by Willa Cather
By the close of the winter the Colonel had put out his money and opened his store. Everything went on at a lively enough pace in El Dorado. Men took large risks because their neighbors did, as blind to the chances against them as the frequenters of the bucket shops on Wall Street. Hope was in the atmosphere, and each man was immersed in his own particular dream of fortune. One thinking man might have saved the community; but many communities have gone to ruin through the lack of that rare man. Afterwards, when the news of the great Gump swindle spread abroad over the land, and its unique details commanded a column’s space in one of the New York papers, financiers laughed and said that a child could have grasped the situation. The inhabitants of El Dorado were chiefly men who had made a little capital working for corporations in large cities, and were incompetent to manage an independent business. They had been mere machines in a great system, consulted by no one, subject to complete control. Here they were “prominent citizens,” men of affairs, and their vanity and self-confidence expanded unduly. The rest were farming people who came to make homes and paid little attention to what went on in the town. And the farmer is always swindled, no matter by whom offences come. The crash may start in Wall Street, but it ends in the hillside farms and on the prairie. No matter where the lightning strikes, it blackens the soil at last.
As the winter wore away, Apollo Gump drank harder than ever, drank alone in his rooms now, indulging in the solitary form of the vice, which is its worse form. No one saw much of him after business hours. He was gloomy and abstracted and seemed to dread even the necessary intercourse with men which his position in the bank entailed. The Gump brothers commissioned the Colonel to remonstrate with him upon the error of his ways, which he did without much effect. Still, there were many likable things about Apollo. He was different from the rest; his face was finer and franker, in spite of its heavy marks of dissipation, and his heart was kinder. His dogs were better treated than many men’s children. His brothers were very clever fellows, some of them, all of them free handed enough, except old Isaiah, who was the greatest bore and the sorriest rascal of them all. But the Colonel liked Apollo best. The great end of his life was to serve Mammon, but on the side he served other and better gods. Dante’s lowest hell was a frozen one; and wherever Apollo’s tortured soul writhes, it is not there; that is reserved for colder and perhaps cleaner men than he.
At last spring came, that fabled spring, when all the business men were to return to El Dorado, when the Gump Academy was to be built, when the waterworks were to be put in, when the Gumps were to welcome their wives and children. Chesterfield, Hezekiah and Aristotle had gone East to see to bringing out their families, and the Colonel was impatiently awaiting their return, as the real estate business seemed to be at a standstill and he could get no satisfaction from Apollo about the condition of affairs. One night there came a telegram from New York, brought post haste across the country from the nearest station, announcing that the father of the Gumps was dying, and summoning the other brothers to his bedside. There was great excitement in El Dorado at these tidings, and the sympathy of its inhabitants was so genuine that they scarcely stopped to think what the departure of the Gumps might mean.
De Witt and Ezekiel left the next day accompanied by Miss Venus and Miss Almira. Apollo and Isaiah remained to look after the bank. The Colonel began to feel anxious, realizing that the Gumps had things pretty much in their own hands and that if the death of their father should make any material difference in their projects and they should decide to leave Kansas for good, the town and his interests would be wofully undone. Still, he said very little, not thinking it a time to bring up business considerations; for even Apollo looked worried and harassed and was entirely sober for days together.
The Gumps left on Monday. On the following Sunday Isaiah delivered a particularly powerful discourse on the mutability of riches. He compared temporal wealth to stock in the great bank of God, which paid such rich dividends of grace daily, hourly. He earnestly exhorted his hearers to choose the good part and lay up for themselves treasures in heaven, where moths cannot corrupt nor thieves break through and steal. Apollo was not at church that morning. The next morning the man who took care of Apollo’s blooded horses found that two of them were missing. When he went to report this to Apollo he got no response to his knock, and, not succeeding in finding Isaiah, he went to consult the Colonel. Together they went back to Apollo’s room and broke in the door. They found the room in wretched disorder, with clothing strewn about over the furniture; but nothing was missing save Apollo’s grip and revolver, the picture of the theatrical-looking person that had hung in his sleeping room, and Apollo himself. Then the truth dawned upon the Colonel. The Gumps had gone, taking with them the Gump banking funds, land funds, city improvement funds, academy funds, and all funds, both public and private.
* * * *
As soon as the news of the hegira of the Gumps got abroad, carriages and horses came from all the towns in the country, bringing to the citizens of El Dorado their attentive creditors. All the townsmen had paid fabulous prices for their land, borrowed money on it, put the money into the Gump bank, and done their business principally on credit obtained on the Gump indorsement. Now that their money was gone, they discovered that the land was worth nothing, was a desert which the fertile imagination of the Gumps had made to blossom as the rose. The loan companies also discovered the worthlessness of the land, and used every possible means to induce the tenants to remain on it; but the entire country was panic-stricken and would hear no argument. Their one desire was to get away from this desolate spot, where they had been duped. The infuriated creditors tore down the houses and carried even the foundation stones away. Scarcely a house in the town had been paid for; the money had been paid to Aristotle Gump, contractor and builder, who had done his business in the East almost entirely on credit. The loan agents and various other creditors literally put the town into wagons and carried it off. Meanwhile, the popular indignation was turned against the Colonel as having been immediately associated with the Gumps and implicated in their dishonesty. In vain did he protest his innocence. When men are hurt they must have something to turn upon, like children who kick the door that pinches their fingers. So the poor old Colonel, who was utterly ruined and one of the heaviest losers, was accused of having untold wealth hidden away somewhere in the bluffs; and all the tempest of wrath and hatred which the Gumps had raised broke over his head. He was glad, indeed, when the town was utterly deserted, and he could live without the continual fear of those reproachful and suspicious glances. Often as he sat watching those barren bluffs, he wondered whether some day the whole grand delusion would not pass away, and this great West, with its cities built on borrowed capital, its business done on credit, its temporary homes, its drifting, restless population, become panic-stricken and disappear, vanish utterly and completely, as a bubble that bursts, as a dream that is done. He hated western Kansas; and yet in a way he pitied this poor brown country, which seemed as lonely as himself and as unhappy. No one cared for it, for its soil or its rivers. Every one wanted to speculate in it. It seemed as if God himself had only made it for purposes of speculation and was tired of the deal and doing his best to get it off his hands and deed it over to the Other Party.
III.
On this particular morning, the fourth anniversary of the fatal advent of Apollo Gump into his store at Winchester, as the Colonel sat smoking in his chair, a covered wagon came toiling slowly up from the south. The horses were thin and fagged, and it was all that they could do to drag the creaking wagon. The harness was old and patched with rope. Over the hames and along the back strap hung pieces of sunflower brush to serve as fly nets. The wagon stopped at the well and two little boys clambered out and came trotting up the path toward the store. As they came the Colonel heard them chattering together in a broad Southern dialect; and the sound of his own tongue was sweet to his ears.
“What is
it, boys?” he asked, coming to the door.
“Say, boss, kin we git some watah at yo’ well?”
“Of course you can, boys. Git all you want.”
“Thank yo’, sir;” and the lads trotted back to the wagon.
The Colonel took up his stick and followed them. He had not seen such good natured, tow-headed little chaps for a long while; and he was fond of children. A little girl, dressed in that particularly ugly shade of red in which farming people seem to delight, clambered out of the wagon and went up to the well with a tin cup, picking her way carefully with her bare feet to avoid the sand burrs. A fretful voice called from the wagon.
“Law me, boys, haint you most got that watah yit?”
A wan woman’s face appeared at the front of the wagon, and she sat down and coughed heavily, holding her hand over her chest as if it hurt her. The little girl filled the tin cup and ran toward the wagon.
“Howdy do, sir?” said the woman, turning to the Colonel as soon as she had finished drinking.
“Right smart, ma’am, thank ’ee.”
“Mercy, air yo’ from the South? Virginy? Laws! I am from Mizzoura myself an’ I wisht I was back there. I ’low we’d be well enough off if we could git back to Pap.”
She looked wistfully off toward the southwest and put her hand to her side again. There was something in the look of her big, hollow eyes that touched the Colonel. He told her she had better stay there a few days and rest the horses—she did not look well enough to go on.
“No, thank yo’, sir, we must git on. I’ll be better in the mornin’, maybe. I was feelin’ right smart yisterday. It’s my lungs, the slow consumption. I think I’ll last till I git back to Pap. There has been a good deal of the consumption in our family, an’ they most all last.” She talked nervously on, breathing heavily between her words. “Haint there a town Eldorader somewheres about here?”
The Colonel flushed painfully. “Yes, this is El Dorado.”
“Law me, purty lookin’ town!” said the woman, laughing dismally. “Superb’s better’n this.” She pronounced Superb as though it had but one syllable. “They got a blacksmith shop an’ a hardware store there, anyways. I am from nigh Superb, yo’ see. We moved there ten years ago, when the country was lookin’ mighty green and purty. It’s all done burnt up long ago. It’s that dry we couldn’t raise any garden stuff there these three years. Everything’s gone now, exceptin’ these horses Pap give me when I was married. No, my man haint with me; he died just afore we come away. A bull gored him through an’ through, an’ he crawled outsiden the bobwire fence and died. It was mighty hard. He didn’t want to die there; he craved to die in Mizzoura. We shot the bull and brought t’other cattle with us; but they all died on the way.”
She closed her eyes and leaned back against the side of the wagon. Suddenly she roused herself and said:
“Law me, boys, this must be the sto’ that man told us on. Yo’ see our meat and stuff give out most a week ago, an’ we been a livin’ on pancakes ever since. We was all gittin’ sick, fur we turned agin’ ’em, when we met a feller on horseback down the valley, a mighty nice lookin’ feller, an’ he give us five dollars an’ told us we’d find a store someers up here an’ could git some groceries.”
“It must have been one of them loan company fellows,” said the Colonel meditatively. “They still come sneakin’ about once in a while, though I don’t know what they’re after. They haven’t left us much but the dirt, an’ I reckon that wouldn’t do ’em much good if they could carry it off.”
“That I can’t tell yo’. I never seen him befo’,—but he was a mighty kind sort of a feller. He give us the money, and he give me some brandy.”
The Colonel helped her out of the wagon, and they went up to the store, while the boys watered the horses. Their purchases were soon made; but the Colonel refused to take their money.
“No, ma’am, I can’t do that. You’ll need your money before you get to Missouri. It’s all in the family, between blood kin like. We’re both from the South; and I reckon it would have been enough better for us if we’d never left it.”
“Thank yo’ mighty kindly, sir. Yo’ sholey can’t be doin’ much business heah; better git in an’ go with us. Good day to yo’, an’ thank you kindly, sir.”
The Colonel stood wistfully watching the wagon until it rolled slowly out of sight, and then went back to his store, and with a sigh sat down,—sat down to wait until water came from the rock and verdure from the desert, a sort of Sphinx of the Solomon who sat waiting for the end of time. This was a day when his mind dwelt even more than usual upon his misfortunes, and homesickness was heavy upon him, and he yearned for his own people and the faces of his kindred; for the long Virginia twilights in which he and Major Denney used to sit under the great trees in the courthouse yard, living the siege of Richmond over again; for the old comrades who took a drink with him at the Taylor House bar; for the little children who rolled their hoops before his door every morning, and went nutting with him in the fall; for the Great North Mountains, where the frosts would soon be kindling the maples and hickories into flame; for the soft purple of the Blue Ridge lying off to the eastward; and for that sound which every Virginian hears forever and forever in his dreams, that rhythmic song of deathless devotion, deep and solemn as the cadence of epic verse, which the Potomac and Shenandoah sing to the Virginia shore as they meet at Harper’s Ferry. To every exile from the valley of Virginia that sound is as the voice of his mother, bidding him keep his honor clean, and forever calling him to come home. The Colonel had stopped his horse there on the moonlight night in ’62 when he rode away to the wars, and listened long to that sound; and looking up at the towering grandeur of Maryland heights above him, he had lifted his hand and sworn the oath that every young Virginian swore and that every young Virginian kept. For if the blood shed for those noble rivers could have been poured into their flood, they would have run crimson to the sea; and it is of that that they sing always as they meet, chanting the story over and over in the moonlight and the sunlight, through time and change unable to forget all that wasted glory of youth, all that heroic love. Before now, when the old man had heard them calling to him in the lonely winter nights, he had bowed his head in his hands and wept in an almost physical passion of homesickness.
Toward evening the clouds banked up in the western sky, and with the night a violent storm set in, one of those drenching rains that always come too late in that country, after a barren summer has waned into a fruitless autumn. For some reason he felt indisposed to go to bed. He sat watching the lightning from the window and listening to the swollen Solomon, that tore between its muddy banks with a sullen roar, as though it resented this intrusion upon its accustomed calm and indolence. Once he thought he saw a light flash from one of the bluffs across the river, but on going to the door all was dark. At last he regretfully put out his lamp and went to bed.
IV.
That night, a few hours before, when the storm was at its worst, a horseman had come galloping along the bank of the Solomon. He drew rein at the foot of a steep, naked bluff and sat in his saddle looking about him. It was a sorry night for a man to be out. The blackness of the sky seemed to bear down upon him, save when now and then it was ripped from end to end by a jagged thrust of lightning, which rent it like the veil of the temple. At each flash he could see the muddy water of the swollen river whirling along wraiths of white foam over the little shivering willows. Save for that one lonely light across the river, there was no sign of man. He dismounted from his horse and, tying it to a sapling, he took a spade, strapped to the saddle, and began to climb the bluff. The water from the uplands was running down the hill wearing channels in the soft stone and made the grass so slippery that he could scarcely stand. When he reached the top he took a dark lantern from his pocket and lit it, sheltering it under the cape of his mackintosh; then he set it behind a clump
of bunch grass. Starting from a lone oak, he carefully paced a distance and began to dig. His clothing was wet through, and even his mackintosh was wet enough to impede his arms. He impatiently threw off everything but his shirt and trousers and fell to work again. His shirt was wet and his necktie hung like a rag under his collar. His black hair hung wet over his white forehead, his brows were drawn together and his teeth were set. His eyes were fixed on the ground, and he worked with the desperation of a man who works to forget. He drove the spade in to the top at every thrust and threw the soggy earth far down the hillside, blistering his white hands with the rigor of his toil. The rain beat ceaselessly in his face and dripped from his hair and mustache; but he never paused save when now and then he heard some strange sound from the river. Then he started, shut off the light from his dark lantern and waited until all was quiet.
When he had been digging for some time, he knelt down and thrust his arm into the hole to feel its depth. Close beside him he heard a shrill, whirring, metallic sound which a man who hears it once remembers to his dying day. He felt a sharp pain in the big vein of his right arm and sprang to his feet with an oath; and then the rattlesnake, having been the avenger of many, slid quietly off through the wet grass.
