He awoke with the aroma of the woods still steeping his senses. His
first instinct was that of all young animals; he seized a few of the
young, tender green leaves of the yerba buena vine that crept over his
mossy pillow and ate them, being rewarded by a half berry-like flavor
that seemed to soothe the cravings of his appetite. The languor of sleep
being still upon him, he lazily watched the quivering of a sunbeam that
was caught in the canopying boughs above. Then he dozed again. Hovering
between sleeping and waking, he became conscious of a slight movement
among the dead leaves on the bank beside the hollow in which he lay. The
movement appeared to be intelligent, and directed toward his revolver,
which glittered on the bank. Amused at this evident return of his
larcenous friend of the previous day, he lay perfectly still. The
movement and rustle continued, but it now seemed long and undulating.
Lance's eyes suddenly became set; he was intensely, keenly awake. It
was not a snake, but the hand of a human arm, half hidden in the moss,
groping for the weapon. In that flash of perception he saw that it was
small, bare, and deeply freckled. In an instant he grasped it firmly,
and rose to his feet, dragging to his own level as he did so, the
struggling figure of a young girl.
“Leave me go!” she said, more ashamed than frightened.
Lance looked at her. She was scarcely more than fifteen, slight and
lithe, with a boyish flatness of breast and back. Her flushed face and
bare throat were absolutely peppered with minute brown freckles,
like grains of spent gunpowder. Her eyes, which were large and gray,
presented the singular spectacle of being also freckled,--at least they
were shot through in pupil and cornea with tiny spots like powdered
allspice. Her hair was even more remarkable in its tawny, deer-skin
color, full of lighter shades, and bleached to the faintest of blondes
on the crown of her head, as if by the action of the sun. She had
evidently outgrown her dress, which was made for a smaller child, and
the too brief skirt disclosed a bare, freckled, and sandy desert of
shapely limb, for which the darned stockings were equally too scant.
Lance let his grasp slip from her thin wrist to her hand, and then with
a good-humored gesture tossed it lightly back to her.
She did not retreat, but continued looking at him in a half-surly
embarrassment.
“I ain't a bit frightened,” she said; “I'm not going to run away,--don't
you fear.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Lance, with unmistakable satisfaction, “but why
did you go for my revolver?”
She flushed again and was silent. Presently she began to kick the earth
at the roots of the tree, and said, as if confidentially to her foot,--
“I wanted to get hold of it before you did.”
“You did?--and why?”
“Oh, you know why.”
Every tooth in Lance's head showed that he did, perfectly. But he was
discreetly silent.
“I didn't know what you were hiding there for,” she went on, still
addressing the tree, “and,” looking at him sideways under her white
lashes, “I didn't see your face.”
This subtle compliment was the first suggestion of her artful sex.
It actually sent the blood into the careless rascal's face, and for a
moment confused him. He coughed. “So you thought you'd freeze on to that
six-shooter of mine until you saw my hand?”
She nodded. Then she picked up a broken hazel branch, fitted it into the
small of her back, threw her tanned bare arms over the ends of it, and
expanded her chest and her biceps at the same moment. This simple action
was supposed to convey an impression at once of ease and muscular force.
“Perhaps you'd like to take it now,” said Lance, handing her the pistol.
“I've seen six-shooters before now,” said the girl, evading the
proffered weapon and its suggestion. “Dad has one, and my brother had
two derringers before he was half as big as me.”
She stopped to observe in her companion the effect of this capacity of
her family to bear arms. Lance only regarded her amusedly. Presently she
again spoke abruptly:--
“What made you eat that grass, just now?”
“Grass!” echoed Lance.
“Yes, there,” pointing to the yerba buena.
Lance laughed. “I was hungry. Look!” he said, gayly tossing some silver
into the air. “Do you think you could get me some breakfast for that,
and have enough left to buy something for yourself?”
The girl eyed the money and the man with half-bashful curiosity.
“I reckon Dad might give ye suthing if he had a mind ter, though ez a
rule he's down on tramps ever since they run off his chickens. Ye might
try.”
“But I want YOU to try. You can bring it to me here.”
The girl retreated a step, dropped her eyes, and, with a smile that was
a charming hesitation between bashfulness and impudence, said: “So you
ARE hidin', are ye?”
“That's just it. Your head's level. I am,” laughed Lance unconcernedly.
“Yur ain't one o' the McCarty gang--are ye?”
Mr. Lance Harriott felt a momentary moral exaltation in declaring
truthfully that he was not one of a notorious band of mountain
freebooters known in the district under that name.
“Nor ye ain't one of them chicken lifters that raided Henderson's ranch?
We don't go much on that kind o' cattle yer.”
“No,” said Lance, cheerfully.
“Nor ye ain't that chap ez beat his wife unto death at Santa Clara?”
Lance honestly scorned the imputation. Such conjugal ill treatment as
he had indulged in had not been physical, and had been with other men's
wives.
There was a moment's further hesitation on the part of the girl. Then
she said shortly:
“Well, then, I reckon you kin come along with me.”
“Where?” asked Lance.
“To the ranch,” she replied simply.
“Then you won't bring me anything to eat here?”
“What for? You kin get it down there.” Lance hesitated. “I tell you it's
all right,” she continued. “I'll make it all right with Dad.”
“But suppose I reckon I'd rather stay here,” persisted Lance, with a
perfect consciousness, however, of affectation in his caution.
“Stay away then,” said the girl coolly; “only as Dad perempted this yer
woods”--
“PRE-empted,” suggested Lance.
“Per-empted or pre-emp-ted, as you like,” continued the girl
scornfully,--“ez he's got a holt on this yer woods, ye might ez well see
him down thar ez here. For here he's like to come any minit. You can bet
your life on that.”
She must have read Lance's amusement in his eyes, for she again dropped
her own with a frown of brusque embarrassment. “Come along, then; I'm
your man,” said Lance, gayly, extending his hand.
She would not accept it, eying it, however, furtively, like a horse
about to shy. “Hand me your pistol first,” she said.
He handed it to her with an assumption of gayety. She received it on her
part with unfeigned seriousness, and threw it over her shoulder like
a gun. This combined action of the child and heroine, it is quite
unnecessary to say, afforded Lance undiluted joy.
“You go first,” she said.
Lance stepped promptly out, with a broad grin. “Looks kinder as if I was
a prisoner, don't it?” he suggested.
“Go on, and don't fool,” she replied.
The two fared onward through the wood. For one moment he entertained the
facetious idea of appearing to rush frantically away, “just to see
what the girl would do,” but abandoned it. “It's an even thing if she
wouldn't spot me the first pop,” he reflected admiringly.
When they had reached the open hillside, Lance stopped inquiringly.
“This way,” she said, pointing toward the summit, and in quite an
opposite direction to the valley where he had heard the voices, one
of which he now recognized as hers. They skirted the thicket for a few
moments, and then turned sharply into a trail which began to dip toward
a ravine leading to the valley.
“Why do you have to go all the way round?” he asked.
“WE don't,” the girl replied with emphasis; “there's a shorter cut.”
“Where?”
“That's telling,” she answered shortly.
“What's your name?” asked Lance, after a steep scramble and a drop into
the ravine.
“Flip.”
“What?”
“Flip.”
“I mean your first name,--your front name.”
“Flip.”
“Flip! Oh, short for Felipa!”
“It ain't Flipper,--it's Flip.” And she relapsed into silence.
“You don't ask me mine?” suggested Lance.
She did not vouchsafe a reply.
“Then you don't want to know?”
“Maybe Dad will. You can lie to HIM.”
This direct answer apparently sustained the agreeable homicide for some
moments. He moved onward, silently exuding admiration.
“Only,” added Flip, with a sudden caution, “you'd better agree with me.”
The trail here turned again abruptly and re-entered the canyon. Lance
looked up, and noticed they were almost directly beneath the bay thicket
and the plateau that towered far above them. The trail here showed signs
of clearing, and the way was marked by felled trees and stumps of pines.
“What does your father do here?” he finally asked. Flip remained silent,
swinging the revolver. Lance repeated his question.
“Burns charcoal and makes diamonds,” said Flip, looking at him from the
corners of her eyes.
“Makes diamonds?” echoed Lance.
Flip nodded her head.
“Many of 'em?” he continued carelessly.
“Lots. But they're not big,” she returned, with a sidelong glance.
“Oh, they're not big?” said Lance gravely.
They had by this time reached a small staked inclosure, whence the
sudden fluttering and cackle of poultry welcomed the return of the
evident mistress of this sylvan retreat. It was scarcely imposing.
Further on, a cooking stove under a tree, a saddle and bridle, a few
household implements scattered about, indicated the “ranch.” Like most
pioneer clearings, it was simply a disorganized raid upon nature that
had left behind a desolate battlefield strewn with waste and decay.
The fallen trees, the crushed thicket, the splintered limbs, the rudely
torn-up soil, were made hideous by their grotesque juxtaposition with
the wrecked fragments of civilization, in empty cans, broken bottles,
battered hats, soleless boots, frayed stockings, cast-off rags, and
the crowning absurdity of the twisted-wire skeleton of a hooped skirt
hanging from a branch. The wildest defile, the densest thicket, the most
virgin solitude, was less dreary and forlorn than this first footprint
of man. The only redeeming feature of this prolonged bivouac was the
cabin itself. Built of the half-cylindrical strips of pine bark, and
thatched with the same material, it had a certain picturesque rusticity.
But this was an accident of economy rather than taste, for which
Flip apologized by saying that the bark of the pine was “no good” for
charcoal.
“I reckon Dad's in the woods,” she added, pausing before the open door
of the cabin. “Oh, Dad!” Her voice, clear and high, seemed to fill
the whole long canyon, and echoed from the green plateau above. The
monotonous strokes of an axe were suddenly pretermitted, and somewhere
from the depths of the close-set pines a voice answered “Flip.” There
was a pause of a few moments, with some muttering, stumbling, and
crackling in the underbrush, and then the sudden appearance of “Dad.”
Had Lance first met him in the thicket, he would have been puzzled to
assign his race to Mongolian, Indian, or Ethiopian origin. Perfunctory
but incomplete washings of his hands and face, after charcoal burning,
had gradually ground into his skin a grayish slate-pencil pallor,
grotesquely relieved at the edges, where the washing had left off,
with a border of a darker color. He looked like an overworked Christy
minstrel with the briefest of intervals between his performances. There
were black rims in the orbits of his eyes, as if he gazed feebly out of
unglazed spectacles, which heightened his simian resemblance, already
grotesquely exaggerated by what appeared to be repeated and spasmodic
experiments in dyeing his gray hair. Without the slightest notice of
Lance, he inflicted his protesting and querulous presence entirely on
his daughter.
“Well, what's up now? Yer ye are calling me from work an hour before
noon. Dog my skin, ef I ever get fairly limbered up afore it's 'Dad!'
and 'Oh, Dad!'”
To Lance's intense satisfaction the girl received this harangue with
an air of supreme indifference, and when “Dad” had relapsed into an
unintelligible, and, as it seemed to Lance, a half-frightened muttering,
she said coolly,--
“Ye'd better drop that axe and scoot round getten' this stranger some
breakfast and some grub to take with him. He's one of them San Francisco
sports out here trout fishing in the branch. He's got adrift from his
party, has lost his rod and fixins, and had to camp out last night in
the Gin and Ginger Woods.”
“That's just it; it's allers suthin like that,” screamed the old man,
dashing his fist on his leg in a feeble, impotent passion, but without
looking at Lance. “Why in blazes don't he go up to that there blamed
hotel on the summit? Why in thunder--” But here he caught his daughter's
large, freckled eyes full in his own. He blinked feebly, his voice fell
into a tone of whining entreaty. “Now, look yer, Flip, it's playing
it rather low down on the old man, this yer running' in o' tramps and
desarted emigrants and cast-ashore sailors and forlorn widders and
ravin' lunatics, on this yer ranch. I put it to you, Mister,” he said
abruptly, turning to Lance for the first time, but as if he had already
taken an active part in the conversation,--“I put it as a gentleman
yourself, and a fair-minded sportin' man, if this is the square thing?”
Before Lance could reply, Flip had already begun. “That's just it! D'ye
reckon, being a sportin' man and an A 1 feller, he's goin' to waltz down
inter that hotel, rigged out ez he is? D'ye reckon he's goin' to let
his partners get the laugh outer him? D'ye reckon he's goin' to show his
head outer this yer ranch till he can do it square? Not much! Go 'long.
Dad, you're talking silly!”
The old man weakened. He feebly trailed his axe between his legs to a
stump and sat down, wiping his forehead with his sleeve, and imparting
to it the appearance of a slate with a difficult sum partly rubbed out.
He looked despairingly at Lance. “In course,” he said, with a deep sigh,
“you naturally ain't got any money. In course you left your pocketbook,
containing fifty dollars, under a stone, and can't find it. In course,”
he continued, as he observed Lance put his hand to his pocket, “you've
only got a blank check on Wells, Fargo & Co. for a hundred dollars, and
you'd like me to give you the difference?”
Amused as Lance evidently was at this, his absolute admiration for Flip
absorbed everything else. With his eyes fixed upon the girl, he briefly
assured the old man that he would pay for everything he wanted. He did
this with a manner quite different from the careless, easy attitude he
had assumed toward Flip; at least the quick-witted girl noticed it, and
wondered if he was angry. It was quite true that ever since his eye had
fallen upon another of his own sex, its glance had been less frank and
careless. Certain traits of possible impatience, which might develop
into man-slaying, were coming to the fore. Yet a word or a gesture of
Flip's was sufficient to change that manner, and when, with the fretful
assistance of her father, she had prepared a somewhat sketchy and
primitive repast, he questioned the old man about diamond-making. The
eye of Dad kindled.
“I want ter know how ye knew I was making diamonds,” he asked, with a
certain bashful pettishness not unlike his daughter's.
“Heard it in 'Frisco,” replied Lance, with glib mendacity, glancing at
the girl.
“I reckon they're gettin' sort of skeert down there--them jewelers,”
chuckled Dad, “yet it's in nater that their figgers will have to come
down. It's only a question of the price of charcoal. I suppose they
didn't tell you how I made the discovery?”
Lance would have stopped the old man's narrative by saying that he
knew the story, but he wished to see how far Flip lent herself to her
father's delusion.
“Ye see, one night about two years ago I had a pit o' charcoal burning
out there, and tho' it had been a smouldering and a smoking and a
blazing for nigh unto a month, somehow it didn't charcoal worth a cent.
And yet, dog my skin, but the heat o' that er pit was suthin hidyus
and frightful; ye couldn't stand within a hundred yards of it, and they
could feel it on the stage road three miles over yon, t'other side the
mountain. There was nights when me and Flip had to take our blankets
up the ravine and camp out all night, and the back of this yer hut
shriveled up like that bacon. It was about as nigh on to hell as any
sample ye kin get here. Now, mebbe you think I built that air fire?
Mebbe you'll allow the heat was just the nat'ral burning of that pit?”
“Certainly,” said Lance, trying to see Flip's eyes, which were
resolutely averted.
“Thet's whar you'd be lyin'! That yar heat kem out of the bowels of the
yearth,--kem up like out of a chimbley or a blast, and kep up that yar
fire. And when she cools down a month after, and I got to strip her,
there was a hole in the yearth, and a spring o' bilin', scaldin' water
pourin' out of it ez big as your waist. And right in the middle of it
was this yer.” He rose with the instinct of a skillful raconteur, and
whisked from under his bunk a chamois leather bag, which he emptied
on the table before them. It contained a small fragment of native rock
crystal, half-fused upon a petrified bit of pine. It was so glaringly
truthful, so really what it purported to be, that the most unscientific
woodman or pioneer would have understood it at a glance. Lance raised
his mirthful eyes to Flip.
“It was cooled suddint,--stunted by the water,” said the girl, eagerly.
She stopped, and as abruptly turned away her eyes and her reddened face.
“That's it, that's just it,” continued the old man. “Thar's Flip, thar,
knows it; she ain't no fool!” Lance did not speak, but turned a hard,
unsympathizing look upon the old man, and rose almost roughly. The old
man clutched his coat. “That's it, ye see. The carbon's just turning to
di'mens. And stunted. And why? 'Cos the heat wasn't kep up long enough.
Mebbe yer think I stopped thar? That ain't me. Thar's a pit out yar in
the woods ez hez been burning six months; it hain't, in course, got the
advantages o' the old one, for it's nat'ral heat. But I'm keeping that
heat up. I've got a hole where I kin watch it every four hours. When
the time comes, I'm thar! Don't you see? That's me! that's David
Fairley,--that's the old man,--you bet!”
“That's so,” said Lance, curtly. “And now, Mr. Fairley, if you'll
hand me over a coat or a jacket till I can get past these fogs on the
Monterey road, I won't keep you from your diamond pit.” He threw down a
handful of silver on the table.
“Ther's a deerskin jacket yer,” said the old man, “that one o' them
vaqueros left for the price of a bottle of whiskey.”
“I reckon it wouldn't suit the stranger,” said Flip, dubiously producing
a much-worn, slashed, and braided vaquero's jacket. But it did suit
Lance, who found it warm, and also had suddenly found a certain
satisfaction in opposing Flip. When he had put it on, and nodded coldly
to the old man, and carelessly to Flip, he walked to the door.
“If you're going to take the Monterey road, I can show you a short cut
to it,” said Flip, with a certain kind of shy civility.
The paternal Fairley groaned. “That's it; let the chickens and the ranch
go to thunder, as long as there's a stranger to trapse round with; go
on!”
Lance would have made some savage reply, but Flip interrupted. “You know
yourself, Dad, it's a blind trail, and as that 'ere constable that kem
out here hunting French Pete, couldn't find it, and had to go round by
the canyon, like ez not the stranger would lose his way, and have to
come back!” This dangerous prospect silenced the old man, and Flip and
Lance stepped into the road together. They walked on for some moments
without speaking. Suddenly Lance turned upon his companion.
“You didn't swallow all that rot about the diamond, did you?” he asked,
crossly.
Flip ran a little ahead, as if to avoid a reply.
“You don't mean to say that's the sort of hog wash the old man serves
out to you regularly?” continued Lance, becoming more slangy in his ill
temper.
“I don't know that it's any consarn o' yours what I think,” replied
Flip, hopping from boulder to boulder, as they crossed the bed of a dry
watercourse.
“And I suppose you've piloted round and dry-nussed every tramp and dead
beat you've met since you came here,” continued Lance, with unmistakable
ill humor. “How many have you helped over this road?”
“It's a year since there was a Chinaman chased by some Irishmen from the
Crossing into the brush about yer, and he was too afeered to come out,
and nigh most starved to death in thar. I had to drag him out and start
him on the mountain, for you couldn't get him back to the road. He was
the last one but YOU.”
“Do you reckon it's the right thing for a girl like you to run about
with trash of this kind, and mix herself up with all sorts of rough and
bad company?” said Lance.
Flip stopped short. “Look! if you're goin' to talk like Dad, I'll go
back.”
The ridiculousness of such a resemblance struck him more keenly than a
consciousness of his own ingratitude. He hastened to assure Flip that he
was joking. When he had made his peace they fell into talk again, Lance
becoming unselfish enough to inquire into one or two facts concerning
her life which did not immediately affect him. Her mother had died on
the plains when she was a baby, and her brother had run away from home
at twelve. She fully expected to see him again, and thought he might
sometime stray into their canyon. “That is why, then, you take so much
stock in tramps,” said Lance. “You expect to recognize HIM?”
“Well,” replied Flip, gravely, “there is suthing in THAT, and there's
suthing in THIS: some o' these chaps might run across brother and do him
a good turn for the sake of me.”
“Like me, for instance?” suggested Lance.
“Like you. You'd do him a good turn, wouldn't you?”
“You bet!” said Lance, with a sudden emotion that quite startled him;
“only don't you go to throwing yourself round promiscuously.” He was
half-conscious of an irritating sense of jealousy, as he asked if any of
her proteges had ever returned.
“No,” said Flip, “no one ever did. It shows,” she added with sublime
simplicity, “I had done 'em good, and they could get on alone. Don't
it?”
“It does,” responded Lance grimly. “Have you any other friends that
come?”
“Only the Postmaster at the Crossing.”
“The Postmaster?”
“Yes; he's reckonin' to marry me next year, if I'm big enough.”
“And what do you reckon?” asked Lance earnestly.
Flip began a series of distortions with her shoulders, ran on ahead,
picked up a few pebbles and threw them into the wood, glanced back at
Lance with swimming mottled eyes, that seemed a piquant incarnation of
everything suggestive and tantalizing, and said,
“That's telling.”
They had by this time reached the spot where they were to separate.
“Look,” said Flip, pointing to a faint deflection of their path, which
seemed, however, to lose itself in the underbrush a dozen yards away,
“ther's your trail. It gets plainer and broader the further you get on,
but you must use your eyes here, and get to know it well afore you get
into the fog. Good-by.”
“Good-by.” Lance took her hand and drew her beside him. She was still
redolent of the spices of the thicket, and to the young man's excited
fancy seemed at that moment to personify the perfume and intoxication of
her native woods. Half laughingly, half earnestly, he tried to kiss her;
she struggled for some time strongly, but at the last moment yielded,
with a slight return and the exchange of a subtle fire that thrilled
him, and left him standing confused and astounded as she ran away. He
watched her lithe, nymph-like figure disappear in the checkered shadows
of the wood, and then he turned briskly down the half-hidden trail. His
eyesight was keen, he made good progress, and was soon well on his way
toward the distant ridge.
But Flip's return had not been as rapid. When she reached the wood she
crept to its beetling verge, and, looking across the canyon, watched
Lance's figure as it vanished and reappeared in the shadows and
sinuosities of the ascent. When he reached the ridge the outlying fog
crept across the summit, caught him in its embrace, and wrapped him
from her gaze. Flip sighed, raised herself, put her alternate foot on
a stump, and took a long pull at her too-brief stockings. When she had
pulled down her skirt and endeavored once more to renew the intimacy
that had existed in previous years between the edge of her petticoat and
the top of her stockings, she sighed again, and went home.