



Produced by Donald Lainson





TALES OF TRAIL AND TOWN


By Bret Harte




CONTENTS


THE ANCESTORS OF PETER ATHERLY

TWO AMERICANS

THE JUDGMENT OF BOLINAS PLAIN

THE STRANGE EXPERIENCE OF ALKALI DICK

A NIGHT ON THE DIVIDE

THE YOUNGEST PROSPECTOR IN CALAVERAS

A TALE OF THREE TRUANTS




TALES OF TRAIL AND TOWN




THE ANCESTORS OF PETER ATHERLY


CHAPTER I


It must be admitted that the civilizing processes of Rough and Ready
were not marked by any of the ameliorating conditions of other improved
camps. After the discovery of the famous "Eureka" lead, there was the
usual influx of gamblers and saloon-keepers; but that was accepted as a
matter of course. But it was thought hard that, after a church was built
and a new school erected, it should suddenly be found necessary to have
doors that locked, instead of standing shamelessly open to the criticism
and temptation of wayfarers, or that portable property could no longer
be left out at night in the old fond reliance on universal brotherhood.
The habit of borrowing was stopped with the introduction of more money
into the camp, and the establishment of rates of interest; the poorer
people either took what they wanted, or as indiscreetly bought on
credit. There were better clothes to be seen in its one long straggling
street, but those who wore them generally lacked the grim virtue of the
old pioneers, and the fairer faces that were to be seen were generally
rouged. There was a year or two of this kind of mutation, in which the
youthful barbarism of Rough and Ready might have been said to struggle
with adult civilized wickedness, and then the name itself disappeared.
By an Act of the Legislature the growing town was called "Atherly,"
after the owner of the Eureka mine,--Peter Atherly,--who had given
largess to the town in its "Waterworks" and a "Gin Mill," as the new
Atherly Hotel and its gilded bar-rooms were now called. Even at the last
moment, however, the new title of "Atherly" hung in the balance. The
romantic daughter of the pastor had said that Mr. Atherly should
be called "Atherly of Atherly," an aristocratic title so strongly
suggestive of an innovation upon democratic principles that it was not
until it was discreetly suggested that everybody was still free to call
him "Atherly, late of Rough and Ready," that opposition ceased.

Possibly this incident may have first awakened him to the value of his
name, and some anxiety as to its origin. Roughly speaking, Atherly's
father was only a bucolic emigrant from "Mizzouri," and his mother had
done the washing for the camp on her first arrival. The Atherlys had
suffered on their overland journey from drought and famine, with the
addition of being captured by Indians, who had held them captive for ten
months. Indeed, Mr. Atherly, senior, never recovered from the effects
of his captivity, and died shortly after Mrs. Atherly had given birth
to twins, Peter and Jenny Atherly. This was scant knowledge for Peter
in the glorification of his name through his immediate progenitors; but
"Atherly of Atherly" still sounded pleasantly, and, as the young lady
had said, smacked of old feudal days and honors. It was believed
beyond doubt, even in their simple family records,--the flyleaf of a
Bible,--that Peter Atherly's great-grandfather was an Englishman who
brought over to his Majesty's Virginian possessions his only son, then
a boy. It was not established, however, to what class of deportation
he belonged: whether he was suffering exile from religious or judicial
conviction, or if he were only one of the articled "apprentices"
who largely made up the American immigration of those days. Howbeit,
"Atherly" was undoubtedly an English name, even suggesting respectable
and landed ancestry, and Peter Atherly was proud of it. He looked
somewhat askance upon his Irish and German fellow citizens, and talked
a good deal about "race." Two things, however, concerned him: he was not
in looks certainly like any type of modern Englishman as seen either
on the stage in San Francisco, or as an actual tourist in the mining
regions, and his accent was undoubtedly Southwestern. He was tall and
dark, with deep-set eyes in a singularly immobile countenance; he had
an erect but lithe and sinewy figure even for his thirty odd years,
and might easily have been taken for any other American except for the
single exception that his nose was distinctly Roman, and gave him a
distinguished air. There was a suggestion of Abraham Lincoln (and even
of Don Quixote) in his tall, melancholy figure and length of limb, but
nothing whatever that suggested an Englishman.

It was shortly after the christening of Atherly town that an incident
occurred which at first shook, and then the more firmly established, his
mild monomania. His widowed mother had been for the last two years
an inmate of a private asylum for inebriates, through certain habits
contracted while washing for the camp in the first year of her
widowhood. This had always been a matter of open sympathy to Rough and
Ready; but it was a secret reproach hinted at in Atherly, although
it was known that the rich Peter Atherly kept his mother liberally
supplied, and that both he and his sister "Jinny" or Jenny Atherly
visited her frequently. One day he was telegraphed for, and on going to
the asylum found Mrs. Atherly delirious and raving. Through her son's
liberality she had bribed an attendant, and was fast succumbing to a
private debauch. In the intervals of her delirium she called Peter
by name, talked frenziedly and mysteriously of his "high
connections"--alluded to himself and his sister as being of the
"true breed"--and with a certain vigor of epithet, picked up in the
familiarity of the camp during the days when she was known as "Old Ma'am
Atherly" or "Aunt Sally," declared that they were "no corn-cracking
Hoosiers," "hayseed pikes," nor "northern Yankee scum," and that she
should yet live to see them "holding their own lands again and the lands
of their forefathers." Quieted at last by opiates, she fell into a more
lucid but scarcely less distressing attitude. Recognizing her son again,
as well as her own fast failing condition, she sarcastically thanked
him for coming to "see her off," congratulated him that he would soon be
spared the lie and expense of keeping her here on account of his pride,
under the thin pretext of trying to "cure" her. She knew that Sally
Atherly of Rough and Ready wasn't considered fit company for "Atherly of
Atherly" by his fine new friends. This and much more in a voice mingling
maudlin sentiment with bitter resentment, and with an ominous glitter in
her bloodshot and glairy eyes. Peter winced with a consciousness of the
half-truth of her reproaches, but the curiosity and excitement awakened
by the revelations of her frenzy were greater than his remorse. He said
quickly:--

"You were speaking of father!--of his family--his lands and possessions.
Tell me again!"

"Wot are ye givin' us?" she ejaculated in husky suspicion, opening upon
him her beady eyes, in which the film of death was already gathering.

"Tell me of father,--my father and his family! his
great-grandfather!--the Atherlys, my relations--what you were saying.
What do you know about them?"

"THAT'S all ye wanter know--is it? THAT'S what ye'r' comin' to the old
washer-woman for--is it?" she burst out with the desperation of disgust.
"Well--give it up! Ask me another!"

"But, mother--the old records, you know! The family Bible--what you once
told us--me and Jinny!"

Something gurgled in her throat like a chuckle. With the energy of
malevolence, she stammered: "There wasn't no records--there wasn't no
family Bible! it's all a lie--you hear me! Your Atherly that you're so
proud of was just a British <DW15> who was kicked outer his family in
England and sent to buzz round in Americky. He honey-fogled me--Sally
Magregor--out of a better family than his'n, in Kansas, and skyugled me
away, but it was a straight out marriage, and I kin prove it. It was
in the St. Louis papers, and I've got it stored away safe enough in
my trunk! You hear me! I'm shoutin'! But he wasn't no old settler in
Mizzouri--he wasn't descended from any settler, either! He was a new man
outer England--fresh caught--and talked down his throat. And he fooled
ME--the darter of an old family that was settled on the right bank
of the Mizzouri afore Dan'l Boone came to Kentucky--with his new
philanderings. Then he broke up, and went all to pieces when we struck
Californy, and left ME--Sally Magregor, whose father had <DW65>s of his
own--to wash for Rough and Ready! THAT'S your Atherly! Take him! I don't
want him--I've done with him! I was done with him long afore--afore"--a
cough checked her utterance,--"afore"--She gasped again, but the words
seemed to strangle in her throat. Intent only on her words and scarcely
heeding her sufferings, Peter was bending over her eagerly, when the
doctor rudely pulled him away and lifted her to a sitting posture. But
she never spoke again. The strongest restoratives quickly administered
only left her in a state of scarcely breathing unconsciousness.

"Is she dying? Can't you bring her to," said the anxious Peter, "if only
for a moment, doctor?"

"I'm thinkin'," said the visiting doctor, an old Scotch army surgeon,
looking at the rich Mr. Atherly with cool, professional contempt, "that
your mother willna do any more washing for me as in the old time, nor
give up her life again to support her bairns. And it isna my eentention
to bring her back to pain for the purposes of geeneral conversation!"

Nor, indeed, did she ever come back to any purpose, but passed away with
her unfinished sentence. And her limbs were scarcely decently composed
by the attendants before Peter was rummaging the trunk in her room for
the paper she had spoken of. It was in an old work-box--a now faded
yellow clipping from a newspaper, lying amidst spoils of cotton thread,
buttons, and beeswax, which he even then remembered to have seen upon
his mother's lap when she superadded the sewing on of buttons to her
washing of the miners' shirts. And his dark and hollow cheek glowed with
gratified sentiment as he read the clipping.

"We hear with regret of the death of Philip Atherly, Esq., of Rough and
Ready, California. Mr. Atherly will be remembered by some of our readers
as the hero of the romantic elopement of Miss Sallie Magregor, daughter
of Colonel 'Bob' Magregor, which created such a stir in well-to-do
circles some thirty years ago. It was known vaguely that the young
couple had 'gone West,'--a then unknown region,--but it seems that
after severe trials and tribulations on the frontier with savages, they
emigrated early to Oregon, and then, on the outbreak of the gold fever,
to California. But it will be a surprise to many to know that it has
just transpired that Mr. Atherly was the second son of Sir Ashley
Atherly, an English baronet, and by the death of his brother might have
succeeded to the property and title."

He remained for some moments looking fixedly at the paper, until the
commonplace paragraph imprinted itself upon his brain as no line of
sage or poet had ever done, and then he folded it up and put it in his
pocket. In his exaltation he felt that even the mother he had never
loved was promoted to a certain respect as his father's wife, although
he was equally conscious of a new resentment against her for her
contemptuous allusions to HIS father, and her evident hopeless inability
to comprehend his position. His mother, he feared, was indeed low!--but
HE was his father's son! Nevertheless, he gave her a funeral at Atherly,
long remembered for its barbaric opulence and display. Thirty carriages,
procured from Sacramento at great expense, were freely offered to his
friends to join in the astounding pageant. A wonderful casket of
iron and silver, brought from San Francisco, held the remains of the
ex-washerwoman of Rough and Ready. But a more remarkable innovation was
the addition of a royal crown to the other ornamentation of the casket.
Peter Atherly's ideas of heraldry were very vague,--Sacramento at that
time offered him no opportunity of knowing what were the arms of the
Atherlys,--and the introduction of the royal crown seemed to satisfy
Peter's mind as to what a crest MIGHT be, while to the ordinary
democratic mind it simply suggested that the corpse was English!
Political criticism being thus happily averted, Mrs. Atherly's body
was laid in the little cemetery, not far away from certain rude wooden
crosses which marked the burial-place of wanderers whose very names were
unknown, and in due time a marble shaft was erected over it. But
when, the next day, the county paper contained, in addition to
the column-and-a-half description of the funeral, the more formal
announcement of the death of "Mrs. Sallie Atherly, wife of the late
Philip Atherly, second son of Sir Ashley Atherly, of England," criticism
and comment broke out. The old pioneers of Rough and Ready felt that
they had been imposed upon, and that in some vague way the unfortunate
woman had made them the victims of a huge practical joke during all
these years. That she had grimly enjoyed their ignorance of her position
they did not doubt. "Why, I remember onct when I was sorter bullyraggin'
her about mixin' up my duds with Doc Simmons's, and sendin' me Whiskey
Dick's old rags, she turned round sudden with a kind of screech, and ran
out into the brush. I reckoned, at the time, that it was either 'drink'
or feelin's, and could hev kicked myself for being sassy to the
old woman, but I know now that all this time that air critter--that
barrownet's daughter-in-law--was just laughin' herself into fits in the
brush! No, sir,