The pioneer

The Allen girls moved to Virginia City in April. Their father had gone there early in the year and taken a house which would be a proper and fitting place from which to marry Rosamund. He had found what he thought suitable in the mansion, as they called it in Virginia, of one Murchison, a mining superintendent, who, in the heyday of sudden riches, had built him a comfortable home and then died.

The Murchison mansion had come on the market just at the right moment, Allen told people. Men wondered where his money came from, as the current talk among his kind was that “the bottom had fallen out of the Barranca, and Allen was bust.” He himself spread the story that successful speculations had once again set him on his feet. That something had done so was proved by his renting of the Murchison mansion, a furnished house in the Virginia City of that period being an expensive luxury.

It stood at the south end of B Street, perched high on the top of two sloping terraces which were bulkheaded by a wooden wall, surmounted by an ornamental balustrade. Small fruit trees and flowering shrubs clothed the terraces in a thin, flickering foliage, just showing its first, faint tips of green when the girls arrived. A long flight of steps ran up to a balcony which rounded out about the front door, and upon which one seemed to be mounted high in the air, looking down over a dropping series of flat and peaked roofs to where the dark red walls and tall chimneys of the hoisting works clustered about the city’s feet. Beyond this unrolled the wild, bare landscape, undulating line of mountain beyond mountain, cut clear as cameos against the blue Nevada sky.

The vivid green streak made by the Carson River gleamed to the right. At the limit of sight, fitted into a gap between the hills, was the Carson desert, a patch of stark, yellow sand.

The girls were not surprised at the style of the house. They knew vaguely that their father’s affairs were not as satisfactory as they had been, but of their truly desperate nature they had no suspicion. There were delays in the sale of the Folsom Street property, and it was not till March that the new tenant appeared from Sacramento to take possession. In response to their father’s orders they obediently gathered together their belongings, closed the house, and made the move to Virginia without assistance from him.

Events had fallen together in an unexpected way, but one that in the end spared June those glimpses of her lover’s happiness that she had told the Colonel would be unbearable. It is true that she had to see the carriages drive to Jerry’s marriage and hear the sound of his wedding bells. But before that event circumstances had developed which made radical changes in the plans of bride and groom. Black Dan had discovered that Jerry’s business had dwindled to nothing, his private fortune vanished in the Crown Point collapse. The bonanza king, with his rapidly accumulating millions, had a sturdy, American objection to an idle man, especially when that man was to be the husband of his only child, and was known to be of a light and pleasure-loving temperament. A position was made for Jerry on the Cresta Plata, with duties sufficiently exacting to keep him continually occupied, and with the added attraction of an exceedingly generous salary.

Mercedes sulked when she heard it. She did not want to live in Virginia. She had thought she might go there from time to time, flit through it, a disturbing vision of beauty to miners and millionaires, but to take up her residence there was a different matter. She wanted to occupy the fine house her father had given her in San Francisco, entertain royally and be a queen of society, with Jerry as a necessary satellite circling about. She complained to Black Dan, even cried a little, and for the first time in her life found him obdurate.

The doting father was troubled about the future of his child. He disliked the marriage she was making, but knew that to protest against it was hopeless. He mistrusted Jerry, whose record he had often heard canvassed, and whose style, as a charmer of women, he despised. He wanted the pair under his eye. He wanted to keep his hand tight on his son-in-law. He did not believe that the man loved Mercedes, and he took a bitter satisfaction in bringing him to Virginia and setting him to work.

“Rion and I can watch him,” he thought to himself. “We’ll keep his nose to the grindstone, and if he shows any symptoms of lifting it we’ll hold it closer.”

Black Dan said little of his uneasiness to any one save his brother. The two men had the same opinion of Jerry, and though neither expressed it to the other, each felt cold doubts as to the happiness of the marriage.

Early in January, after a honeymoon of less than a week, Jerry was summoned to his new duties. He and Mercedes were installed in a house on B Street which had been hired and hastily refitted for them. Here in the heart of a biting Nevada winter their married life began. Neither bride nor groom guessed that it was being surreptitiously watched by three pairs of interested eyes. To the observation of the suspicious and inimical Graceys that of Colonel Parrish was added. He too had come to Virginia on the first of January to assume his position as assistant secretary of the Cresta Plata. He and Rion had settled themselves in comfortable quarters on the floor over Caswell’s drug store, where their rooms gave on a balustraded wooden veranda which looked out on the turmoil of C Street.

It was not from Jerry, but from Mercedes that the first signs of discontent came. She had hated Virginia from the first glimpse of it. The cold, bleak town, buffeted by furious winds, clinging to its bare mountain side, revolted her. Her little soul shrank before the loneliness of the silent desert. She was essentially a Southron, a lover of sunshine, bright colors, and gaiety. Moreover, for the first time in her life, she felt neglected. In Virginia City in 1874 there were more engrossing interests than the allurement of women. It was a man’s town, where the softer sex was in the background, save as a diversion and spectacular luxury. Mercedes was often lonely. Jerry had flung himself into the speculative fever of the time with fury. Even Black Dan was preoccupied and abrupt. Making millions is, after all, the most absorbing pastime that man may know.

Finally a delicacy of the throat developed, and Mercedes looked pale and thin, and began to cough. It was April, she had been married four months, and she wanted to go; she wanted San Francisco and sunshine, and the amusements for which she lived.

Jerry did not protest. The dream of passion was at an end. The Mercedes he had come to know in the intimacy of married life was so different a being from the Mercedes who had beguiled him in the summer, that he was not sorry to have her leave him. His pride was hurt and he felt angry and bitter against her, but he had no poignant regrets. Neither had loved. The ignoble instincts that had drawn them together were satiated. Her woman’s spite had worked itself out. His lust for her wealth, his desire for her possession, were satisfied. They were willing to part.

She left in April, it being understood that Jerry was to “go below” to see her every two weeks. The story that her health had been impaired by a climate which had proved too severe for many before her, was given out as the reason for her departure. Black Dan even was made to believe it. He also believed her assurances that she would return in the summer. He thought the few tears she shed were grief at parting with a husband whom he supposed she loved. He determined to watch Jerry closer than ever, and for this purpose moved into the house on B Street, where the husband was now left alone.

Thus it fell out for June that she was spared the sight of Jerry as a joyous bridegroom. Almost simultaneously with the Allens’ move to Virginia, Mercedes left it. June and Rosamund were arranging the Murchison mansion on B Street when Mrs. Jerome Barclay was beginning those extensive purchases in San Francisco which were to render her home on Van Ness Avenue a truly “palatial residence.”

June saw her old lover often. The contracted size of the town made it impossible for her to avoid him. More than once they encountered each other in the houses of friends, and were forced to interchange the little dead phrases of society. Both were shaken by these accidental meetings. June dreaded and shrank from the sight of his face and the sound of his voice; but Jerry went away from her presence, stirred and uplifted, his mind full of the thought of her, his sense of her charm reawakened.

His life, crowded with the strenuous business of men, was empty of what had been for years its main interest and preoccupation. The vain man, confident of his attractions, had been played with and scornfully cast aside. The bitterness of his marriage was as wormwood to him. He felt sore toward Mercedes, whose indifference toward him had roused in him the angry amaze that a spoiled child feels toward the stranger who is proof against its blandishments. He felt himself wronged, and in a way, trapped. They made him work like a day laborer for his salary, and his wife had left him. That was what he’d got by marrying! Lupé, poor, dead Lupé, would not have treated him so! And June—what a fool he’d been! He forgot that June had no money, and for that reason he had put her resolutely aside. He forgot that last year he had avoided her and tried to banish all thought of her. In his longing for the adulation and tenderness upon which he had lived her image came nearer and nearer, grew more and more disturbing and sweet.

Early in May Rosamund left for a week’s visit to San Francisco to accomplish the major part of her trousseau-buying. June, left in the Murchison mansion to “keep house”—a duty which she performed but ill—found many empty hours on her hands. She had made few friends in the new town. The apathy which had fallen on her at the time of Jerry’s engagement had not lifted, and the coming loss of Rosamund weighed heavier every day. In the tumult around her her life was quiet and colorless. She told the Colonel that he was the only constant visitor she had.

“If you’ve another as regular as I am,” he had answered, “I’ll have to look into it.”

Then he had added, in what he fondly thought was a light, unmeaning tone, “Don’t even see much of Rion?”

“Rion?” June had replied with the arched eyebrows of surprised query. “I don’t see him at all.”

After that there was nothing more to be said, except of course for the Colonel to go to Rion and ask him why he had not called on Miss Allen, and for Rion, red and embarrassed, to answer that he did not suppose Miss Allen would care to see him, but if she did he would go.

There was one house to which she did pay constant visits. This was Mitty Sullivan’s, on the north side of town, near the Cresta Plata hoisting works.

These were booming days for Mitty. Her husband’s fortune was mounting in leaps too vast and rapid to be easily calculated. The Gracey boys’ belief in their superintendent had not been misplaced. The brawny, half-educated Irishman had risen to a commanding position, and was respectfully alluded to as having “the best nose for ore in the two states.” He was already very rich, having for the past four years successfully speculated on “inside information.” His great gains made even the princely salary he received on the Cresta Plata seem small. He was in the thick of the whirlpool now and Mitty was with him. She had a baby, a girl, and she saw it, backed by the fortune that she and Barney were making, going to Europe and marrying “a lord.” For Mitty’s horizon had widened with astonishing rapidity since the days when she waited on table at the Foleys hotel.

On one of the afternoons of Rosamund’s absence June walked across town for a chat and a cup of tea with her old-time friend. From B Street and its neat house-fronts and gardens she descended to the never-ending movement of the street below. This—the main stem of the mining city—for ever seething with a turbulent current of life, was the once famous C Street, a thoroughfare unique in the history of American towns.

The day shift would not be up for hours yet. When its time was up the mines would vomit forth thousands of men, who, penned all day in the dark, stifling heat of the underground city, would pour into the garish brilliancy of the overground one for the diversions of the night. Here, in the gusto of their liberation, they would range till daylight, restless eddies of life, passing up one street and down the other, never silent, never still, pressing vaguely on through the noise and glare, with the encircling blackness hanging round their little piece of the animated, outside world, like an inky curtain.

At all hours the street was crowded. Now it stretched up its mile or two of uneven length like a gray cañon, filled to both walls with a human river. Under the arcade formed by a continuous line of roofs that jutted from the second-story windows across the sidewalk, an endless throng passed up and down. They collected in groups before shop windows, overflowed the sidewalk and encroached on the middle of the roadway, congested in a close packed, swaying mass of heads in front of the bulletin boards where the stock quotations were pasted up, gathered in talkative knots at corners.

The street, in the mud of which playing cards, bits of orange peel, fragments of theatrical posters, scraps of silk and ribbon were imbedded like the pattern in a carpet, was as full as the sidewalk. The day of the overland freighters was past, but ore wagons still drove sixteen-mule teams, the driver guiding by a single rope, the mules bending their necks under the picturesque arches of their bells. Between these, busy managers flashed by in their buggies, stopping here and there to lean from their seats for a moment’s converse with a knot of men. In more fashionable equipages, brought up from San Francisco and drawn by sleek-skinned, long-tailed horses, the wives of suddenly enriched superintendents lolled back gorgeously, their beruffled silk skirts floating out over the wheel, the light flashing on their diamonds.

Over all this movement of life there was an unceasing swell of sound, a combination of many notes and keys, more noticeable by reason of the outlying rim of silence. Thousands of voices blended into a single sonorous hum, through which broke the jingling of pianos from the open doors of saloons, the click of billiard balls, the cries of the drivers to their mules, the raucous voices of street hawkers selling wares at populous corners, and the sweet, broken melody of the bells. Beneath this—a continuous level undertone—was the murmur of machinery, with the faint throb of the engines beating through it like the sound of the steady, unagitated pulse-beats of a laboring Titan.

June pressed through the throng, walking rapidly toward the upper end of C Street. Here, looking down on the dark red walls and tall chimneys of the Cresta Plata, stood the pretty, one-story cottage where Mitty Sullivan lived. It was surrounded by a square of garden, in which lilacs were budding and apple-trees showed a delicate hoar of young blossom. Mitty’s prosperity revealed itself in many ways. She had a nurse for the baby as well as a “hired girl.” She was exceedingly anxious to spend money and very ignorant of how to do it. She had passed the stage—a recognized station in the ascending career of the western wife—where her husband had presented her with diamond ear-rings. The silver, crystal, and Britannia metal in the superintendent’s cottage were astonishing; only to be rivaled in extravagance by the dresses which hung in Mitty’s own wardrobe and which had been ordered—regardless of cost—from the best dressmakers in San Francisco.

She greeted June with affection and drew her into the parlor, recently furnished with a set of blue and gold brocade furniture, the windows draped with lambrequins to match. There was a brilliant moquette carpet on the floor and the walls were hung with oil paintings, which Barney had bought on a recent visit to the coast. A quantity of growing plants in the windows added a touch of beauty to the glaring, over-furnished room.

Mitty herself had grown into a blooming matron, a trifle coarse, for she was fond of “a good table” and saw to it that her hired girl knew how to produce one, and already menaced by the embonpoint which is so deadly a foe to Californian beauty. The baby girl on her arm was a rosily healthy infant, with Barney’s red hair and her mother’s freshness of color. Twenty years later she would bring her share of the Bonanza fortune, which her father was then accumulating, to the restoration of the old New York family into which she was to marry. Her sister—yet unborn—was to do the same charitable act by the castle and estates of an English earl, who in return would make her a countess.

The greetings over, the baby was placed by the table in her high chair and given a string of spools and a rubber rabbit to play with, while Mitty, comfortably settling herself in an arm-chair, inquired if June had noticed the stock quotations on her way down. The hired girl, who was setting down the tea tray, listened with open attention for the answer. Both mistress and maid were “plunging” according to their means, and when June confessed that she had passed the bulletins without reading the figures, the two speculators looked at each other in open dismay.

“It’s so long to wait till Barney comes home,” Mitty complained. “I thought of course you’d read them as you passed.”

June was contrite, but could remember nothing.

“And I wanted to know so much! They say that Peruvian’s getting soft. They were saying so this morning anyway. You didn’t even hear anything as you came along? I believe you’re the only woman in Virginia who doesn’t speculate.”

June had not even heard. The knowing volubility of Mitty on the fluctuations of stocks in which she was as well versed as Barney himself, seemed little short of miraculous to the only woman in Virginia who didn’t speculate.

The servant, who had been eagerly listening to the conversation, now broke in.

“I’ll run up and have a squint round, Mrs. Sullivan. Maybe I can pick up more than Miss Allen.”

Mitty tried to be dignified and give the proposition a deliberate consideration. But her consent came with a promptitude it was difficult to suppress. As the woman whisked out through the kitchen door she said in a tone intended to excuse her lack of discipline:

“That girl’s got all her money in Peruvian, and hearing it was ‘soft’ has sort of upset her. Last week she told me she was thirty thousand dollars ahead. She only came to live with us because Barney being one of the big superintendents, she thought she’d get points, and as she’s an A 1 girl I’ve got to humor her.”

They chatted over their tea, Mitty regaling her guest with the gossip of the day, of which she was full. They had been talking some time when the conversation turned on Mercedes and Jerry. It was the first time the subject had come up between them. Mitty knew part at least of her friend’s story, and she had tried to spare her, but she hated Mercedes, who had treated her with scornful indifference, and she hated Jerry because Barney did. She was glad now to give her candid opinion to the woman they had combined to hurt.

“They said it was her health that was bad, and that was why she had to quit and go below. Health!” with a compressing of the corners of her mouth and a glance of sidelong meaning. “Her health’s all right; it was her temper.”

“Temper!” said June faintly. “Uncle Jim said her throat was delicate and she had a cough.”

“Cough!” snorted Mitty. “We all have coughs, but we don’t leave our husbands and go cavorting down to San Francisco to throw round money and pick up some other man. She didn’t care for him. That was all that was the matter. It’s a simple disease and a lot of ’em get it.”

June silently stirred her tea. Every word pierced her, but she wanted to hear them. She had heard nothing of the separation, except the generally accepted story of Mercedes’ delicate health. Instinct told her that Mitty, the woman, had looked deeper and would know more of what had really been the case. Without speaking she raised her eyes from the cup and fixed them on the baby, who in an excess of affection was licking the face of the rubber rabbit. Mitty went on with complacent volubility:

“Barney thought maybe it was a baby. He’s a simple, innocent sort of man, Barney Sullivan. But I said to him, ‘Don’t you fear, there won’t be any babies in that house! The Lord ain’t goin’ to make such a break as to give that woman a baby.’ I guess not,” said Mitty, folding her arms and looking grimly round the room as if challenging an unseen audience to contradict her.

June returned to the stirring of her tea while her hostess continued,

“No. She just hated Virginia. Nobody was standing round here to kiss her boots and do the doormat act. And she didn’t like Jerry well enough for him to make her stand it. You have to like a man a good deal to stay here in winter,”—in the tone of one who is forced to admit a melancholy fact. “If you don’t, you’re liable to pretend to get sick and have to go below for a spell. I’ve seen many of ’em go that way.”

“Didn’t Jerry try to stop her?” said June in a low voice.

“Try to stop her?”—with angry contempt—“not much! He didn’t care. Why, June Allen, he was glad, downright glad, I believe, to have her go. He don’t care for anything under the canopy but Jerry Barclay.”

“He cared when he married her.” June’s voice was lower still and shook. Her friend noticed it and determined to sow seed, now she had the opportunity.

“Next to himself Jerry Barclay cares for money. That’s what he was after, and he didn’t get it the way he expected. He’s got the smoothest tongue any man ever had in his head, and he’s used it right along to get money with. How long was Mrs. Newbury dead when he got engaged to Mercedes Gracey? And do you suppose he’d have ever asked her if they hadn’t struck one of the biggest ore-bodies in Virginia on the fifteen-hundred-foot level of the Cresta Plata? But they’ve got him by the leg up here now,”—with an exultant laugh—“the whole three of ’em’s on to him. They give him a big salary and don’t they make him work for it—oh, my! There ain’t no drones in the Gracey boys’ hive, you can bet, and Jerry Barclay’s got to hustle for every cent he earns. No San Francisco and good times for him! If Mercedes was to cry and do the loving wife act to Black Dan and say she couldn’t live without her husband I wouldn’t bet but what she’d get him. But she ain’t done it. She don’t want him, Junie. That’s what’s the matter in that shebang. Neither one of ’em wants the other.”

“Why did she marry him?” said June. “Why did she—”

The baby here interrupted by giving vent to a loud exclamation, and at the same time disdainfully casting her rubber rabbit on the floor. Then she leaned over the arm of her high chair, staring with motionless intentness at the discarded rabbit, as if expecting to see it get up and walk away.

“That’s the thing that gets me,” said Mitty thoughtfully. “Why did she marry him? She could have got a better man than Jerry, though I suppose he was about the best in sight at the time. But she’s like the baby here—always cryin’ and stretchin’ out for toys she can’t reach. Then you give her the toy and she looks it all over and suddenly gives a sort er disgusted snort, and throws it on the floor. She ain’t got no more use for it, and the first thing you know she’ll be stretchin’ out for another one.”

June made no answer to this and Mitty, big with her subject, for her dislike of Mercedes was an absorbing sentiment, went on:

“She treated him like dirt. Barney was up there one night while they were at dinner. He was just in the room in front with the curtains down between and they didn’t know he was there. He said he could hear her pickin’ at Jerry because he’d been half an hour late for dinner. He said she kep’ on pickin’ and pickin’ and Jerry not saying a word. Barney says to me when he got home, ‘Jerry’s paid high for his position.’ And I says to him when he told me, ‘That woman’s goin’ to make every one pay high for anything they get out er her. She’s not givin’ things away free gratis.’”

The baby’s contemplation of the fallen rabbit had by this time lost its charm. She threw herself back in her chair and raised her voice in a wail distinctly suggestive of weariness of spirit and ennui. Mitty lifted her, a formless, weeping bundle, from her chair, and June’s offer of the rabbit was met by an angrily repulsing hand and a writhing movement of irritated disgust.

“She’s tired, poor lamb!” said Mitty, rocking her gently to and fro and slapping on her back with a comforting, maternal hand. “We try to keep her awake till Barney gets in. He just thinks there’s nothing in the world like his baby.”

The dusk was beginning to subdue the brilliancy of sunset, and June, buttoning herself into her jacket, bade mother and child good night. Mitty’s cheerful good-bys followed her down the passageway, the baby’s now lusty cries drowning the last messages which usually delay feminine farewells.

Once outside, she walked rapidly toward home, avoiding the crowds on C Street, and flitting, a small, dark figure, through less frequented byways. Tumult was in her heart, also the sense of dread that had been with her ever since she came to Virginia and knew her old lover was so near.

Since his marriage she had tried with desperate persistence to uproot him from her thoughts. She not only had begun to realize his baseness of character, but the realization was becoming not a matter of words, but a living force which was beginning to chill the feeling that for so long had held her in its grasp. The first symptom of a decline in love, the comprehension and dislike of the faults of the being loved, had begun to stir in her.

Now Mitty’s unexpected revelation had upset this more normal and serener frame of mind. She felt herself suddenly swept backward toward a point that she had hoped was far behind. An elation rose in her that frightened her and filled her with shame. Jerry sordid, throwing her from him for the lust of money, was a bearable thought. It was Jerry loving and beloved that had been too bitter to be borne. And Mitty had said there was no love on either side—he was glad to have his wife go.

A turmoil of many feelings battled in her and the two strongest and most violently opposed were fear and joy. As she stole homeward through the darkening streets fear became stronger than joy. The future loomed suddenly sinister. Her loneliness stretched darkly menacing before her. Rosamund would soon be gone—gone so far, never again to be reached with an outstretched hand or a calling voice. And Jerry would be there, close to her, Jerry who did not love his wife, and was glad to have her go.