Part 7 (1/2)
”But,” persisted the boy in a flash of inspiration, ”is popper goin' to join in business with those surveyors,--a surveyin'?”
”No, child, what an idea! Run away there,--and mind!--don't bother your father.”
Nevertheless John Milton's inspiration had taken a new and characteristic shape. All this, he reflected, had happened since the surveyors came--since they had weakly displayed such a shameless and unmanly interest in his sisters! It could have but one meaning. He hung around the sitting-room and pa.s.sages until he eventually encountered Clementina, taller than ever, evidently wearing a guilty satisfaction in her face, engrafted upon that habitual bearing of hers which he had always recognized as belonging to a vague but objectionable race whose members were individually known to him as ”a proudy.”
”Which of those two surveyor fellows is it, Clemmy?” he said with an engaging smile, yet halting at a strategic distance.
”Is what?”
”Wot you're goin' to marry.”
”Idiot!”
”That ain't tellin' which,” responded the boy darkly.
Clementina swept by him into the sitting-room, where he heard her declare that ”really that boy was getting too low and vulgar for anything.” Yet it struck him, that being pressed for further explanation, she did NOT specify why. This was ”girls' meanness!”
Howbeit he lingered late in the road that evening, hearing his father discuss with the search-party that had followed the banks of the creek, vainly looking for further traces of the missing 'Lige, the possibility of his being living or dead, of the body having been carried away by the current to the bay or turning up later in some distant marsh when the spring came with low water. One who had been to his cabin beside the embarcadero reported that it was, as had been long suspected, barely habitable, and contained neither books, papers, nor records which would indicate his family or friends. It was a G.o.d-forsaken, dreary, worthless place; he wondered how a white man could ever expect to make a living there. If Elijah never turned up again it certainly would be a long time before any squatter would think of taking possession of it. John Milton knew instinctively, without looking up, that his father's eyes were fixed upon him, and he felt himself constrained to appear to be abstracted in gazing down the darkening road. Then he heard his father say, with what he felt was an equal a.s.sumption of carelessness: ”Yes, I reckon I've got somewhere a bill of sale of that land that I had to take from 'Lige for an old bill, but I kalkilate that's all I'll ever see of it.”
Rain fell again as the darkness gathered, but he still loitered on the road and the sloping path of the garden, filled with a half resentful sense of wrong, and hugging with gloomy pride an increasing sense of loneliness and of getting dangerously wet. The swollen creek still whispered, murmured and swirled beside the bank. At another time he might have had wild ideas of emulating the surveyors on some extempore raft and so escaping his present dreary home existence; but since the disappearance of 'Lige, who had always excited an odd boyish antipathy in his heart, although he had never seen him, he shunned the stream contaminated with the missing man's unheroic fate. Presently the light from the open window of the sitting-room glittered on the wet leaves and sprays where he stood, and the voices of the family conclave came fitfully to his ear. They didn't want him there. They had never thought of asking him to come in. Well!--who cared? And he wasn't going to be bought off with a candle and a seat by the kitchen fire. No!
Nevertheless he was getting wet to no purpose. There was the tool-house and carpenter's shed near the bank; its floor was thickly covered with sawdust and pine-wood shavings, and there was a mouldy buffalo skin which he had once transported thither from the old wagon-bed. There, too, was his secret cache of a candle in a bottle, buried with other piratical treasures in the presence of the youthful Peters, who consented to be sacrificed on the spot in buccaneering fas.h.i.+on to complete the unhallowed rites. He unearthed the candle, lit it, and clearing away a part of the shavings stood it up on the floor. He then brought a prized, battered, and coverless volume from a hidden recess in the rafters, and lying down with the buffalo robe over him, and his cap in his hand ready to extinguish the light at the first footstep of a trespa.s.ser, gave himself up--as he had given himself up, I fear, many other times--to the enchantment of the page before him.
The current whispered, murmured, and sang, unheeded at his side. The voices of his mother and sisters, raised at times in eagerness or expectation of the future, fell upon his unlistening ears. For with the spell that had come upon him, the mean walls of his hiding-place melted away; the vulgar stream beside him might have been that dim, subterraneous river down which Sindbad and his bale of riches were swept out of the Cave of Death to the sunlight of life and fortune, so surely and so simply had it transported him beyond the cramped and darkened limits of his present life. He was in the better world of boyish romance,--of gallant deeds and high emprises; of miraculous atonement and devoted sacrifice; of brave men, and those rarer, impossible women,--the immaculate conception of a boy's virgin heart. What mattered it that behind that glittering window his mother and sisters grew feverish and excited over the vulgar details of their real but baser fortune? From the dark tool-shed by the muddy current, John Milton, with a battered dogs'-eared chronicle, soared on the wings of fancy far beyond their wildest ken!
CHAPER V.
Prosperity had settled upon the plains of Tasajara. Not only had the embarcadero emerged from the tules of Tasajara Creek as a thriving town of steamboat wharves, warehouses, and outlying mills and factories, but in five years the transforming railroad had penetrated the great plain itself and revealed its undeveloped fertility. The low-lying lands that had been yearly overflowed by the creek, now drained and cultivated, yielded treasures of wheat and barley that were apparently inexhaustible. Even the helpless indolence of Sidon had been surprised into activity and change. There was nothing left of the straggling settlement to recall its former aspect. The site of Harkutt's old store and dwelling was lost and forgotten in the new mill and granary that rose along the banks of the creek. Decay leaves ruin and traces for the memory to linger over; prosperity is unrelenting in its complete and smiling obliteration of the past.
But Tasajara City, as the embarcadero was now called, had no previous record, and even the former existence of an actual settler like the forgotten Elijah Curtis was unknown to the present inhabitants. It was Daniel Harkutt's idea carried out in Daniel Harkutt's land, with Daniel Harkutt's capital and energy. But Daniel Harkutt had become Daniel Harcourt, and Harcourt Avenue, Harcourt Square, and Harcourt House, ostentatiously proclaimed the new spelling of his patronymic. When the change was made and for what reason, who suggested it and under what authority, were not easy to determine, as the sign on his former store had borne nothing but the legend, Goods and Provisions, and his name did not appear on written record until after the occupation of Tasajara; but it is presumed that it was at the instigation of his daughters, and there was no one to oppose it. Harcourt was a pretty name for a street, a square, or a hotel; even the few in Sidon who had called it Harkutt admitted that it was an improvement quite consistent with the change from the fever-haunted tules and sedges of the creek to the broad, level, and handsome squares of Tasajara City.
This might have been the opinion of a visitor at the Harcourt House, who arrived one summer afternoon from the Stockton boat, but whose shrewd, half-critical, half-professional eyes and quiet questionings betrayed some previous knowledge of the locality. Seated on the broad veranda of the Harcourt House, and gazing out on the well-kept green and young eucalyptus trees of the Harcourt Square or Plaza, he had elicited a counter question from a prosperous-looking citizen who had been lounging at his side.
”I reckon you look ez if you might have been here before, stranger.”
”Yes,” said the stranger quietly, ”I have been. But it was when the tules grew in the square opposite, and the tide of the creek washed them.”
”Well,” said the Tasajaran, looking curiously at the stranger, ”I call myself a pioneer of Tasajara. My name's Peters,--of Peters and Co.,--and those warehouses along the wharf, where you landed just now, are mine; but I was the first settler on Harcourt's land, and built the next cabin after him. I helped to clear out them tules and dredged the channels yonder. I took the contract with Harcourt to build the last fifteen miles o' railroad, and put up that depot for the company. Perhaps you were here before that?”
”I was,” returned the stranger quietly.
”I say,” said Peters, hitching his chair a little nearer to his companion, ”you never knew a kind of broken-down feller, called Curtis--'Lige Curtis--who once squatted here and sold his right to Harkutt? He disappeared; it was allowed he killed hisself, but they never found his body, and, between you and me, I never took stock in that story. You know Harcourt holds under him, and all Tasajara rests on that t.i.tle.”
”I've heard so,” a.s.sented the stranger carelessly, ”but I never knew the original settler. Then Harcourt has been lucky?”
”You bet. He's got three millions right about HERE, or within this quarter section, to say nothing of his outside speculations.”
”And lives here?”
”Not for two years. That's his old house across the plaza, but his women-folks live mostly in 'Frisco and New York, where he's got houses too. They say they sorter got sick of Tasajara after his youngest daughter ran off with a feller.”