Cæsar's Ghost

I

IT will be remembered by the earlier readers of the great, explorer, Emmet Franklin, that the first and second edition of his Brahmaputran Journal has no preface. One plunges into the text at the date of his setting out from Peking, with not even a preliminary word to introduce the narrative of that terrible and wonderful three years.

Perhaps this accounts in part for the interest that both reviewers and general public have taken in the preface to the third edition of the Journal, lately come from the press. Yet the preface itself is a document to intrigue the interest. It covers three pages, and consists of a catalogue of the various animals that served Franklin on the expedition, the virtues they displayed, and the deaths they met, each in turn, upon the lonely Himalayan trails.

The whole tone of the preface, say the reviewers, is in striking contrast to Franklin’s attitude toward animals displayed in the Journal. There he seems to regard them as mere instruments for the attainment of his goal, and their sufferings and mortality are mentioned only when their loss threatens to delay the expedition. Attention is called more than once to the bald entry in the second volume where the death of Franklin’s collie is recorded.

‘Have lost my collie,’ Franklin writes. ‘ It fell into the lake as we were landing last evening at sundown; and as I did not want it in my tent with its wet fur, I tied it to the pole outside. Found it this morning standing as if straining to get inside the flap, frozen stiff. A nuisance, as it was faithful in guarding my belongings.’

Not a word of regret, you see, except for the inconvenience to himself. But the collie gets his meticulous tribute in the preface, along with horses and yaks and shaggy little Chinese ponies. Only, what prompted this late atonement? Had the ghosts of his dumb and faithful servitors returned to haunt Franklin in his leisure hours? The reviews all close with much the same refrain.

How near the mark their chance shots come, only we who lived near to Franklin during the year that elapsed between the second and third edition of his Journal can tell. During that year the explorer was our nearest neighbor; and though our intimacy could scarcely be said to have attained the warmth of friendship, we were familiar with the activities and influences of his life as is possible only in an isolated community like ours. Moreover, we saw the beginning and end of Franklin’s relations to Cæsar; and there, I am convinced, lies the key to that astonishing preface.

We live in a little valley on the edge of the California desert. Our ranch is the last in the irrigated belt, and between us and neighbors there is a terraced olive grove whose deep-eaved cottage has stood tenantless for years. The owner lived there just long enough to regain his health, then abandoned his ranch and went back to his New York home; since when the gophers and ground-squirrels have had things pretty much their own way on its weed-grown terraces.

We were pleased, of course, when a letter from the owner informed us that the cottage was to have a tenant at last; pleased and excited as well, when we learned, further, that the prospective tenant was none other than Emmet Franklin, the great explorer.

We are a simple community and take people pretty much as we find them; but the name of Emmet Franklin was just then on everyone’s lips. Kings had delighted to honor him for his achievements in a part of Asia hitherto jealously guarded against European exploration. We had read of his travels in the daily news, and now my father sent to Los Angeles for a copy of the Brahmaputran Journal, and our neighbors borrowed the two thick volumes and read them so thoroughly that the frontispiece portrait of Franklin came loose and had to be pasted into volume one at least half a dozen times.

I wondered what our neighbors made of Franklin’s portrait: the long jaw, the close lips, the cold steady eyes with the sharp angle of the lids, the forehead, intellectual but lacking in benevolence. Whatever they thought, they kept a loyal silence, only Ed Ryan, the mailcarrier, venturing a comment. He had returned the Journal for Widow Dixon, and he as stooped to recover Franklin’s portrait, loose again, he held it for a moment in his huge paw.

‘Say, but that’s a frozen eye!’ he observed.

‘From gazing long upon Himalayan snows,’ my father quoted.

‘Maybe so, maybe so,’ said Ed doubtfully. ‘It looks to me like the ice came from inside, not out. I’d hate to be his horse.’

We smiled at this characteristic speech. Ed Ryan was foolish about animals, and he judged every man by his attitude toward his horse or his dog. His own sleek sorrel mare was almost useless from overfeeding and petting.

Franklin arrived, and my first impression was that he was chillingly like his portrait. He had a dry emotionless voice, and he looked at each new acquaintance as if summing up his possibilities for usefulness in furthering some secret purposes of his own. It may have been merely an unfortunate manner, but it checked the friendly impulse.

Yet, when he made it known that he needed a horse, we were all ready to be helpful again.

‘He does n’t care for anything young and fancy,’ said Mason the hotelkeeper, a little proud of being Franklin’s spokesman in the matter. ‘He’s only here for a few months to rest. An old horse will do. I thought of Cæsar.’

‘ Cæsar! ’ said Ryan.

‘Well, why not? Mr. Franklin would n’t use him much, and I think Cæsar would enjoy the change. It must be dull for him, sticking around in pasture all the the time. What’s your objection, Ed?’

Ed Ryan was not ready with his objections; and when one man after another indorsed the plan of offering Cæsar to the great man in our midst, he finally gave in, and even promised to fetch the old horse from pasture and take him out to Franklin.

To understand how much the offer of Cæsar meant, one must know something of the horse’s history. He had originally belonged to Elder Thompson, who for the few years he spent among us was the idol of the community. Elder Thompson was what is called a ‘lunger’ in our bald Western slang. He was a thin, stooped man, with gentle brown eyes, and a curling beard such as one sees in the old paintings of the Beloved Disciple. What obscure sect he belonged to, I do not remember now; and it does not matter in any case, for his pure and charitable spirit knew no divisions of creed or name. Weak as he was, he carried on his work of preaching and comforting the sick and the sad to the very last day of his life.

And Elder Thompson’s Cæsar grew to be almost as dear to the valley as the elder himself. Cæsar’s ribs were like barrel-staves, and no amount of feeding could hide them. His shoulders were misshapen from a too-early wearing of the collar, and his long, solemn black face, with its pendulous lower lip, had almost the effect of caricature. But for all his ugliness he was a saint among his kind. Never had horse combined such gentleness of disposition with so indomitable a spirit. He drew the elder’s shabby buggy up and down the desert roads through rain and shine; and when the elder died, the community raised a purse and put Cæsar to spend his old age in the luscious salt pastures about John Cochrane’s sulphur spring.

Now he was to be lent to Franklin as a special token of the valley’s regard.

Franklin’s manner of receiving the loan was not particularly gracious. He told Ed Ryan in his dry impassive voice that he would much prefer buying the horse, and that he would pay thirtyfive dollars for him.

‘ I can get that much use out of him,’ Franklin added.

‘He is n’t a young horse, you understand,’ Ryan protested, taking alarm. ‘You’ll have to go easy with him.’

‘He will serve my purpose,’ said Franklin dryly. ‘He is not for sale? How very quaint. Be so kind as to turn him into the paddock for me.’

‘He meant the corral,’ the carrier explained in telling us the story. ‘I pretty near brought Cæsar away with me on the spot, I was so mad. Mr. Franklin may be a great explorer, but I say again what I said before, I’d hate to be his horse.’

‘It will be all right,’ said my father reassuringly. ‘Mr. Franklin’s manner is misleading. We find he improves on acquaintance.’

We were already yielding to the explorer’s charm. He had come to the house that morning on an errand, and catching sight of a swastika design on one of our Indian baskets, had stopped to discuss its origin.

‘It is the sacred design of the Asiatic Buddhists,’ he told us, his cold blue eyes taking fire. ‘Even the figures on the arms — why, I have seen that exact pattern in the monastery at Gompu, up in the Himalayas.’

Then for an hour he held us spellbound with tales of the Buddhist monastery by its enchanted sapphire lake. ‘I could not finish my exploration of the lake,’ he concluded, his face clouding. ‘I froze my hands in a blizzard and inflammation set in. While I was delirious, my men took me down to a lower altitude, and it was impossible to return.’

‘You see,’ said my father afterward, ‘that explains his apparent heartlessness. Even his own life is a light matter to him compared to his work.’

I heard my father repeating this incident to Ed Ryan a day or two later. Already we were assuming the rôle of Franklin’s defenders and interpreters.

Nevertheless, we kept an eye on Cæsar, and whenever we saw the faithful old horse trotting down the road, we would involuntarily register the hour of his departure and would be conscious of his absence until we saw him coming home again.

‘Franklin lets him hurry too much,’ said my father, as Cæsar was returning rather stumblingly one evening, his coat streaked with foam. ‘ I don’t think he uses the whip, but Csæsar always looks overheated. I must drop him a hint.’

The hint was not dropped, however, for Franklin forestalled it. He dined with us a few evenings later, and as we drank our coffee by the fire he observed with his faintly sarcastic smile, —

‘This seems to be a community of sentimentalists. The chap who brings the mail is really worth taking notes on when he gets started on the subject of animals.’

‘He is very humane,’ said my father with a touch of stiffness.

‘So?’ Franklin’s accent had an irritating foreign cadence when he pronounced this little word. ‘I am not foolish about animals myself. Some forms of life are important, some less important. The less must be sacrificed to the greater.’

‘The form of life is not always the measure of its importance,’ retorted my father. ‘Nobility of spirit has its claims whether in animal or man. There are many men who could easier be spared from the world than a horse like Cæsar, for example.’

‘So you too make a fetish of Cæsar. Yes, yes, I know. He was the property of a worthy man, and a certain sentimental value attaches to him on that account. But otherwise the horse is not remarkable.’

‘Good heavens, Franklin, where are your eyes?’ my father protested warmly. ‘Try studying Cæsar with the care you would put upon a Buddhist inscription. The horse is worth it.’

Franklin gave my father a quick look, as if the suggestion had struck him. But he only repeated his exasperating ‘So?’ and after a little began to talk of ot her things.

A few days later he informed us that he was going to take over the cultivation of the olives. He said he needed the definite incentive to exercise.

‘How about a team and cultivator?’ my father asked.

‘There is a single cultivator on the place, and I shall use Cæsar.’

My father hesitated. ‘But you drive Cæsar to town every day. Is n't fourteen miles enough for the old horse?’

‘I’ve ridden old horses three times fourteen miles in a day, and that over mountain passes,’ said Franklin quietly; adding as an afterthought, ‘They soon wore out, of course.’

By a visible effort my father held his peace. Franklin began to follow out his plan of exercise, and observed with a good deal of satisfaction that he already felt the benefit to his system of the regular work, and found himself in better form for the revision of his Journal.

But the valley had ceased to take a deep interest in the Journal, so indignant were they at Franklin’s cool interpretation of his rights over Cæsar. Ed Ryan remonstrated with Franklin, but was routed.

‘He’s got the gift of words,’ he said bitterly. ‘He made me feel as if I was poking my nose into his private affairs. But Asia or no Asia, I’m not going to have Cæsar wearing his heart out. You tackle Franklin, Mr. Eaton. You can talk.’

‘Why not simply withdraw the horse?’ suggested my father, ignoring the doubtful compliment. ‘We have the right to do that.’

‘The right, yes,’ said the carrier pessimistically. ‘But just try standing up to that icicle gaze and saying you ’ve come to take the horse away—the horse he wants to use. No! He means to keep him to turn up those soothin’ furrows that make the great brain work so well. Not that he does n’t make a good fist of the cultivating too,’ Ryan added, as though bound to give the devil his due. ‘Well, I guess you'll have to settle Mr. Franklin.’

My father declined the responsibility, and I think he meant to stick to his resolution. But when one evening he saw Franklin starting off to town with Cæsar after a hard day’s work on the terraces, his resolve fled to the winds. Franklin unconsciously invited an outburst by turning in our drive and asking for a whip.

‘The horse seems to need urging tonight,’ he observed.

‘To need urging!’ my father exclaimed. ‘Surely, Franklin, you don’t mean to drive the poor beast to town after working him hard all day!’

‘Why not?’ asked Franklin, lifting his brows.

‘Your conscience ought to tell you that. What will people think if you come into the village with that poor old fellow in such a state of exhaustion ? ’

‘He can make the trip, I think.’

‘Can make the trip!’ my father stormed. ‘Well, you may have been able to treat animals like this in the Orient, and God pity the poor creatures you sacrificed to your selfish desires —

‘To my selfish desires!’ Franklin interrupted in a tone that showed that shaft had hit home.

‘I have said it,’ said my father stoutly. But he evidently began to be ashamed of his vehemence, for he added more mildly, ‘I’m going to the village this evening. If you will leave Cæsar here I should be glad to drive you down.’

I expected a flat refusal from Franklin, but he climbed out at once. ‘ Thank you,’ he said quietly. ‘I am looking for important mail. It is immaterial to me how I get there.’

And while the gray colt was being harnessed, Franklin took Cæsar from the shafts and led him to our stable.

I saw him look more than once at the old horse’s legs, which were trembling a little.

He returned restlessly to the subject during the drive, as I learned afterward.

‘When a man has a large end in

. view,’ he said, ‘he must be ruthless or fail. I have accomplished the impossible only because I have no sentimental weaknesses.’

‘I know what tremendous things you’ve done,’ said my father; ‘but honestly, Franklin, do you think any end justifies the suffering and sacrifice of those lesser existences, as you called them the other day?’

‘Take my word for it, yes!’ was Franklin’s swift reply, and his eyes kindled to an almost fanatical brightness.

‘But I think he will be more careful of Cæsar after this,’ my father concluded. ‘He showed that his conscience was not altogether easy about the old horse.’

II

Yet Franklin was at his cultivating again next morning. At noon he appeared at our door to say that Cæsar had lain down and would not get up.

‘Whether from disinclination or something more serious, I cannot tell. I should like Mr. Eaton to look at the horse, if he will.’

‘He is in Los Angeles,’ I said. And then, as Franklin still lingered, ‘Shall I come over? I don’t know that I can be of any help — ’

‘If you will be so good,’ said Franklin in his dryest voice.

Cæsar did not seem to be in pain. He was lying in a corner of the corral, his head on a little hummock of hay. He twisted his neck and looked at us with an inquiring eye, then touched his nose to his twitching flank, as it asking the meaning of the strange impotence that had seized him.

‘He does that all the time,’ said Franklin in a subdued voice. ‘I fancy the trouble is in his hindquarters.’

‘Was he at his hay when he fell?’ I asked looking at Cæsar’s pillow.

‘No, I merely put that there to keep his head out of the muck,’said Franklin gruffly.

I picked a sprig of fresh alfalfa and offered it to Cæsar. He took it between his long teeth and chewed reflectively, then whinnied softly for more.

‘He is n’t very ill or he would n’t eat,’I said. ‘Maybe he’s only a little stiff and needs help to get up. Have you a rope?’

Franklin fetched a rope and we put it around Cæsar’s neck and began coaxing him and encouraging him to get on his feet. I secretly admired Franklin’s skill. Those long strong hands of his were so sure in every movement, and he pulled and coaxed, until at last the old horse scrambled to his feet again. One could see that all was not well, however. Cæsar’s legs trembled as if they might give way any minute.

‘Ed Ryan is a veterinary,’ I said at last. ‘Why not send for him?’

‘As you please,’said Franklin, with a slight grimace.

Ryan was restrained in his criticism, softened perhaps by my story of the pillow of hay. But he pronounced Cæsar’s ailment a sort of paralysis from overwork and age.

‘Incurable?’ Franklin asked curtly.

‘Well, he ’ll not be able to work again, but with real good care he’ll last quite a spell yet. I’d stake him out. in the young grass among the olives. He’ll get that far all right, if you go easy.’

‘Surely, my good man, you are not proposing that I nurse up an absolutely useless horse!’ Franklin exclaimed with a cold smile.

Ryan bristled. ‘You’ve worked the horse to death and now I s’pose you want to knock him on the head. Well, it can't be done. Cæsar, he’s earned a rest and he’s going to have it. He’ll be com’table out ihere in the sun, and as long as he’s com’table he stays.’

‘As you choose,’ said Franklin with shrug. ‘But you will have to look aft er him. I have more important matters on hand.’

‘Him and his matters,’growled Ryan as he drove me home. ‘Always makes us look like fools, just because were human toward dumb brutes. I wish you’d spoken up, Miss Vera, he might have listened to you. One thing’s certain, you’ll have to see that he feeds and waters Cæsar properly.’

‘But I can’t be running over to Mr. Franklin’s place and looking after his horse,’ I protested.

Ed’s round face took on a look of unutterable reproach.

‘His horse! It’s Cæsar, and if you don’t care to do that for Caesar, then I must, though it will mean toting all this way out.’

Of course, I promised that I would see to Cæsar’s comfort. As I did not care to brave Franklin’s ironic smile, I waited until toward sundown and then strolled ailong the wild hillside above the olive terraces, gathering wild buckwheat blossoms and sprays of artemisia so that on a chance encounter it might appear that I was merely out for a walk.

But as I rounded the shoulder of the hill, I came face to face with Franklin. I think I was the less self-conscious of the two, for he was surprised bareheaded and in his shirt-sleeves, pulling handsful of grass and feeding them to Cæsar.

‘You see I have caught the infection,’he observed to me with a sour smile. ‘The presence of the horse on my place disturbs me. Ryan must take him away to-morrow.’

‘We’ll take him,’ I said quietly. ‘He can pasture on our alfalfa.’

Franklin ignored this. He dusted his hands of the clinging green leaves and thrust them into his pockets. Then he turned his cold stare on me.

‘It’s absurd. I have but a few months in which to finish the revision of my Journal, and my valuable time is being wasted by this childish fuss about a horse.’

‘I have said that we will take him.’

‘I find he has difficulty in chewing alfalfa,’ said Franklin irritably. ‘And that is n’t the question. He should be put out of the way. You know that as well as I.’

Cæsar thrust his long nose against Franklin’s arm and whinnied softly. I was struck by the man’s strange, impulsive gesture as he stooped and began pulling grass again.

The worst of it was, we knew that Franklin was right about Cæsar. The old horse himself was not happy. He had that trick of turning his nose inquiringly upon his trembling flank, and his kind old eyes followed our movements with a look of settled sadness. Ed Ryan avoided coming out at all — I think because he felt the reproach of Cæsar’s eyes.

Then came a day when even Franklin’s strong hands could not help the old horse to his feet again. He still nibbled gently at the tender grass we offered him and took slow sips from the dripping pail, but it was plain that he would never rise. Franklin sent word to Ryan, and became grimly sarcastic when Friday and Saturday went by and Ryan did not appear.

‘Ed isn’t doing right. He should put the old horse away instead of letting him die by inches,’ said my father. ‘I shall speak to him myself.’

‘He’s in a sunny com’table place,’ said Ryan when my father took him to task in the post-office that evening. ‘ Maybe he ’ll get better in a day or two. I’m waiting to see.’

‘He goes to one extreme and Franklin to the other,’ remarked my father as we drove home. ‘Well, let them settle it between them. Franklin will take good care of Cæsar until Ed appears; of that I am sure.’

We did not see Franklin on Sunday, but on Monday morning he appeared at the door and asked if he might borrow our Indian for an hour or two. I called Tortes, and then rather awkwardly asked after Csesar.

I did not get an immediate reply. Then Franklin said in his dryest voice, ‘The horse is dead.’

‘Dead!’ I repeated.

‘I shot him last night,’ jerked out Franklin. ‘It was time to end this impossible situation. And now, if I may have Tortes to help me dig a pit for the carcass, we shall be done with the whole matter.’

Tortes appeared. Franklin lifted his hat to me and without another word marched off as if he were leading a troop, Tortes following meekly after.

My judgment told me that Franklin had done the sensible thing, but I did not love him the better for it. And when I remembered the cold tone in which he had announced his deed, I felt an actual repulsion toward the man. I hoped Ryan and the rest of the village would give him a bad time when they heard of Cæsar’s death.

The weather had turned suddenly warm and springlike, and that evening we sat late on the veranda, listening to the frogs singing in the weir and enjoying the fragrance of orange-blossoms and wild sage from the hill. We were just going in when there was a step on the gravel and Franklin appeared in the strip of moonlight below us.

My greeting was anything but cordial, but I doubt if he noticed it. So monosyllabic were his replies to our efforts at conversation, that I wondered why he had chosen to inflict himself on us in so unsociable a mood.

‘I am going away to-morrow,’ he said abruptly, breaking a silence that threatened to be endless. ‘My work has ceased to be satisfactory here, and I must make a change.’

My father murmured polite regrets. They met with no response from Franklin. He jumped up, thrust his hands in his pockets, and after a few rapid steps stopped, facing us, looking down at us with eyes that the moonlight made colder.

‘As to Cæsar,’ he said, just as if we had brought up the subject, ‘Ryan should have put him out of the way. He — he was interfering with my work.

‘And so you shot him,’I put in.

‘I shot him,’ Franklin admitted quietly. He paused. ‘Would it interest you to know why I shot him? I will tell you, then. Yesterday afternoon I happened to go out to the terrace where the horse was, and seeing that the cultivator was still in the furrow, I started to pull it out of the way of the man who was coming to finish the work this morning. I pulled it aside quite easily, but as I passed Cæsar he struggled to rise. He tried again and again, and he whinnied to me, asking me to help him. The cultivator, you see — his job — he wanted to be of help. But it was in vain. He fell back with a long sigh. I did not think so much of it at the time. But in the night I waked and could think of nothing but that sigh. I thought it over, and having reached a conclusion I lighted the lantern, took my revolver and went out. The horse whinnied when he heard me,’Franklin continued after clearing his throat; ‘and when I bent over him and put the revolver to his temple, he touched my hand with his nose — curiously soft — curiously soft — Where was I ? ’

Franklin jerked out the question with a swift, furtive glance at us. He recovered himself and went on in his emotionless voice.

‘He never stirred. I thought I had finished with him then. But he has a personality that one cannot forget. However, that may be the illusion of overwrought nerves. After all, I was kind to your Cæsar. There was a gray horse we left dying in the snow at Poodla Pass — that, was a different matter.’

He pulled himself up, bade us an abrupt good-night, and was gone. It was the last we saw of Franklin, and so foreign was this apologia, delivered in the mysterious light of a dying moon, to all that we had seen of the man before, that my father and I sometimes wondered if we had dreamed it. But when the third edition of the Brahmaputran Journal was announced by the publishers, my father sent for it, excusing the extravagance on the ground that it was probably enlarged.

There were but few changes in the text, but my father read the preface aloud.

‘Well,’he said when he had finished, ‘what do you make of it?’

‘It sounds haunted,’I exclaimed.

My father nodded. ‘ Cæsar!’ he said.