On the last day of our leave we drove through El Paso, not triumphant exactly, nor with undue pride, but by as quiet a route to the post as we could select.
Parties desiring to hunt in the Sacramento Mountains will consult their best interests by calling upon us for information. Anyone wishing to establish a hardware store may buy of us sufficient ammunition to stock his business for years.
THE HAUNTED WHEEL.
BY PRESIDENT BATES.
THE great house of Dalrymple & Dalrymple went down and left no wreck behind—not even the heap of “dust” that so often remains concealed under the débris of a commercial crash. If a great brick block had suddenly collapsed with a roar and rumble, and, after the dust had blown away, there was not so much as a cellar to show where it had been, the ruin could not have been more strangely complete. It was as if the great business—capital, credit, stock, connections, goodwill, everything—had blown away like a fog and left no vestige. Even the great sign, whose gilded letters used to stretch clear across the tall front of the store in the middle of the block, was painted over in less than a month with the less fashionable, but perhaps as useful, legend, “Juggers & Wesch, Flour and Feed.” And the plate-glass windows, that for so many years displayed the most fashionable fineries, were now devoted to dusty bags of bran and barrels of cornmeal, beans and oats.
It was not a great failure either—only $30,000. Nobody lost much. The Dalrymples sold everything, after the fashion of the honest merchants of the elder time, and nearly paid all their debts. They were only $30,000 to the bad—merely a descent from wealth and ease to poverty and $30,000 less than nothing. And it was not their fault. Their misfortunes began in the failures of others, and ended in their own. The Dalrymple brothers, everybody said, were left with their honor unimpaired. But everybody did not add the unhappy facts that they were left with honor alone past the age of active life, from long ease unfit to begin a new struggle for existence, bankrupt both physically and mentally as well as in fortune.
The bachelor Dalrymple went away to California, where a relative offered him an asylum.
James Dalrymple looked about for awhile vainly for something to do, and then died out of a world that had no use for him. His wife, aged fifty-five, and his daughter, aged eighteen, had a hard time of it—poor souls! Luckily the daughter was a business woman. She had often aided her father as his amanuensis. She knew how to use those modern instruments of commerce, the typewriter and short-hand. She could make out a bill, keep accounts, and write a terse, polite, clear business letter. She had been a society belle, but she had imbibed mental solids from natural taste. She was not too proud to walk with quiet strength on the bottom level, no matter how proudly she had walked at the top. So she sought and found employment, and kept her mother and herself in two or three rooms of a small cottage on an unfashionable street. With all the airs and graces and pretensions of wealth she put away also all the old loves and friendships. She thought they did not keep the true ring of heart soundness. She became simply Dibble & Dribble’s typewriter.
A lady she was, every inch of her—accomplished, refined, gracious, charming, beautiful; not a fine lady; merely a poor young woman, without piano, wardrobe or “style.” She became only a straightforward, faithful, hard-working, modest business girl, known as Miss Dalrymple; for she was, after all, a little sensitive and proud, and permitted few except her mother to call her by her beautiful and stately old name of Daphne Dalrymple.