HAPPY REST is a village whose name has never appeared in gazetteer or census report. This remark should not cause any depreciation of the faithfulness of public and private statisticians, for Happy Rest belonged to a class of settlements which sprang up about as suddenly as did Jonah’s Gourd, and, after a short existence, disappeared so quickly that the last inhabitant generally found himself alone before he knew that anything unusual was going on.
When the soil of Happy Rest supported nothing more artificial than a broken wagon wheel, left behind by some emigrants going overland to California, a deserter from a fort near by discovered that the soil was auriferous.
His statement to that effect, made in a barroom in the first town he reached thereafter, led to his being invited to drink, which operation resulted in certain supplementary statements and drinks.
Within three hours every man within five miles of that barroom knew that the most paying dirt on the continent had been discovered not far away, and three hours later a large body of gold-hunters, guided by the deserter, were en route for the auriferous locality; while a storekeeper and a liquor-dealer, with their respective stocks-in-trade, followed closely after.
The ground was found; it proved to be tolerably rich; tents went up, underground residences were burrowed, and the grateful miners ordered the barkeeper to give unlimited credit to the locality’s discoverer. The barkeeper obeyed the order, and the ex-warrior speedily met his death in a short but glorious contest with John Barleycorn.
There was no available lumber from which to construct a coffin, and the storekeeper had no large boxes; but as the liquor-seller had already emptied two barrels, these were taken, neatly joined in the centre, and made to contain the remains of the founder of the hamlet. The method of his death and origin of his coffin led a spirituous miner to suggest that he rested happily, and from this remark the name of the town was elaborated.
Of course, no ladies accompanied the expedition. Men who went West for gold did not take their families with them, as a rule, and the settlers of new mining towns were all of the masculine gender.
When a town had attained to the dignity of a hotel, members of the gentler sex occasionally appeared, but—with the exception of an occasional washerwoman—their influence was decidedly the reverse of that usually attributed to woman’s society.
For the privileges of their society, men fought with pistols and knives, and bought of them disgrace and sorrow for gold. But at first Happy Rest was unblessed and uncursed by the presence of any one who did not wear pantaloons.
On the fifth day of its existence, however, when the arrival of an express agent indicated that Capital had formally acknowledged the existence of Happy Rest, there was an unusual commotion in the never-quiet village.
An important rumor had spread among the tents and gopher-holes, and, one after another, the citizens visited the saloon, took the barkeeper mysteriously aside, and, with faces denoting the greatest concern, whispered earnestly to him. The barkeeper felt his importance as the sole custodian of all the village news, but he replied with affability to all questions:
“Well, yes; there hed a lady come; come by the same stage as the express agent. What kind?—Well, he really couldn’t say—some might think one way, an’ some another. He thought she was a real lady, though she wouldn’t ’low anything to be sent her from the bar, and she hedn’t brought no baggage. Thought so—knowed she was a lady—in fact, would bet drinks for the crowd on it. ’Cos why?—’Cos nobody heerd her cuss or seed her laugh. H’d bet three to two she was a lady—might bet two to one, ef he got his dander up on the subject. Then, on t’other hand, she’d axed for Major Axel, and the major, ez everybody know’d, was—well, he wasn’t ’xactly a saint. Besides, as the major hedn’t come to Happy Rest, nohow, it looked ez if he was dodgin’ her for somethin’. Where was she stopping?—up to Old Psalmsinger’s. Old Psalm hed turned himself out of house an’ home, and bought her a new tea-kettle to boot. If anybody know’d anybody that wanted to take three to two, send him along.”
A few men called to bet, and bets were exchanged all over the camp, but most of the excitement centred about the storekeeper’s.
Argonauts, pioneers, heroes, or whatever else the early gold-seekers were, they were likewise mortal men, so they competed vigorously for the few blacking-brushes, boxes of blacking, looking-glasses, pocket-combs and neckties which the store contained. They bought toilet-soap, and borrowed razors; and when they had improved their personal appearance to the fullest possible extent, they stood aimlessly about, like unemployed workmen in the market-place. Each one, however, took up a position which should rake the only entrance to old Psalmsinger’s tent.
Suddenly, two or three scores of men struck various attitudes, as if to be photographed, and exclaimed in unison:
“There she is!”
From the tent of old Psalmsinger there had emerged the only member of the gentler sex who had reached Happy Rest.
For only a moment she stood still and looked about her, as if uncertain which way to go; but before she had taken a step, old Psalmsinger raised his voice, and said:
“I thort it last night, when I only seed her in the moonlight, but I know it now—she’s a lady, an’ no mistake. Ef I was a bettin’ man, I’d bet all my dust on it, an’ my farm to hum besides!”
A number of men immediately announced that they would bet, in the speaker’s place, to any amount, and in almost any odds. For, though old Psalm, by reason of non-participation in any of the drinks, fights, or games with which the camp refreshed itself, was considered a mere nonentity, it was generally admitted that men of his style could tell a lady or a preacher at sight.
The gentle unknown finally started toward the largest group of men, seeing which, several smaller groups massed themselves on the larger with alacrity.
As she neared them, the men could see that she was plainly dressed, but that every article of attire was not only neat but tasteful, and that she had enough grace of form and carriage to display everything to advantage. A few steps nearer, and she displayed a set of sad but refined features, marred only by an irresolute, purposeless mouth.
Then an ex-reporter from New York turned suddenly to a graceless young scamp who had once been a regular ornament to Broadway, and exclaimed:
“Louise Mattray, isn’t it?”
“’Tis, by thunder!” replied the young man. “I knew I’d seen her somewhere. Wonder what she’s doing here?”
The reporter shrugged his shoulders.
“Some wild-goose speculation, I suppose. Smart and gritty—if I had her stick I shouldn’t be here—but she always slips up—can’t keep all her wires well in hand. Was an advertising agent when I left the East—picked up a good many ads, too, and made folks treat her respectfully, when they’d have kicked a man out of doors if he’d come on the same errand.”
“Say she’s been asking for Axel,” remarked the young man.
“That so!” queried the reporter, wrinkling his brow, and hurrying through his mental notebook. “Oh, yes—there was some talk about them at one time. Some said they were married—she said so, but she never took his name. She had a handsome son, that looked like her and the major, but she didn’t know how to manage him—went to the dogs, or worse, before he was eighteen.”
“Axell here?” asked the young man.
“No,” replied the reporter; “and ’twouldn’t do her any good if he was. The major’s stylish and good-looking, and plays a brilliant game, but he hasn’t any more heart than is absolutely necessary to his circulation. Besides, his——”
The reporter was interrupted by a heavy hand falling on his shoulder, and found, on turning, that the hand belonged to “The General.”
The general was not a military man, but his title had been conferred in recognition of the fact that he was a born leader. Wherever he went the general assumed the reins of government, and his administration had always been popular as well as judicious.
But at this particular moment the general seemed to feel unequal to what was evidently his duty, and he, like a skillful general, sought a properly qualified assistant, and the reporter seemed to him to be just the man he wanted.
“Spidertracks,” said the general, with an air in which authority and supplication were equally prominent, “you’ve told an awful sight of lies in your time. Don’t deny it, now—nobody that ever reads the papers will b’leeve you. Now’s yer chance to put yer gift of gab to a respectable use. The lady’s bothered, and wants to say somethin’ or ask somethin’, and she’ll understand your lingo better’n mine. Fire away now, lively!”
The ex-shorthand-writer seemed complimented by the general’s address, and stepping forward and raising the remains of what had once been a hat, said:
“Can I serve you in any way, madame?”
The lady glanced at him quickly and searchingly, and then, seeming assured of the reporter’s honesty, replied:
“I am looking for an old acquaintance of mine—one Major Axell.”
“He is not in camp, ma’am,” said Spidertracks. “He was at Rum Valley a few days ago, when our party was organized to come here.”
“I was there yesterday,” said the lady, looking greatly disappointed, “and was told he started for here a day or two before.”
“Some mistake, ma’am, I assure you,” replied Spidertracks. “I should have known of his arrival if he had come. I’m an old newspaper man, ma’am, and can’t get out of the habit of getting the news.”
The lady turned away, but seemed irresolute. The reporter followed her.
“If you will return to Rum Valley, ma’am, I’ll find the major for you, if he is hereabouts,” said he. “You will be more comfortable there, and I will be more likely than you to find him.”
The lady hesitated for a moment longer; then she drew from her pocket a diary, wrote a line or two on one of its leaves, tore it out and handed it to the reporter.
“I will accept your offer, and be very grateful for it, for I do not bear this mountain traveling very well. If you find him, give him this scrawl and tell him where I am—that will be sufficient.”
“Trust me to find him, ma’am,” replied Spidertracks. “And as the stage is just starting, and there won’t be another for a week, allow me to see you into it. Any baggage?”
“Only a small hand-bag in the tent,” said she.
They hurried off together, Spidertracks found the bag, and five minutes later was bowing and waving his old hat to the cloud of dust which the departing stage left behind it. But when even the dust itself had disappeared, he drew from his pocket the paper the fair passenger had given him.
“’Tain’t sealed,” said he, reasoning with himself, “so there can’t be any secrets in it. Let’s see—hello! ‘Ernest is somewhere in this country; I wish to see you about him—and about nothing else.’ Whew-w-w! What splendid material for a column, if there was only a live paper in this infernal country! Looking for that young scamp, eh? There is something to her, and I’ll help her if I can. Wonder if I’d recognize him if I saw him again? I ought to, if he looks as much like his parents as he used to do. ’Twould do my soul good to make the poor woman smile once; but it’s an outrageous shame there’s no good daily paper here to work the whole thing up in. With the chase, and fighting, and murder that may come of it, ’twould make the leading sensation for a week!”
The agonized reporter clasped his hands behind him and walked slowly back to where he had left the crowd. Most of the citizens had, on seeing the lady depart, taken a drink as a partial antidote to dejection, and strolled away to their respective claims, regardless of the occasional mud which threatened the polish on their boots; but two or three gentlemen of irascible tempers and judicial minds lingered, to decide whether Spidertracks had not, by the act of seeing the lady to the stage, made himself an accessory to her departure, and consequently a fit subject for challenge by every disappointed man in camp.
The reporter was in the midst of a very able and voluble defense, when the attention of his hearers seemed distracted by something on the trail by which the original settlers had entered the village.
Spidertracks himself looked, shaded his eyes, indulged in certain disconnected fragments of profanity, and finally exclaimed:
“Axell himself, by the white coat of Horace Greeley! Wonder who he’s got with him! They seem to be having a difficulty about something!”
The gentlemen who had arraigned Spidertracks allowed him to be acquitted by default. Far better to them was a fight near by than the most interesting lady afar off.
They stuck their hands into their pockets, and stared intently. Finally one of them, in a tone of disgusted resignation, remarked:
“Axell ought to be ashamed of hisself; he’s draggin’ along a little feller not half the size he is. Blamed if he ain’t got his match, though; the little feller’s jest doin’ some gellorious chawin’ an’ diggin’.”
The excitement finally overcame the inertia of the party, and each man started deliberately to meet the major and his captive. Spidertracks, faithful to his profession, kept well in advance of the others. Suddenly he exclaimed to himself:
“Good Lord! don’t they know each other? The major didn’t wear that beard when in New York; but the boy—he’s just the same scamp, in spite of his dirt and rags. If she were to see them now—but, pshaw! ’twould all fall flat—no live paper to take hold of the matter and work it up.”
“There, curse your treacherous heart!” roared the major, as he gave his prisoner a push which threw him into the reporter’s arms. “Now we’re in a civilized community, and you’ll have a chance of learning the opinions of gentlemen on such irregularities. Tried to kill me, gentlemen, upon my honor!—did it after I had shared my eatables and pocket-pistol with him, too. Did it to get my dust. Got me at a disadvantage for a moment, and made a formal demand for the dust, and backed his request with a pistol—my own pistol, gentlemen! I’ve only just reached here; I don’t yet know who’s here, but I imagine there’s public spirit enough to discourage treachery. Will some one see to him while I take something?”
Spidertracks drew his revolver, mildly touched the young man on the shoulder, and remarked:
“Come on.”
The ex-knight of the pencil bowed his prisoner into an abandoned gopher-hole (i. e., an artificial cave,) cocked his revolver, and then stretched himself on the ground and devoted himself to staring at the unfortunate youth. To a student of human nature Ernest Mattray was curious, fascinating, and repulsive. Short, slight, handsome, delicate, nervous, unscrupulous, selfish, effeminate, dishonest, and cruel, he was an excellent specimen of what city life could make of a boy with no father and an irresolute mother.
The reporter, who had many a time studied faces in the Tombs, felt almost as if at his old vocation again as he gazed into the restless eyes and sullen features of the prisoner.
Meanwhile Happy Rest was becoming excited. There had been some little fighting done since the settlement of the place, but as there had been no previous attempt at highway robbery and murder made in the vicinity, the prisoner was an object of considerable interest.
In fact, the major told so spirited a story, that most of the inhabitants strolled up, one after another, to look at the innovator, while that individual himself, with the modesty which seems inseparable from true greatness, retired to the most secluded of the three apartments into which the cave was divided, and declined all the attentions which were thrust upon him.
The afternoon had faded almost into evening, when a decrepit figure, in a black dress and bonnet, approached the cave, and gave Spidertracks a new element for the thrilling report he had composed and mentally rearranged during his few hours of duty as jailer.
“Beats the dickens,” muttered the reporter to himself, “how these Sisters of Charity always know when a tough case has been caught. Natural enough in New York. But where did she come from? Who told her? Cross, beads, and all. Hello! Oh, Louise Mattray, you’re a deep one; but it’s a pity your black robe isn’t quite long enough to hide the very tasty dress you wore this morning? Queer dodge, too—wonder what it means? Wonder if she’s caught sight of the major, and don’t want to be recognized?”
The figure approached.
“May I see the prisoner?” she asked.
“No one has a better right, Mrs. Mattray,” said the guardian of the cave, with a triumphant smile, while the poor woman started and trembled. “Don’t be frightened—no one is going to hurt you. Heard all about it, I suppose?—know who just missed being the victim?”
“Yes,” said the unhappy woman, entering the cave.
When she emerged it was growing quite dark. She passed the reporter with head and vail down, and whispered:
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it,” said the reporter, quickly. “Going to stay until you see how things go with him?”
She shook her head and passed on.
The sky grew darker. The reporter almost wished it might grow so dark that the prisoner could escape unperceived, or so quickly that a random shot could not find him. There were strange noises in camp.
The storekeeper, who never traveled except by daylight, was apparently harnessing his mules to the wagon—he was moving the wagon itself to the extreme left of the camp, where there was nothing to haul but wood, and even that was still standing in the shape of fine old trees.
There seemed to be an unusual clearness in the air, for Spidertracks distinctly heard the buzz of some earnest conversation. There seemed strange shadows floating in the air—a strange sense of something moving toward him—something almost shapeless, yet tangible—something that approached him—that gave him a sense of insecurity and then of alarm. Suddenly the indefinable something uttered a yell, and resolved itself into a party of miners, led by the gallant and aggrieved major himself, who shouted:
“Lynch the scoundrel, boys—that’s the only thing to do!”
The excited reporter sprang to his feet in an agony of genuine humanity and suppressed itemizing, and screamed:
“Major, wait a minute—you’ll be sorry if you don’t!”
But the gallant major had been at the bar for two or three hours, preparing himself for this valorous deed, and the courage he had there imbibed knew not how to brook delay—not until the crowd had reached the mouth of the cave and found it dark, and had heard one unduly prudent miner suggest that it might be well to have a light, so as to dodge being sliced in the dark.
“Bring a light quick, then,” shouted the major. “I’ll drag him out when it comes; he knows my grip, curse him!”
A bunch of dried grass was hastily lighted and thrown into the cave, and the major rapidly followed it, while as many miners as could crowd in after him hastened to do so. They found the major, with white face and trembling limbs, standing in front of the lady for whose sake they had done so much elaborate dressing in the morning, and who they had afterwards wrathfully seen departing in the stage.
The major rallied, turned around, and said:
“There’s some mistake here, gentlemen. Won’t you have the kindness to leave us alone?”
Slowly—very slowly—the crowd withdrew. It seemed to them that, in the nature of things, the lady ought to have it out with the major with pistols or knives for disturbing her, and that they, who were in all the sadness of disappointment at failure of a well-planned independent execution, ought to see the end of the whole affair. But a beseeching look from the lady herself finally cleared the cave, and the major exclaimed:
“Louise, what does this mean?”
“It means,” said the lady, with most perfect composure, “that, thanks to a worthless father and a bad bringing-up by an incapable mother, Ernest has found his way into this country. I came to find him, and I found him in this hole, to which his affectionate father brought him to-day. It is about as well, I imagine, that I helped him to escape, seeing to what further kind attentions you had reserved him.”
“Please don’t be so icy, Louise,” begged the major. “He attempted to rob and kill me, the young rascal; besides, I had not the faintest idea of who he was.”
“Perhaps,” said the lady, still very calm, “you will tell me from whom he inherited the virtues which prompted his peculiar actions towards you? His mother has always earned her livelihood honorably.”
“Louise,” said the major, with a humility which would have astonished his acquaintance, “won’t you have the kindness to reserve your sarcasm until I am better able to bear it? You probably think I have no heart—I acknowledge I have thought as much myself—but something is making me feel very weak and tender just now.”
The lady looked critically at him for a moment, and then burst into tears.
“Oh, God!” she sobbed, “what else is there in store for this poor, miserable, injured life of mine?”
“Restitution,” whispered the major softly—“if you will let me make it, or try to make it.”
The weeping woman looked up inquiringly, and said only the words:
“And she?”
“My first wife?” answered the major. “Dead—really dead, Louise, as I hope to be saved. She died several years ago, and I longed to do you justice then, but the memory of our parting was too much for my cowardly soul. If you will take me as I am, Louise, I will, as long as I live, remember the past, and try to atone for it.”
She put her hand in his, and they left the gopher-hole together. As they disappeared in the outer darkness, there emerged from one of the compartments of the cave an individual whose features were indistinguishable in the darkness, but who was heard to emphatically exclaim:
“If I had the dust, I’d start a live daily here, just to tell the whole story; though the way he got out didn’t do me any particular credit.”
For days the residents of Happy Rest used all available mental stimulants to aid them in solving the mystery of the major and the wonderful lady; but, as the mental stimulants aforesaid were all spirituous, the results were more deplorable than satisfactory. But when, a few days later, the couple took the stage for Rum Valley, the enterprising Spidertracks took an outside passage, and at the end of the route had his persistency rewarded by seeing, in the Bangup House, a Sister of Charity tenderly embrace the major’s fair charge, start at the sight of the major, and then, after some whispering by the happy mother, sullenly extend a hand, which the major grasped heartily, and over which there dropped something which, though a drop of water, was not a rain-drop. Then did Spidertracks return to the home of his adoption, and lavish the stores of his memory; and for days his name was famous, and his liquor was paid for by admiring auditors.
