Kitabı oku: «The Continental Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 2, February, 1862», sayfa 8
As she had approached the house, the nearest outer door was that facing the road, immediately over which the fire was evidently about to break out, and this door she tried, finding it fast. Then she remembered a side entrance, through an old wood-shed, that was seldom locked, and she immediately made her way to it.
Meanwhile the fire was busy with the dry wood-work of the house, and though there was no wind, it spread with fearful rapidity. Already the flames had burst out through the roof in two or three places, and in the front of the house they were cruelly curling and creeping about the eaves. They seemed confined, however, to the upper portion of the building, and therein she had hope.
As she had anticipated, she found the side door unfastened, and she made her way rapidly to the foot of the back stairway. When she opened the door to ascend, a thick, black smoke rushed down, almost overpowering her. The opening of the door seemed to aid the fire, too, and there was a sort of explosive eagerness in the new start it took as it now crackled and roared above her. Then she recognized in the sickening smoke a smell of burning feathers, and she felt faint and weak as she thought that it might be his bed that was on fire.
This was only for an instant. Staggering backward before the cloud of smoke, with outstretched, groping hands, like one suddenly struck blind, an 'instinct,' or what you please to call it, struck her, and she tore off her flannel petticoat, wrapping it about her head and shoulders. Then, holding her hands over mouth and nose, she rushed desperately up the stairs.
No one, unless he has been through such a smoke, can conceive of the trials she had to undergo in mounting those stairs. No one can fancy, except from the recollection of such an experience, how the fierce heat beat her back when she reached the upper hall. The walls were not yet fully on fire, but great tongues of flame curled along the ceiling, and hot blasts swept across her path.
She knew his room. It was but a step to it, and the door opened easily. The nurse was fast asleep, so fast that poor Hannah's warning cry, as she stumbled in, hardly aroused her. On the bed lay Jason, so thin, so white, so corpse-like, she would hardly have known him. In the fierce strength of her despair it was no task to lift that emaciated body, but, ah! how to get out of the house with it? For when she turned she saw that the hall was now wholly on fire.
But she did not hesitate. Wrapping him quickly and tenderly in a blanket taken from the bed, she rushed out into the flames.
Meanwhile Peter Hopkins and his 'hired man' had been aroused by Hannah's first screams, and had hurriedly scrambled on a portion of their clothing and rushed out. They had been in time—running quickly across the field—to see Hannah disappear behind the house. Neither of them supposed for an instant that she had entered it.
Trying the front door, and finding it fast, Peter uplifted his stout foot and kicked it crashing in, but he found it impossible to enter by the breach he had made. The front stairway was all in flames, and the fierce heat drove him hopelessly back. Then they ran around to the rear. By this time the entire upper portion of the building seemed to be one mass of fire and smote, and now they could hear shrill and terrible shrieks, evidently proceeding from the suddenly awakened inmates. They ran to the kitchen door and burst it in.
As they did so there rushed towards them from the foot of the kitchen stairs some horrible, blazing, and unnatural shape, that came stumbling but swiftly forward. With it came smoke and flame and a horrible sound of stifled moans.
At the approach of this strange and unsightly object they sprang back amazed, and it passed them headlong into the open air; passed them and dropped apart, as it were, into the stream before the door.
For many years thereafter the slumbers of Farmer Hopkins were disturbed by visions of what he saw when the two two parts of that terrible apparition were taken from the water.
There lay Hannah Lee, no longer beautiful and fresh as the morning, but blackened, crisped, scorched and shrunken, with all her wealth of silken hair burned to ashes, with all her clear loveliness of complexion gone forever. And there lay Jason Fletcher, unburned,—so carefully had she covered him as she fled,—but senseless, and to all appearance a corpse.
Thus Hannah Lee went through fire and water, even unto worse than death, for the sake of him she loved. And verily she had her reward.
When the sun rose, there only remained a black and ugly pit to mark the place where Deacon Fletcher's house had stood.
And of all its inmates, only Jason—carefully watched and tended at the house of Peter Hopkins—was left to tell the tale of that night's tragedy. And he, poor fellow, had no tale to tell, the delirium of fever having been upon him all the night. It was very doubtful if he would recover,—more than doubtful. Not one in a thousand could do so, with such an exposure at the critical period of his sickness.
Even more tenderly, with even more anxiety, did all in the country round minister to poor Hannah Lee. The story of her love, of her bravery, of her heroic self-abnegation, spread throughout all those parts, and there was no end to what was done for her by neighbors and friends. So widely did her fame spread, that people from thirty, forty, and even fifty miles away came to see her, or sent messages, or money, or delicacies to comfort her.
What could be done for them was done, and they both lived.
When Jason Fletcher arose from his sick bed, he arose another man than the Jason Fletcher who was thrown down in the arbor by Farmer Hopkins. He went sick, a dependent, simple, good-hearted, though impatient boy, worn out by the constraints of twenty years, but capable of future cultivation and improvement; he arose from his sickness a moody, cross-grained, dogged and impatient man, whose only memories were tinged red with wrong, and made bitter by thought of what he had endured. It was little matter to him that all his father's broad acres were now his own—the thought of the horrible death his parents had died only suggested a question in his mind, whether it were not a 'judgment' on them: they having lived to persecute him too long already. Through all the vista of his past life he saw only gloom and shadows, and no ray of brightness cheered the retrospective glance.
No ray? Yes, there was one. He saw a fair young girl, loving and innocent, whose sweet face scarce ever left his thoughts. She reigned where father and mother held no sway; and she made, with the sunshine of her love, a clear heaven for him even in the purgatory of the past. So he lay, slowly gathering strength, dreaming about her. And presently they told him—gently as might be—how she had saved him. And they nearly killed him in the telling.
When he was well enough to be about, it was strange that they would not allow him to see her. She was still very ill, they said, and the doctor, a reasonable man enough usually, utterly refused him admission to her chamber. He fretted at this, and as he gained strength he 'went wrong.'
Mingled with the memory of his old privations was a full assurance of his present liberty. He was of age, and he owned, by right, all the extensive property the Deacon, his father, had so laboriously amassed. During all his boyhood he had never had a shilling, at any one time, that he could call his own; now hundreds of pounds stood ready at his bidding, and he proceeded very speedily to spend them. During all his boyhood he had been cut off from the amusements common to the youth of that day; now he launched out into the most extravagant pleasures his money could procure. Money was nothing, for he had it in plenty; character was nothing, for he had none to lose; only love remained to him of all the good things he might have held, and love lay bleeding while he was denied access to Hannah. Love lay bleeding, and he turned for comfort to the wine-cup, and raised Bacchus to the place Cupid should have occupied. Alas for Jason Fletcher!
Weeks rolled on and passed into months, and still he was refused speech with, or right of, Hannah. And he chafed at the denial. Had she not risked everything to save his life? And he could not even thank her!
At length, being unable to find further excuse wherewith to put him off, they one day told him he could see his love. They endeavored to prepare him by hints and suggestions as to the probable consequences of the trial she had passed through, but all that they could say or he imagine had not prepared him for the fearful sight.
Poor Hannah Lee! This scarred, deformed and helpless body, without proper hands—oh! white hands, how well he remembered them!—without comeliness of form or feature, was all that was left of the once glorious creature, whose heaven-given beauty had ensnared his fresh and untutored heart! Poor Hannah Lee!
The rough youth, loving her yet, but repelled by the horrible aspect she presented, fell sobbing upon his knees and buried his face in the bed-clothing. He spoke no word, but the tumultuous throes of his agony shook the room as he knelt beside her. And from the bed arose a wail more terrible in its utter, eternal sorrowfulness than had ever fallen upon the ears of those present. It was the wail of a soul recognizing for the first time that the loveliness of life had passed away forever.
They mingled their cries thus for a little time, and then Jason arose and staggered from the room. He would have spoken, but the dreadful sorrow rose up and choked him. All the memories of the past were linked with youth and beauty. He could not speak to the blight before him, as to his love and his life, and so, with blind and lumbering footsteps, he toiled heavily from the house.
The fires of the Revolution had broken forth and swept over New England, burning out like stubble the little loyalty to the crown left in men's hearts.
At the battle of Bunker Hill Jason Fletcher fought like a tiger. Last among the latest, he clubbed his musket, and was driven slowly backward from the slight redoubt.
He was heard of at White Plains, at Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown, and always with marvelous mention of courage and prowess. Then he was promoted from the ranks, and was mentioned as 'Lieutenant Fletcher.' Then there were rumors of some dishonor that had sullied the brightness of his fame; and then it came to be hinted about that in all the rank and file of the patriot army there was no one so utterly dissolute and drunken as he. And then came news of his ignominiously quitting the service, and a cloud dropped down about him, and no word, good or bad, came home from the castaway any more.
Meanwhile poor Hannah Lee languished upon her bed of suffering, but did not die. And finally, when spring after spring had spread new verdure over the rough hills among which she dwelt, she got, by little and little, to venturing out into the village streets. And when they saw her bowed form and her ugly, misshapen hands, the village children, knowing her history, forbore to sneer at or taunt her. All the village loved the unfortunate creature, and all the village strove together to do her kindness.
One man in the town—a cousin of Jason the wanderer—was supposed to hold communication with him. This man notified Hannah one day that a safe life annuity had been purchased for her, and thereafter she lived at the house of Farmer Hopkins, not as a loved dependent, but as a cherished and faithful friend. Thus freed from the bitter sting of helpless poverty, Hannah sank resignedly into a quiet and honorable life.
At length, one warm summer day, when Jason Fletcher should have been about forty years of age, there strayed into the village a blind mendicant, with a dog for guide, and a wooden leg rudely fastened to one stiff stump. This stranger, white-headed and with the care-lines of many years on his sadly furrowed face, sought out poor Hannah Lee, and told her that he had, by the grace of God, come back, at last, to die. Leading him with gentle counsels to that Mercy Seat where none ever seek in vain, poor Hannah saw him bend with contrite and humble spirit, and seek the forgiveness needed to atone for many years of sin. Patient and penitent he passed a few quiet years, and then she followed to the tomb the earthly remains of him for whom she had sacrificed a life.
And this being done, she removed to a distant town, where Martha Hopkins, now kind Mrs. Marjoram, dwelt.
And many years afterwards Mrs. Marjoram told her story, as a lesson that men should never judge a living soul by its outward habiliments.
FREEDOM'S STARS
From Everglades to Dismal Swamp
Rose on the hot and trembling air
Cloud after cloud, in dark array,
Enfolding from their serpent lair
The starry flag that guards the free:—
One after one its stars grew dun,
Heaven given to shine on Liberty.
But swifter than the lightning's gleam
Flashed out the spears of Northern-light,
And with the north wind's saving wings,
The cloud-host, vanquished, took to flight.
Then in her white-winged radiance there
The angel Freedom conquering came,
Relit once more her brilliant stars,
To burn with an eternal flame.
ON THE PLAINS
The plains is the current designation of the region stretching westward from Missouri—or rather from the western settlements of Kansas and Nebraska—to the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains. Part of it is included under the vague designation of 'the Great American Desert;' but that title is applicable to a far larger area westward than eastward of the Rocky Mountains. The Great Basin, whereof Salt Lake is the lowest point, and the Valley of the Colorado, which skirts it on the east, are mainly sterile from drouth or other causes—not one acre in each hundred of their surface being arable without irrigation, and not one in ten capable of being made productive by irrigation. Arid, naked, or thinly shrub-covered mountains traverse and chequer those deep yet elevated valleys, wherein few savages or even wild animals of any size or value were ever able to find subsistence. Probably that of the Colorado is, as a whole, the most sterile and forbidding of any valley of equal size on earth, unless it be that of one of the usually frozen rivers in or near the Arctic circle. Even Mormon energy, industry, frugality and subservience to sacerdotal despotism, barely suffice to wrench a rude, coarse living from those narrow belts and patches of less niggard soil which skirt those infrequent lakes and scanty streams of the Great Basin which are susceptible of irrigation; mines alone (and they must be rich ones) can ever render populous the extensive country which is interposed between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada.
The Plains differ radically from their western counterpoise. They have no mountains, and very few considerable hills; they are not rocky: in fact, they are rendered all but worthless by their destitution of rock. In Kansas, a few ridges, mainly (I believe) of lime, rise to the surface; beyond these, and near the west line of the new State, stretches a thin-soiled, rolling sandstone district, perhaps forty miles wide; then comes the Buffalo range, formerly covering the entire valley of the Mississippi, and even stretching fitfully beyond the Rocky Mountains, but now shrunk to a strip hardly more than one hundred and fifty miles in width, but extending north and south from Texas into the British territory which embosoms the Red River of the North. Better soil than that of the Buffalo region west of Kansas is rarely found, though the scarcity of wood, and the unfitness of the little that skirts the longer and more abiding streams for any use but that of fuel, must be a great drawback to settlement and cultivation. The coarse, short, hearty grass that carpets most of this region, and which is allowed to attain its full growth only in the valleys of the Chugwater and a few other streams which have their course mainly within or very near the Rocky Mountains, and which the Buffalo no longer visit, seems worthy at least of trial by the farmers and shepherds of our older States. Its ability to resist drouth and overcropping and hard usage generally must be great, and I judge that many lawns and pastures would be improved by it. That it has merely held its ground for ages, in defiance of the crushing tread and close feeding of the enormous herds of the Plains, proves it a plant of signal hardihood and tenacity of life; while the favor with which it is regarded by passing teams and herds combines with its evident abundance of nutriment to render its intrinsic value unquestionable.
The green traveler or emigrant in early summer has traversed, since he crossed the Missouri, five hundred miles of almost uniformly arable soil, most of it richly grassed, with belts of timber skirting its moderately copious and not unfrequent water-courses, and he very naturally concludes 'the American Desert' a misnomer, or at best a gross exaggeration. But, from the moment of leaving the Buffaloes behind him, the country begins to shoal, as a sailor might say, growing rapidly sterile, treeless, and all but grassless. The scanty forage that is still visible is confined to the immediate banks or often submerged intervales of streams, though a little sometimes lingers in hollows or ravines where the drifted snows of winter evidently lay melting slowly till late in the spring. By-and-by the streams disappear, or are plainly on the point of vanishing; of living wood there is none, and only experienced plainsmen know where to look for the fragments of dead trees which still linger on the banks of a few slender or dried-up brooks, whence sweeping fires or other destructive agencies long since eradicated all growing timber. The last living, or, indeed, standing tree you passed was a stunted, shabby specimen of the unlovely Cotton-wood, rooted in naked sand beside a water-course, and shielded from prairie-fires by the high, precipitous bank; for, scanty as is the herbage of the desert, the fierce winds which sweep over it will yet, especially in late spring or early summer, drive a fire (which has obtained a start in some fairly grassed vale or nook) through its dead, tinder-like remains. How far human improvidence and recklessness—especially that of our own destructive Caucasian race—has contributed to denude the Plains of the little wood that thinly dotted their surface at a period not very remote, I can not pretend to decide; but it is very evident that there are far fewer trees now standing than there were even one century ago.
Of rocks rising above or nearing the surface, the Plains are all but destitute; hence their eminent lack first of wood, then of moisture. Your foot will scarcely strike a pebble from Lawrence to Denver; and the very few rocky terraces or perpendicular ridges you encounter appear to be a concrete of sand and clay, hardened to stone by the persistent, petrifying action of wind and rain. Of other rock, save the sandstone ridges already noticed, there is none: hence the rivers, though running swiftly, are never broken by falls; hence the prairie-fires are nowhere arrested by swamps or marshes; hence the forests, if this region was ever generally wooded, have been gradually swept away and devoured, until none remain. In fact, from the river bottoms of the lower Kansas to those of the San Joaquin and Sacramento, there is no swamp, though two or three miry meadows of inconsiderable size, near the South Pass, known as 'Ice Springs' and 'Pacific Springs,' are of a somewhat swampy character. Beside these, there is nothing approximating the natural meadows of New England, the fenny, oozy flats of nearly all inhabited countries. Bilious fevers find no aliment in the dry, pure breezes of this elevated region; but this exemption is dearly bought by the absence of lakes, of woods, of summer rains, and unfailing streams.
Vast, rarely-trodden forests are wild and lonely: the cit who plunges into one, a stranger to its ways, is awed by its gloom, its silence, its restricted range of vision, its stifled winds, and its generally forbidding aspect. He may talk bravely and even blithely to his companions, but his ease and gayety are unnatural: Leatherstocking is at home in the forest, but Pelham is not, and can not be. On the better portion of the Plains—say in the heart of the Buffalo region—it is otherwise: though you are hundreds of miles from a human habitation other than a rude mail-station tent or ruder Indian lodge, the country wears a subdued, placid aspect; you rise a gentle slope of two or three miles, and look down the opposite incline or 'divide,' and up the counterpart of that you have just traversed, seeing nothing but these gentle, wave-like undulations of the surface to limit your gaze, which contemplates at once some fifty to eighty square miles of unfenced, treeless, but green and close-cropped pasturage; and it is hard to realize that you are out of the pale of civilization, hundreds of miles from a decent dwelling-house, and that the innumerable cattle moving and grazing before you—so countless that they seem thickly to cover half the district swept by your vision—are not domestic and heritable—the collected herds of some great grazing county, impelled from Texas or New Mexico to help subdue some distant Oregon. It seems a sad waste to see so much good live-stock ranging to no purpose and dying to no profit: for the roving, migrating whites who cross the Plains slaughter the buffalo in mere wantonness, leaving scores of carcasses to rot where they fell, perhaps taking the tongue and the hump for food, but oftener content with mere wanton destruction. The Indian, to whom the buffalo is food, clothing, and lodging (for his tent, as well as his few if not scanty habiliments, is formed of buffalo-skins stretched over lodge-poles), justly complains of this shameful improvidence and cruelty. Were he to deal thus with an emigrant's herd, he would be shot without mercy; why, then, should whites decimate his without excuse?
Beyond the Buffalo region the Plains are bleak, monotonous, and solitary. The Antelope, who would be a deer if his legs were shorter and his body not so stout, is the redeeming feature of the well-grassed plains next to Kansas, and which recur under the shadow of the Rocky Mountains; but he is an animal of too much sense to remain in the scantily grassed desert which separates the buffalo range from the latter. There the lean Wolf strolls and hunts and starves; there the petty Prairie-Wolf, a thoroughly contemptible beast, picks up such a dirty living as he may; while the sprightly, amusing little Prairie-Dog, who is a rather short-legged gray squirrel, with a funny little yelp and a troglodyte habitation, lives in villages or cities of from five hundred to five thousand dens, each (or most of them) tenanted in common with him by a harmless little Owl and a Rattlesnake of questionable amiability. The Owl sits by the mouth of the hole till driven away by your approach, when he follows his confrere's example by diving; the Rattlesnake stays usually below, to give any prowling, thieving prairie-wolf, or other carnivorous intruder, the worst of the bargain, should he attempt to dig out the architect of this subterranean abode. But for this nice little family arrangement, the last prairie-dog would long since have been unearthed and eaten. As it is, the rattlesnake gets a den for nothing, while the prairie-dog sleeps securely under the guardianship of his poison-tongued confederate. The owl, I presume, either pays his scot by hunting mice and insects for the general account, or by keeping watch against all felonious approaches. Even man does not care to dig out such a nest, and prefers to drown out the inmates by pouring in pail after pail of water till they have to put in an appearance above ground. The only defense against this is to construct a prairie-dog town as far as possible from water, and this is carefully attended to. I heard on the Plains of one being drowned out by a sudden and overwhelming flood; but of the hundreds I passed, not one was located where this seemed possible.
Absence of rock in place—that is, of ridges or strata of rock rising through the soil above or nearly to the surface—has determined the character not only of the Plains but of much of the roll of the great rivers east and south of them. Even at the very base of the Rocky Mountains, the Chugwater shows a milky though rapid current, while the North Platte brings a considerable amount of earthy sediment from the heart of that Alpine region. After fairly entering upon the Plains, every stream begins to burrow and to wash, growing more and more turbid, until it is lost in 'Big Muddy,' the most opaque and sedimentary of all great rivers. I suspect that all the other rivers of this continent convey in the aggregate less earthy matter to the ocean than the Missouri pours into the previously transparent Mississippi, thenceforth an unfailing testimony that evil company corrupts and defiles. Louisiana is the spoil of the Plains, which have in process of time been denuded to an average depth of not less than fifty and perhaps to that of two or three hundred feet. I passed hills along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains where this process is less complete and more active than is usual,—hills which are the remaining vestiges of a former average level of the plain adjacent, and which have happened to wear away so steeply and sharply that very little vegetation ever finds support on their sides, which every rain is still abrading. At a single point only do I remember a phenomenon presented by some other mountain bases,—that of a water-course (dry perhaps half the year, but evidently a heady torrent at times), which had gradually built up a bed and banks of boulders, pebbles and gravel, washed down from a higher portion of its headlong course, so that its current, when it had a current, was considerably above the general surface on either side of it. Away from the mountains, however, boulders or loose stones of any size are rarely seen in the beds of even the largest and deepest channeled streams, which are usually swift, but never broken by a fall, because never down to the subjacent rock in place, assuming that such rock must be.
In the rare instances of rocky banks skirting the immediate valley of a stream, the seeming rock is evidently a modern concrete of clay and the usual sand or gravel composing the soil,—a concrete slowly formed by the action of sun and rain and wind, on a bank left nearly or quite perpendicular by the wearing action of the stream. In the neighborhood of Cheyenne Pass,—say for a distance of fifty to a hundred miles S.S.W. of Laramie,—this effect is exhibited on the grandest scale in repeated instances, and in two or three cases for an extent of miles. Along either bank of the Chugwater, at distances of twenty to forty miles, above its junction with the Laramie affluent of the North Platte, stretch perpendicular rocky terraces, thirty to forty feet high, looking, from a moderate distance, as regular and as artificial as the façade of any row of city edifices. I did not see 'Chimney Rock,' farther down the Platte; but I presume that this, too, is a relic of what was once the average level of the adjacent country, from which all around has been gradually washed away, while this 'spared monument' has been hardened by exposure and the action of the elements from earth to enduring rock—a gigantic natural adobe.
The Plains attest God's wisdom in usually providing surface-rock in generous abundance as the only reliable conservative force against the insidious waste and wear of earth by water. Storms, rills, and rivers are constantly at work to carry off the soil of every island and continent, and lose it in the depths of seas and oceans. Rock in place impedes this tendency, by arresting the headlong course of streams, and depositing in their stiller depths the spoils that the current was hastening away; still more by the formation of swamps and marshes, which arrest the sweep of fires, and so protect the youth and growth of trees and forests. An uninhabited, moderately-rolling or nearly flat country, wherein no ridges of stubborn rock gave protection to fire-repelling marshes, would gradually be swept of trees by fires, and converted into prairie or desert.
Life on the Plains—the life of white men, by courtesy termed civilized—is a rough and rugged matter. I can not concur with J.B. Ficklin, long a mail-agent ranging from St. Joseph to Salt Lake (now, I regret to say, a quarter-master in the rebel army), who holds that a man going on the Plains should never wash his face till he comes off again; but water is used there for purposes of ablution with a frugality not fully justified by its scarcity. A 'biled shirt' lasts a good while. I noted some in use which the dry, fine dust of that region must have been weeks in bringing to the rigidity and clayey yellow or tobacco-stain hue which they unchangeably wore during the days that I enjoyed the society of the wearers. Pilot-bread, a year or so baked, and ever since subjected to the indurating influences of an atmosphere intensely dry, is not particularly succulent or savory food, and I did not find it improved by some minutes' immersion in the frying-pan of hot lard from which our rations of pork had just been turned out; but others of more experience liked it much. The pork of the Plains is generally poor, composed of the lightly-salted and half-smoked sides of shotes who had evidently little personal knowledge of corn. The coffee I did not drink; but, in the absence of milk, and often of sugar also, and in view of its manufacture by the rudest and rawest of masculine cooks, I judge that the temptation to excessive indulgence in this beverage was not irresistible. Most of the water of the Plains, unlike that of the Great Basin, is pretty good; but as you near the Rocky Mountains, 'alkali' becomes a terror to man and beast.
