Jeff Briggss Love Story | Page 4

early rising, bringing with it, presumably, the proverbial
accompaniment of health, wisdom, and pecuniary emoluments, had
also brought with it certain ideas of the effeminacy of separate toilettes
and the virtue of readiness.
In a few moments he was deep in a chapter.
A vague pecking at his door--as of an unseasonable woodpecker,
finally asserted itself to his consciousness. "Come in," he said, with his
eye still on the page.
The door opened to a gaunt figure, partly composed of bed-quilt and
partly of plaid shawl. A predominance of the latter and a long wisp of

iron-gray hair determined her sex. She leaned against the post with an
air of fatigue, half moral and half physical.
"How ye kin lie thar, abed, Jeff, and read and smoke on sich a night!
The sperrit o' the Lord abroad over the yearth--and up stage not gone
by yet. Well, well! it's well thar ez SOME EZ CAN'T SLEEP."
"The up coach, like as not, is stopped by high water on the North Fork,
ten miles away, aunty," responded Jeff, keeping to the facts. Possibly
not recognizing the hand of the beneficent Creator in the rebellious
window shutter, he avoided theology.
"Well," responded the figure, with an air of delivering an unheeded and
thankless warning, "it is not for ME to say. P'raps it's all His wisdom
that some will keep to their own mind. It's well ez some hezn't narves,
and kin luxuriate in terbacker in the night watches. But He says, 'I'll
come like a thief in the night!'--like a thief in the night, Jeff."
Totally unable to reconcile this illustration with the delayed "Pioneer"
coach and Yuba Bill, its driver, Jeff lay silent. In his own way, perhaps,
he was uneasy--not to say shocked--at his aunt's habitual freedom of
scriptural quotation, as that good lady herself was with an occasional
oath from his lips; a fact, by the way, not generally understood by
purveyors of Scripture, licensed and unlicensed.
"I'd take a pull at them bitters, aunty," said Jeff feebly, with his
wandering eye still recurring to his page. "They'll do ye a power of
good in the way o' calmin' yer narves."
"Ef I was like some folks I wouldn't want bitters--though made outer
the simplest yarbs of the yearth, with jest enough sperrit to bring out
the vartoos--ez Deacon Stoer's Balm 'er Gilead is--what yer meaning?
Ef I was like some folks I could lie thar and smoke in the lap o'
idleness--with fourteen beds in the house empty, and nary lodger for
one of 'em. Ef I was that indifferent to havin' invested my fortin in the
good will o' this house, and not ez much ez a single transient lookin' in,
I could lie down and take comfort in profane literatoor. But it ain't in
me to do it. And it wasn't your father's way, Jeff, neither!"

As the elder Briggs's way had been to seek surcease from such trouble
at the gambling table, and eventually, in suicide, Jeff could not deny it.
But he did not say that a full realization of his unhappy venture
overcame him as he closed the blinds of the hotel that night; and that
the half desperate idea of abandoning it then and there to the warring
elements that had resented his trespass on Nature seemed to him an act
of simple reason and justice. He did not say this, for easy-going natures
are not apt to explain the processes by which their content or
resignation is reached, and are therefore supposed to have none.
Keeping to the facts, he simply suggested the weather was unfavorable
to travelers, and again found his place on the page before him. Fixing it
with his thumb, he looked up resignedly. The figure wearily detached
itself from the door-post, and Jeff's eyes fell on his book. "You won't
stop, aunty?" he asked mechanically, as if reading aloud from the page;
but she was gone.
A little ashamed, although much relieved, Jeff fell back again to
literature, interrupted only by the charging of the wind and the heavy
volleys of rain. Presently he found himself wondering if a certain
banging were really a shutter, and then, having settled in his mind that
it WAS, he was startled by a shout. Another, and in the road before the
house!
Jeff put down the book, and marked the place by turning down the leaf,
being one of that large class of readers whose mental faculties are
butter-fingered, and easily slip their hold. Then he resumed his boots
and was duly caparisoned. He extinguished the kerosene lamp, and
braved the outer air, and strong currents of the hall and stairway in the
darkness. Lighting two candles in the bar-room, he proceeded to unlock
the hall door. At the same instant