Chapter V: Part 5

Many years have passed since Marshal Furgeson stood those seven Slaves of the Magic Tree in line before the calaboose door and made them surrender the feathered cork apple-stealers and the sacred chicken hooks. In those years many terrors have ridden the boys who have gone out into the world to fight its dragons and grapple with its gorgons; but never have those boys felt any happiness so sweet as that which rested on their hearts when they heard the Marshal say, "Now you boys run on home--but mind you if I ever----" and he never did--except Joe Nevison. Once it was for boring a hole in the depot platform and tapping a barrel of cider; once it was for going through a window in the Hustler hardware store and taking a box of pocketknives and two revolvers, with which to reward his gang, and finally, when the boy was in the midst of his teens, for breaking into the schoolhouse and burning the books. Joe's father always bought him off, as fathers always can buy boys off, when mothers go to the offended person and promise, and beg, and weep. So Joe Nevison grew up the town bad boy--defiant of law, reckless and unrestrained, with the blood of border ruffianism in his veins and the scorn of God and man and the love of sin in his heart. The week after he left town, and before he was twenty, his father paid for "Red" Martin's grey race horse, which disappeared the night Joe's bed was found empty. In those days the Nevisons had more money than most of the people in our town, but as the years went by they began to lose their property, and it was said that it went in great slices to Joe, to keep him out of the penitentiary.

We knew that Joe Nevison was in the West. People from our town, who seem to swarm over the earth, wrote back that they had met Joe in Dodge City, in Leoti, in No-Man's-Land, in Texas, in Arizona--wherever there was trouble. Sometimes he was the hired bad man of a desert town, whose business it was to shoot terror into the hearts of disturbers from rival towns; sometimes he was a free lance--living the devil knows how--always dressed like a fashion-plate of the plains in high-heeled boots, wide felt hat, flowing necktie, flannel shirt and velvet trousers. They say that he did not gamble more than was common among the sporting men of his class, and that he never worked. Sometimes we heard of him adventuring as a land dealer, sometimes as a cattleman, sometimes as a mining promoter, sometimes as a horseman, but always as the sharper, who rides on the crest of the forward wave of civilization, leaving a town when it tears down its tents and puts up brick buildings, and then appearing in the next canvas community, wherein the night is filled with music, and the cares that infest the day are drowned in bad whiskey or winked out with powder and shot. And thus Joe Nevison closed his twenties--a desert scorpion, outcast by society and proud of it. As he passed into his thirties he left the smoky human crystals that formed on the cow trails and at the mountain gold camps. Cripple Creek became too effete for him, and an electric light in a tent became a target he could not resist; wherefore he went into the sage brush and the short grass, seeking others of his kind, the human rattlesnake, the ranging coyote and the outlawed wolf. Joe Nevison rode with the Dalton gang, raided ranches and robbed banks with the McWhorters and held up stages as a lone highwayman. At least, so men said in the West, though no one could prove it, and at the opening of Lawton he appeared at the head of a band of cutthroats, who were herded out of town by the deputy United States marshals before noon of the first day. Not until popular government was established could they get in to open their skin-game, which was better and safer for them than ordinary highway faring. At Lawton our people saw Joe and he asked about the home people, asked about the boys--the old boys he called them--and becoming possessed of a post-office address, Joe wrote a long letter to George Kirwin, the foreman of our office. We call him old George, because he is still under forty. Joe being in an expansive mood, and with more money on his clothes than he cared for, sent old George ten dollars to pay for a dollar Joe had borrowed the day he left town in the eighties. We printed Joe's letter in our paper, and it pleased his mother. That was the beginning of a regular correspondence between the rover and the home-stayer. George Kirwin, gaunt, taciturn, and hard-working, had grown out of the dreamy, story-loving boy who had been one of the Slaves of the Magic Tree and into a shy old bachelor who wept over "East Lynne" whenever it came to the town opera house, and asked for a lay-off only when Modjeska appeared in Topeka, or when there was grand opera at Kansas City. But he ruled the back office with an iron hand and superintended the Mission Sunday-School across the track, putting all his spare money into Christmas presents for his pupils. After that first letter that came from Joe Nevison, no one had a hint of what passed between the two men. But a month never went by that Joe's letter missed. When Lawton began to wane, Joe Nevison seemed to mend his wayward course. He moved to South McAlester and opened a faro game--a square game they said it was--for the Territory! This meant that unless Joe was hard up every man had his chance before the wheel. Old George took the longest trip of his life, when we got him a pass to South McAlester and he put on his black frock coat and went to visit Joe. All that we learned from him was that Joe "had changed a good deal," and that he was "taking everything in the drug store, from the big green bottle at the right of the front door clear around past the red prescription case, and back to the big blue bottle at the left of the door." But after George came home the Mission Sunday-School began to thrive. George was not afraid of tainted money, and the school got a new library, which included "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn," as well as "Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates" for the boys, and all the "Pansy" books for the girls. It was a quaint old lot of books, and George Kirwin was nearly a year getting it together. Also he bought a new stove for his Sunday-School room, and a lot of pictures for the church walls, among others "Wide Awake and Fast Asleep," "Simply to Thy Cross," and "The Old Oaken Bucket." He gave to the school a cabinet organ with more stops than most of the children could count.

A year ago a new reporter brought in this item: "Joseph Nevison, of South McAlester, I. T., is visiting his mother, Mrs. Julia Nevison, at 234 South Fifth Street."

We sent the reporter out for more about Joe Nevison and at noon George Kirwin hurried down to the little home below the tracks. From these two searchers after truth we learned that Joe Nevison's mother had brought him home from the Indian Territory mortally sick. Half-a-dozen of us who had played with him as boys went to see him that evening, and found a wan, haggard man with burned-out black eyes, lying in a clean white bed. He seemed to know each of us for a moment and spoke to us through his delirium in a tired, piping voice--like the voice of the little boy who had been our leader. He called us by forgotten nicknames, and he hummed at a tune that we had not heard for a score of years. Then he piped out "While the Landlubbers Lie Down Below, Below, Below," and followed that with "Green Grass Growing all Around, all Around," and that with the song about the "Tonga Islands," his voice growing into a clearer alto as he sang. His mother tried to quiet him, but he smiled his dead smile at her through his cindery eyes, shook his head and went on. When he had lain quiet for a moment, he turned to one of us and said: "Dock, I'm goin' up and dive off that stump--a back flip-flop--you dassent!" Pretty soon he seemed to come up snuffing and blowing and grinning and said, "Last man dressed got to chaw beef." Then he cried: "Dock's it--Dock's it; catch 'im, hold him--there he goes--duck him, strip him. O well, let him go if he's go'n' to cry. Say, boys, I wish you fellers'd come over t' my stick horse livery stable--honest I got the best hickory horse you ever see. Whoa, there--whoa now, I tell you. You Pilliken Dunlevy let me harness you; there, put it under your arm, and back of your neck--no I ain't go'n' to let you hold it--I'll jerk the tar out of you if you don't go. Whe-e-e that's the way to go, hol--hold on, whoa there. Back up. Let's go over to Jim's and run on his track. Say, Jim, I got the best little pacer in the country here--get up there, Pilliken," and he clucked and sawed his arms, and cracked an imaginary whip. When George came in, the face on the bed brightened and the treble voice said: "Hello Fatty--we've been waitin' for you. Now let's go on. What you got in your wagon--humph--bet it's a pumpkin. Did old Boswell chase you?" and then he laughed, and turned away from us. His trembling hands seemed to be fighting something from his face. "Bushes," whispered Enoch Haver, and then added, "Now he's climbing up the bank of the ravine." And we saw the lean hands on the bed clutch up the wall, and then the voice broke forth: "Me first--first up--get away from here, Dock--I said first," and we could see his hands climbing an imaginary tree.

His face glowed with the excitement of his delirium as he climbed, and then apparently catching his breath he rested before he called out: "I'm comin' down, clear the track for old Dan Tucker," and from the convulsive gripping of his hands and arms and the hysterical intake of his breath we who had seen Joe Nevison dive from the top of the old tree, from limb to limb to the bottom, knew what he was doing. His heart was thumping audibly when he finished, and we tried to calm him. For a while we all sat about him in silence--forgetting the walls that shut us in, and living with him in the open, Slaves of the Magic Tree. Then one by one we left and only George Kirwin stayed with the sick man.

Joe Nevison had lived a wicked life. He had been the friend and companion of vile men and the women whom such men choose, and they had lived lives such as we in our little town only read about--and do not understand. Yet all that night Joe Nevison roamed through the woods by the creek, a little child, and no word passed his lips that could have brought a hint of the vicious life that his manhood had known.

In that long night, while George Kirwin sat by his dying friend, listening to his babble, two men were in the genii's hands. They put off their years as a garment. Together they ran over the roofs of buildings on Main Street that have been torn down for thirty years; they played in barns and corncribs burned down so long ago that their very site is in doubt; they romped over prairies where now are elm-covered streets; and they played with boys and girls who have lain forgotten in little sunken graves for a quarter of a century, out on the hill; or they called from the four winds of heaven playmates who left our town at a time so remote that to the watcher by the bed it seemed ages ago. The games they played were of another day than this. When Joe began crying "Barbaree," he summoned a troop of ghosts, and the pack went scampering through the spectre town in the starlight; and when that game had tired him the voice began to chatter of "Slap-and-a-kick," and "Foot-and-a-half," and of "Rolly-poley," and of the ball games--"Scrub," and "Town-ball," and "Anteover," each old game conjuring up spirits from its own vasty deep until the room was full of phantoms and the watcher's memory ached with the sweet sorrow of old joys.

George Kirwin says that long after midnight Joe awakened from a doze, fumbling through the bedclothes, looking for something. Finally he complained that he could not find his mouth-harp. They tried to make him forget it, but when they failed, his mother went to the bureau and pulling open the lower drawer found a little varnished box; under the shaded lamp she brought out a sack of marbles, a broken bean-shooter, with whittled prongs, a Barlow knife, a tintype picture of a boy, and the mouth-organ. This she gave to the hands that fluttered about the face on the pillow. He began to play "The Mocking Bird," opening and shutting his bony hands to let the music rise and fall. When he closed that tune he played "O the Mistletoe Bough," and after that over and over again he played "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground." When he dropped the mouth-harp, he lay very still for a time, though his lips moved incessantly. The morning was coming, and he was growing weak. But when his voice came back they knew that he was far afield again; for he said, "Come on, fellers, let's set down here under the hill and rest. It's a long ways back." When he had rested he spoke up again, "Say, fellers, what'll we sing?" George tried him with a gospel hymn, but Joe would have none of it, and reviled the song and the singer after the fashion of boys. In a moment he exclaimed: "Here--listen to me. Let's sing this," and his alto voice came out uncertainly and faintly: "Wrap Me up in My Tarpaulin Jacket."

George Kirwin's rough voice joined the song and the mother listened and wept. Other old songs followed, but Joe Nevison, the man, never woke up. It was the little boy full of the poetry and sweetness of a child at play, the boy who had turned the poetry of his boyish soul into a life of adventure unchecked by moral restraint, whose eyes they closed that morning.

And George Kirwin explained to us when he came down to work that afternoon, that maybe the bad part of Joe Nevison's soul had shrivelled away during his sickness, instead of waiting for death. George told us that what made him sad was that a soul in which there was so much that might have been good had been stunted by life and was entering eternity with so little to show for its earthly journey.

When one considers it, one finds that Joe Nevison wasted his life most miserably. There was nothing to his credit to say in his obituary--no good deed to recount and there were many, many bad ones. Moreover, the sorrow and bitterness that he brought into his father's last days, and the shame that he put upon his mother, who lived to see his end, made it impossible for our paper to say of him any kind thing that would not have seemed maudlin.

Yet at Joe Nevison's funeral the old settlers, many of them broken in years and by trouble, gathered at the little wooden church in the hollow below the track, to see the last of him, though certainly not to pay him a tribute of respect. They remembered him as the little boy who had trudged up the hill to school when the old stone schoolhouse was the only stone building in town; they remembered him as he was in the days when he began to turn Marshal Furgeson's hair grey with wild pranks. They remembered the boy's childish virtues, and could feel the remorse that must at times have gnawed his heart. Also these old men and women knew of the devil of unbridled passion that the child's father had put into Joe's blood. And when he started down the broad road they had seen his track beyond him. So as the little gathering of old people filed through the church door and lined up on the sidewalk waiting for the mourners to come out, we heard through the crowd white haired men sighing: "Poor Joe; poor fellow." Can one hope that God's forgiveness will be fuller than that!

XIII

A Pilgrim in the Wilderness

A few years ago we were getting out a special edition of our paper, printed on book-paper, and filled with pictures of the old settlers, and we called it "the historical edition." In preparing the historical edition we had to confer with "Aunt" Martha Merrifield so often that George Kirwin, the foreman, who was kept trotting to her with proof-slips and copy for her to revise, remarked, as he was making up the last form of the troublesome edition, that, if the recording angel ever had a fire in his office, he could make up the record for our town from "Aunt" Martha's scrapbook. In that big, fat, crinkly-leafed book, she has pasted so many wedding notices and birth notices and death notices that one who reads the book wonders how so many people could have been born, married and died in a town of only ten thousand inhabitants. One evening, while the historical edition was growing, a reporter spent the evening with "Aunt" Martha. The talk drifted back to the early days, and "Aunt" Martha mentioned Balderson. To identify him she went to her scrapbook, and as she was turning the pages she said:

"In those days of the early seventies, before the railroad came, when the town awoke in the morning and found a newly arrived covered waggon near a neighbour's house, it always meant that kin had come. If at school that day the children from the house of visitation bragged about their relatives, expatiating upon the power and riches that they left back East, the town knew that the visitors were ordinary kin; but if the children from the afflicted household said little about the visitors and evidently tried to avoid telling just who they were, then the town knew that the strangers were poor kin--probably some of "his folks"; for it was well understood that the women in this town all came from high connections 'back East' in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. Newcomers sometimes wondered how such a galaxy of princesses and duchesses and ladyships happened to marry so far beneath their station.

"But the Dixons had no children, so when a covered waggon drove up to their place in the night, and a fussy, pussy little man with a dingy, stringy beard, appeared in the Dixons' back yard in the morning, looking after the horses hitched to the strange waggon; the town had to wait until the next week's issue of the _Statesman_ to get reliable news about their prospective fellow-citizen." With that "Aunt" Martha opened her scrapbook and read a clipping from the _Statesman_, under the head, "A Valuable Acquisition to Our City." It ran:

"It has been many months since we have been favoured with a call from so cultured and learned a gentleman as the Hon. Andoneran P. Balderson, late of Quito, Hancock County, Iowa, who has finally determined to settle in our midst. Cramped by the irritating conventionalities of an effete civilisation, Colonel Balderson comes among us for that larger freedom and wider horizon which his growing powers demand. He comes with the ripened experience of a jurist, a soldier, and a publicist, and, when transportation facilities have been completed between this and the Missouri River, Judge Balderson will bring to our little city his magnificent law library; but until then he will be found over the Elite Oyster Bay, where he will be glad to welcome clients and others.

"Having participated in the late War of the Rebellion, as captain in Company G of Colonel Jennison's famous and invincible army of the border, Colonel Balderson will give special attention to pension matters. He also will set to work to obtain a complete set of abstracts, and will be glad to give advice on real-estate law and the practice of eminent domain, to which subject he has given deep study. All business done with neatness and despatch.

"Before leaving Iowa, and after considerable pressure, Judge Balderson consented to act as agent for a number of powerful Eastern fire insurance companies, and has in contemplation the establishment of the Southwestern distributing point for the Multum in Parvo Farm Gate Company, of which corporation Colonel Balderson owns the patent right for Kansas. This business, however, he would be willing to dispose of to proper parties. Terms on application.

"The colonel desires us to announce that there will be a meeting of the veterans of the late war at the schoolhouse next Saturday night, for the purpose of organising a society to refresh and perpetuate the sacred memories of that gigantic struggle, and to rally around the old flag, touch shoulders again, and come into a closer fellowship for benevolent, social, and other purposes. The judge, on that occasion, will deliver his famous address on the 'Battle of Look Out Mountain,' in which battle Colonel Balderson participated as a member of an Iowa regiment. Admission free. Silver collection to defray necessary expenses."

Accompanying this article was a slightly worn woodcut of the colonel in his soldier garb, a cap with the top drawn forward, the visor low over his eyes, and a military overcoat thrown gaily back, exposing his shoulder. The picture showed the soldier in profile, with a fierce military moustache and a stubby, runty goatee, meant to strike terror to the civilian heart.

From "Aunt" Martha we learned that before Judge Balderson had been in town a week he had dyed his whiskers and had taken command of our forces in the county-seat war then brewing. During the judge's first month in the county the campaign for the county-seat election was opened, and he canvassed the north end of the county for our town, denouncing, with elaborate eloquence, as horse thieves, mendicants, and renegades from justice, the settlers in the south end of the county who favoured the rival town. The judge organised a military company and picketed the hills about our town day and night against a raid from the Southenders; and, having stirred public passion deeply, he turned his pickets loose on the morning of election day to set prairie fires all over the south end of the county to harass the settlers who might vote for the rival town and keep them away from the polls fighting fire.

Our people won; "the hell-hounds of disorder and anarchy"--as Judge Balderson called the rival townspeople--were "rebuked by the stern hand of a just and terrible Providence." Balderson was a hero, and our people sent him to the legislature. "Aunt" Martha added:

"He went to Topeka in his blue soldier clothes, his campaign hat, and brass buttons; but he came back, at the first recess, in diamonds and fine linen, and the town sniffed a little." Having learned this much of Balderson our office became interested in him, and a reporter was set to work to look up Balderson. The reporter found that according to Wilder's "Annals," Balderson hustled himself into the chairmanship of the railroad committee and became a power in the State. The next time Colonel "Alphabetical" Morrison came to the office he was asked for further details about Balderson. The Colonel told us that when the legislature finally adjourned, very proud and very drunk, in the bedlam of the closing hours, Judge Balderson mounted a desk, waved the Stars and Stripes, and told of the Battle of Look Out Mountain. Colonel Morrison chuckled as he added: "The next day the _State Journal_ printed his picture--the one with the slouching cap, the military moustache, the fierce goatee, and the devil-may-care cape--and referred to the judge as 'the silver-tongued orator of the Cottonwood,' a title which began to amuse the fellows around town."

Naturally he was a candidate for Congress. Colonel Morrison says that Balderson became familiarly known in State politics as Little Baldy, and was in demand at soldiers' meetings and posed as the soldier's friend.

Wilder's "Annals" records the fact that Balderson failed to go to Congress, but went to the State Senate. He waxed fat. We learned that he bought a private bank and all the books recording abstracts of title to land in his county, and that he affected a high silk hat when he went to Chicago, while his townsmen were inclined to eye him askance. The lack of three votes from his home precinct kept him from being nominated lieutenant-governor by his party, but Colonel Morrison says that Balderson soon took on the title of governor, and was unruffled by his defeat. The Colonel describes Balderson as assuming the air of a kind of sacred white cow, and putting much hair-oil and ointment and frankincense upon his carcass. Other old settlers say that in those days his dyed whiskers fairly glistened. And when, at State conventions, in the fervour of his passion he unbent, unbuttoned his frock-coat, grabbed the old flag, and charged up and down the platform in an oratorical frensy, it seemed that another being had emerged from the greasy little roll of adipose in which "Governor" Balderson enshrined himself. His climax was invariably the wavering battle-line upon the mountain, the flag tottering and about to fall, "when suddenly it rises and goes forward, up--up--up the hill, through the smoke of hell, and full and fair into the teeth of death, with ten thousand cheering, maddened soldiers behind it. And who carried that flag--who carried that flag?" he would scream, in a tremulous voice, repeating his question over and over, and then answer himself in tragic bass: "The little corporal of Company B!" And, "Who fell into the arms of victory that great day, with four wounds upon his body? The little corporal of Company B!" It is hardly necessary to add that Governor Balderson was the little corporal.

After the failure of his bank, when rumour accused him of burning the court-house that he might sell his abstracts to the county at a fabulous price, he called a public meeting to hear his defence, and repeated to his townsmen that query, "Who carried the flag?" adding in a hoarse whisper: "And yet--great God!--they say that the little corporal is an in-cen-di-ary. Was this great war fought in vain, that tr-e-e-sin should lift her hydra head to hiss out such blasphemy upon the boys who wore the blue?"

However, the evidence was against him, and as our people had long since lost interest in the flag-bearer, the committee gave him five minutes to leave. He returned three minutes in change and struck out over the hill towards the west, afoot, and the town knew him no more forever.

Where Balderson went after leaving town no one seems to know. The earth might have swallowed him up. But in 1882 someone sent a marked copy of the _Denver Tribune_ to the _Statesman_ office, the _Statesman_ reprinted it, and "Aunt" Martha filed it away in her book. Here is it:

"Big Burro Springs, Colorado, September 7th (Special).--Three men were killed yesterday in a fight between the men at Jingle-bob ranch and a surveying party under A. P. Balderson. The Balderson party consisted of four men, among whom was 'Rowdy' Joe Nevison, the famous marshal of Leoti, Kansas. They were locating a reservoir site which Balderson has taken up on Burro Creek for the Balderson Irrigation Company and for supplying the Look Out Townsite Company with water. These are Balderson's schemes, and, if established, will put the Jingle-bob ranch people out of business, as they have no title to the land on which they are operating. The remarkable part of the fight is that which Balderson took in it. After two of his men had been killed and the owner of the Jingle-bob ranch had fallen, Balderson and his two remaining men came forward with hands up, waving handkerchiefs. The Jingle-bob people recognised the flag of truce, and Balderson led his men across the creek to the cow-camp. Just as he approached close enough to the man who had the party covered, Balderson yelled, 'Watch out--back of you!' and, as all the captors turned their heads, Balderson knocked the pistol from the hand of the only man whose weapon was pointed at the Balderson party, and the next moment the cow-men looked into the barrels of the surveyors' three revolvers, and were told that if they budged a hair they would be killed. Balderson then disarmed the cow-men, and, after passing around the drinks, hired the outfit as policemen for the town of Look Out. It is said that he has given them two thousand dollars apiece in Irrigation Company stock, has promised to defend them if they are charged with the murder of the two surveyors, and has given each cow-man a deed to a corner lot on the public square of the prospective Balderson town. Deputy Sheriff Crosby from this place went over to arrest Balderson, charged with killing D. V. Sherman of the Jingle-bob property, and, after asking for his warrant, Balderson took it, put it in his pocket, advised the deputy to hurry home, and, if he found any coyotes or jack-rabbits that couldn't get out of his way fast enough, not to stop to kill them, but shoo them off the trail and save time."

They say in Colorado that Balderson became an irrigation king. It is certain that he raised half a million dollars in New York for his dam and ditches. He built the "Look Out Opera House," and decorated it in gilded stucco and with red plush two inches deep. Morrison contributed this anecdote to the office Legend of Balderson: "He was in Florida in his private car when they finished the opera house. When he came back and saw a plaster bust of Shakespeare over the proscenium arch, he waved his cane pompously and exclaimed: 'Take her down! Bill Shakespeare is all right for the effete East, but out here he ain't deuce high with the little corporal of Company B.'" So in Shakespeare's niche is a plaster-cast of a soldier's face with the slouch-cap, the military moustache, and the goatee of great pride, after the picture that once adorned the columns of the _Statesman_. For a time they talked of Balderson for United States Senator, and, at the laying of the corner-stone of the capitol, the Denver papers spoke of the masterly oration of former Governor Balderson of Kansas, whose marvellous word-painting of the Battle of Look Out Mountain held the vast audience spellbound for an hour. A few months later a cloudburst carried away the Big Burro dam, and times went bad, and the stockholders in Balderson's company, who would have rebuilt the dam, could not find Balderson when they needed him, and certain creditors of the company, hitherto unknown, appeared, and Balderson faded away like a morning star.

Here is a part of the narrative that George Kirwin got from Joe Nevison: Joe began with the coal strike at Castle Rock, Wyoming, in 1893, when the strikers massed on Flat Top Mountain and day after day went through their drill. He told a highly dramatic story of the stoutish little man of fifty-five, with a fat, smooth-shaven face, who pounded that horde of angry men into some semblance of military order. All day the little man, in his shrunken seersucker coat and greasy white hat, would bark orders at the men, march and counter-march them, and go through the manual of arms, backward and forward and seven hands round. When the battle with the militia came, the strikers charged down Flat Top and fought bravely. The little man in the seersucker coat stayed with them, snapping orders at them, damning them, coaxing them. And when the deputies gathered up the strikers for the trial in court two months later, the little man was still there. He was prospecting on a gopher-hole somewhere up in the hills, and was trying to get his wildcat mine listed on the Salt Lake Mining Exchange. No one gave bond for the little man in the seersucker coat, and he went to jail. He was Balderson. He seemed to give little heed to the trial, and sat with the strikers rather stolidly. Venire after venire of jurymen was gone through. At last an old man wearing a Loyal Legion button went into the jury-box. Balderson saw him; they exchanged recognising glances, and Balderson turned scarlet and looked away quickly. He nudged an attorney for the strikers and said: "Keep him, whatever you do."

After the evidence was all in and the attorneys were about to make their arguments, Balderson and one of the lawyers for the strikers were alone.

"They told me to take the part about you, Balderson; you were in the Union Army, weren't you?"

Balderson looked at the floor and said:

"Yes; but don't say anything about it."

The lawyer, who knew Balderson's record, was astonished. He had made his whole speech up on the line that Balderson as an old soldier would appeal to the sympathies of the jury. Over and over the lawyer pressed Balderson to know why nothing should be said of his soldier record, and finally in exasperation the lawyer broke out:

"Lookee here, Baldy; you're too old to get coy. I'm going to make my speech as I've mapped it out, soldier racket and all. I guess you've taken enough trips up Look Out Mountain to get used to the altitude by this time."

The lawyer started away, but Balderson grabbed him and pulled him back. "Don't do it; for God's sake, don't do it! There's a fellow on that jury that's a G. A. R. man; we were soldiers together; he knows me from away back. Talk of Iowy; talk of Kansas; talk of anything on God's green earth, but don't talk soldier. That man would wade through hell for me neck deep on any other basis than that." Balderson's voice was quivering. He added: "But don't talk soldier." Balderson slumped, with his head in his hands. The attorney snapped at him:

"Weren't you a soldier?"

"Yes; oh, yes," Balderson sighed.

"Didn't you go up Look Out Mountain?"

"Oh, yes--that, too."

There was a silence between the men. The lawyer rasped it with, "Well, what then?"

"Well--well," and the tousled little man sighed so deeply his sigh was almost a sob, and lifted up the eyes of a whipped dog to the lawyer's--"after that I got in the commissary department--and--and--was dishonourably discharged." He rubbed his eyes with his fingers a moment and then grinned foxily: "Ain't that enough?"

Roosevelt is a mining-camp in Idaho. It is five days from a morning paper, and the camp is new. It is a log town with one street and no society, except such as may gather around the big box-stove at Johnnie Conyer's saloon. A number of ladies and two women lived in the camp, a few tin-horn "gents," and about two hundred men. It is a seven months' snow-camp, where men take their drama canned in the phonograph, their food canned, their medicine all out of one bottle, and their morals "without benefit of clergy." Across the front of one of the canvas-covered log store-rooms that fringe the single street a cloth sign is stretched. It reads, "Department Store," and inside a dance hall, a saloon, and a gambling-place are operating. A few years ago, when Colonel Alphabetical Morrison was travelling through the West on a land deal for John Markley, business took him to Roosevelt, and he found Balderson, grey of beard, shiny of pate, with unkempt, ratty back hair; he was watery-eyed, and his red-veined skin had slipped down from his once fat face into draperies over his lean neck and jowls. He was in the dealer's chair, running the game.

The statute of limitations had covered all his Kansas misdeeds, and he nodded affably as his old acquaintance came in. Later in the day the two men went to Mrs. Smith's boarding-house to take a social bite. They sat in front of the log-house in the evening, Balderson mellow and reminiscent.

"Seems to me this way: I ain't cut out for society as it is organised. I do all right in a town until the piano begins to get respectable and the rules of order are tucked snugly inside the decalogue, then I slip my belt, and my running gear doesn't track. I get a few grand and noble thoughts, freeze to 'em, and later find that the hereditary appurtenances thereunto appertaining are private property of someone else, and there is nothing for me to do but to stand a lawsuit or vanish. I have had bad luck, lost my money, lost my friends, lost my conscience, lost everything, pretty near"--and here he turned his watery eyes on his friend with a saw-toothed smile and shook his depleted abdomen, that had been worn off climbing many hills--"I've lost everything, pretty near, but my vermiform appendix and my table of contents, and as like as not I'll find some feller's got them copyrighted." He heaved a great sigh and resumed, "I suppose I could 'a' stood it all well enough if I had just had some sort of faith, some religious consolation, some creed, or god, or something." He sighed again, and then leered up: "But, you know--I'm so damned skeptic!"

Last spring, according to the Boise, Idaho, papers, "Governor" Balderson and two other old soldiers celebrated Memorial Day in Roosevelt. They got a muslin flag as big as the flap of a shirt, from heaven knows where, and in the streets of Roosevelt they hoisted this flag on the highest pine pole in all the Salmon River Mountains. There were elaborate ceremonies, and to the miners and gamblers and keepers of wildcat mines in the mountains assembled, "Governor" Balderson told eloquently of the Battle of Look Out Mountain. And Colonel Morrison who read the account smiled appreciatively and pointed out to us the exact stage in the proceedings where Balderson demanded to know who carried the flag. There was long and tumultuous applause at the climax.

We also read in the Boise papers that at the fall election in Roosevelt they made Balderson justice of the peace, which, as Colonel Morrison explained, was a purely honorary office in a community where every man is his own court and constable and jury and judge; but the Colonel said that Balderson was proud of official distinction, and probably levied mild tribute from the people who indulged in riotous living, by compelling them to buy drink-checks redeemable only at his department store.

It was from the Boise papers that we had the final word from Balderson. A message came to Roosevelt this spring that an outfit, thirty miles away at the head of Profile Creek, was sick and starving. It was a dangerous trip to the rescue, for snowslides were booming on every southern hillside. Death would literally play tag with the man who dared to hit the trail for Profile. Balderson did not hesitate a moment, but filled his pack with provisions, put a marked deck and some loaded dice in his pocket, and waved Roosevelt a cheery good-by as he struck out over the three logs that bridge Mule Creek. He was bundled to the chin in warm coats, and on his way met Hot Foot Higgins coming in from Profile. Balderson seems to have given Higgins his warmest coat before the snow-slide hit them. It killed them both. Hot Foot died instantly, but Balderson must have lived many hours, for the snow about his body was melted and in his pocket they found Hot Foot's watch.

They buried him near the trail where they found him, and, stuck in a candle-box, over the heap of stones above him, flutters lonesomely in the desolation of the mountain-side the little muslin rag that was once a flag. They call the hill on which he sleeps "Look Out Mountain."

Late this spring the mail brought to the office of the Boise _Capital-News_ a battered woodcut half a century old. When the _News_ came to our office we saw the familiar soldier's face in profile, with a cap drawn over the eyes, with a waving moustache and a fierce goatee, and across the shoulders of the figure a military cape thrown back jauntily. With the old cut in the Boise paper was an article which the editor says in a note was written in a young woman's angular handwriting, done in pencil on wrapping-paper. The article told, in spelling unspeakable, of the greatness and goodness of "Ex-Governor Balderson of Kansas." It related that he was ever the "friend to the friendless"; that, "with all his worldly honours, he was modest and unassuming"; that "he had his faults, as who of us have not," but that he was "honest, tried and true"; and the memorial closed with the words: "Heaven's angel gained is Roosevelt's hero lost."

XIV

The Passing of Priscilla Winthrop

What a dreary waste life in our office must have been before Miss Larrabee came to us to edit a society page for the paper! To be sure we had known in a vague way that there were lines of social cleavage in the town; that there were whist clubs and dancing clubs and women's clubs, and in a general way that the women who composed these clubs made up our best society, and that those benighted souls beyond the pale of these clubs were out of the caste. We knew that certain persons whose names were always handed in on the lists of guests at parties were what we called "howling swells." But it remained for Miss Larrabee to sort out ten or a dozen of these "howling swells" who belonged to the strictest social caste in town, and call them "howling dervishes." Incidentally it may be said that both Miss Larrabee and her mother were dervishes, but that did not prevent her from making sport of them. From Miss Larrabee we learned that the high priestess of the howling dervishes of our society was Mrs. Mortimer Conklin, known by the sisterhood of the mosque as Priscilla Winthrop. We in our office had never heard her called by that name, but Miss Larrabee explained, rather elaborately, that unless one was permitted to speak of Mrs. Conklin thus, one was quite beyond the hope of a social heaven.

In the first place, Priscilla Winthrop was Mrs. Conklin's maiden name; in the second place, it links her with the Colonial Puritan stock of which she is so justly proud--being scornful of mere Daughters of the Revolution--and finally, though Mrs. Conklin is a grandmother, her maiden name seems to preserve the sweet, vague illusion of girlhood which Mrs. Conklin always carries about her like the shadow of a dream. And Miss Larrabee punctuated this with a wink which we took to be a quotation mark, and she went on with her work. So we knew we had been listening to the language used in the temple.

Our town was organised fifty years ago by Abolitionists from New England, and twenty years ago, when Alphabetical Morrison was getting out one of the numerous boom editions of his real estate circular, he printed an historical article therein in which he said that Priscilla Winthrop was the first white child born on the town site. Her father was territorial judge, afterward member of the State Senate, and after ten years spent in mining in the far West, died in the seventies, the richest man in the State. It was known that he left Priscilla, his only child, half a million dollars in government bonds.

She was the first girl in our town to go away to school. Naturally, she went to Oberlin, famous in those days for admitting coloured students. But she finished her education at Vassar, and came back so much of a young lady that the town could hardly contain her. She married Mortimer Conklin, took him to the Centennial on a wedding trip, came home, rebuilt her father's house, covering it with towers and minarets and steeples, and scroll-saw fretwork, and christened it Winthrop Hall. She erected a store building on Main Street, that Mortimer might have a luxurious office on the second floor, and then settled down to the serious business of life, which was building up a titled aristocracy in a Kansas town.

The Conklin children were never sent to the public schools, but had a governess, yet Mortimer Conklin, who was always alert for the call, could not understand why the people never summoned him to any office of honour or trust. He kept his brass signboard polished, went to his office punctually every morning at ten o'clock, and returned home to dinner at five, and made clients wait ten minutes in the outer office before they could see him--at least so both of them say, and there were no others in all the years. He shaved every day, wore a frock-coat and a high hat to church--where for ten years he was the only male member of the Episcopalian flock--and Mrs. Conklin told the women that altogether he was a credit to his sex and his family--a remark which was passed about ribaldly in town for a dozen years, though Mortimer Conklin never knew that he was the subject of a town joke. Once he rebuked a man in the barber shop for speaking of feminine extravagance, and told the shop that he did not stint his wife, that when she asked him for money he always gave it to her without question, and that if she wanted a dress he told her to buy it and send the bill to him. And we are such a polite people that no one in the crowded shop laughed--until Mortimer Conklin went out.

Of course at the office we have known for twenty-five years what the men thought of Mortimer, but not until Miss Larrabee joined the force did we know that among the women Mrs. Conklin was considered an oracle. Miss Larrabee said that her mother has a legend that when Priscilla Winthrop brought home from Boston the first sealskin sacque ever worn in town she gave a party for it, and it lay in its box on the big walnut bureau in the spare room of the Conklin mansion in solemn state, while seventy-five women salaamed to it. After that Priscilla Winthrop was the town authority on sealskins. When any member of the town nobility had a new sealskin, she took it humbly to Priscilla Winthrop to pass judgment upon it. If Priscilla said it was London-dyed, its owner pranced away on clouds of glory; but if she said it was American-dyed, its owner crawled away in shame, and when one admired the disgraced garment, the martyred owner smiled with resigned sweetness and said humbly: "Yes--but it's only American-dyed, you know."

No dervish ever questioned the curse of the priestess. The only time a revolt was imminent was in the autumn of 1884 when the Conklins returned from their season at Duxbury, Massachusetts, and Mrs. Conklin took up the carpets in her house, heroically sold all of them at the second-hand store, put in new waxed floors and spread down rugs. The town uprose and hooted; the outcasts and barbarians in the Methodist and Baptist Missionary Societies rocked the Conklin home with their merriment, and ten dervishes with set faces bravely met the onslaughts of the savages; but among themselves in hushed whispers, behind locked doors, the faithful wondered if there was not a mistake some place. However, when Priscilla Winthrop assured them that in all the best homes in Boston rugs were replacing carpets, their souls were at peace.

All this time we at the office knew nothing of what was going on. We knew that the Conklins devoted considerable time to society; but Alphabetical Morrison explained that by calling attention to the fact that Mrs. Conklin had prematurely grey hair. He said a woman with prematurely grey hair was as sure to be a social leader as a spotted horse is to join a circus. But now we know that Colonel Morrison's view was a superficial one, for he was probably deterred from going deeper into the subject by his dislike for Mortimer Conklin, who invested a quarter of a million dollars of the Winthrop fortune in the Wichita boom, and lost it. Colonel Morrison naturally thought as long as Conklin was going to lose that money he could have lost it just as well at home in the "Queen City of the Prairies," giving the Colonel a chance to win. And when Conklin, protecting his equities in Wichita, sent a hundred thousand dollars of good money after the quarter million of bad money, Colonel Morrison's grief could find no words; though he did find language for his wrath. When the Conklins draped their Oriental rugs for airing every Saturday over the veranda and portico railings of the house front, Colonel Morrison accused the Conklins of hanging out their stamp collection to let the neighbours see it. This was the only side of the rug question we ever heard in our office until Miss Larrabee came; then she told us that one of the first requirements of a howling dervish was to be able to quote from Priscilla Winthrop's Rug book from memory. The Rug book, the China book and the Old Furniture book were the three sacred scrolls of the sect.

All this was news to us. However, through Colonel Morrison, we had received many years ago another sidelight on the social status of the Conklins. It came out in this way: Time honoured custom in our town allows the children of a home where there is an outbreak of social revelry, whether a church festival or a meeting of the Cold-Nosed Whist Club, to line up with the neighbour children on the back stoop or in the kitchen, like human vultures, waiting to lick the ice-cream freezer and to devour the bits of cake and chicken salad that are left over. Colonel Morrison told us that no child was ever known to adorn the back yard of the Conklin home while a social cataclysm was going on, but that when Mrs. Morrison entertained the Ladies' Literary League, children from the holy Conklin family went home from his back porch with their faces smeared with chicken croquettes and their hands sticky with jellycake.

This story never gained general circulation in town, but even if it had been known of all men it would not have shaken the faith of the devotees. For they did not smile when Priscilla Winthrop began to refer to old Frank Hagan, who came to milk the Conklin cow and curry the Conklin horse, as "Francois, the man," or to call the girl who did the cooking and general housework "Cosette, the maid," though every one of the dozen other women in town whom "Cosette, the maid" had worked for knew that her name was Fanny Ropes. And shortly after that the homes of the rich and the great over on the hill above Main Street began to fill with Lisettes and Nanons and Fanchons, and Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington called her girl "Grisette," explaining that they had always had a Grisette about the house since her mother first went to housekeeping in Peoria, Illinois, and it sounded so natural to hear the name that they always gave it to a new servant. This story came to the office through the Young Prince, who chuckled over it during the whole hour he consumed in writing Ezra Worthington's obituary.