Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories Read online

  AN OLD ROMAN OF MARIPOSA

  "I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul." --WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY.

  Mariposa, in the days when I first knew it, was still a wreck of thegold fever. The merest skeleton of its former self, it lay there inthe gulch between the chaparral-covered foothills and hugged itsmemories of the days when it was young and lusty and had a murder everymorning for breakfast. All around it the gashed and seamed and scarredand furrowed earth bore testimony to the labors of those stirringtimes, when men dug a fortune out of the ground in a day--and spent itin the town at night.

  It was my first visit to the town, but I soon found that the peoplestill lived in the past. The first man with whom I talked made vividfor my eyes the placer mines down the bed of the creek, in his youngdays as thronged as a city street, but now deserted and blistering inthe sun; made me hear the sounds of bar-room frolicking and fighting,and the rolling chorus of "Forty-nine"; made me see, as he had seen,the piles of gold-dust and nuggets upon the gaming tables, and thehundreds of gold-weighted miners trooping into town on Saturday night.And every man and woman with whom I talked did the same thing for me,with new incidents and characters, until the hours became a fast-movingpanorama of the "days of gold," and I began to feel as if I myself wereliving through their excitements and had drawn their delirium into myveins.

  My hostess, herself an old-timer, began the entertainment anew as wesat on her porch in the early forenoon of the next day, breathing deepdraughts of the honey-scented air blowing down the hills from thousandsof pink-flowered manzanita bushes. She told me how she and her sisterhad alighted from the stage in Mariposa one evening, so many yearsbefore, when they were both "just slips of girls." They were the veryfirst white women there, and the men, hundreds of them, who had notseen the form of woman, save Indian squaws, for many months, came totheir shanty, called their father outside and begged to be allowed justto look at them. So the two came shyly out, hand in hand, and the mencrowded around them with looks of respectful adoration, and then passedon to make way for others. One fell on his knees and kissed the hem ofher dress. And presently a voice rose out of the throng, and the wholegreat crowd quickly joined in the hymn, "Nearer, my God, to Thee."

  As we talked, one or another old-timer stopped to greet us and to addfor my entertainment still more recollections of the days when they andhope and Mariposa were young. My pulses beat fast with the excitementof that dead life which their stories called into being again and Iforgot that they and the century too had grown old since the times ofwhich they spoke--until the Newspaper Man came along, and the sight ofhim brought me back to the present with a sudden jerk. I had seen himlast in San Francisco, only a week previous, but he had been inout-of-the-way, ghost-of-the-past Mariposa, he told me, for severaldays, reporting a murder trial for his paper.

  "Better come to this afternoon's session of the case," he said. "Theprisoner is n't much, but his father 's the most interesting old chap I've run across since I 've been on the Coast. I 'll tell you about himas we walk over."

  So we sauntered up the hot, dusty street to the court-house, betweenthe rows of straggling, forlorn little houses, each one with its ownthrilling memory of the "days of Forty-nine"; and the Newspaper Man'stale, like everything else in Mariposa, took its being and itsbeginning from that same boisterous time.

  "It's a brutal, ghastly case," he said, "and to my mind the onlymystery about it is the prisoner's father. He is a fine-looking man,with the manner and the head of an old Roman. He has the reputation ofbeing the straightest and squarest man in the county; and how he evercame to be the father of such a good-for-nothing scum-of-the-earth asthe prisoner I can explain only on the supposition that he is n't.

  "The old man is one of the pioneers in Mariposa, and they tell me thathe was one of the nerviest men that ever drew a gun in this town. Hekilled his man in those days, just as lots of other good men did, butit was in self-defence; and everybody was glad that the town was rid ofthe man he dropped, and so nothing was said about it. There was acoroner's jury, which gave a verdict of suicide, and explained theirfinding on the ground that it was suicidal for any man to draw on DanHopkins and then give Dan the chance to shoot first.

  "Along in the latter years of the gold excitement a woman came to thetown, who seems to have been part Portuguese, part Mexican, and allbad. She followed some man here from San Francisco, and lived as harda life as the times and place made possible. And after a while shewent to Dan Hopkins and told him that he must marry her. At first hewould n't consider seriously either her story or her proposition. Butshe kept at him, swore by all the saints in the calendar that the childwas his, and then swore them all over again that if he did not marryher she would kill the child and herself too as soon as it was born,and their blood would be on his head. And finally he did marry her,and made a home for her.

  "Time and again during this trial I 've watched that man's fine, sternold face and wondered what his motives and his feelings were when hetook that poor beast of a woman to be his wife--whether he reallybelieved her and thought it was his duty; or whether he feared that ifhe did not, the blood of a woman and a child would haunt him all therest of his life; or whether the underside of his nature, under herinfluence, rose up and dominated all that was best in him and made himlove her and be willing to marry her.

  "Whatever it was, the deed was done, and the woman of the town becameMrs. Hopkins, with Dan Hopkins's gun at her service, ready to takerevenge upon anybody who might offer her the least insult or whisper aslighting word about the past.

  "He did not try to crowd her down people's throats--they might let heralone if they wished, and they mostly did, I believe--but they weremade to understand that they had to treat her and speak of her withrespect.

  "He bought a big ranch a little way out of town, and there they livedfrom that time on. As far as I can find out, the woman lived astraight, respectable kind of life for a dozen years or more, and thenshe died.

  "But all her badness seems to have descended to the boy. It's one ofthe oddest studies in heredity I ever came across. The people here alltell me that until he was thirteen or fourteen years old he was a manlysort of a lad, and gave promise of being something like his father ashe grew up. But about that time the evil in him began to show itself,and the older he grew the less moral principle he seemed to possess.He was courageous, they say, and that was the only good quality he had.It was a sort of dare-devil bravery, and along with it he was cruel,thieving, untruthful, and--well, about as near thoroughly bad as theymake 'em. At least, that's the sum of the account of him the peoplehere have given me.

  "The old man was universally known to be so honest and square in allhis dealings, and so upright and honorable in every way, that the son'sdepravity seemed all the blacker by contrast. He has stood by theyoung fellow from the first of his wickedness, so everybody says, andhas always shown toward him not only steadfast affection, but just thesame sort of spirit that he did toward the boy's mother.

  "He has never intimated even to his best friend that the young man wasanything but the best and most dutiful son that ever lived. He haskept him supplied with money, so that the fellow's only reason for thepetty thievery he did was pure love of stealing. He has paid his fineswhen he has been arrested, and shielded him from public contempt, anddone everything possible to make it easy for him to be honest andrespectable.

  "But the boy has steadily gone on, they say, from bad to worse; and nowhe has capped it all with this crime, which, in wilful and unprovokedbrutality, was worthy of a criminal hardened by twice his years andexperience.

  "He and another young blade about as bad as he is (though this oneseems to have been the one who planned it and led in its execution),went to the house of an old man, who lived alone a little farther up inthe foothills toward the Yosemite Valley, and asked to be allowed tostay all night. The old man took them in, got supper for them, andmade them as comfortable as he could. In the night they got up andm
urdered him, stole all his money--he had just sold some horses andcattle to the prisoner's father--and were preparing to skip the countryand go to Australia, when they were arrested.

  "The thing 's not been absolutely proved on young Hopkins yet, but thecircumstantial evidence is so plain that, even if there is nothingelse, I don't see how he 's going to escape the rope. I 've just hearda rumor, though, that there 's to be some new evidence this afternoonthat will settle the matter without a doubt."

  The room rapidly filled up, and as we waited for court to open, theNewspaper Man pointed out one and another hale old man whose clear eyesand fresh skin belied his years, and told tales of his daring fortyyears before, of the wealth he had dug from the earth, and of thereckless ways in which he had lost it. And at last came the prisonerand his father. The old man's figure was tall, erect, broad-chested,and muscular, and his bearing proud and reserved.

  "I 'm always half expecting to see that old man get up," the NewspaperMan whispered to me, "fold his arms across that great chest of his, andsay '_Romanus sum_,' and then proudly lead his son away."

  He must have been sixty-five years old or more, though he looked twentyyears younger. His dark hair and beard were only sifted with gray, andhe held himself so erect and with such dignity, and all the lines ofhis countenance expressed such force and nobleness of character, thatthe suggestion of his appearance was of the strength of middle age.

  But the boy was a painful contrast. His eye was shifty, his expressionweak and sensual, and the hard lines of his face and the indifferenceof his manner told the story of a man old in criminal thoughts if notin years and deeds. For he looked no more than twenty-five, and mayhave been even younger.

  The father sat near him, and although they seldom spoke together hefrequently by some small act or apparently unconscious movement showeda tenderness and affection for the wayward son that seemed all thegreater by contrast with his own proud reserve and the boy's hardenedindifference.

  The new testimony was brought in. The sheriff had set a go-between atwork with the two prisoners, and with his aid had secured copies of allthe notes they had at once begun writing to each other. In theseletters, which were all produced in court, they had freely discussedtheir crime and argued about the points wherein they had made mistakes.Young Hopkins had boasted to the other that they need not fearconviction, because his father would certainly get them clear; and theyhad planned what they would do after the trial was over, wallowing inanticipations of a course of crime and debauchery.

  When the sheriff began to give this testimony the old man's hand wasresting affectionately on his son's shoulder. As it went on, layingbare the depravity of the boy's soul, the muscles of his face quivereda little, and presently, with just the suggestion of a flinchingshudder in face and figure, he took his hand away and shrank back alittle from the young man. I wondered as I watched him whether he wasadmitting to himself for the first time that this was the evil child ofan evil woman, for whom there was no hope, or whether it was arevelation to him of a depth of depravity in his son's heart of whichhe had not guessed.

  Then the prosecution asked for a few minutes' recess, announcing thatit had a new witness to bring forward. After much hurrying to and fro,and whispering and consulting among lawyers and court and prisonofficials, young Hopkins's accomplice appeared on the witness-stand andturned State's evidence. He had learned of the intercepted letters,and, frightened by their probable result for himself, told the wholestory of the crime, from the time Hopkins had first broached it to himuntil they were arrested in San Francisco. And during the entirenarration of the cold-blooded, brutal, and cowardly deed, old DanHopkins sat with his eyes on the witness, as steady and unflinching incolor and nerve and muscle as if he had been listening to a lecture ora sermon.

  I think he had decided, even then, what he would do, no matter what thefinding of the jury might be.

  At last it was all over; the jury listened to the judge's charge, andfiled out. "It's hanging, sure," said the Newspaper Man. "After thatevidence and that charge there's only one verdict they can bring in.It's a good thing as far as the boy's concerned, but I do feel sorryfor his governor."

  Every one felt so sure that the jury would soon return that none lefttheir places, and a buzz of conversation soon filled the room. Old DanHopkins sat with his arms folded, his head erect, and his eyes, steadyand clear, upon the empty witness chair. There were many sympathizingglances sent toward him, though no one approached or spoke to him; forit was evident from his compressed lips and frowning brow that hepreferred to be left alone. He had moved a little away from his son,and sat scarcely ten feet distant on my left. When the jury returned,in less than half an hour, he bent upon them the same abstracted gazeand unmoved countenance.

  The foreman stood up and glanced sadly toward the man who had been hisfriend and neighbor for many years. There were tears in his eyes, andhis voice broke and trembled as he gave their verdict, "Guilty ofmurder in the first degree."

  Not a sound broke the death-like stillness of the room as he sat down,and I noticed that every face within my view was turned away from theprisoner's chair and the old man who sat near it. The tense strain ofthe moment was broken by the prisoner's counsel, who arose and began amotion for a new trial.

  But the click of a revolver sharply halted his first sentence, as DanHopkins jumped to his feet with a sudden, swift movement of his rightarm. A dozen men leaped forward with outstretched arms crying, "Stop!Stop!"

  But even before they could reach him the report rang through the room,and just as they seized the father's arms the son dropped to the floor,dead. He waved back the men who were pressing around him.

  "Stop!" he cried. "Stand back a minute!" And they fell backinstinctively.

  He walked calmly to the judge's desk and laid down his smoking pistol.Then he folded his arms and faced about, with head thrown back,flashing eyes, and colorless face. He looked at the sheriff, who, withthe sense of official duty strong upon him, had stepped out from thehuddled crowd and was coming toward him.

  "Wait one minute, let me speak," he said. "I believe you are all myfriends, for I have lived most of my life here, among you, and I hope Ihave the respect and confidence and friendship of you all. But that,"and his flashing eyes rested for a moment upon the sheriff, thelawyers, and then upon the judge, "must have no influence upon thepenalty I shall pay for what I have just done. The knowledge has beenbitter enough to me this afternoon that that poor boy there deserveddeath. For the first time I have been convinced that he was bad fromthe bottom of his heart, and that there was no hope for him. But withmy own hand I have killed him, that he might be saved the last horrorand disgrace. Let them, and the law's justice, be my portion, for Ideserve them for having given him life in the first place. Mine wasthe first sin, and it is right that I should suffer the disgrace andthe penalty."

  He turned to the sheriff, holding out his arms for the handcuffs."Now, I am ready. Arrest me."