Part 22

Uncle Deck fairly bored the judge with his gaze when the old man walked to the platform and I was as intent with my scrutiny, for I was wondering how Kingsley would get through with it. He was white and somewhat shaky, but he was the same old cold proposition when he faced the voters.

“I hope you will pardon a word on a personal matter,” he said, as he unfolded his papers; “but I have returned from a business trip and find serious illness in my family. I have been keeping watch at the bedside of my dear wife and my thoughts are not clear enough to enable me to make the little address I had contemplated for to-day. I will only say that the movement to clear the town of its debt is very praiseworthy and my report will show that the thing may be done with a little extra effort. Our only considerable indebtedness consists of town bonds amounting to eight thousand dollars and current items as follows.” Then he went on to give the list of unpaid town orders, of which only a few were extant. “I see here representatives of the bondholders,” he added, “who will check my figures if such assurance is required by any voter--and probably most of the parties who hold town orders are in the meeting. I hope the town orders will be presented for payment at once so that there may be no floating indebtedness.” He folded up his papers.

My uncle got up and stamped down his trousers legs.

“Now, you voters,” he called, “ask your questions!”

But not a voice was raised.

“I’m no lawyer and I’m making no threats,” my uncle went on. “But after the way this meeting has been advertised, and after the call that has been made, I reckon that the men who have been holding out claims against this town and who haven’t presented them will be left to whistle for their money. I propose to have action taken that will outlaw those claims.”

Judge Kingsley turned slowly on my uncle and stood as stiff as a stake.

“To what claims do you refer, Selectman Sidney? Do you question the accuracy of my report?”

“Come out of your holes, you old woodchucks!” shouted Uncle Deck, looking past the judge at the voters. Men scowled at him and grumbled.

The judge walked toward the First Selectman and shook his papers.

“You must talk to me, sir! I am the treasurer of this town and have been for a good many years. Here before the voters I demand that you specify claims.”

“I’ll specify, then! How about the town notes that are out with your name on them?”

A murmur ran through the assemblage.

“Just one moment, sir! Weigh your words,” warned the judge. “You are attacking my financial reputation; there is a law for slanderers and I have many witnesses here. Do you say there is one single town note extant with my name on it?”

“I say there are a lot of ’em!”

This time many voters raised voices of protest and there were hisses.

“That’s the thanks a straight man gets for trying to protect his town against a thief, eh?” raged my uncle, his ready temper bursting loose.

“If the judge don’t collect fifty thousand dollars damages for this, then I’m no guesser,” declared Dodovah Vose, who sat beside me.

Uncle Deck tramped to the edge of the platform and with wagging finger selected a man in the throng; the man was Farmer Bailey.

“Bailey, you hold a town note with Kingsley’s name on it! You know you do! Are you going to sit there and see it canceled as no good by the vote of this town?”

Bailey rose slowly and everybody listened in deep silence.

“I hold no note of any kind with Judge Kingsley’s name on it.”

“Yah-h-h! You have told me that before. But you don’t dare to stand here in town meeting and say it under oath.”

“Send down that Bible on the stand and I’ll take oath and kiss the Book,” offered Bailey. There was applause and the judge quieted it by raising his hand.

“I will pay double for any note with my name on it as treasurer, and I will turn the money over to the town as a gift,” he said.

I despised him when he made that bluff, though of course he had to do it. Really, in spite of his devilish temper and his spirit of revenge my uncle was twice the man Judge Kingsley was in that moment. I wasn’t trying to figure out the righteousness of the thing on either side; the judge was fighting for his very life, as well as his standing, and my uncle, though he was working for the good of the town according to his lights, was satisfying his old grudge--the real passion of his life.

A voter rose and bellowed until he secured silence; they were giving the judge an ovation.

“I want to put in a word here, fellow-townsmen! Money has been borrowed on town notes. A certain eminent man you all know tried to borrow from me and said I could escape taxation. And now he is backed by the liars--”

“And barked at by the liars, too,” yelled another man.

“I stand up here for Selectman Sidney, who has given his time and effort to help this town out of the clutches--”

They howled him down. But by this time the defenders of my uncle were howling, too.

“This meeting is going to break up in a free fight if a stop isn’t put to this jawing,” said Dodovah Vose. He jumped up on the settee and made himself heard. “I move we adjourn!”

The apprehensive moderator put the motion, the judge’s friends carried it, and the meeting was dissolved.

My uncle leaped off the platform and came raging at me through the crowd.

“It’s you--you damnation imp of Gehenna! Racing and chasing over this town yesterday! I had a line on you. Saving that old whelp from what was coming to him!” He put his hands over his head and wriggled his fingers. “God! I don’t know what you have done--you got that money by robbing a bank, probably. But you have done it--you have jumped up and down on your family! You have got to answer to me!”

Men pushed away in panic and left us in a ring. But I had no notion of entertaining the old goggle-eyes of Levant by fisticuffs with my uncle. I folded my arms.

“According to your reckoning, Uncle Deck, I have owed you something for a long time. I want to stand square with you! Go ahead and collect!”

He did not seem to understand at once.

“Go ahead and beat me up! I won’t raise a finger.” Yes, I would have taken the beating--I knew inside of me that I did owe my uncle something of the sort.

“Not by a dam-site, he sha’n’t beat you up,” declared Dodovah Vose. “I saved you from him once,” he said, careless of revelations, “and I’ll save you again.”

So, after waiting a minute and enduring my uncle’s tongue instead of his fists, I went away with Landlord Vose.

I was not in the mood for any further paltering or palavering in regard to my personal and private standing with the Kingsley family. I had a collection to make and I proposed to go and make it. I ought to have known better than to force the issue at that time. But youth is headstrong, the sense of my injuries was hot, and I felt that if ever the judge might be willing to show his gratitude that would be the time.

He was crossing the square on his way home and I left Mr. Vose and hurried after. I caught up with him at the front door.

“I want to come in and have a word with you and with your daughter,” I told him.

“Impossible,” he said, curtly. “I’m afraid my wife is at death’s door. And my daughter--she is very bitter!”

“I propose to have you explain enough so that she will not be bitter, sir. It’s my due. You know what kind of a service I have rendered. I have made an enemy of my uncle--ruined all my prospects to help you. There are things you can tell your daughter to--”

“How does my daughter enter into any affairs between you and myself? You must let me alone in my sorrow. Later I will pay you for your services. I am grateful. If I were not in such distress I would explain how grateful I am. I will pray that I may be spared till I can pay back to you what I owe.”

“Good Cæsar! I don’t want your money, Judge Kingsley. I’ll work and earn more to help you out of your difficulties. I only ask you to be a man and make your daughter understand--”

“My daughter again! You don’t presume--”

“I do presume, sir. She was kind to me until this horrible misunderstanding came up. I expect you to tell her that I am your best friend. It’s my right!”

I’ll never forget the look he gave me. I’ll wager a good bit that the idea of such enormity on my part never came into his Kingsley consciousness till that moment. Even then he did not seem to be just sure that he understood.

“I don’t expect anything definite from you or her, Judge Kingsley, until I have made good in the world. But I do look to you to give me a square deal. That’s only what you owe to me, man to man.”

“I owe you money and I will pay it. There is no other sort of bargain between us.”

He stepped into his house and shut the door in my face.

In that damnable situation I was minded to follow him and have it out, even if I were obliged to expose him. However, if death were hovering over that house it was a sanctuary I could not invade. But bitter thoughts raged in me when I turned away; I only asked to be set right with Celene.

I understand that this part of my confession will elicit little sympathy for me from the casual reader who takes the comfortable view that the world is full of girls and if one does not swing low enough on the bough there’s always another within reach. But mine was the exceptional case where the first love had become an obsession and all my spirit of persistency was flaming in me. I have not figured out as yet whether the troubles into which my general persistency in all matters has slammed me overbalance the fruits it has brought to me--but I reckon, after all, I’ll have to take my hat off to my persistency. If I had been a quitter I would not have played the biggest game in my life--and I’m coming to that right soon.

Once more circumstances were forcing me, though I needed mighty little forcing, to leave Levant at that juncture in my affairs.

“Damn ’em!” I blazed out to Dodovah Vose when I stamped into the tavern, “I’ve got to show ’em! I’ll show ’em I can make good.”

He blinked at me.

“But you have shown ’em already,” he said. He thought, of course, that I was speaking about the general public in Levant. “And if I was in your place I wouldn’t give a dam what your uncle says to you.”

Less than two hours later Landlord Vose revised that advice. He rushed up to my room where I was sorting some papers, having resolved to travel light when I did go.

“Get under--get under, young Sidney,” he gasped.

“Under what?”

“I reckon I mean get out. It’s your uncle Deck! Bailey and some other of them yawp-mouths in this place have been twitting and tormenting him and dropping hints, and he’s worse than a sore-eared bulldog after a scruffing. He’s coming with a double-barreled shot-gun. He is! He’s drunk, son, and there’s no dealing with him. He lays it all to you!”

“I won’t run.”

“But he isn’t responsible, son. To say nothing of what will happen to you, it means that he’ll go to State prison. You’re sane and sober and you ought to be willing to save him from himself.”

Right then Mr. Vose said something which appealed to me. I had stepped outside my family--I had conspired against my uncle--I had blocked his dearest ambition, iniquitous though it was. By hanging around and allowing him to take pot-shots at me I would be aggravating his troubles and bringing more serious afflictions upon him. A dead nephew, shot-riddled, would be a damning exhibit A in his trial for murder!

I picked up my few belongings and escaped from the back door of the tavern, hid in a cross-road till Dodovah Vose’s stableman came with a hitch, and I caught a train at a station down the line; hustling out of my native town on the run, by dint of practice, was getting to be one of the best performances in my list of tricks.

I counted my money when I was on my way to the city. I had not been keeping any strict account between the judge and myself; from the common stock I had been paying expenses and spending as loose as peas in order to hasten our journey back East. I found around two hundred and fifty dollars in my pockets, and I reflected, with a sort of grim zest in the humor of the thing, that I could fairly claim most of this money as my own--the tainted cash from my poker profits.

I went straight to Jodrey Vose when I arrived in the metropolis and he looked neither surprised nor overjoyed.

“Where have you been?” he inquired.

“Oh, sort of loafing around up-country--killing time!”

He squinted at me sourly.

“I can’t say that you’re doing any great credit to my training, young Sidney!”

“You are right, Captain Vose, but I’m turning over a new leaf and I’m out to make good. I am hoping that I can do something in the case of Anson C. Doughty so that I can get back into the diving business and keep on the job hereafter.”

“Then you’ll go back to diving and keep out from under plug-hats, will you?”

“Yes, sir!”

He looked at me for a long time and then he pulled out a letter.

“This here,” he said, tapping it, “is something more about that _Golden Gate_ treasure. There’s a new crowd on the rampage about it. From somebody in the old crowd they have got hold of my name. I came nigh trying it on once, as I have told you. But it’s a gamble; I am old and I don’t want it. You are young and there’s nothing as yet for you on the Atlantic coast, and you might grab in on this. They want an Eastern diver because the divers out there are tied up with the big concerns and can’t be depended on to keep their mouths shut--so this letter says.”

“Probably it’s a pretty uncertain proposition, sir.”

“Well, you don’t expect to fall into anything very certain, do you, a diver blacklisted from Kittery to the Keys?” he demanded, tartly.

“No, sir.”

“I know nothing about these people, their plans, or anything. But I’ll do this for you, if you want me to. I’ll wire this party and tell him I am sending you on. After you are started you can post him from some place as to when you’ll arrive. Better give him a wire from time to time to keep his interest up. How’s your wallet?”

“I think it’s all right, sir.”

“If you’re lying to me that’s your own lookout. Haven’t sold your diving-dress, have you?”

“I have it safe in storage, sir.”

“Well, I’m glad you kept remembering that you’re a diver--and the best one I ever turned out!” That was the first word of high praise he had given me. He got up and shook my hand. “Now go dive, son, and after you raise that four million from the wreck of the Golden Gate come back and tell me all about it.”

I did not linger in the city; there were too many possibilities in the way of Dawlins and Doughtys.

Two hours later I was headed across the continent with my diving-dress in its canvas bag and the address of one Captain Rask Holstrom written in my note-book. I was pretty dizzy with the haste of it all and felt like the human shuttle between oceans--but I possessed considerable more serenity than I did when I began that lunatic lope with Judge Kingsley.

I had framed a motto and hung it in my soul--“I’ll show ’em!”

XXVI--CAPTAIN HOLSTROM ET AL.

MY face was set to the West, to be sure, but my thoughts were traveling back over my shoulder to the East. I wish I could say that a lively sense of injury enabled me to put out of my mind Levant and everybody in Levant--box and dice! But I’m not much of a liar.

I do not propose to dwell on the bitterness which stuck in me day after day, along with softer sentiments. This narrative goes into a gallop at about this point and there is no time to be wasted on self-communings. However, if I do not mention my old home and the folks back there it must not be understood that the problem of my life ceased to go to bed with me, rise with me, and keep pace with me as I hurried through the day’s work. I obeyed Jodrey Vose’s counsel about giving bulletins of my progress west. After I had bought my railroad ticket and had counted up, I felt that I could not afford to take any chances on those strangers losing their interest in me. I needed a job almighty sudden after I landed in San Francisco.

On the last leg of the journey I was able to forecast the hour of my arrival and I suggested by wire that somebody meet me--knowing that my diver’s kit in its duck bag would be identification enough. This telegraph business was shooting arrows into the air and I would have welcomed a return message; I thought they ought to be able to guess closely enough to intercept me somewhere along the line. But, although no answer came, I had the comfortable feeling that they’d be likely to be on the lookout for me. And at last I got my first peek at Pacific waters.

Our train was hung up outside the yard over in Oakland while they opened our track to the ferry, and a chap I had chatted with more or less in the smoking-room on the trip, and who knew my business, rushed out, climbed down beside the roadbed, and scooped a tumblerful of water. He ran back into the car and dumped the water over me for a joke, and I’m so accustomed to water that the joke did not jar me. I took it as it was meant.

“I baptize thee in the name of the Pacific,” he said. “Now I hope the old dame will be good to you in your line.”

Well, whether she was or not depends on how one looks at those things.

I walked slowly through the ferry-house, hoping to be hailed, and stepped out on to the foot of Market Street into the old San Francisco of the days before the great calamity. In my right hand I tugged along the duck bag that was bulging with my diving equipment. In my left hand I had the rest of my earthly possessions in a grip which was about the size of a ten-cent loaf of bread. It was early evening, and all the lights were aglare.

There was a turn-table for the cable cars at the foot of Market Street. The cars were coming down in constant procession, and the turn-table was busy. It was a regular merry-go-round kind of an affair. It interested me, but it didn’t interest me so much that I had no eye for a girl who stood beside me at the edge of the thing. It seemed to me right then--fresh from a tedious train ride, where I’d been penned in with a frumpy set of women passengers--that I had never seen a prettier girl. She had her finger pointed at some one on the turn-table, and was saying “Father!” over and over, with a new inflection on the word every time she spoke it. Her finger traveled as the table revolved, and I was able to pick out father fight away. I was right-down sorry for that girl when I laid eyes on father. Father was grinning like a sculpin in deep water, and he was good and drunk, and he was evidently taking a joy ride on that turn-table.

It struck me right then, as a stranger, that San Francisco had a good trait pretty well developed; it was willing to let a man mind his own business as long as he didn’t make too much of a nuisance of himself. The street-car men did not push father off the turn-table, and two policemen took a look at him and went off about their business.

I took a good look at the man, too, when the turntable brought him near me and stopped to let a car on. He had a face about as square as the front of a safe, and his nose was the shape of a safety-lock knob, and was red. His pot-bellied body was set on legs like crooked wharf pilings. I had father sized up in a second. Double-breasted blue coat, cap of blue, with the peak pulled rakishly down over one eye, gray beard which radiated in spills from his chin like tiller spokes--he was a steamboat man, sure! I don’t know what in the devil possessed me to butt in and make certain--perhaps I wanted to start something so as to get a rise out of the girl. I’m not naturally fresh and you may be sure I was in no mood for a flirtation. I was crusted with Yankee reserve even when I was young. But that impish air of San Francisco was in my nostrils--did you ever sniff it? It makes your head buzz and your thoughts froth, and it takes hold of an Easterner as quickly as a stiff cocktail grabs a man who isn’t used to a mixed drink. You’ll do almost anything in San Francisco when the sparkle from that trade-wind gets into your lungs.

So I tipped father the wink.

“Give her the jingle when she starts again,” I said.

I was right in my guess. He crooked his forefinger, reached down, and yanked empty air.

“Clang!” he barked. In a few seconds the turntable began to revolve again. Father gave me as silly a grin as I ever saw on a grown-up man’s face. “Yingleyingle--yingle!” he yelled in falsetto. And away he went!

I never got a more awful look from a pretty girl than I got from that one when I turned and caught her eyes. There was nothing shrinking or bashful about her when she was mad, so I found out then and there.

“You fool! You have started him all over again.”

“He seemed to be well started before I came along, miss.” It was that confounded air that was making me reckless and saucy.

“Clang!” yelped father, coming around again. “Yingle--yingle--yingle! Pull in them port fenders and mouse that anchor; we’re going outside this trip.”

“Just see the fool notion you have gone and put into him when he was all ready to come along with me!” she blazed. She knocked her little knuckles together in as fine a state of temper as I ever viewed spouting in a female. She turned suddenly and drove one of her fists against a man whom I had not noticed till then. He was tall--as long as the moral law, as we say East--as thin as a pump-handle, and he had a tangle of gray whisker and beard on top of him that made him look like a window-mop. He fell down when she hit him. She kicked him with the point of a little shoe, and he came up, unfolding in sections like a carpenter’s two-foot rule.

“Slap this man’s face, Ike, and send him along about his business,” she commanded.

But he only teetered and grinned and drooled, and winked at me over her shoulder.

“Oh, you are only another drunken fool!” she raged; and she stretched on tiptoe, and beat his face with the flat of her hand. “You have stood here without putting up a finger to help me get him off that turn-table, where he’s disgracing himself. I wonder whether there are any real men left in San Francisco!” She was in such a state of mind that I was mighty ashamed by then, I tell you that!

I dropped my baggage and took off my hat.

“I don’t know much about San Francisco and the real men, miss,” I told her, “for I’ve been in town only about five minutes. I reckon it makes an Easterner dizzy to be rushed in and dropped here. I didn’t mean to make trouble for you. Seeing that I’ve made it, I’ll unmake it if I can. Do you want your father--saying it is your father--brought off that turn-table?”

“No!” she snapped, still spiteful and all worked up. “I want you to think up something else for him to do on there as soon as he gets tired of doing what you suggested.”

Well, it was up to me to butt into that affair still farther--I could see that. I couldn’t sneak off and leave that girl feeling that way about me. I hopped on to the moving turn-table, took father by the arm, and told him his daughter wanted him to come along. He braced himself and shook loose.

“Nossir,” said he. “I’ve paid my money, and I’ll stay aboard till I get to where I’m bound.”

“Look here, you are not getting anywhere, man. You are only riding around and around, making a show of yourself, and there’s your nice daughter waiting for you.”

“It’s no place for a daughter--going where I’m going. Daughter ought to be in bed.” And then he braced himself back still farther, and--well, I suppose I’ll have to call it “singing” in order to describe the sound:

“I’m bound for the foot of Telegraph Hill,

To the Barbary Coast so gay.

I’m starting there for a peach of a tear--fill

’Em up all round--hooray!”

I took hold of his arm once more, and it was some arm.

“Look here,” he snarled, squinting at me, “I don’t know who you are, but I’ll let you know who I am blamed quick.”