Kitobni o'qish: «From Sand Hill to Pine»

A NIECE OF SNAPSHOT HARRY’S

I

There was a slight jarring though the whole frame of the coach, a grinding and hissing from the brakes, and then a sudden jolt as the vehicle ran upon and recoiled from the taut pole-straps of the now arrested horses. The murmur of a voice in the road was heard, followed by the impatient accents of Yuba Bill, the driver.

“Wha-a-t? Speak up, can’t ye?”

Here the voice uttered something in a louder key, but equally unintelligible to the now interested and fully awakened passengers.

One of them dropped the window nearest him and looked out. He could see the faint glistening of a rain-washed lantern near the wheelers’ heads, mingling with the stronger coach lights, and the glow of a distant open cabin door through the leaves and branches of the roadside. The sound of falling rain on the roof, a soft swaying of wind-tossed trees, and an impatient movement on the box-seat were all they heard. Then Yuba Bill’s voice rose again, apparently in answer to the other.

“Why, that’s half a mile away!”

“Yes, but ye might have dropped onto it in the dark, and it’s all on the down grade,” responded the strange voice more audibly.

The passengers were now thoroughly aroused.

“What’s up, Ned?” asked the one at the window of the nearest of two figures that had descended from the box.

“Tree fallen across the road,” said Ned, the expressman, briefly.

“I don’t see no tree,” responded the passenger, leaning out of the window towards the obscurity ahead.

“Now, that’s onfortnit!” said Yuba Bill grimly; “but ef any gentleman will only lend him an opery glass, mebbe he can see round the curve and over the other side o’ the hill where it is. Now, then,” addressing the stranger with the lantern, “bring along your axes, can’t ye?”

“Here’s one, Bill,” said an officious outside passenger, producing the instrument he had taken from its strap in the boot. It was the “regulation” axe, beautifully shaped, highly polished, and utterly ineffective, as Bill well knew.

“We ain’t cuttin’ no kindlin’s,” he said scornfully; then he added brusquely to the stranger: “Fetch out your biggest wood axe—you’ve got one, ye know—and look sharp.”

“I don’t think Bill need be so d–d rough with the stranger, considering he’s saved the coach a very bad smash,” suggested a reflective young journalist in the next seat. “He talks as if the man was responsible.”

“He ain’t quite sure if that isn’t the fact,” said the express messenger, in a lowered voice.

“Why? What do you mean?” clamored the others excitedly.

“Well—THIS is about the spot where the up coach was robbed six months ago,” returned the messenger.

“Dear me!” said the lady in the back seat, rising with a half hysterical laugh, “hadn’t we better get out before they come?”

“There is not the slightest danger, madam,” said a quiet, observant man, who had scarcely spoken before, “or the expressman would not have told us; nor would he, I fancy, have left his post beside the treasure on the box.”

The slight sarcasm implied in this was enough to redden the expressman’s cheek in the light of the coach lamp which Yuba Bill had just unshipped and brought to the window. He would have made some tart rejoinder, but was prevented by Yuba Bill addressing the passengers: “Ye’ll have to put up with ONE light, I reckon, until we’ve got this job finished.”

“How long will it last, Bill?” asked the man nearest the window.

“Well,” said Bill, with a contemptuous glance at the elegant coach axe he was carrying in his hand, “considerin’ these purty first-class highly expensive hash choppers that the kempany furnishes us, I reckon it may take an hour.”

“But is there no place where we can wait?” asked the lady anxiously. “I see a light in that house yonder.”

“Ye might try it, though the kempany, as a rule, ain’t in the habit o’ makin’ social calls there,” returned Bill, with a certain grim significance. Then, turning to some outside passengers, he added, “Now, then! them ez is goin’ to help me tackle that tree, trot down! I reckon that blitherin’ idiot” (the stranger with the lantern, who had disappeared) “will have sense enough to fetch us some ropes with his darned axe.”

The passengers thus addressed, apparently miners and workingmen, good humoredly descended, all except one, who seemed disinclined to leave the much coveted seat on the box beside the driver.

“I’ll look after your places and keep my own,” he said, with a laugh, as the others followed Bill through the dripping rain. When they had disappeared, the young journalist turned to the lady.

“If you would really like to go to that house, I will gladly accompany you.” It was possible that in addition to his youthful chivalry there was a little youthful resentment of Yuba Bill’s domineering prejudices in his attitude. However, the quiet, observant passenger lifted a look of approval to him, and added, in his previous level, half contemptuous tone:—

“You’ll be quite as well there as here, madam, and there is certainly no reason for your stopping in the coach when the driver chooses to leave it.”

The passengers looked at each other. The stranger spoke with authority, and Bill had certainly been a little arbitrary!

“I’ll go too,” said the passenger by the window. “And you’ll come, won’t you, Ned?” he added to the express messenger. The young man hesitated; he was recently appointed, and as yet fresh to the business—but he was not to be taught his duty by an officious stranger! He resented the interference youthfully by doing the very thing he would have preferred NOT to do, and with assumed carelessness—yet feeling in his pocket to assure himself that the key of the treasure compartment was safe—turned to follow them.

“Won’t YOU come too?” said the journalist, politely addressing the cynical passenger.

“No, I thank you! I’ll take charge of the coach,” was the smiling rejoinder, as he settled himself more comfortably in his seat.

The little procession moved away in silence. Oddly enough, no one, except the lady, really cared to go, and two—the expressman and journalist—would have preferred to remain on the coach. But the national instinct of questioning any purely arbitrary authority probably was a sufficient impulse. As they neared the opened door of what appeared to be a four-roomed, unpainted, redwood boarded cabin, the passenger who had occupied the seat near the window said,—

“I’ll go first and sample the shanty.”

He was not, however, so far in advance of them but that the others could hear quite distinctly his offhand introduction of their party on the threshold, and the somewhat lukewarm response of the inmates. “We thought we’d just drop in and be sociable until the coach was ready to start again,” he continued, as the other passengers entered. “This yer gentleman is Ned Brice, Adams & Co.‘s expressman; this yer is Frank Frenshaw, editor of the ‘Mountain Banner;’ this yer’s a lady, so it ain’t necessary to give HER name, I reckon—even if we knowed it! Mine’s Sam Hexshill, of Hexshill & Dobbs’s Flour Mills, of Stockton, whar, ef you ever come that way, I’ll be happy to return the compliment and hospitality.”

The room they had entered had little of comfort and brightness in it except the fire of pine logs which roared and crackled in the adobe chimney. The air would have been too warm but for the strong west wind and rain which entered the open door freely. There was no other light than the fire, and its tremulous and ever-changing brilliancy gave a spasmodic mobility to the faces of those turned towards it, or threw into stronger shadow the features that were turned away. Yet, by this uncertain light, they could see the figures of a man and two women. The man rose and, with a certain apathetic gesture that seemed to partake more of weariness and long suffering than positive discourtesy, tendered seats on chairs, boxes, and even logs to the self-invited guests. The stage party were surprised to see that this man was the stranger who had held the lantern in the road.

“Ah! then you didn’t go with Bill to help clear the road?” said the expressman surprisedly.

The man slowly drew up his tall, shambling figure before the fire, and then facing them, with his hands behind him, as slowly lowered himself again as if to bring his speech to the level of his hearers and give a lazier and more deliberate effect to his long-drawn utterance.

“Well—no!” he said slowly. “I—didn’t—go—with—no—Bill—to—help—clear—the road! I—don’t—reckon—TO go—with—no—Bill—to—clear—ANY road! I’ve just whittled this thing down to a pint, and it’s this—I ain’t no stage kempany’s nigger! So far as turnin’ out and warnin’ ‘em agin goin’ to smash over a fallen tree, and slap down into the canyon with a passel of innercent passengers, I’m that much a white man, but I ain’t no NIGGER to work clearing things away for ‘em, nor I ain’t no scrub to work beside ‘em.” He slowly straightened himself up again, and, with his former apathetic air, looking down upon one of the women who was setting a coffee-pot on the coals, added, “But I reckon my old woman here kin give you some coffee and whiskey—of you keer for it.”

Unfortunately the young expressman was more loyal to Bill than diplomatic. “If Bill’s a little rough,” he said, with a heightened color, “perhaps he has some excuse for it. You forget it’s only six months ago that this coach was ‘held up’ not a hundred yards from this spot.”

The woman with the coffee-pot here faced about, stood up, and, either from design or some odd coincidence, fell into the same dogged attitude that her husband had previously taken, except that she rested her hands on her hips. She was prematurely aged, like many of her class, and her black, snake-like locks, twisting loose from her comb as she lifted her head, showed threads of white against the firelight. Then with slow and implacable deliberation she said:

“We ‘forget’! Well! not much, sonny! We ain’t forgot it, and we ain’t goin’ to forget it, neither! We ain’t bin likely to forget it for any time the last six months. What with visitations from the county constables, snoopin’s round from ‘Frisco detectives, droppin’s-in from newspaper men, and yawpin’s and starin’s from tramps and strangers on the road—we haven’t had a chance to disremember MUCH! And when at last Hiram tackled the head stage agent at Marysville, and allowed that this yer pesterin’ and persecutin’ had got ter stop—what did that yer head agent tell him? Told him to ‘shet his head,’ and be thankful that his ‘thievin’ old shanty wasn’t burnt down around his ears!’ Forget that six months ago the coach was held up near here? Not much, sonny—not much!”

The situation was embarrassing to the guests, as ordinary politeness called for some expression of sympathy with their gloomy hostess, and yet a selfish instinct of humanity warned them that there must be some foundation for this general distrust of the public. The journalist was troubled in his conscience; the expressman took refuge in an official reticence; the lady coughed slightly, and drew nearer to the fire with a vague but safe compliment to its brightness and comfort. It devolved upon Mr. Heckshill, who felt the responsibility of his late airy introduction of the party, to boldly keep up his role, with an equally non-committal, light-hearted philosophy.

“Well, ma’am,” he said, addressing his hostess, “it’s a queer world, and no man’s got sabe enough to say what’s the rights and wrongs o’ anything. Some folks believe one thing and act upon it, and other folks think differently and act upon THAT! The only thing ye kin safely say is that THINGS IS EZ THEY BE! My rule here and at the mill is jest to take things ez I find ‘em!”

It occurred to the journalist that Mr. Heckshill had the reputation, in his earlier career, of “taking” such things as unoccupied lands and timber “as he found them,” without much reference to their actual owners. Apparently he was acting upon the same principle now, as he reached for the demijohn of whiskey with the ingenuous pleasantry, “Did somebody say whiskey, or did I dream it?”

But this did not satisfy Frenshaw. “I suppose,” he said, ignoring Heckshill’s diplomatic philosophy, “that you may have been the victim of some misunderstanding or some unfortunate coincidence. Perhaps the company may have confounded you with your neighbors, who are believed to be friendly to the gang; or you may have made some injudicious acquaintances. Perhaps”—

He was stopped by a suppressed but not unmusical giggle, which appeared to come from the woman in the corner who had not yet spoken, and whose face and figure in the shadow he had previously overlooked. But he could now see that her outline was slim and graceful, and the contour of her head charming,—facts that had evidently not escaped the observation of the expressman and Mr. Heckshill, and that might have accounted for the cautious reticence of the one and the comfortable moralizing of the other.

The old woman cast an uneasy glance on the fair giggler, but replied to Frenshaw:

“That’s it! ‘injerdishus acquaintances!’ But just because we might happen to have friends, or even be sorter related to folks in another line o’ business that ain’t none o’ ours, the kempany hain’t no call to persecute US for it! S’pose we do happen to know some one like”—

“Spit it out, aunty, now you’ve started in! I don’t mind,” said the fair giggler, now apparently casting off all restraint in an outburst of laughter.

“Well,” said the old woman, with dogged desperation, “suppose, then, that that young girl thar is the niece of Snapshot Harry, who stopped the coach the last time”—

“And ain’t ashamed of it, either!” interrupted the young girl, rising and disclosing in the firelight an audacious but wonderfully pretty face; “and supposing he IS my uncle, that ain’t any cause for their bedevilin’ my poor old cousins Hiram and Sophy thar!” For all the indignation of her words, her little white teeth flashed mischievously in the dancing light, as if she rather enjoyed the embarrassment of her audience, not excluding her own relatives. Evidently cousin Sophy thought so too.

“It’s all very well for you to laugh, Flo, you limb!” she retorted querulously, yet with an admiring glance at the girl, “for ye know thar ain’t a man dare touch ye even with a word; but it’s mighty hard on me and Hiram, all the same.”

“Never you mind, Sophy dear,” said the girl, placing her hand half affectionately, half humorously on the old woman’s shoulder; “mebbe I won’t always be a discredit and a bother to you. Jest you hold your hosses, and wait until uncle Harry ‘holds up’ the next Pioneer Coach,”—the dancing devil in her eyes glanced as if accidentally on the young expressman,—“and he’ll make a big enough pile to send me to Europe, and you’ll be quit o’ me.”

The embarrassment, suspiciousness, and uneasiness of the coach party here found relief in a half hysteric explosion of laughter, in which even the dogged Hiram and Sophy joined. It seemed as impossible to withstand the girl’s invincible audacity as her beauty. She was quick to perceive her advantage, and, with a responsive laugh and a picturesque gesture of invitation, said:—

“Now that’s all settled, ye’d better waltz in and have your whiskey and coffee afore the stage starts. Ye kin comfort yourselves that it ain’t stolen or pizoned, even if it is served up to ye by Snapshot Harry’s niece!” With another easy gesture she swung the demijohn over her arm, and, offering a tin cup to each of the men, filled them in turn.

The ice thus broken, or perhaps thus perilously skated over, the passengers were as profuse in their thanks and apologies as they had been constrained and artificial before. Heckshill and Frenshaw vied with each other for a glance from the audacious Flo. If their compliments partook of an extravagance that was at times ironical, the girl was evidently not deceived by it, but replied in kind. Only the expressman who seemed to have fallen under the spell of her audacious glances, was uneasy at the license of the others, yet himself dumb towards her. The lady discreetly drew nearer to the fire, the old woman, and her coffee; Hiram subsided into his apathetic attitude by the fire.

A shout from the road at last proclaimed the return of Yuba Bill and his helpers. It had the singular effect of startling the party into a vague and uneasy consciousness of indiscretion, as if it had been the voice of the outer world of law and order, and their manner again became constrained. The leave-taking was hurried and perfunctory; the diplomatic Heckshill again lapsed into glittering generalities about “the best of friends parting.” Only the expressman lingered for a moment on the doorstep in the light of the fire and the girl’s dancing eyes.

“I hope,” he stammered, with a very youthful blush, “to come the next time—with—with—a better introduction.”

“Uncle Harry’s,” she said, with a quick laugh and a mock curtsey, as she turned away.

Once out of hearing, the party broke into hurried comment and criticism of the scene they had just witnessed, and particularly of the fair actress who had played so important a part, averring their emphatic intention of wresting the facts from Yuba Bill at once, and cross-examining him closely; but oddly enough, reaching the coach and that redoubted individual, no one seemed to care to take the initiative, and they all scrambled hurriedly to their seats without a word. How far Yuba Bill’s irritability and imperious haste contributed to this, or a fear that he might in turn catechise them kept them silent, no one knew. The cynically observant passenger was not there; he and the sole occupant of the box-seat, they were told, had joined the clearing party some moments before, and would be picked up by Yuba Bill later on.

Five minutes after Bill had gathered up the reins, they reached the scene of obstruction. The great pine-tree which had fallen from the steep bank above and stretched across the road had been partly lopped of its branches, divided in two lengths, which were now rolled to either side of the track, leaving barely space for the coach to pass. The huge vehicle “slowed up” as Yuba Bill skillfully guided his six horses through this narrow alley, whose tassels of pine, glistening with wet, brushed the panels and sides of the coach, and effectually excluded any view from its windows. Seen from the coach top, the horses appeared to be cleaving their way through a dark, shining olive sea, that parted before and closed behind them, as they slowly passed. The leaders were just emerging from it, and Bill was gathering up his slackened reins, when a peremptory voice called, “Halt!” At the same moment the coach lights flashed upon a masked and motionless horseman in the road. Bill made an impulsive reach for his whip, but in the same instant checked himself, reined in his horses with a suppressed oath, and sat perfectly rigid. Not so the expressman, who caught up his rifle, but it was arrested by Bill’s arm, and his voice in his ear!

“Too late!—we’re covered!—don’t be a d–d fool!”

The inside passengers, still encompassed by obscurity, knew only that the stage had stopped. The “outsiders” knew, by experience, that they were covered by unseen guns in the wayside branches, and scarcely moved.

“I didn’t think it was the square thing to stop you, Bill, till you’d got through your work,” said a masterful but not unpleasant voice, “and if you’ll just hand down the express box, I’ll pass you and the rest of your load through free. But as we’re both in a hurry, you’d better look lively about it.”

“Hand it down,” said Bill gruffly to the expressman.

The expressman turned with a white check but blazing eyes to the compartment below his seat. He lingered, apparently in some difficulty with the lock of the compartment, but finally brought out the box and handed it to another armed and masked figure that appeared mysteriously from the branches beside the wheels.

“Thank you!” said the voice; “you can slide on now.”

“And thank you for nothing,” said Bill, gathering up his reins. “It’s the first time any of your kind had to throw down a tree to hold me up!”

“You’re lying, Bill!—though you don’t know it,” said the voice cheerfully. “Far from throwing down a tree to stop you, it was I sent word along the road to warn you from crashing down upon it, and sending you and your load to h-ll before your time! Drive on!”

The angry Bill waited for no second comment, but laying his whip over the backs of his team, drove furiously forward. So rapidly had the whole scene passed that the inside passengers knew nothing of it, and even those on the top of the coach roused from their stupor and inglorious inaction only to cling desperately to the terribly swaying coach as it thundered down the grade and try to keep their equilibrium. Yet, furious as was their speed, Yuba Bill could not help noticing that the expressman from time to time cast a hurried glance behind him. Bill knew that the young man had shown readiness and nerve in the attack, although both were hopeless; yet he was so much concerned at his set white face and compressed lips that when, at the end of three miles’ unabated speed, they galloped up to the first station, he seized the young man by the arm, and, as the clamor of the news they had brought rose around them, dragged him past the wondering crowd, caught a decanter from the bar, and, opening the door of a side room, pushed him into it and closed the door behind them.

“Look yar, Brice! Stop it! Quit it right thar!” he said emphatically, laying his large hand on the young fellow’s shoulder. “Be a man! You’ve shown you are one, green ez you are, for you had the sand in ye—the clear grit to-night, yet you’d have been a dead man now, if I hadn’t stopped ye! Man! you had no show from the beginning! You’ve done your level best to save your treasure, and I’m your witness to the kempany, and proud of it, too! So shet your head and—and,” pouring out a glass of whiskey, “swaller that!”

But Brice waved him aside with burning eyes and dry lips.

“You don’t know it all, Bill!” he said, with a half choked voice.

“All what?”

“Swear that you’ll keep it a secret,” he said feverishly, gripping Bill’s arm in turn, “and I’ll tell you.”

“Go on!”

“THE COACH WAS ROBBED BEFORE THAT!”

“Wot yer say?” ejaculated Bill.

“The treasure—a packet of greenbacks—had been taken from the box before the gang stopped us!”

“The h-ll, you say!”

“Listen! When you told me to hand down the box, I had an idea—a d–d fool one, perhaps—of taking that package out and jumping from the coach with it. I knew they would fire at me only; I might get away, but if they killed me, I’d have done only my duty, and nobody else would have got hurt. But when I got to the box I found that the lock had been forced and the money was gone. I managed to snap the lock again before I handed it down. I thought they might discover it at once and chase us, but they didn’t.”

“And then thar war no greenbacks in the box that they took?” gasped Bill, with staring eyes.

“No!”

Bill raised his hand in the air as if in solemn adjuration, and then brought it down on his knee, doubling up in a fit of uncontrollable but perfectly noiseless laughter. “Oh, Lord!” he gasped, “hol’ me afore I bust right open! Hush,” he went on, with a jerk of his fingers towards the next room, “not a word o’ this to any one! It’s too much to keep, I know; it’s nearly killing me! but we must swaller it ourselves! Oh, Jerusalem the Golden! Oh, Brice! Think o’ that face o’ Snapshot Harry’s ez he opened that treasure box afore his gang in the brush! And he allers so keen and so easy and so cock sure! Created snakes! I’d go through this every trip for one sight of him as he just riz up from that box and cussed!” He again shook with inward convulsions till his face grew purple, and even the red came back to the younger man’s cheek.

“But this don’t bring the money back, Bill,” said Brice gloomily.

Yuba Bill swallowed the glass of whiskey at a gulp, wiped his mouth and eyes, smothered a second explosion, and then gravely confronted Brice.

“When do you think it was taken, and how?”

“It must have been taken when I left the coach on the road and went over to that settler’s cabin,” said Brice bitterly. “Yet I believed everything was safe, and I left two men—both passengers—one inside and one on the box, that man who sat the other side of you.”

“Jee whillikins!” ejaculated Bill, with his hand to his forehead, “the men I clean forgot to pick up in the road, and now I reckon they never intended to be picked up, either.”

“No doubt a part of the gang,” said Brice, with increased bitterness; “I see it all now.”

“No!” said Bill decisively, “that ain’t Snapshot Harry’s style; he’s a clean fighter, with no underhand tricks. And I don’t believe he threw down that tree, either. Look yer, sonny!” he added, suddenly laying his hand on Brice’s shoulder, “a hundred to one that that was the work of a couple o’ d–d sneaks or traitors in that gang who kem along as passengers. I never took any stock in that coyote who paid extra for his box-seat.”

Brice knew that Bill never looked kindly on any passenger who, by bribing the ticket agent, secured this favorite seat, which Bill felt was due to his personal friends and was in his own selection. He only returned gloomily:—

“I don’t see what difference it makes to us which robber got the money.

“Ye don’t,” said Bill, raising his head, with a sudden twinkle in his eyes. “Then ye don’t know Snapshot Harry. Do ye suppose he’s goin’ to sit down and twiddle his thumbs with that skin game played on him? No, sir,” he continued, with a thoughtful deliberation, drawing his fingers slowly through his long beard, “he spotted it—and smelt out the whole trick ez soon ez he opened that box, and that’s why he didn’t foller us! He’ll hunt those sneak thieves into h-ll but what he’ll get ‘em, and,” he went on still more slowly, “by the livin’ hokey! I reckon, sonny, that’s jest how ye’ll get your chance to chip in!”

“I don’t understand,” said Brice impatiently.

“Well,” said Bill, with more provoking slowness, as if he were communing with himself rather than Brice, “Harry’s mighty proud and high toned, and to be given away like this has cut down into his heart, you bet. It ain’t the money he’s thinkin’ of; it’s this split in the gang—the loss of his power ez boss, ye see—and ef he could get hold o’ them chaps he’d let the money slide ez long ez they didn’t get it. So you’ve got a detective on your side that’s worth the whole police force of Californy! Ye never heard anything about Snapshot Harry, did ye?” asked Bill carelessly, raising his eyes to Brice’s eager face.

The young man flushed slightly. “Very little,” he said. At the same time a vision of the pretty girl in the settler’s cabin flashed upon him with a new significance.

“He’s more than half white, in some ways,” said Bill thoughtfully, “and they say he lives somewhere about here in a cabin in the bush, with a crippled sister and her darter, who both swear by him. It mightn’t be hard to find him—ef a man was dead set on it.”

Brice faced about with determined eyes. “I’LL DO IT,” he said quietly.

“Ye might,” said Bill, still more deliberately stroking his beard, “mention my name, ef ye ever get to see him.”

“Your name,” ejaculated the astonished Brice.

“My name,” repeated Bill calmly. “He knows it’s my bounden duty to kill him ef I get the chance, and I know that he’d plug me full o’ holes in a minit ef thar war a necessity for it. But in these yer affairs, sonny, it seems to be the understood thing by the kempany that I’m to keep fiery young squirts like you, and chuckle-headed passengers like them”—jerking his thumb towards the other room—“from gettin’ themselves killed by their rashness. So ontil the kempany fill the top o’ that coach with men who ain’t got any business to do BUT fightin’ other men who ain’t got any other business to do BUT to fight them—the odds are agin us! Harry has always acted square to me—that’s how I know he ain’t in this sneak-thief business, and why he didn’t foller us, suspectin’ suthin’, and I’ve always acted square to him. All the same, I’d like ter hev seen his face when that box was opened! Lordy!” Here Bill again collapsed in his silent paroxysm of mirth. “Ye might tell him how I laughed!”

“I would hardly do that, Bill,” said the young man, smiling in spite of himself. “But you’ve given me an idea, and I’ll work it out.”

Bill glanced at the young fellow’s kindling eyes and flushing cheek, and nodded. “Well, rastle with that idea later on, sonny. I’ll fix you all right in my report to the kempany, but the rest you must work alone. I’ve started out the usual posse, circus-ridin’ down the road after Harry. He’d be a rough customer to meet just now,” continued Bill, with a chuckle, “ef thar was the ghost of a chance o’ them comin’ up with him, for him and his gang is scattered miles away by this.” He paused, tossed off another glass of whiskey, wiped his mouth, and saying to Brice, with a wink, “It’s about time to go and comfort them thar passengers,” led the way through the crowded barroom into the stage office.

The spectacle of Bill’s humorously satisfied face and Brice’s bright eyes and heightened color was singularly effective. The “inside” passengers, who had experienced neither the excitement nor the danger of the robbery, yet had been obliged to listen to the hairbreadth escapes of the others, pooh-poohed the whole affair, and even the “outsides” themselves were at last convinced that the robbery was a slight one, with little or no loss to the company. The clamor subsided almost as suddenly as it had arisen; the wiser passengers fashioned their attitude on the sang-froid of Yuba Bill, and the whole coach load presently rolled away as complacently as if nothing had happened.

II

The robbery furnished the usual amount of copy for the local press. There was the inevitable compliment to Yuba Bill for his well-known coolness; the conduct of the young expressman, “who, though new to the service, displayed an intrepidity that only succumbed to numbers,” was highly commended, and even the passengers received their meed of praise, not forgetting the lady, “who accepted the incident with the light-hearted pleasantry characteristic of the Californian woman.” There was the usual allusion to the necessity of a Vigilance Committee to cope with this “organized lawlessness” but it is to be feared that the readers of “The Red Dog Clarion,” however ready to lynch a horse thief, were of the opinion that rich stage express companies were quite able to take care of their own property.

A TREASURE OF THE REDWOODS

PART I

Mr. Jack Fleming stopped suddenly before a lifeless and decaying redwood-tree with an expression of disgust and impatience. It was the very tree he had passed only an hour before, and he now knew he had been describing that mysterious and hopeless circle familiar enough to those lost in the woods.

There was no mistaking the tree, with its one broken branch which depended at an angle like the arm of a semaphore; nor did it relieve his mind to reflect that his mishap was partly due to his own foolish abstraction. He was returning to camp from a neighboring mining town, and while indulging in the usual day-dreams of a youthful prospector, had deviated from his path in attempting to make a short cut through the forest. He had lost the sun, his only guide, in the thickly interlaced boughs above him, which suffused though the long columnar vault only a vague, melancholy twilight. He had evidently penetrated some unknown seclusion, absolutely primeval and untrodden. The thick layers of decaying bark and the desiccated dust of ages deadened his footfall and invested the gloom with a profound silence.

As he stood for a moment or two, irresolute, his ear, by this time attuned to the stillness, caught the faint but distinct lap and trickle of water. He was hot and thirsty, and turned instinctively in that direction. A very few paces brought him to a fallen tree; at the foot of its upturned roots gurgled the spring whose upwelling stream had slowly but persistently loosened their hold on the soil, and worked their ruin. A pool of cool and clear water, formed by the disruption of the soil, overflowed, and after a few yards sank again in the sodden floor.

As he drank and bathed his head and hands in this sylvan basin, he noticed the white glitter of a quartz ledge in its depths, and was considerably surprised and relieved to find, hard by, an actual outcrop of that rock through the thick carpet of bark and dust. This betokened that he was near the edge of the forest or some rocky opening. He fancied that the light grew clearer beyond, and the presence of a few fronds of ferns confirmed him in the belief that he was approaching a different belt of vegetation. Presently he saw the vertical beams of the sun again piercing the opening in the distance. With this prospect of speedy deliverance from the forest at last secure, he did not hurry forward, but on the contrary coolly retraced his footsteps to the spring again. The fact was that the instincts and hopes of the prospector were strongly dominant in him, and having noticed the quartz ledge and the contiguous outcrop, he determined to examine them more closely. He had still time to find his way home, and it might not be so easy to penetrate the wilderness again. Unfortunately, he had neither pick, pan, nor shovel with him, but a very cursory displacement of the soil around the spring and at the outcrop with his hands showed him the usual red soil and decomposed quartz which constituted an “indication.” Yet none knew better than himself how disappointing and illusive its results often were, and he regretted that he had not a pan to enable him to test the soil by washing it at the spring. If there were only a miner’s cabin handy, he could easily borrow what he wanted. It was just the usual luck,—“the things a man sees when he hasn’t his gun with him!”

He turned impatiently away again in the direction of the opening. When he reached it, he found himself on a rocky hillside sloping toward a small green valley. A light smoke curled above a clump of willows; it was from the chimney of a low dwelling, but a second glance told him that it was no miner’s cabin. There was a larger clearing around the house, and some rude attempt at cultivation in a roughly fenced area. Nevertheless, he determined to try his luck in borrowing a pick and pan there; at the worst he could inquire his way to the main road again.

A hurried scramble down the hill brought him to the dwelling,—a rambling addition of sheds to the usual log cabin. But he was surprised to find that its exterior, and indeed the palings of the fence around it, were covered with the stretched and drying skins of animals. The pelts of bear, panther, wolf, and fox were intermingled with squirrel and wildcat skins, and the displayed wings of eagle, hawk, and kingfisher. There was no trail leading to or from the cabin; it seemed to have been lost in this opening of the encompassing woods and left alone and solitary.

The barking of a couple of tethered hounds at last brought a figure to the door of the nearest lean-to shed. It seemed to be that of a young girl, but it was clad in garments so ridiculously large and disproportionate that it was difficult to tell her precise age. A calico dress was pinned up at the skirt, and tightly girt at the waist by an apron—so long that one corner had to be tucked in at the apron string diagonally, to keep the wearer from treading on it. An enormous sunbonnet of yellow nankeen completely concealed her head and face, but allowed two knotted and twisted brown tails of hair to escape under its frilled cape behind. She was evidently engaged in some culinary work, and still held a large tin basin or pan she had been cleaning clasped to her breast.

Fleming’s eye glanced at it covetously, ignoring the figure behind it. But he was diplomatic.

“I have lost my way in the woods. Can you tell me in what direction the main road lies?”

She pointed a small red hand apparently in the direction he had come. “Straight over thar—across the hill.”

Fleming sighed. He had been making a circuit of the forest instead of going through it—and this open space containing the cabin was on a remote outskirt!

“How far is it to the road?” he asked.

“Jest a spell arter ye rise the hill, ef ye keep ‘longside the woods. But it’s a right smart chance beyond, ef ye go through it.”

This was quite plain to him. In the local dialect a “spell” was under a mile; “a right smart chance” might be three or four miles farther. Luckily the spring and outcrop were near the outskirts; he would pass near them again on his way. He looked longingly at the pan which she still held in her hands. “Would you mind lending me that pan for a little while?” he said half laughingly.

“Wot for?” demanded the girl quickly. Yet her tone was one of childish curiosity rather than suspicion. Fleming would have liked to avoid the question and the consequent exposure of his discovery which a direct answer implied. But he saw it was too late now.

“I want to wash a little dirt,” he said bluntly.

The girl turned her deep sunbonnet toward him. Somewhere in its depths he saw the flash of white teeth. “Go along with ye—ye’re funnin’!” she said.

“I want to wash out some dirt in that pan—I’m prospecting for gold,” he said; “don’t you understand?”

“Are ye a miner?”

“Well, yes—a sort of one,” he returned, with a laugh.

“Then ye’d better be scootin’ out o’ this mighty quick afore dad comes. He don’t cotton to miners, and won’t have ‘em around. That’s why he lives out here.”

“Well, I don’t live out here,” responded the young man lightly. “I shouldn’t be here if I hadn’t lost my way, and in half an hour I’ll be off again. So I’m not likely to bother him. But,” he added, as the girl still hesitated, “I’ll leave a deposit for the pan, if you like.”

“Leave a which?”

“The money that the pan’s worth,” said Fleming impatiently.

The huge sunbonnet stiffly swung around like the wind-sail of a ship and stared at the horizon. “I don’t want no money. Ye kin git,” said the voice in its depths.

“Look here,” he said desperately, “I only wanted to prove to you that I’ll bring your pan back safe. Now look! If you don’t like to take money, I’ll leave this ring with you until I come back. There!” He slipped a small specimen ring, made out of his first gold findings, from his little finger.

The sunbonnet slowly swung around again and stared at the ring. Then the little red right hand reached forward, took the ring, placed it on the forefinger of the left hand, with all the other fingers widely extended for the sunbonnet to view, and all the while the pan was still held against her side by the other hand. Fleming noticed that the hands, though tawny and not over clean, were almost childlike in size, and that the forefinger was much too small for the ring. He tried to fathom the depths of the sun-bonnet, but it was dented on one side, and he could discern only a single pale blue eye and a thin black arch of eyebrow.

“Well,” said Fleming, “is it a go?”

“Of course ye’ll be comin’ back for it again,” said the girl slowly.

There was so much of hopeless disappointment at that prospect in her voice that Fleming laughed outright. “I’m afraid I shall, for I value the ring very much,” he said.

The girl handed him the pan. “It’s our bread pan,” she said.

It might have been anything, for it was by no means new; indeed, it was battered on one side and the bottom seemed to have been broken; but it would serve, and Fleming was anxious to be off. “Thank you,” he said briefly, and turned away. The hound barked again as he passed; he heard the girl say, “Shut your head, Tige!” and saw her turn back into the kitchen, still holding the ring before the sunbonnet.

When he reached the woods, he attacked the outcrop he had noticed, and detached with his hands and the aid of a sharp rock enough of the loose soil to fill the pan. This he took to the spring, and, lowering the pan in the pool, began to wash out its contents with the centrifugal movement of the experienced prospector. The saturated red soil overflowed the brim with that liquid ooze known as “slumgullion,” and turned the crystal pool to the color of blood until the soil was washed away. Then the smaller stones were carefully removed and examined, and then another washing of the now nearly empty pan showed the fine black sand covering the bottom. This was in turn as gently washed away.

Alas! the clean pan showed only one or two minute glistening yellow scales, like pinheads, adhering from their specific gravity to the bottom; gold, indeed, but merely enough to indicate “the color,” and common to ordinary prospecting in his own locality.

He tried another panful with the same result. He became aware that the pan was leaky, and that infinite care alone prevented the bottom from falling out during the washing. Still it was an experiment, and the result a failure.

Fleming was too old a prospector to take his disappointment seriously. Indeed, it was characteristic of that performance and that period that failure left neither hopelessness nor loss of faith behind it; the prospector had simply miscalculated the exact locality, and was equally as ready to try his luck again. But Fleming thought it high time to return to his own mining work in camp, and at once set off to return the pan to its girlish owner and recover his ring.

As he approached the cabin again, he heard the sound of singing. It was evidently the girl’s voice, uplifted in what seemed to be a fragment of some negro camp-meeting hymn:—

 
     “Dar was a poor man and his name it was Lazarum,
     Lord bress de Lamb—glory hallelugerum!
     Lord bress de Lamb!”
 

The first two lines had a brisk movement, accented apparently by the clapping of hands or the beating of a tin pan, but the refrain, “Lord bress de Lamb,” was drawn out in a lugubrious chant of infinite tenuity.

 
     “The rich man died and he went straight to hellerum.
     Lord bress de Lamb—glory hallelugerum!
     Lord bress de Lamb!”
 

Fleming paused at the cabin door. Before he could rap the voice rose again:—

 
     “When ye see a poo’ man be sure to give him crumbsorum,
     Lord bress de Lamb—glory hallelugerum!
     Lord bress de Lamb!”
 

At the end of this interminable refrain, drawn out in a youthful nasal contralto, Fleming knocked. The girl instantly appeared, holding the ring in her fingers. “I reckoned it was you,” she said, with an affected briskness, to conceal her evident dislike at parting with the trinket. “There it is!”

But Fleming was too astounded to speak. With the opening of the door the sunbonnet had fallen back like a buggy top, disclosing for the first time the head and shoulders of the wearer. She was not a child, but a smart young woman of seventeen or eighteen, and much of his embarrassment arose from the consciousness that he had no reason whatever for having believed her otherwise.

“I hope I didn’t interrupt your singing,” he said awkwardly.

“It was only one o’ mammy’s camp-meetin’ songs,” said the girl.

“Your mother? Is she in?” he asked, glancing past the girl into the kitchen.

“‘Tain’t mother—she’s dead. Mammy’s our old nurse. She’s gone to Jimtown, and taken my duds to get some new ones fitted to me. These are some o’ mother’s.”

This accounted for her strange appearance; but Fleming noticed that the girl’s manner had not the slightest consciousness of their unbecomingness, nor of the charms of face and figure they had marred.

She looked at him curiously. “Hev you got religion?”

“Well, no!” said Fleming, laughing; “I’m afraid not.”

“Dad hez—he’s got it pow’ful.”

“Is that the reason he don’t like miners?” asked Fleming.

“‘Take not to yourself the mammon of unrighteousness,’” said the girl, with the confident air of repeating a lesson. “That’s what the Book says.”

“But I read the Bible, too,” replied the young man.

“Dad says, ‘The letter killeth’!” said the girl sententiously.

Fleming looked at the trophies nailed on the walls with a vague wonder if this peculiar Scriptural destructiveness had anything to do with his skill as a marksman. The girl followed his eye.

“Dad’s a mighty hunter afore the Lord.”

“What does he do with these skins?”

“Trades ‘em off for grub and fixin’s. But he don’t believe in trottin’ round in the mud for gold.”

“Don’t you suppose these animals would have preferred it if he had? Gold hunting takes nothing from anybody.”

The girl stared at him, and then, to his great surprise, laughed instead of being angry. It was a very fascinating laugh in her imperfectly nourished pale face, and her little teeth revealed the bluish milky whiteness of pips of young Indian corn.

“Wot yer lookin’ at?” she asked frankly.

“You,” he replied, with equal frankness.

“It’s them duds,” she said, looking down at her dress; “I reckon I ain’t got the hang o’ ‘em.”

Yet there was not the slightest tone of embarrassment or even coquetry in her manner, as with both hands she tried to gather in the loose folds around her waist.

“Let me help you,” he said gravely.

She lifted up her arms with childlike simplicity and backed toward him as he stepped behind her, drew in the folds, and pinned them around what proved a very small waist indeed. Then he untied the apron, took it off, folded it in half, and retied its curtailed proportions around the waist. “It does feel a heap easier,” she said, with a little shiver of satisfaction, as she lifted her round cheek, and the tail of her blue eyes with their brown lashes, over her shoulder. It was a tempting moment—but Jack felt that the whole race of gold hunters was on trial just then, and was adamant! Perhaps he was a gentle fellow at heart, too.

“I could loop up that dress also, if I had more pins,” he remarked tentatively. Jack had sisters of his own.

The pins were forthcoming. In this operation—a kind of festooning—the girl’s petticoat, a piece of common washed-out blue flannel, as pale as her eyes, but of the commonest material, became visible, but without fear or reproach to either.

“There, that looks more tidy,” said Jack, critically surveying his work and a little of the small ankles revealed. The girl also examined it carefully by its reflection on the surface of the saucepan. “Looks a little like a chiny girl, don’t it?”

Jack would have resented this, thinking she meant a Chinese, until he saw her pointing to a cheap crockery ornament, representing a Dutch shepherdess, on the shelf. There was some resemblance.

“You beat mammy out o’ sight!” she exclaimed gleefully. “It will jest set her clear crazy when she sees me.”

“Then you had better say you did it yourself,” said Fleming.

“Why?” asked the girl, suddenly opening her eyes on him with relentless frankness.

“You said your father didn’t like miners, and he mightn’t like your lending your pan to me.”

“I’m more afraid o’ lyin’ than o’ dad,” she said with an elevation of moral sentiment that was, however, slightly weakened by the addition, “Mammy’ll say anything I’ll tell her to say.”

“Well, good-by,” said Fleming, extending his hand.

“Ye didn’t tell me what luck ye had with the pan,” she said, delaying taking his hand.

Fleming shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, my usual luck,—nothing,” he returned, with a smile.

“Ye seem to keer more for gettin’ yer old ring back than for any luck,” she continued. “I reckon you ain’t much o’ a miner.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Ye didn’t say wot yer name was, in case dad wants to know.”

“I don’t think he will want to; but it’s John Fleming.”

She took his hand. “You didn’t tell me yours,” he said, holding the little red fingers, “in case I wanted to know.”

It pleased her to consider the rejoinder intensely witty. She showed all her little teeth, threw away his hand, and said:—

“G’ long with ye, Mr. Fleming. It’s Tinka”—

“Tinker?”

“Yes; short for Katinka,—Katinka Jallinger.”

“Good-by, Miss Jallinger.”

“Good-by. Dad’s name is Henry Boone Jallinger, of Kentucky, ef ye was ever askin’.”

“Thank you.”

He turned away as she swiftly re-entered the house. As he walked away, he half expected to hear her voice uplifted again in the camp-meeting chant, but he was disappointed. When he reached the top of the hill he turned and looked back at the cabin.

She was apparently waiting for this, and waved him an adieu with the humble pan he had borrowed. It flashed a moment dazzlingly as it caught the declining sun, and then went out, even obliterating the little figure behind it.

PART II

Mr. Jack Fleming was indeed “not much of a miner.” He and his partners—both as young, hopeful, and inefficient as himself—had for three months worked a claim in a mountain mining settlement which yielded them a certain amount of healthy exercise, good-humored grumbling, and exalted independence. To dig for three or four hours in the morning, smoke their pipes under a redwood-tree for an hour at noon, take up their labors again until sunset, when they “washed up” and gathered sufficient gold to pay for their daily wants, was, without their seeking it, or even knowing it, the realization of a charming socialistic ideal which better men than themselves had only dreamed of. Fleming fell back into this refined barbarism, giving little thought to his woodland experience, and no revelation of it to his partners. He had transacted their business at the mining town. His deviations en route were nothing to them, and small account to himself.

The third day after his return he was lying under a redwood when his partner approached him.

“You aren’t uneasy in your mind about any unpaid bill—say a wash bill—that you’re owing?”

“Why?”

“There’s a big nigger woman in camp looking for you; she’s got a folded account paper in her hand. It looks deucedly like a bill.”

“There must be some mistake,” suggested Fleming, sitting up.

“She says not, and she’s got your name pat enough! Faulkner” (his other partner) “headed her straight up the gulch, away from camp, while I came down to warn you. So if you choose to skedaddle into the brush out there and lie low until we get her away, we’ll fix it!”

“Nonsense! I’ll see her.”

His partner looked aghast at this temerity, but Fleming, jumping to his feet, at once set out to meet his mysterious visitor. This was no easy matter, as the ingenious Faulkner was laboriously leading his charge up the steep gulch road, with great politeness, but many audible misgivings as to whether this was not “Jack Fleming’s day for going to Jamestown.”

He was further lightening the journey by cheering accounts of the recent depredations of bears and panthers in that immediate locality. When overtaken by Fleming he affected a start of joyful surprise, to conceal the look of warning which Fleming did not heed,—having no eyes but for Faulkners companion. She was a very fat negro woman, panting with exertion and suppressed impatience. Fleming’s heart was filled with compunction.

“Is you Marse Fleming?” she gasped.

“Yes,” said Fleming gently. “What can I do for you?”

“Well! Ye kin pick dis yar insek, dis caterpillier,” she said, pointing to Faulkner, “off my paf. Ye kin tell dis yar chipmunk dat when he comes to showin’ me mule tracks for b’ar tracks, he’s barkin’ up de wrong tree! Dat when he tells me dat he sees panfers a-promenadin’ round in de short grass or hidin’ behime rocks in de open, he hain’t talkin’ to no nigger chile, but a growed woman! Ye kin tell him dat Mammy Curtis lived in de woods afo’ he was born, and hez seen more b’ars and mountain lyuns dan he hez hairs in his mustarches.”

The word “Mammy” brought a flash of recollection to Fleming.

“I am very sorry,” he began; but to his surprise the negro woman burst into a good-tempered laugh.

“All right, honey! S’long’s you is Marse Fleming and de man dat took dat ‘ar pan offer Tinka de odder day, I ain’t mindin’ yo’ frens’ bedevilments. I’ve got somefin fo’ you, yar, and a little box,” and she handed him a folded paper.

Fleming felt himself reddening, he knew not why, at which Faulkner discreetly but ostentatiously withdrew, conveying to his other partner painful conviction that Fleming had borrowed a pan from a traveling tinker, whose negro wife was even now presenting a bill for the same, and demanding a settlement. Relieved by his departure, Fleming hurriedly tore open the folded paper. It was a letter written upon a leaf torn out of an old account book, whose ruled lines had undoubtedly given his partners the idea that it was a bill. Fleming hurriedly read the following, traced with a pencil in a schoolgirl’s hand:—

Mr. J. FLEMING.

Dear Sir,—After you went away that day I took that pan you brought back to mix a batch of bread and biscuits. The next morning at breakfast dad says: “What’s gone o’ them thar biscuits—my teeth is just broke with them—they’re so gritty—they’re abominable! What’s this?” says he, and with that he chucks over to me two or three flakes of gold that was in them. You see what had happened, Mr. Fleming, was this! You had better luck than you was knowing of! It was this way! Some of the gold you washed had got slipped into the sides of the pan where it was broke, and the sticky dough must have brought it out, and I kneaded them up unbeknowing. Of course I had to tell a wicked lie, but “Be ye all things to all men,” says the Book, and I thought you ought to know your good luck, and I send mammy with this and the gold in a little box. Of course, if dad was a hunter of Mammon and not of God’s own beasts, he would have been mighty keen about finding where it came from, but he allows it was in the water in our near spring. So good-by. Do you care for your ring now as much as you did?

Yours very respectfully,

KATINKA JALLINGER.

As Mr. Fleming glanced up from the paper, mammy put a small cardboard box in his hand. For an instant he hesitated to open it, not knowing how far mammy was intrusted with the secret. To his great relief she said briskly: “Well, dar! now dat job’s done gone and often my han’s, I allow to quit and jest get off dis yer camp afo’ ye kin shake a stick. So don’t tell me nuffin I ain’t gotter tell when I goes back.”

Fleming understood. “You can tell her I thank her—and—I’ll attend to it,” he said vaguely; “that is—I”—

“Hold dar! that’s just enuff, honey—no mo’! So long to ye and youse folks.”

He watched her striding away toward the main road, and then opened the box.

It contained three flakes of placer or surface gold, weighing in all about a quarter of an ounce. They could easily have slipped into the interstices of the broken pan and not have been observed by him. If this was the result of the washing of a single pan—and he could now easily imagine that other flakes might have escaped—what—But he stopped, dazed and bewildered at the bare suggestion. He gazed upon the vanishing figure of “mammy.” Could she—could Katinka—have the least suspicion of the possibilities of this discovery? Or had Providence put the keeping of this secret into the hands of those who least understood its importance? For an instant he thought of running after her with a word of caution; but on reflection he saw that this might awaken her suspicion and precipitate a discovery by another.

His only safety for the present was silence, until he could repeat his experiment. And that must be done quickly.

How should he get away without his partners’ knowledge of his purpose? He was too loyal to them to wish to keep this good fortune to himself, but he was not yet sure of his good fortune. It might be only a little “pocket” which he had just emptied; it might be a larger one which another trial would exhaust.

He had put up no “notice;” he might find it already in possession of Katinka’s father, or any chance prospector like himself. In either case he would be covered with ridicule by his partners and the camp, or more seriously rebuked for his carelessness and stupidity. No! he could not tell them the truth; nor could he lie. He would say he was called away for a day on private business.

Luckily for him, the active imagination of his partners was even now helping him. The theory of the “tinker” and the “pan” was indignantly rejected by his other partner. His blushes and embarrassment were suddenly remembered by Faulkner, and by the time he reached his cabin, they had settled that the negro woman had brought him a love letter! He was young and good looking; what was more natural than that he should have some distant love affair?

His embarrassed statement that he must leave early the next morning on business that he could not at PRESENT disclose was considered amply confirmatory, and received with maliciously significant acquiescence. “Only,” said Faulkner, “at YOUR age, sonny,”—he was nine months older than Fleming,—“I should have gone TO-NIGHT.” Surely Providence was favoring him!

He was off early the next morning. He was sorely tempted to go first to the cabin, but every moment was precious until he had tested the proof of his good fortune.

It was high noon before he reached the fringe of forest. A few paces farther and he found the spring and outcrop. To avert his partners’ suspicions he had not brought his own implements, but had borrowed a pan, spade, and pick from a neighbor’s claim before setting out. The spot was apparently in the same condition as when he left it, and with a beating heart he at once set to work, an easy task with his new implements. He nervously watched the water overflow the pan of dirt at its edges until, emptied of earth and gravel, the black sand alone covered the bottom. A slight premonition of disappointment followed; a rich indication would have shown itself before this! A few more workings, and the pan was quite empty except for a few pin-points of “color,” almost exactly the quantity he found before. He washed another pan with the same result. Another taken from a different level of the outcrop yielded neither more nor less! There was no mistake: it was a failure! His discovery had been only a little “pocket,” and the few flakes she had sent him were the first and last of that discovery.

He sat down with a sense of relief; he could face his partners again without disloyalty; he could see that pretty little figure once more without the compunction of having incurred her father’s prejudices by locating a permanent claim so near his cabin. In fact, he could carry out his partners’ fancy to the letter!

He quickly heaped his implements together and turned to leave the wood; but he was confronted by a figure that at first he scarcely recognized. Yet—it was Katinka! the young girl of the cabin, who had sent him the gold. She was dressed differently—perhaps in her ordinary every-day garments—a bright sprigged muslin, a chip hat with blue ribbons set upon a coil of luxurious brown hair. But what struck him most was that the girlish and diminutive character of the figure had vanished with her ill-fitting clothes; the girl that stood before him was of ordinary height, and of a prettiness and grace of figure that he felt would have attracted anywhere. Fleming felt himself suddenly embarrassed,—a feeling that was not lessened when he noticed that her pretty lip was compressed and her eyebrows a little straightened as she gazed at him.

“Ye made a bee line for the woods, I see,” she said coldly. “I allowed ye might have been droppin’ in to our house first.”

“So I should,” said Fleming quickly, “but I thought I ought to first make sure of the information you took the trouble to send me.” He hesitated to speak of the ill luck he had just experienced; he could laugh at it himself—but would she?

“And ye got a new pan?” she said half poutingly.

Here seemed his opportunity. “Yes, but I’m afraid it hasn’t the magic of yours. I haven’t even got the color. I believe you bewitched your old pan.”

Her face flushed a little and brightened, and her lip relaxed with a smile. “Go ‘long with yer! Ye don’t mean to say ye had no luck to-day?”

“None—but in seeing you.”

Her eyes sparkled. “Ye see, I said all ‘long ye weren’t much o’ a miner. Ye ain’t got no faith. Ef ye had as much as a grain o’ mustard seed, ye’d remove mountains; it’s in the Book.”

“Yes, and this mountain is on the bedrock, and my faith is not strong enough,” he said laughingly. “And then, that would be having faith in Mammon, and you don’t want me to have THAT.”

She looked at him curiously. “I jest reckon ye don’t care a picayune whether ye strike anything or not,” she said half admiringly.

“To please you I’ll try again, if you’ll look on. Perhaps you’ll bring me luck as you did before. You shall take the pan. I will fill it and you shall wash it out. You’ll be my MASCOT.”

She stiffened a little at this, and then said pertly, “Wot’s that?”

“My good fairy.”

She smiled again, this time with a new color in her pale face. “Maybe I am,” she said, with sudden gravity.

He quickly filled the pan again with soil, brought it to the spring, and first washed out the greater bulk of loose soil. “Now come here and kneel down beside me,” he said, “and take the pan and do as I show you.”

She knelt down obediently. Suddenly she lifted her little hand with a gesture of warning. “Wait a minit—jest a minit—till the water runs clear again.”

The pool had become slightly discolored from the first washing.

“That makes no difference,” he said quickly.

“Ah! but wait, please!” She laid her brown hand upon his arm; a pleasant warmth seemed to follow her touch. Then she said joyously, “Look down there.”

“Where?” he asked.

“There—don’t ye see it?”

“See what?”

“You and me!”

He looked where she pointed. The pool had settled, resumed its mirror-like calm, and reflected distinctly, not only their two bending faces, but their two figures kneeling side by side. Two tall redwoods rose on either side of them, like the columns before an altar.

There was a moment of silence. The drone of a bumble-bee near by seemed to make the silence swim drowsily in their ears; far off they heard the faint beat of a woodpecker. The suggestion of their kneeling figures in this magic mirror was vague, unreasoning, yet for the moment none the less irresistible. His arm instinctively crept around her little waist as he whispered,—he scarce knew what he said,—“Perhaps here is the treasure I am seeking.”

The girl laughed, released herself, and sprang up; the pan sank ingloriously to the bottom of the pool, where Fleming had to grope for it, assisted by Tinka, who rolled up her sleeve to her elbow. For a minute or two they washed gravely, but with no better success than attended his own individual efforts. The result in the bottom of the pan was the same. Fleming laughed.

“You see,” he said gayly, “the Mammon of unrighteousness is not for me—at least, so near your father’s tabernacle.”

“That makes no difference now,” said the girl quickly, “for dad is goin’ to move, anyway, farther up the mountains. He says it’s gettin’ too crowded for him here—when the last settler took up a section three miles off.”

“And are YOU going too?” asked the young man earnestly.

Tinka nodded her brown head. Fleming heaved a genuine sigh. “Well, I’ll try my hand here a little longer. I’ll put up a notice of claim; I don’t suppose your father would object. You know he couldn’t LEGALLY.”

“I reckon ye might do it ef ye wanted—ef ye was THAT keen on gettin’ gold!” said Tinka, looking away. There was something in the girl’s tone which this budding lover resented. He had become sensitive.

“Oh, well,” he said, “I see that it might make unpleasantness with your father. I only thought,” he went on, with tenderer tentativeness, “that it would be pleasant to work here near you.”

“Ye’d be only wastin’ yer time,” she said darkly.

Fleming rose gravely. “Perhaps you’re right,” he answered sadly and a little bitterly, “and I’ll go at once.”

He walked to the spring, and gathered up his tools. “Thank you again for your kindness, and good-by.”

He held out his hand, which she took passively, and he moved away.

But he had not gone far before she called him. He turned to find her still standing where he had left her, her little hands clinched at her side, and her widely opened eyes staring at him. Suddenly she ran at him, and, catching the lapels of his coat in both hands, held him rigidly fast.

“No! no! ye sha’n’t go—ye mustn’t go!” she said, with hysterical intensity. “I want to tell ye something! Listen!—you—you—Mr. Fleming! I’ve been a wicked, wicked girl! I’ve told lies to dad—to mammy—to YOU! I’ve borne false witness—I’m worse than Sapphira—I’ve acted a big lie. Oh, Mr. Fleming, I’ve made you come back here for nothing! Ye didn’t find no gold the other day. There wasn’t any. It was all me! I—I—SALTED THAT PAN!”

“Salted it!” echoed Fleming, in amazement.

“Yes, ‘salted it,’” she faltered; “that’s what dad says they call it—what those wicked sons of Mammon do to their claims to sell them. I—put gold in the pan myself; it wasn’t there before.”

“But why?” gasped Fleming.

She stopped. Then suddenly the fountains in the deep of her blue eyes were broken up; she burst into a sob, and buried her head in her hands, and her hands on his shoulder. “Because—because”—she sobbed against him—“I WANTED YOU to come back!”

He folded her in his arms. He kissed her lovingly, forgivingly, gratefully, tearfully, smilingly—and paused; then he kissed her sympathetically, understandingly, apologetically, explanatorily, in lieu of other conversation. Then, becoming coherent, he asked,—

“But WHERE did you get the gold?”

“Oh,” she said between fitful and despairing sobs, “somewhere!—I don’t know—out of the old Run—long ago—when I was little! I didn’t never dare say anything to dad—he’d have been crazy mad at his own daughter diggin’—and I never cared nor thought a single bit about it until I saw you.”

“And you have never been there since?”

“Never.”

“Nor anybody else?”

“No.”

Suddenly she threw back her head; her chip hat fell back from her face, rosy with a dawning inspiration! “Oh, say, Jack!—you don’t think that—after all this time—there might”—She did not finish the sentence, but, grasping his hand, cried, “Come!”

She caught up the pan, he seized the shovel and pick, and they raced like boy and girl down the hill. When within a few hundred feet of the house she turned at right angles into the clearing, and saying, “Don’t be skeered; dad’s away,” ran boldly on, still holding his hand, along the little valley. At its farther extremity they came to the “Run,” a half-dried watercourse whose rocky sides were marked by the erosion of winter torrents. It was apparently as wild and secluded as the forest spring. “Nobody ever came here,” said the girl hurriedly, “after dad sunk the well at the house.”

One or two pools still remained in the Run from the last season’s flow, water enough to wash out several pans of dirt.

Selecting a spot where the white quartz was visible, Fleming attacked the bank with the pick. After one or two blows it began to yield and crumble away at his feet. He washed out a panful perfunctorily, more intent on the girl than his work; she, eager, alert, and breathless, had changed places with him, and become the anxious prospector! But the result was the same. He threw away the pan with a laugh, to take her little hand! But she whispered, “Try again.”

He attacked the bank once more with such energy that a great part of it caved and fell, filling the pan and even burying the shovel in the debris. He unearthed the latter while Tinka was struggling to get out the pan.

“The mean thing is stuck and won’t move,” she said pettishly. “I think it’s broken now, too, just like ours.”

Fleming came laughingly forward, and, putting one arm around the girl’s waist, attempted to assist her with the other. The pan was immovable, and, indeed, seemed to be broken and bent. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation and began hurriedly to brush away the dirt and throw the soil out of the pan.

In another moment he had revealed a fragment of decomposed quartz, like discolored honeycombed cheese, half filling the pan. But on its side, where the pick had struck it glancingly, there was a yellow streak like a ray of sunshine! And as he strove to lift it he felt in that unmistakable omnipotency of weight that it was seamed and celled with gold.

The news of Mr. Fleming’s engagement, two weeks later, to the daughter of the recluse religious hunter who had made a big strike at Lone Run, excited some skeptical discussion, even among the honest congratulations of his partners.

“That’s a mighty queer story how Jack got that girl sweet on him just by borrowin’ a prospectin’ pan of her,” said Faulkner, between the whiffs of his pipe under the trees. “You and me might have borrowed a hundred prospectin’ pans and never got even a drink thrown in. Then to think of that old preachin’ coon-hunter hevin’ to give in and pass his strike over to his daughter’s feller, jest because he had scruples about gold diggin’ himself. He’d hev booted you and me outer his ranch first.”

“Lord, ye ain’t takin’ no stock in that hogwash,” responded the other. “Why, everybody knows old man Jallinger pretended to be sick o’ miners and minin’ camps, and couldn’t bear to hev ‘em near him, only jest because he himself was all the while secretly prospectin’ the whole lode and didn’t want no interlopers. It was only when Fleming nippled in by gettin’ hold o’ the girl that Jallinger knew the secret was out, and that’s the way he bought him off. Why, Jack wasn’t no miner—never was—ye could see that. HE never struck anything. The only treasure he found in the woods was Tinka Jallinger!”

A BELLE OF CANADA CITY

Cissy was tying her hat under her round chin before a small glass at her window. The window gave upon a background of serrated mountain and olive-shadowed canyon, with a faint additional outline of a higher snow level—the only dreamy suggestion of the whole landscape. The foreground was a glaringly fresh and unpicturesque mining town, whose irregular attempts at regularity were set forth with all the cruel, uncompromising clearness of the Californian atmosphere. There was the straight Main Street with its new brick block of “stores,” ending abruptly against a tangled bluff; there was the ruthless clearing in the sedate pines where the hideous spire of the new church imitated the soaring of the solemn shafts it had displaced with almost irreligious mockery. Yet this foreground was Cissy’s world—her life, her sole girlish experience. She did not, however, bother her pretty head with the view just then, but moved her cheek up and down before the glass, the better to examine by the merciless glare of the sunlight a few freckles that starred the hollows of her temples. Like others of her sex, she was a poor critic of what was her real beauty, and quarreled with that peculiar texture of her healthy skin which made her face as eloquent in her sun-kissed cheek as in her bright eyes and expression. Nevertheless, she was somewhat consoled by the ravishing effect of the bowknot she had just tied, and turned away not wholly dissatisfied. Indeed, as the acknowledged belle of Canada City and the daughter of its principal banker, small wonder that a certain frank vanity and childlike imperiousness were among her faults—and her attractions.

She bounded down the stairs and into the front parlor, for their house possessed the unheard-of luxury of a double drawing-room, albeit the second apartment contained a desk, and was occasionally used by Cissy’s father in private business interviews with anxious seekers of “advances” who shunned the publicity of the bank. Here she instantly flew into the arms of her bosom friend, Miss Piney Tibbs, a girl only a shade or two less pretty than herself, who, always more or less ill at ease in these splendors, was awaiting her impatiently. For Miss Tibbs was merely the daughter of the hotel-keeper; and although Tibbs was a Southerner, and had owned “his own niggers” in the States, she was of inferior position and a protegee of Cissy’s.

“Thank goodness you’ve come,” exclaimed Miss Tibbs, “for I’ve bin sittin’ here till I nigh took root. What kep’ ye?”

“How does it look?” responded Cissy, as a relevant reply.

The “it” referred to Cissy’s new hat, and to the young girl the coherence was perfectly plain. Miss Tibbs looked at “it” severely. It would not do for a protegee to be too complaisant.

“Hem! Must have cost a heap o’ money.”

“It did! Came from the best milliner in San Francisco.”

“Of course,” said Piney, with half assumed envy. “When your popper runs the bank and just wallows in gold!”

“Never mind, dear,” replied Cissy cheerfully. “So’ll YOUR popper some day. I’m goin’ to get mine to let YOUR popper into something—Ditch stocks and such. Yes! True, O King! Popper’ll do anything for me,” she added a little loftily.

Loyal as Piney was to her friend, she was by no means convinced of this. She knew the difference between the two men, and had a vivid recollection of hearing her own father express his opinion of Cissy’s respected parent as a “Gold Shark” and “Quartz Miner Crusher.” It did not, however, affect her friendship for Cissy. She only said, “Let’s come!” caught Cissy around the waist, pranced with her out into the veranda, and gasped, out of breath, “Where are we goin’ first?”

“Down Main Street,” said Cissy promptly.

“And let’s stop at Markham’s store. They’ve got some new things in from Sacramento,” added Piney.

“Country styles,” returned Cissy, with a supercilious air. “No! Besides, Markham’s head clerk is gettin’ too presumptuous. Just guess! He asked me, while I was buyin’ something, if I enjoyed the dance last Monday!”

“But you danced with him,” said the simple Piney, in astonishment.

“But not in his store among his customers,” said Cissy sapiently. “No! we’re going down Main Street past Secamps’. Those Secamp girls are sure to be at their windows, looking out. This hat will just turn ‘em green—greener than ever.”

“You’re just horrid, Ciss!” said Piney, with admiration.

“And then,” continued Cissy, “we’ll just sail down past the new block to the parson’s and make a call.”

“Oh, I see,” said Piney archly. “It’ll be just about the time when the new engineer of the mill works has a clean shirt on, and is smoking his cigyar before the office.”

Cissy tossed her hat disdainfully. “Much anybody cares whether he’s there or not! I haven’t forgotten how he showed us over the mill the other day in a pair of overalls, just like a workman.”

“But they say he’s awfully smart and well educated, and needn’t work, and I’m sure it’s very nice of him to dress just like the other men when he’s with ‘em,” urged Piney.

“Bah! That was just to show that he didn’t care what we thought of him, he’s that conceited! And it wasn’t respectful, considering one of the directors was there, all dressed up. Don’t tell me! You can see it in his eye, looking you over without blinking and then turning away as if he’d got enough of you. He makes me tired.”

Piney did not reply. The engineer had seemed to her to be a singularly attractive young man, yet she was equally impressed with Cissy’s superior condition, which could find flaws in such perfection. Following her friend down the steps of the veranda, they passed into the staring graveled walk of the new garden, only recently recovered from the wild wood, its accurate diamond and heart shaped beds of vivid green set in white quartz borders giving it the appearance of elaborately iced confectionery. A few steps further brought them to the road and the wooden “sidewalk” to Main Street, which carried civic improvements to the hillside, and Mr. Trixit’s very door. Turning down this thoroughfare, they stopped laughing, and otherwise assumed a conscious half artificial air; for it was the hour when Canada City lounged listlessly before its shops, its saloons, its offices and mills, or even held lazy meetings in the dust of the roadway, and the passage down the principal street of its two prettiest girls was an event to be viewed as if it were a civic procession. Hats flew off as they passed; place was freely given; impeding barrels and sacks were removed from the wooden pavement, and preoccupied indwellers hastily summoned to the front door to do homage to Cissy Trixit and Piney as they went by. Not but that Canada City, in the fierce and unregenerate days of its youth, had seen fairer and higher colored faces, more gayly bedizened, on its thoroughfares, but never anything so fresh and innocent. Men stood there all unconsciously, reverencing their absent mothers, sisters, and daughters, in their spontaneous homage to the pair, and seemed to feel the wholesome breath of their Eastern homes wafted from the freshly ironed skirts of these foolish virgins as they rustled by. I am afraid that neither Cissy nor Piney appreciated this feeling; few women did at that time; indeed, these young ladies assumed a slight air of hauteur.

“Really, they do stare so,” said Cissy, with eyes dilating with pleasurable emotion; “we’ll have to take the back street next time!”

Piney, proud in the glory reflected from Cissy, and in her own, answered, “We will—sure!”

There was only one interruption to this triumphal progress, and that was so slight as to be noticed by only one of the two girls. As they passed the new works at the mill, the new engineer, as Piney had foreseen, was leaning against the doorpost, smoking a pipe. He took his hat from his head and his pipe from his month as they approached, and greeted them with an easy “Good-afternoon,” yet with a glance that was quietly observant and tolerantly critical.

“There!” said Cissy, when they had passed, “didn’t I tell you? Did you ever see such conceit in your born days? I hope you did not look at him.”

Piney, conscious of having done so, and of having blushed under his scrutiny, nevertheless stoutly asserted that she had merely looked at him “to see who it was.” But Cissy was placated by passing the Secamps’ cottage, from whose window the three strapping daughters of John Secamp, lately an emigrant from Missouri, were, as Cissy had surmised, lightening the household duties by gazing at the—to them—unwonted wonders of the street. Whether their complexions, still bearing traces of the alkali dust and inefficient nourishment of the plains, took a more yellow tone from the spectacle of Cissy’s hat, I cannot say. Cissy thought they did; perhaps Piney was nearer the truth when she suggested that they were only “looking” to enable them to make a home-made copy of the hat next week.

Their progress forward and through the outskirts of the town was of the same triumphal character. Teamsters withheld their oaths and their uplifted whips as the two girls passed by; weary miners, toiling in ditches, looked up with a pleasure that was half reminiscent of their past; younger skylarkers stopped in their horse-play with half smiling, half apologetic faces; more ambitious riders on the highway urged their horses to greater speed under the girls’ inspiring eyes, and “Vaquero Billy,” charging them, full tilt, brought up his mustang on its haunches and rigid forelegs, with a sweeping bow of his sombrero, within a foot of their artfully simulated terror! In this way they at last reached the clearing in the forest, the church with its ostentatious spire, and the Reverend Mr. Windibrook’s dwelling, otherwise humorously known as “The Pastorage,” where Cissy intended to call.

The Reverend Mr. Windibrook had been selected by his ecclesiastical superiors to minister to the spiritual wants of Canada City as being what was called a “hearty” man. Certainly, if considerable lung capacity, absence of reserve, and power of handshaking and back slapping were necessary to the redemption of Canada City, Mr. Windibrook’s ministration would have been successful. But, singularly enough, the rude miner was apt to resent this familiarity, and it is recorded that Isaac Wood, otherwise known as “Grizzly Woods,” once responded to a cheerful back slap from the reverend gentleman by an ostentatiously friendly hug which nearly dislocated the parson’s ribs. Perhaps Mr. Windibrook was more popular on account of his admiring enthusiasm of the prosperous money-getting members of his flock and a singular sympathy with their methods, and Mr. Trixit’s daring speculations were an especially delightful theme to him.

“Ah, Miss Trixit,” he said, as Cissy entered the little parlor, “and how is your dear father? Still startling the money market with his fearless speculations? This, brother Jones,” turning to a visitor, “is the daughter of our Napoleon of finance, Montagu Trixit. Only last week, in that deal in ‘the Comstock,’ he cleared fifty thousand dollars! Yes, sir,” repeating it with unction, “fifty—thousand—dollars!—in about two hours, and with a single stroke of the pen! I believe I am not overstating, Miss Trixit?” he added, appealing to Cissy with a portentous politeness that was as badly fitting as his previous “heartiness.”

Cissy colored slightly. “I don’t know,” she said simply. She was perfectly truthful. She knew nothing of her father’s business, except the vague reputation of his success.

Her modesty, however, produced a singular hilarity in Mr. Windibrook, and a playful push. “YOU don’t know? Ha, but I do. Yes, sir,”—to the visitor,—“I have reason to remember it. I called upon him the next day. I used, sir, the freedom of an old friend. ‘Trixit,’ I said, clapping my hand on his shoulder, ‘the Lord has been good to you. I congratulate you.’

“‘H’m!’ he said, without looking up. ‘What do you reckon those congratulations are worth?’

“Many a man, sir, who didn’t know his style, would have been staggered. But I knew my man. I looked him straight in the eye. ‘A new organ,’ I said, ‘and as good a one as Sacramento can turn out.’

“He took up a piece of paper, scrawled a few lines on it to his cashier, and said, ‘Will that do?’” Mr. Windibrook’s voice sank to a thrilling whisper. “It was an order for one thousand dollars! Fact, sir. THAT is the father of this young lady.”

“Ye had better luck than Bishop Briggs had with old Johnson, the Excelsior Bank president,” said the visitor, encouraged by Windibrook’s “heartiness” into a humorous retrospect. “Briggs goes to him for a subscription for a new fence round the buryin’-ground—the old one havin’ rotted away. ‘Ye don’t want no fence,’ sez Johnson, short like. ‘No fence round a buryin’-ground?’ sez Briggs, starin’. ‘No! Them as is IN the buryin’-ground can’t get OUT, and them as ISN’T don’t want to get IN, nohow! So you kin just travel—I ain’t givin’ money away on uselessnesses!’ Ha! ha!”

A chill silence followed, which checked even Piney’s giggle. Mr. Windibrook evidently had no “heartiness” for non-subscribing humor. “There are those who can jest with sacred subjects,” he said ponderously, “but I have always found Mr. Trixit, though blunt, eminently practical. Your father is still away,” he added, shifting the conversation to Cissy, “hovering wherever he can extract the honey to store up for the provision of age. An industrious worker.”

“He’s still away,” said Cissy, feeling herself on safe ground, though she was not aware of her father’s entomological habits. “In San Francisco, I think.”

She was glad to get away from Mr. Windibrook’s “heartiness” and console herself with Mrs. Windibrook’s constitutional depression, which was partly the result of nervous dyspepsia and her husband’s boisterous cordiality. “I suppose, dear, you are dreadfully anxious about your father when he is away from home?” she said to Cissy, with a sympathetic sigh.

Cissy, conscious of never having felt a moment’s anxiety, and accustomed to his absences, replied naively, “Why?”

“Oh,” responded Mrs. Windibrook, “on account of his great business responsibilities, you know; so much depends upon him.”

Again Cissy did not comprehend; she could not understand why this masterful man, her father, who was equal to her own and, it seemed, everybody’s needs, had any responsibility, or was not as infallible and constant as the sunshine or the air she breathed. Without being his confidante, or even his associate, she had since her mother’s death no other experience; youthfully alive to the importance of their wealth, it seemed to her, however, only a natural result of being HIS daughter. She smiled vaguely and a little impatiently. They might have talked to her about HERSELF; it was a little tiresome to always have to answer questions about her “popper.” Nevertheless, she availed herself of Mrs. Windibrook’s invitation to go into the garden and see the new summerhouse that had been put up among the pines, and gradually diverted her hostess’s conversation into gossip of the town. If it was somewhat lugubrious and hesitating, it was, however, a relief to Cissy, and bearing chiefly upon the vicissitudes of others, gave her the comforting glow of comparison.

Touching the complexion of the Secamp girls, Mrs. Windibrook attributed it to their great privations in the alkali desert. “One day,” continued Mrs. Windibrook, “when their father was ill with fever and ague, they drove the cattle twenty miles to water through that dreadful poisonous dust, and when they got there their lips were cracked and bleeding and their eyelids like burning knives, and Mamie Secamp’s hair, which used to be a beautiful brown like your own, my dear, was bleached into a rusty yellow.”

“And they WILL wear colors that don’t suit them,” said Cissy impatiently.

“Never mind, dear,” said Mrs. Windibrook ambiguously; “I suppose they will have their reward.”

Nor was the young engineer discussed in a lighter vein. “It pains me dreadfully to see that young man working with the common laborers and giving himself no rest, just because he says he wants to know exactly ‘how the thing is done’ and why the old works failed,” she remarked sadly. “When Mr. Windibrook knew he was the son of Judge Masterton and had rich relations, he wished, of course, to be civil, but somehow young Masterton and he didn’t ‘hit off.’ Indeed, Mr. Windibrook was told that he had declared that the prosperity of Canada City was only a mushroom growth, and it seems too shocking to repeat, dear, but they say he said that the new church—OUR church—was simply using the Almighty as a big bluff to the other towns. Of course, Mr. Windibrook couldn’t see him after that. Why, he even said your father ought to send you to school somewhere, and not let you grow up in this half civilized place.”

Strangely enough, Cissy did not hail this corroboration of her dislike to young Masterton with the liveliness one might have expected. Perhaps it was because Piney Tibbs was no longer present, having left Cissy at the parsonage and returned home. Still she enjoyed her visit after a fashion, romped with the younger Windibrooks and climbed a tree in the security of her sylvan seclusion and the promptings of her still healthy, girlish blood, and only came back to cake and tea and her new hat, which she had prudently hung up in the summer-house, as the afternoon was waning. When they returned to the house, they found that Mr. Windibrook had gone out with his visitor, and Cissy was spared the advertisement of a boisterous escort home, which he generally insisted upon. She gayly took leave of the infant Windibrook and his mother, sallied out into the empty road, and once more became conscious of her new hat.

The shadows were already lengthening, and a cool breeze stirred the deep aisles of the pines on either side of the highway. One or two people passed her hurriedly, talking and gesticulating, evidently so preoccupied that they did not notice her. Again, a rapid horseman rode by without glancing round, overtook the pedestrians, exchanged a few hurried words with them, and then spurred swiftly away as one of them shouted after him, “There’s another dispatch confirming it.” A group of men talking by the roadside failed to look up as she passed. Cissy pouted slightly at this want of taste, which made some late election news or the report of a horse race more enthralling than her new hat and its owner. Even the toilers in the ditches had left their work, and were congregated around a man who was reading aloud from a widely margined “extra” of the “Canada City Press.” It seemed provoking, as she knew her cheeks were glowing from her romp, and was conscious that she was looking her best. However, the Secamps’ cottage was just before her, and the girls were sure to be on the lookout! She shook out her skirts and straightened her pretty little figure as she approached the house. But to her surprise, her coming had evidently been anticipated by them, and they were actually—and unexpectedly—awaiting her behind the low whitewashed garden palings! As she neared them they burst into a shrill, discordant laugh, so full of irony, gratified malice, and mean exaltation that Cissy was for a moment startled. But only for a moment; she had her father’s reckless audacity, and bore them down with a display of such pink cheeks and flashing eyes that their laughter was checked, and they remained open-mouthed as she swept by them.

Perhaps this incident prevented her from noticing another but more passive one. A group of men standing before the new mill—the same men who had so solicitously challenged her attention with their bows a couple of hours ago—turned as she approached and suddenly dispersed. It was not until this was repeated by another group that its oddity forced itself upon her still angry consciousness. Then the street seemed to be full of those excited preoccupied groups who melted away as she advanced. Only one man met her curious eyes,—the engineer,—yet she missed the usual critical smile with which he was wont to greet her, and he gave her a bow of such profound respect and gravity that for the first time she felt really uneasy. Was there something wrong with her hat? That dreadful, fateful hat! Was it too conspicuous? Did he think it was vulgar? She was eager to cross the street on the next block where there were large plate-glass windows which she and Piney—if Piney were only with her now!—had often used as mirrors.

But there was a great crowd on the next block, congregated around the bank,—her father’s bank! A vague terror, she knew not what, now began to creep over her. She would have turned into a side street, but mingled with her fear was a resolution not to show it,—not to even THINK of it,—to combat it as she had combated the horrid laugh of the Secamp girls, and she kept her way with a beating heart but erect head, without looking across the street.

There was another crowd before the newspaper office—also on the other side—and a bulletin board, but she would not try to read it. Only one idea was in her mind,—to reach home before any one should speak to her; for the last intelligible sound that had reached her was the laugh of the Secamp girls, and this was still ringing in her ears, seeming to voice the hidden strangeness of all she saw, and stirring her, as that had, with childish indignation. She kept on with unmoved face, however, and at last turned into the planked side-terrace,—a part of her father’s munificence,—and reached the symmetrical garden-beds and graveled walk. She ran up the steps of the veranda and entered the drawing-room through the open French window. Glancing around the familiar room, at her father’s closed desk, at the open piano with the piece of music she had been practicing that morning, the whole walk seemed only a foolish dream that had frightened her. She was Cissy Trixit, the daughter of the richest man in the town! This was her father’s house, the wonder of Canada City!

WHAT HAPPENED AT THE FONDA

PART I

“Well!” said the editor of the “Mountain Clarion,” looking up impatiently from his copy. “What’s the matter now?”

The intruder in his sanctum was his foreman. He was also acting as pressman, as might be seen from his shirt-sleeves spattered with ink, rolled up over the arm that had just been working “the Archimedian lever that moves the world,” which was the editor’s favorite allusion to the hand-press that strict economy obliged the “Clarion” to use. His braces, slipped from his shoulders during his work, were looped negligently on either side, their functions being replaced by one hand, which occasionally hitched up his trousers to a securer position. A pair of down-at-heel slippers—dear to the country printer—completed his negligee.

But the editor knew that the ink-spattered arm was sinewy and ready, that a stout and loyal heart beat under the soiled shirt, and that the slipshod slippers did not prevent its owner’s foot from being “put down” very firmly on occasion. He accordingly met the shrewd, good-humored blue eyes of his faithful henchman with an interrogating smile.

“I won’t keep you long,” said the foreman, glancing at the editor’s copy with his habitual half humorous toleration of that work, it being his general conviction that news and advertisements were the only valuable features of a newspaper; “I only wanted to talk to you a minute about makin’ suthin more o’ this yer accident to Colonel Starbottle.”

“Well, we’ve a full report of it in, haven’t we?” said the editor wonderingly. “I have even made an editorial para. about the frequency of these accidents, and called attention to the danger of riding those half broken Spanish mustangs.”

“Yes, ye did that,” said the foreman tolerantly; “but ye see, thar’s some folks around here that allow it warn’t no accident. There’s a heap of them believe that no runaway hoss ever mauled the colonel ez HE got mauled.”

“But I heard it from the colonel’s own lips,” said the editor, “and HE surely ought to know.”

“He mout know and he moutn’t, and if he DID know, he wouldn’t tell,” said the foreman musingly, rubbing his chin with the cleaner side of his arm. “Ye didn’t see him when he was picked up, did ye?”

“No,” said the editor. “Only after the doctor had attended him. Why?”

“Jake Parmlee, ez picked him up outer the ditch, says that he was half choked, and his black silk neck-handkercher was pulled tight around his throat. There was a mark on his nose ez ef some one had tried to gouge out his eye, and his left ear was chawed ez ef he’d bin down in a reg’lar rough-and-tumble clinch.”

“He told me his horse bolted, buck-jumped, threw him, and he lost consciousness,” said the editor positively. “He had no reason for lying, and a man like Starbottle, who carries a Derringer and is a dead shot, would have left his mark on somebody if he’d been attacked.”

“That’s what the boys say is just the reason why he lied. He was TOOK SUDDENT, don’t ye see,—he’d no show—and don’t like to confess it. See? A man like HIM ain’t goin’ to advertise that he kin be tackled and left senseless and no one else got hurt by it! His political influence would be ruined here!”

The editor was momentarily staggered at this large truth.

“Nonsense!” he said, with a laugh. “Who would attack Colonel Starbottle in that fashion? He might have been shot on sight by some political enemy with whom he had quarreled—but not BEATEN.”

“S’pose it warn’t no political enemy?” said the foreman doggedly.

“Then who else could it be?” demanded the editor impatiently.

“That’s jest for the press to find out and expose,” returned the foreman, with a significant glance at the editor’s desk. “I reckon that’s whar the ‘Clarion’ ought to come in.”

“In a matter of this kind,” said the editor promptly, “the paper has no business to interfere with a man’s statement. The colonel has a perfect right to his own secret—if there is one, which I very much doubt. But,” he added, in laughing recognition of the half reproachful, half humorous discontent on the foreman’s face, “what dreadful theory have YOU and the boys got about it—and what do YOU expect to expose?”

“Well,” said the foreman very seriously, “it’s jest this: You see, the colonel is mighty sweet on that Spanish woman Ramierez up on the hill yonder. It was her mustang he was ridin’ when the row happened near her house.”

“Well?” said the editor, with disconcerting placidity.

“Well,”—hesitated the foreman, “you see, they’re a bad lot, those Greasers, especially the Ramierez, her husband.”

The editor knew that the foreman was only echoing the provincial prejudice against this race, which he himself had always combated. Ramierez kept a fonda or hostelry on a small estate,—the last of many leagues formerly owned by the Spanish grantee, his landlord,—and had a wife of some small coquetries and redundant charms. Gambling took place at the fonda, and it was said the common prejudice against the Mexican did not, however, prevent the American from trying to win his money.

“Then you think Ramierez was jealous of the colonel? But in that case he would have knifed him,—Spanish fashion,—and not without a struggle.”

“There’s more ways they have o’ killin’ a man than that; he might hev been dragged off his horse by a lasso and choked,” said the foreman darkly.

The editor had heard of this vaquero method of putting an enemy hors de combat; but it was a clumsy performance for the public road, and the brutality of its manner would have justified the colonel in exposing it.

The foreman saw the incredulity expressed in his face, and said somewhat aggressively, “Of course I know ye don’t take no stock in what’s said agin the Greasers, and that’s what the boys know, and what they said, and that’s the reason why I thought I oughter tell ye, so that ye mightn’t seem to be always favorin’ ‘em.”

The editor’s face darkened slightly, but he kept his temper and his good humor. “So that to prove that the ‘Clarion’ is unbiased where the Mexicans are concerned, I ought to make it their only accuser, and cast a doubt on the American’s veracity?” he said, with a smile.

“I don’t mean that,” said the foreman, reddening. “Only I thought ye might—as ye understand these folks’ ways—ye might be able to get at them easy, and mebbe make some copy outer the blamed thing. It would just make a stir here, and be a big boom for the ‘Clarion.’”

“I’ve no doubt it would,” said the editor dryly. “However, I’ll make some inquiries; but you might as well let ‘the boys’ know that the ‘Clarion’ will not publish the colonel’s secret without his permission. Meanwhile,” he continued, smiling, “if you are very anxious to add the functions of a reporter to your other duties and bring me any discoveries you may make, I’ll—look over your copy.”

He good humoredly nodded, and took up his pen again,—a hint at which the embarrassed foreman, under cover of hitching up his trousers, awkwardly and reluctantly withdrew.

It was with some natural youthful curiosity, but no lack of loyalty to Colonel Starbottle, that the editor that evening sought this “war-horse of the Democracy,” as he was familiarly known, in his invalid chamber at the Palmetto Hotel. He found the hero with a bandaged ear and—perhaps it was fancy suggested by the story of the choking—cheeks more than usually suffused and apoplectic. Nevertheless, he was seated by the table with a mint julep before him, and welcomed the editor by instantly ordering another.

The editor was glad to find him so much better.

“Gad, sir, no bones broken, but a good deal of ‘possum scratching about the head for such a little throw like that. I must have slid a yard or two on my left ear before I brought up.”

“You were unconscious from the fall, I believe.”

“Only for an instant, sir—a single instant! I recovered myself with the assistance of a No’the’n gentleman—a Mr. Parmlee—who was passing.”

“Then you think your injuries were entirely due to your fall?”

The colonel paused with the mint julep halfway to his lips, and set it down. “Sir!” he ejaculated, with astounded indignation.

“You say you were unconscious,” returned the editor lightly, “and some of your friends think the injuries inconsistent with what you believe to be the cause. They are concerned lest you were unknowingly the victim of some foul play.”

“Unknowingly! Sir! Do you take me for a chuckle-headed niggah, that I don’t know when I’m thrown from a buck-jumping mustang? or do they think I’m a Chinaman to be hustled and beaten by a gang of bullies? Do they know, sir, that the account I have given I am responsible for, sir?—personally responsible?”

There was no doubt to the editor that the colonel was perfectly serious, and that the indignation arose from no guilty consciousness of a secret. A man as peppery as the colonel would have been equally alert in defense.

“They feared that you might have been ill used by some evilly disposed person during your unconsciousness,” explained the editor diplomatically; “but as you say THAT was only for a moment, and that you were aware of everything that happened”—He paused.

“Perfectly, sir! Perfectly! As plain as I see this julep before me. I had just left the Ramierez rancho. The senora,—a devilish pretty woman, sir,—after a little playful badinage, had offered to lend me her daughter’s mustang if I could ride it home. You know what it is, Mr. Grey,” he said gallantly. “I’m an older man than you, sir, but a challenge from a d–d fascinating creature, I trust, sir, I am not yet old enough to decline. Gad, sir, I mounted the brute. I’ve ridden Morgan stock and Blue Grass thoroughbreds bareback, sir, but I’ve never thrown my leg over such a blanked Chinese cracker before. After he bolted I held my own fairly, but he buck-jumped before I could lock my spurs under him, and the second jump landed me!”

“How far from the Ramierez fonda were you when you were thrown?”

“A matter of four or five hundred yards, sir.”

“Then your accident might have been seen from the fonda?”

“Scarcely, sir. For in that case, I may say, without vanity, that—er—the—er senora would have come to my assistance.”

“But not her husband?”

The old-fashioned shirt-frill which the colonel habitually wore grew erectile with a swelling indignation, possibly half assumed to conceal a certain conscious satisfaction beneath. “Mr. Grey,” he said, with pained severity, “as a personal friend of mine, and a representative of the press,—a power which I respect,—I overlook a disparaging reflection upon a lady, which I can only attribute to the levity of youth and thoughtlessness. At the same time, sir,” he added, with illogical sequence, “if Ramierez felt aggrieved at my attentions, he knew where I could be found, sir, and that it was not my habit to decline giving gentlemen—of any nationality—satisfaction—sir!—personal satisfaction.”

He paused, and then added, with a singular blending of anxiety and a certain natural dignity, “I trust, sir, that nothing of this—er—kind will appear in your paper.”

“It was to keep it out by learning the truth from you, my dear colonel,” said the editor lightly, “that I called to-day. Why, it was even suggested,” he added, with a laugh, “that you were half strangled by a lasso.”

To his surprise the colonel did not join in the laugh, but brought his hand to his loose cravat with an uneasy gesture and a somewhat disturbed face.

“I admit, sir,” he said, with a forced smile, “that I experienced a certain sensation of choking, and I may have mentioned it to Mr. Parmlee; but it was due, I believe, sir, to my cravat, which I always wear loosely, as you perceive, becoming twisted in my fall, and in rolling over.”

He extended his fat white hand to the editor, who shook it cordially, and then withdrew. Nevertheless, although perfectly satisfied with his mission, and firmly resolved to prevent any further discussion on the subject, Mr. Grey’s curiosity was not wholly appeased. What were the relations of the colonel with the Ramierez family? From what he himself had said, the theory of the foreman as to the motives of the attack might have been possible, and the assault itself committed while the colonel was unconscious.

Mr. Grey, however, kept this to himself, briefly told his foreman that he found no reason to add to the account already in type, and dismissed the subject from his mind. The colonel left the town the next day.

One morning a week afterward, the foreman entered the sanctum cautiously, and, closing the door of the composing-room behind him, stood for a moment before the editor with a singular combination of irresolution, shamefacedness, and humorous discomfiture in his face.

Answering the editor’s look of inquiry, he began slowly, “Mebbe ye remember when we was talkin’ last week o’ Colonel Starbottle’s accident, I sorter allowed that he knew all the time WHY he was attacked that way, only he wouldn’t tell.”

“Yes, I remember you were incredulous,” said the editor, smiling.

“Well, I take it all back! I reckon he told all he knew. I was wrong! I cave!”

“Why?” asked the editor wonderingly.

“Well, I have been through the mill myself!”

He unbuttoned his shirt collar, pointed to his neck, which showed a slight abrasion and a small livid mark of strangulation at the throat, and added, with a grim smile, “And I’ve got about as much proof as I want.”

The editor put down his pen and stared at him.

“You see, Mr. Grey, it was partly your fault! When you bedeviled me about gettin’ that news, and allowed I might try my hand at reportin’, I was fool enough to take up the challenge. So once or twice, when I was off duty here, I hung around the Ramierez shanty. Once I went in thar when they were gamblin’; thar war one or two Americans thar that war winnin’ as far as I could see, and was pretty full o’ that aguardiente that they sell thar—that kills at forty rods. You see, I had a kind o’ suspicion that ef thar was any foul play goin’ on it might be worked on these fellers ARTER they were drunk, and war goin’ home with thar winnin’s.”

“So you gave up your theory of the colonel being attacked from jealousy?” said the editor, smiling.

“Hol’ on! I ain’t through yet! I only reckoned that ef thar was a gang of roughs kept thar on the premises they might be used for that purpose, and I only wanted to ketch em at thar work. So I jest meandered into the road when they war about comin’ out, and kept my eye skinned for what might happen. Thar was a kind o’ corral about a hundred yards down the road, half adobe wall, and a stockade o’ palm’s on top of it, about six feet high. Some of the palm’s were off, and I peeped through, but thar warn’t nobody thar. I stood thar, alongside the bank, leanin’ my back agin one o’ them openin’s, and jest watched and waited.

“All of a suddent I felt myself grabbed by my coat collar behind, and my neck-handkercher and collar drawn tight around my throat till I couldn’t breathe. The more I twisted round, the tighter the clinch seemed to get. I couldn’t holler nor speak, but thar I stood with my mouth open, pinned back agin that cursed stockade, and my arms and legs movin’ up and down, like one o’ them dancin’ jacks! It seems funny, Mr. Grey—I reckon I looked like a darned fool—but I don’t wanter feel ag’in as I did jest then. The clinch o’ my throat got tighter; everything got black about me; I was jest goin’ off and kalkilatin’ it was about time for you to advertise for another foreman, when suthin broke—fetched away!

“It was my collar button, and I dropped like a shot. It was a minute before I could get my breath ag’in, and when I did and managed to climb that darned stockade, and drop on the other side, thar warn’t a soul to be seen! A few hosses that stampeded in my gettin’ over the fence war all that was there! I was mighty shook up, you bet!—and to make the hull thing perfectly ridic’lous, when I got back to the road, after all I’d got through, darn my skin, ef thar warn’t that pesky lot o’ drunken men staggerin’ along, jinglin’ the scads they had won, and enjoyin’ themselves, and nobody a-followin’ ‘em! I jined ‘em jest for kempany’s sake, till we got back to town, but nothin’ happened.”

“But, my dear Richards,” said the editor warmly, “this is no longer a matter of mere reporting, but of business for the police. You must see the deputy sheriff at once, and bring your complaint—or shall I? It’s no joking matter.”

“Hol’ on, Mr. Grey,” replied Richards slowly. “I’ve told this to nobody but you—nor am I goin’ to—sabe? It’s an affair of my own—and I reckon I kin take care of it without goin’ to the Revised Statutes of the State of California, or callin’ out the sheriff’s posse.”

His humorous blue eyes just then had certain steely points in them like glittering facets as he turned them away, which the editor had seen before on momentous occasions, and he was speaking slowly and composedly, which the editor also knew boded no good to an adversary.

“Don’t be a fool, Richards,” he said quietly. “Don’t take as a personal affront what was a common, vulgar crime. You would undoubtedly have been robbed by that rascal had not the others come along.”

Richards shook his head. “I might hev bin robbed a dozen times afore THEY came along—ef that was the little game. No, Mr. Grey,—it warn’t no robbery.”

“Had you been paying court to the Senora Ramierez, like Colonel Starbottle?” asked the editor, with a smile.

“Not much,” returned Richards scornfully; “she ain’t my style. But”—he hesitated, and then added, “thar was a mighty purty gal thar—and her darter, I reckon—a reg’lar pink fairy! She kem in only a minute, and they sorter hustled her out ag’in—for darn my skin ef she didn’t look as much out o’ place in that smoky old garlic-smellin’ room as an angel at a bull-fight. And what got me—she was ez white ez you or me, with blue eyes, and a lot o’ dark reddish hair in a long braid down her back. Why, only for her purty sing-song voice and her ‘Gracias, senor,’ you’d hev reckoned she was a Blue Grass girl jest fresh from across the plains.”

A little amused at his foreman’s enthusiasm, Mr. Grey gave an ostentatious whistle and said, “Come, now, Richards, look here! Really!”

“Only a little girl—a mere child, Mr. Grey—not more’n fourteen if a day,” responded Richards, in embarrassed depreciation.

“Yes, but those people marry at twelve,” said the editor, with a laugh. “Look out! Your appreciation may have been noticed by some other admirer.”

He half regretted this speech the next moment in the quick flush—the male instinct of rivalry—that brought back the glitter of Richards’s eyes. “I reckon I kin take care of that, sir,” he said slowly, “and I kalkilate that the next time I meet that chap—whoever he may be—he won’t see so much of my back as he did.”

The editor knew there was little doubt of this, and for an instant believed it his duty to put the matter in the hands of the police. Richards was too good and brave a man to be risked in a bar-room fight. But reflecting that this might precipitate the scandal he wished to avoid, he concluded to make some personal investigation. A stronger curiosity than he had felt before was possessing him. It was singular, too, that Richards’s description of the girl was that of a different and superior type—the hidalgo, or fair-skinned Spanish settler. If this was true, what was she doing there—and what were her relations to the Ramierez?

PART II

The next afternoon he went to the fonda. Situated on the outskirts of the town which had long outgrown it, it still bore traces of its former importance as a hacienda, or smaller farm, of one of the old Spanish landholders. The patio, or central courtyard, still existed as a stable-yard for carts, and even one or two horses were tethered to the railings of the inner corridor, which now served as an open veranda to the fonda or inn. The opposite wing was utilized as a tienda, or general shop,—a magazine for such goods as were used by the Mexican inhabitants,—and belonged also to Ramierez.

Ramierez himself—round-whiskered and Sancho Panza-like in build—welcomed the editor with fat, perfunctory urbanity. The fonda and all it contained was at his disposicion.

The senora coquettishly bewailed, in rising and falling inflections, his long absence, his infidelity and general perfidiousness. Truly he was growing great in writing of the affairs of his nation—he could no longer see his humble friends! Yet not long ago—truly that very week—there was the head impresor of Don Pancho’s imprenta himself who had been there!

A great man, of a certainty, and they must take what they could get! They were only poor innkeepers; when the governor came not they must welcome the alcalde. To which the editor—otherwise Don Pancho—replied with equal effusion. He had indeed recommended the fonda to his impresor, who was but a courier before him. But what was this? The impresor had been ravished at the sight of a beautiful girl—a mere muchacha—yet of a beauty that deprived the senses—this angel—clearly the daughter of his friend! Here was the old miracle of the orange in full fruition and the lovely fragrant blossom all on the same tree—at the fonda. And this had been kept from him!

“Yes, it was but a thing of yesterday,” said the senora, obviously pleased. “The muchacha—for she was but that—had just returned from the convent at San Jose, where she had been for four years. Ah! what would you? The fonda was no place for the child, who should know only the litany of the Virgin—and they had kept her there. And now—that she was home again—she cared only for the horse. From morning to night! Caballeros might come and go! There might be a festival—all the same to her, it made nothing if she had the horse to ride! Even now she was with one in the fields. Would Don Pancho attend and see Cota and her horse?”

The editor smilingly assented, and accompanied his hostess along the corridor to a few steps which brought them to the level of the open meadows of the old farm inclosure. A slight white figure on horseback was careering in the distance. At a signal from Senora Ramierez it wheeled and came down rapidly towards them. But when within a hundred yards the horse was suddenly pulled up vaquero fashion, and the little figure leaped off and advanced toward them on foot, leading the horse.

To his surprise, Mr. Grey saw that she had been riding bareback, and from her discreet halt at that distance he half suspected ASTRIDE! His effusive compliments to the mother on this exhibition of skill were sincere, for he was struck by the girl’s fearlessness. But when both horse and rider at last stood before him, he was speechless and embarrassed.

For Richards had not exaggerated the girl’s charms. She was indeed dangerously pretty, from her tawny little head to her small feet, and her figure, although comparatively diminutive, was perfectly proportioned. Gray eyed and blonde as she was in color, her racial peculiarities were distinct, and only the good-humored and enthusiastic Richards could have likened her to an American girl.

But he was the more astonished in noticing that her mustang was as distinct and peculiar as herself—a mongrel mare of the extraordinary type known as a “pinto,” or “calico” horse, mottled in lavender and pink, Arabian in proportions, and half broken! Her greenish gray eyes, in which too much of the white was visible, had, he fancied, a singular similarity of expression to Cota’s own!

Utterly confounded, and staring at the girl in her white, many flounced frock, bare head, and tawny braids, as she stood beside this incarnation of equine barbarism, Grey could remember nothing like it outside of a circus.

He stammered a few words of admiration of the mare. Miss Cota threw out her two arms with a graceful gesture and a profound curtsey, and said—

“A la disposicion de le Usted, senor.”

Grey was quick to understand the malicious mischief which underlay this formal curtsey and danced in the girl’s eyes, and even fancied it shared by the animal itself. But he was a singularly good rider of untrained stock, and rather proud of his prowess. He bowed.

“I accept that I may have the honor of laying the senorita’s gift again at her little feet.”

But here the burly Ramierez intervened. “Ah, Mother of God! May the devil fly away with all this nonsense! I will have no more of it,” he said impatiently to the girl. “Have a care, Don Pancho,” he turned to the editor; “it is a trick!”

“One I think I know,” said Grey sapiently. The girl looked at him curiously as he managed to edge between her and the mustang, under the pretense of stroking its glossy neck. “I shall keep MY OWN spurs,” he said to her in a lower voice, pointing to the sharp, small-roweled American spurs he wore, instead of the large, blunt, five-pointed star of the Mexican pattern.

The girl evidently did not understand him then—though she did a moment later! For without attempting to catch hold of the mustang’s mane, Grey in a single leap threw himself across its back. The animal, utterly unprepared, was at first stupefied. But by this time her rider had his seat. He felt her sensitive spine arch like a cat’s beneath him as she sprang rocket-wise into the air.

But here she was mistaken! Instead of clinging tightly to her flanks with the inner side of his calves, after the old vaquero fashion to which she was accustomed, he dropped his spurred heels into her sides and allowed his body to rise with her spring, and the cruel spur to cut its track upward from her belly almost to her back.

She dropped like a shot, he dexterously withdrawing his spurs, and regaining his seat, jarred but not discomfited. Again she essayed a leap; the spurs again marked its height in a scarifying track along her smooth barrel. She tried a third leap, but this time dropped halfway as she felt the steel scraping her side, and then stood still, trembling. Grey leaped off!

There was a sound of applause from the innkeeper and his wife, assisted by a lounging vaquero in the corridor. Ashamed of his victory, Grey turned apologetically to Cota. To his surprise she glanced indifferently at the trickling sides of her favorite, and only regarded him curiously.

“Ah,” she said, drawing in her breath, “you are strong—and you comprehend!”

“It was only a trick for a trick, senorita,” he replied, reddening; “let me look after those scratches in the stable,” he added, as she was turning away, leading the agitated and excited animal toward a shed in the rear.

He would have taken the riata which she was still holding, but she motioned him to precede her. He did so by a few feet, but he had scarcely reached the stable door before she suddenly caught him roughly by the shoulders, and, shoving him into the entrance, slammed the door upon him.

Amazed and a little indignant, he turned in time to hear a slight sound of scuffling outside, and to see Cota re-enter with a flushed face.

“Pardon, senor,” she said quickly, “but I feared she might have kicked you. Rest tranquil, however, for the servant he has taken her away.”

She pointed to a slouching peon with a malevolent face, who was angrily driving the mustang toward the corral.

“Consider it no more! I was rude! Santa Maria! I almost threw you, too; but,” she added, with a dazzling smile, “you must not punish me as you have her! For you are very strong—and you comprehend.”

But Grey did not comprehend, and with a few hurried apologies he managed to escape his fair but uncanny tormentor. Besides, this unlooked-for incident had driven from his mind the more important object of his visit,—the discovery of the assailants of Richards and Colonel Starbottle.

His inquiries of the Ramierez produced no result. Senor Ramierez was not aware of any suspicious loiterers among the frequenters of the fonda, and except from some drunken American or Irish revelers he had been free of disturbance.

Ah! the peon—an old vaquero—was not an angel, truly, but he was dangerous only to the bull and the wild horses—and he was afraid even of Cota! Mr. Grey was fain to ride home empty of information.

He was still more concerned a week later, on returning unexpectedly one afternoon to his sanctum, to hear a musical, childish voice in the composing-room.

It was Cota! She was there, as Richards explained, on his invitation, to view the marvels and mysteries of printing at a time when they would not be likely to “disturb Mr. Grey at his work.” But the beaming face of Richards and the simple tenderness of his blue eyes plainly revealed the sudden growth of an evidently sincere passion, and the unwonted splendors of his best clothes showed how carefully he had prepared for the occasion.

Grey was worried and perplexed, believing the girl a malicious flirt. Yet nothing could be more captivating than her simple and childish curiosity, as she watched Richards swing the lever of the press, or stood by his side as he marshaled the type into files on his “composing-stick.” He had even printed a card with her name, “Senorita Cota Ramierez,” the type of which had been set up, to the accompaniment of ripples of musical laughter, by her little brown fingers.

The editor might have become quite sentimental and poetical had he not noticed that the gray eyes which often rested tentatively and meaningly on himself, even while apparently listening to Richards, were more than ever like the eyes of the mustang on whose scarred flanks her glance had wandered so coldly.

He withdrew presently so as not to interrupt his foreman’s innocent tete-a-tete, but it was not very long after that Cota passed him on the highroad with the pinto horse in a gallop, and blew him an audacious kiss from the tips of her fingers.

For several days afterwards Richards’s manner was tinged with a certain reserve on the subject of Cota which the editor attributed to the delicacy of a serious affection, but he was surprised also to find that his foreman’s eagerness to discuss his unknown assailant had somewhat abated. Further discussion regarding it naturally dropped, and the editor was beginning to lose his curiosity when it was suddenly awakened by a chance incident.

An intimate friend and old companion of his—one Enriquez Saltillo—had diverged from a mountain trip especially to call upon him. Enriquez was a scion of one of the oldest Spanish-California families, and in addition to his friendship for the editor it pleased him also to affect an intense admiration of American ways and habits, and even to combine the current California slang with his native precision of speech—and a certain ironical levity still more his own.

It seemed, therefore, quite natural to Mr. Grey to find him seated with his feet on the editorial desk, his hat cocked on the back of his head, reading the “Clarion” exchanges. But he was up in a moment, and had embraced Grey with characteristic effusion.

“I find myself, my leetle brother, but an hour ago two leagues from this spot! I say to myself, ‘Hola! It is the home of Don Pancho—my friend! I shall find him composing the magnificent editorial leader, collecting the subscription of the big pumpkin and the great gooseberry, or gouging out the eye of the rival editor, at which I shall assist!’ I hesitate no longer; I fly on the instant, and I am here.”

Grey was delighted. Saltillo knew the Spanish population thoroughly—his own superior race and their Mexican and Indian allies. If any one could solve the mystery of the Ramierez fonda, and discover Richards’s unknown assailant, it was HE! But Grey contented himself, at first, with a few brief inquiries concerning the beautiful Cota and her anonymous association with the Ramierez. Enriquez was as briefly communicative.

“Of your suspicions, my leetle brother, you are right—on the half! That leetle angel of a Cota is, without doubt, the daughter of the adorable Senora Ramierez, but not of the admirable senor—her husband. Ah! what would you? We are a simple, patriarchal race; thees Ramierez, he was the Mexican tenant of the old Spanish landlord—such as my father—and we are ever the fathers of the poor, and sometimes of their children. It is possible, therefore, that the exquisite Cota resemble the Spanish landlord. Ah! stop—remain tranquil! I remember,” he went on, suddenly striking his forehead with a dramatic gesture, “the old owner of thees ranch was my cousin Tiburcio. Of a consequence, my friend, thees angel is my second cousin! Behold! I shall call there on the instant. I shall embrace my long-lost relation. I shall introduce my best friend, Don Pancho, who lofe her. I shall say, ‘Bless you, my children,’ and it is feenish! I go! I am gone even now!”

He started up and clapped on his hat, but Grey caught him by the arm.

“For Heaven’s sake, Enriquez, be serious for once,” he said, forcing him back into the chair. “And don’t speak so loud. The foreman in the other room is an enthusiastic admirer of the girl. In fact, it is on his account that I am making these inquiries.”

“Ah, the gentleman of the pantuflos, whose trousers will not remain! I have seen him, friend. Truly he has the ambition excessif to arrive from the bed to go to the work without the dress or the wash. But,” in recognition of Grey’s half serious impatience, “remain tranquil. On him I shall not go back! I have said! The friend of my friend is ever the same as my friend! He is truly not seducing to the eye, but without doubt he will arrive a governor or a senator in good time. I shall gif to him my second cousin. It is feenish! I will tell him now!”

He attempted to rise, but was held down and vigorously shaken by Grey.

“I’ve half a mind to let you do it, and get chucked through the window for your pains,” said the editor, with a half laugh. “Listen to me. This is a more serious matter than you suppose.”

And Grey briefly recounted the incident of the mysterious attacks on Starbottle and Richards. As he proceeded he noticed, however, that the ironical light died out of Enriquez’s eyes, and a singular thoughtfulness, yet unlike his usual precise gravity, came over his face. He twirled the ends of his penciled mustache—an unfailing sign of Enriquez’s emotion.

“The same accident that arrive to two men that shall be as opposite as the gallant Starbottle and the excellent Richards shall not prove that it come from Ramierez, though they both were at the fonda,” he said gravely. “The cause of it have not come to-day, nor yesterday, nor last week. The cause of it have arrive before there was any gallant Starbottle or excellent Richards; before there was any American in California—before you and I, my leetle brother, have lif! The cause happen first—TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO!”

The editor’s start of impatient incredulity was checked by the unmistakable sincerity of Enriquez’s face. “It is so,” he went on gravely; “it is an old story—it is a long story. I shall make him short—and new.”

He stopped and lit a cigarette without changing his odd expression.

“It was when the padres first have the mission, and take the heathen and convert him—and save his soul. It was their business, you comprehend, my Pancho? The more heathen they convert, the more soul they save, the better business for their mission shop. But the heathen do not always wish to be ‘convert;’ the heathen fly, the heathen skidaddle, the heathen will not remain, or will backslide. What will you do? So the holy fathers make a little game. You do not of a possibility comprehend how the holy fathers make a convert, my leetle brother?” he added gravely.

“No,” said the editor.

“I shall tell to you. They take from the presidio five or six dragons—you comprehend—the cavalry soldiers, and they pursue the heathen from his little hut. When they cannot surround him and he fly, they catch him with the lasso, like the wild hoss. The lasso catch him around the neck; he is obliged to remain. Sometime he is strangle. Sometime he is dead, but the soul is save! You believe not, Pancho? I see you wrinkle the brow—you flash the eye; you like it not? Believe me, I like it not, neither, but it is so!”

He shrugged his shoulders, threw away his half smoked cigarette, and went on.

“One time a padre who have the zeal excessif for the saving of soul, when he find the heathen, who is a young girl, have escape the soldiers, he of himself have seize the lasso and flung it! He is lucky; he catch her—but look you! She stop not—she still fly! She not only fly, but of a surety she drag the good padre with her! He cannot loose himself, for his riata is fast to the saddle; the dragons cannot help, for he is drag so fast. On the instant she have gone—and so have the padre. For why? It is not a young girl he have lasso, but the devil! You comprehend—it is a punishment—a retribution—he is feenish! And forever!

“For every year he must come back a spirit—on a spirit hoss—and swing the lasso, and make as if to catch the heathen. He is condemn ever to play his little game; now there is no heathen more to convert, he catch what he can. My grandfather have once seen him—it is night and a storm, and he pass by like a flash! My grandfather like it not—he is much dissatisfied! My uncle have seen him, too, but he make the sign of the cross, and the lasso have fall to the side, and my uncle have much gratification. A vaquero of my father and a peon of my cousin have both been picked up, lassoed, and dragged dead.

“Many peoples have died of him in the strangling. Sometime he is seen, sometime it is the woman only that one sees—sometime it is but the hoss. But ever somebody is dead—strangle! Of a truth, my friend, the gallant Starbottle and the ambitious Richards have just escaped!”

The editor looked curiously at his friend. There was not the slightest suggestion of mischief or irony in his tone or manner; nothing, indeed, but a sincerity and anxiety usually rare with his temperament. It struck him also that his speech had but little of the odd California slang which was always a part of his imitative levity. He was puzzled.

“Do you mean to say that this superstition is well known?” he asked, after a pause.

“Among my people—yes.”

“And do YOU believe in it?”

Enriquez was silent. Then he arose, and shrugged his shoulders. “Quien sabe? It is not more difficult to comprehend than your story.”

He gravely put on his hat. With it he seemed to have put on his old levity. “Come, behold, it is a long time between drinks! Let us to the hotel and the barkeep, who shall give up the smash of brandy and the julep of mints before the lasso of Friar Pedro shall prevent us the swallow! Let us skiddadle!”

Mr. Grey returned to the “Clarion” office in a much more satisfied condition of mind. Whatever faith he held in Enriquez’s sincerity, for the first time since the attack on Colonel Starbottle he believed he had found a really legitimate journalistic opportunity in the incident. The legend and its singular coincidence with the outrages would make capital “copy.”

No names would be mentioned, yet even if Colonel Starbottle recognized his own adventure, he could not possibly object to this interpretation of it. The editor had found that few people objected to be the hero of a ghost story, or the favored witness of a spiritual manifestation. Nor could Richards find fault with this view of his own experience, hitherto kept a secret, so long as it did not refer to his relations with the fair Cota. Summoning him at once to his sanctum, he briefly repeated the story he had just heard, and his purpose of using it. To his surprise, Richards’s face assumed a seriousness and anxiety equal to Enriquez’s own.

“It’s a good story, Mr. Grey,” he said awkwardly, “and I ain’t sayin’ it ain’t mighty good newspaper stuff, but it won’t do NOW, for the whole mystery’s up and the assailant found.”

“Found! When? Why didn’t you tell me before?” exclaimed Grey, in astonishment.

“I didn’t reckon ye were so keen on it,” said Richards embarrassedly, “and—and—it wasn’t my own secret altogether.”

“Go on,” said the editor impatiently.

“Well,” said Richards slowly and doggedly, “ye see there was a fool that was sweet on Cota, and he allowed himself to be bedeviled by her to ride her cursed pink and yaller mustang. Naturally the beast bolted at once, but he managed to hang on by the mane for half a mile or so, when it took to buck-jumpin’. The first ‘buck’ threw him clean into the road, but didn’t stun him, yet when he tried to rise, the first thing he knowed he was grabbed from behind and half choked by somebody. He was held so tight that he couldn’t turn, but he managed to get out his revolver and fire two shots under his arm. The grip held on for a minute, and then loosened, and the somethin’ slumped down on top o’ him, but he managed to work himself around. And then—what do you think he saw?—why, that thar hoss! with two bullet holes in his neck, lyin’ beside him, but still grippin’ his coat collar and neck-handkercher in his teeth! Yes, sir! the rough that attacked Colonel Starbottle, the villain that took me behind when I was leanin’ agin that cursed fence, was that same God-forsaken, hell-invented pinto hoss!”

In a flash of recollection the editor remembered his own experience, and the singular scuffle outside the stable door of the fonda. Undoubtedly Cota had saved him from a similar attack.

“But why not tell this story with the other?” said the editor, returning to his first idea. “It’s tremendously interesting.”

“It won’t do,” said Richards, with dogged resolution.

“Why?”

“Because, Mr. Grey—that fool was myself!”

“You! Again attacked!”

“Yes,” said Richards, with a darkening face. “Again attacked, and by the same hoss! Cota’s hoss! Whether Cota was or was not knowin’ its tricks, she was actually furious at me for killin’ it—and it’s all over ‘twixt me and her.”

“Nonsense,” said the editor impulsively; “she will forgive you! You didn’t know your assailant was a horse WHEN YOU FIRED. Look at the attack on you in the road!”

Richards shook his head with dogged hopelessness. “It’s no use, Mr. Grey. I oughter guessed it was a hoss then—thar was nothin’ else in that corral. No! Cota’s already gone away back to San Jose, and I reckon the Ramierez has got scared of her and packed her off. So, on account of its bein’ HER hoss, and what happened betwixt me and her, you see my mouth is shut.”

“And the columns of the ‘Clarion’ too,” said the editor, with a sigh.

“I know it’s hard, sir, but it’s better so. I’ve reckoned mebbe she was a little crazy, and since you’ve told me that Spanish yarn, it mout be that she was sort o’ playin’ she was that priest, and trained that mustang ez she did.”

After a pause, something of his old self came back into his blue eyes as he sadly hitched up his braces and passed them over his broad shoulders. “Yes, sir, I was a fool, for we’ve lost the only bit of real sensation news that ever came in the way of the ‘Clarion.’”

A JACK AND JILL OF THE SIERRAS

It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and the hottest hour of the day on that Sierran foothill. The western sun, streaming down the mile-long slope of close-set pine crests, had been caught on an outlying ledge of glaring white quartz, covered with mining tools and debris, and seemed to have been thrown into an incandescent rage. The air above it shimmered and became visible. A white canvas tent on it was an object not to be borne; the steel-tipped picks and shovels, intolerable to touch and eyesight, and a tilted tin prospecting pan, falling over, flashed out as another sun of insufferable effulgence. At such moments the five members of the “Eureka Mining Company” prudently withdrew to the nearest pine-tree, which cast a shadow so sharply defined on the glistening sand that the impingement of a hand or finger beyond that line cut like a knife. The men lay, or squatted, in this shadow, feverishly puffing their pipes and waiting for the sun to slip beyond the burning ledge. Yet so irritating was the dry air, fragrant with the aroma of the heated pines, that occasionally one would start up and walk about until he had brought on that profuse perspiration which gave a momentary relief, and, as he believed, saved him from sunstroke. Suddenly a voice exclaimed querulously:—

“Derned if the blasted bucket ain’t empty ag’in! Not a drop left, by Jimminy!”

A stare of helpless disgust was exchanged by the momentarily uplifted heads; then every man lay down again, as if trying to erase himself.

“Who brought the last?” demanded the foreman.

“I did,” said a reflective voice coming from a partner lying comfortably on his back, “and if anybody reckons I’m going to face Tophet ag’in down that slope, he’s mistaken!” The speaker was thirsty—but he had principles.

“We must throw round for it,” said the foreman, taking the dice from his pocket.

He cast; the lowest number fell to Parkhurst, a florid, full-blooded Texan. “All right, gentlemen,” he said, wiping his forehead, and lifting the tin pail with a resigned air, “only EF anything comes to me on that bare stretch o’ stage road,—and I’m kinder seein’ things spotty and black now, remember you ain’t anywhar NEARER the water than you were! I ain’t sayin’ it for myself—but it mout be rough on YOU—and”—

“Give ME the pail,” interrupted a tall young fellow, rising. “I’ll risk it.”

Cries of “Good old Ned,” and “Hunky boy!” greeted him as he took the pail from the perspiring Parkhurst, who at once lay down again. “You mayn’t be a professin’ Christian, in good standin’, Ned Bray,” continued Parkhurst from the ground, “but you’re about as white as they make ‘em, and you’re goin’ to do a Heavenly Act! I repeat it, gents—a Heavenly Act!”

Without a reply Bray walked off with the pail, stopping only in the underbrush to pluck a few soft fronds of fern, part of which he put within the crown of his hat, and stuck the rest in its band around the outer brim, making a parasol-like shade above his shoulders. Thus equipped he passed through the outer fringe of pines to a rocky trail which began to descend towards the stage road. Here he was in the full glare of the sun and its reflection from the heated rocks, which scorched his feet and pricked his bent face into a rash. The descent was steep and necessarily slow from the slipperiness of the desiccated pine needles that had fallen from above. Nor were his troubles over when, a few rods further, he came upon the stage road, which here swept in a sharp curve round the flank of the mountain, its red dust, ground by heavy wagons and pack-trains into a fine powder, was nevertheless so heavy with some metallic substance that it scarcely lifted with the foot, and he was obliged to literally wade through it. Yet there were two hundred yards of this road to be passed before he could reach that point of its bank where a narrow and precipitous trail dropped diagonally from it, to creep along the mountain side to the spring he was seeking.

When he reached the trail, he paused to take breath and wipe the blinding beads of sweat from his eyes before he cautiously swung himself over the bank into it. A single misstep here would have sent him headlong to the tops of pine-trees a thousand feet below. Holding his pail in one hand, with the other he steadied himself by clutching the ferns and brambles at his side, and at last reached the spring—a niche in the mountain side with a ledge scarcely four feet wide. He had merely accomplished the ordinary gymnastic feat performed by the members of the Eureka Company four or five times a day! But the day was exceptionally hot. He held his wrists to cool their throbbing pulses in the clear, cold stream that gurgled into its rocky basin; he threw the water over his head and shoulders; he swung his legs over the ledge and let the overflow fall on his dusty shoes and ankles. Gentle and delicious rigors came over him. He sat with half closed eyes looking across the dark olive depths of the canyon between him and the opposite mountain. A hawk was swinging lazily above it, apparently within a stone’s throw of him; he knew it was at least a mile away. Thirty feet above him ran the stage road; he could hear quite distinctly the slow thud of hoofs, the dull jar of harness, and the labored creaking of the Pioneer Coach as it crawled up the long ascent, part of which he had just passed. He thought of it,—a slow drifting cloud of dust and heat, as he had often seen it, abandoned by even its passengers, who sought shelter in the wayside pines as they toiled behind it to the summit,—and hugged himself in the grateful shadows of the spring. It had passed out of hearing and thought, he had turned to fill his pail, when he was startled by a shower of dust and gravel from the road above, and the next moment he was thrown violently down, blinded and pinned against the ledge by the fall of some heavy body on his back and shoulders. His last flash of consciousness was that he had been struck by a sack of flour slipped from the pack of some passing mule.

How long he remained unconscious he never knew. It was probably not long, for his chilled hands and arms, thrust by the blow on his shoulders into the pool of water, assisted in restoring him. He came to with a sense of suffocating pressure on his back, but his head and shoulders were swathed in utter darkness by the folds of some soft fabrics and draperies, which, to his connecting consciousness, seemed as if the contents of a broken bale or trunk had also fallen from the pack. With a tremendous effort he succeeded in getting his arm out of the pool, and attempted to free his head from its blinding enwrappings. In doing so his hand suddenly touched human flesh—a soft, bared arm! With the same astounding discovery came one more terrible: that arm belonged to the weight that was pressing him down; and now, assisted by his struggles, it was slowly slipping toward the brink of the ledge and the abyss below! With a desperate effort he turned on his side, caught the body,—as such it was,—dragged it back on the ledge, at the same moment that, freeing his head from its covering,—a feminine skirt,—he discovered it was a woman!

She had been also unconscious, although the touch of his cold, wet hand on her skin had probably given her a shock that was now showing itself in a convulsive shudder of her shoulders and a half opening of her eyes. Suddenly she began to stare at him, to draw in her knees and feet toward her, sideways, with a feminine movement, as she smoothed out her skirt, and kept it down with a hand on which she leaned. She was a tall, handsome girl, from what he could judge of her half-sitting figure in her torn silk dust-cloak, which, although its cape and one sleeve were split into ribbons, had still protected her delicate, well-fitting gown beneath. She was evidently a lady.

“What—is it?—what has happened?” she said faintly, yet with a slight touch of formality in her manner.

“You must have fallen—from the road above,” said Bray hesitatingly.

“From the road above?” she repeated, with a slight frown, as if to concentrate her thought. She glanced upward, then at the ledge before her, and then, for the first time, at the darkening abyss below. The color, which had begun to return, suddenly left her face here, and she drew instinctively back against the mountain side. “Yes,” she half murmured to herself, rather than to him, “it must be so. I was walking too near the bank—and—I fell!” Then turning to him, she said, “And you found me lying here when you came.”

“I think,” stammered Bray, “that I was here when you fell, and I—I broke the fall.” He was sorry for it a moment afterward.

She lifted her handsome gray eyes to him, saw the dust, dirt, and leaves on his back and shoulders, the collar of his shirt torn open, and a few spots of blood from a bruise on his forehead. Her black eyebrows straightened again as she said coldly, “Dear me! I am very sorry; I couldn’t help it, you know. I hope you are not otherwise hurt.”

“No,” he replied quickly. “But you, are you sure you are not injured? It must have been a terrible shock.”

“I’m not hurt,” she said, helping herself to her feet by the aid of the mountain-side bushes, and ignoring his proffered hand. “But,” she added quickly and impressively, glancing upward toward the stage road overhead, “why don’t they come? They must have missed me! I must have been here a long time; it’s too bad!”

“THEY missed you?” he repeated diffidently.

“Yes,” she said impatiently, “of course! I wasn’t alone. Don’t you understand? I got out of the coach to walk uphill on the bank under the trees. It was so hot and stuffy. My foot must have slipped up there—and—I—slid—down. Have you heard any one calling me? Have you called out yourself?”

Mr. Bray did not like to say he had only just recovered consciousness. He smiled vaguely and foolishly. But on turning around in her impatience, she caught sight of the chasm again, and lapsed quite white against the mountain side.

“Let me give you some water from the spring,” he said eagerly, as she sank again to a sitting posture; “it will refresh you.”

He looked hesitatingly around him; he had neither cup nor flask, but he filled the pail and held it with great dexterity to her lips. She drank a little, extracted a lace handkerchief from some hidden pocket, dipped its point in the water, and wiped her face delicately, after a certain feline fashion. Then, catching sight of some small object in the fork of a bush above her, she quickly pounced upon it, and with a swift sweep of her hand under her skirt, put on HER FALLEN SLIPPER, and stood on her feet again.

“How does one get out of such a place?” she asked fretfully, and then, glancing at him half indignantly, “why don’t you shout?”

“I was going to tell you,” he said gently, “that when you are a little stronger, we can get out by the way I came in,—along the trail.”

He pointed to the narrow pathway along the perilous incline. Somehow, with this tall, beautiful creature beside him, it looked more perilous than before. She may have thought so too, for she drew in her breath sharply and sank down again.

“Is there no other way?”

“None!”

“How did YOU happen to be here?” she asked suddenly, opening her gray eyes upon him. “What did you come here for?” she went on, almost impertinently.

“To fetch a pail of water.” He stopped, and then it suddenly occurred to him that after all there was no reason for his being bullied by this tall, good-looking girl, even if he HAD saved her. He gave a little laugh, and added mischievously, “Just like Jack and Jill, you know.”

“What?” she said sharply, bending her black brows at him.

“Jack and Jill,” he returned carelessly; “I broke my crown, you know, and YOU,”—he did not finish.

She stared at him, trying to keep her face and her composure; but a smile, that on her imperious lips he thought perfectly adorable, here lifted the corners of her mouth, and she turned her face aside. But the smile, and the line of dazzling little teeth it revealed, were unfortunately on the side toward him. Emboldened by this, he went on, “I couldn’t think what had happened. At first I had a sort of idea that part of a mule’s pack had fallen on top of me,—blankets, flour, and all that sort of thing, you know, until”—

Her smile had vanished. “Well,” she said impatiently, “until?”

“Until I touched you. I’m afraid I gave you a shock; my hand was dripping from the spring.”

She colored so quickly that he knew she must have been conscious at the time, and he noticed now that the sleeve of her cloak, which had been half torn off her bare arm, was pinned together over it. When and how had she managed to do it without his detecting the act?

“At all events,” she said coldly, “I’m glad you have not received greater injury from—your mule pack.”

“I think we’ve both been very lucky,” he said simply.

She did not reply, but remained looking furtively at the narrow trail. Then she listened. “I thought I heard voices,” she said, half rising.

“Shall I shout?” he asked.

“No! You say there’s no use—there’s only this way out of it!”

“I might go up first, and perhaps get assistance—a rope or chair,” he suggested.

“And leave me here alone?” she cried, with a horrified glance at the abyss. “No, thank you! I should be over that ledge before you came back! There’s a dreadful fascination in it even now. No! I think I’d rather go—at once! I never shall be stronger as long as I stay near it; I may be weaker.”

She gave a petulant little shiver, and then, though paler and evidently agitated, composed her tattered and dusty outer garments in a deft, ladylike way, and leaned back against the mountain side, He saw her also glance at his loosened shirt front and hanging neckerchief, and with a heightened color he quickly re-knotted it around his throat. They moved from the ledge toward the trail. Suddenly she started back.

“But it’s only wide enough for ONE, and I never—NEVER—could even stand on it a minute alone!” she exclaimed.

He looked at her critically. “We will go together, side by side,” he said quietly, “but you will have to take the outside.”

“Outside!” she repeated, recoiling. “Impossible! I shall fall.”

“I shall keep hold of you,” he explained; “you need not fear that. Stop! I’ll make it safer.” He untied the large bandanna silk handkerchief which he wore around his shoulders, knotted one end of it firmly to his belt, and handed her the other.

“Do you think you can hold on to that?”

“I—don’t know,”—she hesitated. “If I should fall?”

“Stay a moment! Is your belt strong?” He pointed to a girdle of yellow leather which caught her tunic around her small waist.

“Yes,” she said eagerly, “it’s real leather.”

He gently slipped the edge of the handkerchief under it and knotted it. They were thus linked together by a foot of handkerchief.

“I feel much safer,” she said, with a faint smile.

“But if I should fall,” he remarked, looking into her eyes, “you would go too! Have you thought of that?”

“Yes.” Her previous charming smile returned. “It would be really Jack and Jill this time.”

They passed out on the trail. “Now I must take YOUR arm,” he said laughingly; “not you MINE.” He passed his arm under hers, holding it firmly. It was the one he had touched. For the first few steps her uncertain feet took no hold of the sloping mountain side, which seemed to slip sideways beneath her. He was literally carrying her on his shoulder. But in a few moments she saw how cleverly he balanced himself, always leaning toward the hillside, and presently she was able to help him by a few steps. She expressed her surprise at his skill.

“It’s nothing; I carry a pail of water up here without spilling a drop.”

She stiffened slightly under this remark, and indeed so far overdid her attempt to walk without his aid, that her foot slipped on a stone, and she fell outward toward the abyss. But in an instant his arm was transferred from her elbow to her waist, and in the momentum of his quick recovery they both landed panting against the mountain side.

“I’m afraid you’d have spilt the pail that time,” she said, with a slightly heightened color, as she disengaged herself gently from his arm.

“No,” he answered boldly, “for the pail never would have stiffened itself in a tiff, and tried to go alone.”

“Of course not, if it were only a pail,” she responded.

They moved on again in silence. The trail was growing a little steeper toward the upper end and the road bank. Bray was often himself obliged to seek the friendly aid of a manzanita or thornbush to support them. Suddenly she stopped and caught his arm. “There!” she said. “Listen! They’re coming!”

Bray listened; he could hear at intervals a far-off shout; then a nearer one—a name—“Eugenia.” So that was HERS!

“Shall I shout back?” he asked.

“Not yet!” she answered. “Are we near the top?” A sudden glow of pleasure came over him—he knew not why, except that she did not look delighted, excited, or even relieved.

“Only a few yards more,” he said, with an unaffected half sigh.

“Then I’d better untie this,” she suggested, beginning to fumble at the knot of the handkerchief which linked them.

Their heads were close together, their fingers often met; he would have liked to say something, but he could only add: “Are you sure you will feel quite safe? It is a little steeper as we near the bank.”

MR. BILSON’S HOUSEKEEPER

I

When Joshua Bilson, of the Summit House, Buckeye Hill, lost his wife, it became necessary for him to take a housekeeper to assist him in the management of the hotel. Already all Buckeye had considered this a mere preliminary to taking another wife, after a decent probation, as the relations of housekeeper and landlord were confidential and delicate, and Bilson was a man, and not above female influence. There was, however, some change of opinion on that point when Miss Euphemia Trotter was engaged for that position. Buckeye Hill, which had confidently looked forward to a buxom widow or, with equal confidence, to the promotion of some pretty but inefficient chambermaid, was startled by the selection of a maiden lady of middle age, and above the medium height, at once serious, precise, and masterful, and to all appearances outrageously competent. More carefully “taking stock” of her, it was accepted she had three good points,—dark, serious eyes, a trim but somewhat thin figure, and well-kept hands and feet. These, which in so susceptible a community would have been enough, in the words of one critic, “to have married her to three men,” she seemed to make of little account herself, and her attitude toward those who were inclined to make them of account was ceremonious and frigid. Indeed, she seemed to occupy herself entirely with looking after the servants, Chinese and Europeans, examining the bills and stores of traders and shopkeepers, in a fashion that made her respected and—feared. It was whispered, in fact, that Bilson stood in awe of her as he never had of his wife, and that he was “henpecked in his own farmyard by a strange pullet.”

Nevertheless, he always spoke of her with a respect and even a reverence that seemed incompatible with their relative positions. It gave rise to surmises more or less ingenious and conflicting: Miss Trotter had a secret interest in the hotel, and represented a San Francisco syndicate; Miss Trotter was a woman of independent property, and had advanced large sums to Bilson; Miss Trotter was a woman of no property, but she was the only daughter of—variously—a late distinguished nobleman, a ruined millionaire, and a foreign statesman, bent on making her own living.

Alas, for romance! Miss Euphemia Trotter, or “Miss E. Trotter,” as she preferred to sign herself, loathing her sentimental prefix, was really a poor girl who had been educated in an Eastern seminary, where she eventually became a teacher. She had survived her parents and a neglected childhood, and had worked hard for her living since she was fourteen. She had been a nurse in a hospital, an assistant in a reformatory, had observed men and women under conditions of pain and weakness, and had known the body only as a tabernacle of helplessness and suffering; yet had brought out of her experience a hard philosophy which she used equally to herself as to others. That she had ever indulged in any romance of human existence, I greatly doubt; the lanky girl teacher at the Vermont academy had enough to do to push herself forward without entangling girl friendships or confidences, and so became a prematurely hard duenna, paid to look out for, restrain, and report, if necessary, any vagrant flirtation or small intrigue of her companions. A pronounced “old maid” at fifteen, she had nothing to forget or forgive in others, and still less to learn from them.

It was spring, and down the long slopes of Buckeye Hill the flowers were already effacing the last dented footprints of the winter rains, and the winds no longer brought their monotonous patter. In the pine woods there were the song and flash of birds, and the quickening stimulus of the stirring aromatic sap. Miners and tunnelmen were already forsaking the direct road for a ramble through the woodland trail and its sylvan charms, and occasionally breaking into shouts and horseplay like great boys. The schoolchildren were disporting there; there were some older couples sentimentally gathering flowers side by side. Miss Trotter was also there, but making a short cut from the bank and express office, and by no means disturbed by any gentle reminiscence of her girlhood or any other instinctive participation in the wanton season. Spring came, she knew, regularly every year, and brought “spring cleaning” and other necessary changes and rehabilitations. This year it had brought also a considerable increase in the sum she was putting by, and she was, perhaps, satisfied in a practical way, if not with the blind instinctiveness of others. She was walking leisurely, holding her gray skirt well over her slim ankles and smartly booted feet, and clear of the brushing of daisies and buttercups, when suddenly she stopped. A few paces before her, partly concealed by a myrtle, a young woman, startled at her approach, had just withdrawn herself from the embrace of a young man and slipped into the shadow. Nevertheless, in that moment, Miss Trotter’s keen eyes had recognized her as a very pretty Swedish girl, one of her chambermaids at the hotel. Miss Trotter passed without a word, but gravely. She was not shocked nor surprised, but it struck her practical mind at once that if this were an affair with impending matrimony, it meant the loss of a valuable and attractive servant; if otherwise, a serious disturbance of that servant’s duties. She must look out for another girl to take the place of Frida Pauline Jansen, that was all. It is possible, therefore, that Miss Jansen’s criticism of Miss Trotter to her companion as a “spying, jealous old cat” was unfair. This companion Miss Trotter had noticed, only to observe that his face and figure were unfamiliar to her. His red shirt and heavy boots gave no indication of his social condition in that locality. He seemed more startled and disturbed at her intrusion than the girl had been, but that was more a condition of sex than of degree, she also knew. In such circumstances it is the woman always who is the most composed and self-possessed.

A few days after this, Miss Trotter was summoned in some haste to the office. Chris Calton, a young man of twenty-six, partner in the Roanoke Ledge, had fractured his arm and collar-bone by a fall, and had been brought to the hotel for that rest and attention, under medical advice, which he could not procure in the Roanoke company’s cabin. She had a retired, quiet room made ready. When he was installed there by the doctor she went to see him, and found a good-looking, curly headed young fellow, even boyish in appearance and manner, who received her with that air of deference and timidity which she was accustomed to excite in the masculine breast—when it was not accompanied with distrust. It struck her that he was somewhat emotional, and had the expression of one who had been spoiled and petted by women, a rather unusual circumstance among the men of the locality. Perhaps it would be unfair to her to say that a disposition to show him that he could expect no such “nonsense” THERE sprang up in her heart at that moment, for she never had understood any tolerance of such weakness, but a certain precision and dryness of manner was the only result of her observation. She adjusted his pillow, asked him if there was anything that he wanted, but took her directions from the doctor, rather than from himself, with a practical insight and minuteness that was as appalling to the patient as it was an unexpected delight to Dr. Duchesne. “I see you quite understand me, Miss Trotter,” he said, with great relief.

“I ought to,” responded the lady dryly. “I had a dozen such cases, some of them with complications, while I was assistant at the Sacramento Hospital.”

“Ah, then!” returned the doctor, dropping gladly into purely professional detail, “you’ll see this is very simple, not a comminuted fracture; constitution and blood healthy; all you’ve to do is to see that he eats properly, keeps free from excitement and worry, but does not get despondent; a little company; his partners and some of the boys from the Ledge will drop in occasionally; not too much of THEM, you know; and of course, absolute immobility of the injured parts.” The lady nodded; the patient lifted his blue eyes for an instant to hers with a look of tentative appeal, but it slipped off Miss Trotter’s dark pupils—which were as abstractedly critical as the doctor’s—without being absorbed by them. When the door closed behind her, the doctor exclaimed: “By Jove! you’re in luck, Chris! That’s a splendid woman! Just the one to look after you!” The patient groaned slightly. “Do what she says, and we’ll pull you through in no time. Why! she’s able to adjust those bandages herself!”

This, indeed, she did a week later, when the surgeon had failed to call, unveiling his neck and arm with professional coolness, and supporting him in her slim arms against her stiff, erect buckramed breast, while she replaced the splints with masculine firmness of touch and serene and sexless indifference. His stammered embarrassed thanks at the relief—for he had been in considerable pain—she accepted with a certain pride as a tribute to her skill, a tribute which Dr. Duchesne himself afterward fully indorsed.

On re-entering his room the third or fourth morning after his advent at the Summit House, she noticed with some concern that there was a slight flush on his cheek and a certain exaltation which she at first thought presaged fever. But an examination of his pulse and temperature dispelled that fear, and his talkativeness and good spirits convinced her that it was only his youthful vigor at last overcoming his despondency. A few days later, this cheerfulness not being continued, Dr. Duchesne followed Miss Trotter into the hall. “We must try to keep our patient from moping in his confinement, you know,” he began, with a slight smile, “and he seems to be somewhat of an emotional nature, accustomed to be amused and—er—er—petted.”

“His friends were here yesterday,” returned Miss Trotter dryly, “but I did not interfere with them until I thought they had stayed long enough to suit your wishes.”

“I am not referring to THEM,” said the doctor, still smiling; “but you know a woman’s sympathy and presence in a sickroom is often the best of tonics or sedatives.”

Miss Trotter raised her eyes to the speaker with a half critical impatience.

“The fact is,” the doctor went on, “I have a favor to ask of you for our patient. It seems that the other morning a new chambermaid waited upon him, whom he found much more gentle and sympathetic in her manner than the others, and more submissive and quiet in her ways—possibly because she is a foreigner, and accustomed to servitude. I suppose you have no objection to HER taking charge of his room?”

Miss Trotter’s cheek slightly flushed. Not from wounded vanity, but from the consciousness of some want of acumen that had made her make a mistake. She had really believed, from her knowledge of the patient’s character and the doctor’s preamble, that he wished HER to show some more kindness and personal sympathy to the young man, and had even been prepared to question its utility! She saw her blunder quickly, and at once remembering that the pretty Swedish girl had one morning taken the place of an absent fellow servant, in the rebound from her error, she said quietly: “You mean Frida! Certainly! she can look after his room, if he prefers her.” But for her blunder she might have added conscientiously that she thought the girl would prove inefficient, but she did not. She remembered the incident of the wood; yet if the girl had a lover in the wood, she could not urge it as a proof of incapacity. She gave the necessary orders, and the incident passed.

Visiting the patient a few days afterward, she could not help noticing a certain shy gratitude in Mr. Calton’s greeting of her, which she quietly ignored. This forced the ingenuous Chris to more positive speech. He dwelt with great simplicity and enthusiasm on the Swedish girl’s gentleness and sympathy. “You have no idea of—her—natural tenderness, Miss Trotter,” he stammered naively. Miss Trotter, remembering the wood, thought to herself that she had some faint idea of it, but did not impart what it was. He spoke also of her beauty, not being clever enough to affect an indifference or ignorance of it, which made Miss Trotter respect him and smile an unqualified acquiescence. Frida certainly was pretty! But when he spoke of her as “Miss Jansen,” and said she was so much more “ladylike and refined than the other servants,” she replied by asking him if his bandages hurt him, and, receiving a negative answer, graciously withdrew.

Indeed, his bandages gave him little trouble now, and his improvement was so marked and sustained that the doctor was greatly gratified, and, indeed, expressed as much to Miss Trotter, with the conscientious addition that he believed the greater part of it was due to her capable nursing! “Yes, ma’am, he has to thank YOU for it, and no one else!”

Miss Trotter raised her dark eyes and looked steadily at him. Accustomed as he was to men and women, the look strongly held him. He saw in her eyes an intelligence equal to his own, a knowledge of good and evil, and a toleration and philosophy, equal to his own, but a something else that was as distinct and different as their sex. And therein lay its charm, for it merely translated itself in his mind that she had very pretty eyes, which he had never noticed before, without any aggressive intellectual quality. And with this, alas! came the man’s propensity to reason. It meant of course but ONE thing; he saw it all now! If HE, in his preoccupation and coolness, had noticed her eyes, so also had the younger and emotional Chris. The young fellow was in love with her! It was that which had stimulated his recovery, and she was wondering if he, the doctor, had observed it. He smiled back the superior smile of our sex in moments of great inanity, and poor Miss Trotter believed he understood her. A few days after this, she noticed that Frida Jansen was wearing a pearl ring and a somewhat ostentatious locket. She remembered now that Mr. Bilson had told her that the Roanoke Ledge was very rich, and that Calton was likely to prove a profitable guest. But it was not HER business.

It became her business, however, some days later, when Mr. Calton was so much better that he could sit in a chair, or even lounge listlessly in the hall and corridor. It so chanced that she was passing along the upper hall when she saw Frida’s pink cotton skirt disappear in an adjacent room, and heard her light laugh as the door closed. But the room happened to be a card-room reserved exclusively for gentlemen’s poker or euchre parties, and the chambermaids had no business there. Miss Trotter had no doubt that Mr. Calton was there, and that Frida knew it; but as this was an indiscretion so open, flagrant, and likely to be discovered by the first passing guest, she called to her sharply. She was astonished, however, at the same moment to see Mr. Calton walking in the corridor at some distance from the room in question. Indeed, she was so confounded that when Frida appeared from the room a little flurried, but with a certain audacity new to her, Miss Trotter withheld her rebuke, and sent her off on an imaginary errand, while she herself opened the card-room door. It contained simply Mr. Bilson, her employer; his explanation was glaringly embarrassed and unreal! Miss Trotter affected obliviousness, but was silent; perhaps she thought her employer was better able to take care of himself than Mr. Calton.

A week later this tension terminated by the return of Calton to Roanoke Ledge, a convalescent man. A very pretty watch and chain afterward were received by Miss Trotter, with a few lines expressing the gratitude of the ex-patient. Mr. Bilson was highly delighted, and frequently borrowed the watch to show to his guests as an advertisement of the healing powers of the Summit Hotel. What Mr. Calton sent to the more attractive and flirtatious Frida did not as publicly appear, and possibly Mr. Bilson did not know it. The incident of the cardroom was forgotten. Since that discovery, Miss Trotter had felt herself debarred from taking the girl’s conduct into serious account, and it did not interfere with her work.

II

One afternoon Miss Trotter received a message that Mr. Calton desired a few moments’ private conversation with her. A little curious, she had him shown into one of the sitting-rooms, but was surprised on entering to find that she was in the presence of an utter stranger! This was explained by the visitor saying briefly that he was Chris’s elder brother, and that he presumed the name would be sufficient introduction. Miss Trotter smiled doubtfully, for a more distinct opposite to Chris could not be conceived. The stranger was apparently strong, practical, and masterful in all those qualities in which his brother was charmingly weak. Miss Trotter, for no reason whatever, felt herself inclined to resent them.

“I reckon, Miss Trotter,” he said bluntly, “that you don’t know anything of this business that brings me here. At least,” he hesitated, with a certain rough courtesy, “I should judge from your general style and gait that you wouldn’t have let it go on so far if you had, but the fact is, that darned fool brother of mine—beg your pardon!—has gone and got himself engaged to one of the girls that help here,—a yellow-haired foreigner, called Frida Jansen.”

“I was not aware that it had gone so far as that,” said Miss Trotter quietly, “although his admiration for her was well known, especially to his doctor, at whose request I selected her to especially attend to your brother.”

“The doctor is a fool,” broke in Mr. Calton abruptly. “He only thought of keeping Chris quiet while he finished his job.”

“And really, Mr. Calton,” continued Miss Trotter, ignoring the interruption, “I do not see what right I have to interfere with the matrimonial intentions of any guest in this house, even though or—as you seem to put it—BECAUSE the object of his attentions is in its employ.”

Mr. Calton stared—angrily at first, and then with a kind of wondering amazement that any woman—above all a housekeeper—should take such a view. “But,” he stammered, “I thought you—you—looked after the conduct of those girls.”

“I’m afraid you’ve assumed too much,” said Miss Trotter placidly. “My business is to see that they attend to their duties here. Frida Jansen’s duty was—as I have just told you—to look after your brother’s room. And as far as I understand you, you are not here to complain of her inattention to that duty, but of its resulting in an attachment on your brother’s part, and, as you tell me, an intention as to her future, which is really the one thing that would make my ‘looking after her conduct’ an impertinence and interference! If you had come to tell me that he did NOT intend to marry her, but was hurting her reputation, I could have understood and respected your motives.”

Mr. Calton felt his face grow red and himself discomfited. He had come there with the firm belief that he would convict Miss Trotter of a grave fault, and that in her penitence she would be glad to assist him in breaking off the match. On the contrary, to find himself arraigned and put on his defense by this tall, slim woman, erect and smartly buckramed in logic and whalebone, was preposterous! But it had the effect of subduing his tone.

“You don’t understand,” he said awkwardly yet pleadingly. “My brother is a fool, and any woman could wind him round her finger. SHE knows it. She knows he is rich and a partner in the Roanoke Ledge. That’s all she wants. She is not a fit match for him. I’ve said he was a fool—but, hang it all! that’s no reason why he should marry an ignorant girl—a foreigner and a servant—when he could do better elsewhere.”

“This would seem to be a matter between you and your brother, and not between myself and my servant,” said Miss Trotter coldly. “If you cannot convince HIM, your own brother, I do not see how you expect me to convince HER, a servant, over whom I have no control except as a mistress of her WORK, when, on your own showing, she has everything to gain by the marriage. If you wish Mr. Bilson, the proprietor, to threaten her with dismissal unless she gives up your brother,”—Miss Trotter smiled inwardly at the thought of the card-room incident,—“it seems to me you might only precipitate the marriage.”

Mr. Calton looked utterly blank and hopeless. His reason told him that she was right. More than that, a certain admiration for her clear-sightedness began to possess him, with the feeling that he would like to have “shown up” a little better than he had in this interview. If Chris had fallen in love with HER—but Chris was a fool and wouldn’t have appreciated her!

“But you might talk with her, Miss Trotter,” he said, now completely subdued. “Even if you could not reason her out of it, you might find out what she expects from this marriage. If you would talk to her as sensibly as you have to me”—

“It is not likely that she will seek my assistance as you have,” said Miss Trotter, with a faint smile which Mr. Calton thought quite pretty, “but I will see about it.”

Whatever Miss Trotter intended to do did not transpire. She certainly was in no hurry about it, as she did not say anything to Frida that day, and the next afternoon it so chanced that business took her to the bank and post-office. Her way home again lay through the Summit woods. It recalled to her the memorable occasion when she was first a witness to Frida’s flirtations. Neither that nor Mr. Bilson’s presumed gallantries, however, seemed inconsistent, in Miss Trotter’s knowledge of the world, with a serious engagement with young Calton. She was neither shocked nor horrified by it, and for that reason she had not thought it necessary to speak of it to the elder Mr. Calton.

Her path wound through a thicket fragrant with syringa and southernwood; the faint perfume was reminiscent of Atlantic hillsides, where, long ago, a girl teacher, she had walked with the girl pupils of the Vermont academy, and kept them from the shy advances of the local swains. She smiled—a little sadly—as the thought occurred to her that after this interval of years it was again her business to restrain the callow affections. Should she never have the matchmaking instincts of her sex; never become the trusted confidante of youthful passion? Young Calton had not confessed his passion to HER, nor had Frida revealed her secret. Only the elder brother had appealed to her hard, practical common sense against such sentiment. Was there something in her manner that forbade it? She wondered if it was some uneasy consciousness of this quality which had impelled her to snub the elder Calton, and rebelled against it.

It was quite warm; she had been walking a little faster than her usual deliberate gait, and checked herself, halting in the warm breath of the syringas. Here she heard her name called in a voice that she recognized, but in tones so faint and subdued that it seemed to her part of her thoughts. She turned quickly and beheld Chris Calton a few feet from her, panting, partly from running and partly from some nervous embarrassment. His handsome but weak mouth was expanded in an apologetic smile; his blue eyes shone with a kind of youthful appeal so inconsistent with his long brown mustache and broad shoulders that she was divided between a laugh and serious concern.

“I saw you—go into the wood—but I lost you,” he said, breathing quickly, “and then when I did see you again—you were walking so fast I had to run after you. I wanted—to speak—to you—if you’ll let me. I won’t detain you—I can walk your way.”

Miss Trotter was a little softened, but not so much as to help him out with his explanation. She drew her neat skirts aside, and made way for him on the path beside her.

“You see,” he went on nervously, taking long strides to her shorter ones, and occasionally changing sides in his embarrassment, “my brother Jim has been talking to you about my engagement to Frida, and trying to put you against her and me. He said as much to me, and added you half promised to help him! But I didn’t believe him—Miss Trotter!—I know you wouldn’t do it—you haven’t got it in your heart to hurt a poor girl! He says he has every confidence in you—that you’re worth a dozen such girls as she is, and that I’m a big fool or I’d see it. I don’t say you’re not all he says, Miss Trotter; but I’m not such a fool as he thinks, for I know your GOODNESS too. I know how you tended me when I was ill, and how you sent Frida to comfort me. You know, too,—for you’re a woman yourself,—that all you could say, or anybody could, wouldn’t separate two people who loved each other.”

Miss Trotter for the first time felt embarrassed, and this made her a little angry. “I don’t think I gave your brother any right to speak for me or of me in this matter,” she said icily; “and if you are quite satisfied, as you say you are, of your own affection and Frida’s, I do not see why you should care for anybody’sinterference.”

“Now you are angry with me,” he said in a doleful voice which at any other time would have excited her mirth; “and I’ve just done it. Oh, Miss Trotter, don’t! Please forgive me! I didn’t mean to say your talk was no good. I didn’t mean to say you couldn’t help us. Please don’t be mad at me!”

He reached out his hand, grasped her slim fingers in his own, and pressed them, holding them and even arresting her passage. The act was without familiarity or boldness, and she felt that to snatch her hand away would be an imputation of that meaning, instead of the boyish impulse that prompted it. She gently withdrew her hand as if to continue her walk, and said, with a smile:—

“Then you confess you need help—in what way?”

“With her!”

Miss Trotter stared. “With HER!” she repeated. This was a new idea. Was it possible that this common, ignorant girl was playing and trifling with her golden opportunity? “Then you are not quite sure of her?” she said a little coldly.

“She’s so high spirited, you know,” he said humbly, “and so attractive, and if she thought my friends objected and were saying unkind things of her,—well!”—he threw out his hands with a suggestion of hopeless despair—“there’s no knowing what she might do.”

Miss Trotter’s obvious thought was that Frida knew on which side her bread was buttered; but remembering that the proprietor was a widower, it occurred to her that the young woman might also have it buttered on both sides. Her momentary fancy of uniting two lovers somehow weakened at this suggestion, and there was a hardening of her face as she said, “Well, if YOU can’t trust her, perhaps your brother may be right.”

“I don’t say that, Miss Trotter,” said Chris pleadingly, yet with a slight wincing at her words; “YOU could convince her, if you would only try. Only let her see that she has some other friends beside myself. Look! Miss Trotter, I’ll leave it all to you—there! If you will only help me, I will promise not to see her—not to go near her again—until you have talked with her. There! Even my brother would not object to that. And if he has every confidence in you, I’m showing you I’ve more—don’t you see? Come, now, promise—won’t you, dear Miss Trotter?” He again took her hand, and this time pressed a kiss upon her slim fingers. And this time she did not withdraw them. Indeed, it seemed to her, in the quick recurrence of her previous sympathy, as if a hand had been put into her loveless past, grasping and seeking hers in its loneliness. None of her school friends had ever appealed to her like this simple, weak, and loving young man. Perhaps it was because they were of her own sex, and she distrusted them.

Nevertheless, this momentary weakness did not disturb her good common sense. She looked at him fixedly for a moment, and then said, with a faint smile, “Perhaps she does not trust YOU. Perhaps you cannot trust yourself.”

He felt himself reddening with a strange embarrassment. It was not so much the question that disturbed him as the eyes of Miss Trotter; eyes that he had never before noticed as being so beautiful in their color, clearness, and half tender insight. He dropped her hand with a new-found timidity, and yet with a feeling that he would like to hold it longer.

“I mean,” she said, stopping short in the trail at a point where a fringe of almost impenetrable “buckeyes” marked the extreme edge of the woods,—“I mean that you are still very young, and as Frida is nearly your own age,”—she could not resist this peculiarly feminine innuendo,—“she may doubt your ability to marry her in the face of opposition; she may even think my interference is a proof of it; but,” she added quickly, to relieve his embarrassment and a certain abstracted look with which he was beginning to regard her, “I will speak to her, and,” she concluded playfully, “you must take the consequences.”

He said “Thank you,” but not so earnestly as his previous appeal might have suggested, and with the same awkward abstraction in his eyes. Miss Trotter did not notice it, as her own eyes were at that moment fixed upon a point on the trail a few rods away. “Look,” she said in a lower voice, “I may have the opportunity now for there is Frida herself passing.” Chris turned in the direction of her glance. It was indeed the young girl walking leisurely ahead of them. There was no mistaking the smart pink calico gown in which Frida was wont to array her rather generous figure, nor the long yellow braids that hung Marguerite-wise down her back. With the consciousness of good looks which she always carried, there was, in spite of her affected ease, a slight furtiveness in the occasional swift turn of her head, as if evading or seeking observation.

“I will overtake her and speak to her now,” continued Miss Trotter. “I may not have so good a chance again to see her alone. You can wait here for my return, if you like.”