by Frank Norris
It never could be found out what happened to Schuster, or what he did, during the next ten hours. We pick him up again in a saloon on the waterfront about noon the next day, with thirty dollars in his pocket and God knows what disorderly notions in his crazed wits. At this time he was sober as far as the alcohol went. It might be supposed that now would have been the time for reflection and repentance and return to home and respectability. Return home! Not much! Schuster had began to wonder what kind of an ass he had been to have walked the floor of a department-store for the last score of years. Something was boiling in his veins. B-r-r-r! Let ’em all stand far from him now.
That day he left San Francisco and rode the blind baggage as far as Colfax on the Overland. He chose Colfax because he saw the name chalked on a freight car at the Oakland mole. At Colfax, within three hours after his arrival, he fought with a restaurant man over the question of a broken saucer, and the same evening was told to leave the town by the sheriff.
Out of Colfax, some twenty-eight miles into the mountains, are placer gold mines, having for headquarters a one-street town called Iowa Hill. Schuster went over to the Hill the same day on the stage. The stage got in at night and pulled up in front of the postoffice. Schuster went into the postoffice, which was also a Wells-Fargo office, a candy store, a drug store, a cigar store, and a lounging-room, and asked about hotels.
Only the postmaster was in at that time, but as Schuster leaned across the counter, talking to him, a young man came in, with a huge spur on his left boot-heel. He and the postmaster nodded, and the young man slid an oblong object about the size of a brick across the counter. The object was wrapped in newspaper and seemed altogether too heavy for anything but metal — metal of the precious kind, for example.
“He?” answered the postmaster to Schuster, when the young man had gone. “He’s the superintendent of the Little Bear mine on the other side of the American River, about three miles by the trail.”
For the next week Schuster set himself to work to solve the problem of how a man might obtain a shotgun in the vicinity of Iowa Hill without the fact being remembered afterward and the man identified. It seemed good to him after a while to steal the gun from a couple of Chinamen who were washing gravel along the banks of the American River about two miles below the Little Bear. For two days he lay in the tarweed and witch hazel, on the side of the canyon overlooking the cabin, noted the time when both Chinamen were sufficiently far away, and stole the gun, together with a saw and a handful of cartridges loaded with buckshot. Within the next week he sawed off the gun-barrels sufficiently short, experimented once or twice with the buckshot, and found occasion to reconnoiter every step of the trail that led from the Little Bear to Iowa Hill. Also, he found out at the bar of the hotel at the Hill that the superintendent of the Little Bear amalgamated and reported the cleanup on Sundays. When he had made sure of this Schuster was seen no more about that little one-street mining town.
“He says it’s Sunday,” said Paul Schuster to himself; “but that’s why it’s probably Saturday or Monday. He ain’t going to have the town know when he brings the brick over. It might even be Friday. I’ll make it a four-night watch.”
There is a nasty bit on the trail from the Little Bear to the Hill, steep as a staircase, narrow as a rabbit-run, and overhung with manzanita. The place is trumpet-mouthed in shape, and sound carries far. So, on the second night of his watch, Schuster could at last plainly hear the certain sounds that he had been waiting for — sounds that jarred sharply on the prolonged roll of the Morning Star stamps, a quarter of a mile beyond the canyon. The sounds were those of a horse threshing through the gravel and shallow water of the ford in the river just below. He heard the horse grunt as he took the slope of the nearer bank, and the voice of his rider speaking to him came distinctly to his ears. Then silence for one — two — three minutes, while the stamp mill at the Morning Star purred and rumbled unceasingly and Schuster’s heart pumped thickly in his throat. Then a blackness blacker than that of the night heaved suddenly against the grey of “the sky, close in upon him, and a pebble clicked beneath a shod hoof.
“Pull up!” Schuster was in the midst of the trail, his cheek caressing the varnished stock.
“Whoa! Steady there! What in hell — —”
“Pull up. You know what’s wanted. Chuck us that brick.”
The superintendent chirped sharply to the horse, spurring with his left heel.
“Stand clear there, God damn you! I’ll ride you down!”
The stock leaped fiercely in Schuster’s arm-pit, nearly knocking him down, and, in the light of two parallel flashes, he saw an instantaneous picture — rugged skyline, red-tinted manzanita bushes, the plunging mane and head of a horse, and above it a Face with open mouth and staring eyes, smoke-wreathed and hatless. The empty stirrup thrashed across Schuster’s body as the horse scraped by him. The trail was dark in front of him. He could see nothing. But soon he heard a little bubbling noise and a hiccough. Then all fell quiet again.
“I got you, all right!”
Thus Schuster, the ex-floor-walker, whose part hitherto in his little life-drama had been to say, “first aisle left,” “elevator, second floor,” “first counter right.”
Then he went down on his knees, groping at the warm bundle in front of him. But he found no brick. It had never occurred to him that the superintendent might ride over to town for other reasons than merely to ship the week’s cleanup. He struck a light and looked more closely — looked at the man he had shot. He could not tell whether it was the superintendent or not, for various reasons, but chiefly because the barrels of the gun had been sawn off, the gun loaded with buckshot, and both barrels fired simultaneously at close range.
Men coming over the trail from the Hill the next morning found the young superintendent, and spread the report of what had befallen him.
* * * * *
When the Prodigal Son became hungry he came to himself. So it was with Schuster. Living on two slices of bacon per day (eaten raw for fear of kindling fires) is what might be called starving under difficulties, and within a week Schuster was remembering and longing for floor-walking and respectability. Within a month of his strange disappearance he was back in San Francisco again knocking at the door of his aunt’s house on Geary street. A week later he was taken on again at his old store, in his old position, his unexcused absence being at length, and under protest, condoned by a remembrance of “long and faithful service.”
Schuster picked up his old life again precisely where he had left it on the second of May, six weeks previously — picked it up and stayed by it, calmly, steadily, uneventfully. The day before he died he told this story to his maiden aunt, who told it to me, with the remark that it was, of course, an absurd lie. Perhaps it was.
One thing, however, remains to tell. I repeated the absurd lie to a friend of mine who is in the warden’s office over at the prison of San Quentin. I mentioned Schuster’s name.
“Schuster! Schuster!” he repeated; “why we had a Schuster over here once — a long time ago, though. An old fellow he was, and a bad egg, too. Commuted for life, though. Son was a barber at the Palace Hotel.”
“What was old Schuster up for?” I asked.
“Highway robbery,” said my friend.
BOOM
San Diego in Southern California, is the largest city in the world. If your geographies and guide-books and encyclopædias have told you otherwise, they have lied, or their authors have never seen San Diego. Why, San Diego is nearly twenty-five miles from end to end! Why, San Diego has more miles of sidewalk, more leagues of street railways, more measureless lengths of paved streets, more interminable systems of sewer-piping, than has London or Paris or even — even — even Chicago (and I who say so was born in Chicago, too)! There are statelier houses in San Diego than in any other “of the world’s great centres,” more spacious avenues, more imposing business blocks, more delicious parks, more overpowering public buildings, the pavements are better laid, t
he electric lighting is more systematic, the railroad and transportation facilities more accommodating, the climate is better than the Riviera, the days are longer, the nights shorter, the men finer, the women prettier, the theatres more attractive, the restaurants cheaper, the wines more sparkling, “business opportunities” lie in wait for the unfortunate at dark street-corners and fly at his throat till he must fain fight them off. Life is one long, glad fermentation. There is no darkness in San Diego, nor any more night.
Incidentally corner lots are desirable.
All of this must be so, because you may read it in the green and gold prospectus of the San Diego Land and Improvement Company (consolidated), sent free on application — that is, at one time during the boom it was sent free — but to-day the edition is out of print, and can only be seen in the collection of bibliophiles and wealthy amateurs, and the boom is only an echo now. But when the guests of the big Coronado Hotel over on the island come across to the main land and course jackrabbits with greyhounds in the country to the north of the town, their horses’ hoofs, as they plunge through the sagebrush and tar weed, will sometimes slide and clatter upon a bit of concrete sidewalk, half sunk of its own weight into the sand; or the jack will be started in a low square of bricks, such as is built for frame house foundations, and which make excellent jumping for the horses. There is a colony of rattlers on the shores of a marsh to the southwest (the maps call it Amethyst Lake) and the little half-breed Indians catch the tarantulas and horned toads that you buy alive in glass jars on the hotel veranda, near the postoffice site, and everything is very gay and pleasant and picturesque.
Why I remember it all so well is because I found Steele in this place. You see, Steele was a very good friend of mine though he was Oxon, and I only a man from Chicago. When his wife knew I was coming west she gave me Steele’s address, and told me I was to look him up. Since she told me this with much insistence and reiteration and with tears in her voice, I made it a point to be particular. She had not heard from Steele in two years. The address she gave me was “Hon. Ralph Truax-Steele, Elmwood avenue and One Hundred and Eighty-eighth street, San Diego, California.”
When I arrived at San Diego I found it would be advisable to hire a horse, for 188th street, instead of waiting for the Elmwood Avenue electric car, and when I asked for directions a red-headed man whose father was Irish and whose mother was Chinese, offered to act as guide for twenty dollars. He said, though, he would furnish his own outfit. I demurred and he went away. I was told that some eight miles out beyond the range I would find a water-hole, and that if I held to the southwest after leaving this hole, keeping my horse’s ears between the double peak of a distant mountain called Little Two Top, I would come after a while to a lamp-post with a tarantula’s nest where the lamp should have been. It would be hard to miss this lamp-post, they told me, as the desert was very flat thereabouts, and the lamp-posts could be seen for a radius of ten miles. Also, there might be water there — the horse would smell it out if there was. Also, it was a good place to camp, because of a tiny ledge of shale outcropping there. I was to be particular about this lamp-post, because it stood at the corner of Elmwood avenue and 188th street.
When I asked about the Hon. Truax-Steele, Oxon, information was less explicit. They shook their heads. One of them seemed to recollect a “shack” about a mile hitherward of Two Top, a statement that was at once contradicted by someone else. Might have been an old Digger “wicky-up.” Sometimes the Indians camped in the valley on their way to ghost dances and tribal feasts. It wasn’t a place for a white man to live, chiefly because the climate offered so many advantages and attractions to horned toads, tarantulas and rattlesnakes. Then the red-headed Chinese-Irishman came back and said, with an accent that was beyond all words, that a sheepherder had once told him of a loco-man out beyond McIntyre’s waterhole, and another man said that, “Yes, that was so; he’d passed flasks with a loco-man out that way once last June, when he was out looking for a strayed pony. In fact, the loco-man lived out there, had a son, too, leastways a kid lived with him.” This seemed encouraging. The Hon. Truax-Steele, Oxon, was accredited with a son — so his wife had said, who should know. So I started out, simultaneously hoping and dreading that the loco-man and the honourable Truax might be one flesh.
I left San Diego at four o’clock A.M. to avoid as much as possible the heat of mid-day, and just at sunset saw what might have been a cactus plant standing out stark and still on the white blur of sage and alkali like an exclamation point on a blank page. It was the lamp-post of the spider’s nest that marked the intersection of Elmwood avenue and 188th street. And then my horse shied, with his hind legs only, in the way good horses have, and Ralph Truax-Steele rose out of a dried muck-hole under the bit.
I had expected a madman, but his surprise and pleasure at seeing me were perfectly sane. After awhile he said: “Sorry, old boy. It’s the hospitality of the Arab I can give you; nothing better. A handful of dates (we call ’em caned prunes out here), the dried flesh of a kid (Californian for jerked beef), and a mouthful of cold water, which the same we will thicken with forty-rod rye; incidentally, coffee, black and unsweet, and tobacco, which at one time I should have requested my undergroom to discontinue.”
We went to his “shack” (I observed it to be built of discarded bricks, mortared with ‘dobe mud) and I was made acquainted with his boy, Carrington Truax-Steele, fitting for Oxford under tutelage of his father.
We had supper, after which the Hon. Truax, Sr. stood forth under the kindling glory of that desert twilight by that incongruous, reeling lamp-post, booted, bare-headed and woolen-shirted, and to the low swinging scimitar of the new welded moon declaimed Creon’s speech to Oedipus in sonorous Greek. When he was done he exclaimed, abruptly: “Come along, I’ll show you ‘round.”
I looked about that stricken reach of alkali, and followed him wondering. That evening the Hon. Ralph Truax-Steele, Oxon, showed me his real estate and also, unwittingly, the disordered workings of his brain. The rest I guessed and afterwards confirmed.
Steele had gone mad over the real estate “boom” that had struck the town five years previously, when land was worth as many dollars as could cover it, and men and women fought with each other to buy lots around the water hole called Amethyst Lake. The “boom” had collapsed, and with it Steele’s reason, for to him the boom was on the point of recommencing; sane enough on other points, in this direction the man’s grip upon himself was gone for good.
“There,” he said to me that evening as we crushed our way through the sagebrush, indicating a low roll on the desert surface, “there are my villa sites, here will run a driveway, and yonder where you see the skeleton of that steer I’m thinking of putting up a little rustic stone chapel.”
“Ralph, Ralph,” I said, “come out of this. Can’t you see that the whole business is dead and done for long since? You’re going back with me to God’s country to-morrow — going back to your wife, you and the boy. She sent me to fetch you.”
He stared at me wonderingly.
“Why, it’s bound to come within a few days,” he said. “Wait till next Wednesday, say, and you won’t recognise this place. There’ll be a rush here such as there was when Oklahoma was opened. We have everything for us — climate, temperature, water. Harry,” he added in my ear, “look around you. You are standing on the site of one of the grandest, stateliest cities of civilisation.”
That night the boy Carrington and I sat late in consultation while Steele slept. “Nothing but force will do it,” said the lad. “I know him well, and I’ve tried it again and again. It’s no use any other way.” So force it was.
How we got Steele back to San Diego I may not tell. Carrington is the only other person who knows, and I’m sure he will say nothing. When Steele found himself in the heart of a real city and began to look about him, and take stock of his surroundings, the real collapse came. He is in a sanitarium now somewhere in Illinois, and his wife and son see him on Wednesday and Sunday afte
rnoons from two till five. Steele will never come out of that sanitarium, though he now realises that his desert city was a myth, a creation of his own distorted wits. He’s sound enough on that point, but a strange inversion has taken place. It is now upon all other subjects that he is insane.
THE DIS-ASSOCIATED CHARITIES
There used to be a place in feudal Paris called the Court of Miracles, and Mister Victor Hugo has told us all about it. This Court was a quarter of the town where the beggars lived, and it was called “of the miracles”, because once across its boundaries the blind saw, the lame walked and the poor cared not to have the gospel preached unto them.
San Francisco has its Court of Miracles too. It is a far cry thither, for it lies on the other side of Chinatown and Dagotown, and blocks beyond Luna’s restaurant. It is in the valley between Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill, and you must pass through it as you go down to Meigg’s Wharf where the Government tugs tie up.
One has elected to call it the Court of Miracles, but it is not a court, and the days of miracles are over. It is a row of seven two-story houses, one of them brick. The brick house is over a saloon kept by a Kanaka woman and called “The Eiffel Tower.” Here San Francisco’s beggars live and have their being. That is, a good many of them.
The doubled-up old man with the white beard and neck-handkerchief who used to play upon a zither and the sympathies of the public on the corner of Sutter street has moved out, and one can find no trace of him, and Father Elphick, the white-headed vegetarian of Lotta’s Fountain, is dead. But plenty of the others are left. The neatly dressed fellow with dark blue spectacles, who sings the Marseillaise, accompanying himself upon an infinitesimal hand organ, is here; Mrs. McCleaverty is here, and the old bare-headed man who sits on the street corner by the Bohemian Club, after six o’clock in the evening and turns the crank of a soundless organ, has here set up his everlasting rest.
