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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready
+#11 in our series by Bret Harte
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+A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready
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+by Bret Harte
+
+August, 2000  [Etext #2280]
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+
+A MILLIONAIRE OF ROUGH-AND-READY
+
+by BRET HARTE
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+There was no mistake this time: he had struck gold at last!
+
+It had lain there before him a moment ago--a misshapen piece of
+brown-stained quartz, interspersed with dull yellow metal; yielding
+enough to have allowed the points of his pick to penetrate its
+honeycombed recesses, yet heavy enough to drop from the point of
+his pick as he endeavored to lift it from the red earth.
+
+He was seeing all this plainly, although he found himself, he knew
+not why, at some distance from the scene of his discovery, his
+heart foolishly beating, his breath impotently hurried.  Yet he was
+walking slowly and vaguely; conscious of stopping and staring at
+the landscape, which no longer looked familiar to him.  He was
+hoping for some instinct or force of habit to recall him to
+himself; yet when he saw a neighbor at work in an adjacent claim,
+he hesitated, and then turned his back upon him.  Yet only a moment
+before he had thought of running to him, saying, "By Jingo!  I've
+struck it," or "D--n it, old man, I've got it"; but that moment had
+passed, and now it seemed to him that he could scarce raise his
+voice, or, if he did, the ejaculation would appear forced and
+artificial.  Neither could he go over to him coolly and tell his
+good fortune; and, partly from this strange shyness, and partly
+with a hope that another survey of the treasure might restore him
+to natural expression, he walked back to his tunnel.
+
+Yes; it was there!  No mere "pocket" or "deposit," but a part of
+the actual vein he had been so long seeking.  It was there, sure
+enough, lying beside the pick and the debris of the "face" of the
+vein that he had exposed sufficiently, after the first shock of
+discovery, to assure himself of the fact and the permanence of his
+fortune.  It was there, and with it the refutation of his enemies'
+sneers, the corroboration of his friends' belief, the practical
+demonstration of his own theories, the reward of his patient
+labors.  It was there, sure enough.  But, somehow, he not only
+failed to recall the first joy of discovery, but was conscious of a
+vague sense of responsibility and unrest.  It was, no doubt, an
+enormous fortune to a man in his circumstances: perhaps it meant a
+couple of hundred thousand dollars, or more, judging from the value
+of the old Martin lead, which was not as rich as this, but it
+required to be worked constantly and judiciously.  It was with a
+decided sense of uneasiness that he again sought the open sunlight
+of the hillside.  His neighbor was still visible on the adjacent
+claim; but he had apparently stopped working, and was
+contemplatively smoking a pipe under a large pine-tree.  For an
+instant he envied him his apparent contentment.  He had a sudden
+fierce and inexplicable desire to go over to him and exasperate his
+easy poverty by a revelation of his own new-found treasure.  But
+even that sensation quickly passed, and left him staring blankly at
+the landscape again.
+
+As soon as he had made his discovery known, and settled its value,
+he would send for his wife and her children in the States.  He
+would build a fine house on the opposite hillside, if she would
+consent to it, unless she preferred, for the children's sake, to
+live in San Francisco.  A sense of a loss of independence--of a
+change of circumstances that left him no longer his own master--
+began to perplex him, in the midst of his brightest projects.
+Certain other relations with other members of his family, which had
+lapsed by absence and his insignificance, must now be taken up
+anew.  He must do something for his sister Jane, for his brother
+William, for his wife's poor connections.  It would be unfair to
+him to say that he contemplated those things with any other
+instinct than that of generosity; yet he was conscious of being
+already perplexed and puzzled.
+
+Meantime, however, the neighbor had apparently finished his pipe,
+and, knocking the ashes out of it, rose suddenly, and ended any
+further uncertainty of their meeting by walking over directly
+towards him.  The treasure-finder advanced a few steps on his side,
+and then stopped irresolutely.
+
+"Hollo, Slinn!" said the neighbor, confidently.
+
+"Hollo, Masters," responded Slinn, faintly.  From the sound of the
+two voices a stranger might have mistaken their relative condition.
+"What in thunder are you mooning about for?  What's up?"  Then,
+catching sight of Slinn's pale and anxious face, he added abruptly,
+"Are you sick?"
+
+Slinn was on the point of telling him his good fortune, but
+stopped.  The unlucky question confirmed his consciousness of his
+physical and mental disturbance, and he dreaded the ready ridicule
+of his companion.  He would tell him later; Masters need not know
+WHEN he had made the strike.  Besides, in his present vagueness, he
+shrank from the brusque, practical questioning that would be sure
+to follow the revelation to a man of Masters' temperament.
+
+"I'm a little giddy here," he answered, putting his hand to his
+head, "and I thought I'd knock off until I was better."
+
+Masters examined him with two very critical gray eyes.  "Tell ye
+what, old man!--if you don't quit this dog-goned foolin' of yours
+in that God-forsaken tunnel you'll get loony!  Times you get so
+tangled up in follerin' that blind lead o' yours you ain't
+sensible!"
+
+Here was the opportunity to tell him all, and vindicate the justice
+of his theories!  But he shrank from it again; and now, adding to
+the confusion, was a singular sense of dread at the mental labor of
+explanation.  He only smiled painfully, and began to move away.
+"Look you!" said Masters, peremptorily, "ye want about three
+fingers of straight whiskey to set you right, and you've got to
+take it with me.  D--n it, man, it may be the last drink we take
+together!  Don't look so skeered!  I mean--I made up my mind about
+ten minutes ago to cut the whole d--d thing, and light out for
+fresh diggings.  I'm sick of getting only grub wages out o' this
+bill.  So that's what I mean by saying it's the last drink you and
+me'll take together.  You know my ways: sayin' and doin' with me's
+the same thing."
+
+It was true.  Slinn had often envied Masters' promptness of
+decision and resolution.  But he only looked at the grim face of
+his interlocutor with a feeble sense of relief.  He was GOING.  And
+he, Slinn, would not have to explain anything!
+
+He murmured something about having to go over to the settlement on
+business.  He dreaded lest Masters should insist upon going into
+the tunnel.
+
+"I suppose you want to mail that letter," said Masters, drily.
+"The mail don't go till to-morrow, so you've got time to finish it,
+and put it in an envelope."
+
+Following the direction of Masters' eyes, Slinn looked down and
+saw, to his utter surprise, that he was holding an unfinished
+pencilled note in his hand.  How it came there, when he had written
+it, he could not tell; he dimly remembered that one of his first
+impulses was to write to his wife, but that he had already done so
+he had forgotten.  He hastily concealed the note in his breast-
+pocket, with a vacant smile.  Masters eyed him half contemptuously,
+half compassionately.
+
+"Don't forget yourself and drop it in some hollow tree for a
+letter-box," be said.  "Well--so long!--since you won't drink.
+Take care of yourself," and, turning on his heel, Masters walked
+away.
+
+Slinn watched him as he crossed over to his abandoned claim, saw
+him gather his few mining utensils, strap his blanket over his
+back, lift his hat on his long-handled shovel as a token of
+farewell, and then stride light-heartedly over the ridge.
+
+He was alone now with his secret and his treasure.  The only man in
+the world who knew of the exact position of his tunnel had gone
+away forever.  It was not likely that this chance companion of a
+few weeks would ever remember him or the locality again; he would
+now leave his treasure alone--for even a day perhaps--until he had
+thought out some plan and sought out some friend in whom to
+confide.  His secluded life, the singular habits of concentration
+which had at last proved so successful had, at the same time, left
+him few acquaintances and no associates.  And in all his well-laid
+plans and patiently-digested theories for finding the treasure, the
+means and methods of working it and disposing of it had never
+entered.
+
+And now, at the hour when he most needed his faculties, what was
+the meaning of this strange benumbing of them!
+
+Patience!  He only wanted a little rest--a little time to recover
+himself.  There was a large boulder under a tree in the highway of
+the settlement--a sheltered spot where he had often waited for the
+coming of the stage-coach.  He would go there, and when he was
+sufficiently rested and composed he would go on.
+
+Nevertheless, on his way he diverged and turned into the woods, for
+no other apparent purpose than to find a hollow tree.  "A hollow
+tree."  Yes! that was what Masters had said; he remembered it
+distinctly; and something was to be done there, but what it was, or
+why it should be done, he could not tell.  However, it was done,
+and very luckily, for his limbs could scarcely support him further,
+and reaching that boulder he dropped upon it like another stone.
+
+And now, strange to say, the uneasiness and perplexity which had
+possessed him ever since he had stood before his revealed wealth
+dropped from him like a burden laid upon the wayside.  A
+measureless peace stole over him, in which visions of his new-found
+fortune, no longer a trouble and perplexity, but crowned with
+happiness and blessing to all around him, assumed proportions far
+beyond his own weak, selfish plans.  In its even-handed
+benefaction, his wife and children, his friends and relations, even
+his late poor companion of the hillside, met and moved harmoniously
+together; in its far-reaching consequences there was only the
+influence of good.  It was not strange that this poor finite mind
+should never have conceived the meaning of the wealth extended to
+him; or that conceiving it he should faint and falter under the
+revelation.  Enough that for a few minutes he must have tasted a
+joy of perfect anticipation that years of actual possession might
+never bring.
+
+The sun seemed to go down in a rosy dream of his own happiness, as
+he still sat there.  Later, the shadows of the trees thickened and
+surrounded him, and still later fell the calm of a quiet evening
+sky with far-spaced passionless stars, that seemed as little
+troubled by what they looked upon as he was by the stealthy
+creeping life in the grasses and underbrush at his feet.  The dull
+patter of soft little feet in the soft dust of the road, the gentle
+gleam of moist and wondering little eyes on the branches and in the
+mossy edges of the boulder, did not disturb him.  He sat patiently
+through it all, as if he had not yet made up his mind.
+
+But when the stage came with the flashing sun the next morning, and
+the irresistible clamor of life and action, the driver suddenly
+laid his four spirited horses on their haunches before the quiet
+spot.  The express messenger clambered down from the box, and
+approached what seemed to be a heap of cast-off clothes upon the
+boulder.
+
+"He don't seem to be drunk," he said, in reply to a querulous
+interrogation from the passengers.  "I can't make him out.  His
+eyes are open, but he cannot speak or move.  Take a look at him,
+Doc."
+
+A rough unprofessional-looking man here descended from the inside
+of the coach, and, carelessly thrusting aside the other curious
+passengers, suddenly leant over the heap of clothes in a
+professional attitude.
+
+"He is dead," said one of the passengers.
+
+The rough man let the passive head sink softly down again.  "No
+such luck for him," he said curtly, but not unkindly.  "It's a
+stroke of paralysis--and about as big as they make 'em.  It's a
+toss-up if he ever speaks or moves again as long as he lives."
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+When Alvin Mulrady announced his intention of growing potatoes and
+garden "truck" on the green slopes of Los Gatos, the mining
+community of that region, and the adjacent hamlet of "Rough-and-
+Ready," regarded it with the contemptuous indifference usually
+shown by those adventurers towards all bucolic pursuits.  There was
+certainly no active objection to the occupation of two hillsides,
+which gave so little promise to the prospector for gold that it was
+currently reported that a single prospector, called "Slinn," had
+once gone mad or imbecile through repeated failures.  The only
+opposition came, incongruously enough, from the original pastoral
+owner of the soil, one Don Ramon Alvarado, whose claim for seven
+leagues of hill and valley, including the now prosperous towns of
+Rough-and-Ready and Red Dog, was met with simple derision from the
+squatters and miners.  "Looks ez ef we woz goin' to travel three
+thousand miles to open up his d--d old wilderness, and then pay for
+the increased valoo we give it--don't it?  Oh, yes, certainly!" was
+their ironical commentary.  Mulrady might have been pardoned for
+adopting this popular opinion; but by an equally incongruous
+sentiment, peculiar, however, to the man, he called upon Don Ramon,
+and actually offered to purchase the land, or "go shares" with him
+in the agricultural profits.  It was alleged that the Don was so
+struck with this concession that he not only granted the land, but
+struck up a quaint reserved friendship for the simple-minded
+agriculturist and his family.  It is scarcely necessary to add that
+this intimacy was viewed by the miners with the contempt that it
+deserved.  They would have been more contemptuous, however, had
+they known the opinion that Don Ramon entertained of their
+particular vocation, and which he early confided to Mulrady.
+
+"They are savages who expect to reap where they have not sown; to
+take out of the earth without returning anything to it but their
+precious carcasses; heathens, who worship the mere stones they dig
+up."  "And was there no Spaniard who ever dug gold?" asked Mulrady,
+simply.  "Ah, there are Spaniards and Moors," responded Don Ramon,
+sententiously.  "Gold has been dug, and by caballeros; but no good
+ever came of it.  There were Alvarados in Sonora, look you, who had
+mines of SILVER, and worked them with peons and mules, and lost
+their money--a gold mine to work a silver one--like gentlemen!  But
+this grubbing in the dirt with one's fingers, that a little gold
+may stick to them, is not for caballeros.  And then, one says
+nothing of the curse."
+
+"The curse!" echoed Mary Mulrady, with youthful feminine
+superstition.  "What is that?"
+
+"You knew not, friend Mulrady, that when these lands were given to
+my ancestors by Charles V., the Bishop of Monterey laid a curse
+upon any who should desecrate them.  Good!  Let us see!  Of the
+three Americanos who founded yonder town, one was shot, another
+died of a fever--poisoned, you understand, by the soil--and the
+last got himself crazy of aguardiente.  Even the scientifico,* who
+came here years ago and spied into the trees and the herbs: he was
+afterwards punished for his profanation, and died of an accident in
+other lands.  But," added Don Ramon, with grave courtesy, "this
+touches not yourself.  Through me, YOU are of the soil."
+
+
+* Don Ramon probably alluded to the eminent naturalist Douglas, who
+visited California before the gold excitement, and died of an
+accident in the Sandwich Islands.
+
+
+Indeed, it would seem as if a secure if not a rapid prosperity was
+the result of Don Ramon's manorial patronage.  The potato patch and
+market garden flourished exceedingly; the rich soil responded with
+magnificent vagaries of growth; the even sunshine set the seasons
+at defiance with extraordinary and premature crops.  The salt pork
+and biscuit consuming settlers did not allow their contempt of
+Mulrady's occupation to prevent their profiting by this opportunity
+for changing their diet.  The gold they had taken from the soil
+presently began to flow into his pockets in exchange for his more
+modest treasures.  The little cabin, which barely sheltered his
+family--a wife, son, and daughter--was enlarged, extended, and
+refitted, but in turn abandoned for a more pretentious house on the
+opposite hill.  A whitewashed fence replaced the rudely-split
+rails, which had kept out the wilderness.  By degrees, the first
+evidences of cultivation--the gashes of red soil, the piles of
+brush and undergrowth, the bared boulders, and heaps of stone--
+melted away, and were lost under a carpet of lighter green, which
+made an oasis in the tawny desert of wild oats on the hillside.
+Water was the only free boon denied this Garden of Eden; what was
+necessary for irrigation had to be brought from a mining ditch at
+great expense, and was of insufficient quantity.  In this emergency
+Mulrady thought of sinking an artesian well on the sunny slope
+beside his house; not, however, without serious consultation and
+much objection from his Spanish patron.  With great austerity Don
+Ramon pointed out that this trifling with the entrails of the earth
+was not only an indignity to Nature almost equal to shaft-sinking
+and tunneling, but was a disturbance of vested interests.  "I and
+my fathers, San Diego rest them!" said Don Ramon, crossing himself,
+"were content with wells and cisterns, filled by Heaven at its
+appointed seasons; the cattle, dumb brutes though they were, knew
+where to find water when they wanted it.  But thou sayest truly,"
+he added, with a sigh, "that was before streams and rain were
+choked with hellish engines, and poisoned with their spume.  Go on,
+friend Mulrady, dig and bore if thou wilt, but in a seemly fashion,
+and not with impious earthquakes of devilish gunpowder."
+
+With this concession Alvin Mulrady began to sink his first artesian
+shaft.  Being debarred the auxiliaries of steam and gunpowder, the
+work went on slowly.  The market garden did not suffer meantime, as
+Mulrady had employed two Chinamen to take charge of the ruder
+tillage, while he superintended the engineering work of the well.
+This trifling incident marked an epoch in the social condition of
+the family.  Mrs. Mulrady at once assumed a conscious importance
+among her neighbors.  She spoke of her husband's "men"; she alluded
+to the well as "the works"; she checked the easy frontier
+familiarity of her customers with pretty Mary Mulrady, her
+seventeen-year-old daughter.  Simple Alvin Mulrady looked with
+astonishment at this sudden development of the germ planted in all
+feminine nature to expand in the slightest sunshine of prosperity.
+"Look yer, Malviny; ain't ye rather puttin' on airs with the boys
+that want to be civil to Mamie?  Like as not one of 'em may be
+makin' up to her already."  "You don't mean to say, Alvin Mulrady,"
+responded Mrs. Mulrady, with sudden severity, "that you ever
+thought of givin' your daughter to a common miner, or that I'm
+goin' to allow her to marry out of our own set?"  "Our own set!"
+echoed Mulrady feebly, blinking at her in astonishment, and then
+glancing hurriedly across at his freckle-faced son and the two
+Chinamen at work in the cabbages.  "Oh, you know what I mean," said
+Mrs. Mulrady sharply; "the set that we move in.  The Alvarados and
+their friends!  Doesn't the old Don come here every day, and ain't
+his son the right age for Mamie?  And ain't they the real first
+families here--all the same as if they were noblemen?  No, leave
+Mamie to me, and keep to your shaft; there never was a man yet had
+the least sabe about these things, or knew what was due to his
+family."  Like most of his larger minded, but feebler equipped sex,
+Mulrady was too glad to accept the truth of the latter proposition,
+which left the meannesses of life to feminine manipulation, and
+went off to his shaft on the hillside.  But during that afternoon
+he was perplexed and troubled.  He was too loyal a husband not to
+be pleased with this proof of an unexpected and superior foresight
+in his wife, although he was, like all husbands, a little startled
+by it.  He tried to dismiss it from his mind.  But looking down
+from the hillside upon his little venture, where gradual increase
+and prosperity had not been beyond his faculties to control and
+understand, he found himself haunted by the more ambitious projects
+of his helpmate.  From his own knowledge of men, he doubted if Don
+Ramon, any more than himself, had ever thought of the possibility
+of a matrimonial connection between the families.  He doubted if he
+would consent to it.  And unfortunately it was this very doubt
+that, touching his own pride as a self-made man, made him first
+seriously consider his wife's proposition.  He was as good as Don
+Ramon, any day!  With this subtle feminine poison instilled in his
+veins, carried completely away by the logic of his wife's illogical
+premises, he almost hated his old benefactor.  He looked down upon
+the little Garden of Eden, where his Eve had just tempted him with
+the fatal fruit, and felt a curious consciousness that he was
+losing its simple and innocent enjoyment forever.
+
+Happily, about this time Don Ramon died.  It is not probable that
+he ever knew the amiable intentions of Mrs. Mulrady in regard to
+his son, who now succeeded to the paternal estate, sadly
+partitioned by relatives and lawsuits.  The feminine Mulradys
+attended the funeral, in expensive mourning from Sacramento; even
+the gentle Alvin was forced into ready-made broadcloth, which
+accented his good-natured but unmistakably common presence.  Mrs.
+Mulrady spoke openly of her "loss"; declared that the old families
+were dying out; and impressed the wives of a few new arrivals at
+Red Dog with the belief that her own family was contemporary with
+the Alvarados, and that her husband's health was far from perfect.
+She extended a motherly sympathy to the orphaned Don Caesar.
+Reserved, like his father, in natural disposition, he was still
+more gravely ceremonious from his loss; and, perhaps from the
+shyness of an evident partiality for Mamie Mulrady, he rarely
+availed himself of her mother's sympathizing hospitality.  But he
+carried out the intentions of his father by consenting to sell to
+Mulrady, for a small sum, the property he had leased.  The idea of
+purchasing had originated with Mrs. Mulrady.
+
+"It'll be all in the family," had observed that astute lady, "and
+it's better for the looks of the things that we shouldn't he his
+tenants."
+
+It was only a few weeks later that she was startled by hearing her
+husband's voice calling her from the hillside as he rapidly
+approached the house.  Mamie was in her room putting on a new pink
+cotton gown, in honor of an expected visit from young Don Caesar,
+and Mrs. Mulrady was tidying the house in view of the same event.
+Something in the tone of her good man's voice, and the unusual
+circumstance of his return to the house before work was done,
+caused her, however, to drop her dusting cloth, and run to the
+kitchen door to meet him.  She saw him running through the rows of
+cabbages, his face shining with perspiration and excitement, a
+light in his eyes which she had not seen for years.  She recalled,
+without sentiment, that he looked like that when she had called
+him--a poor farm hand of her father's--out of the brush heap at the
+back of their former home, in Illinois, to learn the consent of her
+parents.  The recollection was the more embarrassing as he threw
+his arms around her, and pressed a resounding kiss upon her sallow
+cheek.
+
+"Sakes alive!  Mulrady!" she said, exorcising the ghost of a blush
+that had also been recalled from the past with her housewife's
+apron, "what are you doin', and company expected every minit?"
+
+"Malviny, I've struck it; and struck it rich!"
+
+She disengaged herself from his arms, without excitement, and
+looked at him with bright but shrewdly observant eyes.
+
+"I've struck it in the well--the regular vein that the boys have
+been looking fer.  There's a fortin' fer you and Mamie: thousands
+and tens of thousands!"
+
+"Wait a minit."
+
+She left him quickly, and went to the foot of the stairs.  He could
+hear her wonderingly and distinctly.  "Ye can take off that new
+frock, Mamie," she called out.
+
+There was a sound of undisguised expostulation from Mamie.
+
+"I'm speaking," said Mrs. Mulrady, emphatically.
+
+The murmuring ceased.  Mrs. Mulrady returned to her husband.  The
+interruption seemed to have taken off the keen edge of his
+enjoyment.  He at once abdicated his momentary elevation as a
+discoverer, and waited for her to speak.
+
+"Ye haven't told any one yet?" she asked.
+
+"No.  I was alone, down in the shaft.  Ye see, Malviny, I wasn't
+expectin' of anything."  He began, with an attempt at fresh
+enjoyment, "I was just clearin' out, and hadn't reckoned on
+anythin'."
+
+"You see, I was right when I advised you taking the land," she
+said, without heeding him.
+
+Mulrady's face fell.  "I hope Don Caesar won't think"--he began,
+hesitatingly.  "I reckon, perhaps, I oughter make some sorter
+compensation--you know."
+
+"Stuff!" said Mrs. Mulrady, decidedly.  "Don't be a fool.  Any gold
+discovery, anyhow, would have been yours--that's the law.  And you
+bought the land without any restrictions.  Besides, you never had
+any idea of this!"--she stopped, and looked him suddenly in the
+face--"had you?"
+
+Mulrady opened his honest, pale-gray eyes widely.
+
+"Why, Malviny!  You know I hadn't.  I could swear!"
+
+"Don't swear, and don't let on to anybody but what you DID know it
+was there.  Now, Alvin Mulrady, listen to me."  Her voice here took
+the strident form of action.  "Knock off work at the shaft, and
+send your man away at once.  Put on your things, catch the next
+stage to Sacramento at four o'clock, and take Mamie with you."
+
+"Mamie!" echoed Mulrady, feebly.
+
+"You want to see Lawyer Cole and my brother Jim at once," she went
+on, without heeding him, "and Mamie wants a change and some proper.
+clothes.  Leave the rest to me and Abner.  I'll break it to Mamie,
+and get her ready."
+
+Mulrady passed his hands through his tangled hair, wet with
+perspiration.  He was proud of his wife's energy and action; he did
+not dream of opposing her, but somehow he was disappointed.  The
+charming glamour and joy of his discovery had vanished before he
+could fairly dazzle her with it; or, rather, she was not dazzled
+with it at all.  It had become like business, and the expression
+"breaking it" to Mamie jarred upon him.  He would have preferred to
+tell her himself; to watch the color come into her delicate oval
+face, to have seen her soft eyes light with an innocent joy he had
+not seen in his wife's; and he felt a sinking conviction that his
+wife was the last one to awaken it.
+
+"You ain't got any time to lose," she said, impatiently, as he
+hesitated.
+
+Perhaps it was her impatience that struck harshly upon him;
+perhaps, if she had not accepted her good fortune so confidently,
+he would not have spoken what was in his mind at the time; but he
+said gravely, "Wait a minit, Malviny; I've suthin' to tell you
+'bout this find of mine that's sing'lar."
+
+"Go on," she said, quickly.
+
+"Lyin' among the rotten quartz of the vein was a pick," he said,
+constrainedly; "and the face of the vein sorter looked ez if it had
+been worked at.  Follering the line outside to the base of the hill
+there was signs of there having been an old tunnel; but it had
+fallen in, and was blocked up."
+
+"Well?" said Mrs. Mulrady, contemptuously.
+
+"Well," returned her husband, somewhat disconnectedly, "it kinder
+looked as if some feller might have discovered it before."
+
+"And went away, and left it for others!  That's likely--ain't it?"
+interrupted his wife, with ill-disguised intolerance.  "Everybody
+knows the hill wasn't worth that for prospectin'; and it was
+abandoned when we came here.  It's your property and you've paid
+for it.  Are you goin' to wait to advertise for the owner, Alvin
+Mulrady, or are you going to Sacramento at four o'clock to-day?"
+
+Mulrady started.  He had never seriously believed in the
+possibility of a previous discovery; but his conscientious nature
+had prompted him to give it a fair consideration.  She was probably
+right.  What he might have thought had she treated it with equal
+conscientiousness he did not consider.  "All right," he said
+simply.  "I reckon we'll go at once."
+
+"And when you talk to Lawyer Cole and Jim, keep that silly stuff
+about the pick to yourself.  There's no use of putting queer ideas
+into other people's heads because you happen to have 'em yourself."
+
+When the hurried arrangements were at last completed, and Mr.
+Mulrady and Mamie, accompanied by a taciturn and discreet Chinaman,
+carrying their scant luggage, were on their way to the high road to
+meet the up stage, the father gazed somewhat anxiously and
+wistfully into his daughter's face.  He had looked forward to those
+few moments to enjoy the freshness and naivete of Mamie's youthful
+delight and enthusiasm as a relief to his wife's practical, far-
+sighted realism.  There was a pretty pink suffusion in her delicate
+cheek, the breathless happiness of a child in her half-opened
+little mouth, and a beautiful absorption in her large gray eyes
+that augured well for him.
+
+"Well, Mamie, how do we like bein' an heiress?  How do we like
+layin' over all the gals between this and 'Frisco?"
+
+"Eh?"
+
+She had not heard him.  The tender beautiful eyes were engaged in
+an anticipatory examination of the remembered shelves in the "Fancy
+Emporium" at Sacramento; in reading the admiration of the clerks;
+in glancing down a little criticisingly at the broad cowhide
+brogues that strode at her side; in looking up the road for the
+stage-coach; in regarding the fit of her new gloves--everywhere but
+in the loving eyes of the man beside her.
+
+He, however, repeated the question, touched with her charming
+preoccupation, and passing his arm around her little waist.
+
+"I like it well enough, pa, you know!" she said, slightly
+disengaging his arm, but adding a perfunctory little squeeze to his
+elbow to soften the separation.  "I always had an idea SOMETHING
+would happen.  I suppose I'm looking like a fright," she added;
+"but ma made me hurry to get away before Don Caesar came."
+
+"And you didn't want to go without seeing him?" he added, archly.
+
+"I didn't want him to see me in this frock," said Mamie, simply.
+"I reckon that's why ma made me change," she added, with a slight
+laugh.
+
+"Well I reckon you're allus good enough for him in any dress," said
+Mulrady, watching her attentively; "and more than a match for him
+NOW," he added, triumphantly.
+
+"I don't know about that," said Mamie.  "He's been rich all the
+time, and his father and grandfather before him; while we've been
+poor and his tenants."
+
+His face changed; the look of bewilderment, with which he had
+followed her words, gave way to one of pain, and then of anger.
+"Did he get off such stuff as that?" he asked, quickly.
+
+"No.  I'd like to catch him at it," responded Mamie, promptly.
+"There's better nor him to be had for the asking now."
+
+They had walked on a few moments in aggrieved silence, and the
+Chinaman might have imagined some misfortune had just befallen
+them.  But Mamie's teeth shone again between her parted lips.  "La,
+pa! it ain't that!  He cares everything for me, and I do for him;
+and if ma hadn't got new ideas--"  She stopped suddenly.
+
+"What new ideas?" queried her father, anxiously.
+
+"Oh, nothing!  I wish, pa, you'd put on your other boots!
+Everybody can see these are made for the farrows.  And you ain't a
+market gardener any more."
+
+"What am I, then?" asked Mulrady, with a half-pleased, half-uneasy
+laugh.
+
+"You're a capitalist, I say; but ma says a landed proprietor."
+Nevertheless, the landed proprietor, when he reached the boulder on
+the Red Dog highway, sat down in somewhat moody contemplation, with
+his head bowed over the broad cowhide brogues, that seemed to have
+already gathered enough of the soil to indicate his right to that
+title.  Mamie, who had recovered her spirits, but had not lost her
+preoccupation, wandered off by herself in the meadow, or ascended
+the hillside, as her occasional impatience at the delay of the
+coach, or the following of some ambitious fancy, alternately
+prompted her.  She was so far away at one time that the stage-
+coach, which finally drew up before Mulrady, was obliged to wait
+for her.
+
+When she was deposited safely inside, and Mulrady had climbed to
+the box beside the driver, the latter remarked, curtly,--
+
+"Ye gave me a right smart skeer, a minit ago, stranger."
+
+"Ez how?"
+
+"Well, about three years ago, I was comin' down this yer grade, at
+just this time, and sittin' right on that stone, in just your
+attitude, was a man about your build and years.  I pulled up to let
+him in, when, darn my skin! if he ever moved, but sorter looked at
+me without speakin'.  I called to him, and he never answered, 'cept
+with that idiotic stare.  I then let him have my opinion of him, in
+mighty strong English, and drove off, leavin' him there.  The next
+morning, when I came by on the up-trip, darn my skin! if he wasn't
+thar, but lyin' all of a heap on the boulder.  Jim drops down and
+picks him up.  Doctor Duchesne, ez was along, allowst it was a
+played-out prospector, with a big case of paralysis, and we
+expressed him through to the County Hospital, like so much dead
+freight.  I've allus been kinder superstitious about passin' that
+rock, and when I saw you jist now, sittin' thar, dazed like, with
+your head down like the other chap, it rather threw me off my
+centre."
+
+In the inexplicable and half-superstitious uneasiness that this
+coincidence awakened in Mulrady's unimaginative mind, he was almost
+on the point of disclosing his good fortune to the driver, in order
+to prove how preposterous was the parallel, but checked himself in
+time.
+
+"Did you find out who he was?" broke in a rash passenger.  "Did you
+ever get over it?" added another unfortunate.
+
+With a pause of insulting scorn at the interruption, the driver
+resumed, pointedly, to Mulrady: "The pint of the whole thing was my
+cussin' a helpless man, ez could neither cuss back nor shoot; and
+then afterwards takin' you for his ghost layin' for me to get
+even."  He paused again, and then added, carelessly, "They say he
+never kem to enuff to let on who he was or whar he kem from; and he
+was eventooally taken to a 'Sylum for Doddering Idjits and Gin'ral
+and Permiskus Imbeciles at Sacramento.  I've heerd it's considered
+a first-class institooshun, not only for them ez is paralyzed and
+can't talk, as for them ez is the reverse and is too chipper.
+Now," he added, languidly turning for the first time to his
+miserable questioners, "how did YOU find it?"
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+When the news of the discovery of gold in Mulrady shaft was finally
+made public, it created an excitement hitherto unknown in the
+history of the country.  Half of Red Dog and all Rough-and-Ready
+were emptied upon the yellow hills surrounding Mulrady's, until
+their circling camp fires looked like a besieging army that had
+invested his peaceful pastoral home, preparatory to carrying it by
+assault.  Unfortunately for them, they found the various points of
+vantage already garrisoned with notices of "preemption" for mining
+purposes in the name of the various members of the Alvarado family.
+This stroke of business was due to Mrs. Mulrady, as a means of
+mollifying the conscientious scruples of her husband and of
+placating the Alvarados, in view of some remote contingency.  It is
+but fair to say that this degradation of his father's Castilian
+principles was opposed by Don Caesar.  "You needn't work them
+yourself, but sell out to them that will; it's the only way to keep
+the prospectors from taking it without paying for it at all,"
+argued Mrs. Mulrady.  Don Caesar finally assented; perhaps less to
+the business arguments of Mulrady's wife than to the simple
+suggestion of Mamie's mother.  Enough that he realized a sum in
+money for a few acres that exceeded the last ten years' income of
+Don Ramon's seven leagues.
+
+Equally unprecedented and extravagant was the realization of the
+discovery in Mulrady's shaft.  It was alleged that a company,
+hastily formed in Sacramento, paid him a million of dollars down,
+leaving him still a controlling two-thirds interest in the mine.
+With an obstinacy, however, that amounted almost to a moral
+conviction, he refused to include the house and potato-patch in the
+property.  When the company had yielded the point, he declined,
+with equal tenacity, to part with it to outside speculators on even
+the most extravagant offers.  In vain Mrs. Mulrady protested; in
+vain she pointed out to him that the retention of the evidence of
+his former humble occupation was a green blot upon their social
+escutcheon.
+
+"If you will keep the land, build on it, and root up the garden."
+But Mulrady was adamant.
+
+"It's the only thing I ever made myself, and got out of the soil
+with my own hands; it's the beginning of my fortune, and it may be
+the end of it.  Mebbee I'll be glad enough to have it to come back
+to some day, and be thankful for the square meal I can dig out of
+it."
+
+By repeated pressure, however, Mulrady yielded the compromise that
+a portion of it should be made into a vineyard and flower-garden,
+and by a suitable coloring of ornament and luxury obliterate its
+vulgar part.  Less successful, however, was that energetic woman in
+another effort to mitigate the austerities of their earlier state.
+It occurred to her to utilize the softer accents of Don Caesar in
+the pronunciation of their family name, and privately had "Mulrade"
+take the place of Mulrady on her visiting card.  "It might be
+Spanish," she argued with her husband.  "Lawyer Cole says most
+American names are corrupted, and how do you know that yours
+ain't?"  Mulrady, who would not swear that his ancestors came from
+Ireland to the Carolinas in '98, was helpless to refute the
+assertion.  But the terrible Nemesis of an un-Spanish, American
+provincial speech avenged the orthographical outrage at once.  When
+Mrs. Mulrady began to be addressed orally, as well as by letter, as
+"Mrs. Mulraid," and when simple amatory effusions to her daughter
+rhymed with "lovely maid," she promptly refused the original vowel.
+But she fondly clung to the Spanish courtesy which transformed her
+husband's baptismal name, and usually spoke of him--in his absence--
+as "Don Alvino."  But in the presence of his short, square figure,
+his orange tawny hair, his twinkling gray eyes, and retrousse nose,
+even that dominant woman withheld his title.  It was currently
+reported at Red Dog that a distinguished foreigner had one day
+approached Mulrady with the formula, "I believe I have the honor of
+addressing Don Alvino Mulrady?"  "You kin bet your boots, stranger,
+that's me," had returned that simple hidalgo.
+
+Although Mrs. Mulrady would have preferred that Mamie should remain
+at Sacramento until she could join her, preparatory to a trip to
+"the States" and Europe, she yielded to her daughter's desire to
+astonish Rough-and-Ready, before she left, with her new wardrobe,
+and unfold in the parent nest the delicate and painted wings with
+which she was to fly from them forever.  "I don't want them to
+remember me afterwards in those spotted prints, ma, and like as not
+say I never had a decent frock until I went away."  There was
+something so like the daughter of her mother in this delicate
+foresight that the touched and gratified parent kissed her, and
+assented.  The result was gratifying beyond her expectation.  In
+that few weeks' sojourn at Sacramento, the young girl seemed to
+have adapted and assimilated herself to the latest modes of fashion
+with even more than the usual American girl's pliancy and taste.
+Equal to all emergencies of style and material, she seemed to
+supply, from some hitherto unknown quality she possessed, the grace
+and manner peculiar to each.  Untrammeled by tradition, education,
+or precedent, she had the Western girl's confidence in all things
+being possible, which made them so often probable.  Mr. Mulrady
+looked at his daughter with mingled sentiments of pride and awe.
+Was it possible that this delicate creature, so superior to him
+that he seemed like a degenerate scion of her remoter race, was his
+own flesh and blood?  Was she the daughter of her mother, who even
+in her remembered youth was never equipped like this?  If the
+thought brought no pleasure to his simple, loving nature, it at
+least spared him the pain of what might have seemed ingratitude in
+one more akin to himself.  "The fact is, we ain't quite up to her
+style," was his explanation and apology.  A vague belief that in
+another and a better world than this he might approximate and
+understand this perfection somewhat soothed and sustained him.
+
+It was quite consistent, therefore, that the embroidered cambric
+dress which Mamie Mulrady wore one summer afternoon on the hillside
+at Los Gatos, while to the critical feminine eye at once artistic
+and expensive, should not seem incongruous to her surroundings or
+to herself in the eyes of a general audience.  It certainly did not
+seem so to one pair of frank, humorous ones that glanced at her
+from time to time, as their owner, a young fellow of five-and-
+twenty, walked at her side.  He was the new editor of the "Rough-
+and-Ready Record," and, having been her fellow-passenger from
+Sacramento, had already once or twice availed himself of her
+father's invitation to call upon them.  Mrs. Mulrady had not
+discouraged this mild flirtation.  Whether she wished to disconcert
+Don Caesar for some occult purpose, or whether, like the rest of
+her sex, she had an overweening confidence in the unheroic,
+unseductive, and purely platonic character of masculine humor, did
+not appear.
+
+"When I say I'm sorry you are going to leave us, Miss Mulrady,"
+said the young fellow, lightly, "you will comprehend my
+unselfishness, since I frankly admit your departure would be a
+positive relief to me as an editor and a man.  The pressure in the
+Poet's Corner of the 'Record' since it was mistakingly discovered
+that a person of your name might be induced to seek the 'glade' and
+'shade' without being 'afraid,' 'dismayed,' or 'betrayed,' has been
+something enormous, and, unfortunately, I am debarred from
+rejecting anything, on the just ground that I am myself an
+interested admirer."
+
+"It's dreadful to be placarded around the country by one's own full
+name, isn't it?" said Mamie, without, however, expressing much
+horror in her face.
+
+"They think it much more respectful than to call you 'Mamie,'" he
+responded, lightly; "and many of your admirers are middle-aged men,
+with a mediaeval style of compliment.  I've discovered that amatory
+versifying wasn't entirely a youthful passion.  Colonel Cash is
+about as fatal with a couplet as with a double-barreled gun, and
+scatters as terribly.  Judge Butts and Dr. Wilson have both
+discerned the resemblance of your gifts to those of Venus, and
+their own to Apollo.  But don't undervalue those tributes, Miss
+Mulrady," he added, more seriously.  "You'll have thousands of
+admirers where you are going; but you'll be willing to admit in the
+end, I think, that none were more honest and respectful than your
+subjects at Rough-and-Ready and Red Dog."  He stopped, and added in
+a graver tone, "Does Don Caesar write poetry?"
+
+"He has something better to do," said the young lady, pertly.
+
+"I can easily imagine that," he returned, mischievously; "it must
+be a pallid substitute for other opportunities."
+
+"What did you come here for?" she asked, suddenly.
+
+"To see you."
+
+"Nonsense!  You know what I mean.  Why did you ever leave
+Sacramento to come here?  I should think it would suit you so much
+better than this place."
+
+"I suppose I was fired by your father's example, and wished to find
+a gold mine."
+
+"Men like you never do," she said, simply.
+
+"Is that a compliment, Miss Mulrady?"
+
+"I don't know.  But I think that you think that it is."
+
+He gave her the pleased look of one who had unexpectedly found a
+sympathetic intelligence.  "Do I?  This is interesting.  Let's sit
+down."  In their desultory rambling they had reached, quite
+unconsciously, the large boulder at the roadside.  Mamie hesitated
+a moment, looked up and down the road, and then, with an already
+opulent indifference to the damaging of her spotless skirt, sat
+herself upon it, with her furled parasol held by her two little
+hands thrown over her half-drawn-up knee.  The young editor, half
+sitting, half leaning, against the stone, began to draw figures in
+the sand with his cane.
+
+"On the contrary, Miss Mulrady, I hope to make some money here.
+You are leaving Rough-and-Ready because you are rich.  We are
+coming to it because we are poor."
+
+"We?" echoed Mamie, lazily, looking up the road.
+
+"Yes.  My father and two sisters."
+
+"I am sorry.  I might have known them if I hadn't been going away."
+At the same moment, it flashed across her mind that, if they were
+like the man before her, they might prove disagreeably independent
+and critical.  "Is your father in business?" she asked.
+
+He shook his head.  After a pause, he said, punctuating his
+sentences with the point of his stick in the soft dust, "He is
+paralyzed, and out of his mind, Miss Mulrady.  I came to California
+to seek him, as all news of him ceased three years since; and I
+found him only two weeks ago, alone, friendless--an unrecognized
+pauper in the county hospital."
+
+"Two weeks ago?  That was when I went to Sacramento."
+
+"Very probably."
+
+"It must have been very shocking to you?"
+
+"It was."
+
+"I should think you'd feel real bad?"
+
+"I do, at times."  He smiled, and laid his stick on the stone.
+"You now see, Miss Mulrady, how necessary to me is this good
+fortune that you don't think me worthy of.  Meantime I must try to
+make a home for them at Rough-and-Ready."
+
+Miss Mulrady put down her knee and her parasol.  "We mustn't stay
+here much longer, you know."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why, the stage-coach comes by at about this time."
+
+"And you think the passengers will observe us sitting here?"
+
+"Of course they will."
+
+"Miss Mulrady, I implore you to stay."
+
+He was leaning over her with such apparent earnestness of voice and
+gesture that the color came into her cheek.  For a moment she
+scarcely dared to lift her conscious eyes to his.  When she did so,
+she suddenly glanced her own aside with a flash of anger.  He was
+laughing.
+
+"If you have any pity for me, do not leave me now," he repeated.
+"Stay a moment longer, and my fortune is made.  The passengers will
+report us all over Red Dog as engaged.  I shall be supposed to be
+in your father's secrets, and shall be sought after as a director
+of all the new companies.  The 'Record' will double its
+circulation; poetry will drop out of its columns, advertising rush
+to fill its place, and I shall receive five dollars a week more
+salary, if not seven and a half.  Never mind the consequences to
+yourself at such a moment.  I assure you there will be none.  You
+can deny it the next day--I will deny it--nay, more, the 'Record'
+itself will deny it in an extra edition of one thousand copies, at
+ten cents each.  Linger a moment longer, Miss Mulrady.  Fly, oh fly
+not yet.  They're coming--hark! oh!  By Jove, it's only Don
+Caesar!"
+
+It was, indeed, only the young scion of the house of Alvarado,
+blue-eyed, sallow-skinned, and high-shouldered, coming towards them
+on a fiery, half-broken mustang, whose very spontaneous lawlessness
+seemed to accentuate and bring out the grave and decorous ease of
+his rider.  Even in his burlesque preoccupation the editor of the
+"Record" did not withhold his admiration of this perfect
+horsemanship.  Mamie, who, in her wounded amour propre, would like
+to have made much of it to annoy her companion, was thus estopped
+any ostentatious compliment.
+
+Don Caesar lifted his hat with sweet seriousness to the lady, with
+grave courtesy to the gentleman.  While the lower half of this
+Centaur was apparently quivering with fury, and stamping the ground
+in his evident desire to charge upon the pair, the upper half, with
+natural dignity, looked from the one to the other, as if to leave
+the privilege of an explanation with them.  But Mamie was too wise,
+and her companion too indifferent, to offer one.  A slight shade
+passed over Don Caesar's face.  To complicate the situation at that
+moment, the expected stagecoach came rattling by.  With quick
+feminine intuition, Mamie caught in the faces of the driver and the
+expressman, and reflected in the mischievous eyes of her companion,
+a peculiar interpretation of their meeting, that was not removed by
+the whispered assurance of the editor that the passengers were
+anxiously looking back "to see the shooting."
+
+The young Spaniard, equally oblivious of humor or curiosity,
+remained impassive.
+
+"You know Mr. Slinn, of the 'Record," said Mamie, "don't you?"
+
+Don Caesar had never before met the Senor Esslinn.  He was under
+the impression that it was a Senor Robinson that was of the
+"Record."
+
+"Oh, HE was shot," said Slinn.  "I'm taking his place."
+
+"Bueno!  To be shot too?  I trust not."
+
+Slinn looked quickly and sharply into Don Caesar's grave face.  He
+seemed to be incapable of any double meaning.  However, as he had
+no serious reason for awakening Don Caesar's jealousy, and very
+little desire to become an embarrassing third in this conversation,
+and possibly a burden to the young lady, he proceeded to take his
+leave of her.  From a sudden feminine revulsion of sympathy, or
+from some unintelligible instinct of diplomacy, Mamie said, as she
+extended her hand, "I hope you'll find a home for your family near
+here.  Mamma wants pa to let our old house.  Perhaps it might suit
+you, if not too far from your work.  You might speak to ma about
+it."
+
+"Thank you; I will," responded the young man, pressing her hand
+with unaffected cordiality.
+
+Don Caesar watched him until he had disappeared behind the wayside
+buckeyes.
+
+"He is a man of family--this one--your countryman?"
+
+It seemed strange to her to have a mere acquaintance spoken of as
+"her countryman"--not the first time nor the last time in her
+career.  As there appeared no trace or sign of jealousy in her
+questioner's manner, she answered briefly but vaguely:
+
+"Yes; it's a shocking story.  His father disappeared some years
+ago, and he has just found him--a helpless paralytic--in the
+Sacramento Hospital.  He'll have to support him--and they're very
+poor."
+
+"So, then, they are not independent of each other always--these
+fathers and children of Americans!"
+
+"No," said Mamie, shortly.  Without knowing why, she felt inclined
+to resent Don Caesar's manner.  His serious gravity--gentle and
+high-bred as it was, undoubtedly--was somewhat trying to her at
+times, and seemed even more so after Slinn's irreverent humor.  She
+picked up her parasol, a little impatiently, as if to go.
+
+But Don Caesar had already dismounted, and tied his horse to a tree
+with a strong lariat that hung at his saddle-bow.
+
+"Let us walk through the woods towards your home.  I can return
+alone for the horse when you shall dismiss me."
+
+They turned in among the pines that, overcrowding the hollow, crept
+partly up the side of the hill of Mulrady's shaft.  A disused
+trail, almost hidden by the waxen-hued yerba buena, led from the
+highway, and finally lost itself in the undergrowth.  It was a
+lovers' walk; they were lovers, evidently, and yet the man was too
+self-poised in his gravity, the young woman too conscious and
+critical, to suggest an absorbing or oblivious passion.
+
+"I should not have made myself so obtrusive to-day before your
+friend," said Don Caesar, with proud humility, "but I could not
+understand from your mother whether you were alone or whether my
+company was desirable.  It is of this I have now to speak, Mamie.
+Lately your mother has seemed strange to me; avoiding any reference
+to our affection; treating it lightly, and even as to-day, I fancy,
+putting obstacles in the way of our meeting alone.  She was
+disappointed at your return from Sacramento where, I have been
+told, she intended you to remain until you left the country; and
+since your return I have seen you but twice.  I may be wrong. 
+Perhaps I do not comprehend the American mother; I have--who
+knows?--perhaps offended in some point of etiquette, omitted some
+ceremony that was her due.  But when you told me, Mamie, that it
+was not necessary to speak to HER first, that it was not the
+American fashion--"
+
+Mamie started, and blushed slightly.
+
+"Yes," she said hurriedly, "certainly; but ma has been quite queer
+of late, and she may think--you know--that since--since there has
+been so much property to dispose of, she ought to have been
+consulted."
+
+"Then let us consult her at once, dear child!  And as to the
+property, in Heaven's name, let her dispose of it as she will.
+Saints forbid that an Alvarado should ever interfere.  And what is
+it to us, my little one?  Enough that Dona Mameta Alvarado will
+never have less state than the richest bride that ever came to Los
+Gatos."
+
+Mamie had not forgotten that, scarcely a month ago, even had she
+loved the man before her no more than she did at present, she would
+still have been thrilled with delight at these words!  Even now she
+was moved--conscious as she had become that the "state" of a bride
+of the Alvarados was not all she had imagined, and that the bare
+adobe court of Los Gatos was open to the sky and the free criticism
+of Sacramento capitalists!
+
+"Yes, dear," she murmured with a half childlike pleasure, that lit
+up her face and eyes so innocently that it stopped any minute
+investigation into its origin and real meaning.  "Yes, dear; but we
+need not have a fuss made about it at present, and perhaps put ma
+against us.  She wouldn't hear of our marrying now; and she might
+forbid our engagement."
+
+"But you are going away."
+
+"I should have to go to New York or Europe FIRST, you know," she
+answered, naively, "even if it were all settled.  I should have to
+get things!  One couldn't be decent here."
+
+With the recollection of the pink cotton gown, in which she had
+first pledged her troth to him, before his eyes, he said, "But you
+are charming now.  You cannot be more so to me.  If I am satisfied,
+little one, with you as you are, let us go together, and then you
+can get dresses to please others."
+
+She had not expected this importunity.  Really, if it came to this,
+she might have engaged herself to some one like Slinn; he at least
+would have understood her.  He was much cleverer, and certainly
+more of a man of the world.  When Slinn had treated her like a
+child, it was with the humorous tolerance of an admiring superior,
+and not the didactic impulse of a guardian.  She did not say this,
+nor did her pretty eyes indicate it, as in the instance of her
+brief anger with Slinn.  She only said gently,--
+
+"I should have thought you, of all men, would have been particular
+about your wife doing the proper thing.  But never mind!  Don't let
+us talk any more about it.  Perhaps as it seems such a great thing
+to you, and so much trouble, there may be no necessity for it at
+all."
+
+I do not think that the young lady deliberately planned this
+charmingly illogical deduction from Don Caesar's speech, or that
+she calculated its effect upon him; but it was part of her nature
+to say it, and profit by it.  Under the unjust lash of it, his
+pride gave way.
+
+"Ah, do you not see why I wish to go with you?" he said, with
+sudden and unexpected passion.  "You are beautiful; you are good;
+it has pleased Heaven to make you rich also; but you are a child in
+experience, and know not your own heart.  With your beauty, your
+goodness, and your wealth, you will attract all to you--as you do
+here--because you cannot help it.  But you will be equally
+helpless, little one, if THEY should attract YOU, and you had no
+tie to fall back upon."
+
+It was an unfortunate speech.  The words were Don Caesar's; but the
+thought she had heard before from her mother, although the
+deduction had been of a very different kind.  Mamie followed the
+speaker with bright but visionary eyes.  There must be some truth
+in all this.  Her mother had said it; Mr. Slinn had laughingly
+admitted it.  She HAD a brilliant future before her!  Was she right
+in making it impossible by a rash and foolish tie?  He himself had
+said she was inexperienced.  She knew it; and yet, what was he
+doing now but taking advantage of that inexperience?  If he really
+loved her, he would be willing to submit to the test.  She did not
+ask a similar one from him; and was willing, if she came out of it
+free, to marry him just the same.  There was something so noble in
+this thought that she felt for a moment carried away by an impulse
+of compassionate unselfishness, and smiled tenderly as she looked
+up in his face.
+
+"Then you consent, Mamie?" he said, eagerly, passing his arm around
+her waist.
+
+"Not now, Caesar," she said, gently disengaging herself.  "I must
+think it over; we are both too young to act upon it rashly; it
+would be unfair to you, who are so quiet and have seen so few
+girls--I mean Americans--to tie yourself to the first one you have
+known.  When I am gone you will go more into the world.  There are
+Mr. Slinn's two sisters coming here--I shouldn't wonder if they
+were far cleverer and talked far better than I do--and think how I
+should feel if I knew that only a wretched pledge to me kept you
+from loving them!"  She stopped, and cast down her eyes.
+
+It was her first attempt at coquetry, for, in her usual charming
+selfishness, she was perfectly frank and open; and it might not
+have been her last, but she had gone too far at first, and was not
+prepared for a recoil of her own argument.
+
+"If you admit that it is possible--that it is possible to you!" he
+said, quickly.
+
+She saw her mistake.  "We may not have many opportunities to meet
+alone," she answered, quietly; "and I am sure we would be happier
+when we meet not to accuse each other of impossibilities.  Let us
+rather see how we can communicate together, if anything should
+prevent our meeting.  Remember, it was only by chance that you were
+able to see me now.  If ma has believed that she ought to have been
+consulted, our meeting together in this secret way will only make
+matters worse.  She is even now wondering where I am, and may be
+suspicious.  I must go back at once.  At any moment some one may
+come here looking for me."
+
+"But I have so much to say," he pleaded.  "Our time has been so
+short."
+
+"You can write."
+
+"But what will your mother think of that?" he said, in grave
+astonishment.
+
+She colored again as she returned, quickly, "Of course, you must
+not write to the house.  You can leave a letter somewhere for me--
+say, somewhere about here.  Stop!" she added, with a sudden girlish
+gayety, "see, here's the very place.  Look there!"
+
+She pointed to the decayed trunk of a blasted sycamore, a few feet
+from the trail.  A cavity, breast high, half filled with skeleton
+leaves and pine-nuts, showed that it had formerly been a squirrel's
+hoard, but for some reason had been deserted.
+
+"Look! it's a regular letter-box," she continued, gayly, rising on
+tip-toe to peep into its recesses.  Don Caesar looked at her
+admiringly; it seemed like a return to their first idyllic love-
+making in the old days, when she used to steal out of the cabbage
+rows in her brown linen apron and sun-bonnet to walk with him in
+the woods.  He recalled the fact to her with the fatality of a
+lover already seeking to restore in past recollections something
+that was wanting in the present.  She received it with the
+impatience of youth, to whom the present is all sufficient.
+
+"I wonder how you could ever have cared for me in that holland
+apron," she said, looking down upon her new dress.
+
+"Shall I tell you why?" he said, fondly, passing his arm around her
+waist, and drawing her pretty head nearer his shoulder.
+
+"No--not now!" she said, laughingly, but struggling to free
+herself.  "There's not time.  Write it, and put it in the box.
+There," she added, hastily, "listen!--what's that?"
+
+"It's only a squirrel," he whispered reassuringly in her ear.
+
+"No; it's somebody coming!  I must go!  Please!  Caesar, dear!
+There, then--"
+
+She met his kiss half-way, released herself with a lithe movement
+of her wrist and shoulder, and the next moment seemed to slip into
+the woods, and was gone.
+
+Don Caesar listened with a sigh as the last rustling ceased, cast a
+look at the decayed tree as if to fix it in his memory, and then
+slowly retraced his steps towards his tethered mustang.
+
+He was right, however, in his surmise of the cause of that
+interruption.  A pair of bright eyes had been watching them from
+the bough of an adjacent tree.  It was a squirrel, who, having had
+serious and prior intentions of making use of the cavity they had
+discovered, had only withheld examination by an apparent courteous
+discretion towards the intruding pair.  Now that they were gone he
+slipped down the tree and ran towards the decayed stump.
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Apparently dissatisfied with the result of an investigation, which
+proved that the cavity was unfit as a treasure hoard for a discreet
+squirrel, whatever its value as a receptacle for the love-tokens of
+incautious humanity, the little animal at once set about to put
+things in order.  He began by whisking out an immense quantity of
+dead leaves, disturbed a family of tree-spiders, dissipated a drove
+of patient aphides browsing in the bark, as well as their attendant
+dairymen, the ants, and otherwise ruled it with the high hand of
+dispossession and a contemptuous opinion of the previous
+incumbents.  It must not be supposed, however, that his proceedings
+were altogether free from contemporaneous criticism; a venerable
+crow sitting on a branch above him displayed great interest in his
+occupation, and, hopping down a few moments afterwards, disposed of
+some worm-eaten nuts, a few larvae, and an insect or two, with
+languid dignity and without prejudice.  Certain incumbrances,
+however, still resisted the squirrel's general eviction; among them
+a folded square of paper with sharply defined edges, that declined
+investigation, and, owing to a nauseous smell of tobacco, escaped
+nibbling as it had apparently escaped insect ravages.  This, owing
+to its sharp angles, which persisted in catching in the soft
+decaying wood in his whirlwind of house-cleaning, he allowed to
+remain.  Having thus, in a general way, prepared for the coming
+winter, the self-satisfied little rodent dismissed the subject from
+his active mind.
+
+His rage and indignation a few days later may be readily conceived,
+when he found, on returning to his new-made home, another square of
+paper, folded like the first, but much fresher and whiter, lying
+within the cavity, on top of some moss which had evidently been
+placed there for the purpose.  This he felt was really more than he
+could bear, but it was smaller, and with a few energetic kicks and
+whisks of his tail he managed to finally dislodge it through the
+opening, where it fell ignominiously to the earth.  The eager eyes
+of the ever-attendant crow, however, instantly detected it; he flew
+to the ground, and, turning it over, examined it gravely.  It was
+certainly not edible, but it was exceedingly rare, and, as an old
+collector of curios, he felt he could not pass it by.  He lifted it
+in his beak, and, with a desperate struggle against the
+superincumbent weight, regained the branch with his prize.  Here,
+by one of those delicious vagaries of animal nature, he apparently
+at once discharged his mind of the whole affair, became utterly
+oblivious of it, allowed it to drop without the least concern, and
+eventually flew away with an abstracted air, as if he had been
+another bird entirely.  The paper got into a manzanita bush, where
+it remained suspended until the evening, when, being dislodged by a
+passing wild-cat on its way to Mulrady's hen-roost, it gave that
+delicately sensitive marauder such a turn that she fled into the
+adjacent county.
+
+But the troubles of the squirrel were not yet over.  On the
+following day the young man who had accompanied the young woman
+returned to the trunk, and the squirrel had barely time to make his
+escape before the impatient visitor approached the opening of the
+cavity, peered into it, and even passed his hand through its
+recesses.  The delight visible upon his anxious and serious face at
+the disappearance of the letter, and the apparent proof that it had
+been called for, showed him to have been its original depositor,
+and probably awakened a remorseful recollection in the dark bosom
+of the omnipresent crow, who uttered a conscious-stricken croak
+from the bough above him.  But the young man quickly disappeared
+again, and the squirrel was once more left in undisputed
+possession.
+
+A week passed.  A weary, anxious interval to Don Caesar, who had
+neither seen nor heard from Mamie since their last meeting.  Too
+conscious of his own self-respect to call at the house after the
+equivocal conduct of Mrs. Mulrady, and too proud to haunt the lanes
+and approaches in the hope of meeting her daughter, like an
+ordinary lover, he hid his gloomy thoughts in the monastic shadows
+of the courtyard at Los Gatos, or found relief in furious riding at
+night and early morning on the highway.  Once or twice the up-stage
+had been overtaken and passed by a rushing figure as shadowy as a
+phantom horseman, with only the star-like point of a cigarette to
+indicate its humanity.  It was in one of these fierce recreations
+that he was obliged to stop in early morning at the blacksmith's
+shop at Rough-and-Ready, to have a loosend horseshoe replaced, and
+while waiting picked up a newspaper.  Don Caesar seldom read the
+papers, but noticing that this was the "Record," he glanced at its
+columns.  A familiar name suddenly flashed out of the dark type
+like a spark from the anvil.  With a brain and heart that seemed to
+be beating in unison with the blacksmith's sledge, he read as
+follows:--
+
+"Our distinguished fellow-townsman, Alvin Mulrady, Esq., left town
+day before yesterday to attend an important meeting of directors of
+the Red Dog Ditch Company, in San Francisco.  Society will regret
+to hear that Mrs. Mulrady and her beautiful and accomplished
+daughter, who are expecting to depart for Europe at the end of the
+month, anticipated the event nearly a fortnight, by taking this
+opportunity of accompanying Mr. Mulrady as far as San Francisco, on
+their way to the East.  Mrs. and Miss Mulrady intend to visit
+London, Paris, and Berlin, and will be absent three years.  It is
+possible that Mr. Mulrady may join them later at one or other of
+those capitals.  Considerable disappointment is felt that a more
+extended leave-taking was not possible, and that, under the
+circumstances, no opportunity was offered for a 'send off' suitable
+to the condition of the parties and the esteem in which they are
+held in Rough-and-Ready."
+
+The paper dropped from his hands.  Gone! and without a word!  No,
+that was impossible!  There must be some mistake; she had written;
+the letter had miscarried; she must have sent word to Los Gatos,
+and the stupid messenger had blundered; she had probably appointed
+another meeting, or expected him to follow to San Francisco.  "The
+day before yesterday!"  It was the morning's paper--she had been
+gone scarcely two days--it was not too late yet to receive a
+delayed message by post, by some forgetful hand--by--ah--the tree!
+
+Of course it was in the tree, and he had not been there for a week!
+Why had he not thought of it before?  The fault was his, not hers.
+Perhaps she had gone away, believing him faithless, or a country
+boor.
+
+"In the name of the Devil, will you keep me here till eternity!"
+
+The blacksmith stared at him.  Don Caesar suddenly remembered that
+he was speaking, as he was thinking--in Spanish.
+
+"Ten dollars, my friend, if you have done in five minutes!"
+
+The man laughed.  "That's good enough American," he said, beginning
+to quicken his efforts.  Don Caesar again took up the paper.  There
+was another paragraph that recalled his last interview with Mamie:--
+
+"Mr. Harry Slinn, Jr., the editor of this paper, has just moved
+into the pioneer house formerly occupied by Alvin Mulrady, Esq.,
+which has already become historic in the annals of the county.  Mr.
+Slinn brings with him his father--H. J. Slinn, Esq.,--and his two
+sisters.  Mr. Slinn, Sen., who has been suffering for many years
+from complete paralysis, we understand is slowly improving; and it
+is by the advice of his physicians that he has chosen the
+invigorating air of the foothills as a change to the debilitating
+heat of Sacramento."
+
+The affair had been quickly settled, certainly, reflected Don
+Caesar, with a slight chill of jealousy, as he thought of Mamie's
+interest in the young editor.  But the next moment he dismissed it
+from his mind; all except a dull consciousness that, if she really
+loved him--Don Caesar--as he loved her, she could not have assisted
+in throwing into his society the young sisters of the editor, who
+she expected might be so attractive.
+
+Within the five minutes the horse was ready, and Don Caesar in the
+saddle again.  In less than half an hour he was at the wayside
+boulder.  Here he picketed his horse, and took the narrow foot-
+trail through the hollow.  It did not take him long to reach their
+old trysting-place.  With a beating heart he approached the
+decaying trunk and looked into the cavity.  There was no letter
+there!
+
+A few blackened nuts and some of the dry moss he had put there were
+lying on the ground at its roots.  He could not remember whether
+they were there when he had last visited the spot.  He began to
+grope in the cavity with both hands.  His fingers struck against
+the sharp angles of a flat paper packet: a thrill of joy ran
+through them and stopped his beating heart; he drew out the hidden
+object, and was chilled with disappointment.
+
+It was an ordinary-sized envelope of yellowish-brown paper,
+bearing, besides the usual government stamp, the official legend of
+an express company, and showing its age as much by this record of a
+now obsolete carrying service as by the discoloration of time and
+atmosphere.  Its weight, which was heavier than that of any
+ordinary letter of the same size and thickness, was evidently due
+to some loose enclosures, that slightly rustled and could be felt
+by the fingers, like minute pieces of metal or grains of gravel.
+It was within Don Caesar's experience that gold specimens were
+often sent in that manner.  It was in a state of singular
+preservation, except the address, which, being written in pencil,
+was scarcely discernible, and even when deciphered appeared to be
+incoherent and unfinished.  The unknown correspondent had written
+"dear Mary," and then "Mrs. Mary Slinn," with an unintelligible
+scrawl following for the direction.  If Don Caesar's mind had not
+been lately preoccupied with the name of the editor, he would
+hardly have guessed the superscription.
+
+In his cruel disappointment and fully aroused indignation, he at
+once began to suspect a connection of circumstances which at any
+other moment he would have thought purely accidental, or perhaps
+not have considered at all.  The cavity in the tree had evidently
+been used as a secret receptacle for letters before; did Mamie know
+it at the time, and how did she know it?  The apparent age of the
+letter made it preposterous to suppose that it pointed to any
+secret correspondence of hers with young Mr. Slinn; and the address
+was not in her handwriting.  Was there any secret previous intimacy
+between the families?  There was but one way in which he could
+connect this letter with Mamie's faithlessness.  It was an
+infamous, a grotesquely horrible idea, a thought which sprang as
+much from his inexperience of the world and his habitual
+suspiciousness of all humor as anything else!  It was that the
+letter was a brutal joke of Slinn's--a joke perhaps concocted by
+Mamie and himself--a parting insult that should at the last moment
+proclaim their treachery and his own credulity.  Doubtless it
+contained a declaration of their shame, and the reason why she had
+fled from him without a word of explanation.  And the enclosure, of
+course, was some significant and degrading illustration.  Those
+Americans are full of those low conceits; it was their national
+vulgarity.
+
+He had the letter in his angry hand.  He could break it open if he
+wished and satisfy himself; but it was not addressed to HIM, and
+the instinct of honor, strong even in his rage, was the instinct of
+an adversary as well.  No; Slinn should open the letter before him.
+Slinn should explain everything, and answer for it.  If it was
+nothing--a mere accident--it would lead to some general
+explanation, and perhaps even news of Mamie.  But he would arraign
+Slinn, and at once.  He put the letter in his pocket, quickly
+retraced his steps to his horse, and, putting spurs to the animal,
+followed the high road to the gate of Mulrady's pioneer cabin.
+
+He remembered it well enough.  To a cultivated taste, it was
+superior to the more pretentious "new house."  During the first
+year of Mulrady's tenancy, the plain square log-cabin had received
+those additions and attractions which only a tenant can conceive
+and actual experience suggest; and in this way the hideous right
+angles were broken with sheds, "lean-to" extensions, until a
+certain picturesqueness was given to the irregularity of outline,
+and a home-like security and companionship to the congregated
+buildings.  It typified the former life of the great capitalist, as
+the tall new house illustrated the loneliness and isolation that
+wealth had given him.  But the real points of vantage were the
+years of cultivation and habitation that had warmed and enriched
+the soil, and evoked the climbing vines and roses that already hid
+its unpainted boards, rounded its hard outlines, and gave
+projection and shadow from the pitiless glare of a summer's long
+sun, or broke the steady beating of the winter rains.  It was true
+that pea and bean poles surrounded it on one side, and the only
+access to the house was through the cabbage rows that once were the
+pride and sustenance of the Mulradys.  It was this fact, more than
+any other, that had impelled Mrs. Mulrady to abandon its site; she
+did not like to read the history of their humble origin reflected
+in the faces of their visitors as they entered.
+
+Don Caesar tied his horse to the fence, and hurriedly approached
+the house.  The door, however, hospitably opened when he was a few
+paces from it, and when he reached the threshold he found himself
+unexpectedly in the presence of two pretty girls.  They were
+evidently Slinn's sisters, whom he had neither thought of nor
+included in the meeting he had prepared.  In spite of his
+preoccupation, he felt himself suddenly embarrassed, not only by
+the actual distinction of their beauty, but by a kind of likeness
+that they seemed to bear to Mamie.
+
+"We saw you coming," said the elder, unaffectedly.  "You are Don
+Caesar Alvarado.  My brother has spoken of you."
+
+The words recalled Don Caesar to himself and a sense of courtesy.
+He was not here to quarrel with these fair strangers at their first
+meeting; he must seek Slinn elsewhere, and at another time.  The
+frankness of his reception and the allusion to their brother made
+it appear impossible that they should be either a party to his
+disappointment, or even aware of it.  His excitement melted away
+before a certain lazy ease, which the consciousness of their beauty
+seemed to give them.  He was able to put a few courteous inquiries,
+and, thanks to the paragraph in the "Record," to congratulate them
+upon their father's improvement.
+
+"Oh, pa is a great deal better in his health, and has picked up
+even in the last few days, so that he is able to walk round with
+crutches," said the elder sister.  "The air here seems to
+invigorate him wonderfully."
+
+"And you know, Esther," said the younger, "I think he begins to
+take more notice of things, especially when he is out-of-doors.  He
+looks around on the scenery, and his eye brightens, as if he knew
+all about it; and sometimes he knits his brows, and looks down so,
+as if he was trying to remember."
+
+"You know, I suppose," exclaimed Esther, "that since his seizure
+his memory has been a blank--that is, three or four years of his
+life seem to have been dropped out of his recollection."
+
+"It might be a mercy sometimes, Senora," said Don Caesar, with a
+grave sigh, as he looked at the delicate features before him, which
+recalled the face of the absent Mamie.
+
+"That's not very complimentary," said the younger girl, laughingly;
+"for pa didn't recognize us, and only remembered us as little
+girls."
+
+"Vashti!" interrupted Esther, rebukingly; then, turning to Don
+Caesar, she added, "My sister, Vashti, means that father remembers
+more what happened before he came to California, when we were quite
+young, than he does of the interval that elapsed.  Dr. Duchesne
+says it's a singular case.  He thinks that, with his present
+progress, he will recover the perfect use of his limbs; though his
+memory may never come back again."
+
+"Unless--  You forget what the doctor told us this morning,"
+interrupted Vashti again, briskly.
+
+"I was going to say it," said Esther, a little curtly.  "UNLESS he
+has another stroke.  Then he will either die or recover his mind
+entirely."
+
+Don Caesar glanced at the bright faces, a trifle heightened in
+color by their eager recital and the slight rivalry of narration,
+and looked grave.  He was a little shocked at a certain lack of
+sympathy and tenderness towards their unhappy parent.  They seemed
+to him not only to have caught that dry, curious toleration of
+helplessness which characterizes even relationship in its
+attendance upon chronic suffering and weakness, but to have
+acquired an unconscious habit of turning it to account.  In his
+present sensitive condition, he even fancied that they flirted
+mildly over their parent's infirmity.
+
+"My brother Harry has gone to Red Dog," continued Esther; "he'll be
+right sorry to have missed you.  Mrs. Mulrady spoke to him about
+you; you seem to have been great friends.  I s'pose you knew her
+daughter, Mamie; I hear she is very pretty."
+
+Although Don Caesar was now satisfied that the Slinns knew nothing
+of Mamie's singular behavior to him, he felt embarrassed by this
+conversation.  "Miss Mulrady is very pretty," he said, with grave
+courtesy; "it is a custom of her race.  She left suddenly," he
+added with affected calmness.
+
+"I reckon she did calculate to stay here longer--so her mother
+said; but the whole thing was settled a week ago.  I know my
+brother was quite surprised to hear from Mr. Mulrady that if we
+were going to decide about this house we must do it at once; he had
+an idea himself about moving out of the big one into this when they
+left."
+
+"Mamie Mulrady hadn't much to keep her here, considerin' the money
+and the good looks she has, I reckon," said Vashti.  "She isn't the
+sort of girl to throw herself away in the wilderness, when she can
+pick and choose elsewhere.  I only wonder she ever come back from
+Sacramento.  They talk about papa Mulrady having BUSINESS at San
+Francisco, and THAT hurrying them off!  Depend upon it, that
+'business' was Mamie herself.  Her wish is gospel to them.  If
+she'd wanted to stay and have a farewell party, old Mulrady's
+business would have been nowhere."
+
+"Ain't you a little rough on Mamie," said Esther, who had been
+quietly watching the young man's face with her large languid eyes,
+"considering that we don't know her, and haven't even the right of
+friends to criticise?"
+
+"I don't call it rough," returned Vashti, frankly, "for I'd do the
+same if I were in her shoes--and they're four-and-a-halves, for
+Harry told me so.  Give me her money and her looks, and you
+wouldn't catch me hanging round these diggings--goin' to choir
+meetings Saturdays, church Sundays, and buggy-riding once a month--
+for society!  No--Mamie's head was level--you bet!"
+
+Don Caesar rose hurriedly.  They would present his compliments to
+their father, and he would endeavor to find their brother at Red
+Dog.  He, alas! had neither father, mother, nor sister, but if they
+would receive his aunt, the Dona Inez Sepulvida, the next Sunday,
+when she came from mass, she should be honored and he would be
+delighted.  It required all his self-possession to deliver himself
+of this formal courtesy before he could take his leave, and on the
+back of his mustang give way to the rage, disgust and hatred of
+everything connected with Mamie that filled his heart.  Conscious
+of his disturbance, but not entirely appreciating their own share
+in it, the two girls somewhat wickedly prolonged the interview by
+following him into the garden.
+
+"Well, if you MUST leave now," said Esther, at last, languidly, "it
+ain't much out of your way to go down through the garden and take a
+look at pa as you go.  He's somewhere down there, near the woods,
+and we don't like to leave him alone too long.  You might pass the
+time of day with him; see if he's right side up.  Vashti and I have
+got a heap of things to fix here yet; but if anything's wrong with
+him, you can call us.  So-long."
+
+Don Caesar was about to excuse himself hurriedly; but that sudden
+and acute perception of all kindred sorrow which belongs to refined
+suffering, checked his speech.  The loneliness of the helpless old
+man in this atmosphere of active and youthful selfishness touched
+him.  He bowed assent, and turned aside into one of the long
+perspectives of bean-poles.  The girls watched him until out of
+sight.
+
+"Well," said Vashti, "don't tell ME.  But if there wasn't something
+between him and that Mamie Mulrady, I don't know a jilted man when
+I see him."
+
+"Well, you needn't have let him SEE that you knew it, so that any
+civility of ours would look as if we were ready to take up with her
+leavings," responded Esther, astutely, as the girls reentered the
+house.
+
+Meantime, the unconscious object of their criticism walked sadly
+down the old market-garden, whose rude outlines and homely details
+he once clothed with the poetry of a sensitive man's first love.
+Well, it was a common cabbage field and potato patch after all.  In
+his disgust he felt conscious of even the loss of that sense of
+patronage and superiority which had invested his affection for a
+girl of meaner condition.  His self-respect was humiliated with his
+love.  The soil and dirt of those wretched cabbages had clung to
+him, but not to her.  It was she who had gone higher; it was he who
+was left in the vulgar ruins of his misplaced passion.
+
+He reached the bottom of the garden without observing any sign of
+the lonely invalid.  He looked up and down the cabbage rows, and
+through the long perspective of pea-vines, without result.  There
+was a newer trail leading from a gap in the pines to the wooded
+hollow, which undoubtedly intersected the little path that he and
+Mamie had once followed from the high road.  If the old man had
+taken this trail he had possibly over-tasked his strength, and
+there was the more reason why he should continue his search, and
+render any assistance if required.  There was another idea that
+occurred to him, which eventually decided him to go on.  It was
+that both these trails led to the decayed sycamore stump, and that
+the older Slinn might have something to do with the mysterious
+letter.  Quickening his steps through the field, he entered the
+hollow, and reached the intersecting trail as he expected.  To the
+right it lost itself in the dense woods in the direction of the
+ominous stump; to the left it descended in nearly a straight line
+to the highway, now plainly visible, as was equally the boulder on
+which he had last discovered Mamie sitting with young Slinn.  If he
+were not mistaken, there was a figure sitting there now; it was
+surely a man.  And by that half-bowed, helpless attitude, the
+object of his search!
+
+It did not take him long to descend the track to the highway and
+approach the stranger.  He was seated with his hands upon his
+knees, gazing in a vague, absorbed fashion upon the hillside, now
+crowned with the engine-house and chimney that marked the site of
+Mulrady's shaft.  He started slightly, and looked up, as Don Caesar
+paused before him.  The young man was surprised to see that the
+unfortunate man was not as old as he had expected, and that his
+expression was one of quiet and beatified contentment.
+
+"Your daughters told me you were here," said Don Caesar, with
+gentle respect.  "I am Caesar Alvarado, your not very far neighbor;
+very happy to pay his respects to you as he has to them."
+
+"My daughters?" said the old man, vaguely.  "Oh, yes! nice little
+girls.  And my boy Harry.  Did you see Harry?  Fine little fellow,
+Harry."
+
+"I am glad to hear that you are better," said Don Caesar, hastily,
+"and that the air of our country does you no harm.  God benefit
+you, senor," he added, with a profoundly reverential gesture,
+dropping unconsciously into the religious habit of his youth.  "May
+he protect you, and bring you back to health and happiness!"
+
+"Happiness?" said Slinn, amazedly.  "I am happy--very happy!  I
+have everything I want: good air, good food, good clothes, pretty
+little children, kind friends--"  He smiled benignantly at Don
+Caesar.  "God is very good to me!"
+
+Indeed, he seemed very happy; and his face, albeit crowned with
+white hair, unmarked by care and any disturbing impression, had so
+much of satisfied youth in it that the grave features of his
+questioner made him appear the elder.  Nevertheless, Don Caesar
+noticed that his eyes, when withdrawn from him, sought the hillside
+with the same visionary abstraction.
+
+"It is a fine view, Senor Esslinn," said Don Caesar.
+
+"It is a beautiful view, sir," said Slinn, turning his happy eyes
+upon him for a moment, only to rest them again on the green slope
+opposite.
+
+"Beyond that hill which you are looking at--not far, Senor Esslinn--
+I live.  You shall come and see me there--you and your family."
+
+"You--you--live there?" stammered the invalid, with a troubled
+expression--the first and only change to the complete happiness
+that had hitherto suffused his face.  "You--and your name is--is
+Ma--"
+
+"Alvarado," said Don Caesar, gently.  Caesar Alvarado."
+
+"You said Masters," said the old man, with sudden querulousness.
+
+"No, good friend.  I said Alvarado," returned Don Caesar, gravely.
+
+"If you didn't say Masters, how could I say it?  I don't know any
+Masters."
+
+Don Caesar was silent.  In another moment the happy tranquillity
+returned to Slinn's face; and Don Caesar continued:--
+
+"It is not a long walk over the hill, though it is far by the road.
+When you are better you shall try it.  Yonder little trail leads to
+the top of the hill, and then--"
+
+He stopped, for the invalid's face had again assumed its troubled
+expression.  Partly to change his thoughts, and partly for some
+inexplicable idea that had suddenly seized him, Don Caesar
+continued:--
+
+"There is a strange old stump near the trail, and in it a hole.  In
+the hole I found this letter."  He stopped again--this time in
+alarm.  Slinn had staggered to his feet with ashen and distorted
+features, and was glancing at the letter which Don Caesar had drawn
+from his pocket.  The muscles of his throat swelled as if he was
+swallowing; his lips moved, but no sound issued from them.  At
+last, with a convulsive effort, he regained a disjointed speech, in
+a voice scarcely audible.
+
+"My letter! my letter!  It's mine!  Give it me!  It's my fortune--
+all mine!  In the tunnel--hill!  Masters stole it--stole my
+fortune!  Stole it all!  See, see!"
+
+He seized the letter from Don Caesar with trembling hands, and tore
+it open forcibly: a few dull yellow grains fell from it heavily,
+like shot, to the ground.
+
+"See, it's true!  My letter!  My gold!  My strike!  My--my--my
+God!"
+
+A tremor passed over his face.  The hand that held the letter
+suddenly dropped sheer and heavy as the gold had fallen.  The whole
+side of his face and body nearest Don Caesar seemed to drop and
+sink into itself as suddenly.  At the same moment, and without a
+word, he slipped through Don Caesar's outstretched hands to the
+ground.  Don Caesar bent quickly over him, but no longer than to
+satisfy himself that he lived and breathed, although helpless.  He
+then caught up the fallen letter, and, glancing over it with
+flashing eyes, thrust it and the few specimens in his pocket.  He
+then sprang to his feet, so transformed with energy and
+intelligence that he seemed to have added the lost vitality of the
+man before him to his own.  He glanced quickly up and down the
+highway.  Every moment to him was precious now; but he could not
+leave the stricken man in the dust of the road; nor could he carry
+him to the house; nor, having alarmed his daughters, could he
+abandon his helplessness to their feeble arms.  He remembered that
+his horse was still tied to the garden fence.  He would fetch it,
+and carry the unfortunate man across the saddle to the gate.  He
+lifted him with difficulty to the boulder, and ran rapidly up the
+road in the direction of his tethered steed.  He had not proceeded
+far when he heard the noise of wheels behind him.  It was the up
+stage coming furiously along.  He would have called to the driver
+for assistance, but even through that fast-sweeping cloud of dust
+and motion he could see that the man was utterly oblivious of
+anything but the speed of his rushing chariot, and had even risen
+in his box to lash the infuriated and frightened animals forward.
+
+An hour later, when the coach drew up at the Red Dog Hotel, the
+driver descended from the box, white, but taciturn.  When he had
+swallowed a glass of whiskey at a single gulp, he turned to the
+astonished express agent, who had followed him in.
+
+"One of two things, Jim, hez got to happen," he said, huskily.
+"Either that there rock hez got to get off the road, or I have.
+I've seed HIM on it agin!"
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+No further particulars of the invalid's second attack were known
+than those furnished by Don Caesar's brief statement, that he had
+found him lying insensible on the boulder.  This seemed perfectly
+consistent with the theory of Dr. Duchesne; and as the young
+Spaniard left Los Gatos the next day, he escaped not only the
+active reporter of the "Record," but the perusal of a grateful
+paragraph in the next day's paper recording his prompt kindness and
+courtesy.  Dr. Duchesne's prognosis, however, seemed at fault; the
+elder Slinn did not succumb to this second stroke, nor did he
+recover his reason.  He apparently only relapsed into his former
+physical weakness, losing the little ground he had gained during
+the last month, and exhibiting no change in his mental condition,
+unless the fact that he remembered nothing of his seizure and the
+presence of Don Caesar could be considered as favorable.  Dr.
+Duchesne's gravity seemed to give that significance to this
+symptom, and his cross-questioning of the patient was characterized
+by more than his usual curtness.
+
+"You are sure you don't remember walking in the garden before you
+were ill?" he said.  "Come, think again.  You must remember that."
+The old man's eyes wandered restlessly around the room, but he
+answered by a negative shake of his head.  "And you don't remember
+sitting down on a stone by the road?"
+
+The old man kept his eyes resolutely fixed on the bedclothes before
+him.  "No!" he said, with a certain sharp decision that was new to
+him.
+
+The doctor's eye brightened.  "All right, old man; then don't."
+
+On his way out he took the eldest Miss Slinn aside.  "He'll do," he
+said, grimly: "he's beginning to lie."
+
+"Why, he only said he didn't remember," responded Esther.
+
+"That was because he didn't want to remember," said the doctor,
+authoritatively.  "The brain is acting on some impression that is
+either painful and unpleasant, or so vague that he can't formulate
+it; he is conscious of it, and won't attempt it yet.  It's a heap
+better than his old self-satisfied incoherency."
+
+A few days later, when the fact of Slinn's identification with the
+paralytic of three years ago by the stage-driver became generally
+known, the doctor came in quite jubilant.
+
+"It's all plain now," he said, decidedly.  "That second stroke was
+caused by the nervous shock of his coming suddenly upon the very
+spot where he had the first one.  It proved that his brain still
+retained old impressions, but as this first act of his memory was a
+painful one, the strain was too great.  It was mighty unlucky; but
+it was a good sign."
+
+"And you think, then--" hesitated Harry Slinn.
+
+"I think," said Dr. Duchesne, "that this activity still exists, and
+the proof of it, as I said before, is that he is trying now to
+forget it, and avoid thinking of it.  You will find that he will
+fight shy of any allusion to it, and will be cunning enough to
+dodge it every time."
+
+He certainly did.  Whether the doctor's hypothesis was fairly based
+or not, it was a fact that, when he was first taken out to drive
+with his watchful physician, he apparently took no notice of the
+boulder--which still remained on the roadside, thanks to the later
+practical explanation of the stage-driver's vision--and curtly
+refused to talk about it.  But, more significant to Duchesne, and
+perhaps more perplexing, was a certain morose abstraction, which
+took the place of his former vacuity of contentment, and an
+intolerance of his attendants, which supplanted his old habitual
+trustfulness to their care, that had been varied only by the
+occasional querulousness of an invalid.  His daughters sometimes
+found him regarding them with an attention little short of
+suspicion, and even his son detected a half-suppressed aversion in
+his interviews with him.
+
+Referring this among themselves to his unfortunate malady, his
+children, perhaps, justified this estrangement by paying very
+little attention to it.  They were more pleasantly occupied.  The
+two girls succeeded to the position held by Mamie Mulrady in the
+society of the neighborhood, and divided the attentions of Rough-
+and-Ready.  The young editor of the "Record" had really achieved,
+through his supposed intimacy with the Mulradys, the good fortune
+he had jestingly prophesied.  The disappearance of Don Caesar was
+regarded as a virtual abandonment of the field to his rival: and
+the general opinion was that he was engaged to the millionaire's
+daughter on a certain probation of work and influence in his
+prospective father-in-law's interests.  He became successful in one
+or two speculations, the magic of the lucky Mulrady's name
+befriending him.  In the superstition of the mining community, much
+of this luck was due to his having secured the old cabin.
+
+"To think," remarked one of the augurs of Red Dog, French Pete, a
+polyglot jester, "that while every fool went to taking up claims
+where the gold had already been found no one thought of stepping
+into the old man's old choux in the cabbage-garden!"  Any doubt,
+however, of the alliance of the families was dissipated by the
+intimacy that sprang up between the elder Slinn and the
+millionaire, after the latter's return from San Francisco.
+
+It began in a strange kind of pity for the physical weakness of the
+man, which enlisted the sympathies of Mulrady, whose great strength
+had never been deteriorated by the luxuries of wealth, and who was
+still able to set his workmen an example of hard labor; it was
+sustained by a singular and superstitious reverence for his mental
+condition, which, to the paternal Mulrady, seemed to possess that
+spiritual quality with which popular ignorance invests demented
+people.
+
+"Then you mean to say that during these three years the vein o'
+your mind, so to speak, was a lost lead, and sorter dropped out o'
+sight or follerin'?" queried Mulrady, with infinite seriousness.
+
+"Yes," returned Slinn, with less impatience than he usually showed
+to questions.
+
+"And durin' that time, when you was dried up and waitin' for rain,
+I reckon you kinder had visions?"
+
+A cloud passed over Slinn's face.
+
+"Of course, of course!" said Mulrady, a little frightened at his
+tenacity in questioning the oracle.  "Nat'rally, this was private,
+and not to be talked about.  I meant, you had plenty of room for
+'em without crowdin'; you kin tell me some day when you're better,
+and kin sorter select what's points and what ain't."
+
+"Perhaps I may some day," said the invalid, gloomily, glancing in
+the direction of his preoccupied daughters; "when we're alone."
+
+When his physical strength had improved, and his left arm and side
+had regained a feeble but slowly gathering vitality, Alvin Mulrady
+one day surprised the family by bringing the convalescent a pile of
+letters and accounts, and spreading them on a board before Slinn's
+invalid chair, with the suggestion that he should look over,
+arrange, and docket them.  The idea seemed preposterous, until it
+was found that the old man was actually able to perform this
+service, and exhibited a degree of intellectual activity and
+capacity for this kind of work that was unsuspected.  Dr. Duchesne
+was delighted, and divided with admiration between his patient's
+progress and the millionaire's sagacity.  "And there are envious
+people," said the enthusiastic doctor, "who believe that a man like
+him, who could conceive of such a plan for occupying a weak
+intellect without taxing its memory or judgment, is merely a lucky
+fool!  Look here.  May be it didn't require much brains to stumble
+on a gold mine, and it is a gift of Providence.  But, in my
+experience, Providence don't go round buyin' up d--d fools, or
+investin' in dead beats."
+
+When Mr. Slinn, finally, with the aid of crutches, was able to
+hobble every day to the imposing counting-house and the office of
+Mr. Mulrady, which now occupied the lower part of the new house,
+and contained some of its gorgeous furniture, he was installed at a
+rosewood desk behind Mr. Mulrady's chair, as his confidential clerk
+and private secretary.  The astonishment of Red Dog and Rough-and-
+Ready at this singular innovation knew no bounds; but the boldness
+and novelty of the idea carried everything before it.  Judge Butts,
+the oracle of Rough-and-Ready, delivered its decision: "He's got a
+man who's physically incapable of running off with his money, and
+has no memory to run off with his ideas.  How could he do better?"
+Even his own son, Harry, coming upon his father thus installed, was
+for a moment struck with a certain filial respect, and for a day or
+two patronized him.
+
+In this capacity Slinn became the confidant not only of Mulrady's
+business secrets, but of his domestic affairs.  He knew that young
+Mulrady, from a freckle-faced slow country boy, had developed into
+a freckle-faced fast city man, with coarse habits of drink and
+gambling.  It was through the old man's hands that extravagant
+bills and shameful claims passed on their way to be cashed by
+Mulrady; it was he that at last laid before the father one day his
+signature perfectly forged by the son.
+
+"Your eyes are not ez good ez mine, you know, Slinn," said Mulrady,
+gravely.  "It's all right.  I sometimes make my Y's like that.  I'd
+clean forgot to cash that check.  You must not think you've got the
+monopoly of disremembering," he added, with a faint laugh.
+
+Equally through Slinn's hands passed the record of the lavish
+expenditure of Mrs. Mulrady and the fair Mamie, as well as the
+chronicle of their movements and fashionable triumphs.  As Mulrady
+had already noticed that Slinn had no confidence with his own
+family, he did not try to withhold from them these domestic
+details, possibly as an offset to the dreary catalogue of his son's
+misdeeds, but more often in the hope of gaining from the taciturn
+old man some comment that might satisfy his innocent vanity as
+father and husband, and perhaps dissipate some doubts that were
+haunting him.
+
+"Twelve hundred dollars looks to be a good figger for a dress,
+ain't it?  But Malviny knows, I reckon, what ought to be worn at
+the Tooilleries, and she don't want our Mamie to take a back seat
+before them furrin' princesses and gran' dukes.  It's a slap-up
+affair, I kalkilate.  Let's see.  I disremember whether it's an
+emperor or a king that's rulin' over thar now.  It must be suthin'
+first class and A 1, for Malviny ain't the woman to throw away
+twelve hundred dollars on any of them small-potato despots!  She
+says Mamie speaks French already like them French Petes.  I don't
+quite make out what she means here.  She met Don Caesar in Paris,
+and she says, 'I think Mamie is nearly off with Don Caesar, who has
+followed her here.  I don't care about her dropping him TOO
+suddenly; the reason I'll tell you hereafter.  I think the man
+might be a dangerous enemy.'  Now, what do you make of this?  I
+allus thought Mamie rather cottoned to him, and it was the old
+woman who fought shy, thinkin' Mamie would do better.  Now, I am
+agreeable that my gal should marry any one she likes, whether it's
+a dook or a poor man, as long as he's on the square.  I was ready
+to take Don Caesar; but now things seem to have shifted round.  As
+to Don Caesar's being a dangerous enemy if Mamie won't have him,
+that's a little too high and mighty for me, and I wonder the old
+woman don't make him climb down.  What do you think?"
+
+"Who is Don Caesar?" asked Slinn.
+
+"The man what picked you up that day.  I mean," continued Mulrady,
+seeing the marks of evident ignorance on the old man's face,--"I
+mean a sort of grave, genteel chap, suthin' between a parson and a
+circus-rider.  You might have seen him round the house talkin' to
+your gals."
+
+But Slinn's entire forgetfulness of Don Caesar was evidently
+unfeigned.  Whatever sudden accession of memory he had at the time
+of his attack, the incident that caused it had no part in his
+recollection.  With the exception of these rare intervals of
+domestic confidences with his crippled private secretary, Mulrady
+gave himself up to money-getting.  Without any especial faculty for
+it--an easy prey often to unscrupulous financiers--his unfailing
+luck, however, carried him safely through, until his very mistakes
+seemed to be simply insignificant means to a large significant end
+and a part of his original plan.  He sank another shaft, at a great
+expense, with a view to following the lead he had formerly found,
+against the opinions of the best mining engineers, and struck the
+artesian spring he did NOT find at that time, with a volume of
+water that enabled him not only to work his own mine, but to
+furnish supplies to his less fortunate neighbors at a vast profit.
+A league of tangled forest and canyon behind Rough-and-Ready, for
+which he had paid Don Ramon's heirs an extravagant price in the
+presumption that it was auriferous, furnished the most accessible
+timber to build the town, at prices which amply remunerated him.
+The practical schemes of experienced men, the wildest visions of
+daring dreams delayed or abortive for want of capital, eventually
+fell into his hands.  Men sneered at his methods, but bought his
+shares.  Some who affected to regard him simply as a man of money
+were content to get only his name to any enterprise.  Courted by
+his superiors, quoted by his equals, and admired by his inferiors,
+he bore his elevation equally without ostentation or dignity.
+Bidden to banquets, and forced by his position as director or
+president into the usual gastronomic feats of that civilization and
+period, he partook of simple food, and continued his old habit of
+taking a cup of coffee with milk and sugar at dinner.  Without
+professing temperance, he drank sparingly in a community where
+alcoholic stimulation was a custom.  With neither refinement nor an
+extended vocabulary, he was seldom profane, and never indelicate.
+With nothing of the Puritan in his manner or conversation, he
+seemed to be as strange to the vices of civilization as he was to
+its virtues.  That such a man should offer little to and receive
+little from the companionship of women of any kind was a foregone
+conclusion.  Without the dignity of solitude, he was pathetically
+alone.
+
+Meantime, the days passed; the first six months of his opulence
+were drawing to a close, and in that interval he had more than
+doubled the amount of his discovered fortune.  The rainy season set
+in early.  Although it dissipated the clouds of dust under which
+Nature and Art seemed to be slowly disappearing, it brought little
+beauty to the landscape at first, and only appeared to lay bare the
+crudenesses of civilization.  The unpainted wooden buildings of
+Rough-and-Ready, soaked and dripping with rain, took upon
+themselves a sleek and shining ugliness, as of second-hand
+garments; the absence of cornices or projections to break the
+monotony of the long straight lines of downpour made the town
+appear as if it had been recently submerged, every vestige of
+ornamentation swept away, and only the bare outlines left.  Mud was
+everywhere; the outer soil seemed to have risen and invaded the
+houses even to their most secret recesses, as if outraged Nature
+was trying to revenge herself.  Mud was brought into the saloons
+and barrooms and express offices, on boots, on clothes, on baggage,
+and sometimes appeared mysteriously in splashes of red color on the
+walls, without visible conveyance.  The dust of six months, closely
+packed in cornice and carving, yielded under the steady rain a thin
+yellow paint, that dropped on wayfarers or unexpectedly oozed out
+of ceilings and walls on the wretched inhabitants within.  The
+outskirts of Rough-and-Ready and the dried hills round Los Gatos
+did not appear to fare much better; the new vegetation had not yet
+made much headway against the dead grasses of the summer; the pines
+in the hollow wept lugubriously into a small rivulet that had
+sprung suddenly into life near the old trail; everywhere was the
+sound of dropping, splashing, gurgling, or rushing waters.
+
+More hideous than ever, the new Mulrady house lifted itself against
+the leaden sky, and stared with all its large-framed, shutterless
+windows blankly on the prospect, until they seemed to the wayfarer
+to become mere mirrors set in the walls, reflecting only the watery
+landscape, and unable to give the least indication of light or heat
+within.  Nevertheless, there was a fire in Mulrady's private office
+that December afternoon, of a smoky, intermittent variety, that
+sufficed more to record the defects of hasty architecture than to
+comfort the millionaire and his private secretary, who had lingered
+after the early withdrawal of the clerks.  For the next day was
+Christmas, and, out of deference to the near approach of this
+festivity, a half-holiday had been given to the employees.
+"They'll want, some of them, to spend their money before to-morrow;
+and others would like to be able to rise up comfortably drunk
+Christmas morning," the superintendent had suggested.  Mr. Mulrady
+had just signed a number of checks indicating his largess to those
+devoted adherents with the same unostentatious, undemonstrative,
+matter-of-fact manner that distinguished his ordinary business.
+The men had received it with something of the same manner.  A half-
+humorous "Thank you, sir"--as if to show that, with their patron,
+they tolerated this deference to a popular custom, but were a
+little ashamed of giving way to it--expressed their gratitude and
+their independence.
+
+"I reckon that the old lady and Mamie are having a high old time in
+some of them gilded pallises in St. Petersburg or Berlin about this
+time.  Them diamonds that I ordered at Tiffany ought to have
+reached 'em about now, so that Mamie could cut a swell at Christmas
+with her war-paint.  I suppose it's the style to give presents in
+furrin' countries ez it is here, and I allowed to the old lady that
+whatever she orders in that way she is to do in Californy style--no
+dollar-jewelry and galvanized-watches business.  If she wants to
+make a present to any of them nobles ez has been purlite to her,
+it's got to be something that Rough-and-Ready ain't ashamed of.  I
+showed you that pin Mamie bought me in Paris, didn't I?  It's just
+come for my Christmas present.  No!  I reckon I put it in the safe,
+for them kind o' things don't suit my style: but s'pose I orter
+sport it to-morrow.  It was mighty thoughtful in Mamie, and it must
+cost a lump; it's got no slouch of a pearl in it.  I wonder what
+Mamie gave for it?"
+
+"You can easily tell; the bill is here.  You paid it yesterday,"
+said Slinn.  There was no satire in the man's voice, nor was there
+the least perception of irony in Mulrady's manner, as he returned
+quietly,--
+
+"That's so; it was suthin' like a thousand francs; but French
+money, when you pan it out as dollars and cents, don't make so
+much, after all."  There was a few moments' silence, when he
+continued, in the same tone of voice, "Talkin' o' them things,
+Slinn, I've got suthin' for you."  He stopped suddenly.  Ever
+watchful of any undue excitement in the invalid, he had noticed a
+slight flush of disturbance pass over his face, and continued
+carelessly, "But we'll talk it over to-morrow; a day or two don't
+make much difference to you and me in such things, you know.
+P'raps I'll drop in and see you.  We'll be shut up here."
+
+"Then you're going out somewhere?" asked Slinn, mechanically.
+
+"No," said Mulrady, hesitatingly.  It had suddenly occurred to him
+that he had nowhere to go if he wanted to, and he continued, half
+in explanation, "I ain't reckoned much on Christmas, myself.
+Abner's at the Springs; it wouldn't pay him to come here for a day--
+even if there was anybody here he cared to see.  I reckon I'll
+hang round the shanty, and look after things generally.  I haven't
+been over the house upstairs to put things to rights since the
+folks left.  But YOU needn't come here, you know."
+
+He helped the old man to rise, assisted him in putting on his
+overcoat, and than handed him the cane which had lately replaced
+his crutches.
+
+"Good-by, old man!  You musn't trouble yourself to say 'Merry
+Christmas' now, but wait until you see me again.  Take care of
+yourself."
+
+He slapped him lightly on the shoulder, and went back into his
+private office.  He worked for some time at his desk, and then laid
+his pen aside, put away his papers methodically, placing a large
+envelope on his private secretary's vacant table.  He then opened
+the office door and ascended the staircase.  He stopped on the
+first landing to listen to the sound of rain on the glass skylight,
+that seemed to echo through the empty hall like the gloomy roll of
+a drum.  It was evident that the searching water had found out the
+secret sins of the house's construction, for there were great
+fissures of discoloration in the white and gold paper in the
+corners of the wall.  There was a strange odor of the dank forest
+in the mirrored drawing-room, as if the rain had brought out the
+sap again from the unseasoned timbers; the blue and white satin
+furniture looked cold, and the marble mantels and centre tables had
+taken upon themselves the clamminess of tombstones.  Mr. Mulrady,
+who had always retained his old farmer-like habit of taking off his
+coat with his hat on entering his own house, and appearing in his
+shirt-sleeves, to indicate domestic ease and security, was obliged
+to replace it, on account of the chill.  He had never felt at home
+in this room.  Its strangeness had lately been heightened by Mrs.
+Mulrady's purchase of a family portrait of some one she didn't
+know, but who, she had alleged, resembled her "Uncle Bob," which
+hung on the wall beside some paintings in massive frames.  Mr.
+Mulrady cast a hurried glance at the portrait that, on the strength
+of a high coat-collar and high top curl--both rolled with equal
+precision and singular sameness of color--had always glared at
+Mulrady as if HE was the intruder; and, passing through his wife's
+gorgeous bedroom, entered the little dressing-room, where he still
+slept on the smallest of cots, with hastily improvised
+surroundings, as if he was a bailiff in "possession."  He didn't
+linger here long, but, taking a key from a drawer, continued up the
+staircase, to the ominous funeral marches of the beating rain on
+the skylight, and paused on the landing to glance into his son's
+and daughter's bedrooms, duplicates of the bizarre extravagance
+below.  If he were seeking some characteristic traces of his absent
+family, they certainly were not here in the painted and still damp
+blazoning of their later successes.  He ascended another staircase,
+and, passing to the wing of the house, paused before a small door,
+which was locked.  Already the ostentatious decorations of wall and
+passages were left behind, and the plain lath-and-plaster partition
+of the attic lay before him.  He unlocked the door, and threw it
+open.
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+The apartment he entered was really only a lumber-room or loft over
+the wing of the house, which had been left bare and unfinished, and
+which revealed in its meagre skeleton of beams and joints the
+hollow sham of the whole structure.  But in more violent contrast
+to the fresher glories of the other part of the house were its
+contents, which were the heterogeneous collection of old furniture,
+old luggage, and cast-off clothing, left over from the past life in
+the old cabin.  It was a much plainer record of the simple
+beginnings of the family than Mrs. Mulrady cared to have remain in
+evidence, and for that reason it had been relegated to the hidden
+recesses of the new house, in the hope that it might absorb or
+digest it.  There were old cribs, in which the infant limbs of
+Mamie and Abner had been tucked up; old looking-glasses, that had
+reflected their shining, soapy faces, and Mamie's best chip Sunday
+hat; an old sewing-machine, that had been worn out in active
+service; old patchwork quilts; an old accordion, to whose long
+drawn inspirations Mamie had sung hymns; old pictures, books, and
+old toys.  There were one or two old chromos, and, stuck in an old
+frame, a colored print from the "Illustrated London News" of a
+Christmas gathering in an old English country house.  He stopped
+and picked up this print, which he had often seen before, gazing at
+it with a new and singular interest.  He wondered if Mamie had seen
+anything of this kind in England, and why couldn't he have had
+something like it here, in their own fine house, with themselves
+and a few friends?  He remembered a past Christmas, when he had
+bought Mamie that now headless doll with the few coins that were
+left him after buying their frugal Christmas dinner.  There was an
+old spotted hobby-horse that another Christmas had brought to
+Abner--Abner, who would be driving a fast trotter to-morrow at the
+Springs!  How everything had changed!  How they all had got up in
+the world, and how far beyond this kind of thing--and yet--yet it
+would have been rather comfortable to have all been together again
+here.  Would THEY have been more comfortable?  No!  Yet then he
+might have had something to do, and been less lonely to-morrow.
+What of that?  He HAD something to do: to look after this immense
+fortune.  What more could a man want, or should he want?  It was
+rather mean in him, able to give his wife and children everything
+they wanted, to be wanting anything more.  He laid down the print
+gently, after dusting its glass and frame with his silk
+handkerchief, and slowly left the room.
+
+The drum-beat of the rain followed him down the staircase, but he
+shut it out with his other thoughts, when he again closed the door
+of his office.  He set diligently to work by the declining winter
+light, until he was interrupted by the entrance of his Chinese
+waiter to tell him that supper--which was the meal that Mulrady
+religiously adhered to in place of the late dinner of civilization--
+was ready in the dining-room.  Mulrady mechanically obeyed the
+summons; but on entering the room the oasis of a few plates in a
+desert of white table-cloth which awaited him made him hesitate.
+In its best aspect, the high dark Gothic mahogany ecclesiastical
+sideboard and chairs of this room, which looked like the
+appointments of a mortuary chapel, were not exhilarating; and to-
+day, in the light of the rain-filmed windows and the feeble rays of
+a lamp half-obscured by the dark shining walls, it was most
+depressing.
+
+"You kin take up supper into my office," said Mulrady, with a
+sudden inspiration.  "I'll eat it there."
+
+He ate it there, with his usual healthy appetite, which did not
+require even the stimulation of company.  He had just finished,
+when his Irish cook--the one female servant of the house--came to
+ask permission to be absent that evening and the next day.
+
+"I suppose the likes of your honor won't be at home on the
+Christmas Day?  And it's me cousins from the old counthry at Rough-
+and-Ready that are invitin' me."
+
+"Why don't you ask them over here?" said Mulrady, with another
+vague inspiration.  "I'll stand treat."
+
+"Lord preserve you for a jinerous gintleman!  But it's the likes of
+them and myself that wouldn't be at home here on such a day."
+
+There was so much truth in this that Mulrady checked a sigh as he
+gave the required permission, without saying that he had intended
+to remain.  He could cook his own breakfast: he had done it before;
+and it would be something to occupy him.  As to his dinner, perhaps
+he could go to the hotel at Rough-and-Ready.  He worked on until
+the night had well advanced.  Then, overcome with a certain
+restlessness that disturbed him, he was forced to put his books and
+papers away.  It had begun to blow in fitful gusts, and
+occasionally the rain was driven softly across the panes like the
+passing of childish fingers.  This disturbed him more than the
+monotony of silence, for he was not a nervous man.  He seldom read
+a book, and the county paper furnished him only the financial and
+mercantile news which was part of his business.  He knew he could
+not sleep if he went to bed.  At last he rose, opened the window,
+and looked out from pure idleness of occupation.  A splash of
+wheels in the distant muddy road and fragments of a drunken song
+showed signs of an early wandering reveller.  There were no lights
+to be seen at the closed works; a profound darkness encompassed the
+house, as if the distant pines in the hollow had moved up and round
+it.  The silence was broken now only by the occasional sighing of
+wind and rain.  It was not an inviting night for a perfunctory
+walk; but an idea struck him--he would call upon the Slinns, and
+anticipate his next day's visit!  They would probably have company,
+and be glad to see him: he could tell the girls of Mamie and her
+success.  That he had not thought of this before was a proof of his
+usual self-contained isolation, that he thought of it now was an
+equal proof that he was becoming at last accessible to loneliness.
+He was angry with himself for what seemed to him a selfish
+weakness.
+
+He returned to his office, and, putting the envelope that had been
+lying on Slinn's desk in his pocket, threw a serape over his
+shoulders, and locked the front door of the house behind him.  It
+was well that the way was a familiar one to him, and that his feet
+instinctively found the trail, for the night was very dark.  At
+times he was warned only by the gurgling of water of little
+rivulets that descended the hill and crossed his path.  Without the
+slightest fear, and with neither imagination nor sensitiveness, he
+recalled how, the winter before, one of Don Caesar's vaqueros,
+crossing this hill at night, had fallen down the chasm of a
+landslip caused by the rain, and was found the next morning with
+his neck broken in the gully.  Don Caesar had to take care of the
+man's family.  Suppose such an accident should happen to him?
+Well, he had made his will.  His wife and children would be
+provided for, and the work of the mine would go on all the same; he
+had arranged for that.  Would anybody miss him?  Would his wife, or
+his son, or his daughter?  No.  He felt such a sudden and
+overwhelming conviction of the truth of this that he stopped as
+suddenly as if the chasm had opened before him.  No!  It was the
+truth.  If he were to disappear forever in the darkness of the
+Christmas night there was none to feel his loss.  His wife would
+take care of Mamie; his son would take care of himself, as he had
+before--relieved of even the scant paternal authority he rebelled
+against.  A more imaginative man than Mulrady would have combated
+or have followed out this idea, and then dismissed it; to the
+millionaire's matter-of-fact mind it was a deduction that, having
+once presented itself to his perception, was already a recognized
+fact.  For the first time in his life he felt a sudden instinct of
+something like aversion towards his family, a feeling that even his
+son's dissipation and criminality had never provoked.  He hurried
+on angrily through the darkness.
+
+It was very strange; the old house should be almost before him now,
+across the hollow, yet there were no indications of light!  It was
+not until he actually reached the garden fence, and the black bulk
+of shadow rose out against the sky, that he saw a faint ray of
+light from one of the lean-to windows.  He went to the front door
+and knocked.  After waiting in vain for a reply, he knocked again.
+The second knock proving equally futile, he tried the door; it was
+unlocked, and, pushing it open, he walked in.  The narrow passage
+was quite dark, but from his knowledge of the house he knew the
+"lean-to" was next to the kitchen, and, passing through the dining-
+room into it, he opened the door of the little room from which the
+light proceeded.  It came from a single candle on a small table,
+and beside it, with his eyes moodily fixed on the dying embers of
+the fire, sat old Slinn.  There was no other light nor another
+human being in the whole house.
+
+For the instant Mulrady, forgetting his own feelings in the mute
+picture of the utter desolation of the helpless man, remained
+speechless on the threshold.  Then, recalling himself, he stepped
+forward and laid his hand gayly on the bowed shoulders.
+
+"Rouse up out o' this, old man!  Come! this won't do.  Look!  I've
+run over here in the rain, jist to have a sociable time with you
+all."
+
+"I knew it," said the old man, without looking up; "I knew you'd
+come."
+
+"You knew I'd come?" echoed Mulrady, with an uneasy return of the
+strange feeling of awe with which he regarded Slinn's abstraction.
+
+"Yes; you were alone--like myself--all alone!"
+
+"Then, why in thunder didn't you open the door or sing out just
+now?" he said, with an affected brusquerie to cover his uneasiness.
+"Where's your daughters?"
+
+"Gone to Rough-and-Ready to a party."
+
+"And your son?"
+
+"He never comes here when he can amuse himself elsewhere."
+
+"Your children might have stayed home on Christmas Eve."
+
+"So might yours."
+
+He didn't say this impatiently, but with a certain abstracted
+conviction far beyond any suggestion of its being a retort.
+Mulrady did not appear to notice it.
+
+"Well, I don't see why us old folks can't enjoy ourselves without
+them," said Mulrady, with affected cheerfulness.  "Let's have a
+good time, you and me.  Let's see--you haven't any one you can send
+to my house, hev you?"
+
+"They took the servant with them," said Slinn, briefly.  "There is
+no one here."
+
+"All right," said the millionaire, briskly.  "I'll go myself.  Do
+you think you can manage to light up a little more, and build a
+fire in the kitchen while I'm gone?  It used to be mighty
+comfortable in the old times."
+
+He helped the old man to rise from his chair, and seemed to have
+infused into him some of his own energy.  He then added, "Now,
+don't you get yourself down again into that chair until I come
+back," and darted out into the night once more.
+
+In a quarter of an hour he returned with a bag on his broad
+shoulders, which one of his porters would have shrunk from lifting,
+and laid it before the blazing hearth of the now lighted kitchen.
+"It's something the old woman got for her party, that didn't come
+off," he said, apologetically.  "I reckon we can pick out enough
+for a spread.  That darned Chinaman wouldn't come with me," he
+added, with a laugh, "because, he said, he'd knocked off work
+'allee same, Mellican man!'  Look here, Slinn," he said, with a
+sudden decisiveness, "my pay-roll of the men around here don't run
+short of a hundred and fifty dollars a day, and yet I couldn't get
+a hand to help me bring this truck over for my Christmas dinner."
+
+"Of course," said Slinn, gloomily.
+
+"Of course; so it oughter be," returned Mulrady, shortly.  "Why,
+it's only their one day out of 364; and I can have 363 days off, as
+I am their boss.  I don't mind a man's being independent," he
+continued, taking off his coat and beginning to unpack his sack--a
+common "gunny bag"--used for potatoes.  "We're independent
+ourselves, ain't we, Slinn?"
+
+His good spirits, which had been at first labored and affected, had
+become natural.  Slinn, looking at his brightened eye and fresher
+color, could not help thinking he was more like his own real self
+at this moment than in his counting-house and offices--with all his
+simplicity as a capitalist.  A less abstracted and more observant
+critic than Slinn would have seen in this patient aptitude for real
+work, and the recognition of the force of petty detail, the
+dominance of the old market-gardener in his former humble, as well
+as his later more ambitious, successes.
+
+"Heaven keep us from being dependent upon our children!" said
+Slinn, darkly.
+
+"Let the young ones alone to-night; we can get along without them,
+as they can without us," said Mulrady, with a slight twinge as he
+thought of his reflections on the hillside.  "But look here,
+there's some champagne and them sweet cordials that women like;
+there's jellies and such like stuff, about as good as they make
+'em, I reckon; and preserves, and tongues, and spiced beef--take
+your pick!  Stop, let's spread them out."  He dragged the table to
+the middle of the floor, and piled the provisions upon it.  They
+certainly were not deficient in quality or quantity.  "Now, Slinn,
+wade in."
+
+"I don't feel hungry," said the invalid, who had lapsed again into
+a chair before the fire.
+
+"No more do I," said Mulrady; "but I reckon it's the right thing to
+do about this time.  Some folks think they can't be happy without
+they're getting outside o' suthin', and my directors down at
+'Frisco can't do any business without a dinner.  Take some
+champagne, to begin with."
+
+He opened a bottle, and filled two tumblers.  "It's past twelve
+o'clock, old man, so here's a merry Christmas to you, and both of
+us ez is here.  And here's another to our families--ez isn't."
+
+They both drank their wine stolidly.  The rain beat against the
+windows sharply, but without the hollow echoes of the house on the
+hill.  "I must write to the old woman and Mamie, and say that you
+and me had a high old time on Christmas Eve."
+
+"By ourselves," added the invalid.
+
+Mr. Mulrady coughed.  "Nat'rally--by ourselves.  And her
+provisions," he added, with a laugh.  "We're really beholden to HER
+for 'em.  If she hadn't thought of having them--"
+
+"For somebody else, you wouldn't have had them--would you?" said
+Slinn, slowly, gazing at the fire.
+
+"No," said Mulrady, dubiously.  After a pause he began more
+vivaciously, and as if to shake off some disagreeable thought that
+was impressing him, "But I mustn't forget to give you YOUR
+Christmas, old man, and I've got it right here with me."  He took
+the folded envelope from his pocket, and, holding it in his hand
+with his elbow on the table, continued, "I don't mind telling you
+what idea I had in giving you what I'm goin' to give you now.  I've
+been thinking about it for a day or two.  A man like you don't want
+money--you wouldn't spend it.  A man like you don't want stocks or
+fancy investments, for you couldn't look after them.  A man like
+you don't want diamonds and jewellery, nor a gold-headed cane, when
+it's got to be used as a crutch.  No, sir.  What you want is
+suthin' that won't run away from you; that is always there before
+you and won't wear out, and will last after you're gone.  That's
+land!  And if it wasn't that I have sworn never to sell or give
+away this house and that garden, if it wasn't that I've held out
+agin the old woman and Mamie on that point, you should have THIS
+house and THAT garden.  But, mebbee, for the same reason that I've
+told you, I want that land to keep for myself.  But I've selected
+four acres of the hill this side of my shaft, and here's the deed
+of it.  As soon as you're ready, I'll put you up a house as big as
+this--that shall be yours, with the land, as long as you live, old
+man; and after that your children's."
+
+"No; not theirs!" broke in the old man, passionately.  "Never!"
+
+Mulrady recoiled for an instant in alarm at the sudden and
+unexpected vehemence of his manner, "Go slow, old man; go slow," he
+said, soothingly.  "Of course, you'll do with your own as you
+like."  Then, as if changing the subject, he went on cheerfully:
+"Perhaps you'll wonder why I picked out that spot on the hillside.
+Well, first, because I reserved it after my strike in case the lead
+should run that way, but it didn't.  Next, because when you first
+came here you seemed to like the prospect.  You used to sit there
+looking at it, as if it reminded you of something.  You never said
+it did.  They say you was sitting on that boulder there when you
+had that last attack, you know; but," he added, gently, "you've
+forgotten all about it."
+
+"I have forgotten nothing," said Slinn, rising, with a choking
+voice.  "I wish to God I had; I wish to God I could!"
+
+He was on his feet now, supporting himself by the table.  The
+subtle generous liquor he had drunk had evidently shaken his self-
+control, and burst those voluntary bonds he had put upon himself
+for the last six months; the insidious stimulant had also put a
+strange vigor into his blood and nerves.  His face was flushed, but
+not distorted; his eyes were brilliant, but not fixed; he looked as
+he might have looked to Masters in his strength three years before
+on that very hillside.
+
+"Listen to me, Alvin Mulrady," he said, leaning over him with
+burning eyes.  "Listen, while I have brain to think and strength to
+utter, why I have learnt to distrust, fear, and hate them!  You
+think you know my story.  Well, hear the truth from ME to-night,
+Alvin Mulrady, and do not wonder if I have cause."
+
+He stopped, and, with pathetic inefficiency, passed the fingers and
+inward-turned thumb of his paralyzed hand across his mouth, as if
+to calm himself.  "Three years ago I was a miner, but not a miner
+like you!  I had experience, I had scientific knowledge, I had a
+theory, and the patience and energy to carry it out.  I selected a
+spot that had all the indications, made a tunnel, and, without aid,
+counsel or assistance of any kind, worked it for six months,
+without rest or cessation, and with scarcely food enough to sustain
+my body.  Well, I made a strike; not like you, Mulrady, not a
+blunder of good luck, a fool's fortune--there, I don't blame you
+for it--but in perfect demonstration of my theory, the reward of my
+labor.  It was no pocket, but a vein, a lead, that I had regularly
+hunted down and found--a fortune!
+
+"I never knew how hard I had worked until that morning; I never
+knew what privations I had undergone until that moment of my
+success, when I found I could scarcely think or move!  I staggered
+out into the open air.  The only human soul near me was a
+disappointed prospector, a man named Masters, who had a tunnel not
+far away.  I managed to conceal from him my good fortune and my
+feeble state, for I was suspicious of him--of any one; and as he
+was going away that day I thought I could keep my secret until he
+was gone.  I was dizzy and confused, but I remember that I managed
+to write a letter to my wife, telling her of my good fortune, and
+begging her to come to me; and I remember that I saw Masters go.  I
+don't remember anything else.  They picked me up on the road, near
+that boulder, as you know."
+
+"I know," said Mulrady, with a swift recollection of the stage-
+driver's account of his discovery.
+
+"They say," continued Slinn, tremblingly, "that I never recovered
+my senses or consciousness for nearly three years; they say I lost
+my memory completely during my illness, and that by God's mercy,
+while I lay in that hospital, I knew no more than a babe; they say,
+because I could not speak or move, and only had my food as nature
+required it, that I was an imbecile, and that I never really came
+to my senses until after my son found me in the hospital.  They SAY
+that--but I tell you to-night, Alvin Mulrady," he said, raising his
+voice to a hoarse outcry, "I tell you that it is a lie!  I came to
+my senses a week after I lay on that hospital cot; I kept my senses
+and memory ever after during the three years that I was there,
+until Harry brought his cold, hypocritical face to my bedside and
+recognized me.  Do you understand?  I, the possessor of millions,
+lay there a pauper.  Deserted by wife and children--a spectacle for
+the curious, a sport for the doctors--AND I KNEW IT!  I heard them
+speculate on the cause of my helplessness.  I heard them talk of
+excesses and indulgences--I, that never knew wine or woman!  I
+heard a preacher speak of the finger of God, and point to me.  May
+God curse him!"
+
+"Go slow, old man; go slow," said Mulrady, gently.
+
+"I heard them speak of me as a friendless man, an outcast, a
+criminal--a being whom no one would claim.  They were right; no one
+claimed me.  The friends of others visited them; relations came and
+took away their kindred; a few lucky ones got well; a few, equally
+lucky, died!  I alone lived on, uncared for, deserted.
+
+"The first year," he went on more rapidly, "I prayed for their
+coming.  I looked for them every day.  I never lost hope.  I said
+to myself, 'She has not got my letter; but when the time passes she
+will be alarmed by my silence, and then she will come or send some
+one to seek me.'  A young student got interested in my case, and,
+by studying my eyes, thought that I was not entirely imbecile and
+unconscious.  With the aid of an alphabet, he got me to spell my
+name and town in Illinois, and promised by signs to write to my
+family.  But in an evil moment I told him of my cursed fortune, and
+in that moment I saw that he thought me a fool and an idiot.  He
+went away, and I saw him no more.  Yet I still hoped.  I dreamed of
+their joy at finding me, and the reward that my wealth would give
+them.  Perhaps I was a little weak still, perhaps a little flighty,
+too, at times; but I was quite happy that year, even in my
+disappointment, for I had still hope!"
+
+He paused, and again composed his face with his paralyzed hand; but
+his manner had become less excited, and his voice was stronger.
+
+"A change must have come over me the second year, for I only
+dreaded their coming now and finding me so altered.  A horrible
+idea that they might, like the student, believe me crazy if I spoke
+of my fortune made me pray to God that they might not reach me
+until after I had regained my health and strength--and found my
+fortune.  When the third year found me still there--I no longer
+prayed for them--I cursed them!  I swore to myself that they should
+never enjoy my wealth; but I wanted to live, and let them know I
+had it.  I found myself getting stronger; but as I had no money, no
+friends, and nowhere to go, I concealed my real condition from the
+doctors, except to give them my name, and to try to get some little
+work to do to enable me to leave the hospital and seek my lost
+treasure.  One day I found out by accident that it had been
+discovered!  You understand--my treasure!--that had cost me years
+of labor and my reason; had left me a helpless, forgotten pauper.
+That gold I had never enjoyed had been found and taken possession
+of by another!"
+
+He checked an exclamation from Mulrady with his hand.  "They say
+they picked me up senseless from the floor, where I must have
+fallen when I heard the news--I don't remember--I recall nothing
+until I was confronted, nearly three weeks after, by my son, who
+had called at the hospital, as a reporter for a paper, and had
+accidentally discovered me through my name and appearance.  He
+thought me crazy, or a fool.  I didn't undeceive him.  I did not
+tell him the story of the mine to excite his doubts and derision,
+or, worse (if I could bring proof to claim it), have it perhaps
+pass into his ungrateful hands.  No; I said nothing.  I let him
+bring me here.  He could do no less, and common decency obliged him
+to do that."
+
+"And what proof could you show of your claim?" asked Mulrady,
+gravely.
+
+"If I had that letter--if I could find Masters," began Slinn,
+vaguely.
+
+"Have you any idea where the letter is, or what has become of
+Masters?" continued Mulrady, with a matter-of-fact gravity, that
+seemed to increase Slinn's vagueness and excite his irritability.
+
+"I don't know--I sometimes think--"  He stopped, sat down again,
+and passed his hands across his forehead.  "I have seen the letter
+somewhere since.  Yes," he went on, with sudden vehemence, "I know
+it, I have seen it!  I--"  His brows knitted, his features began to
+work convulsively; he suddenly brought his paralyzed hand down,
+partly opened, upon the table.  "I WILL remember where."
+
+"Go slow, old man; go slow."
+
+"You asked me once about my visions.  Well, that is one of them.  I
+remember a man somewhere showing me that letter.  I have taken it
+from his hands and opened it, and knew it was mine by the specimens
+of gold that were in it.  But where--or when--or what became of it,
+I cannot tell.  It will come to me--it MUST come to me soon."
+
+He turned his eyes upon Mulrady, who was regarding him with an
+expression of grave curiosity, and said bitterly, "You think me
+crazy.  I know it.  It needed only this."
+
+"Where is this mine," asked Mulrady, without heeding him.
+
+The old man's eyes swiftly sought the ground.
+
+"It is a secret, then?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You have spoken of it to any one?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Not to the man who possesses it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I wouldn't take it from him."
+
+"Why wouldn't you?"
+
+"Because that man is yourself!"
+
+In the instant of complete silence that followed they could hear
+that the monotonous patter of rain on the roof had ceased.
+
+"Then all this was in MY shaft, and the vein I thought I struck
+there was YOUR lead, found three years ago in YOUR tunnel.  Is that
+your idea?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then I don't sabe why you don't want to claim it."
+
+"I have told you why I don't want it for my children.  I go
+further, now, and I tell you, Alvin Mulrady, that I was willing
+that your children should squander it, as they were doing.  It has
+only been a curse to me; it could only be a curse to them; but I
+thought you were happy in seeing it feed selfishness and vanity.
+You think me bitter and hard.  Well, I should have left you in your
+fool's paradise, but that I saw to-night, when you came here, that
+your eyes had been opened like mine.  You, the possessor of my
+wealth, my treasure, could not buy your children's loving care and
+company with your millions, any more than I could keep mine in my
+poverty.  You were to-night lonely and forsaken, as I was.  We were
+equal, for the first time in our lives.  If that cursed gold had
+dropped down the shaft between us into the hell from which it
+sprang, we might have clasped hands like brothers across the
+chasm."
+
+Mulrady, who in a friendly show of being at his ease had not yet
+resumed his coat, rose in his shirt-sleeves, and, standing before
+the hearth, straightened his square figure by drawing down his
+waistcoat on each side with two powerful thumbs.  After a moment's
+contemplative survey of the floor between him and the speaker, he
+raised his eyes to Slinn.  They were small and colorless; the
+forehead above them was low, and crowned with a shock of tawny
+reddish hair; even the rude strength of his lower features was
+enfeebled by a long, straggling, goat-like beard; but for the first
+time in his life the whole face was impressed and transformed with
+a strong and simple dignity.
+
+"Ez far ez I kin see, Slinn," he said, gravely, "the pint between
+you and me ain't to be settled by our children, or wot we allow is
+doo and right from them to us.  Afore we preach at them for playing
+in the slumgullion, and gettin' themselves splashed, perhaps we
+mout ez well remember that that thar slumgullion comes from our own
+sluice-boxes, where we wash our gold.  So we'll just put THEM
+behind us, so," he continued, with a backward sweep of his powerful
+hand towards the chimney, "and goes on.  The next thing that crops
+up ahead of us is your three years in the hospital, and wot you
+went through at that time.  I ain't sayin' it wasn't rough on you,
+and that you didn't have it about as big as it's made; but ez
+you'll allow that you'd hev had that for three years, whether I'd
+found your mine or whether I hadn't, I think we can put THAT behind
+us, too.  There's nothin' now left to prospect but your story of
+your strike.  Well, take your own proofs.  Masters is not here; and
+if he was, accordin' to your own story, he knows nothin' of your
+strike that day, and could only prove you were a disappointed
+prospector in a tunnel; your letter--that the person you wrote to
+never got--YOU can't produce; and if you did, would be only your
+own story without proof!  There is not a business man ez would look
+at your claim; there isn't a friend of yours that wouldn't believe
+you were crazy, and dreamed it all; there isn't a rival of yours ez
+wouldn't say ez you'd invented it.  Slinn, I'm a business man--I am
+your friend--I am your rival--but I don't think you're lyin'--I
+don't think you're crazy--and I'm not sure your claim ain't a good
+one!
+
+"Ef you reckon from that that I'm goin' to hand you over the mine
+to-morrow," he went on, after a pause, raising his hand with a
+deprecating gesture, "you're mistaken.  For your own sake, and the
+sake of my wife and children, you've got to prove it more clearly
+than you hev; but I promise you that from this night forward I will
+spare neither time nor money to help you to do it.  I have more
+than doubled the amount that you would have had, had you taken the
+mine the day you came from the hospital.  When you prove to me that
+your story is true--and we will find some way to prove it, if it IS
+true--that amount will be yours at once, without the need of a word
+from law or lawyers.  If you want my name to that in black and
+white, come to the office to-morrow, and you shall have it."
+
+"And you think I'll take it now?" said the old man passionately.
+"Do you think that your charity will bring back my dead wife, the
+three years of my lost life, the love and respect of my children?
+Or do you think that your own wife and children, who deserted you
+in your wealth, will come back to you in your poverty?  No!  Let
+the mine stay, with its curse, where it is--I'll have none of it!"
+
+"Go slow, old man; go slow," said Mulrady, quietly, putting on his
+coat.  "You will take the mine if it is yours; if it isn't, I'll
+keep it.  If it is yours, you will give your children a chance to
+sho what they can do for you in your sudden prosperity, as I shall
+give mine a chance to show how they can stand reverse and
+disappointment.  If my head is level--and I reckon it is--they'll
+both pan out all right."
+
+He turned and opened the door.  With a quick revulsion of feeling,
+Slinn suddenly seized Mulrady's hand between both of his own, and
+raised it to his lips.  Mulrady smiled, disengaged his hand gently,
+and saying soothingly, "Go slow, old man; go slow," closed the door
+behind him, and passed out into the clear Christmas dawn.
+
+For the stars, with the exception of one that seemed to sparkle
+brightly over the shaft of his former fortunes, were slowly paling.
+A burden seemed to have fallen from his square shoulders as he
+stepped out sturdily into the morning air.  He had already
+forgotten the lonely man behind him, for he was thinking only of
+his wife and daughter.  And at the same moment they were thinking
+of him; and in their elaborate villa overlooking the blue
+Mediterranean at Cannes were discussing, in the event of Mamie's
+marriage with Prince Rosso e Negro, the possibility of Mr.
+Mulrady's paying two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the
+gambling debts of that unfortunate but deeply conscientious
+nobleman.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+When Alvin Mulrady reentered his own house, he no longer noticed
+its loneliness.  Whether the events of the last few hours had
+driven it from his mind, or whether his late reflections had
+repeopled it with his family under pleasanter auspices, it would be
+difficult to determine.  Destitute as he was of imagination, and
+matter-of-fact in his judgments, he realized his new situation as
+calmly as he would have considered any business proposition.  While
+he was decided to act upon his moral convictions purely, he was
+prepared to submit the facts of Slinn's claim to the usual patient
+and laborious investigation of his practical mind.  It was the
+least he could do to justify the ready and almost superstitious
+assent he had given to Slinn's story.
+
+When he had made a few memoranda at his desk by the growing light,
+he again took the key of the attic, and ascended to the loft that
+held the tangible memories of his past life.  If he was still under
+the influence of his reflections, it was with very different
+sensations that he now regarded them.  Was it possible that these
+ashes might be warmed again, and these scattered embers rekindled?
+His practical sense said No! whatever his wish might have been.  A
+sudden chill came over him; he began to realize the terrible change
+that was probable, more by the impossibility of his accepting the
+old order of things than by his voluntarily abandoning the new.
+His wife and children would never submit.  They would go away from
+this place, far away, where no reminiscence of either former wealth
+or former poverty could obtrude itself upon them.  Mamie--his
+Mamie--should never go back to the cabin, since desecrated by
+Slinn's daughters, and take their places.  No!  Why should she?--
+because of the half-sick, half-crazy dreams of an old vindictive
+man?
+
+He stopped suddenly.  In moodily turning over a heap of mining
+clothing, blankets, and india-rubber boots, he had come upon an old
+pickaxe--the one he had found in the shaft; the one he had
+carefully preserved for a year, and then forgotten!  Why had he not
+remembered it before?  He was frightened, not only at this sudden
+resurrection of the proof he was seeking, but at his own fateful
+forgetfulness.  Why had he never thought of this when Slinn was
+speaking?  A sense of shame, as if he had voluntarily withheld it
+from the wronged man, swept over him.  He was turning away, when he
+was again startled.
+
+This time it was by a voice from below--a voice calling him--
+Slinn's voice.  How had the crippled man got here so soon, and what
+did he want?  He hurriedly laid aside the pick, which, in his first
+impulse, he had taken to the door of the loft with him, and
+descended the stairs.  The old man was standing at the door of his
+office awaiting him.
+
+As Mulrady approached, he trembled violently, and clung to the
+doorpost for support.
+
+"I had to come over, Mulrady," he said, in a choked voice; "I could
+stand it there no longer.  I've come to beg you to forget all that
+I have said; to drive all thought of what passed between us last
+night out of your head and mine forever!  I've come to ask you to
+swear with me that neither of us will ever speak of this again
+forever.  It is not worth the happiness I have had in your
+friendship for the last half-year; it is not worth the agony I have
+suffered in its loss in the last half-hour."
+
+Mulrady grasped his outstretched hand.  "P'raps," he said, gravely,
+"there mayn't be any use for another word, if you can answer one
+now.  Come with me.  No matter," he added, as Slinn moved with
+difficulty; "I will help you."
+
+He half supported, half lifted the paralyzed man up the three
+flights of stairs, and opened the door of the loft.  The pick was
+leaning against the wall, where he had left it.  "Look around, and
+see if you recognize anything."
+
+The old man's eyes fell upon the implement in a half-frightened
+way, and then lifted themselves interrogatively to Mulrady's face.
+
+"Do you know that pick?"
+
+Slinn raised it in his trembling hands.  "I think I do; and yet--"
+
+"Slinn! is it yours?"
+
+"No," he said hurriedly.
+
+"Then what makes you think you know it?"
+
+"It has a short handle like one I've seen."
+
+"And is isn't yours?"
+
+"No.  The handle of mine was broken and spliced.  I was too poor to
+buy a new one."
+
+"Then you say that this pick which I found in my shaft is not
+yours?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Slinn!"
+
+The old man passed his hand across his forehead, looked at Mulrady,
+and dropped his eyes.  "It is not mine," he said simply.
+
+"That will do," said Mulrady, gravely.
+
+"And you will not speak of this again?" said the old man, timidly.
+
+"I promise you--not until I have some more evidence."
+
+He kept his word, but not before he had extorted from Slinn as full
+a description of Masters as his imperfect memory and still more
+imperfect knowledge of his former neighbor could furnish.  He
+placed this, with a large sum of money and the promise of a still
+larger reward, in the hands of a trustworthy agent.  When this was
+done he resumed his old relations with Slinn, with the exception
+that the domestic letters of Mrs. Mulrady and Mamie were no longer
+a subject of comment, and their bills no longer passed through his
+private secretary's hands.
+
+Three months passed; the rainy season had ceased, the hillsides
+around Mulrady's shaft were bridal-like with flowers; indeed, there
+were rumors of an approaching fashionable marriage in the air, and
+vague hints in the "Record" that the presence of a distinguished
+capitalist might soon be required abroad.  The face of that
+distinguished man did not, however, reflect the gayety of nature
+nor the anticipation of happiness; on the contrary, for the past
+few weeks, he had appeared disturbed and anxious, and that rude
+tranquillity which had characterized him was wanting.  People shook
+their heads; a few suggested speculations; all agreed on
+extravagance.
+
+One morning, after office hours, Slinn, who had been watching the
+careworn face of his employer, suddenly rose and limped to his
+side.
+
+"We promised each other," he said, in a voice trembling with
+emotion; "never to allude to our talk of Christmas Eve again unless
+we had other proofs of what I told you then.  We have none; I don't
+believe we'll ever have any more.  I don't care if we ever do, and
+I break that promise now because I cannot bear to see you unhappy
+and know that this is the cause."
+
+Mulrady made a motion of deprecation, but the old man continued--
+
+"You are unhappy, Alvin Mulrady.  You are unhappy because you want
+to give your daughter a dowry of two hundred and fifty thousand
+dollars, and you will not use the fortune that you think may be
+mine."
+
+"Who's been talking about a dowry?" asked Mulrady, with an angry
+flush.
+
+"Don Caesar Alvarado told my daughter."
+
+"Then that is why he has thrown off on me since he returned," said
+Mulrady, with sudden small malevolence, "just that he might unload
+his gossip because Mamie wouldn't have him.  The old woman was
+right in warnin' me agin him."
+
+The outburst was so unlike him, and so dwarfed his large though
+common nature with its littleness, that it was easy to detect its
+feminine origin, although it filled Slinn with vague alarm.
+
+"Never mind him," said the old man, hastily; "what I wanted to say
+now is that I abandon everything to you and yours.  There are no
+proofs; there never will be any more than what we know, than what
+we have tested and found wanting.  I swear to you that, except to
+show you that I have not lied and am not crazy, I would destroy
+them on their way to your hands.  Keep the money, and spend it as
+you will.  Make your daughter happy, and, through her, yourself.
+You have made me happy through your liberality; don't make me
+suffer through your privation."
+
+"I tell you what, old man," said Mulrady, rising to his feet, with
+an awkward mingling of frankness and shame in his manner and
+accent, "I should like to pay that money for Mamie, and let her be
+a princess, if it would make her happy.  I should like to shut the
+lantern jaws of that Don Caesar, who'd be too glad if anything
+happened to break off Mamie's match.  But I shouldn't touch that
+capital--unless you'd lend it to me.  If you'll take a note from
+me, payable if the property ever becomes yours, I'd thank you.  A
+mortgage on the old house and garden, and the lands I bought of Don
+Caesar, outside the mine, will screen you."
+
+"If that pleases you," said the old man, with a smile, "have your
+way; and if I tear up the note, it does not concern you."
+
+It did please the distinguished capitalist of Rough-and-Ready; for
+the next few days his face wore a brightened expression, and he
+seemed to have recovered his old tranquillity.  There was, in fact,
+a slight touch of consequence in his manner, the first ostentation
+he had ever indulged in, when he was informed one morning at his
+private office that Don Caesar Alvarado was in the counting-house,
+desiring a few moments' conference.  "Tell him to come in," said
+Mulrady, shortly.  The door opened upon Don Caesar--erect, sallow,
+and grave.  Mulrady had not seen him since his return from Europe,
+and even his inexperienced eyes were struck with the undeniable
+ease and grace with which the young Spanish-American had
+assimilated the style and fashion of an older civilization.  It
+seemed rather as if he had returned to a familiar condition than
+adopted a new one.
+
+"Take a cheer," said Mulrady.
+
+The young man looked at Slinn with quietly persistent significance.
+
+"You can talk all the same," said Mulrady, accepting the
+significance.  "He's my private secretary."
+
+"It seems that for that reason we might choose another moment for
+our conversation," returned Don Caesar, haughtily.  "Do I
+understand you cannot see me now?"
+
+Mulrady hesitated, he had always revered and recognized a certain
+social superiority in Don Ramon Alvarado; somehow his son--a young
+man of half his age, and once a possible son-in-law--appeared to
+claim that recognition also.  He rose, without a word, and preceded
+Don Caesar up-stairs into the drawing-room.  The alien portrait on
+the wall seemed to evidently take sides with Don Caesar, as against
+the common intruder, Mulrady.
+
+"I hoped the Senora Mulrady might have saved me this interview,"
+said the young man, stiffly; "or at least have given you some
+intimation of the reason why I seek it.  As you just now proposed
+my talking to you in the presence of the unfortunate Senor Esslinn
+himself, it appears she has not."
+
+"I don't know what you're driving at, or what Mrs. Mulrady's got to
+do with Slinn or you," said Mulrady, in angry uneasiness.
+
+"Do I understand," said Don Caesar, sternly, "that Senora Mulrady
+has not told you that I entrusted to her an important letter,
+belonging to Senor Esslinn, which I had the honor to discover in
+the wood six months ago, and which she said she would refer to
+you?"
+
+"Letter?" echoed Mulrady, slowly; "my wife had a letter of
+Slinn's?"
+
+Don Caesar regarded the millionaire attentively.  "It is as I
+feared," he said, gravely.  "You do not know or you would not have
+remained silent."  He then briefly recounted the story of his
+finding Slinn's letter, his exhibition of it to the invalid, its
+disastrous effect upon him, and his innocent discovery of the
+contents.  "I believed myself at that time on the eve of being
+allied with your family, Senor Mulrady," he said, haughtily; "and
+when I found myself in the possession of a secret which affected
+its integrity and good name, I did not choose to leave it in the
+helpless hands of its imbecile owner, or his sillier children, but
+proposed to trust it to the care of the Senora, that she and you
+might deal with it as became your honor and mine.  I followed her
+to Paris, and gave her the letter there.  She affected to laugh at
+any pretension of the writer, or any claim he might have on your
+bounty; but she kept the letter, and, I fear, destroyed it.  You
+will understand, Senor Mulrady, that when I found that my
+attentions were no longer agreeable to your daughter, I had no
+longer the right to speak to you on the subject, nor could I,
+without misapprehension, force her to return it.  I should have
+still kept the secret to myself, if I had not since my return here
+made the nearer acquaintance of Senor Esslinn's daughters.  I
+cannot present myself at his house, as a suitor for the hand of the
+Senorita Vashti, until I have asked his absolution for my
+complicity in the wrong that has been done to him.  I cannot, as a
+caballero, do that without your permission.  It is for that purpose
+I am here."
+
+It needed only this last blow to complete the humiliation that
+whitened Mulrady's face.  But his eye was none the less clear and
+his voice none the less steady as he turned to Don Caesar.
+
+"You know perfectly the contents of that letter?"
+
+"I have kept a copy of it."
+
+"Come with me."
+
+He preceded his visitor down the staircase and back into his
+private office.  Slinn looked up at his employer's face in
+unrestrained anxiety.  Mulrady sat down at his desk, wrote a few
+hurried lines, and rang a bell.  A manager appeared from the
+counting-room.
+
+"Send that to the bank."
+
+He wiped his pen as methodically as if he had not at that moment
+countermanded the order to pay his daughter's dowry, and turned
+quietly to Slinn.
+
+"Don Caesar Alvarado has found the letter you wrote your wife on
+the day you made your strike in the tunnel that is now my shaft.
+He gave the letter to Mrs. Mulrady; but he has kept a copy."
+
+Unheeding the frightened gesture of entreaty from Slinn, equally
+with the unfeigned astonishment of Don Caesar, who was entirely
+unprepared for this revelation of Mulrady's and Slinn's
+confidences, he continued, "He has brought the copy with him.  I
+reckon it would be only square for you to compare it with what you
+remember of the original."
+
+In obedience to a gesture from Mulrady, Don Caesar mechanically
+took from his pocket a folded paper, and handed it to the
+paralytic.  But Slinn's trembling fingers could scarcely unfold the
+paper; and as his eyes fell upon its contents, his convulsive lips
+could not articulate a word.
+
+"P'raps I'd better read it for you," said Mulrady, gently.  "You
+kin follow me and stop me when I go wrong."
+
+He took the paper, and, in dead silence, read as follows:--
+
+"DEAR WIFE,--I've just struck gold in my tunnel, and you must get
+ready to come here with the children, at once.  It was after six
+months' hard work; and I'm so weak I . . .  It's a fortune for us
+all.  We should be rich even if it were only a branch vein dipping
+west towards the next tunnel, instead of dipping east, according to
+my theory--"
+
+"Stop!" said Slinn, in a voice that shook the room.
+
+Mulrady looked up.
+
+"It's wrong, ain't it?" he asked, anxiously; "it should be EAST
+towards the next tunnel."
+
+"No!  IT'S RIGHT!  I am wrong!  We're all wrong!"
+
+Slinn had risen to his feet, erect and inspired.  "Don't you see,"
+he almost screamed, with passionate vehemence, "it's MASTERS'
+ABANDONED TUNNEL your shaft has struck?  Not mine!  It was Masters'
+pick you found!  I know it now!"
+
+"And your own tunnel?" said Mulrady, springing to his feet in
+excitement.  "And YOUR strike?"
+
+"Is still there!"
+
+The next instant, and before another question could be asked, Slinn
+had darted from the room.  In the exaltation of that supreme
+discovery he regained the full control of his mind and body.
+Mulrady and Don Caesar, no less excited, followed him precipitately,
+and with difficulty kept up with his feverish speed.  Their way lay
+along the base of the hill below Mulrady's shaft, and on a line with
+Masters' abandoned tunnel.  Only once he stopped to snatch a pick
+from the hand of an astonished Chinaman at work in a ditch, as he
+still kept on his way, a quarter of a mile beyond the shaft.  Here
+he stopped before a jagged hole in the hillside.  Bared to the sky
+and air, the very openness of its abandonment, its unpropitious
+position, and distance from the strike in Mulrady's shaft had no
+doubt preserved its integrity from wayfarer or prospector.
+
+"You can't go in there alone, and without a light," said Mulrady,
+laying his hand on the arm of the excited man.  "Let me get more
+help and proper tools."
+
+"I know every step in the dark as in the daylight," returned Slinn,
+struggling.  "Let me go, while I have yet strength and reason!
+Stand aside!"
+
+He broke from them, and the next moment was swallowed up in the
+yawning blackness.  They waited with bated breath until, after a
+seeming eternity of night and silence, they heard his returning
+footsteps, and ran forward to meet him.  As he was carrying
+something clasped to his breast, they supported him to the opening.
+But at the same moment the object of his search and his burden, a
+misshapen wedge of gold and quartz, dropped with him, and both fell
+together with equal immobility to the ground.  He had still
+strength to turn his fading eyes to the other millionaire of Rough-
+and-Ready, who leaned over him.
+
+"You--see," he gasped, brokenly, "I was not--crazy!"
+
+No.  He was dead!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg etext of A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready.
+
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