First Fam'lies of the Sierras Part 24

They took him to the County Hospital, and there they called him "Old Bab." It was a year before he got about; and then he came leaning on a staff, with a frightful face. He had lost all spirit. He sat moodily about the hospital, and sometimes said bitter things.

One day he said of Gra.s.shopper Jim, who was a great talker, "That man must necessarily lie. There is not truth enough in the United States to keep his tongue going for ever as it does."

One evening a young candidate told him he was going to make a speech, and very patronizingly asked him to come out and hear him. Old Bab looked straight at the wall, as if counting the stripes on the paper, then said, half to himself, "The fact of Balaam's a.s.s making a speech has had a more demoralizing influence than any other event told in the Holy Bible; for ever since that time every lineal descendant seems determined to follow his example."

His face was never relieved by a smile, and his chin stuck out fearfully: so that one day, when Snapping Andy, who was licensed by the miners to be the champion growler of the camp, called him "Old Baboon,"

it was as complete as a baptismal ceremony, and he was known by no other name.

Some women visited him one evening; fallen angels--women with the trail of the serpent all over them. They gave him a pipe and money, and, above all, words of encouragement and kindness.

He moodily filled the meerschaum they had brought him, and after driving a volume of smoke through his nose, looked quietly up and said: "Society is wrong. These women are not bad women. For my part, I begin to find so much that is evil in that which the world calls good, and so much that is good in what the world calls evil, that I refuse to draw a distinction where G.o.d has not."

Then he fired a double-barrelled volley at society through his nose, and throwing out volume after volume of smoke as a sort of redoubt between himself and the world he hated, drifted silently into a tropical, golden land of dreams.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE GOPHER.

And do you remember the man they called The Gopher? Poor old Gopher! His was another story. He died before Baboon found his fortune, else they might have set up together, and behind their bull-dogs and grizzlies growled at the world a day or two with perfect satisfaction. But fate said otherwise.

The Gopher had always been misunderstood, even from the first. If the camp held him at arm's length in the old days, it, as a rule, shunned him now, when new men came in, and murder began to be a word with a terrible meaning, and even the good Widow almost forgot him.

The camp went down, and cabins were deserted by hundreds. But there was one cabin that was never vacant; it stood apart from town, on the brown hill-side, and as it was one of the first, so it promised to be the last of the camp. It always had an ugly bull-dog tied to the door--was itself a low, suspicious-looking structure that year by year sank lower as the gra.s.s grew taller around it, till it seemed trying to hide in the chaparral. It had but one occupant, a silent, selfish man, who never came out by day except to bury himself alone in his claim at work.

Nothing was known of him at all, save the story that he had killed his partner in a gambling-house away back somewhere in '51. He was shunned and feared by all, and he approached and spoke to no one except the butcher, the grocer, and expressman; and to these only briefly, on business. I believe, however, that the old cripple, Baboon, sometimes sat on the bank and talked to the murderer at work in his claim. It was even said that Baboon was on fair terms with the dog at the door.

This solitary man of the savage dog was, as you guess, "The Gopher."

That was not the name given him by his parents, but it was the name the camp had given him a generation before, and it was now the only name by which he was known. The amount of gold which he had h.o.a.rded and hidden away in that dismal old cabin, through years and years of incessant toil, was computed to be enormous.

Year after year the gra.s.s stole farther down from the hill-tops to which it had been driven, as it were, in the early settlement of the camp; at last it environed the few remaining cabins, as if they were besieged, and it stood up tall and undisturbed in the only remaining trail. Still regularly three times a day the smoke curled up from the Gopher's cabin, and the bull-dog kept unbroken sentry at the door.

In the January spring that followed, the gra.s.s and clover crept down strong and thick from the hills, and spread in a pretty carpet across the unmeasured streets of the once populous and prosperous camp. Little gray horned toads sunned themselves on the great flat rocks that had served for hearth-stones, and the wild hop-vines clambered up and across the toppling and shapeless chimneys.

About this time a closely-contested election drew near. It was a bold and original thought of a candidate to approach the Gopher and solicit his vote. His friends shook their heads, but his case was desperate, and he ventured down upon the old gray cabin hiding in the gra.s.s and chaparral. The dog protested, and the office-seeker was proceeding to knock his ugly teeth down his throat with a pick-handle, when the door opened, and he found the muzzle of a double-barrelled shot-gun in his face. The candidate did not stay to urge his claims, and the Gopher's politics remained a mystery.

Here in this land of the sun the days trench deep into the nights of northern countries, and birds and beasts retire before the sunset: a habit which the transplanted Saxon declines to adopt.

Some idlers sat at sunset on the verandah of the last saloon, looking down the gulch as the manzanita smoke curled up from the Gopher's cabin.

There is an hour when the best that is in man comes to the surface; sometimes the outcroppings are not promising of any great inner wealth; but the indications, whatever they may be, are not false. It is dulse and drift coming to the surface when the storm of the day is over. Yet the best thoughts are never uttered; often because no fit words are found to array them in; oftener because no fit ear is found to receive them.

How lonesome it looked, that little storm-stained cabin thus alone, stooping down, hiding away in the long strong gra.s.s, as if half-ashamed of the mournful history of its sad and lonely occupant.

A sailor broke silence: "Looks like a Feejee camp on a South Sea island."

"Robinson Crusoe--the last man of the original camp--the last rose of Summer." This was said by a young man who had sent some verses to the _Hangtown Weekly_.

"Looks to me, in its crow's nest of chaparral, like the lucky ace of spades," added a man who sat apart contemplating the wax under the nail of his right fore-finger.

The schoolmaster here picked up the ace of hearts, drew out his pencil and figured rapidly.

"There!" he cried, flouris.h.i.+ng the card, "I put it an ounce a day for eighteen years, and that is the result." The figures astonished them all. It was decided that the old miser had at least a mule-load of gold in his cabin.

"It is my opinion," said the new Squire, who was small of stature, and consequently insolent and impertinent, "he had ought to be taken up, tried, and hung for killing his pardner in '51."

"The time has run out," said the Coroner, who now came up, adjusting a tall hat to which he was evidently not accustomed; "the time for such cases by the law made and provided has run out, and it is my opinion it can't be did."

Not long after this it was discovered that the Gopher was not at work.

Then it came out that he was very ill, and that Old Baboon was seen to enter his cabin.

CHAPTER XXIX.

A NATURAL DEATH.

Early one frosty morning in the Fall following, Old Baboon sat by the door of the only saloon. He held an old bull-dog by a tow-string, and both man and dog were pictures of distress as they s.h.i.+vered from the keen cold wind that came pitching down from the snow-peaks. As a man approached, the man s.h.i.+vered till his teeth chattered, and clutching at the string, looked helplessly over his shoulder at the uncompromising bar-keeper, who had just arisen and opened the door to let out the bad odors of his den.

The dog s.h.i.+vered too, and came up and sat down close enough to receive the sympathetic hand of Old Baboon on his broad bowed head. This man was a relic and a wreck. More than twenty years of miner's life and labor in the mountains, interrupted of late only by periodical sprees governed in their duration solely by the results of his last "clean up," had made him one of a type of men known only to the Pacific.

True, he had failed to negotiate with the savage cinnamon-headed vendor of poison; but he was no beggar. It was simply a failure to obtain a Wall Street accommodation in a small way. I doubt if the bristled-haired bar-keeper himself questioned the honesty of Baboon. It was merely a question of ability to pay, and the decision of the autocrat had been promptly and firmly given against the applicant.

Perhaps, in strict justice to the red-haired wretch that washed his tumblers and watched for victims that frosty morning, I should state that appearances were certainly against Baboon.

You can with tolerable certainty, in the placer mines, tell how a miner's claim is paying by the condition and quality of his top-boots.

Baboon had no boots, only a pair of slippers improvised from old rubbers, and between the top of these and the legs of his pantaloons there was no compromise across the naked, cold-blue ankles.

These signs, together with a b.u.t.tonless blue s.h.i.+rt that showed his hairy bosom, a frightful beard and hair beneath a hat that drooped like a wilted palm-leaf, were the circ.u.mstantial evidences from which Judge Barkeep made his decision.

It would perhaps be more pleasant for us all if we could know that such men were a race to themselves; that they never saw civilization; that there never was a time when they were petted by pretty sisters, and sat, pure and strong, the central figures of Christian households; or at least we would like to think that they grew upon the border, and belonged there. But the truth is, very often, they came of the gentlest blood and life. The border man, born and bred in storms, never gets discouraged: it is the man of culture, refinement, and sensitive nature who falls from the front in the hard-fought battles of the West.

This man's brow was broad and full; had his beard and hair been combed and cared for, his head had looked a very picture. But after all, there was one weak point in his face. He had a small, hesitating nose.

As a rule, in any great struggle involving any degree of strategy and strength, the small nose must go to the wall. It may have pluck, spirit, refinement, sensitiveness, and, in fact, to the casual observer, every quality requisite to success; but somehow invariably at the very crisis it gives way.

Small noses are a failure. This is the verdict of history. Give me a man, or woman either, with a big nose--not a nose of flesh, not a loose flabby nose like a camel's lips, nor a thin, starved nose that the eyes have crowded out and forced into prominence, but a full, strong, substantial nose, that is willing and able to take the lead; one that a.s.serts itself boldly between the eyes, and reaches up towards the brows, and has room enough to sit down there and be at home.

Give me a man, or woman either, with a nose like that, and I will have a nose that will accomplish something. I grant you that such a nose may be a knave; but it is never a coward nor a fool--never!

In the strong stream of miners' life as it was, no man could stand still. He either went up or down. The strong and not always the best went up. The weak--which often embraced the gentlest and sweetest natures--were borne down and stranded here and there all along the river.

I have noticed that those who stop, stand, and look longest at the tempting display of viands in cook-shop windows, are those that have not a penny to purchase with. Perhaps there was something of this nature in Old Baboon that impelled him to look again and again over his shoulder--as he clutched tighter to the tow-string--at the cinnamon-headed bottle-washer behind the bar.

A stranger stood before this man. He turned his eyes from the bar-keeper and lifted them helplessly to his.