The Golden Fleece Part 1

The Golden Fleece.

by Julian Hawthorne.

CHAPTER I.

The professor crossed one long, lean leg over the other, and punched down the ashes in his pipe-bowl with the square tip of his middle finger. The thermometer on the shady veranda marked eighty-seven degrees of heat, and nature wooed the soul to languor and revery; but nothing could abate the energy of this bony sage.

"They talk about their Atlantises,--their submerged continents!"

he exclaimed, with a sniff through his wide, hairy nostrils. "Why, Trednoke, do you realize that we are living literally at the bottom of a Mesozoic--at any rate, Cenozoic--sea?"

The gentleman thus indignantly addressed contemplated his questioner with the serenity of one conscious of freedom from geologic responsibility. He was a man of about the professor's age,--say, sixty years,--but not like him in appearance. His figure was stately and ma.s.sive,--that of one who in his youth must have possessed vast physical strength, rigidly developed and disciplined. Well set upon his broad shoulders was a n.o.ble head, crowned with gray, wavy hair; the eyes and eyebrows were black and powerful, but the expression was kindly and humorous. His moustache and the Roman convexity of his chin would have confirmed your conviction that he was a retired warrior; in which you would have been correct, for General Trednoke always appeared what he was, both outwardly and inwardly. His great frame, clad in white linen, was comfortably disposed in a j.a.panese straw arm-chair; yet there was a soldierly poise in his att.i.tude. He was smoking a large and excellent cigar; and a cup of coffee, with a tiny gla.s.s of cognac beside it, stood on a mahogany stand at his elbow.

"Do you remember, Meschines, the time I licked you at school?" he inquired, in a tone of pleasant reminiscence.

"I can't say I do. What's more, I venture to challenge your statement.

And though you are a hundred pounds the better of me in weight, and a West Point graduate, I will wager my pipe (which is worth its weight in diamonds) against that old woollen s.h.i.+rt of Montezuma's that you showed me yesterday, that I can lick you to-day, and forget all about it before bedtime!"

"Well, I guess you could," returned the general, with a little chuckle, "even if I hadn't that Mexican bullet in my leg. But you couldn't, forty-five years ago, though you tried, and though I was a year younger than you, and weighed five pounds less. Come, now: you don't mean to say you've forgotten Susan Brown!"

"Oh--ah--hah! Susan Brown! Well, I declare! And what brought her into your head, I should like to know?"

"Why, after breaking your heart first, and then mine, I lost sight of her, and I don't think I have seen her since. But it appears she was married to a fellow named Parsloe."

"Don't fancy that name!" observed the professor, wagging his head and frowning. "Has a mean sound to it. But what of it?"

"Well, she died,--rest her soul!--and Parsloe too. But they had a daughter, and she survives them."

"And resembles her mother, eh?--No, Trednoke, the time for that sort of thing has gone by with me. Susan might have had me, five-and-forty years ago; but I can't undertake to revive my pa.s.sion for the benefit of Mrs.

Parsloe's daughter. Besides, I'm too busy to think of marriage, and not--not old enough!"

At this tour de force, the general laughed softly, and finished his coffee. An old Indian, somewhat remarkable in appearance, with s.h.a.ggy white hair hanging down on his shoulders, stepped forward from the room where he had been waiting, and removed the cup.

"No letters yet, Kamaiakan?" asked the general, in Spanish.

"In a few minutes, general," the other replied. "Pablo has just come in sight over the hill. There were several errands."

"Muy buen!--I was going to say, Meschines, her father and mother left the girl poor, and she, being, apparently, clever and energetic, took to----"

"I know!" the professor interrupted. "They all do it, when they are clever and energetic, and that's the end of them!--School-teaching!"

"Not at all," returned General Trednoke. "She entered a dry-goods store."

"Entered a dry-goods store! Well, there's nothing so extraordinary in that. I've seen quant.i.ties of women do it, of all ages, colors, and degrees. What did she buy there?"

"Oh, a fiddlestick!" exclaimed the general. "Why don't you keep quiet and listen to my story? I say, she went into a great dry-goods store in New York, as sales-woman."

"Bless my soul! You don't mean a shop-girl?"

"That's what I said, isn't it? And why not?"

"Oh, well!--but, shade of Susan Brown! Ichabod!--what is the feminine of Ichabod, by the way, Trednoke? But, seriously, it's too bad. Susan may have been fickle, but she was always aristocratic. And now her daughter is a shop-girl. You and I are avenged!"

"You are just as ridiculous, Meschines, as you were thirty or fifty years ago," said the general, tranquilly. "You declaim for the sake of hearing your own voice. Besides, what you say is un-American. Grace Parsloe, as I was saying, got a place as shop-girl in one of the great New York stores. I don't say she mightn't have done worse: what I say is, I doubt whether she could have done better. That house--I know one of its founders, and I know what I'm talking about--is like an enormous family, where children are born, year after year, grow up, and take their places in life according to their quality and merit. What I mean is, that the boy who drives a wagon for them to-day, at three dollars a week, may control one of their chief departments, or even become a partner, before they're done with him; and, mutatis mutandis, the same with the girls. When these girls marry, it's apt to be into a higher rank of life than they were born in; and that fact, I take it, is a good indication that their shop-girl experience has been an education and an improvement. They are given work to do, suited to their capacity, be it small or great; they are in the way of learning something of the great economic laws; they learn self-restraint, courtesy, and----"

"And human nature! Yes, poor things: they see the American buying-woman, and that is a discipline more trying than any you West Pointers know about! Oh, yes, I see your point. If the fathers of the big family ARE fathers, and the children ARE children to them... All the same, I fancy the young ladies, when they marry into the higher social circles, as you say they do, don't, as a rule, make their shop girl days a topic of conversation at five-o'clock teas, or put 'Ex-shop-girl to So-and-so' at the bottom of their visiting-cards."

"I believe, after all, you're a sn.o.b, Meschines," said the general, pensively. "But, as I was about to say, when you interrupted me ten minutes ago, Grace Parsloe is coming on here to make us a visit. She fell ill, and her employers, after doing what could be done for her in the way of medical attendance, made up their minds to give her a change of climate. Now, you know, as she had originally gone to them with a letter from me, and as I live out here, on the borders of the Southern desert, in a climate that has no equal, they naturally thought of writing to me about it. And of course I said I'd be delighted to have her here, for a month, or a year, or whatever time it may be. She will be a pleasure to me, and a friend for Miriam, and she may find a husband somewhere up or down the coast, who will give her a fortune, and think all the better of her because she, like him, had the ability and the pluck to make her own way in the world."

"Humph! When do you expect her?"

"She may turn up any day. She is coming round by way of the Isthmus.

From what I hear, she is really a very fine, clever girl. She held a responsible position in the shop, and----"

"Well, let us sink the shop, and get back to the rational and instructive conversation that we--or, to be more accurate, that I was engaged in when this digression began. I presume you are aware that all the indications are lacustrine?"

Hereupon, a hammock, suspended near the talkers, and filled with what appeared to be a bundle of lace and silken shawls, became agitated, and developed at one end a slender arched foot in an open-work silk stocking and sandal-slipper, and at the other end a dark, youthful, oval face, with glorious eyes and dull black hair. A voice of music asked,--

"What is lacustrine, papa?"

"Oh, so you are awake again, Senorita Miriam?"

"I haven't been asleep. What is lacustrine?"

"Ask the professor."

"Lacus, you know, my dear," said the latter, "means fresh-water indications as against salt."

"Then how does Great Salt Lake----"

"Oh, for that matter, the whole ocean was fresh originally. Moisture, evaporation, precipitation. Water is a great solvent: earthquakes break the crust, and there you are!"

"Then, before the earthquakes, the Salt Lakes were fresh?" rejoined the hammock.

"There was fresh water west of the Rockies and south of---- Why," cried the professor, interrupting himself, "when I was in Wyoming and around there, this spring, in what they call the Bad Lands,--cliffs and b.u.t.tes of indurated yellow clay and sandstone, worn and carved out by floods long before the Aztecs started to move out of Canada,--I saw fossil bones sticking out of the cliffs, the least of which would make the fortune of a museum. That was between the Rockies and the Wahsatch."

"People's bones?" asked the hammock, agitating itself again, and showing a glimpse of a smooth throat and a slender ankle.

"Bless my soul! If there were people in those days they must have had an anxious time of it!" returned the sage. "No, no, my dear. There was brontosaurus, and atlantosaurus, and hydrosaurus, and iguanodon,--lizards, you know, not like these little black fellows that run about in the pulverized feldspar here, but chaps eighty or a hundred feet long, and twenty or thirty high; and turtles, as big as a house."

"How did they get there?"

"Got mired while they were feeding, perhaps; or the water drained off and left them high and dry."

"But where did the water go to?"

The general chuckled at this juncture, and lit another cigar. "She knows more questions than you do the answers to them," quoth he. "But I wouldn't mind hearing where the water went to, myself. I should like to see some of it back again."

"Ask the earthquakes, and the sun. There's a hundred and thirty degrees of heat in some of these valleys,--abysses, rather, three or four hundred feet below sea-level. The earth is very thin-skinned in this region, too, and whatever water wasn't evaporated from above would be likely to come to grief underneath."