Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Red One by Jack London
page 65 of 140 (46%)

"Grandfather is sure peeved," said Mary, his oldest daughter,
herself a grandmother, when her father quit smoking.

All he had retained for himself was a span of old horses, a
mountain buckboard, and his one room in the crowded house.
Further, having affirmed that he would be beholden to none of them,
he got the contract to carry the United States mail, twice a week,
from Kelterville up over Tarwater Mountain to Old Almaden--which
was a sporadically worked quick-silver mine in the upland cattle
country. With his old horses it took all his time to make the two
weekly round trips. And for ten years, rain or shine, he had never
missed a trip. Nor had he failed once to pay his week's board into
Mary's hand. This board he had insisted on, in the convalescence
from his Patagonian fever, and he had paid it strictly, though he
had given up tobacco in order to be able to do it.

"Huh!" he confided to the ruined water wheel of the old Tarwater
Mill, which he had built from the standing timber and which had
ground wheat for the first settlers. "Huh! They'll never put me
in the poor farm so long as I support myself. And without a penny
to my name it ain't likely any lawyer fellows'll come snoopin'
around after me."

And yet, precisely because of these highly rational acts, it was
held that John Tarwater was mildly crazy!

The first time he had lifted the chant of "Like Argus of the
Ancient Times," had been in 1849, when, twenty-two years' of age,
violently attacked by the Californian fever, he had sold two
DigitalOcean Referral Badge