield. There was just enough of each ingredient to spoil the taste of all the rest.

Miss Mattie rested her elbow on the railing, her chin in her hand, and gazed thoughtfully about her. As a matter of fact, she was the most inspiring thing in view. At a distance of fifty yards she was still a tall, slender girl. Her body retained the habit, as well as the lines of youth; a trick of gliding into unexpected, pleasing attitudes, which would have been awkward but for the suppleness of limb to which they testified, and the unconsciousness and ease of their irregularity.

Her face was a child's face in the ennobling sense of the word. The record of the years written upon it seemed a masquerade--the face of a clear-eyed girl of fourteen made up to represent her own aunt at a fancy dress party. A face drawn a trifle fine, a little ascetic, but balanced by the humour of the large, shapely mouth, and really beautiful in bone and contour. The beauty of mignonette, and doves, and gentle things.

You could see that she was thirty-five, in the blatant candor of noon, but now, blushed with the pink of the setting sun, she was still in the days of the fairy prince.

Miss Mattie's revery idled over the year upon year of respectable stupidity that represented life in Fairfield, while her eyes and soul were in the boiling gold of the sky-glory. She sighed.

A panorama of life minced before Miss Mattie's mind about as vivid and full of red corpuscles as a Greek frieze. Her affectionate nature was starved. They visited each other, the ladies of Fairfield--these women who had rolled on the floor together as babies--in their best black, or green or whatever it might be, and gloves! This, though the summer sun might be hammering down with all his might. And then they sat in a closed room and talked in a reserved fashion which was entirely the property of the call. Of course, one could have a moment's real talk by chance meeting, and there were the natural griefs of life to break the corsets of this etiquette, although in general, the griefs seemed to be long drawn out and conventional affairs, as if nature herself at last yielded to the system, conquered by the invincible conventionality and stubbornness of the ladies of Fairfield. It was the unspoken but firm belief of each of these women, that a person of their circle who had no more idea of respectability than to drop dead on the public road would never go to Heaven.

Poor Miss Mattie! Small wonder she dropped her hands, sat back and wondered, with another sigh, if it were for this she was born? She did not rebel--there was no violence in her--but she regretted exceedingly. In spite of her slenderness, it was a wide, mother-lap in which her hands rested, an obvious cradle for little children. And instinctively it would come to you as you looked at her, that there could be no more comfortable place for a tired man to come home to, than a household presided over by this slow-moving, gentle woman. There was nothing old-maidish about Miss Mattie but the tale of her years. She had had offers, such as Fairfield and vicinity could boast, and declined them with tact, and the utmost gratitude to the suitor for the compliment; but her "no" though mild was firm, for there lay within her a certain quiet valiant spirit, which would rather endure the fatigue and loneliness of old age in her little house, than to take a larger life from any but the man who was all. A commonplace in fiction; in real life sometimes quite a strain.

The sun distorted himself into a Rugby football, and hurried down as though to be through with Fairfield as soon as possible. It was a most magnificent sun-set; flaming, gorgeous, wild--beyond the management of the women of Fairfield--and Miss Mattie stared into the heart of it with a longing for something to happen. Then the thought came, "What could happen?" she sighed again, and, with eyes blinded by Heaven-shine, glanced down the village street.