第21章 CHAPTER IV(3)

"The man what picked you up that day.I mean,"continued Mulrady,seeing the marks of evident ignorance on the old man's face,--"Imean a sort of grave,genteel chap,suthin'between a parson and a circus-rider.You might have seen him round the house talkin'to your gals."But Slinn's entire forgetfulness of Don Caesar was evidently unfeigned.Whatever sudden accession of memory he had at the time of his attack,the incident that caused it had no part in his recollection.With the exception of these rare intervals of domestic confidences with his crippled private secretary,Mulrady gave himself up to money-getting.Without any especial faculty for it--an easy prey often to unscrupulous financiers--his unfailing luck,however,carried him safely through,until his very mistakes seemed to be simply insignificant means to a large significant end and a part of his original plan.He sank another shaft,at a great expense,with a view to following the lead he had formerly found,against the opinions of the best mining engineers,and struck the artesian spring he did NOT find at that time,with a volume of water that enabled him not only to work his own mine,but to furnish supplies to his less fortunate neighbors at a vast profit.

A league of tangled forest and canyon behind Rough-and-Ready,for which he had paid Don Ramon's heirs an extravagant price in the presumption that it was auriferous,furnished the most accessible timber to build the town,at prices which amply remunerated him.

The practical schemes of experienced men,the wildest visions of daring dreams delayed or abortive for want of capital,eventually fell into his hands.Men sneered at his methods,but bought his shares.Some who affected to regard him simply as a man of money were content to get only his name to any enterprise.Courted by his superiors,quoted by his equals,and admired by his inferiors,he bore his elevation equally without ostentation or dignity.

Bidden to banquets,and forced by his position as director or president into the usual gastronomic feats of that civilization and period,he partook of simple food,and continued his old habit of taking a cup of coffee with milk and sugar at dinner.Without professing temperance,he drank sparingly in a community where alcoholic stimulation was a custom.With neither refinement nor an extended vocabulary,he was seldom profane,and never indelicate.

With nothing of the Puritan in his manner or conversation,he seemed to be as strange to the vices of civilization as he was to its virtues.That such a man should offer little to and receive little from the companionship of women of any kind was a foregone conclusion.Without the dignity of solitude,he was pathetically alone.

Meantime,the days passed;the first six months of his opulence were drawing to a close,and in that interval he had more than doubled the amount of his discovered fortune.The rainy season set in early.Although it dissipated the clouds of dust under which Nature and Art seemed to be slowly disappearing,it brought little beauty to the landscape at first,and only appeared to lay bare the crudenesses of civilization.The unpainted wooden buildings of Rough-and-Ready,soaked and dripping with rain,took upon themselves a sleek and shining ugliness,as of second-hand garments;the absence of cornices or projections to break the monotony of the long straight lines of downpour made the town appear as if it had been recently submerged,every vestige of ornamentation swept away,and only the bare outlines left.Mud was everywhere;the outer soil seemed to have risen and invaded the houses even to their most secret recesses,as if outraged Nature was trying to revenge herself.Mud was brought into the saloons and barrooms and express offices,on boots,on clothes,on baggage,and sometimes appeared mysteriously in splashes of red color on the walls,without visible conveyance.The dust of six months,closely packed in cornice and carving,yielded under the steady rain a thin yellow paint,that dropped on wayfarers or unexpectedly oozed out of ceilings and walls on the wretched inhabitants within.The outskirts of Rough-and-Ready and the dried hills round Los Gatos did not appear to fare much better;the new vegetation had not yet made much headway against the dead grasses of the summer;the pines in the hollow wept lugubriously into a small rivulet that had sprung suddenly into life near the old trail;everywhere was the sound of dropping,splashing,gurgling,or rushing waters.

More hideous than ever,the new Mulrady house lifted itself against the leaden sky,and stared with all its large-framed,shutterless windows blankly on the prospect,until they seemed to the wayfarer to become mere mirrors set in the walls,reflecting only the watery landscape,and unable to give the least indication of light or heat within.Nevertheless,there was a fire in Mulrady's private office that December afternoon,of a smoky,intermittent variety,that sufficed more to record the defects of hasty architecture than to comfort the millionaire and his private secretary,who had lingered after the early withdrawal of the clerks.For the next day was Christmas,and,out of deference to the near approach of this festivity,a half-holiday had been given to the employees.