Devil's Ford by Bret Harte (best free ebook reader for android .TXT) 📖

The five impulsive millionaires of Devil’s Ford fulfilled not a few of their most extravagant promises. In less than six weeks Mr. Carr and his daughters were installed in a new house, built near the site of the double cabin, which was again transferred to the settlement, in order to give greater seclusion to the fair guests. It was a long, roomy, one-storied villa, with a not unpicturesque combination of deep veranda and trellis work, which relieved the flat monotony of the interior and the barrenness of the freshly-cleared ground. An upright piano, brought from Sacramento, occupied the corner of the parlor. A suite of gorgeous furniture, whose pronounced and extravagant glories the young girls instinctively hid under home-made linen covers, had also been spoils from afar. Elsewhere the house was filled with ornaments and decorations that in their incongruity forcibly recalled the gilded plate-glass mirrors of the bedroom in the old cabin. In the hasty furnishing of this Aladdin’s palace, the slaves of the ring had evidently seized upon anything that would add to its glory, without reference always to fitness.

“I wish it didn’t look so cussedly like a robber’s cave,” said George Kearney, when they were taking a quiet preliminary survey of the unclassified treasures, before the Carrs took possession.

“Or a gambling hell,” said his brother reflectively.

“It’s about the same thing, I reckon,” said Dick Mattingly, who was supposed, in his fiery youth, to have encountered the similarity.

Nevertheless, the two girls managed to bestow the heterogeneous collection with tasteful adaptation to their needs. A crystal chandelier, which had once lent a fascinating illusion to the game of Monte, hung unlighted in the broad hall, where a few other bizarre and public articles were relegated. A long red sofa or bench, which had done duty beside a billiard-table found a place here also. Indeed, it is to be feared that some of the more rustic and bashful youths of Devil’s Ford, who had felt it incumbent upon them to pay their respects to the new-comers, were more at ease in this vestibule than in the arcana beyond, whose glories they could see through the open door. To others, it represented a recognized state of probation before their re-entree into civilization again. “I reckon, if you don’t mind, miss,” said the spokesman of one party, “ez this is our first call, we’ll sorter hang out in the hall yer, until you’r used to us.” On another occasion, one Whiskey Dick, impelled by a sense of duty, paid a visit to the new house and its fair occupants, in a fashion frankly recounted by him afterwards at the bar of the Tecumseh Saloon.

“You see, boys, I dropped in there the other night, when some of you fellers was doin’ the high-toned ‘thankee, marm’ business in the parlor. I just came to anchor in the corner of the sofy in the hall, without lettin’ on to say that I was there, and took up a Webster’s dictionary that was on the table and laid it open— keerless like, on my knees, ez if I was sorter consultin’ it—and kinder dozed off there, listenin’ to you fellows gassin’ with the young ladies, and that yer Miss Christie just snakin’ music outer that pianner, and I reckon I fell asleep. Anyhow, I was there nigh on to two hours. It’s mighty soothin’, them fashionable calls; sorter knocks the old camp dust outer a fellow, and sets him up again.”

It would have been well if the new life of the Devil’s Ford had shown no other irregularity than the harmless eccentricities of its original locaters. But the news of its sudden fortune, magnified by report, began presently to flood the settlement with another class of adventurers. A tide of waifs, strays, and malcontents of old camps along the river began to set towards Devil’s Ford, in very much the same fashion as the debris, drift, and alluvium had been carried down in bygone days and cast upon its banks. A few immigrant wagons, diverted from the highways of travel by the fame of the new diggings, halted upon the slopes of Devil’s Spur and on the arid flats of the Ford, and disgorged their sallow freight of alkali-poisoned, prematurely-aged women and children and maimed and fever-stricken men. Against this rude form of domesticity were opposed the chromo-tinted dresses and extravagant complexions of a few single unattended women—happily seen more often at night behind gilded bars than in the garish light of day—and an equal number of pale-faced, dark-moustached, well-dressed, and suspiciously idle men. A dozen rivals of Thompson’s Saloon had sprung up along the narrow main street. There were two new hotels— one a “Temperance House,” whose ascetic quality was confined only to the abnegation of whiskey—a rival stage office, and a small one-storied building, from which the “Sierran Banner” fluttered weekly, for “ten dollars a year, in advance.” Insufferable in the glare of a Sabbath sun, bleak, windy, and flaring in the gloom of a Sabbath night, and hopelessly depressing on all days of the week, the First Presbyterian Church lifted its blunt steeple from the barrenest area of the flats, and was hideous! The civic improvements so enthusiastically contemplated by the five millionaires in the earlier pages of this veracious chronicle—the fountain, reservoir, town-hall, and free library—had not yet been erected. Their sites had been anticipated by more urgent buildings and mining works, unfortunately not considered in the sanguine dreams of the enthusiasts, and, more significant still, their cost and expense had been also anticipated by the enormous outlay of their earnings in the work upon Devil’s Ditch.

Nevertheless, the liberal fulfilment of their promise in the new house in the suburbs blinded the young girls’ eyes to their shortcomings in the town. Their own remoteness and elevation above its feverish life kept them from the knowledge of much that was strange, and perhaps disturbing to their equanimity. As they did not mix with the immigrant women—Miss Jessie’s good-natured intrusion into one of their half-nomadic camps one day having been met with rudeness and suspicion—they gradually fell into the way of trusting the responsibility of new acquaintances to the hands of their original hosts, and of consulting them in the matter of local recreation. It thus occurred that one day the two girls, on their way to the main street for an hour’s shopping at the Villa de Paris and Variety Store, were stopped by Dick Mattingly a few yards from their house, with the remark that, as the county election was then in progress, it would be advisable for them to defer their intention for a few hours. As he did not deem it necessary to add that two citizens, in the exercise of a freeman’s franchise, had been supplementing their ballots with bullets, in front of an admiring crowd, they knew nothing of that accident that removed from Devil’s Ford an entertaining stranger, who had only the night before partaken of their hospitality.

A week or two later, returning one morning from a stroll in the forest, Christie and Jessie were waylaid by George Kearney and Fairfax, and, under pretext of being shown a new and romantic trail, were diverted from the regular path. This enabled Mattingly and Maryland Joe to cut down the body of a man hanged by the Vigilance Committee a few hours before on the regular trail, and to remonstrate with the committee on the incompatibility of such exhibitions with a maidenly worship of nature.

“With the whole county to hang a man in,” expostulated Joe, “you might keep clear of Carr’s woods.”

It is needless to add that the young girls never knew of this act of violence, or the delicacy that kept them in ignorance of it. Mr. Carr was too absorbed in business to give heed to what he looked upon as a convulsion of society as natural as a geological upheaval, and too prudent to provoke the criticism of his daughters by comment in their presence.

An equally unexpected confidence, however, took its place. Mr. Carr having finished his coffee one morning, lingered a moment over his perfunctory paternal embraces, with the awkwardness of a preoccupied man endeavoring by the assumption of a lighter interest to veil another abstraction.

“And what are we doing to-day, Christie?” he asked, as Jessie left the dining-room.

“Oh, pretty much the usual thing—nothing in particular. If George Kearney gets the horses from the summit, we’re going to ride over to Indian Spring to picnic. Fairfax—Mr. Munroe—I always forget that man’s real name in this dreadfully familiar country—well, he’s coming to escort us, and take me, I suppose—that is, if Kearney takes Jessie.”

“A very nice arrangement,” returned her father, with a slight nervous contraction of the corners of his mouth and eyelids to indicate mischievousness. “I’ve no doubt they’ll both be here. You know they usually are—ha! ha! And what about the two Mattinglys and Philip Kearney, eh?” he continued; “won’t they be jealous?”

“It isn’t their turn,” said Christie carelessly; “besides, they’ll probably be there.”

“And I suppose they’re beginning to be resigned,” said Carr, smiling.

“What on earth are you talking of, father?”

She turned her clear brown eyes upon him, and was regarding him with such manifest unconsciousness of the drift of his speech, and, withal, a little vague impatience of his archness, that Mr. Carr was feebly alarmed. It had the