Susan, after a second appeal from her mother, ran over to the corral and let out the family capital, which streamed with exultant grunt through the forest, darkening the fair green meadow gardens, and happily passing out of sight.
When I had breakfasted I joined Mr. Newty in his trip to the corral, where we stood together for hours, during which I had mastered the story of his years since, in 1850, he left his old home in Pike of Missouri. It was one of those histories common enough through this wide West, yet never failing to startle me with its horrible lesson of social disintegration, of human retrograde.
That brave spirit of Westward Ho! which has been the pillar of fire and cloud leading on the weary march of progress over stretches of desert, lining the way with graves of strong men; of new-born lives; of sad, patient mothers, whose pathetic longing for the new home died with them; of the thousand old and young whose last agony came to them as they marched with eyes strained on after the sunken sun, and whose shallow barrows scarcely lift over the drifting dust of the desert; that restless spirit which has dared to uproot the old and plant the new, kindling the grand energy of California, laying foundations for a State to be, that is admirable, is poetic, is to fill an immortal page in the story of America; but when, instead of urging on to wresting from new lands something better than old can give, it degenerates into mere weak-minded restlessness, killing the power of growth, the ideal of home, the faculty of repose, it results in that race of perpetual emigrants who roam as dreary waifs over the West, losing possessions, love of life, love of God, slowly dragging from valley to valley, till they fall by the wayside, happy if some chance stranger performs for them the last rites,—often less fortunate, as blanched bones and fluttering rags upon too many hillsides plainly tell.
The Newtys were of this dreary brotherhood. In 1850, with a small family of that authentic strain of high-bred swine for which Pike County is widely known, as Mr. Newty avers, they bade Missouri and their snug farm good-by, and, having packed their household goods into a wagon, drawn by two spotted oxen, set out with the baby Susan for Oregon, where they came after a year’s march, tired, and cursed with a permanent discontent. There they had taken up a rancho, a quarter-section of public domain, which at the end of two years was “improved” to the extent of the “neatest little worm fence this side of Pike,” a barn, and a smoke-house. “In another year,” said my friend, “I’d have dug for a house, but we tuck ager, and the second baby died.” One day there came a man who “let on that he knowed” land in California much fairer and more worthy tillage than Oregon’s best, so the poor Newtys harnessed up the wagon and turned their backs upon a home nearly ready for comfortable life, and swept south with pigs and plunder. Through all the years this story had repeated itself, new homes gotten to the edge of completion, more babies born, more graves made, more pigs, who replenished as only the Pike County variety may, till it seemed to me the mere multiplication of them must reach a sufficient dead weight to anchor the family; but this was dispelled when Newty remarked, “These yer hogs is awkward about moving, and I’ve pretty much made up my mind to put ’em all into bacon this fall, and sell out and start for Montana.”
Poor fellow! at Montana he will probably find a man from Texas who in half an hour will persuade him that happiness lies there.
As we walked back to their camp, and when Dame Newty hove in sight, my friend ventured to say, “Don’t you mind the old woman and her coons. She’s from Arkansas. She used to say no man could have Susan who couldn’t show coonskins enough of his own killing to make a bed-quilt, but she’s over that mostly.” In spite of this assurance my heart fell a trifle when, the first moment of our return, she turned to her husband and asked, “Do you mind what a dead-open-and-shut on coons our little Johnnie was when he was ten years old?” I secretly wondered if the dead-open-and-shut had anything to do with his untimely demise at eleven, but kept silence.
Regarding her as a sad product of the disease of chronic emigration, her hard, thin nature, all angles and stings, became to me one of the most depressing and pathetic spectacles, and the more when her fever-and-ague boy, a mass of bilious lymph, came and sat by her, looking up with great, haggard eyes, as if pleading for something, he knew not what, but which I plainly saw only death could bestow.
Noon brought the hour of my departure. Susan and her father talked apart a moment, then the old man said the two would ride along with me for a few miles, as he had to go in that direction to look for new hog-feed.
I despatched my two men with the pack-horse, directing them to follow the trail, then saddled my Kaweah and waited for the Newtys. The old man saddled a shaggy little mountain pony for himself, and for Susan strapped a sheepskin upon the back of a young and fiery mustang colt.
While they were getting ready, I made my horse fast to a stake and stepped over to bid good-by to Mrs. Newty. I said to her, in tones of deference, “I have come to bid you good-by, madam, and when I get back this way I hope you will be kind enough to tell me one or two really first-rate coon-stories. I am quite ignorant of that animal, having been raised in countries where they are extremely rare, and I would like to know more of what seems to be to you a creature of such interest.” The wet, gray eyes relaxed, as I fancied, a trifle of their asperity; a faint kindle seemed to light them for an instant as she asked, “You never see coons catch frogs in a spring branch?”