The Bold Frontier Read Online Free PDF

in high summer.
    Why do I stay here?
    Because he was sheriff. Because he didn’t have any other place to go.
    No, wrong. There was a place. But not, somehow, the energy to reach it. He always blamed it on his age. He’d be 46, next birthday.
    He put his bare feet on the old crocheted rug beside the bed. His tin-plated clock showed half past six. He shuddered going to the window, where he lifted the blind and gazed with despair on the frozen mud and dirty snow piles along the main street. Above the false fronts and shoddy cottages of the town, the Sierra ramparts looked down, heartless as gravestones, and just as cold.
    Downstairs, he heard loud, excited voices. An ore wagon creaked past in the street, traces jingling in the frosty air. It had snowed night before last. A howler of a storm, a foot or more dumped on the trails and high passes. He stood scratching his paunch, which had lately grown till it was impossible to ignore, and wondered about the hurrah below. Sure didn’t sound like the normal conversation of the snatch-and-grab breakfast table …
    The drab furnished room depressed him unbearably. He sat on the edge of the bed, arms crossed, hands tucked in his armpits, and hung his head. He’d been having a dream, all about home.
    In the dream, the sky was cloudless and hot. The sea grape and palmetto stirred gently in the noon breeze. Little nervous sandpipers scurried up and down the sand, and hungry gray pelicans soared and dove for prey, splashing the bright smooth water of the Gulf into the air like flung sapphires. Sitting here, growing old in White Pass, he could feel the blessed heat of the Florida sun …
    He thought about his boyhood and young manhood as he pulled on his worn pants and plaid shirt. He thought of picking up great clattery handfuls of shells on the beaches, and putting them in jars just because they were pretty. He thought of crabbing from an old skiff in Red Fish Pass, between two of the long narrow coastal keys. He’d had a decent enough business, clerking in the mercantile with the prospect of buying it when the owner gave it up. Why had he left? Why had he left the sunshine and slogged all the way out here to this?
    With a curious look of contempt on his face, he touched the reason. A clipping from an Atlanta newspaper, years old, crackly and yellow. It was part of an article about Mr. Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. He had underlined the famous charge of the journalist. Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.
    He was over 30 when he married. He’d courted Marthe Schiller, the teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in Hillsborough County, south of Tampa. Marthe was a sturdy, square-jawed woman of German descent, with eyes as blue as the Florida heavens; they relieved the severity of her face. He first admired Marthe because of her book-learning; he was poorly educated, leaving school eagerly at age 10. When love came, it came quickly, completely, generously: he wanted to find a much better existence for them. Although Florida was home, life there was a hardscrabble existence, in a beautiful but poor place to which man had added exactly nothing except towns that seemed to consist mostly of windowless shanties, impoverished farms populated by scrawny red cows, and the sad-eyed black folks who seemed all but abandoned by the world in the hovels you found at the end of nearly every sandy track into the scrub; abandoned, that is, until there was a need for bending the back in the pitiless sun doing work even the dirtiest, most ignorant white cracker wouldn’t touch. That was the real Florida if you looked at it with clear vision.
    Greeley’s charge inspired him. It was inspiring a lot of Americans, single and married. He and his wife of one year set out for California. Eleven months later, marooned in White Pass by another snowstorm, Marthe died of influenza.
    That was nine years ago. He was still here. Longing for Florida and somehow incapable of going back.
    Maybe it was