Mrs Skaggss Husbands | Page 6

wore, say, fur instance,
a green hat with yaller ribbons, you wouldn't play me, and say it did,
onless,"--he added, with intensified cunning,-- "onless it DID?"
"No," said Tommy, "of course I wouldn't; but then, you see, IT DID."
"It did?"
"It did!" repeated Tommy, stoutly; "a green hat with yellow
ribbons--and--and--a red rosette."
"I didn't get to see the ros-ette," said Johnson, with slow and
conscientious deliberation, yet with an evident sense of relief; "but that
ain't sayin' it warn't there, you know. Eh?"
Tommy glanced quietly at his companion. There were great beads of
perspiration on his ashen-gray forehead and on the ends of his lank hair;
the hand which twitched spasmodically in his was cold and clammy,
the other, which was free, had a vague, purposeless, jerky activity, as if
attached to some deranged mechanism. Without any apparent concern
in these phenomena, Tommy halted, and, seating himself on a log,
motioned his companion to a place beside him. Johnson obeyed

without a word. Slight as was the act, perhaps no other incident of their
singular companionship indicated as completely the dominance of this
careless, half-effeminate, but self-possessed boy over this doggedly
self-willed, abnormally excited man.
"It ain't the square thing," said Johnson, after a pause, with a laugh that
was neither mirthful nor musical, and frightened away a lizard that had
been regarding the pair with breathless suspense,-- "it ain't the square
thing for jackass rabbits to wear hats, Tommy,--is it, eh?"
"Well," said Tommy, with unmoved composure, "sometimes they do
and sometimes they don't. Animals are mighty queer." And here
Tommy went off in an animated, but, I regret to say, utterly untruthful
and untrustworthy account of the habits of California fauna, until he
was interrupted by Johnson.
"And snakes, eh, Tommy?" said the man, with an abstracted air, gazing
intently on the ground before him.
"And snakes," said Tommy; "but they don't bite, at least not that kind
you see. There!--don't move, Uncle Ben, don't move; they're gone now.
And it's about time you took your dose."
Johnson had hurriedly risen as if to leap upon the log, but Tommy had
as quickly caught his arm with one hand while he drew a bottle from
his pocket with the other. Johnson paused, and eyed the bottle. "Ef you
say so, my boy," he faltered, as his fingers closed nervously around it;
say 'when,' then." He raised the bottle to his lips and took a long
draught, the boy regarding him critically. "When," said Tommy,
suddenly. Johnson started, flushed, and returned the bottle quickly. But
the color that had risen to his cheek stayed there, his eye grew less
restless, and as they moved away again, the hand that rested on
Tommy's shoulder was steadier.
Their way lay along the flank of Table Mountain,--a wandering trail
through a tangled solitude that might have seemed virgin and unbroken
but for a few oyster-cans, yeast-powder tins, and empty bottles that had
been apparently stranded by the "first low wash" of pioneer waves. On

the ragged trunk of an enormous pine hung a few tufts of gray hair
caught from a passing grizzly, but in strange juxtaposition at its foot lay
an empty bottle of incomparable bitters,--the chef-d'oeuvre of a
hygienic civilization, and blazoned with the arms of an all-healing
republic. The head of a rattlesnake peered from a case that had
contained tobacco, which was still brightly placarded with the
high-colored effigy of a popular danseuse. And a little beyond this the
soil was broken and fissured, there was a confused mass of roughly
hewn timber, a straggling line of sluicing, a heap of gravel and dirt, a
rude cabin, and the claim of Johnson.
Except for the rudest purposes of shelter from rain and cold, the cabin
possessed but little advantage over the simple savagery of surrounding
nature. It had all the practical directness of the habitation of some
animal, without its comfort or picturesque quality; the very birds that
haunted it for food must have felt their own superiority as architects. It
was inconceivably dirty, even with its scant capacity for accretion; it
was singularly stale, even in its newness and freshness of material.
Unspeakably dreary as it was in shadow, the sunlight visited it in a
blind, aching, purposeless way, as if despairing of mellowing its
outlines or of even tanning it into color.
The claim worked by Johnson in his intervals of sobriety was
represented by half a dozen rude openings in the mountain-side, with
the heaped-up debris of rock and gravel before the mouth of each. They
gave very little evidence of engineering skill or constructive purpose, or
indeed showed anything but the vague, successively abandoned essays
of their projector. To-day they served another purpose, for as the sun
had heated the little cabin almost