Like Argus Of The Ancient Times
It was the summer of 1897, and there was trouble in the Tarwater family. Grandfather
Tarwater, after remaining properly subdued and crushed for a quiet decade, had broken
out again. This time it was the Klondike fever. His first and one unvarying symptom of
such attacks was song. One chant only he raised, though he remembered no more than the
first stanza and but three lines of that. And the family knew his feet were itching and his
brain was tingling with the old madness, when he lifted his hoarse-cracked voice, now
falsetto-cracked, in:
Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this modern Greece,
Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece.
Ten years earlier he had lifted the chant, sung to the air of the "Doxology," when afflicted
with the fever to go gold-mining in Patagonia. The multitudinous family had sat upon
him, but had had a hard time doing it. When all else had failed to shake his resolution,
they had applied lawyers to him, with the threat of getting out guardianship papers and of
confining him in the state asylum for the insane--which was reasonable for a man who
had, a quarter of a century before, speculated away all but ten meagre acres of a
California principality, and who had displayed no better business acumen ever since.
The application of lawyers to John Tarwater was like the application of a mustard plaster.
For, in his judgment, they were the gentry, more than any other, who had skinned him out
of the broad Tarwater acres. So, at the time of his Patagonian fever, the very thought of
so drastic a remedy was sufficient to cure him. He quickly demonstrated he was not crazy
by shaking the fever from him and agreeing not to go to Patagonia.
Next, he demonstrated how crazy he really was, by deeding over to his family,
unsolicited, the ten acres on Tarwater Flat, the house, barn, outbuildings, and water-
rights. Also did he turn over the eight hundred dollars in bank that was the long-saved
salvage of his wrecked fortune. But for this the family found no cause for committal to
the asylum, since such committal would necessarily invalidate what he had done.
"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
