With some trouble I got an explanation. It appeared from the borderer’s statement that, years ago, a speculative individual of the name of Harvey had undertaken to construct a railway from Nebraska to Nauvoo, with a branch linking it to the Central Illinois line. He had obtained the usual charter and grant of land from the State, and had actually commenced operations between Keosauque and New Buda, two little towns not far from the Missouri boundary. But he had soon desisted from the Sisyphean task, ruined, disheartened, or disappointed of the aid on which he had somewhat sanguinely reckoned; and thenceforth no more had been said of the scheme or the schemer. “But the property,” groaned I, “the works, surely they must remain?”
“Why,” said Ichabod, meditatively, “I kinder think there’s rails laid down a bit—yes, for some miles I guess, and they’ll be there still. The cussed Indians can’t have stampedoed them, like they do the cattle. There’s a tidy bridge over a creek or two Harvey built, and some sheds and scantling; and that’s about all.”
“All,” said I, “think again, Ichabod. Surely there must be more plant than that, and then the rolling stock?”
The frontiersman laughed. “We know more about gunstocks than rolling stocks, out here on the pararas,” said he; “and I never heard of plants, onless ’twas hickory or sumach. But I’ve kinder catalogued the hull fixings for you, Colonel, without ’tis a pile of rusty iron, or a few waggon-loads of logs—neat bits of oak timber they were, trimmed and dressed, and shaped mighty like a saddle-tree, that Harvey left on the ground.”
“The sleepers, I suppose,” returned I; “are they there still?”
“Well, Colonel, mebbe some of ’em are taking a nap there still,” replied Ichabod, “but parara men often camp thereabouts, hunting, cattle-tending, or prospecting, and firewood being mortal scarce on the plains, ’twasn’t to be expected the bhoys wouldn’t make free with some chips to cook with. I may have had a chop at those logs with my tomahawk, when I wanted a broil, onst or twice, myself.”
I groaned again. The Great Nauvoo and Nebraska Railway was evidently as brittle a speculation as Alnaschar’s basket of glass. I finished the ride to Keosauque in moody reverie. There was no other guest to share such rugged plenty as the wooden tavern, called by courtesy the Eagle Hotel, could afford; and as the landlord was absent, and the landlady busy in the management of her children and Irish helps, no one talked to me, and I sat sullen and dejected the whole evening. Next day, tired as I was, I set out again, under Ichabod’s guidance, to visit what he persisted in naming Harvey’s Folly. We reached the spot at last. A swampy level, intersected by runlets of water, and with a good deal of thorny brake, and here and there a clump of cottonwood poplars diversifying the scene, had been selected by Mr Harvey for the site of his preliminary operations. Why he had chosen that wet ground at all, when so much dry prairie lay beyond, of very tolerable smoothness, it is difficult to conjecture; but perhaps the more accurate level had tempted him. There were rails, certainly there were rails, half-hidden by the growth of hemlocks and rank grass; but on dismounting I discovered that, for lack of proper metal trams, the rails had been constructed of wood, covered with a thin slip of iron—not an unusual device in out-of-the-way parts of America, as I was afterwards told. The fastenings were very defective, the sleepers loose, and the whole concern had a crazy haphazard look. Such as they were, these precious rails were continued for about 5 miles—5 miles out of 350!—and then they terminated in a mass of ruin and confusion. There were roofless sheds, scantlings and screens blown down by hurricane gusts, heaps of rusty iron, broken tools, damaged wheelbarrows, and a shattered truck with only one wheel left. Also there were a quantity of sleepers of dressed oak, and the fragments of many more, split by the axe and charred to coal, as they lay around the blackened spots of burnt turf, where many a camp-fire had been lit by the frontiersmen. That was all the valuable property left at the disposal of the directors. The sight sickened me. “Harvey’s Folly,” muttered I between my teeth, “say rather Bulkeley’s Folly—Bulkeley’s credulity, idiocy, weakness! And not only mine, but Tom Harris’s, and that of all of us. What a long-eared pack were we to be lured by the crafty piping of such a dissembling knave as that glib Colonel!” I rode away, sad and careworn. Ichabod’s quaint talk was unnoticed. I had another companion that claimed my undivided attention, and that was Care, Black Care, which sat crouching behind my saddle. I was haunted by a ghastly phantom of impending bankruptcy. The London Gazette spread its ill-omened sheet before me, and in its fatal columns I read, in flaming characters, “George Bulkeley, of Cannon Street in the City of London, and Stamford Hill, Middlesex, to surrender at Portugal Street on Monday the 14th inst. Official Assignee, Mr Wilks!” That it should have come to this! Ruin, ruin, ruin. Ruin and disgrace to us all, the duped directors of this wretched swindle. Were we not responsible for the debts of the undertaking? Was not the paid-up capital in the treacherous hands of our Yankee cashier, Dr Titus A. C. Bett, and could there be a doubt that it was lost for ever? Plainly the whole business was a fraudulent trick from the first—a net to catch gold-fish! Ah! already with my mind’s eye I saw the broker’s men in possession of Magnolia Villa; I saw my costly furniture, the cellar of wines I had been so proud of, carriages, pictures, everything, submitted to public competition by a smirking auctioneer. I heard the hammer fall, knocking down my Lares and Penates to the highest bidder. Going, going, gone! the accursed formula rang in my ears with baleful clearness. Magnolia Cottage to let! My family hiding in poor lodgings in Boulogne! George Bulkeley, a moody bankrupt, slinking about the pier of that refuge for insolvency, and afraid to face the Stock Exchange! Even though the Court might declare me blameless, even though the commissioner might whitewash me into commercial purity, my conscience was less complaisant, and sternly refused me even a third-class certificate.
I might have had the right to ruin myself and family, but what right had I to make desolate the hearths of many helpless and confiding people? How about those shareholders ignorant of business, those pinched vicars, needy widows, poor old half-pay officers, and the rest, who had been dazzled by our prospectus, and had invested their savings in the pocket of Dr Titus A. C. Bett? It was my respectable name, in common with those of my fellows in the Direction, which had baited the hook for such poor prey as these. My heart—even City men have hearts sometimes—was heavy and mournful with a grief not wholly selfish. Plump! fluff! down went the mustang on his knees, his feet having plunged into the holes that led to the dwellings of some “prairie-dogs”—interesting little brutes that burrow all over the plains—and over the animal’s head I flew with the force of a sky-rocket. Lighting with a great thump on the hard turf, I ran no trifling risk of a broken neck; but my hat saved me, at the expense of its own demolition, and I was only stunned. But when Ichabod hurried to the rescue he found me bruised and faint, and with a sprained thumb that caused me exquisite pain for the time. So stupified was I by the shock, that I did not hear the beat of hoofs upon the green carpet of the prairie, nor the sound of friendly voices, and was surprised, on looking up, to see that I was surrounded by a large party of equestrians, who were surveying me from the saddle with every appearance of interest. Riding-habits and side-saddles here in prairie-land! hats and feathers, too, of most ladylike elegance, and a pair of pretty, rather pale faces under the shadow of those plumed felts. Besides the two girls, there were a grey-haired elderly man, two younger gentlemen, and three or four mounted blacks in suits of striped cotton, one of whom led a couple of hounds in a long leash, while another had a buck strapped behind him on the horse.
“Is the poor gentleman much hurt?” asked one of the young ladies in a sweet kind voice. Ichabod, as bold as a lion in general, was awkward and bashful when addressed by a lady, and seemed to be weighing the words of his answer, when I felt it necessary to reply for myself. On discovering that I was a stranger in the land, General Warfield insisted that I should accompany the party to his house, just across the Missouri border, where my injured thumb should receive every attention, and where he and his family would gladly welcome me. Yielding willingly to this hospitable persuasion, I permitted Ichabod and one of the negroes to help me to remount my mustang, and we rode towards the Missouri boundary. The family whose acquaintance I had just made in so singular a way, bore no similarity to the travelling Americans whom it had previously fallen to my lot to encounter. General Warfield, his son, daughters, and nephew, had the well-bred air and unobtrusive demeanour which I had hitherto deemed exclusively insular. They asked me no abrupt questions as to my station or errand: they indulged in no diatribes against my country, nor in any extravagant laudations of their own; and I might have fancied myself the guest of some long-descended family at home, but for the wild scenes and unusual objects that met my eye as we rode along. It turned out that General Warfield, a retired military officer, not a militiaman, was of an old Virginian family, and had migrated to the newer soil of Missouri six years ago. There his children had grown to be men and women, in the hardy habits of that wild country, a mere outpost of civilisation; and indeed they were returning from a hunting expedition into Iowa when they stumbled upon me in my prostrate condition. Three hours’ ride brought us to the General’s house, a large building of mingled wood and stone, with a pretty garden on one hand, and on the other the farm-buildings, the corrals for horses and cattle, and the negro huts. Within I found furniture of old-fashioned dark mahogany, partridge-wood, and bird’s-eye maple, old family pictures, pretty knickknacks picked up during a three years’ residence in Europe, and the massive silver plate which had been handed down from father to son ever since the ancestral Warfield settled in Virginia in the reign of Charles I. I never knew anything so un-American, in respect to the usual standard of comparison, as the mode of life, the bearing, and tastes, of General Warfield and his high-spirited and amiable children. Here was no exaggeration of sentiment, no outrageous national vanity, no rude indifference to the feelings of others, no prying, no pretension. I felt, as I conversed with them, how wide was the gulf that severed the North from the South. It was not diversity of interest alone, but diversity of habits, principles, and aspirations. Wide apart in heart and mind as the poles from each other, the citizens of the opposite ends of the Union had but the feeble Federal bond to delay that violent disruption and severance of which, even then, the signs of the times gave fearful warning. But it is not my purpose to linger on the happy days I spent beneath the roof of my kind hosts. Let me rather relate the information I received from General Warfield, when his friendly hospitality had caused me to confide to his ear my errand to America, and the ruin I had too much reason to anticipate.
“My dear sir,” said the General, “I am glad you have told me of this—very glad. I can help you in this matter.”