Part 2

“I hope he brings me a grey satinet pelerine like I wrote,” said Mrs. Burrage. She was obviously flushed at the thought of the possession of such a garment--a fact which Olive felt, at the other's age, to be inappropriate to the not distant solemnity of the Christian ordeal of death. She repeated automatically: “... turn from these vanities unto the living God.” She rose:

“I'll let you know if I hear anything, and anyhow stop in tomorrow.”

Outside, sere leaves were whirling in grey funnels of dust, the intense blue bay sparkled under the cobalt sky; and, leaving Marlboro Street with a hand on her bonnet, she ran directly into Honora Canderay.

“Oh!” Olive exclaimed, breathless and slightly concerned. “Indeed if I saw you, Honora; the wind was that strong pulling at a person.”

“What does it matter?” Honora replied. She was wrapped from throat to hem in a cinnamon colored velvet cloak that, fluttering, showed a lining of soft, quilted yellow. In the flood of morning her skin was flawless; her delicate lips and hazel eyes held the faint mockery that was the visible sign of her disturbing quality. She laid a hand, in a short, furred kid glove, on Olive's arm.

“I am so pleased about Jason's success,” she continued, in a clear insistent voice. “You must be mad with anxiety to have him back. It's the most romantic thing in the world. Aren't you thrilled to the soul?”

“I'm glad to--to know he's been preserved,” Olive stammered, confused by Honora's frank speech.

“You sound exactly as if he were a jar of quinces,” the other answered impatiently; “and not a true lover coming back from California with bags of gold.”

Olive's confusion deepened to painful embarrassment at the indelicate term lover. She wondered, hotly red, how Honora could go on so, and made a motion to continue on her way. But the other's fingers closed and held her. “I wonder, Olive,” she said more thoughtfully, “if I know you well enough, if you will allow me, to give you some advice. It is this--don't be too rigid with Jason when he gets back. For nearly ten years he's been out in a life very different from Cottarsport, and he must have changed in that time. Here we stay almost the same--ten or twenty or fifty years is nothing really. The fishing boats come in, they may have different names, but they are the same. We stop and talk, Honora Canderay and Olive Stanes, and years before and years later women will stand here and do the same with beliefs no wider than your finger. But it isn't like that outside; and Jason will have that advantage of us--things really very small, but which have always seemed tremendous here, will mean no more to him than they are worth. He will be careless, perhaps, of your most cherished ideas; and, if you are to meet him fairly, you must try to see through his eyes as well as your own. Truly I want you to be happy, Olive; I want every one in Cottarsport to be as happy... as they can.”

Olive's embarrassment increased: it was impossible to know what Honora Canderay meant by her last words, in that echoing voice. Nevertheless, her independence of spirit, the long nourished tenets of the abhorrence of sin, asserted themselves in the face of even Honora's directions. “I trust,” she replied stiffly, “that Jason has been given grace to walk in the path of God----” She stopped with lips parted, her breath laboring with shock, at the interruption pronounced in ringing accents. Honora Canderay said:

“Grace be damned!”

Olive backed away with her hands pressed to her cheeks. In the midst of her shuddering surprise she realized how much the other resembled her father, the captain.

“I suppose,” Honora further ventured, “that you are looking for a bolt of lightning, but it is late in the season for that. There are no thunder storms to speak of after September.” She turned abruptly, and Olive watched her depart, gracefully swaying against the wind.

*****

All Olive's unformed opinions and attitude concerning Honora Canderay crystallized into one sharp, intelligible feeling--dislike. The breadth of being which the other had seemed to possess was now revealed as nothing more than a lack of reverence. She was inexpressibly upset by Honora's profanity, the blasphemous mind it exhibited, her attempted glossing of sin. It was nothing less. In the assault on Olive's most fundamental verities--the contempt which, she divined, had been offered to the edifice of her conscience and creed--she responded blindly, instinctively, with an overwhelming condemnation. At the same time she was frightened, and hurried away from the proximity of such unsanctified talk. She did not go to Citron Street, and the shops, as she had intended; but kept directly on until she found herself at the harbor and wharves. The latter serrated the water's edge, projecting from the relatively tall, bald warehouses, reeking with the odor of dead fish, cut open and laid in salt, grey-white areas to the sun and wind.

A small group of men, with flat bronzed countenances and rough furze coats, uneasily stirred their hats, in the local manner of saluting women, and turned to gaze fixedly at her as she passed. Even in her perturbation of mind she was conscious of their unusual scrutiny. She couldn't, now, for the life of her, recall what needed to be bought; and, mounting the narrow uneven way from the water, she proceeded home.

Some towels, laid on the boulder to dry, had not been sufficiently weighted, and hung blown and crumpled on a lilac bush. These she collected, rearranged, complaining of the blindness of whoever might be about the house, and then proceeded within. There, to her amazement, she found Hester, in the middle of the morning, and Rhoda bent over the dinner table, sobbing into her arm. Hester met her with a drawn face darkly smudged beneath the eyes.

“The _Emerald_ was lost off the Cape,” she said; “sunk with all on board. A man came over from Salem to tell us. He had to go right back. Pa, he's lost.”

Olive sank into a chair with limp hands. Rhoda continued uninterrupted her sobbing, while Hester went on with her recital in a thin, blank voice. “The ship _J. Q. Adams_ stood by the _Emerald_, but there was such a sea running she couldn't do anything else. They just had to see the _Emerald_, with the men in the rigging, go under. That's what he said who was here. They just had to see Pa drown before their eyes.... The wind was something terrible.”

A deep, dry sorrow constricted Olive's, heart. Suddenly the details of packing her father's blue sea chest returned to her mind--the wool socks she had knitted and carefully folded in the bottom, the needles and emery and thread stowed in their scarlet bag, the tin of goose grease for his throat, the Bible that had been shipped so often. She thought of them all scattered and rent in the wild sea, of her father----

She forced herself to rise, with a set face, and put her hand on Rhoda's shoulder. “It's right to mourn, like Rachel, but don't forget the majesty of God.” Rhoda shook off her palm and continued in an ecstasy of emotional relief. Olive hardened. “Get up,” she commanded; “we must fix things here, for the neighbors and Pastor will be in. I wish Jem were back.”

At this Rhoda became even more unrestrained, and Olive remembered that Jem too was at sea, and that probably he had been caught in the same gale. “He'll be all right,” she added quickly; “the fishing boats live through everything.”

Yet she was infinitely relieved when, two days later, Jem arrived safely home. He came into the house with a pounding of heavy boots, a powerfully built youth with a rugged jaw and an intent quiet gaze. “I heard at the wharf,” he told Olive. They were in the kitchen, and he pulled off his boots and set them away from the stove.

“I'm thankful you're so steady and able,” she said.

“I am glad Jason's coming home--rich,” he replied tersely. Later, after supper, while they still sat at the table, he went on, “There is a fine yawl for sale at Ipswich, sails ain't been made a year, fifty-five tons; I could do right good with that. The fishing's never been better. Do you think Jason would be content to buy her, Olive? I could pay him back after a run or two.”

“He told you he'd do something like that,” she answered. “I guess now it wouldn't mean much to him.”

“And I'll be away,” Rhoda eagerly added; “you wouldn't have to give me anything, Jem. Jason promised me, too.”

An unreasonable and disturbing sense of insecurity enveloped Olive. But, of course, it would be all right--Jason was coming back rich, to marry her. Jem would have the yawl and Rhoda get away to study singing. And yet all that she vaguely dreaded about Jason himself persisted darkly at the back of her consciousness, augmented by Honora Canderay's warning. She was a little afraid of Jason, too; in a way, after so long, he seemed like a stranger, a stranger whom she was going to wed.

“He'll be all dressed up,” Rhoda stated. “I hope, Olive, you will kiss him as soon as he steps through the door. I know I would.”

“Don't be so shameless, Rhoda,” the elder admonished her. “You are very indelicate. I'd never think of kissing Jason like that.”

“I will go over and see the man who owns her,” Jem said enigmatically. “She's a cockpit boat, but I heard the wave wasn't made that could fill her. And we have my share of the last run till Jason's here.”

He paid this faithfully into Olive's hand the next day and then disappeared. She thought he came through the door again: someone stood behind her. Olive turned slowly and saw an impressive figure in stiff black broadcloth and an incredibly high glassy silk hat.

*****

She knew instinctively that it must be Jason Burrage, and yet the feeling of strangeness persisted. All sense of the time which had elapsed since Jason went was lost in the illusion that the figure familiar to her through years of knowledge and association had instantly, by a species of magic, been transformed into the slightly smiling, elaborate man in the doorway. She stepped backward, hesitatingly pronouncing his name.

“Olive,” he exclaimed, with a deep, satisfied breath, “it hasn't changed a particle!” To her extreme relief he did not make a move to embrace her; but gazed intently about the room. One of the things that made him seem different, she realized, was the rim of whiskers framing his lower face. She became conscious of details of his appearance--baggy dove-colored trousers over glazed boots, a quince yellow waistcoat in diamond pattern, a cluster of seals. Then her attention was held by his countenance, and she saw that his clothes were only an insignificant part of his real difference from the man she had known.

Jason Burrage had always had a set will, the reputation of an impatient, even ugly disposition. This had been marked by a sultry lip and flickering eye; but now, though his expression was noticeably quieter, it gave her the impression of a glittering and dangerous reserve; his masklike calm was totally other than the mobile face she had known. Then, too, he had grown much older--she swiftly computed his age: it could not be more than forty-two, yet his hair was thickly stained with grey, lines starred the comers of his eyes and drew faintly at his mouth.

“Are you glad to see me, Olive?” he asked.

“Why, Jason, what an unnecessary question. Of course I am, more thankful than I can say for your safety.”

“I walked across the hills from the Dumner stage,” he proceeded. “It was something to see Cottarsport on its bay and the Neck and the fishing boats at Planger's wharf. I'd like to have an ounce of gold for every time I thought about it and pictured it and you. Out on the placers of the Calaveras, or the Feather, I got to believing there wasn't any such town, but here it is.” He advanced toward her; she realized that she was about to be kissed, and a painful color dyed her cheeks.

“You'll stop for supper,” she said practically.

“I haven't been home yet, I came right here; I'll see them and be back. I'll bet I find them in the kitchen, with the front stoves cold, in spite of what I wrote and sent. I brought you a present, just for fun, and I'll leave it now, since it's heavy.” He bent over a satchel at his feet and got a buckskin bag, bigger than his two fists, which he dropped with a dull thud on the table.

“What is it, Jason?” she asked. But of herself she knew the answer. He untied a string, and, dipping in his fingers, showed her a fine yellow metallic trickle. “Gold dust, two tumblers full,” he replied. “We used to measure it that way--a pinch a dollar, teaspoonful to the ounce, a wineglass holds a hundred, and a tumbler a thousand dollars.”

She was breathless before the small shapeless pouch that held such a staggering amount. He laughed. “Why, Olive, it's nothing at all. I just brought it like that so you could see how we carried it in California. We are all rich now, Olive--the Burrages, and you're one, and the Staneses. I have close to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

This sum was little more to her than a fable, a thing beyond the scope of her comprehension; but the two thousand dollars before her gaze was a miracle made manifest. There it was to study, feel; subconsciously she inserted her hand in the bag, into the cold, smooth particles.

“A hundred and fifty thousand,” he repeated; “but if you think I didn't work for it, if you suppose I picked it right out of a pan on the river bars, why--why, you are wrong.” Words failed him to express the erroneousness of such conclusions. “I slaved like a Mexican,” he added; “and in bad luck almost to the end.” She sat and gazed at him with an easier air and a growing interest, her hands clasped in her lap. “What I didn't know when I left Cottarsport was wonderful.

“Why, take the mining,” he said with a gesture; “I mean the bowl mining at first... just the heavy work in it killed off most of the prospectors--all day with a big iron pan, half full of clay and gravel, sloshing about in those rivers. And maybe you'd work a month without a glimmer, waking wet and cold under the sierras, whirling the pan round and round; and maybe when you had the iron cleared out with a magnet, and dropped in the quicksilver, what gold was there wouldn't amalgam. I can tell you, Olive, only the best, or the hardest, came through.”

He produced a blunt, tapering cigar and lighted it expansively.

“A lonely and dangerous business: every one carried his dust right on his body, and there were plenty would risk a shot at a miner coming back solitary with his donkey and his pile. It got better when the new methods came, and we used a rocker-hollowed out of a log. Then four of us went in partnership--one to dig the gravel, one to carry it to the cradle, another to keep it rocking, and the last to pour in the water. Then we drawed off the gold and sand through a plug hole.

“We did fine at that,” he told her, “and in the fall of 'Fifty cleaned up eighteen thousand apiece. Then we had an argument: we were in the Yuba country, where it was kind of bad; two of us, and I was one of them, said to divide the dust, and get out best we could; but the others wanted to send all the gold to San Francisco in charge of one of them and a man who was going down with more dust. We finally agreed to this and lost every ounce we'd mined. The escort said they were shot by some of the disbanded California army, but I'm not sure. It seemed to me like our two had met somewhere, killed the other, and got the gold to rights.”

“O Jason!” Olive exclaimed.

“That was nothing,” he said complacently; “but only a joker to start with. I did a lot of things then to get a new outfit--sold peanuts on the Plaza in 'Frisco, or hollered the New York _Tribune_ at a dollar and a half a copy; I washed glasses in a saloon and drove mules. After that I took a steamer for Stocton and the Calaveras. You ought to have seen Stocton, Olive--board shanties and blanket houses and tents, with two thieves left hanging on a gallows. We went from there, a party of us, for the north bank of the Calaveras, tramping in dust so hot that it scorched your face. Sluicing had just started and long Toms--a long Tom is a short placer--so we didn't know much about it. Looking back I can see the gold was there; but after working right up to the end of the season we had no more than a couple of thousand apiece. There were too many of us to start with.

“Well, I drifted back to San Francisco.” He paused, and the expression which had most disturbed her deepened on his countenance, a stillness like the marble of a gravestone guarding implacable secrets.

“San Francisco is different from Cottarsport, Olive,” he said after a little. “Here you wouldn't believe there was such a place; and there Cottarsport seemed too safe to be true... Well, I went after it again, this time as far north as Shasta. I prospected from the Shasta country south, and got a good lump together again. By then placer mining was better understood; we had sluice boxes two or three hundred feet long, connected with the streams, with strips nailed across the bottom where the gold and sand settled as the water ran through. Yes, I did well; and then fluming began.

“That,” he explained, “is damming a river around its bed and washing the opened gravel. It takes a lot of money, a lot of work and men; and sometimes it pays big, and often it doesn't. I guess there were fifty of us at it. We slaved all the dry season at the dam and flume, a big wood course for the stream; we had wing dams for the placers and ditches, and the best prospects for eight or ten weeks' washing. It was early in September when we were ready to start, and on a warm afternoon I said to an old pardner, 'What do you make out of those big, black clouds settling on the peaks?' He took one look--the wind was a steady and muggy southwester--and then he sat down and cried. The tears rolled right over his beard.

“It was the rains, nearly two months early, and the next day dams, flume, boards, and hope boiled down past us in a brown mash. That left me poorer than I'd ever been before; I had more when I was home on the wharves.”

“Wait,” she interrupted him, rising; “if you're coming back to supper I must put the draught on the stove.” From the kitchen she heard him singing in a low, contented voice:

“'The pilot bread was in my mouth,

The gold dust in my eye,

And though from you I'm far away,

Dear Anna, don't you cry!'”

Then:

“'Oh, Ann Eliza!

Don't you cry for me.

I'm going to Calaveras

With my wash bowl on my knee.'”

She returned and resumed her position with her hands folded.

“And that,” Jason Burrage told her, “was how I learned gold mining in California. I sank shafts, too, and worked a windlass till the holes got so deep they had to be timbered and the ore needed a crusher. But after the fluming I knew what to wait for. I kept going in a sort of commerce for a while--buying old outfits and selling them again to the late comers--a pick or shovel would bring ten dollars and long boots fifty dollars a pair. I got twenty-four dollars for a box of Seidlitz powders. Then in 'Fifty-four I went in with three scientific men--one had been a big chemist at Paris--and things took a turn. We had the dead wood on gold. Why, we did nothing but re-travel the American Fork and Indian Bar, the Casumnec and Moquelumne, and work the tailings the earlier miners had piled up and left, just like I had south. We did some pretty things with cyanide; yes, and hydraulics and powder.

“Things took a turn,” he repeated; “investments in stampers and so on, and here I am.”

After he had gone--supper, she had informed him, was at five exactly--Olive had the bewildered feeling of partially waking from an extraordinary dream. Yet the buckskin bag on the table possessed a weighty actuality.

*****

She sat for a long while gazing intently at the gold, which, like a crystal ball, held for her varied reflections. Then, recalling the exigencies of the kitchen, she hurried abruptly away. Her thoughts wheeled about Jason Burrage in a confusion of all the impressions she had ever had of him. But try as she might she could not picture the present man as a part of her life in Cottarsport; she could not see herself married to him, although that event waited just beyond today. She set her lips in a straight line, a fixed purpose gave her courage in place of the timidity inspired by Jason's opulent strangeness--she couldn't allow herself to be turned aside for a moment from the way of righteousness. The gods of mammon, however they might blackly assault her spirit, should be confounded.

”... hide me

Till the storm of life is past.”

She sang in a high quavering voice. There was a stir beyond--surely Jason wasn't back so soon; but it was Jem.

“What's on the table here?” he called.

“You let that be,” she cried back in a panic at having left the gift so exposed. “That's gold dust; Jason brought it, two thousand dollars' worth.”

A prolonged whistle followed her announcement. Jem appeared with the buckskin bag in his hand. “Why, here's two yawls right in my hand,” he asserted.

“Mind one thing, Jem,” she went on, “he's coming back for supper, and I won't have you and Rhoda at him about boats and singing the minute he's in the house.”

Rhoda, with exclamations, and then Hester, inspected the gold. “I'd slave five years for that,” the latter stated, “and then hardly get it; and here you, have it for nothing.”

“You'll get the good of it too, Hester,” Olive told her.

“I'll just work for what I get,” she replied fiercely. “I won't take a penny from Jason, Olive Stanes; you can't hold that over me, and the sooner you both know it the better.”

“You ought to pray to be saved from pride.”

“I don't ask benefits from any one,” Hester stoutly observed.

“Hester----” Olive commenced, scandalized, but she stopped at Jason's entrance. “Hester she wanted a share of the gold,” Jem declared with a light in his slow gaze, “and Olive was cursing at her.”

“Lots more,” said Jason Burrage, “buckets full.” In spite of the efforts of every one to be completely at ease the supper was unavoidably stiff.

But when Jason had lighted one of his blunt cigars, and begun a vivid description of western life, the Staneses were transported by the marvels following one upon another: a nugget had been picked up over a foot long, it weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, and realized forty-three thousand dollars. “Why, fifty and seventy-five lumps were common,” he asserted. “At Ford's Bar a man took out seven hundred dollars a day for near a month. Another found seventeen thousand dollars in a gutter two or three feet deep and not a hundred yards long.

“But 'Frisco was the place; you could see it spread in a day with warehouses on the water and tents climbing up every hill. Happy Valley, on the beach, couldn't hold another rag house. The Parker House rented for a hundred and seventy thousand a year, and most of it paid for gambling privileges; monté and faro, blazing lights and brass bands everywhere and dancing in the El Dorado saloon. At first the men danced with each other, but later----”

He stopped; an awkward silence followed. Olive was rigid with inarticulate protest, a sense of outrage--gambling, saloons, and dancing! All that she had feared about Jason became more concrete, more imminent. She saw California as a modern Babylon, a volcano of gold and vice; already she had heard of great fires that had devastated it.

“We didn't mine on Sunday, Olive,” Jason assured her; “and all the boys went to the preaching and sang the hymns, standing out on the grass.”

Hester, finally, with a muttered period, rose and disappeared; Jem went out to consult with a man, his nod to Olive spoke of yawls; and Rhoda, at last, reluctantly made her way above. Olive's uneasiness increased when she found herself alone with the man she was to marry.