VII.

In the days that passed wearisomely enough before the trial, Melissa

heard much that did not tend to soothe her harassed little soul.

Lysander, having taken refuge behind the assertion that it "wasn't

becomin' fer the fam'ly to take sides," bore his mother-in-law's

stinging sarcasms in virtuous silence.

"Seems to me it depends on which side you take," sneered the old woman.

"I don't see anything so very impullite in gettin' mad when yer pap's

shot down like a dog."

Lysander braced himself judicially.

"We don't none of us know nothin' about it," he contended. "If I'd 'a'

been there and 'a' seen the scrimmage, I'd 'a' knowed what to think. As

'tis, I dunno what to think, and there's no law that kin make you think

when you don't hev no fax to base your thinkun' on."

"Some folks lacks other things besides fax to base their thinkun' on,"

the old woman jerked out sententiously.

Lysander pressed the tobacco into his cob pipe, and scratched a match on

the sole of his boot.

"I think they've been middlin' fair," he said, between puffs, "fixin' up

that water business. It's my opinion the young feller's at the bottom of

it,--they say his father's well off; 't enny rate, it's _fixed_, an'

you're better off 'n you wuz,--exceptin', uv course, your affliction,

an' that can't be helped." The man composed his voice very much as he

would have straightened a corpse in which he had no personal interest.

"I'm in fer shuttin' up."

"They don't seem to want you to shut up," fretted his mother-in-law.

"They've s'peenied _you_."

"They're welcome to all I know; 'tain't much, an' 't won't help nor

hender, as I c'n see, but such as it is, they kin hev it an' welcome."

Lysander stood in the doorway, with his hat on the back of his head. He

tilted it over his eyes, as he made this avowal, and sauntered toward

the stable, with his head thrown back, peering from under the brim, as

if its inconvenient position were a matter entirely beyond his control.

Melissa was washing dishes at a table in the corner of the kitchen. She

hurried a little, trembling in her eagerness to speak to Lysander alone.

She carried the dishpan to the kitchen door to empty it, and the

chickens came scuttling with half-flying strides from the shade of the

geraniums where they were dusting themselves, and then fled with a

chorus of dismayed squawks as the dish-water splashed among them. The

girl hung the pan on a nail outside, and flung her apron over her head.

She could see Lysander's tilted hat moving among the low blue gums

beside the shed. She drew the folds of her apron forward to shade her

face, and went down the path with a studied unconcern that sat as ill

upon her as haste. Lysander was mending the cultivator; he looked up,

but not as high as her face.

"'Llo, M'lissy," he said, as kindly as was compatible with a rusty bit

of wire between his teeth.

The girl leaned against the shaded side of a stack of baled barley hay.

"Lysander," she began quaveringly, "Lysander, if you'd seen paw shot,

an' knowed all about it, could they make you tell--would you think you'd

ought to tell?" She hurried her questions as they had been crowding in

her sore conscience. "I mean, of course, if you'd seen it, Lysander."

Her brother-in-law straightened himself, and set his hat on the back of

his head without speaking. Melissa could feel him looking at her

curiously.

"Of course, that's all I mean, Lysander,--just if you'd seen it; would

you tell?" she faltered.

"M'lissy," said the man impressively, "if I'd seen my own paw killed,

an' nobody asked me to tell, I'd keep my mouth most piously shut; that's

what I'd do."

"But if he was mad, Sandy, an' tried to kill somebody else, and,

oh,"--her voice broke into a piteous wail,--"if they wuz thinkun' o'

hangin' 'im!"

"They ain't a-goin' to hang nobody, M'lissy," said Lysander

confidently,--"hangin' has gone out o' fashion. And I don't think it's

becomin' fer the fam'ly to interfere, especially the women folks;

besides, we don't none of us know nothin' about it, you see. Don't you

fret about things you don't know nothin' about. The law'll have to take

its course, M'lissy. That young feller's goin' to git off

reasonable,--very reasonable, indeed, considerin'."

Melissa rubbed her feet in the loose straw, restless and uncomforted.

"When's the trial, Lysander?" she asked, after a little pause, during

which her companion resumed his encounter with the rusty wire he was

straightening.

"The trial, M'lissy, is set for tuhmorruh," Lysander replied, a trifle

oracularly. "I'm a-goin' down because they've sent fer me; if they

hadn't 'a' sent, I wouldn't 'a' gone. I don't know nothin' exceptin'

that yer paw had one of his spells,"--inebriety was always thus

decorously cloaked in Lysander's domestic conversation,--"an' went off

up the canon that mornin' r'arin' mad about the spring. Of course they

don't know that's all I know,--if they knowed it, perhaps they wouldn't

want me; but if they hadn't sent fer me, you can bet I'd stick at home

closer'n a scale-bug to an orange-tree, Melissy, perticular if I was a

young girl, an' didn't know nothin' whatever about the hull fracas. An'

young girls ain't expected to know about such things; it ain't proper

fer 'em, especially when they're members of the fam'ly."

This piece of highly involved wisdom quieted Melissa very much as a

handkerchief stuffed into a sufferer's mouth allays his pain. She went

about the rest of the day silent and distressed.

At daybreak the next morning, Lysander harnessed the dun-colored mules

and drove to Los Angeles.

The sun rose higher, and the warm dullness of a California summer day

settled down upon the little mountain ranch. Heat seemed to rise in

shimmering waves from the yellow barley stubble. The orange-trees cast

dense shadows with no coolness in them, and along the edge of the

orchard the broad leaves of the squash-vines hung in limp dejection upon

their stalks. The heated air was full of pungent odors: tar and honey

and spice from the sage and eucalyptus, with now and then a warmer puff

of some new wild fragrance from far up the mountain-side.

"We're a-goin' to have three hot days," said Mrs. Sproul, looking

anxiously over the valley from the shelter of her husband's hat.

"Sandy'll swelter, bein' dressed up so. I do hope they won't keep him

long. He don't know nothin' about it, noway. Seems to me they might 'a'

believed him, when he said so."

Mother Withrow had fallen into a silence full of the eloquence of

offended dignity, when Lysander disappeared. Like all tyrannical souls,

she was beginning to feel a bitterness worse than that of

opposition,--the bitterness of deceit. She knew that Lysander had

deceived her, and the knowledge was bearing its fruit of humiliation and

chagrin. The evident liberality of Forrester's course in deeding her a

share of the canon, greater, it was said, than the loss occasioned by

the drying up of Flutterwheel Spring, had struck at the root of hatreds

and preconceptions that were far more vital to her than the mere

proprietorship of the water right. She felt hampered and defrauded by

the circumstances that forbade her to turn and fling the gift back in

his face. To this grim, gray-haired tyrant, dying of thirst seemed sweet

compared with the daily bitterness of hearing her enemy praised for his

generosity. She sat in the doorway fanning herself with her apron, and

made no reply to her daughter's anxious observation.

"I calc'lated to rub out a few things this mornin'," continued Mrs.

Sproul, "but somehow I don't feel like settlin' down to washin' or

anythin'; an' the baby's cross, bein' all broke out with the heat. I

wonder what's become of M'lissy."

"She's up in the oak-tree out at the barn," called William T. Sherman,

who with other fraternal generals was holding a council of war over a

gopher caught in a trap. "Letterlone; she's as cross as Sam Patch."

"M'lissy takes her paw's death harder 'n I calc'lated she'd do,"

commented Minerva, virtuously conventional; "she's a good deal upset."

The old woman sniffed audibly.

"I reckon you'll all live through it," she said frostily.

Melissa, swinging her bare feet from a branch of the dense live oak in

the barnyard, had watched Lysander's departure with wistful eagerness,

entirely unaware that he had divined her secret, and was mannishly

averse to having the "women folks" of his family mixed up in a murder

trial. Now that he was really gone, and she was left to the dreariness

of her own reflections, she grew wan and white with misery.

"I had ought to 'a' told it," she moaned. "If they don't hang 'im, they

may put 'im in jail, and that's awful." She thought of him, so straight

and lithe and gay, grown pale and wretched; manacled, according to

Ulysses's graphic description, with iron chains so heavy that he could

not rise; kept feebly alive on bread and water, and presided over by a

jailer whose ingenious cruelty knew no limit but the liveliness of the

boy's fiendish imagination.

"A year or two," Lysander had said, as if it were a trifle. She looked

back a year, and tried to measure the time, losing herself in the hazy

monotony of her past, and conscious only of the remoteness of certain

events that served as landmarks in her simple experience,--events not

yet two years distant.

"Orange-pickun' before last ain't nigh two years ago," she mused, "an'

't ain't a year yet sence Lysander hauled grapes from the Mission to the

winery; an' the year before that he was over to Verdugo at the

bee-ranch, an' come home fer the grape-haulin' at Santa Elena. That's

when Hooker was born; he'll be two years old this fall; it's ever so

long ago. He couldn't stand bein' in jail that long; some folks could,

but he couldn't. He sings, and laughs out loud, and goes tearin' around

so lively. It 'ud kill 'im."

She slipped down from the tree, and started toward the house. The path

was hot to her bare feet, and the wind came in heated gusts from the

mountains. The young turkeys panted, with uplifted wings, in the shade

of the dusty geraniums, whose scarlet blossoms were glowing in fierce

tropical enjoyment of the glaring sun. The hounds went languidly, with

lolling tongues, from one shaded spot to another, blinking their

comments on the weather at their human companions, and snapping in a

half-hearted way at unwary flies.

Mrs. Sproul and her mother were still seated on the little porch when

Melissa appeared.

"Why don't you come in out of the heat, child?" called her sister, as

reproachfully as if Melissa were going in the opposite direction. "We

hain't had such a desert wind for more 'n a year. I keep thinkin' about

Lysander. I've heern of people bein' took down with the heat, and havin'

trouble ever afterward with their brains."

"Lysander ain't a-goin' to have any trouble with his brains," said her

mother significantly.

Mrs. Sproul turned a highly insulted gaze upon the old woman's impassive

face, and tilted her husband's hat defiantly above her diminutive,

freckled countenance.

"Lysander kin have as much trouble with his brains as anybody," she

said, with bantam-like dignity, straightening her limp calico back, and

tightening her grasp on the baby in her arms.

The old woman elevated her shaggy brows, and made a half-mocking sound

in imitation of the spitting of an angry kitten.

Mrs. Sproul's pale blue eyes filled with indignant tears, and she turned

toward Melissa, who looked up from the step, a gleam of sisterly

sympathy lighting up the wan dejection of her young face.

"I wouldn't fret, Minervy," she said kindly; "Lysander don't mind the

heat. People never get sunstruck here; it's only back East. I don't

think it's so very warm, nohow."

"Oh, it's hot enough," sniffled Mrs. Sproul, relaxing her spine under

Melissa's sympathy; "but it ain't altogether the heat. I don't like

Lysander bein' mixed up with murderers and dangerous characters; not but

what he's able to pertect himself, havin' been through the war, but it

seems as if the harmlessest person wuzn't safe when folks go 'round

shootin' right an' left without no provocation whatever. I think we'll

all be safer when that young feller's locked up in San Quentin,--which

they'll do with him, Lysander thinks."

Mrs. Sproul drew a corner of her apron tight over her finger, and

carefully wiped a speck from the corner of the baby's eye, gazing

intently into the serene vacuity of its sleeping countenance as she

spoke.

Melissa caught her breath, and turned and gazed fixedly through the

shimmering haze of the valley toward Los Angeles. The girl herself did

not know the resolution that was shaping itself from all the tangled

facts and fancies of her brain. Perhaps, if she had been held to strict

account, she would have said it was an impulse, "a sudden notion" in her

parlance, that prompted her to arise the next morning, before the

faintest thrill of dawn, and turn her steps toward the town in the

valley. It was not a hopeful journey, and she could not analyze the

motive that lashed her into making it; nevertheless she felt relieved

when the greasewood shut the cabin, with its trailing pepper-trees and

dusty figs and geraniums, from her sight, and she was alone on the

mountain road. It was not a pleasure to go, but it was an undeniable

hardship to stay. There had been no fog in the night, and from the warm

stillness of the early morning air the girl knew that the heat had not

abated. She was quite unmindful of the landscape, gray and brown and

black in the waning light of the misshapen and belated moon, and she was

far from knowing that the man she was making this journey to save would

have thought her a fitting central figure in the soft blur of the

Millet-like etching of which she formed a part.

She threw back her sunbonnet and trudged along, carrying her shoes tied

together by their leathern strings and hung across her arm,--an

impediment to progress, but a concession to urban prejudices which she

did not dream of disregarding. She meant to put them on in the seclusion

of the Arroyo Seco, where she could bathe her dusty feet and rest

awhile; but remembering the heat of yesterday, she wished to make the

most of the early morning, deadly still and far from refreshing though

it was. The sea-breeze would come up later, she hoped, not without

misgivings; and the grapes were beginning to turn in the vineyards along

the road; she would have something to eat with the bit of corn-bread in

her pocket. Altogether she was not greatly concerned about herself or

the difficulties of her journey, so absorbed was she in the vague

uncertainty that lay at its end.

The sun rose hot and pitiless, and the dust and stones of the road grew

more and more scorching to her feet. The leaves of the wild gourd, lying

in great star-shaped patches on the ground, drooped on their stems, and

the spikes of dusty white sage by the road hung limp at the ends, and

filled the air with their wilted fragrance. The sea-breeze did not come

up, and in its stead gusts of hot wind from the north swept through the

valley as if from the door of a furnace. People talked of it afterward

as "the hot spell of 18--," but in Melissa's calendar it was "the day I

walked to Loss Anjelus,"--a day so fraught with hopes and fears, so full

of dim uncertainties and dread and longing, that the heat seemed only a

part of the generally abnormal conditions in which she found herself.

It was afternoon before she reached the end of her journey, entering the

town between rows of low, soft-tinted adobes, on the steps of which

white-shirted men and dusky, lowbrowed women and children ate melons and

laughed lazily at their neighbors, showing their gleaming teeth. She

knew where the courthouse stood, its unblushing ugliness protected by

the rusty Fremont cannon, and made her way wearily toward it through the

more modern and busier streets.

The men who sat in front of the stores in various degrees of undress,

slapping each other resoundingly on their thinly clad backs, and

discussing the weather with passers-by in loud, jocular tones, were, to

Melissa's sober country sense, a light-minded, flippant crowd, to whom

life could have no serious aspect. She looked at them indifferently, as

they sat and joked, or ran in and out of open doors where there was a

constant fizz as of something perpetually boiling over, and made her way

among them, quite unmindful of her dusty shoes and wilted sunbonnet, and

yet vaguely conscious that at another time she might have cared.

At the door of the courthouse, two of this same loosely clad, noisy,

perspiring species were slapping their thighs and choking in hilarious

appreciation of something which a third was reading from an open paper.

The reader made way for Melissa, backing and reading at the same time,

and the sound of their strangely incongruous mirth followed her up the

narrow, unswept, paper-strewn staircase into the stifling heat of the

second floor. She stopped there an instant, leaning against the railing,

uncertain what to do.

One of a pair of double doors opened, and a young man, swinging an

official-looking document, crossed the hall as if he might be walking in

his sleep, and went into a room beyond; kicking the door open, catching

it with his foot, and kicking it to behind him with a familiarity that

betokened long acquaintance, and inspired Melissa with confidence in his

probable knowledge of the intricate workings of justice. She stood still

a moment, clutching the limp folds of her skirt, until the young man

returned; then she took a step forward.

"I've come to tell what I know about the shootin'. I saw it," she

faltered.

The somnambulistic young man shut one eye, and inclined his ear toward

her without turning his head.

"Shooting? What shooting?"

"Up in Sawpit Canon--Mr. Sterling done it--but I saw it--nobody knows

it, though." The words came in short, palpitating sentences that died

away helplessly.

Her listener hesitated for an instant, scratching the blonde plush of

his cropped scalp with his lead-pencil. Then he stepped forward and

kicked one of the double doors open, holding it with his automatic foot.

"Bawb! oh, _Bawb!_" he called; "'m yer."

A short fat man, with an unbuttoned vest and a general air of excessive

perspiration, waddled past the bailiff and confronted Melissa. He smiled

when he saw her, displaying an upper row of teeth heavily trimmed with

gold, a style of personal adornment which impressed Melissa anew with

the vagaries of masculine city taste.

"Witness in the Withrow murder case, pros'cuting 'torney," said the

bailiff over his shoulder, by way of introduction, as he disappeared

through the door.

Melissa looked at the newcomer, trembling and dumb.

"Come in here, my girl," he said, steaming ahead of her through a door

in front of them; "come right in here. Is it pretty hot up your way?"

"Yes, sir," she quavered, not taking the chair he cleared for her. "I

come down to tell about the shootin': I'd ought to 'a' told before, but

I was scared. Mr. Sterling done it, but paw was mad; he picked up Mr.

Sterling's gun and tried to kill 'im,--I saw it all. I was hid in the

sycamores. You hadn't ought to hang 'im or do anything to 'im: he

couldn't help it."

The prosecuting attorney smiled his broad, gilt-edged, comfortable

smile, and laid his pudgy hand reassuringly on Melissa's shoulder.

"It's all right, my little girl," he said. "We're not going to hang Mr.

Sterling this time; he was discharged this afternoon; but he'll be

obliged to you, all the same. He's over at the hotel taking a nap. You

just run along home, and the next time don't be afraid to tell what you

know."

The girl turned away silently, and went down the stairs and out into the

street. She stood still a moment on the hot pavement, looking in the

direction of the hotel in which the man for whom she had made her

fruitless journey was sleeping. Then she set her face patiently toward

home. The reflection from the pavement seemed to blind her; she felt

suddenly faint and tired, and it was with a great throb of relief that

she heard a familiar voice at her elbow, and turned with a little

tearless sob to Lysander.