 A Mother of Five. She was a mother and a rather exemplary one, of five children, although her own age was barely nine. Two of these children were twins, and she generally alluded to them as Mr. Amplac's children, referring to an exceedingly respectable gentleman in the next settlement who, I have reason to believe, had never set eyes on her or them. The twins were quite naturally alike, having been in a previous state of existence, two nine-pins, and were still somewhat vague and in co-et below their low shoulders in their long clothes, but were also firm and globular about the head, and there were not wanting those who professed to see in this an unmistakable resemblance to their reputed father. The other children were dolls of different ages, sex, and condition, but the twins may be said to have been distinctly her own conception. Yet such was her admirable and impartial maternity that she never made any difference between them. The Amplac's children was a description rather than a distinction. She was herself the motherless child of Robert Folkes, a hardworking but somewhat improvident teamster on the express route between Big Bend and Reno. His daily avocation, when she was not actually with him in the wagon, led to an occasional dispersion of herself and her progeny along the road and at wayside stations between those places. But the family was generally collected together by rough but kindly hands already familiar with the handling of her children. I have a very vivid recollection of Jim Carter trampling into a saloon after a five-mile walk through a snowdrift with an Amplac twin in his pocket. Sothin ought to be done, he growled, to make Myrie a little more careful of them Amplac children. I picked up one outer the snow a mile beyond Big Bend. God bless my soul, said a casual passenger, looking up hastily. I didn't know Mr. Amplac was married. Jim winked diabolically at us over his glass. No more did I, he responded gloomily. But you can't tell anything about the ways of them respectable psalms singing J. Birds. Having thus disposed of Amplac's character, later on, when he was alone with Myrie, or Myrie, as she chose to pronounce it, the rascal worked upon her feelings with an account of the infant Amplac's sufferings in the snowdrift and its agonized whisperings for Myrie, Myrie, until real tears stood in Myrie's blue eyes. Let this be a lesson to you, he concluded, drawing the nine-pin dexterously from his pocket, for it took Naya court of the best forty-rod whiskey to bring that child to. Not only did Myrie firmly believe him, but for weeks afterwards, Julian Amplac, this unhappy twin, was kept in a somnolent attitude in the cart, and was believed to have contracted dissipated habits from the effects of his heroic treatment. Her numerous family was achieved in only two years, and succeeded her first child, which was brought from Sacramento at considerable expense by a Mr. William Dodd, also a teamster, on her seventh birthday. This, by one of those rare inventions known only to a child's vocabulary, she at once called Misery, probably a combination of Missy, as she herself was formerly turned by strangers, and Missouri, her native state. It was an excessively large doll at first, Mr. Dodd wishing to get the worth of his money, but time, and perhaps an excess of maternal care, remedied the defect, and it lost flesh in certain unemployed parts of its limbs very rapidly. It was further reduced in bulk by falling under the wagon, and having the whole train pass over it, but singularly enough its greatest attenuation was in the head and shoulders, the complexion peeling off as a solid layer, followed by the disappearance of distinct strata of its extraordinary composition. This continued until the head and shoulders were much too small for even its reduced frame, and all the devices of childish millinery, a shawl secured with tacks and well hammered in, and a hat which tilted backwards and forwards and never appeared at the same angle, failed to restore symmetry, until one dreadful morning, after an imprudent bath, the whole upper structure disappeared, leaving two hideous iron prongs standing erect from the spinal column. Even an imaginative child like Mary could not accept this sort of thing as a head. Later in the day Jack Roper, the blacksmith at the crossing, was concerned at the plaintive appearance before his forge of a little girl clad in a bright blue pinafore of the same color as her eyes, carrying her monstrous offspring in her arms. Jack recognized her and instantly divined the situation. You haven't, he suggested kindly, got another head at home, something left over? Mary shook her head sadly, even her prolific maternity was not equal to the creation of children in detail. Nor anything like a head, he persisted sympathetically. Mary's loving eyes filled with tears. No, nothing! You couldn't, he continued thoughtfully. Use her the other side up. We might get a fine pair of legs out of them irons, he added, touching the two prongs with artistic suggestion. Now look here! He was about to tilt the doll over when a small cry of feminine distress and a swift movement of a matronly little arm arrested the evident indiscretion. I see, he said gravely. Well, you come here to-morrow and we'll fix up something to work her. Jack was thoughtful the rest of the day, more than usually impatient with certain stubborn mules to be shod, and even knocked off work an hour earlier to walk to Big Bend and a rival shop. But the next morning, when the trustful and anxious mother appeared at the forge, she uttered a scream of delight. Jack had neatly joined a hollow iron globe, taken from the nule post of some old iron staircase railing, to the two prongs, and covered it with a coat of red fireproof paint. It was true that its complexion was rather high, that it was inclined to be top heavy, and that in the long run the other dolls suffered considerably by enforced association with this unyielding and implacable head and shoulders. But this did not diminish Mary's joy over her restored firstborn. Even its utter absence of features was no defect in a family where features were as evanescent as in hers, and the most ordinary student of evolution could see that the amplac nine pins were in legitimate succession to the globular headed misery. For a time I think that Mary even preferred her to the others, howbeit it was a pretty sight to see her on a summer afternoon, sitting upon a wayside stump her other children dutifully ranged about her, and the hard, unfeeling head of misery pressed deep down into her loving little heart as she swayed from side to side, crooning her plaintive lullaby. Small wonder that the bees took up the song and droned a slumberous accompaniment, or that high above her head the enormous pines stirred through their depths by the soft sear and air, or heaven knows what, let slip flickering lights and shadows to play over that cast-iron face until the child, looking down upon it with the quick, transforming power of love, thought that it smiled. The two remaining members of the family were less distinctive. Glory Anna, pronounced as two words, Glory Anna, being the work of her father, who also named it, was simply a cylindrical roll of canvas wagon covering, girt so as to define a neck and waist, with a rudely inked face, altogether a weak, pitiable, man-like invention, and Johnny Deere, alleged to be the representative of John Doremus, a young storekeeper who occasionally supplied Mary with gratuitous sweets. Mary never admitted this, and as we were all gentlemen along that road, we were blind to the suggestion. Johnny Deere was originally a small plaster, phrenological cast of a head and bust, begged from some shop window in the country town, with a body clearly constructed by Mary herself. It was an ominous fact that it was always dressed as a boy, and was distinctly the most human looking of all herprogeny. Indeed, in spite of the faculties that were legibly printed all over its smooth, white, hairless head, it was appallingly lifelike. Left sometimes by Mary, astride the branch of a wayside tree, horsemen had been known to dismount hurriedly and examine it, returning with a mystified smile, and it was on record that Yuba Bill had once pulled up the pioneer coach at the request of curious and imploring passengers, and then grimly installed Johnny Deere beside him on the box seat, publicly delivering him to Mary at Big Bend, to her wide-eyed confusion and the first blush we had ever seen on her round, chubby, sunburned cheeks. It may seem strange that with her great popularity and her well-known maternal instincts she had not been kept fully supplied with proper and more conventional dolls, but it was soon recognized that she did not care for them, left their waxen faces, rolling eyes, and abundant hair in ditches, or stripped them to help clothe the more extravagant creatures of her fancy. So it came that Johnny Deere's strictly classical profile looked out from under a girl's fashionable straw sailor hat to the utter obliteration of his prominent intellectual faculties. The Amplac twins were bonnets on their nine-pin heads, and even an attempt was made to fit a waxen scalp on the iron-headed misery. But her dolls were always a creation of her own, her affection for them increasing with the demand upon her imagination. This may seem somewhat inconsistent with her habit of occasionally abandoning them in the woods or in the ditches, but she had an unbounded confidence in the kindly maternity of nature and trusted her children to the breast of the great mother as freely as she did herself in her own motherlessness. And this confidence was rarely betrayed. Rats, mice, snails, wildcats, panther, and bear never touched her lost waifs. Even the elements were kindly. An Amplac twin buried under a snowdrift in high altitudes reappeared smilingly in the spring in all its wooden and painted integrity. We were all pantheists then, and believed this implicitly. It was only when exposed to the milder forces of civilization that Mary had anything to fear. Yet even then, when Patsy O'Connor's domestic goat had once tried to sample the lost misery, he had retreated with the loss of three front teeth, and Thompson's mule came out of an encounter with that iron-headed prodigy with a sprained hind leg and a cut and swollen pastern. But these were the simple Arcadian days of the road between Big Bend and Reno, and progress and prosperity alas brought changes in their wake. It was already whispered that Mary ought to be going to school, and Mr. Amplac, still happily oblivious of the liberties taken with his name, as trustee of the public school at Duckville, had intimated that Mary's bohemian wanderings were a scandal to the county. She was growing up in ignorance, a dreadful ignorance of everything but the chivalry, the deep tenderness, the delicacy and unselfishness of the rude men around her, and obliviousness of faith in anything but the immeasurable bounty of nature toward her and her children. Of course there was a fierce discussion between the boys of the road and the few married families of the settlement on this point, but, of course, progress and snivelization as the boys chose to call it triumphed. The projection of a railroad settled it. Robert Fulkes, promoted to a formanship of a division of the line, was made to understand that his daughter must be educated, but the terrible question of Mary's family remained. No school would open its doors to that heterogeneous collection, and Mary's little heart would have broken over the rude dispersal or heroic burning of her children. The ingenuity of Jack Roper suggested a compromise. She was allowed to select one to take to school with her. The others were adopted by certain of her friends, and she was to be permitted to visit them every Saturday afternoon. The selection was a cruel trial, so cruel that, knowing her undoubted preference for her first-born misery, we would not have interfered for worlds, but in her unexpected choice of Johnny Deere, the most unworldly of us knew that it was the first glimmering of feminine tact, her first submission to the world of propriety that she was now entering. Johnny Deere was undoubtedly the most presentable. Even more, there was an educational suggestion in its prominent, mapped-out, phrenological organs. The adopted fathers were loyal to their trust. Indeed, for years afterward the blacksmith kept the iron-headed misery on a rude shelf, like a shrine near his bunk. Nobody but himself and Mary ever knew the secret, stolen, and thrilling interviews that took place during the first days of their separation. Certain facts, however, transpired concerning Mary's equal faithfulness to another of her children. It is said that one Saturday afternoon, when the road-manager of the new line was seated in his office at Reno, in a private business discussion with two directors, a gentle tap was heard at the door. It was opened to an eager little face, a pair of blue eyes, and a blue pinafore. To the astonishment of the directors, a change came over the face of the manager. Taking the child gently by the hand, he walked to his desk, on which the papers of the new line were scattered, and drew open a drawer from which he took a large nine-pin, extraordinarily dressed as a doll. The astonishment of the two gentlemen was increased at the following quaint colloquy between the manager and the child. She's doing remarkably well, in spite of the trying weather. But I have had to keep her very quiet, said the manager, regarding the nine-pin critically. Yes, said Mary quickly. It's just the same with Johnny Deere. His cough is frightful at nights. But misery's all right. I've just been to see her. There's a good deal of scarlet fever around, continued the manager with quiet concern, and we can't be too careful. But I shall take her for a little run down the line to-morrow. The eyes of Mary sparkled and overflowed like blue water. Then there was a kiss, a little laugh, a shy glance at the two curious strangers, the blue pinafore fluttered away, and the colloquy ended. She was equally attentive in her care of the others, but the rag-baby Gloriana, who had found a home in Jim Carter's cabin at the ridge, living too far for daily visits, was brought down regularly on Saturday afternoon to Mary's house by Jim, tucked in asleep in his saddle-bags, or riding gallantly before him on the horn of his saddle. On Sunday there was a dress parade of all the dolls which kept Mary in heart for the next week's desolation. But there came one Saturday and Sunday when Mary did not appear, and it was known along the road that she had been called to San Francisco to meet an aunt who had just arrived from the States. It was a vacant Sunday to the boys, a very hollow, unsanctified Sunday, somehow, without that little figure, but the next Sunday and the next were still worse, and then it was known that the dreadful aunt was making much of Mary and was sending her to a grand school, a convent at Santa Clara, where it was rumored girls were turned out so accomplished that their own parents did not know them. But we knew that was impossible to our Mary, and a letter which came from her at the end of the month, and before the convent had closed upon the blue pinafore, satisfied us, and was balmed to our anxious hearts. It was characteristic of Mary, it was addressed to nobody in particular, and would, but for the prudence of the aunt, have been entrusted to the post office open and undirected. It was a single sheet, handed to us without a word by her father, but as we passed it from hand to hand, we understood it as if we had heard our lost playfellow's voice. There's more houses in Frisco than you can shake a stick at, and women's till you can't rest, but mules and jackasses ain't got no shoe, nor blacksmith's shops, which is not to be seen nowhere. Rabbits and squirrels also bears and pamphors is unknown and unforgotten on account of the streets and Sunday skulls. Jim Roper, you ought to be very good to misery on account of my not being here, and not hearten your heart to her because she is top-heavy, which is untrue and simply an emptyant lie, like you all us make. I have a canary bird, what sings delightful, but isn't a yellow hammer such as I know, as you'd think. Dear Mr. Montgomery, don't keep gulin' amplac too much shed up in office drawers, it isn't good for his lungs and chest, and don't you ink his head, nother. You're as bad as the rest. Johnny, dear, you must be very kind to your adopted father, and you, Chlorianna, must love your kind Jimmy Carter very much for taking you horseback so often. I has been buggy-riding with an officer who has killed Engens real. I am coming back soon with great affection, so look out in mind. But it was three years before she returned, and this was her last and only letter. The adopted fathers of her children were faithful, however, and when the new line was opened and it was understood that she was to be present with her father at the ceremony, they came with a common understanding to the station to meet their old playmate. They were ranged along the platform, poor Jack Roper a little over-weighted with a bundle he was carrying on his left arm, and then a young girl in the freshness of her teens and the spotless purity of a muslin frock, that, although brief in skirt was perfect in fit, faultlessly booted and gloved, tripped from the train, and offered a delicate hand in turn to each of her old friends. Nothing could be prettier than the smile and the cheeks that were no longer sunburnt. Nothing could be clearer than the blue eyes lifted frankly to theirs, and yet, as she gracefully turned away with her father, the faces of the four adopted parents were found to be as red and embarrassed as her own on that day that Yuba Bill drove up publicly with Johnny Deere on the box seat. You weren't such a fool, said Jack Montgomery to Roper as to bring misery here with you. I was, said Roper, with a constrained laugh, and you, he had just caught sight of the head of a nine-pin peeping from the manager's pocket. The man laughed, and then the four turned silently away. Mary had indeed come back to them, but not the mother of five. End of A MOTHER OF FIVE BALGER'S REPUTATION IN SELECTED STORIES BY BRETT HART This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. SELECTED STORIES BY BRETT HART BALGER'S REPUTATION We all remembered very distinctly Balger's advent in Rattlesnake Camp. It was during the rainy season, a season singularly conducive to settled reflective impressions as we sat and smoked around the stove in Mosby's Grocery. Like older and more civilized communities, we had our periodic waves of sentiment and opinion, with the exception that they were more evanescent with us, and as we had just passed through a fortnight of dissipation and extravagance owing to a visit from some gamblers and speculators, we were now undergoing a severe moral revulsion, partly induced by reduced finances and partly by the arrival of two families with grown-up daughters on the hill. It was raining, with occasional warm breaths through the open window of the southwest trades, redolent of the saturated spices of the woods and springing grasses, which perhaps were slightly inconsistent with the hot stove around which we had congregated. But the stove was only an excuse for our listless gregarious gathering. Warmth and idleness went well together, and it was currently accepted that we had caught from the particular reptile which gave its name to our camp much of its pathetic lifelong search for warmth and its habit of indolently basking in it. A few of us still went through the affectation of attempting to dry our damp clothes by the stove and sizzling our wet boots against it. But as the same individuals calmly permitted the rain to drive in upon them through the open window without moving, and seemed to take infinite delight in the amount of steam they generated, even that pretense dropped. Crodillus himself, with his tail in a muddy ditch and the sun-striking cold fire from his slit eyes as he basked his head on a warm stone beside it, could not have typified us better. Percy Briggs took his pipe from his mouth at last and said, with reflective severity, Well, gentlemen, if we can't get the wagon-road over here, and if we're going to be left out by the stagecoach company, we can at least straighten up the camp and not have it look like a cross between a tenement alley and a broken-down circus. I declare, I was just sick when these two baker-girls started to make a shortcut through the camp, darned if they didn't turn around and take to the woods and the rattlers again before they got halfway. And that benighted idiot, Tom Rawlins, standing there in the ditch, spattered all over with slum-gallion till he looked like a spotted terrapin waving his fins and sashaying backwards and forwards and saying, This way, ladies, this way. I didn't return to Tom Rawlins quite casually without looking up from his steaming boots. I didn't start in night of four last to dance the green corn dance out of Hiawatha with feathers in my hair and a red blanket on my shoulders round that family's new potato patch in order that it might increase and multiply. I didn't sing Sabbath morning bells with an anvil accompaniment until twelve o'clock at night over at the crossing so that they might dream of their happy childhood's home. Seems to me that it wasn't me did it. I might be mistaken. It was late. But I have the impression that it wasn't me. From the silence that followed, this would seem to have been clearly a recent performance of the previous speaker, who, however, responded quite cheerfully. An evening of simple childish gait he don't count. We've got to start in again fair. What we want here is to clear up and encourage decent immigration and get rid of gamblers and blather skites that are making this here camp their happy hunting ground. We don't want any more promiscuous shooting. We don't want any more paint in the town red. We don't want any more swaggering galloots riding up to this grocery and emptying their six shooters in the air before they light. We want to put a stop to it peacefully and without a row. And we can. We ain't got no bullies of our own to fight back, and they know it. So they know they won't get no credit bullying us. They'll leave if we're only firm. It's all along of our cussed fool good nature. They see it amuses us, and they'll keep it up as long as the whiskey's free. What we want to do is, when the next man comes waltzing along, a distant clatter from the rocky hillside here mingled with the puff of damp air through the window. Looks as if we might have a show even now, said Tom Rawlins, removing his feet from the stove as we all instinctively faced toward the window. I reckon you're in with us in this Mosby, said Briggs, turning toward the proprietor of the grocery, who had been leaning listlessly against the wall behind his bar. Order the man's had a fair show, said Mosby cautiously. He deprecated the prevailing condition of things, but it was still an open question whether the families would prove as valuable customers as his present clients. Everything in moderation, gentlemen. The sound of galloping hooves came near, now swishing in the soft mud of the highway, until the unseen rider pulled up before the door. There was no shouting, however, nor did he announce himself with the usual salvo of firearms. But when after a singularly heavy tread and the jingle of spurs on the platform, the door flew open to the newcomer. He seemed a realization of our worst expectations. Tall, broad and muscular, he carried in one hand a shotgun while from his hip dangled a heavy navy revolver. His long hair, unkempt but oiled, swept a greasy circle around his shoulders. His enormous mustache, dripping with wet, completely concealed his mouth. His costume of fringed buckskin was wild and utre even for our frontier camp. But what was more confirmative of our suspicions was that he was evidently in the habit of making an impression, and after a distinct pause at the doorway, with only a side glance at us, he strode to the bar. As there don't seem to be no hotel hereabouts, I reckon I can put up my Mustang here and have a shakedown somewhere behind that counter, he said. His voice seemed to have added to its natural depth the hoarseness of frequent overstraining. Yang got no bunk to spare you boys, have you? asked Mosby, evasively, glancing at Percy Briggs without looking at the stranger. We all looked at Briggs also. It was his affair, after all, he had originated this opposition. To our surprise, he said nothing. The stranger leaned heavily on the counter. I was speaking to you, he said with his eyes on Mosby and slightly accenting the pronoun with a tap of his revolver butt on the bar. You don't seem to catch on. Mosby smiled feebly and again cast an imploring glance at Briggs. To our greater astonishment, Briggs said quietly, Why don't you answer the stranger, Mosby? Yes, yes, said Mosby suavely to the newcomer, while an angry flush crossed his cheek as he recognized the position in which Briggs had placed him. Of course, you're welcome to what doings I have here, but I reckon these gentlemen over there, with a vicious glance at Briggs, might fix ye up something better. They're so powerful kind to your sort. The stranger threw down a gold piece on the counter and said, Work out your whiskey then. Waited until his glass was filled, took it in his hand and then, drawing an empty chair to the stove, sat down beside Briggs. Seen as your that kind, he said, placing his heavy hand on Briggs' knee. Maybe ye can tell me if there's a shanty or a cabinet rattlesnake that I can get for a couple of weeks. I saw an empty one at the head of the hill. You see, gentlemen, he had a confidentially as he swept at the drops of whiskey from his long mustache with his fingers and glanced around our group. I've got some business over at Bigwood, our nearest town, but it is a place to stay at. It ain't my style. What's the matter with Bigwood, said Briggs abruptly, is too howlin', too festive, too rough. There's too much yellin' and shootin' goin' day and night. There's too many card sharps and gay gamboliers comportin' about the town to please me. Too much promiscous soakin' at the bar and free gym-jams. What I want is a quiet place, what a man can give his mind and elbow a rest from betwixt grippin' his shootin' irons and crookedin' his whiskey. A sort of slow, quiet easy place, like this. We all stared at him, Percy Briggs as fixedly as any, but there was not the slightest trace of irony, sarcasm or peculiar significance in his manner. He went on slowly. When I struck this here camp a minute ago, when I see'd that dar-ditch-mandarin' peaceful-like through the street, without a hotel or a free saloon or express office on either side, with the smoke just to curlin' over the chimbley of that log shanty, and the brush just set fire to it, a smoldern in that potato patch with the kind of old-time stingin' in your eyes and nose, and a few women's duds just to flutterin' on a line by the fence, I says to myself, Bulger, this is peace. This is what you're lookin' for, Bulger. This is what you're wantin'. This is what you'll have. You say you've business over at Bigwood? What business? said Briggs. It's a peculiar business, young fellow. Returned the stranger gravely. There's different men as has different opinions about it. Some allows it's an easy business. Some allows it's a rough business. Some says it's a sad business. Others say it's gay and festive. Some wonders as how I've got into it and others wonder how I'll ever get out of it. It's a payin' business. It's a peaceful sort of business when left to itself. It's a peculiar business. A business that sort of belongs to me, though I ain't got no patent from Washington for it. It's my own business. He paused, rose, and, saying, Let's meander over and take a look at that empty cabin, and if she suits me while, plank down a slug for her on the spot, and move in tomorrow. Walked towards the door. I'll pick up Sutton in the way at boxes and blankets from the grocery. He added, looking at Mosby, and if there's a corner where I can stand my gun and a nail to hang up my revolver, why I'm all are. By this time, we were no longer astonished when Briggs rose also, and not only accompanied the sinister looking stranger to the empty cabin, but assisted him in negotiating with its owner for a fortnight's occupancy. Nevertheless, we eagerly assailed Briggs on his return for some explanation of this singular change in his attitude toward the stranger. He coolly reminded us, however, that while his intention of excluding ruffianly adventurers from the camp remained the same, he had no right to go back on the stranger's sentiments, which were evidently in accord with our own, and although Mr. Balger's appearance was inconsistent with them, that was only an additional reason why we should substitute a mild firmness for that violence, which we all deprecated, but which might attend his abrupt dismissal. We were all satisfied except Mosby, who had not yet recovered from Briggs' change of front, which he was pleased to call crawfishing. Seemed to me his account of his business was extraordinary satisfactory, sort of filled the bill all round. No mistake there. He suggested with a malicious irony, I like a man that's outspoken. I understood him very well, said Briggs quietly. In course you did, only when you've settled in your mind whether he was describing horse-stealing or track distributing, maybe you'll let me know. It would seem, however, that Briggs did not interrogate the stranger again regarding it, nor did we, who were quite content to leave matters in Briggs' hands. Enough that Mr. Balger moved into the empty cabin the next day, and with the aid of a few old boxes from the grocery, which he quickly extemporized into tables and chairs, and the purchase of some necessary cooking utensils, soon made himself at home. The rest of the camp, now thoroughly aroused, made a point of leaving their work in the ditches whenever they could to stroll carelessly around Balger's tenement in the vague hope of satisfying a curiosity that had become tormenting. But they could not find that he was doing anything of a suspicious character, except, perhaps, from the fact that it was not outwardly suspicious, which I grieve to say did not lawl them to security. He seemed to be either fixing up his cabin or smoking in his doorway. On the second day he checked this itinerant curiosity by taking the initiative himself, and quietly walking from claim to claim, and from cabin to cabin with a Pacific, but by no means a satisfying interest. The shadow of his tall figure carrying his inseparable gun, which had not yet apparently stood in the corner, falling upon an excavated bank beside the delving miners, gave them a sense of uneasiness they could not explain. A few characteristic yells of boisterous hilarity from their noontime gathering under Cottonwood somehow ceased when Mr. Balger was seen gravely approaching, and his casual stopping before a poker party in the gulch actually caused one of the most reckless gamblers to weakly recede from a bluff and allow his adversary to sweep the board. After this it was felt that matters were becoming serious. There was no subsequent patrolling of the camp before the stranger's cabin. Their curiosity was singularly abated. A general feeling of repulsion kept within bounds, partly by the absence of any overt act from Balger, and partly by an inconsistent over-consciousness of his shotgun took its place. But an unexpected occurrence revived it. One evening, as the usual social circle were drawn around Mosby's Stove, the lazy silence was broken by the familiar sounds of pistol shots and a series of more familiar shrieks and yells from the Rocky Hill Road. The circle quickly recognized the voices of their old friends, the roisters, and gamblers from Sawyer's Dam. They as quickly recognized the returning shouts here and there from a few companions who were welcoming them. I grieve to say that in spite of their previous attitude of reformation, a smile of gratified expectancy lit up the faces of the younger members and even the older ones glanced dubiously at Briggs. Mosby made no attempt to conceal a sigh of relief as he carefully laid out an extra supply of glasses in his bar. Suddenly the oncoming yells ceased, the wild gallop of hoofs slackened into a trot and finally halted, and even the responsive shouts of the camp stopped also. We all looked vacantly at each other. Mosby leaped over his counter and went to the door. Briggs followed with the rest of us. The night was dark and it was a few minutes before we could distinguish a straggling, vague but silent procession moving through the moist, heavy air on the hill. But to our surprise, it was moving away from us, absolutely leaving the camp. We were still staring in expectancy when out of the darkness slowly merged a figure which we recognized at once as Captain Jim, one of the most reckless members of our camp. Pushing us back into the grocery, he entered without a word, closed the door behind him and threw himself vacantly into a chair. We at once pressed around him. He looked up at us daisily, drew a long breath and said slowly, It's no use gentlemen. Sutton's got to be done with that bulger and mighty quick. What's the matter? We asked eagerly matter. He repeated, passing his hand across his forehead matter. Look here. Ye all of you heard them boys from Sawyer's Dam coming over the hill. He heard their music. Maybe he heard us join in the chorus. Well, on they came waltzing down the hill like old times and we waiting for him. Then just as they passed the old cabin. Who do you think they ran right into shooting iron long hair and mustache and all that standing there plumping the road? Why bulger? Well, well, whatever it was, don't ask me. But during my skin if after a word or two from him them boys just stop yelling turned around like lambs and wrote away peaceful like along with them. We ran after them a spell still yelling when that our bulger faced around said to us that he'd come down here for quiet. And if he couldn't have it, he'd have to leave with those gentlemen who wanted it too. And I'm gosh darned if those gentlemen, you know him all patsy carpenter snapshot Harry and the others ever said a darned word, but kind or not it so long and went away. Our astonishment and mystification were complete. And I regret to say the indignation of Captain Jim and Mosby equally so if we're going to be bossed by the first newcomer, said the former gloomily, I reckon we might as well take our chances with the Sawyer's Damn boys whom we know. If we are going to have the legitimate trade of rattlesnake interfered with by the cranks of some hide and horse thief or retired road agent, said Mosby, we might as well invite the whole of your Quinn Marietta's gang here at once. But I suppose this is part of bulger's particular business, he added with a withering glance at Briggs. I understand it all, said Briggs quietly. You know, I told you that bullies couldn't live in the same camp together. That's human nature. And that's how plain men like you and me managed to scut along without getting plugged. You see, bulger wasn't going to have any of his own kind of jump in his claim here. And I reckon he was powerful enough to back down Sawyer's Damn. Anyhow, the bluff told, here we are in peace and quietness. Until he lets us know what is his little game, sneered Mosby. Nevertheless, such is the force of mysterious power that, although it was exercised against what we firmly believe was the independence of the camp, it extorted a certain respect from us. A few thought it was not a bad thing to have a professional bully, and even took care to relate the discomfiture of the wicked youth of Sawyer's Damn for the benefit of a certain adjacent and powerful camp who had looked down upon us. He himself, returning the same evening from his self-imposed escort, vouched safe no other reason than the one he had already given. Preposterous as it seemed, we were obliged to accept it, and the still more preposterous inference that he had sought Rattlesnake Camp solely for the purpose of acquiring and securing its peace and quietness. Certainly he had no other occupation. The little work he did upon the tailings of the abandoned claim which went with his little cabin was scarcely a pretense. He rode over on certain days to Bigwood on account of his business, but no one had ever seen him there, nor could the description of his manner and appearance evoke any information from the Bigwoodians. It remained a mystery. It had also been feared that the advent of Balger would intensify that fear and dislike of riotous Rattlesnake which the two families had shown, and which was the origin of Briggs' futile attempt at reformation. But it was discovered that since his arrival the young girls had shown less timidity in entering the camp, and had even exchanged some polite conversation and good-humored badnage with its younger and more impressible members. Perhaps this tended to make these youths more observant, for a few days later, when the vexed question of Balger's business was again under discussion, one of them remarked gloomily, I reckon there ain't no doubt what he's here for. The youthful prophet was instantly sat upon after the fashion of all elderly critics and stoves. Nevertheless after a pause he was permitted to explain. Only this morning when Lance Forrest and me were chirping with them gals out on the hill, who should we see hanging round in the bush but that cussed Balger? We allowed at first that it might be only a new style of his interfering, so we took no notice, except to pass a few remarks about listeners and that sort of thing, and perhaps to bedevil the girls a little more than we'd have done if we'd been alone. Well, they laughed, and we laughed, and that was the end of it. But this afternoon, as Lance and me were meandering down by their cabin, we sort of turned into the woods to wait till they'd come out. Then, all of a sudden, Lance stopped as rigid as a pointer that's fleshed something, and says, Begosh! And our under a big redwood sat that slimy hypocrite Balger, twisting his long mustaches and smiling like clockwork alongside a little mealy baker, you know her, the pootiest of the two sisters, and she's smiling back on him. Think of it, that unknown, unwashed, long-haired tramp and bully who must be forty of a day, and that innocent gal of sixteen it was simply disgustin'. I need not say that the older cynics and critics already alluded to at once improved the occasion. But more could be expected. Women, the world over, were noted for this sort of thing. This long-haired, swaggering bully with his air of mystery had captivated them, as he always had done since the days of Homer. Simple merit, which sat lowly in bar rooms and conceived projects for the public good around the humble, an ostentatious stove was nowhere. Youth could not too soon learn this bitter lesson, and in this case, youth, too, perhaps, was right in its conjectures. For this was, no doubt, the little game of the perfidious bulger. We recalled the fact that his unhallowed appearance in camp was almost coincident with the arrival of the two families. We glanced at Briggs, to our amazement, for the first time he looked seriously concerned. But Mosby, in the meantime, leaned his elbows lazily over the counter, and in a slow voice added fuel to the flame. I wouldn't have spoken of it before, he said, with a side-long glance at Briggs, for it might be all in the line of bulger's business, but Sutton happened the other night that, for a minute, got me. I was passing the baker, Shannie, and I heard one of them gals singing a camp-meeting hymn. I don't calculate to run again, you young fellows, in any spark in your Newtland that's going on, but her voice sounded so powerful, soothing, and pretty, that I just stood there and listened. Then the old woman, old mother baker, she joined in, and I listened too. And then, during my skin, but a man's voice joined in, just belching out of that cabin, and I sort of lifted myself up and came away. That voice, gentlemen, said Mosby, lingering artistically as he took up a glass and professionally eyed it before wiping it with his towel. That voice, come flim-fix-thar in that cabin among them women folks, was bulger's. The workers got up, with his eyes looking the darker for his flushed face. Gentlemen, he said huskily, there's only one thing to be done. A lot of us have got to ride over to Sawyer's Dam tomorrow morning and pick up as many square men as we can muster. There's a big camp meeting going on there, and there won't be no difficulty in that. When we've got a big enough crowd to show we mean business, we must march back here and ride balder out of this camp. I don't hanker out of vigilance committees. As a rule, it's a rough remedy. It's like drinking a quart of whiskey again in Rattlesnake poison. But it's got to be done. We don't mind being sold ourselves, but when it comes to our stand and buy and seeing the only innocent people in Rattlesnake given away, we kick. Bulger's got to be fired out of this camp, and he will be. But he was not. For when the next morning, a determined and thoughtful procession of the best and most characteristic citizens of Rattlesnake camp filed into Sawyer's Dam, they found that their mysterious friends had disappeared, although they met with a fraternal but subdued welcome from the general camp. But any approach to the subject of their visit, however, was received with a chilling disapproval. Did they not know that lawlessness of any kind, even under the rude mantle of frontier justice, was to be deprecated and scouted when a means of salvation, a power of regeneration, such as was now sweeping over Sawyer's Dam, was at hand? Could they not induce this man who was to be violently deported to accompany them willingly to Sawyer's Dam, and subject himself to the powerful influence of the revival then in full swing? The Rattlesnake boys laughed bitterly and described the man of whom they talked so lightly. But in vain. It's no use, gentlemen, said a more worldly bystander in a lower voice. The camp meetings got a strong grip here and betwixt you and me. There ain't no wonder. For the man that runs it, the big preacher, has got new ways and methods that fetches the boys every time. He don't preach no cut and dried gospel. He don't carry around those slop shop robes and clap them on you whether they fit or not. But he samples and measures the camp before he wades into it. He scouts and examines. He ain't no mere Sunday preacher with a comfortable house and once a week church, but he gives up his days and nights to it and makes his family work with him and even sends him forwards to explore the field. And he ain't no white choker shad-bell either, but fits himself like his gospel to the man he works among. You ought to hear him before you go. His tent is just out your way. I'll go with you. Too dejected to offer any opposition and perhaps a little curious to see this man who had unwittingly frustrated their design of lynching bulger, they halted at the outer fringe of worshipers who packed the huge enclosure. They had not time to indulge their cynicism over this swaying mass of emotional, half-thinking and almost irresponsible beings, nor to detect any similarity between their extreme methods and the scheme of redemption they themselves were seeking. For in a few moments, apparently lifted to his feet on a wave of religious exaltation, the famous preacher arose. The men of rattlesnake gasped for breath. It was bulger. The brigs quickly recovered himself. By what name, said he, turning passionately toward his guide, does this man, this impostor, call himself here? Baker. Baker? echoed the rattlesnake contingent. Baker, repeated Lance Forrester with a ghastly smile. Yes, returned their guide. You ought to know it, too, for he sent his wife and daughters over after his usual style to sample your camp a week ago. Come now, what are you giving us? End of Balger's Reputation. In the Tulees, in Selected Stories by Bret Hart. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Katie Gibbany, Arkansas, December 2007. Selected Stories by Bret Hart. In the Tulees. He had never seen a steamboat in his life. Born and reared in one of the western territories, far from a navigable river, he had only known the dugout or canoe as a means of conveyance across the scant streams whose affordable waters made even those scarcely a necessity. The long, narrow, hooded wagon, drawn by swaying oxen, known familiarly as a prairie schooner in which he journeyed across the plains to California in fifty-three, did not help his conception by that nautical figure. And when at last he dropped upon the land of promise through one of the southern mountain passes, he halted all unconsciously upon the low banks of a great yellow river amidst a tangled break of strange, reed-like grasses that were unknown to him. The river, broadening as it debouched through many channels into a lordly bay, seemed to him the ultima fooly of his journeyings. Unyoking his oxen on the edge of the luxuriant meadows which blended with scarcely any line of demarcation into the great stream itself, he found the prospect good according to his lights and prairie experiences, and, converting his halted wagon into a temporary cabin, he resolved to rest here and settle. There was little difficulty in so doing. The cultivated clearings he had passed were few and far between. The land would be his by discovery and occupation. His habits of loneliness and self-reliance made him independent of neighbors. He took his first meal in his new solitude under a spreading willow, but so near his natural boundary that the waters gurgled and oozed in the reeds but a few feet from him. The sun sank, deepening the gold of the river until it might have been the stream of Pactolus itself. But Martin Morse had no imagination. He was not even a gold seeker. He had simply obeyed the roving instincts of the frontiersmen in coming hither. The land was virgin and unoccupied. It was his. He was alone. These questions settled. He smoked his pipe with less concern over his three thousand miles transference of habitation than the man of cities who had moved into a next street. When the sun sank, he rolled himself in his blankets in the wagon-bed and went quietly to sleep. But he was presently awakened by something which at first he could not determine to be a noise or an intangible sensation. It was a deep throbbing through the silence of the night, a pulsation that seemed even to be communicated to the rude bed whereon he lay. As it came nearer it separated itself into a labored, monotonous panting, continuous but distinct from an equally monotonous but fainter beating of the waters as if the whole track of the river were being coarsed and trodden by a multitude of swiftly trampling feet. A strange feeling took possession of him. Half of fear, half of curious expectation. It was coming nearer. He rose, leaped hurriedly from the wagon and ran to the bank. The night was dark. At first he saw nothing before him but the steel-black sky, pierced with far-spaced, irregularly scattered stars. Then there seemed to be approaching him, from the left, another and more symmetrical constellation, a few red and blue stars high above the river, with three compact lines of larger planetary lights flashing toward him and apparently on his own level. It was almost upon him. He involuntarily drew back as the strange phenomenon swept abreast of where he stood and resolved itself into a dark yet airy bulk whose vagueness, topped by enormous towers, was yet illuminated by those open squares of light that he had taken for stars, but which he saw now were brilliantly lit windows. Their vivid rays shot through the reeds and sent broad bands across the meadow, the stationary wagon and the slumbering oxen. But all this was nothing to the inner life they disclosed through lifted curtains and open blinds, which was the crowning revelation of this strange and wonderful spectacle. Elegantly dressed men and women moved through brilliantly lit and elaborately gilt saloons. In one a banquet seemed to be spread, served by white-jacketed servants. In another were men playing cards around marble-topped tables. In another the light flashed back again from the mirrors and glistening glasses and decanters of a gorgeous refreshment saloon. In smaller openings there was the shy disclosure of dainty white curtains and velvet lounges of more intimate apartments. Even more stood enthralled and mystified. It was as if some invisible Asmodeus had revealed to this simple frontiersman a world of which he had never dreamed. It was the world, a world of which he knew nothing in his simple, rustic habits and profound western isolation, sweeping by him with the rush of an unknown planet. In another moment it was gone, a shower of sparks shot up from one of the towers and fell all around him and then vanished, even as he remembered the set-piece of Fourth of July fireworks had vanished in his own rural town when he was a boy. The darkness fell with it too, but such was his utter absorption and breathless preoccupation that only a cold chill recalled him to himself, and he found he was standing mid-leg deep in the surge cast over the low banks by this passage of the first steamboat he had ever seen. He waited for it the next night when it appeared a little later from the opposite direction on its return trip. He watched it the next night and the next, hereafter he never missed it, coming or going, whatever the hard and weary preoccupations of his new and lonely life. He felt he could not have slept without seeing it go by. Oddly enough his interest and desire did not go further. Even had he the time and money to spend in a passage on the boat and thus actively realized the great world of which he had only these rare glimpses, a certain proud rustic shyness kept him from it. It was not his world. He could not affront the snubs that his ignorance and inexperience would have provoked, and he was dimly conscious, as so many of us are in our ignorance, that in mingling with it he would simply lose the easy privileges of alien criticism. For there was much that he did not understand and some things that graded upon his lonely independence. One night, a lighter one than those previous, he lingered a little longer in the moonlight to watch the phosphorescent wake of the retreating boat. Suddenly it struck him that there was a certain irregular splashing in the water, quite different from the regular, diagonally crossing surges that the boat swept upon the bank. Looking at it more intently he saw a black object turning in the water like a porpoise, and then the unmistakable uplifting of a black arm in an unskillful swimmer's overhand stroke. It was a struggling man, but it was quickly evident that the current was too strong and the turbulence of the shallow water too great for his efforts. Without a moment's hesitation, clad as he was in only his shirt and trousers, Morse strode into the reeds, and the next moment, with a call of warning, was swimming toward the now wildly struggling figure. But, from some unknown reason, as Morse approached him nearer the man uttered some incoherent protest and desperately turned away, throwing off Morse's extended arm. Attributing this only to the vague convulsions of a drowning man, Morse, a skilled swimmer, managed to clutch his shoulder and propelled him at arm's length, still struggling, apparently, with as much reluctance as incapacity, toward the bank. As their feet touched the reeds and slimy bottom, the man's resistance ceased, and he lapsed quite listlessly in Morse's arms. Half lifting, half dragging his burden, he succeeded at last in gaining the strip of meadow and deposited the unconscious man beneath the willow tree. Then he ran to his wagon for whiskey. But to his surprise, on his return the man was already sitting up, and ringing the water from his clothes. He then saw for the first time, by the clear moonlight, that the stranger was elegantly dressed and of striking appearance, and was clearly a part of that bright and fascinating world which Morse had been contemplating in his solitude. He eagerly took the proffered tin cup and drank the whiskey. Then he rose to his feet, staggered a few steps forward, and glanced curiously around him at the still motionless wagon. The few felled trees and evidence of clearing, and even at the rude cabin of logs and canvas, just beginning to rise from the ground, a few paces distant, and said, impatiently, Where the devil am I? Morse hesitated. He was unable to name the locality of his dwelling place. He answered briefly. On the right bank of the Sacramento. The stranger turned upon him a look of suspicion, not unmingled with resentment. Oh! he said, with ironical gravity. And I suppose that this water you picked me out of was the Sacramento River. Thank you. Morse, with slow western patience, explained that he had only settled there three weeks ago, and the place had no name. What's your nearest town, then? Thar ain't any. Thar's a blacksmith's shop and grocery at the crossroads, twenty miles further on, but it's got no name as I've heard on. The stranger's look of suspicion passed. Well, he said, in an imperative fashion, which, however, seemed as much the result of habit as the occasion. I want a horse and might be quick, too. Ain't got any. No horse? How did you get to this place? Morse pointed to the slumbering oxen. The stranger again stared curiously at him. After a pause he said, with a half pitying, half humorous smile. Pike, aren't you? Whether Morse did or did not know that this current California slang for a denizen of the bucolic West implied a certain contempt, he replied simply, I'm from Pike County, Missouri. Well, said the stranger, resuming his impatient manner, you must beggar steal a horse from your neighbors. Thar ain't any neighbor nearer than fifteen miles. Then send fifteen miles. Stop! He opened his still-clinging shirt and drew out a belt pouch, which he threw to Morse. There, there's two hundred and fifty dollars in that. Now, I want a horse. Sabé? Thar ain't any one to send, said Morse quietly. Do you mean to say you are all alone here? Yes. And you fished me out all by yourself? Yes. The stranger again examined him curiously. Then he suddenly stretched out his hand and grasped his companions. All right, if you can't send, I reckon I can manage to walk over there tomorrow. I was going on to say, said Morse, simply, that if you'll lie by tonight, I'll start over sun-up after putting out the cattle and fetch you back a horse a forenoon. That's enough. He, however, remained looking curiously at Morse. Did you never hear, he said, with a singular smile, that it was about the meanest kind of luck that could happen to you to save a drowning man? No, said Morse simply. I reckon it ought to be the meanest you didn't. That depends upon the man you save, said the stranger, with the same ambiguous smile, and whether the saving him is only putting things off. Look here, he added, with an abrupt return to his imperative style. Can't you give me some dry clothes? Morse brought him a pair of overalls and a hickory shirt, well worn, but smelling strongly of a recent wash with coarse soap. The stranger put them on while his companion busied himself in collecting a pile of sticks and dry leaves. What's that for? said the stranger suddenly. A fire to dry your clothes. The stranger calmly kicked the pile aside. Not any fire tonight, if I know it, he said brusquely, before Morse could resent his quickly changing moods he continued, in another tone, dropping to an easy reclining position beneath the tree. Now, tell me all about yourself and what you were doing here. Thus commanded, Morse patiently repeated his story from the time he left his backwoods cabin to his selection of the riverbank for a location. He pointed out the rich quality of this alluvial bottom and its adaptability for the raising of stock which he hoped soon to acquire. The stranger smiled grimly, raised himself to a sitting position and, taking a penknife from his damp clothes, began to clean his nails in the bright moonlight, an occupation which made the simple Morse wander vaguely in his narration. And you don't know that this hole will give you chills and fever till you'll shake yourself out of your boots? Morse had lived before in augish districts and had no fear. And you never heard that some night the whole river will rise up and walk over you in your cabin in your stock? No, for I reckon to move my shanty farther back. The man shut up his penknife with a click and rose. If you've got to get up at sunrise we'd better be turning in. I suppose you can give me a pair of blankets? Morse pointed to the wagon. There's a shake down in the wagon bed, you can lie there. Nevertheless he hesitated, and, with the inconsequence and abruptness of a shy man, continued the previous conversation. I shouldn't like to move far away, for them steamboats his powerful company a-nights. I never seed one afore I came here. And then, with the inconsistency of a reserved man, and without a word of further preliminary, he launched into a confidential disclosure of his late experiences. The stranger listened with a singular interest in a quietly searching eye. Then you were watching the boat very closely just now when you saw me. What else did you see? Anything before that, before you saw me in the water? No, the boat had got well off before I saw you at all. Ah! said the stranger. Well, I'm going to turn in. He walked to the wagon, mounted it, and by the time that Morse had reached it with his wet clothes he was already wrapped in the blankets. A moment later he seemed to be in profound slumber. It was only then, when his guest was lying helplessly at his mercy, that he began to realize his strange experiences. The domination of this man had been so complete that Morse, although by nature independent and self-reliant, had not permitted himself to question his right or to resent his rudeness. He had accepted his guest's careless or premeditated silence regarding the particulars of his accident as a matter of course, and had never dreamed of questioning him, that it was a natural accident of that great world so apart from his own experiences he did not doubt and thought no more about it. The advent of the man himself was greater to him than the causes which brought him there. He was as yet quite unconscious of the complete fascination this mysterious stranger held over him, but he found himself shyly pleased with even the slight interest he had displayed in his affairs, and his hand felt yet warm and tingling from his sudden soft but expressive grasp, as if it had been a woman's. There is a simple intuition of friendship in some lonely, self-abstracted natures that is nearly akin to love it for sight. Even the audacities and insolence of this stranger affected Morse as he might have been touched and captivated by the coquettries or imperiousness of some bucolic virgin. And this reserved and shy frontiersman found himself that night sleepless and hovering with an abashed timidity and consciousness around the wagon that sheltered his guest as if he had been a very cordon watching the moonlit couch of some slumbering Amorellus. He was off by daylight after having placed a rude breakfast by the side of the still sleeping guest, and before midday he had returned with a horse. When he handed the stranger his pouch, lest the amount he had paid for the horse, the man said curtly, What's that for? Your change, I paid only fifty dollars for the horse. The stranger regarded him with his peculiar smile. Then, replacing the pouch in his belt, he shook Morse's hand again and mounted the horse. So your name's Martin Morse. Well, goodbye, Morse. Morse hesitated. A blush rose to his dark cheek. You didn't tell me your name, he said. In case—in case I'm wanted? Well, you can call me Captain Jack. He smiled, and, nodding his head, put spurs to his Mustang encountered away. Morse did not do much work that day, falling into abstracted moods and living over his experiences of the previous night, until he fancied he could almost see his strange guest again. The narrow strip of meadow was haunted by him. There was the tree under which he had first placed him, and that was where he had seen him sitting up in his dripping but well-fitting clothes. In the rough garments he had worn and returned, lingered a new scent of some delicate soap overpowering the strong alkali flavor of his own. He was early by the riverside, having a vague hope, he knew not why, that he should again see him and recognize him among the passengers. He was wading out among the reeds, in the faint light of the rising moon, recalling the exact spot where he had first seen the stranger, when he was suddenly startled by the rolling over in the water of some black object that had caught against the bank, but had been dislodged by his movements. To his horror it bore a faint resemblance to his first vision of the preceding night, but a second glance at the helplessly floating hair and bloated outline showed him that it was a dead man and of a type in build far different from his former companion. There was a bruise upon his matted forehead and an enormous wound in his throat already washed bloodless, white and waxen. An inexplicable fear came upon him, not at the sight of the corpse, for he had been in Indian massacres and had rescued bodies mutilated beyond recognition, but from some moral dread that strangely enough quickened and deepened with the far-off pant of the advancing steamboat. Scarcely knowing why, he dragged the body hurriedly ashore, concealing it in the reeds as if he were disposing of the evidence of his own crime. Then, to his preposterous terror, he noticed that the panting of the steamboat and the beat of its paddles were slowing as the vague bolt came in sight until a huge wave from the suddenly arrested wheels sent a surge like an enormous heartbeat pulsating through the sedge that half submerged him. The flashing of three or four lanterns on deck and the motionless line of lights abreast of him dazzled his eyes, but he knew that the low fringe of willows hid his house and wagon completely from view. A vague murmur of voices from the deck was suddenly overridden by a sharp order, and to his relief the slowly revolving wheels again sent a pulsation through the water, and the great fabric moved solemnly away. A sense of relief came over him, he knew not why, and he was conscious that for the first time he had not cared to look at the boat. When the moon arose he again examined the body and took from its clothing a few articles of identification and some papers of formality and precision which he vaguely conjectured to be some law papers from their resemblance to the phrasing of sheriffs and electors' notices which he had seen in the papers. He then buried the corpse in a shallow trench which he dug by the light of the moon. He had no question of responsibility, his pioneer training had not included coroner's inquests in its experience. In giving the body a speedy and secure burial from predatory animals he did what one frontiersman would do for another, what he hoped might be done for him. If his previous unaccountable feelings returned occasionally it was not from that, but rather from some uneasiness in regard to his late guests' possible feelings and a regret that he had not been here at the finding of the body, that it would in some way have explained his own accident he did not doubt. The boat did not slow up the next night, but passed as usual. Yet three or four days elapsed before he could look forward to its coming with his old extravagant and half exalted curiosity which was his nearest approach to imagination. He was then able to examine it more closely for the appearance of the stranger whom he now began to call his friend in his verbal communings with himself, but whom he did not seem destined to again discover, until one day to his astonishment a couple of fine horses were brought to his clearing by a stock-drover. They had been ordered to be left there, in vain Morse expostulated and questioned. Your name's Martin Morse ain't it, said the drover, with business brusqueness, and I reckon there ain't no other man of that name around here. No, said Morse. Well, then they're yours. But who sent them insisted Morse? What was his name and where does he live? I didn't know as I was called upon to give the pedigree of buyers, said the drover dryly. But the horses is Morgan, you can bet your life. He grinned as he rode away. But Captain Jack had sent them, and that it was a natural prelude to his again visiting him Morse did not doubt, and for a few days he lived in that dream. But Captain Jack did not come. The animals were of great service to him in rounding up the stock he now easily took in for pastureage, and saved him the necessity of having a partner or a hired man. The idea that this superior gentleman in fine clothes might ever appear to him in the former capacity had even flitted through his brain, but he had rejected it with a sigh. But the thought that, with luck and industry, he himself might, in course of time, approximate to Captain Jack's evident station, did occur to him, and was an incentive to energy. Yet it was quite distinct from the ordinary working man's ambition of wealth and state. It was only that it might make him more worthy of his friend. The great world was still as it had appeared to him in the passing boat, a thing to wonder at, to be above, and to criticize. For all that he prospered in his occupation. But one day he woke with listless limbs and feet that scarcely carried him through his daily labours. At night his listlessness changed to active pain, and a feverishness that seemed to impel him toward the fateful river as if his one aim in life was to drink up its waters and bathe in its yellow stream. But whenever he seemed to attempt it, strange dreams assailed him of dead bodies arising with swollen and distorted lips, to touch his own as he strove to drink, or of his mysterious guest battling with him in its current and driving him ashore. Again, when he assayed to bathe his parched and cracking limbs in its flood, he would be confronted with the dazzling lights of the motionless steamboat and the glare of stony eyes until he fled in aimless terror. How long this lasted he knew not until one morning he awoke in his new cabin, with a strange man sitting by his bed and a negrous in the doorway. You've had a sharp attack of tully fever, said the stranger, dropping Morris's listless wrist and answering his questioning eyes. But you're all right now and will pull through. Who are you? stammered Morris feebly. Dr. Duchain of Sacramento. How did you come here? I was ordered to come to you and bring a nurse as you were alone. There she is. He pointed to the smiling negrous. Who ordered you? The doctor smiled with professional tolerance. One of your friends, of course. But what was his name? Really, I don't remember. But don't distress yourself. He has settled for everything right royally. You have only to get strong now. My duty is ended and I can safely leave you with the nurse. Only when you are strong again, I say, and he says, keep back farther from the river. And that was all he knew. For even the nurse who attended him through the first days of his brief convalescence would tell him nothing more. He quickly got rid of her and resumed his work for a new and strange phase of his simple, childish affection for his benefactor, partly super-induced by his illness, was affecting him. He was beginning to feel the pain of an unequal friendship. He was dimly conscious that his mysterious guest was only coldly returning his hospitality and benefits, while holding aloof from any association with him, and indicating the immeasurable distance that separated their future intercourse. He had withheld any kind message or sympathetic greeting. He had kept back even his name. The shy, proud, ignorant heart of the frontiersmen swelled beneath the fancied sleight, which left him helpless a like of reproach or resentment. He could not return the horses, although in a fit of childish indignation he had resolved not to use them. He could not reimburse him for the doctor's bill, although he had sent away the nurse. He took a foolish satisfaction in not moving back from the river, with a faint hope that his ignoring of Captain Jack's advice might mysteriously be conveyed to him. He even thought of selling out his location and abandoning it that he might escape the cold surveillance of his heartless friend. All this was undoubtedly childish, but there is an irrepressible simplicity of youth in all deep feeling, and the worldly inexperience of the frontiersmen left him as innocent as a child. In this phase of his unrequited affection he even went so far as to seek some news of Captain Jack at Sacramento and, following out his foolish quest, even to take the steamboat from thence to Stockton. What happened to him then was perhaps the common experience of such natures. Once upon the boat the illusion of the great world it contained for him utterly vanished. He found it noisy, formal, insincere, and, had he ever understood or used the word in his limited vocabulary, vulgar. Rather perhaps it seemed to him that the prevailing sentiment and action of those who frequented it, and for whom it was built, were of a lower grade than his own. And, strangely enough, this gave him none of his former sense of critical superiority but only of his own utter and complete isolation. He wandered in his rough frontiersmen's clothes, from deck to cabin, from airy galleries to long saloons, alone, unchallenged, unrecognized, as if he were again haunting it only in spirit, as he had so often done in his dreams. His presence on the fringe of some valuable crowd caused no interruption. To him their speech was almost foreign in its allusions to things he did not understand. Or worse, seemed inconsistent with their eagerness and excitement. How different from all this were his old recollections of slowly oncoming teams, uplifted above the level horizon of the plains in his former wanderings. The few sauntering figures that met him as man to man, and exchanged the chronicle of the road, the record of Indian tracks, the finding of a spring, the discovery of pastureage with the lazy restful hospitality of the night, and how fierce here this continual struggle for dominance in existence, even in this lull of passage. For above all and through all he was conscious of the feverish haste of speed and exertion. The boat trembled, vibrated, and shook with every stroke of the ponderous piston. The laughter of the crowd, the exchange of gossip and news, the banquet at the long table, the newspapers and books in the reading-room, even the luxurious couches in the state-rooms, were all dominated, thrilled and pulsating with the perpetual throb of the demon of hurry and unrest. And when at last a horrible fascination dragged him into the engine-room, and he saw the cruel, relentless machinery at work, he seemed to recognize and understand some intelligent but pitiless mollock who was dragging this feverish world at its heels. Later he was seated in a corner of the hurricane-deck, whence he could view the monotonous banks of the river. Yet, perhaps by certain signs, unobservable to others, he knew he was approaching his own locality. He knew that his cabin and clearing would be undissernable behind the fringe of willows on the bank, but he already distinguished the points where a few cotton-woods struggled into a promontory of lighter foliage beyond them. Here voices fell upon his ear, and he was suddenly aware that two men had lazily crossed over from the other side of the boat and were standing before him looking upon the bank. "'It was about here, I reckon,' said one, listlessly, as if continuing a previous lagging conversation, that it must have happened, for it was after we were making for the bend we've just passed that the deputy, going to the state-room below us, found the door locked and the window open. But both men, Jack Despard and Seth Hall, the sheriff, weren't to be found, not a trace of them. The boat was searched, but all for nothing. The idea is that the sheriff, ardor getting his prisoner comfortable in the state-room, took off Jack's handcuffs and locked the door. That Jack, who was mighty desperate, bolted through the window into the river, and the sheriff, who was no slouch, ardor him. Others for the chairs and things was all tossed about in the state-room, that the two men clenched there, and Jack choked Hall and chucked him out, and then slipped Claire into the water himself, for the state-room window was just ahead of the paddle-box, and the captain allows that no man or men could fall before the paddles and live. Anyhow, that was all they ever knew of it. "'And there wasn't no trace of them found,' said the second man, after a long pause. "'No. Captain says them paddles would have just snatched them and slung them round and round and buried them way down in the ooze of the river-bed, with all the silt of the current atop of them, and they mightn't come up for ages. Or else the wheels might have waltzed them way up to Sacramento until there wasn't enough left of them to float, and dropped them when the boat stopped. It was a mighty fool risk for a man like Despard to take,' resumed the second speaker, as he turned away with a slight yawn. "'Bet your life, but he was desperate, and the sheriff had got him sure. And they do say that he was superstitious, like all them gamblers, and allowed that a man who was fixed to die by a rope or pistol wasn't to be washed out of life by water.' The two figures drifted lazily away, but more sat rigid and motionless. Yet, strange to say, only one idea came to him clearly out of this awful revelation. The thought that his friend was still true to him, and that his strange absence and mysterious silence were fully accounted for and explained, and with it came the more thrilling fancy that this man was alive to him alone. He was the sole custodian of his secret. The morality of the question, while it profoundly disturbed him, was rather in reference to its effect upon the chances of Captain Jack and the power it gave his enemies than his own conscience. He would rather that his friend should have proven the proscribed outlaw who retained an unselfish interest in him than the superior gentleman who was coldly wiping out his gratitude. He thought he understood now the reason of his visitors' strange and varying moods, even his bitter superstitious warning in regard to the probable curse entailed upon one who should save a drowning man. Of this he wrecked little, enough that he fancied that Captain Jack's concern in his illness was heightened by that fear, and this assurance of his protecting friendship thrilled him with pleasure. There was no reason now why he should not at once go back to his farm, where at least Captain Jack would always find him, and he did so returning on the same boat. He was now fully recovered from his illness and calmer in mind. He redoubled his labors to put himself in a position to help the mysterious fugitive when the time should come. The remote farm should always be a haven of refuge for him, and in this hope he forbore to take any outside help, remaining solitary and alone, that Captain Jack's retreat should be inviolate. And so the long, dry season passed, the hay was gathered, the pasturing herd sent home, and the first rains, dimpling like shot the broadening surface of the river, were all that broke his unending solitude. In this enforced attitude of waiting and expectancy he was exalted and strengthened by a new idea. He was not a religious man, but, dimly remembering the exhortations of some camp meeting of his boyhood, he conceived the idea that he might have been selected to work out the regeneration of Captain Jack. What might not come of this meeting and communing together in this lonely spot? That anything was due to the memory of the murdered sheriff, whose bones were rotting in the trench that he daily but unconcernedly passed did not occur to him. Perhaps his mind was not large enough for the double consideration. Friendship and love, and, for the matter of that, religion, are eminently one idea. But one night he awakened with a start. His hand, which was hanging out of his bunk, was dabbling idly in water. He had barely time to spring to his middle in what seemed to be a slowly filling tank before the door fell out as from that inward pressure in his whole shanty collapsed like a pack of cards. But it fell outwards, the roof sliding from over his head like a withdrawn canopy, and he was swept from his feet against it, and thence out into what might have been another world. For the rain had ceased and the full moon revealed only one vast, illimitable expanse of water. It was not an overflow, but the whole rushing river magnified and repeated a thousand times, which, even as he gasped for breath and clung to the roof, was bearing him away he knew not wither. But it was bearing him away upon its center, for as he cast one swift glance toward his meadows he saw they were covered by the same sweeping torrent, dotted with his sailing hayricks and reaching to the wooded-foot hills. It was the great flood of fifty-four. In its awe-inspiring completeness it might have seemed to him the primeval deluge. As his frail raft swept under a cottonwood he caught at one of the overhanging limbs, and, working his way desperately along the bow, at last reached a secure position in the fork of the tree. Here he was for the moment safe, but the devastation viewed from this height was only the more appalling. Every sign of his clearing, all evidence of his past year's industry, had disappeared. He was now conscious for the first time of the lowing of the few cattle he had kept, as, huddled together on a slight eminence, they one by one slipped over struggling into the flood. The shining bodies of his dead horses rolled by him as he gazed. The lower-lying limbs of the sycamore near him were bending with the burden of the lighter articles from his overturned wagon and cabin which they had caught and retained, and a rake was securely lodged in a bow. The habitual solitude of his locality was now strangely invaded by drifting sheds, agricultural implements, and fence-rails from unknown and remote neighbors, and he could faintly hear the far off calling of some unhappy farmer adrift upon a spar of his wrecked and shattered house. When day broke he was cold and hungry. Hours passed in hopeless monotony with no slackening or diminution of the waters. Even the drifts became less, and a vacant sea at last spread before him on which nothing moved. An awful silence impressed him. In the afternoon rain again began to fall on this gray, nebulous expanse until the whole world seemed made of aqueous vapor. He had but one idea now, the coming of the evening boat, and he would reserve his strength to swim to it. He did not know until later that it could no longer follow the old channel of the river, and passed far beyond his sight and hearing. With his disappointment and exposure that night came a return of his old fever. His limbs were alternately wracked with pain or benumbed and lifeless. He could scarcely retain his position, at times he scarcely cared to, and speculated upon ending his sufferings by a quick plunge downward. In other moments of lucid misery he was conscious of having wandered in his mind, of having seen the dead face of the murdered sheriff washed out of his shallow grave by the flood, staring at him from the water. To this was added the hallucination of noises. He heard voices, his own name called by a voice he knew, Captain Jax. Suddenly he started, but in that fatal movement lost his balanced and plunge downward. But before the water closed above his head he had had a cruel glimpse of help near him, of a flashing light, of the black hull of a tug not many yards away, of moving figures, the sensation of a sudden plunge following his own, the grip of a strong hand upon his collar, and unconsciousness. When he came to he was being lifted in a boat from the tug and rode through the deserted streets of a large city until he was taken in through the second story window of a half-submerged hotel and cared for. But all his questions yielded only the information that the tug, a privately procured one not belonging to the Public Relief Association, had been dispatched for him with special directions by a man who acted as one of the crew and who was the one who had plunged in for him at the last moment. The man had left the boat at Stockton. There was nothing more? Yes, he had left a letter. More seized it feverishly. It contained only a few lines. We are quits now. You are all right. I have saved you from drowning and shifted the curse to my own shoulders. Goodbye, Captain Jack. The astounded man attempted to rise, to utter an exclamation, but fell back unconscious. Weeks passed before he was able to leave his bed, and then only as an impoverished and physically shattered man. He had no means to restock the farm left bare by the subsiding water. A kindly train-packer offered him a situation as a mule-tier in a pack-train going to the mountains, for he knew tracks and passes and could ride. The mountains gave him back a little of the vigor he had lost in the river valley, but none of its dreams and ambitions. One day, while tracking a lost mule, he stopped to slake his thirst in a water-hole, all that the summer had left of a lonely mountain torrent. Enlarging the hole to give drink to his beast also, he was obliged to dislodge and throw out with the red soil some bits of honeycomb rock, which were so queer-looking and so heavy as to attract his attention. Two of the largest he took back to camp with him. They were gold. From the locality he took out a fortune nobody wondered. To the Californian superstition it was perfectly natural. It was nigger luck, the luck of the stupid, the ignorant, the inexperienced, the non-seeker, the irony of the gods. But the simple bucolic nature that had sustained itself against temptation with patient industry and lonely self- concentration succumbed to rapidly acquired wealth. So it chanced that one day, with a crowd of excitement-loving spendthrifts and companions, he found himself on the outskirts of a lawless mountain-town. An eager frantic crowd had already assembled there. A desperado was to be lynched. Pushing his way through the crowd for a nearer view of the exciting spectacle, the changed and reckless morse was stopped by armed men only at the foot of a cart which upheld a quiet, determined man, who, with a rope around his neck, was scornfully surveying the mob that held the other end of the rope drawn across the limb of a tree above him. The eyes of the doomed man caught those of Morse. His expression changed. A kindly smile at his face. He bowed his proud head for the first time, with an easy gesture of farewell. And then, with a cry, Morse threw himself upon the nearest armed guard, and a fierce struggle began. He had overpowered one adversary and seized another in his hopeless fight toward the cart when the half-astonished crowd felt that something must be done. It was done with a sharp report, the upward curl of smoke and the falling back of the guard as Morse staggered forward free with a bullet in his heart. Yet even then he did not fall until he reached the cart when he lapsed forward, dead, with his arms outstretched and his head at the doomed man's feet. There was something so supreme and all-powerful in this hopeless act of devotion that the heart of the multitude thrilled and then recoiled aghast at its work, and a single word or a gesture from the doomed man himself would have set him free. But they say, and it is credibly recorded, that his Captain Jack Despard looked down upon the hopeless sacrifice at his feet, his eyes blazed, and he flung upon the crowd a curse so awful and sweeping that, hardened as they were, their blood ran cold and then leaped furiously to their cheeks. And now he said, coolly tightening the rope around his neck with a jerk of his head, go on and be damned to you, I'm ready. They did not hesitate this time, and Martin Morse and Captain Jack Despard were buried in the same grave. End of IN THE TULIS