McClure's Magazine/Volume 27/Number 4/Archie's Baby

by Viola Roseboro'

 

ARCHIE'S BABY

BY

VIOLA ROSEBORO'
AUTHOR OF "THE JOYOUS HEART," ETC.

ILLUSTRATION BY E. L. BLUEMENSCHEIN

THEY were a family group of English young people, and they were plying with tea a lady whom they delighted to call the Californian. Through the windows one could see a green, green lawn sloping down to a belt of old trees, storm-riven oaks and close-knit English elms, and beyond hung the gray tower of a little old stone church the Normans had raised on foundations the Saxons had laid.

One of the girls was having a birthday, and she happened to be telling the exotic guest that she was born in the big southeast chamber called the Still-room; some ancestress had once upon a time indulged therein a fad for distilling perfumes and brewing cordials.

"And is that flowery old chintz the very same you opened your eyes upon?" asked the lady.

Why, yes; from a little discussion and comparison of dates it developed that it was; and the Californian smiled as one who ponders and is pleased.

There was that in her smile caught her boyish host's hopeful attention: "Oh, what's the difference," he cried with brotherly brusqueness, "whether Frances was born in the blue bed or the brown? I'd wager you came into the world—do you know I've always fancied you must have been the first white child born somewhere? If you tell me you were not," he went on with plaintive hesitancy, "I must—I must warn you I shall feel my affections have been betrayed."

"But I was," declared the Californian, and gratification as at a fitting turn in a play filled the English faces. "I was the first child, white or in colors, born in the Big Hope mining camp. And now if you knew enough you could unmask my pretensions. Though I make it my metier, in geographical strictness I'm not a Californian, for the Big Hope was east of the Divide."

It must have been something like forty years before that the Big Hope had been blessed with the gracious advent. Yet the lady looked as if she stood upon the crowning point of life. Perhaps her beauty and her temperament had conferred that triumphant aspect upon her long ago, but at any rate it could never have been more convincing than now. It was attained by no misleading conjurings against time; there was nothing about her of the pickled youth of the woman who is laboriously "well-preserved." On the contrary she looked her vigorous years, and as with a man, any man typical of his favored sex, her years served to vivify and enrich her. She was a white and gold beauty, with the thick calla-lily skin that defies so many enemies, and she was given to cultivating her type in white gowns; she wore one now. Despite the academic distinction she had just made she was eminently Californian, but Californians range wide, and it might paradoxically be said that she was the more Californian in that she breathed an aroma of distinguished old-world, cosmopolite experience. Mingled with the fresh tang of her native democracy it was as if you smelled at once a rose and the good earth that grew it.

The circle about her now had drunk in more than one strange yarn of her's before, and it was not hard for so appreciative an audience to get her to tell the tale that had lit her reminiscent eyes when she named the name of the Big Hope Camp. She settled herself in the embrace of her easy-chair, and looked about her and smiled to herself; and it was with her eyes turned through a window on the green, green turf and the gray Norman tower that she began her story.

 

My father was mining at the Big Hope. There was only one other thing to do there, and he was doing that, too. He had a train of burros, and was beginning his career as a magnate of transportation. He bosses more railroads now, I'd have you know, than any other man in the world. But his great distinction in those days was that he had a wife on the spot—it was no distinction to have a wife or wives back East. My mother was the only woman in the camp. I'm glad to know she liked it. I have my daddy's word for it, for I've no shadow of recollection of her myself. I know the Big Hope, though. It was on a spur of mountain that jutted out into the desert, snowy sierras in the clouds above it, and their dark green ramparts rising steep behind: a boundless sea of sand and mirages opened wide to the illimitable sky in front; the camp hung between, like some tiny disturbance of nature made by beavers, or ants, if you like.

The long sluice-boxes running down the mountain were rotting to pieces when I first saw the place to remember it; the claims were played out, and only a few Chinamen were pegging away at the tailings. But I saw the log house I was born in.

And now comes the story. When I was eighteen months old my girl-mother, still but for me, the only woman creature in Big Hope, bore her second child, and both she and the new baby died. Little father was a terror-stricken lad as well as a broken-hearted. He was well-nigh paralyzed with the fear that now I, too, must die for lack of something or other a dollar would buy at any cross-roads in Christendom. The gay audacity of his youth perished. It never returned as regards anything about women and children. Its only play since then has been in the field of transportation—he always talks of transportation rather than of railroads, because you see he dealt so much with burros and stages and pony express before he came to railroads. His pet charities are maternity and children's hospitals, and I, fragile being that I am, must cable him every day that I'm alive, though he, at sixty-odd, refuses to be bothered wiring me oftener than once a week.

Well, now you see, I, in my turn, was the only woman in camp. My reign lasted a month. Packers walked me to sleep, miners rocked my cradle and were full of witticisms, I am told, on this continuance of their professional labors—even you know, don't you that you rock a cradle in placer mining? I was recognized as a valuable nugget. But my father was preparing as best he could to part with me. I must be sent through the desert to the pass, over he Sierra Nevadas, then across California, and down the Santa Clara Valley, a month's journey all told, to Monterey. Dad had a sister whose husband was "in cattle" down there, living in the midst of civilization, not more than fifty miles by stage from a graduated doctor. Daddy has a reverential awe of a graduated doctor to this day, though in his own fields he's supposed to be properly skeptical of mere sheepskin. He was in a terrible case, for he could not go with me, could not take me to the aunt I must reach. His partner was sick, very sick; the poor little man could not well leave him, he could not think of leaving the sick man's precarious interests to suffer, and to tell the truth he could far from afford to let his own go to pot for two months while he took a mighty expensive journey. And in the meanwhile, he could not sleep till I was gotten into some graduated doctor's sphere of influence.

Children, children, of a British nursery, what do you suppose was done?

Enter the hero of my tale, Archibald Hamilton Douglas Graham (perhaps I may leave you to infer the nationality of his forbears), burro packer, aged twenty-two.

Both Archie and my dad were as American Americans as ever fought Indians, yet I've a notion that the Scotchness of Archie's name helped to bring his fate upon him. My father's Scotch comes from generations back, but a little of that blood goes a long way and is thicker than water to the last. He puts it that Archie lived up to his name, and came out ahead in the competitive examination he was privately holding, while he watched the men's methods with me during that month that he waited for the spring to pass into the settled open weather of summer. Archie it seems did not want to get rid of me when I cried. He wanted, instead, to find the pin; he was a profound believer in the pin. Considering who dressed me, I dare say there were grounds for his faith. I understand that these sentiments and opinions made him a marked man for the whole camp from the start. And at the last—the last! Well, the real last was a long way off, sixteen years after he and I left Big Hope, he walking beside the responsible burro upon whose back my condensed milk, my wardrobe, my bottles and my safety-pins were packed with the diamond hitch. For Archie was the boy, God bless him, that took that eighteen months' baby in his arms and hit the wildest trail such a pair ever traveled. Beside burros, on horseback, in stages, for four weeks I was hardly out of those arms four hours. He washed me and dressed me, cleaned my bottles and my clothes, sang me to sleep, and all the time carried me, carried me while he walked behind the burro train on the edge of precipices and through the desert, carried me on one arm and guided a horse with the other, and held me close while those old stage coaches swayed and bumped along and the driver kept his lookout for road-agents and bad Indians. What's the use of expecting me to be like other people after a start like that! Don't mind! I always do swell up inside with little weeps when I talk about it. I don't know why, for what I feel is a desire to shout, to talk like the Bad Man of Calaveras County, and to charter an ocean steamer and go home!

Please see that new flight into Egypt, that piteous, absurd little caravan, without a madonna. There were the Sierras, rearing themselves to the sky about us, and the ribbony, rocky trail circling out from Big Hope around them, and on the other hand space, naked space, and far down naked desert, stretching gray and blue-opaline and violet around the few far mesas—to the end of the world. Mesas, my dears, are just great splinters and chunks of the planet left over when the world was made, and thrown in the desert to be out of the way. I had on a bright pink calico frock and red shoes. Daddy has them now, but he never saw them for sixteen years after that morning. The camp turned out to see us off, of course. The burro train and the other drivers went on ahead, and my father, the little powerful dynamic boss, walked silent behind the last, my burro, with Archie. My Daddy carried me till they came to the edge of the camp, and the start of the ribbony rocky trail around the spur; the men had stopped fifty yards away; they gave me three cheers and then punctiliously turned their backs and went about their business, while my father loosened my hold on his red shirt's neck-band and handed me over to Archie, and Archie hurriedly dangled before me his watch, and when I had grabbed it, clasped hands with Dad, and they parted without a word. Dad watched us till we turned out of sight around the great green mountain. I got all these details out of him when I was a little girl, all except the scenery, and that I looked up years after for myself; dead mining camps don't do much to alter the everlasting hills and the eternal desert.

Dad to this day when we talk about that trip always repeats that Archie Graham was an able chap. I dare say he has been heard to declare that I showed myself at the same time an able infant. He called it able when Archie found the pins that were sticking me. And now that Archie was striding away with me, a pink calico speck, his ability was all Dad had to comfort him. He mentions it now in reminiscent fear and trembling for the same purpose—to comfort himself. It is solid enough comfort now; it was well proven. If it is not able to take care of a baby like that, on a trip like that, pins and colic and bottles, bears and catamounts and Indians and all, I don't know what is. I can't tell you so much about the trip. I had Dad to cross-question at the proper age, at seven say, when questioning comes easy, when you talk naturally in interrogation points, but I had no such chance at Archie Graham. I know we bivouacked nights in the desert before we came to another camp. There's the flight into Egypt for you; fire is the most beautiful thing in the world, and it is never so beautiful as in the blue twilight of the desert. The other men had to wait on Archie like bond slaves, while Archie waited on me. They told that when they got back to Big Hope. "It was right and fittin'," they said, but it would have come hard if Archie's head had swelled as might have been expected. But Archie's head they granted, was "tol'able hard"; which seems to me a tribute equally honorable to those who gave and to him who received it. Archie must have been a master of tact, able in that, too, for he got all kinds of favors. Seats surrendered to him in full stages, beds in full taverns, errands done, privileges at kitchen fires, and he seems to have been mighty chary of anything but coin in return. There was no passing of me from hand to hand. The rare men who were allowed to hold me, were under stern orders to let no one else touch me; and they minded as if they were greenhorns handling dynamite. When we got into range of feminine council Archie braced up even against woman's natural airs of professional superiority, and would take advice only for what he thought it was worth.

But it was before there were any such clashes of expert opinion that he achieved what was, all things considered, his most surprising feat. He had me christened. I was baptized in a bar-room. It was at the camp where we took our first stage, the stage over the Divide. It was a real bona fide christening, only not Presbyterian, as any man himself named Archibald Hamilton Douglas must naturally have preferred. He explained and apologized for the liberty taken when he got to Monterey. The explanation was that he felt as if he ought to do all he could to make things right, he was easier in his mind to have it done. I gather he felt that the Lord could be more reasonably expected to look after His own, than after a baby of no religious affiliations. But the apology seems to have been pretty much all spent on the theological phase of the matter; it was hard luck and he was sorry, but a Methodist preacher was all there was, and wonder enough to get him. I've a notion myself that Methodist preachers are usually the easiest come by in such hard fields as frontier mining-camps. This one was on the way somewhere else, but he had embraced the chance, real Methodist fashion, to stop over and talk to the boys. The boys only woke up to an appreciation of their privileges when I came into the game. It was a popular occasion, my christening was. My poor little mother had named me Juanita Marie, something foreign seeming to her suitable and romantic, and she being too new to the country to sympathize with the current prejudice against Greasers. Archie knew I had been called Nita, and he said that was all he knew. I don't believe myself that whatever his information he'd ever have brought out a Greaser name for that ceremony. He and the preacher fixed it up between them and they named me Anita.

No, you've never heard it, nor anybody else for many a year, except lawyers and people who have listened to this yarn, but that's what my sponsers bestowed on me in baptism. My Aunt said she had some sense of the fitness of things and that she could not call a great, fat, quiet, blonde child a little, quick, dark name like Anita, and it wasn't what my mother had named me anyway. She found equally good reasons, it appeared, for not calling me what my mother had named me; and the outcome was that as soon as Archie's back was turned, for she would not hurt his feelings, she addressed me as Mary, and Mary I've been ever since; Mary, with occasional relapses back to Marie, and all the time my name is Anita, and sixty-three men, beside a fringe of Greasers and Chinamen, saw it given to me.

I'm going to cut this second-hand testimony short and get down to things I can remember myself, only you must hear how bitter hard a thing it was for Archie to part with me. He hung around for three days, and my aunt said she was never so sorry for any one in her life. You see God so made the world that you can't go on for days and weeks taking care of a baby without giving it the heart out of your breast. Aunt Tishia always told how Archie was a born gentleman, modest, self-effacing, and how yet he was tormented to that degree as to how she washed my milk-bottles, and as to whether she kept on my flannel band at night, that he was forced with blushing pain to pursue curious investigations. He tried to apologize on the ground that she had no children of her own. She made the obvious rejoinder that neither had he; but she did her best to come up to his standard as a nursery maid. After this dangling around he melted away with no announced good-bys—unless they were breathed to me in confidence. I respected all his confidences, poor lad, though my Aunt thought she found suspicious tear spots on the breast of my little pinny once when he had had me off to himself in the garden.

Well, he went and I never saw him again. But wait, that is not the end of the story nor the end of my part of it.

Archie never held the pen of a ready writer, but for years at long intervals he wrote to me, and as I got to be a big girl I learned to print mis-spelled messages to him. By the time I was ten my father's fortune was piling up—transportation was transporting us far; and it was decided that I be sent to Paris and put to school in the convent of the Sacré Cœur.

Archie Graham and the flight into Egypt had made the romance of my childhood; it takes a child to simply lave in undiluted, unmodulated romance; and life at the Convent, instead of weaning me from my sentimental attachment to my Uncle Archie, did just the other thing. At first the poor little wild Californian nearly died of homesickness. and Uncle Archie, who existed for me only in dreams, was the one part of my old life that I could still cherish unchanged. Then when I began to come to and take an interest in the game, it transpired that Uncle Archie and my little embroidered Odyssey of our travels, and Uncle Archie's queer presents were my long suit. I began to trade on being a wild Californian; poor little lonely chick. I wanted to be liked tor something! I fancy I've gone on trading with the same stock ever since. But I never did better with it than then. It was not of course as of course if I'd been a boy. It is the most touching thing in the world the way boys, any boys, even little, polished, hat-lifting continentals take fire at the mention of red Indians. I fancy I cou1d have been the hero of a decade in any boy's school in France: but even as it was I became fashion's favorite. Archie's presents, old and new, the gold nugget, the rattlesnake rattles, the beaded moccasins, the buckskin shirt—these were the distinguished possessions with which I outshone powers and principalities.

But the years went on, and the past faded, and the wild West treasures though still treasured, played a smaller and smaller part on the little French girl's stage; and the letters that came and went between Paris and Red Dog or Hangtown or whatever might be temporarily Archie's outlandish post-office grew fewer and fewer, and stopped, first his and then mine, as the "cat dies" when you are swinging.

My heart was not unfaithful, but Archie was become part of a great myth—the myth of America, of California, of kin; and, poor little soul, I was sick of letters I wanted to go back and find it all, if it was truly real and could be found.

When I was seventeen I went, and a French governess and a French maid went with the convent-bred jeune fille. My darling Daddy met us in New York, and we traveled across the continent in a special car. He kept a wistful awe of me till we struck the desert, the desert that had stamped its brand on me before I could remember, and burned it in with more than one strange adventure, after I came to consciousness. Like the ocean, the desert can have no rivals: it is akin to nothing else in creation; and it had been part of my life when I was little!

As the train drew out into that endless sea of sand, under that vast sky, into a World as unlike anything made for man as the dead moon, no plate-glass windows could shut out the awful matchless mildness of it; and with the sting of the alkali in my nostrils, Paris and the convent passed away, and like the prodigal son I arose and went unto my father: away from those triste Frenchwomen, in the smoking-room, I howled, simply howled like a hound with emotion, as I threw myself on his neck. He understood, and that was when we really met, that was when my native tongue (perhaps I'd better not call it English) really came back to me, as I sat on his lap amid all that luxury and wept for a burro and a frying-pan and a camp where I could hear the coyote's cry. Now we talked out everything that had been shut up in our hearts before, and soon I asked about Archie Graham. Dad had lost sight of him, too. That is Dad had been in New York most of the time for five years, and heard heard nothing about or from him. That meant nothing more than the chances of a day, as you might say. He expected to pick him up around the corner any time. Archie had never allowed Dad to do anything special for him. He rolled around the wide West, prosperous enough it seemed, unmarried, adventurous, mining, speculating, buying and selling claims. Dad said we'd hunt him up when he got around to it.

Well, very soon strange things happened, as if in a play, and there was no need to hunt.

Dad got a wire at some water-tank calling him back to New York, and I was left to stare at the wonderful desert out of my plate-glass windows alone; that is the French women stared anywhere else, at their own little high-heeled bottines, rather than at the gray dead ocean, where, running along with us, I could follow the old emigrants' tragic trail by the bones that still lay bleaching upon it.

At Reno a friend of my father's, Mr. Clay Chisholm, came to see me, just to shake hands and look me over, for the ten minutes of the train's stop. Five of the ten had passed when he remarked, "'Lucky chance,' I said to myself when I heard your car was to be with this train, for I just happened to be down here; came down from Virginia City this morning, and I've got to get back there this evening for a murder trial to-morrow." Mr. Clay Chisholm was a lawyer, you see.

"Who killed who?" I asked, feeling—I remember it so well—that the story might help me to get back to this country of mine I was so hungry to understand again.

"Well," began Mr. Chisholm, "I'm on the defense this time, though I don't usually go in for criminal practice." It makes me shiver now when I think how slow and digressively he talked, and how our three or four minutes were flying. "It was a gambling row and that makes it bad for my client. I'm afraid they'll hang him. They come mighty near doing it before, this is his second trial. You see we are getting too proper and civilized to like that kind of thing, though to his own mind my friend Graham acted in self-defense. Well, little girl—" he was looking at his watch and rising from his seat.

"What's his other name?" I asked, sitting still and staring at him.

"His? Graham's? Archibald Hamilton Douglas, he's——"

But I was on my feet clutching him with both hands: "Archie Graham, it's my Uncle Archie, and they'll hang him; and he took care of me for a whole month all by himself when I was a baby; he—" I choked on my sobs.

"What's that?" cried the lawyer so sharply that my nerves twanged in my body. Some one outside called, "All aboard! all aboard!" and the man started and glared about him; then catching my arm he fired at me the question—"Was he the boy that took you to Monterey?"

With my answer he was transformed.

"Quiet down, Miss Mary," he said gently, "I'm not going to get off here, I'll go on with you. Yes, I'll look out for Archie all right. That's just what I am doing. We pass the East-bound train somewhere between here and the summit—I'll fix it. I can catch a freight out of Reno some time to-night. And now," he was very suave and gentle with me, "now you are going to sit down and tell me all about your's and Uncle Archie's trip across the Divide."

I was puzzled and impatient. I wanted to know about Archie. He told me very succinctly. He had been a year and a half in jail, and the confinement had broken down his health. The trouble about clearing him was that the country was anxious to show Eastern capital how reformed and refined it was by hanging some one, and Archie was the convenient scapegoat at hand.

"It was self-defense," said Mr. Chisholm, "but we can never prove it; we've simply got to get the jury on our side on general principles, and the trouble is all the popular general principles just now turn the other way. I ought to be able to get two or three men on that jury who'd refuse to hang a man that could shoot as good as that—I'll show you how it was done. But one or two men trying to stand out would have a rough time of it. I'd hate to trust to 'em. I want something better than that. The shots were like this," and he demonstrated the superiority of Archie's gun-play with serious enthusiasm. Archie was playing poker and sitting between two men whom he caught cheating; presumably all three tried to draw their revolvers, but Archie got the drop on one, fired, and then, literally quicker than sight, turned his pistol over his shoulder—no time to turn himself—and fired again; and each shot killed his man. It was the second that was making him trouble. It was granted the first man was reaching for his gun, and he was a known bad man who when he reached meant death; but the other man, though the cards up his sleeve proved collusion with number one, had no killings to his account, and how did Archie know he was even pulling his gun when he didn't see him, was facing the other way, and fired over his shoulder? Now Archie knew it, and so did every one else by the light of experience and common sense. An armed man with cards up his sleeve was not going to see his partner shot, not then and there, without trying to save himself, and the only way to save himself was to shoot first. It was all according to a code about as definite as a French duel's. But a New York capitalist who was on the ground had been scared away, people said, by this unseemly bloodshed in the midst of their rising school-houses and multiplying churches; and Archie had the "business sentiment" against him. Archie, Mr. Chisholm remarked sorrowfully, had simply failed to keep up with the procession.

Then brightening again he appealed to me once more for the story of the flight into Egypt.

I began to understand dimly what you divined at his first sign of interest in that history, that it had a bearing on practical politics, in your lingo that it suited his book—in talking about Archie I can't seem to speak anything but United States. It flowed then, did my United States, coming back fuller and freer as I went on; and I told him what I've been telling you. He listened with silent passionate attention; and when Archie had landed and left me at Monterey, he sprang from his seat and lifted me with him right off my feet, as if I were four years old.

"By the Great Horn Spoon," he cried, "you've done it, you've saved him!"

I suppose I stared, bewildered as well as happy, my little feminine mind not comprehending the larger logic of trial by jury. He misapprehended my difficulty.

"Oh," said he, "we may go back on the finest double shot seen this side of the Rockies since the railroad came through, but Eastern capital can't preach down the Western heart when it comes to a kid story like that! And I'll get that to the jury—the judge don't judge that can keep me from ringing that in on those twelve good men and true!"

And with these reassurances, obscure to my intelligence, but nevertheless comforting to my heart, he swung off to catch his East-bound train.

Of course he was right about the Western heart, the dear, romantic Western heart. He was a very artful gentleman, was Mr. Clay Chisholm, and he said not a word of me to Archie. In his final summing up he brought in my Odyssey, and my poor prisoner, sitting there in the dock, broken, ill, and on trial for his life, was taken unawares with the dearest memory of his youth. The iron melted and when he heard—it was in the speech—that I was in the country, caring, crying for him, he cried, too.

The jury was out ten minutes. Oh, I love a jury! What are law and evidence in the teeth of the eternal verities!

When he clasped hands with Chisholm, a free man, all Archie said, all he could say in his breaking voice, was, "I knew when you told about her—I knew my baby would save me!"

No, strange as it seems, I never saw him again, never after he left his baby at Monterey. He was dying with consumption, and though it was too late, my father hurried him down into the sunshine of New Mexico. I wanted to go to him, but I was a jeune fille, and one thing and another interfered. I know now the truth; the older heads, the older hearts were against the meeting. The little one that has grown up is gone, vanished—vanished beyond all other possessions of the past. A strange young lady seen in the flesh, coming to him under the name that long ago in the mountain bar-room he had given his baby—she could but have wrecked the dream child he cherished.

When he was gone a wee pink calico frock and two red shoes were found among his scant, rough bachelor possessions.