The Comstock Club Part 18

"Suddenly, in different places in the river bed, jagged, rocky reefs are upraised, dividing the current into four rivers, and these, in a mighty plunge of eighty feet downward, dash on their way. Of course, the waters are churned into foam and roll over the precipice white as are the garments of the morning when no cloud obscures the sun. The loveliest of these falls is called "The Bridal Veil," because it is made of the lace which is woven with a warp of falling waters and a woof of sunlight.

Above this and near the right bank is a long trail of foam, and this is called "The Bridal Train." The other channels are not so fair as the one called "The Bridal Veil," but they are more fierce and wild, and carry in their furious sweep more power.

"One of the reefs which divides the river in mid-channel runs up to a peak, and on this a family of eagles have, through the years, may be through the centuries, made their home and reared their young, on the very verge of the abyss and amid the full echoes of the resounding boom of the falls. Surely the eagle is a fitting symbol of perfect fearlessness and of that exultation which comes with battle clamors.

"But these first falls are but a beginning. The greater splendor succeeds. With swifter flow the startled waters dash on and within a few feet take their second plunge in a solid crescent, over a sheer precipice, two hundred and ten feet to the abyss below. On the brink there is a rolling crest of white, dotted here and there, in sharp contrast, with s.h.i.+ning eddies of green, as might a necklace of emerald s.h.i.+mmer on a throat of snow, and then the leap and fall.

"Here more than foam is made. Here the waters are s.h.i.+vered into fleecy spray, whiter and finer than any miracle that ever fell from India loom, while from the depths below an everlasting vapor rises--the incense of the waters to the water's G.o.d. Finally, through the long, unclouded days, the sun sends down his beams, and to give the startling scene its crowning splendor, wreaths the terror and the glory in a rainbow halo.

On either sullen bank the extremities of its arc are anch.o.r.ed, and there in its many-colored robes of light it stands outstretched above the abyss like wreaths of flowers above a sepulcher. Up through the glory and the terror an everlasting roar ascends, deep-toned as is the voice of Fate, a diapason like that the rolling ocean chants when his eager surges come rus.h.i.+ng in to greet and fiercely woo an irresponsive promontory.

"But to feel all the awe and to mark all the splendor and power that comes of the mighty display, one must climb down the steep descent to the river's brink below, and, pressing up as nearly as possible to the falls, contemplate the tremendous picture. There something of the energy that creates that endless panorama is comprehended; all the deep throbbings of the mighty river's pulses are felt; all the magnificence is seen.

"In the reverberations that come of the war of waters one hears something like G.o.d's voice; something like the splendor of G.o.d is before his eyes; something akin to G.o.d's power is manifesting itself before him, and his soul shrinks within itself, conscious as never before of its own littleness and helplessness in the presence of the workings of Nature's immeasurable forces.

"Not quite so ma.s.sive is the picture as is Niagara, but it has more lights and shades and loveliness, as though a hand more divinely skilled had mixed the tints, and with more delicate art had transfixed them upon that picture suspended there in its rugged and sombre frame.

"As one watches it is not difficult to fancy that away back in the immemorial and unrecorded past, the Angel of Love bewailed the fact that mortals were to be given existence in a spot so forbidding, a spot that apparently was never to be warmed with G.o.d's smile, which was never to make a sign through which G.o.d's mercy was to be discerned; that then Omnipotence was touched, that with His hand He smote the hills and started the great river in its flow; that with His finger He traced out the channel across the corpse of that other river that had been fire, mingled the sunbeams with the raging waters and made it possible in that fire-blasted frame of scoria to swing a picture which should be, first to the red man and later to the pale races, a certain sign of the existence, the power and the unapproachable splendor of the Great First Cause.

"And as the red man through the centuries watched the spectacle, comprehending nothing except that an infinite voice was smiting his ears, and insufferable glories were blazing before his eyes; so through the centuries to come the pale races will stand upon the shuddering sh.o.r.e and watch, experiencing a mighty impulse to put off the sandals from their feet, under an overmastering consciousness that the spot on which they are standing is holy ground.

"There is nothing elsewhere like it; nothing half so weird, so wild, so beautiful, so clothed in majesty, so draped with terror; nothing else that awakens impressions at once so startling, so winsome, so profound.

While journeying through the desert to come suddenly upon it, the spectacle gives one something of the emotions that would be experienced to behold a resurrection from the dead. In the midst of what seems like a dead world, suddenly there springs into irrepressible life something so marvelous, so grand, so caparisoned with loveliness and irresistible might, that the head is bowed, the strained heart throbs tumultuously and the awed soul sinks to its knees."

The whistles had sounded while Strong was speaking, and as he finished the good nights were spoken and the lights put out.

CHAPTER XII.

With the lighting of the pipes one evening, the conversation of the Club turned upon what const.i.tuted courage and a high sense of honor; whether they were native or acquired gifts. A good deal of talk ensued, until at last Wright's opinion was asked:

"You are all right," said he, "and all wrong. Some men are born insensible to fear, and some have a high sense of honor through instinct. But this, I take it, is not the rule and comes, I think, mostly as an hereditary gift, through long generations of proud ancestors. In my judgment, no gift to mortals is as n.o.ble as a lofty, honest pride. I do not mean that spurious article which we see so much of, but the pride which will not permit a man or woman to have an unworthy thought, because of the sense of degradation which it brings to the breast that entertains it. This, I believe, is more common in women than in men, and I suppose that it was this divine trait, manifesting itself in a brutal age, which gave birth to the chivalry of the Middle Ages.

"I have known a few men who, I believe, were born without the instinct of fear. Charley Fairfax was one of these. He was a dead shot with a pistol. He had some words with a man one day on the street in Sacramento, and the man being very threatening, Fairfax drew and c.o.c.ked his Derringer. At the same moment the man drove the blade of a sword cane through one of the lungs of Fairfax, making a wound which eventually proved fatal. Fairfax raised his Derringer and took a quick aim at the heart of the murderer, but suddenly dropped the weapon and said: 'You have killed me, but you have a wife and children; for their sakes I give you your life,' and sank fainting and, as he thought, dying, into the arms of a friend who caught him as he was falling.

"There are other men as generous as Fairfax was, but to do what he did, when smarting under a fatal wound, requires the coolness and the nerve of absolute self-possession.

"Not one man in a million under such circ.u.mstances could command himself enough to think to be generous. Many a man has, for his courage, had a statue raised to his memory who never did and never could have given any such proof of a manhood absolutely self-contained as did Fairfax on that occasion.

"But, as a rule, we are all mere creatures of education. A friend of mine came 'round the Horn in a clipper s.h.i.+p. He told me that when off the cape they encountered a gale which drove the s.h.i.+p far to the southward; that the weather was so dreadfully cold that the s.h.i.+p's rigging was sheeted with ice from sleet and frozen spray.

"One evening the gale slackened a little and some sails were bent on, but toward the turn of the night the wind came on again and the sails had to be taken in. Said my friend: 'The men went up those swaying masts and out upon those icy yards apparently without a thought of danger, while I stood upon the deck fairly trembling with terror merely watching them.' After awhile the storm was weathered, the cape was rounded and the s.h.i.+p put into Valparaiso for fresh supplies.

"The sailors were given a holiday. They went ash.o.r.e and hired saddle horses to visit some resort a few miles out of town. They mounted and started away, but within three minutes half of them returned leading their horses, and one spoke for all when he said: 'The brute is crank; I am afraid he will broach to and capsize.'

"The men who rode the icy spars off Cape Horn on that inky midnight were afraid to ride those gentle mustangs.

"There are, I suppose, in this city to-night one hundred men who, with knife or pistol, would fight anybody and not think much about it. But what would they do were they placed where I saw Corrigan unconcernedly working to-day?

"He was sitting on a narrow plank which had been laid across a shaft at the eight hundred-foot level, repairing a pump column. He was eight hundred feet from the surface, and there was only that plank between him and the bottom of that shaft nine hundred feet below. Put the ordinary ruffian who cuts and shoots on that plank and he would faint and fall off through sheer fright."

"I guess you are right," interposed Carlin. "There is the Mexican who lives across the street from us. If I were to take a revolver and go over there in the morning and attack him, the chances are I would scare him to death; were I to try the same experiment with a bowie knife the chances are more than even that he would give me more of a game than I would want, and simply because he is accustomed to a knife and not to a pistol.

"So the mountain trapper will attack a grizzly bear with perfect coolness, or cross the swiftest stream in a canoe without any fear, but bring the same man for the first time here to the mine and ask him to get on a cage with you and go down a shaft, and he will grow pale and tremble like a girl."

"An Indian," suggested the Professor, "at the side of a white man will go into a desperate battle and never flinch; so long as the white man lives he will fight even unto death. But let a white man engage in a hand to hand fight with two or three Indians, and if he has the nerve to hold him up to the fight for two or three minutes he will conquer, because an hereditary fear overcomes the savage that the pale face will conquer in the end. That is really the cowardice which Falstaff a.s.sumed to feel, the cowardice of instinct in the presence of the true prince, and is the mark which the Indian mothers have impressed upon their babes for ten generations.

"The rule is that we follow our trades!"

"Then some men are brave at one time and cowardly at another," said the Colonel. "Men who will fight without shrinking, by day, are often completely demoralized by a night attack. With such men the trouble is, they cannot see to estimate their danger, and their imaginations multiply and magnify it a hundred fold. I know a man in this city who has been in a hundred fights, many of them most desperate encounters. He told me once that he believed it would frighten him to death to be awakened at night by a burglar in his room.

"This is the fear, too, which paralyzes men in the presence of an earthquake. The sky may be clear and the air still, but the thought that in a moment chaos may come is too much for the ordinary nerves of mortals."

"The bravest act I ever witnessed was on C street in this city,"

responded Strong. "It was a little Hebrew dunning a desperado for the balance due on a pair of pantaloons. The amount was six dollars and fifty cents. I would not have asked the fighter for the money for six times the sum, but the little chap not only asked for it, but when the fighter tried to evade him, he seized him by the arm with one hand and putting the forefinger of his other hand alongside his own nose, in the most insulting tone possible said: 'You does not get avay. Der man vot does not bay for his glose is, vots yer call him? one d----d loafer. I vants my monish.'

"The fighter could no more escape from that eye than a chicken hawk can from the spell of the eye of the black snake, and so he settled.

"That was the courage which it required the hards.h.i.+ps and persecutions of one hundred generations of suffering men to acquire, and I tell you there was something thrilling in the way it was manifested."

"So, too, men's ideas of honor are often warped strangely by education,"

Miller said. "Do you remember there was a Frenchman hanged in this city a few years ago? On the scaffold, with a grandiloquent air, just before the cap was drawn over his face, he said: 'Zey can hang me, but zey cannot hang Frawnce.' He had from childhood entertained the belief that there was but one entirely invincible nation on this earth, and that was France; and the thought that to the last France must be honored possessed him.

"That man had murdered a poor woman of the town for her money."

"I should say there were some queer ideas of honor in this country,"

chipped in the Colonel. "I believe the rule among some or all sporting men is, that it is entirely legitimate to practice any advantage on an opponent in a game, so long as the same idea controls the opponent.

Still those men have most tenacious ideas of honor. Indeed they have a code of their own. If one borrows money of another he pays it if he has to rob someone to do it. If one stakes another--that is gives him money to play--and a winning is made, the profits are scrupulously divided. If one loses more at night than he has money to pay, he must have it early next morning or go into disgrace.

"A friend of mine who lived on Treasure Hill during that first fearful winter, told me that during that season a faro game was running, and the owners of the bank had won some thirty-five hundred dollars. The dealer's habit was to lock up his place in the forenoon and not return until evening. The interval was his only time for sleep, as the game frequently ran all night.

"Three or four 'sports' who lived together in a house, had lost heavily at this game. One morning, one of them said that if he could only get that dealer's cards for half an hour he believed he could 'fix' them so that the luck of the boys would change.

"They had for a cook and servant a young man who had confessed that he left the East without any extensive or extended preparations, and that he did it to avoid paying a penalty for picking a lock and robbing a till.

"He was called up, it was explained to him what was wanted and for what reason, and asked if it was not possible for him to procure those cards.

"The youth took kindly to the proposition, went away, and in a few minutes returned--not with the cards--but with the dealer's sack of coin, saying as he laid down the sack: 'As I picked the lock of the drawer I found the sack and the cards lying side by side. I thought it would be easier to take the coin than to fool with the cards, and here it is.'

"Instantly there was a commotion, and a perfect storm of imprecations was poured out upon the thief. On every side were shouts of: 'Take back that money! you miserable New York thief! What do you take us for? Take back that sack or we will sell you for headcheese before night!'

"The youth carried back the coin and brought the cards. They were found to be 'fixed'; they were 'fixed' over and returned, and that night 'on the dead square,' the bank was broken. The boys had the sack for the second time, but this time the transaction, according to their code, was entirely legitimate.

"By the operation the professional thief obtained new ideas of the nice distinctions which are made in the gamblers' code of honor."

"I once in Idaho knew a most conscientious judge," said Miller. "In his court a suit involving the t.i.tle of some mining ground was pending between two companies. In another part of the district the Judge had some claims which were looked upon as mere 'wild cat.'