Harry Castlemon - "Frank on a Gun Boat"

Daniel Defoe - "The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard"

Various - "The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487"

Alexandre Dumas - "Le vicomte de Bragelonne, Tome IV."

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Gordon Keith written by Thomas Nelson Page

T >> Thomas Nelson Page >> Gordon Keith




At this there was a round of approval, as near general applause as that
stolid folk ever indulged in.

Keith spent the next day in taking leave of his friends.

His last visit that evening was to Dr. Balsam. He had not been to the
village often in the evening since Mrs. Yorke and her daughter had left
the place. Now, as he passed up the walk, the summer moonlight was
falling full on the white front of the little hotel. The slanting
moonlight fell on the corner of the verandah where he had talked so
often to Alice Yorke as she lay reclining on her lounge, and where he
had had that last conversation with Mrs. Yorke, and Keith saw a young
man leaning over some one enveloped in white, half reclining in an
arm-chair. He wondered if the same talk were going on that had gone on
there before that evening when Mrs. Yorke had made him look nakedly
at Life.

When Keith stated his errand, the Doctor looked almost as grave as he
could have done had one of his cherished patients refused to respond to
his most careful treatment.

"One thing I want to say to you," he said presently "You have been
eating your heart out of late about something, and it is telling on you.
Give it up. Give that girl up. You will have to sooner or later. They
will prove too strong for you. Even if you do not, she will not suit
you; you will not get the woman you are after. She is an attractive
young girl, but she will not remain so. A few years in fashionable
society will change her. It is the most corroding life on earth!"
exclaimed the Doctor, bitterly. "Convention usurps the place of every
principle, and becomes the only god. She must change. All is Vanity!"
repeated the Doctor, almost in a revery, his eyes resting on
Keith's face.

"Well," he said, with a sigh, "if you ever get knocked down and hurt
badly, come back up here, and I will patch you up if I am living; and if
not, come back anyhow. The place will heal you provided you don't take
drugs. God bless you! Good-by." He walked with Keith to the outer edge
of his little porch and shook hands with him again, and again said,
"Good-by: God bless you!" When Keith turned at the foot of the hill and
looked back, he was just reentering his door, his spare, tall frame
clearly outlined against the light within. Keith somehow felt as if he
were turning his back on a landmark.

Just as Keith approached the gate on his return home, a figure rose up
from a fence-corner and stood before him in the starlight.

"Good even'n', Mr. Keith." The voice was Dave Dennison's. Keith greeted
him wonderingly. What on earth could have brought the boy out at that
time of the night? "Would you mind jest comin' down this a-way a
little piece?"

Keith walked back a short distance. Dave was always mysterious when he
had a communication to make. It was partly a sort of shyness and partly
a survival of frontier craft.

Dave soon resolved Keith's doubt. "I hear you're a-goin' away and ain't
comin' back no more?"

"How did you hear that--I mean, that I am not coming back again?" asked
Keith.

"Well, you're a-sayin' good-by to everybody, same's if they were all
a-goin' to die. Folks don't do that if they're a-comin' back." He leaned
forward, and in the semi-darkness Keith was aware that he was
scrutinizing his face.

"No, I do not expect to come back--to teach school again; but I hope to
return some day to see my friends."

The boy straightened up.

"Well, I wants to go with you."

"You! Go with me?" Keith exclaimed. Then, for fear the boy might be
wounded, he said: "Why, Dave, I don't even know where I am going. I have
not the least idea in the world what I am going to do. I only know I am
going away, and I am going to succeed."

"That's right. That's all right," agreed the boy. "You're a-goin'
somewheres, and I want to go with you. You don't know where you're
a-goin', but you're a-goin'. You know all them outlandish countries like
you've been a-tellin' us about, and I don't know anything, but I want to
know, and I'm a-goin' with you. Leastways, I'm a-goin', and I'm a-goin'
with you if you'll let me."

Keith's reply was anything but reassuring. He gave good reasons against
Dave's carrying out his plan; but his tone was kind, and the youngster
took it for encouragement.

"I ain't much account, I know," he pleaded. "I ain't any account in the
_worl'_," he corrected himself, so that there could be no mistake about
the matter. "They say at home I used to be some account--some little
account--before I took to books--before I _sorter_ took to books," he
corrected again shamefacedly; "but since then I ain't been no manner of
account. But I think--I kinder think--I could be some account if I
knowed a little and could go somewheres to be account."

Keith was listening earnestly, and the boy went on:

"When you told us that word about that man Hannibal tellin' his soldiers
how everything lay t'other side the mountains, I begin to see what you
meant. I thought before that I knowed a lot; then I found out how durned
little I did know, and since then I have tried to learn, and I mean to
learn; and that's the reason I want to go with you. You know and I
don't, and you're the only one as ever made me want to know."

Keith was conscious of a flush of warm blood about his heart. It was the
first-fruit of his work.

The boy broke in on his pleasant revery.

"You'll let me go?" he asked. "Cause I'm a-goin' certain sure. I ain't
a-goin' to stay here in this country no longer. See here." He pulled out
an old bag and poked it into Keith's hand. "I've got sixteen dollars and
twenty-three cents there. I made it, and while the other boys were
spendin' theirn, I saved mine. You can pour it out and count it."

Keith said he would go and see his father about it the next day.

This did not appear to satisfy Dave.

"I'm a-goin' whether he says so or not," he burst forth. "I want to see
the worl'. Don't nobody keer nothin' about me, an' I want to git out."

"Oh, yes! Why, I care about you," said Keith.

To his surprise, the boy began to whimper.

"Thankee. I'm obliged to you. I--want to go away--where Phrony ner
nobody--ner anybody won't never see me no more--any more."

The truth dawned on Keith. Little Dave, too, had his troubles, his
sorrows, his unrequited affections. Keith warmed to the boy.

"Phrony is a lot older than you," he said consolingly.

"No, she ain't; we are just of an age; and if she was I wouldn't keer.
I'm goin' away."

Keith had to interpose his refusal to take him in such a case. He said,
however, that if he could obtain his father's consent, as soon as he got
settled he would send for him. On the basis of this compromise the boy
went home.



CHAPTER XI

GUMBOLT

With the savings of his two years of school-teaching Keith found that he
had enough, by practising rigid economy, to give himself another year at
college, and he practised rigid economy.

He worked under the spur of ambition to show Alice Yorke and those who
surrounded her that he was not a mere country clod.

With his face set steadily in the direction where stood the luminous
form of the young girl he had met and come to worship amid the
blossoming woods, he studied to such good purpose that at the end of the
session he had packed two years' work into one.

Keith had no very definite ideas, when he started out at the end of his
college year, as to what he should do. He only knew that he had strong
pinions, and that the world was before him. He wished to bury himself
from observation until he should secure the success with which he would
burst forth on an astonished world, overwhelm Mrs. Yorke, and capture
Alice. His first intention had been to go to the far West; but on
consideration he abandoned the idea.

Rumors were already abroad that in the great Appalachian mountain-range
opportunity might be as golden as in that greater range on the other
side of the continent.

Keith had a sentiment that he would rather succeed in the South than
elsewhere.

"Only get rifles out and railroads in, and capital will come pouring
after them," Rhodes had said. "Old Wickersham knows his business."

That was a good while ago, and at last the awakening had begun. Now that
carpet-bagging was at an end, and affairs were once more settled in that
section, the wealth of the country was again being talked of in
the press.

The chief centre of the new life was a day's drive farther in the
mountains than Eden, the little hamlet which Keith had visited once with
Dr. Balsam when he attended an old stage-driver, Gilsey by name, and cut
a bullet out of what he called his "off-leg." This was the veiled
Golconda. To the original name of Humboldt the picturesque and humorous
mountaineer had given the name of "Gumbolt."

This was where old Adam Rawson, stirred by the young engineer's
prophecy, had taken time by the forelock and had bought up the mineral
rights, and "gotten ahead" of Wickersham & Company.

Times and views change even in the Ridge region, and now, after years of
delay, Wickersham & Company's railroad was about to be built. It had
already reached Eden.

Keith, after a few days with his father, stopped at Ridgely to see his
old friends. The Doctor looked him over with some disapproval.

"As gaunt as a greyhound," he muttered. "My patient not married yet, I
suppose? Well, she will be. You'd better tear her out of your memory
before she gets too firmly lodged there."

Keith boldly said he would take the chances.

When old Rawson saw him he, too, remarked on his thinness; but more
encouragingly.

"Well, 'a lean dog for a long chase,'" he said.

"How are cattle?" inquired Keith.

The old fellow turned his eyes on him with a keen look.

"Cattle's tolerable. I been buyin' a considerable number up toward
Gumbolt, where you're goin'. I may get you to look after 'em some day,"
he chuckled.

Gordon wrote to Dave Dennison that he was going to Gumbolt and would
look out for him. A little later he learned that the boy had already
gone there.

The means of reaching Gumbolt from Eden, the terminus of the railroad
which Wickersham & Company were building, was still the stage, a
survivor of the old-time mountain coach, which had outlasted all the
manifold chances and changes of fortune.

Happily for Keith, he had been obliged, though it was raining, to take
the outside seat by the driver, old Tim Gilsey, to whom he recalled
himself, and by his coolness at "Hellstreak Hill," where the road
climbed over the shoulder of the mountain along a sheer cliff, and
suddenly dropped to the river below, a point where old Gilsey was wont
to display his skill as a driver and try the nerves of passengers, he
made the old man his friend for life.

When the stage began to ascend the next hill, the old driver actually
unbent so far as to give an account of a "hold-up" that had occurred at
that point not long before, "all along of the durned railroad them
Yankees was bringin' into the country," to which he laid most of the
evils of the time. "For when you run a stage you know who you got with
you," declared Mr. Gilsey; "but when you run a railroad you dunno
who you got."

"Well, tell me about the time you were held up."

"Didn't nobody hold me up," sniffed Mr. Gilsey. "If I had been goin' to
stop I wouldn't 'a' started. It was a dom fool they put up here when I
was down with rheumatiz. Since then they let me pick my substitute.

"Well," he said, as a few lights twinkled below them, "there she is.
Some pretty tough characters there, too. But you ain't goin' to have no
trouble with 'em. All you got to do is to put the curb on 'em onct."

As Keith looked about him in Gumbolt, the morning after his arrival, he
found that his new home was only a rude mining-camp, raw and rugged; a
few rows of frame houses, beginning to be supplanted by hasty brick
structures, stretched up the hills on the sides of unpaved roads, dusty
in dry weather and bottomless in wet. Yet it was, for its size, already
one of the most cosmopolitan places in the country. Of course, the
population was mainly American, and they were beginning to pour
in--sharp-eyed men from the towns in black coats, and long-legged,
quiet-looking and quiet-voiced mountaineers in rusty clothes, who hulked
along in single file, silent and almost fugitive in the glare of
daylight. Quiet they were and well-nigh stealthy, with something of the
movement of other denizens of the forest, unless they were crossed and
aroused, and then, like those other denizens, they were fierce almost
beyond belief. A small cavil might make a great quarrel, and pistols
would flash as quick as light.

The first visit that Keith received was from J. Quincy Plume, the editor
of the _Gumbolt Whistle_. He had the honor of knowing his distinguished
father, he said, and had once had the pleasure of being at his old home.
He had seen Keith's name on the book, and had simply called to offer him
any services he or his paper could render him. "There are so few
gentlemen in this ---- hole," he explained, "that I feel that we should
all stand together." Keith, knowing J. Quincy's history,
inwardly smiled.

Mr. Plume had aged since he was the speaker of the carpet-bag
legislature; his black hair had begun to be sprinkled with gray, and had
receded yet farther back on his high forehead, his hazel eyes were a
little bleared; and his full lips were less resolute than of old. He had
evidently seen bad times since he was the facile agent of the Wickersham
interests. He wore a black suit and a gay necktie which had once been
gayer, a shabby silk hat, and patent-leather shoes somewhat broken.

His addiction to cards and drink had contributed to Mr. Plume's
overthrow, and after a disappearance from public view for some time he
had turned up just as Gumbolt began to be talked of, with a small sheet
somewhat larger than a pocket-handkerchief, which, in prophetic tribute
to Gumbolt's future manufactures, he christened the _Gumbolt Whistle_.

Mr. Plume offered to introduce Keith to "the prettiest woman in
Gumbolt," and, incidentally, to "the best cocktail" also. "Terpsichore
is a nymph who practises the Terpsichorean art; indeed, I may say,
presides over a number of the arts, for she has the best faro-bank in
town, and the only bar where a gentleman can get a drink that will not
poison a refined stomach. She is, I may say, the leader of
Gumbolt society."

Keith shook his head; he had come to work, he declared.

"Oh, you need not decline; you will have to know Terpy. I am virtue
itself; in fact, I am Joseph--nowadays. You know, I belong to the
cloth?" Keith's expression indicated that he had heard this fact. "But
even I have yielded to her charms--intellectual, I mean, of course."

Mr. Plume withdrew after having suggested to Keith to make him a small
temporary loan, or, if more convenient, to lend him the use of his name
on a little piece of bank-paper "to tide over an accidental and
unexpected emergency," assuring Keith that he would certainly take it up
within sixty days.

Unfortunately for Keith, Plume's cordiality had made so much impression
on him that he was compliant enough to lend him the use of his name, and
as neither at the expiration of sixty days, nor at any other time, did
Mr. Plume ever find it convenient to take up his note, Keith found
himself later under the necessity of paying it himself. This
circumstance, it is due to Mr. Plume to say, he always deplored, and
doubtless with sincerity.

* * * * *

Women were at a premium in Gumbolt, and Mr. Plume was not the only
person who hymned the praises of "Terpsichoar," as she was mainly
called. Keith could not help wondering what sort of a creature she was
who kept a dance-house and a faro-bank, and yet was spoken of with
unstinted admiration and something very like respect by the crowd that
gathered in the "big room of the Windsor." She must be handsome, and
possibly was a good dancer, but she was no doubt a wild, coarse
creature, with painted cheeks and dyed hair. The mental picture he
formed was not one to interfere with the picture he carried in
his heart.

Next day, as he was making a purchase in a shop, a neat and trim-looking
young woman, with a fresh complexion and a mouth full of white teeth,
walked in, and in a pleasant voice said, "Good mornin', all." Keith did
not associate her at all with Terpsichore, but he was surprised that old
Tim Gilsey should not have known of her presence in town. He was still
more surprised when, after having taken a long and perfectly unabashed
look at him, with no more diffidence in it than if he had been a lump of
ore she was inspecting, she said:

"You're the fellow that come to town night before last? Uncle Tim was
tellin' me about you."

"Yes; I got here night before last. Who is Uncle Tim?"

"Uncle Tim Gilsey."

She walked up and extended her hand to him with the most perfect
friendliness, adding, with a laugh as natural as a child's:

"We'll have to be friends; Uncle Tim says you're a white man, and that's
more than some he brings over the road these days are."

"Yes, I hope so. You are Mr. Gilsey's nieces I am glad to meet you"

The young woman burst out laughing.

"Lor', _no_. I ain't anybody's niece; but he's my uncle--I've adopted
_him_. I'm Terpy--Terpsichore, run Terpsichore's Hall," she said by way
of explanation, as if she thought he might not understand her allusion.

Keith's breath was almost taken away. Why, she was not at all like the
picture he had formed of her. She was a neat, quiet-looking young woman,
with a fine figure, slim and straight and supple, a melodious voice, and
laughing gray eyes.

"You must come and see me. We're to have a blow-out to-night. Come
around. I'll introduce you to the boys. I've got the finest ball-room in
town--just finished--and three fiddles. We christen it to-night. Goin'
to be the biggest thing ever was in Gumbolt."

Keith awoke from his daze.

"Thank you, but I am afraid I'll have to ask you to excuse me," he said.

"Why?" she inquired simply.

"Because I can't come. I am not much of a dancer."

She looked at him first with surprise and then with amusement.

"Are you a Methodist preacher?"

"No."

"Salvation?"

"No."

"I thought, maybe, you were like Tib Drummond, the Methodist, what's
always a-preachin' ag'in' me." She turned to the storekeeper. "What do
you think he says? He says he won't come and see me, and he ain't a
preacher nor Salvation Army neither. But he will, won't he?"

"You bet," said the man, peeping up with a grin from behind a barrel.
"If he don't, he'll be about the only one in town who don't."

"No," said Keith, pleasantly, but firmly. "I can't go."

"Oh, yes, you will," she laughed. "I'll expect you. By-by"; and she
walked out of the store with a jaunty air, humming a song about the
"iligint, bauld McIntyres."

The "blow-out" came off, and was honored with a column in the next issue
of the Whistle--a column of reeking eulogy. But Keith did not attend,
though he heard the wheezing of fiddles and the shouting and stamping of
Terpsichore's guests deep into the night.

Keith was too much engrossed for the next few days in looking about him
for work and getting himself as comfortably settled as possible to think
of anything else.

If, however, he forgot the "only decent-looking woman in Gumbolt," she
did not forget him. The invitation of a sovereign is equivalent to a
command the world over; and Terpsichore was as much the queen regnant of
Gumbolt as Her Majesty, Victoria, was Queen of England, or of any other
country in her wide realm. She was more; she was absolute. She could
have had any one of a half-dozen men cut the throat of any other man in
Gumbolt at her bidding.

The mistress of the "Dancing Academy" had not forgotten her boast. The
institution over which she presided was popular enough almost to justify
her wager. There were few men of Keith's age in Gumbolt who did not
attend its sessions and pay their tribute over the green tables that
stretched along the big, low room.

In fact, Miss Terpsichore was not of that class that forget either
friends or foes; whatever she was she was frankly and outspokenly. Mr.
Plume informed Keith that she was "down on him."

"She's got it in for you," he said. "Says she's goin' to drive you out
of Gumbolt."

"Well, she will not," said Keith, with a flash in his eye.

"She is a good friend and a good foe," said the editor. "Better go and
offer a pinch of incense to Diana. She is worth cultivating. You ought
to see her dance."

Keith, however, had made his decision. A girl with eyes like dewy
violets was his Diana, and to her his incense was offered.

A day or two later Keith was passing down the main street, when he saw
the young woman crossing over at the corner ahead of him, stepping from
one stone to another quite daintily. She was holding up her skirt, and
showed a very neat pair of feet in perfectly fitting boots. At the
crossing she stopped. As Keith passed her, he glanced at her, and caught
her eye fastened on him. She did not look away at all, and Keith
inclined his head in recognition of their former meeting.

"Good morning," she said.

"Good morning." Keith lifted his hat and was passing on.

"Why haven't you been to see me?" she demanded.

Keith pretended not to hear.

"I thought I invited you to come and see me?"

Still, Keith did not answer, but he paused. His head was averted, and he
was waiting until she ceased speaking to go on.

Suddenly, to his surprise, she bounded in front of him and squared her
straight figure right before him.

"Did you hear what I said to you?" she demanded tempestuously.

"Yes."

"Then why don't you answer me?" Her gaze was fastened on his face. Her
cheeks were flushed, her voice was imperative, and her eyes flashed.

"Because I didn't wish to do so," said Keith, calmly.

Suddenly she flamed out and poured at him a torrent of vigorous oaths.
He was so taken by surprise that he forgot to do anything but wonder,
and his calmness evidently daunted her.

"Don't you know that when a lady invites you to come to see her, you
have to do it?"

"I have heard that," said Keith, beginning to look amused.

"You have? Do you mean to say Tam not a lady?"

"Well, from your conversation, I might suppose you were a man," said
Keith, half laughing.

"I will show you that I am man enough for you. Don't you know I am the
boss of this town, and that when I tell you to do a thing you have
to obey me?"

"No; I do not know that," said Keith. "You may be the boss of this town,
but I don't have to obey you."

"Well, I will show you about it, and ---- quick, too. See if I don't! I
will run you out of this town, my young man."

"Oh, I don't think you will," said Keith, easily.

"Yes, I will, and quick enough, too. You look out for me."

"Good morning," said Keith, raising his hat.

The loudness of her tone and the vehemence of her manner had arrested
several passers-by, who now stood looking on with interest.

"What's the matter, Terpy?" asked one of them. "What are you so peppery
about? Bank busted?"

The young woman explained the matter with more fairness than Keith would
have supposed.

"Oh, he is just a fool. Let him alone," said the man; whilst another
added: "He'll come around, darlin'; don't you bother; and if he don't,
I will."

"---- him! He's got to go. I won't let him now. You know when I say a
thing it's got to be, and I mean to make him know it, too," asserted the
young Amazon. "I'll have him driven out of town, and if there ain't any
one here that's man enough to do it, I'll do it myself." This
declaration she framed with an imprecation sufficiently strong if an
oath could make it so.

That evening Tim Gilsey came in to see Keith. He looked rather grave.

"I am sorry you did not drop in, if it was for no more than to git
supper," he said. "Terpy is a bad one to have against you. She's the
kindest gal in the world; but she's got a temper, and when a gal's got a
temper, she's worse'n a fractious leader."

"I don't want her against me; but I'll be hanged if I will be driven
into going anywhere that I don't want to go," asserted Keith.

"No, I don't say as you should," said the old driver, his eye resting on
Keith with a look that showed that he liked him none the less for his
pluck. "But you've got to look out. This ain't back in the settlements,
and there's a plenty around here as would cut your throat for a wink of
Terpy's eye. They will give you a shake for it, and if you come out of
that safe it will be all right. I'll see one or two of the boys and see
that they don't let 'em double up on you. A horse can't do nothin' long
if he has got a double load on him, no matter what he is."

Tim strolled out, and, though Keith did not know it for some time, he
put in a word for him in one or two places which stood him in good stead
afterwards.

The following day a stranger came up to Keith. He was a thin man between
youth and middle age, with a long face and a deep voice, and light hair
that stuck up on his head. His eyes were deep-set and clear; his mouth
was grave and his chin strong. He wore a rusty black coat and short,
dark trousers.