The Night-born
It was in the old Alta-Inyo Club--a warm night for San
Francisco--and through the open windows, hushed and far, came
the brawl of the streets. The talk had led on from the Graft
Prosecution and the latest signs that the town was to be run
wide open, down through all the grotesque sordidness and
rottenness of manhate and man-meanness, until the name of
O'Brien was mentioned--O'Brien, the promising young pugilist
who had been killed in the prize-ring the night before. At once
the air had seemed to freshen. O'Brien had been a clean-living
young man with ideals. He neither drank, smoked, nor swore, and
his had been the body of a beautiful young god. He had even
carried his prayer-book to the ringside. They found it in his
coat pocket in the dressing-room. . . afterward.
Here was Youth, clean and wholesome, unsullied--the thing of
glory and wonder for men to conjure with..... after it has been
lost to them and they have turned middle-aged. And so well did
we conjure, that Romance came and for an hour led us far from
the man-city and its snarling roar. Bardwell, in a way, started
it by quoting from Thoreau; but it was old Trefethan, bald-headed and dewlapped, who took up the quotation and for the hour to come was romance incarnate. At first we wondered how many Scotches he had consumed since dinner, but very soon all that was forgotten.
"It was in 1898--I was thirty-five then," he said. "Yes, I know
you are adding it up. You're right. I'm forty-seven now; look
ten years more; and the doctors say--damn the doctors anyway!"
He lifted the long glass to his lips and sipped it slowly to
soothe away his irritation.
"But I was young. . . once. I was young twelve years ago, and I
had hair on top of my head, and my stomach was lean as a
runner's, and the longest day was none too long for me. I was a
husky back there in '98. You remember me, Milner. You knew me
then. Wasn't I a pretty good bit of all right?"
Milner nodded and agreed. Like Trefethan, he was another mining
engineer who had cleaned up a fortune in the Klondike.
"You certainly were, old man," Milner said. "I'll never forget
when you cleaned out those lumberjacks in the M. & M. that
night that little newspaper man started the row. Slavin was in
the country at the time,"--this to us--"and his manager wanted
to get up a match with Trefethan."
"Well, look at me now," Trefethan commanded angrily. "That's
what the Goldstead did to me--God knows how many millions, but
nothing left in my soul..... nor in my veins. The good red
blood is gone. I am a jellyfish, a huge, gross mass of
oscillating protoplasm, a--a . . ."
But language failed him, and he drew solace from the long
glass.
"Women looked at me then; and turned their heads to look a
second time. Strange that I never married. But the girl. That's
what I started to tell you about. I met her a thousand miles
from anywhere, and then some. And she quoted to me those very
words of Thoreau that Bardwell quoted a moment ago--the ones
about the day-born gods and the night-born."
"It was after I had made my locations on Goldstead--and didn't
know what a treasure-pot that that trip creek was going to
prove--that I made that trip east over the Rockies, angling
across to the Great Up North there the Rockies are something
more than a back-bone. They are a boundary, a dividing line, a
wall impregnable and unscalable. There is no intercourse across
them, though, on occasion, from the early days, wandering
trappers have crossed them, though more were lost by the way
than ever came through. And that was precisely why I tackled
the job. It was a traverse any man would be proud to make. I am
prouder of it right now than anything else I have ever done.
"It is an unknown land. Great stretches of it have never been
explored. There are big valleys there where the white man has
never set foot, and Indian tribes as primitive as ten thousand
years ... almost, for they have had some contact with the
whites. Parties of them come out once in a while to trade, and
that is all. Even the Hudson Bay Company failed to find them
and farm them.