A First Family of Tasajara

“Think you’re mighty smart, don’t ye?”

The two naval heroes stopped in their imaginary fury, and, as the dust of conflict cleared away, recognized little Johnny Peters gazing at them with mingled inquisitiveness and envy.

“Guess ye don’t know what happened down the run last night,” he continued impatiently. “‘Lige Curtis got killed, or killed hisself! Blood all over the rock down thar. Seed it, myseff. Dad picked up his six-shooter,—one barrel gone off. My dad was the first to find it out, and he’s bin to Squire Kerby tellin’ him.”

The two companions, albeit burning with curiosity, affected indifference and pre-knowledge.

“Dad sez your father druv ‘Lige outer the store lass night! Dad sez your father’s ‘sponsible. Dad sez your father ez good ez killed him. Dad sez the squire’ll set the constable on your father. Yah!” But here the small insulter incontinently fled, pursued by both the boys. Nevertheless, when he had made good his escape, John Milton showed neither a disposition to take up his former nautical role, nor to follow his companion to visit the sanguinary scene of Elijah’s disappearance. He walked slowly back to the store and continued his work of sweeping and putting in order with an abstracted regularity, and no trace of his former exuberant spirits.

The first one of those instinctive fears which are common to imaginative children, and often assume the functions of premonition, had taken possession of him. The oddity of his father’s manner the evening before, which had only half consciously made its indelible impression on his sensitive fancy, had recurred to him with Johnny Peters’s speech. He had no idea of literally accepting the boy’s charges; he scarcely understood their gravity; but he had a miserable feeling that his father’s anger and excitement last night was because he had been discovered hunting in the dark for that paper of ‘Lige Curtis’s. It WAS ‘Lige Curtis’s paper, for he had seen it lying there. A sudden dreadful conviction came over him that he must never, never let any one know that he had seen his father take up that paper; that he must never admit it, even to HIM. It was not the boy’s first knowledge of that attitude of hypocrisy which the grownup world assumes towards childhood, and in which the innocent victims eventually acquiesce with a Machiavellian subtlety that at last avenges them,—but it was his first knowledge that that hypocrisy might not be so innocent. His father had concealed something from him, because it was not right.

But if childhood does not forget, it seldom broods and is not above being diverted. And the two surveyors—of whose heroic advent in a raft John Milton had only heard that morning with their traveled ways, their strange instruments and stranger talk, captured his fancy. Kept in the background by his sisters when visitors came, as an unpresentable feature in the household, he however managed to linger near the strangers when, in company with Euphemia and Clementina, after breakfast they strolled beneath the sparkling sunlight in the rude garden inclosure along the sloping banks of the creek. It was with the average brother’s supreme contempt that he listened to his sisters’ “practicin’” upon the goodness of these superior beings; it was with an exceptional pity that he regarded the evident admiration of the strangers in return. He felt that in the case of Euphemia, who sometimes evinced a laudable curiosity in his pleasures, and a flattering ignorance of his reading, this might be pardonable; but what any one could find in the useless statuesque Clementina passed his comprehension. Could they not see at once that she was “just that kind of person” who would lie abed in the morning, pretending she was sick, in order to make Phemie do the housework, and make him, John Milton, clean her boots and fetch things for her? Was it not perfectly plain to them that her present sickening politeness was solely with a view to extract from them caramels, rock-candy, and gum drops, which she would meanly keep herself, and perhaps some “buggy-riding” later? Alas, John Milton, it was not! For standing there with her tall, perfectly-proportioned figure outlined against a willow, an elastic branch of which she had drawn down by one curved arm above her head, and on which she leaned—as everybody leaned against something in Sidon—the two young men saw only a straying goddess in a glorified rosebud print. Whether the clearly-cut profile presented to Rice, or the full face that captivated Grant, each suggested possibilities of position, pride, poetry, and passion that astonished while it fascinated them. By one of those instincts known only to the freemasonry of the sex, Euphemia lent herself to this advertisement of her sister’s charms by subtle comparison with her own prettinesses, and thus combined against their common enemy, man.

“Clementina certainly is perfect, to keep her supremacy over that pretty little sister,” thought Rice.

“What a fascinating little creature to hold her own against that tall, handsome girl,” thought Grant.

“They’re takin’ stock o’ them two fellers so as to gabble about ‘em when their backs is turned,” said John Milton gloomily to himself, with a dismal premonition of the prolonged tea-table gossip he would be obliged to listen to later.

“We were very fortunate to make a landing at all last night,” said Rice, looking down upon the still swollen current, and then raising his eyes to Clementina. “Still more fortunate to make it where we did. I suppose it must have been the singing that lured us on to the bank,—as, you know, the sirens used to lure people,—only with less disastrous consequences.”

John Milton here detected three glaring errors; first, it was NOT Clementina who had sung; secondly, he knew that neither of his sisters had ever read anything about sirens, but he had; thirdly, that the young surveyor was glaringly ignorant of local phenomena and should be corrected.

“It’s nothin’ but the current,” he said, with that feverish youthful haste that betrays a fatal experience of impending interruption. “It’s always leavin’ drift and rubbish from everywhere here. There ain’t anythin’ that’s chucked into the creek above that ain’t bound to fetch up on this bank. Why, there was two sheep and a dead hoss here long afore YOU thought of coming!” He did not understand why this should provoke the laughter that it did, and to prove that he had no ulterior meaning, added with pointed politeness, “So IT ISN’T YOUR FAULT, you know—YOU couldn’t help it;” supplementing this with the distinct courtesy, “otherwise you wouldn’t have come.”

“But it would seem that your visitors are not all as accidental as your brother would imply, and one, at least, seems to have been expected last evening. You remember you thought we were a Mr. Parmlee,” said Mr. Rice looking at Clementina.

It would be strange indeed, he thought, if the beautiful girl were not surrounded by admirers. But without a trace of self-consciousness, or any change in her reposeful face, she indicated her sister with a slight gesture, and said: “One of Phemie’s friends. He gave her the accordion. She’s very popular.”

“And I suppose YOU are very hard to please?” he said with a tentative smile.

She looked at him with her large, clear eyes, and that absence of coquetry or changed expression in her beautiful face which might have stood for indifference or dignity as she said: “I don’t know. I am waiting to see.”

But here Miss Phemie broke in saucily with the assertion that Mr. Parmlee might not have a railroad in his pocket, but that at least he didn’t have to wait for the Flood to call on young ladies, nor did he usually come in pairs, for all the world as if he had been let out of Noah’s Ark, but on horseback and like a Christian by the front door. All this provokingly and bewitchingly delivered, however, and with a simulated exaggeration that was incited apparently more by Mr. Lawrence Grant’s evident enjoyment of it, than by any desire to defend the absent Parmlee.

“But where is the front door?” asked Grant laughingly.

The young girl pointed to a narrow zigzag path that ran up the bank beside the house until it stopped at a small picketed gate on the level of the road and store.

“But I should think it would be easier to have a door and private passage through the store,” said Grant.

“WE don’t,” said the young lady pertly, “we have nothing to do with the store. I go in to see paw sometimes when he’s shutting up and there’s nobody there, but Clem has never set foot in it since we came. It’s bad enough to have it and the lazy loafers that hang around it as near to us as they are; but paw built the house in such a fashion that we ain’t troubled by their noise, and we might be t’other side of the creek as far as our having to come across them. And because paw has to sell pork and flour, we haven’t any call to go there and watch him do it.”

The two men glanced at each other. This reserve and fastidiousness were something rare in a pioneer community. Harkutt’s manners certainly did not indicate that he was troubled by this sensitiveness; it must have been some individual temperament of his daughters. Stephen felt his respect increase for the goddess-like Clementina; Mr. Lawrence Grant looked at Miss Phemie with a critical smile.

“But you must be very limited in your company,” he said; “or is Mr. Parmlee not a customer of your father’s?”

“As Mr. Parmlee does not come to us through the store, and don’t talk trade to me, we don’t know,” responded Phemie saucily.

“But have you no lady acquaintances—neighbors—who also avoid the store and enter only at the straight and narrow gate up there?” continued Grant mischievously, regardless of the uneasy, half-reproachful glances of Rice.

But Phemie, triumphantly oblivious of any satire, answered promptly: “If you mean the Pike County Billingses who live on the turnpike road as much as they do off it, or the six daughters of that Georgia Cracker who wear men’s boots and hats, we haven’t.”

“And Mr. Parmlee, your admirer?” suggested Rice. “Hasn’t he a mother or sisters here?”

“Yes, but they don’t want to know us, and have never called here.”

The embarrassment of the questioner at this unexpected reply, which came from the faultless lips of Clementina, was somewhat mitigated by the fact that the young woman’s voice and manner betrayed neither annoyance nor anger.

Here, however, Harkutt appeared from the house with the information that he had secured two horses for the surveyors and their instruments, and that he would himself accompany them a part of the way on their return to Tasajara Creek, to show them the road. His usual listless deliberation had given way to a certain nervous but uneasy energy. If they started at once it would be better, before the loungers gathered at the store and confused them with lazy counsel and languid curiosity. He took it for granted that Mr. Grant wished the railroad survey to be a secret, and he had said nothing, as they would be pestered with questions. “Sidon was inquisitive—and old-fashioned.” The benefit its inhabitants would get from the railroad would not prevent them from throwing obstacles in its way at first; he remembered the way they had acted with a proposed wagon road,—in fact, an idea of his own, something like the railroad; he knew them thoroughly, and if he might advise them, it would be to say nothing here until the thing was settled.

“He evidently does not intend to give us a chance,” said Grant good-humoredly to his companion, as they turned to prepare for their journey; “we are to be conducted in silence to the outskirts of the town like horse-thieves.”

“But you gave him the tip for himself,” said Rice reproachfully; “you cannot blame him for wanting to keep it.”

“I gave it to him in trust for his two incredible daughters,” said Grant with a grimace. “But, hang it! if I don’t believe the fellow has more concern in it than I imagined.”

“But isn’t she perfect?” said Rice, with charming abstraction.

“Who?”

“Clementina, and so unlike her father.”

“Discomposingly so,” said Grant quietly. “One feels in calling her ‘Miss Harkutt’ as if one were touching upon a manifest indiscretion. But here comes John Milton. Well, my lad, what can I do for you?”

The boy, who had been regarding them from a distance with wistful and curious eyes as they replaced their instruments for the journey, had gradually approached them. After a moment’s timid hesitation he said, looking at Grant: “You don’t know anybody in this kind o’ business,” pointing to the instruments, “who’d like a boy, about my size?”

“I’m afraid not, J. M.,” said Grant, cheerfully, without suspending his operation. “The fact is, you see, it’s not exactly the kind of work for a boy of your size.”

John Milton was silent for a moment, shifting himself slowly from one leg to another as he watched the surveyor. After a pause he said, “There don’t seem to be much show in this world for boys o’ my size. There don’t seem to be much use for ‘em any way.” This not bitterly, but philosophically, and even politely, as if to relieve Grant’s rejection of any incivility.

“Really you quite pain me, John Milton,” said Grant, looking up as he tightened a buckle. “I never thought of it before, but you’re right.”

“Now,” continued the boy slowly, “with girls it’s just different. Girls of my size everybody does things for. There’s Clemmy,—she’s only two years older nor me, and don’t know half that I do, and yet she kin lie about all day, and hasn’t to get up to breakfast. And Phemie,—who’s jest the same age, size, and weight as me,—maw and paw lets her do everything she wants to. And so does everybody. And so would you.”

“But you surely don’t want to be like a girl?” said Grant, smiling.

It here occurred to John Milton’s youthful but not illogical mind that this was not argument, and he turned disappointedly away. As his father was to accompany the strangers a short distance, he, John Milton, was to-day left in charge of the store. That duty, however, did not involve any pecuniary transactions—the taking of money or making of change but a simple record on a slate behind the counter of articles selected by those customers whose urgent needs could not wait Mr. Harkutt’s return. Perhaps on account of this degrading limitation, perhaps for other reasons, the boy did not fancy the task imposed upon him. The presence of the idle loungers who usually occupied the armchairs near the stove, and occasionally the counter, dissipated any romance with which he might have invested his charge; he wearied of the monotony of their dull gossip, but mostly he loathed the attitude of hypercritical counsel and instruction which they saw fit to assume towards him at such moments. “Instead o’ lazin’ thar behind the counter when your father ain’t here to see ye, John,” remarked Billings from the depths of his armchair a few moments after Harkutt had ridden away, “ye orter be bustlin’ round, dustin’ the shelves. Ye’ll never come to anythin’ when you’re a man ef you go on like that. Ye never heard o’ Harry Clay—that was called ‘the Mill-boy of the Slashes’—sittin’ down doin’ nothin’ when he was a boy.”

“I never heard of him loafin’ round in a grocery store when he was growned up either,” responded John Milton, darkly.

“P’r’aps you reckon he got to be a great man by standin’ up sassin’ his father’s customers,” said Peters, angrily. “I kin tell ye, young man, if you was my boy”—

“If I was YOUR boy, I’d be playin’ hookey instead of goin’ to school, jest as your boy is doin’ now,” interrupted John Milton, with a literal recollection of his quarrel and pursuit of the youth in question that morning.

An undignified silence on the part of the adults followed, the usual sequel to those passages; Sidon generally declining to expose itself to the youthful Harkutt’s terrible accuracy of statement.

The men resumed their previous lazy gossip about Elijah Curtis’s disappearance, with occasional mysterious allusions in a lower tone, which the boy instinctively knew referred to his father, but which either from indolence or caution, the two great conservators of Sidon, were never formulated distinctly enough for his relentless interference. The morning sunshine was slowly thickening again in an indolent mist that seemed to rise from the saturated plain. A stray lounger shuffled over from the blacksmith’s shop to the store to take the place of another idler who had joined an equally lethargic circle around the slumbering forge. A dull intermittent sound of hammering came occasionally from the wheelwright’s shed—at sufficiently protracted intervals to indicate the enfeebled progress of Sidon’s vehicular repair. A yellow dog left his patch of sunlight on the opposite side of the way and walked deliberately over to what appeared to be more luxurious quarters on the veranda; was manifestly disappointed but not equal to the exertion of returning, and sank down with blinking eyes and a regretful sigh without going further. A procession of six ducks got well into a line for a laborious “march past” the store, but fell out at the first mud puddle and gave it up. A highly nervous but respectable hen, who had ventured upon the veranda evidently against her better instincts, walked painfully on tiptoe to the door, apparently was met by language which no mother of a family could listen to, and retired in strong hysterics. A little later the sun became again obscured, the wind arose, rain fell, and the opportunity for going indoors and doing nothing was once more availed of by all Sidon.

It was afternoon when Mr. Harkutt returned. He did not go into the store, but entered the dwelling from the little picket-gate and steep path. There he called a family council in the sitting-room as being the most reserved and secure. Mrs. Harkutt, sympathizing and cheerfully ready for any affliction, still holding a dust-cloth in her hand, took her seat by the window, with Phemie breathless and sparkling at one side of her, while Clementina, all faultless profile and repose, sat on the other. To Mrs. Harkutt’s motherly concern at John Milton’s absence, it was pointed out that he was wanted at the store,—was a mere boy anyhow, and could not be trusted. Mr. Harkutt, a little ruddier from weather, excitement, and the unusual fortification of a glass of liquor, a little more rugged in the lines of his face, and with an odd ring of defiant self-assertion in his voice, stood before them in the centre of the room.

He wanted them to listen to him carefully, to remember what he said, for it was important; it might be a matter of “lawing” hereafter,—and he couldn’t be always repeating it to them,—he would have enough to do. There was a heap of it that, as women-folks, they couldn’t understand, and weren’t expected to. But he’d got it all clear now, and what he was saying was gospel. He’d always known to himself that the only good that could ever come to Sidon would come by railroad. When those fools talked wagon road he had said nothing, but he had his own ideas; he had worked for that idea without saying anything to anybody; that idea was to get possession of all the land along the embarcadero, which nobody cared for, and ‘Lige Curtis was ready to sell for a song. Well, now, considering what had happened, he didn’t mind telling them that he had been gradually getting possession of it, little by little, paying ‘Lige Curtis in advances and installments, until it was his own! They had heard what those surveyors said; how that it was the only fit terminus for the railroad. Well, that land, and that water-front, and the terminus were HIS! And all from his own foresight and prudence.

It is needless to say that this was not the truth. But it is necessary to point out that this fabrication was the result of his last night’s cogitations and his morning’s experience. He had resolved upon a bold course. He had reflected that his neighbors would be more ready to believe in and to respect a hard, mercenary, and speculative foresight in his taking advantage of ‘Lige’s necessities than if he had—as was the case—merely benefited by them through an accident of circumstance and good humor. In the latter case he would be envied and hated; in the former he would be envied and feared. By logic of circumstance the greater wrong seemed to be less obviously offensive than the minor fault. It was true that it involved the doing of something he had not contemplated, and the certainty of exposure if ‘Lige ever returned, but he was nevertheless resolved. The step from passive to active wrong-doing is not only easy, it is often a relief; it is that return to sincerity which we all require. Howbeit, it gave that ring of assertion to Daniel Harkutt’s voice already noted, which most women like, and only men are prone to suspect or challenge. The incompleteness of his statement was, for the same reason, overlooked by his feminine auditors.

“And what is it worth, dad?” asked Phemie eagerly.

“Grant says I oughter get at least ten thousand dollars for the site of the terminus from the company, but of course I shall hold on to the rest of the land. The moment they get the terminus there, and the depot and wharf built, I can get my own price and buyers for the rest. Before the year is out Grant thinks it ought to go up ten per cent on the value of the terminus, and that a hundred thousand.”

“Oh, dad!” gasped Phemie, frantically clasping her knees with both hands as if to perfectly assure herself of this good fortune.

Mrs. Harkutt audibly murmured “Poor dear Dan’l,” and stood, as it were, sympathetically by, ready to commiserate the pains and anxieties of wealth as she had those of poverty. Clementina alone remained silent, clear-eyed, and unchanged.

“And to think it all came through THEM!” continued Phemie. “I always had an idea that Mr. Grant was smart, dad. And it was real kind of him to tell you.”

“I reckon father could have found it out without them. I don’t know why we should be beholden to them particularly. I hope he isn’t expected to let them think that he is bound to consider them our intimate friends just because they happened to drop in here at a time when his plans have succeeded.”

The voice was Clementina’s, unexpected but quiet, unemotional and convincing. “It seemed,” as Mrs. Harkutt afterwards said, “as if the child had already touched that hundred thousand.” Phemie reddened with a sense of convicted youthful extravagance.

“You needn’t fear for me,” said Harkutt, responding to Clementina’s voice as if it were an echo of his own, and instinctively recognizing an unexpected ally. “I’ve got my own ideas of this thing, and what’s to come of it. I’ve got my own ideas of openin’ up that property and showin’ its resources. I’m goin’ to run it my own way. I’m goin’ to have a town along the embarcadero that’ll lay over any town in Contra Costa. I’m goin’ to have the court-house and county seat there, and a couple of hotels as good as any in the Bay. I’m goin’ to build that wagon road through here that those lazy louts slipped up on, and carry it clear over to Five Mile Corner, and open up the whole Tasajara Plain!”

They had never seen him look so strong, so resolute, so intelligent and handsome. A dimly prophetic vision of him in a black broadcloth suit and gold watch-chain addressing a vague multitude, as she remembered to have seen the Hon. Stanley Riggs of Alasco at the “Great Barbecue,” rose before Phemie’s blue enraptured eyes. With the exception of Mrs. Harkutt,—equal to any possibilities on the part of her husband,—they had honestly never expected it of him. They were pleased with their father’s attitude in prosperity, and felt that perhaps he was not unworthy of being proud of them hereafter.

“But we’re goin’ to leave Sidon,” said Phemie, “ain’t we, paw?”

“As soon as I can run up a new house at the embarcadero,” said Harkutt peevishly, “and that’s got to be done mighty quick if I want to make a show to the company and be in possession.”

“And that’s easier for you to do, dear, now that ‘Lige’s disappeared,” said Mrs. Harkutt consolingly.

“What do ye mean by that? What the devil are ye talkin’ about?” demanded Harkutt suddenly with unexpected exasperation.

“I mean that that drunken ‘Lige would be mighty poor company for the girls if he was our only neighbor,” returned Mrs. Harkutt submissively.

Harkutt, after a fixed survey of his wife, appeared mollified. The two girls, who were mindful of his previous outburst the evening before, exchanged glances which implied that his manners needed correction for prosperity.