Just where the track of the Los Gatos road streams on and upward like
the sinuous trail of a fiery rocket until it is extinguished in the blue
shadows of the Coast Range, there is an embayed terrace near the summit,
hedged by dwarf firs. At every bend of the heat-laden road the eye
rested upon it wistfully; all along the flank of the mountain, which
seemed to pant and quiver in the oven-like air, through rising dust, the
slow creaking of dragging wheels, the monotonous cry of tired springs,
and the muffled beat of plunging hoofs, it held out a promise of
sheltered coolness and green silences beyond. Sunburned and anxious
faces yearned toward it from the dizzy, swaying tops of stagecoaches,
from lagging teams far below, from the blinding white canvas covers of
“mountain schooners,” and from scorching saddles that seemed to weigh
down the scrambling, sweating animals beneath. But it would seem that
the hope was vain, the promise illusive. When the terrace was reached it
appeared not only to have caught and gathered all the heat of the
valley below, but to have evolved a fire of its own from some hidden
crater-like source unknown. Nevertheless, instead of prostrating and
enervating man and beast, it was said to have induced the wildest
exaltation. The heated air was filled and stifling with resinous
exhalations. The delirious spices of balm, bay, spruce, juniper, yerba
buena, wild syringa, and strange aromatic herbs as yet unclassified,
distilled and evaporated in that mighty heat, and seemed to fire with
a midsummer madness all who breathed their fumes. They stung, smarted,
stimulated, intoxicated. It was said that the most jaded and foot-sore
horses became furious and ungovernable under their influence; wearied
teamsters and muleteers, who had exhausted their profanity in the
ascent, drank fresh draughts of inspiration in this fiery air, extended
their vocabulary, and created new and startling forms of objurgation.
It is recorded that one bibulous stage-driver exhausted description
and condensed its virtues in a single phrase: “Gin and ginger.” This
felicitous epithet, flung out in a generous comparison with his favorite
drink, “rum and gum,” clung to it ever after.
Such was the current comment on this vale of spices. Like most human
criticism it was hasty and superficial. No one yet had been known to
have penetrated deeply its mysterious recesses. It was still far below
the summit and its wayside inn. It had escaped the intruding foot of
hunter and prospector; and the inquisitive patrol of the county surveyor
had only skirted its boundary. It remained for Mr. Lance Harriott to
complete its exploration. His reasons for so doing were simple. He had
made the journey thither underneath the stage-coach, and clinging to its
axle. He had chosen this hazardous mode of conveyance at night, as the
coach crept by his place of concealment in the wayside brush, to elude
the sheriff of Monterey County and his posse, who were after him.
He had not made himself known to his fellow-passengers as they already
knew him as a gambler, an outlaw, and a desperado; he deemed it unwise
to present himself in a newer reputation of a man who had just slain
a brother gambler in a quarrel, and for whom a reward was offered.
He slipped from the axle as the stage-coach swirled past the brushing
branches of fir, and for an instant lay unnoticed, a scarcely
distinguishable mound of dust in the broken furrows of the road. Then,
more like a beast than a man, he crept on his hands and knees into the
steaming underbrush. Here he lay still until the clatter of harness
and the sound of voices faded in the distance. Had he been followed,
it would have been difficult to detect in that inert mass of rags any
semblance to a known form or figure. A hideous reddish mask of dust and
clay obliterated his face; his hands were shapeless stumps exaggerated
in his trailing sleeves. And when he rose, staggering like a drunken
man, and plunged wildly into the recesses of the wood, a cloud of dust
followed him, and pieces and patches of his frayed and rotten garments
clung to the impeding branches. Twice he fell, but, maddened and upheld
by the smarting spices and stimulating aroma of the air, he kept on his
course.
Gradually the heat became less oppressive; once when he stopped and
leaned exhaustedly against a sapling, he fancied he saw the zephyr he
could not yet feel in the glittering and trembling of leaves in the
distance before him. Again the deep stillness was moved with a faint
sighing rustle, and he knew he must be nearing the edge of the thicket.
The spell of silence thus broken was followed by a fainter, more musical
interruption--the glassy tinkle of water! A step further his foot
trembled on the verge of a slight ravine, still closely canopied by the
interlacing boughs overhead. A tiny stream that he could have dammed
with his hand yet lingered in this parched red gash in the hillside and
trickled into a deep, irregular, well-like cavity, that again overflowed
and sent its slight surplus on. It had been the luxurious retreat of
many a spotted trout; it was to be the bath of Lance Harriott. Without
a moment's hesitation, without removing a single garment, he slipped
cautiously into it, as if fearful of losing a single drop. His head
disappeared from the level of the bank; the solitude was again unbroken.
Only two objects remained upon the edge of the ravine,--his revolver and
tobacco pouch.
A few minutes elapsed. A fearless blue jay alighted on the bank and
made a prospecting peck at the tobacco pouch. It yielded in favor of a
gopher, who endeavored to draw it toward his hole, but in turn gave way
to a red squirrel, whose attention was divided, however, between the
pouch and the revolver, which he regarded with mischievous fascination.
Then there was a splash, a grunt, a sudden dispersion of animated
nature, and the head of Mr. Lance Harriott appeared above the bank. It
was a startling transformation. Not only that he had, by this wholesale
process, washed himself and his light “drill” garments entirely clean,
but that he had, apparently by the same operation, morally cleansed
HIMSELF, and left every stain and ugly blot of his late misdeeds and
reputation in his bath. His face, albeit scratched here and there, was
rosy, round, shining with irrepressible good humor and youthful levity.
His large blue eyes were infantine in their innocent surprise and
thoughtlessness. Dripping yet with water, and panting, he rested his
elbows lazily on the bank, and became instantly absorbed with a boy's
delight in the movements of the gopher, who, after the first alarm,
returned cautiously to abduct the tobacco pouch. If any familiar had
failed to detect Lance Harriott in this hideous masquerade of dust and
grime and tatters, still less would any passing stranger have recognized
in this blond faun the possible outcast and murderer. And, when with a
swirl of his spattering sleeve, he drove back the gopher in a shower of
spray and leaped to the bank, he seemed to have accepted his felonious
hiding-place as a mere picnicking bower.
A slight breeze was unmistakably permeating the wood from the west.
Looking in that direction, Lance imagined that the shadow was less dark,
and although the undergrowth was denser, he struck off carelessly toward
it. As he went on, the wood became lighter and lighter; branches, and
presently leaves, were painted against the vivid blue of the sky. He
knew he must be near the summit, stopped, felt for his revolver, and
then lightly put the few remaining branches aside.
The full glare of the noonday sun at first blinded him. When he could
see more clearly, he found himself on the open western slope of the
mountain, which in the Coast Range was seldom wooded. The spiced thicket
stretched between him and the summit, and again between him and the
stage road that plunges from the terrace, like forked lightning into the
valley below. He could command all the approaches without being seen.
Not that this seemed to occupy his thoughts or cause him any anxiety.
His first act was to disencumber himself of his tattered coat; he then
filled and lighted his pipe, and stretched himself full-length on the
open hillside, as if to bleach in the fierce sun. While smoking he
carelessly perused the fragment of a newspaper which had enveloped his
tobacco, and being struck with some amusing paragraph, read it half
aloud again to some imaginary auditor, emphasizing its humor with an
hilarious slap upon his leg.
Possibly from the relaxation of fatigue and the bath, which had become
a vapor one as he alternately rolled and dried himself in the baking
grass, his eyes closed dreamily. He was awakened by the sound of voices.
They were distant; they were vague; they approached no nearer. He rolled
himself to the verge of the first precipitous grassy descent. There was
another bank or plateau below him, and then a confused depth of olive
shadows, pierced here and there by the spiked helmets of pines.
There was no trace of habitation, yet the voices were those of some
monotonous occupation, and Lance distinctly heard through them the click
of crockery and the ring of some household utensil. It appeared to be
the interjectional, half listless, half perfunctory, domestic dialogue
of an old man and a girl, of which the words were unintelligible. Their
voices indicated the solitude of the mountain, but without sadness; they
were mysterious without being awe-inspiring. They might have uttered
the dreariest commonplaces, but, in their vast isolation, they seemed
musical and eloquent. Lance drew his first sigh,--they had suggested
dinner.
Careless as his nature was, he was too cautious to risk detection in
broad daylight. He contented himself for the present with endeavoring to
locate that particular part of the depths from which the voices seemed
to rise. It was more difficult, however, to select some other way of
penetrating it than by the stage road. “They're bound to have a fire
or show a light when it's dark,” he reasoned, and, satisfied with that
reflection, lay down again. Presently he began to amuse himself by
tossing some silver coins in the air. Then his attention was directed to
a spur of the Coast Range which had been sharply silhouetted against
the cloudless western sky. Something intensely white, something so
small that it was scarcely larger than the silver coin in his hand, was
appearing in a slight cleft of the range.
While he looked it gradually filled and obliterated the cleft. In
another moment the whole serrated line of mountain had disappeared. The
dense, dazzling white, encompassing host began to pour over and down
every ravine and pass of the coast. Lance recognized the sea-fog, and
knew that scarcely twenty miles away lay the ocean--and safety! The
drooping sun was now caught and hidden in its soft embraces. A sudden
chill breathed over the mountain. He shivered, rose, and plunged again
for very warmth into the spice-laden thicket. The heated balsamic air
began to affect him like a powerful sedative; his hunger was forgotten
in the languor of fatigue; he slumbered. When he awoke it was dark. He
groped his way through the thicket. A few stars were shining directly
above him, but beyond and below, everything was lost in the soft, white,
fleecy veil of fog. Whatever light or fire might have betokened human
habitation was hidden. To push on blindly would be madness; he could
only wait for morning. It suited the outcast's lazy philosophy. He crept
back again to his bed in the hollow and slept. In that profound silence
and shadow, shut out from human association and sympathy by the ghostly
fog, what torturing visions conjured up by remorse and fear should have
pursued him? What spirit passed before him, or slowly shaped itself out
of the infinite blackness of the wood? None. As he slipped gently into
that blackness he remembered with a slight regret, some biscuits that
were dropped from the coach by a careless luncheon-consuming passenger.
That pang over, he slept as sweetly, as profoundly, as divinely, as a
child.