Tales of Trail and Town - Bret Harte (best short novels of all time .TXT) 📗

but were strangely incongruous to those white patches on the table-land and the white tongue stretching from the ridge to the valley. But the master was familiar with those Sierran contrasts, and as he had never ascended the trail before, it might be only the usual prospect of the dwellers there. At this moment Mr. Tribbs appeared from the cabin, with his axe on his shoulder. Nodding carelessly to the master, he was moving away, when the latter stopped him.

“Is Jackson here?” he asked.

“No,” said the father, half impatiently, still moving on. “Hain’t seen him since yesterday.”

“Nor has he been at school,” said the master, “either yesterday or to-day.”

Mr. Tribbs looked puzzled and grieved. “Now I reckoned you had kep’ him in for some devilment of his’n, or lessons.”

“Not ALL NIGHT!” said the master, somewhat indignant at this presumption of his arbitrary functions.

“Humph!” said Mr. Tribbs. “Mariar!” Mrs. Tribbs made her appearance in the doorway. “The schoolmaster allows that Jackson ain’t bin to school at all.” Then, turning to the master, he added, “Thar! you settle it between ye,” and quietly walked away.

Mrs. Tribbs looked by no means satisfied with or interested in the proposed tete-a-tete. “Hev ye looked in the bresh” (i. e., brush or underwood) “for him?” she said querulously.

“No,” said the master, “I came here first. There are two other boys missing,—Providence Smith and Julian Fleming. Did either of them”—

But Mrs. Tribbs had interrupted him with a gesture of impatient relief. “Oh, that’s all, is it? Playin’ hookey together, in course. ‘Scuse me, I must go back to my bakin’.” She turned away, but stopped suddenly, touched, as the master fondly believed, by some tardy maternal solicitude. But she only said: “When he DOES come back, you just give him a whalin’, will ye?” and vanished into her kitchen.

The master rode away, half ashamed of his foolish concern for the derelicts. But he determined to try Smith’s father, who owned a small rancho lower down on a spur of the same ridge. But the spur was really nearer Hemlock Hill, and could have been reached more directly by a road from there. He, however, kept along the ridge, and after half an hour’s ride was convinced that Jackson Tribbs could have communicated with Provy Smith without coming nearer Hemlock Hill, and this revived his former belief that they were together. He found the paternal Smith engaged in hoeing potatoes in a stony field. The look of languid curiosity with which he had regarded the approach of the master changed to one of equally languid aggression as he learned the object of his visit.

“Wot are ye comin’ to ME for? I ain’t runnin’ your school,” he said slowly and aggressively. “I started Providence all right for it mornin’ afore last, since when I never set eyes on him. That lets ME out. My business, young feller, is lookin’ arter the ranch. Yours, I reckon, is lookin’ arter your scholars.”

“I thought it my business to tell you your son was absent from school,” said the master coldly, turning away. “If you are satisfied, I have nothing more to say.” Nevertheless, for the moment he was so startled by this remarkable theory of his own responsibility in the case that he quite accepted the father’s callousness,—or rather it seemed to him that his unfortunate charges more than ever needed his protection. There was still the chance of his hearing some news from Julian Fleming’s father; he lived at some distance, in the valley on the opposite side of Hemlock Hill; and thither the master made his way. Luckily he had not gone far before he met Mr. Fleming, who was a teamster, en route. Like the fathers of the other truants, he was also engaged in his vocation. But, unlike the others, Fleming senior was jovial and talkative. He pulled up his long team promptly, received the master’s news with amused interest, and an invitation to spirituous refreshment from a demijohn in his wagon.

“Me and the ole woman kind o’ spekilated that Jule might hev been over with Aunt Marthy; but don’t you worry, Mr. Schoolmaster. They’re limbs, every one o’ them, but they’ll fetch up somewhere, all square! Just you put two fingers o’ that corn juice inside ye, and let ‘em slide. Ye didn’t hear what the ‘lekshun news was when ye was at Smith’s, did ye?”

The master had not inquired. He confessed he had been worried about the boys. He had even thought that Julian might have met with an accident.

Mr. Fleming wiped his mouth, with a humorous affectation of concern. “Met with an ACCIDENT? Yes, I reckon not ONE accident, but TWO of ‘em. These yer accidents Jule’s met with had two legs, and were mighty lively accidents, you bet, and took him off with ‘em; or mebbe they had four legs, and he’s huntin’ ‘em yet. Accidents! Now I never thought o’ that! Well, when you come across him and THEM ACCIDENTS, you just whale ‘em, all three! And ye won’t take another drink? Well, so long, then! Gee up!” He rolled away, with a laugh, in the heavy dust kicked up by his plunging mules, and the master made his way back to the schoolhouse. His quest for that day was ended.

But the next morning he was both astounded and relieved, at the assembling of school, to find the three truants back in their places. His urgent questioning of them brought only the one and same response from each: “Got lost on the ridge.” He further gathered that they had slept out for two nights, and were together all the time, but nothing further, and no details were given. The master was puzzled. They evidently expected punishment; that was no doubt also the wish of their parents; but if their story was true, it was a serious question if he ought to inflict it. There was no means of testing their statement; there was equally none by which he could controvert it. It was evident that the whole school accepted it without doubt; whether they were in possession of details gained from the truants themselves which they had withheld from him, or whether from some larger complicity with the culprits, he could not say. He told them gravely that he should withhold equally their punishment and their pardon until he could satisfy himself of their veracity, and that there had been no premeditation in their act. They seemed relieved, but here, again, he could not tell whether it sprang from confidence in their own integrity or merely from youthful hopefulness that delayed retribution never arrived!

It was a month before their secret was fully disclosed. It was slowly evolved from corroborating circumstances, but always with a shy reluctance from the boys themselves, and a surprise that any one should think it of importance. It was gathered partly from details picked up at recess or on the playground, from the voluntary testimony of teamsters and packers, from a record in the county newspaper, but always shaping itself into a consecutive and harmonious narrative.

It was a story so replete with marvelous escape and adventure that the master hesitated to accept it in its entirety until after it had long become a familiar history, and was even forgotten by the actors themselves. And even now he transcribes it more from the circumstances that surrounded it than from a hope that the story will be believed.

WHAT HAPPENED

Master Provy Smith had started out that eventful morning with the intention of fighting Master Jackson Tribbs for the “Kingship” of Table Ridge—a trifling territory of ten leagues square—Tribbs having infringed on his boundaries and claimed absolute sovereignty over the whole mountain range. Julian Fleming was present as referee and bottle-holder. The battle ground selected was the highest part of the ridge. The hour was six o’clock, which would allow them time to reach school before its opening, with all traces of their conflict removed. The air was crisp and cold,—a trifle colder than usual,—and there was a singular thickening of the sun’s rays on the ridge, which made the distant peaks indistinct and ghostlike. However, the two combatants stripped “to the buff,” and Fleming patronizingly took position at the “corner,” leaning upon a rifle, which, by reason of his superior years, and the wilderness he was obliged to traverse in going to school, his father had lent him to carry. It was that day a providential weapon.

Suddenly, Fleming uttered the word, “Sho!” The two combatants paused in their first “squaring off” to see, to their surprise, that their referee had faced round, with his gun in his hand, and was staring in another direction.

“B’ar!” shouted the three voices together. A huge bear, followed by its cubs, was seen stumbling awkwardly away to the right, making for the timber below. In an instant the boys had hurried into their jackets again, and the glory of fight was forgotten in the fever of the chase. Why should they pound each other when there was something to really KILL? They started in instant pursuit, Julian leading.

But the wind was now keen and bitter in their faces, and that peculiar thickening of the air which they had noticed had become first a dark blue and then a whitening pall, in which the bear was lost. They still kept on. Suddenly Julian felt himself struck between the eyes by what seemed a snowball, and his companions were as quickly spattered by gouts of monstrous clinging snowflakes. Others as quickly followed—it was not snowing, it was snowballing. They at first laughed, affecting to retaliate with these whirling, flying masses shaken like clinging feathers from a pillow; but in a few seconds they were covered from head to foot by snow, their limbs impeded or pinioned against them by its weight, their breath gone. They stopped blindly, breathlessly. Then, with a common instinct, they turned back. But the next moment they heard Julian cry, “Look out!” Coming towards them out of the storm was the bear, who had evidently turned back by the same instinct. An ungovernable instinct seized the younger boys, and they fled. But Julian stopped with leveled rifle. The bear stopped too, with sullen, staring eyes. But the eyes that glanced along the rifle were young, true, and steady. Julian fired. The hot smoke was swept back by the gale into his face, but the bear turned and disappeared in the storm again. Julian ran on to where his companions had halted at the report, a little ashamed of their cowardice. “Keep on that way!” he shouted hoarsely. “No use tryin’ to go where the b’ar couldn’t. Keep on!”

“Keep on—whar? There ain’t no trail—no nuthin’!” said Jackson querulously, to hold down a rising fear. It was true. The trail had long since disappeared; even their footprints of a moment before were filled up by the piling snow; they were isolated in this stony upland, high in air, without a rock or tree to guide them across its vast white level. They were bitterly cold and benumbed. The stimulus of the storm and chase had passed, but Julian kept driving them before him, himself driven along by the furious blast, yet trying to keep some vague course along the waste. So an hour passed. Then the wind seemed to have changed, or else they had traveled in a circle—they knew not which, but the snow was in their faces now. But, worst of all, the snow had changed too; it no longer fell in huge blue flakes, but in millions of stinging gray granules. Julian’s face grew hard and his eyes bright. He knew it was no longer a snow-squall, but a lasting storm. He stopped; the boys tumbled against him. He looked at them with a strange smile.

“Hev you two made up?” he said.

“No—o!”

“Make up, then.”

“What?”

“Shake