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Title:  A First Family of Tasajara

Author:  Bret Harte

July, 2001  [Etext #2723]


Project Gutenberg Etext A First Family of Tasajara, by Bret Harte
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A FIRST FAMILY OF TASAJARA

by Bret Harte




CHAPTER I.


"It blows," said Joe Wingate.

As if to accent the words of the speaker a heavy gust of wind at
that moment shook the long light wooden structure which served as
the general store of Sidon settlement, in Contra Costa.  Even after
it had passed a prolonged whistle came through the keyhole, sides,
and openings of the closed glass front doors, that served equally
for windows, and filled the canvas ceiling which hid the roof above
like a bellying sail.  A wave of enthusiastic emotion seemed to be
communicated to a line of straw hats and sou-westers suspended from
a cross-beam, and swung them with every appearance of festive
rejoicing, while a few dusters, overcoats, and "hickory" shirts
hanging on the side walls exhibited such marked though idiotic
animation that it had the effect of a satirical comment on the
lazy, purposeless figures of the four living inmates of the store.

Ned Billings momentarily raised his head and shoulders depressed in
the back of his wooden armchair, glanced wearily around, said, "You
bet, it's no slouch of a storm," and then lapsed again with further
extended legs and an added sense of comfort.

Here the third figure, which had been leaning listlessly against
the shelves, putting aside the arm of a swaying overcoat that
seemed to be emptily embracing him, walked slowly from behind the
counter to the door, examined its fastenings, and gazed at the
prospect.  He was the owner of the store, and the view was a
familiar one,--a long stretch of treeless waste before him meeting
an equal stretch of dreary sky above, and night hovering somewhere
between the two.  This was indicated by splashes of darker shadow
as if washed in with india ink, and a lighter low-lying streak that
might have been the horizon, but was not.  To the right, on a line
with the front door of the store, were several scattered, widely
dispersed objects, that, although vague in outline, were rigid
enough in angles to suggest sheds or barns, but certainly not
trees.

"There's a heap more wet to come afore the wind goes down," he
said, glancing at the sky.  "Hark to that, now!"

They listened lazily.  There was a faint murmur from the shingles
above; then suddenly the whole window was filmed and blurred as if
the entire prospect had been wiped out with a damp sponge.  The man
turned listlessly away.

"That's the kind that soaks in; thar won't be much teamin' over
Tasajara for the next two weeks, I reckon," said the fourth
lounger, who, seated on a high barrel, was nibbling--albeit
critically and fastidiously--biscuits and dried apples alternately
from open boxes on the counter.  "It's lucky you've got in your
winter stock, Harkutt."

The shrewd eyes of Mr. Harkutt, proprietor, glanced at the
occupation of the speaker as if even his foresight might have its
possible drawbacks, but he said nothing.

"There'll be no show for Sidon until you've got a wagon road from
here to the creek," said Billings languidly, from the depths of his
chair.  "But what's the use o' talkin'?  Thar ain't energy enough
in all Tasajara to build it.  A God-forsaken place, that two months
of the year can only be reached by a mail-rider once a week, don't
look ez if it was goin' to break its back haulin' in goods and
settlers.  I tell ye what, gentlemen, it makes me sick!"  And
apparently it had enfeebled him to the extent of interfering with
his aim in that expectoration of disgust against the stove with
which he concluded his sentence.

"Why don't YOU build it?" asked Wingate, carelessly.

"I wouldn't on principle," said Billings.  "It's gov'ment work.
What did we whoop up things here last spring to elect Kennedy to
the legislation for?  What did I rig up my shed and a thousand feet
of lumber for benches at the barbecue for?  Why, to get Kennedy
elected and make him get a bill passed for the road!  That's MY
share of building it, if it comes to that.  And I only wish some
folks, that blow enough about what oughter be done to bulge out
that ceiling, would only do as much as I have done for Sidon."

As this remark seemed to have a personal as well as local
application, the storekeeper diplomatically turned it.  "There's a
good many as DON'T believe that a road from here to the creek is
going to do any good to Sidon.  It's very well to say the creek is
an embarcadero, but callin' it so don't put anough water into it to
float a steamboat from the bay, nor clear out the reeds and tules
in it.  Even if the State builds you roads, it ain't got no call to
make Tasajara Creek navigable for ye; and as that will cost as much
as the road, I don't see where the money's comin' from for both."

"There's water enough in front of 'Lige Curtis's shanty, and his
location is only a mile along the bank," returned Billings.

"Water enough for him to laze away his time fishin' when he's
sober, and deep enough to drown him when he's drunk," said Wingate.
"If you call that an embarcadero, you kin buy it any day from
'Lige,--title, possession, and shanty thrown in,--for a demijohn o'
whiskey."

The fourth man here distastefully threw back a half-nibbled biscuit
into the box, and languidly slipped from the barrel to the floor,
fastidiously flicking the crumbs from his clothes as he did so.  "I
reckon somebody'll get it for nothing, if 'Lige don't pull up
mighty soon.  He'll either go off his head with jim-jams or jump
into the creek.  He's about as near desp'rit as they make 'em, and
havin' no partner to look after him, and him alone in the tules,
ther' 's no tellin' WHAT he may do."

Billings, stretched at full length in his chair, here gurgled
derisively.  "Desp'rit!--ketch him!  Why, that's his little game!
He's jist playin' off his desp'rit condition to frighten Sidon.
Whenever any one asks him why he don't go to work, whenever he's
hard up for a drink, whenever he's had too much or too little, he's
workin' that desp'rit dodge, and even talkin' o' killin' himself!
Why, look here," he continued, momentarily raising himself to a
sitting posture in his disgust, "it was only last week he was over
at Rawlett's trying to raise provisions and whiskey outer his water
rights on the creek!  Fact, sir,--had it all written down lawyer-
like on paper.  Rawlett didn't exactly see it in that light, and
told him so.  Then he up with the desp'rit dodge and began to work
that.  Said if he had to starve in a swamp like a dog he might as
well kill himself at once, and would too if he could afford the
weppins.  Johnson said it was not a bad idea, and offered to lend
him his revolver; Bilson handed up his shot-gun, and left it
alongside of him, and turned his head away considerate-like and
thoughtful while Rawlett handed him a box of rat pizon over the
counter, in case he preferred suthin' more quiet.  Well, what did
'Lige do?  Nothin'!  Smiled kinder sickly, looked sorter wild, and
shut up.  He didn't suicide much.  No, sir!  He didn't kill
himself,--not he.  Why, old Bixby--and he's a deacon in good
standin'--allowed, in 'Lige's hearin' and for 'Lige's benefit, that
self-destruction was better nor bad example, and proved it by
Scripture too.  And yet 'Lige did nothin'!  Desp'rit!  He's only
desp'rit to laze around and fish all day off a log in the tules,
and soak up with whiskey, until, betwixt fever an' ague and the
jumps, he kinder shakes hisself free o' responsibility."

A long silence followed; it was somehow felt that the subject was
incongruously exciting; Billings allowed himself to lapse again
behind the back of his chair.  Meantime it had grown so dark that
the dull glow of the stove was beginning to outline a faint halo on
the ceiling even while it plunged the further lines of shelves
behind the counter into greater obscurity.

"Time to light up, Harkutt, ain't it?" said Wingate, tentatively.

"Well, I was reckoning ez it's such a wild night there wouldn't be
any use keepin' open, and when you fellows left I'd just shut up
for good and make things fast," said Harkutt, dubiously.  Before
his guests had time to fully weigh this delicate hint, another gust
of wind shook the tenement, and even forced the unbolted upper part
of the door to yield far enough to admit an eager current of humid
air that seemed to justify the wisdom of Harkutt's suggestion.
Billings slowly and with a sigh assumed a sitting posture in the
chair.  The biscuit-nibbler selected a fresh dainty from the
counter, and Wingate abstractedly walked to the window and rubbed
the glass.  Sky and water had already disappeared behind a curtain
of darkness that was illuminated by a single point of light--the
lamp in the window of some invisible but nearer house--which threw
its rays across the glistening shallows in the road.  "Well," said
Wingate, buttoning up his coat in slow dejection, "I reckon I
oughter be travelin' to help the old woman do the chores before
supper."  He had just recognized the light in his own dining-room,
and knew by that sign that his long-waiting helpmeet had finally
done the chores herself.

"Some folks have it mighty easy," said Billings, with long-drawn
discontent, as he struggled to his feet.  "You've only a step to
go, and yer's me and Peters there"--indicating the biscuit-nibbler,
who was beginning to show alarming signs of returning to the barrel
again--"hev got to trapse five times that distance."

"More'n half a mile, if it comes to that," said Peters, gloomily.
He paused in putting on his overcoat as if thinking better of it,
while even the more fortunate and contiguous Wingate languidly
lapsed against the counter again.

The moment was a critical one.  Billings was evidently also
regretfully eying the chair he had just quitted.  Harkutt resolved
on a heroic effort.

"Come, boys," he said, with brisk conviviality, "take a parting
drink with me before you go."  Producing a black bottle from some
obscurity beneath the counter that smelt strongly of india-rubber
boots, he placed it with four glasses before his guests.  Each made
a feint of holding his glass against the opaque window while
filling it, although nothing could be seen.  A sudden tumult of
wind and rain again shook the building, but even after it had
passed the glass door still rattled violently.

"Just see what's loose, Peters," said Billings; "you're nearest
it."

Peters, still holding the undrained glass in his hand, walked
slowly towards it.

"It's suthin'--or somebody outside," he said, hesitatingly.

The three others came eagerly to his side.  Through the glass,
clouded from within by their breath, and filmed from without by the
rain, some vague object was moving, and what seemed to be a mop of
tangled hair was apparently brushing against the pane.  The door
shook again, but less strongly.  Billings pressed his face against
the glass.  "Hol' on," he said in a quick whisper,--"it's 'Lige!"
But it was too late.  Harkutt had already drawn the lower bolt, and
a man stumbled from the outer obscurity into the darker room.

The inmates drew away as he leaned back for a moment against the
door that closed behind him.  Then dimly, but instinctively,
discerning the glass of liquor which Wingate still mechanically
held in his hand, he reached forward eagerly, took it from
Wingate's surprised and unresisting fingers, and drained it at a
gulp.  The four men laughed vaguely, but not as cheerfully as they
might.

"I was just shutting up," began Harkutt, dubiously.

"I won't keep you a minit," said the intruder, nervously fumbling
in the breast pocket of his hickory shirt.  "It's a matter of
business--Harkutt--I"--  But he was obliged to stop here to wipe
his face and forehead with the ends of a loose handkerchief tied
round his throat.  From the action, and what could be seen of his
pale, exhausted face, it was evident that the moisture upon it was
beads of perspiration, and not the rain which some abnormal heat of
his body was converting into vapor from his sodden garments as he
stood there.

"I've got a document here," he began again, producing a roll of
paper tremblingly from his pocket, "that I'd like you to glance
over, and perhaps you'd"--  His voice, which had been feverishly
exalted, here broke and rattled with a cough.

Billings, Wingate, and Peters fell apart and looked out of the
window.  "It's too dark to read anything now, 'Lige," said Harkutt,
with evasive good humor, "and I ain't lightin' up to-night."

"But I can tell you the substance of it," said the man, with a
faintness that however had all the distinctness of a whisper, "if
you'll just step inside a minute.  It's a matter of importance and
a bargain"--

"I reckon we must be goin'," said Billings to the others, with
marked emphasis.  "We're keepin' Harkutt from shuttin' up."  "Good-
night!"  "Good-night!" added Peters and Wingate, ostentatiously
following Billings hurriedly through the door.  "So long!"

The door closed behind them, leaving Harkutt alone with his
importunate intruder.  Possibly his resentment at his customers'
selfish abandonment of him at this moment developed a vague spirit
of opposition to them and mitigated his feeling towards 'Lige.  He
groped his way to the counter, struck a match, and lit a candle.
Its feeble rays faintly illuminated the pale, drawn face of the
applicant, set in a tangle of wet, unkempt, party-colored hair.  It
was not the face of an ordinary drunkard; although tremulous and
sensitive from some artificial excitement, there was no ENGORGEMENT
or congestion in the features or complexion, albeit they were
morbid and unhealthy.  The expression was of a suffering that was
as much mental as physical, and yet in some vague way appeared
unmeaning--and unheroic.

"I want to see you about selling my place on the creek.  I want you
to take it off my hands for a bargain.  I want to get quit of it,
at once, for just enough to take me out o' this.  I don't want any
profit; only money enough to get away."  His utterance, which had a
certain kind of cultivation, here grew thick and harsh again, and
he looked eagerly at the bottle which stood on the counter.

"Look here, 'Lige," said Harkutt, not unkindly.  "It's too late to
do anythin' tonight.  You come in to-morrow."  He would have added
"when you're sober," but for a trader's sense of politeness to a
possible customer, and probably some doubt of the man's actual
condition.

"God knows where or what I may be tomorrow!  It would kill me to go
back and spend another night as the last, if I don't kill myself on
the way to do it."

Harkutt's face darkened grimly.  It was indeed as Billings had
said.  The pitiable weakness of the man's manner not only made his
desperation inadequate and ineffective, but even lent it all the
cheapness of acting.  And, as if to accent his simulation of a
part, his fingers, feebly groping in his shirt bosom, slipped
aimlessly and helplessly from the shining handle of a pistol in his
pocket to wander hesitatingly towards the bottle on the counter.

Harkutt took the bottle, poured out a glass of the liquor, and
pushed it before his companion, who drank it eagerly.  Whether it
gave him more confidence, or his attention was no longer diverted,
he went on more collectedly and cheerfully, and with no trace of
his previous desperation in his manner.  "Come, Harkutt, buy my
place.  It's a bargain, I tell you.  I'll sell it cheap.  I only
want enough to get away with.  Give me twenty-five dollars and it's
yours.  See, there's the papers--the quitclaim--all drawn up and
signed."  He drew the roll of paper from his pocket again,
apparently forgetful of the adjacent weapon.

"Look here, 'Lige," said Harkutt, with a business-like straightening
of his lips, "I ain't buyin' any land in Tasajara,--least of all
yours on the creek.  I've got more invested here already than I'll
ever get back again.  But I tell you what I'll do.  You say you
can't go back to your shanty.  Well, seein' how rough it is outside,
and that the waters of the creek are probably all over the trail by
this time, I reckon you're about right.  Now, there's five dollars!"
He laid down a coin sharply on the counter.  "Take that and go over
to Rawlett's and get a bed and some supper.  In the mornin' you may
be able to strike up a trade with somebody else--or change your
mind.  How did you get here?  On your hoss?"

"Yes."

"He ain't starved yet?"

"No; he can eat grass.  I can't."

Either the liquor or Harkutt's practical unsentimental treatment of
the situation seemed to give him confidence.  He met Harkutt's eye
more steadily as the latter went on.  "You kin turn your hoss for
the night into my stock corral next to Rawlett's.  It'll save you
payin' for fodder and stablin'."

The man took up the coin with a certain slow gravity which was
almost like dignity.  "Thank you," he said, laying the paper on the
counter.  "I'll leave that as security."

"Don't want it, 'Lige," said Harkutt, pushing it back.

"I'd rather leave it."

"But suppose you have a chance to sell it to somebody at Rawlett's?"
continued Harkutt, with a precaution that seemed ironical.

"I don't think there's much chance of that."

He remained quiet, looking at Harkutt with an odd expression as he
rubbed the edge of the coin that he held between his fingers
abstractedly on the counter.  Something in his gaze--rather perhaps
the apparent absence of anything in it approximate to the present
occasion--was beginning to affect Harkutt with a vague uneasiness.
Providentially a resumed onslaught of wind and rain against the
panes effected a diversion.  "Come," he said, with brisk
practicality, "you'd better hurry on to Rawlett's before it gets
worse.  Have your clothes dried by his fire, take suthin' to eat,
and you'll be all right."  He rubbed his hands cheerfully, as if
summarily disposing of the situation, and incidentally of all
'Lige's troubles, and walked with him to the door.  Nevertheless,
as the man's look remained unchanged, he hesitated a moment with
his hand on the handle, in the hope that he would say something,
even if only to repeat his appeal, but he did not.  Then Harkutt
opened the door; the man moved mechanically out, and at the
distance of a few feet seemed to melt into the rain and darkness.
Harkutt remained for a moment with his face pressed against the
glass.  After an interval he thought he heard the faint splash of
hoofs in the shallows of the road; he opened the door softly and
looked out.

The light had disappeared from the nearest house; only an uncertain
bulk of shapeless shadows remained.  Other remoter and more vague
outlines near the horizon seemed to have a funereal suggestion of
tombs and grave mounds, and one--a low shed near the road--looked
not unlike a halted bier.  He hurriedly put up the shutters in a
momentary lulling of the wind, and re-entering the store began to
fasten them from within.

While thus engaged an inner door behind the counter opened softly
and cautiously, projecting a brighter light into the deserted
apartment from some sacred domestic interior with the warm and
wholesome incense of cooking.  It served to introduce also the
equally agreeable presence of a young girl, who, after assuring
herself of the absence of every one but the proprietor, idly
slipped into the store, and placing her rounded elbows, from which
her sleeves were uprolled, upon the counter, leaned lazily upon
them, with both hands supporting her dimpled chin, and gazed
indolently at him; so indolently that, with her pretty face once
fixed in this comfortable attitude, she was constrained to follow
his movements with her eyes alone, and often at an uncomfortable
angle.  It was evident that she offered the final but charming
illustration of the enfeebling listlessness of Sidon.

"So those loafers have gone at last," she said, meditatively.
"They'll take root here some day, pop.  The idea of three strong
men like that lazing round for two mortal hours doin' nothin'.
Well!"  As if to emphasize her disgust she threw her whole weight
upon the counter by swinging her feet from the floor to touch the
shelves behind her.

Mr. Harkutt only replied by a slight grunt as he continued to screw
on the shutters.

"Want me to help you, dad?" she said, without moving.

Mr. Harkutt muttered something unintelligible, which, however,
seemed to imply a negative, and her attention here feebly wandered
to the roll of paper, and she began slowly and lazily to read it
aloud.

"'For value received, I hereby sell, assign, and transfer to Daniel
D. Harkutt all my right, titles and interest in, and to the
undivided half of, Quarter Section 4, Range 5, Tasajara Township'--
hum--hum," she murmured, running her eyes to the bottom of the
page.  "Why, Lord!  It's that 'Lige Curtis!" she laughed.  "The
idea of HIM having property!  Why, dad, you ain't been THAT silly!"

"Put down that paper, miss," he said, aggrievedly; "bring the
candle here, and help me to find one of these infernal screws
that's dropped."

The girl indolently disengaged herself from the counter and Elijah
Curtis's transfer, and brought the candle to her father.  The screw
was presently found and the last fastening secured.  "Supper
gettin' cold, dad," she said, with a slight yawn.  Her father
sympathetically responded by stretching himself from his stooping
position, and the two passed through the private door into inner
domesticity, leaving the already forgotten paper lying with other
articles of barter on the counter.


CHAPTER II.


With the closing of the little door behind them they seemed to have
shut out the turmoil and vibration of the storm.  The reason became
apparent when, after a few paces, they descended half a dozen steps
to a lower landing.  This disclosed the fact that the dwelling part
of the Sidon General Store was quite below the level of the shop
and the road, and on the slope of the solitary undulation of the
Tasajara plain,--a little ravine that fell away to a brawling
stream below.  The only arboreous growth of Tasajara clothed its
banks in the shape of willows and alders that set compactly around
the quaint, irregular dwelling which straggled down the ravine and
looked upon a slope of bracken and foliage on either side.  The
transition from the black, treeless, storm-swept plain to this
sheltered declivity was striking and suggestive.  From the opposite
bank one might fancy that the youthful and original dwelling had
ambitiously mounted the crest, but, appalled at the dreary prospect
beyond, had gone no further; while from the road it seemed as if
the fastidious proprietor had tried to draw a line between the
vulgar trading-post, with which he was obliged to face the coarser
civilization of the place, and the privacy of his domestic life.
The real fact, however, was that the ravine furnished wood and
water; and as Nature also provided one wall of the house,--as in
the well-known example of aboriginal cave dwellings,--its peculiar
construction commended itself to Sidon on the ground of involving
little labor.

Howbeit, from the two open windows of the sitting-room which they
had entered only the faint pattering of dripping boughs and a
slight murmur from the swollen brook indicated the storm that shook
the upper plain, and the cool breath of laurel, syringa, and alder
was wafted through the neat apartment.  Passing through that
pleasant rural atmosphere they entered the kitchen, a much larger
room, which appeared to serve occasionally as a dining-room, and
where supper was already laid out.  A stout, comfortable-looking
woman--who had, however, a singularly permanent expression of
pained sympathy upon her face--welcomed them in tones of gentle
commiseration.

"Ah, there you be, you two!  Now sit ye right down, dears; DO.  You
must be tired out; and you, Phemie, love, draw up by your poor
father.  There--that's right.  You'll be better soon."

There was certainly no visible sign of suffering or exhaustion on
the part of either father or daughter, nor the slightest apparent
earthly reason why they should be expected to exhibit any.  But,
as already intimated, it was part of Mrs. Harkutt's generous
idiosyncrasy to look upon all humanity as suffering and toiling; to
be petted, humored, condoled with, and fed.  It had, in the course
of years, imparted a singularly caressing sadness to her voice, and
given her the habit of ending her sentences with a melancholy cooing
and an unintelligible murmur of agreement.  It was undoubtedly
sincere and sympathetic, but at times inappropriate and distressing.
It had lost her the friendship of the one humorist of Tasajara,
whose best jokes she had received with such heartfelt commiseration
and such pained appreciation of the evident labor involved as to
reduce him to silence.

Accustomed as Mr. Harkutt was to his wife's peculiarity, he was not
above assuming a certain slightly fatigued attitude befitting it.
"Yes," he said, with a vague sigh, "where's Clemmie?"

"Lyin' down since dinner; she reckoned she wouldn't get up to
supper," she returned soothingly.  "Phemie's goin' to take her up
some sass and tea.  The poor dear child wants a change."

"She wants to go to 'Frisco, and so do I, pop," said Phemie,
leaning her elbow half over her father's plate.  "Come, pop, say
do,--just for a week."

"Only for a week," murmured the commiserating Mrs. Harkutt.

"Perhaps," responded Harkutt, with gloomy sarcasm, "ye wouldn't
mind tellin' me how you're goin' to get there, and where the
money's comin' from to take you?  There's no teamin' over Tasajara
till the rain stops, and no money comin' in till the ranchmen can
move their stuff.  There ain't a hundred dollars in all Tasajara;
at least there ain't been the first red cent of it paid across my
counter for a fortnit!  Perhaps if you do go you wouldn't mind
takin' me and the store along with ye, and leavin' us there."

"Yes, dear," said Mrs. Harkutt, with sympathetic but shameless
tergiversation.  "Don't bother your poor father, Phemie, love;
don't you see he's just tired out?  And you're not eatin' anything,
dad."

As Mr. Harkutt was uneasily conscious that he had been eating
heartily in spite of his financial difficulties, he turned the
subject abruptly.  "Where's John Milton?"

Mrs. Harkutt shaded her eyes with her hand, and gazed meditatively
on the floor before the fire and in the chimney corner for her only
son, baptized under that historic title.  "He was here a minit
ago," she said doubtfully.  "I really can't think where he's gone.
But," assuringly, "it ain't far."

"He's skipped with one o' those story-books he's borrowed," said
Phemie.  "He's always doin' it.  Like as not he's reading with a
candle in the wood-shed.  We'll all be burnt up some night."

"But he's got through his chores," interposed Mrs. Harkutt
deprecatingly.

"Yes," continued Harkutt, aggrievedly, "but instead of goin' to
bed, or addin' up bills, or takin' count o' stock, or even doin'
sums or suthin' useful, he's ruinin' his eyes and wastin' his time
over trash."  He rose and walked slowly into the sitting-room,
followed by his daughter and a murmur of commiseration from his
wife.  But Mrs. Harkutt's ministration for the present did not pass
beyond her domain, the kitchen.

"I reckon ye ain't expectin' anybody tonight, Phemie?" said Mr.
Harkutt, sinking into a chair, and placing his slippered feet
against the wall.

"No," said Phemie, "unless something possesses that sappy little
Parmlee to make one of his visitations.  John Milton says that out
on the road it blows so you can't stand up.  It's just like that
idiot Parmlee to be blown in here, and not have strength of mind
enough to get away again."

Mr. Harkutt smiled.  It was that arch yet approving, severe yet
satisfied smile with which the deceived male parent usually
receives any depreciation of the ordinary young man by his
daughters.  Euphemia was no giddy thing to be carried away by young
men's attentions,--not she!  Sitting back comfortably in his
rocking-chair, he said, "Play something."

The young girl went to the closet and took from the top shelf an
excessively ornamented accordion,--the opulent gift of a reckless
admirer.  It was so inordinately decorated, so gorgeous in the
blaze of papier mache, mother-of-pearl, and tortoise-shell on keys
and keyboard, and so ostentatiously radiant in the pink silk of its
bellows that it seemed to overawe the plainly furnished room with
its splendors.  "You ought to keep it on the table in a glass vase,
Phemie," said her father admiringly.

"And have HIM think I worshiped it!  Not me, indeed!  He's conceited
enough already," she returned, saucily.

Mr. Harkutt again smiled his approbation, then deliberately closed
his eyes and threw his head back in comfortable anticipation of the
coming strains.

It is to be regretted that in brilliancy, finish, and even
cheerfulness of quality they were not up to the suggestions of the
keys and keyboard.  The most discreet and cautious effort on the
part of the young performer seemed only to produce startlingly
unexpected, but instantly suppressed complaints from the
instrument, accompanied by impatient interjections of "No, no,"
from the girl herself.  Nevertheless, with her pretty eyebrows
knitted in some charming distress of memory, her little mouth half
open between an apologetic smile and the exertion of working the
bellows, with her white, rounded arms partly lifted up and waving
before her, she was pleasantly distracting to the eye.  Gradually,
as the scattered strains were marshaled into something like an air,
she began to sing also, glossing over the instrumental weaknesses,
filling in certain dropped notes and omissions, and otherwise
assisting the ineffectual accordion with a youthful but not
unmusical voice.  The song was a lugubrious religious chant; under
its influence the house seemed to sink into greater quiet,
permitting in the intervals the murmur of the swollen creek to
appear more distinct, and even the far moaning of the wind on the
plain to become faintly audible.  At last, having fairly mastered
the instrument, Phemie got into the full swing of the chant.
Unconstrained by any criticism, carried away by the sound of her
own voice, and perhaps a youthful love for mere uproar, or possibly
desirous to drown her father's voice, which had unexpectedly joined
in with a discomposing bass, the conjoined utterances seemed to
threaten the frail structure of their dwelling, even as the gale
had distended the store behind them.  When they ceased at last it
was in an accession of dripping from the apparently stirred leaves
outside.  And then a voice, evidently from the moist depths of the
abyss below, called out,--

"Hullo, there!"

Phemie put down the accordion, said, "Who's that now?" went to the
window, lazily leaned her elbows on the sill, and peered into the
darkness.  Nothing was to be seen; the open space of dimly outlined
landscape had that blank, uncommunicative impenetrability with
which Nature always confronts and surprises us at such moments.  It
seemed to Phemie that she was the only human being present.  Yet
after the feeling had passed she fancied she heard the wash of the
current against some object in the stream, half stationary and half
resisting.

"Is any one down there?  Is that you, Mr. Parmlee?" she called.

There was a pause.  Some invisible auditor said to another, "It's a
young lady."  Then the first voice rose again in a more deferential
tone: "Are we anywhere near Sidon?"

"This is Sidon," answered Harkutt, who had risen, and was now quite
obliterating his daughter's outline at the window.

"Thank you," said the voice.  "Can we land anywhere here, on this
bank?"

"Run down, pop; they're strangers," said the girl, with excited,
almost childish eagerness.

"Hold on," called out Harkutt, "I'll be thar in a moment!"  He
hastily thrust his feet into a pair of huge boots, clapped on an
oilskin hat and waterproof, and disappeared through a door that led
to a lower staircase.  Phemie, still at the window, albeit with a
newly added sense of self-consciousness, hung out breathlessly.
Presently a beam of light from the lower depths of the house shot
out into the darkness.  It was her father with a bull's-eye
lantern.  As he held it up and clambered cautiously down the bank,
its rays fell upon the turbid rushing stream, and what appeared to
be a rough raft of logs held with difficulty against the bank by
two men with long poles.  In its centre was a roll of blankets, a
valise and saddle-bags, and the shining brasses of some odd-looking
instruments.

As Mr. Harkutt, supporting himself by a willow branch that overhung
the current, held up the lantern, the two men rapidly transferred
their freight from the raft to the bank, and leaped ashore.  The
action gave an impulse to the raft, which, no longer held in
position by the poles, swung broadside to the current and was
instantly swept into the darkness.

Not a word had been spoken, but now the voices of the men rose
freely together.  Phemie listened with intense expectation.  The
explanation was simple.  They were surveyors who had been caught by
the overflow on Tasajara plain, had abandoned their horses on the
bank of Tasajara Creek, and with a hastily constructed raft had
intrusted themselves and their instruments to the current.  "But,"
said Harkutt quickly, "there is no connection between Tasajara
Creek and this stream."

The two men laughed.  "There is NOW," said one of them.

"But Tasajara Creek is a part of the bay," said the astonished
Harkutt, "and this stream rises inland and only runs into the bay
four miles lower down.  And I don't see how--

"You're almost twelve feet lower here than Tasajara Creek," said
the first man, with a certain professional authority, "and that's
WHY.  There's more water than Tasajara Creek can carry, and it's
seeking the bay this way.  Look," he continued, taking the lantern
from Harkutt's hand and casting its rays on the stream, "that's
salt drift from the upper bay, and part of Tasajara Creek's running
by your house now!  Don't be alarmed," he added reassuringly,
glancing at the staring storekeeper.  "You're all right here; this
is only the overflow and will find its level soon."

But Mr. Harkutt remained gazing abstractedly at the smiling
speaker.  From the window above the impatient Phemie was wondering
why he kept the strangers waiting in the rain while he talked about
things that were perfectly plain.  It was so like a man!

"Then there's a waterway straight to Tasajara Creek?" he said
slowly.

"There is, as long as this flood lasts," returned the first speaker
promptly; "and a cutting through the bank of two or three hundred
yards would make it permanent.  Well, what's the matter with that?"

"Nothin'," said Harkutt hurriedly.  "I am only considerin'!  But
come in, dry yourselves, and take suthin'."

The light over the rushing water was withdrawn, and the whole
prospect sank back into profound darkness.  Mr. Harkutt had
disappeared with his guests.  Then there was the familiar shuffle
of his feet on the staircase, followed by other more cautious
footsteps that grew delicately and even courteously deliberate as
they approached.  At which the young girl, in some new sense of
decorum, drew in her pretty head, glanced around the room quickly,
reset the tidy on her father's chair, placed the resplendent
accordion like an ornament in the exact centre of the table, and
then vanished into the hall as Mr. Harkutt entered with the
strangers.

They were both of the same age and appearance, but the principal
speaker was evidently the superior of his companion, and although
their attitude to each other was equal and familiar, it could be
easily seen that he was the leader.  He had a smooth, beardless
face, with a critical expression of eye and mouth that might have
been fastidious and supercilious but for the kindly, humorous
perception that tempered it.  His quick eye swept the apartment and
then fixed itself upon the accordion, but a smile lit up his face
as he said quietly,--

"I hope we haven't frightened the musician away.  It was bad enough
to have interrupted the young lady."

"No, no," said Mr. Harkutt, who seemed to have lost his abstraction
in the nervousness of hospitality.  "I reckon she's only lookin'
after her sick sister.  But come into the kitchen, both of you,
straight off, and while you're dryin' your clothes, mother'll fix
you suthin' hot."

"We only need to change our boots and stockings; we've some dry
ones in our pack downstairs," said the first speaker hesitatingly.

"I'll fetch 'em up and you can change in the kitchen.  The old
woman won't mind," said Harkutt reassuringly.  "Come along."  He
led the way to the kitchen; the two strangers exchanged a glance of
humorous perplexity and followed.

The quiet of the little room was once more unbroken.  A far-off
commiserating murmur indicated that Mrs. Harkutt was receiving her
guests.  The cool breath of the wet leaves without slightly stirred
the white dimity curtains, and somewhere from the darkened eaves
there was a still, somnolent drip.  Presently a hurried whisper and
a half-laugh appeared to be suppressed in the outer passage or
hall.  There was another moment of hesitation and the door opened
suddenly and ostentatiously, disclosing Phemie, with a taller and
slighter young woman, her elder sister, at her side.  Perceiving
that the room was empty, they both said "Oh!" yet with a certain
artificiality of manner that was evidently a lingering trace of
some previous formal attitude they had assumed.  Then without
further speech they each selected a chair and a position, having
first shaken out their dresses, and gazed silently at each other.

It may be said briefly that sitting thus--in spite of their
unnatural attitude, or perhaps rather because of its suggestion of
a photographic pose--they made a striking picture, and strongly
accented their separate peculiarities.  They were both pretty, but
the taller girl, apparently the elder, had an ideal refinement and
regularity of feature which was not only unlike Phemie, but
gratuitously unlike the rest of her family, and as hopelessly and
even wantonly inconsistent with her surroundings as was the
elaborately ornamented accordion on the centre-table.  She was one
of those occasional creatures, episodical in the South and West,
who might have been stamped with some vague ante-natal impression
of a mother given to over-sentimental contemplation of books of
beauty and albums rather than the family features; offspring of
typical men and women, and yet themselves incongruous to any known
local or even general type.  The long swan-like neck, tendriled
hair, swimming eyes, and small patrician head, had never lived or
moved before in Tasajara or the West, nor perhaps even existed
except as a personified "Constancy," "Meditation," or the "Baron's
Bride," in mezzotint or copperplate.  Even the girl's common pink
print dress with its high sleeves and shoulders could not
conventionalize these original outlines; and the hand that rested
stiffly on the back of her chair, albeit neither over-white nor
well kept, looked as if it had never held anything but a lyre, a
rose, or a good book.  Even the few sprays of wild jessamine which
she had placed in the coils of her waving hair, although a local
fashion, became her as a special ornament.

The two girls kept their constrained and artificially elaborated
attitude for a few moments, accompanied by the murmur of voices in
the kitchen, the monotonous drip of the eaves before the window,
and the far-off sough of the wind.  Then Phemie suddenly broke into
a constrained giggle, which she however quickly smothered as she
had the accordion, and with the same look of mischievous distress.

"I'm astonished at you, Phemie," said Clementina in a deep contralto
voice, which seemed even deeper from its restraint.  "You don't seem
to have any sense.  Anybody'd think you never had seen a stranger
before."

"Saw him before you did," retorted Phemie pertly.  But here a
pushing of chairs and shuffling of feet in the kitchen checked her.
Clementina fixed an abstracted gaze on the ceiling; Phemie regarded
a leaf on the window sill with photographic rigidity as the door
opened to the strangers and her father.

The look of undisguised satisfaction which lit the young men's
faces relieved Mr. Harkutt's awkward introduction of any
embarrassment, and almost before Phemie was fully aware of it, she
found herself talking rapidly and in a high key with Mr. Lawrence
Grant, the surveyor, while her sister was equally, although more
sedately, occupied with Mr. Stephen Rice, his assistant.  But the
enthusiasm of the strangers, and the desire to please and be
pleased was so genuine and contagious that presently the accordion
was brought into requisition, and Mr. Grant exhibited a surprising
faculty of accompaniment to Mr. Rice's tenor, in which both the
girls joined.

Then a game of cards with partners followed, into which the rival
parties introduced such delightful and shameless obviousness of
cheating, and displayed such fascinating and exaggerated
partisanship that the game resolved itself into a hilarious melee,
to which peace was restored only by an exhibition of tricks of
legerdemain with the cards by the young surveyor.  All of which
Mr. Harkutt supervised patronizingly, with occasional fits of
abstraction, from his rocking-chair; and later Mrs. Harkutt from her
kitchen threshold, wiping her arms on her apron and commiseratingly
observing that she "declared, the young folks looked better
already."

But it was here a more dangerous element of mystery and suggestion
was added by Mr. Lawrence Grant in the telling of Miss Euphemia's
fortune from the cards before him, and that young lady, pink with
excitement, fluttered her little hands not unlike timid birds over
the cards to be drawn, taking them from him with an audible twitter
of anxiety and great doubts whether a certain "fair-haired
gentleman" was in hearts or diamonds.

"Here are two strangers," said Mr. Grant, with extraordinary
gravity laying down the cards, "and here is a 'journey;' this is
'unexpected news,' and this ten of diamonds means 'great wealth' to
you, which you see follows the advent of the two strangers and is
some way connected with them."

"Oh, indeed," said the young lady with great pertness and a toss of
her head.  "I suppose they've got the money with them."

"No, though it reaches you through them," he answered with
unflinching solemnity.  "Wait a bit, I have it!  I see, I've made a
mistake with this card.  It signifies a journey or a road.  Queer!
isn't it, Steve?  It's THE ROAD."

"It is queer," said Rice with equal gravity; "but it's so.  The
road, sure!"  Nevertheless he looked up into the large eyes of
Clementina with a certain confidential air of truthfulness.

"You see, ladies," continued the surveyor, appealing to them with
unabashed rigidity of feature, "the cards don't lie!  Luckily we
are in a position to corroborate them.  The road in question is a
secret known only to us and some capitalists in San Francisco.  In
fact even THEY don't know that it is feasible until WE report to
them.  But I don't mind telling you now, as a slight return for
your charming hospitality, that the road is a RAILROAD from Oakland
to Tasajara Creek of which we've just made the preliminary survey.
So you see what the cards mean is this: You're not far from
Tasajara Creek; in fact with a very little expense your father
could connect this stream with the creek, and have a WATERWAY
STRAIGHT TO THE RAILROAD TERMINUS.  That's the wealth the cards
promise; and if your father knows how to take a hint he can make
his fortune!"

It was impossible to say which was the most dominant in the face of
the speaker, the expression of assumed gravity or the twinkling of
humor in his eyes.  The two girls with superior feminine perception
divined that there was much truth in what he said, albeit they
didn't entirely understand it, and what they did understand--except
the man's good-humored motive--was not particularly interesting.
In fact they were slightly disappointed.  What had promised to be
an audaciously flirtatious declaration, and even a mischievous
suggestion of marriage, had resolved itself into something absurdly
practical and business-like.

Not so Mr. Harkutt.  He quickly rose from his chair, and, leaning
over the table, with his eyes fixed on the card as if it really
signified the railroad, repeated quickly: "Railroad, eh!  What's
that?  A railroad to Tasajara Creek?  Ye don't mean it!--That is--
it ain't a SURE thing?"

"Perfectly sure.  The money is ready in San Francisco now, and by
this time next year--"

"A railroad to Tasajara Creek!" continued Harkutt hurriedly.  "What
part of it?  Where?"

"At the embarcadero naturally," responded Grant.  "There isn't but
the one place for the terminus.  There's an old shanty there now
belongs to somebody."

"Why, pop!" said Phemie with sudden recollection, "ain't it 'Lige
Curtis's house?  The land he offered"--

"Hush!" said her father.

"You know, the one written in that bit of paper," continued the
innocent Phemie.

"Hush! will you?  God A'mighty! are you goin' to mind me?  Are you
goin' to keep up your jabber when I'm speakin' to the gentlemen?
Is that your manners?  What next, I wonder!"

The sudden and unexpected passion of the speaker, the incomprehensible
change in his voice, and the utterly disproportionate exaggeration
of his attitude towards his daughters, enforced an instantaneous
silence.  The rain began to drip audibly at the window, the rush of
the river sounded distinctly from without, even the shaking of the
front part of the dwelling by the distant gale became perceptible.
An angry flash sprang for an instant to the young assistant's eye,
but it met the cautious glance of his friend, and together both
discreetly sought the table.  The two girls alone remained white and
collected. "Will you go on with my fortune, Mr. Grant?" said Phemie
quietly.

A certain respect, perhaps not before observable, was suggested in
the surveyor's tone as he smilingly replied, "Certainly, I was only
waiting for you to show your confidence in me," and took up the
cards.

Mr. Harkutt coughed.  "It looks as if that blamed wind had blown
suthin' loose in the store," he said affectedly.  "I reckon I'll go
and see."  He hesitated a moment and then disappeared in the
passage.  Yet even here he stood irresolute, looking at the closed
door behind him, and passing his hand over his still flushed face.
Presently he slowly and abstractedly ascended the flight of steps,
entered the smaller passage that led to the back door of the shop
and opened it.

He was at first a little startled at the halo of light from the
still glowing stove, which the greater obscurity of the long room
had heightened rather than diminished.  Then he passed behind the
counter, but here the box of biscuits which occupied the centre and
cast a shadow over it compelled him to grope vaguely for what he
sought.  Then he stopped suddenly, the paper he had just found
dropping from his fingers, and said sharply,--

"Who's there?"

"Me, pop."

"John Milton?"

"Yes, sir."

"What the devil are you doin' there, sir?"

"Readin'."

It was true.  The boy was half reclining in a most distorted
posture on two chairs, his figure in deep shadow, but his book was
raised above his head so as to catch the red glow of the stove on
the printed page.  Even then his father's angry interruption
scarcely diverted his preoccupation; he raised himself in his chair
mechanically, with his eyes still fixed on his book.  Seeing which
his father quickly regained the paper, but continued his objurgation.

"How dare you?  Clear off to bed, will you!  Do you hear me?
Pretty goin's on," he added as if to justify his indignation.
"Sneakin' in here and--and lyin' 'round at this time o' night!
Why, if I hadn't come in here to"--

"What?" asked the boy mechanically, catching vaguely at the
unfinished sentence and staring automatically at the paper in his
father's hand.

"Nothin', sir!  Go to bed, I tell you!  Will you?  What are you
standin' gawpin' at?" continued Harkutt furiously.

The boy regained his feet slowly and passed his father, but not
without noticing with the same listless yet ineffaceable perception
of childhood that he was hurriedly concealing the paper in his
pocket.  With the same youthful inconsequence, wondering at this
more than at the interruption, which was no novel event, he went
slowly out of the room.

Harkutt listened to the retreating tread of his bare feet in the
passage and then carefully locked the door.  Taking the paper from
his pocket, and borrowing the idea he had just objurgated in his
son, he turned it towards the dull glow of the stove and attempted
to read it.  But perhaps lacking the patience as well as the keener
sight of youth, he was forced to relight the candle which he had
left on the counter, and reperused the paper.  Yes! there was
certainly no mistake!  Here was the actual description of the
property which the surveyor had just indicated as the future
terminus of the new railroad, and here it was conveyed to him--
Daniel Harkutt!  What was that?  Somebody knocking?  What did this
continual interruption mean?  An odd superstitious fear now mingled
with his irritation.

The sound appeared to come from the front shutters.  It suddenly
occurred to him that the light might be visible through the
crevices.  He hurriedly extinguished it, and went to the door.

"Who's there?"

"Me,--Peters.  Want to speak to you."

Mr. Harkutt with evident reluctance drew the bolts.  The wind,
still boisterous and besieging, did the rest, and precipitately
propelled Peters through the carefully guarded opening.  But his
surprise at finding himself in the darkness seemed to forestall any
explanation of his visit.

"Well," he said with an odd mingling of reproach and suspicion.  "I
declare I saw a light here just this minit!  That's queer."

"Yes, I put it out just now.  I was goin' away," replied Harkutt,
with ill-disguised impatience.

"What! been here ever since?"

"No," said Harkutt curtly.

"Well, I want to speak to ye about 'Lige.  Seein' the candle
shinin' through the chinks I thought he might be still with ye.  If
he ain't, it looks bad.  Light up, can't ye!  I want to show you
something."

There was a peremptoriness in his tone that struck Harkutt
disagreeably, but observing that he was carrying something in his
hand, he somewhat nervously re-lit the candle and faced him.
Peters had a hat in his hand.  It was 'Lige's!

"'Bout an hour after we fellers left here," said Peters, "I heard
the rattlin' of hoofs on the road, and then it seemed to stop just
by my house.  I went out with a lantern, and, darn my skin! if
there warn't 'Lige's hoss, the saddle empty, and 'Lige nowhere!  I
looked round and called him--but nothing were to be seen.  Thinkin'
he might have slipped off--tho' ez a general rule drunken men
don't, and he is a good rider--I followed down the road, lookin'
for him.  I kept on follerin' it down to your run, half a mile
below."

"But," began Harkutt, with a quick nervous laugh, "you don't reckon
that because of that he"--

"Hold on!" said Peters, grimly producing a revolver from his side-
pocket with the stock and barrel clogged and streaked with mud.  "I
found THAT too,--and look! one barrel discharged!  And," he added
hurriedly, as approaching a climax, "look ye,--what I nat'rally
took for wet from the rain--inside that hat--was--blood!"

"Nonsense!" said Harkutt, putting the hat aside with a new
fastidiousness.  "You don't think"--

"I think," said Peters, lowering his voice, "I think, by God! HE'S
BIN AND DONE IT!"

"No!"

"Sure!  Oh, it's all very well for Billings and the rest of that
conceited crowd to sneer and sling their ideas of 'Lige gen'rally
as they did jess now here,--but I'd like 'em to see THAT."  It was
difficult to tell if Mr. Peters' triumphant delight in confuting
his late companions' theories had not even usurped in his mind the
importance of the news he brought, as it had of any human sympathy
with it.

"Look here," returned Harkutt earnestly, yet with a singularly
cleared brow and a more natural manner.  "You ought to take them
things over to Squire Kerby's, right off, and show 'em to him.  You
kin tell him how you left 'Lige here, and say that I can prove by
my daughter that he went away about ten minutes after,--at least,
not more than fifteen."  Like all unprofessional humanity, Mr.
Harkutt had an exaggerated conception of the majesty of unimportant
detail in the eye of the law.  "I'd go with you myself," he added
quickly, "but I've got company--strangers--here."

"How did he look when he left,--kinder wild?" suggested Peters.

Harkutt had begun to feel the prudence of present reticence.
"Well," he said, cautiously, "YOU saw how he looked."

"You wasn't rough with him?--that might have sent him off, you
know," said Peters.

"No," said Harkutt, forgetting himself in a quick indignation, "no,
I not only treated him to another drink, but gave him"--he stopped
suddenly and awkwardly.

"Eh?" said Peters.

"Some good advice,--you know," said Harkutt, hastily.  "But come,
you'd better hurry over to the squire's.  You know YOU'VE made the
discovery; YOUR evidence is important, and there's a law that
obliges you to give information at once."

The excitement of discovery and the triumph over his disputants
being spent, Peters, after the Sidon fashion, evidently did not
relish activity as a duty.  "You know," he said dubiously, "he
mightn't be dead, after all."

Harkutt became a trifle distant.  "You know your own opinion of the
thing," he replied after a pause.  "You've circumstantial evidence
enough to see the squire, and set others to work on it; and," he
added significantly, "you've done your share then, and can wipe
your hands of it, eh?"

"That's so," said Peters, eagerly.  "I'll just run over to the
squire."

"And on account of the women folks, you know, and the strangers
here, I'll say nothin' about it to-night," added Harkutt.

Peters nodded his head, and taking up the hat of the unfortunate
Elijah with a certain hesitation, as if he feared it had already
lost its dramatic intensity as a witness, disappeared into the
storm and darkness again.  A lurking gust of wind lying in ambush
somewhere seemed to swoop down on him as if to prevent further
indecision and whirl him away in the direction of the justice's
house; and Mr. Harkutt shut the door, bolted it, and walked
aimlessly back to the counter.

From a slow, deliberate and cautious man, he seemed to have changed
within an hour to an irresolute and capricious one.  He took the
paper from his pocket, and, unlocking the money drawer of his
counter, folded into a small compass that which now seemed to be
the last testament of Elijah Curtis, and placed it in a recess.
Then he went to the back door and paused, then returned, reopened
the money drawer, took out the paper and again buttoned it in his
hip pocket, standing by the stove and staring abstractedly at the
dull glow of the fire.  He even went through the mechanical process
of raking down the ashes,--solely to gain time and as an excuse for
delaying some other necessary action.

He was thinking what he should do.  Had the question of his right
to retain and make use of that paper been squarely offered to him
an hour ago, he would without doubt have decided that he ought not
to keep it.  Even now, looking at it as an abstract principle, he
did not deceive himself in the least.  But Nature has the
reprehensible habit of not presenting these questions to us
squarely and fairly, and it is remarkable that in most of our
offending the abstract principle is never the direct issue.  Mr.
Harkutt was conscious of having been unwillingly led step by step
into a difficult, not to say dishonest, situation, and against his
own seeking.  He had never asked Elijah to sell him the property;
he had distinctly declined it; it had even been forced upon him as
security for the pittance he so freely gave him.  This proved (to
himself) that he himself was honest; it was only the circumstances
that were queer.  Of course if Elijah had lived, he, Harkutt, might
have tried to drive some bargain with him before the news of the
railroad survey came out--for THAT was only business.  But now that
Elijah was dead, who would be a penny the worse or better but
himself if he chose to consider the whole thing as a lucky
speculation, and his gift of five dollars as the price he paid for
it?  Nobody could think that he had calculated upon 'Lige's
suicide, any more than that the property would become valuable.  In
fact if it came to that, if 'Lige had really contemplated killing
himself as a hopeless bankrupt after taking Harkutt's money as a
loan, it was a swindle on his--Harkutt's--good-nature.  He worked
himself into a rage, which he felt was innately virtuous, at this
tyranny of cold principle over his own warm-hearted instincts, but
if it came to the LAW, he'd stand by law and not sentiment.  He'd
just let them--by which he vaguely meant the world, Tasajara, and
possibly his own conscience--see that he wasn't a sentimental fool,
and he'd freeze on to that paper and that property!

Only he ought to have spoken out before.  He ought to have told the
surveyor at once that he owned the land.  He ought to have said:
"Why, that's my land.  I bought it of that drunken 'Lige Curtis for
a song and out of charity."  Yes, that was the only real trouble,
and that came from his own goodness, his own extravagant sense of
justice and right,--his own cursed good-nature.  Yet, on second
thoughts, he didn't know why he was obliged to tell the surveyor.
Time enough when the company wanted to buy the land.  As soon as it
was settled that 'Lige was dead he'd openly claim the property.
But what if he wasn't dead? or they couldn't find his body? or he
had only disappeared?  His plain, matter-of-fact face contracted
and darkened.  Of course he couldn't ask the company to wait for
him to settle that point.  He had the power to dispose of the
property under that paper, and--he should do it.  If 'Lige turned
up, that was another matter, and he and 'Lige could arrange it
between them.  He was quite firm here, and oddly enough quite
relieved in getting rid of what appeared only a simple question of
detail.  He never suspected that he was contemplating the one
irretrievable step, and summarily dismissing the whole ethical
question.

He turned away from the stove, opened the back door, and walked
with a more determined step through the passage to the sitting-
room.  But here he halted again on the threshold with a quick
return of his old habits of caution.  The door was slightly open;
apparently his angry outbreak of an hour ago had not affected the
spirits of his daughters, for he could hear their hilarious voices
mingling with those of the strangers.  They were evidently still
fortune-telling, but this time it was the prophetic and divining
accents of Mr. Rice addressed to Clementina which were now plainly
audible.

"I see heaps of money and a great many friends in the change that
is coming to you.  Dear me! how many suitors!  But I cannot promise
you any marriage as brilliant as my friend has just offered your
sister.  You may be certain, however, that you'll have your own
choice in this, as you have in all things."

"Thank you for nothing," said Clementina's voice.  "But what are
those horrid black cards beside them?--that's trouble, I'm sure."

"Not for you, though near you.  Perhaps some one you don't care
much for and don't understand will have a heap of trouble on your
account,--yes, on account of these very riches; see, he follows the
ten of diamonds.  It may be a suitor; it may be some one now in the
house, perhaps."

"He means himself, Miss Clementina," struck in Grant's voice
laughingly.

"You're not listening, Miss Harkutt," said Rice with half-serious
reproach.  "Perhaps you know who it is?"

But Miss Clementina's reply was simply a hurried recognition of her
father's pale face that here suddenly confronted her with the
opening door.

"Why, it's father!"


CHAPTER III.


In his strange mental condition even the change from Harkutt's
feeble candle to the outer darkness for a moment blinded Elijah
Curtis, yet it was part of that mental condition that he kept
moving steadily forward as in a trance or dream, though at first
purposelessly.  Then it occurred to him that he was really looking
for his horse, and that the animal was not there.  This for a
moment confused and frightened him, first with the supposition that
he had not brought him at all, but that it was part of his
delusion; secondly, with the conviction that without his horse he
could neither proceed on the course suggested by Harkutt, nor take
another more vague one that was dimly in his mind.  Yet in his
hopeless vacillation it seemed a relief that now neither was
practicable, and that he need do nothing.  Perhaps it was a
mysterious providence!

The explanation, however, was much simpler.  The horse had been
taken by the luxurious and indolent Billings unknown to his
companions.  Overcome at the dreadful prospect of walking home in
that weather, this perfect product of lethargic Sidon had artfully
allowed Peters and Wingate to precede him, and, cautiously
unloosing the tethered animal, had safely passed them in the
darkness.  When he gained his own inclosure he had lazily
dismounted, and, with a sharp cut on the mustang's haunches, sent
him galloping back to rejoin his master, with what result has been
already told by the unsuspecting Peters in the preceding chapter.

Yet no conception of this possibility entered 'Lige Curtis's
alcoholized consciousness, part of whose morbid phantasy it was to
distort or exaggerate all natural phenomena.  He had a vague idea
that he could not go back to Harkutt's; already his visit seemed to
have happened long, long ago, and could not be repeated.  He would
walk on, enwrapped in this uncompromising darkness which concealed
everything, suggested everything, and was responsible for
everything.

It was very dark, for the wind, having lulled, no longer thinned
the veil of clouds above, nor dissipated a steaming mist that
appeared to rise from the sodden plain.  Yet he moved easily
through the darkness, seeming to be upheld by it as something
tangible, upon which he might lean.  At times he thought he heard
voices,--not a particular voice he was thinking of, but strange
voices--of course unreal to his present fancy.  And then he heard
one of these voices, unlike any voice in Sidon, and very faint and
far off, asking if it "was anywhere near Sidon?"--evidently some
one lost like himself.  He answered in a voice that seemed quite as
unreal and as faint, and turned in the direction from which it
came.  There was a light moving like a will-o'-the-wisp far before
him, yet below him as if coming out of the depths of the earth.  It
must be fancy, but he would see--ah!

He had fallen violently forward, and at the same moment felt his
revolver leap from his breast pocket like a living thing, and an
instant after explode upon the rock where it struck, blindingly
illuminating the declivity down which he was plunging.  The
sulphurous sting of burning powder was in his eyes and nose, yet in
that swift revealing flash he had time to clutch the stems of a
trailing vine beside him, but not to save his head from sharp
contact with the same rocky ledge that had caught his pistol.  The
pain and shock gave way to a sickening sense of warmth at the roots
of his hair.  Giddy and faint, his fingers relaxed, he felt himself
sinking, with a languor that was half acquiescence, down, down,--
until, with another shock, a wild gasping for air, and a swift
reaction, he awoke in the cold, rushing water!

Clear and perfectly conscious now, though frantically fighting for
existence with the current, he could dimly see a floating black
object shooting by the shore, at times striking the projections of
the bank, until in its recoil it swung half round and drifted
broadside on towards him.  He was near enough to catch the frayed
ends of a trailing rope that fastened the structure, which seemed
to be a few logs, together.  With a convulsive effort he at last
gained a footing upon it, and then fell fainting along its length.
It was the raft which the surveyors from the embarcadero had just
abandoned.

He did not know this, nor would he have thought it otherwise
strange that a raft might be a part of the drift of the overflow,
even had he been entirely conscious; but his senses were failing,
though he was still able to keep a secure position on the raft, and
to vaguely believe that it would carry him to some relief and
succor.  How long he lay unconscious he never knew; in his after-
recollections of that night, it seemed to have been haunted by
dreams of passing dim banks and strange places; of a face and voice
that had been pleasant to him; of a terror coming upon him as he
appeared to be nearing a place like that home that he had abandoned
in the lonely tules.  He was roused at last by a violent headache,
as if his soft felt hat had been changed into a tightening crown of
iron.  Lifting his hand to his head to tear off its covering, he
was surprised to find that he was wearing no hat, but that his
matted hair, stiffened and dried with blood and ooze, was clinging
like a cap to his skull in the hot morning sunlight.  His eyelids
and lashes were glued together and weighted down by the same
sanguinary plaster.  He crawled to the edge of his frail raft, not
without difficulty, for it oscillated and rocked strangely, and
dipped his hand in the current.  When he had cleared his eyes he
lifted them with a shock of amazement.  Creeks, banks, and plain
had disappeared; he was alone on a bend of the tossing bay of San
Francisco!

His first and only sense--cleared by fasting and quickened by
reaction--was one of infinite relief.  He was not only free from
the vague terrors of the preceding days and nights, but his whole
past seemed to be lost and sunk forever in this illimitable
expanse.  The low plain of Tasajara, with its steadfast monotony of
light and shadow, had sunk beneath another level, but one that
glistened, sparkled, was instinct with varying life, and moved and
even danced below him.  The low palisades of regularly recurring
tules that had fenced in, impeded, but never relieved the blankness
of his horizon, were forever swallowed up behind him.  All trail of
past degradation, all record of pain and suffering, all footprints
of his wandering and misguided feet were smoothly wiped out in that
obliterating sea.  He was physically helpless, and he felt it; he
was in danger, and he knew it,--but he was free!

Happily there was but little wind and the sea was slight.  The raft
was still intact so far as he could judge, but even in his
ignorance he knew it would scarcely stand the surges of the lower
bay.  Like most Californians who had passed the straits of
Carquinez at night in a steamer, he did not recognize the locality,
nor even the distant peak of Tamalpais.  There were a few dotting
sails that seemed as remote, as uncertain, and as unfriendly as sea
birds.  The raft was motionless, almost as motionless as he was in
his cramped limbs and sun-dried, stiffened clothes.  Too weak to
keep an upright position, without mast, stick, or oar to lift a
signal above that vast expanse, it seemed impossible for him to
attract attention.  Even his pistol was gone.

Suddenly, in an attempt to raise himself, he was struck by a flash
so blinding that it seemed to pierce his aching eyes and brain and
turned him sick.  It appeared to come from a crevice between the
logs at the further end of the raft.  Creeping painfully towards it
he saw that it was a triangular slip of highly polished metal that
he had hitherto overlooked.  He did not know that it was a
"flashing" mirror used in topographical observation, which had
slipped from the surveyors' instruments when they abandoned the
raft, but his excited faculties instinctively detected its value to
him.  He lifted it, and, facing the sun, raised it at different
angles with his feeble arms.  But the effort was too much for him;
the raft presently seemed to be whirling with his movement, and he
again fell.

        .        .        .        .        .        .

"Ahoy there!"

The voice was close upon--in his very ears.  He opened his eyes.
The sea still stretched emptily before him; the dotting sails still
unchanged and distant.  Yet a strange shadow lay upon the raft.  He
turned his head with difficulty.  On the opposite side--so close
upon him as to be almost over his head--the great white sails of a
schooner hovered above him like the wings of some enormous sea
bird.  Then a heavy boom swung across the raft, so low that it
would have swept him away had he been in an upright position; the
sides of the vessel grazed the raft and she fell slowly off.  A
terrible fear of abandonment took possession of him; he tried to
speak, but could not.  The vessel moved further away, but the raft
followed!  He could see now it was being held by a boat-hook,--
could see the odd, eager curiosity on two faces that were raised
above the taffrail, and with that sense of relief his eyes again
closed in unconsciousness.

A feeling of chilliness, followed by a grateful sensation of
drawing closer under some warm covering, a stinging taste in his
mouth of fiery liquor and the aromatic steam of hot coffee, were
his first returning sensations.  His head and neck were swathed in
coarse bandages, and his skin stiffened and smarting with soap.  He
was lying in a rude berth under a half-deck from which he could see
the sky and the bellying sail, and presently a bearded face filled
with rough and practical concern that peered down upon him.

"Hulloo! comin' round, eh?  Hold on!"  The next moment the stranger
had leaped down beside Elijah.  He seemed to be an odd mingling of
the sailor and ranchero with the shrewdness of a seaport trader.

"Hulloo, boss!  What was it?  A free fight, or a wash-out?"

"A wash-out!"*  Elijah grasped the idea as an inspiration.  Yes,
his cabin had been inundated, he had taken to a raft, had been
knocked off twice or thrice, and had lost everything--even his
revolver!


* A mining term for the temporary inundation of a claim by flood;
also used for the sterilizing effect of flood on fertile soil.


The man looked relieved.  "Then it ain't a free fight, nor havin'
your crust busted and bein' robbed by beach combers, eh?"

"No," said Elijah, with his first faint smile.

"Glad o' that," said the man bluntly.  "Then thar ain't no police
business to tie up to in 'Frisco?  We were stuck thar a week once,
just because we chanced to pick up a feller who'd been found gagged
and then thrown overboard by wharf thieves.  Had to dance
attendance at court thar and lost our trip."  He stopped and looked
half-pathetically at the prostrate Elijah.  "Look yer! ye ain't
just dyin' to go ashore NOW and see yer friends and send messages,
are ye?"

Elijah shuddered inwardly, but outwardly smiled faintly as he
replied, "No!"

"And the tide and wind jest servin' us now, ye wouldn't mind
keepin' straight on with us this trip?"

"Where to?" asked Elijah.

"Santy Barbara."

"No," said Elijah, after a moment's pause.  "I'll go with you."

The man leaped to his feet, lifted his head above the upper deck,
shouted "Let her go free, Jerry!" and then turned gratefully to his
passenger.  "Look yer!  A wash-out is a wash-out, I reckon, put it
any way you like; it don't put anything back into the land, or
anything back into your pocket afterwards, eh?  No!  And yer well
out of it, pardner!  Now there's a right smart chance for locatin'
jest back of Santy Barbara, where thar ain't no God-forsaken tules
to overflow; and ez far ez the land and licker lies ye 'needn't
take any water in yours' ef ye don't want it.  You kin start fresh
thar, pardner, and brail up.  What's the matter with you, old man,
is only fever 'n' agur ketched in them tules!  I kin see it in your
eyes.  Now you hold on whar you be till I go forrard and see
everything taut, and then I'll come back and we'll have a talk."

And they did.  The result of which was that at the end of a week's
tossing and seasickness, Elijah Curtis was landed at Santa Barbara,
pale, thin, but self-contained and resolute.  And having found
favor in the eyes of the skipper of the Kitty Hawk, general trader,
lumber-dealer, and ranch-man, a week later he was located on the
skipper's land and installed in the skipper's service.  And from
that day, for five years Sidon and Tasajara knew him no more.


CHAPTER IV.


It was part of the functions of John Milton Harkutt to take down
the early morning shutters and sweep out the store for his father
each day before going to school.  It was a peculiarity of this
performance that he was apt to linger over it, partly from the fact
that it put off the evil hour of lessons, partly that he imparted
into the process a purely imaginative and romantic element gathered
from his latest novel-reading.  In this he was usually assisted by
one or two school-fellows on their way to school, who always envied
him his superior menial occupation.  To go to school, it was felt,
was a common calamity of boyhood that called into play only the
simplest forms of evasion, whereas to take down actual shutters in
a bona fide store, and wield a real broom that raised a palpable
cloud of dust, was something that really taxed the noblest
exertions.  And it was the morning after the arrival of the
strangers that Johh Milton stood on the veranda of the store
ostentatiously examining the horizon, with his hand shading his
eyes, as one of his companions appeared.

"Hollo, Milt! wot yer doin'?"

John Milton started dramatically, and then violently dashed at one
of the shutters and began to detach it.  "Ha!" he said hoarsely.
"Clear the ship for action!  Open the ports!  On deck there!
Steady, you lubbers!"  In an instant his enthusiastic school-fellow
was at his side attacking another shutter.  "A long, low schooner
bearing down upon us!  Lively, lads, lively!" continued John
Milton, desisting a moment to take another dramatic look at the
distant plain.  "How does she head now?" he demanded fiercely.

"Sou' by sou'east, sir," responded the other boy, frantically
dancing before the window.  "But she'll weather it."

They each then wrested another shutter away, violently depositing
them, as they ran to and fro, in a rack at the corner of the
veranda.  Added to an extraordinary and unnecessary clattering with
their feet, they accompanied their movements with a singular
hissing sound, supposed to indicate in one breath the fury of the
elements, the bustle of the eager crew, and the wild excitement of
the coming conflict.  When the last shutter was cleared away, John
Milton, with the cry "Man the starboard guns!" dashed into the
store, whose floor was marked by the muddy footprints of yesterday's
buyers, seized a broom and began to sweep violently.  A cloud of
dust arose, into which his companion at once precipitated himself
with another broom and a loud BANG! to indicate the somewhat belated
sound of cannon.  For a few seconds the two boys plied their brooms
desperately in that stifling atmosphere, accompanying each long
sweep and puff of dust out of the open door with the report of
explosions and loud HA'S! of defiance, until not only the store,
but the veranda was obscured with a cloud which the morning sun
struggled vainly to pierce.  In the midst of this tumult and dusty
confusion--happily unheard and unsuspected in the secluded domestic
interior of the building--a shrill little voice arose from the road.

"Think you're mighty smart, don't ye?"

The two naval heroes stopped in their imaginary fury.  and, as the
dust of conflict cleared away, recognized little Johnny Peters
gazing at them with mingled inquisitiveness and envy.

"Guess ye don't know what happened down the run last night," he
continued impatiently.  "'Lige Curtis got killed, or killed
hisself!  Blood all over the rock down thar.  Seed it, myseff.  Dad
picked up his six-shooter,--one barrel gone off.  My dad was the
first to find it out, and he's bin to Squire Kerby tellin' him."

The two companions, albeit burning with curiosity, affected
indifference and pre-knowledge.

"Dad sez your father druv 'Lige outer the store lass night!  Dad
sez your father's 'sponsible.  Dad sez your father ez good ez
killed him.  Dad sez the squire'll set the constable on your
father.  Yah!"  But here the small insulter incontinently fled,
pursued by both the boys.  Nevertheless, when he had made good his
escape, John Milton showed neither a disposition to take up his
former nautical role, nor to follow his companion to visit the
sanguinary scene of Elijah's disappearance.  He walked slowly back
to the store and continued his work of sweeping and putting in
order with an abstracted regularity, and no trace of his former
exuberant spirits.

The first one of those instinctive fears which are common to
imaginative children, and often assume the functions of premonition,
had taken possession of him.  The oddity of his father's manner the
evening before, which had only half consciously made its indelible
impression on his sensitive fancy, had recurred to him with Johnny
Peters's speech.  He had no idea of literally accepting the boy's
charges; he scarcely understood their gravity; but he had a
miserable feeling that his father's anger and excitement last night
was because he had been discovered hunting in the dark for that
paper of 'Lige Curtis's.  It WAS 'Lige Curtis's paper, for he had
seen it lying there.  A sudden dreadful conviction came over him
that he must never, never let any one know that he had seen his
father take up that paper; that he must never admit it, even to HIM.
It was not the boy's first knowledge of that attitude of hypocrisy
which the grownup world assumes towards childhood, and in which the
innocent victims eventually acquiesce with a Machiavellian subtlety
that at last avenges them,--but it was his first knowledge that that
hypocrisy might not be so innocent.  His father had concealed
something from him, because it was not right.

But if childhood does not forget, it seldom broods and is not above
being diverted.  And the two surveyors--of whose heroic advent in a
raft John Milton had only heard that morning with their traveled
ways, their strange instruments and stranger talk, captured his
fancy.  Kept in the background by his sisters when visitors came,
as an unpresentable feature in the household, he however managed to
linger near the strangers when, in company with Euphemia and
Clementina, after breakfast they strolled beneath the sparkling
sunlight in the rude garden inclosure along the sloping banks of
the creek.  It was with the average brother's supreme contempt that
he listened to his sisters' "practicin'" upon the goodness of these
superior beings; it was with an exceptional pity that he regarded
the evident admiration of the strangers in return.  He felt that in
the case of Euphemia, who sometimes evinced a laudable curiosity in
his pleasures, and a flattering ignorance of his reading, this
might be pardonable; but what any one could find in the useless
statuesque Clementina passed his comprehension.  Could they not see
at once that she was "just that kind of person" who would lie abed
in the morning, pretending she was sick, in order to make Phemie do
the housework, and make him, John Milton, clean her boots and fetch
things for her?  Was it not perfectly plain to them that her
present sickening politeness was solely with a view to extract from
them caramels, rock-candy, and gum drops, which she would meanly
keep herself, and perhaps some "buggy-riding" later?  Alas, John
Milton, it was not!  For standing there with her tall, perfectly-
proportioned figure outlined against a willow, an elastic branch of
which she had drawn down by one curved arm above her head, and on
which she leaned--as everybody leaned against something in Sidon--
the two young men saw only a straying goddess in a glorified
rosebud print.  Whether the clearly-cut profile presented to Rice,
or the full face that captivated Grant, each suggested possibilities
of position, pride, poetry, and passion that astonished while it
fascinated them.  By one of those instincts known only to the
freemasonry of the sex, Euphemia lent herself to this advertisement
of her sister's charms by subtle comparison with her own
prettinesses, and thus combined against their common enemy, man.

"Clementina certainly is perfect, to keep her supremacy over that
pretty little sister," thought Rice.

"What a fascinating little creature to hold her own against that
tall, handsome girl," thought Grant.

"They're takin' stock o' them two fellers so as to gabble about 'em
when their backs is turned," said John Milton gloomily to himself,
with a dismal premonition of the prolonged tea-table gossip he
would be obliged to listen to later.

"We were very fortunate to make a landing at all last night," said
Rice, looking down upon the still swollen current, and then raising
his eyes to Clementina.  "Still more fortunate to make it where we
did.  I suppose it must have been the singing that lured us on to
the bank,--as, you know, the sirens used to lure people,--only with
less disastrous consequences."

John Milton here detected three glaring errors; first, it was NOT
Clementina who had sung; secondly, he knew that neither of his
sisters had ever read anything about sirens, but he had; thirdly,
that the young surveyor was glaringly ignorant of local phenomena
and should be corrected.

"It's nothin' but the current," he said, with that feverish youthful
haste that betrays a fatal experience of impending interruption.
"It's always leavin' drift and rubbish from everywhere here.  There
ain't anythin' that's chucked into the creek above that ain't bound
to fetch up on this bank.  Why, there was two sheep and a dead hoss
here long afore YOU thought of coming!"  He did not understand why
this should provoke the laughter that it did, and to prove that he
had no ulterior meaning, added with pointed politeness, "So IT ISN'T
YOUR FAULT, you know--YOU couldn't help it;" supplementing this
with the distinct courtesy, "otherwise you wouldn't have come."

"But it would seem that your visitors are not all as accidental as
your brother would imply, and one, at least, seems to have been
expected last evening.  You remember you thought we were a Mr.
Parmlee," said Mr. Rice looking at Clementina.

It would be strange indeed, he thought, if the beautiful girl were
not surrounded by admirers.  But without a trace of self-
consciousness, or any change in her reposeful face, she indicated
her sister with a slight gesture, and said: "One of Phemie's
friends.  He gave her the accordion.  She's very popular."

"And I suppose YOU are very hard to please?" he said with a
tentative smile.

She looked at him with her large, clear eyes, and that absence of
coquetry or changed expression in her beautiful face which might
have stood for indifference or dignity as she said: "I don't know.
I am waiting to see."

But here Miss Phemie broke in saucily with the assertion that Mr.
Parmlee might not have a railroad in his pocket, but that at least
he didn't have to wait for the Flood to call on young ladies, nor
did he usually come in pairs, for all the world as if he had been
let out of Noah's Ark, but on horseback and like a Christian by the
front door.  All this provokingly and bewitchingly delivered,
however, and with a simulated exaggeration that was incited
apparently more by Mr. Lawrence Grant's evident enjoyment of it,
than by any desire to defend the absent Parmlee.

"But where is the front door?" asked Grant laughingly.

The young girl pointed to a narrow zigzag path that ran up the bank
beside the house until it stopped at a small picketed gate on the
level of the road and store.

"But I should think it would be easier to have a door and private
passage through the store," said Grant.

"WE don't," said the young lady pertly, "we have nothing to do with
the store.  I go in to see paw sometimes when he's shutting up and
there's nobody there, but Clem has never set foot in it since we
came.  It's bad enough to have it and the lazy loafers that hang
around it as near to us as they are; but paw built the house in
such a fashion that we ain't troubled by their noise, and we might
be t'other side of the creek as far as our having to come across
them.  And because paw has to sell pork and flour, we haven't any
call to go there and watch him do it."

The two men glanced at each other.  This reserve and fastidiousness
were something rare in a pioneer community.  Harkutt's manners
certainly did not indicate that he was troubled by this
sensitiveness; it must have been some individual temperament of his
daughters.  Stephen felt his respect increase for the goddess-like
Clementina; Mr. Lawrence Grant looked at Miss Phemie with a
critical smile.

"But you must be very limited in your company," he said; "or is Mr.
Parmlee not a customer of your father's?"

"As Mr. Parmlee does not come to us through the store, and don't
talk trade to me, we don't know," responded Phemie saucily.

"But have you no lady acquaintances--neighbors--who also avoid the
store and enter only at the straight and narrow gate up there?"
continued Grant mischievously, regardless of the uneasy, half-
reproachful glances of Rice.

But Phemie, triumphantly oblivious of any satire, answered
promptly: "If you mean the Pike County Billingses who live on the
turnpike road as much as they do off it, or the six daughters of
that Georgia Cracker who wear men's boots and hats, we haven't."

"And Mr. Parmlee, your admirer?" suggested Rice.  "Hasn't he a
mother or sisters here?"

"Yes, but they don't want to know us, and have never called here."

The embarrassment of the questioner at this unexpected reply, which
came from the faultless lips of Clementina, was somewhat mitigated
by the fact that the young woman's voice and manner betrayed
neither annoyance nor anger.

Here, however, Harkutt appeared from the house with the information
that he had secured two horses for the surveyors and their
instruments, and that he would himself accompany them a part of the
way on their return to Tasajara Creek, to show them the road.  His
usual listless deliberation had given way to a certain nervous but
uneasy energy.  If they started at once it would be better, before
the loungers gathered at the store and confused them with lazy
counsel and languid curiosity.  He took it for granted that Mr.
Grant wished the railroad survey to be a secret, and he had said
nothing, as they would be pestered with questions.  "Sidon was
inquisitive--and old-fashioned."  The benefit its inhabitants would
get from the railroad would not prevent them from throwing
obstacles in its way at first; he remembered the way they had acted
with a proposed wagon road,--in fact, an idea of his own, something
like the railroad; he knew them thoroughly, and if he might advise
them, it would be to say nothing here until the thing was settled.

"He evidently does not intend to give us a chance," said Grant
good-humoredly to his companion, as they turned to prepare for
their journey; "we are to be conducted in silence to the outskirts
of the town like horse-thieves."

"But you gave him the tip for himself," said Rice reproachfully;
"you cannot blame him for wanting to keep it."

"I gave it to him in trust for his two incredible daughters," said
Grant with a grimace.  "But, hang it! if I don't believe the fellow
has more concern in it than I imagined."

"But isn't she perfect?" said Rice, with charming abstraction.

"Who?"

"Clementina, and so unlike her father."

"Discomposingly so," said Grant quietly.  "One feels in calling her
'Miss Harkutt' as if one were touching upon a manifest indiscretion.
But here comes John Milton.  Well, my lad, what can I do for you?"

The boy, who had been regarding them from a distance with wistful
and curious eyes as they replaced their instruments for the
journey, had gradually approached them.  After a moment's timid
hesitation he said, looking at Grant: "You don't know anybody in
this kind o' business," pointing to the instruments, "who'd like a
boy, about my size?"

"I'm afraid not, J. M.," said Grant, cheerfully, without suspending
his operation.  "The fact is, you see, it's not exactly the kind of
work for a boy of your size."

John Milton was silent for a moment, shifting himself slowly from
one leg to another as he watched the surveyor.  After a pause he
said, "There don't seem to be much show in this world for boys o'
my size.  There don't seem to be much use for 'em any way."  This
not bitterly, but philosophically, and even politely, as if to
relieve Grant's rejection of any incivility.

"Really you quite pain me, John Milton," said Grant, looking up as
he tightened a buckle.  "I never thought of it before, but you're
right."

"Now," continued the boy slowly, "with girls it's just different.
Girls of my size everybody does things for.  There's Clemmy,--she's
only two years older nor me, and don't know half that I do, and yet
she kin lie about all day, and hasn't to get up to breakfast.  And
Phemie,--who's jest the same age, size, and weight as me,--maw and
paw lets her do everything she wants to.  And so does everybody.
And so would you."

"But you surely don't want to be like a girl?" said Grant, smiling.

It here occurred to John Milton's youthful but not illogical mind
that this was not argument, and he turned disappointedly away.  As
his father was to accompany the strangers a short distance, he,
John Milton, was to-day left in charge of the store.  That duty,
however, did not involve any pecuniary transactions--the taking of
money or making of change but a simple record on a slate behind the
counter of articles selected by those customers whose urgent needs
could not wait Mr. Harkutt's return.  Perhaps on account of this
degrading limitation, perhaps for other reasons, the boy did not
fancy the task imposed upon him.  The presence of the idle loungers
who usually occupied the armchairs near the stove, and occasionally
the counter, dissipated any romance with which he might have
invested his charge; he wearied of the monotony of their dull
gossip, but mostly he loathed the attitude of hypercritical counsel
and instruction which they saw fit to assume towards him at such
moments.  "Instead o' lazin' thar behind the counter when your
father ain't here to see ye, John," remarked Billings from the
depths of his armchair a few moments after Harkutt had ridden away,
"ye orter be bustlin' round, dustin' the shelves.  Ye'll never come
to anythin' when you're a man ef you go on like that.  Ye never
heard o' Harry Clay--that was called 'the Mill-boy of the Slashes'--
sittin' down doin' nothin' when he was a boy."

"I never heard of him loafin' round in a grocery store when he was
growned up either," responded John Milton, darkly.

"P'r'aps you reckon he got to be a great man by standin' up sassin'
his father's customers," said Peters, angrily.  "I kin tell ye,
young man, if you was my boy"--

"If I was YOUR boy, I'd be playin' hookey instead of goin' to
school, jest as your boy is doin' now," interrupted John Milton,
with a literal recollection of his quarrel and pursuit of the youth
in question that morning.

An undignified silence on the part of the adults followed, the
usual sequel to those passages; Sidon generally declining to expose
itself to the youthful Harkutt's terrible accuracy of statement.

The men resumed their previous lazy gossip about Elijah Curtis's
disappearance, with occasional mysterious allusions in a lower
tone, which the boy instinctively knew referred to his father, but
which either from indolence or caution, the two great conservators
of Sidon, were never formulated distinctly enough for his
relentless interference.  The morning sunshine was slowly
thickening again in an indolent mist that seemed to rise from the
saturated plain.  A stray lounger shuffled over from the
blacksmith's shop to the store to take the place of another idler
who had joined an equally lethargic circle around the slumbering
forge.  A dull intermittent sound of hammering came occasionally
from the wheelwright's shed--at sufficiently protracted intervals
to indicate the enfeebled progress of Sidon's vehicular repair.  A
yellow dog left his patch of sunlight on the opposite side of the
way and walked deliberately over to what appeared to be more
luxurious quarters on the veranda; was manifestly disappointed but
not equal to the exertion of returning, and sank down with blinking
eyes and a regretful sigh without going further.  A procession of
six ducks got well into a line for a laborious "march past" the
store, but fell out at the first mud puddle and gave it up.  A
highly nervous but respectable hen, who had ventured upon the
veranda evidently against her better instincts, walked painfully on
tiptoe to the door, apparently was met by language which no mother
of a family could listen to, and retired in strong hysterics.  A
little later the sun became again obscured, the wind arose, rain
fell, and the opportunity for going indoors and doing nothing was
once more availed of by all Sidon.

It was afternoon when Mr. Harkutt returned.  He did not go into the
store, but entered the dwelling from the little picket-gate and
steep path.  There he called a family council in the sitting-room
as being the most reserved and secure.  Mrs. Harkutt, sympathizing
and cheerfully ready for any affliction, still holding a dust-cloth
in her hand, took her seat by the window, with Phemie breathless
and sparkling at one side of her, while Clementina, all faultless
profile and repose, sat on the other.  To Mrs. Harkutt's motherly
concern at John Milton's absence, it was pointed out that he was
wanted at the store,--was a mere boy anyhow, and could not be
trusted.  Mr. Harkutt, a little ruddier from weather, excitement,
and the unusual fortification of a glass of liquor, a little more
rugged in the lines of his face, and with an odd ring of defiant
self-assertion in his voice, stood before them in the centre of the
room.

He wanted them to listen to him carefully, to remember what he
said, for it was important; it might be a matter of "lawing"
hereafter,--and he couldn't be always repeating it to them,--he
would have enough to do.  There was a heap of it that, as women-
folks, they couldn't understand, and weren't expected to.  But he'd
got it all clear now, and what he was saying was gospel.  He'd
always known to himself that the only good that could ever come to
Sidon would come by railroad.  When those fools talked wagon road
he had said nothing, but he had his own ideas; he had worked for
that idea without saying anything to anybody; that idea was to get
possession of all the land along the embarcadero, which nobody
cared for, and 'Lige Curtis was ready to sell for a song.  Well,
now, considering what had happened, he didn't mind telling them
that he had been gradually getting possession of it, little by
little, paying 'Lige Curtis in advances and installments, until it
was his own!  They had heard what those surveyors said; how that it
was the only fit terminus for the railroad.  Well, that land, and
that water-front, and the terminus were HIS!  And all from his own
foresight and prudence.

It is needless to say that this was not the truth.  But it is
necessary to point out that this fabrication was the result of his
last night's cogitations and his morning's experience.  He had
resolved upon a bold course.  He had reflected that his neighbors
would be more ready to believe in and to respect a hard, mercenary,
and speculative foresight in his taking advantage of 'Lige's
necessities than if he had--as was the case--merely benefited by
them through an accident of circumstance and good humor.  In the
latter case he would be envied and hated; in the former he would be
envied and feared.  By logic of circumstance the greater wrong
seemed to be less obviously offensive than the minor fault.  It was
true that it involved the doing of something he had not contemplated,
and the certainty of exposure if 'Lige ever returned, but he was
nevertheless resolved.  The step from passive to active wrong-doing
is not only easy, it is often a relief; it is that return to
sincerity which we all require.  Howbeit, it gave that ring of
assertion to Daniel Harkutt's voice already noted, which most women
like, and only men are prone to suspect or challenge.  The
incompleteness of his statement was, for the same reason, overlooked
by his feminine auditors.

"And what is it worth, dad?" asked Phemie eagerly.

"Grant says I oughter get at least ten thousand dollars for the
site of the terminus from the company, but of course I shall hold
on to the rest of the land.  The moment they get the terminus
there, and the depot and wharf built, I can get my own price and
buyers for the rest.  Before the year is out Grant thinks it ought
to go up ten per cent on the value of the terminus, and that a
hundred thousand."

"Oh, dad!" gasped Phemie, frantically clasping her knees with both
hands as if to perfectly assure herself of this good fortune.

Mrs. Harkutt audibly murmured "Poor dear Dan'l," and stood, as it
were, sympathetically by, ready to commiserate the pains and
anxieties of wealth as she had those of poverty.  Clementina alone
remained silent, clear-eyed, and unchanged.

"And to think it all came through THEM!" continued Phemie.  "I
always had an idea that Mr. Grant was smart, dad.  And it was real
kind of him to tell you."

"I reckon father could have found it out without them.  I don't
know why we should be beholden to them particularly.  I hope he
isn't expected to let them think that he is bound to consider them
our intimate friends just because they happened to drop in here at
a time when his plans have succeeded."

The voice was Clementina's, unexpected but quiet, unemotional and
convincing.  "It seemed," as Mrs. Harkutt afterwards said, "as if
the child had already touched that hundred thousand."  Phemie
reddened with a sense of convicted youthful extravagance.

"You needn't fear for me," said Harkutt, responding to Clementina's
voice as if it were an echo of his own, and instinctively
recognizing an unexpected ally.  "I've got my own ideas of this
thing, and what's to come of it.  I've got my own ideas of openin'
up that property and showin' its resources.  I'm goin' to run it my
own way.  I'm goin' to have a town along the embarcadero that'll
lay over any town in Contra Costa.  I'm goin' to have the court-
house and county seat there, and a couple of hotels as good as any
in the Bay.  I'm goin' to build that wagon road through here that
those lazy louts slipped up on, and carry it clear over to Five
Mile Corner, and open up the whole Tasajara Plain!"

They had never seen him look so strong, so resolute, so intelligent
and handsome.  A dimly prophetic vision of him in a black
broadcloth suit and gold watch-chain addressing a vague multitude,
as she remembered to have seen the Hon. Stanley Riggs of Alasco at
the "Great Barbecue," rose before Phemie's blue enraptured eyes.
With the exception of Mrs. Harkutt,--equal to any possibilities on
the part of her husband,--they had honestly never expected it of
him.  They were pleased with their father's attitude in prosperity,
and felt that perhaps he was not unworthy of being proud of them
hereafter.

"But we're goin' to leave Sidon," said Phemie, "ain't we, paw?"

"As soon as I can run up a new house at the embarcadero," said
Harkutt peevishly, "and that's got to be done mighty quick if I
want to make a show to the company and be in possession."

"And that's easier for you to do, dear, now that 'Lige's
disappeared," said Mrs. Harkutt consolingly.

"What do ye mean by that?  What the devil are ye talkin' about?"
demanded Harkutt suddenly with unexpected exasperation.

"I mean that that drunken 'Lige would be mighty poor company for
the girls if he was our only neighbor," returned Mrs. Harkutt
submissively.

Harkutt, after a fixed survey of his wife, appeared mollified.  The
two girls, who were mindful of his previous outburst the evening
before, exchanged glances which implied that his manners needed
correction for prosperity.

"You'll want a heap o' money to build there, Dan'l," said Mrs.
Harkutt in plaintive diffidence.

"Yes!  Yes!" said Harkutt impatiently.  "I've kalkilated all that,
and I'm goin' to 'Frisco to-morrow to raise it and put this bill of
sale on record."  He half drew Elijah Curtis's paper from his
pocket, but paused and put it back again.

"Then THAT WAS the paper, dad," said Phemie triumphantly.

"Yes," said her father, regarding her fixedly, "and you know now
why I didn't want anything said about it last night--nor even now."

"And 'Lige had just given it to you!  Wasn't it lucky?"

"He HADN'T just given it to me!" said her father with another
unexpected outburst.  "God Amighty! ain't I tellin' you all the
time it was an old matter!  But you jabber, jabber all the time and
don't listen!  Where's John Milton?"  It had occurred to him that
the boy might have read the paper--as his sister had--while it lay
unheeded on the counter.

"In the store,--you know.  You said he wasn't to hear anything of
this, but I'll call him," said Mrs. Harkutt, rising eagerly.

"Never mind," returned her husband, stopping her reflectively,
"best leave it as it is; if it's necessary I'll tell him.  But
don't any of you say anything, do you hear?"

Nevertheless a few hours later, when the store was momentarily free
of loungers, and Harkutt had relieved his son of his monotonous
charge, he made a pretense, while abstractedly listening to an
account of the boy's stewardship, to look through a drawer as if in
search of some missing article.

"You didn't see anything of a paper I left somewhere about here
yesterday?" he asked carelessly.

"The one you picked up when you came in last night?" said the boy
with discomposing directness.

Harkutt flushed slightly and drew his breath between his set teeth.
Not only could he place no reliance upon ordinary youthful
inattention, but he must be on his guard against his own son as
from a spy!  But he restrained himself.

"I don't remember," he said with affected deliberation, "what it
was I picked up.  Do you?  Did you read it?"

The meaning of his father's attitude instinctively flashed upon the
boy.  He HAD read the paper, but he answered, as he had already
determined, "No."

An inspiration seized Mr. Harkutt.  He drew 'Lige Curtis's bill of
sale from his pocket, and opening it before John Milton said, "Was
it that?"

"I don't know," said the boy.  "I couldn't tell."  He walked away
with affected carelessness, already with a sense of playing some
part like his father, and pretended to whistle for the dog across
the street.  Harkutt coughed ostentatiously, put the paper back in
his pocket, set one or two boxes straight on the counter, locked
the drawer, and disappeared into the back passage.  John Milton
remained standing in the doorway looking vacantly out.  But he did
not see the dull familiar prospect beyond.  He only saw the paper
his father had opened and unfolded before him.  It was the same
paper he had read last night.  But there were three words written
there THAT WERE NOT THERE BEFORE!  After the words "Value received"
there had been a blank.  He remembered that distinctly.  This was
filled in by the words, "Five hundred dollars."  The handwriting
did not seem like his father's, nor yet entirely like 'Lige
Curtis's.  What it meant he did not know,--he would not try to
think.  He should forget it, as he had tried to forget what had
happened before, and he should never tell it to any one!

There was a feverish gayety in his sisters' manner that afternoon
that he did not understand; short colloquies that were suspended
with ill concealed impatience when he came near them, and resumed
when he was sent, on equally palpable excuses, out of the room.  He
had been accustomed to this exclusion when there were strangers
present, but it seemed odd to him now, when the conversation did
not even turn upon the two superior visitors who had been there,
and of whom he confidently expected they would talk.  Such
fragments as he overheard were always in the future tense, and
referred to what they intended to do.  His mother, whose affection
for him had always been shown in excessive and depressing
commiseration of him in even his lightest moments, that afternoon
seemed to add a prophetic and Cassandra-like sympathy for some
vague future of his that would require all her ministration.  "You
won't need them new boots, Milty dear, in the changes that may be
comin' to ye; so don't be bothering your poor father in his
worriments over his new plans."

"What new plans, mommer?" asked the boy abruptly.  "Are we goin'
away from here?"

"Hush, dear, and don't ask questions that's enough for grown folks
to worry over, let alone a boy like you.  Now be good,"--a quality
in Mrs. Harkutt's mind synonymous with ceasing from troubling,--
"and after supper, while I'm in the parlor with your father and
sisters, you kin sit up here by the fire with your book."

"But," persisted the boy in a flash of inspiration, "is popper
goin' to join in business with those surveyors,--a surveyin'?"

"No, child, what an idea!  Run away there,--and mind!--don't bother
your father."

Nevertheless John Milton's inspiration had taken a new and
characteristic shape.  All this, he reflected, had happened since
the surveyors came--since they had weakly displayed such a
shameless and unmanly interest in his sisters!  It could have but
one meaning.  He hung around the sitting-room and passages until he
eventually encountered Clementina, taller than ever, evidently
wearing a guilty satisfaction in her face, engrafted upon that
habitual bearing of hers which he had always recognized as
belonging to a vague but objectionable race whose members were
individually known to him as "a proudy."

"Which of those two surveyor fellows is it, Clemmy?" he said with
an engaging smile, yet halting at a strategic distance.

"Is what?"

"Wot you're goin' to marry."

"Idiot!"

"That ain't tellin' which," responded the boy darkly.

Clementina swept by him into the sitting-room, where he heard her
declare that "really that boy was getting too low and vulgar for
anything."  Yet it struck him, that being pressed for further
explanation, she did NOT specify why.  This was "girls' meanness!"

Howbeit he lingered late in the road that evening, hearing his
father discuss with the search-party that had followed the banks of
the creek, vainly looking for further traces of the missing 'Lige,
the possibility of his being living or dead, of the body having
been carried away by the current to the bay or turning up later in
some distant marsh when the spring came with low water.  One who
had been to his cabin beside the embarcadero reported that it was,
as had been long suspected, barely habitable, and contained neither
books, papers, nor records which would indicate his family or
friends.  It was a God-forsaken, dreary, worthless place; he
wondered how a white man could ever expect to make a living there.
If Elijah never turned up again it certainly would be a long time
before any squatter would think of taking possession of it.  John
Milton knew instinctively, without looking up, that his father's
eyes were fixed upon him, and he felt himself constrained to appear
to be abstracted in gazing down the darkening road.  Then he heard
his father say, with what he felt was an equal assumption of
carelessness: "Yes, I reckon I've got somewhere a bill of sale of
that land that I had to take from 'Lige for an old bill, but I
kalkilate that's all I'll ever see of it."

Rain fell again as the darkness gathered, but he still loitered on
the road and the sloping path of the garden, filled with a half
resentful sense of wrong, and hugging with gloomy pride an
increasing sense of loneliness and of getting dangerously wet.  The
swollen creek still whispered, murmured and swirled beside the
bank.  At another time he might have had wild ideas of emulating
the surveyors on some extempore raft and so escaping his present
dreary home existence; but since the disappearance of 'Lige, who
had always excited an odd boyish antipathy in his heart, although
he had never seen him, he shunned the stream contaminated with the
missing man's unheroic fate.  Presently the light from the open
window of the sitting-room glittered on the wet leaves and sprays
where he stood, and the voices of the family conclave came fitfully
to his ear.  They didn't want him there.  They had never thought of
asking him to come in.  Well!--who cared?  And he wasn't going to
be bought off with a candle and a seat by the kitchen fire.  No!

Nevertheless he was getting wet to no purpose.  There was the tool-
house and carpenter's shed near the bank; its floor was thickly
covered with sawdust and pine-wood shavings, and there was a mouldy
buffalo skin which he had once transported thither from the old
wagon-bed.  There, too, was his secret cache of a candle in a
bottle, buried with other piratical treasures in the presence of
the youthful Peters, who consented to be sacrificed on the spot in
buccaneering fashion to complete the unhallowed rites.  He
unearthed the candle, lit it, and clearing away a part of the
shavings stood it up on the floor.  He then brought a prized,
battered, and coverless volume from a hidden recess in the rafters,
and lying down with the buffalo robe over him, and his cap in his
hand ready to extinguish the light at the first footstep of a
trespasser, gave himself up--as he had given himself up, I fear,
many other times--to the enchantment of the page before him.

The current whispered, murmured, and sang, unheeded at his side.
The voices of his mother and sisters, raised at times in eagerness
or expectation of the future, fell upon his unlistening ears.  For
with the spell that had come upon him, the mean walls of his
hiding-place melted away; the vulgar stream beside him might have
been that dim, subterraneous river down which Sindbad and his bale
of riches were swept out of the Cave of Death to the sunlight of
life and fortune, so surely and so simply had it transported him
beyond the cramped and darkened limits of his present life.  He was
in the better world of boyish romance,--of gallant deeds and high
emprises; of miraculous atonement and devoted sacrifice; of brave
men, and those rarer, impossible women,--the immaculate conception
of a boy's virgin heart.  What mattered it that behind that
glittering window his mother and sisters grew feverish and excited
over the vulgar details of their real but baser fortune?  From the
dark tool-shed by the muddy current, John Milton, with a battered
dogs'-eared chronicle, soared on the wings of fancy far beyond
their wildest ken!


CHAPTER V.


Prosperity had settled upon the plains of Tasajara.  Not only had
the embarcadero emerged from the tules of Tasajara Creek as a
thriving town of steamboat wharves, warehouses, and outlying mills
and factories, but in five years the transforming railroad had
penetrated the great plain itself and revealed its undeveloped
fertility.  The low-lying lands that had been yearly overflowed by
the creek, now drained and cultivated, yielded treasures of wheat
and barley that were apparently inexhaustible.  Even the helpless
indolence of Sidon had been surprised into activity and change.
There was nothing left of the straggling settlement to recall its
former aspect.  The site of Harkutt's old store and dwelling was
lost and forgotten in the new mill and granary that rose along the
banks of the creek.  Decay leaves ruin and traces for the memory to
linger over; prosperity is unrelenting in its complete and smiling
obliteration of the past.

But Tasajara City, as the embarcadero was now called, had no
previous record, and even the former existence of an actual settler
like the forgotten Elijah Curtis was unknown to the present
inhabitants.  It was Daniel Harkutt's idea carried out in Daniel
Harkutt's land, with Daniel Harkutt's capital and energy.  But
Daniel Harkutt had become Daniel Harcourt, and Harcourt Avenue,
Harcourt Square, and Harcourt House, ostentatiously proclaimed the
new spelling of his patronymic.  When the change was made and for
what reason, who suggested it and under what authority, were not
easy to determine, as the sign on his former store had borne
nothing but the legend, Goods and Provisions, and his name did not
appear on written record until after the occupation of Tasajara;
but it is presumed that it was at the instigation of his daughters,
and there was no one to oppose it.  Harcourt was a pretty name for
a street, a square, or a hotel; even the few in Sidon who had
called it Harkutt admitted that it was an improvement quite
consistent with the change from the fever-haunted tules and sedges
of the creek to the broad, level, and handsome squares of Tasajara
City.

This might have been the opinion of a visitor at the Harcourt
House, who arrived one summer afternoon from the Stockton boat, but
whose shrewd, half-critical, half-professional eyes and quiet
questionings betrayed some previous knowledge of the locality.
Seated on the broad veranda of the Harcourt House, and gazing out
on the well-kept green and young eucalyptus trees of the Harcourt
Square or Plaza, he had elicited a counter question from a
prosperous-looking citizen who had been lounging at his side.

"I reckon you look ez if you might have been here before,
stranger."

"Yes," said the stranger quietly, "I have been.  But it was when
the tules grew in the square opposite, and the tide of the creek
washed them."

"Well," said the Tasajaran, looking curiously at the stranger, "I
call myself a pioneer of Tasajara.  My name's Peters,--of Peters
and Co.,--and those warehouses along the wharf, where you landed
just now, are mine; but I was the first settler on Harcourt's land,
and built the next cabin after him.  I helped to clear out them
tules and dredged the channels yonder.  I took the contract with
Harcourt to build the last fifteen miles o' railroad, and put up
that depot for the company.  Perhaps you were here before that?"

"I was," returned the stranger quietly.

"I say," said Peters, hitching his chair a little nearer to his
companion, "you never knew a kind of broken-down feller, called
Curtis--'Lige Curtis--who once squatted here and sold his right to
Harkutt?  He disappeared; it was allowed he killed hisself, but
they never found his body, and, between you and me, I never took
stock in that story.  You know Harcourt holds under him, and all
Tasajara rests on that title."

"I've heard so," assented the stranger carelessly, "but I never
knew the original settler.  Then Harcourt has been lucky?"

"You bet.  He's got three millions right about HERE, or within this
quarter section, to say nothing of his outside speculations."

"And lives here?"

"Not for two years.  That's his old house across the plaza, but his
women-folks live mostly in 'Frisco and New York, where he's got
houses too.  They say they sorter got sick of Tasajara after his
youngest daughter ran off with a feller."

"Hallo!" said the stranger with undisguised interest.  "I never
heard of that!  You don't mean that she eloped"--he hesitated.

"Oh, it was a square enough marriage.  I reckon too square to suit
some folks; but the fellow hadn't nothin', and wasn't worth
shucks,--a sort of land surveyor, doin' odd jobs, you know; and the
old man and old woman were agin it, and the tother daughter worse
of all.  It was allowed here--you know how women-folks talk!--that
the surveyor had been sweet on Clementina, but had got tired of
being played by her, and took up with Phemie out o' spite.  Anyhow
they got married, and Harcourt gave them to understand they
couldn't expect anything from him.  P'raps that's why it didn't
last long, for only about two months ago she got a divorce from
Rice and came back to her family again."

"Rice?" queried the stranger.  "Was that her husband's name,
Stephen Rice?"

"I reckon!  You knew him?"

"Yes,--when the tide came up to the tules, yonder," answered the
stranger musingly.  "And the other daughter,--I suppose she has
made a good match, being a beauty and the sole heiress?"

The Tasajaran made a grimace.  "Not much!  I reckon she's waitin'
for the Angel Gabriel,--there ain't another good enough to suit her
here.  They say she's had most of the big men in California waitin'
in a line with their offers, like that cue the fellows used to make
at the 'Frisco post-office steamer days--and she with nary a letter
or answer for any of them."

"Then Harcourt doesn't seem to have been as fortunate in his family
affairs as in his speculations?"

Peters uttered a grim laugh.  "Well, I reckon you know all about
his son's stampeding with that girl last spring?"

"His son?" interrupted the stranger.  "Do you mean the boy they
called John Milton?  Why, he was a mere child!"

"He was old enough to run away with a young woman that helped in
his mother's house, and marry her afore a justice of the peace.
The old man just snorted with rage, and swore he'd have the
marriage put aside, for the boy was under age.  He said it was a
put-up job of the girl's; that she was older by two years, and only
wanted to get what money might be comin' some day, but that they'd
never see a red cent of it.  Then, they say, John Milton up and
sassed the old man to his face, and allowed that he wouldn't take
his dirty money if he starved first, and that if the old man broke
the marriage he'd marry her again next year; that true love and
honorable poverty were better nor riches, and a lot more o' that
stuff he picked out o' them ten-cent novels he was allus reading.
My women-folks say that he actually liked the girl, because she was
the only one in the house that was ever kind to him; they say the
girls were just ragin' mad at the idea o' havin' a hired gal who
had waited on 'em as a sister-in-law, and they even got old Mammy
Harcourt's back up by sayin' that John's wife would want to rule
the house, and run her out of her own kitchen.  Some say he shook
THEM, talked back to 'em mighty sharp, and held his head a heap
higher nor them.  Anyhow, he's livin' with his wife somewhere in
'Frisco, in a shanty on a sand lot, and workin' odd jobs for the
newspapers.  No! takin' it by and large--it don't look as if
Harcourt had run his family to the same advantage that he has his
land."

"Perhaps he doesn't understand them as well," said the stranger
smiling.

"Mor'n likely the material ain't thar, or ain't as vallyble for a
new country," said Peters grimly.  "I reckon the trouble is that he
lets them two daughters run him, and the man who lets any woman or
women do that, lets himself in for all their meannesses, and all he
gets in return is a woman's result,--show!"

Here the stranger, who was slowly rising from his chair with the
polite suggestion of reluctantly tearing himself from the speaker's
spell, said: "And Harcourt spends most of his time in San
Francisco, I suppose?"

"Yes! but to-day he's here to attend a directors' meeting and the
opening of the Free Library and Tasajara Hall.  I saw the windows
open, and the blinds up in his house across the plaza as I passed
just now."

The stranger had by this time quite effected his courteous
withdrawal.  "Good-afternoon, Mr. Peters," he said, smilingly
lifting his hat, and turned away.

Peters, who was obliged to take his legs off the chair, and half
rise to the stranger's politeness, here reflected that he did not
know his interlocutor's name and business, and that he had really
got nothing in return for his information.  This must be remedied.
As the stranger passed through the hall into the street, followed
by the unwonted civilities of the spruce hotel clerk and the
obsequious attentions of the negro porter, Peters stepped to the
window of the office.  "Who was that man who just passed out?" he
asked.

The clerk stared in undisguised astonishment.  "You don't mean to
say you didn't know WHO he was--all the while you were talking to
him?"

"No," returned Peters, impatiently.

"Why, that was Professor Lawrence Grant!--THE Lawrence Grant--don't
you know?--the biggest scientific man and recognized expert on the
Pacific slope.  Why, that's the man whose single word is enough to
make or break the biggest mine or claim going!  That man!--why,
that's the man whose opinion's worth thousands, for it carries
millions with it--and can't be bought.  That's him who knocked the
bottom outer El Dorado last year, and next day sent Eureka up
booming!  Ye remember that, sure?"

"Of course--but"--stammered Peters.

"And to think you didn't know him!" repeated the hotel clerk
wonderingly.  "And here I was reckoning you were getting points
from him all the time!  Why, some men would have given a thousand
dollars for your chance of talking to him--yes!--of even being SEEN
talking to him.  Why, old Wingate once got a tip on his Prairie
Flower lead worth five thousand dollars while just changing seats
with him in the cars and passing the time of day, sociable like.
Why, what DID you talk about?"

Peters, with a miserable conviction that he had thrown away a
valuable opportunity in mere idle gossip, nevertheless endeavored
to look mysterious as he replied, "Oh, business gin'rally."  Then
in the faint hope of yet retrieving his blunder he inquired, "How
long will he be here?"

"Don't know.  I reckon he and Harcourt's got something on hand.  He
just asked if he was likely to be at home or at his office.  I told
him I reckoned at the house, for some of the family--I didn't get
to see who they were--drove up in a carriage from the 3.40 train
while you were sitting there."

Meanwhile the subject of this discussion, quite unconscious of the
sensation he had created, or perhaps like most heroes philosophically
careless of it, was sauntering indifferently towards Harcourt's
house.  But he had no business with his former host, his only object
was to pass an idle hour before his train left.  He was, of course,
not unaware that he himself was largely responsible for Harcourt's
success; that it was HIS hint which had induced the petty trader of
Sidon to venture his all in Tasajara; HIS knowledge of the
topography and geology of the plain that had stimulated Harcourt's
agricultural speculations; HIS hydrographic survey of the creek that
had made Harcourt's plan of widening the channel to commerce
practicable and profitable.  This he could not help but know.  But
that it was chiefly owing to his own clear, cool, far-seeing, but
never visionary, scientific observation,--his own accurate analysis,
unprejudiced by even a savant's enthusiasm, and uninfluenced by any
personal desire or greed of gain,--that Tasajara City had risen from
the stagnant tules, was a speculation that had never occurred to
him.  There was a much more uneasy consciousness of what he had done
in Mr. Harcourt's face a few moments later, when his visitor's name
was announced, and it is to be feared that if that name had been
less widely honored and respected than it was, no merely grateful
recollection of it would have procured Grant an audience.  As it
was, it was with a frown and a touch of his old impatient asperity
that he stepped to the threshold of an adjoining room and called,
"Clemmy!"

Clementina appeared at the door.

"There's that man Grant in the parlor.  What brings HIM here, I
wonder?  Who does he come to see?"

"Who did he ask for?"

"Me,--but that don't mean anything."

"Perhaps he wants to see you on some business."

"No.  That isn't his high-toned style.  He makes other people go to
him for that," he said bitterly.  "Anyhow--don't you think it's
mighty queer his coming here after his friend--for it was he who
introduced Rice to us--had behaved so to your sister, and caused
all this divorce and scandal?"

"Perhaps he may know nothing about it; he and Rice separated long
ago, even before Grant became so famous.  We never saw much of him,
you know, after we came here.  Suppose you leave him to ME.  I'll
see him."

Mr. Harcourt reflected.  "Didn't he used to be rather attentive to
Phemie?"

Clementina shrugged her shoulders carelessly.  "I dare say--but I
don't think that NOW"--

"Who said anything about NOW?" retorted her father, with a return
of his old abruptness.  After a pause he said: "I'll go down and
see him first, and then send for you.  You can keep him for the
opening and dinner, if you like."

Meantime Lawrence Grant, serenely unsuspicious of these domestic
confidences, had been shown into the parlor--a large room furnished
in the same style as the drawing-room of the hotel he had just
quitted.  He had ample time to note that it was that wonderful
Second Empire furniture which he remembered that the early San
Francisco pioneers in the first flush of their wealth had imported
directly from France, and which for years after gave an unexpected
foreign flavor to the western domesticity and a tawdry gilt
equality to saloons and drawing-rooms, public and private.  But he
was observant of a corresponding change in Harcourt, when a moment
later he entered the room.  That individuality which had kept the
former shopkeeper of Sidon distinct from, although perhaps not
superior to, his customers--was strongly marked.  He was perhaps
now more nervously alert than then; he was certainly more impatient
than before,--but that was pardonable in a man of large affairs and
action.  Grant could not deny that he seemed improved,--rather
perhaps that the setting of fine clothes, cleanliness, and the
absence of petty worries, made his characteristics respectable.
That which is ill breeding in homespun, is apt to become mere
eccentricity in purple and fine linen; Grant felt that Harcourt
jarred on him less than he did before, and was grateful without
superciliousness.  Harcourt, relieved to find that Grant was
neither critical nor aggressively reminiscent, and above all not
inclined to claim the credit of creating him and Tasajara, became
more confident, more at his ease, and, I fear, in proportion more
unpleasant.  It is the repose and not the struggle of the parvenu
that confounds us.

"And YOU, Grant,--you have made yourself famous, and, I hear, have
got pretty much your own prices for your opinions ever since it was
known that you--you--er--were connected with the growth of Tasajara."

Grant smiled; he was not quite prepared for this; but it was
amusing and would pass the time.  He murmured a sentence of half
ironical deprecation, and Mr. Harcourt continued:--

"I haven't got my San Francisco house here to receive you in, but I
hope some day, sir, to see you there.  We are only here for the day
and night, but if you care to attend the opening ceremonies at the
new hall, we can manage to give you dinner afterwards.  You can
escort my daughter Clementina,--she's here with me."

The smile of apologetic declination which had begun to form on
Grant's lips was suddenly arrested.  "Then your daughter is here?"
he asked, with unaffected interest.

"Yes,--she is in fact a patroness of the library and sewing-circle,
and takes the greatest interest in it.  The Reverend Doctor
Pilsbury relies upon her for everything.  She runs the society,
even to the training of the young ladies, sir.  You shall see their
exercises."

This was certainly a new phase of Clementina's character.  Yet why
should she not assume the role of Lady Bountiful with the other
functions of her new condition.  "I should have thought Miss
Harcourt would have found this rather difficult with her other
social duties," he said, "and would have left it to her married
sister."  He thought it better not to appear as if avoiding
reference to Euphemia, although quietly ignoring her late
experiences.  Mr. Harcourt was less easy in his response.

"Now that Euphemia is again with her own family," he said
ponderously, with an affectation of social discrimination that was
in weak contrast to his usual direct business astuteness, "I
suppose she may take her part in these things, but just now she
requires rest.  You may have heard some rumor that she is going
abroad for a time?  The fact is she hasn't the least intention of
doing so, nor do we consider there is the slightest reason for her
going."  He paused as if to give great emphasis to a statement that
seemed otherwise unimportant.  "But here's Clementina coming, and I
must get you to excuse ME.  I've to meet the trustees of the church
in ten minutes, but I hope she'll persuade you to stay, and I'll
see you later at the hall."

As Clementina entered the room her father vanished and, I fear, as
completely dropped out of Mr. Grant's mind.  For the daughter's
improvement was greater than her father's, yet so much more refined
as to be at first only delicately perceptible.  Grant had been
prepared for the vulgar enhancement of fine clothes and personal
adornment, for the specious setting of luxurious circumstances and
surroundings, for the aplomb that came from flattery and conscious
power.  But he found none of these; her calm individuality was
intensified rather than subdued; she was dressed simply, with an
economy of ornament, rich material, and jewelry, but an accuracy of
taste that was always dominant.  Her plain gray merino dress,
beautifully fitting her figure, suggested, with its pale blue
facings, some uniform, as of the charitable society she patronized.
She came towards him with a graceful movement of greeting, yet her
face showed no consciousness of the interval that had elapsed since
they met; he almost fancied himself transported back to the
sitting-room at Sidon with the monotonous patter of the leaves
outside, and the cool moist breath of the bay and alder coming in
at the window.

"Father says that you are only passing through Tasajara to-day, as
you did through Sidon five years ago," she said with a smiling
earnestness that he fancied however was the one new phase of her
character.  "But I won't believe it!  At least we will not accept
another visit quite as accidental as that, even though you brought
us twice the good fortune you did then.  You see, we have not
forgotten it if you have, Mr. Grant.  And unless you want us to
believe that your fairy gifts will turn some day to leaves and
ashes, you will promise to stay with us tonight, and let me show
you some of the good we have done with them.  Perhaps you don't
know, or don't want to know, that it was I who got up this 'Library
and Home Circle of the Sisters of Tasajara' which we are to open
to-day.  And can you imagine why?  You remember--or have you
forgotten--that you once affected to be concerned at the social
condition of the young ladies on the plains of Sidon?  Well, Mr.
Grant, this is gotten up in order that the future Mr. Grants who
wander may find future Miss Billingses who are worthy to converse
with them and entertain them, and who no longer wear men's hats and
live on the public road."

It was such a long speech for one so taciturn as he remembered
Clementina to have been; so unexpected in tone considering her
father's attitude towards him, and so unlooked for in its reference
to a slight incident of the past, that Grant's critical contemplation
of her gave way to a quiet and grateful glance of admiration.  How
could he have been so mistaken in her character?  He had always
preferred the outspoken Euphemia, and yet why should he not have
been equally mistaken in her?  Without having any personal knowledge
of Rice's matrimonial troubles--for their intimate companionship had
not continued after the survey--he had been inclined to blame him;
now he seemed to find excuses for him.  He wondered if she really had
liked him as Peters had hinted; he wondered if she knew that he,
Grant, was no longer intimate with him and knew nothing of her
affairs.  All this while he was accepting her proffered hospitality
and sending to the hotel for his luggage.  Then he drifted into a
conversation, which he had expected would be brief, pointless, and
confined to a stupid resume of their mutual and social progress
since they had left Sidon.  But here he was again mistaken; she was
talking familiarly of present social topics, of things that she knew
clearly and well, without effort or attitude.  She had been to New
York and Boston for two winters; she had spent the previous summer
at Newport; it might have been her whole youth for the fluency,
accuracy, and familiarity of her detail, and the absence of
provincial enthusiasm.  She was going abroad, probably in the
spring.  She had thought of going to winter in Italy, but she would
wait now until her sister was ready to go with her.  Mr. Grant of
course knew that Euphemia was separated from Mr. Rice--no--not until
her father told him?  Well--the marriage had been a wild and foolish
thing for both.  But Euphemia was back again with them in the San
Francisco house; she had talked of coming to Tasajara to-day,
perhaps she might be there tonight.  And, good heavens! it was
actually three o'clock already, and they must start at once for the
Hall.  She would go and get her hat and return instantly.

It was true; he had been talking with her an hour--pleasantly,
intelligently, and yet with a consciousness of an indefinite
satisfaction beyond all this.  It must have been surprise at her
transformation, or his previous misconception of her character.
He had been watching her features and wondering why he had ever
thought them expressionless.  There was also the pleasant
suggestion--common to humanity in such instances--that he himself
was in some way responsible for the change; that it was some
awakened sympathy to his own nature that had breathed into this
cold and faultless statue the warmth of life.  In an odd flash of
recollection he remembered how, five years ago, when Rice had
suggested to her that she was "hard to please," she had replied
that she "didn't know, but that she was waiting to see."  It did
not occur to him to wonder why she had not awakened then, or if
this awakening had anything to do with her own volition.  It was
not probable that they would meet again after to-day, or if they
did, that she would not relapse into her former self and fail to
impress him as she had now.  But--here she was--a paragon of
feminine promptitude--already standing in the doorway, accurately
gloved and booted, and wearing a demure gray hat that modestly
crowned her decorously elegant figure.

They crossed the plaza side by side, in the still garish sunlight
that seemed to mock the scant shade of the youthful eucalyptus
trees, and presently fell in with the stream of people going in
their direction.  The former daughters of Sidon, the Billingses,
the Peterses, and Wingates, were there bourgeoning and expanding in
the glare of their new prosperity, with silk and gold; there were
newer faces still, and pretty ones,--for Tasajara as a "Cow County"
had attracted settlers with large families,--and there were already
the contrasting types of East and West.  Many turned to look after
the tall figure of the daughter of the Founder of Tasajara,--a
spectacle lately rare to the town; a few glanced at her companion,
equally noticeable as a stranger.  Thanks, however, to some
judicious preliminary advertising from the hotel clerk, Peters, and
Daniel Harcourt himself, by the time Grant and Miss Harcourt had
reached the Hall his name and fame were already known, and
speculation had already begun whether this new stroke of Harcourt's
shrewdness might not unite Clementina to a renowned and profitable
partner.

The Hall was in one of the further and newly opened suburbs, and
its side and rear windows gave immediately upon the outlying and
illimitable plain of Tasajara.  It was a tasteful and fair-seeming
structure of wood, surprisingly and surpassingly new.  In fact that
was its one dominant feature; nowhere else had youth and freshness
ever shown itself as unconquerable and all-conquering.  The spice
of virgin woods and trackless forests still rose from its pine
floors, and breathed from its outer shell of cedar that still oozed
its sap, and redwood that still dropped its life-blood.  Nowhere
else were the plastered walls and ceilings as white and dazzling in
their unstained purity, or as redolent of the outlying quarry in
their clear cool breath of lime and stone.  Even the turpentine of
fresh and spotless paint added to this sense of wholesome
germination, and as the clear and brilliant Californian sunshine
swept through the open windows west and east, suffusing the whole
palpitating structure with its searching and resistless radiance,
the very air seemed filled with the aroma of creation.

The fresh colors of the young Republic, the bright blazonry of the
newest State, the coat-of-arms of the infant County of Tasajara--(a
vignette of sunset-tules cloven by the steam of an advancing
train)--hanging from the walls, were all a part of this invincible
juvenescence.  Even the newest silks, ribbons and prints of the
latest holiday fashions made their first virgin appearance in the
new building as if to consecrate it, until it was stirred by the
rustle of youth, as with the sound and movement of budding spring.

A strain from the new organ--whose heart, however, had prematurely
learned its own bitterness--and a thin, clear, but somewhat shrill
chanting from a choir of young ladies were followed by a prayer
from the Reverend Mr. Pilsbury.  Then there was a pause of
expectancy, and Grant's fair companion, who up to that moment had
been quietly acting as guide and cicerone to her father's guest,
excused herself with a little grimace of mock concern and was led
away by one of the committee.  Grant's usually keen eyes were
wandering somewhat abstractedly over the agitated and rustling
field of ribbons, flowers and feathers before him, past the
blazonry of banner on the walls, and through the open windows to
the long sunlit levels beyond, when he noticed a stir upon the
raised dais or platform at the end of the room, where the notables
of Tasajara were formally assembled.  The mass of black coats
suddenly parted and drew back against the wall to allow the coming
forward of a single graceful figure.  A thrill of nervousness as
unexpected as unaccountable passed over him as he recognized
Clementina.  In the midst of a sudden silence she read the report
of the committee from a paper in her hand, in a clear, untroubled
voice--the old voice of Sidon--and formally declared the building
opened.  The sunlight, nearly level, streamed through the western
window across the front of the platform where she stood and
transfigured her slight but noble figure.  The hush that had fallen
upon the Hall was as much the effect of that tranquil, ideal
presence as of the message with which it was charged.  And yet that
apparition was as inconsistent with the clear, searching light
which helped to set it off, as it was with the broad new blazonry
of decoration, the yet unsullied record of the white walls, or even
the frank, animated and pretty faces that looked upon it.  Perhaps
it was some such instinct that caused the applause which hesitatingly
and tardily followed her from the platform to appear polite and half
restrained rather than spontaneous.

Nevertheless Grant was honestly and sincerely profuse in his
congratulations.  "You were far cooler and far more self-contained
than I should have been in your place," he said, "than in fact I
actually WAS, only as your auditor.  But I suppose you have done it
before?"

She turned her beautiful eyes on his wonderingly.  "No,--this is
the first time I ever appeared in public,--not even at school, for
even there I was always a private pupil."

"You astonish me," said Grant; "you seemed like an old hand at it."

"Perhaps I did, or rather as if I didn't think anything of it
myself,--and that no doubt is why the audience didn't think
anything of it either."

So she HAD noticed her cold reception, and yet there was not the
slightest trace of disappointment, regret, or wounded vanity in her
tone or manner.  "You must take me to the refreshment room now,"
she said pleasantly, "and help me to look after the young ladies
who are my guests.  I'm afraid there are still more speeches to
come, and father and Mr. Pilsbury are looking as if they
confidently expected something more would be 'expected' of them."

Grant at once threw himself into the task assigned to him, with his
natural gallantry and a certain captivating playfulness which he
still retained.  Perhaps he was the more anxious to please in order
that his companion might share some of his popularity, for it was
undeniable that Miss Harcourt still seemed to excite only a
constrained politeness among those with whom she courteously
mingled.  And this was still more distinctly marked by the contrast
of a later incident.

For some moments the sound of laughter and greeting had risen near
the door of the refreshment room that opened upon the central hall,
and there was a perceptible movement of the crowd--particularly of
youthful male Tasajara--in that direction.  It was evident that it
announced the unexpected arrival of some popular resident.
Attracted like the others, Grant turned and saw the company making
way for the smiling, easy, half-saucy, half-complacent entry of a
handsomely dressed young girl.  As she turned from time to time to
recognize with rallying familiarity or charming impertinence some
of her admirers, there was that in her tone and gesture which
instantly recalled to him the past.  It was unmistakably Euphemia!
His eyes instinctively sought Clementina's.  She was gazing at him
with such a grave, penetrating look,--half doubting, half wistful,--
a look so unlike her usual unruffled calm that he felt strangely
stirred.  But the next moment, when she rejoined him, the look had
entirely gone.  "You have not seen my sister since you were at
Sidon, I believe?" she said quietly.  "She would be sorry to miss
you."  But Euphemia and her train were already passing them on the
opposite side of the long table.  She had evidently recognized
Grant, yet the two sisters were looking intently into each other's
eyes when he raised his own.  Then Euphemia met his bow with a
momentary accession of color, a coquettish wave of her hand across
the table, a slight exaggeration of her usual fascinating
recklessness, and smilingly moved away.  He turned to Clementina,
but here an ominous tapping at the farther end of the long table
revealed the fact that Mr. Harcourt was standing on a chair with
oratorical possibilities in his face and attitude.  There was
another forward movement in the crowd and--silence.  In that solid,
black-broadclothed, respectable figure, that massive watchchain,
that white waistcoat, that diamond pin glistening in the satin
cravat, Euphemia might have seen the realization of her prophetic
vision at Sidon five years before.

He spoke for ten minutes with a fluency and comprehensive business-
like directness that surprised Grant.  He was not there, he said,
to glorify what had been done by himself, his family, or his
friends in Tasajara.  Others who were to follow him might do that,
or at least might be better able to explain and expatiate upon the
advantages of the institution they had just opened, and its social,
moral, and religious effect upon the community.  He was there as a
business man to demonstrate to them--as he had always done and
always hoped to do--the money value of improvement; the profit--if
they might choose to call it--of well-regulated and properly
calculated speculation.  The plot of land upon which they stood, of
which the building occupied only one eighth, was bought two years
before for ten thousand dollars.  When the plans of the building
were completed a month afterwards, the value of the remaining seven
eighths had risen enough to defray the cost of the entire
construction.  He was in a position to tell them that only that
morning the adjacent property, subdivided and laid out in streets
and building-plots, had been admitted into the corporate limits of
the city; and that on the next anniversary of the building they
would approach it through an avenue of finished dwellings!  An
outburst of applause followed the speaker's practical climax; the
fresh young faces of his auditors glowed with invincible
enthusiasm; the afternoon trade-winds, freshening over the
limitless plain beyond, tossed the bright banners at the windows as
with sympathetic rejoicing, and a few odorous pine shavings,
overlooked in a corner in the hurry of preparation, touched by an
eddying zephyr, crept out and rolled in yellow ringlets across the
floor.

The Reverend Doctor Pilsbury arose in a more decorous silence.  He
had listened approvingly, admiringly, he might say even reverently,
to the preceding speaker.  But although his distinguished friend
had, with his usual modesty, made light of his own services and
those of his charming family, he, the speaker, had not risen to
sing his praises.  No; it was not in this Hall, projected by his
foresight and raised by his liberality; in this town, called into
existence by his energy and stamped by his attributes; in this
county, developed by his genius and sustained by his capital; ay,
in this very State whose grandeur was made possible by such giants
as he,--it was not in any of these places that it was necessary to
praise Daniel Harcourt, or that a panegyric of him would be more
than idle repetition.  Nor would he, as that distinguished man had
suggested, enlarge upon the social, moral, and religious benefits
of the improvement they were now celebrating.  It was written on
the happy, innocent faces, in the festive garb, in the decorous
demeanor, in the intelligent eyes that sparkled around him, in the
presence of those of his parishioners whom he could meet as freely
here to-day as in his own church on Sunday.  What then could he
say?  What then was there to say?  Perhaps he should say nothing if
it were not for the presence of the young before him.--He stopped
and fixed his eyes paternally on the youthful Johnny Billings, who
with a half dozen other Sunday-school scholars had been marshaled
before the reverend speaker.--And what was to be the lesson THEY
were to learn from it?  They had heard what had been achieved by
labor, enterprise, and diligence.  Perhaps they would believe, and
naturally too, that what labor, enterprise, and diligence had done
could be done again.  But was that all?  Was there nothing behind
these qualities--which, after all, were within the reach of every
one here?  Had they ever thought that back of every pioneer, every
explorer, every pathfinder, every founder and creator, there was
still another?  There was no terra incognita so rare as to be
unknown to one; no wilderness so remote as to be beyond a greater
ken than theirs; no waste so trackless but that one had already
passed that way!  Did they ever reflect that when the dull sea
ebbed and flowed in the tules over the very spot where they were
now standing, who it was that also foresaw, conceived, and ordained
the mighty change that would take place; who even guided and
directed the feeble means employed to work it; whose spirit moved,
as in still older days of which they had read, over the face of the
stagnant waters?  Perhaps they had.  Who then was the real pioneer
of Tasajara,--back of the Harcourts, the Peterses, the Billingses,
and Wingates?  The reverend gentleman gently paused for a reply.
It was given in the clear but startled accents of the half
frightened, half-fascinated Johnny Billings, in three words:--

"'Lige Curtis, sir!"


CHAPTER VI


The trade wind, that, blowing directly from the Golden Gate, seemed
to concentrate its full force upon the western slope of Russian
Hill, might have dismayed any climber less hopeful and sanguine
than that most imaginative of newspaper reporters and most youthful
of husbands, John Milton Harcourt.  But for all that it was an
honest wind, and its dry, practical energy and salt-pervading
breath only seemed to sting him to greater and more enthusiastic
exertions, until, quite at the summit of the hill and last of a
straggling line of little cottages half submerged in drifting sand,
he stood upon his own humble porch.

"I was thinking, coming up the hill, Loo," he said, bursting into
the sitting-room, pantingly, "of writing something about the future
of the hill!  How it will look fifty years from now, all terraced
with houses and gardens!--and right up here a kind of Acropolis,
don't you know.  I had quite a picture of it in my mind just now."

A plainly-dressed young woman with a pretty face, that, however,
looked as if it had been prematurely sapped of color and vitality,
here laid aside some white sewing she had in her lap, and said:--

"But you did that once before, Milty, and you know the "Herald"
wouldn't take it because they said it was a free notice of Mr.
Boorem's building lots, and he didn't advertise in the "Herald."  I
always told you that you ought to have seen Boorem first."

The young fellow blinked his eyes with a momentary arrest of that
buoyant hopefulness which was their peculiar characteristic, but
nevertheless replied with undaunted cheerfulness, "I forgot.
Anyhow, it's all the same, for I worked it into that 'Sunday Walk.'
And it's just as easy to write it the other way, you see,--looking
back, DOWN THE HILL, you know.  Something about the old Padres
toiling through the sand just before the Angelus; or as far back as
Sir Francis Drake's time, and have a runaway boat's crew, coming
ashore to look for gold that the Mexicans had talked of.  Lord!
that's easy enough!  I tell you what, Loo, it's worth living up
here just for the inspiration."  Even while boyishly exhaling this
enthusiasm he was also divesting himself of certain bundles whose
contents seemed to imply that he had brought his dinner with him,--
the youthful Mrs. Harcourt setting the table in a perfunctory,
listless way that contrasted oddly with her husband's cheerful
energy.

"You haven't heard of any regular situation yet?" she asked
abstractedly.

"No,--not exactly," he replied.  "But [buoyantly] it's a great deal
better for me not to take anything in a hurry and tie myself to any
particular line.  Now, I'm quite free."

"And I suppose you haven't seen that Mr. Fletcher again?" she
continued.

"No.  He only wanted to know something about me.  That's the way
with them all, Loo.  Whenever I apply for work anywhere it's
always: 'So you're Dan'l Harcourt's son, eh?  Quarreled with the
old man?  Bad job; better make it up!  You'll make more stickin' to
him.  He's worth millions!'  Everybody seems to think everything of
HIM, as if I had no individuality beyond that, I've a good mind to
change my name."

"And pray what would mine be then?"

There was so much irritation in her voice that he drew nearer her
and gently put his arm around her waist.  "Why, whatever mine was,
darling," he said with a tender smile.  "You didn't fall in love
with any particular name, did you, Loo?"

"No, but I married a particular one," she said quickly.

His eyelids quivered again, as if he was avoiding some unpleasantly
staring suggestion, and she stopped.

"You know what I mean, dear," she said, with a quick little laugh.
"Just because your father's an old crosspatch, YOU haven't lost
your rights to his name and property.  And those people who say you
ought to make it up perhaps know what's for the best."

"But you remember what he said of you, Loo?" said the young man
with a flashing eye.  "Do you think I can ever forget that?"

"But you DO forget it, dear; you forget it when you go in town
among fresh faces and people; when you are looking for work.  You
forget it when you're at work writing your copy,--for I've seen you
smile as you wrote.  You forget it climbing up the dreadful sand,
for you were thinking just now of what happened years ago, or is to
happen years to come.  And I want to forget it too, Milty.  I don't
want to sit here all day, thinking of it, with the wind driving the
sand against the window, and nothing to look at but those white
tombs in Lone Mountain Cemetery, and those white caps that might be
gravestones too, and not a soul to talk to or even see pass by
until I feel as if I were dead and buried also.  If you were me--
you--you--you--couldn't help crying too!"

Indeed he was very near it now.  For as he caught her in his arms,
suddenly seeing with a lover's sympathy and the poet's swifter
imagination all that she had seen and even more, he was aghast at
the vision conjured.  In her delicate health and loneliness how
dreadful must have been these monotonous days, and this glittering,
cruel sea!  What a selfish brute he was!  Yet as he stood there
holding her, silently and rhythmically marking his tenderness and
remorseful feelings by rocking her from side to side like a languid
metronome, she quietly disengaged her wet lashes from his shoulder
and said in quite another tone:--

"So they were all at Tasajara last week?"

"Who, dear?"

"Your father and sisters."

"Yes," said John Milton, hesitatingly.

"And they've taken back your sister after her divorce?"

The staring obtrusiveness of this fact apparently made her
husband's bright sympathetic eye blink as before.

"And if you were to divorce me, YOU would be taken back too," she
added quickly, suddenly withdrawing herself with a pettish movement
and walking to the window.

But he followed.  "Don't talk in that way, Loo!  Don't look in that
way, dear!" he said, taking her hand gently, yet not without a
sense of some inconsistency in her conduct that jarred upon his own
simple directness.  "You know that nothing can part us now.  I was
wrong to let my little girl worry herself all alone here, but I--I--
thought it was all so--so bright and free out on this hill,--
looking far away beyond the Golden Gate,--as far as Cathay, you
know, and such a change from those dismal flats of Tasajara and
that awful stretch of tules.  But it's all right now.  And now that
I know how you feel, we'll go elsewhere."

She did not reply.  Perhaps she found it difficult to keep up her
injured attitude in the face of her husband's gentleness.  Perhaps
her attention had been attracted by the unusual spectacle of a
stranger, who had just mounted the hill and was now slowly passing
along the line of cottages with a hesitating air of inquiry.  "He
may be looking for this house,--for you," she said in an entirely
new tone of interest.  "Run out and see.  It may be some one who
wants"--

"An article," said Milton cheerfully.  "By Jove! he IS coming
here."

The stranger was indeed approaching the little cottage, and with
apparently some confidence.  He was a well-dressed, well-made man,
whose age looked uncertain from the contrast between his heavy
brown moustache and his hair, that, curling under the brim of his
hat, was almost white in color.  The young man started, and said,
hurriedly: "I really believe it is Fletcher,--they say his hair
turned white from the Panama fever."

It was indeed Mr. Fletcher who entered and introduced himself,--
a gentle reserved man, with something of that colorlessness of
premature age in his speech which was observable in his hair.  He
had heard of Mr. Harcourt from a friend who had recommended him
highly.  As Mr. Harcourt had probably been told, he, the speaker,
was about to embark some capital in a first-class newspaper in San
Francisco, and should select the staff himself.  He wanted to
secure only first-rate talent,--but above all, youthfulness,
directness, and originality.  The "Clarion," for that was to be
its name, was to have nothing "old fogy" about it.  No.  It was
distinctly to be the organ of Young California!  This and much more
from the grave lips of the elderly young man, whose speech seemed
to be divided between the pretty, but equally faded, young wife,
and the one personification of invincible youth present,--her
husband.

"But I fear I have interrupted your household duties," he said
pleasantly.  "You were preparing dinner.  Pray go on.  And let me
help you,--I'm not a bad cook,--and you can give me my reward by
letting me share it with you, for the climb up here has sharpened
my appetite.  We can talk as we go on."

It was in vain to protest; there was something paternal as well as
practical in the camaraderie of this actual capitalist and possible
Maecenas and patron as he quietly hung up his hat and overcoat, and
helped to set the table with a practiced hand.  Nor, as he
suggested, did the conversation falter, and before they had taken
their seats at the frugal board he had already engaged John Milton
Harcourt as assistant editor of the "Clarion" at a salary that
seemed princely to this son of a millionaire!  The young wife
meantime had taken active part in the discussion; whether it was
vaguely understood that the possession of poetical and imaginative
faculties precluded any capacity for business, or whether it was
owing to the apparent superior maturity of Mrs. Harcourt and the
stranger, it was certain that THEY arranged the practical details
of the engagement, and that the youthful husband sat silent, merely
offering his always hopeful and sanguine consent.

"You'll take a house nearer to town, I suppose?" continued Mr.
Fletcher to the lady, "though you've a charming view here.  I
suppose it was quite a change from Tasajara and your father-in-
law's house?  I daresay he had as fine a place there--on his own
homestead--as he has here?"

Young Harcourt dropped his sensitive eyelids again.  It seemed hard
that he could never get away from these allusions to his father!
Perhaps it was only to that relationship that he was indebted for
his visitor's kindness.  In his simple honesty he could not bear
the thought of such a misapprehension.  "Perhaps, Mr. Fletcher, you
do not know," he said, "that my father is not on terms with me, and
that we neither expect anything nor could we ever take anything
from him.  Could we, Loo?"  He added the useless question partly
because he saw that his wife's face betrayed little sympathy with
him, and partly that Fletcher was looking at her curiously, as if
for confirmation.  But this was another of John Milton's trials as
an imaginative reporter; nobody ever seemed to care for his
practical opinions or facts!

"Mr. Fletcher is not interested in our little family differences,
Milty," she said, looking at Mr. Fletcher, however, instead of him.
"You're Daniel Harcourt's SON whatever happens."

The cloud that had passed over the young man's face and eyes did
not, however, escape Mr. Fletcher's attention, for he smiled, and
added gayly, "And I hope my valued lieutenant in any case."
Nevertheless John Milton was quite ready to avail himself of an
inspiration to fetch some cigars for his guest from the bar of the
Sea-View House on the slope of the hill beyond, and thereby avoid a
fateful subject.  Once in the fresh air again he promptly recovered
his boyish spirits.  The light flying scud had already effaced the
first rising stars; the lower creeping sea-fog had already blotted
out the western shore and sea; but below him to the east the
glittering lights of the city seemed to start up with a new,
mysterious, and dazzling brilliancy.  It was the valley of diamonds
that Sindbad saw lying almost at his feet!  Perhaps somewhere there
the light of his own fame and fortune was already beginning to
twinkle!

He returned to his humble roof joyous and inspired.  As he entered
the hall he heard his wife's voice and his own name mentioned,
followed by that awkward, meaningless silence on his entrance which
so plainly indicated either that he had been the subject of
conversation or that it was not for his ears.  It was a dismal
reminder of his boyhood at Sidon and Tasajara.  But he was too full
of hope and ambition to heed it to-night, and later, when Mr.
Fletcher had taken his departure, his pent-up enthusiasm burst out
before his youthful partner.  Had she realized that their struggles
were over now, that their future was secure?  They need no longer
fear ever being forced to take bounty from the family; they were
independent of them all!  He would make a name for himself that
should be distinct from his father's as he should make a fortune
that would be theirs alone.  The young wife smiled.  "But all that
need not prevent you, dear, from claiming your RIGHTS when the time
comes."

"But if I scorn to make the claim or take a penny of his, Loo?"

"You say you scorn to take the money you think your father got by a
mere trick,--at the best,--and didn't earn.  And now you will be
able to show you can live without it, and earn your own fortune.
Well, dear, for that very reason why should you let your father and
others enjoy and waste what is fairly your share?  For it is YOUR
share whether it came to your father fairly or not; and if not, it
is still your duty, believing as you do, to claim it from him, that
at least YOU may do with it what you choose.  You might want to
restore it--to--to--somebody."

The young man laughed.  "But, my dear Loo! suppose that I were weak
enough to claim it, do you think my father would give it up?  He
has the right, and no law could force him to yield to me more than
he chooses."

"Not the law, but YOU could."

"I don't understand you," he said quickly.

"You could force him by simply telling him what you once told me."

John Milton drew back, and his hand dropped loosely from his
wife's.  The color left his fresh young face; the light quivered
for a moment and then became fixed and set in his eyes.  For that
moment he looked ten years her senior.  "I was wrong ever to tell
even you that, Loo," he said in a low voice.  "You are wrong to
ever remind me of it.  Forget it from this moment, as you value our
love and want it to live and be remembered.  And forget, Loo, as I
do,--and ever shall,--that you ever suggested to me to use my
secret in the way you did just now."

But here Mrs. Harcourt burst into tears, more touched by the
alteration in her husband's manner, I fear, than by any contrition
for wrongdoing.  Of course if he wished to withdraw his confidences
from her, just as he had almost confessed he wished to withdraw his
NAME, she couldn't help it, but it was hard that when she sat there
all day long trying to think what was best for them, she should be
blamed!  At which the quiet and forgiving John Milton smiled
remorsefully and tried to comfort her.  Nevertheless an occasional
odd, indefinable chill seemed to creep across the feverish
enthusiasm with which he was celebrating this day of fortune.  And
yet he neither knew nor suspected until long after that his foolish
wife had that night half betrayed his secret to the stranger!

The next day he presented a note of introduction from Mr. Fletcher
to the business manager of the "Clarion," and the following morning
was duly installed in office.  He did not see his benefactor again;
that single visit was left in the mystery and isolation of an
angelic episode.  It later appeared that other and larger interests
in the San Jose valley claimed his patron's residence and attendance;
only the capital and general purpose of the paper--to develop into a
party organ in the interest of his possible senatorial aspirations
in due season--was furnished by him.  Grateful as John Milton felt
towards him, he was relieved; it seemed probable that Mr. Fletcher
HAD selected him on his individual merits, and not as the son of a
millionaire.

He threw himself into his work with his old hopeful enthusiasm, and
perhaps an originality of method that was part of his singular
independence.  Without the student's training or restraint,--for
his two years' schooling at Tasajara during his parents' prosperity
came too late to act as a discipline,--he was unfettered by any
rules, and guided only by an unerring instinctive taste that became
near being genius.  He was a brilliant and original, if not always
a profound and accurate, reporter.  By degrees he became an
accustomed interest to the readers of the "Clarion;" then an
influence.  Actors themselves in many a fierce drama, living lives
of devotion, emotion, and picturesque incident, they had satisfied
themselves with only the briefest and most practical daily record
of their adventure, and even at first were dazed and startled to
find that many of them had been heroes and some poets.  The
stealthy boyish reader of romantic chronicle at Sidon had learned
by heart the chivalrous story of the emigration.  The second column
of the "Clarion" became famous even while the figure of its
youthful writer, unknown and unrecognized, was still nightly
climbing the sands of Russian Hill, and even looking down as before
on the lights of the growing city, without a thought that he had
added to that glittering constellation.

Cheerful and contented with the exercise of work, he would have
been happy but for the gradual haunting of another dread which
presently began to drag him at earlier hours up the steep path to
his little home; to halt him before the door with the quickened
breath of an anxiety he would scarcely confess to himself, and
sometimes hold him aimlessly a whole day beneath his roof.  For the
pretty but delicate Mrs. Harcourt, like others of her class, had
added a weak and ineffective maternity to their other conjugal
trials, and one early dawn a baby was born that lingered with them
scarcely longer than the morning mist and exhaled with the rising
sun.  The young wife regained her strength slowly,--so slowly that
the youthful husband brought his work at times to the house to keep
her company.  And a singular change had come over her.  She no
longer talked of the past, nor of his family.  As if the little
life that had passed with that morning mist had represented some
ascending expiatory sacrifice, it seemed to have brought them into
closer communion.

Yet her weak condition made him conceal another trouble that had
come upon him.  It was in the third month of his employment on the
"Clarion" that one afternoon, while correcting some proofs on his
chief's desk, he came upon the following editorial paragraph:--

"The played-out cant of 'pioneer genius' and 'pioneer discovery'
appears to have reached its climax in the attempt of some of our
contemporaries to apply it to Dan Harcourt's new Tasajara Job
before the legislature.  It is perfectly well known in Harcourt's
own district that, far from being a pioneer and settler HIMSELF he
simply succeeded after a fashion to the genuine work of one Elijah
Curtis, an actual pioneer and discoverer, years before, while
Harcourt, we believe, was keeping a frontier doggery in Sidon, and
dispensing 'tanglefoot' and salt junk to the hayfooted Pike
Countians of his precinct.  This would make him as much of the
'pioneer discoverer' as the rattlesnake who first takes up board
and lodgings and then possession in a prairie dog's burrow.  And if
the traveler's tale is true that the rattlesnake sometimes makes a
meal of his landlord, the story told at Sidon may be equally
credible that the original pioneer mysteriously disappeared about
the time that Dan Harcourt came into the property.  From which it
would seem that Harcourt is not in a position for his friends to
invite very deep scrutiny into his 'pioneer' achievements."

Stupefaction, a vague terror, and rising anger, rapidly succeeded
each other in the young man's mind as he stood mechanically holding
the paper in his hand.  It was the writing of his chief editor,
whose easy brutality he had sometimes even boyishly admired.
Without stopping to consider their relative positions he sought him
indignantly and laid the proof before him.  The editor laughed.
"But what's that to YOU?  YOU'RE not on terms with the old man."

"But he is my father!" said John Milton hotly.

"Look here," said the editor good-naturedly, "I'd like to oblige
you, but it isn't BUSINESS, you know,--and this IS, you
understand,--PROPRIETOR'S BUSINESS too!  Of course I see it might
stand in the way of your making up to the old man afterwards and
coming in for a million.  Well! you can tell him it's ME.  Say I
WOULD put it in.  Say I'm nasty--and I AM!"

"Then it must go in?" said John Milton with a white face.

"You bet."

"Then I must go out!"  And writing out his resignation, he laid it
before his chief and left.

But he could not bear to tell this to his wife when he climbed the
hill that night, and he invented some excuse for bringing his work
home.  The invalid never noticed any change in his usual buoyancy,
and indeed I fear, when he was fairly installed with his writing
materials at the foot of her bed, he had quite forgotten the
episode.  He was recalled to it by a faint sigh.

"What is it, dear?" he said looking up.

"I like to see you writing, Milty.  You always look so happy."

"Always so happy, dear?"

"Yes.  You are happy, are you not?"

"Always."  He got up and kissed her.  Nevertheless, when he sat
down to his work again, his face was turned a little more to the
window.

Another serious incident--to be also kept from the invalid--shortly
followed.  The article in the "Clarion" had borne its fruit.  The
third day after his resignation a rival paper sharply retorted.
"The cowardly insinuations against the record of a justly honored
capitalist," said the "Pioneer," "although quite in keeping with
the brazen 'Clarion,' might attract the attentions of the slandered
party, if it were not known to his friends as well as himself that
it may be traced almost directly to a cast-off member of his own
family, who, it seems, is reduced to haunting the back doors of
certain blatant journals to dispose of his cheap wares.  The
slanderer is secure from public exposure in the superior decency of
his relations, who refrain from airing their family linen upon
editorial lines."

This was the journal to which John Milton had hopefully turned for
work.  When he read it there seemed but one thing for him to do--
and he did it.  Gentle and optimistic as was his nature, he had
been brought up in a community where sincere directness of personal
offense was followed by equally sincere directness of personal
redress, and--he challenged the editor.  The bearer of his cartel
was one Jack Hamlin, I grieve to say a gambler by profession, but
between whom and John Milton had sprung up an odd friendship of
which the best that can be said is that it was to each equally and
unselfishly unprofitable.  The challenge was accepted, the
preliminaries arranged.  "I suppose," said Jack carelessly, "as the
old man ought to do something for your wife in case of accident,
you've made some sort of a will?"

"I've thought of that," said John Milton, dubiously, "but I'm
afraid it's no use.  You see"--he hesitated--"I'm not of age."

"May I ask how old you are, sonny?" said Jack with great gravity.

"I'm almost twenty," said John Milton, coloring.

"It isn't exactly vingt-et-un, but I'd stand on it; if I were you I
wouldn't draw to such a hand," said Jack, coolly.

The young husband had arranged to be absent from his home that
night, and early morning found him, with Jack, grave, but
courageous, in a little hollow behind the Mission Hills.  To them
presently approached his antagonist, jauntily accompanied by
Colonel Starbottle, his second.  They halted, but after the formal
salutation were instantly joined by Jack Hamlin.  For a few moments
John Milton remained awkwardly alone--pending a conversation which
even at that supreme moment he felt as being like the general
attitude of his friends towards him, in its complete ignoring of
himself.  The next moment the three men stepped towards him.  "We
have come, sir," said Colonel Starbottle in his precisest speech
but his jauntiest manner, "to offer you a full and ample apology--a
personal apology--which only supplements that full public apology
that my principal, sir, this gentleman," indicating the editor of
the "Pioneer," "has this morning made in the columns of his paper,
as you will observe," producing a newspaper.  "We have, sir,"
continued the colonel loftily, "only within the last twelve hours
become aware of the--er--REAL circumstances of the case.  We would
regret that the affair had gone so far already, if it had not given
us, sir, the opportunity of testifying to your gallantry.  We do so
gladly; and if--er--er--a FEW YEARS LATER, Mr. Harcourt, you should
ever need--a friend in any matter of this kind, I am, sir, at your
service."  John Milton gazed half inquiringly, half uneasily at
Jack.

"It's all right, Milt," he said sotto voce.  "Shake hands all round
and let's go to breakfast.  And I rather think that editor wants to
employ you HIMSELF."

It was true, for when that night he climbed eagerly the steep
homeward hill he carried with him the written offer of an
engagement on the "Pioneer."  As he entered the door his wife's
nurse and companion met him with a serious face.  There had been a
strange and unexpected change in the patient's condition, and the
doctor had already been there twice.  As he put aside his coat and
hat and entered her room, it seemed to him that he had forever put
aside all else of essay and ambition beyond those four walls.  And
with the thought a great peace came upon him.  It seemed good to
him to live for her alone.

It was not for long.  As each monotonous day brought the morning
mist and evening fog regularly to the little hilltop where his
whole being was now centred, she seemed to grow daily weaker, and
the little circle of her life narrowed day by day.  One morning
when the usual mist appeared to have been withheld and the sun had
risen with a strange and cruel brightness; when the waves danced
and sparkled on the bay below and light glanced from dazzling
sails, and even the white tombs on Lone Mountain glittered keenly;
when cheery voices hailing each other on the hillside came to him
clearly but without sense or meaning; when earth, sky, and sea
seemed quivering with life and motion,--he opened the door of that
one little house on which the only shadow seemed to have fallen,
and went forth again into the world alone.


CHAPTER VII.


Mr. Daniel Harcourt's town mansion was also on an eminence, but it
was that gentler acclivity of fashion known as Rincon Hill, and
sunned itself on a southern slope of luxury.  It had been described
as "princely" and "fairy-like," by a grateful reporter; tourists
and travelers had sung its praises in letters to their friends and
in private reminiscences, for it had dispensed hospitality to most
of the celebrities who had visited the coast.  Nevertheless its
charm was mainly due to the ruling taste of Miss Clementina
Harcourt, who had astonished her father by her marvelous intuition
of the nice requirements and elegant responsibilities of their
position; and had thrown her mother into the pained perplexity of a
matronly hen, who, among the ducks' eggs intrusted to her fostering
care, had unwittingly hatched a graceful but discomposing cygnet.

Indeed, after holding out feebly against the siege of wealth at
Tasajara and San Francisco, Mrs. Harcourt had abandoned herself
hopelessly to the horrors of its invasion; had allowed herself to
be dragged from her kitchen by her exultant daughters and set up in
black silk in a certain conventional respectability in the drawing-
room.  Strange to say, her commiserating hospitality, or hospital-
like ministration, not only gave her popularity, but a certain kind
of distinction.  An exaltation so sorrowfully deprecated by its
possessor was felt to be a sign of superiority.  She was spoken of
as "motherly," even by those who vaguely knew that there was
somewhere a discarded son struggling in poverty with a helpless
wife, and that she had sided with her husband in disinheriting a
daughter who had married unwisely.  She was sentimentally spoken of
as a "true wife," while never opposing a single meanness of her
husband, suggesting a single active virtue, nor questioning her
right to sacrifice herself and her family for his sake.  With
nothing she cared to affect, she was quite free from affectation,
and even the critical Lawrence Grant was struck with the dignity
which her narrow simplicity, that had seemed small even in Sidon,
attained in her palatial hall in San Francisco.  It appeared to be
a perfectly logical conclusion that when such unaffectedness and
simplicity were forced to assume a hostile attitude to anybody, the
latter must be to blame.

Since the festival of Tasajara Mr. Grant had been a frequent
visitor at Harcourt's, and was a guest on the eve of his departure
from San Francisco.  The distinguished position of each made their
relations appear quite natural without inciting gossip as to any
attraction in Harcourt's daughters.  It was late one afternoon as
he was passing the door of Harcourt's study that his host called
him in.  He found him sitting at his desk with some papers before
him and a folded copy of the "Clarion."  With his back to the
fading light of the window his face was partly in shadow.

"By the way, Grant," he began, with an assumption of carelessness
somewhat inconsistent with the fact that he had just called him in,
"it may be necessary for me to pull up those fellows who are
blackguarding me in the 'Clarion.'"

"Why, they haven't been saying anything new?" asked Grant,
laughingly, as he glanced towards the paper.

"No--that is--only a rehash of what they said before," returned
Harcourt without opening the paper.

"Well," said Grant playfully, "you don't mind their saying that
you're NOT the original pioneer of Tasajara, for it's true; nor
that that fellow 'Lige Curtis disappeared suddenly, for he did, if
I remember rightly.  But there's nothing in that to invalidate your
rights to Tasajara, to say nothing of your five years' undisputed
possession."

"Of course there's no LEGAL question," said Harcourt almost sharply.
"But as a matter of absurd report, I may want to contradict their
insinuations.  And YOU remember all the circumstances, don't you?"

"I should think so!  Why, my dear fellow, I've told it everywhere!--
here, in New York, Newport, and in London; by Jove, it's one of my
best stories!  How a company sent me out with a surveyor to look up
a railroad and agricultural possibilities in the wilderness; how
just as I found them--and a rather big thing they made, too--I was
set afloat by a flood and a raft, and drifted ashore on your bank,
and practically demonstrated to you what you didn't know and didn't
dare to hope for--that there could be a waterway straight to Sidon
from the embarcadero.  I've told what a charming evening we had
with you and your daughters in the old house, and how I returned
your hospitality by giving you a tip about the railroad; and how
you slipped out while we were playing cards, to clinch the bargain
for the land with that drunken fellow, 'Lige Curtis"--

"What's that?" interrupted Harcourt, quickly.

It was well that the shadow hid from Grant the expression of
Harcourt's face, or his reply might have been sharper.  As it was,
he answered a little stiffly:--

"I beg your pardon"--

Harcourt recovered himself.  "You're all wrong!" he said, "that
bargain was made long BEFORE; I never saw 'Lige Curtis after you
came to the house.  It was before that, in the afternoon," he went
on hurriedly, "that he was last in my store.  I can prove it."
Nevertheless he was so shocked and indignant at being confronted in
his own suppressions and falsehoods by an even greater and more
astounding misconception of fact, that for a moment he felt
helpless.  What, he reflected, if it were alleged that 'Lige had
returned again after the loafers had gone, or had never left the
store as had been said?  Nonsense!  There was John Milton, who had
been there reading all the time, and who could disprove it.  Yes,
but John Milton was his discarded son,--his enemy,--perhaps even
his very slanderer!

"But," said Grant quietly, "don't you remember that your daughter
Euphemia said something that evening about the land Lige had
OFFERED you, and you snapped up the young lady rather sharply for
letting out secrets, and THEN you went out?  At least that's my
impression."

It was, however, more than an impression; with Grant's scientific
memory for characteristic details he had noticed that particular
circumstance as part of the social phenomena.

"I don't know what Phemie SAID," returned Harcourt, impatiently.
"I KNOW there was no offer pending; the land had been sold to me
before I ever saw you.  Why--you must have thought me up to pretty
sharp practice with Curtis--eh?" he added, with a forced laugh.

Grant smiled; he had been accustomed to hear of such sharp practice
among his business acquaintance, although he himself by nature and
profession was incapable of it, but he had not deemed Harcourt more
scrupulous than others.  "Perhaps so," he said lightly, "but for
Heaven's sake don't ask me to spoil my reputation as a raconteur
for the sake of a mere fact or two.  I assure you it's a mighty
taking story as I tell it--and it don't hurt you in a business way.
You're the hero of it--hang it all!"

"Yes," said Harcourt, without noticing Grant's half cynical
superiority, but you'll oblige me if you won't tell it again IN
THAT WAY.  There are men here mean enough to make the worst of it.
It's nothing to me, of course, but my family--the girls, you know--
are rather sensitive."

"I had no idea they even knew it,--much less cared for it," said
Grant, with sudden seriousness.  "I dare say if those fellows in
the "Clarion" knew that they were annoying the ladies they'd drop
it.  Who's the editor?  Look here--leave it to me; I'll look into
it.  Better that you shouldn't appear in the matter at all."

"You understand that if it was a really serious matter, Grant,"
said Harcourt with a slight attitude, "I shouldn't allow any one to
take my place."

"My dear fellow, there'll be nobody 'called out' and no 'shooting
at sight,' whatever is the result of my interference," returned
Grant, lightly.  "It'll be all right."  He was quite aware of the
power of his own independent position and the fact that he had been
often appealed to before in delicate arbitration.

Harcourt was equally conscious of this, but by a strange
inconsistency now felt relieved at the coolness with which Grant
had accepted the misconception which had at first seemed so
dangerous.  If he were ready to condone what he thought was SHARP
PRACTICE, he could not be less lenient with the real facts that
might come out,--of course always excepting that interpolated
consideration in the bill of sale, which, however, no one but the
missing Curtis could ever discover.  The fact that a man of Grant's
secure position had interested himself in this matter would secure
him from the working of that personal vulgar jealousy which his
humbler antecedents had provoked.  And if, as he fancied, Grant
really cared for Clementina--

"As you like," he said, with half-affected lightness, "and now let
us talk of something else.  Clementina has been thinking of getting
up a riding party to San Mateo for Mrs. Ashwood.  We must show them
some civility, and that Boston brother of hers, Mr. Shipley, will
have to be invited also.  I can't get away, and my wife, of course,
will only be able to join them at San Mateo in the carriage.  I
reckon it would be easier for Clementina if you took my place, and
helped her look after the riding party.  It will need a man, and I
think she'd prefer you--as you know she's rather particular--
unless, of course, you'd be wanted for Mrs. Ashwood or Phemie, or
somebody else."

From his shadowed corner he could see that a pleasant light had
sprung into Grant's eyes, although his reply was in his ordinary
easy banter.  "I shall be only too glad to act as Miss Clementina's
vaquero, and lasso her runaways, or keep stragglers in the road."

There seemed to be small necessity, however, for this active co-
operation, for when the cheerful cavalcade started from the house a
few mornings later, Mr. Lawrence Grant's onerous duties seemed to
be simply confined to those of an ordinary cavalier at the side of
Miss Clementina, a few paces in the rear of the party.  But this
safe distance gave them the opportunity of conversing without being
overheard,--an apparently discreet precaution.

"Your father was so exceedingly affable to me the other day that if
I hadn't given you my promise to say nothing, I think I would have
fallen on my knees to him then and there, revealed my feelings,
asked for your hand and his blessing--or whatever one does at such
a time.  But how long do you intend to keep me in this suspense?"

Clementina turned her clear eyes half abstractedly upon him, as if
imperfectly recalling some forgotten situation.  "You forget," she
said, "that part of your promise was that you wouldn't even speak
of it to me again without my permission."

"But my time is so short now.  Give me some definite hope before I
go.  Let me believe that when we meet in New York"--

"You will find me just the same as now!  Yes, I think I can promise
THAT.  Let that suffice.  You said the other day you liked me
because I had not changed for five years.  You can surely trust
that I will not alter in as many months."

"If I only knew"--

"Ah, if I only knew,--if WE ALL only knew.  But we don't.  Come,
Mr. Grant, let it rest as it is.  Unless you want to go still
further back and have it as it WAS, at Sidon.  There I think you
fancied Euphemia most."

"Clementina!"

"That is my name, and those people ahead of us know it already."

"You are called CLEMENTINA,--but you are not merciful!"

"You are very wrong, for you might see that Mr. Shipley has twice
checked his horse that he might hear what you are saying, and
Phemie is always showing Mrs. Ashwood something in the landscape
behind us."

All this was the more hopeless and exasperating to Grant since in
the young girl's speech and manner there was not the slightest
trace of coquetry or playfulness.  He could not help saying a
little bitterly: "I don't think that any one would imagine from
your manner that you were receiving a declaration."

"But they might imagine from yours that you had the right to
quarrel with me,--which would be worse."

"We cannot part like this!  It is too cruel to me."

"We cannot part otherwise without the risk of greater cruelty."

"But say at least, Clementina, that I have no rival.  There is no
other more favored suitor?"

"That is so like a man--and yet so unlike the proud one I believed
you to be.  Why should a man like you even consider such a
possibility?  If I were a man I know I couldn't."  She turned upon
him a glance so clear and untroubled by either conscious vanity or
evasion that he was hopelessly convinced of the truth of her
statement, and she went on in a slightly lowered tone, "You have no
right to ask me such a question,--but perhaps for that reason I am
willing to answer you.  There is none.  Hush!  For a good rider you
are setting a poor example to the others, by crowding me towards
the bank.  Go forward and talk to Phemie, and tell her not to worry
Mrs. Ashwood's horse nor race with her; I don't think he's quite
safe, and Mrs. Ashwood isn't accustomed to using the Spanish bit.
I suppose I must say something to Mr. Shipley, who doesn't seem to
understand that I'M acting as chaperon, and YOU as captain of the
party."

She cantered forward as she spoke, and Grant was obliged to join
her sister, who, mounted on a powerful roan, was mischievously
exciting a beautiful quaker-colored mustang ridden by Mrs. Ashwood,
already irritated by the unfamiliar pressure of the Eastern woman's
hand upon his bit.  The thick dust which had forced the party of
twenty to close up in two solid files across the road compelled
them at the first opening in the roadside fence to take the field
in a straggling gallop.  Grant, eager to escape from his own
discontented self by doing something for others, reined in beside
Euphemia and the fair stranger.

"Let me take your place until Mrs. Ashwood's horse is quieted," he
half whispered to Euphemia.

"Thank you,--and I suppose it does not make any matter to Clem who
quiets mine," she said, with provoking eyes and a toss of her head
worthy of the spirited animal she was riding.

"She thinks you quite capable of managing yourself and even
others," he replied with a playful glance at Shipley, who was
riding somewhat stiffly on the other side.

"Don't be too sure," retorted Phemie with another dangerous look;
"I may give you trouble yet."

They were approaching the first undulation of the russet plain they
had emerged upon,--an umbrageous slope that seemed suddenly to
diverge in two defiles among the shaded hills.  Grant had given a
few words of practical advice to Mrs. Ashwood, and shown her how to
guide her mustang by the merest caressing touch of the rein upon
its sensitive neck.  He had not been sympathetically inclined
towards the fair stranger, a rich and still youthful widow,
although he could not deny her unquestioned good breeding, mental
refinement, and a certain languorous thoughtfulness that was almost
melancholy, which accented her blonde delicacy.  But he had noticed
that her manner was politely reserved and slightly constrained
towards the Harcourts, and he had already resented it with a lover's
instinctive loyalty.  He had at first attributed it to a want of
sympathy between Mrs. Ashwood's more intellectual sentimentalities
and the Harcourts' undeniable lack of any sentiment whatever.  But
there was evidently some other innate antagonism.  He was very
polite to Mrs. Ashwood; she responded with a gentlewoman's courtesy,
and, he was forced to admit, even a broader comprehension of his own
merits than the Harcourt girls had ever shown, but he could still
detect that she was not in accord with the party.

"I am afraid you do not like California, Mrs. Ashwood?" he said
pleasantly.  "You perhaps find the life here too unrestrained and
unconventional?"

She looked at him in quick astonishment.  "Are you quite sincere?
Why, it strikes me that this is just what it is NOT.  And I have so
longed for something quite different.  From what I have been told
about the originality and adventure of everything here, and your
independence of old social forms and customs, I am afraid I
expected the opposite of what I've seen.  Why, this very party--
except that the ladies are prettier and more expensively gotten up--
is like any party that might have ridden out at Saratoga or New
York."

"And as stupid, you would say."

"As CONVENTIONAL, Mr. Grant; always excepting this lovely creature
beneath me, whom I can't make out and who doesn't seem to care that
I should.  There! look! I told you so!"

Her mustang had suddenly bounded forward; but as Grant followed he
could see that the cause was the example of Phemie, who had, in
some mad freak, dashed out in a frantic gallop.  A half-dozen of
the younger people hilariously accepted the challenge; the
excitement was communicated to the others, until the whole
cavalcade was sweeping down the slope.  Grant was still at Mrs.
Ashwood's side, restraining her mustang and his own impatient horse
when Clementina joined them.  "Phemie's mare has really bolted, I
fear," she said in a quick whisper, "ride on, and never mind us."
Grant looked quickly ahead; Phemie's roan, excited by the shouts
behind her and to all appearance ungovernable, was fast disappearing
with her rider.  Without a word, trusting to his own good
horsemanship and better knowledge of the ground, he darted out of
the cavalcade to overtake her.

But the unfortunate result of this was to give further impulse to
the now racing horses as they approached a point where the slope
terminated in two diverging canyons.  Mrs. Ashwood gave a sharp
pull upon her bit.  To her consternation the mustang stopped short
almost instantly,--planting his two fore feet rigidly in the dust
and even sliding forward with the impetus.  Had her seat been less
firm she might have been thrown, but she recovered herself,
although in doing so she still bore upon the bit, when to her
astonishment the mustang deliberately stiffened himself as if for a
shock, and then began to back slowly, quivering with excitement.
She did not know that her native-bred animal fondly believed that
he was participating in a rodeo, and that to his equine intelligence
his fair mistress had just lassoed something!  In vain she urged him
forward; he still waited for the shock!  When the cloud of dust in
which she had been enwrapped drifted away, she saw to her amazement
that she was alone.  The entire party had disappeared into one of
the canyons,--but which one she could not tell!

When she succeeded at last in urging her mustang forward again she
determined to take the right-hand canyon and trust to being either
met or overtaken.  A more practical and less adventurous nature
would have waited at the point of divergence for the return of some
of the party, but Mrs. Ashwood was, in truth, not sorry to be left
to herself and the novel scenery for a while, and she had no doubt
but she would eventually find her way to the hotel at San Mateo,
which could not be far away, in time for luncheon.

The road was still well defined, although it presently began to
wind between ascending ranks of pines and larches that marked the
terraces of hills, so high that she wondered she had not noticed
them from the plains.  An unmistakable suggestion of some haunting
primeval solitude, a sense of the hushed and mysterious proximity
of a nature she had never known before, the strange half-
intoxicating breath of unsunned foliage and untrodden grasses and
herbs, all combined to exalt her as she cantered forward.  Even her
horse seemed to have acquired an intelligent liberty, or rather to
have established a sympathy with her in his needs and her own
longings; instinctively she no longer pulled him with the curb; the
reins hung loosely on his self-arched and unfettered neck; secure
in this loneliness she found herself even talking to him with
barbaric freedom.  As she went on, the vague hush of all things
animate and inanimate around her seemed to thicken, until she
unconsciously halted before a dim and pillared wood, and a vast and
heathless opening on whose mute brown lips Nature seemed to have
laid the finger of silence.  She forgot the party she had left, she
forgot the luncheon she was going to; more important still she
forgot that she had already left the traveled track far behind her,
and, tremulous with anticipation, rode timidly into that arch of
shadow.

As her horse's hoofs fell noiselessly on the elastic moss-carpeted
aisle she forgot even more than that.  She forgot the artificial
stimulus and excitement of the life she had been leading so long;
she forgot the small meannesses and smaller worries of her well-to-
do experiences; she forgot herself,--rather she regained a self she
had long forgotten.  For in the sweet seclusion of this half
darkened sanctuary the clinging fripperies of her past slipped from
her as a tawdry garment.  The petted, spoiled, and vapidly
precocious girlhood which had merged into a womanhood of aimless
triumphs and meaner ambitions; the worldly but miserable triumph of
a marriage that had left her delicacy abused and her heart sick and
unsatisfied; the wifehood without home, seclusion, or maternity;
the widowhood that at last brought relief, but with it the
consciousness of hopelessly wasted youth,--all this seemed to drop
from her here as lightly as the winged needles or noiseless
withered spray from the dim gray vault above her head.  In the
sovereign balm of that woodland breath her better spirit was
restored; somewhere in these wholesome shades seemed to still lurk
what should have been her innocent and nymph-like youth, and to
come out once more and greet her.  Old songs she had forgotten, or
whose music had failed in the discords of her frivolous life, sang
themselves to her again in that sweet, grave silence; girlish
dreams that she had foolishly been ashamed of, or had put away with
her childish toys, stole back to her once more and became real in
this tender twilight; old fancies, old fragments of verse and
childish lore, grew palpable and moved faintly before her.  The
boyish prince who should have come was there; the babe that should
have been hers was there!--she stopped suddenly with flaming eyes
and indignant color.  For it appeared that a MAN was there too, and
had just risen from the fallen tree where he had been sitting.


CHAPTER VIII.


She had so far forgotten herself in yielding to the spell of the
place, and in the revelation of her naked soul and inner nature,
that it was with something of the instinct of outraged modesty that
she seemed to shrink before this apparition of the outer world and
outer worldliness.  In an instant the nearer past returned; she
remembered where she was, how she had come there, from whom she had
come, and to whom she was returning.  She could see that she had
not only aimlessly wandered from the world but from the road; and
for that instant she hated this man who had reminded her of it,
even while she knew she must ask his assistance.  It relieved her
slightly to observe that he seemed as disturbed and impatient as
herself, and as he took a pencil from between his lips and returned
it to his pocket he scarcely looked at her.

But with her return to the world of convenances came its repression,
and with a gentlewoman's ease and modulated voice she leaned over
her mustang's neck and said: "I have strayed from my party and am
afraid I have lost my way.  We were going to the hotel at San Mateo.
Would you be kind enough to direct me there, or show me how I can
regain the road by which I came?"

Her voice and manner were quite enough to arrest him where he stood
with a pleased surprise in his fresh and ingenuous face.  She
looked at him more closely.  He was, in spite of his long silken
mustache, so absurdly young; he might, in spite of that youth, be
so absurdly man-like!  What was he doing there?  Was he a farmer's
son, an artist, a surveyor, or a city clerk out for a holiday?  Was
there perhaps a youthful female of his species somewhere for whom
he was waiting and upon whose tryst she was now breaking?  Was he--
terrible thought!--the outlying picket of some family picnic?  His
dress, neat, simple, free from ostentatious ornament, betrayed
nothing.  She waited for his voice.

"Oh, you have left San Mateo miles away to the right," he said with
quick youthful sympathy, "at least five miles!  Where did you leave
your party?"

His voice was winning, and even refined, she thought.  She answered
it quite spontaneously: "At a fork of two roads.  I see now I took
the wrong turning."

"Yes, you took the road to Crystal Spring.  It's just down there in
the valley, not more than a mile.  You'd have been there now if you
hadn't turned off at the woods."

"I couldn't help it, it was so beautiful."

"Isn't it?"

"Perfect."

"And such shadows, and such intensity of color."

"Wonderful!--and all along the ridge, looking down that defile!"

"Yes, and that point where it seems as if you had only to stretch
out your hand to pick a manzanita berry from the other side of the
canyon, half a mile across!"

"Yes, and that first glimpse of the valley through the Gothic
gateway of rocks!"

"And the color of those rocks,--cinnamon and bronze with the light
green of the Yerba buena vine splashing over them."

"Yes, but for color DID you notice that hillside of yellow poppies
pouring down into the valley like a golden Niagara?"

"Certainly,--and the perfect clearness of everything."

"And yet such complete silence and repose!"

"Oh, yes!"

"Ah, yes!"

They were both gravely nodding and shaking their heads with
sparkling eyes and brightened color, looking not at each other but
at the far landscape vignetted through a lozenge-shaped wind
opening in the trees.  Suddenly Mrs. Ashwood straightened herself
in the saddle, looked grave, lifted the reins and apparently the
ten years with them that had dropped from her.  But she said in her
easiest well-bred tones, and a half sigh, "Then I must take the
road back again to where it forks?"

"Oh, no! you can go by Crystal Spring.  It's no further, and I'll
show you the way.  But you'd better stop and rest yourself and your
horse for a little while at the Springs Hotel.  It's a very nice
place.  Many people ride there from San Francisco to luncheon and
return.  I wonder that your party didn't prefer it; and if they are
looking for you,--as they surely must be," he said, as if with a
sudden conception of her importance, "they'll come there when they
find you're not at San Mateo."

This seemed reasonable, although the process of being "fetched" and
taking the five miles ride, which she had enjoyed so much alone, in
company was not attractive.  "Couldn't I go on at once?" she said
impulsively.

"You would meet them sooner," he said thoughtfully.

This was quite enough for Mrs. Ashwood.  "I think I'll rest this
poor horse, who is really tired," she, said with charming hypocrisy,
"and stop at the hotel."

She saw his face brighten.  Perhaps he was the son of the hotel
proprietor, or a youthful partner himself.  "I suppose you live
here?" she suggested gently.  "You seem to know the place so well."

"No," he returned quickly; "I only run down here from San Francisco
when I can get a day off."

A day off!  He was in some regular employment.  But he continued:
"And I used to go to boarding-school near here, and know all these
woods well."

He must be a native!  How odd!  She had not conceived that there
might be any other population here than the immigrants; perhaps
that was what made him so interesting and different from the
others.  "Then your father and mother live here?" she said.

His frank face, incapable of disguise, changed suddenly.  "No," he
said simply, but without any trace of awkwardness.  Then after a
slight pause he laid his hand--she noticed it was white and well
kept--on her mustang's neck, and said, "If--if you care to trust
yourself to me, I could lead you and your horse down a trail into
the valley that is at least a third of the distance shorter.  It
would save you going back to the regular road, and there are one or
two lovely views that I could show you.  I should be so pleased, if
it would not trouble you.  There's a steep place or two--but I
think there's no danger."

"I shall not be afraid."

She smiled so graciously, and, as she fully believed, maternally,
that he looked at her the second time.  To his first hurried
impression of her as an elegant and delicately nurtured woman--one
of the class of distinguished tourists that fashion was beginning
to send thither--he had now to add that she had a quantity of fine
silken-spun light hair gathered in a heavy braid beneath her gray
hat; that her mouth was very delicately lipped and beautifully
sensitive; that her soft skin, although just then touched with
excitement, was a pale faded velvet, and seemed to be worn with
ennui rather than experience; that her eyes were hidden behind a
strip of gray veil whence only a faint glow was discernible.  To
this must still be added a poetic fancy all his own that, as she
sat there, with the skirt of her gray habit falling from her long
bodiced waist over the mustang's fawn-colored flanks, and with her
slim gauntleted hands lightly swaying the reins, she looked like
Queen Guinevere in the forest.  Not that he particularly fancied
Queen Guinevere, or that he at all imagined himself Launcelot, but
it was quite in keeping with the suggestion-haunted brain of John
Milton Harcourt, whom the astute reader has of course long since
recognized.

Preceding her through the soft carpeted vault with a woodman's
instinct,--for there was apparently no trail to be seen,--the soft
inner twilight began to give way to the outer stronger day, and
presently she was startled to see the clear blue of the sky before
her on apparently the same level as the brown pine-tessellated
floor she was treading.  Not only did this show her that she was
crossing a ridge of the upland, but a few moments later she had
passed beyond the woods to a golden hillside that sloped towards a
leafy, sheltered, and exquisitely-proportioned valley.  A tiny but
picturesque tower, and a few straggling roofs and gables, the
flashing of a crystal stream through the leaves, and a narrow white
ribbon of road winding behind it indicated the hostelry they were
seeking.  So peaceful and unfrequented it looked, nestling between
the hills, that it seemed as if they had discovered it.

With his hand at times upon the bridle, at others merely caressing
her mustang's neck, he led the way; there were a few breathless
places where the crown of his straw hat appeared between her
horse's reins, and again when she seemed almost slipping over on
his shoulder, but they were passed with such frank fearlessness and
invincible youthful confidence on the part of her escort that she
felt no timidity.  There were moments when a bit of the charmed
landscape unfolding before them overpowered them both, and they
halted to gaze,--sometimes without a word, or only a significant
gesture of sympathy and attention.  At one of those artistic
manifestations Mrs. Ashwood laid her slim gloved fingers lightly
but unwittingly on John Milton's arm, and withdrew them, however,
with a quick girlish apology and a foolish color which annoyed her
more than the appearance of familiarity.  But they were now getting
well down into the valley; the court of the little hotel was
already opening before them; their unconventional relations in the
idyllic world above had changed; the new one required some delicacy
of handling, and she had an idea that even the simplicity of the
young stranger might be confusing.

"I must ask you to continue to act as my escort," she said,
laughingly.  "I am Mrs. Ashwood of Philadelphia, visiting San
Francisco with my sister and brother, who are, I am afraid, even
now hopelessly waiting luncheon for me at San Mateo.  But as there
seems to be no prospect of my joining them in time, I hope you will
be able to give me the pleasure of your company, with whatever they
may give us here in the way of refreshment."

"I shall be very happy," returned John Milton with unmistakable
candor; "but perhaps some of your friends will be arriving in quest
of you, if they are not already here."

"Then they will join us or wait," said Mrs. Ashwood incisively,
with her first exhibition of the imperiousness of a rich and pretty
woman.  Perhaps she was a little annoyed that her elaborate
introduction of herself had produced no reciprocal disclosure by
her companion.  "Will you please send the landlord to me?" she
added.

John Milton disappeared in the hotel as she cantered to the porch.
In another moment she was giving the landlord her orders with the
easy confidence of one who knew herself only as an always welcome
and highly privileged guest, which was not without its effect.
"And," she added carelessly, "when everything is ready you will
please tell--Mr."--

"Harcourt," suggested the landlord promptly.

Mrs. Ashwood's perfectly trained face gave not the slightest sign
of the surprise that had overtaken her.  "Of course,--Mr. Harcourt."

"You know he's the son of the millionaire," continued the landlord,
not at all unwilling to display the importance of the habitues of
Crystal Spring, "though they've quarreled and don't get on
together."

"I know," said the lady languidly, "and, if any one comes here for
ME, ask them to wait in the parlor until I come."

Then, submitting herself and her dusty habit to the awkward
ministration of the Irish chambermaid, she was quite thrilled with
a delightful curiosity.  She vaguely remembered that she had heard
something of the Harcourt family discord,--but that was the
divorced daughter surely!  And this young man was Harcourt's son,
and they had quarreled!  A quarrel with a frank, open, ingenuous
fellow like that--a mere boy--could only be the father's fault.
Luckily she had never mentioned the name of Harcourt!  She would
not now; he need not know that it was his father who had originated
the party; why should she make him uncomfortable for the few
moments they were together?

There was nothing of this in her face as she descended and joined
him.  He thought that face handsome, well-bred, and refined.  But
this breeding and refinement seemed to him--in his ignorance of the
world, possibly--as only a graceful concealment of a self of which
he knew nothing; and he was not surprised to find that her pretty
gray eyes, now no longer hidden by her veil, really told him no
more than her lips.  He was a little afraid of her, and now that
she had lost her naive enthusiasm he was conscious of a vague
remorsefulness for his interrupted work in the forest.  What was he
doing here?  He who had avoided the cruel, selfish world of wealth
and pleasure,--a world that this woman represented,--the world that
had stood apart from him in the one dream of his life--and had let
Loo die!  His quickly responsive face darkened.

"I am afraid I really interrupted you up there," she said gently,
looking in his face with an expression of unfeigned concern; "you
were at work of some kind, I know, and I have very selfishly
thought only of myself.  But the whole scene was so new to me, and
I so rarely meet any one who sees things as I do, that I know you
will forgive me."  She bent her eyes upon him with a certain soft
timidity.  "You are an artist?"

"I am afraid not," he said, coloring and smiling faintly; "I don't
think I could draw a straight line."

"Don't try to; they're not pretty, and the mere ability to draw
them straight or curved doesn't make an artist.  But you are a
LOVER of nature, I know, and from what I have heard you say I
believe you can do what lovers cannot do,--make others feel as they
do,--and that is what I call being an artist.  You write?  You are
a poet?"

"Oh dear, no," he said with a smile, half of relief and half of
naive superiority, "I'm a prose writer--on a daily newspaper."

To his surprise she was not disconcerted; rather a look of
animation lit up her face as she said brightly, "Oh, then, you can
of course satisfy my curiosity about something.  You know the road
from San Francisco to the Cliff House.  Except for the view of the
sea-lions when one gets there it's stupid; my brother says it's
like all the San Francisco excursions,--a dusty drive with a julep
at the end of it.  Well, one day we were coming back from a drive
there, and when we were beginning to wind along the brow of that
dreadful staring Lone Mountain Cemetery, I said I would get out and
walk, and avoid the obtrusive glitter of those tombstones rising
before me all the way.  I pushed open a little gate and passed in.
Once among these funereal shrubs and cold statuesque lilies
everything was changed; I saw the staring tombstones no longer,
for, like them, I seemed to be always facing the sea.  The road had
vanished; everything had vanished but the endless waste of ocean
below me, and the last slope of rock and sand.  It seemed to be the
fittest place for a cemetery,--this end of the crumbling earth,--
this beginning of the eternal sea.  There! don't think that idea my
own, or that I thought of it then.  No,--I read it all afterwards,
and that's why I'm telling you this."

She could not help smiling at his now attentive face, and went on:
"Some days afterwards I got hold of a newspaper four or six months
old, and there was a description of all that I thought I had seen
and felt,--only far more beautiful and touching, as you shall see,
for I cut it out of the paper and have kept it.  It seemed to me
that it must be some personal experience,--as if the writer had
followed some dear friend there,--although it was with the
unostentation and indefiniteness of true and delicate feeling.  It
impressed me so much that I went back there twice or thrice, and
always seemed to move to the rhythm of that beautiful funeral
march--and I am afraid, being a woman, that I wandered around among
the graves as though I could find out who it was that had been sung
so sweetly, and if it were man or woman.  I've got it here," she
said, taking a dainty ivory porte-monnaie from her pocket and
picking out with two slim finger-tips a folded slip of newspaper;
"and I thought that maybe you might recognize the style of the
writer, and perhaps know something of his history.  For I believe
he has one.  There! that is only a part of the article, of course,
but it is the part that interested me.  Just read from there," she
pointed, leaning partly over his shoulder so that her soft breath
stirred his hair, "to the end; it isn't long."

In the film that seemed to come across his eyes, suddenly the print
appeared blurred and indistinct.  But he knew that she had put into
his hand something he had written after the death of his wife;
something spontaneous and impulsive, when her loss still filled his
days and nights and almost unconsciously swayed his pen.  He
remembered that his eyes had been as dim when he wrote it--and now--
handed to him by this smiling, well-to-do woman, he was as shocked
at first as if he had suddenly found her reading his private
letters.  This was followed by a sudden sense of shame that he had
ever thus publicly bared his feelings, and then by the illogical
but irresistible conviction that it was false and stupid.  The few
phrases she had pointed out appeared as cheap and hollow rhetoric
amid the surroundings of their social tete-a-tete over the
luncheon-table.  There was small danger that this heady wine of
woman's praise would make him betray himself; there was no sign of
gratified authorship in his voice as he quietly laid down the paper
and said dryly: "I am afraid I can't help you.  You know it may be
purely fanciful."

"I don't think so," said Mrs. Ashwood thoughtfully.  "At the same
time it doesn't strike me as a very abiding grief for that very
reason.  It's TOO sympathetic.  It strikes me that it might be the
first grief of some one too young to be inured to sorrow or
experienced enough to accept it as the common lot.  But like all
youthful impressions it is very sincere and true while it lasts.  I
don't know whether one gets anything more real when one gets
older."

With an insincerity he could not account for, he now felt inclined
to defend his previous sentiment, although all the while conscious
of a certain charm in his companion's graceful skepticism.  He had
in his truthfulness and independence hitherto always been quite
free from that feeble admiration of cynicism which attacks the
intellectually weak and immature, and his present predilection may
have been due more to her charming personality.  She was not at all
like his sisters; she had none of Clementina's cold abstraction,
and none of Euphemia's sharp and demonstrative effusiveness.  And
in his secret consciousness of her flattering foreknowledge of him,
with her assurance that before they had ever met he had unwittingly
influenced her, he began to feel more at his ease.  His fair
companion also, in the equally secret knowledge she had acquired of
his history, felt as secure as if she had been formally introduced.
Nobody could find fault with her for showing civility to the
ostensible son of her host; it was not necessary that she should be
aware of their family differences.  There was a charm too in their
enforced isolation, in what was the exceptional solitude of the
little hotel that day, and the seclusion of their table by the
window of the dining-room, which gave a charming domesticity to
their repast.  From time to time they glanced down the lonely
canyon, losing itself in the afternoon shadow.  Nevertheless Mrs.
Ashwood's preoccupation with Nature did not preclude a human
curiosity to hear something more of John Milton's quarrel with his
father.  There was certainly nothing of the prodigal son about him;
there was no precocious evil knowledge in his frank eyes; no record
of excesses in his healthy, fresh complexion; no unwholesome or
disturbed tastes in what she had seen of his rural preferences and
understanding of natural beauty.  To have attempted any direct
questioning that would have revealed his name and identity would
have obliged her to speak of herself as his father's guest.  She
began indirectly; he had said he had been a reporter, and he was
still a chronicler of this strange life.  He had of course heard of
many cases of family feuds and estrangements?  Her brother had told
her of some dreadful vendettas he had known in the Southwest, and
how whole families had been divided.  Since she had been here she
had heard of odd cases of brothers meeting accidentally after long
and unaccounted separations; of husbands suddenly confronted with
wives they had deserted; of fathers encountering discarded sons!

John Milton's face betrayed no uneasy consciousness.  If anything
it was beginning to glow with a boyish admiration of the grace and
intelligence of the fair speaker, that was perhaps heightened by an
assumption of half coquettish discomfiture.

"You are laughing at me!" she said finally.  "But inhuman and
selfish as these stories may seem, and sometimes are, I believe
that these curious estrangements and separations often come from
some fatal weakness of temperament that might be strengthened, or
some trivial misunderstanding that could be explained.  It is
separation that makes them seem irrevocable only because they are
inexplicable, and a vague memory always seems more terrible than a
definite one.  Facts may be forgiven and forgotten, but mysteries
haunt one always.  I believe there are weak, sensitive people who
dread to put their wrongs into shape; those are the kind who sulk,
and when you add separation to sulking, reconciliation becomes
impossible.  I knew a very singular case of that kind once.  If you
like, I'll tell it to you.  May be you will be able, some day, to
weave it into one of your writings.  And it's quite true."

It is hardly necessary to say that John Milton had not been touched
by any personal significance in his companion's speech, whatever
she may have intended; and it is equally true that whether she had
presently forgotten her purpose, or had become suddenly interested
in her own conversation, her face grew more animated, her manner
more confidential, and something of the youthful enthusiasm she had
shown in the mountain seemed to come back to her.

"I might say it happened anywhere and call the people M. or N.,
but it really did occur in my own family, and although I was much
younger at the time it impressed me very strongly.  My cousin, who
had been my playmate, was an orphan, and had been intrusted to the
care of my father, who was his guardian.  He was always a clever
boy, but singularly sensitive and quick to take offense.  Perhaps
it was because the little property his father had left made him
partly dependent on my father, and that I was rich, but he seemed
to feel the disparity in our positions.  I was too young to
understand it; I think it existed only in his imagination, for I
believe we were treated alike.  But I remember that he was full of
vague threats of running away and going to sea, and that it was
part of his weak temperament to terrify me with his extravagant
confidences.  I was always frightened when, after one of those
scenes, he would pack his valise or perhaps only tie up a few
things in a handkerchief, as in the advertisement pictures of the
runaway slaves, and declare that we would never lay eyes upon him
again.  At first I never saw the ridiculousness of all this,--for I
ought to have told you that he was a rather delicate and timid boy,
and quite unfitted for a rough life or any exposure,--but others
did, and one day I laughed at him and told him he was afraid.  I
shall never forget the expression of his face and never forgive
myself for it.  He went away,--but he returned the next day!  He
threatened once to commit suicide, left his clothes on the bank of
the river, and came home in another suit of clothes he had taken
with him.  When I was sent abroad to school I lost sight of him;
when I returned he was at college, apparently unchanged.  When he
came home for vacation, far from having been subdued by contact
with strangers, it seemed that his unhappy sensitiveness had been
only intensified by the ridicule of his fellows.  He had even
acquired a most ridiculous theory about the degrading effects of
civilization, and wanted to go back to a state of barbarism.  He
said the wilderness was the only true home of man.  My father,
instead of bearing with what I believe was his infirmity, dryly
offered him the means to try his experiment.  He started for some
place in Texas, saying we would never hear from him again.  A month
after he wrote for more money.  My father replied rather impatiently,
I suppose,--I never knew exactly what he wrote.  That was some years
ago.  He had told the truth at last, for we never heard from him
again."

It is to be feared that John Milton was following the animated lips
and eyes of the fair speaker rather than her story.  Perhaps that
was the reason why he said, "May he not have been a disappointed
man?"

"I don't understand," she said simply.

"Perhaps," said John Milton with a boyish blush, "you may have
unconsciously raised hopes in his heart--and"--

"I should hardly attempt to interest a chronicler of adventure like
you in such a very commonplace, every-day style of romance," she
said, with a little impatience, "even if my vanity compelled me to
make such confidences to a stranger.  No,--it was nothing quite as
vulgar as that.  And," she added quickly, with a playfully amused
smile as she saw the young fellow's evident distress, "I should
have probably heard from him again.  Those stories always end in
that way."

"And you think?"--said John Milton.

"I think," said Mrs. Ashwood slowly, "that he actually did commit
suicide--or effaced himself in some way, just as firmly as I
believe he might have been saved by judicious treatment.  Otherwise
we should have heard from him.  You'll say that's only a woman's
reasoning--but I think our perceptions are often instinctive, and I
knew his character."

Still following the play of her delicate features into a romance of
his own weaving, the imaginative young reporter who had seen so
much from the heights of Russian Hill said earnestly, "Then I have
your permission to use this material at any future time?"

"Yes," said the lady smilingly.

"And you will not mind if I should take some liberties with the
text?"

"I must of course leave something to your artistic taste.  But you
will let me see it?"

There were voices outside now, breaking the silence of the veranda.
They had been so preoccupied as not to notice the arrival of a
horseman.  Steps came along the passage; the landlord returned.
Mrs. Ashwood turned quickly towards him.

"Mr. Grant, of your party, ma'am, to fetch you."

She saw an unmistakable change in her young friend's mobile face.
"I will be ready in a moment," she said to the landlord.  Then,
turning to John Milton, the arch-hypocrite said sweetly: "My
brother must have known instinctively that I was in good hands, as
he didn't come.  But I am sorry, for I should have so liked to
introduce him to you--although by the way," with a bright smile, "I
don't think you have yet told me your name.  I know I couldn't have
FORGOTTEN it."

"Harcourt," said John Milton, with a half-embarrassed laugh.

"But you must come and see me, Mr.--Mr. Harcourt," she said,
producing a card from a case already in her fingers, "at my hotel,
and let my brother thank you there for your kindness and gallantry
to a stranger.  I shall be here a few weeks longer before we go
south to look for a place where my brother can winter.  DO come and
see me, although I cannot introduce you to anything as real and
beautiful as what YOU have shown me to-day.  Good-by, Mr. Harcourt;
I won't trouble you to come down and bore yourself with my escort's
questions and congratulations."

She bent her head and allowed her soft eyes to rest upon his with a
graciousness that was beyond her speech, pulled her veil over her
eyes again, with a pretty suggestion that she had no further use
for them, and taking her riding-skirt lightly in her hand seemed to
glide from the room.

On her way to San Mateo, where it appeared the disorganized party
had prolonged their visit to accept an invitation to dine with a
local magnate, she was pleasantly conversational with the slightly
abstracted Grant.  She was so sorry to have given them all this
trouble and anxiety!  Of course she ought to have waited at the
fork of the road, but she had never doubted but she could rejoin
them presently on the main road.  She was glad that Miss Euphemia's
runaway horse had been stopped without accident; it would have been
dreadful if anything had happened to HER; Mr. Harcourt seemed so
wrapped up in his girls.  It was a pity they never had a son--Ah?
Indeed!  Then there was a son?  So--and father and son had
quarreled?  That was so sad.  And for some trifling cause, no
doubt?

"I believe he married the housemaid," said Grant grimly.  "Be
careful!--Allow me."

"It's no use!" said Mrs. Ashwood, flushing with pink impatience, as
she recovered her seat, which a sudden bolt of her mustang had
imperiled, "I really can't make out the tricks of this beast!
Thank you," she added, with a sweet smile, "but I think I can
manage him now.  I can't see why he stopped.  I'll be more careful.
You were saying the son was married--surely not that boy!"

"Boy!" echoed Grant.  "Then you know?"--

"I mean of course he must be a boy--they all grew up here--and it
was only five or six years ago that their parents emigrated," she
retorted a little impatiently.  "And what about this creature?"

"Your horse?"

"You know I mean the woman he married.  Of course she was older
than he--and caught him?"

"I think there was a year or two difference," said Grant quietly.

"Yes, but your gallantry keeps you from telling the truth; which is
that the women, in cases of this kind, are much older and more
experienced."

"Are they?  Well, perhaps she is, NOW.  She is dead."

Mrs. Ashwood walked her horse.  "Poor thing," she said.  Then a
sudden idea took possession of her and brought a film to her eyes.
"How long ago?" she asked in a low voice.

"About six or seven months, I think.  I believe there was a baby
who died too."

She continued to walk her horse slowly, stroking its curved neck.
"I think it's perfectly shameful!" she said suddenly.

"Not so bad as that, Mrs. Ashwood, surely.  The girl may have loved
him--and he"--

"You know perfectly what I mean, Mr. Grant.  I speak of the conduct
of the mother and father and those two sisters!"

Grant slightly elevated his eyebrows.  "But you forget, Mrs.
Ashwood.  It was young Harcourt and his wife's own act.  They
preferred to take their own path and keep it."

"I think," said Mrs. Ashwood authoritatively, "that the idea of
leaving those two unfortunate children to suffer and struggle on
alone--out there--on the sand hills of San Francisco--was simply
disgraceful!"

Later that evening she was unreasonably annoyed to find that her
brother, Mr. John Shipley, had taken advantage of the absence of
Grant to pay marked attention to Clementina, and had even prevailed
upon that imperious goddess to accompany him after dinner on a
moonlight stroll upon the veranda and terraces of Los Pajaros.
Nevertheless she seemed to recover her spirits enough to talk
volubly of the beautiful scenery she had discovered in her late
perilous abandonment in the wilds of the Coast Range; to aver her
intention to visit it again; to speak of it in a severely practical
way as offering a far better site for the cottages of the young
married couples just beginning life than the outskirts of towns or
the bleak sand hills of San Francisco; and thence by graceful
degrees into a dissertation upon popular fallacies in regard to
hasty marriages, and the mistaken idea of some parents in not
accepting the inevitable and making the best of it.  She still
found time to enter into an appreciative and exhaustive criticism
upon the literature and journalistic enterprise of the Pacific
Coast with the proprietor of the "Pioneer," and to cause that
gentleman to declare that whatever people might say about rich and
fashionable Eastern women, that Mrs. Ashwood's head was about as
level as it was pretty.

The next morning found her more thoughtful and subdued, and when
her brother came upon her sitting on the veranda, while the party
were preparing to return, she was reading a newspaper slip that she
had taken from her porte-monnaie, with a face that was partly
shadowed.

"What have you struck there, Conny?" said her brother gayly.  "It
looks too serious for a recipe."

"Something I should like you to read some time, Jack," she said,
lifting her lashes with a slight timidity, "if you would take the
trouble.  I really wonder how it would impress you."

"Pass it over," said Jack Shipley good-humoredly, with his cigar
between his lips.  "I'll take it now."

She handed him the slip and turned partly away; he took it, glanced
at it sideways, turned it over, and suddenly his look grew
concentrated, and he took the cigar from his lips.

"Well," she said playfully, turning to him again.  "What do you
think of it?"

"Think of it?" he said with a rising color.  "I think it's
infamous!  Who did it?"

She stared at him, then glanced quickly at the slip.  "What are you
reading?" she said.

"This, of course," he said impatiently.  "What you gave me."  But
he was pointing to THE OTHER SIDE of the newspaper slip.

She took it from him impatiently and read for the first time the
printing on the reverse side of the article she had treasured so
long.  It was the concluding paragraph of an apparently larger
editorial.  "One thing is certain, that a man in Daniel Harcourt's
position cannot afford to pass over in silence accusations like the
above, that affect not only his private character, but the
integrity of his title to the land that was the foundation of his
fortune.  When trickery, sharp practice, and even criminality in
the past are more than hinted at, they cannot be met by mere
pompous silence or allusions to private position, social prestige,
or distinguished friends in the present."

Mrs. Ashwood turned the slip over with scornful impatience, a
pretty uplifting of her eyebrows and a slight curl of her lip.  "I
suppose none of those people's beginnings can bear looking into--
and they certainly should be the last ones to find fault with
anybody.  But, good gracious, Jack! what has this to do with you?"

"With me?" said Shipley angrily.  "Why, I proposed to Clementina
last night!"


CHAPTER IX.


The wayfarers on the Tasajara turnpike, whom Mr. Daniel Harcourt
passed with his fast trotting mare and sulky, saw that their great
fellow-townsman was more than usually preoccupied and curt in his
acknowledgment of their salutations.  Nevertheless as he drew near
the creek, he partly checked his horse, and when he reached a
slight acclivity of the interminable plain--which had really been
the bank of the creek in bygone days--he pulled up, alighted, tied
his horse to a rail fence, and clambering over the inclosure made
his way along the ridge.  It was covered with nettles, thistles,
and a few wiry dwarf larches of native growth; dust from the
adjacent highway had invaded it, with a few scattered and torn
handbills, waste paper, rags, empty provision cans, and other
suburban debris.  Yet it was the site of 'Lige Curtis's cabin, long
since erased and forgotten.  The bed of the old creek had receded;
the last tules had been cleared away; the channel and embarcadero
were half a mile from the bank and log whereon the pioneer of
Tasajara had idly sunned himself.

Mr. Harcourt walked on, occasionally turning over the scattered
objects with his foot, and stopping at times to examine the ground
more closely.  It had not apparently been disturbed since he
himself, six years ago, had razed the wretched shanty and carried
off its timbers to aid in the erection of a larger cabin further
inland.  He raised his eyes to the prospect before him,--to the
town with its steamboats lying at the wharves, to the grain
elevator, the warehouses, the railroad station with its puffing
engines, the flagstaff of Harcourt House and the clustering roofs
of the town, and beyond, the painted dome of his last creation, the
Free Library.  This was all HIS work, HIS planning, HIS foresight,
whatever they might say of the wandering drunkard from whose
tremulous fingers he had snatched the opportunity.  They could not
take THAT from him, however they might follow him with envy and
reviling, any more than they could wrest from him the five years of
peaceful possession.  It was with something of the prosperous
consciousness with which he had mounted the platform on the opening
of the Free Library, that he now climbed into his buggy and drove
away.

Nevertheless he stopped at his Land Office as he drove into town,
and gave a few orders.  "I want a strong picket fence put around
the fifty-vara lot in block fifty-seven, and the ground cleared up
at once.  Let me know when the men get to work, and I'll overlook
them."

Re-entering his own house in the square, where Mrs. Harcourt and
Clementina--who often accompanied him in those business visits--
were waiting for him with luncheon, he smiled somewhat superciliously
as the servant informed him that "Professor Grant had just arrived."
Really that man was trying to make the most of his time with
Clementina!  Perhaps the rival attractions of that Boston swell
Shipley had something to do with it!  He must positively talk to
Clementina about this.  In point of fact he himself was a little
disappointed in Grant, who, since his offer to take the task of
hunting down his calumniators, had really done nothing.  He turned
into his study, but was slightly astonished to find that Grant,
instead of paying court to Clementina in the adjoining drawing-room,
was sitting rather thoughtfully in his own armchair.

He rose as Harcourt entered.  "I didn't let them announce me to
the ladies," he said, "as I have some important business with you
first, and we may find it necessary that I should take the next
train back to town.  You remember that a few weeks ago I offered to
look into the matter of those slanders against you.  I apprehended
it would be a trifling matter of envy or jealousy on the part of
your old associates or neighbors which could be put straight with a
little good feeling; but I must be frank with you, Harcourt, and
say at the beginning that it turns out to be an infernally ugly
business.  Call it conspiracy if you like, or organized hostility,
I'm afraid it will require a lawyer rather than an arbitrator to
manage it, and the sooner the better.  For the most unpleasant
thing about it is, that I can't find out exactly HOW BAD it is!"

Unfortunately the weaker instinct of Harcourt's nature was first
roused; the vulgar rage which confounds the bearer of ill news with
the news itself filled his breast.  "And this is all that your
confounded intermeddling came to?" he said brutally.

"No," said Grant quietly, with a preoccupied ignoring of the insult
that was more hopeless for Harcourt.  "I found out that it is
claimed that this 'Lige Curtis was not drowned nor lost that night;
but that he escaped, and for three years has convinced another man
that you are wrongfully in possession of this land; that these two
naturally hold you in their power, and that they are only waiting
for you to be forced into legal proceedings for slander to prove
all their charges.  Until then, for some reason best known to
themselves, Curtis remains in the background."

"Does he deny the deed under which I hold the property?" said
Harcourt savagely.

"He says it was only a security for a trifling loan, and not an
actual transfer."

"And don't those fools know that his security could be forfeited?"

"Yes, but not in the way it is recorded in the county clerk's
office.  They say that the record shows that there was an
interpolation in the paper he left with you--which was a forgery.
Briefly, Harcourt, you are accused of that.  More,--it is intimated
that when he fell into the creek that night, and escaped on a raft
that was floating past, that he had been first stunned by a blow
from some one interested in getting rid of him."

He paused and glanced out of the window.

"Is that all?" asked Harcourt in a perfectly quiet, steady, voice.

"All!" replied Grant, struck with the change in his companion's
manner, and turning his eyes upon him quickly.

The change indeed was marked and significant.  Whether from relief
at knowing the worst, or whether he was experiencing the same
reaction from the utter falsity of this last accusation that he had
felt when Grant had unintentionally wronged him in his previous
recollection, certain it is that some unknown reserve of strength
in his own nature, of which he knew nothing before, suddenly came
to his aid in this extremity.  It invested him with an uncouth
dignity that for the first time excited Grant's respect.

"I beg your pardon, Grant, for the hasty way I spoke to you a
moment ago, for I thank you, and appreciate thoroughly and
sincerely what you have done.  You are right; it is a matter for
fighting and not fussing over.  But I must have a head to hit.
Whose is it?"

"The man who holds himself legally responsible is Fletcher,--the
proprietor of the 'Clarion,' and a man of property."

"The 'Clarion'?  That is the paper which began the attack?" said
Harcourt.

"Yes, and it is only fair to tell you here that your son threw up
his place on it in consequence of its attack upon you."

There was perhaps the slightest possible shrinking in Harcourt's
eyelids--the one congenital likeness to his discarded son--but his
otherwise calm demeanor did not change.  Grant went on more
cheerfully: "I've told you all I know.  When I spoke of an unknown 
WORST, I did not refer to any further accusation, but to whatever
evidence they might have fabricated or suborned to prove any one of
them.  It is only the strength and fairness of the hands they hold
that is uncertain.  Against that you have your certain uncontested
possession, the peculiar character and antecedents of this 'Lige
Curtis, which would make his evidence untrustworthy and even make
it difficult for them to establish his identity.  I am told that
his failure to contest your appropriation of his property is
explained by the fact of his being absent from the country most of
the time; but again, this would not account for their silence until
within the last six months, unless they have been waiting for
further evidence to establish it.  But even then they must have
known that the time of recovery had passed.  You are a practical
man, Harcourt; I needn't tell you therefore what your lawyer will
probably tell you, that practically, so far as your rights are
concerned, you remain as before these calumnies; that a cause of
action unprosecuted or in abeyance is practically no cause, and
that it is not for you to anticipate one.  BUT"--

He paused and looked steadily at Harcourt.  Harcourt met his look
with a dull, ox-like stolidity.  "I shall begin the suit at once,"
he said.

"And I," said Grant, holding out his hand, "will stand by you.  But
tell me now what you knew of this man Curtis,--his character and
disposition; it may be some clue as to what are his methods and his
intentions."

Harcourt briefly sketched 'Lige Curtis as he knew him and
understood him.  It was another indication of his reserved power
that the description was so singularly clear, practical,
unprejudiced, and impartial that it impressed Grant with its
truthfulness.

"I can't make him out," he said; "you have drawn a weak, but
neither a dishonest nor malignant man.  There must have been
somebody behind him.  Can you think of any personal enemy?"

"I have been subjected to the usual jealousy and envy of my old
neighbors, I suppose, but nothing more.  I have harmed no one
knowingly."

Grant was silent; it had flashed across him that Rice might have
harbored revenge for his father-in-law's interference in his brief
matrimonial experience.  He had also suddenly recalled his
conversation with Billings on the day that he first arrived at
Tasajara.  It would not be strange if this man had some intimation
of the secret.  He would try to find him that evening.  He rose.

"You will stay to dinner?  My wife and Clementina will expect you."

"Not to-night; I am dining at the hotel," said Grant, smilingly;
"but I will come in later in the evening if I may."  He paused
hesitatingly for a moment.  "Have your wife and daughter ever
expressed any opinion on this matter?"

"No," said Harcourt.  "Mrs. Harcourt knows nothing of anything that
does not happen IN the house; Euphemia knows only the things that
happen out of it where she is visiting--and I suppose that young
men prefer to talk to her about other things than the slanders of
her father.  And Clementina--well, you know how calm and superior
to these things SHE is."

"For that very reason I thought that perhaps she might be able to
see them more clearly,--but no matter!  I dare say you are quite
right in not discussing them at home."  This was the fact, although
Grant had not forgotten that Harcourt had put forward his daughters
as a reason for stopping the scandal some weeks before,--a reason
which, however, seemed never to have been borne out by any apparent
sensitiveness of the girls themselves.

When Grant had left, Harcourt remained for some moments steadfastly
gazing from the window over the Tasajara plain.  He had not lost
his look of concentrated power, nor his determination to fight.  A
struggle between himself and the phantoms of the past had become
now a necessary stimulus for its own sake,--for the sake of his
mental and physical equipoise.  He saw before him the pale,
agitated, irresolute features of 'Lige Curtis,--not the man HE had
injured, but the man who had injured HIM, whose spirit was
aimlessly and wantonly--for he had never attempted to get back his
possessions in his lifetime, nor ever tried to communicate with the
possessor--striking at him in the shadow.  And it was THAT man,
that pale, writhing, frightened wretch whom he had once mercifully
helped!  Yes, whose LIFE he had even saved that night from exposure
and delirium tremens when he had given him the whiskey.  And this
life he had saved, only to have it set in motion a conspiracy to
ruin him!  Who knows that 'Lige had not purposely conceived what
they had believed to be an attempt at suicide, only to cast
suspicion of murder on HIM!  From which it will be perceived that
Harcourt's powers of moral reasoning had not improved in five
years, and that even the impartiality he had just shown in his
description of 'Lige to Grant had been swallowed up in this new
sense of injury.  The founder of Tasajara, whose cool business
logic, unfailing foresight, and practical deductions were never at
fault, was once more childishly adrift in his moral ethics.

And there was Clementina, of whose judgment Grant had spoken so
persistently,--could she assist him?  It was true, as he had said,
he had never talked to her of his affairs.  In his sometimes uneasy
consciousness of her superiority he had shrunk from even revealing
his anxieties, much less his actual secret, and from anything that
might prejudice the lofty paternal attitude he had taken towards
his daughters from the beginning of his good fortune.  He was never
quite sure if her acceptance of it was real; he was never entirely
free from a certain jealousy that always mingled with his pride in
her superior rectitude; and yet his feeling was distinct from the
good-natured contempt he had for his wife's loyalty, the anger and
suspicion that his son's opposition had provoked, and the half-
affectionate toleration he had felt for Euphemia's waywardness.
However he would sound Clementina without betraying himself.

He was anticipated by a slight step in the passage and the pushing
open of his study door.  The tall, graceful figure of the girl
herself stood in the opening.

"They tell me Mr. Grant has been here.  Does he stay to dinner?"

"No, he has an engagement at the hotel, but he will probably drop
in later.  Come in, Clemmy, I want to talk to you.  Shut the door
and sit down."

She slipped in quietly, shut the door, took a seat on the sofa,
softly smoothed down her gown, and turned her graceful head and
serenely composed face towards him.  Sitting thus she looked like
some finely finished painting that decorated rather than belonged
to the room,--not only distinctly alien to the flesh and blood
relative before her, but to the house, and even the local,
monotonous landscape beyond the window with the shining new
shingles and chimneys that cut the new blue sky.  These singular
perfections seemed to increase in Harcourt's mind the exasperating
sense of injury inflicted upon him by 'Lige's exposures.  With a
daughter so incomparably gifted,--a matchless creation that was
enough in herself to ennoble that fortune which his own skill and
genius had lifted from the muddy tules of Tasajara where this 'Lige
had left it,--that SHE should be subjected to this annoyance seemed
an infamy that Providence could not allow!  What was his mere
venial transgression to this exaggerated retribution?

"Clemmy, girl, I'm going to ask you a question.  Listen, pet."  He
had begun with a reminiscent tenderness of the epoch of her
childhood, but meeting the unresponding maturity of her clear eyes
he abandoned it.  "You know, Clementina, I have never interfered in
your affairs, nor tried to influence your friendships for anybody.
Whatever people may have to say of me they can't say that!  I've
always trusted you, as I would myself, to choose your own
associates; I have never regretted it, and I don't regret it now.
But I'd like to know--I have reasons to-day for asking--how matters
stand between you and Grant."

The Parian head of Minerva on the bookcase above her did not offer
the spectator a face less free from maidenly confusion than
Clementina's at that moment.  Her father had certainly expected
none, but he was not prepared for the perfect coolness of her
reply.

"Do you mean, have I ACCEPTED him?"

"No,--well--yes."

"No, then!  Is that what he wished to see you about?  It was
understood that he was not to allude again to the subject to any
one."

"He has not to ME.  It was only my own idea.  He had something very
different to tell me.  You may not know, Clementina," he begun
cautiously, "that I have been lately the subject of some anonymous
slanders, and Grant has taken the trouble to track them down for
me.  It is a calumny that goes back as far as Sidon, and I may want
your level head and good memory to help me to refute it."  He then
repeated calmly and clearly, with no trace of the fury that had
raged within him a moment before, the substance of Grant's
revelation.

The young girl listened without apparent emotion.  When he had
finished she said quickly: "And what do you want me to recollect?"

The hardest part of Harcourt's task was coming.  "Well, don't you
remember that I told you the day the surveyors went away--that--I
had bought this land of 'Lige Curtis some time before?"

"Yes, I remember your saying so, but"--

"But what?"

"I thought you only meant that to satisfy mother."

Daniel Harcourt felt the blood settling round his heart, but he was
constrained by an irresistible impulse to know the worst.  "Well,
what did YOU think it really was?"

"I only thought that 'Lige Curtis had simply let you have it,
that's all."

Harcourt breathed again.  "But what for?  Why should he?"

"Well--ON MY ACCOUNT."

"On YOUR account!  What in Heaven's name had YOU to do with it?"

"He loved me."  There was not the slightest trace of vanity, self-
consciousness or coquetry in her quiet, fateful face, and for this
very reason Harcourt knew that she was speaking the truth.

"Loved YOU!--you, Clementina!--my daughter!  Did he ever TELL you
so?"

"Not in words.  He used to walk up and down on the road when I was
at the back window or in the garden, and often hung about the bank
of the creek for hours, like some animal.  I don't think the others
saw him, and when they did they thought it was Parmlee for
Euphemia.  Even Euphemia thought so too, and that was why she was
so conceited and hard to Parmlee towards the end.  She thought it
was Parmlee that night when Grant and Rice came; but it was 'Lige
Curtis who had been watching the window lights in the rain, and who
must have gone off at last to speak to you in the store.  I always
let Phemie believe that it was Parmlee,--it seemed to please her."

There was not the least tone of mischief or superiority, or even of
patronage in her manner.  It was as quiet and cruel as the fate
that might have led 'Lige to his destruction.  Even her father felt
a slight thrill of awe as she paused.  "Then he never really spoke
to you?" he asked hurriedly.

"Only once.  I was gathering swamp lilies all alone, a mile below
the bend of the creek, and he came upon me suddenly.  Perhaps it
was that I didn't jump or start--I didn't see anything to jump or
start at--that he said, 'You're not frightened at me, Miss
Harcourt, like the other girls?  You don't think I'm drunk or half
mad--as they do?'  I don't remember exactly what I said, but it
meant that whether he was drunk or half mad or sober I didn't see
any reason to be afraid of him.  And then he told me that if I was
fond of swamp lilies I might have all I wanted at his place, and
for the matter of that the place too, as he was going away, for he
couldn't stand the loneliness any longer.  He said that he had
nothing in common with the place and the people--no more than I
had--and that was what he had always fancied in me.  I told him
that if he felt in that way about his place he ought to leave it,
or sell it to some one who cared for it, and go away.  That must
have been in his mind when he offered it to you,--at least that's
what I thought when you told us you had bought it.  I didn't know
but what he might have told you, but you didn't care to say it
before mother."

Mr. Harcourt sat gazing at her with breathless amazement.  "And
you--think that--'Lige Curtis--lov--liked you?"

"Yes, I think he did--and that he does now!"

"NOW!  What do you mean?  The man is dead!" said Harcourt starting.

"That's just what I don't believe."

"Impossible!  Think of what you are saying."

"I never could quite understand or feel that he was dead when
everybody said so, and now that I've heard this story I KNOW that
he is living."

"But why did he not make himself known in time to claim the
property?"

"Because he did not care for it."

"What did he care for, then?"

"Me, I suppose."

"But this calumny is not like a man who loves you."

"It is like a JEALOUS one."

With an effort Harcourt threw off his bewildered incredulity and
grasped the situation.  He would have to contend with his enemy in
the flesh and blood, but that flesh and blood would be very weak in
the hands of the impassive girl beside him.  His face lightened.

The same idea might have been in Clementina's mind when she spoke
again, although her face had remained unchanged.  "I do not see why
YOU should bother yourself further about it," she said.  "It is
only a matter between myself and him; you can leave it to me."

"But if you are mistaken and he should not be living?"

"I am not mistaken.  I am even certain now that I have seen him."

"Seen him!"

"Yes," said the girl with the first trace of animation in her face.
"It was four or five months ago when we were visiting the Briones
at Monterey.  We had ridden out to the old Mission by moonlight.
There were some Mexicans lounging around the posada, and one of
them attracted my attention by the way he seemed to watch me,
without revealing any more of his face than I could see between his
serape and the black silk handkerchief that was tied around his
head under his sombrero.  But I knew he was an American--and his
eyes were familiar.  I believe it was he."

"Why did you not speak of it before?"

The look of animation died out of the girl's face.  "Why should I?"
she said listlessly.  "I did not know of these reports then.  He
was nothing more to us.  You wouldn't have cared to see him again."
She rose, smoothed out her skirt and stood looking at her father.
"There is one thing, of course, that you'll do at once."

Her voice had changed so oddly that he said quickly: "What's that?"

"Call Grant off the scent.  He'll only frighten or exasperate your
game, and that's what you don't want."

Her voice was as imperious as it had been previously listless.  And
it was the first time he had ever known her to use slang.

It seemed as startling as if it had fallen from the marble lips
above him.

"But I've promised him that we should go together to my lawyer to-
morrow, and begin a suit against the proprietors of the 'Clarion.'"

"Do nothing of the kind.  Get rid of Grant's assistance in this
matter; and see the 'Clarion' proprietor yourself.  What sort of a
man is he?  Can you invite him to your house?"

"I have never seen him; I believe he lives at San Jose.  He is a
wealthy man and a large land owner there.  You understand that
after the first article appeared in his paper, and I knew that he
had employed your brother--although Grant says that he had nothing
to do with it and left Fletcher on account of it--I could have no
intercourse with him.  Even if I invited him he would not come."

"He MUST come.  Leave it to ME."  She stopped and resumed her
former impassive manner.  "I had something to say to you too,
father.  Mr. Shipley proposed to me the day we went to San Mateo."

Her father's eyes lit with an eager sparkle.  "Well," he said
quickly.

"I reminded him that I had known him only a few weeks, and that I
wanted time to consider."

"Consider!  Why, Clemmy, he's one of the oldest Boston families,
rich from his father and grandfather--rich when I was a shopkeeper
and your mother"--

"I thought you liked Grant?" she said quietly.

"Yes, but if YOU have no choice nor feeling in the matter, why
Shipley is far the better man.  And if any of the scandal should
come to his ears"--

"So much the better that the hesitation should come from me.  But
if you think it better, I can sit down here and write to him at
once declining the offer."  She moved towards the desk.

"No! No!  I did not mean that," said Harcourt quickly.  "I only
thought that if he did hear anything it might be said that he had
backed out."

"His sister knows of his offer, and though she don't like it nor
me, she will not deny the fact.  By the way, you remember when she
was lost that day on the road to San Mateo?"

"Yes."

"Well, she was with your son, John Milton, all the time, and they
lunched together at Crystal Spring.  It came out quite accidentally
through the hotel-keeper."

Harcourt's brow darkened.  "Did she know him before?"

"I can't say; but she does now."

Harcourt's face was heavy with distrust.  "Taking Shipley's offer
and these scandals into consideration, I don't like the look of
this, Clementina."

"I do," said the girl simply.

Harcourt gazed at her keenly and with the shadow of distrust still
upon him.  It seemed to be quite impossible, even with what he knew
of her calmly cold nature, that she should be equally uninfluenced
by Grant or Shipley.  Had she some steadfast, lofty ideal, or
perhaps some already absorbing passion of which he knew nothing?
She was not a girl to betray it--they would only know it when it
was too late.  Could it be possible that there was still something
between her and 'Lige that he knew nothing of?  The thought struck
a chill to his breast.  She was walking towards the door, when he
recalled himself with an effort.

"If you think it advisable to see Fletcher, you might run down to
San Jose for a day or two with your mother, and call on the Ramirez.
They may know him or somebody who does.  Of course if YOU meet him
and casually invite him it would be different."

"It's a good idea," she said quickly.  "I'll do it, and speak to
mother now."

He was struck by the change in her face and voice; they had both
nervously lightened, as oddly and distinctly as they had before
seemed to grow suddenly harsh and aggressive.  She passed out of
the room with girlish brusqueness, leaving him alone with a new and
vague fear in his consciousness.


A few hours later Clementina was standing before the window of the
drawing-room that overlooked the outskirts of the town.  The
moonlight was flooding the vast bluish Tasajara levels with a faint
lustre, as if the waters of the creek had once more returned to
them.  In the shadow of the curtain beside her Grant was facing her
with anxious eyes.

"Then I must take this as your final answer, Clementina?"

"You must.  And had I known of these calumnies before, had you been
frank with me even the day we went to San Mateo, my answer would
have been as final then, and you might have been spared any further
suspense.  I am not blaming you, Mr. Grant; I am willing to believe
that you thought it best to conceal this from me,--even at that
time when you had just pledged yourself to find out its truth or
falsehood,--yet my answer would have been the same.  So long as
this stain rests on my father's name I shall never allow that name
to be coupled with yours in marriage or engagement; nor will my
pride or yours allow us to carry on a simple friendship after this.
I thank you for your offer of assistance, but I cannot even accept
that which might to others seem to allow some contingent claim.  I
would rather believe that when you proposed this inquiry and my
father permitted it, you both knew that it put an end to any other
relations between us."

"But, Clementina, you are wrong, believe me!  Say that I have been
foolish, indiscreet, mad,--still the few who knew that I made these
inquiries on your father's behalf know nothing of my hopes of YOU!"

"But I do, and that is enough for me."

Even in the hopeless preoccupation of his passion he suddenly
looked at her with something of his old critical scrutiny.  But she
stood there calm, concentrated, self-possessed and upright.  Yes!
it was possible that the pride of this Southwestern shopkeepers
daughter was greater than his own.

"Then you banish me, Clementina?"

"It is we whom YOU have banished."

"Good-night."

"Good-by."

He bent for an instant over her cold hand, and then passed out into
the hall.  She remained listening until the front door closed
behind him.  Then she ran swiftly through the hall and up the
staircase, with an alacrity that seemed impossible to the stately
goddess of a moment before.  When she had reached her bedroom and
closed the door, so exuberant still and so uncontrollable was her
levity and action, that without going round the bed which stood
before her in the centre of the room, she placed her two hands upon
it and lightly vaulted sideways across it to reach the window.
There she watched the figure of Grant crossing the moonlit square.
Then turning back into the half-lit room, she ran to the small
dressing-glass placed at an angle on a toilet table against the
wall.  With her palms grasping her knees she stooped down suddenly
and contemplated the mirror.  It showed what no one but Clementina
had ever seen,--and she herself only at rare intervals,--the
laughing eyes and soul of a self-satisfied, material-minded,
ordinary country-girl!


CHAPTER X.


But Mr. Lawrence Grant's character in certain circumstances would
seem to have as startling and inexplicable contradictions as
Clementina Harcourt's, and three days later he halted his horse at
the entrance of Los Gatos Rancho.  The Home of the Cats--so called
from the catamounts which infested the locality--which had for over
a century lazily basked before one of the hottest canyons in the
Coast Range, had lately been stirred into some activity by the
American, Don Diego Fletcher, who had bought it, put up a saw-mill,
and deforested the canyon.  Still there remained enough suggestion
of a feline haunt about it to make Grant feel as if he had tracked
hither some stealthy enemy, in spite of the peaceful intimation
conveyed by the sign on a rough boarded shed at the wayside, that
the "Los Gatos Land and Lumber Company" held their office there.

A cigarette-smoking peon lounged before the door.  Yes; Don Diego
was there, but as he had arrived from Santa Clara only last night
and was going to Colonel Ramirez that afternoon, he was engaged.
Unless the business was important--but the cool, determined manner
of Grant, even more than his words, signified that it WAS
important, and the servant led the way to Don Diego's presence.

There certainly was nothing in the appearance of this sylvan
proprietor and newspaper capitalist to justify Grant's suspicion of
a surreptitious foe.  A handsome man scarcely older than himself,
in spite of a wavy mass of perfectly white hair which contrasted
singularly with his brown mustache and dark sunburned face.  So
disguising was the effect of these contradictions, that he not only
looked unlike anybody else, but even his nationality seemed to be a
matter of doubt.  Only his eyes, light blue and intelligent, which
had a singular expression of gentleness and worry, appeared
individual to the man.  His manner was cultivated and easy.  He
motioned his visitor courteously to a chair.

"I was referred to you," said Grant, almost abruptly, "as the
person responsible for a series of slanderous attacks against Mr.
Daniel Harcourt in the 'Clarion,' of which paper I believe you are
the proprietor.  I was told that you declined to give the authority
for your action, unless you were forced to by legal proceedings."

Fletcher's sensitive blue eyes rested upon Grant's with an
expression of constrained pain and pity.  "I heard of your
inquiries, Mr. Grant; you were making them on behalf of this Mr.
Harcourt or Harkutt"--he made the distinction with intentional
deliberation--"with a view, I believe, to some arbitration.  The
case was stated to you fairly, I think; I believe I have nothing to
add to it."

"That was your answer to the ambassador of Mr. Harcourt," said
Grant, coldly, "and as such I delivered it to him; but I am here
to-day to speak on my own account."

What could be seen of Mr. Fletcher's lips appeared to curl in an
odd smile.  "Indeed, I thought it was--or would be--all in the
family."

Grant's face grew more stern, and his gray eyes glittered.  "You'll
find my status in this matter so far independent that I don't
propose, like Mr. Harcourt, either to begin a suit or to rest
quietly under the calumny.  Briefly, Mr. Fletcher, as you or your
informant knows, I was the surveyor who revealed to Mr. Harcourt
the value of the land to which he claimed a title from your man,
this Elijah or 'Lige Curtis as you call him,"--he could not resist
this imitation of his adversary's supercilious affectation of
precise nomenclature,--"and it was upon my representation of its
value as an investment that he began the improvements which have
made him wealthy.  If this title was fraudulently obtained, all the
facts pertaining to it are sufficiently related to connect me with
the conspiracy."

"Are you not a little hasty in your presumption, Mr. Grant?" said
Fletcher, with unfeigned surprise.

"That is for ME to judge, Mr. Fletcher," returned Grant, haughtily.

"But the name of Professor Grant is known to all California as
beyond the breath of calumny or suspicion."

"It is because of that fact that I propose to keep it so."

"And may I ask in what way you wish me to assist you in so doing?"

"By promptly and publicly retracting in the 'Clarion' every word of
this slander against Harcourt."

Fletcher looked steadfastly at the speaker.  "And if I decline?"

"I think you have been long enough in California, Mr. Fletcher, to
know the alternative expected of a gentleman," said Grant, coldly.

Mr. Fletcher kept his gentle blue eyes--in which surprise still
overbalanced their expression of pained concern--on Grant's face.

"But is not this more in the style of Colonel Starbottle than
Professor Grant?" he asked, with a faint smile.

Grant rose instantly with a white face.  "You will have a better
opportunity of judging," he said, "when Colonel Starbottle has the
honor of waiting upon you from me.  Meantime, I thank you for
reminding me of the indiscretion into which my folly, in still
believing that this thing could be settled amicably, has led me."

He bowed coldly and withdrew.  Nevertheless, as he mounted his
horse and rode away, he felt his cheeks burning.  Yet he had acted
upon calm consideration; he knew that to the ordinary Californian
experience there was nothing quixotic nor exaggerated in the
attitude he had taken.  Men had quarreled and fought on less
grounds; he had even half convinced himself that he HAD been
insulted, and that his own professional reputation demanded the
withdrawal of the attack on Harcourt on purely business grounds;
but he was not satisfied of the personal responsibility of Fletcher
nor of his gratuitous malignity.  Nor did the man look like a tool
in the hands of some unscrupulous and hidden enemy.  However, he
had played his card.  If he succeeded only in provoking a duel with
Fletcher, he at least would divert the public attention from
Harcourt to himself.  He knew that his superior position would
throw the lesser victim in the background.  He would make the
sacrifice; that was his duty as a gentleman, even if SHE would not
care to accept it as an earnest of his unselfish love!

He had reached the point where the mountain track entered the Santa
Clara turnpike when his attention was attracted by a handsome but
old-fashioned carriage drawn by four white mules, which passed down
the road before him and turned suddenly off into a private road.
But it was not this picturesque gala equipage of some local Spanish
grandee that brought a thrill to his nerves and a flash to his eye;
it was the unmistakable, tall, elegant figure and handsome profile
of Clementina, reclining in light gauzy wraps against the back
seat!  It was no fanciful resemblance, the outcome of his reverie,--
there never was any one like her!--it WAS she herself!  But what
was she doing here?

A vaquero cantered from the cross road where the dust of the
vehicle still hung.  Grant hailed him.  Ah! it was a fine carroza
de cuatro mulas that he had just passed!  Si, Senor, truly; it was
of Don Jose Ramirez, who lived just under the hill.  It was
bringing company to the casa.

Ramirez!  That was where Fletcher was going!  Had Clementina known
that he was one of Fletcher's friends?  Might she not be exposed to
unpleasantness, marked coolness, or even insult in that unexpected
meeting?  Ought she not to be warned or prepared for it?  She had
banished Grant from her presence until this stain was removed from
her father's name, but could she blame him for trying to save her
from contact with her father's slanderer?  No!  He turned his horse
abruptly into the cross road and spurred forward in the direction
of the casa.

It was quite visible now--a low-walled, quadrangular mass of
whitewashed adobe lying like a drift on the green hillside.  The
carriage and four had far preceded him, and was already half up the
winding road towards the house.  Later he saw them reach the
courtyard and disappear within.  He would be quite in time to speak
with her before she retired to change her dress.  He would simply
say that while making a professional visit to Los Gatos Land
Company office he had become aware of Fletcher's connection with
it, and accidentally of his intended visit to Ramirez.  His chance
meeting with the carriage on the highway had determined his course.

As he rode into the courtyard he observed that it was also approached
by another road, evidently nearer Los Gatos, and probably the older
and shorter communication between the two ranchos.  The fact was
significantly demonstrated a moment later. He had given his horse
to a servant, sent in his card to Clementina, and had dropped
listlessly on one of the benches of the gallery surrounding the
patio, when a horseman rode briskly into the opposite gateway, and
dismounted with a familiar air.  A waiting peon who recognized him
informed him that the Dona was engaged with a visitor, but that they
were both returning to the gallery for chocolate in a moment.  The
stranger was the man he had left only an hour before--Don Diego
Fletcher!

In an instant the idiotic fatuity of his position struck him fully.
His only excuse for following Clementina had been to warn her of
the coming of this man who had just entered, and who would now meet
her as quickly as himself.  For a brief moment the idea of quietly
slipping out to the corral, mounting his horse again, and flying
from the rancho, crossed his mind; but the thought that he would be
running away from the man he had just challenged, and perhaps some
new hostility that had sprung up in his heart against him,
compelled him to remain.  The eyes of both men met; Fletcher's in
half-wondering annoyance, Grant's in ill-concealed antagonism.
What they would have said is not known, for at that moment the
voices of Clementina and Mrs. Ramirez were heard in the passage,
and they both entered the gallery.  The two men were standing
together; it was impossible to see one without the other.

And yet Grant, whose eyes were instantly directed to Clementina,
thought that she had noted neither.  She remained for an instant
standing in the doorway in the same self-possessed, coldly graceful
pose he remembered she had taken on the platform at Tasajara.  Her
eyelids were slightly downcast, as if she had been arrested by some
sudden thought or some shy maiden sensitiveness; in her hesitation
Mrs. Ramirez passed impatiently before her.

"Mother of God!" said that lively lady, regarding the two
speechless men, "is it an indiscretion we are making here--or are
you dumb?  You, Don Diego, are loud enough when you and Don Jose
are together; at least introduce your friend."

Grant quickly recovered himself.  "I am afraid," he said, coming
forward, "unless Miss Harcourt does, that I am a mere trespasser in
your house, Senora.  I saw her pass in your carriage a few moments
ago, and having a message for her I ventured to follow her here."

"It is Mr. Grant, a friend of my father's," said Clementina,
smiling with equanimity, as if just awakening from a momentary
abstraction, yet apparently unconscious of Grant's imploring eyes;
"but the other gentleman I have not the pleasure of knowing."

"Ah!  Don Diego Fletcher, a countryman of yours; and yet I think he
knows you not."

Clementina's face betrayed no indication of the presence of her
father's foe, and yet Grant knew that she must have recognized his
name, as she looked towards Fletcher with perfect self-possession.
He was too much engaged in watching her to take note of Fletcher's
manifest disturbance, or the evident effort with which he at last
bowed to her.  That this unexpected double meeting with the
daughter of the man he had wronged, and the man who had espoused
the quarrel, should be confounding to him appeared only natural.
But he was unprepared to understand the feverish alacrity with
which he accepted Dona Maria's invitation to chocolate, or the
equally animated way in which Clementina threw herself into her
hostess's Spanish levity.  He knew it was an awkward situation,
that must be surmounted without a scene; he was quite prepared in
the presence of Clementina to be civil to Fletcher; but it was odd
that in this feverish exchange of courtesies and compliments HE,
Grant, should feel the greater awkwardness and be the most ill at
ease.  He sat down and took his part in the conversation; he let it
transpire for Clementina's benefit that he had been to Los Gatos
only on business, yet there was no opportunity for even a
significant glance, and he had the added embarrassment of seeing
that she exhibited no surprise nor seemed to attach the least
importance to his inopportune visit.  In a miserable indecision he
allowed himself to be carried away by the high-flown hospitality of
his Spanish hostess, and consented to stay to an early dinner.  It
was part of the infelicity of circumstance that the voluble Dona
Maria--electing him as the distinguished stranger above the
resident Fletcher--monopolized him and attached him to her side.
She would do the honors of her house; she must show him the ruins
of the old Mission beside the corral; Don Diego and Clementina
would join them presently in the garden.  He cast a despairing
glance at the placidly smiling Clementina, who was apparently
equally indifferent to the evident constraint and assumed ease of
the man beside her, and turned away with Mrs. Ramirez.

A silence fell upon the gallery so deep that the receding voices
and footsteps of Grant and his hostess in the long passage were
distinctly heard until they reached the end.  Then Fletcher arose
with an inarticulate exclamation.  Clementina instantly put her
finger to her lips, glanced around the gallery, extended her hand
to him, and saying "Come," half-led, half-dragged him into the
passage.  To the right she turned and pushed open the door of a
small room that seemed a combination of boudoir and oratory, lit by
a French window opening to the garden, and flanked by a large black
and white crucifix with a prie Dieu beneath it.  Closing the door
behind them she turned and faced her companion.  But it was no
longer the face of the woman who had been sitting in the gallery;
it was the face that had looked back at her from the mirror at
Tasajara the night that Grant had left her--eager, flushed,
material with commonplace excitement!

"'Lige Curtis," she said.

"Yes," he answered passionately, "Lige Curtis, whom you thought
dead!  'Lige Curtis, whom you once pitied, condoled with and
despised!  'Lige Curtis, whose lands and property have enriched
you!  'Lige Curtis, who would have shared it with you freely at the
time, but whom your father juggled and defrauded of it!  'Lige
Curtis, branded by him as a drunken outcast and suicide!  'Lige
Curtis"--

"Hush!"  She clapped her little hand over his mouth with a quick
but awkward schoolgirl gesture, inconceivable to any who had known
her usual languid elegance of motion, and held it there.  He
struggled angrily, impatiently, reproachfully, and then, with a
sudden characteristic weakness that seemed as much of a revelation
as her once hoydenish manner, kissed it, when she let it drop.
Then placing both her hands still girlishly on her slim waist and
curtseying grotesquely before him, she said: "'Lige Curtis!  Oh,
yes!  'Lige Curtis, who swore to do everything for me!  'Lige
Curtis, who promised to give up liquor for me,--who was to leave
Tasajara for me!  'Lige Curtis, who was to reform, and keep his
land as a nest-egg for us both in the future, and then who sold it--
and himself--and me--to dad for a glass of whiskey!  'Lige Curtis,
who disappeared, and then let us think he was dead, only that he
might attack us out of the ambush of his grave!"

"Yes, but think what I have suffered all these years; not for the
cursed land--you know I never cared for that--but for YOU,--you,
Clementina,--YOU rich, admired by every one; idolized, held far
above me,--ME, the forgotten outcast, the wretched suicide--and yet
the man to whom you had once plighted your troth.  Which of those
greedy fortune-hunters whom my money--my life-blood as you might
have thought it was--attracted to you, did you care to tell that
you had ever slipped out of the little garden gate at Sidon to meet
that outcast!  Do you wonder that as the years passed and YOU were
happy, I did not choose to be so forgotten?  Do you wonder that
when YOU shut the door on the past I managed to open it again--if
only a little way--that its light might startle you?"

Yet she did not seem startled or disturbed, and remained only
looking at him critically.

"You say that you have suffered," she replied with a smile.  "You
don't look it!  Your hair is white, but it is becoming to you, and
you are a handsomer man, 'Lige Curtis, than you were when I first
met you; you are finer," she went on, still regarding him,
"stronger and healthier than you were five years ago; you are rich
and prosperous, you have everything to make you happy, but"--here
she laughed a little, held out both her hands, taking his and
holding his arms apart in a rustic, homely fashion--"but you are
still the same old 'Lige Curtis!  It was like you to go off and
hide yourself in that idiotic way; it was like you to let the
property slide in that stupid, unselfish fashion; it was like you
to get real mad, and say all those mean, silly things to dad, that
didn't hurt him--in your regular looney style; for rich or poor,
drunk or sober, ragged or elegant, plain or handsome,--you're
always the same 'Lige Curtis!"

In proportion as that material, practical, rustic self--which
nobody but 'Lige Curtis had ever seen--came back to her, so in
proportion the irresolute, wavering, weak and emotional vagabond of
Sidon came out to meet it.  He looked at her with a vague smile;
his five years of childish resentment, albeit carried on the
shoulders of a man mentally and morally her superior, melted away.
He drew her towards him, yet at the same moment a quick suspicion
returned.

"Well, and what are you doing here?  Has this man who has followed
you any right, any claim upon you?"

"None but what you in your folly have forced upon him!  You have
made him father's ally.  I don't know why he came here.  I only
know why I did--to find YOU!"

"You suspected then?"

"I KNEW!  Hush!"

The returning voices of Grant and of Mrs. Ramirez were heard in the
courtyard.  Clementina made a warning yet girlishly mirthful
gesture, again caught his hand, drew him quickly to the French
window, and slipped through it with him into the garden, where they
were quickly lost in the shadows of a ceanothus hedge.

"They have probably met Don Jose in the orchard, and as he and Don
Diego have business together, Dona Clementina has without doubt
gone to her room and left them.  For you are not very entertaining
to the ladies to-day,--you two caballeros!  You have much politics
together, eh?--or you have discussed and disagreed, eh?  I will
look for the Senorita, and let you go, Don Distraido!"

It is to be feared that Grant's apologies and attempts to detain
her were equally feeble,--as it seemed to him that this was the
only chance he might have of seeing Clementina except in company
with Fletcher.  As Mrs. Ramirez left he lit a cigarette and
listlessly walked up and down the gallery.  But Clementina did not
come, neither did his hostess return.  A subdued step in the
passage raised his hopes,--it was only the grizzled major domo, to
show him his room that he might prepare for dinner.

He followed mechanically down the long passage to a second
corridor.  There was a chance that he might meet Clementina, but he
reached his room without encountering any one.  It was a large
vaulted apartment with a single window, a deep embrasure in the
thick wall that seemed to focus like a telescope some forgotten,
sequestered part of the leafy garden.  While washing his hands,
gazing absently at the green vignette framed by the dark opening,
his attention was drawn to a movement of the foliage, stirred
apparently by the rapid passage of two half-hidden figures.  The
quick flash of a feminine skirt seemed to indicate the coy flight
of some romping maid of the casa, and the pursuit and struggle of
her vaquero swain.  To a despairing lover even the spectacle of
innocent, pastoral happiness in others is not apt to be soothing,
and Grant was turning impatiently away when he suddenly stopped
with a rigid face and quickly approached the window.  In her
struggles with the unseen Corydon, the clustering leaves seemed to
have yielded at the same moment with the coy Chloris, and parting--
disclosed a stolen kiss!  Grant's hand lay like ice against the
wall.  For, disengaging Fletcher's arm from her waist and freeing
her skirt from the foliage, it was the calm, passionless Clementina
herself who stepped out, and moved pensively towards the casa.


CHAPTER XI.


"Readers of the 'Clarion' will have noticed that allusion has been
frequently made in these columns to certain rumors concerning the
early history of Tasajara which were supposed to affect the pioneer
record of Daniel Harcourt.  It was deemed by the conductors of this
journal to be only consistent with the fearless and independent
duty undertaken by the 'Clarion' that these rumors should be fully
chronicled as part of the information required by the readers of a
first-class newspaper, unbiased by any consideration of the social
position of the parties, but simply as a matter of news.  For this
the 'Clarion' does not deem it necessary to utter a word of
apology.  But for that editorial comment or attitude which the
proprietors felt was justified by the reliable sources of their
information they now consider it only due in honor to themselves,
their readers, and Mr. Harcourt to fully and freely apologize.  A
patient and laborious investigation enables them to state that the
alleged facts published by the 'Clarion' and copied by other
journals are utterly unsupported by testimony, and the charges--
although more or less vague--which were based upon them are equally
untenable.  We are now satisfied that one 'Elijah Curtis,' a former
pioneer of Tasajara who disappeared five years ago, and was
supposed to be drowned, has not only made no claim to the Tasajara
property, as alleged, but has given no sign of his equally alleged
resuscitation and present existence, and that on the minutest
investigation there appears nothing either in his disappearance, or
the transfer of his property to Daniel Harcourt, that could in any
way disturb the uncontested title to Tasajara or the unimpeachable
character of its present owner.  The whole story now seems to have
been the outcome of one of those stupid rural hoaxes too common in
California."


"Well," said Mrs. Ashwood, laying aside the 'Clarion' with a
skeptical shrug of her pretty shoulders, as she glanced up at her
brother; "I suppose this means that you are going to propose again
to the young lady?"

"I have," said Jack Shipley, "that's the worst of it--and got my
answer before this came out."

"Jack!" said Mrs. Ashwood, thoroughly surprised.

"Yes!  You see, Conny, as I told you three weeks ago, she said she
wanted time to consider,--that she scarcely knew me, and all that!
Well, I thought it wasn't exactly a gentleman's business to seem to
stand off after that last attack on her father, and so, last week,
I went down to San Jose, where she was staying, and begged her not
to keep me in suspense.  And, by Jove! she froze me with a look,
and said that with these aspersions on her father's character, she
preferred not to be under obligations to any one."

"And you believed her?"

"Oh, hang it all!  Look here, Conny,--I wish you'd just try for
once to find out some good in that family, besides what that
sentimental young widower John Milton may have.  You seem to think
because they've quarreled with HIM there isn't a virtue left among
them."

Far from seeming to offer any suggestion of feminine retaliation,
Mrs. Ashwood smiled sweetly.  "My dear Jack, I have no desire to
keep you from trying your luck again with Miss Clementina, if
that's what you mean, and indeed I shouldn't be surprised if a
family who felt a mesalliance as sensitively as the Harcourts felt
that affair of their son's, would be as keenly alive to the
advantages of a good match for their daughter.  As to young Mr.
Harcourt, he never talked to me of the vices of his family, nor has
he lately troubled me much with the presence of his own virtues.
I haven't heard from him since we came here."

"I suppose he is satisfied with the government berth you got for
him," returned her brother dryly.

"He was very grateful to Senator Flynn, who appreciates his
talents, but who offered it to him as a mere question of fitness,"
replied Mrs. Ashwood with great precision of statement.  "But you
don't seem to know he declined it on account of his other work."

"Preferred his old Bohemian ways, eh?  You can't change those
fellows, Conny.  They can't get over the fascinations of
vagabondage.  Sorry your lady-patroness scheme didn't work.  Pity
you couldn't have promoted him in the line of his profession, as
the Grand Duchess of Girolstein did Fritz."

"For Heaven's sake, Jack, go to Clementina!  You may not be
successful, but there at least the perfect gentlemanliness and
good taste of your illustrations will not be thrown away."

"I think of going to San Francisco tomorrow, anyway," returned Jack
with affected carelessness.  "I'm getting rather bored with this
wild seaside watering place and its glitter of ocean and hopeless
background of mountain.  It's nothing to me that 'there's no land
nearer than Japan' out there.  It may be very healthful to the
tissues, but it's weariness to the spirit, and I don't see why we
can't wait at San Francisco till the rains send us further south,
as well as here."

He had walked to the balcony of their sitting-room in the little
seaside hotel where this conversation took place, and gazed
discontentedly over the curving bay and sandy shore before him.
After a slight pause Mrs. Ashwood stepped out beside him.

"Very likely I may go with you," she said, with a perceptible tone
of weariness.  "We will see after the post arrives."

"By the way, there is a little package for you in my room, that
came this morning.  I brought it up, but forgot to give it to you.
You'll find it on my table."

Mrs. Ashwood abstractedly turned away and entered her brother's
room from the same balcony.  The forgotten parcel, which looked
like a roll of manuscript, was lying on his dressing-table.  She
gazed attentively at the handwriting on the wrapper and then gave a
quick glance around her.  A sudden and subtle change came over her.
She neither flushed nor paled, nor did the delicate lines of
expression in her face quiver or change.  But as she held the
parcel in her hand her whole being seemed to undergo some exquisite
suffusion.  As the medicines which the Arabian physician had
concealed in the hollow handle of the mallet permeated the languid
royal blood of Persia, so some volatile balm of youth seemed to
flow in upon her with the contact of that strange missive and
transform her weary spirit.

"Jack!" she called, in a high clear voice.  But Jack had already
gone from the balcony when she reached it with an elastic step and
a quick youthful swirl and rustling of her skirt.  He was lighting
his cigar in the garden.

"Jack," she said, leaning half over the railing, "come back here in
an hour and we'll talk over that matter of yours again."

Jack looked up eagerly and as if he might even come up then, but
she added quickly, "In about an hour--I must think it over," and
withdrew.

She re-entered the sitting-room, shut the door carefully and locked
it, half pulled down the blind, walking once or twice around the
table on which the parcel lay, with one eye on it like a graceful
cat.  Then she suddenly sat down, took it up with a grave practical
face, examined the postmark curiously, and opened it with severe
deliberation.  It contained a manuscript and a letter of four
closely written pages.  She glanced at the manuscript with bright
approving eyes, ran her fingers through its leaves and then laid it
carefully and somewhat ostentatiously on the table beside her.
Then, still holding the letter in her hand, she rose and glanced
out of the window at her bored brother lounging towards the beach
and at the heaving billows beyond, and returned to her seat.  This
apparently important preliminary concluded, she began to read.

There were, as already stated, four blessed pages of it!  All
vital, earnest, palpitating with youthful energy, preposterous in
premises, precipitate in conclusions,--yet irresistible and
convincing to every woman in their illogical sincerity.  There was
not a word of love in it, yet every page breathed a wholesome
adoration; there was not an epithet or expression that a greater
prude than Mrs. Ashwood would have objected to, yet every sentence
seemed to end in a caress.  There was not a line of poetry in it,
and scarcely a figure or simile, and yet it was poetical.  Boyishly
egotistic as it was in attitude, it seemed to be written less OF
himself than TO her; in its delicate because unconscious flattery,
it made her at once the provocation and excuse.  And yet so potent
was its individuality that it required no signature.  No one but
John Milton Harcourt could have written it.  His personality stood
out of it so strongly that once or twice Mrs. Ashwood almost
unconsciously put up her little hand before her face with a half
mischievous, half-deprecating smile, as if the big honest eyes of
its writer were upon her.

It began by an elaborate apology for declining the appointment
offered him by one of her friends, which he was bold enough to
think had been prompted by her kind heart.  That was like her, but
yet what she might do to any one; and he preferred to think of her
as the sweet and gentle lady who had recognized his merit without
knowing him, rather than the powerful and gracious benefactress who
wanted to reward him when she did know him.  The crown that she had
all unconsciously placed upon his head that afternoon at the little
hotel at Crystal Spring was more to him than the Senator's
appointment; perhaps he was selfish, but he could not bear that she
who had given so much should believe that he could accept a lesser
gift.  All this and much more!  Some of it he had wanted to say to
her in San Francisco at times when they had met, but he could not
find the words.  But she had given him the courage to go on and do
the only thing he was fit for, and he had resolved to stick to
that, and perhaps do something once more that might make him hear
again her voice as he had heard it that day, and again see the
light that had shone in her eyes as she sat there and read.  And
this was why he was sending her a manuscript.  She might have
forgotten that she had told him a strange story of her cousin who
had disappeared--which she thought he might at some time work up.
Here it was.  Perhaps she might not recognize it again, in the way
he had written it here; perhaps she did not really mean it when she
had given him permission to use it, but he remembered her truthful
eyes and believed her--and in any event it was hers to do with what
she liked.  It had been a great pleasure for him to write it and
think that she would see it; it was like seeing her himself--that
was in HIS BETTER SELF--more worthy the companionship of a
beautiful and noble woman than the poor young man she would have
helped.  This was why he had not called the week before she went
away.  But for all that, she had made his life less lonely, and he
should be ever grateful to her.  He could never forget how she
unconsciously sympathized with him that day over the loss that had
blighted his life forever,--yet even then he did not know that she,
herself, had passed through the same suffering.  But just here the
stricken widow of thirty, after a vain attempt to keep up the
knitted gravity of her eyebrows, bowed her dimpling face over the
letter of the blighted widower of twenty, and laughed so long and
silently that the tears stood out like dew on her light-brown
eyelashes.

But she became presently severe again, and finished her reading of
the letter gravely.  Then she folded it carefully, deposited it in
a box on her table, which she locked.  After a few minutes,
however, she unlocked the box again and transferred the letter to
her pocket.  The serenity of her features did not relax again,
although her previous pretty prepossession of youthful spirit was
still indicated in her movements.  Going into her bedroom, she
reappeared in a few minutes with a light cloak thrown over her
shoulders and a white-trimmed broad-brimmed hat.  Then she rolled
up the manuscript in a paper, and called her French maid.  As she
stood there awaiting her with the roll in her hand, she might have
been some young girl on her way to her music lesson.

"If my brother returns before I do, tell him to wait."

"Madame is going"--

"Out," said Mrs. Ashwood blithely, and tripped downstairs.

She made her way directly to the shore where she remembered there
was a group of rocks affording a shelter from the northwest trade
winds.  It was reached at low water by a narrow ridge of sand, and
here she had often basked in the sun with her book.  It was here
that she now unrolled John Milton's manuscript and read.

It was the story she had told him, but interpreted by his poetry
and adorned by his fancy until the facts as she remembered them
seemed to be no longer hers, or indeed truths at all.  She had
always believed her cousin's unhappy temperament to have been the
result of a moral and physical idiosyncrasy,--she found it here to
be the effect of a lifelong and hopeless passion for herself!  The
ingenious John Milton had given a poet's precocity to the youth
whom she had only known as a suspicious, moody boy, had idealized
him as a sensitive but songless Byron, had given him the added
infirmity of pulmonary weakness, and a handkerchief that in moments
of great excitement, after having been hurriedly pressed to his
pale lips, was withdrawn "with a crimson stain."  Opposed to this
interesting figure--the more striking to her as she had been
hitherto haunted by the impression that her cousin during his
boyhood had been subject to facial eruption and boils--was her own
equally idealized self.  Cruelly kind to her cousin and gentle with
his weaknesses while calmly ignoring their cause, leading him
unconsciously step by step in his fatal passion, he only became
aware by accident that she nourished an ideal hero in the person of
a hard, proud, middle-aged practical man of the world,--her future
husband!  At this picture of the late Mr. Ashwood, who had really
been an indistinctive social bon vivant, his amiable relict grew
somewhat hysterical.  The discovery of her real feelings drove the
consumptive cousin into a secret, self-imposed exile on the shores
of the Pacific, where he hoped to find a grave.  But the complete
and sudden change of life and scene, the balm of the wild woods and
the wholesome barbarism of nature, wrought a magical change in his
physical health and a philosophical rest in his mind.  He married
the daughter of an Indian chief.  Years passed, the heroine--a rich
and still young and beautiful widow--unwittingly sought the same
medicinal solitude.  Here in the depth of the forest she encountered
her former playmate; the passion which he had fondly supposed was
dead revived in her presence, and for the first time she learned
from his bearded lips the secret of his passion.  Alas! not SHE
alone!  The contiguous forest could not be bolted out, and the
Indian wife heard all.  Recognizing the situation with aboriginal
directness of purpose, she committed suicide in the fond belief that
it would reunite the survivors.  But in vain; the cousins parted on
the spot to meet no more.

Even Mrs. Ashwood's predilection for the youthful writer could not
overlook the fact that the denouement was by no means novel nor the
situation human, but yet it was here that she was most interested
and fascinated.  The description of the forest was a description
of the wood where she had first met Harcourt; the charm of it
returned, until she almost seemed to again inhale its balsamic
freshness in the pages before her.  Now, as then, her youth came
back with the same longing and regret.  But more bewildering than
all, it was herself that moved there, painted with the loving hand
of the narrator.  For the first time she experienced the delicious
flattery of seeing herself as only a lover could see her.  The
smallest detail of her costume was suggested with an accuracy that
pleasantly thrilled her feminine sense.  The grace of her figure
slowly moving through the shadow, the curves of her arm and the
delicacy of her hand that held the bridle rein, the gentle glow of
her softly rounded cheek, the sweet mystery of her veiled eyes and
forehead, and the escaping gold of her lovely hair beneath her hat
were all in turn masterfully touched or tenderly suggested.  And
when to this was added the faint perfume of her nearer presence--
the scent she always used--the delicate revelations of her
withdrawn gauntlet, the bracelet clasping her white wrist, and at
last the thrilling contact of her soft hand on his arm,--she put
down the manuscript and blushed like a very girl.  Then she
started.

A shout!--HIS voice surely!--and the sound of oars in their
rowlocks.

An instant revulsion of feeling overtook her.  With a quick
movement she instantly hid the manuscript beneath her cloak and
stood up erect and indignant.  Not twenty yards away, apparently
advancing from the opposite shore of the bay, was a boat.  It
contained only John Milton, resting on his oars and scanning the
group of rocks anxiously.  His face, which was quite strained with
anxiety, suddenly flushed when he saw her, and then recognizing the
unmistakable significance of her look and attitude, paled once
more.  He bent over his oars again; a few strokes brought him close
to the rock.

"I beg your pardon," he said hesitatingly, as he turned towards her
and laid aside his oars, "but--I thought--you were--in danger."

She glanced quickly round her.  She had forgotten the tide!  The
ledge between her and the shore was already a foot under brown sea-
water.  Yet if she had not thought that it would look ridiculous,
she would have leaped down even then and waded ashore.

"It's nothing," she said coldly, with the air of one to whom the
situation was an everyday occurrence; "it's only a few steps and a
slight wetting--and my brother would have been here in a moment
more."

John Milton's frank eyes made no secret of his mortification.  "I
ought not to have disturbed you, I know," he said quickly, "I had
no right.  But I was on the other shore opposite and I saw you come
down here--that is"--he blushed prodigiously--"I thought it MIGHT
BE you--and I ventured--I mean--won't you let me row you ashore?"

There seemed to be no reasonable excuse for refusing.  She slipped
quickly into the boat without waiting for his helping hand,
avoiding that contact which only a moment ago she was trying to
recall.

A few strokes brought them ashore.  He continued his explanation
with the hopeless frankness and persistency of youth and
inexperience.  "I only came here the day before yesterday.  I would
not have come, but Mr. Fletcher, who has a cottage on the other
shore, sent for me to offer me my old place on the 'Clarion.'  I
had no idea of intruding upon your privacy by calling here without
permission."

Mrs. Ashwood had resumed her conventional courtesy without however
losing her feminine desire to make her companion pay for the
agitation he had caused her.  "We would have been always pleased to
see you," she said vaguely, "and I hope, as you are here now, you
will come with me to the hotel.  My brother"--

But he still retained his hold of the boat-rope without moving, and
continued, "I saw you yesterday, through the telescope, sitting in
your balcony; and later at night I think it was your shadow I saw
near the blue shaded lamp in the sitting-room by the window,--I
don't mean the RED LAMP that you have in your own room.  I watched
you until you put out the blue lamp and lit the red one.  I tell
you this--because--because--I thought you might be reading a
manuscript I sent you.  At least," he smiled faintly, "I LIKED to
think it so."

In her present mood this struck her only as persistent and somewhat
egotistical.  But she felt herself now on ground where she could
deal firmly with him.

"Oh, yes," she said gravely.  "I got it and thank you very much for
it.  I intended to write to you."

"Don't," he said, looking at her fixedly.  "I can see you don't
like it."

"On the contrary," she said promptly, "I think it beautifully
written, and very ingenious in plot and situation.  Of course it
isn't the story I told you--I didn't expect that, for I'm not a
genius.  The man is not at all like my cousin, you know, and the
woman--well really, to tell the truth, SHE is simply inconceivable!"

"You think so?" he said gravely.  He had been gazing abstractedly
at some shining brown seaweed in the water, and when he raised his
eyes to hers they seemed to have caught its color.

"Think so?  I'm positive!  There's no such a woman; she isn't
HUMAN.  But let us walk to the hotel."

"Thank you, but I must go back now."

"But at least let my brother thank you for taking his place--in
rescuing me.  It was so thoughtful in you to put off at once when
you saw I was surrounded.  I might have been in great danger."

"Please don't make fun of me, Mrs. Ashwood," he said with a faint
return of his boyish smile.  "You know there was no danger.  I have
only interrupted you in a nap or a reverie--and I can see now that
you evidently came here to be alone."

Holding the manuscript more closely hidden under the folds of her
cloak, she smiled enigmatically.  "I think I DID, and it seems that
the tide thought so too, and acted upon it.  But you will come up
to the hotel with me, surely?"

"No, I am going back now."  There was a sudden firmness about the
young fellow which she had never before noticed.  This was
evidently the creature who had married in spite of his family.

"Won't you come back long enough to take your manuscript?  I will
point out the part I refer to, and--we will talk it over."

"There is no necessity.  I wrote to you that you might keep it; it
is yours; it was written for you and none other.  It is quite
enough for me to know that you were good enough to read it.  But
will you do one thing more for me?  Read it again!  If you find
anything in it the second time to change your views--if you find"--

"I will let you know," she said quickly.  "I will write to you as I
intended."

"No, I didn't mean that.  I meant that if you found the woman less
inconceivable and more human, don't write to me, but put your red
lamp in your window instead of the blue one.  I will watch for it
and see it."

"I think I will be able to explain myself much better with simple
pen and ink," she said dryly, " and it will be much more useful to
you."

He lifted his hat gravely, shoved off the boat, leaped into it, and
before she could hold out her hand was twenty feet away.  She
turned and ran quickly up the rocks.  When she reached the hotel,
she could see the boat already half across the bay.

Entering her sitting-room she found that her brother, tired of
waiting for her, had driven out.  Taking the hidden manuscript from
her cloak she tossed it with a slight gesture of impatience on the
table.  Then she summoned the landlord.

"Is there a town across the bay?"

"No! the whole mountain-side belongs to Don Diego Fletcher.  He
lives away back in the coast range at Los Gatos, but he has a
cottage and mill on the beach."

"Don Diego Fletcher--Fletcher!  Is he a Spaniard then?"

"Half and half, I reckon; he's from the lower country, I believe."

"Is he here often?"

"Not much; he has mills at Los Gatos, wheat ranches at Santa Clara,
and owns a newspaper in 'Frisco!  But he's here now.  There were
lights in his house last night, and his cutter lies off the point."

"Could you get a small package and note to him?"

"Certainly; it is only a row across the bay."

"Thank you."

Without removing her hat and cloak she sat down at the table and
began a letter to Don Diego Fletcher.  She begged to inclose to him
a manuscript which she was satisfied, for the interests of its
author, was better in his hands than hers.  It had been given to
her by the author, Mr. J. M. Harcourt, whom she understood was
engaged on Mr. Fletcher's paper, the "Clarion."  In fact, it had
been written at HER suggestion, and from an incident in real life
of which she was cognizant.  She was sorry to say that on account
of some very foolish criticism of her own as to the FACTS, the
talented young author had become so dissatisfied with it as to make
it possible that, if left to himself, this very charming and
beautifully written story would remain unpublished.  As an admirer
of Mr. Harcourt's genius, and a friend of his family, she felt that
such an event would be deplorable, and she therefore begged to
leave it to Mr. Fletcher's delicacy and tact to arrange with the
author for its publication.  She knew that Mr. Fletcher had only to
read it to be convinced of its remarkable literary merit, and she
again would impress upon him the fact that her playful and
thoughtless criticism--which was personal and confidential--was
only based upon the circumstances that the author had really made a
more beautiful and touching story than the poor facts which she had
furnished seemed to warrant.  She had only just learned the
fortunate circumstance that Mr. Fletcher was in the neighborhood of
the hotel where she was staying with her brother.

With the same practical, business-like directness, but perhaps a
certain unbusiness-like haste superadded, she rolled up the
manuscript and dispatched it with the letter.

This done, however, a slight reaction set in, and having taken off
her hat and shawl, she dropped listlessly on a chair by the window,
but as suddenly rose and took a seat in the darker part of the
room.  She felt that she had done right, that highest but most
depressing of human convictions!  It was entirely for his good.
There was no reason why his best interests should suffer for his
folly.  If anybody was to suffer it was she.  But what nonsense was
she thinking!  She would write to him later when she was a little
cooler,--as she had said.  But then he had distinctly told her, and
very rudely too, that he didn't want her to write.  Wanted her to
make SIGNALS to him,--the idiot! and probably was even now watching
her with a telescope.  It was really too preposterous!

The result was that her brother found her on his return in a
somewhat uncertain mood, and, as a counselor, variable and
conflicting in judgment.  If this Clementina, who seemed to have the
family qualities of obstinacy and audacity, really cared for him,
she certainly wouldn't let delicacy stand in the way of letting him
know it--and he was therefore safe to wait a little.  A few moments
later, she languidly declared that she was afraid that she was no
counselor in such matters; really she was getting too old to take
any interest in that sort of thing, and she never had been a
matchmaker!  By the way now, wasn't it odd that this neighbor, that
rich capitalist across the bay, should be called Fletcher, and
"James Fletcher" too, for Diego meant "James" in Spanish.  Exactly
the same name as poor "Cousin Jim" who disappeared.  Did he remember
her old playmate Jim?  But her brother thought something else was a
deuced sight more odd, namely, that this same Don Diego Fletcher was
said to be very sweet on Clementina now, and was always in her
company at the Ramirez.  And that, with this "Clarion" apology on
the top of it, looked infernally queer.

Mrs. Ashwood felt a sudden consternation.  Here had she--Jack's
sister--just been taking Jack's probable rival into confidential
correspondence!  She turned upon Jack sharply:--

"Why didn't you say that before?"

"I did tell you," he said gloomily, "but you didn't listen.  But
what difference does it make to you now?"

"None whatever," said Mrs. Ashwood calmly as she walked out of the
room.

Nevertheless the afternoon passed wearily, and her usual ride into
the upland canyon did not reanimate her.  For reasons known best to
herself she did not take her after-dinner stroll along the shore to
watch the outlying fog.  At a comparatively early hour, while there
was still a roseate glow in the western sky, she appeared with grim
deliberation, and the blue lamp-shade in her hand, and placed it
over the lamp which she lit and stood on her table beside the
window.  This done she sat down and began to write with bright-eyed
but vicious complacency.

"But you don't want that light AND the window, Constance," said
Jack wonderingly.

Mrs. Ashwood could not stand the dreadful twilight.

"But take away your lamp and you'll have light enough from the
sunset," responded Jack.

That was just what she didn't want!  The light from the window was
that horrid vulgar red glow which she hated.  It might be very
romantic and suit lovers like Jack, but as SHE had some work to do,
she wanted the blue shade of the lamp to correct that dreadful
glare.


CHAPTER XII.


John Milton had rowed back without lifting his eyes to Mrs.
Ashwood's receding figure.  He believed that he was right in
declining her invitation, although he had a miserable feeling that
it entailed seeing her for the last time.  With all that he
believed was his previous experience of the affections, he was
still so untutored as to be confused as to his reasons for
declining, or his right to have been shocked and disappointed at
her manner.  It seemed to him sufficiently plain that he had
offended the most perfect woman he had ever known without knowing
more.  The feeling he had for her was none the less powerful
because, in his great simplicity, it was vague and unformulated.
And it was a part of this strange simplicity that in his miserable
loneliness his thoughts turned unconsciously to his dead wife for
sympathy and consolation.  Loo would have understood him!

Mr. Fletcher, who had received him on his arrival with singular
effusiveness and cordiality, had put off their final arrangements
until after dinner, on account of pressing business.  It was
therefore with some surprise that an hour before the time he was
summoned to Fletcher's room.  He was still more surprised to find
him sitting at his desk, from which a number of business papers and
letters had been hurriedly thrust aside to make way for a manuscript.
A single glance at it was enough to show the unhappy John Milton
that it was the one he had sent to Mrs. Ashwood.  The color flashed
to his cheek and he felt a mist before his eyes.  His employer's
face, on the contrary, was quite pale, and his eyes were fixed on
Harcourt with a singular intensity.  His voice too, although under
great control, was hard and strange.

"Read that," he said, handing the young man a letter.

The color again streamed into John Milton's face as he recognized
the hand of Mrs. Ashwood, and remained there while he read it.
When he put it down, however, he raised his frank eyes to
Fletcher's, and said with a certain dignity and manliness: "What
she says is the truth, sir.  But it is I alone who am at fault.
This manuscript is merely MY stupid idea of a very simple story she
was once kind enough to tell me when we were talking of strange
occurrences in real life, which she thought I might some time make
use of in my work.  I tried to embellish it, and failed.  That's
all.  I will take it back,--it was written only for her."

There was such an irresistible truthfulness and sincerity in his
voice and manner, that any idea of complicity with the sender was
dismissed from Fletcher's mind.  As Harcourt, however, extended his
hand for the manuscript Fletcher interfered.

"You forget that you gave it to her, and she has sent it to me.  If
I don't keep it, it can be returned to her only.  Now may I ask who
is this lady who takes such an interest in your literary career?
Have you known her long?  Is she a friend of your family?"

The slight sneer that accompanied his question restored the natural
color to the young man's face, but kindled his eye ominously.

"No," he said briefly.  "I met her accidentally about two months
ago and as accidentally found out that she had taken an interest in
one of the first things I ever wrote for your paper.  She neither
knew you nor me.  It was then that she told me this story; she did
not even then know who I was, though she had met some of my family.
She was very good and has generously tried to help me."

Fletcher's eyes remained fixed upon him.

"But this tells me only WHAT she is, not WHO she is."

"I am afraid you must inquire of her brother, Mr. Shipley," said
Harcourt curtly.

"Shipley?"

"Yes; he is traveling with her for his health, and they are going
south when the rains come.  They are wealthy Philadelphians, I
believe, and--and she is a widow."

Fletcher picked up her note and glanced again at the signature,
"Constance Ashwood."  There was a moment of silence, when he
resumed in quite a different voice: "It's odd I never met them nor
they me."

As he seemed to be waiting for a response, John Milton said simply:
"I suppose it's because they have not been here long, and are
somewhat reserved."

Mr. Fletcher laid aside the manuscript and letter, and took up his
apparently suspended work.

"When you see this Mrs.--Mrs. Ashwood again, you might say"--

"I shall not see her again," interrupted John Milton hastily.

Mr. Fletcher shrugged his shoulders.  "Very well," he said with a
peculiar smile, "I will write to her.  Now, Mr. Harcourt," he
continued with a sudden business brevity, "if you please, we'll
drop this affair and attend to the matter for which I just summoned
you.  Since yesterday an important contract for which I have been
waiting is concluded, and its performance will take me East at
once.  I have made arrangements that you will be left in the
literary charge of the 'Clarion.'  It is only a fitting recompense
that the paper owes to you and your father,--to whom I hope to see
you presently reconciled.  But we won't discuss that now!  As my
affairs take me back to Los Gatos within half an hour, I am sorry I
cannot dispense my hospitality in person,--but you will dine and
sleep here to-night.  Good-by.  As you go out will you please send
up Mr. Jackson to me."  He nodded briefly, seemed to plunge
instantly into his papers again, and John Milton was glad to
withdraw.

The shock he had felt at Mrs. Ashwood's frigid disposition of his
wishes and his manuscript had benumbed him to any enjoyment or
appreciation of the change in his fortune.  He wandered out of the
house and descended to the beach in a dazed, bewildered way, seeing
only the words of her letter to Fletcher before him, and striving
to grasp some other meaning from them than their coldly practical
purport.  Perhaps this was her cruel revenge for his telling her
not to write to him.  Could she not have divined it was only his
fear of what she might say!  And now it was all over!  She had
washed her hands of him with the sending of that manuscript and
letter, and he would pass out of her memory as a foolish, conceited
ingrate,--perhaps a figure as wearily irritating and stupid to her
as the cousin she had known.  He mechanically lifted his eyes to
the distant hotel; the glow was still in the western sky, but the
blue lamp was already shining in the window.  His cheek flushed
quickly, and he turned away as if she could have seen his face.
Yes--she despised him, and THAT was his answer!

When he returned, Mr. Fletcher had gone.  He dragged through a
dinner with Mr. Jackson, Fletcher's secretary, and tried to realize
his good fortune in listening to the subordinate's congratulations.
"But I thought," said Jackson, "you had slipped up on your luck to-
day, when the old man sent for you.  He was quite white, and ready
to rip out about something that had just come in.  I suppose it was
one of those anonymous things against your father,--the old man's
dead set against 'em now."  But John Milton heard him vaguely, and
presently excused himself for a row on the moonlit bay.

The active exertion, with intervals of placid drifting along the
land-locked shore, somewhat soothed him.  The heaving Pacific
beyond was partly hidden in a low creeping fog, but the curving bay
was softly radiant.  The rocks whereon she sat that morning, the
hotel where she was now quietly reading, were outlined in black and
silver.  In this dangerous contiguity it seemed to him that her
presence returned,--not the woman who had met him so coldly; who
had penned those lines; the woman from whom he was now parting
forever, but the blameless ideal he had worshiped from the first,
and which he now felt could never pass out of his life again!  He
recalled their long talks, their rarer rides and walks in the city;
her quick appreciation and ready sympathy; her pretty curiosity and
half-maternal consideration of his foolish youthful past; even the
playful way that she sometimes seemed to make herself younger as if
to better understand him.  Lingering at times in the shadow of the
headland, he fancied he saw the delicate nervous outlines of her
face near his own again; the faint shading of her brown lashes, the
soft intelligence of her gray eyes.  Drifting idly in the placid
moonlight, pulling feverishly across the swell of the channel, or
lying on his oars in the shallows of the rocks, but always following
the curves of the bay, like a bird circling around a lighthouse, it
was far in the night before he at last dragged his boat upon the
sand.  Then he turned to look once more at her distant window.  He
would be away in the morning and he should never see it again!  It
was very late, but the blue light seemed to be still burning
unalterably and inflexibly.

But even as he gazed, a change came over it.  A shadow seemed to
pass before the blind; the blue shade was lifted; for an instant he
could see the colorless star-like point of the light itself show
clearly.  It was over now; she was putting out the lamp.  Suddenly
he held his breath!  A roseate glow gradually suffused the window
like a burning blush; the curtain was drawn aside, and the red
lamp-shade gleamed out surely and steadily into the darkness.

Transfigured and breathless in the moonlight, John Milton gazed on
it.  It seemed to him the dawn of Love!


CHAPTER XIII.


The winter rains had come.  But so plenteously and persistently,
and with such fateful preparation of circumstance, that the long
looked for blessing presently became a wonder, an anxiety, and at
last a slowly widening terror.  Before a month had passed every
mountain, stream, and watercourse, surcharged with the melted snows
of the Sierras, had become a great tributary; every tributary a
great river, until, pouring their great volume into the engorged
channels of the American and Sacramento rivers, they overleaped
their banks and became as one vast inland sea.  Even to a country
already familiar with broad and striking catastrophe, the flood was
a phenomenal one.  For days the sullen overflow lay in the valley
of the Sacramento, enormous, silent, currentless--except where the
surplus waters rolled through Carquinez Straits, San Francisco Bay,
and the Golden Gate, and reappeared as the vanished Sacramento
River, in an outflowing stream of fresh and turbid water fifty
miles at sea.

Across the vast inland expanse, brooded over by a leaden sky, leaden
rain fell, dimpling like shot the sluggish pools of the flood; a
cloudy chaos of fallen trees, drifting barns and outhouses, wagons
and agricultural implements moved over the surface of the waters, or
circled slowly around the outskirts of forests that stood ankle deep
in ooze and the current, which in serried phalanx they resisted
still.  As night fell these forms became still more vague and
chaotic, and were interspersed with the scattered lanterns and
flaming torches of relief-boats, or occasionally the high terraced
gleaming windows of the great steamboats, feeling their way along
the lost channel.  At times the opening of a furnace-door shot broad
bars of light across the sluggish stream and into the branches of
dripping and drift-encumbered trees; at times the looming
smoke-stacks sent out a pent-up breath of sparks that illuminated
the inky chaos for a moment, and then fell as black and dripping
rain.  Or perhaps a hoarse shout from some faintly outlined hulk on
either side brought a quick response from the relief-boats, and the
detaching of a canoe with a blazing pine-knot in its bow into the
outer darkness.

It was late in the afternoon when Lawrence Grant, from the deck of
one of the larger tugs, sighted what had been once the estuary of
Sidon Creek.  The leader of a party of scientific observation and
relief, he had kept a tireless watch of eighteen hours, keenly
noticing the work of devastation, the changes in the channel, the
prospects of abatement, and the danger that still threatened.  He
had passed down the length of the submerged Sacramento valley,
through the Straits of Carquinez, and was now steaming along the
shores of the upper reaches of San Francisco Bay.  Everywhere the
same scene of desolation,--vast stretches of tule land, once broken
up by cultivation and dotted with dwellings, now clearly erased on
that watery chart; long lines of symmetrical perspective, breaking
the monotonous level, showing orchards buried in the flood; Indian
mounds and natural eminences covered with cattle or hastily erected
camps; half submerged houses, whose solitary chimneys, however,
still gave signs of an undaunted life within; isolated groups of
trees, with their lower branches heavy with the unwholesome fruit
of the flood, in wisps of hay and straw, rakes and pitchforks, or
pathetically sheltering some shivering and forgotten household pet.
But everywhere the same dull, expressionless, placid tranquillity
of destruction,--a horrible leveling of all things in one bland
smiling equality of surface, beneath which agony, despair, and ruin
were deeply buried and forgotten; a catastrophe without convulsion,--
a devastation voiceless, passionless, and supine.

The boat had slowed up before what seemed to be a collection of
disarranged houses with the current flowing between lines that
indicated the existence of thoroughfares and streets.  Many of the
lighter wooden buildings were huddled together on the street
corners with their gables to the flow; some appeared as if they had
fallen on their knees, and others lay complacently on their sides,
like the houses of a child's toy village.  An elevator still lifted
itself above the other warehouses; from the centre of an enormous
square pond, once the plaza, still arose a "Liberty pole," or
flagstaff, which now supported a swinging lantern, and in the
distance appeared the glittering dome of some public building.
Grant recognized the scene at once.  It was all that was left of
the invincible youth of Tasajara!

As this was an objective point of the scheme of survey and relief
for the district, the boat was made fast to the second story of one
of the warehouses.  It was now used as a general store and depot,
and bore a singular resemblance in its interior to Harcourt's
grocery at Sidon.  This suggestion was the more fatefully indicated
by the fact that half a dozen men were seated around a stove in the
centre, more or less given up to a kind of philosophical and lazy
enjoyment of their enforced idleness.  And when to this was added
the more surprising coincidence that the party consisted of
Billings, Peters, and Wingate,--former residents of Sidon and first
citizens of Tasajara,--the resemblance was complete.

They were ruined,--but they accepted their common fate with a
certain Indian stoicism and Western sense of humor that for the
time lifted them above the vulgar complacency of their former
fortunes.  There was a deep-seated, if coarse and irreverent
resignation in their philosophy.  At the beginning of the calamity
it had been roughly formulated by Billings in the statement that
"it wasn't anybody's fault; there was nobody to kill, and what
couldn't be reached by a Vigilance Committee there was no use
resolootin' over."  When the Reverend Doctor Pilsbury had suggested
an appeal to a Higher Power, Peters had replied, good humoredly,
that "a Creator who could fool around with them in that style was
above being interfered with by prayer."  At first the calamity had
been a thing to fight against; then it became a practical joke, the
sting of which was lost in the victims' power of endurance and
assumed ignorance of its purport.  There was something almost
pathetic in their attempts to understand its peculiar humor.

"How about that Europ-e-an trip o' yours, Peters?" said Billings,
meditatively, from the depths of his chair.  "Looks as if those
Crowned Heads over there would have to wait till the water goes
down considerable afore you kin trot out your wife and darters
before 'em!"

"Yes," said Peters, "it rather pints that way; and ez far ez I kin
see, Mame Billings ain't goin' to no Saratoga, neither, this year."

"Reckon the boys won't hang about old Harcourt's Free Library to
see the girls home from lectures and singing-class much this year,"
said Wingate.  "Wonder if Harcourt ever thought o' this the day he
opened it, and made that rattlin' speech o' his about the new
property?  Clark says everything built on that made ground has got
to go after the water falls.  Rough on Harcourt after all his other
losses, eh?  He oughter have closed up with that scientific chap,
Grant, and married him to Clementina while the big boom was on"--

"Hush!" said Peters, indicating Grant, who had just entered
quietly.

"Don't mind me, gentlemen," said Grant, stepping towards the group
with a grave but perfectly collected face; "on the contrary, I am
very anxious to hear all the news of Harcourt's family.  I left for
New York before the rainy season, and have only just got back."

His speech and manner appeared to be so much in keeping with the
prevailing grim philosophy that Billings, after a glance at the
others, went on.  "Ef you left afore the first rains," said he,
"you must have left only the steamer ahead of Fletcher, when he run
off with Clementina Harcourt, and you might have come across them
on their wedding trip in New York."

Not a muscle of Grant's face changed under their eager and cruel
scrutiny.  "No, I didn't," he returned quietly.  "But why did she
run away?  Did the father object to Fletcher?  If I remember
rightly he was rich and a good match."

"Yes, but I reckon the old man hadn't quite got over the 'Clarion'
abuse, for all its eating humble-pie and taking back its yarns of
him.  And may be he might have thought the engagement rather
sudden.  They say that she'd only met Fletcher the day afore the
engagement."

"That be d----d," said Peters, knocking the ashes out of his pipe,
and startling the lazy resignation of his neighbors by taking his
feet from the stove and sitting upright.  "I tell ye, gentlemen,
I'm sick o' this sort o' hog-wash that's been ladled round to us.
That gal Clementina Harcourt and that feller Fletcher had met not
only once, but MANY times afore--yes! they were old friends if it
comes to that, a matter of six years ago."

Grant's eyes were fixed eagerly on the speaker, although the others
scarcely turned their heads.

"You know, gentlemen," said Peters, "I never took stock in this yer
story of the drownin' of 'Lige Curtis.  Why?  Well, if you wanter
know--in my opinion--there never was any 'Lige Curtis!"

Billings lifted his head with difficulty; Wingate turned his face
to the speaker.

"There never was a scrap o' paper ever found in his cabin with the
name o' 'Lige Curtis on it; there never was any inquiry made for
'Lige Curtis; there never was any sorrowin' friends comin' after
'Lige Curtis.  For why?--There never was any 'Lige Curtis.  The man
who passed himself off in Sidon under that name--was that man
Fletcher.  That's how he knew all about Harcourt's title; that's
how he got his best holt on Harcourt.  And he did it all to get
Clementina Harcourt, whom the old man had refused to him in Sidon."

A grunt of incredulity passed around the circle.  Such is the fate
of historical innovation!  Only Grant listened attentively.

"Ye ought to tell that yarn to John Milton," said Wingate
ironically; "it's about in the style o' them stories he slings in
the 'Clarion.'"

"He's made a good thing outer that job.  Wonder what he gets for
them?" said Peters.

It was Billings's time to rise, and, under the influence of some
strong cynical emotion, to even rise to his feet.  "Gets for 'em!--
GETS for 'em!  I'll tell you WHAT he gets for 'em!  It beats this
story o' Peters's,--it beats the flood.  It beats me!  Ye know that
boy, gentlemen; ye know how he uster lie round his father's store,
reading flapdoodle stories and sich!  Ye remember how I uster try
to give him good examples and knock some sense into him?  Ye
remember how, after his father's good luck, he spiled all his own
chances, and ran off with his father's waiter gal--all on account
o' them flapdoodle books he read?  Ye remember how he sashayed
round newspaper offices in 'Frisco until he could write a
flapdoodle story himself?  Ye wanter know what he gets for 'em.
I'll tell you.  He got an interduction to one of them high-toned,
highfalutin', 'don't-touch-me' rich widders from Philadelfy,--
that's what he gets for 'em!  He got her dead set on him and his
stories, that's what he gets for 'em!  He got her to put him up
with Fletcher in the 'Clarion,'--that's what he gets for 'em.  And
darn my skin!--ef what they say is true, while we hard-working men
are sittin' here like drowned rats--that air John Milton, ez never
did a stitch o' live work like me yere; ez never did anythin' but
spin yarns about US ez did WORK, is now 'gittin' for 'em'--what?
Guess!  Why, he's gittin' THE RICH WIDDER HERSELF and HALF A
MILLION DOLLARS WITH HER!  Gentlemen! lib'ty is a good thing--but
thar's some things ye gets too much lib'ty of in this country--and
that's this yer LIB'TY OF THE PRESS!"





End of Project Gutenberg Etext A First Family of Tasajara, by Bret Harte