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An Old Roman Of Mariposa
by
“It’s a brutal, ghastly case,” he said, “and to my mind the only mystery about it is the prisoner’s father. He is a fine-looking man, with the manner and the head of an old Roman. He has the reputation of being the straightest and squarest man in the county; and how he ever came to be the father of such a good-for-nothing scum-of-the-earth as the prisoner I can explain only on the supposition that he is n’t.
“The old man is one of the pioneers in Mariposa, and they tell me that he was one of the nerviest men that ever drew a gun in this town. He killed his man in those days, just as lots of other good men did, but it was in self-defence; and everybody was glad that the town was rid of the man he dropped, and so nothing was said about it. There was a coroner’s jury, which gave a verdict of suicide, and explained their finding on the ground that it was suicidal for any man to draw on Dan Hopkins and then give Dan the chance to shoot first.
“Along in the latter years of the gold excitement a woman came to the town, who seems to have been part Portuguese, part Mexican, and all bad. She followed some man here from San Francisco, and lived as hard a life as the times and place made possible. And after a while she went to Dan Hopkins and told him that he must marry her. At first he would n’t consider seriously either her story or her proposition. But she kept at him, swore by all the saints in the calendar that the child was his, and then swore them all over again that if he did not marry her she would kill the child and herself too as soon as it was born, and their blood would be on his head. And finally he did marry her, and made a home for her.
“Time and again during this trial I ‘ve watched that man’s fine, stern old face and wondered what his motives and his feelings were when he took that poor beast of a woman to be his wife–whether he really believed her and thought it was his duty; or whether he feared that if he did not, the blood of a woman and a child would haunt him all the rest of his life; or whether the underside of his nature, under her influence, rose up and dominated all that was best in him and made him love her and be willing to marry her.
“Whatever it was, the deed was done, and the woman of the town became Mrs. Hopkins, with Dan Hopkins’s gun at her service, ready to take revenge upon anybody who might offer her the least insult or whisper a slighting word about the past.
“He did not try to crowd her down people’s throats–they might let her alone if they wished, and they mostly did, I believe–but they were made to understand that they had to treat her and speak of her with respect.
“He bought a big ranch a little way out of town, and there they lived from that time on. As far as I can find out, the woman lived a straight, respectable kind of life for a dozen years or more, and then she died.
“But all her badness seems to have descended to the boy. It’s one of the oddest studies in heredity I ever came across. The people here all tell me that until he was thirteen or fourteen years old he was a manly sort of a lad, and gave promise of being something like his father as he grew up. But about that time the evil in him began to show itself, and the older he grew the less moral principle he seemed to possess. He was courageous, they say, and that was the only good quality he had. It was a sort of dare-devil bravery, and along with it he was cruel, thieving, untruthful, and–well, about as near thoroughly bad as they make ’em. At least, that’s the sum of the account of him the people here have given me.