Roughing It
“Gentlemen, I’m not stubborn and I’m not unreasonable. I’m always
willing to do just as near right as I can. How long will it take?”
“Probably only a little while.”
“And can I take him up the shore and hang him as soon as you are done?”
“_If_ he is proven guilty he shall be hanged without unnecessary delay.”
“If he’s proven guilty. Great Neptune, _ain’t_ he guilty? This beats my
time. Why you all _know_ he’s guilty.”
But at last they satisfied him that they were projecting nothing
underhanded. Then he said:
“Well, all right. You go on and try him and I’ll go down and overhaul
his conscience and prepare him to go—like enough he needs it, and I
don’t want to send him off without a show for hereafter.”
This was another obstacle. They finally convinced him that it was
necessary to have the accused in court. Then they said they would send a
guard to bring him.
“No, sir, I prefer to fetch him myself—he don’t get out of _my_ hands.
Besides, I’ve got to go to the ship to get a rope, anyway.”
The court assembled with due ceremony, empaneled a jury, and presently
Capt. Ned entered, leading the prisoner with one hand and carrying a
Bible and a rope in the other. He seated himself by the side of his
captive and told the court to “up anchor and make sail.” Then he turned
a searching eye on the jury, and detected Noakes’s friends, the two
bullies.
He strode over and said to them confidentially:
“You’re here to interfere, you see. Now you vote right, do you hear?—or
else there’ll be a double-barreled inquest here when this trial’s off,
and your remainders will go home in a couple of baskets.”
The caution was not without fruit. The jury was a unit—the verdict.
“Guilty.”
Capt. Ned sprung to his feet and said:
“Come along—you’re my meat _now_, my lad, anyway. Gentlemen you’ve done
yourselves proud. I invite you all to come and see that I do it all
straight. Follow me to the canyon, a mile above here.”
The court informed him that a sheriff had been appointed to do the
hanging, and—
Capt. Ned’s patience was at an end. His wrath was boundless. The subject
of a sheriff was judiciously dropped.
When the crowd arrived at the canyon, Capt. Ned climbed a tree and
arranged the halter, then came down and noosed his man. He opened his
Bible, and laid aside his hat. Selecting a chapter at random, he read it
through, in a deep bass voice and with sincere solemnity. Then he said:
“Lad, you are about to go aloft and give an account of yourself; and the
lighter a man’s manifest is, as far as sin’s concerned, the better for
him. Make a clean breast, man, and carry a log with you that’ll bear
inspection. You killed the nigger?”
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No reply. A long pause.
The captain read another chapter, pausing, from time to time, to impress
the effect. Then he talked an earnest, persuasive sermon to him, and
ended by repeating the question:
“Did you kill the nigger?”
No reply—other than a malignant scowl. The captain now read the first
and second chapters of Genesis, with deep feeling—paused a moment,
closed the book reverently, and said with a perceptible savor of
satisfaction:
“There. Four chapters. There’s few that would have took the pains with
you that I have.”
Then he swung up the condemned, and made the rope fast; stood by and
timed him half an hour with his watch, and then delivered the body to
the court. A little after, as he stood contemplating the motionless
figure, a doubt came into his face; evidently he felt a twinge of
conscience—a misgiving—and he said with a sigh:
“Well, p’raps I ought to burnt him, maybe. But I was trying to do for
the best.”
When the history of this affair reached California (it was in the “early
days”) it made a deal of talk, but did not diminish the captain’s
popularity in any degree. It increased it, indeed. California had a
population then that “inflicted” justice after a fashion that was
simplicity and primitiveness itself, and could therefore admire
appreciatively when the same fashion was followed elsewhere.
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CHAPTER LI.
Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our “flush times.” The
saloons were overburdened with custom; so were the police courts, the
gambling dens, the brothels and the jails—unfailing signs of high
prosperity in a mining region—in any region for that matter. Is it not
so? A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade
is brisk and money plenty. Still, there is one other sign; it comes
last, but when it does come it establishes beyond cavil that the “flush
times” are at the flood. This is the birth of the “literary” paper. The
Weekly Occidental, “devoted to literature,” made its appearance in
Virginia. All the literary people were engaged to write for it. Mr. F.
was to edit it. He was a felicitous skirmisher with a pen, and a man who
could say happy things in a crisp, neat way. Once, while editor of the
_Union_, he had disposed of a labored, incoherent, two-column attack
made upon him by a contemporary, with a single line, which, at first
glance, seemed to contain a solemn and tremendous compliment—viz.: “THE
LOGIC OF OUR ADVERSARY RESEMBLES THE PEACE OF GOD,”—and left it to the
reader’s memory and after-thought to invest the remark with another and
“more different” meaning by supplying for himself and at his own leisure
the rest of the Scripture—“_in that it passeth understanding._” He once
said of a little, half-starved, wayside community that had no
subsistence except what they could get by preying upon chance passengers
who stopped over with them a day when traveling by the overland stage,
that in their Church service they had altered the Lord’s Prayer to read:
“Give us this day our daily stranger!”
We expected great things of the Occidental. Of course it could not get
along without an original novel, and so we made arrangements to hurl
into the work the full strength of the company. Mrs. F. was an able
romancist of the ineffable school—I know no other name to apply to a
school whose heroes are all dainty and all perfect. She wrote the
opening chapter, and introduced a lovely blonde simpleton who talked
nothing but pearls and poetry and who was virtuous to the verge of
eccentricity. She also introduced a young French Duke of aggravated
refinement, in love with the blonde. Mr. F. followed next week, with a
brilliant lawyer who set about getting the Duke’s estates into trouble,
and a sparkling young lady of high society who fell to fascinating the
Duke and impairing the appetite of the blonde. Mr. D., a dark and bloody
editor of one of the dailies, followed Mr. F., the third week,
introducing a mysterious Roscicrucian who transmuted metals, held
consultations with the devil in a cave at dead of night, and cast the
horoscope of the several heroes and heroines in such a way as to provide
plenty of trouble for their future careers and breed a solemn and awful
public interest in the novel. He also introduced a cloaked and masked
melodramatic miscreant, put him on a salary and set him on the midnight
track of the Duke with a poisoned dagger. He also created an Irish
coachman with a rich brogue and placed him in the service of the
society-young-lady with an ulterior mission to carry billet-doux to the
Duke.
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About this time there arrived in Virginia a dissolute stranger with a
literary turn of mind—rather seedy he was, but very quiet and
unassuming; almost diffident, indeed. He was so gentle, and his manners
were so pleasing and kindly, whether he was sober or intoxicated, that
he made friends of all who came in contact with him. He applied for
literary work, offered conclusive evidence that he wielded an easy and
practiced pen, and so Mr. F. engaged him at once to help write the
novel. His chapter was to follow Mr. D.’s, and mine was to come next.
Now what does this fellow do but go off and get drunk and then proceed
to his quarters and set to work with his imagination in a state of
chaos, and that chaos in a condition of extravagant activity. The result
may be guessed. He scanned the chapters of his predecessors, found
plenty of heroes and heroines already created, and was satisfied with
them; he decided to introduce no more; with all the confidence that
whisky inspires and all the easy complacency it gives to its servant, he
then launched himself lovingly into his work: he married the coachman to
the society-young-lady for the sake of the scandal; married the Duke to
the blonde’s stepmother, for the sake of the sensation; stopped the
desperado’s salary; created a misunderstanding between the devil and the
Roscicrucian; threw the Duke’s property into the wicked lawyer’s hands;
made the lawyer’s upbraiding conscience drive him to drink, thence to
delirium tremens, thence to suicide; broke the coachman’s neck; let his
widow succumb to contumely, neglect, poverty and consumption; caused the
blonde to drown herself, leaving her clothes on the bank with the
customary note pinned to them forgiving the Duke and hoping he would be
happy; revealed to the Duke, by means of the usual strawberry mark on
left arm, that he had married his own long-lost mother and destroyed his
long-lost sister; instituted the proper and necessary suicide of the
Duke and the Duchess in order to compass poetical justice; opened the
earth and let the Roscicrucian through, accompanied with the accustomed
smoke and thunder and smell of brimstone, and finished with the promise
that in the next chapter, after holding a general inquest, he would take
up the surviving character of the novel and tell what became of the
devil!
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It read with singular smoothness, and with a “dead” earnestness that was
funny enough to suffocate a body. But there was war when it came in. The
other novelists were furious. The mild stranger, not yet more than half
sober, stood there, under a scathing fire of vituperation, meek and
bewildered, looking from one to another of his assailants, and wondering
what he could have done to invoke such a storm. When a lull came at
last, he said his say gently and appealingly—said he did not rightly
remember what he had written, but was sure he had tried to do the best
he could, and knew his object had been to make the novel not only
pleasant and plausible but instructive and—
The bombardment began again. The novelists assailed his ill-chosen
adjectives and demolished them with a storm of denunciation and
ridicule. And so the siege went on. Every time the stranger tried to
appease the enemy he only made matters worse. Finally he offered to
rewrite the chapter. This arrested hostilities. The indignation
gradually quieted down, peace reigned again and the sufferer retired in
safety and got him to his own citadel.
But on the way thither the evil angel tempted him and he got drunk
again. And again his imagination went mad. He led the heroes and
heroines a wilder dance than ever; and yet all through it ran that same
convincing air of honesty and earnestness that had marked his first
work. He got the characters into the most extraordinary situations, put
them through the most surprising performances, and made them talk the
strangest talk! But the chapter cannot be described. It was
symmetrically crazy; it was artistically absurd; and it had explanatory
footnotes that were fully as curious as the text. I remember one of the
“situations,” and will offer it as an example of the whole. He altered
the character of the brilliant lawyer, and made him a great-hearted,
splendid fellow; gave him fame and riches, and set his age at thirty-
three years. Then he made the blonde discover, through the help of the
Roscicrucian and the melodramatic miscreant, that while the Duke loved
her money ardently and wanted it, he secretly felt a sort of leaning