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+The Project Gutenberg Etext The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh, Etc.
+#12 in our series by Bret Harte
+
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+The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales
+
+by Bret Harte
+
+August, 2000  [Etext #2281]
+
+CONTENTS.
+THE HERITAGE OF DEDLOW MARSH
+A KNIGHT-ERRANT OF THE FOOT-HILLS
+A SECRET OF TELEGRAPH HILL
+CAPTAIN JIM'S FRIEND
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh, Etc.
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+
+
+THE HERITAGE OF DEDLOW MARSH and Other Tales
+
+by
+
+Bret Harte
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+THE HERITAGE OF DEDLOW MARSH
+A KNIGHT-ERRANT OF THE FOOT-HILLS
+A SECRET OF TELEGRAPH HILL
+CAPTAIN JIM'S FRIEND
+
+
+
+THE HERITAGE OF DEDLOW MARSH.
+
+
+I.
+
+
+The sun was going down on the Dedlow Marshes.  The tide was
+following it fast as if to meet the reddening lines of sky and
+water in the west, leaving the foreground to grow blacker and
+blacker every moment, and to bring out in startling contrast the
+few half-filled and half-lit pools left behind and forgotten.  The
+strong breath of the Pacific fanning their surfaces at times
+kindled them into a dull glow like dying embers.  A cloud of sand-
+pipers rose white from one of the nearer lagoons, swept in a long
+eddying ring against the sunset, and became a black and dropping
+rain to seaward.  The long sinuous line of channel, fading with the
+light and ebbing with the tide, began to give off here and there
+light puffs of gray-winged birds like sudden exhalations.  High in
+the darkening sky the long arrow-headed lines of geese and 'brant'
+pointed towards the upland.  As the light grew more uncertain the
+air at times was filled with the rush of viewless and melancholy
+wings, or became plaintive with far-off cries and lamentations.  As
+the Marshes grew blacker the far-scattered tussocks and accretions
+on its level surface began to loom in exaggerated outline, and two
+human figures, suddenly emerging erect on the bank of the hidden
+channel, assumed the proportion of giants.
+
+When they had moored their unseen boat, they still appeared for
+some moments to be moving vaguely and aimlessly round the spot
+where they had disembarked.  But as the eye became familiar with
+the darkness it was seen that they were really advancing inland,
+yet with a slowness of progression and deviousness of course that
+appeared inexplicable to the distant spectator.  Presently it was
+evident that this seemingly even, vast, black expanse was traversed
+and intersected by inky creeks and small channels, which made human
+progression difficult and dangerous.  As they appeared nearer and
+their figures took more natural proportions, it could be seen that
+each carried a gun; that one was a young girl, although dressed so
+like her companion in shaggy pea-jacket and sou'wester as to be
+scarcely distinguished from him above the short skirt that came
+halfway down her high india-rubber fishing-boots.  By the time they
+had reached firmer ground, and turned to look back at the sunset,
+it could be also seen that the likeness between their faces was
+remarkable.  Both, had crisp, black, tightly curling hair; both had
+dark eyes and heavy eyebrows; both had quick vivid complexions,
+slightly heightened by the sea and wind.  But more striking than
+their similarity of coloring was the likeness of expression and
+bearing.  Both wore the same air of picturesque energy; both bore
+themselves with a like graceful effrontery and self-possession.
+
+The young man continued his way.  The young girl lingered for a
+moment looking seaward, with her small brown hand lifted to shade
+her eyes,--a precaution which her heavy eyebrows and long lashes
+seemed to render utterly gratuitous.
+
+"Come along, Mag.  What are ye waitin' for?" said the young man
+impatiently.
+
+"Nothin'.  Lookin' at that boat from the Fort."  Her clear eyes
+were watching a small skiff, invisible to less keen-sighted
+observers, aground upon a flat near the mouth of the channel.
+"Them chaps will have a high ole time gunnin' thar, stuck in the
+mud, and the tide goin' out like sixty!"
+
+"Never you mind the sodgers," returned her companion, aggressively,
+"they kin take care o' their own precious skins, or Uncle Sam will
+do it for 'em, I reckon.  Anyhow the people--that's you and me,
+Mag--is expected to pay for their foolishness.  That's what they're
+sent yer for.  Ye oughter to be satisfied with that," he added with
+deep sarcasm.
+
+"I reckon they ain't expected to do much off o' dry land, and they
+can't help bein' queer on the water," returned the young girl with
+a reflecting sense of justice.
+
+"Then they ain't no call to go gunnin', and wastin' Guv'nment
+powder on ducks instead o' Injins."
+
+"Thet's so," said the girl thoughtfully.  "Wonder ef Guv'nment pays
+for them frocks the Kernel's girls went cavortin' round Logport in
+last Sunday--they looked like a cirkis."
+
+"Like ez not the old Kernel gets it outer contracts--one way or
+another.  WE pay for it all the same," he added gloomily.
+
+"Jest the same ez if they were MY clothes," said the girl, with a
+quick, fiery, little laugh, "ain't it?  Wonder how they'd like my
+sayin' that to 'em when they was prancin' round, eh, Jim?"
+
+But her companion was evidently unprepared for this sweeping
+feminine deduction, and stopped it with masculine promptitude.
+
+"Look yer--instead o' botherin' your head about what the Fort girls
+wear, you'd better trot along a little more lively.  It's late
+enough now."
+
+"But these darned boots hurt like pizen," said the girl, limping.
+"They swallowed a lot o' water over the tops while I was wadin'
+down there, and my feet go swashin' around like in a churn every
+step."
+
+"Lean on me, baby," he returned, passing his arm around her waist,
+and dropping her head smartly on his shoulder.  "Thar!"  The act
+was brotherly and slightly contemptuous, but it was sufficient to
+at once establish their kinship.
+
+They continued on thus for some moments in silence, the girl, I
+fear, after the fashion of her sex, taking the fullest advantage of
+this slightly sentimental and caressing attitude.  They were moving
+now along the edge of the Marsh, parallel with the line of rapidly
+fading horizon, following some trail only known to their keen
+youthful eyes.  It was growing darker and darker.  The cries of the
+sea-birds had ceased; even the call of a belated plover had died
+away inland; the hush of death lay over the black funereal pall of
+marsh at their side.  The tide had run out with the day.  Even the
+sea-breeze had lulled in this dead slack-water of all nature, as if
+waiting outside the bar with the ocean, the stars, and the night.
+
+Suddenly the girl stopped and halted her companion.  The faint far
+sound of a bugle broke the silence, if the idea of interruption
+could have been conveyed by the two or three exquisite vibrations
+that seemed born of that silence itself, and to fade and die in it
+without break or discord.  Yet it was only the 'retreat' call from
+the Fort two miles distant and invisible.
+
+The young girl's face had become irradiated, and her small mouth
+half opened as she listened.  "Do you know, Jim," she said with a
+confidential sigh, "I allus put words to that when I hear it--it's
+so pow'ful pretty.  It allus goes to me like this: 'Goes the day,
+Far away, With the light, And the night Comes along--Comes along--
+Comes along--Like a-a so-o-ong.'"  She here lifted her voice, a
+sweet, fresh, boyish contralto, in such an admirable imitation of
+the bugle that her brother, after the fashion of more select
+auditors, was for a moment quite convinced that the words meant
+something.  Nevertheless, as a brother, it was his duty to crush
+this weakness.  "Yes; and it says:'shut your head, Go to bed,'" he
+returned irascibly; "and YOU'D better come along, if we're goin' to
+hev any supper.  There's Yeller Bob hez got ahead of us over there
+with the game already."
+
+The girl glanced towards a slouching burdened figure that now
+appeared to be preceding them, straightened herself suddenly, and
+then looked attentively towards the Marsh.
+
+"Not the sodgers again?" said her brother impatiently.
+
+"No," she said quickly; "but if that don't beat anythin'!  I'd hev
+sworn, Jim, that Yeller Bob was somewhere behind us.  I saw him
+only jest now when 'Taps' sounded, somewhere over thar."  She
+pointed with a half-uneasy expression in quite another direction
+from that in which the slouching Yellow Bob had just loomed.
+
+"Tell ye what, Mag, makin' poetry outer bugle calls hez kinder
+muddled ye.  THAT'S Yeller Bob ahead, and ye orter know Injins well
+enuff by this time to remember that they allus crop up jest when ye
+don't expect them.  And there's the bresh jest afore us.  Come!"
+
+The 'bresh,' or low bushes, was really a line of stunted willows
+and alders that seemed to have gradually sunk into the level of the
+plain, but increased in size farther inland, until they grew to the
+height and density of a wood.  Seen from the channel it had the
+appearance of a green cape or promontory thrust upon the Marsh.
+Passing through its tangled recesses, with the aid of some unerring
+instinct, the two companions emerged upon another and much larger
+level that seemed as illimitable as the bay.  The strong breath of
+the ocean lying just beyond the bar and estuary they were now
+facing came to them salt and humid as another tide.  The nearer
+expanse of open water reflected the after-glow, and lightened the
+landscape.  And between the two wayfarers and the horizon rose,
+bleak and startling, the strange outlines of their home.
+
+At first it seemed a ruined colonnade of many pillars, whose base
+and pediment were buried in the earth, supporting a long
+parallelogram of entablature and cornices.  But a second glance
+showed it to be a one-storied building, upheld above the Marsh by
+numberless piles placed at regular distances; some of them sunken
+or inclined from the perpendicular, increasing the first illusion.
+Between these pillars, which permitted a free circulation of air,
+and, at extraordinary tides, even the waters of the bay itself, the
+level waste of marsh, the bay, the surges of the bar, and finally
+the red horizon line, were distinctly visible.  A railed gallery or
+platform, supported also on piles, and reached by steps from the
+Marsh, ran around the building, and gave access to the several
+rooms and offices.
+
+But if the appearance of this lacustrine and amphibious dwelling
+was striking, and not without a certain rude and massive grandeur,
+its grounds and possessions, through which the brother and sister
+were still picking their way, were even more grotesque and
+remarkable.  Over a space of half a dozen acres the flotsam and
+jetsam of years of tidal offerings were collected, and even guarded
+with a certain care.  The blackened hulks of huge uprooted trees,
+scarcely distinguishable from the fragments of genuine wrecks
+beside them, were securely fastened by chains to stakes and piles
+driven in the marsh, while heaps of broken and disjointed bamboo
+orange crates, held together by ropes of fibre, glistened like
+ligamented bones heaped in the dead valley.  Masts, spars,
+fragments of shell-encrusted boats, binnacles, round-houses and
+galleys, and part of the after-deck of a coasting schooner, had
+ceased their wanderings and found rest in this vast cemetery of the
+sea.  The legend on a wheel-house, the lettering on a stern or bow,
+served for mortuary inscription.  Wailed over by the trade winds,
+mourned by lamenting sea-birds, once every year the tide visited
+its lost dead and left them wet with its tears.
+
+To such a spot and its surroundings the atmosphere of tradition and
+mystery was not wanting.  Six years ago Boone Culpepper had built
+the house, and brought to it his wife--variously believed to be a
+gypsy, a Mexican, a bright mulatto, a Digger Indian, a South Sea
+princess from Tahiti, somebody else's wife--but in reality a little
+Creole woman from New Orleans, with whom he had contracted a
+marriage, with other gambling debts, during a winter's vacation
+from his home in Virginia.  At the end of two years she had died,
+succumbing, as differently stated, from perpetual wet feet, or the
+misanthropic idiosyncrasies of her husband, and leaving behind her
+a girl of twelve and a boy of sixteen to console him.  How futile
+was this bequest may be guessed from a brief summary of Mr.
+Culpepper's peculiarities.  They were the development of a singular
+form of aggrandizement and misanthropy.  On his arrival at Logport
+he had bought a part of the apparently valueless Dedlow Marsh from
+the Government at less than a dollar an acre, continuing his
+singular investment year by year until he was the owner of three
+leagues of amphibious domain.  It was then discovered that this
+property carried with it the WATER FRONT of divers valuable and
+convenient sites for manufactures and the commercial ports of a
+noble bay, as well as the natural embarcaderos of some 'lumbering'
+inland settlements.  Boone Culpepper would not sell.  Boone
+Culpepper would not rent or lease.  Boone Culpepper held an
+invincible blockade of his neighbors, and the progress and
+improvement he despised--granting only, after a royal fashion,
+occasional license, revocable at pleasure, in the shape of tolls,
+which amply supported him, with the game he shot in his
+kingfisher's eyrie on the Marsh.  Even the Government that had made
+him powerful was obliged to 'condemn' a part of his property at an
+equitable price for the purposes of Fort Redwood, in which the
+adjacent town of Logport shared.  And Boone Culpepper, unable to
+resist the act, refused to receive the compensation or quit-claim
+the town.  In his scant intercourse with his neighbors he always
+alluded to it as his own, showed it to his children as part of
+their strange inheritance, and exhibited the starry flag that
+floated from the Fort as a flaunting insult to their youthful eyes.
+Hated, feared, and superstitiously shunned by some, regarded as a
+madman by others, familiarly known as 'The Kingfisher of Dedlow,'
+Boone Culpepper was one day found floating dead in his skiff, with
+a charge of shot through his head and shoulders.  The shot-gun
+lying at his feet at the bottom of the boat indicated the
+'accident' as recorded in the verdict of the coroner's jury--but
+not by the people.  A thousand rumors of murder or suicide
+prevailed, but always with the universal rider, 'Served him right.'
+So invincible was this feeling that but few attended his last
+rites, which took place at high water.  The delay of the
+officiating clergyman lost the tide; the homely catafalque--his own
+boat--was left aground on the Marsh, and deserted by all mourners
+except the two children.  Whatever he had instilled into them by
+precept and example, whatever took place that night in their lonely
+watch by his bier on the black marshes, it was certain that those
+who confidently looked for any change in the administration of the
+Dedlow Marsh were cruelly mistaken.  The old Kingfisher was dead,
+but he had left in the nest two young birds, more beautiful and
+graceful, it was true, yet as fierce and tenacious of beak and
+talon.
+
+
+II.
+
+
+Arriving at the house, the young people ascended the outer flight
+of wooden steps, which bore an odd likeness to the companion-way of
+a vessel, and the gallery, or 'deck,' as it was called--where a
+number of nets, floats, and buoys thrown over the railing completed
+the nautical resemblance.  This part of the building was evidently
+devoted to kitchen, dining-room, and domestic offices; the
+principal room in the centre serving as hall or living-room, and
+communicating on the other side with two sleeping apartments.  It
+was of considerable size, with heavy lateral beams across the
+ceiling--built, like the rest of the house, with a certain maritime
+strength--and looked not unlike a saloon cabin.  An enormous open
+Franklin stove between the windows, as large as a chimney, blazing
+with drift-wood, gave light and heat to the apartment, and brought
+into flickering relief the boarded walls hung with the spoils of
+sea and shore, and glittering with gun-barrels.  Fowling-pieces of
+all sizes, from the long ducking-gun mounted on a swivel for boat
+use to the light single-barrel or carbine, stood in racks against
+the walls; game-bags, revolvers in their holsters, hunting and
+fishing knives in their sheaths, depended from hooks above them.
+In one corner stood a harpoon; in another, two or three Indian
+spears for salmon.  The carpetless floor and rude chairs and
+settles were covered with otter, mink, beaver, and a quantity of
+valuable seal-skins, with a few larger pelts of the bear and elk.
+The only attempt at decoration was the displayed wings and breasts
+of the wood and harlequin duck, the muir, the cormorant, the gull,
+the gannet, and the femininely delicate half-mourning of petrel and
+plover, nailed against the wall.  The influence of the sea was
+dominant above all, and asserted its saline odors even through the
+spice of the curling drift-wood smoke that half veiled the ceiling.
+
+A berry-eyed old Indian woman with the complexion of dried salmon;
+her daughter, also with berry eyes, and with a face that seemed
+wholly made of a moist laugh; 'Yellow Bob,' a Digger 'buck,' so
+called from the prevailing ochre markings of his cheek, and
+'Washooh,' an ex-chief; a nondescript in a blanket, looking like a
+cheap and dirty doll whose fibrous hair was badly nailed on his
+carved wooden head, composed the Culpepper household.  While the
+two former were preparing supper in the adjacent dining-room,
+Yellow Bob, relieved of his burden of game, appeared on the gallery
+and beckoned mysteriously to his master through the window.  James
+Culpepper went out, returned quickly, and after a minute's
+hesitation and an uneasy glance towards his sister, who had
+meantime pushed back her sou'wester from her forehead, and without
+taking off her jacket had dropped into a chair before the fire with
+her back towards him, took his gun noiselessly from the rack, and
+saying carelessly that he would be back in a moment, disappeared.
+
+Left to herself, Maggie coolly pulled off her long boots and
+stockings, and comfortably opposed to the fire two very pretty feet
+and ankles, whose delicate purity was slightly blue-bleached by
+confinement in the tepid sea-water.  The contrast of their waxen
+whiteness with her blue woolen skirt, and with even the skin of her
+sunburnt hands and wrists, apparently amused her, and she sat for
+some moments with her elbows on her knees, her skirts slightly
+raised, contemplating them, and curling her toes with evident
+satisfaction.  The firelight playing upon the rich coloring of her
+face, the fringe of jet-black curls that almost met the thick sweep
+of eyebrows, and left her only a white strip of forehead, her short
+upper lip and small chin, rounded but resolute, completed a piquant
+and striking figure.  The rich brown shadows on the smoke-stained
+walls and ceiling, the occasional starting into relief of the
+scutcheons of brilliant plumage, and the momentary glitter of the
+steel barrels, made a quaint background to this charming picture.
+Sitting there, and following some lingering memory of her tramp on
+the Marsh, she hummed to herself a few notes of the bugle call that
+had impressed her--at first softly, and finally with the full pitch
+of her voice.
+
+Suddenly she stopped.
+
+There was a faint and unmistakable rapping on the floor beneath
+her.  It was distinct, but cautiously given, as if intended to be
+audible to her alone.  For a moment she stood upright, her feet
+still bare and glistening, on the otter skin that served as a rug.
+There were two doors to the room, one from which her brother had
+disappeared, which led to the steps, the other giving on the back
+gallery, looking inland.  With a quick instinct she caught up her
+gun and ran to that one, but not before a rapid scramble near the
+railing was followed by a cautious opening of the door.  She was
+just in time to shut it on the extended arm and light blue sleeve
+of an army overcoat that protruded through the opening, and for a
+moment threw her whole weight against it.
+
+"A dhrop of whiskey, Miss, for the love of God."
+
+She retained her hold, cocked her weapon, and stepped back a pace
+from the door.  The blue sleeve was followed by the rest of the
+overcoat, and a blue cap with the infantry blazoning, and the
+letter H on its peak.  They were for the moment more
+distinguishable than the man beneath them--grimed and blackened
+with the slime of the Marsh.  But what could be seen of his mud-
+stained face was more grotesque than terrifying.  A combination of
+weakness and audacity, insinuation and timidity struggled through
+the dirt for expression.  His small blue eyes were not ill-natured,
+and even the intruding arm trembled more from exhaustion than
+passion.
+
+"On'y a dhrop, Miss," he repeated piteously, "and av ye pleeze,
+quick! afore I'm stharved with the cold entoirely."
+
+She looked at him intently--without lowering her gun.
+
+"Who are you?"
+
+"Thin, it's the truth I'll tell ye, Miss--whisth then!" he said in
+a half-whisper; "I'm a desarter!"
+
+"Then it was YOU that was doggin' us on the Marsh?"
+
+"It was the sarjint I was lavin', Miss."
+
+She looked at him hesitatingly.
+
+"Stay outside there; if you move a step into the room, I'll blow
+you out of it."
+
+He stepped back on the gallery.  She closed the door, bolted it,
+and still holding the gun, opened a cupboard, poured out a glass of
+whiskey, and returning to the door, opened it and handed him the
+liquor.
+
+She watched him drain it eagerly, saw the fiery stimulant put life
+into his shivering frame, trembling hands, and kindle his dull eye--
+and--quietly raised her gun again.
+
+"Ah, put it down, Miss, put it down!  Fwhot's the use?  Sure the
+bullets yee carry in them oiyes of yours is more deadly!  It's out
+here oi'll sthand, glory be to God, all night, without movin' a fut
+till the sarjint comes to take me, av ye won't levil them oiyes at
+me like that.  Ah, whirra! look at that now! but it's a gooddess
+she is--the livin' Jaynus of warr, standin' there like a statoo,
+wid her alybaster fut put forward."
+
+In her pride and conscious superiority, any suggestion of shame at
+thus appearing before a common man and a mendicant was as
+impossible to her nature as it would have been to a queen or the
+goddess of his simile.  His presence and his compliment alike
+passed her calm modesty unchallenged.  The wretched scamp
+recognized the fact and felt its power, and it was with a
+superstitious reverence asserting itself through his native
+extravagance that he raised his grimy hand to his cap in military
+salute and became respectfully rigid.
+
+"Then the sodgers were huntin' YOU?" she said thoughtfully,
+lowering her weapon.
+
+"Thrue for you, Miss--they worr, and it's meself that was lyin'
+flat in the ditch wid me faytures makin' an illigant cast in the
+mud--more betoken, as ye see even now--and the sarjint and his
+daytail thrampin' round me.  It was thin that the mortial cold
+sthruck thro' me mouth, and made me wake for the whiskey that would
+resthore me."
+
+"What did you desert fer?"
+
+"Ah, list to that now!  Fwhat did I desart fer?  Shure ev there was
+the ghost of an inemy round, it's meself that would be in the front
+now!  But it was the letthers from me ould mother, Miss, that is
+sthruck wid a mortial illness--long life to her!--in County Clare,
+and me sisthers in Ninth Avenue in New York, fornint the daypo,
+that is brekken their harruts over me listin' in the Fourth
+Infanthry to do duty in a haythen wilderness.  Av it was the
+cavalry--and it's me own father that was in the Innishkillen
+Dthragoons, Miss--oi wouldn't moind.  Wid a horse betune me legs,
+it's on parade oi'd be now, Miss, and not wandhering over the bare
+flure of the Marsh, stharved wid the cold, the thirst, and hunger,
+wid the mud and the moire thick on me; facin' an illigant young
+leddy as is the ekal ov a Fayld Marshal's darter--not to sphake ov
+Kernal Preston's--ez couldn't hold a candle to her."
+
+Brought up on the Spanish frontier, Maggie Culpepper was one of the
+few American girls who was not familiar with the Irish race.  The
+rare smile that momentarily lit up her petulant mouth seemed to
+justify the intruder's praise.  But it passed quickly, and she
+returned dryly:
+
+"That means you want more drink, suthin' to eat, and clothes.
+Suppose my brother comes back and ketches you here?"
+
+"Shure, Miss, he's just now hunten me, along wid his two haythen
+Diggers, beyond the laygoon there.  It worr the yellar one that
+sphotted me lyin' there in the ditch; it worr only your own oiyes,
+Miss--more power to their beauty for that!--that saw me folly him
+unbeknownst here; and that desaved them, ye see!"
+
+The young girl remained for an instant silent and thoughtful.
+
+"We're no friends of the Fort," she said finally, "but I don't
+reckon for that reason my brother will cotton to YOU.  Stay out
+thar where ye are, till I come to ye.  If you hear me singin'
+again, you'll know he's come back, and ye'd better scoot with what
+you've already got, and be thankful."
+
+She shut the door again and locked it, went into the dining-room,
+returned with some provisions wrapped in paper, took a common
+wicker flask from the wall, passed into her brother's bedroom, and
+came out with a flannel shirt, overalls, and a coarse Indian
+blanket, and, reopening the door, placed them before the astonished
+and delighted vagabond.  His eye glistened; he began, "Glory be to
+God," but for once his habitual extravagance failed him.  Nature
+triumphed with a more eloquent silence over his well-worn art.  He
+hurriedly wiped his begrimed face and eyes with the shirt she had
+given him, and catching the sleeve of her rough pea-jacket in his
+dirty hand, raised it to his lips.
+
+"Go!" she said imperiously.  "Get away while you can."
+
+"Av it vas me last words--it's speechless oi am," he stammered, and
+disappeared over the railing.
+
+She remained for a moment holding the door half open, and gazing
+into the darkness that seemed to flow in like a tide.  Then she
+shut it, and going into her bedroom resumed her interrupted
+toilette.  When she emerged again she was smartly stockinged and
+slippered, and even the blue serge skirt was exchanged for a bright
+print, with a white fichu tied around her throat.  An attempt to
+subdue her rebellious curls had resulted in the construction from
+their ruins of a low Norman arch across her forehead with pillared
+abutments of ringlets.  When her brother returned a few moments
+later she did not look up, but remained, perhaps a little
+ostentatiously, bending over the fire.
+
+"Bob allowed that the Fort boat was huntin' MEN--deserters, I
+reckon," said Jim aggrievedly.  "Wanted me to believe that he SAW
+one on the Marsh hidin'.  On'y an Injin lie, I reckon, to git a
+little extra fire-water, for toting me out to the bresh on a fool's
+errand."
+
+"Oh, THAT'S where you went!" said Maggie, addressing the fire.
+"Since when hev you tuk partnership with the Guv'nment and Kernel
+Preston to hunt up and take keer of their property?"
+
+"Well, I ain't goin' to hev such wreckage as they pick up and
+enlist set adrift on our marshes, Mag," said Jim decidedly.
+
+"What would you hev done had you ketched him?" said Maggie, looking
+suddenly into her brother's face.
+
+"Given him a dose of snipe-shot that he'd remember, and be thankful
+it wasn't slugs," said Jim promptly.  Observing a deeper
+seriousness in her attitude, he added, "Why, if it was in war-time
+he'd get a BALL from them sodgers on sight."
+
+"Yes; but YOU ain't got no call to interfere," said Maggie.
+
+"Ain't I?  Why, he's no better than an outlaw.  I ain't sure that
+he hasn't been stealin' or killin' somebody over theer."
+
+"Not that man!" said Maggie impulsively.
+
+"Not what man?" said her brother, facing her quickly.
+
+"Why," returned Maggie, repairing her indiscretion with feminine
+dexterity, "not ANY man who might have knocked you and me over on
+the marshes in the dusk, and grabbed our guns."
+
+"Wish he'd hev tried it," said the brother, with a superior smile,
+but a quickly rising color.  "Where d'ye suppose I'D hev been all
+the while?"
+
+Maggie saw her mistake, and for the first time in her life resolved
+to keep a secret from her brother--overnight.  "Supper's gettin'
+cold," she said, rising.
+
+They went into the dining-room--an apartment as plainly furnished
+as the one they had quitted, but in its shelves, cupboards, and
+closely fitting boarding bearing out the general nautical
+suggestion of the house--and seated themselves before a small table
+on which their frugal meal was spread.  In this tete-a-tete
+position Jim suddenly laid down his knife and fork and stared at
+his sister.
+
+"Hello!"
+
+"What's the matter?" said Maggie, starting slightly.  "How you do
+skeer one."
+
+"Who's been prinkin', eh?"
+
+"My ha'r was in kinks all along o' that hat," said Maggie, with a
+return of higher color, "and I had to straighten it.  It's a boy's
+hat, not a girl's."
+
+But that necktie and that gown--and all those frills and tuckers?"
+continued Jim generalizing, with a rapid twirling of his fingers
+over her.  "Are you expectin' Judge Martin, or the Expressman this
+evening?"
+
+Judge Martin was the lawyer of Logport, who had proven her father's
+will, and had since raved about his single interview with the
+Kingfisher's beautiful daughter; the Expressman was a young fellow
+who was popularly supposed to have left his heart while delivering
+another valuable package on Maggie in person, and had "never been
+the same man since."  It was a well-worn fraternal pleasantry that
+had done duty many a winter's evening, as a happy combination of
+moral admonition and cheerfulness.  Maggie usually paid it the
+tribute of a quick little laugh and a sisterly pinch, but that
+evening those marks of approbation were withheld.
+
+"Jim dear," said she, when their Spartan repast was concluded and
+they were reestablished before the living-room fire.  "What was it
+the Redwood Mill Kempany offered you for that piece near Dead Man's
+Slough?"
+
+Jim took his pipe from his lips long enough to say, "Ten thousand
+dollars," and put it back again.
+
+"And what do ye kalkilate all our property, letting alone this yer
+house, and the driftwood front, is worth all together?"
+
+"Includin' wot the Gov'nment owes us?--for that's all ours, ye
+know?" said Jim quickly.
+
+"No--leavin' that out--jest for greens, you know," suggested
+Maggie.
+
+"Well nigh onter a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, I
+reckon, by and large."
+
+"That's a heap o' money, Jim!  I reckon old Kernel Preston wouldn't
+raise that in a hundred years," continued Maggie, warming her knees
+by the fire.
+
+"In five million years," said Jim, promptly sweeping away further
+discussion.  After a pause he added, "You and me, Mag, kin see
+anybody's pile, and go 'em fifty thousand better."
+
+There were a few moments of complete silence, in which Maggie
+smoothed her knees, and Jim's pipe, which seemed to have become
+gorged and apoplectic with its owner's wealth, snored unctuously.
+
+"Jim dear, what if--it's on'y an idea of mine, you know--what if
+you sold that piece to the Redwood Mill, and we jest tuk that money
+and--and--and jest lifted the ha'r offer them folks at Logport?
+Jest astonished 'em!  Jest tuk the best rooms in that new hotel,
+got a hoss and buggy, dressed ourselves, you and me, fit to kill,
+and made them Fort people take a back seat in the Lord's
+Tabernacle, oncet for all.  You see what I mean, Jim," she said
+hastily, as her brother seemed to be succumbing, like his pipe, in
+apoplectic astonishment, "jest on'y to SHOW 'em what we COULD do if
+we keerd.  Lord! when we done it and spent the money we'd jest snap
+our fingers and skip back yer ez nat'ral ez life!  Ye don't think,
+Jim," she said, suddenly turning half fiercely upon him, "that I'd
+allow to LIVE among 'em--to stay a menet after that!"
+
+Jim laid down his pipe and gazed at his sister with stony
+deliberation.  "And--what--do--you--kalkilate--to make by all
+that?" he said with scornful distinctness.
+
+"Why, jest to show 'em we HAVE got money, and could buy 'em all up
+if we wanted to," returned Maggie, sticking boldly to her guns,
+albeit with a vague conviction that her fire was weakened through
+elevation, and somewhat alarmed at the deliberation of the enemy.
+
+"And you mean to say they don't know it now," he continued with
+slow derision.
+
+"No," said Maggie.  "Why, theer's that new school-marm over at
+Logport, you know, Jim, the one that wanted to take your picter in
+your boat for a young smuggler or fancy pirate or Eyetalian
+fisherman, and allowed that you'r handsomed some, and offered to
+pay you for sittin'--do you reckon SHE'D believe you owned the land
+her schoolhouse was built on.  No!  Lots of 'em don't.  Lots of 'em
+thinks we're poor and low down--and them ez doesn't, thinks"--
+
+"What?" asked her brother sharply.
+
+"That we're MEAN."
+
+The quick color came to Jim's cheek.  "So," he said, facing her
+quickly, "for the sake of a lot of riff-raff and scum that's
+drifted here around us--jest for the sake of cuttin' a swell before
+them--you'll go out among the hounds ez allowed your mother was a
+Spanish nigger or a kanaka, ez called your father a pirate and
+landgrabber, ez much as allowed he was shot by some one or killed
+himself a purpose, ez said you was a heathen and a looney because
+you didn't go to school or church along with their trash, ez kept
+away from Maw's sickness ez if it was smallpox, and Dad's fun'ral
+ez if he was a hoss-thief, and left you and me to watch his coffin
+on the marshes all night till the tide kem back.  And now you--YOU
+that jined hands with me that night over our father lyin' there
+cold and despised--ez if he was a dead dog thrown up by the tide--
+and swore that ez long ez that tide ebbed and flowed it couldn't
+bring you to them, or them to you agin!  You now want--what?  What?
+Why, to go and cast your lot among 'em, and live among 'em, and
+join in their God-forsaken holler foolishness, and--and--and"--
+
+"Stop!  It's a lie!  I DIDN'T say that.  Don't you dare to say it!"
+said the girl, springing to her feet, and facing her brother in
+turn, with flashing eyes.
+
+For a moment the two stared at each other--it might have been as in
+a mirror, so perfectly were their passions reflected in each line,
+shade, and color of the other's face.  It was as if they had each
+confronted their own passionate and willful souls, and were
+frightened.  It had often occurred before, always with the same
+invariable ending.  The young man's eyes lowered first; the girl's
+filled with tears.
+
+"Well, ef ye didn't mean that, what did ye mean?" said Jim,
+sinking, with sullen apology, back into his chair.
+
+"I--only--meant it--for--for--revenge!" sobbed Maggie.
+
+"Oh!" said Jim, as if allowing his higher nature to be touched by
+this noble instinct.  "But I didn't jest see where the revenge kem
+in."
+
+"No?  But, never mind now, Jim," said Maggie, ostentatiously
+ignoring, after the fashion of her sex, the trouble she had
+provoked; "but to think--that--that--you thought"--(sobbing).
+
+"But I didn't, Mag"--(caressingly).
+
+With this very vague and impotent conclusion, Maggie permitted
+herself to be drawn beside her brother, and for a few moments they
+plumed each other's ruffled feathers, and smoothed each other's
+lifted crests, like two beautiful young specimens of that halcyon
+genus to which they were popularly supposed to belong.  At the end
+of half an hour Jim rose, and, yawning slightly, said in a
+perfunctory way:
+
+"Where's the book?"
+
+The book in question was the Bible.  It had been the self-imposed
+custom of these two young people to read aloud a chapter every
+night as their one vague formula of literary and religious
+discipline.  When it was produced, Maggie, presuming on his
+affectionate and penitential condition, suggested that to-night he
+should pick out "suthin' interestin'."  But this unorthodox
+frivolity was sternly put aside by Jim--albeit, by way of
+compromise, he agreed to "chance it," i. e., open its pages at
+random.
+
+He did so.  Generally he allowed himself a moment's judicious pause
+for a certain chaste preliminary inspection necessary before
+reading aloud to a girl.  To-night he omitted that modest
+precaution, and in a pleasant voice, which in reading was
+singularly free from colloquial infelicities of pronunciation,
+began at once:
+
+"'Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the
+inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord,
+to the help of the Lord against the mighty.'"
+
+"Oh, you looked first," said Maggie.
+
+"I didn't now--honest Injin!  I just opened."
+
+"Go on," said Maggie, eagerly shoving him and interposing her neck
+over his shoulder.
+
+And Jim continued Deborah's wonderful song of Jael and Sisera to
+the bitter end of its strong monosyllabic climax.
+
+"There," he said, closing the volume, "that's what I call revenge.
+That's the real Scripture thing--no fancy frills theer."
+
+"Yes; but, Jim dear, don't you see that she treated him first--
+sorter got round him with free milk and butter, and reg'larly
+blandished him," argued Maggie earnestly.
+
+But Jim declined to accept this feminine suggestion, or to pursue
+the subject further, and after a fraternal embrace they separated
+for the night.  Jim lingered long enough to look after the
+fastening of the door and windows, and Maggie remained for some
+moments at her casement, looking across the gallery to the Marsh
+beyond.
+
+The moon had risen, the tide was half up.  Whatever sign or trace
+of alien footprint or occupation had been there was already
+smoothly obliterated; even the configuration of the land had
+changed.  A black cape had disappeared, a level line of shore had
+been eaten into by teeth of glistening silver.  The whole dark
+surface of the Marsh was beginning to be streaked with shining
+veins as if a new life was coursing through it.  Part of the open
+bay before the Fort, encroaching upon the shore, seemed in the
+moonlight to be reaching a white and outstretched arm towards the
+nest of the Kingfisher.
+
+
+III.
+
+
+The reveille at Fort Redwood had been supplemented full five
+minutes by the voice of Lieutenant George Calvert's servant, before
+that young officer struggled from his bed.  His head was splitting,
+his tongue and lips were dry and feverish, his bloodshot eyes were
+shrinking from the insufferable light of the day, his mind a
+confused medley of the past night and the present morning, of cards
+and wild revelry, and the vision of a reproachfully trim orderly
+standing at his door with reports and orders which he now held
+composedly in his hand.  For Lieutenant Calvert had been enjoying a
+symposium variously known as "Stag Feed" and "A Wild Stormy Night"
+with several of his brother officers, and a sickening conviction
+that it was not the first or the last time he had indulged in these
+festivities.  At that moment he loathed himself, and then after the
+usual derelict fashion cursed the fate that had sent him, after
+graduating, to a frontier garrison--the dull monotony of whose
+duties made the Border horse-play of dissipation a relief.  Already
+he had reached the miserable point of envying the veteran
+capacities of his superiors and equals.  "If I could drink like
+Kirby or Crowninshield, or if there was any other cursed thing a
+man could do in this hole," he had wretchedly repeated to himself,
+after each misspent occasion, and yet already he was looking
+forward to them as part of a 'sub's' duty and worthy his emulation.
+Already the dream of social recreation fostered by West Point had
+been rudely dispelled.  Beyond the garrison circle of Colonel
+Preston's family and two officers' wives, there was no society.
+The vague distrust and civil jealousy with which some frontier
+communities regard the Federal power, heightened in this instance
+by the uncompromising attitude the Government had taken towards the
+settlers' severe Indian policy, had kept the people of Logport
+aloof from the Fort.  The regimental band might pipe to them on
+Saturdays, but they would not dance.
+
+Howbeit, Lieutenant Calvert dressed himself with uncertain hands
+but mechanical regularity and neatness, and, under the automatic
+training of discipline and duty, managed to button his tunic
+tightly over his feelings, to pull himself together with his sword-
+belt, compressing a still cadet-like waist, and to present that
+indescribable combination of precision and jauntiness which his
+brother officers too often allowed to lapse into frontier
+carelessness.  His closely clipped light hair, yet dripping from a
+plunge in the cold water, had been brushed and parted with military
+exactitude, and when surmounted by his cap, with the peak in an
+artful suggestion of extra smartness tipped forward over his eyes,
+only his pale face--a shade lighter than his little blonde
+moustache--showed his last night's excesses.  He was mechanically
+reaching for his sword and staring confusedly at the papers on his
+table when his servant interrupted:
+
+"Major Bromley arranged that Lieutenant Kirby takes your sash this
+morning, as you're not well, sir; and you're to report for special
+to the colonel," he added, pointing discreetly to the envelope.
+
+Touched by this consideration of his superior, Major Bromley, who
+had been one of the veterans of last night's engagement, Calvert
+mastered the contents of the envelope without the customary
+anathema of specials, said, "Thank you, Parks," and passed out on
+the veranda.
+
+The glare of the quiet sunlit quadrangle, clean as a well-swept
+floor, the whitewashed walls and galleries of the barrack buildings
+beyond, the white and green palisade of officers' cottages on
+either side, and the glitter of a sentry's bayonet, were for a
+moment intolerable to him.  Yet, by a kind of subtle irony, never
+before had the genius and spirit of the vocation he had chosen
+seemed to be as incarnate as in the scene before him.  Seclusion,
+self-restraint, cleanliness, regularity, sobriety, the atmosphere
+of a wholesome life, the austere reserve of a monastery without its
+mysterious or pensive meditation, were all there.  To escape which,
+he had of his own free will successively accepted a fool's
+distraction, the inevitable result of which was, the viewing of
+them the next morning with tremulous nerves and aching eyeballs.
+
+An hour later, Lieutenant George Calvert had received his final
+instructions from Colonel Preston to take charge of a small
+detachment to recover and bring back certain deserters, but notably
+one, Dennis M'Caffrey of Company H, charged additionally with
+mutinous solicitation and example.  As Calvert stood before his
+superior, that distinguished officer, whose oratorical powers had
+been considerably stimulated through a long course of "returning
+thanks for the Army," slightly expanded his chest and said
+paternally:
+
+"I am aware, Mr. Calvert, that duties of this kind are somewhat
+distasteful to young officers, and are apt to be considered in the
+light of police detail; but I must remind you that no one part of a
+soldier's duty can be held more important or honorable than
+another, and that the fulfilment of any one, however trifling,
+must, with honor to himself and security to his comrades, receive
+his fullest devotion.  A sergeant and a file of men might perform
+your duty, but I require, in addition, the discretion, courtesy,
+and consideration of a gentleman who will command an equal respect
+from those with whom his duty brings him in contact.  The unhappy
+prejudices which the settlers show to the military authority here
+render this, as you are aware, a difficult service, but I believe
+that you will, without forgetting the respect due to yourself and
+the Government you represent, avoid arousing these prejudices by
+any harshness, or inviting any conflict with the civil authority.
+The limits of their authority you will find in your written
+instructions; but you might gain their confidence, and impress
+them, Mr. Calvert, with the idea of your being their AUXILIARY in
+the interests of justice--you understand.  Even if you are
+unsuccessful in bringing back the men, you will do your best to
+ascertain if their escape has been due to the sympathy of the
+settlers, or even with their preliminary connivance.  They may not
+be aware that inciting enlisted men to desert is a criminal
+offence; you will use your own discretion in informing them of the
+fact or not, as occasion may serve you.  I have only to add, that
+while you are on the waters of this bay and the land covered by its
+tides, you have no opposition of authority, and are responsible to
+no one but your military superiors.  Good-bye, Mr. Calvert.  Let me
+hear a good account of you."
+
+Considerably moved by Colonel Preston's manner, which was as
+paternal and real as his rhetoric was somewhat perfunctory, Calvert
+half forgot his woes as he stepped from the commandant's piazza.
+But he had to face a group of his brother officers, who were
+awaiting him.
+
+"Good-bye, Calvert," said Major Bromley; "a day or two out on grass
+won't hurt you--and a change from commissary whiskey will put you
+all right.  By the way, if you hear of any better stuff at Westport
+than they're giving us here, sample it and let us know.  Take care
+of yourself.  Give your men a chance to talk to you now and then,
+and you may get something from them, especially Donovan.  Keep your
+eye on Ramon.  You can trust your sergeant straight along."
+
+"Good-bye, George," said Kirby.  "I suppose the old man told you
+that, although no part of a soldier's duty was better than another,
+your service was a very delicate one, just fitted for you, eh?  He
+always does when he's cut out some hellish scrub-work for a chap.
+And told you, too, that as long as you didn't go ashore, and kept
+to a dispatch-boat, or an eight-oared gig, where you couldn't
+deploy your men, or dress a line, you'd be invincible."
+
+"He did say something like that," smiled Calvert, with an uneasy
+recollection, however, that it was THE part of his superior's
+speech that particularly impressed him.
+
+"Of course," said Kirby gravely, "THAT, as an infantry officer, is
+clearly your duty."
+
+"And don't forget, George," said Rollins still more gravely, "that,
+whatever may befall you, you belong to a section of that
+numerically small but powerfully diversified organization--the
+American Army.  Remember that in the hour of peril you can address
+your men in any language, and be perfectly understood.  And
+remember that when you proudly stand before them, the eyes not only
+of your own country, but of nearly all the others, are upon you!
+Good-bye, Georgey.  I heard the major hint something about whiskey.
+They say that old pirate, Kingfisher Culpepper, had a stock of the
+real thing from Robertson County laid in his shebang on the Marsh
+just before he died.  Pity we aren't on terms with them, for the
+cubs cannot drink it, and might be induced to sell.  Shouldn't
+wonder, by the way, if your friend M'Caffrey was hanging round
+somewhere there; he always had a keen scent.  You might confiscate
+it as an "incitement to desertion," you know.  The girl's pretty,
+and ought to be growing up now."
+
+But haply at this point the sergeant stopped further raillery by
+reporting the detachment ready; and drawing his sword, Calvert,
+with a confused head, a remorseful heart, but an unfaltering step,
+marched off his men on his delicate mission.
+
+It was four o'clock when he entered Jonesville.  Following a
+matter-of-fact idea of his own, he had brought his men the greater
+distance by a circuitous route through the woods, thus avoiding the
+ostentatious exposure of his party on the open bay in a well-manned
+boat to an extended view from the three leagues of shore and marsh
+opposite.  Crossing the stream, which here separated him from the
+Dedlow Marsh by the common ferry, he had thus been enabled to halt
+unperceived below the settlement and occupy the two roads by which
+the fugitives could escape inland.  He had deemed it not impossible
+that, after the previous visit of the sergeant, the deserters
+hidden in the vicinity might return to Jonesville in the belief
+that the visit would not be repeated so soon.  Leaving a part of
+his small force to patrol the road and another to deploy over the
+upland meadows, he entered the village.  By the exercise of some
+boyish diplomacy and a certain prepossessing grace, which he knew
+when and how to employ, he became satisfied that the objects of his
+quest were not THERE--however, their whereabouts might have been
+known to the people.  Dividing his party again, he concluded to
+take a corporal and a few men and explore the lower marshes
+himself.
+
+The preoccupation of duty, exercise, and perhaps, above all, the
+keen stimulus of the iodine-laden salt air seemed to clear his mind
+and invigorate his body.  He had never been in the Marsh before,
+and enjoyed its novelty with the zest of youth.  It was the hour
+when the tide of its feathered life was at its flood.  Clouds of
+duck and teal passing from the fresh water of the river to the salt
+pools of the marshes perpetually swept his path with flying
+shadows; at times it seemed as if even the uncertain ground around
+him itself arose and sped away on dusky wings.  The vicinity of
+hidden pools and sloughs was betrayed by startled splashings; a few
+paces from their marching feet arose the sunlit pinions of a swan.
+The air was filled with multitudinous small cries and pipings.  In
+this vocal confusion it was some minutes before he recognized the
+voice of one of his out-flankers calling to the other.
+
+An important discovery had been made.  In a long tongue of bushes
+that ran down to the Marsh they had found a mud-stained uniform,
+complete even to the cap, bearing the initial of the deserter's
+company.
+
+"Is there any hut or cabin hereabouts, Schmidt?" asked Calvert.
+
+"Dot vos schoost it, Lefdennun," replied his corporal.  "Dot vos de
+shanty from der Kingvisher--old Gulbebber.  I pet a dollar, py
+shimminy, dot der men haf der gekommt."
+
+He pointed through the brake to a long, low building that now
+raised itself, white in the sunlight, above the many blackened
+piles.  Calvert saw in a single reconnoitring glance that it had
+but one approach--the flight of steps from the Marsh.  Instructing
+his men to fall in on the outer edge of the brake and await his
+orders, he quickly made his way across the space and ascended the
+steps.  Passing along the gallery he knocked at the front door.
+There was no response.  He repeated his knock.  Then the window
+beside it opened suddenly, and he was confronted with the double-
+muzzle of a long ducking-gun.  Glancing instinctively along the
+barrels, he saw at their other extremity the bright eyes, brilliant
+color, and small set mouth of a remarkably handsome girl.  It was
+the fact, and to the credit of his training, that he paid more
+attention to the eyes than to the challenge of the shining tubes
+before him.
+
+"Jest stop where you are--will you!" said the girl determinedly.
+
+Calvert's face betrayed not the slightest terror or surprise.
+Immovable as on parade, he carried his white gloved hand to his
+cap, and said gently, "With pleasure."
+
+"Oh yes," said the girl quickly; "but if you move a step I'll jest
+blow you and your gloves offer that railin' inter the Marsh."
+
+"I trust not," returned Calvert, smiling.
+
+"And why?"
+
+"Because it would deprive me of the pleasure of a few moments'
+conversation with you--and I've only one pair of gloves with me."
+
+He was still watching her beautiful eyes--respectfully, admiringly,
+and strategically.  For he was quite convinced that if he DID move
+she would certainly discharge one or both barrels at him.
+
+"Where's the rest of you?" she continued sharply.
+
+"About three hundred yards away, in the covert, not near enough to
+trouble you."
+
+"Will they come here?"
+
+"I trust not."
+
+"You trust not?" she repeated scornfully.  "Why?
+
+"Because they would be disobeying orders."
+
+She lowered her gun slightly, but kept her black brows levelled at
+him.  "I reckon I'm a match for YOU," she said, with a slightly
+contemptuous glance at his slight figure, and opened the door.  For
+a moment they stood looking at each other.  He saw, besides the
+handsome face and eyes that had charmed him, a tall slim figure,
+made broader across the shoulders by an open pea-jacket that showed
+a man's red flannel shirt belted at the waist over a blue skirt,
+with the collar knotted by a sailor's black handkerchief, and
+turned back over a pretty though sunburnt throat.  She saw a rather
+undersized young fellow in a jaunty undress uniform, scant of gold
+braid, and bearing only the single gold shoulder-bars of his rank,
+but scrupulously neat and well fitting.  Light-colored hair cropped
+close, the smallest of light moustaches, clear and penetrating blue
+eyes, and a few freckles completed a picture that did not
+prepossess her.  She was therefore the more inclined to resent the
+perfect ease and self-possession with which the stranger carried
+off these manifest defects before her.
+
+She laid aside the gun, put her hands deep in the pockets of her
+pea-jacket, and, slightly squaring her shoulders, said curtly,
+"What do you want?"
+
+"A very little information, which I trust it will not trouble you
+to give me.  My men have just discovered the uniform belonging to a
+deserter from the Fort lying in the bushes yonder.  Can you give me
+the slightest idea how it came there?"
+
+"What right have you trapseing over our property?" she said,
+turning upon him sharply, with a slight paling of color.
+
+"None whatever."
+
+"Then what did you come for?"
+
+"To ask that permission, in case you would give me no information."
+
+"Why don't you ask my brother, and not a woman?  Were you afraid?"
+
+"He could hardly have done me the honor of placing me in more peril
+than you have," returned Calvert, smiling.  "Then I have the
+pleasure of addressing Miss Culpepper?"
+
+"I'm Jim Culpepper's sister."
+
+"And, I believe, equally able to give or refuse the permission I
+ask."
+
+"And what if I refuse?"
+
+"Then I have only to ask pardon for having troubled you, go back,
+and return here with the tide.  You don't resist THAT with a shot-
+gun, do you?" he asked pleasantly.
+
+Maggie Culpepper was already familiar with the accepted theory of
+the supreme jurisdiction of the Federal Sea.  She half turned her
+back upon him, partly to show her contempt, but partly to evade the
+domination of his clear, good-humored, and self-sustained little
+eyes.
+
+"I don't know anythin' about your deserters, nor what rags o'
+theirs happen to be floated up here," she said, angrily, "and don't
+care to.  You kin do what you like."
+
+"Then I'm afraid I should remain here a little longer, Miss
+Culpepper; but my duty"--
+
+"Your wot?" she interrupted, disdainfully.
+
+"I suppose I AM talking shop," he said smilingly.  "Then my
+business"--
+
+"Your business--pickin' up half-starved runaways!"
+
+"And, I trust, sometimes a kind friend," he suggested, with a grave
+bow.
+
+"You TRUST?  Look yer, young man, she said, with her quick, fierce,
+little laugh, "I reckon you TRUST a heap too much!"  She would like
+to have added, "with your freckled face, red hair, and little
+eyes"--but this would have obliged her to face them again, which
+she did not care to do.
+
+Calvert stepped back, lifted his hand to his cap, still pleasantly,
+and then walked gravely along the gallery, down the steps, and
+towards the cover.  From her window, unseen, she followed his neat
+little figure moving undeviatingly on, without looking to the left
+or right, and still less towards the house he had just quitted.
+Then she saw the sunlight flash on cross-belt plates and steel
+barrels, and a light blue line issued from out the dark green
+bushes, round the point, and disappeared.  And then it suddenly
+occurred to her what she had been doing!  This, then, was her first
+step towards that fancy she had so lately conceived, quarrelled
+over with her brother, and lay awake last night to place anew, in
+spite of all opposition!  This was her brilliant idea of dazzling
+and subduing Logport and the Fort!  Had she grown silly, or what
+had happened?  Could she have dreamed of the coming of this
+whipper-snapper, with his insufferable airs, after that beggarly
+deserter?  I am afraid that for a few moments the miserable
+fugitive had as small a place in Maggie's sympathy as the
+redoubtable whipper-snapper himself.  And now the cherished dream
+of triumph and conquest was over!  What a "looney" she had been!
+Instead of inviting him in, and outdoing him in "company manners,"
+and "fooling" him about the deserter, and then blazing upon him
+afterwards at Logport in the glory of her first spent wealth and
+finery, she had driven him away!
+
+And now "he'll go and tell--tell the Fort girls of his hairbreadth
+escape from the claws of the Kingfisher's daughter!"
+
+The thought brought a few bitter tears to her eyes, but she wiped
+them away.  The thought brought also the terrible conviction that
+Jim was right, that there could be nothing but open antagonism
+between them and the traducers of their parents, as she herself had
+instinctively shown!  But she presently wiped that conviction away
+also, as she had her tears.
+
+Half an hour later she was attracted by the appearance from the
+windows of certain straggling blue spots on the upland that seemed
+moving diagonally towards the Marsh.  She did not know that it was
+Calvert's second "detail" joining him, but believed for a moment
+that he had not yet departed, and was strangely relieved.  Still
+later the frequent disturbed cries of coot, heron, and marsh-hen,
+recognizing the presence of unusual invaders of their solitude,
+distracted her yet more, and forced her at last with increasing
+color and an uneasy sense of shyness to steal out to the gallery
+for a swift furtive survey of the Marsh.  But an utterly unexpected
+sight met her eyes, and kept her motionless.
+
+The birds were rising everywhere and drifting away with querulous
+perturbation before a small but augmented blue detachment that was
+moving with monotonous regularity towards the point of bushes where
+she had seen the young officer previously disappear.  In their
+midst, between two soldiers with fixed bayonets, marched the man
+whom even at that distance she instantly recognized as the deserter
+of the preceding night, in the very clothes she had given him.  To
+complete her consternation, a little to the right marched the young
+officer also, but accompanied by, and apparently on the most
+amicable terms with, Jim--her own brother!
+
+To forget all else and dart down the steps, flying towards the
+point of bushes, scarcely knowing why or what she was doing, was to
+Maggie the impulse and work of a moment.  When she had reached it
+the party were not twenty paces away.  But here a shyness and
+hesitation again seized her, and she shrank back in the bushes with
+an instinctive cry to her brother inarticulate upon her lips.  They
+came nearer, they were opposite to her; her brother Jim keeping
+step with the invader, and even conversing with him with an
+animation she had seldom seen upon his face--they passed!  She had
+been unnoticed except by one.  The roving eye of the deserter had
+detected her handsome face among the leaves, slightly turned
+towards it, and poured out his whole soul in a single swift wink of
+eloquent but indescribable confidence.
+
+When they had quite gone, she crept back to the house, a little
+reassured, but still tremulous.  When her brother returned at
+nightfall, he found her brooding over the fire, in the same
+attitude as on the previous night.
+
+"I reckon ye might hev seen me go by with the sodgers," he said,
+seating himself beside her, a little awkwardly, and with an unusual
+assumption of carelessness.
+
+Maggie, without looking up, was languidly surprised.  He had been
+with the soldiers--and where?
+
+"About two hours ago I met this yer Leftenant Calvert," he went on
+with increasing awkwardness, "and--oh, I say, Mag--he said he saw
+you, and hoped he hadn't troubled ye, and--and--ye saw him, didn't
+ye?"
+
+Maggie, with all the red of the fire concentrated in her cheek as
+she gazed at the flame, believed carelessly "that she had seen a
+shrimp in uniform asking questions."
+
+"Oh, he ain't a bit stuck up," said Jim quickly, "that's what I
+like about him.  He's ez nat'ral ez you be, and tuck my arm,
+walkin' around, careless-like, laffen at what he was doin', ez ef
+it was a game, and he wasn't sole commander of forty men.  He's
+only a year or two older than me--and--and"--he stopped and looked
+uneasily at Maggie.
+
+"So ye've bin craw-fishin' agin?" said Maggie, in her deepest and
+most scornful contralto.
+
+"Who's craw-fishin'?" he retorted, angrily.
+
+"What's this backen out o' what you said yesterday?  What's all
+this trucklin' to the Fort now?"
+
+"What?  Well now, look yer," said Jim, rising suddenly, with
+reproachful indignation, "darned if I don't jest tell ye everythin'.
+I promised HIM I wouldn't.  He allowed it would frighten ye."
+
+"FRIGHTEN ME!" repeated Maggie contemptuously, nevertheless with
+her cheek paling again.  "Frighten me--with what?"
+
+"Well, since yer so cantankerous, look yer.  We've been robbed!"
+
+"Robbed?" echoed Maggie, facing him.
+
+"Yes, robbed by that same deserter.  Robbed of a suit of my
+clothes, and my whiskey-flask, and the darned skunk had 'em on.
+And if it hadn't bin for that Leftenant Calvert, and my givin' him
+permission to hunt him over the Marsh, we wouldn't have caught
+him."
+
+"Robbed?" repeated Maggie again, vaguely.
+
+"Yes, robbed!  Last night, afore we came home.  He must hev got in
+yer while we was comin' from the boat."
+
+"Did, did that Leftenant say so?" stammered Maggie.
+
+"Say it, of course he did! and so do I," continued Jim,
+impatiently.  "Why, there were my very clothes on his back, and he
+daren't deny it.  And if you'd hearkened to me jest now, instead of
+flyin' off in tantrums, you'd see that THAT'S jest how we got him,
+and how me and the Leftenant joined hands in it.  I didn't give him
+permission to hunt deserters, but THIEVES.  I didn't help him to
+ketch the man that deserted from HIM, but the skunk that took MY
+clothes.  For when the Leftenant found the man's old uniform in the
+bush, he nat'rally kalkilated he must hev got some other duds near
+by in some underhand way.  Don't you see? eh?  Why, look, Mag.
+Darned if you ain't skeered after all!  Who'd hev thought it?
+There now--sit down, dear.  Why, you're white ez a gull."
+
+He had his arm round her as she sank back in the chair again with a
+forced smile.
+
+"There now," he said with fraternal superiority, "don't mind it,
+Mag, any more.  Why, it's all over now.  You bet he won't trouble
+us agin, for the Leftenant sez that now he's found out to be a
+thief, they'll jest turn him over to the police, and he's sure o'
+getten six months' state prison fer stealin' and burglarin' in our
+house.  But"--he stopped suddenly and looked at his sister's
+contracted face; "look yer, Mag, you're sick, that's what's the
+matter.  Take suthin'"--
+
+"I'm better now," she said with an effort; "it's only a kind o'
+blind chill I must hev got on the Marsh last night.  What's that?"
+
+She had risen, and grasping her brother's arm tightly had turned
+quickly to the window.  The casement had suddenly rattled.
+
+"It's only the wind gettin' up.  It looked like a sou'wester when I
+came in.  Lot o' scud flyin'.  But YOU take some quinine, Mag.
+Don't YOU go now and get down sick like Maw."
+
+Perhaps it was this well-meant but infelicitous reference that
+brought a moisture to her dark eyes, and caused her lips to
+momentarily quiver.  But it gave way to a quick determined setting
+of her whole face as she turned it once more to the fire, and said,
+slowly:
+
+"I reckon I'll sleep it off, if I go to bed now.  What time does
+the tide fall."
+
+"About three, unless this yer wind piles it up on the Marsh afore
+then.  Why?"
+
+"I was only wonderin' if the boat wus safe," said Maggie, rising.
+
+"You'd better hoist yourself outside some quinine, instead o'
+talken about those things," said Jim, who preferred to discharge
+his fraternal responsibility by active medication.  "You aren't fit
+to read tonight."
+
+"Good night, Jim," she said suddenly, stopping before him.
+
+"Good night, Mag."  He kissed her with protecting and amiable
+toleration, generously referring her hot hands and feverish lips to
+that vague mystery of feminine complaint which man admits without
+indorsing.
+
+They separated.  Jim, under the stimulus of the late supposed
+robbery, ostentatiously fastening the doors and windows with
+assuring comments, calculated to inspire confidence in his sister's
+startled heart.  Then he went to bed.  He lay awake long enough to
+be pleasantly conscious that the wind had increased to a gale, and
+to be lulled again to sleep by the cosy security of the heavily
+timbered and tightly sealed dwelling that seemed to ride the storm
+like the ship it resembled.  The gale swept through the piles
+beneath him and along the gallery as through bared spars and over
+wave-washed decks.  The whole structure, attacked above, below, and
+on all sides by the fury of the wind, seemed at times to be lifted
+in the air.  Once or twice the creaking timbers simulated the sound
+of opening doors and passing footsteps, and again dilated as if the
+gale had forced a passage through.  But Jim slept on peacefully,
+and was at last only aroused by the brilliant sunshine staring
+through his window from the clear wind-swept blue arch beyond.
+
+Dressing himself lazily, he passed into the sitting-room and
+proceeded to knock at his sister's door, as was his custom; he was
+amazed to find it open and the room empty.  Entering hurriedly, he
+saw that her bed was undisturbed, as if it had not been occupied,
+and was the more bewildered to see a note ostentatiously pinned
+upon the pillow, addressed in pencil, in a large school-hand, "To
+Jim."
+
+Opening it impatiently, he was startled to read as follows:--
+
+
+"Don't be angry, Jim dear--but it was all my fault--and I didn't
+tell you.  I knew all about the deserter, and I gave him the
+clothes and things that they say he stole.  It was while you was
+out that night, and he came and begged of me, and was mournful and
+hidjus to behold.  I thought I was helping him, and getting our
+revenge on the Fort, all at the same time.  Don't be mad, Jim dear,
+and do not be frighted fer me.  I'm going over thar to make it all
+right--to free HIM of stealing--to have YOU left out of it all--and
+take it all on myself.  Don't you be a bit feared for me.  I ain't
+skeert of the wind or of going.  I'll close reef everything, clear
+the creek, stretch across to Injen Island, hugg the Point, and bear
+up fer Logport.  Dear Jim--don't get mad--but I couldn't bear this
+fooling of you nor HIM--and that man being took for stealing any
+longer!--Your loving sister,
+
+MAGGIE."
+
+
+With a confused mingling of shame, anger, and sudden fear he ran
+out on the gallery.  The tide was well up, half the Marsh had
+already vanished, and the little creek where he had moored his
+skiff was now an empty shining river.  The water was everywhere--
+fringing the tussocks of salt grass with concentric curves of spume
+and drift, or tumultuously tossing its white-capped waves over the
+spreading expanse of the lower bay.  The low thunder of breakers in
+the farther estuary broke monotonously on the ear.  But his eye was
+fascinated by a dull shifting streak on the horizon, that, even as
+he gazed, shuddered, whitened along its whole line, and then grew
+ghastly gray again.  It was the ocean bar.
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+"Well, I must say," said Cicely Preston, emphasizing the usual
+feminine imperative for perfectly gratuitous statement, as she
+pushed back her chair from the commandant's breakfast table, "I
+MUST really say that I don't see anything particularly heroic in
+doing something wrong, lying about it just to get other folks into
+trouble, and then rushing off to do penance in a high wind and an
+open boat.  But she's pretty, and wears a man's shirt and coat, and
+of course THAT settles anything.  But why earrings and wet white
+stockings and slippers?  And why that Gothic arch of front and a
+boy's hat?  That's what I simply ask;" and the youngest daughter of
+Colonel Preston rose from the table, shook out the skirt of her
+pretty morning dress, and, placing her little thumbs in the belt of
+her smart waist, paused witheringly for a reply.
+
+"You are most unfair, my child," returned Colonel Preston gravely.
+"Her giving food and clothes to a deserter may have been only an
+ordinary instinct of humanity towards a fellow-creature who
+appeared to be suffering, to say nothing of M'Caffrey's plausible
+tongue.  But her periling her life to save him from an unjust
+accusation, and her desire to shield her brother's pride from
+ridicule, is altogether praiseworthy and extraordinary.  And the
+moral influence of her kindness was strong enough to make that
+scamp refuse to tell the plain truth that might implicate her in an
+indiscretion, though it saved him from state prison."
+
+"He knew you wouldn't believe him if he had said the clothes were
+given to him," retorted Miss Cicely, "so I don't see where the
+moral influence comes in.  As to her periling her life, those Marsh
+people are amphibious anyway, or would be in those clothes.  And as
+to her motive, why, papa, I heard you say in this very room, and
+afterwards to Mr. Calvert, when you gave him instructions, that you
+believed those Culpeppers were capable of enticing away deserters;
+and you forget the fuss you had with her savage brother's lawyer
+about that water front, and how you said it was such people who
+kept up the irritation between the Civil and Federal power."
+
+The colonel coughed hurriedly.  It is the fate of all great
+organizers, military as well as civil, to occasionally suffer
+defeat in the family circle.
+
+"The more reason," he said, soothingly, "why we should correct
+harsh judgments that spring from mere rumors.  You should give
+yourself at least the chance of overcoming your prejudices, my
+child.  Remember, too, that she is now the guest of the Fort."
+
+"And she chooses to stay with Mrs. Bromley!  I'm sure it's quite
+enough for you and mamma to do duty--and Emily, who wants to know
+why Mr. Calvert raves so about her--without MY going over there to
+stare."
+
+Colonel Preston shook his head reproachfully, but eventually
+retired, leaving the field to the enemy.  The enemy, a little pink
+in the cheeks, slightly tossed the delicate rings of its blonde
+crest, settled its skirts again at the piano, but after turning
+over the leaves of its music book, rose, and walked pettishly to
+the window.
+
+But here a spectacle presented itself that for a moment dismissed
+all other thoughts from the girl's rebellious mind.
+
+Not a dozen yards away, on the wind-swept parade, a handsome young
+fellow, apparently halted by the sentry, had impetuously turned
+upon him in an attitude of indignant and haughty surprise.  To the
+quick fancy of the girl it seemed as if some disguised rustic god
+had been startled by the challenge of a mortal.  Under an oilskin
+hat, like the petasus of Hermes, pushed back from his white
+forehead, crisp black curls were knotted around a head whose
+beardless face was perfect as a cameo cutting.  In the close-
+fitting blue woolen jersey under his open jacket the clear outlines
+and youthful grace of his upper figure were revealed as clearly as
+in a statue.  Long fishing-boots reaching to his thighs scarcely
+concealed the symmetry of his lower limbs.  Cricket and lawn-
+tennis, knickerbockers and flannels had not at that period
+familiarized the female eye to unfettered masculine outline, and
+Cicely Preston, accustomed to the artificial smartness and
+regularity of uniform, was perhaps the more impressed by the
+stranger's lawless grace.
+
+The sentry had repeated his challenge; an angry flush was deepening
+on the intruder's cheek.  At this critical moment Cicely threw open
+the French windows and stepped upon the veranda.
+
+The sentry saluted the familiar little figure of his colonel's
+daughter with an explanatory glance at the stranger.  The young
+fellow looked up--and the god became human.
+
+"I'm looking for my sister," he said, half awkwardly, half
+defiantly; "she's here, somewhere."
+
+"Yes--and perfectly safe, Mr. Culpepper, I think," said the arch-
+hypocrite with dazzling sweetness; "and we're all so delighted.
+And so brave and plucky and skillful in her to come all that way--
+and for such a purpose."
+
+"Then--you know--all about it"--stammered Jim, more relieved than
+he had imagined--"and that I"--
+
+"That you were quite ignorant of your sister helping the deserter.
+Oh yes, of course," said Cicely, with bewildering promptitude.
+"You see, Mr. Culpepper, we girls are SO foolish.  I dare say I
+should have done the same thing in her place, only I should never
+have had the courage to do what she did afterwards.  You really
+must forgive her.  But won't you come in--DO."  She stepped back,
+holding the window open with the half-coaxing air of a spoiled
+child.  "This way is quickest.  DO come."  As he still hesitated,
+glancing from her to the house, she added, with a demure little
+laugh, "Oh, I forget--this is Colonel Preston's quarters, and I'm
+his daughter."
+
+And this dainty little fairy, so natural in manner, so tasteful in
+attire, was one of the artificial over-dressed creatures that his
+sister had inveighed against so bitterly!  Was Maggie really to be
+trusted?  This new revelation coming so soon after the episode of
+the deserter staggered him.  Nevertheless he hesitated, looking up
+with a certain boyish timidity into Cicely's dangerous eyes.
+
+"Is--is--my sister there?"
+
+"I'm expecting her with my mother every moment," responded this
+youthful but ingenious diplomatist sweetly; "she might be here now;
+but," she added with a sudden heart-broken flash of sympathy, "I
+know HOW anxious you both must be.  I'LL take you to her now.  Only
+one moment, please."  The opportunity of leading this handsome
+savage as it were in chains across the parade, before everybody,
+her father, her mother, her sister, and HIS--was not to be lost.
+She darted into the house, and reappeared with the daintiest
+imaginable straw hat on the side of her head, and demurely took her
+place at his side.  "It's only over there, at Major Bromley's," she
+said, pointing to one of the vine-clad cottage quarters; but you
+are a stranger here, you know, and might get lost."
+
+Alas! he was already that.  For keeping step with those fairy-like
+slippers, brushing awkwardly against that fresh and pretty skirt,
+and feeling the caress of the soft folds; looking down upon the
+brim of that beribboned little hat, and more often meeting the
+upturned blue eyes beneath it, Jim was suddenly struck with a
+terrible conviction of his own contrasting coarseness and
+deficiencies.  How hideous those oiled canvas fishing-trousers and
+pilot jacket looked beside this perfectly fitted and delicately
+gowned girl!  He loathed his collar, his jersey, his turned-back
+sou'wester, even his height, which seemed to hulk beside her--
+everything, in short, that the girl had recently admired.  By the
+time that they had reached Major Bromley's door he had so far
+succumbed to the fair enchantress and realized her ambition of a
+triumphant procession, that when she ushered him into the presence
+of half a dozen ladies and gentlemen he scarcely recognized his
+sister as the centre of attraction, or knew that Miss Cicely's
+effusive greeting of Maggie was her first one.  "I knew he was
+dying to see you after all you had BOTH passed through, and I
+brought him straight here," said the diminutive Machiavelli,
+meeting the astonished gaze of her father and the curious eyes of
+her sister with perfect calmness, while Maggie, full of gratitude
+and admiration of her handsome brother, forgot his momentary
+obliviousness, and returned her greeting warmly.  Nevertheless,
+there was a slight movement of reserve among the gentlemen at the
+unlooked-for irruption of this sunburnt Adonis, until Calvert,
+disengaging himself from Maggie's side, came forward with his usual
+frank imperturbability and quiet tact, and claimed Jim as his
+friend and honored guest.
+
+It then came out with that unostentatious simplicity which
+characterized the brother and sister, and was their secure claim to
+perfect equality with their entertainers, that Jim, on discovering
+his sister's absence, and fearing that she might be carried by the
+current towards the bar, had actually SWUM THE ESTUARY to Indian
+Island, and in an ordinary Indian canoe had braved the same
+tempestuous passage she had taken a few hours before.  Cicely,
+listening to this recital with rapt attention, nevertheless managed
+to convey the impression of having fully expected it from the
+first.  "Of course he'd have come here; if she'd only waited," she
+said, sotto voce, to her sister Emily.
+
+"He's certainly the handsomer of the two," responded that young
+lady.
+
+"Of course," returned Cicely, with a superior air, "don't you see
+she COPIES him."
+
+Not that this private criticism prevented either from vying with
+the younger officers in their attentions to Maggie, with perhaps
+the addition of an open eulogy of her handsome brother, more or
+less invidious in comparison to the officers.  "I suppose it's an
+active out-of-door life gives him that perfect grace and freedom,"
+said Emily, with a slight sneer at the smartly belted Calvert.
+"Yes; and he don't drink or keep late hours," responded Cicely
+significantly.  "His sister says they always retire before ten
+o'clock, and that although his father left him some valuable
+whiskey he seldom takes a drop of it."  "Therein," gravely
+concluded Captain Kirby, "lies OUR salvation.  If, after such a
+confession, Calvert doesn't make the most of his acquaintance with
+young Culpepper to remove that whiskey from his path and bring it
+here, he's not the man I take him for."
+
+Indeed, for the moment it seemed as if he was not.  During the next
+three or four days, in which Colonel Preston had insisted upon
+detaining his guests, Calvert touched no liquor, evaded the evening
+poker parties at quarters, and even prevailed upon some of his
+brother officers to give them up for the more general entertainment
+of the ladies.  Colonel Preston was politician enough to avail
+himself of the popularity of Maggie's adventure to invite some of
+the Logport people to assist him in honoring their neighbor.  Not
+only was the old feud between the Fort and the people thus bridged
+over, but there was no doubt that the discipline of the Fort had
+been strengthened by Maggie's extravagant reputation as a mediator
+among the disaffected rank and file.  Whatever characteristic
+license the grateful Dennis M'Caffrey--let off with a nominal
+punishment--may have taken in his praise of the "Quane of the
+Marshes," it is certain that the men worshiped her, and that the
+band pathetically begged permission to serenade her the last night
+of her stay.
+
+At the end of that time, with a dozen invitations, a dozen
+appointments, a dozen vows of eternal friendship, much hand-
+shaking, and accompanied by a number of the officers to their boat,
+Maggie and Jim departed.  They talked but little on their way home;
+by some tacit understanding they did not discuss those projects,
+only recalling certain scenes and incidents of their visit.  By the
+time they had reached the little creek the silence and nervous
+apathy which usually follow excitement in the young seemed to have
+fallen upon them.  It was not until after their quiet frugal supper
+that, seated beside the fire, Jim looked up somewhat self-
+consciously in his sister's grave and thoughtful face.
+
+"Say, Mag, what was that idea o' yours about selling some land, and
+taking a house at Logport?"
+
+Maggie looked up, and said passively, "Oh, THAT idea?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Well," said Jim somewhat awkwardly, "it COULD be done, you know.
+I'm willin'."
+
+As she did not immediately reply, he continued uneasily, "Miss
+Preston says we kin get a nice little house that is near the Fort,
+until we want to build."
+
+"Oh, then you HAVE talked about it?"
+
+"Yes--that is--why, what are ye thinkin' of, Mag?  Wasn't it YOUR
+idea all along?" he said, suddenly facing her with querulous
+embarrassment.  They had been sitting in their usual evening
+attitudes of Assyrian frieze profile, with even more than the usual
+Assyrian frieze similarity of feature.
+
+"Yes; but, Jim dear, do you think it the best thing for--for us to
+do?" said Maggie, with half-frightened gravity.
+
+At this sudden and startling exhibition of female inconsistency and
+inconsequence, Jim was for a moment speechless.  Then he recovered
+himself, volubly, aggrievedly, and on his legs.  What DID she mean?
+Was he to give up understanding girls--or was it their sole
+vocation in life to impede masculine processes and shipwreck
+masculine conclusions?  Here, after all she said the other night,
+after they had nearly "quo'lled" over her "set idees," after she'd
+"gone over all that foolishness about Jael and Sisera--and there
+wasn't any use for it--after she'd let him run on to them officers
+all he was goin' to do--nay, after SHE herself, for he had heard
+her, had talked to Calvert about it, she wanted to know NOW if it
+was best."  He looked at the floor and the ceiling, as if expecting
+the tongued and grooved planks to cry out at this crowning
+enormity.
+
+The cause of it had resumed her sad gaze at the fire.  Presently,
+without turning her head, she reached up her long, graceful arm,
+and clasping her brother's neck, brought his face down in profile
+with her own, cheek against cheek, until they looked like the
+double outlines of a medallion.  Then she said--to the fire:
+
+"Jim, do you think she's pretty?"
+
+"Who?" said Jim, albeit his color had already answered the
+question.
+
+"You know WHO.  Do you like her?"
+
+Jim here vaguely murmured to the fire that he thought her "kinder
+nice," and that she dressed mighty purty.  "Ye know, Mag," he said
+with patronizing effusion, "you oughter get some gownds like hers."
+
+"That wouldn't make me like her," said Maggie gravely.
+
+"I don't know about that," said Jim politely, but with an appalling
+hopelessness of tone.  After a pause he added slyly, "'Pears to me
+SOMEBODY ELSE thought somebody else mighty purty--eh?"
+
+To his discomfiture she did not solicit further information.  After
+a pause he continued, still more archly:
+
+"Do you like HIM, Mag?"
+
+"I think he's a perfect gentleman," she said calmly.
+
+He turned his eyes quickly from the glowing fire to her face.  The
+cheek that had been resting against his own was as cool as the
+night wind that came through the open door, and the whole face was
+as fixed and tranquil as the upper stars.
+
+
+V.
+
+
+For a year the tide had ebbed and flowed on the Dedlow Marsh
+unheeded before the sealed and sightless windows of the
+"Kingfisher's Nest."  Since the young birds had flown to Logport,
+even the Indian caretakers had abandoned the piled dwelling for
+their old nomadic haunts in the "bresh."  The high spring tide had
+again made its annual visit to the little cemetery of drift-wood,
+and, as if recognizing another wreck in the deserted home, had hung
+a few memorial offerings on the blackened piles, softly laid a
+garland of grayish drift before it, and then sobbed itself out in
+the salt grass.
+
+From time to time the faint echoes of the Culpeppers' life at
+Logport reached the upland, and the few neighbors who had only
+known them by hearsay shook their heads over the extravagance they
+as yet only knew by report.  But it was in the dead ebb of the tide
+and the waning daylight that the feathered tenants of the Marsh
+seemed to voice dismal prophecies of the ruin of their old master
+and mistress, and to give themselves up to gloomiest lamentation
+and querulous foreboding.  Whether the traditional "bird of the
+air" had entrusted his secret to a few ornithological friends, or
+whether from a natural disposition to take gloomy views of life, it
+was certain that at this hour the vocal expression of the Marsh was
+hopeless and despairing.  It was then that a dejected plover,
+addressing a mocking crew of sandpipers on a floating log, seemed
+to bewail the fortune that was being swallowed up by the riotous
+living and gambling debts of Jim.  It was then that the querulous
+crane rose, and testily protested against the selling of his
+favorite haunt in the sandy peninsula, which only six months of
+Jim's excesses had made imperative.  It was then that a mournful
+curlew, who, with the preface that he had always been really
+expecting it, reiterated the story that Jim had been seen more than
+once staggering home with nervous hands and sodden features from a
+debauch with the younger officers; it was the same desponding fowl
+who knew that Maggie's eyes had more than once filled with tears at
+Jim's failings, and had already grown more hollow with many
+watchings.  It was a flock of wrangling teal that screamingly
+discussed the small scandals, jealous heart-burnings, and curious
+backbitings that had attended Maggie's advent into society.  It was
+the high-flying brent who, knowing how the sensitive girl, made
+keenly conscious at every turn of her defective training and
+ingenuous ignorance, had often watched their evening flight with
+longing gaze, now "honked" dismally at the recollection.  It was at
+this hour and season that the usual vague lamentings of Dedlow
+Marsh seemed to find at last a preordained expression.  And it was
+at such a time, when light and water were both fading, and the
+blackness of the Marsh was once more reasserting itself, that a
+small boat was creeping along one of the tortuous inlets, at times
+half hiding behind the bank like a wounded bird.  As it slowly
+penetrated inland it seemed to be impelled by its solitary occupant
+in a hesitating uncertain way, as if to escape observation rather
+than as if directed to any positive bourn.  Stopping beside a bank
+of reeds at last, the figure rose stoopingly, and drew a gun from
+between its feet and the bottom of the boat.  As the light fell
+upon its face, it could be seen that it was James Culpepper!  James
+Culpepper! hardly recognizable in the swollen features, bloodshot
+eyes, and tremulous hands of that ruined figure!  James Culpepper,
+only retaining a single trace of his former self in his look of set
+and passionate purpose!  And that purpose was to kill himself--to
+be found dead, as his father had been before him--in an open boat,
+adrift upon the Marsh!
+
+It was not the outcome of a sudden fancy.  The idea had first come
+to him in a taunting allusion from the drunken lips of one of his
+ruder companions, for which he had stricken the offender to the
+earth.  It had since haunted his waking hours of remorse and
+hopeless fatuity; it had seemed to be the one relief and atonement
+he could make his devoted sister; and, more fatuous than all, it
+seemed to the miserable boy the one revenge he would take upon the
+faithless coquette, who for a year had played with his simplicity,
+and had helped to drive him to the distraction of cards and drink.
+Only that morning Colonel Preston had forbidden him the house; and
+now it seemed to him the end had come.  He raised his distorted
+face above the reedy bank for a last tremulous and half-frightened
+glance at the landscape he was leaving forever.  A glint in the
+western sky lit up the front of his deserted dwelling in the
+distance, abreast of which the windings of the inlet had
+unwittingly led him.  As he looked he started, and involuntarily
+dropped into a crouching attitude.  For, to his superstitious
+terror, the sealed windows of his old home were open, the bright
+panes were glittering with the fading light, and on the outer
+gallery the familiar figure of his sister stood, as of old,
+awaiting his return!  Was he really going mad, or had this last
+vision of his former youth been purposely vouchsafed him?
+
+But, even as he gazed, the appearance of another figure in the
+landscape beyond the house proved the reality of his vision, and as
+suddenly distracted him from all else.  For it was the apparition
+of a man on horseback approaching the house from the upland; and
+even at that distance he recognized its well-known outlines.  It
+was Calvert!  Calvert the traitor!  Calvert, the man whom he had
+long suspected as being the secret lover and destined husband of
+Cicely Preston!  Calvert, who had deceived him with his calm
+equanimity and his affected preference for Maggie, to conceal his
+deliberate understanding with Cicely.  What was he doing here?  Was
+he a double traitor, and now trying to deceive HER--as he had him?
+And Maggie here!  This sudden return--this preconcerted meeting.
+It was infamy!
+
+For a moment he remained stupefied, and then, with a mechanical
+instinct, plunged his head and face in the lazy-flowing water, and
+then once again rose cool and collected.  The half-mad distraction
+of his previous resolve had given way to another, more deliberate,
+but not less desperate determination.  He knew now WHY he came
+there--WHY he had brought his gun--why his boat had stopped when it
+did!
+
+Lying flat in the bottom, he tore away fragments of the crumbling
+bank to fill his frail craft, until he had sunk it to the gunwale,
+and below the low level of the Marsh.  Then, using his hands as
+noiseless paddles, he propelled this rude imitation of a floating
+log slowly past the line of vision, until the tongue of bushes had
+hidden him from view.  With a rapid glance at the darkening flat,
+he then seized his gun, and springing to the spongy bank, half
+crouching half crawling through reeds and tussocks, he made his way
+to the brush.  A foot and eye less experienced would have plunged
+its owner helpless in the black quagmire.  At one edge of the
+thicket he heard hoofs trampling the dried twigs.  Calvert's horse
+was already there, tied to a skirting alder.
+
+He ran to the house, but, instead of attracting attention by
+ascending the creaking steps, made his way to the piles below the
+rear gallery and climbed to it noiselessly.  It was the spot where
+the deserter had ascended a year ago, and, like him, he could see
+and hear all that passed distinctly.  Calvert stood near the open
+door as if departing.  Maggie stood between him and the window, her
+face in shadow, her hands clasped tightly behind her.  A profound
+sadness, partly of the dying day and waning light, and partly of
+some vague expiration of their own sorrow, seemed to encompass
+them.  Without knowing why, a strange trembling took the place of
+James Culpepper's fierce determination, and a film of moisture
+stole across his staring eyes.
+
+"When I tell you that I believe all this will pass, and that you
+will still win your brother back to you," said Calvert's sad but
+clear voice, "I will tell you why--although, perhaps, it is only a
+part of that confidence you command me to withhold.  When I first
+saw you, I myself had fallen into like dissolute habits; less
+excusable than he, for I had some experience of the world and its
+follies.  When I met YOU, and fell under the influence of your
+pure, simple, and healthy life; when I saw that isolation,
+monotony, misunderstanding, even the sense of superiority to one's
+surroundings could be lived down and triumphed over, without vulgar
+distractions or pitiful ambitions; when I learned to love you--hear
+me out, Miss Culpepper, I beg you--you saved ME--I, who was nothing
+to you, even as I honestly believe you will still save your
+brother, whom you love."
+
+"How do you know I didn't RUIN him?" she said, turning upon him
+bitterly.  "How do you know that it wasn't to get rid of OUR
+monotony, OUR solitude that I drove him to this vulgar distraction,
+this pitiful--yes, you were right--pitiful ambition?"
+
+"Because it isn't your real nature," he said quietly.
+
+"My real nature," she repeated with a half savage vehemence that
+seemed to be goaded from her by his very gentleness, "my real
+nature!  What did HE--what do YOU know of it?--My real nature!--
+I'll tell you what it was," she went on passionately.  "It was to
+be revenged on you all for your cruelty, your heartlessness, your
+wickedness to me and mine in the past.  It was to pay you off for
+your slanders of my dead father--for the selfishness that left me
+and Jim alone with his dead body on the Marsh.  That was what sent
+me to Logport--to get even with you--to--to fool and flaunt you!
+There, you have it now!  And now that God has punished me for it by
+crushing my brother--you--you expect me to let you crush ME too."
+
+"But," he said eagerly, advancing toward her, "you are wronging me--
+you are wronging yourself, cruelly."
+
+"Stop," she said, stepping back, with her hands still locked behind
+her.  "Stay where you are.  There!  That's enough!"  She drew
+herself up and let her hands fall at her side.  "Now, let us speak
+of Jim," she said coldly.
+
+Without seeming to hear her, he regarded her for the first time
+with hopeless sadness.
+
+"Why did you let my brother believe you were his rival with Cicely
+Preston?" she asked impatiently.
+
+"Because I could not undeceive him without telling him I hopelessly
+loved his sister.  You are proud, Miss Culpepper," he said, with
+the first tinge of bitterness in his even voice.  "Can you not
+understand that others may be proud too?"
+
+"No," she said bluntly; "it is not pride but weakness.  You could
+have told him what you knew to be true: that there could be nothing
+in common between her folk and such savages as we; that there was a
+gulf as wide as that Marsh and as black between our natures, our
+training and theirs, and even if they came to us across it, now and
+then, to suit their pleasure, light and easy as that tide--it was
+still there to some day ground and swamp them!  And if he doubted
+it, you had only to tell him your own story.  You had only to tell
+him what you have just told me--that you yourself, an officer and a
+gentleman, thought you loved me, a vulgar, uneducated, savage girl,
+and that I, kinder to you than you to me or him, made you take it
+back across that tide, because I couldn't let you link your life
+with me, and drag you in the mire."
+
+"You need not have said that, Miss Culpepper, returned Calvert with
+the same gentle smile, "to prove that I am your inferior in all but
+one thing."
+
+"And that?" she said quickly.
+
+"Is my love."
+
+His gentle face was as set now as her own as he moved back slowly
+towards the door.  There he paused.
+
+"You tell me to speak of Jim, and Jim only.  Then hear me.  I
+believe that Miss Preston cares for him as far as lies in her young
+and giddy nature.  I could not, therefore, have crushed HIS hope
+without deceiving him, for there are as cruel deceits prompted by
+what we call reason as by our love.  If you think that a knowledge
+of this plain truth would help to save him, I beg you to be kinder
+to him than you have been to me,--or even, let me dare to hope, to
+YOURSELF."
+
+He slowly crossed the threshold, still holding his cap lightly in
+his hand.
+
+"When I tell you that I am going away to-morrow on a leave of
+absence, and that in all probability we may not meet again, you
+will not misunderstand why I add my prayer to the message your
+friends in Logport charged me with.  They beg that you will give up
+your idea of returning here, and come back to them.  Believe me,
+you have made yourself loved and respected there, in spite--I beg
+pardon--perhaps I should say BECAUSE of your pride.  Good-night and
+good-bye."
+
+For a single instant she turned her set face to the window with a
+sudden convulsive movement, as if she would have called him back,
+but at the same moment the opposite door creaked and her brother
+slipped into the room.  Whether a quick memory of the deserter's
+entrance at that door a year ago had crossed her mind, whether
+there was some strange suggestion in his mud-stained garments and
+weak deprecating smile, or whether it was the outcome of some
+desperate struggle within her, there was that in her face that
+changed his smile into a frightened cry for pardon, as he ran and
+fell on his knees at her feet.  But even as he did so her stern
+look vanished, and with her arm around him she bent over him and
+mingled her tears with his.
+
+"I heard it all, Mag dearest!  All!  Forgive me!  I have been
+crazy!--wild!--I will reform!--I will be better!  I will never
+disgrace you again, Mag!  Never, never!  I swear it!"
+
+She reached down and kissed him.  After a pause, a weak boyish
+smile struggled into his face.
+
+"You heard what he said of HER, Mag.  Do you think it might be
+true?"
+
+She lifted the damp curls from his forehead with a sad half-
+maternal smile, but did not reply.
+
+"And Mag, dear, don't you think YOU were a little--just a little--
+hard on HIM?  No!  Don't look at me that way, for God's sake!
+There, I didn't mean anything.  Of course you knew best.  There,
+Maggie dear, look up.  Hark there!  Listen, Mag, do!"
+
+They lifted their eyes to the dim distance seen through the open
+door.  Borne on the fading light, and seeming to fall and die with
+it over marsh and river, came the last notes of the bugle from the
+Fort.
+
+"There!  Don't you remember what you used to say, Mag?"
+
+The look that had frightened him had quite left her face now.
+
+"Yes," she smiled, laying her cold cheek beside his softly.  "Oh
+yes!  It was something that came and went, 'Like a song'--'Like a
+song.'"
+
+
+
+A KNIGHT-ERRANT OF THE FOOTHILLS.
+
+
+I.
+
+
+As Father Felipe slowly toiled up the dusty road towards the Rancho
+of the Blessed Innocents, he more than once stopped under the
+shadow of a sycamore to rest his somewhat lazy mule and to compose
+his own perplexed thoughts by a few snatches from his breviary.
+For the good padre had some reason to be troubled.  The invasion of
+Gentile Americans that followed the gold discovery of three years
+before had not confined itself to the plains of the Sacramento, but
+stragglers had already found their way to the Santa Cruz Valley,
+and the seclusion of even the mission itself was threatened.  It
+was true that they had not brought their heathen engines to
+disembowel the earth in search of gold, but it was rumored that
+they had already speculated upon the agricultural productiveness of
+the land, and had espied "the fatness thereof."  As he reached the
+higher plateau he could see the afternoon sea-fog--presently to
+obliterate the fair prospect--already pulling through the gaps in
+the Coast Range, and on a nearer slope--no less ominously--the
+smoke of a recent but more permanently destructive Yankee saw-mill
+was slowly drifting towards the valley.
+
+"Get up, beast!" said the father, digging his heels into the
+comfortable flanks of his mule with some human impatience, "or art
+THOU, too, a lazy renegade?  Thinkest thou, besotted one, that the
+heretic will spare thee more work than the Holy Church."
+
+The mule, thus apostrophized in ear and flesh, shook its head
+obstinately as if the question was by no means clear to its mind,
+but nevertheless started into a little trot, which presently
+brought it to the low adobe wall of the courtyard of "The
+Innocents," and entered the gate.  A few lounging peons in the
+shadow of an archway took off their broad-brimmed hats and made way
+for the padre, and a half dozen equally listless vaqueros helped
+him to alight.  Accustomed as he was to the indolence and
+superfluity of his host's retainers, to-day it nevertheless seemed
+to strike some note of irritation in his breast.
+
+A stout, middle-aged woman of ungirt waist and beshawled head and
+shoulders appeared at the gateway as if awaiting him.  After a
+formal salutation she drew him aside into an inner passage.
+
+"He is away again, your Reverence," she said.
+
+"Ah--always the same?"
+
+"Yes, your Reverence--and this time to 'a meeting' of the heretics
+at their pueblo, at Jonesville--where they will ask him of his land
+for a road."
+
+"At a MEETING?" echoed the priest uneasily.
+
+"Ah yes! a meeting--where Tiburcio says they shout and spit on the
+ground, your Reverence, and only one has a chair and him they call
+a 'chairman' because of it, and yet he sits not but shouts and
+spits even as the others and keeps up a tapping with a hammer like
+a very pico.  And there it is they are ever 'resolving' that which
+is not, and consider it even as done."
+
+"Then he is still the same," said the priest gloomily, as the woman
+paused for breath.
+
+"Only more so, your Reverence, for he reads nought but the
+newspaper of the Americanos that is brought in the ship, the 'New
+York 'errald'--and recites to himself the orations of their
+legislators.  Ah! it was an evil day when the shipwrecked American
+sailor taught him his uncouth tongue, which, as your Reverence
+knows, is only fit for beasts and heathen incantation."
+
+"Pray Heaven THAT were all he learned of him," said the priest
+hastily, "for I have great fear that this sailor was little better
+than an atheist and an emissary from Satan.  But where are these
+newspapers and the fantasies of publicita that fill his mind?  I
+would see them, my daughter."
+
+"You shall, your Reverence, and more too," she replied eagerly,
+leading the way along the passage to a grated door which opened
+upon a small cell-like apartment, whose scant light and less air
+came through the deeply embayed windows in the outer wall.  "Here
+is his estudio."
+
+In spite of this open invitation, the padre entered with that air
+of furtive and minute inspection common to his order.  His glance
+fell upon a rude surveyor's plan of the adjacent embryo town of
+Jonesville hanging on the wall, which he contemplated with a cold
+disfavor that even included the highly colored vignette of the
+projected Jonesville Hotel in the left-hand corner.  He then passed
+to a supervisor's notice hanging near it, which he examined with a
+suspicion heightened by that uneasiness common to mere worldly
+humanity when opposed to an unknown and unfamiliar language.  But
+an exclamation broke from his lips when he confronted an election
+placard immediately below it.  It was printed in Spanish and
+English, and Father Felipe had no difficulty in reading the
+announcement that "Don Jose Sepulvida would preside at a meeting of
+the Board of Education in Jonesville as one of the trustees."
+
+"This is madness," said the padre.
+
+Observing that Dona Maria was at the moment preoccupied in
+examining the pictorial pages of an illustrated American weekly
+which had hitherto escaped his eyes, he took it gently from her
+hand.
+
+"Pardon, your Reverence," she said with slightly acidulous
+deprecation, "but thanks to the Blessed Virgin and your Reverence's
+teaching, the text is but gibberish to me and I did but glance at
+the pictures."
+
+"Much evil may come in with the eye," said the priest
+sententiously, "as I will presently show thee.  We have here," he
+continued, pointing to an illustration of certain college athletic
+sports, "a number of youthful cavaliers posturing and capering in a
+partly nude condition before a number of shameless women, who
+emulate the saturnalia of heathen Rome by waving their
+handkerchiefs.  We have here a companion picture," he said,
+indicating an illustration of gymnastic exercises by the students
+of a female academy at "Commencement," "in which, as thou seest,
+even the aged of both sexes unblushingly assist as spectators with
+every expression of immodest satisfaction."
+
+"Have they no bull-fights or other seemly recreation that they must
+indulge in such wantonness?" asked Dona Maria indignantly, gazing,
+however, somewhat curiously at the baleful representations.
+
+"Of all that, my daughter, has their pampered civilization long
+since wearied," returned the good padre, "for see, this is what
+they consider a moral and even a religious ceremony."  He turned to
+an illustration of a woman's rights convention; "observe with what
+rapt attention the audience of that heathen temple watch the
+inspired ravings of that elderly priestess on the dais.  It is even
+this kind of sacrilegious performance that I am told thy nephew Don
+Jose expounds and defends."
+
+"May the blessed saints preserve us; where will it lead to?"
+murmured the horrified Dona Maria.
+
+"I will show thee," said Father Felipe, briskly turning the pages
+with the same lofty ignoring of the text until he came to a
+representation of a labor procession.  "There is one of their
+periodic revolutions unhappily not unknown even in Mexico.  Thou
+perceivest those complacent artisans marching with implements of
+their craft, accompanied by the military, in the presence of their
+own stricken masters.  Here we see only another instance of the
+instability of all communities that are not founded on the
+principles of the Holy Church."
+
+"And what is to be done with my nephew?"
+
+The good father's brow darkened with the gloomy religious zeal of
+two centuries ago.  "We must have a council of the family, the
+alcalde, and the archbishop, at ONCE," he said ominously.  To the
+mere heretical observer the conclusion might have seemed lame and
+impotent, but it was as near the Holy inquisition as the year of
+grace 1852 could offer.
+
+A few days after this colloquy the unsuspecting subject of it, Don
+Jose Sepulvida, was sitting alone in the same apartment.  The
+fading glow of the western sky, through the deep embrasured
+windows, lit up his rapt and meditative face.  He was a young man
+of apparently twenty-five, with a colorless satin complexion, dark
+eyes alternating between melancholy and restless energy, a narrow
+high forehead, long straight hair, and a lightly penciled
+moustache.  He was said to resemble the well-known portrait of the
+Marquis of Monterey in the mission church, a face that was alleged
+to leave a deep and lasting impression upon the observers.  It was
+undoubtedly owing to this quality during a brief visit of the
+famous viceroy to a remote and married ancestress of Don Jose at
+Leon that the singular resemblance may be attributed.
+
+A heavy and hesitating step along the passage stopped before the
+grating.  Looking up, Don Jose beheld to his astonishment the
+slightly inflamed face of Roberto, a vagabond American whom he had
+lately taken into his employment.
+
+Roberto, a polite translation of "Bob the Bucker," cleaned out at a
+monte-bank in Santa Cruz, penniless and profligate, had sold his
+mustang to Don Jose and recklessly thrown himself in with the
+bargain.  Touched by the rascal's extravagance, the quality of the
+mare, and observing that Bob's habits had not yet affected his seat
+in the saddle, but rather lent a demoniac vigor to his chase of
+wild cattle, Don Jose had retained rider and horse in his service
+as vaquero.
+
+Bucking Bob, observing that his employer was alone, coolly opened
+the door without ceremony, shut it softly behind him, and then
+closed the wooden shutter of the grating.  Don Jose surveyed him
+with mild surprise and dignified composure.  The man appeared
+perfectly sober,--it was a peculiarity of his dissipated habits
+that, when not actually raving with drink, he was singularly shrewd
+and practical.
+
+"Look yer, Don Kosay," he began in a brusque but guarded voice,
+"you and me is pards.  When ye picked me and the mare up and set us
+on our legs again in this yer ranch, I allowed I'd tie to ye
+whenever you was in trouble--and wanted me.  And I reckon that's
+what's the matter now.  For from what I see and hear on every side,
+although you're the boss of this consarn, you're surrounded by a
+gang of spies and traitors.  Your comings and goings, your ins and
+outs, is dogged and followed and blown upon.  The folks you trust
+is playing it on ye.  It ain't for me to say why or wherefore--
+what's their rights and what's yourn--but I've come to tell ye that
+if you don't get up and get outer this ranch them d--d priests and
+your own flesh and blood--your aunts and your uncles and your
+cousins, will have you chucked outer your property, and run into a
+lunatic asylum."
+
+"Me--Don Jose Sepulvida--a lunatico!  You are yourself crazy of
+drink, friend Roberto."
+
+"Yes," said Roberto grimly, "but that kind ain't ILLEGAL, while
+your makin' ducks and drakes of your property and going into
+'Merikin ideas and 'Merikin speculations they reckon is.  And
+speakin' on the square, it ain't NAT'RAL."
+
+Don Jose sprang to his feet and began to pace up and down his cell-
+like study.  "Ah, I remember now," he muttered, "I begin to
+comprehend: Father Felipe's homilies and discourses!  My aunt's too
+affectionate care!  My cousin's discreet consideration!  The prompt
+attention of my servants!  I see it all!  And you," he said,
+suddenly facing Roberto, "why come you to tell me this?"
+
+"Well, boss," said the American dryly, "I reckoned to stand by
+you."
+
+"Ah," said Don Jose, visibly affected.  "Good Roberto, come hither,
+child, you may kiss my hand."
+
+"If! it's all the same to you, Don Kosay,--THAT kin slide."
+
+"Ah, if--yes," said Don Jose, meditatively putting his hand to his
+forehead, "miserable that I am!--I remembered not you were
+Americano.  Pardon, my friend--embrace me--Conpanero y Amigo."
+
+With characteristic gravity he reclined for a moment upon Robert's
+astonished breast.  Then recovering himself with equal gravity he
+paused, lifted his hand with gentle warning, marched to a recess in
+the corner, unhooked a rapier hanging from the wall, and turned to
+his companion.
+
+"We will defend ourselves, friend Roberto.  It is the sword of the
+Comandante--my ancestor.  The blade is of Toledo."
+
+"An ordinary six-shooter of Colt's would lay over that," said
+Roberto grimly--"but that ain't your game just now, Don Kosay.  You
+must get up and get, and at once.  You must vamose the ranch afore
+they lay hold of you and have you up before the alcalde.  Once away
+from here, they daren't follow you where there's 'Merikin law, and
+when you kin fight 'em in the square."
+
+"Good," said Don Jose with melancholy preciseness.  "You are wise,
+friend Roberto.  We may fight them later, as you say--on the
+square, or in the open Plaza.  And you, camarado, YOU shall go with
+me--you and your mare."
+
+Sincere as the American had been in his offer of service, he was
+somewhat staggered at this imperative command.  But only for a
+moment.  "Well," he said lazily, "I don't care if I do."
+
+"But," said Don Jose with increased gravity, "you SHALL care,
+friend Roberto.  We shall make an alliance, an union.  It is true,
+my brother, you drink of whiskey, and at such times are even as a
+madman.  It has been recounted to me that it was necessary to your
+existence that you are a lunatic three days of the week.  Who
+knows?  I myself, though I drink not of aguardiente, am accused of
+fantasies for all time.  Necessary it becomes therefore that we
+should go TOGETHER.  My fantasies and speculations cannot injure
+you, my brother; your whiskey shall not empoison me.  We shall go
+together in the great world of your American ideas of which I am
+much inflamed.  We shall together breathe as one the spirit of
+Progress and Liberty.  We shall be even as neophytes making of
+ourselves Apostles of Truth.  I absolve and renounce myself
+henceforth of my family.  I shall take to myself the sister and the
+brother, the aunt and the uncle, as we proceed.  I devote myself to
+humanity alone.  I devote YOU, my friend, and the mare--though
+happily she has not a Christian soul--to this glorious mission."
+
+The few level last rays of light lit up a faint enthusiasm in the
+face of Don Jose, but without altering his imperturbable gravity.
+The vaquero eyed him curiously and half doubtfully.
+
+"We will go to-morrow," resumed Don Jose with solemn decision, "for
+it is Wednesday.  It was a Sunday that thou didst ride the mare up
+the steps of the Fonda and demanded that thy liquor should be
+served to thee in a pail.  I remember it, for the landlord of the
+Fonda claimed twenty pesos for damage and the kissing of his wife.
+Therefore, by computation, good Roberto, thou shouldst be sober
+until Friday, and we shall have two clear days to fly before thy
+madness again seizes thee."
+
+"They kin say what they like, Don Kosay, but YOUR head is level,"
+returned the unabashed American, grasping Don Jose's hand.  "All
+right, then.  Hasta manana, as your folks say."
+
+"Hasta manana," repeated Don Jose gravely.
+
+At daybreak next morning, while slumber still weighted the lazy
+eyelids of "the Blessed Innocents," Don Jose Sepulvida and his
+trusty squire Roberto, otherwise known as "Bucking Bob," rode forth
+unnoticed from the corral.
+
+
+II.
+
+
+Three days had passed.  At the close of the third, Don Jose was
+seated in a cosy private apartment of the San Mateo Hotel, where
+they had halted for an arranged interview with his lawyer before
+reaching San Francisco.  From his window he could see the
+surrounding park-like avenues of oaks and the level white high
+road, now and then clouded with the dust of passing teams.  But his
+eyes were persistently fixed upon a small copy of the American
+Constitution before him.  Suddenly there was a quick rap on his
+door, and before he could reply to it a man brusquely entered.
+
+Don Jose raised his head slowly, and recognized the landlord.  But
+the intruder, apparently awed by the gentle, grave, and studious
+figure before him, fell back for an instant in an attitude of surly
+apology.
+
+"Enter freely, my good Jenkinson," said Don Jose, with a quiet
+courtesy that had all the effect of irony.  "The apartment, such as
+it is, is at your disposition.  It is even yours, as is the house."
+
+"Well, I'm darned if I know as it is," said the landlord,
+recovering himself roughly, "and that's jest what's the matter.
+Yer's that man of yours smashing things right and left in the bar-
+room and chuckin' my waiters through the window."
+
+"Softly, softly, good Jenkinson," said Don Jose, putting a mark in
+the pages of the volume before him.  "It is necessary first that I
+should correct your speech.  He is not my 'MAN,' which I comprehend
+to mean a slave, a hireling, a thing obnoxious to the great
+American nation which I admire and to which HE belongs.  Therefore,
+good Jenkinson, say 'friend,' 'companion,' 'guide,' philosopher,'
+if you will.  As to the rest, it is of no doubt as you relate.  I
+myself have heard the breakings of glass and small dishes as I sit
+here; three times I have seen your waiters projected into the road
+with much violence and confusion.  To myself I have then said, even
+as I say to you, good Jenkinson, 'Patience, patience, the end is
+not far.'  In four hours," continued Don Jose, holding up four
+fingers, "he shall make a finish.  Until then, not."
+
+"Well, I'm d--d," ejaculated Jenkinson, gasping for breath in his
+indignation.
+
+"Nay, excellent Jenkinson, not dam-ned but of a possibility dam-
+AGED.  That I shall repay when he have make a finish."
+
+"But, darn it all," broke in the landlord angrily.
+
+"Ah," said Don Jose gravely, "you would be paid before!  Good; for
+how much shall you value ALL you have in your bar?"
+
+Don Jose's imperturbability evidently shook the landlord's faith in
+the soundness of his own position.  He looked at his guest
+critically and audaciously.
+
+"It cost me two hundred dollars to fit it up," he said curtly.
+
+Don Jose rose, and, taking a buckskin purse from his saddle-bag,
+counted out four slugs* and handed them to the stupefied Jenkinson.
+The next moment, however, his host recovered himself, and casting
+the slugs back on the little table, brought his fist down with an
+emphasis that made them dance.
+
+
+* Hexagonal gold pieces valued at $50 each, issued by a private
+firm as coin in the early days.
+
+
+"But, look yer--suppose I want this thing stopped--you hear me--
+STOPPED--now."
+
+"That would be interfering with the liberty of the subject, my good
+Jenkinson--which God forbid!" said Don Jose calmly.  "Moreover, it
+is the custom of the Americanos--a habit of my friend Roberto--a
+necessity of his existence--and so recognized of his friends.
+Patience and courage, Senor Jenkinson.  Stay--ah, I comprehend! you
+have--of a possibility--a wife?"
+
+"No, I'm a widower," said Jenkinson sharply.
+
+"Then I congratulate you.  My friend Roberto would have kissed her.
+It is also of his habit.  Truly you have escaped much.  I embrace
+you, Jenkinson."
+
+He threw his arms gravely around Jenkinson, in whose astounded face
+at last an expression of dry humor faintly dawned.  After a
+moment's survey of Don Jose's impenetrable gravity, he coolly
+gathered up the gold coins, and saying that he would assess the
+damages and return the difference, he left the room as abruptly as
+he had entered it.
+
+But Don Jose was not destined to remain long in peaceful study of
+the American Constitution.  He had barely taken up the book again
+and renewed his serious contemplation of its excellences when there
+was another knock at his door.  This time, in obedience to his
+invitation to enter, the new visitor approached with more
+deliberation and a certain formality.
+
+He was a young man of apparently the same age as Don Jose,
+handsomely dressed, and of a quiet self-possession and gravity
+almost equal to his host's.
+
+"I believe I am addressing Don Jose Sepulvida," he said with a
+familiar yet courteous inclination of his handsome head.  Don Jose,
+who had risen in marked contrast to his reception of his former
+guest, answered,--
+
+"You are truly making to him a great honor."
+
+"Well, you're going it blind as far as I'M concerned certainly,"
+said the young man, with a slight smile, "for you don't know ME."
+
+"Pardon, my friend," said Don Jose gently, "in this book, this
+great Testament of your glorious nation, I have read that you are
+all equal, one not above, one not below the other.  I salute in you
+the Nation!  It is enough!"
+
+"Thank you," returned the stranger, with a face that, saving the
+faintest twinkle in the corner of his dark eyes, was as immovable
+as his host's, "but for the purposes of my business I had better
+say I am Jack Hamlin, a gambler, and am just now dealing faro in
+the Florida saloon round the corner."
+
+He paused carelessly, as if to allow Don Jose the protest he did
+not make, and then continued,--
+
+"The matter is this.  One of your vaqueros, who is, however, an
+American, was round there an hour ago bucking against faro, and put
+up and LOST, not only the mare he was riding, but a horse which I
+have just learned is yours.  Now we reckon, over there, that we can
+make enough money playing a square game, without being obliged to
+take property from a howling drunkard, to say nothing of it not
+belonging to him, and I've come here, Don Jose, to say that if
+you'll send over and bring away your man and your horse, you can
+have 'em both."
+
+"If I have comprehended, honest Hamlin," said Don Jose slowly,
+"this Roberto, who was my vaquero and is my brother, has approached
+this faro game by himself unsolicited?"
+
+"He certainly didn't seem shy of it," said Mr. Hamlin with equal
+gravity.  "To the best of my knowledge he looked as if he'd been
+there before."
+
+"And if he had won, excellent Hamlin, you would have given him the
+equal of his mare and horse?"
+
+"A hundred dollars for each, yes, certainly."
+
+"Then I see not why I should send for the property which is truly
+no longer mine, nor for my brother who will amuse himself after the
+fashion of his country in the company of so honorable a caballero
+as yourself?  Stay! oh imbecile that I am.  I have not remembered.
+You would possibly say that he has no longer of horses!  Play him;
+play him, admirable yet prudent Hamlin.  I have two thousand
+horses!  Of a surety he cannot exhaust them in four hours.
+Therefore play him, trust to me for recompensa, and have no fear."
+
+A quick flush covered the stranger's cheek, and his eyebrows
+momentarily contracted.  He walked carelessly to the window,
+however, glanced out, and then turned to Don Jose.
+
+"May I ask, then," he said with almost sepulchral gravity, "is
+anybody taking care of you?"
+
+"Truly," returned Don Jose cautiously, "there is my brother and
+friend Roberto."
+
+"Ah! Roberto, certainly," said Mr. Hamlin profoundly.
+
+"Why do you ask, considerate friend?"
+
+"Oh! I only thought, with your kind of opinions, you must often
+feel lonely in California.  Good-bye."  He shook Don Jose's hand
+heartily, took up his hat, inclined his head with graceful
+seriousness, and passed out of the room.  In the hall he met the
+landlord.
+
+"Well," said Jenkinson, with a smile half anxious, half
+insinuating, "you saw him?  What do you think of him?"
+
+Mr. Hamlin paused and regarded Jenkinson with a calmly
+contemplative air, as if he were trying to remember first who he
+was, and secondly why he should speak to him at all.  "Think of
+whom?" he repeated carelessly.
+
+"Why him--you know--Don Jose."
+
+"I did not see anything the matter with him," returned Hamlin with
+frigid simplicity.
+
+"What? nothing queer?"
+
+"Well, no--except that he's a guest in YOUR house," said Hamlin
+with great cheerfulness.  "But then, as you keep a hotel, you can't
+help occasionally admitting a--gentleman."
+
+Mr. Jenkinson smiled the uneasy smile of a man who knew that his
+interlocutor's playfulness occasionally extended to the use of a
+derringer, in which he was singularly prompt and proficient, and
+Mr. Hamlin, equally conscious of that knowledge on the part of his
+companion, descended the staircase composedly.
+
+But the day had darkened gradually into night, and Don Jose was at
+last compelled to put aside his volume.  The sound of a large bell
+rung violently along the hall and passages admonished him that the
+American dinner was ready, and although the viands and the mode of
+cooking were not entirely to his fancy, he had, in his grave
+enthusiasm for the national habits, attended the table d'hote
+regularly with Roberto.  On reaching the lower hall he was informed
+that his henchman had early succumbed to the potency of his
+libations, and had already been carried by two men to bed.
+Receiving this information with his usual stoical composure, he
+entered the dining-room, but was surprised to find that a separate
+table had been prepared for him by the landlord, and that a rude
+attempt had been made to serve him with his own native dishes.
+
+"Senores y Senoritas," said Don Jose, turning from it and with
+grave politeness addressing the assembled company, "if I seem to-
+day to partake alone and in a reserved fashion of certain viands
+that have been prepared for me, it is truly from no lack of
+courtesy to your distinguished company, but rather, I protest, to
+avoid the appearance of greater discourtesy to our excellent
+Jenkinson, who has taken some pains and trouble to comport his
+establishment to what he conceives to be my desires.  Wherefore, my
+friends, in God's name fall to, the same as if I were not present,
+and grace be with you."
+
+A few stared at the tall, gentle, melancholy figure with some
+astonishment; a few whispered to their neighbors; but when, at the
+conclusion of his repast, Don Jose arose and again saluted the
+company, one or two stood up and smilingly returned the courtesy,
+and Polly Jenkinson, the landlord's youngest daughter, to the great
+delight of her companions, blew him a kiss.
+
+After visiting the vaquero in his room, and with his own hand
+applying some native ointment to the various contusions and
+scratches which recorded the late engagements of the unconscious
+Roberto, Don Jose placed a gold coin in the hands of the Irish
+chamber-maid, and bidding her look after the sleeper, he threw his
+serape over his shoulders and passed into the road.  The loungers
+on the veranda gazed at him curiously, yet half acknowledged his
+usual serious salutation, and made way for him with a certain
+respect.  Avoiding the few narrow streets of the little town, he
+pursued his way meditatively along the highroad, returning to the
+hotel after an hour's ramble, as the evening stage-coach had
+deposited its passengers and departed.
+
+"There's a lady waiting to see you upstairs," said the landlord
+with a peculiar smile.  "She rather allowed it wasn't the proper
+thing to see you alone, or she wasn't quite ekal to it, I reckon,
+for she got my Polly to stand by her."
+
+"Your Polly, good Jenkinson?" said Don Jose interrogatively.
+
+"My darter, Don Jose."
+
+"Ah, truly!  I am twice blessed," said Don Jose, gravely ascending
+the staircase.
+
+On entering the room he perceived a tall, large-featured woman with
+an extraordinary quantity of blond hair parted on one side of her
+broad forehead, sitting upon the sofa.  Beside her sat Polly
+Jenkinson, her fresh, honest, and rather pretty face beaming with
+delighted expectation and mischief.  Don Jose saluted them with a
+formal courtesy, which, however, had no trace of the fact that he
+really did not remember anything of them.
+
+"I called," said the large-featured woman with a voice equally
+pronounced, "in reference to a request from you, which, though
+perhaps unconventional in the extreme, I have been able to meet by
+the intervention of this young lady's company.  My name on this
+card may not be familiar to you--but I am 'Dorothy Dewdrop.'"
+
+A slight movement of abstraction and surprise passed over Don
+Jose's face, but as quickly vanished as he advanced towards her and
+gracefully raised the tips of her fingers to his lips.  "Have I
+then, at last, the privilege of beholding that most distressed and
+deeply injured of women!  Or is it but a dream!"
+
+It certainly was not, as far as concerned the substantial person of
+the woman before him, who, however, seemed somewhat uneasy under
+his words as well as the demure scrutiny of Miss Jenkinson.  "I
+thought you might have forgotten," she said with slight acerbity,
+"that you desired an interview with the authoress of"--
+
+"Pardon," interrupted Don Jose, standing before her in an attitude
+of the deepest sympathizing dejection, "I had not forgotten.  It is
+now three weeks since I have read in the journal 'Golden Gate' the
+eloquent and touching poem of your sufferings, and your
+aspirations, and your miscomprehensions by those you love.  I
+remember as yesterday that you have said, that cruel fate have
+linked you to a soulless state--that--but I speak not well your own
+beautiful language--you are in tears at evenfall 'because that you
+are not understood of others, and that your soul recoiled from iron
+bonds, until, as in a dream, you sought succor and release in some
+true Knight of equal plight.'"
+
+"I am told," said the large-featured woman with some satisfaction,
+"that the poem to which you allude has been generally admired."
+
+"Admired!  Senora," said Don Jose, with still darker sympathy, "it
+is not the word; it is FELT.  I have felt it.  When I read those
+words of distress, I am touched of compassion!  I have said, This
+woman, so disconsolate, so oppressed, must be relieved, protected!
+I have wrote to you, at the 'Golden Gate,' to see me here."
+
+"And I have come, as you perceive," said the poetess, rising with a
+slight smile of constraint; "and emboldened by your appreciation, I
+have brought a few trifles thrown off"--
+
+"Pardon, unhappy Senora," interrupted Don Jose, lifting his hand
+deprecatingly without relaxing his melancholy precision, "but to a
+cavalier further evidence is not required--and I have not yet make
+finish.  I have not content myself to WRITE to you.  I have sent my
+trusty friend Roberto to inquire at the 'Golden Gate' of your
+condition.  I have found there, most unhappy and persecuted friend--
+that with truly angelic forbearance you have not told ALL--that
+you are MARRIED, and that of a necessity it is your husband that is
+cold and soulless and unsympathizing--and all that you describe."
+
+"Sir!" said the poetess, rising in angry consternation.
+
+"I have written to him," continued Don Jose, with unheeding
+gravity; "have appealed to him as a friend, I have conjured him as
+a caballero, I have threatened him even as a champion of the Right,
+I have said to him, in effect--that this must not be as it is.  I
+have informed him that I have made an appointment with you even at
+this house, and I challenged him to meet you here--in this room--
+even at this instant, and, with God's help, we should make good our
+charges against him.  It is yet early; I have allowed time for the
+lateness of the stage and the fact that he will come by another
+conveyance.  Therefore, O Dona Dewdrop, tremble not like thy
+namesake as it were on the leaf of apprehension and expectancy.  I,
+Don Jose, am here to protect thee.  I will take these charges"--
+gently withdrawing the manuscripts from her astonished grasp--
+"though even, as I related to thee before, I want them not, yet we
+will together confront him with them and make them good against
+him."
+
+"Are you mad?" demanded the lady in almost stentorious accents, "or
+is this an unmanly hoax?"  Suddenly she stopped in undeniable
+consternation.  "Good heavens," she muttered, "if Abner should
+believe this.  He is SUCH a fool!  He has lately been queer and
+jealous.  Oh dear!" she said, turning to Polly Jenkinson with the
+first indication of feminine weakness, "Is he telling the truth? is
+he crazy? what shall I do?"
+
+Polly Jenkinson, who had witnessed the interview with the intensest
+enjoyment, now rose equal to the occasion.
+
+"You have made a mistake," she said, uplifting her demure blue eyes
+to Don Jose's dark and melancholy gaze.  "This lady is a POETESS!
+The sufferings she depicts, the sorrows she feels, are in the
+IMAGINATION, in her fancy only."
+
+"Ah!" said Don Jose gloomily; "then it is all false."
+
+"No," said Polly quickly, "only they are not her OWN, you know.
+They are somebody elses.  She only describes them for another,
+don't you see?"
+
+"And who, then, is this unhappy one?" asked the Don quickly.
+
+"Well--a--friend," stammered Polly, hesitatingly.
+
+"A friend!" repeated Don Jose.  "Ah, I see, of possibility a dear
+one, even," he continued, gazing with tender melancholy into the
+untroubled cerulean depths of Polly's eyes, "even, but no, child,
+it could not be!  THOU art too young."
+
+"Ah," said Polly, with an extraordinary gulp and a fierce nudge of
+the poetess, "but it WAS me."
+
+"You, Senorita," repeated Don Jose, falling back in an attitude of
+mingled admiration and pity.  "You, the child of Jenkinson!"
+
+"Yes, yes," joined in the poetess hurriedly; "but that isn't going
+to stop the consequences of your wretched blunder.  My husband will
+be furious, and will be here at any moment.  Good gracious! what is
+that?"
+
+The violent slamming of a distant door at that instant, the sounds
+of quick scuffling on the staircase, and the uplifting of an irate
+voice had reached her ears and thrown her back in the arms of Polly
+Jenkinson.  Even the young girl herself turned an anxious gaze
+towards the door.  Don Jose alone was unmoved.
+
+"Possess yourselves in peace, Senoritas," he said calmly.  "We have
+here only the characteristic convalescence of my friend and
+brother, the excellent Roberto.  He will ever recover himself from
+drink with violence, even as he precipitates himself into it with
+fury.  He has been prematurely awakened.  I will discover the
+cause."
+
+With an elaborate bow to the frightened women, he left the room.
+Scarcely had the door closed when the poetess turned quickly to
+Polly.  "The man's a stark staring lunatic, but, thank Heaven,
+Abner will see it at once.  And now let's get away while we can.
+To think," she said, snatching up her scattered manuscripts, "that
+THAT was all the beast wanted."
+
+"I'm sure he's very gentle and kind," said Polly, recovering her
+dimples with a demure pout; "but stop, he's coming back."
+
+It was indeed Don Jose re-entering the room with the composure of a
+relieved and self-satisfied mind.  "It is even as I said, Senora,"
+he began, taking the poetess's hand,--"and MORE.  You are SAVED!"
+
+As the women only stared at each other, he gravely folded his arms
+and continued: "I will explain.  For the instant I have not
+remember that, in imitation of your own delicacy, I have given to
+your husband in my letter, not the name of myself, but, as a mere
+Don Fulano, the name of my brother Roberto--'Bucking Bob.'  Your
+husband have this moment arrive!  Penetrating the bedroom of the
+excellent Roberto, he has indiscreetly seize him in his bed,
+without explanation, without introduction, without fear!  The
+excellent Roberto, ever ready for such distractions, have respond!
+In a word, to use the language of the good Jenkinson--our host, our
+father--who was present, he have 'wiped the floor with your
+husband,' and have even carried him down the staircase to the
+street.  Believe me, he will not return.  You are free!"
+
+"Fool!  Idiot!  Crazy beast!" said the poetess, dashing past him
+and out of the door.  "You shall pay for this!"
+
+Don Jose did not change his imperturbable and melancholy calm.
+"And now, little one," he said, dropping on one knee before the
+half-frightened Polly, "child of Jenkinson, now that thy perhaps
+too excitable sponsor has, in a poet's caprice, abandoned thee for
+some newer fantasy, confide in me thy distress, to me, thy Knight,
+and tell the story of thy sorrows."
+
+"But," said Polly, rising to her feet and struggling between a
+laugh and a cry.  "I haven't any sorrows.  Oh dear! don't you see,
+it's only her FANCY to make me seem so.  There's nothing the matter
+with me."
+
+"Nothing the matter," repeated Don Jose slowly.  "You have no
+distress?  You want no succor, no relief, no protector?  This,
+then, is but another delusion!" he said, rising sadly.
+
+"Yes, no--that is--oh, my gracious goodness!" said Polly,
+hopelessly divided between a sense of the ridiculous and some
+strange attraction in the dark, gentle eyes that were fixed upon
+her half reproachfully.  "You don't understand."
+
+Don Jose replied only with a melancholy smile, and then going to
+the door, opened it with a bowed head and respectful courtesy.  At
+the act, Polly plucked up courage again, and with it a slight dash
+of her old audacity.
+
+"I'm sure I'm very sorry that I ain't got any love sorrows," she
+said demurely.  "And I suppose it's very dreadful in me not to have
+been raving and broken-hearted over somebody or other as that woman
+has said.  Only," she waited till she had gained the secure vantage
+of the threshold, "I never knew a gentleman to OBJECT to it
+before!"
+
+With this Parthian arrow from her blue eyes she slipped into the
+passage and vanished through the door of the opposite parlor.  For
+an instant Don Jose remained motionless and reflecting.  Then,
+recovering himself with grave precision, he deliberately picked up
+his narrow black gloves from the table, drew them on, took his hat
+in his hand, and solemnly striding across the passage, entered the
+door that had just closed behind her.
+
+
+III.
+
+
+It must not be supposed that in the meantime the flight of Don Jose
+and his follower was unattended by any commotion at the rancho of
+the Blessed Innocents.  At the end of three hours' deliberation, in
+which the retainers were severally examined, the corral searched,
+and the well in the courtyard sounded, scouts were dispatched in
+different directions, who returned with the surprising information
+that the fugitives were not in the vicinity.  A trustworthy
+messenger was sent to Monterey for "custom-house paper," on which
+to draw up a formal declaration of the affair.  The archbishop was
+summoned from San Luis, and Don Victor and Don Vincente Sepulvida,
+with the Donas Carmen and Inez Alvarado, and a former alcalde,
+gathered at a family council the next day.  In this serious
+conclave the good Father Felipe once more expounded the alienated
+condition and the dangerous reading of the absent man.  In the
+midst of which the ordinary post brought a letter from Don Jose,
+calmly inviting the family to dine with him and Roberto at San
+Mateo on the following Wednesday.  The document was passed gravely
+from hand to hand.  Was it a fresh evidence of mental aberration--
+an audacity of frenzy--or a trick of the vaquero?  The archbishop
+and alcalde shook their heads--it was without doubt a lawless, even
+a sacrilegious and blasphemous fete.  But a certain curiosity of
+the ladies and of Father Felipe carried the day.  Without formally
+accepting the invitation it was decided that the family should
+examine the afflicted man, with a view of taking active measures
+hereafter.  On the day appointed, the traveling carriage of the
+Sepulvidas, an equipage coeval with the beginning of the century,
+drawn by two white mules gaudily caparisoned, halted before the
+hotel at San Mateo and disgorged Father Felipe, the Donas Carmen
+and Inez Alvarado and Maria Sepulvida, while Don Victor and Don
+Vincente Sepulvida, their attendant cavaliers on fiery mustangs,
+like outriders, drew rein at the same time.  A slight thrill of
+excitement, as of the advent of a possible circus, had preceded
+them through the little town; a faint blending of cigarette smoke
+and garlic announced their presence on the veranda.
+
+Ushered into the parlor of the hotel, apparently set apart for
+their reception, they were embarrassed at not finding their host
+present.  But they were still more disconcerted when a tall full-
+bearded stranger, with a shrewd amused-looking face, rose from a
+chair by the window, and stepping forward, saluted them in fluent
+Spanish with a slight American accent.
+
+"I have to ask you, gentlemen and ladies," he began, with a certain
+insinuating ease and frankness that alternately aroused and lulled
+their suspicions, "to pardon the absence of our friend Don Jose
+Sepulvida at this preliminary greeting.  For to be perfectly frank
+with you, although the ultimate aim and object of our gathering is
+a social one, you are doubtless aware that certain infelicities and
+misunderstandings--common to most families--have occurred, and a
+free, dispassionate, unprejudiced discussion and disposal of them
+at the beginning will only tend to augment the goodwill of our
+gathering."
+
+"The Senor without doubt is"--suggested the padre, with a polite
+interrogative pause.
+
+"Pardon me!  I forgot to introduce myself.  Colonel Parker--
+entirely at your service and that of these charming ladies."
+
+The ladies referred to allowed their eyes to rest with evident
+prepossession on the insinuating stranger.  "Ah, a soldier," said
+Don Vincente.
+
+"Formerly," said the American lightly; "at present a lawyer, the
+counsel of Don Jose."
+
+A sudden rigor of suspicion stiffened the company; the ladies
+withdrew their eyes; the priest and the Sepulvidas exchanged
+glances.
+
+"Come," said Colonel Parker, with apparent unconsciousness of the
+effect of his disclosure, "let us begin frankly.  You have, I
+believe, some anxiety in regard to the mental condition of Don
+Jose."
+
+"We believe him to be mad," said Padre Felipe promptly,
+"irresponsible, possessed!"
+
+"That is your opinion; good," said the lawyer quietly.
+
+"And ours too," clamored the party, "without doubt."
+
+"Good," returned the lawyer with perfect cheerfulness.  "As his
+relations, you have no doubt had superior opportunities for
+observing his condition.  I understand also that you may think it
+necessary to have him legally declared non compos, a proceeding
+which, you are aware, might result in the incarceration of our
+distinguished friend in a mad-house."
+
+"Pardon, Senor," interrupted Dona Maria proudly, "you do not
+comprehend the family.  When a Sepulvida is visited of God we do
+not ask the Government to confine him like a criminal.  We protect
+him in his own house from the consequences of his frenzy."
+
+"From the machinations of the worldly and heretical," broke in the
+priest, "and from the waste and dispersion of inherited
+possessions."
+
+"Very true," continued Colonel Parker, with unalterable good-humor;
+"but I was only about to say that there might be conflicting
+evidence of his condition.  For instance, our friend has been here
+three days.  In that time he has had three interviews with three
+individuals under singular circumstances."  Colonel Parker then
+briefly recounted the episodes of the landlord, the gambler, Miss
+Jenkinson and the poetess, as they had been related to him.  "Yet,"
+he continued, "all but one of these individuals are willing to
+swear that they not only believe Don Jose perfectly sane, but
+endowed with a singularly sound judgment.  In fact, the testimony
+of Mr. Hamlin and Miss Jenkinson is remarkably clear on that
+subject."
+
+The company exchanged a supercilious smile.  "Do you not see, O
+Senor Advocate," said Don Vincente compassionately, "that this is
+but a conspiracy to avail themselves of our relative's weakness.
+Of a necessity they find him sane who benefits them."
+
+"I have thought of that, and am glad to hear you say so," returned
+the lawyer still more cheerfully, "for your prompt opinion
+emboldens me to be at once perfectly frank with you.  Briefly then,
+Don Jose has summoned me here to make a final disposition of his
+property.  In the carrying out of certain theories of his, which it
+is not my province to question, he has resolved upon comparative
+poverty for himself as best fitted for his purpose, and to employ
+his wealth solely for others.  In fact, of all his vast possessions
+he retains for himself only an income sufficient for the bare
+necessaries of life."
+
+"And you have done this?" they asked in one voice.
+
+"Not yet," said the lawyer.
+
+"Blessed San Antonio, we have come in time!" ejaculated Dona
+Carmen.  "Another day and it would have been too late; it was an
+inspiration of the Blessed Innocents themselves," said Dona Maria,
+crossing herself.  "Can you longer doubt that this is the wildest
+madness?" said Father Felipe with flashing eyes.
+
+"Yet," returned the lawyer, caressing his heavy beard with a
+meditative smile, "the ingenious fellow actually instanced the vows
+of YOUR OWN ORDER, reverend sir, as an example in support of his
+theory.  But to be brief.  Conceiving, then, that his holding of
+property was a mere accident of heritage, not admitted by him,
+unworthy his acceptance, and a relic of superstitious ignorance"--
+
+"This is the very sacrilege of Satanic prepossession," broke in the
+priest indignantly.
+
+"He therefore," continued the lawyer composedly, "makes over and
+reverts the whole of his possessions, with the exceptions I have
+stated, to his family and the Church."
+
+A breathless and stupefying silence fell upon the company.  In the
+dead hush the sound of Polly Jenkinson's piano, played in a distant
+room, could be distinctly heard.  With their vacant eyes staring at
+him the speaker continued:
+
+"That deed of gift I have drawn up as he dictated it.  I don't mind
+saying that in the opinion of some he might be declared non compos
+upon the evidence of that alone.  I need not say how relieved I am
+to find that your opinion coincides with my own."
+
+"But," gasped Father Felipe hurriedly, with a quick glance at the
+others, "it does not follow that it will be necessary to resort to
+these legal measures.  Care, counsel, persuasion--"
+
+"The general ministering of kinship--nursing, a woman's care--the
+instincts of affection," piped Dona Maria in breathless eagerness.
+
+"Any light social distraction--a harmless flirtation--a possible
+attachment," suggested Dona Carmen shyly.
+
+"Change of scene--active exercise--experiences--even as those you
+have related," broke in Don Vincente.
+
+"I for one have ever been opposed to LEGAL measures," said Don
+Victor.  "A mere consultation of friends--in fact, a fete like this
+is sufficient."
+
+"Good friends," said Father Felipe, who had by this time recovered
+himself, taking out his snuff-box portentously, "it would seem
+truly, from the document which this discreet caballero has spoken
+of, that the errors of our dear Don Jose are rather of method than
+intent, and that while we may freely accept the one"--
+
+"Pardon," interrupted Colonel Parker with bland persistence, "but I
+must point out to you that what we call in law 'a consideration' is
+necessary to the legality of a conveyance, even though that
+consideration be frivolous and calculated to impair the validity of
+the document."
+
+"Truly," returned the good padre insinuatingly; "but if a discreet
+advocate were to suggest the substitution of some more pious and
+reasonable consideration"--
+
+"But that would be making it a perfectly sane and gratuitous
+document, not only glaringly inconsistent with your charges, my
+good friends, with Don Jose's attitude towards you and his flight
+from home, but open to the gravest suspicion in law.  In fact, its
+apparent propriety in the face of these facts would imply improper
+influence."
+
+The countenances of the company fell.  The lawyer's face, however,
+became still more good-humored and sympathizing.  "The case is
+simply this.  If in the opinion of judge and jury Don Jose is
+declared insane, the document is worthless except as a proof of
+that fact or a possible indication of the undue influence of his
+relations, which might compel the court to select his guardians and
+trustees elsewhere than among them."
+
+"Friend Abogado," said Father Felipe with extraordinary
+deliberation, "the document thou hast just described so eloquently
+convinces me beyond all doubt that Don Jose is not only perfectly
+sane but endowed with a singular discretion.  I consider it as a
+delicate and high-spirited intimation to us, his friends and
+kinsmen, of his unalterable and logically just devotion to his
+family and religion, whatever may seem to be his poetical and
+imaginative manner of declaring it.  I think there is not one
+here," continued the padre, looking around him impressively, "who
+is not entirely satisfied of Don Jose's reason and competency to
+arrange his own affairs."
+
+"Entirely," "truly," "perfectly," eagerly responded the others with
+affecting spontaneity.
+
+"Nay, more.  To prevent any misconception, we shall deem it our
+duty to take every opportunity of making our belief publicly
+known," added Father Felipe.
+
+The padre and Colonel Parker gazed long and gravely into each
+other's eyes.  It may have been an innocent touch of the sunlight
+through the window, but a faint gleam seemed to steal into the
+pupil of the affable lawyer at the same moment that, probably from
+the like cause, there was a slight nervous contraction of the left
+eyelid of the pious father.  But it passed, and the next instant
+the door opened to admit Don Jose Sepulvida.
+
+He was at once seized and effusively embraced by the entire company
+with every protest of affection and respect.  not only Mr. Hamlin
+and Mr. Jenkinson, who accompanied him as invited guests, but
+Roberto, in a new suit of clothes and guiltless of stain or trace
+of dissipation, shared in the pronounced friendliness of the
+kinsmen.  Padre Felipe took snuff, Colonel Parker blew his nose
+gently.
+
+Nor were they less demonstrative of their new convictions later at
+the banquet.  Don Jose, with Jenkinson and the padre on his right
+and left, preserved his gentle and half-melancholy dignity in the
+midst of the noisy fraternization.  Even Padre Felipe, in a brief
+speech or exhortation proposing the health of their host, lent
+himself in his own tongue to this polite congeniality.  "We have
+had also, my friends and brothers," he said in peroration, "a
+pleasing example of the compliment of imitation shown by our
+beloved Don Jose.  No one who has known him during his friendly
+sojourn in this community but will be struck with the conviction
+that he has acquired that most marvelous faculty of your great
+American nation, the exhibition of humor and of the practical
+joke."
+
+Every eye was turned upon the imperturbable face of Don Jose as he
+slowly rose to reply.  "In bidding you to this fete, my friends and
+kinsmen," he began calmly, "it was with the intention of formally
+embracing the habits, customs, and spirit of American institutions
+by certain methods of renunciation of the past, as became a
+caballero of honor and resolution.  Those methods may possibly be
+known to some of you."  He paused for a moment as if to allow the
+members of his family to look unconscious.  "Since then, in the
+wisdom of God, it has occurred to me that my purpose may be as
+honorably effected by a discreet blending of the past and the
+present--in a word, by the judicious combination of the interests
+of my native people and the American nation.  In consideration of
+that purpose, friends and kinsmen, I ask you to join me in drinking
+the good health of my host Senor Jenkinson, my future father-in-
+law, from whom I have to-day had the honor to demand the hand of
+the peerless Polly, his daughter, as the future mistress of the
+Rancho of the Blessed Innocents."
+
+
+The marriage took place shortly after.  Nor was the free will and
+independence of Don Jose Sepulvida in the least opposed by his
+relations.  Whether they felt they had already committed
+themselves, or had hopes in the future, did not transpire.  Enough
+that the escapade of a week was tacitly forgotten.  The only
+allusion ever made to the bridegroom's peculiarities was drawn from
+the demure lips of the bride herself on her installation at the
+"Blessed Innocents."
+
+"And what, little one, didst thou find in me to admire?" Don Jose
+had asked tenderly.
+
+"Oh, you seemed to be so much like that dear old Don Quixote, you
+know," she answered demurely.
+
+"Don Quixote," repeated Don Jose with gentle gravity.  "But, my
+child, that was only a mere fiction--a romance, of one Cervantes.
+Believe me, of a truth there never was any such person!"
+
+
+
+A SECRET OF TELEGRAPH HILL
+
+
+I.
+
+
+As Mr. Herbert Bly glanced for the first time at the house which
+was to be his future abode in San Francisco, he was somewhat
+startled.  In that early period of feverish civic improvement the
+street before it had been repeatedly graded and lowered until the
+dwelling--originally a pioneer suburban villa perched upon a slope
+of Telegraph Hill--now stood sixty feet above the sidewalk,
+superposed like some Swiss chalet on successive galleries built in
+the sand-hill, and connected by a half-dozen distinct zigzag
+flights of wooden staircase.  Stimulated, however, by the thought
+that the view from the top would be a fine one, and that existence
+there would have all the quaint originality of Robinson Crusoe's
+tree-dwelling, Mr. Bly began cheerfully to mount the steps.  It
+should be premised that, although a recently appointed clerk in a
+large banking house, Mr. Bly was somewhat youthful and imaginative,
+and regarded the ascent as part of that "Excelsior" climbing
+pointed out by a great poet as a praiseworthy function of ambitious
+youth.
+
+Reaching at last the level of the veranda, he turned to the view.
+The distant wooded shore of Contra Costa, the tossing white-caps
+and dancing sails of the bay between, and the foreground at his
+feet of wharves and piers, with their reed-like jungles of masts
+and cordage, made up a bright, if somewhat material, picture.  To
+his right rose the crest of the hill, historic and memorable as the
+site of the old semaphoric telegraph, the tossing of whose gaunt
+arms formerly thrilled the citizens with tidings from the sea.
+Turning to the house, he recognized the prevailing style of light
+cottage architecture, although incongruously confined to narrow
+building plots and the civic regularity of a precise street
+frontage.  Thus a dozen other villas, formerly scattered over the
+slope, had been laboriously displaced and moved to the rigorous
+parade line drawn by the street surveyor, no matter how irregular
+and independent their design and structure.  Happily, the few
+scrub-oaks and low bushes which formed the scant vegetation of this
+vast sand dune offered no obstacle and suggested no incongruity.
+Beside the house before which Mr. Bly now stood, a prolific Madeira
+vine, quickened by the six months' sunshine, had alone survived the
+displacement of its foundations, and in its untrimmed luxuriance
+half hid the upper veranda from his view.
+
+Still glowing with his exertion, the young man rang the bell and
+was admitted into a fair-sized drawing-room, whose tasteful and
+well-arranged furniture at once prepossessed him.  An open piano, a
+sheet of music carelessly left on the stool, a novel lying face
+downwards on the table beside a skein of silk, and the distant
+rustle of a vanished skirt through an inner door, gave a suggestion
+of refined domesticity to the room that touched the fancy of the
+homeless and nomadic Bly.  He was still enjoying, in half
+embarrassment, that vague and indescribable atmosphere of a refined
+woman's habitual presence, when the door opened and the mistress of
+the house formally presented herself.
+
+She was a faded but still handsome woman.  Yet she wore that
+peculiar long, limp, formless house-shawl which in certain phases
+of Anglo-Saxon spinster and widowhood assumes the functions of the
+recluse's veil and announces the renunciation of worldly vanities
+and a resigned indifference to external feminine contour.  The most
+audacious masculine arm would shrink from clasping that shapeless
+void in which the flatness of asceticism or the heavings of passion
+might alike lie buried.  She had also in some mysterious way
+imported into the fresh and pleasant room a certain bombaziny
+shadow of the past, and a suggestion of that appalling reminiscence
+known as "better days."  Though why it should be always represented
+by ashen memories, or why better days in the past should be
+supposed to fix their fitting symbol in depression in the present,
+Mr. Bly was too young and too preoccupied at the moment to
+determine.  He only knew that he was a little frightened of her,
+and fixed his gaze with a hopeless fascination on a letter which
+she somewhat portentously carried under the shawl, and which seemed
+already to have yellowed in its arctic shade.
+
+"Mr. Carstone has written to me that you would call," said Mrs.
+Brooks with languid formality.  "Mr. Carstone was a valued friend
+of my late husband, and I suppose has told you the circumstances--
+the only circumstances--which admit of my entertaining his
+proposition of taking anybody, even temporarily, under my roof.
+The absence of my dear son for six months at Portland, Oregon,
+enables me to place his room at the disposal of Mr. Carstone's
+young protege, who, Mr. Carstone tells me, and I have every reason
+to believe, is, if perhaps not so seriously inclined nor yet a
+church communicant, still of a character and reputation not
+unworthy to follow my dear Tappington in our little family circle
+as he has at his desk in the bank."
+
+The sensitive Bly, struggling painfully out of an abstraction as to
+how he was ever to offer the weekly rent of his lodgings to such a
+remote and respectable person, and also somewhat embarrassed at
+being appealed to in the third person, here started and bowed.
+
+"The name of Bly is not unfamiliar to me," continued Mrs. Brooks,
+pointing to a chair and sinking resignedly into another, where her
+baleful shawl at once assumed the appearance of a dust-cover; "some
+of my dearest friends were intimate with the Blys of Philadelphia.
+They were a branch of the Maryland Blys of the eastern shore, of
+whom my Uncle James married.  Perhaps you are distantly related?"
+
+Mrs. Brooks was perfectly aware that her visitor was of unknown
+Western origin, and a poor but clever protege of the rich banker;
+but she was one of a certain class of American women who, in the
+midst of a fierce democracy, are more or less cat-like conservators
+of family pride and lineage, and more or less felinely inconsistent
+and treacherous to republican principles.  Bly, who had just
+settled in his mind to send her the rent anonymously--as a weekly
+valentine--recovered himself and his spirits in his usual boyish
+fashion.
+
+"I am afraid, Mrs. Brooks," he said gayly, "I cannot lay claim to
+any distinguished relationship, even to that 'Nelly Bly' who, you
+remember, 'winked her eye when she went to sleep.'"  He stopped in
+consternation.  The terrible conviction flashed upon him that this
+quotation from a popular negro-minstrel song could not possibly be
+remembered by a lady as refined as his hostess, or even known to
+her superior son.  The conviction was intensified by Mrs. Brooks
+rising with a smileless face, slightly shedding the possible
+vulgarity with a shake of her shawl, and remarking that she would
+show him her son's room, led the way upstairs to the apartment
+recently vacated by the perfect Tappington.
+
+Preceded by the same distant flutter of unseen skirts in the
+passage which he had first noticed on entering the drawing-room,
+and which evidently did not proceed from his companion, whose self-
+composed cerements would have repressed any such indecorous
+agitation, Mr. Bly stepped timidly into the room.  It was a very
+pretty apartment, suggesting the same touches of tasteful
+refinement in its furniture and appointments, and withal so
+feminine in its neatness and regularity, that, conscious of his
+frontier habits and experience, he felt at once repulsively
+incongruous.  "I cannot expect, Mr. Bly," said Mrs. Brooks
+resignedly, "that you can share my son's extreme sensitiveness to
+disorder and irregularity; but I must beg you to avoid as much as
+possible disturbing the arrangement of the book-shelves, which, you
+observe, comprise his books of serious reference, the Biblical
+commentaries, and the sermons which were his habitual study.  I
+must beg you to exercise the same care in reference to the valuable
+offerings from his Sabbath-school scholars which are upon the
+mantel.  The embroidered book-marker, the gift of the young ladies
+of his Bible-class in Dr. Stout's church, is also, you perceive,
+kept for ornament and affectionate remembrance.  The harmonium--
+even if you are not yourself given to sacred song--I trust you will
+not find in your way, nor object to my daughter continuing her
+practice during your daily absence.  Thank you.  The door you are
+looking at leads by a flight of steps to the side street."
+
+"A very convenient arrangement," said Bly hopefully, who saw a
+chance for an occasional unostentatious escape from a too
+protracted contemplation of Tappington's perfections.  "I mean," he
+added hurriedly, "to avoid disturbing you at night."
+
+"I believe my son had neither the necessity nor desire to use it
+for that purpose," returned Mrs. Brooks severely; "although he
+found it sometimes a convenient short cut to church on Sabbath when
+he was late."
+
+Bly, who in his boyish sensitiveness to external impressions had by
+this time concluded that a life divided between the past
+perfections of Tappington and the present renunciations of Mrs.
+Brooks would be intolerable, and was again abstractedly inventing
+some delicate excuse for withdrawing without committing himself
+further, was here suddenly attracted by a repetition of the
+rustling of the unseen skirt.  This time it was nearer, and this
+time it seemed to strike even Mrs. Brooks's remote preoccupation.
+"My daughter, who is deeply devoted to her brother," she said,
+slightly raising her voice, "will take upon herself the care of
+looking after Tappington's precious mementoes, and spare you the
+trouble.  Cherry, dear! this way.  This is the young gentleman
+spoken of by Mr. Carstone, your papa's friend.  My daughter
+Cherubina, Mr. Bly."
+
+The fair owner of the rustling skirt, which turned out to be a
+pretty French print, had appeared at the doorway.  She was a tall,
+slim blonde, with a shy, startled manner, as of a penitent nun who
+was suffering for some conventual transgression--a resemblance that
+was heightened by her short-cut hair, that might have been cropped
+as if for punishment.  A certain likeness to her mother suggested
+that she was qualifying for that saint's ascetic shawl--subject,
+however, to rebellious intervals, indicated in the occasional
+sidelong fires of her gray eyes.  Yet the vague impression that she
+knew more of the world than her mother, and that she did not look
+at all as if her name was Cherubina, struck Bly in the same
+momentary glance.
+
+"Mr. Bly is naturally pleased with what he has seen of our dear
+Tappington's appointments; and as I gather from Mr. Carstone's
+letter that he is anxious to enter at once and make the most of the
+dear boy's absence, you will see, my dear Cherry, that Ellen has
+everything ready for him?"
+
+Before the unfortunate Bly could explain or protest, the young girl
+lifted her gray eyes to his.  Whether she had perceived and
+understood his perplexity he could not tell; but the swift shy
+glance was at once appealing, assuring, and intelligent.  She was
+certainly unlike her mother and brother.  Acting with his usual
+impulsiveness, he forgot his previous resolution, and before he
+left had engaged to begin his occupation of the room on the
+following day.
+
+The next afternoon found him installed.  Yet, after he had unpacked
+his modest possessions and put them away, after he had placed his
+few books on the shelves, where they looked glaringly trivial and
+frivolous beside the late tenant's severe studies; after he had set
+out his scanty treasures in the way of photographs and some curious
+mementoes of his wandering life, and then quickly put them back
+again with a sudden angry pride at exposing them to the
+unsympathetic incongruity of the other ornaments, he, nevertheless,
+felt ill at ease.  He glanced in vain around the pretty room.  It
+was not the delicately flowered wall-paper; it was not the white
+and blue muslin window-curtains gracefully tied up with blue and
+white ribbons; it was not the spotless bed, with its blue and white
+festooned mosquito-net and flounced valances, and its medallion
+portrait of an unknown bishop at the back; it was not the few
+tastefully framed engravings of certain cardinal virtues, "The Rock
+of Ages," and "The Guardian Angel"; it was not the casts in relief
+of "Night" and "Morning"; it was certainly not the cosy dimity-
+covered arm-chairs and sofa, nor yet the clean-swept polished grate
+with its cheerful fire sparkling against the chill afternoon sea-
+fogs without; neither was it the mere feminine suggestion, for that
+touched a sympathetic chord in his impulsive nature; nor the
+religious and ascetic influence, for he had occupied a monastic
+cell in a school of the padres at an old mission, and slept
+profoundly;--it was none of those, and yet a part of all.  Most
+habitations retain a cast or shell of their previous tenant that,
+fitting tightly or loosely, is still able to adjust itself to the
+newcomer; in most occupied apartments there is still a shadowy
+suggestion of the owner's individuality; there was nothing here
+that fitted Bly--nor was there either, strange to say, any evidence
+of the past proprietor in this inhospitality of sensation.  It did
+not strike him at the time that it was this very LACK of
+individuality which made it weird and unreal, that it was strange
+only because it was ARTIFICIAL, and that a REAL Tappington had
+never inhabited it.
+
+He walked to the window--that never-failing resource of the unquiet
+mind--and looked out.  He was a little surprised to find, that,
+owing to the grading of the house, the scrub-oaks and bushes of the
+hill were nearly on the level of his window, as also was the
+adjoining side street on which his second door actually gave.
+Opening this, the sudden invasion of the sea-fog and the figure of
+a pedestrian casually passing along the disused and abandoned
+pavement not a dozen feet from where he had been comfortably
+seated, presented such a striking contrast to the studious quiet
+and cosiness of his secluded apartment that he hurriedly closed the
+door again with a sense of indiscreet exposure.  Returning to the
+window, he glanced to the left, and found that he was overlooked by
+the side veranda of another villa in the rear, evidently on its way
+to take position on the line of the street.  Although in actual and
+deliberate transit on rollers across the backyard and still
+occulting a part of the view, it remained, after the reckless
+fashion of the period, inhabited.  Certainly, with a door fronting
+a thoroughfare, and a neighbor gradually approaching him, he would
+not feel lonely or lack excitement.
+
+He drew his arm-chair to the fire and tried to realize the all-
+pervading yet evasive Tappington.  There was no portrait of him in
+the house, and although Mrs. Brooks had said that he "favored" his
+sister, Bly had, without knowing why, instinctively resented it.
+He had even timidly asked his employer, and had received the vague
+reply that he was "good-looking enough," and the practical but
+discomposing retort, "What do you want to know for?"  As he really
+did not know why, the inquiry had dropped.  He stared at the
+monumental crystal ink-stand half full of ink, yet spotless and
+free from stains, that stood on the table, and tried to picture
+Tappington daintily dipping into it to thank the fair donors--
+"daughters of Rebecca."  Who were they? and what sort of man would
+they naturally feel grateful to?
+
+What was that?
+
+He turned to the window, which had just resounded to a slight tap
+or blow, as if something soft had struck it.  With an instinctive
+suspicion of the propinquity of the adjoining street he rose, but a
+single glance from the window satisfied him that no missile would
+have reached it from thence.  He scanned the low bushes on the
+level before him; certainly no one could be hiding there.  He
+lifted his eyes toward the house on the left; the curtains of the
+nearest window appeared to be drawn suddenly at the same moment.
+Could it have come from there?  Looking down upon the window-ledge,
+there lay the mysterious missile--a little misshapen ball.  He
+opened the window and took it up.  It was a small handkerchief tied
+into a soft knot, and dampened with water to give it the necessary
+weight as a projectile.
+
+Was it apparently the trick of a mischievous child? or--
+
+But here a faint knock on the door leading into the hall checked
+his inquiry.  He opened it sharply in his excitement, and was
+embarrassed to find the daughter of his hostess standing there,
+shy, startled, and evidently equally embarrassed by his abrupt
+response.
+
+"Mother only wanted me to ask you if Ellen had put everything to
+rights," she said, making a step backwards.
+
+"Oh, thank you.  Perfectly," said Herbert with effusion.  "Nothing
+could be better done.  In fact"--
+
+"You're quite sure she hasn't forgotten anything? or that there
+isn't anything you would like changed?" she continued, with her
+eyes leveled on the floor.
+
+"Nothing, I assure you," he said, looking at her downcast lashes.
+As she still remained motionless, he continued cheerfully, "Would
+you--would you--care to look round and see?"
+
+"No; I thank you."
+
+There was an awkward pause.  He still continued to hold the door
+open.  Suddenly she moved forward with a school-girl stride,
+entered the room, and going to the harmonium, sat down upon the
+music-stool beside it, slightly bending forward, with one long,
+slim, white hand on top of the other, resting over her crossed
+knees.
+
+Herbert was a little puzzled.  It was the awkward and brusque act
+of a very young person, and yet nothing now could be more gentle
+and self-composed than her figure and attitude.
+
+"Yes," he continued, smilingly; "I am only afraid that I may not be
+able to live quite up to the neatness and regularity of the example
+I find here everywhere.  You know I am dreadfully careless and not
+at all orderly.  I shudder to think what may happen; but you and
+your mother, Miss Brooks, I trust, will make up your minds to
+overlook and forgive a good deal.  I shall do my best to be worthy
+of Mr. Tap--of my predecessor--but even then I am afraid you'll
+find me a great bother."
+
+She raised her shy eyelids.  The faintest ghost of a long-buried
+dimple came into her pale cheek as she said softly, to his utter
+consternation:
+
+"Rats!"
+
+Had she uttered an oath he could not have been more startled than
+he was by this choice gem of Western saloon-slang from the pure
+lips of this Evangeline-like figure before him.  He sat gazing at
+her with a wild hysteric desire to laugh.  She lifted her eyes
+again, swept him with a slightly terrified glance, and said:
+
+"Tap says you all say that when any one makes-believe politeness to
+you."
+
+"Oh, your BROTHER says that, does he?" said Herbert, laughing.
+
+"Yes, and sometimes 'Old rats.'  But," she continued hurriedly, "HE
+doesn't say it; he says YOU all do.  My brother is very particular,
+and very good.  Doctor Stout loves him.  He is thought very much of
+in all Christian circles.  That book-mark was given to him by one
+of his classes."
+
+Every trace of her dimples had vanished.  She looked so sweetly
+grave, and withal so maidenly, sitting there slightly smoothing the
+lengths of her pink fingers, that Herbert was somewhat embarrassed.
+
+"But I assure you, Miss Brooks, I was not making-believe.  I am
+really very careless, and everything is so proper--I mean so neat
+and pretty--here, that I"--he stopped, and, observing the same
+backward wandering of her eye as of a filly about to shy, quickly
+changed the subject.  "You have, or are about to have, neighbors?"
+he said, glancing towards the windows as he recalled the incident
+of a moment before.
+
+"Yes; and they're not at all nice people.  They are from Pike
+County, and very queer.  They came across the plains in '50.  They
+say 'Stranger'; the men are vulgar, and the girls very forward.
+Tap forbids my ever going to the window and looking at them.
+They're quite what you would call 'off color.'"
+
+Herbert, who did not dare to say that he never would have dreamed
+of using such an expression in any young girl's presence, was
+plunged in silent consternation.
+
+"Then your brother doesn't approve of them?" he said, at last,
+awkwardly.
+
+"Oh, not at all.  He even talked of having ground-glass put in all
+these windows, only it would make the light bad."
+
+Herbert felt very embarrassed.  If the mysterious missile came from
+these objectionable young persons, it was evidently because they
+thought they had detected a more accessible and sympathizing
+individual in the stranger who now occupied the room.  He concluded
+he had better not say anything about it.
+
+Miss Brooks's golden eyelashes were bent towards the floor.  "Do
+you play sacred music, Mr. Bly?" she said, without raising them.
+
+"I am afraid not."
+
+"Perhaps you know only negro-minstrel songs?"
+
+"I am afraid--yes."
+
+"I know one."  The dimples faintly came back again.  "It's called
+'The Ham-fat Man.'  Some day when mother isn't in I'll play it for
+you."
+
+Then the dimples fled again, and she immediately looked so
+distressed that Herbert came to her assistance.
+
+"I suppose your brother taught you that too?"
+
+"Oh dear, no!" she returned, with her frightened glance; "I only
+heard him say some people preferred that kind of thing to sacred
+music, and one day I saw a copy of it in a music-store window in
+Clay Street, and bought it.  Oh no! Tappington didn't teach it to
+me."
+
+In the pleasant discovery that she was at times independent of her
+brother's perfections, Herbert smiled, and sympathetically drew a
+step nearer to her.  She rose at once, somewhat primly holding back
+the sides of her skirt, school-girl fashion, with thumb and finger,
+and her eyes cast down.
+
+"Good afternoon, Mr. Bly."
+
+"Must you go?  Good afternoon."
+
+She walked directly to the open door, looking very tall and stately
+as she did so, but without turning towards him.  When she reached
+it she lifted her eyes; there was the slightest suggestion of a
+return of her dimples in the relaxation of her grave little mouth.
+Then she said, "good-bye, Mr. Bly," and departed.
+
+The skirt of her dress rustled for an instant in the passage.
+Herbert looked after her.  "I wonder if she skipped then--she looks
+like a girl that might skip at such a time," he said to himself.
+"How very odd she is--and how simple!  But I must pull her up in
+that slang when I know her better.  Fancy her brother telling her
+THAT!  What a pair they must be!"  Nevertheless, when he turned
+back into the room again he forbore going to the window to indulge
+further curiosity in regard to his wicked neighbors.  A certain new
+feeling of respect to his late companion--and possibly to himself--
+held him in check.  Much as he resented Tappington's perfections,
+he resented quite as warmly the presumption that he was not quite
+as perfect, which was implied in that mysterious overture.  He
+glanced at the stool on which she had been sitting with a half-
+brotherly smile, and put it reverently on one side with a very
+vivid recollection of her shy maidenly figure.  In some mysterious
+way too the room seemed to have lost its formal strangeness;
+perhaps it was the touch of individuality--HERS--that had been
+wanting?  He began thoughtfully to dress himself for his regular
+dinner at the Poodle Dog Restaurant, and when he left the room he
+turned back to look once more at the stool where she had sat.  Even
+on his way to that fast and famous cafe of the period he felt, for
+the first time in his thoughtless but lonely life, the gentle
+security of the home he had left behind him.
+
+
+II.
+
+
+It was three or four days before he became firmly adjusted to his
+new quarters.  During this time he had met Cherry casually on the
+staircase, in going or coming, and received her shy greetings; but
+she had not repeated her visit, nor again alluded to it.  He had
+spent part of a formal evening in the parlor in company with a
+calling deacon, who, unappalled by the Indian shawl for which the
+widow had exchanged her household cerements on such occasions,
+appeared to Herbert to have remote matrimonial designs, as far at
+least as a sympathetic deprecation of the vanities of the present,
+an echoing of her sighs like a modest encore, a preternatural
+gentility of manner, a vague allusion to the necessity of bearing
+"one another's burdens," and an everlasting promise in store, would
+seem to imply.  To Herbert's vivid imagination, a discussion on the
+doctrinal points of last Sabbath's sermon was fraught with delicate
+suggestion and an acceptance by the widow of an appointment to
+attend the Wednesday evening "Lectures" had all the shy reluctant
+yielding of a granted rendezvous.  Oddly enough, the more formal
+attitude seemed to be reserved for the young people, who, in the
+suggestive atmosphere of this spiritual flirtation, alone appeared
+to preserve the proprieties and, to some extent, decorously
+chaperon their elders.  Herbert gravely turned the leaves of
+Cherry's music while she played and sang one or two discreet but
+depressing songs expressive of her unalterable but proper devotion
+to her mother's clock, her father's arm-chair, and her aunt's
+Bible; and Herbert joined somewhat boyishly in the soul-subduing
+refrain.  Only once he ventured to suggest in a whisper that he
+would like to add HER music-stool to the adorable inventory; but he
+was met by such a disturbed and terrified look that he desisted.
+"Another night of this wild and reckless dissipation will finish
+me," he said lugubriously to himself when he reached the solitude
+of his room.  "I wonder how many times a week I'd have to help the
+girl play the spiritual gooseberry downstairs before we could have
+any fun ourselves?"
+
+Here the sound of distant laughter, interspersed with vivacious
+feminine shrieks, came through the open window.  He glanced between
+the curtains.  His neighbor's house was brilliantly lit, and the
+shadows of a few romping figures were chasing each other across the
+muslin shades of the windows.  The objectionable young women were
+evidently enjoying themselves.  In some conditions of the mind
+there is a certain exasperation in the spectacle of unmeaning
+enjoyment, and he shut the window sharply.  At the same moment some
+one knocked at his door.
+
+It was Miss Brooks, who had just come upstairs.
+
+"Will you please let me have my music-stool?"
+
+He stared at her a moment in surprise, then recovering himself,
+said, "Yes, certainly," and brought the stool.  For an instant he
+was tempted to ask why she wanted it, but his pride forbade him.
+
+"Thank you.  Good-night."
+
+"Good-night!"
+
+"I hope it wasn't in your way?"
+
+"Not at all."
+
+"Good-night!"
+
+"Good-night."
+
+She vanished.  Herbert was perplexed.  Between young ladies whose
+naive exuberance impelled them to throw handkerchiefs at his window
+and young ladies whose equally naive modesty demanded the
+withdrawal from his bedroom of a chair on which they had once sat,
+his lot seemed to have fallen in a troubled locality.  Yet a day or
+two later he heard Cherry practising on the harmonium as he was
+ascending the stairs on his return from business; she had departed
+before he entered the room, but had left the music-stool behind
+her.  It was not again removed.
+
+One Sunday, the second or third of his tenancy, when Cherry and her
+mother were at church, and he had finished some work that he had
+brought from the bank, his former restlessness and sense of
+strangeness returned.  The regular afternoon fog had thickened
+early, and, driving him back from a cheerless, chilly ramble on the
+hill, had left him still more depressed and solitary.  In sheer
+desperation he moved some of the furniture, and changed the
+disposition of several smaller ornaments.  Growing bolder, he even
+attacked the sacred shelf devoted to Tappington's serious
+literature and moral studies.  At first glance the book of sermons
+looked suspiciously fresh and new for a volume of habitual
+reference, but its leaves were carefully cut, and contained one or
+two book-marks.  It was only another evidence of that perfect
+youth's care and neatness.  As he was replacing it he noticed a
+small object folded in white paper at the back of the shelf.  To
+put the book back into its former position it was necessary to take
+this out.  He did so, but its contents slid from his fingers and
+the paper to the floor.  To his utter consternation, looking down
+he saw a pack of playing-cards strewn at his feet!
+
+He hurriedly picked them up.  They were worn and slippery from use,
+and exhaled a faint odor of tobacco.  Had they been left there by
+some temporary visitor unknown to Tappington and his family, or had
+they been hastily hidden by a servant?  Yet they were of a make and
+texture superior to those that a servant would possess; looking at
+them carefully, he recognized them to be of a quality used by the
+better-class gamblers.  Restoring them carefully to their former
+position, he was tempted to take out the other volumes, and was
+rewarded with the further discovery of a small box of ivory
+counters, known as "poker-chips."  It was really very
+extraordinary!  It was quite the cache of some habitual gambler.
+Herbert smiled grimly at the irreverent incongruity of the hiding-
+place selected by its unknown and mysterious owner, and amused
+himself by fancying the horror of his sainted predecessor had he
+made the discovery.  He determined to replace them, and to put some
+mark upon the volumes before them in order to detect any future
+disturbance of them in his absence.
+
+Ought he not to take Miss Brooks in his confidence?  Or should he
+say nothing about it at present, and trust to chance to discover
+the sacrilegious hider?  Could it possibly be Cherry herself,
+guilty of the same innocent curiosity that had impelled her to buy
+the "Ham-fat Man"?  Preposterous!  Besides, the cards had been
+used, and she could not play poker alone!
+
+He watched the rolling fog extinguish the line of Russian Hill, the
+last bit of far perspective from his window.  He glanced at his
+neighbor's veranda, already dripping with moisture; the windows
+were blank; he remembered to have heard the girls giggling in
+passing down the side street on their way to church, and had
+noticed from behind his own curtains that one was rather pretty.
+This led him to think of Cherry again, and to recall the quaint yet
+melancholy grace of her figure as she sat on the stool opposite.
+Why had she withdrawn it so abruptly; did she consider his jesting
+allusion to it indecorous and presuming?  Had he really meant it
+seriously; and was he beginning to think too much about her?  Would
+she ever come again?  How nice it would be if she returned from
+church alone early, and they could have a comfortable chat together
+here!  Would she sing the "Ham-fat Man" for him?  Would the dimples
+come back if she did?  Should he ever know more of this quaint
+repressed side of her nature?  After all, what a dear, graceful,
+tantalizing, lovable creature she was!  Ought he not at all hazards
+try to know her better?  Might it not be here that he would find a
+perfect realization of his boyish dreams, and in HER all that--what
+nonsense he was thinking!
+
+Suddenly Herbert was startled by the sound of a light but hurried
+foot upon the wooden outer step of his second door, and the quick
+but ineffective turning of the door-handle.  He started to his
+feet, his mind still filled with a vision of Cherry.  Then he as
+suddenly remembered that he had locked the door on going out,
+putting the key in his overcoat pocket.  He had returned by the
+front door, and his overcoat was now hanging in the lower hall.
+
+The door again rattled impetuously.  Then it was supplemented by a
+female voice in a hurried whisper: "Open quick, can't you? do
+hurry!"
+
+He was confounded.  The voice was authoritative, not unmusical; but
+it was NOT Cherry's.  Nevertheless he called out quickly, "One
+moment, please, and I'll get the key!" dashed downstairs and up
+again, breathlessly unlocked the door and threw it open.
+
+Nobody was there!
+
+He ran out into the street.  On one side it terminated abruptly on
+the cliff on which his dwelling was perched; on the other, it
+descended more gradually into the next thoroughfare; but up and
+down the street, on either hand, no one was to be seen.  A slightly
+superstitious feeling for an instant crept over him.  Then he
+reflected that the mysterious visitor could in the interval of his
+getting the key have easily slipped down the steps of the cliff or
+entered the shrubbery of one of the adjacent houses.  But why had
+she not waited?  And what did she want?  As he reentered his door
+he mechanically raised his eyes to the windows of his neighbor's.
+This time he certainly was not mistaken.  The two amused,
+mischievous faces that suddenly disappeared behind the curtain as
+he looked up showed that the incident had not been unwitnessed.
+Yet it was impossible that it could have been either of THEM.
+Their house was only accessible by a long detour.  It might have
+been the trick of a confederate; but the tone of half familiarity
+and half entreaty in the unseen visitor's voice dispelled the idea
+of any collusion.  He entered the room and closed the door angrily.
+A grim smile stole over his face as he glanced around at the dainty
+saint-like appointments of the absent Tappington, and thought what
+that irreproachable young man would have said to the indecorous
+intrusion, even though it had been a mistake.  Would those
+shameless Pike County girls have dared to laugh at HIM?
+
+But he was again puzzled to know why he himself should have been
+selected for this singular experience.  Why was HE considered fair
+game for these girls?  And, for the matter of that, now that he
+reflected upon it, why had even this gentle, refined, and
+melancholy Cherry thought it necessary to talk slang to HIM on
+their first acquaintance, and offer to sing him the "Ham-fat Man"?
+It was true he had been a little gay, but never dissipated.  Of
+course he was not a saint, like Tappington--oh, THAT was it!  He
+believed he understood it now.  He was suffering from that
+extravagant conception of what worldliness consists of, so common
+to very good people with no knowledge of the world.  Compared to
+Tappington he was in their eyes, of course, a rake and a roue.  The
+explanation pleased him.  He would not keep it to himself.  He
+would gain Cherry's confidence and enlist her sympathies.  Her
+gentle nature would revolt at this injustice to their lonely
+lodger.  She would see that there were degrees of goodness besides
+her brother's.  She would perhaps sit on that stool again and NOT
+sing the "Ham-fat Man."
+
+A day or two afterwards the opportunity seemed offered to him.  As
+he was coming home and ascending the long hilly street, his eye was
+taken by a tall graceful figure just preceding him.  It was she.
+He had never before seen her in the street, and was now struck with
+her ladylike bearing and the grave superiority of her perfectly
+simple attire.  In a thoroughfare haunted by handsome women and
+striking toilettes, the refined grace of her mourning costume, and
+a certain stateliness that gave her the look of a young widow, was
+a contrast that evidently attracted others than himself.  It was
+with an odd mingling of pride and jealousy that he watched the
+admiring yet respectful glances of the passers-by, some of whom
+turned to look again, and one or two to retrace their steps and
+follow her at a decorous distance.  This caused him to quicken his
+own pace, with a new anxiety and a remorseful sense of wasted
+opportunity.  What a booby he had been, not to have made more of
+his contiguity to this charming girl--to have been frightened at
+the naive decorum of her maidenly instincts!  He reached her side,
+and raised his hat with a trepidation at her new-found graces--with
+a boldness that was defiant of her other admirers.  She blushed
+slightly.
+
+"I thought you'd overtake me before," she said naively.  "I saw YOU
+ever so long ago."
+
+He stammered, with an equal simplicity, that he had not dared to.
+
+She looked a little frightened again, and then said hurriedly: "I
+only thought that I would meet you on Montgomery Street, and we
+would walk home together.  I don't like to go out alone, and mother
+cannot always go with me.  Tappington never cared to take me out--I
+don't know why.  I think he didn't like the people staring and stop
+ping us.  But they stare more--don't you think?--when one is alone.
+So I thought if you were coming straight home we might come
+together--unless you have something else to do?"
+
+Herbert impulsively reiterated his joy at meeting her, and averred
+that no other engagement, either of business or pleasure, could or
+would stand in his way.  Looking up, however, it was with some
+consternation that he saw they were already within a block of the
+house.
+
+"Suppose we take a turn around the hill and come back by the old
+street down the steps?" he suggested earnestly.
+
+The next moment he regretted it.  The frightened look returned to
+her eyes; her face became melancholy and formal again.
+
+"No!" she said quickly.  "That would be taking a walk with you like
+these young girls and their young men on Saturdays.  That's what
+Ellen does with the butcher's boy on Sundays.  Tappington often
+used to meet them.  Doing the 'Come, Philanders,' as he says you
+call it."
+
+It struck Herbert that the didactic Tappington's method of
+inculcating a horror of slang in his sister's breast was open to
+some objection; but they were already on the steps of their house,
+and he was too much mortified at the reception of his last unhappy
+suggestion to make the confidential disclosure he had intended,
+even if there had still been time.
+
+"There's mother waiting for me," she said, after an awkward pause,
+pointing to the figure of Mrs. Brooks dimly outlined on the
+veranda.  "I suppose she was beginning to be worried about my being
+out alone.  She'll be so glad I met you."  It didn't appear to
+Herbert, however, that Mrs. Brooks exhibited any extravagant joy
+over the occurrence, and she almost instantly retired with her
+daughter into the sitting-room, linking her arm in Cherry's, and,
+as it were, empanoplying her with her own invulnerable shawl.
+Herbert went to his room more dissatisfied with himself than ever.
+
+Two or three days elapsed without his seeing Cherry; even the well-
+known rustle of her skirt in the passage was missing.  On the third
+evening he resolved to bear the formal terrors of the drawing-room
+again, and stumbled upon a decorous party consisting of Mrs.
+Brooks, the deacon, and the pastor's wife--but not Cherry.  It
+struck him on entering that the momentary awkwardness of the
+company and the formal beginning of a new topic indicated that HE
+had been the subject of their previous conversation.  In this idea
+he continued, through that vague spirit of opposition which attacks
+impulsive people in such circumstances, to generally disagree with
+them on all subjects, and to exaggerate what he chose to believe
+they thought objectionable in him.  He did not remain long; but
+learned in that brief interval that Cherry had gone to visit a
+friend in Contra Costa, and would be absent a fortnight; and he was
+conscious that the information was conveyed to him with a peculiar
+significance.
+
+The result of which was only to intensify his interest in the
+absent Cherry, and for a week to plunge him in a sea of conflicting
+doubts and resolutions.  At one time he thought seriously of
+demanding an explanation from Mrs. Brooks, and of confiding to her--
+as he had intended to do to Cherry--his fears that his character
+had been misinterpreted, and his reasons for believing so.  But
+here he was met by the difficulty of formulating what he wished to
+have explained, and some doubts as to whether his confidences were
+prudent.  At another time he contemplated a serious imitation of
+Tappington's perfections, a renunciation of the world, and an
+entire change in his habits.  He would go regularly to church--HER
+church, and take up Tappington's desolate Bible-class.  But here
+the torturing doubt arose whether a young lady who betrayed a
+certain secular curiosity, and who had evidently depended upon her
+brother for a knowledge of the world, would entirely like it.  At
+times he thought of giving up the room and abandoning for ever this
+doubly dangerous proximity; but here again he was deterred by the
+difficulty of giving a satisfactory reason to his employer, who had
+procured it as a favor.  His passion--for such he began to fear it
+to be--led him once to the extravagance of asking a day's holiday
+from the bank, which he vaguely spent in the streets of Oakland in
+the hope of accidentally meeting the exiled Cherry.
+
+
+III.
+
+
+The fortnight slowly passed.  She returned, but he did not see her.
+She was always out or engaged in her room with some female friend
+when Herbert was at home.  This was singular, as she had never
+appeared to him as a young girl who was fond of visiting or had
+ever affected female friendships.  In fact, there was little doubt
+now that, wittingly or unwittingly, she was avoiding him.
+
+He was moodily sitting by the fire one evening, having returned
+early from dinner.  In reply to his habitual but affectedly
+careless inquiry, Ellen had told him that Mrs. Brooks was confined
+to her room by a slight headache, and that Miss Brooks was out.  He
+was trying to read, and listening to the wind that occasionally
+rattled the casement and caused the solitary gas-lamp that was
+visible in the side street to flicker and leap wildly.  Suddenly he
+heard the same footfall upon his outer step and a light tap at the
+door.  Determined this time to solve the mystery, he sprang to his
+feet and ran to the door; but to his anger and astonishment it was
+locked and the key was gone.  Yet he was positive that HE had not
+taken it out.
+
+The tap was timidly repeated.  In desperation he called out,
+"Please don't go away yet.  The key is gone; but I'll find it in a
+moment."  Nevertheless he was at his wits' end.
+
+There was a hesitating pause and then the sound of a key cautiously
+thrust into the lock.  It turned; the door opened, and a tall
+figure, whose face and form were completely hidden in a veil and
+long gray shawl, quickly glided into the room and closed the door
+behind it.  Then it suddenly raised its arms, the shawl was parted,
+the veil fell aside, and Cherry stood before him!
+
+Her face was quite pale.  Her eyes, usually downcast, frightened,
+or coldly clear, were bright and beautiful with excitement.  The
+dimples were faintly there, although the smile was sad and half
+hysterical.  She remained standing, erect and tall, her arms
+dropped at her side, holding the veil and shawl that still depended
+from her shoulders.
+
+"So--I've caught you!" she said, with a strange little laugh.  "Oh
+yes.  'Please don't go away yet.  I'll get the key in a moment,'"
+she continued, mimicking his recent utterance.
+
+He could only stammer, "Miss Brooks--then it was YOU?"
+
+"Yes; and you thought it was SHE, didn't you?  Well, and you're
+caught!  I didn't believe it; I wouldn't believe it when they said
+it.  I determined to find it out myself.  And I have; and it's
+true."
+
+Unable to determine whether she was serious or jesting, and
+conscious only of his delight at seeing her again, he advanced
+impulsively.  But her expression instantly changed: she became at
+once stiff and school-girlishly formal, and stepped back towards
+the door.
+
+"Don't come near me, or I'll go," she said quickly, with her hand
+upon the lock.
+
+"But not before you tell me what you mean," he said half laughingly
+half earnestly.  "Who is SHE? and what wouldn't you have believed?
+For upon my honor, Miss Brooks, I don't know what you are talking
+about."
+
+His evident frankness and truthful manner appeared to puzzle her.
+"You mean to say you were expecting no one?" she said sharply.
+
+"I assure you I was not."
+
+"And--and no woman was ever here--at that door?"
+
+He hesitated.  "Not to-night--not for a long time; not since you
+returned from Oakland."
+
+"Then there WAS one?"
+
+"I believe so."
+
+"You BELIEVE--you don't KNOW?"
+
+"I believed it was a woman from her voice; for the door was locked,
+and the key was downstairs.  When I fetched it and opened the door,
+she--or whoever it was--was gone."
+
+"And that's why you said so imploringly, just now, 'Please don't go
+away yet'?  You see I've caught you.  Ah! I don't wonder you
+blush!"
+
+If he had, his cheeks had caught fire from her brilliant eyes and
+the extravagantly affected sternness--as of a school-girl monitor--
+in her animated face.  Certainly he had never seen such a
+transformation.
+
+"Yes; but, you see, I wanted to know who the intruder was," he
+said, smiling at his own embarrassment.
+
+"You did--well, perhaps THAT will tell you?  It was found under
+your door before I went away."  She suddenly produced from her
+pocket a folded paper and handed it to him.  It was a misspelt
+scrawl, and ran as follows:--
+
+"Why are you so cruel?  Why do you keep me dansing on the stepps
+before them gurls at the windows?  Was it that stuckup Saint, Miss
+Brooks, that you were afraid of, my deer?  Oh, you faithless
+trater!  Wait till I ketch you!  I'll tear your eyes out and hern!"
+
+It did not require great penetration for Herbert to be instantly
+convinced that the writer of this vulgar epistle and the owner of
+the unknown voice were two very different individuals.  The note
+was evidently a trick.  A suspicion of its perpetrators flashed
+upon him.
+
+"Whoever the woman was, it was not she who wrote the note," he said
+positively.  "Somebody must have seen her at the door.  I remember
+now that those girls--your neighbors--were watching me from their
+window when I came out.  Depend upon it, that letter comes from
+them."
+
+Cherry's eyes opened widely with a sudden childlike perception, and
+then shyly dropped.  "Yes," she said slowly; "they DID watch you.
+They know it, for it was they who made it the talk of the
+neighborhood, and that's how it came to mother's ears."  She
+stopped, and, with a frightened look, stepped back towards the door
+again.
+
+"Then THAT was why your mother"--
+
+"Oh yes," interrupted Cherry quickly.  "That was why I went over to
+Oakland, and why mother forbade my walking with you again, and why
+she had a talk with friends about your conduct, and why she came
+near telling Mr. Carstone all about it until I stopped her."  She
+checked herself--he could hardly believe his eyes--the pale, nun-
+like girl was absolutely blushing.
+
+"I thank you, Miss Brooks," he said gravely, "for your
+thoughtfulness, although I hope I could have still proven my
+innocence to Mr. Carstone, even if some unknown woman tried my door
+by mistake, and was seen doing it.  But I am pained to think that
+YOU could have believed me capable of so wanton and absurd an
+impropriety--and such a gross disrespect to your mother's house."
+
+"But," said Cherry with childlike naivete, "you know YOU don't
+think anything of such things, and that's what I told mother."
+
+"You told your mother THAT?"
+
+"Oh yes--I told her Tappington says it's quite common with young
+men.  Please don't laugh--for it's very dreadful.  Tappington
+didn't laugh when he told it to me as a warning.  He was shocked."
+
+"But, my dear Miss Brooks"--
+
+"There--now you're angry--and that's as bad.  Are you sure you
+didn't know that woman?"
+
+"Positive!"
+
+"Yet you seemed very anxious just now that she should wait till you
+opened the door."
+
+"That was perfectly natural."
+
+"I don't think it was natural at all."
+
+"But--according to Tappington"--
+
+"Because my brother is very good you need not make fun of him."
+
+"I assure you I have no such intention.  But what more can I say?
+I give you my word that I don't know who that unlucky woman was.
+No doubt she may have been some nearsighted neighbor who had
+mistaken the house, and I dare say was as thoroughly astonished at
+my voice as I was at hers.  Can I say more?  Is it necessary for me
+to swear that since I have been here no woman has ever entered that
+door--but"--
+
+"But who?"
+
+"Yourself."
+
+"I know what you mean," she said hurriedly, with her old frightened
+look, gliding to the outer door.  "It's shameful what I've done.
+But I only did it because--because I had faith in you, and didn't
+believe what they said was true."  She had already turned the lock.
+There were tears in her pretty eyes.
+
+"Stop," said Herbert gently.  He walked slowly towards her, and
+within reach of her frightened figure stopped with the timid
+respect of a mature and genuine passion.  "You must not be seen
+going out of that door," he said gravely.  "You must let me go
+first, and, when I am gone, lock the door again and go through the
+hall to your own room.  No one must know that I was in the house
+when you came in at that door.  Good-night."
+
+Without offering his hand he lifted his eyes to her face.  The
+dimples were all there--and something else.  He bowed and passed
+out.
+
+Ten minutes later he ostentatiously returned to the house by the
+front door, and proceeded up the stairs to his own room.  As he
+cast a glance around he saw that the music-stool had been moved
+before the fire, evidently with the view of attracting his
+attention.  Lying upon it, carefully folded, was the veil that she
+had worn.  There could be no doubt that it was left there
+purposely.  With a smile at this strange girl's last characteristic
+act of timid but compromising recklessness, after all his
+precautions, he raised it tenderly to his lips, and then hastened
+to hide it from the reach of vulgar eyes.  But had Cherry known
+that its temporary resting-place that night was under his pillow
+she might have doubted his superior caution.
+
+When he returned from the bank the next afternoon, Cherry rapped
+ostentatiously at his door.  "Mother wishes me to ask you," she
+began with a certain prim formality, which nevertheless did not
+preclude dimples, "if you would give us the pleasure of your
+company at our Church Festival to-night?  There will be a concert
+and a collation.  You could accompany us there if you cared.  Our
+friends and Tappington's would be so glad to see you, and Dr. Stout
+would be delighted to make your acquaintance."
+
+"Certainly!" said Herbert, delighted and yet astounded.  "Then," he
+added in a lower voice, "your mother no longer believes me so
+dreadfully culpable?"
+
+"Oh no," said Cherry in a hurried whisper, glancing up and down the
+passage; "I've been talking to her about it, and she is satisfied
+that it is all a jealous trick and slander of these neighbors.
+Why, I told her that they had even said that I was that mysterious
+woman; that I came that way to you because she had forbidden my
+seeing you openly."
+
+"What!  You dared say that?"
+
+"Yes don't you see?  Suppose they said they HAD seen me coming in
+last night--THAT answers it," she said triumphantly.
+
+"Oh, it does?" he said vacantly.
+
+"Perfectly.  So you see she's convinced that she ought to put you
+on the same footing as Tappington, before everybody; and then there
+won't be any trouble.  You'll come, won't you?  It won't be so VERY
+good.  And then, I've told mother that as there have been so many
+street-fights, and so much talk about the Vigilance Committee
+lately, I ought to have somebody for an escort when I am coming
+home.  And if you're known, you see, as one of US, there'll be no
+harm in your meeting me."
+
+"Thank you," he said, extending his hand gratefully.
+
+Her fingers rested a moment in his.  "Where did you put it?" she
+said demurely.
+
+"It?  Oh! IT'S all safe," he said quickly, but somewhat vaguely.
+
+"But I don't call the upper drawer of your bureau safe," she
+returned poutingly, "where EVERYBODY can go.  So you'll find it NOW
+inside the harmonium, on the keyboard."
+
+"Oh, thank you."
+
+"It's quite natural to have left it there ACCIDENTALLY--isn't it?"
+she said imploringly, assisted by all her dimples.  Alas! she had
+forgotten that he was still holding her hand.  Consequently, she
+had not time to snatch it away and vanish, with a stifled little
+cry, before it had been pressed two or three times to his lips.  A
+little ashamed of his own boldness, Herbert remained for a few
+moments in the doorway listening, and looking uneasily down the
+dark passage.  Presently a slight sound came over the fanlight of
+Cherry's room.  Could he believe his ears?  The saint-like Cherry--
+no doubt tutored, for example's sake, by the perfect Tappington--
+was softly whistling.
+
+In this simple fashion the first pages of this little idyl were
+quietly turned.  The book might have been closed or laid aside even
+then.  But it so chanced that Cherry was an unconscious prophet;
+and presently it actually became a prudential necessity for her to
+have a masculine escort when she walked out.  For a growing state
+of lawlessness and crime culminated one day the deep tocsin of the
+Vigilance Committee, and at its stroke fifty thousand peaceful men,
+reverting to the first principles of social safety, sprang to arms,
+assembled at their quarters, or patrolled the streets.  In another
+hour the city of San Francisco was in the hands of a mob--the most
+peaceful, orderly, well organized, and temperate the world had ever
+known, and yet in conception as lawless, autocratic, and imperious
+as the conditions it opposed.
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+Herbert, enrolled in the same section with his employer and one or
+two fellow-clerks, had participated in the meetings of the
+committee with the light-heartedness and irresponsibility of youth,
+regretting only the loss of his usual walk with Cherry and the
+hours that kept him from her house.  He was returning from a
+protracted meeting one night, when the number of arrests and
+searching for proscribed and suspected characters had been so large
+as to induce fears of organized resistance and rescue, and on
+reaching the foot of the hill found it already so late, that to
+avoid disturbing the family he resolved to enter his room directly
+by the door in the side street.  On inserting his key in the lock
+it met with some resisting obstacle, which, however, yielded and
+apparently dropped on the mat inside.  Opening the door and
+stepping into the perfectly dark apartment, he trod upon this
+object, which proved to be another key.  The family must have
+procured it for their convenience during his absence, and after
+locking the door had carelessly left it in the lock.  It was lucky
+that it had yielded so readily.
+
+The fire had gone out.  He closed the door and lit the gas, and
+after taking off his overcoat moved to the door leading into the
+passage to listen if anybody was still stirring.  To his utter
+astonishment he found it locked.  What was more remarkable--the key
+was also INSIDE!  An inexplicable feeling took possession of him.
+He glanced suddenly around the room, and then his eye fell upon the
+bed.  Lying there, stretched at full length, was the recumbent
+figure of a man.
+
+He was apparently in the profound sleep of utter exhaustion.  The
+attitude of his limbs and the order of his dress--of which only his
+collar and cravat had been loosened--showed that sleep must have
+overtaken him almost instantly.  In fact, the bed was scarcely
+disturbed beyond the actual impress of his figure.  He seemed to be
+a handsome, matured man of about forty; his dark straight hair was
+a little thinned over the temples, although his long heavy
+moustache was still youthful and virgin.  His clothes, which were
+elegantly cut and of finer material than that in ordinary use, the
+delicacy and neatness of his linen, the whiteness of his hands,
+and, more particularly, a certain dissipated pallor of complexion
+and lines of recklessness on the brow and cheek, indicated to
+Herbert that the man before him was one of that desperate and
+suspected class--some of whose proscribed members he had been
+hunting--the professional gambler!
+
+Possibly the magnetism of Herbert's intent and astonished gaze
+affected him.  He moved slightly, half opened his eyes, said
+"Halloo, Tap," rubbed them again, wholly opened them, fixed them
+with a lazy stare on Herbert, and said:
+
+"Now, who the devil are you?"
+
+"I think I have the right to ask that question, considering that
+this is my room," said Herbert sharply.
+
+"YOUR room?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+The stranger half raised himself on his elbow, glanced round the
+room, settled himself slowly back on the pillows, with his hands
+clasped lightly behind his head, dropped his eyelids, smiled, and
+said:
+
+"Rats!"
+
+"What?" demanded Herbert, with a resentful sense of sacrilege to
+Cherry's virgin slang.
+
+"Well, old rats then!  D'ye think I don't know this shebang?  Look
+here, Johnny, what are you putting on all this side for, eh?
+What's your little game?  Where's Tappington?"
+
+"If you mean Mr. Brooks, the son of this house, who formerly lived
+in this room," replied Herbert, with a formal precision intended to
+show a doubt of the stranger's knowledge of Tappington, "you ought
+to know that he has left town."
+
+"Left town!" echoed the stranger, raising himself again.  "Oh, I
+see! getting rather too warm for him here?  Humph! I ought to have
+thought of that.  Well, you know, he DID take mighty big risks,
+anyway!"  He was silent a moment, with his brows knit and a rather
+dangerous expression in his handsome face.  "So some d--d hound
+gave him away--eh?"
+
+"I hadn't the pleasure of knowing Mr. Brooks except by reputation,
+as the respected son of the lady upon whose house you have just
+intruded," said Herbert frigidly, yet with a creeping consciousness
+of some unpleasant revelation.
+
+The stranger stared at him for a moment, again looked carefully
+round the room, and then suddenly dropped his head back on the
+pillow, and with his white hands over his eyes and mouth tried to
+restrain a spasm of silent laughter.  After an effort he succeeded,
+wiped his moist eyes, and sat up.
+
+"So you didn't know Tappington, eh?" he said, lazily buttoning his
+collar.
+
+"No."
+
+"No more do I."
+
+He retied his cravat, yawned, rose, shook himself perfectly neat
+again, and going to Herbert's dressing-table quietly took up a
+brush and began to lightly brush himself, occasionally turning to
+the window to glance out.  Presently he turned to Herbert and said:
+
+"Well, Johnny, what's your name?"
+
+"I am Herbert Bly, of Carstone's Bank."
+
+"So, and a member of this same Vigilance Committee, I reckon," he
+continued.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, Mr. Bly, I owe you an apology for coming here, and some
+thanks for the only sleep I've had in forty-eight hours.  I struck
+this old shebang at about ten o'clock, and it's now two, so I
+reckon I've put in about four hours' square sleep.  Now, look
+here."  He beckoned Herbert towards the window.  "Do you see those
+three men standing under that gaslight?  Well, they're part of a
+gang of Vigilantes who've hunted me to the hill, and are waiting to
+see me come out of the bushes, where they reckon I'm hiding.  Go to
+them and say that I'm here!  Tell them you've got Gentleman George--
+George Dornton, the man they've been hunting for a week--in this
+room.  I promise you I won't stir, nor kick up a row, when they've
+come.  Do it, and Carstone, if he's a square man, will raise your
+salary for it, and promote you."  He yawned slightly, and then
+slowly looking around him, drew the easy-chair towards him and
+dropped comfortably in it, gazing at the astounded and motionless
+Herbert with a lazy smile.
+
+"You're wondering what my little game is, Johnny, ain't you?  Well,
+I'll tell you.  What with being hunted from pillar to post, putting
+my old pards to no end of trouble, and then slipping up on it
+whenever I think I've got a sure thing like this,"--he cast an
+almost affectionate glance at the bed,--"I've come to the
+conclusion that it's played out, and I might as well hand in my
+checks.  It's only a question of my being RUN OUT of 'Frisco, or
+hiding until I can SLIP OUT myself; and I've reckoned I might as
+well give them the trouble and expense of transportation.  And if I
+can put a good thing in your way in doing it--why, it will sort of
+make things square with you for the fuss I've given you."
+
+Even in the stupefaction and helplessness of knowing that the man
+before him was the notorious duellist and gambler George Dornton,
+one of the first marked for deportation by the Vigilance Committee,
+Herbert recognized all he had heard of his invincible coolness,
+courage, and almost philosophic fatalism.  For an instant his
+youthful imagination checked even his indignation.  When he
+recovered himself, he said, with rising color and boyish vehemence:
+
+"Whoever YOU may be, I am neither a police officer nor a spy.  You
+have no right to insult me by supposing that I would profit by the
+mistake that made you my guest, or that I would refuse you the
+sanctuary of the roof that covers your insult as well as your
+blunder."
+
+The stranger gazed at him with an amused expression, and then rose
+and stretched out his hand.
+
+"Shake, Mr. Bly!  You're the only man that ever kicked George
+Dornton when he deserved it.  Good-night!"  He took his hat and
+walked to the door.
+
+"Stop!" said Herbert impulsively; "the night is already far gone;
+go back and finish your sleep."
+
+"You mean it?"
+
+"I do."
+
+The stranger turned, walked back to the bed, unfastening his coat
+and collar as he did so, and laid himself down in the attitude of a
+moment before.
+
+"I will call you in the morning," continued Herbert.  "By that
+time,"--he hesitated,--"by that time your pursuers may have given
+up their search.  One word more.  You will be frank with me?"
+
+"Go on."
+
+"Tappington and you are--friends?"
+
+"Well--yes."
+
+"His mother and sister know nothing of this?"
+
+"I reckon he didn't boast of it.  I didn't.  Is that all?"
+sleepily.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Don't YOU worry about HIM.  Good-night."
+
+"Good-night."
+
+But even at that moment George Dornton had dropped off in a quiet,
+peaceful sleep.
+
+Bly turned down the light, and, drawing his easy-chair to the
+window, dropped into it in bewildering reflection.  This then was
+the secret--unknown to mother and daughter--unsuspected by all!
+This was the double life of Tappington, half revealed in his
+flirtation with the neighbors, in the hidden cards behind the
+books, in the mysterious visitor--still unaccounted for--and now
+wholly exploded by this sleeping confederate, for whom, somehow,
+Herbert felt the greatest sympathy!  What was to be done?  What
+should he say to Cherry--to her mother--to Mr. Carstone?  Yet he
+had felt he had done right.  From time to time he turned to the
+motionless recumbent shadow on the bed and listened to its slow and
+peaceful respiration.  Apart from that undefinable attraction which
+all original natures have for each other, the thrice-blessed
+mystery of protection of the helpless, for the first time in his
+life, seemed to dawn upon him through that night.
+
+Nevertheless, the actual dawn came slowly.  Twice he nodded and
+awoke quickly with a start.  The third time it was day.  The
+street-lamps were extinguished, and with them the moving, restless
+watchers seemed also to have vanished.  Suddenly a formal
+deliberate rapping at the door leading to the hall startled him to
+his feet.
+
+It must be Ellen.  So much the better; he could quickly get rid of
+her.  He glanced at the bed; Dornton slept on undisturbed.  He
+unlocked the door cautiously, and instinctively fell back before
+the erect, shawled, and decorous figure of Mrs. Brooks.  But an
+utterly new resolution and excitement had supplanted the habitual
+resignation of her handsome features, and given them an angry
+sparkle of expression.
+
+Recollecting himself, he instantly stepped forward into the
+passage, drawing to the door behind him, as she, with equal
+celerity, opposed it with her hand.
+
+"Mr. Bly," she said deliberately, "Ellen has just told me that your
+voice has been heard in conversation with some one in this room
+late last night.  Up to this moment I have foolishly allowed my
+daughter to persuade me that certain infamous scandals regarding
+your conduct here were false.  I must ask you as a gentleman to let
+me pass now and satisfy myself."
+
+"But, my dear madam, one moment.  Let me first explain--I beg"--
+stammered Herbert with a half-hysterical laugh.  "I assure you a
+gentleman friend"--
+
+But she had pushed him aside and entered precipitately.  With a
+quick feminine glance round the room she turned to the bed, and
+then halted in overwhelming confusion.
+
+"It's a friend," said Herbert in a hasty whisper.  "A friend of
+mine who returned with me late, and whom, on account of the
+disturbed state of the streets, I induced to stay here all night.
+He was so tired that I have not had the heart to disturb him yet."
+
+"Oh, pray don't!--I beg"--said Mrs. Brooks with a certain youthful
+vivacity, but still gazing at the stranger's handsome features as
+she slowly retreated.  "Not for worlds!"
+
+Herbert was relieved; she was actually blushing.
+
+"You see, it was quite unpremeditated, I assure you.  We came in
+together," whispered Herbert, leading her to the door, "and I"--
+
+"Don't believe a word of it, madam," said a lazy voice from the
+bed, as the stranger leisurely raised himself upright, putting the
+last finishing touch to his cravat as he shook himself neat again.
+"I'm an utter stranger to him, and he knows it.  He found me here,
+biding from the Vigilantes, who were chasing me on the hill.  I got
+in at that door, which happened to be unlocked.  He let me stay
+because he was a gentleman--and--I wasn't.  I beg your pardon,
+madam, for having interrupted him before you; but it was a little
+rough to have him lie on MY account when he wasn't the kind of man
+to lie on his OWN.  You'll forgive him--won't you, please?--and, as
+I'm taking myself off now, perhaps you'll overlook MY intrusion
+too."
+
+It was impossible to convey the lazy frankness of this speech, the
+charming smile with which it was accompanied, or the easy yet
+deferential manner with which, taking up his hat, he bowed to Mrs.
+Brooks as he advanced toward the door.
+
+"But," said Mrs. Brooks, hurriedly glancing from Herbert to the
+stranger, "it must be the Vigilantes who are now hanging about the
+street.  Ellen saw them from her window, and thought they were YOUR
+friends, Mr. Bly.  This gentleman--your friend"--she had become a
+little confused in her novel excitement--"really ought not to go
+out now.  It would be madness."
+
+"If you wouldn't mind his remaining a little longer, it certainly
+would be safer," said Herbert, with wondering gratitude.
+
+"I certainly shouldn't consent to his leaving my house now," said
+Mrs. Brooks with dignity; "and if you wouldn't mind calling Cherry
+here, Mr. Bly--she's in the dining-room--and then showing yourself
+for a moment in the street and finding out what they wanted, it
+would be the best thing to do."
+
+Herbert flew downstairs; in a few hurried words he gave the same
+explanation to the astounded Cherry that he had given to her
+mother, with the mischievous addition that Mrs. Brooks's unjust
+suspicions had precipitated her into becoming an amicable
+accomplice, and then ran out into the street.  Here he ascertained
+from one of the Vigilantes, whom he knew, that they were really
+seeking Dornton; but that, concluding that the fugitive had already
+escaped to the wharves, they expected to withdraw their
+surveillance at noon.  Somewhat relieved, he hastened back, to find
+the stranger calmly seated on the sofa in the parlor with the same
+air of frank indifference, lazily relating the incidents of his
+flight to the two women, who were listening with every expression
+of sympathy and interest.  "Poor fellow!" said Cherry, taking the
+astonished Bly aside into the hall, "I don't believe he's half as
+bad as THEY said he is--or as even HE makes himself out to be.  But
+DID you notice mother?"
+
+Herbert, a little dazed, and, it must be confessed, a trifle uneasy
+at this ready acceptance of the stranger, abstractedly said he had
+not.
+
+"Why, it's the most ridiculous thing.  She's actually going round
+WITHOUT HER SHAWL, and doesn't seem to know it."
+
+
+V.
+
+
+When Herbert finally reached the bank that morning he was still in
+a state of doubt and perplexity.  He had parted with his grateful
+visitor, whose safety in a few hours seemed assured, but without
+the least further revelation or actual allusion to anything
+antecedent to his selecting Tappington's room as refuge.  More than
+that, Herbert was convinced from his manner that he had no
+intention of making a confidant of Mrs. Brooks, and this convinced
+him that Dornton's previous relations with Tappington were not only
+utterly inconsistent with that young man's decorous reputation, but
+were unsuspected by the family.  The stranger's familiar knowledge
+of the room, his mysterious allusions to the "risks" Tappington had
+taken, and his sudden silence on the discovery of Bly's ignorance
+of the whole affair all pointed to some secret that, innocent or
+not, was more or less perilous, not only to the son but to the
+mother and sister.  Of the latter's ignorance he had no doubt--but
+had he any right to enlighten them?  Admitting that Tappington had
+deceived them with the others, would they thank him for opening
+their eyes to it?  If they had already a suspicion, would they care
+to know that it was shared by him?  Halting between his frankness
+and his delicacy, the final thought that in his budding relations
+with the daughter it might seem a cruel bid for her confidence, or
+a revenge for their distrust of him, inclined him to silence.  But
+an unforeseen occurrence took the matter from his hands.  At noon
+he was told that Mr. Carstone wished to see him in his private
+room!
+
+Satisfied that his complicity with Dornton's escape was discovered,
+the unfortunate Herbert presented himself, pale but self-possessed,
+before his employer.  That brief man of business bade him be
+seated, and standing himself before the fireplace, looked down
+curiously, but not unkindly, upon his employee.
+
+"Mr. Bly, the bank does not usually interfere with the private
+affairs of its employees, but for certain reasons which I prefer to
+explain to you later, I must ask you to give me a straightforward
+answer to one or two questions.  I may say that they have nothing
+to do with your relations to the bank, which are to us perfectly
+satisfactory."
+
+More than ever convinced that Mr. Carstone was about to speak of
+his visitor, Herbert signified his willingness to reply.
+
+"You have been seen a great deal with Miss Brooks lately--on the
+street and elsewhere--acting as her escort, and evidently on terms
+of intimacy.  To do you both justice, neither of you seemed to have
+made it a secret or avoided observation; but I must ask you
+directly if it is with her mother's permission?"
+
+Considerably relieved, but wondering what was coming, Herbert
+answered, with boyish frankness, that it was.
+
+"Are you--engaged to the young lady?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Are you--well, Mr. Bly--briefly, are you what is called 'in love'
+with her?" asked the banker, with a certain brusque hurrying over
+of a sentiment evidently incompatible with their present business
+surroundings.
+
+Herbert blushed.  It was the first time he had heard the question
+voiced, even by himself.
+
+"I am," he said resolutely.
+
+"And you wish to marry her?"
+
+"If I dared ask her to accept a young man with no position as yet,"
+stammered Herbert.
+
+"People don't usually consider a young man in Carstone's Bank of no
+position," said the banker dryly; "and I wish for your sake THAT
+were the only impediment.  For I am compelled to reveal to you a
+secret."  He paused, and folding his arms, looked fixedly down upon
+his clerk.  "Mr. Bly, Tappington Brooks, the brother of your
+sweetheart, was a defaulter and embezzler from this bank!"
+
+Herbert sat dumfounded and motionless.
+
+"Understand two things," continued Mr. Carstone quickly.  "First,
+that no purer or better women exist than Miss Brooks and her
+mother.  Secondly, that they know nothing of this, and that only
+myself and one other man are in possession of the secret."
+
+He slightly changed his position, and went on more deliberately.
+"Six weeks ago Tappington sat in that chair where you are sitting
+now, a convicted hypocrite and thief.  Luckily for him, although
+his guilt was plain, and the whole secret of his double life
+revealed to me, a sum of money advanced in pity by one of his
+gambling confederates had made his accounts good and saved him from
+suspicion in the eyes of his fellow-clerks and my partners.  At
+first he tried to fight me on that point; then he blustered and
+said his mother could have refunded the money; and asked me what
+was a paltry five thousand dollars!  I told him, Mr. Bly, that it
+might be five years of his youth in state prison; that it might be
+five years of sorrow and shame for his mother and sister; that it
+might be an everlasting stain on the name of his dead father--my
+friend.  He talked of killing himself: I told him he was a cowardly
+fool.  He asked me to give him up to the authorities: I told him I
+intended to take the law in my own hands and give him another
+chance; and then he broke down.  I transferred him that very day,
+without giving him time to communicate with anybody, to our branch
+office at Portland, with a letter explaining his position to our
+agent, and the injunction that for six months he should be under
+strict surveillance.  I myself undertook to explain his sudden
+departure to Mrs. Brooks, and obliged him to write to her from time
+to time."  He paused, and then continued: "So far I believe my plan
+has been successful: the secret has been kept; he has broken with
+the evil associates that ruined him here--to the best of my
+knowledge he has had no communication with them since; even a
+certain woman here who shared his vicious hidden life has abandoned
+him."
+
+"Are you sure?" asked Herbert involuntarily, as he recalled his
+mysterious visitor.
+
+"I believe the Vigilance Committee has considered it a public duty
+to deport her and her confederates beyond the State," returned
+Carstone dryly.
+
+Another idea flashed upon Herbert.  "And the gambler who advanced
+the money to save Tappington?" he said breathlessly.
+
+"Wasn't such a hound as the rest of his kind, if report says true,"
+answered Carstone.  "He was well known here as George Dornton--
+Gentleman George--a man capable of better things.  But he was
+before your time, Mr. Bly--YOU don't know him."
+
+Herbert didn't deem it a felicitous moment to correct his employer,
+and Mr. Carstone continued: "I have now told you what I thought it
+was my duty to tell you.  I must leave YOU to judge how far it
+affects your relations with Miss Brooks."
+
+Herbert did not hesitate.  "I should be very sorry, sir, to seem to
+undervalue your consideration or disregard your warning; but I am
+afraid that even if you had been less merciful to Tappington, and
+he were now a convicted felon, I should change neither my feelings
+nor my intentions to his sister."
+
+"And you would still marry her?" said Carstone sternly; "YOU, an
+employee of the bank, would set the example of allying yourself
+with one who had robbed it?"
+
+"I--am afraid I would, sir," said Herbert slowly.
+
+"Even if it were a question of your remaining here?" said Carstone
+grimly.
+
+Poor Herbert already saw himself dismissed and again taking up his
+weary quest for employment; but, nevertheless, he answered stoutly:
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"And nothing will prevent you marrying Miss Brooks?"
+
+"Nothing--save my inability to support her."
+
+"Then," said Mr. Carstone, with a peculiar light in his eyes, "it
+only remains for the bank to mark its opinion of your conduct by
+INCREASING YOUR SALARY TO ENABLE YOU TO DO SO!  Shake hands, Mr.
+Bly," he said, laughing.  "I think you'll do to tie to--and I
+believe the young lady will be of the same opinion.  But not a word
+to either her or her mother in regard to what you have heard.  And
+now I may tell you something more.  I am not without hope of
+Tappington's future, nor--d--n it!--without some excuse for his
+fault, sir.  He was artificially brought up.  When my old friend
+died, Mrs. Brooks, still a handsome woman, like all her sex
+wouldn't rest until she had another devotion, and wrapped herself
+and her children up in the Church.  Theology may be all right for
+grown people, but it's apt to make children artificial; and
+Tappington was pious before he was fairly good.  He drew on a
+religious credit before he had a moral capital behind it.  He was
+brought up with no knowledge of the world, and when he went into
+it--it captured him.  I don't say there are not saints born into
+the world occasionally; but for every one you'll find a lot of
+promiscuous human nature.  My old friend Josh Brooks had a heap of
+it, and it wouldn't be strange if some was left in his children,
+and burst through their straight-lacing in a queer way.  That's
+all!  Good-morning, Mr. Bly.  Forget what I've told you for six
+months, and then I shouldn't wonder if Tappington was on hand to
+give his sister away.
+
+       .       .       .       .       .       .       .
+
+Mr. Carstone's prophecy was but half realized.  At the end of six
+months Herbert Bly's discretion and devotion were duly rewarded by
+Cherry's hand.  But Tappington did NOT give her away.  That saintly
+prodigal passed his period of probation with exemplary rectitude,
+but, either from a dread of old temptation, or some unexplained
+reason, he preferred to remain in Portland, and his fastidious nest
+on Telegraph Hill knew him no more.  The key of the little door on
+the side street passed, naturally, into the keeping of Mrs. Bly.
+
+Whether the secret of Tappington's double life was ever revealed to
+the two women is not known to the chronicler.  Mrs. Bly is reported
+to have said that the climate of Oregon was more suited to her
+brother's delicate constitution than the damp fogs of San
+Francisco, and that his tastes were always opposed to the mere
+frivolity of metropolitan society.  The only possible reason for
+supposing that the mother may have become cognizant of her son's
+youthful errors was in the occasional visits to the house of the
+handsome George Dornton, who, in the social revolution that
+followed the brief reign of the Vigilance Committee,
+characteristically returned as a dashing stockbroker, and the fact
+that Mrs. Brooks seemed to have discarded her ascetic shawl
+forever.  But as all this was contemporaneous with the absurd
+rumor, that owing to the loneliness induced by the marriage of her
+daughter she contemplated a similar change in her own condition, it
+is deemed unworthy the serious consideration of this veracious
+chronicle.
+
+
+
+CAPTAIN JIM'S FRIEND.
+
+
+I.
+
+
+Hardly one of us, I think, really believed in the auriferous
+probabilities of Eureka Gulch.  Following a little stream, we had
+one day drifted into it, very much as we imagined the river gold
+might have done in remoter ages, with the difference that WE
+remained there, while the river gold to all appearances had not.
+At first it was tacitly agreed to ignore this fact, and we made the
+most of the charming locality, with its rare watercourse that lost
+itself in tangled depths of manzanita and alder, its laurel-choked
+pass, its flower-strewn hillside, and its summit crested with
+rocking pines.
+
+"You see," said the optimistic Rowley, water's the main thing after
+all.  If we happen to strike river gold, thar's the stream for
+washing it; if we happen to drop into quartz--and that thar rock
+looks mighty likely--thar ain't a more natural-born site for a mill
+than that right bank, with water enough to run fifty stamps.  That
+hillside is an original dump for your tailings, and a ready found
+inclined road for your trucks, fresh from the hands of Providence;
+and that road we're kalkilatin' to build to the turnpike will run
+just easy along that ridge."
+
+Later, when we were forced to accept the fact that finding gold was
+really the primary object of a gold-mining company, we still
+remained there, excusing our youthful laziness and incertitude by
+brilliant and effective sarcasms upon the unremunerative
+attractions of the gulch.  Nevertheless, when Captain Jim,
+returning one day from the nearest settlement and post-office,
+twenty miles away, burst upon us with "Well, the hull thing'll be
+settled now, boys; Lacy Bassett is coming down yer to look round,"
+we felt considerably relieved.
+
+And yet, perhaps, we had as little reason for it as we had for
+remaining there.  There was no warrant for any belief in the
+special divining power of the unknown Lacy Bassett, except Captain
+Jim's extravagant faith in his general superiority, and even that
+had always been a source of amused skepticism to the camp.  We were
+already impatiently familiar with the opinions of this unseen
+oracle; he was always impending in Captain Jim's speech as a
+fragrant memory or an unquestioned authority.  When Captain Jim
+began, "Ez Lacy was one day tellin' me," or, "Ez Lacy Bassett
+allows," or more formally, when strangers were present, "Ez a
+partickler friend o' mine, Lacy Bassett--maybe ez you know him--
+sez," the youthful and lighter members of the Eureka Mining Company
+glanced at each other in furtive enjoyment.  Nevertheless no one
+looked more eagerly forward to the arrival of this apocryphal sage
+than these indolent skeptics.  It was at least an excitement; they
+were equally ready to accept his condemnation of the locality or
+his justification of their original selection.
+
+He came.  He was received by the Eureka Mining Company lying on
+their backs on the grassy site of the prospective quartz mill, not
+far from the equally hypothetical "slide" to the gulch.  He came by
+the future stage road--at present a thickset jungle of scrub-oaks
+and ferns.  He was accompanied by Captain Jim, who had gone to meet
+him on the trail, and for a few moments all critical inspection of
+himself was withheld by the extraordinary effect he seemed to have
+upon the faculties of his introducer.
+
+Anything like the absolute prepossession of Captain Jim by this
+stranger we had never imagined.  He approached us running a little
+ahead of his guest, and now and then returning assuringly to his
+side with the expression of a devoted Newfoundland dog, which in
+fluffiness he generally resembled.  And now, even after the
+introduction was over, when he made a point of standing aside in an
+affectation of carelessness, with his hands in his pockets, the
+simulation was so apparent, and his consciousness and absorption in
+his friend so obvious, that it was a relief to us to recall him
+into the conversation.
+
+As to our own first impressions of the stranger, they were probably
+correct.  We all disliked him; we thought him conceited, self-
+opinionated, selfish, and untrustworthy.  But later, reflecting
+that this was possibly the result of Captain Jim's over-praise, and
+finding none of these qualities as yet offensively opposed to our
+own selfishness and conceit, we were induced, like many others, to
+forget our first impressions.  We could easily correct him if he
+attempted to impose upon US, as he evidently had upon Captain Jim.
+Believing, after the fashion of most humanity, that there was
+something about US particularly awe-inspiring and edifying to vice
+or weakness of any kind, we good-humoredly yielded to the cheap
+fascination of this showy, self-saturated, over-dressed, and
+underbred stranger.  Even the epithet of "blower" as applied to him
+by Rowley had its mitigations; in that Trajan community a bully was
+not necessarily a coward, nor florid demonstration always a
+weakness.
+
+His condemnation of the gulch was sweeping, original, and striking.
+He laughed to scorn our half-hearted theory of a gold deposit in
+the bed and bars of our favorite stream.  We were not to look for
+auriferous alluvium in the bed of any present existing stream, but
+in the "cement" or dried-up bed of the original prehistoric rivers
+that formerly ran parallel with the present bed, and which--he
+demonstrated with the stem of Pickney's pipe in the red dust--could
+be found by sinking shafts at right angles with the stream.  The
+theory was to us, at that time, novel and attractive.  It was true
+that the scientific explanation, although full and gratuitous,
+sounded vague and incoherent.  It was true that the geological
+terms were not always correct, and their pronunciation defective,
+but we accepted such extraordinary discoveries as "ignus fatuus
+rock," "splendiferous drift," "mica twist" (recalling a popular
+species of tobacco), "iron pirates," and "discomposed quartz" as
+part of what he not inaptly called a "tautological formation," and
+were happy.  Nor was our contentment marred by the fact that the
+well-known scientific authority with whom the stranger had been
+intimate,--to the point of "sleeping together" during a survey,--
+and whom he described as a bent old man with spectacles, must have
+aged considerably since one of our party saw him three years before
+as a keen young fellow of twenty-five.  Inaccuracies like those
+were only the carelessness of genius.  "That's my opinion,
+gentlemen," he concluded, negligently rising, and with pointed
+preoccupation whipping the dust of Eureka Gulch from his clothes
+with his handkerchief, "but of course it ain't nothin' to me."
+
+Captain Jim, who had followed every word with deep and trustful
+absorption, here repeated, "It ain't nothing to him, boys," with a
+confidential implication of the gratuitous blessing we had
+received, and then added, with loyal encouragement to him, "It
+ain't nothing to you, Lacy, in course," and laid his hand on his
+shoulder with infinite tenderness.
+
+We, however, endeavored to make it something to Mr. Lacy Bassett.
+He was spontaneously offered a share in the company and a part of
+Captain Jim's tent.  He accepted both after a few deprecating and
+muttered asides to Captain Jim, which the latter afterwards
+explained to us was the giving up of several other important
+enterprises for our sake.  When he finally strolled away with
+Rowley to look over the gulch, Captain Jim reluctantly tore himself
+away from him only for the pleasure of reiterating his praise to us
+as if in strictest confidence and as an entirely novel proceeding.
+
+"You see, boys, I didn't like to say it afore HIM, we bein' old
+friends; but, between us, that young feller ez worth thousands to
+the camp.  Mebbee," he continued with grave naivete, "I ain't said
+much about him afore, mebbee, bein' old friends and accustomed to
+him--you know how it is, boys,--I haven't appreciated him as much
+ez I ought, and ez you do.  In fact, I don't ezakly remember how I
+kem to ask him down yer.  It came to me suddent, one day only a
+week ago Friday night, thar under that buckeye; I was thinkin' o'
+one of his sayins, and sez I--thar's Lacy, if he was here he'd set
+the hull thing right.  It was the ghost of a chance my findin' him
+free, but I did.  And there HE is, and yer WE are settled!  Ye
+noticed how he just knocked the bottom outer our plans to work.  Ye
+noticed that quick sort o' sneerin' smile o' his, didn't ye--that's
+Lacy!  I've seen him knock over a heap o' things without sayin'
+anythin'--with jist that smile."
+
+It occurred to us that we might have some difficulty in utilizing
+this smile in our present affairs, and that we should have probably
+preferred something more assuring, but Captain Jim's faith was
+contagious.
+
+"What is he, anyway?" asked Joe Walker lazily.
+
+"Eh!" echoed Captain Jim in astonishment.  "What is Lacy Bassett?"
+
+"Yes, what is he?" repeated Walker.
+
+"Wot IS--he?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I've knowed him now goin' as four year," said Captain Jim with
+slow reflective contentment.  "Let's see.  It was in the fall o'
+'54 I first met him, and he's allus been the same ez you see him
+now."
+
+"But what is his business or profession?  What does he do?"
+
+Captain Jim looked reproachfully at his questioner.
+
+"Do?" he repeated, turning to the rest of us as if disdaining a
+direct reply.  "Do?--why, wot he's doin' now.  He's allus the same,
+allus Lacy Bassett."
+
+Howbeit, we went to work the next day under the superintendence of
+the stranger with youthful and enthusiastic energy, and began the
+sinking of a shaft at once.  To do Captain Jim's friend justice,
+for the first few weeks he did not shirk a fair share of the actual
+labor, replacing his objectionable and unsuitable finery with a
+suit of serviceable working clothes got together by general
+contribution of the camp, and assuring us of a fact we afterwards
+had cause to remember, that "he brought nothing but himself into
+Eureka Gulch."  It may be added that he certainly had not brought
+money there, as Captain Jim advanced the small amounts necessary
+for his purchases in the distant settlement, and for the still
+smaller sums he lost at cards, which he played with characteristic
+self-sufficiency.
+
+Meantime the work in the shaft progressed slowly but regularly.
+Even when the novelty had worn off and the excitement of
+anticipation grew fainter, I am afraid that we clung to this new
+form of occupation as an apology for remaining there; for the
+fascinations of our vagabond and unconventional life were more
+potent than we dreamed of.  We were slowly fettered by our very
+freedom; there was a strange spell in this very boundlessness of
+our license that kept us from even the desire of change; in the
+wild and lawless arms of nature herself we found an embrace as
+clinging, as hopeless and restraining, as the civilization from
+which we had fled.  We were quite content after a few hours' work
+in the shaft to lie on our backs on the hillside staring at the
+unwinking sky, or to wander with a gun through the virgin forest in
+search of game scarcely less vagabond than ourselves.  We indulged
+in the most extravagant and dreamy speculations of the fortune we
+should eventually discover in the shaft, and believed that we were
+practical.  We broke our "saleratus bread" with appetites
+unimpaired by restlessness or anxiety; we went to sleep under the
+grave and sedate stars with a serene consciousness of having fairly
+earned our rest; we awoke the next morning with unabated
+trustfulness, and a sweet obliviousness of even the hypothetical
+fortunes we had perhaps won or lost at cards overnight.  We paid no
+heed to the fact that our little capital was slowly sinking with
+the shaft, and that the rainy season--wherein not only "no man
+could work," but even such play as ours was impossible--was
+momentarily impending.
+
+In the midst of this, one day Lacy Bassett suddenly emerged from
+the shaft before his "shift" of labor was over with every sign of
+disgust and rage in his face and inarticulate with apparent
+passion.  In vain we gathered round him in concern; in vain Captain
+Jim regarded him with almost feminine sympathy, as he flung away
+his pick and dashed his hat to the ground.
+
+"What's up, Lacy, old pard?  What's gone o' you?" said Captain Jim
+tenderly.
+
+"Look!" gasped Lacy at last, when every eye was on him, holding up
+a small fragment of rock before us and the next moment grinding it
+under his heel in rage.  "Look!  To think that I've been fooled
+agin by this blanked fossiliferous trap--blank it!  To think that
+after me and Professor Parker was once caught jist in this way up
+on the Stanislaus at the bottom of a hundred-foot shaft by this
+rotten trap--that yer I am--bluffed agin!"
+
+There was a dead silence; we looked at each other blankly.
+
+"But, Bassett," said Walker, picking up a part of the fragment,
+"we've been finding this kind of stuff for the last two weeks."
+
+"But how?" returned Lacy, turning upon him almost fiercely.  "Did
+ye find it superposed on quartz, or did you find it NOT superposed
+on quartz?  Did you find it in volcanic drift, or did ye find it in
+old red-sandstone or coarse illuvion?  Tell me that, and then ye
+kin talk.  But this yer blank fossiliferous trap, instead o' being
+superposed on top, is superposed on the bottom.  And that means"--
+
+"What?" we all asked eagerly.
+
+"Why--blank it all--that this yer convulsion of nature, this
+prehistoric volcanic earthquake, instead of acting laterally and
+chuckin' the stream to one side, has been revolutionary and turned
+the old river-bed bottom-side up, and yer d--d cement hez got half
+the globe atop of it!  Ye might strike it from China, but nowhere
+else."
+
+We continued to look at one another, the older members with
+darkening faces, the younger with a strong inclination to laugh.
+Captain Jim, who had been concerned only in his friend's emotion,
+and who was hanging with undisguised satisfaction on these final
+convincing proofs of his superior geological knowledge, murmured
+approvingly and confidingly, "He's right, boys!  Thar ain't another
+man livin' ez could give you the law and gospil like that!  Ye can
+tie to what he says.  That's Lacy all over."
+
+Two weeks passed.  We had gathered, damp and disconsolate, in the
+only available shelter of the camp.  For the long summer had ended
+unexpectedly to us; we had one day found ourselves caught like the
+improvident insect of the child's fable with gauzy and unseasonable
+wings wet and bedraggled in the first rains, homeless and hopeless.
+The scientific Lacy, who lately spent most of his time as a bar-
+room oracle in the settlement, was away, and from our dripping
+canvas we could see Captain Jim returning from a visit to him,
+slowly plodding along the trail towards us.
+
+"It's no use, boys," said Rowley, summarizing the result of our
+conference, "we must speak out to him, and if nobody else cares to
+do it I will.  I don't know why we should be more mealy-mouthed
+than they are at the settlement.  They don't hesitate to call
+Bassett a dead-beat, whatever Captain Jim says to the contrary."
+
+The unfortunate Captain Jim had halted irresolutely before the
+gloomy faces in the shelter.  Whether he felt instinctively some
+forewarning of what was coming I cannot say.  There was a certain
+dog-like consciousness in his eye and a half-backward glance over
+his shoulder as if he were not quite certain that Lacy was not
+following.  The rain had somewhat subdued his characteristic
+fluffiness, and he cowered with a kind of sleek storm-beaten
+despondency over the smoking fire of green wood before our tent.
+
+Nevertheless, Rowley opened upon him with a directness and decision
+that astonished us.  He pointed out briefly that Lacy Bassett had
+been known to us only through Captain Jim's introduction.  That he
+had been originally invited there on Captain Jim's own account, and
+that his later connection with the company had been wholly the
+result of Captain Jim's statements.  That, far from being any aid
+or assistance to them, Bassett had beguiled them by apocryphal
+knowledge and sham scientific theories into an expensive and
+gigantic piece of folly.  That, in addition to this, they had just
+discovered that he had also been using the credit of the company
+for his own individual expenses at the settlement while they were
+working on his d--d fool shaft--all of which had brought them to
+the verge of bankruptcy.  That, as a result, they were forced now
+to demand his resignation--not only on their general account, but
+for Captain Jim's sake--believing firmly, as they did, that he had
+been as grossly deceived in his friendship for Lacy Bassett as THEY
+were in their business relations with him.
+
+Instead of being mollified by this, Captain Jim, to our greater
+astonishment, suddenly turned upon the speaker, bristling with his
+old canine suggestion.
+
+"There!  I said so!  Go on!  I'd have sworn to it afore you opened
+your lips.  I knowed it the day you sneaked around and wanted to
+know wot his business was!  I said to myself, Cap, look out for
+that sneakin' hound Rowley, he's no friend o' Lacy's.  And the day
+Lacy so far demeaned himself as to give ye that splendid
+explanation o' things, I watched ye; ye didn't think it, but I
+watched ye.  Ye can't fool me!  I saw ye lookin' at Walker there,
+and I said to myself, Wot's the use, Lacy, wot's the use o' your
+slingin' them words to such as THEM?  Wot do THEY know?  It's just
+their pure jealousy and ignorance.  Ef you'd come down yer, and
+lazed around with us and fallen into our common ways, you'd ha'
+been ez good a man ez the next.  But no, it ain't your style, Lacy,
+you're accustomed to high-toned men like Professor Parker, and you
+can't help showing it.  No wonder you took to avoidin' us; no
+wonder I've had to foller you over the Burnt Wood Crossin' time and
+again, to get to see ye.  I see it all now: ye can't stand the
+kempany I brought ye to!  Ye had to wipe the slum gullion of Eureka
+Gulch off your hands, Lacy"--  He stopped, gasped for breath, and
+then lifted his voice more savagely, "And now, what's this?  Wot's
+this hogwash? this yer lyin' slander about his gettin' things on
+the kempany's credit?  Eh, speak up, some of ye!"
+
+We were so utterly shocked and stupefied at the degradation of this
+sudden and unexpected outburst from a man usually so honorable,
+gentle, self-sacrificing, and forgiving, that we forgot the cause
+of it and could only stare at each other.  What was this cheap
+stranger, with his shallow swindling tricks, to the ignoble change
+he had worked upon the man before us.  Rowley and Walker, both
+fearless fighters and quick to resent an insult, only averted their
+saddened faces and turned aside without a word.
+
+"Ye dussen't say it!  Well, hark to me then," he continued with
+white and feverish lips.  "I put him up to helpin' himself.  I told
+him to use the kempany's name for credit.  Ye kin put that down to
+ME.  And when ye talk of HIS resigning, I want ye to understand
+that I resign outer this rotten kempany and TAKE HIM WITH ME!  Ef
+all the gold yer lookin' for was piled up in that shaft from its
+bottom in hell to its top in the gulch, it ain't enough to keep me
+here away from him!  Ye kin take all my share--all MY rights yer
+above ground and below it--all I carry,"--he threw his buckskin
+purse and revolver on the ground,--"and pay yourselves what you
+reckon you've lost through HIM.  But you and me is quits from to-
+day."
+
+He strode away before a restraining voice or hand could reach him.
+His dripping figure seemed to melt into the rain beneath the
+thickening shadows of the pines, and the next moment he was gone.
+From that day forward Eureka Gulch knew him no more.  And the camp
+itself somehow melted away during the rainy season, even as he had
+done.
+
+
+II.
+
+
+Three years had passed.  The pioneer stage-coach was sweeping down
+the long descent to the pastoral valley of Gilead, and I was
+looking towards the village with some pardonable interest and
+anxiety.  For I carried in my pocket my letters of promotion from
+the box seat of the coach--where I had performed the functions of
+treasure messenger for the Excelsior Express Company--to the
+resident agency of that company in the bucolic hamlet before me.
+The few dusty right-angled streets, with their rigid and staringly
+new shops and dwellings, the stern formality of one or two obelisk-
+like meeting-house spires, the illimitable outlying plains of wheat
+and wild oats beyond, with their monotony scarcely broken by
+skeleton stockades, corrals, and barrack-looking farm buildings,
+were all certainly unlike the unkempt freedom of the mountain
+fastnesses in which I had lately lived and moved.  Yuba Bill, the
+driver, whose usual expression of humorous discontent deepened into
+scorn as he gathered up his reins as if to charge the village and
+recklessly sweep it from his path, indicated a huge, rambling,
+obtrusively glazed, and capital-lettered building with a
+contemptuous flick of his whip as we passed.  "Ef you're
+kalkilatin' we'll get our partin' drink there you're mistaken.
+That's wot they call a TEMPERANCE HOUSE--wot means a place where
+the licker ye get underhand is only a trifle worse than the hash ye
+get above-board.  I suppose it's part o' one o' the mysteries o'
+Providence that wharever you find a dusty hole like this--that's
+naturally THIRSTY--ye run agin a 'temperance' house.  But never YOU
+mind!  I shouldn't wonder if thar was a demijohn o' whiskey in the
+closet of your back office, kept thar by the feller you're
+relievin'--who was a white man and knew the ropes."
+
+A few minutes later, when my brief installation was over, we DID
+find the demijohn in the place indicated.  As Yuba Bill wiped his
+mouth with the back of his heavy buckskin glove, he turned to me
+not unkindly.  "I don't like to set ye agin Gile-ad, which is a
+scrip-too-rural place, and a God-fearin' place, and a nice dry
+place, and a place ez I've heard tell whar they grow beans and
+pertatoes and garden sass; but afore three weeks is over, old pard,
+you'll be howlin' to get back on that box seat with me, whar you
+uster sit, and be ready to take your chances agin, like a little
+man, to get drilled through with buckshot from road agents.  You
+hear me!  I'll give you three weeks, sonny, just three weeks, to
+get your butes full o' hayseed and straws in yer har; and I'll find
+ye wadin' the North Fork at high water to get out o' this."  He
+shook my hand with grim tenderness, removing his glove--a rare
+favor--to give me the pressure of his large, soft, protecting palm,
+and strode away.  The next moment he was shaking the white dust of
+Gilead from his scornful chariot-wheels.
+
+In the hope of familiarizing myself with the local interests of the
+community, I took up a copy of the "Gilead Guardian" which lay on
+my desk, forgetting for the moment the usual custom of the country
+press to displace local news for long editorials on foreign
+subjects and national politics.  I found, to my disappointment,
+that the "Guardian" exhibited more than the usual dearth of
+domestic intelligence, although it was singularly oracular on "The
+State of Europe," and "Jeffersonian Democracy."  A certain cheap
+assurance, a copy-book dogmatism, a colloquial familiarity, even in
+the impersonal plural, and a series of inaccuracies and blunders
+here and there, struck some old chord in my memory.  I was mutely
+wondering where and when I had become personally familiar with
+rhetoric like that, when the door of the office opened and a man
+entered.  I was surprised to recognize Captain Jim.
+
+I had not seen him since he had indignantly left us, three years
+before, in Eureka Gulch.  The circumstances of his defection were
+certainly not conducive to any voluntary renewal of friendship on
+either side; and although, even as a former member of the Eureka
+Mining Company, I was not conscious of retaining any sense of
+injury, yet the whole occurrence flashed back upon me with awkward
+distinctness.  To my relief, however, he greeted me with his old
+cordiality; to my amusement he added to it a suggestion of the
+large forgiveness of conscious rectitude and amiable toleration.  I
+thought, however, I detected, as he glanced at the paper which was
+still in my hand and then back again at my face, the same uneasy
+canine resemblance I remembered of old.  He had changed but little
+in appearance; perhaps he was a trifle stouter, more mature, and
+slower in his movements.  If I may return to my canine
+illustration, his grayer, dustier, and more wiry ensemble gave me
+the impression that certain pastoral and agricultural conditions
+had varied his type, and he looked more like a shepherd's dog in
+whose brown eyes there was an abiding consciousness of the care of
+straying sheep, and possibly of one black one in particular.
+
+He had, he told me, abandoned mining and taken up farming on a
+rather large scale.  He had prospered.  He had other interests at
+stake, "A flour-mill with some improvements--and--and"--here his
+eyes wandered to the "Guardian" again, and he asked me somewhat
+abruptly what I thought of the paper.  Something impelled me to
+restrain my previous fuller criticism, and I contented myself by
+saying briefly that I thought it rather ambitious for the locality.
+"That's the word," he said with a look of gratified relief,
+"'ambitious'--you've just hit it.  And what's the matter with thet?
+Ye kan't expect a high-toned man to write down to the level of
+every karpin' hound, ken ye now?  That's what he says to me"--  He
+stopped half confused, and then added abruptly: "That's one o' my
+investments."
+
+"Why, Captain Jim, I never suspected that you"--
+
+"Oh, I don't WRITE it," he interrupted hastily.  "I only furnish
+the money and the advertising, and run it gin'rally, you know; and
+I'm responsible for it.  And I select the eddyter--and"--he
+continued, with a return of the same uneasy wistful look--"thar's
+suthin' in thet, you know, eh?"
+
+I was beginning to be perplexed.  The memory evoked by the style of
+the editorial writing and the presence of Captain Jim was assuming
+a suspicious relationship to each other.  "And who's your editor?"
+I asked.
+
+"Oh, he's--he's--er--Lacy Bassett," he replied, blinking his eyes
+with a hopeless assumption of carelessness.  "Let's see!  Oh yes!
+You knowed Lacy down there at Eureka.  I disremembered it till now.
+Yes, sir!" he repeated suddenly and almost rudely, as if to
+preclude any adverse criticism, "he's the eddyter!"
+
+To my surprise he was quite white and tremulous with nervousness.
+I was very sorry for him, and as I really cared very little for the
+half-forgotten escapade of his friend except so far as it seemed to
+render HIM sensitive, I shook his hand again heartily and began to
+talk of our old life in the gulch--avoiding as far as possible any
+allusion to Lacy Bassett.  His face brightened; his old simple
+cordiality and trustfulness returned, but unfortunately with it his
+old disposition to refer to Bassett.  "Yes, they waz high old
+times, and ez I waz sayin' to Lacy on'y yesterday, there is a kind
+o' freedom 'bout that sort o' life that runs civilization and
+noospapers mighty hard, however high-toned they is.  Not but what
+Lacy ain't right," he added quickly, "when he sez that the
+opposition the 'Guardian' gets here comes from ignorant low-down
+fellers ez wos brought up in played-out camps, and can't tell a
+gentleman and a scholar and a scientific man when they sees him.
+No!  So I sez to Lacy, 'Never you mind, it's high time they did,
+and they've got to do it and to swaller the "Guardian," if I sink
+double the money I've already put into the paper.'"
+
+I was not long in discovering from other sources that the
+"Guardian" was not popular with the more intelligent readers of
+Gilead, and that Captain Jim's extravagant estimate of his friend
+was by no means indorsed by the community.  But criticism took a
+humorous turn even in that practical settlement, and it appeared
+that Lacy Bassett's vanity, assumption, and ignorance were an
+unfailing and weekly joy to the critical, in spite of the vague
+distrust they induced in the more homely-witted, and the dull
+acquiescence of that minority who accepted the paper for its
+respectable exterior and advertisements.  I was somewhat grieved,
+however, to find that Captain Jim shared equally with his friend in
+this general verdict of incompetency, and that some of the most
+outrageous blunders were put down to HIM.  But I was not prepared
+to believe that Lacy had directly or by innuendo helped the public
+to this opinion.
+
+Whether through accident or design on his part, Lacy Bassett did
+not personally obtrude himself upon my remembrance until a month
+later.  One dazzling afternoon, when the dust and heat had driven
+the pride of Gilead's manhood into the surreptitious shadows of the
+temperance hotel's back room, and had even cleared the express
+office of its loungers, and left me alone with darkened windows in
+the private office, the outer door opened and Captain Jim's friend
+entered as part of that garish glitter I had shut out.  To do the
+scamp strict justice, however, he was somewhat subdued in his dress
+and manner, and, possibly through some gentle chastening of epigram
+and revolver since I had seen him last, was less aggressive and
+exaggerated.  I had the impression, from certain odors wafted
+through the apartment and a peculiar physical exaltation that was
+inconsistent with his evident moral hesitancy, that he had prepared
+himself for the interview by a previous visit to the hidden
+fountains of the temperance hotel.
+
+"We don't seem to have run agin each other since you've been here,"
+he said with an assurance that was nevertheless a trifle forced
+"but I reckon we're both busy men, and there's a heap too much
+loafing goin' on in Gilead.  Captain Jim told me he met you the day
+you arrived; said you just cottoned to the 'Guardian' at once and
+thought it a deal too good for Gilead; eh?  Oh, well, jest ez
+likely he DIDN'T say it--it was only his gassin'.  He's a queer
+man--is Captain Jim."
+
+I replied somewhat sharply that I considered him a very honest man,
+a very simple man, and a very loyal man.
+
+"That's all very well," said Bassett, twirling his cane with a
+patronizing smile, "but, as his friend, don't you find him
+considerable of a darned fool?"
+
+I could not help retorting that I thought HE had found that hardly
+an objection.
+
+"YOU think so," he said querulously, apparently ignoring everything
+but the practical fact,--"and maybe others do; but that's where
+you're mistaken.  It don't pay.  It may pay HIM to be runnin' me as
+his particular friend, to be quotin' me here and there, to be
+gettin' credit of knowin' me and my friends and ownin' me--by Gosh!
+but I don't see where the benefit to ME comes in.  Eh?  Take your
+own case down there at Eureka Gulch; didn't he send for me just to
+show me up to you fellers?  Did I want to have anything to do with
+the Eureka Company?  Didn't he set me up to give my opinion about
+that shaft just to show off what I knew about science and all that?
+And what did he get me to join the company for?  Was it for you?
+No!  Was it for me?  No!  It was just to keep me there for HIMSELF,
+and kinder pit me agin you fellers and crow over you!  Now that
+ain't my style!  It may be HIS--it may be honest and simple and
+loyal, as you say, and it may be all right for him to get me to run
+up accounts at the settlement and then throw off on me--but it
+ain't my style.  I suppose he let on that I did that.  No?  He
+didn't?  Well then, why did he want to run me off with him, and out
+the whole concern in an underhand way and make me leave with nary a
+character behind me, eh?  Now, I never said anything about this
+before--did I?  It ain't like me.  I wouldn't have said anything
+about it now, only you talked about MY being benefited by his
+darned foolishness.  Much I've made outer HIM."
+
+Despicable, false, and disloyal as this was, perhaps it was the
+crowning meanness of such confidences that his very weakness seemed
+only a reflection of Captain Jim's own, and appeared in some
+strange way to degrade his friend as much as himself.  The
+simplicity of his vanity and selfishness was only equalled by the
+simplicity of Captain Jim's admiration of it.  It was a part of my
+youthful inexperience of humanity that I was not above the common
+fallacy of believing that a man is "known by the company he keeps,"
+and that he is in a manner responsible for its weakness; it was a
+part of that humanity that I felt no surprise in being more amused
+than shocked by this revelation.  It seemed a good joke on Captain
+Jim!
+
+"Of course YOU kin laugh at his darned foolishness; but, by Gosh,
+it ain't a laughing matter to me!"
+
+"But surely he's given you a good position on the 'Guardian,'" I
+urged.  "That was disinterested, certainly."
+
+"Was it?  I call that the cheekiest thing yet.  When he found he
+couldn't make enough of me in private life, he totes me out in
+public as HIS editor--the man who runs HIS paper!  And has his name
+in print as the proprietor, the only chance he'd ever get of being
+before the public.  And don't know the whole town is laughing at
+him!"
+
+"That may be because they think HE writes some of the articles," I
+suggested.
+
+Again the insinuation glanced harmlessly from his vanity.  "That
+couldn't be, because I do all the work, and it ain't his style," he
+said with naive discontent.  "And it's always the highest style,
+done to please him, though between you and me it's sorter castin'
+pearls before swine--this 'Frisco editing--and the public would be
+just as satisfied with anything I could rattle off that was peart
+and sassy,--something spicy or personal.  I'm willing to climb down
+and do it, for there's nothin' stuck-up about me, you know; but
+that darned fool Captain Jim has got the big head about the style
+of the paper, and darned if I don't think he's afraid if there's a
+lettin' down, people may think it's him!  Ez if!  Why, you know as
+well as me that there's a sort of snap I could give these things
+that would show it was me and no slouch did them, in a minute."
+
+I had my doubts about the elegance or playfulness of Mr. Bassett's
+trifling, but from some paragraphs that appeared in the next issue
+of the "Guardian" I judged that he had won over Captain Jim--if
+indeed that gentleman's alleged objections were not entirely the
+outcome of Bassett's fancy.  The social paragraphs themselves were
+clumsy and vulgar.  A dull-witted account of a select party at
+Parson Baxter's, with a point-blank compliment to Polly Baxter his
+daughter, might have made her pretty cheek burn but for her evident
+prepossession for the meretricious scamp, its writer.  But even
+this horse-play seemed more natural than the utterly artificial
+editorials with their pinchbeck glitter and cheap erudition; and
+thus far it appeared harmless.
+
+I grieve to say that these appearances were deceptive.  One
+afternoon, as I was returning from a business visit to the
+outskirts of the village, I was amazed on reentering the main
+street to find a crowd collected around the "Guardian" office,
+gazing at the broken glass of its windows and a quantity of type
+scattered on the ground.  But my attention was at that moment more
+urgently attracted by a similar group around my own office, who,
+however, seemed more cautious, and were holding timorously aloof
+from the entrance.  As I ran rapidly towards them, a few called
+out, "Look out--he's in there!" while others made way to let me
+pass.  With the impression of fire or robbery in my mind, I entered
+precipitately, only to find Yuba Bill calmly leaning back in an
+arm-chair with his feet on the back of another, a glass of whiskey
+from my demijohn in one hand and a huge cigar in his mouth.  Across
+his lap lay a stumpy shotgun which I at once recognized as "the
+Left Bower," whose usual place was at his feet on the box during
+his journeys.  He looked cool and collected, although there were
+one or two splashes of printer's ink on his shirt and trousers, and
+from the appearance of my lavatory and towel he had evidently been
+removing similar stains from his hands.  Putting his gun aside and
+grasping my hand warmly without rising, he began with even more
+than his usual lazy imperturbability:
+
+"Well, how's Gilead lookin' to-day?"
+
+It struck me as looking rather disturbed, but, as I was still too
+bewildered to reply, he continued lazily:
+
+"Ez you didn't hunt me up, I allowed you might hev got kinder
+petrified and dried up down yer, and I reckoned to run down and
+rattle round a bit and make things lively for ye.  I've jist
+cleared out a newspaper office over thar.  They call it the
+'Guardi-an,' though it didn't seem to offer much pertection to them
+fellers ez was in it.  In fact, it wasn't ez much a fight ez it
+orter hev been.  It was rather monotonous for me."
+
+"But what's the row, Bill?  What has happened?" I asked excitedly.
+
+"Nothin' to speak of, I tell ye," replied Yuba Bill reflectively.
+"I jest meandered into that shop over there, and I sez, 'I want ter
+see the man ez runs this yer mill o' literatoor an' progress.'
+Thar waz two infants sittin' on high chairs havin' some innocent
+little game o' pickin' pieces o' lead outer pill-boxes like, and as
+soon ez they seed me one of 'em crawled under his desk and the
+other scooted outer the back door.  Bimeby the door opens again,
+and a fluffy coyote-lookin' feller comes in and allows that HE is
+responsible for that yer paper.  When I saw the kind of animal he
+was, and that he hadn't any weppings, I jist laid the Left Bower
+down on the floor.  Then I sez, 'You allowed in your paper that I
+oughter hev a little sevility knocked inter me, and I'm here to hev
+it done.  You ken begin it now.'  With that I reached for him, and
+we waltzed oncet or twicet around the room, and then I put him up
+on the mantelpiece and on them desks and little boxes, and took him
+down again, and kinder wiped the floor with him gin'rally, until
+the first thing I knowed he was outside the winder on the sidewalk.
+On'y blamed if I didn't forget to open the winder.  Ef it hadn't
+been for that, it would hev been all quiet and peaceful-like, and
+nobody hev knowed it.  But the sash being in the way, it sorter
+created a disturbance and unpleasantness OUTSIDE."
+
+"But what was it all about?" I repeated.  "What had he done to
+you?"
+
+"Ye'll find it in that paper," he said, indicating a copy of the
+"Guardian" that lay on my table with a lazy nod of his head.
+"P'r'aps you don't read it?  No more do I.  But Joe Bilson sez to
+me yesterday: 'Bill,' sez he, 'they're goin' for ye in the
+"Guardian."'  'Wot's that?' sez I.  'Hark to this,' sez he, and
+reads out that bit that you'll find there."
+
+I had opened the paper, and he pointed to a paragraph.  "There it
+is.  Pooty, ain't it?"  I read with amazement as follows:--
+
+
+"If the Pioneer Stage Company want to keep up with the times, and
+not degenerate into the old style 'one hoss' road-wagon business,
+they'd better make some reform on the line.  They might begin by
+shipping off some of the old-time whiskey-guzzling drivers who are
+too high and mighty to do anything but handle the ribbons, and are
+above speaking to a passenger unless he's a favorite or one of
+their set.  Over-praise for an occasional scrimmage with road
+agents, and flattery from Eastern greenhorns, have given them the
+big head.  If the fool-killer were let loose on the line with a big
+club, and knocked a little civility into their heads, it wouldn't
+be a bad thing, and would be a particular relief to the passengers
+for Gilead who have to take the stage from Simpson's Bar."
+
+
+"That's my stage," said Yuba Bill quietly, when I had ended; "and
+that's ME."
+
+"But it's impossible," I said eagerly.  "That insult was never
+written by Captain Jim."
+
+"Captain Jim," repeated Yuba Bill reflectively.  "Captain Jim,--
+yes, that was the name o' the man I was playin' with.  Shortish
+hairy feller, suthin' between a big coyote and the old-style hair-
+trunk.  Fought pretty well for a hay-footed man from Gil-e-ad."
+
+"But you've whipped the wrong man, Bill," I said.  "Think again!
+Have you had any quarrel lately?--run against any newspaper man?"
+The recollection had flashed upon me that Lacy Bassett had lately
+returned from a visit to Stockton.
+
+Yuba Bill regarded his boots on the other arm-chair for a few
+moments in profound meditation.  "There was a sort o' gaudy
+insect," he began presently, "suthin' halfway betwixt a boss-fly
+and a devil's darnin'-needle, ez crawled up onter the box seat with
+me last week, and buzzed!  Now I think on it, he talked high-
+faluten' o' the inflooence of the press and sech.  I may hev said
+'shoo' to him when he was hummin' the loudest.  I mout hev flicked
+him off oncet or twicet with my whip.  It must be him.  Gosh!" he
+said suddenly, rising and lifting his heavy hand to his forehead,
+"now I think agin he was the feller ez crawled under the desk when
+the fight was goin' on, and stayed there.  Yes, sir, that was HIM.
+His face looked sorter familiar, but I didn't know him moultin'
+with his feathers off."  He turned upon me with the first
+expression of trouble and anxiety I had ever seen him wear.  "Yes,
+sir, that's him.  And I've kem--me, Yuba Bill!--kem MYSELF, a
+matter of twenty miles, totin' a GUN--a gun, by Gosh!--to fight
+that--that--that potatar-bug!"  He walked to the window, turned,
+walked back again, finished his whiskey with a single gulp, and
+laid his hand almost despondingly on my shoulder.  "Look ye, old--
+old fell, you and me's ole friends.  Don't give me away.  Don't let
+on a word o' this to any one!  Say I kem down yer howlin' drunk on
+a gen'ral tear!  Say I mistook that newspaper office for a cigar-
+shop, and--got licked by the boss!  Say anythin' you like, 'cept
+that I took a gun down yer to chase a fly that had settled onter
+me.  Keep the Left Bower in yer back office till I send for it.  Ef
+you've got a back door somewhere handy where I can slip outer this
+without bein' seen I'd be thankful."
+
+As this desponding suggestion appeared to me as the wisest thing
+for him to do in the then threatening state of affairs outside,--
+which, had he suspected it, he would have stayed to face,--I
+quickly opened a door into a courtyard that communicated through an
+alley with a side street.  Here we shook hands and parted; his last
+dejected ejaculation being, "That potatobug!"  Later I ascertained
+that Captain Jim had retired to his ranch some four miles distant.
+He was not seriously hurt, but looked, to use the words of my
+informant, "ez ef he'd been hugged by a playful b'ar."  As the
+"Guardian" made its appearance the next week without the slightest
+allusion to the fracas, I did not deem it necessary to divulge the
+real facts.  When I called to inquire about Captain Jim's
+condition, he himself, however, volunteered an explanation.
+
+"I don't mind tellin' you, ez an old friend o' mine and Lacy's,
+that the secret of that there attack on me and the 'Guardian' was
+perlitikal.  Yes, sir!  There was a powerful orginization in the
+interest o' Halkins for assemblyman ez didn't like our high-toned
+editorials on caucus corruption, and hired a bully to kem down here
+and suppress us.  Why, this yer Lacy spotted the idea to oncet; yer
+know how keen be is."
+
+"Was Lacy present?" I asked as carelessly as I could.
+
+Captain Jim glanced his eyes over his shoulder quite in his old
+furtive canine fashion, and then blinked them at me rapidly.  "He
+war!  And if it warn't for HIS pluck and HIS science and HIS
+strength, I don't know whar I'D hev been now!  Howsomever, it's all
+right.  I've had a fair offer to sell the 'Guardian' over at
+Simpson's Bar, and it's time I quit throwin' away the work of a man
+like Lacy Bassett upon it.  And between you and me, I've got an
+idea and suthin' better to put his talens into."
+
+
+III.
+
+
+It was not long before it became evident that the "talens" of Mr.
+Lacy Bassett, as indicated by Captain Jim, were to grasp at a seat
+in the state legislature.  An editorial in the "Simpson's Bar
+Clarion" boldly advocated his pretensions.  At first it was
+believed that the article emanated from the gifted pen of Lacy
+himself, but the style was so unmistakably that of Colonel
+Starbottle, an eminent political "war-horse" of the district, that
+a graver truth was at once suggested, namely, that the "Guardian"
+had simply been transferred to Simpson's Bar, and merged into the
+"Clarion" solely on this condition.  At least it was recognized
+that it was the hand of Captain Jim which guided the editorial
+fingers of the colonel, and Captain Jim's money that distended the
+pockets of that gallant political leader.
+
+Howbeit Lacy Bassett was never elected; in fact he was only for one
+brief moment a candidate.  It was related that upon his first
+ascending the platform at Simpson's Bar a voice in the audience
+said lazily, "Come down!"  That voice was Yuba Bill's.  A slight
+confusion ensued, in which Yuba Bill whispered a few words in the
+colonel's ear.  After a moment's hesitation the "war-horse" came
+forward, and in his loftiest manner regretted that the candidate
+had withdrawn.  The next issue of the "Clarion" proclaimed with no
+uncertain sound that a base conspiracy gotten up by the former
+proprietor of the "Guardian" to undermine the prestige of the Great
+Express Company had been ruthlessly exposed, and the candidate on
+learning it HIMSELF for the first time, withdrew his name from the
+canvass, as became a high-toned gentleman.  Public opinion,
+ignoring Lacy Bassett completely, unhesitatingly denounced Captain
+Jim.
+
+During this period I had paid but little heed to Lacy Bassett's
+social movements, or the successes which would naturally attend
+such a character with the susceptible sex.  I had heard that he was
+engaged to Polly Baxter, but that they had quarrelled in
+consequence of his flirtations with others, especially a Mrs.
+Sweeny, a profusely ornamented but reputationless widow.  Captain
+Jim had often alluded with a certain respectful pride and delicacy
+to Polly's ardent appreciation of his friend, and had more than
+half hinted with the same reverential mystery to their matrimonial
+union later, and his intention of "doing the square thing" for the
+young couple.  But it was presently noticed that these allusions
+became less frequent during Lacy's amorous aberrations, and an
+occasional depression and unusual reticence marked Captain Jim's
+manner when the subject was discussed in his presence.  He seemed
+to endeavor to make up for his friend's defection by a kind of
+personal homage to Polly, and not unfrequently accompanied her to
+church or to singing-class.  I have a vivid recollection of meeting
+him one afternoon crossing the fields with her, and looking into
+her face with that same wistful, absorbed, and uneasy canine
+expression that I had hitherto supposed he had reserved for Lacy
+alone.  I do not know whether Polly was averse to the speechless
+devotion of these yearning brown eyes; her manner was animated and
+the pretty cheek that was nearest me mantled as I passed; but I was
+struck for the first time with the idea that Captain Jim loved her!
+I was surprised to have that fancy corroborated in the remark of
+another wayfarer whom I met, to the effect, "That now that Bassett
+was out o' the running it looked ez if Captain Jim was makin' up
+for time!"  Was it possible that Captain Jim had always loved her?
+I did not at first know whether to be pained or pleased for his
+sake.  But I concluded that whether the unworthy Bassett had at
+last found a RIVAL in Captain Jim or in the girl herself, it was a
+displacement that was for Captain Jim's welfare.  But as I was
+about leaving Gilead for a month's transfer to the San Francisco
+office, I had no opportunity to learn more from the confidences of
+Captain Jim.
+
+I was ascending the principal staircase of my San Francisco hotel
+one rainy afternoon, when I was pointedly recalled to Gilead by the
+passing glitter of Mrs. Sweeny's jewelry and the sudden vanishing
+behind her of a gentleman who seemed to be accompanying her.  A few
+moments after I had entered my room I heard a tap at my door, and
+opened it upon Lacy Bassett.  I thought he looked a little confused
+and agitated.  Nevertheless, with an assumption of cordiality and
+ease he said, "It appears we're neighbors.  That's my room next to
+yours."  He pointed to the next room, which I then remembered was a
+sitting-room en suite with my own, and communicating with it by a
+second door, which was always locked.  It had not been occupied
+since my tenancy.  As I suppose my face did not show any
+extravagant delight at the news of his contiguity, he added,
+hastily, "There's a transom over the door, and I thought I'd tell
+you you kin hear everything from the one room to the other."
+
+I thanked him, and told him dryly that, as I had no secrets to
+divulge and none that I cared to hear, it made no difference to me.
+As this seemed to increase his confusion and he still hesitated
+before the door, I asked him if Captain Jim was with him.
+
+"No," he said quickly.  "I haven't seen him for a month, and don't
+want to.  Look here, I want to talk to you a bit about him."  He
+walked into the room, and closed the door behind him.  "I want to
+tell you that me and Captain Jim is played!  All this runnin' o' me
+and interferin' with me is played!  I'm tired of it.  You kin tell
+him so from me."
+
+"Then you have quarrelled?"
+
+"Yes.  As much as any man can quarrel with a darned fool who can't
+take a hint."
+
+"One moment.  Have you quarrelled about Polly Baxter?"
+
+"Yes," he answered querulously.  "Of course I have.  What does he
+mean by interfering?
+
+"Now listen to me, Mr. Bassett," I interrupted.  "I have no desire
+to concern myself in your association with Captain Jim, but since
+you persist in dragging me into it, you must allow me to speak
+plainly.  From all that I can ascertain you have no serious
+intentions of marrying Polly Baxter.  You have come here from
+Gilead to follow Mrs. Sweeny, whom I saw you with a moment ago.
+Now, why do you not frankly give up Miss Baxter to Captain Jim, who
+will make her a good husband, and go your own way with Mrs. Sweeny?
+If you really wish to break off your connection with Captain Jim,
+that's the only way to do it."
+
+His face, which had exhibited the weakest and most pitiable
+consciousness at the mention of Mrs. Sweeny, changed to an
+expression of absolute stupefaction as I concluded.
+
+"Wot stuff are you tryin' to fool me with?" he said at last
+roughly.
+
+"I mean," I replied sharply, "that this double game of yours is
+disgraceful.  Your association with Mrs. Sweeny demands the
+withdrawal of any claim you have upon Miss Baxter at once.  If you
+have no respect for Captain Jim's friendship, you must at least
+show common decency to her."
+
+He burst into a half-relieved, half-hysteric laugh.  "Are you
+crazy?" gasped he.  "Why, Captain Jim's just huntin' ME down to
+make ME marry Polly.  That's just what the row's about.  That's
+just what he's interferin' for--just to carry out his darned fool
+ideas o' gettin' a wife for me; just his vanity to say HE'S made
+the match.  It's ME that he wants to marry to that Baxter girl--not
+himself.  He's too cursed selfish for that."
+
+I suppose I was not different from ordinary humanity, for in my
+unexpected discomfiture I despised Captain Jim quite as much as I
+did the man before me.  Reiterating my remark that I had no desire
+to mix myself further in their quarrels, I got rid of him with as
+little ceremony as possible.  But a few minutes later, when the
+farcical side of the situation struck me, my irritation was
+somewhat mollified, without however increasing my respect for
+either of the actors.  The whole affair had assumed a triviality
+that was simply amusing, nothing more, and I even looked forward to
+a meeting with Captain Jim and HIS exposition of the matter--which
+I knew would follow--with pleasurable anticipation.  But I was
+mistaken.
+
+One afternoon, when I was watching the slanting volleys of rain
+driven by a strong southwester against the windows of the hotel
+reading-room, I was struck by the erratic movements of a dripping
+figure outside that seemed to be hesitating over the entrance to
+the hotel.  At times furtively penetrating the porch as far as the
+vestibule, and again shyly recoiling from it, its manner was so
+strongly suggestive of some timid animal that I found myself
+suddenly reminded of Captain Jim and the memorable evening of his
+exodus from Eureka Gulch.  As the figure chanced to glance up to
+the window where I stood I saw to my astonishment that it WAS
+Captain Jim himself, but so changed and haggard that I scarcely
+knew him.  I instantly ran out into the hall and vestibule, but
+when I reached the porch he had disappeared.  Either he had seen me
+and wished to avoid me, or he had encountered the object of his
+quest, which I at once concluded must be Lacy Bassett.  I was so
+much impressed and worried by his appearance and manner, that, in
+this belief, I overcame my aversion to meeting Bassett, and even
+sought him through the public rooms and lobbies in the hope of
+finding Captain Jim with him.  But in vain; possibly he had
+succeeded in escaping his relentless friend.
+
+As the wind and rain increased at nightfall and grew into a
+tempestuous night, with deserted streets and swollen waterways, I
+did not go out again, but retired early, inexplicably haunted by
+the changed and brooding face of Captain Jim.  Even in my dreams he
+pursued me in his favorite likeness of a wistful, anxious, and
+uneasy hound, who, on my turning to caress him familiarly, snapped
+at me viciously, and appeared to have suddenly developed a snarling
+rabid fury.  I seemed to be awakened at last by the sound of his
+voice.  For an instant I believed the delusion a part of my dream.
+But I was mistaken; I was lying broad awake, and the voice clearly
+had come from the next room, and was distinctly audible over the
+transom.
+
+"I've had enough of it," he said, "and I'm givin' ye now--this
+night--yer last chance.  Quit this hotel and that woman, and go
+back to Gilead and marry Polly.  Don't do it and I'll kill ye, ez
+sure ez you sit there gapin' in that chair.  If I can't get ye to
+fight me like a man,--and I'll spit in yer face or put some insult
+onto you afore that woman, afore everybody, ez would make a bigger
+skunk nor you turn,--I'll hunt ye down and kill ye in your tracks."
+
+There was a querulous murmur of interruption in Lacy's voice, but
+whether of defiance or appeal I could not distinguish.  Captain
+Jim's voice again rose, dogged and distinct.
+
+"Ef YOU kill me it's all the same, and I don't say that I won't
+thank ye.  This yer world is too crowded for yer and me, Lacy
+Bassett.  I've believed in ye, trusted in ye, lied for ye, and
+fought for ye.  From the time I took ye up--a feller-passenger to
+'Fresco--believin' there wor the makin's of a man in ye, to now,
+you fooled me,--fooled me afore the Eureka boys; fooled me afore
+Gilead; fooled me afore HER; fooled me afore God!  It's got to end
+here.  Ye've got to take the curse of that foolishness off o' me!
+You've got to do one single thing that's like the man I took ye
+for, or you've got to die.  Times waz when I'd have wished it for
+your account--that's gone, Lacy Bassett!  You've got to do it for
+ME.  You've got to do it so I don't see 'd--d fool' writ in the
+eyes of every man ez looks at me."
+
+He had apparently risen and walked towards the door.  His voice
+sounded from another part of the room.
+
+"I'll give ye till to-morrow mornin' to do suthin' to lift this
+curse off o' me.  Ef you refoose, then, by the living God, I'll
+slap yer face in the dinin'-room, or in the office afore them all!
+You hear me!"
+
+There was a pause, and then a quick sharp explosion that seemed to
+fill and expand both rooms until the windows were almost lifted
+from their casements, a hysterical inarticulate cry from Lacy, the
+violent opening of a door, hurried voices, and the tramping of many
+feet in the passage.  I sprang out of bed, partly dressed myself,
+and ran into the hall.  But by that time I found a crowd of guests
+and servants around the next door, some grasping Bassett, who was
+white and trembling, and others kneeling by Captain Jim, who was
+half lying in the doorway against the wall.
+
+"He heard it all," Bassett gasped hysterically, pointing to me.
+"HE knows that this man wanted to kill me."
+
+Before I could reply, Captain Jim partly raised himself with a
+convulsive effort.  Wiping away the blood that, oozing from his
+lips, already showed the desperate character of his internal wound,
+he said in a husky and hurried voice: "It's all right, boys!  It's
+my fault.  It was ME who done it.  I went for him in a mean
+underhanded way jest now, when he hadn't a weppin nor any show to
+defend himself.  We gripped.  He got a holt o' my derringer--you
+see that's MY pistol there, I swear it--and turned it agin me in
+self-defense, and sarved me right.  I swear to God, gentlemen, it's
+so!"  Catching sight of my face, he looked at me, I fancied half
+imploringly and half triumphantly, and added, "I might hev knowed
+it!  I allers allowed Lacy Bassett was game!--game, gentlemen--and
+he was.  If it's my last word, I say it--he was game!"
+
+And with this devoted falsehood upon his lips and something of the
+old canine instinct in his failing heart, as his head sank back he
+seemed to turn it towards Bassett, as if to stretch himself out at
+his feet.  Then the light failed from his yearning upward glance,
+and the curse of foolishness was lifted from him forever.
+
+So conclusive were the facts, that the coroner's jury did not deem
+it necessary to detain Mr. Bassett for a single moment after the
+inquest.  But he returned to Gilead, married Polly Baxter, and
+probably on the strength of having "killed his man," was unopposed
+on the platform next year, and triumphantly elected to the
+legislature!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg etext of The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh.
+
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