Found At Blazing Star

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FOUND AT BLAZING STAR


By Bret Harte



The rain had only ceased with the gray streaks of morning at Blazing
Star, and the settlement awoke to a moral sense of cleanliness, and the
finding of forgotten knives, tin cups, and smaller camp utensils, where
the heavy showers had washed away the debris and dust heaps before the
cabin doors. Indeed, it was recorded in Blazing Star that a fortunate
early riser had once picked up on the highway a solid chunk of gold
quartz which the rain had freed from its incumbering soil, and washed
into immediate and glittering popularity. Possibly this may have been
the reason why early risers in that locality, during the rainy season,
adopted a thoughtful habit of body, and seldom lifted their eyes to the
rifted or india-ink washed skies above them.

"Cass" Beard had risen early that morning, but not with a view to
discovery. A leak in his cabin roof,--quite consistent with his
careless, improvident habits,--had roused him at 4 A. M., with a flooded
"bunk" and wet blankets. The chips from his wood pile refused to kindle
a fire to dry his bed-clothes, and he had recourse to a more provident
neighbor's to supply the deficiency. This was nearly opposite. Mr.
Cassius crossed the highway, and stopped suddenly. Something glittered
in the nearest red pool before him. Gold, surely! But, wonderful to
relate, not an irregular, shapeless fragment of crude ore, fresh from
Nature's crucible, but a bit of jeweler's handicraft in the form of a
plain gold ring. Looking at it more attentively, he saw that it bore the
inscription, "May to Cass."

Like most of his fellow gold-seekers, Cass was superstitious. "Cass!"
His own name! He tried the ring. It fitted his little finger closely. It
was evidently a woman's ring. He looked up and down the highway. No one
was yet stirring. Little pools of water in the red road were beginning
to glitter and grow rosy from the far-flushing east, but there was no
trace of the owner of the shining waif. He knew that there was no woman
in camp, and among his few comrades in the settlement he remembered to
have seen none wearing an ornament like that. Again, the coincidence
of the inscription to his rather peculiar nickname would have been a
perennial source of playful comment in a camp that made no allowance
for sentimental memories. He slipped the glittering little hoop into his
pocket, and thoughtfully returned to his cabin.

Two hours later, when the long, straggling procession, which every
morning wended its way to Blazing Star Gulch,--the seat of mining
operations in the settlement,--began to move, Cass saw fit to
interrogate his fellows. "Ye didn't none on ye happen to drop anything
round yer last night?" he asked, cautiously.

"I dropped a pocketbook containing government bonds and some other
securities, with between fifty and sixty thousand dollars," responded
Peter Drummond, carelessly; "but no matter, if any man will return a few
autograph letters from foreign potentates that happened to be in it,--of
no value to anybody but the owner,--he can keep the money. Thar's
nothin' mean about me," he concluded, languidly.

This statement, bearing every evidence of the grossest mendacity, was
lightly passed over, and the men walked on with the deepest gravity.

"But hev you?" Cass presently asked of another.

"I lost my pile to Jack Hamlin at draw-poker, over at Wingdam last
night," returned the other, pensively, "but I don't calkilate to find it
lying round loose."

Forced at last by this kind of irony into more detailed explanation,
Cass confided to them his discovery, and produced his treasure. The
result was a dozen vague surmises,--only one of which seemed to
be popular, and to suit the dyspeptic despondency of the party,--a
despondency born of hastily masticated fried pork and flapjacks. The
ring was believed to have been dropped by some passing "road agent"
laden with guilty spoil.

"Ef I was you," said Drummond, gloomily, "I wouldn't flourish that yer
ring around much afore folks. I've seen better men nor you strung up a
tree by Vigilantes for having even less than that in their possession."

"And I wouldn't say much about bein' up so d----d early this morning,"
added an even more pessimistic comrade; "it might look bad before a
jury."

With this the men sadly dispersed, leaving the innocent Cass with the
ring in his hand, and a general impression on his mind that he was
already an object of suspicion to his comrades,--an impression, it is
hardly necessary to say, they fully intended should be left to rankle in
his guileless bosom.

Notwithstanding Cass's first hopeful superstition the ring did not seem
to bring him nor the camp any luck. Daily the "clean up" brought the
same scant rewards to their labors, and deepened the sardonic gravity of
Blazing Star. But, if Cass found no material result from his treasure,
it stimulated his lazy imagination, and, albeit a dangerous and
seductive stimulant, at least lifted him out of the monotonous grooves
of his half-careless, half-slovenly, but always self-contented camp
life. Heeding the wise caution of his comrades, he took the habit of
wearing the ring only at night. Wrapped in his blanket, he stealthily
slipped the golden circlet over his little finger, and, as he averred,
"slept all the better for it." Whether it ever evoked any warmer dream
or vision during those calm, cold, virgin-like spring nights, when even
the moon and the greater planets retreated into the icy blue, steel-like
firmament, I cannot say. Enough that this superstition began to be
colored a little by fancy, and his fatalism somewhat mitigated by
hope. Dreams of this kind did not tend to promote his efficiency in the
communistic labors of the camp, and brought him a self-isolation that,
however gratifying at first, soon debarred him the benefits of that hard
practical wisdom which underlaid the grumbling of his fellow workers.

"I'm dog-goned," said one commentator, "ef I don't believe that Cass
is looney over that yer ring he found. Wears it on a string under his
shirt."

Meantime, the seasons did not wait the discovery of the secret. The red
pools in Blazing Star highway were soon dried up in the fervent June sun
and riotous night wind of those altitudes. The ephemeral grasses that
had quickly supplanted these pools and the chocolate-colored mud, were
as quickly parched and withered. The footprints of spring became vague
and indefinite, and were finally lost in the impalpable dust of the
summer highway.

In one of his long, aimless excursions, Cass had penetrated a thick
undergrowth of buckeye and hazel, and found himself quite unexpectedly
upon the high road to Red Chief's Crossing. Cass knew by the lurid cloud
of dust that hid the distance, that the up coach had passed. He had
already reached that stage of superstition when the most trivial
occurrence seemed to point in some way to an elucidation of the mystery
of his treasure. His eyes had mechanically fallen to the ground
again, as if he half expected to find in some other waif a hint or
corroboration of his imaginings. Thus abstracted, the figure of a young
girl on horseback, in the road directly before the bushes he emerged
from, appeared to have sprung directly from the ground.

"Oh, come here, please do; quick!"

Cass stared, and then moved hesitatingly toward her.

"I heard some one coming through the bushes, and I waited," she went on.
"Come quick. It's something too awful for anything."

In spite of this appalling introduction, Cass could not but notice that
the voice, although hurried and excited, was by no means agitated or
frightened; that the eyes which looked into his sparkled with a certain
kind of pleased curiosity.

"It was just here," she went on vivaciously, "just here that I went into
the bush and cut a switch for my mare,--and,"--leading him along at a
brisk trot by her side,--"just here, look, see! this is what I found."

It was scarcely thirty feet from the road. The only object that met
Cass's eye was a man's stiff, tall hat, lying emptily and vacantly
in the grass. It was new, shiny, and of modish shape. But it was so
incongruous, so perkily smart, and yet so feeble and helpless lying
there, so ghastly ludicrous in its very appropriateness and incapacity
to adjust itself to the surrounding landscape, that it affected him
with something more than a sense of its grotesqueness, and he could only
stare at it blankly.

"But you're not looking the right way," the girl went on sharply; "look
there!"

Cass followed the direction of her whip. At last, what might have seemed
a coat thrown carelessly on the ground met his eye, but presently he
became aware of a white, rigid, aimlessly-clinched hand protruding from
the flaccid sleeve; mingled with it in some absurd way and half hidden
by the grass, lay what might have been a pair of cast-off trousers but
for two rigid boots that pointed in opposite angles to the sky. It was
a dead man. So palpably dead that life seemed to have taken flight from
his very clothes. So impotent, feeble, and degraded by them that the
naked subject of a dissecting table would have been less insulting to
humanity. The head had fallen back, and was partly hidden in a gopher
burrow, but the white, upturned face and closed eyes had less of
helpless death in them than those wretched enwrappings. Indeed, one limp
hand that lay across the swollen abdomen lent itself to the grotesquely
hideous suggestion of a gentleman sleeping off the excesses of a hearty
dinner.

"Ain't he horrid?" continued the girl; "but what killed him?"

Struggling between a certain fascination at the girl's cold-blooded
curiosity and horror of the murdered man, Cass hesitatingly lifted the
helpless head. A bluish hole above the right temple, and a few brown
paint-like spots on the forehead, shirt cellar, and matted hair proved
the only record.

"Turn him over again," said the girl, impatiently, as Cass was about to
relinquish his burden. "May be you'll find another wound."

But Cass was dimly remembering certain formalities that in older
civilizations attend the discovery of dead bodies, and postponed a
present inquest.

"Perhaps you'd better ride on, Miss, afore you get summoned as a
witness. I'll give warning at Red Chief's Crossing, and send the coroner
down here."

"Let me go with you," she said, earnestly, "it would be such fun. I
don't mind being a witness. Or," she added, without heeding Cass's look
of astonishment, "I'll wait here till you come back."

"But you see, Miss, it wouldn't seem right--" began Cass.

"But I found him first," interrupted the girl, with a pout.

Staggered by this preemptive right, sacred to all miners, Cass stopped.

"Who is the coroner?" she asked.

"Joe Hornsby."

"The tall, lame man, who was half eaten by a grizzly?"

"Yes."

"Well, look now! I'll ride on and bring him back in half an hour.
There!"

"But, Miss--!"

"Oh, don't mind ME. I never saw anything of this kind before, and I want
to see it ALL."

"Do you know Hornsby?" asked Cass, unconsciously a trifle irritated.

"No, but I'll bring him." She wheeled her horse into the road.

In the presence of this living energy Cass quite forgot the helpless
dead. "Have you been long in these parts, Miss?" he asked.

"About two weeks," she answered, shortly. "Good-by, just now. Look
around for the pistol or anything else you can find, although I have
been over the whole ground twice already."

A little puff of dust as the horse sprang into the road, a muffled
shuffle, struggle, then the regular beat of hoofs, and she was gone.

After five minutes had passed, Cass regretted that he had not
accompanied her; waiting in such a spot was an irksome task. Not that
there was anything in the scene itself to awaken gloomy imaginings;
the bright, truthful Californian sunshine scoffed at any illusion of
creeping shadows or waving branches. Once, in the rising wind, the empty
hat rolled over--but only in a ludicrous, drunken way. A search for any
further sign or token had proved futile, and Cass grew impatient. He
began to hate himself for having stayed; he would have fled but for
shame. Nor was his good humor restored when at the close of a weary half
hour two galloping figures emerged from the dusty horizon--Hornsby and
the young girl.

His vague annoyance increased as he fancied that both seemed to ignore
him, the coroner barely acknowledging his presence with a nod. Assisted
by the young girl, whose energy and enthusiasm evidently delighted him,
Hornsby raised the body for a more careful examination. The dead man's
pockets were carefully searched. A few coins, a silver pencil, knife,
and tobacco-box were all they found. It gave no clew to his identity.
Suddenly the young girl, who had, with unabashed curiosity, knelt
beside the exploring official hands of the Red Chief, uttered a cry of
gratification.

"Here's something! It dropped from the bosom of his shirt on the ground.
Look!"

She was holding in the air, between her thumb and forefinger, a folded
bit of well-worn newspaper. Her eyes sparkled.

"Shall I open it?" she asked.

"Yes."

"It's a little ring" she said; "looks like an engagement ring. Something
is written on it. Look! 'May to Cass.'"

Cass darted forward. "It's mine," he stammered, "mine! I dropped it.
It's nothing--nothing," he went on, after a pause, embarrassed and
blushing, as the girl and her companion both stared at him--"a mere
trifle. I'll take it."

But the coroner opposed his outstretched hand. "Not much," he said,
significantly.

"But it's MINE," continued Cass, indignation taking the place of shame
at his discovered secret. "I found it six months ago in the road.
I--picked it up."

"With your name already written on it! How handy!" said the coroner,
grimly.

"It's an old story" said Cass, blushing again under the
half-mischievous, half-searching eyes of the girl. "All Blazing Star
knows I found it."

"Then ye'll have no difficulty in provin' it," said Hornsby, coolly.
"Just now, however, WE'VE found it, and we propose to keep it for the
inquest."

Cass shrugged his shoulders. Further altercation would have only
heightened his ludicrous situation in the girl's eyes. He turned away,
leaving his treasure in the coroner's hands.

The inquest, a day or two later, was prompt and final. No clew to the
dead man's identity; no evidence sufficiently strong to prove murder or
suicide; no trace of any kind, inculpating any party, known or
unknown, were found. But much publicity and interest were given to the
proceedings by the presence of the principal witness, a handsome girl.
"To the pluck, persistency, and intellect of Miss Porter," said the "Red
Chief Recorder," "Tuolumne County owes the recovery of the body."

No one who was present at the inquest failed to be charmed with the
appearance and conduct of this beautiful young lady.

"Miss Porter has but lately arrived in this district, in which, it
is hoped, she will become an honored resident, and continue to set an
example to all lackadaisical and sentimental members of the so-called
'sterner sex.'" After this universally recognized allusion to Cass
Beard, the "Recorder" returned to its record: "Some interest was excited
by what appeared to be a clew to the mystery in the discovery of a small
gold engagement ring on the body. Evidence was afterward offered to show
it was the property of a Mr. Cass Beard of Blazing Star, who appeared
upon the scene AFTER the discovery of the corpse by Miss Porter. He
alleged he had dropped it in lifting the unfortunate remains of the
deceased. Much amusement was created in court by the sentimental
confusion of the claimant, and a certain partisan spirit shown by his
fellow-miners of Blazing Star. It appearing, however, by the admission
of this sighing Strephon of the Foot hills, that he had himself FOUND
this pledge of affection lying in the highway six months previous, the
coroner wisely placed it in the safe-keeping of the county court until
the appearance of the rightful owner."

Thus on the 13th of September, 186-, the treasure found at Blazing Star
passed out of the hands of its finder.

*****

Autumn brought an abrupt explanation of the mystery. Kanaka Joe had been
arrested for horse stealing, but had with noble candor confessed to
the finer offense of manslaughter. That swift and sure justice which
overtook the horse stealer in these altitudes was stayed a moment and
hesitated, for the victim was clearly the mysterious unknown. Curiosity
got the better of an extempore judge and jury.

"It was a fair fight," said the accused, not without some human vanity,
feeling that the camp hung upon his words, "and was settled by the
man az was peartest and liveliest with his weapon. We had a sort of
unpleasantness over at Lagrange the night afore, along of our both
hevin' a monotony of four aces. We had a clinch and a stamp around, and
when we was separated it was only a question of shootin' on sight. He
left Lagrange at sun up the next morning, and I struck across a bit o'
buckeye and underbrush and came upon him, accidental like, on the Red
Chief Road. I drawed when I sighted him, and called out. He slipped from
his mare and covered himself with her flanks, reaching for his holster,
but she rared and backed down on him across the road and into the grass,
where I got in another shot and fetched him."

"And you stole his mare?" suggested the Judge.

"I got away," said the gambler, simply.

Further questioning only elicited the fact that Joe did not know the
name or condition of his victim. He was a stranger in Lagrange.

It was a breezy afternoon, with some turbulency in the camp, and much
windy discussion over this unwonted delay of justice. The suggestion
that Joe should be first hanged for horse stealing and then tried for
murder was angrily discussed, but milder counsels were offered--that
the fact of the killing should be admitted only as proof of the theft.
A large party from Red Chief had come over to assist in judgment, among
them the coroner.

Cass Beard had avoided these proceedings, which only recalled an
unpleasant experience, and was wandering with pick, pan, and wallet
far from the camp. These accoutrements, as I have before intimated,
justified any form of aimless idleness under the equally aimless title
of "prospecting." He had at the end of three hours' relaxation reached
the highway to Red Chief, half hidden by blinding clouds of dust torn
from the crumbling red road at every gust which swept down the mountain
side. The spot had a familiar aspect to Cass, although some freshly-dug
holes near the wayside, with scattered earth beside them, showed the
presence of a recent prospector. He was struggling with his memory, when
the dust was suddenly dispersed and he found himself again at the scene
of the murder. He started: he had not put foot on the road since the
inquest. There lacked only the helpless dead man and the contrasting
figure of the alert young woman to restore the picture. The body was
gone, it was true, but as he turned he beheld Miss Porter, at a few
paces distant, sitting on her horse as energetic and observant as on the
first morning they had met. A superstitious thrill passed over him and
awoke his old antagonism.

She nodded to him slightly. "I came here to refresh my memory," she
said, "as Mr. Hornsby thought I might be asked to give my evidence again
at Blazing Star."

Cass carelessly struck an aimless blow with his pick against the sod and
did not reply.

"And you?" she queried.

"I stumbled upon the place just now while prospecting, or I shouldn't be
here."

"Then it was YOU made these holes?"

"No," said Cass, with ill-concealed disgust. "Nobody but a stranger
would go foolin' round such a spot."

He stopped, as the rude significance of his speech struck him, and added
surlily, "I mean--no one would dig here."

The girl laughed and showed a set of very white teeth in her square jaw.
Cass averted his face.

"Do you mean to say that every miner doesn't know that it's lucky to dig
wherever human blood has been spilt?"

Cass felt a return of his superstition, but he did not look up. "I never
heard it before," he said, severely.

"And you call yourself a California miner?"

"I do."

It was impossible for Miss Porter to misunderstand his curt speech and
unsocial manner. She stared at him and colored slightly. Lifting her
reins lightly, she said: "You certainly do not seem like most of the
miners I have met."

"Nor you like any girl from the East I ever met," he responded.

"What do you mean?" she asked, checking her horse.

"What I say," he answered, doggedly. Reasonable as this reply was, it
immediately struck him that it was scarcely dignified or manly. But
before he could explain himself Miss Porter was gone.

He met her again that very evening. The trial had been summarily
suspended by the appearance of the Sheriff of Calaveras and his posse,
who took Joe from that self-constituted tribunal of Blazing Star and
set his face southward and toward authoritative although more cautious
justice. But not before the evidence of the previous inquest had been
read, and the incident of the ring again delivered to the public.

It is said the prisoner burst into an incredulous laugh and asked to see
this mysterious waif. It was handed to him. Standing in the very
shadow of the gallows tree--which might have been one of the pines that
sheltered the billiard room in which the Vigilance Committee held their
conclave--the prisoner gave way to a burst of merriment, so genuine
and honest that the judge and jury joined in automatic sympathy. When
silence was restored an explanation was asked by the Judge. But there
was no response from the prisoner except a subdued chuckle.

"Did this ring belong to you?" asked the Judge, severely, the jury and
spectators craning their ears forward with an expectant smile already
on their faces. But the prisoner's eyes only sparkled maliciously as he
looked around the court.

"Tell us, Joe," said a sympathetic and laughter-loving juror, under his
breath. "Let it out and we'll make it easy for you."

"Prisoner," said the Judge, with a return of official dignity, "remember
that your life is in peril. Do you refuse?"

Joe lazily laid his arm on the back of his chair with (to quote the
words of an animated observer) "the air of having a Christian hope and a
sequence flush in his hand," and said: "Well, as I reckon I'm not up yer
for stealin' a ring that another man lets on to have found, and as fur
as I kin see, hez nothin' to do with the case, I do!" And as it was here
that the Sheriff of Calaveras made a precipitate entry into the room,
the mystery remained unsolved.

The effect of this freshly-important ridicule on the sensitive mind of
Cass might have been foretold by Blazing Star had it ever taken that
sensitiveness into consideration. He had lost the good humor and easy
pliability which had tempted him to frankness, and he had gradually
become bitter and hard. He had at first affected amusement over his own
vanished day dream--hiding his virgin disappointment in his own breast;
but when he began to turn upon his feelings he turned upon his comrades
also. Cass was for a while unpopular. There is no ingratitude so
revolting to the human mind as that of the butt who refuses to be one
any longer. The man who rejects that immunity which laughter generally
casts upon him and demands to be seriously considered deserves no mercy.

It was under these hard conditions that Cass Beard, convicted of overt
sentimentalism, aggravated by inconsistency, stepped into the Red Chief
coach that evening. It was his habit usually to ride with the driver,
but the presence of Hornsby and Miss Porter on the box seat changed
his intention. Yet he had the satisfaction of seeing that neither had
noticed him, and as there was no other passenger inside, he stretched
himself on the cushion of the back seat and gave way to moody
reflections. He quite determined to leave Blazing Star, to settle
himself seriously to the task of money getting, and to return to
his comrades, some day, a sarcastic, cynical, successful man, and so
overwhelm them with confusion. For poor Cass had not yet reached that
superiority of knowing that success would depend upon his ability to
forego his past. Indeed, part of his boyhood had been cast among these
men, and he was not old enough to have learned that success was not to
be gauged by their standard. The moon lit up the dark interior of the
coach with a faint poetic light. The lazy swinging of the vehicle that
was bearing him away--albeit only for a night and a day--the solitude,
the glimpses from the window of great distances full of vague
possibilities, made the abused ring potent as that of Gyges. He dreamed
with his eyes open. From an Alnaschar vision he suddenly awoke.
The coach had stopped. The voices of men, one in entreaty, one in
expostulation, came from the box. Cass mechanically put his hand to his
pistol pocket.

"Thank you, but I INSIST upon getting down."

It was Miss Porter's voice. This was followed by a rapid,
half-restrained interchange of words between Hornsby and the driver.
Then the latter said, gruffly,--