第18章 LIKE ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES(1)

IT was the summer of 1897, and there was trouble in the Tarwater family.Grandfather Tarwater, after remaining properly subdued and crushed for a quiet decade, had broken out again.This time it was the Klondike fever.His first and one unvarying symptom of such attacks was song.One chant only he raised, though he remembered no more than the first stanza and but three lines of that.And the family knew his feet were itching and his brain was tingling with the old madness, when he lifted his hoarse-cracked voice, now falsetto-cracked, in:

Like Argus of the ancient times, We leave this modern Greece, Tum- tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum, To shear the Golden Fleece.

Ten years earlier he had lifted the chant, sung to the air of the "Doxology," when afflicted with the fever to go gold-mining in Patagonia.The multitudinous family had sat upon him, but had had a hard time doing it.When all else had failed to shake his resolution, they had applied lawyers to him, with the threat of getting out guardianship papers and of confining him in the state asylum for the insane - which was reasonable for a man who had, a quarter of a century before, speculated away all but ten meagre acres of a California principality, and who had displayed no better business acumen ever since.

The application of lawyers to John Tarwater was like the application of a mustard plaster.For, in his judgment, they were the gentry, more than any other, who had skinned him out of the broad Tarwater acres.So, at the time of his Patagonian fever, the very thought of so drastic a remedy was sufficient to cure him.He quickly demonstrated he was not crazy by shaking the fever from him and agreeing not to go to Patagonia.

Next, he demonstrated how crazy he really was, by deeding over to his family, unsolicited, the ten acres on Tarwater Flat, the house, barn, outbuildings, and water-rights.Also did he turn over the eight hundred dollars in bank that was the long-saved salvage of his wrecked fortune.

But for this the family found no cause for committal to the asylum, since such committal would necessarily invalidate what he had done.

"Grandfather is sure peeved," said Mary, his oldest daughter, herself a grandmother, when her father quit smoking.

All he had retained for himself was a span of old horses, a mountain buckboard, and his one room in the crowded house.Further, having affirmed that he would be beholden to none of them, he got the contract to carry the United States mail, twice a week, from Kelterville up over Tarwater Mountain to Old Almaden - which was a sporadically worked quick-silver mine in the upland cattle country.With his old horses it took all his time to make the two weekly round trips.And for ten years, rain or shine, he had never missed a trip.Nor had he failed once to pay his week's board into Mary's hand.This board he had insisted on, in the convalescence from his Patagonian fever, and he had paid it strictly, though he had given up tobacco in order to be able to do it.

"Huh!" he confided to the ruined water wheel of the old Tarwater Mill, which he had built from the standing timber and which had ground wheat for the first settlers."Huh! They'll never put me in the poor farm so long as I support myself.And without a penny to my name it ain't likely any lawyer fellows'll come snoopin' around after me."And yet, precisely because of these highly rational acts, it was held that John Tarwater was mildly crazy!

The first time he had lifted the chant of "Like Argus of the Ancient Times," had been in 1849, when, twenty-two years' of age, violently attacked by the Californian fever, he had sold two hundred and forty Michigan acres, forty of it cleared, for the price of four yoke of oxen, and a wagon, and had started across the Plains.

"And we turned off at Fort Hall, where the Oregon emigration went north'ard, and swung south for Californy," was his way of concluding the narrative of that arduous journey.And Bill Ping and me used to rope grizzlies out of the underbrush of Cache Slough in the Sacramento Valley." Years of freighting and mining had followed, and, with a stake gleaned from the Merced placers, he satisfied the land-hunger of his race and timeby settling in Sonoma County.

During the ten years of carrying the mail across Tarwater Township, up Tarwater Valley, and over Tarwater Mountain, most all of which land had once been his, he had spent his time dreaming of winning back that land before he died.And now, his huge gaunt form more erect than it had been for years, with a glinting of blue fires in his small and close-set eyes, he was lifting his ancient chant again.

"There he goes now - listen to him," said William Tarwater.

"Nobody at home," laughed Harris Topping, day labourer, husband of Annie Tarwater, and father of her nine children.

The kitchen door opened to admit the old man, returning from feeding his horses.The song had ceased from his lips; but Mary was irritable from a burnt hand and a grandchild whose stomach refused to digest properly diluted cows' milk.

"Now there ain't no use you carryin' on that way, father," she tackled him."The time's past for you to cut and run for a place like the Klondike, and singing won't buy you nothing.""Just the same," he answered quietly."I bet I could go to that Klondike place and pick up enough gold to buy back the Tarwater lands.""Old fool!" Annie contributed.

"You couldn't buy them back for less'n three hundred thousand and then some," was William's effort at squelching him.

"Then I could pick up three hundred thousand, and then some, if I was only there," the old man retorted placidly.

"Thank God you can't walk there, or you'd be startin', I know," Mary cried."Ocean travel costs money.""I used to have money," her father said humbly.

"Well, you ain't got any now - so forget it," William advised."Them times is past, like roping bear with Bill Ping.There ain't no more bear.""Just the same - "