Upon the sand on a desolated coast far down on the Gulf of Mexico an athletic looking man of perhaps thirty lies looking out over the sea. What cruel eyes he has, like the eyes of some cunning beast of prey.
He is perhaps thirty years of age, but one can see well enough, just by looking at him casually, that he has retained all the youthful strength and elasticity of his splendid body. He has a small black mustache and black hair and his skin is burned to a deep brown. Even as he lies, relaxed and listless, on the yellow sand a glow of life and of strength seems to emanate from him.
As he lies thus one can tell, any schoolboy could tell, that he is physically made to be the very ideal of American romance. He is a man of action—young and strong—there can be little doubt he is a man of daring. What might not be done with such a man! Throw him back into the days of the early pioneers and he will turn you out another Daniel Boone. He will creep through hundreds of miles of forests, never disturbing a grass blade, and bring you back the fair daughter of the English nobleman, traveling in this country, whose daughter inadvertently went for an afternoon’s stroll in the wood and was captured by a skulking Indian; or he will shoot you a squirrel in the eye at five hundred yards with his faithful rifle, called, playfully, “Old Betsy.” Move him up a little now. Let, say Bret Harte, have him. There he is, fine and dandy. He is a gambler in a Western mining camp now, wearing a silk shirt and a Stetson hat. He will lose you a whole fortune without the bat of an eye, but his personal associates are a bit rough. He is always being seen about with Black Peg, who runs a house of prostitution, and with Silent Smith, the killer.
Until, well, until one day when a New England school-teacher comes into the rough mining camp. One night she is set upon and is about to be outraged by a drunken miner. Then he, the associate of Black Peg, steps forward and shoots the miner. Ten minutes before, he was drunk and lying in the gutter, so drunk in fact that flies had been using his eyeballs as sliding places, but the danger to the school-teacher had sobered him instantly. He is a gentleman now. He offers the school-teacher his arm and they walk to her cabin discussing Emerson and Longfellow, and then our central figure of romance leaves her at her cabin door and goes to a lonely spot in the mountains. He sits down to wait until winter and the deep snows come, in order that he may freeze to death. He has realized that he loves the New England lady and is, in the language of the Far West, as set forth in all the best books, “not fitten for her.”
The truth is that father, that is to say, my fanciful father, might well have been used by any one of a dozen of our American hero-makers. He is in the goods. That is the idea. In the hands of a Jack London he might have been another Sea Wolf or a musher trudging through the deep snow of the frozen North, cornering some fair virgin in an isolated cabin, only to let her off at the last moment out of respect for her dead mother, who expected something quite different of her. Then later he might have gone to Yale, and after that become a stock broker, taking daring chances with railroad stocks, married a woman who loved only the glare and shine of social life, chucked her, failed in business, gone farming, and turned out a clean man after all, say in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. It could have been done.
Where my fanciful father was unfortunate, however, was in that he had to live in the fancy of a boy in a hay barn—one who had as yet had little or no experience with heroes.
And then there is no doubt he, from the first, had certain weaknesses. He wasn’t always kind to old women and children and, as you will see in the sequel, he wasn’t to be trusted with a virgin. He just wouldn’t behave himself, and when it comes to this matter of virgins, perhaps the least said about any man’s attitude toward them—except, to be sure, in novels and in the movies—the better. As Mr. Howells once pointed out, “it is better to present to the readers only the brighter and more pleasant aspects of our common lives.”
However, let us return to the man lying on the sand. There he is, you see, and it was sure he had been all his life, at any rate, a man of action. The Civil War had just come to an end a few years before and during the war he had been rather busily engaged. He had gone into the war as a spy for the Federal government and when he had got into the South had managed to engage himself as a spy for the Confederate side also. This had permitted him to move rather freely back and forth and to do well carrying contraband goods. When he had no special information to give to one or the other of his employers he could invent information—during a war that is always easy. He was, as I have said, a man of action. He aimed to get results, as they say in the advertising profession.
The war at an end, he had gone into the South, having several projects in mind and, at the time we meet him first, he was waiting on the lonely coast to sight a ship that was to bring some business associates of his. In a bayou, near the mouth of the river, some ten miles away, there was a ship, manned by his own men, awaiting his return. He was engaged in the business of smuggling firearms to various revolutionary parties in South American republics and was now only waiting for the coming of a man who was to hand over to him certain monies.
And so the day passed and the evening came and at last an hour before darkness settled down over the lonely sand dunes a ship appeared. My mythical father arose and, fastening a cloth to the end of a stick, waved it back and forth over his head. The ship drew near and two boats were lowered. Some ten or twelve men were coming ashore and with them a woman. When they had got into the boats the ship did not wait but immediately steamed away.