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Title:  Under the Redwoods

Author:  Bret Harte

March, 2001  [Etext #2555]


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Under the Redwoods

by

Bret Harte




CONTENTS


JIMMY'S BIG BROTHER FROM CALIFORNIA

THE YOUNGEST MISS PIPER

A WIDOW OF THE SANTA ANA VALLEY

THE MERMAID OF LIGHTHOUSE POINT

UNDER THE EAVES

HOW REUBEN ALLEN "SAW LIFE" IN SAN FRANCISCO

THREE VAGABONDS OF TRINIDAD

A VISION OF THE FOUNTAIN

A ROMANCE OF THE LINE

BOHEMIAN DAYS IN SAN FRANCISCO

UNDER THE REDWOODS




JIMMY'S BIG BROTHER FROM CALIFORNIA


As night crept up from the valley that stormy afternoon, Sawyer's
Ledge was at first quite blotted out by wind and rain, but
presently reappeared in little nebulous star-like points along the
mountain side, as the straggling cabins of the settlement were one
by one lit up by the miners returning from tunnel and claim.  These
stars were of varying brilliancy that evening, two notably so--one
that eventually resolved itself into a many-candled illumination of
a cabin of evident festivity; the other into a glimmering taper in
the window of a silent one.  They might have represented the
extreme mutations of fortune in the settlement that night: the
celebration of a strike by Robert Falloner, a lucky miner; and the
sick-bed of Dick Lasham, an unlucky one.

The latter was, however, not quite alone.  He was ministered to by
Daddy Folsom, a weak but emotional and aggressively hopeful
neighbor, who was sitting beside the wooden bunk whereon the
invalid lay.  Yet there was something perfunctory in his attitude:
his eyes were continually straying to the window, whence the
illuminated Falloner festivities could be seen between the trees,
and his ears were more intent on the songs and laughter that came
faintly from the distance than on the feverish breathing and
unintelligible moans of the sufferer.

Nevertheless he looked troubled equally by the condition of his
charge and by his own enforced absence from the revels.  A more
impatient moan from the sick man, however, brought a change to his
abstracted face, and he turned to him with an exaggerated
expression of sympathy.

"In course!  Lordy!  I know jest what those pains are: kinder ez ef
you was havin' a tooth pulled that had roots branchin' all over ye!
My!  I've jest had 'em so bad I couldn't keep from yellin'!  That's
hot rheumatics!  Yes, sir, I oughter know!  And" (confidentially)
"the sing'ler thing about 'em is that they get worse jest as
they're going off--sorter wringin' yer hand and punchin' ye in the
back to say 'Good-by.'  There!" he continued, as the man sank
exhaustedly back on his rude pillow of flour-sacks.  "There! didn't
I tell ye?  Ye'll be all right in a minit, and ez chipper ez a jay
bird in the mornin'.  Oh, don't tell me about rheumatics--I've bin
thar!  On'y mine was the cold kind--that hangs on longest--yours is
the hot, that burns itself up in no time!"

If the flushed face and bright eyes of Lasham were not enough to
corroborate this symptom of high fever, the quick, wandering laugh
he gave would have indicated the point of delirium.  But the too
optimistic Daddy Folsom referred this act to improvement, and went
on cheerfully: "Yes, sir, you're better now, and"--here he assumed
an air of cautious deliberation, extravagant, as all his assumptions
were--"I ain't sayin' that--ef--you--was--to--rise--up" (very
slowly) "and heave a blanket or two over your shoulders--jest by way
o' caution, you know--and leanin' on me, kinder meander over to Bob
Falloner's cabin and the boys, it wouldn't do you a heap o' good.
Changes o' this kind is often prescribed by the faculty."  Another
moan from the sufferer, however, here apparently corrected Daddy's
too favorable prognosis.  "Oh, all right!  Well, perhaps ye know
best; and I'll jest run over to Bob's and say how as ye ain't
comin', and will be back in a jiffy!"

"The letter," said the sick man hurriedly, "the letter, the letter!"

Daddy leaned suddenly over the bed.  It was impossible for even his
hopefulness to avoid the fact that Lasham was delirious.  It was a
strong factor in the case--one that would certainly justify his
going over to Falloner's with the news.  For the present moment,
however, this aberration was to be accepted cheerfully and humored
after Daddy's own fashion.  "Of course--the letter, the letter," he
said convincingly; "that's what the boys hev bin singin' jest now--


     'Good-by, Charley; when you are away,
      Write me a letter, love; send me a letter, love!'


That's what you heard, and a mighty purty song it is too, and
kinder clings to you.  It's wonderful how these things gets in your
head."

"The letter--write--send money--money--money, and the photograph--
the photograph--photograph--money," continued the sick man, in the
rapid reiteration of delirium.

"In course you will--to-morrow--when the mail goes," returned Daddy
soothingly; "plenty of them.  Jest now you try to get a snooze,
will ye?  Hol' on!--take some o' this."

There was an anodyne mixture on the rude shelf, which the doctor
had left on his morning visit.  Daddy had a comfortable belief that
what would relieve pain would also check delirium, and he
accordingly measured out a dose with a liberal margin to allow of
waste by the patient in swallowing in his semi-conscious state.  As
he lay more quiet, muttering still, but now unintelligibly, Daddy,
waiting for a more complete unconsciousness and the opportunity to
slip away to Falloner's, cast his eyes around the cabin.  He
noticed now for the first time since his entrance that a crumpled
envelope bearing a Western post-mark was lying at the foot of the
bed.  Daddy knew that the tri-weekly post had arrived an hour
before he came, and that Lasham had evidently received a letter.
Sure enough the letter itself was lying against the wall beside
him.  It was open.  Daddy felt justified in reading it.

It was curt and businesslike, stating that unless Lasham at once
sent a remittance for the support of his brother and sister--two
children in charge of the writer--they must find a home elsewhere.
That the arrears were long standing, and the repeated promises of
Lasham to send money had been unfulfilled.  That the writer could
stand it no longer.  This would be his last communication unless
the money were sent forthwith.

It was by no means a novel or, under the circumstances, a shocking
disclosure to Daddy.  He had seen similar missives from daughters,
and even wives, consequent on the varying fortunes of his
neighbors; no one knew better than he the uncertainties of a
miner's prospects, and yet the inevitable hopefulness that buoyed
him up.  He tossed it aside impatiently, when his eye caught a
strip of paper he had overlooked lying upon the blanket near the
envelope.  It contained a few lines in an unformed boyish hand
addressed to "my brother," and evidently slipped into the letter
after it was written.  By the uncertain candlelight Daddy read as
follows:--


Dear Brother, Rite to me and Cissy rite off.  Why aint you done it?
It's so long since you rote any.  Mister Recketts ses you dont care
any more.  Wen you rite send your fotograff.  Folks here ses I aint
got no big bruther any way, as I disremember his looks, and cant
say wots like him.  Cissy's kryin' all along of it.  I've got a
hedake.  William Walker make it ake by a blo.  So no more at
present from your loving little bruther Jim.


The quick, hysteric laugh with which Daddy read this was quite
consistent with his responsive, emotional nature; so, too, were the
ready tears that sprang to his eyes.  He put the candle down
unsteadily, with a casual glance at the sick man.  It was notable,
however, that this look contained less sympathy for the ailing "big
brother" than his emotion might have suggested.  For Daddy was
carried quite away by his own mental picture of the helpless
children, and eager only to relate his impressions of the incident.
He cast another glance at the invalid, thrust the papers into his
pocket, and clapping on his hat slipped from the cabin and ran to
the house of festivity.  Yet it was characteristic of the man, and
so engrossed was he by his one idea, that to the usual inquiries
regarding his patient he answered, "he's all right," and plunged at
once into the incident of the dunning letter, reserving--with the
instinct of an emotional artist--the child's missive until the
last.  As he expected, the money demand was received with indignant
criticisms of the writer.

"That's just like 'em in the States," said Captain Fletcher;
"darned if they don't believe we've only got to bore a hole in the
ground and snake out a hundred dollars.  Why, there's my wife--with
a heap of hoss sense in everything else--is allus wonderin' why I
can't rake in a cool fifty betwixt one steamer day and another."

"That's nothin' to my old dad," interrupted Gus Houston, the
"infant" of the camp, a bright-eyed young fellow of twenty; "why,
he wrote to me yesterday that if I'd only pick up a single piece of
gold every day and just put it aside, sayin' 'That's for popper and
mommer,' and not fool it away--it would be all they'd ask of me."

"That's so," added another; "these ignorant relations is just the
ruin o' the mining industry.  Bob Falloner hez bin lucky in his
strike to-day, but he's a darned sight luckier in being without
kith or kin that he knows of."

Daddy waited until the momentary irritation had subsided, and then
drew the other letter from his pocket.  "That ain't all, boys," he
began in a faltering voice, but gradually working himself up to a
pitch of pathos; "just as I was thinking all them very things, I
kinder noticed this yer poor little bit o' paper lyin' thar
lonesome like and forgotten, and I--read it--and well--gentlemen--
it just choked me right up!"  He stopped, and his voice faltered.

"Go slow, Daddy, go slow!" said an auditor smilingly.  It was
evident that Daddy's sympathetic weakness was well known.

Daddy read the child's letter.  But, unfortunately, what with his
real emotion and the intoxication of an audience, he read it
extravagantly, and interpolated a child's lisp (on no authority
whatever), and a simulated infantile delivery, which, I fear, at
first provoked the smiles rather than the tears of his audience.
Nevertheless, at its conclusion the little note was handed round
the party, and then there was a moment of thoughtful silence.

"Tell you what it is, boys," said Fletcher, looking around the
table, "we ought to be doin' suthin' for them kids right off!  Did
you," turning to Daddy, "say anythin' about this to Dick?"

"Nary--why, he's clean off his head with fever--don't understand a
word--and just babbles," returned Daddy, forgetful of his roseate
diagnosis a moment ago, "and hasn't got a cent."

"We must make up what we can amongst us afore the mail goes to-
night," said the "infant," feeling hurriedly in his pockets.
"Come, ante up, gentlemen," he added, laying the contents of his
buckskin purse upon the table.

"Hold on, boys," said a quiet voice.  It was their host Falloner,
who had just risen and was slipping on his oilskin coat.  "You've
got enough to do, I reckon, to look after your own folks.  I've
none!  Let this be my affair.  I've got to go to the Express Office
anyhow to see about my passage home, and I'll just get a draft for
a hundred dollars for that old skeesicks--what's his blamed name?
Oh, Ricketts"--he made a memorandum from the letter--"and I'll send
it by express.  Meantime, you fellows sit down there and write
something--you know what--saying that Dick's hurt his hand and
can't write--you know; but asked you to send a draft, which you're
doing.  Sabe?  That's all!  I'll skip over to the express now and
get the draft off, and you can mail the letter an hour later.  So
put your dust back in your pockets and help yourselves to the
whiskey while I'm gone."  He clapped his hat on his head and
disappeared.

"There goes a white man, you bet!" said Fletcher admiringly, as the
door closed behind their host.  "Now, boys," he added, drawing a
chair to the table, "let's get this yer letter off, and then go
back to our game."

Pens and ink were produced, and an animated discussion ensued as to
the matter to be conveyed.  Daddy's plea for an extended explanatory
and sympathetic communication was overruled, and the letter was
written to Ricketts on the simple lines suggested by Falloner.

"But what about poor little Jim's letter?  That ought to be
answered," said Daddy pathetically.

"If Dick hurt his hand so he can't write to Ricketts, how in
thunder is he goin' to write to Jim?" was the reply.

"But suthin' oughter be said to the poor kid," urged Daddy
piteously.

"Well, write it yourself--you and Gus Houston make up somethin'
together.  I'm going to win some money," retorted Fletcher,
returning to the card-table, where he was presently followed by all
but Daddy and Houston.

"Ye can't write it in Dick's name, because that little brother
knows Dick's handwriting, even if he don't remember his face.
See?" suggested Houston.

"That's so," said Daddy dubiously; "but," he added, with elastic
cheerfulness, we can write that Dick 'says.'  See?"

"Your head's level, old man!  Just you wade in on that."

Daddy seized the pen and "waded in."  Into somewhat deep and
difficult water, I fancy, for some of it splashed into his eyes,
and he sniffled once or twice as he wrote.  "Suthin' like this," he
said, after a pause:--


DEAR LITTLE JIMMIE,--Your big brother havin' hurt his hand, wants
me to tell you that otherways he is all hunky and A1.  He says he
don't forget you and little Cissy, you bet! and he's sendin' money
to old Ricketts straight off.  He says don't you and Cissy mind
whether school keeps or not as long as big Brother Dick holds the
lines.  He says he'd have written before, but he's bin follerin' up
a lead mighty close, and expects to strike it rich in a few days.


"You ain't got no sabe about kids," said Daddy imperturbably;
"they've got to be humored like sick folks.  And they want
everythin' big--they don't take no stock in things ez they are--
even ef they hev 'em worse than they are.  'So,'" continued Daddy,
reading to prevent further interruption, "'he says you're just to
keep your eyes skinned lookin' out for him comin' home any time--
day or night.  All you've got to do is to sit up and wait.  He
might come and even snake you out of your beds!  He might come with
four white horses and a nigger driver, or he might come disguised
as an ornary tramp.  Only you've got to be keen on watchin'.'  (Ye
see," interrupted Daddy explanatorily, "that'll jest keep them kids
lively.)  'He says Cissy's to stop cryin' right off, and if Willie
Walker hits yer on the right cheek you just slug out with your left
fist, 'cordin' to Scripter.'  Gosh," ejaculated Daddy, stopping
suddenly and gazing anxiously at Houston, "there's that blamed
photograph--I clean forgot that."

"And Dick hasn't got one in the shop, and never had," returned
Houston emphatically.  "Golly! that stumps us!  Unless," he added,
with diabolical thoughtfulness, "we take Bob's?  The kids don't
remember Dick's face, and Bob's about the same age.  And it's a
regular star picture--you bet!  Bob had it taken in Sacramento--in
all his war paint.  See!"  He indicated a photograph pinned against
the wall--a really striking likeness which did full justice to
Bob's long silken mustache and large, brown determined eyes.  "I'll
snake it off while they ain't lookin', and you jam it in the
letter.  Bob won't miss it, and we can fix it up with Dick after
he's well, and send another."

Daddy silently grasped the "infant's" hand, who presently secured
the photograph without attracting attention from the card-players.
It was promptly inclosed in the letter, addressed to Master James
Lasham.  The "infant" started with it to the post-office, and Daddy
Folsom returned to Lasham's cabin to relieve the watcher that had
been detached from Falloner's to take his place beside the sick
man.

Meanwhile the rain fell steadily and the shadows crept higher and
higher up the mountain.  Towards midnight the star points faded out
one by one over Sawyer's Ledge even as they had come, with the
difference that the illumination of Falloner's cabin was
extinguished first, while the dim light of Lasham's increased in
number.  Later, two stars seemed to shoot from the centre of the
ledge, trailing along the descent, until they were lost in the
obscurity of the slope--the lights of the stage-coach to Sacramento
carrying the mail and Robert Falloner.  They met and passed two
fainter lights toiling up the road--the buggy lights of the doctor,
hastily summoned from Carterville to the bedside of the dying Dick
Lasham.


The slowing up of his train caused Bob Falloner to start from a
half doze in a Western Pullman car.  As he glanced from his window
he could see that the blinding snowstorm which had followed him for
the past six hours had at last hopelessly blocked the line.  There
was no prospect beyond the interminable snowy level, the whirling
flakes, and the monotonous palisades of leafless trees seen through
it to the distant banks of the Missouri.  It was a prospect that
the mountain-bred Falloner was beginning to loathe, and although it
was scarcely six weeks since he left California, he was already
looking back regretfully to the deep slopes and the free song of
the serried ranks of pines.

The intense cold had chilled his temperate blood, even as the rigors
and conventions of Eastern life had checked his sincerity and
spontaneous flow of animal spirits begotten in the frank intercourse
and brotherhood of camps.  He had just fled from the artificialities
of the great Atlantic cities to seek out some Western farming lands
in which he might put his capital and energies.  The unlooked-for
interruption of his progress by a long- forgotten climate only
deepened his discontent.  And now--that train was actually backing!
It appeared they must return to the last station to wait for a
snow-plough to clear the line.  It was, explained the conductor,
barely a mile from Shepherdstown, where there was a good hotel and a
chance of breaking the journey for the night.

Shepherdstown!  The name touched some dim chord in Bob Falloner's
memory and conscience--yet one that was vague.  Then he suddenly
remembered that before leaving New York he had received a letter
from Houston informing him of Lasham's death, reminding him of his
previous bounty, and begging him--if he went West--to break the
news to the Lasham family.  There was also some allusion to a joke
about his (Bob's) photograph, which he had dismissed as unimportant,
and even now could not remember clearly.  For a few moments his
conscience pricked him that he should have forgotten it all, but now
he could make amends by this providential delay.  It was not a task
to his liking; in any other circumstances he would have written, but
he would not shirk it now.

Shepherdstown was on the main line of the Kansas Pacific Road, and
as he alighted at its station, the big through trains from San
Francisco swept out of the stormy distance and stopped also.  He
remembered, as he mingled with the passengers, hearing a childish
voice ask if this was the Californian train.  He remembered hearing
the amused and patient reply of the station-master: "Yes, sonny--
here she is again, and here's her passengers," as he got into the
omnibus and drove to the hotel.  Here he resolved to perform his
disagreeable duty as quickly as possible, and on his way to his
room stopped for a moment at the office to ask for Ricketts'
address.  The clerk, after a quick glance of curiosity at his new
guest, gave it to him readily, with a somewhat familiar smile.  It
struck Falloner also as being odd that he had not been asked to
write his name on the hotel register, but this was a saving of time
he was not disposed to question, as he had already determined to
make his visit to Ricketts at once, before dinner.  It was still
early evening.

He was washing his hands in his bedroom when there came a light tap
at his sitting-room door.  Falloner quickly resumed his coat and
entered the sitting-room as the porter ushered in a young lady
holding a small boy by the hand.  But, to Falloner's utter
consternation, no sooner had the door closed on the servant than
the boy, with a half-apologetic glance at the young lady, uttered a
childish cry, broke from her, and calling, "Dick! Dick!" ran
forward and leaped into Falloner's arms.

The mere shock of the onset and his own amazement left Bob without
breath for words.  The boy, with arms convulsively clasping his
body, was imprinting kisses on Bob's waistcoat in default of
reaching his face.  At last Falloner managed gently but firmly to
free himself, and turned a half-appealing, half-embarrassed look
upon the young lady, whose own face, however, suddenly flushed
pink.  To add to the confusion, the boy, in some reaction of
instinct, suddenly ran back to her, frantically clutched at her
skirts, and tried to bury his head in their folds.

"He don't love me," he sobbed.  "He don't care for me any more."

The face of the young girl changed.  It was a pretty face in its
flushing; in the paleness and thoughtfulness that overcast it it
was a striking face, and Bob's attention was for a moment distracted
from the grotesqueness of the situation.  Leaning over the boy she
said in a caressing yet authoritative voice, "Run away for a moment,
dear, until I call you," opening the door for him in a maternal way
so inconsistent with the youthfulness of her figure that it struck
him even in his confusion.  There was something also in her dress
and carriage that equally affected him: her garments were somewhat
old-fashioned in style, yet of good material, with an odd incongruity
to the climate and season.

Under her rough outer cloak she wore a polka jacket and the
thinnest of summer blouses; and her hat, though dark, was of rough
straw, plainly trimmed.  Nevertheless, these peculiarities were
carried off with an air of breeding and self-possession that was
unmistakable.  It was possible that her cool self-possession might
have been due to some instinctive antagonism, for as she came a
step forward with coldly and clearly-opened gray eyes, he was
vaguely conscious that she didn't like him.  Nevertheless, her
manner was formally polite, even, as he fancied, to the point of
irony, as she began, in a voice that occasionally dropped into the
lazy Southern intonation, and a speech that easily slipped at times
into Southern dialect:--

"I sent the child out of the room, as I could see that his advances
were annoying to you, and a good deal, I reckon, because I knew
your reception of them was still more painful to him.  It is quite
natural, I dare say, you should feel as you do, and I reckon
consistent with your attitude towards him.  But you must make some
allowance for the depth of his feelings, and how he has looked
forward to this meeting.  When I tell you that ever since he
received your last letter, he and his sister--until her illness
kept her home--have gone every day when the Pacific train was due
to the station to meet you; that they have taken literally as
Gospel truth every word of your letter"--

"My letter?" interrupted Falloner.

The young girl's scarlet lip curled slightly.  "I beg your pardon--
I should have said the letter you dictated.  Of course it wasn't in
your handwriting--you had hurt your hand, you know," she added
ironically.  "At all events, they believed it all--that you were
coming at any moment; they lived in that belief, and the poor
things went to the station with your photograph in their hands so
that they might be the first to recognize and greet you."

"With my photograph?" interrupted Falloner again.

The young girl's clear eyes darkened ominously.  "I reckon," she
said deliberately, as she slowly drew from her pocket the
photograph Daddy Folsom had sent, "that that is your photograph.
It certainly seems an excellent likeness," she added, regarding him
with a slight suggestion of contemptuous triumph.

In an instant the revelation of the whole mystery flashed upon him!
The forgotten passage in Houston's letter about the stolen
photograph stood clearly before him; the coincidence of his
appearance in Shepherdstown, and the natural mistake of the
children and their fair protector, were made perfectly plain.  But
with this relief and the certainty that he could confound her with
an explanation came a certain mischievous desire to prolong the
situation and increase his triumph.  She certainly had not shown
him any favor.

"Have you got the letter also?" he asked quietly.

She whisked it impatiently from her pocket and handed it to him.
As he read Daddy's characteristic extravagance and recognized the
familiar idiosyncrasies of his old companions, he was unable to
restrain a smile.  He raised his eyes, to meet with surprise the
fair stranger's leveled eyebrows and brightly indignant eyes, in
which, however, the rain was fast gathering with the lightning.

"It may be amusing to you, and I reckon likely it was all a
California joke," she said with slightly trembling lips; "I don't
know No'thern gentlemen and their ways, and you seem to have
forgotten our ways as you have your kindred.  Perhaps all this may
seem so funny to them: it may not seem funny to that boy who is now
crying his heart out in the hall; it may not be very amusing to
that poor Cissy in her sick-bed longing to see her brother.  It may
be so far from amusing to her, that I should hesitate to bring you
there in her excited condition and subject her to the pain that you
have caused him.  But I have promised her; she is already expecting
us, and the disappointment may be dangerous, and I can only implore
you--for a few moments at least--to show a little more affection
than you feel."  As he made an impulsive, deprecating gesture, yet
without changing his look of restrained amusement, she stopped him
hopelessly.  "Oh, of course, yes, yes, I know it is years since you
have seen them; they have no right to expect more; only--only--
feeling as you do," she burst impulsively, "why--oh, why did you
come?"

Here was Bob's chance.  He turned to her politely; began gravely,
"I simply came to"--when suddenly his face changed; he stopped as
if struck by a blow.  His cheek flushed, and then paled!  Good God!
What had he come for?  To tell them that this brother they were
longing for--living for--perhaps even dying for--was dead!  In his
crass stupidity, his wounded vanity over the scorn of the young
girl, his anticipation of triumph, he had forgotten--totally
forgotten--what that triumph meant!  Perhaps if he had felt more
keenly the death of Lasham the thought of it would have been
uppermost in his mind; but Lasham was not his partner or associate,
only a brother miner, and his single act of generosity was in the
ordinary routine of camp life.  If she could think him cold and
heartless before, what would she think of him now?  The absurdity
of her mistake had vanished in the grim tragedy he had seemed to
have cruelly prepared for her.  The thought struck him so keenly
that he stammered, faltered, and sank helplessly into a chair.

The shock that he had received was so plain to her that her own
indignation went out in the breath of it.  Her lip quivered.
"Don't you mind," she said hurriedly, dropping into her Southern
speech; "I didn't go to hurt you, but I was just that mad with the
thought of those pickaninnies, and the easy way you took it, that I
clean forgot I'd no call to catechise you!  And you don't know me
from the Queen of Sheba.  Well," she went on, still more rapidly,
and in odd distinction to her previous formal slow Southern
delivery, "I'm the daughter of Colonel Boutelle, of Bayou Sara,
Louisiana; and his paw, and his paw before him, had a plantation
there since the time of Adam, but he lost it and six hundred
niggers during the Wah!  We were pooh as pohverty--paw and maw and
we four girls--and no more idea of work than a baby.  But I had an
education at the convent at New Orleans, and could play, and speak
French, and I got a place as school-teacher here; I reckon the
first Southern woman that has taught school in the No'th!
Ricketts, who used to be our steward at Bayou Sara, told me about
the pickaninnies, and how helpless they were, with only a brother
who occasionally sent them money from California.  I suppose I
cottoned to the pooh little things at first because I knew what it
was to be alone amongst strangers, Mr. Lasham; I used to teach them
at odd times, and look after them, and go with them to the train to
look for you.  Perhaps Ricketts made me think you didn't care for
them; perhaps I was wrong in thinking it was true, from the way you
met Jimmy just now.  But I've spoken my mind and you know why."
She ceased and walked to the window.

Falloner rose.  The storm that had swept through him was over.
The quick determination, resolute purpose, and infinite patience
which had made him what he was were all there, and with it a
conscientiousness which his selfish independence had hitherto kept
dormant.  He accepted the situation, not passively--it was not in
his nature--but threw himself into it with all his energy.

"You were quite right," he said, halting a moment beside her; "I
don't blame you, and let me hope that later you may think me less
to blame than you do now.  Now, what's to be done?  Clearly, I've
first to make it right with Tommy--I mean Jimmy--and then we must
make a straight dash over to the girl!  Whoop!"  Before she could
understand from his face the strange change in his voice, he had
dashed out of the room.  In a moment he reappeared with the boy
struggling in his arms.  "Think of the little scamp not knowing his
own brother!" he laughed, giving the boy a really affectionate, if
slightly exaggerated hug, and expecting me to open my arms to the
first little boy who jumps into them!  I've a great mind not to
give him the present I fetched all the way from California.  Wait a
moment."  He dashed into the bedroom, opened his valise--where he
providentially remembered he had kept, with a miner's superstition,
the first little nugget of gold he had ever found--seized the tiny
bit of quartz of gold, and dashed out again to display it before
Jimmy's eager eyes.

If the heartiness, sympathy, and charming kindness of the man's
whole manner and face convinced, even while it slightly startled,
the young girl, it was still more effective with the boy.  Children
are quick to detect the false ring of affected emotion, and Bob's
was so genuine--whatever its cause--that it might have easily
passed for a fraternal expression with harder critics.  The child
trustfully nestled against him and would have grasped the gold, but
the young man whisked it into his pocket.  "Not until we've shown
it to our little sister--where we're going now!  I'm off to order a
sleigh."  He dashed out again to the office as if he found some
relief in action, or, as it seemed to Miss Boutelle, to avoid
embarrassing conversation.  When he came back again he was carrying
an immense bearskin from his luggage.  He cast a critical look at
the girl's unseasonable attire.

"I shall wrap you and Jimmy in this--you know it's snowing
frightfully."

Miss Boutelle flushed a little.  "I'm warm enough when walking,"
she said coldly.  Bob glanced at her smart little French shoes, and
thought otherwise.  He said nothing, but hastily bundled his two
guests downstairs and into the street.  The whirlwind dance of the
snow made the sleigh an indistinct bulk in the glittering darkness,
and as the young girl for an instant stood dazedly still, Bob
incontinently lifted her from her feet, deposited her in the
vehicle, dropped Jimmy in her lap, and wrapped them both tightly in
the bearskin.  Her weight, which was scarcely more than a child's,
struck him in that moment as being tantalizingly incongruous to the
matronly severity of her manner and its strange effect upon him.
He then jumped in himself, taking the direction from his companion,
and drove off through the storm.

The wind and darkness were not favorable to conversation, and only
once did he break the silence.  "Is there any one who would be
likely to remember--me--where we are going?" he asked, in a lull of
the storm.

Miss Boutelle uncovered enough of her face to glance at him
curiously.  "Hardly!  You know the children came here from the
No'th after your mother's death, while you were in California."

"Of course," returned Bob hurriedly; "I was only thinking--you know
that some of my old friends might have called," and then collapsed
into silence.

After a pause a voice came icily, although under the furs: "Perhaps
you'd prefer that your arrival be kept secret from the public?  But
they seem to have already recognized you at the hotel from your
inquiry about Ricketts, and the photograph Jimmy had already shown
them two weeks ago."  Bob remembered the clerk's familiar manner
and the omission to ask him to register.  "But it need go no
further, if you like," she added, with a slight return of her
previous scorn.

"I've no reason for keeping it secret," said Bob stoutly.

No other words were exchanged until the sleigh drew up before a
plain wooden house in the suburbs of the town.  Bob could see at a
glance that it represented the income of some careful artisan or
small shopkeeper, and that it promised little for an invalid's
luxurious comfort.  They were ushered into a chilly sitting-room
and Miss Boutelle ran upstairs with Jimmy to prepare the invalid
for Bob's appearance.  He noticed that a word dropped by the woman
who opened the door made the young girl's face grave again, and
paled the color that the storm had buffeted to her cheek.  He
noticed also that these plain surroundings seemed only to enhance
her own superiority, and that the woman treated her with a
deference in odd contrast to the ill-concealed disfavor with which
she regarded him.  Strangely enough, this latter fact was a relief
to his conscience.  It would have been terrible to have received
their kindness under false pretenses; to take their just blame of
the man he personated seemed to mitigate the deceit.

The young girl rejoined him presently with troubled eyes.  Cissy
was worse, and only intermittently conscious, but had asked to see
him.  It was a short flight of stairs to the bedroom, but before he
reached it Bob's heart beat faster than it had in any mountain
climb.  In one corner of the plainly furnished room stood a small
truckle bed, and in it lay the invalid.  It needed but a single
glance at her flushed face in its aureole of yellow hair to
recognize the likeness to Jimmy, although, added to that strange
refinement produced by suffering, there was a spiritual exaltation
in the child's look--possibly from delirium--that awed and
frightened him; an awful feeling that he could not lie to this
hopeless creature took possession of him, and his step faltered.
But she lifted her small arms pathetically towards him as if she
divined his trouble, and he sank on his knees beside her.  With a
tiny finger curled around his long mustache, she lay there silent.
Her face was full of trustfulness, happiness, and consciousness--
but she spoke no word.

There was a pause, and Falloner, slightly lifting his head without
disturbing that faintly clasping finger, beckoned Miss Boutelle to
his side.  "Can you drive?" he said, in a low voice.

"Yes."

"Take my sleigh and get the best doctor in town to come here at
once.  Bring him with you if you can; if he can't come at once,
drive home yourself.  I will stay here."

"But"--hesitated Miss Boutelle.

"I will stay here," he repeated.

The door closed on the young girl, and Falloner, still bending over
the child, presently heard the sleigh-bells pass away in the storm.
He still sat with his bent head, held by the tiny clasp of those
thin fingers.  But the child's eyes were fixed so intently upon him
that Mrs. Ricketts leaned over the strangely-assorted pair and
said--

"It's your brother Dick, dearie.  Don't you know him?"

The child's lips moved faintly.  "Dick's dead," she whispered.

"She's wandering," said Mrs. Ricketts.  "Speak to her."  But Bob,
with his eyes on the child's, lifted a protesting hand.  The little
sufferer's lips moved again.  "It isn't Dick--it's the angel God
sent to tell me."

She spoke no more.  And when Miss Boutelle returned with the doctor
she was beyond the reach of finite voices.  Falloner would have
remained all night with them, but he could see that his presence in
the contracted household was not desired.  Even his offer to take
Jimmy with him to the hotel was declined, and at midnight he
returned alone.

What his thoughts were that night may be easily imagined.  Cissy's
death had removed the only cause he had for concealing his real
identity.  There was nothing more to prevent his revealing all to
Miss Boutelle and to offer to adopt the boy.  But he reflected this
could not be done until after the funeral, for it was only due to
Cissy's memory that he should still keep up the role of Dick Lasham
as chief mourner.  If it seems strange that Bob did not at this
crucial moment take Miss Boutelle into his confidence, I fear it
was because he dreaded the personal effect of the deceit he had
practiced upon her more than any ethical consideration; she had
softened considerably in her attitude towards him that night; he
was human, after all, and while he felt his conduct had been
unselfish in the main, he dared not confess to himself how much her
opinion had influenced him.  He resolved that after the funeral he
would continue his journey, and write to her, en route, a full
explanation of his conduct, inclosing Daddy's letter as corroborative
evidence.  But on searching his letter-case he found that he had
lost even that evidence, and he must trust solely at present to
her faith in his improbable story.

It seemed as if his greatest sacrifice was demanded at the funeral!
For it could not be disguised that the neighbors were strongly
prejudiced against him.  Even the preacher improved the occasion to
warn the congregation against the dangers of putting off duty until
too late.  And when Robert Falloner, pale, but self-restrained,
left the church with Miss Boutelle, equally pale and reserved, on
his arm, he could with difficulty restrain his fury at the passing
of a significant smile across the faces of a few curious bystanders.
"It was Amy Boutelle, that was the 'penitence' that fetched him, you
bet!" he overheard, a barely concealed whisper; and the reply, "And
it's a good thing she's made out of it too, for he's mighty rich!"

At the church door he took her cold hand into his.  "I am leaving
to-morrow morning with Jimmy," he said, with a white face.  "Good-
by."

"You are quite right; good-by," she replied as briefly, but with
the faintest color.  He wondered if she had heard it too.

Whether she had heard it or not, she went home with Mrs. Ricketts
in some righteous indignation, which found--after the young lady's
habit--free expression.  Whatever were Mr. Lasham's faults of
omission it was most un-Christian to allude to them there, and an
insult to the poor little dear's memory who had forgiven them.
Were she in his shoes she would shake the dust of the town off her
feet; and she hoped he would.  She was a little softened on
arriving to find Jimmy in tears.  He had lost Dick's photograph--or
Dick had forgotten to give it back at the hotel, for this was all
he had in his pocket.  And he produced a letter--the missing letter
of Daddy, which by mistake Falloner had handed back instead of the
photograph.  Miss Boutelle saw the superscription and Californian
postmark with a vague curiosity.

"Did you look inside, dear?  Perhaps it slipped in."

Jimmy had not.  Miss Boutelle did--and I grieve to say, ended by
reading the whole letter.

Bob Falloner had finished packing his things the next morning, and
was waiting for Mr. Ricketts and Jimmy.  But when a tap came at the
door, he opened it to find Miss Boutelle standing there.  "I have
sent Jimmy into the bedroom," she said with a faint smile, "to look
for the photograph which you gave him in mistake for this.  I think
for the present he prefers his brother's picture to this letter,
which I have not explained to him or any one."  She stopped, and
raising her eyes to his, said gently: "I think it would have only
been a part of your goodness to have trusted me, Mr. Falloner."

"Then you will forgive me?" he said eagerly.

She looked at him frankly, yet with a faint trace of coquetry that
the angels might have pardoned.  "Do you want me to say to you what
Mrs. Ricketts says were the last words of poor Cissy?"

A year later, when the darkness and rain were creeping up Sawyer's
Ledge, and Houston and Daddy Folsom were sitting before their
brushwood fire in the old Lasham cabin, the latter delivered
himself oracularly.

"It's a mighty queer thing, that news about Bob!  It's not that
he's married, for that might happen to any one; but this yer
account in the paper of his wedding being attended by his 'little
brother.'  That gets me!  To think all the while he was here he was
lettin' on to us that he hadn't kith or kin!  Well, sir, that
accounts to me for one thing,--the sing'ler way he tumbled to that
letter of poor Dick Lasham's little brother and sent him that
draft!  Don't ye see?  It was a feller feelin'!  Knew how it was
himself!  I reckon ye all thought I was kinder soft reading that
letter o' Dick Lasham's little brother to him, but ye see what it
did."



THE YOUNGEST MISS PIPER


I do not think that any of us who enjoyed the acquaintance of the
Piper girls or the hospitality of Judge Piper, their father, ever
cared for the youngest sister.  Not on account of her extreme
youth, for the eldest Miss Piper confessed to twenty-six--and the
youth of the youngest sister was established solely, I think, by
one big braid down her back.  Neither was it because she was the
plainest, for the beauty of the Piper girls was a recognized
general distinction, and the youngest Miss Piper was not entirely
devoid of the family charms.  Nor was it from any lack of
intelligence, nor from any defective social quality; for her
precocity was astounding, and her good-humored frankness alarming.
Neither do I think it could be said that a slight deafness, which
might impart an embarrassing publicity to any statement--the
reverse of our general feeling--that might be confided by any one
to her private ear, was a sufficient reason; for it was pointed out
that she always understood everything that Tom Sparrell told her in
his ordinary tone of voice.  Briefly, it was very possible that
Delaware--the youngest Miss Piper--did not like us.  Yet it was
fondly believed by us that the other sisters failed to show that
indifference to our existence shown by Miss Delaware, although the
heartburnings, misunderstandings, jealousies, hopes and fears, and
finally the chivalrous resignation with which we at last accepted
the long foregone conclusion that they were not for us, and far
beyond our reach, is not a part of this veracious chronicle.
Enough that none of the flirtations of her elder sisters affected
or were shared by the youngest Miss Piper.  She moved in this
heart-breaking atmosphere with sublime indifference, treating her
sisters' affairs with what we considered rank simplicity or
appalling frankness.  Their few admirers who were weak enough to
attempt to gain her mediation or confidence had reason to regret
it.

"It's no kind o' use givin' me goodies," she said to a helpless
suitor of Louisiana Piper's who had offered to bring her some
sweets, "for I ain't got no influence with Lu, and if I don't give
'em up to her when she hears of it, she'll nag me and hate you like
pizen.  Unless," she added thoughtfully, "it was wintergreen
lozenges; Lu can't stand them, or anybody who eats them within a
mile."  It is needless to add that the miserable man, thus put upon
his gallantry, was obliged in honor to provide Del with the
wintergreen lozenges that kept him in disfavor and at a distance.
Unfortunately, too, any predilection or pity for any particular
suitor of her sister's was attended by even more disastrous
consequences.  It was reported that while acting as "gooseberry"--a
role usually assigned to her--between Virginia Piper and an
exceptionally timid young surveyor, during a ramble she conceived a
rare sentiment of humanity towards the unhappy man.  After once or
twice lingering behind in the ostentatious picking of a wayside
flower, or "running on ahead" to look at a mountain view, without
any apparent effect on the shy and speechless youth, she decoyed
him aside while her elder sister rambled indifferently and somewhat
scornfully on.  The youngest Miss Piper leaped upon the rail of a
fence, and with the stalk of a thimbleberry in her mouth swung her
small feet to and fro and surveyed him dispassionately.

"Ye don't seem to be ketchin' on?" she said tentatively.

The young man smiled feebly and interrogatively.

"Don't seem to be either follering suit nor trumpin'," continued
Del bluntly.

"I suppose so--that is, I fear that Miss Virginia"--he stammered.

"Speak up!  I'm a little deaf.  Say it again!" said Del, screwing
up her eyes and eyebrows.

The young man was obliged to admit in stentorian tones that his
progress had been scarcely satisfactory.

"You're goin' on too slow--that's it," said Del critically.  "Why,
when Captain Savage meandered along here with Jinny" (Virginia)
"last week, afore we got as far as this he'd reeled off a heap of
Byron and Jamieson" (Tennyson), "and sich; and only yesterday Jinny
and Doctor Beveridge was blowin' thistletops to know which was a
flirt all along the trail past the crossroads.  Why, ye ain't
picked ez much as a single berry for Jinny, let alone Lad's Love or
Johnny Jumpups and Kissme's, and ye keep talkin' across me, you
two, till I'm tired.  Now look here," she burst out with sudden
decision, "Jinny's gone on ahead in a kind o' huff; but I reckon
she's done that afore too, and you'll find her, jest as Spinner
did, on the rise of the hill, sittin' on a pine stump and lookin'
like this."  (Here the youngest Miss Piper locked her fingers over
her left knee, and drew it slightly up,--with a sublime
indifference to the exposure of considerable small-ankled red
stocking,--and with a far-off, plaintive stare, achieved a
colorable imitation of her elder sister's probable attitude.)
"Then you jest go up softly, like as you was a bear, and clap your
hands on her eyes, and say in a disguised voice like this" (here
Del turned on a high falsetto beyond any masculine compass),
"'Who's who?' jest like in forfeits."

"But she'll be sure to know me," said the surveyor timidly.

"She won't," said Del in scornful skepticism.

"I hardly think"--stammered the young man, with an awkward smile,
"that I--in fact--she'll discover me--before I can get beside her."

"Not if you go softly, for she'll be sittin' back to the road, so--
gazing away, so"--the youngest Miss Piper again stared dreamily in
the distance, "and you'll creep up just behind, like this."

"But won't she be angry?  I haven't known her long--that is--don't
you see?"  He stopped embarrassedly.

"Can't hear a word you say," said Del, shaking her head decisively.
"You've got my deaf ear.  Speak louder, or come closer."

But here the instruction suddenly ended, once and for all time!
For whether the young man was seriously anxious to perfect himself;
whether he was truly grateful to the young girl and tried to show
it; whether he was emboldened by the childish appeal of the long
brown distinguishing braid down her back, or whether he suddenly
found something peculiarly provocative in the reddish brown eyes
between their thickset hedge of lashes, and with the trim figure
and piquant pose, and was seized with that hysteric desperation
which sometimes attacks timidity itself, I cannot say!  Enough that
he suddenly put his arm around her waist and his lips to her soft
satin cheek, peppered and salted as it was by sun-freckles and
mountain air, and received a sound box on the ear for his pains.
The incident was closed.  He did not repeat the experiment on
either sister.  The disclosure of his rebuff seemed, however, to
give a singular satisfaction to Red Gulch.

While it may be gathered from this that the youngest Miss Piper was
impervious to general masculine advances, it was not until later
that Red Gulch was thrown into skeptical astonishment by the rumors
that all this time she really had a lover!  Allusion has been made
to the charge that her deafness did not prevent her from perfectly
understanding the ordinary tone of voice of a certain Mr. Thomas
Sparrell.

No undue significance was attached to this fact through the very
insignificance and "impossibility" of that individual;--a lanky,
red-haired youth, incapacitated for manual labor through lameness,--
a clerk in a general store at the Cross Roads!  He had never been
the recipient of Judge Piper's hospitality; he had never visited
the house even with parcels; apparently his only interviews with
her or any of the family had been over the counter.  To do him
justice he certainly had never seemed to seek any nearer
acquaintance; he was not at the church door when her sisters,
beautiful in their Sunday gowns, filed into the aisle, with little
Delaware bringing up the rear; he was not at the Democratic
barbecue, that we attended without reference to our personal
politics, and solely for the sake of Judge Piper and the girls; nor
did he go to the Agricultural Fair Ball--open to all.  His
abstention we believed to be owing to his lameness; to a wholesome
consciousness of his own social defects; or an inordinate passion
for reading cheap scientific textbooks, which did not, however, add
fluency nor conviction to his speech.  Neither had he the
abstraction of a student, for his accounts were kept with an
accuracy which struck us, who dealt at the store, as ignobly
practical, and even malignant.  Possibly we might have expressed
this opinion more strongly but for a certain rude vigor of repartee
which he possessed, and a suggestion that he might have a temper on
occasion.  "Them red-haired chaps is like to be tetchy and to kinder
see blood through their eyelashes," had been suggested by an
observing customer.

In short, little as we knew of the youngest Miss Piper, he was the
last man we should have suspected her to select as an admirer.
What we did know of their public relations, purely commercial ones,
implied the reverse of any cordial understanding.  The provisioning
of the Piper household was entrusted to Del, with other practical
odds and ends of housekeeping, not ornamental, and the following is
said to be a truthful record of one of their overheard interviews
at the store:--

The youngest Miss Piper, entering, displacing a quantity of goods
in the centre to make a sideways seat for herself, and looking
around loftily as she took a memorandum-book and pencil from her
pocket.

"Ahem!  If I ain't taking you away from your studies, Mr. Sparrell,
maybe you'll be good enough to look here a minit;--but" (in
affected politeness) "if I'm disturbing you I can come another
time."

Sparrell, placing the book he had been reading carefully under the
counter, and advancing to Miss Delaware with a complete ignoring of
her irony: "What can we do for you to-day, Miss Piper?"

Miss Delaware, with great suavity of manner, examining her
memorandum-book: "I suppose it wouldn't be shocking your delicate
feelings too much to inform you that the canned lobster and oysters
you sent us yesterday wasn't fit for hogs?"

Sparrell (blandly): "They weren't intended for them, Miss Piper.
If we had known you were having company over from Red Gulch to
dinner, we might have provided something more suitable for them.
We have a fair quality of oil-cake and corn-cobs in stock, at
reduced figures.  But the canned provisions were for your own
family."

Miss Delaware (secretly pleased at this sarcastic allusion to her
sister's friends, but concealing her delight): "I admire to hear
you talk that way, Mr. Sparrell; it's better than minstrels or a
circus.  I suppose you get it outer that book," indicating the
concealed volume.  "What do you call it?"

Sparrell (politely): "The First Principles of Geology."

Miss Delaware, leaning sideways and curling her little fingers
around her pink ear: "Did you say the first principles of 'geology'
or 'politeness'?  You know I am so deaf; but, of course, it
couldn't be that."

Sparrell (easily): "Oh no, you seem to have that in your hand"--
pointing to Miss Delaware's memorandum-book--"you were quoting from
it when you came in."

Miss Delaware, after an affected silence of deep resignation:
"Well! it's too bad folks can't just spend their lives listenin' to
such elegant talk; I'd admire to do nothing else!  But there's my
family up at Cottonwood--and they must eat.  They're that low that
they expect me to waste my time getting food for 'em here, instead
of drinking in the First Principles of the Grocery."

"Geology," suggested Sparrell blandly.  "The history of rock
formation."

"Geology," accepted Miss Delaware apologetically; "the history of
rocks, which is so necessary for knowing just how much sand you can
put in the sugar.  So I reckon I'll leave my list here, and you can
have the things toted to Cottonwood when you've got through with
your First Principles."

She tore out a list of her commissions from a page of her
memorandum-book, leaped lightly from the counter, threw her brown
braid from her left shoulder to its proper place down her back,
shook out her skirts deliberately, and saying, "Thank you for a
most improvin' afternoon, Mr. Sparrell," sailed demurely out of the
store.

A few auditors of this narrative thought it inconsistent that a
daughter of Judge Piper and a sister of the angelic host should put
up with a mere clerk's familiarity, but it was pointed out that
"she gave him as good as he sent," and the story was generally
credited.  But certainly no one ever dreamed that it pointed to any
more precious confidences between them.

I think the secret burst upon the family, with other things, at the
big picnic at Reservoir Canyon.  This festivity had been arranged
for weeks previously, and was undertaken chiefly by the "Red Gulch
Contingent," as we were called, as a slight return to the Piper
family for their frequent hospitality.  The Piper sisters were
expected to bring nothing but their own personal graces and attend
to the ministration of such viands and delicacies as the boys had
profusely supplied.

The site selected was Reservoir Canyon, a beautiful, triangular
valley with very steep sides, one of which was crowned by the
immense reservoir of the Pioneer Ditch Company.  The sheer flanks
of the canyon descended in furrowed lines of vines and clinging
bushes, like folds of falling skirts, until they broke again into
flounces of spangled shrubbery over a broad level carpet of
monkshood, mariposas, lupines, poppies, and daisies.  Tempered and
secluded from the sun's rays by its lofty shadows, the delicious
obscurity of the canyon was in sharp contrast to the fiery mountain
trail that in the full glare of the noonday sky made its tortuous
way down the hillside, like a stream of lava, to plunge suddenly
into the valley and extinguish itself in its coolness as in a lake.
The heavy odors of wild honeysuckle, syringa, and ceanothus that
hung over it were lightened and freshened by the sharp spicing of
pine and bay.  The mountain breeze which sometimes shook the
serrated tops of the large redwoods above with a chill from the
remote snow peaks even in the heart of summer, never reached the
little valley.

It seemed an ideal place for a picnic.  Everybody was therefore
astonished to hear that an objection was suddenly raised to this
perfect site.  They were still more astonished to know that the
objector was the youngest Miss Piper!  Pressed to give her reasons,
she had replied that the locality was dangerous; that the reservoir
placed upon the mountain, notoriously old and worn out, had been
rendered more unsafe by false economy in unskillful and hasty
repairs to satisfy speculating stockbrokers, and that it had lately
shown signs of leakage and sapping of its outer walls; that, in the
event of an outbreak, the little triangular valley, from which
there was no outlet, would be instantly flooded.  Asked still more
pressingly to give her authority for these details, she at first
hesitated, and then gave the name of Tom Sparrell.

The derision with which this statement was received by us all, as
the opinion of a sedentary clerk, was quite natural and obvious,
but not the anger which it excited in the breast of Judge Piper;
for it was not generally known that the judge was the holder of a
considerable number of shares in the Pioneer Ditch Company, and
that large dividends had been lately kept up by a false economy of
expenditure, to expedite a "sharp deal" in the stock, by which the
judge and others could sell out of a failing company.  Rather, it
was believed, that the judge's anger was due only to the discovery
of Sparrell's influence over his daughter and his interference with
the social affairs of Cottonwood.  It was said that there was a
sharp scene between the youngest Miss Piper and the combined forces
of the judge and the elder sisters, which ended in the former's
resolute refusal to attend the picnic at all if that site was
selected.

As Delaware was known to be fearless even to the point of
recklessness, and fond of gayety, her refusal only intensified the
belief that she was merely "stickin' up for Sparrell's judgment"
without any reference to her own personal safety or that of her
sisters.  The warning was laughed away; the opinion of Sparrell
treated with ridicule as the dyspeptic and envious expression of an
impractical man.  It was pointed out that the reservoir had lasted
a long time even in its alleged ruinous state; that only a miracle
of coincidence could make it break down that particular afternoon
of the picnic; that even if it did happen, there was no direct
proof that it would seriously flood the valley, or at best add more
than a spice of excitement to the affair.  The "Red Gulch
Contingent," who WOULD be there, was quite as capable of taking
care of the ladies, in case of any accident, as any lame crank who
wouldn't, but could only croak a warning to them from a distance.
A few even wished something might happen that they might have an
opportunity of showing their superior devotion; indeed, the
prospect of carrying the half-submerged sisters, in a condition of
helpless loveliness, in their arms to a place of safety was a
fascinating possibility.  The warning was conspicuously ineffective;
everybody looked eagerly forward to the day and the unchanged
locality; to the greatest hopefulness and anticipation was added the
stirring of defiance, and when at last the appointed hour had
arrived, the picnic party passed down the twisting mountain trail
through the heat and glare in a fever of enthusiasm.

It was a pretty sight to view this sparkling procession--the girls
cool and radiant in their white, blue, and yellow muslins and
flying ribbons, the "Contingent" in its cleanest ducks, and blue
and red flannel shirts, the judge white-waistcoated and panama-
hatted, with a new dignity borrowed from the previous circumstances,
and three or four impressive Chinamen bringing up the rear with
hampers--as it at last debouched into Reservoir Canyon.

Here they dispersed themselves over the limited area, scarcely half
an acre, with the freedom of escaped school children.  They were
secure in their woodland privacy.  They were overlooked by no high
road and its passing teams; they were safe from accidental
intrusion from the settlement; indeed they went so far as to effect
the exclusiveness of "clique."  At first they amused themselves by
casting humorously defiant eyes at the long low Ditch Reservoir,
which peeped over the green wall of the ridge, six hundred feet
above them; at times they even simulated an exaggerated terror of
it, and one recognized humorist declaimed a grotesque appeal to its
forbearance, with delightful local allusions.  Others pretended to
discover near a woodman's hut, among the belt of pines at the top
of the descending trail, the peeping figure of the ridiculous and
envious Sparrell.  But all this was presently forgotten in the
actual festivity.  Small as was the range of the valley, it still
allowed retreats during the dances for waiting couples among the
convenient laurel and manzanita bushes which flounced the mountain
side.  After the dancing, old-fashioned children's games were
revived with great laughter and half-hearted and coy protests from
the ladies; notably one pastime known as "I'm a-pinin'," in which
ingenious performance the victim was obliged to stand in the centre
of a circle and publicly "pine" for a member of the opposite sex.
Some hilarity was occasioned by the mischievous Miss "Georgy" Piper
declaring, when it came to her turn, that she was "pinin'" for a
look at the face of Tom Sparrell just now!

In this local trifling two hours passed, until the party sat down
to the long-looked for repast.  It was here that the health of
Judge Piper was neatly proposed by the editor of the "Argus."  The
judge responded with great dignity and some emotion.  He reminded
them that it had been his humble endeavor to promote harmony--that
harmony so characteristic of American principles--in social as he
had in political circles, and particularly among the strangely
constituted yet purely American elements of frontier life.  He
accepted the present festivity with its overflowing hospitalities,
not in recognition of himself--("yes! yes!")--nor of his family--
(enthusiastic protests)--but of that American principle!  If at one
time it seemed probable that these festivities might be marred by
the machinations of envy--(groans)--or that harmony interrupted by
the importation of low-toned material interests--(groans)--he could
say that, looking around him, he had never before felt--er--that--
Here the judge stopped short, reeled slightly forward, caught at a
camp-stool, recovered himself with an apologetic smile, and turned
inquiringly to his neighbor.

A light laugh--instantly suppressed--at what was at first supposed
to be the effect of the "overflowing hospitality" upon the speaker
himself, went around the male circle until it suddenly appeared
that half a dozen others had started to their feet at the same
time, with white faces, and that one of the ladies had screamed.

"What is it?" everybody was asking with interrogatory smiles.

It was Judge Piper who replied:--

"A little shock of earthquake," he said blandly; "a mere thrill!  I
think," he added with a faint smile, "we may say that Nature
herself has applauded our efforts in good old Californian fashion,
and signified her assent.  What are you saying, Fludder?"

"I was thinking, sir," said Fludder deferentially, in a lower
voice, "that if anything was wrong in the reservoir, this shock,
you know, might"--

He was interrupted by a faint crashing and crackling sound, and
looking up, beheld a good-sized boulder, evidently detached from
some greater height, strike the upland plateau at the left of the
trail and bound into the fringe of forest beside it.  A slight
cloud of dust marked its course, and then lazily floated away in
mid air.  But it had been watched agitatedly, and it was evident
that that singular loss of nervous balance which is apt to affect
all those who go through the slightest earthquake experience was
felt by all.  But some sense of humor, however, remained.

"Looks as if the water risks we took ain't goin' to cover
earthquakes," drawled Dick Frisney; "still that wasn't a bad shot,
if we only knew what they were aiming at."

"Do be quiet," said Virginia Piper, her cheeks pink with excitement.
"Listen, can't you?  What's that funny murmuring you hear now and
then up there?"

"It's only the snow-wind playin' with the pines on the summit.  You
girls won't allow anybody any fun but yourselves."

But here a scream from "Georgy," who, assisted by Captain Fairfax,
had mounted a camp-stool at the mouth of the valley, attracted
everybody's attention.  She was standing upright, with dilated
eyes, staring at the top of the trail.  "Look!" she said excitedly,
"if the trail isn't moving!"

Everybody faced in that direction.  At the first glance it seemed
indeed as if the trail was actually moving; wriggling and
undulating its tortuous way down the mountain like a huge snake,
only swollen to twice its usual size.  But the second glance showed
it to be no longer a trail but a channel of water, whose stream,
lifted in a bore-like wall four or five feet high, was plunging
down into the devoted valley.

For an instant they were unable to comprehend even the nature of
the catastrophe.  The reservoir was directly over their heads; the
bursting of its wall they had imagined would naturally bring down
the water in a dozen trickling streams or falls over the cliff
above them and along the flanks of the mountain.  But that its
suddenly liberated volume should overflow the upland beyond and
then descend in a pent-up flood by their own trail and their only
avenue of escape, had been beyond their wildest fancy.

They met this smiting truth with that characteristic short laugh
with which the American usually receives the blow of Fate or the
unexpected--as if he recognized only the absurdity of the
situation.  Then they ran to the women, collected them together,
and dragged them to vantages of fancied security among the bushes
which flounced the long skirts of the mountain walls.  But I leave
this part of the description to the characteristic language of one
of the party:--

"When the flood struck us, it did not seem to take any stock of us
in particular, but laid itself out to 'go for' that picnic for all
it was worth!  It wiped it off the face of the earth in about
twenty-five seconds!  It first made a clean break from stem to
stern, carrying everything along with it.  The first thing I saw
was old Judge Piper, puttin' on his best licks to get away from a
big can of strawberry ice cream that was trundling after him and
trying to empty itself on his collar, whenever a bigger wave lifted
it.  He was followed by what was left of the brass band; the big
drum just humpin' itself to keep abreast o' the ice cream, mixed up
with camp-stools, music-stands, a few Chinamen, and then what they
call in them big San Francisco processions 'citizens generally.'
The hull thing swept up the canyon inside o' thirty seconds.  Then,
what Captain Fairfax called 'the reflex action in the laws o'
motion' happened, and darned if the hull blamed procession didn't
sweep back again--this time all the heavy artillery, such as camp-
kettles, lager beer kegs, bottles, glasses, and crockery that was
left behind takin' the lead now, and Judge Piper and that ice cream
can bringin' up the rear.  As the jedge passed us the second time,
we noticed that that ice cream can--hevin' swallowed water--was
kinder losing its wind, and we encouraged the old man by shoutin'
out, 'Five to one on him!'  And then, you wouldn't believe what
followed.  Why, darn my skin, when that 'reflex' met the current at
the other end, it just swirled around again in what Captain Fairfax
called the 'centrifugal curve,' and just went round and round the
canyon like ez when yer washin' the dirt out o' a prospectin' pan--
every now and then washin' some one of the boys that was in it,
like scum, up ag'in the banks.

"We managed in this way to snake out the judge, jest ez he was
sailin' round on the home stretch, passin' the quarter post two
lengths ahead o' the can.  A good deal o' the ice cream had washed
away, but it took us ten minutes to shake the cracked ice and
powdered salt out o' the old man's clothes, and warm him up again
in the laurel bush where he was clinging.  This sort o' 'Here we go
round the mulberry bush' kep' on until most o' the humans was got
out, and only the furniture o' the picnic was left in the race.
Then it got kinder mixed up, and went sloshin' round here and
there, ez the water kep' comin' down by the trail.  Then Lulu
Piper, what I was holdin' up all the time in a laurel bush, gets an
idea, for all she was wet and draggled; and ez the things went
bobbin' round, she calls out the figures o' a cotillon to 'em.
'Two camp-stools forward.'  'Sashay and back to your places.'
'Change partners.'  'Hands all round.'

"She was clear grit, you bet!  And the joke caught on and the other
girls jined in, and it kinder cheered 'em, for they was wantin' it.
Then Fludder allowed to pacify 'em by sayin' he just figured up the
size o' the reservoir and the size o' the canyon, and he kalkilated
that the cube was about ekal, and the canyon couldn't flood any
more.  And then Lulu--who was peart as a jay and couldn't be
fooled--speaks up and says, 'What's the matter with the ditch,
Dick?'

"Lord! then we knew that she knew the worst; for of course all the
water in the ditch itself--fifty miles of it!--was drainin' now
into that reservoir and was bound to come down to the canyon."

It was at this point that the situation became really desperate,
for they had now crawled up the steep sides as far as the bushes
afforded foothold, and the water was still rising.  The chatter of
the girls ceased, there were long silences, in which the men
discussed the wildest plans, and proposed to tear their shirts into
strips to make ropes to support the girls by sticks driven into the
mountain side.  It was in one of those intervals that the distinct
strokes of a woodman's axe were heard high on the upland at the
point where the trail descended to the canyon.  Every ear was
alert, but only those on one side of the canyon could get a fair
view of the spot.  This was the good fortune of Captain Fairfax and
Georgy Piper, who had climbed to the highest bush on that side, and
were now standing up, gazing excitedly in that direction.

"Some one is cutting down a tree at the head of the trail," shouted
Fairfax.  The response and joyful explanation, "for a dam across
the trail," was on everybody's lips at the same time.

But the strokes of the axe were slow and painfully intermittent.
Impatience burst out.

"Yell to him to hurry up!  Why haven't they brought two men?"

"It's only one man," shouted the captain, "and he seems to be a
cripple.  By Jiminy!--it is--yes!--it's Tom Sparrell!"

There was a dead silence.  Then, I grieve to say, shame and its
twin brother rage took possession of their weak humanity.  Oh, yes!
It was all of a piece!  Why in the name of Folly hadn't he sent for
an able-bodied man.  Were they to be drowned through his cranky
obstinacy?

The blows still went on slowly.  Presently, however, they seemed to
alternate with other blows--but alas! they were slower, and if
possible feebler!

"Have they got another cripple to work?" roared the Contingent in
one furious voice.

"No--it's a woman--a little one--yes! a girl.  Hello!  Why, sure as
you live, it's Delaware!"

A spontaneous cheer burst from the Contingent, partly as a rebuke
to Sparrell, I think, partly from some shame over their previous
rage.  He could take it as he liked.

Still the blows went on distressingly slow.  The girls were hoisted
on the men's shoulders; the men were half submerged.  Then there
was a painful pause; then a crumbling crash.  Another cheer went up
from the canyon.

"It's down! straight across the trail," shouted Fairfax, "and a
part of the bank on the top of it."

There was another moment of suspense.  Would it hold or be carried
away by the momentum of the flood?  It held!  In a few moments
Fairfax again gave voice to the cheering news that the flow had
stopped and the submerged trail was reappearing.  In twenty minutes
it was clear--a muddy river bed, but possible of ascent!  Of course
there was no diminution of the water in the canyon, which had no
outlet, yet it now was possible for the party to swing from bush to
bush along the mountain side until the foot of the trail--no longer
an opposing one--was reached.  There were some missteps and
mishaps,--flounderings in the water, and some dangerous rescues,--
but in half an hour the whole concourse stood upon the trail and
commenced the ascent.  It was a slow, difficult, and lugubrious
procession--I fear not the best-tempered one, now that the stimulus
of danger and chivalry was past.  When they reached the dam made by
the fallen tree, although they were obliged to make a long detour
to avoid its steep sides, they could see how successfully it had
diverted the current to a declivity on the other side.

But strangely enough they were greeted by nothing else!  Sparrell
and the youngest Miss Piper were gone; and when they at last
reached the highroad, they were astounded to hear from a passing
teamster that no one in the settlement knew anything of the
disaster!

This was the last drop in their cup of bitterness!  They who had
expected that the settlement was waiting breathlessly for their
rescue, who anticipated that they would be welcomed as heroes, were
obliged to meet the ill-concealed amusement of passengers and
friends at their dishevelled and bedraggled appearance, which
suggested only the blundering mishaps of an ordinary summer outing!
"Boatin' in the reservoir, and fell in?"  "Playing at canal-boat in
the Ditch?" were some of the cheerful hypotheses.  The fleeting
sense of gratitude they had felt for their deliverers was dissipated
by the time they had reached their homes, and their rancor increased
by the information that when the earthquake occurred Mr. Tom
Sparrell and Miss Delaware were enjoying a "pasear" in the forest--
he having a half-holiday by virtue of the festival--and that
the earthquake had revived his fears of a catastrophe.  The two had
procured axes in the woodman's hut and did what they thought was
necessary to relieve the situation of the picnickers.  But the very
modesty of this account of their own performance had the effect of
belittling the catastrophe itself, and the picnickers' report of
their exceeding peril was received with incredulous laughter.

For the first time in the history of Red Gulch there was a serious
division between the Piper family, supported by the Contingent, and
the rest of the settlement.  Tom Sparrell's warning was remembered
by the latter, and the ingratitude of the picnickers to their
rescuers commented upon; the actual calamity to the reservoir was
more or less attributed to the imprudent and reckless contiguity of
the revelers on that day, and there were not wanting those who
referred the accident itself to the machinations of the scheming
Ditch Director Piper!

It was said that there was a stormy scene in the Piper household
that evening.  The judge had demanded that Delaware should break
off her acquaintance with Sparrell, and she had refused; the judge
had demanded of Sparrell's employer that he should discharge him,
and had been met with the astounding information that Sparrell was
already a silent partner in the concern.  At this revelation Judge
Piper was alarmed; while he might object to a clerk who could not
support a wife, as a consistent democrat he could not oppose a
fairly prosperous tradesman.  A final appeal was made to Delaware;
she was implored to consider the situation of her sisters, who had
all made more ambitious marriages or were about to make them.  Why
should she now degrade the family by marrying a country storekeeper?

It is said that here the youngest Miss Piper made a memorable
reply, and a revelation the truth of which was never gainsaid:--

"You all wanter know why I'm going to marry Tom Sparrell?" she
queried, standing up and facing the whole family circle.

"Yes."

"Why I prefer him to the hull caboodle that you girls have married
or are going to marry?" she continued, meditatively biting the end
of her braid.

"Yes."

"Well, he's the only man of the whole lot that hasn't proposed to
me first."

It is presumed that Sparrell made good the omission, or that the
family were glad to get rid of her, for they were married that
autumn.  And really a later comparison of the family records shows
that while Captain Fairfax remained "Captain Fairfax," and the
other sons-in-law did not advance proportionately in standing or
riches, the lame storekeeper of Red Gulch became the Hon. Senator
Tom Sparrell.



A WIDOW OF THE SANTA ANA VALLEY


The Widow Wade was standing at her bedroom window staring out, in
that vague instinct which compels humanity in moments of doubt and
perplexity to seek this change of observation or superior
illumination.  Not that Mrs. Wade's disturbance was of a serious
character.  She had passed the acute stage of widowhood by at least
two years, and the slight redness of her soft eyelids as well as the
droop of her pretty mouth were merely the recognized outward and
visible signs of the grievously minded religious community in which
she lived.  The mourning she still wore was also partly in
conformity with the sad-colored garments of her neighbors, and the
necessities of the rainy season.  She was in comfortable
circumstances, the mistress of a large ranch in the valley, which
had lately become more valuable by the extension of a wagon road
through its centre.  She was simply worrying whether she should go
to a "sociable" ending with "a dance"--a daring innovation of some
strangers--at the new hotel, or continue to eschew such follies,
that were, according to local belief, unsuited to "a vale of tears."

Indeed at this moment the prospect she gazed abstractedly upon
seemed to justify that lugubrious description.  The Santa Ana
Valley--a long monotonous level--was dimly visible through moving
curtains of rain or veils of mist, to the black mourning edge of
the horizon, and had looked like that for months.  The valley--in
some remote epoch an arm of the San Francisco Bay--every rainy
season seemed to be trying to revert to its original condition,
and, long after the early spring had laid on its liberal color in
strips, bands, and patches of blue and yellow, the blossoms of
mustard and lupine glistened like wet paint.  Nevertheless on that
rich alluvial soil Nature's tears seemed only to fatten the widow's
acres and increase her crops.  Her neighbors, too, were equally
prosperous.  Yet for six months of the year the recognized
expression of Santa Ana was one of sadness, and for the other six
months--of resignation.  Mrs. Wade had yielded early to this
influence, as she had to others, in the weakness of her gentle
nature, and partly as it was more becoming the singular tragedy
that had made her a widow.

The late Mr. Wade had been found dead with a bullet through his
head in a secluded part of the road over Heavy Tree Hill in Sonora
County.  Near him lay two other bodies, one afterwards identified
as John Stubbs, a resident of the Hill, and probably a traveling
companion of Wade's, and the other a noted desperado and
highwayman, still masked, as at the moment of the attack.  Wade and
his companion had probably sold their lives dearly, and against
odds, for another mask was found on the ground, indicating that the
attack was not single-handed, and as Wade's body had not yet been
rifled, it was evident that the remaining highwayman had fled in
haste.  The hue and cry had been given by apparently the only one
of the travelers who escaped, but as he was hastening to take the
overland coach to the East at the time, his testimony could not be
submitted to the coroner's deliberation.  The facts, however, were
sufficiently plain for a verdict of willful murder against the
highwayman, although it was believed that the absent witness had
basely deserted his companion and left him to his fate, or, as was
suggested by others, that he might even have been an accomplice.
It was this circumstance which protracted comment on the incident,
and the sufferings of the widow, far beyond that rapid obliteration
which usually overtook such affairs in the feverish haste of the
early days.  It caused her to remove to Santa Ana, where her old
father had feebly ranched a "quarter section" in the valley.  He
survived her husband only a few months, leaving her the property,
and once more in mourning.  Perhaps this continuity of woe endeared
her to a neighborhood where distinctive ravages of diphtheria or
scarlet fever gave a kind of social preeminence to any household,
and she was so sympathetically assisted by her neighbors in the
management of the ranch that, from an unkempt and wasteful
wilderness, it became paying property.  The slim, willowy figure,
soft red-lidded eyes, and deep crape of "Sister Wade" at church or
prayer-meeting was grateful to the soul of these gloomy worshipers,
and in time she herself found that the arm of these dyspeptics of
mind and body was nevertheless strong and sustaining.  Small wonder
that she should hesitate to-night about plunging into inconsistent,
even though trifling, frivolities.

But apart from this superficial reason, there was another instinctive
one deep down in the recesses of Mrs. Wade's timid heart which she
had kept to herself, and indeed would have tearfully resented had it
been offered by another.  The late Mr. Wade had been, in fact, a
singular example of this kind of frivolous existence carried to a
man-like excess.  Besides being a patron of amusements, Mr. Wade
gambled, raced, and drank.  He was often home late, and sometimes
not at all.  Not that this conduct was exceptional in the "roaring
days" of Heavy Tree Hill, but it had given Mrs. Wade perhaps an
undue preference for a less certain, even if a more serious life.
His tragic death was, of course, a kind of martyrdom, which exalted
him in the feminine mind to a saintly memory; yet Mrs. Wade was not
without a certain relief in that.  It was voiced, perhaps crudely,
by the widow of Abner Drake in a visit of condolence to the tearful
Mrs. Wade a few days after Wade's death.  "It's a vale o' sorrow,
Mrs. Wade," said the sympathizer, "but it has its ups and downs, and
I recken ye'll be feelin' soon pretty much as I did about Abner when
HE was took.  It was mighty soothin' and comfortin' to feel that
whatever might happen now, I always knew just whar Abner was passin'
his nights."  Poor slim Mrs. Wade had no disquieting sense of humor
to interfere with her reception of this large truth, and she
accepted it with a burst of reminiscent tears.

A long volleying shower had just passed down the level landscape,
and was followed by a rolling mist from the warm saturated soil
like the smoke of the discharge.  Through it she could see a faint
lightening of the hidden sun, again darkening through a sudden
onset of rain, and changing as with her conflicting doubts and
resolutions.  Thus gazing, she was vaguely conscious of an addition
to the landscape in the shape of a man who was passing down the
road with a pack on his back like the tramping "prospectors" she
had often seen at Heavy Tree Hill.  That memory apparently settled
her vacillating mind; she determined she would NOT go to the dance.
But as she was turning away from the window a second figure, a
horseman, appeared in another direction by a cross-road, a shorter
cut through her domain.  This she had no difficulty in recognizing
as one of the strangers who were getting up the dance.  She had
noticed him at church on the previous Sunday.  As he passed the
house he appeared to be gazing at it so earnestly that she drew
back from the window lest she should be seen.  And then, for no
reason whatever, she changed her mind once more, and resolved to go
to the dance.  Gravely announcing this fact to the wife of her
superintendent who kept house with her in her loneliness, she
thought nothing more about it.  She should go in her mourning, with
perhaps the addition of a white collar and frill.

It was evident, however, that Santa Ana thought a good deal more
than she did of this new idea, which seemed a part of the
innovation already begun by the building up of the new hotel.  It
was argued by some that as the new church and new schoolhouse had
been opened by prayer, it was only natural that a lighter festivity
should inaugurate the opening of the hotel.  "I reckon that dancin'
is about the next thing to travelin' for gettin' up an appetite for
refreshments, and that's what the landlord is kalkilatin' to
sarve," was the remark of a gloomy but practical citizen on the
veranda of "The Valley Emporium."  "That's so," rejoined a
bystander; "and I notice on that last box o' pills I got for chills
the directions say that a little 'agreeable exercise'--not too
violent--is a great assistance to the working o' the pills."

"I reckon that that Mr. Brooks who's down here lookin' arter mill
property, got up the dance.  He's bin round town canvassin' all the
women folks and drummin' up likely gals for it.  They say he
actooally sent an invite to the Widder Wade," remarked another
lounger.  "Gosh! he's got cheek!"

"Well, gentlemen," said the proprietor judicially, "while we don't
intend to hev any minin' camp fandangos or 'Frisco falals round
Santa Any--(Santa Ana was proud of its simple agricultural
virtues)--I ain't so hard-shelled as not to give new things a fair
trial.  And, after all, it's the women folk that has the say about
it.  Why, there's old Miss Ford sez she hasn't kicked a fut sence
she left Mizoori, but wouldn't mind trying it agin.  Ez to Brooks
takin' that trouble--well, I suppose it's along o' his bein'
HEALTHY!"  He heaved a deep dyspeptic sigh, which was faintly
echoed by the others.  "Why, look at him now, ridin' round on that
black hoss o' his, in the wet since daylight and not carin' for
blind chills or rhumatiz!"

He was looking at a serape-draped horseman, the one the widow had
seen on the previous night, who was now cantering slowly up the
street.  Seeing the group on the veranda, he rode up, threw himself
lightly from his saddle, and joined them.  He was an alert,
determined, good-looking fellow of about thirty-five, whose smooth,
smiling face hardly commended itself to Santa Ana, though his eyes
were distinctly sympathetic.  He glanced at the depressed group
around him and became ominously serious.

"When did it happen?" he asked gravely.

"What happen?" said the nearest bystander.

"The Funeral, Flood, Fight, or Fire.  Which of the four F's was
it?"

"What are ye talkin' about?" said the proprietor stiffly, scenting
some dangerous humor.

"YOU," said Brooks promptly.  "You're all standing here, croaking
like crows, this fine morning.  I passed YOUR farm, Johnson, not an
hour ago; the wheat just climbing out of the black adobe mud as
thick as rows of pins on paper--what have YOU to grumble at?  I saw
YOUR stock, Briggs, over on Two-Mile Bottom, waddling along, fat as
the adobe they were sticking in, their coats shining like fresh
paint--what's the matter with YOU?  And," turning to the
proprietor, "there's YOUR shed, Saunders, over on the creek, just
bursting with last year's grain that you know has gone up two
hundred per cent. since you bought it at a bargain--what are YOU
growling at?  It's enough to provoke a fire or a famine to hear you
groaning--and take care it don't, some day, as a lesson to you."

All this was so perfectly true of the prosperous burghers that they
could not for a moment reply.  But Briggs had recourse to what he
believed to be a retaliatory taunt.

"I heard you've been askin' Widow Wade to come to your dance," he
said, with a wink at the others.  "Of course she said 'Yes.'"

"Of course she did," returned Brooks coolly.  "I've just got her
note."

"What?" ejaculated the three men together.  "Mrs. Wade comin'?"

"Certainly!  Why shouldn't she?  And it would do YOU good to come
too, and shake the limp dampness out o' you," returned Brooks, as
he quietly remounted his horse and cantered away.

"Darned ef I don't think he's got his eye on the widder," said
Johnson faintly.

"Or the quarter section," added Briggs gloomily.

For all that, the eventful evening came, with many lights in the
staring, undraped windows of the hotel, coldly bright bunting on
the still damp walls of the long dining-room, and a gentle downpour
from the hidden skies above.  A close carryall was especially
selected to bring Mrs. Wade and her housekeeper.  The widow
arrived, looking a little slimmer than usual in her closely
buttoned black dress, white collar and cuffs, very glistening in
eye and in hair,--whose glossy black ringlets were perhaps more
elaborately arranged than was her custom,--and with a faint coming
and going of color, due perhaps to her agitation at this tentative
reentering into worldly life, which was nevertheless quite virginal
in effect.  A vague solemnity pervaded the introductory proceedings,
and a singular want of sociability was visible in the "sociable"
part of the entertainment.  People talked in whispers or with that
grave precision which indicates good manners in rural communities;
conversed painfully with other people whom they did not want to talk
to rather than appear to be alone, or rushed aimlessly together like
water drops, and then floated in broken, adherent masses over the
floor.  The widow became a helpless, religious centre of deacons and
Sunday-school teachers, which Brooks, untiring, yet fruitless, in
his attempt to produce gayety, tried in vain to break.  To this
gloom the untried dangers of the impending dance, duly prefigured by
a lonely cottage piano and two violins in a desert of expanse, added
a nervous chill.  When at last the music struck up--somewhat
hesitatingly and protestingly, from the circumstance that the player
was the church organist, and fumbled mechanically for his stops, the
attempt to make up a cotillon set was left to the heroic Brooks.
Yet he barely escaped disaster when, in posing the couples, he
incautiously begged them to look a little less as if they were
waiting for the coffin to be borne down the aisle between them, and
was rewarded by a burst of tears from Mrs. Johnson, who had lost a
child two years before, and who had to be led away, while her place
in the set was taken by another.  Yet the cotillon passed off; a
Spanish dance succeeded; "Moneymusk," with the Virginia Reel, put a
slight intoxicating vibration into the air, and healthy youth at
last asserted itself in a score of freckled but buxom girls in white
muslin, with romping figures and laughter, at the lower end of the
room.  Still a rigid decorum reigned among the elder dancers, and
the figures were called out in grave formality, as if, to Brooks's
fancy, they were hymns given from the pulpit, until at the close of
the set, in half-real, half-mock despair, he turned desperately to
Mrs. Wade, his partner:--

"Do you waltz?"

Mrs. Wade hesitated.  She HAD, before marriage, and was a good
waltzer.  "I do," she said timidly, "but do you think they"--

But before the poor widow could formulate her fears as to the
reception of "round dances," Brooks had darted to the piano, and
the next moment she heard with a "fearful joy" the opening bars of
a waltz.  It was an old Julien waltz, fresh still in the fifties,
daring, provocative to foot, swamping to intellect, arresting to
judgment, irresistible, supreme!  Before Mrs. Wade could protest,
Brooks's arm had gathered up her slim figure, and with one quick
backward sweep and swirl they were off!  The floor was cleared for
them in a sudden bewilderment of alarm--a suspense of burning
curiosity.  The widow's little feet tripped quickly, her long black
skirt swung out; as she turned the corner there was not only a
sudden revelation of her pretty ankles, but, what was more
startling, a dazzling flash of frilled and laced petticoat, which
at once convinced every woman in the room that the act had been
premeditated for days!  Yet even that criticism was presently
forgotten in the pervading intoxication of the music and the
movement.  The younger people fell into it with wild rompings,
whirlings, and clasping of hands and waists.  And stranger than
all, a corybantic enthusiasm seized upon the emotionally religious,
and those priests and priestesses of Cybele who were famous for
their frenzy and passion in camp-meeting devotions seemed to find
an equal expression that night in the waltz.  And when, flushed and
panting, Mrs. Wade at last halted on the arm of her partner, they
were nearly knocked over by the revolving Johnson and Mrs. Stubbs
in a whirl of gloomy exultation!  Deacons and Sunday-school
teachers waltzed together until the long room shook, and the very
bunting on the walls waved and fluttered with the gyrations of
those religious dervishes.  Nobody knew--nobody cared how long this
frenzy lasted--it ceased only with the collapse of the musicians.
Then, with much vague bewilderment, inward trepidation, awkward and
incoherent partings, everybody went dazedly home; there was no
other dancing after that--the waltz was the one event of the
festival and of the history of Santa Ana.  And later that night,
when the timid Mrs. Wade, in the seclusion of her own room and the
disrobing of her slim figure, glanced at her spotless frilled and
laced petticoat lying on a chair, a faint smile--the first of her
widowhood--curved the corners of her pretty mouth.

A week of ominous silence regarding the festival succeeded in Santa
Ana.  The local paper gave the fullest particulars of the opening
of the hotel, but contented itself with saying: "The entertainment
concluded with a dance."  Mr. Brooks, who felt himself compelled to
call upon his late charming partner twice during the week,
characteristically soothed her anxieties as to the result.  "The
fact of it is, Mrs. Wade, there's really nobody in particular to
blame--and that's what gets them.  They're all mixed up in it,
deacons and Sunday-school teachers; and when old Johnson tried to
be nasty the other evening and hoped you hadn't suffered from your
exertions that night, I told him you hadn't quite recovered yet
from the physical shock of having been run into by him and Mrs.
Stubbs, but that, you being a lady, you didn't tell just how you
felt at the exhibition he and she made of themselves.  That shut
him up."

"But you shouldn't have said that," said Mrs. Wade with a
frightened little smile.

"No matter," returned Brooks cheerfully.  "I'll take the blame of
it with the others.  You see they'll have to have a scapegoat--and
I'm just the man, for I got up the dance!  And as I'm going away, I
suppose I shall bear off the sin with me into the wilderness."

"You're going away?" repeated Mrs. Wade in more genuine concern.

"Not for long," returned Brooks laughingly.  "I came here to look
up a mill site, and I've found it.  Meantime I think I've opened
their eyes."

"You have opened mine," said the widow with timid frankness.

They were soft pretty eyes when opened, in spite of their heavy red
lids, and Mr. Brooks thought that Santa Ana would be no worse if
they remained open.  Possibly he looked it, for Mrs. Wade said
hurriedly, "I mean--that is--I've been thinking that life needn't
ALWAYS be as gloomy as we make it here.  And even HERE, you know,
Mr. Brooks, we have six months' sunshine--though we always forget
it in the rainy season."

"That's so," said Brooks cheerfully.  "I once lost a heap of money
through my own foolishness, and I've managed to forget it, and I
even reckon to get it back again out of Santa Ana if my mill
speculation holds good.  So good-by, Mrs. Wade--but not for long."
He shook her hand frankly and departed, leaving the widow conscious
of a certain sympathetic confidence and a little grateful for--she
knew not what.

This feeling remained with her most of the afternoon, and even
imparted a certain gayety to her spirits, to the extent of causing
her to hum softly to herself; the air being oddly enough the Julien
Waltz.  And when, later in the day, the shadows were closing in
with the rain, word was brought to her that a stranger wished to
see her in the sitting-room, she carried a less mournful mind to
this function of her existence.  For Mrs. Wade was accustomed to
give audience to traveling agents, tradesmen, working-hands and
servants, as chatelaine of her ranch, and the occasion was not
novel.  Yet on entering the room, which she used partly as an
office, she found some difficulty in classifying the stranger, who
at first glance reminded her of the tramping miner she had seen
that night from her window.  He was rather incongruously dressed,
some articles of his apparel being finer than others; he wore a
diamond pin in a scarf folded over a rough "hickory" shirt; his
light trousers were tucked in common mining boots that bore stains
of travel and a suggestion that he had slept in his clothes.  What
she could see of his unshaven face in that uncertain light
expressed a kind of dogged concentration, overlaid by an assumption
of ease.  He got up as she came in, and with a slight "How do,
ma'am," shut the door behind her and glanced furtively around the
room.

"What I've got to say to ye, Mrs. Wade,--as I reckon you be,--is
strictly private and confidential!  Why, ye'll see afore I get
through.  But I thought I might just as well caution ye agin our
being disturbed."

Overcoming a slight instinct of repulsion, Mrs. Wade returned, "You
can speak to me here; no one will interrupt you--unless I call
them," she added with a little feminine caution.

"And I reckon ye won't do that," he said with a grim smile.  "You
are the widow o' Pulaski Wade, late o' Heavy Tree Hill, I reckon?"

"I am," said Mrs. Wade.

"And your husband's buried up thar in the graveyard, with a
monument over him setting forth his virtues ez a Christian and a
square man and a high-minded citizen?  And that he was foully
murdered by highwaymen?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Wade, "that is the inscription."

"Well, ma'am, a bigger pack o' lies never was cut on stone!"

Mrs. Wade rose, half in indignation, half in terror.

"Keep your sittin'," said the stranger, with a warning wave of his
hand.  "Wait till I'm through, and then you call in the hull State
o' Californy, ef ye want."

The stranger's manner was so doggedly confident that Mrs. Wade sank
back tremblingly in her chair.  The man put his slouch hat on his
knee, twirled it round once or twice, and then said with the same
stubborn deliberation:--

"The highwayman in that business was your husband--Pulaski Wade--
and his gang, and he was killed by one o' the men he was robbin'.
Ye see, ma'am, it used to be your husband's little game to rope in
three or four strangers in a poker deal at Spanish Jim's saloon--I
see you've heard o' the place," he interpolated as Mrs. Wade drew
back suddenly--"and when he couldn't clean 'em out in that way, or
they showed a little more money than they played, he'd lay for 'em
with his gang in a lone part of the trail, and go through them like
any road agent.  That's what he did that night--and that's how he
got killed."

"How do you know this?" said Mrs. Wade, with quivering lips.

"I was one o' the men he went through before he was killed.  And
I'd hev got my money back, but the rest o' the gang came up, and I
got away jest in time to save my life and nothin' else.  Ye might
remember thar was one man got away and giv' the alarm, but he was
goin' on to the States by the overland coach that night and
couldn't stay to be a witness.  I was that man.  I had paid my
passage through, and I couldn't lose THAT too with my other money,
so I went."

Mrs. Wade sat stunned.  She remembered the missing witness, and how
she had longed to see the man who was last with her husband; she
remembered Spanish Jim's saloon--his well-known haunt; his frequent
and unaccountable absences, the sudden influx of money which he
always said he had won at cards; the diamond ring he had given her
as the result of "a bet;" the forgotten recurrence of other
robberies by a secret masked gang; a hundred other things that had
worried her, instinctively, vaguely.  She knew now, too, the
meaning of the unrest that had driven her from Heavy Tree Hill--the
strange unformulated fears that had haunted her even here.  Yet
with all this she felt, too, her present weakness--knew that this
man had taken her at a disadvantage, that she ought to indignantly
assert herself, deny everything, demand proof, and brand him a
slanderer!

"How did--you--know it was my husband?" she stammered.

"His mask fell off in the fight; you know another mask was found--
it was HIS.  I saw him as plainly as I see him there!" he pointed
to a daguerreotype of her husband which stood upon her desk.

Mrs. Wade could only stare vacantly, hopelessly.  After a pause the
man continued in a less aggressive manner and more confidential
tone, which, however, only increased her terror.  "I ain't sayin'
that YOU knowed anything about this, ma'am, and whatever other
folks might say when THEY know of it, I'll allers say that you
didn't."

"What, then, did you come here for?" said the widow desperately.

"What do I come here for?" repeated the man grimly, looking around
the room; "what did I come to this yer comfortable home--this yer
big ranch and to a rich woman like yourself for?  Well, Mrs. Wade,
I come to get the six hundred dollars your husband robbed me of,
that's all!  I ain't askin' more!  I ain't askin' interest!  I
ain't askin' compensation for havin' to run for my life--and,"
again looking grimly round the walls, "I ain't askin' more than you
will give--or is my rights."

"But this house never was his; it was my father's," gasped Mrs.
Wade; "you have no right"--

"Mebbe 'yes' and mebbe 'no,' Mrs. Wade," interrupted the man, with
a wave of his hat; "but how about them two checks to bearer for two
hundred dollars each found among your husband's effects, and
collected by your lawyer for you--MY CHECKS, Mrs. Wade?"

A wave of dreadful recollection overwhelmed her.  She remembered
the checks found upon her husband's body, known only to her and her
lawyer, believed to be gambling gains, and collected at once under
his legal advice.  Yet she made one more desperate effort in spite
of the instinct that told her he was speaking the truth.

"But you shall have to prove it--before witnesses."

"Do you WANT me to prove it before witnesses?" said the man, coming
nearer her.  "Do you want to take my word and keep it between
ourselves, or do you want to call in your superintendent and his
men, and all Santy Any, to hear me prove your husband was a
highwayman, thief, and murderer?  Do you want to knock over that
monument on Heavy Tree Hill, and upset your standing here among the
deacons and elders?  Do you want to do all this and be forced, even
by your neighbors, to pay me in the end, as you will?  Ef you do,
call in your witnesses now and let's have it over.  Mebbe it would
look better ef I got the money out of YOUR FRIENDS than ye--
a woman!  P'raps you're right!"

He made a step towards the door, but she stopped him.

"No! no! wait!  It's a large sum--I haven't it with me," she
stammered, thoroughly beaten.

"Ye kin get it."

"Give me time!" she implored.  "Look!  I'll give you a hundred down
now,--all I have here,--the rest another time!"  She nervously
opened a drawer of her desk and taking out a buckskin bag of gold
thrust it in his hand.  "There! go away now!"  She lifted her thin
hands despairingly to her head.  "Go! do!"

The man seemed struck by her manner.  "I don't want to be hard on a
woman," he said slowly.  "I'll go now and come back again at nine
to-night.  You can git the money, or what's as good, a check to
bearer, by then.  And ef ye'll take my advice, you won't ask no
advice from others, ef you want to keep your secret.  Just now it's
safe with me; I'm a square man, ef I seem to be a hard one."  He
made a gesture as if to take her hand, but as she drew shrinkingly
away, he changed it to an awkward bow, and the next moment was
gone.

She started to her feet, but the unwonted strain upon her nerves
and frail body had been greater than she knew.  She made a step
forward, felt the room whirl round her and then seem to collapse
beneath her feet, and, clutching at her chair, sank back into it,
fainting.

How long she lay there she never knew.  She was at last conscious
of some one bending over her, and a voice--the voice of Mr. Brooks--
in her ear, saying, "I beg your pardon; you seem ill.  Shall I
call some one?"

"No!" she gasped, quickly recovering herself with an effort, and
staring round her.  "Where is--when did you come in?"

"Only this moment.  I was leaving tonight, sooner than I expected,
and thought I'd say good-by.  They told me that you had been
engaged with a stranger, but he had just gone.  I beg your pardon--
I see you are ill.  I won't detain you any longer."

"No! no! don't go!  I am better--better," she said feverishly.  As
she glanced at his strong and sympathetic face a wild idea seized
her.  He was a stranger here, an alien to these people, like
herself.  The advice that she dare not seek from others, from her
half-estranged religious friends, from even her superintendent and
his wife, dare she ask from him?  Perhaps he saw this frightened
doubt, this imploring appeal, in her eyes, for he said gently, "Is
it anything I can do for you?"

"Yes," she said, with the sudden desperation of weakness; "I want
you to keep a secret."

"Yours?--yes!" he said promptly.

Whereat poor Mrs. Wade instantly burst into tears.  Then, amidst
her sobs, she told him of the stranger's visit, of his terrible
accusations, of his demands, his expected return, and her own utter
helplessness.  To her terror, as she went on she saw a singular
change in his kind face; he was following her with hard, eager
intensity.  She had half hoped, even through her fateful instincts,
that he might have laughed, manlike, at her fears, or pooh-poohed
the whole thing.  But he did not.  "You say he positively recognized
your husband?" he repeated quickly.

"Yes, yes!" sobbed the widow, "and knew that daguerreotype!" she
pointed to the desk.

Brooks turned quickly in that direction.  Luckily his back was
towards her, and she could not see his face, and the quick,
startled look that came into his eyes.  But when they again met
hers, it was gone, and even their eager intensity had changed to a
gentle commiseration.  "You have only his word for it, Mrs. Wade,"
he said gently, "and in telling your secret to another, you have
shorn the rascal of half his power over you.  And he knew it.  Now,
dismiss the matter from your mind and leave it all to me.  I will
be here a few minutes before nine--AND ALONE IN THIS ROOM.  Let
your visitor be shown in here, and don't let us be disturbed.
Don't be alarmed," he added with a faint twinkle in his eye, "there
will be no fuss and no exposure!"


It lacked a few minutes of nine when Mr. Brooks was ushered into
the sitting-room.  As soon as he was alone he quietly examined the
door and the windows, and having satisfied himself, took his seat
in a chair casually placed behind the door.  Presently he heard the
sound of voices and a heavy footstep in the passage.  He lightly
felt his waistcoat pocket--it contained a pretty little weapon of
power and precision, with a barrel scarcely two inches long.

The door opened, and the person outside entered the room.  In an
instant Brooks had shut the door and locked it behind him.  The man
turned fiercely, but was faced by Brooks quietly, with one finger
calmly hooked in his waistcoat pocket.  The man slightly recoiled
from him--not as much from fear as from some vague stupefaction.
"What's that for?  What's your little game?" he said half
contemptuously.

"No game at all," returned Brooks coolly.  "You came here to sell a
secret.  I don't propose to have it given away first to any
listener."

"YOU don't--who are YOU?"

"That's a queer question to ask of the man you are trying to
personate--but I don't wonder!  You're doing it d----d badly."

"Personate--YOU?" said the stranger, with staring eyes.

"Yes, ME," said Brooks quietly.  "I am the only man who escaped
from the robbery that night at Heavy Tree Hill and who went home by
the Overland Coach."

The stranger stared, but recovered himself with a coarse laugh.
"Oh, well! we're on the same lay, it appears!  Both after the
widow--afore we show up her husband."

"Not exactly," said Brooks, with his eyes fixed intently on the
stranger.  "You are here to denounce a highwayman who is DEAD and
escaped justice.  I am here to denounce one who is LIVING!--Stop!
drop your hand; it's no use.  You thought you had to deal only with
a woman to-night, and your revolver isn't quite handy enough.
There! down!--down!  So!  That'll do."

"You can't prove it," said the man hoarsely.

"Fool!  In your story to that woman you have given yourself away.
There were but two travelers attacked by the highwaymen.  One was
killed--I am the other.  Where do YOU come in?  What witness can
you be--except as the highwayman that you are?  Who is left to
identify Wade but--his accomplice!"

The man's suddenly whitened face made his unshaven beard seem to
bristle over his face like some wild animal's.  "Well, ef you
kalkilate to blow me, you've got to blow Wade and his widder too.
Jest you remember that," he said whiningly.

"I've thought of that," said Brooks coolly, "and I calculate that
to prevent it is worth about that hundred dollars you got from that
poor woman--and no more!  Now, sit down at that table, and write as
I dictate."

The man looked at him in wonder, but obeyed.

"Write," said Brooks, "'I hereby certify that my accusations
against the late Pulaski Wade of Heavy Tree Hill are erroneous and
groundless, and the result of mistaken identity, especially in
regard to any complicity of his in the robbery of John Stubbs,
deceased, and Henry Brooks, at Heavy Tree Hill, on the night of the
13th August, 1854.'"

The man looked up with a repulsive smile.  "Who's the fool now,
Cap'n?  What's become of your hold on the widder, now?"

"Write!" said Brooks fiercely.

The sound of a pen hurriedly scratching paper followed this first
outburst of the quiet Brooks.

"Sign it," said Brooks.

The man signed it.

"Now go," said Brooks, unlocking the door, "but remember, if you
should ever be inclined to revisit Santa Ana, you will find ME
living here also."

The man slunk out of the door and into the passage like a wild
animal returning to the night and darkness.  Brooks took up the
paper, rejoined Mrs. Wade in the parlor, and laid it before her.

"But," said the widow, trembling even in her joy, "do you--do you
think he was REALLY mistaken?"

"Positive," said Brooks coolly.  "It's true, it's a mistake that
has cost you a hundred dollars, but there are some mistakes that
are worth that to be kept quiet."

        .        .        .        .        .        .

They were married a year later; but there is no record that in
after years of conjugal relations with a weak, charming, but
sometimes trying woman, Henry Brooks was ever tempted to tell her
the whole truth of the robbery of Heavy Tree Hill.



THE MERMAID OF LIGHTHOUSE POINT


Some forty years ago, on the northern coast of California, near the
Golden Gate, stood a lighthouse.  Of a primitive class, since
superseded by a building more in keeping with the growing magnitude
of the adjacent port, it attracted little attention from the
desolate shore, and, it was alleged, still less from the desolate
sea beyond.  A gray structure of timber, stone, and glass, it was
buffeted and harried by the constant trade winds, baked by the
unclouded six months' sun, lost for a few hours in the afternoon
sea-fog, and laughed over by circling guillemots from the Farallones.
It was kept by a recluse--a preoccupied man of scientific tastes,
who, in shameless contrast to his fellow immigrants, had applied to
the government for this scarcely lucrative position as a means of
securing the seclusion he valued more than gold.  Some believed that
he was the victim of an early disappointment in love--a view
charitably taken by those who also believed that the government
would not have appointed "a crank" to a position of responsibility.
Howbeit, he fulfilled his duties, and, with the assistance of an
Indian, even cultivated a small patch of ground beside the
lighthouse.  His isolation was complete!  There was little to attract
wanderers here: the nearest mines were fifty miles away; the virgin
forest on the mountains inland were penetrated only by sawmills and
woodmen from the Bay settlements, equally remote.  Although by the
shore-line the lights of the great port were sometimes plainly
visible, yet the solitude around him was peopled only by Indians,--a
branch of the great northern tribe of "root-diggers,"--peaceful and
simple in their habits, as yet undisturbed by the white man, nor
stirred into antagonism by aggression.  Civilization only touched
him at stated intervals, and then by the more expeditious sea from
the government boat that brought him supplies.  But for his
contiguity to the perpetual turmoil of wind and sea, he might have
passed a restful Arcadian life in his surroundings; for even his
solitude was sometimes haunted by this faint reminder of the great
port hard by that pulsated with an equal unrest.  Nevertheless, the
sands before his door and the rocks behind him seemed to have been
untrodden by any other white man's foot since their upheaval from
the ocean.  It was true that the little bay beside him was marked on
the map as "Sir Francis Drake's Bay," tradition having located it as
the spot where that ingenious pirate and empire-maker had once
landed his vessels and scraped the barnacles from his adventurous
keels.  But of this Edgar Pomfrey--or "Captain Pomfrey," as he was
called by virtue of his half-nautical office--had thought little.

For the first six months he had thoroughly enjoyed his seclusion.
In the company of his books, of which he had brought such a fair
store that their shelves lined his snug corners to the exclusion of
more comfortable furniture, he found his principal recreation.
Even his unwonted manual labor, the trimming of his lamp and
cleaning of his reflectors, and his personal housekeeping, in which
his Indian help at times assisted, he found a novel and interesting
occupation.  For outdoor exercise, a ramble on the sands, a climb
to the rocky upland, or a pull in the lighthouse boat, amply
sufficed him.  "Crank" as he was supposed to be, he was sane enough
to guard against any of those early lapses into barbarism which
marked the lives of some solitary gold-miners.  His own taste, as
well as the duty of his office, kept his person and habitation
sweet and clean, and his habits regular.  Even the little
cultivated patch of ground on the lee side of the tower was
symmetrical and well ordered.  Thus the outward light of Captain
Pomfrey shone forth over the wilderness of shore and wave, even
like his beacon, whatever his inward illumination may have been.

It was a bright summer morning, remarkable even in the monotonous
excellence of the season, with a slight touch of warmth which the
invincible Northwest Trades had not yet chilled.  There was still a
faint haze off the coast, as if last night's fog had been caught in
the quick sunshine, and the shining sands were hot, but without the
usual dazzling glare.  A faint perfume from a quaint lilac-colored
beach-flower, whose clustering heads dotted the sand like bits of
blown spume, took the place of that smell of the sea which the
odorless Pacific lacked.  A few rocks, half a mile away, lifted
themselves above the ebb tide at varying heights as they lay on the
trough of the swell, were crested with foam by a striking surge, or
cleanly erased in the full sweep of the sea.  Beside, and partly
upon one of the higher rocks, a singular object was moving.

Pomfrey was interested but not startled.  He had once or twice seen
seals disporting on these rocks, and on one occasion a sea-lion,--
an estray from the familiar rocks on the other side of the Golden
Gate.  But he ceased work in his garden patch, and coming to his
house, exchanged his hoe for a telescope.  When he got the mystery
in focus he suddenly stopped and rubbed the object-glass with his
handkerchief.  But even when he applied the glass to his eye for a
second time, he could scarcely believe his eyesight.  For the
object seemed to be a WOMAN, the lower part of her figure submerged
in the sea, her long hair depending over her shoulders and waist.
There was nothing in her attitude to suggest terror or that she was
the victim of some accident.  She moved slowly and complacently
with the sea, and even--a more staggering suggestion--appeared to
be combing out the strands of her long hair with her fingers.  With
her body half concealed she might have been a mermaid!

He swept the foreshore and horizon with his glass; there was
neither boat nor ship--nor anything that moved, except the long
swell of the Pacific.  She could have come only from the sea; for
to reach the rocks by land she would have had to pass before the
lighthouse, while the narrow strip of shore which curved northward
beyond his range of view he knew was inhabited only by Indians.
But the woman was unhesitatingly and appallingly WHITE, and her
hair light even to a golden gleam in the sunshine.

Pomfrey was a gentleman, and as such was amazed, dismayed, and
cruelly embarrassed.  If she was a simple bather from some vicinity
hitherto unknown and unsuspected by him, it was clearly his
business to shut up his glass and go back to his garden patch--
although the propinquity of himself and the lighthouse must have
been as plainly visible to her as she was to him.  On the other
hand, if she was the survivor of some wreck and in distress--or, as
he even fancied from her reckless manner, bereft of her senses, his
duty to rescue her was equally clear.  In his dilemma he determined
upon a compromise and ran to his boat.  He would pull out to sea,
pass between the rocks and the curving sand-spit, and examine the
sands and sea more closely for signs of wreckage, or some
overlooked waiting boat near the shore.  He would be within hail if
she needed him, or she could escape to her boat if she had one.

In another moment his boat was lifting on the swell towards the
rocks.  He pulled quickly, occasionally turning to note that the
strange figure, whose movements were quite discernible to the naked
eye, was still there, but gazing more earnestly towards the nearest
shore for any sign of life or occupation.  In ten minutes he had
reached the curve where the trend opened northward, and the long
line of shore stretched before him.  He swept it eagerly with a
single searching glance.  Sea and shore were empty.  He turned
quickly to the rock, scarcely a hundred yards on his beam.  It was
empty too!  Forgetting his previous scruples, he pulled directly
for it until his keel grated on its submerged base.  There was
nothing there but the rock, slippery with the yellow-green slime of
seaweed and kelp--neither trace nor sign of the figure that had
occupied it a moment ago.  He pulled around it; there was no cleft
or hiding-place.  For an instant his heart leaped at the sight of
something white, caught in a jagged tooth of the outlying reef, but
it was only the bleached fragment of a bamboo orange-crate, cast
from the deck of some South Sea trader, such as often strewed the
beach.  He lay off the rock, keeping way in the swell, and
scrutinizing the glittering sea.  At last he pulled back to the
lighthouse, perplexed and discomfited.

Was it simply a sporting seal, transformed by some trick of his
vision?  But he had seen it through his glass, and now remembered
such details as the face and features framed in their contour of
golden hair, and believed he could even have identified them.  He
examined the rock again with his glass, and was surprised to see
how clearly it was outlined now in its barren loneliness.  Yet he
must have been mistaken.  His scientific and accurate mind allowed
of no errant fancy, and he had always sneered at the marvelous as
the result of hasty or superficial observation.  He was a little
worried at this lapse of his healthy accuracy,--fearing that it
might be the result of his seclusion and loneliness,--akin to the
visions of the recluse and solitary.  It was strange, too, that it
should take the shape of a woman; for Edgar Pomfrey had a story--
the usual old and foolish one.

Then his thoughts took a lighter phase, and he turned to the memory
of his books, and finally to the books themselves.  From a shelf he
picked out a volume of old voyages, and turned to a remembered
passage: "In other seas doe abound marvells soche as Sea Spyders of
the bigness of a pinnace, the wich they have been known to attack
and destroy; Sea Vypers which reach to the top of a goodly maste,
whereby they are able to draw marinners from the rigging by the
suction of their breathes; and Devill Fyshe, which vomit fire by
night which makyth the sea to shine prodigiously, and mermaydes.
They are half fyshe and half mayde of grate Beauty, and have been
seen of divers godly and creditable witnesses swymming beside
rocks, hidden to their waist in the sea, combing of their hayres,
to the help of whych they carry a small mirrore of the bigness of
their fingers."  Pomfrey laid the book aside with a faint smile.
To even this credulity he might come!

Nevertheless, he used the telescope again that day.  But there was
no repetition of the incident, and he was forced to believe that he
had been the victim of some extraordinary illusion.  The next
morning, however, with his calmer judgment doubts began to visit
him.  There was no one of whom he could make inquiries but his
Indian helper, and their conversation had usually been restricted
to the language of signs or the use of a few words he had picked
up.  He contrived, however, to ask if there was a "waugee" (white)
woman in the neighborhood.  The Indian shook his head in surprise.
There was no "waugee" nearer than the remote mountain-ridge to
which he pointed.  Pomfrey was obliged to be content with this.
Even had his vocabulary been larger, he would as soon have thought
of revealing the embarrassing secret of this woman, whom he
believed to be of his own race, to a mere barbarian as he would of
asking him to verify his own impressions by allowing him to look at
her that morning.  The next day, however, something happened which
forced him to resume his inquiries.  He was rowing around the
curving spot when he saw a number of black objects on the northern
sands moving in and out of the surf, which he presently made out as
Indians.  A nearer approach satisfied him that they were wading
squaws and children gathering seaweed and shells.  He would have
pushed his acquaintance still nearer, but as his boat rounded the
point, with one accord they all scuttled away like frightened
sandpipers.  Pomfrey, on his return, asked his Indian retainer if
they could swim.  "Oh, yes!"  "As far as the rock?"  "Yes."  Yet
Pomfrey was not satisfied.  The color of his strange apparition
remained unaccounted for, and it was not that of an Indian woman.

Trifling events linger long in a monotonous existence, and it was
nearly a week before Pomfrey gave up his daily telescopic inspection
of the rock.  Then he fell back upon his books again, and, oddly
enough, upon another volume of voyages, and so chanced upon the
account of Sir Francis Drake's occupation of the bay before him.  He
had always thought it strange that the great adventurer had left no
trace or sign of his sojourn there; still stranger that he should
have overlooked the presence of gold, known even to the Indians
themselves, and have lost a discovery far beyond his wildest dreams
and a treasure to which the cargoes of those Philippine galleons he
had more or less successfully intercepted were trifles.  Had the
restless explorer been content to pace those dreary sands during
three weeks of inactivity, with no thought of penetrating the inland
forests behind the range, or of even entering the nobler bay beyond?
Or was the location of the spot a mere tradition as wild and
unsupported as the "marvells" of the other volume?  Pomfrey had the
skepticism of the scientific, inquiring mind.

Two weeks had passed and he was returning from a long climb inland,
when he stopped to rest in his descent to the sea.  The panorama of
the shore was before him, from its uttermost limit to the
lighthouse on the northern point.  The sun was still one hour high,
it would take him about that time to reach home.  But from this
coign of vantage he could see--what he had not before observed--
that what he had always believed was a little cove on the northern
shore was really the estuary of a small stream which rose near him
and eventually descended into the ocean at that point.  He could
also see that beside it was a long low erection of some kind,
covered with thatched brush, which looked like a "barrow," yet
showed signs of habitation in the slight smoke that rose from it
and drifted inland.  It was not far out of his way, and he resolved
to return in that direction.  On his way down he once or twice
heard the barking of an Indian dog, and knew that he must be in the
vicinity of an encampment.  A camp-fire, with the ashes yet warm,
proved that he was on the trail of one of the nomadic tribes, but
the declining sun warned him to hasten home to his duty.  When he
at last reached the estuary, he found that the building beside it
was little else than a long hut, whose thatched and mud-plastered
mound-like roof gave it the appearance of a cave.  Its single
opening and entrance abutted on the water's edge, and the smoke he
had noticed rolled through this entrance from a smouldering fire
within.  Pomfrey had little difficulty in recognizing the purpose
of this strange structure from the accounts he had heard from
"loggers" of the Indian customs.  The cave was a "sweat-house"--a
calorific chamber in which the Indians closely shut themselves,
naked, with a "smudge" or smouldering fire of leaves, until,
perspiring and half suffocated, they rushed from the entrance and
threw themselves into the water before it.  The still smouldering
fire told him that the house had been used that morning, and he
made no doubt that the Indians were encamped near by.  He would
have liked to pursue his researches further, but he found he had
already trespassed upon his remaining time, and he turned somewhat
abruptly away--so abruptly, in fact, that a figure, which had
evidently been cautiously following him at a distance, had not time
to get away.  His heart leaped with astonishment.  It was the woman
he had seen on the rock.

Although her native dress now only disclosed her head and hands,
there was no doubt about her color, and it was distinctly white,
save for the tanning of exposure and a slight red ochre marking on
her low forehead.  And her hair, long and unkempt as it was, showed
that he had not erred in his first impression of it.  It was a
tawny flaxen, with fainter bleachings where the sun had touched it
most.  Her eyes were of a clear Northern blue.  Her dress, which
was quite distinctive in that it was neither the cast off finery of
civilization nor the cheap "government" flannels and calicoes
usually worn by the Californian tribes, was purely native, and of
fringed deerskin, and consisted of a long, loose shirt and leggings
worked with bright feathers and colored shells.  A necklace, also
of shells and fancy pebbles, hung round her neck.  She seemed to be
a fully developed woman, in spite of the girlishness of her flowing
hair, and notwithstanding the shapeless length of her gaberdine-
like garment, taller than the ordinary squaw.

Pomfrey saw all this in a single flash of perception, for the next
instant she was gone, disappearing behind the sweat-house.  He ran
after her, catching sight of her again, half doubled up, in the
characteristic Indian trot, dodging around rocks and low bushes as
she fled along the banks of the stream.  But for her distinguishing
hair, she looked in her flight like an ordinary frightened squaw.
This, which gave a sense of unmanliness and ridicule to his own
pursuit of her, with the fact that his hour of duty was drawing
near and he was still far from the lighthouse, checked him in full
career, and he turned regretfully away.  He had called after her at
first, and she had not heeded him.  What he would have said to her
he did not know.  He hastened home discomfited, even embarrassed--
yet excited to a degree he had not deemed possible in himself.

During the morning his thoughts were full of her.  Theory after
theory for her strange existence there he examined and dismissed.
His first thought, that she was a white woman--some settler's wife--
masquerading in Indian garb, he abandoned when he saw her moving;
no white woman could imitate that Indian trot, nor would remember
to attempt it if she were frightened.  The idea that she was a
captive white, held by the Indians, became ridiculous when he
thought of the nearness of civilization and the peaceful, timid
character of the "digger" tribes.  That she was some unfortunate
demented creature who had escaped from her keeper and wandered into
the wilderness, a glance at her clear, frank, intelligent, curious
eyes had contradicted.  There was but one theory left--the most
sensible and practical one--that she was the offspring of some
white man and Indian squaw.  Yet this he found, oddly enough, the
least palatable to his fancy.  And the few half-breeds he had seen
were not at all like her.

The next morning he had recourse to his Indian retainer, "Jim."
With infinite difficulty, protraction, and not a little
embarrassment, he finally made him understand that he had seen a
"white squaw" near the "sweat-house," and that he wanted to know
more about her.  With equal difficulty Jim finally recognized the
fact of the existence of such a person, but immediately afterwards
shook his head in an emphatic negation.  With greater difficulty
and greater mortification Pomfrey presently ascertained that Jim's
negative referred to a supposed abduction of the woman which he
understood that his employer seriously contemplated.  But he also
learned that she was a real Indian, and that there were three or
four others like her, male and female, in that vicinity; that from
a "skeena mowitch" (little baby) they were all like that, and that
their parents were of the same color, but never a white or "waugee"
man or woman among them; that they were looked upon as a distinct
and superior caste of Indians, and enjoyed certain privileges with
the tribe; that they superstitiously avoided white men, of whom
they had the greatest fear, and that they were protected in this by
the other Indians; that it was marvelous and almost beyond belief
that Pomfrey had been able to see one, for no other white man had,
or was even aware of their existence.

How much of this he actually understood, how much of it was lying
and due to Jim's belief that he wished to abduct the fair stranger,
Pomfrey was unable to determine.  There was enough, however, to
excite his curiosity strongly and occupy his mind to the exclusion
of his books--save one.  Among his smaller volumes he had found a
travel book of the "Chinook Jargon," with a lexicon of many of the
words commonly used by the Northern Pacific tribes.  An hour or
two's trial with the astonished Jim gave him an increased
vocabulary and a new occupation.  Each day the incongruous pair
took a lesson from the lexicon.  In a week Pomfrey felt he would be
able to accost the mysterious stranger.  But he did not again
surprise her in any of his rambles, or even in a later visit to the
sweat-house.  He had learned from Jim that the house was only used
by the "bucks," or males, and that her appearance there had been
accidental.  He recalled that he had had the impression that she
had been stealthily following him, and the recollection gave him a
pleasure he could not account for.  But an incident presently
occurred which gave him a new idea of her relations towards him.

The difficulty of making Jim understand had hitherto prevented
Pomfrey from intrusting him with the care of the lantern; but with
the aid of the lexicon he had been able to make him comprehend its
working, and under Pomfrey's personal guidance the Indian had once
or twice lit the lamp and set its machinery in motion.  It remained
for him only to test Jim's unaided capacity, in case of his own
absence or illness.  It happened to be a warm, beautiful sunset,
when the afternoon fog had for once delayed its invasion of the
shore-line, that he left the lighthouse to Jim's undivided care,
and reclining on a sand-dune still warm from the sun, lazily
watched the result of Jim's first essay.  As the twilight deepened,
and the first flash of the lantern strove with the dying glories of
the sun, Pomfrey presently became aware that he was not the only
watcher.  A little gray figure creeping on all fours suddenly
glided out of the shadow of another sand-dune and then halted,
falling back on its knees, gazing fixedly at the growing light.  It
was the woman he had seen.  She was not a dozen yards away, and in
her eagerness and utter absorption in the light had evidently
overlooked him.  He could see her face distinctly, her lips parted
half in wonder, half with the breathless absorption of a devotee.
A faint sense of disappointment came over him.  It was not HIM she
was watching, but the light!  As it swelled out over the darkening
gray sand she turned as if to watch its effect around her, and
caught sight of Pomfrey.  With a little startled cry--the first she
had uttered--she darted away.  He did not follow.  A moment before,
when he first saw her, an Indian salutation which he had learned
from Jim had risen to his lips, but in the odd feeling which her
fascination of the light had caused him he had not spoken.  He
watched her bent figure scuttling away like some frightened animal,
with a critical consciousness that she was really scarce human, and
went back to the lighthouse.  He would not run after her again!
Yet that evening he continued to think of her, and recalled her
voice, which struck him now as having been at once melodious and
childlike, and wished he had at least spoken, and perhaps elicited
a reply.

He did not, however, haunt the sweat-house near the river again.
Yet he still continued his lessons with Jim, and in this way,
perhaps, although quite unpremeditatedly, enlisted a humble ally.
A week passed in which he had not alluded to her, when one morning,
as he was returning from a row, Jim met him mysteriously on the
beach.

"S'pose him come slow, slow," said Jim gravely, airing his newly
acquired English; "make no noise--plenty catchee Indian maiden."
The last epithet was the polite lexicon equivalent of squaw.

Pomfrey, not entirely satisfied in his mind, nevertheless softly
followed the noiselessly gliding Jim to the lighthouse.  Here Jim
cautiously opened the door, motioning Pomfrey to enter.

The base of the tower was composed of two living rooms, a storeroom
and oil-tank.  As Pomfrey entered, Jim closed the door softly
behind him.  The abrupt transition from the glare of the sands and
sun to the semi-darkness of the storeroom at first prevented him
from seeing anything, but he was instantly distracted by a
scurrying flutter and wild beating of the walls, as of a caged
bird.  In another moment he could make out the fair stranger,
quivering with excitement, passionately dashing at the barred
window, the walls, the locked door, and circling around the room in
her desperate attempt to find an egress, like a captured seagull.
Amazed, mystified, indignant with Jim, himself, and even his
unfortunate captive, Pomfrey called to her in Chinook to stop, and
going to the door, flung it wide open.  She darted by him, raising
her soft blue eyes for an instant in a swift, sidelong glance of
half appeal, half-frightened admiration, and rushed out into the
open.  But here, to his surprise, she did not run away.  On the
contrary, she drew herself up with a dignity that seemed to
increase her height, and walked majestically towards Jim, who at
her unexpected exit had suddenly thrown himself upon the sand, in
utterly abject terror and supplication.  She approached him slowly,
with one small hand uplifted in a menacing gesture.  The man
writhed and squirmed before her.  Then she turned, caught sight of
Pomfrey standing in the doorway, and walked quietly away.  Amazed,
yet gratified with this new assertion of herself, Pomfrey
respectfully, but alas! incautiously, called after her.  In an
instant, at the sound of his voice, she dropped again into her
slouching Indian trot and glided away over the sandhills.

Pomfrey did not add any reproof of his own to the discomfiture of
his Indian retainer.  Neither did he attempt to inquire the secret
of this savage girl's power over him.  It was evident he had spoken
truly when he told his master that she was of a superior caste.
Pomfrey recalled her erect and indignant figure standing over the
prostrate Jim, and was again perplexed and disappointed at her
sudden lapse into the timid savage at the sound of his voice.
Would not this well-meant but miserable trick of Jim's have the
effect of increasing her unreasoning animal-like distrust of him?
A few days later brought an unexpected answer to his question.

It was the hottest hour of the day.  He had been fishing off the
reef of rocks where he had first seen her, and had taken in his
line and was leisurely pulling for the lighthouse.  Suddenly a
little musical cry not unlike a bird's struck his ear.  He lay on
his oars and listened.  It was repeated; but this time it was
unmistakably recognizable as the voice of the Indian girl, although
he had heard it but once.  He turned eagerly to the rock, but it
was empty; he pulled around it, but saw nothing.  He looked towards
the shore, and swung his boat in that direction, when again the cry
was repeated with the faintest quaver of a laugh, apparently on the
level of the sea before him.  For the first time he looked down,
and there on the crest of a wave not a dozen yards ahead, danced
the yellow hair and laughing eyes of the girl.  The frightened
gravity of her look was gone, lost in the flash of her white teeth
and quivering dimples as her dripping face rose above the sea.
When their eyes met she dived again, but quickly reappeared on the
other bow, swimming with lazy, easy strokes, her smiling head
thrown back over her white shoulder, as if luring him to a race.
If her smile was a revelation to him, still more so was this first
touch of feminine coquetry in her attitude.  He pulled eagerly
towards her; with a few long overhand strokes she kept her
distance, or, if he approached too near, she dived like a loon,
coming up astern of him with the same childlike, mocking cry.  In
vain he pursued her, calling her to stop in her own tongue, and
laughingly protested; she easily avoided his boat at every turn.
Suddenly, when they were nearly abreast of the river estuary, she
rose in the water, and, waving her little hands with a gesture of
farewell, turned, and curving her back like a dolphin, leaped into
the surging swell of the estuary bar and was lost in its foam.  It
would have been madness for him to have attempted to follow in his
boat, and he saw that she knew it.  He waited until her yellow
crest appeared in the smoother water of the river, and then rowed
back.  In his excitement and preoccupation he had quite forgotten
his long exposure to the sun during his active exercise, and that
he was poorly equipped for the cold sea-fog which the heat had
brought in earlier, and which now was quietly obliterating sea and
shore.  This made his progress slower and more difficult, and by
the time he had reached the lighthouse he was chilled to the bone.

The next morning he woke with a dull headache and great weariness,
and it was with considerable difficulty that he could attend to his
duties.  At nightfall, feeling worse, he determined to transfer the
care of the light to Jim, but was amazed to find that he had
disappeared, and what was more ominous, a bottle of spirits which
Pomfrey had taken from his locker the night before had disappeared
too.  Like all Indians, Jim's rudimentary knowledge of civilization
included "fire-water;" he evidently had been tempted, had fallen,
and was too ashamed or too drunk to face his master.  Pomfrey,
however, managed to get the light in order and working, and then,
he scarcely knew how, betook himself to bed in a state of high
fever.  He turned from side to side racked by pain, with burning
lips and pulses.  Strange fancies beset him; he had noticed when he
lit his light that a strange sail was looming off the estuary--a
place where no sail had ever been seen or should be--and was
relieved that the lighting of the tower might show the reckless or
ignorant mariner his real bearings for the "Gate."  At times he had
heard voices above the familiar song of the surf, and tried to rise
from his bed, but could not.  Sometimes these voices were strange,
outlandish, dissonant, in his own language, yet only partly
intelligible; but through them always rang a single voice, musical,
familiar, yet of a tongue not his own--hers!  And then, out of his
delirium--for such it proved afterwards to be--came a strange
vision.  He thought that he had just lit the light when, from some
strange and unaccountable reason, it suddenly became dim and defied
all his efforts to revive it.  To add to his discomfiture, he could
see quite plainly through the lantern a strange-looking vessel
standing in from the sea.  She was so clearly out of her course for
the Gate that he knew she had not seen the light, and his limbs
trembled with shame and terror as he tried in vain to rekindle the
dying light.  Yet to his surprise the strange ship kept steadily
on, passing the dangerous reef of rocks, until she was actually in
the waters of the bay.  But stranger than all, swimming beneath her
bows was the golden head and laughing face of the Indian girl, even
as he had seen it the day before.  A strange revulsion of feeling
overtook him.  Believing that she was luring the ship to its
destruction, he ran out on the beach and strove to hail the vessel
and warn it of its impending doom.  But he could not speak--no
sound came from his lips.  And now his attention was absorbed by
the ship itself.  High-bowed and pooped, and curved like the
crescent moon, it was the strangest craft that he had ever seen.
Even as he gazed it glided on nearer and nearer, and at last
beached itself noiselessly on the sands before his own feet.  A
score of figures as bizarre and outlandish as the ship itself now
thronged its high forecastle--really a castle in shape and warlike
purpose--and leaped from its ports.  The common seamen were nearly
naked to the waist; the officers looked more like soldiers than
sailors.  What struck him more strangely was that they were one and
all seemingly unconscious of the existence of the lighthouse,
sauntering up and down carelessly, as if on some uninhabited
strand, and even talking--so far as he could understand their old
bookish dialect--as if in some hitherto undiscovered land.  Their
ignorance of the geography of the whole coast, and even of the sea
from which they came, actually aroused his critical indignation;
their coarse and stupid allusions to the fair Indian swimmer as the
"mermaid" that they had seen upon their bow made him more furious
still.  Yet he was helpless to express his contemptuous anger, or
even make them conscious of his presence.  Then an interval of
incoherency and utter blankness followed.  When he again took up
the thread of his fancy the ship seemed to be lying on her beam
ends on the sand; the strange arrangement of her upper deck and
top-hamper, more like a dwelling than any ship he had ever seen,
was fully exposed to view, while the seamen seemed to be at work
with the rudest contrivances, calking and scraping her barnacled
sides.  He saw that phantom crew, when not working, at wassail and
festivity; heard the shouts of drunken roisterers; saw the placing
of a guard around some of the most uncontrollable, and later
detected the stealthy escape of half a dozen sailors inland, amidst
the fruitless volley fired upon them from obsolete blunderbusses.
Then his strange vision transported him inland, where he saw these
seamen following some Indian women.  Suddenly one of them turned
and ran frenziedly towards him as if seeking succor, closely
pursued by one of the sailors.  Pomfrey strove to reach her,
struggled violently with the fearful apathy that seemed to hold his
limbs, and then, as she uttered at last a little musical cry, burst
his bonds and--awoke!

As consciousness slowly struggled back to him, he could see the
bare wooden-like walls of his sleeping-room, the locker, the one
window bright with sunlight, the open door of the tank-room, and
the little staircase to the tower.  There was a strange smoky and
herb-like smell in the room.  He made an effort to rise, but as he
did so a small sunburnt hand was laid gently yet restrainingly upon
his shoulder, and he heard the same musical cry as before, but this
time modulated to a girlish laugh.  He raised his head faintly.
Half squatting, half kneeling by his bed was the yellow-haired
stranger.

With the recollection of his vision still perplexing him, he said
in a weak voice, "Who are you?"

Her blue eyes met his own with quick intelligence and no trace of
her former timidity.  A soft, caressing light had taken its place.
Pointing with her finger to her breast in a childlike gesture, she
said, "Me--Olooya."

"Olooya!"  He remembered suddenly that Jim had always used that
word in speaking of her, but until then he had always thought it
was some Indian term for her distinct class.

"Olooya," he repeated.  Then, with difficulty attempting to use her
own tongue, he asked, "When did you come here?"

"Last night," she answered in the same tongue.  "There was no
witch-fire there," she continued, pointing to the tower; "when it
came not, Olooya came!  Olooya found white chief sick and alone.
White chief could not get up!  Olooya lit witch-fire for him."

"You?" he repeated in astonishment.  "I lit it myself."

She looked at him pityingly, as if still recognizing his delirium,
and shook her head.  "White chief was sick--how can know?  Olooya
made witch-fire."

He cast a hurried glance at his watch hanging on the wall beside
him.  It had RUN DOWN, although he had wound it the last thing
before going to bed.  He had evidently been lying there helpless
beyond the twenty-four hours!

He groaned and turned to rise, but she gently forced him down
again, and gave him some herbal infusion, in which he recognized
the taste of the Yerba Buena vine which grew by the river.  Then
she made him comprehend in her own tongue that Jim had been
decoyed, while drunk, aboard a certain schooner lying off the shore
at a spot where she had seen some men digging in the sands.  She
had not gone there, for she was afraid of the bad men, and a slight
return of her former terror came into her changeful eyes.  She knew
how to light the witch-light; she reminded him she had been in the
tower before.

"You have saved my light, and perhaps my life," he said weakly,
taking her hand.

Possibly she did not understand him, for her only answer was a
vague smile.  But the next instant she started up, listening
intently, and then with a frightened cry drew away her hand and
suddenly dashed out of the building.  In the midst of his amazement
the door was darkened by a figure--a stranger dressed like an
ordinary miner.  Pausing a moment to look after the flying Olooya,
the man turned and glanced around the room, and then with a coarse,
familiar smile approached Pomfrey.

"Hope I ain't disturbin' ye, but I allowed I'd just be neighborly
and drop in--seein' as this is gov'nment property, and me and my
pardners, as American citizens and tax-payers, helps to support it.
We're coastin' from Trinidad down here and prospectin' along the
beach for gold in the sand.  Ye seem to hev a mighty soft berth of
it here--nothing to do--and lots of purty half-breeds hangin'
round!"

The man's effrontery was too much for Pomfrey's self-control,
weakened by illness.  "It IS government property," he answered
hotly, "and you have no more right to intrude upon it than you have
to decoy away my servant, a government employee, during my illness,
and jeopardize that property."

The unexpectedness of this attack, and the sudden revelation of the
fact of Pomfrey's illness in his flushed face and hollow voice
apparently frightened and confused the stranger.  He stammered a
surly excuse, backed out of the doorway, and disappeared.  An hour
later Jim appeared, crestfallen, remorseful, and extravagantly
penitent.  Pomfrey was too weak for reproaches or inquiry, and he
was thinking only of Olooya.

She did not return.  His recovery in that keen air, aided, as he
sometimes thought, by the herbs she had given him, was almost as
rapid as his illness.  The miners did not again intrude upon the
lighthouse nor trouble his seclusion.  When he was able to sun
himself on the sands, he could see them in the distance at work on
the beach.  He reflected that she would not come back while they
were there, and was reconciled.  But one morning Jim appeared,
awkward and embarrassed, leading another Indian, whom he introduced
as Olooya's brother.  Pomfrey's suspicions were aroused.  Except
that the stranger had something of the girl's superiority of
manner, there was no likeness whatever to his fair-haired
acquaintance.  But a fury of indignation was added to his
suspicions when he learned the amazing purport of their visit.  It
was nothing less than an offer from the alleged brother to SELL his
sister to Pomfrey for forty dollars and a jug of whiskey!
Unfortunately, Pomfrey's temper once more got the better of his
judgment.  With a scathing exposition of the laws under which the
Indian and white man equally lived, and the legal punishment of
kidnaping, he swept what he believed was the impostor from his
presence.  He was scarcely alone again before he remembered that
his imprudence might affect the girl's future access to him, but it
was too late now.

Still he clung to the belief that he should see her when the
prospectors had departed, and he hailed with delight the breaking
up of the camp near the "sweat-house" and the disappearance of the
schooner.  It seemed that their gold-seeking was unsuccessful; but
Pomfrey was struck, on visiting the locality, to find that in their
excavations in the sand at the estuary they had uncovered the
decaying timbers of a ship's small boat of some ancient and
obsolete construction.  This made him think of his strange dream,
with a vague sense of warning which he could not shake off, and on
his return to the lighthouse he took from his shelves a copy of the
old voyages to see how far his fancy had been affected by his
reading.  In the account of Drake's visit to the coast he found a
footnote which he had overlooked before, and which ran as follows:
"The Admiral seems to have lost several of his crew by desertion,
who were supposed to have perished miserably by starvation in the
inhospitable interior or by the hands of savages.  But later
voyagers have suggested that the deserters married Indian wives,
and there is a legend that a hundred years later a singular race of
half-breeds, bearing unmistakable Anglo-Saxon characteristics, was
found in that locality."  Pomfrey fell into a reverie of strange
hypotheses and fancies.  He resolved that, when he again saw
Olooya, he would question her; her terror of these men might be
simply racial or some hereditary transmission.

But his intention was never fulfilled.  For when days and weeks had
elapsed, and he had vainly haunted the river estuary and the rocky
reef before the lighthouse without a sign of her, he overcame his
pride sufficiently to question Jim.  The man looked at him with
dull astonishment.

"Olooya gone," he said.

"Gone!--where?"

The Indian made a gesture to seaward which seemed to encompass the
whole Pacific.

"How?  With whom?" repeated his angry yet half-frightened master.

"With white man in ship.  You say YOU no want Olooya--forty dollars
too much.  White man give fifty dollars--takee Olooya all same."



UNDER THE EAVES


The assistant editor of the San Francisco "Daily Informer" was
going home.  So much of his time was spent in the office of the
"Informer" that no one ever cared to know where he passed those six
hours of sleep which presumably suggested a domicile.  His business
appointments outside the office were generally kept at the
restaurant where he breakfasted and dined, or of evenings in the
lobbies of theatres or the anterooms of public meetings.  Yet he
had a home and an interval of seclusion of which he was jealously
mindful, and it was to this he was going to-night at his usual
hour.

His room was in a new building on one of the larger and busier
thoroughfares.  The lower floor was occupied by a bank, but as it
was closed before he came home, and not yet opened when he left, it
did not disturb his domestic sensibilities.  The same may be said
of the next floor, which was devoted to stockbrokers' and companies
offices, and was equally tomb-like and silent when he passed; the
floor above that was a desert of empty rooms, which echoed to his
footsteps night and morning, with here and there an oasis in the
green sign of a mining secretary's office, with, however, the
desolating announcement that it would only be "open for transfers
from two to four on Saturdays."  The top floor had been frankly
abandoned in an unfinished state by the builder, whose ambition had
"o'erleaped itself" in that sanguine era of the city's growth.
There was a smell of plaster and the first coat of paint about it
still, but the whole front of the building was occupied by a long
room with odd "bull's-eye" windows looking out through the heavy
ornamentations of the cornice over the adjacent roofs.

It had been originally intended for a club-room, but after the ill
fortune which attended the letting of the floor below, and possibly
because the earthquake-fearing San Franciscans had their doubts of
successful hilarity at the top of so tall a building, it remained
unfinished, with the two smaller rooms at its side.  Its incomplete
and lonely grandeur had once struck the editor during a visit of
inspection, and the landlord, whom he knew, had offered to make it
habitable for him at a nominal rent.  It had a lavatory with a
marble basin and a tap of cold water.  The offer was a novel one,
but he accepted it, and fitted up the apartment with some cheap
second-hand furniture, quite inconsistent with the carved mantels
and decorations, and made a fair sitting-room and bedroom of it.
Here, on a Sunday, when its stillness was intensified, and even a
passing footstep on the pavement fifty feet below was quite
startling, he would sit and work by one of the quaint open windows.
In the rainy season, through the filmed panes he sometimes caught a
glimpse of the distant, white-capped bay, but never of the street
below him.

The lights were out, but, groping his way up to the first landing,
he took from a cup-boarded niche in the wall his candlestick and
matches and continued the ascent to his room.  The humble
candlelight flickered on the ostentatious gold letters displayed on
the ground-glass doors of opulent companies which he knew were
famous, and rooms where millionaires met in secret conclave, but
the contrast awakened only his sense of humor.  Yet he was always
relieved after he had reached his own floor.  Possibly its
incompleteness and inchoate condition made it seem less lonely than
the desolation of the finished and furnished rooms below, and it
was only this recollection of past human occupancy that was
depressing.

He opened his door, lit the solitary gas jet that only half
illuminated the long room, and, it being already past midnight,
began to undress himself.  This process presently brought him to
that corner of his room where his bed stood, when he suddenly
stopped, and his sleepy yawn changed to a gape of surprise.  For,
lying in the bed, its head upon the pillow, and its rigid arms
accurately stretched down over the turned-back sheet, was a child's
doll!  It was a small doll--a banged and battered doll, that had
seen service, but it had evidently been "tucked in" with maternal
tenderness, and lay there with its staring eyes turned to the
ceiling, the very genius of insomnia!

His first start of surprise was followed by a natural resentment of
what might have been an impertinent intrusion on his privacy by
some practical-joking adult, for he knew there was no child in the
house.

His room was kept in order by the wife of the night watchman
employed by the bank, and no one else had a right of access to it.
But the woman might have brought a child there and not noticed its
disposal of its plaything.  He smiled.  It might have been worse!
It might have been a real baby!

The idea tickled him with a promise of future "copy"--of a story
with farcical complications, or even a dramatic ending, in which
the baby, adopted by him, should turn out to be somebody's stolen
offspring.  He lifted the little image that had suggested these
fancies, carefully laid it on his table, went to bed, and presently
forgot it all in slumber.

In the morning his good-humor and interest in it revived to the
extent of writing on a slip of paper, "Good-morning!  Thank you--
I've slept very well," putting the slip in the doll's jointed arms,
and leaving it in a sitting posture outside his door when he left
his room.  When he returned late at night it was gone.

But it so chanced that, a few days later, owing to press of work on
the "Informer," he was obliged to forego his usual Sunday holiday
out of town, and that morning found him, while the bells were
ringing for church, in his room with a pile of manuscript and proof
before him.  For these were troublous days in San Francisco; the
great Vigilance Committee of '56 was in session, and the offices of
the daily papers were thronged with eager seekers of news.  Such
affairs, indeed, were not in the functions of the assistant editor,
nor exactly to his taste; he was neither a partisan of the so-
called Law and Order Party, nor yet an enthusiastic admirer of the
citizen Revolutionists known as the Vigilance Committee, both
extremes being incompatible with his habits of thought.
Consequently he was not displeased at this opportunity of doing his
work away from the office and the "heady talk" of controversy.

He worked on until the bells ceased and a more than Sabbath
stillness fell upon the streets.  So quiet was it that once or
twice the conversation of passing pedestrians floated up and into
his window, as of voices at his elbow.

Presently he heard the sound of a child's voice singing in subdued
tone, as if fearful of being overheard.  This time he laid aside
his pen--it certainly was no delusion!  The sound did not come from
the open window, but from some space on a level with his room.  Yet
there was no contiguous building as high.

He rose and tried to open his door softly, but it creaked, and the
singing instantly ceased.  There was nothing before him but the
bare, empty hall, with its lathed and plastered partitions, and the
two smaller rooms, unfinished like his own, on either side of him.
Their doors were shut; the one at his right hand was locked, the
other yielded to his touch.

For the first moment he saw only the bare walls of the apparently
empty room.  But a second glance showed him two children--a boy of
seven and a girl of five--sitting on the floor, which was further
littered by a mattress, pillow, and blanket.  There was a cheap
tray on one of the trunks containing two soiled plates and cups and
fragments of a meal.  But there was neither a chair nor table nor
any other article of furniture in the room.  Yet he was struck by
the fact that, in spite of this poverty of surrounding, the
children were decently dressed, and the few scattered pieces of
luggage in quality bespoke a superior condition.

The children met his astonished stare with an equal wonder and, he
fancied, some little fright.  The boy's lips trembled a little as
he said apologetically--

"I told Jinny not to sing.  But she didn't make MUCH noise."

"Mamma said I could play with my dolly.  But I fordot and singed,"
said the little girl penitently.

"Where's your mamma?" asked the young man.  The fancy of their
being near relatives of the night watchman had vanished at the
sound of their voices.

"Dorn out," said the girl.

"When did she go out?"

"Last night."

"Were you all alone here last night?"

"Yes!"

Perhaps they saw the look of indignation and pity in the editor's
face, for the boy said quickly--

"She don't go out EVERY night; last night she went to"--

He stopped suddenly, and both children looked at each other with a
half laugh and half cry, and then repeated in hopeless unison,
"She's dorn out."

"When is she coming back again?"

"To-night.  But we won't make any more noise."

"Who brings you your food?" continued the editor, looking at the
tray.

"Woberts."

Evidently Roberts, the night watchman!  The editor felt relieved;
here was a clue to some explanation.  He instantly sat down on the
floor between them.

"So that was the dolly that slept in my bed," he said gayly, taking
it up.

God gives helplessness a wonderful intuition of its friends.  The
children looked up at the face of their grown-up companion,
giggled, and then burst into a shrill fit of laughter.  He felt
that it was the first one they had really indulged in for many
days.  Nevertheless he said, "Hush!" confidentially; why he
scarcely knew, except to intimate to them that he had taken in
their situation thoroughly.  "Make no noise," he added softly, "and
come into my big room."

They hung back, however, with frightened yet longing eyes.  "Mamma
said we mussent do out of this room," said the girl.

"Not ALONE," responded the editor quickly, "but with ME, you know;
that's different."

The logic sufficed them, poor as it was.  Their hands slid quite
naturally into his.  But at the door he stopped, and motioning to
the locked door of the other room, asked:--

"And is that mamma's room, too?"

Their little hands slipped from his and they were silent.
Presently the boy, as if acted upon by some occult influence of the
girl, said in a half whisper, "Yes."

The editor did not question further, but led them into his room.
Here they lost the slight restraint they had shown, and began,
child fashion, to become questioners themselves.

In a few moments they were in possession of his name, his business,
the kind of restaurant he frequented, where he went when he left
his room all day, the meaning of those funny slips of paper, and
the written manuscripts, and why he was so quiet.  But any attempt
of his to retaliate by counter questions was met by a sudden
reserve so unchildlike and painful to him--as it was evidently to
themselves--that he desisted, wisely postponing his inquiries until
he could meet Roberts.

He was glad when they fell to playing games with each other quite
naturally, yet not entirely forgetting his propinquity, as their
occasional furtive glances at his movements showed him.  He, too,
became presently absorbed in his work, until it was finished and it
was time for him to take it to the office of the "Informer."  The
wild idea seized him of also taking the children afterwards for a
holiday to the Mission Dolores, but he prudently remembered that
even this negligent mother of theirs might have some rights over
her offspring that he was bound to respect.

He took leave of them gayly, suggesting that the doll be replaced
in his bed while he was away, and even assisted in "tucking it up."
But during the afternoon the recollection of these lonely
playfellows in the deserted house obtruded itself upon his work and
the talk of his companions.  Sunday night was his busiest night,
and he could not, therefore, hope to get away in time to assure
himself of their mother's return.

It was nearly two in the morning when he returned to his room.  He
paused for a moment on the threshold to listen for any sound from
the adjoining room.  But all was hushed.

His intention of speaking to the night watchman was, however,
anticipated the next morning by that guardian himself.  A tap upon
his door while he was dressing caused him to open it somewhat
hurriedly in the hope of finding one of the children there, but he
met only the embarrassed face of Roberts.  Inviting him into the
room, the editor continued dressing.  Carefully closing the door
behind him, the man began, with evident hesitation,--

"I oughter hev told ye suthin' afore, Mr. Breeze; but I kalkilated,
so to speak, that you wouldn't be bothered one way or another, and
so ye hadn't any call to know that there was folks here"--

"Oh, I see," interrupted Breeze cheerfully; "you're speaking of the
family next door--the landlord's new tenants."

"They ain't exactly THAT," said Roberts, still with embarrassment.
"The fact is--ye see--the thing points THIS way: they ain't no
right to be here, and it's as much as my place is worth if it leaks
out that they are."

Mr. Breeze suspended his collar-buttoning, and stared at Roberts.

"You see, sir, they're mighty poor, and they've nowhere else to go--
and I reckoned to take 'em in here for a spell and say nothing
about it."

"But the landlord wouldn't object, surely?  I'll speak to him
myself," said Breeze impulsively.

"Oh, no; don't!" said Roberts in alarm; "he wouldn't like it.  You
see, Mr. Breeze, it's just this way: the mother, she's a born lady,
and did my old woman a good turn in old times when the family was
rich; but now she's obliged--just to support herself, you know--to
take up with what she gets, and she acts in the bally in the
theatre, you see, and hez to come in late o' nights.  In them cheap
boarding-houses, you know, the folks looks down upon her for that,
and won't hev her, and in the cheap hotels the men are--you know--a
darned sight wuss, and that's how I took her and her kids in here,
where no one knows 'em."

"I see," nodded the editor sympathetically; "and very good it was
of you, my man."

Roberts looked still more confused, and stammered with a forced
laugh, "And--so--I'm just keeping her on here, unbeknownst, until
her husband gets"--  He stopped suddenly.

"So she has a husband living, then?" said Breeze in surprise.

"In the mines, yes--in the mines!" repeated Roberts with a
monotonous deliberation quite distinct from his previous
hesitation, "and she's only waitin' until he gets money enough--
to--to take her away."  He stopped and breathed hard.

"But couldn't you--couldn't WE--get her some more furniture?
There's nothing in that room, you know, not a chair or table; and
unless the other room is better furnished"--

"Eh?  Oh, yes!" said Roberts quickly, yet still with a certain
embarrassment; "of course THAT'S better furnished, and she's quite
satisfied, and so are the kids, with anything.  And now, Mr.
Breeze, I reckon you'll say nothin' o' this, and you'll never go
back on me?"

"My dear Mr. Roberts," said the editor gravely, "from this moment I
am not only blind, but deaf to the fact that ANYBODY occupies this
floor but myself."

"I knew you was white all through, Mr. Breeze," said the night
watchman, grasping the young man's hand with a grip of iron, "and I
telled my wife so.  I sez, 'Jest you let me tell him EVERYTHIN','
but she"--  He stopped again and became confused.

"And she was quite right, I dare say," said Breeze, with a laugh;
"and I do not want to know anything.  And that poor woman must
never know that I ever knew anything, either.  But you may tell
your wife that when the mother is away she can bring the little
ones in here whenever she likes."

"Thank ye--thank ye, sir!--and I'll just run down and tell the old
woman now, and won't intrude upon your dressin' any longer."

He grasped Breeze's hand again, went out and closed the door behind
him.  It might have been the editor's fancy, but he thought there
was a certain interval of silence outside the door before the night
watchman's heavy tread was heard along the hall again.

For several evenings after this Mr. Breeze paid some attention to
the ballet in his usual round of the theatres.  Although he had
never seen his fair neighbor, he had a vague idea that he might
recognize her through some likeness to her children.  But in vain.
In the opulent charms of certain nymphs, and in the angular
austerities of others, he failed equally to discern any of those
refinements which might have distinguished the "born lady" of
Roberts's story, or which he himself had seen in her children.

These he did not meet again during the week, as his duties kept him
late at the office; but from certain signs in his room he knew that
Mrs. Roberts had availed herself of his invitation to bring them in
with her, and he regularly found "Jinny's" doll tucked up in his
bed at night, and he as regularly disposed of it outside his door
in the morning, with a few sweets, like an offering, tucked under
its rigid arms.

But another circumstance touched him more delicately; his room was
arranged with greater care than before, and with an occasional
exhibition of taste that certainly had not distinguished Mrs.
Roberts's previous ministrations.  One evening on his return he
found a small bouquet of inexpensive flowers in a glass on his
writing-table.  He loved flowers too well not to detect that they
were quite fresh, and could have been put there only an hour or two
before he arrived.

The next evening was Saturday, and, as he usually left the office
earlier on that day, it occurred to him, as he walked home, that it
was about the time his fair neighbor would be leaving the theatre,
and that it was possible he might meet her.

At the front door, however, he found Roberts, who returned his
greeting with a certain awkwardness which struck him as singular.
When he reached the niche on the landing he found his candle was
gone, but he proceeded on, groping his way up the stairs, with an
odd conviction that both these incidents pointed to the fact that
the woman had just returned or was expected.

He had also a strange feeling--which may have been owing to the
darkness--that some one was hidden on the landing or on the stairs
where he would pass.  This was further accented by a faint odor of
patchouli, as, with his hand on the rail, he turned the corner of
the third landing, and he was convinced that if he had put out his
other hand it would have come in contact with his mysterious
neighbor.  But a certain instinct of respect for her secret, which
she was even now guarding in the darkness, withheld him, and he
passed on quickly to his own floor.

Here it was lighter; the moon shot a beam of silver across the
passage from an unshuttered window as he passed.  He reached his
room door, entered, but instead of lighting the gas and shutting
the door, stood with it half open, listening in the darkness.

His suspicions were verified; there was a slight rustling noise,
and a figure which had evidently followed him appeared at the end
of the passage.  It was that of a woman habited in a grayish dress
and cloak of the same color; but as she passed across the band of
moonlight he had a distinct view of her anxious, worried face.  It
was a face no longer young; it was worn with illness, but still
replete with a delicacy and faded beauty so inconsistent with her
avowed profession that he felt a sudden pang of pain and doubt.
The next moment she had vanished in her room, leaving the same
faint perfume behind her.  He closed his door softly, lit the gas,
and sat down in a state of perplexity.  That swift glimpse of her
face and figure had made her story improbable to the point of
absurdity, or possibly to the extreme of pathos!

It seemed incredible that a woman of that quality should be forced
to accept a vocation at once so low, so distasteful, and so
unremunerative.  With her evident antecedents, had she no friends
but this common Western night watchman of a bank?  Had Roberts
deceived him?  Was his whole story a fabrication, and was there
some complicity between the two?  What was it?  He knit his brows.

Mr. Breeze had that overpowering knowledge of the world which only
comes with the experience of twenty-five, and to this he superadded
the active imagination of a newspaper man.  A plot to rob the bank?
These mysterious absences, that luggage which he doubted not was
empty and intended for spoil!  But why encumber herself with the
two children?  Here his common sense and instinct of the ludicrous
returned and he smiled.

But he could not believe in the ballet dancer!  He wondered,
indeed, how any manager could have accepted the grim satire of that
pale, worried face among the fairies, that sad refinement amid
their vacant smiles and rouged checks.  And then, growing sad
again, he comforted himself with the reflection that at least the
children were not alone that night, and so went to sleep.

For some days he had no further meeting with his neighbors.  The
disturbed state of the city--for the Vigilance Committee were still
in session--obliged the daily press to issue "extras," and his work
at the office increased.

It was not until Sunday again that he was able to be at home.
Needless to say that his solitary little companions were duly
installed there, while he sat at work with his proofs on the table
before him.

The stillness of the empty house was only broken by the habitually
subdued voices of the children at their play, when suddenly the
harsh stroke of a distant bell came through the open window.  But
it was no Sabbath bell, and Mr. Breeze knew it.  It was the tocsin
of the Vigilance Committee, summoning the members to assemble at
their quarters for a capture, a trial, or an execution of some
wrongdoer.  To him it was equally a summons to the office--to
distasteful news and excitement.

He threw his proofs aside in disgust, laid down his pen, seized his
hat, and paused a moment to look round for his playmates.  But they
were gone!  He went into the hall, looked into the open door of
their room, but they were not there.  He tried the door of the
second room, but it was locked.

Satisfied that they had stolen downstairs in their eagerness to
know what the bell meant, he hurried down also, met Roberts in the
passage,--a singularly unusual circumstance at that hour,--called
to him to look after the runaways, and hurried to his office.

Here he found the staff collected, excitedly discussing the news.
One of the Vigilance Committee prisoners, a notorious bully and
ruffian, detained as a criminal and a witness, had committed
suicide in his cell.  Fortunately this was all reportorial work,
and the services of Mr. Breeze were not required.  He hurried back,
relieved, to his room.

When he reached his landing, breathlessly, he heard the same quick
rustle he had heard that memorable evening, and was quite satisfied
that he saw a figure glide swiftly out of the open door of his
room.  It was no doubt his neighbor, who had been seeking her
children, and as he heard their voices as he passed, his uneasiness
and suspicions were removed.

He sat down again to his scattered papers and proofs, finished his
work, and took it to the office on his way to dinner.  He returned
early, in the hope that he might meet his neighbor again, and had
quite settled his mind that he was justified in offering a civil
"Good-evening" to her, in spite of his previous respectful ignoring
of her presence.  She must certainly have become aware by this time
of his attention to her children and consideration for herself, and
could not mistake his motives.  But he was disappointed, although
he came up softly; he found the floor in darkness and silence on
his return, and he had to be content with lighting his gas and
settling down to work again.

A near church clock had struck ten when he was startled by the
sound of an unfamiliar and uncertain step in the hall, followed by
a tap at his door.  Breeze jumped to his feet, and was astonished
to find Dick, the "printer's devil," standing on the threshold with
a roll of proofs in his hand.

"How did you get here?" he asked testily.

"They told me at the restaurant they reckoned you lived yere, and
the night watchman at the door headed me straight up.  When he knew
whar I kem from he wanted to know what the news was, but I told him
he'd better buy an extra and see."

"Well, what did you come for?" said the editor impatiently.

"The foreman said it was important, and he wanted to know afore he
went to press ef this yer correction was YOURS?"

He went to the table, unrolled the proofs, and, taking out the
slip, pointed to a marked paragraph.  "The foreman says the
reporter who brought the news allows he got it straight first-hand!
But ef you've corrected it, he reckons you know best."

Breeze saw at a glance that the paragraph alluded to was not of his
own writing, but one of several news items furnished by reporters.
These had been "set up" in the same "galley," and consequently
appeared in the same proof-slip.  He was about to say curtly that
neither the matter nor the correction was his, when something odd
in the correction of the item struck him.  It read as follows:--

"It appears that the notorious 'Jim Bodine,' who is in hiding and
badly wanted by the Vigilance Committee, has been tempted lately
into a renewal of his old recklessness.  He was seen in Sacramento
Street the other night by two separate witnesses, one of whom
followed him, but he escaped in some friendly doorway."

The words "in Sacramento Street" were stricken out and replaced by
the correction "on the Saucelito shore," and the words "friendly
doorway " were changed to "friendly dinghy."  The correction was
not his, nor the handwriting, which was further disguised by being
an imitation of print.  A strange idea seized him.

"Has any one seen these proofs since I left them at the office?"

"No, only the foreman, sir."

He remembered that he had left the proofs lying openly on his table
when he was called to the office at the stroke of the alarm bell;
he remembered the figure he saw gliding from his room on his
return.  She had been there alone with the proofs; she only could
have tampered with them.

The evident object of the correction was to direct the public
attention from Sacramento Street to Saucelito, as the probable
whereabouts of this "Jimmy Bodine."  The street below was
Sacramento Street, the "friendly doorway" might have been their
own.

That she had some knowledge of this Bodine was not more improbable
than the ballet story.  Her strange absences, the mystery
surrounding her, all seemed to testify that she had some
connection--perhaps only an innocent one--with these desperate
people whom the Vigilance Committee were hunting down.  Her attempt
to save the man was, after all, no more illegal than their attempt
to capture him.  True, she might have trusted him, Breeze, without
this tampering with his papers; yet perhaps she thought he was
certain to discover it--and it was only a silent appeal to his
mercy.  The corrections were ingenious and natural--it was the act
of an intelligent, quick-witted woman.

Mr. Breeze was prompt in acting upon his intuition, whether right
or wrong.  He took up his pen, wrote on the margin of the proof,
"Print as corrected," said to the boy carelessly, "The corrections
are all right," and dismissed him quickly.

The corrected paragraph which appeared in the "Informer" the next
morning seemed to attract little public attention, the greater
excitement being the suicide of the imprisoned bully and the effect
it might have upon the prosecution of other suspected parties,
against whom the dead man had been expected to bear witness.

Mr. Breeze was unable to obtain any information regarding the
desperado Bodine's associates and relations; his correction of the
paragraph had made the other members of the staff believe he had
secret and superior information regarding the fugitive, and he thus
was estopped from asking questions.  But he felt himself justified
now in demanding fuller information from Roberts at the earliest
opportunity.

For this purpose he came home earlier that night, hoping to find
the night watchman still on his first beat in the lower halls.  But
he was disappointed.  He was amazed, however, on reaching his own
landing, to find the passage piled with new luggage, some of that
ruder type of rolled blanket and knapsack known as a "miner's kit."
He was still more surprised to hear men's voices and the sound of
laughter proceeding from the room that was always locked.  A sudden
sense of uneasiness and disgust, he knew not why, came over him.

He passed quickly into his room, shut the door sharply, and lit the
gas.  But he presently heard the door of the locked room open, a
man's voice, slightly elevated by liquor and opposition, saying, "I
know what's due from one gen'leman to 'nother"--a querulous,
objecting voice saying, "Hole on! not now," and a fainter feminine
protest, all of which were followed by a rap on his door.

Breeze opened it to two strangers, one of whom lurched forward
unsteadily with outstretched hand.  He had a handsome face and
figure, and a certain consciousness of it even in the abandon of
liquor; he had an aggressive treacherousness of eye which his
potations had not subdued.  He grasped Breeze's hand tightly, but
dropped it the next moment perfunctorily as he glanced round the
room.

"I told them I was bound to come in," he said, without looking at
Breeze, "and say 'Howdy!' to the man that's bin a pal to my women
folks and the kids--and acted white all through!  I said to Mame,
'I reckon HE knows who I am, and that I kin be high-toned to them
that's high-toned; kin return shake for shake and shot for shot!'
Aye! that's me!  So I was bound to come in like a gen'leman, sir,
and here I am!"

He threw himself in an unproffered chair and stared at Breeze.

"I'm afraid," said Breeze dryly, "that, nevertheless, I never knew
who you were, and that even now I am ignorant whom I am addressing."

"That's just it," said the second man, with a querulous protest,
which did not, however, conceal his admiring vassalage to his
friend; "that's what I'm allus telling Jim.  'Jim,' I says, 'how is
folks to know you're the man that shot Kernel Baxter, and dropped
three o' them Mariposa Vigilants?  They didn't see you do it!  They
just look at your fancy style and them mustaches of yours, and
allow ye might be death on the girls, but they don't know ye!  An'
this man yere--he's a scribe in them papers--writes what the boss
editor tells him, and lives up yere on the roof, 'longside yer wife
and the children--what's he knowin' about YOU?'  Jim's all right
enough," he continued, in easy confidence to Breeze, "but he's too
fresh 'bout himself."

Mr. James Bodine accepted this tribute and criticism of his
henchman with a complacent laugh, which was not, however, without a
certain contempt for the speaker and the man spoken to.  His bold,
selfish eyes wandered round the room as if in search of some other
amusement than his companions offered.

"I reckon this is the room which that hound of a landlord, Rakes,
allowed he'd fix up for our poker club--the club that Dan Simmons
and me got up, with a few other sports.  It was to be a slap-up
affair, right under the roof, where there was no chance of the
police raiding us.  But the cur weakened when the Vigilants started
out to make war on any game a gen'leman might hev that wasn't in
their gummy-bag, salt pork trade.  Well, it's gettin' a long time
between drinks, gen'lemen, ain't it?"  He looked round him
significantly.

Only the thought of the woman and her children in the next room,
and the shame that he believed she was enduring, enabled Breeze to
keep his temper or even a show of civility.

"I'm afraid," he said quietly, "that you'll find very little here
to remind you of the club--not even the whiskey; for I use the room
only as a bedroom, and as I am a workingman, and come in late and
go out early, I have never found it available for hospitality, even
to my intimate friends.  I am very glad, however, that the little
leisure I have had in it has enabled me to make the floor less
lonely for your children."

Mr. Bodine got up with an affected yawn, turned an embarrassed yet
darkening eye on Breeze, and lunged unsteadily to the door.  "And
as I only happened in to do the reg'lar thing between high-toned
gen'lemen, I reckon we kin say 'Quits.'"  He gave a coarse laugh,
said "So long," nodded, stumbled into the passage, and thence into
the other room.

His companion watched him pass out with a relieved yet protecting
air, and then, closing the door softly, drew nearer to Breeze, and
said in husky confidence,--

"Ye ain't seein' him at his best, mister!  He's bin drinkin' too
much, and this yer news has upset him."

"What news?" asked Breeze.

"This yer suicide o' Irish Jack!"

"Was he his friend?"

"Friend?" ejaculated the man, horrified at the mere suggestion.
"Not much!  Why, Irish Jack was the only man that could hev hung
Jim!  Now he's dead, in course the Vigilants ain't got no proof
agin Jim.  Jim wants to face it out now an' stay here, but his wife
and me don't see it noways!  So we are taking advantage o' the lull
agin him to get him off down the coast this very night.  That's why
he's been off his head drinkin'.  Ye see, when a man has been for
weeks hidin'--part o' the time in that room and part o' the time on
the wharf, where them Vigilants has been watchin' every ship that
left in order to ketch him, he's inclined to celebrate his chance
o' getting away"--

"Part of the time in that room?" interrupted Breeze quickly.

"Sartin!  Don't ye see?  He allus kem in as you went out--sabe!--
and got away before you kem back, his wife all the time just a-
hoverin' between the two places, and keeping watch for him.  It was
killin' to her, you see, for she wasn't brought up to it, whiles
Jim didn't keer--had two revolvers and kalkilated to kill a dozen
Vigilants afore he dropped.  But that's over now, and when I've got
him safe on that 'plunger' down at the wharf to-night, and put him
aboard the schooner that's lying off the Heads, he's all right
agin."

"And Roberts knew all this and was one of his friends?" asked
Breeze.

"Roberts knew it, and Roberts's wife used to be a kind of servant
to Jim's wife in the South, when she was a girl, but I don't know
ez Roberts is his FRIEND!"

"He certainly has shown himself one," said Breeze.

"Ye-e-s," said the stranger meditatively, "ye-e-s."  He stopped,
opened the door softly, and peeped out, and then closed it again
softly.  "It's sing'lar, Mr. Breeze," he went on in a sudden yet
embarrassed burst of confidence, "that Jim thar--a man thet can
shoot straight, and hez frequent; a man thet knows every skin game
goin'--that THET man Jim," very slowly, "hezn't really--got--any
friends--'cept me--and his wife."

"Indeed?" said Mr. Breeze dryly.

"Sure!  Why, you yourself didn't cotton to him--I could see THET."

Mr. Breeze felt himself redden slightly, and looked curiously at
the man.  This vulgar parasite, whom he had set down as a worshiper
of sham heroes, undoubtedly did not look like an associate of
Bodine's, and had a certain seriousness that demanded respect.  As
he looked closer into his wide, round face, seamed with small-pox,
he fancied he saw even in its fatuous imbecility something of that
haunting devotion he had seen on the refined features of the wife.
He said more gently,--

"But one friend like you would seem to be enough."

"I ain't what I uster be, Mr. Breeze," said the man meditatively,
"and mebbe ye don't know who I am.  I'm Abe Shuckster, of
Shuckster's Ranch--one of the biggest in Petalumy.  I was a rich
man until a year ago, when Jim got inter trouble.  What with
mortgages and interest, payin' up Jim's friends and buying off some
ez was set agin him, thar ain't much left, and when I've settled
that bill for the schooner lying off the Heads there I reckon I'm
about played out.  But I've allus a shanty at Petalumy, and mebbe
when things is froze over and Jim gets back--you'll come and see
him--for you ain't seen him at his best."

"I suppose his wife and children go with him?" said Breeze.

"No!  He's agin it, and wants them to come later.  But that's all
right, for you see she kin go back to their own house at the
Mission, now that the Vigilants are givin' up shadderin' it.  So
long, Mr. Breeze!  We're startin' afore daylight.  Sorry you didn't
see Jim in condition."

He grasped Breeze's hand warmly and slipped out of the door softly.
For an instant Mr. Breeze felt inclined to follow him into the room
and make a kinder adieu to the pair, but the reflection that he
might embarrass the wife, who, it would seem, had purposely avoided
accompanying her husband when he entered, withheld him.  And for
the last few minutes he had been doubtful if he had any right to
pose as her friend.  Beside the devotion of the man who had just
left him, his own scant kindness to her children seemed ridiculous.

He went to bed, but tossed uneasily until he fancied he heard
stealthy footsteps outside his door and in the passage.  Even then
he thought of getting up, dressing, and going out to bid farewell
to the fugitives.  But even while he was thinking of it he fell
asleep and did not wake until the sun was shining in at his
windows.

He sprang to his feet, threw on his dressing-gown, and peered into
the passage.  Everything was silent.  He stepped outside--the light
streamed into the hall from the open doors and windows of both
rooms--the floor was empty; not a trace of the former occupants
remained.  He was turning back when his eye fell upon the battered
wooden doll set upright against his doorjamb, holding stiffly in
its jointed arms a bit of paper folded like a note.  Opening it, he
found a few lines written in pencil.


God bless you for your kindness to us, and try to forgive me for
touching your papers.  But I thought that you would detect it, know
WHY I did it, and then help us, as you did!  Good-by!

MAMIE BODINE.


Mr. Breeze laid down the paper with a slight accession of color, as
if its purport had been ironical.  How little had he done compared
to the devotion of this delicate woman or the sacrifices of that
rough friend!  How deserted looked this nest under the eaves, which
had so long borne its burden of guilt, innocence, shame, and
suffering!  For many days afterwards he avoided it except at night,
and even then he often found himself lying awake to listen to the
lost voices of the children.

But one evening, a fortnight later, he came upon Roberts in the
hall.  "Well," said Breeze, with abrupt directness, "did he get
away?"

Roberts started, uttered an oath which it is possible the Recording
Angel passed to his credit, and said, "Yes, HE got away all right!"

"Why, hasn't his wife joined him?"

"No.  Never, in this world, I reckon; and if anywhere in the next,
I don't want to go there!" said Roberts furiously.

"Is he dead?"

"Dead?  That kind don't die!"

"What do you mean?"

Roberts's lips writhed, and then, with a strong effort, he said
with deliberate distinctness, "I mean--that the hound went off with
another woman--that--was--in--that schooner, and left that fool
Shuckster adrift in the plunger."

"And the wife and children?"

"Shuckster sold his shanty at Petaluma to pay their passage to the
States.  Good-night!"



HOW REUBEN ALLEN "SAW LIFE" IN SAN FRANCISCO


The junior partner of the firm of Sparlow & Kane, "Druggists and
Apothecaries," of San Francisco, was gazing meditatively out of the
corner of the window of their little shop in Dupont Street.  He
could see the dimly lit perspective of the narrow thoroughfare fade
off into the level sand wastes of Market Street on the one side,
and plunge into the half-excavated bulk of Telegraph Hill on the
other.  He could see the glow and hear the rumble of Montgomery
Street--the great central avenue farther down the hill.  Above the
housetops was spread the warm blanket of sea-fog under which the
city was regularly laid to sleep every summer night to the cool
lullaby of the Northwest Trades.  It was already half-past eleven;
footsteps on the wooden pavement were getting rarer and more
remote; the last cart had rumbled by; the shutters were up along
the street; the glare of his own red and blue jars was the only
beacon left to guide the wayfarers.  Ordinarily he would have been
going home at this hour, when his partner, who occupied the surgery
and a small bedroom at the rear of the shop, always returned to
relieve him.  That night, however, a professional visit would
detain the "Doctor" until half-past twelve.  There was still an
hour to wait.  He felt drowsy; the mysterious incense of the shop,
that combined essence of drugs, spice, scented soap, and orris
root--which always reminded him of the Arabian Nights--was
affecting him.  He yawned, and then, turning away, passed behind
the counter, took down a jar labeled "Glycyrr. Glabra," selected a
piece of Spanish licorice, and meditatively sucked it.  Not
receiving from it that diversion and sustenance he apparently was
seeking, he also visited, in an equally familiar manner, a jar
marked "Jujubes," and returned ruminatingly to his previous position.

If I have not in this incident sufficiently established the
youthfulness of the junior partner, I may add briefly that he was
just nineteen, that he had early joined the emigration to
California, and after one or two previous light-hearted essays at
other occupations, for which he was singularly unfitted, he had
saved enough to embark on his present venture, still less suited to
his temperament.  In those adventurous days trades and vocations
were not always filled by trained workmen; it was extremely
probable that the experienced chemist was already making his
success as a gold-miner, with a lawyer and a physician for his
partners, and Mr. Kane's inexperienced position was by no means a
novel one.  A slight knowledge of Latin as a written language, an
American schoolboy's acquaintance with chemistry and natural
philosophy, were deemed sufficient by his partner, a regular
physician, for practical cooperation in the vending of drugs and
putting up of prescriptions.  He knew the difference between acids
and alkalies and the peculiar results which attended their
incautious combination.  But he was excessively deliberate,
painstaking, and cautious.  The legend which adorned the desk at
the counter, "Physicians' prescriptions carefully prepared," was
more than usually true as regarded the adverb.  There was no danger
of his poisoning anybody through haste or carelessness, but it was
possible that an urgent "case" might have succumbed to the disease
while he was putting up the remedy.  Nor was his caution entirely
passive.  In those days the "heroic" practice of medicine was in
keeping with the abnormal development of the country; there were
"record" doses of calomel and quinine, and he had once or twice
incurred the fury of local practitioners by sending back their
prescriptions with a modest query.

The far-off clatter of carriage wheels presently arrested his
attention; looking down the street, he could see the lights of a
hackney carriage advancing towards him.  They had already flashed
upon the open crossing a block beyond before his vague curiosity
changed into an active instinctive presentiment that they were
coming to the shop.  He withdrew to a more becoming and dignified
position behind the counter as the carriage drew up with a jerk
before the door.

The driver rolled from his box and opened the carriage door to a
woman whom he assisted, between some hysterical exclamations on her
part and some equally incoherent explanations of his own, into the
shop.  Kane saw at a glance that both were under the influence of
liquor, and one, the woman, was disheveled and bleeding about the
head.  Yet she was elegantly dressed and evidently en fete, with
one or two "tricolor" knots and ribbons mingled with her finery.
Her golden hair, matted and darkened with blood, had partly escaped
from her French bonnet and hung heavily over her shoulders.  The
driver, who was supporting her roughly, and with a familiarity that
was part of the incongruous spectacle, was the first to speak.

"Madame le Blank! ye know!  Got cut about the head down at the fete
at South Park!  Tried to dance upon the table, and rolled over on
some champagne bottles.  See?  Wants plastering up!"

"Ah brute!  Hog!  Nozzing of ze kine!  Why will you lie?  I dance!
Ze cowards, fools, traitors zere upset ze table and I fall.  I am
cut!  Ah, my God, how I am cut!"

She stopped suddenly and lapsed heavily against the counter.  At
which Kane hurried around to support her into the surgery with the
one fixed idea in his bewildered mind of getting her out of the
shop, and, suggestively, into the domain and under the
responsibility of his partner.  The hackman, apparently relieved
and washing his hands of any further complicity in the matter,
nodded and smiled, and saying, "I reckon I'll wait outside,
pardner," retreated incontinently to his vehicle.  To add to Kane's
half-ludicrous embarrassment the fair patient herself slightly
resisted his support, accused the hackman of "abandoning her," and
demanded if Kane knew "zee reason of zees affair," yet she
presently lapsed again into the large reclining-chair which he had
wheeled forward, with open mouth, half-shut eyes, and a strange
Pierrette mask of face, combined of the pallor of faintness and
chalk, and the rouge of paint and blood.  At which Kane's
cautiousness again embarrassed him.  A little brandy from the
bottle labeled "Vini Galli" seemed to be indicated, but his
inexperience could not determine if her relaxation was from
bloodlessness or the reacting depression of alcohol.  In this
dilemma he chose a medium course, with aromatic spirits of ammonia,
and mixing a diluted quantity in a measuring-glass, poured it
between her white lips.  A start, a struggle, a cough--a volley of
imprecatory French, and the knocking of the glass from his hand
followed--but she came to!  He quickly sponged her head of the
half-coagulated blood, and removed a few fragments of glass from a
long laceration of the scalp.  The shock of the cold water and the
appearance of the ensanguined basin frightened her into a momentary
passivity.  But when Kane found it necessary to cut her hair in the
region of the wound in order to apply the adhesive plaster, she
again endeavored to rise and grasp the scissors.

"You'll bleed to death if you're not quiet," said the young man
with dogged gravity.

Something in his manner impressed her into silence again.  He cut
whole locks away ruthlessly; he was determined to draw the edges of
the wound together with the strip of plaster and stop the bleeding--
if he cropped the whole head.  His excessive caution for her
physical condition did not extend to her superficial adornment.
Her yellow tresses lay on the floor, her neck and shoulders were
saturated with water from the sponge which he continually applied,
until the heated strips of plaster had closed the wound almost
hermetically.  She whimpered, tears ran down her cheeks; but so
long as it was not blood the young man was satisfied.

In the midst of it he heard the shop door open, and presently the
sound of rapping on the counter.  Another customer!

Mr. Kane called out, "Wait a moment," and continued his ministrations.
After a pause the rapping recommenced.  Kane was just securing the
last strip of plaster and preserved a preoccupied silence.  Then the
door flew open abruptly and a figure appeared impatiently on the
threshold.  It was that of a miner recently returned from the gold
diggings--so recently that he evidently had not had time to change
his clothes at his adjacent hotel, and stood there in his high
boots, duck trousers, and flannel shirt, over which his coat was
slung like a hussar's jacket from his shoulder.  Kane would have
uttered an indignant protest at the intrusion, had not the intruder
himself as quickly recoiled with an astonishment and contrition that
was beyond the effect of any reproval.  He literally gasped at the
spectacle before him.  A handsomely dressed woman reclining in a
chair; lace and jewelry and ribbons depending from her saturated
shoulders; tresses of golden hair filling her lap and lying on the
floor; a pail of ruddy water and a sponge at her feet, and a pale
young man bending over her head with a spirit lamp and strips of
yellow plaster!

"'Scuse me, pard!  I was just dropping in; don't you hurry!  I kin
wait," he stammered, falling back, and then the door closed
abruptly behind him.

Kane gathered up the shorn locks, wiped the face and neck of his
patient with a clean towel and his own handkerchief, threw her
gorgeous opera cloak over her shoulders, and assisted her to rise.
She did so, weakly but obediently; she was evidently stunned and
cowed in some mysterious way by his material attitude, perhaps, or
her sudden realization of her position; at least the contrast
between her aggressive entrance into the shop and her subdued
preparation for her departure was so remarkable that it affected
even Kane's preoccupation.

"There," he said, slightly relaxing his severe demeanor with an
encouraging smile, "I think this will do; we've stopped the
bleeding.  It will probably smart a little as the plaster sets
closer.  I can send my partner, Dr. Sparlow, to you in the
morning."

She looked at him curiously and with a strange smile.  "And zees
Doctor Sparrlow--eez he like you, M'sieu?"

"He is older, and very well known," said the young man seriously.
"I can safely recommend him."

"Ah," she repeated, with a pensive smile which made Kane think her
quite pretty.  "Ah--he ez older--your Doctor Sparrlow--but YOU are
strong, M'sieu."

"And," said Kane vaguely, "he will tell you what to do."

"Ah," she repeated again softly, with the same smile, "he will tell
me what to do if I shall not know myself.  Dat ez good."

Kane had already wrapped her shorn locks in a piece of spotless
white paper and tied it up with narrow white ribbon in the dainty
fashion dear to druggists' clerks.  As he handed it to her she felt
in her pocket and produced a handful of gold.

"What shall I pay for zees, M'sieu?"

Kane reddened a little--solely because of his slow arithmetical
faculties.  Adhesive plaster was cheap--he would like to have
charged proportionately for the exact amount he had used; but the
division was beyond him!  And he lacked the trader's instinct.

"Twenty-five cents, I think," he hazarded briefly.

She started, but smiled again.  "Twenty-five cents for all zees--ze
medicine, ze strips for ze head, ze hair cut"--she glanced at the
paper parcel he had given her--"it is only twenty-five cents?"

"That's all."

He selected from her outstretched palm, with some difficulty, the
exact amount, the smallest coin it held.  She again looked at him
curiously--half confusedly--and moved slowly into the shop.  The
miner, who was still there, retreated as before with a gaspingly
apologetic gesture--even flattening himself against the window to
give her sweeping silk flounces freer passage.  As she passed into
the street with a "Merci, M'sieu, good a'night," and the hackman
started from the vehicle to receive her, the miner drew a long
breath, and bringing his fist down upon the counter, ejaculated,--

"B'gosh!  She's a stunner!"

Kane, a good deal relieved at her departure and the success of his
ministration, smiled benignly.

The stranger again stared after the retreating carriage, looked
around the shop, and even into the deserted surgery, and approached
the counter confidentially.  "Look yer, pardner.  I kem straight
from St. Jo, Mizzorri, to Gold Hill--whar I've got a claim--and I
reckon this is the first time I ever struck San Francisker.  I
ain't up to towny ways nohow, and I allow that mebbe I'm rather
green.  So we'll let that pass!  Now look yer!" he added, leaning
over the counter with still deeper and even mysterious confidence,
"I suppose this yer kind o' thing is the regular go here, eh?
nothin' new to YOU! in course no!  But to me, pard, it's just
fetchin' me!  Lifts me clear outer my boots every time!  Why, when
I popped into that thar room, and saw that lady--all gold,
furbelows, and spangles--at twelve o'clock at night, sittin' in
that cheer and you a-cuttin' her h'r and swabbin' her head o'
blood, and kinder prospectin' for 'indications,' so to speak, and
doin' it so kam and indifferent like, I sez to myself, 'Rube,
Rube,' sez I, 'this yer's life! city life! San Francisker life! and
b'gosh, you've dropped into it!  Now, pard, look yar! don't you
answer, ye know, ef it ain't square and above board for me to know;
I ain't askin' you to give the show away, ye know, in the matter of
high-toned ladies like that, but" (very mysteriously, and sinking
his voice to the lowest confidential pitch, as he put his hand to
his ear as if to catch the hushed reply), "what mout hev bin
happening, pard?"

Considerably amused at the man's simplicity, Kane replied good-
humoredly: "Danced among some champagne bottles on a table at a
party, fell and got cut by glass."

The stranger nodded his head slowly and approvingly as he repeated
with infinite deliberateness: "Danced on champagne bottles,
champagne! you said, pard? at a pahty!  Yes!" (musingly and
approvingly).  "I reckon that's about the gait they take.  SHE'D do
it."

"Is there anything I can do for you? sorry to have kept you
waiting," said Kane, glancing at the clock.

"O ME!  Lord! ye needn't mind me.  Why, I should wait for anythin'
o' the like o' that, and be just proud to do it!  And ye see, I
sorter helped myself while you war busy."

"Helped yourself?" said Kane in astonishment.

"Yes, outer that bottle."  He pointed to the ammonia bottle, which
still stood on the counter.  "It seemed to be handy and popular."

"Man! you might have poisoned yourself."

The stranger paused a moment at the idea.  "So I mout, I reckon,"
he said musingly, "that's so! pizined myself jest ez you was
lookin' arter that high-toned case, and kinder bothered you!  It's
like me!"

"I mean it required diluting; you ought to have taken it in water,"
said Kane.

"I reckon!  It DID sorter h'ist me over to the door for a little
fresh air at first! seemed rayther scaldy to the lips.  But wot of
it that GOT THAR," he put his hand gravely to his stomach, "did me
pow'ful good."

"What was the matter with you?" asked Kane.

"Well, ye see, pard" (confidentially again), "I reckon it's suthin'
along o' my heart.  Times it gets to poundin' away like a quartz
stamp, and then it stops suddent like, and kinder leaves ME out
too."

Kane looked at him more attentively.  He was a strong, powerfully
built man with a complexion that betrayed nothing more serious than
the effects of mining cookery.  It was evidently a common case of
indigestion.

"I don't say it would not have done you some good if properly
administered," he replied.  "If you like I'll put up a diluted
quantity and directions?"

"That's me, every time, pardner!" said the stranger with an accent
of relief.  "And look yer, don't you stop at that!  Ye just put me
up some samples like of anythin' you think mout be likely to hit.
I'll go in for a fair show, and then meander in every now and then,
betwixt times, to let you know.  Ye don't mind my drifting in here,
do ye?  It's about ez likely a place ez I struck since I've left
the Sacramento boat, and my hotel, just round the corner.  Ye just
sample me a bit o' everythin'; don't mind the expense.  I'll take
YOUR word for it.  The way you--a young fellow--jest stuck to your
work in thar, cool and kam as a woodpecker--not minding how high-
toned she was--nor the jewelery and spangles she had on--jest got
me!  I sez to myself, 'Rube,' sez I, 'whatever's wrong o' YOUR
insides, you jest stick to that feller to set ye right.'"

The junior partner's face reddened as he turned to his shelves
ostensibly for consultation.  Conscious of his inexperience, the
homely praise of even this ignorant man was not ungrateful.  He
felt, too, that his treatment of the Frenchwoman, though
successful, might not be considered remunerative from a business
point of view by his partner.  He accordingly acted upon the
suggestion of the stranger and put up two or three specifics for
dyspepsia.  They were received with grateful alacrity and the
casual display of considerable gold in the stranger's pocket in the
process of payment.  He was evidently a successful miner.

After bestowing the bottles carefully about his person, he again
leaned confidentially towards Kane.  "I reckon of course you know
this high-toned lady, being in the way of seein' that kind o'
folks.  I suppose you won't mind telling me, ez a stranger.  But"
(he added hastily, with a deprecatory wave of his hand), "perhaps
ye would."

Mr. Kane, in fact, had hesitated.  He knew vaguely and by report
that Madame le Blanc was the proprietress of a famous restaurant,
over which she had rooms where private gambling was carried on to a
great extent.  It was also alleged that she was protected by a
famous gambler and a somewhat notorious bully.  Mr. Kane's caution
suggested that he had no right to expose the reputation of his
chance customer.  He was silent.

The stranger's face became intensely sympathetic and apologetic.
"I see!--not another word, pard!  It ain't the square thing to be
givin' her away, and I oughtn't to hev asked.  Well--so long!  I
reckon I'll jest drift back to the hotel.  I ain't been in San
Francisker mor' 'n three hours, and I calkilate, pard, that I've
jest seen about ez square a sample of high-toned life as fellers ez
haz bin here a year.  Well, hastermanyanner--ez the Greasers say.
I'll be droppin' in to-morrow.  My name's Reuben Allen o' Mariposa.
I know yours; it's on the sign, and it ain't Sparlow."

He cast another lingering glance around the shop, as if loath to
leave it, and then slowly sauntered out of the door, pausing in the
street a moment, in the glare of the red light, before he faded
into darkness.  Without knowing exactly why, Kane had an instinct
that the stranger knew no one in San Francisco, and after leaving
the shop was going into utter silence and obscurity.

A few moments later Dr. Sparlow returned to relieve his wearied
partner.  A pushing, active man, he listened impatiently to Kane's
account of his youthful practice with Madame le Blanc, without,
however, dwelling much on his methods.  "You ought to have charged
her more," the elder said decisively.  "She'd have paid it.  She
only came here because she was ashamed to go to a big shop in
Montgomery Street--and she won't come again."

"But she wants you to see her to-morrow," urged Kane, "and I told
her you would!"

"You say it was only a superficial cut?" queried the doctor, "and
you closed it?  Umph! what can she want to see ME for?"  He paid
more attention, however, to the case of the stranger, Allen.  "When
he comes here again, manage to let me see him."  Mr. Kane promised,
yet for some indefinable reason he went home that night not quite
as well satisfied with himself.

He was much more concerned the next morning when, after relieving
the doctor for his regular morning visits, he was startled an hour
later by the abrupt return of that gentleman.  His face was marked
by some excitement and anxiety, which nevertheless struggled with
that sense of the ludicrous which Californians in those days
imported into most situations of perplexity or catastrophe.
Putting his hands deeply into his trousers pockets, he confronted
his youthful partner behind the counter.

"How much did you charge that French-woman?" he said gravely.

"Twenty-five cents," said Kane timidly.

"Well, I'd give it back and add two hundred and fifty dollars if
she had never entered the shop."

"What's the matter?"

"Her head will be--and a mass of it, in a day, I reckon!  Why, man,
you put enough plaster on it to clothe and paper the dome of the
Capitol!  You drew her scalp together so that she couldn't shut her
eyes without climbing up the bed-post!  You mowed her hair off so
that she'll have to wear a wig for the next two years--and handed
it to her in a beau-ti-ful sealed package!  They talk of suing me
and killing you out of hand."

"She was bleeding a great deal and looked faint," said the junior
partner; "I thought I ought to stop that."

"And you did--by thunder!  Though it might have been better
business for the shop if I'd found her a crumbling ruin here, than
lathed and plastered in this fashion, over there!  However," he
added, with a laugh, seeing an angry light in his junior partner's
eye, "SHE don't seem to mind it--the cursing all comes from THEM.
SHE rather likes your style and praises it--that's what gets me!
Did you talk to her much," he added, looking critically at his
partner.

"I only told her to sit still or she'd bleed to death," said Kane
curtly.

"Humph!--she jabbered something about your being 'strong' and
knowing just how to handle her.  Well, it can't be helped now.  I
think I came in time for the worst of it and have drawn their fire.
Don't do it again.  The next time a woman with a cut head and long
hair tackles you, fill up her scalp with lint and tannin, and pack
her off to some of the big shops and make THEM pick it out."  And
with a good-humored nod he started off to finish his interrupted
visits.

With a vague sense of remorse, and yet a consciousness of some
injustice done him, Mr. Kane resumed his occupation with filters
and funnels, and mortars and triturations.  He was so gloomily
preoccupied that he did not, as usual, glance out of the window, or
he would have observed the mining stranger of the previous night
before it.  It was not until the man's bowed shoulders blocked the
light of the doorway that he looked up and recognized him.  Kane
was in no mood to welcome his appearance.  His presence, too,
actively recalled the last night's adventure of which he was a
witness--albeit a sympathizing one.  Kane shrank from the illusions
which he felt he would be sure to make.  And with his present ill
luck, he was by no means sure that his ministrations even to HIM
had been any more successful than they had been to the Frenchwoman.
But a glance at his good-humored face and kindling eyes removed
that suspicion.  Nevertheless, he felt somewhat embarrassed and
impatient, and perhaps could not entirely conceal it.  He forgot
that the rudest natures are sometimes the most delicately sensitive
to slights, and the stranger had noticed his manner and began
apologetically.

"I allowed I'd just drop in anyway to tell ye that these thar pills
you giv' me did me a heap o' good so far--though mebbe it's only
fair to give the others a show too, which I'm reckoning to do."  He
paused, and then in a submissive confidence went on: "But first I
wanted to hev you excuse me for havin' asked all them questions
about that high-toned lady last night, when it warn't none of my
business.  I am a darned fool."

Mr. Kane instantly saw that it was no use to keep up his attitude
of secrecy, or impose upon the ignorant, simple man, and said
hurriedly: "Oh no.  The lady is very well known.  She is the
proprietress of a restaurant down the street--a house open to
everybody.  Her name is Madame le Blanc; you may have heard of her
before?"

To his surprise the man exhibited no diminution of interest nor
change of sentiment at this intelligence.  "Then," he said slowly,
"I reckon I might get to see her again.  Ye see, Mr. Kane, I rather
took a fancy to her general style and gait--arter seein' her in
that fix last night.  It was rather like them play pictures on the
stage.  Ye don't think she'd make any fuss to seein' a rough old
'forty-niner' like me?"

"Hardly," said Kane, "but there might be some objection from her
gentlemen friends," he added, with a smile,--"Jack Lane, a gambler,
who keeps a faro bank in her rooms, and Jimmy O'Ryan, a prize-
fighter, who is one of her 'chuckers out.'"

His further relation of Madame le Blanc's entourage apparently gave
the miner no concern.  He looked at Kane, nodded, and repeated
slowly and appreciatively: "Yes, keeps a gamblin' and faro bank and
a prize-fighter--I reckon that might be about her gait and style
too.  And you say she lives"--

He stopped, for at this moment a man entered the shop quickly, shut
the door behind him, and turned the key in the lock.  It was done
so quickly that Kane instinctively felt that the man had been
loitering in the vicinity and had approached from the side street.
A single glance at the intruder's face and figure showed him that
it was the bully of whom he had just spoken.  He had seen that
square, brutal face once before, confronting the police in a riot,
and had not forgotten it.  But today, with the flush of liquor on
it, it had an impatient awkwardness and confused embarrassment that
he could not account for.  He did not comprehend that the genuine
bully is seldom deliberate of attack, and is obliged--in common
with many of the combative lower animals--to lash himself into a
previous fury of provocation.  This probably saved him, as perhaps
some instinctive feeling that he was in no immediate danger kept
him cool.  He remained standing quietly behind the counter.  Allen
glanced around carelessly, looking at the shelves.

The silence of the two men apparently increased the ruffian's rage
and embarrassment.  Suddenly he leaped into the air with a whoop
and clumsily executed a negro double shuffle on the floor, which
jarred the glasses--yet was otherwise so singularly ineffective and
void of purpose that he stopped in the midst of it and had to
content himself with glaring at Kane.

"Well," said Kane quietly, "what does all this mean?  What do you
want here?"

"What does it mean?" repeated the bully, finding his voice in a
high falsetto, designed to imitate Kane's.  "It means I'm going to
play merry h-ll with this shop!  It means I'm goin' to clean it out
and the blank hair-cuttin' blank that keeps it.  What do I want
here?  Well--what I want I intend to help myself to, and all h-ll
can't stop me!  And" (working himself to the striking point) "who
the blank are you to ask me?"  He sprang towards the counter, but
at the same moment Allen seemed to slip almost imperceptibly and
noiselessly between them, and Kane found himself confronted only by
the miner's broad back.

"Hol' yer hosses, stranger," said Allen slowly, as the ruffian
suddenly collided with his impassive figure.  "I'm a sick man
comin' in yer for medicine.  I've got somethin' wrong with my
heart, and goin's on like this yer kinder sets it to thumpin'."

"Blank you and your blank heart!" screamed the bully, turning in a
fury of amazement and contempt at this impotent interruption.
"Who"--but his voice stopped.  Allen's powerful right arm had
passed over his head and shoulders like a steel hoop, and pinioned
his elbows against his sides.  Held rigidly upright, he attempted
to kick, but Allen's right leg here advanced, and firmly held his
lower limbs against the counter that shook to his struggles and
blasphemous outcries.  Allen turned quietly to Kane, and, with a
gesture of his unemployed arm, said confidentially:

"Would ye mind passing me down that ar Romantic Spirits of Ammonyer
ye gave me last night?"

Kane caught the idea, and handed him the bottle.

"Thar," said Allen, taking out the stopper and holding the pungent
spirit against the bully's dilated nostrils and vociferous mouth,
"thar, smell that, and taste it, it will do ye good; it was
powerful kammin' to ME last night."

The ruffian gasped, coughed, choked, but his blaspheming voice died
away in a suffocating hiccough.

"Thar," continued Allen, as his now subdued captive relaxed his
struggling, "ye 'r' better, and so am I.  It's quieter here now,
and ye ain't affectin' my heart so bad.  A little fresh air will
make us both all right."  He turned again to Kane in his former
subdued confidential manner.

"Would ye mind openin' that door?"

Kane flew to the door, unlocked it, and held it wide open.  The
bully again began to struggle, but a second inhalation of the
hartshorn quelled him, and enabled his captor to drag him to the
door.  As they emerged upon the sidewalk, the bully, with a final
desperate struggle, freed his arm and grasped his pistol at his
hip-pocket, but at the same moment Allen deliberately caught his
hand, and with a powerful side throw cast him on the pavement,
retaining the weapon in his own hand.  "I've one of my own," he
said to the prostrate man, "but I reckon I'll keep this yer too,
until you're better."

The crowd that had collected quickly, recognizing the notorious and
discomfited bully, were not of a class to offer him any sympathy,
and he slunk away followed by their jeers.  Allen returned quietly
to the shop.  Kane was profuse in his thanks, and yet oppressed
with his simple friend's fatuous admiration for a woman who could
keep such ruffians in her employ.  "You know who that man was, I
suppose?" he said.

"I reckon it was that 'er prize-fighter belongin' to that high-
toned lady," returned Allen simply.  "But he don't know anything
about RASTLIN', b'gosh; only that I was afraid o' bringin' on that
heart trouble, I mout hev hurt him bad."

"They think"--hesitated Kane, "that--I--was rough in my treatment
of that woman and maliciously cut off her hair.  This attack was
revenge--or"--he hesitated still more, as he remembered Dr.
Sparlow's indication of the woman's feeling--"or that bully's idea
of revenge."

"I see," nodded Allen, opening his small sympathetic eyes on Kane
with an exasperating air of secrecy--"just jealousy."

Kane reddened in sheer hopelessness of explanation.  "No; it was
earning his wages, as he thought."

"Never ye mind, pard," said Allen confidentially.  "I'll set 'em
both right.  Ye see, this sorter gives me a show to call at that
thar restaurant and give HIM back his six-shooter, and set her on
the right trail for you.  Why, Lordy!  I was here when you was
fixin' her--I'm testimony o' the way you did it--and she'll
remember me.  I'll sorter waltz round thar this afternoon.  But I
reckon I won't be keepin' YOU from your work any longer.  And look
yar!--I say, pard!--this is seein' life in 'Frisco--ain't it?
Gosh!  I've had more high times in this very shop in two days, than
I've had in two years of St. Jo.  So long, Mr. Kane!"  He waved his
hand, lounged slowly out of the shop, gave a parting glance up the
street, passed the window, and was gone.

The next day being a half-holiday for Kane, he did not reach the
shop until afternoon.  "Your mining friend Allen has been here,"
said Doctor Sparlow.  "I took the liberty of introducing myself,
and induced him to let me carefully examine him.  He was a little
shy, and I am sorry for it, as I fear he has some serious organic
trouble with his heart and ought to have a more thorough
examination."  Seeing Kane's unaffected concern, he added, "You
might influence him to do so.  He's a good fellow and ought to take
some care of himself.  By the way, he told me to tell you that he'd
seen Madame le Blanc and made it all right about you.  He seems to
be quite infatuated with the woman."

"I'm sorry he ever saw her," said Kane bitterly.

"Well, his seeing her seems to have saved the shop from being
smashed up, and you from getting a punched head," returned the
Doctor with a laugh.  "He's no fool--yet it's a freak of human
nature that a simple hayseed like that--a man who's lived in the
backwoods all his life, is likely to be the first to tumble before
a pot of French rouge like her."

Indeed, in a couple of weeks, there was no further doubt of Mr.
Reuben Allen's infatuation.  He dropped into the shop frequently on
his way to and from the restaurant, where he now regularly took his
meals; he spent his evenings in gambling in its private room.  Yet
Kane was by no means sure that he was losing his money there
unfairly, or that he was used as a pigeon by the proprietress and
her friends.  The bully O'Ryan was turned away; Sparlow grimly
suggested that Allen had simply taken his place, but Kane
ingeniously retorted that the Doctor was only piqued because Allen
had evaded his professional treatment.  Certainly the patient had
never consented to another examination, although he repeatedly and
gravely bought medicines, and was a generous customer.  Once or
twice Kane thought it his duty to caution Allen against his new
friends and enlighten him as to Madame le Blanc's reputation, but
his suggestions were received with a good-humored submission that
was either the effect of unbelief or of perfect resignation to the
fact, and he desisted.  One morning Dr. Sparlow said cheerfully:--

"Would you like to hear the last thing about your friend and the
Frenchwoman?  The boys can't account for her singling out a fellow
like that for her friend, so they say that the night that she cut
herself at the fete and dropped in here for assistance, she found
nobody here but Allen--a chance customer!  That it was HE who cut
off her hair and bound up her wounds in that sincere fashion, and
she believed he had saved her life."  The Doctor grinned maliciously
as he added: "And as that's the way history is written you see your
reputation is safe."

It may have been a month later that San Francisco was thrown into a
paroxysm of horror and indignation over the assassination of a
prominent citizen and official in the gambling-rooms of Madame le
Blanc, at the hands of a notorious gambler.  The gambler had
escaped, but in one of those rare spasms of vengeful morality which
sometimes overtakes communities who have too long winked at and
suffered the existence of evil, the fair proprietress and her whole
entourage were arrested and haled before the coroner's jury at the
inquest.  The greatest excitement prevailed; it was said that if
the jury failed in their duty, the Vigilance Committee had arranged
for the destruction of the establishment and the deportation of its
inmates.  The crowd that had collected around the building was
reinforced by Kane and Dr. Sparlow, who had closed their shop in
the next block to attend.  When Kane had fought his way into the
building and the temporary court, held in the splendidly furnished
gambling saloon, whose gilded mirrors reflected the eager faces of
the crowd, the Chief of Police was giving his testimony in a formal
official manner, impressive only for its relentless and impassive
revelation of the character and antecedents of the proprietress.
The house had been long under the espionage of the police; Madame
le Blanc had a dozen aliases; she was "wanted" in New Orleans, in
New York, in Havana!  It was in HER house that Dyer, the bank
clerk, committed suicide; it was there that Colonel Hooley was set
upon by her bully, O'Ryan; it was she--Kane heard with reddening
cheeks--who defied the police with riotous conduct at a fete two
months ago.  As he coolly recited the counts of this shameful
indictment, Kane looked eagerly around for Allen, whom he knew had
been arrested as a witness.  How would HE take this terrible
disclosure?  He was sitting with the others, his arm thrown over
the back of his chair, and his good-humored face turned towards the
woman, in his old confidential attitude.  SHE, gorgeously dressed,
painted, but unblushing, was cool, collected, and cynical.

The Coroner next called the only witness of the actual tragedy,
"Reuben Allen."  The man did not move nor change his position.  The
summons was repeated; a policeman touched him on the shoulder.
There was a pause, and the officer announced: "He has fainted, your
Honor!"

"Is there a physician present?" asked the Coroner.

Sparlow edged his way quickly to the front.  "I'm a medical man,"
he said to the Coroner, as he passed quickly to the still, upright,
immovable figure and knelt beside it with his head upon his heart.
There was an awed silence as, after a pause, he rose slowly to his
feet.

"The witness is a patient, your Honor, whom I examined some weeks
ago and found suffering from valvular disease of the heart.  He is
dead."



THREE VAGABONDS OF TRINIDAD


"Oh! it's you, is it?" said the Editor.

The Chinese boy to whom the colloquialism was addressed answered
literally, after his habit:--

"Allee same Li Tee; me no changee.  Me no ollee China boy."

"That's so," said the Editor with an air of conviction.  "I don't
suppose there's another imp like you in all Trinidad County.  Well,
next time don't scratch outside there like a gopher, but come in."

"Lass time," suggested Li Tee blandly, "me tap tappee.  You no like
tap tappee.  You say, alle same dam woodpeckel."

It was quite true--the highly sylvan surroundings of the Trinidad
"Sentinel" office--a little clearing in a pine forest--and its
attendant fauna, made these signals confusing.  An accurate
imitation of a woodpecker was also one of Li Tee's accomplishments.

The Editor without replying finished the note he was writing; at
which Li Tee, as if struck by some coincident recollection, lifted
up his long sleeve, which served him as a pocket, and carelessly
shook out a letter on the table like a conjuring trick.  The
Editor, with a reproachful glance at him, opened it.  It was only
the ordinary request of an agricultural subscriber--one Johnson--
that the Editor would "notice" a giant radish grown by the
subscriber and sent by the bearer.

"Where's the radish, Li Tee?" said the Editor suspiciously.

"No hab got.  Ask Mellikan boy."

"What?"

Here Li Tee condescended to explain that on passing the schoolhouse
he had been set upon by the schoolboys, and that in the struggle
the big radish--being, like most such monstrosities of the quick
Californian soil, merely a mass of organized water--was "mashed"
over the head of some of his assailants.  The Editor, painfully
aware of these regular persecutions of his errand boy, and perhaps
realizing that a radish which could not be used as a bludgeon was
not of a sustaining nature, forebore any reproof.  "But I cannot
notice what I haven't seen, Li Tee," he said good-humoredly.

"S'pose you lie--allee same as Johnson," suggested Li with equal
cheerfulness.  "He foolee you with lotten stuff--you foolee
Mellikan man, allee same."

The Editor preserved a dignified silence until he had addressed his
letter.  "Take this to Mrs. Martin," he said, handing it to the
boy; "and mind you keep clear of the schoolhouse.  Don't go by the
Flat either if the men are at work, and don't, if you value your
skin, pass Flanigan's shanty, where you set off those firecrackers
and nearly burnt him out the other day.  Look out for Barker's dog
at the crossing, and keep off the main road if the tunnel men are
coming over the hill."  Then remembering that he had virtually
closed all the ordinary approaches to Mrs. Martin's house, he
added, "Better go round by the woods, where you won't meet ANY
ONE."

The boy darted off through the open door, and the Editor stood for
a moment looking regretfully after him.  He liked his little
protege ever since that unfortunate child--a waif from a Chinese
wash-house--was impounded by some indignant miners for bringing
home a highly imperfect and insufficient washing, and kept as
hostage for a more proper return of the garments.  Unfortunately,
another gang of miners, equally aggrieved, had at the same time
looted the wash-house and driven off the occupants, so that Li Tee
remained unclaimed.  For a few weeks he became a sporting appendage
of the miners' camp; the stolid butt of good-humored practical
jokes, the victim alternately of careless indifference or of
extravagant generosity.  He received kicks and half-dollars
intermittently, and pocketed both with stoical fortitude.  But
under this treatment he presently lost the docility and frugality
which was part of his inheritance, and began to put his small wits
against his tormentors, until they grew tired of their own mischief
and his.  But they knew not what to do with him.  His pretty
nankeen-yellow skin debarred him from the white "public school,"
while, although as a heathen he might have reasonably claimed
attention from the Sabbath-school, the parents who cheerfully gave
their contributions to the heathen ABROAD, objected to him as a
companion of their children in the church at home.  At this
juncture the Editor offered to take him into his printing office as
a "devil."  For a while he seemed to be endeavoring, in his old
literal way, to act up to that title.  He inked everything but the
press.  He scratched Chinese characters of an abusive import on
"leads," printed them, and stuck them about the office; he put
"punk" in the foreman's pipe, and had been seen to swallow small
type merely as a diabolical recreation.  As a messenger he was
fleet of foot, but uncertain of delivery.  Some time previously the
Editor had enlisted the sympathies of Mrs. Martin, the good-natured
wife of a farmer, to take him in her household on trial, but on the
third day Li Tee had run away.  Yet the Editor had not despaired,
and it was to urge her to a second attempt that he dispatched that
letter.

He was still gazing abstractedly into the depths of the wood when
he was conscious of a slight movement--but no sound--in a clump of
hazel near him, and a stealthy figure glided from it.  He at once
recognized it as "Jim," a well-known drunken Indian vagrant of the
settlement--tied to its civilization by the single link of "fire
water," for which he forsook equally the Reservation where it was
forbidden and his own camps where it was unknown.  Unconscious of
his silent observer, he dropped upon all fours, with his ear and
nose alternately to the ground like some tracking animal.  Then
having satisfied himself, he rose, and bending forward in a dogged
trot, made a straight line for the woods.  He was followed a few
seconds later by his dog--a slinking, rough, wolf-like brute, whose
superior instinct, however, made him detect the silent presence of
some alien humanity in the person of the Editor, and to recognize
it with a yelp of habit, anticipatory of the stone that he knew was
always thrown at him.

"That's cute," said a voice, "but it's just what I expected all
along."

The Editor turned quickly.  His foreman was standing behind him,
and had evidently noticed the whole incident.

"It's what I allus said," continued the man.  "That boy and that
Injin are thick as thieves.  Ye can't see one without the other--
and they've got their little tricks and signals by which they
follow each other.  T'other day when you was kalkilatin' Li Tee was
doin' your errands I tracked him out on the marsh, just by
followin' that ornery, pizenous dog o' Jim's.  There was the whole
caboodle of 'em--including Jim--campin' out, and eatin' raw fish
that Jim had ketched, and green stuff they had both sneaked outer
Johnson's garden.  Mrs. Martin may TAKE him, but she won't keep him
long while Jim's round.  What makes Li foller that blamed old Injin
soaker, and what makes Jim, who, at least, is a 'Merican, take up
with a furrin' heathen, just gets me."

The Editor did not reply.  He had heard something of this before.
Yet, after all, why should not these equal outcasts of civilization
cling together!

        .        .        .        .        .        .

Li Tee's stay with Mrs. Martin was brief.  His departure was
hastened by an untoward event--apparently ushered in, as in the
case of other great calamities, by a mysterious portent in the sky.
One morning an extraordinary bird of enormous dimensions was seen
approaching from the horizon, and eventually began to hover over
the devoted town.  Careful scrutiny of this ominous fowl, however,
revealed the fact that it was a monstrous Chinese kite, in the
shape of a flying dragon.  The spectacle imparted considerable
liveliness to the community, which, however, presently changed to
some concern and indignation.  It appeared that the kite was
secretly constructed by Li Tee in a secluded part of Mrs. Martin's
clearing, but when it was first tried by him he found that through
some error of design it required a tail of unusual proportions.
This he hurriedly supplied by the first means he found--Mrs.
Martin's clothes-line, with part of the weekly wash depending from
it.  This fact was not at first noticed by the ordinary sightseer,
although the tail seemed peculiar--yet, perhaps, not more peculiar
than a dragon's tail ought to be.  But when the actual theft was
discovered and reported through the town, a vivacious interest was
created, and spy-glasses were used to identify the various articles
of apparel still hanging on that ravished clothes-line.  These
garments, in the course of their slow disengagement from the
clothes-pins through the gyrations of the kite, impartially
distributed themselves over the town--one of Mrs. Martin's
stockings falling upon the veranda of the Polka Saloon, and the
other being afterwards discovered on the belfry of the First
Methodist Church--to the scandal of the congregation.  It would
have been well if the result of Li Tee's invention had ended here.
Alas! the kite-flyer and his accomplice, "Injin Jim," were tracked
by means of the kite's tell-tale cord to a lonely part of the marsh
and rudely dispossessed of their charge by Deacon Hornblower and a
constable.  Unfortunately, the captors overlooked the fact that the
kite-flyers had taken the precaution of making a "half-turn" of the
stout cord around a log to ease the tremendous pull of the kite--
whose power the captors had not reckoned upon--and the Deacon
incautiously substituted his own body for the log.  A singular
spectacle is said to have then presented itself to the on-lookers.
The Deacon was seen to be running wildly by leaps and bounds over
the marsh after the kite, closely followed by the constable in
equally wild efforts to restrain him by tugging at the end of the
line.  The extraordinary race continued to the town until the
constable fell, losing his hold of the line.  This seemed to impart
a singular specific levity to the Deacon, who, to the astonishment
of everybody, incontinently sailed up into a tree!  When he was
succored and cut down from the demoniac kite, he was found to have
sustained a dislocation of the shoulder, and the constable was
severely shaken.  By that one infelicitous stroke the two outcasts
made an enemy of the Law and the Gospel as represented in Trinidad
County.  It is to be feared also that the ordinary emotional instinct
of a frontier community, to which they were now simply abandoned,
was as little to be trusted.  In this dilemma they disappeared from
the town the next day--no one knew where.  A pale blue smoke rising
from a lonely island in the bay for some days afterwards suggested
their possible refuge.  But nobody greatly cared.  The sympathetic
mediation of the Editor was characteristically opposed by Mr. Parkin
Skinner, a prominent citizen:--

"It's all very well for you to talk sentiment about niggers,
Chinamen, and Injins, and you fellers can laugh about the Deacon
being snatched up to heaven like Elijah in that blamed Chinese
chariot of a kite--but I kin tell you, gentlemen, that this is a
white man's country!  Yes, sir, you can't get over it!  The nigger
of every description--yeller, brown, or black, call him 'Chinese,'
'Injin,' or 'Kanaka,' or what you like--hez to clar off of God's
footstool when the Anglo-Saxon gets started!  It stands to reason
that they can't live alongside o' printin' presses, M'Cormick's
reapers, and the Bible!  Yes, sir! the Bible; and Deacon Hornblower
kin prove it to you.  It's our manifest destiny to clar them out--
that's what we was put here for--and it's just the work we've got
to do!"

I have ventured to quote Mr. Skinner's stirring remarks to show
that probably Jim and Li Tee ran away only in anticipation of a
possible lynching, and to prove that advanced sentiments of this
high and ennobling nature really obtained forty years ago in an
ordinary American frontier town which did not then dream of
Expansion and Empire!

Howbeit, Mr. Skinner did not make allowance for mere human nature.
One morning Master Bob Skinner, his son, aged twelve, evaded the
schoolhouse, and started in an old Indian "dug-out" to invade the
island of the miserable refugees.  His purpose was not clearly
defined to himself, but was to be modified by circumstances.  He
would either capture Li Tee and Jim, or join them in their lawless
existence.  He had prepared himself for either event by
surreptitiously borrowing his father's gun.  He also carried
victuals, having heard that Jim ate grasshoppers and Li Tee rats,
and misdoubting his own capacity for either diet.  He paddled
slowly, well in shore, to be secure from observation at home, and
then struck out boldly in his leaky canoe for the island--a tufted,
tussocky shred of the marshy promontory torn off in some tidal
storm.  It was a lovely day, the bay being barely ruffled by the
afternoon "trades;" but as he neared the island he came upon the
swell from the bar and the thunders of the distant Pacific, and
grew a little frightened.  The canoe, losing way, fell into the
trough of the swell, shipping salt water, still more alarming to
the prairie-bred boy.  Forgetting his plan of a stealthy invasion,
he shouted lustily as the helpless and water-logged boat began to
drift past the island; at which a lithe figure emerged from the
reeds, threw off a tattered blanket, and slipped noiselessly, like
some animal, into the water.  It was Jim, who, half wading, half
swimming, brought the canoe and boy ashore.  Master Skinner at once
gave up the idea of invasion, and concluded to join the refugees.

This was easy in his defenceless state, and his manifest delight in
their rude encampment and gypsy life, although he had been one of
Li Tee's oppressors in the past.  But that stolid pagan had a
philosophical indifference which might have passed for Christian
forgiveness, and Jim's native reticence seemed like assent.  And,
possibly, in the minds of these two vagabonds there might have been
a natural sympathy for this other truant from civilization, and
some delicate flattery in the fact that Master Skinner was not
driven out, but came of his own accord.  Howbeit, they fished
together, gathered cranberries on the marsh, shot a wild duck and
two plovers, and when Master Skinner assisted in the cooking of
their fish in a conical basket sunk in the ground, filled with
water, heated by rolling red-hot stones from their drift-wood fire
into the buried basket, the boy's felicity was supreme.  And what
an afternoon!  To lie, after this feast, on their bellies in the
grass, replete like animals, hidden from everything but the
sunshine above them; so quiet that gray clouds of sandpipers
settled fearlessly around them, and a shining brown muskrat slipped
from the ooze within a few feet of their faces--was to feel
themselves a part of the wild life in earth and sky.  Not that
their own predatory instincts were hushed by this divine peace;
that intermitting black spot upon the water, declared by the Indian
to be a seal, the stealthy glide of a yellow fox in the ambush of a
callow brood of mallards, the momentary straying of an elk from the
upland upon the borders of the marsh, awoke their tingling nerves
to the happy but fruitless chase.  And when night came, too soon,
and they pigged together around the warm ashes of their camp-fire,
under the low lodge poles of their wigwam of dried mud, reeds, and
driftwood, with the combined odors of fish, wood-smoke, and the
warm salt breath of the marsh in their nostrils, they slept
contentedly.  The distant lights of the settlement went out one by
one, the stars came out, very large and very silent, to take their
places.  The barking of a dog on the nearest point was followed by
another farther inland.  But Jim's dog, curled at the feet of his
master, did not reply.  What had HE to do with civilization?

The morning brought some fear of consequences to Master Skinner,
but no abatement of his resolve not to return.  But here he was
oddly combated by Li Tee.  "S'pose you go back allee same.  You
tellee fam'lee canoe go topside down--you plentee swimee to bush.
Allee night in bush.  Housee big way off--how can get?  Sabe?"

"And I'll leave the gun, and tell Dad that when the canoe upset the
gun got drowned," said the boy eagerly.

Li Tee nodded.

"And come again Saturday, and bring more powder and shot and a
bottle for Jim," said Master Skinner excitedly.

"Good!" grunted the Indian.

Then they ferried the boy over to the peninsula, and set him on a
trail across the marshes, known only to themselves, which would
bring him home.  And when the Editor the next morning chronicled
among his news, "Adrift on the Bay--A Schoolboy's Miraculous
Escape," he knew as little what part his missing Chinese errand boy
had taken in it as the rest of his readers.

Meantime the two outcasts returned to their island camp.  It may
have occurred to them that a little of the sunlight had gone from
it with Bob; for they were in a dull, stupid way fascinated by the
little white tyrant who had broken bread with them.  He had been
delightfully selfish and frankly brutal to them, as only a
schoolboy could be, with the addition of the consciousness of his
superior race.  Yet they each longed for his return, although he
was seldom mentioned in their scanty conversation--carried on in
monosyllables, each in his own language, or with some common
English word, or more often restricted solely to signs.  By a
delicate flattery, when they did speak of him it was in what they
considered to be his own language.

"Boston boy, plenty like catchee HIM," Jim would say, pointing to a
distant swan.  Or Li Tee, hunting a striped water snake from the
reeds, would utter stolidly, "Melikan boy no likee snake."  Yet the
next two days brought some trouble and physical discomfort to them.
Bob had consumed, or wasted, all their provisions--and, still more
unfortunately, his righteous visit, his gun, and his superabundant
animal spirits had frightened away the game, which their habitual
quiet and taciturnity had beguiled into trustfulness.  They were
half starved, but they did not blame him.  It would come all right
when he returned.  They counted the days, Jim with secret notches
on the long pole, Li Tee with a string of copper "cash" he always
kept with him.  The eventful day came at last,--a warm autumn day,
patched with inland fog like blue smoke and smooth, tranquil, open
surfaces of wood and sea; but to their waiting, confident eyes the
boy came not out of either.  They kept a stolid silence all that
day until night fell, when Jim said, "Mebbe Boston boy go dead."
Li Tee nodded.  It did not seem possible to these two heathens that
anything else could prevent the Christian child from keeping his
word.

After that, by the aid of the canoe, they went much on the marsh,
hunting apart, but often meeting on the trail which Bob had taken,
with grunts of mutual surprise.  These suppressed feelings, never
made known by word or gesture, at last must have found vicarious
outlet in the taciturn dog, who so far forgot his usual discretion
as to once or twice seat himself on the water's edge and indulge in
a fit of howling.  It had been a custom of Jim's on certain days to
retire to some secluded place, where, folded in his blanket, with
his back against a tree, he remained motionless for hours.  In the
settlement this had been usually referred to the after effects of
drink, known as the "horrors," but Jim had explained it by saying
it was "when his heart was bad."  And now it seemed, by these
gloomy abstractions, that "his heart was bad" very often.  And then
the long withheld rains came one night on the wings of a fierce
southwester, beating down their frail lodge and scattering it
abroad, quenching their camp-fire, and rolling up the bay until it
invaded their reedy island and hissed in their ears.  It drove the
game from Jim's gun; it tore the net and scattered the bait of Li
Tee, the fisherman.  Cold and half starved in heart and body, but
more dogged and silent than ever, they crept out in their canoe
into the storm-tossed bay, barely escaping with their miserable
lives to the marshy peninsula.  Here, on their enemy's ground,
skulking in the rushes, or lying close behind tussocks, they at
last reached the fringe of forest below the settlement.  Here, too,
sorely pressed by hunger, and doggedly reckless of consequences,
they forgot their caution, and a flight of teal fell to Jim's gun
on the very outskirts of the settlement.

It was a fatal shot, whose echoes awoke the forces of civilization
against them.  For it was heard by a logger in his hut near the
marsh, who, looking out, had seen Jim pass.  A careless, good-
natured frontiersman, he might have kept the outcasts' mere
presence to himself; but there was that damning shot!  An Indian
with a gun!  That weapon, contraband of law, with dire fines and
penalties to whoso sold or gave it to him!  A thing to be looked
into--some one to be punished!  An Indian with a weapon that made
him the equal of the white!  Who was safe?  He hurried to town to
lay his information before the constable, but, meeting Mr. Skinner,
imparted the news to him.  The latter pooh-poohed the constable,
who he alleged had not yet discovered the whereabouts of Jim, and
suggested that a few armed citizens should make the chase
themselves.  The fact was that Mr. Skinner, never quite satisfied
in his mind with his son's account of the loss of the gun, had put
two and two together, and was by no means inclined to have his own
gun possibly identified by the legal authority.  Moreover, he went
home and at once attacked Master Bob with such vigor and so highly
colored a description of the crime he had committed, and the
penalties attached to it, that Bob confessed.  More than that, I
grieve to say that Bob lied.  The Indian had "stoled his gun," and
threatened his life if he divulged the theft.  He told how he was
ruthlessly put ashore, and compelled to take a trail only known to
them to reach his home.  In two hours it was reported throughout
the settlement that the infamous Jim had added robbery with
violence to his illegal possession of the weapon.  The secret of
the island and the trail over the marsh was told only to a few.

Meantime it had fared hard with the fugitives.  Their nearness to
the settlement prevented them from lighting a fire, which might
have revealed their hiding-place, and they crept together,
shivering all night in a clump of hazel.  Scared thence by passing
but unsuspecting wayfarers wandering off the trail, they lay part
of the next day and night amid some tussocks of salt grass, blown
on by the cold sea-breeze; chilled, but securely hidden from sight.
Indeed, thanks to some mysterious power they had of utter
immobility, it was wonderful how they could efface themselves,
through quiet and the simplest environment.  The lee side of a
straggling vine in the meadow, or even the thin ridge of cast-up
drift on the shore, behind which they would lie for hours
motionless, was a sufficient barrier against prying eyes.  In this
occupation they no longer talked together, but followed each other
with the blind instinct of animals--yet always unerringly, as if
conscious of each other's plans.  Strangely enough, it was the REAL
animal alone--their nameless dog--who now betrayed impatience and a
certain human infirmity of temper.  The concealment they were
resigned to, the sufferings they mutely accepted, he alone
resented!  When certain scents or sounds, imperceptible to their
senses, were blown across their path, he would, with bristling
back, snarl himself into guttural and strangulated fury.  Yet, in
their apathy, even this would have passed them unnoticed, but that
on the second night he disappeared suddenly, returning after two
hours' absence with bloody jaws--replete, but still slinking and
snappish.  It was only in the morning that, creeping on their hands
and knees through the stubble, they came upon the torn and mangled
carcass of a sheep.  The two men looked at each other without
speaking--they knew what this act of rapine meant to themselves.
It meant a fresh hue and cry after them--it meant that their
starving companion had helped to draw the net closer round them.
The Indian grunted, Li Tee smiled vacantly; but with their knives
and fingers they finished what the dog had begun, and became
equally culpable.  But that they were heathens, they could not have
achieved a delicate ethical responsibility in a more Christian-like
way.

Yet the rice-fed Li Tee suffered most in their privations.  His
habitual apathy increased with a certain physical lethargy which
Jim could not understand.  When they were apart he sometimes found
Li Tee stretched on his back with an odd stare in his eyes, and
once, at a distance, he thought he saw a vague thin vapor drift
from where the Chinese boy was lying and vanish as he approached.
When he tried to arouse him there was a weak drawl in his voice and
a drug-like odor in his breath.  Jim dragged him to a more
substantial shelter, a thicket of alder.  It was dangerously near
the frequented road, but a vague idea had sprung up in Jim's now
troubled mind that, equal vagabonds though they were, Li Tee had
more claims upon civilization, through those of his own race who
were permitted to live among the white men, and were not hunted to
"reservations" and confined there like Jim's people.  If Li Tee was
"heap sick," other Chinamen might find and nurse him.  As for Li
Tee, he had lately said, in a more lucid interval: "Me go dead--
allee samee Mellikan boy.  You go dead too--allee samee," and then
lay down again with a glassy stare in his eyes.  Far from being
frightened at this, Jim attributed his condition to some
enchantment that Li Tee had evoked from one of his gods--just as he
himself had seen "medicine-men" of his own tribe fall into strange
trances, and was glad that the boy no longer suffered.  The day
advanced, and Li Tee still slept.  Jim could hear the church bells
ringing; he knew it was Sunday--the day on which he was hustled
from the main street by the constable; the day on which the shops
were closed, and the drinking saloons open only at the back door.
The day whereon no man worked--and for that reason, though he knew
it not, the day selected by the ingenious Mr. Skinner and a few
friends as especially fitting and convenient for a chase of the
fugitives.  The bell brought no suggestion of this--though the dog
snapped under his breath and stiffened his spine.  And then he
heard another sound, far off and vague, yet one that brought a
flash into his murky eye, that lit up the heaviness of his Hebraic
face, and even showed a slight color in his high cheek-bones.  He
lay down on the ground, and listened with suspended breath.  He
heard it now distinctly.  It was the Boston boy calling, and the
word he was calling was "Jim."

Then the fire dropped out of his eyes as he turned with his usual
stolidity to where Li Tee was lying.  Him he shook, saying briefly:
"Boston boy come back!"  But there was no reply, the dead body
rolled over inertly under his hand; the head fell back, and the jaw
dropped under the pinched yellow face.  The Indian gazed at him
slowly, and then gravely turned again in the direction of the
voice.  Yet his dull mind was perplexed, for, blended with that
voice were other sounds like the tread of clumsily stealthy feet.
But again the voice called "Jim!" and raising his hands to his lips
he gave a low whoop in reply.  This was followed by silence, when
suddenly he heard the voice--the boy's voice--once again, this time
very near him, saying eagerly:--

"There he is!"

Then the Indian knew all.  His face, however, did not change as he
took up his gun, and a man stepped out of the thicket into the
trail:--

"Drop that gun, you d----d Injin."

The Indian did not move.

"Drop it, I say!"

The Indian remained erect and motionless.

A rifle shot broke from the thicket.  At first it seemed to have
missed the Indian, and the man who had spoken cocked his own rifle.
But the next moment the tall figure of Jim collapsed where he stood
into a mere blanketed heap.

The man who had fired the shot walked towards the heap with the
easy air of a conqueror.  But suddenly there arose before him an
awful phantom, the incarnation of savagery--a creature of blazing
eyeballs, flashing tusks, and hot carnivorous breath.  He had
barely time to cry out "A wolf!" before its jaws met in his throat,
and they rolled together on the ground.

But it was no wolf--as a second shot proved--only Jim's slinking
dog; the only one of the outcasts who at that supreme moment had
gone back to his original nature.



A VISION OF THE FOUNTAIN


Mr. Jackson Potter halted before the little cottage, half shop,
half hostelry, opposite the great gates of Domesday Park, where
tickets of admission to that venerable domain were sold.  Here Mr.
Potter revealed his nationality as a Western American, not only in
his accent, but in a certain half-humorous, half-practical
questioning of the ticket-seller--as that quasi-official stamped
his ticket--which was nevertheless delivered with such unfailing
good-humor, and such frank suggestiveness of the perfect equality
of the ticket-seller and the well-dressed stranger that, far from
producing any irritation, it attracted the pleased attention not
only of the official, but his wife and daughter and a customer.
Possibly the good looks of the stranger had something to do with
it.  Jackson Potter was a singularly handsome young fellow, with
one of those ideal faces and figures sometimes seen in Western
frontier villages, attributable to no ancestor, but evolved
possibly from novels and books devoured by ancestresses in the long
solitary winter evenings of their lonely cabins on the frontier.  A
beardless, classical head, covered by short flocculent blonde
curls, poised on a shapely neck and shoulders, was more Greek in
outline than suggestive of any ordinary American type.  Finally,
after having thoroughly amused his small audience, he lifted his
straw hat to the "ladies," and lounged out across the road to the
gateway.  Here he paused, consulting his guide-book, and read
aloud: "St. John's gateway.  This massive structure, according to
Leland, was built in"--murmured--"never mind when; we'll pass St.
John," marked the page with his pencil, and tendering his ticket to
the gate-keeper, heard, with some satisfaction, that, as there were
no other visitors just then, and as the cicerone only accompanied
PARTIES, he would be left to himself, and at once plunged into a
by-path.

It was that loveliest of rare creations--a hot summer day in
England, with all the dampness of that sea-blown isle wrung out of
it, exhaled in the quivering blue vault overhead, or passing as dim
wraiths in the distant wood, and all the long-matured growth of
that great old garden vivified and made resplendent by the fervid
sun.  The ashes of dead and gone harvests, even the dust of those
who had for ages wrought in it, turned again and again through
incessant cultivation, seemed to move and live once more in that
present sunshine.  All color appeared to be deepened and mellowed,
until even the very shadows of the trees were as velvety as the
sward they fell upon.  The prairie-bred Potter, accustomed to the
youthful caprices and extravagances of his own virgin soil, could
not help feeling the influence of the ripe restraints of this.

As he glanced through the leaves across green sunlit spaces to the
ivy-clad ruins of Domesday Abbey, which seemed itself a growth of
the very soil, he murmured to himself: "Things had been made mighty
comfortable for folks here, you bet!"  Forgotten books he had read
as a boy, scraps of school histories, or rarer novels, came back to
him as he walked along, and peopled the solitude about him with
their heroes.

Nevertheless, it was unmistakably hot--a heat homelike in its
intensity, yet of a different effect, throwing him into languid
reverie rather than filling his veins with fire.  Secure in his
seclusion in the leafy chase, he took off his jacket and rambled on
in his shirt sleeves.  Through the opening he presently saw the
abbey again, with the restored wing where the noble owner lived for
two or three weeks in the year, but now given over to the
prevailing solitude.  And then, issuing from the chase, he came
upon a broad, moss-grown terrace.  Before him stretched a tangled
and luxuriant wilderness of shrubs and flowers, darkened by cypress
and cedars of Lebanon; its dun depths illuminated by dazzling white
statues, vases, trellises, and paved paths, choked and lost in the
trailing growths of years of abandonment and forgetfulness.  He
consulted his guide-book again.  It was the "old Italian garden,"
constructed under the design of a famous Italian gardener by the
third duke; but its studied formality being displeasing to his
successor, it was allowed to fall into picturesque decay and
negligent profusion, which were not, however, disturbed by later
descendants,--a fact deplored by the artistic writer of the guide-
book, who mournfully called attention to the rare beauty of the
marble statues, urns, and fountains, ruined by neglect, although
one or two of the rarer objects had been removed to Deep Dene
Lodge, another seat of the present duke.

It is needless to say that Mr. Potter conceived at once a humorous
opposition to the artistic enthusiasm of the critic, and, plunging
into the garden, took a mischievous delight in its wildness and the
victorious struggle of nature with the formality of art.  At every
step through the tangled labyrinth he could see where precision and
order had been invaded, and even the rigid masonry broken or
upheaved by the rebellious force.  Yet here and there the two
powers had combined to offer an example of beauty neither could
have effected alone.  A passion vine had overrun and enclasped a
vase with a perfect symmetry no sculptor could have achieved.  A
heavy balustrade was made ethereal with a delicate fretwork of
vegetation between its balusters like lace.  Here, however, the lap
and gurgle of water fell gratefully upon the ear of the perspiring
and thirsty Mr. Potter, and turned his attention to more material
things.  Following the sound, he presently came upon an enormous
oblong marble basin containing three time-worn fountains with
grouped figures.  The pipes were empty, silent, and choked with
reeds and water plants, but the great basin itself was filled with
water from some invisible source.

A terraced walk occupied one side of the long parallelogram; at
intervals and along the opposite bank, half shadowed by willows,
tinted marble figures of tritons, fauns, and dryads arose half
hidden in the reeds.  They were more or less mutilated by time, and
here and there only the empty, moss-covered plinths that had once
supported them could be seen.  But they were so lifelike in their
subdued color in the shade that he was for a moment startled.

The water looked deliciously cool.  An audacious thought struck
him.  He was alone, and the place was a secluded one.  He knew
there were no other visitors; the marble basin was quite hidden
from the rest of the garden, and approached only from the path by
which he had come, and whose entire view he commanded.  He quietly
and deliberately undressed himself under the willows, and
unhesitatingly plunged into the basin.  The water was four or five
feet deep, and its extreme length afforded an excellent swimming
bath, despite the water-lilies and a few aquatic plants that
mottled its clear surface, or the sedge that clung to the bases of
the statues.  He disported for some moments in the delicious
element, and then seated himself upon one of the half-submerged
plinths, almost hidden by reeds, that had once upheld a river god.
Here, lazily resting himself upon his elbow, half his body still
below the water, his quick ear was suddenly startled by a rustling
noise and the sound of footsteps.  For a moment he was inclined to
doubt his senses; he could see only the empty path before him and
the deserted terrace.  But the sound became more distinct, and to
his great uneasiness appeared to come from the OTHER side of the
fringe of willows, where there was undoubtedly a path to the
fountain which he had overlooked.  His clothes were under those
willows, but he was at least twenty yards from the bank and an
equal distance from the terrace.  He was about to slip beneath the
water when, to his crowning horror, before he could do so, a young
girl slowly appeared from the hidden willow path full upon the
terrace.  She was walking leisurely with a parasol over her head
and a book in her hand.  Even in his intense consternation her
whole figure--a charming one in its white dress, sailor hat, and
tan shoes--was imprinted on his memory as she instinctively halted
to look upon the fountain, evidently an unexpected surprise to her.

A sudden idea flashed upon him.  She was at least sixty yards away;
he was half hidden in the reeds and well in the long shadows of the
willows.  If he remained perfectly motionless she might overlook
him at that distance, or take him for one of the statues.  He
remembered also that as he was resting on his elbow, his half-
submerged body lying on the plinth below water, he was somewhat in
the attitude of one of the river gods.  And there was no other
escape.  If he dived he might not be able to keep under water as
long as she remained, and any movement he knew would betray him.
He stiffened himself and scarcely breathed.  Luckily for him his
attitude had been a natural one and easy to keep.  It was well,
too, for she was evidently in no hurry and walked slowly, stopping
from time to time to admire the basin and its figures.  Suddenly he
was instinctively aware that she was looking towards him and even
changing her position, moving her pretty head and shading her eyes
with her hand as if for a better view.  He remained motionless,
scarcely daring to breathe.  Yet there was something so innocently
frank and undisturbed in her observation, that he knew as
instinctively that she suspected nothing, and took him for a half-
submerged statue.  He breathed more freely.  But presently she
stopped, glanced around her, and, keeping her eyes fixed in his
direction, began to walk backwards slowly until she reached a stone
balustrade behind her.  On this she leaped, and, sitting down,
opened in her lap the sketch-book she was carrying, and, taking out
a pencil, to his horror began to sketch!

For a wild moment he recurred to his first idea of diving and
swimming at all hazards to the bank, but the conviction that now
his slightest movement must be detected held him motionless.  He
must save her the mortification of knowing she was sketching a
living man, if he died for it.  She sketched rapidly but fixedly
and absorbedly, evidently forgetting all else in her work.  From
time to time she held out her sketch before her to compare it with
her subject.  Yet the seconds seemed minutes and the minutes hours.
Suddenly, to his great relief, a distant voice was heard calling
"Lottie."  It was a woman's voice; by its accent it also seemed to
him an American one.

The young girl made a slight movement of impatience, but did not
look up, and her pencil moved still more rapidly.  Again the voice
called, this time nearer.  The young girl's pencil fairly flew over
the paper, as, still without looking up, she lifted a pretty voice
and answered back, "Y-e-e-s!"

It struck him that her accent was also that of a compatriot.

"Where on earth are you?" continued the first voice, which now
appeared to come from the other side of the willows on the path by
which the young girl had approached.  "Here, aunty," replied the
girl, closing her sketch-book with a snap and starting to her feet.

A stout woman, fashionably dressed, made her appearance from the
willow path.

"What have you been doing all this while?" she said querulously.
"Not sketching, I hope," she added, with a suspicious glance at the
book.  "You know your professor expressly forbade you to do so in
your holidays."

The young girl shrugged her shoulders.  "I've been looking at the
fountains," she replied evasively.

"And horrid looking pagan things they are, too," said the elder
woman, turning from them disgustedly, without vouchsafing a second
glance.  "Come.  If we expect to do the abbey, we must hurry up, or
we won't catch the train.  Your uncle is waiting for us at the top
of the garden."

And, to Potter's intense relief, she grasped the young girl's arm
and hurried her away, their figures the next moment vanishing in
the tangled shrubbery.

Potter lost no time in plunging with his cramped limbs into the
water and regaining the other side.  Here he quickly half dried
himself with some sun-warmed leaves and baked mosses, hurried on
his clothes, and hastened off in the opposite direction to the path
taken by them, yet with such circuitous skill and speed that he
reached the great gateway without encountering anybody.  A brisk
walk brought him to the station in time to catch a stopping train,
and in half an hour he was speeding miles away from Domesday Park
and his half-forgotten episode.

        .        .        .        .        .        .

Meantime the two ladies continued on their way to the abbey.  "I
don't see why I mayn't sketch things I see about me," said the
young lady impatiently.  "Of course, I understand that I must go
through the rudimentary drudgery of my art and study from casts,
and learn perspective, and all that; but I can't see what's the
difference between working in a stuffy studio over a hand or arm
that I know is only a STUDY, and sketching a full or half length in
the open air with the wonderful illusion of light and shade and
distance--and grouping and combining them all--that one knows and
feels makes a picture.  The real picture one makes is already in
one's self."

"For goodness' sake, Lottie, don't go on again with your usual
absurdities.  Since you are bent on being an artist, and your
Popper has consented and put you under the most expensive master in
Paris, the least you can do is to follow the rules.  And I dare say
he only wanted you to 'sink the shop' in company.  It's such horrid
bad form for you artistic people to be always dragging out your
sketch-books.  What would you say if your Popper came over here,
and began to examine every lady's dress in society to see what
material it was, just because he was a big dry-goods dealer in
America?"

The young girl, accustomed to her aunt's extravagances, made no
reply.  But that night she consulted her sketch, and was so far
convinced of her own instincts, and the profound impression the
fountain had made upon her, that she was enabled to secretly finish
her interrupted sketch from memory.  For Miss Charlotte Forrest was
a born artist, and in no mere caprice had persuaded her father to
let her adopt the profession, and accepted the drudgery of a
novitiate.  She looked earnestly upon this first real work of her
hand and found it good!  Still, it was but a pencil sketch, and
wanted the vivification of color.

When she returned to Paris she began--still secretly--a larger
study in oils.  She worked upon it in her own room every moment she
could spare from her studio practice, unknown to her professor.  It
absorbed her existence; she grew thin and pale.  When it was
finished, and only then, she showed it tremblingly to her master.
He stood silent, in profound astonishment.  The easel before him
showed a foreground of tangled luxuriance, from which stretched a
sheet of water like a darkened mirror, while through parted reeds
on its glossy surface arose the half-submerged figure of a river
god, exquisite in contour, yet whose delicate outlines were almost
a vision by the crowning illusion of light, shadow, and atmosphere.

"It is a beautiful copy, mademoiselle, and I forgive you breaking
my rules," he said, drawing a long breath.  "But I cannot now
recall the original picture."

"It's no copy of a picture, professor," said the young girl
timidly, and she disclosed her secret.  "It was the only perfect
statue there," she added diffidently; "but I think it wanted--
something."

"True," said the professor abstractedly.  "Where the elbow rests
there should be a half-inverted urn flowing with water; but the
drawing of that shoulder is so perfect--as is YOUR study of it--
that one guesses the missing forearm one cannot see, which clasped
it.  Beautiful! beautiful!"

Suddenly he stopped, and turned his eyes almost searchingly on
hers.

"You say you have never drawn from the human model, mademoiselle?"

"Never," said the young girl innocently.

"True," murmured the professor again.  "These are the classic ideal
measurements.  There are no limbs like those now.  Yet it is
wonderful!  And this gem, you say, is in England?"

"Yes."

"Good!  I am going there in a few days.  I shall make a pilgrimage
to see it.  Until then, mademoiselle, I beg you to break as many of
my rules as you like."

Three weeks later she found the professor one morning standing
before her picture in her private studio.  "You have returned from
England," she said joyfully.

"I have," said the professor gravely.

"You have seen the original subject?" she said timidly.

"I have NOT.  I have not seen it, mademoiselle," he said, gazing at
her mildly through his glasses, "because it does not exist, and
never existed."

The young girl turned pale.

"Listen.  I have go to England.  I arrive at the Park of Domesday.
I penetrate the beautiful, wild garden.  I approach the fountain.
I see the wonderful water, the exquisite light and shade, the
lilies, the mysterious reeds--beautiful, yet not as beautiful as
you have made it, mademoiselle, but no statue--no river god!  I
demand it of the concierge.  He knows of it absolutely nothing.  I
transport myself to the noble proprietor, Monsieur le Duc, at a
distant chateau where he has collected the ruined marbles.  It is
not there."

"Yet I saw it," said the young girl earnestly, yet with a troubled
face.  "O professor," she burst out appealingly, "what do you think
it was?"

"I think, mademoiselle," said the professor gravely, "that you
created it.  Believe me, it is a function of genius!  More, it is a
proof, a necessity!  You saw the beautiful lake, the ruined
fountain, the soft shadows, the empty plinth, curtained by reeds.
You yourself say you feel there was 'something wanting.'
Unconsciously you yourself supplied it.  All that you had ever
dreamt of mythology, all that you had ever seen of statuary,
thronged upon you at that supreme moment, and, evolved from your
own fancy, the river god was born.  It is your own, chere enfant,
as much the offspring of your genius as the exquisite atmosphere
you have caught, the charm of light and shadow that you have
brought away.  Accept my felicitations.  You have little more to
learn of me."

As he bowed himself out and descended the stairs he shrugged his
shoulders slightly.  "She is an adorable genius," he murmured.
"Yet she is also a woman.  Being a woman, naturally she has a
lover--this river god!  Why not?"

The extraordinary success of Miss Forrest's picture and the
instantaneous recognition of her merit as an artist, apart from her
novel subject, perhaps went further to remove her uneasiness than
any serious conviction of the professor's theory.  Nevertheless, it
appealed to her poetic and mystic imagination, and although other
subjects from her brush met with equally phenomenal success, and
she was able in a year to return to America with a reputation
assured beyond criticism, she never entirely forgot the strange
incident connected with her initial effort.

And by degrees a singular change came over her.  Rich, famous, and
attractive, she began to experience a sentimental and romantic
interest in that episode.  Once, when reproached by her friends for
her indifference to her admirers, she had half laughingly replied
that she had once found her "ideal," but never would again.  Yet
the jest had scarcely passed her lips before she became pale and
silent.  With this change came also a desire to re-purchase the
picture, which she had sold in her early success to a speculative
American picture-dealer.  On inquiry she found, alas! that it had
been sold only a day or two before to a Chicago gentleman, of the
name of Potter, who had taken a fancy to it.

Miss Forrest curled her pretty lip, but, nothing daunted, resolved
to effect her purpose, and sought the purchaser at his hotel.  She
was ushered into a private drawing-room, where, on a handsome
easel, stood the newly acquired purchase.  Mr. Potter was out, "but
would return in a moment."

Miss Forrest was relieved, for, alone and undisturbed, she could
now let her full soul go out to her romantic creation.  As she
stood there, she felt the glamour of the old English garden come
back to her, the play of light and shadow, the silent pool, the
godlike face and bust, with its cast-down, meditative eyes, seen
through the parted reeds.  She clasped her hands silently before
her.  Should she never see it again as then?

"Pray don't let me disturb you; but won't you take a seat?"

Miss Forrest turned sharply round.  Then she started, uttered a
frightened little cry, and fainted away.

Mr. Potter was touched, but a master of himself.  As she came to,
he said quietly: "I came upon you suddenly--as you stood entranced
by this picture--just as I did when I first saw it.  That's why I
bought it.  Are you any relative of the Miss Forrest who painted
it?" he continued, quietly looking at her card, which he held in
his hand.

Miss Forrest recovered herself sufficiently to reply, and stated
her business with some dignity.

"Ah," said Mr. Potter, "THAT is another question.  You see, the
picture has a special value to me, as I once saw an old-fashioned
garden like that in England.  But that chap there,--I beg your
pardon, I mean that figure,--I fancy, is your own creation,
entirely.  However, I'll think over your proposition, and if you
will allow me I'll call and see you about it."

Mr. Potter did call--not once, but many times--and showed quite a
remarkable interest in Miss Forrest's art.  The question of the
sale of the picture, however, remained in abeyance.  A few weeks
later, after a longer call than usual, Mr. Potter said:--

"Don't you think the best thing we can do is to make a kind of
compromise, and let us own the picture together?"

And they did.



A ROMANCE OF THE LINE


As the train moved slowly out of the station, the Writer of Stories
looked up wearily from the illustrated pages of the magazines and
weeklies on his lap to the illustrated advertisements on the walls
of the station sliding past his carriage windows.  It was getting
to be monotonous.  For a while he had been hopefully interested in
the bustle of the departing trains, and looked up from his
comfortable and early invested position to the later comers with
that sense of superiority common to travelers; had watched the
conventional leave-takings--always feebly prolonged to the
uneasiness of both parties--and contrasted it with the impassive
business promptitude of the railway officials; but it was the old
experience repeated.  Falling back on the illustrated advertisements
again, he wondered if their perpetual recurrence at every station
would not at last bring to the tired traveler the loathing of
satiety; whether the passenger in railway carriages, continually
offered Somebody's oats, inks, washing blue, candles, and soap,
apparently as a necessary equipment for a few hours' journey, would
not there and thereafter forever ignore the use of these articles,
or recoil from that particular quality.  Or, as an unbiased
observer, he wondered if, on the other hand, impressible passengers,
after passing three or four stations, had ever leaped from the train
and refused to proceed further until they were supplied with one or
more of those articles.  Had he ever known any one who confided to
him in a moment of expansiveness that he had dated his use of
Somebody's soap to an advertisement persistently borne upon him
through the medium of a railway carriage window?  No!  Would he not
have connected that man with that other certifying individual who
always appends a name and address singularly obscure and
unconvincing, yet who, at some supreme moment, recommends Somebody's
pills to a dying friend,--afflicted with a similar address,--which
restore him to life and undying obscurity.  Yet these pictorial and
literary appeals must have a potency independent of the wares they
advertise, or they wouldn't be there.

Perhaps he was the more sensitive to this monotony as he was just
then seeking change and novelty in order to write a new story.  He
was not looking for material,--his subjects were usually the same,--
he was merely hoping for that relaxation and diversion which
should freshen and fit him for later concentration.  Still, he had
often heard of the odd circumstances to which his craft were
sometimes indebted for suggestion.  The invasion of an eccentric-
looking individual--probably an innocent tradesman into a railway
carriage had given the hint for "A Night with a Lunatic;" a
nervously excited and belated passenger had once unconsciously sat
for an escaped forger; the picking up of a forgotten novel in the
rack, with passages marked in pencil, had afforded the plot of a
love story; or the germ of a romance had been found in an obscure
news paragraph which, under less listless moments, would have
passed unread.  On the other hand, he recalled these inconvenient
and inconsistent moments from which the so-called "inspiration"
sprang, the utter incongruity of time and place in some brilliant
conception, and wondered if sheer vacuity of mind were really so
favorable.

Going back to his magazine again, he began to get mildly interested
in a story.  Turning the page, however, he was confronted by a
pictorial advertising leaflet inserted between the pages, yet so
artistic in character that it might have been easily mistaken for
an illustration of the story he was reading, and perhaps was not
more remote or obscure in reference than many he had known.  But
the next moment he recognized with despair that it was only a
smaller copy of one he had seen on the hoarding at the last
station.  He threw the leaflet aside, but the flavor of the story
was gone.  The peerless detergent of the advertisement had erased
it from the tablets of his memory.  He leaned back in his seat
again, and lazily watched the flying suburbs.  Here were the usual
promising open spaces and patches of green, quickly succeeded again
by solid blocks of houses whose rear windows gave directly upon the
line, yet seldom showed an inquisitive face--even of a wondering
child.  It was a strange revelation of the depressing effects of
familiarity.  Expresses might thunder by, goods trains drag their
slow length along, shunting trains pipe all day beneath their
windows, but the tenants heeded them not.  Here, too, was the
junction, with its labyrinthine interlacing of tracks that dazed
the tired brain; the overburdened telegraph posts, that looked as
if they really could not stand another wire; the long lines of
empty, homeless, and deserted trains in sidings that had seen
better days; the idle trains, with staring vacant windows, which
were eventually seized by a pert engine hissing, "Come along, will
you?" and departed with a discontented grunt from every individual
carriage coupling; the racing trains, that suddenly appeared
parallel with one's carriage windows, begot false hopes of a
challenge of speed, and then, without warning, drew contemptuously
and, superciliously away; the swift eclipse of everything in a
tunneled bridge; the long, slithering passage of an "up" express,
and then the flash of a station, incoherent and unintelligible with
pictorial advertisements again.

He closed his eyes to concentrate his thought, and by degrees a
pleasant languor stole over him.  The train had by this time
attained that rate of speed which gave it a slight swing and roll
on curves and switches not unlike the rocking of a cradle.  Once or
twice he opened his eyes sleepily upon the waltzing trees in the
double planes of distance, and again closed them.  Then, in one of
these slight oscillations, he felt himself ridiculously slipping
into slumber, and awoke with some indignation.  Another station was
passed, in which process the pictorial advertisements on the
hoardings and the pictures in his lap seemed to have become jumbled
up, confused, and to dance before him, and then suddenly and
strangely, without warning, the train stopped short--at ANOTHER
station.  And then he arose, and--what five minutes before he never
conceived of doing--gathered his papers and slipped from the
carriage to the platform.  When I say "he" I mean, of course, the
Writer of Stories; yet the man who slipped out was half his age and
a different-looking person.

        .        .        .        .        .        .

The change from the motion of the train--for it seemed that he had
been traveling several hours--to the firmer platform for a moment
bewildered him.  The station looked strange, and he fancied it
lacked a certain kind of distinctness.  But that quality was also
noticeable in the porters and loungers on the platform.  He thought
it singular, until it seemed to him that they were not characteristic,
nor in any way important or necessary to the business he had in
hand.  Then, with an effort, he tried to remember himself and his
purpose, and made his way through the station to the open road
beyond.  A van, bearing the inscription, "Removals to Town and
Country," stood before him and blocked his way, but a dogcart was in
waiting, and a grizzled groom, who held the reins, touched his hat
respectfully.  Although still dazed by his journey and uncertain of
himself, he seemed to recognize in the man that distinctive
character which was wanting in the others.  The correctness of his
surmise was revealed a few moments later, when, after he had taken
his seat beside him, and they were rattling out of the village
street, the man turned towards him and said:--

"Tha'll know Sir Jarge?"

"I do not," said the young man.

"Ay! but theer's many as cooms here as doan't, for all they cooms.
Tha'll say it ill becooms mea as war man and boy in Sir Jarge's
sarvice for fifty year, to say owt agen him, but I'm here to do it,
or they couldn't foolfil their business.  Tha wast to ax me
questions about Sir Jarge and the Grange, and I wor to answer soa
as to make tha think thar was suthing wrong wi' un.  Howbut I may
save tha time and tell thea downroight that Sir Jarge forged his
uncle's will, and so gotten the Grange.  That 'ee keeps his niece
in mortal fear o' he.  That tha'll be put in haunted chamber wi' a
boggle."

"I think," said the young man hesitatingly, "that there must be
some mistake.  I do not know any Sir George, and I am NOT going to
the Grange."

"Eay!  Then thee aren't the 'ero sent down from London by the story
writer?"

"Not by THAT one," said the young man diffidently.

The old man's face changed.  It was no mere figure of speech: it
actually was ANOTHER face that looked down upon the traveler.

"Then mayhap your honor will be bespoken at the Angel's Inn," he
said, with an entirely distinct and older dialect, "and a finer
hostel for a young gentleman of your condition ye'll not find on
this side of Oxford.  A fair chamber, looking to the sun; sheets
smelling of lavender from Dame Margery's own store, and, for the
matter of that, spread by the fair hands of Maudlin, her daughter--
the best favored lass that ever danced under a Maypole.  Ha! have
at ye there, young sir!  Not to speak of the October ale of old
Gregory, her father--ay, nor the rare Hollands, that never paid
excise duties to the king."

"I'm afraid," said the young traveler timidly, "there's over a
century between us.  There's really some mistake."

"What?" said the groom, "ye are NOT the young spark who is to marry
Mistress Amy at the Hall, yet makes a pother and mess of it all by
a duel with Sir Roger de Cadgerly, the wicked baronet, for his
over-free discourse with our fair Maudlin this very eve?  Ye are
NOT the traveler whose post-chaise is now at the Falcon?  Ye are
not he that was bespoken by the story writer in London?"

"I don't think I am," said the young man apologetically.  "Indeed,
as I am feeling far from well, I think I'll get out and walk."

He got down--the vehicle and driver vanished in the distance.  It
did not surprise him.  "I must collect my thoughts," he said.  He
did so.  Possibly the collection was not large, for presently he
said, with a sigh of relief:--

"I see it all now!  My name is Paul Bunker.  I am of the young
branch of an old Quaker family, rich and respected in the country,
and I am on a visit to my ancestral home.  But I have lived since a
child in America, and am alien to the traditions and customs of the
old country, and even of the seat to which my fathers belong.  I
have brought with me from the far West many peculiarities of speech
and thought that may startle my kinsfolk.  But I certainly shall
not address my uncle as 'Hoss!' nor shall I say 'guess' oftener
than is necessary."

Much brightened and refreshed by his settled identity, he had time,
as he walked briskly along, to notice the scenery, which was
certainly varied and conflicting in character, and quite
inconsistent with his preconceived notions of an English landscape.
On his right, a lake of the brightest cobalt blue stretched before
a many-towered and terraced town, which was relieved by a
background of luxuriant foliage and emerald-green mountains; on his
left arose a rugged mountain, which he was surprised to see was
snow-capped, albeit a tunnel was observable midway of its height,
and a train just issuing from it.  Almost regretting that he had
not continued on his journey, as he was fully sensible that it was
in some way connected with the railway he had quitted, presently
his attention was directed to the gateway of a handsome park, whose
mansion was faintly seen in the distance.  Hurrying towards him,
down the avenue of limes, was a strange figure.  It was that of a
man of middle age; clad in Quaker garb, yet with an extravagance of
cut and detail which seemed antiquated even for England.  He had
evidently seen the young man approaching, and his face was beaming
with welcome.  If Paul had doubted that it was his uncle, the first
words he spoke would have reassured him.

"Welcome to Hawthorn Hall," said the figure, grasping his hand
heartily, "but thee will excuse me if I do not tarry with thee long
at present, for I am hastening, even now, with some nourishing and
sustaining food for Giles Hayward, a farm laborer."  He pointed to
a package he was carrying.  "But thee will find thy cousins Jane
and Dorcas Bunker taking tea in the summer-house.  Go to them!
Nay--positively--I may not linger, but will return to thee quickly."
And, to Paul's astonishment, he trotted away on his sturdy,
respectable legs, still beaming and carrying his package in his hand.

"Well, I'll be dog-goned! but the old man ain't going to be left,
you bet!" he ejaculated, suddenly remembering his dialect.  "He'll
get there, whether school keeps or not!"  Then, reflecting that no
one heard him, he added simply, "He certainly was not over civil
towards the nephew he has never seen before.  And those girls--whom
I don't know!  How very awkward!"

Nevertheless, he continued his way up the avenue towards the
mansion.  The park was beautifully kept.  Remembering the native
wildness and virgin seclusion of the Western forest, he could not
help contrasting it with the conservative gardening of this pretty
woodland, every rood of which had been patrolled by keepers and
rangers, and preserved and fostered hundreds of years before he was
born, until warmed for human occupancy.  At times the avenue was
crossed by grass drives, where the original woodland had been
displaced, not by the exigency of a "clearing" for tillage, as in
his own West, but for the leisurely pleasure of the owner.  Then, a
few hundred yards from the house itself,--a quaint Jacobean
mansion,--he came to an open space where the sylvan landscape had
yielded to floral cultivation, and so fell upon a charming summer-
house, or arbor, embowered with roses.  It must have been the one
of which his uncle had spoken, for there, to his wondering
admiration, sat two little maids before a rustic table, drinking
tea demurely, yes, with all the evident delight of a childish
escapade from their elders.  While in the picturesque quaintness of
their attire there was still a formal suggestion of the sect to
which their father belonged, their summer frocks--differing in
color, yet each of the same subdued tint--were alike in cut and
fashion, and short enough to show their dainty feet in prim
slippers and silken hose that matched their frocks.  As the
afternoon sun glanced through the leaves upon their pink cheeks,
tied up in quaint hats by ribbons under their chins, they made a
charming picture.  At least Paul thought so as he advanced towards
them, hat in hand.  They looked up at his approach, but again cast
down their eyes with demure shyness; yet he fancied that they first
exchanged glances with each other, full of mischievous intelligence.

"I am your cousin Paul," he said smilingly, "though I am afraid I
am introducing myself almost as briefly as your father just now
excused himself to me.  He told me I would find you here, but he
himself was hastening on a Samaritan mission."

"With a box in his hand?" said the girls simultaneously, exchanging
glances with each other again.

"With a box containing some restorative, I think," responded Paul,
a little wonderingly.

"Restorative!  So THAT'S what he calls it now, is it?" said one of
the girls saucily.  "Well, no one knows what's in the box, though
he always carries it with him.  Thee never sees him without it"--

"And a roll of paper," suggested the other girl.

"Yes, a roll of paper--but one never knows what it is!" said the
first speaker.  "It's very strange.  But no matter now, Paul.
Welcome to Hawthorn Hall.  I am Jane Bunker, and this is Dorcas."
She stopped, and then, looking down demurely, added, "Thee may kiss
us both, cousin Paul."

The young man did not wait for a second invitation, but gently
touched his lips to their soft young cheeks.

"Thee does not speak like an American, Paul.  Is thee really and
truly one?" continued Jane.

Paul remembered that he had forgotten his dialect, but it was too
late now.

"I am really and truly one, and your own cousin, and I hope you
will find me a very dear"--

"Oh!" said Dorcas, starting up primly.  "You must really allow me
to withdraw."  To the young man's astonishment, she seized her
parasol, and, with a youthful affectation of dignity, glided from
the summer-house and was lost among the trees.

"Thy declaration to me was rather sudden," said Jane quietly, in
answer to his look of surprise, "and Dorcas is peculiarly sensitive
and less like the 'world's people' than I am.  And it was just a
little cruel, considering that she has loved thee secretly all
these years, followed thy fortunes in America with breathless
eagerness, thrilled at thy narrow escapes, and wept at thy
privations."

"But she has never seen me before!" said the astounded Paul.

"And thee had never seen me before, and yet thee has dared to
propose to me five minutes after thee arrived, and in her
presence."

"But, my dear girl!" expostulated Paul.

"Stand off!" she said, rapidly opening her parasol and interposing
it between them.  "Another step nearer--ay, even another word of
endearment--and I shall be compelled--nay, forced," she added in a
lower voice, "to remove this parasol, lest it should be crushed and
ruined!"

"I see," he said gloomily, "you have been reading novels; but so
have I, and the same ones!  Nevertheless, I intended only to tell
you that I hoped you would always find me a kind friend."

She shut her parasol up with a snap.  "And I only intended to tell
thee that my heart was given to another."

"You INTENDED--and now?"

"Is it the 'kind friend' who asks?"

"If it were not?"

"Really?"

"Yes."

"Ah!"

"Oh!"

"But thee loves another?" she said, toying with her cup.

He attempted to toy with his, but broke it.  A man lacks delicacy
in this kind of persiflage.  "You mean I am loved by another," he
said bluntly.

"You dare to say that!" she said, flashing, in spite of her prim
demeanor.

"No, but YOU did just now!  You said your sister loved me!"

"Did I?" she said dreamily.  "Dear! dear!  That's the trouble of
trying to talk like Mr. Blank's delightful dialogues.  One gets so
mixed!"

"Yet you will be a sister to me?" he said.  "'Tis an old American
joke, but 'twill serve."

There was a long silence.

"Had thee not better go to sister Dorcas?  She is playing with the
cows," said Jane plaintively.

"You forget," he returned gravely, "that, on page 27 of the novel
we have both read, at this point he is supposed to kiss her."

She had forgotten, but they both remembered in time.  At this
moment a scream came faintly from the distance.  They both started,
and rose.

"It is sister Dorcas," said Jane, sitting down again and pouring
out another cup of tea.  "I have always told her that one of those
Swiss cows would hook her."

Paul stared at her with a strange revulsion of feeling.  "I could
save Dorcas," he muttered to himself, "in less time than it takes
to describe."  He paused, however, as he reflected that this would
depend entirely upon the methods of the writer of this description.
"I could rescue her!  I have only to take the first clothes-line
that I find, and with that knowledge and skill with the lasso which
I learned in the wilds of America, I could stop the charge of the
most furious ruminant.  I will!" and without another word he turned
and rushed off in the direction of the sound.

        .        .        .        .        .        .

He had not gone a hundred yards before he paused, a little
bewildered.  To the left could still be seen the cobalt lake with
the terraced background; to the right the rugged mountains.  He
chose the latter.  Luckily for him a cottager's garden lay in his
path, and from a line supported by a single pole depended the
homely linen of the cottager.  To tear these garments from the line
was the work of a moment (although it represented the whole week's
washing), and hastily coiling the rope dexterously in his hand, he
sped onward.  Already panting with exertion and excitement, a few
roods farther he was confronted with a spectacle that left him
breathless.

A woman--young, robust, yet gracefully formed--was running ahead of
him, driving before her with an open parasol an animal which he
instantly recognized as one of that simple yet treacherous species
most feared by the sex--known as the "Moo Cow."

For a moment he was appalled by the spectacle.  But it was only for
a moment!  Recalling his manhood and her weakness, he stopped, and
bracing his foot against a stone, with a graceful flourish of his
lasso around his head, threw it in the air.  It uncoiled slowly,
sped forward with unerring precision, and missed!  With the single
cry of "Saved!" the fair stranger sank fainting in his arms!  He
held her closely until the color came back to her pale face.  Then
he quietly disentangled the lasso from his legs.

"Where am I?" she said faintly.

"In the same place," he replied, slowly but firmly.  "But," he
added, "you have changed!"

She had, indeed, even to her dress.  It was now of a vivid brick
red, and so much longer in the skirt that it seemed to make her
taller.  Only her hat remained the same.

"Yes," she said, in a low, reflective voice and a disregard of her
previous dialect, as she gazed up in his eyes with an eloquent
lucidity, "I have changed, Paul!  I feel myself changing at those
words you uttered to Jane.  There are moments in a woman's life
that man knows nothing of; moments bitter and cruel, sweet and
merciful, that change her whole being; moments in which the simple
girl becomes a worldly woman; moments in which the slow procession
of her years is never noted--except by another woman!  Moments that
change her outlook on the world and her relations to it--and her
husband's relations!  Moments when the maid becomes a wife, the
wife a widow, the widow a re-married woman, by a simple, swift
illumination of the fancy.  Moments when, wrought upon by a single
word--a look--an emphasis and rising inflection, all logical
sequence is cast away, processes are lost--inductions lead nowhere.
Moments when the inharmonious becomes harmonious, the indiscreet
discreet, the inefficient efficient, and the inevitable evitable.
I mean," she corrected herself hurriedly--"You know what I mean!
If you have not felt it you have read it!"

"I have," he said thoughtfully.  "We have both read it in the same
novel.  She is a fine writer."

"Ye-e-s."  She hesitated with that slight resentment of praise of
another woman so delightful in her sex.  "But you have forgotten
the Moo Cow!" and she pointed to where the distracted animal was
careering across the lawn towards the garden.

"You are right," he said, "the incident is not yet closed.  Let us
pursue it."

They both pursued it.  Discarding the useless lasso, he had
recourse to a few well-aimed epithets.  The infuriated animal
swerved and made directly towards a small fountain in the centre of
the garden.  In attempting to clear it, it fell directly into the
deep cup-like basin and remained helplessly fixed, with its fore-
legs projecting uneasily beyond the rim.

"Let us leave it there," she said, "and forget it--and all that has
gone before.  Believe me," she added, with a faint sigh, "it is
best.  Our paths diverge from this moment.  I go to the summer-
house, and you go to the Hall, where my father is expecting you."
He would have detained her a moment longer, but she glided away and
was gone.

Left to himself again, that slight sense of bewilderment which had
clouded his mind for the last hour began to clear away; his
singular encounter with the girls strangely enough affected him
less strongly than his brief and unsatisfactory interview with his
uncle.  For, after all, he was his host, and upon him depended his
stay at Hawthorn Hall.  The mysterious and slighting allusions of
his cousins to the old man's eccentricities also piqued his
curiosity.  Why had they sneered at his description of the contents
of the package he carried--and what did it really contain?  He did
not reflect that it was none of his business,--people in his
situation seldom do,--and he eagerly hurried towards the Hall.
But he found in his preoccupation he had taken the wrong turning in
the path, and that he was now close to the wall which bounded and
overlooked the highway.  Here a singular spectacle presented
itself.  A cyclist covered with dust was seated in the middle of
the road, trying to restore circulation to his bruised and injured
leg by chafing it with his hands, while beside him lay his damaged
bicycle.  He had evidently met with an accident.  In an instant
Paul had climbed the wall and was at his side.

"Can I offer you any assistance?" he asked eagerly.

"Thanks--no!  I've come a beastly cropper over something or other
on this road, and I'm only bruised, though the machine has suffered
worse," replied the stranger, in a fresh, cheery voice.  He was a
good-looking fellow of about Paul's own age, and the young
American's heart went out towards him.

"How did it happen?" asked Paul.

"That's what puzzles me," said the stranger.  "I was getting out of
the way of a queer old chap in the road, and I ran over something
that seemed only an old scroll of paper; but the shock was so great
that I was thrown, and I fancy I was for a few moments unconscious.
Yet I cannot see any other obstruction in the road, and there's
only that bit of paper."  He pointed to the paper,--a half-crushed
roll of ordinary foolscap, showing the mark of the bicycle upon it.

A strange idea came into Paul's mind.  He picked up the paper and
examined it closely.  Besides the mark already indicated, it showed
two sharp creases about nine inches long, and another exactly at
the point of the impact of the bicycle.  Taking a folded two-foot
rule from his pocket, he carefully measured these parallel creases
and made an exhaustive geometrical calculation with his pencil on
the paper.  The stranger watched him with awed and admiring
interest.  Rising, he again carefully examined the road, and was
finally rewarded by the discovery of a sharp indentation in the
dust, which, on measurement and comparison with the creases in the
paper and the calculations he had just made, proved to be identical.

"There was a solid body in that paper," said Paul quietly; "a
parallelogram exactly nine inches long and three wide."

"I say! you're wonderfully clever, don't you know," said the
stranger, with unaffected wonder.  "I see it all--a brick."

Paul smiled gently and shook his head.  "That is the hasty
inference of an inexperienced observer.  You will observe at the
point of impact of your wheel the parallel crease is CURVED, as
from the yielding of the resisting substances, and not BROKEN, as
it would be by the crumbling of a brick."

"I say, you're awfully detective, don't you know! just like that
fellow--what's his name?" said the stranger admiringly.

The words recalled Paul to himself.  Why was he acting like a
detective? and what was he seeking to discover?  Nevertheless, he
felt impelled to continue.  "And that queer old chap whom you met--
why didn't he help you?"

"Because I passed him before I ran into the--the parallelogram, and
I suppose he didn't know what happened behind him?"

"Did he have anything in his hand?"

"Can't say."

"And you say you were unconscious afterwards?"

"Yes!"

"Long enough for the culprit to remove the principal evidence of
his crime?"

"Come!  I say, really you are--you know you are!"

"Have you any secret enemy?"

"No."

"And you don't know Mr. Bunker, the man who owns this vast estate?"

"Not at all.  I'm from Upper Tooting."

"Good afternoon," said Paul abruptly, and turned away.

It struck him afterwards that his action might have seemed uncivil,
and even inhuman, to the bruised cyclist, who could hardly walk.
But it was getting late, and he was still far from the Hall, which,
oddly enough, seemed to be no longer visible from the road.  He
wandered on for some time, half convinced that he had passed the
lodge gates, yet hoping to find some other entrance to the domain.
Dusk was falling; the rounded outlines of the park trees beyond the
wall were solid masses of shadow.  The full moon, presently rising,
restored them again to symmetry, and at last he, to his relief,
came upon the massive gateway.  Two lions ramped in stone on the
side pillars.  He thought it strange that he had not noticed the
gateway on his previous entrance, but he remembered that he was
fully preoccupied with the advancing figure of his uncle.  In a few
minutes the Hall itself appeared, and here again he was surprised
that he had overlooked before its noble proportions and picturesque
outline.  Its broad terraces, dazzlingly white in the moonlight;
its long line of mullioned windows, suffused with a warm red glow
from within, made it look like part of a wintry landscape--and
suggested a Christmas card.  The venerable ivy that hid the ravages
time had made in its walls looked like black carving.  His heart
swelled with strange emotions as he gazed at his ancestral hall.
How many of his blood had lived and died there; how many had gone
forth from that great porch to distant lands!  He tried to think of
his father--a little child--peeping between the balustrades of that
terrace.  He tried to think of it, and perhaps would have succeeded
had it not occurred to him that it was a known fact that his uncle
had bought the estate and house of an impoverished nobleman only
the year before.  Yet--he could not tell why--he seemed to feel
higher and nobler for that trial.

The terrace was deserted, and so quiet that as he ascended to it
his footsteps seemed to echo from the walls.  When he reached the
portals, the great oaken door swung noiselessly on its hinges--
opened by some unseen but waiting servitor--and admitted him to a
lofty hall, dark with hangings and family portraits, but warmed by
a red carpet the whole length of its stone floor.  For a moment he
waited for the servant to show him to the drawing-room or his
uncle's study.  But no one appeared.  Believing this to be a part
of the characteristic simplicity of the Quaker household, he boldly
entered the first door, and found himself in a brilliantly lit and
perfectly empty drawing-room.  The same experience met him with the
other rooms on that floor--the dining-room displaying an already
set, exquisitely furnished and decorated table, with chairs for
twenty guests!  He mechanically ascended the wide oaken staircase
that led to the corridor of bedrooms above a central salon.  Here
he found only the same solitude.  Bedroom doors yielded to his
touch, only to show the same brilliantly lit vacancy.  He presently
came upon one room which seemed to give unmistakable signs of HIS
OWN occupancy.  Surely there stood his own dressing-case on the
table! and his own evening clothes carefully laid out on another,
as if fresh from a valet's hands.  He stepped hastily into the
corridor--there was no one there; he rang the bell--there was no
response!  But he noticed that there was a jug of hot water in his
basin, and he began dressing mechanically.

There was little doubt that he was in a haunted house, but this did
not particularly disturb him.  Indeed, he found himself wondering
if it could be logically called a haunted house--unless he himself
was haunting it, for there seemed to be no other there.  Perhaps
the apparitions would come later, when he was dressed.  Clearly it
was not his uncle's house--and yet, as he had never been inside his
uncle's house, he reflected that he ought not to be positive.

He finished dressing and sat down in an armchair with a kind of
thoughtful expectancy.  But presently his curiosity became
impatient of the silence and mystery, and he ventured once more to
explore the house.  Opening his bedroom door, he found himself
again upon the deserted corridor, but this time he could distinctly
hear a buzz of voices from the drawing-room below.  Assured that he
was near a solution of the mystery, he rapidly descended the broad
staircase and made his way to the open door of the drawing-room.
But although the sound of voices increased as he advanced, when he
entered the room, to his utter astonishment, it was as empty as
before.

Yet, in spite of his bewilderment and confusion, he was able to
follow one of the voices, which, in its peculiar distinctness and
half-perfunctory tone, he concluded must belong to the host of the
invisible assembly.

"Ah," said the voice, greeting some unseen visitor, "so glad you
have come.  Afraid your engagements just now would keep you away."
Then the voice dropped to a lower and more confidential tone.  "You
must take down Lady Dartman, but you will have Miss Morecamp--a
clever girl--on the other side of you.  Ah, Sir George!  So good of
you to come.  All well at the Priory?  So glad to hear it."  (Lower
and more confidentially.)  "You know Mrs. Monkston.  You'll sit by
her.  A little cut up by her husband losing his seat.  Try to amuse
her."

Emboldened by desperation, Paul turned in the direction of the
voice.  "I am Paul Bunker," he said hesitatingly.  "I'm afraid
you'll think me intrusive, but I was looking for my uncle, and"--

"Intrusive, my dear boy!  The son of my near neighbor in the
country intrusive?  Really, now, I like that!  Grace!" (the voice
turned in another direction) "here is the American nephew of our
neighbor Bunker at Widdlestone, who thinks he is 'a stranger.'"

"We all knew of your expected arrival at Widdlestone--it was so
good of you to waive ceremony and join us," said a well-bred
feminine voice, which Paul at once assumed to belong to the
hostess.  "But I must find some one for your dinner partner.  Mary"
(here her voice was likewise turned away), "this is Mr. Bunker, the
nephew of an old friend and neighbor in Upshire;" (the voice again
turned to him), "you will take Miss Morecamp in.  My dear" (once
again averted), "I must find some one else to console poor dear
Lord Billingtree with."  Here the hostess's voice was drowned by
fresh arrivals.

Bewildered and confused as he was, standing in this empty desert of
a drawing-room, yet encompassed on every side by human voices, so
marvelous was the power of suggestion, he seemed to almost feel the
impact of the invisible crowd.  He was trying desperately to
realize his situation when a singularly fascinating voice at his
elbow unexpectedly assisted him.  It was evidently his dinner
partner.

"I suppose you must be tired after your journey.  When did you
arrive?"

"Only a few hours ago," said Paul.

"And I dare say you haven't slept since you arrived.  One doesn't
on the passage, you know; the twenty hours pass so quickly, and the
experience is so exciting--to US at least.  But I suppose as an
American you are used to it."

Paul gasped.  He had passively accepted the bodiless conversation,
because it was at least intelligible!  But NOW!  Was he going mad?

She evidently noticed his silence.  "Never mind," she continued,
"you can tell me all about it at dinner.  Do you know I always
think that this sort of thing--what we're doing now,--this
ridiculous formality of reception,--which I suppose is after all
only a concession to our English force of habit,--is absurd!  We
ought to pass, as it were, directly from our houses to the dinner-
table.  It saves time."

"Yes--no--that is--I'm afraid I don't follow you," stammered Paul.

There was a slight pout in her voice as she replied: "No matter
now--we must follow them--for our host is moving off with Lady
Billingtree, and it's our turn now."

So great was the illusion that he found himself mechanically
offering his arm as he moved through the empty room towards the
door.  Then he descended the staircase without another word,
preceded, however, by the sound of his host's voice.  Following
this as a blind man might, he entered the dining-room, which to his
discomfiture was as empty as the salon above.  Still following the
host's voice, he dropped into a chair before the empty table,
wondering what variation of the Barmecide feast was in store for
him.  Yet the hum of voices from the vacant chairs around the board
so strongly impressed him that he could almost believe that he was
actually at dinner.

"Are you seated?" asked the charming voice at his side.

"Yes," a little wonderingly, as his was the only seat visibly
occupied.

"I am so glad that this silly ceremony is over.  By the way, where
are you?"

Paul would have liked to answer, "Lord only knows!" but he
reflected that it might not sound polite.  "Where am I?" he feebly
repeated.

"Yes; where are you dining?"

It seemed a cool question under the circumstances, but he answered
promptly,--

"With you."

"Of course," said the charming voice; "but where are you eating
your dinner?"

Considering that he was not eating anything, Paul thought this
cooler still.  But he answered briefly, "In Upshire."

"Oh!  At your uncle's?"

"No," said Paul bluntly; "in the next house."

"Why, that's Sir William's--our host's--and he and his family are
here in London.  You are joking."

"Listen!" said Paul desperately.  Then in a voice unconsciously
lowered he hurriedly told her where he was--how he came there--the
empty house--the viewless company!  To his surprise the only
response was a musical little laugh.  But the next moment her voice
rose higher with an unmistakable concern in it, apparently
addressing their invisible host.

"Oh, Sir William, only think how dreadful.  Here's poor Mr. Bunker,
alone in an empty house, which he has mistaken for his uncle's--and
without any dinner!"

"Really; dear, dear!  How provoking!  But how does he happen to be
WITH US?  James, how is this?"

"If you please, Sir William," said a servant's respectful voice,
"Widdlestone is in the circuit and is switched on with the others.
We heard that a gentleman's luggage had arrived at Widdlestone, and
we telegraphed for the rooms to be made ready, thinking we'd have
her ladyship's orders later."

A single gleam of intelligence flashed upon Paul.  His luggage--
yes, had been sent from the station to the wrong house, and he had
unwittingly followed.  But these voices! whence did they come?  And
where was the actual dinner at which his host was presiding?  It
clearly was not at this empty table.

"See that he has everything he wants at once," said Sir William;
"there must be some one there."  Then his voice turned in the
direction of Paul again, and he said laughingly, "Possess your soul
and appetite in patience for a moment, Mr. Bunker; you will be only
a course behind us.  But we are lucky in having your company--even
at your own discomfort."

Still more bewildered, Paul turned to his invisible partner.  "May
I ask where YOU are dining?"

"Certainly; at home in Curzon Street," returned the pretty voice.
"It was raining so, I did not go out."

"And--Lord Billington?" faltered Paul.

"Oh, he's in Scotland--at his own place."

"Then, in fact, nobody is dining here at all," said Paul desperately.

There was a slight pause, and then the voice responded, with a
touch of startled suggestion in it: "Good heavens, Mr. Bunker!  Is
it possible you don't know we're dining by telephone?"

"By what?"

"Telephone.  Yes.  We're a telephonic dinner-party.  We are dining
in our own houses; but, being all friends, we're switched on to
each other, and converse exactly as we would at table.  It saves a
great trouble and expense, for any one of us can give the party,
and the poorest can equal the most extravagant.  People who are
obliged to diet can partake of their own slops at home, and yet
mingle with the gourmets without awkwardness or the necessity of
apology.  We are spared the spectacle, at least, of those who eat
and drink too much.  We can switch off a bore at once.  We can
retire when we are fatigued, without leaving a blank space before
the others.  And all this without saying anything of the higher
spiritual and intellectual effect--freed from material grossness of
appetite and show--which the dinner party thus attains.  But you
are surely joking!  You, an American, and not know it!  Why, it
comes from Boston.  Haven't you read that book, 'Jumping a Century'?
It's by an American."

A strange illumination came upon Paul.  Where had he heard
something like this before?  But at the same moment his thoughts
were diverted by the material entrance of a footman, bearing a
silver salver with his dinner.  It was part of his singular
experience that the visible entrance of this real, commonplace
mortal--the only one he had seen--in the midst of this voiceless
solitude was distinctly unreal, and had all the effect of an
apparition.  He distrusted it and the dishes before him.  But his
lively partner's voice was now addressing an unseen occupant of the
next chair.  Had she got tired of his ignorance, or was it feminine
tact to enable him to eat something?  He accepted the latter
hypothesis, and tried to eat.  But he felt himself following the
fascinating voice in all the charm of its youthful and spiritual
inflections.  Taking advantage of its momentary silence, he said
gently,--

"I confess my ignorance, and am willing to admit all you claim for
this wonderful invention.  But do you think it compensates for the
loss of the individual person?  Take my own case--if you will not
think me personal.  I have never had the pleasure of seeing you; do
you believe that I am content with only that suggestion of your
personality which the satisfaction of hearing your voice affords
me?"

There was a pause, and then a very mischievous ring in the voice
that replied: "It certainly is a personal question, and it is
another blessing of this invention that you'll never know whether I
am blushing or not; but I forgive you, for I never before spoke to
any one I had never seen--and I suppose it's confusion.  But do you
really think you would know me--the REAL one--any better?  It is
the real person who thinks and speaks, not the outward semblance
that we see, which very often unfairly either attracts or repels
us?  We can always SHOW ourselves at our best, but we must, at
last, reveal our true colors through our thoughts and speech.
Isn't it better to begin with the real thing first?"

"I hope, at least, to have the privilege of judging by myself,"
said Paul gallantly.  "You will not be so cruel as not to let me
see you elsewhere, otherwise I shall feel as if I were in some
dream, and will certainly be opposed to your preference for
realities."

"I am not certain if the dream would not be more interesting to
you," said the voice laughingly.  "But I think your hostess is
already saying 'good-by.'  You know everybody goes at once at this
kind of party; the ladies don't retire first, and the gentlemen
join them afterwards.  In another moment we'll ALL be switched off;
but Sir William wants me to tell you that his coachman will drive
you to your uncle's, unless you prefer to try and make yourself
comfortable for the night here.  Good-by!"

The voices around him seemed to grow fainter, and then utterly
cease.  The lights suddenly leaped up, went out, and left him in
complete darkness.  He attempted to rise, but in doing so overset
the dishes before him, which slid to the floor.  A cold air seemed
to blow across his feet.  The "good-by" was still ringing in his
ears as he straightened himself to find he was in his railway
carriage, whose door had just been opened for a young lady who was
entering the compartment from a wayside station.  "Good-by," she
repeated to the friend who was seeing her off.  The Writer of
Stories hurriedly straightened himself, gathered up the magazines
and papers that had fallen from his lap, and glanced at the station
walls.  The old illustrations glanced back at him!  He looked at
his watch; he had been asleep just ten minutes!



BOHEMIAN DAYS IN SAN FRANCISCO


It is but just to the respectable memory of San Francisco that in
these vagrant recollections I should deprecate at once any
suggestion that the levity of my title described its dominant tone
at any period of my early experiences.  On the contrary, it was a
singular fact that while the rest of California was swayed by an
easy, careless unconventionalism, or swept over by waves of emotion
and sentiment, San Francisco preserved an intensely material and
practical attitude, and even a certain austere morality.  I do not,
of course, allude to the brief days of '49, when it was a
straggling beach of huts and stranded hulks, but to the earlier
stages of its development into the metropolis of California.  Its
first tottering steps in that direction were marked by a distinct
gravity and decorum.  Even during the period when the revolver
settled small private difficulties, and Vigilance Committees
adjudicated larger public ones, an unmistakable seriousness and
respectability was the ruling sign of its governing class.  It was
not improbable that under the reign of the Committee the lawless
and vicious class were more appalled by the moral spectacle of
several thousand black-coated, serious-minded business men in
embattled procession than by mere force of arms, and one "suspect"--
a prize-fighter--is known to have committed suicide in his cell
after confrontation with his grave and passionless shopkeeping
judges.  Even that peculiar quality of Californian humor which was
apt to mitigate the extravagances of the revolver and the
uncertainties of poker had no place in the decorous and responsible
utterance of San Francisco.  The press was sober, materialistic,
practical--when it was not severely admonitory of existing evil;
the few smaller papers that indulged in levity were considered
libelous and improper.  Fancy was displaced by heavy articles on
the revenues of the State and inducements to the investment of
capital.  Local news was under an implied censorship which
suppressed anything that might tend to discourage timid or cautious
capital.  Episodes of romantic lawlessness or pathetic incidents of
mining life were carefully edited--with the comment that these
things belonged to the past, and that life and property were now
"as safe in San Francisco as in New York or London."

Wonder-loving visitors in quest of scenes characteristic of the
civilization were coldly snubbed with this assurance.  Fires,
floods, and even seismic convulsions were subjected to a like
grimly materialistic optimism.  I have a vivid recollection of a
ponderous editorial on one of the severer earthquakes, in which it
was asserted that only the UNEXPECTEDNESS of the onset prevented
San Francisco from meeting it in a way that would be deterrent of
all future attacks.  The unconsciousness of the humor was only
equaled by the gravity with which it was received by the whole
business community.  Strangely enough, this grave materialism
flourished side by side with--and was even sustained by--a narrow
religious strictness more characteristic of the Pilgrim Fathers of
a past century than the Western pioneers of the present.  San
Francisco was early a city of churches and church organizations to
which the leading men and merchants belonged.  The lax Sundays of
the dying Spanish race seemed only to provoke a revival of the
rigors of the Puritan Sabbath.  With the Spaniard and his Sunday
afternoon bullfight scarcely an hour distant, the San Francisco
pulpit thundered against Sunday picnics.  One of the popular
preachers, declaiming upon the practice of Sunday dinner-giving,
averred that when he saw a guest in his best Sunday clothes
standing shamelessly upon the doorstep of his host, he felt like
seizing him by the shoulder and dragging him from that threshold of
perdition.

Against the actual heathen the feeling was even stronger, and
reached its climax one Sunday when a Chinaman was stoned to death
by a crowd of children returning from Sunday-school.  I am offering
these examples with no ethical purpose, but merely to indicate a
singular contradictory condition which I do not think writers of
early Californian history have fairly recorded.  It is not my
province to suggest any theory for these appalling exceptions to
the usual good-humored lawlessness and extravagance of the rest of
the State.  They may have been essential agencies to the growth and
evolution of the city.  They were undoubtedly sincere.  The
impressions I propose to give of certain scenes and incidents of my
early experience must, therefore, be taken as purely personal and
Bohemian, and their selection as equally individual and vagrant.  I
am writing of what interested me at the time, though not perhaps of
what was more generally characteristic of San Francisco.

I had been there a week--an idle week, spent in listless outlook
for employment; a full week in my eager absorption of the strange
life around me and a photographic sensitiveness to certain scenes
and incidents of those days, which start out of my memory to-day as
freshly as the day they impressed me.

One of these recollections is of "steamer night," as it was
called,--the night of "steamer day,"--preceding the departure of
the mail steamship with the mails for "home."  Indeed, at that time
San Francisco may be said to have lived from steamer day to steamer
day; bills were made due on that day, interest computed to that
period, and accounts settled.  The next day was the turning of a
new leaf: another essay to fortune, another inspiration of energy.
So recognized was the fact that even ordinary changes of condition,
social and domestic, were put aside until AFTER steamer day.  "I'll
see what I can do after next steamer day" was the common cautious
or hopeful formula.  It was the "Saturday night" of many a wage-
earner--and to him a night of festivity.  The thoroughfares were
animated and crowded; the saloons and theatres full.  I can recall
myself at such times wandering along the City Front, as the
business part of San Francisco was then known.  Here the lights
were burning all night, the first streaks of dawn finding the
merchants still at their counting-house desks.  I remember the dim
lines of warehouses lining the insecure wharves of rotten piles,
half filled in--that had ceased to be wharves, but had not yet
become streets,--their treacherous yawning depths, with the
uncertain gleam of tarlike mud below, at times still vocal with the
lap and gurgle of the tide.  I remember the weird stories of
disappearing men found afterward imbedded in the ooze in which they
had fallen and gasped their life away.  I remember the two or three
ships, still left standing where they were beached a year or two
before, built in between warehouses, their bows projecting into the
roadway.  There was the dignity of the sea and its boundless
freedom in their beautiful curves, which the abutting houses could
not destroy, and even something of the sea's loneliness in the far-
spaced ports and cabin windows lit up by the lamps of the prosaic
landsmen who plied their trades behind them.  One of these ships,
transformed into a hotel, retained its name, the Niantic, and part
of its characteristic interior unchanged.  I remember these ships'
old tenants--the rats--who had increased and multiplied to such an
extent that at night they fearlessly crossed the wayfarer's path at
every turn, and even invaded the gilded saloons of Montgomery
Street.  In the Niantic their pit-a-pat was met on every staircase,
and it was said that sometimes in an excess of sociability they
accompanied the traveler to his room.  In the early "cloth-and-
papered" houses--so called because the ceilings were not plastered,
but simply covered by stretched and whitewashed cloth--their
scamperings were plainly indicated in zigzag movements of the
sagging cloth, or they became actually visible by finally dropping
through the holes they had worn in it!  I remember the house whose
foundations were made of boxes of plug tobacco--part of a
jettisoned cargo--used instead of more expensive lumber; and the
adjacent warehouse where the trunks of the early and forgotten
"forty-niners" were stored, and--never claimed by their dead or
missing owners--were finally sold at auction.  I remember the
strong breath of the sea over all, and the constant onset of the
trade winds which helped to disinfect the deposit of dirt and
grime, decay and wreckage, which were stirred up in the later
evolutions of the city.

Or I recall, with the same sense of youthful satisfaction and
unabated wonder, my wanderings through the Spanish Quarter, where
three centuries of quaint customs, speech, and dress were still
preserved; where the proverbs of Sancho Panza were still spoken in
the language of Cervantes, and the high-flown illusions of the La
Manchian knight still a part of the Spanish Californian hidalgo's
dream.  I recall the more modern "Greaser," or Mexican--his index
finger steeped in cigarette stains; his velvet jacket and his
crimson sash; the many-flounced skirt and lace manta of his women,
and their caressing intonations--the one musical utterance of the
whole hard-voiced city.  I suppose I had a boy's digestion and
bluntness of taste in those days, for the combined odor of tobacco,
burned paper, and garlic, which marked that melodious breath, did
not affect me.

Perhaps from my Puritan training I experienced a more fearful joy
in the gambling saloons.  They were the largest and most comfortable,
even as they were the most expensively decorated rooms in San
Francisco.  Here again the gravity and decorum which I have already
alluded to were present at that earlier period--though perhaps from
concentration of another kind.  People staked and lost their last
dollar with a calm solemnity and a resignation that was almost
Christian.  The oaths, exclamations, and feverish interruptions
which often characterized more dignified assemblies were absent
here.  There was no room for the lesser vices; there was little or
no drunkenness; the gaudily dressed and painted women who presided
over the wheels of fortune or performed on the harp and piano
attracted no attention from those ascetic players.  The man who had
won ten thousand dollars and the man who had lost everything rose
from the table with equal silence and imperturbability.  I never
witnessed any tragic sequel to those losses; I never heard of any
suicide on account of them.  Neither can I recall any quarrel or
murder directly attributable to this kind of gambling.  It must be
remembered that these public games were chiefly rouge et noir,
monte, faro, or roulette, in which the antagonist was Fate, Chance,
Method, or the impersonal "bank," which was supposed to represent
them all; there was no individual opposition or rivalry; nobody
challenged the decision of the "croupier," or dealer.

I remember a conversation at the door of one saloon which was as
characteristic for its brevity as it was a type of the prevailing
stoicism.  "Hello!" said a departing miner, as he recognized a
brother miner coming in, "when did you come down?"  "This morning,"
was the reply.  "Made a strike on the bar?" suggested the first
speaker.  "You bet!" said the other, and passed in.  I chanced an
hour later to be at the same place as they met again--their
relative positions changed.  "Hello!  Whar now?" said the incomer.
"Back to the bar."  "Cleaned out?"  "You bet!"  Not a word more
explained a common situation.

My first youthful experience at those tables was an accidental one.
I was watching roulette one evening, intensely absorbed in the mere
movement of the players.  Either they were so preoccupied with the
game, or I was really older looking than my actual years, but a
bystander laid his hand familiarly on my shoulder, and said, as to
an ordinary habitue, "Ef you're not chippin' in yourself, pardner,
s'pose you give ME a show."  Now I honestly believe that up to that
moment I had no intention, nor even a desire, to try my own
fortune.  But in the embarrassment of the sudden address I put my
hand in my pocket, drew out a coin, and laid it, with an attempt at
carelessness, but a vivid consciousness that I was blushing, upon a
vacant number.  To my horror I saw that I had put down a large
coin--the bulk of my possessions!  I did not flinch, however; I
think any boy who reads this will understand my feeling; it was not
only my coin but my manhood at stake.  I gazed with a miserable
show of indifference at the players, at the chandelier--anywhere
but at the dreadful ball spinning round the wheel.  There was a
pause; the game was declared, the rake rattled up and down, but
still I did not look at the table.  Indeed, in my inexperience of
the game and my embarrassment, I doubt if I should have known if I
had won or not.  I had made up my mind that I should lose, but I
must do so like a man, and, above all, without giving the least
suspicion that I was a greenhorn.  I even affected to be listening
to the music.  The wheel spun again; the game was declared, the
rake was busy, but I did not move.  At last the man I had displaced
touched me on the arm and whispered, "Better make a straddle and
divide your stake this time."  I did not understand him, but as I
saw he was looking at the board, I was obliged to look, too.  I
drew back dazed and bewildered!  Where my coin had lain a moment
before was a glittering heap of gold.

My stake had doubled, quadrupled, and doubled again.  I did not
know how much then---I do not know now--it may have been not more
than three or four hundred dollars--but it dazzled and frightened
me.  "Make your game, gentlemen," said the croupier monotonously.
I thought he looked at me--indeed, everybody seemed to be looking
at me--and my companion repeated his warning.  But here I must
again appeal to the boyish reader in defense of my idiotic
obstinacy.  To have taken advice would have shown my youth.  I
shook my head--I could not trust my voice.  I smiled, but with a
sinking heart, and let my stake remain.  The ball again sped round
the wheel, and stopped.  There was a pause.  The croupier
indolently advanced his rake and swept my whole pile with others
into the bank!  I had lost it all.  Perhaps it may be difficult for
me to explain why I actually felt relieved, and even to some extent
triumphant, but I seemed to have asserted my grown-up independence--
possibly at the cost of reducing the number of my meals for days;
but what of that!  I was a man!  I wish I could say that it was a
lesson to me.  I am afraid it was not.  It was true that I did not
gamble again, but then I had no especial desire to--and there was
no temptation.  I am afraid it was an incident without a moral.
Yet it had one touch characteristic of the period which I like to
remember.  The man who had spoken to me, I think, suddenly
realized, at the moment of my disastrous coup, the fact of my
extreme youth.  He moved toward the banker, and leaning over him
whispered a few words.  The banker looked up, half impatiently,
half kindly--his hand straying tentatively toward the pile of coin.
I instinctively knew what he meant, and, summoning my determination,
met his eyes with all the indifference I could assume, and walked
away.

I had at that period a small room at the top of a house owned by a
distant relation--a second or third cousin, I think.  He was a man
of independent and original character, had a Ulyssean experience of
men and cities, and an old English name of which he was proud.
While in London he had procured from the Heralds' College his
family arms, whose crest was stamped upon a quantity of plate he
had brought with him to California.  The plate, together with an
exceptionally good cook, which he had also brought, and his own
epicurean tastes, he utilized in the usual practical Californian
fashion by starting a rather expensive half-club, half-restaurant
in the lower part of the building--which he ruled somewhat
autocratically, as became his crest.  The restaurant was too
expensive for me to patronize, but I saw many of its frequenters as
well as those who had rooms at the club.  They were men of very
distinct personality; a few celebrated, and nearly all notorious.
They represented a Bohemianism--if such it could be called--less
innocent than my later experiences.  I remember, however, one
handsome young fellow whom I used to meet occasionally on the
staircase, who captured my youthful fancy.  I met him only at
midday, as he did not rise till late, and this fact, with a certain
scrupulous elegance and neatness in his dress, ought to have made
me suspect that he was a gambler.  In my inexperience it only
invested him with a certain romantic mystery.

One morning as I was going out to my very early breakfast at a
cheap Italian cafe on Long Wharf, I was surprised to find him also
descending the staircase.  He was scrupulously dressed even at that
early hour, but I was struck by the fact that he was all in black,
and his slight figure, buttoned to the throat in a tightly fitting
frock coat, gave, I fancied, a singular melancholy to his pale
Southern face.  Nevertheless, he greeted me with more than his
usual serene cordiality, and I remembered that he looked up with a
half-puzzled, half-amused expression at the rosy morning sky as he
walked a few steps with me down the deserted street.  I could not
help saying that I was astonished to see him up so early, and he
admitted that it was a break in his usual habits, but added with a
smiling significance I afterwards remembered that it was "an even
chance if he did it again."  As we neared the street corner a man
in a buggy drove up impatiently.  In spite of the driver's evident
haste, my handsome acquaintance got in leisurely, and, lifting his
glossy hat to me with a pleasant smile, was driven away.  I have a
very lasting recollection of his face and figure as the buggy
disappeared down the empty street.  I never saw him again.  It was
not until a week later that I knew that an hour after he left me
that morning he was lying dead in a little hollow behind the
Mission Dolores--shot through the heart in a duel for which he had
risen so early.

I recall another incident of that period, equally characteristic,
but happily less tragic in sequel.  I was in the restaurant one
morning talking to my cousin when a man entered hastily and said
something to him in a hurried whisper.  My cousin contracted his
eyebrows and uttered a suppressed oath.  Then with a gesture of
warning to the man he crossed the room quietly to a table where a
regular habitue of the restaurant was lazily finishing his
breakfast.  A large silver coffee-pot with a stiff wooden handle
stood on the table before him.  My cousin leaned over the guest
familiarly and apparently made some hospitable inquiry as to his
wants, with his hand resting lightly on the coffee-pot handle.
Then--possibly because, my curiosity having been excited, I was
watching him more intently than the others--I saw what probably no
one else saw--that he deliberately upset the coffee-pot and its
contents over the guest's shirt and waistcoat.  As the victim
sprang up with an exclamation, my cousin overwhelmed him with
apologies for his carelessness, and, with protestations of sorrow
for the accident, actually insisted upon dragging the man upstairs
into his own private room, where he furnished him with a shirt and
waistcoat of his own.  The side door had scarcely closed upon them,
and I was still lost in wonder at what I had seen, when a man
entered from the street.  He was one of the desperate set I have
already spoken of, and thoroughly well known to those present.  He
cast a glance around the room, nodded to one or two of the guests,
and then walked to a side table and took up a newspaper.  I was
conscious at once that a singular constraint had come over the
other guests--a nervous awkwardness that at last seemed to make
itself known to the man himself, who, after an affected yawn or
two, laid down the paper and walked out.

"That was a mighty close call," said one of the guests with a sigh
of relief.

"You bet!  And that coffee-pot spill was the luckiest kind of
accident for Peters," returned another.

"For both," added the first speaker, "for Peters was armed too, and
would have seen him come in!"

A word or two explained all.  Peters and the last comer had
quarreled a day or two before, and had separated with the intention
to "shoot on sight," that is, wherever they met,--a form of duel
common to those days.  The accidental meeting in the restaurant
would have been the occasion, with the usual sanguinary consequence,
but for the word of warning given to my cousin by a passer-by who
knew that Peters' antagonist was coming to the restaurant to look at
the papers.  Had my cousin repeated the warning to Peters himself he
would only have prepared him for the conflict--which he would not
have shirked--and so precipitated the affray.

The ruse of upsetting the coffee-pot, which everybody but myself
thought an accident, was to get him out of the room before the
other entered.  I was too young then to venture to intrude upon my
cousin's secrets, but two or three years afterwards I taxed him
with the trick and he admitted it regretfully.  I believe that a
strict interpretation of the "code" would have condemned his act as
unsportsmanlike, if not UNFAIR!

I recall another incident connected with the building equally
characteristic of the period.  The United States Branch Mint stood
very near it, and its tall, factory-like chimneys overshadowed my
cousin's roof.  Some scandal had arisen from an alleged leakage of
gold in the manipulation of that metal during the various processes
of smelting and refining.  One of the excuses offered was the
volatilization of the precious metal and its escape through the
draft of the tall chimneys.  All San Francisco laughed at this
explanation until it learned that a corroboration of the theory had
been established by an assay of the dust and grime of the roofs in
the vicinity of the Mint.  These had yielded distinct traces of
gold.  San Francisco stopped laughing, and that portion of it which
had roofs in the neighborhood at once began prospecting.  Claims
were staked out on these airy placers, and my cousin's roof, being
the very next one to the chimney, and presumably "in the lead," was
disposed of to a speculative company for a considerable sum.  I
remember my cousin telling me the story--for the occurrence was
quite recent--and taking me with him to the roof to explain it, but
I am afraid I was more attracted by the mystery of the closely
guarded building, and the strangely tinted smoke which arose from
this temple where money was actually being "made," than by anything
else.  Nor did I dream as I stood there--a very lanky, open-mouthed
youth--that only three or four years later I should be the
secretary of its superintendent.  In my more adventurous ambition I
am afraid I would have accepted the suggestion half-heartedly.
Merely to have helped to stamp the gold which other people had
adventurously found was by no means a part of my youthful dreams.

At the time of these earlier impressions the Chinese had not yet
become the recognized factors in the domestic and business economy
of the city which they had come to be when I returned from the
mines three years later.  Yet they were even then a more remarkable
and picturesque contrast to the bustling, breathless, and brand-new
life of San Francisco than the Spaniard.  The latter seldom
flaunted his faded dignity in the principal thoroughfares.  "John"
was to be met everywhere.  It was a common thing to see a long file
of sampan coolies carrying their baskets slung between them, on
poles, jostling a modern, well-dressed crowd in Montgomery Street,
or to get a whiff of their burned punk in the side streets; while
the road leading to their temporary burial-ground at Lone Mountain
was littered with slips of colored paper scattered from their
funerals.  They brought an atmosphere of the Arabian Nights into
the hard, modern civilization; their shops--not always confined at
that time to a Chinese quarter--were replicas of the bazaars of
Canton and Peking, with their quaint display of little dishes on
which tidbits of food delicacies were exposed for sale, all of the
dimensions and unreality of a doll's kitchen or a child's
housekeeping.

They were a revelation to the Eastern immigrant, whose preconceived
ideas of them were borrowed from the ballet or pantomime; they did
not wear scalloped drawers and hats with jingling bells on their
points, nor did I ever see them dance with their forefingers
vertically extended.  They were always neatly dressed, even the
commonest of coolies, and their festive dresses were marvels.  As
traders they were grave and patient; as servants they were sad and
civil, and all were singularly infantine in their natural
simplicity.  The living representatives of the oldest civilization
in the world, they seemed like children.  Yet they kept their
beliefs and sympathies to themselves, never fraternizing with the
fanqui, or foreign devil, or losing their singular racial
qualities.  They indulged in their own peculiar habits; of their
social and inner life, San Francisco knew but little and cared
less.  Even at this early period, and before I came to know them
more intimately, I remember an incident of their daring fidelity to
their own customs that was accidentally revealed to me.  I had
become acquainted with a Chinese youth of about my own age, as I
imagined,--although from mere outward appearance it was generally
impossible to judge of a Chinaman's age between the limits of
seventeen and forty years,--and he had, in a burst of confidence,
taken me to see some characteristic sights in a Chinese warehouse
within a stone's throw of the Plaza.  I was struck by the singular
circumstance that while the warehouse was an erection of wood in
the ordinary hasty Californian style, there were certain brick and
stone divisions in its interior, like small rooms or closets,
evidently added by the Chinamen tenants.  My companion stopped
before a long, very narrow entrance, a mere longitudinal slit in
the brick wall, and with a wink of infantine deviltry motioned me
to look inside.  I did so, and saw a room, really a cell, of fair
height but scarcely six feet square, and barely able to contain a
rude, slanting couch of stone covered with matting, on which lay,
at a painful angle, a richly dressed Chinaman.  A single glance at
his dull, staring, abstracted eyes and half-opened mouth showed me
he was in an opium trance.  This was not in itself a novel sight,
and I was moving away when I was suddenly startled by the
appearance of his hands, which were stretched helplessly before him
on his body, and at first sight seemed to be in a kind of wicker
cage.

I then saw that his finger-nails were seven or eight inches long,
and were supported by bamboo splints.  Indeed, they were no longer
human nails, but twisted and distorted quills, giving him the
appearance of having gigantic claws.  "Velly big Chinaman,"
whispered my cheerful friend; "first-chop man--high classee--no can
washee--no can eat--no dlinke, no catchee him own glub allee same
nothee man--China boy must catchee glub for him, allee time!  Oh,
him first-chop man--you bettee!"

I had heard of this singular custom of indicating caste before, and
was amazed and disgusted, but I was not prepared for what followed.
My companion, evidently thinking he had impressed me, grew more
reckless as showman, and saying to me, "Now me showee you one funny
thing--heap makee you laugh," led me hurriedly across a little
courtyard swarming with chickens and rabbits, when he stopped
before another inclosure.  Suddenly brushing past an astonished
Chinaman who seemed to be standing guard, he thrust me into the
inclosure in front of a most extraordinary object.  It was a
Chinaman, wearing a huge, square, wooden frame fastened around his
neck like a collar, and fitting so tightly and rigidly that the
flesh rose in puffy weals around his cheeks.  He was chained to a
post, although it was as impossible for him to have escaped with
his wooden cage through the narrow doorway as it was for him to lie
down and rest in it.  Yet I am bound to say that his eyes and face
expressed nothing but apathy, and there was no appeal to the
sympathy of the stranger.  My companion said hurriedly,--

"Velly bad man; stealee heap from Chinamen," and then, apparently
alarmed at his own indiscreet intrusion, hustled me away as quickly
as possible amid a shrill cackling of protestation from a few of
his own countrymen who had joined the one who was keeping guard.
In another moment we were in the street again--scarce a step from
the Plaza, in the full light of Western civilization--not a stone's
throw from the courts of justice.

My companion took to his heels and left me standing there bewildered
and indignant.  I could not rest until I had told my story, but
without betraying my companion, to an elder acquaintance, who laid
the facts before the police authorities.  I had expected to be
closely cross-examined--to be doubted--to be disbelieved.  To my
surprise, I was told that the police had already cognizance of
similar cases of illegal and barbarous punishments, but that the
victims themselves refused to testify against their countrymen--and
it was impossible to convict or even to identify them.  "A white man
can't tell one Chinese from another, and there are always a dozen of
'em ready to swear that the man you've got isn't the one."  I was
startled to reflect that I, too, could not have conscientiously
sworn to either jailor or the tortured prisoner--or perhaps even to
my cheerful companion.  The police, on some pretext, made a raid upon
the premises a day or two afterwards, but without result.  I
wondered if they had caught sight of the high-class, first-chop
individual, with the helplessly outstretched fingers, as that story
I had kept to myself.

But these barbaric vestiges in John Chinaman's habits did not
affect his relations with the San Franciscans.  He was singularly
peaceful, docile, and harmless as a servant, and, with rare
exceptions, honest and temperate.  If he sometimes matched cunning
with cunning, it was the flattery of imitation.  He did most of the
menial work of San Francisco, and did it cleanly.  Except that he
exhaled a peculiar druglike odor, he was not personally offensive
in domestic contact, and by virtue of being the recognized
laundryman of the whole community his own blouses were always
freshly washed and ironed.  His conversational reserve arose, not
from his having to deal with an unfamiliar language,--for he had
picked up a picturesque and varied vocabulary with ease,--but from
his natural temperament.  He was devoid of curiosity, and utterly
unimpressed by anything but the purely business concerns of those
he served.  Domestic secrets were safe with him; his indifference
to your thoughts, actions, and feelings had all the contempt which
his three thousand years of history and his innate belief in your
inferiority seemed to justify.  He was blind and deaf in your
household because you didn't interest him in the least.  It was
said that a gentleman, who wished to test his impassiveness,
arranged with his wife to come home one day and, in the hearing of
his Chinese waiter who was more than usually intelligent--to
disclose with well-simulated emotion the details of a murder he had
just committed.  He did so.  The Chinaman heard it without a sign
of horror or attention even to the lifting of an eyelid, but
continued his duties unconcerned.  Unfortunately, the gentleman, in
order to increase the horror of the situation, added that now there
was nothing left for him but to cut his throat.  At this John
quietly left the room.  The gentleman was delighted at the success
of his ruse until the door reopened and John reappeared with his
master's razor, which he quietly slipped--as if it had been a
forgotten fork--beside his master's plate, and calmly resumed his
serving.  I have always considered this story to be quite as
improbable as it was inartistic, from its tacit admission of a
certain interest on the part of the Chinaman.  I never knew one who
would have been sufficiently concerned to go for the razor.

His taciturnity and reticence may have been confounded with
rudeness of address, although he was always civil enough.  "I see
you have listened to me and done exactly what I told you," said a
lady, commending some performance of her servant after a previous
lengthy lecture; "that's very nice."  "Yes," said John calmly, "you
talkee allee time; talkee allee too much."  "I always find Ling
very polite," said another lady, speaking of her cook, "but I wish
he did not always say to me, 'Goodnight, John,' in a high falsetto
voice."  She had not recognized the fact that he was simply
repeating her own salutation with his marvelous instinct of
relentless imitation, even as to voice.  I hesitate to record the
endless stories of his misapplication of that faculty which were
then current, from the one of the laundryman who removed the
buttons from the shirts that were sent to him to wash that they
might agree with the condition of the one offered him as a pattern
for "doing up," to that of the unfortunate employer who, while
showing John how to handle valuable china carefully, had the
misfortune to drop a plate himself--an accident which was followed
by the prompt breaking of another by the neophyte, with the
addition of "Oh, hellee!" in humble imitation of his master.

I have spoken of his general cleanliness; I am reminded of one or
two exceptions, which I think, however, were errors of zeal.  His
manner of sprinkling clothes in preparing them for ironing was
peculiar.  He would fill his mouth with perfectly pure water from a
glass beside him, and then, by one dexterous movement of his lips
in a prolonged expiration, squirt the water in an almost invisible
misty shower on the article before him.  Shocking as this was at
first to the sensibilities of many American employers, it was
finally accepted, and even commended.  It was some time after this
that the mistress of a household, admiring the deft way in which
her cook had spread a white sauce on certain dishes, was cheerfully
informed that the method was "allee same."

His recreations at that time were chiefly gambling, for the Chinese
theatre wherein the latter produced his plays (which lasted for
several months and comprised the events of a whole dynasty) was not
yet built.  But he had one or two companies of jugglers who
occasionally performed also at American theatres.  I remember a
singular incident which attended the debut of a newly arrived
company.  It seemed that the company had been taken on their
Chinese reputation solely, and there had been no previous rehearsal
before the American stage manager.  The theatre was filled with an
audience of decorous and respectable San Franciscans of both sexes.
It was suddenly emptied in the middle of the performance; the
curtain came down with an alarmed and blushing manager apologizing
to deserted benches, and the show abruptly terminated.  Exactly
WHAT had happened never appeared in the public papers, nor in the
published apology of the manager.  It afforded a few days' mirth
for wicked San Francisco, and it was epigrammatically summed up in
the remark that "no woman could be found in San Francisco who was
at that performance, and no man who was not."  Yet it was alleged
even by John's worst detractors that he was innocent of any
intended offense.  Equally innocent, but perhaps more morally
instructive, was an incident that brought his career as a
singularly successful physician to a disastrous close.  An ordinary
native Chinese doctor, practicing entirely among his own
countrymen, was reputed to have made extraordinary cures with two
or three American patients.  With no other advertising than this,
and apparently no other inducement offered to the public than what
their curiosity suggested, he was presently besieged by hopeful and
eager sufferers.  Hundreds of patients were turned away from his
crowded doors.  Two interpreters sat, day and night, translating
the ills of ailing San Francisco to this medical oracle, and
dispensing his prescriptions--usually small powders--in exchange
for current coin.  In vain the regular practitioners pointed out
that the Chinese possessed no superior medical knowledge, and that
their religion, which proscribed dissection and autopsies,
naturally limited their understanding of the body into which they
put their drugs.  Finally they prevailed upon an eminent Chinese
authority to give them a list of the remedies generally used in the
Chinese pharmacopoeia, and this was privately circulated.  For
obvious reasons I may not repeat it here.  But it was summed up--
again after the usual Californian epigrammatic style--by the remark
that "whatever were the comparative merits of Chinese and American
practice, a simple perusal of the list would prove that the Chinese
were capable of producing the most powerful emetic known."  The
craze subsided in a single day; the interpreters and their oracle
vanished; the Chinese doctors' signs, which had multiplied,
disappeared, and San Francisco awoke cured of its madness, at the
cost of some thousand dollars.

My Bohemian wanderings were confined to the limits of the city, for
the very good reason that there was little elsewhere to go.  San
Francisco was then bounded on one side by the monotonously restless
waters of the bay, and on the other by a stretch of equally
restless and monotonously shifting sand dunes as far as the Pacific
shore.  Two roads penetrated this waste: one to Lone Mountain--the
cemetery; the other to the Cliff House--happily described as "an
eight-mile drive with a cocktail at the end of it."  Nor was the
humor entirely confined to this felicitous description.  The Cliff
House itself, half restaurant, half drinking saloon, fronting the
ocean and the Seal Rock, where disporting seals were the chief
object of interest, had its own peculiar symbol.  The decanters,
wine-glasses, and tumblers at the bar were all engraved in old
English script with the legal initials "L. S." (Locus Sigilli),--
"the place of the seal."

On the other hand, Lone Mountain, a dreary promontory giving upon
the Golden Gate and its striking sunsets, had little to soften its
weird suggestiveness.  As the common goal of the successful and
unsuccessful, the carved and lettered shaft of the man who had made
a name, and the staring blank headboard of the man who had none,
climbed the sandy slopes together.  I have seen the funerals of the
respectable citizen who had died peacefully in his bed, and the
notorious desperado who had died "with his boots on," followed by
an equally impressive cortege of sorrowing friends, and often the
self-same priest.  But more awful than its barren loneliness was
the utter absence of peacefulness and rest in this dismal
promontory.  By some wicked irony of its situation and climate it
was the personification of unrest and change.  The incessant trade
winds carried its loose sands hither and thither, uncovering the
decaying coffins of early pioneers, to bury the wreaths and
flowers, laid on a grave of to-day, under their obliterating waves.
No tree to shade them from the glaring sky above could live in
those winds, no turf would lie there to resist the encroaching sand
below.  The dead were harried and hustled even in their graves by
the persistent sun, the unremitting wind, and the unceasing sea.
The departing mourner saw the contour of the very mountain itself
change with the shifting dunes as he passed, and his last look
beyond rested on the hurrying, eager waves forever hastening to the
Golden Gate.

If I were asked to say what one thing impressed me as the dominant
and characteristic note of San Francisco, I should say it was this
untiring presence of sun and wind and sea.  They typified, even if
they were not, as I sometimes fancied, the actual incentive to the
fierce, restless life of the city.  I could not think of San
Francisco without the trade winds; I could not imagine its strange,
incongruous, multigenerous procession marching to any other music.
They were always there in my youthful recollections; they were
there in my more youthful dreams of the past as the mysterious
vientes generales that blew the Philippine galleons home.

For six months they blew from the northwest, for six months from
the southwest, with unvarying persistency.  They were there every
morning, glittering in the equally persistent sunlight, to chase
the San Franciscan from his slumber; they were there at midday, to
stir his pulses with their beat; they were there again at night, to
hurry him through the bleak and flaring gas-lit streets to bed.
They left their mark on every windward street or fence or gable, on
the outlying sand dunes; they lashed the slow coasters home, and
hurried them to sea again; they whipped the bay into turbulence on
their way to Contra Costa, whose level shoreland oaks they had
trimmed to windward as cleanly and sharply as with a pruning-
shears.  Untiring themselves, they allowed no laggards; they drove
the San Franciscan from the wall against which he would have
leaned, from the scant shade in which at noontide he might have
rested.  They turned his smallest fires into conflagrations, and
kept him ever alert, watchful, and eager.  In return, they
scavenged his city and held it clean and wholesome; in summer they
brought him the soft sea-fog for a few hours to soothe his abraded
surfaces; in winter they brought the rains and dashed the whole
coast-line with flowers, and the staring sky above it with soft,
unwonted clouds.  They were always there--strong, vigilant,
relentless, material, unyielding, triumphant.





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Under the Redwoods by Bret Harte

