On the Frontier

B >> Bret Harte >> On the Frontier


"It went!" said the Judge in a voice of hushed respect. "What did you
make it for?" he almost whispered.

"To know if we'd make the break we talked about and vamose the ranch.
It's the FIFTH time today," continued the Right Bower in a voice of
gloomy significance. "And it went agin bad cards too."

"I ain't superstitious," said the Judge, with awe and fatuity beaming
from every line of his credulous face, "but it's flyin' in the face of
Providence to go agin such signs as that."

"Make it again, to see if the Old Man must go," suggested the Left
Bower.

The suggestion was received with favor, the three men gathering
breathlessly around the player. Again the fateful cards were shuffled
deliberately, placed in their mysterious combination, with the same
ominous result. Yet everybody seemed to breathe more freely, as if
relieved from some responsibility, the Judge accepting this manifest
expression of Providence with resigned self-righteousness.

"Yes, gentlemen," resumed the Left Bower, serenely, as if a calm legal
decision had just been recorded, "we must not let any foolishness or
sentiment get mixed up with this thing, but look at it like business
men. The only sensible move is to get up and get out of the camp."

"And the Old Man?" queried the Judge.

"The Old Man--hush! he's coming."

The doorway was darkened by a slight lissome shadow. It was the absent
partner, otherwise known as "the Old Man." Need it be added that he was
a BOY of nineteen, with a slight down just clothing his upper lip!

"The creek is up over the ford, and I had to 'shin' up a willow on the
bank and swing myself across," he said, with a quick, frank laugh; "but
all the same, boys, it's going to clear up in about an hour, you bet.
It's breaking away over Bald Mountain, and there's a sun flash on a bit
of snow on Lone Peak. Look! you can see it from here. It's for all the
world like Noah's dove just landed on Mount Ararat. It's a good omen."

From sheer force of habit the men had momentarily brightened up at
the Old Man's entrance. But the unblushing exhibition of degrading
superstition shown in the last sentence recalled their just severity.
They exchanged meaning glances. Union Mills uttered hopelessly to
himself: "Hell's full of such omens."

Too occupied with his subject to notice this ominous reception, the Old
Man continued: "I reckon I struck a fresh lead in the new grocery man
at the Crossing. He says he'll let the Judge have a pair of boots on
credit, but he can't send them over here; and considering that the Judge
has got to try them anyway, it don't seem to be asking too much for the
Judge to go over there. He says he'll give us a barrel of pork and a bag
of flour if we'll give him the right of using our tail-race and clean
out the lower end of it."

"It's the work of a Chinaman, and a four days' job," broke in the Left
Bower.

"It took one white man only two hours to clean out a third of it,"
retorted the Old Man triumphantly, "for I pitched in at once with a pick
he let me have on credit, and did that amount of work this morning, and
told him the rest of you boys would finish it this afternoon."

A slight gesture from the Right Bower checked an angry exclamation from
the Left. The Old Man did not notice either, but, knitting his smooth
young brow in a paternally reflective fashion, went on: "You'll have
to get a new pair of trousers, Mills, but as he doesn't keep clothing,
we'll have to get some canvas and cut you out a pair. I traded off the
beans he let me have for some tobacco for the Right Bower at the other
shop, and got them to throw in a new pack of cards. These are about
played out. We'll be wanting some brushwood for the fire; there's a heap
in the hollow. Who's going to bring it in? It's the Judge's turn, isn't
it? Why, what's the matter with you all?"

The restraint and evident uneasiness of his companions had at last
touched him. He turned his frank young eyes upon them; they glanced
helplessly at each other. Yet his first concern was for them, his first
instinct paternal and protecting. He ran his eyes quickly over them;
they were all there and apparently in their usual condition. "Anything
wrong with the claim?" he suggested.

Without looking at him the Right Bower rose, leaned against the open
door with his hands behind him and his face towards the landscape, and
said, apparently to the distant prospect: "The claim's played out, the
partnership's played out, and the sooner we skedaddle out of this the
better. If," he added, turning to the Old Man, "if YOU want to stay, if
you want to do Chinaman's work at Chinaman's wages, if you want to hang
on to the charity of the traders at the Crossing, you can do it, and
enjoy the prospects and the Noah's doves alone. But we're calculatin' to
step out of it."

"But I haven't said I wanted to do it ALONE," protested the Old Man with
a gesture of bewilderment.

"If these are your general ideas of the partnership," continued the
Right Bower, clinging to the established hypothesis of the other
partners for support, "it ain't ours, and the only way we can prove it
is to stop the foolishness right here. We calculated to dissolve the
partnership and strike out for ourselves elsewhere. You're no longer
responsible for us, nor we for you. And we reckon it's the square thing
to leave you the claim and the cabin, and all it contains. To prevent
any trouble with the traders, we've drawn up a paper here--"

"With a bonus of fifty thousand dollars each down, and the rest to be
settled on my children," interrupted the Old Man, with a half-uneasy
laugh. "Of course. But--" he stopped suddenly, the blood dropped from
his fresh cheek, and he again glanced quickly round the group. "I don't
think--I--I quite sabe, boys," he added, with a slight tremor of voice
and lip. "If it's a conundrum, ask me an easier one."

Any lingering doubt he might have had of their meaning was dispelled by
the Judge. "It's about the softest thing you kin drop into, Old Man,"
he said confidentially; "if I hadn't promised the other boys to go with
them, and if I didn't need the best medical advice in Sacramento for my
lungs, I'd just enjoy staying with you."

"It gives a sorter freedom to a young fellow like you, Old Man, like
goin' into the world on your own capital, that every Californian boy
hasn't got," said Union Mills, patronizingly.

"Of course it's rather hard papers on us, you know, givin' up
everything, so to speak; but it's for your good, and we ain't goin' back
on you," said the Left Bower, "are we, boys?"

The color had returned to the Old Man's face a little more quickly and
freely than usual. He picked up the hat he had cast down, put it on
carefully over his brown curls, drew the flap down on the side towards
his companions, and put his hands in his pockets. "All right," he said,
in a slightly altered voice. "When do you go?"

"To-day," answered the Left Bower. "We calculate to take a moonlight
pasear over to the Cross Roads and meet the down stage at about twelve
to-night. There's plenty of time yet," he added, with a slight laugh;
"it's only three o'clock now."

There was a dead silence. Even the rain withheld its continuous patter,
a dumb, gray film covered the ashes of the hushed hearth. For the first
time the Right Bower exhibited some slight embarrassment.

"I reckon it's held up for a spell," he said, ostentatiously examining
the weather, "and we might as well take a run round the claim to see
if we've forgotten nothing. Of course, we'll be back again," he added
hastily, without looking at the Old Man, "before we go, you know."

The others began to look for their hats, but so awkwardly and with such
evident preoccupation of mind that it was not at first discovered that
the Judge had his already on. This raised a laugh, as did also a clumsy
stumble of Union Mills against the pork barrel, although that gentleman
took refuge from his confusion and secured a decent retreat by a gross
exaggeration of his lameness, as he limped after the Right Bower. The
Judge whistled feebly. The Left Bower, in a more ambitious effort to
impart a certain gayety to his exit, stopped on the threshold and said,
as if in arch confidence to his companions, "Darned if the Old Man
don't look two inches higher since he became a proprietor," laughed
patronizingly, and vanished.

If the newly-made proprietor had increased in stature, he had not
otherwise changed his demeanor. He remained in the same attitude until
the last figure disappeared behind the fringe of buckeye that hid the
distant highway. Then he walked slowly to the fire-place, and, leaning
against the chimney, kicked the dying embers together with his foot.
Something dropped and spattered in the film of hot ashes. Surely the
rain had not yet ceased!

His high color had already fled except for a spot on either cheek-bone
that lent a brightness to his eyes. He glanced around the cabin. It
looked familiar and yet strange. Rather, it looked strange BECAUSE
still familiar, and therefore incongruous with the new atmosphere that
surrounded it--discordant with the echo of their last meeting, and
painfully accenting the change. There were the four "bunks," or sleeping
berths, of his companions, each still bearing some traces of the
individuality of its late occupant with a dumb loyalty that seemed to
make their light-hearted defection monstrous. In the dead ashes of the
Judge's pipe, scattered on his shelf, still lived his old fire; in
the whittled and carved edges of the Left Bower's bunk still were the
memories of bygone days of delicious indolence; in the bullet-holes
clustered round a knot of one of the beams there was still the record of
the Right Bower's old-time skill and practice; in the few engravings
of female loveliness stuck upon each headboard there were the proofs of
their old extravagant devotion--all a mute protest to the change.

He remembered how, a fatherless, truant schoolboy, he had drifted into
their adventurous, nomadic life, itself a life of grown-up truancy like
his own, and became one of that gypsy family. How they had taken the
place of relations and household in his boyish fancy, filling it with
the unsubstantial pageantry of a child's play at grown-up existence,
he knew only too well. But how, from being a pet and protege, he had
gradually and unconsciously asserted his own individuality and taken
upon his younger shoulders not only a poet's keen appreciation of that
life, but its actual responsibilities and half-childish burdens, he
never suspected. He had fondly believed that he was a neophyte in their
ways, a novice in their charming faith and indolent creed, and they had
encouraged it; now their renunciation of that faith could only be an
excuse for a renunciation of HIM. The poetry that had for two years
invested the material and sometimes even mean details of their existence
was too much a part of himself to be lightly dispelled. The lesson of
those ingenuous moralists failed, as such lessons are apt to fail; their
discipline provoked but did not subdue; a rising indignation, stirred by
a sense of injury, mounted to his cheek and eyes. It was slow to come,
but was none the less violent that it had been preceded by the benumbing
shock of shame and pride.

I hope I shall not prejudice the reader's sympathies if my duty as a
simple chronicler compels me to state, therefore, that the sober second
thought of this gentle poet was to burn down the cabin on the spot with
all its contents. This yielded to a milder counsel--waiting for the
return of the party, challenging the Right Bower, a duel to the death,
perhaps himself the victim, with a crushing explanation in extremis,
"It seems we are ONE too many. No matter; it is settled now. Farewell!"
Dimly remembering, however, that there was something of this in the last
well-worn novel they had read together, and that his antagonist might
recognize it, or even worse, anticipate it himself, the idea was quickly
rejected. Besides, the opportunity for an apotheosis of self-sacrifice
was past. Nothing remained now but to refuse the proffered bribe of
claim and cabin by letter, for he must not wait their return. He tore a
leaf from a blotted diary, begun and abandoned long since, and essayed
to write. Scrawl after scrawl was torn up, until his fury had cooled
down to a frigid third personality. "Mr. John Ford regrets to inform his
late partners that their tender of house, of furniture," however, seemed
too inconsistent with the pork-barrel table he was writing on; a more
eloquent renunciation of their offer became frivolous and idiotic from a
caricature of Union Mills, label and all, that appeared suddenly on the
other side of the leaf; and when he at last indited a satisfactory and
impassioned exposition of his feelings, the legible addendum of "Oh,
ain't you glad you're out of the wilderness!"--the forgotten first line
of a popular song, which no scratching would erase--seemed too like an
ironical postscript to be thought of for a moment. He threw aside his
pen and cast the discordant record of past foolish pastime into the dead
ashes of the hearth.

How quiet it was. With the cessation of the rain the wind too had gone
down, and scarcely a breath of air came through the open door. He walked
to the threshold and gazed on the hushed prospect. In this listless
attitude he was faintly conscious of a distant reverberation, a mere
phantom of sound--perhaps the explosion of a distant blast in the
hills--that left the silence more marked and oppressive. As he turned
again into the cabin a change seemed to have come over it. It already
looked old and decayed. The loneliness of years of desertion seemed to
have taken possession of it; the atmosphere of dry rot was in the
beams and rafters. To his excited fancy the few disordered blankets
and articles of clothing seemed dropping to pieces; in one of the bunks
there was a hideous resemblance in the longitudinal heap of clothing to
a withered and mummied corpse. So it might look in after years when some
passing stranger--but he stopped. A dread of the place was beginning
to creep over him; a dread of the days to come, when the monotonous
sunshine should lay bare the loneliness of these walls; the long, long
days of endless blue and cloudless, overhanging solitude; summer days
when the wearying, incessant trade winds should sing around that empty
shell and voice its desolation. He gathered together hastily a few
articles that were especially his own--rather that the free communion
of the camp, from indifference or accident, had left wholly to him. He
hesitated for a moment over his rifle, but, scrupulous in his wounded
pride, turned away and left the familiar weapon that in the dark days
had so often provided the dinner or breakfast of the little household.
Candor compels me to state that his equipment was not large nor
eminently practical. His scant pack was a light weight for even his
young shoulders, but I fear he thought more of getting away from the
Past than providing for the Future.

With this vague but sole purpose he left the cabin, and almost
mechanically turned his steps towards the creek he had crossed
that morning. He knew that by this route he would avoid meeting his
companions; its difficulties and circuitousness would exercise his
feverish limbs and give him time for reflection. He had determined to
leave the claim, but whence he had not yet considered. He reached the
bank of the creek where he had stood two hours before; it seemed to him
two years. He looked curiously at his reflection in one of the broad
pools of overflow, and fancied he looked older. He watched the rush and
outset of the turbid current hurrying to meet the South Fork, and
to eventually lose itself in the yellow Sacramento. Even in his
preoccupation he was impressed with a likeness to himself and his
companions in this flood that had burst its peaceful boundaries. In
the drifting fragments of one of their forgotten flumes washed from the
bank, he fancied he saw an omen of the disintegration and decay of the
Lone Star claim.

The strange hush in the air that he had noticed before--a calm so
inconsistent with that hour and the season as to seem portentous--became
more marked in contrast to the feverish rush of the turbulent
water-course. A few clouds lazily huddled in the west apparently had
gone to rest with the sun on beds of somnolent poppies. There was a
gleam as of golden water everywhere along the horizon, washing out the
cold snowpeaks, and drowning even the rising moon. The creek caught it
here and there, until, in grim irony, it seemed to bear their broken
sluice-boxes and useless engines on the very Pactolian stream they had
been hopefully created to direct and carry. But by some peculiar trick
of the atmosphere, the perfect plenitude of that golden sunset glory
was lavished on the rugged sides and tangled crest of the Lone Star
mountain. That isolated peak, the landmark of their claim, the gaunt
monument of their folly, transfigured in the evening splendor, kept its
radiance unquenched long after the glow had fallen from the encompassing
skies, and when at last the rising moon, step by step, put out the fires
along the winding valley and plains, and crept up the bosky sides of
the canyon, the vanishing sunset was lost only to reappear as a golden
crown.

The eyes of the young man were fixed upon it with more than a momentary
picturesque interest. It had been the favorite ground of his prospecting
exploits, its lowest flank had been scarred in the old enthusiastic days
with hydraulic engines, or pierced with shafts, but its central position
in the claim and its superior height had always given it a commanding
view of the extent of their valley and its approaches, and it was this
practical pre-eminence that alone attracted him at that moment. He knew
that from its crest he would be able to distinguish the figures of his
companions, as they crossed the valley near the cabin, in the growing
moonlight. Thus he could avoid encountering them on his way to the high
road, and yet see them, perhaps, for the last time. Even in his sense of
injury there was a strange satisfaction in the thought.

The ascent was toilsome, but familiar. All along the dim trail he was
accompanied by gentler memories of the past, that seemed, like the faint
odor of spiced leaves and fragrant grasses wet with the rain and crushed
beneath his ascending tread, to exhale the sweeter perfume in his effort
to subdue or rise above them. There was the thicket of manzanita, where
they had broken noonday bread together; here was the rock beside their
maiden shaft, where they had poured a wild libation in boyish enthusiasm
of success; and here the ledge where their first flag, a red shirt
heroically sacrificed, was displayed from a long-handled shovel to
the gaze of admirers below. When he at last reached the summit, the
mysterious hush was still in the air, as if in breathless sympathy with
his expedition. In the west, the plain was faintly illuminated, but
disclosed no moving figures. He turned towards the rising moon, and
moved slowly to the eastern edge. Suddenly he stopped. Another step
would have been his last! He stood upon the crumbling edge of a
precipice. A landslip had taken place on the eastern flank, leaving
the gaunt ribs and fleshless bones of Lone Star mountain bare in the
moonlight. He understood now the strange rumble and reverberation he had
heard; he understood now the strange hush of bird and beast in brake and
thicket!

Although a single rapid glance convinced him that the slide had taken
place in an unfrequented part of the mountain, above an inaccessible
canyon, and reflection assured him his companions could not have reached
that distance when it took place, a feverish impulse led him to descend
a few rods in the track of the avalanche. The frequent recurrence of
outcrop and angle made this comparatively easy. Here he called aloud;
the feeble echo of his own voice seemed only a dull impertinence to the
significant silence. He turned to reascend; the furrowed flank of the
mountain before him lay full in the moonlight. To his excited fancy, a
dozen luminous star-like points in the rocky crevices started into
life as he faced them. Throwing his arm over the ledge above him, he
supported himself for a moment by what appeared to be a projection of
the solid rock. It trembled slightly. As he raised himself to its level,
his heart stopped beating. It was simply a fragment detached from the
outcrop, lying loosely on the ledge but upholding him by ITS OWN WEIGHT
ONLY. He examined it with trembling fingers; the encumbering soil fell
from its sides and left its smoothed and worn protuberances glistening
in the moonlight. It was virgin gold!

Looking back upon that moment afterwards, he remembered that he was not
dazed, dazzled, or startled. It did not come to him as a discovery or an
accident, a stroke of chance or a caprice of fortune. He saw it all in
that supreme moment; Nature had worked out their poor deduction. What
their feeble engines had essayed spasmodically and helplessly against
the curtain of soil that hid the treasure, the elements had achieved
with mightier but more patient forces. The slow sapping of the winter
rains had loosened the soil from the auriferous rock, even while the
swollen stream was carrying their impotent and shattered engines to the
sea.

What mattered that his single arm could not lift the treasure he had
found! What mattered that to unfix those glittering stars would still
tax both skill and patience! The work was done, the goal was reached!
even his boyish impatience was content with that. He rose slowly to his
feet, unstrapped his long-handled shovel from his back, secured it in
the crevice, and quietly regained the summit.

It was all his own! His own by right of discovery under the law of the
land, and without accepting a favor from THEM. He recalled even the fact
that it was HIS prospecting on the mountain that first suggested the
existence of gold in the outcrop and the use of the hydraulic. HE had
never abandoned that belief, whatever the others had done. He dwelt
somewhat indignantly to himself on this circumstance, and half
unconsciously faced defiantly towards the plain below. But it was
sleeping peacefully in the full sight of the moon, without life or
motion. He looked at the stars; it was still far from midnight. His
companions had no doubt long since returned to the cabin to prepare for
their midnight journey. They were discussing him, perhaps laughing at
him, or worse, pitying him and his bargain. Yet here was his bargain! A
slight laugh he gave vent to here startled him a little, it sounded
so hard and so unmirthful, and so unlike, as he oddly fancied, what he
really THOUGHT. But WHAT did he think?

Nothing mean or revengeful; no, they never would say THAT. When he had
taken out all the surface gold and put the mine in working order, he
would send them each a draft for a thousand dollars. Of course, if they
were ever ill or poor he would do more. One of the first, the very first
things he should do would be to send them each a handsome gun and tell
them that he only asked in return the old-fashioned rifle that once was
his. Looking back at the moment in after years, he wondered that, with
this exception, he made no plans for his own future, or the way he
should dispose of his newly acquired wealth. This was the more singular
as it had been the custom of the five partners to lie awake at night,
audibly comparing with each other what they would do in case they made
a strike. He remembered how, Alnaschar-like, they nearly separated once
over a difference in the disposal of a hundred thousand dollars that
they never had, nor expected to have. He remembered how Union Mills
always began his career as a millionnaire by a "square meal" at
Delmonico's; how the Right Bower's initial step was always a trip home
"to see his mother"; how the Left Bower would immediately placate the
parents of his beloved with priceless gifts (it may be parenthetically
remarked that the parents and the beloved one were as hypothetical
as the fortune); and how the Judge would make his first start as a
capitalist by breaking a certain faro bank in Sacramento. He himself had
been equally eloquent in extravagant fancy in those penniless days,
he who now was quite cold and impassive beside the more extravagant
reality.

How different it might have been! If they had only waited a day longer!
if they had only broken their resolves to him kindly and parted in good
will! How he would long ere this have rushed to greet them with the
joyful news! How they would have danced around it, sung themselves
hoarse, laughed down their enemies, and run up the flag triumphantly on
the summit of the Lone Star Mountain! How they would have crowned him
"the Old Man," "the hero of the camp!" How he would have told them the
whole story; how some strange instinct had impelled him to ascend the
summit, and how another step on that summit would have precipitated him
into the canyon! And how--but what if somebody else, Union Mills or the
Judge, had been the first discoverer? Might they not have meanly kept
the secret from him; have selfishly helped themselves and done--