Читать книгу The Treasure of Hidden Valley - Emerson Willis George - Страница 9

AS THE two young men walked down the brilliantly lighted main street of Encampment, Grant Jones explained that the water had been dammed several miles up the south fork of the Encampment river and conducted in a California red-wood pipe down to the smelter plant for power purposes; and that the town of Encampment was lighted at a less cost per capita than any other town in the world. It simply cost nothing, so to speak.

Grant had pointed out several residences of local celebrities, but at last a familiar name drew Roderick’s special attention – the name of one of his father’s old friends.

“This is Boney Earnest’s home,” Grant was remarking. “He is the fellow who stands in front of the furnaces at the smelter in a sleeveless shirt and with a red bandana around his neck. They have a family of ten children, every one of them as bright as a new silver dollar. Oh, we have lots of children here and by the way a good public school. You see that log house just beyond? That is where Boney Earnest used to live when he first came into camp – before his brood was quite so numerous. It now belongs to Major Buell Hampton. It is not much to look at, but just wait until you get inside.”

“Then this Major Hampton, I presume, has furnished it up in great shape?”

“No, nothing but rough benches, a table, some chairs and a few shelves full of books. What I mean is that Major Hampton’s personality is there and that beats all the rich furniture and all the bric-à-brac on earth. As a college man you will appreciate him.”

Without ceremony Grant rapped vigorously at the door and received a loud response to “come in.” At the far end of a room that was perhaps 40 feet long by 20 feet in width was an open fireplace in which huge logs of wood were burning. Here Major Hampton was standing with his back to the fire and his hands crossed behind him.

As his visitors entered, the Major said in courtly welcome: “Mr. Grant Jones, I am glad to see you.” And he advanced with hand extended.

“Major, let me introduce you to a newcomer, Roderick Warfield. We belong to the same ‘frat.’.rdquo;

“Mr. Warfield,” responded the Major, shaking the visitor’s hand, “I welcome you not only to the camp but to my humble dwelling.”

He led them forward and provided chairs in front of the open fire. On the center table was a humidor filled with tobacco and beside it lay several pipes.

“Mr. Warfield,” observed the Major, speaking with a marked southern accent, “I am indeed pleased, suh, to meet anyone who is a friend of Mr. Jones. I have found him a most delightful companion and I hope you will make free to call on me often. Interested in mining, I presume?”

“Well,” replied Roderick, “interested, yes, in a way. But tentative arrangements have been made for me to join the cowboy brigade. I am to ride the range if Mr. Shields is pleased with me, as our friend here seems to think he will be. He is looking for some more cowboys and my name has been mentioned to him.”

“Yes,” concurred Grant, “Mr. Shields needs some more cowboys very badly, and as Warfield is accustomed to riding, I’m quite sure he’ll fill the bill.”

“Personally,” observed the Major, “I am very much interested in mining. It has a great charm for me. The taking out of wealth from the bosom of the earth – wealth that has never been tainted by commercialism – appeals to me very much.”

“Then I presume you are doing some mining yourself.”

“No,” replied the Major. “If I had capital, doubtless I would be in the mining business. But my profession, if I may term it so, is that of a hunter. These hills and mountains are pretty full of game, and I manage to find two or three deer a week. My friend and next door neighbor, Mr. Boney Earnest, and his family consisting of a wife and ten children, have been very considerate of me and I have undertaken the responsibility of furnishing the meat for their table. Are you fond of venison, Mr. Warfield?”

“I must confess,” said Roderick, “I have never tasted venison.”

“Finest meat in the world,” responded the Major. “Of course,” he went on, “I aim to sell about one deer a week, which brings me a fair compensation. It enables me to buy tobacco and ammunition,” and he laughed good naturedly at his limited wants.

“One would suppose,” interjected Grant Jones, “that the Boney Earnest family must be provided with phenomenal appetites if they eat the meat of two deer each week. But if you knew the Major’s practice of supplying not less than a dozen poor families with venison because they are needy, you would understand why he does not have a greater income from the sale of these antlered trophies of the hills.”

The Major waved the compliment aside and lit his pipe. As he threw his head well back after the pipe was going, Roderick was impressed that Major Buell Hampton most certainly was an exceptional specimen of manhood. He was over six feet tall, splendidly proportioned, and perhaps weighed considerably more than two hundred pounds.

There were little things here and there that gave an insight into the character of the man. Hanging on the wall was a broad-brimmed slouch hat of the southern planter style. Around his neck the Major wore a heavy gold watch guard with many a link. To those who knew him best, as Roderick came subsequently to learn, this chain was symbolical of his endless kindnesses to the poor – notwithstanding his own poverty, of such as he had he freely gave; like the chain his charities seemed linked together without a beginning – without an end. His well-brushed shoes and puttees, his neatly arranged Windsor tie, denoted the old school of refinement and good breeding.

His long dark hair and flowing mustaches were well streaked with gray. His forehead was knotted, his nose was large but well formed, while the tangled lines of his face were deep cut and noticeable. From under heavily thatched eyebrows the eyes beamed forth the rare tenderness and gentle consideration for others which his conversation suggested. Long before the evening’s visit was over, a conviction was fixed in Roderick’s heart that here indeed was a king among men – one on whom God had set His seal of greatness.

In later days, when both had become well acquainted, Roderick sometimes discovered moments when this strange man was in deep meditation – when his eyes seemed resting far away on some mysterious past or inscrutable future. And Roderick would wonder whether it was a dark cloud of memory or anxiety for what was to come that obscured and momentarily dimmed the radiance of this great soul. It was in such moments that Major Buell Hampton became patriarchal in appearance; and an observer might well have exclaimed: “Here is one over whom a hundred winters or even countless centuries have blown their fiercest chilling winds.” But when Buell Hampton had turned again to things of the present, his face was lit up with his usual inspiring smile of preparedness to consider the simplest questions of the poorest among the poor of his acquaintances – a transfiguration indescribable, as if the magic work of some ancient alchemist had pushed the years away, transforming the centenarian into a comparatively young man who had seen, perhaps, not more than half a century. He was, indeed, changeable as a chameleon. But in all phases he looked, in the broadest sense of the word, the humanitarian.

As the three men sat that night around the fire and gazed into the leaping flames and glowing embers, there had been a momentary lull in the conversation, broken at last by the Major.

“I hope we shall become great friends, Mr. War-field,” he said. “But to be friends we must be acquainted, and in order to be really acquainted with a man I must know his views on politics, religion, social questions, and the economic problems of the age in which we live.”

He waved his hand at the bookshelves well filled with volumes whose worn bindings showed that they were there for reading and not for show. Long rows of periodicals, even stacks of newspapers, indicated close attention to the current questions of the day.

“Rather a large order,” replied Roderick, smiling. “It would take a long time to test out a man in such a thorough way.”

The Major paid no heed to the comment. Still fixedly regarding the bookshelves, he continued: “You see my library, while not extensive, represents my possessions. Each day is a link in life’s chain, and I endeavor to keep pace with the latest thought and the latest steps in the world’s progress.”

Then he turned round suddenly and asked the direct question: “By the way, Mr. Warfield, are you a married man?”

Roderick blushed the blush of a young bachelor and confessed that he was not.

“Whom God hath joined let no man put asunder,” laughed Grant Jones. “The good Lord has not joined me to anyone yet, but I am hoping He will.”

“Grant, you are a boy,” laughed the Major. “You always will be a boy. You are quick to discover the ridiculous; and yet,” went on the Major reflectively, “I have seen my friend Jones in serious mood at times. But I like him whether he is frivolous or serious. When you boys speak of marriage as something that is arranged by a Divine power, you are certainly laboring under one of the many delusions of this world.”

Roderick remembered his compact with Stella Rain, the pretty little college widow. For a moment his mind was back at the campus grounds in old Galesburg. Presently he said: “I beg your pardon, Major, but would you mind giving me your ideas of an ideal marriage?”

“An ideal marriage,” repeated the Major, smiling, as he knocked the ashes from his meerschaum. “Well, an ideal marriage is a something the young girl dreams about, a something the engaged girl believes she has found, and a something the married woman knows never existed.”

He looked deep into the open grate as if re-reading a half forgotten chapter in his own life. Presently refilling and lighting his pipe he turned to Roderick and said: “When people enter into marriage – a purely civil institution – a man agrees to bring in the raw products – the meat, the flour, the corn, the fuel; and the woman agrees to manufacture the goods into usable condition. The husband agrees to provide a home – the wife agrees to take care of it and keep it habitable. In one respect marriage is slavery,” continued the Major, “slavery in the sense that each mutually sentences himself or herself to a life of servitude, each serving the other in, faithfully carrying out, when health permits, their contract or agreement of partnership. Therefore marriages are made on earth – not in heaven. There is nothing divine about them. They are, as I have said, purely a civil institution.”

The speaker paused. His listeners, deeply interested, were reluctant by any interruption to break the flow of thought. They waited patiently, and presently the Major resumed: “Since the laws of all civilized nations recognize the validity of a partnership contract, they should also furnish an honorable method of nullifying and cancelling it when either party willfully breaks the marriage agreement of partnership by act of omission or commission. Individuals belonging to those isolated cases ‘Whom God hath joined’ – if perchance there are any – of course have no objections to complying with the formalities of the institutions of marriage; they are really mated and so the divorce court has no terrors for them. It is only from among the great rank and file of the other class whom ‘God hath not joined’ that the unhappy victims are found hovering around the divorce courts, claiming that the partnership contract has been violated and broken and the erring one has proven a false and faithless partner.

“In most instances, I believe, and it is the saddest part of it all, the complainant is usually justified. And it is certainly a most wise, necessary, and humane law that enables an injured wife or husband to terminate a distasteful or repulsive union. Only in this way can the standard of humanity be raised by peopling the earth with natural love-begotten children, free from the effects of unfavorable pre-natal influences which not infrequently warp and twist the unborn into embryonic imbeciles or moral perverts with degenerate tendencies.

“Society as well as posterity is indebted fully as much to the civil institution of divorce as it is to the civil institution of marriage. Oh, yes, I well know, pious-faced church folks walk about throughout the land with dubs to bludgeon those of my belief without going to the trouble of submitting these vital questions to an unprejudiced court of inquiry.”

The Major smiled, and said: “I see you young men are interested in my diatribe, or my sermon – call it which you will – so I’ll go on. Well, the churches that are nearest to the crudeness of antiquity, superstition, and ignorance are the ones most unyielding and denunciatory to the institution of divorce. The more progressive the church or the community and the more enlightened the human race becomes, the less objectionable and the more desirable is an adequate system of divorce laws – laws that enable an injured wife or husband to refuse to stultify their conscience and every instinct of decency by bringing children into the world that are not welcome. A womanly woman covets motherhood – desires children – love offerings with which to people the earth – babes that are not handicapped with parental hatreds, regrets, or disgust. Marriage is not a flippant holiday affair but a most serious one, freighted not alone with grave responsibilities to the mutual happiness of both parties to the civil contract, but doubly so to the offspring resultant from the union. But I guess that is about enough of my philosophy for one evening, isn’t it?” he concluded, with a little laugh that was not devoid of bitterness – it might have been the bitterness of personal reminiscence, or bitterness toward a blind and misguided world in general, or perhaps both combined.

Grant Jones turning to Roderick said: “Well, what do you think of the Major’s theory?”

“I fear,” said Roderick in a serious tone, “that it is not a theory but an actual condition.”

“Bravo,” said the Major as he arose from his chair and advanced to Roderick, extending his hand. “All truth,” said he, “in time will be uncovered, truth that today is hidden beneath the débris of formalities, ignorance, and superstition.”

“But why, Major,” asked Grant, “are there so many divorces? Do not contracting parties know their own minds? Now it seems impossible to conceive of my ever wanting a divorce from a certain little lady I know,” he added with a pleasant laugh – the care-free, confiding laugh of a boy.

“My dear Jones,” said the Major, “the supposed reasons for divorce are legion – the actual reasons are perhaps few. However it is not for me to say that all the alleged reasons are not potent and sufficient. When we hear two people maligning each other in or out of the court we are prone to believe both are telling the truth. Truth is the underlying foundation of respect, respect begets friendship, and friendship sometimes is followed by the more tender passion we call love. A man meets a woman,” the Major went on, thoughtfully, “whom he knows is not what the world calls virtuous. He may fall in love with her and may marry her and be happy with her. But if a man loves a woman he believes to be virtuous and then finds she is not – it is secretly regarded by him as the unforgivable sin and is doubtless the unspoken and unwritten allegation in many a divorce paper.”

He mused for a moment, then went on: “Sometime there will be a single standard of morals for the sexes, but as yet we are not far enough away from the brutality of our ancestors. Yes, it is infinitely better,” he added, rising from his chair, “that a home should be broken into a thousand fragments through the kindly assistance of a divorce court rather than it should only exist as a family battle ground.” The tone of his voice showed that the talk was at an end, and he bade his visitors a courteous good-night, with the cordial addition: “Come again.”

“It was great,” remarked Roderick, as the young men wended their homeward way. “What a wealth of new thought a fellow can bring away from such a conversation!”

“Just as I told you,” replied Grant “But the Major opens his inmost heart like that only to his chosen friends.”

“Then I’m mighty glad to be enrolled among the number,” said Roderick. “Makes a chap feel rather shy of matrimony though, doesn’t it?”

“Not on your life. True love can never change – can never wrong itself. When you feel that way toward a girl, Warfield, and know that the girl is of the same mind, go and get the license – no possible mistake can be made.”

Grant Jones was thinking of Dorothy Shields, and his face was aglow. To Roderick had come thought of Stella Rain, and he felt depressed. Was there no mistake in his love affair? – this was the uneasy question that was beginning to call for an answer. And yet he had never met a girl whom he would prefer to the dainty, sweet, unselfish, brave little “college widow” of Galesburg.