Utterly oblivious of this artistic “shadowing” in the insignificant person of the small boy who once or twice even crossed their path with affected timidity, they continued an apparently confidential previous interview. The words “stocks” and “shares” were alone intelligible. Johnny had heard them during the day, but he was struck by the fact that Uncle Ben seemed to be seeking information from the paragon and was perfectly submissive and humble. But the boy was considerably mystified when after a tramp of half an hour they arrived upon the debatable ground of the Harrison-McKinstry boundary. Having been especially warned never to go there, Johnny as a matter of course was perfectly familiar with it. But what was the incomprehensible stranger doing there? Was he brought by Uncle Ben with a view of paralyzing both of the combatants with the spectacle of his perfections? Was he a youthful sheriff, a young judge, or maybe the son of the Governor of California? Or was it that Uncle Ben was “silly” and didn’t know the locality? Here was an opportunity for him, Johnny, to introduce himself, and explain and even magnify the danger, with perhaps a slight allusion to his own fearless familiarity with it. Unfortunately, as he was making up his small mind behind a tree, the paragon turned and with the easy disdain that so well became him, said:
“Well, I wouldn’t offer a dollar an acre for the whole ranch. But if YOU choose to give a fancy price–that’s your lookout.”
To Johnny’s already prejudiced mind, Uncle Ben received this just contempt submissively, as he ought, but nevertheless he muttered something “silly” in reply, which Johnny was really too disgusted to listen to. Ought he not to step forward and inform the paragon that he was wasting his time on a man who couldn’t even spell “ba-ker,” and who was taught his letters by his, Johnny’s, brother?
The paragon continued:
“And of course you know that merely your buying the title to the land don’t give you possession. You’ll have to fight these squatters and jumpers just the same. It’ll be three instead of two fighting–that’s all!”
Uncle Ben’s imbecile reply did not trouble Johnny. He had ears now only for the superior intellect before him. IT continued coolly:
“Now let’s take a look at that yield of yours. I haven’t much time to give you, as I expect some men to be looking for me here–and I suppose you want this thing still kept a secret. I don’t see how you’ve managed to do it so far. Is your claim near? You live on it–I think you said?”
But that the little listener was so preoccupied with the stranger, this suggestion of Uncle Ben’s having a claim worth the attention of that distinguished presence would have set him thinking; the little that he understood he set down to Uncle Ben’s “gassin’.” As the two men moved forward again, he followed them until Uncle Ben’s house was reached.
It was a rude shanty of boards and rough boulders, half burrowing in one of the largest mounds of earth and gravel, which had once represented the tailings or refuse of the abandoned Indian Spring Placer. In fact it was casually alleged by some that Uncle Ben eked out the scanty “grub wages,” he made by actual mining, in reworking and sifting the tailings at odd times–a degrading work hitherto practised only by Chinese, and unworthy the Caucasian ambition. The mining code of honor held that a man might accept the smallest results of his daily labor, as long as he was sustained by the prospect of a larger “strike,” but condemned his contentment with a modest certainty. Nevertheless a little of this suspicion encompassed his dwelling and contributed to its loneliness, even as a long ditch, the former tail-race of the claim, separated him from his neighbors. Prudently halting at the edge of the wood, Johnny saw his resplendent vision cross the strip of barren flat, and enter the cabin with Uncle Ben like any other mortal. He sat down on a stump and awaited its return, which he fondly hoped might be alone! At the end of half an hour he made a short excursion to examine the condition of a blackberry bramble, and returned to his post of observation. But there was neither sound nor motion in the direction of the cabin. When another ten minutes had elapsed, the door opened and to Johnny’s intense discomfiture, Uncle Ben appeared alone and walked leisurely towards the woods. Burning with anxiety Johnny threw himself in Uncle Ben’s way. But here occurred one of those surprising inconsistencies known only to children. As Uncle Ben turned his small gray eyes upon him in a half astonished, half questioning manner, the potent spirit of childish secretiveness suddenly took possession of the boy. Wild horses could not now have torn from him that question which only a moment before was on his lips.
“Hullo, Johnny! What are ye doin’ here?” said Uncle Ben kindly.
“Nothin’.” After a pause, in which he walked all round Uncle Ben’s large figure, gazing up at him as if he were a monument, he added, “Huntin’ blackberrieth.”
“Why ain’t you over at the collation?”
“Ruperth there,” he answered promptly.
The idea of being thus vicariously present in the person of his brother seemed a sufficient excuse. He leap-frogged over the stump on which he had been sitting as an easy unembarrassing pause for the next question. But Uncle Ben was apparently perfectly satisfied with Johnny’s reply, and nodding to him, walked away.
When his figure had disappeared in the bushes, Johnny cautiously approached the cabin. At a certain distance he picked up a stone and threw it against the door, immediately taking to his heels and the friendly copse again. No one appearing he repeated the experiment twice and even thrice with a larger stone and at a nearer distance. Then he boldly skirted the cabin and dropped into the race-way at its side. Following it a few hundred yards he came upon a long disused shaft opening into it, which had been covered with a rough trap of old planks, as if to protect incautious wayfarers from falling in. Here a sudden and inexplicable fear overtook Johnny, and he ran away. When he reached the hotel, almost the first sight that met his astounded eyes was the spectacle of the paragon, apparently still in undisturbed possession of all his perfections–driving coolly off in a buggy with a fresh companion.
Meantime Mr. Ford, however touched by the sentimental significance of the celebration, became slightly wearied of its details. As his own room in the Eureka Hotel was actually thrilled by the brass band without and the eloquence of speakers below, and had become redolent of gunpowder and champagne exploded around it, he determined to return to the school-house and avail himself of its woodland quiet to write a few letters.
The change was grateful, the distant murmur of the excited settlement came only as the soothing sound of wind among the leaves. The pure air of the pines that filled every cranny of the quiet school-room, and seemed to disperse all taint of human tenancy, made the far-off celebrations as unreal as a dream. The only reality of his life was here.
He took from his pocket a few letters one of which was worn and soiled with frequent handling. He re-read it in a half methodical, half patient way, as if he were waiting for some revelation it inspired, which was slow that afternoon in coming. At other times it had called up a youthful enthusiasm which was wont to transfigure his grave and prematurely reserved face with a new expression. To-day the revelation and expression were both wanting. He put the letter back with a slight sigh, that sounded so preposterous in the silent room that he could not forego an embarrassed smile. But the next moment he set himself seriously to work on his correspondence.
Presently he stopped; once or twice he had been overtaken by a vague undefinable sense of pleasure, even to the dreamy halting of his pen. It was a sensation in no way connected with the subject of his correspondence, or even his previous reflections–it was partly physical, and yet it was in some sense suggestive. It must be the intoxicating effect of the woodland air. He even fancied he had noticed it before, at the same hour when the sun was declining and the fresh odors of the undergrowth were rising. It certainly was a perfume. He raised his eyes. There lay the cause on the desk before him–a little nosegay of wild Californian myrtle encircling a rose-bud which had escaped his notice.
There was nothing unusual in the circumstance. The children were in the habit of making their offerings generally without particular reference to time or occasion, and it might have been overlooked by him during school-hours. He felt a pity for the forgotten posy already beginning to grow limp in its neglected solitude. He remembered that in some folk-lore of the children’s, perhaps a tradition of the old association of the myrtle with Venus, it was believed to be emblematic of the affections. He remembered also that he had even told them of this probable origin of their superstition. He was still holding it in his hand when he was conscious of a silken sensation that sent a magnetic thrill through his fingers. Looking at it more closely he saw that the sprigs were bound together, not by thread or ribbon, but by long filaments of soft brown hair tightly wound around them. He unwound a single hair and held it to the light. Its length, color, texture, and above all a certain inexplicable instinct, told him it was Cressy McKinstry’s. He laid it down quickly, as if he had, in that act, familiarly touched her person.
He finished his letter, but presently found himself again looking at the myrtle and thinking about it. From the position in which it had been placed it was evidently intended for him; the fancy of binding it with hair was also intentional and not a necessity, as he knew his feminine scholars were usually well provided with bits of thread, silk, or ribbon. If it had been some new absurdity of childish fashion introduced in the school, he would have noticed it ere this. For it was this obtrusion of a personality that vaguely troubled him. He remembered Cressy’s hair; it was certainly very beautiful, in spite of her occasional vagaries of coiffure. He recalled how, one afternoon, it had come down when she was romping with Octavia in the play-ground, and was surprised to find what a vivid picture he retained of her lingering in the porch to put it up; her rounded arms held above her head, her pretty shoulders, full throat, and glowing face thrown back, and a wisp of the very hair between her white teeth! He began another letter.
When it was finished the shadow of the pine-branch before the window, thrown by the nearly level sun across his paper, had begun slowly to reach the opposite wall. He put his work away, lingered for a moment in hesitation over the myrtle sprays, and then locked them in his desk with an odd feeling that he had secured in some vague way a hold upon Cressy’s future vagaries; then reflecting that Uncle Ben, whom he had seen in town, would probably keep holiday with the others, he resolved to wait no longer, but strolled back to the hotel. The act however had not recalled Uncle Ben to him by any association of ideas, for since his discovery of Johnny Filgee’s caricature he had failed to detect anything to corroborate the caricaturist’s satire, and had dismissed the subject from his mind.
On entering his room at the hotel he found Rupert Filgee standing moodily by the window, while his brother Johnny, overcome by a repletion of excitement and collation, was asleep on the single arm-chair. Their presence was not unusual, as Mr. Ford, touched by the loneliness of these motherless boys, had often invited them to come to his rooms to look over his books and illustrated papers.
“Well?” he said cheerfully.
Rupert did not reply or change his position. Mr. Ford, glancing at him sharply, saw a familiar angry light in the boy’s beautiful eyes, slightly dimmed by a tear. Laying his hand gently on Rupert’s shoulder he said, “What’s the matter, Rupert?”
“Nothin’,” said the boy doggedly, with his eyes still fixed on the pane.
“Has–has–Mrs. Tripp” (the fair proprietress) “been unkind?” he went on lightly.
No reply.
“You know, Rupe,” continued Mr. Ford demurely, “she must show SOME reserve before company–like to-day. It won’t do to make a scandal.”
Rupert maintained an indignant silence. But the dimple (which he usually despised as a feminine blot) on the cheek nearer the master became slightly accented. Only for a moment; the dark eyes clouded again.
“I wish I was dead, Mr. Ford.”
“Hallo!”
“Or–doin’ suthin’.”
“That’s better. What do you want to do?”
“To work–make a livin’ myself. Quit toten’ wood and water at home; quit cookin’ and makin’ beds, like a yaller Chinaman; quit nussin’ babies and dressin’ ’em and undressin’ ’em, like a girl. Look at HIM now,” pointing to the sweetly unconscious Johnny, “look at him there. Do you know what that means? It means I’ve got to pack him home through the town jist ez he is thar, and then make a fire and bile his food for him, and wash him and undress him and put him to bed, and ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’ him, and tuck him up; and Dad all the while ‘scootin’ round town with other idjits, jawin’ about ‘progress’ and the ‘future of Injin Spring.’ Much future we’ve got over our own house, Mr. Ford. Much future he’s got laid up for me!”
The master, to whom those occasional outbreaks from Rupert were not unfamiliar, smiled, albeit with serious eyes that belied his lips, and consoled the boy as he had often done before. But he was anxious to know the cause of this recent attack and its probable relations to the fascinating Mrs. Tripp.
“I thought we talked all that over some time ago, Rupe. In a few months you’ll be able to leave school, and I’ll advise your father about putting you into something to give you a chance for yourself. Patience, old fellow; you’re doing very well. Consider–there’s your pupil, Uncle Ben.”
“Oh, yes! That’s another big baby to tot round in school when I ain’t niggerin’ at home.”
“And I don’t see exactly what else you could do at Indian Spring,” continued Mr. Ford.
“No,” said Rupert gloomily, “but I could get away to Sacramento. Yuba Bill says they take boys no bigger nor me in thar express offices or banks–and in a year or two they’re as good ez anybody and get paid as big. Why, there was a fellow here, just now, no older than you, Mr. Ford, and not half your learnin’, and he dressed to death with jewelry, and everybody bowin’ and scrapin’ to him, that it was perfectly sickenin’.”
Mr. Ford lifted his eyebrows. “Oh, you mean the young man of Benham and Co., who was talking to Mrs. Tripp?” he said.
A quick flush of angry consciousness crossed Rupert’s face. “Maybe; he has just cheek enough for anythin’.”
“And you want to be like him?” said Mr. Ford.
“You know what I mean, Mr. Ford. Not LIKE him. Why YOU’RE as good as he is, any day,” continued Rupert with relentless naivete; “but if a jay-bird like that can get on, why couldn’t I?”
There was no doubt that the master here pointed out the defectiveness of Rupert’s logic and the beneficence of patience and study, as became their relations of master and pupil, but with the addition of a certain fellow sympathy and some amusing recital of his own boyish experiences, that had the effect of calling Rupert’s dimples into action again. At the end of half an hour the boy had become quite tractable, and, getting ready to depart, approached his sleeping brother with something like resignation. But Johnny’s nap seemed to have had the effect of transforming him into an inert jelly-like mass. It required the joint exertions of both the master and Rupert to transfer him bodily into the latter’s arms, where, with a single limp elbow encircling his brother’s neck, he lay with his unfinished slumber still visibly distending his cheeks, his eyelids, and even lifting his curls from his moist forehead. The master bade Rupert “good-night,” and returned to his room as the boy descended the stairs with his burden.
But here Providence, with, I fear, its occasional disregard of mere human morality, rewarded Rupert after his own foolish desires. Mrs. Tripp was at the foot of the stairs as Rupert came slowly down. He saw her, and was covered with shame; she saw him and his burden, and was touched with kindliness. Whether or not she was also mischievously aware of Rupert’s admiration, and was not altogether displeased with it, I cannot say. In a voice that thrilled him, she said:–
“What! Rupert, are you going so soon?”
“Yes, ma’am—on account of Johnny.”
“But let me take him–I can keep him here to-night.”
It was a great temptation, but Rupert had strength to refuse, albeit with his hat pulled over his downcast eyes.
“Poor dear, how tired he looks.”
She approached her still fresh and pretty face close to Rupert and laid her lips on Johnny’s cheek. Then she lifted her audacious eyes to his brother, and pushing back his well-worn chip hat from his clustering curls, she kissed him squarely on the forehead.
“Good-night, dear.”
The boy stumbled, and then staggered blindly forward into the outer darkness. But with a gentleman’s delicacy he turned almost instantly into a side street, as if to keep this consecration of himself from vulgar eyes. The path he had chosen was rough and weary, the night was dark, and Johnny was ridiculously heavy, but he kept steadily on, the woman’s kiss in the fancy of the foolish boy shining on his forehead and lighting him onward like a star.
CHAPTER VI.
When the door closed on Rupert the master pulled down the blind, and, trimming his lamp, tried to compose himself by reading. Outside, the “Great Day for Indian Spring” was slowly evaporating in pale mists from the river, and the celebration itself spasmodically taking flight here and there in Roman candles and rockets. An occasional outbreak from revellers in the bar-room below, a stumbling straggler along the planked sidewalk before the hotel, only seemed to intensify the rustic stillness. For the future of Indian Spring was still so remote that Nature insensibly re-invested its boundaries on the slightest relaxation of civic influence, and Mr. Ford lifted his head from the glowing columns of the “Star” to listen to the far-off yelp of a coyote on the opposite shore.
He was also conscious of the recurrence of that vague, pleasurable recollection, so indefinite that, when he sought to identify it with anything–even the finding of the myrtle sprays on his desk– it evaded him. He tried to work, with the same interruption. Then an uneasy sensation that he had not been sufficiently kind to Rupert in his foolish love-troubles remorsefully seized him. A half pathetic, half humorous picture of the miserable Rupert staggering under the double burden of his sleeping brother and a misplaced affection, or possibly abandoning the one or both in the nearest ditch in a reckless access of boyish frenzy and fleeing his home forever, rose before his eyes. He seized his hat with the intention of seeking him–or forgetting him in some other occupation by the way. For Mr. Ford had the sensitive conscience of many imaginative people; an unfailing monitor, it was always calling his whole moral being into play to evade it.
As he crossed the passage he came upon Mrs. Tripp hooded and elaborately attired in a white ball dress, which however did not, to his own fancy, become her as well as her ordinary costume. He was passing her with a bow, when she said, with complacent consciousness of her appearance, “Aren’t you going to the ball to- night?”
He remembered then that “an opening ball” at the Court-house was a part of the celebration. “No,” he said smiling; “but it is a pity that Rupert couldn’t have seen you in your charming array.”
“Rupert,” said the lady, with a slightly coquettish laugh; “you have made him as much a woman-hater as yourself. I offered to take him in our party, and he ran away to you.” She paused, and giving him a furtive critical glance said, with an easy mingling of confidence and audacity, “Why don’t YOU go? Nobody’ll hurt you.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” replied Mr. Ford gallantly. “There’s the melancholy example of Rupert always before me.”
Mrs. Tripp tossed her chignon and descended a step of the stairs. “You’d better go,” she continued, looking up over the balusters. “You can look on if you can’t dance.”
Now Mr. Ford COULD dance, and it so chanced, rather well, too. With this consciousness he remained standing in half indignant hesitation on the landing as she disappeared. Why shouldn’t he go? It was true, he had half tacitly acquiesced in the reserve with which he had been treated, and had never mingled socially in the gatherings of either sex at Indian Spring–but that was no reason. He could at least dress himself, walk to the Court-house and–look on.
Any black coat and white shirt was sufficiently de rigueur for Indian Spring. Mr. Ford added the superfluous elegance of a forgotten white waistcoat. When he reached the sidewalk it was only nine o’clock, but the windows of the Court-house were already flaring like a stranded steamer on the barren bank where it had struck. On the way thither he was once or twice tempted to change his mind, and hesitated even at the very door. But the fear that his hesitation would be noticed by the few loungers before it, and the fact that some of them were already hesitating through bashfulness, determined him to enter.
The clerks’ office and judges’ chambers on the lower floor had been invaded by wraps, shawls, and refreshments, but the dancing was reserved for the upper floor or courtroom, still unfinished. Flags, laurel-wreaths, and appropriate floral inscriptions hid its bare walls; but the coat of arms of the State, already placed over the judges’ dais with its illimitable golden sunset, its triumphant goddess, and its implacable grizzly, seemed figuratively to typify the occasion better than the inscriptions. The room was close and crowded. The flickering candles in tin sconces against the walls, or depending in rude chandeliers of barrel-hoops from the ceiling, lit up the most astounding diversity of female costume the master had ever seen. Gowns of bygone fashions, creased and stained with packing and disuse, toilets of forgotten festivity revised with modern additions; garments in and out of season–a fur-trimmed jacket and a tulle skirt, a velvet robe under a pique sacque; fresh young faces beneath faded head-dresses, and mature and buxom charms in virgin’ white. The small space cleared for the dancers was continually invaded by the lookers-on, who in files of three deep lined the room.
As the master pushed his way to the front, a young girl, who had been standing in the sides of a quadrille, suddenly darted with a nymph-like quickness among the crowd and was for an instant hidden. Without distinguishing either face or figure, Mr. Ford recognized in the quick, impetuous action a characteristic movement of Cressy’s; with an embarrassing instinct that he could not account for, he knew she had seen him, and that, for some inexplicable reason, he was the cause of her sudden disappearance.
But it was only for a moment. Even while he was vaguely scanning the crowd she reappeared and took her place beside her mystified partner–the fascinating stranger of Johnny’s devotion and Rupert’s dislike. She was pale; he had never seen her so beautiful. All that he had thought distasteful and incongruous in her were but accessories of her loveliness at that moment, in that light, in that atmosphere, in that strange assembly. Even her full pink gauze dress, from which her fair young shoulders slipped as from a sunset cloud, seemed only the perfection of virginal simplicity; her girlish length of limb and the long curves of her neck and back were now the outlines of thorough breeding. The absence of color in her usually fresh face had been replaced by a faint magnetic aurora that seemed to him half spiritual. He could not take his eyes from her; he could not believe what he saw. Yet that was Cressy McKinstry–his pupil! Had he ever really seen her? Did he know her now? Small wonder that all eyes were bent upon her, that a murmur of unspoken admiration, or still more intense hush of silence moved the people around him. He glanced hurriedly at them, and was oddly relieved by this evident participation in his emotions.
She was dancing now, and with that same pale restraint and curious quiet that had affected him so strongly. She had not even looked in his direction, yet he was aware by the same instinct that had at first possessed him that she knew he was present. His desire to catch her eye was becoming mingled with a certain dread, as if in a single interchange of glances the illusions of the moment would either vanish utterly or become irrevocably fixed. He forced himself, when the set was finished, to turn away, partly to avoid contact with some acquaintances who had drifted before him, and whom politeness would have obliged him to ask to dance, and partly to collect his thoughts. He determined to make a tour of the rooms and then go quietly home. Those who recognized him made way for him with passive curiosity; the middle-aged and older adding a confidential sympathy and equality that positively irritated him. For an instant he had an idea of seeking out Mrs. Tripp and claiming her as a partner, merely to show her that he danced.
He had nearly made the circuit of the room when he was surprised by the first strains of a waltz. Waltzing was not a strong feature of Indian Spring festivity, partly that the Church people had serious doubts if David’s saltatory performances before the Ark included “round dances,” and partly that the young had not yet mastered its difficulties. When he yielded to his impulse to look again at the dancers he found that only three or four couples had been bold enough to take the floor. Cressy McKinstry and her former partner were one of them. In his present exaltation he was not astonished to find that she had evidently picked up the art in her late visit, and was now waltzing with quiet grace and precision, but he was surprised that her partner was far from being equally perfect, and that after a few turns she stopped and smilingly disengaged her waist from his arm. As she stepped back she turned with unerring instinct to that part of the room where the master stood, and raised her eyes through the multitude of admiring faces to his. Their eyes met in an isolation as supreme as if they had been alone. It was an attraction the more dangerous because unformulated–a possession without previous pledge, promise, or even intention–a love that did not require to be “made.”
He approached her quietly and even more coolly than he thought possible. “Will you allow me a trial?” he asked.
She looked in his face, and as if she had not heard the question but was following her own thought, said, “I knew you would come; I saw you when you first came in.” Without another word she put her hand in his, and as if it were part of an instinctive action of drawing closer to him, caught with her advancing foot the accent of the waltz, and the next moment the room seemed to slip away from them into whirling space.
The whole thing had passed so rapidly from the moment he approached her to the first graceful swing of her full skirt at his side, that it seemed to him almost like the embrace of a lovers’ meeting. He had often been as near her before, had stood at her side at school, and even leaned over her desk, but always with an irritated instinct of reserve that had equally affected her, and which he now understood. With her conscious but pale face so near his own, with the faint odor of her hair clinging to her, and with the sweet confusion of the half lingering, half withheld contact of her hand and arm, all had changed. He did not dare to reflect that he could never again approach her except with this feeling. He did not dare to think of anything; he abandoned himself to the sense that had begun with the invasion of her hair-bound myrtle in the silent school-room, and seemed to have at last led her to his arms. They were moving now in such perfect rhythm and unison that they seemed scarcely conscious of motion. Once when they neared the open window he caught a glimpse of the round moon rising above the solemn heights of the opposite shore, and felt the cool breath of mountain and river sweep his cheek and mingle a few escaped threads of her fair hair with his own. With that glimpse and that sensation the vulgarity and the tawdriness of their surroundings, the guttering candles in their sconces, the bizarre figures, the unmeaning faces seemed to be whirled far into distant space. They were alone with night and nature; it was they who were still; all else had receded in a vanishing perspective of dull reality, in which they had no part.
Play on, O waltz of Strauss! Whirl on, O love and youth! For you cannot whirl so swiftly but that this receding world will return again with narrowing circle to hem you in. Faster, O cracked clarionet! Louder, O too brazen bassoon! Keep back, O dull and earthy environment, till master and pupil have dreamed their foolish dream!
They are in fancy alone on the river-bank, only the round moon above them and their linked shadows faintly fluttering in the stream. They have drawn so closely together now that her arm is encircling his neck, her soft eyes uplifted like the moon’s reflection and drowning into his; closer and closer till their hearts stop beating and their lips have met in a first kiss. Faster, O little feet! swing clear, O Cressy’s skirt and keep the narrowing circle back! . . . They are again alone; the judges’ dais and the emblazoning of the State caught in a single whirling flash of consciousness are changed to an altar, seen dimly through the bridal veil that covers her fair head. There is the murmur of voices mingling two lives in one. They turn and pass proudly down between the aisles of wondering festal faces. Ah! the circle is drawing closer. One more quick whirl to keep them back, O flying skirt and dainty-winged feet! Too late! The music stops. The tawdry walls shut in again, the vulgar crowds return, they stand pale and quiet, the centre of a ring of breathless admiring, frightened, or forbidding faces. Her arms fold like wings at her side. The waltz is over.
A shrill feminine chorus assail her with praises, struck here and there with a metallic ring of envy; a dozen all-daring cavaliers, made reckless by her grace and beauty, clamor for her hand in the next waltz. She replies, not to them, but to him, “Not again,” and slips away in the crowd with that strange new shyness that of all her transformations seems the most delicious. Yet so conscious are they of their mutual passion that they do not miss each other, and he turns away as if their next meeting were already an appointed tryst. A few congratulate him on his skill. Johnny’s paragon looks after him curiously; certain elders shake hands with him perplexedly, as if not quite sure of the professional consistency of his performance. Those charming tide-waiters on social success, the fair, artfully mingling expectation with compliment, only extract from him the laughing statement that this one waltz was the single exception allowed him from the rule of his professional conduct, and he refers them to his elder critics. A single face, loutish, looming, and vindictive, stands on among the crowd–the face of Seth Davis. He had not seen him since he left the school; he had forgotten his existence; even now he only remembered his successor, Joe Masters, and he looked curiously around to see if that later suitor of Cressy’s was present. It was not until he reached the door that he began to think seriously of Seth Davis’s jealous face, and was roused to a singular indignation. “Why hadn’t this great fool vented his jealousy on the openly compromising Masters,” he thought. He even turned and walked back with some vaguely aggressive instinct, but the young man had disappeared. With this incident still in his mind he came upon Uncle Ben and Hiram McKinstry standing among the spectators in the doorway. Why might not Uncle Ben be jealous too? and if his single waltz had really appeared so compromising why should not Cressy’s father object? But both men–albeit, McKinstry usually exhibited a vague unreasoning contempt for Uncle Ben–were unanimous in their congratulations and outspoken admiration.
“When I see’d you sail in, Mr. Ford,” said Uncle Ben, with abstract reflectiveness, “I sez to the fellers, ‘lie low, boys, and you’ll see style.’ And when you put on them first steps, I sez, ‘that’s French–the latest high-toned French style–outer the best masters, and–and outer the best books. For why?’ sez I. ‘It’s the same long, sliding stroke you see in his copies. There’s that long up sweep, and that easy curve to the right with no hitch. That’s the sorter swing he hez in readin’ po’try too. That’s why it’s called the po’try of motion,’ sez I. ‘And you ken bet your boots, boys, it’s all in the trainin’ o’ education.'”
“Mr. Ford,” said Mr. McKinstry gravely, slightly waving a lavender- colored kid glove, with which he had elected to conceal his maimed hand, and at the same moment indicate a festal occasion: “I hev to thank ye for the way you took out that child o’ mine, like ez she woz an ontried filly, and put her through her paces. I don’t dance myself, partikly in that gait–which I take to be suthin’ betwixt a lope and a canter and I don’t get to see much dancin’ nowadays on account o’ bein’ worrited by stock, but seein’ you two together just now, suthin’ came over me, and I don’t think I ever felt so kam in my life.”
The blood rushed to the master’s cheek with an unexpected consciousness of guilt and shame. “But,” he stammered awkwardly, “your daughter dances beautifully herself; she has certainly had practice.”
“That,” said McKinstry, laying his gloved hand impressively on the master’s shoulder, with the empty little finger still more emphasized by being turned backward in the net; “that may be ez it ez, but I wanted to say that it was the simple, easy, fammily touch that you gev it, that took me. Toward the end, when you kinder gathered her up and she sorter dropped her head into your breast- pocket, and seemed to go to sleep, like ez ef she was still a little girl, it so reminded me of the times when I used to tote her myself walkin’ by the waggin at Platt River, that it made me wish the old woman was here to see it.”
Still coloring, the master cast a rapid, sidelong glance at McKinstry’s dark red face and beard, but in the slow satisfaction of his features there was no trace of that irony which the master’s self-consciousness knew.
“Then your wife is not here?” said Mr. Ford abstractedly.
“She war at church. She reckoned that I’d do to look arter Cressy– she bein’, so to speak, under conviction. D’ye mind walkin’ this way a bit; I want to speak a word with ye?” He put his maimed hand through the master’s arm, after his former fashion, and led him to a corner.
“Did ye happen to see Seth Davis about yer?”
“I believe I saw him a moment ago,” returned Mr. Ford half contemptuously.
“Did he get off anythin’ rough on ye?”
“Certainly not,” said the master haughtily. “Why should he dare?”
“That’s so,” said McKinstry meditatively. “You had better keep right on in that line. That’s your gait, remember. Leave him–or his father–it’s the same thing–to ME. Don’t YOU let yourself be roped in to this yer row betwixt me and the Davises. You ain’t got no call to do it. It’s already been on my mind your bringin’ that gun to me in the Harrison row. The old woman hadn’t oughter let you–nor Cress either. Hark to me, Mr. Ford! I reckon to stand between you and both the Davises till the cows come home–only– mind YOU give him the go-by when he happens to meander along towards you.”
“I’m very much obliged to you,” said Ford with disproportionately sudden choler; “but I don’t propose to alter my habits for a ridiculous school-boy whom I have dismissed.” The unjust and boyish petulance of his speech instantly flashed upon him, and he felt his cheek burn again.
McKinstry regarded him with dull, red, slumbrous eyes. “Don’t you go to lose your best holt, Mr. Ford–and that’s kam. Keep your kam–and you’ve allus got the dead wood on Injin Springs. I ain’t got it,” he continued, in his slowest, most passionless manner, “and a row more or less ain’t much account to me–but YOU, you keep your kam.” He paused, stepped back, and regarding the master, with a slight wave of his crippled hand over his whole person, as if indicating some personal adornment, said, “It sets you off!”
He nodded, turned, and re-entered the ball-room. Mr. Ford, without trusting himself to further speech, elbowed his way through the crowded staircase to the street. But even there his strange anger, as well as the equally strange remorse, which had seized him in McKinstry’s presence, seemed to evaporate in the clear moonlight and soft summer air. There was the river-bank, with the tremulous river glancing through the dreamy mist, as they had seen it from the window together. He even turned to look back on the lighted ball-room, as if SHE might have been looking out, too. But he knew he should see her again to-morrow, and he hurriedly put aside all reserve, all thought of the future, all examination of his conduct, to walk home enwrapped in the vaguer pleasure of the past. Rupert Filgee, to whom he had never given a second thought, now peacefully slumbering beside his baby brother, had not gone home in more foolish or more dangerous company.
When he reached the hotel, he was surprised to find it only eleven o’clock. No one had returned, the building was deserted by all but the bar-keeper and a flirting chambermaid, who regarded him with aggrieved astonishment. He began to feel very foolish, and half regretted that he had not stayed to dance with Mrs. Tripp; or, at least, remained as a quiet onlooker apart from the others. With a hasty excuse about returning to write letters for the morning’s post, he took a candle and slowly remounted the stairs to his room. But on entering he found himself unprepared for that singular lack of sympathy with which familiar haunts always greet our new experiences; he could hardly believe that he had left that room only two hours before; it seemed so uncongenial and strange to the sensation that was still possessing him. Yet there were his table, his books, his arm-chair, his bed as he had left them; even a sticky fragment of gingerbread that had fallen from Johnny’s pocket. He had not yet reached that stage of absorbing passion where he was able to put the loved one in his own surroundings; she as yet had no place in this quiet room; he could scarcely think of her here, and he MUST think of her, if he had to go elsewhere. An extravagant idea of walking the street until his restless dream was over seized him, but even in his folly the lackadaisical, moonstruck quality of such a performance was too obvious. The school-house! He would go there; it was only a pleasant walk, the night was lovely, and he could bring the myrtle-spray from his desk. It was too significant now–if not too precious–to be kept there. Perhaps he had not examined it closely, nor the place where it had lain; there might be an additional sign, word, or token he had overlooked. The thought thrilled him, even while he was calmly arguing to himself that it was an instinct of caution.
The air was quieter and warmer than usual, though still characteristic of the locality in its dry, dewless clarity. The grass was yet warm from the day-long sun, and when he entered the pines that surrounded the schoolhouse, they had scarcely yet lost their spicy heat. The moon, riding high, filled the dark aisles with a delicious twilight that lent itself to his waking dreams. It was not long before to-morrow; he could easily manage to bring her here in the grove at recess, and would speak with her there. It did not occur to him what he should say, or why he should say it; it did not occur to him that he had no other provocation than her eyes, her conscious manner, her eloquent silence, and her admission that she had expected him. It did not occur to him that all this was inconsistent with what he knew of her antecedents, her character, and her habits. It was this very inconsistency that charmed and convinced him. We are always on the lookout for these miracles of passion. We may doubt the genuineness of an affection that is first-hand, but never of one that is transferred.
He approached the school-house and unlocking the door closed it behind him, not so much to keep out human intrusion as the invasion of bats and squirrels. The nearly vertical moon, while it perfectly lit the playground and openings in the pines around the house, left the interior in darkness, except the reflection upon the ceiling from the shining gravel without. Partly from a sense of precaution and partly because he was familiar with the position of the benches, he did not strike a light, and reached his own desk unerringly, drew his chair before it and unlocked it, groped in its dark recess for the myrtle spray, felt its soft silken binding with an electrical thrill, drew it out, and in the security of the darkness, raised it to his lips.
To make room for it in his breast pocket he was obliged to take out his letters–among them the well-worn one he had tried to read that morning. A mingling of pleasure and remorse came over him as he felt that it was already of the past, and as he dropped it carelessly into the empty desk it fell with a faint, hollow sound as if it were ashes to ashes.
What was that?
The noise of steps upon the gravel, light laughter, the moving of two or three shadows on the ceiling, the sound of voices, a man’s, a child’s, and HERS!
Could it be possible? Was not he mistaken? No! the man’s voice was Masters’; the child’s, Octavia’s; the woman’s, HERS.
He remained silent in the shadow. The school-room was not far from the trail where she would have had to pass going home from the ball. But why had she come there? had they seen him arrive? and were mischievously watching him? The sound of Cressy’s voice and the lifting of the unprotected window near the door convinced him to the contrary.
“There, that’ll do. Now you two can step aside. ‘Tave, take him over to yon fence, and keep him there till I get in. No–thank you, sir–I can assist myself. I’ve done it before. It ain’t the first time I’ve been through this window, is it, ‘Tave?”
Ford’s heart stopped beating. There was a moment of laughing expostulation, the sound of retreating voices, the sudden darkening of the window, the billowy sweep of a skirt, the faint quick flash of a little ankle, and Cressy McKinstry swung herself into the room and dropped lightly on the floor.
She advanced eagerly up the moonlit passage between the two rows of benches. Suddenly she stopped; the master rose at the same moment with outstretched warning hand to check the cry of terror he felt sure would rise to her lips. But he did not know the lazy nerves of the girl before him. She uttered no outcry. And even in the faint dim light he could see only the same expression of conscious understanding come over her face that he had seen in the ball-room, mingled with a vague joy that parted her breathless lips. As he moved quickly forward their hands met; she caught his with a quick significant pressure and darted back to the window.
“Oh, ‘Tave!” (very languidly.)
“Yes.”
“You two had better wait for me at the edge of the trail yonder, and keep a lookout for folks going by. Don’t let them see you hanging round so near. Do you hear? I’m all right.”
With her hand still meaningly lifted, she stood gazing at the two figures until they slowly receded towards the distant trail. Then she turned as he approached her, the reflection of the moonlit road striking up into her shining eyes and eager waiting face. A dozen questions were upon his lips, a dozen replies were ready upon hers. But they were never uttered, for the next moment her eyes half closed, she leaned forward and fell–into a kiss.
She was the first to recover, holding his face in her hands, turned towards the moonlight, her own in passionate shadow. “Listen,” she said quickly. “They think I came here to look for something I left in my desk. They thought it high fun to come with me–these two. I did come to look for something–not in my desk, but yours.”
“Was it this?” he whispered, taking the myrtle from his breast. She seized it with a light cry, putting it first to her lips and then to his. Then clasping his face again between her soft palms, she turned it to the window and said: “Look at them and not at me.”
He did so–seeing the two figures slowly walking in the trail. And holding her there firmly against his breast, it seemed a blasphemy to ask the question that had been upon his lips.
“That’s not all,” she murmured, moving his face backwards and forwards to her lips as if it were something to which she was giving breath. “When we came to the woods I felt that you would be here.”
“And feeling that, you brought HIM?” said Ford, drawing back.
“Why not?” she replied indolently. “Even if he had seen you, I could have managed to have you walk home with me.”
“But do you think it’s quite fair? Would he like it?”
“Would HE like it?” she echoed lazily.
“Cressy,” said the young man earnestly, gazing into her shadowed face. “Have you given him any right to object? Do you understand me?”
She stopped as if thinking. “Do you want me to call him in?” she said quietly, but without the least trace of archness or coquetry. “Would you rather he were here–or shall we go out now and meet him? I’ll say you just came as I was going out.”
What should he say? “Cressy,” he asked almost curtly, “do you love me?”
It seemed such a ridiculous thing to ask, holding her thus in his arms, if it were true; it seemed such a villainous question, if it were not.
“I think I loved you when you first came,” she said slowly. “It must have been that that made me engage myself to him,” she added simply. “I knew I loved you, and thought only of you when I was away. I came back because I loved you. I loved you the day you came to see Maw–even when I thought you came to tell her of Masters, and to say that you couldn’t take me back.”
“But you don’t ask me if I love you?”
“But you do–you couldn’t help it now,” she said confidently.
What could he do but reply as illogically with a closer embrace, albeit a slight tremor as if a cold wind had blown across the open window, passed over him. She may have felt it too, for she presently said, “Kiss me and let me go.”
“But we must have a longer talk, darling–when–when–others are not waiting.”
“Do you know the far barn near the boundary?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I used to take your books there, afternoons to–to–be with you,” she whispered, “and Paw gave orders that no one was to come nigh it while I was there. Come to-morrow, just before sundown.”
A long embrace followed, in which all that they had not said seemed, to them at least, to become articulate on their tremulous and clinging lips. Then they separated, he unlocking the door softly to give her egress that way. She caught up a book from a desk in passing, and then slipped like a rosy shaft of the coming dawn across the fading moonlight, and a moment after her slow voice, without a tremor of excitement, was heard calling to her companions.
CHAPTER VII.
The conversation which Johnny Filgee had overheard between Uncle Ben and the gorgeous stranger, although unintelligible to his infant mind, was fraught with some significance to the adult settlers of Indian Spring. The town itself, like most interior settlements, was originally a mining encampment, and as such its founders and settlers derived their possession of the soil under the mining laws that took precedence of all other titles. But although that title was held to be good even after the abandonment of their original occupation, and the establishment of shops, offices, and dwellings on the site of the deserted places, the suburbs of the town and outlying districts were more precariously held by squatters, under the presumption of their being public land open to preemption, or the settlement of school-land warrants upon them. Few of the squatters had taken the trouble to perfect even these easy titles, merely holding “possession” for agricultural or domiciliary purposes, and subject only to the invasion of “jumpers,” a class of adventurers who, in the abeyance of recognized legal title, “jumped” or forcibly seized such portions of a squatter’s domains as were not protected by fencing or superior force. It was therefore with some excitement that Indian Spring received the news that a Mexican grant of three square leagues, which covered the whole district, had been lately confirmed by the Government, and that action would be taken to recover possession. It was understood that it would not affect the adverse possessions held by the town under the mining laws, but it would compel the adjacent squatters like McKinstry, Davis, Masters, and Filgee, and jumpers like the Harrisons, to buy the legal title, or defend a slow but losing lawsuit. The holders of the grant– rich capitalists of San Francisco–were open to compromise to those in actual possession, and in the benefits of this compromise the unscrupulous “jumper,” who had neither sown nor reaped, but simply dispossessed the squatter who had done both, shared equally with him.
A diversity of opinion as to the effect of the new claim naturally obtained; the older settlers still clung to their experiences of an easy aboriginal holding of the soil, and were sceptical both as to the validity and justice of these revived alien grants; but the newer arrivals hailed this certain tenure of legal titles as a guarantee to capital and an incentive to improvement. There was also a growing and influential party of Eastern and Northern men, who were not sorry to see a fruitful source of dissension and bloodshed removed. The feuds of the McKinstrys and Harrisons, kept alive over a boundary to which neither had any legal claim, would seem to bring them hereafter within the statute law regarding ordinary assaults without any ethical mystification. On the other hand McKinstry and Harrison would each be able to arrange any compromise with the new title holders for the lands they possessed, or make over that “actual possession” for a consideration. It was feared that both men, being naturally lawless, would unite to render any legal eviction a long and dangerous process, and that they would either be left undisturbed till the last, or would force a profitable concession. But a greater excitement followed when it was known that a section of the land had already been sold by the owners of the grant, that this section exactly covered the debatable land of the McKinstry-Harrison boundaries, and that the new landlord would at once attempt its legal possession. The inspiration of genius that had thus effected a division of the Harrison-McKinstry combination at its one weak spot excited even the admiration of the sceptics. No one in Indian Spring knew its real author, for the suit was ostensibly laid in the name of a San Francisco banker. But the intelligent reader of Johnny Filgee’s late experience during the celebration will have already recognized Uncle Ben as the man, and it becomes a part of this veracious chronicle at this moment to allow him to explain, not only his intentions, but the means by which he carried them out, in his own words.
It was one afternoon at the end of his usual solitary lesson, and the master and Uncle Ben were awaiting the arrival of Rupert. Uncle Ben’s educational progress lately, through dint of slow tenacity, had somewhat improved, and he had just completed from certain forms and examples in a book before him a “Letter to a Consignee” informing him that he, Uncle Ben, had just shipped “2 cwt. Ivory Elephant Tusks, 80 peculs of rice and 400bbls. prime mess pork from Indian Spring;” and another beginning “Honored Madam,” and conveying in admirably artificial phraseology the “lamented decease” of the lady’s husband from yellow fever, contracted on the Gold Coast, and Uncle Ben was surveying his work with critical satisfaction when the master, somewhat impatiently, consulted his watch. Uncle Ben looked up.
“I oughter told ye that Rupe didn’t kalkilate to come to day.”
“Indeed–why not?”
“I reckon because I told him he needn’t. I allowed to–to hev a little private talk with ye, Mr. Ford, if ye didn’t mind.”
Mr. Ford’s face did not shine with invitation. “Very well,” he said, “only remember I have an engagement this afternoon.”
“But that ain’t until about sundown, said Uncle Ben quietly. “I won’t keep ye ez long ez that.”
Mr. Ford glanced quickly at Uncle Ben with a rising color. “What do you know of my engagements?” he said sharply.
“Nothin’, Mr. Ford,” returned Uncle Ben simply; “but hevin’ bin layin’ round, lookin’ for ye here and at the hotel for four or five days allus about that time and not findin’ you, I rather kalkilated you might hev suthin’ reg’lar on hand.”
There was certainly nothing in his face or manner to indicate the least evasion or deceit, or indeed anything but his usual naivete, perhaps a little perturbed and preoccupied by what he was going to say. “I had an idea of writin’ you a letter,” he continued, “kinder combinin’ practice and confidential information, you know. To be square with you, Mr. Ford, in pint o’ fact, I’ve got it HERE. But ez it don’t seem to entirely gibe with the facts, and leaves a heap o’ things onsaid and onseen, perhaps it’s jest ez wall ez I read it to you myself–putten’ in a word here and there, and explainin’ it gin’rally. Do you sabe?”
The master nodded, and Uncle Ben drew from his desk a rude portfolio made from the two covers of a dilapidated atlas, and took from between them a piece of blotting-paper, which through inordinate application had acquired the color and consistency of a slate, and a few pages of copy-book paper, that to the casual glance looked like sheets of exceedingly difficult music. Surveying them with a blending of chirographic pride, orthographic doubt, and the bashful consciousness of a literary amateur, he traced each line with a forefinger inked to the second joint, and slowly read aloud as follows:–
“‘Mr. Ford, Teacher.
“‘DEAR SIR,–Yours of the 12th rec’d and contents noted.'” (“I did’nt,” explained Uncle Ben parenthetically, “receive any letter of yours, but I thought I might heave in that beginning from copy for practice. The rest is ME.”) “‘In refference to my having munney,”‘ continued Uncle Ben reading and pointing each word as he read, “‘and being able to buy Ditch Stocks an’ Land'”–
“One moment,” said Mr. Ford interrupting, “I thought you were going to leave out copy. Come to what you have to say.”
“But I HEV–this is all real now. Hold on and you’ll see,” said Uncle Ben. He resumed with triumphant emphasis:–
“‘When it were gin’rally allowed that I haddent a red cent, I want to explain to you Mister Ford for the first time a secret. This here is how it was done. When I first came to Injian Spring, I settled down into the old Palmetto claim, near a heap of old taillings. Knowin’ it were against rools, and reg’lar Chinyman’s bizness to work them I diddn’t let on to enyboddy what I did–witch wos to turn over some of the quarts what I thought was likely and Orrifferus. Doing this I kem uppon some pay ore which them Palmetto fellers had overlookt, or more likely had kaved in uppon them from the bank onknown. Workin’ at it in od times by and large, sometimes afore sun up and sometimes after sundown, and all the time keeping up a day’s work on the clame for a show to the boys, I emassed a honist fortun in 2 years of 50,000 dolers and still am. But it will be askd by the incredjulos Reeder How did you never let out anything to Injian Spring, and How did you get rid of your yeald? Mister Ford, the Anser is I took it twist a month on hoss back over to La Port and sent it by express to a bank in Sacramento, givin’ the name of Daubigny, witch no one in La Port took for me. The Ditch Stok and the Land was all took in the same name, hens the secret was onreviled to the General Eye–stop a minit,'” he interrupted himself quickly as the master in an accession of impatient scepticism was about to break in upon him, “it ain’t all.” Then dropping his voice to a tremulous and almost funereal climax, he went on:–
“‘Thus we see that pashent indurstry is Rewarded in Spite of Mining Rools and Reggylashuns, and Predgudisses agin Furrin Labor is played out and fleeth like a shad-or contenueyeth not long in One Spot, and that a Man may apear to be off no Account and yet Emass that witch is far abov rubles and Fadith not Away.
“‘Hoppin’ for a continneyance
“‘of your fevors I remain,
“‘Yours to command,
“‘BENJ D’AUBIGNY.”‘
The gloomy satisfaction with which Uncle Ben regarded this peroration–a satisfaction that actually appeared to be equal to the revelation itself–only corroborated the master’s indignant doubts.
“Come,” he said, impulsively taking the paper from Uncle Ben’s reluctant hand, “how much of this is a concoction of yours and Rupe’s–and how much is a true story? Do you really mean?”–
“Hold on, Mr. Ford!” interrupted Uncle Ben, suddenly fumbling in the breast-pocket of his red shirt, “I reckoned on your being a little hard with me, remembering our first talk ’bout these things– so I allowed I’d bring you some proof.” Slowly extracting a long legal envelope from his pocket, he opened it, and drew out two or three crisp certificates of stock, and handed them to the master.
“Ther’s one hundred shares made out to Benj Daubigny. I’d hev brought you over the deed of the land too, but ez it’s rather hard to read off-hand, on account of the law palaver, I’ve left it up at the shanty to tackle at odd times by way of practising. But ef you like we’ll go up thar, and I’ll show it to you.”
Still haunted by his belief in Uncle Ben’s small duplicities, Mr. Ford hesitated. These were certainly bona fide certificates of stock made out to “Daubigny.” But he had never actually accepted Uncle Ben’s statement of his identity with that person, and now it was offered as a corroboration of a still more improbable story. He looked at Uncle Ben’s simple face slightly deepening in color under his scrutiny–perhaps with conscious guilt.
“Have you made anybody your confidant? Rupe, for instance?” he asked significantly.
“In course not,” replied Uncle Ben with a slight stiffening of wounded pride. “On’y yourself, Mr. Ford, and the young feller Stacey from the bank–ez was obligated to know it. In fact, I wos kalkilatin’ to ask you to help me talk to him about that yer boundary land.”
Mr. Ford’s scepticism was at last staggered. Any practical joke or foolish complicity between the agent of the bank and a man like Uncle Ben was out of the question, and if the story were his own sole invention, he would have scarcely dared to risk so accessible and uncompromising a denial as the agent had it in his power to give.
He held out his hand to Uncle Ben. “Let me congratulate you,” he said heartily, “and forgive me if your story really sounded so wonderful I couldn’t quite grasp it. Now let me ask you something more. Have you had any reason for keeping this a secret, other than your fear of confessing that you violated a few bigoted and idiotic mining rules–which, after all, are binding only upon sentiment–and which your success has proved to be utterly impractical?”
“There WAS another reason, Mr. Ford,” said Uncle Ben, wiping away an embarrassed smile with the back of his hand, “that is, to be square with you, WHY I thought of consultin’ you. I didn’t keer to have McKinstry, and”–he added hurriedly, “in course Harrison, too, know that I bought up the title to thur boundary.”
“I understand,” nodded the master. “I shouldn’t think you would.”
“Why shouldn’t ye?” asked Uncle Ben quickly.
“Well–I don’t suppose you care to quarrel with two passionate men.”
Uncle Ben’s face changed. Presently, however, with his hand to his face, he managed to manipulate another smile, only it appeared for the purpose of being as awkwardly wiped away.
“Say ONE passionate man, Mr. Ford.”
“Well, one if you like,” returned the master cheerfully. “But for the matter of that, why any? Come–do you mind telling me why you bought the land at all? You know it’s of little value to any but McKinstry and Harrison.”
“Soppose,” said Uncle Ben slowly, with a great affectation of wiping his ink-spotted desk with his sleeve, “soppose that I had got kinder tired of seein’ McKinstry and Harrison allus fightin’ and scrimmagin’ over their boundary line. Soppose I kalkilated that it warn’t the sort o’ thing to induce folks to settle here. Soppose I reckoned that by gettin’ the real title in my hands I’d have the deadwood on both o’ them, and settle the thing my own way, eh?”
“That certainly was a very laudable intention,” returned Mr. Ford, observing Uncle Ben curiously, “and from what you said just now about one passionate man, I suppose you have determined already WHO to favor. I hope your public spirit will be appreciated by Indian Spring at least–if it isn’t by those two men.”
“You lay low and keep dark and you’ll see,” returned his companion with a hopefulness of speech which his somewhat anxious eagerness however did not quite bear out. “But you’re not goin’ yet, surely,” he added, as the master again absently consulted his watch. “It’s on’y half past four. It’s true thar ain’t any more to tell,” he added simply, “but I had an idea that you might hev took to this yer little story of mine more than you ‘pear to be, and might be askin’ questions and kinder bedevlin’ me with jokes ez to what I was goin’ to do–and all that. But p’raps it don’t seem so wonderful to you arter all. Come to think of it–squarely now,” he said, with a singular despondency, “I’m rather sick of it myself–eh?”
“My dear old boy,” said Ford, grasping both his hands, with a swift revulsion of shame at his own utterly selfish abstraction, “I am overjoyed at your good luck. More than that, I can say honestly, old fellow, that it couldn’t have fallen in more worthy hands, or to any one whose good fortune would have pleased me more. There! And if I’ve been slow and stupid in taking it in, it is because it’s so wonderful, so like a fairy tale of virtue rewarded–as if you were a kind of male Cinderella, old man!” He had no intention of lying–he had no belief that he was: he had only forgotten that his previous impressions and hesitations had arisen from the very fact that he DID doubt the consistency of the story with his belief in Uncle Ben’s weakness. But he thought himself now so sincere that the generous reader, who no doubt is ready to hail the perfect equity of his neighbor’s good luck, will readily forgive him.
In the plenitude of this sincerity, Ford threw himself at full length on one of the long benches, and with a gesture invited Uncle Ben to make himself equally at his ease. “Come,” he said with boyish gayety, “let’s hear your plans, old man. To begin with, who’s to share them with you? Of course there are ‘the old folks at home’ first; then you have brothers–and perhaps sisters?” He stopped and glanced with a smile at Uncle Ben; the idea of there being a possible female of his species struck his fancy.
Uncle Ben, who had hitherto always exercised a severe restraint– partly from respect and partly from caution–over his long limbs in the school-house, here slowly lifted one leg over another bench, and sat himself astride of it, leaning forward on his elbow, his chin resting between his hands.
“As far as the old folks goes, Mr. Ford, I’m a kind of an orphan.”
“A KIND of orphan?” echoed Ford.
“Yes,” said Uncle Ben, leaning heavily on his chin, so that the action of his jaws with the enunciation of each word slightly jerked his head forward as if he were imparting confidential information to the bench before him. “Yes, that is, you see, I’m all right ez far as the old man goes–HE’S dead; died way back in Mizzouri. But ez to my mother, it’s sorter betwixt and between– kinder unsartain. You see, Mr. Ford, she went off with a city feller–an entire stranger to me–afore the old man died, and that’s wot broke up my schoolin’. Now whether she’s here, there, or yon, can’t be found out, though Squire Tompkins allowed–and he were a lawyer–that the old man could get a divorce if he wanted, and that you see would make me a whole orphan, ef I keerd to prove title, ez the lawyers say. Well–thut sorter lets the old folks out. Then my brother was onc’t drowned in the North Platt, and I never had any sisters. That don’t leave much family for plannin’ about–does it?”
“No,” said the master reflectively, gazing at Uncle Ben, “unless you avail yourself of your advantages now and have one of your own. I suppose now that you are rich, you’ll marry.”
Uncle Ben slightly changed his position, and then with his finger and thumb began to apparently feed himself with certain crumbs which had escaped from the children’s luncheon-baskets and were still lying on the bench. Intent on this occupation and without raising his eyes to the master, he returned slowly, “Well, you see, I’m sorter married already.”
The master sat up quickly.
“What, YOU married–now?”
“Well, perhaps that’s a question. It’s a good deal like my beein’ an orphan–oncertain and onsettled.” He paused to pursue an evasive crumb to the end of the bench and having captured it, went on: “It was when I was younger than you be, and she warn’t very old neither. But she knew a heap more than I did; and ez to readin’ and writin’, she was thar, I tell you, every time. You’d hev admired to see her, Mr. Ford.” As he paused here as if he had exhausted the subject, the master said impatiently, “Well, where is she now?”
Uncle Ben shook his head slowly. “I ain’t seen her sens I left Mizzouri, goin’ on five years ago.”
“But why haven’t you? What was the matter?” persisted the master.
“Well–you see–I runned away. Not SHE, you know, but I–I scooted, skedaddled out here.”
“But what for?” asked the master, regarding Uncle Ben with hopeless wonder. “Something must have happened. What was it? Was she”–
“She WAS a good schollard,” said Uncle Ben gravely, “and allowed to be sech, by all. She stood about so high,” he continued, indicating with his hand a medium height. “War little and dark complected.”
“But you must have had some reason for leaving her?”
“I’ve sometimes had an idea,” said Uncle Ben cautiously, “that mebbee runnin’ away ran in some fam’lies. Now, there war my mother run off with an entire stranger, and yer’s me ez run off by myself. And what makes it the more one-like is that jest as dad allus allowed he could get a devorce agin mother, so my wife could hev got one agin me for leavin’ her. And it’s almost an evenhanded game that she hez. It’s there where the oncertainty comes in.”
“But are you satisfied to remain in this doubt? or do you propose, now that you are able, to institute a thorough search for her?”
“I was kalkilatin’ to look around a little,” said Uncle Ben simply.
“And return to her if you find her?” continued the master.
“I didn’t say that, Mr. Ford.”
“But if she hasn’t got a divorce from you that’s what you’ll have to do, and what you ought to do–if I understand your story. For by your own showing, a more causeless, heartless, and utterly inexcusable desertion than yours, I never heard of.”
“Do you think so?” said Uncle Ben with exasperating simplicity.
“Do I think so?” repeated Mr. Ford, indignantly. “Everybody’ll think so. They can’t think otherwise. You say you deserted her, and you admit she did nothing to provoke it.”
“No,” returned Uncle Ben quickly, “nothin’. Did I tell you, Mr. Ford, that she could play the pianner and sing?”
“No,” said Mr. Ford, curtly, rising impatiently and crossing the room. He was more than half convinced that Uncle Ben was deceiving him. Either under the veil of his hide-bound simplicity he was an utterly selfish, heartless, secretive man, or else he was telling an idiotic falsehood.
“I’m sorry I can neither congratulate you nor condole with you on what you have just told me. I cannot see that you have the least excuse for delaying a single moment to search for your wife and make amends for your conduct. And if you want my opinion it strikes me as being a much more honorable way of employing your new riches than mediating in your neighbors’ squabbles. But it’s getting late and I’m afraid we must bring our talk to an end. I hope you’ll think this over before we meet again–and think differently.”
Nevertheless, as they both left the schoolhouse, Mr. Ford lingered over the locking of the door to give Uncle Ben a final chance for further explanation. But none came. The new capitalist of Indian Spring regarded him with an intensification of his usual half sad, half embarrassed smile, and only said: “You understand this yer’s a secret, Mr. Ford?”
“Certainly,” said Ford with ill-concealed irritation.
“‘Bout my bein’ sorter married?”
“Don’t be alarmed,” he responded dryly; “it’s not a taking story.”
They separated; Uncle Ben, more than ever involved in his usual unsatisfactory purposes, wending his way towards his riches; the master lingering to observe his departure before he plunged, in virtuous superiority, into the woods that fringed the Harrison and McKinstry boundaries.
CHAPTER VIII.
The religious attitude which Mrs. McKinstry had assumed towards her husband’s weak civilized tendencies was not entirely free from human rancor. That strong loyal nature which had unsexed itself in the one idea of duty, now that duty seemed to be no longer appreciated took refuge in her forgotten womanhood and in the infinitesimally small arguments, resources, and manoeuvres at its command. She had conceived a singular jealousy of this daughter who had changed her husband’s nature, and who had supplanted the traditions of the household life; she had acquired an exaggerated depreciation of those feminine charms which had never been a factor in her own domestic happiness. She saw in her husband’s desire to mitigate the savage austerities of their habits only a weak concession to the powers of beauty and adornment–degrading vanities she had never known in their life-long struggle for frontier supremacy–that had never brought them victorious out of that struggle. “Frizzles,” “furblows,” and “fancy fixin’s” had never helped them in their exodus across the plains; had never taken the place of swift eyes, quick ears, strong hands, and endurance; had never nursed the sick or bandaged the wounded. When envy or jealousy invades the female heart after forty it is apt to bring a bitterness which knows no attenuating compensation in that coquetry, emulation, passionate appeal, or innocent tenderness, which makes tolerable the jealous caprices of the younger woman. The struggle for rivalry is felt to be hopeless, the power of imitation is gone. Of her forgotten womanhood Mrs. McKinstry revived only a capacity to suffer meanly and inflict mean suffering upon others. In the ruined castle of her youth, and the falling in of banqueting hall and bower, the dungeon and torture-chamber appeared to have been left, or, to use her own metaphor, she had querulously complained to the parson that, “Accordin’ to some folks, she mout hev bin the barren fig-tree e-lected to bear persimmums.”
Her methods were not entirely different from those employed by her suffering sisterhood in like emergencies. The unlucky Hiram, “worrited by stock,” was hardly placated or consoled by learning from her that it was only the result of his own weakness, acting upon the ‘cussedness of the stock-dispersing Harrisons; the perplexity into which he was thrown by the news of the new legal claim to his land was not soothed by the suggestion that it was a trick of that Yankee civilization to which he was meanly succumbing. She who had always been a rough but devoted nurse in sickness was now herself overtaken by vague irregular disorders which involved the greatest care and the absence of all exciting causes. The attendance of McKinstry and Cressy at a “crazy quilting party” had brought on “blind chills;” the importation of a melodeon for Cressy to play on had superinduced an “innerd rash,” and a threatened attack of “palsy creeps” had only been warded off by the timely postponement of an evening party suggested by her daughter. The old nomadic instinct, morbidly excited by her discontent, caused her to lay artful plans for a further emigration. She knew she had the germs of “mash fever” caught from the adjacent river; she related mysterious information, gathered in “class meeting,” of the superior facilities for stock raising on the higher foot-hills; she resuscitated her dead and gone Missouri relations in her daily speech, to a manifest invidious comparison with the living; she revived even the incidents of her early married life with the same baleful intent. The acquisition of a few “biled shirts” by Hiram for festive appearances with Cressy painfully reminded her that he had married her in “hickory;” she further accented the change by herself appearing in her oldest clothes, on the hypothesis that it was necessary for some one to keep up the traditions of the past.
Her attitude towards Cressy would have been more decided had she ever possessed the slightest influence over her, or had even understood her with the intuitive sympathies of the maternal relations. Yet she went so far as to even openly regret the breaking off of the match with Seth Davis, whose family, at least, still retained the habits and traditions she revered; but she was promptly silenced by her husband informing her that words “that had to be tuk back” had already passed between him and Seth’s father, and that, according to those same traditions, blood was more likely to be spilled than mingled. Whether she was only withheld from attempting a reconciliation herself through lack of tact and opportunity remains to be seen. For the present she encouraged Masters’s attentions under a new and vague idea that a flirtation which distracted Cressy from her studies was displeasing to McKinstry and inimical to his plans. Blindly ignorant of Mr. Ford’s possible relations to her daughter, and suspecting nothing, she felt towards him only a dull aversion as being the senseless pivot of her troubles. Seeing no one, and habitually closing her ears to any family allusion to Cressy’s social triumphs, she was unaware of even the popular admiration their memorable waltz had excited.
On the morning of the day that Uncle Ben had confided to the master his ingenious plan for settling the boundary disputes, the barking of McKinstry’s yellow dog announced the approach of a stranger to the ranch. It proved to be Mr. Stacey–not only as dazzlingly arrayed as when he first rose above Johnny Filgee’s horizon, but wearing, in addition to his jaunty business air, a look of complacent expectation of the pretty girl whom he had met at the ball. He had not seen her for a month. It was a happy inspiration of his own that enabled him to present himself that morning in the twin functions of a victorious Mercury and Apollo.
McKinstry had to be summoned from an adjacent meadow, while Cressy, in the mean time, undertook to entertain the gallant stranger. This was easily done. It was part of her fascinations that, disdaining the ordinary real or assumed ignorance of the ingenue of her class, she generally exhibited to her admirers (with perhaps the single exception of the master) a laughing consciousness of the state of mind into which her charms had thrown them. She understood their passion if she could not accept it. This to a bashful rustic community was helpful, but in the main unsatisfactory; with advances so promptly unmasked, the most strategic retreat was apt to become an utter rout. Leaning against the lintel of the door, her curved hand shading the sparkling depths of her eyes, and the sunlight striking down upon the pretty curves of her languid figure, she awaited the attack.
“I haven’t seen you, Miss Cressy, since we danced together–a month ago.”
“That was mighty rough papers,” said Cressy, who was purposely dialectical to strangers, “considering that you trapsed up and down the lane, past the house, twice yesterday.”
“Then you saw me?” said the young man, with a slightly discomfited laugh.
“I did. And so did the hound, and so, I reckon, did Joe Masters and the hired man. And when you pranced back on the home stretch, there was the hound, Masters, the hired man, and Maw all on your trail, and Paw bringin’ up the rear with a shot-gun. There was about a half a mile of you altogether.” She removed her hand from her eyes to indicate with a lazily graceful sweep this somewhat imaginative procession, and laughed.
“You are certainly well guarded,” said Stacey hesitatingly; “and looking at you, Miss Cressy,” he added boldly, “I don’t wonder at it.”
“Well, it IS reckoned that next to Paw’s boundaries I’m pretty well protected from squatters and jumpers.”
Forceful and quaint as her language was, the lazy sweetness of her intonation, and the delicate refinement of her face, more than atoned for it. It was unconventional and picturesque as her gestures. So at least thought Mr. Stacey, and it emboldened him to further gallantry.
“Well, Miss Cressy, as my business with your father to-day was to try to effect a compromise of his boundary claims, perhaps you might accept my services in your own behalf.”
“Which means,” responded the young lady pertly, “the same thing to ME as to Paw. No trespassers but yourself. Thank you, sir.” She twirled lightly on her heel and dropped him that exaggerated curtsey known to the school-children as a “cheese.” It permitted in its progress the glimpse of a pretty little slipper which completed his subjugation.
“Well, if it’s only a fair compromise,” he began laughingly.
“Compromise means somebody giving up. Who is it?” she asked.
The infatuated Stacey had reached the point of thinking this repartee if possible more killing than his own.
“Ha! That’s for Miss Cressy to say.”
But the young lady leaning back against the lintel with the comfortable ease of being irresponsibly diverted, sagely pointed out that that was the function of the arbitrator.
“Ah well, suppose we begin by giving up Seth Davis, eh? You see that I’m pretty well posted, Miss Cressy.”
“You alarm me,” said Cressy sweetly. “But I reckon he HAD given up.”
“He was in the running that night at the ball. Looked half savage while I was dancing with you. Wanted to eat me.”
“Poor Seth! And he used to be SO particular in his food,” said the witty Cressy.
Mr. Stacey was convulsed. “And there’s Mr. Dabney–Uncle Ben,” he continued, “eh? Very quiet but very sly. A dark horse, eh? Pretends to take lessons for the sake of being near some one, eh? Would he were a boy again because somebody else is a girl?”
“I should be frightened of you if you lived here always,” returned Cressy with invincible naivete; “but perhaps then you wouldn’t know so much.”
Stacey simply accepted this as a compliment. “And there’s Masters,” he said insinuatingly.
“Not Joe?” said Cressy with a low laugh, turning her eyes to the door.
“Yes,” said Stacey with a quick, uneasy smile. “Ah! I see we mustn’t drop HIM. Is he out THERE?” he added, trying to follow the direction of her eyes.
But the young girl kept her face studiously averted. “Is that all?” she asked after a pause.
“Well–there’s that solemn school-master, who cut me out of the waltz with you–that Mr. Ford.”
Had he been a perfectly cool and impartial observer he would have seen the slight tremor cross Cressy’s soft eyelids even in profile, followed by that momentary arrest of her whole face, mouth, dimples, and eyes, which had overtaken it the night the master entered the ball-room. But he was neither, and it passed quickly and unnoticed. Her usual lithe but languid play of expression and color came back, and she turned her head lazily towards the speaker. “There’s Paw coming. I suppose you wouldn’t mind giving me a sample of your style of arbitrating with him, before you try it on me?”
“Certainly not,” said Stacey, by no means displeased at the prospect of having so pretty and intelligent a witness in the daughter of what he believed would form an attractive display of his diplomatic skill and graciousness to the father. “Don’t go away. I’ve got nothing to say Miss Cressy could not understand and answer.”
The jingling of spurs, and the shadow of McKinstry and his shot-gun falling at this moment between the speaker and Cressy, spared her the necessity of a reply. McKinstry cast an uneasy glance around the apartment, and not seeing Mrs. McKinstry looked relieved, and even the deep traces of the loss of a valuable steer that morning partly faded from his Indian-red complexion. He placed his shot- gun carefully in the corner, took his soft felt hat from his head, folded it and put it in one of the capacious pockets of his jacket, turned to his daughter, and laying his maimed hand familiarly on her shoulder, said gravely, without looking at Stacey, “What might the stranger be wantin’, Cress?”
“Perhaps I’d better answer that myself,” said Stacey briskly. “I’m acting for Benham and Co., of San Francisco, who have bought the Spanish title to part of this property. I”–
“Stop there!” said McKinstry, in a voice dull but distinct. He took his hat from his pocket, put it on, walked to the corner and took up his gun, looked at Stacey for the first time with narcotic eyes that seemed to drowsily absorb his slight figure, then put the gun back half contemptuously, and with a wave of his hand towards the door, said: “We’ll settle this yer outside. Cress, you stop in here. There’s man’s talk goin’ on.”
“But, Paw,” said Cressy, laying her hand languidly on her father’s sleeve without the least change of color or amused expression. “This gentleman has come over here on a compromise.”
“On a–WHICH?” said McKinstry, glancing scornfully out of the door for some rare species of mustang vaguely suggested to him in that unfamiliar word.
“To see if we couldn’t come to some fair settlement,” said Stacey. “I’ve no objection to going outside with you, but I think we can discuss this matter here just as well.” His fine feathers had not made him a coward, although his heart had beaten a little faster at this sudden recollection of the dangerous reputation of his host.
“Go on,” said McKinstry.
“The plain facts of the case are these,” continued Stacey, with more confidence. “We have sold a strip of this property covering the land in dispute between you and Harrison. We are bound to put our purchaser in peaceable possession. Now to save time we are willing to buy that possession of any man who can give it. We are told that you can.”
“Well, considerin’ that for the last four years I’ve been fightin’ night and day agin them low-down Harrisons for it, I reckon you’ve been lied to,” said McKinstry deliberately. “Why–except the clearing on the north side, whar I put up a barn, thar ain’t an acre of it as hasn’t been shifted first this side and then that as fast ez I druv boundary stakes and fences, and the Harrisons pulled ’em up agin. Thar ain’t more than fifty acres ez I’ve hed a clear hold on, and I wouldn’t hev had that ef it hadn’t bin for the barn, the raisin’ alone o’ which cost me a man, two horses, and this yer little finger.”
“Put us in possession of even that fifty acres, and WE’LL undertake to hold the rest and eject those Harrisons from it,” returned Stacey complacently. “You understand that the moment we’ve made a peaceable entrance to even a foothold on your side, the Harrisons are only trespassers, and with the title to back us we can call on the whole sheriff’s posse to put them off. That’s the law.”
“That ar the law?” repeated McKinstry meditatively.
“Yes,” said Stacey. “So,” he continued, with a self-satisfied smile to Cressy, “far from being hard on you, Mr. McKinstry, we’re rather inclined to put you on velvet. We offer you a fair price for the only thing you can give us–actual possession; and we help you with your old grudge against the Harrisons. We not only clear them out, but we pay YOU for even the part they held adversely to you.”
Mr. McKinstry passed his three whole fingers over his forehead and eyes as if troubled by a drowsy aching. “Then you don’t reckon to hev anythin’ to say to them Harrisons?”
“We don’t propose to recognize them in the matter at all,” returned Stacey.
“Nor allow ’em anythin’?”
“Not a cent! So you see, Mr. McKinstry,” he continued magnanimously, yet with a mischievous smile to Cressy, “there is nothing in this amicable discussion that requires to be settled outside.”
“Ain’t there?” said McKinstry, in a dull, deliberate voice, raising his eyes for the second time to Stacey. They were bloodshot, with a heavy, hanging furtiveness, not unlike one of his own hunted steers. “But I ain’t kam enuff in yer.” He moved to the door with a beckoning of his fateful hand. “Outside a minit–EF you please.”
Stacey started, shrugged his shoulders, and half defiantly stepped beyond the threshold. Cressy, unchanged in color or expression, lazily followed to the door.
“Wot,” said McKinstry, slowly facing Stacey; “wot ef I refoose? Wot ef I say I don’t allow any man, or any bank, or any compromise, to take up my quo’r’lls? Wot ef I say that low-down and mean as them Harrisons is, they don’t begin to be ez mean, ez low-down, ez underhanded, ez sneakin’ ez that yer compromise? Wot ef I say that ef that’s the kind o’ hogwash that law and snivelization offers me for peace and quietness, I’ll take the fightin’, and the law- breakin’, and the sheriff, and all h-ll for his posse instead? Wot ef I say that?”
“It will only be my duty to repeat it,” said Stacey, with an affected carelessness which, however, did not conceal his surprise and his discomfiture. “It’s no affair of mine.”
“Unless,” said Cressy, assuming her old position against the lintel of the door, and smoothing the worn bear-skin that served as a mat with the toe of her slipper, “unless you’ve mixed it up with your other arbitration, you know.”
“Wot other arbitration?” asked McKinstry suddenly, with murky eyes.
Stacey cast a rapid, half indignant glance at the young girl, who received it with her hands tucked behind her back, her lovely head bent submissively forward, and a prolonged little laugh.
“Oh nothing, Paw,” she said, “only a little private foolishness betwixt me and the gentleman. You’d admire to hear him talk, Paw– about other things than business. He’s just that chipper and gay.”
Nevertheless, as with a muttered “Good-morning” the young fellow turned away, she quietly brushed past her father, and followed him– with her hands still penitently behind her, and the rosy palms turned upward–as far as the gate. Her single long Marguerite braid of hair trailing down her back nearly to the hem of her skirt, appeared to accent her demure reserve. At the gate she shaded her eyes with her hand, and glanced upward.
“It don’t seem to be a good day for arbitrating. A trifle early in the season, ain’t it?”
“Good-morning, Miss McKinstry.”
She held out her hand. He took it with an affected ease but cautiously, as if it had been the velvet paw of a young panther who had scratched him. After all, what was she but the cub of the untamed beast, McKinstry? He was well out of it! He was not revengeful–but business was business, and he had given them the first chance.
As his figure disappeared behind the buckeyes of the lane, Cressy cast a glance at the declining sun. She re-entered the house, and went directly to her room. As she passed the window, she could see her father already remounted galloping towards the tules, as if in search of that riparian “kam” his late interview had disturbed. A few straggling bits of color in the sloping meadows were the children coming home from school. She hastily tied a girlish sun- bonnet under her chin, and slipping out of the back door, swept like a lissom shadow along the line of fence until she seemed to melt into the umbrage of the woods that fringed the distant north boundary.
CHAPTER IX.
Meanwhile, unaware of her husband’s sudden relapse to her old border principles and of the visit that had induced it, Mrs. McKinstry was slowly returning from a lugubrious recital of her moods and feelings at the parson’s. As she crossed the barren flat and reached the wooded upland midway between the school-house and the ranch, she saw before her the old familiar figure of Seth Davis lounging on the trail. In her habitual loyalty to her husband’s feuds she would probably have stalked defiantly past him, notwithstanding her late regrets of the broken engagement, but Seth began to advance awkwardly towards her. In fact, he had noticed the tall, gaunt, plaid-shawled and holland-bonneted figure approaching, and had waited for it.
As he seemed intent upon getting in her way she stopped and raised her right hand warningly before her. In spite of the shawl and the sun-bonnet, suffering had implanted a rude Runic dignity to her attitude. “Words that hev to be took back, Seth Davis,” she said hastily, “hev passed between you and my man. Out of my way, then, that I may pass, too.”
“Not much betwixt you and me, Aunt Rachel,” he said with slouching deprecation, using the old household title by which he had familiarly known her. “I’ve nothin agin you–and I kin prove it by wot I’m yer to say. And I ain’t trucklin’ to yer for myself, for ez far ez me and your’n ez concerned,” he continued, with a malevolent glance, “thar ain’t gold enough in Caleforny to mak the weddin’ ring that could hitch me and Cress together. I want to tell you that you’re bein’ played; that you’re bein’ befooled and bamboozled and honey-fogled. Thet while you’re groanin’ at class- meetin’ and Hiram’s quo’llin’ with Dad, and Joe Masters waitin’ round to pick up any bone that’s throwed him, that sneakin’, hypocritical Yankee school-master is draggin’ your daughter to h-ll with him on the sly.”
“Quit that, Seth Davis,” said Mrs. McKinstry sternly, “or be man enough to tell it to a man. That’s Hiram’s business to know.”
“And what if he knows it well enough and winks at it? What if he’s willin’ enough to truckle to it, to curry favor with them sneakin’ Yanks?” said Seth malignantly.
A spasm of savage conviction seized Mrs. McKinstry. But it was more from her jealous fears of her husband’s disloyalty than concern for her daughter’s transgression. Nevertheless, she said desperately, “It’s a lie. Where are your proofs?”
“Proofs?” returned Seth. “Who is it sneaks around the school-house to have private talks with the school-master, and edges him on with Cressy afore folks? Your husband. Who goes sneakin’ off every arternoon with that same cantin’ hound of a school-master? Your daughter. Who’s been carryin’ on together, and hidin’ thick enough to be ridden out on a rail together? Your daughter and the school- master. Proofs?–ask anybody. Ask the children. Look yar–you, Johnny–come here.”
He had suddenly directed his voice to a blackberry bush near the trail, from which the curly head of Johnny Filgee had just appeared. That home-returning infant painfully disengaged himself, his slate, his books, and his small dinner-pail half filled with fruit as immature as himself, and came towards them sideways.
“Yer’s a dime, Johnny, to git some candy,” said Seth, endeavoring to distort his passion-set face into a smile.
Johnny Filgee’s small, berry-stained palm promptly closed over the coin.
“Now, don’t lie. Where’s Cressy?”
“Kithin’ her bo.”
“Good boy. What bo?”
Johnny hesitated. He had once seen the school-master and Cressy together; he had heard it whispered by the other children that they loved each other. But looking at Seth and Mrs. McKinstry he felt that something more tremendous than this stupid fact was required of him for grown-up people, and being honest and imaginative, he determined that it should be worth the money.
“Speak up, Johnny, don’t be afeard to tell.”
Johnny was not “afeard”–he was only thinking. He had it! He remembered that he had just seen his paragon, the brilliant Stacey, coming from the boundary woods. What more poetical and startlingly effective than to connect him with Cressy? He replied promptly:–
“Mithter Thtathy. He gived her a watch and ring of truly gold. Goin’ to be married at Thacramento.”
“You lyin’ limb,” said Seth, seizing him roughly. But Mrs. McKinstry interposed.
“Let that brat go,” she said with gleaming eyes. “I want to talk to you.” Seth released Johnny. “It’s a trick,’ he said, “he’s bin put up to it by that Ford.”
But Johnny, after securing a safe vantage behind the blackberry bush, determined to give them another trial–with facts.
“I know mor’n that,” he called out.
“Git–you measly pup,” said Seth savagely.
“I know Theriff Briggth, he rid over the boundary with a lot o’ men and horthes,” said Johnny, with that hurried delivery with which he was able to estop interruption. “Theed ’em go by. Maur Harrithon theth his dad’s goin’ to chuck out ole McKinthtry. Hooray!”
Mrs. McKinstry turned her dark face sharply on Seth. “What’s that he sez?”
“Nothin’ but children’s gassin’,” he answered, meeting her eyes with an evil consciousness half loutish, half defiant, “and ef it war true, it would only sarve Hiram McKinstry right.”
She laid her hand upon his shoulder with swift suspicion. “Out o’ my way, Seth Davis,” she said suddenly, pushing him aside. “Ef this ez any underhanded work of yours, you’ll pay for it.”
She strode past him in the direction of Johnny, but at the approach of the tall woman with the angry eyes, the boy flew. She hesitated a moment, turned again with a threatening wave of the hand to Seth, and started off rapidly in the direction of the boundary.
She had not placed so much faith in the boy’s story as in the vague revelation of evil in Davis’s manner. If there was any “cussedness” afoot, Seth, convinced of Cressy’s unfaithfulness, and with no further hope of any mediation from the parents, would know it. Unless Hiram had been warned, he was still lulled in his fatuous dream of civilization. At that time he and his men were in the tules with the stock; to be satisfied, she herself must go to the boundary.
She reached the ridge of the cottonwoods and sycamores, and a few hundred yards further brought her to the edge of that gentle southern slope which at last sank into the broad meadow of the debatable ground. In spite of Stacey’s invidious criticism of its intrinsic value, this theatre of savage dissension, violence, and bloodshed was by some irony of nature a pastoral landscape of singular and peaceful repose. The soft glacis stretching before her was in spring cerulean with lupins, and later starred with mariposas. The meadow was transversely crossed by a curving line of alders that indicated a rare water-course, of which in the dry season only a single pool remained to flash back the unvarying sky. There had been no attempt at cultivation of this broad expanse; wild oats, mustard, and rank grasses left it a tossing sea of turbulent and variegated color whose waves rode high enough to engulf horse and rider in their choking depths. Even the traces of human struggle, the uprooted stakes, scattered fence-rails, and empty post-holes were forever hidden under these billows of verdure. Midway of the field and near the water-course arose McKinstry’s barn–the solitary human structure whose rude, misshapen, bulging sides and swallow-haunted eaves bursting with hay from the neighboring pasture, seemed however only an extravagant growth of the prolific soil. Mrs. McKinstry gazed at it anxiously. There was no sign of life or movement near or around it; it stood as it had always stood, deserted and solitary. But turning her eyes to the right, beyond the water-course, she could see a slight regular undulation of the grassy sea and what appeared to be the drifting on its surface of half a dozen slouched hats in the direction of the alders. There was no longer any doubt; a party from the other side was approaching the border.
A shout and the quick galloping of hoofs behind her sent a thrill of relief to her heart. She had barely time to draw aside as her husband and his followers swept past her down the slope. But it needed not his furious cry, “The Harrisons hev sold us out,” to tell her that the crisis had come.
She held her breath as the cavalcade diverged, and in open order furiously approached the water-course, and she could see a sudden check and hesitation in the movement in the meadow at that unlooked-for onset. Then she thought of the barn. It would be a rallying-point for them if driven back–a tower of defence if besieged. There were arms secreted beneath the hay for such an emergency. She would run there, swing-to its open doors, and get ready to barricade them.
She ran crouchingly, seeking the higher grasses and brambles of the ridge to escape observation from the meadow until she could descend upon the barn from the rear. She threw aside her impeding shawl; her brown holland sun-bonnet, torn off her head and hanging by its strings from her shoulders, let her coarse silver-threaded hair stream like a mane over her back; her face and hands were bleeding from thorns and whitened by dust. But she struggled on fiercely like some hunted animal until she reached the descending trail, when, letting herself go blindly, only withheld by the long grasses she clutched at wildly on either side, she half fell, half stumbled down the slope and emerged beside the barn, breathless and exhausted.
But what a contrast was there! For an instant she could scarcely believe that she had left the ridge with her husband’s savage outcry in her ears, and in her eyes the swift vision of his furious cavalcade. The boundary meadow was hidden by the soft lines of graceful willows in whose dim recesses the figures of the passionate horsemen seemed to have melted forever. There was nothing now to interrupt the long vista of peaceful beauty that stretched before her through this lonely hollow to the distant sleeping hills. The bursting barn in the foreground, heaped with grain that fringed its eaves and bristled from its windows and doors until its unlovely bulk was hidden in trailing feathery outlines; the gentle flutter of wings and soothing twitter of swallows and jays around its open rafters, and the drifting shadows of a few circling crows above it; the drowsy song of bees on the wild mustard that half hid its walls with yellow bloom; the sound of faintly-trickling water in one of those old Indian-haunted springs that had given its name to the locality; all these for an instant touched the senses of this hard, fierce woman as she had not been touched since she was a girl. For one brief moment the joys of peace and that matured repose that never had been hers flashed upon her; but with it came the savage consciousness that even now it was being wrested away, and the thought fired her blood again. She listened eagerly for a second in the direction of the meadow; there was no report of fire-arms–there was yet time to prepare the barn for defence. She ran to the front of the building and seized the latch of the half-closed door. A little feminine cry that was half a laugh came from within, with the rapid rustle of a skirt and as the door swung open a light figure vanished through the rear window. The slanting sunlight falling in the shadowed interior disclosed only the single erect figure of the school-master John Ford.
The first confusion and embarrassment of an interrupted rendezvous that had colored Ford’s cheeks, gave way to a look of alarm as he caught sight of the bleeding face and dishevelled figure of Mrs. McKinstry. She saw it. To her distorted fancy it seemed only a proof of deeper guilt. Without a word she closed the heavy door behind her and swung the huge cross-bar unaided to its place. She then turned and confronted him, wiping the dust from her face and arms with her torn and dangling sun-bonnet in a way that recalled her attitude on the first day he had met her.
“That was Cress with ye?” she said.
He hesitated, still gazing at her in wonder.
“Don’t lie.”
He started. “I don’t propose to,” he retorted indignantly. “It was”–
“I don’t ask ye how long this yer’s bin goin’ on,” she said, pointing to Cressy’s sun-bonnet, a few books, and a scattered nosegay of wild flowers lying on the hay; “and I don’t want to