It was a memorable morning on which the two stages left Paradise Bar together. The yellow stage, with its nickel-plated harness and white horses and tan-gloved driver, started three minutes first; and then, as if gathering up his horses and the stage and the reins altogether, Uncle Hank went down the line. It was a lively experience for the passengers; bends they went around on two wheels, creeks they took at a leap, bowlders and ruts only they avoided, and that because a scientist was using his science. The grade of the other line must have been at that time very good, for Uncle Hank had been only four minutes hitched in front of the Elysium Hotel when the other stage drew up. It was true that he picked his teeth as if he had been in to lunch, and casually enquired of a passenger, so that George William might hear, if they had stopped for dinner on the road, or did they expect to get it at the hotel; whereat the passenger, jolted and jarred beyond good manners, roared: “Stop for dinner! Great Scott! We stopped for nothing—bowlders, rivers, landslides and precipices; if his Satanic Majesty was after us, he found the worst trail he ever traveled—and I can’t imagine what other reason there could be for such driving.”
The passenger went into the hotel. George William said something below his breath, and Uncle Hank smiled. Alas for vanity! Ever it goes before a stumble, a broken spring or a sick horse. The stages had different schedules for the upward trip, but on the next journey downward disaster overtook Uncle Hank. Seven of the nine hours’ ride were accomplished, and the stage was at the mouth of the canyon. Here a point of rock thrusts itself forward, marking a sharp turn in the road. Around this turn galloped the horses, and twenty feet before him, sunning itself in the road, Moloch saw an eleven-button rattler. He knew what that meant, and sat down and slid with all four feet plowing the mountain road. They stopped short of the snake, that had coiled and awaited their coming, and then perceiving the enemy otherwise engaged, had wisely slipped into the manzanitas by the roadside. Fifteen precious minutes were used in repairing the disaster to the harness—and the race was lost. That night, for the first time in the ten years in which he had been the oracle of two communities, Uncle Hank, instead of telling stories and expounding wisdom for the benefit of the unenlightened below, went up to his room immediately after dinner and retired without lighting his candle. George William put on a new pink necktie and his beloved silk hat, and went about, stepping high like one of his white horses, but casting wary glances abroad for the appearance of one Morosin’ Jones, who was coy and fidgety and could perforate a dollar at one hundred feet.
In Paradise Bar every game was settled by the best two out of three. Life was too feverish and too short to await three out of five, and it was against the principles of the camp to leave any questions undecided. Therefore, it was tacitly understood that the winner of the next race would be the standard of comparison thereafter in matters pertaining to travel. Other stage lines would be second-class, ranking just above a mule train. There was another reason: Paradise Bar was exceedingly fond of excitement, but it had no mind to risk its neck in stage racing down the mountain-side forever and ever; precipices yawned too many invitations. The personal feeling and the betting both heavily favored Uncle Hank, both gratifying and troubling to him.
There is little doubt that in the third race, under fair conditions, Uncle Hank would have won; he would either have won or gone over a precipice. But Rome, who had never before been known to have anything the matter with him save an abnormal appetite for grain, fell slightly lame. All day before the race, Uncle Hank worried over this, all night he tossed in his blankets, and was only partly relieved the next day when Rome appeared again to be all right, and ate hay as if under the impression that the sun was shining and there was plenty more being made. The last two days had greatly changed Uncle Hank; he carried his head so that his beard touched his breast; his hat was slouched low over his eyes; he kept his hands in his pockets and spoke in monosyllables. He ate little and had a far-away look in his blue eyes. He saw his fame departing, his reputation collapsing, all that a man may build in this life, whether he creates empires or digs post-holes, crumbling—the reputation of “being onto his job.”
The next morning with the fear of that lameness in his heart, Uncle Hank hitched up and drove down the main street. He saw the yellow stage also ready. There was no evidence of lameness in Rome as he drove up to the door of the express office, nor when the stage stopped at the Record Nugget for the hotel passengers. Uncle Hank’s despondent face became more cheerful; he looked older and grayer and even bent a little that morning, but he climbed up on the box with his old-time energy. His courage and spirit were never to be doubted; only that lameness in Rome worried him. He gathered up the lines and loosened his whip; but the four did not go with their accustomed dashing display. Instead there was confusion and hesitation; in fifteen yards the slight lameness of the right wheel horse was apparent, and Uncle Hank drew up. He dropped the lines, and for a moment his face was in his hands.
The other stage had gone. Nothing could ever convince the public satisfactorily, he thought, that after starting he had not given up the race through fear. The limp was scarcely apparent. He perhaps would not have noticed it for some miles had it not been for his haunting dread and the false start. Yet he knew what it would mean before the level was reached—a steep down grade and he would have to go walking into Meadow Lark, a loser by an hour.
Uncle Hank, a broken old man, climbed down from the stage. “Take ’em, George,” he said to the hostler. “There won’t be no stage down to-day.” He said no more, but passed amid a dead silence along the road through the population of Paradise Bar which had turned out to see the beginning of the deciding race. Some guessed at the reason; and to all it became apparent when the horses were taken back to the stable and carefully examined. That day Uncle Hank did not appear, nor the next; So Bob Allen went up to his cabin in the evening and, receiving no response to his knocking, kicked open the door and went in. Uncle Hank lay in his bunk, his face to the wall. To Bob’s expressions of sympathy and encouraging remarks, he made no reply; they were to him as the expressions engraved on tombstones, and but added bitterness now. To his arguments, Uncle Hank vouchsafed single words in return, and never turned his face from the wall. From sympathy to argument, from argument he drifted into bulldozing; alluded to Uncle Hank as a man afraid of things, among which he specified a large number in language that I will not reproduce; and when three connected words was the most he could get out of Uncle Hank even by this, Bob knew the case was desperate, and retired, defeated.
The friends of Uncle Hank, the entire population of Paradise Bar, gravely discussed the situation. It was unanimously decided that the yellow stage should thereafter stop outside of the camp limits, and Morosin’ Jones publicly announced, his shoulders working up and down most nervously, that George William would immediately cease from wearing stand-up collars and red neckties; he would come into camp with a slouch hat, a flannel shirt and teamster’s warranted-to-wear gloves—or it was quite likely he would never go out again. This statement met with the silent approval of the entire assemblage; and George William, hearing of it, puzzled and bewildered, wisely refrained from coming into the camp limits at all, but remained by the stage. He explained in Meadow Lark that Paradise Bar had gone crazy; and a cheerful miner from that camp acquiesced, but added that some of the lunatics were not yet corralled, but still straying about; and said it looking so significantly at George William that the latter went home and hunted up a flannel shirt at once.
The next morning a committee waited on Uncle Hank, prepared with arguments that would show him the error of broken-heartedness—the easiest thing in the world to cure if its victims would but live to tell us of it. Uncle Hank still lay with his face to the wall, and in a little while the news was abroad in the camp that Uncle Hank, still with his face to the wall, had resolutely died. It was a gray day in Paradise Bar; the melodion in the Red Light was hushed; friends nodded instead of speaking as they passed by; the camp began to realize what it had lost. It was determined, as a last mark of the camp’s esteem for Uncle Hank, to make the journey to the place of the final tie-up simple but impressive. No formal meeting was held; the boys just gathered together and acted on a common idea. The whole camp would be in the procession, and they would go down to Meadow Lark over the old familiar road. Uncle Hank’s stage carrying the old stage-driver, would be at the head, of course; then there was an awkward pause. More than one felt that it would add to the dignity of the occasion to have two stages, but finally, when Major Wilkerson arose and suggested that the Gray Eagle stage, carrying leading citizens, be placed next, there was a murmur of dissent. Then Bob Allen arose in his place and made the only known speech of his life:
“Friends, you are on the wrong trail and will hit a blind canyon, certain. Of course we should have the other stage, and Pike to drive it. Uncle Hank wasn’t the kind of a man to carry jealousy with him into camp. ’Twasn’t being beat by Pike that broke Uncle Hank’s heart; it was partly p’haps being beat at all, and partly, to my way of thinkin’, because Paradise Bar didn’t stand behind him. That was the main reason, gentlemen; he just died of pure lonesomeness. When this yaller ve-hicle comes into camp, does we say to it: ‘You’re purty and you’re new, and probably your springs is all right and maybe your road; but you might jest as well pass on. Do you observe this old stage with its paint wore off and its bullet holes? Do you see that it’s down a little on one side and some of the spokes is new and some are old? Do you know that these four old hosses have been whoopin’ her up for Paradise Bar and for nothin’ else these ten years—and a sunshiny day and one chuck full of snow and sleet was all the same to them? Be you aware that this is our Uncle Hank, and that he has been workin’ our lead for us these fifteen years, and never lost a dollar or a pound of stuff or spilled a passenger, or asked one of the boys to hoof it because he hadn’t no dinero? Those bullet holes—men behind masks made ’em, but Uncle Hank never tightened a ribbon for the whole caboodle. The paint’s been knocked off that stage in our service, and it’s ours. Therefore, though you be yaller and handsome, with consid’ble silver plate, we can’t back you against our own flesh and blood. And that settles it.’ Did we talk that way, boys? No, we jest stood off and gambled on the result as if Uncle Hank was a travelin’ stranger ’stead of the best friend we had. We stood off impartial like and invited the white hoss outfit to git in and win if it could. And now, gentlemen, have we got the nerve to dynamite this opposition stage line, when the whole gang of us ought to be blown sky high?