presence they had, without in the least suspecting the actual truth, become doubtful if the fugitive had proceeded so far. He might at that moment be snugly ensconced behind some low wire-grass ridge, watching their own clearly defined figures, and waiting only for the night to evade them. The Beasley house seemed a proper place of operation in beating up the field. Ira’s cold reception of the suggestion was duly disposed of by the deputy. “I have the RIGHT, ye know,” he said, with a grim pleasantry, “to summon ye as my posse to aid and assist me in carrying out the law; but I ain’t the man to be rough on my friends, and I reckon it will do jest as well if I ‘requisition’ your house.” The dreadful recollection that the deputy had the power to detail him and the constable to scour the plain while he remained behind in company with Sue stopped Ira’s further objections. Yet, if he could only get rid of her while the deputy was in the house,–but then his nearest neighbor was five miles away! There was nothing left for him to do but to return with the men and watch his wife keenly. Strange to say, there was a certain stimulus in this which stirred his monotonous pulses and was not without a vague pleasure. There is a revelation to some natures in newly awakened jealousy that is a reincarnation of love.
As they came into the house a slight circumstance, which an hour ago would have scarcely touched his sluggish sensibilities, now appeared to corroborate his fear. His wife had changed her cuffs and collar, taken off her rough apron, and evidently redressed her hair. This, with the enhanced brightness of her eyes, which he had before noticed, convinced him that it was due to the visit of the deputy. There was no doubt that the official was equally attracted and fascinated by her prettiness, and although her acceptance of his return was certainly not a cordial one, there was a kind of demure restraint and over-consciousness in her manner that might be coquetry. Ira had vaguely observed this quality in other young women, but had never experienced it in his brief courtship. There had been no rivalry, no sexual diplomacy nor insincerity in his capture of the motherless girl who had leaped from the tail-board of her father’s wagon almost into his arms, and no man had since come between them. The idea that Sue should care for any other than himself had been simply inconceivable to his placid, matter- of-fact nature. That their sacrament was final he had never doubted. If his two cows, bought with his own money or reared by him, should suddenly have developed an inclination to give milk to a neighbor, he would not have been more astonished. But THEY could have been brought back with a rope, and without a heart throb.
Passion of this kind, which in a less sincere society restricts its expression to innuendo or forced politeness, left the rustic Ira only dumb and lethargic. He moved slowly and abstractedly around the room, accenting his slight lameness more than ever, or dropped helplessly into a chair, where he sat, inanely conscious of the contiguity of his wife and the deputy, and stupidly expectant of– he knew not what. The atmosphere of the little house seemed to him charged with some unwholesome electricity. It kindled his wife’s eyes, stimulating the deputy and his follower to coarse playfulness, enthralled his own limbs to the convulsive tightening of his fingers around the rungs of his chair. Yet he managed to cling to his idea of keeping his wife occupied, and of preventing any eyeshot between her and her guests, or the indulgence of dangerously flippant conversation, by ordering her to bring some refreshment. “What’s gone o’ the whiskey bottle?” he said, after fumbling in the cupboard.
Mrs. Beasley did not blench. She only gave her head a slight toss. “Ef you men can’t get along with the coffee and flapjacks I’m going to give ye, made with my own hands, ye kin just toddle right along to the first bar, and order your tangle-foot there. Ef it’s a barkeeper you’re looking for, and not a lady, say so!”
The novel audacity of this speech, and the fact that it suggested that preoccupation he hoped for, relieved Ira for a moment, while it enchanted the guests as a stroke of coquettish fascination. Mrs. Beasley triumphantly disappeared in the kitchen, slipped off her cuffs and set to work, and in a few moments emerged with a tray bearing the cakes and steaming coffee. As neither she nor her husband ate anything (possibly owing to an equal preoccupation) the guests were obliged to confine their attentions to the repast before them. The sun, too, was already nearing the horizon, and although its nearly level beams acted like a powerful search-light over the stretching plain, twilight would soon put an end to the quest. Yet they lingered. Ira now foresaw a new difficulty: the cows were to be brought up and fodder taken from the barn; to do this he would be obliged to leave his wife and the deputy together. I do not know if Mrs. Beasley divined his perplexity, but she carelessly offered to perform that evening function herself. Ira’s heart leaped and sank again as the deputy gallantly proposed to assist her. But here rustic simplicity seemed to be equal to the occasion. “Ef I propose to do Ira’s work,” said Mrs. Beasley, with provocative archness, “it’s because I reckon he’ll do more good helpin’ you catch your man than you’ll do helpin’ ME! So clear out, both of ye!” A feminine audacity that recalled the deputy to himself, and left him no choice but to accept Ira’s aid. I do not know whether Mrs. Beasley felt a pang of conscience as her husband arose gratefully and limped after the deputy; I only know that she stood looking at them from the door, smiling and triumphant.
Then she slipped out of the back door again, and ran swiftly to the barn, fastening on her clean cuffs and collar as she ran. The fugitive was anxiously awaiting her, with a slight touch of brusqueness in his eagerness.
“Thought you were never coming!” he said.
She breathlessly explained, and showed him through the half-opened door the figures of the three men slowly spreading and diverging over the plain, like the nearly level sun-rays they were following. The sunlight fell also on her panting bosom, her electrified sandy hair, her red, half-opened mouth, and short and freckled upper lip. The relieved fugitive turned from the three remoter figures to the one beside him, and saw, for the first time, that it was fair. At which he smiled, and her face flushed and was irradiated.
Then they fell to talk,–he grateful, boastful,–as the distant figures grew dim; she quickly assenting, but following his expression rather than his words, with her own girlish face and brightening eyes. But what he said, or how he explained his position, with what speciousness he dwelt upon himself, his wrongs, and his manifold manly virtues, is not necessary for us to know, nor was it, indeed, for her to understand. Enough for her that she felt she had found the one man of all the world, and that she was at that moment protecting him against all the world! He was the unexpected, spontaneous gift to her, the companion her childhood had never known, the lover she had never dreamed of, even the child of her unsatisfied maternal yearnings. If she could not comprehend all his selfish incoherences, she felt it was her own fault; if she could not follow his ignorant assumptions, she knew it was SHE who was deficient; if she could not translate his coarse speech, it was because it was the language of a larger world from which she had been excluded. To this world belonged the beautiful limbs she gazed on,–a very different world from that which had produced the rheumatic deformities and useless mayhem of her husband, or the provincially foppish garments of the deputy. Sitting in the hayloft together, where she had mounted for greater security, they forgot themselves in his monologue of cheap vaporing, broken only by her assenting smiles and her half-checked sighs. The sharp spices of the heated pine-shingles over their heads and the fragrance of the clover-scented hay filled the close air around them. The sun was falling with the wind, but they heeded it not; until the usual fateful premonition struck the woman, and saying “I must go now,” she only half-unconsciously precipitated the end. For, as she rose, he caught first her hand and then her waist, and attempted to raise the face that was suddenly bending down as if seeking to hide itself in the hay. It was a brief struggle, ending in a submission as sudden, and their lips met in a kiss, so eager that it might have been impending for days instead of minutes.
“Oh, Sue! where are ye?”
It was her husband’s voice, out of a darkness that they only then realized. The man threw her aside with a roughness that momentarily shocked her above any sense of surprise or shame: SHE would have confronted her husband in his arms,–glorified and translated,–had he but kept her there. Yet she answered, with a quiet, level voice that astonished her lover, “Here! I’m just coming down!” and walked coolly to the ladder. Looking over, and seeing her husband with the deputy standing in the barnyard, she quickly returned, put her finger to her lips, made a gesture for her companion to conceal himself in the hay again, and was turning away, when, perhaps shamed by her superior calmness, he grasped her hand tightly and whispered, “Come again tonight, dear; do!” She hesitated, raised her hand suddenly to her lips, and then quickly disengaging it, slipped down the ladder.
“Ye haven’t done much work yet as I kin see,” said Ira wearily. “Whitey and Red Tip [the cows] are hangin’ over the corral, just waitin’.”
“The yellow hen we reckoned was lost is sittin’ in the hayloft, and mustn’t be disturbed,” said Mrs. Beasley, with decision; “and ye’ll have to take the hay from the stack to-night. And,” with an arch glance at the deputy, “as I don’t see that you two have done much either, you’re just in time to help fodder down.”
Setting the three men to work with the same bright audacity, the task was soon completed–particularly as the deputy found no opportunity for exclusive dalliance with Mrs. Beasley. She shut the barn door herself, and led the way to the house, learning incidentally that the deputy had abandoned the chase, was to occupy a “shake-down” on the kitchen-floor that night with the constable, and depart at daybreak. The gloom of her husband’s face had settled into a look of heavy resignation and alternate glances of watchfulness, which only seemed to inspire her with renewed vivacity. But the cooking of supper withdrew her disturbing presence for a time from the room, and gave him some relief. When the meal was ready he sought further surcease from trouble in copious draughts of whiskey, which she produced from a new bottle, and even pressed upon the deputy in mischievous contrition for her previous inhospitality.
“Now I know that it wasn’t whiskey only ye came for, I’ll show you that Sue Beasley is no slouch of a barkeeper either,” she said.
Then, rolling her sleeves above her pretty arms, she mixed a cocktail in such delightful imitation of the fashionable barkeeper’s dexterity that her guests were convulsed with admiration. Even Ira was struck with this revelation of a youthfulness that five years of household care had checked, but never yet subdued. He had forgotten that he had married a child. Only once, when she glanced at the cheap clock on the mantel, had he noticed another change, more remarkable still from its very inconsistency with her burst of youthful spirits. It was another face that he saw,–older and matured with an intensity of abstraction that struck a chill to his heart. It was not HIS Sue that was standing there, but another Sue, wrought, as it seemed to his morbid extravagance, by some one else’s hand.
Yet there was another interval of relief when his wife, declaring she was tired, and even jocosely confessing to some effect of the liquor she had pretended to taste, went early to bed. The deputy, not finding the gloomy company of the husband to his taste, presently ensconced himself on the floor, before the kitchen fire, in the blankets that she had provided. The constable followed his example. In a few moments the house was silent and sleeping, save for Ira sitting alone, with his head sunk on his chest and his hands gripping the arms of his chair before the dying embers of his hearth.
He was trying, with the alternate quickness and inaction of an inexperienced intellect and an imagination morbidly awakened, to grasp the situation before him. The common sense that had hitherto governed his life told him that the deputy would go to-morrow, and that there was nothing in his wife’s conduct to show that her coquetry and aberration would not pass as easily. But it recurred to him that she had never shown this coquetry or aberration to HIM during their own brief courtship,–that she had never looked or acted like this before. If this was love, she had never known it; if it was only “women’s ways,” as he had heard men say, and so dangerously attractive, why had she not shown it to him? He remembered that matter-of-fact wedding, the bride without timidity, without blushes, without expectation beyond the transference of her home to his. Would it have been different with another man?–with the deputy, who had called this color and animation to her face? What did it all mean? Were all married people like this? There were the Westons, their neighbors,–was Mrs. Weston like Sue? But he remembered that Mrs. Weston had run away with Mr. Weston from her father’s house. It was what they called “a love match.” Would Sue have run away with him? Would she now run away with–?
The candle was guttering as he rose with a fierce start–his first impulse of anger–from the table. He took another gulp of whiskey. It tasted like water; its fire was quenched in the greater heat of his blood. He would go to bed. Here a new and indefinable timidity took possession of him; he remembered the strange look in his wife’s face. It seemed suddenly as if the influence of the sleeping stranger in the next room had not only isolated her from him, but would make his presence in her bedroom an intrusion on their hidden secrets. He had to pass the open door of the kitchen. The head of the unconscious deputy was close to Ira’s heavy boot. He had only to lift his heel to crush that ruddy, good-looking, complacent face. He hurried past him, up the creaking stairs. His wife lay still on one side of the bed, apparently asleep, her face half-hidden in her loosened, fluffy hair. It was well; for in the vague shyness and restraint that was beginning to take possession of him he felt he could not have spoken to her, or, if he had, it would have been only to voice the horrible, unformulated things that seemed to choke him. He crept softly to the opposite side of the bed, and began to undress. As he pulled off his boots and stockings, his eye fell upon his bare, malformed feet. This caused him to look at his maimed hand, to rise, drag himself across the floor to the mirror, and gaze upon his lacerated ear. She, this prettily formed woman lying there, must have seen it often; she must have known all these years that he was not like other men,– not like the deputy, with his tight riding-boots, his soft hand, and the diamond that sparkled vulgarly on his fat little finger. A cold sweat broke over him. He drew on his stockings again, lifted the outer counterpane, and, half undressed, crept under it, wrapping its corner around his maimed hand, as if to hide it from the light. Yet he felt that he saw things dimly; there was a moisture on his cheeks and eyelids he could not account for; it must be the whiskey “coming out.”
His wife lay very still; she scarcely seemed to breathe. What if she should never breathe again, but die as the old Sue he knew, the lanky girl he had married, unchanged and uncontaminated? It would be better than this. Yet at the same moment the picture was before him of her pretty simulation of the barkeeper, of her white bared arms and laughing eyes, all so new, so fresh to him! He tried to listen to the slow ticking of the clock, the occasional stirring of air through the house, and the movement, like a deep sigh, which was the regular, inarticulate speech of the lonely plain beyond, and quite distinct from the evening breeze. He had heard it often, but, like so many things he had learned that day, he never seemed to have caught its meaning before. Then, perhaps, it was his supine position, perhaps some cumulative effect of the whiskey he had taken, but all this presently became confused and whirling. Out of its gyrations he tried to grasp something, to hear voices that called him to “wake,” and in the midst of it he fell into a profound sleep.
The clock ticked, the wind sighed, the woman at his side lay motionless for many minutes.
Then the deputy on the kitchen floor rolled over with an appalling snort, struggled, stretched himself, and awoke. A healthy animal, he had shaken off the fumes of liquor with a dry tongue and a thirst for water and fresh air. He raised his knees and rubbed his eyes. The water bucket was missing from the corner. Well, he knew where the spring was, and a turn out of the close and stifling kitchen would do him good. He yawned, put on his boots softly, opened the back door, and stepped out. Everything was dark, but above and around him, to the very level of his feet, all apparently pricked with bright stars. The bulk of the barn rose dimly before him on the right, to the left was the spring. He reached it, drank, dipped his head and hands in it, and arose refreshed. The dry, wholesome breath that blew over this flat disk around him, rimmed with stars, did the rest. He began to saunter slowly back, the only reminiscence of his evening’s potations being the figure he recalled of his pretty hostess, with bare arms and lifted glasses, imitating the barkeeper. A complacent smile straightened his yellow mustache. How she kept glancing at him and watching him, the little witch! Ha! no wonder! What could she find in the surly, slinking, stupid brute yonder? (The gentleman here alluded to was his host.) But the deputy had not been without a certain provincial success with the fair. He was true to most men, and fearless to all. One may not be too hard upon him at this moment of his life.
For as he was passing the house he stopped suddenly. Above the dry, dusty, herbal odors of the plain, above the scent of the new- mown hay within the barn, there was distinctly another fragrance,– the smell of a pipe. But where? Was it his host who had risen to take the outer air? Then it suddenly flashed upon him that Beasley did NOT smoke, nor the constable either. The smell seemed to come from the barn. Had he followed out the train of ideas thus awakened, all might have been well; but at this moment his attention was arrested by a far more exciting incident to him,–the draped and hooded figure of Mrs. Beasley was just emerging from the house. He halted instantly in the shadow, and held his breath as she glided quickly across the intervening space and disappeared in the half-opened door of the barn. Did she know he was there? A keen thrill passed over him; his mouth broadened into a breathless smile. It was his last! for, as he glided forward to the door, the starry heavens broke into a thousand brilliant fragments around him, the earth gave way beneath his feet, and he fell forward with half his skull shot away.
Where he fell there he lay without an outcry, with only one movement,–the curved and grasping fingers of the fighter’s hand towards his guarded hip. Where he fell there he lay dead, his face downwards, his good right arm still curved around across his back. Nothing of him moved but his blood,–broadening slowly round him in vivid color, and then sluggishly thickening and darkening until it stopped too, and sank into the earth, a dull brown stain. For an instant the stillness of death followed the echoless report, then there was a quick and feverish rustling within the barn, the hurried opening of a window in the loft, scurrying footsteps, another interval of silence, and then out of the farther darkness the sounds of horse-hoofs in the muffled dust of the road. But not a sound or movement in the sleeping house beyond.
The stars at last paled slowly, the horizon lines came back,–a thin streak of opal fire. A solitary bird twittered in the bush beside the spring. Then the back door of the house opened, and the constable came forth, half-awakened and apologetic, and with the bewildered haste of a belated man. His eyes were level, looking for his missing leader as he went on, until at last he stumbled and fell over the now cold and rigid body. He scrambled to his feet again, cast a hurried glance around him,–at the half-opened door of the barn, at the floor littered with trampled hay. In one corner lay the ragged blouse and trousers of the fugitive, which the constable instantly recognized. He went back to the house, and reappeared in a few moments with Ira, white, stupefied, and hopelessly bewildered; clear only in his statement that his wife had just fainted at the news of the catastrophe, and was equally helpless in her own room. The constable–a man of narrow ideas but quick action–saw it all. The mystery was plain without further evidence. The deputy had been awakened by the prowling of the fugitive around the house in search of a horse. Sallying out, they had met, and Ira’s gun, which stood in the kitchen, and which the deputy had seized, had been wrested from him and used with fatal effect at arm’s length, and the now double assassin had escaped on the sheriff’s horse, which was missing. Turning the body over to the trembling Ira, he saddled his horse and galloped to Lowville for assistance.
These facts were fully established at the hurried inquest which met that day. There was no need to go behind the evidence of the constable, the only companion of the murdered man and first discoverer of the body. The fact that he, on the ground floor, had slept through the struggle and the report, made the obliviousness of the couple in the room above a rational sequence. The dazed Ira was set aside, after half a dozen contemptuous questions; the chivalry of a Californian jury excused the attendance of a frightened and hysterical woman confined to her room. By noon they had departed with the body, and the long afternoon shadows settled over the lonely plain and silent house. At nightfall Ira appeared at the door, and stood for some moments scanning the plain; he was seen later by two packers, who had glanced furtively at the scene of the late tragedy, sitting outside his doorway, a mere shadow in the darkness; and a mounted patrol later in the night saw a light in the bedroom window where the invalid Mrs. Beasley was confined. But no one saw her afterwards. Later, Ira explained that she had gone to visit a relative until her health was restored. Having few friends and fewer neighbors, she was not missed; and even the constable, the sole surviving guest who had enjoyed her brief eminence of archness and beauty that fatal night, had quite forgotten her in his vengeful quest of the murderer. So that people became accustomed to see this lonely man working in the fields by day, or at nightfall gazing fixedly from his doorway. At the end of three months he was known as the recluse or “hermit” of Bolinas Plain; in the rapid history-making of that epoch it was forgotten that he had ever been anything else.
But Justice, which in those days was apt to nod over the affairs of the average citizen, was keenly awake to offenses against its own officers; and it chanced that the constable, one day walking through the streets of Marysville, recognized the murderer and apprehended him. He was removed to Lowville. Here, probably through some modest doubt of the ability of the County Court, which the constable represented, to deal with purely circumstantial evidence, he was not above dropping a hint to the local Vigilance Committee, who, singularly enough, in spite of his resistance, got possession of the prisoner. It was the rainy season, and business was slack; the citizens of Lowville were thus enabled to give so notorious a case their fullest consideration, and to assist cheerfully at the ultimate hanging of the prisoner, which seemed to be a foregone conclusion.
But herein they were mistaken. For when the constable had given his evidence, already known to the county, there was a disturbance in the fringe of humanity that lined the walls of the assembly room where the committee was sitting, and the hermit of Bolinas Plain limped painfully into the room. He had evidently walked there: he was soaked with rain and plastered with mud; he was exhausted and inarticulate. But as he staggered to the witness-bench, and elbowed the constable aside, he arrested the attention of every one. A few laughed, but were promptly silenced by the court. It was a reflection upon its only virtue,–sincerity.
“Do you know the prisoner?” asked the judge.
Ira Beasley glanced at the pale face of the acrobat, and shook his head.
“Never saw him before,” he said faintly.
“Then what are you doing here?” demanded the judge sternly.
Ira collected himself with evident effort, and rose to his halting feet. First he moistened his dry lips, then he said, slowly and distinctly, “Because I killed the deputy of Bolinas.”
With the thrill which ran through the crowded room, and the relief that seemed to come upon him with that utterance, he gained strength and even a certain dignity.
“I killed him,” he went on, turning his head slowly around the circle of eager auditors with the rigidity of a wax figure, “because he made love to my wife. I killed him because he wanted to run away with her. I killed him because I found him waiting for her at the door of the barn at the dead o’ night, when she’d got outer bed to jine him. He hadn’t no gun. He hadn’t no fight. I killed him in his tracks. That man,” pointing to the prisoner, “wasn’t in it at all.” He stopped, loosened his collar, and, baring his rugged throat below his disfigured ear, said: “Now take me out and hang me!”
“What proof have we of this? Where’s your wife? Does she corroborate it?”
A slight tremor ran over him.
“She ran away that night, and never came back again. Perhaps,” he added slowly, “because she loved him and couldn’t bear me; perhaps, as I’ve sometimes allowed to myself, gentlemen, it was because she didn’t want to bear evidence agin me.”
In the silence that followed the prisoner was heard speaking to one that was near him. Then he rose. All the audacity and confidence that the husband had lacked were in HIS voice. Nay, there was even a certain chivalry in his manner which, for the moment, the rascal really believed.
“It’s true!” he said. “After I stole the horse to get away, I found that woman running wild down the road, cryin’ and sobbin’. At first I thought she’d done the shooting. It was a risky thing for me to do, gentlemen; but I took her up on the horse and got her away to Lowville. It was that much dead weight agin my chances, but I took it. She was a woman and–I ain’t a dog!”
He was so exalted and sublimated by his fiction that for the first time the jury was impressed in his favor. And when Ira Beasley limped across the room, and, extending his maimed hand to the prisoner, said, “Shake!” there was another dead silence.
It was broken by the voice of the judge addressing the constable.
“What do you know of the deputy’s attentions to Mrs. Beasley? Were they enough to justify the husband’s jealousy? Did he make love to her?”
The constable hesitated. He was a narrow man, with a crude sense of the principles rather than the methods of justice. He remembered the deputy’s admiration; he now remembered, even more strongly, the object of that admiration, simulating with her pretty arms the gestures of the barkeeper, and the delight it gave them. He was loyal to his dead leader, but he looked up and down, and then said, slowly and half-defiantly: “Well, judge, he was a MAN.”
Everybody laughed. That the strongest and most magic of all human passions should always awake levity in any public presentment of or allusion to it was one of the inconsistencies of human nature which even a lynch judge had to admit. He made no attempt to control the tittering of the court, for he felt that the element of tragedy was no longer there. The foreman of the jury arose and whispered to the judge amid another silence. Then the judge spoke:–
“The prisoner and his witness are both discharged. The prisoner to leave the town within twenty-four hours; the witness to be conducted to his own house at the expense of, and with the thanks of, the Committee.”
They say that one afternoon, when a low mist of rain had settled over the sodden Bolinas Plain, a haggard, bedraggled, and worn-out woman stepped down from a common “freighting wagon” before the doorway where Beasley still sat; that, coming forward, he caught her in his arms and called her “Sue;” and they say that they lived happily together ever afterwards. But they say–and this requires some corroboration–that much of that happiness was due to Mrs. Beasley’s keeping forever in her husband’s mind her own heroic sacrifice in disappearing as a witness against him, her own forgiveness of his fruitless crime, and the gratitude he owed to the fugitive.
THE STRANGE EXPERIENCE OF ALKALI DICK
He was a “cowboy.” A reckless and dashing rider, yet mindful of his horse’s needs; good-humored by nature, but quick in quarrel; independent of circumstance, yet shy and sensitive of opinion; abstemious by education and general habit, yet intemperate in amusement; self-centred, yet possessed of a childish vanity,–taken altogether, a characteristic product of the Western plains, which he never should have left.
But reckless adventure after adventure had brought him into difficulties, from which there was only one equally adventurous escape: he joined a company of Indians engaged by Buffalo Bill to simulate before civilized communities the sports and customs of the uncivilized. In divers Christian arenas of the nineteenth century he rode as a northern barbarian of the first might have disported before the Roman populace, but harmlessly, of his own free will, and of some little profit to himself. He threw his lasso under the curious eyes of languid men and women of the world, eager for some new sensation, with admiring plaudits from them and a half contemptuous egotism of his own. But outside of the arena he was lonely, lost, and impatient for excitement.
An ingenious attempt to “paint the town red” did not commend itself as a spectacle to the householders who lived in the vicinity of Earl’s Court, London, and Alkali Dick was haled before a respectable magistrate by a serious policeman, and fined as if he had been only a drunken coster. A later attempt at Paris to “incarnadine” the neighborhood of the Champs de Mars, and “round up” a number of boulevardiers, met with a more disastrous result,– the gleam of steel from mounted gendarmes, and a mandate to his employers.
So it came that one night, after the conclusion of the performance, Alkali Dick rode out of the corral gate of the Hippodrome with his last week’s salary in his pocket and an imprecation on his lips. He had shaken the sawdust of the sham arena from his high, tight- fitting boots; he would shake off the white dust of France, and the effeminate soil of all Europe also, and embark at once for his own country and the Far West!
A more practical and experienced man would have sold his horse at the nearest market and taken train to Havre, but Alkali Dick felt himself incomplete on terra firma without his mustang,–it would be hard enough to part from it on embarking,–and he had determined to ride to the seaport.
The spectacle of a lithe horseman, clad in a Rembrandt sombrero, velvet jacket, turnover collar, almost Van Dyke in its proportions, white trousers and high boots, with long curling hair falling over his shoulders, and a pointed beard and mustache, was a picturesque one, but still not a novelty to the late-supping Parisians who looked up under the midnight gas as he passed, and only recognized one of those men whom Paris had agreed to designate as “Booflo- bils,” going home.
At three o’clock he pulled up at a wayside cabaret, preferring it to the publicity of a larger hotel, and lay there till morning. The slight consternation of the cabaret-keeper and his wife over this long-haired phantom, with glittering, deep-set eyes, was soothed by a royally-flung gold coin, and a few words of French slang picked up in the arena, which, with the name of Havre, comprised Dick’s whole knowledge of the language. But he was touched with their ready and intelligent comprehension of his needs, and their genial if not so comprehensive loquacity. Luckily for his quick temper, he did not know that they had taken him for a traveling quack-doctor going to the Fair of Yvetot, and that madame had been on the point of asking him for a magic balsam to prevent migraine.
He was up betimes and away, giving a wide berth to the larger towns; taking byways and cut-offs, yet always with the Western pathfinder’s instinct, even among these alien, poplar-haunted plains, low-banked willow-fringed rivers, and cloverless meadows. The white sun shining everywhere,–on dazzling arbors, summer-houses, and trellises; on light green vines and delicate pea-rows; on the white trousers, jackets, and shoes of smart shopkeepers or holiday makers; on the white headdresses of nurses and the white-winged caps of the Sisters of St. Vincent,–all this grew monotonous to this native of still more monotonous wastes. The long, black shadows of short, blue-skirted, sabotted women and short, blue-bloused, sabotted men slowly working in the fields, with slow oxen, or still slower heavy Norman horses; the same horses gayly bedecked, dragging slowly not only heavy wagons, but their own apparently more monstrous weight over the white road, fretted his nervous Western energy, and made him impatient to get on.
At the close of the second day he found some relief on entering a trackless wood,–not the usual formal avenue of equidistant trees, leading to nowhere, and stopping upon the open field,–but apparently a genuine forest as wild as one of his own “oak bottoms.” Gnarled roots and twisted branches flung themselves across his path; his mustang’s hoofs sank in deep pits of moss and last year’s withered leaves; trailing vines caught his heavy- stirruped feet, or brushed his broad sombrero; the vista before him seemed only to endlessly repeat the same sylvan glade; he was in fancy once more in the primeval Western forest, and encompassed by its vast, dim silences. He did not know that he had in fact only penetrated an ancient park which in former days resounded to the winding fanfare of the chase, and was still, on stated occasions, swept over by accurately green-coated Parisians and green-plumed Dianes, who had come down by train! To him it meant only unfettered and unlimited freedom.
He rose in his stirrups, and sent a characteristic yell ringing down the dim aisles before him. But, alas! at the same moment, his mustang, accustomed to the firmer grip of the prairie, in lashing out, stepped upon a slimy root, and fell heavily, rolling over his clinging and still unlodged rider. For a few moments both lay still. Then Dick extricated himself with an oath, rose giddily, dragged up his horse,–who, after the fashion of his race, was meekly succumbing to his reclining position,–and then became aware that the unfortunate beast was badly sprained in the shoulder, and temporarily lame. The sudden recollection that he was some miles from the road, and that the sun was sinking, concentrated his scattered faculties. The prospect of sleeping out in that summer woodland was nothing to the pioneer-bred Dick; he could make his horse and himself comfortable anywhere–but he was delaying his arrival at Havre. He must regain the high road,–or some wayside inn. He glanced around him; the westering sun was a guide for his general direction; the road must follow it north or south; he would find a “clearing” somewhere. But here Dick was mistaken; there seemed no interruption of, no encroachment upon this sylvan tract, as in his western woods. There was no track or trail to be found; he missed even the ordinary woodland signs that denoted the path of animals to water. For the park, from the time a Northern Duke had first alienated it from the virgin forest, had been rigidly preserved.
Suddenly, rising apparently from the ground before him, he saw the high roof-ridges and tourelles of a long, irregular, gloomy building. A few steps further showed him that it lay in a cup-like depression of the forest, and that it was still a long descent from where he had wandered to where it stood in the gathering darkness. His mustang was moving with great difficulty; he uncoiled his lariat from the saddle-horn, and, selecting the most open space, tied one end to the trunk of a large tree,–the forty feet of horsehair rope giving the animal a sufficient degree of grazing freedom.
Then he strode more quickly down the forest side towards the building, which now revealed its austere proportions, though Dick could see that they were mitigated by a strange, formal flower- garden, with quaint statues and fountains. There were grim black allees of clipped trees, a curiously wrought iron gate, and twisted iron espaliers. On one side the edifice was supported by a great stone terrace, which seemed to him as broad as a Parisian boulevard. Yet everywhere it appeared sleeping in the desertion and silence of the summer twilight. The evening breeze swayed the lace curtains at the tall windows, but nothing else moved. To the unsophisticated Western man it looked like a scene on the stage.
His progress was, however, presently checked by the first sight of preservation he had met in the forest,–a thick hedge, which interfered between him and a sloping lawn beyond. It was up to his waist, yet he began to break his way through it, when suddenly he was arrested by the sound of voices. Before him, on the lawn, a man and woman, evidently servants, were slowly advancing, peering into the shadows of the wood which he had just left. He could not understand what they were saying, but he was about to speak and indicate by signs his desire to find the road when the woman, turning towards her companion, caught sight of his face and shoulders above the hedge. To his surprise and consternation, he saw the color drop out of her fresh cheeks, her round eyes fix in their sockets, and with a despairing shriek she turned and fled towards the house. The man turned at his companion’s cry, gave the same horrified glance at Dick’s face, uttered a hoarse “Sacre!” crossed himself violently, and fled also.
Amazed, indignant, and for the first time in his life humiliated, Dick gazed speechlessly after them. The man, of course, was a sneaking coward; but the woman was rather pretty. It had not been Dick’s experience to have women run from him! Should he follow them, knock the silly fellow’s head against a tree, and demand an explanation? Alas, he knew not the language! They had already reached the house and disappeared in one of the offices. Well! let them go–for a mean “lowdown” pair of country bumpkins:–HE wanted no favors from them!
He turned back angrily into the forest to seek his unlucky beast. The gurgle of water fell on his ear; hard by was a spring, where at least he could water the mustang. He stooped to examine it; there was yet light enough in the sunset sky to throw back from that little mirror the reflection of his thin, oval face, his long, curling hair, and his pointed beard and mustache. Yes! this was his face,–the face that many women in Paris had agreed was romantic and picturesque. Had those wretched greenhorns never seen a real man before? Were they idiots, or insane? A sudden recollection of the silence and seclusion of the building suggested certainly an asylum,–but where were the keepers?
It was getting darker in the wood; he made haste to recover his horse, to drag it to the spring, and there bathe its shoulder in the water mixed with whiskey taken from his flask. His saddle-bag contained enough bread and meat for his own supper; he would camp for the night where he was, and with the first light of dawn make his way back through the wood whence he came. As the light slowly faded from the wood he rolled himself in his saddle-blanket and lay down.
But not to sleep. His strange position, the accident to his horse, an unusual irritation over the incident of the frightened servants,–trivial as it might have been to any other man,–and, above all, an increasing childish curiosity, kept him awake and restless. Presently he could see also that it was growing lighter beyond the edge of the wood, and that the rays of a young crescent moon, while it plunged the forest into darkness and impassable shadow, evidently was illuminating the hollow below. He threw aside his blanket, and made his way to the hedge again. He was right; he could see the quaint, formal lines of the old garden more distinctly,–the broad terrace, the queer, dark bulk of the house, with lights now gleaming from a few of its open windows.
Before one of these windows opening on the terrace was a small, white, draped table with fruits, cups, and glasses, and two or three chairs. As he gazed curiously at these new signs of life and occupation, he became aware of a regular and monotonous tap upon the stone flags of the terrace. Suddenly he saw three figures slowly turn the corner of the terrace at the further end of the building, and walk towards the table. The central figure was that of an elderly woman, yet tall and stately of carriage, walking with a stick, whose regular tap he had heard, supported on the one side by an elderly Cure in black soutaine, and on the other by a tall and slender girl in white.
They walked leisurely to the other end of the terrace, as if performing a regular exercise, and returned, stopping before the open French window; where, after remaining in conversation a few moments, the elderly lady and her ecclesiastical companion entered. The young girl sauntered slowly to the steps of the terrace, and leaning against a huge vase as she looked over the garden, seemed lost in contemplation. Her face was turned towards the wood, but in quite another direction from where he stood.
There was something so gentle, refined, and graceful in her figure, yet dominated by a girlish youthfulness of movement and gesture, that Alkali Dick was singularly interested. He had probably never seen an ingenue before; he had certainly never come in contact with a girl of that caste and seclusion in his brief Parisian experience. He was sorely tempted to leave his hedge and try to obtain a nearer view of her. There was a fringe of lilac bushes running from the garden up the slope; if he could gain their shadows, he could descend into the garden. What he should do after his arrival he had not thought; but he had one idea–he knew not why–that if he ventured to speak to her he would not be met with the abrupt rustic terror he had experienced at the hands of the servants. SHE was not of that kind! He crept through the hedge, reached the lilacs, and began the descent softly and securely in the shadow. But at the same moment she arose, called in a youthful voice towards the open window, and began to descend the steps. A half-expostulating reply came from the window, but the young girl answered it with the laughing, capricious confidence of a spoiled child, and continued her way into the garden. Here she paused a moment and hung over a rose-tree, from which she gathered a flower, afterwards thrust into her belt. Dick paused, too, half-crouching, half-leaning over a lichen-stained, cracked stone pedestal from which the statue had long been overthrown and forgotten.
To his surprise, however, the young girl, following the path to the lilacs, began leisurely to ascend the hill, swaying from side to side with a youthful movement, and swinging the long stalk of a lily at her side. In another moment he would be discovered! Dick was frightened; his confidence of the moment before had all gone; he would fly,–and yet, an exquisite and fearful joy kept him motionless. She was approaching him, full and clear in the moonlight. He could see the grace of her delicate figure in the simple white frock drawn at the waist with broad satin ribbon, and its love-knots of pale blue ribbons on her shoulders; he could see the coils of her brown hair, the pale, olive tint of her oval cheek, the delicate, swelling nostril of her straight, clear-cut nose; he could even smell the lily she carried in her little hand. Then, suddenly, she lifted her long lashes, and her large gray eyes met his.
Alas! the same look of vacant horror came into her eyes, and fixed and dilated their clear pupils. But she uttered no outcry,–there was something in her blood that checked it; something that even gave a dignity to her recoiling figure, and made Dick flush with admiration. She put her hand to her side, as if the shock of the exertion of her ascent had set her heart to beating, but she did not faint. Then her fixed look gave way to one of infinite sadness, pity, and pathetic appeal. Her lips were parted; they seemed to be moving, apparently in prayer. At last her voice came, wonderingly, timidly, tenderly: “Mon Dieu! c’est donc vous? Ici? C’est vous que Marie a crue voir! Que venez-vous faire ici, Armand de Fontonelles? Repondez!”
Alas, not a word was comprehensible to Dick; nor could he think of a word to say in reply. He made an uncouth, half-irritated, half- despairing gesture towards the wood he had quitted, as if to indicate his helpless horse, but he knew it was meaningless to the frightened yet exalted girl before him. Her little hand crept to her breast and clutched a rosary within the folds of her dress, as her soft voice again arose, low but appealingly:
“Vous souffrez! Ah, mon Dieu! Peuton vous secourir? Moi-meme– mes prieres pourraient elles interceder pour vous? Je supplierai le ciel de prendre en pitie l’ame de mon ancetre. Monsieur le Cure est la,–je lui parlerai. Lui et ma mere vous viendront en aide.”
She clasped her hands appealingly before him.
Dick stood bewildered, hopeless, mystified; he had not understood a word; he could not say a word. For an instant he had a wild idea of seizing her hand and leading her to his helpless horse, and then came what he believed was his salvation,–a sudden flash of recollection that he had seen the word he wanted, the one word that would explain all, in a placarded notice at the Cirque of a bracelet that had been LOST,–yes, the single word “PERDU.” He made a step towards her, and in a voice almost as faint as her own, stammered, “PERDU!”
With a little cry, that was more like a sigh than an outcry, the girl’s arms fell to her side; she took a step backwards, reeled, and fainted away.
Dick caught her as she fell. What had he said!–but, more than all, what should he do now? He could not leave her alone and helpless,–yet how could he justify another disconcerting intrusion? He touched her hands; they were cold and lifeless; her eyes were half closed; her face as pale and drooping as her lily. Well, he must brave the worst now, and carry her to the house, even at the risk of meeting the others and terrifying them as he had her. He caught her up,–he scarcely felt her weight against his breast and shoulder,–and ran hurriedly down the slope to the terrace, which was still deserted. If he had time to place her on some bench beside the window within their reach, he might still fly undiscovered! But as he panted up the steps of the terrace with his burden, he saw that the French window was still open, but the light seemed to have been extinguished. It would be safer for her if he could place her INSIDE the house,–if he but dared to enter. He was desperate, and he dared!
He found himself alone, in a long salon of rich but faded white and gold hangings, lit at the further end by two tall candles on either side of the high marble mantel, whose rays, however, scarcely reached the window where he had entered. He laid his burden on a high-backed sofa. In so doing, the rose fell from her belt. He picked it up, put it in his breast, and turned to go. But he was arrested by a voice from the terrace:–
“Renee!”
It was the voice of the elderly lady, who, with the Cure at her side, had just appeared from the rear of the house, and from the further end of the terrace was looking towards the garden in search of the young girl. His escape in that way was cut off. To add to his dismay, the young girl, perhaps roused by her mother’s voice, was beginning to show signs of recovering consciousness. Dick looked quickly around him. There was an open door, opposite the window, leading to a hall which, no doubt, offered some exit on the other side of the house. It was his only remaining chance! He darted through it, closed it behind him, and found himself at the end of a long hall or picture-gallery, strangely illuminated through high windows, reaching nearly to the roof, by the moon, which on that side of the building threw nearly level bars of light and shadows across the floor and the quaint portraits on the wall.
But to his delight he could see at the other end a narrow, lance- shaped open postern door showing the moonlit pavement without– evidently the door through which the mother and the Cure had just passed out. He ran rapidly towards it. As he did so he heard the hurried ringing of bells and voices in the room he had quitted–the young girl had evidently been discovered–and this would give him time. He had nearly reached the door, when he stopped suddenly– his blood chilled with awe! It was his turn to be terrified–he was standing, apparently, before HIMSELF!
His first recovering thought was that it was a mirror–so accurately was every line and detail of his face and figure reflected. But a second scrutiny showed some discrepancies of costume, and he saw it was a panelled portrait on the wall. It was of a man of his own age, height, beard, complexion, and features, with long curls like his own, falling over a lace Van Dyke collar, which, however, again simulated the appearance of his own hunting-shirt. The broad- brimmed hat in the picture, whose drooping plume was lost in shadow, was scarcely different from Dick’s sombrero. But the likeness of the face to Dick was marvelous–convincing! As he gazed at it, the wicked black eyes seemed to flash and kindle at his own,–its lip curled with Dick’s own sardonic humor!
He was recalled to himself by a step in the gallery. It was the Cure who had entered hastily, evidently in search of one of the servants. Partly because it was a man and not a woman, partly from a feeling of bravado–and partly from a strange sense, excited by the picture, that he had some claim to be there, he turned and faced the pale priest with a slight dash of impatient devilry that would have done credit to the portrait. But he was sorry for it the next moment!
The priest, looking up suddenly, discovered what seemed to him to be the portrait standing before its own frame and glaring at him. Throwing up his hands with an averted head and an “EXORCIS–!” he wheeled and scuffled away. Dick seized the opportunity, darted through the narrow door on to the rear terrace, and ran, under cover of the shadow of the house, to the steps into the garden. Luckily for him, this new and unexpected diversion occupied the inmates too much with what was going on in the house to give them time to search outside. Dick reached the lilac hedge, tore up the hill, and in a few moments threw himself, panting, on his blanket. In the single look he had cast behind, he had seen that the half- dark salon was now brilliantly lighted–where no doubt the whole terrified household was now assembled. He had no fear of being followed; since his confrontation with his own likeness in the mysterious portrait, he understood everything. The apparently supernatural character of his visitation was made plain; his ruffled vanity was soothed–his vindication was complete. He laughed to himself and rolled about, until in his suppressed merriment the rose fell from his bosom, and–he stopped! Its freshness and fragrance recalled the innocent young girl he had frightened. He remembered her gentle, pleading voice, and his cheek flushed. Well, he had done the best he could in bringing her back to the house–at the risk of being taken for a burglar–and she was safe now! If that stupid French parson didn’t know the difference between a living man and a dead and painted one, it wasn’t his fault. But he fell asleep with the rose in his fingers.
He was awake at the first streak of dawn. He again bathed his horse’s shoulder, saddled, but did not mount him, as the beast, although better, was still stiff, and Dick wished to spare him for the journey to still distant Havre, although he had determined to lie over that night at the first wayside inn. Luckily for him, the disturbance at the chateau had not extended to the forest, for Dick had to lead his horse slowly and could not have escaped; but no suspicion of external intrusion seemed to have been awakened, and the woodland was, evidently, seldom invaded.
By dint of laying his course by the sun and the exercise of a little woodcraft, in the course of two hours he heard the creaking of a hay-cart, and knew that he was near a traveled road. But to his discomfiture he presently came to a high wall, which had evidently guarded this portion of the woods from the public. Time, however, had made frequent breaches in the stones; these had been roughly filled in with a rude abatis of logs and treetops pointing towards the road. But as these were mainly designed to prevent intrusion into the park rather than egress from it, Dick had no difficulty in rolling them aside and emerging at last with his limping steed upon the white high-road. The creaking cart had passed; it was yet early for traffic, and Dick presently came upon a wine-shop, a bakery, a blacksmith’s shop, laundry, and a somewhat pretentious cafe and hotel in a broader space which marked the junction of another road.
Directly before it, however, to his consternation, were the massive, but timeworn, iron gates of a park, which Dick did not doubt was the one in which he had spent the previous night. But it was impossible to go further in his present plight, and he boldly approached the restaurant. As he was preparing to make his usual explanatory signs, to his great delight he was addressed in a quaint, broken English, mixed with forgotten American slang, by the white-trousered, black-alpaca coated proprietor. More than that– he was a Social Democrat and an enthusiastic lover of America–had he not been to “Bos-town” and New York, and penetrated as far west as “Booflo,” and had much pleasure in that beautiful and free country? Yes! it was a “go-a-‘ed” country–you “bet-your-lif’.” One had reason to say so: there was your electricity–your street cars–your “steambots”–ah! such steambots–and your “r-rail-r- roads.” Ah! observe! compare your r-rail-r-roads and the buffet of the Pullman with the line from Paris, for example–and where is one? Nowhere! Actually, positively, without doubt, nowhere!
Later, at an appetizing breakfast–at which, to Dick’s great satisfaction, the good man had permitted and congratulated himself to sit at table with a free-born American–he was even more loquacious. For what then, he would ask, was this incompetence, this imbecility, of France? He would tell. It was the vile corruption of Paris, the grasping of capital and companies, the fatal influence of the still clinging noblesse, and the insidious Jesuitical power of the priests. As for example, Monsieur “the Booflo-bil” had doubtless noticed the great gates of the park before the cafe? It was the preserve,–the hunting-park of one of the old grand seigneurs, still kept up by his descendants, the Comtes de Fontonelles–hundreds of acres that had never been tilled, and kept as wild waste wilderness,–kept for a day’s pleasure in a year! And, look you! the peasants starving around its walls in their small garden patches and pinched farms! And the present Comte de Fontonelles cascading gold on his mistresses in Paris; and the Comtesse, his mother, and her daughter living there to feed and fatten and pension a brood of plotting, black-cowled priests. Ah, bah! where was your Republican France, then? But a time would come. The “Booflo-bil” had, without doubt, noticed, as he came along the road, the breaches in the wall of the park?
Dick, with a slight dry reserve, “reckoned that he had.”
“They were made by the scythes and pitchforks of the peasants in the Revolution of ’93, when the count was emigre, as one says with reason ‘skedadelle,’ to England. Let them look the next time that they burn not the chateau,–‘bet your lif’!'”
“The chateau,” said Dick, with affected carelessness. “Wot’s the blamed thing like?”
It was an old affair,–with armor and a picture-gallery,–and bricabrac. He had never seen it. Not even as a boy,–it was kept very secluded then. As a man–you understand–he could not ask the favor. The Comtes de Fontonelles and himself were not friends. The family did not like a cafe near their sacred gates,–where had stood only the huts of their retainers. The American would observe that he had not called it “Cafe de Chateau,” nor “Cafe de Fontonelles,”–the gold of California would not induce him. Why did he remain there? Naturally, to goad them! It was a principle, one understood. To GOAD them and hold them in check! One kept a cafe,–why not? One had one’s principles,–one’s conviction,–that was another thing! That was the kind of “‘air-pin”–was it not?– that HE, Gustav Ribaud, was like!
Yet for all his truculent socialism, he was quick, obliging, and charmingly attentive to Dick and his needs. As to Dick’s horse, he should have the best veterinary surgeon–there was an incomparable one in the person of the blacksmith–see to him, and if it were an affair of days, and Dick must go, he himself would be glad to purchase the beast, his saddle, and accoutrements. It was an affair of business,–an advertisement for the cafe! He would ride the horse himself before the gates of the park. It would please his customers. Ha! he had learned a trick or two in free America.
Dick’s first act had been to shave off his characteristic beard and mustache, and even to submit his long curls to the village barber’s shears, while a straw hat, which he bought to take the place of his slouched sombrero, completed his transformation. His host saw in the change only the natural preparation of a voyager, but Dick had really made the sacrifice, not from fear of detection, for he had recovered his old swaggering audacity, but from a quick distaste he had taken to his resemblance to the portrait. He was too genuine a Westerner, and too vain a man, to feel flattered at his resemblance to an aristocratic bully, as he believed the ancestral De Fontonelles to be. Even his momentary sensation as he faced the Cure in the picture-gallery was more from a vague sense that liberties had been taken with his, Dick’s, personality, than that he had borrowed anything from the portrait.
But he was not so clear about the young girl. Her tender, appealing voice, although he knew it had been addressed only to a vision, still thrilled his fancy. The pluck that had made her withstand her fear so long–until he had uttered that dreadful word–still excited his admiration. His curiosity to know what mistake he had made–for he knew it must have been some frightful blunder–was all the more keen, as he had no chance to rectify it. What a brute she must have thought him–or DID she really think him a brute even then?–for her look was one more of despair and pity! Yet she would remember him only by that last word, and never know that he had risked insult and ejection from her friends to carry her to her place of safety. He could not bear to go across the seas carrying the pale, unsatisfied face of that gentle girl ever before his eyes! A sense of delicacy–new to Dick, but always the accompaniment of deep feeling–kept him from even hinting his story to his host, though he knew–perhaps BECAUSE he knew–that it would gratify his enmity to the family. A sudden thought struck Dick. He knew her house, and her name. He would write her a note. Somebody would be sure to translate it for her.
He borrowed pen, ink, and paper, and in the clean solitude of his fresh chintz bedroom, indited the following letter:–
DEAR MISS FONTONELLES,–Please excuse me for having skeert you. I hadn’t any call to do it, I never reckoned to do it–it was all jest my derned luck; I only reckoned to tell you I was lost–in them blamed woods–don’t you remember?–“lost”–PERDOO!–and then you up and fainted! I wouldn’t have come into your garden, only, you see, I’d just skeered by accident two of your helps, reg’lar softies, and I wanted to explain. I reckon they allowed I was that man that that picture in the hall was painted after. I reckon they took ME for him–see? But he ain’t MY style, nohow, and I never saw the picture at all until after I’d toted you, when you fainted, up to your house, or I’d have made my kalkilations and acted according. I’d have laid low in the woods, and got away without skeerin’ you. You see what I mean? It was mighty mean of me, I suppose, to have tetched you at all, without saying, “Excuse me, miss,” and toted you out of the garden and up the steps into your own parlor without asking your leave. But the whole thing tumbled so suddent. And it didn’t seem the square thing for me to lite out and leave you lying there on the grass. That’s why! I’m sorry I skeert that old preacher, but he came upon me in the picture hall so suddent, that it was a mighty close call, I tell you, to get off without a shindy. Please forgive me, Miss Fontonelles. When you get this, I shall be going back home to America, but you might write to me at Denver City, saying you’re all right. I liked your style; I liked your grit in standing up to me in the garden until you had your say, when you thought I was the Lord knows what– though I never understood a word you got off–not knowing French. But it’s all the same now. Say! I’ve got your rose!
Yours very respectfully,
RICHARD FOUNTAINS.
Dick folded the epistle and put it in his pocket. He would post it himself on the morning before he left. When he came downstairs he found his indefatigable host awaiting him, with the report of the veterinary blacksmith. There was nothing seriously wrong with the mustang, but it would be unfit to travel for several days. The landlord repeated his former offer. Dick, whose money was pretty well exhausted, was fain to accept, reflecting that SHE had never seen the mustang and would not recognize it. But he drew the line at the sombrero, to which his host had taken a great fancy. He had worn it before HER!
Later in the evening Dick was sitting on the low veranda of the cafe, overlooking the white road. A round white table was beside him, his feet were on the railing, but his eyes were resting beyond on the high, mouldy iron gates of the mysterious park. What he was thinking of did not matter, but he was a little impatient at the sudden appearance of his host–whom he had evaded during the afternoon–at his side. The man’s manner was full of bursting loquacity and mysterious levity.
Truly, it was a good hour when Dick had arrived at Fontonelles,– “just in time.” He could see now what a world of imbeciles was France. What stupid ignorance ruled, what low cunning and low tact could achieve,–in effect, what jugglers and mountebanks, hypocritical priests and licentious and lying noblesse went to make up existing society. Ah, there had been a fine excitement, a regular coup d’theatre at Fontonelles,–the chateau yonder; here at the village, where the news was brought by frightened grooms and silly women! He had been in the thick of it all the afternoon! He had examined it,–interrogated them like a juge d’instruction,– winnowed it, sifted it. And what was it all? An attempt by these wretched priests and noblesse to revive in the nineteenth century– the age of electricity and Pullman cars–a miserable mediaeval legend of an apparition, a miracle! Yes; one is asked to believe that at the chateau yonder was seen last night three times the apparition of Armand de Fontonelles!
Dick started. “Armand de Fontonelles!” He remembered that she had repeated that name.
“Who’s he?” he demanded abruptly.
“The first Comte de Fontonelles! When monsieur knows that the first comte has been dead three hundred years, he will see the imbecility of the affair!”
“Wot did he come back for?” growled Dick.
“Ah! it was a legend. Consider its artfulness! The Comte Armand had been a hard liver, a dissipated scoundrel, a reckless beast, but a mighty hunter of the stag. It was said that on one of these occasions he had been warned by the apparition of St. Hubert; but he had laughed,–for, observe, HE always jeered at the priests too; hence this story!–and had declared that the flaming cross seen between the horns of the sacred stag was only the torch of a poacher, and he would shoot it! Good! the body of the comte, dead, but without a wound, was found in the wood the next day, with his discharged arquebus in his hand. The Archbishop of Rouen refused his body the rites of the Church until a number of masses were said every year and–paid for! One understands! one sees their ‘little game;’ the count now appears,–he is in purgatory! More masses,– more money! There you are. Bah! One understands, too, that the affair takes place, not in a cafe like this,–not in a public place,–but at a chateau of the noblesse, and is seen by”–the proprietor checked the characters on his fingers–TWO retainers; one young demoiselle of the noblesse, daughter of the chatelaine herself; and, my faith, it goes without saying, by a fat priest, the Cure! In effect, two interested ones! And the priest,–his lie is magnificent! Superb! For he saw the comte in the picture- gallery,–in effect, stepping into his frame!”
“Oh, come off the roof,” said Dick impatiently; “they must have seen SOMETHING, you know. The young lady wouldn’t lie!”
Monsieur Ribaud leaned over, with a mysterious, cynical smile, and lowering his voice said:–
“You have reason to say so. You have hit it, my friend. There WAS a something! And if we regard the young lady, you shall hear. The story of Mademoiselle de Fontonelles is that she has walked by herself alone in the garden,–you observe, ALONE–in the moonlight, near the edge of the wood. You comprehend? The mother and the Cure are in the house,–for the time effaced! Here at the edge of the wood–though why she continues, a young demoiselle, to the edge of the wood does not make itself clear–she beholds her ancestor, as on a pedestal, young, pale, but very handsome and exalte,– pardon!”
“Nothing,” said Dick hurriedly; “go on!”
“She beseeches him why! He says he is lost! She faints away, on the instant, there–regard me!–ON THE EDGE OF THE WOOD, she says. But her mother and Monsieur le Cure find her pale, agitated, distressed, ON THE SOFA IN THE SALON. One is asked to believe that she is transported through the air–like an angel–by the spirit of Armand de Fontonelles. Incredible!”
“Well, wot do YOU think?” said Dick sharply.
The cafe proprietor looked around him carefully, and then lowered his voice significantly:–
“A lover!”
“A what?” said Dick, with a gasp.
“A lover!” repeated Ribaud. “You comprehend! Mademoiselle has no dot,–the property is nothing,–the brother has everything. A Mademoiselle de Fontonelles cannot marry out of her class, and the noblesse are all poor. Mademoiselle is young,–pretty, they say, of her kind. It is an intolerable life at the old chateau; mademoiselle consoles herself!”
Monsieur Ribaud never knew how near he was to the white road below the railing at that particular moment. Luckily, Dick controlled himself, and wisely, as Monsieur Ribaud’s next sentence showed him.
“A romance,–an innocent, foolish liaison, if you like,–but, all the same, if known of a Mademoiselle de Fontonelles, a compromising, a fatal entanglement. There you are. Look! for this, then, all this story of cock and bulls and spirits! Mademoiselle has been discovered with her lover by some one. This pretty story shall stop their mouths!”
“But wot,” said Dick brusquely, “wot if the girl was really skeert at something she’d seen, and fainted dead away, as she said she did,–and–and”–he hesitated–“some stranger came along and picked her up?”
Monsieur Ribaud looked at him pityingly.
“A Mademoiselle de Fontonelle is picked up by her servants, by her family, but not by the young man in the woods, alone. It is even more compromising!”
“Do you mean to say,” said Dick furiously, “that the ragpickers and sneaks that wade around in the slumgallion of this country would dare to spatter that young gal?”
“I mean to say, yes,–assuredly, positively yes!” said Ribaud, rubbing his hands with a certain satisfaction at Dick’s fury. “For you comprehend not the position of la jeune fille in all France! Ah! in America the young lady she go everywhere alone; I have seen her–pretty, charming, fascinating–alone with the young man. But here, no, never! Regard me, my friend. The French mother, she say to her daughter’s fiance, ‘Look! there is my daughter. She has never been alone with a young man for five minutes,–not even with you. Take her for your wife!’ It is monstrous! it is impossible! it is so!”
There was a silence of a few minutes, and Dick looked blankly at the iron gates of the park of Fontonelles. Then he said: “Give me a cigar.”
Monsieur Ribaud instantly produced his cigar case. Dick took a cigar, but waved aside the proffered match, and entering the cafe, took from his pocket the letter to Mademoiselle de Fontonelles, twisted it in a spiral, lighted it at a candle, lit his cigar with it, and returning to the veranda held it in his hand until the last ashes dropped on the floor. Then he said, gravely, to Ribaud:–
“You’ve treated me like a white man, Frenchy, and I ain’t goin’ back on yer–though your ways ain’t my ways–nohow; but I reckon in this yer matter at the shotto you’re a little too previous! For though I don’t as a gin’ral thing take stock in ghosts, I BELIEVE EVERY WORD THAT THEM FOLK SAID UP THAR. And,” he added, leaning his hand somewhat heavily on Ribaud’s shoulder, “if you’re the man I take you for, you’ll believe it too! And if that chap, Armand de Fontonelles, hadn’t hev picked up that gal at that moment, he would hev deserved to roast in hell another three hundred years! That’s why I believe her story. So you’ll let these yer Fontonelles keep their ghosts for all they’re worth; and when you next feel inclined to talk about that girl’s LOVER, you’ll think of me, and shut your head! You hear me, Frenchy, I’m shoutin’! And don’t you forget it!”
Nevertheless, early the next morning, Monsieur Ribaud accompanied his guest to the railway station, and parted from him with great effusion. On his way back an old-fashioned carriage with a postilion passed him. At a sign from its occupant, the postilion pulled up, and Monsieur Ribaud, bowing to the dust, approached the window, and the pale, stern face of a dignified, white-haired woman of sixty that looked from it.
“Has he gone?” said the lady.
“Assuredly, madame; I was with him at the station.”
“And you think no one saw him?”
“No one, madame, but myself.”
“And–what kind of a man was he?”
Monsieur Ribaud lifted his shoulders, threw out his hands despairingly, yet with a world of significance, and said:–
“An American.”
“Ah!”
The carriage drove on and entered the gates of the chateau. And Monsieur Ribaud, cafe proprietor and Social Democrat, straightened himself in the dust and shook his fist after it.
A NIGHT ON THE DIVIDE
With the lulling of the wind towards evening it came on to snow– heavily, in straight, quickly succeeding flakes, dropping like white lances from the sky. This was followed by the usual Sierran phenomenon. The deep gorge, which, as the sun went down, had lapsed into darkness, presently began to reappear; at first the vanished trail came back as a vividly whitening streak before them; then the larches and pines that ascended from it like buttresses against the hillsides glimmered in ghostly distinctness, until at last the two slopes curved out of the darkness as if hewn in marble. For the sudden storm, which extended scarcely two miles, had left no trace upon the steep granite face of the high cliffs above; the snow, slipping silently from them, left them still hidden in the obscurity of night. In the vanished landscape the gorge alone stood out, set in a chaos of cloud and storm through which the moonbeams struggled ineffectually.
It was this unexpected sight which burst upon the occupants of a large covered “station wagon” who had chanced upon the lower end of the gorge. Coming from a still lower altitude, they had known nothing of the storm, which had momentarily ceased, but had left a record of its intensity in nearly two feet of snow. For some moments the horses floundered and struggled on, in what the travelers believed to be some old forgotten drift or avalanche, until the extent and freshness of the fall became apparent. To add to their difficulties, the storm recommenced, and not comprehending its real character and limit, they did not dare to attempt to return the way they came. To go on, however, was impossible. In this quandary they looked about them in vain for some other exit from the gorge. The sides of that gigantic white furrow terminated in darkness. Hemmed in from the world in all directions, it might have been their tomb.
But although THEY could see nothing beyond their prison walls, they themselves were perfectly visible from the heights above them. And Jack Tenbrook, quartz miner, who was sinking a tunnel in the rocky ledge of shelf above the gorge, stepping out from his cabin at ten o’clock to take a look at the weather before turning in, could observe quite distinctly the outline of the black wagon, the floundering horses, and the crouching figures by their side, scarcely larger than pygmies on the white surface of the snow, six hundred feet below him. Jack had courage and strength, and the good humor that accompanies them, but he contented himself for a few moments with lazily observing the travelers’ discomfiture. He had taken in the situation with a glance; he would have helped a brother miner or mountaineer, although he knew that it could only have been drink or bravado that brought HIM into the gorge in a snowstorm, but it was very evident that these were “greenhorns,” or eastern tourists, and it served their stupidity and arrogance right! He remembered also how he, having once helped an Eastern visitor catch the mustang that had “bucked” him, had been called “my man,” and presented with five dollars; he recalled how he had once spread the humble resources of his cabin before some straying members of the San Francisco party who were “opening” the new railroad, and heard the audible wonder of a lady that a civilized being could live so “coarsely”? With these recollections in his mind, he managed to survey the distant struggling horses with a fine sense of humor, not unmixed with self-righteousness. There was no real danger in the situation; it meant at the worst a delay and a camping in the snow till morning, when he would go down to their assistance. They had a spacious traveling equipage, and were, no doubt, well supplied with furs, robes, and provisions for a several hours’ journey; his own pork barrel was quite empty, and his blankets worn. He half smiled, extended his long arms in a decided yawn, and turned back into his cabin to go to bed. Then he cast a final glance around the interior. Everything was all right; his loaded rifle stood against the wall; he had just raked ashes over the embers of his fire to keep it intact till morning. Only one thing slightly troubled him; a grizzly bear, two-thirds grown, but only half tamed, which had been given to him by a young lady named “Miggles,” when that charming and historic girl had decided to accompany her paralytic lover to the San Francisco hospital, was missing that evening. It had been its regular habit to come to the door every night for some sweet biscuit or sugar before going to its lair in the underbrush behind the cabin. Everybody knew it along the length and breadth of Hemlock Ridge, as well as the fact of its being a legacy from the fair exile. No rifle had ever yet been raised against its lazy bulk or the stupid, small-eyed head and ruff of circling hairs made more erect by its well-worn leather collar. Consoling himself with the thought that the storm had probably delayed its return, Jack took off his coat and threw it on his bunk. But from thinking of the storm his thoughts naturally returned again to the impeded travelers below him, and he half mechanically stepped out in his shirt-sleeves for a final look at them.
But here something occurred that changed his resolution entirely. He had previously noticed only the three foreshortened, crawling figures around the now stationary wagon bulk. They were now apparently making arrangements to camp for the night. But another figure had been added to the group, and as it stood perched upon a wagon seat laid on the snow Jack could see that its outline was not bifurcated like the others. But even that general suggestion was not needed! the little head, the symmetrical curves visible even at that distance, were quite enough to indicate that it was a woman! The easy smile faded from Jack’s face, and was succeeded by a look of concern and then of resignation. He had no choice now; he MUST go! There was a woman there, and that settled it. Yet he had arrived at this conclusion from no sense of gallantry, nor, indeed, of chivalrous transport, but as a matter of simple duty to the sex. He was giving up his sleep, was going down six hundred feet of steep trail to offer his services during the rest of the night as much as a matter of course as an Eastern man would have offered his seat in an omnibus to a woman, and with as little expectation of return for his courtesy.
Having resumed his coat, with a bottle of whiskey thrust into its pocket, he put on a pair of india-rubber boots reaching to his thighs, and, catching the blanket from his bunk, started with an axe and shovel on his shoulder on his downward journey. When the distance was half completed he shouted to the travelers below; the cry was joyously answered by the three men; he saw the fourth figure, now unmistakably that of a slender youthful woman, in a cloak, helped back into the wagon, as if deliverance was now sure and immediate. But Jack on arriving speedily dissipated that illusive hope; they could only get through the gorge by taking off the wheels of the wagon, placing the axle on rude sledge-runners of split saplings, which, with their assistance, he would fashion in a couple of hours at his cabin and bring down to the gorge. The only other alternative would be for them to come to his cabin and remain there while he went for assistance to the nearest station, but that would take several hours and necessitate a double journey for the sledge if he was lucky enough to find one. The party quickly acquiesced in Jack’s first suggestion.
“Very well,” said Jack, “then there’s no time to be lost; unhitch your horses and we’ll dig a hole in that bank for them to stand in out of the snow.” This was speedily done. “Now,” continued Jack, “you’ll just follow me up to my cabin; it’s a pretty tough climb, but I’ll want your help to bring down the runners.”
Here the man who seemed to be the head of the party–of middle age and a superior, professional type–for the first time hesitated. “I forgot to say that there is a lady with us,–my daughter,” he began, glancing towards the wagon.
“I reckoned as much,” interrupted Jack simply, “and I allowed to carry her up myself the roughest part of the way. She kin make herself warm and comf’ble in the cabin until we’ve got the runners ready.”
“You hear what our friend says, Amy?” suggested the gentleman, appealingly, to the closed leather curtains of the wagon.
There was a pause. The curtain was suddenly drawn aside, and a charming little head and shoulders, furred to the throat and topped with a bewitching velvet cap, were thrust out. In the obscurity little could be seen of the girl’s features, but there was a certain willfulness and impatience in her attitude. Being in the shadow, she had the advantage of the others, particularly of Jack, as his figure was fully revealed in the moonlight against the snowbank. Her eyes rested for a moment on his high boots, his heavy mustache, so long as to mingle with the unkempt locks which fell over his broad shoulders, on his huge red hands streaked with black grease from the wagon wheels, and some blood, stanched with snow, drawn from bruises in cutting out brambles in the brush; on– more awful than all–a monstrous, shiny “specimen” gold ring encircling one of his fingers,–on the whiskey bottle that shamelessly bulged from his side pocket, and then–slowly dropped her dissatisfied eyelids.
“Why can’t I stay HERE?” she said languidly. “It’s quite nice and comfortable.”
“Because we can’t leave you alone, and we must go with this gentleman to help him.”
Miss Amy let the tail of her eye again creep shudderingly over this impossible Jack. “I thought the–the gentleman was going to help US,” she said dryly.
“Nonsense, Amy, you don’t understand,” said her father impatiently. “This gentleman is kind enough to offer to make some sledge-runners for us at his cabin, and we must help him.”
“But I can stay here while you go. I’m not afraid.”
“Yes, but you’re ALONE here, and something might happen.”
“Nothing could happen,” interrupted Jack, quickly and cheerfully. He had flushed at first, but he was now considering that the carrying of a lady as expensively attired and apparently as delicate and particular as this one might be somewhat difficult. “There’s nothin’ that would hurt ye here,” he continued, addressing the velvet cap and furred throat in the darkness, “and if there was it couldn’t get at ye, bein’, so to speak, in the same sort o’ fix as you. So you’re all right,” he added positively.
Inconsistently enough, the young lady did not accept this as gratefully as might have been imagined, but Jack did not see the slight flash of her eye as, ignoring him, she replied markedly to her father, “I’d much rather stop here, papa.”
“And,” continued Jack, turning also to her father, “you can keep the wagon and the whole gorge in sight from the trail all the way up. So you can see that everything’s all right. Why, I saw YOU from the first.” He stopped awkwardly, and added, “Come along; the sooner we’re off the quicker the job’s over.”
“Pray don’t delay the gentleman and–the job,” said Miss Amy sweetly.
Reassured by Jack’s last suggestion, her father followed him with the driver and the second man of the party, a youngish and somewhat undistinctive individual, but to whose gallant anxieties Miss Amy responded effusively. Nevertheless, the young lady had especially noted Jack’s confession that he had seen them when they first entered the gorge. “And I suppose,” she added to herself mentally, “that he sat there with his boozing companions, laughing and jeering at our struggles.”
But when the sound of her companions’ voices died away, and their figures were swallowed up in the darkness behind the snow, she forgot all this, and much else that was mundane and frivolous, in the impressive and majestic solitude which seemed to descend upon her from the obscurity above.
At first it was accompanied with a slight thrill of vague fear, but this passed presently into that profound peace which the mountains alone can give their lonely or perturbed children. It seemed to her that Nature was never the same, on the great plains where men and cities always loomed into such ridiculous proportions, as when the Great Mother raised herself to comfort them with smiling hillsides, or encompassed them and drew them closer in the loving arms of her mountains. The long white canada stretched before her in a purity that did not seem of the earth; the vague bulk of the mountains rose on either side of her in a mystery that was not of this life. Yet it was not oppressive; neither was its restfulness and quiet suggestive of obliviousness and slumber; on the contrary, the highly rarefied air seemed to give additional keenness to her senses; her hearing had become singularly acute; her eyesight pierced the uttermost extremity of the gorge, lit by the full moon that occasionally shone through slowly drifting clouds. Her nerves thrilled with a delicious sense of freedom and a strange desire to run or climb. It seemed to her, in her exalted fancy, that these solitudes should be peopled only by a kingly race, and not by such gross and material churls as this mountaineer who helped them. And, I grieve to say,–writing of an idealist that WAS, and a heroine that IS to be,–she was getting outrageously hungry.
There were a few biscuits in her traveling-bag, and she remembered that she had been presented with a small jar of California honey at San Jose. This she took out and opened on the seat before her, and spreading the honey on the biscuits, ate them with a keen schoolgirl relish and a pleasant suggestion of a sylvan picnic in spite of the cold. It was all very strange; quite an experience for her to speak of afterwards. People would hardly believe that she had spent an hour or two, all alone, in a deserted wagon in a mountain snow pass. It was an adventure such as one reads of in the magazines. Only something was lacking which the magazines always supplied,–something heroic, something done by somebody. If that awful-looking mountaineer–that man with the long hair and mustache, and that horrible gold ring,–why such a ring?–was only different! But he was probably gorging beefsteak or venison with her father and Mr. Waterhouse,–men were always such selfish creatures!–and had quite forgotten all about her. It would have been only decent for them to have brought her down something hot; biscuits and honey were certainly cloying, and somehow didn’t agree with the temperature. She was really half starved! And much they cared! It would just serve them right if something DID happen to her,–or SEEM to happen to her,–if only to frighten them. And the pretty face that was turned up in the moonlight wore a charming but decided pout.
Good gracious, what was that? The horses were either struggling or fighting in their snow shelters. Then one with a frightened neigh broke from its halter and dashed into the road, only to be plunged snorting and helpless into the drifts. Then the other followed. How silly! Something had frightened them. Perhaps only a rabbit or a mole; horses were such absurdly nervous creatures! However, it is just as well; somebody would see them or hear them,–that neigh was quite human and awful,–and they would hurry down to see what was the matter. SHE couldn’t be expected to get out and look after the horses in the snow. Anyhow, she WOULDN’T! She was a good deal safer where she was; it might have been rats or mice about that frightened them! Goodness!
She was still watching with curious wonder the continued fright of the animals, when suddenly she felt the wagon half bumped, half lifted from behind. It was such a lazy, deliberate movement that for a moment she thought it came from the party, who had returned noiselessly with the runners. She scrambled over to the back seat, unbuttoned the leather curtain, lifted it, but nothing was to be seen. Consequently, with feminine quickness, she said, “I see you perfectly, Mr. Waterhouse–don’t be silly!” But at this moment there was another shock to the wagon, and from beneath it arose what at first seemed to her to be an uplifting of the drift itself, but, as the snow was shaken away from its heavy bulk, proved to be the enormous head and shoulders of a bear!
Yet even then she was not WHOLLY frightened, for the snout that confronted her had a feeble inoffensiveness; the small eyes were bright with an eager, almost childish curiosity rather than a savage ardor, and the whole attitude of the creature lifted upon its hind legs was circus-like and ludicrous rather than aggressive. She was enabled to say with some dignity, “Go away! Shoo!” and to wave her luncheon basket at it with exemplary firmness. But here the creature laid one paw on the back seat as if to steady itself, with the singular effect of collapsing the whole side of the wagon, and then opened its mouth as if in some sort of inarticulate reply. But the revelation of its red tongue, its glistening teeth, and, above all, the hot, suggestive fume of its breath, brought the first scream from the lips of Miss Amy. It was real and convincing; the horses joined in it; the three screamed together! The bear hesitated for an instant, then, catching sight of the honey-pot on the front seat, which the shrinking-back of the young girl had disclosed, he slowly reached forward his other paw and attempted to grasp it. This exceedingly simple movement, however, at once doubled up the front seat, sent the honey-pot a dozen feet into the air, and dropped Miss Amy upon her knees in the bed of the wagon. The combined mental and physical shock was too much for her; she instantly and sincerely fainted; the last thing in her ears amidst this wreck of matter being the “wheep” of a bullet and the sharp crack of a rifle.
. . . . . .
She recovered her consciousness in the flickering light of a fire of bark, that played upon the rafters of a roof thatched with bark and upon a floor of strewn and shredded bark. She even suspected she was lying upon a mattress of bark underneath the heavy bearskin she could feel and touch. She had a delicious sense of warmth, and, mingled with this strange spicing of woodland freedom, even a sense of home protection. And surely enough, looking around, she saw her father at her side.
He briefly explained the situation. They had been at first attracted by the cry of the frightened horses and their plunging, which they could see distinctly, although they saw nothing else. “But, Mr. Tenbrook”–
“Mr. Who?” said Amy, staring at the rafters.
“The owner of this cabin–the man who helped us–caught up his gun, and, calling us to follow, ran like lightning down the trail. At first we followed blindly, and unknowingly, for we could only see the struggling horses, who, however, seemed to be ALONE, and the wagon from which you did not seem to have stirred. Then, for the first time, my dear child, we suddenly saw your danger. Imagine how we felt as that hideous brute rose up in the road and began attacking the wagon. We called on Tenbrook to fire, but for some inconceivable reason he did not, although he still kept running at the top of his speed. Then we heard you shriek–“
“I didn’t shriek, papa; it was the horses.”
“My child, I knew your voice.”
“Well, it was only a VERY LITTLE scream–because I had tumbled.” The color was coming back rapidly to her pink cheeks.
“And, then, at your scream, Tenbrook fired!–it was a wonderful shot for the distance, so everybody says–and killed the bear, though Tenbrook says it oughtn’t to. I believe he wanted to capture the creature alive. They’ve queer notions, those hunters. And then, as you were unconscious, he brought you up here.”
“WHO brought me?”
“Tenbrook; he’s as strong as a horse. Slung you up on his shoulders like a feather pillow.”
“Oh!”
“And then, as the wagon required some repairing from the brute’s attack, we concluded to take it leisurely, and let you rest here for a while.”
“And where is–where are THEY?”
“At work on the wagon. I determined to stay with you, though you are perfectly safe here.”
“I suppose I ought–to thank–this man, papa?”
“Most certainly, though of course, I have already done so. But he was rather curt in reply. These half-savage men have such singular ideas. He said the beast would never have attacked you except for the honey-pot which it scented. That’s absurd.”
“Then it’s all my fault?”
“Nonsense! How could YOU know?”
“And I’ve made all this trouble. And frightened the horses. And spoilt the wagon. And made the man run down and bring me up here when he didn’t want to!”
“My dear child! Don’t be idiotic! Amy! Well, really!”
For the idiotic one was really wiping two large tears from her lovely blue eyes. She subsided into an ominous silence, broken by a single sniffle. “Try to go to sleep, dear; you’ve had quite a shock to your nerves, added her father soothingly. She continued silent, but not sleeping.
“I smell coffee.”
“Yes, dear.”
“You’ve been having coffee, papa?”
“We DID have some, I think,” said the wretched man apologetically, though why he could not determine.
“Before I came up? while the bear was trying to eat me?”
“No, after.”
“I’ve a horrid taste in my mouth. It’s the honey. I’ll never eat honey again. Never!”
“Perhaps it’s the whiskey.”
“What?”
“The whiskey. You were quite faint and chilled, you know. We gave you some.”
“Out of–that–black–bottle?”
“Yes.”
Another silence.
“I’d like some coffee. I don’t think he’d begrudge me that, if he did save my life.”
“I dare say there’s some left.” Her father at once bestirred himself and presently brought her some coffee in a tin cup. It was part of Miss Amy’s rapid convalescence, or equally of her debilitated condition, that she made no comment on the vessel. She lay for some moments looking curiously around the cabin; she had no doubt it had a worse look in the daylight, but somehow the firelight brought out a wondrous luxury of color in the bark floor and thatching. Besides, it was not “smelly,” as she feared it would be; on the contrary the spicy aroma of the woods was always dominant. She remembered that it was this that always made a greasy, oily picnic tolerable. She raised herself on her elbow, seeing which her father continued confidently, “Perhaps, dear, if you sat up for a few moments you might be strong enough presently to walk down with me to the wagon. It would save time.”
Amy instantly lay down again. “I don’t know what you can be thinking of, papa. After this shock really I don’t feel as if I could STAND alone, much less WALK. But, of course,” with pathetic resignation, “if you and Mr. Waterhouse supported me, perhaps I might crawl a few steps at a time.”
“Nonsense, Amy. Of course, this man Tenbrook will carry you down as he brought you up. Only I thought,–but there are steps, they’re coming now. No!–only HE.”
The sound of crackling in the underbrush was followed by a momentary darkening of the open door of the cabin. It was the tall figure of the mountaineer. But he did not even make the pretense of entering; standing at the door he delivered his news to the interior generally. It was to the effect that everything was ready, and the two other men were even then harnessing the horses. Then he drew back into the darkness.
“Papa,” said Amy, in a sudden frightened voice, “I’ve lost my bracelet.”
“Haven’t you dropped it somewhere there in the bunk?” asked her father.
“No. It’s on the floor of the wagon. I remember now it fell off when I tumbled! And it will be trodden upon and crushed! Couldn’t you run down, ahead of me, and warn them, papa, dear? Mr. Tenbrook will have to go so slowly with me.” She tumbled out of the bunk with singular alacrity, shook herself and her skirts into instantaneous gracefulness, and fitted the velvet cap on her straying hair. Then she said hurriedly, “Run quick, papa dear, and as you go, call him in and say I am quite ready.”
Thus adjured, the obedient parent disappeared in the darkness. With him also disappeared Miss Amy’s singular alacrity. Sitting down carefully again on the edge of the bunk, she leaned against the post with a certain indefinable languor that was as touching as it was graceful. I need not tell any feminine readers that there was no dissimulation in all this,–no coquetry, no ostentation,– and that the young girl was perfectly sincere! But the masculine reader might like to know that the simple fact was that, since she had regained consciousness, she had been filled with remorse for her capricious and ungenerous rejection of Tenbrook’s proffered service. More than that, she felt she had periled her life in that moment of folly, and that this man–this hero–had saved her. For hero he was, even if he did not fulfill her ideal,–it was only SHE that was not a heroine. Perhaps if he had been more like what she wished she would have felt this less keenly; love leaves little room for the exercise of moral ethics. So Miss Amy Forester, being a good girl at bottom, and not exactly loving this man, felt towards him a frank and tender consideration which a more romantic passion would have shrunk from showing. Consequently, when Tenbrook entered a moment later, he found Amy paler and more thoughtful, but, as he fancied, much prettier than before, looking up at him with eyes of the sincerest solicitude.
Nevertheless, he remained standing near the door, as if indicating a possible intrusion, his face wearing a look of lowering abstraction. It struck her that this might be the effect of his long hair and general uncouthness, and this only spurred her to a fuller recognition of his other qualities.
“I am afraid,” she began, with a charming embarrassment, “that instead of resting satisfied with your kindness in carrying me up here, I will have to burden you again with my dreadful weakness, and ask you to carry me down also. But all this seems so little after what you have just done and for which I can never, NEVER hope to thank you!” She clasped her two little hands together, holding her gloves between, and brought them down upon her lap in a gesture as prettily helpless as it was unaffected.
“I have done scarcely anything,” he said, glancing away towards the fire, “and–your father has thanked me.”
“You have saved my life!”
“No! no!” he said quickly. “Not that! You were in no danger, except from my rifle, had I missed.”
“I see,” she said eagerly, with a little posthumous thrill at having been after all a kind of heroine, “and it was a wonderful shot, for you were so careful not to touch me.”
“Please don’t say any more,” he said, with a slight movement of half awkwardness, half impatience. “It was a rough job, but it’s over now.”
He stopped and chafed his red hands abstractedly together. She could see that he had evidently just washed them–and the glaring ring was more in evidence than ever. But the thought gave her an inspiration.
“You’ll at least let me shake hands with you!” she said, extending both her own with childish frankness.
“Hold on, Miss Forester,” he said, with sudden desperation. “It ain’t the square thing! Look here! I can’t play this thing on you!–I can’t let you play it on me any longer! You weren’t in any danger,–you NEVER were! That bear was only a half-wild thing I helped to ra’r myself! It’s taken sugar from my hand night after night at the door of this cabin as it might have taken it from yours here if it was alive now. It slept night after night in the brush, not fifty yards away. The morning’s never come yet–till now,” he said hastily, to cover an odd break in his voice, “when it didn’t brush along the whole side of this cabin to kinder wake me up and say ‘So long,’ afore it browsed away into the canyon. Thar ain’t a man along the whole Divide who didn’t know it; thar ain’t a man along the whole Divide that would have drawn a bead or pulled a trigger on it till now. It never had an enemy but the bees; it never even knew why horses and cattle were frightened of it. It wasn’t much of a pet, you’d say, Miss Forester; it wasn’t much to meet a lady’s eye; but we of the woods must take our friends where we find ’em and of our own kind. It ain’t no fault of yours, Miss, that you didn’t know it; it ain’t no fault of yours what happened; but when it comes to your THANKING me for it, why–it’s–it’s rather rough, you see–and gets me.” He stopped short as desperately and as abruptly as he had begun, and stared blankly at the fire.
A wave of pity and shame swept over the young girl and left its high tide on her cheek. But even then it was closely followed by the feminine instinct of defence and defiance. The REAL hero–the GENTLEMAN–she reasoned bitterly, would have spared her all this knowledge.
“But why,” she said, with knitted brows, “why, if you knew it was so precious and so harmless–why did you fire upon it?”
“Because,” he said almost fiercely, turning upon her, “because you SCREAMED, and THEN I KNEW IT HAD FRIGHTENED YOU!” He stopped instantly as she momentarily recoiled from him, but the very brusqueness of his action had dislodged a tear from his dark eyes that fell warm on the back of her hand, and seemed to blot out the indignity. “Listen, Miss,” he went on hurriedly, as if to cover up his momentary unmanliness. “I knew the bear was missing to-night, and when I heard the horses scurrying about I reckoned what was up. I knew no harm could come to you, for the horses were unharnessed and away from the wagon. I pelted down that trail ahead of them all like grim death, calkilatin’ to get there before the bear; they wouldn’t have understood me; I was too high up to call to the creature when he did come out, and I kinder hoped you wouldn’t see him. Even when he turned towards the wagon, I knew it wasn’t YOU he was after, but suthin’ else, and I kinder hoped, Miss, that you, being different and quicker-minded than the rest, would see it too. All the while them folks were yellin’ behind me to fire–as if I didn’t know my work. I was half-way down–and then you screamed! And then I forgot everything,–everything but standing clear of hitting you,–and I fired. I was that savage that I wanted to believe that he’d gone mad, and would have touched you, till I got down there and found the honey-pot lying alongside of him. But there,–it’s all over now! I wouldn’t have let on a word to you only I couldn’t bear to take YOUR THANKS for it, and I couldn’t bear to have you thinking me a brute for dodgin’ them.” He stopped, walked to the fire, leaned against the chimney under the shallow pretext of kicking the dull embers into a blaze, which, however, had only the effect of revealing his two glistening eyes as he turned back again and came towards her. “Well,” he said, with an ineffectual laugh, “it’s all over now, it’s all in the day’s work, I reckon,–and now, Miss, if you’re ready, and will just fix yourself your own way so as to ride easy, I’ll carry you down.” And slightly bending his strong figure, he dropped on one knee beside her with extended arms.
Now it is one thing to be carried up a hill in temperate, unconscious blood and practical business fashion by a tall, powerful man with steadfast, glowering eyes, but quite another thing to be carried down again by the same man, who has been crying, and when you are conscious that you are going to cry too, and your tears may be apt to mingle. So Miss Amy Forester said: “Oh, wait, please! Sit down a moment. Oh, Mr. Tenbrook, I am so very, very sorry,” and, clapping her hand to her eyes, burst into tears.
“Oh, please, please don’t, Miss Forester,” said Jack, sitting down on the end of the bunk with frightened eyes, “please don’t do that! It ain’t worth it. I’m only a brute to have said anything.”
“No, no! You are SO noble, SO forgiving!” sobbed Miss Forester, “and I have made you go and kill the only thing you cared for, that was all your own.”
“No, Miss,–not all my own, either,–and that makes it so rough. For it was only left in trust with me by a friend. It was her only companion.”
“HER only companion?” echoed Miss Forester, sharply lifting her bowed head.
“Except,” said Jack hurriedly, miscomprehending the emphasis with masculine fatuity,–“except the dying man for whom she lived and sacrificed her whole life. She gave me this ring, to always remind me of my trust. I suppose,” he added ruefully, looking down upon it, “it’s no use now. I’d better take it off.”
Then Amy eyed the monstrous object with angelic simplicity. “I certainly should,” she said with infinite sweetness; “it would only remind you of your loss. But,” she added, with a sudden, swift, imploring look of her blue eyes, “if you could part with it to me, it would be such a reminder and token of–of your forgiveness.”
Jack instantly handed it to her. “And now,” he said, “let me carry you down.”
“I think,” she said hesitatingly, “that–I had better try to walk,” and she rose to her feet.
“Then I shall know that you have not forgiven me,” said Jack sadly.
“But I have no right to trouble”–
Alas! she had no time to finish her polite objection, for the next moment she felt herself lifted in the air, smelled the bark thatch within an inch of her nose, saw the firelight vanish behind her, and subsiding into his curved arms as in a hammock, the two passed forth into the night together.
“I can’t find, your bracelet anywhere, Amy,” said her father, when they reached the wagon.
“It was on the floor in the lint,” said Amy reproachfully. “But, of course, you never thought of that!”
. . . . . .
My pen halts with some diffidence between two conclusions to this veracious chronicle. As they agree in result, though not in theory or intention, I may venture to give them both. To one coming from the lips of the charming heroine herself I naturally yield the precedence. “Oh, the bear story! I don’t really remember whether that was before I was engaged to John or after. But I had known him for some time; father introduced him at the Governor’s ball at Sacramento. Let me see!–I think it was in the winter of ’56. Yes! it was very amusing; I always used to charge John with having trained that bear to attack our carriage so that he might come in