Chapter 7

When I was expelled from school by the Yankees, Mr. McEvoy, the leading Irish politician, called me aside and said: "Whisper, you just hang round until next election, and we'll turn out the Yankee managers, and put you in the school again." The Germans were slow in acquiring political knowledge as well as in learning the English language; but language, politics, and law itself are the birthright of the Irish. By force of circumstances, and through the otherwise deplorable failure of Miss Priscilla, I resumed work in the school before the election, but Mr. McEvoy, true to his promise, organised the opposition--it is always the opposition--and ejected the Yankee managers, but in the fall of 1850 I resigned, and went a long way south.

When I returned, Joliet was a city, and Mr. Rendel, one of my German night scholars, was city marshal. I met him walking the streets, and carrying his staff of office with great dignity. I took up my abode in an upper apartment of the gaol, then in charge of Sheriff Cunningham, who had a farm in West Joliet, near a plank road, leading on to the prairie. I had known the Sheriff two years before, but did not see much of him at this time, though I was in daily communication with his son, Silas, the Deputy Sheriff. It was under these favourable circumstancesthat I was enabled to witness a General Gaol Delivery of all the prisoners in Joliet. One, charged with killing his third man, was out on bail. I saw him in Matheson's boarding-house making love to one of the hired girls, and she seemed quite pleased with his polite attentions. Matheson was elected Governor of the State of Illinois, and became a millionaire by dealing in railways. He was a native of Missouri, and a man of ability; In '49 I saw him at work in a machine shop.

The prisoners did not regain their freedom all at once, but in the space of three weeks they trickled out one by one. The Deputy Sheriff, Silas, had been one of my pupils; he was now about seventeen years of age, and a model son of the prairies. His features were exceedingly thin, his eyes keen, his speech and movements slow, his mind cool and calculating. He never injured his constitution by any violent exertion; in fact, he seemed to have taken leave of active life and all its worries, and to have settled down to an existence of ease and contemplation. If he had any anxiety about the safe custody of his prisoners he never showed it. He had finished his education, so I did not attempt to control him by moral suasion, or by anything else, but by degrees I succeeded in eliciting from him all the particulars he could impart about the criminals under his care. There was no fence around the gaol, and Silas kept two of them always locked in. He "calkilated they wer kinder unsafe." They belonged to a society of horse thieves whose members were distributed at regular intervals along the prairies, and who forwarded their stolen animals by night to Chicago. The two gentlemen in gaol were of an untrustworthy character, and would be likely to slip away. About a week after my arrival I met Silas coming out of the gaol, and he said:

"They're gone, be gosh." Silas never wasted words.

"Who is gone?" I inquired.

"Why, them two horse thieves. Just look here."

We went round to the east side of the gaol, and there was a hole about two feet deep, and just wide enough to let a man through. The ground underneath the wall was rocky, but the two prisoners had been industrious, had picked a hole under the wall and had gone through.

"Where's the Sheriff?" I asked. "Won't Mr. Cunningham go after the men?"

"He's away at Bourbonnais' Grove, about suthin' or other, among the Bluenoses; can't say when he'll be back; it don't matter anyhow. He might just as well try to go to hell backwards as catch them two horse thieves now."

Silas had still two other prisoners under his care, and he let them go outside as usual to enjoy the fresh air. They had both been committed for murder, but their crime was reckoned a respectable one compared to the mean one of horse stealing, so Silas gave them honourable treatment.

One of the prisoners was a widow lady who had killed another lady with an axe, at a hut near the canal on the road to Lockport. She seemed crazy, and when outside the gaol walked here and there in a helpless kind of way, muttering to herself; but sometimes an idea seemed to strike her that she had something to do Lockport way, and she started in that direction, forgetting very likely that she had done it already; but whenever Silas called her back, she returned without giving any trouble. One day, however, when Silas was asleep she went clean out of sight, and I did not see her any more. The Sheriff was still absent among the Bluenoses.

The fourth prisoner was an Englishman named Wilkins who owned a farm on the prairie, in the direction of Bourbonnais' Grove. A few weeks before, returning home from Joliet with his waggon and team of horses, he halted for a short time at a distillery, situated at the foot of the low bluff which bounded the bottom, through which ran the Aux Plaines River. It was a place at which the farmers often called to discuss politics, the prices of produce, and other matters, and also, if so disposed, to take in a supply of liquor. The corn whisky of Illinois was an article of commerce which found its way to many markets. Although it was sold at a low price at home, it became much more valuable after it had been exported to England or France, and had undergone scientific treatment by men of ability. The corn used in its manufacture was exceedingly cheap, as may be imagined when corn-fed pork was, in the winter of '49, offered for sale in Joliet at one cent per pound. After the poison of the prairies had been exported to Europe, a new flavour was imparted to it, and it became Cognac, or the best Irish or Scotch whisky.

Wilkins halted his team and went into the whisky-mill, where the owner, Robinson, was throwing charcoal into the furnace under his boiler with a long-handled shovel. He was an enterprising Englishman who was wooing the smiles of fortune with better prospects of success than the slow, hard-working farmer. I had seen him first in West Joliet in '49, when he was travelling around buying corn for his distillery. He was a handsome man, about thirty years of age, five feet ten inches in height, had been well educated, was quite able to hold his own among the men of the West, and accommodated himself to their manners and habits.

There were three other farmers present, and their talk drifted from one thing to another until it at last settled on the question of the relative advantages of life in England and the States. Robinson took the part of England, Wilkins stuck to the States; he said:

"A poor man has no chance at home; he is kept down by landlords, and can never get a farm of his own. In Illinois I am a free man, and have no one to lord it over me. If I had lived and slaved in England for a hundred years I should never have been any better off, and now I have a farm as good as any in Will County, and am just as good a man as e'er another in it."

Now Wilkins was only a small man, shorter by four inches than Robinson, who towered above him, and at once resented the claim to equality. He said:

"You as good as any other man, are you? Why there ain't a more miserable little skunk within twenty miles round Joliet."

Robinson was forgetting the etiquette of the West. No man--except, perhaps, in speaking to a nigger--ever assumed a tone of insolent superiority to any other man; if he did so, it was at the risk of sudden death; even a hired man was habitually treated with civility. The titles of colonel, judge, major, captain, and squire were in constant use both in public and private; there was plenty of humorous "chaff," but not insult. Colonels, judges, majors, captains, and squires were civil, both to each other and to the rest of the citizens. Robinson, in speaking to his fellow countryman, forgot for a moment that he was not in dear old England, where he could settle a little difference with his fists. But little Wilkins did not forget, and he was not the kind of man to be pounded with impunity. He had in his pocket a hunting knife, with which he could kill a hog--or a man. When Robinson called him a skunk he felt in his pocket for the knife, and put his thumb on the spring at the back of the buckhorn handle, playing with it gently. It was not a British Brummagem article, made for the foreign or colonial market, but a genuine weapon that could be relied on at a pinch.

"Oh, I dare say you were a great man at home, weren't you?" he said. "A lord maybe, or a landlord. But we don't have sich great men here, and I am as good a man as you any day, skunk though I be."

Robinson had just thrown another shovelful of charcoal into the furnace under his boiler, and he held up his shovel as if ready to strike Williams, but it was never known whether he really intended to strike or not.

The three other men standing near were quite amused with the dispute of the two Englishmen, and were smiling pleasantly at their foolishness. But little Wilkins did not smile, nor did he wait for the shovel to come down on his head; he darted under it with his open knife in the same manner as the Roman soldier went underneath the dense spears of the Pyrrhic phalanx, and set to work. Robinson tried to parry the blows with the handle of the shovel, but he made only a poor fight; the knife was driven to the hilt into his body seven times, then he threw down his shovel, and tried to save himself behind the boiler, but it was too late; the dispute about England and the States was settled.

Wilkins took his team home, then returned to Joliet and gave himself into the custody of the squire, Hoosier Smith. At the inquest he was committed to take his trial for murder, and did not get bail. His wife left the farm, and with her two little boys lived in an old log hut near the gaol. She brought with her two cows, which Wilkins milked each morning as soon as Silas let him out of prison. I could see him every day from the window of my room, and I often passed by the hut when he was doing chores, chopping wood, or fetching water, but I never spoke to him. He did not look happy or sociable, and I could not think of anything pleasant to say by way of making his acquaintance. After much observation and thought I came to the conclusion that Sheriff Cunningham wanted his prisoner to go away; he would not like to hang the man; the citizens would not take Wilkins off his hands; if two fools chose to get up a little difficulty and one was killed, it was their own look-out; and anyway they were only foreigners. The fact was Wilkins was waiting for someone to purchase his farm.

The court-house for Will County was within view of the gaol, at the other side of the street, and one day I went over to look at it. The judge was hearing a civil case, and I sat down to listen to the proceedings. A learned counsel was addressing the jury. He talked at great length in a nasal tone, slowly and deliberately; he had one foot on a form, one hand in a pocket of his pants, and the other hand rested gracefully on a volume of the statutes of the State of Illinois. He had much to say about various horses running on the prairie, and particularly about one animal which he called the "Skemelhorne horse." I tried to follow his argument, but the "Skemelhorne horse" was so mixed up with the other horses that I could not spot him.

Semicircular seats of unpainted pine for the accommodation of the public rose tier above tier, but most of them were empty. There were present several gentlemen of the legal profession, but they kept silence, and never interrupted the counsel's address. Nor did the judge utter a word; he sat at his desk sideways, with his boots resting on a chair. He wore neither wig nor gown, and had not even put on his Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. Neither had the lawyers. If there was a court crier or constable present he was indistinguishable from the rest of the audience.

Near the judge's desk there was a bucket of water and three tumblers on a small table. It was a hot day. The counsel paused in his speech, went to the table, and took a drink; a juryman left the box and drank. The judge also came down from his seat, dipped a tumbler in the bucket and quenched his thirst; one spectator after another went to the bucket. There was equality and fraternity in the court of law; the speech about the Skemelhorne horse went on with the utmost gravity and decorum, until the nasal drawl of the learned counsel put me to sleep.

On awakening, I went into another hall, in which dealings in real estate were registered. Shelves fixed against the walls held huge volumes lettered on the back. One of these volumes was on a table in the centre of the hall, and in it the registrar was copying a deed. Before him lay a pile of deeds with a lead weight on the top. A farmer came in with a paper, on which the registrar endorsed a number and placed at the bottom of the pile. There was no parchment used; each document was a half-sheet foolscap size, party printed and partly written. Another farmer came in, took up the pile and examined the numbers to see how soon his deed was likely to be copied, and if it was in its proper place according to the number endorsed. The registrar was not fenced off from the public by a wide counter; he was the servant of the citizens, and had to satisfy those who paid him for his labours. His pay was a fixed number of cents per folio, not dollars, nor pounds.

When I went back to gaol I found it deserted. Wilkins had sold his farm and disappeared. His wife remained in the hut. Sheriff Cunningham was still away among the Bluenoses, and Silas was 'functus officio', having accomplished a general gaol delivery. He did not pine away on account of the loss of his prisoners, nor grow any thinner--that was impossible. I remained four days longer, expecting something would happen; but nothing did happen, then I left the gaol.

I wrote out two notices informing the public that I was willing to sell my real estate; one of these I pasted up at the Post Office, the other on the bridge over the Aux Plaines River. Next day a German from Chicago agreed to pay the price asked, and we called on Colonel Smith, the Squire. The Colonel filled in a brief form of transfer, witnessed the payment of the money--which was in twenty-dollar gold pieces, and he charged one dollar as his fee. The German would have to pay about 35 cents for its registration. If the deed was lost or stolen, he would insert in a local journal a notice of his intention to apply for a copy, which would make the original of as little value to anybody as a Provincial and Suburban bank note.

In Illinois, transfers of land were registered in each county town. To buy or sell a farm was as easy as horse-stealing, and safer. Usually, no legal help was necessary for either transaction.

By this time California had a rival; gold had been found in Australia. I was fond of gold; I jingled the twenty dollar gold pieces in my pocket, and resolved to look for more at the fountainhead, by way of my native land. A railway from Chicago had just reached Joliet, and had been opened three days before. It was an invitation to start, and I accepted it.

Nobody ever loved his native land better than I do when I am away from it. I can call to mind its innumerable beauties, and in fancy saunter once more through the summer woods, among the bracken, the bluebells, and the foxglove. I can wander by the banks of the Brock, where the sullen trout hide in the clear depths of the pools. I can walk along the path--the path to Paradise--still lined with the blue-eyed speedwell and red campion; I know where the copse is carpeted with the bluebell and ragged robin, where grow the alders, and the hazels rich with brown nuts, the beeches and the oaks; where the flower of the yellow broom blazes like gold in the noontide sun; where the stockdove coos overhead in the ivy; where the kingfisher darts past like a shaft of sapphire, and the water ouzel flies up stream; where the pheasant glides out from his home in the wood to feed on the headland of the wheat field; where the partridge broods in the dust with her young; where the green lane is bordered by the guelder-rose or wayfaring tree, the raspberry, strawberry, and cherry, the wild garlic of starlike flowers, the woodruff, fragrant as new-mown hay; the yellow pimpernel on the hedge side. I see in the fields and meadows the bird's foot trefoil, the oxeye daisy, the lady smocks, sweet hemlock, butterbur, the stitchwort, and the orchis, the "long purpled" of Shakespeare. By the margin of the pond the yellow iris hangs out its golden banners over which the dragon fly skims. The hedgerows are gay with the full-blown dog-roses, the bells of the bilberries droop down along the wood-side, and the red-hipped bumble bees hum over them. Out of the woodland and up Snaperake Lane I rise to the moorland, and then the sea coast comes in sight, and the longing to know what lies beyond it.

I have been twice to see what lies beyond it, and when I return once more my own land does not know me. There is another sea coast in sight now, and when I sail away from it I hope to land on some one of the Isles of the Blest.

I called on my oldest living love; she looked, I thought, even younger than when we last parted. She was sitting before the fire alone, pale and calm, but she gave me no greeting; she had forgotten me. I took a chair, sat down beside her, and waited. A strange lass with a fair face and strong bare arms came in and stared at me steadily for a minute or two, but went away without saying a word. I looked around the old house room that I knew so well, with its floor of flags from Buckley Delph, scoured white with sandstone. There stood, large and solid, the mealark of black oak, with the date, 1644, carved just below the heavy lid, more than 200 years old, and as sound as ever. The sloping mirror over the chest of drawers was still supported by the four seasons, one at each corner. Above it was Queen Caroline, with the crown on her head, and the sceptre in her hand, seated in a magnificent Roman chariot, drawn by the lion and the unicorn. That team had tortured my young soul for years. I could never understand why that savage lion had not long ago devoured both the Queen and the unicorn.

My old love was looking at me, and at last she put one hand on my knee, and said:

"It's George."

"Yes," I said, "it's George."

She gazed a while into the fire and said:

"Alice is dead."

"Yes, Alice is dead."

"And Jenny is dead."

"Yes, and Jenny. They are at the bottom of the sea."

In that way she counted a long list of the dead, which she closed by saying:

"They are all gone but Joe."

She had been a widow more than twenty-five years. She was a young woman, tall and strong, before Bonaparte, Wellington, the United States, or Australia, had ever been heard of in Lancashire, and from the top of a stile she had counted every windmill and chimney in Preston before it was covered with the black pall of smoke from the cotton-mills.

AMONG THE DIGGERS IN 1853.

I.

I lost a summer in 1853, and had two winters instead, one in England, the other in Australia.

It was cold in the month of May as we neared Bendigo. We were a mixed party of English, Irish, and Scotch, twelve in number, and accompanied by three horse-teams, carrying tubs, tents, and provisions. We also had plenty of arms wherewith to fight the bush-rangers, but I did not carry any myself; I left the fighting department to my mate, Philip, and to the others who were fond of war. Philip was by nature and training as gentle and amiable as a lamb, but he was a Young Irelander, and therefore a fighter on principle. O'Connell had tried moral suasion on the English Government long enough, and to no purpose, so Philip and his fiery young friends were prepared to have recourse to arms. The arms he was now carrying consisted of a gleaming bowie knife, and two pistols stuck in his belt. The pistols were good ones; Philip had tried them on a friend in the Phoenix Park the morning after a ball at the Rotunda, and had pinked his man--shot him in the arm. It is needless to say that there was a young lady in the case; I don't know what became of her, but during the rest of her life she could boast of having been the fair demoiselle on whose account the very last duel was fought in Ireland. Then the age of chivalry went out. The bowie knife was the British article bought in Liverpool. It would neither kill a man nor cut a beef-steak, as was proved by experience.

We met parties of men from Bendigo--unlucky diggers, who offered to sell their thirty-shilling licenses. By this time my cash was low; my twenty-dollar gold pieces were all consumed. While voyaging to the new Ophir, where gold was growing underfoot, I could not see any sound sense in being niggardly. But when I saw a regular stream of disappointed men with empty pockets offering their monthly licenses for five shillings each within sight of the goldfield, I had misgivings, and I bought a license that had three weeks to run from William Matthews. Ten other men bought licenses, but William Patterson, a canny Scotchman, said he would chance it.

It was about midday when we halted near Bendigo Creek, opposite a refreshment tent. Standing in front of it was a man who had passed us on the road, and lit his pipe at our fire. When he stooped to pick up a firestick I saw the barrel of a revolver under his coat. He was accompanied by a lady on horseback, wearing a black riding habit. Our teamsters called him Captain Sullivan. He was even then a man well known to the convicts and the police, and was supposed to be doing a thriving business as keeper of a sly grog shop, but in course of time it was discovered that his main source of profit was murder and robbery. He was afterwards known as "The New Zealand Murderer," who turned Queen's evidence, sent his mates to the gallows, but himself died unhanged.

While we stood in the track, gazing hopelessly over the endless heaps of clay and gravel covering the flat, a little man came up and spoke to Philip, in whom he recognised a fellow countryman. He said:

"You want a place to camp on, don't you?"

"Yes," replied Philip, "we have only just come up from Melbourne."

"Well, come along with me," said the stranger.

He was a civil fellow, and said his name was Jack Moore. We went with him in the direction of the first White Hill, but before reaching it we turned to the left up a low bluff, and halted in a gully where many men were at work puddling clay in tubs.

After we had put up our tent, Philip went down the gully to study the art of gold digging. He watched the men at work; some were digging holes, some were dissolving clay in tubs of water by stirring it rapidly with spades, and a few were stooping at the edge of water-holes, washing off the sand mixed with the gold in milk pans.

Philip tried to enter into conversation with the diggers. He stopped near one man, and said:

"Good day, mate. How are you getting along?"

The man gazed at him steadily, and replied "Go you to hell," so Philip moved on. The next man he addressed sent him in the same direction, adding a few blessings; the third man was panning off, and there was a little gold visible in his pan. He was gray, grim, and hairy. Philip said:

"Not very lucky to-day, mate?"

The hairy man stood up, straightened his back, and looked at Philip from head to foot.