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The Land of Little Rain-Part7_Mary Hunter Austin(1868-1934)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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humorous appreciation that strangers mistake for dullness. At

Jimville they see behavior as history and judge it by facts,



untroubled by invention and the dramatic sense. You glimpse a

crude equity in their dealings with Wilkins, who had shot a man at



Lone Tree, fairly, in an open quarrel. Rumor of it reached

Jimville before Wilkins rested there in flight. I saw Wilkins, all



Jimville saw him; in fact, he came into the Silver Dollar when we

were holding a church fair and bought a pink silk pincushion. I



have often wondered what became of it. Some of us shook hands with

him, not because we did not know, but because we had not been



officially notified, and there were those present who knew how it

was themselves. When the sheriff arrived Wilkins had moved on, and



Jimville organized a posse and brought him back, because the

sheriff was a Jimville man and we had to stand by him.



I said we had the church fair at the Silver Dollar. We had

most things there, dances, town meetings, and the kinetoscope



exhibition of the Passion Play. The Silver Dollar had been built

when the borders of Jimville spread from Minton to the red hill the



Defiance twisted through. "Side-Winder" Smith scrubbed the floor

for us and moved the bar to the back room. The fair was designed



for the support of the circuit rider who preached to the few that

would hear, and buried us all in turn. He was the symbol of



Jimville's respectability, although he was of a sect that

held dancing among the cardinal sins. The management took no



chances on offending the minister; at 11.30 they tendered him the

receipts of the evening in the chairman's hat, as a delicate



intimation that the fair was closed. The company filed out of the

front door and around to the back. Then the dance began formally



with no feelings hurt. These were the sort of courtesies, common

enough in Jimville, that brought tears of delicate inner laughter.



There were others besides Mr. Fanshawe who had walked out of

Mr. Harte's demesne to Jimville and wore names that smacked of the



soil,--"Alkali Bill," "Pike" Wilson, "Three Finger," and "Mono

Jim;" fierce, shy, profane, sun-dried derelicts of the windy hills,



who each owned, or had owned, a mine and was wishful to own one

again. They laid up on the worn benches of the Silver Dollar or



the Same Old Luck like beached vessels, and their talk ran on

endlessly of "strike" and "contact" and "mother lode," and worked



around to fights and hold-ups, villainy, haunts, and the hoodoo of

the Minietta, told austerely without imagination.



Do not suppose I am going to repeat it all; you who want these

things written up from the point of view of people who do not do



them every day would get no savor in their speech.

Says Three Finger, relating the history of the



Mariposa, "I took it off'n Tom Beatty, cheap, after his brother

Bill was shot."



Says Jim Jenkins, "What was the matter of him?"

"Who? Bill? Abe Johnson shot him; he was fooling around



Johnson's wife, an' Tom sold me the mine dirt cheap."

"Why didn't he work it himself?"



"Him? Oh, he was laying for Abe and calculated to have to

leave the country pretty quick."



"Huh!" says Jim Jenkins, and the tale flows smoothly on.

Yearly the spring fret floats the loose population of Jimville



out into the desolate waste hot lands, guiding by the peaks and a

few rarely touched water-holes, always, always with the golden



hope. They develop prospects and grow rich, develop others and

grow poor but never embittered. Say the hills, It is all one,



there is gold enough, time enough, and men enough to come after

you. And at Jimville they understand the language of the hills.



Jimville does not know a great deal about the crust of the

earth, it prefers a "hunch." That is an intimation from the gods



that if you go over a brown back of the hills, by a dripping

spring, up Coso way, you will find what is worth while. I have



never heard that the failure of any particular hunch disproved the

principle. Somehow the rawness of the land favors the sense of



personal relation to the supernatural. There is not much

intervention of crops, cities, clothes, and manners between you and



the organizing forces to cut off communication. All this begets in

Jimville a state that passes explanation unless you will accept an



explanation that passes belief. Along with killing and

drunkenness, coveting of women, charity, simplicity, there is a






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