Mrs. Skagg's Husbands and Other Stories

“Maybe it’s this yer harness,” said Bill, a little anxiously. “When I hitches on this yer curb” (he indicated a massive gold watch-chain with enormous links), “and mounts this ‘morning star,’” (he pointed to a very large solitaire pin which had the appearance of blistering his whole shirt-front), “it kinder weighs heavy on me, Tommy. Otherwise I’m all right, my boy,—all right.” But he evaded Islington’s keen eye, and turned from the light.

“You have something to tell me, Bill,” said Islington, suddenly, and with almost brusque directness; “out with it.”

Bill did not speak, but moved uneasily toward his hat.

“You didn’t come three thousand miles, without a word of warning, to talk to me of old times,” said Islington, more kindly, “glad as I would have been to see you. It isn’t your way, Bill, and you know it. We shall not be disturbed here,” he added, in reply to an inquiring glance that Bill directed to the door, “and I am ready to hear you.”

“Firstly, then,” said Bill, drawing his chair nearer Islington, “answer me one question, Tommy, fair and square, and up and down.”

“Go on,” said Islington, with a slight smile.

“Ef I should say to you, Tommy,—say to you to-day, right here, you must come with me,—you must leave this place for a month, a year, two years maybe, perhaps forever,—is there anything that ‘ud keep you,—anything, my boy, ez you couldn’t leave?”

“No,” said Tommy, quietly; “I am only visiting here. I thought of leaving Greyport to-day.”

“But if I should say to you, Tommy, come with me on a pasear to Chiny, to Japan, to South Ameriky, p’r’aps, could you go?”

“Yes,” said Islington, after a slight pause.

“Thar isn’t ennything,” said Bill, drawing a little closer, and lowering his voice confidentially,—“ennything in the way of a young woman—you understand, Tommy—ez would keep you? They’re mighty sweet about here; and whether a man is young or old, Tommy, there’s always some woman as is brake or whip to him!”

In a certain excited bitterness that characterized the delivery of this abstract truth, Bill did not see that the young man’s face flushed slightly as he answered “No.”

“Then listen. It’s seven years ago, Tommy, thet I was working one o’ the Pioneer coaches over from Gold Hill. Ez I stood in front o’ the stage-office, the sheriff o’ the county comes to me, and he sez, ‘Bill,’ sez he, ‘I’ve got a looney chap, as I’m in charge of, taking ‘im down to the ‘sylum in Stockton. He’z quiet and peaceable, but the insides don’t like to ride with him. Hev you enny objection to give him a lift on the box beside you?’ I sez, ‘No; put him up.’ When I came to go and get up on that box beside him, that man, Tommy,—that man sittin’ there, quiet and peaceable, was—Johnson!

“He didn’t know me, my boy,” Yuba Bill continued, rising and putting his hands on Tommy’s shoulders,—“he didn’t know me. He didn’t know nothing about you, nor Angel’s, nor the quicksilver lode, nor even his own name. He said his name was Skaggs, but I knowd it was Johnson. Thar was times, Tommy, you might have knocked me off that box with a feather; thar was times when if the twenty-seven passengers o’ that stage hed found theirselves swimming in the American River five hundred feet below the road, I never could have explained it satisfactorily to the company,—never.

“The sheriff said,” Bill continued hastily, as if to preclude any interruption from the young man,—“the sheriff said he had been brought into Murphy’s Camp three years before, dripping with water, and sufferin’ from perkussion of the brain, and had been cared for generally by the boys ‘round. When I told the sheriff I knowed ‘im, I got him to leave him in my care; and I took him to ‘Frisco, Tommy, to ‘Frisco, and I put him in charge o’ the best doctors there, and paid his board myself. There was nothin’ he didn’t have ez he wanted. Don’t look that way, my dear boy, for God’s sake, don’t!”

“O Bill,” said Islington, rising and staggering to the window, “why did you keep this from me?”

“Why?” said Bill, turning on him savagely,—“why? because I warn’t a fool. Thar was you, winnin’ your way in college; thar was YOU, risin’ in the world, and of some account to it; yer was an old bummer, ez good ez dead to it,—a man ez oughter been dead afore! a man ez never denied it! But you allus liked him better nor me,” said Bill, bitterly.

“Forgive me, Bill,” said the young man, seizing both his hands. “I know you did it for the best; but go on.”

“Thar ain’t much more to tell, nor much use to tell it, as I can see,” said Bill, moodily. “He never could be cured, the doctors said, for he had what they called monomania,—was always talking about his wife and darter that somebody had stole away years ago, and plannin’ revenge on that somebody. And six months ago he was missed. I tracked him to Carson, to Salt Lake City, to Omaha, to Chicago, to New York,—and here!”

“Here!” echoed Islington.

“Here! And that’s what brings me here to-day. Whethers he’s crazy or well, whethers he’s huntin’ you or lookin’ up that other man, you must get away from here. You mustn’t see him. You and me, Tommy, will go away on a cruise. In three or four years he’ll be dead or missing, and then we’ll come back. Come.” And he rose to his feet.

“Bill,” said Islington, rising also, and taking the hand of his friend, with the same quiet obstinacy that in the old days had endeared him to Bill, “wherever he is, here or elsewhere, sane or crazy, I shall seek and find him. Every dollar that I have shall be his, every dollar that I have spent shall be returned to him. I am young yet, thank God, and can work; and if there is a way out of this miserable business, I shall find it.”

“I knew,” said Bill, with a surliness that ill concealed his evident admiration of the calm figure before him—“I knew the partikler style of d—n fool that you was, and expected no better. Good by, then—God Almighty! who’s that?”

He was on his way to the open French window, but had started back, his face quite white and bloodless, and his eyes staring. Islington ran to the window, and looked out. A white skirt vanished around the corner of the veranda. When he returned, Bill had dropped into a chair.

“It must have been Miss Masterman, I think; but what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” said Bill, faintly; “have you got any whiskey handy?”

Islington brought a decanter, and, pouring out some spirits, handed the glass to Bill. Bill drained it, and then said, “Who is Miss Masterman?”

“Mr. Masterman’s daughter; that is, an adopted daughter, I believe.”

“Wot name?”

“I really don’t know,” said Islington, pettishly, more vexed than he cared to own at this questioning.

Yuba Bill rose and walked to the window, closed it, walked back again to the door, glanced at Islington, hesitated, and then returned to his chair.

“I didn’t tell you I was married—did I?” he said suddenly, looking up in Islington’s face with an unsuccessful attempt at a reckless laugh.

“No,” said Islington, more pained at the manner than the words.

“Fact,” said Yuba Bill. “Three years ago it was, Tommy,—three years ago!”

He looked so hard at Islington, that, feeling he was expected to say something, he asked vaguely, “Who did you marry?”

“Thet’s it!” said Yuba Bill; “I can’t ezactly say; partikly, though, a she devil! generally, the wife of half a dozen other men.”

Accustomed, apparently, to have his conjugal infelicities a theme of mirth among men, and seeing no trace of amusement on Islington’s grave face, his dogged, reckless manner softened, and, drawing his chair closer to Islington, he went on: “It all began outer this: we was coming down Watson’s grade one night pretty free, when the expressman turns to me and sez, ‘There’s a row inside, and you’d better pull up!’ I pulls up, and out hops, first a woman, and then two or three chaps swearing and cursin’, and tryin’ to drag some one arter them. Then it ‘pear’d, Tommy, thet it was this woman’s drunken husband they was going to put out for abusin’ her, and strikin’ her in the coach; and if it hadn’t been for me, my boy, they’d hev left that chap thar in the road. But I fixes matters up by putting her alongside o’ me on the box, and we drove on. She was very white, Tommy,—for the matter o’ that, she was always one o’ these very white women, that never got red in the face,—but she never cried a whimper. Most wimin would have cried. It was queer, but she never cried. I thought so at the time.

“She was very tall, with a lot o’ light hair meandering down the back of her head, as long as a deer-skin whip-lash, and about the color. She hed eyes thet’d bore you through at fifty yards, and pooty hands and feet. And when she kinder got out o’ that stiff, narvous state she was in, and warmed up a little, and got chipper, by G-d, sir, she was handsome,—she was that!”

A little flushed and embarrassed at his own enthusiasm, he stopped, and then said, carelessly, “They got off at Murphy’s.”

“Well,” said Islington.

“Well, I used to see her often arter thet, and when she was alone she allus took the box-seat. She kinder confided her troubles to me, how her husband got drunk and abused her; and I didn’t see much o’ him, for he was away in ‘Frisco arter thet. But it was all square, Tommy,—all square ‘twixt me and her.

“I got a going there a good deal, and then one day I sez to myself, ‘Bill, this won’t do,’ and I got changed to another route. Did you ever know Jackson Filltree, Tommy?” said Bill, breaking off suddenly.

“No.”

“Might have heerd of him, p’r’aps?”

“No,” said Islington, impatiently.

“Jackson Filltree ran the express from White’s out to Summit, ‘cross the North Fork of the Yuba. One day he sez to me, ‘Bill, that’s a mighty bad ford at the North Fork.’ I sez, ‘I believe you, Jackson.’ ‘It’ll git me some day, Bill, sure,’ sez he. I sez, ‘Why don’t you take the lower ford?’ ‘I don’t know,’ sez he, ‘but I can’t.’ So ever after, when I met him, he sez, ‘That North Fork ain’t got me yet.’ One day I was in Sacramento, and up comes Filltree. He sez, ‘I’ve sold out the express business on account of the North Fork, but it’s bound to get me yet, Bill, sure’; and he laughs. Two weeks after they finds his body below the ford, whar he tried to cross, comin’ down from the Summit way. Folks said it was foolishness: Tommy, I sez it was Fate! The second day arter I was changed to the Placerville route, thet woman comes outer the hotel above the stage-office. Her husband, she said, was lying sick in Placerville; that’s what she said; but it was Fate, Tommy, Fate. Three months afterward, her husband takes an overdose of morphine for delirium tremems, and dies. There’s folks ez sez she gave it to him, but it’s Fate. A year after that I married her,—Fate, Tommy, Fate!

“I lived with her jest three months,” he went on, after a long breath,—“three months! It ain’t much time for a happy man. I’ve seen a good deal o’ hard life in my day, but there was days in that three months longer than any day in my life,—days, Tommy, when it was a toss-up whether I should kill her or she me. But thar, I’m done. You are a young man, Tommy, and I ain’t goin’ to tell things thet, old as I am, three years ago I couldn’t have believed.”

When at last, with his grim face turned toward the window, he sat silently with his clinched hands on his knees before him, Islington asked where his wife was now.

“Ask me no more, my boy,—no more. I’ve said my say.” With a gesture as of throwing down a pair of reins before him, he rose, and walked to the window.

“You kin understand, Tommy, why a little trip around the world ‘ud do me good. Ef you can’t go with me, well and good. But go I must.”

“Not before luncheon, I hope,” said a very sweet voice, as Blanche Masterman suddenly stood before them. “Father would never forgive me if in his absence I permitted one of Mr. Islington’s friends to go in this way. You will stay, won’t you? Do! And you will give me your arm now; and when Mr. Islington has done staring, he will follow us into the dining-room and introduce you.”

“I have quite fallen in love with your friend,” said Miss Blanche, as they stood in the drawing-room looking at the figure of Bill, strolling, with his short pipe in his mouth, through the distant shrubbery. “He asks very queer questions, though. He wanted to know my mother’s maiden name.”

“He is an honest fellow,” said Islington, gravely.

“You are very much subdued. You don’t thank me, I dare say, for keeping you and your friend here; but you couldn’t go, you know, until father returned.”

Islington smiled, but not very gayly.

“And then I think it much better for us to part here under these frescos, don’t you? Good by.”

She extended her long, slim hand.

“Out in the sunlight there, when my eyes were red, you were very anxious to look at me,” she added, in a dangerous voice.

Islington raised his sad eyes to hers. Something glittering upon her own sweet lashes trembled and fell.

“Blanche!”

She was rosy enough now, and would have withdrawn her hand, but Islington detained it. She was not quite certain but that her waist was also in jeopardy. Yet she could not help saying, “Are you sure that there isn’t anything in the way of a young woman that would keep you?”

“Blanche!” said Islington in reproachful horror.

“If gentlemen will roar out their secrets before an open window, with a young woman lying on a sofa on the veranda, reading a stupid French novel, they must not be surprised if she gives more attention to them than her book.”

“Then you know all, Blanche?”

“I know,” said Blanche, “let’s see—I know the partiklar style of—ahem!—fool you was, and expected no better. Good by.” And, gliding like a lovely and innocent milk snake out of his grasp, she slipped away.

To the pleasant ripple of waves, the sound of music and light voices, the yellow midsummer moon again rose over Greyport. It looked upon formless masses of rock and shrubbery, wide spaces of lawn and beach, and a shimmering expanse of water. It singled out particular objects,—a white sail in shore, a crystal globe upon the lawn, and flashed upon something held between the teeth of a crouching figure scaling the low wall of Cliffwood Lodge. Then, as a man and woman passed out from under the shadows of the foliage into the open moonlight of the garden path, the figure leaped from the wall, and stood erect and waiting in the shadow.

It was the figure of an old man, with rolling eyes, his trembling hand grasping a long, keen knife,—a figure more pitiable than pitiless, more pathetic than terrible. But the next moment the knife was stricken from his hand, and he struggled in the firm grasp of another figure that apparently sprang from the wall beside him.

“D—n you, Masterman!” cried the old man, hoarsely; “give me fair play, and I’ll kill you yet!”

“Which my name is Yuba Bill,” said Bill, quietly, “and it’s time this d—n fooling was stopped.”

The old man glared in Bill’s face savagely. “I know you. You’re one of Masterman’s friends,—d—n you,—let me go till I cut his heart out,—let me go! Where is my Mary?—where is my wife?—there she is! there!—there!—there! Mary!” He would have screamed, but Bill placed his powerful hand upon his mouth, as he turned in the direction of the old man’s glance. Distinct in the moonlight the figures of Islington and Blanche, arm in arm, stood out upon the garden path.

“Give me my wife!” muttered the old man hoarsely, between Bill’s fingers. “Where is she?”

A sudden fury passed over Yuba Bill’s face. “Where is your wife?” he echoed, pressing the old man back against the garden wall, and holding him there as in a vice. “Where is your wife?” he repeated, thrusting his grim sardonic jaw and savage eyes into the old man’s frightened face. “Where is Jack Adam’s wife? Where is MY wife? Where is the she-devil that drove one man mad, that sent another to hell by his own hand, that eternally broke and ruined me? Where! Where! Do you ask where? In jail in Sacramento,—in jail, do you hear?—in jail for murder, Johnson,—murder!”

The old man gasped, stiffened, and then, relaxing, suddenly slipped, a mere inanimate mass, at Yuba Bill’s feet. With a sudden revulsion of feeling, Yuba Bill dropped at his side, and, lifting him tenderly in his arms, whispered, “Look up, old man, Johnson! look up, for God’s sake!—it’s me,—Yuba Bill! and yonder is your daughter, and—Tommy!—don’t you know—Tommy, little Tommy Islington?”

Johnson’s eyes slowly opened. He whispered, “Tommy! yes, Tommy! Sit by me, Tommy. But don’t sit so near the bank. Don’t you see how the river is rising and beckoning to me,—hissing, and boilin’ over the rocks? It’s gittin higher!—hold me, Tommy,—hold me, and don’t let me go yet. We’ll live to cut his heart out, Tommy,—we’ll live—we’ll—” His head sank, and the rushing river, invisible to all eyes save his, leaped toward him out of the darkness, and bore him away, no longer to the darkness, but through it to the distant, peaceful shining sea.

HOW SANTA CLAUS CAME TO SIMPSON’S BAR

It had been raining in the valley of the Sacramento. The North Fork had overflowed its banks and Rattlesnake Creek was impassable. The few boulders that had marked the summer ford at Simpson’s Crossing were obliterated by a vast sheet of water stretching to the foothills. The up stage was stopped at Grangers; the last mail had been abandoned in the tules, the rider swimming for his life. “An area,” remarked the “Sierra Avalanche,” with pensive local pride, “as large as the State of Massachusetts is now under water.”

Nor was the weather any better in the foothills. The mud lay deep on the mountain road; wagons that neither physical force nor moral objurgation could move from the evil ways into which they had fallen, encumbered the track, and the way to Simpson’s Bar was indicated by broken-down teams and hard swearing. And farther on, cut off and inaccessible, rained upon and bedraggled, smitten by high winds and threatened by high water, Simpson’s Bar, on the eve of Christmas day, 1862, clung like a swallow’s nest to the rocky entablature and splintered capitals of Table Mountain, and shook in the blast.

As night shut down on the settlement, a few lights gleamed through the mist from the windows of cabins on either side of the highway now crossed and gullied by lawless streams and swept by marauding winds. Happily most of the population were gathered at Thompson’s store, clustered around a red-hot stove, at which they silently spat in some accepted sense of social communion that perhaps rendered conversation unnecessary. Indeed, most methods of diversion had long since been exhausted on Simpson’s Bar; high water had suspended the regular occupations on gulch and on river, and a consequent lack of money and whiskey had taken the zest from most illegitimate recreation. Even Mr. Hamlin was fain to leave the Bar with fifty dollars in his pocket,—the only amount actually realized of the large sums won by him in the successful exercise of his arduous profession. “Ef I was asked,” he remarked somewhat later,—“ef I was asked to pint out a purty little village where a retired sport as didn’t care for money could exercise hisself, frequent and lively, I’d say Simpson’s Bar; but for a young man with a large family depending on his exertions, it don’t pay.” As Mr. Hamlin’s family consisted mainly of female adults, this remark is quoted rather to show the breadth of his humor than the exact extent of his responsibilities.

Howbeit, the unconscious objects of this satire sat that evening in the listless apathy begotten of idleness and lack of excitement. Even the sudden splashing of hoofs before the door did not arouse them. Dick Bullen alone paused in the act of scraping out his pipe, and lifted his head, but no other one of the group indicated any interest in, or recognition of, the man who entered.

It was a figure familiar enough to the company, and known in Simpson’s Bar as “The Old Man.” A man of perhaps fifty years; grizzled and scant of hair, but still fresh and youthful of complexion. A face full of ready, but not very powerful sympathy, with a chameleon-like aptitude for taking on the shade and color of contiguous moods and feelings. He had evidently just left some hilarious companions, and did not at first notice the gravity of the group, but clapped the shoulder of the nearest man jocularly, and threw himself into a vacant chair.

“Jest heard the best thing out, boys! Ye know Smiley, over yar,—Jim Smiley,—funniest man in the Bar? Well, Jim was jest telling the richest yarn about—”

“Smiley’s a – fool,” interrupted a gloomy voice.

“A particular – skunk,” added another in sepulchral accents.

A silence followed these positive statements. The Old Man glanced quickly around the group. Then his face slowly changed. “That’s so,” he said reflectively, after a pause, “certingly a sort of a skunk and suthin of a fool. In course.” He was silent for a moment as in painful contemplation of the unsavoriness and folly of the unpopular Smiley. “Dismal weather, ain’t it?” he added, now fully embarked on the current of prevailing sentiment. “Mighty rough papers on the boys, and no show for money this season. And tomorrow’s Christmas.”

There was a movement among the men at this announcement, but whether of satisfaction or disgust was not plain. “Yes,” continued the Old Man in the lugubrious tone he had, within the last few moments, unconsciously adopted,—“yes, Christmas, and to-night’s Christmas eve. Ye see, boys, I kinder thought—that is, I sorter had an idee, jest passin’ like, you know—that may be ye’d all like to come over to my house to-night and have a sort of tear round. But I suppose, now, you wouldn’t? Don’t feel like it, may be?” he added with anxious sympathy, peering into the faces of his companions.

“Well, I don’t know,” responded Tom Flynn with some cheerfulness. “P’r’aps we may. But how about your wife, Old Man? What does SHE say to it?”

The Old Man hesitated. His conjugal experience had not been a happy one, and the fact was known to Simpson’s Bar. His first wife, a delicate, pretty little woman, had suffered keenly and secretly from the jealous suspicions of her husband, until one day he invited the whole Bar to his house to expose her infidelity. On arriving, the party found the shy, petite creature quietly engaged in her household duties, and retired abashed and discomfited. But the sensitive woman did not easily recover from the shock of this extraordinary outrage. It was with difficulty she regained her equanimity sufficiently to release her lover from the closet in which he was concealed and escape with him. She left a boy of three years to comfort her bereaved husband. The Old Man’s present wife had been his cook. She was large, loyal, and aggressive.

Before he could reply, Joe Dimmick suggested with great directness that it was the “Old Man’s house,” and that, invoking the Divine Power, if the case were his own, he would invite whom he pleased, even if in so doing he imperilled his salvation. The Powers of Evil, he further remarked, should contend against him vainly. All this delivered with a terseness and vigor lost in this necessary translation.

“In course. Certainly. Thet’s it,” said the Old Man with a sympathetic frown. “Thar’s no trouble about THET. It’s my own house, built every stick on it myself. Don’t you be afeard o’ her, boys. She MAY cut up a trifle rough,—ez wimmin do,—but she’ll come round.” Secretly the Old Man trusted to the exaltation of liquor and the power of courageous example to sustain him in such an emergency.

As yet, Dick Bullen, the oracle and leader of Simpson’s Bar, had not spoken. He now took his pipe from his lips. “Old Man, how’s that yer Johnny gettin’ on? Seems to me he didn’t look so peart last time I seed him on the bluff heavin’ rocks at Chinamen. Didn’t seem to take much interest in it. Thar was a gang of ‘em by yar yesterday,—drownded out up the river,—and I kinder thought o’ Johnny, and how he’d miss ‘em! May be now, we’d be in the way ef he wus sick?”

The father, evidently touched not only by this pathetic picture of Johnny’s deprivation, but by the considerate delicacy of the speaker, hastened to assure him that Johnny was better and that a “little fun might ‘liven him up.” Whereupon Dick arose, shook himself, and saying, “I’m ready. Lead the way, Old Man: here goes,” himself led the way with a leap, a characteristic howl, and darted out into the night. As he passed through the outer room he caught up a blazing brand from the hearth. The action was repeated by the rest of the party, closely following and elbowing each other, and before the astonished proprietor of Thompson’s grocery was aware of the intention of his guests, the room was deserted.