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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Flip: A California Romance, by Bret Harte
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Flip: A California Romance
+
+Author: Bret Harte
+
+Release Date: May 27, 2006 [EBook #2793]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FLIP: A CALIFORNIA ROMANCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Donald Lainson
+
+
+
+
+
+FLIP: A CALIFORNIA ROMANCE
+
+
+By Bret Harte
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Just where the track of the Los Gatos road streams on and upward like
+the sinuous trail of a fiery rocket until it is extinguished in the blue
+shadows of the Coast Range, there is an embayed terrace near the summit,
+hedged by dwarf firs. At every bend of the heat-laden road the eye
+rested upon it wistfully; all along the flank of the mountain, which
+seemed to pant and quiver in the oven-like air, through rising dust, the
+slow creaking of dragging wheels, the monotonous cry of tired springs,
+and the muffled beat of plunging hoofs, it held out a promise of
+sheltered coolness and green silences beyond. Sunburned and anxious
+faces yearned toward it from the dizzy, swaying tops of stagecoaches,
+from lagging teams far below, from the blinding white canvas covers of
+"mountain schooners," and from scorching saddles that seemed to weigh
+down the scrambling, sweating animals beneath. But it would seem that
+the hope was vain, the promise illusive. When the terrace was reached it
+appeared not only to have caught and gathered all the heat of the
+valley below, but to have evolved a fire of its own from some hidden
+crater-like source unknown. Nevertheless, instead of prostrating and
+enervating man and beast, it was said to have induced the wildest
+exaltation. The heated air was filled and stifling with resinous
+exhalations. The delirious spices of balm, bay, spruce, juniper, yerba
+buena, wild syringa, and strange aromatic herbs as yet unclassified,
+distilled and evaporated in that mighty heat, and seemed to fire with
+a midsummer madness all who breathed their fumes. They stung, smarted,
+stimulated, intoxicated. It was said that the most jaded and foot-sore
+horses became furious and ungovernable under their influence; wearied
+teamsters and muleteers, who had exhausted their profanity in the
+ascent, drank fresh draughts of inspiration in this fiery air, extended
+their vocabulary, and created new and startling forms of objurgation.
+It is recorded that one bibulous stage-driver exhausted description
+and condensed its virtues in a single phrase: "Gin and ginger." This
+felicitous epithet, flung out in a generous comparison with his favorite
+drink, "rum and gum," clung to it ever after.
+
+Such was the current comment on this vale of spices. Like most human
+criticism it was hasty and superficial. No one yet had been known to
+have penetrated deeply its mysterious recesses. It was still far below
+the summit and its wayside inn. It had escaped the intruding foot of
+hunter and prospector; and the inquisitive patrol of the county surveyor
+had only skirted its boundary. It remained for Mr. Lance Harriott to
+complete its exploration. His reasons for so doing were simple. He had
+made the journey thither underneath the stage-coach, and clinging to its
+axle. He had chosen this hazardous mode of conveyance at night, as the
+coach crept by his place of concealment in the wayside brush, to elude
+the sheriff of Monterey County and his posse, who were after him.
+
+He had not made himself known to his fellow-passengers as they already
+knew him as a gambler, an outlaw, and a desperado; he deemed it unwise
+to present himself in a newer reputation of a man who had just slain
+a brother gambler in a quarrel, and for whom a reward was offered.
+He slipped from the axle as the stage-coach swirled past the brushing
+branches of fir, and for an instant lay unnoticed, a scarcely
+distinguishable mound of dust in the broken furrows of the road. Then,
+more like a beast than a man, he crept on his hands and knees into the
+steaming underbrush. Here he lay still until the clatter of harness
+and the sound of voices faded in the distance. Had he been followed,
+it would have been difficult to detect in that inert mass of rags any
+semblance to a known form or figure. A hideous reddish mask of dust and
+clay obliterated his face; his hands were shapeless stumps exaggerated
+in his trailing sleeves. And when he rose, staggering like a drunken
+man, and plunged wildly into the recesses of the wood, a cloud of dust
+followed him, and pieces and patches of his frayed and rotten garments
+clung to the impeding branches. Twice he fell, but, maddened and upheld
+by the smarting spices and stimulating aroma of the air, he kept on his
+course.
+
+Gradually the heat became less oppressive; once when he stopped and
+leaned exhaustedly against a sapling, he fancied he saw the zephyr he
+could not yet feel in the glittering and trembling of leaves in the
+distance before him. Again the deep stillness was moved with a faint
+sighing rustle, and he knew he must be nearing the edge of the thicket.
+The spell of silence thus broken was followed by a fainter, more musical
+interruption--the glassy tinkle of water! A step further his foot
+trembled on the verge of a slight ravine, still closely canopied by the
+interlacing boughs overhead. A tiny stream that he could have dammed
+with his hand yet lingered in this parched red gash in the hillside and
+trickled into a deep, irregular, well-like cavity, that again overflowed
+and sent its slight surplus on. It had been the luxurious retreat of
+many a spotted trout; it was to be the bath of Lance Harriott. Without
+a moment's hesitation, without removing a single garment, he slipped
+cautiously into it, as if fearful of losing a single drop. His head
+disappeared from the level of the bank; the solitude was again unbroken.
+Only two objects remained upon the edge of the ravine,--his revolver and
+tobacco pouch.
+
+A few minutes elapsed. A fearless blue jay alighted on the bank and
+made a prospecting peck at the tobacco pouch. It yielded in favor of a
+gopher, who endeavored to draw it toward his hole, but in turn gave way
+to a red squirrel, whose attention was divided, however, between the
+pouch and the revolver, which he regarded with mischievous fascination.
+Then there was a splash, a grunt, a sudden dispersion of animated
+nature, and the head of Mr. Lance Harriott appeared above the bank. It
+was a startling transformation. Not only that he had, by this wholesale
+process, washed himself and his light "drill" garments entirely clean,
+but that he had, apparently by the same operation, morally cleansed
+HIMSELF, and left every stain and ugly blot of his late misdeeds and
+reputation in his bath. His face, albeit scratched here and there, was
+rosy, round, shining with irrepressible good humor and youthful levity.
+His large blue eyes were infantine in their innocent surprise and
+thoughtlessness. Dripping yet with water, and panting, he rested his
+elbows lazily on the bank, and became instantly absorbed with a boy's
+delight in the movements of the gopher, who, after the first alarm,
+returned cautiously to abduct the tobacco pouch. If any familiar had
+failed to detect Lance Harriott in this hideous masquerade of dust and
+grime and tatters, still less would any passing stranger have recognized
+in this blond faun the possible outcast and murderer. And, when with a
+swirl of his spattering sleeve, he drove back the gopher in a shower of
+spray and leaped to the bank, he seemed to have accepted his felonious
+hiding-place as a mere picnicking bower.
+
+A slight breeze was unmistakably permeating the wood from the west.
+Looking in that direction, Lance imagined that the shadow was less dark,
+and although the undergrowth was denser, he struck off carelessly toward
+it. As he went on, the wood became lighter and lighter; branches, and
+presently leaves, were painted against the vivid blue of the sky. He
+knew he must be near the summit, stopped, felt for his revolver, and
+then lightly put the few remaining branches aside.
+
+The full glare of the noonday sun at first blinded him. When he could
+see more clearly, he found himself on the open western slope of the
+mountain, which in the Coast Range was seldom wooded. The spiced thicket
+stretched between him and the summit, and again between him and the
+stage road that plunges from the terrace, like forked lightning into the
+valley below. He could command all the approaches without being seen.
+Not that this seemed to occupy his thoughts or cause him any anxiety.
+His first act was to disencumber himself of his tattered coat; he then
+filled and lighted his pipe, and stretched himself full-length on the
+open hillside, as if to bleach in the fierce sun. While smoking he
+carelessly perused the fragment of a newspaper which had enveloped his
+tobacco, and being struck with some amusing paragraph, read it half
+aloud again to some imaginary auditor, emphasizing its humor with an
+hilarious slap upon his leg.
+
+Possibly from the relaxation of fatigue and the bath, which had become
+a vapor one as he alternately rolled and dried himself in the baking
+grass, his eyes closed dreamily. He was awakened by the sound of voices.
+They were distant; they were vague; they approached no nearer. He rolled
+himself to the verge of the first precipitous grassy descent. There was
+another bank or plateau below him, and then a confused depth of olive
+shadows, pierced here and there by the spiked helmets of pines.
+
+There was no trace of habitation, yet the voices were those of some
+monotonous occupation, and Lance distinctly heard through them the click
+of crockery and the ring of some household utensil. It appeared to be
+the interjectional, half listless, half perfunctory, domestic dialogue
+of an old man and a girl, of which the words were unintelligible. Their
+voices indicated the solitude of the mountain, but without sadness; they
+were mysterious without being awe-inspiring. They might have uttered
+the dreariest commonplaces, but, in their vast isolation, they seemed
+musical and eloquent. Lance drew his first sigh,--they had suggested
+dinner.
+
+Careless as his nature was, he was too cautious to risk detection in
+broad daylight. He contented himself for the present with endeavoring to
+locate that particular part of the depths from which the voices seemed
+to rise. It was more difficult, however, to select some other way of
+penetrating it than by the stage road. "They're bound to have a fire
+or show a light when it's dark," he reasoned, and, satisfied with that
+reflection, lay down again. Presently he began to amuse himself by
+tossing some silver coins in the air. Then his attention was directed to
+a spur of the Coast Range which had been sharply silhouetted against
+the cloudless western sky. Something intensely white, something so
+small that it was scarcely larger than the silver coin in his hand, was
+appearing in a slight cleft of the range.
+
+While he looked it gradually filled and obliterated the cleft. In
+another moment the whole serrated line of mountain had disappeared. The
+dense, dazzling white, encompassing host began to pour over and down
+every ravine and pass of the coast. Lance recognized the sea-fog, and
+knew that scarcely twenty miles away lay the ocean--and safety! The
+drooping sun was now caught and hidden in its soft embraces. A sudden
+chill breathed over the mountain. He shivered, rose, and plunged again
+for very warmth into the spice-laden thicket. The heated balsamic air
+began to affect him like a powerful sedative; his hunger was forgotten
+in the languor of fatigue; he slumbered. When he awoke it was dark. He
+groped his way through the thicket. A few stars were shining directly
+above him, but beyond and below, everything was lost in the soft, white,
+fleecy veil of fog. Whatever light or fire might have betokened human
+habitation was hidden. To push on blindly would be madness; he could
+only wait for morning. It suited the outcast's lazy philosophy. He crept
+back again to his bed in the hollow and slept. In that profound silence
+and shadow, shut out from human association and sympathy by the ghostly
+fog, what torturing visions conjured up by remorse and fear should have
+pursued him? What spirit passed before him, or slowly shaped itself out
+of the infinite blackness of the wood? None. As he slipped gently into
+that blackness he remembered with a slight regret, some biscuits that
+were dropped from the coach by a careless luncheon-consuming passenger.
+That pang over, he slept as sweetly, as profoundly, as divinely, as a
+child.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+He awoke with the aroma of the woods still steeping his senses. His
+first instinct was that of all young animals; he seized a few of the
+young, tender green leaves of the yerba buena vine that crept over his
+mossy pillow and ate them, being rewarded by a half berry-like flavor
+that seemed to soothe the cravings of his appetite. The languor of sleep
+being still upon him, he lazily watched the quivering of a sunbeam that
+was caught in the canopying boughs above. Then he dozed again. Hovering
+between sleeping and waking, he became conscious of a slight movement
+among the dead leaves on the bank beside the hollow in which he lay. The
+movement appeared to be intelligent, and directed toward his revolver,
+which glittered on the bank. Amused at this evident return of his
+larcenous friend of the previous day, he lay perfectly still. The
+movement and rustle continued, but it now seemed long and undulating.
+Lance's eyes suddenly became set; he was intensely, keenly awake. It
+was not a snake, but the hand of a human arm, half hidden in the moss,
+groping for the weapon. In that flash of perception he saw that it was
+small, bare, and deeply freckled. In an instant he grasped it firmly,
+and rose to his feet, dragging to his own level as he did so, the
+struggling figure of a young girl.
+
+"Leave me go!" she said, more ashamed than frightened.
+
+Lance looked at her. She was scarcely more than fifteen, slight and
+lithe, with a boyish flatness of breast and back. Her flushed face and
+bare throat were absolutely peppered with minute brown freckles,
+like grains of spent gunpowder. Her eyes, which were large and gray,
+presented the singular spectacle of being also freckled,--at least they
+were shot through in pupil and cornea with tiny spots like powdered
+allspice. Her hair was even more remarkable in its tawny, deer-skin
+color, full of lighter shades, and bleached to the faintest of blondes
+on the crown of her head, as if by the action of the sun. She had
+evidently outgrown her dress, which was made for a smaller child, and
+the too brief skirt disclosed a bare, freckled, and sandy desert of
+shapely limb, for which the darned stockings were equally too scant.
+Lance let his grasp slip from her thin wrist to her hand, and then with
+a good-humored gesture tossed it lightly back to her.
+
+She did not retreat, but continued looking at him in a half-surly
+embarrassment.
+
+"I ain't a bit frightened," she said; "I'm not going to run away,--don't
+you fear."
+
+"Glad to hear it," said Lance, with unmistakable satisfaction, "but why
+did you go for my revolver?"
+
+She flushed again and was silent. Presently she began to kick the earth
+at the roots of the tree, and said, as if confidentially to her foot,--
+
+"I wanted to get hold of it before you did."
+
+"You did?--and why?"
+
+"Oh, you know why."
+
+Every tooth in Lance's head showed that he did, perfectly. But he was
+discreetly silent.
+
+"I didn't know what you were hiding there for," she went on, still
+addressing the tree, "and," looking at him sideways under her white
+lashes, "I didn't see your face."
+
+This subtle compliment was the first suggestion of her artful sex.
+It actually sent the blood into the careless rascal's face, and for a
+moment confused him. He coughed. "So you thought you'd freeze on to that
+six-shooter of mine until you saw my hand?"
+
+She nodded. Then she picked up a broken hazel branch, fitted it into the
+small of her back, threw her tanned bare arms over the ends of it, and
+expanded her chest and her biceps at the same moment. This simple action
+was supposed to convey an impression at once of ease and muscular force.
+
+"Perhaps you'd like to take it now," said Lance, handing her the pistol.
+
+"I've seen six-shooters before now," said the girl, evading the
+proffered weapon and its suggestion. "Dad has one, and my brother had
+two derringers before he was half as big as me."
+
+She stopped to observe in her companion the effect of this capacity of
+her family to bear arms. Lance only regarded her amusedly. Presently she
+again spoke abruptly:--
+
+"What made you eat that grass, just now?"
+
+"Grass!" echoed Lance.
+
+"Yes, there," pointing to the yerba buena.
+
+Lance laughed. "I was hungry. Look!" he said, gayly tossing some silver
+into the air. "Do you think you could get me some breakfast for that,
+and have enough left to buy something for yourself?"
+
+The girl eyed the money and the man with half-bashful curiosity.
+
+"I reckon Dad might give ye suthing if he had a mind ter, though ez a
+rule he's down on tramps ever since they run off his chickens. Ye might
+try."
+
+"But I want YOU to try. You can bring it to me here."
+
+The girl retreated a step, dropped her eyes, and, with a smile that was
+a charming hesitation between bashfulness and impudence, said: "So you
+ARE hidin', are ye?"
+
+"That's just it. Your head's level. I am," laughed Lance unconcernedly.
+
+"Yur ain't one o' the McCarty gang--are ye?"
+
+Mr. Lance Harriott felt a momentary moral exaltation in declaring
+truthfully that he was not one of a notorious band of mountain
+freebooters known in the district under that name.
+
+"Nor ye ain't one of them chicken lifters that raided Henderson's ranch?
+We don't go much on that kind o' cattle yer."
+
+"No," said Lance, cheerfully.
+
+"Nor ye ain't that chap ez beat his wife unto death at Santa Clara?"
+
+Lance honestly scorned the imputation. Such conjugal ill treatment as
+he had indulged in had not been physical, and had been with other men's
+wives.
+
+There was a moment's further hesitation on the part of the girl. Then
+she said shortly:
+
+"Well, then, I reckon you kin come along with me."
+
+"Where?" asked Lance.
+
+"To the ranch," she replied simply.
+
+"Then you won't bring me anything to eat here?"
+
+"What for? You kin get it down there." Lance hesitated. "I tell you it's
+all right," she continued. "I'll make it all right with Dad."
+
+"But suppose I reckon I'd rather stay here," persisted Lance, with a
+perfect consciousness, however, of affectation in his caution.
+
+"Stay away then," said the girl coolly; "only as Dad perempted this yer
+woods"--
+
+"PRE-empted," suggested Lance.
+
+"Per-empted or pre-emp-ted, as you like," continued the girl
+scornfully,--"ez he's got a holt on this yer woods, ye might ez well see
+him down thar ez here. For here he's like to come any minit. You can bet
+your life on that."
+
+She must have read Lance's amusement in his eyes, for she again dropped
+her own with a frown of brusque embarrassment. "Come along, then; I'm
+your man," said Lance, gayly, extending his hand.
+
+She would not accept it, eying it, however, furtively, like a horse
+about to shy. "Hand me your pistol first," she said.
+
+He handed it to her with an assumption of gayety. She received it on her
+part with unfeigned seriousness, and threw it over her shoulder like
+a gun. This combined action of the child and heroine, it is quite
+unnecessary to say, afforded Lance undiluted joy.
+
+"You go first," she said.
+
+Lance stepped promptly out, with a broad grin. "Looks kinder as if I was
+a prisoner, don't it?" he suggested.
+
+"Go on, and don't fool," she replied.
+
+The two fared onward through the wood. For one moment he entertained the
+facetious idea of appearing to rush frantically away, "just to see
+what the girl would do," but abandoned it. "It's an even thing if she
+wouldn't spot me the first pop," he reflected admiringly.
+
+When they had reached the open hillside, Lance stopped inquiringly.
+"This way," she said, pointing toward the summit, and in quite an
+opposite direction to the valley where he had heard the voices, one
+of which he now recognized as hers. They skirted the thicket for a few
+moments, and then turned sharply into a trail which began to dip toward
+a ravine leading to the valley.
+
+"Why do you have to go all the way round?" he asked.
+
+"WE don't," the girl replied with emphasis; "there's a shorter cut."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"That's telling," she answered shortly.
+
+"What's your name?" asked Lance, after a steep scramble and a drop into
+the ravine.
+
+"Flip."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Flip."
+
+"I mean your first name,--your front name."
+
+"Flip."
+
+"Flip! Oh, short for Felipa!"
+
+"It ain't Flipper,--it's Flip." And she relapsed into silence.
+
+"You don't ask me mine?" suggested Lance.
+
+She did not vouchsafe a reply.
+
+"Then you don't want to know?"
+
+"Maybe Dad will. You can lie to HIM."
+
+This direct answer apparently sustained the agreeable homicide for some
+moments. He moved onward, silently exuding admiration.
+
+"Only," added Flip, with a sudden caution, "you'd better agree with me."
+
+The trail here turned again abruptly and re-entered the canyon. Lance
+looked up, and noticed they were almost directly beneath the bay thicket
+and the plateau that towered far above them. The trail here showed signs
+of clearing, and the way was marked by felled trees and stumps of pines.
+
+"What does your father do here?" he finally asked. Flip remained silent,
+swinging the revolver. Lance repeated his question.
+
+"Burns charcoal and makes diamonds," said Flip, looking at him from the
+corners of her eyes.
+
+"Makes diamonds?" echoed Lance.
+
+Flip nodded her head.
+
+"Many of 'em?" he continued carelessly.
+
+"Lots. But they're not big," she returned, with a sidelong glance.
+
+"Oh, they're not big?" said Lance gravely.
+
+They had by this time reached a small staked inclosure, whence the
+sudden fluttering and cackle of poultry welcomed the return of the
+evident mistress of this sylvan retreat. It was scarcely imposing.
+Further on, a cooking stove under a tree, a saddle and bridle, a few
+household implements scattered about, indicated the "ranch." Like most
+pioneer clearings, it was simply a disorganized raid upon nature that
+had left behind a desolate battlefield strewn with waste and decay.
+The fallen trees, the crushed thicket, the splintered limbs, the rudely
+torn-up soil, were made hideous by their grotesque juxtaposition with
+the wrecked fragments of civilization, in empty cans, broken bottles,
+battered hats, soleless boots, frayed stockings, cast-off rags, and
+the crowning absurdity of the twisted-wire skeleton of a hooped skirt
+hanging from a branch. The wildest defile, the densest thicket, the most
+virgin solitude, was less dreary and forlorn than this first footprint
+of man. The only redeeming feature of this prolonged bivouac was the
+cabin itself. Built of the half-cylindrical strips of pine bark, and
+thatched with the same material, it had a certain picturesque rusticity.
+But this was an accident of economy rather than taste, for which
+Flip apologized by saying that the bark of the pine was "no good" for
+charcoal.
+
+"I reckon Dad's in the woods," she added, pausing before the open door
+of the cabin. "Oh, Dad!" Her voice, clear and high, seemed to fill
+the whole long canyon, and echoed from the green plateau above. The
+monotonous strokes of an axe were suddenly pretermitted, and somewhere
+from the depths of the close-set pines a voice answered "Flip." There
+was a pause of a few moments, with some muttering, stumbling, and
+crackling in the underbrush, and then the sudden appearance of "Dad."
+
+Had Lance first met him in the thicket, he would have been puzzled to
+assign his race to Mongolian, Indian, or Ethiopian origin. Perfunctory
+but incomplete washings of his hands and face, after charcoal burning,
+had gradually ground into his skin a grayish slate-pencil pallor,
+grotesquely relieved at the edges, where the washing had left off,
+with a border of a darker color. He looked like an overworked Christy
+minstrel with the briefest of intervals between his performances. There
+were black rims in the orbits of his eyes, as if he gazed feebly out of
+unglazed spectacles, which heightened his simian resemblance, already
+grotesquely exaggerated by what appeared to be repeated and spasmodic
+experiments in dyeing his gray hair. Without the slightest notice of
+Lance, he inflicted his protesting and querulous presence entirely on
+his daughter.
+
+"Well, what's up now? Yer ye are calling me from work an hour before
+noon. Dog my skin, ef I ever get fairly limbered up afore it's 'Dad!'
+and 'Oh, Dad!'"
+
+To Lance's intense satisfaction the girl received this harangue with
+an air of supreme indifference, and when "Dad" had relapsed into an
+unintelligible, and, as it seemed to Lance, a half-frightened muttering,
+she said coolly,--
+
+"Ye'd better drop that axe and scoot round getten' this stranger some
+breakfast and some grub to take with him. He's one of them San Francisco
+sports out here trout fishing in the branch. He's got adrift from his
+party, has lost his rod and fixins, and had to camp out last night in
+the Gin and Ginger Woods."
+
+"That's just it; it's allers suthin like that," screamed the old man,
+dashing his fist on his leg in a feeble, impotent passion, but without
+looking at Lance. "Why in blazes don't he go up to that there blamed
+hotel on the summit? Why in thunder--" But here he caught his daughter's
+large, freckled eyes full in his own. He blinked feebly, his voice fell
+into a tone of whining entreaty. "Now, look yer, Flip, it's playing
+it rather low down on the old man, this yer running' in o' tramps and
+desarted emigrants and cast-ashore sailors and forlorn widders and
+ravin' lunatics, on this yer ranch. I put it to you, Mister," he said
+abruptly, turning to Lance for the first time, but as if he had already
+taken an active part in the conversation,--"I put it as a gentleman
+yourself, and a fair-minded sportin' man, if this is the square thing?"
+
+Before Lance could reply, Flip had already begun. "That's just it! D'ye
+reckon, being a sportin' man and an A 1 feller, he's goin' to waltz down
+inter that hotel, rigged out ez he is? D'ye reckon he's goin' to let
+his partners get the laugh outer him? D'ye reckon he's goin' to show his
+head outer this yer ranch till he can do it square? Not much! Go 'long.
+Dad, you're talking silly!"
+
+The old man weakened. He feebly trailed his axe between his legs to a
+stump and sat down, wiping his forehead with his sleeve, and imparting
+to it the appearance of a slate with a difficult sum partly rubbed out.
+He looked despairingly at Lance. "In course," he said, with a deep sigh,
+"you naturally ain't got any money. In course you left your pocketbook,
+containing fifty dollars, under a stone, and can't find it. In course,"
+he continued, as he observed Lance put his hand to his pocket, "you've
+only got a blank check on Wells, Fargo & Co. for a hundred dollars, and
+you'd like me to give you the difference?"
+
+Amused as Lance evidently was at this, his absolute admiration for Flip
+absorbed everything else. With his eyes fixed upon the girl, he briefly
+assured the old man that he would pay for everything he wanted. He did
+this with a manner quite different from the careless, easy attitude he
+had assumed toward Flip; at least the quick-witted girl noticed it, and
+wondered if he was angry. It was quite true that ever since his eye had
+fallen upon another of his own sex, its glance had been less frank and
+careless. Certain traits of possible impatience, which might develop
+into man-slaying, were coming to the fore. Yet a word or a gesture of
+Flip's was sufficient to change that manner, and when, with the fretful
+assistance of her father, she had prepared a somewhat sketchy and
+primitive repast, he questioned the old man about diamond-making. The
+eye of Dad kindled.
+
+"I want ter know how ye knew I was making diamonds," he asked, with a
+certain bashful pettishness not unlike his daughter's.
+
+"Heard it in 'Frisco," replied Lance, with glib mendacity, glancing at
+the girl.
+
+"I reckon they're gettin' sort of skeert down there--them jewelers,"
+chuckled Dad, "yet it's in nater that their figgers will have to come
+down. It's only a question of the price of charcoal. I suppose they
+didn't tell you how I made the discovery?"
+
+Lance would have stopped the old man's narrative by saying that he
+knew the story, but he wished to see how far Flip lent herself to her
+father's delusion.
+
+"Ye see, one night about two years ago I had a pit o' charcoal burning
+out there, and tho' it had been a smouldering and a smoking and a
+blazing for nigh unto a month, somehow it didn't charcoal worth a cent.
+And yet, dog my skin, but the heat o' that er pit was suthin hidyus
+and frightful; ye couldn't stand within a hundred yards of it, and they
+could feel it on the stage road three miles over yon, t'other side the
+mountain. There was nights when me and Flip had to take our blankets
+up the ravine and camp out all night, and the back of this yer hut
+shriveled up like that bacon. It was about as nigh on to hell as any
+sample ye kin get here. Now, mebbe you think I built that air fire?
+Mebbe you'll allow the heat was just the nat'ral burning of that pit?"
+
+"Certainly," said Lance, trying to see Flip's eyes, which were
+resolutely averted.
+
+"Thet's whar you'd be lyin'! That yar heat kem out of the bowels of the
+yearth,--kem up like out of a chimbley or a blast, and kep up that yar
+fire. And when she cools down a month after, and I got to strip her,
+there was a hole in the yearth, and a spring o' bilin', scaldin' water
+pourin' out of it ez big as your waist. And right in the middle of it
+was this yer." He rose with the instinct of a skillful raconteur, and
+whisked from under his bunk a chamois leather bag, which he emptied
+on the table before them. It contained a small fragment of native rock
+crystal, half-fused upon a petrified bit of pine. It was so glaringly
+truthful, so really what it purported to be, that the most unscientific
+woodman or pioneer would have understood it at a glance. Lance raised
+his mirthful eyes to Flip.
+
+"It was cooled suddint,--stunted by the water," said the girl, eagerly.
+She stopped, and as abruptly turned away her eyes and her reddened face.
+
+"That's it, that's just it," continued the old man. "Thar's Flip, thar,
+knows it; she ain't no fool!" Lance did not speak, but turned a hard,
+unsympathizing look upon the old man, and rose almost roughly. The old
+man clutched his coat. "That's it, ye see. The carbon's just turning to
+di'mens. And stunted. And why? 'Cos the heat wasn't kep up long enough.
+Mebbe yer think I stopped thar? That ain't me. Thar's a pit out yar in
+the woods ez hez been burning six months; it hain't, in course, got the
+advantages o' the old one, for it's nat'ral heat. But I'm keeping that
+heat up. I've got a hole where I kin watch it every four hours. When
+the time comes, I'm thar! Don't you see? That's me! that's David
+Fairley,--that's the old man,--you bet!"
+
+"That's so," said Lance, curtly. "And now, Mr. Fairley, if you'll
+hand me over a coat or a jacket till I can get past these fogs on the
+Monterey road, I won't keep you from your diamond pit." He threw down a
+handful of silver on the table.
+
+"Ther's a deerskin jacket yer," said the old man, "that one o' them
+vaqueros left for the price of a bottle of whiskey."
+
+"I reckon it wouldn't suit the stranger," said Flip, dubiously producing
+a much-worn, slashed, and braided vaquero's jacket. But it did suit
+Lance, who found it warm, and also had suddenly found a certain
+satisfaction in opposing Flip. When he had put it on, and nodded coldly
+to the old man, and carelessly to Flip, he walked to the door.
+
+"If you're going to take the Monterey road, I can show you a short cut
+to it," said Flip, with a certain kind of shy civility.
+
+The paternal Fairley groaned. "That's it; let the chickens and the ranch
+go to thunder, as long as there's a stranger to trapse round with; go
+on!"
+
+Lance would have made some savage reply, but Flip interrupted. "You know
+yourself, Dad, it's a blind trail, and as that 'ere constable that kem
+out here hunting French Pete, couldn't find it, and had to go round by
+the canyon, like ez not the stranger would lose his way, and have to
+come back!" This dangerous prospect silenced the old man, and Flip and
+Lance stepped into the road together. They walked on for some moments
+without speaking. Suddenly Lance turned upon his companion.
+
+"You didn't swallow all that rot about the diamond, did you?" he asked,
+crossly.
+
+Flip ran a little ahead, as if to avoid a reply.
+
+"You don't mean to say that's the sort of hog wash the old man serves
+out to you regularly?" continued Lance, becoming more slangy in his ill
+temper.
+
+"I don't know that it's any consarn o' yours what I think," replied
+Flip, hopping from boulder to boulder, as they crossed the bed of a dry
+watercourse.
+
+"And I suppose you've piloted round and dry-nussed every tramp and dead
+beat you've met since you came here," continued Lance, with unmistakable
+ill humor. "How many have you helped over this road?"
+
+"It's a year since there was a Chinaman chased by some Irishmen from the
+Crossing into the brush about yer, and he was too afeered to come out,
+and nigh most starved to death in thar. I had to drag him out and start
+him on the mountain, for you couldn't get him back to the road. He was
+the last one but YOU."
+
+"Do you reckon it's the right thing for a girl like you to run about
+with trash of this kind, and mix herself up with all sorts of rough and
+bad company?" said Lance.
+
+Flip stopped short. "Look! if you're goin' to talk like Dad, I'll go
+back."
+
+The ridiculousness of such a resemblance struck him more keenly than a
+consciousness of his own ingratitude. He hastened to assure Flip that he
+was joking. When he had made his peace they fell into talk again, Lance
+becoming unselfish enough to inquire into one or two facts concerning
+her life which did not immediately affect him. Her mother had died on
+the plains when she was a baby, and her brother had run away from home
+at twelve. She fully expected to see him again, and thought he might
+sometime stray into their canyon. "That is why, then, you take so much
+stock in tramps," said Lance. "You expect to recognize HIM?"
+
+"Well," replied Flip, gravely, "there is suthing in THAT, and there's
+suthing in THIS: some o' these chaps might run across brother and do him
+a good turn for the sake of me."
+
+"Like me, for instance?" suggested Lance.
+
+"Like you. You'd do him a good turn, wouldn't you?"
+
+"You bet!" said Lance, with a sudden emotion that quite startled him;
+"only don't you go to throwing yourself round promiscuously." He was
+half-conscious of an irritating sense of jealousy, as he asked if any of
+her proteges had ever returned.
+
+"No," said Flip, "no one ever did. It shows," she added with sublime
+simplicity, "I had done 'em good, and they could get on alone. Don't
+it?"
+
+"It does," responded Lance grimly. "Have you any other friends that
+come?"
+
+"Only the Postmaster at the Crossing."
+
+"The Postmaster?"
+
+"Yes; he's reckonin' to marry me next year, if I'm big enough."
+
+"And what do you reckon?" asked Lance earnestly.
+
+Flip began a series of distortions with her shoulders, ran on ahead,
+picked up a few pebbles and threw them into the wood, glanced back at
+Lance with swimming mottled eyes, that seemed a piquant incarnation of
+everything suggestive and tantalizing, and said,
+
+"That's telling."
+
+They had by this time reached the spot where they were to separate.
+"Look," said Flip, pointing to a faint deflection of their path, which
+seemed, however, to lose itself in the underbrush a dozen yards away,
+"ther's your trail. It gets plainer and broader the further you get on,
+but you must use your eyes here, and get to know it well afore you get
+into the fog. Good-by."
+
+"Good-by." Lance took her hand and drew her beside him. She was still
+redolent of the spices of the thicket, and to the young man's excited
+fancy seemed at that moment to personify the perfume and intoxication of
+her native woods. Half laughingly, half earnestly, he tried to kiss her;
+she struggled for some time strongly, but at the last moment yielded,
+with a slight return and the exchange of a subtle fire that thrilled
+him, and left him standing confused and astounded as she ran away. He
+watched her lithe, nymph-like figure disappear in the checkered shadows
+of the wood, and then he turned briskly down the half-hidden trail. His
+eyesight was keen, he made good progress, and was soon well on his way
+toward the distant ridge.
+
+But Flip's return had not been as rapid. When she reached the wood she
+crept to its beetling verge, and, looking across the canyon, watched
+Lance's figure as it vanished and reappeared in the shadows and
+sinuosities of the ascent. When he reached the ridge the outlying fog
+crept across the summit, caught him in its embrace, and wrapped him
+from her gaze. Flip sighed, raised herself, put her alternate foot on
+a stump, and took a long pull at her too-brief stockings. When she had
+pulled down her skirt and endeavored once more to renew the intimacy
+that had existed in previous years between the edge of her petticoat and
+the top of her stockings, she sighed again, and went home.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+For six months the sea fogs monotonously came and went along the
+Monterey coast; for six months they beleaguered the Coast Range with
+afternoon sorties of white hosts that regularly swept over the mountain
+crest, and were as regularly beaten back again by the leveled lances of
+the morning sun. For six months that white veil which had once hidden
+Lance Harriott in its folds returned without him. For that amiable
+outlaw no longer needed disguise or hiding-place. The swift wave of
+pursuit that had dashed him on the summit had fallen back, and the next
+day was broken and scattered. Before the week had passed, a regular
+judicial inquiry relieved his crime of premeditation, and showed it to
+be a rude duel of two armed and equally desperate men. From a secure
+vantage in a seacoast town Lance challenged a trial by his peers, and,
+as an already prejudged man escaping from his executioners, obtained a
+change of venue. Regular justice, seated by the calm Pacific, found
+the action of an interior, irregular jury rash and hasty. Lance was
+liberated on bail.
+
+The Postmaster at Fisher's Crossing had just received the weekly mail
+and express from San Francisco, and was engaged in examining it. It
+consisted of five letters and two parcels. Of these, three of the
+letters and the two parcels were directed to Flip. It was not the
+first time during the last six months that this extraordinary event had
+occurred, and the curiosity of the Crossing was duly excited. As Flip
+had never called personally for the letters or parcels, but had sent one
+of her wild, irregular scouts or henchmen to bring them, and as she was
+seldom seen at the Crossing or on the stage road, that curiosity was
+never satisfied. The disappointment to the Postmaster--a man past the
+middle age--partook of a sentimental nature. He looked at the letters
+and parcels; he looked at his watch; it was yet early, he could
+return by noon. He again examined the addresses; they were in the same
+handwriting as the previous letters. His mind was made up, he would
+deliver them himself. The poetic, soulful side of his mission was
+delicately indicated by a pale blue necktie, a clean shirt, and a small
+package of gingernuts, of which Flip was extravagantly fond.
+
+The common road to Fairley's Ranch was by the stage turnpike to a point
+below the Gin and Ginger Woods, where the prudent horseman usually left
+his beast and followed the intersecting trail afoot. It was here that
+the Postmaster suddenly observed on the edge of the wood the figure of
+an elegantly-dressed woman; she was walking slowly, and apparently at
+her ease; one hand held her skirts lightly gathered between her gloved
+fingers, the other slowly swung a riding whip. Was it a picnic of some
+people from Monterey or Santa Cruz? The spectacle was novel enough to
+justify his coming nearer. Suddenly she withdrew into the wood; he lost
+sight of her; she was gone. He remembered, however, that Flip was
+still to be seen, and as the steep trail was beginning to tax all his
+energies, he was fain to hurry forward. The sun was nearly vertical when
+he turned into the canyon, and saw the bark roof of the cabin beyond. At
+almost the same moment Flip appeared, flushed and panting, in the road
+before him.
+
+"You've got something for me," she said, pointing to the parcel and
+letters. Completely taken by surprise, the Postmaster mechanically
+yielded them up, and as instantly regretted it. "They're paid for,"
+continued Flip, observing his hesitation.
+
+"That's so," stammered the official of the Crossing, seeing his last
+chance of knowing the contents of the parcel vanish; "but I thought ez
+it's a valooable package, maybe ye might want to examine it to see that
+it was all right afore ye receipted for it."
+
+"I'll risk it," said Flip, coolly, "and if it ain't right I'll let ye
+know."
+
+As the girl seemed inclined to retire with her property, the Postmaster
+was driven to other conversation. "We ain't had the pleasure of seeing
+you down at the Crossing for a month o' Sundays," he began, with airy
+yet pronounced gallantry. "Some folks let on you was keepin' company
+with some feller like Bijah Brown, and you were getting a little too
+set up for the Crossing." The individual here mentioned being the county
+butcher, and supposed to exhibit his hopeless affection for Flip by
+making a long and useless divergence from his weekly route to enter the
+canyon for "orders," Flip did not deem it necessary to reply. "Then I
+allowed how ez you might have company," he continued; "I reckon there's
+some city folks up at the summit. I saw a mighty smart, fash'n'ble gal
+cavorting round. Had no end o' style and fancy fixin's. That's my kind,
+I tell you. I just weaken on that sort o' gal," he continued, in the
+firm belief that he had awakened Flip's jealousy, as he glanced at her
+well-worn homespun frock, and found her eyes suddenly fixed on his own.
+
+"Strange I ain't got to see her yet," she replied coolly, shouldering
+her parcel, and quite ignoring any sense of obligation to him for his
+extra-official act.
+
+"But you might get to see her at the edge of the Gin and Ginger Woods,"
+he persisted feebly, in a last effort to detain her; "if you'll take a
+pasear there with me." Flip's only response was to walk on toward the
+cabin, whence, with a vague complimentary suggestion of "droppin' in to
+pass the time o' day" with her father, the Postmaster meekly followed.
+
+The paternal Fairley, once convinced that his daughter's new companion
+required no pecuniary or material assistance from his hands, relaxed
+to the extent of entering into a querulous confidence with him, during
+which Flip took the opportunity of slipping away. As Fairley had that
+infelicitous tendency of most weak natures, to unconsciously exaggerate
+unimportant details in their talk, the Postmaster presently became
+convinced that the butcher was a constant and assiduous suitor of
+Flip's. The absurdity of his sending parcels and letters by post when he
+might bring them himself did not strike the official. On the contrary,
+he believed it to be a master stroke of cunning. Fired by jealousy and
+Flip's indifference, he "deemed it his duty"--using that facile form of
+cowardly offensiveness--to betray Flip.
+
+Of which she was happily oblivious. Once away from the cabin, she
+plunged into the woods, with the parcel swung behind her like a
+knapsack. Leaving the trail, she presently struck off in a straight line
+through cover and underbrush with the unerring instinct of an animal,
+climbing hand over hand the steepest ascent, or fluttering like a bird
+from branch to branch down the deepest declivity. She soon reached
+that part of the trail where the susceptible Postmaster had seen the
+fascinating unknown. Assuring herself she was not followed, she crept
+through the thicket until she reached a little waterfall and basin that
+had served the fugitive Lance for a bath. The spot bore signs of later
+and more frequent occupancy, and when Flip carefully removed some bark
+and brushwood from a cavity in the rock and drew forth various folded
+garments, it was evident she had used it as a sylvan dressing-room. Here
+she opened the parcel; it contained a small and delicate shawl of yellow
+China crepe. Flip instantly threw it over her shoulders and stepped
+hurriedly toward the edge of the wood. Then she began to pass backward
+and forward before the trunk of a tree. At first nothing was visible on
+the tree, but a closer inspection showed a large pane of ordinary window
+glass stuck in the fork of the branches. It was placed at such a cunning
+angle against the darkness of the forest opening that it made a soft and
+mysterious mirror, not unlike a Claude Lorraine glass, wherein not only
+the passing figure of the young girl was seen, but the dazzling green
+and gold of the hillside, and the far-off silhouetted crests of the
+Coast Range.
+
+But this was evidently only a prelude to a severer rehearsal. When she
+returned to the waterfall she unearthed from her stores a large piece
+of yellow soap and some yards of rough cotton "sheeting." These she
+deposited beside the basin and again crept to the edge of the wood to
+assure herself that she was alone. Satisfied that no intruding foot
+had invaded that virgin bower, she returned to her bath and began
+to undress. A slight wind followed her, and seemed to whisper to the
+circumjacent trees. It appeared to waken her sister naiads and nymphs,
+who, joining their leafy fingers, softly drew around her a gently moving
+band of trembling lights and shadows, of flecked sprays and inextricably
+mingled branches, and involved her in a chaste sylvan obscurity, veiled
+alike from pursuing god or stumbling shepherd. Within these hallowed
+precincts was the musical ripple of laughter and falling water, and at
+times the glimpse of a lithe brier-caught limb, or a ray of sunlight
+trembling over bright flanks, or the white austere outline of a childish
+bosom.
+
+When she drew again the leafy curtain, and once more stepped out of
+the wood, she was completely transformed. It was the figure that had
+appeared to the Postmaster; the slight, erect, graceful form of a
+young woman modishly attired. It was Flip, but Flip made taller by the
+lengthened skirt and clinging habiliments of fashion. Flip freckled,
+but, through the cunning of a relief of yellow color in her gown, her
+piquant brown-shot face and eyes brightened and intensified until she
+seemed like a spicy odor made visible. I cannot affirm that the judgment
+of Flip's mysterious modiste was infallible, or that the taste of
+Mr. Lance Harriott, her patron, was fastidious; enough that it was
+picturesque, and perhaps not more glaring and extravagant than the color
+in which Spring herself had once clothed the sere hillside where Flip
+was now seated. The phantom mirror in the tree fork caught and held her
+with the sky, the green leaves, the sunlight and all the graciousness
+of her surroundings, and the wind gently tossed her hair and the gay
+ribbons of her gypsy hat. Suddenly she started. Some remote sound in
+the trail below, inaudible to any ear less fine than hers, arrested her
+breathing. She rose swiftly and darted into cover.
+
+Ten minutes passed. The sun was declining; the white fog was beginning
+to creep over the Coast Range. From the edge of the wood Cinderella
+appeared, disenchanted, and in her homespun garments. The clock had
+struck--the spell was past. As she disappeared down the trail even
+the magic mirror, moved by the wind, slipped from the tree top to the
+ground, and became a piece of common glass.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+The events of the day had produced a remarkable impression on the facial
+aspect of the charcoal-burning Fairley. Extraordinary processes of
+thought, indicated by repeated rubbing of his forehead, had produced a
+high light in the middle and a corresponding deepening of shadow at the
+sides, until it bore the appearance of a perfect sphere. It was this
+forehead that confronted Flip reproachfully as became a deceived
+comrade, menacingly as became an outraged parent in the presence of a
+third party and--a Postmaster!
+
+"Fine doin's this, yer receivin' clandecent bundles and letters, eh?"
+he began. Flip sent one swift, withering look of contempt at the
+Postmaster, who at once becoming invertebrate and groveling, mumbled
+that he must "get on" to the Crossing, and rose to go. But the old
+man, who had counted on his presence for moral support, and was clearly
+beginning to hate him for precipitating this scene with his daughter,
+whom he feared, violently protested.
+
+"Sit down, can't ye? Don't you see you're a witness?" he screamed
+hysterically.
+
+It was a fatal suggestion. "Witness," repeated Flip, scornfully.
+
+"Yes, a witness! He gave ye letters and bundles."
+
+"Weren't they directed to me?" asked Flip.
+
+"Yes," said the Postmaster, hesitatingly; "in course, yes."
+
+"Do YOU lay claim to them?" she said, turning to her father.
+
+"No," responded the old man.
+
+"Do you?" sharply, to the Postmaster.
+
+"No," he replied.
+
+"Then," said Flip, coolly, "if you're not claimin' 'em for yourself, and
+you hear father say they ain't his, I reckon the less you have to say
+about 'em the better."
+
+"Thar's suthin' in that," said the old man, shamelessly abandoning the
+Postmaster.
+
+"Then why don't she say who sent 'em, and what they are like," said the
+Postmaster, "if there's nothin' in it?"
+
+"Yes," echoed Dad. "Flip, why don't you?"
+
+Without answering the direct question, Flip turned upon her father.
+
+"Maybe you forget how you used to row and tear round here because tramps
+and such like came to the ranch for suthin', and I gave it to 'em? Maybe
+you'll quit tearin' round and letting yourself be made a fool of now
+by that man, just because one of those tramps gets up and sends us some
+presents back in turn?"
+
+"'Twasn't me, Flip," said the old man, deprecatingly, but glaring at the
+astonished Postmaster. "Twasn't my doin'. I allus said if you cast your
+bread on the waters it would come back to you by return mail. The fact
+is, the Gov'ment is gettin' too high-handed! Some o' these bloated
+officials had better climb down before next leckshen."
+
+"Maybe," continued Flip to her father, without looking at her
+discomfited visitor, "ye'd better find out whether one of those
+officials comes up to this yer ranch to steal away a gal about my own
+size, or to get points about diamond-making. I reckon he don't travel
+round to find out who writes all the letters that go through the Post
+Office."
+
+The Postmaster had seemingly miscalculated the old man's infirm temper
+and the daughter's skillful use of it. He was unprepared for Flip's
+boldness and audacity, and when he saw that both barrels of the
+accusation had taken effect on the charcoal burner, who was rising
+with epileptic rage, he fairly turned and fled. The old man would have
+followed him with objurgation beyond the door, but for the restraining
+hand of Flip.
+
+Baffled and beaten, nevertheless Fate was not wholly unkind to the
+retreating suitor. Near the Gin and Ginger Woods he picked up a letter
+which had fallen from Flip's pocket. He recognized the writing, and did
+not scruple to read it. It was not a love epistle,--at least, not such a
+one as he would have written,--it did not give the address nor the name
+of the correspondent; but he read the following with greedy eyes:--
+
+
+"Perhaps it's just as well that you don't rig yourself out for the
+benefit of those dead beats at the Crossing, or any tramp that might
+hang round the ranch. Keep all your style for me when I come. I can't
+tell you when, it's mighty uncertain before the rainy season. But
+I'm coming soon. Don't go back on your promise about lettin up on the
+tramps, and being a little more high-toned. And don't you give 'em so
+much. It's true I sent you hats TWICE. I clean forgot all about the
+first; but I wouldn't have given a ten-dollar hat to a nigger woman
+who had a sick baby because I had an extra hat. I'd have let that baby
+slide. I forgot to ask whether the skirt is worn separately; I must see
+the dressmaking sharp about it; but I think you'll want something on
+besides a jacket and skirt; at least, it looks like it up here. I don't
+think you could manage a piano down there without the old man knowing
+it, and raisin' the devil generally. I promised you I'd let up on him.
+Mind you keep all your promises to me. I'm glad you're gettin' on with
+the six-shooter; tin cans are good at fifteen yards, but try it on
+suthin' that MOVES! I forgot to say that I am on the track of your
+big brother. It's a three years' old track, and he was in Arizona. The
+friend who told me didn't expatiate much on what he did there, but I
+reckon they had a high old time. If he's above the earth I'll find him,
+you bet. The yerba buena and the southern wood came all right,--they
+smelt like you. Say, Flip, do you remember the last--the VERY
+last--thing that happened when you said 'Good-by' on the trail? Don't
+let me ever find out that you've let anybody else kiss--"
+
+
+But here the virtuous indignation of the Postmaster found vent in an
+oath. He threw the letter away. He retained of it only two facts,--Flip
+HAD a brother who was missing; she had a lover present in the flesh.
+
+How much of the substance of this and previous letters Flip had confided
+to her father I cannot say. If she suppressed anything it was probably
+that which affected Lance's secret alone, and it was doubtful how much
+of that she herself knew. In her own affairs she was frank without being
+communicative, and never lost her shy obstinacy even with her father.
+Governing the old man as completely as she did, she appeared most
+embarrassed when she was most dominant; she had her own way without
+lifting her voice or her eyes; she seemed oppressed by mauvaise honte
+when she was most triumphant; she would end a discussion with a shy
+murmur addressed to herself, or a single gesture of self-consciousness.
+
+The disclosure of her strange relations with an unknown man and the
+exchange of presents and confidences seemed to suddenly awake Fairley to
+a vague, uneasy sense of some unfulfilled duties as a parent. The first
+effect of this on his weak nature was a peevish antagonism to the cause
+of it. He had long, fretful monologues on the vanity of diamond-making,
+if accompanied with a "pestering" by "interlopers;" on the wickedness
+of concealment and conspiracy, and their effects on charcoal-burning;
+on the nurturing of spies and "adders" in the family circle, and on the
+seditiousness of dark and mysterious councils in which a gray-haired
+father was left out. It was true that a word or look from Flip generally
+brought these monologues to an inglorious and abrupt termination, but
+they were none the less lugubrious as long as they lasted. In time
+they were succeeded by an affectation of contrite apology and
+self-depreciation. "Don't go out o' the way to ask the old man," he
+would say, referring to the quantity of bacon to be ordered; "it's
+nat'ral a young gal should have her own advisers." The state of the
+flour barrel would also produce a like self-abasement. "Unless ye're
+already in correspondence about more flour, ye might take the opinion o'
+the first tramp ye meet ez to whether Santa Cruz Mills is a good
+brand, but don't ask the old man." If Flip was in conversation with
+the butcher, Fairley would obtrusively retire with the hope "he wasn't
+intrudin' on their secrets."
+
+These phases of her father's weakness were not frequent enough to excite
+her alarm, but she could not help noticing they were accompanied with a
+seriousness unusual to him. He began to be tremulously watchful of her,
+returning often from work at an earlier hour, and lingering by the cabin
+in the morning. He brought absurd and useless presents for her, and
+presented them with a nervous anxiety, poorly concealed by an assumption
+of careless, paternal generosity. "Suthin' I picked up at the Crossin'
+for ye to-day," he would say, airily, and retire to watch the effect of
+a pair of shoes two sizes too large, or a fur cap in September. He
+would have hired a cheap parlor organ for her, but for the apparently
+unexpected revelation that she couldn't play. He had received the news
+of a clue to his long-lost son without emotion, but lately he seemed to
+look upon it as a foregone conclusion, and one that necessarily solved
+the question of companionship for Flip. "In course, when you've got your
+own flesh and blood with ye, ye can't go foolin' around with strangers."
+These autumnal blossoms of affection, I fear, came too late for any
+effect upon Flip, precociously matured by her father's indifference
+and selfishness. But she was good humored, and, seeing him seriously
+concerned, gave him more of her time, even visited him in the sacred
+seclusion of the "diamond pit," and listened with far-off eyes to his
+fitful indictment of all things outside his grimy laboratory. Much
+of this patient indifference came with a capricious change in her own
+habits; she no longer indulged in the rehearsal of dress, she packed
+away her most treasured garments, and her leafy boudoir knew her no
+more. She sometimes walked on the hillside, and often followed the trail
+she had taken with Lance when she led him to the ranch. She once or
+twice extended her walk to the spot where she had parted from him,
+and as often came shyly away, her eyes downcast and her face warm with
+color. Perhaps because these experiences and some mysterious instinct of
+maturing womanhood had left a story in her eyes, which her two adorers,
+the Postmaster and the Butcher, read with passion, she became famous
+without knowing it. Extravagant stories of her fascinations brought
+strangers into the valley. The effect upon her father may be imagined.
+Lance could not have desired a more effective guardian than he proved to
+be in this emergency. Those who had been told of this hidden pearl were
+surprised to find it so jealously protected.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+The long, parched summer had drawn to its dusty close. Much of it was
+already blown abroad and dissipated on trail and turnpike, or crackled
+in harsh, unelastic fibres on hillside and meadow. Some of it had
+disappeared in the palpable smoke by day and fiery crests by night of
+burning forests. The besieging fogs on the Coast Range daily thinned
+their hosts, and at last vanished. The wind changed from northwest to
+southwest. The salt breath of the sea was on the summit. And then
+one day the staring, unchanged sky was faintly touched with remote
+mysterious clouds, and grew tremulous in expression. The next morning
+dawned upon a newer face in the heavens, on changed woods, on altered
+outlines, on vanished crests, on forgotten distances. It was raining!
+
+Four weeks of this change, with broken spaces of sunlight and intense
+blue aerial islands, and then a storm set in. All day the summit pines
+and redwoods rocked in the blast. At times the onset of the rain seemed
+to be held back by the fury of the gale, or was visibly seen in sharp
+waves on the hillside. Unknown and concealed watercourses suddenly
+overflowed the trails, pools became lakes and brooks rivers. Hidden from
+the storm, the sylvan silence of sheltered valleys was broken by the
+impetuous rush of waters; even the tiny streamlet that traversed Flip's
+retreat in the Gin and Ginger Woods became a cascade.
+
+The storm drove Fairley from his couch early. The falling of a large
+tree across the trail, and the sudden overflow of a small stream beside
+it, hastened his steps. But he was doomed to encounter what was to him a
+more disagreeable object--a human figure. By the bedraggled drapery that
+flapped and fluttered in the wind, by the long, unkempt hair that hid
+the face and eyes, and by the grotesquely misplaced bonnet, the old man
+recognized one of his old trespassers,--an Indian squaw.
+
+"Clear out 'er that! Come, make tracks, will ye?" the old man screamed;
+but here the wind stopped his voice, and drove him against a hazel bush.
+
+"Me heap sick," answered the squaw, shivering through her muddy shawl.
+
+"I'll make ye a heap sicker if ye don't vamose the ranch," continued
+Fairley, advancing.
+
+"Me wantee Wangee girl. Wangee girl give me heap grub," said the squaw,
+without moving.
+
+"You bet your life," groaned the old man to himself. Nevertheless
+an idea struck him. "Ye ain't brought no presents, hev ye?" he asked
+cautiously. "Ye ain't got no pooty things for poor Wangee girl?" he
+continued, insinuatingly.
+
+"Me got heap cache nuts and berries," said the squaw.
+
+"Oh, in course! in course! That's just it," screamed Fairley; "you've
+got 'em cached only two mile from yer, and you'll go and get 'em for a
+half dollar, cash down."
+
+"Me bring Wangee girl to cache," replied the Indian, pointing to the
+wood. "Honest Injin."
+
+Another bright idea struck Mr. Fairley. But it required some
+elaboration. Hurrying the squaw with him through the pelting rain, he
+reached the shelter of the corral. Vainly the shivering aborigine drew
+her tightly bandaged papoose closer to her square, flat breast, and
+looked longingly toward the cabin; the old man backed her against the
+palisade. Here he cautiously imparted his dark intentions to employ her
+to keep watch and ward over the ranch, and especially over its young
+mistress--"clear out all the tramps 'ceptin' yourself, and I'll keep
+ye in grub and rum." Many and deliberate repetitions of this offer in
+various forms at last seemed to affect the squaw; she nodded violently,
+and echoed the last word "rum." "Now," she added. The old man hesitated;
+she was in possession of his secret; he groaned, and, promising an
+immediate installment of liquor, led her to the cabin.
+
+The door was so securely fastened against the impact of the storm that
+some moments elapsed before the bar was drawn, and the old man had
+become impatient and profane. When it was partly opened by Flip he
+hastily slipped in, dragging the squaw after him, and cast one
+single suspicious glance around the rude apartment which served as a
+sitting-room. Flip had apparently been writing. A small inkstand was
+still on the board table, but her paper had evidently been concealed
+before she allowed them to enter. The squaw instantly squatted before
+the adobe hearth, warmed her bundled baby, and left the ceremony
+of introduction to her companion. Flip regarded the two with calm
+preoccupation and indifference. The only thing that touched her interest
+was the old squaw's draggled skirt and limp neckerchief. They were
+Flip's own, long since abandoned and cast off in the Gin and Ginger
+Woods. "Secrets again," whined Fairley, still eying Flip furtively.
+"Secrets again, in course--in course--jiss so. Secrets that must be kep
+from the ole man. Dark doin's by one's own flesh and blood. Go on! go
+on! Don't mind me." Flip did not reply. She had even lost the interest
+in her old dress. Perhaps it had only touched some note in unison with
+her revery.
+
+"Can't ye get the poor critter some whiskey?" he queried, fretfully. "Ye
+used to be peart enuff before." As Flip turned to the corner to lift
+the demijohn, Fairley took occasion to kick the squaw with his foot, and
+indicate by extravagant pantomime that the bargain was not to be alluded
+to before the girl. Flip poured out some whiskey in a tin cup, and,
+approaching the squaw, handed it to her. "It's like ez not," continued
+Fairley to his daughter, but looking at the squaw, "that she'll be
+huntin' the woods off and on, and kinder looking after the last pit near
+the Madronos; ye'll give her grub and licker ez she likes. Well, d'ye
+hear, Flip? Are ye moonin' agin with yer secrets? What's gone with ye?"
+
+If the child were dreaming, it was a delicious dream. Her magnetic eyes
+were suffused by a strange light, as though the eye itself had blushed;
+her full pulse showed itself more in the rounding outline of her cheek
+than in any deepening of color; indeed, if there was any heightening of
+tint, it was in her freckles, which fairly glistened like tiny spangles.
+Her eyes were downcast, her shoulders slightly bent, but her voice was
+low and clear and thoughtful as ever.
+
+"One o' the big pines above the Madrono pit has blown over into the
+run," she said. "It's choked up the water, and it's risin' fast. Like ez
+not it's pourin' over into the pit by this time."
+
+The old man rose with a fretful cry. "And why in blames didn't you say
+so first?" he screamed, catching up his axe and rushing to the door.
+
+"Ye didn't give me a chance," said Flip, raising her eyes for the first
+time. With an impatient imprecation, Fairley darted by her and rushed
+into the wood. In an instant she had shut the door and bolted it. In
+the same instant the squaw arose, dashed the long hair not only from her
+eyes, but from her head, tore away her shawl and blanket, and revealed
+the square shoulders of Lance Harriott! Flip remained leaning against
+the door; but the young man in rising dropped the bandaged papoose,
+which rolled from his lap into the fire. Flip, with a cry, sprang toward
+it; but Lance caught her by the waist with one arm, as with the other he
+dragged the bundle from the flames.
+
+"Don't be alarmed," he said, gayly, "it's only--"
+
+"What?" said Flip, trying to disengage herself.
+
+"My coat and trousers."
+
+Flip laughed, which encouraged Lance to another attempt to kiss her. She
+evaded it by diving her head into his waistcoat, and saying, "There's
+father."
+
+"But he's gone to clear away that tree?" suggested Lance.
+
+One of Flip's significant silences followed.
+
+"Oh, I see," he laughed. "That was a plan to get him away! Ah!" She had
+released herself.
+
+"Why did you come like that?" she said, pointing to his wig and blanket.
+
+"To see if you'd know me," he responded.
+
+"No," said Flip, dropping her eyes. "It's to keep other people from
+knowing you. You're hidin' agin."
+
+"I am," returned Lance; "but," he interrupted, "it's only the same old
+thing."
+
+"But you wrote from Monterey that it was all over," she persisted.
+
+"So it would have been," he said gloomily, "but for some dog down here
+who is hunting up an old scent. I'll spot him yet, and--" He stopped
+suddenly, with such utter abstraction of hatred in his fixed and
+glittering eyes that she almost feared him. She laid her hand quite
+unconsciously on his arm. He grasped it; his face changed.
+
+"I couldn't wait any longer to see you, Flip, so I came here anyway,"
+he went on. "I thought to hang round and get a chance to speak to you
+first, when I fell afoul of the old man. He didn't know me, and tumbled
+right in my little game. Why, do you believe he wants to hire me for my
+grub and liquor, to act as a sort of sentry over you and the ranch?"
+And here he related with great gusto the substance of his interview. "I
+reckon as he's that suspicious," he concluded, "I'd better play it out
+now as I've begun, only it's mighty hard I can't see you here before the
+fire in your fancy toggery, Flip, but must dodge in and out of the wet
+underbrush in these yer duds of yours that I picked up in the old place
+in the Gin and Ginger Woods."
+
+"Then you came here just to see me?" asked Flip.
+
+"I did."
+
+"For only that?"
+
+"Only that."
+
+Flip dropped her eyes. Lance had got his other arm around her waist, but
+her resisting little hand was still potent.
+
+"Listen," she said at last without looking up, but apparently talking to
+the intruding arm, "when Dad comes I'll get him to send you to watch the
+diamond pit. It isn't far; it's warm, and"--
+
+"What?"
+
+"I'll come, after a bit, and see you. Quit foolin' now. If you'd only
+have come here like yourself--like--like--a white man."
+
+"The old man," interrupted Lance, "would have just passed me on to the
+summit. I couldn't have played the lost fisherman on him at this time of
+year."
+
+"Ye could have been stopped at the Crossing by high water, you silly,"
+said the girl. "It was." This grammatical obscurity referred to the
+stage coach.
+
+"Yes, but I might have been tracked to this cabin. And look here, Flip,"
+he said, suddenly straightening himself, and lifting the girl's face to
+a level with his own, "I don't want you to lie any more for me. It ain't
+right."
+
+"All right. Ye needn't go to the pit, then, and I won't come."
+
+"Flip!"
+
+"And here's Dad coming. Quick!"
+
+Lance chose to put his own interpretation on this last adjuration. The
+resisting little hand was now lying quite limp on his shoulder, He drew
+her brown, bright face near his own, felt her spiced breath on his lips,
+his cheeks, his hot eyelids, his swimming eyes, kissed her, hurriedly
+replaced his wig and blanket, and dropped beside the fire with the
+tremulous laugh of youth and innocent first passion. Flip had withdrawn
+to the window, and was looking out upon the rocking pines.
+
+"He don't seem to be coming," said Lance, with a half-shy laugh.
+
+"No," responded Flip demurely, pressing her hot oval cheek against the
+wet panes; "I reckon I was mistaken. You're sure," she added, looking
+resolutely another way, but still trembling like a magnetic needle
+toward Lance, as he moved slightly before the fire, "you're SURE you'd
+like me to come to you?"
+
+"Sure, Flip?"
+
+"Hush!" said Flip, as this reassuring query of reproachful astonishment
+appeared about to be emphasized by a forward amatory dash of Lance's;
+"hush! he's coming this time, sure."
+
+It was, indeed, Fairley, exceedingly wet, exceedingly bedraggled,
+exceedingly sponged out as to color, and exceedingly profane. It
+appeared that there was, indeed, a tree that had fallen in the
+"run," but that, far from diverting the overflow into the pit, it had
+established "back water," which had forced another outlet. All this
+might have been detected at once by any human intellect not distracted
+by correspondence with strangers, and enfeebled by habitually scorning
+the intellect of its own progenitor. This reckless selfishness had
+further only resulted in giving "rheumatics" to that progenitor, who now
+required the external administration of opodeldoc to his limbs, and the
+internal administration of whiskey. Having thus spoken, Mr. Fairley,
+with great promptitude and infantine simplicity, at once bared two legs
+of entirely different colors and mutely waited for his daughter to
+rub them. If Flip did this all unconsciously, and with the mechanical
+dexterity of previous habit, it was because she did not quite understand
+the savage eyes and impatient gestures of Lance in his encompassing wig
+and blanket, and because it helped her to voice her thought.
+
+"Ye'll never be able to take yer watch at the diamond pit to-night,
+Dad," she said; "and I've been reck'nin' you might set the squaw there
+instead. I can show her what to do."
+
+But to Flip's momentary discomfiture, her father promptly objected.
+"Mebbee I've got suthin' else for her to do. Mebbee I may have my
+secrets, too--eh?" he said, with dark significance, at the same time
+administering a significant nudge to Lance, which kept up the young
+man's exasperation. "No, she'll rest yer a bit just now. I'll set her to
+watchin' suthin' else, like as not, when I want her." Flip fell into one
+of her suggestive silences. Lance watched her earnestly, mollified by a
+single furtive glance from her significant eyes; the rain dashed against
+the windows, and occasionally spattered and hissed in the hearth of the
+broad chimney, and Mr. David Fairley, somewhat assuaged by the
+internal administration of whiskey, grew more loquacious. The genius of
+incongruity and inconsistency which generally ruled his conduct came
+out with freshened vigor under the gentle stimulation of spirit. "On an
+evening like this," he began, comfortably settling himself on the floor
+beside the chimney, "ye might rig yerself out in them new duds and fancy
+fixin's that that Sacramento shrimp sent ye, and let your own flesh and
+blood see ye. If that's too much to do for your old dad, ye might do it
+to please that digger squaw as a Christian act." Whether in the hidden
+depths of the old man's consciousness there was a feeling of paternal
+vanity in showing this wretched aborigine the value and importance
+of the treasure she was about to guard, I cannot say. Flip darted an
+interrogatory look at Lance, who nodded a quiet assent, and she flew
+into the inner room. She did not linger on the details of her toilet,
+but reappeared almost the next moment in her new finery; buttoning the
+neck of her gown as she entered the room, and chastely stopping at the
+window to characteristically pull up her stocking. The peculiarity of
+her situation increased her usual shyness; she played with the black and
+gold beads of a handsome necklace,--Lance's last gift,--as the merest
+child might; her unbuckled shoe gave the squaw a natural opportunity of
+showing her admiration and devotion by insisting upon buckling it, and
+gave Lance, under that disguise, an opportunity of covertly kissing
+the little foot and ankle in the shadow of the chimney; an event which
+provoked slight hysterical symptoms in Flip, and caused her to sit
+suddenly down in spite of the remonstrances of her parent. "Ef you can't
+quit gigglin' and squirmin' like an Injin baby yourself, ye'd better git
+rid o' them duds," he ejaculated with peevish scorn.
+
+Yet, under this perfunctory rebuke, his weak vanity could not be hidden,
+and he enjoyed the evident admiration of a creature whom he believed to
+be half-witted and degraded all the more keenly because it did not make
+him jealous. She could not take Flip from him. Rendered garrulous by
+liquor, he went to voice his contempt for those who might attempt
+it. Taking advantage of his daughter's absence to resume her homely
+garments, he whispered confidentially to Lance,--
+
+"Ye see these yer fine dresses, ye might think is presents. Pr'aps
+Flip lets on they are? Pr'aps she don't know any better. But they ain't
+presents. They're only samples o' dressmaking and jewelry that a vain,
+conceited shrimp of a feller up in Sacramento sends down here to get
+customers for. In course I'm to pay for 'em. In course he reckons I'm
+to do it. In course I calkilate to do it; but he needn't try to play 'em
+off as presents. He talks suthin' o' coming down here, sportin' hisself
+off on Flip as a fancy buck! Not ez long ez the old man's here, you
+bet." Thoroughly carried away by his fancied wrongs, it was perhaps
+fortunate that he did not observe the flashing eyes of Lance behind his
+lank and lustreless wig; but seeing only the figure of Lance, as he had
+conjured him, he went on: "That's why I want you to hang around her.
+Hang around her ontil my boy,--him that's comin' home on a visit,--gets
+here, and I reckon he'll clear out that yar Sacramento counter-jumper.
+Only let me get a sight o' him afore Flip does, eh? D'ye hear? Dog my
+skin if I don't believe the d----d Injin's drunk." It was fortunate that
+at that moment Flip reappeared, and, dropping on the hearth between her
+father and the infuriated Lance, let her hand slip in his with a warning
+pressure. The light touch momentarily recalled him to himself and her,
+but not until the quick-witted girl had had revealed to her in one
+startled wave of consciousness the full extent of Lance's infirmity
+of temper. With the instinct of awakened tenderness came a sense of
+responsibility, and a vague premonition of danger. The coy blossom
+of her heart was scarce unfolded before it was chilled by approaching
+shadows. Fearful of, she knew not what, she hesitated. Every moment of
+Lance's stay was imperiled by a single word that might spring from
+his suppressed white lips; beyond and above the suspicions his sudden
+withdrawal might awaken in her father's breast, she was dimly conscious
+of some mysterious terror without that awaited him. She listened to the
+furious onslaught of the wind upon the sycamores beside their cabin, and
+thought she heard it there; she listened to the sharp fusillade of rain
+upon roof and pane, and the turbulent roar and rush of leaping mountain
+torrents at their very feet, and fancied it was there. She suddenly
+sprang to the window, and, pressing her eyes to the pane, saw
+through the misty turmoil of tossing boughs and swaying branches the
+scintillating intermittent flames of torches moving on the trail above,
+and KNEW it was there!
+
+In an instant she was collected and calm. "Dad," she said, in her
+ordinary indifferent tone, "there's torches movin' up toward the diamond
+pit. Likely it's tramps. I'll take the squaw and see." And before the
+old man could stagger to his feet she had dragged Lance with her into
+the road.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+The wind charged down upon them, slamming the door at their backs,
+extinguishing the broad shaft of light that had momentarily shot out
+into the darkness, and swept them a dozen yards away. Gaining the lee of
+a madrono tree, Lance opened his blanketed arms, enfolded the girl, and
+felt her for one brief moment tremble and nestle in his bosom like some
+frightened animal. "Well," he said, gayly, "what next?" Flip recovered
+herself. "You're safe now anywhere outside the house. But did you expect
+them tonight?" Lance shrugged his shoulders. "Why not?" "Hush!" returned
+the girl; "they're coming this way."
+
+The four flickering, scattered lights presently dropped into line. The
+trail had been found; they were coming nearer. Flip breathed quickly;
+the spiced aroma of her presence filled the blanket as he drew her
+tightly beside him. He had forgotten the storm that raged around them,
+the mysterious foe that was approaching, until Flip caught his sleeve
+with a slight laugh. "Why, it's Kennedy and Bijah?"
+
+"Who's Kennedy and Bijah?" asked Lance, curtly.
+
+"Kennedy's the Postmaster and Bijah's the Butcher."
+
+"What do they want?" continued Lance.
+
+"Me," said Flip, coyly.
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yes; let's run away."
+
+Half leading, half dragging her friend, Flip made her way with unerring
+woodcraft down the ravine. The sound of voices and even the tumult of
+the storm became fainter, an acrid smell of burning green wood smarted
+Lance's lips and eyes; in the midst of the darkness beneath him
+gradually a faint, gigantic nimbus like a lurid eye glowed and sank,
+quivered and faded with the spent breath of the gale as it penetrated
+their retreat. "The pit," whispered Flip; "it's safe on the other side,"
+she added, cautiously skirting the orbit of the great eye, and leading
+him to a sheltered nest of bark and sawdust. It was warm and odorous.
+Nevertheless, they both deemed it necessary to enwrap themselves in the
+single blanket. The eye beamed fitfully upon them, occasionally a wave
+of lambent tremulousness passed across it; its weirdness was an excuse
+for their drawing nearer each other in playful terror.
+
+"Flip."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"What did the other two want? To see you, TOO?"
+
+"Likely," said Flip, without the least trace of coquetry. "There's been
+a lot of strangers yer, off and on."
+
+"Perhaps you'd like to go back and see them?"
+
+"Do you want me to?"
+
+Lance's reply was a kiss. Nevertheless he was vaguely uneasy. "Looks a
+little as if I were running away, don't it?" he suggested.
+
+"No," said Flip; "they think you're only a squaw; it's me they're
+after." Lance smarted a little at this infelicitous speech. A strange
+and irritating sensation had been creeping over him--it was his first
+experience of shame and remorse. "I reckon I'll go back and see," he
+said, rising abruptly.
+
+Flip was silent. She was thinking. Believing that the men were seeking
+her only, she knew that their attention would be directed from her
+companion when it was found out he was no longer with her, and she
+dreaded to meet them in his irritable presence.
+
+"Go," she said, "tell Dad something's gone wrong in the diamond pit, and
+say I'm watching it for him here."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I'll go there and wait for him. If he can't get rid of them, and they
+follow him there, I'll come back here and meet you. Anyhow, I'll manage
+to have Dad wait there a spell."
+
+She took his hand and led him back by a different path to the trail. He
+was surprised to find that the cabin, its window glowing from the fire,
+was only a hundred yards away. "Go in the back way, by the shed. Don't
+go in the room, nor near the light, if you can. Don't talk inside,
+but call or beckon to Dad. Remember," she said, with a laugh, "you're
+keeping watch of me for him. Pull your hair down on your eyes so." This
+operation, like most feminine embellishments of the masculine toilet was
+attended by a kiss, and Flip, stepping back into the shadow, vanished in
+the storm.
+
+Lance's first movements were inconsistent with his assumed sex. He
+picked up his draggled skirt, and drew a bowie knife from his boot. From
+his bosom he took a revolver, turning the chambers noiselessly as he
+felt the caps. He then crept toward the cabin softly and gained the
+shed. It was quite dark but for a pencil of light piercing a crack of
+the rude, ill-fitting door that opened on the sitting-room. A single
+voice not unfamiliar to him, raised in half-brutal triumph, greeted his
+ears.
+
+A name was mentioned--his own! His angry hand was on the latch. One
+moment more and he would have burst the door, but in that instant
+another name was uttered--a name that dropped his hand from the latch
+and the blood from his cheeks. He staggered backward, passed his hand
+swiftly across his forehead, recovered himself with a gesture of mingled
+rage and despair, and, sinking on his knees beside the door, pressed his
+hot temples against the crack.
+
+"Do I know Lance Harriott?" said the voice. "Do I know the d----d
+ruffian? Didn't I hunt him a year ago into the brush three miles from
+the Crossing? Didn't we lose sight of him the very day he turned up yer
+at this ranch, and got smuggled over into Monterey? Ain't it the same
+man as killed Arkansaw Bob--Bob Ridley--the name he went by in Sonora?
+And who was Bob Ridley, eh? Who? Why, you d----d old fool, it was Bob
+Fairley--YOUR SON!"
+
+The old man's voice rose querulous and indistinct.
+
+"What are ye talkin' about?" interrupted the first speaker. "I tell you
+I KNOW. Look at these pictures. I found 'em on his body. Look at 'em.
+Pictures of you and your girl. Pr'aps you'll deny them. Pr'aps you'll
+tell me I lie when I tell you HE told me he was your son; told me how he
+ran away from you; how you were livin' somewhere in the mountains
+makin' gold, or suthin' else, outer charcoal. He told me who he was as
+a secret. He never let on he told it to any one else. And when I found
+that the man who killed him, Lance Harriott, had been hidin' here, had
+been sendin' spies all around to find out all about your son, had been
+foolin' you and tryin' to ruin your gal as he had killed your boy, I
+knew that HE knew it, too."
+
+"LIAR!"
+
+The door fell in with a crash. There was the sudden apparition of a
+demoniac face, still half hidden by the long trailing black locks of
+hair that curled like Medusa's around it. A cry of terror filled the
+room. Three of the men dashed from the door and fled precipitately. The
+man who had spoken sprang toward his rifle in the chimney corner.
+But the movement was his last; a blinding flash and shattering report
+interposed between him and his weapon.
+
+The impulse carried him forward headlong into the fire, that hissed and
+spluttered with his blood, and Lance Harriott with his smoking pistol,
+strode past him to the door. Already far down the trail there were
+hurried voices, the crack and crackling of impending branches growing
+fainter and fainter in the distance. Lance turned back to the solitary
+living figure--the old man.
+
+Yet he might have been dead, too, he sat so rigid and motionless, his
+fixed eyes staring vacantly at the body on the hearth. Before him on the
+table lay the cheap photographs, one evidently of himself, taken in some
+remote epoch of complexion, one of a child which Lance recognized as
+Flip.
+
+"Tell me," said Lance hoarsely, laying his quivering hand on the table,
+"was Bob Ridley your son?"
+
+"My son," echoed the old man in a strange, far-off voice, without
+turning his eyes from the corpse--"My son--is--is--is there!" pointing
+to the dead man. "Hush! Didn't he tell you so? Didn't you hear him say
+it? Dead--dead--shot--shot!"
+
+"Silence! are you crazy, man?" repeated Lance, tremblingly; "that is not
+Bob Ridley, but a dog, a coward, a liar gone to his reckoning. Hear
+me! If your son WAS Bob Ridley, I swear to God I never knew it, now
+or--or--THEN. Do you hear me? Tell me! Do you believe me? Speak! You
+shall speak."
+
+He laid his hand almost menacingly on the old man's shoulder. Fairley
+slowly raised his head. Lance fell back with a groan of horror. The weak
+lips were wreathed with a feeble imploring smile, but the eyes wherein
+the fretful, peevish, suspicious spirit had dwelt were blank and
+tenantless; the flickering intellect that had lit them was blown out and
+vanished.
+
+Lance walked toward the door and remained motionless for a moment,
+gazing into the night. When he turned back again toward the fire his
+face was as colorless as the dead man's on the hearth; the fire of
+passion was gone from his beaten eyes; his step was hesitating and slow.
+He went up to the table.
+
+"I say, old man," he said, with a strange smile and an odd, premature
+suggestion of the infinite weariness of death in his voice, "you
+wouldn't mind giving me this, would you?" and he took up the picture of
+Flip. The old man nodded repeatedly. "Thank you," said Lance. He went
+to the door, paused a moment, and returned. "Good-by, old man," he
+said, holding out his hand. Fairley took it with a childish smile. "He's
+dead," said the old man softly, holding Lance's hand, but pointing to
+the hearth. "Yes," said Lance, with the faintest of smiles on the palest
+of faces. "You feel sorry for any one that's dead, don't you?" Fairley
+nodded again. Lance looked at him with eyes as remote as his own, shook
+his head, and turned away. When he reached the door he laid his revolver
+carefully, and, indeed, somewhat ostentatiously, upon a chair. But when
+he stepped from the threshold he stopped a moment in the light of the
+open door to examine the lock of a small derringer which he drew from
+his pocket. He then shut the door carefully, and with the same slow,
+hesitating step, felt his way into the night.
+
+He had but one idea in his mind, to find some lonely spot; some spot
+where the footsteps of man would never penetrate, some spot that would
+yield him rest, sleep, obliteration, forgetfulness, and, above all,
+where HE would be forgotten. He had seen such places; surely there were
+many,--where bones were picked up of dead men who had faded from the
+earth and had left no other record. If he could only keep his senses now
+he might find such a spot, but he must be careful, for her little feet
+went everywhere, and she must never see him again alive or dead. And in
+the midst of his thoughts, and the darkness, and the storm, he heard a
+voice at his side, "Lance, how long you have been!"
+
+*****
+
+Left to himself, the old man again fell into a vacant contemplation
+of the dead body before him, until a stronger blast swept down like an
+avalanche upon the cabin, burst through the ill-fastened door and broken
+chimney, and, dashing the ashes and living embers over the floor, filled
+the room with blinding smoke and flame. Fairley rose with a feeble cry,
+and then, as if acted upon by some dominant memory, groped under the
+bed until he found his buckskin bag and his precious crystal, and
+fled precipitately from the room. Lifted by this second shock from his
+apathy, he returned to the fixed idea of his life,--the discovery and
+creation of the diamond,--and forgot all else. The feeble grasp that his
+shaken intellect kept of the events of the night relaxed, the disguised
+Lance, the story of his son, the murder, slipped into nothingness; there
+remained only the one idea, his nightly watch by the diamond pit. The
+instinct of long habit was stronger than the darkness or the onset of
+the storm, and he kept his tottering way over stream and fallen timber
+until he reached the spot. A sudden tremor seemed to shake the lambent
+flame that had lured him on. He thought he heard the sound of voices;
+there were signs of recent disturbance,--footprints in the sawdust! With
+a cry of rage and suspicion, Fairley slipped into the pit and sprang
+toward the nearest opening. To his frenzied fancy it had been tampered
+with, his secret discovered, the fruit of his long labors stolen from
+him that very night. With superhuman strength he began to open the pit,
+scattering the half-charred logs right and left, and giving vent to the
+suffocating gases that rose from the now incandescent charcoal. At times
+the fury of the gale would drive it back and hold it against the sides
+of the pit, leaving the opening free; at times, following the blind
+instinct of habit, the demented man would fall upon his face and bury
+his nose and mouth in the wet bark and sawdust. At last, the paroxysm
+past, he sank back again in his old apathetic attitude of watching,
+the attitude he had so often kept beside his sylvan crucible. In this
+attitude and in silence he waited for the dawn.
+
+It came with a hush in the storm; it came with blue openings in the
+broken up and tumbled heavens; it came with stars that glistened first,
+and then paled, and at last sank drowning in those deep cerulean lakes;
+it came with those cerulean lakes broadening into vaster seas, whose
+shores expanded at last into one illimitable ocean, cerulean no more,
+but flecked with crimson and opal dyes; it came with the lightly lifted
+misty curtain of the day, torn and rent on crag and pine top, but always
+lifting, lifting. It came with the sparkle of emerald in the grasses,
+and the flash of diamonds in every spray, with a whisper in the
+awakening woods, and voices in the traveled roads and trails.
+
+The sound of these voices stopped before the pit, and seemed to
+interrogate the old man. He came, and, putting his finger on his lips,
+made a sign of caution. When three or four men had descended he bade
+them follow him, saying, weakly and disjointedly, but persistently: "My
+boy--my son Robert--came home--came home at last--here with Flip--both
+of them--come and see!"
+
+He had reached a little niche or nest in the hillside, and stopped and
+suddenly drew aside a blanket. Beneath it, side by side, lay Flip and
+Lance, dead, with their cold hands clasped in each other's.
+
+"Suffocated!" said two or three, turning with horror toward the broken
+up and still smouldering pit.
+
+"Asleep!" said the old man. "Asleep! I've seen 'em lying that way when
+they were babies together. Don't tell me! Don't say I don't know my
+own flesh and blood! So! so! So, my pretty ones!" He stooped and kissed
+them. Then, drawing the blanket over them gently, he rose and said
+softly, "Good night!"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Flip: A California Romance, by Bret Harte
+
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