Short Stories - - (story books to read .TXT) 📗

But “Mister” was paying no attention to this sally or the mirth it had provoked. “Flowers—flowers and fruit—fruit and flowers,” he was muttering to himself, apparently confounding a conventional Eastern attention from the friends of an afflicted family with the catalogue of some Maine county-fair. “Must come to the same thing—of course,” he exclaimed, conclusively, striding away from the de facto coffin and his companions. He disappeared within the barroom. “I’ve made free with them new stores of yourn, Dennison,” he called out presently, staggering down the room toward the expectant party, weighted with an awkward load—two stems of bananas and four spiky pineapples. “It won’t hurt their sellin’,” he apologized, as with a dexterous balancing and tying he disposed of the two first-named decorations upright, one upon either side of poor Professor Jovanny’s perpendicular feet—vegetable obelisks. A pineapple stood upon each one of the “round corners.” Dennison and the rest were hearty in commendations of their friend’s thoughtfulness and taste. “That just fixes her off too slick!” exclaimed Big Jinny, in high delight.

The sun mounted; the barkeeper appeared in the adjoining room. First stragglers, curious to learn the truth of any rumors concerning the day’s novelties at the Cosmopolitan, strolled across the threshold. Dennison put “Mister” and a table on which was deposited a loaded revolver and an empty biscuit-tin, with a slit in its cover, over against the door; Big Jinny and the Pearl, he posted at the special bar for the day, which he had by no means ungenerously furnished forth; himself, he stationed in an arm-chair, without the dance-room, to advertise the obsequies, urge entrance into the penetralia of the dance-room, as a matter of duty and pleasure, and act as master of ceremonies generally.

It will be remarked that, designedly or accidentally, Rioba Jack was appointed unto no prominent function in these festivities of grief, so he dropped an eagle into “Mister’s” resonant receptacle and walked out of the Cosmopolitan. The street was sparsely peopled at that early hour. He turned the corner of the hotel and halted abruptly to avoid collision with a figure—a girl standing motionless, and leaning against the wall, as if summoning up the courage to advance further. What told the Rioba instantly that it was Professor Jovanny’s daughter, was not difficult to appreciate. The set young face, tear-stained and pallid, but independent of a pair of dark, mournful eyes for its beauty, the slender form not ungracefully draped by the scanty, black-stuff dress; the head bared to the sharp morning wind—it was a vignette of young grief, passive, despairing, solitary, that the Rioba gazed at pityingly.

“Good—good-day,” he said, awkwardly. “You’re—his gal, I take it. Can I—might I help you, Miss?” The last word in respectful salute to the unmarried, weaker sex, had been a stranger to the Rioba’s lips for a dozen years.

“I am going to my father,” the girl replied, in a curiously abstracted fashion of speech; one wherein lay just a shadow of foreign accent. She looked away from the Rioba’s clear gaze, and continued, as if partly speaking to herself, “I wish to see where they have put my father. I must sit by him. He will need me.”

“But,” began the Rioba, in distressed perplexity, as she wrapped her shawl closer about her exposed throat (it was a beautiful throat), and made a motion to pass him, “yer father’s dead, Miss. Poor, old Jovanny’s dead. He’s layin’ in state in his pianny—coffin, I mean—round to the Cosmopolitan here. You wouldn’t like to be a sittin’ alone there all day ’side the coffin, and everybody starin’ at you. ’Twouldn’t do.”

“I want to sit by my father,” the girl answered more decidedly. “Take me to him.”

The Rioba was mute. He saw that his new protégée (for such he instinctively recognized her), was in that state of mind that the eyes of all the universe were as naught to her. Extremity of sorrow had taken hold upon her, and to reason with her would be like reasoning with the clouded mind. He looked again down upon her white, pathetic face. Its innocence awoke a new emotion in the Rioba’s heart.

“Come along,” he ejaculated, not unkindly. He turned and led the way to the Cosmopolitan. His companion followed mutely with bowed head. The gathering crowd in the dance-room stared as the two entered. The girl heeded the whispers not a whit. She uttered a low exclamation and walked quickly across to the “caskit.” “He is here, you see,” she said slowly, half turning to the Rioba with a recognizing smile whose transforming effect upon her wan face, utterly obliterated from his mind any further sense of the awkwardness of his position. Some one pushed a chair forward. She seated herself beside the coffin and fixed her eyes upon the marble face within it—a statue gazing upon a statue. The room was hushed. Suddenly some human vermin, audibly of the feminine gender, laughed from a far corner. The girl raised her head and looked fixedly whence the sound had proceeded. A troubled expression came over her countenance. But at the same moment she caught sight of the Rioba standing not distant, his face flushed with wrath at the insult, his eyes brimming with compassion encountering her own. Some shadowy, tardy sense of her utterly unprotected situation must have tinged that brief look of hers with an unconscious appeal. The effect upon the Rioba was electric. Leisurely drawing his pistol from its belt, the stalwart cavalier of the Sierras, whose education in chivalry had been intuitive, stepped quietly toward the coffin of Professor Jovanny, against the edge of which that loneliest of mourners had rested her forehead. The Rioba laid his hand gently upon her shoulder, and drew himself up. “Friends and feller-citizens,” he said, running his eye comprehensively round the room as he spoke, “this here young woman and this here corpse is under my protection. Look at that there comb in Big Jinny’s head!” Before any one in the room had discovered the gaudy ornament in question it was smashed to atoms by the bullet from the revolver discharged by the Rioba as a period to his sentence. Big Jinny uttered one single staccato screech (to which luxury she was certainly entitled), not much relishing being made a target of; and then became in common with the entire company, significantly silent.

Dennison’s startled face appeared at the door outside; he had listened to speech and shot. The Rioba caught his eye and smiled. It was a smile of wholesale defiance!

The morning wore on—noon came—afternoon. Professor Jovanny’s “laying in state” had been, in the language of “Mister,” “a big go.” Within its allotted limits of time, wellnigh the entire male and female population of Yellow Bear City had one by one entered the door of the Cosmopolitan dance-room, contributed (so far as concerned the male proportion), inspected, imbibed at discretion, departed. The “heft” of “Mister’s” biscuit-tin was something to excite the dormant cupidity of anyone. All day long that ill-sorted pathetic tableau in the center of the place had remained changeless—the voiceless, motionless watcher; the tranquil tenant of that uncouth coffin; the Rioba standing beside both, erect, attentive, grave. The room was scarcely entirely still; even the Rioba had not expected that. There was some shuffling of feet, subdued commenting and query. Big Jinny and the Pearl exchanged pleasantries of a more or less Doric character with passing acquaintances. Glasses clinked and coin jingled. But no word, no ejaculation was let fall that could reflect upon or annoy her who sat in the midst of the staring, sluggishly revolving whirlpool. Big Jinny had stuck sundry disconnected fragments of her unlucky adornment in her ropy locks—a laconic hint. More than once did some acquaintance offer to relieve the Rioba on guard; but that gentleman only smiled and said, in an offhand fashion, “I guess I’ll finish.”

Darkness had set in as the funeral procession took order before the Cosmopolitan door. The majority of the sterner sex in Yellow Bear seemed disposed to swell it. “Mister’s” mule-cart preceded, whereon, amputated as to its legs and with its cover nailed fast, was placed the coffin. Dennison and “Mister” drove the hearse slowly. Immediately in its rear walked, bareheaded still, and as walks the somnambulist, Professor Jovanny’s daughter. The instant that the Rioba had said, “You shall go with it,” she had not offered to interfere with the shutting up, at last, from view of her dead father’s body, or the removal of the dismembered piano itself to the cart. The Rioba himself walked a pace to the right, very much with the air of a young man who was dimly aware that he was moving toward an emergency. A miscellaneous crowd lengthened out in the rear. The pitchy flame of the pine-wood torches filled the evening air and played strange tricks with the tree shadows. Professor Jovanny’s funeral cortège began to get straggling and unsteady. In fact the liberty of outside locomotion and potations of strong waters had begun to battle against further decorum. Fragments of ribald songs, unseemly pranks and hilarities broke out behind intermittently. At one stage of the progress a good part of the procession seceded to witness (and assist at) the settlement of a “melancholy dispute for precedence between two of Yellow Bear’s foremost citizens”—as their obituaries in the next Intelligencer recorded. Nevertheless, the cavernous hole dug for the reception of poor Professor Jovanny, or, rather for his bulky sarcophagus, yawned at last down a little declivity under a clump of firs.

“Dig her big enough for a hoss,” had been Dennison’s prudential injunction to the “committee” of grave-diggers. In their zeal they had excavated a pit that was fearful. The crowd gathered about, holding up the torches. Dennison and “Mister” superintended carefully the lowering of the coffin, a feat accomplished not without difficulty. Yellow Bear was, by this time, too weary of affliction, and, it is only veracious to add, too inebriated to think of carrying out any of the quasi religious or municipal ceremonies discussed. The first shovels of clay were discharged into the black depth. Then all at once, with this most merciless of earthly sounds suddenly breaking the stillness, the desolate mourner’s soul awoke from its long lethargy to active grief. The girl uttered an exceedingly bitter cry. “My father!—O God, my father!” came from her white lips again and again, interrupted by a tempest of sobs and tears under which she bowed, crouching down upon the earth in an agony of loss and loneliness. The Rioba stood with his head bent suspiciously near to her side. Dennison stood opposite.

The crowd had dispersed before the work of “filling in” was ended. The girl would not be moved until all was over. Rioba Jack did not shift from his own station. At last, however, the shovels were thrown aside and the few men left, beside the Rioba and Dennison, began relieving each other of the torches, or collecting the tools.

“Come, my gal,” said the Rioba, with unconscious but wondrous tenderness. The sound of his voice seemed to give the kneeling one strength. She nodded her bowed head, checked her sobs piteously and presently rose. Still keeping her wet eyes averted from the flaring lights, she half-turned toward him and—put out her hand.

The Rioba took it as if it had been an angel’s. Suddenly Dennison, who had been the most attentive of spectators, approached. The Rioba looked and discerned at his back, holding a torch, the swart, greasy face of Mother Sal, whom the other man had selected as consignee of the orphan.

“Look-a-here, Rioba,” exclaimed the proprietor of the Cosmopolitan, abruptly, and standing squarely a couple of yards in front of him, “it