In the Tules Page #5

"In the Tules" is a short story by Bret Harte that captures the rugged and often harsh life of those living in the California wilderness during the Gold Rush era. Set amid the picturesque yet challenging landscape of the tule marshes, the narrative follows the life of a lone prospector who encounters various characters that reveal the complexities of human nature and survival. Through Harte's vivid descriptions and insightful character portrayals, the story explores themes of isolation, resilience, and the search for both fortune and companionship in a harshly beautiful setting.

• Short story

								

reading-room, even the luxurious couches in the staterooms, were all
dominated, thrilled, and pulsating with the perpetual throb of the demon
of hurry and unrest. And when at last a horrible fascination dragged him
into the engine room, and he saw the cruel relentless machinery at work,
he seemed to recognize and understand some intelligent but pitiless
Moloch, who was dragging this feverish world at its heels.

Later he was seated in a corner of the hurricane deck, whence he could
view the monotonous banks of the river; yet, perhaps by certain signs
unobservable to others, he knew he was approaching his own locality.
He knew that his cabin and clearing would be undiscernible behind the
fringe of willows on the bank, but he already distinguished the points
where a few cottonwoods struggled into a promontory of lighter foliage
beyond them. Here voices fell upon his ear, and he was suddenly aware
that two men had lazily crossed over from the other side of the boat,
and were standing before him looking upon the bank.

"It was about here, I reckon," said one, listlessly, as if continuing a
previous lagging conversation, "that it must have happened. For it was
after we were making for the bend we've just passed that the deputy,
goin' to the stateroom below us, found the door locked and the window
open. But both men--Jack Despard and Seth Hall, the sheriff--weren't
to be found. Not a trace of 'em. The boat was searched, but all for
nothing. The idea is that the sheriff, arter getting his prisoner
comf'ble in the stateroom, took off Jack's handcuffs and locked the
door; that Jack, who was mighty desp'rate, bolted through the window
into the river, and the sheriff, who was no slouch, arter him.
Others allow--for the chairs and things was all tossed about in the
stateroom--that the two men clinched THAR, and Jack choked Hall and
chucked him out, and then slipped cl'ar into the water himself, for the
stateroom window was just ahead of the paddle box, and the cap'n allows
that no man or men could fall afore the paddles and live. Anyhow, that
was all they ever knew of it."

"And there wasn't no trace of them found?" said the second man, after a
long pause.

"No. Cap'n says them paddles would hev' just snatched 'em and slung 'em
round and round and buried 'em way down in the ooze of the river bed,
with all the silt of the current atop of 'em, and they mightn't come up
for ages; or else the wheels might have waltzed 'em way up to Sacramento
until there wasn't enough left of 'em to float, and dropped 'em when the
boat stopped."

"It was a mighty fool risk for a man like Despard to take," resumed the
second speaker as he turned away with a slight yawn.

"Bet your life! but he was desp'rate, and the sheriff had got him sure!
And they DO say that he was superstitious, like all them gamblers, and
allowed that a man who was fixed to die by a rope or a pistol wasn't to
be washed out of life by water."

The two figures drifted lazily away, but Morse sat rigid and motionless.
Yet, strange to say, only one idea came to him clearly out of this awful
revelation--the thought that his friend was still true to him--and that
his strange absence and mysterious silence were fully accounted for and
explained. And with it came the more thrilling fancy that this man was
alive now to HIM alone.

HE was the sole custodian of his secret. The morality of the question,
while it profoundly disturbed him, was rather in reference to its effect
upon the chances of Captain Jack and the power it gave his enemies than
his own conscience. He would rather that his friend should have proven
the proscribed outlaw who retained an unselfish interest in him than the
superior gentleman who was coldly wiping out his gratitude. He thought
he understood now the reason of his visitor's strange and varying
moods--even his bitter superstitious warning in regard to the probable
curse entailed upon one who should save a drowning man. Of this he
recked little; enough that he fancied that Captain Jack's concern in
his illness was heightened by that fear, and this assurance of his
protecting friendship thrilled him with pleasure.

There was no reason now why he should not at once go back to his farm,
where, at least, Captain Jack would always find him; and he did so,
returning on the same boat. He was now fully recovered from his illness,
and calmer in mind; he redoubled his labors to put himself in a position
to help the mysterious fugitive when the time should come. The remote
farm should always be a haven of refuge for him, and in this hope he
forbore to take any outside help, remaining solitary and alone, that
Captain Jack's retreat should be inviolate. And so the long, dry season
passed, the hay was gathered, the pasturing herds sent home, and the
first rains, dimpling like shot the broadening surface of the river,
were all that broke his unending solitude. In this enforced attitude of
waiting and expectancy he was exalted and strengthened by a new idea. He
was not a religious man, but, dimly remembering the exhortations of some
camp meeting of his boyhood, he conceived the idea that he might have
been selected to work out the regeneration of Captain Jack. What might
not come of this meeting and communing together in this lonely spot?
That anything was due to the memory of the murdered sheriff, whose bones
were rotting in the trench that he daily but unconcernedly passed, did
not occur to him. Perhaps his mind was not large enough for the double
consideration. Friendship and love--and, for the matter of that,
religion--are eminently one-ideaed.

But one night he awakened with a start. His hand, which was hanging out
of his bunk, was dabbling idly in water. He had barely time to spring
to his middle in what seemed to be a slowly filling tank before the door
fell out as from that inward pressure, and his whole shanty collapsed
like a pack of cards. But it fell outwards, the roof sliding from over
his head like a withdrawn canopy; and he was swept from his feet against
it, and thence out into what might have been another world! For the
rain had ceased, and the full moon revealed only one vast, illimitable
expanse of water! It was not an overflow, but the whole rushing river
magnified and repeated a thousand times, which, even as he gasped for
breath and clung to the roof, was bearing him away he knew not whither.
But it was bearing him away upon its center, for as he cast one swift
glance toward his meadows he saw they were covered by the same sweeping
torrent, dotted with his sailing hayricks and reaching to the wooded
foothills. It was the great flood of '54. In its awe-inspiring
completeness it might have seemed to him the primeval Deluge.

As his frail raft swept under a cottonwood he caught at one of the
overhanging limbs, and, working his way desperately along the bough, at
last reached a secure position in the fork of the tree. Here he was for
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