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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Susy, A Story of the Plains
+by Bret Harte
+#18 in our series by Bret Harte
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+Susy, A Story of the Plains
+
+by Bret Harte
+
+February, 2001  [Etext #2495]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Susy, A Story of the Plains by Bret Harte
+******This file should be named susy10.txt or susy10.zip******
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+
+SUSY, A STORY OF THE PLAINS
+
+by
+
+Bret Harte
+
+
+From: "ARGONAUT EDITION" OF THE WORKS OF BRET HARTE, VOL. 7
+
+P. F. COLLIER & SON
+
+NEW YORK
+
+
+
+SUSY, A STORY OF THE PLAINS
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Where the San Leandro turnpike stretches its dusty, hot, and
+interminable length along the valley, at a point where the heat and
+dust have become intolerable, the monotonous expanse of wild oats on
+either side illimitable, and the distant horizon apparently remoter
+than ever, it suddenly slips between a stunted thicket or hedge of
+"scrub oaks," which until that moment had been undistinguishable
+above the long, misty, quivering level of the grain.  The thicket
+rising gradually in height, but with a regular slope whose gradient
+had been determined by centuries of western trade winds, presently
+becomes a fair wood of live-oak, and a few hundred yards further at
+last assumes the aspect of a primeval forest.  A delicious coolness
+fills the air; the long, shadowy aisles greet the aching eye with a
+soothing twilight; the murmur of unseen brooks is heard, and, by a
+strange irony, the enormous, widely-spaced stacks of wild oats are
+replaced by a carpet of tiny-leaved mosses and chickweed at the
+roots of trees, and the minutest clover in more open spaces.  The
+baked and cracked adobe soil of the now vanished plains is exchanged
+for a heavy red mineral dust and gravel, rocks and boulders make
+their appearance, and at times the road is crossed by the white
+veins of quartz.  It is still the San Leandro turnpike,--a few miles
+later to rise from this canada into the upper plains again,--but it
+is also the actual gateway and avenue to the Robles Rancho.  When
+the departing visitors of Judge Peyton, now owner of the rancho,
+reach the outer plains again, after twenty minutes' drive from the
+house, the canada, rancho, and avenue have as completely disappeared
+from view as if they had been swallowed up in the plain.
+
+A cross road from the turnpike is the usual approach to the casa or
+mansion,--a long, low quadrangle of brown adobe wall in a bare but
+gently sloping eminence.  And here a second surprise meets the
+stranger.  He seems to have emerged from the forest upon another
+illimitable plain, but one utterly trackless, wild, and desolate.
+It is, however, only a lower terrace of the same valley, and, in
+fact, comprises the three square leagues of the Robles Rancho.
+Uncultivated and savage as it appears, given over to wild cattle and
+horses that sometimes sweep in frightened bands around the very casa
+itself, the long south wall of the corral embraces an orchard of
+gnarled pear-trees, an old vineyard, and a venerable garden of
+olives and oranges.  A manor, formerly granted by Charles V. to Don
+Vincente Robles, of Andalusia, of pious and ascetic memory, it had
+commended itself to Judge Peyton, of Kentucky, a modern heretic
+pioneer of bookish tastes and secluded habits, who had bought it of
+Don Vincente's descendants.  Here Judge Peyton seemed to have
+realized his idea of a perfect climate, and a retirement, half-
+studious, half-active, with something of the seignioralty of the old
+slaveholder that he had been.  Here, too, he had seen the hope of
+restoring his wife's health--for which he had undertaken the
+overland emigration--more than fulfilled in Mrs. Peyton's improved
+physical condition, albeit at the expense, perhaps, of some of the
+languorous graces of ailing American wifehood.
+
+It was with a curious recognition of this latter fact that Judge
+Peyton watched his wife crossing the patio or courtyard with her arm
+around the neck of her adopted daughter "Suzette."  A sudden memory
+crossed his mind of the first day that he had seen them together,--
+the day that he had brought the child and her boy-companion--two
+estrays from an emigrant train on the plains--to his wife in camp.
+Certainly Mrs. Peyton was stouter and stronger fibred; the wonderful
+Californian climate had materialized her figure, as it had their
+Eastern fruits and flowers, but it was stranger that "Susy"--the
+child of homelier frontier blood and parentage, whose wholesome
+peasant plumpness had at first attracted them--should have grown
+thinner and more graceful, and even seemed to have gained the
+delicacy his wife had lost.  Six years had imperceptibly wrought
+this change; it had never struck him before so forcibly as on this
+day of Susy's return from the convent school at Santa Clara for the
+holidays.
+
+The woman and child had reached the broad veranda which, on one side
+of the patio, replaced the old Spanish corridor.  It was the single
+modern innovation that Peyton had allowed himself when he had broken
+the quadrangular symmetry of the old house with a wooden "annexe" or
+addition beyond the walls.  It made a pleasant lounging-place,
+shadowed from the hot midday sun by sloping roofs and awnings, and
+sheltered from the boisterous afternoon trade winds by the opposite
+side of the court.  But Susy did not seem inclined to linger there
+long that morning, in spite of Mrs. Peyton's evident desire for a
+maternal tete-a-tete.  The nervous preoccupation and capricious
+ennui of an indulged child showed in her pretty but discontented
+face, and knit her curved eyebrows, and Peyton saw a look of pain
+pass over his wife's face as the young girl suddenly and half-
+laughingly broke away and fluttered off towards the old garden.
+
+Mrs. Peyton looked up and caught her husband's eye.
+
+"I am afraid Susy finds it more dull here every time she returns,"
+she said, with an apologetic smile.  "I am glad she has invited one
+of her school friends to come for a visit to-morrow.  You know,
+yourself, John," she added, with a slight partisan attitude, "that
+the lonely old house and wild plain are not particularly lively for
+young people, however much they may suit YOUR ways."
+
+"It certainly must be dull if she can't stand it for three weeks in
+the year," said her husband dryly.  "But we really cannot open the
+San Francisco house for her summer vacation, nor can we move from
+the rancho to a more fashionable locality.  Besides, it will do her
+good to run wild here.  I can remember when she wasn't so
+fastidious.  In fact, I was thinking just now how changed she was
+from the day when we picked her up"--
+
+"How often am I to remind you, John," interrupted the lady, with
+some impatience, "that we agreed never to speak of her past, or even
+to think of her as anything but our own child.  You know how it
+pains me!  And the poor dear herself has forgotten it, and thinks of
+us only as her own parents.  I really believe that if that wretched
+father and mother of hers had not been killed by the Indians, or
+were to come to life again, she would neither know them nor care for
+them.  I mean, of course, John," she said, averting her eyes from a
+slightly cynical smile on her husband's face, "that it's only
+natural for young children to be forgetful, and ready to take new
+impressions."
+
+"And as long, dear, as WE are not the subjects of this youthful
+forgetfulness, and she isn't really finding US as stupid as the
+rancho," replied her husband cheerfully, "I suppose we mustn't
+complain."
+
+"John, how can you talk such nonsense?" said Mrs. Peyton impatiently.
+"But I have no fear of that," she added, with a slightly ostentatious
+confidence.  "I only wish I was as sure"--
+
+"Of what?"
+
+"Of nothing happening that could take her from us.  I do not mean
+death, John,--like our first little one.  That does not happen to
+one twice; but I sometimes dread"--
+
+"What?  She's only fifteen, and it's rather early to think about the
+only other inevitable separation,--marriage.  Come, Ally, this is
+mere fancy.  She has been given up to us by her family,--at least,
+by all that we know are left of them.  I have legally adopted her.
+If I have not made her my heiress, it is because I prefer to leave
+everything to YOU, and I would rather she should know that she was
+dependent upon you for the future than upon me."
+
+"And I can make a will in her favor if I want to?" said Mrs. Peyton
+quickly.
+
+"Always," responded her husband smilingly; "but you have ample time
+to think of that, I trust.  Meanwhile I have some news for you which
+may make Susy's visit to the rancho this time less dull to her.  You
+remember Clarence Brant, the boy who was with her when we picked her
+up, and who really saved her life?"
+
+"No, I don't," said Mrs. Peyton pettishly, "nor do I want to!  You
+know, John, how distasteful and unpleasant it is for me to have
+those dreary, petty, and vulgar details of the poor child's past
+life recalled, and, thank Heaven, I have forgotten them except when
+you choose to drag them before me.  You agreed, long ago, that we
+were never to talk of the Indian massacre of her parents, so that we
+could also ignore it before her; then why do you talk of her vulgar
+friends, who are just as unpleasant?  Please let us drop the past."
+
+"Willingly, my dear; but, unfortunately, we cannot make others do
+it.  And this is a case in point.  It appears that this boy, whom we
+brought to Sacramento to deliver to a relative"--
+
+"And who was a wicked little impostor,--you remember that yourself,
+John, for he said that he was the son of Colonel Brant, and that he
+was dead; and you know, and my brother Harry knew, that Colonel
+Brant was alive all the time, and that he was lying, and Colonel
+Brant was not his father," broke in Mrs. Peyton impatiently.
+
+"As it seems you do remember that much," said Peyton dryly, "it is
+only just to him that I should tell you that it appears that he was
+not an impostor.  His story was TRUE.  I have just learned that
+Colonel Brant WAS actually his father, but had concealed his lawless
+life here, as well as his identity, from the boy.  He was really
+that vague relative to whom Clarence was confided, and under that
+disguise he afterwards protected the boy, had him carefully educated
+at the Jesuit College of San Jose, and, dying two years ago in that
+filibuster raid in Mexico, left him a considerable fortune."
+
+"And what has he to do with Susy's holidays?" said Mrs. Peyton, with
+uneasy quickness.  "John, you surely cannot expect her ever to meet
+this common creature again, with his vulgar ways.  His wretched
+associates like that Jim Hooker, and, as you yourself admit, the
+blood of an assassin, duelist, and--Heaven knows what kind of a
+pirate his father wasn't at the last--in his veins!  You don't
+believe that a lad of this type, however much of his father's ill-
+gotten money he may have, can be fit company for your daughter?  You
+never could have thought of inviting him here?"
+
+"I'm afraid that's exactly what I have done, Ally," said the smiling
+but unmoved Peyton; "but I'm still more afraid that your conception
+of his present condition is an unfair one, like your remembrance of
+his past.  Father Sobriente, whom I met at San Jose yesterday, says
+he is very intelligent, and thoroughly educated, with charming
+manners and refined tastes.  His father's money, which they say was
+an investment for him in Carson's Bank five years ago, is as good as
+any one's, and his father's blood won't hurt him in California or
+the Southwest.  At least, he is received everywhere, and Don Juan
+Robinson was his guardian.  Indeed, as far as social status goes, it
+might be a serious question if the actual daughter of the late John
+Silsbee, of Pike County, and the adopted child of John Peyton was in
+the least his superior.  As Father Sobriente evidently knew
+Clarence's former companionship with Susy and her parents, it would
+be hardly politic for us to ignore it or seem to be ashamed of it.
+So I intrusted Sobriente with an invitation to young Brant on the
+spot."
+
+Mrs. Peyton's impatience, indignation, and opposition, which had
+successively given way before her husband's quiet, masterful good
+humor, here took the form of a neurotic fatalism.  She shook her
+head with superstitious resignation.
+
+"Didn't I tell you, John, that I always had a dread of something
+coming"--
+
+"But if it comes in the shape of a shy young lad, I see nothing
+singularly portentous in it.  They have not met since they were
+quite small; their tastes have changed; if they don't quarrel and
+fight they may be equally bored with each other.  Yet until then, in
+one way or another, Clarence will occupy the young lady's vacant
+caprice, and her school friend, Mary Rogers, will be here, you know,
+to divide his attentions, and," added Peyton, with mock solemnity,
+preserve the interest of strict propriety.  Shall I break it to
+her,--or will you?"
+
+"No,--yes," hesitated Mrs. Peyton; "perhaps I had better."
+
+"Very well, I leave his character in your hands; only don't
+prejudice her into a romantic fancy for him."  And Judge Peyton
+lounged smilingly away.
+
+Then two little tears forced themselves from Mrs. Peyton's eyes.
+Again she saw that prospect of uninterrupted companionship with
+Susy, upon which each successive year she had built so many maternal
+hopes and confidences, fade away before her.  She dreaded the coming
+of Susy's school friend, who shared her daughter's present thoughts
+and intimacy, although she had herself invited her in a more
+desperate dread of the child's abstracted, discontented eyes; she
+dreaded the advent of the boy who had shared Susy's early life
+before she knew her; she dreaded the ordeal of breaking the news and
+perhaps seeing that pretty animation spring into her eyes, which she
+had begun to believe no solicitude or tenderness of her own ever
+again awakened,--and yet she dreaded still more that her husband
+should see it too.  For the love of this recreated woman, although
+not entirely materialized with her changed fibre, had nevertheless
+become a coarser selfishness fostered by her loneliness and limited
+experience.  The maternal yearning left unsatisfied by the loss of
+her first-born had never been filled by Susy's thoughtless
+acceptance of it; she had been led astray by the child's easy
+transference of dependence and the forgetfulness of youth, and was
+only now dimly conscious of finding herself face to face with an
+alien nature.
+
+She started to her feet and followed the direction that Susy had
+taken.  For a moment she had to front the afternoon trade wind which
+chilled her as it swept the plain beyond the gateway, but was
+stopped by the adobe wall, above whose shelter the stunted treetops--
+through years of exposure--slanted as if trimmed by gigantic
+shears.  At first, looking down the venerable alley of fantastic,
+knotted shapes, she saw no trace of Susy.  But half way down the
+gleam of a white skirt against a thicket of dark olives showed her
+the young girl sitting on a bench in a neglected arbor.  In the
+midst of this formal and faded pageantry she looked charmingly
+fresh, youthful, and pretty; and yet the unfortunate woman thought
+that her attitude and expression at that moment suggested more than
+her fifteen years of girlhood.  Her golden hair still hung
+unfettered over her straight, boy-like back and shoulders; her short
+skirt still showed her childish feet and ankles; yet there seemed to
+be some undefined maturity or a vague womanliness about her that
+stung Mrs. Peyton's heart.  The child was growing away from her,
+too!
+
+"Susy!"
+
+The young girl raised her head quickly; her deep violet eyes seemed
+also to leap with a sudden suspicion, and with a half-mechanical,
+secretive movement, that might have been only a schoolgirl's
+instinct, her right hand had slipped a paper on which she was
+scribbling between the leaves of her book.  Yet the next moment,
+even while looking interrogatively at her mother, she withdrew the
+paper quietly, tore it up into small pieces, and threw them on the
+ground.
+
+But Mrs. Peyton was too preoccupied with her news to notice the
+circumstance, and too nervous in her haste to be tactful.  "Susy,
+your father has invited that boy, Clarence Brant,--you know that
+creature we picked up and assisted on the plains, when you were a
+mere baby,--to come down here and make us a visit."
+
+Her heart seemed to stop beating as she gazed breathlessly at the
+girl.  But Susy's face, unchanged except for the alert, questioning
+eyes, remained fixed for a moment; then a childish smile of wonder
+opened her small red mouth, expanded it slightly as she said
+simply:--
+
+"Lor, mar!  He hasn't, really!"
+
+Inexpressibly, yet unreasonably reassured, Mrs. Peyton hurriedly
+recounted her husband's story of Clarence's fortune, and was even
+joyfully surprised into some fairness of statement.
+
+"But you don't remember him much, do you, dear?  It was so long ago,
+and--you are quite a young lady now," she added eagerly.
+
+The open mouth was still fixed; the wondering smile would have been
+idiotic in any face less dimpled, rosy, and piquant than Susy's.
+After a slight gasp, as if in still incredulous and partly
+reminiscent preoccupation, she said without replying:--
+
+"How funny!  When is he coming?"
+
+"Day after to-morrow," returned Mrs. Peyton, with a contented smile.
+
+"And Mary Rogers will be here, too.  It will be real fun for her."
+
+Mrs. Peyton was more than reassured.  Half ashamed of her jealous
+fears, she drew Susy's golden head towards her and kissed it.  And
+the young girl, still reminiscent, with smilingly abstracted
+toleration, returned the caress.
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+It was not thought inconsistent with Susy's capriciousness that she
+should declare her intention the next morning of driving her pony
+buggy to Santa Inez to anticipate the stage-coach and fetch Mary
+Rogers from the station.  Mrs. Peyton, as usual, supported the young
+lady's whim and opposed her husband's objections.
+
+"Because the stage-coach happens to pass our gate, John, it is no
+reason why Susy shouldn't drive her friend from Santa Inez if she
+prefers it.  It's only seven miles, and you can send Pedro to follow
+her on horseback to see that she comes to no harm."
+
+"But that isn't Pedro's business," said Peyton.
+
+"He ought to be proud of the privilege," returned the lady, with a
+toss of her head.
+
+Peyton smiled grimly, but yielded; and when the stage-coach drew up
+the next afternoon at the Santa Inez Hotel, Susy was already waiting
+in her pony carriage before it.  Although the susceptible driver,
+expressman, and passengers generally, charmed with this golden-
+haired vision, would have gladly protracted the meeting of the two
+young friends, the transfer of Mary Rogers from the coach to the
+carriage was effected with considerable hauteur and youthful dignity
+by Susy.  Even Mary Rogers, two years Susy's senior, a serious
+brunette, whose good-humor did not, however, impair her capacity for
+sentiment, was impressed and even embarrassed by her demeanor; but
+only for a moment.  When they had driven from the hotel and were
+fairly hidden again in the dust of the outlying plain, with the
+discreet Pedro hovering in the distance, Susy dropped the reins,
+and, grasping her companion's arm, gasped, in tones of dramatic
+intensity:--
+
+"He's been heard from, and is coming HERE!"
+
+"Who?"
+
+A sickening sense that her old confidante had already lost touch
+with her--they had been separated for nearly two weeks--might have
+passed through Susy's mind.
+
+"Who?" she repeated, with a vicious shake of Mary's arm, "why,
+Clarence Brant, of course."
+
+"No!" said Mary, vaguely.
+
+Nevertheless, Susy went on rapidly, as if to neutralize the effect
+of her comrade's vacuity.
+
+"You never could have imagined it!  Never!  Even I, when mother told
+me, I thought I should have fainted, and ALL would have been
+revealed!"
+
+"But," hesitated the still wondering confidante, "I thought that was
+all over long ago.  You haven't seen him nor heard from him since
+that day you met accidentally at Santa Clara, two years ago, have
+you?"
+
+Susy's eyes shot a blue ray of dark but unutterable significance
+into Mary's, and then were carefully averted.  Mary Rogers, although
+perfectly satisfied that Susy had never seen Clarence since,
+nevertheless instantly accepted and was even thrilled with this
+artful suggestion of a clandestine correspondence.  Such was the
+simple faith of youthful friendship.
+
+"Mother knows nothing of it, of course, and a word from you or him
+would ruin everything," continued the breathless Susy.  "That's why
+I came to fetch you and warn you.  You must see him first, and warn
+him at any cost.  If I hadn't run every risk to come here to-day,
+Heaven knows what might have happened!  What do you think of the
+ponies, dear?  They're my own, and the sweetest!  This one's Susy,
+that one Clarence,--but privately, you know.  Before the world and
+in the stables he's only Birdie."
+
+"But I thought you wrote to me that you called them 'Paul and
+Virginie,'" said Mary doubtfully.
+
+"I do, sometimes," said Susy calmly.  "But one has to learn to
+suppress one's feelings, dear!"  Then quickly, "I do so hate deceit,
+don't you?  Tell me, don't you think deceit perfectly hateful?"
+
+Without waiting for her friend's loyal assent, she continued
+rapidly: "And he's just rolling in wealth! and educated, papa says,
+to the highest degree!"
+
+"Then," began Mary, "if he's coming with your mother's consent, and
+if you haven't quarreled, and it is not broken off, I should think
+you'd be just delighted."
+
+But another quick flash from Susy's eyes dispersed these beatific
+visions of the future.  "Hush!" she said, with suppressed dramatic
+intensity.  "You know not what you say!  There's an awful mystery
+hangs over him.  Mary Rogers," continued the young girl, approaching
+her small mouth to her confidante's ear in an appalling whisper.
+"His father was--a PIRATE! Yes--lived a pirate and was killed a
+pirate!"
+
+The statement, however, seemed to be partly ineffective.  Mary
+Rogers was startled but not alarmed, and even protested feebly.
+"But," she said, "if the father's dead, what's that to do with
+Clarence?  He was always with your papa--so you told me, dear--or
+other people, and couldn't catch anything from his own father.  And
+I'm sure, dearest, he always seemed nice and quiet."
+
+"Yes, SEEMED," returned Susy darkly, "but that's all you know!  It
+was in his BLOOD.  You know it always is,--you read it in the
+books,--you could see it in his eye.  There were times, my dear,
+when he was thwarted,--when the slightest attention from another
+person to me revealed it!  I have kept it to myself,--but think,
+dearest, of the effects of jealousy on that passionate nature!
+Sometimes I tremble to look back upon it."
+
+Nevertheless, she raised her hands and threw back her lovely golden
+mane from her childish shoulders with an easy, untroubled gesture.
+It was singular that Mary Rogers, leaning back comfortably in the
+buggy, also accepted these heart-rending revelations with
+comfortably knitted brows and luxuriously contented concern.  If she
+found it difficult to recognize in the picture just drawn by Susy
+the quiet, gentle, and sadly reserved youth she had known, she said
+nothing.  After a silence, lazily watching the distant wheeling
+vacquero, she said:--
+
+"And your father always sends an outrider like that with you?  How
+nice!  So picturesque--and like the old Spanish days."
+
+"Hush!" said Susy, with another unutterable glance.
+
+But this time Mary was in full sympathetic communion with her
+friend, and equal to any incoherent hiatus of revelation.
+
+"No!" she said promptly, "you don't mean it!"
+
+"Don't ask me, I daren't say anything to papa, for he'd be simply
+furious.  But there are times when we're alone, and Pedro wheels
+down so near with SUCH a look in his black eyes, that I'm all in a
+tremble.  It's dreadful!  They say he's a real Briones,--and he
+sometimes says something in Spanish, ending with 'senorita,' but I
+pretend I don't understand."
+
+"And I suppose that if anything should happen to the ponies, he'd
+just risk his life to save you."
+
+"Yes,--and it would be so awful,--for I just hate him!"
+
+"But if I was with you, dear, he couldn't expect you to be as
+grateful as if you were alone.  Susy!" she continued after a pause,
+"if you just stirred up the ponies a little so as to make 'em go
+fast, perhaps he might think they'd got away from you, and come
+dashing down here.  It would be so funny to see him,--wouldn't it?"
+
+The two girls looked at each other; their eyes sparkled already with
+a fearful joy,--they drew a long breath of guilty anticipation.  For
+a moment Susy even believed in her imaginary sketch of Pedro's
+devotion.
+
+"Papa said I wasn't to use the whip except in a case of necessity,"
+she said, reaching for the slender silver-handled toy, and setting
+her pretty lips together with the added determination of
+disobedience.  "G'long!"--and she laid the lash smartly on the
+shining backs of the animals.
+
+They were wiry, slender brutes of Mojave Indian blood, only lately
+broken to harness, and still undisciplined in temper.  The lash sent
+them rearing into the air, where, forgetting themselves in the
+slackened traces and loose reins, they came down with a succession
+of bounds that brought the light buggy leaping after them with its
+wheels scarcely touching the ground.  That unlucky lash had knocked
+away the bonds of a few months' servitude and sent the half-broken
+brutes instinctively careering with arched backs and kicking heels
+into the field towards the nearest cover.
+
+Mary Rogers cast a hurried glance over her shoulder.  Alas, they had
+not calculated on the insidious levels of the terraced plain, and
+the faithful Pedro had suddenly disappeared; the intervention of six
+inches of rising wild oats had wiped him out of the prospect and
+their possible salvation as completely as if he had been miles away.
+Nevertheless, the girls were not frightened; perhaps they had not
+time.  There was, however, the briefest interval for the most
+dominant of feminine emotions, and it was taken advantage of by
+Susy.
+
+"It was all YOUR fault, dear!" she gasped, as the forewheels of the
+buggy, dropping into a gopher rut, suddenly tilted up the back of
+the vehicle and shot its fair occupants into the yielding palisades
+of dusty grain.  The shock detached the whiffletree from the
+splinter-bar, snapped the light pole, and, turning the now
+thoroughly frightened animals again from their course, sent them,
+goaded by the clattering fragments, flying down the turnpike.  Half
+a mile farther on they overtook the gleaming white canvas hood of a
+slowly moving wagon drawn by two oxen, and, swerving again, the
+nearer pony stepped upon a trailing trace and ingloriously ended
+their career by rolling himself and his companion in the dust at the
+very feet of the peacefully plodding team.
+
+Equally harmless and inglorious was the catastrophe of Susy and her
+friend.  The strong, elastic stalks of the tall grain broke their
+fall and enabled them to scramble to their feet, dusty, disheveled,
+but unhurt, and even unstunned by the shock.  Their first
+instinctive cries over a damaged hat or ripped skirt were followed
+by the quick reaction of childish laughter.  They were alone; the
+very defection of Pedro consoled them, in its absence of any witness
+to their disaster; even their previous slight attitude to each other
+was forgotten.  They groped their way, pushing and panting, to the
+road again, where, beholding the overset buggy with its wheels
+ludicrously in the air, they suddenly seized and shook each other,
+and in an outburst of hilarious ecstasy, fairly laughed until the
+tears came into their eyes.
+
+Then there was a breathless silence.
+
+"The stage will be coming by in a moment," composedly said Susy.
+"Fix me, dear."
+
+Mary Rogers calmly walked around her friend, bestowing a practical
+shake there, a pluck here, completely retying one bow and restoring
+an engaging fullness to another, yet critically examining, with her
+head on one side, the fascinating result.  Then Susy performed the
+same function for Mary with equal deliberation and deftness.
+Suddenly Mary started and looked up.
+
+"It's coming," she said quickly, "and they've SEEN US."
+
+The expression of the faces of the two girls instantly changed.  A
+pained dignity and resignation, apparently born of the most
+harrowing experiences and controlled only by perfect good breeding,
+was distinctly suggested in their features and attitude as they
+stood patiently by the wreck of their overturned buggy awaiting the
+oncoming coach.  In sharp contrast was the evident excitement among
+the passengers.  A few rose from their seats in their eagerness; as
+the stage pulled up in the road beside the buggy four or five of the
+younger men leaped to the ground.
+
+"Are you hurt, miss?" they gasped sympathetically.
+
+Susy did not immediately reply, but ominously knitted her pretty
+eyebrows as if repressing a spasm of pain.  Then she said, "Not at
+all," coldly, with the suggestion of stoically concealing some
+lasting or perhaps fatal injury, and took the arm of Mary Rogers,
+who had, in the mean time, established a touching yet graceful limp.
+
+Declining the proffered assistance of the passengers, they helped
+each other into the coach, and freezingly requesting the driver to
+stop at Mr. Peyton's gate, maintained a statuesque and impressive
+silence.  At the gates they got down, followed by the sympathetic
+glances of the others.
+
+To all appearance their escapade, albeit fraught with dangerous
+possibilities, had happily ended.  But in the economy of human
+affairs, as in nature, forces are not suddenly let loose without
+more or less sympathetic disturbance which is apt to linger after
+the impelling cause is harmlessly spent.  The fright which the girls
+had unsuccessfully attempted to produce in the heart of their escort
+had passed him to become a panic elsewhere.  Judge Peyton, riding
+near the gateway of his rancho, was suddenly confronted by the
+spectacle of one of his vacqueros driving on before him the two
+lassoed and dusty ponies, with a face that broke into violent
+gesticulating at his master's quick interrogation.
+
+"Ah!  Mother of God!  It was an evil day!  For the bronchos had run
+away, upset the buggy, and had only been stopped by a brave
+Americano of an ox-team, whose lasso was even now around their
+necks, to prove it, and who had been dragged a matter of a hundred
+varas, like a calf, at their heels.  The senoritas,--ah! had he not
+already said they were safe, by the mercy of Jesus!--picked up by
+the coach, and would be here at this moment."
+
+"But where was Pedro all the time?  What was he doing?" demanded
+Peyton, with a darkened face and gathering anger.
+
+The vacquero looked at his master, and shrugged his shoulders
+significantly.  At any other time Peyton would have remembered that
+Pedro, as the reputed scion of a decayed Spanish family, and
+claiming superiority, was not a favorite with his fellow-retainers.
+But the gesture, half of suggestion, half of depreciation, irritated
+Peyton still more.
+
+"Well, where is this American who DID something when there wasn't a
+man among you all able to stop a child's runaway ponies?" he said
+sarcastically.  "Let me see him."
+
+The vacquero became still more deprecatory.
+
+"Ah!  He had driven on with his team towards San Antonio.  He would
+not stop to be thanked.  But that was the whole truth.  He,
+Incarnacion, could swear to it as to the Creed.  There was nothing
+more."
+
+"Take those beasts around the back way to the corral," said Peyton,
+thoroughly enraged, "and not a word of this to any one at the casa,
+do you hear?  Not a word to Mrs. Peyton or the servants, or, by
+Heaven, I'll clear the rancho of the whole lazy crew of you at once.
+Out of the way there, and be off!"
+
+He spurred his horse past the frightened menial, and dashed down the
+narrow lane that led to the gate.  But, as Incarnacion had truly
+said, "It was an evil day," for at the bottom of the lane, ambling
+slowly along as he lazily puffed a yellow cigarette, appeared the
+figure of the erring Pedro.  Utterly unconscious of the accident,
+attributing the disappearance of his charges to the inequalities of
+the plain, and, in truth, little interested in what he firmly
+believed was his purely artificial function, he had even made a
+larger circuit to stop at a wayside fonda for refreshments.
+
+Unfortunately, there is no more illogical sequence of human emotion
+than the exasperation produced by the bland manner of the
+unfortunate object who has excited it, although that very unconcern
+may be the convincing proof of innocence of intention.  Judge
+Peyton, already influenced, was furious at the comfortable
+obliviousness of his careless henchman, and rode angrily towards
+him.  Only a quick turn of Pedro's wrist kept the two men from
+coming into collision.
+
+"Is this the way you attend to your duty?" demanded Peyton, in a
+thick, suppressed voice, "Where is the buggy?  Where is my
+daughter?"
+
+There was no mistaking Judge Peyton's manner, even if the reason of
+it was not so clear to Pedro's mind, and his hot Latin blood flew
+instinctively to his face.  But for that, he might have shown some
+concern or asked an explanation.  As it was, he at once retorted
+with the national shrug and the national half-scornful, half-lazy
+"Quien sabe?"
+
+"Who knows?" repeated Peyton, hotly.  "I do!  She was thrown out of
+her buggy through your negligence and infernal laziness!  The ponies
+ran away, and were stopped by a stranger who wasn't afraid of
+risking his bones, while you were limping around somewhere like a
+slouching, cowardly coyote."
+
+The vacquero struggled a moment between blank astonishment and
+inarticulate rage.  At last he burst out:--
+
+"I am no coyote!  I was there!  I saw no runaway!"
+
+"Don't lie to me, sir!" roared Peyton.  "I tell you the buggy was
+smashed, the girls were thrown out and nearly killed"--  He stopped
+suddenly.  The sound of youthful laughter had come from the bottom
+of the lane, where Susy Peyton and Mary Rogers, just alighted from
+the coach, in the reaction of their previous constrained attitude,
+were flying hilariously into view.  A slight embarrassment crossed
+Peyton's face; a still deeper flush of anger overspread Pedro's
+sullen cheek.
+
+Then Pedro found tongue again, his native one, rapidly, violently,
+half incoherently.  "Ah, yes!  It had come to this.  It seems he was
+not a vacquero, a companion of the padrone on lands that had been
+his own before the Americanos robbed him of it, but a servant, a
+lackey of muchachas, an attendant on children to amuse them, or--why
+not?--an appendage to his daughter's state!  Ah, Jesus Maria! such a
+state! such a muchacha!  A picked-up foundling--a swineherd's
+daughter--to be ennobled by his, Pedro's, attendance, and for whose
+vulgar, clownish tricks,--tricks of a swineherd's daughter,--he,
+Pedro, was to be brought to book and insulted as if she were of
+Hidalgo blood!  Ah, Caramba!  Don Juan Peyton would find he could no
+more make a servant of him than he could make a lady of her!"
+
+The two young girls were rapidly approaching.  Judge Peyton spurred
+his horse beside the vacquero's, and, swinging the long thong of his
+bridle ominously in his clenched fingers, said, with a white face:--
+
+"Vamos!"
+
+Pedro's hand slid towards his sash.  Peyton only looked at him with
+a rigid smile of scorn.
+
+"Or I'll lash you here before them both," he added in a lower voice.
+
+The vacquero met Peyton's relentless eyes with a yellow flash of
+hate, drew his reins sharply, until his mustang, galled by the cruel
+bit, reared suddenly as if to strike at the immovable American,
+then, apparently with the same action, he swung it around on its
+hind legs, as on a pivot, and dashed towards the corral at a furious
+gallop.
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Meantime the heroic proprietor of the peaceful ox-team, whose valor
+Incarnacion had so infelicitously celebrated, was walking listlessly
+in the dust beside his wagon.  At a first glance his slouching
+figure, taken in connection with his bucolic conveyance, did not
+immediately suggest a hero.  As he emerged from the dusty cloud it
+could be seen that he was wearing a belt from which a large dragoon
+revolver and hunting knife were slung, and placed somewhat
+ostentatiously across the wagon seat was a rifle.  Yet the other
+contents of the wagon were of a singularly inoffensive character,
+and even suggested articles of homely barter.  Culinary utensils of
+all sizes, tubs, scullery brushes, and clocks, with several rolls of
+cheap carpeting and calico, might have been the wares of some
+traveling vender.  Yet, as they were only visible through a flap of
+the drawn curtains of the canvas hood, they did not mitigate the
+general aggressive effect of their owner's appearance.  A red
+bandanna handkerchief knotted and thrown loosely over his shoulders,
+a slouched hat pulled darkly over a head of long tangled hair,
+which, however, shadowed a round, comfortable face, scantily and
+youthfully bearded, were part of these confusing inconsistencies.
+
+The shadows of the team wagon were already lengthening grotesquely
+over the flat, cultivated fields, which for some time had taken the
+place of the plains of wild oats in the branch road into which they
+had turned.  The gigantic shadow of the proprietor, occasionally
+projected before it, was in characteristic exaggeration, and was
+often obliterated by a puff of dust, stirred by the plodding hoofs
+of the peaceful oxen, and swept across the field by the strong
+afternoon trades.  The sun sank lower, although a still potent
+presence above the horizon line; the creaking wagon lumbered still
+heavily along.  Yet at intervals its belligerent proprietor would
+start up from his slouching, silent march, break out into violent,
+disproportionate, but utterly ineffective objurgation of his cattle,
+jump into the air and kick his heels together in some paroxysm of
+indignation against them,--an act, however, which was received
+always with heavy bovine indifference, the dogged scorn of swaying,
+repudiating heads, or the dull contempt of lazily flicking tails.
+
+Towards sunset one or two straggling barns and cottages indicated
+their approach to the outskirts of a country town or settlement.
+Here the team halted, as if the belligerent-looking teamster had
+felt his appearance was inconsistent with an effeminate
+civilization, and the oxen were turned into an open waste opposite a
+nondescript wooden tenement, half farmhouse and half cabin,
+evidently of the rudest Western origin.  He may have recognized the
+fact that these "shanties" were not, as the ordinary traveler might
+infer, the first rude shelter of the original pioneers or settlers,
+but the later makeshifts of some recent Western immigrants who, like
+himself, probably found themselves unequal to the settled habits of
+the village, and who still retained their nomadic instincts.  It
+chanced, however, that the cabin at present was occupied by a New
+England mechanic and his family, who had emigrated by ship around
+Cape Horn, and who had no experience of the West, the plains, or its
+people.  It was therefore with some curiosity and a certain amount
+of fascinated awe that the mechanic's only daughter regarded from
+the open door of her dwelling the arrival of this wild and lawless-
+looking stranger.
+
+Meantime he had opened the curtains of the wagon and taken from its
+interior a number of pots, pans, and culinary utensils, which he
+proceeded to hang upon certain hooks that were placed on the outer
+ribs of the board and the sides of the vehicle.  To this he added a
+roll of rag carpet, the end of which hung from the tailboard, and a
+roll of pink calico temptingly displayed on the seat.  The
+mystification and curiosity of the young girl grew more intense at
+these proceedings.  It looked like the ordinary exhibition of a
+traveling peddler, but the gloomy and embattled appearance of the
+man himself scouted so peaceful and commonplace a suggestion.  Under
+the pretense of chasing away a marauding hen, she sallied out upon
+the waste near the wagon.  It then became evident that the traveler
+had seen her, and was not averse to her interest in his movements,
+although he had not changed his attitude of savage retrospection.
+An occasional ejaculation of suppressed passion, as if the memory of
+some past conflict was too much for him, escaped him even in this
+peaceful occupation.  As this possibly caused the young girl to
+still hover timidly in the distance, he suddenly entered the wagon
+and reappeared carrying a tin bucket, with which he somewhat
+ostentatiously crossed her path, his eyes darkly wandering as if
+seeking something.
+
+"If you're lookin' for the spring, it's a spell furder on--by the
+willows."
+
+It was a pleasant voice, the teamster thought, albeit with a dry,
+crisp, New England accent unfamiliar to his ears.  He looked into
+the depths of an unlovely blue-check sunbonnet, and saw certain
+small, irregular features and a sallow check, lit up by a pair of
+perfectly innocent, trustful, and wondering brown eyes.  Their timid
+possessor seemed to be a girl of seventeen, whose figure, although
+apparently clad in one of her mother's gowns, was still undeveloped
+and repressed by rustic hardship and innutrition.  As her eyes met
+his she saw that the face of this gloomy stranger was still
+youthful, by no means implacable, and, even at that moment, was
+actually suffused by a brick-colored blush!  In matters of mere
+intuition, the sex, even in its most rustic phase, is still our
+superior; and this unsophisticated girl, as the trespasser
+stammered, "Thank ye, miss," was instinctively emboldened to greater
+freedom.
+
+"Dad ain't tu hum, but ye kin have a drink o' milk if ye keer for
+it."
+
+She motioned shyly towards the cabin, and then led the way.  The
+stranger, with an inarticulate murmur, afterwards disguised as a
+cough, followed her meekly.  Nevertheless, by the time they had
+reached the cabin he had shaken his long hair over his eyes again,
+and a dark abstraction gathered chiefly in his eyebrows.  But it did
+not efface from the girl's mind the previous concession of a blush,
+and, although it added to her curiosity, did not alarm her.  He
+drank the milk awkwardly.  But by the laws of courtesy, even among
+the most savage tribes, she felt he was, at that moment at least,
+harmless.  A timid smile fluttered around her mouth as she said:--
+
+"When ye hung up them things I thought ye might be havin' suthing to
+swap or sell.  That is,"--with tactful politeness,--"mother was
+wantin' a new skillet, and it would have been handy if you'd had
+one.  But"--with an apologetic glance at his equipments--"if it
+ain't your business, it's all right, and no offense."
+
+"I've got a lot o' skillets," said the strange teamster, with marked
+condescension, "and she can have one.  They're all that's left outer
+a heap o' trader's stuff captured by Injuns t'other side of Laramie.
+We had a big fight to get 'em back.  Lost two of our best men,--
+scalped at Bloody Creek,--and had to drop a dozen redskins in their
+tracks,--me and another man,--lyin' flat in er wagon and firin'
+under the flaps o' the canvas.  I don't know ez they waz wuth it,"
+he added in gloomy retrospect; "but I've got to get rid of 'em, I
+reckon, somehow, afore I work over to Deadman's Gulch again."
+
+The young girl's eyes brightened timidly with a feminine mingling of
+imaginative awe and personal, pitying interest.  He was, after all,
+so young and amiable looking for such hardships and adventures.  And
+with all this, he--this Indian fighter--was a little afraid of HER!
+
+"Then that's why you carry that knife and six-shooter?" she said.
+"But you won't want 'em now, here in the settlement."
+
+"That's ez mebbe," said the stranger darkly.  He paused, and then
+suddenly, as if recklessly accepting a dangerous risk, unbuckled his
+revolver and handed it abstractedly to the young girl.  But the
+sheath of the bowie-knife was a fixture in his body-belt, and he was
+obliged to withdraw the glittering blade by itself, and to hand it
+to her in all its naked terrors.  The young girl received the
+weapons with a smiling complacency.  Upon such altars as these the
+skeptical reader will remember that Mars had once hung his "battered
+shield," his lance, and "uncontrolled crest."
+
+Nevertheless, the warlike teamster was not without embarrassment.
+Muttering something about the necessity of "looking after his
+stock," he achieved a hesitating bow, backed awkwardly out of the
+door, and receiving from the conquering hands of the young girl his
+weapons again, was obliged to carry them somewhat ingloriously in
+his hands across the road, and put them on the wagon seat, where, in
+company with the culinary articles, they seemed to lose their
+distinctively aggressive character.  Here, although his cheek was
+still flushed from his peaceful encounter, his voice regained some
+of its hoarse severity as he drove the oxen from the muddy pool into
+which they had luxuriantly wandered, and brought their fodder from
+the wagon.  Later, as the sun was setting, he lit a corn-cob pipe,
+and somewhat ostentatiously strolled down the road, with a furtive
+eye lingering upon the still open door of the farmhouse.  Presently
+two angular figures appeared from it, the farmer and his wife,
+intent on barter.
+
+These he received with his previous gloomy preoccupation, and a
+slight variation of the story he had told their daughter.  It is
+possible that his suggestive indifference piqued and heightened the
+bargaining instincts of the woman, for she not only bought the
+skillet, but purchased a clock and a roll of carpeting.  Still more,
+in some effusion of rustic courtesy, she extended an invitation to
+him to sup with them, which he declined and accepted in the same
+embarrassed breath, returning the proffered hospitality by
+confidentially showing them a couple of dried scalps, presumably of
+Indian origin.  It was in the same moment of human weakness that he
+answered their polite query as to "what they might call him," by
+intimating that his name was "Red Jim,"--a title of achievement by
+which he was generally known, which for the present must suffice
+them.  But during the repast that followed this was shortened to
+"Mister Jim," and even familiarly by the elders to plain "Jim."
+Only the young girl habitually used the formal prefix in return for
+the "Miss Phoebe" that he called her.
+
+With three such sympathetic and unexperienced auditors the gloomy
+embarrassment of Red Jim was soon dissipated, although it could
+hardly be said that he was generally communicative.  Dark tales of
+Indian warfare, of night attacks and wild stampedes, in which he had
+always taken a prominent part, flowed freely from his lips, but
+little else of his past history or present prospects.  And even his
+narratives of adventure were more or less fragmentary and imperfect
+in detail.
+
+"You woz saying," said the farmer, with slow, matter of fact, New
+England deliberation, "ez how you guessed you woz beguiled amongst
+the Injins by your Mexican partner, a pow'ful influential man, and
+yet you woz the only one escaped the gen'ral slarterin'.  How came
+the Injins to kill HIM,--their friend?"
+
+"They didn't," returned Jim, with ominously averted eyes.
+
+"What became of him?" continued the farmer.
+
+Red Jim shadowed his eyes with his hand, and cast a dark glance of
+scrutiny out of the doors and windows.  The young girl perceived it
+with timid, fascinated concern, and said hurriedly:--
+
+"Don't ask him, father!  Don't you see he mustn't tell?"
+
+"Not when spies may be hangin' round, and doggin' me at every step,"
+said Red Jim, as if reflecting, with another furtive glance towards
+the already fading prospect without.  "They've sworn to revenge
+him," he added moodily.
+
+A momentary silence followed.  The farmer coughed slightly, and
+looked dubiously at his wife.  But the two women had already
+exchanged feminine glances of sympathy for this evident slayer of
+traitors, and were apparently inclined to stop any adverse
+criticism.
+
+In the midst of which a shout was heard from the road.  The farmer
+and his family instinctively started.  Red Jim alone remained
+unmoved,--a fact which did not lessen the admiration of his feminine
+audience.  The host rose quickly, and went out.  The figure of a
+horseman had halted in the road, but after a few moments'
+conversation with the farmer they both moved towards the house and
+disappeared.  When the farmer returned, it was to say that "one of
+them 'Frisco dandies, who didn't keer about stoppin' at the hotel
+in the settlement," had halted to give his "critter" a feed and
+drink that he might continue his journey.  He had asked him to come
+in while the horse was feeding, but the stranger had "guessed he'd
+stretch his legs outside and smoke his cigar;" he might have thought
+the company "not fine enough for him," but he was "civil spoken
+enough, and had an all-fired smart hoss, and seemed to know how to
+run him."  To the anxious inquiries of his wife and daughter he
+added that the stranger didn't seem like a spy or a Mexican; was "as
+young as HIM," pointing to the moody Red Jim, "and a darned sight
+more peaceful-like in style."
+
+Perhaps owing to the criticism of the farmer, perhaps from some
+still lurking suspicion of being overheard by eavesdroppers, or
+possibly from a humane desire to relieve the strained apprehension
+of the women, Red Jim, as the farmer disappeared to rejoin the
+stranger, again dropped into a lighter and gentler vein of
+reminiscence.  He told them how, when a mere boy, he had been lost
+from an emigrant train in company with a little girl some years his
+junior.  How, when they found themselves alone on the desolate
+plain, with the vanished train beyond their reach, he endeavored to
+keep the child from a knowledge of the real danger of their
+position, and to soothe and comfort her.  How he carried her on his
+back, until, exhausted, he sank in a heap of sage-brush.  How he was
+surrounded by Indians, who, however, never suspected his hiding-
+place; and how he remained motionless and breathless with the
+sleeping child for three hours, until they departed.  How, at the
+last moment, he had perceived a train in the distance, and had
+staggered with her thither, although shot at and wounded by the
+trainmen in the belief that he was an Indian.  How it was afterwards
+discovered that the child was the long-lost daughter of a
+millionaire; how he had resolutely refused any gratuity for saving
+her, and she was now a peerless young heiress, famous in California.
+Whether this lighter tone of narrative suited him better, or whether
+the active feminine sympathy of his auditors helped him along,
+certain it was that his story was more coherent and intelligible and
+his voice less hoarse and constrained than in his previous
+belligerent reminiscences; his expression changed, and even his
+features worked into something like gentler emotion.  The bright
+eyes of Phoebe, fastened upon him, turned dim with a faint moisture,
+and her pale cheek took upon itself a little color.  The mother,
+after interjecting "Du tell," and "I wanter know," remained open-
+mouthed, staring at her visitor.  And in the silence that followed,
+a pleasant, but somewhat melancholy voice came from the open door.
+
+"I beg your pardon, but I thought I couldn’t be mistaken.  It IS my
+old friend, Jim Hooker!"
+
+Everybody started.  Red Jim stumbled to his feet with an
+inarticulate and hysteric exclamation.  Yet the apparition that now
+stood in the doorway was far from being terrifying or discomposing.
+It was evidently the stranger,--a slender, elegantly-knit figure,
+whose upper lip was faintly shadowed by a soft, dark mustache
+indicating early manhood, and whose unstudied ease in his well-
+fitting garments bespoke the dweller of cities.  Good-looking and
+well-dressed, without the consciousness of being either; self-
+possessed through easy circumstances, yet without self-assertion;
+courteous by nature and instinct as well as from an experience of
+granting favors, he might have been a welcome addition to even a
+more critical company.  But Red Jim, hurriedly seizing his
+outstretched hand, instantly dragged him away from the doorway into
+the road and out of hearing of his audience.
+
+"Did you hear what I was saying?" he asked hoarsely.
+
+"Well, yes,--I think so," returned the stranger, with a quiet smile.
+
+"Ye ain't goin' back on me, Clarence, are ye,--ain't goin' to gimme
+away afore them, old pard, are ye?" said Jim, with a sudden change
+to almost pathetic pleading.
+
+"No," returned the stranger, smiling.  "And certainly not before
+that interested young lady, Jim.  But stop.  Let me look at you."
+
+He held out both hands, took Jim's, spread them apart for a moment
+with a boyish gesture, and, looking in his face, said half
+mischievously, half sadly, "Yes, it's the same old Jim Hooker,--
+unchanged."
+
+"But YOU'RE changed,--reg'lar war paint, Big Injin style!" said
+Hooker, looking up at him with an awkward mingling of admiration and
+envy.  "Heard you struck it rich with the old man, and was Mister
+Brant now!"
+
+"Yes," said Clarence gently, yet with a smile that had not only a
+tinge of weariness but even of sadness in it.
+
+Unfortunately, the act, which was quite natural to Clarence's
+sensitiveness, and indeed partly sprang from some concern in his old
+companion's fortunes, translated itself by a very human process to
+Hooker's consciousness as a piece of rank affectation.  HE would
+have been exalted and exultant in Clarence's place, consequently any
+other exhibition was only "airs."  Nevertheless, at the present
+moment Clarence was to be placated.
+
+"You didn't mind my telling that story about your savin' Susy as my
+own, did ye?" he said, with a hasty glance over his shoulder.  "I
+only did it to fool the old man and women-folks, and make talk.  You
+won't blow on me?  Ye ain't mad about it?"
+
+It had crossed Clarence's memory that when they were both younger
+Jim Hooker had once not only borrowed his story, but his name and
+personality as well.  Yet in his loyalty to old memories there was
+mingled no resentment for past injury.  "Of course not," he said,
+with a smile that was, however, still thoughtful.  "Why should I?
+Only I ought to tell you that Susy Peyton is living with her adopted
+parents not ten miles from here, and it might reach their ears.
+She's quite a young lady now, and if I wouldn't tell her story to
+strangers, I don't think YOU ought to, Jim."
+
+He said this so pleasantly that even the skeptical Jim forgot what
+he believed were the "airs and graces" of self-abnegation, and said,
+"Let's go inside, and I'll introduce you," and turned to the house.
+But Clarence Brant drew back.  "I'm going on as soon as my horse is
+fed, for I'm on a visit to Peyton, and I intend to push as far as
+Santa Inez still to-night.  I want to talk with you about yourself,
+Jim," he added gently; "your prospects and your future.  I heard,"
+he went on hesitatingly, "that you were--at work--in a restaurant in
+San Francisco.  I'm glad to see that you are at least your own
+master here,"--he glanced at the wagon.  "You are selling things, I
+suppose?  For yourself, or another?  Is that team yours?  Come," he
+added, still pleasantly, but in an older and graver voice, with
+perhaps the least touch of experienced authority, "be frank, Jim.
+Which is it?  Never mind what things you've told IN THERE, tell ME
+the truth about yourself.  Can I help you in any way?  Believe me, I
+should like to.  We have been old friends, whatever difference in
+our luck, I am yours still."
+
+Thus adjured, the redoubtable Jim, in a hoarse whisper, with a
+furtive eye on the house, admitted that he was traveling for an
+itinerant peddler, whom he expected to join later in the settlement;
+that he had his own methods of disposing of his wares, and (darkly)
+that his proprietor and the world generally had better not interfere
+with him; that (with a return to more confidential lightness) he had
+already "worked the Wild West Injin" business so successfully as to
+dispose of his wares, particularly in yonder house, and might do
+even more if not prematurely and wantonly "blown upon," "gone back
+on," or "given away."
+
+"But wouldn't you like to settle down on some bit of land like this,
+and improve it for yourself?" said Clarence.  "All these valley
+terraces are bound to rise in value, and meantime you would be
+independent.  It could be managed, Jim.  I think I could arrange it
+for you," he went on, with a slight glow of youthful enthusiasm.
+"Write to me at Peyton's ranch, and I'll see you when I come back,
+and we'll hunt up something for you together."  As Jim received the
+proposition with a kind of gloomy embarrassment, he added lightly,
+with a glance at the farmhouse, "It might be near HERE, you know;
+and you'd have pleasant neighbors, and even eager listeners to your
+old adventures."
+
+"You'd better come in a minit before you go," said Jim, clumsily
+evading a direct reply.  Clarence hesitated a moment, and then
+yielded.  For an equal moment Jim Hooker was torn between secret
+jealousy of his old comrade's graces and a desire to present them as
+familiar associations of his own.  But his vanity was quickly
+appeased.
+
+Need it be said that the two women received this fleck and foam of a
+super-civilization they knew little of as almost an impertinence
+compared to the rugged, gloomy, pathetic, and equally youthful hero
+of an adventurous wilderness of which they knew still less?  What
+availed the courtesy and gentle melancholy of Clarence Brant beside
+the mysterious gloom and dark savagery of Red Jim?  Yet they
+received him patronizingly, as one who was, like themselves, an
+admirer of manly grace and power, and the recipient of Jim's
+friendship.  The farmer alone seemed to prefer Clarence, and yet the
+latter's tacit indorsement of Red Jim, through his evident previous
+intimacy with him, impressed the man in Jim's favor.  All of which
+Clarence saw with that sensitive perception which had given him an
+early insight into human weakness, yet still had never shaken his
+youthful optimism.  He smiled a little thoughtfully, but was openly
+fraternal to Jim, courteous to his host and family, and, as he rode
+away in the faint moonlight, magnificently opulent in his largess to
+the farmer,--his first and only assertion of his position.
+
+The farmhouse, straggling barn, and fringe of dusty willows, the
+white dome of the motionless wagon, with the hanging frying pans and
+kettles showing in the moonlight like black silhouettes against the
+staring canvas, all presently sank behind Clarence like the details
+of a dream, and he was alone with the moon, the hazy mystery of the
+level, grassy plain, and the monotony of the unending road.  As he
+rode slowly along he thought of that other dreary plain, white with
+alkali patches and brown with rings of deserted camp-fires, known to
+his boyhood of deprivation, dependency, danger, and adventure, oddly
+enough, with a strange delight; and his later years of study,
+monastic seclusion, and final ease and independence, with an easy
+sense of wasted existence and useless waiting.  He remembered his
+homeless childhood in the South, where servants and slaves took the
+place of the father he had never known, and the mother that he
+rarely saw; he remembered his abandonment to a mysterious female
+relation, where his natural guardians seemed to have overlooked and
+forgotten him, until he was sent, an all too young adventurer, to
+work his passage on an overland emigrant train across the plains; he
+remembered, as yesterday, the fears, the hopes, the dreams and
+dangers of that momentous journey.  He recalled his little playmate,
+Susy, and their strange adventures--the whole incident that the
+imaginative Jim Hooker had translated and rehearsed as his own--rose
+vividly before him.  He thought of the cruel end of that pilgrimage,
+which again left him homeless and forgotten by even the relative he
+was seeking in a strange land.  He remembered his solitary journey
+to the gold mines, taken with a boy's trust and a boy's fearlessness,
+and the strange protector he had found there, who had news of his
+missing kinsman; he remembered how this protector--whom he had at
+once instinctively loved--transferred him to the house of this
+new-found relation, who treated him kindly and sent him to the
+Jesuit school, but who never awakened in him a feeling of kinship.
+He dreamed again of his life at school, his accidental meeting with
+Susy at Santa Clara, the keen revival of his boyish love for his old
+playmate, now a pretty schoolgirl, the petted adopted child of
+wealthy parents.  He recalled the terrible shock that interrupted
+this boyish episode: the news of the death of his protector, and the
+revelation that this hard, silent, and mysterious man was his own
+father, whose reckless life and desperate reputation had impelled
+him to assume a disguise.
+
+He remembered how his sudden accession to wealth and independence
+had half frightened him, and had always left a lurking sensitiveness
+that he was unfairly favored, by some mere accident, above his less
+lucky companions.  The rude vices of his old associates had made him
+impatient of the feebler sensual indulgences of the later companions
+of his luxury, and exposed their hollow fascinations; his sensitive
+fastidiousness kept him clean among vulgar temptations; his clear
+perceptions were never blinded by selfish sophistry.  Meantime his
+feeling for Susy remained unchanged.  Pride had kept him from
+seeking the Peytons.  His present visit was as unpremeditated as
+Peyton's invitation had been unlooked for by him.  Yet he had not
+allowed himself to be deceived.  He knew that this courtesy was
+probably due to the change in his fortune, although he had hoped it
+might have been some change in their opinion brought about by Susy.
+But he would at least see her again, not in the pretty, half-
+clandestine way she had thought necessary, but openly and as her
+equal.
+
+In his rapid ride he seemed to have suddenly penetrated the peaceful
+calm of the night.  The restless irritation of the afternoon trade
+winds had subsided; the tender moonlight had hushed and tranquilly
+possessed the worried plain; the unending files of wild oats, far
+spaced and distinct, stood erect and motionless as trees; something
+of the sedate solemnity of a great forest seemed to have fallen upon
+their giant stalks.  There was no dew.  In that light, dry air, the
+heavier dust no longer rose beneath the heels of his horse, whose
+flying shadow passed over the field like a cloud, leaving no trail
+or track behind it.  In the preoccupation of his thought and his
+breathless retrospect, the young man had ridden faster than he
+intended, and he now checked his panting horse.  The influence of
+the night and the hushed landscape stole over him; his thoughts took
+a gentler turn; in that dim, mysterious horizon line before him, his
+future seemed to be dreamily peopled with airy, graceful shapes that
+more or less took the likeness of Susy.  She was bright, coquettish,
+romantic, as he had last seen her; she was older, graver, and
+thoughtfully welcome of him; or she was cold, distant, and severely
+forgetful of the past.  How would her adopted father and mother
+receive him?  Would they ever look upon him in the light of a suitor
+to the young girl?  He had no fear of Peyton,--he understood his own
+sex, and, young as he was, knew already how to make himself
+respected; but how could he overcome that instinctive aversion which
+Mrs. Peyton had so often made him feel he had provoked?  Yet in this
+dreamy hush of earth and sky, what was not possible?  His boyish
+heart beat high with daring visions.
+
+He saw Mrs. Peyton in the porch, welcoming him with that maternal
+smile which his childish longing had so often craved to share with
+Susy.  Peyton would be there, too,--Peyton, who had once pushed back
+his torn straw hat to look approvingly in his boyish eyes; and
+Peyton, perhaps, might be proud of him.
+
+Suddenly he started.  A voice in his very ear!
+
+"Bah!  A yoke of vulgar cattle grazing on lands that were thine by
+right and law.  Neither more nor less than that.  And I tell thee,
+Pancho, like cattle, to be driven off or caught and branded for
+one's own.  Ha!  There are those who could swear to the truth of
+this on the Creed.  Ay! and bring papers stamped and signed by the
+governor's rubric to prove it.  And not that I hate them,--bah! what
+are those heretic swine to me?  But thou dost comprehend me?  It
+galls and pricks me to see them swelling themselves with stolen
+husks, and men like thee, Pancho, ousted from their own land."
+
+Clarence had halted in utter bewilderment.  No one was visible
+before him, behind him, on either side.  The words, in Spanish, came
+from the air, the sky, the distant horizon, he knew not which.  Was
+he still dreaming?  A strange shiver crept over his skin as if the
+air had grown suddenly chill.  Then another mysterious voice arose,
+incredulous, half mocking, but equally distinct and clear.
+
+"Caramba!  What is this?  You are wandering, friend Pancho.  You are
+still smarting from his tongue.  He has the grant confirmed by his
+brigand government; he has the POSSESSION, stolen by a thief like
+himself; and he has the Corregidors with him.  For is he not one of
+them himself, this Judge Peyton?"
+
+Peyton!  Clarence felt the blood rush back to his face in
+astonishment and indignation.  His heels mechanically pressed his
+horse's flanks, and the animal sprang forward.
+
+"Guarda!  Mira!" said the voice again in a quicker, lower tone.  But
+this time it was evidently in the field beside him, and the heads
+and shoulders of two horsemen emerged at the same moment from the
+tall ranks of wild oats.  The mystery was solved.  The strangers had
+been making their way along a lower level of the terraced plain,
+hidden by the grain, not twenty yards away, and parallel with the
+road they were now ascending to join.  Their figures were alike
+formless in long striped serapes, and their features undistinguishable
+under stiff black sombreros.
+
+"Buenas noches, senor," said the second voice, in formal and
+cautious deliberation.
+
+A sudden inspiration made Clarence respond in English, as if he had
+not comprehended the stranger's words, "Eh?"
+
+"Gooda-nighta," repeated the stranger.
+
+"Oh, good-night," returned Clarence.  They passed him.  Their spurs
+tinkled twice or thrice, their mustangs sprang forward, and the next
+moment the loose folds of their serapes were fluttering at their
+sides like wings in their flight.
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+After the chill of a dewless night the morning sun was apt to look
+ardently upon the Robles Rancho, if so strong an expression could
+describe the dry, oven-like heat of a Californian coast-range
+valley.  Before ten o'clock the adobe wall of the patio was warm
+enough to permit lingering vacqueros and idle peons to lean against
+it, and the exposed annexe was filled with sharp, resinous odors
+from the oozing sap of unseasoned "redwood" boards, warped and
+drying in the hot sunshine.  Even at that early hour the climbing
+Castilian roses were drooping against the wooden columns of the new
+veranda, scarcely older than themselves, and mingling an already
+faded spice with the aroma of baking wood and the more material
+fragrance of steaming coffee, that seemed dominant everywhere.
+
+In fact, the pretty breakfast-room, whose three broad windows,
+always open to the veranda, gave an al fresco effect to every meal,
+was a pathetic endeavor of the Southern-bred Peyton to emulate the
+soft, luxurious, and open-air indolence of his native South, in a
+climate that was not only not tropical, but even austere in its most
+fervid moments.  Yet, although cold draughts invaded it from the
+rear that morning, Judge Peyton sat alone, between the open doors
+and windows, awaiting the slow coming of his wife and the young
+ladies.  He was not in an entirely comfortable mood that morning.
+Things were not going on well at Robles.  That truculent vagabond,
+Pedro, had, the night before, taken himself off with a curse that
+had frightened even the vacqueros, who most hated him as a
+companion, but who now seemed inclined to regard his absence as an
+injury done to their race.  Peyton, uneasily conscious that his own
+anger had been excited by an exaggerated conception of the accident,
+was now, like most obstinate men, inclined to exaggerate the
+importance of Pedro's insolence.  He was well out of it to get rid
+of this quarrelsome hanger-on, whose presumption and ill-humor
+threatened the discipline of the rancho, yet he could not entirely
+forget that he had employed him on account of his family claims, and
+from a desire to placate racial jealousy and settle local differences.
+For the inferior Mexicans and Indian half-breeds still regarded
+their old masters with affection; were, in fact, more concerned for
+the integrity of their caste than the masters were themselves, and
+the old Spanish families who had made alliances with Americans, and
+shared their land with them, had rarely succeeded in alienating
+their retainers with their lands.  Certain experiences in the
+proving of his grant before the Land Commission had taught Peyton
+that they were not to be depended upon.  And lately there had been
+unpleasant rumors of the discovery of some unlooked-for claimants to
+a division of the grant itself, which might affect his own title.
+
+He looked up quickly as voices and light steps on the veranda at
+last heralded the approach of his tardy household from the corridor.
+But, in spite of his preoccupation, he was startled and even
+awkwardly impressed with a change in Susy's appearance.  She was
+wearing, for the first time, a long skirt, and this sudden maturing
+of her figure struck him, as a man, much more forcibly than it would
+probably have impressed a woman, more familiar with details.  He had
+not noticed certain indications of womanhood, as significant,
+perhaps, in her carriage as her outlines, which had been lately
+perfectly apparent to her mother and Mary, but which were to him
+now, for the first time, indicated by a few inches of skirt.  She
+not only looked taller to his masculine eyes, but these few inches
+had added to the mystery as well as the drapery of the goddess; they
+were not so much the revelation of maturity as the suggestion that
+it was HIDDEN.  So impressed was he, that a half-serious lecture on
+her yesterday's childishness, the outcome of his irritated
+reflections that morning, died upon his lips.  He felt he was no
+longer dealing with a child.
+
+He welcomed them with that smile of bantering approbation, supposed
+to keep down inordinate vanity, which for some occult reason one
+always reserves for the members of one's own family.  He was quite
+conscious that Susy was looking very pretty in this new and mature
+frock, and that as she stood beside his wife, far from ageing Mrs.
+Peyton's good looks and figure, she appeared like an equal
+companion, and that they mutually "became" one another.  This, and
+the fact that they were all, including Mary Rogers, in their
+freshest, gayest morning dresses, awakened a half-humorous, half-
+real apprehension in his mind, that he was now hopelessly surrounded
+by a matured sex, and in a weak minority.
+
+"I think I ought to have been prepared," he began grimly, "for this
+addition to--to--the skirts of my family."
+
+"Why, John," returned Mrs. Peyton quickly; "do you mean to say you
+haven't noticed that the poor child has for weeks been looking
+positively indecent?"
+
+"Really, papa, I've been a sight to behold.  Haven't I, Mary?"
+chimed in Susy.
+
+"Yes, dear.  Why, Judge, I've been wondering that Susy stood it so
+well, and never complained."
+
+Peyton glanced around him at this compact feminine embattlement.  It
+was as he feared.  Yet even here he was again at fault.
+
+"And," said Mrs. Peyton slowly, with the reserved significance of
+the feminine postscript in her voice, "if that Mr. Brant is coming
+here to-day, it would be just as well for him to see that SHE IS NO
+LONGER A CHILD, AS WHEN HE KNEW HER."
+
+An hour later, good-natured Mary Rogers, in her character of "a
+dear,"--which was usually indicated by the undertaking of small
+errands for her friend,--was gathering roses from the old garden for
+Susy's adornment, when she saw a vision which lingered with her for
+many a day.  She had stopped to look through the iron grille in the
+adobe wall, across the open wind-swept plain.  Miniature waves were
+passing over the wild oats, with glittering disturbances here and
+there in the depressions like the sparkling of green foam; the
+horizon line was sharply defined against the hard, steel-blue sky;
+everywhere the brand-new morning was shining with almost painted
+brilliancy; the vigor, spirit, and even crudeness of youth were over
+all.  The young girl was dazzled and bewildered.  Suddenly, as if
+blown out of the waving grain, or an incarnation of the vivid
+morning, the bright and striking figure of a youthful horseman
+flashed before the grille.  It was Clarence Brant!  Mary Rogers had
+always seen him, in the loyalty of friendship, with Susy's
+prepossessed eyes, yet she fancied that morning that he had never
+looked so handsome before.  Even the foppish fripperies of his
+riding-dress and silver trappings seemed as much the natural
+expression of conquering youth as the invincible morning sunshine.
+Perhaps it might have been a reaction against Susy's caprice or some
+latent susceptibility of her own; but a momentary antagonism to her
+friend stirred even her kindly nature.  What right had Susy to
+trifle with such an opportunity?  Who was SHE to hesitate over this
+gallant prince?
+
+But Prince Charming's quick eyes had detected her, and the next
+moment his beautiful horse was beside the grating, and his ready
+hand of greeting extended through the bars.
+
+"I suppose I am early and unexpected, but I slept at Santa Inez last
+night, that I might ride over in the cool of the morning.  My things
+are coming by the stage-coach, later.  It seemed such a slow way of
+coming one's self."
+
+Mary Rogers's black eyes intimated that the way he had taken was the
+right one, but she gallantly recovered herself and remembered her
+position as confidante.  And here was the opportunity of delivering
+Susy's warning unobserved.  She withdrew her hand from Clarence's
+frank grasp, and passing it through the grating, patted the sleek,
+shining flanks of his horse, with a discreet division of admiration.
+
+"And such a lovely creature, too!  And Susy will be so delighted!
+and oh, Mr. Brant, please, you're to say nothing of having met her
+at Santa Clara.  It's just as well not to begin with THAT here, for,
+you see" (with a large, maternal manner), "you were both SO young
+then."
+
+Clarence drew a quick breath.  It was the first check to his vision
+of independence and equal footing!  Then his invitation was NOT the
+outcome of a continuous friendship revived by Susy, as he had hoped;
+the Peytons had known nothing of his meeting with her, or perhaps
+they would not have invited him.  He was here as an impostor,--and
+all because Susy had chosen to make a mystery of a harmless
+encounter, which might have been explained, and which they might
+have even countenanced.  He thought bitterly of his old playmate for
+a brief moment,--as brief as Mary's antagonism.  The young girl
+noticed the change in his face, but misinterpreted it.
+
+"Oh, there's no danger of its coming out if you don't say anything,"
+she said, quickly.  "Ride on to the house, and don't wait for me.
+You'll find them in the patio on the veranda."
+
+Clarence moved on, but not as spiritedly as before.  Nevertheless
+there was still dash enough about him and the animal he bestrode to
+stir into admiration the few lounging vacqueros of a country which
+was apt to judge the status of a rider by the quality of his horse.
+Nor was the favorable impression confined to them alone.  Peyton's
+gratification rang out cheerily in his greeting:--
+
+"Bravo, Clarence!  You are here in true caballero style.  Thanks for
+the compliment to the rancho."
+
+For a moment the young man was transported back again to his
+boyhood, and once more felt Peyton's approving hand pushing back the
+worn straw hat from his childish forehead.  A faint color rose to
+his cheeks; his eyes momentarily dropped.  The highest art could
+have done no more!  The slight aggressiveness of his youthful finery
+and picturesque good looks was condoned at once; his modesty
+conquered where self-assertion might have provoked opposition, and
+even Mrs. Peyton felt herself impelled to come forward with an
+outstretched hand scarcely less frank than her husband's.  Then
+Clarence lifted his eyes.  He saw before him the woman to whom his
+childish heart had gone out with the inscrutable longing and
+adoration of a motherless, homeless, companionless boy; the woman
+who had absorbed the love of his playmate without sharing it with
+him; who had showered her protecting and maternal caresses on Susy,
+a waif like himself, yet had not only left his heart lonely and
+desolate, but had even added to his childish distrust of himself the
+thought that he had excited her aversion.  He saw her more beautiful
+than ever in her restored health, freshness of coloring, and mature
+roundness of outline.  He was unconsciously touched with a man's
+admiration for her without losing his boyish yearnings and half-
+filial affection; in her new materialistic womanhood his youthful
+imagination had lifted her to a queen and goddess.  There was all
+this appeal in his still boyish eyes,--eyes that had never yet known
+shame or fear in the expression of their emotions; there was all
+this in the gesture with which he lifted Mrs. Peyton's fingers to
+his lips.  The little group saw in this act only a Spanish courtesy
+in keeping with his accepted role.  But a thrill of surprise, of
+embarrassment, of intense gratification passed over her.  For he had
+not even looked at Susy!
+
+Her relenting was graceful.  She welcomed him with a winning smile.
+Then she motioned pleasantly towards Susy.
+
+"But here is an older friend, Mr. Brant, whom you do not seem to
+recognize,--Susy, whom you have not seen since she was a child."
+
+A quick flush rose to Clarence's cheek.  The group smiled at this
+evident youthful confession of some boyish admiration.  But Clarence
+knew that his truthful blood was merely resenting the deceit his
+lips were sealed from divulging.  He did not dare to glance at Susy;
+it added to the general amusement that the young girl was obliged to
+present herself.  But in this interval she had exchanged glances
+with Mary Rogers, who had rejoined the group, and she knew she was
+safe.  She smiled with gracious condescension at Clarence; observed,
+with the patronizing superiority of age and established position,
+that he had GROWN, but had not greatly changed, and, it is needless
+to say, again filled her mother's heart with joy.  Clarence, still
+intoxicated with Mrs. Peyton's kindliness, and, perhaps, still
+embarrassed by remorse, had not time to remark the girl's studied
+attitude.  He shook hands with her cordially, and then, in the quick
+reaction of youth, accepted with humorous gravity the elaborate
+introduction to Mary Rogers by Susy, which completed this little
+comedy.  And if, with a woman's quickness, Mrs. Peyton detected a
+certain lingering glance which passed between Mary Rogers and
+Clarence, and misinterpreted it, it was only a part of that
+mystification into which these youthful actors are apt to throw
+their mature audiences.
+
+"Confess, Ally," said Peyton, cheerfully, as the three young people
+suddenly found their tongues with aimless vivacity and inconsequent
+laughter, and started with unintelligible spirits for an exploration
+of the garden, "confess now that your bete noir is really a very
+manly as well as a very presentable young fellow.  By Jove! the
+padres have made a Spanish swell out of him without spoiling the
+Brant grit, either!  Come, now; you're not afraid that Susy's style
+will suffer from HIS companionship.  'Pon my soul, she might borrow
+a little of his courtesy to his elders without indelicacy.  I only
+wish she had as sincere a way of showing her respect for you as he
+has.  Did you notice that he really didn't seem to see anybody else
+but you at first?  And yet you never were a friend to him, like
+Susy."
+
+The lady tossed her head slightly, but smiled.
+
+"This is the first time he's seen Mary Rogers, isn't it?" she said
+meditatively.
+
+"I reckon.  But what's that to do with his politeness to you?"
+
+"And do her parents know him?" she continued, without replying.
+
+"How do I know?  I suppose everybody has heard of him.  Why?"
+
+"Because I think they've taken a fancy to each other."
+
+"What in the name of folly, Ally"--began the despairing Peyton.
+
+"When you invite a handsome, rich, and fascinating young man into
+the company of young ladies, John," returned Mrs. Peyton, in her
+severest manner, "you must not forget you owe a certain responsibility
+to the parents.  I shall certainly look after Miss Rogers."
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+Although the three young people had left the veranda together, when
+they reached the old garden Clarence and Susy found themselves
+considerably in advance of Mary Rogers, who had become suddenly and
+deeply interested in the beauty of a passion vine near the gate.  At
+the first discovery of their isolation their voluble exchange of
+information about themselves and their occupations since their last
+meeting stopped simultaneously.  Clarence, who had forgotten his
+momentary irritation, and had recovered his old happiness in her
+presence, was nevertheless conscious of some other change in her
+than that suggested by the lengthened skirt and the later and more
+delicate accentuation of her prettiness.  It was not her affectation
+of superiority and older social experience, for that was only the
+outcome of what he had found charming in her as a child, and which
+he still good-humoredly accepted; nor was it her characteristic
+exaggeration of speech, which he still pleasantly recognized.  It
+was something else, vague and indefinite,--something that had been
+unnoticed while Mary was with them, but had now come between them
+like some unknown presence which had taken the confidante's place.
+He remained silent, looking at her half-brightening cheek and
+conscious profile.  Then he spoke with awkward directness.
+
+"You are changed, Susy, more than in looks."
+
+"Hush," said the girl in a tragic whisper, with a warning gesture
+towards the blandly unconscious Mary.
+
+"But," returned Clarence wonderingly, "she's your--our friend, you
+know."
+
+"I DON'T know," said Susy, in a still deeper tone, "that is--oh,
+don't ask me!  But when you're always surrounded by spies, when you
+can't say your soul is your own, you doubt everybody!"  There was
+such a pretty distress in her violet eyes and curving eyebrows, that
+Clarence, albeit vague as to its origin and particulars,
+nevertheless possessed himself of the little hand that was
+gesticulating dangerously near his own, and pressed it
+sympathetically.  Perhaps preoccupied with her emotions, she did not
+immediately withdraw it, as she went on rapidly: "And if you were
+cooped up here, day after day, behind these bars," pointing to the
+grille, "you'd know what I suffer."
+
+"But"--began Clarence.
+
+"Hush!" said Susy, with a stamp of her little foot.
+
+Clarence, who had only wished to point out that the whole lower end
+of the garden wall was in ruins and the grille really was no
+prevention, "hushed."
+
+"And listen!  Don't pay me much attention to-day, but talk to HER,"
+indicating the still discreet and distant Mary, "before father and
+mother.  Not a word to her of this confidence, Clarence.  To-morrow
+ride out alone on your beautiful horse, and come back by way of the
+woods, beyond our turning, at four o'clock.  There's a trail to the
+right of the big madrono tree.  Take that.  Be careful and keep a
+good lookout, for she mustn't see you."
+
+"Who mustn't see me?" said the puzzled Clarence.
+
+"Why, Mary, of course, you silly boy!" returned the girl
+impatiently.  "She'll be looking for ME.  Go now, Clarence!  Stop!
+Look at that lovely big maiden's-blush up there," pointing to a
+pink-suffused specimen of rose grandiflora hanging on the wall.
+"Get it, Clarence,--that one,--I'll show you where,--there!"  They
+had already plunged into the leafy bramble, and, standing on tiptoe,
+with her hand on his shoulder and head upturned, Susy's cheek had
+innocently approached Clarence's own.  At this moment Clarence,
+possibly through some confusion of color, fragrance, or softness of
+contact, seemed to have availed himself of the opportunity, in a way
+which caused Susy to instantly rejoin Mary Rogers with affected
+dignity, leaving him to follow a few moments later with the captured
+flower.
+
+Without trying to understand the reason of to-morrow's rendezvous,
+and perhaps not altogether convinced of the reality of Susy's
+troubles, he, however, did not find that difficulty in carrying out
+her other commands which he had expected.  Mrs. Peyton was still
+gracious, and, with feminine tact, induced him to talk of himself,
+until she was presently in possession of his whole history, barring
+the episode of his meeting with Susy, since he had parted with them.
+He felt a strange satisfaction in familiarly pouring out his
+confidences to this superior woman, whom he had always held in awe.
+There was a new delight in her womanly interest in his trials and
+adventures, and a subtle pleasure even in her half-motherly
+criticism and admonition of some passages.  I am afraid he forgot
+Susy, who listened with the complacency of an exhibitor; Mary, whose
+black eyes dilated alternately with sympathy for the performer and
+deprecation of Mrs. Peyton's critical glances; and Peyton, who,
+however, seemed lost in thought, and preoccupied.  Clarence was
+happy.  The softly shaded lights in the broad, spacious, comfortably
+furnished drawing-room shone on the group before him.  It was a
+picture of refined domesticity which the homeless Clarence had never
+known except as a vague, half-painful, boyish remembrance; it was a
+realization of welcome that far exceeded his wildest boyish vision
+of the preceding night.  With that recollection came another,--a
+more uneasy one.  He remembered how that vision had been interrupted
+by the strange voices in the road, and their vague but ominous
+import to his host.  A feeling of self-reproach came over him.  The
+threats had impressed him as only mere braggadocio,--he knew the
+characteristic exaggeration of the race,--but perhaps he ought to
+privately tell Peyton of the incident at once.
+
+The opportunity came later, when the ladies had retired, and Peyton,
+wrapped in a poncho in a rocking-chair, on the now chilly veranda,
+looked up from his reverie and a cigar.  Clarence casually
+introduced the incident, as if only for the sake of describing the
+supernatural effect of the hidden voices, but he was concerned to
+see that Peyton was considerably disturbed by their more material
+import.  After questioning him as to the appearance of the two men,
+his host said: "I don't mind telling you, Clarence, that as far as
+that fellow's intentions go he is quite sincere, although his
+threats are only borrowed thunder.  He is a man whom I have just
+dismissed for carelessness and insolence,--two things that run in
+double harness in this country,--but I should be more afraid to find
+him at my back on a dark night, alone on the plains; than to
+confront him in daylight, in the witness box, against me.  He was
+only repeating a silly rumor that the title to this rancho and the
+nine square leagues beyond would be attacked by some speculators."
+
+"But I thought your title was confirmed two years ago," said
+Clarence.
+
+"The GRANT was confirmed," returned Peyton, "which means that the
+conveyance of the Mexican government of these lands to the ancestor
+of Victor Robles was held to be legally proven by the United States
+Land Commission, and a patent issued to all those who held under it.
+I and my neighbors hold under it by purchase from Victor Robles,
+subject to the confirmation of the Land Commission.  But that
+confirmation was only of Victor's GREAT-GRANDFATHER'S TITLE, and it
+is now alleged that as Victor's father died without making a will,
+Victor has claimed and disposed of property which he ought to have
+divided with his SISTERS.  At least, some speculating rascals in San
+Francisco have set up what they call 'the Sisters' title,' and are
+selling it to actual settlers on the unoccupied lands beyond.  As,
+by the law, it would hold possession against the mere ordinary
+squatters, whose only right is based, as you know, on the
+presumption that there is NO TITLE CLAIMED, it gives the possessor
+immunity to enjoy the use of the property until the case is decided,
+and even should the original title hold good against his, the
+successful litigant would probably be willing to pay for
+improvements and possession to save the expensive and tedious
+process of ejectment."
+
+"But this does not affect YOU, who have already possession?" said
+Clarence quickly.
+
+"No, not as far as THIS HOUSE and the lands I actually OCCUPY AND
+CULTIVATE are concerned; and they know that I am safe to fight to
+the last, and carry the case to the Supreme Court in that case,
+until the swindle is exposed, or they drop it; but I may have to pay
+them something to keep the squatters off my UNOCCUPIED land."
+
+"But you surely wouldn't recognize those rascals in any way?" said
+the astonished Clarence.
+
+"As against other rascals?  Why not?" returned Peyton grimly.  "I
+only pay for the possession which their sham title gives me to my
+own land.  If by accident that title obtains, I am still on the safe
+side."  After a pause he said, more gravely, "What you overheard,
+Clarence, shows me that the plan is more forward than I had
+imagined, and that I may have to fight traitors here."
+
+"I hope, sir," said Clarence, with a quick glow in his earnest face,
+"that you'll let me help you.  You thought I did once, you
+remember,--with the Indians."
+
+There was so much of the old Clarence in his boyish appeal and
+eager, questioning face that Peyton, who had been talking to him as
+a younger but equal man of affairs, was startled into a smile, "You
+did, Clarence, though the Indians butchered your friends, after all.
+I don't know, though, but that your experiences with those
+Spaniards--you must have known a lot of them when you were with Don
+Juan Robinson and at the college--might be of service in getting at
+evidence, or smashing their witnesses if it comes to a fight.  But
+just now, MONEY is everything.  They must be bought OFF THE LAND if
+I have to mortgage it for the purpose.  That strikes you as a rather
+heroic remedy, Clarence, eh?" he continued, in his old, half-
+bantering attitude towards Clarence's inexperienced youth, "don't it?"
+
+But Clarence was not thinking of that.  Another more audacious but
+equally youthful and enthusiastic idea had taken possession of his
+mind, and he lay awake half that night revolving it.  It was true
+that it was somewhat impractically mixed with his visions of Mrs.
+Peyton and Susy, and even included his previous scheme of relief for
+the improvident and incorrigible Hooker.  But it gave a wonderful
+sincerity and happiness to his slumbers that night, which the wiser
+and elder Peyton might have envied, and I wot not was in the long
+run as correct and sagacious as Peyton's sleepless cogitations.  And
+in the early morning Mr. Clarence Brant, the young capitalist, sat
+down to his traveling-desk and wrote two clear-headed, logical, and
+practical business letters,--one to his banker, and the other to his
+former guardian, Don Juan Robinson, as his first step in a resolve
+that was, nevertheless, perhaps as wildly quixotic and enthusiastic
+as any dream his boyish and unselfish heart had ever indulged.
+
+At breakfast, in the charmed freedom of the domestic circle,
+Clarence forgot Susy's capricious commands of yesterday, and began
+to address himself to her in his old earnest fashion, until he was
+warned by a significant knitting of the young lady's brows and
+monosyllabic responses.  But in his youthful loyalty to Mrs. Peyton,
+he was more pained to notice Susy's occasional unconscious
+indifference to her adopted mother's affectionate expression, and a
+more conscious disregard of her wishes.  So uneasy did he become, in
+his sensitive concern for Mrs. Peyton's half-concealed
+mortification, that he gladly accepted Peyton's offer to go with him
+to visit the farm and corral.  As the afternoon approached, with
+another twinge of self-reproach, he was obliged to invent some
+excuse to decline certain hospitable plans of Mrs. Peyton's for his
+entertainment, and at half past three stole somewhat guiltily, with
+his horse, from the stables.  But he had to pass before the outer
+wall of the garden and grille, through which he had seen Mary the
+day before.  Raising his eyes mechanically, he was startled to see
+Mrs. Peyton standing behind the grating, with her abstracted gaze
+fixed upon the wind-tossed, level grain beyond her.  She smiled as
+she saw him, but there were traces of tears in her proud, handsome
+eyes.
+
+"You are going to ride?" she said pleasantly.
+
+"Y-e-es," stammered the shamefaced Clarence.
+
+She glanced at him wistfully.
+
+"You are right.  The girls have gone away by themselves.  Mr. Peyton
+has ridden over to Santa Inez on this dreadful land business, and I
+suppose you'd have found him a dull riding companion.  It is rather
+stupid here.  I quite envy you, Mr. Brant, your horse and your
+freedom."
+
+"But, Mrs. Peyton," broke in Clarence, impulsively, "you have a
+horse--I saw it, a lovely lady's horse--eating its head off in the
+stable.  Won't you let me run back and order it; and won't you,
+please, come out with me for a good, long gallop?"
+
+He meant what he said.  He had spoken quickly, impulsively, but with
+the perfect understanding in his own mind that his proposition meant
+the complete abandonment of his rendezvous with Susy.  Mrs. Peyton
+was astounded and slightly stirred with his earnestness, albeit
+unaware of all it implied.
+
+"It's a great temptation, Mr. Brant," she said, with a playful
+smile, which dazzled Clarence with its first faint suggestion of a
+refined woman's coquetry; "but I'm afraid that Mr. Peyton would
+think me going mad in my old age.  No.  Go on and enjoy your gallop,
+and if you should see those giddy girls anywhere, send them home
+early for chocolate, before the cold wind gets up."
+
+She turned, waved her slim white hand playfully in acknowledgment of
+Clarence's bared head, and moved away.
+
+For the first few moments the young man tried to find relief in
+furious riding, and in bullying his spirited horse.  Then he pulled
+quickly up.  What was he doing?  What was he going to do?  What
+foolish, vapid deceit was this that he was going to practice upon
+that noble, queenly, confiding, generous woman?  (He had already
+forgotten that she had always distrusted him.)  What a fool he was
+not to tell her half-jokingly that he expected to meet Susy!  But
+would he have dared to talk half-jokingly to such a woman on such a
+topic?  And would it have been honorable without disclosing the
+WHOLE truth,--that they had met secretly before?  And was it fair to
+Susy?--dear, innocent, childish Susy!  Yet something must be done!
+It was such trivial, purposeless deceit, after all; for this noble
+woman, Mrs. Peyton, so kind, so gentle, would never object to his
+loving Susy and marrying her.  And they would all live happily
+together; and Mrs. Peyton would never be separated from them, but
+always beaming tenderly upon them as she did just now in the garden.
+Yes, he would have a serious understanding with Susy, and that would
+excuse the clandestine meeting to-day.
+
+His rapid pace, meantime, had brought him to the imperceptible
+incline of the terrace, and he was astonished, in turning in the
+saddle, to find that the casa, corral, and outbuildings had
+completely vanished, and that behind him rolled only the long sea of
+grain, which seemed to have swallowed them in its yellowing depths.
+Before him lay the wooded ravine through which the stagecoach
+passed, which was also the entrance to the rancho, and there, too,
+probably, was the turning of which Susy had spoken.  But it was
+still early for the rendezvous; indeed, he was in no hurry to meet
+her in his present discontented state, and he made a listless
+circuit of the field, in the hope of discovering the phenomena that
+had caused the rancho's mysterious disappearance.  When he had found
+that it was the effect of the different levels, his attention was
+arrested by a multitude of moving objects in a still more distant
+field, which proved to be a band of wild horses.  In and out among
+them, circling aimlessly, as it seemed to him, appeared two horsemen
+apparently performing some mystic evolution.  To add to their
+singular performance, from time to time one of the flying herd,
+driven by the horsemen far beyond the circle of its companions,
+dropped suddenly and unaccountably in full career.  The field closed
+over it as if it had been swallowed up.  In a few moments it
+appeared again, trotting peacefully behind its former pursuer.  It
+was some time before Clarence grasped the meaning of this strange
+spectacle.  Although the clear, dry atmosphere sharply accented the
+silhouette-like outlines of the men and horses, so great was the
+distance that the slender forty-foot lasso, which in the skillful
+hands of the horsemen had effected these captures, was COMPLETELY
+INVISIBLE!  The horsemen were Peyton's vacqueros, making a selection
+from the young horses for the market.  He remembered now that Peyton
+had told him that he might be obliged to raise money by sacrificing
+some of his stock, and the thought brought back Clarence's
+uneasiness as he turned again to the trail.  Indeed, he was hardly
+in the vein for a gentle tryst, as he entered the wooded ravine to
+seek the madrono tree which was to serve as a guide to his lady's
+bower.
+
+A few rods further, under the cool vault filled with woodland
+spicing, he came upon it.  In its summer harlequin dress of scarlet
+and green, with hanging bells of poly-tinted berries, like some
+personified sylvan Folly, it seemed a fitting symbol of Susy's
+childish masquerade of passion.  Its bizarre beauty, so opposed to
+the sober gravity of the sedate pines and hemlocks, made it an
+unmistakable landmark.  Here he dismounted and picketed his horse.
+And here, beside it, to the right, ran the little trail crawling
+over mossy boulders; a narrow yellow track through the carpet of
+pine needles between the closest file of trees; an almost
+imperceptible streak across pools of chickweed at their roots, and a
+brown and ragged swath through the ferns.  As he went on, the
+anxiety and uneasiness that had possessed him gave way to a languid
+intoxication of the senses; the mysterious seclusion of these
+woodland depths recovered the old influence they had exerted over
+his boyhood.  He was not returning to Susy, as much as to the older
+love of his youth, of which she was, perhaps, only an incident.  It
+was therefore with an odd boyish thrill again that, coming suddenly
+upon a little hollow, like a deserted nest, where the lost trail
+made him hesitate, he heard the crackle of a starched skirt behind
+him, was conscious of the subtle odor of freshly ironed and scented
+muslin, and felt the gentle pressure of delicate fingers upon his
+eyes.
+
+"Susy!"
+
+"You silly boy!  Where were you blundering to?  Why didn't you look
+around you?"
+
+"I thought I would hear your voices."
+
+"Whose voices, idiot?"
+
+"Yours and Mary's," returned Clarence innocently, looking round for
+the confidante.
+
+"Oh, indeed!  Then you wanted to see MARY?  Well, she's looking for
+me somewhere.  Perhaps you'll go and find her, or shall I?"
+
+She was offering to pass him when he laid his hand on hers to detain
+her.  She instantly evaded it, and drew herself up to her full
+height, incontestably displaying the dignity of the added inches to
+her skirt.  All this was charmingly like the old Susy, but it did
+not bid fair to help him to a serious interview.  And, looking at
+the pretty, pink, mocking face before him, with the witchery of the
+woodland still upon him, he began to think that he had better put it
+off.
+
+"Never mind about Mary," he said laughingly.  "But you said you
+wanted to see me, Susy; and here I am."
+
+"Said I wanted to see you?" repeated Susy, with her blue eyes lifted
+in celestial scorn and wonderment.  "Said I wanted to see you?  Are
+you not mistaken, Mr. Brant?  Really, I imagined that you came here
+to see ME."
+
+With her fair head upturned, and the leaf of her scarlet lip
+temptingly curled over, Clarence began to think this latest phase of
+her extravagance the most fascinating.  He drew nearer to her as he
+said gently, "You know what I mean, Susy.  You said yesterday you
+were troubled.  I thought you might have something to tell me."
+
+"I should think it was YOU who might have something to tell me after
+all these years," she said poutingly, yet self-possessed.  "But I
+suppose you came here only to see Mary and mother.  I'm sure you let
+them know that plainly enough last evening."
+
+"But you said"--began the stupefied Clarence.
+
+"Never mind what I said.  It's always what I say, never what YOU
+say; and you don't say anything."
+
+The woodland influence must have been still very strong upon
+Clarence that he did not discover in all this that, while Susy's
+general capriciousness was unchanged, there was a new and singular
+insincerity in her manifest acting.  She was either concealing the
+existence of some other real emotion, or assuming one that was
+absent.  But he did not notice it, and only replied tenderly:--
+
+"But I want to say a great deal to you, Susy.  I want to say that if
+you still feel as I do, and as I have always felt, and you think you
+could be happy as I would be if--if--we could be always together, we
+need not conceal it from your mother and father any longer.  I am
+old enough to speak for myself, and I am my own master.  Your mother
+has been very kind to me,--so kind that it doesn't seem quite right
+to deceive her,--and when I tell her that I love you, and that I
+want you to be my wife, I believe she will give us her blessing."
+
+Susy uttered a strange little laugh, and with an assumption of
+coyness, that was, however, still affected, stooped to pick a few
+berries from a manzanita bush.
+
+"I'll tell you what she'll say, Clarence.  She'll say you're
+frightfully young, and so you are!"
+
+The young fellow tried to echo the laugh, but felt as if he had
+received a blow.  For the first time he was conscious of the truth:
+this girl, whom he had fondly regarded as a child, had already
+passed him in the race; she had become a woman before he was yet a
+man, and now stood before him, maturer in her knowledge, and older
+in her understanding, of herself and of him.  This was the change
+that had perplexed him; this was the presence that had come between
+them,--a Susy he had never known before.
+
+She laughed at his changed expression, and then swung herself easily
+to a sitting posture on the low projecting branch of a hemlock.  The
+act was still girlish, but, nevertheless, she looked down upon him
+in a superior, patronizing way.  "Now, Clarence," she said, with a
+half-abstracted manner, "don't you be a big fool!  If you talk that
+way to mother, she'll only tell you to wait two or three years until
+you know your own mind, and she'll pack me off to that horrid school
+again, besides watching me like a cat every moment you are here.  If
+you want to stay here, and see me sometimes like this, you'll just
+behave as you have done, and say nothing.  Do you see?  Perhaps you
+don't care to come, or are satisfied with Mary and mother.  Say so,
+then.  Goodness knows, I don't want to force you to come here."
+
+Modest and reserved as Clarence was generally, I fear that
+bashfulness of approach to the other sex was not one of these
+indications.  He walked up to Susy with appalling directness, and
+passed his arm around her waist.  She did not move, but remained
+looking at him and his intruding arm with a certain critical
+curiosity, as if awaiting some novel sensation.  At which he kissed
+her.  She then slowly disengaged his arm, and said:--
+
+"Really, upon my word, Clarence," in perfectly level tones, and
+slipped quietly to the ground.
+
+He again caught her in his arms, encircling her disarranged hair and
+part of the beribboned hat hanging over her shoulder, and remained
+for an instant holding her thus silently and tenderly.  Then she
+freed herself with an abstracted air, a half smile, and an unchanged
+color except where her soft cheek had been abraded by his coat
+collar.
+
+"You're a bold, rude boy, Clarence," she said, putting back her hair
+quietly, and straightening the brim of her hat.  "Heaven knows where
+you learned manners!" and then, from a safer distance, with the same
+critical look in her violet eyes, "I suppose you think mother would
+allow THAT if she knew it?"
+
+But Clarence, now completely subjugated, with the memory of the kiss
+upon him and a heightened color, protested that he only wanted to
+make their intercourse less constrained, and to have their
+relations, even their engagement, recognized by her parents; still
+he would take her advice.  Only there was always the danger that if
+they were discovered she would be sent back to the convent all the
+same, and his banishment, instead of being the probation of a few
+years, would be a perpetual separation.
+
+"We could always run away, Clarence," responded the young girl
+calmly.  "There's nothing the matter with THAT."
+
+Clarence was startled.  The idea of desolating the sad, proud,
+handsome Mrs. Peyton, whom he worshiped, and her kind husband, whom
+he was just about to serve, was so grotesque and confusing, that he
+said hopelessly, "Yes."
+
+"Of course," she continued, with the same odd affectation of
+coyness, which was, however, distinctly uncalled for, as she eyed
+him from under her broad hat, "you needn't come with me unless you
+like.  I can run away by myself,--if I want to!  I've thought of it
+before.  One can't stand everything!"
+
+"But, Susy," said Clarence, with a swift remorseful recollection of
+her confidence yesterday, "is there really anything troubles you?
+Tell me, dear.  What is it?"
+
+"Oh, nothing--EVERYTHING!  It's no use,--YOU can't understand!  YOU
+like it, I know you do.  I can see it; it's your style.  But it's
+stupid, it's awful, Clarence!  With mamma snooping over you and
+around you all day, with her 'dear child,' 'mamma's pet,' and 'What
+is it, dear?' and 'Tell it all to your own mamma,' as if I would!
+And 'my own mamma,' indeed!  As if I didn't know, Clarence, that she
+ISN'T.  And papa, caring for nothing but this hideous, dreary
+rancho, and the huge, empty plains.  It's worse than school, for
+there, at least, when you went out, you could see something besides
+cattle and horses and yellow-faced half-breeds!  But here--Lord!
+it's only a wonder I haven't run away before!"
+
+Startled and shocked as Clarence was at this revelation, accompanied
+as it was by a hardness of manner that was new to him, the influence
+of the young girl was still so strong upon him that he tried to
+evade it as only an extravagance, and said with a faint smile, "But
+where would you run to?"
+
+She looked at him cunningly, with her head on one side, and then
+said:--
+
+"I have friends, and"--
+
+She hesitated, pursing up her pretty lips.
+
+"And what?"
+
+"Relations."
+
+"Relations?"
+
+"Yes,--an aunt by marriage.  She lives in Sacramento.  She'd be
+overjoyed to have me come to her.  Her second husband has a theatre
+there."
+
+"But, Susy, what does Mrs. Peyton know of this?"
+
+"Nothing.  Do you think I'd tell her, and have her buy them up as
+she has my other relations?  Do you suppose I don't know that I've
+been bought up like a nigger?"
+
+She looked indignant, compressing her delicate little nostrils, and
+yet, somehow, Clarence had the same singular impression that she was
+only acting.
+
+The calling of a far-off voice came faintly through the wood.
+
+"That's Mary, looking for me," said Susy composedly.  "You must go,
+now, Clarence.  Quick!  Remember what I said,--and don't breathe a
+word of this.  Good-by."
+
+But Clarence was standing still, breathless, hopelessly disturbed,
+and irresolute.  Then he turned away mechanically towards the trail.
+
+"Well, Clarence?"
+
+She was looking at him half reproachfully, half coquettishly, with
+smiling, parted lips.  He hastened to forget himself and his
+troubles upon them twice and thrice.  Then she quickly disengaged
+herself, whispered, "Go, now," and, as Mary's call was repeated,
+Clarence heard her voice, high and clear, answering, "Here, dear,"
+as he was plunging into the thicket.
+
+He had scarcely reached the madrono tree again and remounted his
+horse, before he heard the sound of hoofs approaching from the road.
+In his present uneasiness he did not care to be discovered so near
+the rendezvous, and drew back into the shadow until the horseman
+should pass.  It was Peyton, with a somewhat disturbed face, riding
+rapidly.  Still less was he inclined to join or immediately follow
+him, but he was relieved when his host, instead of taking the direct
+road to the rancho, through the wild oats, turned off in the
+direction of the corral.
+
+A moment later Clarence wheeled into the direct road, and presently
+found himself in the long afternoon shadows through the thickest of
+the grain.  He was riding slowly, immersed in thought, when he was
+suddenly startled by a hissing noise at his ear, and what seemed to
+be the uncoiling stroke of a leaping serpent at his side.
+Instinctively he threw himself forward on his horse's neck, and as
+the animal shied into the grain, felt the crawling scrape and jerk
+of a horsehair lariat across his back and down his horse's flanks.
+He reined in indignantly and stood up in his stirrups.  Nothing was
+to be seen above the level of the grain.  Beneath him the trailing
+riata had as noiselessly vanished as if it had been indeed a gliding
+snake.  Had he been the victim of a practical joke, or of the
+blunder of some stupid vacquero?  For he made no doubt that it was
+the lasso of one of the performers he had watched that afternoon.
+But his preoccupied mind did not dwell long upon it, and by the time
+he had reached the wall of the old garden, the incident was
+forgotten.
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+Relieved of Clarence Brant's embarrassing presence, Jim Hooker did
+not, however, refuse to avail himself of that opportunity to expound
+to the farmer and his family the immense wealth, influence, and
+importance of the friend who had just left him.  Although Clarence's
+plan had suggested reticence, Hooker could not forego the pleasure
+of informing them that "Clar" Brant had just offered to let him into
+an extensive land speculation.  He had previously declined a large
+share or original location in a mine of Clarence's, now worth a
+million, because it was not "his style."  But the land speculation
+in a country of unsettled titles and lawless men, he need not remind
+them, required some experience of border warfare.  He would not say
+positively, although he left them to draw their own conclusions with
+gloomy significance, that this was why Clarence had sought him.
+With this dark suggestion, he took leave of Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins and
+their daughter Phoebe the next day, not without some natural human
+emotion, and peacefully drove his team and wagon into the settlement
+of Fair Plains.
+
+He was not prepared, however, for a sudden realization of his
+imaginative prospects.  A few days after his arrival in Fair Plains,
+he received a letter from Clarence, explaining that he had not time
+to return to Hooker to consult him, but had, nevertheless, fulfilled
+his promise, by taking advantage of an opportunity of purchasing the
+Spanish "Sisters'" title to certain unoccupied lands near the
+settlement.  As these lands in part joined the section already
+preempted and occupied by Hopkins, Clarence thought that Jim Hooker
+would choose that part for the sake of his neighbor's company.  He
+inclosed a draft on San Francisco, for a sum sufficient to enable
+Jim to put up a cabin and "stock" the property, which he begged he
+would consider in the light of a loan, to be paid back in
+installments, only when the property could afford it.  At the same
+time, if Jim was in difficulty, he was to inform him.  The letter
+closed with a characteristic Clarence-like mingling of enthusiasm
+and older wisdom.  "I wish you luck, Jim, but I see no reason why
+you should trust to it.  I don't know of anything that could keep
+you from making yourself independent of any one, if you go to work
+with a LONG AIM and don't fritter away your chances on short ones.
+If I were you, old fellow, I'd drop the Plains and the Indians out
+of my thoughts, or at least out of my TALK, for a while; they won't
+help you in the long run.  The people who believe you will be
+jealous of you; those who don't, will look down upon you, and if
+they get to questioning your little Indian romances, Jim, they'll be
+apt to question your civilized facts.  That won't help you in the
+ranching business and that's your only real grip now."  For the
+space of two or three hours after this, Jim was reasonably grateful
+and even subdued,--so much so that his employer, to whom he confided
+his good fortune, frankly confessed that he believed him from that
+unusual fact alone.  Unfortunately, neither the practical lesson
+conveyed in this grim admission, nor the sentiment of gratitude,
+remained long with Jim.  Another idea had taken possession of his
+fancy.  Although the land nominated in his bill of sale had been,
+except on the occasion of his own temporary halt there, always
+unoccupied, unsought, and unclaimed, and although he was amply
+protected by legal certificates, he gravely collected a posse of
+three or four idlers from Fair Plains, armed them at his own
+expense, and in the dead of night took belligerent and forcible
+possession of the peaceful domain which the weak generosity and
+unheroic dollars of Clarence had purchased for him!  A martial camp-
+fire tempered the chill night winds to the pulses of the invaders,
+and enabled them to sleep on their arms in the field they had won.
+The morning sun revealed to the astonished Hopkins family the
+embattled plain beyond, with its armed sentries.  Only then did Jim
+hooker condescend to explain the reason of his warlike occupation,
+with dark hints of the outlying "squatters" and "jumpers," whose
+incursions their boldness alone had repulsed.  The effect of this
+romantic situation upon the two women, with the slight fascination
+of danger imported into their quiet lives, may well be imagined.
+Possibly owing to some incautious questioning by Mr. Hopkins, and
+some doubts of the discipline and sincerity of his posse, Jim
+discharged them the next day; but during the erection of his cabin
+by some peaceful carpenters from the settlement, he returned to his
+gloomy preoccupation and the ostentatious wearing of his revolvers.
+As an opulent and powerful neighbor, he took his meals with the
+family while his house was being built, and generally impressed them
+with a sense of security they had never missed.
+
+Meantime, Clarence, duly informed of the installation of Jim as his
+tenant, underwent a severe trial.  It was necessary for his plans
+that this should be kept a secret at present, and this was no easy
+thing for his habitually frank and open nature.  He had once
+mentioned that he had met Jim at the settlement, but the information
+was received with such indifference by Susy, and such marked
+disfavor by Mrs. Peyton, that he said no more.  He accompanied
+Peyton in his rides around the rancho, fully possessed himself of
+the details of its boundaries, the debatable lands held by the
+enemy, and listened with beating pulses, but a hushed tongue, to his
+host's ill-concealed misgivings.
+
+"You see, Clarence, that lower terrace?" he said, pointing to a far-
+reaching longitudinal plain beyond the corral; "it extends from my
+corral to Fair Plains.  That is claimed by the sisters' title, and,
+as things appear to be going, if a division of the land is made it
+will be theirs.  It's bad enough to have this best grazing land
+lying just on the flanks of the corral held by these rascals at an
+absurd prohibitory price, but I am afraid that it may be made to
+mean something even worse.  According to the old surveys, these
+terraces on different levels were the natural divisions of the
+property,--one heir or his tenant taking one, and another taking
+another,--an easy distinction that saved the necessity of boundary
+fencing or monuments, and gave no trouble to people who were either
+kinsmen or lived in lazy patriarchal concord.  That is the form of
+division they are trying to reestablish now.  Well," he continued,
+suddenly lifting his eyes to the young man's flushed face, in some
+unconscious, sympathetic response to his earnest breathlessness,
+"although my boundary line extends half a mile into that field, my
+house and garden and corral ARE ACTUALLY UPON THAT TERRACE OR
+LEVEL."  They certainly appeared to Clarence to be on the same line
+as the long field beyond.  "If," went on Peyton, "such a decision is
+made, these men will push on and claim the house and everything on
+the terrace."
+
+"But," said Clarence quickly, "you said their title was only
+valuable where they have got or can give POSSESSION.  You already
+have yours.  They can't take it from you except by force."
+
+"No," said Peyton grimly, "nor will they dare to do it as long as I
+live to fight them."
+
+"But," persisted Clarence, with the same singular hesitancy of
+manner, "why didn't you purchase possession of at least that part of
+the land which lies so dangerously near your own house?"
+
+"Because it was held by squatters, who naturally preferred buying
+what might prove a legal title to their land from these impostors
+than to sell out their possession to ME at a fair price."
+
+"But couldn't you have bought from them both?" continued Clarence.
+
+"My dear Clarence, I am not a Croesus nor a fool.  Only a man who
+was both would attempt to treat with these rascals, who would now,
+of course, insist that THEIR WHOLE claim should be bought up at
+their own price, by the man who was most concerned in defeating
+them."
+
+He turned away a little impatiently.  Fortunately he did not observe
+that Clarence's averted face was crimson with embarrassment, and
+that a faint smile hovered nervously about his mouth.
+
+Since his late rendezvous with Susy, Clarence had had no chance to
+interrogate her further regarding her mysterious relative.  That
+that shadowy presence was more or less exaggerated, if not an
+absolute myth, he more than half suspected, but of the discontent
+that had produced it, or the recklessness it might provoke, there
+was no doubt.  She might be tempted to some act of folly.  He
+wondered if Mary Rogers knew it.  Yet, with his sensitive ideas of
+loyalty, he would have shrunk from any confidence with Mary
+regarding her friend's secrets, although he fancied that Mary's dark
+eyes sometimes dwelt upon him with mournful consciousness and
+premonition.  He did not imagine the truth, that this romantic
+contemplation was only the result of Mary's conviction that Susy was
+utterly unworthy of his love.  It so chanced one morning that the
+vacquero who brought the post from Santa Inez arrived earlier than
+usual, and so anticipated the two girls, who usually made a youthful
+point of meeting him first as he passed the garden wall.  The letter
+bag was consequently delivered to Mrs. Peyton in the presence of the
+others, and a look of consternation passed between the young girls.
+But Mary quickly seized upon the bag as if with girlish and
+mischievous impatience, opened it, and glanced within it.
+
+"There are only three letters for you," she said, handing them to
+Clarence, with a quick look of significance, which he failed to
+comprehend, "and nothing for me or Susy."
+
+"But," began the innocent Clarence, as his first glance at the
+letters showed him that one was directed to Susy, "here is"--
+
+A wicked pinch on his arm that was nearest Mary stopped his speech,
+and he quickly put the letters in his pocket.
+
+"Didn't you understand that Susy don't want her mother to see that
+letter?" asked Mary impatiently, when they were alone a moment
+later.
+
+"No," said Clarence simply, handing her the missive.
+
+Mary took it and turned it over in her hands.
+
+"It's in a man's handwriting," she said innocently.
+
+"I hadn't noticed it," returned Clarence with invincible naivete,
+"but perhaps it is."
+
+"And you hand it over for me to give to Susy, and ain't a bit
+curious to know who it's from?"
+
+"No," returned Clarence, opening his big eyes in smiling and
+apologetic wonder.
+
+"Well," responded the young lady, with a long breath of melancholy
+astonishment, "certainly, of all things you are--you really ARE!"
+With which incoherency--apparently perfectly intelligible to
+herself--she left him.  She had not herself the slightest idea who
+the letter was from; she only knew that Susy wanted it concealed.
+
+The incident made little impression on Clarence, except as part of
+the general uneasiness he felt in regard to his old playmate.  It
+seemed so odd to him that this worry should come from HER,--that she
+herself should form the one discordant note in the Arcadian dream
+that he had found so sweet; in his previous imaginings it was the
+presence of Mrs. Peyton which he had dreaded; she whose propinquity
+now seemed so full of gentleness, reassurance, and repose.  How
+worthy she seemed of any sacrifice he could make for her!  He had
+seen little of her for the last two or three days, although her
+smile and greeting were always ready for him.  Poor Clarence did not
+dream that she had found from certain incontestable signs and
+tokens, both in the young ladies and himself, that he did not
+require watching, and that becoming more resigned to Susy's
+indifference, which seemed so general and passive in quality, she
+was no longer tortured by the sting of jealousy.
+
+Finding himself alone that afternoon, the young man had wandered
+somewhat listlessly beyond the low adobe gateway.  The habits of the
+siesta obtained in a modified form at the rancho.  After luncheon,
+its masters and employees usually retired, not so much from the
+torrid heat of the afternoon sun, but from the first harrying of the
+afternoon trades, whose monotonous whistle swept round the walls.  A
+straggling passion vine near the gate beat and struggled against the
+wind.  Clarence had stopped near it, and was gazing with worried
+abstraction across the tossing fields, when a soft voice called his
+name.
+
+It was a pleasant voice,--Mrs. Peyton's.  He glanced back at the
+gateway; it was empty.  He looked quickly to the right and left; no
+one was there.
+
+The voice spoke again with the musical addition of a laugh; it
+seemed to come from the passion vine.  Ah, yes; behind it, and half
+overgrown by its branches, was a long, narrow embrasured opening in
+the wall, defended by the usual Spanish grating, and still further
+back, as in the frame of a picture, the half length figure of Mrs.
+Peyton, very handsome and striking, too, with a painted
+picturesqueness from the effect of the checkered light and shade.
+
+"You looked so tired and bored out there," she said.  "I am afraid
+you are finding it very dull at the rancho.  The prospect is
+certainly not very enlivening from where you stand."
+
+Clarence protested with a visible pleasure in his eyes, as he held
+back a spray before the opening.
+
+"If you are not afraid of being worse bored, come in here and talk
+with me.  You have never seen this part of the house, I think,--my
+own sitting-room.  You reach it from the hall in the gallery.  But
+Lola or Anita will show you the way."
+
+He reentered the gateway, and quickly found the hall,--a narrow,
+arched passage, whose black, tunnel-like shadows were absolutely
+unaffected by the vivid, colorless glare of the courtyard without,
+seen through an opening at the end.  The contrast was sharp,
+blinding, and distinct; even the edges of the opening were black;
+the outer light halted on the threshold and never penetrated within.
+The warm odor of verbena and dried rose leaves stole from a half-
+open door somewhere in the cloistered gloom.  Guided by it, Clarence
+presently found himself on the threshold of a low-vaulted room.  Two
+other narrow embrasured windows like the one he had just seen, and a
+fourth, wider latticed casement, hung with gauze curtains, suffused
+the apartment with a clear, yet mysterious twilight that seemed its
+own.  The gloomy walls were warmed by bright-fringed bookshelves,
+topped with trifles of light feminine coloring and adornment.  Low
+easy-chairs and a lounge, small fanciful tables, a dainty desk,
+gayly colored baskets of worsteds or mysterious kaleidoscopic
+fragments, and vases of flowers pervaded the apartment with a
+mingled sense of grace and comfort.  There was a womanly refinement
+in its careless negligence, and even the delicate wrapper of
+Japanese silk, gathered at the waist and falling in easy folds to
+the feet of the graceful mistress of this charming disorder, looked
+a part of its refined abandonment.
+
+Clarence hesitated as on the threshold of some sacred shrine.  But
+Mrs. Peyton, with her own hands, cleared a space for him on the
+lounge.
+
+"You will easily suspect from all this disorder, Mr. Brant, that I
+spend a greater part of my time here, and that I seldom see much
+company.  Mr. Peyton occasionally comes in long enough to stumble
+over a footstool or upset a vase, and I think Mary and Susy avoid it
+from a firm conviction that there is work concealed in these
+baskets.  But I have my books here, and in the afternoons, behind
+these thick walls, one forgets the incessant stir and restlessness
+of the dreadful winds outside.  Just now you were foolish enough to
+tempt them while you were nervous, or worried, or listless.  Take my
+word for it, it's a great mistake.  There is no more use fighting
+them, as I tell Mr. Peyton, than of fighting the people born under
+them.  I have my own opinion that these winds were sent only to stir
+this lazy race of mongrels into activity, but they are enough to
+drive us Anglo-Saxons into nervous frenzy.  Don't you think so?  But
+you are young and energetic, and perhaps you are not affected by
+them."
+
+She spoke pleasantly and playfully, yet with a certain nervous
+tension of voice and manner that seemed to illustrate her theory.
+At least, Clarence, in quick sympathy with her slightest emotion,
+was touched by it.  There is no more insidious attraction in the
+persons we admire, than the belief that we know and understand their
+unhappiness, and that our admiration for them is lifted higher than
+a mere mutual instinctive sympathy with beauty or strength.  This
+adorable woman had suffered.  The very thought aroused his chivalry.
+It loosened, also, I fear, his quick, impulsive tongue.
+
+Oh, yes; he knew it.  He had lived under this whip of air and sky
+for three years, alone in a Spanish rancho, with only the native
+peons around him, and scarcely speaking his own tongue even to his
+guardian.  He spent his mornings on horseback in fields like these,
+until the vientos generales, as they called them, sprang up and
+drove him nearly frantic; and his only relief was to bury himself
+among the books in his guardian's library, and shut out the world,--
+just as she did.  The smile which hovered around the lady's mouth at
+that moment arrested Clarence, with a quick remembrance of their
+former relative positions, and a sudden conviction of his
+familiarity in suggesting an equality of experience, and he blushed.
+But Mrs. Peyton diverted his embarrassment with an air of interested
+absorption in his story, and said:--
+
+"Then you know these people thoroughly, Mr. Brant?  I am afraid that
+WE do not."
+
+Clarence had already gathered that fact within the last few days,
+and, with his usual impulsive directness, said so.  A slight
+knitting of Mrs. Peyton's brows passed off, however, as he quickly
+and earnestly went on to say that it was impossible for the Peytons
+in their present relations to the natives to judge them, or to be
+judged by them fairly.  How they were a childlike race, credulous
+and trustful, but, like all credulous and trustful people, given to
+retaliate when imposed upon with a larger insincerity, exaggeration,
+and treachery.  How they had seen their houses and lands occupied by
+strangers, their religion scorned, their customs derided, their
+patriarchal society invaded by hollow civilization or frontier
+brutality--all this fortified by incident and illustration, the
+outcome of some youthful experience, and given with the glowing
+enthusiasm of conviction.  Mrs. Peyton listened with the usual
+divided feminine interest between subject and speaker.
+
+Where did this rough, sullen boy--as she had known him--pick up this
+delicate and swift perception, this reflective judgment, and this
+odd felicity of expression?  It was not possible that it was in him
+while he was the companion of her husband's servants or the
+recognized "chum" of the scamp Hooker.  No.  But if HE could have
+changed like this, why not Susy?  Mrs. Peyton, in the conservatism
+of her sex, had never been quite free from fears of her adopted
+daughter's hereditary instincts; but, with this example before her,
+she now took heart.  Perhaps the change was coming slowly; perhaps
+even now what she thought was indifference and coldness was only
+some abnormal preparation or condition.  But she only smiled and
+said:--
+
+"Then, if you think those people have been wronged, you are not on
+our side, Mr. Brant?"
+
+What to an older and more worldly man would have seemed, and
+probably was, only a playful reproach, struck Clarence deeply, and
+brought his pent-up feelings to his lips.
+
+"YOU have never wronged them.  You couldn't do it; it isn't in your
+nature.  I am on YOUR side, and for you and yours always, Mrs.
+Peyton.  From the first time I saw you on the plains, when I was
+brought, a ragged boy, before you by your husband, I think I would
+gladly have laid down my life for you.  I don't mind telling you now
+that I was even jealous of poor Susy, so anxious was I for the
+smallest share in your thoughts, if only for a moment.  You could
+have done anything with me you wished, and I should have been
+happy,--far happier than I have been ever since.  I tell you this,
+Mrs. Peyton, now, because you have just doubted if I might be 'on
+your side,' but I have been longing to tell it all to you before,
+and it is that I am ready to do anything you want,--all you want,--
+to be on YOUR SIDE and at YOUR SIDE, now and forever."
+
+He was so earnest and hearty, and above all so appallingly and
+blissfully happy, in this relief of his feelings, smiling as if it
+were the most natural thing in the world, and so absurdly
+unconscious of his twenty-two years, his little brown curling
+mustache, the fire in his wistful, yearning eyes, and, above all, of
+his clasped hands and lover-like attitude, that Mrs. Peyton--at
+first rigid as stone, then suffused to the eyes--cast a hasty glance
+round the apartment, put her handkerchief to her face, and laughed
+like a girl.
+
+At which Clarence, by no means discomposed, but rather accepting her
+emotion as perfectly natural, joined her heartily, and added:--
+
+"It's so, Mrs. Peyton; I'm glad I told you.  You don't mind it, do
+you?"
+
+But Mrs. Peyton had resumed her gravity, and perhaps a touch of her
+previous misgivings.
+
+"I should certainly be very sorry," she said, looking at him
+critically, "to object to your sharing your old friendship for your
+little playmate with her parents and guardians, or to your
+expressing it to THEM as frankly as to her."
+
+She saw the quick change in his mobile face and the momentary arrest
+of its happy expression.  She was frightened and yet puzzled.  It
+was not the sensitiveness of a lover at the mention of the loved
+one's name, and yet it suggested an uneasy consciousness.  If his
+previous impulsive outburst had been prompted honestly, or even
+artfully, by his passion for Susy, why had he looked so shocked when
+she spoke of her?
+
+But Clarence, whose emotion had been caused by the sudden recall of
+his knowledge of Susy's own disloyalty to the woman whose searching
+eyes were upon him, in his revulsion against the deceit was, for an
+instant, upon the point of divulging all.  Perhaps, if Mrs. Peyton
+had shown more confidence, he would have done so, and materially
+altered the evolution of this story.  But, happily, it is upon these
+slight human weaknesses that your romancer depends, and Clarence,
+with no other reason than the instinctive sympathy of youth with
+youth in its opposition to wisdom and experience, let the
+opportunity pass, and took the responsibility of it out of the hands
+of this chronicler.
+
+Howbeit, to cover his confusion, he seized upon the second idea that
+was in his mind, and stammered, "Susy!  Yes, I wanted to speak to
+you about her."  Mrs. Peyton held her breath, but the young man went
+on, although hesitatingly, with evident sincerity.  "Have you heard
+from any of her relations since--since--you adopted her?"
+
+It seemed a natural enough question, although not the sequitur she
+had expected.  "No," she said carelessly.  "It was well understood,
+after the nearest relation--an aunt by marriage--had signed her
+consent to Susy's adoption, that there should be no further
+intercourse with the family.  There seemed to us no necessity for
+reopening the past, and Susy herself expressed no desire."  She
+stopped, and again fixing her handsome eyes on Clarence, said, "Do
+you know any of them?"
+
+But Clarence by this time had recovered himself, and was able to
+answer carelessly and truthfully that he did not.  Mrs. Peyton,
+still regarding him closely, added somewhat deliberately, "It
+matters little now what relations she has; Mr. Peyton and I have
+complete legal control over her until she is of age, and we can
+easily protect her from any folly of her own or others, or from any
+of the foolish fancies that sometimes overtake girls of her age and
+inexperience."
+
+To her utter surprise, however, Clarence uttered a faint sigh of
+relief, and his face again recovered its expression of boyish
+happiness.  "I'm glad of it, Mrs. Peyton," he said heartily.  "No
+one could understand better what is for her interest in all things
+than yourself.  Not," he said, with hasty and equally hearty loyalty
+to his old playmate, "that I think she would ever go against your
+wishes, or do anything that she knows to be wrong, but she is very
+young and innocent,--as much of a child as ever, don't you think so,
+Mrs. Peyton?"
+
+It was amusing, yet nevertheless puzzling, to hear this boyish young
+man comment upon Susy's girlishness.  And Clarence was serious, for
+he had quite forgotten in Mrs. Peyton's presence the impression of
+superiority which Susy had lately made upon him.  But Mrs. Peyton
+returned to the charge, or, rather, to an attack upon what she
+conceived to be Clarence's old position.
+
+"I suppose she does seem girlish compared to Mary Rogers, who is a
+much more reserved and quiet nature.  But Mary is very charming, Mr.
+Brant, and I am really delighted to have her here with Susy.  She
+has such lovely dark eyes and such good manners.  She has been well
+brought up, and it is easy to see that her friends are superior
+people.  I must write to them to thank them for her visit, and beg
+them to let her stay longer.  I think you said you didn't know
+them?"
+
+But Clarence, whose eyes had been thoughtfully and admiringly
+wandering over every characteristic detail of the charming
+apartment, here raised them to its handsome mistress, with an
+apologetic air and a "No" of such unaffected and complete
+abstraction, that she was again dumbfounded.  Certainly, it could
+not be Mary in whom he was interested.
+
+Abandoning any further inquisition for the present, she let the talk
+naturally fall upon the books scattered about the tables.  The young
+man knew them all far better than she did, with a cognate knowledge
+of others of which she had never heard.  She found herself in the
+attitude of receiving information from this boy, whose boyishness,
+however, seemed to have evaporated, whose tone had changed with the
+subject, and who now spoke with the conscious reserve of knowledge.
+Decidedly, she must have grown rusty in her seclusion.  This came,
+she thought bitterly, of living alone; of her husband's
+preoccupation with the property; of Susy's frivolous caprices.  At
+the end of eight years to be outstripped by a former cattle-boy of
+her husband's, and to have her French corrected in a matter of fact
+way by this recent pupil of the priests, was really too bad!
+Perhaps he even looked down upon Susy!  She smiled dangerously but
+suavely.
+
+"You must have worked so hard to educate yourself from nothing, Mr.
+Brant.  You couldn't read, I think, when you first came to us.  No?
+Could you really?  I know it has been very difficult for Susy to get
+on with her studies in proportion.  We had so much to first
+eradicate in the way of manners, style, and habits of thought which
+the poor child had picked up from her companions, and for which SHE
+was not responsible.  Of course, with a boy that does not signify,"
+she added, with feline gentleness.
+
+But the barbed speech glanced from the young man's smoothly smiling
+abstraction.
+
+"Ah, yes.  But those were happy days, Mrs. Peyton," he answered,
+with an exasperating return of his previous boyish enthusiasm,
+"perhaps because of our ignorance.  I don't think that Susy and I
+are any happier for knowing that the plains are not as flat as we
+believed they were, and that the sun doesn't have to burn a hole in
+them every night when it sets.  But I know I believed that YOU knew
+everything.  When I once saw you smiling over a book in your hand, I
+thought it must be a different one from any that I had ever seen,
+and perhaps made expressly for you.  I can see you there still.  Do
+you know," quite confidentially, "that you reminded me--of course
+YOU were much younger--of what I remembered of my mother?"
+
+But Mrs. Peyton's reply of "Ah, indeed," albeit polite, indicated
+some coldness and lack of animation.  Clarence rose quickly, but
+cast a long and lingering look around him.
+
+"You will come again, Mr. Brant," said the lady more graciously.
+"If you are going to ride now, perhaps you would try to meet Mr.
+Peyton.  He is late already, and I am always uneasy when he is out
+alone,--particularly on one of those half-broken horses, which they
+consider good enough for riding here.  YOU have ridden them before
+and understand them, but I am afraid that's another thing WE have
+got to learn."
+
+When the young man found himself again confronting the glittering
+light of the courtyard, he remembered the interview and the soft
+twilight of the boudoir only as part of a pleasant dream.  There was
+a rude awakening in the fierce wind, which had increased with the
+lengthening shadows.  It seemed to sweep away the half-sensuous
+comfort that had pervaded him, and made him coldly realize that he
+had done nothing to solve the difficulties of his relations to Susy.
+He had lost the one chance of confiding to Mrs. Peyton,--if he had
+ever really intended to do so.  It was impossible for him to do it
+hereafter without a confession of prolonged deceit.
+
+He reached the stables impatiently, where his attention was
+attracted by the sound of excited voices in the corral.  Looking
+within, he was concerned to see that one of the vacqueros was
+holding the dragging bridle of a blown, dusty, and foam-covered
+horse, around whom a dozen idlers were gathered.  Even beneath its
+coating of dust and foam and the half-displaced saddle blanket,
+Clarence immediately recognized the spirited pinto mustang which
+Peyton had ridden that morning.
+
+"What's the matter?" said Clarence, from the gateway.
+
+The men fell apart, glancing at each other.  One said quickly in
+Spanish:--
+
+"Say nothing to HIM.  It is an affair of the house."
+
+But this brought Clarence down like a bombshell among them, not to
+be overlooked in his equal command of their tongue and of them.
+"Ah! come, now.  What drunken piggishness is this?  Speak!"
+
+"The padron has been--perhaps--thrown," stammered the first speaker.
+"His horse arrives,--but he does not.  We go to inform the senora."
+
+"No, you don't! mules and imbeciles!  Do you want to frighten her to
+death?  Mount, every one of you, and follow me!"
+
+The men hesitated, but for only a moment.  Clarence had a fine
+assortment of Spanish epithets, expletives, and objurgations,
+gathered in his rodeo experience at El Refugio, and laid them about
+him with such fervor and discrimination that two or three mules,
+presumably with guilty consciences, mistaking their direction,
+actually cowered against the stockade of the corral in fear.  In
+another moment the vacqueros had hastily mounted, and, with Clarence
+at their head, were dashing down the road towards Santa Inez.  Here
+he spread them in open order in the grain, on either side of the
+track, himself taking the road.
+
+They did not proceed very far.  For when they had reached the
+gradual slope which marked the decline to the second terrace,
+Clarence, obeying an instinct as irresistible as it was
+unaccountable, which for the last few moments had been forcing
+itself upon him, ordered a halt.  The casa and corral had already
+sunk in the plain behind them; it was the spot where the lasso had
+been thrown at him a few evenings before!  Bidding the men converge
+slowly towards the road, he went on more cautiously, with his eyes
+upon the track before him.  Presently he stopped.  There was a
+ragged displacement of the cracked and crumbling soil and the
+unmistakable scoop of kicking hoofs.  As he stooped to examine them,
+one of the men at the right uttered a shout.  By the same strange
+instinct Clarence knew that Peyton was found!
+
+He was, indeed, lying there among the wild oats at the right of the
+road, but without trace of life or scarcely human appearance.  His
+clothes, where not torn and shredded away, were partly turned inside
+out; his shoulders, neck, and head were a shapeless, undistinguishable
+mask of dried earth and rags, like a mummy wrapping.  His left boot
+was gone.  His large frame seemed boneless, and, except for the
+cerements of his mud-stiffened clothing, was limp and sodden.
+
+Clarence raised his head suddenly from a quick examination of the
+body, and looked at the men around him.  One of them was already
+cantering away.  Clarence instantly threw himself on his horse, and,
+putting spurs to the animal, drew a revolver from his holster and
+fired over the man's head.  The rider turned in his saddle, saw his
+pursuer, and pulled up.
+
+"Go back," said Clarence, "or my next shot won't MISS you."
+
+"I was only going to inform the senora," said the man with a shrug
+and a forced smile.
+
+"I will do that," said Clarence grimly, driving him back with him
+into the waiting circle; then turning to them he said slowly, with
+deliberate, smileless irony, "And now, my brave gentlemen,--knights
+of the bull and gallant mustang hunters,--I want to inform YOU that
+I believe that Mr. Peyton was MURDERED, and if the man who killed
+him is anywhere this side of hell, I intend to find him.  Good!  You
+understand me!  Now lift up the body,--you two, by the shoulders;
+you two, by the feet.  Let your horses follow.  For I intend that
+you four shall carry home your master in your arms, on foot.  Now
+forward to the corral by the back trail.  Disobey me, or step out of
+line and"--  He raised the revolver ominously.
+
+If the change wrought in the dead man before them was weird and
+terrifying, no less distinct and ominous was the change that, during
+the last few minutes, had come over the living speaker.  For it was
+no longer the youthful Clarence who sat there, but a haggard,
+prematurely worn, desperate-looking avenger, lank of cheek, and
+injected of eye, whose white teeth glistened under the brown
+mustache and thin pale lips that parted when his restrained breath
+now and then hurriedly escaped them.
+
+As the procession moved on, two men slunk behind with the horses.
+
+"Mother of God!  Who is this wolf's whelp?" said Manuel.
+
+"Hush!" said his companion in a terrified whisper.  "Have you not
+heard?  It is the son of Hamilton Brant, the assassin, the duelist,--
+he who was fusiladed in Sonora."  He made the sign of the cross
+quickly.  "Jesus Maria!  Let them look out who have cause, for the
+blood of his father is in him!"
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+What other speech passed between Clarence and Peyton's retainers was
+not known, but not a word of the interview seemed to have been
+divulged by those present.  It was generally believed and accepted
+that Judge Peyton met his death by being thrown from his half-broken
+mustang, and dragged at its heels, and medical opinion, hastily
+summoned from Santa Inez after the body had been borne to the
+corral, and stripped of its hideous encasings, declared that the
+neck had been broken, and death had followed instantaneously.  An
+inquest was deemed unnecessary.
+
+Clarence had selected Mary to break the news to Mrs. Peyton, and the
+frightened young girl was too much struck with the change still
+visible in his face, and the half authority of his manner, to
+decline, or even to fully appreciate the calamity that had befallen
+them.  After the first benumbing shock, Mrs. Peyton passed into that
+strange exaltation of excitement brought on by the immediate
+necessity for action, followed by a pallid calm, which the average
+spectator too often unfairly accepts as incongruous, inadequate, or
+artificial.  There had also occurred one of those strange
+compensations that wait on Death or disrupture by catastrophe: such
+as the rude shaking down of an unsettled life, the forcible
+realization of what were vague speculations, the breaking of old
+habits and traditions, and the unloosing of half-conscious bonds.
+Mrs. Peyton, without insensibility to her loss or disloyalty to her
+affections, nevertheless felt a relief to know that she was now
+really Susy's guardian, free to order her new life wherever and
+under what conditions she chose as most favorable to it, and that
+she could dispose of this house that was wearying to her when Susy
+was away, and which the girl herself had always found insupportable.
+She could settle this question of Clarence's relations to her
+daughter out of hand without advice or opposition.  She had a
+brother in the East, who would be summoned to take care of the
+property.  This consideration for the living pursued her, even while
+the dead man's presence still awed the hushed house; it was in her
+thoughts as she stood beside his bier and adjusted the flowers on
+his breast, which no longer moved for or against these vanities; and
+it stayed with her even in the solitude of her darkened room.
+
+But if Mrs. Peyton was deficient, it was Susy who filled the popular
+idea of a mourner, and whose emotional attitude of a grief-stricken
+daughter left nothing to be desired.  It was she who, when the house
+was filled with sympathizing friends from San Francisco and the few
+near neighbors who had hurried with condolences, was overflowing in
+her reminiscences of the dead man's goodness to her, and her own
+undying affection; who recalled ominous things that he had said, and
+strange premonitions of her own, the result of her ever-present
+filial anxiety; it was she who had hurried home that afternoon,
+impelled with vague fears of some impending calamity; it was she who
+drew a picture of Peyton as a doting and almost too indulgent
+parent, which Mary Rogers failed to recognize, and which brought
+back vividly to Clarence's recollection her own childish
+exaggerations of the Indian massacre.  I am far from saying that she
+was entirely insincere or merely acting at these moments; at times
+she was taken with a mild hysteria, brought on by the exciting
+intrusion of this real event in her monotonous life, by the
+attentions of her friends, the importance of her suffering as an
+only child, and the advancement of her position as the heiress of
+the Robles Rancho.  If her tears were near the surface, they were at
+least genuine, and filmed her violet eyes and reddened her pretty
+eyelids quite as effectually as if they had welled from the depths
+of her being.  Her black frock lent a matured dignity to her figure,
+and paled her delicate complexion with the refinement of suffering.
+Even Clarence was moved in that dark and haggard abstraction that
+had settled upon him since his strange outbreak over the body of his
+old friend.
+
+The extent of that change had not been noticed by Mrs. Peyton, who
+had only observed that Clarence had treated her grief with a grave
+and silent respect.  She was grateful for that.  A repetition of his
+boyish impulsiveness would have been distasteful to her at such a
+moment.  She only thought him more mature and more subdued, and as
+the only man now in her household his services had been invaluable
+in the emergency.
+
+The funeral had taken place at Santa Inez, where half the county
+gathered to pay their last respects to their former fellow-citizen
+and neighbor, whose legal and combative victories they had admired,
+and whom death had lifted into a public character.  The family were
+returning to the house the same afternoon, Mrs. Peyton and the girls
+in one carriage, the female house-servants in another, and Clarence
+on horseback.  They had reached the first plateau, and Clarence was
+riding a little in advance, when an extraordinary figure, rising
+from the grain beyond, began to gesticulate to him wildly.  Checking
+the driver of the first carriage, Clarence bore down upon the
+stranger.  To his amazement it was Jim Hooker.  Mounted on a
+peaceful, unwieldy plough horse, he was nevertheless accoutred and
+armed after his most extravagant fashion.  In addition to a heavy
+rifle across his saddle-bow he was weighted down with a knife and
+revolvers.  Clarence was in no mood for trifling, and almost rudely
+demanded his business.
+
+"Gord, Clarence, it ain't foolin'.  The Sisters' title was decided
+yesterday."
+
+"I knew it, you fool!  It's YOUR title!  You were already on your
+land and in possession.  What the devil are you doing HERE?"
+
+"Yes,--but," stammered Jim, "all the boys holding that title moved
+up here to 'make the division' and grab all they could.  And I
+followed.  And I found out that they were going to grab Judge
+Peyton's house, because it was on the line, if they could, and
+findin' you was all away, by Gord THEY DID! and they're in it!  And
+I stoled out and rode down here to warn ye."
+
+He stopped, looked at Clarence, glanced darkly around him and then
+down on his accoutrements.  Even in that supreme moment of
+sincerity, he could not resist the possibilities of the situation.
+
+"It's as much as my life's worth," he said gloomily.  "But," with a
+dark glance at his weapons, "I'll sell it dearly."
+
+"Jim!" said Clarence, in a terrible voice, "you're not lying again?"
+
+"No," said Jim hurriedly.  "I swear it, Clarence!  No!  Honest Injin
+this time.  And look.  I'll help you.  They ain't expectin' you yet,
+and they think ye'll come by the road.  Ef I raised a scare off
+there by the corral, while you're creepin' ROUND BY THE BACK, mebbe
+you could get in while they're all lookin' for ye in front, don't
+you see?  I'll raise a big row, and they needn't know but what ye've
+got wind of it and brought a party with you from Santa Inez."
+
+In a flash Clarence had wrought a feasible plan out of Jim's
+fantasy.
+
+"Good," he said, wringing his old companion's hand.  "Go back
+quietly now; hang round the corral, and when you see the carriage
+climbing the last terrace raise your alarm.  Don't mind how loud it
+is, there'll be nobody but the servants in the carriages."
+
+He rode quickly back to the first carriage, at whose window Mrs.
+Peyton's calm face was already questioning him.  He told her briefly
+and concisely of the attack, and what he proposed to do.
+
+"You have shown yourself so strong in matters of worse moment than
+this," he added quietly, "that I have no fears for your courage.  I
+have only to ask you to trust yourself to me, to put you back at
+once in your own home.  Your presence there, just now, is the one
+important thing, whatever happens afterwards."
+
+She recognized his maturer tone and determined manner, and nodded
+assent.  More than that, a faint fire came into her handsome eyes;
+the two girls kindled their own at that flaming beacon, and sat with
+flushed checks and suspended, indignant breath.  They were Western
+Americans, and not over much used to imposition.
+
+"You must get down before we raise the hill, and follow me on foot
+through the grain.  I was thinking," he added, turning to Mrs.
+Peyton, "of your boudoir window."
+
+She had been thinking of it, too, and nodded.
+
+"The vine has loosened the bars," he said.
+
+"If it hasn't, we must squeeze through them," she returned simply.
+
+At the end of the terrace Clarence dismounted, and helped them from
+the carriage.  He then gave directions to the coachmen to follow the
+road slowly to the corral in front of the casa, and tied his horse
+behind the second carriage.  Then, with Mrs. Peyton and the two
+young girls, he plunged into the grain.
+
+It was hot, it was dusty, their thin shoes slipped in the crumbling
+adobe, and the great blades caught in their crape draperies, but
+they uttered no complaint.  Whatever ulterior thought was in their
+minds, they were bent only on one thing at that moment,--on entering
+the house at any hazard.  Mrs. Peyton had lived long enough on the
+frontier to know the magic power of POSSESSION.  Susy already was
+old enough to feel the acute feminine horror of the profanation of
+her own belongings by alien hands.  Clarence, more cognizant of the
+whole truth than the others, was equally silent and determined; and
+Mary Rogers was fired with the zeal of loyalty.
+
+Suddenly a series of blood-curdling yells broke from the direction
+of the corral, and they stopped.  But Clarence at once recognized
+the well-known war-whoop imitation of Jim Hooker,--infinitely more
+gruesome and appalling than the genuine aboriginal challenge.  A
+half dozen shots fired in quick succession had evidently the same
+friendly origin.
+
+"Now is our time," said Clarence eagerly.  "We must run for the
+house."
+
+They had fortunately reached by this time the angle of the adobe
+wall of the casa, and the long afternoon shadows of the building
+were in their favor.  They pressed forward eagerly with the sounds
+of Jim Hooker's sham encounter still in their ears, mingled with
+answering shouts of defiance from strange voices within the building
+towards the front.
+
+They rapidly skirted the wall, even passing boldly before the back
+gateway, which seemed empty and deserted, and the next moment stood
+beside the narrow window of the boudoir.  Clarence's surmises were
+correct; the iron grating was not only loose, but yielded to a
+vigorous wrench, the vine itself acting as a lever to pull out the
+rusty bars.  The young man held out his hand, but Mrs. Peyton, with
+the sudden agility of a young girl, leaped into the window, followed
+by Mary and Susy.  The inner casement yielded to her touch; the next
+moment they were within the room.  Then Mrs. Peyton's flushed and
+triumphant face reappeared at the window.
+
+"It's all right; the men are all in the courtyard, or in the front
+of the house.  The boudoir door is strong, and we can bolt them
+out."
+
+"It won't be necessary," said Clarence quietly; "you will not be
+disturbed."
+
+"But are you not coming in?" she asked timidly, holding the window
+open.
+
+Clarence looked at her with his first faint smile since Peyton's
+death.
+
+"Of course I am, but not in THAT way.  I am going in by THE FRONT
+GATE."
+
+She would have detained him, but, with a quick wave of his hand, he
+left her, and ran swiftly around the wall of the casa toward the
+front.  The gate was half open; a dozen excited men were gathered
+before it and in the archway, and among them, whitened with dust,
+blackened with powder, and apparently glutted with rapine, and still
+holding a revolver in his hand, was Jim Hooker!  As Clarence
+approached, the men quickly retreated inside the gate and closed it,
+but not before he had exchanged a meaning glance with Jim.  When he
+reached the gate, a man from within roughly demanded his business.
+
+"I wish to see the leader of this party," said Clarence quietly.
+
+"I reckon you do," returned the man, with a short laugh.  "But I
+kalkilate HE don't return the compliment."
+
+"He probably will when he reads this note to his employer,"
+continued Clarence still coolly, selecting a paper from his
+pocketbook.  It was addressed to Francisco Robles, Superintendent of
+the Sisters' Title, and directed him to give Mr. Clarence Brant free
+access to the property and the fullest information concerning it.
+The man took it, glanced at it, looked again at Clarence, and then
+passed the paper to a third man among the group in the courtyard.
+The latter read it, and approached the gate carelessly.
+
+"Well, what do you want?"
+
+"I am afraid you have the advantage of me in being able to transact
+business through bars," said Clarence, with slow but malevolent
+distinctness, "and as mine is important, I think you had better open
+the gate to me."
+
+The slight laugh that his speech had evoked from the bystanders was
+checked as the leader retorted angrily:--
+
+"That's all very well; but how do I know that you're the man
+represented in that letter?  Pancho Robles may know you, but I
+don't."
+
+"That you can find out very easily," said Clarence.  "There is a man
+among your party who knows me,--Mr. Hooker.  Ask him."
+
+The man turned, with a quick mingling of surprise and suspicion, to
+the gloomy, imperturbable Hooker.  Clarence could not hear the reply
+of that young gentleman, but it was evidently not wanting in his
+usual dark, enigmatical exaggeration.  The man surlily opened the
+gate.
+
+"All the same," he said, still glancing suspiciously at Hooker, "I
+don't see what HE'S got to do with you."
+
+"A great deal," said Clarence, entering the courtyard, and stepping
+into the veranda; "HE'S ONE OF MY TENANTS."
+
+"Your WHAT?" said the man, with a coarse laugh of incredulity.
+
+"My tenants," repeated Clarence, glancing around the courtyard
+carelessly.  Nevertheless, he was relieved to notice that the three
+or four Mexicans of the party did not seem to be old retainers of
+the rancho.  There was no evidence of the internal treachery he had
+feared.
+
+"Your TENANTS!" echoed the man, with an uneasy glance at the faces
+of the others.
+
+"Yes," said Clarence, with business brevity; "and, for the matter of
+that, although I have no reason to be particularly proud of it, SO
+ARE YOU ALL.  You ask my business here.  It seems to be the same as
+yours,--to hold possession of this house!  With this difference,
+however," he continued, taking a document from his pocket.  "Here is
+the certificate, signed by the County Clerk, of the bill of sale of
+the entire Sisters' title to ME.  It includes the whole two leagues
+from Fair Plains to the old boundary line of this rancho, which you
+forcibly entered this morning.  There is the document; examine it if
+you like.  The only shadow of a claim you could have to this
+property you would have to derive from ME.  The only excuse you
+could have for this act of lawlessness would be orders from ME.  And
+all that you have done this morning is only the assertion of MY
+legal right to this house.  If I disavow your act, as I might, I
+leave you as helpless as any tramp that was ever kicked from a
+doorstep,--as any burglar that was ever collared on the fence by a
+constable."
+
+It was the truth.  There was no denying the authority of the
+document, the facts of the situation, or its ultimate power and
+significance.  There was consternation, stupefaction, and even a
+half-humorous recognition of the absurdity of their position on most
+of the faces around him.  Incongruous as the scene was, it was made
+still more grotesque by the attitude of Jim Hooker.  Ruthlessly
+abandoning the party of convicted trespassers, he stalked gloomily
+over to the side of Clarence, with the air of having been all the
+time scornfully in the secret and a mien of wearied victoriousness,
+and thus halting, he disdainfully expectorated tobacco juice on the
+ground between him and his late companions, as if to form a line of
+demarcation.  The few Mexicans began to edge towards the gateway.
+This defection of his followers recalled the leader, who was no
+coward, to himself again.
+
+"Shut the gate, there!" he shouted.
+
+As its two sides clashed together again, he turned deliberately to
+Clarence.
+
+"That's all very well, young man, as regards the TITLE.  You may
+have BOUGHT up the land, and legally own every square inch of
+howling wilderness between this and San Francisco, and I wish you
+joy of your d--d fool's bargain; you may have got a whole circus
+like that," pointing to the gloomy Jim, "at your back.  But with all
+your money and all your friends you've forgotten one thing.  You
+haven't got possession, and we have."
+
+"That's just where we differ," said Clarence coolly, "for if you
+take the trouble to examine the house, you will see that it is
+already in possession of Mrs. Peyton,--MY TENANT."
+
+He paused to give effect to his revelations.  But he was,
+nevertheless, unprepared for an unrehearsed dramatic situation.
+Mrs. Peyton, who had been tired of waiting, and was listening in the
+passage, at the mention of her name, entered the gallery, followed
+by the young ladies.  The slight look of surprise upon her face at
+the revelation she had just heard of Clarence's ownership, only gave
+the suggestion of her having been unexpectedly disturbed in her
+peaceful seclusion.  One of the Mexicans turned pale, with a
+frightened glance at the passage, as if he expected the figure of
+the dead man to follow.
+
+The group fell back.  The game was over,--and lost.  No one
+recognized it more quickly than the gamblers themselves.  More than
+that, desperate and lawless as they were, they still retained the
+chivalry of Western men, and every hat was slowly doffed to the
+three black figures that stood silently in the gallery.  And even
+apologetic speech began to loosen the clenched teeth of the
+discomfited leader.
+
+"We--were--told there was no one in the house," he stammered.
+
+"And it was the truth," said a pert, youthful, yet slightly affected
+voice.  "For we climbed into the window just as you came in at the
+gate."
+
+It was Susy's words that stung their ears again; but it was Susy's
+pretty figure, suddenly advanced and in a slightly theatrical
+attitude, that checked their anger.  There had been a sudden ominous
+silence, as the whole plot of rescue seemed to be revealed to them
+in those audacious words.  But a sense of the ludicrous, which too
+often was the only perception that ever mitigated the passions of
+such assemblies, here suddenly asserted itself.  The leader burst
+into a loud laugh, which was echoed by the others, and, with waving
+hats, the whole party swept peacefully out through the gate.
+
+"But what does all this mean about YOUR purchasing the land, Mr.
+Brant?" said Mrs. Peyton quickly, fixing her eyes intently on
+Clarence.
+
+A faint color--the useless protest of his truthful blood--came to
+his cheek.
+
+"The house is YOURS, and yours alone, Mrs. Peyton.  The purchase of
+the sisters' title was a private arrangement between Mr. Peyton and
+myself, in view of an emergency like this."
+
+She did not, however, take her proud, searching eyes from his face,
+and he was forced to turn away.
+
+"It was SO like dear, good, thoughtful papa," said Susy.  "Why,
+bless me," in a lower voice, "if that isn't that lying old Jim
+Hooker standing there by the gate!"
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+Judge Peyton had bequeathed his entire property unconditionally to
+his wife.  But his affairs were found to be greatly in disorder, and
+his papers in confusion, and although Mrs. Peyton could discover no
+actual record of the late transaction with Mr. Brant, which had
+saved her the possession of the homestead, it was evident that he
+had spent large sums in speculative attempts to maintain the
+integrity of his estate.  That enormous domain, although perfectly
+unencumbered, had been nevertheless unremunerative, partly through
+the costs of litigation and partly through the systematic
+depredations to which its great size and long line of unprotected
+boundary had subjected it.  It had been invaded by squatters and
+"jumpers," who had sown and reaped crops without discovery; its
+cattle and wild horses had strayed or been driven beyond its ill-
+defined and hopeless limits.  Against these difficulties the widow
+felt herself unable and unwilling to contend, and with the advice of
+her friends and her lawyer, she concluded to sell the estate, except
+that portion covered by the Sisters' title, which, with the
+homestead, had been reconveyed to her by Clarence.  She retired with
+Susy to the house in San Francisco, leaving Clarence to occupy and
+hold the casa, with her servants, for her until order was restored.
+The Robles Rancho thus became the headquarters of the new owner of
+the Sisters' title, from which he administered its affairs, visited
+its incumbencies, overlooked and surveyed its lands, and--
+occasionally--collected its rents.  There were not wanting critics
+who averred that these were scarcely remunerative, and that the
+young San Francisco fine gentleman, who was only Hamilton Brant's
+son, after all, yet who wished to ape the dignity and degree of a
+large landholder, had made a very foolish bargain.  I grieve to say
+that one of his own tenants, namely, Jim Hooker, in his secret heart
+inclined to that belief, and looked upon Clarence's speculation as
+an act of far-seeing and inordinate vanity.
+
+Indeed, the belligerent Jim had partly--and of course darkly--
+intimated something of this to Susy in their brief reunion at the
+casa during the few days that followed its successful reoccupation.
+And Clarence, remembering her older caprices, and her remark on her
+first recognition of him, was quite surprised at the easy
+familiarity of her reception of this forgotten companion of their
+childhood.  But he was still more concerned in noticing, for the
+first time, a singular sympathetic understanding of each other, and
+an odd similarity of occasional action and expression between them.
+It was a part of this monstrous peculiarity that neither the
+sympathy nor the likeness suggested any particular friendship or
+amity in the pair, but rather a mutual antagonism and suspicion.
+Mrs. Peyton, coldly polite to Clarence's former COMPANION, but
+condescendingly gracious to his present TENANT and retainer, did not
+notice it, preoccupied with the annoyance and pain of Susy's
+frequent references to the old days of their democratic equality.
+
+"You don't remember, Jim, the time that you painted my face in the
+wagon, and got me up as an Indian papoose?" she said mischievously.
+
+But Jim, who had no desire to recall his previous humble position
+before Mrs. Peyton or Clarence, was only vaguely responsive.
+Clarence, although joyfully touched at this seeming evidence of
+Susy's loyalty to the past, nevertheless found himself even more
+acutely pained at the distress it caused Mrs. Peyton, and was as
+relieved as she was by Hooker's reticence.  For he had seen little
+of Susy since Peyton's death, and there had been no repetition of
+their secret interviews.  Neither had he, nor she as far as he could
+judge, noticed the omission.  He had been more than usually kind,
+gentle, and protecting in his manner towards her, with little
+reference, however, to any response from her, yet he was vaguely
+conscious of some change in his feelings.  He attributed it, when he
+thought of it at all, to the exciting experiences through which he
+had passed; to some sentiment of responsibility to his dead friend;
+and to another secret preoccupation that was always in his mind.  He
+believed it would pass in time.  Yet he felt a certain satisfaction
+that she was no longer able to trouble him, except, of course, when
+she pained Mrs. Peyton, and then he was half conscious of taking the
+old attitude of the dead husband in mediating between them.  Yet so
+great was his inexperience that he believed, with pathetic
+simplicity of perception, that all this was due to the slow maturing
+of his love for her, and that he was still able to make her happy.
+But this was something to be thought of later.  Just now Providence
+seemed to have offered him a vocation and a purpose that his idle
+adolescence had never known.  He did not dream that his capacity for
+patience was only the slow wasting of his love.
+
+Meantime that more wonderful change and recreation of the Californian
+landscape, so familiar, yet always so young, had come to the rancho.
+The league-long terrace that had yellowed, whitened, and wasted for
+half a year beneath a staring, monotonous sky, now under sailing
+clouds, flying and broken shafts of light, and sharply defined lines
+of rain, had taken a faint hue of resurrection.  The dust that had
+muffled the roads and byways, and choked the low oaks that fringed
+the sunken canada, had long since been laid.  The warm, moist breath
+of the southwest trades had softened the hard, dry lines of the
+landscape, and restored its color as of a picture over which a damp
+sponge had been passed.  The broad expanse of plateau before the
+casa glistened and grew dark.  The hidden woods of the canada,
+cleared and strengthened in their solitude, dripped along the trails
+and hollows that were now transformed into running streams.  The
+distinguishing madrono near the entrance to the rancho had changed
+its crimson summer suit and masqueraded in buff and green.
+
+Yet there were leaden days, when half the prospect seemed to be seen
+through palisades of rain; when the slight incline between the
+terraces became a tumultuous cascade, and the surest hoofs slipped
+on trails of unctuous mud; when cattle were bogged a few yards from
+the highway, and the crossing of the turnpike road was a dangerous
+ford.  There were days of gale and tempest, when the shriveled
+stalks of giant oats were stricken like trees, and lay across each
+other in rigid angles, and a roar as of the sea came up from the
+writhing treetops in the sunken valley.  There were long weary
+nights of steady downpour, hammering on the red tiles of the casa,
+and drumming on the shingles of the new veranda, which was more
+terrible to be borne.  Alone, but for the servants, and an
+occasional storm-stayed tenant from Fair Plains, Clarence might
+have, at such times, questioned the effect of this seclusion upon
+his impassioned nature.  But he had already been accustomed to
+monastic seclusion in his boyish life at El Refugio, and he did not
+reflect that, for that very reason, its indulgences might have been
+dangerous.  From time to time letters reached him from the outer
+world of San Francisco,--a few pleasant lines from Mrs. Peyton, in
+answer to his own chronicle of his half stewardship, giving the news
+of the family, and briefly recounting their movements.  She was
+afraid that Susy's sensitive nature chafed under the restriction of
+mourning in the gay city, but she trusted to bring her back for a
+change to Robles when the rains were over.  This was a poor
+substitute for those brief, happy glimpses of the home circle which
+had so charmed him, but he accepted it stoically.  He wandered over
+the old house, from which the perfume of domesticity seemed to have
+evaporated, yet, notwithstanding Mrs. Peyton's playful permission,
+he never intruded upon the sanctity of the boudoir, and kept it
+jealously locked.
+
+He was sitting in Peyton's business room one morning, when
+Incarnacion entered.  Clarence had taken a fancy to this Indian,
+half steward, half vacquero, who had reciprocated it with a certain
+dog-like fidelity, but also a feline indirectness that was part of
+his nature.  He had been early prepossessed with Clarence through a
+kinsman at El Refugio, where the young American's generosity had
+left a romantic record among the common people.  He had been pleased
+to approve of his follies before the knowledge of his profitless and
+lordly land purchase had commended itself to him as corroborative
+testimony.  "Of true hidalgo blood, mark you," he had said
+oracularly.  "Wherefore was his father sacrificed by mongrels!  As
+to the others, believe me,--bah!"
+
+He stood there, sombrero in hand, murky and confidential, steaming
+through his soaked serape and exhaling a blended odor of equine
+perspiration and cigarette smoke.
+
+"It was, perhaps, as the master had noticed, a brigand's own day!
+Bullying, treacherous, and wicked!  It blew you off your horse if
+you so much as lifted your arms and let the wind get inside your
+serape; and as for the mud,--caramba! in fifty varas your forelegs
+were like bears, and your hoofs were earthen plasters!"
+
+Clarence knew that Incarnacion had not sought him with mere
+meteorological information, and patiently awaited further
+developments.  The vacquero went on:--
+
+"But one of the things this beast of a weather did was to wash down
+the stalks of the grain, and to clear out the trough and hollows
+between, and to make level the fields, and--look you! to uncover the
+stones and rubbish and whatever the summer dust had buried.  Indeed,
+it was even as a miracle that Jose Mendez one day, after the first
+showers, came upon a silver button from his calzas, which he had
+lost in the early summer.  And it was only that morning that,
+remembering how much and with what fire Don Clarencio had sought the
+missing boot from the foot of the Senor Peyton when his body was
+found, he, Incarnacion, had thought he would look for it on the
+falda of the second terrace.  And behold, Mother of God it was
+there!  Soaked with mud and rain, but the same as when the senor was
+alive.  To the very spur!"
+
+He drew the boot from beneath his serape and laid it before
+Clarence.  The young man instantly recognized it, in spite of its
+weather-beaten condition and its air of grotesque and drunken
+inconsistency to the usually trim and correct appearance of Peyton
+when alive.  "It is the same," he said, in a low voice.
+
+"Good!" said Incarnacion.  "Now, if Don Clarencio will examine the
+American spur, he will see--what?  A few horse-hairs twisted and
+caught in the sharp points of the rowel.  Good!  Is it the hair of
+the horse that Senor rode?  Clearly not; and in truth not.  It is
+too long for the flanks and belly of the horse; it is not the same
+color as the tail and the mane.  How comes it there?  It comes from
+the twisted horsehair rope of a riata, and not from the braided
+cowhide thongs of the regular lasso of a vacquero.  The lasso slips
+not much, but holds; the riata slips much and strangles."
+
+"But Mr. Peyton was not strangled," said Clarence quickly.
+
+"No, for the noose of the riata was perhaps large,--who knows?  It
+might have slipped down his arms, pinioned him, and pulled him off.
+Truly!--such has been known before.  Then on the ground it slipped
+again, or he perhaps worked it off to his feet where it caught on
+his spur, and then he was dragged until the boot came off, and
+behold! he was dead."
+
+This had been Clarence's own theory of the murder, but he had only
+half confided it to Incarnacion.  He silently examined the spur with
+the accusing horse-hair, and placed it in his desk.  Incarnacion
+continued:--
+
+"There is not a vacquero in the whole rancho who has a horse-hair
+riata.  We use the braided cowhide; it is heavier and stronger; it
+is for the bull and not the man.  The horse-hair riata comes from
+over the range--south."
+
+There was a dead silence, broken only by the drumming of the rain
+upon the roof of the veranda.  Incarnacion slightly shrugged his
+shoulders.
+
+"Don Clarencio does not know the southern county?  Francisco Robles,
+cousin of the 'Sisters,'--he they call 'Pancho,'--comes from the
+south.  Surely when Don Clarencio bought the title he saw Francisco,
+for he was the steward?"
+
+"I dealt only with the actual owners and through my bankers in San
+Francisco," returned Clarence abstractedly.
+
+Incarnacion looked through the yellow corners of his murky eyes at
+his master.
+
+"Pedro Valdez, who was sent away by Senor Peyton, is the foster-
+brother of Francisco.  They were much together.  Now that Francisco
+is rich from the gold Don Clarencio paid for the title, they come
+not much together.  But Pedro is rich, too.  Mother of God!  He
+gambles and is a fine gentleman.  He holds his head high,--even over
+the Americanos he gambles with.  Truly, they say he can shoot with
+the best of them.  He boasts and swells himself, this Pedro!  He
+says if all the old families were like him, they would drive those
+western swine back over the mountains again."
+
+Clarence raised his eyes, caught a subtle yellow flash from
+Incarnacion's, gazed at him suddenly, and rose.
+
+"I don't think I have ever seen him," he said quietly.  "Thank you
+for bringing me the spur.  But keep the knowledge of it to yourself,
+good Nascio, for the present."
+
+Nascio nevertheless still lingered.  Perceiving which, Clarence
+handed him a cigarette and proceeded to light one himself.  He knew
+that the vacquero would reroll his, and that that always deliberate
+occupation would cover and be an excuse for further confidence.
+
+"The Senora Peyton does not perhaps meet this Pedro in the society
+of San Francisco?"
+
+"Surely not.  The senora is in mourning and goes not out in society,
+nor would she probably go anywhere where she would meet a dismissed
+servant of her husband."
+
+Incarnacion slowly lit his cigarette, and said between the puffs,
+"And the senorita--she would not meet him?"
+
+"Assuredly not."
+
+"And," continued Incarnacion, throwing down the match and putting
+his foot on it, "if this boaster, this turkey-cock, says she did,
+you could put him out like that?"
+
+"Certainly," said Clarence, with an easy confidence he was, however,
+far from feeling, "if he really SAID it--which I doubt."
+
+"Ah, truly," said Incarnacion; "who knows?  It may be another
+Senorita Silsbee."
+
+"The senora's adopted daughter is called MISS PEYTON, friend Nascio.
+You forget yourself," said Clarence quietly.
+
+"Ah, pardon!" said Incarnacion with effusive apology; "but she was
+born Silsbee.  Everybody knows it; she herself has told it to
+Pepita.  The Senor Peyton bequeathed his estate to the Senora
+Peyton.  He named not the senorita!  Eh, what would you?  It is the
+common cackle of the barnyard.  But I say 'Mees Silsbee.'  For look
+you.  There is a Silsbee of Sacramento, the daughter of her aunt,
+who writes letters to her.  Pepita has seen them!  And possibly it
+is only that Mees of whom the brigand Pedro boasts."
+
+"Possibly," said Clarence, "but as far as this rancho is concerned,
+friend Nascio, thou wilt understand--and I look to thee to make the
+others understand--that there is no Senorita SILSBEE here, only the
+Senorita PEYTON, the respected daughter of the senora thy mistress!"
+He spoke with the quaint mingling of familiarity and paternal
+gravity of the Spanish master--a faculty he had acquired at El
+Refugio in a like vicarious position, and which never failed as a
+sign of authority.  "And now," he added gravely, "get out of this,
+friend, with God's blessing, and see that thou rememberest what I
+told thee."
+
+The retainer, with equal gravity, stepped backwards, saluted with
+his sombrero until the stiff brim scraped the floor, and then
+solemnly withdrew.
+
+Left to himself, Clarence remained for an instant silent and
+thoughtful before the oven-like hearth.  So! everybody knew Susy's
+real relations to the Peytons, and everybody but Mrs. Peyton,
+perhaps, knew that she was secretly corresponding with some one of
+her own family.  In other circumstances he might have found some
+excuse for this assertion of her independence and love of her
+kindred, but in her attitude towards Mrs. Peyton it seemed
+monstrous.  It appeared impossible that Mrs. Peyton should not have
+heard of it, or suspected the young girl's disaffection.  Perhaps
+she had,--it was another burden laid upon her shoulders,--but the
+proud woman had kept it to herself.  A film of moisture came across
+his eyes.  I fear he thought less of the suggestion of Susy's secret
+meeting with Pedro, or Incarnacion's implied suspicions that Pedro
+was concerned in Peyton's death, than of this sentimental
+possibility.  He knew that Pedro had been hated by the others on
+account of his position; he knew the instinctive jealousies of the
+race and their predisposition to extravagant misconstruction.  From
+what he had gathered, and particularly from the voices he had
+overheard on the Fair Plains Road, it seemed to him that Pedro was
+more capable of mercenary intrigue than physical revenge.  He was
+not aware of the irrevocable affront put upon Pedro by Peyton, and
+he had consequently attached no importance to Peyton's own half-
+scornful intimation of the only kind of retaliation that Pedro would
+be likely to take.  The unsuccessful attempt upon himself he had
+always thought might have been an accident, or if it was really a
+premeditated assault, it might have been intended actually for
+HIMSELF and not Peyton, as he had first thought, and his old friend
+had suffered for HIM, through some mistake of the assailant.  The
+purpose, which alone seemed wanting, might have been to remove
+Clarence as a possible witness who had overheard their conspiracy--
+how much of it they did not know--on the Fair Plains Road that
+night.  The only clue he held to the murderer in the spur locked in
+his desk, merely led him beyond the confines of the rancho, but
+definitely nowhere else.  It was, however, some relief to know that
+the crime was not committed by one of Peyton's retainers, nor the
+outcome of domestic treachery.
+
+After some consideration he resolved to seek Jim Hooker, who might
+be possessed of some information respecting Susy's relations, either
+from the young girl's own confidences or from Jim's personal
+knowledge of the old frontier families.  From a sense of loyalty to
+Susy and Mrs. Peyton, he had never alluded to the subject before
+him, but since the young girl's own indiscretion had made it a
+matter of common report, however distasteful it was to his own
+feelings, he felt he could not plead the sense of delicacy for her.
+He had great hopes in what he had always believed was only her
+exaggeration of fact as well as feeling.  And he had an instinctive
+reliance on her fellow poseur's ability to detect it.  A few days
+later, when he found he could safely leave the rancho alone, he rode
+to Fair Plains.
+
+The floods were out along the turnpike road, and even seemed to have
+increased since his last journey.  The face of the landscape had
+changed again.  One of the lower terraces had become a wild mere of
+sedge and reeds.  The dry and dusty bed of a forgotten brook had
+reappeared, a full-banked river, crossing the turnpike and
+compelling a long detour before the traveler could ford it.  But as
+he approached the Hopkins farm and the opposite clearing and cabin
+of Jim Hooker, he was quite unprepared for a still more remarkable
+transformation.  The cabin, a three-roomed structure, and its
+cattle-shed had entirely disappeared!  There were no traces or signs
+of inundation.  The land lay on a gentle acclivity above the farm
+and secure from the effects of the flood, and a part of the ploughed
+and cleared land around the site of the cabin showed no evidence of
+overflow on its black, upturned soil.  But the house was gone!  Only
+a few timbers too heavy to be removed, the blighting erasions of a
+few months of occupation, and the dull, blackened area of the site
+itself were to be seen.  The fence alone was intact.
+
+Clarence halted before it, perplexed and astonished.  Scarcely two
+weeks had elapsed since he had last visited it and sat beneath its
+roof with Jim, and already its few ruins had taken upon themselves
+the look of years of abandonment and decay.  The wild land seemed to
+have thrown off its yoke of cultivation in a night, and nature
+rioted again with all its primal forces over the freed soil.  Wild
+oats and mustard were springing already in the broken furrows, and
+lank vines were slimily spreading over a few scattered but still
+unseasoned and sappy shingles.  Some battered tin cans and fragments
+of old clothing looked as remote as if they had been relics of the
+earliest immigration.
+
+Clarence turned inquiringly towards the Hopkins farmhouse across the
+road.  His arrival, however, had already been noticed, as the door
+of the kitchen opened in an anticipatory fashion, and he could see
+the slight figure of Phoebe Hopkins in the doorway, backed by the
+overlooking heads and shoulders of her parents.  The face of the
+young girl was pale and drawn with anxiety, at which Clarence's
+simple astonishment took a shade of concern.
+
+"I am looking for Mr. Hooker," he said uneasily.  "And I don't seem
+to be able to find either him or his house."
+
+"And you don't know what's gone of him?" said the girl quickly.
+
+"No; I haven't seen him for two weeks."
+
+"There, I told you so!" said the girl, turning nervously to her
+parents.  "I knew it.  He hasn't seen him for two weeks."  Then,
+looking almost tearfully at Clarence's face, she said, "No more have
+we."
+
+"But," said Clarence impatiently, "something must have happened.
+Where is his house?"
+
+"Taken away by them jumpers," interrupted the old farmer; "a lot of
+roughs that pulled it down and carted it off in a jiffy before our
+very eyes without answerin' a civil question to me or her.  But he
+wasn't there, nor before, nor since."
+
+"No," added the old woman, with flashing eyes, "or he'd let 'em have
+what ther' was in his six-shooters."
+
+"No, he wouldn't, mother," said the girl impatiently, "he'd CHANGED,
+and was agin all them ideas of force and riotin'.  He was for peace
+and law all the time.  Why, the day before we missed him he was
+tellin' me California never would be decent until people obeyed the
+laws and the titles were settled.  And for that reason, because he
+wouldn't fight agin the law, or without the consent of the law,
+they've killed him, or kidnapped him away."
+
+The girl's lips quivered, and her small brown hands twisted the
+edges of her blue checked apron.  Although this new picture of Jim's
+peacefulness was as astounding and unsatisfactory as his own
+disappearance, there was no doubt of the sincerity of poor Phoebe's
+impression.
+
+In vain did Clarence point out to them there must be some mistake;
+that the trespassers--the so-called jumpers--really belonged to the
+same party as Hooker, and would have no reason to dispossess him;
+that, in fact, they were all HIS, Clarence's, tenants.  In vain he
+assured them of Hooker's perfect security in possession; that he
+could have driven the intruders away by the simple exhibition of his
+lease, or that he could have even called a constable from the town
+of Fair Plains to protect him from mere lawlessness.  In vain did he
+assure them of his intention to find his missing friend, and
+reinstate him at any cost.  The conviction that the unfortunate
+young man had been foully dealt with was fixed in the minds of the
+two women.  For a moment Clarence himself was staggered by it.
+
+"You see," said the young girl, with a kindling face, "the day
+before he came back from Robles, ther' were some queer men hangin'
+round his cabin, but as they were the same kind that went off with
+him the day the Sisters' title was confirmed, we thought nothing of
+it.  But when he came back from you he seemed worried and anxious,
+and wasn't a bit like himself.  We thought perhaps he'd got into
+some trouble there, or been disappointed.  He hadn't, had he, Mr.
+Brant?" continued Phoebe, with an appealing look.
+
+"By no means," said Clarence warmly.  "On the contrary, he was able
+to do his friends good service there, and was successful in what he
+attempted.  Mrs. Peyton was very grateful.  Of course he told you
+what had happened, and what he did for us," continued Clarence, with
+a smile.
+
+He had already amused himself on the way with a fanciful conception
+of the exaggerated account Jim had given of his exploits.  But the
+bewildered girl shook her head.
+
+"No, he didn't tell us ANYTHING."
+
+Clarence was really alarmed.  This unprecedented abstention of
+Hooker's was portentous.
+
+"He didn't say anything but what I told you about law and order,"
+she went on; "but that same night we heard a good deal of talking
+and shouting in the cabin and around it.  And the next day he was
+talking with father, and wanting to know how HE kept his land
+without trouble from outsiders."
+
+"And I said," broke in Hopkins, "that I guessed folks didn't bother
+a man with women folks around, and that I kalkilated that I wasn't
+quite as notorious for fightin' as he was."
+
+"And he said," also interrupted Mrs. Hopkins, "and quite in his
+nat'ral way, too,--gloomy like, you remember, Cyrus," appealingly to
+her husband,--"that that was his curse."
+
+The smile that flickered around Clarence's mouth faded, however, as
+he caught sight of Phoebe's pleading, interrogating eyes.  It was
+really too bad.  Whatever change had come over the rascal it was too
+evident that his previous belligerent personality had had its full
+effect upon the simple girl, and that, hereafter, one pair of honest
+eyes would be wistfully following him.
+
+Perplexed and indignant, Clarence again closely questioned her as to
+the personnel of the trespassing party who had been seen once or
+twice since passing over the field.  He had at last elicited enough
+information to identify one of them as Gilroy, the leader of the
+party that had invaded Robles rancho.  His cheek flushed.  Even if
+they had wished to take a theatrical and momentary revenge on Hooker
+for the passing treachery to them which they had just discovered,
+although such retaliation was only transitory, and they could not
+hold the land, it was an insult to Clarence himself, whose tenant
+Jim was, and subversive of all their legally acquired rights.  He
+would confront this Gilroy at once; his half-wild encampment was
+only a few miles away, just over the boundaries of the Robles
+estate.  Without stating his intention, he took leave of the Hopkins
+family with the cheerful assurance that he would probably return
+with some news of Hooker, and rode away.
+
+The trail became more indistinct and unfrequented as it diverged
+from the main road, and presently lost itself in the slope towards
+the east.  The horizon grew larger: there were faint bluish lines
+upon it which he knew were distant mountains; beyond this a still
+fainter white line--the Sierran snows.  Presently he intersected a
+trail running south, and remarked that it crossed the highway behind
+him, where he had once met the two mysterious horsemen.  They had
+evidently reached the terrace through the wild oats by that trail.
+A little farther on were a few groups of sheds and canvas tents in a
+bare and open space, with scattered cattle and horsemen, exactly
+like an encampment, or the gathering of a country fair.  As Clarence
+rode down towards them he could see that his approach was instantly
+observed, and that a simultaneous movement was made as if to
+anticipate him.  For the first time he realized the possible
+consequences of his visit, single-handed, but it was too late to
+retrace his steps.  With a glance at his holster, he rode boldly
+forward to the nearest shed.  A dozen men hovered near him, but
+something in his quiet, determined manner held them aloof.  Gilroy
+was on the threshold in his shirtsleeves.  A single look showed him
+that Clarence was alone, and with a careless gesture of his hand he
+warned away his own followers.
+
+"You've got a sort of easy way of droppin' in whar you ain't
+invited, Brant," he said with a grim smile, which was not, however,
+without a certain air of approval.  "Got it from your father, didn't
+you?"
+
+"I don't know, but I don't believe HE ever thought it necessary to
+warn twenty men of the approach of ONE," replied Clarence, in the
+same tone.  "I had no time to stand on ceremony, for I have just
+come from Hooker's quarter section at Fair Plains."
+
+Gilroy smiled again, and gazed abstractedly at the sky.
+
+"You know as well as I do," said Clarence, controlling his voice
+with an effort, "that what you have done there will have to be
+undone, if you wish to hold even those lawless men of yours
+together, or keep yourself and them from being run into the brush
+like highwaymen.  I've no fear for that.  Neither do I care to know
+what was your motive in doing it; but I can only tell you that if it
+was retaliation, I alone was and still am responsible for Hooker's
+action at the rancho.  I came here to know just what you have done
+with him, and, if necessary, to take his place."
+
+"You're just a little too previous in your talk, I reckon, Brant,"
+returned Gilroy lazily, "and as to legality, I reckon we stand on
+the same level with yourself, just here.  Beginnin' with what you
+came for: as we don't know where your Jim Hooker is, and as we ain't
+done anythin' to HIM, we don't exackly see what we could do with YOU
+in his place.  Ez to our motives,--well, we've got a good deal to
+say about THAT.  We reckoned that he wasn't exackly the kind of man
+we wanted for a neighbor.  His pow'ful fightin' style didn't suit us
+peaceful folks, and we thought it rather worked agin this new 'law
+and order' racket to have such a man about, to say nuthin' of it
+prejudicin' quiet settlers.  He had too many revolvers for one man
+to keep his eye on, and was altogether too much steeped in blood, so
+to speak, for ordinary washin' and domestic purposes!  His hull get
+up was too deathlike and clammy; so we persuaded him to leave.  We
+just went there, all of us, and exhorted him.  We stayed round there
+two days and nights, takin' turns, talkin' with him, nuthin' more,
+only selecting subjects in his own style to please him, until he
+left!  And then, as we didn't see any use for his house there, we
+took it away.  Them's the cold facts, Brant," he added, with a
+certain convincing indifference that left no room for doubt, "and
+you can stand by 'em.  Now, workin' back to the first principle you
+laid down,--that we'll have to UNDO what we've DONE,--we don't agree
+with you, for we've taken a leaf outer your own book.  We've got it
+here in black and white.  We've got a bill o' sale of Hooker's house
+and possession, and we're on the land in place of him,--AS YOUR
+TENANTS."  He reentered the shanty, took a piece of paper from a
+soap-box on the shell, and held it out to Clarence.  "Here it is.
+It's a fair and square deal, Brant.  We gave him, as it says here, a
+hundred dollars for it!  No humbuggin', but the hard cash, by
+Jiminy!  AND HE TOOK THE MONEY."
+
+The ring of truth in the man's voice was as unmistakable as the
+signature in Jim's own hand.  Hooker had sold out!  Clarence turned
+hastily away.
+
+"We don't know where he went," continued Gilroy grimly, "but I
+reckon you ain't over anxious to see him NOW.  And I kin tell ye
+something to ease your mind,--he didn't require much persuadin'.
+And I kin tell ye another, if ye ain't above takin' advice from
+folks that don't pertend to give it," he added, with the same
+curious look of interest in his face.  "You've done well to get shut
+of him, and if you got shut of a few more of his kind that you trust
+to, you'd do better."
+
+As if to avoid noticing any angry reply from the young man, he
+reentered the cabin and shut the door behind him.  Clarence felt the
+uselessness of further parley, and rode away.
+
+But Gilroy's Parthian arrow rankled as he rode.  He was not greatly
+shocked at Jim's defection, for he was always fully conscious of his
+vanity and weakness; but he was by no means certain that Jim's
+extravagance and braggadocio, which he had found only amusing and,
+perhaps, even pathetic, might not be as provocative and prejudicial
+to others as Gilroy had said.  But, like all sympathetic and
+unselfish natures, he sought to find some excuse for his old
+companion's weakness in his own mistaken judgment.  He had no
+business to bring poor Jim on the land, to subject his singular
+temperament to the temptations of such a life and such surroundings;
+he should never have made use of his services at the rancho.  He had
+done him harm rather than good in his ill-advised, and, perhaps,
+SELFISH attempts to help him.  I have said that Gilroy's parting
+warning rankled in his breast, but not ignobly.  It wounded the
+surface of his sensitive nature, but could not taint or corrupt the
+pure, wholesome blood of the gentleman beneath it.  For in Gilroy's
+warning he saw only his own shortcomings.  A strange fatality had
+marked his friendships.  He had been no help to Jim; he had brought
+no happiness to Susy or Mrs. Peyton, whose disagreement his visit
+seemed to have accented.  Thinking over the mysterious attack upon
+himself, it now seemed to him possible that, in some obscure way,
+his presence at the rancho had precipitated the more serious attack
+on Peyton.  If, as it had been said, there was some curse upon his
+inheritance from his father, he seemed to have made others share it
+with him.  He was riding onward abstractedly, with his head sunk on
+his breast and his eyes fixed upon some vague point between his
+horse's sensitive ears, when a sudden, intelligent, forward pricking
+of them startled him, and an apparition arose from the plain before
+him that seemed to sweep all other sense away.
+
+It was the figure of a handsome young horseman as abstracted as
+himself, but evidently on better terms with his own personality.  He
+was dark haired, sallow cheeked, and blue eyed,--the type of the old
+Spanish Californian.  A burnt-out cigarette was in his mouth, and he
+was riding a roan mustang with the lazy grace of his race.  But what
+arrested Clarence's attention more than his picturesque person was
+the narrow, flexible, long coil of gray horse-hair riata which hung
+from his saddle-bow, but whose knotted and silver-beaded terminating
+lash he was swirling idly in his narrow brown hand.  Clarence knew
+and instantly recognized it as the ordinary fanciful appendage of a
+gentleman rider, used for tethering his horse on lonely plains, and
+always made the object of the most lavish expenditure of decoration
+and artistic skill.  But he was as suddenly filled with a blind,
+unreasoning sense of repulsion and fury, and lifted his eyes to the
+man as he approached.  What the stranger saw in Clarence's blazing
+eyes no one but himself knew, for his own became fixed and staring;
+his sallow cheeks grew lanker and livid; his careless, jaunty
+bearing stiffened into rigidity, and swerving his horse to one side
+he suddenly passed Clarence at a furious gallop.  The young American
+wheeled quickly, and for an instant his knees convulsively gripped
+the flanks of his horse to follow.  But the next moment he recalled
+himself, and with an effort began to collect his thoughts.  What was
+he intending to do, and for what reason!  He had met hundreds of
+such horsemen before, and caparisoned and accoutred like this, even
+to the riata.  And he certainly was not dressed like either of the
+mysterious horsemen whom he had overheard that moonlight evening.
+He looked back; the stranger had already slackened his pace, and was
+slowly disappearing.  Clarence turned and rode on his way.
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+Without disclosing the full extent of Jim's defection and desertion,
+Clarence was able to truthfully assure the Hopkins family of his
+personal safety, and to promise that he would continue his quest,
+and send them further news of the absentee.  He believed it would be
+found that Jim had been called away on some important business, but
+that not daring to leave his new shanty exposed and temptingly
+unprotected, he had made a virtue of necessity by selling it to his
+neighbors, intending to build a better house on its site after his
+return.  Having comforted Phoebe, and impulsively conceived further
+plans for restoring Jim to her,--happily without any recurrence of
+his previous doubts as to his own efficacy as a special Providence,--
+he returned to the rancho.  If he thought again of Jim's defection
+and Gilroy's warning, it was only to strengthen himself to a clearer
+perception of his unselfish duty and singleness of purpose.  He
+would give up brooding, apply himself more practically to the
+management of the property, carry out his plans for the foundation
+of a Landlords' Protective League for the southern counties, become
+a candidate for the Legislature, and, in brief, try to fill Peyton's
+place in the county as he had at the rancho.  He would endeavor to
+become better acquainted with the half-breed laborers on the estate
+and avoid the friction between them and the Americans; he was
+conscious that he had not made that use of his early familiarity
+with their ways and language which he might have done.  If,
+occasionally, the figure of the young Spaniard whom he had met on
+the lonely road obtruded itself on him, it was always with the
+instinctive premonition that he would meet him again, and the
+mystery of the sudden repulsion be in some way explained.  Thus
+Clarence!  But the momentary impulse that had driven him to Fair
+Plains, the eagerness to set his mind at rest regarding Susy and her
+relatives, he had utterly forgotten.
+
+Howbeit some of the energy and enthusiasm that he breathed into
+these various essays made their impression.  He succeeded in forming
+the Landlords' League; under a commission suggested by him the
+straggling boundaries of Robles and the adjacent claims were
+resurveyed, defined, and mutually protected; even the lawless
+Gilroy, from extending an amused toleration to the young administrator,
+grew to recognize and accept him; the peons and vacqueros began to
+have faith in a man who acknowledged them sufficiently to rebuild
+the ruined Mission Chapel on the estate, and save them the long
+pilgrimage to Santa Inez on Sundays and saints' days; the San
+Francisco priest imported from Clarence's old college at San Jose,
+and an habitual guest at Clarence's hospitable board, was grateful
+enough to fill his flock with loyalty to the young padron.
+
+He had returned from a long drive one afternoon, and had just thrown
+himself into an easy-chair with the comfortable consciousness of a
+rest fairly earned.  The dull embers of a fire occasionally glowed
+in the oven-like hearth, although the open casement of a window let
+in the soft breath of the southwest trades.  The angelus had just
+rung from the restored chapel, and, mellowed by distance, seemed to
+Clarence to lend that repose to the wind-swept landscape that it had
+always lacked.
+
+Suddenly his quick ear detected the sound of wheels in the ruts of
+the carriage way.  Usually his visitors to the casa came on
+horseback, and carts and wagons used only the lower road.  As the
+sound approached nearer, an odd fancy filled his heart with
+unaccountable pleasure.  Could it be Mrs. Peyton making an
+unexpected visit to the rancho?  He held his breath.  The vehicle
+was now rolling on into the patio.  The clatter of hoofs and a halt
+were followed by the accents of women's voices.  One seemed
+familiar.  He rose quickly, as light footsteps ran along the
+corridor, and then the door opened impetuously to the laughing face
+of Susy!
+
+He came towards her hastily, yet with only the simple impulse of
+astonishment.  He had no thought of kissing her, but as he
+approached, she threw her charming head archly to one side, with a
+mischievous knitting of her brows and a significant gesture towards
+the passage, that indicated the proximity of a stranger and the
+possibility of interruption.
+
+"Hush!  Mrs. McClosky's here," she whispered.
+
+"Mrs. McClosky?" repeated Clarence vaguely.
+
+"Yes, of course," impatiently.  "My Aunt Jane.  Silly!  We just cut
+away down here to surprise you.  Aunty's never seen the place, and
+here was a good chance."
+
+"And your mother--Mrs. Peyton?  Has she--does she?"--stammered
+Clarence.
+
+"Has she--does she?" mimicked Susy, with increasing impatience.
+"Why, of course she DOESN'T know anything about it.  She thinks I'm
+visiting Mary Rogers at Oakland.  And I am--AFTERWARDS," she
+laughed.  "I just wrote to Aunt Jane to meet me at Alameda, and we
+took the stage to Santa Inez and drove on here in a buggy.  Wasn't
+it real fun?  Tell me, Clarence!  You don't say anything!  Tell me--
+wasn't it real fun?"
+
+This was all so like her old, childlike, charming, irresponsible
+self, that Clarence, troubled and bewildered as he was, took her
+hands and drew her like a child towards him.
+
+"Of course," she went on, yet stopping to smell a rosebud in his
+buttonhole, "I have a perfect right to come to my own home, goodness
+knows! and if I bring my own aunt, a married woman, with me,--
+although," loftily, "there may be a young unmarried gentleman alone
+there,--still I fail to see any impropriety in it!"
+
+He was still holding her; but in that instant her manner had
+completely changed again; the old Susy seemed to have slipped away
+and evaded him, and he was retaining only a conscious actress in his
+arms.
+
+"Release me, Mr. Brant, please," she said, with a languid affected
+glance behind her; "we are not alone."
+
+Then, as the rustling of a skirt sounded nearer in the passage, she
+seemed to change back to her old self once more, and with a
+lightning flash of significance whispered,--
+
+"She knows everything!"
+
+To add to Clarence's confusion, the woman who entered cast a quick
+glance of playful meaning on the separating youthful pair.  She was
+an ineffective blonde with a certain beauty that seemed to be
+gradually succumbing to the ravages of paint and powder rather than
+years; her dress appeared to have suffered from an equally unwise
+excess of ornamentation and trimming, and she gave the general
+impression of having been intended for exhibition in almost any
+other light than the one in which she happened to be.  There were
+two or three mud-stains on the laces of her sleeve and underskirt
+that were obtrusively incongruous.  Her voice, which had, however, a
+ring of honest intention in it, was somewhat over-strained, and
+evidently had not yet adjusted itself to the low-ceilinged,
+conventual-like building.
+
+"There, children, don't mind me!  I know I'm not on in this scene,
+but I got nervous waiting there, in what you call the 'salon,' with
+only those Greaser servants staring round me in a circle, like a
+regular chorus.  My! but it's anteek here--regular anteek--Spanish."
+Then, with a glance at Clarence, "So this is Clarence Brant,--your
+Clarence?  Interduce me, Susy."
+
+In his confusion of indignation, pain, and even a certain conception
+of the grim ludicrousness of the situation, Clarence grasped
+despairingly at the single sentence of Susy's.  "In my own home."
+Surely, at least, it was HER OWN HOME, and as he was only the
+business agent of her adopted mother, he had no right to dictate to
+her under what circumstances she should return to it, or whom she
+should introduce there.  In her independence and caprice Susy might
+easily have gone elsewhere with this astounding relative, and would
+Mrs. Peyton like it better?  Clinging to this idea, his instinct of
+hospitality asserted itself.  He welcomed Mrs. McClosky with nervous
+effusion:--
+
+"I am only Mrs. Peyton's major domo here, but any guest of her
+DAUGHTER'S is welcome."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. McClosky, with ostentatious archness, "I reckon
+Susy and I understand your position here, and you've got a good
+berth of it.  But we won't trouble you much on Mrs. Peyton's
+account, will we, Susy?  And now she and me will just take a look
+around the shanty,--it is real old Spanish anteek, ain't it?--and
+sorter take stock of it, and you young folks will have to tear
+yourselves apart for a while, and play propriety before me.  You've
+got to be on your good behavior while I'm here, I can tell you!  I'm
+a heavy old 'doo-anna.'  Ain't I, Susy?  School-ma'ms and mother
+superiors ain't in the game with ME for discipline."
+
+She threw her arms around the young girl's waist and drew her
+towards her affectionately, an action that slightly precipitated
+some powder upon the black dress of her niece.  Susy glanced
+mischievously at Clarence, but withdrew her eyes presently to let
+them rest with unmistakable appreciation and admiration on her
+relative.  A pang shot through Clarence's breast.  He had never seen
+her look in that way at Mrs. Peyton.  Yet here was this stranger,
+provincial, overdressed, and extravagant, whose vulgarity was only
+made tolerable through her good humor, who had awakened that
+interest which the refined Mrs. Peyton had never yet been able to
+touch.  As Mrs. McClosky swept out of the room with Susy he turned
+away with a sinking heart.
+
+Yet it was necessary that the Spanish house servants should not
+suspect this treason to their mistress, and Clarence stopped their
+childish curiosity about the stranger with a careless and easy
+acceptance of Susy's sudden visit in the light of an ordinary
+occurrence, and with a familiarity towards Mrs. McClosky which
+became the more distasteful to him in proportion as he saw that it
+was evidently agreeable to her.  But, easily responsive, she became
+speedily confidential.  Without a single question from himself, or a
+contributing remark from Susy, in half an hour she had told him her
+whole history.  How, as Jane Silsbee, an elder sister of Susy's
+mother, she had early eloped from the paternal home in Kansas with
+McClosky, a strolling actor.  How she had married him and gone on
+the stage under his stage name, effectively preventing any
+recognition by her family.  How, coming to California, where her
+husband had become manager of the theatre at Sacramento, she was
+indignant to find that her only surviving relation, a sister-in-law,
+living in the same place, had for a money consideration given up all
+claim to the orphaned Susy, and how she had resolved to find out "if
+the poor child was happy."  How she succeeded in finding out that
+she was not happy.  How she wrote to her, and even met her secretly
+at San Francisco and Oakland, and how she had undertaken this
+journey partly for "a lark," and partly to see Clarence and the
+property.  There was no doubt of the speaker's sincerity; with this
+outrageous candor there was an equal obliviousness of any indelicacy
+in her conduct towards Mrs. Peyton that seemed hopeless.  Yet he
+must talk plainly to her; he must say to her what he could not say
+to Susy; upon HER Mrs. Peyton's happiness--he believed he was
+thinking of Susy's also--depended.  He must take the first
+opportunity of speaking to her alone.
+
+That opportunity came sooner than he had expected.  After dinner,
+Mrs. McClosky turned to Susy, and playfully telling her that she had
+"to talk business" with Mr. Brant, bade her go to the salon and
+await her.  When the young girl left the room, she looked at
+Clarence, and, with that assumption of curtness with which coarse
+but kindly natures believe they overcome the difficulty of delicate
+subjects, said abruptly:--
+
+"Well, young man, now what's all this between you and Susy?  I'm
+looking after her interests--same as if she was my own girl.  If
+you've got anything to say, now's your time.  And don't you shilly-
+shally too long over it, either, for you might as well know that a
+girl like that can have her pick and choice, and be beholden to no
+one; and when she don't care to choose, there's me and my husband
+ready to do for her all the same.  We mightn't be able to do the
+anteek Spanish Squire, but we've got our own line of business, and
+it's a comfortable one."
+
+To have this said to him under the roof of Mrs. Peyton, from whom,
+in his sensitiveness, he had thus far jealously guarded his own
+secret, was even more than Clarence's gentleness could stand, and
+fixed his wavering resolution.
+
+"I don't think we quite understand each other, Mrs. McClosky," he
+said coldly, but with glittering eyes.  "I have certainly something
+to say to you; if it is not on a subject as pleasant as the one you
+propose, it is, nevertheless, one that I think you and I are more
+competent to discuss together."
+
+Then, with quiet but unrelenting directness, he pointed out to her
+that Susy was a legally adopted daughter of Mrs. Peyton, and, as a
+minor, utterly under her control; that Mrs. Peyton had no knowledge
+of any opposing relatives; and that Susy had not only concealed the
+fact from her, but that he was satisfied that Mrs. Peyton did not
+even know of Susy's discontent and alienation; that she had tenderly
+and carefully brought up the helpless orphan as her own child, and
+even if she had not gained her affection was at least entitled to
+her obedience and respect; that while Susy's girlish caprice and
+inexperience excused HER conduct, Mrs. Peyton and her friends would
+have a right to expect more consideration from a person of Mrs.
+McClosky's maturer judgment.  That for these reasons, and as the
+friend of Mrs. Peyton, whom he could alone recognize as Susy's
+guardian and the arbiter of her affections, he must decline to
+discuss the young girl with any reference to himself or his own
+intentions.
+
+An unmistakable flush asserted itself under the lady's powder.
+
+"Suit yourself, young man, suit yourself," she said, with equally
+direct resentment and antagonism; "only mebbee you'll let me tell
+you that Jim McClosky ain't no fool, and mebbee knows what lawyers
+think of an arrangement with a sister-in-law that leaves a real
+sister out!  Mebbee that's a 'Sister's title' you ain't thought of,
+Mr. Brant!  And mebbee you'll find out that your chance o' gettin'
+Mrs. Peyton's consent ain't as safe to gamble on as you reckon it
+is.  And mebbee, what's more to the purpose, if you DID get it, it
+might not be just the trump card to fetch Susy with!  And to wind
+up, Mr. Brant, when you DO have to come down to the bed-rock and me
+and Jim McClosky, you may find out that him and me have discovered a
+better match for Susy than the son of old Ham Brant, who is trying
+to play the Spanish grandee off his father's money on a couple of
+women.  And we mayn't have to go far to do it--or to get THE REAL
+THING, Mr. Brant!"
+
+Too heartsick and disgusted to even notice the slur upon himself or
+the import of her last words, Clarence only rose and bowed as she
+jumped up from the table.  But as she reached the door he said, half
+appealingly:--
+
+"Whatever are your other intentions, Mrs. McClosky, as we are both
+Susy's guests, I beg you will say nothing of this to her while we
+are here, and particularly that you will not allow her to think for
+a moment that I have discussed MY relations to her with anybody."
+
+She flung herself out of the door without a reply; but on entering
+the dark low-ceilinged drawing-room she was surprised to find that
+Susy was not there.  She was consequently obliged to return to the
+veranda, where Clarence had withdrawn, and to somewhat
+ostentatiously demand of the servants that Susy should be sent to
+her room at once.  But the young girl was not in her own room, and
+was apparently nowhere to be found.  Clarence, who had now fully
+determined as a last resource to make a direct appeal to Susy
+herself, listened to this fruitless search with some concern.  She
+could not have gone out in the rain, which was again falling.  She
+might be hiding somewhere to avoid a recurrence of the scene she had
+perhaps partly overheard.  He turned into the corridor that led to
+Mrs. Peyton's boudoir.  As he knew that it was locked, he was
+surprised to see by the dim light of the hanging lamp that a
+duplicate key to the one in his desk was in the lock.  It must be
+Susy's, and the young girl had probably taken refuge there.  He
+knocked gently.  There was a rustle in the room and the sound of a
+chair being moved, but no reply.  Impelled by a sudden instinct he
+opened the door, and was met by a cool current of air from some open
+window.  At the same moment the figure of Susy approached him from
+the semi-darkness of the interior.
+
+"I did not know you were here," said Clarence, much relieved, he
+knew not why, "but I am glad, for I wanted to speak with you alone
+for a few moments."
+
+She did not reply, but he drew a match from his pocket and lit the
+two candles which he knew stood on the table.  The wick of one was
+still warm, as if it had been recently extinguished.  As the light
+slowly radiated, he could see that she was regarding him with an air
+of affected unconcern, but a somewhat heightened color.  It was like
+her, and not inconsistent with his idea that she had come there to
+avoid an after scene with Mrs. McClosky or himself, or perhaps both.
+The room was not disarranged in any way.  The window that was opened
+was the casement of the deep embrasured one in the rear wall, and
+the light curtain before it still swayed occasionally in the night
+wind.
+
+"I'm afraid I had a row with your aunt, Susy," he began lightly, in
+his old familiar way; "but I had to tell her I didn't think her
+conduct to Mrs. Peyton was exactly the square thing towards one who
+had been as devoted to you as she has been."
+
+"Oh, for goodness' sake, don't go over all that again," said Susy
+impatiently.  "I've had enough of it."
+
+Clarence flashed, but recovered himself.
+
+"Then you overheard what I said, and know what I think," he said
+calmly.
+
+"I knew it BEFORE," said the young girl, with a slight supercilious
+toss of the head, and yet a certain abstraction of manner as she
+went to the window and closed it.  "Anybody could see it!  I know
+you always wanted me to stay here with Mrs. Peyton, and be coddled
+and monitored and catechised and shut up away from any one, until
+YOU had been coddled and monitored and catechised by somebody else
+sufficiently to suit her ideas of your being a fit husband for me.
+I told aunty it was no use our coming here to--to"--
+
+"To do what?" asked Clarence.
+
+"To put some spirit into you," said the young girl, turning upon him
+sharply; "to keep you from being tied to that woman's apron-strings.
+To keep her from making a slave of you as she would of me.  But it
+is of no use.  Mary Rogers was right when she said you had no wish
+to please anybody but Mrs. Peyton, and no eyes for anybody but her.
+And if it hadn't been too ridiculous, considering her age and yours,
+she'd say you were dead in love with her."
+
+For an instant Clarence felt the blood rush to his face and then
+sink away, leaving him pale and cold.  The room, which had seemed to
+whirl around him, and then fade away, returned with appalling
+distinctness,--the distinctness of memory,--and a vision of the
+first day that he had seen Mrs. Peyton sitting there, as he seemed
+to see her now.  For the first time there flashed upon him the
+conviction that the young girl had spoken the truth, and had
+brusquely brushed the veil from his foolish eyes.  He WAS in love
+with Mrs. Peyton!  That was what his doubts and hesitation regarding
+Susy meant.  That alone was the source, secret, and limit of his
+vague ambition.
+
+But with the conviction came a singular calm.  In the last few
+moments he seemed to have grown older, to have loosed the bonds of
+old companionship with Susy, and the later impression she had given
+him of her mature knowledge, and moved on far beyond her years and
+experience.  And it was with an authority that was half paternal,
+and in a voice he himself scarcely recognized, that he said:--
+
+"If I did not know you were prejudiced by a foolish and indiscreet
+woman, I should believe that you were trying to insult me as you
+have your adopted mother, and would save you the pain of doing both
+in HER house by leaving it now and forever.  But because I believe
+you are controlled against your best instinct by that woman, I shall
+remain here with you to frustrate her as best I can, or until I am
+able to lay everything before Mrs. Peyton except the foolish speech
+you have just made."
+
+The young girl laughed.  "Why not THAT one too, while you're about
+it?  See what she'll say."
+
+"I shall tell her," continued Clarence calmly, "only what YOU
+yourself have made it necessary for me to tell her to save you from
+folly and disgrace, and only enough to spare her the mortification
+of hearing it first from her own servants."
+
+"Hearing WHAT from her own servants?  What do you mean?  How dare
+you?" demanded the young girl sharply.
+
+She was quite real in her anxiety now, although her attitude of
+virtuous indignation struck him as being like all her emotional
+expression, namely, acting.
+
+"I mean that the servants know of your correspondence with Mrs.
+McClosky, and that she claims to be your aunt," returned Clarence.
+"They know that you confided to Pepita.  They believe that either
+Mrs. McClosky or you have seen"--
+
+He had stopped suddenly.  He was about to say that the servants
+(particularly Incarnacion) knew that Pedro had boasted of having met
+Susy, when, for the first time, the tremendous significance of what
+he had hitherto considered as merely an idle falsehood flashed upon
+him.
+
+"Seen whom?" repeated Susy in a higher voice, impatiently stamping
+her foot.
+
+Clarence looked at her, and in her excited, questioning face saw a
+confirmation of his still half-formed suspicions.  In his own abrupt
+pause and knitted eyebrows she must have read his thoughts also.
+Their eyes met.  Her violet pupils dilated, trembled, and then
+quickly shifted as she suddenly stiffened into an attitude of
+scornful indifference, almost grotesque in its unreality.  His eyes
+slowly turned to the window, the door, the candles on the table and
+the chair before it, and then came back to her face again.  Then he
+drew a deep breath.
+
+"I give no heed to the idle gossip of servants, Susy," he said
+slowly.  "I have no belief that you have ever contemplated anything
+worse than an act of girlish folly, or the gratification of a
+passing caprice.  Neither do I want to appeal to you or frighten
+you, but I must tell you now, that I know certain facts that might
+make such a simple act of folly monstrous, inconceivable in YOU, and
+almost accessory to a crime!  I can tell you no more.  But so
+satisfied am I of such a possibility, that I shall not scruple to
+take any means--the strongest--to prevent even the remotest chance
+of it.  Your aunt has been looking for you; you had better go to her
+now.  I will close the room and lock the door.  Meantime, I should
+advise you not to sit so near an open window with a candle at night
+in this locality.  Even if it might not be dangerous for you, it
+might be fatal to the foolish creatures it might attract."
+
+He took the key from the door as he held it open for her to pass
+out.  She uttered a shrill little laugh, like a nervous, mischievous
+child, and, slipping out of her previous artificial attitude as if
+it had been a mantle, ran out of the room.
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+As Susy's footsteps died away, Clarence closed the door, walked to
+the window, and examined it closely.  The bars had been restored
+since he had wrenched them off to give ingress to the family on the
+day of recapture.  He glanced around the room; nothing seemed to
+have been disturbed.  Nevertheless he was uneasy.  The suspicions of
+a frank, trustful nature when once aroused are apt to be more
+general and far-reaching than the specific distrusts of the
+disingenuous, for they imply the overthrow of a whole principle and
+not a mere detail.  Clarence's conviction that Susy had seen Pedro
+recently since his dismissal led him into the wildest surmises of
+her motives.  It was possible that without her having reason to
+suspect Pedro's greater crime, he might have confided to her his
+intention of reclaiming the property and installing her as the
+mistress and chatelaine of the rancho.  The idea was one that might
+have appealed to Susy's theatrical imagination.  He recalled Mrs.
+McClosky's sneer at his own pretensions and her vague threats of a
+rival of more lineal descent.  The possible infidelity of Susy to
+himself touched him lightly when the first surprise was over;
+indeed, it scarcely could be called infidelity, if she knew and
+believed Mary Rogers's discovery; and the conviction that he and she
+had really never loved each other now enabled him, as he believed,
+to look at her conduct dispassionately.  Yet it was her treachery to
+Mrs. Peyton and not to himself that impressed him most, and perhaps
+made him equally unjust, through his affections.
+
+He extinguished the candles, partly from some vague precautions he
+could not explain, and partly to think over his fears in the
+abstraction and obscurity of the semi-darkness.  The higher windows
+suffused a faint light on the ceiling, and, assisted by the dark
+lantern-like glow cast on the opposite wall by the tunnel of the
+embrasured window, the familiar outlines of the room and its
+furniture came back to him.  Somewhat in this fashion also, in the
+obscurity and quiet, came back to him the events he had overlooked
+and forgotten.  He recalled now some gossip of the servants, and
+hints dropped by Susy of a violent quarrel between Peyton and Pedro,
+which resulted in Pedro's dismissal, but which now seemed clearly
+attributable to some graver cause than inattention and insolence.
+He recalled Mary Rogers's playful pleasantries with Susy about
+Pedro, and Susy's mysterious air, which he had hitherto regarded
+only as part of her exaggeration.  He remembered Mrs. Peyton's
+unwarrantable uneasiness about Susy, which he had either overlooked
+or referred entirely to himself; she must have suspected something.
+To his quickened imagination, in this ruin of his faith and trust,
+he believed that Hooker's defection was either part of the
+conspiracy, or that he had run away to avoid being implicated with
+Susy in its discovery.  This, too, was the significance of Gilroy's
+parting warning.  He and Mrs. Peyton alone had been blind and
+confiding in the midst of this treachery, and even HE had been blind
+to his own real affections.
+
+The wind had risen again, and the faint light on the opposite wall
+grew tremulous and shifting with the movement of the foliage
+without.  But presently the glow became quite obliterated, as if by
+the intervention of some opaque body outside the window.  He rose
+hurriedly and went to the casement.  But at the same moment he
+fancied he heard the jamming of a door or window in quite another
+direction, and his examination of the casement before him showed him
+only the silver light of the thinly clouded sky falling
+uninterruptedly through the bars and foliage on the interior of the
+whitewashed embrasure.  Then a conception of his mistake flashed
+across him.  The line of the casa was long, straggling, and exposed
+elsewhere; why should the attempt to enter or communicate with any
+one within be confined only to this single point?  And why not
+satisfy himself at once if any trespassers were lounging around the
+walls, and then confront them boldly in the open?  Their discovery
+and identification was as important as the defeat of their intentions.
+
+He relit the candle, and, placing it on a small table by the wall
+beyond the visual range of the window, rearranged the curtain so
+that, while it permitted the light to pass out, it left the room in
+shadow.  He then opened the door softly, locked it behind him, and
+passed noiselessly into the hall.  Susy's and Mrs. McClosky's rooms
+were at the further end of the passage, but between them and the
+boudoir was the open patio, and the low murmur of the voices of
+servants, who still lingered until he should dismiss them for the
+night.  Turning back, he moved silently down the passage, until he
+reached the narrow arched door to the garden.  This he unlocked and
+opened with the same stealthy caution.  The rain had recommenced.
+Not daring to risk a return to his room, he took from a peg in the
+recess an old waterproof cloak and "sou'wester" of Peyton's, which
+still hung there, and passed out into the night, locking the door
+behind him.  To keep the knowledge of his secret patrol from the
+stablemen, he did not attempt to take out his own horse, but trusted
+to find some vacquero's mustang in the corral.  By good luck an old
+"Blue Grass" hack of Peyton's, nearest the stockade as he entered,
+allowed itself to be quickly caught.  Using its rope headstall for a
+bridle, Clarence vaulted on its bare back, and paced cautiously out
+into the road.  Here he kept the curve of the long line of stockade
+until he reached the outlying field where, half hidden in the
+withered, sapless, but still standing stalks of grain, he slowly
+began a circuit of the casa.
+
+The misty gray dome above him, which an invisible moon seemed to
+have quicksilvered over, alternately lightened and darkened with
+passing gusts of fine rain.  Nevertheless he could see the outline
+of the broad quadrangle of the house quite distinctly, except on the
+west side, where a fringe of writhing willows beat the brown adobe
+walls with their imploring arms at every gust.  Elsewhere nothing
+moved; the view was uninterrupted to where the shining, watery sky
+met the equally shining, watery plain.  He had already made a half
+circuit of the house, and was still noiselessly picking his way
+along the furrows, muffled with soaked and broken-down blades, and
+the velvety upspringing of the "volunteer" growth, when suddenly,
+not fifty yards before him, without sound or warning, a figure rode
+out of the grain upon the open crossroad, and deliberately halted
+with a listless, abstracted, waiting air.  Clarence instantly
+recognized one of his own vacqueros, an undersized half-breed, but
+he as instantly divined that he was only an outpost or confederate,
+stationed to give the alarm.  The same precaution had prevented each
+hearing the other, and the lesser height of the vacquero had
+rendered him indistinguishable as he preceded Clarence among the
+grain.  As the young man made no doubt that the real trespasser was
+nearer the casa, along the line of willows, he wheeled to intercept
+him without alarming his sentry.  Unfortunately, his horse answered
+the rope bridle clumsily, and splashed in striking out.  The watcher
+quickly raised his head, and Clarence knew that his only chance was
+now to suppress him.  Determined to do this at any hazard, with a
+threatening gesture he charged boldly down upon him.
+
+But he had not crossed half the distance between them when the man
+uttered an appalling cry, so wild and despairing that it seemed to
+chill even the hot blood in Clarence's veins, and dashed frenziedly
+down the cross-road into the interminable plain.  Before Clarence
+could determine if that cry was a signal or an involuntary outburst,
+it was followed instantly by the sound of frightened and struggling
+hoofs clattering against the wall of the casa, and a swaying of the
+shrubbery near the back gate of the patio.  Here was his real
+quarry!  Without hesitation he dug his heels into the flanks of his
+horse and rode furiously towards it.  As he approached, a long
+tremor seemed to pass through the shrubbery, with the retreating
+sound of horse hoofs.  The unseen trespasser had evidently taken the
+alarm and was fleeing, and Clarence dashed in pursuit.  Following
+the sound, for the shrubbery hid the fugitive from view, he passed
+the last wall of the casa; but it soon became evident that the
+unknown had the better horse.  The hoof-beats grew fainter and
+fainter, and at times appeared even to cease, until his own approach
+started them again, eventually to fade away in the distance.  In
+vain Clarence dug his heels into the flanks of his heavier steed,
+and regretted his own mustang; and when at last he reached the edge
+of the thicket he had lost both sight and sound of the fugitive.
+The descent to the lower terrace lay before him empty and desolate.
+The man had escaped!
+
+He turned slowly back with baffled anger and vindictiveness.
+However, he had prevented something, although he knew not what.  The
+principal had got away, but he had identified his confederate, and
+for the first time held a clue to his mysterious visitant.  There
+was no use to alarm the household, which did not seem to have been
+disturbed.  The trespassers were far away by this time, and the
+attempt would hardly be repeated that night.  He made his way
+quietly back to the corral, let loose his horse, and regained the
+casa unobserved.  He unlocked the arched door in the wall, reentered
+the darkened passage, stopped a moment to open the door of the
+boudoir, glance at the closely fastened casement, and extinguish the
+still burning candle, and, relocking the door securely, made his way
+to his own room.
+
+But he could not sleep.  The whole incident, over so quickly, had
+nevertheless impressed him deeply, and yet like a dream.  The
+strange yell of the vacquero still rang in his ears, but with an
+unearthly and superstitious significance that was even more
+dreamlike in its meaning.  He awakened from a fitful slumber to find
+the light of morning in the room, and Incarnacion standing by his
+bedside.
+
+The yellow face of the steward was greenish with terror, and his
+lips were dry.
+
+"Get up, Senor Clarencio; get up at once, my master.  Strange things
+have happened.  Mother of God protect us!"
+
+Clarence rolled to his feet, with the events of the past night
+struggling back upon his consciousness.
+
+"What mean you, Nascio?" he said, grasping the man's arm, which was
+still mechanically making the sign of the cross, as he muttered
+incoherently.  "Speak, I command you!"
+
+"It is Jose, the little vacquero, who is even now at the padre's
+house, raving as a lunatic, stricken as a madman with terror!  He
+has seen him,--the dead alive!  Save us!"
+
+"Are you mad yourself, Nascio?" said Clarence.  "Whom has he seen?"
+
+"Whom?  God help us! the old padron--Senor Peyton himself!  He
+rushed towards him here, in the patio, last night--out of the air,
+the sky, the ground, he knew not,--his own self, wrapped in his old
+storm cloak and hat, and riding his own horse,--erect, terrible, and
+menacing, with an awful hand upholding a rope--so!  He saw him with
+these eyes, as I see you.  What HE said to him, God knows!  The
+priest, perhaps, for he has made confession!"
+
+In a flash of intelligence Clarence comprehended all.  He rose
+grimly and began to dress himself.
+
+"Not a word of this to the women,--to any one, Nascio, dost thou
+understand?" he said curtly.  "It may be that Jose has been
+partaking too freely of aguardiente,--it is possible.  I will see
+the priest myself.  But what possesses thee?  Collect thyself, good
+Nascio."
+
+But the man was still trembling.
+
+"It is not all,--Mother of God! it is not all, master!" he
+stammered, dropping to his knees and still crossing himself.  "This
+morning, beside the corral, they find the horse of Pedro Valdez
+splashed and spattered on saddle and bridle, and in the stirrup,--
+dost thou hear? the STIRRUP,--hanging, the torn-off boot of Valdez!
+Ah, God!  The same as HIS!  Now do you understand?  It is HIS
+vengeance.  No!  Jesu forgive me! it is the vengeance of God!"
+
+Clarence was staggered.
+
+"And you have not found Valdez?  You have looked for him?" he said,
+hurriedly throwing on his clothes.
+
+"Everywhere,--all over the plain.  The whole rancho has been out
+since sunrise,--here and there and everywhere.  And there is
+nothing!  Of course not.  What would you?"  He pointed solemnly to
+the ground.
+
+"Nonsense!" said Clarence, buttoning his coat and seizing his hat.
+"Follow me."
+
+He ran down the passage, followed by Incarnacion, through the
+excited, gesticulating crowd of servants in the patio, and out of
+the back gate.  He turned first along the wall of the casa towards
+the barred window of the boudoir.  Then a cry came from Incarnacion.
+
+They ran quickly forward.  Hanging from the grating of the window,
+like a mass of limp and saturated clothes, was the body of Pedro
+Valdez, with one unbooted foot dangling within an inch of the
+ground.  His head was passed inside the grating and fixed as at that
+moment when the first spring of the frightened horse had broken his
+neck between the bars as in a garrote, and the second plunge of the
+terrified animal had carried off his boot in the caught stirrup when
+it escaped.
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+The winter rains were over and gone, and the whole long line of
+Californian coast was dashed with color.  There were miles of yellow
+and red poppies, leagues of lupines that painted the gently rounded
+hills with soft primary hues, and long continuous slopes, like low
+mountain systems, of daisies and dandelions.  At Sacramento it was
+already summer; the yellow river was flashing and intolerable; the
+tule and marsh grasses were lush and long; the bloom of cottonwood
+and sycamore whitened the outskirts of the city, and as Cyrus
+Hopkins and his daughter Phoebe looked from the veranda of the
+Placer Hotel, accustomed as they were to the cool trade winds of the
+coast valleys, they felt homesick from the memory of eastern heats.
+
+Later, when they were surveying the long dinner tables at the table
+d'hote with something of the uncomfortable and shamefaced loneliness
+of the provincial, Phoebe uttered a slight cry and clutched her
+father's arm.  Mr. Hopkins stayed the play of his squared elbows and
+glanced inquiringly at his daughter's face.  There was a pretty
+animation in it, as she pointed to a figure that had just entered.
+It was that of a young man attired in the extravagance rather than
+the taste of the prevailing fashion, which did not, however, in the
+least conceal a decided rusticity of limb and movement.  A long
+mustache, which looked unkempt, even in its pomatumed stiffness, and
+lank, dark hair that had bent but never curled under the barber's
+iron, made him notable even in that heterogeneous assembly.
+
+"That's he," whispered Phoebe.
+
+"Who?" said her father.
+
+Alas for the inconsistencies of love!  The blush came with the name
+and not the vision.
+
+"Mr. Hooker," she stammered.
+
+It was, indeed, Jim Hooker.  But the role of his exaggeration was
+no longer the same; the remorseful gloom in which he had been
+habitually steeped had changed into a fatigued, yet haughty,
+fastidiousness more in keeping with his fashionable garments.  He
+was more peaceful, yet not entirely placable, and, as he sat down at
+a side table and pulled down his striped cuffs with his clasped
+fingers, he cast a glance of critical disapproval on the general
+company.  Nevertheless, he seemed to be furtively watchful of his
+effect upon them, and as one or two whispered and looked towards
+him, his consciousness became darkly manifest.
+
+All of which might have intimidated the gentle Phoebe, but did not
+discompose her father.  He rose, and crossing over to Hooker's
+table, clapped him heartily on the back.
+
+"How do, Hooker?  I didn't recognize you in them fine clothes, but
+Phoebe guessed as how it was you."
+
+Flushed, disconcerted, irritated, but always in wholesome awe of Mr.
+Hopkins, Jim returned his greeting awkwardly and half hysterically.
+How he would have received the more timid Phoebe is another
+question.  But Mr. Hopkins, without apparently noticing these
+symptoms, went on:--
+
+"We're only just down, Phoebe and me, and as I guess we'll want to
+talk over old times, we'll come alongside o' you.  Hold on, and I'll
+fetch her."
+
+The interval gave the unhappy Jim a chance to recover himself, to
+regain his vanished cuffs, display his heavy watch-chain, curl his
+mustache, and otherwise reassume his air of blase fastidiousness.
+But the transfer made, Phoebe, after shaking hands, became
+speechless under these perfections.  Not so her father.
+
+"If there's anything in looks, you seem to be prospering," he said
+grimly; "unless you're in the tailorin' line, and you're only
+showin' off stock.  What mout ye be doing?"
+
+"Ye ain't bin long in Sacramento, I reckon?" suggested Jim, with
+patronizing pity.
+
+"No, we only came this morning," returned Hopkins.
+
+"And you ain't bin to the theatre?" continued Jim.
+
+"No."
+
+"Nor moved much in--in--gin'ral fash'nable sassiety?"
+
+"Not yet," interposed Phoebe, with an air of faint apology.
+
+"Nor seen any of them large posters on the fences, of 'The Prairie
+Flower; or, Red-handed Dick,'--three-act play with five tableaux,--
+just the biggest sensation out,--runnin' for forty nights,--money
+turned away every night,--standin' room only?" continued Jim, with
+prolonged toleration.
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, I play Red-handed Dick.  I thought you might have seen it and
+recognized me.  All those people over there," darkly indicating the
+long table, "know me.  A fellow can't stand it, you know, being
+stared at by such a vulgar, low-bred lot.  It's gettin' too fresh
+here.  I'll have to give the landlord notice and cut the whole
+hotel.  They don't seem to have ever seen a gentleman and a
+professional before."
+
+"Then you're a play-actor now?" said the farmer, in a tone which did
+not, however, exhibit the exact degree of admiration which shone in
+Phoebe's eyes.
+
+"For the present," said Jim, with lofty indifference.  "You see I
+was in--in partnership with McClosky, the manager, and I didn't like
+the style of the chump that was doin' Red-handed Dick, so I offered
+to take his place one night to show him how.  And by Jinks! the
+audience, after that night, wouldn't let anybody else play it,--
+wouldn't stand even the biggest, highest-priced stars in it!  I
+reckon," he added gloomily, "I'll have to run the darned thing in
+all the big towns in Californy,--if I don't have to go East with it
+after all, just for the business.  But it's an awful grind on a
+man,--leaves him no time, along of the invitations he gets, and what
+with being run after in the streets and stared at in the hotels he
+don't get no privacy.  There's men, and women, too, over at that
+table, that just lie in wait for me here till I come, and don't lift
+their eyes off me.  I wonder they don't bring their opery-glasses
+with them."
+
+Concerned, sympathizing, and indignant, poor Phoebe turned her brown
+head and honest eyes in that direction.  But because they were
+honest, they could not help observing that the other table did not
+seem to be paying the slightest attention to the distinguished
+impersonator of Red-handed Dick.  Perhaps he had been overheard.
+
+"Then that was the reason ye didn't come back to your location.  I
+always guessed it was because you'd got wind of the smash-up down
+there, afore we did," said Hopkins grimly.
+
+"What smash-up?" asked Jim, with slightly resentful quickness.
+
+"Why, the smash-up of the Sisters' title,--didn't you hear that?"
+
+There was a slight movement of relief and a return of gloomy hauteur
+in Jim's manner.
+
+"No, we don't know much of what goes on in the cow counties, up
+here."
+
+"Ye mout, considerin' it concerns some o' your friends," returned
+Hopkins dryly.  "For the Sisters' title went smash as soon as it was
+known that Pedro Valdez--the man as started it--had his neck broken
+outside the walls o' Robles Rancho; and they do say as this yer
+Brant, YOUR friend, had suthin' to do with the breaking of it,
+though it was laid to the ghost of old Peyton.  Anyhow, there was
+such a big skeer that one of the Greaser gang, who thought he'd seen
+the ghost, being a Papist, to save his everlasting soul went to the
+priest and confessed.  But the priest wouldn't give him absolution
+until he'd blown the hull thing, and made it public.  And then it
+turned out that all the dockyments for the title, and even the
+custom-house paper, were FORGED by Pedro Valdez, and put on the
+market by his confederates.  And that's just where YOUR friend,
+Clarence Brant, comes in, for HE had bought up the whole title from
+them fellers.  Now, either, as some say, he was in the fraud from
+the beginnin', and never paid anything, or else he was an all-fired
+fool, and had parted with his money like one.  Some allow that the
+reason was that he was awfully sweet on Mrs. Peyton's adopted
+daughter, and ez the parents didn't approve of him, he did THIS so
+as to get a holt over them by the property.  But he's a ruined man,
+anyway, now; for they say he's such a darned fool that he's goin' to
+pay for all the improvements that the folks who bought under him put
+into the land, and that'll take his last cent.  I thought I'd tell
+you that, for I suppose YOU'VE lost a heap in your improvements, and
+will put in your claim?"
+
+"I reckon I put nearly as much into it as Clar Brant did," said Jim
+gloomily, "but I ain't goin' to take a cent from him, or go back on
+him now."
+
+The rascal could not resist this last mendacious opportunity,
+although he was perfectly sincere in his renunciation, touched in
+his sympathy, and there was even a film of moisture in his shifting
+eyes.
+
+Phoebe was thrilled with the generosity of this noble being, who
+could be unselfish even in his superior condition.  She added
+softly:--
+
+"And they say that the girl did not care for him at all, but was
+actually going to run off with Pedro, when he stopped her and sent
+for Mrs. Peyton."
+
+To her surprise, Jim's face flushed violently.
+
+"It's all a dod-blasted lie," he said, in a thick stage whisper.
+"It's only the hogwash them Greasers and Pike County galoots ladle
+out to each other around the stove in a county grocery.  But,"
+recalling himself loftily, and with a tolerant wave of his be-
+diamonded hand, "wot kin you expect from one of them cow counties?
+They ain't satisfied till they drive every gentleman out of the
+darned gopher-holes they call their 'kentry.'"
+
+In her admiration of what she believed to be a loyal outburst for
+his friend, Phoebe overlooked the implied sneer at her provincial
+home.  But her father went on with a perfunctory, exasperating,
+dusty aridity:--
+
+"That mebbee ez mebbee, Mr. Hooker, but the story down in our
+precinct goes that she gave Mrs. Peyton the slip,--chucked up her
+situation as adopted darter, and went off with a queer sort of a
+cirkiss woman,--one of her own KIN, and I reckon one of her own
+KIND."
+
+To this Mr. Hooker offered no further reply than a withering rebuke
+of the waiter, a genteel abstraction, and a lofty change of subject.
+He pressed upon them two tickets for the performance, of which he
+seemed to have a number neatly clasped in an india-rubber band, and
+advised them to come early.  They would see him after the
+performance and sup together.  He must leave them now, as he had to
+be punctually at the theatre, and if he lingered he should be
+pestered by interviewers.  He withdrew under a dazzling display of
+cuff and white handkerchief, and with that inward swing of the arm
+and slight bowiness of the leg generally recognized in his
+profession as the lounging exit of high comedy.
+
+The mingling of awe and an uneasy sense of changed relations which
+that meeting with Jim had brought to Phoebe was not lessened when
+she entered the theatre with her father that evening, and even Mr.
+Hopkins seemed to share her feelings.  The theatre was large, and
+brilliant in decoration, the seats were well filled with the same
+heterogeneous mingling she had seen in the dining-room at the Placer
+Hotel, but in the parquet were some fashionable costumes and
+cultivated faces.  Mr. Hopkins was not altogether so sure that Jim
+had been "only gassing."  But the gorgeous drop curtain,
+representing an allegory of Californian prosperity and abundance,
+presently uprolled upon a scene of Western life almost as striking
+in its glaring unreality.  From a rose-clad English cottage in a
+subtropical landscape skipped "Rosalie, the Prairie Flower."  The
+briefest of skirts, the most unsullied of stockings, the tiniest of
+slippers, and the few diamonds that glittered on her fair neck and
+fingers, revealed at once the simple and unpretending daughter of
+the American backwoodsman.  A tumult of delighted greeting broke
+from the audience.  The bright color came to the pink, girlish
+cheeks, gratified vanity danced in her violet eyes, and as she
+piquantly bowed her acknowledgments, this great breath of praise
+seemed to transfigure and possess her.  A very young actor who
+represented the giddy world in a straw hat and with an effeminate
+manner was alternately petted and girded at by her during the
+opening exposition of the plot, until the statement that a "dark
+destiny" obliged her to follow her uncle in an emigrant train across
+the plains closed the act, apparently extinguished him, and left HER
+the central figure.  So far, she evidently was the favorite.  A
+singular aversion to her crept into the heart of Phoebe.
+
+But the second act brought an Indian attack upon the emigrant train,
+and here "Rosalie" displayed the archest heroism and the pinkest and
+most distracting self-possession, in marked contrast to the giddy
+worldling who, having accompanied her apparently for comic purposes
+best known to himself, cowered abjectly under wagons, and was pulled
+ignominiously out of straw, until Red Dick swept out of the wings
+with a chosen band and a burst of revolvers and turned the tide of
+victory.  Attired as a picturesque combination of the Neapolitan
+smuggler, river-bar miner, and Mexican vacquero, Jim Hooker
+instantly began to justify the plaudits that greeted him and the
+most sanguinary hopes of the audience.  A gloomy but fascinating
+cloud of gunpowder and dark intrigue from that moment hung about the
+stage.
+
+Yet in this sombre obscuration Rosalie had passed a happy six
+months, coming out with her character and stockings equally
+unchanged and unblemished, to be rewarded with the hand of Red Dick
+and the discovery of her father, the governor of New Mexico, as a
+white-haired, but objectionable vacquero, at the fall of the
+curtain.
+
+Through this exciting performance Phoebe sat with a vague and
+increasing sense of loneliness and distrust.  She did not know that
+Hooker had added to his ordinary inventive exaggeration the form of
+dramatic composition.  But she had early detected the singular fact
+that such shadowy outlines of plot as the piece possessed were
+evidently based on his previous narrative of his OWN experiences,
+and the saving of Susy Peyton--by himself!  There was the episode of
+their being lost on the plains, as he had already related it to her,
+with the addition of a few years to Susy's age and some vivid
+picturesqueness to himself as Red Dick.  She was not, of course,
+aware that the part of the giddy worldling was Jim's own conception
+of the character of Clarence.  But what, even to her provincial
+taste, seemed the extravagance of the piece, she felt, in some way,
+reflected upon the truthfulness of the story she had heard.  It
+seemed to be a parody on himself, and in the laughter which some of
+the most thrilling points produced in certain of the audience, she
+heard an echo of her own doubts.  But even this she could have borne
+if Jim's confidence had not been given to the general public; it was
+no longer HERS alone, she shared it with them.  And this strange,
+bold girl, who acted with him,--the "Blanche Belville" of the
+bills,--how often he must have told HER the story, and yet how badly
+she had learned it!  It was not her own idea of it, nor of HIM.  In
+the last extravagant scene she turned her weary and half-shamed eyes
+from the stage and looked around the theatre.  Among a group of
+loungers by the wall a face that seemed familiar was turned towards
+her own with a look of kindly and sympathetic recognition.  It was
+the face of Clarence Brant.  When the curtain fell, and she and her
+father rose to go, he was at their side.  He seemed older and more
+superior looking than she had ever thought him before, and there was
+a gentle yet sad wisdom in his eyes and voice that comforted her
+even while it made her feel like crying.
+
+"You are satisfied that no harm has come to our friend," he said
+pleasantly.  "Of course you recognized him?"
+
+"Oh, yes; we met him to-day," said Phoebe.  Her provincial pride
+impelled her to keep up a show of security and indifference.  "We
+are going to supper with him."
+
+Clarence slightly lifted his brows.
+
+"You are more fortunate than I am," he said smilingly.  "I only
+arrived here at seven, and I must leave at midnight."
+
+Phoebe hesitated a moment, then said with affected carelessness:--
+
+"What do you think of the young girl who plays with him?  Do you
+know her?  Who is she?"
+
+He looked at her quickly, and then said, with some surprise:--
+
+"Did he not tell you?"
+
+"She WAS the adopted daughter of Mrs. Peyton,--Miss Susan Silsbee,"
+he said gravely.
+
+"Then she DID run away from home as they said," said Phoebe
+impulsively.
+
+"Not EXACTLY as they said," said Clarence gently.  "She elected to
+make her home with her aunt, Mrs. McClosky, who is the wife of the
+manager of this theatre, and she adopted the profession a month ago.
+As it now appears that there was some informality in the old
+articles of guardianship, Mrs. Peyton would have been powerless to
+prevent her from doing either, even if she had wished to."
+
+The infelicity of questioning Clarence regarding Susy suddenly
+flashed upon the forgetful Phoebe, and she colored.  Yet, although
+sad, he did not look like a rejected lover.
+
+"Of course, if she is here with her own relatives, that makes all
+the difference," she said gently.  "It is protection."
+
+"Certainly," said Clarence.
+
+"And," continued Phoebe hesitatingly, "she is playing with--with--an
+old friend--Mr. Hooker!"
+
+"That is quite proper, too, considering their relations," said
+Clarence tolerantly.
+
+"I--don't--understand," stammered Phoebe.
+
+The slightly cynical smile on Clarence's face changed as he looked
+into Phoebe's eyes.
+
+"I've just heard that they are married," he returned gently.
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+Nowhere had the long season of flowers brought such glory as to the
+broad plains and slopes of Robles Rancho.  By some fortuitous chance
+of soil, or flood, or drifting pollen, the three terraces had each
+taken a distinct and separate blossom and tint of color.  The
+straggling line of corral, the crumbling wall of the old garden, the
+outlying chapel, and even the brown walls of the casa itself, were
+half sunken in the tall racemes of crowding lupines, until from the
+distance they seemed to be slowly settling in the profundity of a
+dark-blue sea.  The second terrace was a league-long flow of gray
+and gold daisies, in which the cattle dazedly wandered mid-leg deep.
+A perpetual sunshine of yellow dandelions lay upon the third.  The
+gentle slope to the dark-green canada was a broad cataract of
+crimson poppies.  Everywhere where water had stood, great patches of
+color had taken its place.  It seemed as if the rains had ceased
+only that the broken heavens might drop flowers.
+
+Never before had its beauty--a beauty that seemed built upon a
+cruel, youthful, obliterating forgetfulness of the past--struck
+Clarence as keenly as when he had made up his mind that he must
+leave the place forever.  For the tale of his mischance and ill-
+fortune, as told by Hopkins, was unfortunately true.  When he
+discovered that in his desire to save Peyton's house by the purchase
+of the Sisters' title he himself had been the victim of a gigantic
+fraud, he accepted the loss of the greater part of his fortune with
+resignation, and was even satisfied by the thought that he had at
+least effected the possession of the property for Mrs. Peyton.  But
+when he found that those of his tenants who had bought under him had
+acquired only a dubious possession of their lands and no title, he
+had unhesitatingly reimbursed them for their improvements with the
+last of his capital.  Only the lawless Gilroy had good-humoredly
+declined.  The quiet acceptance of the others did not, unfortunately,
+preclude their settled belief that Clarence had participated in the
+fraud, and that even now his restitution was making a dangerous
+precedent, subversive of the best interests of the State, and
+discouraging to immigration.  Some doubted his sanity.  Only one,
+struck with the sincerity of his motive, hesitated to take his
+money, with a look of commiseration on his face.
+
+"Are you not satisfied?" asked Clarence, smiling.
+
+"Yes, but"--
+
+"But what?"
+
+"Nothin'.  Only I was thinkin' that a man like you must feel awful
+lonesome in Calforny!"
+
+Lonely he was, indeed; but his loneliness was not the loss of
+fortune nor what it might bring.  Perhaps he had never fully
+realized his wealth; it had been an accident rather than a custom of
+his life, and when it had failed in the only test he had made of its
+power, it is to be feared that he only sentimentally regretted it.
+It was too early yet for him to comprehend the veiled blessings of
+the catastrophe in its merciful disruption of habits and ways of
+life; his loneliness was still the hopeless solitude left by
+vanished ideals and overthrown idols.  He was satisfied that he had
+never cared for Susy, but he still cared for the belief that he had.
+
+After the discovery of Pedro's body that fatal morning, a brief but
+emphatic interview between himself and Mrs. McClosky had followed.
+He had insisted upon her immediately accompanying Susy and himself
+to Mrs. Peyton in San Francisco.  Horror-stricken and terrified at
+the catastrophe, and frightened by the strange looks of the excited
+servants, they did not dare to disobey him.  He had left them with
+Mrs. Peyton in the briefest preliminary interview, during which he
+spoke only of the catastrophe, shielding the woman from the
+presumption of having provoked it, and urging only the importance of
+settling the question of guardianship at once.  It was odd that Mrs.
+Peyton had been less disturbed than he imagined she would be at even
+his charitable version of Susy's unfaithfulness to her; it even
+seemed to him that she had already suspected it.  But as he was
+about to withdraw to leave her to meet them alone, she had stopped
+him suddenly.
+
+"What would you advise me to do?"
+
+It was his first interview with her since the revelation of his own
+feelings.  He looked into the pleading, troubled eyes of the woman
+he now knew he had loved, and stammered:--
+
+"You alone can judge.  Only you must remember that one cannot force
+an affection any more than one can prevent it."
+
+He felt himself blushing, and, conscious of the construction of his
+words, he even fancied that she was displeased.
+
+"Then you have no preference?" she said, a little impatiently.
+
+"None."
+
+She made a slight gesture with her handsome shoulders, but she only
+said, "I should have liked to have pleased you in this," and turned
+coldly away.  He had left without knowing the result of the
+interview; but a few days later he received a letter from her
+stating that she had allowed Susy to return to her aunt, and that
+she had resigned all claims to her guardianship.
+
+"It seemed to be a foregone conclusion," she wrote; "and although I
+cannot think such a change will be for her permanent welfare, it is
+her present WISH, and who knows, indeed, if the change will be
+permanent?  I have not allowed the legal question to interfere with
+my judgment, although her friends must know that she forfeits any
+claim upon the estate by her action; but at the same time, in the
+event of her suitable marriage, I should try to carry out what I
+believe would have been Mr. Peyton's wishes."
+
+There were a few lines of postscript: "It seems to me that the
+change would leave you more free to consult your own wishes in
+regard to continuing your friendship with Susy, and upon such a
+footing as may please you.  I judge from Mrs. McClosky's
+conversation that she believed you thought you were only doing your
+duty in reporting to me, and that the circumstances had not altered
+the good terms in which you all three formerly stood."
+
+Clarence had dropped the letter with a burning indignation that
+seemed to sting his eyes until a scalding moisture hid the words
+before him.  What might not Susy have said?  What exaggeration of
+his affection was she not capable of suggesting?  He recalled Mrs.
+McClosky, and remembered her easy acceptance of him as Susy's lover.
+What had they told Mrs. Peyton?  What must be her opinion of his
+deceit towards herself?  It was hard enough to bear this before he
+knew he loved her.  It was intolerable now!  And this is what she
+meant when she suggested that he should renew his old terms with
+Susy; it was for HIM that this ill-disguised, scornful generosity in
+regard to Susy's pecuniary expectations was intended.  What should
+he do?  He would write to her, and indignantly deny any clandestine
+affection for Susy.  But could he do that, in honor, in truthfulness?
+Would it not be better to write and confess all?  Yes,--EVERYTHING.
+
+Fortunately for his still boyish impulsiveness, it was at this time
+that the discovery of his own financial ruin came to him.  The
+inquest on the body of Pedro Valdez and the confession of his
+confidant had revealed the facts of the fraudulent title and forged
+testamentary documents.  Although it was correctly believed that
+Pedro had met his death in an escapade of gallantry or intrigue, the
+coroner's jury had returned a verdict of "accidental death," and the
+lesser scandal was lost in the wider, far-spreading disclosure of
+fraud.  When he had resolved to assume all the liabilities of his
+purchase, he was obliged to write to Mrs. Peyton and confess his
+ruin.  But he was glad to remind her that it did not alter HER
+status or security; he had only given her the possession, and she
+would revert to her original and now uncontested title.  But as
+there was now no reason for his continuing the stewardship, and as
+he must adopt some profession and seek his fortune elsewhere, he
+begged her to relieve him of his duty.  Albeit written with a
+throbbing heart and suffused eyes, it was a plain, business-like,
+and practical letter.  Her reply was equally cool and matter of
+fact.  She was sorry to hear of his losses, although she could not
+agree with him that they could logically sever his present
+connection with the rancho, or that, placed upon another and
+distinctly business footing, the occupation would not be as
+remunerative to him as any other.  But, of course, if he had a
+preference for some more independent position, that was another
+question, although he would forgive her for using the privilege of
+her years to remind him that his financial and business success had
+not yet justified his independence.  She would also advise him not
+to decide hastily, or, at least, to wait until she had again
+thoroughly gone over her husband's papers with her lawyer, in
+reference to the old purchase of the Sisters' title, and the
+conditions under which it was bought.  She knew that Mr. Brant would
+not refuse this as a matter of business, nor would that friendship,
+which she valued so highly, allow him to imperil the possession of
+the rancho by leaving it at such a moment.  As soon as she had
+finished the examination of the papers, she would write again.  Her
+letter seemed to leave him no hope, if, indeed, he had ever indulged
+in any.  It was the practical kindliness of a woman of business,
+nothing more.  As to the examination of her husband's papers, that
+was a natural precaution.  He alone knew that they would give no
+record of a transaction which had never occurred.  He briefly
+replied that his intention to seek another situation was unchanged,
+but that he would cheerfully await the arrival of his successor.
+Two weeks passed.  Then Mr. Sanderson, Mrs. Peyton's lawyer,
+arrived, bringing an apologetic note from Mrs. Peyton.  She was so
+sorry her business was still delayed, but as she had felt that she
+had no right to detain him entirely at Robles, she had sent to Mr.
+Sanderson to TEMPORARILY relieve him, that he might be free to look
+around him or visit San Francisco in reference to his own business,
+only extracting a promise from him that he would return to Robles to
+meet her at the end of the week, before settling upon anything.
+
+The bitter smile with which Clarence had read thus far suddenly
+changed.  Some mysterious touch of unbusiness-like but womanly
+hesitation, that he had never noticed in her previous letters, gave
+him a faint sense of pleasure, as if her note had been perfumed.  He
+had availed himself of the offer.  It was on this visit to
+Sacramento that he had accidentally discovered the marriage of Susy
+and Hooker.
+
+"It's a great deal better business for her to have a husband in the
+'profesh' if she's agoin' to stick to it," said his informant, Mrs.
+McClosky, "and she's nothing if she ain't business and profesh, Mr.
+Brant.  I never see a girl that was born for the stage--yes, you
+might say jess cut out o' the boards of the stage--as that girl Susy
+is!  And that's jest what's the matter; and YOU know it, and I know
+it, and there you are!"
+
+It was with these experiences that Clarence was to-day reentering
+the wooded and rocky gateway of the rancho from the high road of the
+canada; but as he cantered up the first slope, through the drift of
+scarlet poppies that almost obliterated the track, and the blue and
+yellow blooms of the terraces again broke upon his view, he thought
+only of Mrs. Peyton's pleasure in this changed aspect of her old
+home.  She had told him of it once before, and of her delight in it;
+and he had once thought how happy he should be to see it with her.
+
+The servant who took his horse told him that the senora had arrived
+that morning from Santa Inez, bringing with her the two Senoritas
+Hernandez from the rancho of Los Canejos, and that other guests were
+expected.  And there was the Senor Sanderson and his Reverence Padre
+Esteban.  Truly an affair of hospitality, the first since the padron
+died.  Whatever dream Clarence might have had of opportunities for
+confidential interview was rudely dispelled.  Yet Mrs. Peyton had
+left orders to be informed at once of Don Clarencio's arrival.
+
+As he crossed the patio and stepped upon the corridor he fancied he
+already detected in the internal arrangements the subtle influence
+of Mrs. Peyton's taste and the indefinable domination of the
+mistress.  For an instant he thought of anticipating the servant and
+seeking her in the boudoir, but some instinct withheld him, and he
+turned into the study which he had used as an office.  It was empty;
+a few embers glimmered on the hearth.  At the same moment there was
+a light step behind him, and Mrs. Peyton entered and closed the door
+behind her.  She was very beautiful.  Although paler and thinner,
+there was an odd sort of animation about her, so unlike her usual
+repose that it seemed almost feverish.
+
+"I thought we could talk together a few moments before the guests
+arrive.  The house will be presently so full, and my duties as
+hostess commence."
+
+"I was--about to seek you--in--in the boudoir," hesitated Clarence.
+
+She gave an impatient shiver.
+
+"Good heavens, not there!  I shall never go there again.  I should
+fancy every time I looked out of the window that I saw the head of
+that man between the bars.  No! I am only thankful that I wasn't
+here at the time, and that I can keep my remembrance of the dear old
+place unchanged."  She checked herself a little abruptly, and then
+added somewhat irrelevantly but cheerfully, "Well, you have been
+away?  What have you done?"
+
+"Nothing," said Clarence.
+
+"Then you have kept your promise," she said, with the same nervous
+hilarity.
+
+"I have returned here without making any other engagement," he said
+gravely; "but I have not altered my determination."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders again, or, as it seemed, the skin of her
+tightly fitting black dress above them, with the sensitive shiver of
+a highly groomed horse, and moved to the hearth as if for warmth;
+put her slim, slippered foot upon the low fender, drawing, with a
+quick hand, the whole width of her skirt behind her until it
+clingingly accented the long, graceful curve from her hip to her
+feet.  All this was so unlike her usual fastidiousness and repose
+that he was struck by it.  With her eyes on the glowing embers of
+the hearth, and tentatively advancing her toe to its warmth and
+drawing it away, she said:--
+
+"Of course, you must please yourself.  I am afraid I have no right
+except that of habit and custom to keep you here; and you know," she
+added, with an only half-withheld bitterness, "that they are not
+always very effective with young people who prefer to have the
+ordering of their own lives.  But I have something still to tell you
+before you finally decide.  I have, as you know, been looking over
+my--over Mr. Peyton's papers very carefully.  Well, as a result, I
+find, Mr. Brant, that there is no record whatever of his wonderfully
+providential purchase of the Sisters' title from you; that he never
+entered into any written agreement with you, and never paid you a
+cent; and that, furthermore, his papers show me that he never even
+contemplated it; nor, indeed, even knew of YOUR owning the title
+when he died.  Yes, Mr. Brant, it was all to YOUR foresight and
+prudence, and YOUR generosity alone, that we owe our present
+possession of the rancho.  When you helped us into that awful
+window, it was YOUR house we were entering; and if it had been YOU,
+and not those wretches, who had chosen to shut the doors on us after
+the funeral, we could never have entered here again.  Don't deny it,
+Mr. Brant.  I have suspected it a long time, and when you spoke of
+changing YOUR position, I determined to find out if it wasn't I who
+had to leave the house rather than you.  One moment, please.  And I
+did find out, and it WAS I.  Don't speak, please, yet.  And now,"
+she said, with a quick return to her previous nervous hilarity,
+"knowing this, as you did, and knowing, too, that I would know it
+when I examined the papers,--don't speak, I'm not through yet,--
+don't you think that it was just a LITTLE cruel for you to try to
+hurry me, and make me come here instead of your coming to ME in San
+Francisco, when I gave you leave for that purpose?"
+
+"But, Mrs. Peyton," gasped Clarence.
+
+"Please don't interrupt me," said the lady, with a touch of her old
+imperiousness, "for in a moment I must join my guests.  When I found
+you wouldn't tell me, and left it to me to find out, I could only go
+away as I did, and really leave you to control what I believed was
+your own property.  And I thought, too, that I understood your
+motives, and, to be frank with you, that worried me; for I believed
+I knew the disposition and feelings of a certain person better than
+yourself."
+
+"One moment," broke out Clarence, "you MUST hear me, now.  Foolish
+and misguided as that purchase may have been, I swear to you I had
+only one motive in making it,--to save the homestead for you and
+your husband, who had been my first and earliest benefactors.  What
+the result of it was, you, as a business woman, know; your friends
+know; your lawyer will tell you the same.  You owe me nothing.  I
+have given you nothing but the repossession of this property, which
+any other man could have done, and perhaps less stupidly than I did.
+I would not have forced you to come here to hear this if I had
+dreamed of your suspicions, or even if I had simply understood that
+you would see me in San Francisco as I passed through."
+
+"Passed through?  Where were you going?" she said quickly.
+
+"To Sacramento."
+
+The abrupt change in her manner startled him to a recollection of
+Susy, and he blushed.  She bit her lips, and moved towards the
+window.
+
+"Then you saw her?" she said, turning suddenly towards him.  The
+inquiry of her beautiful eyes was more imperative than her speech.
+
+Clarence recognized quickly what he thought was his cruel blunder in
+touching the half-healed wound of separation.  But he had gone too
+far to be other than perfectly truthful now.
+
+"Yes; I saw her on the stage," he said, with a return of his boyish
+earnestness; "and I learned something which I wanted you to first
+hear from me.  She is MARRIED,--and to Mr. Hooker, who is in the
+same theatrical company with her.  But I want you to think, as I
+honestly do, that it is the best for her.  She has married in her
+profession, which is a great protection and a help to her success,
+and she has married a man who can look lightly upon certain
+qualities in her that others might not be so lenient to.  His worst
+faults are on the surface, and will wear away in contact with the
+world, and he looks up to her as his superior.  I gathered this from
+her friend, for I did not speak with her myself; I did not go there
+to see her.  But as I expected to be leaving you soon, I thought it
+only right that as I was the humble means of first bringing her into
+your life, I should bring you this last news, which I suppose takes
+her out of it forever.  Only I want you to believe that YOU have
+nothing to regret, and that SHE is neither lost nor unhappy."
+
+The expression of suspicious inquiry on her face when he began
+changed gradually to perplexity as he continued, and then relaxed
+into a faint, peculiar smile.  But there was not the slightest trace
+of that pain, wounded pride, indignation, or anger, that he had
+expected to see upon it.
+
+"That means, I suppose, Mr. Brant, that YOU no longer care for her?"
+
+The smile had passed, yet she spoke now with a half-real, half-
+affected archness that was also unlike her.
+
+"It means," said Clarence with a white face, but a steady voice,
+"that I care for her now as much as I ever cared for her, no matter
+to what folly it once might have led me.  But it means, also, that
+there was no time when I was not able to tell it to YOU as frankly
+as I do now"--
+
+"One moment, please," she interrupted, and turned quickly towards
+the door.  She opened it and looked out.  "I thought they were
+calling me,--and--I--I--MUST go now, Mr. Brant.  And without
+finishing my business either, or saying half I had intended to say.
+But wait"--she put her hand to her head in a pretty perplexity,
+"it's a moonlight night, and I'll propose after dinner a stroll in
+the gardens, and you can manage to walk a little with me."  She
+stopped again, returned, said, "It was very kind of you to think of
+me at Sacramento," held out her hand, allowed it to remain for an
+instant, cool but acquiescent, in his warmer grasp, and with the
+same odd youthfulness of movement and gesture slipped out of the
+door.
+
+An hour later she was at the head of her dinner table, serene,
+beautiful, and calm, in her elegant mourning, provokingly
+inaccessible in the sweet deliberation of her widowed years; Padre
+Esteban was at her side with a local magnate, who had known Peyton
+and his wife, while Donna Rosita and a pair of liquid-tongued,
+childlike senoritas were near Clarence and Sanderson.  To the priest
+Mrs. Peyton spoke admiringly of the changes in the rancho and the
+restoration of the Mission Chapel, and together they had commended
+Clarence from the level of their superior passionless reserve and
+years.  Clarence felt hopelessly young and hopelessly lonely; the
+naive prattle of the young girls beside him appeared infantine.  In
+his abstraction, he heard Mrs. Peyton allude to the beauty of the
+night, and propose that after coffee and chocolate the ladies should
+put on their wraps and go with her to the old garden.  Clarence
+raised his eyes; she was not looking at him, but there was a slight
+consciousness in her face that was not there before, and the
+faintest color in her cheek, still lingering, no doubt, from the
+excitement of conversation.
+
+It was a cool, tranquil, dewless night when they at last straggled
+out, mere black and white patches in the colorless moonlight.  The
+brilliancy of the flower-hued landscape was subdued under its
+passive, pale austerity; even the gray and gold of the second
+terrace seemed dulled and confused.  At any other time Clarence
+might have lingered over this strange effect, but his eyes followed
+only a tall figure, in a long striped burnous, that moved gracefully
+beside the soutaned priest.  As he approached, it turned towards
+him.
+
+"Ah! here you are.  I just told Father Esteban that you talked of
+leaving to-morrow, and that he would have to excuse me a few moments
+while you showed me what you had done to the old garden."
+
+She moved beside him, and, with a hesitation that was not unlike a
+more youthful timidity, slipped her hand through his arm.  It was
+for the first time, and, without thinking, he pressed it impulsively
+to his side.  I have already intimated that Clarence's reserve was
+at times qualified by singular directness.
+
+A few steps carried them out of hearing; a few more, and they seemed
+alone in the world.  The long adobe wall glanced away emptily beside
+them, and was lost; the black shadows of the knotted pear-trees were
+beneath their feet.  They began to walk with the slight affectation
+of treading the shadows as if they were patterns on a carpet.
+Clarence was voiceless, and yet he seemed to be moving beside a
+spirit that must be first addressed.
+
+But it was flesh and blood nevertheless.
+
+"I interrupted you in something you were saying when I left the
+office," she said quietly.
+
+"I was speaking of Susy," returned Clarence eagerly; "and"--
+
+"Then you needn't go on," interrupted Mrs. Peyton quickly.  "I
+understand you, and believe you.  I would rather talk of something
+else.  We have not yet arranged how I can make restitution to you
+for the capital you sank in saving this place.  You will be
+reasonable, Mr. Brant, and not leave me with the shame and pain of
+knowing that you ruined yourself for the sake of your old friends.
+For it is no more a sentimental idea of mine to feel in this way
+than it is a fair and sensible one for you to imply that a mere
+quibble of construction absolves me from responsibility.  Mr.
+Sanderson himself admits that the repossession you gave us is a fair
+and legal basis for any arrangement of sharing or division of the
+property with you, that might enable you to remain here and continue
+the work you have so well begun.  Have you no suggestion, or must it
+come from ME, Mr. Brant?"
+
+"Neither.  Let us not talk of that now."
+
+She did not seem to notice the boyish doggedness of his speech,
+except so far as it might have increased her inconsequent and
+nervously pitched levity.
+
+"Then suppose we speak of the Misses Hernandez, with whom you
+scarcely exchanged a word at dinner, and whom I invited for you and
+your fluent Spanish.  They are charming girls, even if they are a
+little stupid.  But what can I do?  If I am to live here, I must
+have a few young people around me, if only to make the place
+cheerful for others.  Do you know I have taken a great fancy to Miss
+Rogers, and have asked her to visit me.  I think she is a good
+friend of yours, although perhaps she is a little shy.  What's the
+matter?  You have nothing against her, have you?"
+
+Clarence had stopped short.  They had reached the end of the pear-
+tree shadows.  A few steps more would bring them to the fallen south
+wall of the garden and the open moonlight beyond, but to the right
+an olive alley of deeper shadow diverged.
+
+"No," he said, with slow deliberation; "I have to thank Mary Rogers
+for having discovered something in me that I have been blindly,
+foolishly, and hopelessly struggling with."
+
+"And, pray, what was that?" said Mrs. Peyton sharply.
+
+"That I love you!"
+
+Mrs. Peyton was fairly startled.  The embarrassment of any truth is
+apt to be in its eternal abruptness, which no deviousness of tact or
+circumlocution of diplomacy has ever yet surmounted.  Whatever had
+been in her heart, or mind, she was unprepared for this directness.
+The bolt had dropped from the sky; they were alone; there was
+nothing between the stars and the earth but herself and this man and
+this truth; it could not be overlooked, surmounted, or escaped from.
+A step or two more would take her out of the garden into the
+moonlight, but always into this awful frankness of blunt and
+outspoken nature.  She hesitated, and turned the corner into the
+olive shadows.  It was, perhaps, more dangerous; but less shameless,
+and less like truckling.  And the appallingly direct Clarence
+instantly followed.
+
+"I know you will despise me, hate me; and, perhaps, worst of all,
+disbelieve me; but I swear to you, now, that I have always loved
+you,--yes, ALWAYS!  When first I came here, it was not to see my old
+playmate, but YOU, for I had kept the memory of you as I first saw
+you when a boy, and you have always been my ideal.  I have thought
+of, dreamed of, worshiped, and lived for no other woman.  Even when
+I found Susy again, grown up here at your side; even when I thought
+that I might, with your consent, marry her, it was that I might be
+with YOU always; that I might be a part of YOUR home, your family,
+and have a place with her in YOUR heart; for it was you I loved, and
+YOU only.  Don't laugh at me, Mrs. Peyton, it is the truth, the
+whole truth, I am telling you.  God help me!"
+
+If she only COULD have laughed,--harshly, ironically, or even
+mercifully and kindly!  But it would not come.  And she burst out:--
+
+"I am not laughing.  Good heavens, don't you see?  It is ME you are
+making ridiculous."
+
+"YOU ridiculous?" he said in a momentarily choked, half-stupefied
+voice.  "You--a beautiful woman, my superior in everything, the
+mistress of these lands where I am only steward--made ridiculous,
+not by my presumption, but by my confession?  Was the saint you just
+now admired in Father Esteban's chapel ridiculous because of the
+peon clowns who were kneeling before it?"
+
+"Hush!  This is wicked!  Stop!"
+
+She felt she was now on firm ground, and made the most of it in
+voice and manner.  She must draw the line somewhere, and she would
+draw it between passion and impiety.
+
+"Not until I have told you all, and I MUST before I leave you.  I
+loved you when I came here,--even when your husband was alive.
+Don't be angry, Mrs. Peyton; HE would not, and need not, have been
+angry; he would have pitied the foolish boy, who, in the very
+innocence and ignorance of his passion, might have revealed it to
+him as he did to everybody but ONE.  And yet, I sometimes think you
+might have guessed it, had you thought of me at all.  It must have
+been on my lips that day I sat with you in the boudoir.  I know that
+I was filled with it; with it and with you; with your presence, with
+your beauty, your grace of heart and mind,--yes, Mrs. Peyton, even
+with your own unrequited love for Susy.  Only, then, I knew not what
+it was."
+
+"But I think I can tell you what it was then, and now," said Mrs.
+Peyton, recovering her nervous little laugh, though it died a moment
+after on her lips.  "I remember it very well.  You told me then that
+I REMINDED YOU OF YOUR MOTHER.  Well, I am not old enough to be your
+mother, Mr. Brant, but I am old enough to have been, and might have
+been, the mother of your wife.  That was what you meant then; that
+is what you mean now.  I was wrong to accuse you of trying to make
+me ridiculous.  I ask your pardon.  Let us leave it as it was that
+day in the boudoir, as it is NOW.  Let me still remind you of your
+mother,--I know she must have been a good woman to have had so good
+a son,--and when you have found some sweet young girl to make you
+happy, come to me for a mother's blessing, and we will laugh at the
+recollection and misunderstanding of this evening."
+
+Her voice did not, however, exhibit that exquisite maternal
+tenderness which the beatific vision ought to have called up, and
+the persistent voice of Clarence could not be evaded in the shadow.
+
+"I said you reminded me of my mother," he went on at her side,
+"because I knew her and lost her only as a child.  She never was
+anything to me but a memory, and yet an ideal of all that was sweet
+and lovable in woman.  Perhaps it was a dream of what she might have
+been when she was as young in years as you.  If it pleases you still
+to misunderstand me, it may please you also to know that there is a
+reminder of her even in this.  I have no remembrance of a word of
+affection from her, nor a caress; I have been as hopeless in my love
+for her who was my mother, as of the woman I would make my wife."
+
+"But you have seen no one, you know no one, you are young, you
+scarcely know your own self!  You will forget this, you will forget
+ME!  And if--if--I should--listen to you, what would the world say,
+what would YOU yourself say a few years hence?  Oh, be reasonable.
+Think of it,--it would be so wild,--so mad! so--so--utterly
+ridiculous!"
+
+In proof of its ludicrous quality, two tears escaped her eyes in the
+darkness.  But Clarence caught the white flash of her withdrawn
+handkerchief in the shadow, and captured her returning hand.  It was
+trembling, but did not struggle, and presently hushed itself to rest
+in his.
+
+"I'm not only a fool but a brute," he said in a lower voice.
+"Forgive me.  I have given you pain,--you, for whom I would have
+died."
+
+They had both stopped.  He was still holding her sleeping hand.  His
+arm had stolen around the burnous so softly that it followed the
+curves of her figure as lightly as a fold of the garment, and was
+presumably unfelt.  Grief has its privileges, and suffering
+exonerates a questionable situation.  In another moment her fair
+head MIGHT have dropped upon his shoulder.  But an approaching voice
+uprose in the adjoining broad allee.  It might have been the world
+speaking through the voice of the lawyer Sanderson.
+
+"Yes, he is a good fellow, and an intelligent fellow, too, but a
+perfect child in his experience of mankind."
+
+They both started, but Mrs. Peyton's hand suddenly woke up and
+grasped his firmly.  Then she said in a higher, but perfectly level
+tone:--
+
+"Yes, I think with you we had better look at it again in the
+sunlight to-morrow.  But here come our friends; they have probably
+been waiting for us to join them and go in."
+
+        .        .        .        .        .        .        .
+
+The wholesome freshness of early morning was in the room when
+Clarence awoke, cleared and strengthened.  His resolution had been
+made.  He would leave the rancho that morning, to enter the world
+again and seek his fortune elsewhere.  This was only right to HER,
+whose future it should never be said he had imperiled by his folly
+and inexperience; and if, in a year or two of struggle he could
+prove his right to address her again, he would return.  He had not
+spoken to her since they had parted in the garden, with the grim
+truths of the lawyer ringing in his ears, but he had written a few
+lines of farewell, to be given to her after he had left.  He was
+calm in his resolution, albeit a little pale and hollow-eyed for it.
+
+He crept downstairs in the gray twilight of the scarce-awakened
+house, and made his way to the stables.  Saddling his horse, and
+mounting, he paced forth into the crisp morning air.  The sun, just
+risen, was everywhere bringing out the fresh color of the flower-
+strewn terraces, as the last night's shadows, which had hidden them,
+were slowly beaten back.  He cast a last look at the brown adobe
+quadrangle of the quiet house, just touched with the bronzing of the
+sun, and then turned his face towards the highway.  As he passed the
+angle of the old garden he hesitated, but, strong in his resolution,
+he put the recollection of last night behind him, and rode by
+without raising his eyes.
+
+"Clarence!"
+
+It was HER voice.  He wheeled his horse.  She was standing behind
+the grille in the old wall as he had seen her standing on the day he
+had ridden to his rendezvous with Susy.  A Spanish manta was thrown
+over her head and shoulders, as if she had dressed hastily, and had
+run out to intercept him while he was still in the stable.  Her
+beautiful face was pale in its black-hooded recess, and there were
+faint circles around her lovely eyes.
+
+"You were going without saying 'goodby'!" she said softly.
+
+She passed her slim white hand between the grating.  Clarence leaped
+to the ground, caught it, and pressed it to his lips.  But he did
+not let it go.
+
+"No! no!" she said, struggling to withdraw it.  "It is better as it
+is--as--as you have decided it to be.  Only I could not let you go
+thus,--without a word.  There now,--go, Clarence, go.  Please!
+Don't you see I am behind these bars?  Think of them as the years
+that separate us, my poor, dear, foolish boy.  Think of them as
+standing between us, growing closer, heavier, and more cruel and
+hopeless as the years go on."
+
+Ah, well! they had been good bars a hundred and fifty years ago,
+when it was thought as necessary to repress the innocence that was
+behind them as the wickedness that was without.  They had done duty
+in the convent at Santa Inez, and the monastery of Santa Barbara,
+and had been brought hither in Governor Micheltorrenas' time to keep
+the daughters of Robles from the insidious contact of the outer
+world, when they took the air in their cloistered pleasance.
+Guitars had tinkled against them in vain, and they had withstood the
+stress and storm of love tokens.  But, like many other things which
+have had their day and time, they had retained their semblance of
+power, even while rattling loosely in their sockets, only because no
+one had ever thought of putting them to the test, and, in the strong
+hand of Clarence, assisted, perhaps, by the leaning figure of Mrs.
+Peyton, I grieve to say that the whole grille suddenly collapsed,
+became a frame of tinkling iron, and then clanked, bar by bar, into
+the road.  Mrs. Peyton uttered a little cry and drew back, and
+Clarence, leaping the ruins, caught her in his arms.
+
+For a moment only, for she quickly withdrew from them, and although
+the morning sunlight was quite rosy on her cheeks, she said gravely,
+pointing to the dismantled opening:--
+
+"I suppose you MUST stay now, for you never could leave me here
+alone and defenseless."
+
+He stayed.  And with this fulfillment of his youthful dreams the
+romance of his young manhood seemed to be completed, and so closed
+the second volume of this trilogy.  But what effect that fulfillment
+of youth had upon his maturer years, or the fortunes of those who
+were nearly concerned in it, may be told in a later and final
+chronicle.
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of Susy, A Story of the Plains
+by Bret Harte
+
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