Tales of Trail and Town | Page 4

San Francisco, or as an actual tourist in
the mining regions, and his accent was undoubtedly Southwestern. He
was tall and dark, with deep-set eyes in a singularly immobile
countenance; he had an erect but lithe and sinewy figure even for his
thirty odd years, and might easily have been taken for any other
American except for the single exception that his nose was distinctly
Roman, and gave him a distinguished air. There was a suggestion of
Abraham Lincoln (and even of Don Quixote) in his tall, melancholy
figure and length of limb, but nothing whatever that suggested an
Englishman.
It was shortly after the christening of Atherly town that an incident
occurred which at first shook, and then the more firmly established, his
mild monomania. His widowed mother had been for the last two years
an inmate of a private asylum for inebriates, through certain habits
contracted while washing for the camp in the first year of her
widowhood. This had always been a matter of open sympathy to Rough
and Ready; but it was a secret reproach hinted at in Atherly, although it
was known that the rich Peter Atherly kept his mother liberally
supplied, and that both he and his sister "Jinny" or Jenny Atherly
visited her frequently. One day he was telegraphed for, and on going to
the asylum found Mrs. Atherly delirious and raving. Through her son's
liberality she had bribed an attendant, and was fast succumbing to a
private debauch. In the intervals of her delirium she called Peter by

name, talked frenziedly and mysteriously of his "high
connections"--alluded to himself and his sister as being of the "true
breed"--and with a certain vigor of epithet, picked up in the familiarity
of the camp during the days when she was known as "Old Ma'am
Atherly" or "Aunt Sally," declared that they were "no corn-cracking
Hoosiers," "hayseed pikes," nor "northern Yankee scum," and that she
should yet live to see them "holding their own lands again and the lands
of their forefathers." Quieted at last by opiates, she fell into a more
lucid but scarcely less distressing attitude. Recognizing her son again,
as well as her own fast failing condition, she sarcastically thanked him
for coming to "see her off," congratulated him that he would soon be
spared the lie and expense of keeping her here on account of his pride,
under the thin pretext of trying to "cure" her. She knew that Sally
Atherly of Rough and Ready wasn't considered fit company for
"Atherly of Atherly" by his fine new friends. This and much more in a
voice mingling maudlin sentiment with bitter resentment, and with an
ominous glitter in her bloodshot and glairy eyes. Peter winced with a
consciousness of the half-truth of her reproaches, but the curiosity and
excitement awakened by the revelations of her frenzy were greater than
his remorse. He said quickly:--
"You were speaking of father!--of his family--his lands and possessions.
Tell me again!"
"Wot are ye givin' us?" she ejaculated in husky suspicion, opening
upon him her beady eyes, in which the film of death was already
gathering.
"Tell me of father,--my father and his family! his great-
grandfather!--the Atherlys, my relations--what you were saying. What
do you know about them?"
"THAT'S all ye wanter know--is it? THAT'S what ye'r' comin' to the
old washer-woman for--is it?" she burst out with the desperation of
disgust. "Well--give it up! Ask me another!"
"But, mother--the old records, you know! The family Bible--what you
once told us--me and Jinny!"

Something gurgled in her throat like a chuckle. With the energy of
malevolence, she stammered: "There wasn't no records--there wasn't no
family Bible! it's all a lie--you hear me! Your Atherly that you're so
proud of was just a British bummer who was kicked outer his family in
England and sent to buzz round in Americky. He honey-fogled
me--Sally Magregor--out of a better family than his'n, in Kansas, and
skyugled me away, but it was a straight out marriage, and I kin prove it.
It was in the St. Louis papers, and I've got it stored away safe enough in
my trunk! You hear me! I'm shoutin'! But he wasn't no old settler in
Mizzouri--he wasn't descended from any settler, either! He was a new
man outer England--fresh caught--and talked down his throat. And he
fooled ME--the darter of an old family that was settled on the right
bank of the Mizzouri afore Dan'l Boone came to Kentucky--with his
new philanderings. Then he broke up, and went all to pieces when we
struck Californy, and left ME--Sally Magregor, whose father had
niggers of his own--to wash for Rough and Ready! THAT'S your
Atherly! Take him! I don't want him--I've done with him! I was done
with him long afore--afore"--a cough checked her utterance,-- "afore"--