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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation, by Harte
+#25 in our series by Bret Harte
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+Title:  Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation
+
+Author:  Bret Harte
+
+March, 2001  [Etext #2556]
+[Date last updated: October 20, 2005]
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation, by Harte
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+
+MR. JACK HAMLIN'S MEDIATION
+
+by
+
+Bret Harte
+
+
+From: "ARGONAUT EDITION" OF THE WORKS OF BRET HARTE, VOL. 12.
+
+P. F. COLLIER & SON
+
+NEW YORK
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+MR. JACK HAMLIN'S MEDIATION
+
+THE MAN AT THE SEMAPHORE
+
+AN ESMERALDA OF ROCKY CANYON
+
+DICK SPINDLER'S FAMILY CHRISTMAS
+
+WHEN THE WATERS WERE UP AT "JULES'"
+
+THE BOOM IN THE "CALAVERAS CLARION"
+
+THE SECRET OF SOBRIENTE'S WELL
+
+LIBERTY JONES'S DISCOVERY
+
+
+
+
+MR. JACK HAMLIN'S MEDIATION
+
+
+At nightfall it began to rain.  The wind arose too, and also began
+to buffet a small, struggling, nondescript figure, creeping along
+the trail over the rocky upland meadow towards Rylands's rancho.
+At times its head was hidden in what appeared to be wings thrown
+upward from its shoulders; at times its broad-brimmed hat was
+cocked jauntily on one side, and again the brim was fixed over the
+face like a visor.  At one moment a drifting misshapen mass of
+drapery, at the next its vague garments, beaten back hard against
+the figure, revealed outlines far too delicate for that rude
+enwrapping.  For it was Mrs. Rylands herself, in her husband's hat
+and her "hired man's" old blue army overcoat, returning from the
+post-office two miles away.  The wind continued its aggression
+until she reached the front door of her newly plastered farmhouse,
+and then a heavier blast shook the pines above the low-pitched,
+shingled roof, and sent a shower of arrowy drops after her like a
+Parthian parting, as she entered.  She threw aside the overcoat and
+hat, and somewhat inconsistently entered the sitting-room, to walk
+to the window and look back upon the path she had just traversed.
+The wind and the rain swept down a slope, half meadow, half
+clearing,--a mile away,--to a fringe of sycamores.  A mile further
+lay the stage road, where, three hours later, her husband would
+alight on his return from Sacramento.  It would be a long wet walk
+for Joshua Rylands, as their only horse had been borrowed by a
+neighbor.
+
+In that fading light Mrs. Rylands's oval cheek was shining still
+from the raindrops, but there was something in the expression of
+her worried face that might have as readily suggested tears.  She
+was strikingly handsome, yet quite as incongruous an ornament to
+her surroundings as she had been to her outer wrappings a moment
+ago.  Even the clothes she now stood in hinted an inadaptibility to
+the weather--the house--the position she occupied in it.  A figured
+silk dress, spoiled rather than overworn, was still of a quality
+inconsistent with her evident habits, and the lace-edged petticoat
+that peeped beneath it was draggled with mud and unaccustomed
+usage.  Her glossy black hair, which had been tossed into curls in
+some foreign fashion, was now wind-blown into a burlesque of it.
+This incongruity was still further accented by the appearance of
+the room she had entered.  It was coldly and severely furnished,
+making the chill of the yet damp white plaster unpleasantly
+obvious.  A black harmonium organ stood in one corner, set out with
+black and white hymn-books; a trestle-like table contained a large
+Bible; half a dozen black, horsehair-cushioned chairs stood,
+geometrically distant, against the walls, from which hung four
+engravings of "Paradise Lost" in black mourning frames; some dried
+ferns and autumn leaves stood in a vase on the mantelpiece, as if
+the chill of the room had prematurely blighted them.  The coldly
+glittering grate below was also decorated with withered sprays, as
+if an attempt had been made to burn them, but was frustrated
+through damp.  Suddenly recalled to a sense of her wet boots and
+the new carpet, she hurriedly turned away, crossed the hall into
+the dining-room, and thence passed into the kitchen.  The "hired
+girl," a large-boned Missourian, a daughter of a neighboring
+woodman, was peeling potatoes at the table.  Mrs. Rylands drew a
+chair before the kitchen stove, and put her wet feet on the hob.
+
+"I'll bet a cooky, Mess Rylands, you've done forgot the vanillar,"
+said the girl, with a certain domestic and confidential familiarity.
+
+Mrs. Rylands started guiltily.  She made a miserable feint of
+looking in her lap and on the table.  "I'm afraid I did, Jane, if I
+didn't bring it in HERE."
+
+"That you didn't," returned Jane.  "And I reckon ye forgot that 'ar
+pepper-sauce for yer husband."
+
+Mrs. Rylands looked up with piteous contrition.  "I really don't
+know what's the matter with me.  I certainly went into the shop,
+and had it on my list,--and--really"--
+
+Jane evidently knew her mistress, and smiled with superior
+toleration.  "It's kinder bewilderin' goin' in them big shops, and
+lookin' round them stuffed shelves."  The shop at the cross roads
+and post-office was 14 x 14, but Jane was nurtured on the plains.
+"Anyhow," she added good-humoredly, "the expressman is sure to look
+in as he goes by, and you've time to give him the order."
+
+"But is he SURE to come?" asked Mrs. Rylands anxiously.  "Mr.
+Rylands will be so put out without his pepper-sauce."
+
+"He's sure to come ef he knows you're here.  Ye kin always
+kalkilate on that."
+
+"Why?" said Mrs. Rylands abstractedly.
+
+"Why? 'cause he just can't keep his eyes off ye!  That's why he
+comes every day,--'tain't jest for trade!"
+
+This was quite true, not only of the expressman, but of the butcher
+and baker, and the "candlestick-maker," had there been so advanced
+a vocation at the cross roads.  All were equally and curiously
+attracted by her picturesque novelty.  Mrs. Rylands knew this
+herself, but without vanity or coquettishness.  Possibly that was
+why the other woman told her.  She only slightly deepened the lines
+of discontent in her cheek and said abstractedly, "Well, when he
+comes, YOU ask him."
+
+She dried her shoes, put on a pair of slippers that had a faded
+splendor about them, and went up to her bedroom.  Here she
+hesitated for some time between the sewing-machine and her
+knitting-needles, but finally settled upon the latter, and a pair
+of socks for her husband which she had begun a year ago.  But she
+presently despaired of finishing them before he returned, three
+hours hence, and so applied herself to the sewing-machine.  For a
+little while its singing hum was heard between the blasts that
+shook the house, but the thread presently snapped, and the machine
+was put aside somewhat impatiently, with a discontented drawing of
+the lines around her handsome mouth.  Then she began to "tidy" the
+room, putting a great many things away and bringing out a great
+many more, a process that was necessarily slow, owing to her
+falling into attitudes of minute inspection of certain articles of
+dress, with intervals of trying them on, and observing their effect
+in her mirror.  This kind of interruption also occurred while she
+was putting away some books that were lying about on chairs and
+tables, stopping midway to open their pages, becoming interested,
+and quite finishing one chapter, with the book held close against
+the window to catch the fading light of day.  The feminine reader
+will gather from this that Mrs. Rylands, though charming, was not
+facile in domestic duties.  She had just glanced at the clock, and
+lit the candle to again set herself to work, and thus bridge over
+the two hours more of waiting, when there came a tap at the door.
+She opened it to Jane.
+
+"There's an entire stranger downstairs, ez hez got a lame hoss and
+wants to borry a fresh one."
+
+"We have none, you know," said Mrs. Rylands, a little impatiently.
+
+"Thet's what I told him.  Then he wanted to know ef he could lie by
+here till he could get one or fix up his own hoss."
+
+"As you like; you know if you can manage it," said Mrs. Rylands, a
+little uneasily.  "When Mr. Rylands comes you can arrange it
+between you.  Where is he now?"
+
+"In the kitchen."
+
+"The kitchen!" echoed Mrs. Rylands.
+
+"Yes, ma'am, I showed him into the parlor, but he kinder shivered
+his shoulders, and reckoned ez how he'd go inter the kitchen.  Ye
+see, ma'am, he was all wet, and his shiny big boots was sloppy.
+But he ain't one o' the stuck-up kind, and he's willin' to make
+hisself cowf'ble before the kitchen stove."
+
+"Well, then, he don't want ME," said Mrs. Rylands, with a relieved
+voice.
+
+"Yes'm," said Jane, apparently equally relieved.  "Only, I thought
+I'd just tell you."
+
+A few minutes later, in crossing the upper hall, Mrs. Rylands heard
+Jane's voice from the kitchen raised in rustic laughter.  Had she
+been satirically inclined, she might have understood Jane's
+willingness to relieve her mistress of the duty of entertaining the
+stranger; had she been philosophical, she might have considered the
+girl's dreary, monotonous life at the rancho, and made allowance
+for her joy at this rare interruption of it.  But I fear that Mrs.
+Rylands was neither satirical nor philosophical, and presently,
+when Jane reentered, with color in her alkaline face, and light in
+her huckleberry eyes, and said she was going over to the cattle-
+sheds in the "far pasture," to see if the hired man didn't know of
+some horse that could be got for the stranger, Mrs. Rylands felt a
+little bitterness in the thought that the girl would have scarcely
+volunteered to go all that distance in the rain for HER.  Yet, in a
+few moments she forgot all about it, and even the presence of her
+guest in the house, and in one of her fitful abstracted employments
+passed through the dining-room into the kitchen, and had opened the
+door with an "Oh, Jane!" before she remembered her absence.
+
+The kitchen, lit by a single candle, could be only partly seen by
+her as she stood with her hand on the lock, although she herself
+was plainly visible.  There was a pause, and then a quiet, self-
+possessed, yet amused, voice answered:--
+
+"My name isn't Jane, and if you're the lady of the house, I reckon
+yours wasn't ALWAYS Rylands."
+
+At the sound of the voice Mrs. Rylands threw the door wide open,
+and as her eyes fell upon the speaker--her unknown guest--she
+recoiled with a little cry, and a white, startled face.  Yet the
+stranger was young and handsome, dressed with a scrupulousness and
+elegance which even the stress of travel had not deranged, and he
+was looking at her with a smile of recognition, mingled with that
+careless audacity and self-possession which seemed to be the
+characteristic of his face.
+
+"Jack Hamlin!" she gasped.
+
+"That's me, all the time," he responded easily, "and YOU'RE Nell
+Montgomery!"
+
+"How did you know I was here?  Who told you?" she said impetuously.
+
+"Nobody! never was so surprised in my life!  When you opened that
+door just now you might have knocked me down with a feather."  Yet
+he spoke lazily, with an amused face, and looked at her without
+changing his position.
+
+"But you MUST have known SOMETHING!  It was no mere accident," she
+went on vehemently, glancing around the room.
+
+"That's where you slip up, Nell," said Hamlin imperturbably.  "It
+WAS an accident and a bad one.  My horse lamed himself coming down
+the grade.  I sighted the nearest shanty, where I thought I might
+get another horse.  It happened to be this."  For the first time he
+changed his attitude, and leaned back contemplatively in his chair.
+
+She came towards him quickly.  "You didn't use to lie, Jack," she
+said hesitatingly.
+
+"Couldn't afford it in my business,--and can't now," said Jack
+cheerfully.  "But," he added curiously, as if recognizing something
+in his companion's agitation, and lifting his brown lashes to her,
+the window, and the ceiling, "what's all this about?  What's your
+little game here?"
+
+"I'm married," she said, with nervous intensity,--"married, and
+this is my husband's house!"
+
+"Not married straight out!--regularly fixed?"
+
+"Yes," she said hurriedly.
+
+"One of the boys?  Don't remember any Rylands.  SPELTER used to be
+very sweet on you,--but Spelter mightn't have been his real name?"
+
+"None of our lot!  No one you ever knew; a--a straight out, square
+man," she said quickly.
+
+"I say, Nell, look here!  You ought to have shown up your cards
+without even a call.  You ought to have told him that you danced at
+the Casino."
+
+"I did."
+
+"Before he asked you to marry him?"
+
+"Before."
+
+Jack got up from his chair, put his hands in his pockets, and
+looked at her curiously.  This Nell Montgomery, this music-hall
+"dance and song girl," this girl of whom so much had been SAID and
+so little PROVED!  Well, this was becoming interesting.
+
+"You don't understand," she said, with nervous feverishness; "you
+remember after that row I had with Jim, that night the manager gave
+us a supper,--when he treated me like a dog?"
+
+"He did that," interrupted Jack.
+
+"I felt fit for anything," she said, with a half-hysterical laugh,
+that seemed voiced, however, to check some slumbering memory.  "I'd
+have cut my throat or his, it didn't matter which"--
+
+"It mattered something to us, Nell," put in Jack again, with polite
+parenthesis; "don't leave US out in the cold."
+
+"I started from 'Frisco that night on the boat ready to fling
+myself into anything--or the river!" she went on hurriedly.  "There
+was a man in the cabin who noticed me, and began to hang around.  I
+thought he knew who I was,--had seen me on the posters; and as I
+didn't feel like foolin', I told him so.  But he wasn't that kind.
+He said he saw I was in trouble and wanted me to tell him all."
+
+Mr. Hamlin regarded her cheerfully.  "And you told him," he said,
+"how you had once run away from your childhood's happy home to go
+on the stage!  How you always regretted it, and would have gone
+back but that the doors were shut forever against you!  How you
+longed to leave, but the wicked men and women around you always"--
+
+"I didn't!" she burst out, with sudden passion; "you know I didn't.
+I told him everything: who I was, what I had done, what I expected
+to do again.  I pointed out the men--who were sitting there,
+whispering and grinning at us, as if they were in the front row of
+the theatre--and said I knew them all, and they knew me.  I never
+spared myself a thing.  I said what people said of me, and didn't
+even care to say it wasn't true!"
+
+"Oh, come!" protested Jack, in perfunctory politeness.
+
+"He said he liked me for telling the truth, and not being ashamed
+to do it!  He said the sin was in the false shame and the hypocrisy;
+for that's the sort of man he is, you see, and that's like him
+always!  He asked if I would marry him--out of hand--and do my best
+to be his lawful wife.  He said he wanted me to think it over and
+sleep on it, and to-morrow he would come and see me for an answer.
+I slipped off the boat at 'Frisco, and went alone to a hotel where I
+wasn't known.  In the morning I didn't know whether he'd keep his
+word or I'd keep mine.  But he came!  He said he'd marry me that
+very day, and take me to his farm in Santa Clara.  I agreed.  I
+thought it would take me out of everybody's knowledge, and they'd
+think me dead!  We were married that day, before a regular
+clergyman.  I was married under my own name,"--she stopped and
+looked at Jack, with a hysterical laugh,--"but he made me write
+underneath it, 'known as Nell Montgomery;' for he said HE wasn't
+ashamed of it, nor should I be."
+
+"Does he wear long hair and stick straws in it?" said Hamlin
+gravely.  "Does he 'hear voices' and have 'visions'?"
+
+"He's a shrewd, sensible, hard-working man,--no more mad than you
+are, nor as mad as I was the day I married him.  He's lived up to
+everything he's said."  She stopped, hesitated in her quick,
+nervous speech; her lip quivered slightly, but she recalled
+herself, and looking imploringly, yet hopelessly, at Jack, gasped,
+"And that's what's the matter!"
+
+Jack fixed his eyes keenly upon her.  "And you?" he said curtly.
+
+"I?" she repeated wonderingly.
+
+"Yes, what have YOU done?" he said, with sudden sharpness.
+
+The wonder was so apparent in her eyes that his keen glance
+softened.  "Why," she said bewilderingly, "I have been his dog, his
+slave,--as far as he would let me.  I have done everything; I have
+not been out of the house until he almost drove me out.  I have
+never wanted to go anywhere or see any one; but he has always
+insisted upon it.  I would have been willing to slave here, day and
+night, and have been happy.  But he said I must not seem to be
+ashamed of my past, when he is not.  I would have worn common
+homespun clothes and calico frocks, and been glad of it, but he
+insists upon my wearing my best things, even my theatre things; and
+as he can't afford to buy more, I wear these things I had.  I know
+they look beastly here, and that I'm a laughing-stock, and when I
+go out I wear almost anything to try and hide them; but," her lip
+quivered dangerously again, "he wants me to do it, and it pleases
+him."
+
+Jack looked down.  After a pause he lifted his lashes towards her
+draggled skirt, and said in an easier, conversational tone, "Yes!
+I thought I knew that dress.  I gave it to you for that walking
+scene in 'High Life,' didn't I?"
+
+"No," she said quickly, "it was the blue one with silver trimming,--
+don't you remember?  I tried to turn it the first year I was
+married, but it never looked the same."
+
+"It was sweetly pretty," said Jack encouragingly, "and with that
+blue hat lined with silver, it was just fetching!  Somehow I don't
+quite remember this one," and he looked at it critically.
+
+"I had it at the races in '58, and that supper Judge Boompointer
+gave us at 'Frisco where Colonel Fish upset the table trying to get
+at Jim.  Do you know," she said, with a little laugh, "it's got the
+stains of the champagne on it yet; it never would come off.  See!"
+and she held the candle with great animation to the breadth of silk
+before her.
+
+"And there's more of it on the sleeve," said Jack; "isn't there?"
+
+Mrs. Rylands looked reproachfully at Jack.
+
+"That isn't champagne; don't you know what it is?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"It's blood," she said gravely; "when that Mexican cut poor Ned so
+bad,--don't you remember?  I held his head upon my arm while you
+bandaged him."  She heaved a little sigh, and then added, with a
+faint laugh, "That's the worst thing about the clothes of a girl in
+the profession, they get spoiled or stained before they wear out."
+
+This large truth did not seem to impress Mr. Hamlin.  "Why did you
+leave Santa Clara?" he said abruptly, in his previous critical
+tone.
+
+"Because of the folks there.  They were standoffish and ugly.  You
+see, Josh"--
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Josh Rylands!--HIM!  He told everybody who I was, even those who
+had never seen me in the bills,--how good I was to marry him, how
+he had faith in me and wasn't ashamed,--until they didn't believe
+we were married at all.  So they looked another way when they met
+us, and didn't call.  And all the while I was glad they didn't, but
+he wouldn't believe it, and allowed I was pining on account of it."
+
+"And were you?"
+
+"I swear to God, Jack, I'd have been content, and more, to have
+been just there with him, seein' nobody, letting every one believe
+I was dead and gone, but he said it was wrong, and weak!  Maybe it
+was," she added, with a shy, interrogating look at Jack, of which,
+however, he took no notice.  "Then when he found they wouldn't
+call, what do you think he did?"
+
+"Beat you, perhaps," suggested Jack cheerfully.
+
+"He never did a thing to me that wasn't straight out, square, and
+kind," she said, half indignantly, half hopelessly.  "He thought if
+HIS kind of people wouldn't see me, I might like to see my own
+sort.  So without saying anything to me, he brought down, of all
+things! Tinkie Clifford, she that used to dance in the cheap
+variety shows at 'Frisco, and her particular friend, Captain Sykes.
+It would have just killed you, Jack," she said, with a sudden
+hysteric burst of laughter, "to have seen Josh, in his square,
+straight-out way, trying to be civil and help things along.  But,"
+she went on, as suddenly relapsing into her former attitude of
+worried appeal, "I couldn't stand it, and when she got to talking
+free and easy before Josh, and Captain Sykes to guzzling champagne,
+she and me had a row.  She allowed I was putting on airs, and I
+made her walk, in spite of Josh."
+
+"And Josh seemed to like it," said Hamlin carelessly.  "Has he seen
+her since?"
+
+"No; I reckon he's cured of asking that kind of company for me.
+And then we came here.  But I persuaded him not to begin by going
+round telling people who I was,--as he did the last time,--but to
+leave it to folks to find out if they wanted to, and he gave in.
+Then he let me fix up this house and furnish it my own way, and I
+did!"
+
+"Do you mean to say that YOU fixed up that family vault of a
+sitting-room?" said Jack, in horror.
+
+"Yes, I didn't want any fancy furniture or looking-glasses, and
+such like, to attract folks, nor anything to look like the old
+times.  I don't think any of the boys would care to come here.  And
+I got rid of a lot of sporting travelers, 'wild-cat' managers, and
+that kind of tramp in this way.  But"--  She hesitated, and her
+face fell again.
+
+"But what?" said Jack.
+
+"I don't think that Josh likes it either.  He brought home the
+other day 'My Johnny is a Shoemakiyure,' and wanted me to try it on
+the organ.  But it reminded me how we used to get just sick of
+singing it on and off the boards, and I couldn't touch it.  He
+wanted me to go to the circus that was touring over at the cross
+roads, but it was the old Flanigin's circus, you know, the one
+Gussie Riggs used to ride in, with its old clown and its old
+ringmaster and the old 'wheezes,' and I chucked it."
+
+"Look here," said Jack, rising and surveying Mrs. Rylands
+critically.  "If you go on at this gait, I'll tell you what that
+man of yours will do.  He'll bolt with some of your old friends!"
+
+She turned a quick, scared face upon him for an instant.  But only
+for an instant.  Her hysteric little laugh returned, at once,
+followed by her weary, worried look.  "No, Jack, you don't know
+him!  If it was only that!  He cares only for me in his own way,--
+and," she stammered as she went on, "I've no luck in making him
+happy."
+
+She stopped.  The wind shook the house and fired a volley of rain
+against the windows.  She took advantage of it to draw a torn lace-
+edged handkerchief from her pocket behind, and keeping the tail of
+her eyes in a frightened fashion on Jack, applied the handkerchief
+furtively, first to her nose, and then to her eyes.
+
+"Don't do that," said Jack fastidiously, "it's wet enough outside."
+Nevertheless, he stood up and gazed at her.
+
+"Well," he began.
+
+She timidly drew nearer to him, and took a seat on the kitchen
+table, looking up wistfully into his eyes.
+
+"Well," resumed Jack argumentatively, "if he won't 'chuck' you, why
+don't you 'chuck' HIM?"
+
+She turned quite white, and suddenly dropped her eyes.  "Yes," she
+said, almost inaudibly, "lots of girls would do that."
+
+"I don't mean go back to your old life," continued Jack.  "I reckon
+you've had enough of that.  But get into some business, you know,
+like other women.  A bonnet shop, or a candy shop for children,
+see?  I'll help start you.  I've got a couple of hundred, if not in
+my own pocket in somebody's else, just burning to be used!  And
+then you can look about you; and perhaps some square business man
+will turn up and you can marry him.  You know you can't live this
+way, nohow.  It's killing you; it ain't fair on you, nor on Rylands
+either."
+
+"No," she said quickly, "it ain't fair on HIM.  I know it, I know
+it isn't, I know it isn't," she repeated, "only"--  She stopped.
+
+"Only what?" said Jack impatiently.
+
+She did not speak.  After a pause she picked up the rolling-pin
+from the table and began absently rolling it down her lap to her
+knee, as if pressing out the stained silk skirt.  "Only," she
+stammered, slowly rolling the pin handles in her open palms, "I--I
+can't leave Josh."
+
+"Why can't you?" said Jack quickly.
+
+"Because--because--I," she went on, with a quivering lip, working
+the rolling-pin heavily down her knee as if she were crushing her
+answer out of it,--"because--I--love him!"
+
+There was a pause, a dash of rain against the window, and another
+dash from her eyes upon her hands, the rolling-pin, and the skirts
+she had gathered up hastily, as she cried, "O Jack! Jack! I never
+loved anybody like him!  I never knew what love was!  I never knew
+a man like him before!  There never WAS one before!"
+
+To this large, comprehensive, and passionate statement Mr. Jack
+Hamlin made no reply.  An audacity so supreme had conquered his.
+He walked to the window, looked out upon the dark, rain-filmed pane
+that, however, reflected no equal change in his own dark eyes, and
+then returned and walked round the kitchen table.  When he was at
+her back, without looking at her, he reached out his hand, took her
+passive one that lay on the table in his, grasped it heartily for a
+single moment, laid it gently down, and returned around the table,
+where he again confronted her cheerfully face to face.
+
+"You'll make the riffle yet," he said quietly.  "Just now I don't
+see what I could do, or where I could chip in your little game; but
+if I DO, or you do, count me in and let me know.  You know where to
+write,--my old address at Sacramento."  He walked to the corner,
+took up his still wet serape, threw it over his shoulders, and
+picked up his broad-brimmed riding-hat.
+
+"You're not going, Jack?" she said hesitatingly, as she rubbed her
+wet eyes into a consciousness of his movements.  "You'll wait to
+see HIM?  He'll be here in an hour."
+
+"I've been here too long already," said Jack.  "And the less you
+say about my calling, even accidentally, the better.  Nobody will
+believe it,--YOU didn't yourself.  In fact, unless you see how I
+can help you, the sooner you consider us all dead and buried, the
+sooner your luck will change.  Tell your girl I've found my own
+horse so much better that I have pushed on with him, and give her
+that."
+
+He threw a gold coin on the table.
+
+"But your horse is still lame," she said wonderingly.  "What will
+you do in this storm?"
+
+"Get into the cover of the next wood and camp out.  I've done it
+before."
+
+"But, Jack!"
+
+He suddenly made a slight gesture of warning.  His quick ear had
+caught the approach of footsteps along the wet gravel outside.  A
+mischievous light slid into his dark eyes as he coolly moved
+backward to the door and, holding it open, said, in a remarkably
+clear and distinct voice:--
+
+"Yes, as you say, society is becoming very mixed and frivolous
+everywhere, and you'd scarcely know San Francisco now.  So
+delighted, however, to have made your acquaintance, and regret my
+business prevents my waiting to see your good husband.  So odd that
+I should have known your Aunt Jemima!  But, as you say, the world
+is very small, after all.  I shall tell the deacon how well you are
+looking,--in spite of the kitchen smoke in your eyes.  Good-by!  A
+thousand thanks for your hospitality."
+
+And Jack, bowing profoundly to the ground, backed out upon Jane,
+the hired man, and the expressman, treading, I grieve to say, with
+some deliberation upon the toes of the two latter, in order,
+possibly, that in their momentary pain and discomposure they might
+not scan too closely the face of this ingenious gentleman, as he
+melted into the night and the storm.
+
+Jane entered, with a slight toss of her head.
+
+"Here's your expressman,--ef you're wantin' him NOW."
+
+Mrs. Rylands was too preoccupied to notice her handmaiden's
+significant emphasis, as she indicated a fresh-looking, bashful
+young fellow, whose confusion was evidently heightened by the
+unexpected egress of Mr. Hamlin, and the point-blank presence of
+the handsome Mrs. Rylands.
+
+"Oh, certainly," said Mrs. Rylands quickly.  "So kind of him to
+oblige us.  Give him the order, Jane, please."
+
+She turned to escape from the kitchen and these new intruders, when
+her eye fell upon the coin left by Mr. Hamlin.  "The gentleman
+wished you to take that for your trouble, Jane," she said hastily,
+pointing to it, and passed out.
+
+Jane cast a withering look after her retreating skirts, and picking
+the coin from the table, turned to the hired man.  "Run to the
+stable after that dandified young feller, Dick, and hand that back
+to him.  Ye kin say that Jane Mackinnon don't run arrants fur
+money, nor play gooseberry to other folks fur fun."
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+Mr. Joshua Rylands had, according to the vocabulary of his class,
+"found grace" at the age of sixteen, while still in the spiritual
+state of "original sin" and the political one of Missouri.  He had
+not indeed found it by persistent youthful seeking or spiritual
+insight, but somewhat violently and turbulently at a camp-meeting.
+A village boy, naturally gentle and impressible, with an original
+character,--limited, however, in education and experience,--he had,
+after his first rustic debauch with some vulgar companions, fallen
+upon the camp-meeting in reckless audacity; and instead of being
+handed over to the district constable, was taken in and placed upon
+"the anxious bench," "rastled with," and exhorted by a strong
+revivalist preacher, "convicted of sin," and--converted!  It is
+doubtful if the shame of a public arrest and legal punishment would
+have impressed his youthful spirit as much as did this spiritual
+examination and trial, in which he himself became accuser.
+Howbeit, its effect, though punitive, was also exemplary.  He at
+once cast off his evil companions; remaining faithful to his
+conversion, in spite of their later "backslidings."  When, after
+the Western fashion, the time came for him to forsake his father's
+farm and seek a new "quarter section" on some more remote frontier,
+he carried into that secluded, lonely, half-monkish celibacy of
+pioneer life--which has been the foundation of so much strong
+Western character--more than the usual religious feeling.  At once
+industrious and adventurous, he lived by "the Word," as he called
+it, and Nature as he knew it,--tempted by none of the vices or
+sentiments of civilization.  When he finally joined the Californian
+emigration, it was not as a gold-seeker, but as a discoverer of new
+agricultural fields; if the hardship was as great and the rewards
+fewer, he nevertheless knew that he retained his safer isolation
+and independence of spirit.  Vice and civilization were to him
+synonymous terms; it was the natural condition of the worldly and
+unregenerate.  Such was the man who chanced to meet "Nell
+Montgomery, the Pearl of the Variety Stage," on the Sacramento
+boat, in one of his forced visits to civilization.  Without knowing
+her in her profession, her frank exposition of herself did not
+startle him; he recognized it, accepted it, and strove to convert
+it.  And as long as this daughter of Folly forsook her evil ways
+for him, it was a triumph in which there was no shame, and might be
+proclaimed from the housetop.  When his neighbors thought
+differently, and avoided them, he saw no inconsistency in bringing
+his wife's old friends to divert her: she might in time convert
+THEM.  He had no more fear of her returning to their ways than he
+had of himself "backsliding."  Narrow as was his creed, he had none
+of the harshness nor pessimism of the bigot.  With the keenest
+self-scrutiny, his credulity regarding others was touching.
+
+The storm was still raging when he alighted that evening from the
+up coach at the trail nearest his house.  Although incumbered with
+a heavy carpet-bag, he started resignedly on his two-mile tramp
+without begrudging the neighborly act of his wife which had
+deprived him of his horse.  It was "like her" to do these things in
+her good-humored abstraction, an abstraction, however, that
+sometimes worried him, from the fear that it indicated some
+unhappiness with her present lot.  He was longing to rejoin her
+after his absence of three days, the longest time they had been
+separated since their marriage, and he hurried on with a certain
+lover-like excitement, quite new to his usually calm and temperate
+blood.
+
+Struggling with the storm and darkness, but always with the happy
+consciousness of drawing nearer to her in that struggle, he labored
+on, finding his perilous way over the indistinguishable trail by
+certain landmarks in the distance, visible only to his pioneer eye.
+That heavier shadow to the right was not the hillside, but the
+SLOPE to the distant hill; that low, regular line immediately
+before him was not a fence or wall, but the line of distant
+gigantic woods, a mile from his home.  Yet as he began to descend
+the slope towards the wood, he stopped and rubbed his eyes.  There
+was distinctly a light in it.  His first idea was that he had lost
+the trail and was nearing the woodman Mackinnon's cabin.  But a
+more careful scrutiny revealed to him that it was really the wood,
+and the light was a camp-fire.  It was a rough night for camping
+out, but they were probably some belated prospectors.
+
+When he had reached the fringe of woodland, he could see quite
+plainly that the fire was built beside one of the large pines, and
+that the little encampment, which looked quite comfortable and
+secluded from the storm-beaten trail, was occupied apparently by a
+single figure.  By the good glow of the leaping fire, that figure
+standing erect before it, elegantly shaped, in the graceful folds
+of a serape, looked singularly romantic and picturesque, and
+reminded Joshua Rylands--whose ideas of art were purely reminiscent
+of boyish reading--of some picture in a novel.  The heavy black
+columns of the pines, glancing out of the concave shadow, also
+seemed a fitting background to what might have been a scene in a
+play.  So strongly was he impressed by it that but for his anxiety
+to reach his home, still a mile distant, and the fact that he was
+already late, he would have penetrated the wood and the seclusion
+of the stranger with an offer of hospitality for the night.  The
+man, however, was evidently capable of taking care of himself, and
+the outline of a tethered horse was faintly visible under another
+tree.  It might be a surveyor or engineer,--the only men of a
+better class who were itinerant.
+
+But another and even greater surprise greeted him as he toiled up
+the rocky slope towards his farmhouse.  The windows of the sitting-
+room, which were usually blank and black by night, were glittering
+with unfamiliar light.  Like most farmers, he seldom used the room
+except for formal company, his wife usually avoiding it, and even
+he himself now preferred the dining-room or the kitchen.  His first
+suggestion that his wife had visitors gave him a sense of pleasure
+on her account, mingled, however, with a slight uneasiness of his
+own which he could not account for.  More than that, as he
+approached nearer he could hear the swell of the organ above the
+roar of the swaying pines, and the cadences were not of a
+devotional character.  He hesitated for a moment, as he had
+hesitated at the fire in the woods; yet it was surely his own
+house!  He hurried to the door, opened it; not only the light of
+the sitting-room streamed into the hall, but the ruddier glow of an
+actual fire in the disused grate!  The familiar dark furniture had
+been rearranged to catch some of the glow and relieve its
+sombreness.  And his wife, rising from the music-stool, was the
+room's only occupant!
+
+Mrs. Rylands gazed anxiously and timidly at her husband's
+astonished face, as he threw off his waterproof and laid down his
+carpet-bag.  Her own face was a little flurried with excitement,
+and his, half hidden in his tawny beard, and, possibly owing to his
+self-introspective nature, never spontaneously sympathetic, still
+expressed only wonder!  Mrs. Rylands was a little frightened.  It
+is sometimes dangerous to meddle with a man's habits, even when he
+has grown weary of them.
+
+"I thought," she began hesitatingly, "that it would be more
+cheerful for you in here, this stormy evening.  I thought you might
+like to put your wet things to dry in the kitchen, and we could sit
+here together, after supper, alone."
+
+I am afraid that Mrs. Rylands did not offer all her thoughts.  Ever
+since Mr. Hamlin's departure she had been uneasy and excited,
+sometimes falling into fits of dejection, and again lighting up
+into hysterical levity; at other times carefully examining her
+wardrobe, and then with a sudden impulse rushing downstairs again
+to give orders for her husband's supper, and to make the
+extraordinary changes in the sitting-room already noted.  Only a
+few moments before he arrived, she had covertly brought down a
+piece of music, and put aside the hymn-books, and taken, with a
+little laugh, a pack of cards from her pocket, which she placed
+behind the already dismantled vase on the chimney.
+
+"I reckoned you had company, Ellen," he said gravely, kissing her.
+
+"No," she said quickly.  "That is," she stopped with a sudden surge
+of color in her face that startled her, "there was--a man--here, in
+the kitchen--who had a lame horse, and who wanted to get a fresh
+one.  But he went away an hour ago.  And he wasn't in this room--at
+least, after it was fixed up.  So I've had no company."
+
+She felt herself again blushing at having blushed, and a little
+terrified.  There was no reason for it.  But for Jack's warning,
+she would have been quite ready to tell her husband all.  She had
+never blushed before him over her past life; why she should now
+blush over seeing Jack, of all people! made her utter a little
+hysterical laugh.  I am afraid that this experienced little woman
+took it for granted that her husband knew that if Jack or any man
+had been there as a clandestine lover, she would not have blushed
+at all.  Yet with all her experience, she did not know that she had
+blushed simply because it was to Jack that she had confessed that
+she loved the man before her.  Her husband noted the blush as part
+of her general excitement.  He permitted her to drag him into the
+room and seat him before the hearth, where she sank down on one
+knee to pull off his heavy rubber boots.  But he waved her aside at
+this, pulled them off with his own hands, and let her take them to
+the kitchen and bring back his slippers.  By this time a smile had
+lighted up his hard face.  The room was certainly more comfortable
+and cheerful.  Still he was a little worried; was there not in
+these changes a falling away from the grace of self-abnegation
+which she had so sedulously practiced?
+
+When supper was served by Jane, in the dull dining-room, Mr.
+Rylands, had he not been more engaged in these late domestic
+changes, might have noticed that the Missouri girl waited upon him
+with a certain commiserating air that was remarkable by its
+contrast with the frigid ceremonious politeness with which she
+attended her mistress.  It had not escaped Mrs. Rylands, however,
+who ever since Jack's abrupt departure had noticed this change in
+the girl's demeanor to herself, and with a woman's intuitive
+insight of another woman, had fathomed it.  The comfortable tete-a-
+tete with Jack, which Jane had looked forward to, Mrs. Rylands had
+anticipated herself, and then sent him off!  When Joshua thanked
+his wife for remembering the pepper-sauce, and Mrs. Rylands
+pathetically admitted her forgetfulness, the head-toss which Jane
+gave as she left the room was too marked to be overlooked by him.
+Mrs. Rylands gave a hysterical little laugh.  "I am afraid Jane
+doesn't like my sending away the expressman just after I had also
+dismissed the stranger whom she had taken a fancy to, and left her
+without company," she said unwisely.
+
+Mr. Rylands did not laugh.  "I reckon," he returned slowly, "that
+Jane must feel kinder lonely; she bears all the burden of our bein'
+outer the world, without any of our glory in the cause of it."
+
+Nevertheless, when supper was over, and the pair were seated in the
+sitting-room before the fire, this episode was forgotten.  Mrs.
+Rylands produced her husband's pipe and tobacco-pouch.  He looked
+around the formal walls and hesitated.  He had been in the habit of
+smoking in the kitchen.
+
+"Why not here?" said Mrs. Rylands, with a sudden little note of
+decision.  "Why should we keep this room only for company that
+don't come?  I call it silly."
+
+This struck Mr. Rylands as logical.  Besides, undoubtedly the fire
+had mellowed the room.  After a puff or two he looked at his wife
+musingly.  "Couldn't you make yourself one of them cigarettys, as
+they call 'em?  Here's the tobacco, and I'll get you the paper."
+
+"I COULD," she said tentatively.  Then suddenly, "What made you
+think of it?  You never saw ME smoke!"
+
+"No," said Rylands, "but that lady, your old friend, Miss Clifford,
+does, and I thought you might be hankering after it."
+
+"How do you know Tinkie Clifford smokes?" said Mrs. Rylands quickly.
+
+"She lit a cigaretty that day she called."
+
+"I hate it," said Mrs. Rylands shortly.
+
+Mr. Rylands nodded approval, and puffed meditatively.
+
+"Josh, have you seen that girl since?"
+
+"No," said Joshua.
+
+"Nor any other girl like her?"
+
+"No," said Joshua wonderingly.  "You see I only got to know her on
+your account, Ellen, that she might see you."
+
+"Well, don't you do it any more!  None of 'em!  Promise me!"  She
+leaned forward eagerly in her chair.
+
+"But Ellen,"--her husband began gravely.
+
+"I know what you're going to say, but they can't do me any good,
+and you can't do them any good as you did ME, so there!"
+
+Mr. Rylands was silent, and smiled meditatively.
+
+"Josh!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When you met me that night on the Sacramento boat, and looked at
+me, did you--did I," she hesitated,--"did you look at me because I
+had been crying?"
+
+"I thought you were troubled in spirit, and looked so."
+
+"I suppose I looked worried, of course; I had no time to change or
+even fix my hair; I had on that green dress, and it NEVER was
+becoming.  And you only spoke to me on account of my awful looks?"
+
+"I saw only your wrestling soul, Ellen, and I thought you needed
+comfort and help."
+
+She was silent for a moment, and then, leaning forward, picked up
+the poker and began to thrust it absently between the bars.
+
+"And if it had been some other girl crying and looking awful, you'd
+have spoken to her all the same?"
+
+This was a new idea to Mr. Rylands, but with most men logic is
+supreme.  "I suppose I would," he said slowly.
+
+"And married her?"  She rattled the bars of the grate with the
+poker as if to drown the inevitable reply.
+
+Mr. Rylands loved the woman before him, but it pleased him to think
+that he loved truth better.  "If it had been necessary to her
+salvation, yes," he said.
+
+"Not Tinkie?" she said suddenly.
+
+"SHE never would have been in your contrite condition."
+
+"Much you know!  Girls like that can cry as well as laugh, just as
+they want to.  Well!  I suppose I DID look horrid."  Nevertheless,
+she seemed to gain some gratification from her husband's reply, and
+changed the subject as if fearful of losing that satisfaction by
+further questioning.
+
+"I tried some of those songs you brought, but I don't think they go
+well with the harmonium," she said, pointing to some music on its
+rack, "except one.  Just listen."  She rose, and with the same
+nervous quickness she had shown before, went to the instrument and
+began to sing and play.  There was a hopeless incongruity between
+the character of the instrument and the spirit of the song.  Mrs.
+Rylands's voice was rather forced and crudely trained, but Joshua
+Rylands, sitting there comfortably slippered by the fire and
+conscious of the sheeted rain against the window, felt it good.
+Presently he arose, and lounging heavily over to the fair
+performer, leaned down and imprinted a kiss on the labyrinthine
+fringes of her hair.  At which Mrs. Rylands caught blindly at his
+hand nearest her, and without lifting her other hand from the keys,
+or her eyes from the music, said tentatively:--
+
+"You know there's a chorus just here!  Why can't you try it with
+me?"
+
+Mr. Rylands hesitated a moment, then, with a preliminary cough,
+lifted a voice as crude as hers, but powerful through much camp-
+meeting exercise, and roared a chorus which was remarkable chiefly
+for requiring that archness and playfulness in execution which he
+lacked.  As the whole house seemed to dilate with the sound, and
+the wind outside to withhold its fury, Mr. Rylands felt that
+physical delight which children feel in personal outcry, and was
+grateful to his wife for the opportunity.  Laying his hand
+affectionately on her shoulder, he noticed for the first time that
+she was in a kind of evening-dress, and that her delicate white
+shoulder shone through the black lace that enveloped it.
+
+For an instant Mr. Rylands was shocked at this unwonted exposure.
+He had never seen his wife in evening-dress before.  It was true
+they were alone, and in their own sitting-room, but the room was
+still invested with that formality and publicity which seemed to
+accent this indiscretion.  The simple-minded frontier man's mind
+went back to Jane, to the hired man, to the expressman, the
+stranger, all of whom might have noticed it also.
+
+"You have a new dress," he said slowly, "have you worn it all day?"
+
+"No," she said, with a timid smile.  "I only put it on just before
+you came.  It's the one I used to wear in the ballroom scene in
+'Gay Times in 'Frisco.'  You don't know it, I know.  I thought I
+would wear it tonight, and then," she suddenly grasped his hand,
+"you'll let me put all these things away forever!  Won't you, Josh?
+I've seen such nice pretty calico at the store to-day, and I can
+make up one or two home dresses, like Jane's, only better fitting,
+of course.  In fact, I asked them to send the roll up here to-
+morrow for you to see."
+
+Mr. Rylands felt relieved.  Perhaps his views had changed about the
+moral effect of her retaining these symbols of her past, for he
+consented to the calico dresses, not, however, without an inward
+suspicion that she would not look so well in them, and that the one
+she had on was more becoming.
+
+Meantime she tried another piece of music.  It was equally
+incongruous and slightly Bacchantic.
+
+"There used to be a mighty pretty dance went to that," she said,
+nodding her head in time with the music, and assisting the heavily
+spasmodic attempts of the instrument with the pleasant levity of
+her voice.  "I used to do it."
+
+"Ye might try it now, Ellen," suggested her husband, with a half-
+frightened, half-amused tolerance.
+
+"YOU play, then," said Mrs. Rylands quickly, offering her seat to
+him.
+
+Mr. Rylands sat down to the harmonium, as Mrs. Rylands briskly
+moved the table and chairs against the wall.  Mr. Rylands played
+slowly and strenuously, as from a conscientious regard of the
+instrument.  Mrs. Rylands stood in the centre of the floor, making
+a rather pretty, animated picture, as she again stimulated the
+heavy harmonium swell not only with her voice but her hands and
+feet.  Presently she began to skip.
+
+I should warn the reader here that this was before the "shawl" or
+"skirt" dancing was in vogue, and I am afraid that pretty Mrs.
+Rylands's performances would now be voted slow.  Her silk skirt and
+frilled petticoat were lifted just over her small ankles and tiny
+bronze-kid shoes.  In the course of a pirouette or two, there was a
+slight further revelation of blue silk stockings and some delicate
+embroidery, but really nothing more than may be seen in the sweep
+of a modern waltz.  Suddenly the music ceased.  Mr. Rylands had
+left the harmonium and walked over to the hearth.  Mrs. Rylands
+stopped, and came towards him with a flushed, anxious face.
+
+"It don't seem to go right, does it?" she said, with her nervous
+laugh.  "I suppose I'm getting too old now, and I don't quite
+remember it."
+
+"Better forget it altogether," he replied gravely.  He stopped at
+seeing a singular change in her face, and added awkwardly, "When I
+told you I didn't want you to be ashamed of your past, nor to try
+to forget what you were, I didn't mean such things as that!"
+
+"What did you mean?" she said timidly.
+
+The truth was that Mr. Rylands did not know.  He had known this
+sort of thing only in the abstract.  He had never had the least
+acquaintance with the class to which his wife had belonged, nor
+known anything of their methods.  It was a revelation to him now,
+in the woman he loved, and who was his wife.  He was not shocked so
+much as he was frightened.
+
+"You shall have the dress to-morrow, Ellen," he said gently, "and
+you can put away these gewgaws.  You don't need to look like Tinkie
+Clifford."
+
+He did not see the look of triumph that lit up her eye, but added,
+"Go on and play."
+
+She sat down obediently to the instrument.  He watched her for a
+few moments from the toe of her kid slipper on the pedals to the
+swell of her shoulders above the keyboard, with a strange,
+abstracted face.  Presently she stopped and came over to him.
+
+"And when I've got these nice calico frocks, and you can't tell me
+from Jane, and I'm a good housekeeper, and settle down to be a
+farmer's wife, maybe I'll have a secret to tell you."
+
+"A secret?" he repeated gravely.  "Why not now?"
+
+Her face was quite aglow with excitement and a certain timid
+mischief as she laughed: "Not while you are so solemn.  It can
+wait."
+
+He looked at his watch.  "I must give some orders to Jim about the
+stock before he turns in," he said.
+
+"He's gone to the stables already," said Mrs. Rylands.
+
+"No matter; I can go there and find him."
+
+"Shall I bring your boots?" she said quickly.
+
+"I'll put them on when I pass through the kitchen.  I won't be long
+away.  Now go to bed.  You are looking tired," he said gently, as
+he gazed at the drawn lines about her eyes and mouth.  Her former
+pretty color struck him also as having changed of late, and as
+being irregular and inharmonious.
+
+As Mrs. Rylands obediently ascended the stairs she heaved a faint
+sigh, her only recognition of her husband's criticism.  He turned
+and passed quickly into the kitchen.  He wanted to be alone to
+collect his thoughts.  But he was surprised to find Jane still
+there, sitting bolt upright in a chair in the corner.  Apparently
+she had been expecting him, for as he entered she stood up, and
+wiped her cheek and mouth with one hand, as if to compress her lips
+the more tightly.
+
+"I reckoned," she began, "that unless you war for forgettin'
+everythin' in these yer goings on, ye'd be passin' through here to
+tend to your stock.  I've got a word to say to ye, Mr. Rylands.
+When I first kem over here to help, I got word from the folks
+around that your wife afore you married her was just one o' them
+bally dancers.  Well, that was YOUR lookout, not mine!  Jane
+Mackinnon ain't the kind to take everybody's sayin' as gospil, but
+she kalkilates to treat folks ez she finds 'em.  When she finds 'em
+lyin' and deceivin'; when she finds em purtendin' one thing and
+doin' another; when she finds 'em makin' fools tumble to 'em;
+playing soots on their own husbands, and turnin' an honest house
+into a music-hall and a fandango shop, she kicks!  You hear me!
+Jane Mackinnon kicks!"
+
+"What do you mean?" said Mr. Rylands sternly.
+
+"I mean," said Miss Mackinnon, striking her hips with the back of
+her hands smartly, and accenting each word that dropped like a
+bullet from her mouth with an additional blow,--"I--mean--that--
+your--wife--had--one--of--her--old--hangers-on--from--'Frisco--
+here--in--this--very--kitchen--all--the--arternoon; there!  I mean
+that whiles she was waitin' here for you, she was canoodlin' and
+cryin' over old times with him!  I saw her myself through the
+winder.  That's what I mean, Mr. Joshua Rylands."
+
+"It's false!  She had some poor stranger here with a lame horse.
+She told me so herself."
+
+Jane Mackinnon laughed shrilly.
+
+"Did she tell you that the poor stranger was young and pretty-
+faced, with black moustarches? that his store clothes must have
+cost a fortin, saying nothing of his gold-lined, broadcloth
+sarrapper?  Did she say that his horse was so lame that when I went
+to get another he wouldn't WAIT for it?  Did she tell you WHO he
+was?"
+
+"No, she did not know," said Rylands sternly, but with a whitening
+face.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you!  The gambler, the shooter!--the man whose
+name is black enough to stain any woman he knows.  Jim recognized
+him like a shot; he sez, the moment he clapped eyes on him at the
+door, 'Dod blasted, if it ain't Jack Hamlin!'"
+
+Little as Mr. Rylands knew of the world, he had heard that name.
+But it was not THAT he was thinking of.  He was thinking of the
+camp-fire in the wood, the handsome figure before it, the tethered
+horse.  He was thinking of the lighted sitting-room, the fire, his
+wife's bare shoulders, her slippers, stockings, and the dance.  He
+saw it all,--a lightning-flash to his dull imagination.  The room
+seemed to expand and then grow smaller, the figure of Jane to sway
+backwards and forwards before him.  He murmured the name of God
+with lips that were voiceless, caught at the kitchen table to
+steady himself, held it till he felt his arms grow rigid, and then
+recovered himself,--white, cold, and sane.
+
+"Speak a word of this to HER," he said deliberately, "enter her
+room while I'm gone, even leave the kitchen before I come back, and
+I'll throw you into the road.  Tell that hired man, if he dares to
+breathe it to a soul I'll strangle him."
+
+The unlooked-for rage of this quiet, God-fearing man, and dupe, as
+she believed, was terrible, but convincing.  She shrank back into
+the corner as he coolly drew on his boots and waterproof, and
+without another word left the house.
+
+He knew what he was going to do as well as if it had been ordained
+for him.  He knew he would find the young man in the wood; for
+whatever were the truth of the other stories, he and the visitor
+were identical; he had seen him with his own eyes.  He would
+confront him face to face and know all; and until then, he could
+not see his wife again.  He walked on rapidly, but without
+feverishness or mental confusion.  He saw his duty plainly,--if
+Ellen had "backslidden," he must give her another trial.  These
+were his articles of faith.  He should not put her away; but she
+should nevermore be wife to him.  It was HE who had tempted her, it
+was true; perhaps God would forgive her for that reason, but HE
+could never love her again.
+
+The fury of the storm had somewhat abated as he reached the wood.
+The fire was still there, but no longer a leaping flame.  A dull
+glow in the darkness of the forest aisles was all that indicated
+its position.  Rylands at once plunged in that direction; he was
+near enough to see the red embers when he heard a sharp click, and
+a voice called:--
+
+"Hold up!"
+
+Mr. Hamlin was a light sleeper.  The crackle of underbrush had been
+enough to disturb him.  The voice was his; the click was the
+cocking of his revolver.
+
+Rylands was no coward, but halted diplomatically.
+
+"Now, then," said Mr. Hamlin's voice, "a little more this way, IN
+THE LIGHT, if you please!"
+
+Rylands moved as directed, and saw Mr. Hamlin lying before the
+fire, resting easily on one hand, with his revolver in the other.
+
+"Thank you!" said Jack.  "Excuse my precautions, but it is night,
+and this is, for the present, my bedroom."
+
+"My name is Rylands; you called at my house this afternoon and saw
+my wife," said Rylands slowly.
+
+"I did," said Hamlin.  "It was mighty kind of you to return my call
+so soon, but I didn't expect it."
+
+"I reckon not.  But I know who you are, and that you are an old
+associate of hers, in the days of her sin and unregeneration.  I
+want you to answer me, before God and man, what was your purpose in
+coming there to-day?"
+
+"Look here!  I don't think it's necessary to drag in strangers to
+hear my answer," said Jack, lying down again, "but I came to borrow
+a horse."
+
+"Is that the truth?"
+
+Jack got upon his feet very solemnly, put on his hat, drew down his
+waistcoat, and approached Mr. Rylands with his hands in his pockets.
+
+"Mr. Rylands," he said, with great suavity of manner, "this is the
+second time today that I have had the honor of having my word
+doubted by your family.  Your wife was good enough to question my
+assertion that I didn't know that she was living here, but that was
+a woman's vanity.  You have no such excuse.  There is my horse
+yonder, lame, as you may see.  I didn't lame him for the sake of
+seeing your wife nor you."
+
+There was that in Mr. Hamlin's audacity and perfect self-possession
+which, even while it irritated, never suggested deceit.  He was too
+reckless of consequence to lie.  Mr. Rylands was staggered and half
+convinced.  Nevertheless, he hesitated.
+
+"Dare you tell me everything that happened between my wife and you?"
+
+"Dare you listen?" said Mr. Hamlin quietly.
+
+Mr. Rylands turned a little white.  After a moment he said:--
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Good!" said Mr. Hamlin.  "I like your grit, though I don't mind
+telling you it's the ONLY thing I like about you.  Sit down.  Well,
+I haven't seen Nell Montgomery for three years until I met her as
+your wife, at your house.  She was surprised as I was, and
+frightened as I wasn't.  She spent the whole interview in telling
+me the history of her marriage and her life with you, and nothing
+more.  I cannot say that it was remarkably entertaining, or that
+she was as amusing as your wife as she was as Nell Montgomery, the
+variety actress.  When she had finished, I came away."
+
+Mr. Rylands, who had seated himself, made a movement as if to rise.
+But Mr. Hamlin laid his hand on his knee.
+
+"I asked you if you dared to listen.  I have something myself to
+say of that interview.  I found your wife wearing the old dresses
+that other men had given her, and she said she wore them because
+she thought it pleased you.  I found that you, who are questioning
+my calling upon her, had already got the worst of her old chums to
+visit her without asking her consent; I found that instead of being
+the first one to lie for her and hide her, you were the first one
+to tell anybody her history, just because you thought it was to the
+glory of God generally, and of Joshua Rylands in particular."
+
+"A man's motives are his own," stammered Rylands.
+
+"Sorry you didn't see it when you questioned mine just now," said
+Jack coolly.
+
+"Then she complained to you?" said Rylands hesitatingly.
+
+"I didn't say that," said Jack shortly.
+
+"But you found her unhappy?"
+
+"Damnably."
+
+"And you advised her"--said Rylands tentatively.
+
+"I advised her to chuck you and try to get a better husband."  He
+paused, and then added, with a disgusted laugh, "but she didn't
+tumble to it, for a d----d silly reason."
+
+"What reason?" said Rylands hurriedly.
+
+"Said she LOVED you," returned Jack, kicking a brand back into the
+fire.  Mr. Rylands's white cheeks flamed out suddenly like the
+brand.  Seeing which, Jack turned upon him deliberately.
+
+"Mr. Joshua Rylands, I've seen many fools in my time.  I've seen
+men holding four aces backed down because they thought they KNEW
+the other man had a royal flush!  I've seen a man sell his claim
+for a wild-cat share, with the gold lying a foot below him in the
+ground he walked on.  I've seen a dead shot shoot wild because he
+THOUGHT he saw something in the other man's eye.  I've seen a heap
+of God-forsaken fools, but I never saw one before who claimed God
+as a pal.  You've got a wife a d----d sight truer to you for what
+you call her 'sin,' than you've ever been to her, with all your
+d----d salvation!  And as you couldn't make her otherwise, though
+you've tried to hard enough, it seems to me that for square
+downright chuckle-headedness, you can take the cake!  Good-night!
+Now, run away and play!  You're making me tired."
+
+"One moment," said Mr. Rylands awkwardly and hurriedly.  "I may
+have wronged you; I was mistaken.  Won't you come back with me and
+accept my--our--hospitality?"
+
+"Not much," said Jack.  "I left your house because I thought it
+better for you and her that no one should know of my being there."
+
+"But you were already recognized," said Mr. Rylands.  "It was Jane
+who lied about you, and your return with me will confute her
+slanders."
+
+"Who?" asked Jack.
+
+"Jane, our hired girl."
+
+Mr. Hamlin uttered an indescribable laugh.
+
+"That's just as well!  You simply tell Jane you SAW me; that I was
+greatly shocked at what she said, but that I forgive her.  I don't
+think she'll say any more."
+
+
+Strange to add, Mr. Hamlin's surmise was correct.  Mr. Rylands
+found Jane still in the kitchen alone, terrified, remorseful, yet
+ever after silent on the subject.  Stranger still, the hired man
+became equally uncommunicative.  Mrs. Rylands, attributing her
+husband's absence only to care of the stock, had gone to bed in a
+feverish condition, and Mr. Rylands did not deem it prudent to tell
+her of his interview.  The next day she sent for the doctor, and it
+was deemed necessary for her to keep her bed for a few days.  Her
+husband was singularly attentive and considerate during that time,
+and it was probable that Mrs. Rylands seized that opportunity to
+tell him the secret she spoke of the night before.  Whatever it
+was,--for it was not generally known for a few months later,--it
+seemed to draw them closer together, imparted a protecting dignity
+to Joshua Rylands, which took the place of his former selfish
+austerity, gave them a future to talk of confidentially, hopefully,
+and sometimes foolishly, which took the place of their more foolish
+past, and when the roll of calico came from the cross roads, it
+contained also a quantity of fine linen, laces, small caps, and
+other trifles, somewhat in contrast to the more homely materials
+ordered.
+
+And when three months were past, the sitting-room was often lit up
+and made cheerful, particularly on that supreme occasion when, with
+a great deal of enthusiasm, all the women of the countryside
+flocked to see Mrs. Rylands and her first baby.  And a more
+considerate and devoted couple than the father and mother they had
+never known.
+
+
+
+THE MAN AT THE SEMAPHORE
+
+
+In the early days of the Californian immigration, on the extremest
+point of the sandy peninsula, where the bay of San Francisco
+debouches into the Pacific, there stood a semaphore telegraph.
+Tossing its black arms against the sky,--with its back to the
+Golden Gate and that vast expanse of sea whose nearest shore was
+Japan,--it signified to another semaphore further inland the "rigs"
+of incoming vessels, by certain uncouth signs, which were again
+passed on to Telegraph Hill, San Francisco, where they reappeared
+on a third semaphore, and read to the initiated "schooner," "brig"
+"ship," or "steamer."  But all homesick San Francisco had learned
+the last sign, and on certain days of the month every eye was
+turned to welcome those gaunt arms widely extended at right angles,
+which meant "sidewheel steamer" (the only steamer which carried the
+mails) and "letters from home."  In the joyful reception accorded
+to that herald of glad tidings, very few thought of the lonely
+watcher on the sand dunes who dispatched them, or even knew of that
+desolate Station.
+
+For desolate it was beyond description.  The Presidio, with its
+voiceless, dismounted cannon and empty embrasures hidden in a
+hollow, and the Mission Dolores, with its crumbling walls and
+belfry tower lost in another, made the ultima thule of all San
+Francisco wandering.  The Cliff house and Fort Point did not then
+exist; from Black Point the curving line of shore of "Yerba Buena"--
+or San Francisco--showed only a stretch of glittering wind-swept
+sand dunes, interspersed with straggling gullies of half-buried
+black "scrub oak."  The long six months' summer sun fiercely beat
+upon it from the cloudless sky above; the long six months' trade
+winds fiercely beat upon it from the west; the monotonous roll-call
+of the long Pacific surges regularly beat upon it from the sea.
+Almost impossible to face by day through sliding sands and
+buffeting winds, at night it was impracticable through the dense
+sea-fog that stole softly through the Golden Gate at sunset.
+Thence, until morning, sea and shore were a trackless waste,
+bounded only by the warning thunders of the unseen sea.  The
+station itself, a rudely built cabin, with two windows,--one
+furnished with a telescope,--looked like a heap of driftwood, or a
+stranded wreck left by the retiring sea; the semaphore--the only
+object for leagues--lifted above the undulating dunes, took upon
+itself various shapes, more or less gloomy, according to the hour
+or weather,--a blasted tree, the masts and clinging spars of a
+beached ship, a dismantled gallows; or, with the background of a
+golden sunset across the Gate, and its arms extended at right
+angles, to a more hopeful fancy it might have seemed the missionary
+Cross, which the enthusiast Portala lifted on that heathen shore a
+hundred years before.
+
+Not that Dick Jarman--the solitary station keeper--ever indulged
+this fancy.  An escaped convict from one of her Britannic Majesty's
+penal colonies, a "stowaway" in the hold of an Australian ship, he
+had landed penniless in San Francisco, fearful of contact with his
+more honest countrymen already there, and liable to detection at
+any moment.  Luckily for him, the English immigration consisted
+mainly of gold-seekers en route to Sacramento and the southern
+mines.  He was prudent enough to resist the temptation to follow
+them, and accepted the post of semaphore keeper,--the first work
+offered him,--which the meanest immigrant, filled with dreams of
+gold, would have scorned.  His employers asked him no questions,
+and demanded no references; his post could be scarcely deemed one
+of trust,--there was no property for him to abscond with but the
+telescope; he was removed from temptation and evil company in his
+lonely waste; his duties were as mechanical as the instrument he
+worked, and interruption of them would be instantly known at San
+Francisco.  For this he would receive his board and lodging and
+seventy-five dollars a month,--a sum to be ridiculed in those
+"flush days," but which seemed to the broken-spirited and half-
+famished stowaway a princely independence.
+
+And then there was rest and security!  He was free from that
+torturing anxiety and fear of detection which had haunted him night
+and day for three months.  The ceaseless vigilance and watchful
+dread he had known since his escape, he could lay aside now.  The
+rude cabin on the sand dune was to him as the long-sought cave to
+some hunted animal.  It seemed impossible that any one would seek
+him there.  He was spared alike the contact of his enemies or the
+shame of recognizing even a friendly face, until by each he would
+be forgotten.  From his coign of vantage on that desolate waste,
+and with the aid of his telescope, no stranger could approach
+within two or three miles of his cabin without undergoing his
+scrutiny.  And at the worst, if he was pursued here, before him was
+the trackless shore and the boundless sea!
+
+And at times there was a certain satisfaction in watching, unseen
+and in perfect security, the decks of passing ships.  With the aid
+of his glass he could mingle again with the world from which he was
+debarred, and gloomily wonder who among those passengers knew their
+solitary watcher, or had heard of his deeds; it might have made him
+gloomier had he known that in those eager faces turned towards the
+golden haven there was little thought of anything but themselves.
+He tried to read in faces on board the few outgoing ships the
+record of their success with a strange envy.  They were returning
+home!  HOME!  For sometimes--but seldom--he thought of his own home
+and his past.  It was a miserable past of forgery and embezzlement
+that had culminated a career of youthful dissipation and self-
+indulgence, and shut him out, forever, from the staid old English
+cathedral town where he was born.  He knew that his relations
+believed and wished him dead.  He thought of this past with little
+pleasure, but with little remorse.  Like most of his stamp, he
+believed it was ill-luck, chance, somebody else's fault, but never
+his own responsible action.  He would not repent; he would be wiser
+only.  And he would not be retaken--alive!
+
+Two or three months passed in this monotonous duty, in which he
+partly recovered his strength and his nerves.  He lost his furtive,
+restless, watchful look; the bracing sea air and the burning sun
+put into his face the healthy tan and the uplifted frankness of a
+sailor.  His eyes grew keener from long scanning of the horizon; he
+knew where to look for sails, from the creeping coastwise schooner
+to the far-rounding merchantman from Cape Horn.  He knew the faint
+line of haze that indicated the steamer long before her masts and
+funnels became visible.  He saw no soul except the solitary boatman
+of the little "plunger," who landed his weekly provisions at a
+small cove hard by.  The boatman thought his secretiveness and
+reticence only the surliness of his nation, and cared little for a
+man who never asked for the news, and to whom he brought no
+letters.  The long nights which wrapped the cabin in sea-fog, and
+at first seemed to heighten the exile's sense of security, by
+degrees, however, became monotonous, and incited an odd restlessness,
+which he was wont to oppose by whiskey,--allowed as a part of his
+stores,--which, while it dulled his sensibilities, he, however,
+never permitted to interfere with his mechanical duties.
+
+He had been there five months, and the hills on the opposite shore
+between Tamalpais were already beginning to show their russet
+yellow sides.  One bright morning he was watching the little fleet
+of Italian fishing-boats hovering in the bay.  This was always a
+picturesque spectacle, perhaps the only one that relieved the
+general monotony of his outlook.  The quaint lateen sails of dull
+red, or yellow, showing against the sparkling waters, and the red
+caps or handkerchiefs of the fishermen, might have attracted even a
+more abstracted man.  Suddenly one of the larger boats tacked, and
+made directly for the little cove where his weekly plunger used to
+land.  In an instant he was alert and suspicious.  But a close
+examination of the boat through his glass satisfied him that it
+contained, in addition to the crew, only two or three women,
+apparently the family of the fishermen.  As it ran up on the beach
+and the entire party disembarked he could see it was merely a
+careless, peaceable invasion, and he thought no more about it.  The
+strangers wandered about the sands, gesticulating and laughing;
+they brought a pot ashore, built a fire, and cooked a homely meal.
+He could see that from time to time the semaphore--evidently a
+novelty to them--had attracted their attention; and having occasion
+to signal the arrival of a bark, the working of the uncouth arms of
+the instrument drew the children in half-frightened curiosity
+towards it, although the others held aloof, as if fearful of
+trespassing upon some work of the government, no doubt secretly
+guarded by the police.  A few mornings later he was surprised to
+see upon the beach, near the same locality, a small heap of lumber
+which had evidently been landed in the early morning fog.  The next
+day an old tent appeared on the spot, and the men, evidently
+fishermen, began the erection of a rude cabin beside it.  Jarman
+had been long enough there to know that it was government land, and
+that these manifestly humble "squatters" upon it would not be
+interfered with for some time to come.  He began to be uneasy
+again; it was true they were fully half a mile from him, and they
+were foreigners; but might not their reckless invasion of the law
+attract others, in this lawless country, to do the same?  It ought
+to be stopped.  For once Richard Jarman sided with legal authority.
+
+But when the cabin was completed, it was evident from what he saw
+of its rude structure that it was only a temporary shelter for the
+fisherman's family and the stores, and refitting of the fishing-
+boat, more convenient to them than the San Francisco wharves.  The
+beach was utilized for the mending of nets and sails, and thus
+became half picturesque.  In spite of the keen northwestern trades,
+the cloudless, sunshiny mornings tempted these southerners back to
+their native al fresco existence; they not only basked in the sun,
+but many of their household duties, and even the mysteries of their
+toilet, were performed in the open air.  They did not seem to care
+to penetrate into the desolate region behind them; their half-
+amphibious habit kept them near the water's edge, and Richard
+Jarman, after taking his limited walks for the first few mornings
+in another direction, found it no longer necessary to avoid the
+locality, and even forgot their propinquity.
+
+But one morning, as the fog was clearing away and the sparkle of
+the distant sea was beginning to show from his window, he rose from
+his belated breakfast to fetch water from the "breaker" outside,
+which had to be replenished weekly from Sancelito, as there was no
+spring in his vicinity.  As he opened the door, he was inexpressibly
+startled by the figure of a young woman standing in front of it,
+who, however, half fearfully, half laughingly withdrew before him.
+But his own manifest disturbance apparently gave her courage.
+
+"I jess was looking at that thing," she said bashfully, pointing to
+the semaphore.
+
+He was still more astonished, for, looking at her dark eyes and
+olive complexion, he had expected her to speak Italian or broken
+English.  And, possibly because for a long time he had seen and
+known little of women, he was quite struck with her good looks.  He
+hesitated, stammered, and then said:--
+
+"Won't you come in?"
+
+She drew back still farther and made a rapid gesture of negation
+with her head, her hand, and even her whole lithe figure.  Then she
+said, with a decided American intonation:--
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Why not?" said Jarman mechanically.
+
+The girl sidled up against the cabin, keeping her eyes fixed on
+Jarman with a certain youthful shrewdness.
+
+"Oh, you know!" she said.
+
+"I really do not.  Tell me why."
+
+She drew herself up against the wall a little proudly, though still
+youthfully, with her hands behind her.
+
+"I ain't that kind of girl," she said simply.
+
+The blood rushed to Jarman's checks.  Dissipated and abandoned as
+his life had been, small respecter of women as he was, he was
+shocked and shamed.  Knowing too, as he did, how absorbed he was in
+other things, he was indignant, because not guilty.
+
+"Do as you please, then," he said shortly, and reentered the cabin.
+But the next moment he saw his error in betraying an irritation
+that was open to misconstruction.  He came out again, scarcely
+looking at the girl, who was lounging away.
+
+"Do you want me to explain to you how the thing works?" he said
+indifferently.  "I can't show you unless a ship comes in."
+
+The girl's eyes brightened softly as she turned to him.
+
+"Do tell me," she said, with an anticipatory smile and flash of
+white teeth.  "Won't you?"
+
+She certainly was very pretty and simple, in spite of her late
+speech.  Jarman briefly explained to her the movements of the
+semaphore arms and their different significance.  She listened with
+her capped head a little on one side like an attentive bird, and
+her arms unconsciously imitating the signs.  Certainly, for all
+that she SPOKE like an American, her gesticulation was Italian.
+
+"And then," she said triumphantly when he paused, "when the sailors
+see that sign up they know they are coming in the harbor."
+
+Jarman smiled, as he had not smiled since he had been there.  He
+corrected this mistake of her eager haste to show her intelligence,
+and, taking the telescope, pointed out the other semaphore,--a thin
+black outline on a distant inland hill.  He then explained how HIS
+signs were repeated by that instrument to San Francisco.
+
+"My!  Why, I always allowed that was only the cross stuck up in the
+Lone Mountain Cemetery," she said.
+
+"You are a Catholic?"
+
+"I reckon."
+
+"And you are an Italian?"
+
+"Father is, but mother was a 'Merikan, same as me.  Mother's dead."
+
+"And your father is the fisherman yonder?"
+
+"Yes,--but," with a look of pride, "he's got the biggest boat of
+any."
+
+"And only you and your family are ashore here?"
+
+"Yes, and sometimes Mark."  She laughed an odd little laugh.
+
+"Mark?  Who's he?" he asked quickly.
+
+He had not noticed the sudden coquettish pose and half-affected
+bashfulness of the girl; he was thinking only of the possibility of
+detection by strangers.
+
+"Oh, he is Marco Franti, but I call him 'Mark.'  It's the same
+name, you know, and it makes him mad," said the girl, with the same
+suggestion of archness and coquetry.
+
+But all this was lost on Jarman.
+
+"Oh, another Italian," he said, relieved.  She turned away a little
+awkwardly when he added, "But you haven't told me YOUR name, you
+know."
+
+"Cara."
+
+"Cara,--that's 'dear' in Italian, isn't it?" he said, with a
+reminiscence of the opera and a half smile.
+
+"Yes," she said a little scornfully, "but it means Carlotta,--
+Charlotte, you know.  Some girls call me Charley," she said
+hurriedly.
+
+"I see--Cara--or Carlotta Franti."
+
+To his surprise she burst into a peal of laughter.
+
+"I reckon not YET.  Franti is Mark's name, not mine.  Mine is
+Murano,--Carlotta Murano.  Good-by."  She moved away, then stopped
+suddenly and said, "I'm comin' again some time when the thing is
+working," and with a nod of her head, ran away.  He looked after
+her; could see the outlines of her youthful figure in her slim
+cotton gown,--limp and clinging in the damp sea air, and the sudden
+revelation of her bare ankles thrust stockingless into canvas
+shoes.
+
+He went back into his cabin, when presently his attention was
+engrossed by an incoming vessel.  He made the signals, half
+expecting, almost hoping, that the girl would return to watch him.
+But her figure was already lost in the sand dunes.  Yet he fancied
+he still heard the echoes of her voice and his own in this cabin
+which had so long been dumb and voiceless, and he now started at
+every sound.  For the first time he became aware of the dreadful
+disorder and untidiness of its uninvaded privacy.  He could
+scarcely believe he had been living with his stove, his bed, and
+cooking utensils all in one corner of the barnlike room, and he
+began to put them "to rights" in a rough, hard formality, strongly
+suggestive of his convict experience.  He rolled up his blankets
+into a hard cylinder at the head of his cot.  He scraped out his
+kettles and saucepans, and even "washed down" the floor, afterwards
+sprinkling clean dry sand, hot with the noonday sunshine, on its
+half-dried boards.  In arranging these domestic details he had to
+change the position of a little mirror; and glancing at it for the
+first time in many days, he was dissatisfied with his straggling
+beard,--grown during his voyage from Australia,--and although he
+had retained it as a disguise, he at once shaved it off, leaving
+only a mustache, and revealing a face from which a healthier life
+and out-of-door existence had removed the last traces of vice and
+dissipation.  But he did not know it.
+
+All the next day he thought of his fair visitor, and found himself
+often repeating her odd remark that she was "not that kind of
+girl," with a smile that was alternately significant or vacant.
+Evidently she could take care of herself, he thought, although her
+very good looks no doubt had exposed her to the rude attentions of
+fishermen or the common drift of San Francisco wharves.  Perhaps
+this was why her father brought her here.  When the day passed and
+she came not, he began vaguely to wonder if he had been rude to
+her.  Perhaps he had taken her simple remark too seriously; perhaps
+she had expected he would only laugh, and had found him dull and
+stupid.  Perhaps he had thrown away an opportunity.  An opportunity
+for what?  To renew his old life and habits?  No, no!  The horrors
+of his recent imprisonment and escape were still too fresh in his
+memory; he was not safe yet.  Then he wondered if he had not grown
+spiritless and pigeon-livered in his solitude and loneliness.  The
+next day he searched for her with his glass, and saw her playing
+with one of the children on the beach,--a very picture of child or
+nymphlike innocence.  Perhaps it was because she was not "that kind
+of girl" that she had attracted him.  He laughed bitterly.  Yes;
+that was very funny; he, an escaped convict, drawn towards honest,
+simple innocence!  Yet he knew--he was positive--he had not thought
+of any ill when he spoke to her.  He took a singular, a ridiculous
+pride in and credit to himself for that.  He repeated it incessantly
+to himself.  Then what made her angry?  Himself!  The devil!  Did he
+carry, then, the record of his past life forever in his face--in his
+speech--in his manners?  The thought made him sullen.  The next day
+he would not look towards the shore; it was wonderful what
+excitement and satisfaction he got out of that strange act of
+self-denial; it made the day seem full that had been so vacant
+before; yet he could not tell why or wherefore.  He felt injured,
+but he rather liked it.  Yet in the night he was struck with the
+idea that she might have gone back to San Francisco, and he lay
+awake longing for the morning light to satisfy him.  Yet when the
+fog cleared, and from a nearer point, behind a sand dune, he
+discovered, by the aid of his glass, that she was seated on the
+sun-warmed sands combing out her long hair like a mermaid, he
+immediately returned to the cabin, and that morning looked no more
+that way.  In the afternoon, there being no sails in sight, he
+turned aside from the bay and walked westward towards the ocean,
+halting only at the league-long line of foam which marked the
+breaking Pacific surges.  Here he was surprised to see a little
+child, half-naked, following barefooted the creeping line of spume,
+or running after the detached and quivering scraps of foam that
+chased each other over the wet sand, and only a little further on,
+to come upon Cara herself, sitting with her elbows on her knees and
+her round chin in her hands, apparently gazing over the waste of
+waters before her.  A sudden and inexplicable shyness overtook him.
+He hesitated, and stepped half-hidden in a gully between the sand
+dunes.
+
+As yet he had not been observed; the young girl called to the child
+and, suddenly rising, threw off her red cap and shawl and quietly
+began to disrobe herself.  A couple of coarse towels were at her
+feet.  Jarman instantly comprehended that she was going to bathe
+with the child.  She undoubtedly knew as well as he did that she
+was safe in that solitude; that no one could intrude upon her
+privacy from the bay shore, nor from the desolate inland trail to
+the sea, without her knowledge.  Of his own contiguity she had
+evidently taken no thought, believing him safely housed in his
+cabin beside the semaphore.  She lifted her hands, and with a
+sudden movement shook out her long hair and let it fall down her
+back at the same moment that her unloosened blouse began to slip
+from her shoulders.  Richard Jarman turned quickly and walked
+noiselessly and rapidly away, until the little hillock had shut out
+the beach.
+
+His retreat was as sudden, unreasoning, and unpremeditated as his
+intrusion.  It was not like himself, he knew, and yet it was as
+perfectly instinctive and natural as if he had intruded upon a
+sister.  In the South Seas he had seen native girls diving beside
+the vessels for coins, but they had provoked no such instinct as
+that which possessed him now.  More than that, he swept a quick,
+wrathful glance along the horizon on either side, and then,
+mounting a remote hillock which still hid him from the beach, he
+sat there and kept watch and ward.  From time to time the strong
+sea-breeze brought him the sound of infantine screams and shouts of
+girlish laughter from the unseen shore; he only looked the more
+keenly and suspiciously for any wandering trespasser, and did not
+turn his head.  He lay there nearly half an hour, and when the
+sounds had ceased, rose and made his way slowly back to the cabin.
+He had not gone many yards before he heard the twitter of voices
+and smothered laughter behind him.  He turned; it was Cara and the
+child,--a girl of six or seven.  Cara's face was rosy,--possibly
+from her bath, and possibly from some shame-faced consciousness.
+He slackened his pace, and as they ranged beside him said, "Good-
+morning!"
+
+"Lord!" said Cara, stifling another laugh, "we didn't know you were
+around; we thought you were always 'tending your telegraph, didn't
+we, Lucy?" (to the child, who was convulsed with mirth and
+sheepishness).  "Why, we've been taking a wash in the sea."  She
+tried to gather up her long hair, which had been left to stray over
+her shoulders and dry in the sunlight, and even made a slight
+pretense of trying to conceal the wet towels they were carrying.
+
+Jarman did not laugh.  "If you had told me," he said gravely, "I
+could have kept watch for you with my glass while you were there.
+I could see further than you."
+
+"Tould you see US?" asked the little girl, with hopeful vivacity.
+
+"No!" said Jarman, with masterly evasion.  "There are little
+sandhills between this and the beach."
+
+"Then how tould other people see us?" persisted the child.
+
+Jarman could see that the older girl was evidently embarrassed, and
+changed the subject.  "I sometimes go out," he said, "when I can
+see there are no vessels in sight, and I take ray glass with me.  I
+can always get back in time to make signals.  I thought, in fact,"
+he said, glancing at Cara's brightening face, "that I might get as
+far as your house on the shore some day."  To his surprise, her
+embarrassment suddenly seemed to increase, although she had looked
+relieved before, and she did not reply.  After a moment she said
+abruptly:--
+
+"Did you ever see the sea-lions?"
+
+"No," said Jarman.
+
+"Not the big ones on Seal Rock, beyond the cliffs?" continued the
+girl, in real astonishment.
+
+"No," repeated Jarman.  "I never walked in that direction." He
+vaguely remembered that they were a curiosity which sometimes
+attracted parties thither, and for that reason he had avoided the
+spot.
+
+"Why, I have sailed all around the rock in father's boat,"
+continued Cara, with importance.  "That's the best way to see 'em,
+and folks from Frisco sometimes takes a sail out there just on
+purpose,--it's too sandy to walk or drive there.  But it's only a
+step from here.  Look here!" she said suddenly, and frankly opening
+her fine eyes upon him.  "I'm going to take Lucy there to-morrow,
+and I'll show you."  Jarman felt his cheeks flush quickly with a
+pleasure that embarrassed him.  "It won't take long," added Cara,
+mistaking his momentary hesitation, "and you can leave your
+telegraph alone.  Nobody will be there, so no one will see you and
+nobody know it."
+
+He would have gone then, anyway, he knew, yet in his absurd self-
+consciousness he was glad that her last suggestion had relieved him
+of a sense of reckless compliance.  He assented eagerly, when with
+a wave of her hand, a flash of her white teeth, and the same
+abruptness she had shown at their last parting, she caught Lucy by
+the arm and darted away in a romping race to her dwelling.  Jarman
+started after her.  He had not wanted to go to her father's house
+particularly, but why was SHE evidently as averse to it?  With the
+subtle pleasure that this admission gave him there was a faint
+stirring of suspicion.
+
+It was gone when he found her and Lucy the next morning, radiant
+with the sunshine, before his door.  The restraint of their
+previous meetings had been removed in some mysterious way, and they
+chatted gayly as they walked towards the cliffs.  She asked him
+frankly many questions about himself, why he had come there, and if
+he "wasn't lonely;" she answered frankly--I fear much more frankly
+than he answered her--the many questions he asked her about herself
+and her friends.  When they reached the cliffs they descended to
+the beach, which they found deserted.  Before them--it seemed
+scarce a pistol shot from the shore arose a high, broad rock,
+beaten at its base by the long Pacific surf, on which a number of
+shapeless animals were uncouthly disporting.  This was Seal Rock,
+the goal of their journey.
+
+Yet after a few moments they no longer looked at it, but seated on
+the sand, with Lucy gathering shells at the water's edge, they
+continued their talk.  Presently the talk became eager confidences,
+and then,--there were long and dangerous lapses of silence, when
+both were fain to make perfunctory talk with Lucy on the beach.
+After one of those silences Jarman said:--
+
+"Do you know I rather thought yesterday you didn't want me to come
+to your father's house.  Why was that?"
+
+"Because Marco was there," said the girl frankly.
+
+"What had HE to do with it?" said Jarman abruptly.
+
+"He wants to marry me."
+
+"And do you want to marry HIM?" said Jarman quickly.
+
+"No," said the girl passionately.
+
+"Why don't you get rid of him, then?"
+
+"I can't, he's hiding here,--he's father's friend."
+
+"Hiding?  What's he been doing?"
+
+"Stealing.  Stealing gold-dust from miners.  I never cared for him
+anyway.  And I hate a thief!"
+
+She looked up quickly.  Jarman had risen to his feet, his face
+turned to sea.
+
+"What are you looking at?" she said wonderingly.
+
+"A ship," said Jarman, in a strange, hoarse voice.  "I must hurry
+back and signal.  I'm afraid I haven't even time to walk with you,--
+I must run for it.  Good-by!"
+
+He turned without offering his hand and ran hurriedly in the
+direction of the semaphore.
+
+Cara, discomfited, turned her black eyes to the sea.  But it seemed
+empty as before, no sail, no ship on the horizon line, only a
+little schooner slowly beating out of the Gate.  Ah, well!  It no
+doubt was there,--that sail,--though she could not see it; how keen
+and far-seeing his handsome, honest eyes were!  She heaved a little
+sigh, and, calling Lucy to her side, began to make her way homeward.
+But she kept her eyes on the semaphore; it seemed to her the next
+thing to seeing him,--this man she was beginning to love.  She waited
+for the gaunt arms to move with the signal of the vessel he had
+seen.  But, strange to say, it was motionless.  He must have been
+mistaken.
+
+All this, however, was driven from her mind in the excitement that
+she found on her return thrilling her own family.  They had been
+warned that a police boat with detectives on board had been
+dispatched from San Francisco to the cove.  Luckily, they had
+managed to convey the fugitive Franti on board a coastwise
+schooner,--Cara started as she remembered the one she had seen
+beating out of the Gate,--and he was now safe from pursuit.  Cara
+felt relieved; at the same time she felt a strange joy at her
+heart, which sent the conscious blood to her cheek.  She was not
+thinking of the escaped Marco, but of Jarman.  Later, when the
+police boat arrived,--whether the detectives had been forewarned of
+Marco's escape or not,--they contented themselves with a formal
+search of the little fishing-hut and departed.  But their boat
+remained lying off the shore.
+
+That night Cara tossed sleeplessly on her bed; she was sorry she
+had ever spoken of Marco to Jarman.  It was unnecessary now;
+perhaps he disbelieved her and thought she loved Marco; perhaps
+that was the reason of his strange and abrupt leave-taking that
+afternoon.  She longed for the next day, she could tell him
+everything now.
+
+Towards morning she slept fitfully, but was awakened by the sound
+of voices on the sands outside the hut.  Its flimsy structure,
+already warped by the fierce day-long sun, allowed her through
+chinks and crevices not only to recognize the voices of the
+detectives, but to hear distinctly what they said.  Suddenly the
+name of Jarman struck upon her ear.  She sat upright in bed,
+breathless.
+
+"Are you sure it's the same man?" asked a second voice.
+
+"Perfectly," answered the first.  "He was tracked to 'Frisco, but
+disappeared the day he landed.  We knew from our agents that he
+never left the bay.  And when we found that somebody answering his
+description got the post of telegraph operator out here, we knew
+that we had spotted our man and the L250 sterling offered for his
+capture."
+
+"But that was five months ago.  Why didn't you take him then?"
+
+"Couldn't!  For we couldn't hold him without the extradition papers
+from Australia.  We sent for 'em; they're due to-day or to-morrow
+on the mail steamer."
+
+"But he might have got away at any time?"
+
+"He couldn't without our knowing it.  Don't you see?  Every time
+the signals went up, we in San Francisco knew he was at his post.
+We had him safe, out here on these sandhills, as if he'd been under
+lock and key in 'Frisco.  He was his own keeper, and reported to
+us."
+
+"But since you're here and expect the papers to-morrow, why don't
+you 'cop' him now?"
+
+"Because there isn't a judge in San Francisco that would hold him a
+moment unless he had those extradition papers before him.  He'd be
+discharged, and escape."
+
+"Then what are you going to do?"
+
+"As soon as the steamer is signaled in 'Frisco, we'll board her in
+the bay, get the papers, and drop down upon him."
+
+"I see; and as HE'S the signal man, the darned fool"--
+
+"Will give the signal himself."
+
+The laugh that followed was so cruel that the young girl shuddered.
+But the next moment she slipped from the bed, erect, pale, and
+determined.
+
+The voices seemed gradually to retreat.  She dressed herself
+hurriedly, and passed noiselessly through the room of her still
+sleeping parent, and passed out.  A gray fog was lifting slowly
+over the sands and sea, and the police boat was gone.  She no
+longer hesitated, but ran quickly in the direction of Jarman's
+cabin.  As she ran, her mind seemed to be swept clear of all
+illusion and fancy; she saw plainly everything that had happened;
+she knew the mystery of Jarman's presence here,--the secret of his
+life,--the dreadful cruelty of her remark to him,--the man that she
+knew now she loved.  The sun was painting the black arms of the
+semaphore as she toiled over the last stretch of sand and knocked
+loudly at the door.  There was no reply.  She knocked again; the
+cabin was silent.  Had he already fled?--and without seeing her and
+knowing all!  She tried the handle of the door; it yielded; she
+stepped boldly into the room, with his name upon her lips.  He was
+lying fully dressed upon his couch.  She ran eagerly to his side
+and stopped.  It needed only a single glance at his congested face,
+his lips parted with his heavy breath, to see that the man was
+hopelessly, helplessly drunk!
+
+Yet even then, without knowing that it was her thoughtless speech
+which had driven him to seek this foolish oblivion of remorse and
+sorrow, she saw only his HELPLESSNESS.  She tried in vain to rouse
+him; he only muttered a few incoherent words and sank back again.
+She looked despairingly around.  Something must be done; the
+steamer might be visible at any moment.  Ah, yes,--the telescope!
+She seized it and swept the horizon.  There was a faint streak of
+haze against the line of sea and sky, abreast the Golden Gate.  He
+had once told her what it meant.  It WAS the steamer!  A sudden
+thought leaped into her clear and active brain.  If the police boat
+should chance to see that haze too, and saw no warning signal from
+the semaphore, they would suspect something.  That signal must be
+made, BUT NOT THE RIGHT ONE!  She remembered quickly how he had
+explained to her the difference between the signals for a coasting
+steamer and the one that brought the mails.  At that distance the
+police boat could not detect whether the semaphore's arms were
+extended to perfect right angles for the mail steamer, or if the
+left arm slightly deflected for a coasting steamer.  She ran out to
+the windlass and seized the crank.  For a moment it defied her
+strength; she redoubled her efforts: it began to creak and groan,
+the great arms were slowly uplifted, and the signal made.
+
+But the familiar sounds of the moving machinery had pierced through
+Jarman's sluggish consciousness as no other sound in heaven or
+earth could have done, and awakened him to the one dominant sense
+he had left,--the habit of duty.  She heard him roll from the bed
+with an oath, stumble to the door, and saw him dash forward with an
+affrighted face, and plunge his head into a bucket of water.  He
+emerged from it pale and dripping, but with the full light of
+reason and consciousness in his eyes.  He started when he saw her;
+even then she would have fled, but he caught her firmly by the
+wrist.
+
+Then with a hurried, trembling voice she told him all and
+everything.  He listened in silence, and only at the end raised her
+hand gravely to his lips.
+
+"And now," she added tremulously, "you must fly--quick--at once; or
+it will be too late!"
+
+But Richard Jarman walked slowly to the door of his cabin, still
+holding her hand, and said quietly, pointing to his only chair:--
+
+"Sit down; we must talk first."
+
+What they said was never known, but a few moments later they left
+the cabin, Jarman carrying in a small bag all his possessions, and
+Cara leaning on his arm.  An hour later the priest of the Mission
+Dolores was called upon to unite in matrimony a frank, honest-
+looking sailor and an Italian gypsy-looking girl.  There were many
+hasty unions in those days, and the Holy Church was only too glad
+to be able to give them its legal indorsement.  But the good Padre
+was a little sorry for the honest sailor, and gave the girl some
+serious advice.
+
+The San Francisco papers the next morning threw some dubious light
+upon the matter in a paragraph headed, "Another Police Fiasco."
+
+"We understand that the indefatigable police of San Francisco,
+after ascertaining that Marco Franti, the noted gold-dust thief,
+was hiding on the shore near the Presidio, proceeded there with
+great solemnity, and arrived, as usual, a few hours after their man
+had escaped.  But the climax of incapacity was reached when, as it
+is alleged, the sweetheart of the absconding Franti, and daughter
+of a brother fisherman, eloped still later, and joined her lover
+under the very noses of the police.  The attempt of the detectives
+to excuse themselves at headquarters by reporting that they were
+also on the track of an alleged escaped Sydney Duck was received
+with the derision and skepticism it deserved, as it seemed that
+these worthies mistook the mail steamer, which they should have
+boarded to get certain extradition papers, for a coasting steamer."
+
+        .        .        .        .        .        .
+
+It was not until four years later that Murano was delighted to
+recognize in the husband of his long-lost daughter a very rich
+cattle-owner in Southern California, called Jarman; but he never
+knew that he had been an escaped convict from Sydney, who had
+lately received a full pardon through the instrumentality of divers
+distinguished people in Australia.
+
+
+
+AN ESMERALDA OF ROCKY CANYON
+
+
+It is to be feared that the hero of this chronicle began life as an
+impostor.  He was offered to the credulous and sympathetic family
+of a San Francisco citizen as a lamb, who, unless bought as a
+playmate for the children, would inevitably pass into the butcher's
+hands.  A combination of refined sensibility and urban ignorance of
+nature prevented them from discerning certain glaring facts that
+betrayed his caprid origin.  So a ribbon was duly tied round his
+neck, and in pleasing emulation of the legendary "Mary," he was
+taken to school by the confiding children.  Here, alas the fraud
+was discovered, and history was reversed by his being turned out by
+the teacher, because he was NOT "a lamb at school."  Nevertheless,
+the kind-hearted mother of the family persisted in retaining him,
+on the plea that he might yet become "useful."  To her husband's
+feeble suggestion of "gloves," she returned a scornful negative,
+and spoke of the weakly infant of a neighbor, who might later
+receive nourishment from this providential animal.  But even this
+hope was destroyed by the eventual discovery of his sex.  Nothing
+remained now but to accept him as an ordinary kid, and to find
+amusement in his accomplishments,--eating, climbing, and butting.
+It must be confessed that these were of a superior quality; a
+capacity to eat everything from a cambric handkerchief to an
+election poster, an agility which brought him even to the roofs of
+houses, and a power of overturning by a single push the chubbiest
+child who opposed him, made him a fearful joy to the nursery.  This
+last quality was incautiously developed in him by a negro boy-
+servant, who, later, was hurriedly propelled down a flight of
+stairs by his too proficient scholar.  Having once tasted victory,
+"Billy" needed no further incitement to his performances.  The
+small wagon which he sometimes consented to draw for the benefit of
+the children never hindered his attempts to butt the passer-by.  On
+the contrary, on well-known scientific principles he added the
+impact of the bodies of the children projected over his head in his
+charge, and the infelicitous pedestrian found himself not only
+knocked off his legs by Billy, but bombarded by the whole nursery.
+
+Delightful as was this recreation to juvenile limbs, it was felt to
+be dangerous to the adult public.  Indignant protestations were
+made, and as Billy could not be kept in the house, he may be said
+to have at last butted himself out of that sympathetic family and
+into a hard and unfeeling world.  One morning he broke his tether
+in the small back yard.  For several days thereafter he displayed
+himself in guilty freedom on the tops of adjacent walls and
+outhouses.  The San Francisco suburb where his credulous protectors
+lived was still in a volcanic state of disruption, caused by the
+grading of new streets through rocks and sandhills.  In consequence
+the roofs of some houses were on the level of the doorsteps of
+others, and were especially adapted to Billy's performances.  One
+afternoon, to the admiring and perplexed eyes of the nursery, he
+was discovered standing on the apex of a neighbor's new Elizabethan
+chimney, on a space scarcely larger than the crown of a hat, calmly
+surveying the world beneath him.  High infantile voices appealed to
+him in vain; baby arms were outstretched to him in hopeless
+invitation; he remained exalted and obdurate, like Milton's hero,
+probably by his own merit "raised to that bad eminence."  Indeed,
+there was already something Satanic in his budding horns and
+pointed mask as the smoke curled softly around him.  Then he
+appropriately vanished, and San Francisco knew him no more.  At the
+same time, however, one Owen M'Ginnis, a neighboring sandhill
+squatter, also disappeared, leaving San Francisco for the southern
+mines, and he was said to have taken Billy with him,--for no
+conceivable reason except for companionship.  Howbeit, it was the
+turning-point of Billy's career; such restraint as kindness,
+civilization, or even policemen had exercised upon his nature was
+gone.  He retained, I fear, a certain wicked intelligence, picked
+up in San Francisco with the newspapers and theatrical and election
+posters he had consumed.  He reappeared at Rocky Canyon among the
+miners as an exceedingly agile chamois, with the low cunning of a
+satyr.  That was all that civilization had done for him!
+
+If Mr. M'Ginnis had fondly conceived that he would make Billy
+"useful," as well as companionable, he was singularly mistaken.
+Horses and mules were scarce in Rocky Canyon, and he attempted to
+utilize Billy by making him draw a small cart, laden with
+auriferous earth, from his claim to the river.  Billy, rapidly
+gaining strength, was quite equal to the task, but alas! not his
+inborn propensity.  An incautious gesture from the first passing
+miner Billy chose to construe into the usual challenge.  Lowering
+his head, from which his budding horns had been already pruned by
+his master, he instantly went for his challenger, cart and all.
+Again the scientific law already pointed out prevailed.  With the
+shock of the onset the entire contents of the cart arose and poured
+over the astonished miner, burying him from sight.  In any other
+but a Californian mining-camp such a propensity in a draught animal
+would have been condemned, on account of the damage and suffering
+it entailed, but in Rocky Canyon it proved unprofitable to the
+owner from the very amusement and interest it excited.  Miners lay
+in wait for Billy with a "greenhorn," or new-comer, whom they would
+put up to challenge the animal by some indiscreet gesture.  In this
+way hardly a cartload of "pay-gravel" ever arrived safely at its
+destination, and the unfortunate M'Ginnis was compelled to withdraw
+Billy as a beast of burden.  It was whispered that so great had his
+propensity become, under repeated provocation, that M'Ginnis
+himself was no longer safe.  Going ahead of his cart one day to
+remove a fallen bough from the trail, Billy construed the act of
+stooping into a playful challenge from his master,--with the
+inevitable result.
+
+The next day M'Ginnis appeared with a wheelbarrow, but without
+Billy.  From that day he was relegated to the rocky crags above the
+camp, from whence he was only lured occasionally by the mischievous
+miners, who wished to exhibit his peculiar performances.  For
+although Billy had ample food and sustenance among the crags, he
+had still a civilized longing for posters; and whenever a circus, a
+concert, or a political meeting was "billed" in the settlement, he
+was on hand while the paste was yet fresh and succulent.  In this
+way it was averred that he once removed a gigantic theatre bill
+setting forth the charms of the "Sacramento Pet," and being caught
+in the act by the advance agent, was pursued through the main
+street, carrying the damp bill on his horns, eventually affixing
+it, after his own peculiar fashion, on the back of Judge
+Boompointer, who was standing in front of his own court-house.
+
+In connection with the visits of this young lady another story
+concerning Billy survives in the legends of Rocky Canyon.  Colonel
+Starbottle was at that time passing through the settlement on
+election business, and it was part of his chivalrous admiration for
+the sex to pay a visit to the pretty actress.  The single waiting-
+room of the little hotel gave upon the veranda, which was also
+level with the street.  After a brief yet gallant interview, in
+which he oratorically expressed the gratitude of the settlement
+with old-fashioned Southern courtesy, Colonel Starbottle lifted the
+chubby little hand of the "Pet" to his lips, and, with a low bow,
+backed out upon the veranda.  But the Pet was astounded by his
+instant reappearance, and by his apparently casting himself
+passionately and hurriedly at her feet!  It is needless to say that
+he was followed closely by Billy, who from the street had casually
+noticed him, and construed his novel exit into an ungentlemanly
+challenge.
+
+Billy's visits, however, became less frequent, and as Rocky Canyon
+underwent the changes incidental to mining settlements, he was
+presently forgotten in the invasion of a few Southwestern families,
+and the adoption of amusements less practical and turbulent than he
+had afforded.  It was alleged that he was still seen in the more
+secluded fastnesses of the mountains, having reverted to a wild
+state, and it was suggested by one or two of the more adventurous
+that he might yet become edible, and a fair object of chase.  A
+traveler through the Upper Pass of the canyon related how he had
+seen a savage-looking, hairy animal like a small elk perched upon
+inaccessible rocks, but always out of gunshot.  But these and other
+legends were set at naught and overthrown by an unexpected incident.
+
+The Pioneer Coach was toiling up the long grade towards Skinners
+Pass when Yuba Bill suddenly pulled up, with his feet on the brake.
+
+"Jimminy!" he ejaculated, drawing a deep breath.
+
+The startled passenger beside him on the box followed the direction
+of his eyes.  Through an opening in the wayside pines he could see,
+a few hundred yards away, a cuplike hollow in the hillside of the
+vividest green.  In the centre a young girl of fifteen or sixteen
+was dancing and keeping step to the castanet "click" of a pair of
+"bones," such as negro minstrels use, held in her hands above her
+head.  But, more singular still, a few paces before her a large
+goat, with its neck roughly wreathed with flowers and vines, was
+taking ungainly bounds and leaps in imitation of its companion.
+The wild background of the Sierras, the pastoral hollow, the
+incongruousness of the figures, and the vivid color of the girl's
+red flannel petticoat showing beneath her calico skirt, that had
+been pinned around her waist, made a striking picture, which by
+this time had attracted all eyes.  Perhaps the dancing of the girl
+suggested a negro "break-down" rather than any known sylvan
+measure; but all this, and even the clatter of the bones, was made
+gracious by the distance.
+
+"Esmeralda! by the living Harry!" shouted the excited passenger on
+the box.
+
+Yuba Bill took his feet off the brake, and turned a look of deep
+scorn upon his companion as he gathered the reins again.
+
+"It's that blanked goat, outer Rocky Canyon beyond, and Polly
+Harkness!  How did she ever come to take up with HIM?"
+
+Nevertheless, as soon as the coach reached Rocky Canyon, the story
+was quickly told by the passengers, corroborated by Yuba Bill, and
+highly colored by the observer on the box-seat.  Harkness was known
+to be a new-comer who lived with his wife and only daughter on the
+other side of Skinners Pass.  He was a "logger" and charcoal-
+burner, who had eaten his way into the serried ranks of pines below
+the pass, and established in these efforts an almost insurmountable
+cordon of fallen trees, stripped bark, and charcoal pits around the
+clearing where his rude log hut stood,--which kept his seclusion
+unbroken.  He was said to be a half-savage mountaineer from Georgia,
+in whose rude fastnesses he had distilled unlawful whiskey, and that
+his tastes and habits unfitted him for civilization.  His wife
+chewed and smoked; he was believed to make a fiery brew of his own
+from acorns and pine nuts; he seldom came to Rocky Canyon except for
+provisions; his logs were slipped down a "shoot" or slide to the
+river, where they voyaged once a month to a distant mill, but HE did
+not accompany them.  The daughter, seldom seen at Rocky Canyon, was
+a half-grown girl, brown as autumn fern, wild-eyed, disheveled, in a
+homespun skirt, sunbonnet, and boy's brogans.  Such were the plain
+facts which skeptical Rocky Canyon opposed to the passengers'
+legends.  Nevertheless, some of the younger miners found it not out
+of their way to go over Skinners Pass on the journey to the river,
+but with what success was not told.  It was said, however, that a
+celebrated New York artist, making a tour of California, was on the
+coach one day going through the pass, and preserved the memory of
+what he saw there in a well-known picture entitled "Dancing Nymph
+and Satyr," said by competent critics to be "replete with the study
+of Greek life."  This did not affect Rocky Canyon, where the study
+of mythology was presumably displaced by an experience of more
+wonderful flesh-and-blood people, but later it was remembered with
+some significance.
+
+Among the improvements already noted, a zinc and wooden chapel had
+been erected in the main street, where a certain popular revivalist
+preacher of a peculiar Southwestern sect regularly held exhortatory
+services.  His rude emotional power over his ignorant fellow-
+sectarians was well known, while curiosity drew others.  His effect
+upon the females of his flock was hysterical and sensational.
+Women prematurely aged by frontier drudgery and child-bearing,
+girls who had known only the rigors and pains of a half-equipped,
+ill-nourished youth in their battling with the hard realities of
+nature around them, all found a strange fascination in the
+extravagant glories and privileges of the unseen world he pictured
+to them, which they might have found in the fairy tales and nursery
+legends of civilized children, had they known them.  Personally he
+was not attractive; his thin pointed face, and bushy hair rising on
+either side of his square forehead in two rounded knots, and his
+long, straggling, wiry beard dropping from a strong neck and
+shoulders, were indeed of a common Southwestern type; yet in him
+they suggested something more.  This was voiced by a miner who
+attended his first service, and as the Reverend Mr. Withholder rose
+in the pulpit, the former was heard to audibly ejaculate, "Dod
+blasted!--if it ain't Billy!"  But when on the following Sunday, to
+everybody's astonishment, Polly Harkness, in a new white muslin
+frock and broad-brimmed Leghorn hat, appeared before the church
+door with the real Billy, and exchanged conversation with the
+preacher, the likeness was appalling.
+
+I grieve to say that the goat was at once christened by Rocky
+Canyon as "The Reverend Billy," and the minister himself was
+Billy's "brother."  More than that, when an attempt was made by
+outsiders, during the service, to inveigle the tethered goat into
+his old butting performances, and he took not the least notice of
+their insults and challenges, the epithet "blanked hypocrite" was
+added to his title.
+
+Had he really reformed?  Had his pastoral life with his nymph-like
+mistress completely cured him of his pugnacious propensity, or had
+he simply found it was inconsistent with his dancing, and seriously
+interfered with his "fancy steps"?  Had he found tracts and hymn-
+books were as edible as theatre posters?  These were questions that
+Rocky canyon discussed lightly, although there was always the more
+serious mystery of the relations of the Reverend Mr. Withholder,
+Polly Harkness, and the goat towards each other.  The appearance of
+Polly at church was no doubt due to the minister's active canvass
+of the districts.  But had he ever heard of Polly's dancing with
+the goat?  And where in this plain, angular, badly dressed Polly
+was hidden that beautiful vision of the dancing nymph which had
+enthralled so many?  And when had Billy ever given any suggestion
+of his Terpsichorean abilities--before or since?  Were there any
+"points" of the kind to be discerned in him now?  None!  Was it not
+more probable that the Reverend Mr. Withholder had himself been
+dancing with Polly, and been mistaken for the goat?  Passengers who
+could have been so deceived with regard to Polly's beauty might
+have as easily mistaken the minister for Billy.  About this time
+another incident occurred which increased the mystery.
+
+The only male in the settlement who apparently dissented from the
+popular opinion regarding Polly was a new-comer, Jack Filgee.
+While discrediting her performance with the goat,--which he had
+never seen,--he was evidently greatly prepossessed with the girl
+herself.  Unfortunately, he was equally addicted to drinking, and
+as he was exceedingly shy and timid when sober, and quite
+unpresentable at other times, his wooing, if it could be so called,
+progressed but slowly.  Yet when he found that Polly went to
+church, he listened so far to the exhortations of the Reverend Mr.
+Withholder as to promise to come to "Bible class" immediately after
+the Sunday service.  It was a hot afternoon, and Jack, who had kept
+sober for two days, incautiously fortified himself for the ordeal
+by taking a drink before arriving.  He was nervously early, and
+immediately took a seat in the empty church near the open door.
+The quiet of the building, the drowsy buzzing of flies, and perhaps
+the soporific effect of the liquor caused his eyes to close and his
+head to fall forward on his breast repeatedly.  He was recovering
+himself for the fourth time when he suddenly received a violent
+cuff on the ear, and was knocked backward off the bench on which he
+was sitting.  That was all he knew.
+
+He picked himself up with a certain dignity, partly new to him, and
+partly the result of his condition, and staggered, somewhat bruised
+and disheveled, to the nearest saloon.  Here a few frequenters who
+had seen him pass, who knew his errand and the devotion to Polly
+which had induced it, exhibited a natural concern.
+
+"How's things down at the gospel shop?" said one.  "Look as ef
+you'd been wrastlin' with the Sperit, Jack!"
+
+"Old man must hev exhorted pow'ful," said another, glancing at his
+disordered Sunday attire.
+
+"Ain't be'n hevin' a row with Polly?  I'm told she slings an awful
+left."
+
+Jack, instead of replying, poured out a dram of whiskey, drank it,
+and putting down his glass, leaned heavily against the counter as
+he surveyed his questioners with a sorrow chastened by reproachful
+dignity.
+
+"I'm a stranger here, gentlemen," he said slowly "ye've known me
+only a little; but ez ye've seen me both blind drunk and sober, I
+reckon ye've caught on to my gin'ral gait!  Now I wanter put it to
+you, ez fair-minded men, ef you ever saw me strike a parson?"
+
+"No," said a chorus of sympathetic voices.  The barkeeper, however,
+with a swift recollection of Polly and the Reverend Withholder, and
+some possible contingent jealousy in Jack, added prudently, "Not
+yet."
+
+The chorus instantly added reflectively, "Well, no not yet."
+
+"Did ye ever," continued Jack solemnly, "know me to cuss, sass,
+bully-rag, or say anything agin parsons, or the church?"
+
+"No," said the crowd, overthrowing prudence in curiosity, "ye never
+did,--we swear it!  And now, what's up?"
+
+"I ain't what you call 'a member in good standin','" he went on,
+artistically protracting his climax.  "I ain't be'n convicted o'
+sin; I ain't 'a meek an' lowly follower;' I ain't be'n exactly what
+I orter be'n; I hevn't lived anywhere up to my lights; but is thet
+a reason why a parson should strike me?"
+
+"Why?  What?  When did he?  Who did?" asked the eager crowd, with
+one voice.
+
+Jack then painfully related how he had been invited by the Reverend
+Mr. Withholder to attend the Bible class.  How he had arrived
+early, and found the church empty.  How he had taken a seat near
+the door to be handy when the parson came.  How he just felt
+"kinder kam and good," listenin' to the flies buzzing, and must
+have fallen asleep,--only he pulled himself up every time,--though,
+after all, it warn't no crime to fall asleep in an empty church!
+How "all of a suddent" the parson came in, "give him a clip side o'
+the head," and knocked him off the bench, and left him there!
+
+"But what did he SAY?" queried the crowd.
+
+"Nuthin'.  Afore I could get up, he got away."
+
+"Are you sure it was him?" they asked.  "You know you SAY you was
+asleep."
+
+"Am I sure?" repeated Jack scornfully.  "Don't I know thet face and
+beard?  Didn't I feel it hangin' over me?"
+
+"What are you going to do about it?" continued the crowd eagerly.
+
+"Wait till he comes out--and you'll see," said Jack, with dignity.
+
+This was enough for the crowd; they gathered excitedly at the door,
+where Jack was already standing, looking towards the church.  The
+moments dragged slowly; it might be a long meeting.  Suddenly the
+church door opened and a figure appeared, looking up and down the
+street.  Jack colored--he recognized Polly--and stepped out into
+the road.  The crowd delicately, but somewhat disappointedly, drew
+back in the saloon.  They did not care to interfere in THAT sort of
+thing.
+
+Polly saw him, and came hurriedly towards him.  She was holding
+something in her hand.
+
+"I picked this up on the church floor," she said shyly, "so I
+reckoned you HAD be'n there,--though the parson said you hadn't,--
+and I just excused myself and ran out to give it ye.  It's yourn,
+ain't it?"  She held up a gold specimen pin, which he had put on in
+honor of the occasion.  "I had a harder time, though, to git this
+yer,--it's yourn too,--for Billy was laying down in the yard, back
+o' the church, and just comf'bly swallerin' it."
+
+"Who?" said Jack quickly.
+
+"Billy,--my goat."
+
+Jack drew a long breath, and glanced back at the saloon.  "Ye ain't
+goin' back to class now, are ye?" he said hurriedly.  "Ef you ain't,
+I'll--I'll see ye home."
+
+"I don't mind," said Polly demurely, "if it ain't takin' ye outer
+y'ur way."
+
+Jack offered his arm, and hurrying past the saloon, the happy pair
+were soon on the road to Skinners Pass.
+
+
+Jack did not, I regret to say, confess his blunder, but left the
+Reverend Mr. Withholder to remain under suspicion of having
+committed an unprovoked assault and battery.  It was characteristic
+of Rocky Canyon, however, that this suspicion, far from injuring
+his clerical reputation, incited a respect that had been hitherto
+denied him.  A man who could hit out straight from the shoulder
+had, in the language of the critics, "suthin' in him."  Oddly
+enough, the crowd that had at first sympathized with Jack now began
+to admit provocations.  His subsequent silence, a disposition when
+questioned on the subject to smile inanely, and, later, when
+insidiously asked if he had ever seen Polly dancing with the goat,
+his bursting into uproarious laughter completely turned the current
+of opinion against him.  The public mind, however, soon became
+engrossed by a more interesting incident.
+
+The Reverend Mr. Withholder had organized a series of Biblical
+tableaux at Skinnerstown for the benefit of his church.
+Illustrations were to be given of "Rebecca at the Well," "The
+Finding of Moses," "Joseph and his Brethren;" but Rocky Canyon was
+more particularly excited by the announcement that Polly Harkness
+would personate "Jephthah's Daughter."  On the evening of the
+performance, however, it was found that this tableau had been
+withdrawn and another substituted, for reasons not given.  Rocky
+Canyon, naturally indignant at this omission to represent native
+talent, indulged in a hundred wild surmises.  But it was generally
+believed that Jack Filgee's revengeful animosity to the Reverend
+Mr. Withholder was at the bottom of it.  Jack, as usual, smiled
+inanely, but nothing was to be got from him.  It was not until a
+few days later, when another incident crowned the climax of these
+mysteries, that a full disclosure came from his lips.
+
+One morning a flaming poster was displayed at Rocky Canyon, with a
+charming picture of the "Sacramento Pet" in the briefest of skirts,
+disporting with a tambourine before a goat garlanded with flowers,
+who bore, however, an undoubted likeness to Billy.  The text in
+enormous letters, and bristling with points of admiration, stated
+that the "Pet" would appear as "Esmeralda," assisted by a performing
+goat, especially trained by the gifted actress.  The goat would
+dance, play cards, and perform those tricks of magic familiar to the
+readers of Victor Hugo's beautiful story of the "Hunchback of Notre
+Dame," and finally knock down and overthrow the designing seducer,
+Captain Phoebus.  The marvelous spectacle would be produced under
+the patronage of the Hon. Colonel Starbottle and the Mayor of
+Skinnerstown.
+
+As all Rocky Canyon gathered open-mouthed around the poster, Jack
+demurely joined the group.  Every eye was turned upon him.
+
+"It don't look as if yer Polly was in THIS show, any more than she
+was in the tablows," said one, trying to conceal his curiosity
+under a slight sneer.  "She don't seem to be doin' any dancin'!"
+
+"She never DID any dancin'," said Jack, with a smile.
+
+"Never DID!  Then what was all these yarns about her dancin' up at
+the pass?"
+
+"It was the Sacramento Pet who did all the dancin'; Polly only LENT
+the goat.  Ye see, the Pet kinder took a shine to Billy arter he
+bowled Starbottle over thet day at the hotel, and she thought she
+might teach him tricks.  So she DID, doing all her teachin' and
+stage-rehearsin' up there at the pass, so's to be outer sight, and
+keep this thing dark.  She bribed Polly to lend her the goat and
+keep her secret, and Polly never let on a word to anybody but me."
+
+"Then it was the Pet that Yuba Bill saw dancin' from the coach?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And that yer artist from New York painted as an 'Imp and Satire'?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then that's how Polly didn't show up in them tablows at
+Skinnerstown?  It was Withholder who kinder smelt a rat, eh? and
+found out it was only a theayter gal all along that did the
+dancin'?"
+
+"Well, you see," said Jack, with affected hesitation, "thet's
+another yarn.  I don't know mebbe ez I oughter tell it.  Et ain't
+got anything to do with this advertisement o' the Pet, and might be
+rough on old man Withholder!  Ye mustn't ask me, boys."
+
+But there was that in his eye, and above all in this lazy
+procrastination of the true humorist when he is approaching his
+climax, which rendered the crowd clamorous and unappeasable.  They
+WOULD have the story!
+
+Seeing which, Jack leaned back against a rock with great gravity,
+put his hands in his pockets, looked discontentedly at the ground,
+and began: "You see, boys, old Parson Withholder had heard all
+these yarns about Polly and thet trick-goat, and he kinder reckoned
+that she might do for some one of his tablows.  So he axed her if
+she'd mind standin' with the goat and a tambourine for Jephthah's
+Daughter, at about the time when old Jeph comes home, sailin' in
+and vowin' he'll kill the first thing he sees,--jest as it is in
+the Bible story.  Well, Polly didn't like to say it wasn't HER that
+performed with the goat, but the Pet, for thet would give the Pet
+dead away; so Polly agrees to come thar with the goat and rehearse
+the tablow.  Well, Polly's thar, a little shy; and Billy,--you bet
+HE'S all there, and ready for the fun; but the darned fool who
+plays Jephthah ain't worth shucks, and when HE comes in he does
+nothin' but grin at Polly and seem skeert at the goat.  This makes
+old Withholder jest wild, and at last he goes on the platform
+hisself to show them how the thing oughter be done.  So he comes
+bustlin' and prancin' in, and ketches sight o' Polly dancin' in
+with the goat to welcome him; and then he clasps his hands--so--and
+drops on his knees, and hangs down his head--so--and sez, 'Me
+chyld! me vow!  Oh, heavens!'  But jest then Billy--who's gettin'
+rather tired o' all this foolishness--kinder slues round on his
+hind legs, and ketches sight o' the parson!"  Jack paused a moment,
+and thrusting his hands still deeper in his pockets, said lazily,
+"I don't know if you fellers have noticed how much old Withholder
+looks like Billy?"
+
+There was a rapid and impatient chorus of "Yes! yes!" and "Go on!"
+
+"Well," continued Jack, "when Billy sees Withholder kneelin' thar
+with his head down, he gives a kind o' joyous leap and claps his
+hoofs together, ez much ez to say, 'I'm on in this scene,' drops
+his own head, and jest lights out for the parson!"
+
+"And butts him clean through the side scenes into the street,"
+interrupted a delighted auditor.
+
+But Jack's face never changed.  "Ye think so?" he said gravely.
+"But thet's jest whar ye slip up; and thet's jest whar Billy
+slipped up!" he added slowly.  "Mebbe ye've noticed, too, thet the
+parson's built kinder solid about the head and shoulders.  It
+mought hev be'n thet, or thet Billy didn't get a fair start, but
+thet goat went down on his fore legs like a shot, and the parson
+gave one heave, and jest scooted him off the platform!  Then the
+parson reckoned thet this yer 'tablow' had better be left out, as
+thar didn't seem to be any other man who could play Jephthah, and
+it wasn't dignified for HIM to take the part.  But the parson
+allowed thet it might be a great moral lesson to Billy!"
+
+And it WAS, for from that moment Billy never attempted to butt
+again.  He performed with great docility later on in the Pet's
+engagement at Skinnerstown; he played a distinguished role
+throughout the provinces; he had had the advantages of Art from
+"the Pet," and of Simplicity from Polly, but only Rocky Canyon knew
+that his real education had come with his first rehearsal with the
+Reverend Mr. Withholder.
+
+
+
+DICK SPINDLER'S FAMILY CHRISTMAS
+
+
+There was surprise and sometimes disappointment in Rough and Ready,
+when it was known that Dick Spindler intended to give a "family"
+Christmas party at his own house.  That he should take an early
+opportunity to celebrate his good fortune and show hospitality was
+only expected from the man who had just made a handsome "strike" on
+his claim; but that it should assume so conservative, old-
+fashioned, and respectable a form was quite unlooked-for by Rough
+and Ready, and was thought by some a trifle pretentious.  There
+were not half-a-dozen families in Rough and Ready; nobody ever knew
+before that Spindler had any relations, and this "ringing in" of
+strangers to the settlement seemed to indicate at least a lack of
+public spirit.  "He might," urged one of his critics, "hev given
+the boys,--that had worked alongside o' him in the ditches by day,
+and slung lies with him around the camp-fire by night,--he might
+hev given them a square 'blow out,' and kep' the leavin's for his
+old Spindler crew, just as other families do.  Why, when old man
+Scudder had his house-raisin' last year, his family lived for a
+week on what was left over, arter the boys had waltzed through the
+house that night,--and the Scudders warn't strangers, either."  It
+was also evident that there was an uneasy feeling that Spindler's
+action indicated an unhallowed leaning towards the minority of
+respectability and exclusiveness, and a desertion--without the
+excuse of matrimony--of the convivial and independent bachelor
+majority of Rough and Ready.
+
+"Ef he was stuck after some gal and was kinder looking ahead, I'd
+hev understood it," argued another critic.
+
+"Don't ye be too sure he ain't," said Uncle Jim Starbuck gloomily.
+"Ye'll find that some blamed woman is at the bottom of this yer
+'family' gathering.  That and trouble ez almost all they're made
+for!"
+
+There happened to be some truth in this dark prophecy, but none of
+the kind that the misogynist supposed.  In fact, Spindler had
+called a few evenings before at the house of the Rev. Mr. Saltover,
+and Mrs. Saltover, having one of her "Saleratus headaches," had
+turned him over to her widow sister, Mrs. Huldy Price, who
+obediently bestowed upon him that practical and critical attention
+which she divided with the stocking she was darning.  She was a
+woman of thirty-five, of singular nerve and practical wisdom, who
+had once smuggled her wounded husband home from a border affray,
+calmly made coffee for his deceived pursuers while he lay hidden in
+the loft, walked four miles for that medical assistance which
+arrived too late to save him, buried him secretly in his own
+"quarter section," with only one other witness and mourner, and so
+saved her position and property in that wild community, who
+believed he had fled.  There was very little of this experience to
+be traced in her round, fresh-colored brunette cheek, her calm
+black eyes, set in a prickly hedge of stiff lashes, her plump
+figure, or her frank, courageous laugh.  The latter appeared as a
+smile when she welcomed Mr. Spindler.  "She hadn't seen him for a
+coon's age," but "reckoned he was busy fixin' up his new house."
+
+"Well, yes," said Spindler, with a slight hesitation, "ye see, I'm
+reckonin' to hev a kinder Christmas gatherin' of my"--he was about
+to say "folks," but dismissed it for "relations," and finally
+settled upon "relatives" as being more correct in a preacher's
+house.
+
+Mrs. Price thought it a very good idea.  Christmas was the natural
+season for the family to gather to "see who's here and who's there,
+who's gettin' on and who isn't, and who's dead and buried.  It was
+lucky for them who were so placed that they could do so and be
+joyful."  Her invincible philosophy probably carried her past any
+dangerous recollections of the lonely grave in Kansas, and holding
+up the stocking to the light, she glanced cheerfully along its
+level to Mr. Spindler's embarrassed face by the fire.
+
+"Well, I can't say much ez to that," responded Spindler, still
+awkwardly, "for you see I don't know much about it anyway."
+
+"How long since you've seen 'em?" asked Mrs. Price, apparently
+addressing herself to the stocking.
+
+Spindler gave a weak laugh.  "Well, you see, ef it comes to that,
+I've never seen 'em!"
+
+Mrs. Price put the stocking in her lap and opened her direct eyes
+on Spindler.  "Never seen 'em?" she repeated.  "Then, they're not
+near relations?"
+
+"There are three cousins," said Spindler, checking them off on his
+fingers, "a half-uncle, a kind of brother-in-law,--that is, the
+brother of my sister-in-law's second husband,--and a niece.  That's
+six."
+
+"But if you've not seen them, I suppose they've corresponded with
+you?" said Mrs. Price.
+
+"They've nearly all of 'em written to me for money, seeing my name
+in the paper ez hevin' made a strike," returned Spindler simply;
+"and hevin' sent it, I jest know their addresses."
+
+"Oh!" said Mrs. Price, returning to the stocking.
+
+Something in the tone of her ejaculation increased Spindler's
+embarrassment, but it also made him desperate.  "You see, Mrs.
+Price," he blurted out, "I oughter tell ye that I reckon they are
+the folks that 'hevn't got on,' don't you see, and so it seemed
+only the square thing for me, ez had 'got on,' to give them a sort
+o' Christmas festival.  Suthin', don't ye know, like what your
+brother-in-law was sayin' last Sunday in the pulpit about this yer
+peace and goodwill 'twixt man and man."
+
+Mrs. Price looked again at the man before her.  His sallow,
+perplexed face exhibited some doubt, yet a certain determination,
+regarding the prospect the quotation had opened to him.  "A very
+good idea, Mr. Spindler, and one that does you great credit," she
+said gravely.
+
+"I'm mighty glad to hear you say so, Mrs. Price," he said, with an
+accent of great relief, "for I reckoned to ask you a great favor!
+You see," he fell into his former hesitation, "that is--the fact
+is--that this sort o' thing is rather suddent to me,--a little
+outer my line, don't you see, and I was goin' to ask ye ef you'd
+mind takin' the hull thing in hand and runnin it for me."
+
+"Running it for you," said Mrs. Price, with a quick eye-shot from
+under the edge of her lashes.  "Man alive!  What are you thinking
+of?"
+
+"Bossin' the whole job for me," hurried on Spindler, with nervous
+desperation.  "Gettin' together all the things and makin' ready for
+'em,--orderin' in everythin' that's wanted, and fixin' up the
+rooms,--I kin step out while you're doin' it,--and then helpin' me
+receivin' 'em, and sittin' at the head o' the table, you know,--
+like ez ef you was the mistress."
+
+"But," said Mrs. Price, with her frank laugh, "that's the duty of
+one of your relations,--your niece, for instance,--or cousin, if
+one of them is a woman."
+
+"But," persisted Spindler, "you see, they're strangers to me; I
+don't know 'em, and I do you.  You'd make it easy for 'em,--and for
+me,--don't you see?  Kinder introduce 'em,--don't you know?  A
+woman of your gin'ral experience would smooth down all them little
+difficulties," continued Spindler, with a vague recollection of the
+Kansas story, "and put everybody on velvet.  Don't say 'No,' Mrs.
+Price!  I'm just kalkilatin' on you."
+
+Sincerity and persistency in a man goes a great way with even the
+best of women.  Mrs. Price, who had at first received Spindler's
+request as an amusing originality, now began to incline secretly
+towards it.  And, of course, began to suggest objections.
+
+"I'm afraid it won't do," she said thoughtfully, awakening to the
+fact that it would do and could be done.  "You see, I've promised
+to spend Christmas at Sacramento with my nieces from Baltimore.
+And then there's Mrs. Saltover and my sister to consult."
+
+But here Spindler's simple face showed such signs of distress that
+the widow declared she would "think it over,"--a process which the
+sanguine Spindler seemed to consider so nearly akin to talking it
+over that Mrs. Price began to believe it herself, as he hopefully
+departed.
+
+She "thought it over" sufficiently to go to Sacramento and excuse
+herself to her nieces.  But here she permitted herself to "talk it
+over," to the infinite delight of those Baltimore girls, who
+thought this extravaganza of Spindler's "so Californian and
+eccentric!"  So that it was not strange that presently the news
+came back to Rough and Ready, and his old associates learned for
+the first time that he had never seen his relatives, and that they
+would be doubly strangers.  This did not increase his popularity;
+neither, I grieve to say, did the intelligence that his relatives
+were probably poor, and that the Reverend Mr. Saltover had approved
+of his course, and had likened it to the rich man's feast, to which
+the halt and blind were invited.  Indeed, the allusion was supposed
+to add hypocrisy and a bid for popularity to Spindler's defection,
+for it was argued that he might have feasted "Wall-eyed Joe" or
+"Tangle-foot Billy,"--who had once been "chawed" by a bear while
+prospecting,--if he had been sincere.  Howbeit, Spindler's faith
+was oblivious to these criticisms, in his joy at Mr. Saltover's
+adhesion to his plans and the loan of Mrs. Price as a hostess.  In
+fact, he proposed to her that the invitation should also convey
+that information in the expression, "by the kind permission of the
+Rev. Mr. Saltover," as a guarantee of good faith, but the widow
+would have none of it.  The invitations were duly written and
+dispatched.
+
+"Suppose," suggested Spindler, with a sudden lugubrious
+apprehension,--"suppose they shouldn't come?"
+
+"Have no fear of that," said Mrs. Price, with a frank laugh.
+
+"Or ef they was dead," continued Spindler.
+
+"They couldn't all be dead," said the widow cheerfully.
+
+"I've written to another cousin by marriage," said Spindler
+dubiously, "in case of accident; I didn't think of him before,
+because he was rich."
+
+"And have you ever seen him either, Mr. Spindler?" asked the widow,
+with a slight mischievousness.
+
+"Lordy!  No!" he responded, with unaffected concern.
+
+Only one mistake was made by Mrs. Price in her arrangements for the
+party.  She had noticed what the simple-minded Spindler could never
+have conceived,--the feeling towards him held by his old associates,
+and had tactfully suggested that a general invitation should be
+extended to them in the evening.
+
+"You can have refreshments, you know, too, after the dinner, and
+games and music."
+
+"But," said the unsophisticated host, "won't the boys think I'm
+playing it rather low down on them, so to speak, givin' 'em a kind
+o' second table, as ef it was the tailings after a strike?"
+
+"Nonsense," said Mrs. Price, with decision.  "It's quite
+fashionable in San Francisco, and just the thing to do."
+
+To this decision Spindler, in his blind faith in the widow's
+management, weakly yielded.  An announcement in the "Weekly Banner"
+that, "On Christmas evening Richard Spindler, Esq., proposed to
+entertain his friends and fellow citizens at an 'at home,' in his
+own residence," not only widened the breach between him and the
+"boys," but awakened an active resentment that only waited for an
+outlet.  It was understood that they were all coming; but that they
+should have "some fun out of it" which might not coincide with
+Spindler's nor his relatives' sense of humor seemed a foregone
+conclusion.
+
+Unfortunately, too, subsequent events lent themselves to this irony
+of the situation.
+
+He was so obviously sincere in his intent, and, above all, seemed
+to place such a pathetic reliance on her judgment, that she
+hesitated to let him know the shock his revelation had given her.
+And what might his other relations prove to be?  Good Lord!  Yet,
+oddly enough, she was so prepossessed by him, and so fascinated by
+his very Quixotism, that it was perhaps for these complex reasons
+that she said a little stiffly:--
+
+"One of these cousins, I see, is a lady, and then there is your
+niece.  Do you know anything about them, Mr. Spindler?"
+
+His face grew serious.  "No more than I know of the others," he
+said apologetically.  After a moment's hesitation he went on: "Now
+you speak of it, it seems to me I've heard that my niece was
+di-vorced.  But," he added, brightening up, "I've heard that she
+was popular."
+
+Mrs. Price gave a short laugh, and was silent for a few minutes.
+Then this sublime little woman looked up at him.  What he might
+have seen in her eyes was more than he expected, or, I fear,
+deserved.  "Cheer up, Mr. Spindler," she said manfully.  "I'll see
+you through this thing, don't you mind!  But don't you say anything
+about--about--this Vigilance Committee business to anybody.  Nor
+about your niece--it was your niece, wasn't it?--being divorced.
+Charley (the late Mr. Price) had a queer sort of sister, who--but
+that's neither here nor there!  And your niece mayn't come, you
+know; or if she does, you ain't bound to bring her out to the
+general company."
+
+At parting, Spindler, in sheer gratefulness, pressed her hand, and
+lingered so long over it that a little color sprang into the
+widow's brown cheek.  Perhaps a fresh courage sprang into her
+heart, too, for she went to Sacramento the next day, previously
+enjoining Spindler on no account to show any answers he might
+receive.  At Sacramento her nieces flew to her with confidences.
+
+"We so wanted to see you, Aunt Huldy, for we've heard something so
+delightful about your funny Christmas Party!"  Mrs. Price's heart
+sank, but her eyes snapped.  "Only think of it!  One of Mr.
+Spindler's long-lost relatives--a Mr. Wragg--lives in this hotel,
+and papa knows him.  He's a sort of half-uncle, I believe, and he's
+just furious that Spindler should have invited him.  He showed papa
+the letter; said it was the greatest piece of insolence in the
+world; that Spindler was an ostentatious fool, who had made a
+little money and wanted to use him to get into society; and the fun
+of the whole thing was that this half-uncle and whole brute is
+himself a parvenu,--a vulgar, ostentatious creature, who was only
+a"--
+
+"Never mind what he was, Kate," interrupted Mrs. Price hastily.  "I
+call his conduct a shame."
+
+"So do we," said both girls eagerly.  After a pause Kate clasped
+her knees with her locked fingers, and rocking backwards and
+forwards, said, "Milly and I have got an idea, and don't you say
+'No' to it.  We've had it ever since that brute talked in that way.
+Now, through him, we know more about this Mr. Spindler's family
+connections than you do; and we know all the trouble you and he'll
+have in getting up this party.  You understand?  Now, we first want
+to know what Spindler's like.  Is he a savage, bearded creature,
+like the miners we saw on the boat?"
+
+Mrs. Price said that, on the contrary, he was very gentle, soft-
+spoken, and rather good-looking.
+
+"Young or old?"
+
+"Young,--in fact, a mere boy, as you may judge from his actions,"
+returned Mrs. Price, with a suggestive matronly air.
+
+Kate here put up a long-handled eyeglass to her fine gray eyes,
+fitted it ostentatiously over her aquiline nose, and then said, in
+a voice of simulated horror, "Aunt Huldy,--this revelation is
+shocking!"
+
+Mrs. Price laughed her usual frank laugh, albeit her brown cheek
+took upon it a faint tint of Indian red.  "If that's the wonderful
+idea you girls have got, I don't see how it's going to help
+matters," she said dryly.
+
+"No, that's not it?  We really have an idea.  Now look here."
+
+Mrs. Price "looked here."  This process seemed to the superficial
+observer to be merely submitting her waist and shoulders to the
+arms of her nieces, and her ears to their confidential and coaxing
+voices.
+
+Twice she said "it couldn't be thought of," and "it was
+impossible;" once addressed Kate as "You limb!" and finally said
+that she "wouldn't promise, but might write!"
+
+        .        .        .        .        .        .
+
+It was two days before Christmas.  There was nothing in the air,
+sky, or landscape of that Sierran slope to suggest the season to
+the Eastern stranger.  A soft rain had been dropping for a week on
+laurel, pine, and buckeye, and the blades of springing grasses and
+shyly opening flowers.  Sedate and silent hillsides that had grown
+dumb and parched towards the end of the dry season became gently
+articulate again; there were murmurs in hushed and forgotten
+canyons, the leap and laugh of water among the dry bones of dusty
+creeks, and the full song of the larger forks and rivers.
+Southwest winds brought the warm odor of the pine sap swelling in
+the forest, or the faint, far-off spice of wild mustard springing
+in the lower valleys.  But, as if by some irony of Nature, this
+gentle invasion of spring in the wild wood brought only disturbance
+and discomfort to the haunts and works of man.  The ditches were
+overflowed, the fords of the Fork impassable, the sluicing adrift,
+and the trails and wagon roads to Rough and Ready knee-deep in mud.
+The stage-coach from Sacramento, entering the settlement by the
+mountain highway, its wheels and panels clogged and crusted with an
+unctuous pigment like mud and blood, passed out of it through the
+overflowed and dangerous ford, and emerged in spotless purity,
+leaving its stains behind with Rough and Ready.  A week of enforced
+idleness on the river "Bar" had driven the miners to the more
+comfortable recreation of the saloon bar, its mirrors, its florid
+paintings, its armchairs, and its stove.  The steam of their wet
+boots and the smoke of their pipes hung over the latter like the
+sacrificial incense from an altar.  But the attitude of the men was
+more critical and censorious than contented, and showed little of
+the gentleness of the weather or season.
+
+"Did you hear if the stage brought down any more relations of
+Spindler's?"
+
+The barkeeper, to whom this question was addressed, shifted his
+lounging position against the bar and said, "I reckon not, ez far
+ez I know."
+
+"And that old bloat of a second cousin--that crimson beak--what kem
+down yesterday,--he ain't bin hangin' round here today for his
+reg'lar pizon?"
+
+"No," said the barkeeper thoughtfully, "I reckon Spindler's got him
+locked up, and is settin' on him to keep him sober till after
+Christmas, and prevent you boys gettin' at him."
+
+"He'll have the jimjams before that," returned the first speaker;
+"and how about that dead beat of a half-nephew who borrowed twenty
+dollars of Yuba Bill on the way down, and then wanted to get off at
+Shootersvilie, but Bill wouldn't let him, and scooted him down to
+Spindler's and collected the money from Spindler himself afore he'd
+give him up?"
+
+"He's up thar with the rest of the menagerie," said the barkeeper,
+"but I reckon that Mrs. Price hez bin feedin' him up.  And ye know
+the old woman--that fifty-fifth cousin by marriage--whom Joe
+Chandler swears he remembers ez an old cook for a Chinese
+restaurant in Stockton,--darn my skin ef that Mrs. Price hasn't
+rigged her out in some fancy duds of her own, and made her look
+quite decent."
+
+A deep groan here broke from Uncle Jim Starbuck.
+
+"Didn't I tell ye?" he said, turning appealingly to the others.
+"It's that darned widow that's at the bottom of it all!  She first
+put Spindler up to givin' the party, and now, darn my skin, ef she
+ain't goin to fix up these ragamuffins and drill 'em so we can't
+get any fun outer 'em after all!  And it's bein' a woman that's
+bossin' the job, and not Spindler, we've got to draw things mighty
+fine and not cut up too rough, or some of the boys will kick."
+
+"You bet," said a surly but decided voice in the crowd.
+
+"And," said another voice, "Mrs. Price didn't live in 'Bleeding
+Kansas' for nothing."
+
+"Wot's the programme you've settled on, Uncle Jim?" said the
+barkeeper lightly, to check what seemed to promise a dangerous
+discussion.
+
+"Well," said Starbuck, "we kalkilate to gather early Christmas
+night in Hooper's Hollow and rig ourselves up Injun fashion, and
+then start for Spindler's with pitch-pine torches, and have a
+'torchlight dance' around the house; them who does the dancin' and
+yellin' outside takin' their turn at goin' in and hevin' refreshment.
+Jake Cooledge, of Boston, sez if anybody objects to it, we've only
+got to say we're 'Mummers of the Olden Times,' sabe?  Then, later,
+we'll have 'Them Sabbath Evening Bells' performed on prospectin'
+pans by the band.  Then, at the finish, Jake Cooledge is goin' to
+give one of his surkastic speeches,--kinder welcomin' Spindler's
+family to the Free Openin' o' Spindler's Almshouse and Reformatory."
+He paused, possibly for that approbation which, however, did not
+seem to come spontaneously.  "It ain't much," he added apologetically,
+"for we're hampered by women; but we'll add to the programme ez we
+see how things pan out.  Ye see, from what we can hear, all of
+Spindler's relations ain't on hand yet!  We've got to wait, like in
+elckshun times, for 'returns from the back counties.'  Hello!  What's
+that?"
+
+It was the swish and splutter of hoofs on the road before the door.
+The Sacramento coach!  In an instant every man was expectant, and
+Starbuck darted outside on the platform.  Then there was the usual
+greeting and bustle, the hurried ingress of thirsty passengers into
+the saloon, and a pause.  Uncle Jim returned, excitedly and
+pantingly.  "Look yer, boys!  Ef this ain't the richest thing out!
+They say there's two more relations o' Spindler's on the coach,
+come down as express freight, consigned,--d'ye hear?--consigned to
+Spindler!"
+
+"Stiffs, in coffins?" suggested an eager voice.
+
+"I didn't get to hear more.  But here they are."
+
+There was the sudden irruption of a laughing, curious crowd into
+the bar-room, led by Yuba Bill, the driver.  Then the crowd parted,
+and out of their midst stepped two children, a boy and a girl, the
+oldest apparently of not more than six years, holding each other's
+hands.  They were coarsely yet cleanly dressed, and with a certain
+uniform precision that suggested formal charity.  But more
+remarkable than all, around the neck of each was a little steel
+chain, from which depended the regular check and label of the
+powerful Express Company, Wells; Fargo & Co., and the words: "To
+Richard Spindler."  "Fragile."  "With great care."  "Collect on
+delivery."  Occasionally their little hands went up automatically
+and touched their labels, as if to show them.  They surveyed the
+crowd, the floor, the gilded bar, and Yuba Bill without fear and
+without wonder.  There was a pathetic suggestion that they were
+accustomed to this observation.
+
+"Now, Bobby," said Yuba Bill, leaning back against the bar, with an
+air half-paternal, half-managerial, "tell these gents how you came
+here."
+
+"By Wellth, Fargoth Expreth," lisped Bobby.
+
+"Whar from?"
+
+"Wed Hill, Owegon."
+
+"Red Hill, Oregon?  Why, it's a thousand miles from here," said a
+bystander.
+
+"I reckon," said Yuba Bill coolly, "they kem by stage to Portland,
+by steamer to 'Frisco, steamer again to Stockton, and then by stage
+over the whole line.  Allers by Wells, Fargo & Co.'s Express, from
+agent to agent, and from messenger to messenger.  Fact!  They ain't
+bin tetched or handled by any one but the Kempany's agents; they
+ain't had a line or direction except them checks around their necks!
+And they've wanted for nothin' else.  Why, I've carried heaps o'
+treasure before, gentlemen, and once a hundred thousand dollars in
+greenbacks, but I never carried anythin' that was watched and
+guarded as them kids!  Why, the division inspector at Stockton
+wanted to go with 'em over the line; but Jim Bracy, the messenger,
+said he'd call it a reflection on himself and resign, ef they
+didn't give 'em to him with the other packages!  Ye had a pretty
+good time, Bobby, didn't ye?  Plenty to eat and drink, eh?"
+
+The two children laughed a little weak laugh, turned each other
+bashfully around, and then looked up shyly at Yuba Bill and said,
+"Yeth."
+
+"Do you know where you are goin'?" asked Starbuck, in a constrained
+voice.
+
+It was the little girl who answered quickly and eagerly:--
+
+"Yes, to Krissmass and Sandy Claus."
+
+"To what?" asked Starbuck.
+
+Here the boy interposed with a superior air:--
+
+"Thee meanth Couthin Dick.  He'th got Krithmath."
+
+"Where's your mother?"
+
+"Dead."
+
+"And your father?"
+
+"In orthpittal."
+
+There was a laugh somewhere on the outskirts of the crowd.  Every
+one faced angrily in that direction, but the laugher had disappeared.
+Yuba Bill, however, sent his voice after him.  "Yes, in hospital!
+Funny, ain't it?--amoosin' place!  Try it.  Step over here, and in
+five minutes, by the living Hoky, I'll qualify you for admission,
+and not charge you a cent!"  He stopped, gave a sweeping glance of
+dissatisfaction around him, and then, leaning back against the bar,
+beckoned to some one near the door, and said in a disgusted tone,
+"You tell these galoots how it happened, Bracy.  They make me sick!"
+
+Thus appealed to, Bracy, the express messenger, stepped forward in
+Yuba Bill's place.
+
+"It's nothing particular, gentlemen," he said, with a laugh, "only
+it seems that some man called Spindler, who lives about here, sent
+an invitation to the father of these children to bring his family
+to a Christmas party.  It wasn't a bad sort of thing for Spindler
+to do, considering that they were his poor relations, though they
+didn't know him from Adam,--was it?"  He paused; several of the
+bystanders cleared their throats, but said nothing.  "At least,"
+resumed Bracy, "that's what the boys up at Red Hill, Oregon,
+thought, when they heard of it.  Well, as the father was in
+hospital with a broken leg, and the mother only a few weeks dead,
+the boys thought it mighty rough on these poor kids if they were
+done out of their fun because they had no one to bring them.  The
+boys couldn't afford to go themselves, but they got a little money
+together, and then got the idea of sendin' 'em by express.  Our
+agent at Red Hill tumbled to the idea at once; but he wouldn't take
+any money in advance, and said he would send 'em 'C. O. D.' like
+any other package.  And he did, and here they are!  That's all!
+And now, gentlemen, as I've got to deliver them personally to this
+Spindler, and get his receipt and take off their checks, I reckon
+we must toddle.  Come, Bill, help take 'em up!"
+
+"Hold on!" said a dozen voices.  A dozen hands were thrust into a
+dozen pockets; I grieve to say some were regretfully withdrawn
+empty, for it was a hard season in Rough and Ready.  But the
+expressman stepped before them, with warning, uplifted hand.
+
+"Not a cent, boys,--not a cent!  Wells, Fargo's Express Company
+don't undertake to carry bullion with those kids, at least on the
+same contract!"  He laughed, and then looking around him, said
+confidentially in a lower voice, which, however, was quite audible
+to the children, "There's as much as three bags of silver in
+quarter and half dollars in my treasure box in the coach that has
+been poured, yes, just showered upon them, ever since they started,
+and have been passed over from agent to agent and messenger to
+messenger,--enough to pay their passage from here to China!  It's
+time to say quits now.  But bet your life, they are not going to
+that Christmas party poor!"
+
+He caught up the boy, as Yuba Bill lifted the little girl to his
+shoulder, and both passed out.  Then one by one the loungers in the
+bar-room silently and awkwardly followed, and when the barkeeper
+turned back from putting away his decanters and glasses, to his
+astonishment the room was empty.
+
+        .        .        .        .        .        .
+
+Spindler's house, or "Spindler's Splurge," as Rough and Ready chose
+to call it, stood above the settlement, on a deforested hillside,
+which, however, revenged itself by producing not enough vegetation
+to cover even the few stumps that were ineradicable.  A large
+wooden structure in the pseudo-classic style affected by Westerners,
+with an incongruous cupola, it was oddly enough relieved by a still
+more incongruous veranda extending around its four sides, upheld by
+wooden Doric columns, which were already picturesquely covered with
+flowering vines and sun-loving roses.  Mr. Spindler had trusted the
+furnishing of its interior to the same contractor who had
+upholstered the gilded bar-room of the Eureka Saloon, and who had
+apparently bestowed the same design and material, impartially, on
+each.  There were gilded mirrors all over the house and chilly
+marble-topped tables, gilt plaster Cupids in the corners, and
+stuccoed lions "in the way" everywhere.  The tactful hands of Mrs.
+Price had screened some of these with seasonable laurels, fir
+boughs, and berries, and had imparted a slight Christmas flavor to
+the house.  But the greater part of her time had been employed in
+trying to subdue the eccentricities of Spindler's amazing relations;
+in tranquilizing Mrs. "Aunt" Martha Spindler,--the elderly cook
+before alluded to,--who was inclined to regard the gilded splendors
+of the house as indicative of dangerous immorality; in restraining
+"Cousin" Morley Hewlett from considering the dining-room buffet as a
+bar for "intermittent refreshment;" and in keeping the weak-minded
+nephew, Phinney Spindler, from shooting at bottles from the veranda,
+wearing his uncle's clothes, or running up an account in his uncle's
+name for various articles at the general stores.  Yet the
+unlooked-for arrival of the two children had been the one great
+compensation and diversion for her.  She wrote at once to her nieces
+a brief account of her miraculous deliverance.  "I think these poor
+children dropped from the skies here to make our Christmas party
+possible, to say nothing of the sympathy they have created in Rough
+and Ready for Spindler.  He is going to keep them as long as he can,
+and is writing to the father.  Think of the poor little tots
+traveling a thousand miles to 'Krissmass,' as they call it!--though
+they were so well cared for by the messengers that their little
+bodies were positively stuffed like quails.  So, you see, dear, we
+will be able to get along without airing your famous idea.  I'm
+sorry, for I know you're just dying to see it all."
+
+Whatever Kate's "idea" might have been, there certainly seemed now
+no need of any extraneous aid to Mrs. Price's management.
+Christmas came at last, and the dinner passed off without serious
+disaster.  But the ordeal of the reception of Rough and Ready was
+still to come.  For Mrs. Price well knew that although "the boys"
+were more subdued, and, indeed, inclined to sympathize with their
+host's uncouth endeavor, there was still much in the aspect of
+Spindler's relations to excite their sense of the ludicrous.
+
+But here Fortune again favored the house of Spindler with a
+dramatic surprise, even greater than the advent of the children had
+been.  In the change that had come over Rough and Ready, "the boys"
+had decided, out of deference to the women and children, to omit
+the first part of their programme, and had approached and entered
+the house as soberly and quietly as ordinary guests.  But before
+they had shaken hands with the host and hostess, and seen the
+relations, the clatter of wheels was heard before the open door,
+and its lights flashed upon a carriage and pair,--an actual private
+carriage,--the like of which had not been seen since the governor
+of the State had come down to open the new ditch!  Then there was a
+pause, the flash of the carriage lamps upon white silk, the light
+tread of a satin foot on the veranda and in the hall, and the
+entrance of a vision of loveliness!  Middle-aged men and old
+dwellers of cities remembered their youth; younger men bethought
+themselves of Cinderella and the Prince!  There was a thrill and a
+hush as this last guest--a beautiful girl, radiant with youth and
+adornment--put a dainty glass to her sparkling eye and advanced
+familiarly, with outstretched hand, to Dick Spindler.  Mrs. Price
+gave a single gasp, and drew back speechless.
+
+"Uncle Dick," said a laughing contralto voice, which, indeed,
+somewhat recalled Mrs. Price's own, in its courageous frankness, "I
+am so delighted to come, even if a little late, and so sorry that
+Mr. M'Kenna could not come on account of business."
+
+Everybody listened eagerly, but none more eagerly and surprisingly
+than the host himself.  M'Kenna!  The rich cousin who had never
+answered the invitation!  And Uncle Dick!  This, then, was his
+divorced niece!  Yet even in his astonishment he remembered that of
+course no one but himself and Mrs. Price knew it,--and that lady
+had glanced discreetly away.
+
+"Yes," continued the half-niece brightly.  "I came from Sacramento
+with some friends to Shootersville, and from thence I drove here;
+and though I must return to-night, I could not forego the pleasure
+of coming, if it was only for an hour or two, to answer the
+invitation of the uncle I have not seen for years."  She paused,
+and, raising her glasses, turned a politely questioning eye towards
+Mrs. Price.  "One of our relations?" she said smilingly to Spindler.
+
+"No," said Spindler, with some embarrassment, "a--a friend!"
+
+The half-niece extended her hand.  Mrs. Price took it.
+
+But the fair stranger,--what she did and said were the only things
+remembered in Rough and Ready on that festive occasion; no one
+thought of the other relations; no one recalled them nor their
+eccentricities; Spindler himself was forgotten.  People only
+recollected how Spindler's lovely niece lavished her smiles and
+courtesies on every one, and brought to her feet particularly the
+misogynist Starbuck and the sarcastic Cooledge, oblivious of his
+previous speech; how she sat at the piano and sang like an angel,
+hushing the most hilarious and excited into sentimental and even
+maudlin silence; how, graceful as a nymph, she led with "Uncle
+Dick" a Virginia reel until the whole assembly joined, eager for a
+passing touch of her dainty hand in its changes; how, when two
+hours had passed,--all too swiftly for the guests,--they stood with
+bared heads and glistening eyes on the veranda to see the fairy
+coach whirl the fairy princess away!  How--but this incident was
+never known to Rough and Ready.
+
+It happened in the sacred dressing-room, where Mrs. Price was
+cloaking with her own hands the departing half-niece of Mr.
+Spindler.  Taking that opportunity to seize the lovely relative by
+the shoulders and shake her violently, she said: "Oh, yes, and it's
+all very well for you, Kate, you limb!  For you're going away, and
+will never see Rough and Ready and poor Spindler again.  But what
+am I to do, miss?  How am I to face it out?  For you know I've got
+to tell him at least that you're no half-niece of his!"
+
+"Have you?" said the young lady.
+
+"Have I?" repeated the widow impatiently.  "Have I?  Of course I
+have!  What are you thinking of?"
+
+"I was thinking, aunty," said the girl audaciously, "that from what
+I've seen and heard to-night, if I'm not his half-niece now, it's
+only a question of time!  So you'd better wait.  Good-night, dear."
+
+And, really,--it turned out that she was right!
+
+
+
+WHEN THE WATERS WERE UP AT "JULES'"
+
+
+When the waters were up at "Jules'" there was little else up on
+that monotonous level.  For the few inhabitants who calmly and
+methodically moved to higher ground, camping out in tents until the
+flood had subsided, left no distracting wreckage behind them.  A
+dozen half-submerged log cabins dotted the tranquil surface of the
+waters, without ripple or disturbance, looking in the moonlight
+more like the ruins of centuries than of a few days.  There was no
+current to sap their slight foundations or sweep them away; nothing
+stirred that silent lake but the occasional shot-like indentations
+of a passing raindrop, or, still more rarely, a raft, made of a
+single log, propelled by some citizen on a tour of inspection of
+his cabin roof-tree, where some of his goods were still stored.
+There was no sense of terror in this bland obliteration of the
+little settlement; the ruins of a single burnt-up cabin would have
+been more impressive than this stupid and even grotesquely placid
+effect of the rival destroying element.  People took it naturally;
+the water went as it had come,--slowly, impassively, noiselessly; a
+few days of fervid Californian sunshine dried the cabins, and in a
+week or two the red dust lay again as thickly before their doors as
+the winter mud had lain.  The waters of Rattlesnake Creek dropped
+below its banks, the stage-coach from Marysville no longer made a
+detour of the settlement.  There was even a singular compensation
+to this amicable invasion; the inhabitants sometimes found gold in
+those breaches in the banks made by the overflow.  To wait for the
+"old Rattlesnake sluicing" was a vernal hope of the trusting miner.
+
+The history of "Jules'," however, was once destined to offer a
+singular interruption of this peaceful and methodical process.  The
+winter of 1859-60 was an exceptional one.  But little rain had
+fallen in the valleys, although the snow lay deep in the high
+Sierras.  Passes were choked, ravines filled, and glaciers found on
+their slopes.  And when the tardy rains came with the withheld
+southwesterly "trades," the regular phenomenon recurred; Jules'
+Flat silently, noiselessly, and peacefully went under water; the
+inhabitants moved to the higher ground, perhaps a little more
+expeditiously from an impatience born of the delay.  The stagecoach
+from Marysville made its usual detour and stopped before the
+temporary hotel, express offices, and general store of "Jules',"
+under canvas, bark, and the limp leaves of a spreading alder.  It
+deposited a single passenger,--Miles Hemmingway, of San Francisco,
+but originally of Boston,--the young secretary of a mining company,
+dispatched to report upon the alleged auriferous value of "Jules'."
+Of this he had been by no means impressed as he looked down upon
+the submerged cabins from the box-seat of the coach and listened to
+the driver's lazy recital of the flood, and of the singularly
+patient acceptance of it by the inhabitants.
+
+It was the old story of the southwestern miner's indolence and
+incompetency,--utterly distasteful to his northern habits of
+thought and education.  Here was their old fatuous endurance of
+Nature's wild caprices, without that struggle against them which
+brought others strength and success; here was the old philosophy
+which accepted the prairie fire and cyclone, and survived them
+without advancement, yet without repining.  Perhaps in different
+places and surroundings a submission so stoic might have impressed
+him; in gentlemen who tucked their dirty trousers in their muddy
+boots and lived only for the gold they dug, it did not seem to him
+heroic.  Nor was he mollified as he stood beside the rude
+refreshment bar--a few planks laid on trestles--and drank his
+coffee beneath the dripping canvas roof, with an odd recollection
+of his boyhood and an inclement Sunday-school picnic.  Yet these
+men had been living in this shiftless fashion for three weeks!  It
+exasperated him still more to think that he might have to wait
+there a few days longer for the water to subside sufficiently for
+him to make his examination and report.  As he took a proffered
+seat on a candle-box, which tilted under him, and another survey of
+the feeble makeshifts around him, his irascibility found vent.
+
+"Why, in the name of God, didn't you, after you had been flooded
+out ONCE, build your cabins PERMANENTLY on higher ground?"
+
+Although the tone of his voice was more disturbing than his
+question, it pleased one of the loungers to affect to take it
+literally.
+
+"Well, ez you've put it that way,--'in the name of God!'"--returned
+the man lazily, "it mout hev struck us that ez HE was bossin' the
+job, so to speak, and handlin' things round here generally, we
+might leave it to Him.  It wasn't OUR flood to monkey with."
+
+"And as He didn't coven-ant, so to speak, to look arter this higher
+ground 'speshally, and make an Ararat of it for us, ez far ez we
+could see, we didn't see any reason for SETTLIN' yer," put in a
+second speaker, with equal laziness.
+
+The secretary saw his mistake instantly, and had experience enough
+of Western humor not to prolong the disadvantage of his unfortunate
+adjuration.  He colored slightly and said, with a smile, "You know
+what I mean; you could have protected yourselves better.  A levee
+on the bank would have kept you clear of the highest watermark."
+
+"Hey you ever heard WHAT the highest watermark was?" said the first
+speaker, turning to another of the loungers without looking at the
+secretary.
+
+"Never heard it,--didn't know there was a limit before," responded
+the man.
+
+The first speaker turned back to the secretary.  "Did you ever know
+what happened at 'Bulger's,' on the North Fork?  They had one o'
+them levees."
+
+"No.  What happened?" asked the secretary impatiently.
+
+"They was fixed suthin' like us," returned the first speaker.
+"THEY allowed they'd build a levee above THEIR highest watermark,
+and did.  It worked like a charm at first; but the water hed to go
+somewhere, and it kinder collected at the first bend.  Then it
+sorter raised itself on its elbows one day, and looked over the
+levee down upon whar some of the boys was washin' quite comf'ble.
+Then it paid no sorter attention to the limit o' that high
+watermark, but went six inches better!  Not slow and quiet like ez
+it useter to, ez it does HERE, kinder fillin' up from below, but
+went over with a rush and a current, hevin' of course the whole
+height of the levee to fall on t'other side where the boys were
+sluicing."  He paused, and amidst a profound silence added, "They
+say that 'Bulger's' was scattered promiscuous-like all along the
+fort for five miles.  I only know that one of his mules and a
+section of sluicing was picked up at Red Flat, eight miles away!"
+
+Mr. Hemmingway felt that there WAS an answer to this, but, being
+wise, also felt that it would be unavailing.  He smiled politely
+and said nothing, at which the first speaker turned to him:--
+
+"Thar ain't anything to see to-day, but to-morrow, ez things go,
+the water oughter be droppin'.  Mebbe you'd like to wash up now and
+clean yourself," he added, with a glance at Hemmingway's small
+portmanteau.  "Ez we thought you'd likely be crowded here, we've
+rigged up a corner for you at Stanton's shanty with the women."
+
+The young man's cheek flushed slightly at some possible irony in
+this, and he protested with considerable stress that he was quite
+ready "to rough it" where he was.
+
+"I reckon it's already fixed," returned the man decisively, "so
+you'd better come and I'll show you the way."
+
+"One moment," said Hemmingway, with a smile; "my credentials are
+addressed to the manager of the Boone Ditch Company at 'Jules'.'
+Perhaps I ought to see him first."
+
+"All right; he's Stanton."
+
+"And"--hesitated the secretary, "YOU, who appear to understand the
+locality so well,--I trust I may have the pleasure"--
+
+"Oh, I'm Jules."
+
+The secretary was a little startled and amused.  So "Jules" was a
+person, and not a place!
+
+"Then you're a pioneer?" asked Hemmingway, a little less
+dictatorially, as they passed out under the dripping trees.
+
+"I struck this creek in the fall of '49, comin' over Livermore's
+Pass with Stanton," returned Jules, with great brevity of speech
+and deliberate tardiness of delivery.  "Sent for my wife and two
+children the next year; wife died same winter, change bein' too
+sudden for her, and contractin' chills and fever at Sweetwater.
+When I kem here first thar wasn't six inches o' water in the creek;
+out there was a heap of it over there where you see them yallowish-
+green patches and strips o' brush and grass; all that war water
+then, and all that growth hez sprung up since."
+
+Hemmingway looked around him.  The "higher ground" where they stood
+was in reality only a mound-like elevation above the dead level of
+the flat, and the few trees were merely recent young willows and
+alders.  The area of actual depression was much greater than he had
+imagined, and its resemblance to the bed of some prehistoric inland
+sea struck him forcibly.  A previous larger inundation than Jules'
+brief experience had ever known had been by no means improbable.
+His cheek reddened at his previous hasty indictment of the
+settlers' ignorance and shiftlessness, and the thought that he had
+probably committed his employers to his own rash confidence and
+superiority of judgment.  However, there was no evidence that this
+diluvial record was not of the remote past.  He smiled again with
+greater security as he thought of the geological changes that had
+since tempered these cataclysms, and the amelioration brought by
+settlement and cultivation.  Nevertheless, he would make a thorough
+examination to-morrow.
+
+Stanton's cabin was the furthest of these temporary habitations,
+and was partly on the declivity which began to slope to the river's
+bank.  It was, like the others, a rough shanty of unplaned boards,
+but, unlike the others, it had a base of logs laid lengthwise on
+the ground and parallel with each other, on which the flooring and
+structure were securely fastened.  This gave it the appearance of a
+box slid on runners, or a Noah's Ark whose bulk had been reduced.
+Jules explained that the logs, laid in that manner, kept the shanty
+warmer and free from damp.  In reply to Hemmingway's suggestion
+that it was a great waste of material, Jules simply replied that
+the logs were the "flotsam and jetsam" of the creek from the
+overflowed mills below.
+
+Hemmingway again smiled.  It was again the old story of Western
+waste and prodigality.  Accompanied by Jules, however, he climbed
+up the huge, slippery logs which made a platform before the door,
+and entered.
+
+The single room was unequally divided; the larger part containing
+three beds, by day rolled in a single pile in one corner to make
+room for a table and chairs.  A few dresses hanging from nails on
+the wall showed that it was the women's room.  The smaller
+compartment was again subdivided by a hanging blanket, behind which
+was a rude bunk or berth against the wall, a table made of a
+packing-box, containing a tin basin and a can of water.  This was
+his apartment.
+
+"The women-folks are down the creek, bakin', to-day," said Jules
+explanatorily; "but I reckon that one of 'em will be up here in a
+jiffy to make supper, so you just take it easy till they come.
+I've got to meander over to the claim afore I turn in, but you just
+lie by to-night and take a rest."
+
+He turned away, leaving Hemmingway standing in the doorway still
+distraught and hesitating.  Nor did the young man recognize the
+delicacy of Jules' leave-taking until he had unstrapped his
+portmanteau and found himself alone, free to make his toilet,
+unembarrassed by company.  But even then he would have preferred
+the rough companionship of the miners in the common dormitory of
+the general store to this intrusion upon the half-civilization of
+the women, their pitiable little comforts and secret makeshifts.
+His disgust of his own indecision which brought him there naturally
+recoiled in the direction of his host and hostesses, and after a
+hurried ablution, a change of linen, and an attempt to remove the
+stains of travel from his clothes, he strode out impatiently into
+the open air again.
+
+It was singularly mild even for the season.  The southwest trades
+blew softly, and whispered to him of San Francisco and the distant
+Pacific, with its long, steady swell.  He turned again to the
+overflowed Flat beneath him, and the sluggish yellow water that
+scarcely broke a ripple against the walls of the half-submerged
+cabins.  And this was the water for whose going down they were
+waiting with an immobility as tranquil as the waters themselves!
+What marvelous incompetency,--or what infinite patience!  He knew,
+of course, their expected compensation in this "ground sluicing" at
+Nature's own hand; the long rifts in the banks of the creek which
+so often showed "the color" in the sparkling scales of river gold
+disclosed by the action of the water; the heaps of reddish mud left
+after its subsidence around the walls of the cabins,--a deposit
+that often contained a treasure a dozen times more valuable than
+the cabin itself!  And then he heard behind him a laugh, a short
+and panting breath, and turning, beheld a young woman running
+towards him.
+
+In his first astounded sight of her, in her limp nankeen sunbonnet,
+thrown back from her head by the impetus of her flight, he saw only
+too much hair, two much white teeth, too much eye-flash, and, above
+all,--as it appeared to him,--too much confidence in the power of
+these qualities.  Even as she ran, it seemed to him that she was
+pulling down ostentatiously the rolled-up sleeves of her pink
+calico gown over her shapely arms.  I am inclined to think that the
+young gentleman's temper was at fault, and his conclusion hasty; a
+calmer observer would have detected nothing of this in her frankly
+cheerful voice.  Nevertheless, her evident pleasure in the meeting
+seemed to him only obtrusive coquetry.
+
+"Lordy!  I reckoned to git here afore you'd get through fixin' up,
+and in time to do a little prinkin' myself, and here you're out
+already."  She laughed, glancing at his clean shirt and damp hair.
+"But all the same, we kin have a talk, and you kin tell me all the
+news afore the other wimmen get up here.  It's a coon's age since I
+was at Sacramento and saw anybody or anything."  She stopped and,
+instinctively detecting some vague reticence in the man before her,
+said, still laughing, "You're Mr. Hemmingway, ain't you?"
+
+Hemmingway took off his hat quickly, with a slight start at his
+forgetfulness.  "I beg your pardon; yes, certainly."
+
+"Aunty Stanton thought it was 'Hummingbird,'" said the girl, with a
+laugh, "but I reckoned not.  I'm Jinney Jules, you know; folks call
+me 'J. J.'  It wouldn't do for a Hummingbird and a Jay Jay to be in
+the same camp, would it?  It would be just TOO funny!"
+
+Hemmingway did not find the humor of this so singularly exhaustive,
+but he was already beginning to be ashamed of his attitude towards
+her.  "I'm very sorry to be giving you all this trouble by my
+intrusion, for I was quite willing to stay at the store yonder.
+Indeed," he added, with a burst of frankness quite as sincere as
+her own, "if you think your father will not be offended, I would
+gladly go there now."
+
+If he still believed in her coquetry and vanity, he would have been
+undeceived and crushed by the equal and sincere frankness with
+which she met this ungallant speech.
+
+"No!  I reckon he wouldn't care, if you'd be as comf'ble and fit
+for to-morrow.  But ye WOULDN'T," she said reflectively.  "The boys
+thar sit up late over euchre, and swear a heap, and Simpson, who'd
+sleep alongside of ye, snores pow'ful, I've heard.  Aunty Stanton
+kin do her level at that, too, and they say"--with a laugh--"that I
+kin, too, but you're away off in that corner, and it won't reach
+you.  So, takin' it all, by the large, you'd better stay whar ye
+are.  We wimmen, that is, the most of us, will be off and away down
+to Rattlesnake Bar shoppin' afore sun up, so ye'll sleep ez long ez
+ye want to, and find yer breakfast ready when ye wake.  So I'll
+jest set to and get ye some supper, and ye kin tell me all the
+doin's in Sacramento and 'Frisco while I'm workin'."
+
+In spite of her unconscious rebuff to his own vanity, Hemmingway
+felt a sense of relief and less constraint in his relations to this
+decidedly provincial hostess.
+
+"Can I help you in any way?" he asked eagerly.
+
+"Well, ye MIGHT bring me an armful o' wood from the pile under the
+alders, ef ye ain't afraid o' dirtyin' your coat," she said
+tentatively.
+
+Mr. Hemmingway was not afraid; he declared himself delighted.  He
+brought a generous armful of small cut willow boughs, and deposited
+them before a small stove, which seemed a temporary substitute for
+the usual large adobe chimney that generally occupied the entire
+gable of a miner's cabin.  An elbow and short length of stovepipe
+carried the smoke through the cabin side.  But he also noticed that
+his fair companion had used the interval to put on a pair of white
+cuffs and a collar.  However, she brushed the green moss from his
+sleeve with some toweling, and although this operation brought her
+so near to him that her breath--as soft and warm as the southwest
+trades--stirred his hair, it was evident that this contiguity was
+only frontier familiarity, as far removed from conscious coquetry
+as it was, perhaps, from educated delicacy.
+
+"The boys gin'rally kem to take up enough wood for me to begin
+with," she said, "but I reckon they didn't know I was comin' up so
+soon."
+
+Hemmingway's distrust returned a little at this obvious suggestion
+that he was only a substitute for their general gallantry, but he
+smiled and said somewhat bluntly, "I don't suppose you lack for
+admirers here."
+
+The girl, however, took him literally.  "Lordy, no!  Me and Mamie
+Robinson are the only girls for fifteen miles along the creek.
+ADMIRIN'!  I call it jest PESTERIN' sometimes!  I reckon I'll hev
+to keep a dog!"
+
+Hemmingway shivered.  Yes, she was not only conscious, but spoilt
+already.  He pictured to himself the uncouth gallantries of the
+settlement, the provincial badinage, the feeble rivalries of the
+young men whom he had seen at the general store.  Undoubtedly this
+was what she was expecting in HIM!
+
+"Well," she said, turning from the fire she had kindled, "while I'm
+settin' the table, tell me what's a-doin' in Sacramento!  I reckon
+you've got heaps of lady friends thar,--I'm told there's lots of
+fashions just from the States."
+
+"I'm afraid I don't know enough of them to interest you," he said
+dryly.
+
+"Go on and talk," she replied.  "Why, when Tom Flynn kem back from
+Sacramento, and he warn't thar more nor a week, he jest slung yarns
+about his doin's thar to last the hull rainy season."
+
+Half amused and half annoyed, Hemmingway seated himself on the
+little platform beside the open door, and began a conscientious
+description of the progress of Sacramento, its new buildings,
+hotels, and theatres, as it had struck him on his last visit.  For
+a while he was somewhat entertained by the girl's vivacity and
+eager questioning, but presently it began to pall.  He continued,
+however, with a grim sense of duty, and partly as a reason for
+watching her in her household duties.  Certainly she was graceful!
+Her tall, lithe, but beautifully moulded figure, even in its
+characteristic southwestern indolence, fell into poses as
+picturesque as they were unconscious.  She lifted the big molasses-
+can from its shelf on the rafters with the attitude of a Greek
+water-bearer.  She upheaved the heavy flour-sack to the same secure
+shelf with the upraised palms of an Egyptian caryatid.  Suddenly
+she interrupted Hemmingway's perfunctory talk with a hearty laugh.
+He started, looked up from his seat on the platform, and saw that
+she was standing over him and regarding him with a kind of
+mischievous pity.
+
+"Look here," she said, "I reckon that'll do!  You kin pull up
+short!  I kin see what's the matter with you; you're jest plumb
+tired, tuckered out, and want to turn in!  So jest you sit that
+quiet until I get supper ready and never mind me."  In vain
+Hemmingway protested, with a rising color.  The girl only shook her
+head.  "Don't tell me!  You ain't keering to talk, and you're only
+playin' Sacramento statistics on me," she retorted, with unfeigned
+cheerfulness.  "Anyhow, here's the wimmen comin', and supper is
+ready."
+
+There was a sound of weary, resigned ejaculations and pantings, and
+three gaunt women in lustreless alpaca gowns appeared before the
+cabin.  They seemed prematurely aged and worn with labor, anxiety,
+and ill nourishment.  Doubtless somewhere in these ruins a flower
+like Jay Jules had once flourished; doubtless somewhere in that
+graceful nymph herself the germ of this dreary maturity was hidden.
+Hemmingway welcomed them with a seriousness equal to their own.
+The supper was partaken with the kind of joyless formality which in
+the southwest is supposed to indicate deep respect, even the
+cheerful Jay falling under the influence, and it was with a feeling
+of relief that at last the young man retired to his fenced-off
+corner for solitude and repose.  He gathered, however, that before
+"sun up" the next morning the elder women were going to Rattlesnake
+Bar for the weekly shopping, leaving Jay as before to prepare his
+breakfast and then join them later.  It was already a change in his
+sentiments to find himself looking forward to that tete-a-tete with
+the young girl, as a chance of redeeming his character in her eyes.
+He was beginning to feel he had been stupid, unready, and withal
+prejudiced.  He undressed himself in his seclusion, broken only by
+the monotonous voices in the adjoining apartment.  From time to
+time he heard fragments and scraps of their conversation, always in
+reference to affairs of the household and settlement, but never of
+himself,--not even the suggestion of a prudent lowering of their
+voices,--and fell asleep.  He woke up twice in the night with a
+sensation of cold so marked and distinct from his experience of the
+early evening, that he was fain to pile his clothes over his
+blankets to keep warm.  He fell asleep again, coming once more to
+consciousness with a sense of a slight jar, but relapsing again
+into slumber for he knew not how long.  Then he was fully awakened
+by a voice calling him, and, opening his eyes, beheld the blanket
+partition put aside, and the face of Jay thrust forward.  To his
+surprise it wore a look of excited astonishment dominated by
+irrepressible laughter.
+
+"Get up quick as you kin," she said gaspingly; "this is about the
+killingest thing that ever happened!"
+
+She disappeared, but he could still hear her laughing, and to his
+utter astonishment with her disappearance the floor seemed to
+change its level.  A giddy feeling seized him; he put his feet to
+the floor; it was unmistakably wet and oozing.  He hurriedly
+clothed himself, still accompanied by the strange feeling of
+oscillation and giddiness, and passed though the opening into the
+next room.  Again his step produced the same effect upon the floor,
+and he actually stumbled against her shaking figure, as she wiped
+the tears of uncontrollable mirth from her eyes with her apron.
+The contact seemed to upset her remaining gravity.  She dropped
+into a chair, and, pointing to the open door, gasped, "Look thar!
+Lordy!  How's that for high?" threw her apron over her head, and
+gave way to an uproarious fit of laughter.
+
+Hemmingway turned to the open door.  A lake was before him on the
+level of the cabin.  He stepped forward on the platform; the water
+was right and left, all around him.  The platform dipped slightly
+to his step.  The cabin was afloat,--afloat upon its base of logs
+like a raft, the whole structure upheld by the floor on which the
+logs were securely fastened.  The high ground had disappeared--the
+river--its banks the green area beyond.  They, and THEY alone, were
+afloat upon an inland sea.
+
+He turned an astounded and serious face upon her mirth.  "When did
+it happen?" he demanded.  She checked her laugh, more from a sense
+of polite deference to his mood than any fear, and said quietly,
+"That gets me.  Everything was all right two hours ago when the
+wimmen left.  It was too early to get your breakfast and rouse ye
+out, and I felt asleep, I reckon, until I felt a kind o' slump and
+a jar."  Hemmingway remembered his own half-conscious sensation.
+"Then I got up and saw we was adrift.  I didn't waken ye, for I
+thought it was only a sort of wave that would pass.  It wasn't
+until I saw we were movin' and the hull rising ground gettin' away,
+that I thought o' callin' ye."
+
+He thought of the vanished general store, of her father, the
+workers on the bank, the helpless women on their way to the Bar,
+and turned almost savagely on her.
+
+"But the others,--where are they?" he said indignantly.  "Do you
+call that a laughing matter?"
+
+She stopped at the sound of his voice as at a blow.  Her face
+hardened into immobility, yet when she replied it was with the
+deliberate indolence of her father.  "The wimmen are up on the
+hills by this time.  The boys hev bin drowned out many times afore
+this and got clear off, on sluice boxes and timber, without
+squealing.  Tom Flynn went down ten miles to Sayer's once on two
+bar'ls, and I never heard that HE was cryin' when they picked him
+up."
+
+A flush came to Hemmingway's cheek, but with it a gleam of
+intelligence.  Of course the inundation was known to them FIRST,
+and there was the wreckage to support them.  They had clearly saved
+themselves.  If they had abandoned the cabin, it was because they
+knew its security, perhaps had even seen it safely adrift.
+
+"Has this ever happened to the cabin before?" he asked, as he
+thought of its peculiar base.
+
+"No."
+
+He looked at the water again.  There was a decided current.  The
+overflow was evidently no part of the original inundation.  He put
+his hand in the water.  It was icy cold.  Yes, he understood it
+now.  It was the sudden melting of snow in the Sierras which had
+brought this volume down the canyon.  But was there more still to
+come?
+
+"Have you anything like a long pole or stick in the cabin?"
+
+"Nary," said the girl, opening her big eyes and shaking her head
+with a simulation of despair, which was, however, flatly contradicted
+by her laughing mouth.
+
+"Nor any cord or twine?" he continued.
+
+She handed him a ball of coarse twine.
+
+"May I take a couple of these hooks?" he asked, pointing to some
+rough iron hooks in the rafters, on which bacon and jerked beef
+were hanging.
+
+She nodded.  He dislodged the hooks, greased them with the bacon
+rind, and affixed them to the twine.
+
+"Fishin'?" she asked demurely.
+
+"Exactly," he replied gravely.
+
+He threw the line in the water.  It slackened at about six feet,
+straightened, and became taut at an angle, and then dragged.  After
+one or two sharp jerks he pulled it up.  A few leaves and grasses
+were caught in the hooks.  He examined them attentively.
+
+"We're not in the creek," he said, "nor in the old overflow.
+There's no mud or gravel on the hooks, and these grasses don't grow
+near water."
+
+"Now, that's mighty cute of you," she said admiringly, as she knelt
+beside him on the platform.  "Let's see what you've caught.  Look
+yer!" she added, suddenly lifting a limp stalk, "that's 'old man,'
+and thar ain't a scrap of it grows nearer than Springer's Rise,--
+four miles from home."
+
+"Are you sure?" he asked quickly.
+
+"Sure as pop!  I used to go huntin' it for smellidge."
+
+"For what?" he said, with a bewildered smile.
+
+"For this,"--she thrust the leaves to his nose and then to her own
+pink nostrils; "for--for"--she hesitated, and then with a
+mischievous simulation of correctness added, "for the perfume."
+
+He looked at her admiringly.  For all her five feet ten inches,
+what a mere child she was, after all!  What a fool he was to have
+taken a resentful attitude towards her!  How charming and graceful
+she looked, kneeling there beside him!
+
+"Tell me," he said suddenly, in a gentler voice, "what were you
+laughing at just now?"
+
+Her brown eyes wavered for a moment, and then brimmed with
+merriment.  She threw herself sideways, in a leaning posture,
+supporting herself on one arm, while with her other hand she slowly
+drew out her apron string, as she said, in a demure voice:--
+
+"Well, I reckoned it was jest too killin' to think of you, who
+didn't want to talk to me, and would hev given your hull pile to
+hev skipped out o' this, jest stuck here alongside o' me, whether
+you would or no, for Lord knows how long!"
+
+"But that was last night," he said, in a tone of raillery.  "I was
+tired, and you said so yourself, you know.  But I'm ready to talk
+now.  What shall I tell you?"
+
+"Anything," said the girl, with a laugh.
+
+"What I am thinking of?" he said, with frankly admiring eyes.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Everything?"
+
+"Yes, everything."  She stopped, and leaning forward, suddenly
+caught the brim of his soft felt hat, and drawing it down smartly
+over his audacious eyes, said, "Everything BUT THAT."
+
+It was with some difficulty and some greater embarrassment that he
+succeeded in getting his eyes free again.  When he did so, she had
+risen and entered the cabin.  Disconcerted as he was, he was
+relieved to see that her expression of amusement was unchanged.
+Was her act a piece of rustic coquetry, or had she resented his
+advances?  Nor did her next words settle the question.
+
+"Ye kin do yer nice talk and philanderin' after we've settled whar
+we are, what we're goin', and what's goin' to happen.  Jest now it
+'pears to me that ez these yere logs are the only thing betwixt us
+and 'kingdom come,' ye'd better be hustlin' round with a few spikes
+to clinch 'em to the floor."
+
+She handed him a hammer and a few spikes.  He obediently set to
+work, with little confidence, however, in the security of the
+fastening.  There was neither rope nor chain for lashing the logs
+together; a stronger current and a collision with some submerged
+stump or wreckage would loosen them and wreck the cabin.  But he
+said nothing.  It was the girl who broke the silence.
+
+"What's your front name?"
+
+"Miles."
+
+"MILES,--that's a funny name.  I reckon that's why you war so FAR
+OFF and DISTANT at first."
+
+Mr. Hemmingway thought this very witty, and said so.  "But," he
+added, "when I was a little nearer a moment ago, you stopped me."
+
+"But you was moving faster than the shanty was.  I reckon you don't
+take that gait with your lady friends at Sacramento!  However, you
+kin talk now."
+
+"But you forget I don't know 'where we are,' nor 'what's going to
+happen.'"
+
+"But I do," she said quietly.  "In a couple of hours we'll be
+picked up, so you'll be free again."
+
+Something in the confidence of her manner made him go to the door
+again and look out.  There was scarcely any current now, and the
+cabin seemed motionless.  Even the wind, which might have acted
+upon it, was wanting.  They were apparently in the same position as
+before, but his sounding-line showed that the water was slightly
+falling.  He came back and imparted the fact with a certain
+confidence born of her previous praise of his knowledge.  To his
+surprise she only laughed and said lazily, "We'll be all right, and
+you'll be free, in about two hours."
+
+"I see no sign of it," he said, looking through the door again.
+
+"That's because you're looking in the water and the sky and the mud
+for it," she said, with a laugh.  "I reckon you've been trained to
+watch them things a heap better than to study the folks about
+here."
+
+"I daresay you're right," said Hemmingway cheerfully, "but I don't
+clearly see what the folks about here have to do with our situation
+just now."
+
+"You'll see," she said, with a smile of mischievous mystery.  "All
+the same," she added, with a sudden and dangerous softness in her
+eyes, "I ain't sayin' that YOU ain't kinder right neither."
+
+An hour ago he would have laughed at the thought that a mere look
+and sentence like this from the girl could have made his heart
+beat.  "Then I may go on and talk?"
+
+She smiled, but her eyes said, "Yes," plainly.
+
+He turned to take a chair near her.  Suddenly the cabin trembled,
+there was a sound of scraping, a bump, and then the whole structure
+tilted to one side and they were both thrown violently towards the
+corner, with a swift inrush of water.  Hemmingway quickly caught
+the girl by the waist; she clung to him instinctively, yet still
+laughing, as with a desperate effort he succeeded in dragging her
+to the upper side of the slanting cabin, and momentarily restoring
+its equilibrium.  They remained for an instant breathless.  But in
+that instant he had drawn her face to his and kissed her.
+
+She disengaged herself gently with neither excitement nor emotion,
+and pointing to the open door said, "Look there!"
+
+Two of the logs which formed the foundation of their floor were
+quietly floating in the water before the cabin!  The submerged
+obstacle or snag which had torn them from their fastening was still
+holding the cabin fast.  Hemmingway saw the danger.  He ran along
+the narrow ledge to the point of contact and unhesitatingly leaped
+into the icy cold water.  It reached his armpits before his feet
+struck the obstacle,--evidently a stump with a projecting branch.
+Bracing himself against it, he shoved off the cabin.  But when he
+struck out to follow it, he found that the log nearest him was
+loose and his grasp might tear it away.  At the same moment,
+however, a pink calico arm fluttered above his head, and a strong
+grasp seized his coat collar.  The cabin half revolved as the girl
+dragged him into the open door.
+
+"You bantam!" she said, with a laugh, "why didn't you let ME do
+that?  I'm taller than you!  But," she added, looking at his
+dripping clothes and dragging out a blanket from the corner, "I
+couldn't dry myself as quick as you kin!"  To her surprise,
+however, Hemmingway tossed the blanket aside, and pointing to the
+floor, which was already filmed with water, ran to the still warm
+stove, detached it from its pipe, and threw it overboard.  The sack
+of flour, bacon, molasses, and sugar, and all the heavier articles
+followed it into the stream.  Relieved of their weight the cabin
+base rose an inch or two higher.  Then he sat down and said,
+"There! that may keep us afloat for that 'couple of hours' you
+speak of.  So I suppose I may talk now!"
+
+"Ye haven't no time," she said, in a graver voice.  "It won't be as
+long as a couple of hours now.  Look over thar!"
+
+He looked where she pointed across the gray expanse of water.  At
+first he could see nothing.  Presently he saw a mere dot on its
+face which at times changed to a single black line.
+
+"It's a log, like these," he said.
+
+"It's no log.  It's an Injun dug-out*--comin' for me."
+
+
+* A canoe made from a hollowed log.
+
+
+"Your father?" he said joyfully.
+
+She smiled pityingly.  "It's Tom Flynn.  Father's got suthin' else
+to look arter.  Tom Flynn hasn't."
+
+"And who's Tom Flynn?" he asked, with an odd sensation.
+
+"The man I'm engaged to," she said gravely, with a slight color.
+
+The rose that blossomed on her cheek faded in his.  There was a
+moment of silence.  Then he said frankly, "I owe you some apology.
+Forgive my folly and impertinence a moment ago.  How could I have
+known this?"
+
+"You took no more than you deserved, or that Tom would have
+objected to," she said, with a little laugh.  "You've been mighty
+kind and handy."
+
+She held out her hand; their fingers closed together in a frank
+pressure.  Then his mind went back to his work, which he had
+forgotten,--to his first impressions of the camp and of her.  They
+both stood silent, watching the canoe, now quite visible, and the
+man that was paddling it, with an intensity that both felt was
+insincere.
+
+"I'm afraid," he said, with a forced laugh, "that I was a little
+too hasty in disposing of your goods and possessions.  We could
+have kept afloat a little longer."
+
+"It's all the same," she said, with a slight laugh; "it's jest as
+well we didn't look too comf'ble--to HIM."
+
+He did not reply; he did not dare to look at her.  Yes!  It was the
+same coquette he had seen last night.  His first impressions were
+correct.
+
+The canoe came on rapidly now, propelled by a powerful arm.  In a
+few moments it was alongside, and its owner leaped on the platform.
+It was the gentleman with his trousers tucked in his boots, the
+second voice in the gloomy discussion in the general store last
+evening.  He nodded simply to the girl, and shook Hemmingway's hand
+warmly.
+
+Then he made a hurried apology for his delay: it was so difficult
+to find "the lay" of the drifted cabin.  He had struck out first
+for the most dangerous spot,--the "old clearing," on the right
+bank, with its stumps and new growths,--and it seemed he was right.
+And all the rest were safe, and "nobody was hurt."
+
+"All the same, Tom," she said, when they were seated and paddling
+off again, "you don't know HOW NEAR YOU CAME TO LOSING ME."  Then
+she raised her beautiful eyes and looked significantly, not at HIM,
+but at Hemmingway.
+
+When the water was down at "Jules'" the next day, they found
+certain curious changes and some gold, and the secretary was able
+to make a favorable report.  But he made none whatever of his
+impressions "when the water was up at 'Jules','" though he often
+wondered if they were strictly trustworthy.
+
+
+
+THE BOOM IN THE "CALAVERAS CLARION"
+
+
+The editorial sanctum of the "Calaveras Clarion" opened upon the
+"composing-room" of that paper on the one side, and gave apparently
+upon the rest of Calaveras County upon the other.  For, situated on
+the very outskirts of the settlement and the summit of a very steep
+hill, the pines sloped away from the editorial windows to the long
+valley of the South Fork and--infinity.  The little wooden building
+had invaded Nature without subduing it.  It was filled night and
+day with the murmur of pines and their fragrance.  Squirrels
+scampered over its roof when it was not preoccupied by woodpeckers,
+and a printer's devil had once seen a nest-building blue jay enter
+the composing window, flutter before one of the slanting type-cases
+with an air of deliberate selection, and then fly off with a vowel
+in its bill.
+
+Amidst these sylvan surroundings the temporary editor of the
+"Clarion" sat at his sanctum, reading the proofs of an editorial.
+As he was occupying that position during a six weeks' absence of
+the bona fide editor and proprietor, he was consequently reading
+the proof with some anxiety and responsibility.  It had been
+suggested to him by certain citizens that the "Clarion" needed a
+firmer and more aggressive policy towards the Bill before the
+Legislature for the wagon road to the South Fork.  Several Assembly
+men had been "got at" by the rival settlement of Liberty Hill, and
+a scathing exposure and denunciation of such methods was necessary.
+The interests of their own township were also to be "whooped up."
+All this had been vigorously explained to him, and he had grasped
+the spirit, if not always the facts, of his informants.  It is to
+be feared, therefore, that he was perusing his article more with
+reference to its vigor than his own convictions.  And yet he was
+not so greatly absorbed as to be unmindful of the murmur of the
+pines without, his half-savage environment, and the lazy talk of
+his sole companions,--the foreman and printer in the adjoining
+room.
+
+"Bet your life!  I've always said that a man INSIDE a newspaper
+office could hold his own agin any outsider that wanted to play
+rough or tried to raid the office!  Thar's the press, and thar's
+the printin' ink and roller!  Folks talk a heap o' the power o' the
+Press!--I tell ye, ye don't half know it.  Why, when old Kernel
+Fish was editin' the 'Sierra Banner,' one o' them bullies that he'd
+lampooned in the 'Banner' fought his way past the Kernel in the
+office, into the composin'-room, to wreck everythin' and 'pye' all
+the types.  Spoffrel--ye don't remember Spoffrel?--little red-
+haired man?--was foreman.  Spoffrel fended him off with the roller
+and got one good dab inter his eyes that blinded him, and then
+Spoffrel sorter skirmished him over to the press,--a plain lever
+just like ours,--whar the locked-up form of the inside was still
+a-lyin'!  Then, quick as lightnin', Spoffrel tilts him over agin it,
+and HE throws out his hand and ketches hold o' the form to steady
+himself, when Spoffrel just runs the form and the hand under the
+press and down with the lever!  And that held the feller fast as
+grim death!  And when at last he begs off, and Spoff lets him
+loose, the hull o' that 'ere lampooning article he objected to was
+printed right onto the skin o' his hand!  Fact, and it wouldn't
+come off, either."
+
+"Gosh, but I'd like to hev seen it," said the printer.  "There
+ain't any chance, I reckon, o' such a sight here.  The boss don't
+take no risks lampoonin', and he" (the editor knew he was being
+indicated by some unseen gesture of the unseen workman) "ain't that
+style."
+
+"Ye never kin tell," said the foreman didactically, "what might
+happen!  I've known editors to get into a fight jest for a little
+innercent bedevilin' o' the opposite party.  Sometimes for a
+misprint.  Old man Pritchard of the 'Argus' oncet had a hole blown
+through his arm because his proofreader had called Colonel
+Starbottle's speech an 'ignominious' defense, when the old man hed
+written 'ingenuous' defense."
+
+The editor paused in his proof-reading.  He had just come upon the
+sentence: "We cannot congratulate Liberty Hill--in its superior
+elevation--upon the ignominious silence of the representative of
+all Calaveras when this infamous Bill was introduced."  He referred
+to his copy.  Yes!  He had certainly written "ignominious,"--that
+was what his informants had suggested.  But was he sure they were
+right?  He had a vague recollection, also, that the representative
+alluded to--Senator Bradley--had fought two duels, and was a "good"
+though somewhat impulsive shot!  He might alter the word to
+"ingenuous" or "ingenious," either would be finely sarcastic, but
+then--there was his foreman, who would detect it!  He would wait
+until he had finished the entire article.  In that occupation he
+became oblivious of the next room, of a silence, a whispered
+conversation, which ended with a rapping at the door and the
+appearance of the foreman in the doorway.
+
+"There's a man in the office who wants to see the editor," he said.
+
+"Show him in," replied the editor briefly.  He was, however,
+conscious that there was a singular significance in his foreman's
+manner, and an eager apparition of the other printer over the
+foreman's shoulder.
+
+"He's carryin' a shot-gun, and is a man twice as big as you be,"
+said the foreman gravely.
+
+The editor quickly recalled his own brief and as yet blameless
+record in the "Clarion."  "Perhaps," he said tentatively, with a
+gentle smile, "he's looking for Captain Brush" (the absent editor).
+
+"I told him all that," said the foreman grimly, "and he said he
+wanted to see the man in charge."
+
+In proportion as the editor's heart sank his outward crest arose.
+"Show him in," he said loftily.
+
+"We KIN keep him out," suggested the foreman, lingering a moment;
+"me and him," indicating the expectant printer behind him, "is
+enough for that."
+
+"Show him up," repeated the editor firmly.
+
+The foreman withdrew; the editor seated himself and again took up
+his proof.  The doubtful word "ignominious" seemed to stand out of
+the paragraph before him; it certainly WAS a strong expression!  He
+was about to run his pencil through it when he heard the heavy step
+of his visitor approaching.  A sudden instinct of belligerency took
+possession of him, and he wrathfully threw the pencil down.
+
+The burly form of the stranger blocked the doorway.  He was dressed
+like a miner, but his build and general physiognomy were quite
+distinct from the local variety.  His upper lip and chin were
+clean-shaven, still showing the blue-black roots of the beard which
+covered the rest of his face and depended in a thick fleece under
+his throat.  He carried a small bundle tied up in a silk
+handkerchief in one hand, and a "shot-gun" in the other, perilously
+at half-cock.  Entering the sanctum, he put down his bundle and
+quietly closed the door behind him.  He then drew an empty chair
+towards him and dropped heavily into it with his gun on his knees.
+The editor's heart dropped almost as heavily, although he quite
+composedly held out his hand.
+
+"Shall I relieve you of your gun?"
+
+"Thank ye, lad--noa.  It's moor coomfortable wi' me, and it's main
+dangersome to handle on the half-cock.  That's why I didn't leave
+'im on the horse outside!"
+
+At the sound of his voice and occasional accent a flash of
+intelligence relieved the editor's mind.  He remembered that twenty
+miles away, in the illimitable vista from his windows, lay a
+settlement of English north-country miners, who, while faithfully
+adopting the methods, customs, and even slang of the Californians,
+retained many of their native peculiarities.  The gun he carried on
+his knee, however, was evidently part of the Californian imitation.
+
+"Can I do anything for you?" said the editor blandly.
+
+"Ay!  I've coom here to bill ma woife."
+
+"I--don't think I understand," hesitated the editor, with a smile.
+
+"I've coom here to get ye to put into your paaper a warnin', a
+notiss, that onless she returns to my house in four weeks, I'll
+have nowt to do wi' her again."
+
+"Oh!" said the editor, now perfectly reassured, "you want an
+advertisement?  That's the business of the foreman; I'll call him."
+He was rising from his seat when the stranger laid a heavy hand on
+his shoulder and gently forced him down again.
+
+"Noa, lad!  I don't want noa foreman nor understrappers to take
+this job.  I want to talk it over wi' you.  Sabe?  My woife she bin
+up and awaa these six months.  We had a bit of difference, that
+ain't here nor there, but she skedaddled outer my house.  I want to
+give her fair warning, and let her know I ain't payin' any debts o'
+hers arter this notiss, and I ain't takin' her back arter four
+weeks from date."
+
+"I see," said the editor glibly.  "What's your wife's name?"
+
+"Eliza Jane Dimmidge."
+
+"Good," continued the editor, scribbling on the paper before him;
+"something like this will do: 'Whereas my wife, Eliza Jane
+Dimmidge, having left my bed and board without just cause or
+provocation, this is to give notice that I shall not be responsible
+for any debts of her contracting on or after this date.'"
+
+"Ye must be a lawyer," said Mr. Dimmidge admiringly.
+
+It was an old enough form of advertisement, and the remark showed
+incontestably that Mr. Dimmidge was not a native; but the editor
+smiled patronizingly and went on: "'And I further give notice that
+if she does not return within the period of four weeks from this
+date, I shall take such proceedings for relief as the law affords.'"
+
+"Coom, lad, I didn't say THAT."
+
+"But you said you wouldn't take her back."
+
+"Ay."
+
+"And you can't prevent her without legal proceedings.  She's your
+wife.  But you needn't take proceedings, you know.  It's only a
+warning."
+
+Mr. Dimmidge nodded approvingly.  "That's so."
+
+"You'll want it published for four weeks, until date?" asked the
+editor.
+
+"Mebbe longer, lad."
+
+The editor wrote "till forbid" in the margin of the paper and
+smiled.
+
+"How big will it be?" said Mr. Dimmidge.
+
+The editor took up a copy of the "Clarion" and indicated about an
+inch of space.  Mr. Dimmidge's face fell.
+
+"I want it bigger,--in large letters, like a play-card," he said.
+"That's no good for a warning."
+
+"You can have half a column or a whole column if you like," said
+the editor airily.
+
+"I'll take a whole one," said Mr. Dimmidge simply.
+
+The editor laughed.  "Why! it would cost you a hundred dollars."
+
+"I'll take it," repeated Mr. Dimmidge.
+
+"But," said the editor gravely, "the same notice in a small space
+will serve your purpose and be quite legal."
+
+"Never you mind that, lad!  It's the looks of the thing I'm arter,
+and not the expense.  I'll take that column."
+
+The editor called in the foreman and showed him the copy.  "Can you
+display that so as to fill a column?"
+
+The foreman grasped the situation promptly.  It would be big
+business for the paper.  "Yes," he said meditatively, "that bold-
+faced election type will do it."
+
+Mr. Dimmidge's face brightened.  The expression "bold-faced"
+pleased him.  "That's it!  I told you.  I want to bill her in a
+portion of the paper."
+
+"I might put in a cut," said the foreman suggestively; "something
+like this."  He took a venerable woodcut from the case.  I grieve
+to say it was one which, until the middle of the present century,
+was common enough in the newspaper offices in the Southwest.  It
+showed the running figure of a negro woman carrying her personal
+property in a knotted handkerchief slung from a stick over her
+shoulder, and was supposed to represent "a fugitive slave."
+
+Mr. Dimmidge's eyes brightened.  "I'll take that, too.  It's a
+little dark-complected for Mrs. P., but it will do.  Now roon away,
+lad," he said to the foreman, as he quietly pushed him into the
+outer office again and closed the door.  Then, facing the surprised
+editor, he said, "Theer's another notiss I want ye to put in your
+paper; but that's atween US.  Not a word to THEM," he indicated the
+banished foreman with a jerk of his thumb.  "Sabe?  I want you to
+put this in another part o' your paper, quite innocent-like, ye
+know."  He drew from his pocket a gray wallet, and taking out a
+slip of paper read from it gravely, "'If this should meet the eye
+of R. B., look out for M. J. D.  He is on your track.  When this
+you see write a line to E. J. D., Elktown Post Office.'  I want
+this to go in as 'Personal and Private'--sabe?--like them notisses
+in the big 'Frisco papers."
+
+"I see," said the editor, laying it aside.  "It shall go in the
+same issue in another column."
+
+Apparently Mr. Dimmidge expected something more than this reply,
+for after a moment's hesitation he said with an odd smile:
+
+"Ye ain't seein' the meanin' o' that, lad?"
+
+"No," said the editor lightly; "but I suppose R. B. does, and it
+isn't intended that any one else should."
+
+"Mebbe it is, and mebbe it isn't," said Mr. Dimmidge, with a self-
+satisfied air.  "I don't mind saying atween us that R. B. is the
+man as I've suspicioned as havin' something to do with my wife
+goin' away; and ye see, if he writes to E. J. D.--that's my wife's
+initials--at Elktown, I'LL get that letter and so make sure."
+
+"But suppose your wife goes there first, or sends?"
+
+"Then I'll ketch her or her messenger.  Ye see?"
+
+The editor did not see fit to oppose any argument to this phenomenal
+simplicity, and Mr. Dimmidge, after settling his bill with the
+foreman, and enjoining the editor to the strictest secrecy regarding
+the origin of the "personal notice," took up his gun and departed,
+leaving the treasury of the "Clarion" unprecedentedly enriched, and
+the editor to his proofs.
+
+The paper duly appeared the next morning with the column
+advertisement, the personal notice, and the weighty editorial on
+the wagon road.  There was a singular demand for the paper, the
+edition was speedily exhausted, and the editor was proportionately
+flattered, although he was surprised to receive neither praise nor
+criticism from his subscribers.  Before evening, however, he
+learned to his astonishment that the excitement was caused by the
+column advertisement.  Nobody knew Mr. Dimmidge, nor his domestic
+infelicities, and the editor and foreman, being equally in the
+dark, took refuge in a mysterious and impressive evasion of all
+inquiry.  Never since the last San Francisco Vigilance Committee
+had the office been so besieged.  The editor, foreman, and even the
+apprentice, were buttonholed and "treated" at the bar, but to no
+effect.  All that could be learned was that it was a bona fide
+advertisement, for which one hundred dollars had been received!
+There were great discussions and conflicting theories as to whether
+the value of the wife, or the husband's anxiety to get rid of her,
+justified the enormous expense and ostentatious display.  She was
+supposed to be an exceedingly beautiful woman by some, by others a
+perfect Sycorax; in one breath Mr. Dimmidge was a weak, uxorious
+spouse, wasting his substance on a creature who did not care for
+him, and in another a maddened, distracted, henpecked man, content
+to purchase peace and rest at any price.  Certainly, never was
+advertisement more effective in its publicity, or cheaper in
+proportion to the circulation it commanded.  It was copied
+throughout the whole Pacific slope; mighty San Francisco papers
+described its size and setting under the attractive headline, "How
+they Advertise a Wife in the Mountains!"  It reappeared in the
+Eastern journals, under the title of "Whimsicalities of the Western
+Press."  It was believed to have crossed to England as a specimen
+of "Transatlantic Savagery."  The real editor of the "Clarion"
+awoke one morning, in San Francisco, to find his paper famous.  Its
+advertising columns were eagerly sought for; he at once advanced
+the rates.  People bought successive issues to gaze upon this
+monumental record of extravagance.  A singular idea, which,
+however, brought further fortune to the paper, was advanced by an
+astute critic at the Eureka Saloon.  "My opinion, gentlemen, is
+that the whole blamed thing is a bluff!  There ain't no Mr.
+Dimmidge; there ain't no Mrs. Dimmidge; there ain't no desertion!
+The whole rotten thing is an ADVERTISEMENT o' suthin'!  Ye'll find
+afore ye get through with it that that there wife won't come back
+until that blamed husband buys Somebody's Soap, or treats her to
+Somebody's particular Starch or Patent Medicine!  Ye jest watch and
+see!"  The idea was startling, and seized upon the mercantile mind.
+The principal merchant of the town, and purveyor to the mining
+settlements beyond, appeared the next morning at the office of the
+"Clarion."  "Ye wouldn't mind puttin' this 'ad' in a column
+alongside o' the Dimmidge one, would ye?"  The young editor glanced
+at it, and then, with a serpent-like sagacity, veiled, however, by
+the suavity of the dove, pointed out that the original advertiser
+might think it called his bona fides into question and withdraw his
+advertisement.  "But if we secured you by an offer of double the
+amount per column?" urged the merchant.  "That," responded the
+locum tenens, "was for the actual editor and proprietor in San
+Francisco to determine.  He would telegraph."  He did so.  The
+response was, "Put it in."  Whereupon in the next issue, side by
+side with Mr. Dimmidge's protracted warning, appeared a column with
+the announcement, in large letters, "WE HAVEN'T LOST ANY WIFE, but
+WE are prepared to furnish the following goods at a lower rate than
+any other advertiser in the county," followed by the usual price
+list of the merchant's wares.  There was an unprecedented demand
+for that issue.  The reputation of the "Clarion," both as a shrewd
+advertising medium and a comic paper, was established at once.  For
+a few days the editor waited with some apprehension for a
+remonstrance from the absent Dimmidge, but none came.  Whether Mr.
+Dimmidge recognized that this new advertisement gave extra
+publicity to his own, or that he was already on the track of the
+fugitive, the editor did not know.  The few curious citizens who
+had, early in the excitement, penetrated the settlement of the
+English miners twenty miles away in search of information, found
+that Mr. Dimmidge had gone away, and that Mrs. Dimmidge had NEVER
+resided there with him!
+
+Six weeks passed.  The limit of Mr. Dimmidge's advertisement had
+been reached, and, as it was not renewed, it had passed out of the
+pages of the "Clarion," and with it the merchant's advertisement in
+the next column.  The excitement had subsided, although its
+influence was still felt in the circulation of the paper and its
+advertising popularity.  The temporary editor was also nearing the
+limit of his incumbency, but had so far participated in the good
+fortune of the "Clarion" as to receive an offer from one of the San
+Francisco dailies.
+
+It was a warm night, and he was alone in his sanctum.  The rest of
+the building was dark and deserted, and his solitary light,
+flashing out through the open window, fell upon the nearer pines
+and was lost in the dark, indefinable slope below.  He had reached
+the sanctum by the rear, and a door which he also left open to
+enjoy the freshness of the aromatic air.  Nor did it in the least
+mar his privacy.  Rather the solitude of the great woods without
+seemed to enter through that door and encompassed him with its
+protecting loneliness.  There was occasionally a faint "peep" in
+the scant eaves, or a "pat-pat," ending in a frightened scurry
+across the roof, or the slow flap of a heavy wing in the darkness
+below.  These gentle disturbances did not, however, interrupt his
+work on "The True Functions of the County Newspaper," the editorial
+on which he was engaged.
+
+Presently a more distinct rustling against the straggling blackberry
+bushes beside the door attracted his attention.  It was followed by
+a light tapping against the side of the house.  The editor started
+and turned quickly towards the open door.  Two outside steps led to
+the ground.  Standing upon the lower one was a woman.  The upper
+part of her figure, illuminated by the light from the door, was
+thrown into greater relief by the dark background of the pines.  Her
+face was unknown to him, but it was a pleasant one, marked by a
+certain good-humored determination.
+
+"May I come in?" she said confidently.
+
+"Certainly," said the editor.  "I am working here alone because it
+is so quiet."  He thought he would precipitate some explanation
+from her by excusing himself.
+
+"That's the reason why I came," she said, with a quiet smile.
+
+She came up the next step and entered the room.  She was plainly
+but neatly dressed, and now that her figure was revealed he saw
+that she was wearing a linsey-woolsey riding-skirt, and carried a
+serviceable rawhide whip in her cotton-gauntleted hand.  She took
+the chair he offered her and sat down sideways on it, her whip hand
+now also holding up her skirt, and permitting a hem of clean white
+petticoat and a smart, well-shaped boot to be seen.
+
+"I don't remember to have had the pleasure of seeing you in
+Calaveras before," said the editor tentatively.
+
+"No.  I never was here before," she said composedly, "but you've
+heard enough of me, I reckon.  I'm Mrs. Dimmidge."  She threw one
+hand over the back of the chair, and with the other tapped her
+riding-whip on the floor.
+
+The editor started.  Mrs. Dimmidge!  Then she was not a myth.  An
+absurd similarity between her attitude with the whip and her
+husband's entrance with his gun six weeks before forced itself upon
+him and made her an invincible presence.
+
+"Then you have returned to your husband?" he said hesitatingly.
+
+"Not much!" she returned, with a slight curl of her lip.
+
+"But you read his advertisement?"
+
+"I saw that column of fool nonsense he put in your paper--ef that's
+what you mean," she said with decision, "but I didn't come here to
+see HIM--but YOU."
+
+The editor looked at her with a forced smile, but a vague misgiving.
+He was alone at night in a deserted part of the settlement, with a
+plump, self-possessed woman who had a contralto voice, a horsewhip,
+and--he could not help feeling--an evident grievance.
+
+"To see me?" he repeated, with a faint attempt at gallantry.  "You
+are paying me a great compliment, but really"--
+
+"When I tell you I've come three thousand miles from Kansas straight
+here without stopping, ye kin reckon it's so," she replied firmly.
+
+"Three thousand miles!" echoed the editor wonderingly.
+
+"Yes.  Three thousand miles from my own folks' home in Kansas,
+where six years ago I married Mr. Dimmidge,--a British furriner as
+could scarcely make himself understood in any Christian language!
+Well, he got round me and dad, allowin' he was a reg'lar out-and-
+out profeshnal miner,--had lived in mines ever since he was a boy;
+and so, not knowin' what kind o' mines, and dad just bilin' over
+with the gold fever, we were married and kem across the plains to
+Californy.  He was a good enough man to look at, but it warn't
+three months before I discovered that he allowed a wife was no
+better nor a nigger slave, and he the master.  That made me open my
+eyes; but then, as he didn't drink, and didn't gamble, and didn't
+swear, and was a good provider and laid by money, why I shifted
+along with him as best I could.  We drifted down the first year to
+Sonora, at Red Dog, where there wasn't another woman.  Well, I did
+the nigger slave business,--never stirring out o' the settlement,
+never seein' a town or a crowd o' decent people,--and he did the
+lord and master!  We played that game for two years, and I got
+tired.  But when at last he allowed he'd go up to Elktown Hill,
+where there was a passel o' his countrymen at work, with never a
+sign o' any other folks, and leave me alone at Red Dog until he
+fixed up a place for me at Elktown Hill,--I kicked!  I gave him
+fair warning!  I did as other nigger slaves did,--I ran away!"
+
+A recollection of the wretched woodcut which Mr. Dimmidge had
+selected to personify his wife flashed upon the editor with a new
+meaning.  Yet perhaps she had not seen it, and had only read a copy
+of the advertisement.  What could she want?  The "Calaveras
+Clarion," although a "Palladium" and a "Sentinel upon the Heights
+of Freedom" in reference to wagon roads, was not a redresser of
+domestic wrongs,--except through its advertising columns!  Her next
+words intensified that suggestion.
+
+"I've come here to put an advertisement in your paper."
+
+The editor heaved a sigh of relief, as once before.  "Certainly,"
+he said briskly.  "But that's another department of the paper, and
+the printers have gone home.  Come to-morrow morning early."
+
+"To-morrow morning I shall be miles away," she said decisively,
+"and what I want done has got to be done NOW!  I don't want to see
+no printers; I don't want ANYBODY to know I've been here but you.
+That's why I kem here at night, and rode all the way from Sawyer's
+Station, and wouldn't take the stage-coach.  And when we've settled
+about the advertisement, I'm going to mount my horse, out thar in
+the bushes, and scoot outer the settlement."
+
+"Very good," said the editor resignedly.  "Of course I can deliver
+your instructions to the foreman.  And now--let me see--I suppose
+you wish to intimate in a personal notice to your husband that
+you've returned."
+
+"Nothin' o' the kind!" said Mrs. Dimmidge coolly.  "I want to
+placard him as he did me.  I've got it all written out here.
+Sabe?"
+
+She took from her pocket a folded paper, and spreading it out on
+the editor's desk, with a certain pride of authorship read as
+follows:--
+
+"Whereas my husband, Micah J. Dimmidge, having given out that I
+have left his bed and board,--the same being a bunk in a log cabin
+and pork and molasses three times a day,--and having advertised
+that he'd pay no debts of MY contractin',--which, as thar ain't
+any, might be easier collected than debts of his own contractin',--
+this is to certify that unless he returns from Elktown Hill to his
+only home in Sonora in one week from date, payin' the cost of this
+advertisement, I'll know the reason why.--Eliza Jane Dimmidge."
+
+"Thar," she added, drawing a long breath, "put that in a column of
+the 'Clarion,' same size as the last, and let it work, and that's
+all I want of you."
+
+"A column?" repeated the editor.  "Do you know the cost is very
+expensive, and I COULD put it in a single paragraph?"
+
+"I reckon I kin pay the same as Mr. Dimmidge did for HIS," said the
+lady complacently.  "I didn't see your paper myself, but the paper
+as copied it--one of them big New York dailies--said that it took
+up a whole column."
+
+The editor breathed more freely; she had not seen the infamous
+woodcut which her husband had selected.  At the same moment he was
+struck with a sense of retribution, justice, and compensation.
+
+"Would you," he asked hesitatingly,--"would you like it illustrated--
+by a cut?"
+
+"With which?"
+
+"Wait a moment; I'll show you."
+
+He went into the dark composing-room, lit a candle, and rummaging
+in a drawer sacred to weather-beaten, old-fashioned electrotyped
+advertising symbols of various trades, finally selected one and
+brought it to Mrs. Dimmidge.  It represented a bare and exceedingly
+stalwart arm wielding a large hammer.
+
+"Your husband being a miner,--a quartz miner,--would that do?" he
+asked.  (It had been previously used to advertise a blacksmith, a
+gold-beater, and a stone-mason.)
+
+The lady examined it critically.
+
+"It does look a little like Micah's arm," she said meditatively.
+"Well--you kin put it in."
+
+The editor was so well pleased with his success that he must needs
+make another suggestion.  "I suppose," he said ingenuously, "that
+you don't want to answer the 'Personal'?"
+
+"'Personal'?" she repeated quickly, "what's that?  I ain't seen no
+'Personal.'"  The editor saw his blunder.  She, of course, had
+never seen Mr. Dimmidge's artful "Personal;" THAT the big dailies
+naturally had not noticed nor copied.  But it was too late to
+withdraw now.  He brought out a file of the "Clarion," and snipping
+out the paragraph with his scissors, laid it before the lady.
+
+She stared at it with wrinkled brows and a darkening face.
+
+"And THIS was in the same paper?--put in by Mr. Dimmidge?" she
+asked breathlessly.
+
+The editor, somewhat alarmed, stammered "Yes."  But the next moment
+he was reassured.  The wrinkles disappeared, a dozen dimples broke
+out where they had been, and the determined, matter-of-fact Mrs.
+Dimmidge burst into a fit of rosy merriment.  Again and again she
+laughed, shaking the building, startling the sedate, melancholy
+woods beyond, until the editor himself laughed in sheer vacant
+sympathy.
+
+"Lordy!" she said at last, gasping, and wiping the laughter from
+her wet eyes.  "I never thought of THAT."
+
+"No," explained the editor smilingly; "of course you didn't.  Don't
+you see, the papers that copied the big advertisement never saw
+that little paragraph, or if they did, they never connected the two
+together."
+
+"Oh, it ain't that," said Mrs. Dimmidge, trying to regain her
+composure and holding her sides.  "It's that blessed DEAR old
+dunderhead of a Dimmidge I'm thinking of.  That gets me.  I see it
+all now.  Only, sakes alive!  I never thought THAT of him.  Oh,
+it's just too much!" and she again relapsed behind her handkerchief.
+
+"Then I suppose you don't want to reply to it," said the editor.
+
+Her laughter instantly ceased.  "Don't I?" she said, wiping her
+face into its previous complacent determination.  "Well, young man,
+I reckon that's just what I WANT to do!  Now, wait a moment; let's
+see what he said," she went on, taking up and reperusing the
+"Personal" paragraph.  "Well, then," she went on, after a moment's
+silent composition with moving lips, "you just put these lines in."
+
+The editor took up his pencil.
+
+"To Mr. J. D. Dimmidge.--Hope you're still on R. B.'s tracks.  Keep
+there!--E. J. D."
+
+The editor wrote down the line, and then, remembering Mr. Dimmidge's
+voluntary explanation of HIS "Personal," waited with some confidence
+for a like frankness from Mrs. Dimmidge.  But he was mistaken.
+
+"You think that he--R. B.--or Mr. Dimmidge--will understand this?"
+he at last asked tentatively.  "Is it enough?"
+
+"Quite enough," said Mrs. Dimmidge emphatically.  She took a roll
+of greenbacks from her pocket, selected a hundred-dollar bill and
+then a five, and laid them before the editor.  "Young man," she
+said, with a certain demure gravity, "you've done me a heap o'
+good.  I never spent money with more satisfaction than this.  I
+never thought much o' the 'power o' the Press,' as you call it,
+afore.  But this has been a right comfortable visit, and I'm glad I
+ketched you alone.  But you understand one thing: this yer visit,
+and WHO I am, is betwixt you and me only."
+
+"Of course I must say that the advertisement was AUTHORIZED,"
+returned the editor.  "I'm only the temporary editor.  The
+proprietor is away."
+
+"So much the better," said the lady complacently.  "You just say
+you found it on your desk with the money; but don't you give me
+away."
+
+"I can promise you that the secret of your personal visit is safe
+with me," said the young man, with a bow, as Mrs. Dimmidge rose.
+"Let me see you to your horse," he added.  "It's quite dark in the
+woods."
+
+"I can see well enough alone, and it's just as well you shouldn't
+know HOW I kem or HOW I went away.  Enough for you to know that
+I'll be miles away before that paper comes out.  So stay where you
+are."
+
+She pressed his hand frankly and firmly, gathered up her riding-
+skirt, slipped backwards to the door, and the next moment rustled
+away into the darkness.
+
+Early the next morning the editor handed Mrs. Dimmidge's
+advertisement, and the woodcut he had selected, to his foreman.  He
+was purposely brief in his directions, so as to avoid inquiry, and
+retired to his sanctum.  In the space of a few moments the foreman
+entered with a slight embarrassment of manner.
+
+"You'll excuse my speaking to you, sir," he said, with a singular
+mixture of humility and cunning.  "It's no business of mine, I
+know; but I thought I ought to tell you that this yer kind o' thing
+won't pay any more,--it's about played out!"
+
+"I don't think I understand you," said the editor loftily, but with
+an inward misgiving.  "You don't mean to say that a regular, actual
+advertisement"--
+
+"Of course, I know all that," said the foreman, with a peculiar
+smile; "and I'm ready to back you up in it, and so's the boy; but
+it won't pay."
+
+"It HAS paid a hundred and five dollars," said the editor, taking
+the notes from his pocket; "so I'd advise you to simply attend to
+your duty and set it up."
+
+A look of surprise, followed, however, by a kind of pitying smile,
+passed over the foreman's face.  "Of course, sir, THAT'S all right,
+and you know your own business; but if you think that the new
+advertisement will pay this time as the other one did, and whoop up
+another column from an advertiser, I'm afraid you'll slip up.  It's
+a little 'off color' now,--not 'up to date,'--if it ain't a regular
+'back number,' as you'll see."
+
+"Meantime I'll dispense with your advice," said the editor curtly,
+"and I think you had better let our subscribers and advertisers do
+the same, or the 'Clarion' might also be obliged to dispense with
+your SERVICES."
+
+"I ain't no blab," said the foreman, in an aggrieved manner, "and I
+don't intend to give the show away even if it don't PAY.  But I
+thought I'd tell you, because I know the folks round here better
+than you do."
+
+He was right.  No sooner had the advertisement appeared than the
+editor found that everybody believed it to be a sheer invention of
+his own to "once more boom" the "Clarion."  If they had doubted
+MR. Dimmidge, they utterly rejected MRS. Dimmidge as an advertiser!
+It was a stale joke that nobody would follow up; and on the heels of
+this came a letter from the editor-in-chief.
+
+
+MY DEAR BOY,--You meant well, I know, but the second Dimmidge "ad"
+was a mistake.  Still, it was a big bluff of yours to show the
+money, and I send you back your hundred dollars, hoping you won't
+"do it again."  Of course you'll have to keep the advertisement in
+the paper for two issues, just as if it were a real thing, and it's
+lucky that there's just now no pressure in our columns.  You might
+have told a better story than that hogwash about your finding the
+"ad" and a hundred dollars lying loose on your desk one morning.
+It was rather thin, and I don't wonder the foreman kicked.
+
+
+The young editor was in despair.  At first he thought of writing to
+Mrs. Dimmidge at the Elktown Post-Office, asking her to relieve him
+of his vow of secrecy; but his pride forbade.  There was a humorous
+concern, not without a touch of pity, in the faces of his
+contributors as he passed; a few affected to believe in the new
+advertisement, and asked him vague, perfunctory questions about it.
+His position was trying, and he was not sorry when the term of his
+engagement expired the next week, and he left Calaveras to take his
+new position on the San Francisco paper.
+
+He was standing in the saloon of the Sacramento boat when he felt a
+sudden heavy pressure on his shoulder, and looking round sharply,
+beheld not only the black-bearded face of Mr. Dimmidge, lit up by a
+smile, but beside it the beaming, buxom face of Mrs. Dimmidge,
+overflowing with good-humor.  Still a little sore from his past
+experience, he was about to address them abruptly, when he was
+utterly vanquished by the hearty pressure of their hands and the
+unmistakable look of gratitude in their eyes.
+
+"I was just saying to 'Lizy Jane," began Mr. Dimmidge breathlessly,
+"if I could only meet that young man o' the 'Clarion' what brought
+us together again"--
+
+"You'd be willin' to pay four times the amount we both paid him,"
+interpolated the laughing Mrs. Dimmidge.
+
+"But I didn't bring you together," burst out the dazed young man,
+"and I'd like to know, in the name of Heaven, what brought you
+together now?"
+
+"Don't you see, lad," said the imperturbable Mr. Dimmidge, "'Lizy
+Jane and myself had qua'lled, and we just unpacked our fool
+nonsense in your paper and let the hull world know it!  And we both
+felt kinder skeert and shamed like, and it looked such small
+hogwash, and of so little account, for all the talk it made, that
+we kinder felt lonely as two separated fools that really ought to
+share their foolishness together."
+
+"And that ain't all," said Mrs. Dimmidge, with a sly glance at her
+spouse, "for I found out from that 'Personal' you showed me that
+this particular old fool was actooally jealous!--JEALOUS!"
+
+"And then?" said the editor impatiently.
+
+"And then I KNEW he loved me all the time."
+
+
+
+THE SECRET OF SOBRIENTE'S WELL
+
+
+Even to the eye of the most inexperienced traveler there was no
+doubt that Buena Vista was a "played-out" mining camp.  There,
+seamed and scarred by hydraulic engines, was the old hillside, over
+whose denuded surface the grass had begun to spring again in fitful
+patches; there were the abandoned heaps of tailings already
+blackened by sun and rain, and worn into mounds like ruins of
+masonry; there were the waterless ditches, like giant graves, and
+the pools of slumgullion, now dried into shining, glazed cement.
+There were two or three wooden "stores," from which the windows and
+doors had been taken and conveyed to the newer settlement of
+Wynyard's Gulch.  Four or five buildings that still were inhabited--
+the blacksmith's shop, the post-office, a pioneer's cabin, and the
+old hotel and stage-office--only accented the general desolation.
+The latter building had a remoteness of prosperity far beyond the
+others, having been a wayside Spanish-American posada, with adobe
+walls of two feet in thickness, that shamed the later shells of
+half-inch plank, which were slowly warping and cracking like dried
+pods in the oven-like heat.
+
+The proprietor of this building, Colonel Swinger, had been looked
+upon by the community as a person quite as remote, old-fashioned,
+and inconsistent with present progress as the house itself.  He was
+an old Virginian, who had emigrated from his decaying plantation on
+the James River only to find the slaves, which he had brought with
+him, freed men when they touched Californian soil; to be driven by
+Northern progress and "smartness" out of the larger cities into the
+mountains, to fix himself at last, with the hopeless fatuity of his
+race, upon an already impoverished settlement; to sink his scant
+capital in hopeless shafts and ledges, and finally to take over the
+decaying hostelry of Buena Vista, with its desultory custom and
+few, lingering, impecunious guests.  Here, too, his old Virginian
+ideas of hospitality were against his financial success; he could
+not dun nor turn from his door those unfortunate prospectors whom
+the ebbing fortunes of Buena Vista had left stranded by his side.
+
+Colonel Swinger was sitting in a wicker-work rocking-chair on the
+veranda of his hotel--sipping a mint julep which he held in his
+hand, while he gazed into the dusty distance.  Nothing could have
+convinced him that he was not performing a serious part of his duty
+as hotel-keeper in this attitude, even though there were no
+travelers expected, and the road at this hour of the day was
+deserted.  On a bench at his side Larry Hawkins stretched his lazy
+length,--one foot dropped on the veranda, and one arm occasionally
+groping under the bench for his own tumbler of refreshment.  Apart
+from this community of occupation, there was apparently no
+interchange of sentiment between the pair.  The silence had
+continued for some moments, when the colonel put down his glass and
+gazed earnestly into the distance.
+
+"Seein' anything?" remarked the man on the bench, who had sleepily
+regarded him.
+
+"No," said the colonel, "that is--it's only Dick Ruggles crossin'
+the road."
+
+"Thought you looked a little startled, ez if you'd seen that ar
+wanderin' stranger."
+
+"When I see that wandering stranger, sah," said the colonel
+decisively, "I won't be sittin' long in this yer chyar.  I'll let
+him know in about ten seconds that I don't harbor any vagrants
+prowlin' about like poor whites or free niggers on my propahty,
+sah!"
+
+"All the same, I kinder wish ye did see him, for you'd be settled
+in YOUR mind and I'd be easier in MINE, ef you found out what he
+was doin' round yer, or ye had to admit that it wasn't no LIVIN'
+man."
+
+"What do you mean?" said the colonel, testily facing around in his
+chair.
+
+His companion also altered his attitude by dropping his other foot
+to the floor, sitting up, and leaning lazily forward with his hands
+clasped.
+
+"Look yer, colonel.  When you took this place, I felt I didn't have
+no call to tell ye all I know about it, nor to pizen yer mind by
+any darned fool yarns I mout hev heard.  Ye know it was one o' them
+old Spanish haciendas?"
+
+"I know," said the colonel loftily, "that it was held by a grant
+from Charles the Fifth of Spain, just as my propahty on the James
+River was given to my people by King James of England, sah!"
+
+"That ez as may be," returned his companion, in lazy indifference;
+"though I reckon that Charles the Fifth of Spain and King James of
+England ain't got much to do with what I'm goin' to tell ye.  Ye
+see, I was here long afore YOUR time, or any of the boys that hev
+now cleared out; and at that time the hacienda belonged to a man
+named Juan Sobriente.  He was that kind o' fool that he took no
+stock in mining.  When the boys were whoopin' up the place and
+finding the color everywhere, and there was a hundred men working
+down there in the gulch, he was either ridin' round lookin' up the
+wild horses he owned, or sittin' with two or three lazy peons and
+Injins that was fed and looked arter by the priests.  Gosh! now I
+think of it, it was mighty like YOU when you first kem here with
+your niggers.  That's curious, too, ain't it?"
+
+He had stopped, gazing with an odd, superstitious wonderment at the
+colonel, as if overcome by this not very remarkable coincidence.
+The colonel, overlooking or totally oblivious to its somewhat
+uncomplimentary significance, simply said, "Go on.  What about
+him?"
+
+"Well, ez I was sayin', he warn't in it nohow, but kept on his
+reg'lar way when the boom was the biggest.  Some of the boys
+allowed it was mighty oncivil for him to stand off like that, and
+others--when he refused a big pile for his hacienda and the garden,
+that ran right into the gold-bearing ledge--war for lynching him
+and driving him outer the settlement.  But as he had a pretty
+darter or niece livin' with him, and, except for his partickler
+cussedness towards mining, was kinder peaceable and perlite, they
+thought better of it.  Things went along like this, until one day
+the boys noticed--particklerly the boys that had slipped up on
+their luck--that old man Sobriente was gettin' rich,--had stocked a
+ranch over on the Divide, and had given some gold candlesticks to
+the mission church.  That would have been only human nature and
+business, ef he'd had any during them flush times; but he hadn't.
+This kinder puzzled them.  They tackled the peons,--his niggers,--
+but it was all 'No sabe.'  They tackled another man,--a kind of
+half-breed Kanaka, who, except the priest, was the only man who
+came to see him, and was supposed to be mighty sweet on the darter
+or niece,--but they didn't even get the color outer HIM.  Then the
+first thing we knowed was that old Sobriente was found dead in the
+well!"
+
+"In the well, sah!" said the colonel, starting up.  "The well on my
+propahty?"
+
+"No," said his companion.  "The old well that was afterwards shut
+up.  Yours was dug by the last tenant, Jack Raintree, who allowed
+that he didn't want to 'take any Sobriente in his reg'lar whiskey
+and water.'  Well, the half-breed Kanaka cleared out after the old
+man's death, and so did that darter or niece; and the church, to
+whom old Sobriente had left this house, let it to Raintree for next
+to nothin'."
+
+"I don't see what all that has got to do with that wandering
+tramp," said the colonel, who was by no means pleased with this
+history of his property.
+
+"I'll tell ye.  A few days after Raintree took it over, he was
+lookin' round the garden, which old Sobriente had always kept shut
+up agin strangers, and he finds a lot of dried-up 'slumgullion'*
+scattered all about the borders and beds, just as if the old man
+had been using it for fertilizing.  Well, Raintree ain't no fool;
+he allowed the old man wasn't one, either; and he knew that
+slumgullion wasn't worth no more than mud for any good it would do
+the garden.  So he put this yer together with Sobriente's good
+luck, and allowed to himself that the old coyote had been secretly
+gold-washin' all the while he seemed to be standin' off agin it!
+But where was the mine?  Whar did he get the gold?  That's what got
+Raintree.  He hunted all over the garden, prospected every part of
+it,--ye kin see the holes yet,--but he never even got the color!"
+
+
+* That is, a viscid cement-like refuse of gold-washing.
+
+
+He paused, and then, as the colonel made an impatient gesture, he
+went on.
+
+"Well, one night just afore you took the place, and when Raintree
+was gettin' just sick of it, he happened to be walkin' in the
+garden.  He was puzzlin' his brain agin to know how old Sobriente
+made his pile, when all of a suddenst he saw suthin' a-movin' in
+the brush beside the house.  He calls out, thinkin' it was one of
+the boys, but got no answer.  Then he goes to the bushes, and a
+tall figger, all in black, starts out afore him.  He couldn't see
+any face, for its head was covered with a hood, but he saw that it
+held suthin' like a big cross clasped agin its breast.  This made
+him think it was one them priests, until he looks agin and sees
+that it wasn't no cross it was carryin,' but a PICKAXE!  He makes a
+jump towards it, but it vanished!  He traipsed over the hull
+garden,--went though ev'ry bush,--but it was clean gone.  Then the
+hull thing flashed upon him with a cold shiver.  The old man bein'
+found dead in the well! the goin' away of the half-breed and the
+girl! the findin' o' that slumgullion!  The old man HAD made a
+strike in that garden, the half-breed had discovered his secret and
+murdered him, throwin' him down the well!  It war no LIVIN' man
+that he had seen, but the ghost of old Sobriente!"
+
+The colonel emptied the remaining contents of his glass at a single
+gulp, and sat up.  "It's my opinion, sah, that Raintree had that
+night more than his usual allowance of corn-juice on board; and
+it's only a wonder, sah, that he didn't see a few pink alligators
+and sky-blue snakes at the same time.  But what's this got to do
+with that wanderin' tramp?"
+
+"They're all the same thing, colonel, and in my opinion that there
+tramp ain't no more alive than that figger was."
+
+"But YOU were the one that saw this tramp with your own eyes,"
+retorted the colonel quickly, "and you never before allowed it was
+a spirit!"
+
+"Exactly!  I saw it whar a minit afore nothin' had been standin',
+and a minit after nothin' stood," said Larry Hawkins, with a
+certain serious emphasis; "but I warn't goin' to say it to ANYBODY,
+and I warn't goin' to give you and the hacienda away.  And ez
+nobody knew Raintree's story, I jest shut up my head.  But you kin
+bet your life that the man I saw warn't no livin' man!"
+
+"We'll see, sah!" said the colonel, rising from his chair with his
+fingers in the armholes of his nankeen waistcoat, "ef he ever
+intrudes on my property again.  But look yar! don't ye go sayin'
+anything of this to Polly,--you know what women are!"
+
+A faint color came into Larry's face; an animation quite different
+to the lazy deliberation of his previous monologue shone in his
+eyes, as he said, with a certain rough respect he had not shown
+before to his companion, "That's why I'm tellin' ye, so that ef SHE
+happened to see anything and got skeert, ye'd know how to reason
+her out of it."
+
+"'Sh!" said the colonel, with a warning gesture.
+
+A young girl had just appeared in the doorway, and now stood
+leaning against the central pillar that supported it, with one hand
+above her head, in a lazy attitude strongly suggestive of the
+colonel's Southern indolence, yet with a grace entirely her own.
+Indeed, it overcame the negligence of her creased and faded yellow
+cotton frock and unbuttoned collar, and suggested--at least to the
+eyes of ONE man--the curving and clinging of the jasmine vine
+against the outer column of the veranda.  Larry Hawkins rose
+awkwardly to his feet.
+
+"Now what are you two men mumblin' and confidin' to each other?
+You look for all the world like two old women gossips," she said,
+with languid impertinence.
+
+It was easy to see that a privileged and recognized autocrat spoke.
+No one had ever questioned Polly Swinger's right to interrupting,
+interfering, and saucy criticisms.  Secure in the hopeless or
+chivalrous admiration of the men around her, she had repaid it with
+a frankness that scorned any coquetry; with an indifference to the
+ordinary feminine effect or provocation in dress or bearing that
+was as natural as it was invincible.  No one had ever known Polly
+to "fix up" for anybody, yet no one ever doubted the effect, if she
+had.  No one had ever rebuked her charming petulance, or wished to.
+
+Larry gave a weak, vague laugh.  Colonel Swinger as ineffectively
+assumed a mock parental severity.  "When you see two gentlemen,
+miss, discussin' politics together, it ain't behavin' like a lady
+to interrupt.  Better run away and tidy yourself before the stage
+comes."
+
+The young lady replied to the last innuendo by taking two spirals
+of soft hair, like "corn silk," from her oval cheek, wetting them
+with her lips, and tucking them behind her ears.  Her father's
+ungentlemanly suggestion being thus disposed of, she returned to
+her first charge.
+
+"It ain't no politics; you ain't been swearing enough for THAT!
+Come, now!  It's the mysterious stranger ye've been talking about!"
+
+Both men stared at her with unaffected concern.
+
+"What do YOU know about any mysterious stranger?" demanded her
+father.
+
+"Do you suppose you men kin keep a secret," scoffed Polly.  "Why,
+Dick Ruggles told me how skeert ye all were over an entire
+stranger, and he advised me not to wander down the road after dark.
+I asked him if he thought I was a pickaninny to be frightened by
+bogies, and that if he hadn't a better excuse for wantin' 'to see
+me home' from the Injin spring, he might slide."
+
+Larry laughed again, albeit a little bitterly, for it seemed to him
+that the excuse was fully justified; but the colonel said promptly,
+"Dick's a fool, and you might have told him there were worse things
+to be met on the road than bogies.  Run away now, and see that the
+niggers are on hand when the stage comes."
+
+Two hours later the stage came with a clatter of hoofs and a cloud
+of red dust, which precipitated itself and a dozen thirsty
+travelers upon the veranda before the hotel bar-room; it brought
+also the usual "express" newspapers and much talk to Colonel
+Swinger, who always received his guests in a lofty personal fashion
+at the door, as he might have done in his old Virginian home; but
+it brought likewise--marvelous to relate--an ACTUAL GUEST, who had
+two trunks and asked for a room!  He was evidently a stranger to
+the ways of Buena Vista, and particularly to those of Colonel
+Swinger, and at first seemed inclined to resent the social attitude
+of his host, and his frank and free curiosity.  When he, however,
+found that Colonel Swinger was even better satisfied to give an
+account of HIS OWN affairs, his family, pedigree, and his present
+residence, he began to betray some interest.  The colonel told him
+all the news, and would no doubt have even expatiated on his
+ghostly visitant, had he not prudently concluded that his guest
+might decline to remain in a haunted inn.  The stranger had spoken
+of staying a week; he had some private mining speculations to watch
+at Wynyard's Gulch,--the next settlement, but he did not care to
+appear openly at the "Gulch Hotel."  He was a man of thirty, with
+soft, pleasing features and a singular litheness of movement,
+which, combined with a nut-brown, gypsy complexion, at first
+suggested a foreigner.  But his dialect, to the colonel's ears, was
+distinctly that of New England, and to this was added a puritanical
+and sanctimonious drawl.  "He looked," said the colonel in after
+years, "like a blank light mulatter, but talked like a blank Yankee
+parson."  For all that, he was acceptable to his host, who may have
+felt that his reminiscences of his plantation on the James River
+were palling on Buena Vista ears, and was glad of his new auditor.
+It was an advertisement, too, of the hotel, and a promise of its
+future fortunes.  "Gentlemen having propahty interests at the
+Gulch, sah, prefer to stay at Buena Vista with another man of
+propahty, than to trust to those new-fangled papah-collared,
+gingerbread booths for traders that they call 'hotels' there," he
+had remarked to some of "the boys."  In his preoccupation with the
+new guest, he also became a little neglectful of his old chum and
+dependent, Larry Hawkins.  Nor was this the only circumstance that
+filled the head of that shiftless loyal retainer of the colonel
+with bitterness and foreboding.  Polly Swinger--the scornfully
+indifferent, the contemptuously inaccessible, the coldly capricious
+and petulant--was inclined to be polite to the stranger!
+
+The fact was that Polly, after the fashion of her sex, took it into
+her pretty head, against all consistency and logic, suddenly to
+make an exception to her general attitude towards mankind in favor
+of one individual.  The reason-seeking masculine reader will rashly
+conclude that this individual was the CAUSE as well as the object;
+but I am satisfied that every fair reader of these pages will
+instinctively know better.  Miss Polly had simply selected the new
+guest, Mr. Starbuck, to show OTHERS, particularly Larry Hawkins,
+what she COULD do if she were inclined to be civil.  For two days
+she "fixed up" her distracting hair at him so that its silken floss
+encircled her head like a nimbus; she tucked her oval chin into a
+white fichu instead of a buttonless collar; she appeared at dinner
+in a newly starched yellow frock!  She talked to him with "company
+manners;" said she would "admire to go to San Francisco," and asked
+if he knew her old friends the Fauquier girls from "Faginia."  The
+colonel was somewhat disturbed; he was glad that his daughter had
+become less negligent of her personal appearance; he could not but
+see, with the others, how it enhanced her graces; but he was, with
+the others, not entirely satisfied with her reasons.  And he could
+not help observing--what was more or less patent to ALL--that
+Starbuck was far from being equally responsive to her attentions,
+and at times was indifferent and almost uncivil.  Nobody seemed to
+be satisfied with Polly's transformation but herself.
+
+But eventually she was obliged to assert herself.  The third
+evening after Starbuck's arrival she was going over to the cabin of
+Aunt Chloe, who not only did the washing for Buena Vista, but
+assisted Polly in dressmaking.  It was not far, and the night was
+moonlit.  As she crossed the garden she saw Starbuck moving in the
+manzanita bushes beyond; a mischievous light came into her eyes;
+she had not EXPECTED to meet him, but she had seen him go out, and
+there were always POSSIBILITIES.  To her surprise, however, he
+merely lifted his hat as she passed, and turned abruptly in another
+direction.  This was more than the little heart-breaker of Buena
+Vista was accustomed to!
+
+"Oh, Mr. Starbuck!" she called, in her laziest voice.
+
+He turned almost impatiently.
+
+"Since you're so civil and pressing, I thought I'd tell you I was
+just runnin' over to Aunt Chloe's," she said dryly.
+
+"I should think it was hardly the proper thing for a young lady to
+do at this time of night," he said superciliously.  "But you know
+best,--you know the people here."
+
+Polly's cheeks and eyes flamed.  "Yes, I reckon I do," she said
+crisply; "it's only a STRANGER here would think of being rude.
+Good-night, Mr. Starbuck!"
+
+She tripped away after this Parthian shot, yet feeling, even in her
+triumph, that the conceited fool seemed actually relieved at her
+departure!  And for the first time she now thought that she had
+seen something in his face that she did not like!  But her lazy
+independence reasserted itself soon, and half an hour later, when
+she had left Aunt Chloe's cabin, she had regained her self-esteem.
+Yet, to avoid meeting him again, she took a longer route home,
+across the dried ditch and over the bluff, scarred by hydraulics,
+and so fell, presently, upon the old garden at the point where it
+adjoined the abandoned diggings.  She was quite sure she had
+escaped a meeting with Starbuck, and was gliding along under the
+shadow of the pear-trees, when she suddenly stopped.  An
+indescribable terror overcame her as she stared at a spot in the
+garden, perfectly illuminated by the moonlight not fifty yards from
+where she stood.  For she saw on its surface a human head--a man's
+head!--seemingly on the level of the ground, staring in her
+direction.  A hysterical laugh sprang from her lips, and she caught
+at the branches above her or she would have fallen!  Yet in that
+moment the head had vanished!  The moonlight revealed the empty
+garden,--the ground she had gazed at,--but nothing more!
+
+She had never been superstitious.  As a child she had heard the
+negroes talk of "the hants,"--that is, "the HAUNTS" or spirits,--
+but had believed it a part of their ignorance, and unworthy a white
+child,--the daughter of their master!  She had laughed with Dick
+Ruggles over the illusions of Larry, and had shared her father's
+contemptuous disbelief of the wandering visitant being anything but
+a living man; yet she would have screamed for assistance now, only
+for the greater fear of making her weakness known to Mr. Starbuck,
+and being dependent upon him for help.  And with it came the sudden
+conviction that HE had seen this awful vision, too.  This would
+account for his impatience of her presence and his rudeness.  She
+felt faint and giddy.  Yet after the first shock had passed, her
+old independence and pride came to her relief.  She would go to the
+spot and examine it.  If it were some trick or illusion, she would
+show her superiority and have the laugh on Starbuck.  She set her
+white teeth, clenched her little hands, and started out into the
+moonlight.  But alas! for women's weakness.  The next moment she
+uttered a scream and almost fell into the arms of Mr. Starbuck, who
+had stepped out of the shadows beside her.
+
+"So you see you HAVE been frightened," he said, with a strange,
+forced laugh; "but I warned you about going out alone!"
+
+Even in her fright she could not help seeing that he, too, seemed
+pale and agitated, at which she recovered her tongue and her self-
+possession.
+
+"Anybody would be frightened by being dogged about under the trees,"
+she said pertly.
+
+"But you called out before you saw me," he said bluntly, "as if
+something had frightened you.  That was WHY I came towards you."
+
+She knew it was the truth; but as she would not confess to her
+vision, she fibbed outrageously.
+
+"Frightened," she said, with pale but lofty indignation.  "What was
+there to frighten me?  I'm not a baby, to think I see a bogie in
+the dark!"  This was said in the faint hope that HE had seen
+something too.  If it had been Larry or her father who had met her,
+she would have confessed everything.
+
+"You had better go in," he said curtly.  "I will see you safe
+inside the house."
+
+She demurred at this, but as she could not persist in her first
+bold intention of examining the locality of the vision without
+admitting its existence, she permitted him to walk with her to the
+house, and then at once fled to her own room.  Larry and her father
+noticed their entrance together and their agitated manner, and were
+uneasy.  Yet the colonel's paternal pride and Larry's lover's
+respect kept the two men from communicating their thoughts to each
+other.
+
+"The confounded pup has been tryin' to be familiar, and Polly's set
+him down," thought Larry, with glowing satisfaction.
+
+"He's been trying some of his sanctimonious Yankee abolition talk
+on Polly, and she shocked him!" thought the colonel exultingly.
+
+But poor Polly had other things to think of in the silence of her
+room.  Another woman would have unburdened herself to a confidante;
+but Polly was too loyal to her father to shatter his beliefs, and
+too high-spirited to take another and a lesser person into her
+confidence.  She was certain that Aunt Chloe would be full of
+sympathetic belief and speculations, but she would not trust a
+nigger with what she couldn't tell her own father.  For Polly
+really and truly believed that she had seen a ghost, no doubt the
+ghost of the murdered Sobriente, according to Larry's story.  WHY
+he should appear with only his head above ground puzzled her,
+although it suggested the Catholic idea of purgatory, and he was a
+Catholic!  Perhaps he would have risen entirely but for that stupid
+Starbuck's presence; perhaps he had a message for HER alone.  The
+idea pleased Polly, albeit it was a "fearful joy" and attended with
+some cold shivering.  Naturally, as a gentleman, he would appear to
+HER--the daughter of a gentleman--the successor to his house--
+rather than to a Yankee stranger.  What was she to do?  For once
+her calm nerves were strangely thrilled; she could not think of
+undressing and going to bed, and two o'clock surprised her, still
+meditating, and occasionally peeping from her window upon the
+moonlit but vacant garden.  If she saw him again, would she dare to
+go down alone?  Suddenly she started to her feet with a beating
+heart!  There was the unmistakable sound of a stealthy footstep in
+the passage, coming towards her room.  Was it he?  In spite of her
+high resolves she felt that if the door opened she should scream!
+She held her breath--the footsteps came nearer--were before her
+door--and PASSED!
+
+Then it was that the blood rushed back to her cheek with a flush of
+indignation.  Her room was at the end of the passage; there was
+nothing beyond but a private staircase, long disused, except by
+herself, as a short cut through the old patio to the garden.  No
+one else knew of it, and no one else had the right of access to it!
+This insolent human intrusion--as she was satisfied it was now--
+overcame her fear, and she glided to the door.  Opening it softly,
+she could hear the stealthy footsteps descending.  She darted back,
+threw a shawl over her head and shoulders, and taking the small
+Derringer pistol which it had always been part of her ostentatious
+independence to place at her bed-head, she as stealthily followed
+the intruder.  But the footsteps had died away before she reached
+the patio, and she saw only the small deserted, grass-grown
+courtyard, half hidden in shadows, in whose centre stood the
+fateful and long sealed-up well!  A shudder came over her at again
+being brought into contact with the cause of her frightful vision,
+but as her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she saw
+something more real and appalling!  The well was no longer sealed!
+Fragments of bricks and boards lay around it!  One end of a rope,
+coiled around it like a huge snake, descended its foul depths; and
+as she gazed with staring eyes, the head and shoulders of a man
+emerged slowly from it!  But it was NOT the ghostly apparition of
+last evening, and her terror changed to scorn and indignation as
+she recognized the face of Starbuck!
+
+Their eyes met; an oath broke from his lips.  He made a movement to
+spring from the well, but as the girl started back, the pistol held
+in her hand was discharged aimlessly in the air, and the report
+echoed throughout the courtyard.  With a curse Starbuck drew back,
+instantly disappeared in the well, and Polly fell fainting on the
+steps.  When she came to, her father and Larry were at her side.
+They had been alarmed at the report, and had rushed quickly to the
+patio, but not in time to prevent the escape of Starbuck and his
+accomplice.  By the time she had recovered her consciousness, they
+had learned the full extent of that extraordinary revelation which
+she had so innocently precipitated.  Sobriente's well had really
+concealed a rich gold ledge,--actually tunneled and galleried by
+him secretly in the past,--and its only other outlet was an opening
+in the garden hidden by a stone which turned on a swivel.  Its
+existence had been unknown to Sobriente's successor, but was known
+to the Kanaka who had worked with Sobriente, who fled with his
+daughter after the murder, but who no doubt was afraid to return
+and work the mine.  He had imparted the secret to Starbuck, another
+half-breed, son of a Yankee missionary and Hawaiian wife, who had
+evidently conceived this plan of seeking Buena Vista with an
+accomplice, and secretly removing such gold as was still
+accessible.  The accomplice, afterwards identified by Larry as the
+wandering tramp, failed to discover the secret entrance FROM the
+garden, and Starbuck was consequently obliged to attempt it from
+the hotel--for which purpose he had introduced himself as a
+boarder--by opening the disused well secretly at night.  These
+facts were obtained from papers found in the otherwise valueless
+trunks, weighted with stones for ballast, which Starbuck had
+brought to the hotel to take away his stolen treasure in, but which
+he was obliged to leave in his hurried flight.  The attempt would
+have doubtless succeeded but for Polly's courageous and timely
+interference!
+
+And now that they had told her ALL, they only wanted to know what
+had first excited HER suspicions, and driven her to seek the well
+as the object of Starbuck's machinations?  THEY had noticed her
+manner when she entered the house that night, and Starbuck's
+evident annoyance.  Had she taxed him with her suspicions, and so
+discovered a clue?
+
+It was a terrible temptation to Polly to pose as a more perfect
+heroine, and one may not blame her if she did not rise entirely
+superior to it.  Her previous belief, that the head of the
+accomplice at the opening of the garden was that of a GHOST, she
+now felt was certainly in the way, as was also her conduct to
+Starbuck, whom she believed to be equally frightened, and whom she
+never once suspected!  So she said, with a certain lofty
+simplicity, that there were SOME THINGS which she really did not
+care to talk about, and Larry and her father left her that night
+with the firm conviction that the rascal Starbuck had tried to
+tempt her to fly with him and his riches, and had been crushingly
+foiled.  Polly never denied this, and once, in later days, when
+admiringly taxed with it by Larry, she admitted with dove-like
+simplicity that she MAY have been too foolishly polite to her
+father's guest for the sake of her father's hotel.
+
+However, all this was of small account to the thrilling news of a
+new discovery and working of the "old gold ledge" at Buena Vista!
+As the three kept their secret from the world, the discovery was
+accepted in the neighborhood as the result of careful examination
+and prospecting on the part of Colonel Swinger and his partner
+Larry Hawkins.  And when the latter gentleman afterwards boldly
+proposed to Polly Swinger, she mischievously declared that she
+accepted him only that the secret might not go "out of the family."
+
+
+
+LIBERTY JONES'S DISCOVERY
+
+
+It was at best merely a rocky trail winding along a shelf of the
+eastern slope of the Santa Cruz range, yet the only road between
+the sea and the inland valley.  The hoof-prints of a whole century
+of zigzagging mules were impressed on the soil, regularly soaked by
+winter rains and dried by summer suns during that period; the
+occasional ruts of heavy, rude, wooden wheels--long obsolete--were
+still preserved and visible.  Weather-worn boulders and ledges,
+lying in the unclouded glare of an August sky, radiated a quivering
+heat that was intolerable, even while above them the masts of
+gigantic pines rocked their tops in the cold southwestern trades
+from the unseen ocean beyond.  A red, burning dust lay everywhere,
+as if the heat were slowly and visibly precipitating itself.
+
+The creaking of wheels and axles, the muffled plunge of hoofs, and
+the cough of a horse in the dust thus stirred presently broke the
+profound woodland silence.  Then a dirty white canvas-covered
+emigrant wagon slowly arose with the dust along the ascent.  It was
+travel-stained and worn, and with its rawboned horses seemed to
+have reached the last stage of its journey and fitness.  The only
+occupants, a man and a girl, appeared to be equally jaded and
+exhausted, with the added querulousness of discontent in their
+sallow and badly nourished faces.  Their voices, too, were not
+unlike the creaking they had been pitched to overcome, and there
+was an absence of reserve and consciousness in their speech, which
+told pathetically of an equal absence of society.
+
+"It's no user talkin'!  I tell ye, ye hain't got no more sense than
+a coyote!  I'm sick and tired of it, doggoned if I ain't!  Ye ain't
+no more use nor a hossfly,--and jest ez hinderin'!  It was along o'
+you that we lost the stock at Laramie, and ef ye'd bin at all
+decent and takin', we'd hev had kempany that helped, instead of
+laggin' on yere alone!"
+
+"What did ye bring me for?" retorted the girl shrilly.  "I might
+hev stayed with Aunt Marty.  I wasn't hankerin' to come."
+
+"Bring ye for?" repeated her father contemptuously; "I reckoned ye
+might he o' some account here, whar wimmin folks is skeerce, in the
+way o' helpin',--and mebbe gettin' yer married to some likely
+feller.  Mighty much chance o' that, with yer yaller face and skin
+and bones."
+
+"Ye can't blame me for takin' arter you, dad," she said, with a
+shrill laugh, but no other resentment of his brutality.
+
+"Ye want somebody to take arter you--with a club," he retorted
+angrily.  "Ye hear!  Wot's that ye're doin' now?"
+
+She had risen and walked to the tail of the wagon.  "Goin' to get
+out and walk.  I'm tired o' bein' jawed at."
+
+She jumped into the road.  The act was neither indignant nor
+vengeful; the frequency of such scenes had blunted their sting.
+She was probably "tired" of the quarrel, and ended it rudely.  Her
+father, however, let fly a Parthian arrow.
+
+"Ye needn't think I'm goin' to wait for ye, ez I hev!  Ye've got to
+keep tetch with the team, or get left.  And a good riddance of bad
+rubbidge."
+
+In reply the girl dived into the underwood beside the trail, picked
+a wild berry or two, stripped a wand of young hazel she had broken
+off, and switching it at her side, skipped along on the outskirts
+of the wood and ambled after the wagon.  Seen in the full,
+merciless glare of a Californian sky, she justified her father's
+description; thin and bony, her lank frame outstripped the body of
+her ragged calico dress, which was only kept on her shoulders by
+straps,--possibly her father's cast-off braces.  A boy's soft felt
+hat covered her head, and shadowed her only notable feature, a pair
+of large dark eyes, looking larger for the hollow temples which
+narrowed the frame in which they were set.
+
+So long as the wagon crawled up the ascent the girl knew she could
+easily keep up with it, or even distance the tired horses.  She
+made one or two incursions into the wood, returning like an animal
+from quest of food, with something in her mouth, which she was
+tentatively chewing, and once only with some inedible mandrono
+berries, plucked solely for their brilliant coloring.  It was very
+hot and singularly close; the higher current of air had subsided,
+and, looking up, a singular haze seemed to have taken its place
+between the treetops.  Suddenly she heard a strange, rumbling
+sound; an odd giddiness overtook her, and she was obliged to clutch
+at a sapling to support herself; she laughed vacantly, though a
+little frightened, and looked vaguely towards the summit of the
+road; but the wagon had already disappeared.  A strange feeling of
+nausea then overcame her; she spat out the leaves she had been
+chewing, disgustedly.  But the sensation as quickly passed, and she
+once more sought the trail and began slowly to follow the tracks of
+the wagon.  The air blew freshly, the treetops began again to rock
+over her head, and the incident was forgotten.
+
+Presently she paused; she must have missed the trail, for the wagon
+tracks had ended abruptly before a large boulder that lay across
+the mountain trail.  She dipped into the woods again; here there
+were other wagon tracks that confused her.  It was like her dogged,
+stupid father to miss the trail; she felt a gleam of malicious
+satisfaction at his discomfiture.  Sooner or later, he would have
+to retrace his steps and virtually come back for her!  She took up
+a position where two rough wheel ruts and tracks intersected each
+other, one of which must be the missing trail.  She noticed, too,
+the broader hoof-prints of cattle without the following wheel ruts,
+and instead of traces, the long smooth trails made by the dragging
+of logs, and knew by these tokens that she must be near the highway
+or some woodman's hut or ranch.  She began to be thirsty, and was
+glad, presently, when her quick, rustic ear caught the tinkling of
+water.  Yet it was not so easy to discover, and she was getting
+footsore and tired again before she found it, some distance away,
+in a gully coming from a fissure in a dislocated piece of outcrop.
+It was beautifully clear, cold, and sparkling, with a slightly
+sweetish taste, yet unlike the brackish "alkali" of the plains.  It
+refreshed and soothed her greatly, so much that, reclining against
+a tree, but where she would be quite visible from the trail, her
+eyes closed dreamily, and presently she slept.
+
+When she awoke, the shafts of sunlight were striking almost level
+into her eyes.  She must have slept two hours.  Her father had not
+returned; she knew the passage of the wagon would have awakened
+her.  She began to feel strange, but not yet alarmed; it was only
+the uncertainty that made her uneasy.  Had her father really gone
+on by some other trail?  Or had he really hurried on and left her,
+as he said he would?  The thought brought an odd excitement to her
+rather than any fear.  A sudden sense of freedom, as if some
+galling chain had dropped from her, sent a singular thrill through
+her frame.  Yet she felt confused with her independence, not
+knowing what to do with it, and momentarily dazzled with the
+possible gift.
+
+At this moment she heard voices, and the figures of two men
+appeared on the trail.
+
+They were talking earnestly, and walking as if familiar with the
+spot, yet gazing around them as if at some novelty of the aspect.
+
+"And look there," said one; "there has been some serious disturbance
+of that outcrop," pointing in the direction of the spring; "the
+lower part has distinctly subsided."  He spoke with a certain
+authority, and dominance of position, and was evidently the
+superior, as he was the elder of the two, although both were roughly
+dressed.
+
+"Yes, it does kinder look as if it had lost its holt, like the
+ledge yonder."
+
+"And you see I am right; the movement was from east to west,"
+continued the elder man.
+
+The girl could not comprehend what they said, and even thought them
+a little silly.  But she advanced towards them; at which they
+stopped short, staring at her.  With feminine instinct she
+addressed the more important one:--
+
+"Ye ain't passed no wagon nor team goin' on, hev ye?"
+
+"What sort of wagon?" said the man.
+
+"Em'grant wagon, two yaller hosses.  Old man--my dad--drivin'."
+She added the latter kinship as a protecting influence against
+strangers, in spite of her previous independence.
+
+The men glanced at each other.
+
+"How long ago?"
+
+The girl suddenly remembered that she had slept two hours.
+
+"Sens noon," she said hesitatingly.
+
+"Since the earthquake?"
+
+"Wot's that?"
+
+The man came impatiently towards her.  "How did you come here?"
+
+"Got outer the wagon to walk.  I reckon dad missed the trail, and
+hez got off somewhere where I can't find him."
+
+"What trail was he on,--where was he going?"
+
+"Sank Hozay,* I reckon.  He was goin' up the grade--side o' the
+hill; he must hev turned off where there's a big rock hangin'
+over."
+
+
+* San Jose.
+
+
+"Did you SEE him turn off?"
+
+"No."
+
+The second man, who was in hearing distance, had turned away, and
+was ostentatiously examining the sky and the treetops; the man who
+had spoken to her joined him, and they said something in a low
+voice.  They turned again and came slowly towards her.  She, from
+some obscure sense of imitation, stared at the treetops and the sky
+as the second man had done.  But the first man now laid his hand
+kindly on her shoulder and said, "Sit down."
+
+Then they told her there had been an earthquake so strong that it
+had thrown down a part of the hillside, including the wagon trail.
+That a wagon team and driver, such as she had described, had been
+carried down with it, crushed to fragments, and buried under a
+hundred feet of rock in the gulch below.  A party had gone down to
+examine, but it would be weeks perhaps before they found it, and
+she must be prepared for the worst.  She looked at them vaguely and
+with tearless eyes.
+
+"Then ye reckon dad's dead?"
+
+"We fear it."
+
+"Then wot's a-goin' to become o' me?" she said simply.
+
+They glanced again at each other.  "Have you no friends in
+California?" said the elder man.
+
+"Nary one."
+
+"What was your father going to do?"
+
+"Dunno.  I reckon HE didn't either."
+
+"You may stay here for the present," said the elder man meditatively.
+"Can you milk?"
+
+The girl nodded.  "And I suppose you know something about looking
+after stock?" he continued.
+
+The girl remembered that her father thought she didn't, but this
+was no time for criticism, and she again nodded.
+
+"Come with me," said the older man, rising.  "I suppose," he added,
+glancing at her ragged frock, "everything you have is in the
+wagon."
+
+She nodded, adding with the same cold naivete, "It ain't much!"
+
+They walked on, the girl following; at times straying furtively on
+either side, as if meditating an escape in the woods,--which indeed
+had once or twice been vaguely in her thoughts,--but chiefly to
+avoid further questioning and not to hear what the men said to each
+other.  For they were evidently speaking of her, and she could not
+help hearing the younger repeat her words, "Wot's agoin' to become
+o' me?" with considerable amusement, and the addition: "She'll take
+care of herself, you bet!  I call that remark o' hers the richest
+thing out."
+
+"And I call the state of things that provoked it--monstrous!" said
+the elder man grimly.  "You don't know the lives of these people."
+
+Presently they came to an open clearing in the forest, yet so
+incomplete that many of the felled trees, partly lopped of their
+boughs, still lay where they had fallen.  There was a cabin or
+dwelling of unplaned, unpainted boards; very simple in structure,
+yet made in a workmanlike fashion, quite unlike the usual log cabin
+she had seen.  This made her think that the elder man was a
+"towny," and not a frontiersman like the other.
+
+As they approached the cabin the elder man stopped, and turning to
+her, said:--
+
+"Do you know Indians?"
+
+The girl started, and then recovering herself with a quick laugh:
+"G'lang!--there ain't any Injins here!"
+
+"Not the kind YOU mean; these are very peaceful.  There's a squaw
+here whom you will"--he stopped, hesitated as he looked critically
+at the girl, and then corrected himself--"who will help you."
+
+He pushed open the cabin door and showed an interior, equally
+simple but well joined and fitted,--a marvel of neatness and finish
+to the frontier girl's eye.  There were shelves and cupboards and
+other conveniences, yet with no ostentation of refinement to
+frighten her rustic sensibilities.
+
+Then he pushed open another door leading into a shed and called
+"Waya."  A stout, undersized Indian woman, fitted with a coarse
+cotton gown, but cleaner and more presentable than the girl's one
+frock, appeared in the doorway.  "This is Waya, who attends to the
+cooking and cleaning," he said; "and by the way, what is your
+name?"
+
+"Libby Jones."
+
+He took a small memorandum book and a "stub" of pencil from his
+pocket.  "Elizabeth Jones," he said, writing it down.  The girl
+interposed a long red hand.
+
+"No," she interrupted sharply, "not Elizabeth, but Libby, short for
+Lib'rty."
+
+"Liberty?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Liberty Jones, then.  Well, Waya, this is Miss Jones, who will
+look after the cows and calves--and the dairy."  Then glancing at
+her torn dress, he added: "You'll find some clean things in there,
+until I can send up something from San Jose.  Waya will show you."
+
+Without further speech he turned away with the other man.  When
+they were some distance from the cabin, the younger remarked:--
+
+"More like a boy than a girl, ain't she?"
+
+"So much the better for her work," returned the elder grimly.
+
+"I reckon!  I was only thinkin' she didn't han'some much either as
+a boy or girl, eh, doctor?" he pursued.
+
+"Well! as THAT won't make much difference to the cows, calves, or
+the dairy, it needn't trouble US," returned the doctor dryly.  But
+here a sudden outburst of laughter from the cabin made them both
+turn in that direction.  They were in time to see Liberty Jones
+dancing out of the cabin door in a large cotton pinafore, evidently
+belonging to the squaw, who was following her with half-laughing,
+half-frightened expostulations.  The two men stopped and gazed at
+the spectacle.
+
+"Don't seem to be takin' the old man's death very pow'fully," said
+the younger, with a laugh.
+
+"Quite as much as he deserved, I daresay," said the doctor curtly.
+"If the accident had happened to HER, he would have whined and
+whimpered to us for the sake of getting something, but have been as
+much relieved, you may be certain.  SHE'S too young and too natural
+to be a hypocrite yet."
+
+Suddenly the laughter ceased and Liberty Jones's voice arose,
+shrill but masterful: "Thar, that'll do!  Quit now!  You jest get
+back to your scrubbin'--d'ye hear?  I'm boss o' this shanty, you
+bet!"
+
+The doctor turned with a grim smile to his companion.  "That's the
+only thing that bothered me, and I've been waiting for.  She's
+settled it.  She'll do.  Come."
+
+They turned away briskly through the wood.  At the end of half an
+hour's walk they found the team that had brought them there in
+waiting, and drove towards San Jose.  It was nearly ten miles
+before they passed another habitation or trace of clearing.  And by
+this time night had fallen upon the cabin they had left, and upon
+the newly made orphan and her Indian companion, alone and contented
+in that trackless solitude.
+
+        .        .        .        .        .        .
+
+Liberty Jones had been a year at the cabin.  In that time she had
+learned that her employer's name was Doctor Ruysdael, that he had a
+lucrative practice in San Jose, but had also "taken up" a league or
+two of wild forest land in the Santa Cruz range, which he preserved
+and held after a fashion of his own, which gave him the reputation
+of being a "crank" among the very few neighbors his vast possessions
+permitted, and the equally few friends his singular tastes allowed
+him.  It was believed that a man owning such an enormous quantity of
+timber land, who should refuse to set up a sawmill and absolutely
+forbid the felling of trees; who should decline to connect it with
+the highway to Santa Cruz, and close it against improvement and
+speculation, had given sufficient evidence of his insanity; but when
+to this was added the rumor that he himself was not only devoid of
+the human instinct of hunting the wild animals with which his domain
+abounded, but that he held it so sacred to their use as to forbid
+the firing of a gun within his limits, and that these restrictions
+were further preserved and "policed" by the scattered remnants of a
+band of aborigines,--known as "digger Injins,"--it was seriously
+hinted that his eccentricity had acquired a political and moral
+significance, and demanded legislative interference.  But the doctor
+was a rich man, a necessity to his patients, a good marksman, and,
+it was rumored, did not include his fellow men among the animals he
+had a distaste for killing.
+
+Of all this, however, Liberty knew little and cared less.  The
+solitude appealed to her sense of freedom; she did not "hanker"
+after a society she had never known.  At the end of the first week,
+when the doctor communicated to her briefly, by letter, the
+convincing proofs of the death of her father and his entombment
+beneath the sunken cliff, she accepted the fact without comment or
+apparent emotion.  Two months later, when her only surviving
+relative, "Aunt Marty," of Missouri, acknowledged the news--
+communicated by Doctor Ruysdael--with Scriptural quotations and the
+cheerful hope that it "would be a lesson to her" and she would
+"profit in her new place," she left her aunt's letter unanswered.
+
+She looked after the cows and calves with an interest that was
+almost possessory, patronized and played with the squaw,--yet made
+her feel her inferiority,--and moved among the peaceful aborigines
+with the domination of a white woman and a superior.  She tolerated
+the half-monthly visits of "Jim Hoskins," the young companion of
+the doctor, who she learned was the doctor's factor and overseer of
+the property, who lived seven miles away on an agricultural
+clearing, and whose control of her actions was evidently limited by
+the doctor,--for the doctor's sake alone.  Nor was Mr. Hoskins
+inclined to exceed those limits.  He looked upon her as something
+abnormal,--a "crank" as remarkable in her way as her patron was in
+his, neuter of sex and vague of race, and he simply restricted his
+supervision to the bringing and taking of messages.  She remained
+sole queen of the domain.  A rare straggler from the main road,
+penetrating this seclusion, might have scarcely distinguished her
+from Waya, in her coarse cotton gown and slouched hat, except for
+the free stride which contrasted with her companion's waddle.
+Once, in following an estrayed calf, she had crossed the highway
+and been saluted by a passing teamster in the digger dialect; yet
+the mistake left no sting in her memory.  And, like the digger, she
+shrank from that civilization which had only proved a hard
+taskmaster.
+
+The sole touch of human interest she had in her surroundings was in
+the rare visits of the doctor and his brief but sincere commendation
+of her rude and rustic work.  It is possible that the strange,
+middle-aged, gray-haired, intellectual man, whose very language was
+at times mysterious and unintelligible to her, and whose suggestion
+of power awed her, might have touched some untried filial chord in
+her being.  Although she felt that, save for absolute freedom, she
+was little more to him than she had been to her father, yet he had
+never told her she had "no sense," that she was "a hindrance," and
+he had even praised her performance of her duties.  Eagerly as she
+looked for his coming, in his actual presence she felt a singular
+uneasiness of which she was not entirely ashamed, and if she was
+relieved at his departure, it none the less left her to a delightful
+memory of him, a warm sense of his approval, and a fierce ambition
+to be worthy of it, for which she would have sacrificed herself or
+the other miserable retainers about her, as a matter of course.  She
+had driven Waya and the other squaws far along the sparse tableland
+pasture in search of missing stock; she herself had lain out all
+night on the rocks beside an ailing heifer.  Yet, while satisfied to
+earn his praise for the performance of her duty, for some feminine
+reason she thought more frequently of a casual remark he had made on
+his last visit: "You are stronger and more healthy in this air," he
+had said, looking critically into her face.  "We have got that
+abominable alkali out of your system, and wholesome food will do the
+rest."  She was not sure she had quite understood him, but she
+remembered that she had felt her face grow hot when he spoke,--
+perhaps because she had not understood him.
+
+His next visit was a day or two delayed, and in her anxiety she had
+ventured as far as the highway to earnestly watch for his coming.
+From her hiding-place in the underwood she could see the team and
+Jim Hoskins already waiting for him.  Presently she saw him drive
+up to the trail in a carryall with a party of ladies and gentlemen.
+He alighted, bade "Good-by" to the party, and the team turned to
+retrace its course.  But in that single moment she had been struck
+and bewildered by what seemed to her the dazzlingly beautiful
+apparel of the women, and their prettiness.  She felt a sudden
+consciousness of her own coarse, shapeless calico gown, her
+straggling hair, and her felt hat, and a revulsion of feeling
+seized her.  She crept like a wounded animal out of the underwood,
+and then ran swiftly and almost fiercely back towards the cabin.
+She ran so fast that for a time she almost kept pace with the
+doctor and Hoskins in the wagon on the distant trail.  Then she
+dived into the underwood again, and making a short cut through the
+forest, came at the end of two hours within hailing distance of the
+cabin,--footsore and exhausted, in spite of the strange excitement
+that had driven her back.  Here she thought she heard voices--his
+voice among the rest--calling her, but the same singular revulsion
+of feeling hurried her vaguely on again, even while she experienced
+a foolish savage delight in not answering the summons.  In this
+erratic wandering she came upon the spring she had found on her
+first entrance in the forest a year ago, and drank feverishly a
+second time at its trickling source.  She could see that since her
+first visit it had worn a great hollow below the tree roots and now
+formed a shining, placid pool.  As she stooped to look at it, she
+suddenly observed that it reflected her whole figure as in a cruel
+mirror,--her slouched hat and loosened hair, her coarse and
+shapeless gown, her hollow cheeks and dry yellow skin,--in all
+their hopeless, uncompromising details.  She uttered a quick,
+angry, half-reproachful cry, and turned again to fly.  But she had
+not gone far before she came upon the hurrying figures and anxious
+faces of the doctor and Hoskins.  She stopped, trembling and
+irresolute.
+
+"Ah," said the doctor, in a tone of frank relief.  "Here you are!
+I was getting worried about you.  Waya said you had been gone since
+morning!"  He stopped and looked at her attentively.  "Is anything
+the matter?"
+
+His evident concern sent a warm glow over her chilly frame, and yet
+the strange sensation remained.  "No--no!" she stammered.
+
+Doctor Ruysdael turned to Hoskins.  "Go back and tell Waya I've
+found her."
+
+Libby felt that the doctor only wanted to get rid of his companion,
+and became awed again.
+
+"Has anybody been bothering you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Have the diggers frightened you?"
+
+"No"--with a gesture of contempt.
+
+"Have you and Waya quarreled?"
+
+"Nary"--with a faint, tremulous smile.
+
+He still stared at her, and then dropped his blue eyes musingly.
+"Are you lonely here?  Would you rather go to San Jose?"
+
+Like a flash the figures of the two smartly dressed women started
+up before her again, with every detail of their fresh and wholesome
+finery as cruelly distinct as had been her own shapeless ugliness
+in the mirror of the spring.  "No! NO!" she broke out vehemently
+and passionately.  "Never!"
+
+He smiled gently.  "Look here!  I'll send you up some books.  You
+read--don't you?"  She nodded quickly.  "Some magazines and papers.
+Odd I never thought of it before," he added half musingly.  "Come
+along to the cabin.  And," he stopped again and said decisively,
+"the next time you want anything, don't wait for me to come, but
+write."
+
+A few days after he left she received a package of books,--an odd
+collection of novels, magazines, and illustrated journals of the
+period.  She received them eagerly as an evidence of his concern
+for her, but it is to be feared that her youthful nature found
+little satisfaction in the gratification of fancy.  Many of the
+people she read of were strange to her; many of the incidents
+related seemed to her mere lies; some tales which treated of people
+in her own sphere she found profoundly uninteresting.  In one of
+the cheaper magazines she chanced upon a fashion plate; she glanced
+eagerly through all the others for a like revelation until she got
+a dozen together, when she promptly relegated the remaining
+literature to a corner and oblivion.  The text accompanying the
+plates was in a jargon not always clear, but her instinct supplied
+the rest.  She dispatched by Hoskins a note to Doctor Ruysdael:
+"Please send me some brite kalikers and things for sewing.  You
+told me to ask."  A few days later brought the response in a good-
+sized parcel.
+
+Yet this did not keep her from her care of the stock nor her
+rambles in the forest; she was quick to utilize her rediscovery of
+the spring for watering the cattle; it was not so far afield as the
+half-dried creek in the canyon, and was a quiet sylvan spot.  She
+ate her frugal midday meal there and drank of its waters, and,
+secure in her seclusion, bathed there and made her rude toilet when
+the cows were driven home.  But she did not again look into its
+mirrored surface when it was tranquil!
+
+And so a month passed.  But when Doctor Ruysdael was again due at
+the cabin, a letter was brought by Hoskins, with the news that he
+was called away on professional business down the coast, and could
+not come until two weeks later.  In the disappointment that
+overcame her, she did not at first notice that Hoskins was gazing
+at her with a singular expression, which was really one of
+undisguised admiration.  Never having seen this before in the eyes
+of any man who looked at her, she referred it to some vague
+"larking" or jocularity, for which she was in no mood.
+
+"Say, Libby! you're gettin' to be a right smart-lookin' gal.  Seems
+to agree with ye up here," said Hoskins with an awkward laugh.
+"Darned ef ye ain't lookin' awful purty!"
+
+"G'long!" said Liberty Jones, more than ever convinced of his
+badinage.
+
+"Fact," said Hoskins energetically.  "Why, Doc would tell ye so,
+too.  See ef he don't!"
+
+At this Liberty Jones felt her face grow hot.  "You jess get!" she
+said, turning away in as much embarrassment as anger.  Yet he
+hovered near her with awkward attentions that pleased while it
+still angered her.  He offered to go with her to look up the cows;
+she flatly declined, yet with a strange satisfaction in his evident
+embarrassment.  This may have lent some animation to her face, for
+he drew a long breath and said:--
+
+"Don't go pertendin' ye don't know yer purty.  Say, let me and you
+walk a bit and have a talk together."  But Libby had another idea
+in her mind and curtly dismissed him.  Then she ran swiftly to the
+spring, for the words "The Doc will tell ye so, too" were ringing
+in her ears.  The doctor who came with the two beautifully dressed
+women! HE--would tell her she was pretty!  She had not dared to
+look at herself in that crystal mirror since that dreadful day two
+months ago.  She would now.
+
+It was a pretty place in the cool shade of the giant trees, and the
+hoof-marks of cattle drinking from the run beneath the pool had not
+disturbed the margin of that tranquil sylvan basin.  For a moment
+she stood tremulous and uncertain, and then going up to the shining
+mirror, dropped on her knees before it with her thin red hands
+clasped on her lap.  Unconsciously she had taken the attitude of
+prayer; perhaps there was something like it in her mind.
+
+And then the light glanced full on the figure that she saw there!
+
+It fell on a full oval face and throat guileless of fleck or stain,
+smooth as a child's and glowing with health; on large dark eyes, no
+longer sunk in their orbits, but filled with an eager, happy light;
+on bared arms now shapely in contour and cushioned with firm flesh;
+on a dazzling smile, the like of which had never been on the face
+of Liberty Jones before!
+
+She rose to her feet, and yet lingered as if loath to part from
+this delightful vision.  Then a fear overcame her that it was some
+trick of the water, and she sped swiftly back to the house to
+consult the little mirror which hung in her sleeping-room, but
+which she had never glanced at since the momentous day of the
+spring.  She took it shyly into the sunshine, and found that it
+corroborated the reflection of the spring.  That night she worked
+until late at the calico Doctor Ruysdael had sent her, and went to
+bed happy.  The next day brought her Hoskins again with a feeble
+excuse of inquiring if she had a letter for the doctor, and she was
+surprised to find that he was reinforced by a stranger from
+Hoskins's farm, who was equally awkward and vaguely admiring.  But
+the appearance of the TWO men produced a singular phase in her
+impressions and experience.  She was no longer indignant at
+Hoskins, but she found relief in accepting the compliments of the
+stranger in preference, and felt a delight in Hoskins's discomfiture.
+Waya, promoted to the burlesque of a chaperone, grinned with
+infinite delight and understanding.
+
+When at last the day came for the doctor's arrival, he was duly met
+by Hoskins, and as duly informed by that impressible subordinate of
+the great change in Liberty's appearance.  But the doctor was far
+from being equally impressed with his factor's story, and indeed
+showed much more interest in the appearance of the stock which they
+met along the road.  Once the doctor got out of the wagon to
+inspect a cow, and particularly the coat of a rough draught horse
+that had been turned out and put under Liberty's care.  "His skin
+is like velvet," said the doctor.  "The girl evidently understands
+stock, and knows how to keep them in condition."
+
+"I reckon she's beginning to understand herself, too," said
+Hoskins.  "Golly! wait till ye see HER."
+
+The doctor DID see her, but with what feelings he did not as
+frankly express.  She was not at the cabin when they arrived, but
+presently appeared from the direction of the spring where, for
+reasons of her own, she had evidently made her toilet.  Doctor
+Ruysdael was astounded; Hoskins's praise was not exaggerated; and
+there was an added charm that Hoskins was not prepared for.  She
+had put on a gown of her own making,--the secret toil of many a
+long night,--amateurishly fashioned from some cheap yellow calico
+the doctor had sent her, yet fitting her wonderfully, and showing
+every curve of her graceful figure.  Unaccented by a corset,--an
+article she had never known,--even the lines of the stiff,
+unyielding calico had a fashion that was nymph-like and suited her
+unfettered limbs.  Doctor Ruysdael was profoundly moved.  Though a
+philosopher, he was practical.  He found himself suddenly
+confronted not only by a beautiful girl, but a problem!  It was
+impossible to keep the existence of this woodland nymph from the
+knowledge of his distant neighbors; it was equally impossible for
+him to assume the responsibility of keeping a goddess like this in
+her present position.  He had noticed her previous improvement, but
+had never dreamed that pure and wholesome living could in two
+months work such a miracle.  And he was to a certain degree
+responsible, HE had created her,--a beautiful Frankenstein, whose
+lustrous, appealing eyes were even now menacing his security and
+position.
+
+Perhaps she saw trouble and perplexity in the face where she had
+expected admiration and pleasure, for a slight chill went over her
+as he quickly praised the appearance of the stock and spoke of her
+own improvement.  But when they were alone, he turned to her
+abruptly.
+
+"You said you had no wish to go to San Jose?"
+
+"No."  Yet she was conscious that her greatest objection had been
+removed, and she colored faintly.
+
+"Listen to me," he said dryly.  "You deserve a better position than
+this,--a better home and surroundings than you have here.  You are
+older, too,--a woman almost,--and you must look ahead."
+
+A look of mingled fright, reproach, and appeal came into her
+eloquent face.  "Yer wantin' to send me away?" she stammered.
+
+"No," he said frankly.  "It is you who are GROWING away.  This is
+no longer the place for you."
+
+"But I want to stay.  I don't wanter go.  I am--I WAS happy here."
+
+"But I'm thinking of giving up this place.  It takes up too much of
+my time.  You must be provided"--
+
+"YOU are going away?" she said passionately.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Take me with you.  I'll go anywhere!--to San Jose---wherever you
+go.  Don't turn me off as dad did, for I'll foller you as I never
+followed dad.  I'll go with you--or I'll die!"
+
+There was neither fear nor shame in her words; it was the outspoken
+instinct of the animal he had been rearing; be was convinced and
+appalled by it.
+
+"I am returning to San Jose at once," he said gravely.  "You shall
+go with me--FOR THE PRESENT!  Get yourself ready!"
+
+He took her to San Jose, and temporarily to the house of a patient,--
+a widow lady,--while he tried, alone, to grapple with the problem
+that now confronted him.  But that problem became more complicated
+at the end of the third day, by Liberty Jones falling suddenly and
+alarmingly ill.  The symptoms were so grave that the doctor, in his
+anxiety, called in a brother physician in consultation.  When the
+examination was over, the two men withdrew and stared at each other.
+
+"Of course there is no doubt that the symptoms all point to slow
+arsenical poisoning," said the consulting doctor.
+
+"Yes," said Ruysdael quickly, "yet it is utterly inexplicable, both
+as to motive and opportunity."
+
+"Humph!" said the other grimly, "young ladies take arsenic in
+minute doses to improve the complexion and promote tissue,
+forgetting that the effects are cumulative when they stop suddenly.
+Your young friend has 'sworn off' too quickly."
+
+"But it is impossible," said Doctor Ruysdael impatiently.  "She is
+a mere child--a country girl--ignorant of such habits."
+
+"Humph! the peasants in the Tyrol try it on themselves after
+noticing the effect on the coats of cattle."
+
+Doctor Ruysdael started.  A recollection of the sleek draught horse
+flashed upon him.  He rose and hastily re-entered the patient's
+room.  In a few moments he returned.  "Do you think I could remove
+her at once to the mountains?" he said gravely.
+
+"Yes, with care and a return to graduated doses of the same poison;
+you know it's the only remedy just now," answered the other.
+
+By noon the next day the doctor and his patient had returned to the
+cabin, but Ruysdael himself carried the helpless Liberty Jones to
+the spring and deposited her gently beside it.  "You may drink
+now," he said gravely.
+
+The girl did so eagerly, apparently imbibing new strength from the
+sparkling water.  The doctor meanwhile coolly filled a phial from
+the same source, and made a hasty test of the contents by the aid
+of some other phials from his case.  The result seemed to satisfy
+him.  Then he said gravely:
+
+"And THIS is the spring you had discovered?"
+
+The girl nodded.
+
+"And you and the cattle have daily used it?"
+
+She nodded again wonderingly.  Then she caught his hand appealingly.
+
+"You won't send me away?"
+
+He smiled oddly as he glanced from the waters of the hill to the
+brimming eyes.  "No."
+
+"No-r," tremulously, "go away--yourself?"
+
+The doctor looked this time only into her eyes.  There was a
+tremendous idea in his own, which seemed in some way to have solved
+that dreadful problem.
+
+"No!  We will stay here TOGETHER."
+
+        .        .        .        .        .        .
+
+Six months later there was a paragraph in the San Francisco press:
+"The wonderful Arsenical Spring in the Santa Cruz Mountain, known
+as 'Liberty Spring,' discovered by Doctor Ruysdael, has proved such
+a remarkable success that we understand the temporary huts for
+patients are to be shortly replaced by a magnificent Spa Hotel
+worthy of the spot, and the eligible villa sites it has brought
+into the market.  It will be a source of pleasure to all to know
+that the beautiful nymph--a worthy successor to the far-famed
+'Elise' of the German 'Brunnen'--who has administered the waters to
+so many grateful patients will still be in attendance, although it
+is rumored that she is shortly to become the wife of the
+distinguished discoverer."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation, by Harte
+
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