Openings in the Old Trail

The counsel sank down in his seat with the bitter conviction that the jury was manifestly against him, and the case as good as lost. But his face was scarcely as disturbed as his client’s, who, in great agitation, had begun to argue with him wildly, and was apparently pressing some point against the lawyer’s vehement opposal. The Colonel’s murky eyes brightened as he still stood erect, with his hand thrust in his breast.

“It will be put to you, gentlemen, when the counsel on the other side refrains from mere interruption and confines himself to reply, that my unfortunate client has no action—no remedy at law—because there were no spoken words of endearment. But, gentlemen, it will depend upon YOU to say what are and what are not articulate expressions of love. We all know that among the lower animals, with whom you may possibly be called upon to classify the defendant, there are certain signals more or less harmonious, as the case may be. The ass brays, the horse neighs, the sheep bleats—the feathered denizens of the grove call to their mates in more musical roundelays. These are recognized facts, gentlemen, which you yourselves, as dwellers among nature in this beautiful land, are all cognizant of. They are facts that no one would deny—and we should have a poor opinion of the ass who, at—er—such a supreme moment, would attempt to suggest that his call was unthinking and without significance. But, gentlemen, I shall prove to you that such was the foolish, self-convicting custom of the defendant. With the greatest reluctance, and the—er—greatest pain, I succeeded in wresting from the maidenly modesty of my fair client the innocent confession that the defendant had induced her to correspond with him in these methods. Picture to yourself, gentlemen, the lonely moonlight road beside the widow’s humble cottage. It is a beautiful night, sanctified to the affections, and the innocent girl is leaning from her casement. Presently there appears upon the road a slinking, stealthy figure, the defendant on his way to church. True to the instruction she has received from him, her lips part in the musical utterance” (the Colonel lowered his voice in a faint falsetto, presumably in fond imitation of his fair client), “‘Keeree!’ Instantly the night becomes resonant with the impassioned reply” (the Colonel here lifted his voice in stentorian tones), “‘Kee-row.’ Again, as he passes, rises the soft ‘Keeree;’ again, as his form is lost in the distance, comes back the deep ‘Keerow.’”

A burst of laughter, long, loud, and irrepressible, struck the whole court-room, and before the Judge could lift his half-composed face and take his handkerchief from his mouth, a faint “Keeree” from some unrecognized obscurity of the court-room was followed by a loud “Keerow” from some opposite locality. “The Sheriff will clear the court,” said the Judge sternly; but, alas! as the embarrassed and choking officials rushed hither and thither, a soft “Keeree” from the spectators at the window, OUTSIDE the court-house, was answered by a loud chorus of “Keerows” from the opposite windows, filled with onlookers. Again the laughter arose everywhere,—even the fair plaintiff herself sat convulsed behind her handkerchief.

The figure of Colonel Starbottle alone remained erect—white and rigid. And then the Judge, looking up, saw—what no one else in the court had seen—that the Colonel was sincere and in earnest; that what he had conceived to be the pleader’s most perfect acting and most elaborate irony were the deep, serious, mirthless CONVICTIONS of a man without the least sense of humor. There was the respect of this conviction in the Judge’s voice as he said to him gently, “You may proceed, Colonel Starbottle.”

“I thank your Honor,” said the Colonel slowly, “for recognizing and doing all in your power to prevent an interruption that, during my thirty years’ experience at the bar, I have never been subjected to without the privilege of holding the instigators thereof responsible—PERSONALLY responsible. It is possibly my fault that I have failed, oratorically, to convey to the gentlemen of the jury the full force and significance of the defendant’s signals. I am aware that my voice is singularly deficient in producing either the dulcet tones of my fair client or the impassioned vehemence of the defendant’s response. I will,” continued the Colonel, with a fatigued but blind fatuity that ignored the hurriedly knit brows and warning eyes of the Judge, “try again. The note uttered by my client” (lowering his voice to the faintest of falsettos) “was ‘Keeree;’ the response was ‘Keerow-ow.’” And the Colonel’s voice fairly shook the dome above him.

Another uproar of laughter followed this apparently audacious repetition, but was interrupted by an unlooked-for incident. The defendant rose abruptly, and tearing himself away from the withholding hand and pleading protestations of his counsel, absolutely fled from the court-room, his appearance outside being recognized by a prolonged “Keerow” from the bystanders, which again and again followed him in the distance.

In the momentary silence which followed, the Colonel’s voice was heard saying, “We rest here, your Honor,” and he sat down. No less white, but more agitated, was the face of the defendant’s counsel, who instantly rose.

“For some unexplained reason, your Honor, my client desires to suspend further proceedings, with a view to effect a peaceable compromise with the plaintiff. As he is a man of wealth and position, he is able and willing to pay liberally for that privilege. While I, as his counsel, am still convinced of his legal irresponsibility, as he has chosen publicly to abandon his rights here, I can only ask your Honor’s permission to suspend further proceedings until I can confer with Colonel Starbottle.”

“As far as I can follow the pleadings,” said the Judge gravely, “the case seems to be hardly one for litigation, and I approve of the defendant’s course, while I strongly urge the plaintiff to accept it.”

Colonel Starbottle bent over his fair client. Presently he rose, unchanged in look or demeanor. “I yield, your Honor, to the wishes of my client, and—er—lady. We accept.”

Before the court adjourned that day it was known throughout the town that Adoniram K. Hotchkiss had compromised the suit for four thousand dollars and costs.

Colonel Starbottle had so far recovered his equanimity as to strut jauntily towards his office, where he was to meet his fair client. He was surprised, however, to find her already there, and in company with a somewhat sheepish-looking young man—a stranger. If the Colonel had any disappointment in meeting a third party to the interview, his old-fashioned courtesy did not permit him to show it. He bowed graciously, and politely motioned them each to a seat.

“I reckoned I’d bring Hiram round with me,” said the young lady, lifting her searching eyes, after a pause, to the Colonel’s, “though he WAS awful shy, and allowed that you didn’t know him from Adam, or even suspect his existence. But I said, ‘That’s just where you slip up, Hiram; a pow’ful man like the Colonel knows everything—and I’ve seen it in his eye.’ Lordy!” she continued, with a laugh, leaning forward over her parasol, as her eyes again sought the Colonel’s, “don’t you remember when you asked me if I loved that old Hotchkiss, and I told you, ‘That’s tellin’,’ and you looked at me—Lordy! I knew THEN you suspected there was a Hiram SOMEWHERE, as good as if I’d told you. Now you jest get up, Hiram, and give the Colonel a good hand-shake. For if it wasn’t for HIM and HIS searchin’ ways, and HIS awful power of language, I wouldn’t hev got that four thousand dollars out o’ that flirty fool Hotchkiss—enough to buy a farm, so as you and me could get married! That’s what you owe to HIM. Don’t stand there like a stuck fool starin’ at him. He won’t eat you—though he’s killed many a better man. Come, have I got to do ALL the kissin’?”

It is of record that the Colonel bowed so courteously and so profoundly that he managed not merely to evade the proffered hand of the shy Hiram, but to only lightly touch the franker and more impulsive finger-tips of the gentle Zaidee. “I—er—offer my sincerest congratulations—though I think you—er—overestimate—my—er—powers of penetration. Unfortunately, a pressing engagement, which may oblige me also to leave town tonight, forbids my saying more. I have—er—left the—er—business settlement of this—er—case in the hands of the lawyers who do my office work, and who will show you every attention. And now let me wish you a very good afternoon.”

Nevertheless, the Colonel returned to his private room, and it was nearly twilight when the faithful Jim entered, to find him sitting meditatively before his desk. “‘Fo’ God! Kernel, I hope dey ain’t nuffin de matter, but you’s lookin’ mighty solemn! I ain’t seen you look dat way, Kernel, since de day pooh Massa Stryker was fetched home shot froo de head.”

“Hand me down the whiskey, Jim,” said the Colonel, rising slowly.

The negro flew to the closet joyfully, and brought out the bottle. The Colonel poured out a glass of the spirit and drank it with his old deliberation.

“You’re quite right, Jim,” he said, putting down his glass, “but I’m—er—getting old—and—somehow I am missing poor Stryker damnably!”

THE LANDLORD OF THE BIG FLUME HOTEL

The Big Flume stage-coach had just drawn up at the Big Flume Hotel simultaneously with the ringing of a large dinner bell in the two hands of a negro waiter, who, by certain gyrations of the bell was trying to impart to his performance that picturesque elegance and harmony which the instrument and its purpose lacked. For the refreshment thus proclaimed was only the ordinary station dinner, protracted at Big Flume for three quarters of an hour, to allow for the arrival of the connecting mail from Sacramento, although the repast was of a nature that seldom prevailed upon the traveler to linger the full period over its details. The ordinary cravings of hunger were generally satisfied in half an hour, and the remaining minutes were employed by the passengers in drowning the memory of their meal in “drinks at the bar,” in smoking, and even in a hurried game of “old sledge,” or dominoes. Yet to-day the deserted table was still occupied by a belated traveler, and a lady—separated by a wilderness of empty dishes—who had arrived after the stage-coach. Observing which, the landlord, perhaps touched by this unwonted appreciation of his fare, moved forward to give them his personal attention.

He was a man, however, who seemed to be singularly deficient in those supreme qualities which in the West have exalted the ability to “keep a hotel” into a proverbial synonym for superexcellence. He had little or no innovating genius, no trade devices, no assumption, no faculty for advertisement, no progressiveness, and no “racket.” He had the tolerant good-humor of the Southwestern pioneer, to whom cyclones, famine, drought, floods, pestilence, and savages were things to be accepted, and whom disaster, if it did not stimulate, certainly did not appall. He received the insults, complaints, and criticisms of hurried and hungry passengers, the comments and threats of the Stage Company as he had submitted to the aggressions of a stupid, unjust, but overruling Nature—with unshaken calm. Perhaps herein lay his strength. People were obliged to submit to him and his hotel as part of the unfinished civilization, and they even saw something humorous in his impassiveness. Those who preferred to remonstrate with him emerged from the discussion with the general feeling of having been played with by a large-hearted and paternally disposed bear. Tall and long-limbed, with much strength in his lazy muscles, there was also a prevailing impression that this feeling might be intensified if the discussion were ever carried to physical contention. Of his personal history it was known only that he had emigrated from Wisconsin in 1852, that he had calmly unyoked his ox teams at Big Flume, then a trackless wilderness, and on the opening of a wagon road to the new mines had built a wayside station which eventually developed into the present hotel. He had been divorced in a Western State by his wife “Rosalie,” locally known as “The Prairie Flower of Elkham Creek,” for incompatibility of temper! Her temper was not stated.

Such was Abner Langworthy, the proprietor, as he moved leisurely down towards the lady guest, who was nearest, and who was sitting with her back to the passage between the tables. Stopping, occasionally, to professionally adjust the tablecloths and glasses, he at last reached her side.

“Ef there’s anythin’ more ye want that ye ain’t seein’, ma’am,” he began—and stopped suddenly. For the lady had looked up at the sound of his voice. It was his divorced wife, whom he had not seen since their separation. The recognition was instantaneous, mutual, and characterized by perfect equanimity on both sides.

“Well! I wanter know!” said the lady, although the exclamation point was purely conventional. “Abner Langworthy! though perhaps I’ve no call to say ‘Abner.’”

“Same to you, Rosalie—though I say it too,” returned the landlord. “But hol’ on just a minit.” He moved forward to the other guest, put the same perfunctory question regarding his needs, received a negative answer, and then returned to the lady and dropped into a chair opposite to her.

“You’re looking peart and—fleshy,” he said resignedly, as if he were tolerating his own conventional politeness with his other difficulties; “unless,” he added cautiously, “you’re takin’ on some new disease.”

“No! I’m fairly comf’ble,” responded the lady calmly, “and you’re gettin’ on in the vale, ez is natural—though you still kind o’ run to bone, as you used.”

There was not a trace of malevolence in either of their comments, only a resigned recognition of certain unpleasant truths which seemed to have been habitual to both of them. Mr. Langworthy paused to flick away some flies from the butter with his professional napkin, and resumed,—

“It must be a matter o’ five years sens I last saw ye, isn’t it?—in court arter you got the decree—you remember?”

“Yes—the 28th o’ July, ‘51. I paid Lawyer Hoskins’s bill that very day—that’s how I remember,” returned the lady. “You’ve got a big business here,” she continued, glancing round the room; “I reckon you’re makin’ it pay. Don’t seem to be in your line, though; but then, thar wasn’t many things that was.”

“No—that’s so,” responded Mr. Langworthy, nodding his head, as assenting to an undeniable proposition, “and you—I suppose you’re gettin’ on too. I reckon you’re—er—married—eh?”—with a slight suggestion of putting the question delicately.

The lady nodded, ignoring the hesitation. “Yes, let me see, it’s just three years and three days. Constantine Byers—I don’t reckon you know him—from Milwaukee. Timber merchant. Standin’ timber’s his specialty.”

“And I reckon he’s—satisfactory?”

“Yes! Mr. Byers is a good provider—and handy. And you? I should say you’d want a wife in this business?”

Mr. Langworthy’s serious half-perfunctory manner here took on an appearance of interest. “Yes—I’ve bin thinkin’ that way. Thar’s a young woman helpin’ in the kitchen ez might do, though I’m not certain, and I ain’t lettin’ on anything as yet. You might take a look at her, Rosalie,—I orter say Mrs. Byers ez is,—and kinder size her up, and gimme the result. It’s still wantin’ seven minutes o’ schedule time afore the stage goes, and—if you ain’t wantin’ more food”—delicately, as became a landlord—“and ain’t got anythin’ else to do, it might pass the time.”

Strange as it may seem, Mrs. Byers here displayed an equal animation in her fresh face as she rose promptly to her feet and began to rearrange her dust cloak around her buxom figure. “I don’t mind, Abner,” she said, “and I don’t think that Mr. Byers would mind either;” then seeing Langworthy hesitating at the latter unexpected suggestion, she added confidently, “and I wouldn’t mind even if he did, for I’m sure if I don’t know the kind o’ woman you’d be likely to need, I don’t know who would. Only last week I was sayin’ like that to Mr. Byers”—

“To Mr. Byers?” said Abner, with some surprise.

“Yes—to him. I said, ‘We’ve been married three years, Constantine, and ef I don’t know by this time what kind o’ woman you need now—and might need in future—why, thar ain’t much use in matrimony.’”

“You was always wise, Rosalie,” said Abner, with reminiscent appreciation.

“I was always there, Abner,” returned Mrs. Byers, with a complacent show of dimples, which she, however, chastened into that resignation which seemed characteristic of the pair. “Let’s see your ‘intended’—as might be.”

Thus supported, Mr. Langworthy led Mrs. Byers into the hall through a crowd of loungers, into a smaller hall, and there opened the door of the kitchen. It was a large room, whose windows were half darkened by the encompassing pines which still pressed around the house on the scantily cleared site. A number of men and women, among them a Chinaman and a negro, were engaged in washing dishes and other culinary duties; and beside the window stood a young blonde girl, who was wiping a tin pan which she was also using to hide a burst of laughter evidently caused by the abrupt entrance of her employer. A quantity of fluffy hair and part of a white, bared arm were nevertheless visible outside the disk, and Mrs. Byers gathered from the direction of Mr. Langworthy’s eyes, assisted by a slight nudge from his elbow, that this was the selected fair one. His feeble explanatory introduction, addressed to the occupants generally, “Just showing the house to Mrs.—er—Dusenberry,” convinced her that the circumstances of his having been divorced he had not yet confided to the young woman. As he turned almost immediately away, Mrs. Byers in following him managed to get a better look at the girl, as she was exchanging some facetious remark to a neighbor. Mr. Langworthy did not speak until they had reached the deserted dining-room again.

“Well?” he said briefly, glancing at the clock, “what did ye think o’ Mary Ellen?”

To any ordinary observer the girl in question would have seemed the least fitted in age, sobriety of deportment, and administrative capacity to fill the situation thus proposed for her, but Mrs. Byers was not an ordinary observer, and her auditor was not an ordinary listener.

“She’s older than she gives herself out to be,” said Mrs. Byers tentatively, “and them kitten ways don’t amount to much.”

Mr. Langworthy nodded. Had Mrs. Byers discovered a homicidal tendency in Mary Ellen he would have been equally unmoved.

“She don’t handsome much,” continued Mrs. Byers musingly, “but”—

“I never was keen on good looks in a woman, Rosalie. You know that!” Mrs. Byers received the equivocal remark unemotionally, and returned to the subject.

“Well!” she said contemplatively, “I should think you could make her suit.”

Mr. Langworthy nodded with resigned toleration of all that might have influenced her judgment and his own. “I was wantin’ a fa’r-minded opinion, Rosalie, and you happened along jest in time. Kin I put up anythin’ in the way of food for ye?” he added, as a stir outside and the words “All aboard!” proclaimed the departing of the stage-coach,—“an orange or a hunk o’ gingerbread, freshly baked?”

“Thank ye kindly, Abner, but I sha’n’t be usin’ anythin’ afore supper,” responded Mrs. Byers, as they passed out into the veranda beside the waiting coach.

Mr. Langworthy helped her to her seat. “Ef you’re passin’ this way ag’in”—he hesitated delicately.

“I’ll drop in, or I reckon Mr. Byers might, he havin’ business along the road,” returned Mrs. Byers with a cheerful nod, as the coach rolled away and the landlord of the Big Flume Hotel reentered his house.

For the next three weeks, however, it did not appear that Mr. Langworthy was in any hurry to act upon the advice of his former wife. His relations to Mary Ellen Budd were characterized by his usual tolerance to his employees’ failings,—which in Mary Ellen’s case included many “breakages,”—but were not marked by the invasion of any warmer feeling, or a desire for confidences. The only perceptible divergence from his regular habits was a disposition to be on the veranda at the arrival of the stage-coach, and when his duties permitted this, a cautious survey of his female guests at the beginning of dinner. This probably led to his more or less ignoring any peculiarities in his masculine patrons or their claims to his personal attention. Particularly so, in the case of a red-bearded man, in a long linen duster, both heavily freighted with the red dust of the stage road, which seemed to have invaded his very eyes as he watched the landlord closely. Towards the close of the dinner, when Abner, accompanied by a negro waiter after his usual custom, passed down each side of the long table, collecting payment for the meal, the stranger looked up. “You air the landlord of this hotel, I reckon?”

“I am,” said Abner tolerantly.

“I’d like a word or two with ye.”

But Abner had been obliged to have a formula for such occasions. “Ye’ll pay for yer dinner first,” he said submissively, but firmly, “and make yer remarks agin the food arter.”

The stranger flushed quickly, and his eye took an additional shade of red, but meeting Abner’s serious gray ones, he contented himself with ostentatiously taking out a handful of gold and silver and paying his bill. Abner passed on, but after dinner was over he found the stranger in the hall.

“Ye pulled me up rather short in thar,” said the man gloomily, “but it’s just as well, as the talk I was wantin’ with ye was kinder betwixt and between ourselves, and not hotel business. My name’s Byers, and my wife let on she met ye down here.”

For the first time it struck Abner as incongruous that another man should call Rosalie “his wife,” although the fact of her remarriage had been made sufficiently plain to him. He accepted it as he would an earthquake, or any other dislocation, with his usual tolerant smile, and held out his hand.

Mr. Byers took it, seemingly mollified, and yet inwardly disturbed,—more even than was customary in Abner’s guests after dinner.

“Have a drink with me,” he suggested, although it had struck him that Mr. Byers had been drinking before dinner.

“I’m agreeable,” responded Byers promptly; “but,” with a glance at the crowded bar-room, “couldn’t we go somewhere, jest you and me, and have a quiet confab?”

“I reckon. But ye must wait till we get her off.”

Mr. Byers started slightly, but it appeared that the impedimental sex in this case was the coach, which, after a slight feminine hesitation, was at last started. Whereupon Mr. Langworthy, followed by a negro with a tray bearing a decanter and glasses, grasped Mr. Byers’s arm, and walked along a small side veranda the depth of the house, stepped off, and apparently plunged with his guest into the primeval wilderness.

It has already been indicated that the site of the Big Flume Hotel had been scantily cleared; but Mr. Byers, backwoodsman though he was, was quite unprepared for so abrupt a change. The hotel, with its noisy crowd and garish newness, although scarcely a dozen yards away, seemed lost completely to sight and sound. A slight fringe of old tin cans, broken china, shavings, and even of the long-dried chips of the felled trees, once crossed, the two men were alone! From the tray, deposited at the foot of an enormous pine, they took the decanter, filled their glasses, and then disposed of themselves comfortably against a spreading root. The curling tail of a squirrel disappeared behind them; the far-off tap of a woodpecker accented the loneliness. And then, almost magically as it seemed, the thin veneering of civilization on the two men seemed to be cast off like the bark of the trees around them, and they lounged before each other in aboriginal freedom. Mr. Byers removed his restraining duster and undercoat. Mr. Langworthy resigned his dirty white jacket, his collar, and unloosed a suspender, with which he played.

“Would it be a fair question between two fa’r-minded men, ez hez lived alone,” said Mr. Byers, with a gravity so supernatural that it could be referred only to liquor, “to ask ye in what sort o’ way did Mrs. Byers show her temper?”

“Show her temper?” echoed Abner vacantly.

“Yes—in course, I mean when you and Mrs. Byers was—was—one? You know the di-vorce was for in-com-pat-ibility of temper.”

“But she got the divorce from me, so I reckon I had the temper,” said Langworthy, with great simplicity.