The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

He led him, chattering with cold, across bleak steppes where the wind blew like a curse of God, set there to see that no man passed that way and lived; blew and blew, until it became a thing hideous and maddening, a thing damnable and accursed, coming out of a hell that froze; and the hunter, driven mad, his face raw, his hands bleeding, his bones aching to the marrow, no longer able to go forward, sat on the earth with his head between his knees and howled.

The Captain of the Cleavewaive, set thus living the life he longed for, forgot to be astonished at the strange course which the Duke of Dorset had elected to follow. When the navigating officer had carried to him the Duke's direction, he had been greatly puzzled. There was better hunting in British Columbia than here, some deer and a bear now and then, but nothing to tempt a man over seas with his gun cases. But the mystery of it was a thing inconsequential beside the pleasing fortune which this changed plan carried individually to him, and he easily left it. He was living, through the medium of this man's adventures, vicariously, that big, open, alluring life of the first man running with the wolf in the morning of the world. He was harking back with joy to those elements, primal and savage, by virtue of which all things fight desperately to live. These things were not to be found in books, they were not to be invented, they were known only to those haunting the waste places of the earth.

The Captain of the Cleavewaive was, then, pleased to carry out any plan of his guest. He was quite willing to go into the coast at the point selected by the Duke of Dorset, or at any point within a reasonable run.

At sunrise, the gunboat, turning due east out of her course, anchored off a little bay on the Oregon coast of the United States. The mountains came, at this point, down to the sea; a great chain rising landward and covered with firs, standing a primeval forest. The bay was a perfect miniature harbor protected by a crooked finger of the mountain; the inner border of this finger was a sea wall with steps coming down to the water. A small, gray-stone house, not unlike a gamekeeper's lodge, stood behind this wall on the summit of the finger, flanked by two giant firs, lifting their brown, naked bodies, without a limb, two hundred feet into the sky.

The Captain of the Cleavewaive hesitated to put the Duke ashore in a place so evidently deserted. He pointed out that the bay was merely a private yacht harbor, used doubtless in summer, but now in the autumn abandoned for the winter. There was no boat of any kind to be seen in the bay, and no evidence that the place was inhabited. But the Duke was unmoved in his determination to go ashore at this point; and his boxes were got up from his cabin. While these preparations went forward, the Captain, searching the coast with his glass, saw a man come out from behind the stone house on the summit of the promontory. The man stopped when he observed the gunboat, looked at it a moment under the palm of his hand, and came down with long swinging strides to the point on the sea wall where the stone steps descended into the water.

When the Duke came ashore at this point, the man swinging along the sea wall was already there. He stood back some twenty feet from the landing, waiting until the sailors should bring the Duke's boxes up the stone: stairway, and return to the gunboat. Then he spoke, nodding his head to the Duke: "Good mornin', stranger," he said, in a big deliberate voice that drew out each word as though it were elastic, stretching from his throat over his tongue to his teeth.

The Duke, standing on the sea wall among his boxes, regarded the man with an interest, every moment visibly increasing. He had never until this day, in any country, come upon this type of peasant. The man was past sixty, but indefinitely past it; one could not say how old he was. He might have been five or ten, or only a year or two beyond it. He was big-boned, slouchy, and powerful; his eyes, mild and blue; his face, sinewy and weather-beaten; he wore a shirt without a collar, and fastened at the throat with a big white button; suspenders, hand knitted of blue wool; and trousers tucked into the tops of enormous cowhide boots. His head was covered with a big felt hat, rain-stained, sweat-stained, and mould-stained, until it was a color that no maker ever dreamed of.

The Duke returned the salutation and inquired if he were on the estate of Mr. Cyrus Childers.

"He calls it his'n," replied the native, "but to my notion no man owns the mountains."

The Duke's interest increased. "Are you a servant of Mr. Childers?" he asked.