and out! Yer goin’ to shut up your desk and your books and this hull consarn inside of an hour, and vamose the ranch. Arter an hour from now thar won’t be any Mr. Farendell, and no weddin’ to-morrow.”
“If that’s your game–perhaps you’d like to murder me at once?” said Farendell with a shifting eye, as his hand again moved towards his revolver.
But again the thin hand of the stranger was also lifted. “We ain’t in the business o’ murderin’ or bein’ murdered, or we might hev kem here together, me and Duffy. Now if anything happens to me Duffy will be left, and HE’S got the proofs.”
Farendell seemed to recognize the fact with the same directness. “That’s it, is it?” he said bluntly. “Well, how much do you want? Only, I warn you that I haven’t much to give.”
“Wotever you’ve got, if it was millions, it ain’t enough to buy us up, and ye ought to know that by this time,” responded Scranton, with a momentary flash in his eyes. But the next moment his previous passionless deliberation returned, and leaning his arm on the desk of the man before him he picked up a paperweight carelessly and turned it over as he said slowly, “The fact is, Mr. Farendell, you’ve been making us, me and Duffy, tired. We’ve bin watchin’ you and your doin’s, lyin’ low and sayin’ nothin’, till we concluded that it was about time you handed in your checks and left the board. We ain’t wanted nothin’ of ye, we ain’t begrudged ye nothin’, but we’ve allowed that this yer thing must stop.”
“And what if I refuse?” said Farendell.
“Thar’ll be some cussin’ and a big row from YOU, I kalkilate–and maybe some fightin’ all round,” said Scranton dispassionately. “But it will be all the same in the end. The hull thing will come out, and you’ll hev to slide just the same. T’otherwise, ef ye slide out NOW, it’s without a row.”
“And do you suppose a business man like me can disappear without a fuss over it?” said Farendell angrily. “Are you mad?”
“I reckon the hole YOU’LL make kin be filled up,” said Scranton dryly. “But ef ye go NOW, you won’t be bothered by the fuss, while if you stay you’ll have to face the music, and go too!”
Farendell was silent. Possibly the truth of this had long since been borne upon him. No one but himself knew the incessant strain of these years of evasion and concealment, and how he often had been near to some such desperate culmination. The sacrifice offered to him was not, therefore, so great as it might have seemed. The knowledge of this might have given him a momentary superiority over his antagonist had Scranton’s motive been a purely selfish or malignant one, but as it was not, and as he may have had some instinctive idea of Farendell’s feeling also, it made his ultimatum appear the more passionless and fateful. And it was this quality which perhaps caused Farendell to burst out with desperate abruptness,–
“What in h-ll ever put you up to this!”
Scranton folded his arms upon Farendell’s desk, and slowly wiping his clean jaw with one hand, repeated deliberately, “Wall–I reckon I told ye that before! You’ve been making us–me and Duffy– tired!” He paused for a moment, and then, rising abruptly, with a careless gesture towards the uncovered tray of gold, said, “Come! ye kin take enuff o’ that to get away with; the less ye take, though, the less likely you’ll be to be followed!”
He went to the door, unlocked and opened it. A strange light, as of a lurid storm interspersed by sheet-like lightning, filled the outer darkness, and the silence was now broken by dull crashes and nearer cries and shouting. A few figures were also dimly flitting around the neighboring empty offices, some of which, like Farendell’s, had been entered by their now alarmed owners.
“You’ve got a good chance now,” continued Scranton; “ye couldn’t hev a better. It’s a big fire–a scorcher–and jest the time for a man to wipe himself out and not be missed. Make tracks where the crowd is thickest and whar ye’re likely to be seen, ez ef ye were helpin’! Ther’ ‘ll be other men missed tomorrow beside you,” he added with grim significance; “but nobody’ll know that you was one who really got away.”
Where the imperturbable logic of the strange man might have failed, the noise, the tumult, the suggestion of swift-coming disaster, and the necessity for some immediate action of any kind, was convincing. Farendell hastily stuffed his pockets with gold and the papers he had found, and moved to the door. Already he fancied he felt the hot breath of the leaping conflagration beyond. “And you?” he said, turning suspiciously to Scranton.
“When you’re shut of this and clean off, I’ll fix things and leave too–but not before. I reckon,” he added grimly, with a glance at the sky, now streaming with sparks like a meteoric shower, “thar won’t be much left here in the morning.”
A few dull embers pattered on the iron roof of the low building and bounded off in ashes. Farendell cast a final glance around him, and then darted from the building. The iron door clanged behind him–he was gone.
Evidently not too soon, for the other buildings were already deserted by their would-be salvors, who had filled the streets with piles of books and valuables waiting to be carried away. Then occurred a terrible phenomenon, which had once before in such disasters paralyzed the efforts of the firemen. A large wooden warehouse in the centre of the block of offices, many hundred feet from the scene of active conflagration–which had hitherto remained intact–suddenly became enveloped in clouds of smoke, and without warning burst as suddenly from roof and upper story into vivid flame. There were eye-witnesses who declared that a stream of living fire seemed to leap upon it from the burning district, and connected the space between them with an arch of luminous heat. In another instant the whole district was involved in a whirlwind of smoke and flame, out of whose seething vortex the corrugated iron buildings occasionally showed their shriveling or glowing outlines. And then the fire swept on and away.
When the sun again arose over the panic-stricken and devastated city, all personal incident and disaster was forgotten in the larger calamity. It was two or three days before the full particulars could be gathered–even while the dominant and resistless energy of the people was erecting new buildings upon the still-smoking ruins. It was only on the third day afterwards that James Farendell, on the deck of a coasting steamer, creeping out through the fogs of the Golden Gate, read the latest news in a San Francisco paper brought by the pilot. As he hurriedly comprehended the magnitude of the loss, which was far beyond his previous conception, he experienced a certain satisfaction in finding his position no worse materially than that of many of his fellow workers. THEY were ruined like himself; THEY must begin their life afresh–but then! Ah! there was still that terrible difference. He drew his breath quickly, and read on. Suddenly he stopped, transfixed by a later paragraph. For an instant he failed to grasp its full significance. Then he read it again, the words imprinting themselves on his senses with a slow deliberation that seemed to him as passionless as Scranton’s utterances on that fateful night.
“The loss of life, it is now feared, is much greater than at first imagined. To the list that has been already published we must add the name of James Farendell, the energetic contractor so well known to our citizens, who was missing the morning after the fire. His calcined remains were found this afternoon in the warped and twisted iron shell of his counting-house, the wooden frame having been reduced to charcoal in the intense heat. The unfortunate man seems to have gone there to remove his books and papers,–as was evidenced by the iron safe being found open,–but to have been caught and imprisoned in the building through the heat causing the metal sheathing to hermetically seal the doors and windows. He was seen by some neighbors to enter the building while the fire was still distant, and his remains were identified by his keys, which were found beneath him. A poignant interest is added to his untimely fate by the circumstance that he was to have been married on the following day to the widow of his late partner, and that he had, at the call of duty, that very evening left a dinner party given to celebrate the last day of his bachelorhood–or, as it has indeed proved, of his earthly existence. Two families are thus placed in mourning, and it is a singular sequel that by this untoward calamity the well-known firm of Farendell & Cutler may be said to have ceased to exist.”
Mr. Farendell started to his feet. But a lurch of the schooner as she rose on the long swell of the Pacific sent him staggering dizzily back to his seat, and checked his first wild impulse to return. He saw it all now,–the fire had avenged him by wiping out his persecutor, Scranton, but in the eyes of his contemporaries it had only erased HIM! He might return to refute the story in his own person, but the dead man’s partner still lived with his secret, and his own rehabilitation could only revive his former peril.
. . . . . .
Four years elapsed before the late Mr. Farendell again set foot in the levee of Sacramento. The steamboat that brought him from San Francisco was a marvel to him in size, elegance, and comfort; so different from the little, crowded, tri-weekly packet he remembered; and it might, in a manner, have prepared him for the greater change in the city. But he was astounded to find nothing to remind him of the past,–no landmark, nor even ruin, of the place he had known. Blocks of brick buildings, with thoroughfares having strange titles, occupied the district where his counting- house had stood, and even obliterated its site; equally strange names were upon the shops and warehouses. In his four years’ wanderings he had scarcely found a place as unfamiliar. He had trusted to the great change in his own appearance–the full beard that he wore and the tanning of a tropical sun–to prevent recognition; but the precaution was unnecessary, there were none to recognize him in the new faces which were the only ones he saw in the transformed city. A cautious allusion to the past which he had made on the boat to a fellow passenger had brought only the surprised rejoinder, “Oh, that must have been before the big fire,” as if it was an historic epoch. There was something of pain even in this assured security of his loneliness. His obliteration was complete.
For the late Mr. Farendell had suffered some change of mind with his other mutations. He had been singularly lucky. The schooner in which he had escaped brought him to Acapulco, where, as a returning Californian, and a presumably successful one, his services and experience were eagerly sought by an English party engaged in developing certain disused Mexican mines. As the post, however, was perilously near the route of regular emigration, as soon as he had gained a sufficient sum he embarked with some goods to Callao, where he presently established himself in business, resuming his REAL name–the unambitious but indistinctive one of “Smith.” It is highly probable that this prudential act was also his first step towards rectitude. For whether the change was a question of moral ethics, or merely a superstitious essay in luck, he was thereafter strictly honest in business. He became prosperous. He had been sustained in his flight by the intention that, if he were successful elsewhere, he would endeavor to communicate with his abandoned fiancee, and ask her to join him, and share not his name but fortune in exile. But as he grew rich, the difficulties of carrying out this intention became more apparent; he was by no means certain of her loyalty surviving the deceit he had practiced and the revelation he would have to make; he was doubtful of the success of any story which at other times he would have glibly invented to take the place of truth. Already several months had elapsed since his supposed death; could he expect her to be less accessible to premature advances now than when she had been a widow? Perhaps this made him think of the wife he had deserted so long ago. He had been quite content to live without regret or affection, forgetting and forgotten, but in his present prosperity he felt there was some need of putting his domestic affairs into a more secure and legitimate shape, to avert any catastrophe like the last. HERE at least would be no difficulty; husbands had deserted their wives before this in Californian emigration, and had been heard of only after they had made their fortune. Any plausible story would be accepted by HER in the joy of his reappearance; or if, indeed, as he reflected with equal complacency, she was dead or divorced from him through his desertion–a sufficient cause in her own State–and re-married, he would at least be more secure. He began, without committing himself, by inquiry and anonymous correspondence. His wife, he learnt, had left Missouri for Sacramento only a month or two after his own disappearance from that place, and her address was unknown!
A complication so unlooked for disquieted him, and yet whetted his curiosity. The only person she might meet in California who could possibly identify him with the late Mr. Farendell was Duffy; he had often wondered if that mysterious partner of Scranton’s had been deceived with the others, or had ever suspected that the body discovered in the counting-house was Scranton’s. If not, he must have accepted the strange coincidence that Scranton had disappeared also the same night. In the first six months of his exile he had searched the Californian papers thoroughly, but had found no record of any doubt having been thrown on the accepted belief. It was these circumstances, and perhaps a vague fascination not unlike that which impels the malefactor to haunt the scene of his crime, that, at the end of four years, had brought him, a man of middle age and assured occupation and fortune, back to the city he had fled from.
A few days at one of the new hotels convinced him thoroughly that he was in no danger of recognition, and gave him the assurance to take rooms more in keeping with his circumstances and his own frankly avowed position as the head of a South American house. A cautious acquaintance–through the agency of his banker–with a few business men gave him some occupation, and the fact of his South American letters being addressed to Don Diego Smith gave a foreign flavor to his individuality, which his tanned face and dark beard had materially helped. A stronger test convinced him how complete was the obliteration of his former identity. One day at the bank he was startled at being introduced by the manager to a man whom he at once recognized as a former business acquaintance. But the shock was his alone; the formal approach and unfamiliar manner of the man showed that he had failed to recognize even a resemblance. But would he equally escape detection by his wife if he met her as accidentally,–an encounter not to be thought of until he knew something more of her? He became more cautious in going to public places, but luckily for him the proportion of women to men was still small in California, and they were more observed than observing.
A month elapsed; in that time he had thoroughly exhausted the local Directories in his cautious researches among the “Smiths,” for in his fear of precipitating a premature disclosure he had given up his former anonymous advertising. And there was a certain occupation in this personal quest that filled his business time. He was in no hurry. He had a singular faith that he would eventually discover her whereabouts, be able to make all necessary inquiries into her conduct and habits, and perhaps even enjoy a brief season of unsuspected personal observation before revealing himself. And this faith was as singularly rewarded.
Having occasion to get his watch repaired one day he entered a large jeweler’s shop, and while waiting its examination his attention was attracted by an ordinary old-fashioned daguerreotype case in the form of a heart-shaped locket lying on the counter with other articles left for repairs. Something in its appearance touched a chord in his memory; he lifted the half-opened case and saw a much faded daguerreotype portrait of himself taken in Missouri before he left in the Californian emigration. He recognized it at once as one he had given to his wife; the faded likeness was so little like his present self that he boldly examined it and asked the jeweler one or two questions. The man was communicative. Yes, it was an old-fashioned affair which had been left for repairs a few days ago by a lady whose name and address, written by herself, were on the card tied to it.
Mr. James Smith had by this time fully controlled the emotion he felt as he recognized his wife’s name and handwriting, and knew that at last the clue was found! He laid down the case carelessly, gave the final directions for the repairs of his watch, and left the shop. The address, of which he had taken a mental note, was, to his surprise, very near his own lodgings; but he went straight home. Here a few inquiries of his janitor elicited the information that the building indicated in the address was a large one of furnished apartments and offices like his own, and that the “Mrs. Smith” must be simply the housekeeper of the landlord, whose name appeared in the Directory, but not her own. Yet he waited until evening before he ventured to reconnoitre the premises; with the possession of his clue came a slight cooling of his ardor and extreme caution in his further proceedings. The house–a reconstructed wooden building–offered no external indication of the rooms she occupied in the uniformly curtained windows that front the street. Yet he felt an odd and pleasurable excitement in passing once or twice before those walls that hid the goal of his quest. As yet he had not seen her, and there was naturally the added zest of expectation. He noticed that there was a new building opposite, with vacant offices to let. A project suddenly occurred to him, which by morning he had fully matured. He hired a front room in the first floor of the new building, had it hurriedly furnished as a private office, and on the second morning of his discovery was installed behind his desk at the window commanding a full view of the opposite house. There was nothing strange in the South American capitalist selecting a private office in so popular a locality.
Two or three days elapsed without any result from his espionage. He came to know by sight the various tenants, the two Chinese servants, and the solitary Irish housemaid, but as yet had no glimpse of the housekeeper. She evidently led a secluded life among her duties; it occurred to him that perhaps she went out, possibly to market, earlier than he came, or later, after he had left the office. In this belief he arrived one morning after an early walk in a smart spring shower, the lingering straggler of the winter rains. There were few people astir, yet he had been preceded for two or three blocks by a tall woman whose umbrella partly concealed her head and shoulders from view. He had noticed, however, even in his abstraction, that she walked well, and managed the lifting of her skirt over her trim ankles and well-booted feet with some grace and cleverness. Yet it was only on her unexpectedly turning the corner of his own street that he became interested. She continued on until within a few doors of his office, when she stopped to give an order to a tradesman, who was just taking down his shutters. He heard her voice distinctly; in the quick emotion it gave him he brushed hurriedly past her without lifting his eyes. Gaining his own doorway he rushed upstairs to his office, hastily unlocked it, and ran to the window. The lady was already crossing the street. He saw her pause before the door of the opposite house, open it with a latchkey, and caught a full view of her profile in the single moment that she turned to furl her umbrella and enter. It was his wife’s voice he had heard; it was his wife’s face that he had seen in profile.
Yet she was changed from the lanky young schoolgirl he had wedded ten years ago, or, at least, compared to what his recollection of her had been. Had he ever seen her as she really was? Surely somewhere in that timid, freckled, half-grown bride he had known in the first year of their marriage the germ of this self-possessed, matured woman was hidden. There was the tone of her voice; he had never recalled it before as a lover might, yet now it touched him; her profile he certainly remembered, but not with the feeling it now produced in him. Would he have ever abandoned her had she been like that? Or had HE changed, and was this no longer his old self?–perhaps even a self SHE would never recognize again? James Smith had the superstitions of a gambler, and that vague idea of fate that comes to weak men; a sudden fright seized him, and he half withdrew from the window lest she should observe him, recognize him, and by some act precipitate that fate.
By lingering beyond the usual hour for his departure he saw her again, and had even a full view of her face as she crossed the street. The years had certainly improved her; he wondered with a certain nervousness if she would think they had done the same for him. The complacency with which he had at first contemplated her probable joy at recovering him had become seriously shaken since he had seen her; a woman as well preserved and good-looking as that, holding a certain responsible and, no doubt, lucrative position, must have many admirers and be independent. He longed to tell her now of his fortune, and yet shrank from the test its exposure implied. He waited for her return until darkness had gathered, and then went back to his lodgings a little chagrined and ill at ease. It was rather late for her to be out alone! After all, what did he know of her habits or associations? He recalled the freedom of Californian life, and the old scandals relating to the lapses of many women who had previously led blameless lives in the Atlantic States. Clearly it behooved him to be cautious. Yet he walked late that night before the house again, eager to see if she had returned, and with WHOM? He was restricted in his eagerness by the fear of detection, but he gathered very little knowledge of her habits; singularly enough nobody seemed to care. A little piqued at this, he began to wonder if he were not thinking too much of this woman to whom he still hesitated to reveal himself. Nevertheless, he found himself that night again wandering around the house, and even watching with some anxiety the shadow which he believed to be hers on the window-blind of the room where he had by discreet inquiry located her. Whether his memory was stimulated by his quest he never knew, but presently he was able to recall step by step and incident by incident his early courtship of her and the brief days of their married life. He even remembered the day she accepted him, and even dwelt upon it with a sentimental thrill that he probably never felt at the time, and it was a distinct feature of his extraordinary state of mind and its concentration upon this particular subject that he presently began to look upon HIMSELF as the abandoned and deserted conjugal partner, and to nurse a feeling of deep injury at her hands! The fact that he was thinking of her, and she, probably, contented with her lot, was undisturbed by any memory of him, seemed to him a logical deduction of his superior affection.
It was, therefore, quite as much in the attitude of a reproachful and avenging husband as of a merely curious one that, one afternoon, seeing her issue from her house at an early hour, he slipped down the stairs and began to follow her at a secure distance. She turned into the principal thoroughfare, and presently made one of the crowd who were entering a popular place of amusement where there was an afternoon performance. So complete was his selfish hallucination, that he smiled bitterly at this proof of heartless indifference, and even so far overcame his previous caution as to actually brush by her somewhat rudely as he entered the building at the same moment. He was conscious that she lifted her eyes a little impatiently to the face of the awkward stranger; he was equally, but more bitterly, conscious that she had not recognized him! He dropped into a seat behind her; she did not look at him again with even a sense of disturbance; the momentary contact had evidently left no impression upon her. She glanced casually at her neighbors on either side, and presently became absorbed in the performance. When it was over she rose, and on her way out recognized and exchanged a few words with one or two acquaintances. Again he heard her familiar voice, almost at his elbow, raised with no more consciousness of her contiguity to him than if he were a mere ghost. The thought struck him for the first time with a hideous and appalling significance. What was he but a ghost to her–to every one! A man dead, buried, and forgotten! His vanity and self-complacency vanished before this crushing realization of the hopelessness of his existence. Dazed and bewildered, he mingled blindly and blunderingly with the departing crowd, tossed here and there as if he were an invisible presence, stumbling over the impeding skirts of women with a vague apology they heeded not, and which seemed in his frightened ears as hollow as a voice from the grave.
When he at last reached the street he did not look back, but wandered abstractedly through by-streets in the falling rain, scarcely realizing where he was, until he found himself drenched through, with his closed umbrella in his tremulous hand, standing at the half-submerged levee beside the overflowed river. Here again he realized how completely he had been absorbed and concentrated in his search for his wife during the last three weeks; he had never been on the levee since his arrival. He had taken no note of the excitement of the citizens over the alarming reports of terrible floods in the mountains, and the daily and hourly fear that they experienced of disastrous inundation from the surcharged river. He had never thought of it, yet he had read of it, and even talked, and yet now for the first time in his selfish, blind absorption was certain of it. He stood still for some time, watching doggedly the enormous yellow stream laboring with its burden and drift from many a mountain town and camp, moving steadily and fatefully towards the distant bay, and still more distant and inevitable ocean. For a few moments it vaguely fascinated and diverted him; then it as vaguely lent itself to his one dominant, haunting thought. Yes, it was pointing him the only way out,–the path to the distant ocean and utter forgetfulness again!
The chill of his saturated clothing brought him to himself once more, he turned and hurried home. He went tiredly to his bedroom, and while changing his garments there came a knock at the door. It was the porter to say that a lady had called, and was waiting for him in the sitting-room. She had not given her name.
The closed door prevented the servant from seeing the extraordinary effect produced by this simple announcement upon the tenant. For one instant James Smith remained spellbound in his chair. It was characteristic of his weak nature and singular prepossession that he passed in an instant from the extreme of doubt to the extreme of certainty and conviction. It was his wife! She had recognized him in that moment of encounter at the entertainment; had found his address, and had followed him here! He dressed himself with feverish haste, not, however, without a certain care of his appearance and some selection of apparel, and quickly forecast the forthcoming interview in his mind. For the pendulum had swung back; Mr. James Smith was once more the self-satisfied, self- complacent, and discreetly cautious husband that he had been at the beginning of his quest, perhaps with a certain sense of grievance superadded. He should require the fullest explanations and guarantees before committing himself,–indeed, her present call might be an advance that it would be necessary for him to check. He even pictured her pleading at his feet; a very little stronger effort of his Alnaschar imagination would have made him reject her like the fatuous Persian glass peddler.
He opened the door of the sitting-room deliberately, and walked in with a certain formal precision. But the figure of a woman arose from the sofa, and with a slight outcry, half playful, half hysterical, threw herself upon his breast with the single exclamation, “Jim!” He started back from the double shock. For the woman was NOT his wife! A woman extravagantly dressed, still young, but bearing, even through her artificially heightened color, a face worn with excitement, excess, and premature age. Yet a face that as he disengaged himself from her arms grew upon him with a terrible recognition, a face that he had once thought pretty, inexperienced, and innocent,–the face of the widow of his former partner, Cutler, the woman he was to have married on the day he fled. The bitter revulsion of feeling and astonishment was evidently visible in his face, for she, too, drew back for a moment as they separated. But she had evidently been prepared, if not pathetically inured to such experiences. She dropped into a chair again with a dry laugh, and a hard metallic voice, as she said,–
“Well, it’s YOU, anyway–and you can’t get out of it.”
As he still stared at her, in her inconsistent finery, draggled and wet by the storm, at her limp ribbons and ostentatious jewelry, she continued, in the same hard voice,–
“I thought I spotted you once or twice before; but you took no notice of me, and I reckoned I was mistaken. But this afternoon at the Temple of Music”–
“Where?” said James Smith harshly.
“At the Temple–the San Francisco Troupe performance–where you brushed by me, and I heard your voice saying, ‘Beg pardon!’ I says, ‘That’s Jim Farendell.'”
“Farendell!” burst out James Smith, half in simulated astonishment, half in real alarm.
“Well! Smith, then, if you like better,” said the woman impatiently; “though it’s about the sickest and most played-out dodge of a name you could have pitched upon. James Smith, Don Diego Smith!” she repeated, with a hysteric laugh. “Why, it beats the nigger minstrels all hollow! Well, when I saw you there, I said, ‘That’s Jim Farendell, or his twin brother;’ I didn’t say ‘his ghost,’ mind you; for, from the beginning, even before I knew it all, I never took any stock in that fool yarn about your burnt bones being found in your office.”
“Knew all, knew what?” demanded the man, with a bravado which he nevertheless felt was hopeless.
She rose, crossed the room, and, standing before him, placed one hand upon her hip as she looked at him with half-pitying effrontery.
“Look here, Jim,” she began slowly, “do you know what you’re doing? Well, you’re making me tired!” In spite of himself, a half- superstitious thrill went through him as her words and attitude recalled the dead Scranton. “Do you suppose that I don’t know that you ran away the night of the fire? Do you suppose that I don’t know that you were next to ruined that night, and that you took that opportunity of skedaddling out of the country with all the money you had left, and leaving folks to imagine you were burnt up with the books you had falsified and the accounts you had doctored! It was a mean thing for you to do to me, Jim, for I loved you then, and would have been fool enough to run off with you if you’d told me all, and not left me to find out that you had lost MY money– every cent Cutler had left me in the business–with the rest.”
With the fatuousness of a weak man cornered, he clung to unimportant details. “But the body was believed to be mine by every one,” he stammered angrily. “My papers and books were burnt,–there was no evidence.”
“And why was there not?” she said witheringly, staring doggedly in his face. “Because I stopped it! Because when I knew those bones and rags shut up in that office weren’t yours, and was beginning to make a row about it, a strange man came to me and said they were the remains of a friend of his who knew your bankruptcy and had come that night to warn you,–a man whom you had half ruined once, a man who had probably lost his life in helping you away. He said if I went on making a fuss he’d come out with the whole truth–how you were a thief and a forger, and”–she stopped.
“And what else?” he asked desperately, dreading to hear his wife’s name next fall from her lips.
“And that–as it could be proved that his friend knew your secrets,” she went on in a frightened, embarrassed voice, “you might be accused of making away with him.”
For a moment James Smith was appalled; he had never thought of this. As in all his past villainy he was too cowardly to contemplate murder, he was frightened at the mere accusation of it. “But,” he stammered, forgetful of all save this new terror, “he KNEW I wouldn’t be such a fool, for the man himself told me Duffy had the papers, and killing him wouldn’t have helped me.”
Mrs. Cutler stared at him a moment searchingly, and then turned wearily away. “Well,” she said, sinking into her chair again, “he said if I’d shut my mouth he’d shut his–and–I did. And this,” she added, throwing her hands from her lap, a gesture half of reproach and half of contempt,–“this is what I get for it.”
More frightened than touched by the woman’s desperation, James Smith stammered a vague apologetic disclaimer, even while he was loathing with a revulsion new to him her draggled finery, her still more faded beauty, and the half-distinct consciousness of guilt that linked her to him. But she waved it away, a weary gesture that again reminded him of the dead Scranton.
“Of course I ain’t what I was, but who’s to blame for it? When you left me alone without a cent, face to face with a lie, I had to do something. I wasn’t brought up to work; I like good clothes, and you know it better than anybody. I ain’t one of your stage heroines that go out as dependants and governesses and die of consumption, but I thought,” she went on with a shrill, hysterical laugh, more painful than the weariness which inevitably followed it, “I thought I might train myself to do it, ON THE STAGE! and I joined Barker’s Company. They said I had a face and figure for the stage; that face and figure wore out before I had anything more to show, and I wasn’t big enough to make better terms with the manager. They kept me nearly a year doing chambermaids and fairy queens the other side of the footlights, where I saw you today. Then I kicked! I suppose I might have married some fool for his money, but I was soft enough to think you might be sending for me when you were safe. You seem to be mighty comfortable here,” she continued, with a bitter glance around his handsomely furnished room, “as ‘Don Diego Smith.’ I reckon skedaddling pays better than staying behind.”
“I have only been here a few weeks,” he said hurriedly. “I never knew what had become of you, or that you were still here”–
“Or you wouldn’t have come,” she interrupted, with a bitter laugh. “Speak out, Jim.”
“If there–is anything–I can do–for you,” he stammered, “I’m sure”–
“Anything you can do?” she repeated, slowly and scornfully. “Anything you can do NOW? Yes!” she screamed, suddenly rising, crossing the room, and grasping his arms convulsively. “Yes! Take me away from here–anywhere–at once! Look, Jim,” she went on feverishly, “let bygones be bygones–I won’t peach! I won’t tell on you–though I had it in my heart when you gave me the go-by just now! I’ll do anything you say–go to your farthest hiding-place– work for you–only take me out of this cursed place.”
Her passionate pleading stung even through his selfishness and loathing. He thought of his wife’s indifference! Yes, he might be driven to this, and at least he must secure the only witness against his previous misconduct. “We will see,” he said soothingly, gently loosening her hands. “We must talk it over.” He stopped as his old suspiciousness returned. “But you must have some friends,” he said searchingly, “some one who has helped you.”
“None! Only one–he helped me at first,” she hesitated–“Duffy.”
“Duffy!” said James Smith, recoiling.
“Yes, when he had to tell me all,” she said in half-frightened tones, “he was sorry for me. Listen, Jim! He was a square man, for all he was devoted to his partner–and you can’t blame him for that. I think he helped me because I was alone; for nothing else, Jim. I swear it! He helped me from time to time. Maybe he might have wanted to marry me if he had not been waiting for another woman that he loved, a married woman that had been deserted years ago by her husband, just as you might have deserted me if we’d been married that day. He helped her and paid for her journey here to seek her husband, and set her up in business.”
“What are you talking about–what woman?” stammered James Smith, with a strange presentiment creeping over him.
“A Mrs. Smith. Yes,” she said quickly, as he started, “not a sham name like yours, but really and truly SMITH–that was her husband’s name! I’m not lying, Jim,” she went on, evidently mistaking the cause of the sudden contraction of the man’s face. “I didn’t invent her nor her name; there IS such a woman, and Duffy loves her–and HER only, and he never, NEVER was anything more than a friend to me. I swear it!”
The room seemed to swim around him. She was staring at him, but he could see in her vacant eyes that she had no conception of his secret, nor knew the extent of her revelation. Duffy had not dared to tell all! He burst into a coarse laugh. “What matters Duffy or the silly woman he’d try to steal away from other men.”
“But he didn’t try to steal her, and she’s only silly because she wants to be true to her husband while he lives. She told Duffy she’d never marry him until she saw her husband’s dead face. More fool she,” she added bitterly.
“Until she saw her husband’s dead face,” was all that James Smith heard of this speech. His wife’s faithfulness through years of desertion, her long waiting and truthfulness, even the bitter commentary of the equally injured woman before him, were to him as nothing to what that single sentence conjured up. He laughed again, but this time strangely and vacantly. “Enough of this Duffy and his intrusion in my affairs until I’m able to settle my account with him. Come,” he added brusquely, “if we are going to cut out of this at once I’ve got much to do. Come here again to-morrow, early. This Duffy–does he live here?”
“No. In Marysville.”
“Good! Come early to-morrow.”
As she seemed to hesitate, he opened a drawer of his table and took out a handful of gold, and handed it to her. She glanced at it for a moment with a strange expression, put it mechanically in her pocket, and then looking up at him said, with a forced laugh, “I suppose that means I am to clear out?”
“Until to-morrow,” he said shortly.
“If the Sacramento don’t sweep us away before then,” she interrupted, with a reckless laugh; “the river’s broken through the levee–a clear sweep in two places. Where I live the water’s up to the doorstep. They say it’s going to be the biggest flood yet. You’re all right here; you’re on higher ground.”
She seemed to utter these sentences abstractedly, disconnectedly, as if to gain time. He made an impatient gesture.
“All right, I’m going,” she said, compressing her lips slowly to keep them from trembling. “You haven’t forgotten anything?” As he turned half angrily towards her she added, hurriedly and bitterly, “Anything–for to-morrow?”
“No!”
She opened the door and passed out. He listened until the trail of her wet skirt had descended the stairs, and the street door had closed behind her. Then he went back to his table and began collecting his papers and putting them away in his trunks, which he packed feverishly, yet with a set and determined face. He wrote one or two letters, which he sealed and left upon his table. He then went to his bedroom and deliberately shaved off his disguising beard. Had he not been so preoccupied in one thought, he might have been conscious of loud voices in the street and a hurrying of feet on the wet sidewalk. But he was possessed by only one idea. He must see his wife that evening! How, he knew not yet, but the way would appear when he had reached his office in the building opposite hers. Three hours had elapsed before he had finished his preparations. On going downstairs he stopped to give some directions to the porter, but his room was empty; passing into the street he was surprised to find it quite deserted, and the shops closed; even a drinking saloon at the corner was quite empty. He turned the corner of the street, and began the slight descent towards his office. To his amazement the lower end of the street, which was crossed by the thoroughfare which was his destination, was blocked by a crowd of people. As he hurried forward to join them he suddenly saw, moving down that thoroughfare, what appeared to his startled eyes to be the smokestacks of some small, flat- bottomed steamer. He rubbed his eyes; it was no illusion, for the next moment he had reached the crowd, who were standing half a block away from the thoroughfare, and on the edge of a lagoon of yellow water, whose main current was the thoroughfare he was seeking, and between whose houses, submerged to their first stories, a steamboat was really paddling. Other boats and rafts were adrift on its sluggish waters, and a boatman had just landed a passenger in the backwater of the lower half of the street on which he stood with the crowd.
Possessed of his one idea, he fought his way desperately to the water edge and the boat, and demanded a passage to his office. The boatman hesitated, but James Smith promptly offered him double the value of his craft. The act was not deemed singular in that extravagant epoch, and the sympathizing crowd cheered his solitary departure, as he declined even the services of the boatman. The next moment he was off in mid-stream of the thoroughfare, paddling his boat with a desperate but inexperienced hand until he reached his office, which he entered by the window. The building, which was new and of brick, showed very little damage from the flood, but in far different case was the one opposite, on which his eyes were eagerly bent, and whose cheap and insecure foundations he could see the flood was already undermining. There were boats around the house, and men hurriedly removing trunks and valuables, but the one figure he expected to see was not there. He tied his own boat to the window; there was evidently no chance of an interview now, but if she were leaving there would be still the chance of following her and knowing her destination. As he gazed she suddenly appeared at a window, and was helped by a boatman into a flat-bottomed barge containing trunks and furniture. She was evidently the last to leave. The other boats put off at once, and none too soon; for there was a warning cry, a quick swerving of the barge, and the end of the dwelling slowly dropped into the flood, seeming to sink on its knees like a stricken ox. A great undulation of yellow water swept across the street, inundating his office through the open window and half swamping his boat beside it. At the same time he could see that the current had changed and increased in volume and velocity, and, from the cries and warning of the boatmen, he knew that the river had burst its banks at its upper bend. He had barely time to leap into his boat and cast it off before there was a foot of water on his floor.
But the new current was carrying the boats away from the higher level, which they had been eagerly seeking, and towards the channel of the swollen river. The barge was first to feel its influence, and was hurried towards the river against the strongest efforts of its boatmen. One by one the other and smaller boats contrived to get into the slack water of crossing streets, and one was swamped before his eyes. But James Smith kept only the barge in view. His difficulty in following it was increased by his inexperience in managing a boat, and the quantity of drift which now charged the current. Trees torn by their roots from some upland bank; sheds, logs, timber, and the bloated carcasses of cattle choked the stream. All the ruin worked by the flood seemed to be compressed in this disastrous current. Once or twice he narrowly escaped collision with a heavy beam or the bed of some farmer’s wagon. Once he was swamped by a tree, and righted his frail boat while clinging to its branches.
And then those who watched him from the barge and shore said afterwards that a great apathy seemed to fall upon him. He no longer attempted to guide the boat or struggle with the drift, but sat in the stern with intent forward gaze and motionless paddles. Once they strove to warn him, called to him to make an effort to reach the barge, and did what they could, in spite of their own peril, to alter their course and help him. But he neither answered nor heeded them. And then suddenly a great log that they had just escaped seemed to rise up under the keel of his boat, and it was gone. After a moment his face and head appeared above the current, and so close to the stern of the barge that there was a slight cry from the woman in it, but the next moment, and before the boatman could reach him, he was drawn under it and disappeared. They lay on their oars eagerly watching, but the body of James Smith was sucked under the barge, and, in the mid-channel of the great river, was carried out towards the distant sea.
. . . . . .
There was a strange meeting that night on the deck of a relief boat, which had been sent out in search of the missing barge, between Mrs. Smith and a grave and anxious passenger who had chartered it. When he had comforted her, and pointed out, as, indeed, he had many times before, the loneliness and insecurity of her unprotected life, she yielded to his arguments. But it was not until many months after their marriage that she confessed to him on that eventful night she thought she had seen in a moment of great peril the vision of the dead face of her husband uplifted to her through the water.
LANTY FOSTER’S MISTAKE
Lanty Foster was crouching on a low stool before the dying kitchen fire, the better to get its fading radiance on the book she was reading. Beyond, through the open window and door, the fire was also slowly fading from the sky and the mountain ridge whence the sun had dropped half an hour before. The view was uphill, and the sky-line of the hill was marked by two or three gibbet-like poles from which, on a now invisible line between them, depended certain objects–mere black silhouettes against the sky–which bore weird likeness to human figures. Absorbed as she was in her book, she nevertheless occasionally cast an impatient glance in that direction, as the sunlight faded more quickly than her fire. For the fluttering objects were the “week’s wash” which had to be brought in before night fell and the mountain wind arose. It was strong at that altitude, and before this had ravished the clothes from the line, and scattered them along the highroad leading over the ridge, once even lashing the shy schoolmaster with a pair of Lanty’s own stockings, and blinding the parson with a really tempestuous petticoat.
A whiff of wind down the big-throated chimney stirred the log embers on the hearth, and the girl jumped to her feet, closing the book with an impatient snap. She knew her mother’s voice would follow. It was hard to leave her heroine at the crucial moment of receiving an explanation from a presumed faithless lover, just to climb a hill and take in a lot of soulless washing, but such are the infelicities of stolen romance reading. She threw the clothes- basket over her head like a hood, the handle resting across her bosom and shoulders, and with both her hands free started out of the cabin. But the darkness had come up from the valley in one stride after its mountain fashion, had outstripped her, and she was instantly plunged in it. Still the outline of the ridge above her was visible, with the white, steadfast stars that were not there a moment ago, and by that sign she knew she was late. She had to battle against the rushing wind now, which sung through the inverted basket over her head and held her back, but with bent shoulders she at last reached the top of the ridge and the level. Yet here, owing to the shifting of the lighter background above her, she now found herself again encompassed with the darkness. The outlines of the poles had disappeared, the white fluttering garments were distinct apparitions waving in the wind, like dancing ghosts. But there certainly was a queer misshapen bulk moving beyond, which she did not recognize, and as she at last reached one of the poles, a shock was communicated to it, through the clothes- line and the bulk beyond. Then she heard a voice say impatiently,–
“What in h-ll am I running into now?”
It was a man’s voice, and, from its elevation, the voice of a man on horseback. She answered without fear and with slow deliberation,–
“Inter our clothes-line, I reckon.”
“Oh!” said the man in a half-apologetic tone. Then in brisker accents, “The very thing I want! I say, can you give me a bit of it? The ring of my saddle girth has fetched loose. I can fasten it with that.”
“I reckon,” replied Lanty, with the same unconcern, moving nearer the bulk, which now separated into two parts as the man dismounted. “How much do you want?”
“A foot or two will do.”
They were now in front of each other, although their faces were not distinguishable to either. Lanty, who had been following the lines with her hand, here came upon the end knotted around the last pole. This she began to untie.
“What a place to hang clothes,” he said curiously.
“Mighty dryin’, tho’,” returned Lanty laconically.
“And your house? Is it near by?” he continued.
“Just down the ridge–ye kin see from the edge. Got a knife?” She had untied the knot.
“No–yes–wait.” He had hesitated a moment and then produced something from his breast pocket, which he however kept in his hand. As he did not offer it to her she simply held out a section of the rope between her hands, which he divided with a single cut. She saw only that the instrument was long and keen. Then she lifted the flap of the saddle for him as he attempted to fasten the loose ring with the rope, but the darkness made it impossible. With an ejaculation, he fumbled in his pockets. “My last match!” he said, striking it, as he crouched over it to protect it from the wind. Lanty leaned over also, with her apron raised between it and the blast. The flame for an instant lit up the ring, the man’s dark face, mustache, and white teeth set together as he tugged at the girth, and Lanty’s brown, velvet eyes and soft, round cheek framed in the basket. Then it went out, but the ring was secured.
“Thank you,” said the man, with a short laugh, “but I thought you were a humpbacked witch in the dark there.”
“And I couldn’t make out whether you was a cow or a b’ar,” returned the young girl simply.
Here, however, he quickly mounted his horse, but in the action something slipped from his clothes, struck a stone, and bounded away into the darkness.
“My knife,” he said hurriedly. “Please hand it to me.” But although the girl dropped on her knees and searched the ground diligently, it could not be found. The man with a restrained ejaculation again dismounted, and joined in the search.
“Haven’t you got another match?” suggested Lanty.
“No–it was my last!” he said impatiently.
“Just you hol’ on here,” she said suddenly, “and I’ll run down to the kitchen and fetch you a light. I won’t be long.”
“No! no!” said the man quickly; “don’t! I couldn’t wait. I’ve been here too long now. Look here. You come in daylight and find it, and–just keep it for me, will you?” He laughed. “I’ll come for it. And now, if you’ll only help to set me on that road again, for it’s so infernal black I can’t see the mare’s ears ahead of me, I won’t bother you any more. Thank you.”
Lanty had quietly moved to his horse’s head and taken the bridle in her hand, and at once seemed to be lost in the gloom. But in a few moments he felt the muffled thud of his horse’s hoof on the thick dust of the highway, and its still hot, impalpable powder rising to his nostrils.
“Thank you,” he said again, “I’m all right now,” and in the pause that followed it seemed to Lanty that he had extended a parting hand to her in the darkness. She put up her own to meet it, but missed his, which had blundered onto her shoulder. Before she could grasp it, she felt him stooping over her, the light brush of his soft mustache on her cheek, and then the starting forward of his horse. But the retaliating box on the ear she had promptly aimed at him spent itself in the black space which seemed suddenly to have swallowed up the man, and even his light laugh.
For an instant she stood still, and then, swinging the basket indignantly from her shoulder, took up her suspended task. It was no light one in the increasing wind, and the unfastened clothes- line had precipitated a part of its burden to the ground through the loosening of the rope. But on picking up the trailing garments her hand struck an unfamiliar object. The stranger’s lost knife! She thrust it hastily into the bottom of the basket and completed her work. As she began to descend with her burden she saw that the light of the kitchen fire, seen through the windows, was augmented by a candle. Her mother was evidently awaiting her.
“Pretty time to be fetchin’ in the wash,” said Mrs. Foster querulously. “But what can you expect when folks stand gossipin’ and philanderin’ on the ridge instead o’ tendin’ to their work?”
Now Lanty knew that she had NOT been “gossipin'” nor “philanderin’,” yet as the parting salute might have been open to that imputation, and as she surmised that her mother might have overheard their voices, she briefly said, to prevent further questioning, that she had shown a stranger the road. But for her mother’s unjust accusation she would have been more communicative. As Mrs. Foster went back grumblingly into the sitting-room Lanty resolved to keep the knife at present a secret from her mother, and to that purpose removed it from the basket. But in the light of the candle she saw it for the first time plainly–and started.
For it was really a dagger! jeweled-handled and richly wrought– such as Lanty had never looked upon before. The hilt was studded with gems, and the blade, which had a cutting edge, was damascened in blue and gold. Her soft eyes reflected the brilliant setting, her lips parted breathlessly; then, as her mother’s voice arose in the other room, she thrust it back into its velvet sheath and clapped it into her pocket. Its rare beauty had confirmed her resolution of absolute secrecy. To have shown it now would have made “no end of talk.” And she was not sure but that her parents would have demanded its custody! And it was given to HER by HIM to keep. This settled the question of moral ethics. She took the first opportunity to run up to her bedroom and hide it under the mattress.
Yet the thought of it filled the rest of her evening. When her household duties were done she took up her novel again, partly from force of habit and partly as an attitude in which she could think of IT undisturbed. For what was fiction to her now? True, it possessed a certain reminiscent value. A “dagger” had appeared in several romances she had devoured, but she never had a clear idea of one before. “The Count sprang back, and, drawing from his belt a richly jeweled dagger, hissed between his teeth,” or, more to the purpose: “‘Take this,’ said Orlando, handing her the ruby-hilted poignard which had gleamed upon his thigh, ‘and should the caitiff attempt thy unguarded innocence–‘”
“Did ye hear what your father was sayin’?” Lanty started. It was her mother’s voice in the doorway, and she had been vaguely conscious of another voice pitched in the same querulous key, which, indeed, was the dominant expression of the small ranchers of that fertile neighborhood. Possibly a too complaisant and unaggressive Nature had spoiled them.
“Yes!–no!” said Lanty abstractedly, “what did he say?”
“If you wasn’t taken up with that fool book,” said Mrs. Foster, glancing at her daughter’s slightly conscious color, “ye’d know! He allowed ye’d better not leave yer filly in the far pasture nights. That gang o’ Mexican horse-thieves is out again, and raided McKinnon’s stock last night.”
This touched Lanty closely. The filly was her own property, and she was breaking it for her own riding. But her distrust of her parents’ interference was greater than any fear of horse-stealers. “She’s mighty uneasy in the barn; and,” she added, with a proud consciousness of that beautiful yet carnal weapon upstairs, “I reckon I ken protect her and myself agin any Mexican horse- thieves.”
“My! but we’re gettin’ high and mighty,” responded Mrs. Foster, with deep irony. “Did you git all that outer your fool book?”
“Mebbe,” said Lanty curtly.
Nevertheless, her thoughts that night were not entirely based on written romance. She wondered if the stranger knew that she had really tried to box his ears in the darkness, also if he had been able to see her face. HIS she remembered, at least the flash of his white teeth against his dark face and darker mustache, which was quite as soft as her own hair. But if he thought “for a minnit” that she was “goin’ to allow an entire stranger to kiss her–he was mighty mistaken.” She should let him know it “pretty quick”! She should hand him back the dagger “quite careless like,” and never let on that she’d thought anything of it. Perhaps that was the reason why, before she went to bed, she took a good look at it, and after taking off her straight, beltless, calico gown she even tried the effect of it, thrust in the stiff waistband of her petticoat, with the jeweled hilt displayed, and thought it looked charming–as indeed it did. And then, having said her prayers like a good girl, and supplicated that she should be less “tetchy” with her parents, she went to sleep and dreamed that she had gone out to take in the wash again, but that the clothes had all changed to the queerest lot of folks, who were all fighting and struggling with each other until she, Lanty, drawing her dagger, rushed up single- handed among them, crying, “Disperse, ye craven curs,–disperse, I say.” And they dispersed.
Yet even Lanty was obliged to admit the next morning that all this was somewhat incongruous with the baking of “corn dodgers,” the frying of fish, the making of beds, and her other household duties, and dismissed the stranger from her mind until he should “happen along.” In her freer and more acceptable outdoor duties she even tolerated the advances of neighboring swains who made a point of passing by “Foster’s Ranch,” and who were quite aware that Atalanta Foster, alias “Lanty,” was one of the prettiest girls in the country. But Lanty’s toleration consisted in that singular performance known to herself as “giving them as good as they sent,” being a lazy traversing, qualified with scorn, of all that they advanced. How long they would have put up with this from a plain girl I do not know, but Lanty’s short upper lip seemed framed for indolent and fascinating scorn, and her dreamy eyes usually looked beyond the questioner, or blunted his bolder glances in their velvety surfaces. The libretto of these scenes was not exhaustive, e.g.:–
The Swain (with bold, bad gayety). “Saw that shy schoolmaster hangin’ round your ridge yesterday! Orter know by this time that shyness with a gal don’t pay.”
Lanty (decisively). “Mebbe he allows it don’t get left as often as impudence.”
The Swain (ignoring the reply and his previous attitude and becoming more direct). “I was calkilatin’ to say that with these yer hoss-thieves about, yer filly ain’t safe in the pasture. I took a turn round there two or three times last evening to see if she was all right.”
Lanty (with a flattering show of interest). “No! DID ye, now? I was jest wonderin”‘–
The Swain (eagerly). “I did–quite late, too! Why, that’s nothin’, Miss Atalanty, to what I’d do for you.”
Lanty (musing, with far off-eyes). “Then that’s why she was so awful skeerd and frightened! Just jumpin’ outer her skin with horror. I reckoned it was a b’ar or panther or a spook! You ought to have waited till she got accustomed to your looks.”
Nevertheless, despite this elegant raillery, Lanty was enough concerned in the safety of her horse to visit it the next day with a view of bringing it nearer home. She had just stepped into the alder fringe of a dry “run” when she came suddenly upon the figure of a horseman in the “run,” who had been hidden by the alders from the plain beyond and who seemed to be engaged in examining the hoof marks in the dust of the old ford. Something about his figure struck her recollection, and as he looked up quickly she saw it was the owner of the dagger. But he appeared to be lighter of hair and complexion, and was dressed differently, and more like a vaquero. Yet there was the same flash of his teeth as he recognized her, and she knew it was the same man.
Alas for her preparation! Without the knife she could not make that haughty return of it which she had contemplated. And more than that, she was conscious she was blushing! Nevertheless she managed to level her pretty brown eyebrows at him, and said sharply that if he followed her to her home she would return his property at once.
“But I’m in no hurry for it,” he said with a laugh,–the same light laugh and pleasant voice she remembered,–“and I’d rather not come to the house just now. The knife is in good hands, I know, and I’ll call for it when I want it! And until then–if it’s all the same to you–keep it to yourself,–keep it dark, as dark as the night I lost it!”
“I don’t go about blabbing my affairs,” said Lanty indignantly, “and if it hadn’t BEEN dark that night you’d have had your ears boxed–you know why!”
The stranger laughed again, waved his hand to Lanty, and galloped away.
Lanty was a little disappointed. The daylight had taken away some of her illusions. He was certainly very good-looking, but not quite as picturesque, mysterious, and thrilling as in the dark! And it was very queer–he certainly did look darker that night! Who was he? And why was he lingering near her? He was different from her neighbors–her admirers. He might be one of those locaters, from the big towns, who prospect the lands, with a view of settling government warrants on them,–they were always so secret until they had found what they wanted. She did not dare to seek information of her friends, for the same reason that she had concealed his existence from her mother,–it would provoke awkward questions; and it was evident that he was trusting to her secrecy, too. The thought thrilled her with a new pride, and was some compensation for the loss of her more intangible romance. It would be mighty fine, when he did call openly for his beautiful knife and declared himself, to have them all know that SHE knew about it all along.
When she reached home, to guard against another such surprise she determined to keep the weapon with her, and, distrusting her pocket, confided it to the cheap little country-made corset which only for the last year had confined her budding figure, and which now, perhaps, heaved with an additional pride. She was quite abstracted during the rest of the day, and paid but little attention to the gossip of the farm lads, who were full of a daring raid, two nights before, by the Mexican gang on the large stock farm of a neighbor. The Vigilant Committee had been baffled; it was even alleged that some of the smaller ranchmen and herders were in league with the gang. It was also believed to be a widespread conspiracy; to have a political complexion in its combination of an alien race with Southwestern filibusters. The legal authorities had been reinforced by special detectives from San Francisco. Lanty seldom troubled herself with these matters; she knew the exaggeration, she suspected the ignorance of her rural neighbors. She roughly referred it, in her own vocabulary, to “jaw,” a peculiarly masculine quality. But later in the evening, when the domestic circle in the sitting-room had been augmented by a neighbor, and Lanty had taken refuge behind her novel as an excuse for silence, Zob Hopper, the enamored swain of the previous evening, burst in with more astounding news. A posse of the sheriff had just passed along the ridge; they had “corraled” part of the gang, and rescued some of the stock. The leader of the gang had escaped, but his capture was inevitable, as the roads were stopped. “All the same, I’m glad to see ye took my advice, Miss Atalanty, and brought in your filly,” he concluded, with an insinuating glance at the young girl.
But “Miss Atalanty,” curling a quarter of an inch of scarlet lip above the edge of her novel, here “allowed” that if his advice or the filly had to be “took,” she didn’t know which was worse.
“I wonder ye kin talk to sech peartness, Mr. Hopper,” said Mrs. Foster severely; “she ain’t got eyes nor senses for anythin’ but that book.”
“Talkin’ o’ what’s to be ‘took,'” put in the diplomatic neighbor, “you bet it ain’t that Mexican leader! No, sir! he’s been ‘stopped’ before this–and then got clean away all the same! One o’ them detectives got him once and disarmed him–but he managed to give them the slip, after all. Why, he’s that full o’ shifts and disguises thar ain’t no spottin’ him. He walked right under the constable’s nose oncet, and took a drink with the sheriff that was arter him–and the blamed fool never knew it. He kin change even the color of his hair quick as winkin’.”
“Is he a real Mexican,–a regular Greaser?” asked the paternal Foster. “Cos I never heard that they wuz smart.”
“No! They say he comes o’ old Spanish stock, a bad egg they threw outer the nest, I reckon,” put in Hopper eagerly, seeing a strange animated interest dilating Lanty’s eyes, and hoping to share in it; “but he’s reg’lar high-toned, you bet! Why, I knew a man who seed him in his own camp–prinked out in a velvet jacket and silk sash, with gold chains and buttons down his wide pants and a dagger stuck in his sash, with a handle just blazin’ with jew’ls. Yes! Miss Atalanty, they say that one stone at the top–a green stone, what they call an ’em’ral’–was worth the price o’ a ‘Frisco house-lot. True ez you live! Eh–what’s up now?”
Lanty’s book had fallen on the floor as she was rising to her feet with a white face, still more strange and distorted in an affected yawn behind her little hand. “Yer makin’ me that sick and nervous with yer fool yarns,” she said hysterically, “that I’m goin’ to get a little fresh air. It’s just stifling here with lies and terbacker!” With another high laugh, she brushed past him into the kitchen, opened the door, and then paused, and, turning, ran rapidly up to her bedroom. Here she locked herself in, tore open the bosom of her dress, plucked out the dagger, threw it on the bed, where the green stone gleamed for an instant in the candlelight, and then dropped on her knees beside the bed with her whirling head buried in her cold red hands.
It had all come to her in a flash, like a blaze of lightning,–the black, haunting figure on the ridge, the broken saddle girth, the abandonment of the dagger in the exigencies of flight and concealment; the second meeting, the skulking in the dry, alder- hidden “run,” the changed dress, the lighter-colored hair, but always the same voice and laugh–the leader, the fugitive, the Mexican horse-thief! And she, the Godforsaken fool, the chuckle- headed nigger baby, with not half the sense of her own filly or that sop-headed Hopper–had never seen it! She–SHE who would be the laughing-stock of them all–she had thought him a “locater,” a “towny” from ‘Frisco! And she had consented to keep his knife until he would call for it,–yes, call for it, with fire and flame perhaps, the trampling of hoofs, pistol shots–and–yet–
Yet!–he had TRUSTED her. Yes! trusted her when he knew a word from her lips would have brought the whole district down on him! when the mere exposure of that dagger would have identified and damned him! Trusted her a second time, when she was within cry of her house! When he might have taken her filly without her knowing it? And now she remembered vaguely that the neighbors had said how strange it was that her father’s stock had not suffered as theirs had. HE had protected them–he who was now a fugitive–and their men pursuing him! She rose suddenly with a single stamp of her narrow foot, and as suddenly became cool and sane. And then, quite her old self again, she lazily picked up the dagger and restored it to its place in her bosom. That done, with her color back and her eyes a little brighter, she deliberately went downstairs again, stuck her little brown head into the sitting-room, said cheerfully, “Still yawpin’, you folks,” and quietly passed out into the darkness.
She ran swiftly up to the ridge, impelled by the blind memory of having met him there at night and the one vague thought to give him warning. But it was dark and empty, with no sound but the rushing wind. And then an idea seized her. If he were haunting the vicinity still, he might see the fluttering of the clothes upon the line and believe she was there. She stooped quickly, and in the merciful and exonerating darkness stripped off her only white petticoat and pinned it on the line. It flapped, fluttered, and streamed in the mountain wind. She lingered and listened. But there came a sound she had not counted on,–the clattering hoofs of not ONE, but many, horses on the lower road! She ran back to the house to find its inmates already hastening towards the road for news. She took that chance to slip in quietly, go to her room, whose window commanded a view of the ridge, and crouching low behind it she listened. She could hear the sound of voices, and the dull trampling of heavy boots on the dusty path towards the barnyard on the other side of the house–a pause, and then the return of the trampling boots, and the final clattering of hoofs on the road again. Then there was a tap on her door and her mother’s querulous voice.
“Oh! yer there, are ye? Well–it’s the best place fer a girl–with all these man’s doin’s goin’ on! They’ve got that Mexican horse- thief and have tied him up in your filly’s stall in the barn–till the ‘Frisco deputy gets back from rounding up the others. So ye jest stay where ye are till they’ve come and gone, and we’re shut o’ all that cattle. Are ye mindin’?”
“All right, maw; ‘taint no call o’ mine, anyhow,” returned Lanty, through the half-open door.
At another time her mother might have been startled at her passive obedience. Still more would she have been startled had she seen her daughter’s face now, behind the closed door–with her little mouth set over her clenched teeth. And yet it was her own child, and Lanty was her mother’s real daughter; the same pioneer blood filled their veins, the blood that had never nourished cravens or degenerates, but had given itself to sprinkle and fertilize desert solitudes where man might follow. Small wonder, then, that this frontier-born Lanty, whose first infant cry had been answered by the yelp of wolf and scream of panther; whose father’s rifle had been leveled across her cradle to cover the stealthy Indian who prowled outside, small wonder that she should feel herself equal to these “man’s doin’s,” and prompt to take a part. For even in the first shock of the news of the capture she recalled the fact that the barn was old and rotten, that only that day the filly had kicked a board loose from behind her stall, which she, Lanty, had lightly returned to avoid “making a fuss.” If his captors had not noticed it, or trusted only to their guards, she might make the opening wide enough to free him!
Two hours later the guard nearest the now sleeping house, a farm hand of the Fosters’, saw his employer’s daughter slip out and cautiously approach him. A devoted slave of Lanty’s, and familiar with her impulses, he guessed her curiosity, and was not averse to satisfy it and the sense of his own importance. To her whispers of affected, half-terrified interest, he responded in whispers that the captive was really in the filly’s stall, securely bound by his wrists behind his back, and his feet “hobbled” to a post. That Lanty couldn’t see him, for it was dark inside, and he was sitting with his back to the wall, as he couldn’t sleep comf’ble lyin’ down. Lanty’s eyes glowed, but her face was turned aside.
“And ye ain’t reckonin’ his friends will come and rescue him?” said Lanty, gazing with affected fearfulness in the darkness.
“Not much! There’s two other guards down in the corral, and I’d fire my gun and bring ’em up.”
But Lanty was gazing open-mouthed towards the ridge. “What’s that wavin’ on the ridge?” she said in awe-stricken tones.
She was pointing to the petticoat,–a vague, distant, moving object against the horizon.
“Why, that’s some o’ the wash on the line, ain’t it?”
“Wash–TWO DAYS IN THE WEEK!” said Lanty sharply. “Wot’s gone of you?”
“Thet’s so,” muttered the man, “and it wan’t there at sundown, I’ll swear! P’r’aps I’d better call the guard,” and he raised his rifle.
“Don’t,” said Lanty, catching his arm. “Suppose it’s nothin’, they’ll laugh at ye. Creep up softly and see; ye ain’t afraid, are ye? If ye are, give me yer gun, and I’LL go.”
This settled the question, as Lanty expected. The man cocked his piece, and bending low began cautiously to mount the acclivity. Lanty waited until his figure began to fade, and then ran like fire to the barn.
She had arranged every detail of her plan beforehand. Crouching beside the wall of the stall she hissed through a crack in thrilling whispers, “Don’t move. Don’t speak for your life’s sake. Wait till I hand you back your knife, then do the best you can.” Then slipping aside the loosened board she saw dimly the black outline of curling hair, back, shoulders, and tied wrists of the captive. Drawing the knife from her pocket, with two strokes of its keen cutting edge she severed the cords, threw the knife into the opening, and darted away. Yet in that moment she knew that the man was instinctively turning towards her. But it was one thing to free a horse-thief, and another to stop and “philander” with him.
She ran halfway up the ridge, and met the farm hand returning. It was only a bit of washing after all, and he was glad he hadn’t fired his gun. On the other hand, Lanty confessed she had got “so skeert” being alone, that she came to seek him. She had the shivers; wasn’t her hand cold? It was, but thrilling even in its coldness to the bashfully admiring man. And she was that weak and dizzy, he must let her lean on his arm going down; and they must go SLOW. She was sure he was cold, too, and if he would wait at the back door she would give him a drink of whiskey. Thus Lanty, with her brain afire, her eyes and ears straining into the darkness, and the vague outline of the barn beyond. Another moment was protracted over the drink of whiskey, and then Lanty, with a faint archness, made him promise not to tell her mother of her escapade, and she promised on her part not to say anything about his “stalking a petticoat on the clothesline,” and then shyly closed the door and regained her room. HE must have got away by this time, or have been discovered; she believed they would not open the barn door until the return of the posse.
She was right. It was near daybreak when they returned, and, again crouching low beside her window, she heard, with a fierce joy, the sudden outcry, the oaths, the wrangling voices, the summoning of her father to the front door, and then the tumultuous sweeping away again of the whole posse, and a blessed silence falling over the rancho. And then Lanty went quietly to bed, and slept like a three-year child!
Perhaps that was the reason why she was able at breakfast to listen with lazy and even rosy indifference to the startling events of the night; to the sneers of the farm hands at the posse who had overlooked the knife when they searched their prisoner, as well as the stupidity of the corral guard who had never heard him make a hole “the size of a house” in the barn side! Once she glanced demurely at Silas Briggs–the farm hand and the poor fellow felt consoled in his shame at the remembrance of their confidences.
But Lanty’s tranquillity was not destined to last long. There was again the irruption of exciting news from the highroad; the Mexican leader had been recaptured, and was now safely lodged in Brownsville jail! Those who were previously loud in their praises of the successful horse-thief who had baffled the vigilance of his pursuers were now equally keen in their admiration of the new San Francisco deputy who, in turn, had outwitted the whole gang. It was HE who was fertile in expedients; HE who had studied the whole country, and even risked his life among the gang, and HE who had again closed the meshes of the net around the escaped outlaw. He was already returning by way of the rancho, and might stop there a moment,–so that they could all see the hero. Such was the power of success on the country-side! Outwardly indifferent, inwardly bitter, Lanty turned away. She should not grace his triumph, if she kept in her room all day! And when there was a clatter of hoofs on the road again, Lanty slipped upstairs.
But in a few moments she was summoned. Captain Lance Wetherby, Assistant Chief of Police of San Francisco, Deputy Sheriff and ex- U. S. scout, had requested to see Miss Foster a few moments alone. Lanty knew what it meant,–her secret had been discovered; but she was not the girl to shirk the responsibility! She lifted her little brown head proudly, and with the same resolute step with which she had left the house the night before, descended the stairs and entered the sitting-room. At first she saw nothing. Then a remembered voice struck her ear; she started, looked up, and gasping, fell back against the door. It was the stranger who had given her the dagger, the stranger she had met in the run!–the horse-thief himself! No! no! she saw it all now–she had cut loose the wrong man!
He looked at her with a smile of sadness–as he drew from his breast-pocket that dreadful dagger, the very sight of which Lanty now loathed! “This is the SECOND time, Miss Foster,” he said gently, “that I have taken this knife from Murietta, the Mexican bandit: once when I disarmed him three weeks ago, and he escaped, and last night, when he had again escaped and I recaptured him. After I lost it that night I understood from you that you had found it and were keeping it for me.” He paused a moment and went on: “I don’t ask you what happened last night. I don’t condemn you for it; I can believe what a girl of your courage and sympathy might rightly do if her pity were excited; I only ask–why did you give HIM back that knife I trusted you with?”
“Why? Why did I?” burst out Lanty in a daring gush of truth, scorn, and temper. “BECAUSE I THOUGHT YOU WERE THAT HORSE-THIEF. There!”
He drew back astonished, and then suddenly came that laugh that Lanty remembered and now hailed with joy. “I believe you, by Jove!” he gasped. “That first night I wore the disguise in which I have tracked him and mingled with his gang. Yes! I see it all now– and more. I see that to YOU I owe his recapture!”
“To me!” echoed the bewildered girl; “how?”
“Why, instead of making for his cave he lingered here in the confines of the ranch! He thought you were in love with him, because you freed him and gave him his knife, and stayed to see you!”
But Lanty had her apron to her eyes, whose first tears were filling their velvet depths. And her voice was broken as she said,–
“Then he–cared–a–good deal more for me–than some people!”
But there is every reason to believe that Lanty was wrong! At least later events that are part of the history of Foster’s Rancho and the Foster family pointed distinctly to the contrary.
AN ALI BABA OF THE SIERRAS
Johnny Starleigh found himself again late for school. It was always happening. It seemed to be inevitable with the process of going to school at all. And it was no fault “o’ his.” Something was always occurring,–some eccentricity of Nature or circumstance was invariably starting up in his daily path to the schoolroom. He may not have been “thinkin’ of squirrels,” and yet the rarest and most evasive of that species were always crossing his trail; he may not have been “huntin’ honey,” and yet a wild bees’ nest in the hollow of an oak absolutely obtruded itself before him; he wasn’t “bird-catchin’,” and yet there was a yellow-hammer always within stone’s throw. He had heard how grown men hunters always saw the most wonderful animals when they “hadn’t got a gun with ’em,” and it seemed to be his lot to meet them in his restricted possibilities on the way to school. If Nature was thus capricious with his elders, why should folk think it strange if she was as mischievous with a small boy?
On this particular morning Johnny had been beguiled by the unmistakable footprints–so like his own!–of a bear’s cub. What chances he had of ever coming up with them, or what he would have done if he had, he did not know. He only knew that at the end of an hour and a half he found himself two miles from the schoolhouse, and, from the position of the sun, at least an hour too late for school. He knew that nobody would believe him. The punishment for complete truancy was little worse than for being late. He resolved to accept it, and by way of irrevocability at once burnt his ships behind him–in devouring part of his dinner.
Thus fortified in his outlawry, he began to look about him. He was on a thickly wooded terrace with a blank wall of “outcrop” on one side nearly as high as the pines which pressed close against it. He had never seen it before; it was two or three miles from the highroad and seemed to be a virgin wilderness. But on close examination he could see, with the eye of a boy bred in a mining district, that the wall of outcrop had not escaped the attention of the mining prospector. There were marks of his pick in some attractive quartz seams of the wall, and farther on, a more ambitious attempt, evidently by a party of miners, to begin a tunnel, shown in an abandoned excavation and the heap of debris before it. It had evidently been abandoned for some time, as ferns already forced their green fronds through the stones and gravel, and the yerba buena vine was beginning to mat the surface of the heap. But the boy’s fancy was quickly taken by the traces of a singular accident, and one which had perhaps arrested the progress of the excavators. The roots of a large pine-tree growing close to the wall had been evidently loosened by the excavators, and the tree had fallen, with one of its largest roots still in the opening the miners had made, and apparently blocking the entrance. The large tree lay, as it fell–midway across another but much smaller outcrop of rock which stood sharply about fifteen feet above the level of the terrace–with its gaunt, dead limbs in the air at a low angle. To Johnny’s boyish fancy it seemed so easily balanced on the rock that but for its imprisoned root it would have made a capital see-saw. This he felt must be looked to hereafter. But here his attention was arrested by something more alarming. His quick ear, attuned like an animal’s to all woodland sounds, detected the crackling of underwood in the distance. His equally sharp eye saw the figures of two men approaching. But as he recognized the features of one of them he drew back with a beating heart, a hushed breath, and hurriedly hid himself in the shadow. For he had seen that figure once before–flying before the sheriff and an armed posse–and had never forgotten it! It was the figure of Spanish Pete, a notorious desperado and sluice robber!
Finding he had been unobserved, the boy took courage, and his small faculties became actively alive. The two men came on together cautiously, and at a little distance the second man, whom Johnny did not know, parted from his companion and began to loiter up and down, looking around as if acting as a sentinel for the desperado, who advanced directly to the fallen tree. Suddenly the sentinel uttered an exclamation, and Spanish Pete paused. The sentinel was examining the ground near the heap of debris.
“What’s up?” growled the desperado.
“Foot tracks! Weren’t here before. And fresh ones, too.”
Johnny’s heart sank. It was where he had just passed.
Spanish Pete hurriedly joined his companion.
“Foot tracks be —-!” he said scornfully. “What fool would be crawlin’ round here barefooted? It’s a young b’ar!”
Johnny knew the footprints were his own. Yet he recognized the truth of the resemblance; it was uncomplimentary, but he felt relieved. The desperado came forward, and to the boy’s surprise began to climb the small ridge of outcrop until he reached the fallen tree. Johnny saw that he was carrying a heavy stone. “What’s the blamed fool goin’ to do?” he said to himself; the man’s evident ignorance regarding footprints had lessened the boy’s awe of him. But the stranger’s next essay took Johnny’s breath away. Standing on the fallen tree trunk at its axis on the outcrop, he began to rock it gently. To Johnny’s surprise it began to move. The upper end descended slowly, lifting the root in the excavation at the lower end, and with it a mass of rock, and revealing a cavern behind large enough to admit a man. Johnny gasped. The desperado coolly deposited the heavy stone on the tree beyond its axis on the rock, so that it would keep the tree in position, leaped from the tree to the rock, and quickly descended, at which he was joined by the other man, who was carrying two heavy chamois- leather bags. They both proceeded to the opening thus miraculously disclosed, and disappeared in it.
Johnny sat breathless, wondering, expectant, but not daring to move. The men might come out at any moment; he had seen enough to know that their enterprise as well as their cave was a secret, and that the desperado would subject any witness to it, however innocent or unwilling, to horrible penalties. The time crept slowly by,–he heard every rap of a woodpecker in a distant tree; a blue jay dipped and lighted on a branch within his reach, but he dared not extend his hand; his legs were infested by ants; he even fancied he heard the dry, hollow rattle of a rattlesnake not a yard from him. And then the entrance of the cave was darkened, and the two men reappeared. Johnny stared. He would have rubbed his eyes if he had dared. They were not the same men! Did the cave contain others who had been all the while shut up in its dark recesses? Was there a band? Would they all swarm out upon him? Should he run for his life?
But the illusion was only momentary. A longer look at them convinced him that they were the same men in new clothes and disguised, and as one remounted the outcrop Johnny’s keen eyes recognized him as Spanish Pete. He merely kicked away the stone; the root again descended gently over the opening, and the tree recovered its former angle. The two hurried away, but Johnny noticed that they were empty-handed. The bags had been left behind.
The boy waited patiently, listening with his ear to the ground, like an Indian, for the last rustle of fern and crackle of underbrush, and then emerged, stiff and cramped from his concealment. But he no longer thought of flight; curiosity and ambition burned in his small veins. He quickly climbed up the outcrop, picked up the fallen stone, and in spite of its weight lifted it to the prostrate tree. Here he paused, and from his coign of vantage looked and listened. The solitude was profound. Then mounting the tree and standing over its axis he tried to rock it as the others had. Alas! Johnny’s heart was stout, his courage unlimited, his perception all-embracing, his ambition boundless; but his actual avoirdupois was only that of a boy of ten. The tree did not move. But Johnny had played see-saw before, and quietly moved towards its highest part. It slowly descended under the changed centre of gravity, and the root arose, disclosing the opening as before. Yet here the little hero paused. He waited with his eyes fixed on the opening, ready to fly on the sallying out of any one who had remained concealed. He then placed the stone where he had stood, leaped down, and ran to the opening.
The change from the dazzling sunlight to the darkness confused him at first, and he could see nothing. On entering he stumbled over something which proved to be a bottle in which a candle was fitted, and a box of matches evidently used by the two men. Lighting the candle he could now discern that the cavern was only a few yards long, the beginning of a tunnel which the accident to the tree had stopped. In one corner lay the clothes that the men had left, and which for a moment seemed all that the cavern contained, but on removing them Johnny saw that they were thrown over a rifle, a revolver, and the two chamois-leather bags that the men had brought there. They were so heavy that the boy could scarcely lift them. His face flushed; his hands trembled with excitement. To a boy whose truant wanderings had given him a fair knowledge of mining, he knew that weight could have but one meaning! Gold! He hurriedly untied the nearest bag. But it was not the gold of the locality, of the tunnel, of the “bed rock”! It was “flake gold,” the gold of the river! It had been taken from the miners’ sluices in the distant streams. The bags before him were the spoils of the sluice robber,–spoils that could not be sold or even shown in the district without danger, spoils kept until they could be taken to Marysville or Sacramento for disposal. All this might have occurred to the mind of any boy of the locality who had heard the common gossip of his elders, but to Johnny’s fancy an idea was kindled peculiarly his own! Here was a cavern like that of the “Forty Thieves” in the story book, and he was the “Ali Baba” who knew its secret! He was not obliged to say “Open Sesame,” but he could say it if he liked, if he was showing it off to anybody!
Yet alas he also knew it was a secret he must keep to himself. He had nobody to trust it to. His father was a charcoal-burner of small means; a widower with two children, Johnny and his elder brother Sam. The latter, a flagrant incorrigible of twenty-two, with a tendency to dissipation and low company, had lately abandoned his father’s roof, only to reappear at intervals of hilarious or maudlin intoxication. He had always been held up to Johnny as a warning, or with the gloomy prognosis that he, Johnny, was already following in his tortuous footsteps. Even if he were here he was not to be thought of as a confidant. Still less could he trust his father, who would be sure to bungle the secret with sheriffs and constables, and end by bringing down the vengeance of the gang upon the family. As for himself, he could not dispose of the gold if he were to take it. The exhibition of a single flake of it to the adult public would arouse suspicion, and as it was Johnny’s hard fate to be always doubted, he might be connected with the gang. As a truant he knew he had no moral standing, but he also had the superstition–quite characteristic of childhood–that being in possession of a secret he was a participant in its criminality–and bound, as it were, by terrible oaths! And then a new idea seized him. He carefully put back everything as he had found it, extinguished the candle, left the cave, remounted the tree, and closed the opening again as he had seen the others do it, with the addition of murmuring “Shut Sesame” to himself, and then ran away as fast as his short legs could carry him.
Well clear of the dangerous vicinity, he proceeded more leisurely for about a mile, until he came to a low whitewashed fence, inclosing a small cultivated patch and a neat farmhouse beyond. Here he paused, and, cowering behind the fence, with extraordinary facial contortions produced a cry not unlike the scream of a blue jay. Repeating it at intervals, he was presently relieved by observing the approach of a nankeen sunbonnet within the inclosure above the line of fence. Stopping before him, the sun-bonnet revealed a rosy little face, more than usually plump on one side, and a neck enormously wrapped in a scarf. It was “Meely” (Amelia) Stryker, a schoolmate, detained at home by “mumps,” as Johnny was previously aware. For, with the famous indiscretion of some other great heroes, he was about to intrust his secret and his destiny to one of the weaker sex. And what were the minor possibilities of contagion to this?
“Playin’ hookey ag’in?” said the young lady, with a cordial and even expansive smile, exclusively confined to one side of her face.
“Um! So’d you be ef you’d bin whar I hev,” he said with harrowing mystery.
“No!–say!” said Meely eagerly.
At which Johnny, clutching at the top of the fence, with hurried breath told his story. But not all. With the instinct of a true artist he withheld the manner in which the opening of the cave was revealed, said nothing about the tree, and, I grieve to say, added the words “Open Sesame” as the important factor to the operation. Neither did he mention the name of Spanish Pete. For all of which he was afterwards duly grateful.
“Meet me at the burnt pine down the crossroads at four o’clock,” he said in conclusion, “and I’ll show ye.”
“Why not now?” said Meely impatiently.
“Couldn’t. Much as my life is worth! Must keep watching out! You come at four.”
And with an assuring nod he released the fence and trotted off. He returned cautiously in the direction of the cave; he was by no means sure that the robbers might not return that day, and his mysterious rendezvous with Meely veiled a certain prudence. And it was well! For as he stealthily crept around the face of the outcrop, hidden in the ferns, he saw from the altered angle of the tree that the cavern was opened. He remained motionless, with bated breath. Then he heard the sound of subdued voices from the cavern, and a figure emerged from the opening. Johnny grasped the ferns rigidly to check the dreadful cry that rose to his lips at its sight. For that figure was his own brother!
There was no mistaking that weak, wicked face, even then flushed with liquor! Johnny had seen it too often thus. But never before as a thief’s face! He gave a little gasp, and fell back upon that strange reserve of apathy and reticence in which children are apt to hide their emotions from us at such a moment. He watched impassively the two other men who followed his brother out to give him a small bag and some instructions, and then returned within their cave, while his brother walked quickly away. He watched him disappear; he did not move, for even if he had followed him he could not bear to face him in his shame. And then out of his sullen despair came a boyish idea of revenge. It was those two men who had made his brother a thief!
He was very near the tree. He crept stealthily on his hands and knees through the bracken, and as stealthily climbed the wedge of outcrop, and then leaped like a wild cat on the tree. With incredible activity he lifted the balancing stone, and as the tree began to move, in a flash of perception transferred it to the other side of its axis, and felt the roots and debris, under that additional weight, descend quickly with something like a crash over the opening. Then he took to his heels. He ran so swiftly that all unknowingly he overtook a figure, who, turning, glanced at him, and then disappeared in the wood. It was his second and last view of his brother, as he never saw him again!
But now, strange to say, the crucial and most despairing moment of his day’s experience had come. He had to face Meely Stryker under the burnt pine, and the promise he could not keep, and to tell her that he had lied to her. It was the only way to save his brother now! His small wits, and alas! his smaller methods, were equal to the despairing task. As soon as he saw her waiting under the tree he fell to capering and dancing with an extravagance in which hysteria had no small part. “Sold! sold! sold again, and got the money!” he laughed shrilly.
The girl looked at him with astonishment, which changed gradually to scorn, and then to anger. Johnny’s heart sank, but he redoubled his antics.
“Who’s sold?” she said disdainfully.
“You be. You swallered all that stuff about Ali Baba! You wanted to be Morgy Anna! Ho! ho! And I’ve made you play hookey–from home!”
“You hateful, horrid, little liar!”
Johnny accepted his punishment meekly–in his heart gratefully. “I reckoned you’d laugh and not get mad,” he said submissively. The girl turned, with tears of rage and vexation in her eyes, and walked away. Johnny followed at a humble distance. Perhaps there was something instinctively touching in the boy’s remorse, for they made it up before they reached her fence.
Nevertheless Johnny went home miserable. Luckily for him, his father was absent at a Vigilance Committee called to take cognizance of the late sluice robberies, and although this temporarily concealed his offense of truancy, the news of the vigilance meeting determined him to keep his lips sealed. He lay all night wondering how long it would take the robbers to dig themselves out of the cave, and whether they suspected their imprisonment was the work of an enemy or only an accident. For several days he avoided the locality, and even feared the vengeful appearance of Spanish Pete some night at his father’s house. It was not until the end of a fortnight that he had the courage to revisit the spot. The tree was in its normal position, but immovable, and a great quantity of fresh debris at the mouth of the cave convinced him that the robbers, after escaping, had abandoned it as unsafe. His brother did not return, and either the activity of the Vigilance Committee or the lack of a new place of rendezvous seemed to have dispersed the robbers from the locality, for they were not heard of again.
The next ten years brought an improvement to Mr. Starleigh’s fortunes. Johnny Starleigh, then a student at San Jose, one morning found a newspaper clipping in a letter from Miss Amelia Stryker. It read as follows: “The excavators in the new tunnel in Heavystone Ridge lately discovered the skeletons of two unknown men, who had evidently been crushed and entombed some years previously, by the falling of a large tree over the mouth of their temporary refuge. From some river gold found with them, they were supposed to be part of the gang of sluice robbers who infested the locality some years ago, and were hiding from the Vigilants.”
For a few days thereafter Johnny Starleigh was thoughtful and reserved, but he did not refer to the paragraph in answering the letter. He decided to keep it for later confidences, when Miss Stryker should become Mrs. Starleigh.
MISS PEGGY’S PROTEGES
The string of Peggy’s sunbonnet had become untied–so had her right shoe. These were not unusual accidents to a country girl of ten, but as both of her hands were full she felt obliged to put down what she was carrying. This was further complicated by the nature of her burden–a half-fledged shrike and a baby gopher–picked up in her walk. It was impossible to wrap them both in her apron without serious peril to one or the other; she could not put either down without the chance of its escaping. “It’s like that dreadful riddle of the ferryman who had to take the wolf and the sheep in his boat,” said Peggy to herself, “though I don’t believe anybody was ever so silly as to want to take a wolf across the river.” But, looking up, she beheld the approach of Sam Bedell, a six-foot tunnelman of the “Blue Cement Lead,” and, hailing him, begged him to hold one of her captives. The giant, loathing the little mouse- like ball of fur, chose the shrike. “Hold him by the feet, for he bites AWFUL,” said Peggy, as the bird regarded Sam with the diabolically intense frown of his species. Then, dropping the gopher unconcernedly in her pocket, she proceeded to rearrange her toilet. The tunnelman waited patiently until Peggy had secured the nankeen sunbonnet around her fresh but freckled cheeks, and, with a reckless display of yellow flannel petticoat and stockings like peppermint sticks, had double-knotted her shoestrings viciously when he ventured to speak.
“Same old game, Peggy? Thought you’d got rather discouraged with your ‘happy family,’ arter that new owl o’ yours had gathered ’em in.”
Peggy’s cheek flushed slightly at this ungracious allusion to a former collection of hers, which had totally disappeared one evening after the introduction of a new member in the shape of a singularly venerable and peaceful-looking horned owl.
“I could have tamed HIM, too,” said Peggy indignantly, “if Ned Myers, who gave him to me, hadn’t been training him to ketch things, and never let on anything about it to me. He was a reg’lar game owl!”
“And wot are ye goin’ to do with the Colonel here?” said Sam, indicating under that gallant title the infant shrike, who, with his claws deeply imbedded in Sam’s finger, was squatting like a malignant hunchback, and resisting his transfer to Peggy. “Won’t HE make it rather lively for the others? He looks pow’ful discontented for one so young.”
“That’s his nater,” said Peggy promptly. “Jess wait till I tame him. Ef he’d been left along o’ his folks, he’d grow up like ’em. He’s a ‘butcher bird’–wot they call a ‘nine-killer ‘–kills nine birds a day! Yes! True ez you live! Sticks ’em up on thorns outside his nest, jest like a butcher’s shop, till he gets hungry. I’ve seen ’em!”
“And how do you kalkilate to tame him?” asked Sam.
“By being good to him and lovin’ him,” said Peggy, stroking the head of the bird with infinite gentleness.
“That means YOU’VE got to do all the butchering for him?” said the cynical Sam.
Peggy shook her head, disdaining a verbal reply.
“Ye can’t bring him up on sugar and crackers, like a Polly,” persisted Sam.
“Ye ken do anythin’ with critters, if you ain’t afeerd of ’em and love ’em,” said Peggy shyly.
The tall tunnelman, looking down into the depths of Peggy’s sunbonnet, saw something in the round blue eyes and grave little mouth that made him think so too. But here Peggy’s serious little face took a shade of darker concern as her arm went down deeper into her pocket, and her eyes got rounder.
“It’s–it’s–BURRERED OUT!” she said breathlessly.
The giant leaped briskly to one side. “Hol’ on,” said Peggy abstractedly. With infinite gravity she followed, with her fingers, a seam of her skirt down to the hem, popped them quickly under it, and produced, with a sigh of relief, the missing gopher.
“You’ll do,” said Sam, in fearful admiration. “Mebbe you’ll make suthin’ out o’ the Colonel too. But I never took stock in that there owl. He was too durned self-righteous for a decent bird. Now, run along afore anythin’ else fetches loose ag’in. So long!”
He patted the top of her sunbonnet, gave a little pull to the short brown braid that hung behind her temptingly,–which no miner was ever known to resist,–and watched her flutter off with her spoils. He had done so many times before, for the great, foolish heart of the Blue Cement Ridge had gone out to Peggy Baker, the little daughter of the blacksmith, quite early. There were others of the family, notably two elder sisters, invincible at picnics and dances, but Peggy was as necessary to these men as the blue jay that swung before them in the dim woods, the squirrel that whisked across their morning path, or the woodpecker who beat his tattoo at their midday meal from the hollow pine above them. She was part of the nature that kept them young. Her truancies and vagrancies concerned them not: she was a law to herself, like the birds and squirrels. There were bearded lips to hail her wherever she went, and a blue or red-shirted arm always stretched out in any perilous pass or dangerous crossing.
Her peculiar tastes were an outcome of her nature, assisted by her surroundings. Left a good deal to herself in her infancy, she made playfellows of animated nature around her, without much reference to selection or fitness, but always with a fearlessness that was the result of her own observation, and unhampered by tradition or other children’s timidity. She had no superstition regarding the venom of toads, the poison of spiders, or the ear-penetrating capacity of earwigs. She had experiences and revelations of her own,–which she kept sacredly to herself, as children do,–and one was in regard to a rattlesnake, partly induced, however, by the indiscreet warning of her elders. She was cautioned NOT to take her bread and milk into the woods, and was told the affecting story of the little girl who was once regularly visited by a snake that partook of HER bread and milk, and who was ultimately found rapping the head of the snake for gorging more than his share, and not “taking a ‘poon as me do.” It is needless to say that this incautious caution fired Peggy’s adventurous spirit. SHE took a bowlful of milk to the haunt of a “rattler” near her home, but, without making the pretense of sharing it, generously left the whole to the reptile. After repeating this hospitality for three or four days, she was amazed one morning on returning to the house to find the snake–an elderly one with a dozen rattles–devotedly following her. Alarmed, not for her own safety nor that of her family, but for the existence of her grateful friend in danger of the blacksmith’s hammer, she took a circuitous route leading it away. Then recalling a bit of woodland lore once communicated to her by a charcoal-burner, she broke a spray of the white ash, and laid it before her in the track of the rattlesnake. He stopped instantly, and remained motionless without crossing the slight barrier. She repeated this experiment on later occasions, until the reptile understood her. She kept the experience to herself, but one day it was witnessed by a tunnelman. On that day Peggy’s reputation was made!
From this time henceforth the major part of Blue Cement Ridge became serious collectors for what was known as “Peggy’s menagerie,” and two of the tunnelmen constructed a stockaded inclosure–not half a mile from the blacksmith’s cabin, but unknown to him–for the reception of specimens. For a long time its existence was kept a secret between Peggy and her loyal friends. Her parents, aware of her eccentric tastes only through the introduction of such smaller creatures as lizards, toads, and tarantulas into their house,–which usually escaped from their tin cans and boxes and sought refuge in the family slippers,–had frowned upon her zoological studies. Her mother found that her woodland rambles entailed an extraordinary wear and tear of her clothing. A pinafore reduced to ribbons by a young fox, and a straw hat half swallowed by a mountain kid, did not seem to be a natural incident to an ordinary walk to the schoolhouse. Her sisters thought her tastes “low,” and her familiar association with the miners inconsistent with their own dignity. But Peggy went regularly to school, was a fair scholar in elementary studies (what