Trent’s Trust and Other Stories by Bret Harte (page 4)

“Wot did I do WOT for?” said Prosper sullenly.

“This! Making my mother pretend you were her son! Bringing her here among these men to live a lie!”

“She was willin’,” said Prosper gloomily. “I told her what she had to do, and she seemed to like it.”

“But couldn’t you see she was old and weak, and wasn’t responsible for her actions? Or were you only thinking of yourself?”

This last taunt stung him. He looked up. He was not facing a helpless, dependent old woman as he had been the day before, but a handsome, clever girl, in every way his superior–and in the right! In his vague sense of honor it seemed more creditable for him to fight it out with HER. He burst out: “I never thought of myself! I never had an old mother; I never knew what it was to want one– but the men did! And as I couldn’t get one for them, I got one for myself–to share and share alike–I thought they’d be happier ef there was one in the camp!”

There was the unmistakable accent of truth in his voice. There came a faint twitching of the young girl’s lips and the dawning of a smile. But it only acted as a goad to the unfortunate Prosper. “Ye kin laugh, Miss Pottinger, but it’s God’s truth! But one thing I didn’t do. No! When your mother wanted to bring you in here as my sister, I kicked! I did! And you kin thank me, for all your laughin’, that you’re standing in this camp in your own name–and ain’t nothin’ but my cousin.”

“I suppose you thought your precious friends didn’t want a SISTER too?” said the girl ironically.

“It don’t make no matter wot they want now,” he said gloomily. “For,” he added, with sudden desperation, “it’s come to an end! Yes! You and your mother will stay here a spell so that the boys don’t suspicion nothin’ of either of ye. Then I’ll give it out that you’re takin’ your aunt away on a visit. Then I’ll make over to her a thousand dollars for all the trouble I’ve given her, and you’ll take her away. I’ve bin a fool, Miss Pottinger, mebbe I am one now, but what I’m doin’ is on the square, and it’s got to be done!”

He looked so simple and so good–so like an honest schoolboy confessing a fault and abiding by his punishment, for all his six feet of altitude and silky mustache–that Miss Pottinger lowered her eyes. But she recovered herself and said sharply:–

“It’s all very well to talk of her going away! But she WON’T. You have made her like you–yes! like you better than me–than any of us! She says you’re the only one who ever treated her like a mother–as a mother should be treated. She says she never knew what peace and comfort were until she came to you. There! Don’t stare like that! Don’t you understand? Don’t you see? Must I tell you again that she is strange–that–that she was ALWAYS queer and strange–and queerer on account of her unfortunate habits– surely you knew THEM, Mr. Riggs! She quarreled with us all. I went to live with my aunt, and she took herself off to San Francisco with a silly claim against my father’s shipowners. Heaven only knows how she managed to live there; but she always impressed people with her manners, and some one always helped her! At last I begged my aunt to let me seek her, and I tracked her here. There! If you’ve confessed everything to me, you have made me confess everything to you, and about my own mother, too! Now, what is to be done?”

“Whatever is agreeable to you is the same to me, Miss Pottinger,” he said formally.

“But you mustn’t call me ‘Miss Pottinger’ so loud. Somebody might hear you,” she returned mischievously.

“All right–‘cousin,’ then,” he said, with a prodigious blush. “Supposin’ we go in.”

In spite of the camp’s curiosity, for the next few days they delicately withheld their usual evening visits to Prossy’s mother. “They’ll be wantin’ to talk o’ old times, and we don’t wanter be too previous,” suggested Wynbrook. But their verdict, when they at last met the new cousin, was unanimous, and their praises extravagant. To their inexperienced eyes she seemed to possess all her aunt’s gentility and precision of language, with a vivacity and playfulness all her own. In a few days the whole camp was in love with her. Yet she dispensed her favors with such tactful impartiality and with such innocent enjoyment–free from any suspicion of coquetry–that there were no heartburnings, and the unlucky man who nourished a fancied slight would have been laughed at by his fellows. She had a town-bred girl’s curiosity and interest in camp life, which she declared was like a “perpetual picnic,” and her slim, graceful figure halting beside a ditch where the men were working seemed to them as grateful as the new spring sunshine. The whole camp became tidier; a coat was considered de rigueur at “Prossy’s mother” evenings; there was less horseplay in the trails, and less shouting. “It’s all very well to talk about ‘old mothers,'” said the cynical barkeeper, “but that gal, single handed, has done more in a week to make the camp decent than old Ma’am Riggs has in a month o’ Sundays.”

Since Prosper’s brief conversation with Miss Pottinger before the house, the question “What is to be done?” had singularly lapsed, nor had it been referred to again by either. The young lady had apparently thrown herself into the diversions of the camp with the thoughtless gayety of a brief holiday maker, and it was not for him to remind her–even had he wished to–that her important question had never been answered. He had enjoyed her happiness with the relief of a secret shared by her. Three weeks had passed; the last of the winter’s rains had gone. Spring was stirring in underbrush and wildwood, in the pulse of the waters, in the sap of the great pines, in the uplifting of flowers. Small wonder if Prosper’s boyish heart had stirred a little too.

In fact, he had been possessed by another luminous idea–a wild idea that to him seemed almost as absurd as the one which had brought him all this trouble. It had come to him like that one– out of a starlit night–and he had risen one morning with a feverish intent to put it into action! It brought him later to take an unprecedented walk alone with Miss Pottinger, to linger under green leaves in unfrequented woods, and at last seemed about to desert him as he stood in a little hollow with her hand in his– their only listener an inquisitive squirrel. Yet this was all the disappointed animal heard him stammer,–

“So you see, dear, it would THEN be no lie–for–don’t you see?– she’d be really MY mother as well as YOURS.”

The marriage of Prosper Riggs and Miss Pottinger was quietly celebrated at Sacramento, but Prossy’s “old mother” did not return with the happy pair.

Of Mrs. Pottinger’s later career some idea may be gathered from a letter which Prosper received a year after his marriage. “Circumstances,” wrote Mrs. Pottinger, “which had induced me to accept the offer of a widower to take care of his motherless household, have since developed into a more enduring matrimonial position, so that I can always offer my dear Prosper a home with his mother, should he choose to visit this locality, and a second father in Hiram W. Watergates, Esq., her husband.”

THE CONVALESCENCE OF JACK HAMLIN

The habitually quiet, ascetic face of Seth Rivers was somewhat disturbed and his brows were knitted as he climbed the long ascent of Windy Hill to its summit and his own rancho. Perhaps it was the effect of the characteristic wind, which that afternoon seemed to assault him from all points at once and did not cease its battery even at his front door, but hustled him into the passage, blew him into the sitting room, and then celebrated its own exit from the long, rambling house by the banging of doors throughout the halls and the slamming of windows in the remote distance.

Mrs. Rivers looked up from her work at this abrupt onset of her husband, but without changing her own expression of slightly fatigued self-righteousness. Accustomed to these elemental eruptions, she laid her hands from force of habit upon the lifting tablecloth, and then rose submissively to brush together the scattered embers and ashes from the large hearthstone, as she had often done before.

“You’re in early, Seth,” she said.

“Yes. I stopped at the Cross Roads Post Office. Lucky I did, or you’d hev had kempany on your hands afore you knowed it–this very night! I found this letter from Dr. Duchesne,” and he produced a letter from his pocket.

Mrs. Rivers looked up with an expression of worldly interest. Dr. Duchesne had brought her two children into the world with some difficulty, and had skillfully attended her through a long illness consequent upon the inefficient maternity of soulful but fragile American women of her type. The doctor had more than a mere local reputation as a surgeon, and Mrs. Rivers looked up to him as her sole connecting link with a world of thought beyond Windy Hill.

“He’s comin’ up yer to-night, bringin’ a friend of his–a patient that he wants us to board and keep for three weeks until he’s well agin,” continued Mr. Rivers. “Ye know how the doctor used to rave about the pure air on our hill.”

Mrs. Rivers shivered slightly, and drew her shawl over her shoulders, but nodded a patient assent.

“Well, he says it’s just what that patient oughter have to cure him. He’s had lung fever and other things, and this yer air and gin’ral quiet is bound to set him up. We’re to board and keep him without any fuss or feathers, and the doctor sez he’ll pay liberal for it. This yer’s what he sez,” concluded Mr. Rivers, reading from the letter: “‘He is now fully convalescent, though weak, and really requires no other medicine than the–ozone’–yes, that’s what the doctor calls it–‘of Windy Hill, and in fact as little attendance as possible. I will not let him keep even his negro servant with him. He’ll give you no trouble, if he can be prevailed upon to stay the whole time of his cure.'”

“There’s our spare room–it hasn’t been used since Parson Greenwood was here,” said Mrs. Rivers reflectively. “Melinda could put it to rights in an hour. At what time will he come?”

“He’d come about nine. They drive over from Hightown depot. But,” he added grimly, “here ye are orderin’ rooms to be done up and ye don’t know who for.”

“You said a friend of Dr. Duchesne,” returned Mrs. Rivers simply.

“Dr. Duchesne has many friends that you and me mightn’t cotton to,” said her husband. “This man is Jack Hamlin.” As his wife’s remote and introspective black eyes returned only vacancy, he added quickly. “The noted gambler!”

“Gambler?” echoed his wife, still vaguely.

“Yes–reg’lar; it’s his business.”

“Goodness, Seth! He can’t expect to do it here.”

“No,” said Seth quickly, with that sense of fairness to his fellow man which most women find it so difficult to understand. “No–and he probably won’t mention the word ‘card’ while he’s here.”

“Well?” said Mrs. Rivers interrogatively.

“And,” continued Seth, seeing that the objection was not pressed, he’s one of them desprit men! A reg’lar fighter! Killed two or three men in dools!”

Mrs. Rivers stared. “What could Dr. Duchesne have been thinking of? Why, we wouldn’t be safe in the house with him!”

Again Seth’s sense of equity triumphed. “I never heard of his fightin’ anybody but his own kind, and when he was bullyragged. And ez to women he’s quite t’other way in fact, and that’s why I think ye oughter know it afore you let him come. He don’t go round with decent women. In fact”–But here Mr. Rivers, in the sanctity of conjugal confidences and the fullness of Bible reading, used a few strong scriptural substantives happily unnecessary to repeat here.

“Seth!” said Mrs. Rivers suddenly, “you seem to know this man.”

The unexpectedness and irrelevancy of this for a moment startled Seth. But that chaste and God-fearing man had no secrets. “Only by hearsay, Jane,” he returned quietly; “but if ye say the word I’ll stop his comin’ now.”

“It’s too late,” said Mrs. Rivers decidedly.

“I reckon not,” returned her husband, “and that’s why I came straight here. I’ve only got to meet them at the depot and say this thing can’t be done–and that’s the end of it. They’ll go off quiet to the hotel.”

“I don’t like to disappoint the doctor, Seth,” said Mrs. Rivers. “We might,” she added, with a troubled look of inquiry at her husband, “we might take that Mr. Hamlin on trial. Like as not he won’t stay, anyway, when he sees what we’re like, Seth. What do you think? It would be only our Christian duty, too.”

“I was thinkin’ o’ that as a professin’ Christian, Jane,” said her husband. “But supposin’ that other Christians don’t look at it in that light. Thar’s Deacon Stubbs and his wife and the parson. Ye remember what he said about ‘no covenant with sin’?”

“The Stubbses have no right to dictate who I’ll have in my house,” said Mrs. Rivers quickly, with a faint flush in her rather sallow cheeks.

“It’s your say and nobody else’s,” assented her husband with grim submissiveness. “You do what you like.”

Mrs. Rivers mused. “There’s only myself and Melinda here,” she said with sublime naivete; “and the children ain’t old enough to be corrupted. I am satisfied if you are, Seth,” and she again looked at him inquiringly.

“Go ahead, then, and get ready for ’em,” said Seth, hurrying away with unaffected relief. “If you have everything fixed by nine o’clock, that’ll do.”

Mrs. Rivers had everything “fixed” by that hour, including herself presumably, for she had put on a gray dress which she usually wore when shopping in the county town, adding a prim collar and cuffs. A pearl-encircled brooch, the wedding gift of Seth, and a solitaire ring next to her wedding ring, with a locket containing her children’s hair, accented her position as a proper wife and mother. At a quarter to nine she had finished tidying the parlor, opening the harmonium so that the light might play upon its polished keyboard, and bringing from the forgotten seclusion of her closet two beautifully bound volumes of Tupper’s “Poems” and Pollok’s “Course of Time,” to impart a literary grace to the centre table. She then drew a chair to the table and sat down before it with a religious magazine in her lap. The wind roared over the deep- throated chimney, the clock ticked monotonously, and then there came the sound of wheels and voices.

But Mrs. Rivers was not destined to see her guest that night. Dr. Duchesne, under the safe lee of the door, explained that Mr. Hamlin had been exhausted by the journey, and, assisted by a mild opiate, was asleep in the carriage; that if Mrs. Rivers did not object, they would carry him at once to his room. In the flaring and guttering of candles, the flashing of lanterns, the flapping of coats and shawls, and the bewildering rush of wind, Mrs. Rivers was only vaguely conscious of a slight figure muffled tightly in a cloak carried past her in the arms of a grizzled negro up the staircase, followed by Dr. Duchesne. With the closing of the front door on the tumultuous world without, a silence fell again on the little parlor.

When the doctor made his reappearance it was to say that his patient was being undressed and put to bed by his negro servant, who, however, would return with the doctor to-night, but that the patient would be left with everything that was necessary, and that he would require no attention from the family until the next day. Indeed, it was better that he should remain undisturbed. As the doctor confined his confidences and instructions entirely to the physical condition of their guest, Mrs. Rivers found it awkward to press other inquiries.

“Of course,” she said at last hesitatingly, but with a certain primness of expression, “Mr. Hamlin must expect to find everything here very different from what he is accustomed to–at least from what my husband says are his habits.”

“Nobody knows that better than he, Mrs. Rivers,” returned the doctor with an equally marked precision of manner, “and you could not have a guest who would be less likely to make you remind him of it.”

A little annoyed, yet not exactly knowing why, Mrs. Rivers abandoned the subject, and as the doctor shortly afterwards busied himself in the care of his patient, with whom he remained until the hour of his departure, she had no chance of renewing it. But as he finally shook hands with his host and hostess, it seemed to her that he slightly recurred to it. “I have the greatest hope of the curative effect of this wonderful locality on my patient, but even still more of the beneficial effect of the complete change of his habits, his surroundings, and their influences.” Then the door closed on the man of science and the grizzled negro servant, the noise of the carriage wheels was shut out with the song of the wind in the pine tops, and the rancho of Windy Hill possessed Mr. Jack Hamlin in peace. Indeed, the wind was now falling, as was its custom at that hour, and the moon presently arose over a hushed and sleeping landscape.

For the rest of the evening the silent presence in the room above affected the household; the half-curious servants and ranch hands spoke in whispers in the passages, and at evening prayers, in the dining room, Seth Rivers, kneeling before and bowed over a rush- bottomed chair whose legs were clutched by his strong hands, included “the stranger within our gates” in his regular supplications. When the hour for retiring came, Seth, with a candle in his hand, preceded his wife up the staircase, but stopped before the door of their guest’s room. “I reckon,” he said interrogatively to Mrs. Rivers, “I oughter see ef he’s wantin’ anythin’?”

“You heard what the doctor said,” returned Mrs. Rivers cautiously. At the same time she did not speak decidedly, and the frontiersman’s instinct of hospitality prevailed. He knocked lightly; there was no response. He turned the door handle softly. The door opened. A faint clean perfume–an odor of some general personality rather than any particular thing–stole out upon them. The light of Seth’s candle struck a few glints from some cut-glass and silver, the contents of the guest’s dressing case, which had been carefully laid out upon a small table by his negro servant. There was also a refined neatness in the disposition of his clothes and effects which struck the feminine eye of even the tidy Mrs. Rivers as something new to her experience. Seth drew nearer the bed with his shaded candle, and then, turning, beckoned his wife to approach. Mrs. Rivers hesitated–but for the necessity of silence she would have openly protested–but that protest was shut up in her compressed lips as she came forward.

For an instant that awe with which absolute helplessness invests the sleeping and dead was felt by both husband and wife. Only the upper part of the sleeper’s face was visible above the bedclothes, held in position by a thin white nervous hand that was encircled at the wrist by a ruffle. Seth stared. Short brown curls were tumbled over a forehead damp with the dews of sleep and exhaustion. But what appeared more singular, the closed eyes of this vessel of wrath and recklessness were fringed with lashes as long and silky as a woman’s. Then Mrs. Rivers gently pulled her husband’s sleeve, and they both crept back with a greater sense of intrusion and even more cautiously than they had entered. Nor did they speak until the door was closed softly and they were alone on the landing. Seth looked grimly at his wife.

“Don’t look much ez ef he could hurt anybody.”

“He looks like a sick man,” returned Mrs. Rivers calmly.

The unconscious object of this criticism and attention slept until late; slept through the stir of awakened life within and without, through the challenge of early cocks in the lean-to shed, through the creaking of departing ox teams and the lazy, long-drawn commands of teamsters, through the regular strokes of the morning pump and the splash of water on stones, through the far-off barking of dogs and the half-intelligible shouts of ranchmen; slept through the sunlight on his ceiling, through its slow descent of his wall, and awoke with it in his eyes! He woke, too, with a delicious sense of freedom from pain, and of even drawing a long breath without difficulty–two facts so marvelous and dreamlike that he naturally closed his eyes again lest he should waken to a world of suffering and dyspnoea. Satisfied at last that this relief was real, he again opened his eyes, but upon surroundings so strange, so wildly absurd and improbable, that he again doubted their reality. He was lying in a moderately large room, primly and severely furnished, but his attention was for the moment riveted to a gilt frame upon the wall beside him bearing the text, “God Bless Our Home,” and then on another frame on the opposite wall which admonished him to “Watch and Pray.” Beside them hung an engraving of the “Raising of Lazarus,” and a Hogarthian lithograph of “The Drunkard’s Progress.” Mr. Hamlin closed his eyes; he was dreaming certainly–not one of those wild, fantastic visions that had so miserably filled the past long nights of pain and suffering, but still a dream! At last, opening one eye stealthily, he caught the flash of the sunlight upon the crystal and silver articles of his dressing case, and that flash at once illuminated his memory. He remembered his long weeks of illness and the devotion of Dr. Duchesne. He remembered how, when the crisis was past, the doctor had urged a complete change and absolute rest, and had told him of a secluded rancho in some remote locality kept by an honest Western pioneer whose family he had attended. He remembered his own reluctant assent, impelled by gratitude to the doctor and the helplessness of a sick man. He now recalled the weary journey thither, his exhaustion and the semi-consciousness of his arrival in a bewildering wind on a shadowy hilltop. And this was the place!

He shivered slightly, and ducked his head under the cover again. But the brightness of the sun and some exhilarating quality in the air tempted him to have another outlook, avoiding as far as possible the grimly decorated walls. If they had only left him his faithful servant he could have relieved himself of that mischievous badinage which always alternately horrified and delighted that devoted negro. But he was alone–absolutely alone–in this conventicle!

Presently he saw the door open slowly. It gave admission to the small round face and yellow ringlets of a little girl, and finally to her whole figure, clasping a doll nearly as large as herself. For a moment she stood there, arrested by the display of Mr. Hamlin’s dressing case on the table. Then her glances moved around the room and rested upon the bed. Her blue eyes and Mr. Hamlin’s brown ones met and mingled. Without a moment’s hesitation she moved to the bedside. Taking her doll’s hands in her own, she displayed it before him.

“Isn’t it pitty?”

Mr. Hamlin was instantly his old self again. Thrusting his hand comfortably under the pillow, he lay on his side and gazed at it long and affectionately. “I never,” he said in a faint voice, but with immovable features, “saw anything so perfectly beautiful. Is it alive?”

“It’s a dolly,” she returned gravely, smoothing down its frock and straightening its helpless feet. Then seized with a spontaneous idea, like a young animal she suddenly presented it to him with both hands and said,–

“Kiss it.”

Mr. Hamlin implanted a chaste salute on its vermilion cheek. “Would you mind letting me hold it for a little?” he said with extreme diffidence.

The child was delighted, as he expected. Mr. Hamlin placed it in a sitting posture on the edge of his bed, and put an ostentatious paternal arm around it.

“But you’re alive, ain’t you?” he said to the child.

This subtle witticism convulsed her. “I’m a little girl,” she gurgled.

“I see; her mother?”

“Ess.”

“And who’s your mother?”

“Mammy.”

“Mrs. Rivers?”

The child nodded until her ringlets were shaken on her cheek. After a moment she began to laugh bashfully and with repression, yet as Mr. Hamlin thought a little mischievously. Then as he looked at her interrogatively she suddenly caught hold of the ruffle of his sleeve.

“Oo’s got on mammy’s nighty.”

Mr. Hamlin started. He saw the child’s obvious mistake and actually felt himself blushing. It was unprecedented–it was the sheerest weakness–it must have something to do with the confounded air.

“I grieve to say you are deeply mistaken–it is my very own,” he returned with great gravity. Nevertheless, he drew the coverlet close over his shoulder. But here he was again attracted by another face at the half-opened door–a freckled one, belonging to a boy apparently a year or two older than the girl. He was violently telegraphing to her to come away, although it was evident that he was at the same time deeply interested in the guest’s toilet articles. Yet as his bright gray eyes and Mr. Hamlin’s brown ones met, he succumbed, as the girl had, and walked directly to the bedside. But he did it bashfully–as the girl had not. He even attempted a defensive explanation.

“She hadn’t oughter come in here, and mar wouldn’t let her, and she knows it,” he said with superior virtue.

“But I asked her to come as I’m asking you,” said Mr. Hamlin promptly, “and don’t you go back on your sister or you’ll never be president of the United States.” With this he laid his hand on the boy’s tow head, and then, lifting himself on his pillow to a half- sitting posture, put an arm around each of the children, drawing them together, with the doll occupying the central post of honor. “Now,” continued Mr. Hamlin, albeit in a voice a little faint from the exertion, “now that we’re comfortable together I’ll tell you the story of the good little boy who became a pirate in order to save his grandmother and little sister from being eaten by a wolf at the door.”

But, alas! that interesting record of self-sacrifice never was told. For it chanced that Melinda Bird, Mrs. Rivers’s help, following the trail of the missing children, came upon the open door and glanced in. There, to her astonishment, she saw the domestic group already described, and to her eyes dominated by the “most beautiful and perfectly elegant” young man she had ever seen. But let not the incautious reader suppose that she succumbed as weakly as her artless charges to these fascinations. The character and antecedents of that young man had been already delivered to her in the kitchen by the other help. With that single glance she halted; her eyes sought the ceiling in chaste exaltation. Falling back a step, she called in ladylike hauteur and precision, “Mary Emmeline and John Wesley.”

Mr. Hamlin glanced at the children. “It’s Melindy looking for us,” said John Wesley. But they did not move. At which Mr. Hamlin called out faintly but cheerfully, “They’re here, all right.”

Again the voice arose with still more marked and lofty distinctness, “John Wesley and Mary Em-me-line.” It seemed to Mr. Hamlin that human accents could not convey a more significant and elevated ignoring of some implied impropriety in his invitation. He was for a moment crushed.

But he only said to his little friends with a smile, “You’d better go now and we’ll have that story later.”

“Affer beckus?” suggested Mary Emmeline.

“In the woods,” added John Wesley.

Mr. Hamlin nodded blandly. The children trotted to the door. It closed upon them and Miss Bird’s parting admonition, loud enough for Mr. Hamlin to hear, “No more freedoms, no more intrudings, you hear.”

The older culprit, Hamlin, retreated luxuriously under his blankets, but presently another new sensation came over him– absolutely, hunger. Perhaps it was the child’s allusion to “beckus,” but he found himself wondering when it would be ready. This anxiety was soon relieved by the appearance of his host himself bearing a tray, possibly in deference to Miss Bird’s sense of propriety. It appeared also that Dr. Duchesne had previously given suitable directions for his diet, and Mr. Hamlin found his repast simple but enjoyable. Always playfully or ironically polite to strangers, he thanked his host and said he had slept splendidly.

“It’s this yer ‘ozone’ in the air that Dr. Duchesne talks about,” said Seth complacently.

“I am inclined to think it is also those texts,” said Mr. Hamlin gravely, as he indicated them on the wall. “You see they reminded me of church and my boyhood’s slumbers there. I have never slept so peacefully since.” Seth’s face brightened so interestedly at what he believed to be a suggestion of his guest’s conversion that Mr. Hamlin was fain to change the subject. When his host had withdrawn he proceeded to dress himself, but here became conscious of his weakness and was obliged to sit down. In one of those enforced rests he chanced to be near the window, and for the first time looked on the environs of his place of exile. For a moment he was staggered. Everything seemed to pitch downward from the rocky outcrop on which the rambling house and farm sheds stood. Even the great pines around it swept downward like a green wave, to rise again in enormous billows as far as the eye could reach. He could count a dozen of their tumbled crests following each other on their way to the distant plain. In some vague point of that shimmering horizon of heat and dust was the spot he came from the preceding night. Yet the recollection of it and his feverish past seemed to confuse him, and he turned his eyes gladly away.

Pale, a little tremulous, but immaculate and jaunty in his white flannels and straw hat, he at last made his way downstairs. To his great relief he found the sitting room empty, as he would have willingly deferred his formal acknowledgments to his hostess later. A single glance at the interior determined him not to linger, and he slipped quietly into the open air and sunshine. The day was warm and still, as the wind only came up with the going down of the sun, and the atmosphere was still redolent with the morning spicing of pine and hay and a stronger balm that seemed to fill his breast with sunshine. He walked toward the nearest shade–a cluster of young buckeyes–and having with a certain civic fastidiousness flicked the dust from a stump with his handkerchief he sat down. It was very quiet and calm. The life and animation of early morning had already vanished from the hill, or seemed to be suspended with the sun in the sky. He could see the ranchmen and oxen toiling on the green terraced slopes below, but no sound reached his ears. Even the house he had just quitted seemed empty of life throughout its rambling length. His seclusion was complete. Could he stand it for three weeks? Perhaps it need not be for so long; he was already stronger! He foresaw that the ascetic Seth might become wearisome. He had an intuition that Mrs. Rivers would be equally so; he should certainly quarrel with Melinda, and this would probably debar him from the company of the children–his only hope.

But his seclusion was by no means so complete as he expected. He presently was aware of a camp-meeting hymn hummed somewhat ostentatiously by a deep contralto voice, which he at once recognized as Melinda’s, and saw that severe virgin proceeding from the kitchen along the ridge until within a few paces of the buckeyes, when she stopped and, with her hand shading her eyes, apparently began to examine the distant fields. She was a tall, robust girl, not without certain rustic attractions, of which she seemed fully conscious. This latter weakness gave Mr. Hamlin a new idea. He put up the penknife with which he had been paring his nails while wondering why his hands had become so thin, and awaited events. She presently turned, approached the buckeyes, plucked a spike of the blossoms with great girlish lightness, and then apparently discovering Mr. Hamlin, started in deep concern and said with somewhat stentorian politeness: “I BEG your pardon–didn’t know I was intruding!”

“Don’t mention it,” returned Jack promptly, but without moving. “I saw you coming and was prepared; but generally–as I have something the matter with my heart–a sudden joy like this is dangerous.”

Somewhat mystified, but struggling between an expression of rigorous decorum and gratified vanity, Miss Melinda stammered, “I was only”–

“I knew it–I saw what you were doing,” interrupted Jack gravely, “only I wouldn’t do it if I were you. You were looking at one of those young men down the hill. You forgot that if you could see him he could see you looking too, and that would only make him conceited. And a girl with YOUR attractions don’t require that.”

“Ez if,” said Melinda, with lofty but somewhat reddening scorn, “there was a man on this hull rancho that I’d take a second look at.”

“It’s the first look that does the business,” returned Jack simply. “But maybe I was wrong. Would you mind–as you’re going straight back to the house” (Miss Melinda had certainly expressed no such intention)–“turning those two little kids loose out here? I’ve a sort of engagement with them.”

“I will speak to their mar,” said Melinda primly, yet with a certain sign of relenting, as she turned away.

“You can say to her that I regretted not finding her in the sitting room when I came down,” continued Jack tactfully.

Apparently the tact was successful, for he was delighted a few moments later by the joyous onset of John Wesley and Mary Emmeline upon the buckeyes, which he at once converted into a game of hide and seek, permitting himself at last to be shamelessly caught in the open. But here he wisely resolved upon guarding against further grown-up interruption, and consulting with his companions found that on one of the lower terraces there was a large reservoir fed by a mountain rivulet, but they were not allowed to play there. Thither, however, the reckless Jack hied with his playmates and was presently ensconced under a willow tree, where he dexterously fashioned tiny willow canoes with his penknife and sent them sailing over a submerged expanse of nearly an acre. But half an hour of this ingenious amusement was brought to an abrupt termination. While cutting bark, with his back momentarily turned on his companions, he heard a scream, and turned quickly to see John Wesley struggling in the water, grasping a tree root, and Mary Emmeline–nowhere! In another minute he saw the strings of her pinafore appear on the surface a few yards beyond, and in yet another minute, with a swift rueful glance at his white flannels, he had plunged after her. A disagreeable shock of finding himself out of his depths was, however, followed by contact with the child’s clothing, and clutching her firmly, a stroke or two brought him panting to the bank. Here a gasp, a gurgle, and then a roar from Mary Emmeline, followed by a sympathetic howl from John Wesley, satisfied him that the danger was over. Rescuing the boy from the tree root, he laid them both on the grass and contemplated them exercising their lungs with miserable satisfaction. But here he found his own breathing impeded in addition to a slight faintness, and was suddenly obliged to sit down beside them, at which, by some sympathetic intuition, they both stopped crying.

Encouraged by this, Mr. Hamlin got them to laughing again, and then proposed a race home in their wet clothes, which they accepted, Mr. Hamlin, for respiratory reasons, lagging in their rear until he had the satisfaction of seeing them captured by the horrified Melinda in front of the kitchen, while he slipped past her and regained his own room. Here he changed his saturated clothes, tried to rub away a certain chilliness that was creeping over him, and lay down in his dressing gown to miserable reflections. He had nearly drowned the children and overexcited himself, in spite of his promise to the doctor! He would never again be intrusted with the care of the former nor be believed by the latter!

But events are not always logical in sequence. Mr. Hamlin went comfortably to sleep and into a profuse perspiration. He was awakened by a rapping at his door, and opening it, was surprised to find Mrs. Rivers with anxious inquiries as to his condition. “Indeed,” she said, with an emotion which even her prim reserve could not conceal, “I did not know until now how serious the accident was, and how but for you and Divine Providence my little girl might have been drowned. It seems Melinda saw it all.”

Inwardly objurgating the spying Melinda, but relieved that his playmates hadn’t broken their promise of secrecy, Mr. Hamlin laughed.

“I’m afraid that your little girl wouldn’t have got into the water at all but for me–and you must give all the credit of getting her out to the other fellow.” He stopped at the severe change in Mrs. Rivers’s expression, and added quite boyishly and with a sudden drop from his usual levity, “But please don’t keep the children away from me for all that, Mrs. Rivers.”

Mrs. Rivers did not, and the next day Jack and his companions sought fresh playing fields and some new story-telling pastures. Indeed, it was a fine sight to see this pale, handsome, elegantly dressed young fellow lounging along between a blue-checkered pinafored girl on one side and a barefooted boy on the other. The ranchmen turned and looked after him curiously. One, a rustic prodigal, reduced by dissipation to the swine-husks of ranching, saw fit to accost him familiarly.

“The last time I saw you dealing poker in Sacramento, Mr. Hamlin, I did not reckon to find you up here playing with a couple of kids.”

“No!” responded Mr. Hamlin suavely, “and yet I remember I was playing with some country idiots down there, and you were one of them. Well! understand that up here I prefer the kids. Don’t let me have to remind you of it.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Hamlin could not help noticing that for the next two or three days there were many callers at the ranch and that he was obliged in his walks to avoid the highroad on account of the impertinent curiosity of wayfarers. Some of them were of that sex which he would not have contented himself with simply calling “curious.”

“To think,” said Melinda confidently to her mistress, “that that thar Mrs. Stubbs, who wouldn’t go to the Hightown Hotel because there was a play actress thar, has been snoopin’ round here twice since that young feller came.”

Of this fact, however, Mr. Hamlin was blissfully unconscious.

Nevertheless, his temper was growing uncertain; the angle of his smart straw hat was becoming aggressive to strangers; his politeness sardonic. And now Sunday morning had come with an atmosphere of starched piety and well-soaped respectability at the rancho, and the children were to be taken with the rest of the family to the day-long service at Hightown. As these Sabbath pilgrimages filled the main road, he was fain to take himself and his loneliness to the trails and byways, and even to invade the haunts of some other elegant outcasts like himself–to wit, a crested hawk, a graceful wild cat beautifully marked, and an eloquently reticent rattlesnake. Mr. Hamlin eyed them without fear, and certainly without reproach. They were not out of their element.

Suddenly he heard his name called in a stentorian contralto. An impatient ejaculation rose to his lips, but died upon them as he turned. It was certainly Melinda, but in his present sensitive loneliness it struck him for the first time that he had never actually seen her before as she really was. Like most men in his profession he was a quick reader of thoughts and faces when he was interested, and although this was the same robust, long-limbed, sunburnt girl he had met, he now seemed to see through her triple incrustation of human vanity, conventional piety, and outrageous Sabbath finery an honest, sympathetic simplicity that commanded his respect.

“You are back early from church,” he said.

“Yes. One service is good enough for me when thar ain’t no special preacher,” she returned, “so I jest sez to Silas, ‘as I ain’t here to listen to the sisters cackle ye kin put to the buckboard and drive me home ez soon ez you please.'”

“And so his name is Silas,” suggested Mr. Hamlin cheerfully.

“Go ‘long with you, Mr. Hamlin, and don’t pester,” she returned, with heifer-like playfulness. “Well, Silas put to, and when we rose the hill here I saw your straw hat passin’ in the gulch, and sez to Silas, sez I, ‘Ye kin pull up here, for over yar is our new boarder, Jack Hamlin, and I’m goin’ to talk with him.’ ‘All right,’ sez he, ‘I’d sooner trust ye with that gay young gambolier every day of the week than with them saints down thar on Sunday. He deals ez straight ez he shoots, and is about as nigh onto a gentleman as they make ’em.'”

For one moment or two Miss Bird only saw Jack’s long lashes. When his eyes once more lifted they were shining. “And what did you say?” he said, with a short laugh.

“I told him he needn’t be Christopher Columbus to have discovered that.” She turned with a laugh toward Jack, to be met by the word “shake,” and an outstretched thin white hand which grasped her large red one with a frank, fraternal pressure.

“I didn’t come to tell ye that,” remarked Miss Bird as she sat down on a boulder, took off her yellow hat, and restacked her tawny mane under it, “but this: I reckoned I went to Sunday meetin’ as I ought ter. I kalkilated to hear considerable about ‘Faith’ and ‘Works,’ and sich, but I didn’t reckon to hear all about you from the Lord’s Prayer to the Doxology. You were in the special prayers ez a warnin’, in the sermon ez a text; they picked out hymns to fit ye! And always a drefful example and a visitation. And the rest o’ the tune it was all gabble, gabble by the brothers and sisters about you. I reckon, Mr. Hamlin, that they know everything you ever did since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, and a good deal more than you ever thought of doin’. The women is all dead set on convertin’ ye and savin’ ye by their own precious selves, and the men is ekally dead set on gettin’ rid o’ ye on that account.”

“And what did Seth and Mrs. Rivers say?” asked Hamlin composedly, but with kindling eyes.

“They stuck up for ye ez far ez they could. But ye see the parson hez got a holt upon Seth, havin’ caught him kissin’ a convert at camp meeting; and Deacon Turner knows suthin about Mrs. Rivers’s sister, who kicked over the pail and jumped the fence years ago, and she’s afeard a’ him. But what I wanted to tell ye was that they’re all comin’ up here to take a look at ye–some on ’em to- night. You ain’t afeard, are ye?” she added, with a loud laugh.

“Well, it looks rather desperate, doesn’t it?” returned Jack, with dancing eyes.

“I’ll trust ye for all that,” said Melinda. “And now I reckon I’ll trot along to the rancho. Ye needn’t offer ter see me home,” she added, as Jack made a movement to accompany her. “Everybody up here ain’t as fair-minded ez Silas and you, and Melinda Bird hez a character to lose! So long!” With this she cantered away, a little heavily, perhaps, adjusting her yellow hat with both hands as she clattered down the steep hill.

That afternoon Mr. Hamlin drew largely on his convalescence to mount a half-broken mustang, and in spite of the rising afternoon wind to gallop along the highroad in quite as mischievous and breezy a fashion. He was wont to allow his mustang’s nose to hang over the hind rails of wagons and buggies containing young couples, and to dash ahead of sober carryalls that held elderly “members in good standing.”

An accomplished rider, he picked up and brought back the flying parasol of Mrs. Deacon Stubbs without dismounting. He finally came home a little blown, but dangerously composed.

There was the usual Sunday evening gathering at Windy Hill Rancho– neighbors and their wives, deacons and the pastor–but their curiosity was not satisfied by the sight of Mr. Hamlin, who kept his own room and his own counsel. There was some desultory conversation, chiefly on church topics, for it was vaguely felt that a discussion of the advisability or getting rid of the guest of their host was somewhat difficult under this host’s roof, with the guest impending at any moment. Then a diversion was created by some of the church choir practicing the harmonium with the singing of certain more or less lugubrious anthems. Mrs. Rivers presently joined in, and in a somewhat faded soprano, which, however, still retained considerable musical taste and expression, sang, “Come, ye disconsolate.” The wind moaned over the deep-throated chimney in a weird harmony with the melancholy of that human appeal as Mrs. Rivers sang the first verse:–

“Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish, Come to the Mercy Seat, fervently kneel; Here bring your wounded hearts–here tell your anguish, Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal!”

A pause followed, and the long-drawn, half-human sigh of the mountain wind over the chimney seemed to mingle with the wail of the harmonium. And then, to their thrilled astonishment, a tenor voice, high, clear, but tenderly passionate, broke like a skylark over their heads in the lines of the second verse:–

“Joy of the desolate, Light of the straying, Hope of the penitent–fadeless and pure; Here speaks the Comforter, tenderly saying, Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot cure!”

The hymn was old and familiar enough, Heaven knows. It had been quite popular at funerals, and some who sat there had had its strange melancholy borne upon them in time of loss and tribulations, but never had they felt its full power before. Accustomed as they were to emotional appeal and to respond to it, as the singer’s voice died away above them, their very tears flowed and fell with that voice. A few sobbed aloud, and then a voice asked tremulously,–

“Who is it?”

“It’s Mr. Hamlin,” said Seth quietly. “I’ve heard him often hummin’ things before.”

There was another silence, and the voice of Deacon Stubbs broke in harshly,–

“It’s rank blasphemy.”

“If it’s rank blasphemy to sing the praise o’ God, not only better than some folks in the choir, but like an angel o’ light, I wish you’d do a little o’ that blaspheming on Sundays, Mr. Stubbs.”

The speaker was Mrs. Stubbs, and as Deacon Stubbs was a notoriously bad singer the shot told.

“If he’s sincere, why does he stand aloof? Why does he not join us?” asked the parson.

“He hasn’t been asked,” said Seth quietly. “If I ain’t mistaken this yer gathering this evening was specially to see how to get rid of him.”

There was a quick murmur of protest at this. The parson exchanged glances with the deacon and saw that they were hopelessly in the minority.

“I will ask him myself,” said Mrs. Rivers suddenly.

“So do, Sister Rivers; so do,” was the unmistakable response.

Mrs. Rivers left the room and returned in a few moments with a handsome young man, pale, elegant, composed, even to a grave indifference. What his eyes might have said was another thing; the long lashes were scarcely raised.

“I don’t mind playing a little,” he said quietly to Mrs. Rivers, as if continuing a conversation, “but you’ll have to let me trust my memory.”

“Then you–er–play the harmonium?” said the parson, with an attempt at formal courtesy.

“I was for a year or two the organist in the choir of Dr. Todd’s church at Sacramento,” returned Mr. Hamlin quietly.

The blank amazement on the faces of Deacons Stubbs and Turner and the parson was followed by wreathed smiles from the other auditors and especially from the ladies. Mr. Hamlin sat down to the instrument, and in another moment took possession of it as it had never been held before. He played from memory as he had implied, but it was the memory of a musician. He began with one or two familiar anthems, in which they all joined. A fragment of a mass and a Latin chant followed. An “Ave Maria” from an opera was his first secular departure, but his delighted audience did not detect it. Then he hurried them along in unfamiliar language to “O mio Fernando” and “Spiritu gentil,” which they fondly imagined were hymns, until, with crowning audacity, after a few preliminary chords of the “Miserere,” he landed them broken-hearted in the Trovatore’s donjon tower with “Non te scordar de mi.”

Amidst the applause he heard the preacher suavely explain that those Popish masses were always in the Latin language, and rose from the instrument satisfied with his experiment. Excusing himself as an invalid from joining them in a light collation in the dining room, and begging his hostess’s permission to retire, he nevertheless lingered a few moments by the door as the ladies filed out of the room, followed by the gentlemen, until Deacon Turner, who was bringing up the rear, was abreast of him. Here Mr. Hamlin became suddenly deeply interested in a framed pencil drawing which hung on the wall. It was evidently a schoolgirl’s amateur portrait, done by Mrs. Rivers. Deacon Turner halted quickly by his side as the others passed out–which was exactly what Mr. Hamlin expected.

“Do you know the face?” said the deacon eagerly.

Thanks to the faithful Melinda, Mr. Hamlin did know it perfectly. It was a pencil sketch of Mrs. Rivers’s youthfully erring sister. But he only said he thought he recognized a likeness to some one he had seen in Sacramento.

The deacon’s eye brightened. “Perhaps the same one–perhaps,” he added in a submissive and significant tone “a–er–painful story.”

“Rather–to him,” observed Hamlin quietly.

“How?–I–er–don’t understand,” said Deacon Turner.

“Well, the portrait looks like a lady I knew in Sacramento who had been in some trouble when she was a silly girl, but had got over it quietly. She was, however, troubled a good deal by some mean hound who was every now and then raking up the story wherever she went. Well, one of her friends–I might have been among them, I don’t exactly remember just now–challenged him, but although he had no conscientious convictions about slandering a woman, he had some about being shot for it, and declined. The consequence was he was cowhided once in the street, and the second time tarred and feathered and ridden on a rail out of town. That, I suppose, was what you meant by your ‘painful story.’ But is this the woman?”

“No, no,” said the deacon hurriedly, with a white face, “you have quite misunderstood.”

“But whose is this portrait?” persisted Jack.

“I believe that–I don’t know exactly–but I think it is a sister of Mrs. Rivers’s,” stammered the deacon.

“Then, of course, it isn’t the same woman,” said Jack in simulated indignation.

“Certainly–of course not,” returned the deacon.

“Phew!” said Jack. “That was a mighty close call. Lucky we were alone, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” said the deacon, with a feeble smile.

“Seth,” continued Jack, with a thoughtful air, “looks like a quiet man, but I shouldn’t like to have made that mistake about his sister-in-law before him. These quiet men are apt to shoot straight. Better keep this to ourselves.”

Deacon Turner not only kept the revelation to himself but apparently his own sacred person also, as he did not call again at Windy Hill Rancho during Mr. Hamlin’s stay. But he was exceedingly polite in his references to Jack, and alluded patronizingly to a “little chat” they had had together. And when the usual reaction took place in Mr. Hamlin’s favor and Jack was actually induced to perform on the organ at Hightown Church next Sunday, the deacon’s voice was loudest in his praise. Even Parson Greenwood allowed himself to be non-committal as to the truth of the rumor, largely circulated, that one of the most desperate gamblers in the State had been converted through his exhortations.

So, with breezy walks and games with the children, occasional confidences with Melinda and Silas, and the Sabbath “singing of anthems,” Mr. Hamlin’s three weeks of convalescence drew to a close. He had lately relaxed his habit of seclusion so far as to mingle with the company gathered for more social purposes at the rancho, and once or twice unbent so far as to satisfy their curiosity in regard to certain details of his profession.

“I have no personal knowledge of games of cards,” said Parson Greenwood patronizingly, “and think I am right in saying that our brothers and sisters are equally inexperienced. I am–ahem–far from believing, however, that entire ignorance of evil is the best preparation for combating it, and I should be glad if you’d explain to the company the intricacies of various games. There is one that you mentioned, with a–er–scriptural name.”

“Faro,” said Hamlin, with an unmoved face.

“Pharaoh,” repeated the parson gravely; “and one which you call ‘poker,’ which seems to require great self-control.”

“I couldn’t make you understand poker without your playing it,” said Jack decidedly.

“As long as we don’t gamble–that is, play for money–I see no objection,” returned the parson.

“And,” said Jack musingly, “you could use beans.”

It was agreed finally that there would be no falling from grace in their playing among themselves, in an inquiring Christian spirit, under Jack’s guidance, he having decided to abstain from card playing during his convalescence, and Jack permitted himself to be persuaded to show them the following evening.

It so chanced, however, that Dr. Duchesne, finding the end of Jack’s “cure” approaching, and not hearing from that interesting invalid, resolved to visit him at about this time. Having no chance to apprise Jack of his intention, on coming to Hightown at night he procured a conveyance at the depot to carry him to Windy Hill Rancho. The wind blew with its usual nocturnal rollicking persistency, and at the end of his turbulent drive it seemed almost impossible to make himself heard amongst the roaring of the pines and some astounding preoccupation of the inmates. After vainly knocking, the doctor pushed open the front door and entered. He rapped at the closed sitting room door, but receiving no reply, pushed it open upon the most unexpected and astounding scene he had ever witnessed. Around the centre table several respectable members of the Hightown Church, including the parson, were gathered with intense and eager faces playing poker, and behind the parson, with his hands in his pockets, carelessly lounged the doctor’s patient, the picture of health and vigor. A disused pack of cards was scattered on the floor, and before the gentle and precise Mrs. Rivers was heaped a pile of beans that would have filled a quart measure.

When Dr. Duchesne had tactfully retreated before the hurried and stammering apologies of his host and hostess, and was alone with Jack in his rooms, he turned to him with a gravity that was more than half affected and said, “How long, sir, did it take you to effect this corruption?”

“Upon my honor,” said Jack simply, “they played last night for the first time. And they forced me to show them. But,” added Jack after a significant pause, “I thought it would make the game livelier and be more of a moral lesson if I gave them nearly all good pat hands. So I ran in a cold deck on them–the first time I ever did such a thing in my life. I fixed up a pack of cards so that one had three tens, another three jacks, and another three queens, and so on up to three aces. In a minute they had all tumbled to the game, and you never saw such betting. Every man and woman there believed he or she had struck a sure thing, and staked accordingly. A new panful of beans was brought on, and Seth, your friend, banked for them. And at last the parson raked in the whole pile.”

“I suppose you gave him the three aces,” said Dr. Duchesne gloomily.

“The parson,” said Jack slowly, “HADN’T A SINGLE PAIR IN HIS HAND. It was the stoniest, deadest, neatest BLUFF I ever saw. And when he’d frightened off the last man who held out and laid that measly hand of his face down on that pile of kings, queens, and aces, and looked around the table as he raked in the pile, there was a smile of humble self-righteousness on his face that was worth double the money.”

A PUPIL OF CHESTNUT RIDGE

The schoolmaster of Chestnut Ridge was interrupted in his after- school solitude by the click of hoof and sound of voices on the little bridle path that led to the scant clearing in which his schoolhouse stood. He laid down his pen as the figures of a man and woman on horseback passed the windows and dismounted before the porch. He recognized the complacent, good-humored faces of Mr. and Mrs. Hoover, who owned a neighboring ranch of some importance and who were accounted well to do people by the community. Being a childless couple, however, while they generously contributed to the support of the little school, they had not added to its flock, and it was with some curiosity that the young schoolmaster greeted them and awaited the purport of their visit. This was protracted in delivery through a certain polite dalliance with the real subject characteristic of the Southwestern pioneer.

“Well, Almiry,” said Mr. Hoover, turning to his wife after the first greeting with the schoolmaster was over, “this makes me feel like old times, you bet! Why, I ain’t bin inside a schoolhouse since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Thar’s the benches, and the desks, and the books and all them ‘a b, abs,’ jest like the old days. Dear! Dear! But the teacher in those days was ez old and grizzled ez I be–and some o’ the scholars–no offense to you, Mr. Brooks–was older and bigger nor you. But times is changed: yet look, Almiry, if thar ain’t a hunk o’ stale gingerbread in that desk jest as it uster be! Lord! how it all comes back! Ez I was sayin’ only t’other day, we can’t be too grateful to our parents for givin’ us an eddication in our youth;” and Mr. Hoover, with the air of recalling an alma mater of sequestered gloom and cloistered erudition, gazed reverently around the new pine walls.

But Mrs. Hoover here intervened with a gracious appreciation of the schoolmaster’s youth after her usual kindly fashion. “And don’t you forget it, Hiram Hoover, that these young folks of to-day kin teach the old schoolmasters of ‘way back more’n you and I dream of. We’ve heard of your book larnin’, Mr. Brooks, afore this, and we’re proud to hev you here, even if the Lord has not pleased to give us the children to send to ye. But we’ve always paid our share in keeping up the school for others that was more favored, and now it looks as if He had not forgotten us, and ez if”–with a significant, half-shy glance at her husband and a corroborating nod from that gentleman–“ez if, reelly, we might be reckonin’ to send you a scholar ourselves.”

The young schoolmaster, sympathetic and sensitive, felt somewhat embarrassed. The allusion to his extreme youth, mollified though it was by the salve of praise from the tactful Mrs. Hoover, had annoyed him, and perhaps added to his slight confusion over the information she vouchsafed. He had not heard of any late addition to the Hoover family, he would not have been likely to, in his secluded habits; and although he was accustomed to the naive and direct simplicity of the pioneer, he could scarcely believe that this good lady was announcing a maternal expectation. He smiled vaguely and begged them to be seated.

“Ye see,” said Mr. Hoover, dropping upon a low bench, “the way the thing pans out is this. Almiry’s brother is a pow’ful preacher down the coast at San Antonio and hez settled down thar with a big Free Will Baptist Church congregation and a heap o’ land got from them Mexicans. Thar’s a lot o’ poor Spanish and Injin trash that belong to the land, and Almiry’s brother hez set about convertin’ ’em, givin’ ’em convickshion and religion, though the most of ’em is Papists and followers of the Scarlet Woman. Thar was an orphan, a little girl that he got outer the hands o’ them priests, kinder snatched as a brand from the burnin’, and he sent her to us to be brought up in the ways o’ the Lord, knowin’ that we had no children of our own. But we thought she oughter get the benefit o’ schoolin’ too, besides our own care, and we reckoned to bring her here reg’lar to school.”

Relieved and pleased to help the good-natured couple in the care of the homeless waif, albeit somewhat doubtful of their religious methods, the schoolmaster said he would be delighted to number her among his little flock. Had she already received any tuition?

“Only from them padres, ye know, things about saints, Virgin Marys, visions, and miracles,” put in Mrs. Hoover; “and we kinder thought ez you know Spanish you might be able to get rid o’ them in exchange for ‘conviction o’ sins’ and ‘justification by faith,’ ye know.”

“I’m afraid,” said Mr. Brooks, smiling at the thought of displacing the Church’s “mysteries” for certain corybantic displays and thaumaturgical exhibitions he had witnessed at the Dissenters’ camp meeting, “that I must leave all that to you, and I must caution you to be careful what you do lest you also shake her faith in the alphabet and the multiplication table.”

“Mebbee you’re right,” said Mrs. Hoover, mystified but good- natured; “but thar’s one thing more we oughter tell ye. She’s– she’s a trifle dark complected.”

The schoolmaster smiled. “Well?” he said patiently.

“She isn’t a nigger nor an Injin, ye know, but she’s kinder a half- Spanish, half-Mexican Injin, what they call ‘mes–mes'”–

“Mestiza,” suggested Mr. Brooks; “a half-breed or mongrel.”

“I reckon. Now thar wouldn’t be any objection to that, eh?” said Mr. Hoover a little uneasily.

“Not by me,” returned the schoolmaster cheerfully. “And although this school is state-aided it’s not a ‘public school’ in the eye of the law, so you have only the foolish prejudices of your neighbors to deal with.” He had recognized the reason of their hesitation and knew the strong racial antagonism held towards the negro and Indian by Mr. Hoover’s Southwestern compatriots, and he could not refrain from “rubbing it in.”

“They kin see,” interposed Mrs. Hoover, “that she’s not a nigger, for her hair don’t ‘kink,’ and a furrin Injin, of course, is different from one o’ our own.”

“If they hear her speak Spanish, and you simply say she is a foreigner, as she is, it will be all right,” said the schoolmaster smilingly. “Let her come, I’ll look after her.”

Much relieved, after a few more words the couple took their departure, the schoolmaster promising to call the next afternoon at the Hoovers’ ranch and meet his new scholar. “Ye might give us a hint or two how she oughter be fixed up afore she joins the school.”

The ranch was about four miles from the schoolhouse, and as Mr. Brooks drew rein before the Hoovers’ gate he appreciated the devotion of the couple who were willing to send the child that distance twice a day. The house, with its outbuildings, was on a more liberal scale than its neighbors, and showed few of the makeshifts and half-hearted advances towards permanent occupation common to the Southwestern pioneers, who were more or less nomads in instinct and circumstance. He was ushered into a well-furnished sitting room, whose glaring freshness was subdued and repressed by black-framed engravings of scriptural subjects. As Mr. Brooks glanced at them and recalled the schoolrooms of the old missions, with their monastic shadows which half hid the gaudy, tinseled saints and flaming or ensanguined hearts upon the walls, he feared that the little waif of Mother Church had not gained any cheerfulness in the exchange.

As she entered the room with Mrs. Hoover, her large dark eyes–the most notable feature in her small face–seemed to sustain the schoolmaster’s fanciful fear in their half-frightened wonder. She was clinging closely to Mrs. Hoover’s side, as if recognizing the good woman’s maternal kindness even while doubtful of her purpose; but on the schoolmaster addressing her in Spanish, a singular change took place in their relative positions. A quick look of intelligence came into her melancholy eyes, and with it a slight consciousness of superiority to her protectors that was embarrassing to him. For the rest he observed merely that she was small and slightly built, although her figure was hidden in a long “check apron” or calico pinafore with sleeves–a local garment– which was utterly incongruous with her originality. Her skin was olive, inclining to yellow, or rather to that exquisite shade of buff to be seen in the new bark of the madrono. Her face was oval, and her mouth small and childlike, with little to suggest the aboriginal type in her other features.

The master’s questions elicited from the child the fact that she could read and write, that she knew her “Hail Mary” and creed (happily the Protestant Mrs. Hoover was unable to follow this questioning), but he also elicited the more disturbing fact that her replies and confidences suggested a certain familiarity and equality of condition which he could only set down to his own youthfulness of appearance. He was apprehensive that she might even make some remark regarding Mrs. Hoover, and was not sorry that the latter did not understand Spanish. But before he left he managed to speak with Mrs. Hoover alone and suggested a change in the costume of the pupil when she came to school. “The better she is dressed,” suggested the wily young diplomat, “the less likely is she to awaken any suspicion of her race.”

“Now that’s jest what’s botherin’ me, Mr. Brooks,” returned Mrs. Hoover, with a troubled face, “for you see she is a growin’ girl,” and she concluded, with some embarrassment, “I can’t quite make up my mind how to dress her.”

“How old is she?” asked the master abruptly.

“Goin’ on twelve, but,”–and Mrs. Hoover again hesitated.

“Why, two of my scholars, the Bromly girls, are over fourteen,” said the master, “and you know how they are dressed;” but here he hesitated in his turn. It had just occurred to him that the little waif was from the extreme South, and the precocious maturity of the mixed races there was well known. He even remembered, to his alarm, to have seen brides of twelve and mothers of fourteen among the native villagers. This might also account for the suggestion of equality in her manner, and even for a slight coquettishness which he thought he had noticed in her when he had addressed her playfully as a muchacha. “I should dress her in something Spanish,” he said hurriedly, “something white, you know, with plenty of flounces and a little black lace, or a black silk skirt and a lace scarf, you know. She’ll be all right if you don’t make her look like a servant or a dependent,” he added, with a show of confidence he was far from feeling. “But you haven’t told me her name,” he concluded.

“As we’re reckonin’ to adopt her,” said Mrs. Hoover gravely, “you’ll give her ours.”

“But I can’t call her ‘Miss Hoover,'” suggested the master; “what’s her first name?”

“We was thinkin’ o’ ‘Serafina Ann,'” said Mrs. Hoover with more gravity.

“But what is her name?” persisted the master.

“Well,” returned Mrs. Hoover, with a troubled look, “me and Hiram consider it’s a heathenish sort of name for a young gal, but you’ll find it in my brother’s letter.” She took a letter from under the lid of a large Bible on the table and pointed to a passage in it.

“The child was christened ‘Concepcion,'” read the master. “Why, that’s one of the Marys!”

“The which?” asked Mrs. Hoover severely.

“One of the titles of the Virgin Mary; ‘Maria de la Concepcion,'” said Mr. Brooks glibly.

“It don’t sound much like anythin’ so Christian and decent as ‘Maria’ or ‘Mary,'” returned Mrs. Hoover suspiciously.

“But the abbreviation, ‘Concha,’ is very pretty. In fact it’s just the thing, it’s so very Spanish,” returned the master decisively. “And you know that the squaw who hangs about the mining camp is called ‘Reservation Ann,’ and old Mrs. Parkins’s negro cook is called ‘Aunt Serafina,’ so ‘Serafina Ann’ is too suggestive. ‘Concha Hoover’ ‘s the name.”

“P’r’aps you’re right,” said Mrs. Hoover meditatively.

“And dress her so she’ll look like her name and you’ll be all right,” said the master gayly as he took his departure.

Nevertheless, it was with some anxiety the next morning he heard the sound of hoofs on the rocky bridle path leading to the schoolhouse. He had already informed his little flock of the probable addition to their numbers and their breathless curiosity now accented the appearance of Mr. Hoover riding past the window, followed by a little figure on horseback, half hidden in the graceful folds of a serape. The next moment they dismounted at the porch, the serape was cast aside, and the new scholar entered.

A little alarmed even in his admiration, the master nevertheless thought he had never seen a more dainty figure. Her heavily flounced white skirt stopped short just above her white-stockinged ankles and little feet, hidden in white satin, low-quartered slippers. Her black silk, shell-like jacket half clasped her stayless bust clad in an under-bodice of soft muslin that faintly outlined a contour which struck him as already womanly. A black lace veil which had protected her head, she had on entering slipped down to her shoulders with a graceful gesture, leaving one end of it pinned to her hair by a rose above her little yellow ear. The whole figure was so inconsistent with its present setting that the master inwardly resolved to suggest a modification of it to Mrs. Hoover as he, with great gravity, however, led the girl to the seat he had prepared for her. Mr. Hoover, who had been assisting discipline as he conscientiously believed by gazing with hushed, reverent reminiscence on the walls, here whispered behind his large hand that he would call for her at “four o’clock” and tiptoed out of the schoolroom. The master, who felt that everything would depend upon his repressing the children’s exuberant curiosity and maintaining the discipline of the school for the next few minutes, with supernatural gravity addressed the young girl in Spanish and placed before her a few slight elementary tasks. Perhaps the strangeness of the language, perhaps the unwonted seriousness of the master, perhaps also the impassibility of the young stranger herself, all contributed to arrest the expanding smiles on little faces, to check their wandering eyes, and hush their eager whispers. By degrees heads were again lowered over their tasks, the scratching of pencils on slates, and the far-off rapping of Woodpeckers again indicated the normal quiet of the schoolroom, and the master knew he had triumphed, and the ordeal was past.

But not as regarded himself, for although the new pupil had accepted his instructions with childlike submissiveness, and even as it seemed to him with childlike comprehension, he could not help noticing that she occasionally glanced at him with a demure suggestion of some understanding between them, or as if they were playing at master and pupil. This naturally annoyed him and perhaps added a severer dignity to his manner, which did not appear to be effective, however, and which he fancied secretly amused her. Was she covertly laughing at him? Yet against this, once or twice, as her big eyes wandered from her task over the room, they encountered the curious gaze of the other children, and he fancied he saw an exchange of that freemasonry of intelligence common to children in the presence of their elders even when strangers to each other. He looked forward to recess to see how she would get on with her companions; he knew that this would settle her status in the school, and perhaps elsewhere. Even her limited English vocabulary would not in any way affect that instinctive, childlike test of superiority, but he was surprised when the hour of recess came and he had explained to her in Spanish and English its purpose, to see her quietly put her arm around the waist of Matilda Bromly, the tallest girl in the school, as the two whisked themselves off to the playground. She was a mere child after all!

Other things seemed to confirm this opinion. Later, when the children returned from recess, the young stranger had instantly become a popular idol, and had evidently dispensed her favors and patronage generously. The elder Bromly girl was wearing her lace veil, another had possession of her handkerchief, and a third displayed the rose which had adorned her left ear, things of which the master was obliged to take note with a view of returning them to the prodigal little barbarian at the close of school. Later he was, however, much perplexed by the mysterious passage under the desks of some unknown object which apparently was making the circuit of the school. With the annoyed consciousness that he was perhaps unwittingly participating in some game, he finally “nailed it” in the possession of Demosthenes Walker, aged six, to the spontaneous outcry of “Cotched!” from the whole school. When produced from Master Walker’s desk in company with a horned toad and a piece of gingerbread, it was found to be Concha’s white satin slipper, the young girl herself, meanwhile, bending demurely over her task with the bereft foot tucked up like a bird’s under her skirt. The master, reserving reproof of this and other enormities until later, contented himself with commanding the slipper to be brought to him, when he took it to her with the satirical remark in Spanish that the schoolroom was not a dressing room–Camara para vestirse. To his surprise, however, she smilingly held out the tiny stockinged foot with a singular combination of the spoiled child and the coquettish senorita, and remained with it extended as if waiting for him to kneel and replace the slipper. But he laid it carefully on her desk.

“Put it on at once,” he said in English.

There was no mistaking the tone of his voice, whatever his language. Concha darted a quick look at him like the momentary resentment of an animal, but almost as quickly her eyes became suffused, and with a hurried movement she put on the slipper.

“Please, sir, it dropped off and Jimmy Snyder passed it on,” said a small explanatory voice among the benches.

“Silence!” said the master.

Nevertheless, he was glad to see that the school had not noticed the girl’s familiarity even though they thought him “hard.” He was not sure upon reflection but that he had magnified her offense and had been unnecessarily severe, and this feeling was augmented by his occasionally finding her looking at him with the melancholy, wondering eyes of a chidden animal. Later, as he was moving among the desks’ overlooking the tasks of the individual pupils, he observed from a distance that her head was bent over her desk while her lips were moving as if repeating to herself her lesson, and that afterwards, with a swift look around the room to assure herself that she was unobserved, she made a hurried sign of the cross. It occurred to him that this might have followed some penitential prayer of the child, and remembering her tuition by the padres it gave him an idea. He dismissed school a few moments earlier in order that he might speak to her alone before Mr. Hoover arrived.

Referring to the slipper incident and receiving her assurances that “she” (the slipper) was much too large and fell often “so,” a fact really established by demonstration, he seized his opportunity. “But tell me, when you were with the padre and your slipper fell off, you did not expect him to put it on for you?”

Concha looked at him coyly and then said triumphantly, “Ah, no! but he was a priest, and you are a young caballero.”

Yet even after this audacity Mr. Brooks found he could only recommend to Mr. Hoover a change in the young girl’s slippers, the absence of the rose-pinned veil, and the substitution of a sunbonnet. For the rest he must trust to circumstances. As Mr. Hoover–who with large paternal optimism had professed to see already an improvement in her–helped her into the saddle, the schoolmaster could not help noticing that she had evidently expected him to perform that act of courtesy, and that she looked correspondingly reproachful.

“The holy fathers used sometimes to let me ride with them on their mules,” said Concha, leaning over her saddle towards the schoolmaster.

“Eh, what, missy?” said the Protestant Mr. Hoover, pricking up his ears. “Now you just listen to Mr. Brooks’s doctrines, and never mind them Papists,” he added as he rode away, with the firm conviction that the master had already commenced the task of her spiritual conversion.

The next day the master awoke to find his little school famous. Whatever were the exaggerations or whatever the fancies carried home to their parents by the children, the result was an overwhelming interest in the proceedings and personnel of the school by the whole district. People had already called at the Hoover ranch to see Mrs. Hoover’s pretty adopted daughter. The master, on his way to the schoolroom that morning, had found a few woodmen and charcoal burners lounging on the bridle path that led from the main road. Two or three parents accompanied their children to school, asserting they had just dropped in to see how “Aramanta” or “Tommy” were “gettin’ on.” As the school began to assemble several unfamiliar faces passed the windows or were boldly flattened against the glass. The little schoolhouse had not seen such a gathering since it had been borrowed for a political meeting in the previous autumn. And the master noticed with some concern that many of the faces were the same which he had seen uplifted to the glittering periods of Colonel Starbottle, “the war horse of the Democracy.”

For he could not shut his eyes to the fact that they came from no mere curiosity to see the novel and bizarre; no appreciation of mere picturesqueness or beauty; and alas! from no enthusiasm for the progression of education. He knew the people among whom he had lived, and he realized the fatal question of “color” had been raised in some mysterious way by those Southwestern emigrants who had carried into this “free state” their inherited prejudices. A few words convinced him that the unhappy children had variously described the complexion of their new fellow pupil, and it was believed that the “No’th’n” schoolmaster, aided and abetted by “capital” in the person of Hiram Hoover, had introduced either a “nigger wench,” a “Chinese girl,” or an “Injin baby” to the same educational privileges as the “pure whites,” and so contaminated the sons of freemen in their very nests. He was able to reassure many that the child was of Spanish origin, but a majority preferred the evidence of their own senses, and lingered for that purpose. As the hour for her appearance drew near and passed, he was seized with a sudden fear that she might not come, that Mr. Hoover had been prevailed upon by his compatriots, in view of the excitement, to withdraw her from the school. But a faint cheer from the bridle path satisfied him, and the next moment a little retinue swept by the window, and he understood. The Hoovers had evidently determined to accent the Spanish character of their little charge. Concha, with a black riding skirt over her flounces, was now mounted on a handsome pinto mustang glittering with silver trappings, accompanied by a vaquero in a velvet jacket, Mr. Hoover bringing up the rear. He, as he informed the master, had merely come to show the way to the vaquero, who hereafter would always accompany the child to and from school. Whether or not he had been induced to this display by the excitement did not transpire. Enough that the effect was a success. The riding skirt and her mustang’s fripperies had added to Concha’s piquancy, and if her origin was still doubted by some, the child herself was accepted with enthusiasm. The parents who were spectators were proud of this distinguished accession to their children’s playmates, and when she dismounted amid the acclaim of her little companions, it was with the aplomb of a queen.

The master alone foresaw trouble in this encouragement of her precocious manner. He received her quietly, and when she had removed her riding skirt, glancing at her feet, said approvingly, “I am glad to see you have changed your slippers; I hope they fit you more firmly than the others.”

The child shrugged her shoulders. “Quien sabe. But Pedro (the vaquero) will help me now on my horse when he comes for me.”

The master understood the characteristic non sequitur as an allusion to his want of gallantry on the previous day, but took no notice of it. Nevertheless, he was pleased to see during the day that she was paying more attention to her studies, although they were generally rehearsed with the languid indifference to all mental accomplishment which belonged to her race. Once he thought to stimulate her activity through her personal vanity.

“Why can you not learn as quickly as Matilda Bromly? She is only two years older than you,” he suggested.

“Ah! Mother of God!–why does she then try to wear roses like me? And with that hair. It becomes her not.”

The master became thus aware for the first time that the elder Bromly girl, in “the sincerest form of flattery” to her idol, was wearing a yellow rose in her tawny locks, and, further, that Master Bromly with exquisite humor had burlesqued his sister’s imitation with a very small carrot stuck above his left ear. This the master promptly removed, adding an additional sum to the humorist’s already overflowing slate by way of penance, and returned to Concha. “But wouldn’t you like to be as clever as she?–you can if you will only learn.”

“What for should I? Look you; she has a devotion for the tall one– the boy Brown! Ah! I want him not.”

Yet, notwithstanding this lack of noble ambition, Concha seemed to have absorbed the “devotion” of the boys, big and little, and as the master presently discovered even that of many of the adult population. There were always loungers on the bridle path at the opening and closing of school, and the vaquero, who now always accompanied her, became an object of envy. Possibly this caused the master to observe him closely. He was tall and thin, with a smooth complexionless face, but to the master’s astonishment he had the blue gray eye of the higher or Castilian type of native Californian. Further inquiry proved that he was a son of one of the old impoverished Spanish grant holders whose leagues and cattle had been mortgaged to the Hoovers, who now retained the son to control the live stock “on shares.” “It looks kinder ez ef he might hev an eye on that poorty little gal when she’s an age to marry,” suggested a jealous swain. For several days the girl submitted to her school tasks with her usual languid indifference and did not again transgress the ordinary rules. Nor did Mr. Brooks again refer to their hopeless conversation. But one afternoon he noticed that in the silence and preoccupation of the class she had substituted another volume for her text-book and was perusing it with the articulating lips of the unpracticed reader. He demanded it from her. With blazing eyes and both hands thrust into her desk she refused and defied him. Mr. Brooks slipped his arms around her waist, quietly lifted her from the bench–feeling her little teeth pierce the back of his hand as he did so, but secured the book. Two of the elder boys and girls had risen with excited faces.

“Sit down!” said the master sternly.

They resumed their places with awed looks. The master examined the book. It was a little Spanish prayer book. “You were reading this?” he said in her own tongue.

“Yes. You shall not prevent me!” she burst out. “Mother of God! THEY will not let me read it at the ranch. They would take it from me. And now YOU!”

“You may read it when and where you like, except when you should be studying your lessons,” returned the master quietly. “You may keep it here in your desk and peruse it at recess. Come to me for it then. You are not fit to read it now.”

The girl looked up with astounded eyes, which in the capriciousness of her passionate nature the next moment filled with tears. Then dropping on her knees she caught the master’s bitten hand and covered it with tears and kisses. But he quietly disengaged it and lifted her to her seat. There was a sniffling sound among the benches, which, however, quickly subsided as he glanced around the room, and the incident ended.

Regularly thereafter she took her prayer book back at recess and disappeared with the children, finding, as he afterwards learned, a seat under a secluded buckeye tree, where she was not disturbed by them until her orisons were concluded. The children must have remained loyal to some command of hers, for the incident and this custom were never told out of school, and the master did not consider it his duty to inform Mr. or Mrs. Hoover. If the child could recognize some check–even if it were deemed by some a superstitious one–over her capricious and precocious nature, why should he interfere?

One day at recess he presently became conscious of the ceasing of those small voices in the woods around the schoolhouse, which were always as familiar and pleasant to him in his seclusion as the song of their playfellows–the birds themselves. The continued silence at last awakened his concern and curiosity. He had seldom intruded upon or participated in their games or amusements, remembering when a boy himself the heavy incompatibility of the best intentioned adult intruder to even the most hypocritically polite child at such a moment. A sense of duty, however, impelled him to step beyond the schoolhouse, where to his astonishment he found the adjacent woods empty and soundless. He was relieved, however, after penetrating its recesses, to hear the distant sound of small applause and the unmistakable choking gasps of Johnny Stidger’s pocket accordion. Following the sound he came at last upon a little hollow among the sycamores, where the children were disposed in a ring, in the centre of which, with a handkerchief in each hand, Concha the melancholy!–Concha the devout!–was dancing that most extravagant feat of the fandango–the audacious sembicuaca!

Yet, in spite of her rude and uncertain accompaniment, she was dancing it with a grace, precision, and lightness that was wonderful; in spite of its doubtful poses and seductive languors she was dancing it with the artless gayety and innocence–perhaps from the suggestion of her tiny figure–of a mere child among an audience of children. Dancing it alone she assumed the parts of the man and woman; advancing, retreating, coquetting, rejecting, coyly bewitching, and at last yielding as lightly and as immaterially as the flickering shadows that fell upon them from the waving trees overhead. The master was fascinated yet troubled. What if there had been older spectators? Would the parents take the performance as innocently as the performer and her little audience? He thought it necessary later to suggest this delicately to the child. Her temper rose, her eyes flashed.

“Ah, the slipper, she is forbidden. The prayer book–she must not. The dance, it is not good. Truly, there is nothing.”

For several days she sulked. One morning she did not come to school, nor the next. At the close of the third day the master called at the Hoovers’ ranch.

Mrs. Hoover met him embarrassedly in the hall. “I was sayin’ to Hiram he ought to tell ye, but he didn’t like to till it was certain. Concha’s gone.”

“Gone?” echoed the master.

“Yes. Run off with Pedro. Married to him yesterday by the Popish priest at the mission.”

“Married! That child?”

“She wasn’t no child, Mr. Brooks. We were deceived. My brother was a fool, and men don’t understand these things. She was a grown woman–accordin’ to these folks’ ways and ages–when she kem here. And that’s what bothered me.”

There was a week’s excitement at Chestnut Ridge, but it pleased the master to know that while the children grieved for the loss of Concha they never seemed to understand why she had gone.

DICK BOYLE’S BUSINESS CARD

The Sage Wood and Dead Flat stage coach was waiting before the station. The Pine Barrens mail wagon that connected with it was long overdue, with its transfer passengers, and the station had relapsed into listless expectation. Even the humors of Dick Boyle, the Chicago “drummer,”–and, so far, the solitary passenger–which had diverted the waiting loungers, began to fail in effect, though the cheerfulness of the humorist was unabated. The ostlers had slunk back into the stables, the station keeper and stage driver had reduced their conversation to impatient monosyllables, as if each thought the other responsible for the delay. A solitary Indian, wrapped in a commissary blanket and covered by a cast-off tall hat, crouched against the wall of the station looking stolidly at nothing. The station itself, a long, rambling building containing its entire accommodation for man and beast under one monotonous, shed-like roof, offered nothing to attract the eye. Still less the prospect, on the one side two miles of arid waste to the stunted, far-spaced pines in the distance, known as the “Barrens;” on the other an apparently limitless level with darker patches of sage brush, like the scars of burnt-out fires.

Dick Boyle approached the motionless Indian as a possible relief. “YOU don’t seem to care much if school keeps or not, do you, Lo?”

The Indian, who had been half crouching on his upturned soles, here straightened himself with a lithe, animal-like movement, and stood up. Boyle took hold of a corner of his blanket and examined it critically.

“Gov’ment ain’t pampering you with A1 goods, Lo! I reckon the agent charged ’em four dollars for that. Our firm could have delivered them to you for 2 dols. 37 cents, and thrown in a box of beads in the bargain. Suthin like this!” He took from his pocket a small box containing a gaudy bead necklace and held it up before the Indian.

The savage, who had regarded him–or rather looked beyond him–with the tolerating indifference of one interrupted by a frisking inferior animal, here suddenly changed his expression. A look of childish eagerness came into his gloomy face; he reached out his hand for the trinket.

“Hol’ on!” said Boyle, hesitating for a moment; then he suddenly ejaculated, “Well! take it, and one o’ these,” and drew a business card from his pocket, which he stuck in the band of the battered tall hat of the aborigine. “There! show that to your friends, and when you’re wantin’ anything in our line”–

The interrupting roar of laughter, coming from the box seat of the coach, was probably what Boyle was expecting, for he turned away demurely and walked towards the coach. “All right, boys! I’ve squared the noble red man, and the star of empire is taking its westward way. And I reckon our firm will do the ‘Great Father’ business for him at about half the price that it is done in Washington.”

But at this point the ostlers came hurrying out of the stables. “She’s comin’,” said one. “That’s her dust just behind the Lone Pine–and by the way she’s racin’ I reckon she’s comin’ in mighty light.”

“That’s so,” said the mail agent, standing up on the box seat for a better view, “but darned ef I kin see any outside passengers. I reckon we haven’t waited for much.”

Indeed, as the galloping horses of the incoming vehicle pulled out of the hanging dust in the distance, the solitary driver could be seen urging on his team. In a few moments more they had halted at the lower end of the station.

“Wonder what’s up!” said the mail agent.

“Nothin’! Only a big Injin scare at Pine Barrens,” said one of the ostlers. “Injins doin’ ghost dancin’–or suthin like that–and the passengers just skunked out and went on by the other line. Thar’s only one ez dar come–and she’s a lady.”

“A lady?” echoed Boyle.

“Yes,” answered the driver, taking a deliberate survey of a tall, graceful girl who, waiving the gallant assistance of the station keeper, had leaped unaided from the vehicle. “A lady–and the fort commandant’s darter at that! She’s clar grit, you bet–a chip o’ the old block. And all this means, sonny, that you’re to give up that box seat to HER. Miss Julia Cantire don’t take anythin’ less when I’m around.”

The young lady was already walking, directly and composedly, towards the waiting coach–erect, self-contained, well gloved and booted, and clothed, even in her dust cloak and cape of plain ashen merino, with the unmistakable panoply of taste and superiority. A good-sized aquiline nose, which made her handsome mouth look smaller; gray eyes, with an occasional humid yellow sparkle in their depths; brown penciled eyebrows, and brown tendrils of hair, all seemed to Boyle to be charmingly framed in by the silver gray veil twisted around her neck and under her oval chin. In her sober tints she appeared to him to have evoked a harmony even out of the dreadful dust around them. What HE appeared to her was not so plain; she looked him over–he was rather short; through him–he was easily penetrable; and then her eyes rested with a frank recognition on the driver.

“Good-morning, Mr. Foster,” she said, with a smile.

“Mornin’, miss. I hear they’re havin’ an Injin scare over at the Barrens. I reckon them men must feel mighty mean at bein’ stumped by a lady!”

“I don’t think they believed I would go, and some of them had their wives with them,” returned the young lady indifferently; “besides, they are Eastern people, who don’t know Indians as well as WE do, Mr. Foster.”

The driver blushed with pleasure at the association. “Yes, ma’am,” he laughed, “I reckon the sight of even old ‘Fleas in the Blanket’ over there,” pointing to the Indian, who was walking stolidly away from the station, “would frighten ’em out o’ their boots. And yet he’s got inside his hat the business card o’ this gentleman–Mr. Dick Boyle, traveling for the big firm o’ Fletcher & Co. of Chicago”–he interpolated, rising suddenly to the formal heights of polite introduction; “so it sorter looks ez ef any SKELPIN’ was to be done it might be the other way round, ha! ha!”

Miss Cantire accepted the introduction and the joke with polite but cool abstraction, and climbed lightly into the box seat as the mail bags and a quantity of luggage–evidently belonging to the evading passengers–were quickly transferred to the coach. But for his fair companion, the driver would probably have given profane voice to his conviction that his vehicle was used as a “d—-d baggage truck,” but he only smiled grimly, gathered up his reins, and flicked his whip. The coach plunged forward into the dust, which instantly rose around it, and made it thereafter a mere cloud in the distance. Some of that dust for a moment overtook and hid the Indian, walking stolidly in its track, but he emerged from it at an angle, with a quickened pace and a peculiar halting trot. Yet that trot was so well sustained that in an hour he had reached a fringe of rocks and low bushes hitherto invisible through the irregularities of the apparently level plain, into which he plunged and disappeared. The dust cloud which indicated the coach– probably owing to these same irregularities–had long since been lost on the visible horizon.

The fringe which received him was really the rim of a depression quite concealed from the surface of the plain,–which it followed for some miles through a tangled trough-like bottom of low trees and underbrush,–and was a natural cover for wolves, coyotes, and occasionally bears, whose half-human footprint might have deceived a stranger. This did not, however, divert the Indian, who, trotting still doggedly on, paused only to examine another footprint–much more frequent–the smooth, inward-toed track of moccasins. The thicket grew more dense and difficult as he went on, yet he seemed to glide through its density and darkness–an obscurity that now seemed to be stirred by other moving objects, dimly seen, and as uncertain and intangible as sunlit leaves thrilled by the wind, yet bearing a strange resemblance to human figures! Pressing a few yards further, he himself presently became a part of this shadowy procession, which on closer scrutiny revealed itself as a single file of Indians, following each other in the same tireless trot. The woods and underbrush were full of them; all moving on, as he had moved, in a line parallel with the vanishing coach. Sometimes through the openings a bared painted limb, a crest of feathers, or a strip of gaudy blanket was visible, but nothing more. And yet only a few hundred yards away stretched the dusky, silent plain–vacant of sound or motion!

Meanwhile the Sage Wood and Pine Barren stage coach, profoundly oblivious–after the manner of all human invention–of everything but its regular function, toiled dustily out of the higher plain and began the grateful descent of a wooded canyon, which was, in fact, the culminating point of the depression, just described, along which the shadowy procession was slowly advancing, hardly a mile in the rear and flank of the vehicle. Miss Julia Cantire, who had faced the dust volleys of the plain unflinchingly, as became a soldier’s daughter, here stood upright and shook herself–her pretty head and figure emerging like a goddess from the enveloping silver cloud. At least Mr. Boyle, relegated to the back seat, thought so–although her conversation and attentions had been chiefly directed to the driver and mail agent. Once, when he had light-heartedly addressed a remark to her, it had been received with a distinct but unpromising politeness that had made him desist from further attempts, yet without abatement of his cheerfulness, or resentment of the evident amusement his two male companions got out of his “snub.” Indeed, it is to be feared that Miss Julia had certain prejudices of position, and may have thought that a “drummer”–or commercial traveler–was no more fitting company for the daughter of a major than an ordinary peddler. But it was more probable that Mr. Boyle’s reputation as a humorist–a teller of funny stories and a boon companion of men–was inconsistent with the feminine ideal of high and exalted manhood. The man who “sets the table in a roar” is apt to be secretly detested by the sex, to say nothing of the other obvious reasons why Juliets do not like Mercutios!

For some such cause as this Dick Boyle was obliged to amuse himself silently, alone on the back seat, with those liberal powers of observation which nature had given him. On entering the canyon he had noticed the devious route the coach had taken to reach it, and had already invented an improved route which should enter the depression at the point where the Indians had already (unknown to him) plunged into it, and had conceived a road through the tangled brush that would shorten the distance by some miles. He had figured it out, and believed that it “would pay.” But by this time they were beginning the somewhat steep and difficult ascent of the canyon on the other side. The vehicle had not crawled many yards before it stopped. Dick Boyle glanced around. Miss Cantire was getting down. She had expressed a wish to walk the rest of the ascent, and the coach was to wait for her at the top. Foster had effusively begged her to take her own time–“there was no hurry!” Boyle glanced a little longingly after her graceful figure, released from her cramped position on the box, as it flitted youthfully in and out of the wayside trees; he would like to have joined her in the woodland ramble, but even his good nature was not proof against her indifference. At a turn in the road they lost sight of her, and, as the driver and mail agent were deep in a discussion about the indistinct track, Boyle lapsed into his silent study of the country. Suddenly he uttered a slight exclamation, and quietly slipped from the back of the toiling coach to the ground. The action was, however, quickly noted by the driver, who promptly put his foot on the brake and pulled up. “Wot’s up now?” he growled.

Boyle did not reply, but ran back a few steps and began searching eagerly on the ground.

“Lost suthin?” asked Foster.

“Found something,” said Boyle, picking up a small object. “Look at that! D—-d if it isn’t the card I gave that Indian four hours ago at the station!” He held up the card.

“Look yer, sonny,” retorted Foster gravely, “ef yer wantin’ to get out and hang round Miss Cantire, why don’t yer say so at oncet? That story won’t wash!”

“Fact!” continued Boyle eagerly. “It’s the same card I stuck in his hat–there’s the greasy mark in the corner. How the devil did it–how did HE get here?”

“Better ax him,” said Foster grimly, “ef he’s anywhere round.”

“But I say, Foster, I don’t like the look of this at all! Miss Cantire is alone, and”–

But a burst of laughter from Foster and the mail agent interrupted him. “That’s so,” said Foster. “That’s your best holt! Keep it up! You jest tell her that! Say thar’s another Injin skeer on; that that thar bloodthirsty ole ‘Fleas in His Blanket’ is on the warpath, and you’re goin’ to shed the last drop o’ your blood defendin’ her! That’ll fetch her, and she ain’t bin treatin’ you well! G’lang!”

The horses started forward under Foster’s whip, leaving Boyle standing there, half inclined to join in the laugh against himself,