Chapter IV

In the long, tedious journey between Washington and San Francisco, Jeff had various side lights on America never before glimpsed; and he did not always know what to make of them. His own South was already old and tame, possessing as high a state of civilization as the most of Europe, but this West was wild as the buffalo herds that roamed it, and glittering, glaring, brand new. He saw the march of the colonists who beheld visions in the clouds of dust that all but hid the lumbering wagons; he saw ugly towns rising up on blizzard-swept prairies; he saw Indian villages and mining camps. He wondered about the gaunt stage driver, with little, hard eyes set in the old-leather wrinkles of his face; he was stared at, in rapt amazement, by a crowd of cattlemen who had gathered to meet the stage; he was introduced in spite of himself to the entire stage-load of raw-boned, uncultured frontiersmen and women, who shook him freely by the hand and conversed pleasantly with him. All these things and people he hated and scorned. He was more convinced than ever that the South had been put upon and crushed by an ignoble horde of peasants; that the Republican idea was an abomination and a failure; and that further existence in the United States was more than he could bear.

He was wholly sincere in all this. It was not a pose with him; his belief in the superiority of birth and culture over strength and achievement had, ever since the war, been nursed and cherished until it was an absolute conviction. Nor was he ever a cad, descending to a cheap snob’s tricks to impress the humble people. He was secure enough in himself so that he did not care to impress them, in the first place. Throughout the journey his perfect manners never faltered; and while these clear-eyed frontiersmen would have been quick to detect a false front and hilariously tear it down, laughing to scorn in a moment any pose or affectation, they were really secretly impressed with Jeff; and except for irrepressible curiosity, treated him with entire respect. They were even more humble, less presuming than Jeff thought they would be. If in reality he missed the real spirit of the West; if he failed to discern something noble and fine and far-reaching in the struggle of these precursers in the wilderness, it was not because of cheap standards. However mistaken his philosophy, he was devout in it.

He arrived in San Francisco about the middle of August, not more than three weeks after he had left home. As Seward had promised, the _Ethan Allen_ was waiting to take him to Alaska.

She proved to be a rather small, but quite comfortable steam schooner, built during the war and having the mechanical improvements that the war developed and improved, including a screw propeller in place of a paddle wheel. Jeff did not, however, feel any increased enthusiasm for the journey. She was merely a trading vessel of an ordinary sort, possessing none of the luxuries such as he used to know on the Mississippi packets; and none of his kind were on board. In these days America was great on the sea as well as on land, and the _Ethan Allen_ was manned by Americans rather than by the seafarers of foreign countries; but Jeff’s training did not permit companionship with such men as these. To him they were an unfamiliar type: lean, brawny men of Boston. Evidently he was the only passenger on board.

He had hoped to enjoy the captain’s company, at least; but now he gave over the idea. Some of the captains in command of the Confederate men-of-war had been officers and gentlemen of the most gallant sort, but evidently the commanders of small traders came of another school. At first he could hardly believe that the short, heavily built old fellow giving commands from the bridge was actually the captain of the ship.

He wore no coat at all, his only insignia was a dingy cap of blue; he bawled like a steer when he gave his orders; and his manner was decidedly not that of a gentleman. Jeff noticed one or two significant things concerning him, however. One of them was that his sailors looked at him with a certain look of trust and confidence which Jeff had seen too many times—in terrible days of the Red Years—ever to mistake. Another was that he seemed to get things done.

On closer inspection Jeff saw that he was a man about sixty years of age, with knotty hands, a chest like a barrel, and a round, good-natured face that was lighted rather frequently with a remarkably pleasant smile. He had rather bright blue eyes, twinkling at times; and was evidently gifted with considerable humor of an obvious kind.

“So you are the important passenger we were told to wait two weeks for,” the Captain began cordially. “It’s hotter’n a horned toad, ain’t it? Why don’t you have off your coat?”

Jeff felt like explaining that a gentleman did not go about with his coat off; but he knew that this would be wasting his sweetness on desert air. He simply protested that he did not feel the heat.

“You needn’t keep your com’ny manners with us,” Captain Skinner informed him. “We’re just plain folks. Say, you’re not English, are you?”

“No. I am from North Carolina.”

“Good. I’m glad you are an American. I just sailed from England, and it sure is good to be back among real Americans. You’re keepin’ your coat on sort of reminded me of them. They’re stiff devils. For my part I don’t want no shakes with ’em.”

“You don’t believe, then, that England is the greatest nation in the world to-day?” Jeff asked gravely.

“Believe what! My Gosh, do I look plumb water-logged to you? England the greatest country! We’ll show England who’s the greatest country, if she ever gets gay with us! My boy, did you ever hear of the United States? Do you know what we’ve accomplished in ninety years? Lor’ love me, I never heard tell of no such question as that before.”

Jeff started to turn away, estranged rather than amused, but he did not have the opportunity. Suddenly the skipper began to bawl, loud and more loudly, until it seemed that the ships beyond the Golden Gate would hear him and come in. He seemed to be calling a name, but what it was Jeff could not tell for sure. It sounded like Moll—long-drawn-out like the name of a family cow—as much as anything else. And now he had his answer.

“Here I am,” some one said from the door of the pilot house. “Uncle Dave, you will call out the fire department with such a voice.”

Jeff looked up, startled by the tone, and saw what he had hardly expected to see on an Alaska-bound trading vessel—a young and undeniably pretty girl. She was not, Jeff felt, his own kind of girl—the kind to whom he had once showed the finest of Southern chivalry—yet to deny that she was pretty would be simply to talk through his tall, silk, fashionable hat! He had an uncomfortable feeling that she was almost beautiful, possessing deep, blue, radiant, and certainly lovely eyes, lively color, pleasant-curving lips and a magnificent crown of corn-colored hair. She spoke rather boldly, Jeff thought; not modestly and quietly as was the way of speaking among the girls he knew. Yet he was a just man, and he had to admit that the voice affected him rather cheerily, and he would not quickly tire of hearing it.

For all these points in her favor, Jeff most certainly and surely disapproved of the girl who now stood at the captain’s side. In the first place, he was shocked at her garb. She wore a midshipman’s uniform—trousers and all—and though the suit brought out her well-curved little figure in a manner somehow pleasing to the imagination Jeff was sure he didn’t like the effect. It wasn’t modest, hang it! Girls he knew did not go around in men’s pants! She looked somehow too nimble in the outfit, capable and spry and hobbledehoy. Jeff suspected that she was an incorrigible tomboy, a creature which in general he disapproved of. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see her go skipping to the tops. Even at that, she was as much as he could expect of Captain Skinner’s niece.

Such dignity and courtly grace as the early ante-bellum years demanded in woman were conspicuously absent in Molly. There was not a thing dignified about her. Jeff would not say that she was actually ungraceful, but at least she did not strike the graceful and picturesque poses—hands turned out and chin inclined over shoulder—which the latest books on etiquette recommended. And now Captain Skinner was introducing him to her.

“My dear, this is the young man who is going to sail with us—Mr. Jefferson Sharp. Molly, you ought to heard the question this feller just asked me.”

“What was it, Uncle Dave?”

“He just asked me if I didn’t think England was the greatest country in the world. Honey, does the old man begin to look foolish in his old age that people say such things to him?”

“There are Americans who really think so,” the girl told him, smiling quietly. “There are people who think everything foreign is superior to everything American; they have been told that so many times by foreigners they have begun to believe it.”

Jeff stood a trifle more erect. “I wouldn’t care to argue the point,” he said stiffly. “We all have our views.”

“No, we wouldn’t want to start an argument that might end in a squabble, considering we are going to have so many days in one another’s company,” the girl replied. “Of course we can assume you are an American?”

Jeff looked at her with growing displeasure. “By conquest only,” he said, bowing slightly. “My home was in North Carolina.”

The girl’s expression changed: there was something almost like compassion in her bright eyes. “It will be a little hard, at first, to readjust yourself to new conditions. I can well understand that. It may be hard to consider yourself an American again, to feel as you used to feel, before the war. I’m sure you’ll accomplish it in time.”

“I never can, I’m afraid, Miss—”

“Miss Forest. Try, anyway, Mr. Sharp. It is worth while, I assure you. A republic makes many mistakes, but it’s worth clinging to in the end. Try to forget your grief.”

She smiled rather tenderly; and Jeff felt grateful in spite of himself. This girl was of a different caste and class; yet in her was the dream of motherhood, and that had reached out to Jeff. If there was anything on earth of which this lonely, embittered boy stood most in need, it was mothering; and no wonder that she had struck a responsive chord. He had always been easily moved, tender-hearted as a child. Union men who had been taken prisoners by his battalion had cause to know this fact. He looked at her with shining eyes.

Now, as they waited, the ship moved from the dock. Captain Skinner bawled certain orders; a handful of people on the dock waved in farewell. The little waves moved between the ship and the shore.

“We’re off,” Jeff said quietly.

“Yes. We are saying farewell to America for some weeks, at least.” She was still deep in the thoughtful mood of a moment ago, as she watched the shore recede. “Farewell to the land of friendly faces!”

“And I guess it is farewell to civilization, too.”

“Yes, we are leaving civilization behind us—the kind of civilization that Lincoln believed in—the kind that America stands for.” She looked at him mysteriously. “It will be different from what you think, though. It may be exactly to your liking.” So they stood and watched the little ship leaping into the waves, and their youthful dreams no man could know.