Under the Redwoods
“They told me at the restaurant they reckoned you lived yere, and the night watchman at the door headed me straight up. When he knew whar I kem from he wanted to know what the news was, but I told him he’d better buy an extra and see.”
“Well, what did you come for?” said the editor impatiently.
“The foreman said it was important, and he wanted to know afore he went to press ef this yer correction was YOURS?”
He went to the table, unrolled the proofs, and, taking out the slip, pointed to a marked paragraph. “The foreman says the reporter who brought the news allows he got it straight first-hand! But ef you’ve corrected it, he reckons you know best.”
Breeze saw at a glance that the paragraph alluded to was not of his own writing, but one of several news items furnished by reporters. These had been “set up” in the same “galley,” and consequently appeared in the same proof-slip. He was about to say curtly that neither the matter nor the correction was his, when something odd in the correction of the item struck him. It read as follows:—
“It appears that the notorious ‘Jim Bodine,’ who is in hiding and badly wanted by the Vigilance Committee, has been tempted lately into a renewal of his old recklessness. He was seen in Sacramento Street the other night by two separate witnesses, one of whom followed him, but he escaped in some friendly doorway.”
The words “in Sacramento Street” were stricken out and replaced by the correction “on the Saucelito shore,” and the words “friendly doorway” were changed to “friendly dinghy.” The correction was not his, nor the handwriting, which was further disguised by being an imitation of print. A strange idea seized him.
“Has any one seen these proofs since I left them at the office?”
“No, only the foreman, sir.”
He remembered that he had left the proofs lying openly on his table when he was called to the office at the stroke of the alarm bell; he remembered the figure he saw gliding from his room on his return. She had been there alone with the proofs; she only could have tampered with them.
The evident object of the correction was to direct the public attention from Sacramento Street to Saucelito, as the probable whereabouts of this “Jimmy Bodine.” The street below was Sacramento Street, the “friendly doorway” might have been their own.
That she had some knowledge of this Bodine was not more improbable than the ballet story. Her strange absences, the mystery surrounding her, all seemed to testify that she had some connection—perhaps only an innocent one—with these desperate people whom the Vigilance Committee were hunting down. Her attempt to save the man was, after all, no more illegal than their attempt to capture him. True, she might have trusted him, Breeze, without this tampering with his papers; yet perhaps she thought he was certain to discover it—and it was only a silent appeal to his mercy. The corrections were ingenious and natural—it was the act of an intelligent, quick-witted woman.
Mr. Breeze was prompt in acting upon his intuition, whether right or wrong. He took up his pen, wrote on the margin of the proof, “Print as corrected,” said to the boy carelessly, “The corrections are all right,” and dismissed him quickly.
The corrected paragraph which appeared in the “Informer” the next morning seemed to attract little public attention, the greater excitement being the suicide of the imprisoned bully and the effect it might have upon the prosecution of other suspected parties, against whom the dead man had been expected to bear witness.
Mr. Breeze was unable to obtain any information regarding the desperado Bodine’s associates and relations; his correction of the paragraph had made the other members of the staff believe he had secret and superior information regarding the fugitive, and he thus was estopped from asking questions. But he felt himself justified now in demanding fuller information from Roberts at the earliest opportunity.
For this purpose he came home earlier that night, hoping to find the night watchman still on his first beat in the lower halls. But he was disappointed. He was amazed, however, on reaching his own landing, to find the passage piled with new luggage, some of that ruder type of rolled blanket and knapsack known as a “miner’s kit.” He was still more surprised to hear men’s voices and the sound of laughter proceeding from the room that was always locked. A sudden sense of uneasiness and disgust, he knew not why, came over him.
He passed quickly into his room, shut the door sharply, and lit the gas. But he presently heard the door of the locked room open, a man’s voice, slightly elevated by liquor and opposition, saying, “I know what’s due from one gen’leman to ‘nother”—a querulous, objecting voice saying, “Hole on! not now,” and a fainter feminine protest, all of which were followed by a rap on his door.
Breeze opened it to two strangers, one of whom lurched forward unsteadily with outstretched hand. He had a handsome face and figure, and a certain consciousness of it even in the abandon of liquor; he had an aggressive treacherousness of eye which his potations had not subdued. He grasped Breeze’s hand tightly, but dropped it the next moment perfunctorily as he glanced round the room.
“I told them I was bound to come in,” he said, without looking at Breeze, “and say ‘Howdy!’ to the man that’s bin a pal to my women folks and the kids—and acted white all through! I said to Mame, ‘I reckon HE knows who I am, and that I kin be high-toned to them that’s high-toned; kin return shake for shake and shot for shot!’ Aye! that’s me! So I was bound to come in like a gen’leman, sir, and here I am!”
He threw himself in an unproffered chair and stared at Breeze.
“I’m afraid,” said Breeze dryly, “that, nevertheless, I never knew who you were, and that even now I am ignorant whom I am addressing.”
“That’s just it,” said the second man, with a querulous protest, which did not, however, conceal his admiring vassalage to his friend; “that’s what I’m allus telling Jim. ‘Jim,’ I says, ‘how is folks to know you’re the man that shot Kernel Baxter, and dropped three o’ them Mariposa Vigilants? They didn’t see you do it! They just look at your fancy style and them mustaches of yours, and allow ye might be death on the girls, but they don’t know ye! An’ this man yere—he’s a scribe in them papers—writes what the boss editor tells him, and lives up yere on the roof, ‘longside yer wife and the children—what’s he knowin’ about YOU?’ Jim’s all right enough,” he continued, in easy confidence to Breeze, “but he’s too fresh ‘bout himself.”
Mr. James Bodine accepted this tribute and criticism of his henchman with a complacent laugh, which was not, however, without a certain contempt for the speaker and the man spoken to. His bold, selfish eyes wandered round the room as if in search of some other amusement than his companions offered.
“I reckon this is the room which that hound of a landlord, Rakes, allowed he’d fix up for our poker club—the club that Dan Simmons and me got up, with a few other sports. It was to be a slap-up affair, right under the roof, where there was no chance of the police raiding us. But the cur weakened when the Vigilants started out to make war on any game a gen’leman might hev that wasn’t in their gummy-bag, salt pork trade. Well, it’s gettin’ a long time between drinks, gen’lemen, ain’t it?” He looked round him significantly.
Only the thought of the woman and her children in the next room, and the shame that he believed she was enduring, enabled Breeze to keep his temper or even a show of civility.
“I’m afraid,” he said quietly, “that you’ll find very little here to remind you of the club—not even the whiskey; for I use the room only as a bedroom, and as I am a workingman, and come in late and go out early, I have never found it available for hospitality, even to my intimate friends. I am very glad, however, that the little leisure I have had in it has enabled me to make the floor less lonely for your children.”
Mr. Bodine got up with an affected yawn, turned an embarrassed yet darkening eye on Breeze, and lunged unsteadily to the door. “And as I only happened in to do the reg’lar thing between high-toned gen’lemen, I reckon we kin say ‘Quits.’” He gave a coarse laugh, said “So long,” nodded, stumbled into the passage, and thence into the other room.
His companion watched him pass out with a relieved yet protecting air, and then, closing the door softly, drew nearer to Breeze, and said in husky confidence,—
“Ye ain’t seein’ him at his best, mister! He’s bin drinkin’ too much, and this yer news has upset him.”
“What news?” asked Breeze.
“This yer suicide o’ Irish Jack!”
“Was he his friend?”
“Friend?” ejaculated the man, horrified at the mere suggestion. “Not much! Why, Irish Jack was the only man that could hev hung Jim! Now he’s dead, in course the Vigilants ain’t got no proof agin Jim. Jim wants to face it out now an’ stay here, but his wife and me don’t see it noways! So we are taking advantage o’ the lull agin him to get him off down the coast this very night. That’s why he’s been off his head drinkin’. Ye see, when a man has been for weeks hidin’—part o’ the time in that room and part o’ the time on the wharf, where them Vigilants has been watchin’ every ship that left in order to ketch him, he’s inclined to celebrate his chance o’ getting away”—
“Part of the time in that room?” interrupted Breeze quickly.
“Sartin! Don’t ye see? He allus kem in as you went out—sabe!—and got away before you kem back, his wife all the time just a-hoverin’ between the two places, and keeping watch for him. It was killin’ to her, you see, for she wasn’t brought up to it, whiles Jim didn’t keer—had two revolvers and kalkilated to kill a dozen Vigilants afore he dropped. But that’s over now, and when I’ve got him safe on that ‘plunger’ down at the wharf to-night, and put him aboard the schooner that’s lying off the Heads, he’s all right agin.”
“And Roberts knew all this and was one of his friends?” asked Breeze.
“Roberts knew it, and Roberts’s wife used to be a kind of servant to Jim’s wife in the South, when she was a girl, but I don’t know ez Roberts is his FRIEND!”
“He certainly has shown himself one,” said Breeze.
“Ye-e-s,” said the stranger meditatively, “ye-e-s.” He stopped, opened the door softly, and peeped out, and then closed it again softly. “It’s sing’lar, Mr. Breeze,” he went on in a sudden yet embarrassed burst of confidence, “that Jim thar—a man thet can shoot straight, and hez frequent; a man thet knows every skin game goin’—that THET man Jim,” very slowly, “hezn’t really—got—any friends—‘cept me—and his wife.”
“Indeed?” said Mr. Breeze dryly.
“Sure! Why, you yourself didn’t cotton to him—I could see THET.”
Mr. Breeze felt himself redden slightly, and looked curiously at the man. This vulgar parasite, whom he had set down as a worshiper of sham heroes, undoubtedly did not look like an associate of Bodine’s, and had a certain seriousness that demanded respect. As he looked closer into his wide, round face, seamed with small-pox, he fancied he saw even in its fatuous imbecility something of that haunting devotion he had seen on the refined features of the wife. He said more gently,—
“But one friend like you would seem to be enough.”
“I ain’t what I uster be, Mr. Breeze,” said the man meditatively, “and mebbe ye don’t know who I am. I’m Abe Shuckster, of Shuckster’s Ranch—one of the biggest in Petalumy. I was a rich man until a year ago, when Jim got inter trouble. What with mortgages and interest, payin’ up Jim’s friends and buying off some ez was set agin him, thar ain’t much left, and when I’ve settled that bill for the schooner lying off the Heads there I reckon I’m about played out. But I’ve allus a shanty at Petalumy, and mebbe when things is froze over and Jim gets back—you’ll come and see him—for you ain’t seen him at his best.”
“I suppose his wife and children go with him?” said Breeze.
“No! He’s agin it, and wants them to come later. But that’s all right, for you see she kin go back to their own house at the Mission, now that the Vigilants are givin’ up shadderin’ it. So long, Mr. Breeze! We’re startin’ afore daylight. Sorry you didn’t see Jim in condition.”
He grasped Breeze’s hand warmly and slipped out of the door softly. For an instant Mr. Breeze felt inclined to follow him into the room and make a kinder adieu to the pair, but the reflection that he might embarrass the wife, who, it would seem, had purposely avoided accompanying her husband when he entered, withheld him. And for the last few minutes he had been doubtful if he had any right to pose as her friend. Beside the devotion of the man who had just left him, his own scant kindness to her children seemed ridiculous.
He went to bed, but tossed uneasily until he fancied he heard stealthy footsteps outside his door and in the passage. Even then he thought of getting up, dressing, and going out to bid farewell to the fugitives. But even while he was thinking of it he fell asleep and did not wake until the sun was shining in at his windows.
He sprang to his feet, threw on his dressing-gown, and peered into the passage. Everything was silent. He stepped outside—the light streamed into the hall from the open doors and windows of both rooms—the floor was empty; not a trace of the former occupants remained. He was turning back when his eye fell upon the battered wooden doll set upright against his doorjamb, holding stiffly in its jointed arms a bit of paper folded like a note. Opening it, he found a few lines written in pencil.
God bless you for your kindness to us, and try to forgive me for touching your papers. But I thought that you would detect it, know WHY I did it, and then help us, as you did! Good-by!
MAMIE BODINE.
Mr. Breeze laid down the paper with a slight accession of color, as if its purport had been ironical. How little had he done compared to the devotion of this delicate woman or the sacrifices of that rough friend! How deserted looked this nest under the eaves, which had so long borne its burden of guilt, innocence, shame, and suffering! For many days afterwards he avoided it except at night, and even then he often found himself lying awake to listen to the lost voices of the children.
But one evening, a fortnight later, he came upon Roberts in the hall. “Well,” said Breeze, with abrupt directness, “did he get away?”
Roberts started, uttered an oath which it is possible the Recording Angel passed to his credit, and said, “Yes, HE got away all right!”
“Why, hasn’t his wife joined him?”
“No. Never, in this world, I reckon; and if anywhere in the next, I don’t want to go there!” said Roberts furiously.
“Is he dead?”
“Dead? That kind don’t die!”
“What do you mean?”
Roberts’s lips writhed, and then, with a strong effort, he said with deliberate distinctness, “I mean—that the hound went off with another woman—that—was—in—that schooner, and left that fool Shuckster adrift in the plunger.”
“And the wife and children?”
“Shuckster sold his shanty at Petaluma to pay their passage to the States. Good-night!”
HOW REUBEN ALLEN “SAW LIFE” IN SAN FRANCISCO
The junior partner of the firm of Sparlow & Kane, “Druggists and Apothecaries,” of San Francisco, was gazing meditatively out of the corner of the window of their little shop in Dupont Street. He could see the dimly lit perspective of the narrow thoroughfare fade off into the level sand wastes of Market Street on the one side, and plunge into the half-excavated bulk of Telegraph Hill on the other. He could see the glow and hear the rumble of Montgomery Street—the great central avenue farther down the hill. Above the housetops was spread the warm blanket of sea-fog under which the city was regularly laid to sleep every summer night to the cool lullaby of the Northwest Trades. It was already half-past eleven; footsteps on the wooden pavement were getting rarer and more remote; the last cart had rumbled by; the shutters were up along the street; the glare of his own red and blue jars was the only beacon left to guide the wayfarers. Ordinarily he would have been going home at this hour, when his partner, who occupied the surgery and a small bedroom at the rear of the shop, always returned to relieve him. That night, however, a professional visit would detain the “Doctor” until half-past twelve. There was still an hour to wait. He felt drowsy; the mysterious incense of the shop, that combined essence of drugs, spice, scented soap, and orris root—which always reminded him of the Arabian Nights—was affecting him. He yawned, and then, turning away, passed behind the counter, took down a jar labeled “Glycyrr. Glabra,” selected a piece of Spanish licorice, and meditatively sucked it. Not receiving from it that diversion and sustenance he apparently was seeking, he also visited, in an equally familiar manner, a jar marked “Jujubes,” and returned ruminatingly to his previous position.
If I have not in this incident sufficiently established the youthfulness of the junior partner, I may add briefly that he was just nineteen, that he had early joined the emigration to California, and after one or two previous light-hearted essays at other occupations, for which he was singularly unfitted, he had saved enough to embark on his present venture, still less suited to his temperament. In those adventurous days trades and vocations were not always filled by trained workmen; it was extremely probable that the experienced chemist was already making his success as a gold-miner, with a lawyer and a physician for his partners, and Mr. Kane’s inexperienced position was by no means a novel one. A slight knowledge of Latin as a written language, an American schoolboy’s acquaintance with chemistry and natural philosophy, were deemed sufficient by his partner, a regular physician, for practical cooperation in the vending of drugs and putting up of prescriptions. He knew the difference between acids and alkalies and the peculiar results which attended their incautious combination. But he was excessively deliberate, painstaking, and cautious. The legend which adorned the desk at the counter, “Physicians’ prescriptions carefully prepared,” was more than usually true as regarded the adverb. There was no danger of his poisoning anybody through haste or carelessness, but it was possible that an urgent “case” might have succumbed to the disease while he was putting up the remedy. Nor was his caution entirely passive. In those days the “heroic” practice of medicine was in keeping with the abnormal development of the country; there were “record” doses of calomel and quinine, and he had once or twice incurred the fury of local practitioners by sending back their prescriptions with a modest query.
The far-off clatter of carriage wheels presently arrested his attention; looking down the street, he could see the lights of a hackney carriage advancing towards him. They had already flashed upon the open crossing a block beyond before his vague curiosity changed into an active instinctive presentiment that they were coming to the shop. He withdrew to a more becoming and dignified position behind the counter as the carriage drew up with a jerk before the door.
The driver rolled from his box and opened the carriage door to a woman whom he assisted, between some hysterical exclamations on her part and some equally incoherent explanations of his own, into the shop. Kane saw at a glance that both were under the influence of liquor, and one, the woman, was disheveled and bleeding about the head. Yet she was elegantly dressed and evidently en fete, with one or two “tricolor” knots and ribbons mingled with her finery. Her golden hair, matted and darkened with blood, had partly escaped from her French bonnet and hung heavily over her shoulders. The driver, who was supporting her roughly, and with a familiarity that was part of the incongruous spectacle, was the first to speak.
“Madame le Blank! ye know! Got cut about the head down at the fete at South Park! Tried to dance upon the table, and rolled over on some champagne bottles. See? Wants plastering up!”
“Ah brute! Hog! Nozzing of ze kine! Why will you lie? I dance! Ze cowards, fools, traitors zere upset ze table and I fall. I am cut! Ah, my God, how I am cut!”
She stopped suddenly and lapsed heavily against the counter. At which Kane hurried around to support her into the surgery with the one fixed idea in his bewildered mind of getting her out of the shop, and, suggestively, into the domain and under the responsibility of his partner. The hackman, apparently relieved and washing his hands of any further complicity in the matter, nodded and smiled, and saying, “I reckon I’ll wait outside, pardner,” retreated incontinently to his vehicle. To add to Kane’s half-ludicrous embarrassment the fair patient herself slightly resisted his support, accused the hackman of “abandoning her,” and demanded if Kane knew “zee reason of zees affair,” yet she presently lapsed again into the large reclining-chair which he had wheeled forward, with open mouth, half-shut eyes, and a strange Pierrette mask of face, combined of the pallor of faintness and chalk, and the rouge of paint and blood. At which Kane’s cautiousness again embarrassed him. A little brandy from the bottle labeled “Vini Galli” seemed to be indicated, but his inexperience could not determine if her relaxation was from bloodlessness or the reacting depression of alcohol. In this dilemma he chose a medium course, with aromatic spirits of ammonia, and mixing a diluted quantity in a measuring-glass, poured it between her white lips. A start, a struggle, a cough—a volley of imprecatory French, and the knocking of the glass from his hand followed—but she came to! He quickly sponged her head of the half-coagulated blood, and removed a few fragments of glass from a long laceration of the scalp. The shock of the cold water and the appearance of the ensanguined basin frightened her into a momentary passivity. But when Kane found it necessary to cut her hair in the region of the wound in order to apply the adhesive plaster, she again endeavored to rise and grasp the scissors.
“You’ll bleed to death if you’re not quiet,” said the young man with dogged gravity.
Something in his manner impressed her into silence again. He cut whole locks away ruthlessly; he was determined to draw the edges of the wound together with the strip of plaster and stop the bleeding—if he cropped the whole head. His excessive caution for her physical condition did not extend to her superficial adornment. Her yellow tresses lay on the floor, her neck and shoulders were saturated with water from the sponge which he continually applied, until the heated strips of plaster had closed the wound almost hermetically. She whimpered, tears ran down her cheeks; but so long as it was not blood the young man was satisfied.
In the midst of it he heard the shop door open, and presently the sound of rapping on the counter. Another customer!
Mr. Kane called out, “Wait a moment,” and continued his ministrations. After a pause the rapping recommenced. Kane was just securing the last strip of plaster and preserved a preoccupied silence. Then the door flew open abruptly and a figure appeared impatiently on the threshold. It was that of a miner recently returned from the gold diggings—so recently that he evidently had not had time to change his clothes at his adjacent hotel, and stood there in his high boots, duck trousers, and flannel shirt, over which his coat was slung like a hussar’s jacket from his shoulder. Kane would have uttered an indignant protest at the intrusion, had not the intruder himself as quickly recoiled with an astonishment and contrition that was beyond the effect of any reproval. He literally gasped at the spectacle before him. A handsomely dressed woman reclining in a chair; lace and jewelry and ribbons depending from her saturated shoulders; tresses of golden hair filling her lap and lying on the floor; a pail of ruddy water and a sponge at her feet, and a pale young man bending over her head with a spirit lamp and strips of yellow plaster!
“‘Scuse me, pard! I was just dropping in; don’t you hurry! I kin wait,” he stammered, falling back, and then the door closed abruptly behind him.
Kane gathered up the shorn locks, wiped the face and neck of his patient with a clean towel and his own handkerchief, threw her gorgeous opera cloak over her shoulders, and assisted her to rise. She did so, weakly but obediently; she was evidently stunned and cowed in some mysterious way by his material attitude, perhaps, or her sudden realization of her position; at least the contrast between her aggressive entrance into the shop and her subdued preparation for her departure was so remarkable that it affected even Kane’s preoccupation.
