First Fam'lies of the Sierras Part 4

He was making a short turn in the trail, still holding his clasped hands over his extended stomach, still smiling peacefully out of his half-shut eyes:

"Washee! Washee!"

A double bolt of thunder was in his ears. A tremendous hand reached out from behind a pine, and then the fat little Chinaman squatted down and began to wilt and melt beneath it.

"Washee-Washee, come!"

Washee-Washee was not at all willing to come; but that made not the slightest difference in the world to Sandy. The little almond-eyed man was not at all heavy. Old flannel shirts, cotton overalls, stockings, cotton collars and cambric handkerchiefs never are heavy, no matter how well they may be wadded in, and padded away, and tucked up, and twisted under an outer garment; and so before he had time to say a word he was on his way to the Widow's with Sandy, while Limber Tim, with his mouth half-open, came corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the trail, and grinding and whetting his screechy gum boots together after them.

There is a fine marble statue in the garden at Naples, near the ma.s.sive marble head of Virgil, which represents some great giant as striding along with some little pigmy thrown over his shoulder, which he is carelessly holding on by the heel. Sandy looked not wholly unlike that statue, as he strode up the trail with Washee-Washee.

He reached the door of the Widow's cabin, knocked with the knuckles of his left hand, while his right hand held on to an ankle that hung down over his left shoulder, and calmly waited an answer.

The door half-way opened.

"Beg pardon, mum."

He bowed stiffly as he said this, and then shifting Washee-Washee round, quietly took his other heel in his other hand, and proceeded to shake him up and down, and dance him and stand him gently on his head, until the clothes began to burst out from under his blue seamless garment, and to peep through his pockets, and to reach down around his throat and dangle about his face, till the little man was nearly smothered.

Then Sandy set him down a moment to rest, and he looked in his face as he sat there, and it had the same peaceful smile, the same calm satisfaction as before. The little man now put his head to one side, shut his pretty brown eyes a little tighter at the corners, and opened his mouth the least bit in the world, and put out his tongue as if he was about to sing a hymn.

Then Sandy took him up again. He smiled again sweeter than before. Sandy tilted him side wise, and shook him again. Then there fell a spoon, then a pepper-box, and then a small bra.s.s candlestick; and at last, as he rolled him over and shook the other side, there came out a machine strangely and wonderfully made of whalebone and bra.s.s, and hooks and eyes, that Sandy had never seen before, and did not at all understand, but supposed was either a fish trap or some new invention for washing gold.

Then Limber Tim, who had screwed his back up against the palings, and watched all this with his mouth open, came down, and reaching out with his thumb and finger, as if they had been a pair of tongs, took the garments one by one, named them, for he knew them and their owners well, and laid them silently aside. Then he took Washee-Washee from the hands of Sandy and stood him up, or tried to stand him up alone. He looked like a flagstaff with the banner falling loosely around it in an indolent wind. He held him up by the queue awhile, but he wilted and sank down gently at his feet, all the time smiling sweetly as before, all the time looking up with a half-closed eye and half-parted lips, as though he was enjoying himself perfectly, and would like to laugh, only that he had too much respect for the present company.

"If I could only shake the lies out of him, mum, as easily as I did this 'ere spoon, and this 'ere candlestick, and this 'ere, this 'ere"--Sandy had stooped and picked up the articles as he spoke, and now was handing them to the Widow in triumph.

"Poor little, helpless, pitiful fellow!"

The Widow was looking straight at the celestial, who sat there piled up in a little bit of a heap, the limpest thing in all the Forks perhaps, save Limber Tim.

"Let him go, please; let him go. Bring the things and come in. You can go now, John; but don't do so any more. It is not right."

The Widow smiled in pity as she said this to Washee-Washee. The Chinaman understood the first proposition perfectly, but not the last at all. To him all this was simply a bad investment. To him it was only a little shipwreck; and having been taught by the philosophers of his country to prepare for adversity in the hour of prosperity, he was not at all lacking in resignation now. He rose up, smiled that patient and peaceful smile of his, and wended his way to his home.

Sandy looked a moment at the retreating hungry-looking little Chinaman, and then thrust his two great hands into his two great pockets, and tilting his head, first on the left shoulder and then on the right, tried hard to look the Widow in the face, but found himself contemplating the toes of his great gum boots.

"Will you not come in?"

The man rolled forward. He sat down in the Widow's cabin in a perfect glow of excitement and delight.

I am bound to admit that, upright and great as Sandy was, he kept thinking to himself, "What will the Judge and the boys say of this?" He even was glad in his heart that Limber Tim stood with his back glued up against the palings on the outside, and his hands reached back and wound in and around the rails, so that he could testify to the boys, tell it, in fact, to the world, that he had entered in, and sat down in the Widow's cabin.

It was not easy work for Sandy sitting there. He soon began to suffer.

He hitched about and twisted around on the broad wooden stool as if he had sat down on a very hot stove.

The Widow sat a little way back across the cabin, a bit of work in her lap, looking up at Sandy now, and now dropping her half-sad blue eyes down to her work, and all the time, in a low sweet way, doing every word of the talking.

Sandy's hot stove kept getting hotter and hotter. He began to wish he was down with the boys at the Howling Wilderness, consulting the oracle of c.o.c.ktails. All at once he seemed to discover his great long legs.

They seemed to him as if they reached almost clean across the cabin, like two great anacondas going to swallow up the Widow. He fished them up, curved them, threw his two great hands across them, nursed them affectionately, but they seemed more in the way and uglier than ever before. Then he thrust them out again, but jerked them back instantly, and drove them back under his bench as if they had been two big and unruly bull-dogs, and he nearly upset himself in doing it. They had fairly frightened him, they were surely never half so long before. It seemed to him as if they would reach across the room, through the wall, and even down to the Howling Wilderness. He twisted them up under the bench and got them fast there, and was glad of it, for now they would not and could not run out and rush across the room at the Widow.

But now poor Sandy saw another skeleton. His eyes came upon them suddenly, in a sort of discovery. It seemed as if he had just found them out for the first time, and knew them for mortal enemies, and determined to do away with them at once, and at any sacrifice.

Such hands! had the Widow really been looking at them all this time? the back of that hand was big and rough as the bark of a tree. That finger nail had a white rim of dough around it; that thumb nail was as big and about as dirty as a crevicing spoon! He picked up that hand, thrust it under him, sat firmly over on that side, and held it down and out of sight with all his might. The other one lay there, still in the way. It was uglier than the one he had just slain and hidden away in the bush.

There was dirt enough about the nails to make a small mining claim. He rolled the hand over and over on his lap, as if it had been somebody's baby; and a baby with the colic. At last, in a state of desperation, he rolled it off and let it fall and take care of itself. It hung down at his side like a great big felon from the scaffold.

It twisted and swung around there as if it had just been hung up by the neck in the expiation of some awful crime. It felt to Sandy as if it weighed a ton. He tried to lift it up again, to take care of it, to nurse it, to turn it over on its stomach, to stroke it, and talk to it, and pity it, and soothe away its colic, but lo! he could not lift it. He began to perspire, he was so very warm. It was the warmest time that Sandy had ever seen. All this time Sandy had sat close by the door, and not one word had he uttered.

The Widow rose up, laid her work on the table, all the time smiling sweetly, half sadly, and going up to the fire-place, took from the box in the corner, pine knot after pine knot, and laid them on the blazing fire.

"Come, the evening is chilly, will you not sit closer to the fire?"

Sandy sat still as the statue of Moses in the Vatican, but that abominable felon hanging by the neck at his side kept twisting around and around and around as if he never would die or be still. The Widow sat down with her work as before, and this time she began to talk about the weather, trusting that on this subject at least, her great good friend could open his lips and speak.

"How very cold it is this evening. The chill of the snow is in the air; it blows down from the banks of snow on the mountain, and I fancy it may be cold here in this rickety cabin the Summer through."

Still the ugly convict, that now began to grow black in the face, swung and twisted at his side; but he did not speak.

"Do you not feel cold?"

"Yes 'um."

The two words came out like the bark of a bull-dog; as if one of the brutes he had drawn back under his bench had stuck out his nose and yelped in the face of the Widow, and Sandy was frightened nearly to death. The perspiration dropped from his brow to his hand, and he knew that things could not last in this way much longer. The bull-dogs would be out, and he knew it. The dead man that he was sitting down upon would rise up to judgment, and the felon at his side was only swinging and turning and twisting more than before.

Sandy shut his eyes and attempted to rise. His gum boots screeched, the bench creaked as he began to undouble himself. It turned up and hung on behind him as if it had been a lobster. He shook it off, and began to tower up like a pine. He feared he would pierce through the roof, and began to look out through the half-open door, and to stretch out the prostrate hand. Then he stood still and was more bewildered than before.

The Widow was looking straight at him, and expecting him to speak. He wished he had not got up at all. If he was only back on that overthrown bench, with the dead man beneath him, and the bull-dogs below, and the felon swinging loosely at his side, how happy he would be. He tried to speak, tried like a man, but if it had been to save his life, to save her life, the world, he could not find will to shape one word. He backed and blundered and stumbled across the threshold and drew a breath, such a breath! the first he had drawn for half an hour, as he stood outside, with the Widow's little feet following to the threshold, and her pretty miniature face looking up to his as if looking up to the top of a pine.

"You will come again, will you not? you have been so very kind; please to call, step in as you pa.s.s, and rest. It is so lonesome here, you know! n.o.body that anybody knows. And then you are such good company."

And then the pretty little Widow with the sad sweet face, laughed the prettiest little laugh that ever was laughed this side that other Eden with its one fair woman.

Limber Tim closed his mouth and unscrewed himself from the palings on the fence without as Sandy appeared, and the two took their way to their cabin.

"And you are such good company." That was all Sandy could remember. What could he have said? He tried and tried to recall his observations, whatever they may have been, on the various topics of the day, but in vain. He could only remember the circ.u.mstance of driving two ugly bull-dogs back under his bench, of slaying and hiding away his mortal enemy, and then hanging a felon for high treason; and then chiefest of all, "You will come again, it is lonesome here; you are such good company."

"You are such good company." The wind sang it through the trees as he wended his way home. The water, away down in the canon below the trail, sang it soft and low and sweet, sang it ever, and nothing more, and the tea-kettle that night simmered and sang, and sang this one sweet song for Sandy.

He took the first opportunity after supper to slip out and away from Limber Tim; and there in the dark, with his face to the great black forest, he stood saying over and over to himself, in his great coa.r.s.e voice, trying to catch the soft tones of the Widow, "You are such good company."

That evening Limber Tim leaned up against the logs of the Howling Wilderness, and told all that had happened, and how Sandy had seen the Widow, how he had sat in her cabin, how he had talked, and how she had smiled, and what a very hero his "pardner" had become. He told of Washee-Washee.

The story of Washee-Washee went through the Forks, and then the next morning the Forks rose up and "went through" Washee-Washee.

Perhaps it was what the Widow had said about the "poor little, helpless, harmless man," that saved him, but certain it was, for some unknown reason, the miners dealt gently with this strange little stranger. Had this been one or even a dozen, of their own kind, some tree in the neighborhood of the Forks would have borne in less than an hour one, or even a dozen, of strange and ugly fruit. They went to Washee-Washee's cabin. He smiled as he saw them approach, half shut his eyes as they entered, laid his head a little to one side as they tore up his bunk, and looked perfectly happy, and peaceful as a lamb, as they pulled out from under it enough old clothes to open a shop in Petticoat Lane, or even in Bow Street.

They found a rifle-blanket in one of his wooden shoes, and it was heavy with gold-dust. Poor Washee-Washee, when called upon to explain, said timidly that he had found it floating up the river past his cabin, and took it in to dry it. He seemed hurt when they refused to believe him.

They found a hose coiled up in his great bamboo hat. One of the men took hold of his queue, his beautiful long black queue that swept the ground with its braided folds and black silk ta.s.sels tipped with red and gold, and found it heavy with nuggets, hidden away, for what purpose goodness only knows. It was heavy enough to sink it like a shot were it a fish line--and all this gold was his!