LIKE ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES
IT was the summer of 1897, and there was trouble in the Tarwater family.Grandfather Tarwater, after remaining properly subdued and crushed for aquiet decade, had broken out again. This time it was the Klondike fever.His first and one unvarying symptom of such attacks was song. One chantonly he raised, though he remembered no more than the first stanza andbut three lines of that. And the family knew his feet were itching andhis brain was tingling with the old madness, when he lifted hishoarse-cracked voice, now falsetto-cracked, in:
Like Argus of the ancient times, We leave this modern Greece, Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum, To shear the Golden Fleece.
Ten years earlier he had lifted the chant, sung to the air of the“Doxology,” when afflicted with the fever to go gold-mining in Patagonia.The multitudinous family had sat upon him, but had had a hard time doingit. When all else had failed to shake his resolution, they had appliedlawyers to him, with the threat of getting out guardianship papers and ofconfining him in the state asylum for the insane—which was reasonable fora man who had, a quarter of a century before, speculated away all but tenmeagre acres of a California principality, and who had displayed nobetter business acumen ever since.
The application of lawyers to John Tarwater was like the application of amustard plaster. For, in his judgment, they were the gentry, more thanany other, who had skinned him out of the broad Tarwater acres. So, atthe time of his Patagonian fever, the very thought of so drastic a remedywas sufficient to cure him. He quickly demonstrated he was not crazy byshaking the fever from him and agreeing not to go to Patagonia.
Next, he demonstrated how crazy he really was, by deeding over to hisfamily, unsolicited, the ten acres on Tarwater Flat, the house, barn,outbuildings, and water-rights. Also did he turn over the eight hundreddollars in bank that was the long-saved salvage of his wrecked fortune.But for this the family found no cause for committal to the asylum, sincesuch committal would necessarily invalidate what he had done.
“Grandfather is sure peeved,” said Mary, his oldest daughter, herself agrandmother, when her father quit smoking.
All he had retained for himself was a span of old horses, a mountainbuckboard, and his one room in the crowded house. Further, havingaffirmed that he would be beholden to none of them, he got the contractto carry the United States mail, twice a week, from Kelterville up overTarwater Mountain to Old Almaden—which was a sporadically workedquick-silver mine in the upland cattle country. With his old horses ittook all his time to make the two weekly round trips. And for ten years,rain or shine, he had never missed a trip. Nor had he failed once to payhis week’s board into Mary’s hand. This board he had insisted on, in theconvalescence from his Patagonian fever, and he had paid it strictly,though he had given up tobacco in order to be able to do it.
“Huh!” he confided to the ruined water wheel of the old Tarwater Mill,which he had built from the standing timber and which had ground wheatfor the first settlers. “Huh! They’ll never put me in the poor farm solong as I support myself. And without a penny to my name it ain’t likelyany lawyer fellows’ll come snoopin’ around after me.”
And yet, precisely because of these highly rational acts, it was heldthat John Tarwater was mildly crazy!
The first time he had lifted the chant of “Like Argus of the AncientTimes,” had been in 1849, when, twenty-two years’ of age, violentlyattacked by the Californian fever, he had sold two hundred and fortyMichigan acres, forty of it cleared, for the price of four yoke of oxen,and a wagon, and had started across the Plains.
“And we turned off at Fort Hall, where the Oregon emigration wentnorth’ard, and swung south for Californy,” was his way of concluding thenarrative of that arduous journey. “And Bill Ping and me used to ropegrizzlies out of the underbrush of Cache Slough in the SacramentoValley.”
Years of freighting and mining had followed, and, with a stake gleanedfrom the Merced placers, he satisfied the land-hunger of his race andtime by settling in Sonoma County.
During the ten years of carrying the mail across Tarwater Township, upTarwater Valley, and over Tarwater Mountain, most all of which land hadonce been his, he had spent his time dreaming of winning back that landbefore he died. And now, his huge gaunt form more erect than it had beenfor years, with a glinting of blue fires in his small and close-set eyes,he was lifting his ancient chant again.
“There he goes now—listen to him,” said William Tarwater.
“Nobody at home,” laughed Harris Topping, day labourer, husband of AnnieTarwater, and father of her nine children.
The kitchen door opened to admit the old man, returning from feeding hishorses. The song had ceased from his lips; but Mary was irritable from aburnt hand and a grandchild whose stomach refused to digest properlydiluted cows’ milk.
“Now there ain’t no use you carryin’ on that way, father,” she tackledhim. “The time’s past for you to cut and run for a place like theKlondike, and singing won’t buy you nothing.”
“Just the same,” he answered quietly. “I bet I could go to that Klondikeplace and pick up enough gold to buy back the Tarwater lands.”
“Old fool!” Annie contributed.
“You couldn’t buy them back for less’n three hundred thousand and thensome,” was William’s effort at squelching him.
“Then I could pick up three hundred thousand, and then some, if I wasonly there,” the old man retorted placidly.
“Thank God you can’t walk there, or you’d be startin’, I know,” Marycried. “Ocean travel costs money.”
“I used to have money,” her father said humbly.
“Well, you ain’t got any now—so forget it,” William advised. “Them timesis past, like roping bear with Bill Ping. There ain’t no more bear.”
“Just the same—”
But Mary cut him off. Seizing the day’s paper from the kitchen table,she flourished it savagely under her aged progenitor’s nose.
“What do those Klondikers say? There it is in cold print. Only theyoung and robust can stand the Klondike. It’s worse than the north pole.And they’ve left their dead a-plenty there themselves. Look at theirpictures. You’re forty years older ’n the oldest of them.”
John Tarwater did look, but his eyes strayed to other photographs on thehighly sensational front page.
“And look at the photys of them nuggets they brought down,” he said. “Iknow gold. Didn’t I gopher twenty thousand outa the Merced? Andwouldn’t it a-ben a hundred thousand if that cloudburst hadn’t busted mywing-dam? Now if I was only in the Klondike—”
“Crazy as a loon,” William sneered in open aside to the rest.
“A nice way to talk to your father,” Old Man Tarwater censured mildly.“My father’d have walloped the tar out of me with a single-tree if I’dspoke to him that way.”
“But you _are_ crazy, father—” William began.
“Reckon you’re right, son. And that’s where my father wasn’t crazy.He’d a-done it.”
“The old man’s been reading some of them magazine articles about men whosucceeded after forty,” Annie jibed.
“And why not, daughter?” he asked. “And why can’t a man succeed afterhe’s seventy? I was only seventy this year. And mebbe I could succeedif only I could get to the Klondike—”
“Which you ain’t going to get to,” Mary shut him off.
“Oh, well, then,” he sighed, “seein’s I ain’t, I might just as well go tobed.”
He stood up, tall, gaunt, great-boned and gnarled, a splendid ruin of aman. His ragged hair and whiskers were not grey but snowy white, as werethe tufts of hair that stood out on the backs of his huge bony fingers.He moved toward the door, opened it, sighed, and paused with a backwardlook.
“Just the same,” he murmured plaintively, “the bottoms of my feet isitching something terrible.”
Long before the family stirred next morning, his horses fed and harnessedby lantern light, b
reakfast cooked and eaten by lamp fight, Old ManTarwater was off and away down Tarwater Valley on the road toKelterville. Two things were unusual about this usual trip which he hadmade a thousand and forty times since taking the mail contract. He didnot drive to Kelterville, but turned off on the main road south to SantaRosa. Even more remarkable than this was the paper-wrapped parcelbetween his feet. It contained his one decent black suit, which Mary hadbeen long reluctant to see him wear any more, not because it was shabby,but because, as he guessed what was at the back of her mind, it wasdecent enough to bury him in.
And at Santa Rosa, in a second-hand clothes shop, he sold the suitoutright for two dollars and a half. From the same obliging shopman hereceived four dollars for the wedding ring of his long-dead wife. Thespan of horses and the wagon he disposed of for seventy-five dollars,although twenty-five was all he received down in cash. Chancing to meetAlton Granger on the street, to whom never before had he mentioned theten dollars loaned him in ’74, he reminded Alton Granger of the littleaffair, and was promptly paid. Also, of all unbelievable men to be infunds, he so found the town drunkard for whom he had