The Comstock Club Part 8

"The others were just sufficiently sprung with liquor to take offense at this, and the result was a terrific street fight. Joe was badly bruised but he whipped all three of the others. Then he was arrested and ordered to appear next morning to answer a charge of fighting. He was of course cleared without difficulty, but it took one-fourth of his deposit to pay his lawyer. Then the miners gathered around him and called him a hero and he went on his first spree.

"Next morning when he awoke and thought of as much as he could remember of the previous day's events, he was thoroughly ashamed. As he went down to the office of the hotel, in response to an inquiry as to how he felt, he answered: 'Full of repentance and beer.' A friend showed him the morning paper with a full account of the Sunday fight and his trial and acquittal. This was embellished with taking head-lines, as is the custom with reporters. It cut him to the heart. He knew that if the news reached his old home of his being in a street fight on Sunday, all his hopes would be ended. His first thought was to draw his money and take the first steamer for Panama and New York. He went to the bank and asked how his account stood, for he remembered to have drawn something the previous day. He was answered that there was still to his credit $150.

The steamer fare was $275. Utterly crushed, he returned to his claim.

The fear that the news of his disgrace would reach home, haunted him perpetually and made him afraid to write. He continued to work, but not with the old hope.

"After some weeks, a rumor came that rich ground had been 'struck' away to the north, somewhere in Siskiyou county. He drew what money he had, bought a couple of ponies, one to ride and one to pack, and started for the new field. Before starting, he confided to a friend that the previous night he had dreamed of a mountain, the crest of which glittered all over with gold, and he was going to find it.

"The friend told him it was but a painted devil of the brain, the child of a distempered imagination, but he merely shook his head and went away.

"He has pursued that dream ever since. His eyes have been ever strained to catch the reflection from those shining heights. When he began the search, his early home and the loving arms which were there stretched out to him, began to recede in the distance. In a few years they disappeared altogether. Then his hopes one by one deserted him, until all had fled except the one false one which was, and still is, driving him on. Youth died and was buried by the trail, but so absorbed was he that he hardly grieved. As Time served notice after notice upon him; as his hair blanched, his form bent and the old sprightliness went out of his limbs, he retired more and more from the haunts of men; more and more he drew the mantle of the mountains around him. But his eyes, now bright with an unnatural splendor, were still strained upon the shining height. There were but a few intervening hills and some forests that obstructed his view. A little further on and the goal would be reached.

Last night he was in his cups and he told my friend that this time he would 'strike it sure,' that the old man would make his showing yet, that he would yet go back to the old home and be a Providence to those he loved when a boy.

"Poor wretch. There is an open grave stretched directly across his trail. On this journey or some other soon, he will, while his eyes are still straining towards his heights of gold, drop into that grave and disappear forever.

"Some morning as he awakens, amid the hills or out upon the desert, there will be such a weariness upon him that he will say, 'I will sleep a little longer,' and from that sleep he will never waken.

"Heaven grant that his vision will then become a reality and that he may mount the shining heights at last.

"Of course it is easy to say that he was originally weak, but that is no argument, for human nature is p.r.o.ne to be weak. His was a high-strung, sensitive, generous nature. He never sought gold for the joy it would give him, but for the happiness he dreamed it would give to those he loved. His Nora was a queen in his eyes and he wanted to give her, every day, the surroundings of a queen. He made one mistake and never rallied from it. Had the letter come that fatal Sunday from Nora, as he was expecting it, or had he left for home half an hour earlier, or had he been of coa.r.s.er clay, that day's performance would have been avoided, or would have been pa.s.sed as an incident not to be repeated, but not to be seriously minded. But he was of different mold, and then that was a blow from Fate. It is easy enough to say that there is nothing in that thing called luck. Such talk will not do here on the Comstock. There is no luck when a money lender charges five dollars for the use of a hundred for a month and exacts good security. He gets his one hundred and five dollars, and that is business.

"But in this lead where ore bodies lie like melons on a vine, when ore is reported in the Belcher and in the Savage, when Brown buys stock in the Belcher and Rogers buys in the Savage; when the streak of ore in the Belcher runs into a bonanza and Brown wakes up rich some morning, and when the streak of ore in the Savage runs into a Niagara of hot water which floods the mine and Rogers's stock is sold out to meet an a.s.sessment, it will not do to call Brown a shrewd fellow and Rogers an idiot.

"Still, I do not object to the theory that a man should always keep trying, even if the lack is against him, because luck may change sometime, and if it does not, he sleeps better when he knows that with the lights before him he has done the best he could. A man can stand almost anything when his soul does not reproach him as he tries to go to sleep.

"Then, too, man is notoriously a lazy animal, and unless he has the nerve to spur himself to work, even when unfortunate, he is liable to fail and get the dry rot, which is worse than death.

"But my heart goes out in sympathy when I think of the glorified spirits, which on this coast have failed and are failing every day, because from the first an iron fortune has hedged them round and baffled their every effort, struggle as they would."

Carlin ceased speaking, and the silence which prevailed in the Club for a moment was broken by Miller, who said: "Don't worry about them, Carlin. If they do fail they have lots of fun in trying."

"I would grave more for your mon Joe," interposed Corrigan, "did I not remember Mrs. Dougherty, who married the gintleman of properthy, and thin your Joe war a fraud onyway. What war there in a bit of a sc.r.a.p to make a mon grave himself into craziness over it?"

"Your stock-buying ill.u.s.tration is not fair, Carlin, for that is only a form of gambling at best," suggested Brewster.

The club winced under this a little, for every member dabbled in stocks sometimes, except Brewster and Harding.

For two evenings Harding had been scribbling away behind the table, and during a lull in the conversation Ashley asked him what he had been writing. "Letters?" suggested Ashley.

"No, not letters," answered Harding, sententiously.

"What is it, then," asked Miller; "won't you read it to us?"

"Yes, rade it, rade it," said Corrigan, and the rest all joined in the request.

"You won't laugh?" said Harding, inquiringly.

They all promised, and Harding read as follows:

THE PROSPECTOR.

How strangely to-night my memory flings From the face of the past its shadowy wings, And I see far back through the mist and tears Which make the record of twenty years; From the beautiful days in the Golden State, When life seemed sure by long leases from Fate; From the wondrous visions of "long ago"

To the naked shade that we call "now."

Those halcyon days! There were four with me then-- Ernest and Ned, Wild Tom and Ben.

Now all are gone; Tom was first to die.

I held his hands, closed his glazed eye; And many a tear o'er his grave we shed As we tenderly pillowed his curly head In the shadows deep of the pines, that stand Forever solemn, forever fanned By the winds that steal through the Golden Gate And spread their balm o'er the Golden State.

And the others, too, they all are dead.

By the turbid Gila perished Ned; Brave, n.o.ble Ernest, he was lost Amid Montana's ice and frost; And out upon a desert trail Our Bennie met the spectre pale.

And I am left--the last of all-- And as to-night the white snows fall, As barbarous winds around me roar, I think the long past o'er and o'er-- What I have hoped and suffered, all, From twenty years rolls back the pall, From the dusty, th.o.r.n.y, weary track, As the tortuous path I follow back.

In my childhood's home they think me, there, A failure, or lost, till my name in the prayer At eve is forgot. Well, they cannot know That my toil through heat, through tempest and snow, While it seemed for naught but a struggle for pelf, Was more for them, far more, than myself.

Ah, well! As my hair turns slowly to snow The places of childhood more distantly grow; And my dreams are changing. 'Tis home no more, For shadowy hands from the other sh.o.r.e Stretch nightly down, and it seems as when I lived with Tom, Ned, Ernest and Ben.

And the mountains of Earth seem dwindling down, And the hills of Eden, with golden crown, Rise up, and I think, in the last great day, Will my claim above bear a fire a.s.say?

From the slag of earth, and the baser strains, Will the crucible show of precious grains Enough to give me a standing above, Where in temples of Peace rock the cradles of Love?

"That is good, but it is too serious by half," Miller said, critically.

"What is a young fellow like you doing with such a melancholy view of things?"

"It's a heap better to write such things for pleasure in boyhood than to have to feel them for a fact in old age," said Wright.

"I say, Harding, have you measured all the faet in that poem?" remarked Corrigan, good-naturedly.

"We have been talking too seriously for two or three evenings and it is influencing Harding," was Miller's comment.

Brewster thought it was a good way for Sammie to spend his evenings. It would give him discipline, which would help him in writing all his life.

CHAPTER VII.

The next evening Wright had business down town.

"Carlin was right last night," began Miller, "when he said that all men were naturally lazy. Laziness is a fixed principle in this world. I can prove it by my friend Wand down at Pioche.

"When he was not so old as he has been these last few years, he made a visit to San Francisco, and one day, pa.s.sing a building on Fourth street, saw within several hives of bees, evidently placed there to be sold. Some whim led him within the building and, from the man in charge, he learned that in California, because of the softer climate, bees worked quite nine months in the year; that a good swarm of bees would gather a certain number of pounds of honey in a season, which sold readily at a certain price, making a tremendous percentage on the cost of the bees, which was, if I remember correctly, one hundred dollars per hive. The idea seemed to strike Wand. He had fifteen hundred dollars, and all that day he was mentally estimating how much money could be made out of fifteen swarms of bees in a year. The figures looked exceedingly encouraging. They always do, you know, when your mind is fixed upon a certain business which you want to engage in.

"That evening Wand happened to meet a friend who had just come in from Honolulu. This friend was enthusiastic over the Hawaiian Islands. There was perpetual summer there and ever-blooming flowers. Before one flower cast its leaves, others on the same tree were budding. Their glory was ever before the eyes and their incense ever upon the air.

"Wand fell asleep that night trying to estimate how much money a swarm of bees would make a year in a land of perpetual summer. The conclusion was that next morning Wand bought twelve hives of bees, and that afternoon sailed with them for Honolulu.

"He found a lovely place for his bees, and saw with kindling pleasure that they readily a.s.similated with the new country and went to work with apparent enthusiasm.