CHAPTER I.

[Illustration: _The woman ... stood before him_]

BRET HARTE'S WRITINGS

FRONTIER STORIES

CONTENTS:

FLIP: A CALIFORNIA ROMANCE

FOUND AT BLAZING STAR

IN THE CARQUINEZ WOODS

AT THE MISSION OF SAN CARMEL

A BLUE-GRASS PENELOPE

LEFT OUT ON LONE STAR MOUNTAIN

A SHIP OF '49

FLIP: A CALIFORNIA ROMANCE.

CHAPTER I.

Just where the red 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 stage-coaches,

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 his 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 blonde 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 larcenious friend of the previous day, he lay

perfectly still. The movement and rustle continued, and 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 McCarthy 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 pris'ner, 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 reëntered the cañon. 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 cañon, and echoed from the green plateau above. The

monotonous strokes of an axe were suddenly intermitted, 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 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 a 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 onter 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 quickwitted 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 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 cañon, 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 did n'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 roughs

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 cañon. "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 _protégés_ 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 cañon 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 sea-coast 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 ginger-nuts, 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 cañon, 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

letter. 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 cañon 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. Hed 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 "drop-in' 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 masterstroke 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 used it as a sylvan

dressing-room. Here she opened the parcel; it contained a small and

delicate shawl of yellow China crèpe. 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 nothing 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 getting 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 packet. 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

that dressmaker 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 "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 _Madroños_; 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 _Madroño_ 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 blazes 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.

"Mebbe I've got suthin' else for her to do. Mebbe 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 get 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 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 madroño 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 to-night?" 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 intention 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 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 the

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?" interposed 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 into 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!"

FOUND AT BLAZING STAR.

The rain had only ceased with the gray streaks of morning at Blazing

Star, and the settlement awoke to a moral sense of cleanliness, and the

finding of forgotten knives, tin cups, and smaller camp utensils, where

the heavy showers had washed away the débris and dust heaps before the

cabin-doors. Indeed, it was recorded in Blazing Star that a fortunate

early riser had once picked up on the highway a solid chunk of gold

quartz which the rain had freed from its incumbering soil, and washed

into immediate and glittering popularity. Possibly this may have been

the reason why early risers in that locality, during the rainy season,

adopted a thoughtful habit of body, and seldom lifted their eyes to the

rifted or india-ink washed skies above them.

"Cass" Beard had risen early that morning, but not with a view to

discovery. A leak in his cabin roof--quite consistent with his

careless, improvident habits--had roused him at 4 A.M., with a flooded

"bunk" and wet blankets. The chips from his wood pile refused to kindle

a fire to dry his bedclothes, and he had recourse to a more provident

neighbor's to supply the deficiency. This was nearly opposite. Mr.

Cassius crossed the highway, and stopped suddenly. Something glittered

in the nearest red pool before him. Gold, surely! But, wonderful to

relate, not an irregular, shapeless fragment of crude ore, fresh from

Nature's crucible, but a bit of jeweler's handicraft in the form of a

plain gold ring. Looking at it more attentively, he saw that it bore

the inscription, "May to Cass."

Like most of his fellow gold-seekers, Cass was superstitious. "Cass!"

His own name! He tried the ring. It fitted his little finger closely.

It was evidently a woman's ring. He looked up and down the highway. No

one was yet stirring. Little pools of water in the red road were

beginning to glitter and grow rosy from the far-flushing east, but

there was no trace of the owner of the shining waif. He knew that there

was no woman in camp, and among his few comrades in the settlement he

remembered to have seen none wearing an ornament like that. Again, the

coincidence of the inscription to his rather peculiar nickname would

have been a perennial source of playful comment in a camp that made no

allowance for sentimental memories. He slipped the glittering little

hoop into his pocket, and thoughtfully returned to his cabin.

Two hours later, when the long, straggling procession, which every

morning wended its way to Blazing Star Gulch,--the seat of mining

operations in the settlement,--began to move, Cass saw fit to

interrogate his fellows.

"Ye didn't none on ye happen to drop anything round yer last night?" he

asked, cautiously.

"I dropped a pocketbook containing government bonds and some other

securities, with between fifty and sixty thousand dollars," responded

Peter Drummond, carelessly; "but no matter, if any man will return a

few autograph letters from foreign potentates that happened to be in

it,--of no value to anybody but the owner,--he can keep the money.

Thar's nothin' mean about me," he concluded, languidly.

This statement, bearing every evidence of the grossest mendacity, was

lightly passed over, and the men walked on with the deepest gravity.

"But hev you?" Cass presently asked of another.

"I lost my pile to Jack Hamlin at draw-poker, over at Wingdam last

night," returned the other, pensively, "but I don't calkilate to find

it lying round loose."

Forced at last by this kind of irony into more detailed explanation,

Cass confided to them his discovery, and produced his treasure. The

result was a dozen vague surmises,--only one of which seemed to be

popular, and to suit the dyspeptic despondency of the party,--a

despondency born of hastily masticated fried pork and flapjacks. The

ring was believed to have been dropped by some passing "road agent"

laden with guilty spoil.

"Ef I was you," said Drummond gloomily, "I wouldn't flourish that yer

ring around much afore folks. I've seen better men nor you strung up a

tree by _Vigilantés_ for having even less than that in their

possession."

"And I wouldn't say much about bein' up so d----d early this morning,"

added an even more pessimistic comrade; "it might look bad before a

jury."

With this the men sadly dispersed, leaving the innocent Cass with the

ring in his hand, and a general impression on his mind that he was

already an object of suspicion to his comrades,--an impression, it is

hardly necessary to say, they fully intended should be left to rankle

in his guileless bosom.

Notwithstanding Cass's first hopeful superstition, the ring did not

seem to bring him nor the camp any luck. Daily the "clean up" brought

the same scant rewards to their labors, and deepened the sardonic

gravity of Blazing Star. But, if Cass found no material result from his

treasure, it stimulated his lazy imagination, and, albeit a dangerous

and seductive stimulant, at least lifted him out of the monotonous

grooves of his half-careless, half-slovenly, but always self-contented

camp life. Heeding the wise caution of his comrades, he took the habit

of wearing the ring only at night. Wrapped in his blanket, he

stealthily slipped the golden circlet over his little finger, and, as

he averred, "slept all the better for it." Whether it ever evoked any

warmer dream or vision during those calm, cold, virgin-like spring

nights, when even the moon and the greater planets retreated into the

icy blue, steel-like firmament, I cannot say. Enough that this

superstition began to be colored a little by fancy, and his fatalism

somewhat mitigated by hope. Dreams of this kind did not tend to promote

his efficiency in the communistic labors of the camp, and brought him a

self-isolation that, however gratifying at first, soon debarred him the

benefits of that hard practical wisdom which underlaid the grumbling of

his fellow-workers.

"I'm dog-goned," said one commentator, "ef I don't believe that Cass is

looney over that yer ring he found. Wears it on a string under his

shirt."

Meantime, the seasons did not wait the discovery of the secret. The red

pools in Blazing Star highway were soon dried up in the fervent June

sun and riotous night winds of those altitudes. The ephemeral grasses

that had quickly supplanted these pools and the chocolate-colored mud,

were as quickly parched and withered. The footprints of spring became

vague and indefinite, and were finally lost in the impalpable dust of

the summer highway.

In one of his long, aimless excursions, Cass had penetrated a thick

undergrowth of buckeye and hazel, and found himself quite unexpectedly

upon the high road to Red Chief's Crossing. Cass knew by the lurid

cloud of dust that hid the distance, that the up coach had passed. He

had already reached that stage of superstition when the most trivial

occurrence seemed to point in some way to an elucidation of the mystery

of his treasure. His eyes had mechanically fallen to the ground again,

as if he half expected to find in some other waif a hint or

corroboration of his imaginings. Thus abstracted, the figure of a young

girl on horseback, in the road directly before the bushes he emerged

from, appeared to have sprung directly from the ground.

"Oh, come here, please do; quick!"

Cass stared, and then moved hesitatingly toward her.

"I heard some one coming through the bushes, and I waited," she went

on. "Come quick. It's something too awful for anything."

In spite of this appalling introduction, Cass could not but notice that

the voice, although hurried and excited, was by no means agitated or

frightened; that the eyes which looked into his sparkled with a certain

kind of pleased curiosity.

"It was just here," she went on vivaciously, "just here that I went

into the bush and cut a switch for my mare,--and,"--leading him along

at a brisk trot by her side,--"just here, look, see! this is what I

found."

It was scarcely thirty feet from the road. The only object that met

Cass's eye was a man's stiff, tall hat, lying emptily and vacantly in

the grass. It was new, shiny, and of modish shape. But it was so

incongruous, so perkily smart, and yet so feeble and helpless lying

there, so ghastly ludicrous in its very appropriateness and incapacity

to adjust itself to the surrounding landscape, that it affected him

with something more than a sense of its grotesqueness, and he could

only stare at it blankly.

"But you're not looking the right way," the girl went on sharply; "look

there!"

Cass followed the direction of her whip. At last, what might have

seemed a coat thrown carelessly on the ground met his eye, but

presently he became aware of a white, rigid, aimlessly-clinched hand

protruding from the flaccid sleeve; mingled with it in some absurd way

and half hidden by the grass, lay what might have been a pair of

cast-off trousers but for two rigid boots that pointed in opposite

angles to the sky. It was a dead man! So palpably dead that life seemed

to have taken flight from his very clothes. So impotent, feeble, and

degraded by them that the naked subject of a dissecting table would

have been less insulting to humanity. The head had fallen back, and was

partly hidden in a gopher burrow, but the white, upturned face and

closed eyes had less of helpless death in them than those wretched

enwrappings. Indeed, one limp hand that lay across the swollen abdomen

lent itself to the grotesquely hideous suggestion of a gentleman

sleeping off the excesses of a hearty dinner.

"Ain't he horrid?" continued the girl; "but what killed him?"

Struggling between a certain fascination at the girl's cold-blooded

curiosity and horror of the murdered man, Cass hesitatingly lifted the

helpless head. A bluish hole above the right temple, and a few brown

paint-like spots on the forehead, shirt collar, and matted hair, proved

the only record.

"Turn him over again," said the girl, impatiently, as Cass was about to

relinquish his burden. "Maybe you'll find another wound."

But Cass was dimly remembering certain formalities that in older

civilizations attend the discovery of dead bodies, and postponed a

present inquest.

"Perhaps you'd better ride on, Miss, afore you get summoned as a

witness. I'll give warning at Red Chief's Crossing, and send the

coroner down here."

"Let me go with you," she said, earnestly; "it would be such fun. I

don't mind being a witness. Or," she added, without heeding Cass's look

of astonishment, "I'll wait here till you come back."

"But you see, Miss, it wouldn't seem right"--began Cass.

"But I found him first," interrupted the girl, with a pout.

Staggered by this preemptive right, sacred to all miners, Cass stopped.

"Who is the coroner?" she asked.

"Joe Hornsby."

"The tall, lame man, who was half eaten by a grizzly?"

"Yes."

"Well, look now! I'll ride on and bring him back in half an hour.

There!"

"But, Miss--!"

"Oh, don't mind _me_. I never saw anything of this kind before, and I

want to see it _all_."

"Do you know Hornsby?" asked Cass, unconsciously a trifle irritated.

"No, but I'll bring him." She wheeled her horse into the road.

In the presence of this living energy Cass quite forgot the helpless

dead. "Have you been long in these parts, Miss?" he asked.

"About two weeks," she answered, shortly. "Good-by, just now. Look

around for the pistol or anything else you can find, although _I_ have

been over the whole ground twice already."

A little puff of dust as the horse sprang into the road, a muffled

shuffle, struggle, then the regular beat of hoofs, and she was gone.

After five minutes had passed, Cass regretted that he had not

accompanied her: waiting in such a spot was an irksome task. Not that

there was anything in the scene itself to awaken gloomy imaginings; the

bright, truthful Californian sunshine scoffed at any illusion of

creeping shadows or waving branches. Once, in the rising wind, the

empty hat rolled over--but only in a ludicrous, drunken way. A search

for any further sign or token had proved futile, and Cass grew

impatient. He began to hate himself for having stayed; he would have

fled but for shame. Nor was his good-humor restored when at the close

of a weary half hour two galloping figures emerged from the dusty

horizon--Hornsby and the young girl.

His vague annoyance increased as he fancied that both seemed to ignore

him, the coroner barely acknowledging his presence with a nod. Assisted

by the young girl, whose energy and enthusiasm evidently delighted him,

Hornsby raised the body for a more careful examination. The dead man's

pockets were carefully searched. A few coins, a silver pencil, knife,

and tobacco-box were all they found. It gave no clew to his identity.

Suddenly the young girl, who had, with unabashed curiosity, knelt

beside the exploring official hands of the Red Chief, uttered a cry of

gratification.

"Here's something! It dropped from the bosom of his shirt on the

ground. Look!"

She was holding in the air, between her thumb and forefinger, a folded

bit of well-worn newspaper. Her eyes sparkled.

"Shall I open it?" she asked.

"Yes."

"It's a little ring," she said; "looks like an engagement ring.

Something is written on it. Look! 'May to Cass.'"

Cass darted forward. "It's mine," he stammered, "mine! I dropped it.

It's nothing--nothing," he went on, after a pause, embarrassed and

blushing, as the girl and her companion both stared at him--"a mere

trifle. I'll take it."

But the coroner opposed his outstretched hand. "Not much," he said,

significantly.

"But it's _mine_," continued Cass, indignation taking the place of

shame at his discovered secret. "I found it six months ago in the road.

I--picked it up."

"With your name already written on it! How handy!" said the coroner,

grimly.

"It's an old story," said Cass, blushing again under the half

mischievous, half searching eyes of the girl. "All Blazing Star knows I

found it."

"Then ye'll have no difficulty in provin' it," said Hornsby, coolly.

"Just now, however, _we_'ve found it, and we propose to keep it for the

inquest."

Cass shrugged his shoulders. Further altercation would have only

heightened his ludicrous situation in the girl's eyes. He turned away,

leaving his treasure in the coroner's hands.

The inquest, a day or two later, was prompt and final. No clew to the

dead man's identity; no evidence sufficiently strong to prove murder or

suicide; no trace of any kind, inculpating any party, known or unknown,

were found. But much publicity and interest were given to the

proceedings by the presence of the principal witness, a handsome girl.

"To the pluck, persistency, and intellect of Miss Porter," said the

"Red Chief Recorder," "Tuolumne County owes the recovery of the body."

No one who was present at the inquest failed to be charmed with the

appearance and conduct of this beautiful young lady.

"Miss Porter has but lately arrived in this district, in which, it is

hoped, she will become an honored resident, and continue to set an

example to all lackadaisical and sentimental members of the so-called

'sterner sex.'" After this universally recognized allusion to Cass

Beard, the "Recorder" returned to its record: "Some interest was

excited by what appeared to be a clew to the mystery in the discovery

of a small gold engagement ring on the body. Evidence was afterward

offered to show it was the property of a Mr. Cass Beard of Blazing

Star, who appeared upon the scene _after_ the discovery of the corpse

by Miss Porter. He alleged he had dropped it in lifting the unfortunate

remains of the deceased. Much amusement was created in court by the

sentimental confusion of the claimant, and a certain partisan spirit

shown by his fellow-miners of Blazing Star. It appearing, however, by

the admission of this sighing Strephon of the Foot Hills, that he had

himself _found_ this pledge of affection lying in the highway six

months previous, the coroner wisely placed it in the safe-keeping of

the county court until the appearance of the rightful owner."

Thus on the 13th of September, 186-, the treasure found at Blazing Star

passed out of the hands of its finder.

* * * * *

Autumn brought an abrupt explanation of the mystery. Kanaka Joe had

been arrested for horse-stealing, but had with noble candor confessed

to the finer offense of manslaughter. That swift and sure justice which

overtook the horse-stealer in these altitudes was stayed a moment and

hesitated, for the victim was clearly the mysterious unknown. Curiosity

got the better of an extempore judge and jury.

"It was a fair fight," said the accused, not without some human vanity,

feeling that the camp hung upon his words, "and was settled by the man

az was peartest and liveliest with his weapon. We had a sort of

unpleasantness over at Lagrange the night afore, along of our both

hevin' a monotony of four aces. We had a clinch and a stamp around, and

when we was separated it was only a question of shootin' on sight. He

left Lagrange at sun up the next morning, and I struck across a bit o'

buckeye and underbrush and came upon him, accidental like, on the Red

Chief Road. I drawed when I sighted him, and called out. He slipped

from his mare and covered himself with her flanks, reaching for his

holster, but she rared and backed down on him across the road and into

the grass, where I got in another shot and fetched him."

"And you stole his mare?" suggested the Judge.

"I got away," said the gambler, simply.

Further questioning only elicited the fact that Joe did not know the

name or condition of his victim. He was a stranger in Lagrange.

It was a breezy afternoon, with some turbulency in the camp, and much

windy discussion over this unwonted delay of justice. The suggestion

that Joe should be first hanged for horse stealing and then tried for

murder was angrily discussed, but milder counsels were offered--that

the fact of the killing should be admitted only as proof of the theft.

A large party from Red Chief had come over to assist in judgment, among

them the coroner.

Cass Beard had avoided these proceedings, which only recalled an

unpleasant experience, and was wandering with pick, pan, and wallet far

from the camp. These accoutrements, as I have before intimated,

justified any form of aimless idleness under the equally aimless title

of "prospecting." He had at the end of three hours' relaxation reached

the highway to Red Chief, half hidden by blinding clouds of dust torn

from the crumbling red road at every gust which swept down the mountain

side. The spot had a familiar aspect to Cass, although some freshly-dug

holes near the wayside, with scattered earth beside them, showed the

presence of a recent prospector. He was struggling with his memory,

when the dust was suddenly dispersed and he found himself again at the

scene of the murder. He started: he had not put foot on the road since

the inquest. There lacked only the helpless dead man and the

contrasting figure of the alert young woman to restore the picture. The

body was gone, it was true, but as he turned he beheld Miss Porter, at

a few paces distant, sitting her horse as energetic and observant as on

the first morning they had met. A superstitious thrill passed over him

and awoke his old antagonism.

She nodded to him slightly. "I came here to refresh my memory," she

said, "as Mr. Hornsby thought I might be asked to give my evidence

again at Blazing Star."

Cass carelessly struck an aimless blow with his pick against the sod

and did not reply.

"And you?" she queried.

"_I_ stumbled upon the place just now while prospecting, or I shouldn't

be here."

"Then it was _you_ made these holes?"

"No," said Cass, with ill-concealed disgust. "Nobody but a stranger

would go foolin' round such a spot."

He stopped, as the rude significance of his speech struck him, and

added surlily, "I mean--no one would dig here."

The girl laughed and showed a set of very white teeth in her square

jaw. Cass averted his face.

"Do you mean to say that every miner doesn't know that it's lucky to

dig wherever human blood has been spilt?"

Cass felt a return of his superstition, but he did not look up. "I

never heard it before," he said, severely.

"And you call yourself a California miner?"

"I do."

It was impossible for Miss Porter to misunderstand his curt speech and

unsocial manner. She stared at him and colored slightly. Lifting her

reins lightly, she said: "You certainly do not seem like most of the

miners I have met."

"Nor you like any girl from the East I ever met," he responded.

"What do you mean?" she asked, checking her horse.

"What I say," he answered, doggedly. Reasonable as this reply was, it

immediately struck him that it was scarcely dignified or manly. But

before he could explain himself Miss Porter was gone.

He met her again that very evening. The trial had been summarily

suspended by the appearance of the Sheriff of Calaveras and his

_posse_, who took Joe from that self-constituted tribunal of Blazing

Star and set his face southward and toward authoritative although more

cautious justice. But not before the evidence of the previous inquest

had been read, and the incident of the ring again delivered to the

public. It is said the prisoner burst into an incredulous laugh and

asked to see this mysterious waif. It was handed to him. Standing in

the very shadow of the gallows tree--which might have been one of the

pines that sheltered the billiard room in which the Vigilance Committee

held their conclave--the prisoner gave way to a burst of merriment, so

genuine and honest that the judge and jury joined in automatic

sympathy. When silence was restored an explanation was asked by the

Judge. But there was no response from the prisoner except a subdued

chuckle.

"Did this ring belong to you?" asked the Judge, severely, the jury and

spectators craning their ears forward with an expectant smile already

on their faces. But the prisoner's eyes only sparkled maliciously as he

looked around the court.

"Tell us, Joe," said a sympathetic and laughter-loving juror, under his

breath. "Let it out and we'll make it easy for you."

"Prisoner," said the Judge, with a return of official dignity,

"remember that your life is in peril. Do you refuse?"

Joe lazily laid his arm on the back of his chair with (to quote the

words of an animated observer) "the air of having a Christian hope and

a sequence flush in his hand," and said: "Well, as I reckon I'm not up

yer for stealin' a ring that another man lets on to have found, and as

fur as I kin see, hez nothin' to do with the case, I do!" And as it was

here that the Sheriff of Calaveras made a precipitate entry into the

room, the mystery remained unsolved.

The effect of this freshly-important ridicule on the sensitive mind of

Cass might have been foretold by Blazing Star had it ever taken that

sensitiveness into consideration. He had lost the good-humor and easy

pliability which had tempted him to frankness, and he had gradually

become bitter and hard. He had at first affected amusement over his own

vanished day dream--hiding his virgin disappointment in his own breast;

but when he began to turn upon his feelings he turned upon his comrades

also. Cass was for a while unpopular. There is no ingratitude so

revolting to the human mind as that of the butt who refuses to be one

any longer. The man who rejects that immunity which laughter generally

casts upon him and demands to be seriously considered deserves no

mercy.

It was under these hard conditions that Cass Beard, convicted of overt

sentimentalism, aggravated by inconsistency, stepped into the Red Chief

coach that evening. It was his habit usually to ride with the driver,

but the presence of Hornsby and Miss Porter on the box seat changed his

intention. Yet he had the satisfaction of seeing that neither had

noticed him, and as there was no other passenger inside, he stretched

himself on the cushion of the back seat and gave way to moody

reflections. He quite determined to leave Blazing Star, to settle

himself seriously to the task of money-getting, and to return to his

comrades, some day, a sarcastic, cynical, successful man, and so

overwhelm them with confusion. For poor Cass had not yet reached that

superiority of knowing that success would depend upon his ability to

forego his past. Indeed, part of his boyhood had been cast among these

men, and he was not old enough to have learned that success was not to

be gauged by their standard. The moon lit up the dark interior of the

coach with a faint poetic light. The lazy swinging of the vehicle that

was bearing him away--albeit only for a night and a day--the solitude,

the glimpses from the window of great distances full of vague

possibilities, made the abused ring potent as that of Gyges. He dreamed

with his eyes open. From an Alnaschar vision he suddenly awoke. The

coach had stopped. The voices of men, one in entreaty, one in

expostulation, came from the box. Cass mechanically put his hand to his

pistol pocket.

"Thank you, but I _insist_ upon getting down."

It was Miss Porter's voice. This was followed by a rapid, half

restrained interchange of words between Hornsby and the driver. Then

the latter said gruffly:

"If the lady wants to ride inside, let her."

Miss Porter fluttered to the ground. She was followed by Hornsby. "Just

a minit, Miss," he expostulated, half shamedly, half brusquely, "ye

don't onderstand me. I only"--

But Miss Porter had jumped into the coach.

Hornsby placed his hand on the handle of the door. Miss Porter grasped

it firmly from the inside. There was a slight struggle.

All of which was part of a dream to the boyish Cass. But he awoke from

it--a man! "Do you," he asked, in a voice he scarcely recognized

himself,--"do you want this man inside?"

"No!"

Cass caught at Hornsby's wrist like a young tiger. But alas! what

availed instinctive chivalry against main strength? He only succeeded

in forcing the door open in spite of Miss Porter's superior strategy,

and--I fear I must add, muscle also--and threw himself passionately at

Hornsby's throat, where he hung on and calmly awaited dissolution. But

he had, in the onset, driven Hornsby out into the road and the

moonlight.

"Here! somebody take my lines." The voice was "Mountain Charley's," the

driver. The figure that jumped from the box and separated the

struggling men belonged to this singularly direct person.

"You're riding inside?" said Charley, interrogatively, to Cass. Before

he could reply Miss Porter's voice came from the window:

"He is!"

Charley promptly bundled Cass into the coach.

"And _you_?" to Hornsby, "onless you're kalkilatin' to take a little

'pasear' you're booked _outside_. Get up."

It is probable that Charley assisted Mr. Hornsby as promptly to his

seat, for the next moment the coach was rolling on.

Meanwhile Cass, by reason of his forced entry, had been deposited in

Miss Porter's lap, whence, freeing himself, he had attempted to climb

over the middle seat, but in the starting of the coach was again thrown

heavily against her hat and shoulder; all of which was inconsistent

with the attitude of dignified reserve he had intended to display. Miss

Porter, meanwhile, recovered her good-humor.

"What a brute he was, ugh!" she said, re-tying the ribbons of her

bonnet under her square chin, and smoothing out her linen duster.

Cass tried to look as if he had forgotten the whole affair. "Who? Oh,

yes! I see!" he responded, absently.

"I suppose I ought to thank you," she went on with a smile, "but you

know, really, I could have kept him out if you hadn't pulled his wrist

from outside. I'll show you. Look! Put your hand on the handle there!

Now, I'll hold the lock inside firmly. You see, you can't turn the

catch!"

She indeed held the lock fast. It was a firm hand, yet soft--their

fingers had touched over the handle--and looked white in the moonlight.

He made no reply, but sank back again in his seat with a singular

sensation in the fingers that had touched hers. He was in the shadow,

and, without being seen, could abandon his reserve and glance at her

face. It struck him that he had never really seen her before. She was

not so tall as she had appeared to be. Her eyes were not large, but her

pupils were black, moist, velvety, and so convex as to seem embossed on

the white. She had an indistinctive nose, a rather colorless

face--whiter at the angles of the mouth and nose through the relief of

tiny freckles like grains of pepper. Her mouth was straight, dark, red,

but moist as her eyes. She had drawn herself into the corner of the

back seat, her wrist put through and hanging over the swinging strap,

the easy lines of her plump figure swaying from side to side with the

motion of the coach. Finally, forgetful of any presence in the dark

corner opposite, she threw her head a little farther back, slipped a

trifle lower, and placing two well-booted feet upon the middle seat,

completed a charming and wholesome picture.

Five minutes elapsed. She was looking straight at the moon. Cass Beard

felt his dignified reserve becoming very much like awkwardness. He

ought to be coldly polite.

"I hope you're not flustered, Miss, by the--by the"--he began.

"I?" She straightened herself up in the seat, cast a curious glance

into the dark corner, and then, letting herself down again, said: "Oh

dear, no!"

Another five minutes elapsed. She had evidently forgotten him. She

might, at least, have been civil. He took refuge again in his reserve.

But it was now mixed with a certain pique.

Yet how much softer her face looked in the moonlight! Even her square

jaw had lost that hard, matter-of-fact, practical indication which was

so distasteful to him, and always had suggested a harsh criticism of

his weakness. How moist her eyes were--actually shining in the light!

How that light seemed to concentrate in the corners of the lashes, and

then slipped--a flash--away! Was she? Yes, she was crying.

Cass melted. He moved. Miss Porter put her head out of the window and

drew it back in a moment dry-eyed.

"One meets all sorts of folks traveling," said Cass, with what he

wished to make appear a cheerful philosophy.

"I dare say. I don't know. I never before met any one who was rude to

me. I have traveled all over the country alone, and with all kinds of

people ever since I was so high. I have always gone my own way, without

hindrance or trouble. I always do. I don't see why I shouldn't. Perhaps

other people mayn't like it. I do. I like excitement. I like to see all

that there is to see. Because I'm a girl I don't see why I can't go out

without a keeper, and why I cannot do what any man can do that isn't

wrong; do you? Perhaps you do--perhaps you don't. Perhaps you like a

girl to be always in the house dawdling or thumping a piano or reading

novels. Perhaps you think I'm bold because I don't like it, and won't

lie and say I do."

She spoke sharply and aggressively, and so evidently in answer to

Cass's unspoken indictment against her, that he was not surprised when

she became more direct.

"You know you were shocked when I went to fetch that Hornsby, the

coroner, after we found the dead body."

"Hornsby wasn't shocked," said Cass, a little viciously.

"What do you mean?" she said, abruptly.

"You were good friends enough until"--

"Until he insulted me just now; is that it?"

"Until he thought," stammered Cass, "that because you were--you

know--not so--so--so careful as other girls, he could be a little

freer."

"And so, because I preferred to ride a mile with him to see something

real that had happened, and tried to be useful instead of looking in

shop-windows in Main Street or promenading before the hotel"--

"And being ornamental," interrupted Cass. But this feeble and

un-Cass-like attempt at playful gallantry met with a sudden check.

Miss Porter drew herself together, and looked out of the window. "Do

you wish me to walk the rest of the way home?"

"No," said Cass, hurriedly, with a crimson face and a sense of

gratuitous rudeness.

"Then stop that kind of talk, right there!"

There was an awkward silence. "I wish I was a man," she said, half

bitterly, half earnestly. Cass Beard was not old and cynical enough to

observe that this devout aspiration is usually uttered by those who

have least reason to deplore their own femininity; and, but for the

rebuff he had just received, would have made the usual emphatic dissent

of our sex, when the wish is uttered by warm red lips and tender

voices--a dissent, it may be remarked, generally withheld, however,

when the masculine spinster dwells on the perfection of woman. I dare

say Miss Porter was sincere, for a moment later she continued,

poutingly:

"And yet I used to go to fires in Sacramento when I was only ten years

old. I saw the theatre burnt down. Nobody found fault with me then."

Something made Cass ask if her father and mother objected to her boyish

tastes. The reply was characteristic if not satisfactory:

"Object? I'd like to see them do it!"

The direction of the road had changed. The fickle moon now abandoned

Miss Porter and sought out Cass on the front seat. It caressed the

young fellow's silky moustache and long eyelashes, and took some of the

sunburn from his cheek.

"What's the matter with your neck?" said the girl, suddenly.

Cass looked down, blushing to find that the collar of his smart "duck"

sailor shirt was torn open. But something more than his white, soft,

girlish skin was exposed; the shirt front was dyed quite red with blood

from a slight cut on the shoulder. He remembered to have felt a scratch

while struggling with Hornsby.

The girl's soft eyes sparkled. "Let _me_," she said, vivaciously. "Do!

I'm good at wounds. Come over here. No--stay there. I'll come over to

you."

She did, bestriding the back of the middle seat and dropping at his

side. The magnetic fingers again touched his; he felt her warm breath

on his neck as she bent toward him.

"It's nothing," he said, hastily, more agitated by the treatment than

the wound.

"Give me your flask," she responded, without heeding. A stinging

sensation as she bathed the edges of the cut with the spirit brought

him back to common sense again. "There," she said, skillfully

extemporizing a bandage from her handkerchief and a compress from his

cravat. "Now, button your coat over your chest, so, and don't take

cold." She insisted upon buttoning it for him; greater even than the

feminine delight in a man's strength is the ministration to his

weakness. Yet, when this was finished, she drew a little away from him

in some embarrassment--an embarrassment she wondered at, as his skin

was finer, his touch gentler, his clothes cleaner, and--not to put too

fine a point upon it--he exhaled an atmosphere much sweeter than

belonged to most of the men her boyish habits had brought her in

contact with--not excepting her own father. Later she even exempted her

mother from the possession of this divine effluence. After a moment she

asked, suddenly, "What are you going to do with Hornsby?"

Cass had not thought of him. His short-lived rage was past with the

occasion that provoked it. Without any fear of his adversary, he would

have been content quite willing to meet him no more. He only said,

"That will depend upon him."

"Oh, you won't hear from him again," said she, confidently; "but you

really ought to get up a little more muscle. You've no more than a

girl." She stopped, a little confused.

"What shall I do with your handkerchief?" asked the uneasy Cass,

anxious to change the subject.

"Oh, keep it, if you want to; only don't show it to everybody as you

did that ring you found." Seeing signs of distress in his face, she

added: "Of course that was all nonsense. If you had cared so much for

the ring you couldn't have talked about it, or shown it; could you?"

It relieved him to think that this might be true; he certainly had not

looked at it in that light before.

"But did you really find it?" she asked, with sudden gravity. "Really,

now?"

"Yes."

"And there was no real May in the case?"

"Not that I know of," laughed Cass, secretly pleased.

But Miss Porter, after eying him critically for a moment, jumped up and

climbed back again to her seat. "Perhaps you had better give me that

handkerchief back."

Cass began to unbutton his coat.

"No! no! Do you want to take your death of cold?" she screamed. And

Cass, to avoid this direful possibility, rebuttoned his coat again over

the handkerchief and a peculiarly pleasing sensation.

Very little now was said until the rattling, bounding descent of the

coach denoted the approach to Red Chief. The straggling main street

disclosed itself, light by light. In the flash of glittering windows

and the sound of eager voices Miss Porter descended, without waiting

for Cass's proffered assistance, and anticipated Mountain Charley's

descent from the box. A few undistinguishable words passed between

them.

"You kin freeze to me, Miss," said Charley; and Miss Porter, turning

her frank laugh and frankly opened palm to Cass, half returned the

pressure of his hand and slipped away.

A few days after the stage-coach incident Mountain Charley drew up

beside Cass on the Blazing Star turnpike, and handed him a small

packet. "I was told to give ye that by Miss Porter. Hush--listen! It's

that rather old dog-goned ring o' yours that's bin in all the papers.

She's bamboozled that sap-headed county judge, Boompointer, into givin'

it to her. Take my advice and sling it away for some other feller to

pick up and get looney over. That's all!"

"Did she say anything?" asked Cass, anxiously, as he received his lost

treasure somewhat coldly.

"Well, yes! I reckon. She asked me to stand betwixt Hornsby and you. So

don't _you_ tackle him, and I'll see _he_ don't tackle you," and with a

portentous wink Mountain Charley whipped up his horses and was gone.

Cass opened the packet. It contained nothing but the ring. Unmitigated

by any word of greeting, remembrance, or even raillery, it seemed

almost an insult. Had she intended to flaunt his folly in his face, or

had she believed he still mourned for it and deemed its recovery a

sufficient reward for his slight service? For an instant he felt

tempted to follow Charley's advice, and cast this symbol of folly and

contempt in the dust of the mountain road. And had she not made his

humiliation complete by begging Charley's interference between him and

his enemy? He would go home and send her back the handkerchief she had

given him. But here the unromantic reflection that although he had

washed it that very afternoon in the solitude of his own cabin, he

could not possibly iron it, but must send it "rough dried," stayed his

indignant feet.

Two or three days, a week, a fortnight even, of this hopeless

resentment filled Cass's breast. Then the news of Kanaka Joe's

acquittal in the state court momentarily revived the story of the ring,

and revamped a few stale jokes in the camp. But the interest soon

flagged; the fortunes of the little community of Blazing Star had been

for some months failing; and with early snows in the mountain and

wasted capital in fruitless schemes on the river, there was little room

for the indulgence of that lazy and original humor which belonged to

their lost youth and prosperity. Blazing Star truly, in the grim figure

of their slang, was "played out." Not dug out, worked out, or washed

out, but dissipated in a year of speculation and chance.

Against this tide of fortune Cass struggled manfully, and even evoked

the slow praise of his companions. Better still, he won a certain

praise for himself, in himself, in a consciousness of increased

strength, health, power, and self-reliance. He began to turn his quick

imagination and perception to some practical account, and made one or

two discoveries which quite startled his more experienced, but more

conservative companions. Nevertheless, Cass's discoveries and labors

were not of a kind that produced immediate pecuniary realization, and

Blazing Star, which consumed so many pounds of pork and flour daily,

did not unfortunately produce the daily equivalent in gold. Blazing

Star lost its credit. Blazing Star was hungry, dirty, and ragged.

Blazing Star was beginning to set.

Participating in the general ill-luck of the camp, Cass was not without

his own individual mischance. He had resolutely determined to forget

Miss Porter and all that tended to recall the unlucky ring, but,

cruelly enough, she was the only thing that refused to be

forgotten--whose undulating figure reclined opposite to him in the

weird moonlight of his ruined cabin, whose voice mingled with the song

of the river by whose banks he toiled, and whose eyes and touch

thrilled him in his dreams. Partly for this reason, and partly because

his clothes were beginning to be patched and torn, he avoided Red Chief

and any place where he would be likely to meet her. In spite of this

precaution he had once seen her driving in a pony carriage, but so

smartly and fashionably dressed that he drew back in the cover of a

wayside willow that she might pass without recognition. He looked down

upon his red-splashed clothes and grimy, soil-streaked hands, and for a

moment half hated her. His comrades seldom spoke of her--instinctively

fearing some temptation that might beset his Spartan resolutions, but

he heard from time to time that she had been seen at balls and parties,

apparently enjoying those very frivolities of her sex she affected to

condemn. It was a Sabbath morning in early spring that he was returning

from an ineffectual attempt to enlist a capitalist at the county town

to redeem the fortunes of Blazing Star. He was pondering over the

narrowness of that capitalist, who had evidently but illogically

connected Cass's present appearance with the future of that struggling

camp, when he became so footsore that he was obliged to accept a "lift"

from a wayfaring teamster. As the slowly lumbering vehicle passed the

new church on the outskirts of the town, the congregation were sallying

forth. It was too late to jump down and run away, and Cass dared not

ask his new-found friend to whip up his cattle. Conscious of his

unshorn beard and ragged garments, he kept his eyes fixed upon the

road. A voice that thrilled him called his name. It was Miss Porter, a

resplendent vision of silk, laces, and Easter flowers--yet actually

running, with something of her old dash and freedom, beside the wagon.

As the astonished teamster drew up before this elegant apparition, she

panted:

"Why did you make me run so far, and why didn't you look up?"

Cass, trying to hide the patches on his knees beneath a newspaper,

stammered that he had not seen her.

"And you did not hold down your head purposely?"

"No," said Cass.

"Why have you not been to Red Chief? Why didn't you answer my message

about the ring?" she asked, swiftly.

"You sent nothing but the ring," said Cass, coloring, as he glanced at

the teamster.

"Why, _that_ was a message, you born idiot."

Cass stared. The teamster smiled. Miss Porter gazed anxiously at the

wagon. "I think I'd like a ride in there; it looks awfully good." She

glanced mischievously around at the lingering and curious congregation.

"May I?"

But Cass deprecated that proceeding strongly. It was dirty; he was not

sure it was even _wholesome_; she would be _so_ uncomfortable; he

himself was only going a few rods farther, and in that time she might

ruin her dress--

"Oh, yes," she said, a little bitterly, "certainly, my dress must be

looked after. And--what else?"

"People might think it strange, and believe I had invited you,"

continued Cass, hesitatingly.

"When I had only invited myself? Thank you. Good-by."

She waved her hand and stepped back from the wagon. Cass would have

given worlds to recall her, but he sat still, and the vehicle moved on

in moody silence. At the first cross road he jumped down. "Thank you,"

he said to the teamster. "You're welcome," returned that gentleman,

regarding him curiously, "but the next time a gal like that asks to

ride in this yer wagon, I reckon I won't take the vote of any deadhead

passenger. _Adios_, young fellow. Don't stay out late; ye might be ran

off by some gal, and what would your mother say?" Of course the young

man could only look unutterable things and walk away, but even in that

dignified action he was conscious that its effect was somewhat

mitigated by a large patch from a material originally used as a

flour-sack, which had repaired his trousers, but still bore the

ironical legend, "Best Superfine."

The summer brought warmth and promise and some blossom, if not absolute

fruition to Blazing Star. The long days drew Nature into closer

communion with the men, and hopefulness followed the discontent of

their winter seclusion. It was easier, too, for Capital to be wooed and

won into making a picnic in these mountain solitudes than when high

water stayed the fords and drifting snow the Sierran trails. At the

close of one of these Arcadian days Cass was smoking before the door of

his lonely cabin when he was astounded by the onset of a dozen of his

companions. Peter Drummond, far in the van, was waving a newspaper like

a victorious banner. "All's right now, Cass, old man!" he panted as he

stopped before Cass and shoved back his eager followers.

"What's all right?" asked Cass, dubiously.

"_You_! You kin rake down the pile now. You're hunky! You're on velvet.

Listen!"

He opened the newspaper and read, with annoying deliberation, as

follows:--

"LOST.--If the finder of a plain gold ring, bearing the engraved

inscription, 'May to Cass,' alleged to have been picked up on the high

road near Blazing Star on the 4th March, 186--, will apply to Bookham &

Sons, bankers, 1007 Y. Street, Sacramento, he will be suitably rewarded

either for the recovery of the ring, or for such facts as may identify

it, or the locality where it was found."

Cass rose and frowned savagely on his comrades. "No! no!" cried a dozen

voices assuringly. "It's all right! Honest Injun! True as gospel! No

joke, Cass!"

"Here's the paper, Sacramento 'Union' of yesterday. Look for yourself,"

said Drummond, handing him the well-worn journal. "And you see," he

added, "how darned lucky you are. It ain't necessary for you to produce

the ring, so if that old biled owl of a Boompointer don't giv' it back

to ye, it's all the same."

"And they say nobody but the finder need apply," interrupted another.

"That shuts out Boompointer or Kanaka Joe for the matter o' that."

"It's clar that it _means_ you, Cass, ez much ez if they'd given your

name," added a third.

For Miss Porter's sake and his own Cass had never told them of the

restoration of the ring, and it was evident that Mountain Charley had

also kept silent. Cass could not speak now without violating a secret,

and he was pleased that the ring itself no longer played an important

part in the mystery. But what was that mystery, and why was the ring

secondary to himself? Why was so much stress laid upon his finding it?

"You see," said Drummond, as if answering his unspoken thought,

"that'ar gal--for it is a gal in course--hez read all about it in the

papers, and hez sort o' took a shine to ye. It don't make a bit o'

difference who in thunder Cass _is_ or _waz_, for I reckon she's kicked

him over by this time"--

"Sarved him right, too, for losing the girl's ring and then lying low

and keeping dark about it," interrupted a sympathizer.

"And she's just weakened over the romantic, high-toned way you stuck to

it," continued Drummond, forgetting the sarcasms he had previously

hurled at this romance. Indeed the whole camp, by this time, had become

convinced that it had fostered and developed a chivalrous devotion

which was now on the point of pecuniary realization. It was generally

accepted that "she" was the daughter of this banker, and also felt that

in the circumstances the happy father could not do less than develop

the resources of Blazing Star at once. Even if there were no

relationship, what opportunity could be more fit for presenting to

capital a locality that even produced engagement rings, and, as Jim

Fauquier put it, "the men ez knew how to keep 'em." It was this

sympathetic Virginian who took Cass aside with the following generous

suggestion: "If you find that you and the old gal couldn't hitch

hosses, owin' to your not likin' red hair or a game leg" (it may be

here recorded that Blazing Star had, for no reason whatever, attributed

these unprepossessing qualities to the mysterious advertiser), "you

might let _me_ in. You might say ez how I used to jest worship that

ring with you, and allers wanted to borrow it on Sundays. If anything

comes of it--why--_we're pardners_!"

A serious question was the outfitting of Cass for what now was felt to

be a diplomatic representation of the community. His garments, it

hardly need be said, were inappropriate to any wooing except that of

the "maiden all forlorn," which the advertiser clearly was not. "He

might," suggested Fauquier, "drop in jest as he is--kinder as if he'd

got keerless of the world, being lovesick." But Cass objected strongly,

and was borne out in his objection by his younger comrades. At last a

pair of white duck trousers, a red shirt, a flowing black silk scarf,

and a Panama hat were procured at Red Chief, on credit, after a

judicious exhibition of the advertisement. A heavy wedding-ring, the

property of Drummond (who was not married), was also lent as a graceful

suggestion, and at the last moment Fauquier affixed to Cass's scarf an

enormous specimen pin of gold and quartz. "It sorter indicates the

auriferous wealth o' this yer region, and the old man (the senior

member of Bookham & Sons) needn't know I won it at draw-poker in

Frisco," said Fauqier. "Ef you 'pass' on the gal, you kin hand it back

to me and _I'll_ try it on."

Forty dollars for expenses was put into Cass's hands, and the entire

community accompanied him to the cross roads where he was to meet the

Sacramento coach, which eventually carried him away, followed by a

benediction of waving hats and exploding revolvers.

That Cass did not participate in the extravagant hopes of his comrades,

and that he rejected utterly their matrimonial speculations in his

behalf, need not be said.

Outwardly, he kept his own counsel with good-humored assent. But there

was something fascinating in the situation, and while he felt he had

forever abandoned his romantic dream, he was not displeased to know

that it might have proved a reality. Nor was it distasteful to him to

think that Miss Porter would hear of it and regret her late inability

to appreciate his sentiment. If he really were the object of some

opulent maiden's passion, he would show Miss Porter how he could

sacrifice the most brilliant prospects for her sake. Alone, on the top

of the coach, he projected one of those satisfying conversations in

which imaginative people delight, but which unfortunately never come

quite up to rehearsal. "Dear Miss Porter," he would say, addressing the

back of the driver, "if I could remain faithful to a dream of my youth,

however illusive and unreal, can you believe that for the sake of lucre

I could be false to the one real passion that alone supplanted it?" In

the composition and delivery of this eloquent statement an hour was

happily forgotten: the only drawback to its complete effect was that a

misplacing of epithets in rapid repetition did not seem to make the

slightest difference, and Cass found himself saying "Dear Miss Porter,

if I could be false to a dream of my youth, etc., etc., can you believe

I could be _faithful_ to the one real passion, etc., etc.," with equal

and perfect satisfaction. As Miss Porter was reputed to be well off, if

the unknown were poor, that might be another drawback.

The banking house of Bookham & Sons did not present an illusive nor

mysterious appearance. It was eminently practical and matter of fact;

it was obtrusively open and glassy; nobody would have thought of

leaving a secret there that would have been inevitably circulated over

the counter. Cass felt an uncomfortable sense of incongruity in

himself, in his story, in his treasure, to this temple of disenchanting

realism. With the awkwardness of an embarrassed man he was holding

prominently in his hand an envelope containing the ring and

advertisement as a voucher for his intrusion, when the nearest clerk

took the envelope from his hand, opened it, took out the ring, returned

it, said briskly, "T' other shop, next door, young man," and turned to

another customer.

Cass stepped to the door, saw that "T'other shop" was a pawnbroker's,

and returned again with a flashing eye and heightened color. "It's an

advertisement I have come to answer," he began again.

The clerk cast a glance at Cass's scarf and pin. "Place taken

yesterday--no room for any more," he said, abruptly.

Cass grew quite white. But his old experience in Blazing Star repartee

stood him in good stead. "If it's _your_ place you mean," he said

coolly, "I reckon you might put a dozen men in the hole you're rattlin'

round in--but it's this advertisement I'm after. If Bookham isn't in,

maybe you'll send me one of the grown-up sons." The production of the

advertisement and some laughter from the bystanders had its effect. The

pert young clerk retired, and returned to lead the way to the bank

parlor. Cass's heart sank again as he was confronted by a dark,

iron-gray man--in dress, features, speech, and action--uncompromisingly

opposed to Cass--his ring and his romance. When the young man had told

his story and produced his treasure he paused. The banker scarcely

glanced at it, but said, impatiently:

"Well, your papers?"

"My papers?"

"Yes. Proof of your identity. You say your name is Cass Beard. Good!

What have you got to prove it? How can I tell who you are?"

To a sensitive man there is no form of suspicion that is as bewildering

and demoralizing at the moment as the question of his identity. Cass

felt the insult in the doubt of his word, and the palpable sense of his

present inability to prove it. The banker watched him keenly but not

unkindly.

"Come," he said at length, "this is not my affair; if you can legally

satisfy the lady for whom I am only agent, well and good. I believe you

can; I only warn you that you must. And my present inquiry was to keep

her from losing her time with impostors, a class I don't think you

belong to. There's her card. Good day."

"MISS MORTIMER."

It was _not_ the banker's daughter. The first illusion of Blazing Star

was rudely dispelled. But the care taken by the capitalist to shield

her from imposture indicated a person of wealth. Of her youth and

beauty Cass no longer thought.

The address given was not distant. With a beating heart he rung the

bell of a respectable-looking house, and was ushered into a private

drawing-room. Instinctively he felt that the room was only temporarily

inhabited; an air peculiar to the best lodgings, and when the door

opened upon a tall lady in deep mourning, he was still more convinced

of an incongruity between the occupant and her surroundings. With a

smile that vacillated between a habit of familiarity and ease, and a

recent restraint, she motioned him to a chair.

"Miss Mortimer" was still young, still handsome, still fashionably

dressed, and still attractive. From her first greeting to the end of

the interview Cass felt that she knew all about him. This relieved him

from the onus of proving his identity, but seemed to put him vaguely at

a disadvantage. It increased his sense of inexperience and

youthfulness.

"I hope you will believe," she began, "that the few questions I have to

ask you are to satisfy my own heart, and for no other purpose." She

smiled sadly as she went on. "Had it been otherwise, I should have

instituted a legal inquiry, and left this interview to some one cooler,

calmer, and less interested than myself. But I think, I _know_ I can

trust you. Perhaps we women are weak and foolish to talk of an

_instinct_, and when you know my story you may have reason to believe

that but little dependence can be placed on _that_; but I am not wrong

in saying,--am I?" (with a sad smile) "that _you_ are not above that

weakness?" She paused, closed her lips tightly, and grasped her hands

before her. "You say you found that ring in the road some three months

before--the--the--you know what I mean--the body--was discovered?"

"Yes."

"You thought it might have been dropped by some one in passing?"

"I thought so, yes--it belonged to no one in the camp."

"Before your cabin or on the highway?"

"Before my cabin."

"You are _sure_?" There was something so very sweet and sad in her

smile that it oddly made Cass color.

"But my cabin is near the road," he suggested.

"I see! And there was nothing else; no paper nor envelope?"

"Nothing."

"And you kept it because of the odd resemblance one of the names bore

to yours?"

"Yes."

"For no other reason?"

"None." Yet Cass felt he was blushing.

"You'll forgive my repeating a question you have already answered, but

I am _so_ anxious. There was some attempt to prove at the inquest that

the ring had been found on the body of--the unfortunate man. But you

tell me it was not so?"

"I can swear it."

"Good God--the traitor!" She took a hurried step forward, turned to the

window, and then came back to Cass with a voice broken with emotion. "I

have told you I could trust you. That ring was mine!"

She stopped, and then went on hurriedly. "Years ago I gave it to a man

who deceived and wronged me; a man whose life since then has been a

shame and disgrace to all who knew him; a man who, once a gentleman,

sank so low as to become the associate of thieves and ruffians; sank so

low, that when he died, by violence--a traitor even to them--his own

confederates shrunk from him, and left him to fill a nameless grave.

That man's body you found!"

Cass started. "And his name was----?"

"Part of your surname. Cass--Henry Cass."

"You see why Providence seems to have brought that ring to you," she

went on. "But you ask me why, knowing this, I am so eager to know if

the ring was found by you in the road, or if it were found on his body.

Listen! It is part of my mortification that the story goes that this

man once showed this ring, boasted of it, staked, and lost it at a

gambling table to one of his vile comrades."

"Kanaka Joe," said Cass, overcome by a vivid recollection of Joe's

merriment at the trial.

"The same. Don't you see," she said, hurriedly, "if the ring had been

found on him I could believe that somewhere in his heart he still kept

respect for the woman he had wronged. I am a woman--a foolish woman, I

know--but you have crushed that hope forever."

"But why have you sent for me?" asked Cass, touched by her emotion.

"To know it for certain," she said, almost fiercely. "Can you not

understand that a woman like me must know a thing once and forever? But

you _can_ help me. I did not send for you only to pour my wrongs in

your ears. You must take me with you to this place--to the spot where

you found the ring--to the spot where you found the body--to the spot

where--where _he_ lies. You must do it secretly, that none shall know

me."

Cass hesitated. He was thinking of his companions and the collapse of

their painted bubble. How could he keep the secret from them?

"If it is money, you need, let not that stop you. I have no right to

your time without recompense. Do not misunderstand me. There has been a

thousand dollars awaiting my order at Bookham's when the ring should be

delivered. It shall be doubled if you help me in this last moment."

It was possible. He could convey her safely there, invent some story of

a reward delayed for want of proofs, and afterward share that reward

with his friends. He answered promptly, "I will take you there."

She took his hands in both of hers, raised them to her lips, and

smiled. The shadow of grief and restraint seemed to have fallen from

her face, and a half mischievous, half coquettish gleam in her dark

eyes touched the susceptible Cass in so subtle a fashion that he

regained the street in some confusion. He wondered what Miss Porter

would have thought. But was he not returning to her, a fortunate man,

with one thousand dollars in his pocket! Why should he remember he was

handicapped by a pretty woman and a pathetic episode? It did not make

the proximity less pleasant as he helped her into the coach that

evening, nor did the recollection of another ride with another woman

obtrude itself upon those consolations which he felt it his duty, from

time to time, to offer. It was arranged that he should leave her at the

"Red Chief" Hotel, while he continued on to Blazing Star, returning at

noon to bring her with him when he could do it without exposing her to

recognition. The gray dawn came soon enough, and the coach drew up at

"Red Chief" while the lights in the bar-room and dining-room of the

hotel were still struggling with the far flushing east. Cass alighted,

placed Miss Mortimer in the hands of the landlady, and returned to the

vehicle. It was still musty, close, and frowzy, with half awakened

passengers. There was a vacated seat on the top, which Cass climbed up

to, and abstractedly threw himself beside a figure muffled in shawls

and rugs. There was a slight movement among the multitudinous

enwrappings, and then the figure turned to him and said dryly, "Good

morning!" It was Miss Porter!

"Have you been long here?" he stammered.

"All night."

He would have given worlds to leave her at that moment. He would have

jumped from the starting coach to save himself any explanation of the

embarrassment he was furiously conscious of showing, without, as he

believed, any adequate cause. And yet, like all inexperienced,

sensitive men, he dashed blindly into that explanation; worse, he even

told his secret at once, then and there, and then sat abashed and

conscience-stricken, with an added sense of its utter futility.

"And this," summed up the young girl, with a slight shrug of her pretty

shoulders, "is _your May_?"

Cass would have recommenced his story.

"No, don't, pray! It isn't interesting, nor original. Do _you_ believe

it?"

"I do," said Cass, indignantly.

"How lucky! Then let me go to sleep."

Cass, still furious, but uneasy, did not again address her. When the

coach stopped at Blazing Star she asked him, indifferently: "When does

this sentimental pilgrimage begin?"

"I return for her at one o'clock," replied Cass, stiffly. He kept his

word. He appeased his eager companions with a promise of future

fortune, and exhibited the present and tangible reward. By a circuitous

route known only to himself, he led Miss Mortimer to the road before

the cabin. There was a pink flush of excitement on her somewhat faded

cheek.

"And it was here?" she asked, eagerly.

"I found it here."

"And the body?"

"That was afterward. Over in that direction, beyond the clump of

buckeyes, on the Red Chief turnpike."

"And any one coming from the road we left just now and going

to--to--that place, would have to cross just here? Tell me," she said,

with a strange laugh, laying her cold nervous hand on his, "wouldn't

they?"

"They would."

"Let us go to that place."

Cass stepped out briskly to avoid observation and gain the woods beyond

the highway. "You have crossed here before," she said. "There seems to

be a trail."

"I may have made it: it's a short cut to the buckeyes."

"You never found anything else on the trail?"

"You remember, I told you before, the ring was all I found."

"Ah, true!" she smiled sweetly; "it was _that_ which made it seem so

odd to you. I forgot."

In half an hour they reached the buckeyes. During the walk she had

taken rapid recognizance of everything in her path. When they crossed

the road and Cass had pointed out the scene of the murder, she looked

anxiously around. "You are sure we are not seen?"

"Quite."

"You will not think me foolish if I ask you to wait here while I go in

there"--she pointed to the ominous thicket near them--"alone?" She was

quite white.

Cass's heart, which had grown somewhat cold since his interview with

Miss Porter, melted at once.

"Go; I will stay here."

He waited five minutes. She did not return. What if the poor creature

had determined upon suicide on the spot where her faithless lover had

fallen? He was reassured in another moment by the rustle of skirts in

the undergrowth.

"I was becoming quite alarmed," he said, aloud.

"You have reason to be," returned a hurried voice. He started. It was

Miss Porter, who stepped swiftly out of the cover. "Look," she said,

"look at that man down the road. He has been tracking you two ever

since you left the cabin. Do you know who he is?"

"No!"

"Then listen. It is three-fingered Dick, one of the escaped road

agents. I know him!"

"Let us go and warn her," said Cass, eagerly.

Miss Porter laid her hand upon his shoulder.

"I don't think she'll thank you," she said, dryly. "Perhaps you'd

better see what she's doing, first."

Utterly bewildered, yet with a strong sense of the masterfulness of his

companion, he followed her. She crept like a cat through the thicket.

Suddenly she paused. "Look!" she whispered, viciously, "look at the

tender vigils of your heart-broken May!"

Cass saw the woman who had left him a moment before on her knees on the

grass, with long thin fingers digging like a ghoul in the earth. He had

scarce time to notice her eager face and eyes, cast now and then back

toward the spot where she had left him, before there was a crash in the

bushes, and a man,--the stranger of the road,--leaped to her side.

"Run," he said; "run for it now. You're watched!"

"Oh! that man, Beard!" she said, contemptuously.

"No, another in a wagon. Quick. Fool, you know the place now,--you can

come later; run!" And half-dragging, half-lifting her, he bore her

through the bushes. Scarcely had they closed behind the pair when Miss

Porter ran to the spot vacated by the woman. "Look!" she cried,

triumphantly, "look!"

Cass looked, and sank on his knees beside her.

"It _was_ worth a thousand dollars, wasn't it?" she repeated,

maliciously, "wasn't it? But you ought to return it! _Really_ you

ought."

Cass could scarcely articulate. "But how did _you_ know it?" he finally

gasped.

"Oh, I suspected something; there was a woman, and you know you're

_such_ a fool!"

Cass rose, stiffly.

"Don't be a greater fool now, but go and bring my horse and wagon from

the hill, and don't say anything to the driver."

"Then you did not come alone?"

"No; it would have been bold and improper."

"Please!"

"And to think it _was_ the ring, after all, that pointed to this," she

said.

"The ring that _you_ returned to me."

"What did you say?"

"Nothing."

"Don't, please, the wagon is coming."

* * * * *

In the next morning's edition of the "Red Chief Chronicle" appeared the

following startling intelligence:

EXTRAORDINARY DISCOVERY!

FINDING OF THE STOLEN TREASURE OF WELLS, FARGO & CO. OVER $300,000

RECOVERED.

Our readers will remember the notorious robbery of Wells, Fargo & Co.'s

treasure from the Sacramento and Red Chief Pioneer Coach on the night

of September 1. Although most of the gang were arrested, it is known

that two escaped, who, it was presumed, _cached_ the treasure,

amounting to nearly $500,000 in gold, drafts, and jewelry, as no trace

of the property was found. Yesterday our esteemed fellow citizen, Mr.

Cass Beard, long and favorably known in this county, succeeded in

exhuming the treasure in a copse of hazel near the Red Chief

turnpike,--adjacent to the spot where an unknown body was lately

discovered. This body is now strongly suspected to be that of one Henry

Cass, a disreputable character, who has since been ascertained to have

been one of the road agents who escaped. The matter is now under legal

investigation. The successful result of the search is due to a

systematic plan evolved from the genius of Mr. Beard, who has devoted

over a year to this labor. It was first suggested to him by the finding

of a ring, now definitely identified as part of the treasure which was

supposed to have been dropped from Wells, Fargo & Co.'s boxes by the

robbers in their midnight flight through Blazing Star.

In the same journal appeared the no less important intelligence, which

explains, while it completes this veracious chronicle:--

"It is rumored that a marriage is shortly to take place between the

hero of the late treasure discovery and a young lady of Red Chief,

whose devoted aid and assistance to this important work is well known

to this community."

IN THE CARQUINEZ WOODS.

CHAPTER I.

The sun was going down on the Carquinez Woods. The few shafts of

sunlight that had pierced their pillared gloom were lost in

unfathomable depths, or splintered their ineffectual lances on the

enormous trunks of the redwoods. For a time the dull red of their vast

columns, and the dull red of their cast-off bark which matted the

echoless aisles, still seemed to hold a faint glow of the dying day.

But even this soon passed. Light and color fled upwards. The dark,

interlaced tree-tops, that had all day made an impenetrable shade,

broke into fire here and there; their lost spires glittered, faded, and

went utterly out. A weird twilight that did not come from an outer

world, but seemed born of the wood itself, slowly filled and possessed

the aisles. The straight, tall, colossal trunks rose dimly like columns

of upward smoke. The few fallen trees stretched their huge length into

obscurity, and seemed to lie on shadowy trestles. The strange breath

that filled these mysterious vaults had neither coldness nor moisture;

a dry, fragrant dust arose from the noiseless foot that trod their

bark-strewn floor; the aisles might have been tombs, the fallen trees,

enormous mummies; the silence, the solitude of the forgotten past.

And yet this silence was presently broken by a recurring sound like

breathing, interrupted occasionally by inarticulate and stertorous

gasps. It was not the quick, panting, listening breath of some stealthy

feline or canine animal, but indicated a larger, slower, and more

powerful organization, whose progress was less watchful and guarded, or

as if a fragment of one of the fallen monsters had become animate. At

times this life seemed to take visible form, but as vaguely, as

misshapenly, as the phantom of a nightmare. Now it was a square object

moving sideways, endways, with neither head nor tail and scarcely

visible feet; then an arched bulk rolling against the trunks of the

trees and recoiling again, or an upright cylindrical mass, but always

oscillating and unsteady, and striking the trees on either hand. The

frequent occurrence of the movement suggested the figures of some weird

rhythmic dance to music heard by the shape alone. Suddenly it either

became motionless or faded away.

There was the frightened neighing of a horse, the sudden jingling of

spurs, a shout and outcry, and the swift apparition of three dancing

torches in one of the dark aisles; but so intense was the obscurity

that they shed no light on surrounding objects, and seemed to advance

at their own volition without human guidance, until they disappeared

suddenly behind the interposing bulk of one of the largest trees.

Beyond its eighty feet of circumference the light could not reach, and

the gloom remained inscrutable. But the voices and jingling spurs were

heard distinctly.

"Blast the mare! She's shied off that cursed trail again."

"Ye ain't lost it agin, hev ye?" growled a second voice.

"That's jist what I hev. And these blasted pine-knots don't give light

an inch beyond 'em. D----d if I don't think they make this cursed hole

blacker."

There was a laugh--a woman's laugh--hysterical, bitter, sarcastic,

exasperating. The second speaker, without heeding it, went on:

"What in thunder skeert the hosses? Did you see or hear anything?"

"Nothin'. The wood is like a graveyard."

The woman's voice again broke into a hoarse, contemptuous laugh. The

man resumed angrily:

"If you know anything, why in h--ll don't you say so, instead of

cackling like a d----d squaw there? P'raps you reckon you ken find the

trail too."

"Take this rope off my wrist," said the woman's voice, "untie my hands,

let me down, and I'll find it." She spoke quickly and with a Spanish

accent.

It was the men's turn to laugh. "And give you a show to snatch that

six-shooter and blow a hole through me, as you did to the Sheriff of

Calaveras, eh? Not if this court understands itself," said the first

speaker dryly.

"Go to the devil, then," she said curtly.

"Not before a lady," responded the other. There was another laugh from

the men, the spurs jingled again, the three torches reappeared from

behind the tree, and then passed away in the darkness.

For a time silence and immutability possessed the woods; the great

trunks loomed upwards, their fallen brothers stretched their slow

length into obscurity. The sound of breathing again became audible; the

shape reappeared in the aisle, and recommenced its mystic dance.

Presently it was lost in the shadow of the largest tree, and to the

sound of breathing succeeded a grating and scratching of bark.

Suddenly, as if riven by lightning, a flash broke from the centre of

the tree-trunk, lit up the woods, and a sharp report rang through it.

After a pause the jingling of spurs and the dancing of torches were

revived from the distance.

"Hallo?"

No answer.

"Who fired that shot?"

But there was no reply. A slight veil of smoke passed away to the

right, there was the spice of gunpowder in the air, but nothing more.

The torches came forward again, but this time it could be seen they

were held in the hands of two men and a woman. The woman's hands were

tied at the wrist to the horse-hair reins of her mule, while a _riata_,

passed around her waist and under the mule's girth, was held by one of

the men, who were both armed with rifles and revolvers. Their

frightened horses curveted, and it was with difficulty they could be

made to advance.

"Ho! stranger, what are you shooting at?"

The woman laughed and shrugged her shoulders. "Look yonder at the roots

of the tree. You're a d----d smart man for a sheriff, ain't you?"

The man uttered an exclamation and spurred his horse forward, but the

animal reared in terror. He then sprang to the ground and approached

the tree. The shape lay there, a scarcely distinguishable bulk.

"A grizzly, by the living Jingo! Shot through the heart."

It was true. The strange shape lit up by the flaring torches seemed

more vague, unearthly, and awkward in its dying throes, yet the small

shut eyes, the feeble nose, the ponderous shoulders, and half-human

foot armed with powerful claws were unmistakable. The men turned by a

common impulse and peered into the remote recesses of the wood again.

"Hi, Mister! come and pick up your game. Hallo there!"

The challenge fell unheeded on the empty woods.

"And yet," said he whom the woman had called the sheriff, "he can't be

far off. It was a close shot, and the bear hez dropped in his tracks.

Why, wot's this sticking in his claws?"

The two men bent over the animal. "Why, it's sugar, brown sugar--look!"

There was no mistake. The huge beast's fore paws and muzzle were

streaked with the unromantic household provision, and heightened the

absurd contrast of its incongruous members. The woman, apparently

indifferent, had taken that opportunity to partly free one of her

wrists.

"If we hadn't been cavorting round this yer spot for the last half

hour, I'd swear there was a shanty not a hundred yards away," said the

sheriff.

The other man, without replying, remounted his horse instantly.

"If there is, and it's inhabited by a gentleman that kin make centre

shots like that in the dark, and don't care to explain how, I reckon I

won't disturb him."

The sheriff was apparently of the same opinion, for he followed his

companion's example, and once more led the way. The spurs tinkled, the

torches danced, and the cavalcade slowly reëntered the gloom. In

another moment it had disappeared.

The wood sank again into repose, this time disturbed by neither shape

nor sound. What lower forms of life might have crept close to its roots

were hidden in the ferns, or passed with deadened tread over the

bark-strewn floor. Towards morning a coolness like dew fell from above,

with here and there a dropping twig or nut, or the crepitant awakening

and stretching-out of cramped and weary branches. Later a dull, lurid

dawn, not unlike the last evening's sunset, filled the aisles. This

faded again, and a clear gray light, in which every object stood out in

sharp distinctness, took its place. Morning was waiting outside in all

its brilliant, youthful coloring, but only entered as the matured and

sobered day.

Seen in that stronger light, the monstrous tree near which the dead

bear lay revealed its age in its denuded and scarred trunk, and showed

in its base a deep cavity, a foot or two from the ground, partly hidden

by hanging strips of bark which had fallen across it. Suddenly one of

these strips was pushed aside, and a young man leaped lightly down.

But for the rifle he carried and some modern peculiarities of dress, he

was of a grace so unusual and unconventional that he might have passed

for a faun who was quitting his ancestral home. He stepped to the side

of the bear with a light elastic movement that was as unlike customary

progression as his face and figure were unlike the ordinary types of

humanity. Even as he leaned upon his rifle, looking down at the

prostrate animal, he unconsciously fell into an attitude that in any

other mortal would have been a pose, but with him was the picturesque

and unstudied relaxation of perfect symmetry.

"Hallo, Mister!"

He raised his head so carelessly and listlessly that he did not

otherwise change his attitude. Stepping from behind the tree, the woman

of the preceding night stood before him. Her hands were free except for

a thong of the _riata_, which was still knotted around one wrist, the

end of the thong having been torn or burnt away. Her eyes were

bloodshot, and her hair hung over her shoulders in one long black

braid.

"I reckoned all along it was _you_ who shot the bear," she said; "at

least some one hidin' yer," and she indicated the hollow tree with her

hand. "It wasn't no chance shot." Observing that the young man, either

from misconception or indifference, did not seem to comprehend her, she

added, "We came by here, last night, a minute after you fired."

"Oh, that was _you_ kicked up such a row, was it?" said the young man,

with a shade of interest.

"I reckon," said the woman, nodding her head, "and them that was with

me."

"And who are they?"

"Sheriff Dunn, of Yolo, and his deputy."

"And where are they now?"

"The deputy--in h--ll, I reckon. I don't know about the sheriff."

"I see," said the young man quietly; "and you?"

"I--got away," she said savagely. But she was taken with a sudden

nervous shiver, which she at once repressed by tightly dragging her

shawl over her shoulders and elbows, and folding her arms defiantly.

"And you're going?"

"To follow the deputy, may be," she said gloomily. "But come, I say,

ain't you going to treat? It's cursed cold here."

"Wait a moment." The young man was looking at her, with his arched

brows slightly knit and a half smile of curiosity. "Ain't you Teresa?"

She was prepared for the question, but evidently was not certain

whether she would reply defiantly or confidently. After an exhaustive

scrutiny of his face she chose the latter, and said, "You can bet your

life on it, Johnny."

"I don't bet, and my name isn't Johnny. Then you're the woman who

stabbed Dick Curson over at Lagrange's?"

She became defiant again. "That's me, all the time. What are you going

to do about it?"

"Nothing. And you used to dance at the Alhambra?"

She whisked the shawl from her shoulders, held it up like a scarf, and

made one or two steps of the _sembicuacua_. There was not the least

gayety, recklessness, or spontaneity in the action; it was simply

mechanical bravado. It was so ineffective, even upon her own feelings,

that her arms presently dropped to her side, and she coughed

embarrassedly. "Where's that whiskey, pardner?" she asked.

The young man turned toward the tree he had just quitted, and without

further words assisted her to mount to the cavity. It was an

irregular-shaped vaulted chamber, pierced fifty feet above by a shaft

or cylindrical opening in the decayed trunk, which was blackened by

smoke as if it had served the purpose of a chimney. In one corner lay a

bearskin and blanket; at the side were two alcoves or indentations, one

of which was evidently used as a table, and the other as a cupboard. In

another hollow, near the entrance, lay a few small sacks of flour,

coffee, and sugar, the sticky contents of the latter still strewing the

floor. From this storehouse the young man drew a wicker flask of

whiskey, and handed it, with a tin cup of water, to the woman. She

waved the cup aside, placed the flask to her lips, and drank the

undiluted spirit. Yet even this was evidently bravado, for the water

started to her eyes, and she could not restrain the paroxysm of

coughing that followed.

"I reckon that's the kind that kills at forty rods," she said, with a

hysterical laugh. "But I say, pardner, you look as if you were fixed

here to stay," and she stared ostentatiously around the chamber. But

she had already taken in its minutest details, even to observing that

the hanging strips of bark could be disposed so as to completely hide

the entrance.

"Well, yes," he replied; "it wouldn't be very easy to pull up the

stakes and move the shanty further on."

Seeing that either from indifference or caution he had not accepted her

meaning, she looked at him fixedly, and said,--

"What is your little game?"

"Eh?"

"What are you hiding for--here in this tree?"

"But I'm not hiding."

"Then why didn't you come out when they hailed you last night?"

"Because I didn't care to."

Teresa whistled incredulously. "All right--then if you're not hiding,

I'm going to." As he did not reply, she went on: "If I can keep out of

sight for a couple of weeks, this thing will blow over here, and I can

get across into Yolo. I could get a fair show there, where the boys

know me. Just now the trails are all watched, but no one would think of

lookin' here."

"Then how did you come to think of it?" he asked carelessly.

"Because I knew that bear hadn't gone far for that sugar; because I

knew he hadn't stole it from a _cache_--it was too fresh, and we'd have

seen the torn-up earth; because we had passed no camp; and because I

knew there was no shanty here. And, besides," she added in a low voice,

"may be I was huntin' a hole myself to die in--and spotted it by

instinct."

There was something in this suggestion of a hunted animal that, unlike

anything she had previously said or suggested, was not exaggerated, and

caused the young man to look at her again. She was standing under the

chimney-like opening, and the light from above illuminated her head and

shoulders. The pupils of her eyes had lost their feverish prominence,

and were slightly suffused and softened as she gazed abstractedly

before her. The only vestige of her previous excitement was in her

left-hand fingers, which were incessantly twisting and turning a

diamond ring upon her right hand, but without imparting the least

animation to her rigid attitude. Suddenly, as if conscious of his

scrutiny, she stepped aside out of the revealing light, and by a swift

feminine instinct raised her hand to her head as if to adjust her

straggling hair. It was only for a moment, however, for, as if aware of

the weakness, she struggled to resume her aggressive pose.

"Well," she said. "Speak up. Am I goin' to stop here, or have I got to

get up and get?"

"You can stay," said the young man quietly; "but as I've got my

provisions and ammunition here, and haven't any other place to go to

just now, I suppose we'll have to share it together."

She glanced at him under her eyelids, and a half-bitter,

half-contemptuous smile passed across her face. "All right, old man,"

she said, holding out her hand, "it's a go. We'll start in housekeeping

at once, if you like."

"I'll have to come here once or twice a day," he said, quite

composedly, "to look after my things, and get something to eat; but

I'll be away most of the time, and what with camping out under the

trees every night I reckon my share won't incommode you."

She opened her black eyes upon him, at this original proposition. Then

she looked down at her torn dress. "I suppose this style of thing ain't

very fancy, is it?" she said, with a forced laugh.

"I think I know where to beg or borrow a change for you, if you can't

get any," he replied simply.

She stared at him again. "Are you a family man?"

"No."

She was silent for a moment. "Well," she said, "you can tell your girl

I'm not particular about its being in the latest fashion."

There was a slight flush on his forehead as he turned toward the little

cupboard, but no tremor in his voice as he went on: "You'll find tea

and coffee here, and, if you're bored, there's a book or two. You read,

don't you--I mean English?"

She nodded, but cast a look of undisguised contempt upon the two worn,

coverless novels he held out to her. "You haven't got last week's

'Sacramento Union,' have you? I hear they have my case all in; only

them lying reporters made it out against me all the time."

"I don't see the papers," he replied curtly.

"They say there's a picture of me in the 'Police Gazette,' taken in the

act," and she laughed.

He looked a little abstracted, and turned as if to go. "I think you'll

do well to rest a while just now, and keep as close hid as possible

until afternoon. The trail is a mile away at the nearest point, but

some one might miss it and stray over here. You're quite safe if you're

careful, and stand by the tree. You can build a fire here," he stepped

under the chimney-like opening, "without its being noticed. Even the

smoke is lost and cannot be seen so high."

The light from above was falling on his head and shoulders, as it had

on hers. She looked at him intently.

"You travel a good deal on your figure, pardner, don't you?" she said,

with a certain admiration that was quite sexless in its quality; "but I

don't see how you pick up a living by it in the Carquinez Woods. So

you're going, are you? You might be more sociable. Good-by."

"Good-by!" He leaped from the opening.

"I say, pardner!"

He turned a little impatiently. She had knelt down at the entrance, so

as to be nearer his level, and was holding out her hand. But he did not

notice it, and she quietly withdrew it.

"If anybody dropped in and asked for you, what name will they say?"

He smiled. "Don't wait to hear."

"But suppose _I_ wanted to sing out for you, what will I call you?"

He hesitated. "Call me--Lo."

"Lo, the poor Indian?" [The first word of Pope's familiar apostrophe is

humorously used in the far West as a distinguishing title for the

Indian.]

"Exactly."

It suddenly occurred to the woman, Teresa, that in the young man's

height, supple, yet erect carriage, color, and singular gravity of

demeanor there was a refined, aboriginal suggestion. He did not look

like any Indian she had ever seen, but rather as a youthful chief might

have looked. There was a further suggestion in his fringed buckskin

shirt and moccasins; but before she could utter the half-sarcastic

comment that rose to her lips he had glided noiselessly away, even as

an Indian might have done.

She readjusted the slips of hanging bark with feminine ingenuity,

dispersing them so as to completely hide the entrance. Yet this did not

darken the chamber, which seemed to draw a purer and more vigorous

light through the soaring shaft that pierced the room than that which

came from the dim woodland aisles below. Nevertheless, she shivered,

and drawing her shawl closely around her began to collect some

half-burnt fragments of wood in the chimney to make a fire. But the

preoccupation of her thoughts rendered this a tedious process, as she

would from time to time stop in the middle of an action and fall into

an attitude of rapt abstraction, with far-off eyes and rigid mouth.

When she had at last succeeded in kindling a fire and raising a film of

pale blue smoke, that seemed to fade and dissipate entirely before it

reached the top of the chimney shaft, she crouched beside it, fixed her

eyes on the darkest corner of the cavern, and became motionless.

What did she see through that shadow?

Nothing at first but a confused medley of figures and incidents of the

preceding night; things to be put away and forgotten; things that would

not have happened but for another thing--the thing before which

everything faded! A ball-room; the sounds of music; the one man she had

cared for insulting her with the flaunting ostentation of his

unfaithfulness; herself despised, put aside, laughed at, or worse,

jilted. And then the moment of delirium, when the light danced; the one

wild act that lifted her, the despised one, above them all--made her

the supreme figure, to be glanced at by frightened women, stared at by

half-startled, half-admiring men! "Yes," she laughed; but struck by the

sound of her own voice, moved twice round the cavern nervously, and

then dropped again into her old position.

As they carried him away he had laughed at her--like a hound that he

was; he who had praised her for her spirit, and incited her revenge

against others; he who had taught her to strike when she was insulted;

and it was only fit he should reap what he had sown. She was what he,

what other men, had made her. And what was she now? What had she been

once?

She tried to recall her childhood: the man and woman who might have

been her father and mother; who fought and wrangled over her precocious

little life; abused or caressed her as she sided with either; and then

left her with a circus troupe, where she first tasted the power of her

courage, her beauty, and her recklessness. She remembered those flashes

of triumph that left a fever in her veins--a fever that when it failed

must be stimulated by dissipation, by anything, by everything that

would keep her name a wonder in men's mouths, an envious fear to women.

She recalled her transfer to the strolling players; her cheap

pleasures, and cheaper rivalries and hatred--but always Teresa! the

daring Teresa! the reckless Teresa! audacious as a woman, invincible as

a boy; dancing, flirting, fencing, shooting, swearing, drinking,

smoking, fighting Teresa! "Oh, yes; she had been loved, perhaps--who

knows?--but always feared. Why should she change now? Ha, he should

see."

She had lashed herself in a frenzy, as was her wont, with gestures,

ejaculations, oaths, adjurations, and passionate apostrophes, but with

this strange and unexpected result. Heretofore she had always been

sustained and kept up by an audience of some kind or quality, if only

perhaps a humble companion; there had always been some one she could

fascinate or horrify, and she could read her power mirrored in their

eyes. Even the half-abstracted indifference of her strange host had

been something. But she was alone now. Her words fell on apathetic

solitude; she was acting to viewless space. She rushed to the opening,

dashed the hanging bark aside and leaped to the ground.

She ran forward wildly a few steps, and stopped.

"Hallo!" she cried. "Look, 'tis I, Teresa!"

The profound silence remained unbroken. Her shrillest tones were lost

in an echoless space, even as the smoke of her fire had faded into pure

ether. She stretched out her clenched fists as if to defy the pillared

austerities of the vaults around her.

"Come and take me if you dare!"

The challenge was unheeded. If she had thrown herself violently against

the nearest tree-trunk, she could not have been stricken more

breathless than she was by the compact, embattled solitude that

encompassed her. The hopelessness of impressing these cold and passive

vaults with her selfish passion filled her with a vague fear. In her

rage of the previous night she had not seen the wood in its profound

immobility. Left alone with the majesty of those enormous columns, she

trembled and turned faint. The silence of the hollow tree she had just

quitted seemed to her less awful than the crushing presence of these

mute and monstrous witnesses of her weakness. Like a wounded quail with

lowered crest and trailing wing, she crept back to her hiding-place.

Even then the influence of the wood was still upon her. She picked up

the novel she had contemptuously thrown aside only to let it fall again

in utter weariness. For a moment her feminine curiosity was excited by

the discovery of an old book, in whose blank leaves were pressed a

variety of flowers and woodland grasses. As she could not conceive that

these had been kept for any but a sentimental purpose, she was

disappointed to find that underneath each was a sentence in an unknown

tongue, that even to her untutored eye did not appear to be the

language of passion. Finally she rearranged the couch of skins and

blankets, and, imparting to it in three clever shakes an entirely

different character, lay down to pursue her reveries. But nature

asserted herself, and ere she knew it she was fast asleep.

So intense and prolonged had been her previous excitement that, the

tension once relieved, she passed into a slumber of exhaustion so deep

that she seemed scarce to breathe. High noon succeeded morning, the

central shaft received a single ray of upper sunlight, the afternoon

came and went, the shadows gathered below, the sunset fires began to

eat their way through the groined roof, and she still slept. She slept

even when the bark hangings of the chamber were put aside, and the

young man reentered.

He laid down a bundle he was carrying, and softly approached the

sleeper. For a moment he was startled from his indifference; she lay so

still and motionless. But this was not all that struck him; the face

before him was no longer the passionate, haggard visage that confronted

him that morning; the feverish air, the burning color, the strained

muscles of mouth and brow, and the staring eyes were gone; wiped away,

perhaps, by the tears that still left their traces on cheek and dark

eyelash. It was a face of a handsome woman of thirty, with even a

suggestion of softness in the contour of the cheek and arching of her

upper lip, no longer rigidly drawn down in anger, but relaxed by sleep

on her white teeth.

With the lithe, soft tread that was habitual to him, the young man

moved about, examining the condition of the little chamber and its

stock of provisions and necessaries, and withdrew presently, to

reappear as noiselessly with a tin bucket of water. This done he

replenished the little pile of fuel with an armful of bark and pine

cones, cast an approving glance about him, which included the sleeper,

and silently departed.

It was night when she awoke. She was surrounded by a profound darkness,

except where the shaft-like opening made a nebulous mist in the corner

in her wooden cavern. Providentially she struggled back to

consciousness slowly, so that the solitude and silence came upon her

gradually, with a growing realization of the events of the past

twenty-four hours, but without a shock. She was alone here, but safe

still, and every hour added to her chances of ultimate escape. She

remembered to have seen a candle among the articles on the shelf, and

she began to grope her way toward the matches. Suddenly she stopped.

What was that panting?

Was it her own breathing, quickened with a sudden nameless terror? or

was there something outside? Her heart seemed to stop beating while she

listened. Yes! it was a panting outside--a panting now increased,

multiplied, redoubled, mixed with the sounds of rustling, tearing,

craunching, and occasionally a quick, impatient snarl. She crept on her

hands and knees to the opening and looked out. At first the ground

seemed to be undulating between her and the opposite tree. But a second

glance showed her the black and gray, bristling, tossing backs of

tumbling beasts of prey, charging the carcass of the bear that lay at

its roots, or contesting for the prize with gluttonous choked breath,

sidelong snarls, arched spines, and recurved tails. One of the boldest

had leaped upon a buttressing root of her tree within a foot of the

opening.

The excitement, awe, and terror she had undergone culminated in one

wild, maddened scream, that seemed to pierce even the cold depths of

the forest, as she dropped on her face, with her hands clasped over her

eyes in an agony of fear.

Her scream was answered, after a pause, by a sudden volley of

firebrands and sparks into the midst of the panting, crowding pack; a

few smothered howls and snaps, and a sudden dispersion of the

concourse. In another moment the young man, with a blazing brand in

either hand, leaped upon the body of the bear.

Teresa raised her head, uttered a hysterical cry, slid down the tree,

flew wildly to his side, caught convulsively at his sleeve, and fell on

her knees beside him.

"Save me! save me!" she gasped, in a voice broken by terror. "Save me

from those hideous creatures. No, no!" she implored, as he endeavored

to lift her to her feet. "No--let me stay here close beside you. So,"

clutching the fringe of his leather hunting-shirt, and dragging herself

on her knees nearer him--"so--don't leave me, for God's sake!"

"They are gone," he replied, gazing down curiously at her, as she wound

the fringe around her hand to strengthen her hold; "they're only a lot

of cowardly coyotes and wolves, that dare not attack anything that

lives and can move."

The young woman responded with a nervous shudder. "Yes, that's it," she

whispered, in a broken voice; "it's only the dead they want. Promise

me--swear to me, if I'm caught, or hung, or shot, you won't let me be

left here to be torn and--ah! my God! what's that?"

She had thrown her arms around his knees, completely pinioning him to

her frantic breast. Something like a smile of disdain passed across his

face as he answered, "It's nothing. They will not return. Get up!"

Even in her terror she saw the change in his face. "I know, I know!"

she cried. "I'm frightened--but I cannot bear it any longer. Hear me!

Listen! Listen--but don't move! I didn't mean to kill Curson--no! I

swear to God, no! I didn't mean to kill the sheriff--and I didn't. I

was only bragging--do you hear? I lied! I lied--don't move, I swear to

God I lied. I've made myself out worse than I was. I have. Only don't

leave me now--and if I die--and it's not far off, may be--get me away

from here--and from _them_. Swear it!"

"All right," said the young man, with a scarcely concealed movement of

irritation. "But get up now, and go back to the cabin."

"No; not _there_ alone." Nevertheless, he quietly but firmly released

himself.

"I will stay here," he replied. "I would have been nearer to you, but I

thought it better for your safety that my camp-fire should be further

off. But I can build it here, and that will keep the coyotes off."

"Let me stay with you--beside you," she said imploringly.

She looked so broken, crushed, and spiritless, so unlike the woman of

the morning that, albeit with an ill grace, he tacitly consented, and

turned away to bring his blankets. But in the next moment she was at

his side, following him like a dog, silent and wistful, and even

offering to carry his burden. When he had built the fire, for which she

had collected the pine--cones and broken branches near them, he sat

down, folded his arms, and leaned back against the tree in reserved and

deliberate silence. Humble and submissive, she did not attempt to break

in upon a reverie she could not help but feel had little kindliness to

herself. As the fire snapped and sparkled, she pillowed her head upon a

root, and lay still to watch it.

It rose and fell, and dying away at times to a mere lurid glow, and

again, agitated by some breath scarcely perceptible to them, quickening

into a roaring flame. When only the embers remained, a dead silence

filled the wood. Then the first breath of morning moved the tangled

canopy above, and a dozen tiny sprays and needles detached from the

interlocked boughs winged their soft way noiselessly to the earth. A

few fell upon the prostrate woman like a gentle benediction, and she

slept. But even then, the young man, looking down, saw that the slender

fingers were still aimlessly but rigidly twisted in the leather fringe

of his hunting-shirt.