The pioneer

by Geraldine Bonner

The great detached bulks of the buildings that the carriage passed gleamed with lights, for Folsom Street was still the home of the elect. From the arch of lofty porches hall lamps cast a faint gleam into the outer darkness of shrubberies and lawns. Through the scroll-work of high iron gates the imbedded flags of the marble paths shone white between darkly grassed borders. Here and there a black façade was cut into by rows of long, lighted windows, uncurtained and unshuttered. The street suggested seclusion, wealth and dignity. The fortunes, which were later to erect huge piles on San Francisco’s wind-swept hill-crests, had not yet arisen to blight the picturesqueness of the gray, sea-girdled city.

His own house was one of the largest in the street. Now, in the darkness, it loomed an irregular black mass, cut into with squares and slits of light. Just a month before the lease of his tenants had expired, and he was able to see one, at least, of his dreams realized—Alice’s daughters quartered under his roof.

The revolution of Fortune’s wheel had been, where the Allens were concerned, sudden and dizzying. The ledge, that man for years had fruitlessly sought, in one night had been laid bare. Even for the time and the country it was a startling reversal of conditions. In the spring Beauregard Allen had been a beggar. In the summer he saw himself a man of wealth. Experts pronounced the discovery one of moment. The mine, called the Barranca, was regarded as richer in promise than the Buckeye Belle. Distant portions of the tract, which had come into his possession in so unlooked for a manner, were sold for large sums. The whole region was shaken into astonished animation and Foleys was more effectually wakened from the dead than it would have been by the Colonel’s original scheme.

Allen’s sloth and despondency fell from him like a garment. With the ready money from the land sales he at once began the development of the prospect hole. In July a square tunnel mouth and a board shed intruded on the sylvan landscape near the landslide. In September a fair-sized hoisting works housed the throb of engines and the roll of cars. The noise of Beauregard Allen’s strike went abroad through foot-hill California and its echo rolled to San Francisco, where men who had known him in the early days suddenly remembered him as “Beau” Allen, the handsome Southerner, who had come to grief and dropped out of sight in the fifties.

In September he came down to San Francisco and saw the Colonel. The meeting at first was constrained, but as Allen spoke of his daughters and the plans for their happiness and welfare that he had in view the constraint wore away and the two men talked as beings united by a mutual interest. The Colonel had recognized the fact that the breach must be healed. He had had to struggle against his old repugnance, but there was nothing else for it. No wrong, however deep, should stand between him and Alice’s daughters, and he could not know the daughters without accepting the father. And how he did want to know them! They had already brought brightness and purpose into his life. In an effort to treat the matter lightly he told himself that the harboring of old resentments, when they blocked the way to the forming of new ties, was too much like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Deep in his heart lay the feeling that, apart from his affection for them, they might need him. He knew Allen of old, and Alice was dead.

It was their father’s intention to have them make San Francisco their home. In the larger city they would have the advantages of society and chances to marry well. One of the objects of his visit was to look about for a house whence they could be launched into the little world in which he once had played his part. It was thus that the Colonel, the lease of his old tenant having just expired, was able to offer them his own house for as long a period of years as they might wish.

But Allen, swollen with the pride of his new fortunes, would rent no house. He would buy one, a fitting home for two such girls as his. When it came to that, the Colonel was as willing to sell as to rent. The price of thirty thousand dollars was put upon the Folsom Street mansion, and Allen, being much impressed by its size and old-fashioned splendor, purchased it, paying down the sum of ten thousand dollars, while the Colonel held a mortgage maturing in three years for the other twenty thousand. Allen, despite his sudden accession to wealth, claimed that his expenses just now were of the heaviest. In October he contemplated the building of a twenty-stamp mill at the mine, and the shaft house was to be enlarged. The winter outfits for his daughters would be costly. It was his intention that June and Rosamund should be as richly and modishly clad as any of the young women who cast a glamour over the society of the city.

To-night they were to make their entrance into that society. Mrs. Davenport was an old friend of the Colonel’s and he had asked for the invitations, assuring her that she would find his protégées two of the prettiest and sweetest girls in the world. Now as he sprang from the carriage and pushed open the tall gate of scrolled iron-work he smiled to himself, cheerfully confident that he had not overstated the charms of the Misses Allen.

His ring brought one of the new Chinese servants to the door, a quiet man, soft-footed as a cat, and clothed in freshly-laundered white. Standing in the hall under the light he watched this spectral figure flit noiselessly up the stairway. The hall, papered in a deep reddish-purple on which here and there the gleam of gold arabesques was faintly visible, was wide and dim. It would require a galaxy of lamps thoroughly to dispel the gloom that lurked in its dusky corners. A stately staircase, thickly carpeted and with a darkly-polished hand-rail, ran up in front of him. There was a light again at the top of this throwing faint glimmerings on receding stretches of wall, also somberly papered.

Through the wide arch on his right he could look into a half-lighted parlor, where a globe or two in the chandelier shone a translucent yellow. To his left the doors into the reception-room were open, and here by a table, a reading lamp at his elbow, sat Beauregard Allen smoking a cigar. He was in evening dress, but a button or two of unloosened waist-coat, and the air of sprawling ease that marked his attitude, did not suggest the trim alertness of one garbed and tuned for festival.