Hard-Pan: A Story of Bonanza Fortunes

by Geraldine Bonner

The colonel stood looking after her, amazed, alarmed, uncomprehending. In the old days he would have followed her. Now he stood listening at the closed door, not daring even to knock. When he heard her sobbing cease he came tiptoeing away as though afraid of reawakening her drowsing grief. Standing by the table, he looked long and ruefully at the lamp-globe.

“Poor little girl!” he whispered; “she’s homesick, too.”

The old man’s own homesickness was an incurable malady. As he had said himself, he was too old for transplanting. He could not shake himself down in the new rut. He could not get accustomed to the strange city and its unfamiliar thoroughfares. Its alien aspect seemed to force in upon him the sense of his insignificance and failure. He walked along the streets and no one knew him. There were no cheery voices to cry out, “So long, colonel,” and wave a welcoming hand to a hat-brim. People jostled him to one side, seeing only a thin, threadbare old man in a faded coat. He had no consciousness that they would turn and look at him, and point him out to the stranger from the East whom they were “taking round.” He was no more to Sacramento than it was to him. He grew so to dread the feeling of oppressive melancholy that fell upon him in its unfriendly streets that he gave up going out, and spent most of his time in the garden or in Viola’s room.

When with her he tried to be bright and to make the best of the situation. He saw in her changed attitude nothing but blame of him, and he would have borne anything uncomplainingly to win back the love he thought she withheld. That another and a deeper feeling could be causing her heaviness of spirit he did not dream. Like many another man, he had no instinct to see into the hidden inner life of the child that was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.

He hardly ever let his thoughts revert to the cause that had made her take her hasty step. He knew he had been to blame, and the colonel was a man who always forgot his own mistakes. In the course of time they ceased to be mistakes, and, in his eyes, assumed the proportions of worthy attempts that an unjust fate had frustrated. Just what he had meant by using his daughter’s name in his intercourse with Gault he himself hardly knew—nothing to her actual detriment, that was certain. If any one had breathed a word of blame against her, or tried to harm one hair of her head, he would have been quick to rise in her defense, wrathful as a tiger. The wrongs that do not come directly back, like boomerangs, were wrongs the responsibility of which the colonel readily shifted from his shoulders. He had wanted money for Viola, and he used the readiest means to his hand to get it. The jingling of gold in his pocket, the gladness of her face when he brought her some trifling gift, made everything outside the pleasure of the moment count for naught.

And now they were estranged. A veil of indissoluble coldness separated them. Yet she was never curt or sharp or cross to him. Sometimes it seemed to him that she was the same in word and voice and manner as she had always been, only something had gone from her—light, cheer, gaiety, some inexpressible, loving, lovely thing that had made her the star of his life. Once, taking his courage in both hands, he had asked her if she was angry with him, and then shrank like a whipped dog before the startled negation of her eyes and her quick “Why, no, father! How could I be?”

The one diversion of the colonel’s life was the society of his fellow-boarders. Though he abused them roundly up-stairs to Viola, he took undoubted satisfaction in regaling them with the stories of his past greatness. Night after night he bestrode his hobby, and entertained an admiring circle with its evolutions. It was many years since he had had so large and so attentive an audience, and he profited by the occasion, giving even more remarkable accounts of the men he had made than those with which he had once amused John Gault.

For some time his listeners awarded him a half-credulous attention; but soon their interest in the garrulous old man died away. Miss Mercer expressed the opinion that the colonel was “no better than an old, worn-out fake,” a sentiment which found an echo in the breasts of every other inmate of the house—even Mrs. Seymour quietly, in her own mind, relegating him to the ranks of harmless frauds. The traditions of San Francisco were not known of all men in Sacramento. The colonel found that he was singing the songs of Zion in a strange land. No one believed him. When he spoke of his friendship with Adolphus Maroney, and how thirty years before he had laid the foundation of Jerry McCormick’s fortune, the listeners made little attempt to hide their disbelief, and Mr. Betts and Charley Ryan took much delight in openly “joshing the old man.” Bart Nelson did not indulge in this pastime, as he had conceived a violent, if secret, regard for Viola.

One evening after dinner the “joshing” reached a climax against which even the colonel’s egotistical infatuation was not proof. Viola was up-stairs, according to her custom; Mrs. Seymour was absent on her never-ending household duties; and Bart Nelson was out. There was no one to restrain the old man’s foolish flights, and inspired by the ironically flattering queries of his listeners, his reminiscences became more vaingloriously brilliant than they had ever been before.