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A First Family of Tasajara, a fiction by Bret Harte |
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Chapter 13 |
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_ CHAPTER XIII The winter rains had come. But so plenteously and persistently, and with such fateful preparation of circumstance, that the long looked for blessing presently became a wonder, an anxiety, and at last a slowly widening terror. Before a month had passed every mountain, stream, and watercourse, surcharged with the melted snows of the Sierras, had become a great tributary; every tributary a great river, until, pouring their great volume into the engorged channels of the American and Sacramento rivers, they overleaped their banks and became as one vast inland sea. Even to a country already familiar with broad and striking catastrophe, the flood was a phenomenal one. For days the sullen overflow lay in the valley of the Sacramento, enormous, silent, currentless--except where the surplus waters rolled through Carquinez Straits, San Francisco Bay, and the Golden Gate, and reappeared as the vanished Sacramento River, in an outflowing stream of fresh and turbid water fifty miles at sea. Across the vast inland expanse, brooded over by a leaden sky, leaden rain fell, dimpling like shot the sluggish pools of the flood; a cloudy chaos of fallen trees, drifting barns and outhouses, wagons and agricultural implements moved over the surface of the waters, or circled slowly around the outskirts of forests that stood ankle deep in ooze and the current, which in serried phalanx they resisted still. As night fell these forms became still more vague and chaotic, and were interspersed with the scattered lanterns and flaming torches of relief-boats, or occasionally the high terraced gleaming windows of the great steamboats, feeling their way along the lost channel. At times the opening of a furnace-door shot broad bars of light across the sluggish stream and into the branches of dripping and drift-encumbered trees; at times the looming smoke-stacks sent out a pent-up breath of sparks that illuminated the inky chaos for a moment, and then fell as black and dripping rain. Or perhaps a hoarse shout from some faintly outlined hulk on either side brought a quick response from the relief-boats, and the detaching of a canoe with a blazing pine-knot in its bow into the outer darkness. It was late in the afternoon when Lawrence Grant, from the deck of one of the larger tugs, sighted what had been once the estuary of Sidon Creek. The leader of a party of scientific observation and relief, he had kept a tireless watch of eighteen hours, keenly noticing the work of devastation, the changes in the channel, the prospects of abatement, and the danger that still threatened. He had passed down the length of the submerged Sacramento valley, through the Straits of Carquinez, and was now steaming along the shores of the upper reaches of San Francisco Bay. Everywhere the same scene of desolation,--vast stretches of tule land, once broken up by cultivation and dotted with dwellings, now clearly erased on that watery chart; long lines of symmetrical perspective, breaking the monotonous level, showing orchards buried in the flood; Indian mounds and natural eminences covered with cattle or hastily erected camps; half submerged houses, whose solitary chimneys, however, still gave signs of an undaunted life within; isolated groups of trees, with their lower branches heavy with the unwholesome fruit of the flood, in wisps of hay and straw, rakes and pitchforks, or pathetically sheltering some shivering and forgotten household pet. But everywhere the same dull, expressionless, placid tranquillity of destruction,--a horrible leveling of all things in one bland smiling equality of surface, beneath which agony, despair, and ruin were deeply buried and forgotten; a catastrophe without convulsion,--a devastation voiceless, passionless, and supine. The boat had slowed up before what seemed to be a collection of disarranged houses with the current flowing between lines that indicated the existence of thoroughfares and streets. Many of the lighter wooden buildings were huddled together on the street corners with their gables to the flow; some appeared as if they had fallen on their knees, and others lay complacently on their sides, like the houses of a child's toy village. An elevator still lifted itself above the other warehouses; from the centre of an enormous square pond, once the plaza, still arose a "Liberty pole," or flagstaff, which now supported a swinging lantern, and in the distance appeared the glittering dome of some public building. Grant recognized the scene at once. It was all that was left of the invincible youth of Tasajara! As this was an objective point of the scheme of survey and relief for the district, the boat was made fast to the second story of one of the warehouses. It was now used as a general store and depot, and bore a singular resemblance in its interior to Harcourt's grocery at Sidon. This suggestion was the more fatefully indicated by the fact that half a dozen men were seated around a stove in the centre, more or less given up to a kind of philosophical and lazy enjoyment of their enforced idleness. And when to this was added the more surprising coincidence that the party consisted of Billings, Peters, and Wingate,--former residents of Sidon and first citizens of Tasajara,--the resemblance was complete. They were ruined,--but they accepted their common fate with a certain Indian stoicism and Western sense of humor that for the time lifted them above the vulgar complacency of their former fortunes. There was a deep-seated, if coarse and irreverent resignation in their philosophy. At the beginning of the calamity it had been roughly formulated by Billings in the statement that "it wasn't anybody's fault; there was nobody to kill, and what couldn't be reached by a Vigilance Committee there was no use resolootin' over." When the Reverend Doctor Pilsbury had suggested an appeal to a Higher Power, Peters had replied, good humoredly, that "a Creator who could fool around with them in that style was above being interfered with by prayer." At first the calamity had been a thing to fight against; then it became a practical joke, the sting of which was lost in the victims' power of endurance and assumed ignorance of its purport. There was something almost pathetic in their attempts to understand its peculiar humor. "How about that Europ-e-an trip o' yours, Peters?" said Billings, meditatively, from the depths of his chair. "Looks as if those Crowned Heads over there would have to wait till the water goes down considerable afore you kin trot out your wife and darters before 'em!" "Yes," said Peters, "it rather pints that way; and ez far ez I kin see, Mame Billings ain't goin' to no Saratoga, neither, this year." "Reckon the boys won't hang about old Harcourt's Free Library to see the girls home from lectures and singing-class much this year," said Wingate. "Wonder if Harcourt ever thought o' this the day he opened it, and made that rattlin' speech o' his about the new property? Clark says everything built on that made ground has got to go after the water falls. Rough on Harcourt after all his other losses, eh? He oughter have closed up with that scientific chap, Grant, and married him to Clementina while the big boom was on"-- "Hush!" said Peters, indicating Grant, who had just entered quietly. "Don't mind me, gentlemen," said Grant, stepping towards the group with a grave but perfectly collected face; "on the contrary, I am very anxious to hear all the news of Harcourt's family. I left for New York before the rainy season, and have only just got back." His speech and manner appeared to be so much in keeping with the prevailing grim philosophy that Billings, after a glance at the others, went on. "Ef you left afore the first rains," said he, "you must have left only the steamer ahead of Fletcher, when he run off with Clementina Harcourt, and you might have come across them on their wedding trip in New York." Not a muscle of Grant's face changed under their eager and cruel scrutiny. "No, I didn't," he returned quietly. "But why did she run away? Did the father object to Fletcher? If I remember rightly he was rich and a good match." "Yes, but I reckon the old man hadn't quite got over the 'Clarion' abuse, for all its eating humble-pie and taking back its yarns of him. And may be he might have thought the engagement rather sudden. They say that she'd only met Fletcher the day afore the engagement." "That be d----d," said Peters, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, and startling the lazy resignation of his neighbors by taking his feet from the stove and sitting upright. "I tell ye, gentlemen, I'm sick o' this sort o' hog-wash that's been ladled round to us. That gal Clementina Harcourt and that feller Fletcher had met not only once, but MANY times afore--yes! they were old friends if it comes to that, a matter of six years ago." Grant's eyes were fixed eagerly on the speaker, although the others scarcely turned their heads. "You know, gentlemen," said Peters, "I never took stock in this yer story of the drownin' of 'Lige Curtis. Why? Well, if you wanter know--in my opinion--there never was any 'Lige Curtis!" Billings lifted his head with difficulty; Wingate turned his face to the speaker. "There never was a scrap o' paper ever found in his cabin with the name o' 'Lige Curtis on it; there never was any inquiry made for 'Lige Curtis; there never was any sorrowin' friends comin' after 'Lige Curtis. For why?--There never was any 'Lige Curtis. The man who passed himself off in Sidon under that name--was that man Fletcher. That's how he knew all about Harcourt's title; that's how he got his best holt on Harcourt. And he did it all to get Clementina Harcourt, whom the old man had refused to him in Sidon." A grunt of incredulity passed around the circle. Such is the fate of historical innovation! Only Grant listened attentively. "Ye ought to tell that yarn to John Milton," said Wingate ironically; "it's about in the style o' them stories he slings in the 'Clarion.'" "He's made a good thing outer that job. Wonder what he gets for them?" said Peters. It was Billings's time to rise, and, under the influence of some strong cynical emotion, to even rise to his feet. "Gets for 'em!--GETS for 'em! I'll tell you WHAT he gets for 'em! It beats this story o' Peters's,--it beats the flood. It beats me! Ye know that boy, gentlemen; ye know how he uster lie round his father's store, reading flapdoodle stories and sich! Ye remember how I uster try to give him good examples and knock some sense into him? Ye remember how, after his father's good luck, he spiled all his own chances, and ran off with his father's waiter gal--all on account o' them flapdoodle books he read? Ye remember how he sashayed round newspaper offices in 'Frisco until he could write a flapdoodle story himself? Ye wanter know what he gets for 'em. I'll tell you. He got an interduction to one of them high-toned, highfalutin', 'don't-touch-me' rich widders from Philadelfy,--that's what he gets for 'em! He got her dead set on him and his stories, that's what he gets for 'em! He got her to put him up with Fletcher in the 'Clarion,'--that's what he gets for 'em. And darn my skin!--ef what they say is true, while we hard-working men are sittin' here like drowned rats--that air John Milton, ez never did a stitch o' live work like me yere; ez never did anythin' but spin yarns about US ez did WORK, is now 'gittin' for 'em'--what? Guess! Why, he's gittin' THE RICH WIDDER HERSELF and HALF A MILLION DOLLARS WITH HER! Gentlemen! lib'ty is a good thing--but thar's some things ye gets too much lib'ty of in this country--and that's this yer LIB'TY OF THE PRESS!" [THE END] _ |
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