THE PIONEER

June

THE PIONEER

A TALE OF TWO STATES

By GERALDINE BONNER Author of Tomorrow’s Tangle

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY HARRISON FISHER

INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1905 The Bobbs-Merrill Company March PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS BROOKLYN, N. Y.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE PIONEER

BOOK I THE COUNTRY

[3]

THE PIONEER

CHAPTER I THE SQUATTER

It had been five o’clock in the clear, still freshness of a May morning when the Colonel had started from Sacramento. Now, drawing rein where the shadow of a live-oak lay like a black pool across the road, he looked at his watch—almost five. The sun had nearly wheeled from horizon to horizon.

During the burning noon hour he had rested at Murderer’s Bar. Except for that he had been in the saddle all day, slackening speed where the road passed over the burnt shoulder of the foot-hills, descending into sheltered cañons by cool river-beds, pacing along stretches of deserted highway where his mounted figure was the only living thing in sight.

Stationary in the shade of the live-oak he looked about him. The rich foot-hill country of California stretched away beneath his gaze in lazy undulations, dotted with the forms of the oaks. The grass on unprotected hilltops was already drying to an ocher yellow, the road was deep in dust. Far away, hanging on the horizon like a faded mirage, was the high Sierra, thin, snow-touched, a faint, aërial vision.

The sleepy sounds of midday had died down and[4] the strange, dream-like silence so peculiar to California held the scene. It was like looking at a picture, the Colonel thought, as he turned in his saddle and surveyed the misty line of hill after hill, bare and wooded, dwindling down to where—a vast, sea-like expanse swimming in opalescent tints—stretched one of the fruitful valleys of the world.

Kit Carson, the finest horse procurable in the Sacramento livery stable the Colonel patronized, stamped and flicked off a fly with his long tail. His rider muttered a word of endearment and bent to pat the silky neck, while his eyes continued to move over the great panorama. He had traversed it many times. The first time of all rose in his mind, when in the flush of his splendid manhood, he had sought fortune on the bars and river-beds in forty-nine. Forty-nine! That was twenty-one years ago.

Something in the thought clouded his brow and called a sigh to his lips. He made a gesture as though shaking off a painful memory and gathered up the hanging rein.

“Come, Kit,” he said aloud, “we’ve got to be moving. There’s fifteen miles yet between us and supper.”

The road before them mounted a spur at the top of which it branched, one fork winding up and on to the mining towns hidden in the mountain crevices. The other turned to the right, and rising and falling over the buttresses that the foot-hills thrust into the plain, wandered down “the mother lode,” the great mineral belt of California.

As they rose to the summit of the spur, the brilliancy[5] of the air was tarnished by a cloud of dust, and the silence disrupted by sounds. The crack of whips cut into the tranquillity of the evening hour; the jangling of bells and voices of men mingled in strident dissonance. Both Kit and the Colonel rose above the curve of the hilltop with the pricked ears and alert eyes of curiosity.

The left-hand road was blocked as far as could be seen with a long mule train, one of the trains that a few years before had crossed the Sierra to Virginia City, and still plied a trade with the California mountain towns. The dust rose from it and covered it as though to shut out from Heaven the vision of the straining animals, and deaden the blasphemies of the men. Looking along its struggling length, the end of which was lost round a turn of the road, the Colonel could see the pointed ears, the stretched necks, and the arched collars of the mules, the canvas tops of the wagons and over all, darting back and forth, the leaping flash of the whips.

A forward wagon was stuck, and, groaning and creaking from an unsuccessful effort to start it, the train subsided into panting relaxation. From the dust the near-by drivers emerged, caught sight of the rider, and slouched toward him. They were powerful men—great men in their day, the California mule drivers.

They passed the time of day, told him their destination and asked his. Going on to Foleys, was he? Mining? Supposed not. Not much mining done round Foleys now. Like Virginia, pretty well petered.

[6]“Virginia!” said one of them, “you’d oughter see Virginia! I’ve taken my sixteen-mule team over the Strawberry Creek route and made my ten dollars a day in Virginia, but it’s as dead now as forty-nine.”

Then they slouched back to their work. Through the churned-up dust, red with the brightness of the declining sun, men came swinging down from the forward end of the train, driving mules to attach to the stalled wagon. About it there was a concentrating of movement and then an outburst of furious energy. A storm of profanity arose, the dust ascended like a pillar of red smoke, and in it the forms of men struggled, and the lashes of the whips came and went like the writhing tentacles of an octopus. The watcher had a glimpse of the mules almost sitting in the violence of their endeavor, and with a howl of triumph the wagon lurched forward. The next moment the entire train was in motion, seeming to advance with a single movement, like a gigantic serpent, each wagon-top a section of its vertebrate length, the whole undulating slowly to the rhythmic jangling of the bells.

The Colonel took the turning to the right and was soon traversing a road which looped in gradual descent along the wall of a ravine. The air was chilled by a river that tumbled over stones below. Greenery of tree and chaparral ran up the walls. A white root gripping a rock like knotty fingers, a spattering of dogwood here and there amid the foliage, caught his eye.

Yes, Virginia had unquestionably “petered.” It[7] had had a short life for its promise. Even in sixty-eight they still had had hopes of it. This was May, the May of seventy, and their hopes had not been realized. Fortunately he had invested little there. California the Colonel had found a good enough field for his investments.

He rode on out of the ravine, once again into the dry rolling land, his mind turning over that question of investments. He had not much else to think of. He was a lonely man, unmarried, childless, and rich. What else was there for a man, who had passed his fifty-fifth year, who did not care for women or pleasure, to concern himself about? It was not satisfying; it brought him no happiness, but he had had no expectation of that.

Twenty-one years ago the Colonel had waked to the realization that he had missed happiness. She had been his, in his very arms then, and he had thought to keep her there for ever. Then suddenly she had gone, without warning, tearing herself from his grasp, and he had known that she would never return. So he had tried to fill the blankness she had left, with business—a sorry substitute! He had spent a good deal of time and thought over this matter of investing, and had seen his fortune accumulating in a safe, gradual way. It would have been much larger than it was if he could have cured himself of a tendency to give portions of it away. But the Colonel was a pioneer, and there were many pioneers who had succeeded better than he in finding happiness, if not so well in gaining riches. As they had been successful in the one way, he had tried[8] to remedy a deficit in the other, and his fortune remained at about the same comfortable level, despite his preoccupation in investments.

This very trip was to see about a new one in which there were great possibilities. He had a strip of land at Foleys, back of the town, purchased fifteen years ago when people thought the little camp was to be the mining center of the region. Now, after he had been regularly paying his taxes, and hearing that the place annually grew smaller and deader, a mineral spring had been discovered on his land. It was a good thing that something had been discovered there. The hopes of Foleys had vanished soon after he had come into possession of the tract. His efforts to sell it had been unsuccessful. Some years ago—the last time he was up there—you couldn’t get people to take land near Foleys, short of giving it to them. But a mineral spring was a very different matter.

As Kit Carson bore him swiftly onward he reviewed the idea of his new investment with increasing enthusiasm. If the spring was all they said it was, he would build a hotel near it, and transform the beautiful, unknown locality into a summer resort. There was an ideal situation for a hotel, where the land swept upward into a sort of natural terrace crested with enormous pines. Here the house would be built, and from its front piazza guests rocking in shaker chairs could look over miles of hills and wooded cañons, and far away on clear days could see the mother-of-pearl expanse of the Sacramento Valley.

[9]A few years ago the plan would have been impossible. But now, with the railroad climbing over the Sierra, it would be quite feasible to run a line of stages from Sacramento; or, possibly, Auburn would be shorter. There was even a hope in the back of the Colonel’s mind that the railway might be induced to fling forth a spur as far as Placerville. The Colonel had friendships in high places. Things that ordinary mortals who were not rich, unattached pioneers, could not aspire to, were entirely possible for Colonel James Parrish.

But—here came in the “but” which upsets the best laid plans. At this point the squatter had loomed up.

The Colonel had hardly believed in the squatter at first. His claims were so preposterous. He had come shortly after Parrish’s last visit, nearly four years ago, and had taken up his residence in the half-ruined cottage which had been built on the land in those days when people had thought Foleys was going to be a great mining center. When Cusack, the drowsy lawyer who “attended to Colonel Parrish’s business interests in Foleys,” as he expressed it, let his client know there was a squatter—a married man with two children—on the land, the Colonel’s reply had been “let him squat.” And so the matter had rested.

Now, when the Colonel wanted to take possession of his own, build his hotel and develop his mineral spring, he had received the intelligence that the squatter refused to go—that in fact he claimed the[10] land on a three and a half years’ tenancy undisturbed by notice to leave, and on various and sundry “improvements” he had made.

It took the Colonel’s breath away. That little clause in the lawyer’s letter about the wife and children had induced him to give his permission for the squatter to occupy his cottage. Having no wife or child of his own, he had a secret feeling of friendliness to all men, who, even in poverty and unsuccess, had tasted of this supreme happiness. And he had let the man remain there, undisturbed, throughout the three and a half years, had forgotten him—in fact, did not even know his name.

And then to be suddenly faced by the amazing insolence of the claim! He with his flawless title, his record of scrupulously paid taxes! He wrote to the Foleys lawyer, as to what “the improvements” were, and received the reply that they consisted in “a garden planted out and tended by the squatter’s daughters, and a bit of vineyard land that the girls had pruned and cultivated into bearing condition. There were repairs on the house, mending the roof and the porch which was falling down. Allen had made these himself.”

Allen! It was the first time Colonel Parrish had heard the squatter’s name. It sent a gush of painful memories out from his heart, and for a space he sat silent with drooped head. Why was not the world wide enough for him, and all who bore this name, to pass one another without encounter!

Now, as he rode on the last stage of his journey, and over the hilltops saw the smoke of the Foleys[11] chimneys, his mind had once again fallen on the squatter’s name. Strange coincidence that after twenty-one years this name—a common one—should rise up uncomfortably in his path. He smiled bitterly to himself. Fate played strange tricks, and he felt, with a sense of shamed meanness, that he would have regarded the squatter with more leniency if he had borne any other name than Allen.

CHAPTER II THE GRACEY BOYS

The smell of wood smoke and supper was in the air as the Colonel rode down the main street of Foleys. Under the projecting roof that jutted from the second-story windows and made a species of rude arcade, men were sitting in the negligée of shirt sleeves, smoking and spitting in the cool of the evening. They hailed the new-comer with a word of greeting or a hand raised in salute to the side of a head where a hat brim should have been.

The Colonel returned the salutations, and as Kit Carson paced through the red dust to where the drooping fringe of locust trees hid the façade of the hotel, looked curiously about him, noticing a slight stir of life, an appearance of reviving vitality in the once moribund camp. Foleys was not as dead as it had been four years ago. Fewer of the shop doors were boarded up; there were even new stores open.

He was speculating on this when he threw himself off his horse in front of the hotel. The loungers on the piazza, dustered and shirt-sleeved men, let their tilted chairs drop to the front legs, and rose to greet him to a man. Anybody was an acquisition[13] at Foleys, but Colonel Jim Parrish, with the rumor of bringing a lawsuit into their midst, was welcomed as the harbinger of a new era.

They were all around him shaking hands when Forsythe, the proprietor, armed with a large feather duster, emerged from the front door. He cut the new arrival out from their midst and drew him into the hall. Here, dusting him vigorously, he shouted to Mrs. Forsythe to prepare a room, and between sweeps of the duster, inquired of him on the burning question of the squatter.

“Come to fire old man Allen, eh?” he queried. “Got your work cut out for you with him.”

“He’ll find he’s barked up the wrong tree this time,” said the Colonel grimly, “bringing me up from San Francisco on such a fool’s errand.”

“It’s about the galliest proposition I’ve ever heard. But he’s that kind, drunk a lot of the time, and the rest of it tellin’ the boys round here what a great man he used to be. He was glad enough to get twenty-five dollars a month holdin’ down a small job in the assay office.”

At this moment a door to the right opened, yielding a glimpse of a large bare dining-room set forth with neatly laid tables and decorated with hanging strands of colored paper.

“Say,” said a female voice, “ain’t that Colonel Jim Parrish that just come down the street?”

“That’s just who it is,” answered the Colonel, “and isn’t that Mitty Bruce’s voice?”

This question called to the doorway a female vision in brilliant pink calico. It was a buxom, high-colored[14] country girl of some twenty-one years, coarse featured but not uncomely, her face almost as pink as her dress, her figure of the mature proportions of the early-ripening Californian.

“Well, well, is this Mitty?” said the new-comer, holding out his hand. “You have to come up to the foot-hills to see a handsome girl. I’d never have known you, you’ve grown up so and got so good-looking.”

Mitty sidled up giggling and placed a big, red paw in his.

“Oh, get out!” she said, “ain’t you just awful!”

“I won’t get out and I’m not a bit awful. You’ve got to take care of me at supper and tell me everything that’s happened in Foleys since I was here last.”

“Let her alone to do that,” said Forsythe. “There ain’t anything that goes on in Eldorado and Amador Counties that Mitty don’t know. She’s the best newspaper we got round here.”

Mrs. Forsythe here put her head over the stair-rail and informed the Colonel that his room was ready. He ran up stairs to “wash up” while the other two repaired to the dining-room.

A few minutes later he reappeared and entered the low-ceilinged room that smelled of fresh paint and cooking. It was past the supper hour at Foleys and only a few men lingered over the end of their meal. By a table at the window, cleanly spread and set, Mitty was standing. When she saw him she pulled out a chair and, with its back resting against her waist, pointed to the seat.

[15]“Set right down here,” she said, “everything’s ready for you.”

Then as he obeyed she pushed him in, saying over his shoulder:

“It’s real nice to see you again, Colonel. It seems awful long since you was here last.”

The Colonel looked up at her with an eye of twinkling friendliness. She was gazing at him with childish pleasure and affection. He had known Mitty since her tenth year when Forsythe and his wife had adopted her, the only child of a dying woman whose husband had been killed in a mine.

“Good girl, Mitt,” he said. “Have you got all the gossip of the last four years saved up for me?”

“I guess I can tell you as much as most,” she answered, not without pride, and then flourished off to the hole in the dining-room which communicated with the kitchen.

When she had set his supper before him she sat down opposite, her elbows on the table, comfortably settled for the gossip the traveler had requested.

“Foleys seems to be livening up,” he said. “I noticed several new stores. What’s happening?”

“Foleys!” exclaimed Mitty, with the Californian’s loyalty to his native burg, “Foleys is the liveliest town along the mother lode. There ain’t nothing the matter with Foleys! It’s the Gracey boys’ strike up at the Buckeye Belle mine that’s whooping things up.”

“Oh, that’s it, of course,” said the Colonel. “They say the Gracey boys have really struck it this time.[16] I heard some talk of it before I came up. The report down below was that it was a pretty good thing.”

“You bet,” said the young woman with a knowing air. “Nearly a year ago one of the gentlemen connected with it said to me, ‘We’ve got a mine there; bed-rock’s pitchin’ and there’s two bits to the pan.’ So I wasn’t surprised when I heard they’d struck it. They’re goin’ to build a twenty-stamp mill next thing you know.”

“Good for them!” said the Colonel. “The Gracey boys have been mining for years all over this country and in Mexico and Nevada, and this is the first good thing they’ve got. How far is it from here?”

“About twelve miles up in that direction—” she gave a jerk of her hand to the right—“up on the other side of the South Fork. They have to come here for everything. Barney Sullivan, the superintendent, does most of their buying.”

She looked at the Colonel with a wide-eyed, stolid gaze as she gave this insignificant piece of information. The look suggested to her vis-à-vis that the information was not insignificant to her.

“Barney Sullivan,” he said, “I remember him. He’s been with them for some years, was in Virginia City when they were there. He’s a good-looking fellow with red hair.”

“Good-lookin’, did you say?” exclaimed Mitty, in a high key of scornful disbelief. “Well, that’s more’n I can see. Just a red-headed Irish tarrier, with the freckles on him as big as dimes. It’s a good thing all the world don’t like the same kind of face.”