Chapter 6

Eli's jury was excused for the rest of the day, and by noon he was in his own village, relieved, too, of his most pressing burden: for George Cahoon had met him on the road, and told him that he was not going to the West, after all, for the present, and should not need his money. But, as he turned the bend of the road and neared his house, he felt a rising fear that some disturbing rumor might have reached his wife about his action on the jury. And, to his distress and amazement, there she was, sitting in a chair at the door.

"Lizzie!" he said, "what does this mean? Are you crazy?"

"I'll tell you what it means," she said, as she stood up with a little smile and clasped her hands behind her. "This morning, it got around and came to me that you was standing out all alone for John Wood, and that the talk was that they'd be down on you, and drive you out of town, and that everybody pitied _me--pitied me_! And when I heard that, I thought I'd see! And my strength seemed to come all back, and I got right up, and dressed myself. And what's more, I'm going to get well now!"

And she did.

YOUNG STRONG OF "THE CLARION."

BY MILICENT WASHBURN SHINN.

_Overland Monthly, September, 1884._

If you had asked any resident of Green's Ferry some eight years ago--say, in '76--who were the leading men of his town, he would doubtless have begun:

"Well, there's Judge Garvey, of course. Then there's Uncle Billy Green, who built the first shanty there in '49, and young Strong of 'The Clarion'--"

However he might continue his enumeration, it would certainly have been as above for the first three names. One you would have recognized, if you had been following State politics closely for some years; for Judge Garvey was very regularly chosen State senator in his district, and had held the barren honor of presidential elector the last time his party carried the State. In '76, some of the papers were urging his nomination for Congress, and politicians thought his chance of such a nomination increasing. It has not turned out so; his name has quite dropped out of the papers, and it is said he does not certainly control his own county now; but at that time he was the most potent political influence in three counties. What he influenced them to, I never clearly understood, for I cannot recall that I ever heard his name mentioned in connection with any measure or opinion.

A file of "The Clarion" during the four years that young Strong was editor would doubtless throw light on the matter. "The Clarion" was at this time a sort of voice crying in the wilderness about Reform, which was a very new idea, indeed, to its readers. Garvey did not like the paper, and young Strong disliked Garvey very much; but the two men had kept on fairly good terms--not so rigid good terms, of course, as to forbid their expressing to third parties the frankest contempt for each other. The Judge had here the advantage, for Strong despised him indignantly, as a knave, while he despised Strong--or said he did--pityingly, as a fool. He must, however, have at bottom honored the young fellow with some serious antipathy; for it was after all no laughing matter that a boy of twenty-five should come into "his Gaul, which he had conquered by arms," and filch away his home paper from under his very eyes. Moreover, though people read the editorials, laughed, and voted with the Judge just the same--they still did read them. However, Judge Garvey certainly was more civil to Strong than Strong was to him.

As for Uncle Billy Green, his rank was due not only to his connection with the "first shanty" (a house of entertainment at the point where a trail turned from the river toward the mines), but to his having remained steadily on the spot ever since, putting up a larger building at intervals as the settlement gathered around him, until now he was proprietor of the American Eagle Hotel, a house of goodly dimensions and generous equipment--billiard-room, bowling alley, shooting-gallery. Nor did Uncle Billy Green own and conduct this house in a purely business spirit; a more modest one would have been more profitable; he liked to "do that much for the town." A man by the name of Gulliver had established the old rope-ferry, before the day of bridges, but it was naturally called Green's Ferry, being a ferry at Green's place. He had been of an undoubted valor in the Indian fights of early days, was full of reminiscences, had no personal objections to anybody or anything, and had long given over to Judge Garvey the trouble of forming his opinions.

Judge Garvey and young Strong were pretty sure to be put upon such boards or committees as the local affairs of the small town demanded; and in local matters they proved to pull together fairly well, however at odds they were politically. But in the end it was not over politics, but over the district school, that they fell out squarely. They were both trustees, and as Green was the third, the board seemed in little danger from any too radical reforming tendencies young Strong might be guilty of, and the Judge had no thought of danger as he walked down to "The Clarion" office, a breathless September afternoon, a couple of days before the school should open.

He found young Strong in his editorial room. This was a corner of the printing-office, fenced off by a great screen pasted over with old exchanges. Behind this, Strong sat at his table, correcting proof energetically. It was evident that he took the editing of this little four-page weekly rather seriously--but, then, a man must needs be business-like to produce even four pages weekly with one assistant, and Strong had to economize time enough from strictly editorial functions to do a goodly share of type-setting and the rest of the mechanics of the office.

"I beg your pardon for interrupting you, Mr. Strong," said the Judge. "I perceive you are arduously occupied. But it becomes necessary to confer with you with regard to the school-teacher."

The Judge was a tall and vigorously built man--a little red-faced, but good-looking, if one did not insist on too fine a definiteness of outline. He spoke habitually with a certain inflation of manner, and tried to form himself upon a Southern type that was pretty abundant in our politics some years earlier. He was, however, a native of rural New York, early transplanted to California.

Strong turned in his chair, and sitting sidewise, rested his elbow on the proof-sheets, holding the pencil still in his fingers.

"Well?" he said. "I thought everything was settled."

"Assuredly." Judge Garvey rested his folded arms upon the pile of books stacked at the rear of the table, and leaned over them in a friendly way. "Mr. Coakley is to arrive Sunday evening, and will begin the term on Monday morning, to the great satisfaction, I can guarantee, of all concerned. A slight and merely temporary embarrassment has arisen, with respect to which a few words will make it all right. In point of fact, the young woman with whom we previously held correspondence--who, you will remember, broke her engagement with us to take a more advantageous position--is here."

The Judge stopped for question or comment, but as Strong waited for explanation, he went on:

"She has, it appears, failed after all to secure that, and come here expecting to fall back upon our school, not having heard that it was engaged."

"Well, that's unfortunate for her," said Strong, "but you can't ship Coakley now."

"Your views coincide exactly with my own, my dear sir." The Judge straightened up with some relief. "I have only to ask, then, for a note to the lady to that effect, that my own explanation already given may be corroborated."

Strong began to look alert and suspicious at this.

"Views coincide?" he said. "What two views could there be? What does she say brought her here?"

"She's got an idea that she's got first claim on the place," said the Judge, plumping suddenly into colloquial diction. He had a trick of doing so when he got down to business. It would have had something the effect of candid confession, produced by a maiden's plain-hair days alternated with her waved-hair days, had not the grandiloquence of tone and manner become so far second nature that it ran through both his dialects, and lessened the contrast. "You can't always make a woman see sense."

Strong looked suspiciously at him a few seconds. "Well, I'll go see her this evening," he said. "Where's she staying?"

"That is a totally superfluous tax on your time, my dear Strong," said the Judge, leaning persuasively across the books again. "I have here a mere formal line, stating that Coakley is the regularly engaged teacher of the school, and will begin next Monday; your signature to it--Green's and mine are already there--will be all that is necessary." He pushed pen and ink toward Strong with his exaggerated air of courtesy.

"Oh, I'm not going to sign things that way, you know. I'll go see her." He turned and drew his proof-sheets to him with an air of dismissal.

The Judge stood up very straight, expanded his chest, and folded his arms according to his conception of the Virginian manner. "Am I to understand, sir, that you question my veracity?"

"I don't question anything," said the young man, impatiently. "I'll know what I'm talking about when I've seen her."

"Permit me to suggest, sir"--the Judge was approaching his platform manner--"permit me to suggest, sir, that Mr. Green and myself constitute a majority of the board, and Mr. Green, sir--Uncle Billy Green--has confidence in my honor, and will sustain my action, whatever line you may be persuaded to adopt."

"Oh, as to that," said Strong, exaggerating his crispness of manner in protest against the Judge's staginess, "I'm clerk of the board, and you can't hold a legal meeting nor pay a salary without me. What's the reason you don't want me to see her?"

Judge Garvey unfolded his arms, fell back a step, and dropped easily into the sonorous declamation that made the stalwart Judge no inconspicuous figure on the floor of the Legislature. The newspapers, of course, were responsible for his language--as for the rest of his education; but such as it was, he used it fluently, and the declamatory manner was, to his constituency, quite an essential of eloquence--the prime difference, in fact, between oratory and plain talking.

"You cast aspersions upon my honor, sir. Through me you insult the people of Green's Ferry--of this county--of this district--the enlightened and honorable constituency who it is my proud honor to represent. I sco-r-n to answer your insinuations, sir. They will be hurled back upon yourself by the united voice and righteous indignation of my justly aroused fellow-townsmen, by the voters of this noble district--I may say, by the whole State of California--to which I am not unknown, sir."

Half-a-dozen of the justly aroused fellow-townsmen were straggling in from the street, for in Green's Ferry a sprinkling of the citizens spend the warm afternoons sitting in absolute tranquillity on boxes and barrels here and there, under the awnings of the several business blocks; and the knowledge that a row was at last on between Judge Garvey and young Strong reached them at the first peal. The Judge, alive to the increase of his audience, raised his voice a shade, and went on with a curious mixture of complacency and genuine wrath.

"Is it lack of confidence that has sent me to represent my honorable constituency in the legislative halls of California, Mr. Strong? Have I received that proud token of esteem only to be insulted by one whose obscurity is his only shield; who, with unknown record, with no recommendation save his own overwhelming self-esteem, comes among us to sow dissent in peaceful counsels, and draw scorn and contempt upon his own head by impotent and futile attacks upon those whom he is powerless to harm?"

This rounded the climax well, so the Judge only added: "The call you propose, sir, I shall regard as a direct insult to myself," and strode dramatically from the room.

The papered screen went crashing to the floor behind him. The justly aroused fellow-townsmen looked after him, laughing but admiring.

"Laid you out, didn't he, Strong?"

"That's the way he does it at Sacramento. Oh, the Judge is a real orator--there's no doubt of that."

"_He_ don't have to make his speech up before-hand. No, sir, right where he is, any time of day, he just turns the faucet, and there it comes."

"What was the row, anyway, Strong?"

"I don't know myself; something about a teacher--he began to bluster all of a sudden." Strong walked over to the screen, picked it up, set it straight along a crack with intense precision, and went back to his seat. "Drunk, isn't he? I haven't heard him take the stump that way since election. He's always made rather a point of not quarrelling with me, too."

"Oh, he's no drunker'n usual," answered with candor a fellow-townsman. "The Judge ain't really himself until he's a little off. He didn't blow so without some reason; don't you fool yourself--not if _I_ know the man."

"Well, if he's got any game he must have come to his last chance in it, to try bullying on _me_," said Strong; and then another of the group asked:

"What row could there be about a teacher, Strong? Thought you'd given him his man."

The pencil rolled from the edge of the table across the floor at Strong's movement of attention. "Coakley?--what of him?"

The man began to laugh, and one or two others joined in. One of them said a little offensively: "Pretty good on you, youngster! You took too big a contract for your age when you undertook to keep up with Judge Garvey. He'll give you odds and take you in, every time."

Strong reddened a little, but waited to be answered with very fair composure.

"Didn't you really know, Strong? The Judge scored one on you that time, then. Why, he's been Garvey's man in Sierra Township one or two elections now. Used to be a Millerite preacher, before your day, but he broke down at that. Good hand in county politics, but he's always completely out of business between times. Why you remember him, Strong--he was round with the Judge election times--cross-eyed fellow, with black siders."

"_That_ fellow? Why, he can't spell straight! The way of it was, Judge Garvey told us only Tuesday that the teacher we'd got--first-rate certificates--had backed out; and we couldn't put off beginning school any longer, nor hear of any teacher to be had; so when he produced this man, we had really no choice. I suppose I needn't ask where he got his certificates."

"No--Garvey's solid with this county board and superintendent."

"Disgraceful!" said Strong; whereat all laughed, except one who had lost a ranch a few years before during business dealings with the Judge.

"Oh, he's a scamp--I wouldn't trust him out of sight with his baby's silver mug," said this man, with feeling. The rest laughed again. In Green's Ferry a certain easy-going good-heartedness is required by the public conscience, rather than decalogue virtues. Garvey liked sharp practice--all right; if you were yourself hurt, you would naturally begin to vote against him; otherwise, it was none of your business, except as successful rascality had a claim on your admiration. Young Strong liked to write furious reform editorials--all right; if you were the one hit, you would swear at Strong and stop your subscription until a hit on some one else made you renew it; otherwise, it was none of your business and lively reading. They leaned against the wall and desk, and began with perfect good-nature to tell stories of the Judge. "R'member the time he got that Mexican ranch? Fellow thought it was a bill of sale for thirty acres he was signing, and it was three hundred."

"Best thing was when he made old man Meeker believe he was dying, and deed over a good fifty thousand dollars in stock to his daughter--and married the girl, sir, before the old fellow found he was good for twenty years more. He made the air smell of brimstone the rest of his life if you mentioned Garvey to him! Drowned in a ford a winter or two later, after all. Used to live in a little shanty up Indian Crick and raise potatoes--and Garvey sent him a cow--cheekiest thing!"

Strong turned sharply away from the laugh that followed, and went on with his work, while they slowly dispersed. He worked on savagely with brows drawn together. "It isn't so much the existence of scoundrels like Garvey that gets me," he was saying to himself, "as the way the whole crowd of them take him." He stopped to read over the words he was correcting--they were editorial:

"Was ever folly greater than this of our community, in dropping everything else to run after money. For what do you expect to do with it when you get it? Better eating, and drinking, and the privilege of being toadied to by those who want to make something out of you--what more can you get out of money, if you have never made anything of _yourself_? Just as a pig, if he might take his choice whether he would be turned into a man or would be moved into a cosier sty, with more unbounded swill, would doubtless choose the sty!"

"My broom against the ocean," he said; but he went on correcting doggedly.

And, not to conceal from you what was in reality the most significant fact about Will Strong--the key to about everything he thought and did--he was mentally submitting this editorial, as he had submitted every other he had written, to the test of the probable opinion of a young woman he had not seen nor heard from for two years, but who nevertheless constituted to his mind the chief motive for existence--if not the chief and sufficient explanation of the human race's having been created at all. You must realize, before trying to understand his story, that Will Strong was really a very romantic young man indeed, though he pretended to Green's Ferry that he was not.

Outside the screen, the strips of sun through the western window and open door lengthened across the meagre collection of dusty fonts of type, the small press, the piles of papers. The black-fingered, red-haired boy setting type among them reflected that it must be nearly dinner-time, and turned to see how far in the hot strips had crept--turned, and stood staring; for he met squarely the inquiring look of a pair of clear eyes, and became aware of a lady in the door-way.

It is probable that Jim had never dreamed in his life of any other social distinction than that between rich and poor, notorious and obscure, nor was he a lad of perceptions; yet he knew at once that this was a very unusual sort of lady for Green's Ferry. If he had been a man of the social world he would have known that she was a gentlewoman of notably high-bred appearance. She glanced, not without dismay, about the shabby work-room, as if she felt herself where she had no business to be. Nevertheless, she came forward frankly, and asked in the friendly way of one whose station needs no asserting:

"Mr. Strong?--one of the school-board?--Is he here?"

"Yes'm." The boy made no motion, but stood blankly staring.

"May I see him, please?"

"Lady to see you, Mr. Strong," shouted Jim, standing still.

In the few seconds before Strong emerged, the lady stood her ground in the middle of the floor, with some appearance of anxiety. She was certainly a very noticeable person, and came nearer to warranting that strong word "beautiful" than falls often to the lot of woman. It was a matter of outline more than color, however, for she had not much of that about her--brown hair, blue-gray eyes, skin of a warm paleness. All this low coloring, however, was so perfect of its sort, that it gave something the effect of a fine etching--a rich distinctness attained by shades, not colors. Instead of being outshone by more brilliant-hued women, Miss Northrop had always had the effect of making them look chromo-like. So, too, a certain nobility and self-forgetfulness of manner made the more elaborate manners of others seem the crude device of inferiority. It was a good deal due to her eyes; she had most wonderful eyes, and I doubt if any man or many women ever met them in a full look without feeling a little stir of pulse--whether it was in the lashes, or in the sweet straightforwardness of look, utterly devoid of coquetry, or in the depth of the gray, or in what; certain it is that no one ever saw Miss Northrop without talking of her beautiful eyes.

"A lady to see him?" The word in Green's Ferry defined only the sex. Some one with a notice of a flock of sheep for sale, which she wanted to get in as a local; or with an ill-spelled poem; or--by George, yes--that school-mistress. Lucky she had not met Garvey there--poor girl! Strong laid his pencil down, and came out from behind the screen good-naturedly enough--and stopped short. What a thing to happen to a man, that he should live and move and have his being for a dozen years in the thought of one woman, should count a world worth living in because she was somewhere on it, and a pitiful human race worth working for because they were her fellow-creatures--and should come out from behind his screen, and see her before his eyes--on his dingy work-room floor--out of her four thousand miles' distance!

They had been four years schoolmates in a New England High School. Will was a farmer's lad, from an outlying, rocky village, who worked for his board while he went to school. He came of an unschooled, hard-working, God-fearing yeoman race. Winifred could look up every line of her descent, through vista of governors, college-presidents, and ministers, back to Colonial aristocracy and gentry beyond sea. Her great-grandfathers had carried swords in Revolutionary battles, where Will's had followed with muskets. Winifred herself was one of those flowers into which excellent family trees break occasionally--flowers so lovely that no excellence of the tree seems enough to account for them. If she had any core of aristocratic coldness, it was so overlaid by a sweet humaneness, a frank generosity of impulse, that no one would have known it. If she had been a man, to have a valet, she would have been a hero to him.

Even in the democracy of school, Will Strong knew well enough the difference between his shy awkwardness and her pleasant frankness; and knew that though he could meet school requirements about as well as she, yet his mental range was crude and narrow beside hers; and any one could see that in the town where he was an unknown boy she was an important young lady. These things would not have counted for much had not some mediæval follower of some exiled king dropped down into the boy's temperament that passion of self-abasing loyalty that is rather an anachronism in our democratic days. They had been on terms of friendliness rather than friendship in school, but that was due more to his shyness than anything else. She had really given to him more opportunities than to most of her schoolmates; she liked his integrity and earnestness.