The Greatest Works of Melville Davisson Post: 40+ Titles in One Edition. Melville Davisson Post
and sat down. His features were composed and wore an air of pleasant assurance. "My boy," he began, "this is tough lines, to be sure, but you are worth a car-load of convicts yet. Sit down then, and I will straighten this thing out in a jiffy. I have been devilish lucky this season, and I now have about sixteen thousand dollars in bank. You have, I happen to know, some five thousand dollars in securities which came to you out of father's estate when it was settled. Turn these securities over to me and go right on to Europe as you intended. I will realize on the securities, and with the money I now have will be enabled to purchase the exchange which you require, and will have it sent to you immediately, so there will be no delay. You can go right on with your business as you intended, and neither old Beaumont nor any other living skinflint will ever know of this robbery."
Carper Harris could not speak. His emotion choked him. He seized his brother's hand and wrung it in silence, while the tears streamed down his face.
"Come, come," said the cattle-man, "this won't do! Brace up! I am simply lending you the money. You can return it if you ever get able. If you don't, why, it came easy, and I won't ever miss the loss of it."
"May God bless you, brother!" stammered Carper Harris. "You have saved me from the very grave, and what is more—from the stigma of a felon. You shall not lose this money by me. I will repay it if Heaven spares my life."
"Don't go on like a play-actor, Carper," said the cattle-man, rising and turning to the door. "Pull yourself together, gather up your duds, and skip out to London. The stuff will be there by the time you are ready for it." Then he went out and closed the door behind him.
III.
I had to lie to him," said William Harris. "There was no other way out of it. I knew it was the only means by which I could get him out of the country. If he stayed here they would nab him and put him in the penitentiary in spite of the very devil himself. It is all very well to talk about even-eyed justice and all that rot, but a young man in that kind of a position would have about as much show as a snowball in Vesuvius. The best thing to do was to put him over the pond, and the next thing was to come here. I did both, now what is to be done?"
"It is evident," said Randolph Mason, "that the young man is the victim of one of our numerous gangs of train robbers, and it is quite as evident that it is utterly impossible to recover the stolen money. The thing to be done is to shift the loss."
"Shift the loss, sir," echoed the cattle-man; "I don't believe that I quite catch your meaning."
"Sir," said Mason, "the law of self-preservation is the great law governing the actions of men. All other considerations are of a secondary nature. The selfish interest is the great motive power. It is the natural instinct to seek vicarious atonement. Men do not bear a hurt if the hurt can be placed upon another. It is a bitter law, but it is, nevertheless, a law as fixed as gravity."
"I see," said the commission merchant; "but how is this loss to be shifted on any one? The money is gone for good; there is no way to get it back, and there is no means by which we can switch the responsibility to the shoulders of any other person. The money was placed in Carper Harris's custody, he was instructed to use great care in order to prevent any possible loss. He left Baltimore with it. The story of his robbery would only render him ridiculous if it were urged in his behalf. He alone is responsible for the money; there is no way to shift it."
"I said, sir," growled Mason, "that the loss must be shifted. What does the responsibility matter, provided the burden of loss can be placed upon other shoulders? How much money have you?"
"Only the five thousand dollars which I received from the sale of his securities," answered the man. "The story which I told him about the sixteen thousand was all a lie; I have scarcely a thousand dollars to my name, all told."
Mason looked at the cattle-man and smiled grimly. "So far you have done well," he said; "it seems that you must be the instrument through which this cunning game of Fate is to be blocked. You are the strong one; therefore the burden must fall on your shoulders. Are you ready to bear the brunt of this battle?"
"I am," said the man, quietly; "the boy must be saved if I have to go to Sing Sing for the next twenty years."
IV.
The traveller crossing the continent in a Pullman car is convinced that West Virginia is one continuous mountain. He has no desire to do other than to hurry past with all the rapidity of which the iron horse is capable. He can have no idea that in its central portion is a stretch of rolling blue-grass country, as fertile and as valuable as the stock-farm lands of Kentucky; with a civilization, too, distinctly its own, and not to be met with in any other country of the world. It seems to combine, queerly enough, certain of the elements of the Virginia planter, the western ranchman, and the feudal baron. Perhaps nowhere in any of the United States can be found such decided traces of the ancient feudal system as in this inland basin of West Virginia, surrounded by great mountain ranges, and for many generations cut off from active relations with the outside world. Nor is this civilization of any other than natural growth. In the beginning, those who came to this region were colonial families of degree,—many of them Tories, hating Washington and his government, and staunch lovers of the king at heart, for whom the more closely settled east and south were too unpleasant after the success of the Revolution. Many of them found in this fertile land lying against the foot-hills, and difficult of access from either the east or west, the seclusion and the utter absence of relations with their fellows which they so much desired. With them they brought certain feudal customs as a basis for the civilization which they builded. The nature of the country forced upon them others, and the desire for gain—ever large in the Anglo-Saxon heart—brought in still other customs, foreign and incongruous.
Thus it happened that at an early day this country was divided into great tracts, containing thousands of acres of grass lands, owned by certain powerful families, who resided upon it, and, to a very large extent, preserved ancient customs and ancient ideas in relation to men. The idea of a centrally situated manor-house was one adhered to from the very first, and this differed from the Virginia manor in that it was more massive and seemed to be built with the desire of strength predominating, as though the builder had yet in mind a vague notion of baronial defences, and some half hope or half fear of grim fights, in which he and his henchmen would defend against the invader. Gradually, after the feudal custom, the owner of one of these great tracts gathered about him a colony of tenants and retainers, who looked after his stock and grew to be almost fixtures of the realty and partook in no degree of the shiftless qualities of the modern tenant. They were attached to the family of the master of the estate, and shared in his peculiarities and his prejudices. His quarrel became their own, and personal conflicts between the retainers of different landowners were not infrequent. At such times, if the breaches of the peace were of such a violent order as to attract the attention of the law, the master was in honor bound to shield his men as far as possible, and usually his influence was sufficient to preserve them from punishment.
Indeed it was the landowner and his people against the world. They were different from the Virginians in that they were more aggressive and powerful, and were of a more adventurous and hardy nature. They were never content to be mere farmers, or to depend upon the cultivation of the soil. Nor were they careful enough to become breeders of fine stock. For these reasons it came about that they adopted a certain kind of stock business, combining the qualities of the ranch and the farm. They bought in the autumn great herds of two-year-old cattle, picking them up along the borders of Virginia and Kentucky. These cattle they brought over the mountains in the fall, fed them through the winter, and turned them out in the spring to fatten on their great tracts of pasture land. In the summer this stock was shipped to the eastern market and sold in favorable competition with the corn-fed stock of the west, and the stable-fed cattle of Virginia and Pennsylvania. As this business grew, the little farmer along the border