1 files changed, 4688 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/2310-0.txt b/2310-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ecf77fb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/2310-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4688 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of In the Carquinez Woods, by Bret Harte
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: In the Carquinez Woods
+
+Author: Bret Harte
+
+Release Date: May 16, 2006 [EBook #2310]
+Last Updated: March 4, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE CARQUINEZ WOODS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Donald Lainson
+
+
+
+
+
+IN THE CARQUINEZ WOODS
+
+By Bret Harte
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+The sun was going down on the Carquinez Woods. The few shafts of
+sunlight that had pierced their pillared gloom were lost in unfathomable
+depths, or splintered their ineffectual lances on the enormous trunks
+of the redwoods. For a time the dull red of their vast columns, and the
+dull red of their cast-off bark which matted the echoless aisles, still
+seemed to hold a faint glow of the dying day. But even this soon passed.
+Light and color fled upwards. The dark interlaced treetops, that had all
+day made an impenetrable shade, broke into fire here and there; their
+lost spires glittered, faded, and went utterly out. A weird twilight
+that did not come from the outer world, but seemed born of the wood
+itself, slowly filled and possessed the aisles. The straight, tall,
+colossal trunks rose dimly like columns of upward smoke. The few fallen
+trees stretched their huge length into obscurity, and seemed to lie on
+shadowy trestles. The strange breath that filled these mysterious vaults
+had neither coldness nor moisture; a dry, fragrant dust arose from the
+noiseless foot that trod their bark-strewn floor; the aisles might have
+been tombs, the fallen trees enormous mummies; the silence the solitude
+of a forgotten past.
+
+And yet this silence was presently broken by a recurring sound like
+breathing, interrupted occasionally by inarticulate and stertorous
+gasps. It was not the quick, panting, listening breath of some stealthy
+feline or canine animal, but indicated a larger, slower, and more
+powerful organization, whose progress was less watchful and guarded, or
+as if a fragment of one of the fallen monsters had become animate.
+At times this life seemed to take visible form, but as vaguely, as
+misshapenly, as the phantom of a nightmare. Now it was a square object
+moving sideways, endways, with neither head nor tail and scarcely
+visible feet; then an arched bulk rolling against the trunks of the
+trees and recoiling again, or an upright cylindrical mass, but always
+oscillating and unsteady, and striking the trees on either hand. The
+frequent occurrence of the movement suggested the figures of some weird
+rhythmic dance to music heard by the shape alone. Suddenly it either
+became motionless or faded away.
+
+There was the frightened neighing of a horse, the sudden jingling of
+spurs, a shout and outcry, and the swift apparition of three dancing
+torches in one of the dark aisles; but so intense was the obscurity
+that they shed no light on surrounding objects, and seemed to advance
+of their own volition without human guidance, until they disappeared
+suddenly behind the interposing bulk of one of the largest trees. Beyond
+its eighty feet of circumference the light could not reach, and the
+gloom remained inscrutable. But the voices and jingling spurs were heard
+distinctly.
+
+“Blast the mare! She’s shied off that cursed trail again.”
+
+“Ye ain’t lost it again, hev ye?” growled a second voice.
+
+“That’s jist what I hev. And these blasted pine-knots don’t give light
+an inch beyond ‘em. D--d if I don’t think they make this cursed hole
+blacker.”
+
+There was a laugh--a woman’s laugh--hysterical, bitter, sarcastic,
+exasperating. The second speaker, without heeding it, went on:--
+
+“What in thunder skeert the hosses? Did you see or hear anything?”
+
+“Nothin’. The wood is like a graveyard.”
+
+The woman’s voice again broke into a hoarse, contemptuous laugh. The man
+resumed angrily:--
+
+“If you know anything, why in h-ll don’t you say so, instead of cackling
+like a d--d squaw there? P’raps you reckon you ken find the trail too.”
+
+“Take this rope off my wrist,” said the woman’s voice, “untie my hands,
+let me down, and I’ll find it.” She spoke quickly and with a Spanish
+accent.
+
+It was the men’s turn to laugh. “And give you a show to snatch that
+six-shooter and blow a hole through me, as you did to the Sheriff of
+Calaveras, eh? Not if this court understands itself,” said the first
+speaker dryly.
+
+“Go to the devil, then,” she said curtly.
+
+“Not before a lady,” responded the other. There was another laugh from
+the men, the spurs jingled again, the three torches reappeared from
+behind the tree, and then passed away in the darkness.
+
+For a time silence and immutability possessed the woods; the great
+trunks loomed upwards, their fallen brothers stretched their slow length
+into obscurity. The sound of breathing again became audible; the shape
+reappeared in the aisle, and recommenced its mystic dance. Presently
+it was lost in the shadow of the largest tree, and to the sound of
+breathing succeeded a grating and scratching of bark. Suddenly, as if
+riven by lightning, a flash broke from the center of the tree-trunk,
+lit up the woods, and a sharp report rang through it. After a pause
+the jingling of spurs and the dancing of torches were revived from the
+distance.
+
+“Hallo?”
+
+No answer.
+
+“Who fired that shot?”
+
+But there was no reply. A slight veil of smoke passed away to the right,
+there was the spice of gunpowder in the air, but nothing more.
+
+The torches came forward again, but this time it could be seen they were
+held in the hands of two men and a woman. The woman’s hands were tied
+at the wrist to the horse-hair reins of her mule, while a riata, passed
+around her waist and under the mule’s girth, was held by one of the men,
+who were both armed with rifles and revolvers. Their frightened horses
+curveted, and it was with difficulty they could be made to advance.
+
+“Ho! stranger, what are you shooting at?”
+
+The woman laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “Look yonder at the roots
+of the tree. You’re a d--d smart man for a sheriff, ain’t you?”
+
+The man uttered an exclamation and spurred his horse forward, but the
+animal reared in terror. He then sprang to the ground and approached the
+tree. The shape lay there, a scarcely distinguishable bulk.
+
+“A grizzly, by the living Jingo! Shot through the heart.”
+
+It was true. The strange shape lit up by the flaring torches seemed more
+vague, unearthly, and awkward in its dying throes, yet the small shut
+eyes, the feeble nose, the ponderous shoulders, and half-human foot
+armed with powerful claws were unmistakable. The men turned by a common
+impulse and peered into the remote recesses of the wood again.
+
+“Hi, Mister! come and pick up your game. Hallo there!”
+
+The challenge fell unheeded on the empty woods.
+
+“And yet,” said he whom the woman had called the sheriff, “he can’t be
+far off. It was a close shot, and the bear hez dropped in his tracks.
+Why, wot’s this sticking in his claws?”
+
+The two men bent over the animal. “Why, it’s sugar, brown sugar--look!”
+ There was no mistake. The huge beast’s fore paws and muzzle were
+streaked with the unromantic household provision, and heightened the
+absurd contrast of its incongruous members. The woman, apparently
+indifferent, had taken that opportunity to partly free one of her
+wrists.
+
+“If we hadn’t been cavorting round this yer spot for the last half
+hour, I’d swear there was a shanty not a hundred yards away,” said the
+sheriff.
+
+The other man, without replying, remounted his horse instantly.
+
+“If there is, and it’s inhabited by a gentleman that kin make centre
+shots like that in the dark, and don’t care to explain how, I reckon I
+won’t disturb him.”
+
+The sheriff was apparently of the same opinion, for he followed his
+companion’s example, and once more led the way. The spurs tinkled, the
+torches danced, and the cavalcade slowly reentered the gloom. In another
+moment it had disappeared.
+
+The wood sank again into repose, this time disturbed by neither shape
+nor sound. What lower forms of life might have crept close to its
+roots were hidden in the ferns, or passed with deadened tread over the
+bark-strewn floor. Towards morning a coolness like dew fell from above,
+with here and there a dropping twig or nut, or the crepitant awakening
+and stretching-out of cramped and weary branches. Later a dull, lurid
+dawn, not unlike the last evening’s sunset, filled the aisles. This
+faded again, and a clear gray light, in which every object stood out in
+sharp distinctness, took its place. Morning was waiting outside in all
+its brilliant, youthful coloring, but only entered as the matured and
+sobered day.
+
+Seen in that stronger light, the monstrous tree near which the dead bear
+lay revealed its age in its denuded and scarred trunk, and showed in
+its base a deep cavity, a foot or two from the ground, partly hidden by
+hanging strips of bark which had fallen across it. Suddenly one of these
+strips was pushed aside, and a young man leaped lightly down.
+
+But for the rifle he carried and some modern peculiarities of dress, he
+was of a grace so unusual and unconventional that he might have passed
+for a faun who was quitting his ancestral home. He stepped to the side
+of the bear with a light elastic movement that was as unlike customary
+progression as his face and figure were unlike the ordinary types
+of humanity. Even as he leaned upon his rifle, looking down at the
+prostrate animal, he unconsciously fell into an attitude that in any
+other mortal would have been a pose, but with him was the picturesque
+and unstudied relaxation of perfect symmetry.
+
+“Hallo, Mister!”
+
+He raised his head so carelessly and listlessly that he did not
+otherwise change his attitude. Stepping from behind the tree, the woman
+of the preceding night stood before him. Her hands were free except for
+a thong of the riata, which was still knotted around one wrist, the end
+of the thong having been torn or burnt away. Her eyes were bloodshot,
+and her hair hung over her shoulders in one long black braid.
+
+“I reckoned all along it was YOU who shot the bear,” she said; “at least
+some one hiding yer,” and she indicated the hollow tree with her hand.
+“It wasn’t no chance shot.” Observing that the young man, either from
+misconception or indifference, did not seem to comprehend her, she
+added, “We came by here, last night, a minute after you fired.”
+
+“Oh, that was YOU kicked up such a row, was it?” said the young man,
+with a shade of interest.
+
+“I reckon,” said the woman, nodding her head, “and them that was with
+me.”
+
+“And who are they?”
+
+“Sheriff Dunn, of Yolo, and his deputy.”
+
+“And where are they now?”
+
+“The deputy--in h-ll, I reckon; I don’t know about the sheriff.”
+
+“I see,” said the young man quietly; “and you?”
+
+“I--got away,” she said savagely. But she was taken with a sudden
+nervous shiver, which she at once repressed by tightly dragging her
+shawl over her shoulders and elbows, and folding her arms defiantly.
+
+“And you’re going?”
+
+“To follow the deputy, may be,” she said gloomily. “But come, I say,
+ain’t you going to treat? It’s cursed cold here.”
+
+“Wait a moment.” The young man was looking at her, with his arched brows
+slightly knit and a half smile of curiosity. “Ain’t you Teresa?”
+
+She was prepared for the question, but evidently was not certain whether
+she would reply defiantly or confidently. After an exhaustive scrutiny
+of his face she chose the latter, and said, “You can bet your life on
+it, Johnny.”
+
+“I don’t bet, and my name isn’t Johnny. Then you’re the woman who
+stabbed Dick Curson over at Lagrange’s?”
+
+She became defiant again.
+
+“That’s me, all the time. What are you going to do about it?”
+
+“Nothing. And you used to dance at the Alhambra?” She whisked the shawl
+from her shoulders, held it up like a scarf, and made one or two steps
+of the sembicuacua. There was not the least gayety, recklessness, or
+spontaneity in the action; it was simply mechanical bravado. It was so
+ineffective, even upon her own feelings, that her arms presently dropped
+to her side, and she coughed embarrassedly. “Where’s that whiskey,
+pardner?” she asked.
+
+The young man turned toward the tree he had just quitted, and
+without further words assisted her to mount to the cavity. It was an
+irregular-shaped vaulted chamber, pierced fifty feet above by a shaft or
+cylindrical opening in the decayed trunk, which was blackened by smoke,
+as if it had served the purpose of a chimney. In one corner lay a
+bearskin and blanket; at the side were two alcoves or indentations, one
+of which was evidently used as a table, and the other as a cupboard.
+In another hollow, near the entrance, lay a few small sacks of flour,
+coffee, and sugar, the sticky contents of the latter still strewing
+the floor. From this storehouse the young man drew a wicker flask of
+whiskey, and handed it, with a tin cup of water, to the woman. She waved
+the cup aside, placed the flask to her lips, and drank the undiluted
+spirit. Yet even this was evidently bravado, for the water started
+to her eyes, and she could not restrain the paroxysm of coughing that
+followed.
+
+“I reckon that’s the kind that kills at forty rods,” she said, with a
+hysterical laugh. “But I say, pardner, you look as if you were fixed
+here to stay,” and she stared ostentatiously around the chamber. But she
+had already taken in its minutest details, even to observing that the
+hanging strips of bark could be disposed so as to completely hide the
+entrance.
+
+“Well, yes,” he replied; “it wouldn’t be very easy to pull up the stakes
+and move the shanty further on.”
+
+Seeing that either from indifference or caution he had not accepted her
+meaning, she looked at him fixedly, and said,--
+
+“What is your little game?”
+
+“Eh?”
+
+“What are you hiding for--here, in this tree?”
+
+“But I’m not hiding.”
+
+“Then why didn’t you come out when they hailed you last night?”
+
+“Because I didn’t care to.”
+
+Teresa whistled incredulously. “All right--then if you’re not hiding,
+I’m going to.” As he did not reply, she went on: “If I can keep out of
+sight for a couple of weeks, this thing will blow over here, and I can
+get across into Yolo. I could get a fair show there, where the boys
+know me. Just now the trails are all watched, but no one would think of
+lookin’ here.”
+
+“Then how did you come to think of it?” he asked carelessly.
+
+“Because I knew that bear hadn’t gone far for that sugar; because I know
+he hadn’t stole it from a cache--it was too fresh, and we’d have seen
+the torn-up earth; because we had passed no camp; and because I knew
+there was no shanty here. And, besides,” she added in a low voice,
+“maybe I was huntin’ a hole myself to die in--and spotted it by
+instinct.”
+
+There was something in this suggestion of a hunted animal that, unlike
+anything she had previously said or suggested, was not exaggerated, and
+caused the young man to look at her again. She was standing under the
+chimney-like opening, and the light from above illuminated her head and
+shoulders. The pupils of her eyes had lost their feverish prominence,
+and were slightly suffused and softened as she gazed abstractedly before
+her. The only vestige of her previous excitement was in her left-hand
+fingers, which were incessantly twisting and turning a diamond ring upon
+her right hand, but without imparting the least animation to her rigid
+attitude. Suddenly, as if conscious of his scrutiny, she stepped aside
+out of the revealing light and by a swift feminine instinct raised her
+hand to her head as if to adjust her straggling hair. It was only for
+a moment, however, for, as if aware of the weakness, she struggled to
+resume her aggressive pose.
+
+“Well,” she said. “Speak up. Am I goin’ to stop here, or have I got to
+get up and get?”
+
+“You can stay,” said the young man quietly; “but as I’ve got my
+provisions and ammunition here, and haven’t any other place to go to
+just now, I suppose we’ll have to share it together.”
+
+She glanced at him under her eyelids, and a half-bitter,
+half-contemptuous smile passed across her face. “All right, old man,”
+ she said, holding out her hand, “it’s a go. We’ll start in housekeeping
+at once, if you like.”
+
+“I’ll have to come here once or twice a day,” he said, quite composedly,
+“to look after my things, and get something to eat; but I’ll be away
+most of the time, and what with camping out under the trees every night
+I reckon my share won’t incommode you.”
+
+She opened her black eyes upon him, at this original proposition. Then
+she looked down at her torn dress. “I suppose this style of thing ain’t
+very fancy, is it?” she said, with a forced laugh.
+
+“I think I know where to beg or borrow a change for you, if you can’t
+get any,” he replied simply.
+
+She stared at him again. “Are you a family man?”
+
+“No.”
+
+She was silent for a moment. “Well,” she said, “you can tell your girl
+I’m not particular about its being in the latest fashion.”
+
+There was a slight flush on his forehead as he turned toward the little
+cupboard, but no tremor in his voice as he went on: “You’ll find tea
+and coffee here, and, if you’re bored, there’s a book or two. You read,
+don’t you--I mean English?”
+
+She nodded, but cast a look of undisguised contempt upon the two worn,
+coverless novels he held out to her. “You haven’t got last week’s
+‘Sacramento Union,’ have you? I hear they have my case all in; only them
+lying reporters made it out against me all the time.”
+
+“I don’t see the papers,” he replied curtly.
+
+“They say there’s a picture of me in the ‘Police Gazette,’ taken in the
+act,” and she laughed.
+
+He looked a little abstracted, and turned as if to go. “I think you’ll
+do well to rest a while just now, and keep as close hid as possible
+until afternoon. The trail is a mile away at the nearest point, but
+some one might miss it and stray over here. You’re quite safe if you’re
+careful, and stand by the tree. You can build a fire here,” he stepped
+under the chimney-like opening, “without its being noticed. Even the
+smoke is lost and cannot be seen so high.”
+
+The light from above was falling on his head and shoulders, as it had on
+hers. She looked at him intently.
+
+“You travel a good deal on your figure, pardner, don’t you?” she said,
+with a certain admiration that was quite sexless in its quality; “but
+I don’t see how you pick up a living by it in the Carquinez Woods. So
+you’re going, are you? You might be more sociable. Good-by.”
+
+“Good-by!” He leaped from the opening.
+
+“I say pardner!”
+
+He turned a little impatiently. She had knelt down at the entrance, so
+as to be nearer his level, and was holding out her hand. But he did not
+notice it, and she quietly withdrew it.
+
+“If anybody dropped in and asked for you, what name will they say?”
+
+He smiled. “Don’t wait to hear.”
+
+“But suppose I wanted to sing out for you, what will I call you?”
+
+He hesitated. “Call me--Lo.”
+
+“Lo, the poor Indian?” *
+
+“Exactly.”
+
+     * The first word of Pope’s familiar apostrophe is humorously
+     used in the Far West as a distinguishing title for the
+     Indian.
+
+It suddenly occurred to the woman, Teresa, that in the young man’s
+height, supple, yet erect carriage, color, and singular gravity of
+demeanor there was a refined, aboriginal suggestion. He did not look
+like any Indian she had ever seen, but rather as a youthful chief might
+have looked. There was a further suggestion in his fringed buckskin
+shirt and moccasins; but before she could utter the half-sarcastic
+comment that rose to her lips he had glided noiselessly away, even as an
+Indian might have done.
+
+She readjusted the slips of hanging bark with feminine ingenuity,
+dispersing them so as to completely hide the entrance. Yet this did not
+darken the chamber, which seemed to draw a purer and more vigorous light
+through the soaring shaft that pierced the roof than that which came
+from the dim woodland aisles below. Nevertheless, she shivered, and
+drawing her shawl closely around her began to collect some half-burnt
+fragments of wood in the chimney to make a fire. But the preoccupation
+of her thoughts rendered this a tedious process, as she would from time
+to time stop in the middle of an action and fall into an attitude of
+rapt abstraction, with far-off eyes and rigid mouth. When she had at
+last succeeded in kindling a fire and raising a film of pale blue smoke,
+that seemed to fade and dissipate entirely before it reached the top of
+the chimney shaft, she crouched beside it, fixed her eyes on the darkest
+corner of the cavern, and became motionless.
+
+What did she see through that shadow?
+
+Nothing at first but a confused medley of figures and incidents of the
+preceding night; things to be put away and forgotten; things that
+would not have happened but for another thing--the thing before which
+everything faded! A ball-room; the sounds of music; the one man she
+had cared for insulting her with the flaunting ostentation of his
+unfaithfulness; herself despised, put aside, laughed at, or worse,
+jilted. And then the moment of delirium, when the light danced; the one
+wild act that lifted her, the despised one, above them all--made her
+the supreme figure, to be glanced at by frightened women, stared at by
+half-startled, half-admiring men! “Yes,” she laughed; but struck by the
+sound of her own voice, moved twice round the cavern nervously, and then
+dropped again into her old position.
+
+As they carried him away he had laughed at her--like a hound that he
+was; he who had praised her for her spirit, and incited her revenge
+against others; he who had taught her to strike when she was insulted;
+and it was only fit he should reap what he had sown. She was what he,
+what other men, had made her. And what was she now? What had she been
+once?
+
+She tried to recall her childhood: the man and woman who might have
+been her father and mother; who fought and wrangled over her precocious
+little life; abused or caressed her as she sided with either; and then
+left her with a circus troupe, where she first tasted the power of her
+courage, her beauty, and her recklessness. She remembered those flashes
+of triumph that left a fever in her veins--a fever that when it failed
+must be stimulated by dissipation, by anything, by everything that would
+keep her name a wonder in men’s mouths, an envious fear to women. She
+recalled her transfer to the strolling players; her cheap pleasures, and
+cheaper rivalries and hatred--but always Teresa! the daring Teresa! the
+reckless Teresa! audacious as a woman, invincible as a boy; dancing,
+flirting, fencing, shooting, swearing, drinking, smoking, fighting
+Teresa! “Oh, yes; she had been loved, perhaps--who knows?--but always
+feared. Why should she change now? Ha, he should see.”
+
+She had lashed herself in a frenzy, as was her wont, with gestures,
+ejaculations, oaths, adjurations, and passionate apostrophes, but with
+this strange and unexpected result. Heretofore she had always been
+sustained and kept up by an audience of some kind or quality, if only
+perhaps a humble companion; there had always been some one she could
+fascinate or horrify, and she could read her power mirrored in their
+eyes. Even the half-abstracted indifference of her strange host had been
+something. But she was alone now. Her words fell on apathetic solitude;
+she was acting to viewless space. She rushed to the opening, dashed the
+hanging bark aside, and leaped to the ground.
+
+She ran forward wildly a few steps, and stopped.
+
+“Hallo!” she cried. “Look, ‘tis I, Teresa!”
+
+The profound silence remained unbroken. Her shrillest tones were lost
+in an echoless space, even as the smoke of her fire had faded into pure
+ether. She stretched out her clenched fists as if to defy the pillared
+austerities of the vaults around her.
+
+“Come and take me if you dare!”
+
+The challenge was unheeded. If she had thrown herself violently against
+the nearest tree-trunk, she could not have been stricken more breathless
+than she was by the compact, embattled solitude that encompassed her.
+The hopelessness of impressing these cold and passive vaults with
+her selfish passion filled her with a vague fear. In her rage of the
+previous night she had not seen the wood in its profound immobility.
+Left alone with the majesty of those enormous columns, she trembled and
+turned faint. The silence of the hollow tree she had just quitted seemed
+to her less awful than the crushing presence of these mute and monstrous
+witnesses of her weakness. Like a wounded quail with lowered crest and
+trailing wing, she crept back to her hiding place.
+
+Even then the influence of the wood was still upon her. She picked up
+the novel she had contemptuously thrown aside, only to let it fall again
+in utter weariness. For a moment her feminine curiosity was excited
+by the discovery of an old book, in whose blank leaves were pressed a
+variety of flowers and woodland grasses. As she could not conceive
+that these had been kept for any but a sentimental purpose, she was
+disappointed to find that underneath each was a sentence in an unknown
+tongue, that even to her untutored eye did not appear to be the language
+of passion. Finally she rearranged the couch of skins and blankets, and,
+imparting to it in three clever shakes an entirely different character,
+lay down to pursue her reveries. But nature asserted herself, and ere
+she knew it she was asleep.
+
+So intense and prolonged had been her previous excitement that, the
+tension once relieved, she passed into a slumber of exhaustion so deep
+that she seemed scarce to breathe. High noon succeeded morning, the
+central shaft received a single ray of upper sunlight, the afternoon
+came and went, the shadows gathered below, the sunset fires began to eat
+their way through the groined roof, and she still slept. She slept even
+when the bark hangings of the chamber were put aside, and the young man
+reentered.
+
+He laid down a bundle he was carrying and softly approached the sleeper.
+For a moment he was startled from his indifference; she lay so still and
+motionless. But this was not all that struck him; the face before him
+was no longer the passionate, haggard visage that confronted him that
+morning; the feverish air, the burning color, the strained muscles of
+mouth and brow, and the staring eyes were gone; wiped away, perhaps, by
+the tears that still left their traces on cheek and dark eyelash. It
+was the face of a handsome woman of thirty, with even a suggestion of
+softness in the contour of the cheek and arching of her upper lip, no
+longer rigidly drawn down in anger, but relaxed by sleep on her white
+teeth.
+
+With the lithe, soft tread that was habitual to him, the young man moved
+about, examining the condition of the little chamber and its stock
+of provisions and necessaries, and withdrew presently, to reappear as
+noiselessly with a tin bucket of water. This done, he replenished the
+little pile of fuel with an armful of bark and pine cones, cast an
+approving glance about him, which included the sleeper, and silently
+departed.
+
+It was night when she awoke. She was surrounded by a profound darkness,
+except where the shaft-like opening made a nebulous mist in the corner
+of her wooden cavern. Providentially she struggled back to consciousness
+slowly, so that the solitude and silence came upon her gradually, with
+a growing realization of the events of the past twenty-four hours, but
+without a shock. She was alone here, but safe still, and every hour
+added to her chances of ultimate escape. She remembered to have seen a
+candle among the articles on the shelf, and she began to grope her way
+towards the matches. Suddenly she stopped. What was that panting?
+
+Was it her own breathing, quickened with a sudden nameless terror? or
+was there something outside? Her heart seemed to stop beating while
+she listened. Yes! it was a panting outside--a panting now increased,
+multiplied, redoubled, mixed with the sounds of rustling, tearing,
+craunching, and occasionally a quick, impatient snarl. She crept on
+her hands and knees to the opening and looked out. At first the ground
+seemed to be undulating between her and the opposite tree. But a second
+glance showed her the black and gray, bristling, tossing backs of
+tumbling beasts of prey, charging the carcass of the bear that lay at
+its roots, or contesting for the prize with gluttonous, choked breath,
+sidelong snarls, arched spines, and recurved tails. One of the boldest
+had leaped upon a buttressing root of her tree within a foot of the
+opening. The excitement, awe, and terror she had undergone culminated in
+one wild, maddened scream, that seemed to pierce even the cold depths of
+the forest, as she dropped on her face, with her hands clasped over her
+eyes in an agony of fear.
+
+Her scream was answered, after a pause, by a sudden volley of firebrands
+and sparks into the midst of the panting, crowding pack; a few smothered
+howls and snaps, and a sudden dispersion of the concourse. In another
+moment the young man, with a blazing brand in either hand, leaped upon
+the body of the bear.
+
+Teresa raised her head, uttered a hysterical cry, slid down the tree,
+flew wildly to his side, caught convulsively at his sleeve, and fell on
+her knees beside him.
+
+“Save me! save me!” she gasped, in a voice broken by terror. “Save me
+from those hideous creatures. No, no!” she implored, as he endeavored
+to lift her to her feet. “No--let me stay here close beside you. So,”
+ clutching the fringe of his leather hunting-shirt, and dragging herself
+on her knees nearer him--“so--don’t leave me, for God’s sake!”
+
+“They are gone,” he replied, gazing down curiously at her, as she wound
+the fringe around her hand to strengthen her hold; “they’re only a lot
+of cowardly coyotes and wolves, that dare not attack anything that lives
+and can move.”
+
+The young woman responded with a nervous shudder. “Yes, that’s it,” she
+whispered, in a broken voice; “it’s only the dead they want. Promise
+me--swear to me, if I’m caught, or hung, or shot, you won’t let me be
+left here to be torn and--ah! my God! what’s that?”
+
+She had thrown her arms around his knees, completely pinioning him to
+her frantic breast. Something like a smile of disdain passed across his
+face as he answered, “It’s nothing. They will not return. Get up!”
+
+Even in her terror she saw the change in his face. “I know, I know!”
+ she cried. “I’m frightened--but I cannot bear it any longer. Hear me!
+Listen! Listen--but don’t move! I didn’t mean to kill Curson--no! I
+swear to God, no! I didn’t mean to kill the sheriff--and I didn’t. I was
+only bragging--do you hear? I lied! I lied--don’t move, I swear to God I
+lied. I’ve made myself out worse than I was. I have. Only don’t leave
+me now--and if I die--and it’s not far off, may be--get me away from
+here--and from THEM. Swear it!”
+
+“All right,” said the young man, with a scarcely concealed movement of
+irritation. “But get up now, and go back to the cabin.”
+
+“No; not THERE alone.” Nevertheless, he quietly but firmly released
+himself.
+
+“I will stay here,” he replied. “I would have been nearer to you, but
+I thought it better for your safety that my camp-fire should be further
+off. But I can build it here, and that will keep the coyotes off.”
+
+“Let me stay with you--beside you,” she said imploringly.
+
+She looked so broken, crushed, and spiritless, so unlike the woman of
+the morning that, albeit with an ill grace, he tacitly consented, and
+turned away to bring his blankets. But in the next moment she was at his
+side, following him like a dog, silent and wistful, and even offering
+to carry his burden. When he had built the fire, for which she had
+collected the pine-cones and broken branches near them, he sat down,
+folded his arms, and leaned back against the tree in reserved and
+deliberate silence.
+
+Humble and submissive, she did not attempt to break in upon a reverie
+she could not help but feel had little kindliness to herself. As the
+fire snapped and sparkled, she pillowed her head upon a root, and lay
+still to watch it.
+
+It rose and fell, and dying away at times to a mere lurid glow, and
+again, agitated by some breath scarcely perceptible to them, quickening
+into a roaring flame. When only the embers remained, a dead silence
+filled the wood. Then the first breath of morning moved the tangled
+canopy above, and a dozen tiny sprays and needles detached from the
+interlocked boughs winged their soft way noiselessly to the earth. A few
+fell upon the prostrate woman like a gentle benediction, and she slept.
+But even then, the young man, looking down, saw that the slender fingers
+were still aimlessly but rigidly twisted in the leather fringe of his
+hunting-shirt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+It was a peculiarity of the Carquinez Wood that it stood apart and
+distinct in its gigantic individuality. Even where the integrity of its
+own singular species was not entirely preserved, it admitted no inferior
+trees. Nor was there any diminishing fringe on its outskirts; the
+sentinels that guarded the few gateways of the dim trails were as
+monstrous as the serried ranks drawn up in the heart of the forest.
+Consequently, the red highway that skirted the eastern angle was bare
+and shadeless, until it slipped a league off into a watered valley and
+refreshed itself under lesser sycamores and willows. It was here the
+newly born city of Excelsior, still in its cradle, had, like an infant
+Hercules, strangled the serpentine North Fork of the American river,
+and turned its life current into the ditches and flumes of the Excelsior
+mines.
+
+Newest of the new houses that seemed to have accidentally formed its
+single, straggling street was the residence of the Rev. Winslow Wynn,
+not unfrequently known as “Father Wynn,” pastor of the First Baptist
+church. The “pastorage,” as it was cheerfully called, had the glaring
+distinction of being built of brick, and was, as had been wickedly
+pointed out by idle scoffers, the only “fireproof” structure in town.
+This sarcasm was not, however, supposed to be particularly distasteful
+to “Father Wynn,” who enjoyed the reputation of being “hail fellow, well
+met” with the rough mining element, who called them by their Christian
+names, had been known to drink at the bar of the Polka Saloon while
+engaged in the conversion of a prominent citizen, and was popularly said
+to have no “gospel starch” about him. Certain conscious outcasts and
+transgressors were touched at this apparent unbending of the spiritual
+authority. The rigid tenets of Father Wynn’s faith were lost in the
+supposed catholicity of his humanity. “A preacher that can jine a man
+when he’s histin’ liquor into him, without jawin’ about it, ought to be
+allowed to wrestle with sinners and splash about in as much cold water
+as he likes,” was the criticism of one of his converts. Nevertheless,
+it was true that Father Wynn was somewhat loud and intolerant in his
+tolerance. It was true that he was a little more rough, a little more
+frank, a little more hearty, a little more impulsive than his disciples.
+It was true that often the proclamation of his extreme liberality and
+brotherly equality partook somewhat of an apology. It is true that a few
+who might have been most benefited by this kind of gospel regarded
+him with a singular disdain. It is true that his liberality was of an
+ornamental, insinuating quality, accompanied with but little sacrifice;
+his acceptance of a collection taken up in a gambling saloon for the
+rebuilding of his church, destroyed by fire, gave him a popularity
+large enough, it must be confessed, to cover the sins of the gamblers
+themselves, but it was not proven that HE had ever organized any form
+of relief. But it was true that local history somehow accepted him as
+an exponent of mining Christianity, without the least reference to the
+opinions of the Christian miners themselves.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Wynn’s liberal habits and opinions were not, however,
+shared by his only daughter, a motherless young lady of eighteen.
+Nellie Wynn was in the eye of Excelsior an unapproachable divinity,
+as inaccessible and cold as her father was impulsive and familiar. An
+atmosphere of chaste and proud virginity made itself felt even in
+the starched integrity of her spotless skirts, in her neatly gloved
+finger-tips, in her clear amber eyes, in her imperious red lips, in her
+sensitive nostrils. Need it be said that the youth and middle age of
+Excelsior were madly, because apparently hopelessly, in love with her?
+For the rest, she had been expensively educated, was profoundly ignorant
+in two languages, with a trained misunderstanding of music and painting,
+and a natural and faultless taste in dress.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Wynn was engaged in a characteristic hearty parting with
+one of his latest converts, upon his own doorstep, with admirable
+al fresco effect. He had just clapped him on the shoulder. “Good-by,
+good-by, Charley, my boy, and keep in the right path; not up, or down,
+or round the gulch, you know--ha, ha!--but straight across lots to
+the shining gate.” He had raised his voice under the stimulus of a few
+admiring spectators, and backed his convert playfully against the wall.
+“You see! we’re goin’ in to win, you bet. Good-by! I’d ask you to step
+in and have a chat, but I’ve got my work to do, and so have you. The
+gospel mustn’t keep us from that, must it, Charley? Ha, ha!”
+
+The convert (who elsewhere was a profane expressman, and had become
+quite imbecile under Mr. Wynn’s active heartiness and brotherly
+horse-play before spectators) managed, however, to feebly stammer with a
+blush something about “Miss Nellie.”
+
+“Ah, Nellie. She, too, is at her tasks--trimming her lamp--you know,
+the parable of the wise virgins,” continued Father Wynn hastily,
+fearing that the convert might take the illustration literally. “There,
+there--good-by. Keep in the right path.” And with a parting shove he
+dismissed Charley and entered his own house.
+
+That “wise virgin,” Nellie, had evidently finished with the lamp, and
+was now going out to meet the bridegroom, as she was fully dressed and
+gloved, and had a pink parasol in her hand, as her father entered the
+sitting-room. His bluff heartiness seemed to fade away as he removed
+his soft, broad-brimmed hat and glanced across the too fresh-looking
+apartment. There was a smell of mortar still in the air, and a faint
+suggestion that at any moment green grass might appear between the
+interstices of the red-brick hearth. The room, yielding a little in the
+point of coldness, seemed to share Miss Nellie’s fresh virginity, and,
+barring the pink parasol, set her off as in a vestal’s cell.
+
+“I supposed you wouldn’t care to see Brace, the expressman, so I got
+rid of him at the door,” said her father, drawing one of the new chairs
+towards him slowly, and sitting down carefully, as if it were a hitherto
+untried experiment.
+
+Miss Nellie’s face took a tint of interest. “Then he doesn’t go with the
+coach to Indian Spring to-day?”
+
+“No; why?”
+
+“I thought of going over myself to get the Burnham girls to come to
+choir-meeting,” replied Miss Nellie carelessly, “and he might have been
+company.”
+
+“He’d go now, if he knew you were going,” said her father; “but it’s
+just as well he shouldn’t be needlessly encouraged. I rather think that
+Sheriff Dunn is a little jealous of him. By the way, the sheriff is
+much better. I called to cheer him up to-day” (Mr. Wynn had in fact
+tumultuously accelerated the sick man’s pulse), “and he talked of you,
+as usual. In fact, he said he had only two things to get well for. One
+was to catch and hang that woman Teresa, who shot him; the other--can’t
+you guess the other?” he added archly, with a faint suggestion of his
+other manner.
+
+Miss Nellie coldly could not.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Wynn’s archness vanished. “Don’t be a fool,” he said dryly.
+“He wants to marry you, and you know it.”
+
+“Most of the men here do,” responded Miss Nellie, without the least
+trace of coquetry. “Is the wedding or the hanging to take place first,
+or together, so he can officiate at both?”
+
+“His share in the Union Ditch is worth a hundred thousand dollars,”
+ continued her father; “and if he isn’t nominated for district judge this
+fall, he’s bound to go to the legislature, anyway. I don’t think a girl
+with your advantages and education can afford to throw away the chance
+of shining in Sacramento, San Francisco, or, in good time, perhaps even
+Washington.”
+
+Miss Nellie’s eyes did not reflect entire disapproval of this
+suggestion, although she replied with something of her father’s
+practical quality.
+
+“Mr. Dunn is not out of his bed yet, and they say Teresa’s got away to
+Arizona, so there isn’t any particular hurry.”
+
+“Perhaps not; but see here, Nellie, I’ve some important news for you.
+You know your young friend of the Carquinez Woods--Dorman, the botanist,
+eh? Well, Brace knows all about him. And what do you think he is?”
+
+Miss Nellie took upon herself a few extra degrees of cold, and didn’t
+know.
+
+“An Injin! Yes, an out-and-out Cherokee. You see he calls himself
+Dorman--Low Dorman. That’s only French for ‘Sleeping Water,’ his Injin
+name!--‘Low Dorman.’”
+
+“You mean ‘L’Eau Dormante,’” said Nellie.
+
+“That’s what I said. The chief called him ‘Sleeping Water’ when he was a
+boy, and one of them French Canadian trappers translated it into French
+when he brought him to California to school. But he’s an Injin, sure. No
+wonder he prefers to live in the woods.”
+
+“Well?” said Nellie.
+
+“Well,” echoed her father impatiently, “he’s an Injin, I tell you, and
+you can’t of course have anything to do with him. He mustn’t come here
+again.”
+
+“But you forget,” said Nellie imperturbably, “that it was you who
+invited him here, and were so much exercised over him. You remember
+you introduced him to the Bishop and those Eastern clergymen as a
+magnificent specimen of a young Californian. You forget what an occasion
+you made of his coming to church on Sunday, and how you made him come in
+his buckskin shirt and walk down the street with you after service!”
+
+“Yes, yes,” said the Rev. Mr. Wynn, hurriedly.
+
+“And,” continued Nellie carelessly, “how you made us sing out of the
+same book ‘Children of our Father’s Fold,’ and how you preached at him
+until he actually got a color!”
+
+“Yes,” said her father; “but it wasn’t known then he was an Injin, and
+they are frightfully unpopular with those Southwestern men among whom we
+labor. Indeed, I am quite convinced that when Brace said ‘the only good
+Indian was a dead one’ his expression, though extravagant, perhaps,
+really voiced the sentiments of the majority. It would be only kindness
+to the unfortunate creature to warn him from exposing himself to their
+rude but conscientious antagonism.”
+
+“Perhaps you’d better tell him, then, in your own popular way, which
+they all seem to understand so well,” responded the daughter. Mr. Wynn
+cast a quick glance at her, but there was no trace of irony in her
+face--nothing but a half-bored indifference as she walked toward the
+window.
+
+“I will go with you to the coach-office,” said her father, who generally
+gave these simple paternal duties the pronounced character of a public
+Christian example.
+
+“It’s hardly worth while,” replied Miss Nellie. “I’ve to stop at the
+Watsons’, at the foot of the hill, and ask after the baby; so I shall go
+on to the Crossing and pick up the coach when it passes. Good-by.”
+
+Nevertheless, as soon as Nellie had departed, the Rev. Mr. Wynn
+proceeded to the coach-office, and publicly grasping the hand of Yuba
+Bill, the driver, commended his daughter to his care in the name of the
+universal brotherhood of man and the Christian fraternity. Carried away
+by his heartiness, he forgot his previous caution, and confided to
+the expressman Miss Nellie’s regrets that she was not to have that
+gentleman’s company. The result was that Miss Nellie found the coach
+with its passengers awaiting her with uplifted hats and wreathed smiles
+at the Crossing, and the box seat (from which an unfortunate stranger,
+who had expensively paid for it, had been summarily ejected) at her
+service beside Yuba Bill, who had thrown away his cigar and donned a new
+pair of buckskin gloves to do her honor. But a more serious result to
+the young beauty was the effect of the Rev. Mr. Wynn’s confidences upon
+the impulsive heart of Jack Brace, the expressman. It has been already
+intimated that it was his “day off.” Unable to summarily reassume his
+usual functions beside the driver without some practical reason, and
+ashamed to go so palpably as a mere passenger, he was forced to let
+the coach proceed without him. Discomfited for the moment, he was not,
+however, beaten. He had lost the blissful journey by her side, which
+would have been his professional right, but--she was going to Indian
+Spring! could he not anticipate her there? Might they not meet in the
+most accidental manner? And what might not come from that meeting away
+from the prying eyes of their own town? Mr. Brace did not hesitate, but
+saddling his fleet Buckskin, by the time the stage-coach had passed the
+Crossing in the high-road he had mounted the hill and was dashing along
+the “cutoff” in the same direction, a full mile in advance. Arriving at
+Indian Spring, he left his horse at a Mexican posada on the confines of
+the settlement, and from the piled debris of a tunnel excavation awaited
+the slow arrival of the coach. On mature reflection he could give no
+reason why he had not boldly awaited it at the express office, except
+a certain bashful consciousness of his own folly, and a belief that it
+might be glaringly apparent to the bystanders. When the coach arrived
+and he had overcome this consciousness, it was too late. Yuba Bill had
+discharged his passengers for Indian Spring and driven away. Miss
+Nellie was in the settlement, but where? As time passed he became more
+desperate and bolder. He walked recklessly up and down the main street,
+glancing in at the open doors of shops, and even in the windows of
+private dwellings. It might have seemed a poor compliment to Miss
+Nellie, but it was an evidence of his complete preoccupation, when the
+sight of a female face at a window, even though it was plain or perhaps
+painted, caused his heart to bound, or the glancing of a skirt in the
+distance quickened his feet and his pulses. Had Jack contented himself
+with remaining at Excelsior he might have vaguely regretted, but as soon
+become as vaguely accustomed to, Miss Nellie’s absence. But it was not
+until his hitherto quiet and passive love took this first step of action
+that it fully declared itself. When he had made the tour of the town
+a dozen times unsuccessfully, he had perfectly made up his mind that
+marriage with Nellie or the speedy death of several people, including
+possibly himself, was the only alternative. He regretted he had not
+accompanied her; he regretted he had not demanded where she was going;
+he contemplated a course of future action that two hours ago would
+have filled him with bashful terror. There was clearly but one thing to
+do--to declare his passion the instant he met her, and return with her
+to Excelsior an accepted suitor, or not to return at all.
+
+Suddenly he was vexatiously conscious of hearing his name lazily called,
+and looking up found that he was on the outskirts of the town, and
+interrogated by two horsemen.
+
+“Got down to walk, and the coach got away from you, Jack, eh?”
+
+A little ashamed of his preoccupation, Brace stammered something about
+“collections.” He did not recognize the men, but his own face, name,
+and business were familiar to everybody for fifty miles along the
+stage-road.
+
+“Well, you can settle a bet for us, I reckon. Bill Dacre thar bet me
+five dollars and the drinks that a young gal we met at the edge of the
+Carquinez Woods, dressed in a long brown duster and half muffled up in a
+hood, was the daughter of Father Wynn of Excelsior. I did not get a fair
+look at her, but it stands to reason that a high-toned young lady like
+Nellie Wynn don’t go trap’sing along the wood like a Pike County tramp.
+I took the bet. May be you know if she’s here or in Excelsior?”
+
+Mr. Brace felt himself turning pale with eagerness and excitement. But
+the near prospect of seeing her presently gave him back his caution, and
+he answered truthfully that he had left her in Excelsior, and that in
+his two hours’ sojourn in Indian Spring he had not met her once. “But,”
+ he added, with a Californian’s reverence for the sanctity of a bet, “I
+reckon you’d better make it a stand-off for twenty-four hours, and I’ll
+find out and let you know.” Which, it is only fair to say, he honestly
+intended to do.
+
+With a hurried nod of parting, he continued in the direction of the
+Woods. When he had satisfied himself that the strangers had entered
+the settlement, and would not follow him for further explanation,
+he quickened his pace. In half an hour he passed between two of the
+gigantic sentinels that guarded the entrance to a trail. Here he paused
+to collect his thoughts. The Woods were vast in extent, the trail dim
+and uncertain--at times apparently breaking off, or intersecting another
+trail as faint as itself. Believing that Miss Nellie had diverged from
+the highway only as a momentary excursion into the shade, and that she
+would not dare to penetrate its more sombre and unknown recesses, he
+kept within sight of the skirting plain. By degrees the sedate influence
+of the silent vaults seemed to depress him. The ardor of the chase began
+to flag. Under the calm of their dim roof the fever of his veins began
+to subside; his pace slackened; he reasoned more deliberately. It was by
+no means probable that the young woman in a brown duster was Nellie;
+it was not her habitual traveling dress; it was not like her to walk
+unattended in the road; there was nothing in her tastes and habits to
+take her into this gloomy forest, allowing that she had even entered
+it; and on this absolute question of her identity the two witnesses were
+divided. He stopped irresolutely, and cast a last, long, half-despairing
+look around him. Hitherto he had given that part of the wood nearest the
+plain his greatest attention. His glance now sought its darker recesses.
+Suddenly he became breathless. Was it a beam of sunlight that had
+pierced the groined roof above, and now rested against the trunk of one
+of the dimmer, more secluded giants? No, it was moving; even as he gazed
+it slipped away, glanced against another tree, passed across one of the
+vaulted aisles, and then was lost again. Brief as was the glimpse, he
+was not mistaken--it was the figure of a woman.
+
+In another moment he was on her track, and soon had the satisfaction of
+seeing her reappear at a lesser distance. But the continual intervention
+of the massive trunks made the chase by no means an easy one, and as he
+could not keep her always in sight he was unable to follow or understand
+the one intelligent direction which she seemed to invariably keep.
+Nevertheless, he gained upon her breathlessly, and, thanks to the
+bark-strewn floor, noiselessly. He was near enough to distinguish and
+recognize the dress she wore, a pale yellow, that he had admired when he
+first saw her. It was Nellie, unmistakably; if it were she of the brown
+duster, she had discarded it, perhaps for greater freedom. He was near
+enough to call out now, but a sudden nervous timidity overcame him; his
+lips grew dry. What should he say to her? How account for his presence?
+“Miss Nellie, one moment!” he gasped. She darted forward and--vanished.
+
+At this moment he was not more than a dozen yards from her. He rushed
+to where she had been standing, but her disappearance was perfect and
+complete. He made a circuit of the group of trees within whose radius
+she had last appeared, but there was neither trace of her, nor a
+suggestion of her mode of escape. He called aloud to her; the vacant
+Woods let his helpless voice die in their unresponsive depths. He gazed
+into the air and down at the bark-strewn carpet at his feet. Like most
+of his vocation, he was sparing of speech, and epigrammatic after his
+fashion. Comprehending in one swift but despairing flash of intelligence
+the existence of some fateful power beyond his own weak endeavor, he
+accepted its logical result with characteristic grimness, threw his hat
+upon the ground, put his hands in his pockets, and said--
+
+“Well, I’m d--d!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Out of compliment to Miss Nellie Wynn, Yuba Bill, on reaching Indian
+Spring, had made a slight detour to enable him to ostentatiously set
+down his fair passenger before the door of the Burnhams. When it had
+closed on the admiring eyes of the passengers and the coach had rattled
+away, Miss Nellie, without any undue haste or apparent change in
+her usual quiet demeanor, managed, however, to dispatch her business
+promptly, and, leaving an impression that she would call again before
+her return to Excelsior, parted from her friends and slipped away
+through a side street to the General Furnishing Store of Indian Spring.
+In passing this emporium, Miss Nellie’s quick eye had discovered a cheap
+brown linen duster hanging in its window. To purchase it, and put it
+over her delicate cambric dress, albeit with a shivering sense that she
+looked like a badly folded brown-paper parcel, did not take long. As she
+left the shop it was with mixed emotions of chagrin and security that
+she noticed that her passage through the settlement no longer turned
+the heads of its male inhabitants. She reached the outskirts of Indian
+Spring and the high-road at about the time Mr. Brace had begun his
+fruitless patrol of the main street. Far in the distance a faint
+olive-green table mountain seemed to rise abruptly from the plain.
+It was the Carquinez Woods. Gathering her spotless skirts beneath her
+extemporized brown domino, she set out briskly towards them.
+
+But her progress was scarcely free or exhilarating. She was not
+accustomed to walking in a country where “buggy-riding” was considered
+the only genteel young-lady-like mode of progression, and its regular
+provision the expected courtesy of mankind. Always fastidiously booted,
+her low-quartered shoes were charming to the eye, but hardly adapted
+to the dust and inequalities of the highroad. It was true that she had
+thought of buying a coarser pair at Indian Spring, but once face to face
+with their uncompromising ugliness, she had faltered and fled. The sun
+was unmistakably hot, but her parasol was too well known and offered
+too violent a contrast to the duster for practical use. Once she stopped
+with an exclamation of annoyance, hesitated, and looked back. In half
+an hour she had twice lost her shoe and her temper; a pink flush took
+possession of her cheeks, and her eyes were bright with suppressed rage.
+Dust began to form grimy circles around their orbits; with cat-like
+shivers she even felt it pervade the roots of her blond hair. Gradually
+her breath grew more rapid and hysterical, her smarting eyes became
+humid, and at last, encountering two observant horsemen in the road, she
+turned and fled, until, reaching the wood, she began to cry.
+
+Nevertheless she waited for the two horsemen to pass, to satisfy herself
+that she was not followed; then pushed on vaguely, until she reached a
+fallen tree, where, with a gesture of disgust, she tore off her hapless
+duster and flung it on the ground. She then sat down sobbing, but after
+a moment dried her eyes hurriedly and started to her feet. A few paces
+distant, erect, noiseless, with outstretched hand, the young solitary
+of the Carquinez Woods advanced towards her. His hand had almost touched
+hers, when he stopped.
+
+“What has happened?” he asked gravely.
+
+“Nothing,” she said, turning half away, and searching the ground with
+her eyes, as if she had lost something. “Only I must be going back now.”
+
+“You shall go back at once, if you wish it,” he said, flushing slightly.
+“But you have been crying; why?”
+
+Frank as Miss Nellie wished to be, she could not bring herself to
+say that her feet hurt her, and the dust and heat were ruining her
+complexion. It was therefore with a half-confident belief that
+her troubles were really of a moral quality that she answered,
+“Nothing--nothing, but--but--it’s wrong to come here.”
+
+“But you did not think it was wrong when you agreed to come, at our
+last meeting,” said the young man, with that persistent logic which
+exasperates the inconsequent feminine mind. “It cannot be any more wrong
+to-day.”
+
+“But it was not so far off,” murmured the young girl, without looking
+up.
+
+“Oh, the distance makes it more improper, then,” he said abstractedly;
+but after a moment’s contemplation of her half-averted face, he asked
+gravely, “Has anyone talked to you about me?”
+
+Ten minutes before, Nellie had been burning to unburthen herself of her
+father’s warning, but now she felt she would not. “I wish you wouldn’t
+call yourself Low,” she said at last.
+
+“But it’s my name,” he replied quietly.
+
+“Nonsense! It’s only a stupid translation of a stupid nickname. They
+might as well call you ‘Water’ at once.”
+
+“But you said you liked it.”
+
+“Well, so I do. But don’t you see--I--oh dear! you don’t understand.”
+
+Low did not reply, but turned his head with resigned gravity towards the
+deeper woods. Grasping the barrel of his rifle with his left hand, he
+threw his right arm across his left wrist and leaned slightly upon it
+with the habitual ease of a Western hunter--doubly picturesque in his
+own lithe, youthful symmetry. Miss Nellie looked at him from under her
+eyelids, and then half defiantly raised her head and her dark lashes.
+Gradually an almost magical change came over her features; her eyes grew
+larger and more and more yearning, until they seemed to draw and absorb
+in their liquid depths the figure of the young man before her; her cold
+face broke into an ecstasy of light and color; her humid lips parted
+in a bright, welcoming smile, until, with an irresistible impulse, she
+arose, and throwing back her head stretched towards him two hands full
+of vague and trembling passion.
+
+In another moment he had seized them, kissed them, and, as he drew her
+closer to his embrace, felt them tighten around his neck. “But what name
+do you wish to call me?” he asked, looking down into her eyes.
+
+Miss Nellie murmured something confidentially to the third button of his
+hunting shirt. “But that,” he replied, with a smile, “THAT wouldn’t be
+any more practical, and you wouldn’t want others to call me dar--” Her
+fingers loosened around his neck, she drew her head back, and a singular
+expression passed over her face, which to any calmer observer than
+a lover would have seemed, however, to indicate more curiosity than
+jealousy.
+
+“Who else DOES call you so?” she added earnestly. “How many, for
+instance?”
+
+Low’s reply was addressed not to her ear, but her lips. She did not
+avoid it, but added, “And do you kiss them all like that?” Taking him by
+the shoulders, she held him a little way from her, and gazed at him from
+head to foot. Then drawing him again to her embrace, she said, “I don’t
+care, at least no woman has kissed you like that.” Happy, dazzled, and
+embarrassed, he was beginning to stammer the truthful protestation that
+rose to his lips, but she stopped him: “No, don’t protest! say nothing!
+Let ME love YOU--that is all. It is enough.” He would have caught her
+in his arms again, but she drew back. “We are near the road,” she said
+quietly. “Come! You promised to show me where you camped. Let US make
+the most of our holiday. In an hour I must leave the woods.”
+
+“But I shall accompany you, dearest.”
+
+“No, I must go as I came--alone.”
+
+“But Nellie--”
+
+“I tell you no,” she said, with an almost harsh practical decision,
+incompatible with her previous abandonment. “We might be seen together.”
+
+“Well, suppose we are; we must be seen together eventually,” he
+remonstrated.
+
+The young girl made an involuntary gesture of impatient negation, but
+checked herself. “Don’t let us talk of that now. Come, while I am here
+under your own roof--” she pointed to the high interlaced boughs above
+them--“you must be hospitable. Show me your home; tell me, isn’t it a
+little gloomy sometimes?”
+
+“It never has been; I never thought it WOULD be until the moment you
+leave it to-day.”
+
+She pressed his hand briefly and in a half-perfunctory way, as if her
+vanity had accepted and dismissed the compliment. “Take me somewhere,”
+ she said inquisitively, “where you stay most; I do not seem to see you
+HERE,” she added, looking around her with a slight shiver. “It is so big
+and so high. Have you no place where you eat and rest and sleep?”
+
+“Except in the rainy season, I camp all over the place--at any spot
+where I may have been shooting or collecting.”
+
+“Collecting?” queried Nellie.
+
+“Yes; with the herbarium, you know.”
+
+“Yes,” said Nellie dubiously. “But you told me once--the first time we
+ever talked together,” she added, looking in his eyes--“something about
+your keeping your things like a squirrel in a tree. Could we not
+go there? Is there not room for us to sit and talk without being
+brow-beaten and looked down upon by these supercilious trees?”
+
+“It’s too far away,” said Low truthfully, but with a somewhat pronounced
+emphasis, “much too far for you just now; and it lies on another trail
+that enters the wood beyond. But come, I will show you a spring known
+only to myself, the wood ducks, and the squirrels. I discovered it the
+first day I saw you, and gave it your name. But you shall christen it
+yourself. It will be all yours, and yours alone, for it is so hidden and
+secluded that I defy any feet but my own or whoso shall keep step with
+mine to find it. Shall that foot be yours, Nellie?”
+
+Her face beamed with a bright assent. “It may be difficult to track it
+from here,” he said, “but stand where you are a moment, and don’t move,
+rustle, nor agitate the air in any way. The woods are still now.” He
+turned at right angles with the trail, moved a few paces into the ferns
+and underbrush, and then stopped with his finger on his lips. For an
+instant both remained motionless; then with his intent face bent forward
+and both arms extended, he began to sink slowly upon one knee and one
+side, inclining his body with a gentle, perfectly-graduated movement
+until his ear almost touched the ground. Nellie watched his graceful
+figure breathlessly, until, like a bow unbent, he stood suddenly erect
+again, and beckoned to her without changing the direction of his face.
+
+“What is it?” she asked eagerly.
+
+“All right; I have found it,” he continued, moving forward without
+turning his head.
+
+“But how? What did you kneel for?” He did not reply, but taking her hand
+in his continued to move slowly on through the underbrush, as if
+obeying some magnetic attraction. “How did you find it?” again asked
+the half-awed girl, her voice unconsciously falling to a whisper. Still
+silent, Low kept his rigid face and forward tread for twenty yards
+further; then he stopped and released the girl’s half-impatient hand.
+“How did you find it?” she repeated sharply.
+
+“With my ears and nose,” replied Low gravely.
+
+“With your nose?”
+
+“Yes; I smelt it.”
+
+Still fresh with the memory of his picturesque attitude, the young man’s
+reply seemed to involve something more irritating to her feelings than
+even that absurd anticlimax. She looked at him coldly and critically,
+and appeared to hesitate whether to proceed. “Is it far?” she asked.
+
+“Not more than ten minutes now, as I shall go.”
+
+“And you won’t have to smell your way again?”
+
+“No; it is quite plain now,” he answered seriously, the young girl’s
+sarcasm slipping harmlessly from his Indian stolidity. “Don’t you smell
+it yourself?”
+
+But Miss Nellie’s thin, cold nostrils refused to take that vulgar
+interest.
+
+“Nor hear it? Listen!”
+
+“You forget I suffer the misfortune of having been brought up under a
+roof,” she replied coldly.
+
+“That’s true,” repeated Low, in all seriousness; “it’s not your fault.
+But do you know, I sometimes think I am peculiarly sensitive to water; I
+feel it miles away. At night, though I may not see it or even know where
+it is, I am conscious of it. It is company to me when I am alone, and
+I seem to hear it in my dreams. There is no music as sweet to me as
+its song. When you sang with me that day in church, I seemed to hear it
+ripple in your voice. It says to me more than the birds do, more than
+the rarest plants I find. It seems to live with me and for me. It is my
+earliest recollection; I know it will be my last, for I shall die in its
+embrace. Do you think, Nellie,” he continued, stopping short and gazing
+earnestly in her face--“do you think that the chiefs knew this when they
+called me ‘Sleeping Water’?”
+
+To Miss Nellie’s several gifts I fear the gods had not added poetry. A
+slight knowledge of English verse of a select character, unfortunately,
+did not assist her in the interpretation of the young man’s speech, nor
+relieve her from the momentary feeling that he was at times deficient
+in intellect. She preferred, however, to take a personal view of the
+question, and expressed her sarcastic regret that she had not known
+before that she had been indebted to the great flume and ditch at
+Excelsior for the pleasure of his acquaintance. This pert remark
+occasioned some explanation, which ended in the girl’s accepting a kiss
+in lieu of more logical argument. Nevertheless, she was still conscious
+of an inward irritation--always distinct from her singular and perfectly
+material passion--which found vent as the difficulties of their
+undeviating progress through the underbrush increased. At last she lost
+her shoe again, and stopped short. “It’s a pity your Indian friends
+did not christen you ‘Wild Mustard’ or ‘Clover,’” she said satirically,
+“that you might have had some sympathies and longings for the open
+fields instead of these horrid jungles! I know we will not get back in
+time.”
+
+Unfortunately, Low accepted this speech literally and with his
+remorseless gravity. “If my name annoys you, I can get it changed by the
+legislature, you know, and I can find out what my father’s name was, and
+take that. My mother, who died in giving me birth, was the daughter of a
+chief.”
+
+“Then your mother was really an Indian?” said Nellie, “and you are--”
+ She stopped short.
+
+“But I told you all this the day we first met,” said Low, with grave
+astonishment. “Don’t you remember our long talk coming from church?”
+
+“No,” said Nellie coldly, “you didn’t tell me.” But she was obliged to
+drop her eyes before the unwavering, undeniable truthfulness of his.
+
+“You have forgotten,” he said calmly; “but it is only right you should
+have your own way in disposing of a name that I have cared little for;
+and as you’re to have a share of it--”
+
+“Yes, but it’s getting late, and if we are not going forward--”
+ interrupted the girl impatiently.
+
+“We ARE going forward,” said Low imperturbably; “but I wanted to tell
+you, as we were speaking on THAT subject” (Nellie looked at her watch),
+“I’ve been offered the place of botanist and naturalist in Professor
+Grant’s survey of Mount Shasta, and if I take it--why, when I come back,
+darling--well--”
+
+“But you’re not going just yet,” broke in Nellie, with a new expression
+in her face.
+
+“No.”
+
+“Then we need not talk of it now,” she said, with animation.
+
+Her sudden vivacity relieved him. “I see what’s the matter,” he said
+gently, looking down at her feet; “these little shoes were not made to
+keep step with a moccasin. We must try another way.” He stooped as if
+to secure the erring buskin, but suddenly lifted her like a child to his
+shoulder. “There,” he continued, placing her arm round his neck, “you
+are clear of the ferns and brambles now, and we can go on. Are you
+comfortable?” He looked up, read her answer in her burning eyes and
+the warm lips pressed to his forehead at the roots of his straight dark
+hair, and again moved onward as in a mesmeric dream. But he did not
+swerve from his direct course, and with a final dash through the
+undergrowth parted the leafy curtain before the spring.
+
+At first the young girl was dazzled by the strong light that came from a
+rent in the interwoven arches of the wood. The breach had been caused by
+the huge bulk of one of the great giants that had half fallen, and was
+lying at a steep angle against one of its mightiest brethren, having
+borne down a lesser tree in the arc of its downward path. Two of the
+roots, as large as younger trees, tossed their blackened and bare
+limbs high in the air. The spring--the insignificant cause of this vast
+disruption--gurgled, flashed, and sparkled at the base; the limpid baby
+fingers that had laid bare the foundations of that fallen column played
+with the still clinging rootlets, laved the fractured and twisted limbs,
+and, widening, filled with sleeping water the graves from which they had
+been torn.
+
+“It had been going on for years, down there,” said Low, pointing to a
+cavity from which the fresh water now slowly welled, “but it had been
+quickened by the rising of the subterranean springs and rivers which
+always occurs at a certain stage of the dry season. I remember that
+on that very night--for it happened a little after midnight, when all
+sounds are more audible--I was troubled and oppressed in my sleep by
+what you would call a nightmare; a feeling as if I was kept down by
+bonds and pinions that I longed to break. And then I heard a crash in
+this direction, and the first streak of morning brought me the sound and
+scent of water. Six months afterwards I chanced to find my way here, as
+I told you, and gave it your name. I did not dream that I should ever
+stand beside it with you, and have you christen it yourself.”
+
+He unloosened the cup from his flask, and filling it at the spring
+handed it to her. But the young girl leant over the pool, and pouring
+the water idly back said, “I’d rather put my feet in it. Mayn’t I?”
+
+“I don’t understand you,” he said wonderingly.
+
+“My feet are SO hot and dusty. The water looks deliciously cool. May I?”
+
+“Certainly.”
+
+He turned away as Nellie, with apparent unconsciousness, seated herself
+on the bank, and removed her shoes and stockings. When she had dabbled
+her feet a few moments in the pool, she said over her shoulder--
+
+“We can talk just as well, can’t we?”
+
+“Certainly.”
+
+“Well, then, why didn’t you come to church more often, and why didn’t
+you think of telling father that you were convicted of sin and wanted to
+be baptized?”
+
+“I don’t know,” hesitated the young man.
+
+“Well, you lost the chance of having father convert you, baptize you,
+and take you into full church fellowship.”
+
+“I never thought--” he began.
+
+“You never thought. Aren’t you a Christian?”
+
+“I suppose so.”
+
+“He supposes so! Have you no convictions--no profession?”
+
+“But, Nellie, I never thought that you--”
+
+“Never thought that I--what? Do you think that I could ever be anything
+to a man who did not believe in justification by faith, or in the
+covenant of church fellowship? Do you think father would let me?”
+
+In his eagerness to defend himself he stepped to her side. But seeing
+her little feet shining through the dark water, like outcroppings of
+delicately veined quartz, he stopped embarrassed. Miss Nellie, however,
+leaped to one foot, and, shaking the other over the pool, put her hand
+on his shoulder to steady herself. “You haven’t got a towel--or,” she
+said dubiously, looking at her small handkerchief, “anything to dry them
+on?”
+
+But Low did not, as she perhaps expected, offer his own handkerchief.
+
+“If you take a bath after our fashion,” he said gravely, “you must learn
+to dry yourself after our fashion.”
+
+Lifting her again lightly in his arms, he carried her a few steps to the
+sunny opening, and bade her bury her feet in the dried mosses and baked
+withered grasses that were bleaching in a hollow. The young girl uttered
+a cry of childish delight, as the soft ciliated fibres touched her
+sensitive skin.
+
+“It is healing, too,” continued Low; “a moccasin filled with it after a
+day on the trail makes you all right again.”
+
+But Miss Nellie seemed to be thinking of something else.
+
+“Is that the way the squaws bathe and dry themselves?”
+
+“I don’t know; you forget I was a boy when I left them.”
+
+“And you’re sure you never knew any?”
+
+“None.”
+
+The young girl seemed to derive some satisfaction in moving her feet
+up and down for several minutes among the grasses in the hollow; then,
+after a pause, said, “You are quite certain I am the first woman that
+ever touched this spring?”
+
+“Not only the first woman, but the first human being, except myself.”
+
+“How nice!”
+
+They had taken each other’s hands; seated side by side, they leaned
+against a curving elastic root that half supported, half encompassed,
+them. The girl’s capricious, fitful manner succumbed as before to the
+near contact of her companion. Looking into her eyes, Low fell into a
+sweet, selfish lover’s monologue, descriptive of his past and present
+feelings towards her, which she accepted with a heightened color, a
+slight exchange of sentiment, and a strange curiosity. The sun had
+painted their half-embraced silhouettes against the slanting tree-trunk,
+and began to decline unnoticed; the ripple of the water mingling with
+their whispers came as one sound to the listening ear; even their
+eloquent silences were as deep, and, I wot, perhaps as dangerous, as the
+darkened pool that filled so noiselessly a dozen yards away. So quiet
+were they that the tremor of invading wings once or twice shook the
+silence, or the quick scamper of frightened feet rustled the dead grass.
+But in the midst of a prolonged stillness the young man sprang up so
+suddenly that Nellie was still half clinging to his neck as he stood
+erect. “Hush!” he whispered; “some one is near!”
+
+He disengaged her anxious hands gently, leaped upon the slanting
+tree-trunk, and running half-way up its incline with the agility of a
+squirrel, stretched himself at full length upon it and listened.
+
+To the impatient, inexplicably startled girl, it seemed an age before he
+rejoined her.
+
+“You are safe,” he said; “he is going by the western trail towards
+Indian Spring.”
+
+“Who is HE?” she asked, biting her lips with a poorly restrained gesture
+of mortification and disappointment.
+
+“Some stranger,” replied Low.
+
+“As long as he wasn’t coming here, why did you give me such a fright?”
+ she said pettishly. “Are you nervous because a single wayfarer happens
+to stray here?”
+
+“It was no wayfarer, for he tried to keep near the trail,” said Low. “He
+was a stranger to the wood, for he lost his way every now and then. He
+was seeking or expecting some one, for he stopped frequently and waited
+or listened. He had not walked far, for he wore spurs that tinkled and
+caught in the brush; and yet he had not ridden here, for no horse’s
+hoofs passed the road since we have been here. He must have come from
+Indian Spring.”
+
+“And you heard all that when you listened just now?” asked Nellie, half
+disdainfully.
+
+Impervious to her incredulity Low turned his calm eyes on her face.
+“Certainly, I’ll bet my life on what I say. Tell me: do you know anybody
+in Indian Spring who would likely spy upon you?”
+
+The young girl was conscious of a certain ill-defined uneasiness, but
+answered, “No.”
+
+“Then it was not YOU he was seeking,” said Low thoughtfully. Miss Nellie
+had not time to notice the emphasis, for he added, “You must go at once,
+and lest you have been followed I will show you another way back to
+Indian Spring. It is longer, and you must hasten. Take your shoes and
+stockings with you until we are out of the bush.”
+
+He raised her again in his arms and strode once more out through the
+covert into the dim aisles of the wood. They spoke but little; she could
+not help feeling that some other discordant element, affecting him more
+strongly than it did her, had come between them, and was half perplexed
+and half frightened. At the end of ten minutes he seated her upon a
+fallen branch, and telling her he would return by the time she had
+resumed her shoes and stockings glided from her like a shadow. She would
+have uttered an indignant protest at being left alone, but he was gone
+ere she could detain him. For a moment she thought she hated him. But
+when she had mechanically shod herself once more, not without nervous
+shivers at every falling needle, he was at her side.
+
+“Do you know anyone who wears a frieze coat like that?” he asked,
+handing her a few torn shreds of wool affixed to a splinter of bark.
+
+Miss Nellie instantly recognized the material of a certain sporting
+coat worn by Mr. Jack Brace on festive occasions, but a strange yet
+infallible instinct that was part of her nature made her instantly
+disclaim all knowledge of it.
+
+“No,” she said.
+
+“Not anyone who scents himself with some doctor’s stuff like cologne?”
+ continued Low, with the disgust of keen olfactory sensibilities.
+
+Again Miss Nellie recognized the perfume with which the gallant
+expressman was wont to make redolent her little parlor, but again she
+avowed no knowledge of its possessor. “Well,” returned Low with some
+disappointment, “such a man has been here. Be on your guard. Let us go
+at once.”
+
+She required no urging to hasten her steps, but hurried breathlessly at
+his side. He had taken a new trail by which they left the wood at right
+angles with the highway, two miles away. Following an almost effaced
+mule track along a slight depression of the plain, deep enough, however,
+to hide them from view, he accompanied her, until, rising to the level
+again, she saw they were beginning to approach the highway and the
+distant roofs of Indian Spring. “Nobody meeting you now,” he
+whispered, “would suspect where you had been. Good night! until next
+week--remember.”
+
+They pressed each other’s hands, and standing on the slight ridge
+outlined against the paling sky, in full view of the highway, parting
+carelessly, as if they had been chance met travelers. But Nellie could
+not restrain a parting backward glance as she left the ridge. Low
+had descended to the deserted trail, and was running swiftly in the
+direction of the Carquinez Woods.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Teresa awoke with a start. It was day already, but how far advanced the
+even, unchanging, soft twilight of the woods gave no indication.
+Her companion had vanished, and to her bewildered senses so had the
+camp-fire, even to its embers and ashes. Was she awake, or had she
+wandered away unconsciously in the night? One glance at the tree above
+her dissipated the fancy. There was the opening of her quaint retreat
+and the hanging strips of bark, and at the foot of the opposite tree
+lay the carcass of the bear. It had been skinned, and, as Teresa thought
+with an inward shiver, already looked half its former size.
+
+Not yet accustomed to the fact that a few steps in either direction
+around the circumference of those great trunks produced the sudden
+appearance or disappearance of any figure, Teresa uttered a slight
+scream as her young companion unexpectedly stepped to her side. “You
+see a change here,” he said; “the stamped-out ashes of the camp-fire lie
+under the brush,” and he pointed to some cleverly scattered boughs
+and strips of bark which completely effaced the traces of last night’s
+bivouac. “We can’t afford to call the attention of any packer or hunter
+who might straggle this way to this particular spot and this particular
+tree; the more naturally,” he added, “as they always prefer to camp over
+an old fire.” Accepting this explanation meekly, as partly a reproach
+for her caprice of the previous night, Teresa hung her head.
+
+“I’m very sorry,” she said, “but wouldn’t that,” pointing to the carcass
+of the bear, “have made them curious?”
+
+But Low’s logic was relentless.
+
+“By this time there would have been little left to excite curiosity, if
+you had been willing to leave those beasts to their work.”
+
+“I’m very sorry,” repeated the woman, her lips quivering.
+
+“They are the scavengers of the wood,” he continued in a lighter tone;
+“if you stay here you must try to use them to keep your house clean.”
+
+Teresa smiled nervously.
+
+“I mean that they shall finish their work to-night,” he added, “and I
+shall build another camp-fire for us a mile from here until they do.”
+
+But Teresa caught his sleeve.
+
+“No,” she said hurriedly, “don’t, please, for me. You must not take the
+trouble, nor the risk. Hear me; do, please. I can bear it, I WILL
+bear it--to-night. I would have borne it last night, but it was so
+strange--and”--she passed her hands over her forehead--“I think I must
+have been half mad. But I am not so foolish now.”
+
+She seemed so broken and despondent that he replied reassuringly:
+“Perhaps it would be better that I should find another hiding-place for
+you, until I can dispose of that carcass so that it will not draw dogs
+after the wolves, and men after THEM. Besides, your friend the sheriff
+will probably remember the bear when he remembers anything, and try to
+get on its track again.”
+
+“He’s a conceited fool,” broke in Teresa in a high voice, with a slight
+return of her old fury, “or he’d have guessed where that shot came from;
+and,” she added in a lower tone, looking down at her limp and nerveless
+fingers, “he wouldn’t have let a poor, weak, nervous wretch like me get
+away.”
+
+“But his deputy may put two and two together, and connect your escape
+with it.”
+
+Teresa’s eyes flashed. “It would be like the dog, just to save his
+pride, to swear it was an ambush of my friends, and that he was
+overpowered by numbers. Oh yes! I see it all!” she almost screamed,
+lashing herself into a rage at the bare contemplation of this diminution
+of her glory. “That’s the dirty lie he tells everywhere, and is telling
+now.”
+
+She stamped her feet and glanced savagely around, as if at any risk to
+proclaim the falsehood. Low turned his impassive, truthful face towards
+her.
+
+“Sheriff Dunn,” he began gravely, “is a politician, and a fool when he
+takes to the trail as a hunter of man or beast. But he is not a coward
+nor a liar. Your chances would be better if he were--if he laid your
+escape to an ambush of your friends, than if his pride held you alone
+responsible.”
+
+“If he’s such a good man, why do you hesitate?” she replied bitterly.
+“Why don’t you give me up at once, and do a service to one of your
+friends?”
+
+“I do not even know him,” returned Low opening his clear eyes upon her.
+“I’ve promised to hide you here, and I shall hide you as well from him
+as from anybody.”
+
+Teresa did not reply, but suddenly dropping down upon the ground
+buried her face in her hands and began to sob convulsively. Low turned
+impassively away, and putting aside the bark curtain climbed into the
+hollow tree. In a few moments he reappeared, laden with provisions and
+a few simple cooking utensils, and touched her lightly on the shoulder.
+She looked up timidly; the paroxysm had passed, but her lashes yet
+glittered.
+
+“Come,” he said, “come and get some breakfast. I find you have eaten
+nothing since you have been here--twenty-four hours.”
+
+“I didn’t know it,” she said, with a faint smile. Then seeing his
+burden, and possessed by a new and strange desire for some menial
+employment, she said hurriedly, “Let me carry something--do, please,”
+ and even tried to disencumber him.
+
+Half annoyed, Low at last yielded, and handing his rifle said, “There,
+then, take that; but be careful--it’s loaded!”
+
+A cruel blush burnt the woman’s face to the roots of her hair as she
+took the weapon hesitatingly in her hand.
+
+“No!” she stammered, hurriedly lifting her shame-suffused eyes to his;
+“no! no!”
+
+He turned away with an impatience which showed her how completely
+gratuitous had been her agitation and its significance, and said,
+“Well, then, give it back if you are afraid of it.” But she as suddenly
+declined to return it; and shouldering it deftly, took her place by his
+side. Silently they moved from the hollow tree together.
+
+During their walk she did not attempt to invade his taciturnity.
+Nevertheless she was as keenly alive and watchful of his every movement
+and gesture as if she had hung enchanted on his lips. The unerring
+way with which he pursued a viewless, undeviating path through those
+trackless woods, his quick reconnaissance of certain trees or openings,
+his mute inspection of some almost imperceptible footprint of bird or
+beast, his critical examination of certain plants which he plucked and
+deposited in his deerskin haversack, were not lost on the quick-witted
+woman. As they gradually changed the clear, unencumbered aisles of the
+central woods for a more tangled undergrowth, Teresa felt that subtle
+admiration which culminates in imitation, and simulating perfectly the
+step, tread, and easy swing of her companion, followed so accurately his
+lead that she won a gratified exclamation from him when their goal
+was reached--a broken, blackened shaft, splintered by long-forgotten
+lightning, in the centre of a tangled carpet of wood-clover.
+
+“I don’t wonder you distanced the deputy,” he said cheerfully, throwing
+down his burden, “if you can take the hunting-path like that. In a few
+days, if you stay here, I can venture to trust you alone for a little
+pasear when you are tired of the tree.”
+
+Teresa looked pleased, but busied herself with arrangements for the
+breakfast, while he gathered the fuel for the roaring fire which soon
+blazed beside the shattered tree.
+
+Teresa’s breakfast was a success. It was a revelation to the young
+nomad, whose ascetic habits and simple tastes were usually content with
+the most primitive forms of frontier cookery. It was at least a surprise
+to him to know that without extra trouble kneaded flour, water, and
+saleratus need not be essentially heavy; that coffee need not be boiled
+with sugar to the consistency of syrup; that even that rarest delicacy,
+small shreds of venison covered with ashes and broiled upon the end of
+a ramrod boldly thrust into the flames, would be better and even more
+expeditiously cooked upon burning coals. Moved in his practical nature,
+he was surprised to find this curious creature of disorganized nerves
+and useless impulses informed with an intelligence that did not preclude
+the welfare of humanity or the existence of a soul. He respected her
+for some minutes, until in the midst of a culinary triumph a big tear
+dropped and spluttered in the saucepan. But he forgave the irrelevancy
+by taking no notice of it, and by doing full justice to that particular
+dish.
+
+Nevertheless, he asked several questions based upon these recently
+discovered qualities. It appeared that in the old days of her wanderings
+with the circus troupe she had often been forced to undertake this
+nomadic housekeeping. But she “despised it,” had never done it since,
+and always had refused to do it for “him”--the personal pronoun
+referring, as Low understood, to her lover, Curson. Not caring to revive
+these memories further, Low briefly concluded: “I don’t know what you
+were, or what you may be, but from what I see of you you’ve got all the
+sabe of a frontierman’s wife.”
+
+She stopped and looked at him, and then with an impulse of imprudence
+that only half concealed a more serious vanity, asked, “Do you think I
+might have made a good squaw?”
+
+“I don’t know,” he replied quietly. “I never saw enough of them to
+know.”
+
+Teresa, confident from his clear eyes that he spoke the truth, but
+having nothing ready to follow this calm disposal of her curiosity,
+relapsed into silence.
+
+The meal finished, Teresa washed their scant table equipage in a little
+spring near the camp-fire; where, catching sight of her disordered dress
+and collar, she rapidly threw her shawl, after the national fashion,
+over her shoulder and pinned it quickly. Low cached the remaining
+provisions and the few cooking utensils under the dead embers and ashes,
+obliterating all superficial indication of their camp-fire as deftly and
+artistically as he had before.
+
+“There isn’t the ghost of a chance,” he said in explanation, “that
+anybody but you or I will set foot here before we come back to supper,
+but it’s well to be on guard. I’ll take you back to the cabin now,
+though I bet you could find your way there as well as I can.”
+
+On their way back Teresa ran ahead of her companion, and plucking a few
+tiny leaves from a hidden oasis in the bark-strewn trail brought them to
+him.
+
+“That’s the kind you’re looking for, isn’t it?” she said, half timidly.
+
+“It is,” responded Low, in gratified surprise; “but how did you know it?
+You’re not a botanist, are you?”
+
+“I reckon not,” said Teresa; “but you picked some when we came, and I
+noticed what they were.”
+
+Here was indeed another revelation. Low stopped and gazed at her with
+such frank, open, utterly unabashed curiosity that her black eyes fell
+before him.
+
+“And do you think,” he asked with logical deliberation, “that you could
+find any plant from another I should give you?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Or from a drawing of it”
+
+“Yes; perhaps even if you described it to me.”
+
+A half-confidential, half-fraternal silence followed.
+
+“I tell you what. I’ve got a book--”
+
+“I know it,” interrupted Teresa; “full of these things.”
+
+“Yes. Do you think you could--”
+
+“Of course I could,” broke in Teresa, again.
+
+“But you don’t know what I mean,” said the imperturbable Low.
+
+“Certainly I do. Why, find ‘em, and preserve all the different ones for
+you to write under--that’s it, isn’t it?”
+
+Low nodded his head, gratified but not entirely convinced that she had
+fully estimated the magnitude of the endeavor.
+
+“I suppose,” said Teresa, in the feminine postscriptum voice which it
+would seem entered even the philosophical calm of the aisles they were
+treading--“I suppose that SHE places great value on them?”
+
+Low had indeed heard Science personified before, nor was it at all
+impossible that the singular woman walking by his side had also. He
+said “Yes;” but added, in mental reference to the Linnean Society of San
+Francisco, that “THEY were rather particular about the rarer kinds.”
+
+Content as Teresa had been to believe in Low’s tender relations with
+some favored ONE of her sex, this frank confession of a plural devotion
+staggered her.
+
+“They?” she repeated.
+
+“Yes,” he continued calmly. “The Botanical Society I correspond with are
+more particular than the Government Survey.”
+
+“Then you are doing this for a society?” demanded Teresa, with a stare.
+
+“Certainly. I’m making a collection and classification of specimens. I
+intend--but what are you looking at?”
+
+Teresa had suddenly turned away. Putting his hand lightly on her
+shoulder, the young man brought her face to face him again.
+
+She was laughing.
+
+“I thought all the while it was for a girl,” she said; “and--” But
+here the mere effort of speech sent her off into an audible and genuine
+outburst of laughter. It was the first time he had seen her even smile
+other than bitterly. Characteristically unconscious of any humor in
+her error, he remained unembarrassed. But he could not help noticing
+a change in the expression of her face, her voice, and even her
+intonation. It seemed as if that fit of laughter had loosed the last
+ties that bound her to a self-imposed character, had swept away the last
+barrier between her and her healthier nature, had dispossessed a painful
+unreality, and relieved the morbid tension of a purely nervous attitude.
+The change in her utterance and the resumption of her softer Spanish
+accent seemed to have come with her confidences, and Low took leave
+of her before their sylvan cabin with a comrade’s heartiness, and a
+complete forgetfulness that her voice had ever irritated him.
+
+When he returned that afternoon he was startled to find the cabin empty.
+But instead of bearing any appearance of disturbance or hurried flight,
+the rude interior seemed to have magically assumed a decorous order
+and cleanliness unknown before. Fresh bark hid the inequalities of
+the floor. The skins and blankets were folded in the corners, the rude
+shelves were carefully arranged, even a few tall ferns and bright but
+quickly fading flowers were disposed around the blackened chimney. She
+had evidently availed herself of the change of clothing he had brought
+her, for her late garments were hanging from the hastily-devised wooden
+pegs driven in the wall. The young man gazed around him with mixed
+feelings of gratification and uneasiness. His presence had been
+dispossessed in a single hour; his ten years of lonely habitation had
+left no trace that this woman had not effaced with a deft move of her
+hand. More than that, it looked as if she had always occupied it; and
+it was with a singular conviction that even when she should occupy it no
+longer it would only revert to him as her dwelling that he dropped the
+bark shutters athwart the opening, and left it to follow her.
+
+To his quick ear, fine eye, and abnormal senses, this was easy enough.
+She had gone in the direction of this morning’s camp. Once or twice he
+paused with a half-gesture of recognition and a characteristic “Good!”
+ at the place where she had stopped, but was surprised to find that her
+main course had been as direct as his own. Deviating from this direct
+line with Indian precaution, he first made a circuit of the camp,
+and approached the shattered trunk from the opposite direction. He
+consequently came upon Teresa unawares. But the momentary astonishment
+and embarrassment were his alone.
+
+He scarcely recognized her. She was wearing the garments he had brought
+her the day before--a certain discarded gown of Miss Nellie Wynn, which
+he had hurriedly begged from her under the pretext of clothing the wife
+of a distressed overland emigrant then on the way to the mines. Although
+he had satisfied his conscience with the intention of confessing the
+pious fraud to her when Teresa was gone and safe from pursuit, it
+was not without a sense of remorse that he witnessed the sacrilegious
+transformation. The two women were nearly the same height and size; and
+although Teresa’s maturer figure accented the outlines more strongly, it
+was still becoming enough to increase his irritation.
+
+Of this becomingness she was doubtless unaware at the moment that he
+surprised her. She was conscious of having “a change,” and this had
+emboldened her to “do her hair” and otherwise compose herself. After
+their greeting she was the first to allude to the dress, regretting that
+it was not more of a rough disguise, and that, as she must now discard
+the national habit of wearing her shawl “manta” fashion over her head,
+she wanted a hat. “But you must not,” she said, “borrow any more dresses
+for me from your young woman. Buy them for me at some shop. They left me
+enough money for that.” Low gently put aside the few pieces of gold she
+had drawn from her pocket, and briefly reminded her of the suspicion
+such a purchase by him would produce. “That’s so,” she said, with a
+laugh. “Caramba! what a mule I’m becoming! Ah! wait a moment. I have it!
+Buy me a common felt hat--a man’s hat--as if for yourself, as a change
+to that animal,” pointing to the fox-tailed cap he wore summer and
+winter, “and I’ll show you a trick. I haven’t run a theatrical wardrobe
+for nothing.” Nor had she, for the hat thus procured, a few days later,
+became, by the aid of a silk handkerchief and a bluejay’s feather, a
+fascinating “pork pie.”
+
+Whatever cause of annoyance to Low still lingered in Teresa’s dress,
+it was soon forgotten in a palpable evidence of Teresa’s value as a
+botanical assistant. It appeared that during the afternoon she had not
+only duplicated his specimens, but had discoverd one or two rare
+plants as yet unclassified in the flora of the Carquinez Woods. He was
+delighted, and in turn, over the campfire, yielded up some details of
+his present life and some of his earlier recollections.
+
+“You don’t remember anything of your father?” she asked. “Did he ever
+try to seek you out?”
+
+“No! Why should he?” replied the imperturbable Low; “he was not a
+Cherokee.”
+
+“No, he was a beast,” responded Teresa promptly. “And your mother--do
+you remember her?”
+
+“No, I think she died.”
+
+“You THINK she died? Don’t you know?”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Then you’re another!” said Teresa. Notwithstanding this frankness, they
+shook hands for the night: Teresa nestling like a rabbit in a hollow by
+the side of the campfire; Low with his feet towards it, Indian-wise,
+and his head and shoulders pillowed on his haversack, only half
+distinguishable in the darkness beyond.
+
+With such trivial details three uneventful days slipped by. Their
+retreat was undisturbed, nor could Low detect, by the least evidence
+to his acute perceptive faculties, that any intruding feet had since
+crossed the belt of shade. The echoes of passing events at Indian Spring
+had recorded the escape of Teresa as occurring at a remote and purely
+imaginative distance, and her probable direction the county of Yolo.
+
+“Can you remember,” he one day asked her, “what time it was when you cut
+the riata and got away?”
+
+Teresa pressed her hands upon her eyes and temples.
+
+“About three, I reckon.”
+
+“And you were here at seven; you could have covered some ground in four
+hours?”
+
+“Perhaps--I don’t know,” she said, her voice taking up its old quality
+again. “Don’t ask me--I ran all the way.”
+
+Her face was quite pale as she removed her hands from her eyes, and her
+breath came as quickly as if she had just finished that race for life.
+
+“Then you think I am safe here?” she added, after a pause.
+
+“Perfectly--until they find you are NOT in Yolo. Then they’ll look here.
+And THAT’S the time for you to go THERE.” Teresa smiled timidly.
+
+“It will take them some time to search Yolo--unless,” she added, “you’re
+tired of me here.” The charming non sequitur did not, however, seem to
+strike the young man. “I’ve got time yet to find a few more plants for
+you,” she suggested.
+
+“Oh, certainly!”
+
+“And give you a few more lessons in cooking.”
+
+“Perhaps.”
+
+The conscientious and literal Low was beginning to doubt if she were
+really practical. How otherwise could she trifle with such a situation?
+
+It must be confessed that that day and the next she did trifle with it.
+She gave herself up to a grave and delicious languor that seemed to flow
+from shadow and silence and permeate her entire being. She passed hours
+in a thoughtful repose of mind and spirit that seemed to fall like balm
+from those steadfast guardians, and distill their gentle ether in her
+soul; or breathed into her listening ear immunity from the forgotten
+past, and security for the present. If there was no dream of the future
+in this calm, even recurrence of placid existence, so much the better.
+The simple details of each succeeding day, the quaint housekeeping, the
+brief companionship and coming and going of her young host--himself
+at best a crystallized personification of the sedate and hospitable
+woods--satisfied her feeble cravings. She no longer regretted the
+inferior position that her fears had obliged her to take the first night
+she came; she began to look up to this young man--so much younger than
+herself--without knowing what it meant; it was not until she found
+that this attitude did not detract from his picturesqueness that
+she discovered herself seeking for reasons to degrade him from this
+seductive eminence.
+
+A week had elapsed with little change. On two days he had been absent
+all day, returning only in time to sup in the hollow tree, which,
+thanks to the final removal of the dead bear from its vicinity, was now
+considered a safer retreat than the exposed camp-fire. On the first of
+these occasions she received him with some preoccupation, paying but
+little heed to the scant gossip he brought from Indian Spring, and
+retiring early under the plea of fatigue, that he might seek his own
+distant camp-fire, which, thanks to her stronger nerves and regained
+courage, she no longer required so near. On the second occasion, he
+found her writing a letter more or less blotted with her tears. When it
+was finished, she begged him to post it at Indian Spring, where in two
+days an answer would be returned, under cover, to him.
+
+“I hope you will be satisfied then,” she added.
+
+“Satisfied with what?” queried the young man.
+
+“You’ll see,” she replied, giving him her cold hand. “Good-night.”
+
+“But can’t you tell me now?” he remonstrated, retaining her hand.
+
+“Wait two days longer--it isn’t much,” was all she vouchsafed to answer.
+
+The two days passed. Their former confidence and good fellowship were
+fully restored when the morning came on which he was to bring the
+answer from the post-office at Indian Spring. He had talked again of
+his future, and had recorded his ambition to procure the appointment of
+naturalist to a Government Surveying Expedition. She had even jocularly
+proposed to dress herself in man’s attire and “enlist” as his assistant.
+
+“But you will be safe with your friends, I hope, by that time,”
+ responded Low.
+
+“Safe with my friends,” she repeated in a lower voice. “Safe with my
+friends--yes!” An awkward silence followed; Teresa broke it gayly: “But
+your girl, your sweetheart, my benefactor--will SHE let you go?”
+
+“I haven’t told her yet,” said Low, gravely, “but I don’t see why she
+should object.”
+
+“Object, indeed!” interrupted Teresa in a high voice and a sudden and
+utterly gratuitous indignation; “how should she? I’d like to see her do
+it!”
+
+She accompanied him some distance to the intersection of the trail,
+where they parted in good spirits. On the dusty plain without a gale
+was blowing that rocked the high tree-tops above her, but, tempered and
+subdued, entered the low aisles with a fluttering breath of morning and
+a sound like the cooing of doves. Never had the wood before shown so
+sweet a sense of security from the turmoil and tempest of the world
+beyond; never before had an intrusion from the outer life--even in
+the shape of a letter--seemed so wicked a desecration. Tempted by the
+solicitation of air and shade, she lingered, with Low’s herbarium slung
+on her shoulder.
+
+A strange sensation, like a shiver, suddenly passed across her nerves,
+and left them in a state of rigid tension. With every sense morbidly
+acute, with every faculty strained to its utmost, the subtle instincts
+of Low’s woodcraft transformed and possessed her. She knew it now! A
+new element was in the wood--a strange being--another life--another
+man approaching! She did not even raise her head to look about her, but
+darted with the precision and fleetness of an arrow in the direction
+of her tree. But her feet were arrested, her limbs paralzyed, her very
+existence suspended, by the sound of a voice:--
+
+“Teresa!”
+
+It was a voice that had rung in her ears for the last two years in all
+phases of intensity, passion, tenderness, and anger; a voice upon whose
+modulations, rude and unmusical though they were, her heart and soul had
+hung in transport or anguish. But it was a chime that had rung its last
+peal to her senses as she entered the Carquinez Woods, and for the last
+week had been as dead to her as a voice from the grave. It was the voice
+of her lover--Dick Curson!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+The wind was blowing towards the stranger, so that he was nearly upon
+her when Teresa first took the alarm. He was a man over six feet in
+height, strongly built, with a slight tendency to a roundness of bulk
+which suggested reserved rather than impeded energy. His thick beard
+and mustache were closely cropped around a small and handsome mouth that
+lisped except when he was excited, but always kept fellowship with his
+blue eyes in a perpetual smile of half-cynical good-humor. His dress was
+superior to that of the locality; his general expression that of a
+man of the world, albeit a world of San Francisco, Sacramento, and
+Murderer’s Bar. He advanced towards her with a laugh and an outstretched
+hand.
+
+“YOU here!” she gasped, drawing back.
+
+Apparently neither surprised nor mortified at this reception, he
+answered frankly, “Yeth. You didn’t expect me, I know. But Doloreth
+showed me the letter you wrote her, and--well--here I am, ready to help
+you, with two men and a thpare horthe waiting outside the woodth on the
+blind trail.”
+
+“You--YOU--here?” she only repeated.
+
+Curson shrugged his shoulders. “Yeth. Of courth you never expected
+to thee me again, and leatht of all HERE. I’ll admit that; I’ll thay
+I wouldn’t if I’d been in your plathe. I’ll go further, and thay you
+didn’t want to thee me again--anywhere. But it all cometh to the thame
+thing; here I am. I read the letter you wrote Doloreth. I read how you
+were hiding here, under Dunn’th very nothe, with his whole pothe out,
+cavorting round and barkin’ up the wrong tree. I made up my mind to
+come down here with a few nathty friends of mine and cut you out under
+Dunn’th nothe, and run you over into Yuba--that’th all.”
+
+“How dared she show you my letter--YOU of all men? How dared she ask
+YOUR help?” continued Teresa, fiercely.
+
+“But she didn’t athk my help,” he responded coolly. “D--d if I don’t
+think she jutht calculated I’d be glad to know you were being hunted
+down and thtarving, that I might put Dunn on your track.”
+
+“You lie!” said Teresa, furiously; “she was my friend. A better friend
+than those who professed--more,” she added, with a contemptuous drawing
+away of her skirt as if she feared Curson’s contamination.
+
+“All right. Thettle that with her when you go back,” continued Curson
+philosophically. “We can talk of that on the way. The thing now ith to
+get up and get out of thethe woods. Come!”
+
+Teresa’s only reply was a gesture of scorn.
+
+“I know all that,” continued Curson half soothingly, “but they’re
+waiting.”
+
+“Let them wait. I shall not go.”
+
+“What will you do?”
+
+“Stay here--till the wolves eat me.”
+
+“Teresa, listen. D--- it all--Teresa--Tita! see here,” he said with
+sudden energy. “I swear to God it’s all right. I’m willing to let
+by-gones be by-gones and take a new deal. You shall come back as if
+nothing had happened, and take your old place as before. I don’t mind
+doing the square thing, all round. If that’s what you mean, if that’s
+all that stands in the way, why, look upon the thing as settled. There,
+Tita, old girl, come.”
+
+Careless or oblivious of her stony silence and starting eyes, he
+attempted to take her hand. But she disengaged herself with a quick
+movement, drew back, and suddenly crouched like a wild animal about to
+spring. Curson folded his arms as she leaped to her feet; the little
+dagger she had drawn from her garter flashed menacingly in the air, but
+she stopped.
+
+The man before her remained erect, impassive, and silent; the great
+trees around and beyond her remained erect, impassive, and silent; there
+was no sound in the dim aisles but the quick panting of her mad passion,
+no movement in the calm, motionless shadow but the trembling of her
+uplifted steel. Her arm bent and slowly sank, her fingers relaxed, the
+knife fell from her hand.
+
+“That’th quite enough for a thow,” he said, with a return to his former
+cynical ease and a perceptible tone of relief in his voice. “It’th the
+thame old Theretha. Well, then, if you won’t go with me, go without me;
+take the led horthe and cut away. Dick Athley and Petereth will follow
+you over the county line. If you want thome money, there it ith.” He
+took a buckskin purse from his pocket. “If you won’t take it from me”--he
+hesitated as she made no reply--“Athley’th flush and ready to lend you
+thome.”
+
+She had not seemed to hear him, but had stooped in some embarrassment,
+picked up the knife and hastily hid it, then with averted face and
+nervous fingers was beginning to tear strips of loose bark from the
+nearest trunk.
+
+“Well, what do you thay?”
+
+“I don’t want any money, and I shall stay here.” She hesitated, looked
+around her, and then added, with an effort, “I suppose you meant well.
+Be it so! Let by-gones be by-gones. You said just now, ‘It’s the same
+old Teresa.’ So she is, and seeing she’s the same she’s better here than
+anywhere else.”
+
+There was enough bitterness in her tone to call for Curson’s
+half-perfunctory sympathy.
+
+“That be d--d,” he responded quickly. “Jutht thay you’ll come, Tita,
+and--”
+
+She stopped his half-spoken sentence with a negative gesture. “You don’t
+understand. I shall stay here.”
+
+“But even if they don’t theek you here, you can’t live here forever. The
+friend that you wrote about who wath tho good to you, you know, can’t
+keep you here alwayth; and are you thure you can alwayth trutht her?”
+
+“It isn’t a woman; it’s a man.” She stopped short, and colored to the
+line of her forehead. “Who said it was a woman?” she continued fiercely,
+as if to cover her confusion with a burst of gratuitous anger. “Is that
+another of your lies?”
+
+Curson’s lips, which for a moment had completely lost their smile, were
+now drawn together in a prolonged whistle. He gazed curiously at her
+gown, at her hat, at the bow of bright ribbon that tied her black hair,
+and said, “Ah!”
+
+“A poor man who has kept my secret,” she went on hurriedly--“a man as
+friendless and lonely as myself. Yes,” disregarding Curson’s cynical
+smile, “a man who has shared everything--”
+
+“Naturally,” suggested Curson.
+
+“And turned himself out of his only shelter to give me a roof and
+covering,” she continued mechanically, struggling with the new and
+horrible fancy that his words awakened.
+
+“And thlept every night at Indian Thpring to save your reputation,” said
+Curson. “Of courthe.”
+
+Teresa turned very white. Curson was prepared for an outburst of
+fury--perhaps even another attack. But the crushed and beaten woman only
+gazed at him with frightened and imploring eyes. “For God’s sake, Dick,
+don’t say that!”
+
+The amiable cynic was staggered. His good-humor and a certain chivalrous
+instinct he could not repress got the better of him. He shrugged his
+shoulders. “What I thay, and what you DO, Teretha, needn’t make us
+quarrel. I’ve no claim on you--I know it. Only--” a vivid sense of the
+ridiculous, powerful in men of his stamp, completed her victory--“only
+don’t thay anything about my coming down here to cut you out from
+the--the--THE SHERIFF.” He gave utterance to a short but unaffected
+laugh, made a slight grimace, and turned to go.
+
+Teresa did not join in his mirth. Awkward as it would have been if he
+had taken a severer view of the subject, she was mortified even amidst
+her fears and embarrassment at his levity. Just as she had become
+convinced that his jealousy had made her over-conscious, his apparent
+good-humored indifference gave that over-consciousness a guilty
+significance. Yet this was lost in her sudden alarm as her companion,
+looking up, uttered an exclamation, and placed his hand upon his
+revolver. With a sinking conviction that the climax had come, Teresa
+turned her eyes. From the dim aisles beyond, Low was approaching. The
+catastrophe seemed complete.
+
+She had barely time to utter an imploring whisper: “In the name of God,
+not a word to him.” But a change had already come over her companion. It
+was no longer a parley with a foolish woman; he had to deal with a man
+like himself. As Low’s dark face and picturesque figure came nearer, Mr.
+Curson’s proposed method of dealing with him was made audible.
+
+“Ith it a mulatto or a Thircuth, or both?” he asked, with affected
+anxiety.
+
+Low’s Indian phlegm was impervious to such assault. He turned to Teresa,
+without apparently noticing her companion. “I turned back,” he said
+quietly, “as soon as I knew there were strangers here; I thought you
+might need me.” She noticed for the first time that, in addition to his
+rifle, he carried a revolver and hunting knife in his belt.
+
+“Yeth,” returned Curson, with an ineffectual attempt to imitate Low’s
+phlegm; “but ath I didn’t happen to be a sthranger to this lady, perhaps
+it wathn’t nethethary, particularly ath I had two friends--”
+
+“Waiting at the edge of the wood with a led horse,” interrupted Low,
+without addressing him, but apparently continuing his explanation to
+Teresa. But she turned to Low with feverish anxiety.
+
+“That’s so--he is an old friend--” she gave a quick, imploring glance at
+Curson--“an old friend who came to help me away--he is very kind,” she
+stammered, turning alternately from the one to the other; “but I told
+him there was no hurry--at least to-day--that you--were--very good--too,
+and would hide me a little longer, until your plan--you know YOUR plan,”
+ she added, with a look of beseeching significance to Low--“could be
+tried.” And then, with a helpless conviction that her excuses, motives,
+and emotions were equally and perfectly transparent to both men, she
+stopped in a tremble.
+
+“Perhapth it ‘th jutht ath well, then, that the gentleman came thtraight
+here, and didn’t tackle my two friendth when he pathed them,” observed
+Curson, half sarcastically.
+
+“I have not passed your friends, nor have I been near them,” said Low,
+looking at him for the first time, with the same exasperating calm, “or
+perhaps I should not be HERE or they THERE. I knew that one man entered
+the wood a few moments ago, and that two men and four horses remained
+outside.”
+
+“That’s true,” said Teresa to Curson excitedly--“that’s true. He knows
+all. He can see without looking, hear without listening. He--he--” she
+stammered, colored, and stopped.
+
+The two men had faced each other. Curson, after his first good-natured
+impulse, had retained no wish to regain Teresa, whom he felt he no
+longer loved, and yet who, for that very reason perhaps, had awakened
+his chivalrous instincts. Low, equally on his side, was altogether
+unconscious of any feeling which might grow into a passion, and prevent
+him from letting her go with another if for her own safety. They were
+both men of a certain taste and refinement. Yet, in spite of all this,
+some vague instinct of the baser male animal remained with them, and
+they were moved to a mutually aggressive attitude in the presence of the
+female.
+
+One word more, and the opening chapter of a sylvan Iliad might have
+begun. But this modern Helen saw it coming, and arrested it with an
+inspiration of feminine genius. Without being observed, she disengaged
+her knife from her bosom and let it fall as if by accident. It struck
+the ground with the point of its keen blade, bounded and rolled between
+them. The two men started and looked at each other with a foolish air.
+Curson laughed.
+
+“I reckon she can take care of herthelf,” he said, extending his hand to
+Low. “I’m off. But if I’m wanted SHE’LL know where to find me.” Low took
+the proffered hand, but neither of the two men looked at Teresa. The
+reserve of antagonism once broken, a few words of caution, advice, and
+encouragement passed between them, in apparent obliviousness of her
+presence or her personal responsibility. As Curson at last nodded
+a farewell to her, Low insisted upon accompanying him as far as the
+horses, and in another moment she was again alone.
+
+She had saved a quarrel between them at the sacrifice of herself, for
+her vanity was still keen enough to feel that this exhibition of her
+old weakness had degraded her in their eyes, and, worse, had lost the
+respect her late restraint had won from Low. They had treated her like a
+child or a crazy woman, perhaps even now were exchanging criticisms
+upon her--perhaps pitying her! Yet she had prevented a quarrel, a fight;
+possibly the death of either one or the other of these men who despised
+her, for none better knew than she the trivial beginning and desperate
+end of these encounters. Would they--would Low ever realize it, and
+forgive her? Her small, dark hands went up to her eyes and she sank
+upon the ground. She looked through tear-veiled lashes upon the mute and
+giant witnesses of her deceit and passion, and tried to draw, from their
+immovable calm, strength and consolation as before. But even they seemed
+to stand apart, reserved and forbidding.
+
+When Low returned she hoped to gather from his eyes and manner what
+had passed between him and her former lover. But beyond a mere gentle
+abstraction at times he retained his usual calm. She was at last forced
+to allude to it herself with simulated recklessness.
+
+“I suppose I didn’t get a very good character from my last place?” she
+said, with a laugh.
+
+“I don’t understand you,” he replied, in evident sincerity.
+
+She bit her lip and was silent. But as they were returning home, she
+said gently, “I hope you were not angry with me for the lie I told
+when I spoke of ‘your plan.’ I could not give the real reason for
+not returning with--with--that man. But it’s not all a lie. I have a
+plan--if you haven’t. When you are ready to go to Sacramento to take
+your place, dress me as an Indian boy, paint my face, and let me go with
+you. You can leave me--there--you know.”
+
+“It’s not a bad idea,” he responded gravely. “We will see.”
+
+On the next day, and the next, the rencontre seemed to be forgotten.
+The herbarium was already filled with rare specimens. Teresa had even
+overcome her feminine repugnance to “bugs” and creeping things so far
+as to assist in his entomological collection. He had drawn from a sacred
+cache in the hollow of a tree the few worn text-books from which he had
+studied.
+
+“They seem very precious,” she said, with a smile.
+
+“Very,” he replied gravely. “There was one with plates that the ants ate
+up, and it will be six months before I can afford to buy another.”
+
+Teresa glanced hurriedly over his well-worn buckskin suit, at his calico
+shirt with its pattern almost obliterated by countless washings, and
+became thoughtful.
+
+“I suppose you couldn’t buy one at Indian Spring?” she said innocently.
+
+For once Low was startled out of his phlegm. “Indian Spring!” he
+ejaculated; “perhaps not even in San Francisco. These came from the
+States.”
+
+“How did you get them?” persisted Teresa.
+
+“I bought them for skins I got over the ridge.”
+
+“I didn’t mean that--but no matter. Then you mean to sell that bearskin,
+don’t you?” she added.
+
+Low had, in fact, already sold it, the proceeds having been invested in
+a gold ring for Miss Nellie, which she scrupulously did not wear except
+in his presence. In his singular truthfulness he would have frankly
+confessed it to Teresa, but the secret was not his own. He contented
+himself with saying that he had disposed of it at Indian Spring.
+
+Teresa started, and communicated unconsciously some of her nervousness
+to her companion. They gazed in each other’s eyes with a troubled
+expression.
+
+“Do you think it was wise to sell that particular skin, which might be
+identified?” she asked timidly.
+
+Low knitted his arched brows, but felt a strange sense of relief.
+“Perhaps not,” he said carelessly; “but it’s too late now to mend
+matters.”
+
+That afternoon she wrote several letters, and tore them up. One,
+however, she retained, and handed it to Low to post at Indian Spring,
+whither he was going. She called his attention to the superscription,
+being the same as the previous letter, and added, with affected gayety,
+“But if the answer isn’t as prompt, perhaps it will be pleasanter than
+the last.” Her quick feminine eye noticed a little excitement in his
+manner and a more studious attention to his dress. Only a few days
+before she would not have allowed this to pass without some mischievous
+allusion to his mysterious sweetheart; it troubled her greatly now to
+find that she could not bring herself to this household pleasantry, and
+that her lip trembled and her eye grew moist as he parted from her.
+
+The afternoon passed slowly; he had said he might not return to supper
+until late, nevertheless a strange restlessness took possession of
+her as the day wore on. She put aside her work, the darning of his
+stockings, and rambled aimlessly through the woods. She had wandered she
+knew not how far, when she was suddenly seized with the same vague sense
+of a foreign presence which she had felt before. Could it be Curson
+again, with a word of warning? No! she knew it was not he; so subtle
+had her sense become that she even fancied that she detected in the
+invisible aura projected by the unknown no significance or relation to
+herself or Low, and felt no fear. Nevertheless she deemed it wisest to
+seek the protection of her sylvan bower, and hurried swiftly thither.
+
+But not so quickly nor directly that she did not once or twice pause in
+her flight to examine the new-comer from behind a friendly trunk. He was
+a stranger--a young fellow with a brown mustache, wearing heavy Mexican
+spurs in his riding-boots, whose tinkling he apparently did not care to
+conceal. He had perceived her, and was evidently pursuing her, but
+so awkwardly and timidly that she eluded him with ease. When she had
+reached the security of the hollow tree and pulled the curtain of bark
+before the narrow opening, with her eye to the interstices, she waited
+his coming. He arrived breathlessly in the open space before the tree
+where the bear once lay; the dazed, bewildered, and half-awed expression
+of his face, as he glanced around him and through the openings of the
+forest aisles, brought a faint smile to her saddened face. At last he
+called in a half-embarrassed voice:--
+
+“Miss Nellie!”
+
+The smile faded from Teresa’s cheek. Who was “Miss Nellie?” She pressed
+her ear to the opening. “Miss Wynn!” the voice again called, but was
+lost in the echoless woods. Devoured with a new gratuitous curiosity, in
+another moment Teresa felt she would have disclosed herself at any risk,
+but the stranger rose and began to retrace his steps. Long after his
+tinkling spurs were lost in the distance, Teresa remained like a statue,
+staring at the place where he had stood. Then she suddenly turned like
+a mad woman, glanced down at the gown she was wearing, tore it from
+her back as if it had been a polluted garment, and stamped upon it in
+a convulsion of rage. And then, with her beautiful bare arms clasped
+together over her head, she threw herself upon her couch in a tempest of
+tears.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+When Miss Nellie reached the first mining extension of Indian Spring,
+which surrounded it like a fosse, she descended for one instant into one
+of its trenches, opened her parasol, removed her duster, hid it under a
+bowlder, and with a few shivers and cat-like strokes of her soft
+hands not only obliterated all material traces of the stolen cream of
+Carquinez Woods, but assumed a feline demureness quite inconsistent with
+any moral dereliction. Unfortunately, she forgot to remove at the same
+time a certain ring from her third finger, which she had put on with her
+duster and had worn at no other time. With this slight exception, the
+benignant fate which always protected that young person brought her
+in contact with the Burnham girls at one end of the main street as the
+returning coach to Excelsior entered the other, and enabled her to take
+leave of them before the coach office with a certain ostentation of
+parting which struck Mr. Jack Brace, who was lingering at the doorway,
+into a state of utter bewilderment.
+
+Here was Miss Nellie Wynn, the belle of Excelsior, calm, quiet,
+self-possessed, her chaste cambric skirts and dainty shoes as fresh as
+when she had left her father’s house; but where was the woman of the
+brown duster, and where the yellow-dressed apparition of the woods? He
+was feebly repeating to himself his mental adjuration of a few hours
+before when he caught her eye, and was taken with a blush and a fit
+of coughing. Could he have been such an egregious fool, and was it not
+plainly written on his embarrassed face for her to read?
+
+“Are we going down together?” asked Miss Nellie with an exceptionally
+gracious smile.
+
+There was neither affectation nor coquetry in this advance. The girl
+had no idea of Brace’s suspicion of her, nor did any uneasy desire to
+placate or deceive a possible rival of Low’s prompt her graciousness.
+She simply wished to shake off in this encounter the already stale
+excitement of the past two hours, as she had shaken the dust of the
+woods from her clothes. It was characteristic of her irresponsible
+nature and transient susceptibilities that she actually enjoyed
+the relief of change; more than that, I fear, she looked upon this
+infidelity to a past dubious pleasure as a moral principle. A mild, open
+flirtation with a recognized man like Brace, after her secret passionate
+tryst with a nameless nomad like Low, was an ethical equipoise that
+seemed proper to one of her religious education.
+
+Brace was only too happy to profit by Miss Nellie’s condescension; he at
+once secured the seat by her side, and spent the four hours and a half
+of their return journey to Excelsior in blissful but timid communion
+with her. If he did not dare to confess his past suspicions, he was
+equally afraid to venture upon the boldness he had premeditated a
+few hours before. He was therefore obliged to take a middle course of
+slightly egotistical narration of his own personal adventures, with
+which he beguiled the young girl’s ear. This he only departed from once,
+to describe to her a valuable grizzly bearskin which he had seen that
+day for sale at Indian Spring, with a view to divining her possible
+acceptance of it for a “buggy robe;” and once to comment upon a ring
+which she had inadvertently disclosed in pulling off her glove.
+
+“It’s only an old family keepsake,” she added, with easy mendacity; and
+affecting to recognize in Mr. Brace’s curiosity a not unnatural excuse
+for toying with her charming fingers, she hid them in chaste and
+virginal seclusion in her lap, until she could recover the ring and
+resume her glove.
+
+A week passed--a week of peculiar and desiccating heat for even those
+dry Sierra table-lands. The long days were filled with impalpable
+dust and acrid haze suspended in the motionless air; the nights were
+breathless and dewless; the cold wind which usually swept down from the
+snow line was laid to sleep over a dark monotonous level, whose horizon
+was pricked with the eating fires of burning forest crests. The lagging
+coach of Indian Spring drove up at Excelsior, and precipitated its
+passengers with an accompanying cloud of dust before the Excelsior
+Hotel. As they emerged from the coach, Mr. Brace, standing in the
+doorway, closely scanned their begrimed and almost unrecognizable faces.
+They were the usual type of travelers: a single professional man in
+dusty black, a few traders in tweeds and flannels, a sprinkling of
+miners in red and gray shirts, a Chinaman, a negro, and a Mexican packer
+or muleteer. This latter for a moment mingled with the crowd in the
+bar-room, and even penetrated the corridor and dining-room of the hotel,
+as if impelled by a certain semi-civilized curiosity, and then strolled
+with a lazy, dragging step--half impeded by the enormous leather
+leggings, chains, and spurs, peculiar to his class--down the main
+street. The darkness was gathering, but the muleteer indulged in the
+same childish scrutiny of the dimly lighted shops, magazines, and
+saloons, and even of the occasional groups of citizens at the street
+corners. Apparently young, as far as the outlines of his figure could
+be seen, he seemed to show even more than the usual concern of masculine
+Excelsior in the charms of womankind. The few female figures about
+at that hour, or visible at window or veranda, received his marked
+attention; he respectfully followed the two auburn-haired daughters of
+Deacon Johnson on their way to choir meeting to the door of the church.
+Not content with that act of discreet gallantry, after they had entered
+he managed to slip unperceived behind them.
+
+The memorial of the Excelsior gamblers’ generosity was a modern
+building, large and pretentious, for even Mr. Wynn’s popularity, and
+had been good-humoredly known, in the characteristic language of the
+generous donors, as one of the “biggest religious bluffs” on record. Its
+groined rafters, which were so new and spicy that they still suggested
+their native forest aisles, seldom covered more than a hundred devotees,
+and in the rambling choir, with its bare space for the future organ,
+the few choristers, gathered round a small harmonium, were lost in the
+deepening shadow of that summer evening. The muleteer remained hidden
+in the obscurity of the vestibule. After a few moments’ desultory
+conversation, in which it appeared that the unexpected absence of
+Miss Nellie Wynn, their leader, would prevent their practicing, the
+choristers withdrew. The stranger, who had listened eagerly, drew back
+in the darkness as they passed out, and remained for a few moments a
+vague and motionless figure in the silent church. Then coming cautiously
+to the window, the flapping broad-brimmed hat was put aside, and the
+faint light of the dying day shone in the black eyes of Teresa! Despite
+her face, darkened with dye and disfigured with dust, the matted hair
+piled and twisted around her head, the strange dress and boyish figure,
+one swift glance from under her raised lashes betrayed her identity.
+
+She turned aside mechanically into the first pew, picked up and opened a
+hymn-book. Her eyes became riveted on a name written on the title-page,
+“Nellie Wynn.” HER name, and HER book. The instinct that had guided her
+here was right; the slight gossip of her fellow-passengers was right;
+this was the clergyman’s daughter, whose praise filled all mouths. This
+was the unknown girl the stranger was seeking, but who in turn perhaps
+had been seeking Low--the girl who absorbed his fancy--the secret of
+his absences, his preoccupation, his coldness! This was the girl whom to
+see, perhaps in his arms, she was now periling her liberty and her life
+unknown to him! A slight odor, some faint perfume of its owner, came
+from the book; it was the same she had noticed in the dress Low had
+given her. She flung the volume to the ground, and, throwing her arms
+over the back of the pew before her, buried her face in her hands.
+
+In that light and attitude she might have seemed some rapt acolyte
+abandoned to self-communion. But whatever yearning her soul might have
+had for higher sympathy or deeper consolation, I fear that the spiritual
+Tabernacle of Excelsior and the Reverend Mr. Wynn did not meet that
+requirement. She only felt the dry, oven-like heat of that vast shell,
+empty of sentiment and beauty, hollow in its pretense and dreary in its
+desolation. She only saw in it a chief altar for the glorification of
+this girl who had absorbed even the pure worship of her companion, and
+converted and degraded his sublime paganism to her petty creed. With a
+woman’s withering contempt for her own art displayed in another woman,
+she thought how she herself could have touched him with the peace that
+the majesty of their woodland aisles--so unlike this pillared sham--had
+taught her own passionate heart, had she but dared. Mingling with this
+imperfect theology, she felt she could have proved to him also that
+a brunette and a woman of her experience was better than an immature
+blonde. She began to loathe herself for coming hither, and dreaded to
+meet his face. Here a sudden thought struck her. What if he had not come
+here? What if she had been mistaken? What if her rash interpretation
+of his absence from the wood that night was simple madness? What if
+he should return--if he had already returned? She rose to her feet,
+whitening yet joyful with the thought. She could return at once; what
+was the girl to her now? Yet there was time to satisfy herself if he
+were at HER house. She had been told where it was; she could find it in
+the dark; an open door or window would betray some sign or sound of
+the occupants. She rose, replaced her hat over her eyes, knotted her
+flaunting scarf around her throat, groped her way to the door, and
+glided into the outer darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+It was quite dark when Mr. Jack Brace stopped before Father Wynn’s open
+door. The windows were also invitingly open to the wayfarer, as were
+the pastoral counsels of Father Wynn, delivered to some favored guest
+within, in a tone of voice loud enough for a pulpit. Jack Brace paused.
+The visitor was the convalescent sheriff, Jim Dunn, who had publicly
+commemorated his recovery by making his first call upon the father
+of his inamorata. The Reverend Mr. Wynn had been expatiating upon the
+unremitting heat of a possible precursor of forest fires, and exhibiting
+some catholic knowledge of the designs of a Deity in that regard, and
+what should be the policy of the Legislature, when Mr. Brace concluded
+to enter. Mr. Wynn and the wounded man, who occupied an arm-chair by
+the window, were the only occupants of the room. But in spite of the
+former’s ostentatious greeting, Brace could see that his visit was
+inopportune and unwelcome. The sheriff nodded a quick, impatient
+recognition, which, had it not been accompanied by an anathema on the
+heat, might have been taken as a personal insult. Neither spoke of
+Miss Nellie, although it was patent to Brace that they were momentarily
+expecting her. All of which went far to strengthen a certain wavering
+purpose in his mind.
+
+“Ah, ha! strong language, Mr. Dunn,” said Father Wynn, referring to the
+sheriff’s adjuration, “but ‘out of the fullness of the heart the mouth
+speaketh.’ Job, sir, cursed, we are told, and even expressed himself in
+vigorous Hebrew regarding his birthday. Ha, ha! I’m not opposed to that.
+When I have often wrestled with the spirit I confess I have sometimes
+said, ‘D--n you.’ Yes, sir, ‘D--n you.’”
+
+There was something so unutterably vile in the reverend gentleman’s
+utterance and emphasis of this oath that the two men, albeit both easy
+and facile blasphemers, felt shocked; as the purest of actresses is apt
+to overdo the rakishness of a gay Lothario, Father Wynn’s immaculate
+conception of an imprecation was something terrible. But he added, “The
+law ought to interfere with the reckless use of camp-fires in the woods
+in such weather by packers and prospectors.”
+
+“It isn’t so much the work of white men,” broke in Brace, “as it is
+of Greasers, Chinamen, and Diggers, especially Diggers. There’s that
+blasted Low, ranges the whole Carquinez Woods as if they were his. I
+reckon he ain’t particular just where he throws his matches.”
+
+“But he’s not a Digger; he’s a Cherokee, and only a half-breed at that,”
+ interpolated Wynn. “Unless,” he added, with the artful suggestion of the
+betrayed trust of a too credulous Christian, “he deceived me in this as
+in other things.”
+
+In what other things Low had deceived him he did not say; but, to the
+astonishment of both men, Dunn growled a dissent to Brace’s proposition.
+Either from some secret irritation with that possible rival, or
+impatience at the prolonged absence of Nellie, he had “had enough of
+that sort of hog-wash ladled out to him for genuine liquor.” As to the
+Carquinez Woods, he [Dunn] “didn’t know why Low hadn’t as much right
+there as if he’d grabbed it under a preemption law and didn’t live
+there.” With this hint at certain speculations of Father Wynn in public
+lands for a homestead, he added that “If they [Brace and Wynn] could
+bring him along any older American settler than an Indian, they
+might rake down his [Dunn’s] pile.” Unprepared for this turn in the
+conversation, Wynn hastened to explain that he did not refer to the pure
+aborigine, whose gradual extinction no one regretted more than himself,
+but to the mongrel, who inherited only the vices of civilization. “There
+should be a law, sir, against the mingling of races. There are men, sir,
+who violate the laws of the Most High by living with Indian women--squaw
+men, sir, as they are called.”
+
+Dunn rose with a face livid with weakness and passion. “Who dares say
+that? They are a d--d sight better than sneaking Northern Abolitionists,
+who married their daughters to buck niggers like--” But a spasm of pain
+withheld this Parthian shot at the politics of his two companions, and
+he sank back helplessly in his chair.
+
+An awkward silence ensued. The three men looked at each other in
+embarrassment and confusion. Dunn felt that he had given way to a
+gratuitous passion; Wynn had a vague presentiment that he had said
+something that imperiled his daughter’s prospects; and Brace was divided
+between an angry retort and the secret purpose already alluded to.
+
+“It’s all the blasted heat,” said Dunn, with a forced smile, pushing
+away the whisky which Wynn had ostentatiously placed before him.
+
+“Of course,” said Wynn hastily; “only it’s a pity Nellie ain’t here to
+give you her smelling-salts. She ought to be back now,” he added, no
+longer mindful of Brace’s presence; “the coach is over-due now, though I
+reckon the heat made Yuba Bill take it easy at the up grade.”
+
+“If you mean the coach from Indian Spring,” said Brace quietly, “it’s in
+already; but Miss Nellie didn’t come on it.”
+
+“May be she got out at the Crossing,” said Wynn cheerfully; “she
+sometimes does.”
+
+“She didn’t take the coach at Indian Spring,” returned Brace, “because
+I saw it leave, and passed it on Buckskin ten minutes ago, coming up the
+hills.”
+
+“She’s stopped over at Burnham’s,” said Wynn reflectively. Then, in
+response to the significant silence of his guests, he added, in a tone
+of chagrin which his forced heartiness could not disguise, “Well, boys,
+it’s a disappointment all round; but we must take the lesson as it
+comes. I’ll go over to the coach office and see if she’s sent any word.
+Make yourselves at home until I return.”
+
+When the door had closed behind him, Brace arose and took his hat as
+if to go. With his hand on the lock, he turned to his rival, who, half
+hidden in the gathering darkness, still seemed unable to comprehend his
+ill-luck.
+
+“If you’re waiting for that bald-headed fraud to come back with the
+truth about his daughter,” said Brace coolly, “you’d better send for
+your things and take up your lodgings here.”
+
+“What do you mean?” said Dunn sternly.
+
+“I mean that she’s not at the Burnhams’; I mean that he either does or
+does not know WHERE she is, and that in either case he is not likely to
+give you information. But I can.”
+
+“You can?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Then, where is she?”
+
+“In the Carquinez Woods, in the arms of the man you were just
+defending--Low, the half-breed.”
+
+The room had become so dark that from the road nothing could be
+distinguished. Only the momentary sound of struggling feet was heard.
+
+“Sit down,” said Brace’s voice, “and don’t be a fool. You’re too weak,
+and it ain’t a fair fight. Let go your hold. I’m not lying--I wish to
+God I was!”
+
+There was silence, and Brace resumed, “We’ve been rivals, I know. May be
+I thought my chance as good as yours. If what I say ain’t truth, we’ll
+stand as we stood before; and if you’re on the shoot, I’m your man when
+you like, where you like, or on sight if you choose. But I can’t bear to
+see another man played upon as I’ve been played upon--given dead away as
+I’ve been. It ain’t on the square.
+
+“There,” he continued, after a pause, “that’s right, now steady. Listen.
+A week ago that girl went down just like this to Indian Spring. It
+was given out, like this, that she went to the Burnhams’. I don’t mind
+saying, Dunn, that I went down myself, all on the square, thinking I
+might get a show to talk to her, just as YOU might have done, you know,
+if you had my chance. I didn’t come across her anywhere. But two men
+that I met thought they recognized her in a disguise going into the
+woods. Not suspecting anything, I went after her; saw her at a distance
+in the middle of the woods in another dress that I can swear to, and was
+just coming up to her when she vanished--went like a squirrel up a tree,
+or down like a gopher in the ground, but vanished.”
+
+“Is that all?” said Dunn’s voice. “And just because you were a d--d
+fool, or had taken a little too much whisky, you thought--”
+
+“Steady. That’s just what I said to myself,” interrupted Brace coolly,
+“particularly when I saw her that same afternoon in another dress,
+saying ‘Good-by’ to the Burnhams, as fresh as a rose and as cold as
+those snow-peaks. Only one thing--she had a ring on her finger she never
+wore before, and didn’t expect me to see.”
+
+“What if she did? She might have bought it. I reckon she hasn’t to
+consult you,” broke in Dunn’s voice sternly.
+
+“She didn’t buy it,” continued Brace quietly. “Low gave that Jew trader
+a bearskin in exchange for it, and presented it to her. I found that
+out two days afterwards. I found out that out of the whole afternoon she
+spent less than an hour with the Burnhams. I found out that she bought
+a duster like the disguise the two men saw her in. I found the yellow
+dress she wore that day hanging up in Low’s cabin--the place where I saw
+her go--THE RENDEZVOUS WHERE SHE MEETS HIM. Oh, you’re listenin’, are
+you? Stop! SIT DOWN!
+
+“I discovered it by accident,” continued the voice of Brace when all was
+again quiet; “it was hidden as only a squirrel or an Injin can hide when
+they improve upon nature. When I was satisfied that the girl had been
+in the woods, I was determined to find out where she vanished, and went
+there again. Prospecting around, I picked up at the foot of one of the
+biggest trees this yer old memorandum-book, with grasses and herbs stuck
+in it. I remembered that I’d heard old Wynn say that Low, like the d--d
+Digger that he was, collected these herbs; only he pretended it was for
+science. I reckoned the book was his and that he mightn’t be far away. I
+lay low and waited. Bimeby I saw a lizard running down the root. When he
+got sight of me he stopped.”
+
+“D--n the lizard! What’s that got to do with where she is now?”
+
+“Everything. That lizard had a piece of sugar in his mouth. Where did it
+come from? I made him drop it, and calculated he’d go back for more. He
+did. He scooted up that tree and slipped in under some hanging strips of
+bark. I shoved ‘em aside, and found an opening to the hollow where they
+do their housekeeping.”
+
+“But you didn’t see her there--and how do you know she is there now?”
+
+“I determined to make it sure. When she left to-day, I started an hour
+ahead of her, and hid myself at the edge of the woods. An hour after the
+coach arrived at Indian Spring, she came there in a brown duster and was
+joined by him. I’d have followed them, but the d--d hound has the ears
+of a squirrel, and though I was five hundred yards from him he was on
+his guard.”
+
+“Guard be blessed! Wasn’t you armed? Why didn’t you go for him?” said
+Dunn, furiously.
+
+“I reckoned I’d leave that for you,” said Brace coolly. “If he’d killed
+me, and if he’d even covered me with his rifle, he’d been sure to let
+daylight through me at double the distance. I shouldn’t have been any
+better off, nor you either. If I’d killed HIM, it would have been your
+duty as sheriff to put me in jail; and I reckon it wouldn’t have broken
+your heart, Jim Dunn, to have got rid of TWO rivals instead of one.
+Hullo! Where are you going?”
+
+“Going?” said Dunn hoarsely. “Going to the Carquinez Woods, by God! to
+kill him before her. I’LL risk it, if you daren’t. Let me succeed, and
+you can hang ME and take the girl yourself.”
+
+“Sit down, sit down. Don’t be a fool, Jim Dunn! You wouldn’t keep the
+saddle a hundred yards. Did I say I wouldn’t help you? No. If you’re
+willing, we’ll run the risk together, but it must be in my way. Hear me.
+I’ll drive you down there in a buggy before daylight, and we’ll surprise
+them in the cabin or as they leave the wood. But you must come as if
+to arrest him for some offense--say, as an escaped Digger from the
+Reservation, a dangerous tramp, a destroyer of public property in the
+forests, a suspected road agent, or anything to give you the right
+to hunt him. The exposure of him and Nellie, don’t you see, must be
+accidental. If he resists, kill him on the spot, and nobody’ll blame
+you; if he goes peaceably with you, and you once get him in Excelsior
+jail, when the story gets out that he’s taken the belle of Excelsior for
+his squaw, if you’d the angels for your posse you couldn’t keep the boys
+from hanging him to the first tree. What’s that?”
+
+He walked to the window, and looked out cautiously.
+
+“If it was the old man coming back and listening,” he said, after a
+pause, “it can’t he helped. He’ll hear it soon enough, if he don’t
+suspect something already.”
+
+“Look yer, Brace,” broke in Dunn hoarsely. “D--d if I understand you or
+you me. That dog Low has got to answer to ME, not to the LAW! I’ll take
+my risk of killing him, on sight and on the square. I don’t reckon to
+handicap myself with a warrant, and I am not going to draw him out with
+a lie. You hear me? That’s me all the time!”
+
+“Then you calkilate to go down thar,” said Brace contemptuously, “yell
+out for him and Nellie, and let him line you on a rest from the first
+tree as if you were a grizzly.”
+
+There was a pause. “What’s that you were saying just now about a
+bearskin he sold?” asked Dunn slowly, as if reflecting.
+
+“He exchanged a bearskin,” replied Brace, “with a single hole right over
+the heart. He’s a dead shot, I tell you.”
+
+“D--n his shooting,” said Dunn. “I’m not thinking of that. How long ago
+did he bring in that bearskin?”
+
+“About two weeks, I reckon. Why?”
+
+“Nothing! Look yer, Brace, you mean well--thar’s my hand. I’ll go down
+with you there, but not as the sheriff. I’m going there as Jim Dunn, and
+you can come along as a white man, to see things fixed on the square.
+Come!”
+
+Brace hesitated. “You’ll think better of my plan before you get there;
+but I’ve said I’d stand by you, and I will. Come, then. There’s no time
+to lose.”
+
+They passed out into the darkness together.
+
+“What are you waiting for?” said Dunn impatiently, as Brace, who was
+supporting him by the arm, suddenly halted at the corner of the house.
+
+“Some one was listening--did you not see him? Was it the old man?” asked
+Brace hurriedly.
+
+“Blast the old man! It was only one of them Mexican packers chock-full
+of whisky, and trying to hold up the house. What are you thinking of? We
+shall be late.”
+
+In spite of his weakness, the wounded man hurriedly urged Brace forward,
+until they reached the latter’s lodgings. To his surprise, the horse
+and buggy were already before the door.
+
+“Then you reckoned to go, any way?” said Dunn, with a searching look at
+his companion.
+
+“I calkilated SOMEBODY would go,” returned Brace, evasively, patting the
+impatient Buckskin; “but come in and take a drink before we leave.”
+
+Dunn started out of a momentary abstraction, put his hand on his hip,
+and mechanically entered the house. They had scarcely raised the glasses
+to their lips when a sudden rattle of wheels was heard in the street.
+Brace set down his glass and ran to the window.
+
+“It’s the mare bolted,” he said, with an oath. “We’ve kept her too long
+standing. Follow me,” and he dashed down the staircase into the street.
+Dunn followed with difficulty; when he reached the door he was already
+confronted by his breathless companion. “She’s gone off on a run, and
+I’ll swear there was a man in the buggy!” He stopped and examined the
+halter-strap, still fastened to the fence. “Cut! by God!”
+
+Dunn turned pale with passion. “Who’s got another horse and buggy?” he
+demanded.
+
+“The new blacksmith in Main Street; but we won’t get it by borrowing,”
+ said Brace.
+
+“How then?” asked Dunn savagely.
+
+“Seize it, as the sheriff of Yuba and his deputy, pursuing a confederate
+of the Injin Low--THE HORSE THIEF!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The brief hour of darkness that preceded the dawn was that night
+intensified by a dense smoke, which, after blotting out horizon and sky,
+dropped a thick veil on the high road and the silent streets of Indian
+Spring. As the buggy containing Sheriff Dunn and Brace dashed through
+the obscurity, Brace suddenly turned to his companion.
+
+“Some one ahead!”
+
+The two men bent forward over the dashboard. Above the steady plunging
+of their own horse-hoofs they could hear the quicker irregular beat of
+other hoofs in the darkness before them.
+
+“It’s that horse thief!” said Dunn, in a savage whisper. “Bear to the
+right, and hand me the whip.”
+
+A dozen cuts of the cruel lash, and their maddened horse, bounding at
+each stroke, broke into a wild canter. The frail vehicle swayed from
+side to side at each spring of the elastic shafts. Steadying himself by
+one hand on the low rail, Dunn drew his revolver with the other. “Sing
+out to him to pull up, or we’ll fire. My voice is clean gone,” he added,
+in a husky whisper.
+
+They were so near that they could distinguish the bulk of a vehicle
+careering from side to side in the blackness ahead. Dunn deliberately
+raised his weapon. “Sing out!” he repeated impatiently. But Brace, who
+was still keeping in the shadow, suddenly grasped his companion’s arm.
+
+“Hush! It’s NOT Buckskin,” he whispered hurriedly.
+
+“Are you sure?”
+
+“DON’T YOU SEE WE’RE GAINING ON HIM?” replied the other contemptuously.
+Dunn grasped his companion’s hand and pressed it silently. Even in
+that supreme moment this horseman’s tribute to the fugitive Buckskin
+forestalled all baser considerations of pursuit and capture!
+
+In twenty seconds they were abreast of the stranger, crowding his horse
+and buggy nearly into the ditch; Brace keenly watchful, Dunn suppressed
+and pale. In half a minute they were leading him a length; and when
+their horse again settled down to his steady work, the stranger was
+already lost in the circling dust that followed them. But the victors
+seemed disappointed. The obscurity had completely hidden all but the
+vague outlines of the mysterious driver.
+
+“He’s not our game, anyway,” whispered Dunn. “Drive on.”
+
+“But if it was some friend of his,” suggested Brace uneasily, “what
+would you do?”
+
+“What I SAID I’d do,” responded Dunn savagely. “I don’t want five
+minutes to do it in, either; we’ll be half an hour ahead of that d--d
+fool, whoever he is. Look here; all you’ve got to do is to put me in the
+trail to that cabin. Stand back of me, out of gun-shot, alone, if you
+like, as my deputy, or with any number you can pick up as my posse.
+If he gets by me as Nellie’s lover, you may shoot him or take him as a
+horse thief, if you like.”
+
+“Then you won’t shoot him on sight?”
+
+“Not till I’ve had a word with him.”
+
+“But--”
+
+“I’ve chirped,” said the sheriff gravely. “Drive on.”
+
+For a few moments only the plunging hoofs and rattling wheels were
+heard. A dull, lurid glow began to define the horizon. They were silent
+until an abatement of the smoke, the vanishing of the gloomy horizon
+line, and a certain impenetrability in the darkness ahead showed them
+they were nearing the Carquinez Woods. But they were surprised on
+entering them to find the dim aisles alight with a faint mystic Aurora.
+The tops of the towering spires above them had caught the gleam of the
+distant forest fires, and reflected it as from a gilded dome.
+
+“It would be hot work if the Carquinez Woods should conclude to take a
+hand in this yer little game that’s going on over on the Divide yonder,”
+ said Brace, securing his horse and glancing at the spires overhead.
+“I reckon I’d rather take a back seat at Injin Spring when the show
+commences.”
+
+Dunn did not reply, but, buttoning his coat, placed one hand on his
+companion’s shoulder, and sullenly bade him “lead the way.” Advancing
+slowly and with difficulty the desperate man might have been taken for a
+peaceful invalid returning from an early morning stroll. His right hand
+was buried thoughtfully in the side pocket of his coat. Only Brace knew
+that it rested on the handle of his pistol.
+
+From time to time the latter stopped and consulted the faint trail with
+a minuteness that showed recent careful study. Suddenly he paused. “I
+made a blaze hereabouts to show where to leave the trail. There it is,”
+ he added, pointing to a slight notch cut in the trunk of an adjoining
+tree.
+
+“But we’ve just passed one,” said Dunn, “if that’s what you are looking
+after, a hundred yards back.”
+
+Brace uttered an oath, and ran back in the direction signified by his
+companion. Presently he returned with a smile of triumph.
+
+“They’ve suspected something. It’s a clever trick, but it won’t hold
+water. That blaze which was done to muddle you was cut with an axe; this
+which I made was done with a bowie-knife. It’s the real one. We’re not
+far off now. Come on.”
+
+They proceeded cautiously, at right angles with the “blazed” tree, for
+ten minutes more. The heat was oppressive; drops of perspiration rolled
+from the forehead of the sheriff, and at times, when he attempted to
+steady his uncertain limbs, his hands shrank from the heated, blistering
+bark he touched with ungloved palms.
+
+“Here we are,” said Brace, pausing at last. “Do you see that biggest
+tree, with the root stretching out halfway across to the opposite one?”
+
+“No, it’s further to the right and abreast of the dead brush,”
+ interrupted Dunn quickly, with a sudden revelation that this was the
+spot where he had found the dead bear in the night Teresa escaped.
+
+“That’s so,” responded Brace, in astonishment.
+
+“And the opening is on the other side, opposite the dead brush,” said
+Dunn.
+
+“Then you know it?” said Brace suspiciously.
+
+“I reckon!” responded Dunn, grimly. “That’s enough! Fall back!”
+
+To the surprise of his companion, he lifted his head erect, and with a
+strong, firm step walked directly to the tree. Reaching it, he planted
+himself squarely before the opening.
+
+“Halloo!” he said.
+
+There was no reply. A squirrel scampered away close to his feet. Brace,
+far in the distance, after an ineffectual attempt to distinguish his
+companion through the intervening trunks, took off his coat, leaned
+against a tree, and lit a cigar.
+
+“Come out of that cabin!” continued Dunn, in a clear, resonant voice.
+“Come out before I drag you out!”
+
+“All right, ‘Captain Scott.’ Don’t shoot, and I’ll come down,” said a
+voice as clear and as high as his own. The hanging strips of bark were
+dashed aside, and a woman leaped lightly to the ground.
+
+Dunn staggered back. “Teresa! by the Eternal!”
+
+It was Teresa! the old Teresa! Teresa, a hundred times more vicious,
+reckless, hysterical, extravagant, and outrageous than before. Teresa,
+staring with tooth and eye, sunburnt and embrowned, her hair hanging
+down her shoulders, and her shawl drawn tightly around her neck.
+
+“Teresa it is! the same old gal! Here we are again! Return of the
+favorite in her original character! For two weeks only! Houp la! Tshk!”
+ and, catching her yellow skirt with her fingers, she pirouetted before
+the astounded man, and ended in a pose. Recovering himself with an
+effort, Dunn dashed forward and seized her by the wrist.
+
+“Answer me, woman! Is that Low’s cabin?”
+
+“It is.”
+
+“Who occupies it besides?”
+
+“I do.”
+
+“And who else?”
+
+“Well,” drawled Teresa slowly, with an extravagant affectation of
+modesty, “nobody else but us, I reckon. Two’s company, you know, and
+three’s none.”
+
+“Stop! Will you swear that there isn’t a young girl, his--his
+sweetheart--concealed there with you?”
+
+The fire in Teresa’s eye was genuine as she answered steadily, “Well,
+it ain’t my style to put up with that sort of thing; at least, it wasn’t
+over at Yolo, and you know it, Jim Dunn, or I wouldn’t be here.”
+
+“Yes, yes,” said Dunn hurriedly. “But I’m a d--d fool, or worse, the
+fool of a fool. Tell me, Teresa, is this man Low your lover?”
+
+Teresa lowered her eyes as if in maidenly confusion. “Well, if I’d known
+that YOU had any feeling of your own about it--if you’d spoken sooner--”
+
+“Answer me, you devil!”
+
+“He is.”
+
+“And he has been with you here--yesterday--to-night?”
+
+“He has.”
+
+“Enough.” He laughed a weak, foolish laugh, and, turning pale, suddenly
+lapsed against a tree. He would have fallen, but with a quick instinct
+Teresa sprang to his side, and supported him gently to a root. The
+action over, they both looked astounded.
+
+“I reckon that wasn’t much like either you or me,” said Dunn slowly,
+“was it? But if you’d let me drop then you’d have stretched out the
+biggest fool in the Sierras.” He paused, and looked at her curiously.
+“What’s come over you; blessed if I seem to know you now.”
+
+She was very pale again, and quiet; that was all.
+
+“Teresa! d--n it, look here! When I was laid up yonder in Excelsior I
+said I wanted to get well for only two things. One was to hunt you down,
+the other to marry Nellie Wynn. When I came here I thought that last
+thing could never be. I came here expecting to find her here with Low,
+and kill him--perhaps kill her too. I never once thought of you; not
+once. You might have risen up before me--between me and him--and I’d
+have passed you by. And now that I find it’s all a mistake, and it was
+you, not her, I was looking for, why--”
+
+“Why,” she interrupted bitterly, “you’ll just take me, of course, to
+save your time and earn your salary. I’m ready.”
+
+“But I’M not, just yet,” he said faintly. “Help me up.”
+
+She mechanically assisted him to his feet.
+
+“Now stand where you are,” he added, “and don’t move beyond this tree
+till I return.”
+
+He straightened himself with an effort, clenched his fists until the
+nails were nearly buried in his palms, and strode with a firm, steady
+step in the direction he had come. In a few moments he returned and
+stood before her.
+
+“I’ve sent away my deputy--the man who brought me here, the fool who
+thought you were Nellie. He knows now he made a mistake. But who it was
+he mistook for Nellie he does not know, nor shall ever know, nor shall
+any living being know, other than myself. And when I leave the wood
+to-day I shall know it no longer. You are safe here as far as I am
+concerned, but I cannot screen you from others prying. Let Low take you
+away from here as soon as he can.”
+
+“Let him take me away? Ah, yes. For what?”
+
+“To save you,” said Dunn. “Look here, Teresa! Without knowing it, you
+lifted me out of hell just now, and because of the wrong I might have
+done her--for HER sake, I spare you and shirk my duty.”
+
+“For her sake!” gasped the woman--“for her sake! Oh, yes! Go on.”
+
+“Well,” said Dunn gloomily, “I reckon perhaps you’d as lieve left me in
+hell, for all the love you bear me. And may be you’ve grudge enough agin
+me still to wish I’d found her and him together.”
+
+“You think so?” she said, turning her head away.
+
+“There, d--n it! I didn’t mean to make you cry. May be you wouldn’t,
+then. Only tell that fellow to take you out of this, and not run away
+the next time he sees a man coming.”
+
+“He didn’t run,” said Teresa, with flashing eyes. “I--I--I sent him
+away,” she stammered. Then, suddenly turning with fury upon him, she
+broke out, “Run! Run from you! Ha, ha! You said just now I’d a grudge
+against you. Well, listen, Jim Dunn. I’d only to bring you in range of
+that young man’s rifle, and you’d have dropped in your tracks like--”
+
+“Like that bar, the other night,” said Dunn, with a short laugh. “So
+THAT was your little game?” He checked his laugh suddenly--a cloud
+passed over his face. “Look here, Teresa,” he said, with an assumption
+of carelessness that was as transparent as it was utterly incompatible
+with his frank, open selfishness. “What became of that bar? The
+skin--eh? That was worth something?”
+
+“Yes,” said Teresa quietly. “Low exchanged it and got a ring for me from
+that trader Isaacs. It was worth more, you bet. And the ring didn’t fit
+either--”
+
+“Yes,” interrupted Dunn, with an almost childish eagerness.
+
+“And I made him take it back, and get the value in money. I hear that
+Isaacs sold it again and made another profit; but that’s like those
+traders.” The disingenuous candor of Teresa’s manner was in exquisite
+contrast to Dunn. He rose and grasped her hand so heartily she was
+forced to turn her eyes away.
+
+“Good-by!” he said.
+
+“You look tired,” she murmured, with a sudden gentleness that surprised
+him; “let me go with you a part of the way.”
+
+“It isn’t safe for you just now,” he said, thinking of the possible
+consequences of the alarm Brace had raised.
+
+“Not the way YOU came,” she replied; “but one known only to myself.”
+
+He hesitated only a moment. “All right, then,” he said finally, “let
+us go at once. It’s suffocating here, and I seem to feel this dead bark
+crinkle under my feet.”
+
+She cast a rapid glance around her, and then seemed to sound with her
+eyes the far-off depths of the aisles, beginning to grow pale with the
+advancing day, but still holding a strange quiver of heat in the air.
+When she had finished her half-abstracted scrutiny of the distance, she
+cast one backward glance at her own cabin and stopped.
+
+“Will you wait a moment for me?” she asked gently.
+
+“Yes--but--no tricks, Teresa! It isn’t worth the time.”
+
+She looked him squarely in the eyes without a word.
+
+“Enough,” he said; “go!”
+
+She was absent for some moments. He was beginning to become uneasy, when
+she made her appearance again, clad in her old faded black dress. Her
+face was very pale, and her eyes were swollen, but she placed his hand
+on her shoulder, and bidding him not to fear to lean upon her, for she
+was quite strong, led the way.
+
+“You look more like yourself now, and yet--blast it all!--you don’t
+either,” said Dunn, looking down upon her. “You’ve changed in some way.
+What is it? Is it on account of that Injin? Couldn’t you have found a
+white man in his place?”
+
+“I reckon he’s neither worse nor better for that,” she replied bitterly;
+“and perhaps he wasn’t as particular in his taste as a white man might
+have been. But,” she added, with a sudden spasm of her old rage, “it’s
+a lie; he’s NOT an Indian, no more than I am. Not unless being born of
+a mother who scarcely knew him, of a father who never even saw him, and
+being brought up among white men and wild beasts--less cruel than they
+were--could make him one!”
+
+Dunn looked at her in surprise not unmixed with admiration. “If Nellie,”
+ he thought, “could but love ME like that!” But he only said:
+
+“For all that, he’s an Injin. Why, look at his name. It ain’t Low. It’s
+L’Eau Dormante, Sleeping Water, an Injin name.”
+
+“And what does that prove?” returned Teresa. “Only that Indians clap a
+nick-name on any stranger, white or red, who may camp with them. Why,
+even his own father, a white man, the wretch who begot him and abandoned
+him,--HE had an Indian name--Loup Noir.”
+
+“What name did you say?”
+
+“Le Loup Noir, the Black Wolf. I suppose you’d call him an Indian, too?
+Eh! What’s the matter? We’re walking too fast. Stop a moment and rest.
+There--there, lean on me!”
+
+She was none too soon; for, after holding him upright a moment, his
+limbs failed, and stooping gently she was obliged to support him half
+reclining against a tree.
+
+“Its the heat!” he said. “Give me some whisky from my flask. Never mind
+the water,” he added faintly, with a forced laugh, after he had taken a
+draught at the strong spirit. “Tell me more about the other water--the
+Sleeping Water--you know. How do you know all this about him and
+his--father?”
+
+“Partly from him and partly from Curson, who wrote to me about him,” she
+answered with some hesitation.
+
+But Dunn did not seem to notice this incongruity of correspondence with
+a former lover. “And HE told you?”
+
+“Yes; and I saw the name on an old memorandum book he has, which he says
+belonged to his father. It’s full of old accounts of some trading post
+on the frontier. It’s been missing for a day or two, but it will turn
+up. But I can swear I saw it.”
+
+Dunn attempted to rise to his feet. “Put your hand in my pocket,” he
+said in a hurried whisper. “No, there!--bring out a book. There, I
+haven’t looked at it yet. Is that it?” he added, handing her the book
+Brace had given him a few hours before.
+
+“Yes,” said Teresa, in surprise. “Where did you find it?”
+
+“Never mind! Now let me see it, quick. Open it, for my sight is failing.
+There--thank you--that’s all!”
+
+“Take more whisky,” said Teresa, with a strange anxiety creeping over
+her. “You are faint again.”
+
+“Wait! Listen, Teresa--lower--put your ear lower. Listen! I came near
+killing that chap Low to-day. Wouldn’t it have been ridiculous?”
+
+He tried to smile, but his head fell back. He had fainted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+For the first time in her life Teresa lost her presence of mind in an
+emergency. She could only sit staring at the helpless man, scarcely
+conscious of his condition, her mind filled with a sudden prophetic
+intuition of the significance of his last words. In the light of
+that new revelation she looked into his pale, haggard face for some
+resemblance to Low, but in vain. Yet her swift feminine instinct met the
+objection. “It’s the mother’s blood that would show,” she murmured, “not
+this man’s.”
+
+Recovering herself, she began to chafe his hands and temples, and
+moistened his lips with the spirit. When his respiration returned with a
+faint color to his cheeks, she pressed his hands eagerly and leaned over
+him.
+
+“Are you sure?” she asked.
+
+“Of what?” he whispered faintly.
+
+“That Low is really your son?”
+
+“Who said so?” he asked, opening his round eyes upon her.
+
+“You did yourself, a moment ago,” she said quickly. “Don’t you
+remember?”
+
+“Did I?”
+
+“You did. Is it not so?”
+
+He smiled faintly. “I reckon.”
+
+She held her breath in expectation. But only the ludicrousness of the
+discovery seemed paramount to his weakened faculties. “Isn’t it just
+about the ridiculousest thing all round?” he said, with a feeble
+chuckle. “First YOU nearly kill me before you know I am Low’s father;
+then I’m just spoilin’ to kill him before I know he’s my son; then that
+god-forsaken fool Jack Brace mistakes you for Nellie and Nellie for you.
+Ain’t it just the biggest thing for the boys to get hold of? But we must
+keep it dark until after I marry Nellie, don’t you see? Then we’ll have
+a good time all round, and I’ll stand the drinks. Think of it, Teresha!
+You don’ no me, I do’ no you, nobody knowsh anybody elsh. I try kill
+Lo’. Lo’ wants kill Nellie. No thath no ri--’” but the potent liquor,
+overtaking his exhausted senses, thickened, impeded, and at last stopped
+his speech. His head slipped to her shoulder, and he became once more
+unconscious.
+
+Teresa breathed again. In that brief moment she had abandoned herself to
+a wild inspiration of hope which she could scarcely define. Not that it
+was entirely a wild inspiration; she tried to reason calmly. What if she
+revealed the truth to him? What if she told the wretched man before her
+that she had deceived him; that she had overheard his conversation with
+Brace; that she had stolen Brace’s horse to bring Low warning; that,
+failing to find Low in his accustomed haunts, or at the campfire, she
+had left a note for him pinned to the herbarium, imploring him to fly
+with his companion from the danger that was coming; and that, remaining
+on watch, she had seen them both--Brace and Dunn--approaching, and had
+prepared to meet them at the cabin? Would this miserable and
+maddened man understand her self-abnegation? Would he forgive Low and
+Nellie?--she did not ask for herself. Or would the revelation turn his
+brain, if it did not kill him outright? She looked at the sunken orbits
+of his eyes and hectic on his cheek, and shuddered.
+
+Why was this added to the agony she already suffered? She had been
+willing to stand between them with her life, her liberty, and even--the
+hot blood dyed her cheek at the thought--with the added shame of being
+thought the cast-off mistress of that man’s son. Yet all this she had
+taken upon herself in expiation of something--she knew not clearly what;
+no, for nothing--only for HIM. And yet this very situation offered
+her that gleam of hope which had thrilled her; a hope so wild in its
+improbability, so degrading in its possibility, that at first she knew
+not whether despair was not preferable to its shame. And yet was it
+unreasonable? She was no longer passionate; she would be calm and think
+it out fairly.
+
+She would go to Low at once. She would find him somewhere--and even if
+with that girl, what mattered?--and she would tell him all. When he knew
+that the life and death of his father lay in the scale, would he let his
+brief, foolish passion for Nellie stand in the way? Even if he were not
+influenced by filial affection or mere compassion, would his pride let
+him stoop to a rivalry with the man who had deserted his youth? Could
+he take Dunn’s promised bride, who must have coquetted with him to have
+brought him to this miserable plight? Was this like the calm, proud
+young god she knew? Yet she had an uneasy instinct that calm, proud
+young gods and goddesses did things like this, and felt the weakness of
+her reasoning flush her own conscious cheek.
+
+“Teresa!”
+
+She started. Dunn was awake, and was gazing at her curiously.
+
+“I was reckoning it was the only square thing for Low to stop this
+promiscuous picnicking here and marry you out and out.”
+
+“Marry me!” said Teresa in a voice that, with all her efforts, she could
+not make cynical.
+
+“Yes,” he repeated, “after I’ve married Nellie; tote you down to
+San Angeles, and there take my name like a man, and give it to you.
+Nobody’ll ask after TERESA, sure--you bet your life. And if they do,
+and he can’t stop their jaw, just you call on the old man. It’s mighty
+queer, ain’t it, Teresa, to think of your being my daughter-in-law?”
+
+It seemed here as if he was about to lapse again into unconsciousness
+over the purely ludicrous aspect of the subject, but he haply recovered
+his seriousness. “He’ll have as much money from me as he wants to go
+into business with. What’s his line of business, Teresa?” asked this
+prospective father-in-law, in a large, liberal way.
+
+“He is a botanist!” said Teresa, with a sudden childish animation that
+seemed to keep up the grim humor of the paternal suggestion; “and oh,
+he is too poor to buy books! I sent for one or two for him myself, the
+other day--” she hesitated--“it was all the money I had, but it wasn’t
+enough for him to go on with his studies.”
+
+Dunn looked at her sparkling eyes and glowing cheeks, and became
+thoughtful. “Curson must have been a d--d fool,” he said finally.
+
+Teresa remained silent. She was beginning to be impatient and uneasy,
+fearing some mischance that might delay her dreaded, yet longed-for
+meeting with Low. Yet she could not leave this sick and exhausted man,
+HIS FATHER, now bound to her by more than mere humanity.
+
+“Couldn’t you manage,” she said gently, “to lean on me a few
+steps further, until I could bring you to a cooler spot and nearer
+assistance?”
+
+He nodded. She lifted him almost like a child to his feet. A spasm of
+pain passed over his face. “How far is it?” he asked.
+
+“Not more than ten minutes,” she replied.
+
+“I can make a spurt for that time,” he said coolly, and began to walk
+slowly but steadily on. Only his face, which was white and set, and the
+convulsive grip of his hand on her arm betrayed the effort. At the
+end of ten minutes she stopped. They stood before the splintered,
+lightning-scarred shaft in the opening of the woods, where Low had built
+her first camp-fire. She carefully picked up the herbarium, but her
+quick eye had already detected in the distance, before she had allowed
+Dunn to enter the opening with her, that her note was gone. Low had been
+there before them; he had been warned, as his absence from the cabin
+showed; he would not return there. They were free from interruption--but
+where had he gone?
+
+The sick man drew a long breath of relief as she seated him in the
+clover-grown hollow where she had slept the second night of her stay.
+“It’s cooler than those cursed woods,” he said. “I suppose it’s because
+it’s a little like a grave. What are you going to do now?” he added, as
+she brought a cup of water and placed it at his side.
+
+“I am going to leave you here for a little while,” she said cheerfully,
+but with a pale face and nervous hands. “I’m going to leave you while I
+seek Low.”
+
+The sick man raised his head. “I’m good for a spurt, Teresa, like that
+I’ve just got through, but I don’t think I’m up to a family party.
+Couldn’t you issue cards later on?”
+
+“You don’t understand,” she said. “I’m going to get Low to send some one
+of your friends to you here. I don’t think he’ll begrudge leaving HER a
+moment for that,” she added to herself bitterly.
+
+“What’s that you’re saying?” he queried, with the nervous quickness of
+an invalid.
+
+“Nothing--but that I’m going now.” She turned her face aside to hide her
+moistened eyes. “Wish me good luck, won’t you?” she asked, half sadly,
+half pettishly.
+
+“Come here!”
+
+She came and bent over him. He suddenly raised his hands, and, drawing
+her face down to his own, kissed her forehead.
+
+“Give that to HIM,” he whispered, “from ME.”
+
+She turned and fled, happily for her sentiment, not hearing the feeble
+laugh that followed, as Dunn, in sheer imbecility, again referred to
+the extravagant ludicrousness of the situation. “It is about the biggest
+thing in the way of a sell all round,” he repeated, lying on his back,
+confidentially to the speck of smoke-obscured sky above him. He pictured
+himself repeating it, not to Nellie--her severe propriety might at last
+overlook the fact, but would not tolerate the joke--but to her father!
+It would be one of those characteristic Californian jokes Father Wynn
+would admire.
+
+To his exhaustion fever presently succeeded, and he began to grow
+restless. The heat too seemed to invade his retreat, and from time to
+time the little patch of blue sky was totally obscured by clouds of
+smoke. He amused himself with watching a lizard who was investigating a
+folded piece of paper, whose elasticity gave the little creature lively
+apprehensions of its vitality. At last he could stand the stillness of
+his retreat and his supine position no longer, and rolled himself out of
+the bed of leaves that Teresa had so carefully prepared for him. He rose
+to his feet stiff and sore, and, supporting himself by the nearest tree,
+moved a few steps from the dead ashes of the camp-fire. The movement
+frightened the lizard, who abandoned the paper and fled. With a
+satirical recollection of Brace and his “ridiculous” discovery through
+the medium of this animal, he stooped and picked up the paper. “Like as
+not,” he said to himself, with grim irony, “these yer lizards are in the
+discovery business. P’r’aps this may lead to another mystery,” and he
+began to unfold the paper with a smile. But the smile ceased as his eye
+suddenly caught his own name.
+
+A dozen lines were written in pencil on what seemed to be a blank leaf
+originally torn from some book. He trembled so that he was obliged to
+sit down to read these words:--
+
+
+“When you get this keep away from the woods. Dunn and another man are
+in deadly pursuit of you and your companion. I overheard their plan to
+surprise you in our cabin. DON’T GO THERE, and I will delay them and put
+them off the scent. Don’t mind me. God bless you, and if you never see
+me again think sometimes of
+
+“TERESA.”
+
+
+His trembling ceased; he did not start, but rose in an abstracted way,
+and made a few deliberate steps in the direction Teresa had gone. Even
+then he was so confused that he was obliged to refer to the paper again,
+but with so little effect that he could only repeat the last words,
+“think sometimes of Teresa.” He was conscious that this was not all; he
+had a full conviction of being deceived, and knew that he held the
+proof in his hand, but he could not formulate it beyond that sentence.
+“Teresa”--yes, he would think of her. She would explain it. And here she
+was returning.
+
+In that brief interval her face and manner had again changed. Her face
+was pale and quite breathless. She cast a swift glance at Dunn and the
+paper he mechanically held out, walked up to him, and tore it from his
+hand.
+
+“Well,” she said hoarsely, “what are you going to do about it?”
+
+He attempted to speak, but his voice failed him. Even then he was
+conscious that if he had spoken he would have only repeated, “think
+sometimes of Teresa.” He looked longingly but helplessly at the spot
+where she had thrown the paper, as if it had contained his unuttered
+words.
+
+“Yes,” she went on to herself, as if he was a mute, indifferent
+spectator--“yes, they’re gone. That ends it all. The game’s played out.
+Well!” suddenly turning upon him, “now you know it all. Your Nellie WAS
+here with him, and is with him now. Do you hear? Make the most of it;
+you’ve lost them--but here I am.”
+
+“Yes,” he said eagerly--“yes, Teresa.”
+
+She stopped, stared at him; then taking him by the hand led him like a
+child back to his couch. “Well,” she said, in half-savage explanation,
+“I told you the truth when I said the girl wasn’t at the cabin last
+night, and that I didn’t know her. What are you glowerin’ at? No! I
+haven’t lied to you, I swear to God, except in one thing. Did you know
+what that was? To save him I took upon me a shame I don’t deserve. I let
+you think I was his mistress. You think so now, don’t you? Well, before
+God to-day--and He may take me when He likes--I’m no more to him than a
+sister! I reckon your Nellie can’t say as much.”
+
+She turned away, and with the quick, impatient stride of some caged
+animal made the narrow circuit of the opening, stopping a moment
+mechanically before the sick man, and again, without looking at him,
+continuing her monotonous round. The heat had become excessive, but
+she held her shawl with both hands drawn tightly over her shoulders.
+Suddenly a wood-duck darted out of the covert blindly into the opening,
+struck against the blasted trunk, fell half stunned near her feet, and
+then, recovering, fluttered away. She had scarcely completed another
+circuit before the irruption was followed by a whirring bevy of quail, a
+flight of jays, and a sudden tumult of wings swept through the wood like
+a tornado. She turned inquiringly to Dunn, who had risen to his feet,
+but the next moment she caught convulsively at his wrist; a wolf had
+just dashed through the underbrush not a dozen yards away, and on either
+side of them they could hear the scamper and rustle of hurrying feet
+like the outburst of a summer shower. A cold wind arose from the
+opposite direction, as if to contest this wild exodus, but it was
+followed by a blast of sickening heat. Teresa sank at Dunn’s feet in an
+agony of terror.
+
+“Don’t let them touch me!” she gasped; “keep them off! Tell me, for
+God’s sake, what has happened!”
+
+He laid his hand firmly on her arm, and lifted her in his turn to
+her feet like a child. In that supreme moment of physical danger, his
+strength, reason, and manhood returned in their plenitude of power. He
+pointed coolly to the trail she had quitted, and said,
+
+“The Carquinez Woods are on fire!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+The nest of the tuneful Burnhams, although in the suburbs of Indian
+Spring, was not in ordinary weather and seasons hidden from the longing
+eyes of the youth of that settlement. That night, however, it was veiled
+in the smoke that encompassed the great highway leading to Excelsior.
+It is presumed that the Burnham brood had long since folded their
+wings, for there was no sign of life nor movement in the house as a
+rapidly-driven horse and buggy pulled up before it. Fortunately, the
+paternal Burnham was an early bird, in the habit of picking up the first
+stirring mining worm, and a resounding knock brought him half dressed
+to the street door. He was startled at seeing Father Wynn before him, a
+trifle flushed and abstracted.
+
+“Ah ha! up betimes, I see, and ready. No sluggards here--ha, ha!” he
+said heartily, slamming the door behind him, and by a series of pokes in
+the ribs genially backing his host into his own sitting-room. “I’m up,
+too, and am here to see Nellie. She’s here, eh--of course?” he added,
+darting a quick look at Burnham.
+
+But Mr. Burnham was one of those large, liberal Western husbands who
+classified his household under the general title of “woman folk,” for
+the integers of which he was not responsible. He hesitated, and then
+propounded over the balusters to the upper story the direct query--
+
+“You don’t happen to have Nellie Wynn up there, do ye?”
+
+There was an interval of inquiry proceeding from half a dozen reluctant
+throats, more or less cottony and muffled, in those various degrees
+of grievance and mental distress which indicate too early roused
+young womanhood. The eventual reply seemed to be affirmative, albeit
+accompanied with a suppressed giggle, as if the young lady had just been
+discovered as an answer to an amusing conundrum.
+
+“All right,” said Wynn, with an apparent accession of boisterous
+geniality. “Tell her I must see her, and I’ve only got a few minutes to
+spare. Tell her to slip on anything and come down; there’s no one here
+but myself, and I’ve shut the front door on Brother Burnham. Ha, ha!”
+ and suiting the action to the word, he actually bundled the admiring
+Brother Burnham out on his own doorstep. There was a light pattering on
+the staircase, and Nellie Wynn, pink with sleep, very tall, very slim,
+hastily draped in a white counterpane with a blue border and a general
+classic suggestion, slipped into the parlor. At the same moment her
+father shut the door behind her, placed one hand on the knob, and with
+the other seized her wrist.
+
+“Where were you yesterday?” he asked.
+
+Nellie looked at him, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “Here.”
+
+“You were in the Carquinez Woods with Low Dorman; you went there in
+disguise; you’ve met him there before. He is your clandestine lover; you
+have taken pledges of affection from him; you have--”
+
+“Stop!” she said.
+
+He stopped.
+
+“Did he tell you this?” she asked, with an expression of disdain.
+
+“No; I overheard it. Dunn and Brace were at the house waiting for you.
+When the coach did not bring you, I went to the office to inquire. As I
+left our door I thought I saw somebody listening at the parlor windows.
+It was only a drunken Mexican muleteer leaning against the house; but
+if HE heard nothing, I did. Nellie, I heard Brace tell Dunn that he had
+tracked you in your disguise to the woods--do you hear? that when you
+pretended to be here with the girls you were with Low--alone; that you
+wear a ring that Low got of a trader here; that there was a cabin in the
+woods--”
+
+“Stop!” she repeated.
+
+Wynn again paused.
+
+“And what did YOU do?” she asked.
+
+“I heard they were starting down there to surprise you and him together,
+and I harnessed up and got ahead of them in my buggy.”
+
+“And found me here,” she said, looking full into his eyes.
+
+He understood her and returned the look. He recognized the full
+importance of the culminating fact conveyed in her words, and was
+obliged to content himself with its logical and worldly significance. It
+was too late now to take her to task for mere filial disobedience; they
+must become allies.
+
+“Yes,” he said hurriedly; “but if you value your reputation, if you wish
+to silence both these men, answer me fully.”
+
+“Go on,” she said.
+
+“Did you go to the cabin in the woods yesterday?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Did you ever go there with Low?”
+
+“No; I do not know even where it is.”
+
+Wynn felt that she was telling the truth. Nellie knew it; but as she
+would have been equally satisfied with an equally efficacious falsehood,
+her face remained unchanged.
+
+“And when did he leave you?”
+
+“At nine o’clock, here. He went to the hotel.”
+
+“He saved his life, then, for Dunn is on his way to the woods to kill
+him.”
+
+The jeopardy of her lover did not seem to affect the young girl with
+alarm, although her eyes betrayed some interest.
+
+“Then Dunn has gone to the woods?” she said thoughtfully.
+
+“He has,” replied Wynn.
+
+“Is that all?” she asked.
+
+“I want to know what you are going to do?”
+
+“I WAS going back to bed.”
+
+“This is no time for trifling, girl.”
+
+“I should think not,” she said, with a yawn; “it’s too early, or too
+late.”
+
+Wynn grasped her wrist more tightly. “Hear me! Put whatever face you
+like on this affair, you are compromised--and compromised with a man you
+can’t marry.”
+
+“I don’t know that I ever wanted to marry Low, if you mean him,” she
+said quietly.
+
+“And Dunn wouldn’t marry you now.”
+
+“I’m not so sure of that, either.”
+
+“Nellie,” said Wynn excitedly, “do you want to drive me mad? Have you
+nothing to say--nothing to suggest?”
+
+“Oh, you want me to help you, do you! Why didn’t you say that first?
+Well, go and bring Dunn here.”
+
+“Are you mad? The man has gone already in pursuit of your lover,
+believing you with him.”
+
+“Then he will the more readily come and talk with me without him. Will
+you take the invitation--yes or no?”
+
+“Yes, but--”
+
+“Enough. On your way there you will stop at the hotel and give Low a
+letter from me.”
+
+“Nellie!”
+
+“You shall read it, of course,” she said scornfully, “for it will be
+your text for the conversation you will have with him. Will you please
+take your hand from the lock and open the door?”
+
+Wynn mechanically opened the door. The young girl flew up-stairs. In a
+very few moments she returned with two notes: one contained a few lines
+of formal invitation to Dunn; the other read as follows:
+
+
+“DEAR MR. DORMAN,--My father will tell you how deeply I regret that our
+recent botanical excursions in the Carquinez Woods have been a source of
+serious misapprehensions to those who had a claim to my consideration,
+and that I shall be obliged to discontinue them for the future. At
+the same time he wishes me to express my gratitude for your valuable
+instruction and assistance in that pleasing study, even though
+approaching events may compel me to relinquish it for other duties.
+May I beg you to accept the inclosed ring as a slight recognition of my
+obligations to you?
+
+“Your grateful pupil,
+
+“NELLIE WYNN.”
+
+
+When he had finished reading the letter, she handed him a ring, which
+he took mechanically. He raised his eyes to hers with perfectly genuine
+admiration. “You’re a good girl, Nellie,” he said, and, in a moment
+of parental forgetfulness, unconsciously advanced his lips towards her
+cheek. But she drew back in time to recall him to a sense of that human
+weakness.
+
+“I suppose I’ll have time for a nap yet,” she said, as a gentle hint to
+her embarrassed parent. He nodded and turned towards the door.
+
+“If I were you,” she continued, repressing a yawn, “I’d manage to be
+seen on good terms with Low at the hotel; so perhaps you need not give
+the letter to him until the last thing. Good-by.”
+
+The sitting-room door opened and closed behind her as she slipped
+up-stairs, and her father, without the formality of leave-taking,
+quietly let himself out by the front door.
+
+When he drove into the high road again, however, an overlooked
+possibility threatened for a moment to indefinitely postpone his amiable
+intentions regarding Low. The hotel was at the further end of the
+settlement towards the Carquinez Woods, and as Wynn had nearly reached
+it he was recalled to himself by the sounds of hoofs and wheels rapidly
+approaching from the direction of the Excelsior turnpike. Wynn made no
+doubt it was the sheriff and Brace. To avoid recognition at that moment,
+he whipped up his horse, intending to keep the lead until he could turn
+into the first cross-road. But the coming travelers had the fleetest
+horse, and finding it impossible to distance them he drove close to the
+ditch, pulling up suddenly as the strange vehicle was abreast of him,
+and forcing them to pass him at full speed, with the result already
+chronicled. When they had vanished in the darkness, Mr. Wynn, with a
+heart overflowing with Christian thankfulness and universal benevolence,
+wheeled round, and drove back to the hotel he had already passed. To
+pull up at the veranda with a stentorian shout, to thump loudly at the
+deserted bar, to hilariously beat the panels of the landlord’s door,
+and commit a jocose assault and battery upon that half-dresssed and
+half-awakened man, was eminently characteristic of Wynn, and part of his
+amiable plans that morning.
+
+“Something to wash this wood smoke from my throat, Brother Carter, and
+about as much again to prop open your eyes,” he said, dragging Carter
+before the bar, “and glasses round for as many of the boys as are up
+and stirring after a hard-working Christian’s rest. How goes the honest
+publican’s trade, and who have we here?”
+
+“Thar’s Judge Robinson and two lawyers from Sacramento, Dick Curson over
+from Yolo,” said Carter, “and that ar young Injin yarb doctor from the
+Carquinez Woods. I reckon he’s jist up--I noticed a light under his door
+as I passed.”
+
+“He’s my man for a friendly chat before breakfast,” said Wynn. “You
+needn’t come up. I’ll find the way. I don’t want a light; I reckon my
+eyes ain’t as bright nor as young as his, but they’ll see almost as far
+in the dark--he! he!” And, nodding to Brother Carter, he strode
+along the passage, and with no other introduction than a playful and
+preliminary “Boo!” burst into one of the rooms. Low, who by the light
+of a single candle was bending over the plates of a large quarto, merely
+raised his eyes and looked at the intruder. The young man’s natural
+imperturbability, always exasperating to Wynn, seemed accented that
+morning by contrast with his own over-acted animation.
+
+“Ah ha!--wasting the midnight oil instead of imbibing the morning dews,”
+ said Father Wynn archly, illustrating his metaphor with a movement of
+his hand to his lips. “What have we here?”
+
+“An anonymous gift,” replied Low simply, recognizing the father of
+Nellie by rising from his chair. “It’s a volume I’ve longed to possess,
+but never could afford to buy. I cannot imagine who sent it to me.”
+
+Wynn was for a moment startled by the thought that this recipient of
+valuable gifts might have influential friends. But a glance at the bare
+room, which looked like a camp, and the strange, unconventional garb of
+its occupant, restored his former convictions. There might be a promise
+of intelligence, but scarcely of prosperity, in the figure before him.
+
+“Ah! We must not forget that we are watched over in the night season,”
+ he said, laying his hand on Low’s shoulder, with an illustration of
+celestial guardianship that would have been impious but for its palpable
+grotesqueness. “No, sir, we know not what a day may bring forth.”
+
+Unfortunately, Low’s practical mind did not go beyond a mere human
+interpretation. It was enough, however, to put a new light in his eye
+and a faint color in his cheek.
+
+“Could it have been Miss Nellie?” he asked, with half-boyish hesitation.
+
+Mr. Wynn was too much of a Christian not to bow before what appeared to
+him the purely providential interposition of this suggestion. Seizing
+it and Low at the same moment, he playfully forced him down again in his
+chair.
+
+“Ah, you rascal!” he said, with infinite archness; “that’s your game,
+is it? You want to trap poor Father Wynn. You want to make him say ‘No.’
+You want to tempt him to commit himself. No, sir!--never, sir!--no, no!”
+
+Firmly convinced that the present was Nellie’s, and that her father only
+good-humoredly guessed it, the young man’s simple, truthful nature was
+embarrassed. He longed to express his gratitude, but feared to betray
+the young girl’s trust. The Reverend Mr. Wynn speedily relieved his
+mind.
+
+“No,” he continued, bestriding a chair, and familiarly confronting Low
+over its back. “No, sir--no! And you want me to say ‘No,’ don’t you,
+regarding the little walks of Nellie and a certain young man in the
+Carquinez Woods?--ha, ha! You’d like me to say that I knew nothing
+of the botanizings, and the herb collectings, and the picknickings
+there--he, he!--you sly dog! Perhaps you’d like to tempt Father Wynn
+further, and make him swear he knows nothing of his daughter disguising
+herself in a duster and meeting another young man--isn’t it another
+young man?--all alone, eh? Perhaps you want poor old Father Wynn to say
+No. No, sir, nothing of the kind ever occurred. Ah, you young rascal!”
+
+Slightly troubled, in spite of Wynn’s hearty manner, Low, with his usual
+directness, however, said, “I do not want anyone to deny that I have
+seen Miss Nellie.”
+
+“Certainly, certainly,” said Wynn, abandoning his method, considerably
+disconcerted by Low’s simplicity, and a certain natural reserve that
+shook off his familiarity. “Certainly it’s a noble thing to be able to
+put your hand on your heart and say to the world, ‘Come on, all of you!
+Observe me; I have nothing to conceal. I walk with Miss Wynn in the
+woods as her instructor--her teacher, in fact. We cull a flower here and
+there; we pluck an herb fresh from the hands of the Creator. We look, so
+to speak, from Nature to Nature’s God.’ Yes, my young friend, we should
+be the first to repel the foul calumny that could misinterpret our most
+innocent actions.”
+
+“Calumny?” repeated Low, starting to his feet. “What calumny?”
+
+“My friend, my noble young friend, I recognize your indignation. I know
+your worth. When I said to Nellie, my only child, my perhaps too simple
+offspring--a mere wildflower like yourself--when I said to her, ‘Go,
+my child, walk in the woods with this young man, hand in hand. Let him
+instruct you from the humblest roots, for he has trodden in the ways of
+the Almighty. Gather wisdom from his lips, and knowledge from his simple
+woodman’s craft. Make, in fact, a collection not only of herbs, but of
+moral axioms and experience’--I knew I could trust you, and, trusting
+you, my young friend, I felt I could trust the world. Perhaps I was
+weak, foolish. But I thought only of her welfare. I even recall how that
+to preserve the purity of her garments, I bade her don a simple duster;
+that, to secure her from the trifling companionship of others, I
+bade her keep her own counsel, and seek you at seasons known but to
+yourselves.”
+
+“But . . . did Nellie . . . understand you?” interrupted Low hastily.
+
+“I see you read her simple nature. Understand me? No, not at first!
+Her maidenly instinct--perhaps her duty to another--took the alarm. I
+remember her words. ‘But what will Dunn say?’ she asked. ‘Will he not be
+jealous?’”
+
+“Dunn! jealous! I don’t understand,” said Low, fixing his eyes on Wynn.
+
+“That’s just what I said to Nellie. ‘Jealous!’ I said. ‘What, Dunn,
+your affianced husband, jealous of a mere friend--a teacher, a guide, a
+philosopher. It is impossible.’ Well, sir, she was right. He is jealous.
+And, more than that, he has imparted his jealousy to others! In other
+words, he has made a scandal!”
+
+Low’s eyes flashed. “Where is your daughter now?” he said sternly.
+
+“At present in bed, suffering from a nervous attack brought on by these
+unjust suspicions. She appreciates your anxiety, and, knowing that you
+could not see her, told me to give you this.” He handed Low the ring and
+the letter.
+
+The climax had been forced, and, it must be confessed, was by no means
+the one Mr. Wynn had fully arranged in his own inner consciousness.
+He had intended to take an ostentatious leave of Low in the bar-room,
+deliver the letter with archness, and escape before a possible
+explosion. He consequently backed towards the door for an emergency.
+But he was again at fault. That unaffected stoical fortitude in acute
+suffering, which was the one remaining pride and glory of Low’s race,
+was yet to be revealed to Wynn’s civilized eyes.
+
+The young man took the letter, and read it without changing a muscle,
+folded the ring in it, and dropped it into his haversack. Then he picked
+up his blanket, threw it over his shoulder, took his trusty rifle in his
+hand, and turned towards Wynn as if coldly surprised that he was still
+standing there.
+
+“Are you--are you--going?” stammered Wynn.
+
+“Are you NOT?” replied Low dryly, leaning on his rifle for a moment as
+if waiting for Wynn to precede him. The preacher looked at him a moment,
+mumbled something, and then shambled feebly and ineffectively down the
+staircase before Low, with a painful suggestion to the ordinary observer
+of being occasionally urged thereto by the moccasin of the young man
+behind him.
+
+On reaching the lower hall, however, he endeavored to create a diversion
+in his favor by dashing into the bar-room and clapping the occupants on
+the back with indiscriminate playfulness. But here again he seemed to be
+disappointed. To his great discomfiture, a large man not only returned
+his salutation with powerful levity, but with equal playfulness seized
+him in his arms, and after an ingenious simulation of depositing him
+in the horse-trough set him down in affected amazement. “Bleth’t if
+I didn’t think from the weight of your hand it wath my old friend,
+Thacramento Bill,” said Curson apologetically, with a wink at the
+bystanders. “That’th the way Bill alwayth uthed to tackle hith friendth,
+till he wath one day bounthed by a prithe-fighter in Frithco, whom he
+had mithtaken for a mithionary.” As Mr. Curson’s reputation was of a
+quality that made any form of apology from him instantly acceptable,
+the amused spectators made way for him as, recognizing Low, who was just
+leaving the hotel, he turned coolly from them and walked towards him.
+
+“Halloo!” he said, extending his hand. “You’re the man I’m waiting for.
+Did you get a book from the exthpreth offithe latht night?”
+
+“I did. Why?”
+
+“It’th all right. Ath I’m rethponthible for it, I only wanted to know.”
+
+“Did YOU send it?” asked Low, quickly fixing his eyes on his face.
+
+“Well, not exactly ME. But it’th not worth making a mythtery of it.
+Teretha gave me a commithion to buy it and thend it to you anonymouthly.
+That’th a woman’th nonthenth, for how could thee get a retheipt for it?”
+
+“Then it was HER present,” said Low gloomily.
+
+“Of courthe. It wathn’t mine, my boy. I’d have thent you a Tharp’th
+rifle in plathe of that muthle loader you carry, or thomething
+thenthible. But, I thay! what’th up? You look ath if you had been
+running all night.”
+
+Low grasped his hand. “Thank you,” he said hurriedly; “but it’s nothing.
+Only I must be back to the woods early. Good-by.”
+
+But Curson retained Low’s hand in his own powerful grip.
+
+“I’ll go with you a bit further,” he said. “In fact, I’ve got thomething
+to thay to you; only don’t be in thuch a hurry; the woodth can wait till
+you get there.” Quietly compelling Low to alter his own characteristic
+Indian stride to keep pace with his, he went on: “I don’t mind thaying
+I rather cottoned to you from the time you acted like a white man--no
+offenthe--to Teretha. She thayth you were left when a child lying
+round, jutht ath promithcuouthly ath she wath; and if I can do anything
+towardth putting you on the trail of your people, I’ll do it. I know
+thome of the voyageurth who traded with the Cherokeeth, and your
+father wath one-wathn’t he?” He glanced at Low’s utterly abstracted and
+immobile face. “I thay, you don’t theem to take a hand in thith game,
+pardner. What’th the row? Ith anything wrong over there?” and he pointed
+to the Carquinez Woods, which were just looming out of the morning
+horizon in the distance.
+
+Low stopped. The last words of his companion seemed to recall him to
+himself. He raised his eyes automatically to the woods and started.
+
+“There IS something wrong over there,” he said breathlessly. “Look!”
+
+“I thee nothing,” said Curson, beginning to doubt Low’s sanity; “nothing
+more than I thaw an hour ago.”
+
+“Look again. Don’t you see that smoke rising straight up? It isn’t blown
+over there from the Divide; it’s new smoke! The fire is in the woods!”
+
+“I reckon that’th so,” muttered Curson, shading his eyes with his hand.
+“But, hullo! wait a minute! We’ll get hortheth. I say!” he shouted,
+forgetting his lisp in his excitement--“stop!” But Low had already
+lowered his head and darted forward like an arrow.
+
+In a few moments he had left not only his companion but the last
+straggling houses of the outskirts far behind him, and had struck out in
+a long, swinging trot for the disused “cut-off.” Already he fancied he
+heard the note of clamor in Indian Spring, and thought he distinguished
+the sound of hurrying hoofs on the great highway. But the sunken trail
+hid it from his view. From the column of smoke now plainly visible
+in the growing morning light he tried to locate the scene of the
+conflagration. It was evidently not a fire advancing regularly from the
+outer skirt of the wood, communicated to it from the Divide; it was a
+local outburst near its centre. It was not in the direction of his cabin
+in the tree. There was no immediate danger to Teresa, unless fear drove
+her beyond the confines of the wood into the hands of those who might
+recognize her. The screaming of jays and ravens above his head quickened
+his speed, as it heralded the rapid advance of the flames; and the
+unexpected apparition of a bounding body, flattened and flying over
+the yellow plain, told him that even the secure retreat of the
+mountain wild-cat had been invaded. A sudden recollection of Teresa’s
+uncontrollable terror that first night smote him with remorse and
+redoubled his efforts. Alone in the track of these frantic and
+bewildered beasts, to what madness might she not be driven!
+
+The sharp crack of a rifle from the high road turned his course
+momentarily in that direction. The smoke was curling lazily over the
+heads of the party of men in the road, while the huge hulk of a grizzly
+was disappearing in the distance. A battue of the escaping animals had
+commenced! In the bitterness of his heart he caught at the horrible
+suggestion, and resolved to save her from them or die with her there.
+
+How fast he ran, or the time it took him to reach the woods, has never
+been known. Their outlines were already hidden when he entered them.
+To a sense less keen, a courage less desperate, and a purpose less
+unaltered than Low’s, the wood would have been impenetrable. The central
+fire was still confined to the lofty tree tops, but the downward rush of
+wind from time to time drove the smoke into the aisles in blinding and
+suffocating volumes. To simulate the creeping animals, and fall to the
+ground on hands and knees, feel his way through the underbrush when
+the smoke was densest, or take advantage of its momentary lifting, and
+without uncertainty, mistake, or hesitation glide from tree to tree in
+one undeviating course, was possible only to an experienced woodsman. To
+keep his reason and insight so clear as to be able in the midst of this
+bewildering confusion to shape that course so as to intersect the wild
+and unknown tract of an inexperienced, frightened wanderer belonged to
+Low, and Low alone. He was making his way against the wind towards
+the fire. He had reasoned that she was either in comparative safety to
+windward of it, or he should meet her being driven towards him by it,
+or find her succumbed and fainting at its feet. To do this he must
+penetrate the burning belt, and then pass under the blazing dome. He
+was already upon it; he could see the falling fire dropping like rain or
+blown like gorgeous blossoms of the conflagration across his path. The
+space was lit up brilliantly. The vast shafts of dull copper cast no
+shadow below, but there was no sign nor token of any human being. For a
+moment the young man was at fault. It was true this hidden heart of the
+forest bore no undergrowth; the cool matted carpet of the aisles seemed
+to quench the glowing fragments as they fell. Escape might be difficult,
+but not impossible, yet every moment was precious. He leaned against a
+tree, and sent his voice like a clarion before him: “Teresa!” There was
+no reply. He called again. A faint cry at his back from the trail he had
+just traversed made him turn. Only a few paces behind him, blinded and
+staggering, but following like a beaten and wounded animal, Teresa,
+halted, knelt, clasped her hands, and dumbly held them out before her.
+“Teresa!” he cried again, and sprang to her side.
+
+She caught him by the knees, and lifted her face imploringly to his.
+
+“Say that again!” she cried, passionately. “Tell me it was Teresa you
+called, and no other! You have come back for me! You would not let me
+die here alone!”
+
+He lifted her tenderly in his arms, and cast a rapid glance around
+him. It might have been his fancy, but there seemed a dull glow in the
+direction he had come.
+
+“You do not speak!” she said. “Tell me! You did not come here to seek
+her?”
+
+“Whom?” he said quickly.
+
+“Nellie!”
+
+With a sharp cry he let her slip to the ground. All the pent-up
+agony, rage, and mortification of the last hour broke from him in that
+inarticulate outburst. Then, catching her hands again, he dragged her to
+his level.
+
+“Hear me!” he cried, disregarding the whirling smoke and the fiery
+baptism that sprinkled them--“hear me! If you value your life, if you
+value your soul, and if you do not want me to cast you to the beasts
+like Jezebel of old, never--never take that accursed name again upon
+your lips. Seek her--HER? Yes! Seek her to tie her like a witch’s
+daughter of hell to that blazing tree!” He stopped. “Forgive me,” he
+said in a changed voice. “I’m mad, and forgetting myself and you. Come.”
+
+Without noticing the expression of half-savage delight that had passed
+across her face, he lifted her in his arms.
+
+“Which way are you going?” she asked, passing her hands vaguely across
+his breast, as if to reassure herself of his identity.
+
+“To our camp by the scarred tree,” he replied.
+
+“Not there, not there,” she said, hurriedly. “I was driven from there
+just now. I thought the fire began there until I came here.”
+
+Then it was as he feared. Obeying the same mysterious law that had
+launched this fatal fire like a thunderbolt from the burning mountain
+crest five miles away into the heart of the Carquinez Woods, it had
+again leaped a mile beyond, and was hemming them between two narrowing
+lines of fire. But Low was not daunted. Retracing his steps through
+the blinding smoke, he strode off at right angles to the trail near the
+point where he had entered the wood. It was the spot where he had first
+lifted Nellie in his arms to carry her to the hidden spring. If any
+recollection of it crossed his mind at that moment, it was only shown in
+his redoubled energy. He did not glide through the thick underbrush, as
+on that day, but seemed to take a savage pleasure in breaking through it
+with sheer brute force. Once Teresa insisted upon relieving him of
+the burden of her weight, but after a few steps she staggered blindly
+against him, and would fain have recourse once more to his strong arms.
+And so, alternately staggering, bending, crouching, or bounding and
+crashing on, but always in one direction, they burst through the jealous
+rampart, and came upon the sylvan haunt of the hidden spring. The
+great angle of the half-fallen tree acted as a harrier to the wind and
+drifting smoke, and the cool spring sparkled and bubbled in the almost
+translucent air. He laid her down beside the water, and bathed her
+face and hands. As he did so his quick eye caught sight of a woman’s
+handkerchief lying at the foot of the disrupted root. Dropping Teresa’s
+hand, he walked towards it, and with the toe of his moccasin gave it one
+vigorous kick into the ooze at the overflow of the spring. He turned to
+Teresa, but she evidently had not noticed the act.
+
+“Where are you?” she asked, with a smile.
+
+Something in her movement struck him! He came towards her, and bending
+down looked into her face. “Teresa! Good God!--look at me! What has
+happened?”
+
+She raised her eyes to his. There was a slight film across them; the
+lids were blackened; the beautiful lashes gone forever!
+
+“I see you a little now, I think,” she said, with a smile, passing her
+hands vaguely over his face. “It must have happened when he fainted, and
+I had to drag him through the blazing brush; both my hands were full,
+and I could not cover my eyes.”
+
+“Drag whom?” said Low, quickly.
+
+“Why, Dunn.”
+
+“Dunn! He here?” said Low, hoarsely.
+
+“Yes; didn’t you read the note I left on the herbarium? Didn’t you come
+to the camp-fire?” she asked hurriedly, clasping his hands. “Tell me
+quickly!”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Then you were not there--then you didn’t leave me to die?”
+
+“No! I swear it, Teresa!” the stoicism that had upheld his own agony
+breaking down before her strong emotion.
+
+“Thank God!” She threw her arms around him, and hid her aching eyes in
+his troubled breast.
+
+“Tell me all, Teresa,” he whispered in her listening ear. “Don’t move;
+stay there, and tell me all.”
+
+With her face buried in his bosom, as if speaking to his heart alone,
+she told him part, but not all. With her eyes filled with tears, but a
+smile on her lips, radiant with new-found happiness, she told him how
+she had overheard the plans of Dunn and Brace, how she had stolen their
+conveyance to warn him in time. But here she stopped, dreading to say
+a word that would shatter the hope she was building upon his sudden
+revulsion of feeling for Nellie. She could not bring herself to repeat
+their interview--that would come later, when they were safe and out of
+danger; now not even the secret of his birth must come between them with
+its distraction, to mar their perfect communion. She faltered that Dunn
+had fainted from weakness, and that she had dragged him out of danger.
+“He will never interfere with us--I mean,” she said softly, “with ME
+again. I can promise you that as well as if he had sworn it.”
+
+“Let him pass, now,” said Low; “that will come later on,” he added,
+unconsciously repeating her thought in a tone that made her heart sick.
+“But tell me, Teresa, why did you go to Excelsior?”
+
+She buried her head still deeper, as if to hide it. He felt her broken
+heart beat against his own; he was conscious of a depth of feeling her
+rival had never awakened in him. The possibility of Teresa loving him
+had never occurred to his simple nature. He bent his head and kissed
+her. She was frightened, and unloosed her clinging arms; but he retained
+her hand, and said, “We will leave this accursed place, and you shall
+go with me as you said you would; nor need you ever leave me, unless you
+wish it.”
+
+She could hear the beating of her own heart through his words; she
+longed to look at the eyes and lips that told her this, and read the
+meaning his voice alone could not entirely convey. For the first time
+she felt the loss of her sight. She did not know that it was, in this
+moment of happiness, the last blessing vouchsafed to her miserable life.
+
+A few moments of silence followed, broken only by the distant rumor of
+the conflagration and the crash of falling boughs.
+
+“It may be an hour yet,” he whispered, “before the fire has swept a path
+for us to the road below. We are safe here, unless some sudden current
+should draw the fire down upon us. You are not frightened?” She pressed
+his hand; she was thinking of the pale face of Dunn, lying in the
+secure retreat she had purchased for him at such a sacrifice. Yet
+the possibility of danger to him now for a moment marred her present
+happiness and security. “You think the fire will not go north of where
+you found me?” she asked softly.
+
+“I think not,” he said, “but I will reconnoitre. Stay where you are.”
+
+They pressed hands, and parted. He leaped upon the slanting trunk and
+ascended it rapidly. She waited in mute expectation.
+
+There was a sudden movement of the root on which she sat, a deafening
+crash, and she was thrown forward on her face.
+
+The vast bulk of the leaning tree, dislodged from its aerial support by
+the gradual sapping of the spring at its roots, or by the crumbling
+of the bark from the heat, had slipped, made a half revolution, and,
+falling, overbore the lesser trees in its path, and tore, in its
+resistless momentum, a broad opening to the underbrush.
+
+With a cry to Low, Teresa staggered to her feet. There was an interval
+of hideous silence, but no reply. She called again. There was a sudden
+deepening roar, the blast of a fiery furnace swept through the opening,
+a thousand luminous points around her burst into fire, and in an instant
+she was lost in a whirlwind of smoke and flame! From the onset of its
+fury to its culmination twenty minutes did not elapse; but in that
+interval a radius of two hundred yards around the hidden spring was
+swept of life and light and motion.
+
+For the rest of that day and part of the night a pall of smoke hung
+above the scene of desolation. It lifted only towards the morning, when
+the moon, rising high, picked out in black and silver the shrunken and
+silent columns of those roofless vaults, shorn of base and capital. It
+flickered on the still, overflowing pool of the hidden spring, and
+shone upon the white face of Low, who, with a rootlet of the fallen tree
+holding him down like an arm across his breast, seemed to be sleeping
+peacefully in the sleeping water.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Contemporaneous history touched him as briefly, but not as gently. “It
+is now definitely ascertained,” said “The Slumgullion Mirror,” “that
+Sheriff Dunn met his fate in the Carquinez Woods in the performance
+of his duty; that fearless man having received information of
+the concealment of a band of horse thieves in their recesses. The
+desperadoes are presumed to have escaped, as the only remains found are
+those of two wretched tramps, one of whom is said to have been a digger,
+who supported himself upon roots and herbs, and the other a degraded
+half-white woman. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the fire
+originated through their carelessness, although Father Wynn of the First
+Baptist Church, in his powerful discourse of last Sunday, pointed at the
+warning and lesson of such catastrophes. It may not be out of place
+here to say that the rumors regarding an engagement between the pastor’s
+accomplished daughter and the late lamented sheriff are utterly without
+foundation, as it has been an on dit for some time in all well-informed
+circles that the indefatigable Mr. Brace, of Wells, Fargo and Co.’s
+Express, will shortly lead the lady to the hymeneal altar.”
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of In the Carquinez Woods, by Bret Harte
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE CARQUINEZ WOODS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 2310-0.txt or 2310-0.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/3/1/2310/
+
+Produced by Donald Lainson
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation”
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+“Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+“Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
+of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’ WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm’s
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
+
+The Foundation’s principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation’s web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.