Bunch Gra.s.s.

by Horace Annesley Vach.e.l.l.

FOREWORD

The author of _Bunch Gra.s.s_ ventures to hope that this book will not be altogether regarded as mere flotsam and jetsam of English and American magazines. The stories, it will be found, have a certain continuity, and may challenge interest as apart from incident because an attempt has been made to reproduce atmosphere, the atmosphere of a country that has changed almost beyond recognition in three decades.

The author went to a wild California cow-country just thirty years ago, and remained there seventeen years, during which period the land from such pastoral uses as cattle and sheep-raising became subdivided into innumerable small holdings. He beheld a new country in the making, and the pa.s.sing of the pioneer who settled vital differences with a pistol. During those years some noted outlaws ranged at large in the county here spoken of as San Lorenzo. The Dalton gang of train robbers lived and died (some with their boots on) not far from the village ent.i.tled Paradise. Stage coaches were robbed frequently. Every large rancher suffered much at the hands of cattle and horse thieves.

The writer has talked to Frank James, the most famous of Western desperados; he has enjoyed the acquaintance of Judge Lynch, who hanged two men from a bridge within half-a-mile of the ranch-house; he remembers the Chinese Riots; he has witnessed many a fight between the hungry squatter and the old settler with no t.i.tle to the leagues over which his herds roamed, and so, in a modest way, he may claim to be a historian, not forgetting that the original signification of the word was a narrator of fables founded upon facts.

Apologies are tendered for the dialect to be found in these pages.

There is no Californian dialect. At the time of the discovery of gold, the state was flooded with men from all parts of the world, and dialects became inextricably mixed. Not even Bret Harte was able to reproduce the talk of children whose fathers may have come from Kentucky or Ma.s.sachusetts, and their mothers from Louisiana.

Re-reading these chapters, with a more or less critical detachment, and leaving them--good, bad and indifferent--as they were originally printed, one is forced to the conclusion that sentiment--which would seem to arouse what is most hostile in the cultivated dweller in cities--is an all-pervading essence in primitive communities, colouring and discolouring every phase of life and thought. One instance among a thousand will suffice. Stage coaches, in the writer's county, used to be held up, single-handed, by a highwayman, known as Black Bart. All the foothill folk pleaded in extenuation of the robber that he wrote a copy of verses, embalming his adventure, which he used to pin to the nearest tree. Black Bart would have been shot on sight had he presented his doggerel to any self-respecting Western editor; nevertheless the sentiment that inspired a bandit to set forth his misdeeds in execrable rhyme transformed him from a criminal into a popular hero! The virtues that counted in the foothills during the eighties were generosity, courage, and that amazing power of recuperation which enables a man to begin life again and again, undaunted by the bludgeonings of misfortune. Some of the stories in this volume are obviously the work of an apprentice, but they have been included because, however faulty in technique, they do serve to ill.u.s.trate a past that can never come back, and men and women who were outwardly crude and illiterate but at core kind and chivalrous, and nearly always humorously unconventional. The bunch gra.s.s, so beloved by the patriarchal pioneers, has been ploughed up and destroyed; the unwritten law of Judge Lynch will soon become an oral tradition; but the Land of Yesterday blooms afresh as the Golden State of To-day--and Tomorrow.

I

ALETHEA-BELLE

In the early eighties, when my brother Ajax and I were raising cattle in the foothills of Southern California, our ranch-house was used as a stopping-place by the teamsters hauling freight across the Coast Range; and after the boom began, while the village of Paradise was evolving itself out of rough timber, we were obliged to furnish all comers with board and lodging. Hardly a day pa.s.sed without some "prairie schooner" (the canvas-covered wagon of the squatter) creaking into our corral; and the quiet gulches and canons where Ajax and I had shot quail and deer began to re-echo to the shouts of the children of the rough folk from the mid-West and Missouri. These "Pikers," so called, settled thickly upon the sage-brush hills to the south and east of us, and took up all the land they could claim from the Government. Before spring was over, we were asked to lend an old _adobe_ building to the village fathers, to be used as a schoolhouse, until the schoolhouse proper was built. At that time a New England family of the name of Spafford was working for us. Mrs.

Spafford, having two children of her own, tried to enlist our sympathies.

"I'm kinder sick," she told us, "of cookin' an' teachin'; an' the hot weather's comin' on, too. You'd oughter let 'em hev that old _adobe_."

"But who will teach the children?" we asked.

"We've fixed that," said Mrs. Spafford. "'Tain't everyone as'd want to come into this wilderness, but my auntie's cousin, Alethea-Belle Buchanan, is willin' to take the job."

"Is she able?" we asked doubtfully.

"She's her father's daughter," Mrs. Spafford replied. "Abram Buchanan was as fine an' brave a man as ever preached the Gospel. An' clever, too. My sakes, he never done but one foolish thing, and that was when he merried his wife."

"Tell us about her," said that inveterate gossip, Ajax.

Mrs. Spafford sniffed.

"I seen her once--that was once too much fer me. One o' them lackadaisical, wear-a-wrapper-in-the-mornin', soft, pulpy Southerners.

Pretty--yes, in a spindlin', pink an' white soon-washed-out pattern, but without backbone. I've no patience with sech."

"Her daughter won't be able to halter-break these wild colts."

"Didn't I say that Alethea-Belle took after her father? She must hev consid'able snap an' nerve, fer she's put in the last year, sence Abram died, sellin' books in this State."

"A book agent?"

"Yes, sir, a book agent."

If Mrs. Spafford had said road agent, which means highwayman in California, we could not have been more surprised. A successful book agent must have the hide of a rhinoceros, the guile of a serpent, the obstinacy of a mule, and the persuasive notes of a nightingale.

"If Miss Buchanan has been a book agent, she'll do," said Ajax.

She arrived at Paradise on the ramshackle old stage-coach late one Sat.u.r.day afternoon. Ajax and I carried her small hair-trunk into the ranch-house; Mrs. Spafford received her. We retreated to the corrals.

"She'll never, never do," said Ajax.

"Never," said I.

Alethea-Belle Buchanan looked about eighteen; and her face was white as the dust that lay thick upon her grey linen cloak. Under the cloak we had caught a glimpse of a thin, slab-chested figure. She wore thread gloves, and said "I thank you" in a prim, New England accent.

"Depend upon it, she's had pie for breakfast ever since she was born,"

said Ajax, "and it's not agreed with her. She'll keep a foothill school in order just about two minutes--and no longer!"

At supper, however, she surprised us. She was very plain-featured, but the men--the rough teamsters, for instance--could not keep their eyes off her. She was the most amazing mixture of boldness and timidity I had ever met. We were about to plump ourselves down at table, for instance, when Miss Buchanan, folding her hands and raising her eyes, said grace; but to our first questions she replied, blushing, in timid monosyllables.

After supper, Mrs. Spafford and she washed up. Later, they brought their sewing into the sitting-room. While we were trying to thaw the little schoolmarm's shyness, a mouse ran across the floor. In an instant Miss Buchanan was on her chair. The mouse ran round the room and vanished; the girl who had been sent to Paradise to keep in order the turbulent children of the foothills stepped down from her chair.

"I'm scared to death of mice," she confessed. My brother Ajax scowled.

"Fancy sending that whey-faced little coward--here!" he whispered to me.

"Have you taught school before?" I asked.

"Oh yes, indeed," she answered; "and I know something of your foothill folks. I've been a book agent. Oh, indeed? You know that. Well, I did first-rate, but that was the book, which sold itself--a beautiful book. Maybe you know it--_The Milk of Human Kindness_? When we're better acquainted, I'd like to read you," she looked hard at Ajax, "some o' my favourite pa.s.sages."

"Thanks," said Ajax stiffly.

Next day was Sunday. At breakfast the schoolmarm asked Ajax if there was likely to be a prayer-meeting.

"A prayer-meeting, Miss Buchanan?"

"It's the Sabbath, you know."

"Yes--er--so it is. Well, you see," he smiled feebly, "the cathedral isn't built yet."

"Why, what's the matter with the schoolhouse? I presume you're all church-members?"

Her grey eyes examined each of us in turn, and each made confession.

One of the teamsters was a Baptist; another a Latter-Day Adventist; the Spaffords were Presbyterians; we, of course, belonged to the Church of England.

"We ought to have a prayer-meeting," said the little schoolmarm.

"Yes; we did oughter," a.s.sented Mrs. Spafford.

"I kin pray first-rate when I git started," said the Baptist teamster.