Thomas Jeffersen Brown - James Oliver Curwood (famous ebook reader .TXT) 📗

I
There are not many who will remember him as Thomas Jefferson Brown. For ten years he had been mildly ashamed of himself, and out of respect for people who were dead, and for a dozen or so who were living, he had the good taste to drop his last name. The fact that it was only Brown didn't matter.
"Tack Thomas Jefferson to Brown," he said, "and you've got a name that sticks!"
It had an aristocratic sound; and Thomas Jefferson, with the Brown cut off, was still aristocratic, when you came to count the red corpuscles in him. In some sort of way he was related to two dead Presidents, three dead army officers, a living college professor, and a few common people. He was legitimately born to the purple, but fate had sent him off on a curious ricochet in a game all of its own, and changed him from Thomas Jefferson Brown into just plain Thomas Jefferson without the Brown.
He was one of those specimens who, when you meet them, somehow make you feel there are a few lost kings of the earth, as well as lost lambs. He was what we called a "first-sighter"--that is, you liked him the instant you looked at him. You knew without further acquaintance that he was a man whom you could trust with your money, your friendship--anything you had. He was big, with a wholesome brown face, blond hair, and gray eyes that seemed always to be laughing and twinkling, even when he was hungry. He carried about with him a load of cheerfulness so big that it was constantly spilling over on other people.
There was a time when Thomas Jefferson Brown had little white cards with his name on them. That was when he went to college, and his lungs weren't so good. It was then that some big doctor told him that if he wanted to live to have grandchildren, the best thing for him to do was to "tramp it" for a time--live out of doors, sleep out of doors, do nothing but breathe fresh air and walk. That doctor was Fate, playing his game behind a pair of spectacles and a bumpy forehead. He saved Thomas Jefferson Brown, all right; but he turned him into plain Thomas Jefferson.
For Thomas Jefferson Brown never got over taking his medicine. He kept on tramping. He got big and broad and happy. Somewhere, perhaps in a barn, he caught a microbe that made him dislike ordinary work. He would set to and help a farmer saw wood all day, just for company and grub; but you couldn't hire him to go into an office, or settle down to anything steady, for twenty-five dollars a day. He had a scientific name for the thing that was in him--the _wanderlust_ bug, I think he called it; and he said it was better than the Chinese lady-bugs that the government imports to save California fruit.
The nearest Thomas Jefferson ever came to going back to Thomas Jefferson Brown was when he took a job at braking on the Southern Pacific. That held him for three, days less than two weeks.
"The _wanderlust_ bug wouldn't stand for it," he explained.
Right after that he struck a farmer's house where the farmer was sick, almost dying, with three little kids and a frail little woman trying to keep things up. He worked like ten men for more than a month on that farm, and when he went away he wouldn't take a cent. That's the sort of ne'er-do-well Thomas Jefferson was.
He wouldn't beg. He'd go three days without grub, and laugh all the time. It was mostly in the country and in small villages that he made his living. He could play seven different kinds of instruments without any instruments at all. Did it all with his mouth. And the kids--they went wild over him. In return for his entertainment, Thomas Jefferson wasn't ashamed to take whatever came to him in the way of odd nickels and dimes.
Once the manager of a vaudeville house heard him on a street corner, and offered him a job at fifty a week if he'd sign a contract for a dozen weeks.
"Good Lord," said Thomas Jefferson, "I wouldn't know what to do with six hundred dollars!"
The next week he was cooking in a lumber-camp for his board. That's Thomas Jefferson--or, rather, that's what he was.
And now we're coming to the girl who killed the bug in Thomas Jefferson--and rescued the king. She was born swell. She has blue eyes--the sort that can light up a dark day, and can make your head turn dizzy when they smile at you. And she's got the right sort of hair to go with 'em--red and gold and brown all mixed up, until you can't tell which is which; the sort that makes you wonder if some big artist hasn't been painting a picture for you, when you see it out in the sunshine.
She comes of a titled family, but she'd want to die to-morrow if Thomas Jefferson Brown didn't worship her from the tips of her little toes to the top of her pretty head. She thinks he's a king. And he is--one of those great, big, healthy kings that nature sometimes grows when it has half a chance.


II
It's curious how the whole thing happened. Thomas Jefferson wandered up to Portland at the time we were fitting out a ship for a whaling cruise. We saw him imitating a banjo for a lot of kids down on the wharf, and the minute our eyes lit on him--Tucker's and mine--we liked him. It isn't necessary to go into the details of what happened after that. Just a week later, when Thomas Jefferson and I were shaking hands for the last time, a queer sort of look came into his eyes, and he said:
"Bobby, you're the first man I ever knew that makes me feel like crying when you leave me."
He said it just like one of the kids he'd tickled half to death on the wharf. There was a little jerking in his throat, and there came into his face a look so gentle that it made me think of a girl.
"Why don't you come along on this cruise with me?" I said.
Thomas Jefferson gave a sudden start, and a queer expression came into his eyes, as if he saw something out on the sea that had startled him. Then he laughed. You could hear that laugh of Thomas Jefferson's three blocks away, and sunshine in winter couldn't bring more cheer than the sound of it. He looked at me for a moment, and then said:
"Bobby, I'll go!"
It wasn't forty-eight hours before Thomas Jefferson had a first mortgage on every soul aboard the "Sleeping Sealer," from the cap'n to the oiler down in the engine-room. He was able, all right, but you couldn't have made an able seaman out of him in a hundred years. For all that, he did the work of three men. The first thing you heard when you woke up in the morning was his whistle, and the last thing you heard at night was his laugh or his song. He did everything, from cooking to telling us why Germany couldn't lick England, and how the United States could clean up the map of the earth if Congress would spend less money on job-making bureaus and a little more on war-ships.
Then we discovered what was in the old alligator-skin valise he carried. It was books. Half the time he didn't have to read to us, but just talked off the stuff he'd learned by heart. We got to know a lot before the trip was half begun, just by associating with Thomas Jefferson Brown--or Thomas Jefferson, as he was then.
We spent three months up about the Spicer Islands, and then came down toward Southampton Land. Thomas Jefferson was the happiest man aboard until we caught sight of a coast, and then the change began. After that he'd get restless whenever land hove in sight.
Six weeks later we came down into Roes Welcome Sound, planning to get out through Hudson Strait before winter set in. The fact that we were almost homeward bound didn't seem to affect Thomas Jefferson. I saw the beginning of the end when he said to me one day:
"Bobby, I've never seen this northern country. It's a big, glorious country, and I'd like to go ashore."
There wasn't any use arguing with him. The cap'n tried it, we all tried it, and at last Thomas Jefferson prepared to take his leave of us at Point Fullerton, just eight hundred miles north of civilization, where there's an Eskimo village and a police station of the Royal Northwest Mounted. He came to me the day before we were going to take him ashore, and said:
"Bobby, why don't you come along? Let's chum it, old man, and see what happens."
When he went ashore, the next day, I went with him, and we each took three months' supply of grub and our pay. From that hour there began the big change--the change which turned Thomas Jefferson back into Thomas Jefferson Brown, and which it took a girl to finish.
It came first in his eyes, and then in his laugh. After that he seemed to grow an inch or two taller, and he lost that careless, shiftless way which comes of what he called the _wanderlust_ bug. There wasn't so much laughter in his eyes, but something better had taken its place--a deeper, grayer, more thoughtful look, and he didn't play those queer things with his mouth any more.
The police at Point Fullerton hardly had a glimpse of him as the big, sunny, loose-jointed giant, Thomas Jefferson. He had become a bronze-bearded god, with the strength of five men in his splendid shoulders, and a port to his head that made you think of a piece of sculpture.
"You can't be anything but a _man_ up here, Bobby," he said one day, and I knew what he meant. "It's not the air, it's not the cold, and it's not the fight you make to keep life in your body," he added, "but it's God! That's what it is, Bobby. There's not a sound or a sight up here, outside of that little cabin, that's human. It's all God--there's nothing else--and it makes you think!"


III
It was spring when we came down to Fort Churchill, and it was summer when we struck York Factory. It was the middle of one of those summer days when strawberries ripen even up there, that the last prop fell out from under Thomas Jefferson, and he became Thomas Jefferson Brown. He met Lady Isobel. The title did not really belong to her, for she was only the cousin of Lord Meton; but Thomas Jefferson Brown called her that from the first.
It was down close to the boats, where their launch lay, and the wind had frolicked with Lady Isobel's hair until it rippled about her face and shoulders like a net of spun gold. She was bareheaded, and he was bareheaded, and they stared for a moment, her blue eyes flashing into his gray ones; and then there came into her face a color like rose, and he bowed, as one of the old-time Presidents might have bowed to a hair-powdered beauty in the days when the Capitol was young.
That was the beginning, and to his honor be it said that Thomas Jefferson Brown never revealed that he was a gentleman born, though his heart was stricken with love at that