CHAPTER XII
DRIFT AND CROSSCUT
“A living dog is better than a dead lion.”
—ECCLESIASTES.
On the evening of the day when Jake Shackleton went to his account Essex had walked slowly to Bertrand’s rôtisserie, his head drooped, the evening paper in his hand.
Two hours before the cries of the newsboys announcing the sudden demise of his chief had struck on his ear, for the first moment freezing him into motionless amazement. Standing under a lamp, he had read the short report, then hurried down to the office of The Trumpet. There in the turmoil and hubbub which marks the first portentous movement of the great daily making ready to go to press, he had heard fuller details. The office was in an uproar, shaken to its foundation by the startling news, every man and woman ready with a speculation or a rumor as to the ultimate fate of The Trumpet, on which their own little fates hung.
At his table in the far corner of Bertrand’s he mused over the various reports he had heard. The death of Shackleton would undoubtedly throw the present makeup of The Trumpet out of gear. Its sale would be inevitable. From what he had heard of him, Win Shackleton would be quite incapable of taking his father’s place as proprietor and manager of the paper that Jake Shackleton, the man of brain and initiative, was transforming into a powerful organ of public opinion. And in the general weeding out of men which would unquestionably occur, why should not Barry Essex mount to a top place?
The Trumpet had always paid its capable men large salaries. It was worth while considering. Essex had now decided to remain in San Francisco, at least throughout the winter. The climate pleased him; the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the remote, picturesque city continued to exert its charm. The very duck he was now eating, far beyond his purse in any other American city, was an inducement to remain. But the real one was the woman, all the more desperately desired because denied him. Her indignation had not repelled him, but he saw it would mean a long wooing.
Once in his own room, he kindled the fire and drew toward him a pile of reference books he had to consult for an article on the great actresses of the French stage from Clairon to Rachel. These light and brilliant essays had been an experiment of Shackleton’s, who maintained that the Sunday edition should furnish food for all types of minds. Essex had produced exactly the class of matter wanted, and received for it the generous pay that the proprietor of The Trumpet was always ready to give for good work.
The reader was fluttering the leaves of the first book of the pile when a knock at the door stopped him. He knew it was his neighbor across the hall, who had been in bed for over a week, sick with bronchitis. Essex had seen the man several times during his seclusion and had conceived a carelessly cynical interest in him.
When sober, he had developed remarkable anecdotal capacity, which had immensely amused his new acquaintance. Tales of ’49 and the early Comstock days, scandals of those now in high places, discreditable accounts of the making of fortunes, flowed from his lips in a high-colored and diverting stream. If they were lies they were exceedingly ingenious ones. Essex saw material for a dozen novels in the man’s revealing and lurid recitals. Of his own personal history he was reticent, merely saying that his name was George Harney, and his trade that of job-printer. Drink had almost destroyed him. Physically he was a mere bunch of nerves covered by flabby, sallow flesh.
In answer to Essex’s “come in,” the door opened and Harney shambled into the room. He was fully dressed, but showed the evidences of illness in his hollowed cheeks and eyes, and the yellow skin hanging flaccid round jaw and throat. His hand shook and his gait was uncertain, but he was perfectly sober.
“I came to have a squint at the paper, Doc,” he said in a hoarse voice. “I can’t go out with this blasted wheezing on me. Don’t want to die in my prime.”
Essex threw the paper across the table at him.
“There’s news to-night,” he said, taking up his book; “Shackleton’s dead.”
The man stopped as if electrified.
“Shackleton? Jake Shackleton?” he said in a loud voice.
“Jake Shackleton,” answered Essex, surprised at the startled astonishment of his face. “Did you know him?”
Harney snatched the paper and opened it with an unsteady hand. He ran his eyes over the lines under the black-lettered heading of the first page.
“By gosh!” he said to himself, “so he is; so he is!”
He sat down in the chair at the opposite side of the table, smoothed out the sheet and read the account slowly and carefully.
“By gosh!” he said again when he had finished, “who’d a thought Jake’d go off like that!”
“Did you know him?” repeated Essex.
“Once up in the Sierra, when we was all mining up there.”
He spoke absently and sat looking into the fire for a moment, then said:
“It’s pretty tough luck to be whisked off that way when you just got everything in the palm of your hand.”
Essex made no reply, and after a pause he added:
“Between fifteen and twenty millions it says there,” indicating the paper, “and when I saw Jake Shackleton first you wouldn’t er hired him to sweep down the steps of The Trumpet office. But that was twenty-five years ago at least.”
“Oh, Shackleton was an able man. There’s no question about that. They were saying in the office to-night that twenty million is a conservative figure to put his money at.”
“Who does it go to? Do you know that?” queried the man by the fire.
“Widow and children, I suppose. There are two children. Don’t amount to anything, I believe.”
“No; there are three.”
Harney turned from the fire and looked over his shoulder. He was sitting in a hunched position, his back rounded, his chin depressed. His black eyes, that drew close to the nose, were instinct with eager cunning. The skin across the bridge of the nose was drawn in wrinkles. As he looked the wheezing of his disturbed breathing was distinctly audible. Essex was struck by the sly and malevolent intelligence of his face.
“Three children!” he said. “Well, I’ve always heard the death of a bonanza king was the signal for a large crop of widows and orphans to take the field.”
“There won’t be any widow this time. She’s dead. But the girl’s alive, and I’ve seen her.”
He accompanied this remark with a second look, significant with the same malicious intensity of meaning. Then he rose to his feet and walked toward the door.
“Good night, Doc,” he said as he reached it; “ain’t well enough to talk to-night.”
Essex gave him a return good night and the door closed on him. The younger man cogitated over his books for a space. It did not strike him as interesting or remarkable that Shackleton should have had an unacknowledged child, of whose existence George Harney, the drunken job-printer, knew. He was becoming accustomed to the extraordinary intermingling of classes and conditions that marked the pioneer period of California life. But should the unacknowledged child attempt to establish its claim to part of the great estate left by the bonanza king, what a complication that might lead to! These Californians were certainly a picturesque people, with their dramatic ups and downs of fortune, their disdain of accepted standards, their indifference to tradition, and their magnificently disreputable pasts.
As one of the special writers of The Trumpet, Essex attended the funeral of his chief. He and Mrs. Willers and Edna, in company with the young woman who did the “Fashions and Foibles” column, were in one of the carriages that Mariposa had seen from the hilltop. Mrs. Willers was silent on the long, slow drive. She had honored her chief, who had been just to her. Miss Peebles, the “Fashions and Foibles” young woman, was so engrossed by her fears that a change of ownership in The Trumpet would rob her of her employment that she could talk of nothing else. To Edna, the sensation of being in a carriage was so novel it occupied her to the exclusion of all other matters, and she looked out of the window with a face of sparkling interest.
That evening, after the funeral, Essex was preparing to work late. He had “gutted” the pile of books, and with their contents well assimilated was ready to write his three columns. There was no car line on the street, and traffic at that hour on that quiet thoroughfare was over for the day. For an hour he wrote easily and fluently. The sheets, glistening with damp ink, were pushed in front of him in a careless pile. Now and then he paused to consult his books, which were arranged round him on the table, open at the places he needed for reference. The smoke wreaths were thick round his head and the room was hot. It was nearly ten o’clock when he heard the noisy entrance of his fellow lodger. Harney was evidently sufficiently well to go to work again and to come home drunk. Essex listened with suspended pen and a half-smile on his dark face, which turned to a frown as he realized that the stumbling feet had turned his way. The knock on the door came next, and simultaneously it opened and Harney’s head was thrust in.
“What the devil do you want?” said the scribe, sitting erect, his pipe in his hand, the other waving the smoke strata that hung before his face.
“Let me come and get warm a minute. I’m wheezing again, and my room’s cold as a tomb. Don’t mind me—all I want is to set before the fire for a spell.”
He sidled in before the permission was granted and sank down in the armchair, hitching it nearer to the grate. He was a man to whom intoxication lent a curiously amiable and humorous quality. The ugliness and evil that were so evidently part of his nature were not so apparent, and he became cheerful, almost genial.
Sitting close to the fire, he held out his hands to the blaze, then, stealing a look at Essex over his shoulder, saw that he was refilling his pipe.
“Be’n to the funeral?” he said.
Essex grunted an assent.
“The family there?”
“None of the ladies; only Win Shackleton.”
Harney was silent; then, with the greatest care, he took up a piece of coal and set it on the fire. The action required all the ingenuity of which he was master. His body responded to his intoxication, while, save for an unusual fluency of speech, his mind appeared to remain unaffected. After he had set the coal in place he looked again at Essex, who was staring vacantly at him, thinking of the second part of his article.
“Did you notice a tall, fine-looking young lady there with dark red hair?” said Harney, without removing his glassy gaze from the man at the table.
Essex did not move his eyes, but their absent fixity suddenly seemed to snap into a change of focus betokening attention. Gazing at Harney, he answered coldly:
“No; I saw no one like that. To whom are you referring?”
“Oh, I dunno, I dunno,” responded the other with a clumsy shrug of his shoulders, and turning back to the fire over which he cowered.
“But you know her anyhow,” he added, half to himself.
“Whom do I know? Turn around.”
The man turned, looking a little defiant.
“Now, what are you trying to say?”
“I ain’t tryin’ to say nuthin’. All I done is to ask yer if yer saw a lady—tall, with red hair—at the funeral. You know her, ’cause I’ve seen you with her.”
“Who is she?”
“Well,” slowly and uneasily, “she’s called Moreau.”
“You mean Miss Mariposa Moreau, the daughter of a mining man, who died last spring in Santa Barbara?”
“Yes; that’s her all right. She’s called Moreau, but it ain’t her name.”
“Moreau isn’t her name? What is her name, then?”
“I dunno,” he spoke stubbornly and turned back to the fire.
“Turn back here,” said Essex in a suddenly authoritative tone; “explain to me what you mean by that.”
“I don’t mean nuthin’,” said the other, looking sullenly defiant, “and I don’t know nuthin’ only that that ain’t her true name.”
“What is her name? Answer me at once, and no fooling.”
“I dunno.”
Essex rose. Harney, looking frightened, staggered to his feet, clutching the mantelpiece. He half-raised his arm as if expecting to be struck and said loudly:
“If you want to know ask Shackleton’s widow. She knows.”
Essex stood a few paces from him, suddenly stilled by the phrase. The drunkard, alarmed and yet defiant, could only dimly understand what the expression on the face of the man before him meant.
“Sit down,” said Essex quietly; “I’m not going to touch you. I’m going to get some whisky. That’ll tone you up a bit. The bronchitis has taken it out of you more than you think.”
He went to a cupboard and brought out a bottle and glasses. Pouring some whisky into one, he pushed it toward Harney.
“There, that’ll brace you up. You’ll feel more yourself in a minute.”
He diluted his own with water and only touched the glass’s rim to his lips. His eyes, glistening and intent, were on the drunkard’s now darkly flushing face. The glass rattled against the table as Harney set it down.
“That puts mettle into me again. Makes me feel like the old times before the malaria got into my bones. Malaria was my ruin. Got it in the Sierra mining. People think it’s drink that done it, but it’s malaria.”
“That was when you knew Moreau? What sort of man was he?”
“Poor sort; not any grit. Had a good claim up there beyond Placerville, he and I. Took out’s much as eight thousand in that first summer. Moreau stayed by it, but I quit. Both had our reasons.”
“And Miss Moreau, you say, is not Dan Moreau’s daughter. Is she a step-daughter?”
“Well—in a sort of a way you might say so. Anyway, she ain’t got no legal right to that name.”
“I didn’t know the mother was a widow when she married Moreau?”
“She weren’t. She married twict, and she weren’t divorced. There ain’t but two people in the world that knows it. One’s Jake Shackleton’s widow,”—he rose, and, putting an unsteady hand on the table, leaned forward and almost whispered into his interlocutor’s face,—“and the other’s me.”
“Are you trying to tell me,” said Essex quietly, “that Miss Moreau is Jake Shackleton’s daughter?”
“That’s what she is.” The man turned round like a character on the stage and swept the room with an investigating look—“And she’s more’n that. She’s his lawful daughter, born in wedlock.”
The two faces stared at each other. The drunken man was not too far beyond himself to realize the importance of what he was saying. In a second’s retrospect Essex’s mind flew back over the hitherto puzzling interest Shackleton had taken in Mariposa Moreau. Could it be possible the man before him was telling the truth?
“How does she come to be known as Moreau’s daughter? Why didn’t Shackleton acknowledge her if she was his legitimate child? That’s a fairy tale.”
“There was complications. Have you ever heard that Shackleton was once a Mormon?”
Essex had heard the gossip which had persistently followed Shackleton’s ascending course. He nodded his head, gazing at Harney, a presentiment of coming revelations holding him silent.
“Well, that’s true. He was. I seen him when he was. Jake Shackleton crossed the Sierra with two wives. One—the first one—was the lady who died here a month ago, and passed as Mrs. Moreau. The other’s the widow. But she was the second wife. She didn’t have no children then. But the first wife had one, a girl baby, born on the plains in Utah. It weren’t three weeks old when I seen it.”
“Where did you see it?”
“In the Sierra back of Hangtown. Me and Dan Moreau was workin’ a stream bed there. And one day two emigrants, a man and a woman, with a sick woman inside the wagon, came down from the summit. They was Jake Shackleton and his two wives, and they was the worst looking outfit you’ve ever clapped your eyes on. They was pretty near dead. One er their horses did die, in front of our cabin, and the sick woman—she that afterwards was called Mrs. Moreau—was too beat out to move on. Shackleton, who didn’t care who died, so long’s they got into the settlements, calkalated to make her ride a spell, and when the other horse dropped make her walk. She was the orneriest lookin’ scarecrow you ever seen, and she hadn’t no more life’n a mummy. But she was ready to do just what they said. She was just so beat out. And then Moreau—he was just that kind of a fool—”
He paused and looked at Essex, with his beady, dark eyes glistening with a sense of the importance of his communication. His hand sought the glass and he drained it. Then he leaned forward to deliver the climax of his story:—
“Bought her from Shackleton for a pair of horses.”
“Bought her for a pair of horses! How could he?”
“I’m not sayin’ how he could; I’m sayin’ what he did.”
“What did he do it for?”
“The Lord knows. He was that kind of a fool. We had her in the cabin sick for days, with me and him waitin’ on her hand and foot, and the cussed baby yellin’ like a coyote. She wasn’t good for anything. Just ust ter lie round sick and peaked and sorter pine. But Moreau got a crazy liking for her, and he was sot on the baby same’s if it was his own. I caught on pretty soon to the way the cat was goin’ to jump. I lit out and left ’em.”
“Why did you leave if the claim was good?”
“It weren’t no good when no one worked it, and there weren’t more’n enough in it for Moreau alone, with a woman and a baby on his hands. He said first off he was only goin’ to get her cured up and send her to the Eldorado Hotel to be a waitress, but I seen fast enough what was goin’ to happen. And it did happen. They was snowed in up there all winter. In the spring he took her into Hangtown and married her—said he was marryin’ a widow woman whose husband died on the plains. I heard that afterwards from some er the boys, but it weren’t my business to give ’em away. So I shut my mouth and ain’t opened it till now. But Moreau’s dead, and the woman’s dead, and now Shackleton’s dead. There ain’t no one what knows but me and Shackleton’s widow.”
“And what makes you think this is the same child? The baby you saw may have died and this may be a child born a year or two later.”
“It ain’t. It’s the same. There weren’t never any other children. I kep’ my eye on ’em. Moreau was mining round among the camps and afterward was in Sacramento for a spell, and I was round in them places off and on myself. I saw him, but I dodged him ’cause I knew he didn’t want to run up against me, knowin’ as how I was onter what he’d done. He was safe for me. But I seen the girl often; seen her grow up. And I knew her in a minute the day I saw you walkin’ with her on Sutter Street, and I thinks to myself, ‘You’re with the biggest heiress in San Francisco if you and she only knew it.’ And that’s what she is, if there was somethin’ else but my word to prove it.”
Essex sat pushed back from the table, his hands in his pockets, his pipe nipped between his teeth, his face partly obscured by the floating clouds of smoke that hung about his head.
“A first-rate story,” he said slowly; “have some more whisky.”
And he pushed the bottle toward Harney, who seized it and fumblingly poured the fiery liquor into the glass.
“And it’s true,” he said hoarsely—“every blamed word.”
He drank what he had poured out, set down the glass and stared at Essex with his face puckered into its expression of evil cunning.
“And she don’t know anything about it, does she?” he asked.
“If you mean Miss Moreau, she certainly appears to think she is the child of the man who brought her up.”
“That’s what I heard. But Shackleton, when Moreau died, was goin’ to do the square thing by her. At least, I heard talk of his sendin’ her to Europe to be a singer. Ain’t it so?”
“I heard something about it myself. But I’m no authority.”
There was a pause. Harney settled back in his chair. The room was exceedingly hot, and impregnated with the odor of whisky and the smoke from Essex’s pipe.
“He couldn’t acknowledge her. It would er given the other children too big a black eye. But it seemed like he wanted to square things up when he was taken off suddent like that.”
He paused. The other, smoking, with frowning brows and wide eyes, made no response, his own thoughts holding him in tense immobility.
“And the other wife wouldn’t er stood it, anyway. She’s a pretty competent woman, I guess. Oh, he couldn’t have acknowledged her, nohow. But she’s his legitimate daughter, all right. She’s the lawful heir to—most er them—millions. She’s—”
His voice broke and trailed off into silence, which was suddenly interrupted by a guttural snort and then heavy, regular breathing. Essex rose, and, going to the window, opened it. A keen-edged breeze of air entered, seeming all the fresher from the dense atmosphere of the room. Its hurried entrance sent the smoke wreaths scurrying about in fantastic whorls and curls. The dying fire threw out a frightened flame.
Essex moved toward it, saying as he approached:
“Yes; it’s a good story. You ought to be a novelist, Harney.”
There was no answer, and, looking into the chair, he saw that Harney had fallen into a sodden sleep, curled against the chair-back, his chin sunk on his breast, the hollows in his face looking black in the hard light of the gas. The younger man gazed at him for a moment with an expression of slight, cold disgust, then turned back to the table and sat down.
He wrote no more, but sat motionless, his eyes fixed on vacancy, the thick, curling smoke oozing from the bowl of his pipe and issuing from between his lips. His thoughts reviewed every part of the story he had heard. He felt certain of its truth. The drunken job-printer had never imagined it.
It explained many things that before had puzzled him. Why the Moreaus, even in the days of their affluence, had lived in such uneventful quietude, bringing up their beautiful and talented daughter in a jealous and unusual seclusion. It explained Shackleton’s interest in the girl. He even saw now, recalling the two faces, the likeness that the father himself had seen in Mariposa’s firmly-modeled jaw and chin, which did not belong to the soft, feminine prettiness of Lucy.
It must be true.
And, being true, what possibilities might it not develop? Mrs. Shackleton knew it, too—that this penniless girl was the bonanza king’s eldest and only legitimate child, with power, if not entirely to dispossess her own children, at least to claim the lion’s share of the vast fortune. If Mariposa had proof of her mother’s marriage to Shackleton and of her own identity as the child of that marriage, she could rise and claim her heritage—her part of the twenty millions!
The thought, and what it opened before him, dizzied him. He drank some of the diluted whisky in the glass beside him and sat on motionless. It was evident Mariposa did not know. She had been brought up in ignorance of the whole extraordinary story. The man and woman she had been taught to regard as her parents had committed an offense against the law, which they had hidden from her, secure in the thought that the other participants in the strange proceeding would never dare to confess.
The minutes and hours ticked by and Essex still sat thinking, while the drunkard breathed stertorously in his heavy sleep, and the coals dropped softly in the grate as the fire sank into clinkers and ashes.