Read Ebook: Hard-Pan: A Story of Bonanza Fortunes by Bonner Geraldine

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Ebook has 1305 lines and 63096 words, and 27 pages

Yes, that was the secret of her attraction for him. She was not like any one he had ever known before. She piqued his curiosity.

A picture of her rose before his mental vision, and with a shamefaced laugh at his own sentiment, he threw his cigarette away. Letitia had said she was pretty. Undoubtedly she was, but she was something more than pretty. Refined, delicate, poetic--there was no word that described it. If Letitia went about talking of her, other people would want to see her. He resented the idea violently, and felt his anger rising at the thought of the coarse curiosity and comment that would suddenly surround her. Some one ought to stop Letitia from talking that way.

"For," thought John Gault, as he turned a corner and came within view of Colonel Reed's abode, "I am the prince who has found the Sleeping Beauty."

The house, like many in that quarter of the city, was detached, and had once been a dwelling with pretensions to gentility. Time and weather had worked their will of it, and even under the kindly veil of night its haggard dilapidation was visible. It sat back a few feet from the street in a square of garden, where a tall dracaena shook its rustling foliage to every breeze. There was a large flowering jasmine-tree by the gate, that spread a sweet scent through the noisome airs of that old and ill-drained quarter. The visitor softly opened the gate and entered up a pathway flagged with squares of black-and-white stone that were broken and uneven. From the front window--a wide bay shrouded in vines--the light squeezed in narrow slits. John Gault pulled the old-fashioned bell and stood listening to its jingling note.

There was a step in the passage within, and the light shone through the two narrow panes of glass that flanked the front door on either side. A key turned and the door was opened. In the aperture Viola Reed stood with a kerosene lamp flickering in her hand. She held a piece of light-colored material in the other hand. As her glance fell on the visitor she made an instinctive movement as if to hide this.

"Oh, is it you?" she said. "Come in. I'm glad you've come!"

She uttered the sentences quickly, and was evidently embarrassed. Even by the light of the smoky lamp Gault could see that she had flushed.

"I never thought of your coming to-night," she said, as she turned to open the parlor door. "It's a great surprise. My father will be delighted."

She held the lamp up while the visitor divested himself of his coat and hung it on the chair that did duty as a hat-rack. In the dim hallway, with its walls from which the paper had peeled in long strips, and the stairway beyond, with the twine showing through the ragged carpet, the man of the world in his well-groomed, well-dressed, complacent perfection of finish, presented a curiously incongruous appearance.

The girl opened the door, and he followed her into the parlor. It was a long room, divided in the middle by an archway, its lower end now veiled in shadow. On a large table another lamp glowed, a bunch of paper flowers hanging on one side of the globe to subdue the light. The room gave an impression of lofty emptiness. The footsteps of the visitor seemed to be flung back from its high, bare walls. The lamp struck gleams of light from the gilded frame of a large mirror over the chimney-piece, and here and there caught the running gold arabesques which covered the wall-paper. There were a few wicker chairs drawn up to the table, which was covered with the litter of amateur dressmaking. In the single upholstered chair that the room boasted sat Colonel Ramsay Reed.

With a loud exclamation of pleasure the colonel rose and greeted his guest. He was a remarkable-looking man of sixty-five or seventy, fully six feet in height, erect, alert, with a striking air of distinction in his narrow, hawk-featured face, and a gaunt, angular figure. His white hair flowed nearly to his shoulders, and his white mustache was in singular contrast to the brown and leathery surface of his thin cheeks. He wore a long wrapper of indeterminate hue, patched with materials of different colors and patterns, and a pair of old leather slippers that slipped off his heels when he walked. In his suave and urbane courtesy he seemed to be serenely indifferent to the deficiencies of his costume, folding his dressing-gown round his legs as he subsided into his chair with the deliberate ease that a Roman senator might have displayed in the arrangement of his toga of ceremony.

His daughter did not appear to share his composure; she was nervous and embarrassed. She swept off the evidences of her dressmaking with a few rapid movements, and took them away to the shadows of the far end of the room, hung another paper flower over the blinding glare of the second lamp, and, sitting by the table, let her glance stray furtively about for further details that needed correcting. John Gault, who appeared to be awarding a polite attention to the colonel's conversational amenities, was conscious of her every movement.

Viola Reed was one of those women that nature seems to have intended to make completely and satisfyingly beautiful, the intention having been changed only at the last moment. The upper half of her head was without a fault--the low forehead, the wonderful hair, thick and wavy, and so instinct with life that every separate filament seemed to stand out from its fellows, in color a warm, bright blond, and with shorter hairs about the ears and temples which curled up in golden threads. In strange contrast with this brilliant hair were level, dark-brown eyebrows, that were low over large gray eyes. She had the same dark-brown lashes, which grew wide apart and turned back, a rare beauty, and one which imparts an expression of soft, wistful tenderness to the eyes thus encircled.

Here Viola's beauty ended. Her other features were, at least, inoffensive. She was tall and beautifully formed, but in the slenderest mold. To the Californian ideal she was thin. But her movements were distinguished by a supple grace denied to women of a more stately build and proportion. To-night she wore a shirt-waist, washed out from its original pink to a wan flesh-color, and a scanty black stuff skirt, belted with a black ribbon. Gault, with his eyes fixed on the colonel, was aware of the stealthy rearrangement she made of the ribbon round her neck, and the movements of the investigating hand with which she pushed back her loosened hair-pins.

As was her custom, she made little attempt to join in the conversation. The evening settled down into a replica of its predecessors. The fact that Gault was becoming a familiar figure in the bare front parlor did not seem to abate the colonel's buoyant appreciation of him as a good listener.

The younger man, with his glance on the floor and an expression of polite attention on his face, found himself wondering, with inward amusement, what his friends would say if they could have had a glimpse of him, listening, silently and submissively, to the reminiscences of Colonel Ramsay Reed. The conjecture called up such a picture of incredulous astonishment and disbelief that a smile broke out on his lips. Aware of its incongruity, he stole a quick, apprehensive look at Viola. She was watching him with a surprise evidently tempered by pain at the thought that his amusement might be evoked by her father's garrulity. Gault's gravity became intense, and the colonel, who was too engrossed in the joy of having secured a victim to notice anything, went gaily on. He was launched on his favorite subject--the men he had assisted to affluence in the early days.

"There's Jerry McCormick. You know where he is now? No need to ask any one that; has been a member of Congress, can draw his check for a million, his wife a leader of society, and his daughters marrying English lords. You know them, of course?"

The visitor made an affirmative sign, and the colonel continued:

"Well, I made that man. When I first ran against McCormick he was working in the mines up in Tuolumne, with the water squelching in his boots. In those days a dollar to Jerry looked about as big as a cart-wheel. His wife was glad enough to do a little washing, and his daughter--the youngest ones weren't born then, but the eldest, the one that married the English lord, was--used to run round barefoot, and bring her father his dinner in a tin pail."

"I'm sure she doesn't know what a tin pail is now," said Gault, a mental picture rising in his mind of the magnificent Lady Courtley as he had seen her on her last visit to her parents.

"No," said the old man; "I hear she's one of the Vere de Veres. And I can remember her, a little freckled-faced kid with her hair in her eyes, hanging round the tunnel of the Little Bertha, waiting to give her father his dinner."

"Do you know the younger McCormick girls, Miss Reed? Lady Courtley was before your time," said Gault, in an attempt to draw Viola into the conversation.

She looked surprised, and then gave a little laugh and shook her head.

"I've never even seen them," she answered.

"Oh, they don't know Viola," said the colonel--not with bitterness, but as one who states a simple and natural fact; "the old woman's educated them out of all that. But, as I was saying, I made their father. He'd managed to scrape together a little pile, put it all in a small prospect, and lost every nickel. He was just about dead broke, and came to me crying--yes, crying--and said, 'Colonel Reed, there's only one man in California whose advice I'd follow and whose opinion I'd trust.' 'Who's that?' said I, intending to help the poor devil to the best of my ability. 'It's Ramsay Reed,' said he. 'Well,' said I, 'if you'll just put yourself in my hands, and do what I tell you, I'll set you on your feet.' 'Colonel,' said he, 'say the word, and whatever it is, it goes. You've got more financial ability in your little finger than all the rest of 'em have in their whole bodies.' So I took him in hand."

The colonel paused, a reflective smile wrinkling the skin at the corners of his eyes.

"You certainly seem to have made a success of his case," said Gault, feeling that some comment was expected of him.

"Yes, yes," said the colonel; "I may say a great success. The poor fellow's confidence in me made me determined to do my best. I used to give him points--those were the days when I could give points. Told him if he would follow the lead west of the Little Bertha--people had hardly heard of the Little Bertha then--he'd strike it. He was broke, and I gave him the money. Three months later he'd struck pay dirt. That was the beginning of the Alcade Mine, but he didn't have sense enough to hold on to it, and sold out for a few thousands. I saw then that I'd have to do more than give him an occasional boost, and stood behind him, off and on, for years. Even when we ran into the Virginia City boom he never bought without my advice. He hadn't any discrimination. I'd just say to him, 'Save your money and buy five feet next to the Best and Belcher,' and he'd do what I said every time. Without me he'd have been working in the mines in Tuolumne yet."

In the absorption of his recollections the colonel crossed his knees, bringing one foot, with a torn slipper dropping from the heel, into a position of prominence.

"Oh, those were days worth living in!" he said, running a long, spare hand through his hair--"great days! Men that weren't grown then don't know what life is. I meet Jerry sometimes, but we don't talk much about old times. He knows that he owes everything to me, and it goes against the grain for him to acknowledge it. I hear his daughters are handsome girls."

"Perhaps--I don't know," said Gault, recalling the occasions when he had sat next to the Miss McCormicks at dinners, and suffered exceedingly in the effort known as "making conversation."

"I heard that they were fine, handsome girls, large, and with black hair like their mother. She was a beauty in her day--a hot-tempered Irish girl that Jerry married from the wash-tub. The youngest daughter is about Viola's age--twenty-three."

John Gault turned and looked at Viola with some surprise.

"You thought I was younger, didn't you?" she said, smiling. "Everybody does."

He was about to answer when the colonel once more took up the thread of his reminiscences.

"Maroney was down then--'way down; not even on the lowest rung of the ladder--he wasn't on the ladder at all. I gave him the first lift he had. No one would look at Maroney in those days. He was a thin, consumptive-looking fellow, full of crazy schemes, forever coming to you and borrowing money for some wild-cat stock that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. I took a fancy to him, and every dollar he made was through my help and advice. It was when I had my offices on Montgomery Street, and he'd have a way of dropping in about lunch-time and hanging round looking poor and sick. I used to take him out to lunch, and give him a square meal and a few points that he'd sense enough to follow. He wasn't like Jerry; he was smart. Why, I almost fed that man for years. When he'd get down on his luck--and he was always doing that--I'd say, 'You know, when you want, my check-book's at your disposal.' And it was, more times than I can remember."

The colonel paused, smiling at his thoughts. The visitor, who had been looking idly on the ground, raised his eyes and let them dwell in curious scrutiny upon the old man's profile, cut like a cameo against the dim walls with their fine gold traceries. John Gault, like all Californians, knew every vicissitude in the life of Adolphus Maroney, one of the great bonanza kings, a man whose career was quoted as an example of what could be done by brains and energy in the California of the Comstock era.

Wondering, as he had done many times before, what Viola thought of her father's vainglorious imaginings, he turned now and suddenly looked at her. She was sitting with her elbow on the table and her chin resting in the palm of her hand. Her eyes were on the colonel, and her expression was one of appreciative interest. It was possible that she believed in him, absolutely and unquestionably. Yet her face, in its placid, restful gravity, gave no clue to the thoughts within. She was not to be read by every casual comer. Even the practised eye of the man of much worldly experience was baffled by the quiet reserve of this young girl who was nearly half his age.

"I haven't seen Maroney for nearly eight or nine years," continued the colonel. "The last time it was in the lobby of the Palace. He was with some capitalists from England, with a millionaire or two from New York thrown in. He saw me and looked uncomfortable, but he shook hands and introduced me. I got away as quickly as I could. I didn't want to embarrass him."

"Why should you embarrass him?" asked Viola.

The colonel looked at Gault, and gave the forbearing laugh of the man who treats with good-humored tolerance the ignorance of the woman.

"Why, he was always uneasy for fear I'd give away the fact that it was I who made his money for him. But, God bless my soul!" said the old man, throwing back his head and going off into a sonorous laugh, "he needn't be afraid. I wouldn't rob him of any of his glory. Only I took it pretty hard, when Mrs. Maroney was here last winter, that she didn't go out of her way to be kind to you."

Viola gave a little exclamation, Gault could not make out whether of annoyance or protest. That the colonel should have expected his daughter to be the object of Mrs. Maroney's attention and patronage was only another evidence of his painful self-delusion. Mrs. Maroney was a lady who aspired to storm the fashionable citadels of New York and London, and troubled herself little with those of whom she could make no practical use in the campaign.

"You're unjust to Mrs. Maroney," Viola said gently, and rather weariedly, the visitor thought; "she was only here for two months, and she had quantities of friends to see and people to entertain."

"Oh, my dear, my dear," answered the old man, "that's just your amiable way of looking at it. She was like her husband--she wanted to forget."

He turned his eyes, still bright under their thick white brows, upon the younger man, and looking at him with an expression of mingled pride and patience, said:

"That is the way with the Californians. Once fall, and the procession passes you, and the men that were beside you don't wait to turn and see where you dropped. You stay where you fall and you watch the others sweep on. That's what I have done."

"Don't talk that way, father," said Viola; "Mr. Gault will think you feel unhappy about it."

The old man smiled, and leaning forward, clasped her hand and held it.

"Mr. Gault," he said, with quite a grand air, "knows better than that. The opinions of other people don't affect our happiness. I don't resent the prosperity of my old mates, nor feel any discouragement at our present--er--temporary embarrassments."

Viola stirred uneasily, and said quickly:

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