by Willa Cather
Across the river stretched the level land like the top of an oven. It was a country flat and featureless, without tones or shadows, without accent or emphasis of any kind to break its vast monotony. It was a scene done entirely in high lights, without relief, without a single commanding eminence to rest the eye upon. The flat plains rolled to the unbroken horizon vacant and void, forever reaching in empty yearning toward something they never attained. The tilled fields were even more discouraging to look upon than the unbroken land. Although it was late in the autumn, the corn was not three feet high. The leaves were seared and yellow, and as for tassels, there were none. Nature always dispenses with superfluous appendages; and what use had Solomon valley corn for tassels? Ears were only a tradition there, fabulous fruits like the golden apples of the Hesperides; and many a brawny Hercules had died in his own sweat trying to obtain them. Sometimes, in the dusk of night, when the winds were not quite so hot as usual and only the stars could hear, the dry little corn leaves whispered to each other that once, long ago, real yellow ears grew in the Solomon valley.
Near the river was a solitary frame building, low and wide, with a high sham front, like most stores in Kansas villages. Over the door was painted in faded letters, “Josiah Bywaters, Dry Goods, Groceries and Notions.” In front of the store ran a straight strip of ground, grass grown and weedy, which looked as if it might once have been a road. Here and there, on either side of this deserted way of traffic, were half demolished buildings and excavations where the weeds grew high, which might once have been the sites of houses. For this was once El Dorado, the Queen City of the Plains, the Metropolis of Western Kansas, the coming Commercial Center of the West.
Whatever may have been there once, now there were only those empty, windowless buildings, that one little store, and the lonely old man whose name was painted over the door. Inside the store, on a chair tilted back against the counter, with his pipe in his mouth and a big gray cat on his knee, sat the proprietor. His appearance was not that of the average citizen of western Kansas, and a very little of his conversation told you that he had come from civilization somewhere. He was tall and straight, with an almost military bearing, and an iron jaw. He was thin, but perhaps that was due to his diet. His cat was thin, too, and that was surely owing to its diet, which consisted solely of crackers and water, except when now and then it could catch a gopher; and Solomon valley gophers are so thin that they never tempt the ambition of any discerning cat. If Colonel Bywaters’s manner of living had anything to do with his attenuation, it was the solitude rather than any other hardship that was responsible. He was a sort of “Last Man.” The tide of emigration had gone out and had left him high and dry, stranded on a Kansas bluff. He was living where the rattlesnakes and sunflowers found it difficult to exist.
The Colonel was a man of determination; he had sunk his money in this wilderness and he had determined to wait until he had got it out. His capital had represented the industry of a lifetime. He had made it all down in Virginia, where fortunes are not made in a day. He had often told himself that he had been a fool to quit a country of honest men for a desert like this. But he had come West, worse than that, he had come to western Kansas, even to the Solomon valley, and he must abide the consequences. Even after the whole delusion was dispelled, and the fraud exposed, when the other buildings had been torn down or moved away, when the Eastern brokers had foreclosed their mortgages and held the land empty for miles around, Colonel Bywaters had stubbornly refused to realize that the game was up. Every one had told him that the best thing he could do was to get out of the country; but he refused to listen to advice. Perhaps he had an unreasoning conviction that money could not absolutely vanish, and that, if he stayed there long enough, his must some time come back to him. Perhaps, even had he wished to go, he actually lacked the means wherewith to get away. At any rate, there he remained, becoming almost a part of that vast solitude, trying to live the life of an upright Christian gentleman in this desert, with a heart heavy and homesick for his kind, always living over again in memory the details of that old, peaceful life in the valley of Virginia. He rose at six, as he had always done, ate his meagre breakfast and swept out his store, arranged his faded calicoes and flyspecked fruit cans in the window, and then sat down to wait. Generally he waited until bedtime. In three years he had not sold fifty dollars’ worth. Men were almost unknown beings in that region, and men with money were utterly so. When the town broke up, a few of the inhabitants had tried to farm a little,—tried until they had no grain to sow and no horses to plough and no money to get away with. They were dead, most of them. The only human faces the Colonel ever saw were the starved, bronzed countenances of the poor fellows who sometimes passed in wagons, plodding along with their wives and children and cook stoves and feather beds, trying to get back to “God’s country.” They never bought anything; they only stopped to water their horses and swear a little, and then drove slowly eastward. Once a little girl had cried so bitterly for the red stick candy in the window that her father had taken the last nickel out of his worn, flat pocketbook. But the Colonel was too kind a man to take his money, so he gave the child the money and the candy, too; and he also gave her a little pair of red mittens that the moths had got into, which last she accepted gratefully, though it was August.
The first day of the week brought the exceptions in the monotonous routine of the Colonel’s life. He never rose till nine o’clock on Sunday. Then, in honor of the day, he shaved his chin and brushed out his mustache, and dressed himself in his black suit that had been made for him down in Winchester four years ago. This suit of clothes was an object of great care with the Colonel, and every Sunday night he brushed it out and folded it away in camphor gum. Generally he fished on Sunday. Not that there are any fish in the Solomon; indeed, the mud turtles, having exhausted all the nutriment in the mud, have pretty much died out. But the Colonel was fond of fishing, and fish he would. So in season, every Sunday morning, he would catch a bottle of flies for bait and take his pole and, after locking his store against impossible intruders, he would go gravely down the street. He really went through the weed patch, but to himself and his cat he always spoke of it as the street.
II.
On this particular afternoon, as the Colonel sat watching the autumn sunlight play upon the floor, he was feeling more bitterly discouraged than usual. It was exactly four years ago that day that Major Penelton had brought into his store on Water Street a tall, broad shouldered young man, with the frankest blue eyes and a good-natured smile, whom he introduced as Mr. Apollo Gump of Kansas. After a little general conversation, the young man had asked him if he wished to invest in Western lands. No, the Colonel did not want to put out any money in the West. He had no faith in any of the new states. Very well; Apollo did not wish to persuade him. But some way he saw a good deal of the young man, who was a clever, openhanded sort of a chap, who drank good whiskey and told a good story so that it lost nothing in the telling. So many were the hints he threw out of the fortunes made every day in Western real estate, that in spite of himself the Colonel began to think about it. Soon letters began pouring in upon him, letters from doctors, merchants, bankers, all with a large map on the envelope, representing a town with all the railroads of the West running into it. Above this spidery object was printed the name, El Dorado. These communications all assured him of the beauty of the location, the marvellous fertility of the surrounding country, the commercial and educational advantages of the town. Apollo seemed to take a wonderful liking to him; he often had him to dine with him at the little hotel, and took him down to Washington to hear Patti, assuring him all the time that the theatres of Kansas City were much better than anything in the East, and that one heard much better music there. The end of the matter was that when Apollo went back to Kansas the Colonel sold out his business and went with him. They were accompanied by half a dozen men from Baltimore, Washington and the smaller towns about, whom Apollo had induced t
o invest in the fertile tracts of land about El Dorado and in stock in the Gump banking house.
The Colonel was not a little surprised to find that El Dorado, the metropolis of western Kansas, was a mere cluster of frame houses beside a muddy stream, that there was not a railroad within twenty-five miles, and that the much boasted waterworks consisted of a number of lead pipes running from the big windmill tank on the hill; but Apollo assured him that high buildings were dangerous in that windy country, that the railroads were anxious and eager to come as soon as the town voted bonds, and that the waterworks—pipes, pumps, filters and all, a complete “Holly” system—were ordered and would be put in in the spring. The Colonel did not quite understand how an academy of arts and science could be conducted in the three-room sod shack on the hill; but Aristotle Gump showed him the plan of a stately building with an imposing bell-tower that hung over the desk in his office, assuring him that it would go up in May, and that the workmen from Topeka were already engaged for the job. He was surprised, too, to find so few people in a town of two thousand inhabitants; but he was told that most of the business men had gone East to settle up their affairs, and would be back in the spring with their new goods. Indeed, in Ezekiel Gump’s office, the Colonel saw hundreds of letters, long glowing letters, from these absent citizens, telling of their great business schemes and their unshaken faith in the golden future of El Dorado. There were few houses, indeed, but there were acres and acres of foundations; there were few businesses in operation, but there were hundreds of promises; and Apollo laughingly said that Western towns were built on promises.
But what most puzzled the Colonel was the vast number and importance of the Gumps. The Gumps seemed to be at the head of everything. The eldest brother was Isaiah Gump, the minister, a red-faced, clean shaven man, with a bald pate and dark, wrinkled little hands. Then there were De Witt Gump, the physician and druggist; Chesterfield Gump, the general dry goods merchant; Aristotle Gump, architect and builder, and professor of mathematics in the Gump Academy; Hezekiah Gump, the hardware merchant and president of the El Dorado Board of Trade; Ezekiel Gump, real estate agent, superintendent of waterworks, professor of natural sciences, etc. These were the Gumps. But stay,—were there not also Almira Gump, who taught history and Italian in the academy, and Venus Gump, who conducted a dressmaking and millinery establishment? The Colonel learned from Apollo that the Gump brothers had bought the land and founded the town, that it was, in short, a monument of Gump enterprise, it having been their long cherished ambition to become municipal promoters.
The Sunday after the Colonel’s arrival, Isaiah preached a sermon on the rebuilding of Jerusalem, and told how the Jews built each man before his own door, with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other. This was preliminary to urging the citizens of El Dorado to build sidewalks before their respective residences. He gave a long and eloquent discourse upon the builders of great cities from Menes, Nimrod and Romulus down, and among these celebrated personages, the Gumps were by no means forgotten.
After the sermon, the Colonel went to dine with Apollo at the little hotel. As they sat over their claret and cigars, Apollo said, “Colonel, if you can work any kind of a deal with Zeke, I would advise you to buy up your land before the railroad comes, for land is sure to go up then. It’s a good plan out here to buy before a road comes and sell as soon as possible afterwards.”
“About how much would you advise me to invest in land, Mr. Gump?” inquired the Colonel.
“Well, if I were you, I would about halve my pile. Half I would put into real estate and half into bank stock. Then you’ve got both realty and personal security and you are pretty safe.”
“I think I will get back into business. I may as well open a little shop and give your brother Chesterfield a little competition. I find I have been in the harness so long that I scarcely know what to do with myself out of it. I am too old to learn to be a gentleman of leisure.”
“That’s a good idea; but whatever you do, do it before the road comes. That’s where the mistake is made in Western towns; men buy at high tide of the boom instead of having foresight enough to buy before. A boom makes the man it finds; but woe to the man it leaves in its track.” A year later the Colonel found that Apollo had spoken a great truth.
“I think I rather like that land your brother showed me yesterday. Right next to the ‘eighty’ Mr. Thompson just bought. I would a little rather get tilled land, though.”
“Now, Colonel, you are buying this land to sell; and wild land will sell just as well as any. You don’t want to bother with crops; that’s for the fellows that come in later. Let them do the digging. As soon as you have made up your mind, I want to spring a little scheme on you. I want to run you for city mayor next spring; and as soon as you have invested, we can begin to talk it up.”
That suggestion pleased the Colonel and it rather soothed his conscience. He had his own scruples about land speculation; it seemed to him a good deal like gambling. But if he could really make an effort to further the interests of the town, he felt he would have a better right to make his fortune there.
After dinner they went out to look at Apollo’s blooded horses, and then to Apollo’s rooms over the bank to smoke. Apollo’s rooms were very interesting apartments. They were decorated with boxing gloves, ball bats, fishing rods, an old pair of foils and pictures of innumerable theatrical people, mostly vaudeville celebrities and ladies of the ballet. As the Colonel showed some interest in these, Apollo began rattling off their names and various accomplishments, professional and otherwise, with a familiarity that astonished the old gentleman. One, he declared, could do the best double dislocation act on the horizontal bars to be seen in Europe or America, and his talents had been highly applauded by the Prince of Wales. Another was the best burnt cork artist of his time; and another a languishing blond lady, whose generous outlines were accentuated by the nature of her attire, he declared was “the neatest thing in tights that ever struck Kansas City.” From Apollo that was a sweeping statement; for Kansas City was the unit of measure which he applied to the universe. At one end of his sleeping room there was a large, full length painting of a handsome, smiling woman, in short skirts and spangles. She stood on the toe of her left foot, her right foot raised, her arms lifted, her body thrown back in a pose of easy abandon. She was just beginning to dance, and there was something of lassitude in the movement of the picture. Behind her hung a dark red curtain, creating a daring effect of color through the sheer whiteness of her skirts, and the footlights threw a strong glare up into her triumphant face. It was broadly and boldly painted, something after the manner of Degas, but handled less cruelly than his subjects. The name at the bottom of the picture was that of a young American painter, then better known in Paris than in his own country. There were several photographs of the same person ranged about on Apollo’s dressing case, and, as he thought her extremely beautiful, and as Apollo had not mentioned her, the Colonel politely inquired who she was.
“She was called Therese Barittini,” replied Apollo, not looking at the picture.
“I never heard of her,” remarked the Colonel, wondering at Apollo’s strange manner.
“Probably not; she is dead,” said Apollo shortly; and as the Colonel saw that he did not wish to discuss the subject, he let it drop. But he could never refrain from looking at that picture when he was in Apollo’s room; and he had conjectures of his own. Incidentally he learned that Apollo had grown up about the theatres of Kansas City, ushering as a boy, and later working up to the box office. Had he known more of the theatres of that river metropolis, the Colonel would have realized that they are bad places for a boy. As it was, he attributed Apollo’s exaggerated manner and many of his bad habits to his early environment.
It chanced that the next day was the day for voting on railroad bonds, and of course bonds were voted. There was great rejoicing among the builders of the city. The Gump band was o
ut, and Apollo fired a fine display of fireworks which he had ordered from Kansas City in anticipation of the happy event. Those fireworks must have cost Apollo a nice little sum, for there were a great many of them. Why, there were actually some of the blackened rocket sticks lying around the streets next spring when every one knew that the railroad companies had never heard of such a place as El Dorado.
None of the Gumps had their families with them; they were to come out in the spring. They spoke often and affectionately of their families,—all but Apollo, who never mentioned having any. The Colonel had supposed that he had never been married, until one day when he and Apollo were dining with Isaiah. Isaiah, after droning away in his prosy fashion about his wife and little ones and commenting upon the beauty of family ties, began moralizing upon Apollo’s unfortunate marriage. Apollo, who had been growing whiter and whiter, rose, set down his glass and, reaching across the table, struck the Reverend Isaiah in the mouth. This was the first that the Colonel saw of the bitter altercations which sometimes arose among the Gump brothers.
