Tales of Trail and Town | Page 5

She gasped again, but the words seemed to strangle in her throat. Intent
only on her words and scarcely heeding her sufferings, Peter was
bending over her eagerly, when the doctor rudely pulled him away and
lifted her to a sitting posture. But she never spoke again. The strongest
restoratives quickly administered only left her in a state of scarcely
breathing unconsciousness.
"Is she dying? Can't you bring her to," said the anxious Peter, "if only
for a moment, doctor?"
"I'm thinkin'," said the visiting doctor, an old Scotch army surgeon,
looking at the rich Mr. Atherly with cool, professional contempt, "that
your mother willna do any more washing for me as in the old time, nor
give up her life again to support her bairns. And it isna my eentention
to bring her back to pain for the purposes of geeneral conversation!"
Nor, indeed, did she ever come back to any purpose, but passed away
with her unfinished sentence. And her limbs were scarcely decently
composed by the attendants before Peter was rummaging the trunk in

her room for the paper she had spoken of. It was in an old work- box--a
now faded yellow clipping from a newspaper, lying amidst spoils of
cotton thread, buttons, and beeswax, which he even then remembered
to have seen upon his mother's lap when she superadded the sewing on
of buttons to her washing of the miners' shirts. And his dark and hollow
cheek glowed with gratified sentiment as he read the clipping.
"We hear with regret of the death of Philip Atherly, Esq., of Rough and
Ready, California. Mr. Atherly will be remembered by some of our
readers as the hero of the romantic elopement of Miss Sallie Magregor,
daughter of Colonel 'Bob' Magregor, which created such a stir in
well-to-do circles some thirty years ago. It was known vaguely that the
young couple had 'gone West,'--a then unknown region,--but it seems
that after severe trials and tribulations on the frontier with savages, they
emigrated early to Oregon, and then, on the outbreak of the gold fever,
to California. But it will be a surprise to many to know that it has just
transpired that Mr. Atherly was the second son of Sir Ashley Atherly,
an English baronet, and by the death of his brother might have
succeeded to the property and title."
He remained for some moments looking fixedly at the paper, until the
commonplace paragraph imprinted itself upon his brain as no line of
sage or poet had ever done, and then he folded it up and put it in his
pocket. In his exaltation he felt that even the mother he had never loved
was promoted to a certain respect as his father's wife, although he was
equally conscious of a new resentment against her for her
contemptuous allusions to HIS father, and her evident hopeless
inability to comprehend his position. His mother, he feared, was indeed
low!--but HE was his father's son! Nevertheless, he gave her a funeral
at Atherly, long remembered for its barbaric opulence and display.
Thirty carriages, procured from Sacramento at great expense, were
freely offered to his friends to join in the astounding pageant. A
wonderful casket of iron and silver, brought from San Francisco, held
the remains of the ex-washerwoman of Rough and Ready. But a more
remarkable innovation was the addition of a royal crown to the other
ornamentation of the casket. Peter Atherly's ideas of heraldry were very
vague,--Sacramento at that time offered him no opportunity of knowing

what were the arms of the Atherlys,--and the introduction of the royal
crown seemed to satisfy Peter's mind as to what a crest MIGHT be,
while to the ordinary democratic mind it simply suggested that the
corpse was English! Political criticism being thus happily averted, Mrs.
Atherly's body was laid in the little cemetery, not far away from certain
rude wooden crosses which marked the burial-place of wanderers
whose very names were unknown, and in due time a marble shaft was
erected over it. But when, the next day, the county paper contained, in
addition to the column-and-a-half description of the funeral, the more
formal announcement of the death of "Mrs. Sallie Atherly, wife of the
late Philip Atherly, second son of Sir Ashley Atherly, of England,"
criticism and comment broke out. The old pioneers of Rough and
Ready felt that they had been imposed upon, and that in some vague
way the unfortunate woman had made them the victims of a huge
practical joke during all these years. That she had grimly enjoyed their
ignorance of her position they did not doubt. "Why, I remember onct
when I was sorter bullyraggin' her about mixin' up my duds with Doc
Simmons's, and sendin' me Whiskey Dick's old rags, she turned round
sudden with a