A First Family of Tasajara

But Mr. Harkutt remained gazing abstractedly at the smiling speaker. From the window above the impatient Phemie was wondering why he kept the strangers waiting in the rain while he talked about things that were perfectly plain. It was so like a man!

“Then there’s a waterway straight to Tasajara Creek?” he said slowly.

“There is, as long as this flood lasts,” returned the first speaker promptly; “and a cutting through the bank of two or three hundred yards would make it permanent. Well, what’s the matter with that?”

“Nothin’,” said Harkutt hurriedly. “I am only considerin’! But come in, dry yourselves, and take suthin’.”

The light over the rushing water was withdrawn, and the whole prospect sank back into profound darkness. Mr. Harkutt had disappeared with his guests. Then there was the familiar shuffle of his feet on the staircase, followed by other more cautious footsteps that grew delicately and even courteously deliberate as they approached. At which the young girl, in some new sense of decorum, drew in her pretty head, glanced around the room quickly, reset the tidy on her father’s chair, placed the resplendent accordion like an ornament in the exact centre of the table, and then vanished into the hall as Mr. Harkutt entered with the strangers.

They were both of the same age and appearance, but the principal speaker was evidently the superior of his companion, and although their attitude to each other was equal and familiar, it could be easily seen that he was the leader. He had a smooth, beardless face, with a critical expression of eye and mouth that might have been fastidious and supercilious but for the kindly, humorous perception that tempered it. His quick eye swept the apartment and then fixed itself upon the accordion, but a smile lit up his face as he said quietly,—

“I hope we haven’t frightened the musician away. It was bad enough to have interrupted the young lady.”

“No, no,” said Mr. Harkutt, who seemed to have lost his abstraction in the nervousness of hospitality. “I reckon she’s only lookin’ after her sick sister. But come into the kitchen, both of you, straight off, and while you’re dryin’ your clothes, mother’ll fix you suthin’ hot.”

“We only need to change our boots and stockings; we’ve some dry ones in our pack downstairs,” said the first speaker hesitatingly.

“I’ll fetch ‘em up and you can change in the kitchen. The old woman won’t mind,” said Harkutt reassuringly. “Come along.” He led the way to the kitchen; the two strangers exchanged a glance of humorous perplexity and followed.

The quiet of the little room was once more unbroken. A far-off commiserating murmur indicated that Mrs. Harkutt was receiving her guests. The cool breath of the wet leaves without slightly stirred the white dimity curtains, and somewhere from the darkened eaves there was a still, somnolent drip. Presently a hurried whisper and a half-laugh appeared to be suppressed in the outer passage or hall. There was another moment of hesitation and the door opened suddenly and ostentatiously, disclosing Phemie, with a taller and slighter young woman, her elder sister, at her side. Perceiving that the room was empty, they both said “Oh!” yet with a certain artificiality of manner that was evidently a lingering trace of some previous formal attitude they had assumed. Then without further speech they each selected a chair and a position, having first shaken out their dresses, and gazed silently at each other.

It may be said briefly that sitting thus—in spite of their unnatural attitude, or perhaps rather because of its suggestion of a photographic pose—they made a striking picture, and strongly accented their separate peculiarities. They were both pretty, but the taller girl, apparently the elder, had an ideal refinement and regularity of feature which was not only unlike Phemie, but gratuitously unlike the rest of her family, and as hopelessly and even wantonly inconsistent with her surroundings as was the elaborately ornamented accordion on the centre-table. She was one of those occasional creatures, episodical in the South and West, who might have been stamped with some vague ante-natal impression of a mother given to over-sentimental contemplation of books of beauty and albums rather than the family features; offspring of typical men and women, and yet themselves incongruous to any known local or even general type. The long swan-like neck, tendriled hair, swimming eyes, and small patrician head, had never lived or moved before in Tasajara or the West, nor perhaps even existed except as a personified “Constancy,” “Meditation,” or the “Baron’s Bride,” in mezzotint or copperplate. Even the girl’s common pink print dress with its high sleeves and shoulders could not conventionalize these original outlines; and the hand that rested stiffly on the back of her chair, albeit neither over-white nor well kept, looked as if it had never held anything but a lyre, a rose, or a good book. Even the few sprays of wild jessamine which she had placed in the coils of her waving hair, although a local fashion, became her as a special ornament.

The two girls kept their constrained and artificially elaborated attitude for a few moments, accompanied by the murmur of voices in the kitchen, the monotonous drip of the eaves before the window, and the far-off sough of the wind. Then Phemie suddenly broke into a constrained giggle, which she however quickly smothered as she had the accordion, and with the same look of mischievous distress.

“I’m astonished at you, Phemie,” said Clementina in a deep contralto voice, which seemed even deeper from its restraint. “You don’t seem to have any sense. Anybody’d think you never had seen a stranger before.”

“Saw him before you did,” retorted Phemie pertly. But here a pushing of chairs and shuffling of feet in the kitchen checked her. Clementina fixed an abstracted gaze on the ceiling; Phemie regarded a leaf on the window sill with photographic rigidity as the door opened to the strangers and her father.

The look of undisguised satisfaction which lit the young men’s faces relieved Mr. Harkutt’s awkward introduction of any embarrassment, and almost before Phemie was fully aware of it, she found herself talking rapidly and in a high key with Mr. Lawrence Grant, the surveyor, while her sister was equally, although more sedately, occupied with Mr. Stephen Rice, his assistant. But the enthusiasm of the strangers, and the desire to please and be pleased was so genuine and contagious that presently the accordion was brought into requisition, and Mr. Grant exhibited a surprising faculty of accompaniment to Mr. Rice’s tenor, in which both the girls joined.

Then a game of cards with partners followed, into which the rival parties introduced such delightful and shameless obviousness of cheating, and displayed such fascinating and exaggerated partisanship that the game resolved itself into a hilarious melee, to which peace was restored only by an exhibition of tricks of legerdemain with the cards by the young surveyor. All of which Mr. Harkutt supervised patronizingly, with occasional fits of abstraction, from his rocking-chair; and later Mrs. Harkutt from her kitchen threshold, wiping her arms on her apron and commiseratingly observing that she “declared, the young folks looked better already.”

But it was here a more dangerous element of mystery and suggestion was added by Mr. Lawrence Grant in the telling of Miss Euphemia’s fortune from the cards before him, and that young lady, pink with excitement, fluttered her little hands not unlike timid birds over the cards to be drawn, taking them from him with an audible twitter of anxiety and great doubts whether a certain “fair-haired gentleman” was in hearts or diamonds.

“Here are two strangers,” said Mr. Grant, with extraordinary gravity laying down the cards, “and here is a ‘journey;’ this is ‘unexpected news,’ and this ten of diamonds means ‘great wealth’ to you, which you see follows the advent of the two strangers and is some way connected with them.”

“Oh, indeed,” said the young lady with great pertness and a toss of her head. “I suppose they’ve got the money with them.”

“No, though it reaches you through them,” he answered with unflinching solemnity. “Wait a bit, I have it! I see, I’ve made a mistake with this card. It signifies a journey or a road. Queer! isn’t it, Steve? It’s THE ROAD.”

“It is queer,” said Rice with equal gravity; “but it’s so. The road, sure!” Nevertheless he looked up into the large eyes of Clementina with a certain confidential air of truthfulness.

“You see, ladies,” continued the surveyor, appealing to them with unabashed rigidity of feature, “the cards don’t lie! Luckily we are in a position to corroborate them. The road in question is a secret known only to us and some capitalists in San Francisco. In fact even THEY don’t know that it is feasible until WE report to them. But I don’t mind telling you now, as a slight return for your charming hospitality, that the road is a RAILROAD from Oakland to Tasajara Creek of which we’ve just made the preliminary survey. So you see what the cards mean is this: You’re not far from Tasajara Creek; in fact with a very little expense your father could connect this stream with the creek, and have a WATERWAY STRAIGHT TO THE RAILROAD TERMINUS. That’s the wealth the cards promise; and if your father knows how to take a hint he can make his fortune!”

It was impossible to say which was the most dominant in the face of the speaker, the expression of assumed gravity or the twinkling of humor in his eyes. The two girls with superior feminine perception divined that there was much truth in what he said, albeit they didn’t entirely understand it, and what they did understand—except the man’s good-humored motive—was not particularly interesting. In fact they were slightly disappointed. What had promised to be an audaciously flirtatious declaration, and even a mischievous suggestion of marriage, had resolved itself into something absurdly practical and business-like.

Not so Mr. Harkutt. He quickly rose from his chair, and, leaning over the table, with his eyes fixed on the card as if it really signified the railroad, repeated quickly: “Railroad, eh! What’s that? A railroad to Tasajara Creek? Ye don’t mean it!—That is—it ain’t a SURE thing?”

“Perfectly sure. The money is ready in San Francisco now, and by this time next year—”

“A railroad to Tasajara Creek!” continued Harkutt hurriedly. “What part of it? Where?”

“At the embarcadero naturally,” responded Grant. “There isn’t but the one place for the terminus. There’s an old shanty there now belongs to somebody.”

“Why, pop!” said Phemie with sudden recollection, “ain’t it ‘Lige Curtis’s house? The land he offered”—

“Hush!” said her father.

“You know, the one written in that bit of paper,” continued the innocent Phemie.

“Hush! will you? God A’mighty! are you goin’ to mind me? Are you goin’ to keep up your jabber when I’m speakin’ to the gentlemen? Is that your manners? What next, I wonder!”

The sudden and unexpected passion of the speaker, the incomprehensible change in his voice, and the utterly disproportionate exaggeration of his attitude towards his daughters, enforced an instantaneous silence. The rain began to drip audibly at the window, the rush of the river sounded distinctly from without, even the shaking of the front part of the dwelling by the distant gale became perceptible. An angry flash sprang for an instant to the young assistant’s eye, but it met the cautious glance of his friend, and together both discreetly sought the table. The two girls alone remained white and collected. “Will you go on with my fortune, Mr. Grant?” said Phemie quietly.

A certain respect, perhaps not before observable, was suggested in the surveyor’s tone as he smilingly replied, “Certainly, I was only waiting for you to show your confidence in me,” and took up the cards.

Mr. Harkutt coughed. “It looks as if that blamed wind had blown suthin’ loose in the store,” he said affectedly. “I reckon I’ll go and see.” He hesitated a moment and then disappeared in the passage. Yet even here he stood irresolute, looking at the closed door behind him, and passing his hand over his still flushed face. Presently he slowly and abstractedly ascended the flight of steps, entered the smaller passage that led to the back door of the shop and opened it.

He was at first a little startled at the halo of light from the still glowing stove, which the greater obscurity of the long room had heightened rather than diminished. Then he passed behind the counter, but here the box of biscuits which occupied the centre and cast a shadow over it compelled him to grope vaguely for what he sought. Then he stopped suddenly, the paper he had just found dropping from his fingers, and said sharply,—

“Who’s there?”

“Me, pop.”

“John Milton?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What the devil are you doin’ there, sir?”

“Readin’.”

It was true. The boy was half reclining in a most distorted posture on two chairs, his figure in deep shadow, but his book was raised above his head so as to catch the red glow of the stove on the printed page. Even then his father’s angry interruption scarcely diverted his preoccupation; he raised himself in his chair mechanically, with his eyes still fixed on his book. Seeing which his father quickly regained the paper, but continued his objurgation.

“How dare you? Clear off to bed, will you! Do you hear me? Pretty goin’s on,” he added as if to justify his indignation. “Sneakin’ in here and—and lyin’ ‘round at this time o’ night! Why, if I hadn’t come in here to”—

“What?” asked the boy mechanically, catching vaguely at the unfinished sentence and staring automatically at the paper in his father’s hand.

“Nothin’, sir! Go to bed, I tell you! Will you? What are you standin’ gawpin’ at?” continued Harkutt furiously.

The boy regained his feet slowly and passed his father, but not without noticing with the same listless yet ineffaceable perception of childhood that he was hurriedly concealing the paper in his pocket. With the same youthful inconsequence, wondering at this more than at the interruption, which was no novel event, he went slowly out of the room.

Harkutt listened to the retreating tread of his bare feet in the passage and then carefully locked the door. Taking the paper from his pocket, and borrowing the idea he had just objurgated in his son, he turned it towards the dull glow of the stove and attempted to read it. But perhaps lacking the patience as well as the keener sight of youth, he was forced to relight the candle which he had left on the counter, and reperused the paper. Yes! there was certainly no mistake! Here was the actual description of the property which the surveyor had just indicated as the future terminus of the new railroad, and here it was conveyed to him—Daniel Harkutt! What was that? Somebody knocking? What did this continual interruption mean? An odd superstitious fear now mingled with his irritation.

The sound appeared to come from the front shutters. It suddenly occurred to him that the light might be visible through the crevices. He hurriedly extinguished it, and went to the door.

“Who’s there?”