Stories from Everybody's Magazine Part 5

NEEDED: A FEDERAL BUREAU OF MINES

The enactment of good mining laws, punis.h.i.+ng the proved intent to commit a fraud as well as the fraud itself, and seeing to it that capital stock shall be paid up, seeing to it also that all moneys spent by a mining corporation shall be traceable from start to finish, is the natural first step toward the purification of American mining methods. Beyond that, the national government could take a hand in the game through a federal Bureau of Mines.

There must be some clearing-house of intelligence and of values in this country, some place from which our intelligence may start and to which it may return. The public must have accessible reports of engineers, state or federal, of a sort ent.i.tled to confidence.

The nest of vermin in our large cities, inhabited by those who make a living out of the ignorance and eagerness of small investors, must be smoked out once and for all. In this work, state and national governments, popular education and intelligence, and the aid of the better cla.s.s journalism of America, all must be enlisted. The pages of our press might well be far cleaner than they are. The publication which prints the advertis.e.m.e.nts of a fake-mining enterprise is itself a party to the fraud. A Bureau of Mines chief can sit behind the desk of every advertising manager in the counting-rooms of every newspaper and magazine in America. The press of this country, when it likes, can, by taking thought, somewhat dim the splendor of the mahogany in many an elegant suite of offices in New York, Boston, or elsewhere. It can reduce the reckless and senseless expenditure of ill-gained wealth which is making civilization a mockery in America, and branding our republican form of government as a failure.

We will have a different way of life, or another form of government. We will have a better administration of law in the United States or we will have another political party, possibly another political system. We will clear up this rotten society, or we will try how we like a different organization of society.

The people of America are beginning to murmur. The burden of the murmur is that they have long enough been betrayed. Unspeakable injustice has been done the people of America under the forms of law and government. It is coming to be said that our law and government have not an even hand for all, that a few are allowed to despoil the many. When a people murmurs, let a government beware. Meantime the more that certain unspeakable things are reduced in, and eliminated from, Wall Street and the other "financial centers," the better for our schools, our taxes, our farming, our industry, our living, our CHARACTER, our country.

After all, the government of this country, as we now have it organized, depends on the CHARACTER of its average individual citizen. The end of this abuse of fake-mining enterprises begins now, here, with you and me, in OUR intelligence, in OUR love of a square game. By taking thought we can add a cubit to our OWN stature, and so add to the stature of OUR laws and of our national morality.

WHAT YOU AND I CAN DO

As for you and me, when next we see the flaming advertis.e.m.e.nt advising us that the Madre d'Oro, Montezuma's fabled Mother Vein of Gold, has once more come to the surface of the earth on Manhattan Island or near Plymouth Rock; when next we read counsel that because mining pays in Michigan it ought to pay in Nevada; when next we are advised to get into the game at once because this is our LAST CHANCE--we might at least ask to see the report of the engineer, likewise the record and antecedents of the engineer; and many, many other things. Perchance we might write and ask the mining promoter what, in his belief, is the proper amortization charge in his particular mine. At which the average mining promoter would probably fall dead.

Vol. XXIII No.1 JULY 1910

HOW THE MAN CAME TO TWINKLING ISLAND {page 64-73} By MELVILLE CHATER

OUT of the great world came a man to the wooing of Susanna Crane.

From the vague southwest he came, now skirting the chimneyed towns and elm-bordered village streets, now exchanging the road for the bright rails and perhaps the interior of a droning freight-car, now switching anew through the edge of odorous pine woods, yet leaving behind him always a wary, broken trail.

The man was tall and strong, with hair that gleamed red in the sun, and eyes of a reddish brown. He walked with the free swing of a world wanderer, yet always his heart strained for a glimpse of the Canadian border; for some hundreds of miles behind him lay the Vermont marble quarries whose dust still faintly blanched his clothes, and there, in a drunken flight, he had killed a man. He did not know that in fleeing from justice he was rus.h.i.+ng into the arms of love; he did not even know that he was in the Ragged Woods, with Twinkling Island just off the coast; he only studied the tree bark and snuffed the breeze, and knew that the sea was near. At length, well satisfied with the distance he had come since dawn, he cleared a s.p.a.ce among the pine cones, then lay down, and, lulled by the ancient whisper of the wind in the treetops, closed his eyes.

He was of the Ulysses breed, this man, a wanderer of the earth, acquainted with many cities, one whose s.h.i.+pwrecks and misfortunes had but whetted his love of life; and even while he slept, there came upon him, as of old Nausicaa came upon Ulysses, a woman.

She, too, was straight and strong; her dark face was framed by a blue-checked sunbonnet; she carried a large basket filled with blackberries, and her lips as well as her hands were stained. She saw the man lying in a shaft of the sunset, and started back, then, tiptoeing past, bent forward slightly to examine his face.

In that lingering gaze a twig cracked beneath her foot. He sat up instantly, tense, expectant; then for a silent s.p.a.ce their eyes caught and clung. Thus the first pair might have gazed when Adam wakened to find her who was bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, standing over him.

"Did I scare you, Miss?" at length asked the Man. "I thought--well, I didn't know who you might be at first." His gaze deepened into unconcealed admiration. "I wouldn't scare YOU for anything!"

"I ain't so easy scairt," the girl returned defiantly. "Ef I was," she went on in her fresh, young voice, full of queer, upward inflections, "I wouldn't be a-berryin' in Ragged Woods after sundaown."

She marched onward, her head thrown well back. Twenty steps later the Man was again at her side.

"Pardoname, little one!" he said. "But, seein' you ain't scared, an' thar bein' no blaze in these yere parts, maybe you'd put us on the trail. Guess I'd a-gone on siesterin' till midnight if you hadn't a-happened by--gracias a Dios!"

Her glance shot suspicion at him as though she scented banter in the strange, foreign phrases; then she said:

"Ef you mean you wanter git to Potuck, whar the railroad starts, you've got to walk three miles back to the Potuck Road; then it's three miles west to Potuck taown."

"An' what lies on ahead, whar you're goin'?" he asked.

"Why, nothin'," she returned with a child's surprised simplicity.

"Nothin' but Twinklin' Island an' father an' me."

There was silence then, but the Man watched the strong, straight lines of her face, her keen black eyes, her wealth of black hair tumbled into the back-fallen sunbonnet. At length he said quietly:

"Think I'll g'long over with you to your island, camarada. Maybe your father's got a bite o' something for a hungry man. I pay the freight, sabe? 'Twon't take me more'n a couple o' hours to make the railroad to-night."

To this she vouchsafed nothing, but swung onward, s.h.i.+fting her heavy basket from one hand to the other; then a strong grasp intervened, and she found herself burdenless. In the village streets of Potuck and Nogantic, shamefaced lads had offered such help a hundred times, and she had accepted it, flattered by their homage; but the quick, silent action of this big, red-haired man thrilled her with strange anger.

"I don't want no help," she said proudly, "I kin carry that."

"Not while I'm here, chiquita mia!" He smiled downward, and his body seemed to loom over her like a s.h.i.+eld. "Say, when I woke up an' seen you, do you know what come into my head? A little Navajo squaw I knowed once. Her name was Moonlight Water, but the fellers called her Little Peachey. But she was twenty-five, and you--well, now, how old might you be?"

"Goin' on eighteen," she would have answered nonchalantly to any one else; for him there woke from the depths of her nature a fierce retort:

"Give us that basket! I ain't a-goin' to let you carry it a speck further."

"ALL right," he acquiesced with broad, kind humor, vet without relinquis.h.i.+ng his burden. "ALL right, chiquita mia! Never you mind me, Little Peachey!"

They gained a bare tongue of land lapped by water. She stepped into a canoe, the Man following. Very quickly he took the paddle from her and put forth with strong, practiced strokes, cheering himself onward with s.n.a.t.c.hes of a queer, guttural burden which he had picked up from a negro chantey-singer on some Southern cotton-wharf.

Straight ahead lay the island, breasting the Atlantic swell. Seen from the distant hills, the red sunset strikes its outpost cliffs for a moment's splendor, and so it is called Twinkling Island.

The girl said not a word, nor indeed was it necessary. He found the beach without trouble, helped her ash.o.r.e, and carried the canoe up the slope on his back. A hundred yards onward they encountered a low, rambling house and the vague shape, in the twilight, of an elderly man smoking his pipe on the steps.

The stranger set down the canoe and gave an account of himself.

But even as the great Ulysses was wont to name a false lineage and give a feigned story to his hosts, so this man said his name was McFarlane--which it was not--and told a wily tale of having been directed to a logging camp where hands were needed, of alighting at the wrong station and losing his way in an attempted short cut through the woods. Meanwhile his listener, a man of weather-beaten face and a great shock of gray hair, observed him with shrewd attention. At length he replied:

"Thar's few strangers git to Twinkling Island; but so long as you're here, you're welcome to our plain victuals. The money's neither here nor thar. Git supper, daughter. Seems you're mighty particular to git that canoe high an' dry to-night."

The girl wheeled abruptly and strode indoors, flas.h.i.+ng at the stranger a covert, half-defiant glance.

"Gals are queer cattle," mused old Crane, drawing off his fisherman's boots. " 'Pears to give 'em a kind o' satisfaction to set a man to work. Her mother was just the same, before her."

The guest said nothing; but the realization that the girl who had grudged his taking her basket had afterward suffered him to carry her canoe quite an unnecessary distance, seemed to yield him no unpleasant thoughts.

They sat down to supper in a low'ceiled room of smoked rafters.

The stranger ate hungrily and with few words, yet always his gaze followed the girl's slim figure as she moved to and fro, waiting on the board. As the food disappeared, the talk sprang up. The girl brought in a huge pitcher of cider and left the men by the fireplace, while she pa.s.sed back and forth, clearing away the dishes. Crane set out a decanter of whisky, which spirit he mixed sparingly with his cider, as did also his guest--none too sparingly.

Now was the Man's heart loosened, and he told of all he had seen and done and lived; of his spendthrift youth, pa.s.sed aboard tramp freighters between Lisbon and Rio, Leith and Natal, Tokyo, Melbourne and the Golden Gate--wherever the sea ran green; of ginseng-growing in China, sh.e.l.lac gathering in India, cattle-grazing in Wyoming. He spoke of Alaskan totem-poles, of Indian sign language, of Aztec monoliths buried in the forest. He sang "Lather an' Shavin's," "La Golondrina," "The Cowboy's Lament," and, clicking his fingers castanet-wise, hummed little Spanish airs whose words he would by no means translate.

Crane marveled that this man should be still on the hitherward side of thirty; and as the stranger sat there, his very clothes, poor rags of civilization, seemed to bulk with heroic lines, his face to reflect man's primal freedom, while his every word rang with the sheer joy of the things he had seen and known.

At a break in the talk, the girl, who, though she had constantly busied herself about the room, had missed not a word, nodded significantly to her father, then walked from the house and out into the night. He glanced after her for a moment, then turned with a queer smile.

"We're all 'baout the same, I reckon," he said, "so far as furren countries is consarned. That's to say, a man allaways conceits thar's a heap o' promise waitin' for him, somewhar over yonder.

Naow, you've seen sights enough for a hundred men. Contrariwise, thar's my gal--never been further'n the Caounty Fair. But that don't stop her; no sirree, human nature can't be stopped. Every night, fair or storm, she walks daown an' sits on the rocks, lookin' seaward, before she turns in. She's done it ever since she was SO high. Why, thar's nothin' to see but the Atlantic an'

a piece o' foreland to the northwest! But her fancy is, the sea's a-bringin' her somethin'--that's what she used to say as a kid--somethin', she don't rightly know what. _I_ say it's just furren countries--pieces she's got outer story books, an' yarns she's heard the fishermen tell--that's what's she's hankerin'

for, Mr. McFarlane. So ye see, as I say, we're all 'baout the same, that way."

"When I first seen her," began the Man tentatively, "I could ha'