Read Ebook: Treasure and Trouble Therewith: A Tale of California by Bonner Geraldine

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 2167 lines and 109902 words, and 44 pages

First it was his youth in the Southwest when he had been Tom Michaels, a miner, well paid, saving his wages. Then his marriage with Juana Ramirez, the half-breed girl at Deming, and the bit of land he had bought--with a mortgage to pay--in the glaring, green river valley. Glimpses of their life there, children and work--stupefying, tremendous work--to keep them going and to meet the interest; he had been a giant in those days.

And even so he hadn't been able to do it. Six years after they took possession they moved out, ruined. He remembered it as if it had been yesterday--the adobe house with its flat roof and strings of red peppers hanging on the walls, the cart piled high with furniture, Juana on the front seat and Pancha astride of the mule. Juana had grown old in those six years, fat and shapeless, but she had been dog-loyal, dog-loving, his woman. Never a word of complaint out of her--even when the two children died she had just covered her head with the blanket and sat by the hearth, stoical, dry-eyed, silent.

He could see now that it was his dream of making money--big money--that had been wrong. If he'd been content with a wage and a master he'd have done better by her, but from the start he'd wanted his freedom, balked at being roped and branded with the herd. That was why he drifted back to mining, not a steady job, though he could have got it, but as a prospector, leaving Arizona and moving to California. There were years of it; he knew the mineral belt from the Panamint mountains to the Kootenai country. Juana and Pancha plodded from town to town, seeing him at intervals, always expecting to hear he'd struck "the ledge," and be hardly able to scrape a living for them from the bottom of his pan.

One picture stood out clearer than the rest, ineffaceable, to be carried to his grave--the day he came back and heard that Juana was dead. He had left them at a place in Inyo, a scattering of houses on the edge of the desert. Pancha saw him coming, and her figure, racing to meet him in a blown flutter of cotton skirt, was as plain before his eyes as if she were running toward him now along the shining water path. She was twelve, brown as a nut, and scarecrow-thin, with a tangle of black hair, and narrow, dark eyes. He could recall the feel of her little hard hand inside his as she told him, excited at imparting such news, pushing the hair off her dirty face to see how he took it.

It had crushed the heart in him and some upholding principle of hope and resolution broke. He found a place for Pancha with Maria Lopez, the Mexican woman who ran the Buon Gusto restaurant at Bakersfield and agreed to look after the girl for pay. Then he went back to the open, not caring much, the springs of his soul gone dry. He had no energy for the old life and did other things, anything to make his own food and Pancha's keep--herded sheep, helped on the cattle ranges, tended store, hung on the fringes of the wilderness, saw men turn to savages and turned himself.

At long intervals he went down to the settlements and saw Pancha, growing into a gawky girl, headstrong, and with the wildness of her mother's people cropping out. She hated Maria Lopez and the work in the restaurant and wanted him to take her to the mountains. When she was sixteen a spell of illness laid him up and after that he had difficulty in getting work. Two months passed without a payment and when he finally got down to Bakersfield he found that Pancha had gone, run away with a traveling company of actors. Maria Lopez and he had a fight, raged at one another in mutual fury, and then he started out to find his girl, not knowing when he did what he would do with her.

She solved that problem; she insisted on staying with the actors. She liked the life, she could sing, they told her she had a future. She had fixed and settled everything, even to her name; she would retain that of Lopez, which she was already known by in Bakersfield. There was nothing for it but to let her have her way; a man without home, money or prospects has no authority. But the sense of his own failure, of the hopelessness of his desire to shelter and enrich her, fell on his conscience like a foot on a spark and crushed it out. He returned to the mountains, his hand against all men, already an outlaw, love for his own all that was left of the original man. That governed him, gave him the will to act, stimulated his brain, and lent his mind an unfailing cunning. The meeting with Knapp crystallized into a partnership, but when Garland the bandit rose on the horizon, no one, least of all Pancha, knew he was Michaels the miner.

He stood up in the boat and again reconnoitered; he was near the shore. The country slept under the stars, gray rollings of hills and black blotches of trees, very still in its somber repose. Dropping back to the seat, he plied the paddle with extraordinary softness, wary, listening, alert. Soon, in a week or two, if he could settle the sale, he would be on his way to San Francisco to tell Pancha he had sold his claim at last and had bought the ranch. Under his caution the pleasure of this thought pervaded him with an exquisite satisfaction. He could not forbear its indulgence and, leaning on the paddle, allowed himself a last, delightful vision--the ranch house piazza with Pancha--her make-up off--sitting on the steps at his feet.

That night he slept in the cowshed of an abandoned ranch. A billet of wood under his head, his repose was deep and dreamless, but in the dawn's light he woke, suddenly called out of slumber by a thought. It floated on the surface of his conciousness, vaguely disturbing, then took slow shape and he sat up feeling in the pockets of his coat. The paper was gone; Knapp saying he had taken it was not a dream. For a space he sat, coming to clearer recollection, his partner's voice calling, vaguely heard, its request unheeded in his preoccupation. He gave a mutter of relief, and dropping back settled himself into comfort. The paper was as safe there as in his own pocket and he'd have it again inside of a week. With the first light in his eyes, he lapsed off again for another hour.

MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE

A few miles below where the stage was held up a branch road breaks from the main highway and cuts off at right angles across the plain. This is a ranchers' road. If you follow it southward you come to the region of vast holdings, acres of trees in parallel lines as straight as if laid with a tape measure, great, fawn-colored fields, avenues of palm and oleander leading to white houses where the balconies have striped awnings and people sit in cushioned wicker chairs.

The other end of it runs through lands of decreasing cultivation till--after it passes Tito Murano's cottage--it dips to the tules and that's the end of it. To be sure, a trail--a horse path--breaks away and makes a detour round the head of the marshes, but this is seldom used, a bog in winter and in summer riven with dried water-courses and overgrown with brambles. To get around the tules comfortably you have to strike farther in and that's a long way.

The last house before you get to Tito Murano's, which doesn't count, is the Burrage Ranch. In the white mansions among the fruit trees the Burrage Ranch doesn't count much either. It is old and small, fifty acres, a postage stamp of a ranch. There is no avenue to the house, which is close to the road behind a picket fence, and instead of encircling balconies and striped awnings, it has one small porch with a sagging top, over which climbs a rose that stretches long festoons to the gable. In its yard grow two majestic live oaks, hoary giants with silvered limbs reaching out in a thick-leaved canopy and casting a great spread of shade.

Mark's advent had followed the decease of two older boys and his mother had proclaimed his preciousness by christening him Marquis de Lafayette. Her other sons had borne the undistinguished appellations of relatives, but this one, her consolation and her Benjamin, would be decked with the flower of her fancy. Of the original bearer of the name she knew nothing. Waiting on table at the Golden Nugget and later bearing children and helping on the ranch had not left her time for historical study. When her son, waking to the blight she had so innocently put upon him, asked her where she had found the name, she had answered, "In a book," but beyond that could give no data. When, unable to bear his shame, he had abbreviated it to "Mark D.L." she had been hurt.

Otherwise he had not disappointed her. When she had crowned him with a title she had felt that a high destiny awaited him and the event proved it. After a youth on the ranch, Mark, at sixteen, grew restive, at seventeen announced that he wanted an education and at eighteen packed his grip and went to work his way through Stanford University. Old Man Burrage made himself a bore at the crossroads store and the county fair telling how his boy was waiting on table down to Stanford and doing typewriting nights. Some boy, that!

Now Mark had graduated and was studying in a large law office in San Francisco. He was paid twenty dollars a week, was twenty-four years old, rather silent, five-feet-ten and accounted good-looking. At the time this story opens he was spending his vacation--pushed on to the summer's end by a pressure of work in the office--on the ranch with his parents.

It was late afternoon, on the day following the holdup, and he was sitting in the barn doorway milking the brown cow. The doorway was shadowed, the blackness of the barn's interior behind it, the scent of clean hay drifting out and mingling with the scents of baked earth and tarweed that came from the heated fields. With his cheek against the cow's side he could see between the lower limbs of the oaks the country beyond, rust-colored and tan, streaked with blue shadows and the mottled blackness below the trees. Turning a little further he could look down the road with the eucalyptus tall on either side, the yellow path barred by their shade. From the house came a good smell of hot bread and a sound of voices--Mother and Sadie were getting ready for supper. At intervals Mother's face, red and round below her sleeked, gray hair, her spectacles up, her dress turned in at the neck, appeared at the window to take a refreshing peep at her boy milking the brown cow.

The milk sizzed and foamed in the pail and the milker, his forehead against the cow's warm pelt, watched it rise on the tin's side. It made a loud drumming which prevented his hearing a hail from the picket fence. The hail came again in a husky, dust-choked voice:

"Hello, can you give me a drink?"

This time Mark heard and wheeled on the stool. A tramp was leaning against the fence looking at him.

Tramps are too familiar in California for curiosity or interest, also they are unpopular. They have done dreadful things--lonely women in outlying farms have guns and dogs, the one loaded, the other cultivated in savagery against the visits of the hobo.

Mark rose unwelcoming, but the fellow did look miserable. He was gaunt and dirty, long ragged locks of hair falling below the brim of his torn straw hat, an unkempt straggle of beard growing up his cheeks. His clothes hung loose on his lean frame, and he looked all the same color, dust-brown, his hair, his shirt, his coat, even his face, the tan lying dark over a skin that was sallow. Only his eyes struck a different note. They were gray, very clear in the sun-burned face, the lids long and heavy. Their expression interested Mark; it was not the stone-hard, evil look of the outcast man, but one of an unashamed, smoldering resentment.

The same quality was in his manner. The request for water was neither fawningly nor piteously made. It was surly, a right churlishly demanded. Mark moved to the pump and filled the glass standing there. The tramp leaning on the pickets looked at him, his glance traveling morose over the muscular back and fine shoulders, the straight nape, the dark head with its crown of thick, coarse hair. As Mark advanced with the glass he continued his scrutiny, when, suddenly meeting the young man's eyes, his own shifted and he said in that husky voice, hoarse from a parched throat:

"It's the devil walking in the heat on these rotten dusty roads."

The other nodded and handed him the glass. He drained it, tilting his head till the sinews in his haggard throat showed below his beard. Then he handed it back with a muttered thanks.

"Been walking far?" said Mark.

The tramp moved away from the pickets, jerking his head toward the road behind him. For the first time Mark noticed that he had a basket on his arm, containing a folded blanket.

"From the fruit farms down there. I've been working my way up fruit picking. But it's a dog's job; better starve while you're about it. Thank you. So long."

It was evident he wanted no further parley, for he started off down the road. Mark stood looking after him. He noticed that he was tall and walked with a long stride, not the lazy shuffle of the hobo. Also he had caught a quality of education in the husky voice. Under its coarsened inflections there was an echo of something cultured, not fitting with his present appearance, a voice that might once have known very different conditions. Possibly a dangerous chap, Mark thought; had an ugly look, a secret, forbidding sort of face. When the educated kind dropped they were apt to fall further and come down harder than the others. He threw the glass into the bushes and went in to wash up. Before he was called to supper he had forgotten all about the man.

In the cool of the evening the Burrages sat on the porch, rather crowded for the space was small. Mark, on the bottom step, smoked a pipe and watched the eucalyptus leaves printed in pointed black groupings against the Prussian-blue sky. This was the time when the family, released from its labors, sat back comfortably and listened to the favored one while he told of the city by the sea. Old Man Burrage had a way of suddenly asking questions about people he had known in the brave days of the Comstock, some dead now, others trailing clouds of glory eastward this many years.

"And some of 'em," said the old woman, rocking in easeful reminiscence, "would be as fresh with me as if I'd given 'em encouragement. But George Alston, never--he'd treat me as respectful as if I was the first lady in the land. Halting behind to have a neighborly chat and the rest of them throwin' their money on the table and off through the dining room hollerin' for their horses."

Her son, on the lower step, stirred as if uncomfortable. These memories, once prone to rouse a tender amusement, now carried their secret sting.

"He was the real thing," the farmer gravely commented. "There wasn't many like him."

Sadie, who was not interested in a man dead ten years ago, pushed the conversation on to her own generation.

"His daughters are grown up. They must be young ladies now."

Mark answered:

"Yes--Miss Chrystie's just eighteen, came of age this summer. The other one's a few years older."

"Up in Virginia," said the farmer, "George Alston was a bachelor. Every woman was out with her lariat after him but he give 'em all the slip. And afterward, when he went back East to see his folks, a little girl in his home town got him--a girl a lot younger than him. She died after a few years."

There was regret in his tone, not so much for the untimely demise of the lady as for the fact that George Alston had not found his mate in California.

"What are they like?" said Sadie--"pretty?"

Mark had his back toward her. She could see the shape of it, pale in its light-colored shirt, against the dark filigree of shrubs at the bottom of the steps. His answer sounded indifferent between puffs of his pipe:

"Yes, I guess so. Miss Chrystie's a big, fine sort of girl, with yellow hair and lots of color. She's nearly as tall as I am. The other, Miss Lorry--well, she's small."

"They'd ought to have a heap of money," said the farmer. "But when he died I heard he hadn't cut up as rich as you'd think. Folks said he was too honest."

"They've got enough--four hundred thousand each."

Her husband wouldn't have it.

"Lord, that's small for him," he mourned. "But I'm not surprised. He wouldn't 'a' stood for what some of the rest of 'em did."

"Is the house grand?" asked Sadie.

"I suppose it is; it's big enough, lots of bay windows and rooms and piazzas. It's on Pine Street, near town, with a garden round it full of palms and trees."

"Do they have parties there?"

"No--at least I never heard of any. They're quiet sort of girls, don't go out much. Just live there with an old lady--Mrs. Tisdale--some relative of their mother's."

Sadie was disappointed. Having been led to expect so much from these children of wealth, she felt cheated and was inclined to criticize. She rather grumbled about their being so quiet. Mother disagreed:

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet