Kitabı oku: «Red Men and White», sayfa 8

THE SECOND MISSOURI COMPROMISE

I

The Legislature had sat up all night, much absorbed, having taken off its coat because of the stove. This was the fortieth and final day of its first session under an order of things not new only, but novel. It sat with the retrospect of forty days’ duty done, and the prospect of forty days’ consequent pay to come. Sleepy it was not, but wide and wider awake over a progressing crisis. Hungry it had been until after a breakfast fetched to it from the Overland at seven, three hours ago. It had taken no intermission to wash its face, nor was there just now any apparatus for this, as the tin pitcher commonly used stood not in the basin in the corner, but on the floor by the Governor’s chair; so the eyes of the Legislature, though earnest, were dilapidated. Last night the pressure of public business had seemed over, and no turning back the hands of the clock likely to be necessary. Besides Governor Ballard, Mr. Hewley, Secretary and Treasurer, was sitting up too, small, iron-gray, in feature and bearing every inch the capable, dignified official, but his necktie had slipped off during the night. The bearded Councillors had the best of it, seeming after their vigil less stale in the face than the member from Silver City, for instance, whose day-old black growth blurred his dingy chin, or the member from Big Camas, whose scantier red crop bristled on his cheeks in sparse wandering arrangements, like spikes on the barrel of a musical box. For comfort, most of the pistols were on the table with the Statutes of the United States. Secretary and Treasurer Hewley’s lay on his strong-box immediately behind him. The Governor’s was a light one, and always hung in the arm hole of his waistcoat. The graveyard of Boisé City this year had twenty-seven tenants, two brought there by meningitis, and twenty-five by difference of opinion. Many denizens of the Territory were miners, and the unsettling element of gold-dust hung in the air, breeding argument. The early, thin, bright morning steadily mellowed against the windows distant from the stove; the panes melted clear until they ran, steamed faintly, and dried, this fresh May day, after the night’s untimely cold; while still the Legislature sat in its shirt-sleeves, and several statesmen had removed their boots. Even had appearances counted, the session was invisible from the street. Unlike a good number of houses in the town, the State-House (as they called it from old habit) was not all on the ground-floor for outsiders to stare into, but up a flight of wood steps to a wood gallery. From this, to be sure, the interior could be watched from several windows on both sides; but the journey up the steps was precisely enough to disincline the idle, and this was counted a sensible thing by the law-makers. They took the ground that shaping any government for a raw wilderness community needed seclusion, and they set a high value upon unworried privacy.

The sun had set upon a concentrated Council, but it rose upon faces that looked momentous. Only the Governor’s and Treasurer’s were impassive, and they concealed something even graver than the matter in hand.

“I’ll take a hun’red mo’, Gove’nuh,” said the member from Silver City, softly, his eyes on space. His name was Powhattan Wingo.

The Governor counted out the blue, white, and red chips to Wingo, pencilled some figures on a thickly ciphered and cancelled paper that bore in print the words “Territory of Idaho, Council Chamber,” and then filled up his glass from the tin pitcher, adding a little sugar.

“And I’ll trouble you fo’ the toddy,” Wingo added, always softly, and his eyes always on space. “Raise you ten, suh.” This was to the Treasurer. Only the two were playing at present. The Governor was kindly acting as bank; the others were looking on.

“And ten,” said the Treasurer.

“And ten,” said Wingo.

“And twenty,” said the Treasurer.

“And fifty,” said Wingo, gently bestowing his chips in the middle of the table.

The Treasurer called.

The member from Silver City showed down five high hearts, and a light rustle went over the Legislature when the Treasurer displayed three twos and a pair of threes, and gathered in his harvest. He had drawn two cards, Wingo one; and losing to the lowest hand that could have beaten you is under such circumstances truly hard luck. Moreover, it was almost the only sort of luck that had attended Wingo since about half after three that morning. Seven hours of cards just a little lower than your neighbor’s is searching to the nerves.

“Gove’nuh, I’ll take a hun’red mo’,” said Wingo; and once again the Legislature rustled lightly, and the new deal began.

Treasurer Hewley’s winnings flanked his right, a pillared fortress on the table, built chiefly of Wingo’s misfortunes. Hewley had not counted them, and his architecture was for neatness and not ostentation; yet the Legislature watched him arrange his gains with sullen eyes. It would have pleased him now to lose; it would have more than pleased him to be able to go to bed quite a long time ago. But winners cannot easily go to bed. The thoughtful Treasurer bet his money and deplored this luck. It seemed likely to trap himself and the Governor in a predicament they had not foreseen. All had taken a hand at first, and played for several hours, until Fortune’s wheel ran into a rut deeper than usual. Wingo slowly became the loser to several, then Hewley had forged ahead, winner from everybody. One by one they had dropped out, each meaning to go home, and all lingering to see the luck turn. It was an extraordinary run, a rare specimen, a breaker of records, something to refer to in the future as a standard of measure and an embellishment of reminiscence; quite enough to keep the Idaho Legislature up all night. And then it was their friend who was losing. The only speaking in the room was the brief card talk of the two players.

“Five better,” said Hewley, winner again four times in the last five.

“Ten,” said Wingo.

“And twenty,” said the Secretary and Treasurer.

“Call you.”

“Three kings.”

“They are good, suh. Gove’nuh, I’ll take a hun’red mo’.”

Upon this the wealthy and weary Treasurer made a try for liberty and bed. How would it do, he suggested, to have a round of jack-pots, say ten – or twenty, if the member from Silver City preferred – and then stop? It would do excellently, the member said, so softly that the Governor looked at him. But Wingo’s large countenance remained inexpressive, his black eyes still impersonally fixed on space. He sat thus till his chips were counted to him, and then the eyes moved to watch the cards fall. The Governor hoped he might win now, under the jack-pot system. At noon he should have a disclosure to make; something that would need the most cheerful and contented feelings in Wingo and the Legislature to be received with any sort of calm. Wingo was behind the game to the tune of – the Governor gave up adding as he ran his eye over the figures of the bank’s erased and tormented record, and he shook his head to himself. This was inadvertent.

“May I inquah who yo’re shakin’ yoh head at, suh?” said Wingo, wheeling upon the surprised Governor.

“Certainly,” answered that official. “You.” He was never surprised for very long. In 1867 it did not do to remain surprised in Idaho.

“And have I done anything which meets yoh disapprobation?” pursued the member from Silver City, enunciating with care.

“You have met my disapprobation.”

Wingo’s eye was on the Governor, and now his friends drew a little together, and as a unit sent a glance of suspicion at the lone bank.

“You will gratify me by being explicit, suh,” said Wingo to the bank.

“Well, you’ve emptied the toddy.”

“Ha-ha, Gove’nuh! I rose, suh, to yoh little fly. We’ll awduh some mo’.”

“Time enough when he comes for the breakfast things,” said Governor Ballard, easily.

“As you say, suh. I’ll open for five dolluhs.” Wingo turned back to his game. He was winning, and as his luck continued his voice ceased to be soft, and became a shade truculent. The Governor’s ears caught this change, and he also noted the lurking triumph in the faces of Wingo’s fellow-statesmen. Cheerfulness and content were scarcely reigning yet in the Council Chamber of Idaho as Ballard sat watching the friendly game. He was beginning to fear that he must leave the Treasurer alone and take some precautions outside. But he would have to be separated for some time from his ally, cut off from giving him any hints. Once the Treasurer looked at him, and he immediately winked reassuringly, but the Treasurer failed to respond. Hewley might be able to wink after everything was over, but he could not find it in his serious heart to do so now. He was wondering what would happen if this game should last till noon with the company in its present mood. Noon was the time fixed for paying the Legislative Assembly the compensation due for its services during this session; and the Governor and the Treasurer had put their heads together and arranged a surprise for the Legislative Assembly. They were not going to pay them.

A knock sounded at the door, and on seeing the waiter from the Overland enter, the Governor was seized with an idea. Perhaps precaution could be taken from the inside. “Take this pitcher,” said he, “and have it refilled with the same. Joseph knows my mixture.” But Joseph was night bar-tender, and now long in his happy bed, with a day successor in the saloon, and this one did not know the mixture. Ballard had foreseen this when he spoke, and that his writing a note of directions would seem quite natural.

“The receipt is as long as the drink,” said a legislator, watching the Governor’s pencil fly.

“He don’t know where my private stock is located,” explained Ballard. The waiter departed with the breakfast things and the note, and while the jack-pots continued the Governor’s mind went carefully over the situation.

Until lately the Western citizen has known one every-day experience that no dweller in our thirteen original colonies has had for two hundred years. In Massachusetts they have not seen it since 1641; in Virginia not since 1628. It is that of belonging to a community of which every adult was born somewhere else. When you come to think of this a little it is dislocating to many of your conventions. Let a citizen of Salem, for instance, or a well-established Philadelphia Quaker, try to imagine his chief-justice fresh from Louisiana, his mayor from Arkansas, his tax-collector from South Carolina, and himself recently arrived in a wagon from a thousand-mile drive. To be governor of such a community Ballard had travelled in a wagon from one quarter of the horizon; from another quarter Wingo had arrived on a mule. People reached Boisé in three ways: by rail to a little west of the Missouri, after which it was wagon, saddle, or walk for the remaining fifteen hundred miles; from California it was shorter; and from Portland, Oregon, only about five hundred miles, and some of these more agreeable, by water up the Columbia. Thus it happened that salt often sold for its weight in gold-dust. A miner in the Bannock Basin would meet a freight teamster coming in with the staples of life, having journeyed perhaps sixty consecutive days through the desert, and valuing his salt highly. The two accordingly bartered in scales, white powder against yellow, and both parties content. Some in Boisé to-day can remember these bargains. After all, they were struck but thirty years ago. Governor Ballard and Treasurer Hewley did not come from the same place, but they constituted a minority of two in Territorial politics because they hailed from north of Mason and Dixon’s line. Powhattan Wingo and the rest of the Council were from Pike County, Missouri. They had been Secessionists, some of them Knights of the Golden Circle; they had belonged to Price’s Left Wing, and they flocked together. They were seven – two lying unwell at the Overland, five now present in the State-House with the Governor and Treasurer. Wingo, Gascon Claiborne, Gratiot des Pères, Pete Cawthon, and F. Jackson Gilet were their names. Besides this Council of seven were thirteen members of the Idaho House of Representatives, mostly of the same political feather with the Council, and they too would be present at noon to receive their pay. How Ballard and Hewley came to be a minority of two is a simple matter. Only twenty-five months had gone since Appomattox Court-House. That surrender was presently followed by Johnston’s to Sherman, at Durhams Station, and following this the various Confederate armies in Alabama, or across the Mississippi, or wherever they happened to be, had successively surrendered – but not Price’s Left Wing. There was the wide open West under its nose, and no Grant or Sherman infesting that void. Why surrender? Wingos, Claibornes, and all, they melted away. Price’s Left Wing sailed into the prairie and passed below the horizon. To know what it next did you must, like Ballard or Hewley, pass below the horizon yourself, clean out of sight of the dome at Washington to remote, untracked Idaho. There, besides wild red men in quantities, would you find not very tame white ones, gentlemen of the ripest Southwestern persuasion, and a Legislature to fit. And if, like Ballard or Hewley, you were a Union man, and the President of the United States had appointed you Governor or Secretary of such a place, your days would be full of awkwardness, though your difference in creed might not hinder you from playing draw-poker with the unreconstructed. These Missourians were whole-souled, ample-natured males in many ways, but born with a habit of hasty shooting. The Governor, on setting foot in Idaho, had begun to study pistolship, but acquired thus in middle life it could never be with him that spontaneous art which it was with Price’s Left Wing. Not that the weapons now lying loose about the State-House were brought for use there. Everybody always went armed in Boisé, as the gravestones impliedly testified. Still, the thought of the bad quarter of an hour which it might come to at noon did cross Ballard’s mind, raising the image of a column in the morrow’s paper: “An unfortunate occurrence has ended relations between esteemed gentlemen hitherto the warmest personal friends… They will be laid to rest at 3 p.m… As a last token of respect for our lamented Governor, the troops from Boisé Barracks…” The Governor trusted that if his friends at the post were to do him any service it would not be a funeral one.

The new pitcher of toddy came from the Overland, the jack-pots continued, were nearing a finish, and Ballard began to wonder if anything had befallen a part of his note to the bar-tender, an enclosure addressed to another person.

“Ha, suh!” said Wingo to Hewley. “My pot again, I declah.” The chips had been crossing the table his way, and he was now loser but six hundred dollars.

“Ye ain’t goin’ to whip Mizzooruh all night an’ all day, ez a rule,” observed Pete Cawthon, Councillor from Lost Leg.

“’Tis a long road that has no turnin’, Gove’nuh,” said F. Jackson Gilet, more urbanely. He had been in public life in Missouri, and was now President of the Council in Idaho. He, too, had arrived on a mule, but could at will summon a rhetoric dating from Cicero, and preserved by many luxuriant orators until after the middle of the present century.

“True,” said the Governor, politely. “But here sits the long-suffering bank, whichever way the road turns. I’m sleepy.”

“You sacrifice yo’self in the good cause,” replied Gilet, pointing to the poker game. “Oneasy lies the head that wahs an office, suh.” And Gilet bowed over his compliment.

The Governor thought so indeed. He looked at the Treasurer’s strong-box, where lay the appropriation lately made by Congress to pay the Idaho Legislature for its services; and he looked at the Treasurer, in whose pocket lay the key of the strong-box. He was accountable to the Treasury at Washington for all money disbursed for Territorial expenses.

“Eleven twenty,” said Wingo, “and only two hands mo’ to play.”

The Governor slid out his own watch.

“I’ll scahsely recoup,” said Wingo.

They dealt and played the hand, and the Governor strolled to the window.

“Three aces,” Wingo announced, winning again handsomely. “I struck my luck too late,” he commented to the on-lookers. While losing he had been able to sustain a smooth reticence; now he gave his thoughts freely to the company, and continually moved and fingered his increasing chips. The Governor was still looking out of the window, where he could see far up the street, when Wingo won the last hand, which was small. “That ends it, suh, I suppose?” he said to Hewley, letting the pack of cards linger in his grasp.

“I wouldn’t let him off yet,” said Ballard to Wingo from the window, with sudden joviality, and he came back to the players. “I’d make him throw five cold hands with me.”

“Ah, Gove’nuh, that’s yoh spo’tin’ blood! Will you do it, Mistuh Hewley – a hun’red a hand?”

Mr. Hewley did it; and winning the first, he lost the second, third, and fourth in the space of an eager minute, while the Councillors drew their chairs close.

“Let me see,” said Wingo, calculating, “if I lose this – why still – ” He lost. “But I’ll not have to ask you to accept my papuh, suh. Wingo liquidates. Fo’ty days at six dolluhs a day makes six times fo’ is twenty-fo’ – two hun’red an’ fo’ty dolluhs spot cash in hand at noon, without computation of mileage to and from Silver City at fo’ dolluhs every twenty miles, estimated according to the nearest usually travelled route.” He was reciting part of the statute providing mileage for Idaho legislators. He had never served the public before, and he knew all the laws concerning compensation by heart. “You’ll not have to wait fo’ yoh money, suh,” he concluded.

“Well, Mr. Wingo,” said Governor Ballard, “it depends on yourself whether your pay comes to you or not.” He spoke cheerily. “If you don’t see things my way, our Treasurer will have to wait for his money.” He had not expected to break the news just so, but it made as easy a beginning as any.

“See things yoh way, suh?”

“Yes. As it stands at present I cannot take the responsibility of paying you.”

“The United States pays me, suh. My compensation is provided by act of Congress.”

“I confess I am unable to discern your responsibility, Gove’nuh,” said F. Jackson Gilet. “Mr. Wingo has faithfully attended the session, and is, like every gentleman present, legally entitled to his emoluments.”

“You can all readily become entitled – ”

“All? Am I – are my friends – included in this new depa’tyuh?”

“The difficulty applies generally, Mr. Gilet.”

“Do I understand the Gove’nuh to insinuate – nay, gentlemen, do not rise! Be seated, I beg.” For the Councillors had leaped to their feet.

“Whar’s our money?” said Pete Cawthon. “Our money was put in thet yere box.”

Ballard flushed angrily, but a knock at the door stopped him, and he merely said, “Come in.”

A trooper, a corporal, stood at the entrance, and the disordered Council endeavored to look usual in a stranger’s presence. They resumed their seats, but it was not easy to look usual on such short notice.

“Captain Paisley’s compliments,” said the soldier, mechanically, “and will Governor Ballard take supper with him this evening?”

“Thank Captain Paisley,” said the Governor (his tone was quite usual), “and say that official business connected with the end of the session makes it imperative for me to be at the State-House. Imperative.”

The trooper withdrew. He was a heavy-built, handsome fellow, with black mustache and black eyes that watched through two straight, narrow slits beneath straight black brows. His expression in the Council Chamber had been of the regulation military indifference, and as he went down the steps he irrelevantly sang an old English tune:

 
“‘Since first I saw your face I resolved
To honor and re – ’
 

“I guess,” he interrupted himself as he unhitched his horse, “parrot and monkey hev broke loose.”

The Legislature, always in its shirt-sleeves, the cards on the table, and the toddy on the floor, sat calm a moment, cooled by this brief pause from the first heat of its surprise, while the clatter of Corporal Jones’s galloping shrank quickly into silence.