CHAPTER II.John and MarthaI am not an admirer of men. Looking at most any man, I find myself thinking what a pity it was he had to grow up, since as a little, helpless child he would have made a complete success.Sam Stanley is different. There is some of the child left in Sam, just as there is, I think, in any good man or woman—a little seasoning of simplicity, really, is all it amounts to—but there is a quality about Sam that makes a person feel that he set out, early in life, to follow the recipe for being a man, and that he has made a thorough job of it. Physically, alone, Sam would make about three of most men, with plenty left over for gravy. But it is not that. It is the something that makes him stroll up, unarmed, to a cowpuncher who is bragging wild with moonshine and clinking with firearms, and say, in that drawling, gentle voice of his, “What’s the trouble here, son?” And the something that makes that cowpuncher get polite first, and evaporate immediately after. And Sam whiteheaded, now, at that.Why he, as a young man, with a pretty fair education and a tidy sum of money left him by his father, who had been a well thought of lawyer in Massachusetts, should come out here to Nevada, take up his homestead land, and settle content for the rest of his life, has always been more or less of a mystery to me. I will warn you, though, that it is a mystery that doesn’t get solved in this story, unless you care to take Sam’s explanation of it.He says that, when his father died, it left him without a relative, whom he knew of, in the world. He was twenty years old, and he owned a set of roving toes and an imagination. So he went to California, seeking romance and gold. Finding neither, he took a small boat named The Indiana, and went up to Oregon, where he joined a friend of his, named Tom Cone, who had a place on the Columbia River near Rooster Rock.One day Sam was out in the woods—he said there was nothing to be out in except woods or rain in Oregon in those days—and he heard a noise behind a thicket. He thought Tom, who lived for practical jokes, was getting ready to pull one. So Sam crept up to the thicket, stooping low and making no noise, and shouted “Boo!” at the biggest bear he had ever seen in his life. Sam says he has forgotten what the bear said. He decided, then and there, that the Oregon forests were no place for a man with no more sense than he had; he left them, and came down here to Nevada.“No forests, no fences, no folks, and a free view for ten thousand miles,” is the way Sam puts it, “so, I stayed. It was the first place I’d ever found where I didn’t feel hampered for room.”He staked out his hundred and sixty acres with Boulder Creek tumbling and roaring through them. He built his cabin, out of railroad ties, in a grove of quaking aspen trees. He hired help, and built fences, and dug ditches, and planted crops, and bought stock. He bought more land. He hired more help, dug more ditches, planted bigger crops, bought more stock. He has been doing that, regularly, ever since. And, of course, he located the lead and silver mine, on his property, that made him millions, if it made him a cent, before it played out. But, in spite of the money that “Old Lady Luck,” as he called his mine, made for him, Sam never gave his heart to it. It was the Desert Moon Ranch that he loved, and the money he made from it that he was proud of. That was why, when the honor of the ranch went under, during those terrible weeks last summer, Sam all but went under with it.After Margarita left the place from her visit of 1909, taking the twins with her, Sam went around for a week or two, with his head cocked to one side as if he was listening for something. I knew what he was missing, and I was not surprised when, one day, he told me he had decided to send to San Francisco and get a couple of children and adopt them.He wrote to a big hospital in San Francisco and got in touch with a trained nurse who would be willing to come up and live on the ranch and take care of the two children. He had her go to an orphan’s home and select the children and bring them with her when she came. Sam’s specifications concerning them were that they were to be a boy and a girl, under ten and over five years old, healthy, American, and brown-eyed. (Sam’s own eyes are the color of ball-bluing, giving his face, with his red cheeks, and his white beard, the patriotic effect I have mentioned.)The nurse came early in September with the two brown-eyed children, named Vera and Alvin. Sam at once re-named them. John, he said, was the only name for a boy, and Mary the only name for a girl. But, since my name was Mary, he would let the little girl have Martha, which meant, according to Sam, “Boss of the Ranch.”The nurse’s name was Mrs. Ollie Ricker. If you can imagine a blue-eyed, pink-cheeked, yellow-haired bisque doll, turned old, you will have a good idea of her appearance at that time. I don’t know how old she was then. I don’t know how old she is now. Younger by many years than I am, I am sure; and yet she has always seemed old to me; old with the sudden but inevitable oldness of a wrecked ship, or a burned-down house, or a felled tree, that makes a body forget that a year ago, or perhaps only yesterday, it was a fresh, new thing. She never talked. I do not mean that she never chatted, or gossiped. I mean that she never said one word, not, “Good-morning,” nor, “Good-night,” nor, “If you please,” nor, “Thank you,” if she could possibly avoid it. At the end of sixteen years of daily association with Mrs. Ricker, that is, up to the time of the second murder on the Desert Moon, I knew exactly as much about her past life as you know at this minute.John, at that time, was nine years old. He was as bright, and as upstanding, and as handsome, as any little fellow to be found anywhere; bashful at first, but ready and glad to be friendly, with an uplifting smile that wrinkled his short nose and that would wheedle a cooky out of a pickle jar. I may as well say, now, that this description of John, at nine years old, is as good a description as I can give of John at twenty-five, if you will draw his height up to six feet, and put on weight accordingly.Martha, when she came to us, was a frail, white-faced mite, with enormous brown eyes that looked as if they had been removed from a Jersey heifer and set in her white face. The papers from the orphanage gave her age as five years; but even I, who knew less about children than it was decent for any woman to know, soon saw that something was wrong. She walked well enough, but she could scarcely talk at all. Her ways and her habits were those of a two-year-old infant, yet she was far too large for that age. Before she had been with us a week I knew that Martha was not quite right in her mind.Mrs. Ricker knew it, too. Her excuse was, that she had chosen Martha because she was so pretty; that she had had no opportunity to judge her other characteristics. She insisted that she thought, with proper care, Martha would develop normally.I knew better. Sam knew it, too. But, when I begged and besought him not to adopt her, he brought out an argument good and conclusive for him.“If I don’t adopt her, and take care of her,” said Sam, “who the heck would?”So adopt her he did. And he spent a small fortune on doctors, specialists, for her. None of them could do anything. It was, they said, a hopeless case of retarded development. So, at twenty-one years of age, Martha, though the care and doctoring had given her a fine healthy body, had the mind of a child of five or six years—not too bright a child, either. That was at best. At worst—— Well, no matter. Entirely harmless, the doctors said; but I always had my doubts.Sam tried all sorts of teachers for her, too; bringing them from back east and paying them sums to stagger. But, in the end, we found that Mrs. Ricker was better with her than anyone else. She never pretended any particular love for Martha, but she took care of her, and kept her sweet and clean, and put up with her tempers, when many a better woman than Ollie Ricker would have gone away in disgust. I am not saying that, if there is a Judgment Day, as many say and some believe, I’d care to be standing in Ollie Ricker’s shoes, if she is wearing them at that time; but I do say that her gentleness, and her patience, through all those years with Martha, should be counted to her credit, whether or no.
I am not an admirer of men. Looking at most any man, I find myself thinking what a pity it was he had to grow up, since as a little, helpless child he would have made a complete success.
Sam Stanley is different. There is some of the child left in Sam, just as there is, I think, in any good man or woman—a little seasoning of simplicity, really, is all it amounts to—but there is a quality about Sam that makes a person feel that he set out, early in life, to follow the recipe for being a man, and that he has made a thorough job of it. Physically, alone, Sam would make about three of most men, with plenty left over for gravy. But it is not that. It is the something that makes him stroll up, unarmed, to a cowpuncher who is bragging wild with moonshine and clinking with firearms, and say, in that drawling, gentle voice of his, “What’s the trouble here, son?” And the something that makes that cowpuncher get polite first, and evaporate immediately after. And Sam whiteheaded, now, at that.
Why he, as a young man, with a pretty fair education and a tidy sum of money left him by his father, who had been a well thought of lawyer in Massachusetts, should come out here to Nevada, take up his homestead land, and settle content for the rest of his life, has always been more or less of a mystery to me. I will warn you, though, that it is a mystery that doesn’t get solved in this story, unless you care to take Sam’s explanation of it.
He says that, when his father died, it left him without a relative, whom he knew of, in the world. He was twenty years old, and he owned a set of roving toes and an imagination. So he went to California, seeking romance and gold. Finding neither, he took a small boat named The Indiana, and went up to Oregon, where he joined a friend of his, named Tom Cone, who had a place on the Columbia River near Rooster Rock.
One day Sam was out in the woods—he said there was nothing to be out in except woods or rain in Oregon in those days—and he heard a noise behind a thicket. He thought Tom, who lived for practical jokes, was getting ready to pull one. So Sam crept up to the thicket, stooping low and making no noise, and shouted “Boo!” at the biggest bear he had ever seen in his life. Sam says he has forgotten what the bear said. He decided, then and there, that the Oregon forests were no place for a man with no more sense than he had; he left them, and came down here to Nevada.
“No forests, no fences, no folks, and a free view for ten thousand miles,” is the way Sam puts it, “so, I stayed. It was the first place I’d ever found where I didn’t feel hampered for room.”
He staked out his hundred and sixty acres with Boulder Creek tumbling and roaring through them. He built his cabin, out of railroad ties, in a grove of quaking aspen trees. He hired help, and built fences, and dug ditches, and planted crops, and bought stock. He bought more land. He hired more help, dug more ditches, planted bigger crops, bought more stock. He has been doing that, regularly, ever since. And, of course, he located the lead and silver mine, on his property, that made him millions, if it made him a cent, before it played out. But, in spite of the money that “Old Lady Luck,” as he called his mine, made for him, Sam never gave his heart to it. It was the Desert Moon Ranch that he loved, and the money he made from it that he was proud of. That was why, when the honor of the ranch went under, during those terrible weeks last summer, Sam all but went under with it.
After Margarita left the place from her visit of 1909, taking the twins with her, Sam went around for a week or two, with his head cocked to one side as if he was listening for something. I knew what he was missing, and I was not surprised when, one day, he told me he had decided to send to San Francisco and get a couple of children and adopt them.
He wrote to a big hospital in San Francisco and got in touch with a trained nurse who would be willing to come up and live on the ranch and take care of the two children. He had her go to an orphan’s home and select the children and bring them with her when she came. Sam’s specifications concerning them were that they were to be a boy and a girl, under ten and over five years old, healthy, American, and brown-eyed. (Sam’s own eyes are the color of ball-bluing, giving his face, with his red cheeks, and his white beard, the patriotic effect I have mentioned.)
The nurse came early in September with the two brown-eyed children, named Vera and Alvin. Sam at once re-named them. John, he said, was the only name for a boy, and Mary the only name for a girl. But, since my name was Mary, he would let the little girl have Martha, which meant, according to Sam, “Boss of the Ranch.”
The nurse’s name was Mrs. Ollie Ricker. If you can imagine a blue-eyed, pink-cheeked, yellow-haired bisque doll, turned old, you will have a good idea of her appearance at that time. I don’t know how old she was then. I don’t know how old she is now. Younger by many years than I am, I am sure; and yet she has always seemed old to me; old with the sudden but inevitable oldness of a wrecked ship, or a burned-down house, or a felled tree, that makes a body forget that a year ago, or perhaps only yesterday, it was a fresh, new thing. She never talked. I do not mean that she never chatted, or gossiped. I mean that she never said one word, not, “Good-morning,” nor, “Good-night,” nor, “If you please,” nor, “Thank you,” if she could possibly avoid it. At the end of sixteen years of daily association with Mrs. Ricker, that is, up to the time of the second murder on the Desert Moon, I knew exactly as much about her past life as you know at this minute.
John, at that time, was nine years old. He was as bright, and as upstanding, and as handsome, as any little fellow to be found anywhere; bashful at first, but ready and glad to be friendly, with an uplifting smile that wrinkled his short nose and that would wheedle a cooky out of a pickle jar. I may as well say, now, that this description of John, at nine years old, is as good a description as I can give of John at twenty-five, if you will draw his height up to six feet, and put on weight accordingly.
Martha, when she came to us, was a frail, white-faced mite, with enormous brown eyes that looked as if they had been removed from a Jersey heifer and set in her white face. The papers from the orphanage gave her age as five years; but even I, who knew less about children than it was decent for any woman to know, soon saw that something was wrong. She walked well enough, but she could scarcely talk at all. Her ways and her habits were those of a two-year-old infant, yet she was far too large for that age. Before she had been with us a week I knew that Martha was not quite right in her mind.
Mrs. Ricker knew it, too. Her excuse was, that she had chosen Martha because she was so pretty; that she had had no opportunity to judge her other characteristics. She insisted that she thought, with proper care, Martha would develop normally.
I knew better. Sam knew it, too. But, when I begged and besought him not to adopt her, he brought out an argument good and conclusive for him.
“If I don’t adopt her, and take care of her,” said Sam, “who the heck would?”
So adopt her he did. And he spent a small fortune on doctors, specialists, for her. None of them could do anything. It was, they said, a hopeless case of retarded development. So, at twenty-one years of age, Martha, though the care and doctoring had given her a fine healthy body, had the mind of a child of five or six years—not too bright a child, either. That was at best. At worst—— Well, no matter. Entirely harmless, the doctors said; but I always had my doubts.
Sam tried all sorts of teachers for her, too; bringing them from back east and paying them sums to stagger. But, in the end, we found that Mrs. Ricker was better with her than anyone else. She never pretended any particular love for Martha, but she took care of her, and kept her sweet and clean, and put up with her tempers, when many a better woman than Ollie Ricker would have gone away in disgust. I am not saying that, if there is a Judgment Day, as many say and some believe, I’d care to be standing in Ollie Ricker’s shoes, if she is wearing them at that time; but I do say that her gentleness, and her patience, through all those years with Martha, should be counted to her credit, whether or no.