The Girl at the Halfway House by Emerson Hough (good ebook reader TXT) 📖

round, red house, full of car tracks, and smoke, and hammer blows, and dirt, and confusion; and from these shops came and went men who did an unheard-of thing. They worked eight hours a day, no more, no less! Now, in the time of Man, men worked twenty-four hours a day, or not at all; and they did no man's bidding.

The streets of Ellisville were many. They doubled and crossed. There was a public square hedged about with trees artificially large. For each vanishing saloon there had come a store with its hitching rack for teams. The Land Office was yet at Ellisville, and the rush of settlers was continuous. The men who came out from the East wore wide hats and carried little guns; but when they found the men of Ellisville wearing small, dark hats and carrying no guns at all, they saw that which was not to be believed, and which was, therefore, not so written in the literary centres which told the world about the Ellisvilles. Strangers asked Ellisville about the days of the cattle drive, and Ellisville raised its eminently respectable eyebrows. There was a faint memory of such a time, but it was long, long ago. Two years ago! All the world had changed since then. There had perhaps been a Cottage Hotel. There was perhaps a Mrs. Daly, who conducted a boarding-house, on a back street. Our best people, however, lived at the Stone Hotel. There were twelve lawyers who resided at this hotel, likewise two ministers and their wives. Six of the lawyers would bring out their wives the following spring. Ministers, of course, usually took their wives with them.

Ellisville had thirty business houses and two thousand inhabitants. It had large railway shops and the division offices of the road. It had two schoolhouses (always the schoolhouse grew quickly on the Western soil), six buildings of two stories, two buildings of three stories and built of brick. Business lots were worth $1,800 to $2,500 each. The First National Bank paid $4,000 for its corner. The Kansas City and New England Loan, Trust, and Investment Company had expended $30,000 in cash on its lot, building, and office fixtures. It had loaned three quarters of a million of dollars in and about Ellisville.

Always the land offered something to the settler. The buffalo being gone, and their bones being also gone, some farmers fell to trapping and poisoning the great gray wolves, bringing in large bales of the hides. One farmer bought half a section of land with wolf skins. He had money enough left to buy a few head of cattle and to build a line of fence. This fence cut at right angles a strange, wide, dusty pathway. The farmer did not know what he had done. He had put restraint on that which in its day knew no pause and brooked no hindrance. He had set metes and bounds across the track where once rolled the wheels of destiny. He had set the first fence across the Trail!

The stranger who asked for the old, wild days of Ellisville the Red was told that no such days had ever been. Yet stay: perhaps there were half a dozen men who had lived at Ellisville from the first who could, perhaps, take one to the boarding-house of Mrs. Daly; who could, perhaps, tell something of the forgotten days of the past, the days of two years ago, before the present population of Ellisville came West. There was, perhaps, a graveyard, but the headstones had been so few that one could tell but little of it now. Much of this, no doubt, was exaggeration, this talk of a graveyard, of a doubled street, of murders, of the legal killings which served as arrests, of the lynchings which once passed as justice. There was a crude story of the first court ever held in Ellisville, but of course it was mere libel to say that it was held in the livery barn. Rumour said that the trial was over the case of a negro, or Mexican, or Indian, who had been charged with murder, and who was himself killed in an attempt at lynching, by whose hand it was never known. These things were remembered or talked about by but very few, these the old-timers, the settlers of two years ago. Somewhere to the north of the town, and in the centre of what was declared by some persons to be the old cattle trail, there was reputed to be visible a granite boulder, or perhaps it was a granite shaft, supposed to have been erected with money contributed by cattlemen at the request of Mrs. Daly, who kept the boarding-house on a back street. Some one had seen this monument, and brought back word that it had cut upon its face a singular inscription, namely:

JUAN THE LOCO, THE END OF THE TRAIL. CHAPTER XXXI THE SUCCESS OF BATTERSLEIGH

One morning when Franklin entered his office he found his friend Battersleigh there before him, in full possession, and apparently at peace with all the world. His tall figure was reclining in an office chair, and his feet were supported by the corner of the table, in an attitude which is called American, but which is really only masculine, and quite rational though unbeautiful. Battersleigh's cloak had a swagger in its very back, and his hat sat at a cocky angle not to be denied. He did not hear Franklin as he approached the door, and the latter stood looking in for a moment, amused at Battersleigh and his attitude and his song. When quite happy Battersleigh always sang, and very often his song was the one he was singing now, done in a low nasal, each verse ending, after the vocal fashion of his race, with a sudden uplift of a sheer octave, as thus:

  "I-I-I-'d dance li-i-i-ke a fa-a-a-iree-ee-ee,
    For to see ould Dunlear-e-e-e-e-e!
  I-I-I-'d think twi-i-i-ice e-e-e-r-r I-I-I-'d lave it,
    For to be-e-e-e-e a drag-o-o-n."

Franklin chuckled at the reminiscent music as he stepped in and said good morning. "You seem in fine fettle this morning, friend," said he. "Very fine, for an old man."

Battersleigh squared around and looked at him soberly. "Ned," said he, "ye're a dethractor of innycince. Batty ould! Listen to me, boy! It's fifty years younger I am to-day than when I saw ye last. I'm younger than ye ivver saw me in all your life before."

"And what and where was the fountain?" said Franklin, as he seated himself at his desk.

"The one fountain of all on earth, me boy—Succiss—succiss! The two dearest things of life are Succiss and Revinge. I've found thim both. Shure, pfwhat is that gives one man the lofty air an' the overlookin' eye, where another full his ekil in inches fears to draw the same breath o' life with him? Succiss, succiss, me boy! Some calls it luck, though most lays it to their own shupayrior merit. For Batty, he lays it to nothin' whativver, but takes it like a philosopher an' a gintleman."

"Well, I suppose you don't mind my congratulating you on your success, whatever it may be," said Franklin, as he began to busy himself about his work at the desk. "You're just a trifle mysterious, you know."

"There's none I'd liever have shake me by the hand than yoursilf, Ned," said Battersleigh, "the more especially by this rayson, that ye've nivver believed in ould Batty at all, but thought him a visionary schamer, an' no more. Didn't ye, now, Ned; on your honour?"

"No," said Franklin stoutly. "I've always known you to be the best fellow in the world."

"Tut, tut!" said Battersleigh. "Ye're dodgin' the issue, boy. But pfwhat wud ye say now, Ned, if I should till ye I'd made over tin thousand pounds of good English money since I came to this little town?"

"I should say," said Franklin calmly, as he opened an envelope, "that you had been dreaming again."

"That's it! That's it!" cried Battersleigh. "Shure ye wud, an' I knew it! But come with me to bank this mornin' an' I'll prove it all to ye."

Something in his voice made Franklin wheel around and look at him.
"Oh, do be serious, Battersleigh," said he.

"It's sayrious I am, Ned, I till ye. Luk at me, boy. Do ye not see the years droppin' from me? Succiss! Revinge! Cash! Earth holds no more for Batty. I've thim all, an' I'm contint. This night I retire dhrunk, as a gintleman should be. To-morrow I begin on me wardrobe. I'm goin' a longish journey, lad, back to ould England. I'm a long-lost son, an' thank God! I've not been discovered yit, an' hope I'll not be fer a time.

"I'll till ye a secret, which heretofore I've always neglicted to mintion to anybody. Here I'm Henry Battersleigh, agent of the British-American Colonization Society. On t'other side I might be Cuthbert Allen Wingate-Galt. An' Etcetera, man; etcetera, to God knows what. Don't mintion it, Ned, till I've gone away, fer I've loved the life here so—I've so enjoyed bein' just Batty, agent, and so forth! Belave me, Ned, it's much comfortabler to be merely a' And-so-forth thin it is to be an' Etcetera. An' I've loved ye so, Ned! Ye're the noblest nobleman I ivver knew or ivver expict to know."

Franklin sat gazing at him without speech, and presently Battersleigh went on.

"It's a bit of a story, lad," said he kindly. "Ye see, I've been a poor man all me life, ye may say, though the nephew of one of the richest women in the United Kingdom—an' the stingiest. Instid of doin' her obvayus juty an' supportin' her nephew in becomin' station, she marries a poor little lordlet boy, an' forsakes me entirely. Wasn't it hijjus of her? There may have been raysons satisfyin' to her own mind, but she nivver convinced me that it was Christian conduct on her part. So I wint with the Rile Irish, and fought fer the Widdy. So what with likin' the stir an' at the same time the safety an' comfort o' the wars, an' what with now an' thin a flirtashun in wan colour or another o' the human rainbow, with a bit of sport an' ridin' enough to kape me waist, I've been in the Rile Irish ivver since—whin not somewhere ilse; though mostly, Ned, me boy, stone broke, an' ownin' no more than me bed an' me arms. Ye know this, Ned."

"Yes," said Franklin, "I know, Battersleigh. You've been a proud one,"

"Tut, tut, me boy; nivver mind. Ye'll know I came out here to make me fortune, there bein' no more fightin' daycint enough to engage the attention of a gintleman annywhere upon the globe. I came to make me fortune. An' I've made it. An' I confiss to ye with contrition, Ned, me dear boy, I'm Cubberd Allen Wiggit-Galt, Etcetera !"

After his fashion Franklin sat silent, waiting for the other's speech.

"Ned," said Battersleigh at length, "till me, who's the people of the intire worrld that has the most serane belief in their own shupayriority?"

"New-Yorkers," said Franklin calmly.

"Wrong. Ye mustn't joke, me boy. No. It's the English. Shure, they're the consatedest people in the whole worrld. An' now, thin, who's the wisest people in the worrld?"

"The Americans," said Franklin promptly again.

"Wrong agin. It's thim same d——d domineerin' idjits, the yally-headed subjecks o' the Widdy. An' pfwhy are they wise?"

"You'll have to tell," said Franklin.

"Then I'll till ye. It's because they have a sacra fames fer all the land on earth."

"They're no worse than we," said Franklin. "Look at our Land-Office records here for the past year."

"Yis, the Yankee is a land-lover, but he wants land so that he may live on it, an' he wants to see it before he gives his money for it. Now, ye go to an Englishman, an' till him ye've a bit of land in the cintre of a lost island in the middle of the Pacific say, an' pfwhat does he do? He'll first thry to stale ut,