The Golden Butterfly

PREFACE

The Golden Butterfly, which gives a name to this novel, was seen by an English traveller, two years ago, preserved as a curiosity in a mining city near Sacramento, where it probably still remains. This curious freak of Nature is not therefore an invention of our own. To the same traveller – Mr. Edgar Besant – we are indebted for the description on which is based our account of Empire City.

The striking of oil in Canada in the manner described by Gilead P. Beck was accomplished – with the waste of millions of gallons of the oil, for want of casks and buckets to receive it, and with the result of a promise of almost boundless wealth – by a man named Shaw, some ten years ago. Shaw speculated, we believe; lost his money, and died in poverty.

Names of great living poets and writers have been used in this book in connection with a supposed literary banquet. A critic has expressed surprise that we have allowed Gilead Beck's failure to appreciate Browning to stand as if it were our own. Is a writer of fiction to stop the action of his story in order to explain that it is his character's opinion and not his own, that he states? And it surely is not asking too much to demand of a critic that he should consider first of all the consistency of a character's actions or speeches. Gilead Beck, a man of no education and little reading, but of considerable shrewdness, finds Browning unintelligible and harsh. What other verdict could be expected if the whole of Empire City in its palmiest days had been canvassed?

Moreover, we have never, even from that great writer's most ardent admirers, heard an opinion that he is either easy to read, or musical. The compliments which Mr. Beck paid to the guests who honoured his banquet are of course worded just as he delivered them.

Gilead Beck's experiences as an editor are taken – with a little dressing – from the actual experiences of a living Canadian journalist.

From their Virginian home Jack Dunquerque and Phillis his wife send greetings to those who have already followed their fortunes. She only wishes us to add that Mr. Abraham Dyson was right, and that the Coping Stone of every woman's education is Love. Most people know this, she says, from reading: but she never did read; and the real happiness is to find it out for yourself.

W. B.

J. R.

March, 1877.

PROLOGUE

I

"What do you think, chief?"

The speaker, who was leading by a half a length, turned in his saddle and looked at his companion.

"Push on," growled the chief, who was a man of few words.

"If you were not so intolerably conceited about the value of your words – hang it, man, you are not the Poet Laureate! – you might give your reasons why we should not camp where we are. The sun will be down in two hours; the way is long, the wind is cold, or will be soon. This pilgrim has tightened his belt to stave off the gnawing at his stomach; here is running water, here is wood, here is everything calculated to charm the poetic mind even of Captain Ladds – "

"Road!" interrupted his fellow-traveller, pointing along the track marked more by deep old wheel-ruts, grown over with grass, than by any evidences of engineering skill. "Roads lead to places; places have beds; beds are warmer than grass – no rattlesnakes in beds; miners in hotels – amusing fellows, miners."

"If ever I go out again after buffaloes, or bear, or mountain-deer, or any other game whatever which this great continent offers, with a monosyllabic man, may I be condemned to another two months of buffalo steak without Worcester sauce, such as I have had already; may I be poisoned with bad Bourbon whisky; may I never again see the sweet shady side of Pall Mall; may I – "

Here he stopped suddenly, for want of imagination to complete the curse.

The first speaker was a young man of four and twenty – the age which is to my sex what eighteen is to the other, because at four and twenty youth and manhood meet. He of four and twenty is yet a youth, inasmuch as women are still angels; every dinner is a feast, every man of higher rank is a demigod, and every book is true. He is a man, inasmuch as he has the firm step of manhood, he has passed through his calf-love, he knows what claret means, and his heart is set upon the things for which boys care nothing. He is a youth, because he can still play a game of football and rejoice amazingly in a boat-race; he is a man, because he knows that these things belong to the past, and that to concern one's self seriously with athletics, when you can no longer be an athlete in the games, is to put yourself on the level of a rowing coach or the athletic critic of a sporting paper.

Being only four and twenty, the speaker was in high spirits. He was also hungry. He was always both. What has life better to offer than a continual flow of animal spirits and a perpetual appetite? He was a tall, slight, and perhaps rather a weedy youth, a little too long of leg, a little too narrow in the beam, a little spare about the shoulders; but a youth of a ruddy and a cheerful countenance. To say that the lines of his face were never set to gravity would be too much, because I defy any man to laugh when he is sleeping, eating, or drinking. At all other times this young man was ready to laugh without stopping. Not a foolish cackle of idiotic vacuity such as may be heard in Earlswood asylum or at a tea-party to meet the curate, but a cheerful bubble of mirth and good-humour, proof that the spirit within took everything joyously, seeing in every misadventure its humorous side, and in every privation its absurdity.

The other who rode beside him was some years older at least. A man of thirty-five, or perhaps more; a man with a hatchet-face – nose and forehead in one straight line; long chin and long upper lip in another; face red with health as well as bronzed with the sun – a good honest face, supernaturally grave, grave beyond all understanding; lips that were always tightly closed; eyes which sometimes sparkled in response to some genial thought, or bubbled over at some joke of his companion, but which, as a rule, were like gimlets for sternness, so that strangers, especially stranger servants – the nigger of Jamaica, the guileless Hindoo of his Indian station, and other members of the inferior human brotherhood – trembled exceedingly when they met those eyes. Captain Ladds was accordingly well served, as cold, reserved men generally are. Mankind takes everything unknown pro terribili, for something dreadful, and until we learn to know a man, and think we know him, he is to be treated with the respect due to a possible enemy. Hostis means a stranger, and it is for strangers that we keep our brickbats.

People who knew Ladds laughed at this reputation. They said the gallant captain was a humbug; they pretended that he was as gentle as a turtle-dove; beneath those keen eyes, they said, and behind that sharp hatchet-face, lurked the most amiable of dispositions. At any rate, Ladds was never known to thrash a native servant, or to swear more than is becoming and needful at a syce, while his hatchet-face had been more than once detected in the very act of looking as soft and tender as a young mother's over her first-born. The name of this cavalier was short and simple. It was Thomas Ladds. His intimate friends called him Tommy.

They were in California, and were not buffalo-hunting now, because there is not a buffalo within five hundred miles of Sacramento. Their buffalo-hunting was over, having been accompanied by such small hardships as have been already alluded to. They rode along a track which was as much like a road as Richmond Park is like the Forest of Arden. They were mounted on a pair of small nervous mustangs; their saddles were the Mexican saddles used in the country, in front of which was the never-failing horn. Round this was wound the horsehair lariat, which serves the Western Nimrod for lassoing by day, and for keeping off snakes at night, no snake having ever been known to cross this barrier of bristly horsehair. You might as well expect a burgling coolie, smeared with oil, and naked, to effect his escape by crawling through a hedge of prickly pear. Also, because they were in a foreign land, and wished to be in harmony with its institutions, they wore immense steel spurs, inlaid with silver filigree, and furnished with "lobs" attached to them, which jangled and danced to make melody, just as if they formed part of an illustration to a Christmas book. Boots of course, they wore, and the artistic instinct which, a year before, had converted the younger man into a thing of beauty and a joy for the whole Park in the afternoon, now impelled him to assume a cummerbund of scarlet silk, with white-tasselled fringes, the like of which, perhaps, had never before been seen on the back of a Californian mustang. His companion was less ornate in his personal appearance. Both men carried guns, and if a search had been made, a revolver would have been found either hidden in the belt of each or carried perdu in the trousers-pocket. In these days of Pacific Railways and scampering Globe Trotters, one does not want to parade the revolver; but there are dark places on the earth, from the traveller's as well as from the missionary's point of view, where it would be well to have both bowie and Derringer ready to hand. On the American continent the wandering lamb sometimes has to lie down with the leopard, the harmless gazelle to journey side by side with the cheetah, and the asp may here and there pretend to play innocently over the hole of the cockatrice.

Behind the leaders followed a little troop of three, consisting of one English servant and two "greasers." The latter were dressed in plain unpretending costume of flannel shirt, boots, and rough trousers. Behind each hung his rifle. The English servant was dressed like his master, but more so, his spurs being heavier, the pattern of his check-shirt being larger, his saddle bigger; only for the silk cummerbund he wore a leather strap, the last symbol of the honourable condition of dependence. He rode in advance of the greasers, whom he held in contempt, and some thirty yards behind the leaders. The Mexicans rode in silence; smoking cigarettes perpetually. Sometimes they looked to their guns, or they told a story, or one would sing a snatch of a song in a low voice; mostly they were grave and thoughtful, though what a greaser thinks about has never yet been ascertained.

The country was so far in the Far West that the Sierra Nevada lay to the east. It was a rich and beautiful country: there were park-like tracts – supposing the park to be of a primitive and early settlement-kind – stretching out to the left. These were dotted with white oaks. To the right rose the sloping sides of a hill, which were covered with the brush-wood called the chaparelle, in which grew the manzanita and the scrub-oak, with an occasional cedar pine, not in the least like the cedars of Lebanon and Clapham Common. Hanging about in the jungle or stretching its arms along the side of the dry water course which ran at the traveller's feet beside the road was the wild vine loaded with its small and pretty grapes now ripe. Nature, in inventing the wild grape, has been as generous as in her gift of the sloe. It is a fruit of which an American once observed that it was calculated to develop the generosity of a man's nature, "because," he explained, "you would rather give it to your neighbour than eat it yourself."

The travellers were low down on the western slopes of the Sierra; they were in the midst of dales and glades – cañons and gulches, of perfect loveliness, shut in by mountains which rose over and behind them like friendly giants guarding a troop of sleeping maidens. Pelion was piled on Ossa as peak after peak rose higher, all clad with pine and cedar, receding farther and farther, till peaks became points, and ridges became sharp edges.

It was autumn, and there were dry beds, which had in the spring been rivulets flowing full and clear from the snowy sides of the higher slopes; yet among them lingered the flowers of April upon the shrubs, and the colours of the fading leaves mingled with the hues of the autumn berries.

A sudden turn in the winding road brought the foremost riders upon a change in the appearance of the country. Below them to the left stretched a broad open space, where the ground had been not only cleared of whatever jungle once grew upon it, but also turned over. They looked upon the site of one of the earliest surface-mining grounds. The shingle and gravel stood about in heaps; the gullies and ditches formed by the miners ran up and down the face of the country like the wrinkles in the cheek of a baby monkey; old pits, not deep enough to kill, but warranted to maim and disable, lurked like man-traps in the open; the old wooden aqueducts, run up by the miners in the year '52, were still standing where they were abandoned by the "pioneers;" here and there lay about old washing-pans, rusty and broken, old cradles, and bits of rusty metal which had once belonged to shovels. These relics and signs of bygone gatherings of men were sufficiently dreary in themselves, but at intervals there stood the ruins of a log-house, or a heap which had once been a cottage built of mud. Palestine itself has no more striking picture of desolation and wreck than a deserted surface-mine.

They drew rein and looked in silence. Presently they became aware of the presence of life. Right in the foreground, about two hundred yards before them, there advanced a procession of two. The leader of the show, so to speak, was a man. He was running. He was running so hard, that anybody could see his primary object was speed. After him, with heavy stride, seeming to be in no kind of hurry, and yet covering the ground at a much greater rate than the man, there came a bear – a real old grisly. A bear who was "shadowing" the man and meant claws. A bear who had an insult to avenge, and was resolved to go on with the affair until he had avenged it. A bear, too, who had his enemy in the open, where there was nothing to stop him, and no refuge for his victim but the planks of a ruined log-house, could he find one.

Both men, without a word, got their rifles ready. The younger threw the reins of his horse to his companion and dismounted.

Then he stood still and watched.

The most exhilarating thing in the whole world is allowed to be a hunt. No greater pleasure in life than that of the Shekarry, especially if he be after big game. On this occasion the keenness of the sport was perhaps intensified to him who ran, by the reflection that the customary position of things was reversed. No longer did he hunt the bear; the bear hunted him. No longer did he warily follow up the game; the game boldly followed him. No joyous sound of horns cheered on the hunter: no shout, such as those which inspirit the fox and put fresh vigour into the hare – not even the short eager bark of the hounds, at the sound of which Reynard begins to think how many of his hundred turns are left. It was a silent chase. The bear, who represented in himself the field – men in scarlet, ladies, master, pack, and everything – set to work in a cold unsympathetic way, infinitely more distressing to a nervous creature than the cheerful ringing of a whole field. To hunt in silence would be hard for any man; to be hunted in silence is intolerable.

Grisly held his head down and wagged it from side to side, while his great silent paws rapidly cleared the ground and lessened the distance.

"Tommy," whispered the young fellow, "I can cover him now."

"Wait, Jack. Don't miss. Give Grisly two minutes more. Gad! how the fellow scuds!"

Tommy, you see, obeyed the instinct of nature. He loved the hunt: if not to hunt actively, to witness a hunt. It is the same feeling which crowds the benches at a bullfight in Spain. It was the same feeling which lit up the faces in the Coliseum when Hermann, formerly of the Danube, prisoner, taken red-handed in revolt, and therefore moriturus, performed with vigour, sympathy, and spirit the rôle of Actæon, ending, as we all know, in a splendid chase by bloodhounds; after which the poor Teuton, maddened by his long flight and exhausted by his desperate resistance, was torn to pieces, fighting to the end with a rage past all acting. It is our modern pleasure to read of pain and suffering. Those were the really pleasant days to the Roman ladies when they actually witnessed living agony.

"Give Grisly two minutes," said Captain Ladds.

By this time the rest of the party had come up, and were watching the movements of man and bear. In the plain stood the framework of a ruined wooden house. Man made for log-house. Bear, without any apparent effort, but just to show that he saw the dodge, and meant that it should not succeed, put on a spurt, and the distance between them lessened every moment. Fifty yards; forty yards. Man looked round over his shoulder. The log-house was a good two hundred yards ahead. He hesitated; seemed to stop for a moment. Bear diminished the space by a good dozen yards – and then man doubled.

"Getting pumped," said Ladds the critical. Then he too dismounted, and stood beside the younger man, giving the reins of both horses to one of the Mexicans. "Mustn't let Grisly claw the poor devil," he murmured.

"Let me bring him down, Tommy."

"Bring him down, young un."

The greasers looked on and laughed. It would have been to them a pleasant termination to the "play" had Bruin clawed the man. Neither hunter nor quarry saw the party clustered together on the rising ground on which the track ran. Man saw nothing but the ground over which he flew; bear saw nothing but man before him. The doubling manæuvre was, however, the one thing needed to bring Grisly within easy reach. Faster flew the man, but it was the last flight of despair; had the others been near enough they would have seen the cold drops of agony standing on his forehead; they would have caught his panting breath, they would have heard his muttered prayer.

"Let him have it!" growled Ladds.

It was time. Grisly, swinging along with leisurely step, rolling his great head from side to side in time with the cadence of his footfall – one roll to every half-dozen strides, like a fat German over a trois-temps waltz, suddenly lifted his face, and roared. Then the man shrieked: then the bear stopped, and raised himself for a moment, pawing in the air; then he dropped again, and rushed with quickened step upon his foe; then – but then – ping! one shot. It has struck Grisly in the shoulder; he stops with a roar.

"Good, young un!" said Ladds, bringing piece to shoulder. This time Grisly roars no more. He rolls over. He is shot to the heart, and is dead.

The other participator in this chasse of two heard the crack of the rifles. His senses were growing dazed with fear; he did not stop, he ran on still, but with trembling knees and outstretched hands; and when he came to a heap of shingle and sand – one of those left over from the old surface-mines – he fell headlong on the pile with a cry, and could not rise. The two who shot the bear ran across the ground – he lay almost at their feet – to secure their prey. After them, at a leisurely pace, strode John, the servant. The greasers stayed behind and laughed.

"Grisly's dead," said Tommy, pulling out his knife. "Steak?"

"No; skin," cried the younger. "Let me take his skin. John, we will have the beast skinned. You can get some steaks cut. Where is the man?"

They found him lying on his face, unable to move.

"Now, old man," said the young fellow cheerfully, "might as well sit up, you know, if you can't stand. Bruin's gone to the happy hunting-grounds."

The man sat up, as desired, and tried to take a comprehensive view of the position.

Jack handed him a flask, from which he took a long pull. Then he got up, and somewhat ostentatiously began to smooth down the legs of his trousers.

He was a thin man, about five and forty years of age; he wore an irregular and patchy kind of beard, which flourished exceedingly on certain square half-inches of chin and cheek, and was as thin as grass at Aden on the intervening spaces. He had no boots; but a sort of moccasins, the lightness of which enabled him to show his heels to the bear for so long a time. His trousers might have been of a rough tweed, or they might have been black cloth, because grease, many drenchings, the buffeting of years, and the holes into which they were worn, had long deprived them of their original colour and brilliancy. Above the trousers he wore a tattered flannel shirt, the right arm of which, nearly torn to pieces, revealed a tattooed limb, which was strong although thin; the buttons had long ago vanished from the front of the garment; thorns picturesquely replaced them. He wore a red-cotton handkerchief round his neck, a round felt hat was on his head; this, like the trousers, had lost its pristine colour, and by dint of years and weather, its stiffness too. To prevent the hat from flapping in his eyes, its possessor had pinned it up with thorns in the front.

Necessity is the mother of invention: there is nothing morally wrong in the use of thorns where other men use studs, diamond pins, and such gauds; and the effect is picturesque. The stranger, in fact, was a law unto himself. He had no coat; the rifle of Californian civilisation was missing; there was no sign of knife or revolver; and the only encumbrance, if that was any, to the lightness of his flight was a small wooden box strapped round tightly, and hanging at his back by means of a steel chain, grown a little rusty where it did not rub against his neck and shoulders.

He sat up and winked involuntarily with both eyes. This was the effect of present bewilderment and late fear.

Then he looked round him, after, as before explained, a few moments of assiduous leg-smoothing, which, as stated above, looked ostentatious, but was really only nervous agitation. Then he rose, and saw Grisly lying in a heap a few yards off. He walked over with a grave face, and looked at him.

When Henri Balafré, Duc de Guise, saw Coligny lying dead at his feet, he is said – only it is a wicked lie – to have kicked the body of his murdered father's enemy. When Henri III. of France, ten years later, saw Balafré dead at his feet, he did kick the lifeless body, with a wretched joke. The king was a cur. My American was not. He stood over Bruin with a look in his eyes which betokened respect for fallen greatness and sympathy with bad luck. Grisly would have been his victor, but for the chance which brought him within reach of a friendly rifle.

"A near thing," he said. "Since I've been in this doggoned country I've had one or two near things, but this was the nearest."

The greasers stood round the body of the bear, and the English servant was giving directions for skinning the beast.

"And which of you gentlemen," he went on with a nasal twang more pronounced than before – perhaps with more emphasis on the word "gentlemen" than was altogether required – "which of you gentlemen was good enough to shoot the critter?"

The English servant, who was, like his master, Captain Ladds, a man of few words, pointed to the young man, who stood close by with the other leader of the expedition.

The man snatched from the jaws of death took off his shaky thorn-beset felt, and solemnly held out his hand.

"Sir," he said, "I do not know your name, and you do not know mine. If you did you would not be much happier, because it is not a striking name. If you'll oblige me, sir, by touching that" – he meant his right hand – "we shall be brothers. All that's mine shall be yours. I do not ask you, sir, to reciprocate. All that's mine, sir, when I get anything, shall be yours. At present, sir, there is nothing; but I've Luck behind me. Shake hands, sir. Once a mouse helped a lion, sir. It's in a book. I am the mouse, sir, and you are the lion. Sir, my name is Gilead P. Beck."

The young man laughed and shook hands with him.

"I only fired the first shot," he explained. "My friend here – "

"No; first shot disabled – hunt finished then – Grisly out of the running. Glad you're not clawed – unpleasant to be clawed. Young un did it. No thanks. Tell us where we are."

Mr. Gilead P. Beck, catching the spirit of the situation, told them where they were, approximately. "This," he said, "is Patrick's Camp; at least, it was. The Pioneers of '49 could tell you a good deal about Patrick's Camp. It was here that Patrick kept his store. In those old days – they're gone now – if a man wanted to buy a blanket, that article, sir, was put into one scale, and weighed down with gold-dust in the other. Same with a pair of boots; same with a pound of raisins. Patrick might have died rich, sir, but he didn't – none of the pioneers did – so he died poor; and died in his boots, too, like most of the lot."

"Not much left of the camp."

"No, sir, not much. The mine gave out. Then they moved up the hills, where, I conclude, you gentlemen are on your way. Prospecting likely. The new town, called Empire City, ought to be an hour or so up the track. I was trying to find my way there when I met with old Grisly. Perhaps if I had let him alone he would have let me alone. But I blazed at him, and, sir, I missed him; then he shadowed me. And the old rifle's gone at last."

"How long did the chase last?"

"I should say, sir, forty days and forty nights, or near about. And you gentlemen air going to Empire City?"

"We are going anywhere. Perhaps, for the present, you had better join us."

II

Mr. Gilead P. Beck, partly recovered from the shock caused to his nerves by the revengeful spirit of the bear, and in no way discomfited by any sense of false shame as to his ragged appearance, marched beside the two Englishmen. It was characteristic of his nationality that he regarded the greasers with contempt, and that he joined the two gentlemen as if he belonged to their grade and social rank. An Englishman picked up in such rags and duds would have shrunk abashed to the rear, or he would have apologised for his tattered condition, or he would have begged for some garments – any garments – to replace his own. Mr. Beck had no such feeling. He strode along with a swinging slouch, which covered the ground as rapidly as the step of the horses. The wind blew his rags about his long and lean figure as picturesquely as if he were another Autolycus. He was as full of talk as that worthy, and as lightsome of spirit, despite the solemn gravity of his face. I once saw a poem – I think in the Spectator– on Artemus Ward, in which the bard apostrophised the light-hearted merriment of the Western American; a very fortunate thing to say, because the Western American is externally a most serious person, never merry, never witty, but always humorous. Mr. Beck was quite grave, though at the moment as happy as that other grave and thoughtful person who has made a name in the literature of humour – Panurge – when he escaped half-roasted from the Turk's Serai.

"I ought," he said, "to sit down and cry, like the girl on the prairie."

"Why ought you to cry?"

"I guess I ought to cry because I've lost my rifle and everything except my Luck" – here he pulled at the steel chain – "in that darned long stern chase."

"You can easily get a new rifle," said Jack.

"With dollars," interrupted Mr. Beck. "As for them, there's not a dollar left – nary a red cent; only my Luck."

"And what is your Luck?"

"That," said Mr. Beck, "I will tell you by-and-by. Perhaps it's your Luck, too, young boss," he added, thinking of a shot as fortunate to himself as William Tell's was to his son.

He pulled the box attached to the steel chain round to the front, and looked at it tenderly. It was safe, and he heaved a sigh.

The way wound up a valley – a road marked only, as has been said, by deep ruts along its course. Behind the travellers the evening sun was slowly sinking in the west; before them the peaks of the Sierra lifted their heads, coloured purple in the evening light; and on either hand rose the hill-sides, with their dark foliage in alternate "splashes" of golden light and deepest shade.

It wanted but a quarter of an hour to sunset when Mr. Gilead P. Beck pointed to a township which suddenly appeared, lying at their very feet.

"Empire City, I reckon."

A good-sized town of wooden houses. They were all alike and of the same build as that affected by the architects of doll's houses; that is to say, they were of one story only, had a door in the middle, and a window on either side. They were so small, also, that they looked veritable dolls' houses.

There were one or two among them of more pretentious appearance, and of several stories. These were the hotels, billiard-saloons, bars, and gambling-houses.

"It's a place bound to advance, sir," said Mr. Beck proudly. "Empire City, when I first saw it, which is two years ago, was only two years old. It is only in our country that a great city springs up in a day. Empire City will be the Chicago of the West."

"I see a city," said Captain Ladds; "can't see the people."

It was certainly curious. There was not a soul in the streets; there was no smoke from the chimneys; there was neither carts nor horses; there was not the least sign of occupation.

Mr. Gilead P. Beck whistled.

"All gone," he said. "Guess the city's busted up."

He pushed aside the brambles which grew over what had been a path leading to the place, and hurried down. The others followed him, and rode into the town.

It was deserted. The doors of the houses were open, and if you looked in you might see the rough furniture which the late occupants disdained to carry away with them. The two Englishmen dismounted, gave their reins to the servants, and began to look about them.

The descendants of Og, king of Bashan, have left their houses in black basalt, dotted about the lava-fields of the Hauran, to witness how they lived. In the outposts of desert stations of the East, the Roman soldiers have left their barracks and their baths, their jokes written on the wall, and their names, to show how they passed away the weary hours of garrison duty. So the miners who founded Empire City, and deserted it en masse when the gold gave out, left behind them marks by which future explorers of the ruins should know what manner of men once dwelt there. The billiard saloon stood open with swinging doors; the table was still there, the balls lay about on the table and the floor; the cues stood in the rack; the green cloth, mildewed, covered the table.