Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories Part 13

"It's a bear!" the Artist whispered excitedly, drawing his revolver.

"I know this is reckless, but--you are n't afraid, are you?--the temptation is too much for my prudence. If he comes for us we 'll give our horses the rein and they 'll outrun him."

I leaned forward, trying to get a better view, and just as I heard the click of the trigger I caught a glimpse of a white human foot.

"Stop!" I cried. "It's a man!"

It was too late to stop the discharge, but a quick turn of his wrist sent the bullet whistling harmlessly through the trees. The creature scrambled hurriedly away through the dead leaves, and our horses, trembling and snorting, tried again to run.

"It is a bear!" he cried as we saw its s.h.a.ggy bulk awkwardly climbing the slope between two clumps of bushes. "No, by Jove, it's got hands and feet! Now, what in the--"

Then the thing half turned toward us, and we saw that it had a man's head and face, covered with hair and beard.

"Good G.o.d! It's Henry Moulton!" cried the Artist. "Moulton!

Moulton! Come back here! What's the matter with you!"

At the sound of his name the man sprang to his feet, facing us. The bearskin which wrapped his body slipped down and left him entirely nude. In an instant he dropped upon all fours again, drew the skin over him and shambled away.

We turned our staring eyes upon each other, and there was no need to speak the appalling thought that was in both our minds. With one accord we plied our whips and drove our unwilling and terrified horses in the direction he had taken. We came near enough to see that he was digging among the dry leaves for acorns, and that his beard and mouth were defiled with earth, and full of fragments of leaves and acorn sh.e.l.ls. But as soon as he saw us he darted off into the thick underbrush, whither we could not follow him.

We hurried on to his shack, where the rest of the party had already arrived, and the men all started back at once with ropes and lariats for Moulton's capture and garments for his covering.

The cabin was a rough affair, made of logs and c.h.i.n.ked with fir boughs, and having an earthen floor. A bunk made of rough timbers and mattressed with twigs of fur was covered with some blankets and clothing, tossed into heaps. Under the blankets at the head of the bunk I found a little pile of books--a Shakespeare, a volume of Emerson's essays, Th.o.r.eau's "Walden," and a well-worn "Iliad," in the Greek text.

"How queer," said one of the women, as she looked curiously at the volumes, "that an ignorant creature such as this crazy mountaineer must be should have such books as these in his cabin! They must have been left here by some tourist, and he has put them away and kept them. It shows how much respect even the ignorant have for learning."

Some torn sc.r.a.ps of paper were scattered over the floor, and I picked them all up and tried to piece them together.

When the men returned with the lunatic he was quiet and obedient, except when they tried to subst.i.tute proper clothing for his bearskin.

Against this he fought with all his strength, striking, scratching, and kicking with hands and feet, snapping and biting viciously, and all the time either roaring with fury, or, when they succeeded in pulling the hide a little away from him, groaning, shrieking, and writhing as if he were being flayed.

So they desisted and left him wrapped in the skin and tied to a tree near the cabin door. There he constantly walked back and forth on all fours, the length of his rope, restlessly and in silence, as caged animals do. If any one approached too near he sprang at the intruder with a savage growl and a snap of his jaws. But otherwise he paid no attention to any of those who had expected to be his guests. He refused to eat, unless they offered him acorns or dry oak leaves.

These he devoured voraciously.

There was some scrawled writing on the sc.r.a.ps of paper I had pieced together and the Artist and I made out some disjointed sentences. We agreed that the lunatic must have written them himself, in the first beclouding of his mind, and we thought the words might have some effect upon him. So we went out to where the poor, crazed creature was tied, and, looking him squarely in the eyes, the Artist spoke very slowly:

"Dorothy. Dorothy. She said I am a bear. Where is Dorothy?"

He stopped and stared and a puzzled, human look came into his eyes.

He rose slowly to his feet and stood upright, leaning against the tree. For the moment he forgot his bearskin covering and it half fell off. He stared at us, mumbling strange sounds, which presently became incoherent words of human speech. But he spoke thickly and uncertainly, like one long unused to the sound of his voice:

"Where is--Dorothy? I want--she said--Dorothy--Dorothy--she said--I --a bear--I--I--am--a bear."

Then he dropped to all fours again and drew his bearskin closely about him and that was the last flicker of human intelligence that he showed.

The next morning the men made a small platform of some loose boards to which they tied the lunatic. He fought desperately against his bonds, and it required the combined strength of all the men of the party to fasten him securely to the platform. Then the guide improvised a harness of ropes and hitched to this primitive sled the horse which he himself rode. Watching the poor creature closely, our little party went slowly back to the Valley, whence he was sent to an asylum. The Artist wrote to Mrs. Moulton an account of his condition, and told her also its probable cause.

Some months afterward I went to the asylum, purposely to learn what had become of him. The physician said his mental condition was steadily improving, that there was a pretty sure prospect of his recovery, and that he would probably be sane all the rest of his life, if--and the doctor put a significant emphasis upon that little word--"if he lives as a sane man should, among men, and busies himself as other men do."

Then the man of healing took from a shelf a book and read to me the words which I have put at the beginning of this account.

He told me also that Mrs. Moulton was there, that she had been there almost from the first, and that she spent all the time with the unfortunate man that the physicians would allow.

"Her presence," the doctor added, "has had a singularly helpful effect upon him."

AN OLD ROMAN OF MARIPOSA

"I thank whatever G.o.ds may be For my unconquerable soul."

--WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY.

Mariposa, in the days when I first knew it, was still a wreck of the gold fever. The merest skeleton of its former self, it lay there in the gulch between the chaparral-covered foothills and hugged its memories of the days when it was young and l.u.s.ty and had a murder every morning for breakfast. All around it the gashed and seamed and scarred and furrowed earth bore testimony to the labors of those stirring times, when men dug a fortune out of the ground in a day--and spent it in the town at night.

It was my first visit to the town, but I soon found that the people still lived in the past. The first man with whom I talked made vivid for my eyes the placer mines down the bed of the creek, in his young days as thronged as a city street, but now deserted and blistering in the sun; made me hear the sounds of bar-room frolicking and fighting, and the rolling chorus of "Forty-nine"; made me see, as he had seen, the piles of gold-dust and nuggets upon the gaming tables, and the hundreds of gold-weighted miners trooping into town on Sat.u.r.day night.

And every man and woman with whom I talked did the same thing for me, with new incidents and characters, until the hours became a fast-moving panorama of the "days of gold," and I began to feel as if I myself were living through their excitements and had drawn their delirium into my veins.

My hostess, herself an old-timer, began the entertainment anew as we sat on her porch in the early forenoon of the next day, breathing deep draughts of the honey-scented air blowing down the hills from thousands of pink-flowered manzanita bushes. She told me how she and her sister had alighted from the stage in Mariposa one evening, so many years before, when they were both "just slips of girls." They were the very first white women there, and the men, hundreds of them, who had not seen the form of woman, save Indian squaws, for many months, came to their shanty, called their father outside and begged to be allowed just to look at them. So the two came shyly out, hand in hand, and the men crowded around them with looks of respectful adoration, and then pa.s.sed on to make way for others. One fell on his knees and kissed the hem of her dress. And presently a voice rose out of the throng, and the whole great crowd quickly joined in the hymn, "Nearer, my G.o.d, to Thee."

As we talked, one or another old-timer stopped to greet us and to add for my entertainment still more recollections of the days when they and hope and Mariposa were young. My pulses beat fast with the excitement of that dead life which their stories called into being again and I forgot that they and the century too had grown old since the times of which they spoke--until the Newspaper Man came along, and the sight of him brought me back to the present with a sudden jerk. I had seen him last in San Francisco, only a week previous, but he had been in out-of-the-way, ghost-of-the-past Mariposa, he told me, for several days, reporting a murder trial for his paper.

"Better come to this afternoon's session of the case," he said. "The prisoner is n't much, but his father 's the most interesting old chap I 've run across since I 've been on the Coast. I 'll tell you about him as we walk over."

So we sauntered up the hot, dusty street to the court-house, between the rows of straggling, forlorn little houses, each one with its own thrilling memory of the "days of Forty-nine"; and the Newspaper Man's tale, like everything else in Mariposa, took its being and its beginning from that same boisterous time.

"It's a brutal, ghastly case," he said, "and to my mind the only mystery about it is the prisoner's father. He is a fine-looking man, with the manner and the head of an old Roman. He has the reputation of being the straightest and squarest man in the county; and how he ever came to be the father of such a good-for-nothing sc.u.m-of-the-earth as the prisoner I can explain only on the supposition that he is n't.

"The old man is one of the pioneers in Mariposa, and they tell me that he was one of the nerviest men that ever drew a gun in this town. He killed his man in those days, just as lots of other good men did, but it was in self-defence; and everybody was glad that the town was rid of the man he dropped, and so nothing was said about it. There was a coroner's jury, which gave a verdict of suicide, and explained their finding on the ground that it was suicidal for any man to draw on Dan Hopkins and then give Dan the chance to shoot first.

"Along in the latter years of the gold excitement a woman came to the town, who seems to have been part Portuguese, part Mexican, and all bad. She followed some man here from San Francisco, and lived as hard a life as the times and place made possible. And after a while she went to Dan Hopkins and told him that he must marry her. At first he would n't consider seriously either her story or her proposition. But she kept at him, swore by all the saints in the calendar that the child was his, and then swore them all over again that if he did not marry her she would kill the child and herself too as soon as it was born, and their blood would be on his head. And finally he did marry her, and made a home for her.

"Time and again during this trial I 've watched that man's fine, stern old face and wondered what his motives and his feelings were when he took that poor beast of a woman to be his wife--whether he really believed her and thought it was his duty; or whether he feared that if he did not, the blood of a woman and a child would haunt him all the rest of his life; or whether the underside of his nature, under her influence, rose up and dominated all that was best in him and made him love her and be willing to marry her.

"Whatever it was, the deed was done, and the woman of the town became Mrs. Hopkins, with Dan Hopkins's gun at her service, ready to take revenge upon anybody who might offer her the least insult or whisper a slighting word about the past.

"He did not try to crowd her down people's throats--they might let her alone if they wished, and they mostly did, I believe--but they were made to understand that they had to treat her and speak of her with respect.

"He bought a big ranch a little way out of town, and there they lived from that time on. As far as I can find out, the woman lived a straight, respectable kind of life for a dozen years or more, and then she died.

"But all her badness seems to have descended to the boy. It's one of the oddest studies in heredity I ever came across. The people here all tell me that until he was thirteen or fourteen years old he was a manly sort of a lad, and gave promise of being something like his father as he grew up. But about that time the evil in him began to show itself, and the older he grew the less moral principle he seemed to possess.

He was courageous, they say, and that was the only good quality he had.

It was a sort of dare-devil bravery, and along with it he was cruel, thieving, untruthful, and--well, about as near thoroughly bad as they make 'em. At least, that's the sum of the account of him the people here have given me.

"The old man was universally known to be so honest and square in all his dealings, and so upright and honorable in every way, that the son's depravity seemed all the blacker by contrast. He has stood by the young fellow from the first of his wickedness, so everybody says, and has always shown toward him not only steadfast affection, but just the same sort of spirit that he did toward the boy's mother.

"He has never intimated even to his best friend that the young man was anything but the best and most dutiful son that ever lived. He has kept him supplied with money, so that the fellow's only reason for the petty thievery he did was pure love of stealing. He has paid his fines when he has been arrested, and s.h.i.+elded him from public contempt, and done everything possible to make it easy for him to be honest and respectable.