A First Family of Tasajara

The voice was close upon—in his very ears. He opened his eyes. The sea still stretched emptily before him; the dotting sails still unchanged and distant. Yet a strange shadow lay upon the raft. He turned his head with difficulty. On the opposite side—so close upon him as to be almost over his head—the great white sails of a schooner hovered above him like the wings of some enormous sea bird. Then a heavy boom swung across the raft, so low that it would have swept him away had he been in an upright position; the sides of the vessel grazed the raft and she fell slowly off. A terrible fear of abandonment took possession of him; he tried to speak, but could not. The vessel moved further away, but the raft followed! He could see now it was being held by a boat-hook,—could see the odd, eager curiosity on two faces that were raised above the taffrail, and with that sense of relief his eyes again closed in unconsciousness.

A feeling of chilliness, followed by a grateful sensation of drawing closer under some warm covering, a stinging taste in his mouth of fiery liquor and the aromatic steam of hot coffee, were his first returning sensations. His head and neck were swathed in coarse bandages, and his skin stiffened and smarting with soap. He was lying in a rude berth under a half-deck from which he could see the sky and the bellying sail, and presently a bearded face filled with rough and practical concern that peered down upon him.

“Hulloo! comin’ round, eh? Hold on!” The next moment the stranger had leaped down beside Elijah. He seemed to be an odd mingling of the sailor and ranchero with the shrewdness of a seaport trader.

“Hulloo, boss! What was it? A free fight, or a wash-out?”

“A wash-out!”[1 - A mining term for the temporary inundation of a claim by flood; also used for the sterilizing effect of flood on fertile soil.] Elijah grasped the idea as an inspiration. Yes, his cabin had been inundated, he had taken to a raft, had been knocked off twice or thrice, and had lost everything—even his revolver!

The man looked relieved. “Then it ain’t a free fight, nor havin’ your crust busted and bein’ robbed by beach combers, eh?”

“No,” said Elijah, with his first faint smile.

“Glad o’ that,” said the man bluntly. “Then thar ain’t no police business to tie up to in ‘Frisco? We were stuck thar a week once, just because we chanced to pick up a feller who’d been found gagged and then thrown overboard by wharf thieves. Had to dance attendance at court thar and lost our trip.” He stopped and looked half-pathetically at the prostrate Elijah. “Look yer! ye ain’t just dyin’ to go ashore NOW and see yer friends and send messages, are ye?”

Elijah shuddered inwardly, but outwardly smiled faintly as he replied, “No!”

“And the tide and wind jest servin’ us now, ye wouldn’t mind keepin’ straight on with us this trip?”

“Where to?” asked Elijah.

“Santy Barbara.”

“No,” said Elijah, after a moment’s pause. “I’ll go with you.”

The man leaped to his feet, lifted his head above the upper deck, shouted “Let her go free, Jerry!” and then turned gratefully to his passenger. “Look yer! A wash-out is a wash-out, I reckon, put it any way you like; it don’t put anything back into the land, or anything back into your pocket afterwards, eh? No! And yer well out of it, pardner! Now there’s a right smart chance for locatin’ jest back of Santy Barbara, where thar ain’t no God-forsaken tules to overflow; and ez far ez the land and licker lies ye ‘needn’t take any water in yours’ ef ye don’t want it. You kin start fresh thar, pardner, and brail up. What’s the matter with you, old man, is only fever ‘n’ agur ketched in them tules! I kin see it in your eyes. Now you hold on whar you be till I go forrard and see everything taut, and then I’ll come back and we’ll have a talk.”

And they did. The result of which was that at the end of a week’s tossing and seasickness, Elijah Curtis was landed at Santa Barbara, pale, thin, but self-contained and resolute. And having found favor in the eyes of the skipper of the Kitty Hawk, general trader, lumber-dealer, and ranch-man, a week later he was located on the skipper’s land and installed in the skipper’s service. And from that day, for five years Sidon and Tasajara knew him no more.

CHAPER IV

It was part of the functions of John Milton Harkutt to take down the early morning shutters and sweep out the store for his father each day before going to school. It was a peculiarity of this performance that he was apt to linger over it, partly from the fact that it put off the evil hour of lessons, partly that he imparted into the process a purely imaginative and romantic element gathered from his latest novel-reading. In this he was usually assisted by one or two school-fellows on their way to school, who always envied him his superior menial occupation. To go to school, it was felt, was a common calamity of boyhood that called into play only the simplest forms of evasion, whereas to take down actual shutters in a bona fide store, and wield a real broom that raised a palpable cloud of dust, was something that really taxed the noblest exertions. And it was the morning after the arrival of the strangers that John Milton stood on the veranda of the store ostentatiously examining the horizon, with his hand shading his eyes, as one of his companions appeared.

“Hollo, Milt! wot yer doin’?”

John Milton started dramatically, and then violently dashed at one of the shutters and began to detach it. “Ha!” he said hoarsely. “Clear the ship for action! Open the ports! On deck there! Steady, you lubbers!” In an instant his enthusiastic school-fellow was at his side attacking another shutter. “A long, low schooner bearing down upon us! Lively, lads, lively!” continued John Milton, desisting a moment to take another dramatic look at the distant plain. “How does she head now?” he demanded fiercely.

“Sou’ by sou’east, sir,” responded the other boy, frantically dancing before the window. “But she’ll weather it.”

They each then wrested another shutter away, violently depositing them, as they ran to and fro, in a rack at the corner of the veranda. Added to an extraordinary and unnecessary clattering with their feet, they accompanied their movements with a singular hissing sound, supposed to indicate in one breath the fury of the elements, the bustle of the eager crew, and the wild excitement of the coming conflict. When the last shutter was cleared away, John Milton, with the cry “Man the starboard guns!” dashed into the store, whose floor was marked by the muddy footprints of yesterday’s buyers, seized a broom and began to sweep violently. A cloud of dust arose, into which his companion at once precipitated himself with another broom and a loud BANG! to indicate the somewhat belated sound of cannon. For a few seconds the two boys plied their brooms desperately in that stifling atmosphere, accompanying each long sweep and puff of dust out of the open door with the report of explosions and loud HA’S! of defiance, until not only the store, but the veranda was obscured with a cloud which the morning sun struggled vainly to pierce. In the midst of this tumult and dusty confusion—happily unheard and unsuspected in the secluded domestic interior of the building—a shrill little voice arose from the road.

“Think you’re mighty smart, don’t ye?”

The two naval heroes stopped in their imaginary fury, and, as the dust of conflict cleared away, recognized little Johnny Peters gazing at them with mingled inquisitiveness and envy.

“Guess ye don’t know what happened down the run last night,” he continued impatiently. “‘Lige Curtis got killed, or killed hisself! Blood all over the rock down thar. Seed it, myseff. Dad picked up his six-shooter,—one barrel gone off. My dad was the first to find it out, and he’s bin to Squire Kerby tellin’ him.”

The two companions, albeit burning with curiosity, affected indifference and pre-knowledge.

“Dad sez your father druv ‘Lige outer the store lass night! Dad sez your father’s ‘sponsible. Dad sez your father ez good ez killed him. Dad sez the squire’ll set the constable on your father. Yah!” But here the small insulter incontinently fled, pursued by both the boys. Nevertheless, when he had made good his escape, John Milton showed neither a disposition to take up his former nautical role, nor to follow his companion to visit the sanguinary scene of Elijah’s disappearance. He walked slowly back to the store and continued his work of sweeping and putting in order with an abstracted regularity, and no trace of his former exuberant spirits.

The first one of those instinctive fears which are common to imaginative children, and often assume the functions of premonition, had taken possession of him. The oddity of his father’s manner the evening before, which had only half consciously made its indelible impression on his sensitive fancy, had recurred to him with Johnny Peters’s speech. He had no idea of literally accepting the boy’s charges; he scarcely understood their gravity; but he had a miserable feeling that his father’s anger and excitement last night was because he had been discovered hunting in the dark for that paper of ‘Lige Curtis’s. It WAS ‘Lige Curtis’s paper, for he had seen it lying there. A sudden dreadful conviction came over him that he must never, never let any one know that he had seen his father take up that paper; that he must never admit it, even to HIM. It was not the boy’s first knowledge of that attitude of hypocrisy which the grownup world assumes towards childhood, and in which the innocent victims eventually acquiesce with a Machiavellian subtlety that at last avenges them,—but it was his first knowledge that that hypocrisy might not be so innocent. His father had concealed something from him, because it was not right.

But if childhood does not forget, it seldom broods and is not above being diverted. And the two surveyors—of whose heroic advent in a raft John Milton had only heard that morning with their traveled ways, their strange instruments and stranger talk, captured his fancy. Kept in the background by his sisters when visitors came, as an unpresentable feature in the household, he however managed to linger near the strangers when, in company with Euphemia and Clementina, after breakfast they strolled beneath the sparkling sunlight in the rude garden inclosure along the sloping banks of the creek. It was with the average brother’s supreme contempt that he listened to his sisters’ “practicin’” upon the goodness of these superior beings; it was with an exceptional pity that he regarded the evident admiration of the strangers in return. He felt that in the case of Euphemia, who sometimes evinced a laudable curiosity in his pleasures, and a flattering ignorance of his reading, this might be pardonable; but what any one could find in the useless statuesque Clementina passed his comprehension. Could they not see at once that she was “just that kind of person” who would lie abed in the morning, pretending she was sick, in order to make Phemie do the housework, and make him, John Milton, clean her boots and fetch things for her? Was it not perfectly plain to them that her present sickening politeness was solely with a view to extract from them caramels, rock-candy, and gum drops, which she would meanly keep herself, and perhaps some “buggy-riding” later? Alas, John Milton, it was not! For standing there with her tall, perfectly-proportioned figure outlined against a willow, an elastic branch of which she had drawn down by one curved arm above her head, and on which she leaned—as everybody leaned against something in Sidon—the two young men saw only a straying goddess in a glorified rosebud print. Whether the clearly-cut profile presented to Rice, or the full face that captivated Grant, each suggested possibilities of position, pride, poetry, and passion that astonished while it fascinated them. By one of those instincts known only to the freemasonry of the sex, Euphemia lent herself to this advertisement of her sister’s charms by subtle comparison with her own prettinesses, and thus combined against their common enemy, man.