Bunch Grass Part 6

"Yas, sir. Won't you p-p-please t-take it?"

"Did yer folks tell ye to give me this money?"

"Why, no. I'd oughter hev asked 'em, I s'pose, but I never thought o'

that. Honest Injun, Mr. Spooner, I didn't--and--and it's my own money," she concluded, half defiantly, "an' Popsy said as how I could do what I liked with it. Please take it."

"No," said Pap.

He stared at us, clicking his teeth and frowning. Then he said, curtly, "Wal, I'll take the dime, Sissy--I kin make a dime go farther than a dollar, can't I, boys?"

"You bet," said Ajax.

"And now, Sissy, you run along home," said Pap.

"We'll take her," I said, for Sissy was a sworn friend of ours. At once she put her left hand into mine. We bade the old man good-night, and took leave of him. On the threshold Ajax turned and asked a question----

"Won't you reconsider your decision, Mr. Spooner?"

"No," he snapped, "I won't. I dunno as all this ain't a reg'lar plant.

Looks like it. And, as I say, the scallywags in these yere foothills need thinnin'--they need thinnin'."

Ajax said something in a low voice which Sissy and I could not hear.

Later I asked him what it was, because Pap had clicked his teeth.

"I told him," said my brother, "that he needn't think his call was coming, because I was quite certain that they did not want him either in Heaven--or in the other place."

"Oh," said I, "I thought that you were going to use a little tact with Pap Spooner."

Next morning, early, we had a meeting in the store. A young doctor, a capital fellow, had come out from San Lorenzo with the intention of camping with us till the disease was wiped out; but he shook his head very solemnly when someone suggested that the first case, carefully isolated, might prove the last.

There were two fresh cases that night!

I shall not attempt to describe the horrors that filled the next three weeks. But, not for the first time, I was struck by the heroism and self-sacrifice of these rude foothill folk, whose great qualities s.h.i.+ne brightest in the dark hours of adversity. My brother and I had pa.s.sed through the big boom, when our part of California had become of a sudden a Tom Tiddler's ground, where the youngest and simplest could pick up gold and silver. We had seen our county drunk with prosperity --drunk and disorderly. And we had seen also these same revellers chastened by low prices, dry seasons, and commercial stagnation. But we had yet to witness the crowning sobering effect of a raging pestilence.

The little schoolmarm, Alethea-Belle Buchanan, organised the women into a staff of nurses. Mrs. Dumble enrolled herself amongst the band.

Did she take comfort in the thought that she was wiping out John Jacob Dumble's innumerable rogueries? Let us hope so.

Within a week yellow bunting waved from half a score of cottages in and about Paradise. And then, one heavenly morning, as we were riding into the village, we saw the hideous warning fluttering outside George Leadham's door.

Sissy was down with it!

Poor George, his brown, weather-beaten face seamed with misery, met us at the garden gate.

"She's awful bad," he muttered, "an' the doc. says she'll be worse afore she's better."

Next door a man was digging two graves in his garden.

Meantime, Pap Spooner had disappeared. We heard that he had gone to a mountain ranch of his about fifteen miles away. n.o.body missed him; n.o.body cared whether he went or stayed. In the village store it was conceded that Pap's room, rain or s.h.i.+ne, was better than his company.

His name was never mentioned till it began to fall from Sissy Leadham's delirious lips.

The schoolmarm first told me that the child was asking for Andrew Spooner, moaning, wailing, shrieking for "pore old Pap." George Leadham was distracted.

"What in thunder she wants that ole cuss fer I can't find out. She's drivin' me plum crazy." I explained.

"That's it," said George. "It's bin Pap an' her money night an' day fer forty-eight hours. She wanted ter give him--him, by Jing!--her money."

The doctor heard the story half an hour later. He had not the honour of Andrew Spooner's acquaintance, and he had reason to believe that all men in the foothills were devoid of fear.

"Fetch Pap," said he, in the same tone as he might have said, "Fetch milk and water!" We made no remark.

"I think," said the doctor, gravely, "that if this man comes at once the child may pull through."

"By Heaven! he shall come," said George Leadham to me. The doctor had hurried away.

"He won't come," said Ajax.

"If he don't," said the father, fiercely, "the turkey-buzzards'll hev a meal, for I'll shoot him in his tracks."

Ajax looked at me reflectively.

"George," said he, "shooting Pap wouldn't help little Sissy, would it?

You and I can't handle this job. My brother will go. But--but, my poor old George, don't make ropes out of sand."

So I went.

When I started, the south-east wind, the rain-wind, had begun to blow, and it sounds incredible, but I was not aware of it. The pestilence had paralysed one's normal faculties. But riding due south-east I became, sooner or later, sensible of the change in the atmosphere. And then I remembered a chance remark of the doctor's. "We shall have this diphtheria with us till the rain washes it away," and one of the squatters had replied, bitterly, "Paradise'll be a cemetery an'

nothin' else before the rain comes."

Pa.s.sing through some pine woods I heard the soughing of the tree-tops.

They were entreating the rain to come--to come quickly. How well I knew that soft, sibilant invocation! Higher up the few tufts of bunch gra.s.s that remained rustled in antic.i.p.ation. On the top of the mountain, in ordinary years a sure sign of a coming storm, floated a veil of opaline sea mist ...

I found Pap and a greaser skinning a dead heifer. Pap nodded sulkily, thinking of his hay and his beans and bacon.

"What's up?" he growled.

"It's going to rain," said I.

"Ye ain't ridden from Paradise to tell me that. An' rain's not a- comin', either. 'Twould be a miracle if it did. How's folks? I heard as things couldn't be worse."

"They are bad," said I. "Eubank's sister-in-law and two children are dead. Judge Spragg has lost four. In all about sixteen children have gone and five adults. That's Paradise alone; in the foothills----"

"What brings you here?"

It seemed hopeless to soften this hardened old man. I had thought of a dozen phrases wherewith to soap the ways, so to speak, down which might be launched my pet.i.tion. I forgot them all, confronted by those malicious, sneering eyes, by the derisive, snarling grin.

"Little Sissy Leadham is dying."