4

Virginia and I gathered the berries, and she was as happy as she could be, apparently; but once in a while she would say, “Poor Teunis!  Can’t a Dutchman see a joke?”

After that, the elder and his wife used to come out to see me, bringing Virginia with them, almost every week, and I prided myself greatly on my fried chicken my nice salt-rising bread, my garden vegetables, my green corn, my butter, milk and cream.  I had about forgotten about being arrested, when the grand jury indicted me, and Amos Bemisdarfer and Flavius Bohn went bail for me.  When the trial came on I was fined twenty dollars, and before I could produce the money, it was paid by William Trickey, Ebenezer Junkins and Absalom Frost, who told me that they got me into it, and it wasn’t fair for a boy to suffer through doing what was necessary for the protection of the settlers, and what a lot of older men had egged him on to do.  So I came out of it all straight, and was not much the less thought of.  In fact, I seemed to have ten friends after the affair to one before.  But Dick McGill, whose connection with it I have felt justified in exposing, still hounded me through his paper.  I have before me the copy of the Journal—­little four-page sheet yellowed with time, with the account of it which follows: 

“A desperado named Vandemark, well known to the annals of local crime as ‘Cow Vandemark,’ was arrested last Wednesday for leading the riots which have cleaned out those industrious citizens who have been jumping claims in this county.  A reporter of the Journal, which finds out everything before it happens, attended the ceremonies of giving some of these people a coat of tar and feathers, and can speak from personal observation as to the ferocity of this ruffian Vandemark—­also from slight personal contact.

“This hardened wretch is in every feature a villain—­except that he has a rosy complexion, downy whiskers, and buttermilk eyes, instead of the black flashing orbs of fiction.  Sheriff Boyd decoyed him into town, skilfully avoiding any rousing of his tigerish disposition, and is now making a blacksmith of him—­or was until yesterday, when he paroled him to Miss Virginia Royall, the ward of the Reverend Thorndyke.

“This is a very questionable policy.  If followed up it will result in a saturnalia of crime in this community.  Already several of our young men are reading dime novels and taking lessons in banditry; but the sheriff has stated that this parole will not be considered a precedent.  The affair has resulted in some good, however.  In addition to placing the young man under Christian influences, and others, it has unearthed a patch of the biggest, best, ripest and sweetest wild strawberries in Monterey County on the ancestral estate of the criminal, known as Vandemark’s Folly, and by the use of prison labor, and through the generosity and public spirit of our rising young fellow-citizen, Jacob