Bunch Grass Part 21

"It's my turn. We must order a bottle of Leoville at once."

"You sent that wine," I exclaimed. There was no note of interrogation in my voice. I knew.

"Yes," he said indifferently; "it will be worth drinking in about ten years' time."

We had an admirable dinner upon a terrace overhanging the Loire, but the measure of my enjoyment was stinted by Johnson's exasperating reticence concerning himself. He talked delightfully of the chateaux in Touraine; he displayed an intimate knowledge of French history and archaeology, but I was tingling with impatience to transport myself and him to California. And he knew this--the rogue!

Finally, as the soft silvery twilight encompa.s.sed us, he told what I wanted to know.

"My father was a manufacturer who married a Frenchwoman. My brothers have trodden carefully and securely in my father's footsteps. They are all fairly prosperous--smug, respectable fellows. I resemble my mother. After Eton and Christ Church I was pitchforked into the family business. For a time it absorbed my attention. I will tell you why later. Then, having mastered the really interesting part of it, I grew bored. I wanted to study art. After several scenes with my father, I was allowed to go my own way--a pleasant way, too, but it led downhill, you understand. I spent three winters in Venice. Then my father died, and I came into a small fortune, which I squandered. My mother helped me; then she died. My brothers cut me, condemning me as a Bohemian and a vagabond. I confess that I did take a malicious pleasure in rubbing their sleek fur the wrong way. Then I crossed the Atlantic as the guest of an American millionaire. He took me on in his own car to California. I started a studio in San Francisco--and a life cla.s.s. That undid me, I found myself bankrupt. Then I fell desperately ill. Each day I felt the quicksands engulfing me."

"But your friends?" I interrupted.

"My friends? Yes, I had friends; but perhaps you will understand me, having seen to what depths I fell, that I couldn't bring myself to apply to my friends. Well, I was at my last gasp when I crawled up to your barn. I mean morally, for my strength was returning. You and your brother rode up. By G.o.d! I could have killed you!"

"Killed us?"

"You looked so fit, so prosperous, and I could read you both, could see in flaming capitals your pity, your contempt,--aye, and your disgust that a fellow-Englishman should be festering before your eyes.

I asked for leave to spend the night in your barn, and you said, 'All right.' All right, when everything was so cruelly, so pitilessly the other way! Then you came back, taking for granted that I must accept whatever you offered. I wanted to refuse, but the words stuck in my throat. I followed you to the bath-house. Was I grateful? Not a bit. I decided that for your own amus.e.m.e.nt, and perhaps to staunch your English pride, which I had offended, you meant to lift a poor devil out of h.e.l.l, so as to drop him again into deeper depths when the comedy was over----"

"Good heavens! You thought that?"

"My dear fellow, you write now, don't you? I'm giving you a bit of psychology--showing you the point of view of the worm writhing beneath the boot of lordly Man. But, always, I meant to turn, if I got the chance. I washed myself; I shaved; I slipped into your nice clean clothes. I'll admit that the warm water removed some encrusted mud from my mind, but it sharpened rather then obscured my resolution to make the most of what looked like a last chance. But when you uncorked that Leoville, shame spoiled it for me."

"You drank only two gla.s.ses, I remember."

"It brought everything back--everything! If I had had one more gla.s.s, I should have laid myself at your feet, whining and whimpering. The cigar that I smoked afterwards was poppy and mandragora. Through a cloud of smoke I saw all the pleasant years that were gone. Again I weakened. I had aroused your interest. I could have sponged upon you indefinitely. At that moment I saw the safe. Your brother imprudently mentioned that a large sum of money lay inside it. I made up my mind instantly to take the money, and did so that night. The dog was licking my hand as I robbed you. But next morning----"

He paused, then he laughed lightly. "Next morning----"

"You appeared with the kit-bag! That disconcerted me terribly. It proved what I had not perceived--that you two young Englishmen, tenderfeet both of you, had realised what you were doing, had seriously faced the responsibility of resurrecting the dead. The letter to the cashier, the twenty-dollar bill I found in my coat- pocket--these were as scorpions. But I hadn't the nerve to own up. So I carried the money to the bank and deposited it to your account."

"Then you bought a six-shooter."

"Yes; I meant to try another world. I had had enough of this one. I couldn't go back to my wallow."

"What restrained you?"

"The difficulty of finding a hiding-place. If my body were discovered, I knew that it would be awful for you."

"Thanks."

"It's easy to find a hole, but it's not easy to pull a hole in after one--eh? Still, I thought I should find some wild gulch on the Santa Barbara trail, amongst those G.o.d-forsaken foothills. The buzzards would pull the hole in within forty-eight hours."

"Ah! the buzzards." I shivered, seeing once more those grim s.e.xtons of the Pacific seaboard.

"I found the right place; and just then I saw the stage crawling up the grade. Immediately the excitement of a new sensation gripped me. I had a taste of it when I opened your safe. It seized me again, relentlessly. If I were successful, I might begin again; if I failed, I could shoot myself without imposing an atrocious remorse upon you.

Well, the pluck of that driver upset my plans--the plans of an amateur. I ought to have held them up on the upgrade."

"And after you failed----"

"Ah! after I failed I had a lucid interval. Don't laugh! I was hungry and thirsty. The most pressing need of my nature at that moment was a square meal. I walked to a hotel, and was nailed. Your brother's letter to the cashier saved me. I realised dimly that I had become respectable, that I looked--for the deputy sheriff told me so--an English gentleman--Mr. Johnson, your friend. That's about all."

"All?" I echoed, in dismay.

"The rest is so commonplace. I got a small job as clerk in a fruit- packing house. It led to better things. I suppose I am my father's son. I failed to make a living, spoiling canvas, but as a business man I have been a mild success."

"And what are you doing now?"

"I buy and sell claret. Any other question?"

"Yes. How did you open our burglar-proof safe?"

Johnson laughed.

"My father was a manufacturer of safes," he answered. "I know the tricks of my trade."

IX

UNCLE j.a.p'S LILY

Jaspar Panel owned a section of rough, hilly land to the north-east of Paradise. Everybody called him Uncle j.a.p. He was very tall, very thin, with a face burnt a brick red by exposure to sun and wind, and, born in Ma.s.sachusetts, he had marched as a youth with Sherman to the sea.

After the war he married, crossed the plains in a "prairie schooner,"

and, eventually, took up six hundred and forty acres of Government land in San Lorenzo County. With incredible labour, inspired and sustained by his natural acuteness, he wrought a miracle upon a singularly arid and sterile soil. I have been told that he was the first of the foothill settlers to irrigate abundantly, the first to plant out an orchard and vineyard, the first, certainly, to create a garden out of a sage-brush desert. Teamsters hauling wheat from the Carisa plains used to stop to shake the white alkaline dust from their overalls under Uncle j.a.p's fig trees. They and the cowboys were always made welcome. To such guests Uncle j.a.p would offer figs, water-melons, peaches, a square meal at noon, and exact nothing in return except appreciation. If a man failed to praise Uncle j.a.p's fruit or his wife's sweet pickles, he was not pressed to "call again." The old fellow was inordinately proud of his colts, his Poland-China pigs, his "graded" bull, his fountain in the garden.

"Nice place you have, Mr. Panel," a stranger might say.

"Yas; we call it Sunny Bushes. Uster be nothin' but sun an' bushes onst. It's nice, yas, and it's paid for."

"What a good-looking mare!"

"Yas; she's paid for, too."

Everything on the ranch, animal, vegetable, and mineral, was "paid for." Uncle j.a.p was the last man to hurt anybody's feelings, but the "paid for" rankled on occasion, for some of his visitors stood perilously near the edge of bankruptcy, and, as a rule, had not paid for either the land they occupied, or the cattle they branded, or the clothes they wore. To understand this story you must grasp the fact that Uncle j.a.p lived with credit and not on it.

His wife, also of New England parentage, had a righteous horror of debt bred in her bone. Uncle j.a.p adored her. If he set an extravagant value upon his other possessions, what price above rubies did he place upon the meek, silent, angular woman, who had been his partner, companion, and friend for more than a quarter of a century. Sun and wind had burnt her face, also, to the exact tint of her husband's. Her name was Lily.

"And, doggone it, she looks like a lily," Uncle j.a.p would say, in moments of expansion. "Tall an' slim, yas, an' with a little droop of her head. I'd ought ter be grateful to G.o.d fer givin' me sech a flower outer heaven--an' I am, I am. Look at her now! What a mover!"

Uncle j.a.p's Lily chasing a hen certainly exhibited an activity surprising in one of her years. By a hairbreadth she missed perfection. Uncle j.a.p had been known to hint, nothing more, that he would have liked a dozen or so of babies. The hint took concrete form in: "I think a heap o' young things, colts, kittens, puppies--an' the like." Then he would sigh.

We came to California in the eighties, and in '93, if my memory serves me, Uncle j.a.p discovered bituminous rock in a corner of his ranch. He became very excited over this find, and used to carry samples of ore in his pocket which he showed to the neighbours.

"There's petroleum whar that ore is--_sure_. An' ef I could strike it, boys, why, why I'd jest hang my Lily with di'monds from her head to her feet, I would."