Adventure stories; Mines and mineral resources -- Fiction; Western stories
By careful inquiries, and by some observation, I found that there were
two sisters also in the house, and once I saw all three out shopping in
Princes Street, very tastefully but plainly dressed, and it struck me to
the heart, with a sadness I cannot tell, to think that here was I, who
could step up to them and say: "Madam, your son yet lives; ladies, your
brother is alive," and yet to know that my lips were sealed; that for
some reason Apache Kid could never again come home.
They noticed me staring at them, and, remembering my manners, I looked
away. This intelligence I wrote to Apache Kid (to be called for at
Santa Fe), as he had desired. But I never heard any word in reply. The
letter, however, was not returned, so I presume he received it.
I do not know whether the fact that I am bound by a promise causes me,
in contradictory-wise, to desire all the more to speak to these three of
Apache Kid,—how alien his name sounds here in Edinburgh of all
places!—but I do know that I long to speak to them. In Apache Kid’s
younger sister, especially in her winsome face, there is something I
cannot describe that moves my heart. Once I saw her with her sister
eating strawberries on one of the roof-cafés in Princes Street, whither
I had gone with my mother. My mother noticed the drifting of my eyes and
looked at the girl and looked back at me and smiled, and shook her head
on me, and said:
"She is a sweet girl, but do not stare; you have lost your manners in
America!"
She did not understand, and I could not explain. But her words, spoken
jestingly, took me back to that conversation with Apache Kid on the
stagecoach, after we had left the Half-Way-to-Kettle House, when he
delivered his opinion on the transition period in the West; and I
wondered if he had yet looked up Carlyle’s remark about the manners of
the backwoods.
My little fortune had to be explained in some way, but you may be sure I
told nothing of the terrors of the journey that we undertook in the
gathering of it. The common fallacy that fortunes are to be picked up in
America, by any youth who cares to go a-plucking there, helped me
greatly with most folk, and I never was required to tell the bloody
story of the Lost Cabin Mine.
But now that they who might have wept for my share in that business have
gone beyond all weeping and grieving I can publish the tale with no
misgivings; for the only fear that haunts me, as I go my ways through
the world, is lest I give pain to any of these quiet, cloistered hearts,
who, in their blissful and desirable ignorance, live apart in peace, not
knowing how barbaric, how sad, how full of unrest, and how
blood-bespattered the world still is.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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