V.

On Sunday morning the Withrow establishment wore that air of inactivity

which seems in some households intended to express a mild form of piety.

Mother Withrow, it is true, had not yielded to the general weakness, and

stood at the kitchen table scraping the frying-pan in a resounding way

that might have interfered with the matin hymn of a weaker-lunged man

than Lysander. That stentorian musician seemed rather to enjoy it, as

giving him something definite to overcome vocally, and roared forth his

determination to "gather at the river" from the porch, where he sat with

his splint-bottomed chair tipped back, and his eyes closed in a seeming

ecstasy of religious fervor.

Old Withrow sat on the step, with his chin in his hands, smoking, and

two dove-colored hounds stood, in mantel-ornament attitude, before him,

looking up with that vaguely expectant air which even a long life of

disappointment fails to erase from the canine countenance. Five or six

half-clad chickens, huddling together in the first strangeness of

maternal desertion, were drinking from an Indian mortar under the

hydrant, and mother Withrow, coming to the door to empty her dish-pan,

stood a moment looking at them.

"That there hydrant's quit drippin' again," she said gruffly, turning

toward the old man. "Them young ones turned it on to get a drink, and

then turned it clear off. 'Pears to me they drink most o' the time. I'd

think they come by it honestly, if 't wuzn't water. If you ain't too

tired holdin' your head up with both hands, s'posin' you stir your

stumps and turn it on a drop fer them chickens."

The old man got up with confused, vinous alacrity and started toward the

hydrant.

"There's no need o' savin' water on this ranch," he blustered feebly, "I

kin tell you that. You'd ought to go up to the spring and see what a

good trade you made. I'm a-goin' myself by 'n' by. I knowed"--

He broke off abruptly, as the old woman threw the dish-water dangerously

near him.

"If water's so plenty, some folks had ought to soak their heads," she

retorted, disappearing through the door.

The old man regulated the hydrant somewhat unsteadily, and returned to a

seat on the porch. Lysander's musical efforts had subsided to a not very

exultant hum at the first mention of the water supply. Evidently his

reflections on that subject were not conducive to religious enthusiasm.

Old Withrow assumed a confidential attitude and touched his son-in-law

on the knee.

"She's always so full of her prejudisms," he said, pointing toward the

kitchen door with his thumb. "Now 'f she'd go 'long o' me up to the

spring and see what a tremenjus flow o' water there is, she'd be pleased

as Punch. Now wouldn't she?"

Lysander brought his chair to the floor with a bang that made the loose

boards of the porch rattle.

"Come 'round the house, pap," he said anxiously.

The hounds followed, dejected, but hopeful, as became believers in

special providence.

When the two men were out of hearing of the kitchen, Lysander took his

father-in-law by the shoulders and shook him, as if by shaking down the

loose contents of his brain he might make room for an idea.

"You want to shut up about the spring. It's give out,--dried up. The

blastin' and diggin' in the canon done it, I s'pose, an'

Poindexter--that's the engineer--thinks Forrester'll make it all right;

but you don't want to be coaxin' the old woman up there, not if the

court knows herself, and you want to keep your mouth purty ginerally

shut. D' y' understand?"

The old man's face worked in a feeble effort at comprehension.

"Give out,--dried up? Oh, come now, Lysander," he faltered.

"Yes, dried up, and you want to do the same. Don't you think this 'ud be

a purty good time fer you to take a trip off somer's fer your health,

pap?"

The old man stood a moment wrestling with the hopelessness of the

situation. Besotted as he was, he could still realize the calamity that

had overtaken them: could realize it without the slightest ability to

suggest a remedy. As the direfulness of it all crept over him, something

very like anger gleamed through the blear of his faded eyes.

"I'm a-goin' to see," he muttered sullenly, turning toward the canon.

"Damn their blastin'! Forrester said it was a good trade. He'd ought to

know."

A little later, Melissa started on her much dreamed of visit to the

camp. She had on her shoes now, and a comfortable sense of the

propriety of her appearance induced by this fact, and an excess of

starch in the skirt of her pink calico dress, brought a little flush of

expectation to her cheek. She had even looked longingly at her best hat

in its glory of green and purple millinery, and nothing but the absence

of any excuse to offer her mother and sister for such lavish personal

adornment had saved her from this final touch to the pathetic discord of

her attire.

The silk handkerchief was in her pocket, properly "done up" and wrapped

in a bit of newspaper, and she had rehearsed her part in the dialogue

that a flattered imagination assured her must ensue upon its

presentation until she felt it hardly possible that she could blunder.

"Somehow you don't feel so bashful when you're all dressed up," she

reflected, contemplating the angular obtrusiveness of her drapery with

the satisfaction that fills the soul of the average _debutante_. "You

feel so kind o' sheepish when you're barefooted and your dress is all

slimpsy."

Poor Melissa! how could she know that yesterday, in all the limp

forlornness that had made her hang her head when Sterling spoke to her,

she had been a part of the beauty of the canon, while to-day, in all her

pink and rigid glory, she was a garish spot of discordant color in the

landscape? How, indeed, do any of us know that we are not at our worst

in our most triumphant moments?

The camp was well-nigh deserted, that morning. Poindexter had gone to

Santa Elena to consult his employer, and most of the workmen had

preferred the convivial joys of the Mexican saloon at San Gabriel to the

stillness of the canon. Sterling had written a few letters after

breakfast, and then, taking his rifle from the rack, sauntered along the

little path that led from the camp to the tunnel. The Chinese cook was

dexterously slipping the feathers from a clammy fowl at the door of the

kitchen tent.

"Hello, John," the young man called cheerfully. "What for you cook

chicken? I go catchee venison for dinner."

The Chinaman smiled indulgently. Evidently the deer hunts of the past

had not been brilliantly successful.

"I fly one lit' chicken," he said composedly. "He no velly big. By 'm by

you bling labbit, I fly him too."

"Rabbit!" laughed back the hunter contemptuously, breaking his rifle and

peering into the breech to see that it was loaded. "I'll not waste a

cartridge on a rabbit, John."

He lapsed from pigeon English with an ease that betokened a newcomer.

The Chinaman looked after him pensively.

"Mist' Stellin' heap velly nice man," he said, with gentle

condescension; "all same he _no sabe_ shoot. By 'm by he come home, he

heap likee my little flied looster."

He held his "little rooster" rigidly erect by its elongated legs, and

patiently picked the pin-feathers from its back. He had finished this

process, and, suspending it by one wing in an attitude of patient

suffering, was singeing it with a blazing paper, when Melissa appeared.

"What you want, gell?" he demanded autocratically, noticing that she

carried no pail.

"Where is the young man,--the tall one?" asked Melissa.

"Young man? Mist' Stellin'? He take 'im gun an' go catchee labbit."

He waved his torch in the direction of the path, and then dropped it on

the ground and stamped it out with his queerly shod foot.

Melissa hesitated a moment. She could not risk the precious handkerchief

in the hands of the cook. No one else was visible. Two or three workmen

were sleeping in the large tent under the wild grapevine. She could hear

them breathing in loud nasal discord. It was better to go on up the

canon, she persuaded herself with transparent logic.

"It's purty hard walkin' when you've got your shoes on," she said,

justifying her course by its difficulties, with the touch of Puritanism

that makes the whole theological world kin, "but if I give it to him

myself I'll know he's got it."

She glanced in at the door of the engineer's tent, as she passed. The

banjo was there, a point of dazzling light to her eyes, but otherwise

the disorder was far from elegant; resulting chiefly from that reckless

prodigality in head and foot gear which seems to be a phase of masculine

culture.

"I don't see what they want of so many hats and shoes," commented

Melissa. "I sh'd think they could go barefooted sometimes, to rest their

feet; an' I didn't know folks' heads ever got tired." The thought

recalled her own disappointment in the matter of millinery. She put her

hand up to the broken rim of her hat. "I've a notion to take it off when

I ketch up to him," she soliloquized. "I would if my hair wasn't so

awful red."

Old Withrow had preceded his daughter, stumbling along the flume path,

muttering sullenly. All his groundless elation had suddenly turned to

equally groundless wrath. Having allied himself in a stupid, servile way

with Forrester, he clung to the alliance and its feeble reflected glory

with all the tenacity of ignorance. There were not many connected links

of cause and effect in the old man's muddled brain, but the value of

water, for irrigating purposes only, had a firm lodgment there, along

with the advantages to be derived from friendliness with the owner of a

winery. There stirred in him a groveling desire to exonerate Forrester.

"They're blastin', be they? Forrester never said nothin' 'bout blastin'.

He'll give it to 'em when he knows it. He'll blast 'em!"

He staggered on past the cut-off that led to the camp, keeping well up

on the bank along the path beside the ditch that Lysander had dug from

Flutterwheel Spring. Once there, the sight of the ruin that had befallen

his plans seemed to strike him dumb for a little. The slime still clung

to the rocks, and a faint trickle of water oozed into the pool. He sat

down a moment, mumbling sullen curses, and then staggered to his feet

and wandered aimlessly up the canon.

Sterling had idled along, crossing and recrossing the restless stream

that appeared to be hurrying away from the quiet of the mountains. He

was really not a very enthusiastic hunter, as the Chinaman had

discovered. He liked the faint, sickening odor of the brakes and the

honey-like scent of the wild immortelles that came in little warm gusts

from the cliffs above far better than the smell of powder. He stopped

where the men had been at work the day before, and looked about with

that impartial criticism that always seems easier when nothing is being

done.

Some idea must have suggested itself suddenly, for he hurried across to

the opening of the tunnel and went in, leaving his rifle beside the

entrance. When he turned to come out, he heard a sound of muttered

curses, and in another instant he was confronted by the barrel of a gun

in the hands of a man he had never seen,--a man with wandering,

bloodshot eyes, which the change from the half-light of the tunnel's

mouth magnified into those of an angry beast.

"You've been a-blastin', have ye, an' a-dryin' up other folks's springs?

Damn ye, I'll blast ye!"

The old man was striving in vain to hold the rifle steadily, and

fumbling with the lock. Sterling did not stop to note that the weapon

was his own, and might easily be thrust aside. He did what most young

men would have done--drew his revolver from his pocket and fired.

The report echoed up and down the canon. By the time it died away life

had changed for the younger man. Old Withrow had fallen forward, still

clutching the rifle, and was dead.

Melissa, standing among the sycamores below, had seen it all as a

sudden, paralyzing vision. She stood still a brief, terrified instant,

and then turned and ran down the canon, keeping in the bed of the

stream, and climbing over the boulders.

She was conscious of nothing but a wild dismay that she had seen it. She

had a vague hope that she might run away from her own knowledge. The

swift, unreasoning notion had lodged itself in her brain that it would

be better if no one knew what had happened. Perhaps no one else need be

told. She avoided the camp, scrambling through the chaparral on the

opposite bank, and, reaching the flume path at last, hurried on

breathlessly.

Suddenly Melissa stopped. It would not do to approach the house in that

way. She must rest a little and cool her flushed face before any one

should see her. She leaned against the timbers that supported the flume

across the gully, and fanned herself with her hat. The tumult of her

brain had not shaped itself into any plan. She only wished she had not

seen. It was such a dreadful thing to know, to tell. Insensibly she was

preparing herself to dissemble. She was cooling her cheeks, and getting

ready to saunter lazily toward the house and speak indifferently. She

did not realize that after that she could not tell. There would be an

instant in which to decide, and then a dreary stretch of dissimulation.

At this moment she heard the quick hoofbeats of a galloping horse on

the road that led down the mountain-side. He was going away! Then

certainly she must not speak. They would never find him, and she would

keep the secret forever. She listened until the hoof-beats died away.

The flush faded out of her poor little face, leaving it wan and

hopeless. After all, it was a dreary thing for him to ride away, and

leave her nothing but a dismal secret such as this. A shred of cloud

drifted across the sun, and the canon suddenly became a cold, cheerless

place. She stepped into the path, and came face to face with Lysander.

"Have yuh seen anything of yer paw, M'lissy? Why, what ails yuh, child?

Y'r as white as buttermilk. Has anything bit yuh?"

"No," faltered the girl, looking down at her wretched finery; "my shoes

'a' been a-hurtin' my feet. I'm goin' back to the house to take 'em off.

I'm tired."

"I wish y'd set right down here and take off y'r shoes, M'lissy," said

her brother-in-law anxiously. "We'll have to kind o' watch yer paw. I

had to tell 'im about the spring, an' he struck off right away an' said

he was goin' up there. I reckoned he'd go away an' furgit it, but he

hain't come back yit. I'm afraid he'll git to talkin' when he comes back

to the house, and tell yer maw. It won't do no good, an' there ain't no

use in her workin' herself up red-headed about it,--'t enny rate not

till Poindexter comes back. We must git hold o' yer paw before he gits

to see her, and brace 'im up ag'in. If you'll set here an' call to me if

you see 'im below, I'll go on up an' look fer 'im."

Melissa had stood quite still, looking down at the uncompromising lines

of her drapery. It was rapidly becoming a pink blur to her gaze. The

ghastliness of what she had undertaken to conceal came over her like a

chill, insweeping fog. She shivered as she spoke, trying in vain to

return Lysander's honest gaze.

"I'll come back an' set here when I've took off my shoes. You kin go on.

I'll come in a minute."

Lysander looked into her face an instant as he started.

"The seam o' yer stockin' 's got over the j'int, M'lissy," he said

kindly; "it's made you sick at yer stummick; y'r as white as taller."