A PIONEER OF COOPER’S PIKE.
Enjoy the spring of Love and Youth,
To some good angel leave the rest;
For Time will teach thee soon the truth,
There are no birds in last year’s nest!” — LONGFELLOW.
WHY, certainly. A great many folks ask me what it was that turned my hair white. And you don’t often see a young man of my age with snow-white locks like these, I’m aware. I consider it a spécialité. Well, it was that awful night at San Francisco that did it, if you want to know. I tell you, gentlemen, if ever any fellow was rescued from the jaws of death by the skin of his teeth, it’s the individual that now stands before you. But it’s a long yam, and a dry yam, and it’ll take some time to tell it properly. Let’s adjourn to the billiard-room, and have it all out over a brandy and soda, since you will be inquisitive. I always require a brandy and soda myself when I tell that tale, just to keep my mouth moist; the horror of the thing comes back to me so still, that it somehow seems to dry my blood up.
But first, before I begin to reach the tragedy of it — for you may guess it was a tragedy, and no mistake — let me start fair with the story how I came at all, an Englishman born and bred, and one of the Frekes of Devonshire, to go to San Francisco.
You’ve had a cursory look round Cooper’s Pike this afternoon in my buggy, and you can see what sort of a city it is nowadays. There isn’t another manufacturing town on the Pacific slope that can hold a candle to Cooper’s Pike this minute in the matter of industries. We claim to do the biggest trade in hardware of any city in the State, and our population ran out to over seventy thousand souls at the last enumeration. But the Pike was a precious different sort of a place when I first came here, ten years since.
A more one-horse affair than it looked then you never saw.
It was a miserable village of a single long street, and low at that, consisting in about equal proportions of a hotel, a dancing-saloon, three American bars, a provision store, a shooting-gallery, and a Chinese laundry. People said, those days, it was better to live in vain than to live in Cooper’s Pike City. The inhabitants reckoned about forty men and three women; and so far as I could see they didn’t appear to have a single immortal soul among them. “Hallo!” said I, when I first set eyes on the town of Cooper’s Pike; “here’s a pretty sort of place indeed for me to bring Edith to!”
And that reminds me that I’d better start fair at the very beginning, and tell you who I was, and who was Edith.
Well, I’d come fresh out from the old country in those days, like many another young fellow of good family and insufficient brains, to seek my fortune in the Western Territories. I’d been a couple of years a medical student at Bartholomew’s before I left home; but Bartholomew’s and I didn’t get on together, somehow; and Bartholomew’s had the meanness to insinuate it was my own fault rather than theirs, for being a lazy young vagabond, and neglecting anatomy and physiology with impartial carelessness. Perhaps it was; for I was never a dab at books, and I didn’t take enthusiastically to dissecting, either; but anyhow, my mother went on Bartholomew’s side, and shipped me off to America to shift for myself on a ranch or something. The dear old lady meant to do her best for me, I don’t doubt; and so she did in the end, as I guess you’ll judge if you look around my residence here; for we’re not what you call indigent; and by way of settling me down in life as a complete rancher — why, she bought me a small town lot for a nominal price in Cooper’s Pike City. Cooper’s Pike wasn’t then on the boom; but a land company in England was doing its best to boom it. She bought it, on paper, at an agency in Pall Mall; and I, who didn’t know a ranch from a ten o’ spades in those days — I went readily enough wherever the mater chose to send me. “Honor your father and your mother,” was good enough for me; and, as my mother wished it, I was prepared to run my own ranch undisturbed on a fifty-feet frontage right here in Main Street.
So having nothing to live upon, and no prospects in particular to look forward to in life, I need hardly tell you that the very first thing I did on my way out, on board the Scythia, was to fall in love with the prettiest and most delicately nurtured girl in all England.
Her name was Edith Deverel — the Devonshire Deverels, too — and she was going out with her father, who was in the consular service, to spread sweetness and light in Yokohama.
As they were bound for Japan, via San Francisco, and as I was going in the same direction as far as Carson (where I was to branch off for my property on the Cooper’s Pike trail), we naturally chummed up from the very first day we met on board; and I’ve always noticed that when a young man and a young woman chum up together on a Cunard steamer, you may smell wedding-cake looming up indefinitely in the dim distance. A mixed metaphor, is it, sir? Well, perhaps it is; we’re not particular about mixing our liquors, right out here in the West. As long as we make ourselves understood, we let the rest slide. And I fancy you more or less comprehend my meaning.
So, to cut a long story short, and get into the thick of things at once, as Horace recommends — you see, I still retain reminiscences of the dear old Charterhouse — before we reached New York, we were regularly engaged; and likely to remain so for an indefinite period.
At the moment, however, that didn’t trouble me much. I was happy enough in having induced Edith to be mine for life; and the mere trifling fact that she was to be mine at Yokohama, while I was to be hers in the territory of Nevada, six thousand miles away, didn’t seem to interfere in the very least with the depth and serenity of our youthful transports. Young people don’t duly appreciate at first the importance of contiguity in matters of this sort. They think you can love one another equally well in spite of space relations; which, as Euclid would say, is absurd and impossible. If I was one of the Bureau of National Proverbs, I’d make the children write at the top of their copy-books, “Propinquity is the mother of intersexual affection.”
However, as far as Carson City we went together very happily over the Union Pacific line to our various destinations. The very name seemed to give us a fortunate omen. The Union Pacific line! Could anything on earth be more delightful? Yokohama and Cooper’s Pike united together in the bond of love and fortnightly correspondence! We gloated over the idea, and I almost fancy I made it a subject of my muse’s first and only sonnet.
But when I left the cars at Carson City — yes, sir, I have got Americanized, some, in ten years at Cooper’s Pike; I frankly admit it; the Pacific slope is surprisingly assimilative; nowhere like it on earth for absorptive power — when I left the cars at Carson City, I began to feel in a vague sort of way that perhaps I’d done rather a mean thing in asking Edith to throw herself away on a good-for-nothing emigrant, who hadn’t a prospect in the world or a red cent to bless himself with. As I drove across country on Jim Fletcher’s stage to Cooper’s Pike, three days’ journey over a road which would make an Irish carman’s hair stand on end with horror, this feeling gradually deepened upon me. And when at last I reached Pike itself, and examined life near the setting sun, on the site of Edith’s future home, I felt in a moment I could never ask that ethereal creature to come down from the clouds and partake of hash daily in a lumber-built shanty.
For there wasn’t a stone house anywhere in Cooper’s Pike in those days, nor a house of any sort except right here on Main Street. There wasn’t a sidewalk, or a horse-car, or a respectable woman. The cross streets were staked out to be sure, at regular angles, in very good style; the company did that; but only the stakes themselves as yet were visible; and as the boys used them for firing at in revolver practice, they tended to deteriorate before the city grew up and obliterated them entirely.
However, I was never one to be daunted by hardships. I set to work at once, with the aid of Joe Ashley, the barman at the saloon, to construct myself a hut on my fifty-foot frontage. It wasn’t much of a hut, I allow, for it was built entirely of broken cracker-boxes — I beg your pardon, gentlemen; I forgot you were from the other side — packing-cases for biscuits. I bought them at the grocery store for two days’ labor, splitting firewood; and when the hut was built, a neater or more commodious shanty of its sort you never saw; if only it had been watertight, it would have been replete with every modern convenience. But the rain dropping through where the shingles misfitted did keep one awake a bit at night sometimes; and I must say the absence of a floor was a distinct disadvantage, whenever one had to sit with one’s feet in a puddle. But bless you, you can’t expect to have French cookery and lectures on Esoteric Buddhism in a new settlement; you’re not fit for Nevada if you can’t put up with a little gentle roughing it.
Well, of course I didn’t like to worry my old mater at home with small details of that sort — she might have thought I’d catch cold if she knew I had to lie with the drip from the roof falling on to my blanket; and she’d have had her fears for my morals, I expect, if she’d learned the antecedents of the only ladies (all three of them unmarried) then located in the Cooper’s Pike settlement.
So, just to let her down easy, I put the best face upon it. I wrote home as cheerfully about things generally as I could honestly write. I told her I’d got myself a neat small house built on the lot she’d bought me; that I was on intimate terms with the best society of the place; and that I hoped before long to find some business opening in the lumbering interest. And indeed, Joe the barman was very good society; and the demand for steady hands to split firewood and drive teams to the mines was regularly increasing with the pan-out of the silver.
For about three months I went on picking up odd jobs here and there, and living from hand to mouth in a way that afforded me lots of fun for my money; and I also kept on writing to Edith at Yokohama, assuring her always of my undying affection, and of the absolute impossibility of its ever assuming a more tangible shape than that afforded by a long fortnightly letter. But at the end of three months, as I was washing out molasses barrels one day (at twenty cents an hour) for my friend at the grocery store, up comes the stage from Carson City, and Jim Fletcher jumps off and steps along quite important-like— “Howard Freke, Esquire,” says he, with a polite bow, “I’ve got a letter for you, sir. Boys, this is an event that inaugurates a new era. First United States mail that ever entered Cooper’s Pike City!”
Naturally, the boys all crowded round me; and naturally, too, they shook my hands, and congratulated me and themselves warmly upon this auspicious occurrence. They felt it was an occasion for glasses all around; and on the strength of my letter, I treated the company. After that, I retired to my own hut, to read the mater’s letter in peace and quietness.
Well, I don’t want to say anything disrespectful about my mother, but I must confess the contents of that first communication from home, read in the gloom of my biscuit-box hut, did rather amuse me. My mother hoped I was very particular what society I picked up with, and that I attended divine service twice regularly on Sundays. (The nearest church, those days, was three days off, you must recollect, at Carson City.) She hoped also I had furnished my house quietly and inexpensively, and had been very careful about sanitary arrangements, and gone in for nice, light, cheerful papers. She hoped I would look after the housekeeping accounts with rigor, and not let the cook buy fresh meat for stock, which could be made every bit as good from bones, and so forth. She was surprised I had got on so well at the lumbering in so short a time; but she knew men got good appointments easily in the far West; and she was always sure I’d do really well, like a true born Freke, if once I put my heart thoroughly into it. And then came the chief point of all in the whole letter: “As I wish to mark my pleasure at your earnest desire to help yourself in your new home, and as I think it highly desirable you should as far as possible keep up your music — you play so nicely, and musical evenings are such a resource to young men away from home — I have decided to contribute to the furnishing of your house” — well, what do you think, gentlemen?— “a new grand piano.”
When I came to that, all alone among my biscuit-boxes, I burst out laughing. Why, my whole hut itself wasn’t big enough for the piano even to stand in!
As soon as I’d finished the letter, I went out, rather shamefaced, to see the boys again. I didn’t dare to tell them the story about the piano. I knew how they’d laugh at me and at the dear old mater. But I took it for granted the confounded thing would never get farther than Carson City at the very outside. The bare idea of bringing it right through to the Pike was just too ridiculous!
The dear old mater had precious little notion what sort of place the Pike was, if she thought a piano would be much in demand there.