“What makes him run away?” she asked quickly, opening her lovely eyes in

a possibly innocent wonder that anything could be found to run away from

her.

“He don't like the brass band,” we explained eagerly.

“How funny,” murmured the girl; “is it as out of tune as all that?”

This irresistible witticism alone would have been enough to satisfy

us--we did nothing but repeat it to each other all the next day--but we

were positively transported when we saw her suddenly gather her dainty

skirts in one hand and trip off through the red dust toward Bones, who,

with his eyes over his yellow shoulder, had halted in the road,

and half-turned in mingled disgust and rage at the spectacle of the

descending trombone. We held our breath as she approached him. Would

Bones evade her as he did us at such moments, or would he save our

reputation, and consent, for the moment, to accept her as a new kind of

inebriate? She came nearer; he saw her; he began to slowly quiver with

excitement--his stump of a tail vibrating with such rapidity that

the loss of the missing portion was scarcely noticeable. Suddenly she

stopped before him, took his yellow head between her little hands,

lifted it, and looked down in his handsome brown eyes with her two

lovely blue ones. What passed between them in that magnetic glance no

one ever knew. She returned with him; said to him casually: “We're not

afraid of brass bands, are we?” to which he apparently acquiesced, at

least stifling his disgust of them while he was near her--which was

nearly all the time.

During the speechmaking her gloved hand and his yellow head were always

near together, and at the crowning ceremony--her public checking of Yuba

Bill's “waybill” on behalf of the township, with a gold pencil presented

to her by the Stage Company--Bones' joy, far from knowing no bounds,

seemed to know nothing but them, and he witnessed it apparently in the

air. No one dared to interfere. For the first time a local pride in

Bones sprang up in our hearts--and we lied to each other in his praises

openly and shamelessly.

Then the time came for parting. We were standing by the door of the

coach, hats in hand, as Miss Pinkey was about to step into it; Bones

was waiting by her side, confidently looking into the interior, and

apparently selecting his own seat on the lap of Judge Preston in the

corner, when Miss Pinkey held up the sweetest of admonitory fingers.

Then, taking his head between her two hands, she again looked into

his brimming eyes, and said, simply, “GOOD dog,” with the gentlest of

emphasis on the adjective, and popped into the coach.

The six bay horses started as one, the gorgeous green and gold vehicle

bounded forward, the red dust rose behind, and the yellow dog danced

in and out of it to the very outskirts of the settlement. And then he

soberly returned.

A day or two later he was missed--but the fact was afterward known that

he was at Spring Valley, the county town where Miss Preston lived, and

he was forgiven. A week afterward he was missed again, but this time for

a longer period, and then a pathetic letter arrived from Sacramento for

the storekeeper's wife.

“Would you mind,” wrote Miss Pinkey Preston, “asking some of your boys

to come over here to Sacramento and bring back Bones? I don't mind

having the dear dog walk out with me at Spring Valley, where everyone

knows me; but here he DOES make one so noticeable, on account of HIS

COLOR. I've got scarcely a frock that he agrees with. He don't go with

my pink muslin, and that lovely buff tint he makes three shades lighter.

You know yellow is SO trying.”

A consultation was quickly held by the whole settlement, and a

deputation sent to Sacramento to relieve the unfortunate girl. We

were all quite indignant with Bones--but, oddly enough, I think it was

greatly tempered with our new pride in him. While he was with us alone,

his peculiarities had been scarcely appreciated, but the recurrent

phrase “that yellow dog that they keep at the Rattlers” gave us a

mysterious importance along the countryside, as if we had secured a

“mascot” in some zoological curiosity.

This was further indicated by a singular occurrence. A new church had

been built at the crossroads, and an eminent divine had come from San

Francisco to preach the opening sermon. After a careful examination of

the camp's wardrobe, and some felicitous exchange of apparel, a few of

us were deputed to represent “Rattlers” at the Sunday service. In our

white ducks, straw hats, and flannel blouses, we were sufficiently

picturesque and distinctive as “honest miners” to be shown off in one of

the front pews.

Seated near the prettiest girls, who offered us their hymn books--in the

cleanly odor of fresh pine shavings, and ironed muslin, and blown over

by the spices of our own woods through the open windows, a deep sense

of the abiding peace of Christian communion settled upon us. At this

supreme moment someone murmured in an awe-stricken whisper:

“WILL you look at Bones?”

We looked. Bones had entered the church and gone up in the gallery

through a pardonable ignorance and modesty; but, perceiving his mistake,

was now calmly walking along the gallery rail before the astounded

worshipers. Reaching the end, he paused for a moment, and carelessly

looked down. It was about fifteen feet to the floor below--the simplest

jump in the world for the mountain-bred Bones. Daintily, gingerly,

lazily, and yet with a conceited airiness of manner, as if, humanly

speaking, he had one leg in his pocket and were doing it on three, he

cleared the distance, dropping just in front of the chancel, without a

sound, turned himself around three times, and then lay comfortably down.

Three deacons were instantly in the aisle, coming up before the eminent

divine, who, we fancied, wore a restrained smile. We heard the hurried

whispers: “Belongs to them.” “Quite a local institution here, you know.”

“Don't like to offend sensibilities;” and the minister's prompt “By no

means,” as he went on with his service.

A short month ago we would have repudiated Bones; today we sat there

in slightly supercilious attitudes, as if to indicate that any affront

offered to Bones would be an insult to ourselves, and followed by our

instantaneous withdrawal in a body.

All went well, however, until the minister, lifting the large Bible

from the communion table and holding it in both hands before him, walked

toward a reading stand by the altar rails. Bones uttered a distinct

growl. The minister stopped.

We, and we alone, comprehended in a flash the whole situation. The Bible

was nearly the size and shape of one of those soft clods of sod which we

were in the playful habit of launching at Bones when he lay half-asleep

in the sun, in order to see him cleverly evade it.

We held our breath. What was to be done? But the opportunity belonged

to our leader, Jeff Briggs--a confoundedly good-looking fellow, with the

golden mustache of a northern viking and the curls of an Apollo. Secure

in his beauty and bland in his self-conceit, he rose from the pew, and

stepped before the chancel rails.

“I would wait a moment, if I were you, sir,” he said, respectfully, “and

you will see that he will go out quietly.”

“What is wrong?” whispered the minister in some concern.

“He thinks you are going to heave that book at him, sir, without giving

him a fair show, as we do.”

The minister looked perplexed, but remained motionless, with the book in

his hands. Bones arose, walked halfway down the aisle, and vanished like

a yellow flash!

With this justification of his reputation, Bones disappeared for a week.

At the end of that time we received a polite note from Judge Preston,

saying that the dog had become quite domiciled in their house, and

begged that the camp, without yielding up their valuable PROPERTY in

him, would allow him to remain at Spring Valley for an indefinite time;

that both the judge and his daughter--with whom Bones was already an old

friend--would be glad if the members of the camp would visit their old

favorite whenever they desired, to assure themselves that he was well

cared for.

I am afraid that the bait thus ingenuously thrown out had a good deal to

do with our ultimate yielding. However, the reports of those who visited

Bones were wonderful and marvelous. He was residing there in state,

lying on rugs in the drawing-room, coiled up under the judicial desk in

the judge's study, sleeping regularly on the mat outside Miss Pinkey's

bedroom door, or lazily snapping at flies on the judge's lawn.

“He's as yaller as ever,” said one of our informants, “but it don't

somehow seem to be the same back that we used to break clods over in the

old time, just to see him scoot out of the dust.”

And now I must record a fact which I am aware all lovers of dogs will

indignantly deny, and which will be furiously bayed at by every faithful

hound since the days of Ulysses. Bones not only FORGOT, but absolutely

CUT US! Those who called upon the judge in “store clothes” he would

perhaps casually notice, but he would sniff at them as if detecting and

resenting them under their superficial exterior. The rest he simply paid

no attention to. The more familiar term of “Bonesy”--formerly applied

to him, as in our rare moments of endearment--produced no response.

This pained, I think, some of the more youthful of us; but, through some

strange human weakness, it also increased the camp's respect for him.

Nevertheless, we spoke of him familiarly to strangers at the very moment

he ignored us. I am afraid that we also took some pains to point

out that he was getting fat and unwieldy, and losing his elasticity,

implying covertly that his choice was a mistake and his life a failure.

A year after, he died, in the odor of sanctity and respectability, being

found one morning coiled up and stiff on the mat outside Miss Pinkey's

door. When the news was conveyed to us, we asked permission, the camp

being in a prosperous condition, to erect a stone over his grave. But

when it came to the inscription we could only think of the two words

murmured to him by Miss Pinkey, which we always believe effected his

conversion:

“GOOD Dog!”

A MOTHER OF FIVE

She was a mother--and a rather exemplary one--of five children, although

her own age was barely nine. Two of these children were twins, and she

generally alluded to them as “Mr. Amplach's children,” referring to an

exceedingly respectable gentleman in the next settlement who, I have

reason to believe, had never set eyes on her or them. The twins were

quite naturally alike--having been in a previous state of existence two

ninepins--and were still somewhat vague and inchoate below their low

shoulders in their long clothes, but were also firm and globular about

the head, and there were not wanting those who professed to see in this

an unmistakable resemblance to their reputed father. The other children

were dolls of different ages, sex, and condition, but the twins may

be said to have been distinctly her own conception. Yet such was her

admirable and impartial maternity that she never made any difference

between them. “The Amplach's children” was a description rather than a

distinction.

She was herself the motherless child of Robert Foulkes, a hardworking

but somewhat improvident teamster on the Express Route between Big Bend

and Reno. His daily avocation, when she was not actually with him in the

wagon, led to an occasional dispersion of herself and her progeny along

the road and at wayside stations between those places. But the family

was generally collected together by rough but kindly hands already

familiar with the handling of her children. I have a very vivid

recollection of Jim Carter trampling into a saloon, after a five-mile

walk through a snowdrift, with an Amplach twin in his pocket. “Suthin'

ought to be done,” he growled, “to make Meary a little more careful o'

them Amplach children; I picked up one outer the snow a mile beyond Big

Bend.” “God bless my soul!” said a casual passenger, looking up hastily;

“I didn't know Mr. Amplach was married.” Jim winked diabolically at us

over his glass. “No more did I,” he responded gloomily, “but you can't

tell anything about the ways o' them respectable, psalm-singing jay

birds.” Having thus disposed of Amplach's character, later on, when

he was alone with Mary, or “Meary,” as she chose to pronounce it, the

rascal worked upon her feelings with an account of the infant Amplach's

sufferings in the snowdrift and its agonized whisperings for “Meary!

Meary!” until real tears stood in Mary's blue eyes. “Let this be a

lesson to you,” he concluded, drawing the ninepin dexterously from his

pocket, “for it took nigh a quart of the best forty-rod whisky to bring

that child to.” Not only did Mary firmly believe him, but for weeks

afterwards “Julian Amplach”--this unhappy twin--was kept in a somnolent

attitude in the cart, and was believed to have contracted dissipated

habits from the effects of his heroic treatment.

Her numerous family was achieved in only two years, and succeeded her

first child, which was brought from Sacramento at considerable expense

by a Mr. William Dodd, also a teamster, on her seventh birthday. This,

by one of those rare inventions known only to a child's vocabulary,

she at once called “Misery”--probably a combination of “Missy,” as she

herself was formerly termed by strangers, and “Missouri,” her native

State. It was an excessively large doll at first--Mr. Dodd wishing to

get the worth of his money--but time, and perhaps an excess of maternal

care, remedied the defect, and it lost flesh and certain unemployed

parts of its limbs very rapidly. It was further reduced in bulk by

falling under the wagon and having the whole train pass over it,

but singularly enough its greatest attenuation was in the head and

shoulders--the complexion peeling off as a solid layer, followed by the

disappearance of distinct strata of its extraordinary composition. This

continued until the head and shoulders were much too small for even

its reduced frame, and all the devices of childish millinery--a shawl

secured with tacks and well hammered in, and a hat which tilted backward

and forward and never appeared at the same angle--failed to restore

symmetry. Until one dreadful morning, after an imprudent bath, the whole

upper structure disappeared, leaving two hideous iron prongs standing

erect from the spinal column. Even an imaginative child like Mary could

not accept this sort of thing as a head. Later in the day Jack Roper,

the blacksmith at the “Crossing,” was concerned at the plaintive

appearance before his forge of a little girl clad in a bright-blue

pinafore of the same color as her eyes, carrying her monstrous offspring

in her arms. Jack recognized her and instantly divined the situation.

“You haven't,” he suggested kindly, “got another head at home--suthin'

left over,” Mary shook her head sadly; even her prolific maternity was

not equal to the creation of children in detail. “Nor anythin' like

a head?” he persisted sympathetically. Mary's loving eyes filled with

tears. “No, nuffen!” “You couldn't,” he continued thoughtfully, “use her

the other side up?--we might get a fine pair o' legs outer them irons,”

he added, touching the two prongs with artistic suggestion. “Now look

here”--he was about to tilt the doll over when a small cry of feminine

distress and a swift movement of a matronly little arm arrested the

evident indiscretion. “I see,” he said gravely. “Well, you come here

tomorrow, and we'll fix up suthin' to work her.” Jack was thoughtful the

rest of the day, more than usually impatient with certain stubborn mules

to be shod, and even knocked off work an hour earlier to walk to Big

Bend and a rival shop. But the next morning when the trustful and

anxious mother appeared at the forge she uttered a scream of delight.

Jack had neatly joined a hollow iron globe, taken from the newel post of

some old iron staircase railing, to the two prongs, and covered it

with a coat of red fireproof paint. It was true that its complexion was

rather high, that it was inclined to be top-heavy, and that in the long

run the other dolls suffered considerably by enforced association with

this unyielding and implacable head and shoulders, but this did not

diminish Mary's joy over her restored first-born. Even its utter absence

of features was no defect in a family where features were as evanescent

as in hers, and the most ordinary student of evolution could see

that the “Amplach” ninepins were in legitimate succession to the

globular-headed “Misery.” For a time I think that Mary even preferred

her to the others. Howbeit it was a pretty sight to see her on a summer

afternoon sitting upon a wayside stump, her other children dutifully

ranged around her, and the hard, unfeeling head of Misery pressed deep

down into her loving little heart as she swayed from side to side,

crooning her plaintive lullaby. Small wonder that the bees took up the

song and droned a slumberous accompaniment, or that high above her head

the enormous pines, stirred through their depths by the soft Sierran

air--or Heaven knows what--let slip flickering lights and shadows to

play over that cast-iron face, until the child, looking down upon it

with the quick, transforming power of love, thought that it smiled.

The two remaining members of the family were less distinctive.

“Gloriana”--pronounced as two words: “Glory Anna”--being the work of

her father, who also named it, was simply a cylindrical roll of canvas

wagon-covering, girt so as to define a neck and waist, with a rudely

inked face--altogether a weak, pitiable, manlike invention; and “Johnny

Dear,” alleged to be the representative of John Doremus, a young

storekeeper who occasionally supplied Mary with gratuitous sweets. Mary

never admitted this, and as we were all gentlemen along that road,

we were blind to the suggestion. “Johnny Dear” was originally a small

plaster phrenological cast of a head and bust, begged from some shop

window in the county town, with a body clearly constructed by Mary

herself. It was an ominous fact that it was always dressed as a BOY,

and was distinctly the most HUMAN-looking of all her progeny. Indeed,

in spite of the faculties that were legibly printed all over its smooth,

white, hairless head, it was appallingly lifelike. Left sometimes by

Mary astride of the branch of a wayside tree, horsemen had been known to

dismount hurriedly and examine it, returning with a mystified smile, and

it was on record that Yuba Bill had once pulled up the Pioneer Coach

at the request of curious and imploring passengers, and then grimly

installed “Johnny Dear” beside him on the box seat, publicly delivering

him to Mary at Big Bend, to her wide-eyed confusion and the first blush

we had ever seen on her round, chubby, sunburnt cheeks. It may seem

strange that with her great popularity and her well-known maternal

instincts, she had not been kept fully supplied with proper and more

conventional dolls; but it was soon recognized that she did not care

for them--left their waxen faces, rolling eyes, and abundant hair in

ditches, or stripped them to help clothe the more extravagant creatures

of her fancy. So it came that “Johnny Dear's” strictly classical profile

looked out from under a girl's fashionable straw sailor hat, to the

utter obliteration of his prominent intellectual faculties; the Amplach

twins wore bonnets on their ninepins heads, and even an attempt was

made to fit a flaxen scalp on the iron-headed Misery. But her dolls were

always a creation of her own--her affection for them increasing with the

demand upon her imagination. This may seem somewhat inconsistent

with her habit of occasionally abandoning them in the woods or in the

ditches. But she had an unbounded confidence in the kindly maternity of

Nature, and trusted her children to the breast of the Great Mother as

freely as she did herself in her own motherlessness. And this confidence

was rarely betrayed. Rats, mice, snails, wildcats, panther, and bear

never touched her lost waifs. Even the elements were kindly; an Amplach

twin buried under a snowdrift in high altitudes reappeared smilingly

in the spring in all its wooden and painted integrity. We were all

Pantheists then--and believed this implicitly. It was only when exposed

to the milder forces of civilization that Mary had anything to fear.

Yet even then, when Patsy O'Connor's domestic goat had once tried to

“sample” the lost Misery, he had retreated with the loss of three

front teeth, and Thompson's mule came out of an encounter with that

iron-headed prodigy with a sprained hind leg and a cut and swollen

pastern.

But these were the simple Arcadian days of the road between Big Bend and

Reno, and progress and prosperity, alas! brought changes in their wake.

It was already whispered that Mary ought to be going to school, and

Mr. Amplach--still happily oblivious of the liberties taken with his

name--as trustee of the public school at Duckville, had intimated that

Mary's bohemian wanderings were a scandal to the county. She was growing

up in ignorance, a dreadful ignorance of everything but the chivalry,

the deep tenderness, the delicacy and unselfishness of the rude men

around her, and obliviousness of faith in anything but the immeasurable

bounty of Nature toward her and her children. Of course there was a

fierce discussion between “the boys” of the road and the few married

families of the settlement on this point, but, of course, progress and

“snivelization”--as the boys chose to call it--triumphed. The projection

of a railroad settled it; Robert Foulkes, promoted to a foremanship of

a division of the line, was made to understand that his daughter must be

educated. But the terrible question of Mary's family remained. No school

would open its doors to that heterogeneous collection, and Mary's little

heart would have broken over the rude dispersal or heroic burning of her

children. The ingenuity of Jack Roper suggested a compromise. She

was allowed to select one to take to school with her; the others were

ADOPTED by certain of her friends, and she was to be permitted to visit

them every Saturday afternoon. The selection was a cruel trial, so cruel

that, knowing her undoubted preference for her firstborn, Misery, we

would not have interfered for worlds, but in her unexpected choice

of “Johnny Dear” the most unworldly of us knew that it was the first

glimmering of feminine tact--her first submission to the world of

propriety that she was now entering. “Johnny Dear” was undoubtedly the

most presentable; even more, there was an educational suggestion in its

prominent, mapped-out phrenological organs. The adopted fathers were

loyal to their trust. Indeed, for years afterward the blacksmith kept

the iron-headed Misery on a rude shelf, like a shrine, near his bunk;

nobody but himself and Mary ever knew the secret, stolen, and thrilling

interviews that took place during the first days of their separation.

Certain facts, however, transpired concerning Mary's equal faithfulness

to another of her children. It is said that one Saturday afternoon, when

the road manager of the new line was seated in his office at Reno in

private business discussion with two directors, a gentle tap was heard

at the door. It was opened to an eager little face, a pair of blue eyes,

and a blue pinafore. To the astonishment of the directors, a change came

over the face of the manager. Taking the child gently by the hand, he

walked to his desk, on which the papers of the new line were

scattered, and drew open a drawer from which he took a large ninepin

extraordinarily dressed as a doll. The astonishment of the two gentlemen

was increased at the following quaint colloquy between the manager and

the child.

“She's doing remarkably well in spite of the trying weather, but I have

had to keep her very quiet,” said the manager, regarding the ninepin

critically.

“Ess,” said Mary quickly, “It's just the same with Johnny Dear; his

cough is f'ightful at nights. But Misery's all right. I've just been to

see her.”

“There's a good deal of scarlet fever around,” continued the manager

with quiet concern, “and we can't be too careful. But I shall take her

for a little run down the line tomorrow.”

The eyes of Mary sparkled and overflowed like blue water. Then there was

a kiss, a little laugh, a shy glance at the two curious strangers, the

blue pinafore fluttered away, and the colloquy ended. She was equally

attentive in her care of the others, but the rag baby “Gloriana,” who

had found a home in Jim Carter's cabin at the Ridge, living too far for

daily visits, was brought down regularly on Saturday afternoon to Mary's

house by Jim, tucked in asleep in his saddle bags or riding gallantly

before him on the horn of his saddle. On Sunday there was a dress

parade of all the dolls, which kept Mary in heart for the next week's

desolation.

But there came one Saturday and Sunday when Mary did not appear, and it

was known along the road that she had been called to San Francisco to

meet an aunt who had just arrived from “the States.” It was a vacant

Sunday to “the boys,” a very hollow, unsanctified Sunday, somehow,

without that little figure. But the next, Sunday, and the next, were

still worse, and then it was known that the dreadful aunt was making

much of Mary, and was sending her to a grand school--a convent at Santa

Clara--where it was rumored girls were turned out so accomplished that

their own parents did not know them. But WE knew that was impossible to

our Mary; and a letter which came from her at the end of the month, and

before the convent had closed upon the blue pinafore, satisfied us, and

was balm to our anxious hearts. It was characteristic of Mary; it was

addressed to nobody in particular, and would--but for the prudence of

the aunt--have been entrusted to the post office open and undirected. It

was a single sheet, handed to us without a word by her father; but as

we passed it from hand to hand, we understood it as if we had heard our

lost playfellow's voice.

“Ther's more houses in 'Frisco than you kin shake a stick at and

wimmens till you kant rest, but mules and jakasses ain't got no sho, nor

blacksmiffs shops, wich is not to be seen no wear. Rapits and Skwirls

also bares and panfers is on-noun and unforgotten on account of the

streets and Sunday skoles. Jim Roper you orter be very good to Mizzery

on a kount of my not bein' here, and not harten your hart to her bekos

she is top heavy--which is ontroo and simply an imptient lie--like

you allus make. I have a kinary bird wot sings deliteful--but isn't a

yellerhamer sutch as I know, as you'd think. Dear Mister Montgommery,

don't keep Gulan Amplak to mutch shet up in office drors; it isn't good

for his lungs and chest. And don't you ink his head--nother! youre as

bad as the rest. Johnny Dear, you must be very kind to your attopted

father, and you, Glory Anna, must lov your kind Jimmy Carter verry

mutch for taking you hossback so offen. I has been buggy ridin' with

an orficer who has killed injuns real! I am comin' back soon with grate

affeckshun, so luke out and mind.”

But it was three years before she returned, and this was her last

and only letter. The “adopted fathers” of her children were faithful,

however, and when the new line was opened, and it was understood that

she was to be present with her father at the ceremony, they came, with

a common understanding, to the station to meet their old playmate. They

were ranged along the platform--poor Jack Roper a little overweighted

with a bundle he was carrying on his left arm. And then a young girl

in the freshness of her teens and the spotless purity of a muslin frock

that although brief in skirt was perfect in fit, faultlessly booted and

gloved, tripped from the train, and offered a delicate hand in turn to

each of her old friends. Nothing could be prettier than the smile on the

cheeks that were no longer sunburnt; nothing could be clearer than the

blue eyes lifted frankly to theirs. And yet, as she gracefully turned

away with her father, the faces of the four adopted parents were found

to be as red and embarrassed as her own on the day that Yuba Bill drove

up publicly with “Johnny Dear” on the box seat.

“You weren't such a fool,” said Jack Montgomery to Roper, “as to bring

Misery here with you?”

“I was,” said Roper with a constrained laugh--“and you?” He had just

caught sight of the head of a ninepin peeping from the manager's pocket.

The man laughed, and then the four turned silently away.

“Mary” had indeed come back to them; but not “The Mother of Five!”

BULGER'S REPUTATION

We all remembered very distinctly Bulger's advent in Rattlesnake Camp.

It was during the rainy season--a season singularly inducive to settled

reflective impressions as we sat and smoked around the stove in Mosby's

grocery. Like older and more civilized communities, we had our periodic

waves of sentiment and opinion, with the exception that they were more

evanescent with us, and as we had just passed through a fortnight of

dissipation and extravagance, owing to a visit from some gamblers and

speculators, we were now undergoing a severe moral revulsion, partly

induced by reduced finances and partly by the arrival of two families

with grownup daughters on the hill. It was raining, with occasional warm

breaths, through the open window, of the southwest trades, redolent of

the saturated spices of the woods and springing grasses, which perhaps

were slightly inconsistent with the hot stove around which we had

congregated. But the stove was only an excuse for our listless,

gregarious gathering; warmth and idleness went well together, and it was

currently accepted that we had caught from the particular reptile which

gave its name to our camp much of its pathetic, lifelong search for

warmth, and its habit of indolently basking in it.

A few of us still went through the affectation of attempting to dry our

damp clothes by the stove, and sizzling our wet boots against it; but

as the same individuals calmly permitted the rain to drive in upon them

through the open window without moving, and seemed to take infinite

delight in the amount of steam they generated, even that pretense

dropped. Crotalus himself, with his tail in a muddy ditch, and the sun

striking cold fire from his slit eyes as he basked his head on a warm

stone beside it, could not have typified us better.

Percy Briggs took his pipe from his mouth at last and said, with

reflective severity:

“Well, gentlemen, if we can't get the wagon road over here, and if

we're going to be left out by the stagecoach company, we can at least

straighten up the camp, and not have it look like a cross between a

tenement alley and a broken-down circus. I declare, I was just sick

when these two Baker girls started to make a short cut through the camp.

Darned if they didn't turn round and take to the woods and the rattlers

again afore they got halfway. And that benighted idiot, Tom Rollins,

standin' there in the ditch, spattered all over with slumgullion 'til he

looked like a spotted tarrypin, wavin' his fins and sashaying backwards

and forrards and sayin', 'This way, ladies; this way!'”

“I didn't,” returned Tom Rollins, quite casually, without looking up

from his steaming boots; “I didn't start in night afore last to dance

'The Green Corn Dance' outer 'Hiawatha,' with feathers in my hair and

a red blanket on my shoulders, round that family's new potato patch,

in order that it might 'increase and multiply.' I didn't sing 'Sabbath

Morning Bells' with an anvil accompaniment until twelve o'clock at

night over at the Crossing, so that they might dream of their Happy

Childhood's Home. It seems to me that it wasn't me did it. I might be

mistaken--it was late--but I have the impression that it wasn't me.”

From the silence that followed, this would seem to have been clearly

a recent performance of the previous speaker, who, however, responded

quite cheerfully:

“An evenin' o' simple, childish gaiety don't count. We've got to start

in again FAIR. What we want here is to clear up and encourage decent

immigration, and get rid o' gamblers and blatherskites that are makin'

this yer camp their happy hunting-ground. We don't want any more

permiskus shootin'. We don't want any more paintin' the town red. We

don't want any more swaggerin' galoots ridin' up to this grocery and

emptyin' their six-shooters in the air afore they 'light. We want to put

a stop to it peacefully and without a row--and we kin. We ain't got no

bullies of our own to fight back, and they know it, so they know they

won't get no credit bullyin' us; they'll leave, if we're only firm. It's

all along of our cussed fool good-nature; they see it amuses us, and

they'll keep it up as long as the whisky's free. What we want to do is,

when the next man comes waltzin' along--”

A distant clatter from the rocky hillside here mingled with the puff of

damp air through the window.

“Looks as ef we might hev a show even now,” said Tom Rollins, removing

his feet from the stove as we all instinctively faced toward the window.

“I reckon you're in with us in this, Mosby?” said Briggs, turning toward

the proprietor of the grocery, who had been leaning listlessly against

the wall behind his bar.

“Arter the man's had a fair show,” said Mosby, cautiously. He deprecated

the prevailing condition of things, but it was still an open question

whether the families would prove as valuable customers as his present

clients. “Everything in moderation, gentlemen.”

The sound of galloping hoofs came nearer, now swishing in the soft mud

of the highway, until the unseen rider pulled up before the door. There

was no shouting, however, nor did he announce himself with the usual

salvo of firearms. But when, after a singularly heavy tread and the

jingle of spurs on the platform, the door flew open to the newcomer,

he seemed a realization of our worst expectations. Tall, broad, and

muscular, he carried in one hand a shotgun, while from his hip dangled

a heavy navy revolver. His long hair, unkempt but oiled, swept a greasy

circle around his shoulders; his enormous mustache, dripping with wet,

completely concealed his mouth. His costume of fringed buckskin was wild

and outre even for our frontier camp. But what was more confirmative

of our suspicions was that he was evidently in the habit of making an

impression, and after a distinct pause at the doorway, with only a side

glance at us, he strode toward the bar.

“As there don't seem to be no hotel hereabouts, I reckon I kin put up

my mustang here and have a shakedown somewhere behind that counter,” he

said. His voice seemed to have added to its natural depth the hoarseness

of frequent overstraining.

“Ye ain't got no bunk to spare, you boys, hev ye?” asked Mosby,

evasively, glancing at Percy Briggs without looking at the stranger.

We all looked at Briggs also; it was HIS affair after all--HE had

originated this opposition. To our surprise he said nothing.

The stranger leaned heavily on the counter.

“I was speaking to YOU,” he said, with his eyes on Mosby, and slightly

accenting the pronoun with a tap of his revolver butt on the bar. “Ye

don't seem to catch on.”

Mosby smiled feebly, and again cast an imploring glance at Briggs. To

our greater astonishment, Briggs said, quietly: “Why don't you answer

the stranger, Mosby?”

“Yes, yes,” said Mosby, suavely, to the newcomer, while an angry flush

crossed his check as he recognized the position in which Briggs had

placed him. “Of course, you're welcome to what doings I hev here, but I

reckoned these gentlemen over there,” with a vicious glance at Briggs,

“might fix ye up suthin' better; they're so pow'ful kind to your sort.”

The stranger threw down a gold piece on the counter and said: “Fork out

your whisky, then,” waited until his glass was filled, took it in his

hand, and then, drawing an empty chair to the stove, sat down beside

Briggs. “Seein' as you're that kind,” he said, placing his heavy hand

on Briggs's knee, “mebbe ye kin tell me ef thar's a shanty or a cabin at

Rattlesnake that I kin get for a couple o' weeks. I saw an empty one at

the head o' the hill. You see, gennelmen,” he added confidentially as

he swept the drops of whisky from his long mustache with his fingers and

glanced around our group, “I've got some business over at Bigwood,” our

nearest town, “but ez a place to stay AT it ain't my style.”

“What's the matter with Bigwood?” said Briggs, abruptly.

“It's too howlin', too festive, too rough; thar's too much yellin'

and shootin' goin' day and night. Thar's too many card sharps and gay

gamboliers cavortin' about the town to please me. Too much permiskus

soakin' at the bar and free jimjams. What I want is a quiet place what

a man kin give his mind and elbow a rest from betwixt grippin' his

shootin' irons and crookin' in his whisky. A sort o' slow, quiet, easy

place LIKE THIS.”

We all stared at him, Percy Briggs as fixedly as any. But there was not

the slightest trace of irony, sarcasm, or peculiar significance in his

manner. He went on slowly:

“When I struck this yer camp a minit ago; when I seed that thar ditch

meanderin' peaceful like through the street, without a hotel or free

saloon or express office on either side; with the smoke just a curlin'

over the chimbley of that log shanty, and the bresh just set fire to and

a smolderin' in that potato patch with a kind o' old-time stingin' in

your eyes and nose, and a few women's duds just a flutterin' on a line

by the fence, I says to myself: 'Bulger--this is peace! This is wot

you're lookin' for, Bulger--this is wot you're wantin'--this is wot

YOU'LL HEV!'”

“You say you've business over at Bigwood. What business?” said Briggs.

“It's a peculiar business, young fellow,” returned the stranger,

gravely. “Thar's different men ez has different opinions about it. Some

allows it's an easy business, some allows it's a rough business; some

says it's a sad business, others says it's gay and festive. Some wonders

ez how I've got into it, and others wonder how I'll ever get out of it.

It's a payin' business--it's a peaceful sort o' business when left to

itself. It's a peculiar business--a business that sort o' b'longs to

me, though I ain't got no patent from Washington for it. It's MY OWN

business.” He paused, rose, and saying, “Let's meander over and take a

look at that empty cabin, and ef she suits me, why, I'll plank down

a slug for her on the spot, and move in tomorrow,” walked towards the

door. “I'll pick up suthin' in the way o' boxes and blankets from the

grocery,” he added, looking at Mosby, “and ef thar's a corner whar I kin

stand my gun and a nail to hang up my revolver--why, I'm all thar!”

By this time we were no longer astonished when Briggs rose also, and not

only accompanied the sinister-looking stranger to the empty cabin, but

assisted him in negotiating with its owner for a fortnight's occupancy.

Nevertheless, we eagerly assailed Briggs on his return for some

explanation of this singular change in his attitude toward the stranger.

He coolly reminded us, however, that while his intention of excluding

ruffianly adventurers from the camp remained the same, he had no right

to go back on the stranger's sentiments, which were evidently in accord

with our own, and although Mr. Bulger's appearance was inconsistent with

them, that was only an additional reason why we should substitute a

mild firmness for that violence which we all deprecated, but which might

attend his abrupt dismissal. We were all satisfied except Mosby, who had

not yet recovered from Briggs's change of front, which he was pleased

to call “craw-fishing.” “Seemed to me his account of his business was

extraordinary satisfactory! Sorter filled the bill all round--no mistake

thar,” he suggested, with a malicious irony. “I like a man that's

outspoken.”

“I understood him very well,” said Briggs, quietly.

“In course you did. Only when you've settled in your MIND whether he

was describing horse-stealing or tract-distributing, mebbe you'll let ME

know.”

It would seem, however, that Briggs did not interrogate the stranger

again regarding it, nor did we, who were quite content to leave matters

in Briggs's hands. Enough that Mr. Bulger moved into the empty cabin the

next day, and, with the aid of a few old boxes from the grocery, which

he quickly extemporized into tables and chairs, and the purchase of some

necessary cooking utensils, soon made himself at home. The rest of the

camp, now thoroughly aroused, made a point of leaving their work in

the ditches, whenever they could, to stroll carelessly around Bulger's

tenement in the vague hope of satisfying a curiosity that had become

tormenting. But they could not find that he was doing anything of a

suspicious character--except, perhaps, from the fact that it was

not OUTWARDLY suspicious, which I grieve to say did not lull them to

security. He seemed to be either fixing up his cabin or smoking in his

doorway. On the second day he checked this itinerant curiosity by taking

the initiative himself, and quietly walking from claim to claim and from

cabin to cabin with a pacific but by no means a satisfying interest. The

shadow of his tall figure carrying his inseparable gun, which had not

yet apparently “stood in the corner,” falling upon an excavated bank

beside the delving miners, gave them a sense of uneasiness they could

not explain; a few characteristic yells of boisterous hilarity from

their noontide gathering under a cottonwood somehow ceased when Mr.

Bulger was seen gravely approaching, and his casual stopping before

a poker party in the gulch actually caused one of the most reckless

gamblers to weakly recede from “a bluff” and allow his adversary to

sweep the board. After this it was felt that matters were becoming

serious. There was no subsequent patrolling of the camp before the

stranger's cabin. Their curiosity was singularly abated. A general

feeling of repulsion, kept within bounds partly by the absence of any

overt act from Bulger, and partly by an inconsistent over-consciousness

of his shotgun, took its place. But an unexpected occurrence revived it.

One evening, as the usual social circle were drawn around Mosby's stove,

the lazy silence was broken by the familiar sounds of pistol shots and a

series of more familiar shrieks and yells from the rocky hill road. The

circle quickly recognized the voices of their old friends the roisterers

and gamblers from Sawyer's Dam; they as quickly recognized the returning

shouts here and there from a few companions who were welcoming them. I

grieve to say that in spite of their previous attitude of reformation a

smile of gratified expectancy lit up the faces of the younger members,

and even the older ones glanced dubiously at Briggs. Mosby made no

attempt to conceal a sigh of relief as he carefully laid out an extra

supply of glasses in his bar. Suddenly the oncoming yells ceased, the

wild gallop of hoofs slackened into a trot, and finally halted, and even

the responsive shouts of the camp stopped also. We all looked vacantly

at each other; Mosby leaped over his counter and went to the door;

Briggs followed with the rest of us. The night was dark, and it was a

few minutes before we could distinguish a straggling, vague, but silent

procession moving through the moist, heavy air on the hill. But, to our

surprise, it was moving away from us--absolutely LEAVING the camp! We

were still staring in expectancy when out of the darkness slowly emerged

a figure which we recognized at once as Captain Jim, one of the most

reckless members of our camp. Pushing us back into the grocery he

entered without a word, closed the door behind him, and threw himself

vacantly into a chair. We at once pressed around him. He looked up at us

dazedly, drew a long breath, and said slowly:

“It's no use, gentlemen! Suthin's GOT to be done with that Bulger; and

mighty quick.”

“What's the matter?” we asked eagerly.

“Matter!” he repeated, passing his hand across his forehead. “Matter!

Look yere! Ye all of you heard them boys from Sawyer's Dam coming over

the hill? Ye heard their music--mebbe ye heard US join in the chorus?

Well, on they came waltzing down the hill, like old times, and we

waitin' for 'em. Then, jest as they passed the old cabin, who do you

think they ran right into--shooting iron, long hair and mustache, and

all that--standing there plump in the road? why, Bulger!”

“Well?”

“Well!--Whatever it was--don't ask ME--but, dern my skin, ef after a

word or two from HIM--them boys just stopped yellin', turned round like

lambs, and rode away, peaceful-like, along with him. We ran after them

a spell, still yellin', when that thar Bulger faced around, said to us

that he'd 'come down here for quiet,' and ef he couldn't hev it he'd

have to leave with those gentlemen WHO WANTED IT too! And I'm gosh

darned ef those GENTLEMEN--you know 'em all--Patsey Carpenter, Snapshot

Harry, and the others--ever said a darned word, but kinder nodded 'So

long' and went away!”

Our astonishment and mystification were complete; and I regret to say,

the indignation of Captain Jim and Mosby equally so. “If we're going to

be bossed by the first newcomer,” said the former, gloomily, “I reckon

we might as well take our chances with the Sawyer's Dam boys, whom we

know.”

“Ef we are going to hev the legitimate trade of Rattlesnake interfered

with by the cranks of some hidin' horse thief or retired road agent,”

said Mosby, “we might as well invite the hull of Joaquin Murietta's

gang here at once! But I suppose this is part o' Bulger's particular

'business,'” he added, with a withering glance at Briggs.

“I understand it all,” said Briggs, quietly. “You know I told you

that bullies couldn't live in the same camp together. That's human

nature--and that's how plain men like you and me manage to scud along

without getting plugged. You see, Bulger wasn't going to hev any of his

own kind jumpin' his claim here. And I reckon he was pow'ful enough to

back down Sawyer's Dam. Anyhow, the bluff told--and here we are in peace

and quietness.”

“Until he lets us know what is his little game,” sneered Mosby.

Nevertheless, such is the force of mysterious power that although it was

exercised against what we firmly believed was the independence of the

camp, it extorted a certain respect from us. A few thought it was not a

bad thing to have a professional bully, and even took care to relate the

discomfiture of the wicked youth of Sawyer's Dam for the benefit of

a certain adjacent and powerful camp who had looked down upon us.

He himself, returning the same evening from his self-imposed escort,

vouchsafed no other reason than the one he had already given.

Preposterous as it seemed, we were obliged to accept it, and the still

more preposterous inference that he had sought Rattlesnake Camp solely

for the purpose of acquiring and securing its peace and quietness.

Certainly he had no other occupation; the little work he did upon the

tailings of the abandoned claim which went with his little cabin was

scarcely a pretense. He rode over on certain days to Bigwood on account

of his business, but no one had ever seen him there, nor could the

description of his manner and appearance evoke any information from the

Bigwoodians. It remained a mystery.

It had also been feared that the advent of Bulger would intensify that

fear and dislike of riotous Rattlesnake which the two families

had shown, and which was the origin of Briggs's futile attempt at

reformation. But it was discovered that since his arrival the young

girls had shown less timidity in entering the camp, and had even

exchanged some polite conversation and good-humoured badinage with its

younger and more impressible members. Perhaps this tended to make these

youths more observant, for a few days later, when the vexed question

of Bulger's business was again under discussion, one of them remarked,

gloomily:

“I reckon there ain't no doubt WHAT he's here for!”

The youthful prophet was instantly sat upon after the fashion of

all elderly critics since Job's. Nevertheless, after a pause he was

permitted to explain.

“Only this morning, when Lance Forester and me were chirping with them

gals out on the hill, who should we see hanging around in the bush but

that cussed Bulger! We allowed at first that it might be only a new

style of his interferin', so we took no notice, except to pass a few

remarks about listeners and that sort o' thing, and perhaps to bedevil

the girls a little more than we'd hev done if we'd been alone. Well,

they laughed, and we laughed--and that was the end of it. But this

afternoon, as Lance and me were meandering down by their cabin, we

sorter turned into the woods to wait till they'd come out. Then all of

a suddent Lance stopped as rigid as a pointer that's flushed somethin',

and says, 'B'gosh!' And thar, under a big redwood, sat that slimy

hypocrite Bulger, twisting his long mustaches and smiling like clockwork

alongside o' little Meely Baker--you know her, the pootiest of the

two sisters--and she smilin' back on him. Think of it! that unknown,

unwashed, longhaired tramp and bully, who must be forty if a day, and

that innocent gal of sixteen. It was simply disgustin'!”

I need not say that the older cynics and critics already alluded to at

once improved the occasion. 'What more could be expected? Women,

the world over, were noted for this sort of thing! This long-haired,

swaggering bully, with his air of mystery, had captivated them, as he

always had done since the days of Homer. Simple merit, which sat lowly

in barrooms, and conceived projects for the public good around the

humble, unostentatious stove, was nowhere! Youth could not too soon

learn this bitter lesson. And in this case youth too, perhaps, was

right in its conjectures, for this WAS, no doubt, the little game of the

perfidious Bulger. We recalled the fact that his unhallowed appearance

in camp was almost coincident with the arrival of the two families.

We glanced at Briggs; to our amazement, for the first time he looked

seriously concerned. But Mosby in the meantime leaned his elbows lazily

over the counter and, in a slow voice, added fuel to the flame.

“I wouldn't hev spoken of it before,” he said, with a sidelong glance

at Briggs, “for it might be all in the line o' Bulger's 'business,'

but suthin' happened the other night that, for a minit, got me! I was

passin' the Bakers' shanty, and I heard one of them gals a singing a

camp-meeting hymn. I don't calkilate to run agin you young fellers in

any sparkin' or canoodlin' that's goin' on, but her voice sounded so

pow'ful soothin' and pretty thet I jest stood there and listened. Then

the old woman--old Mother Baker--SHE joined in, and I listened too. And

then--dern my skin!--but a man's voice joined in--jest belching outer

that cabin!--and I sorter lifted myself up and kem away.

“That voice, gentlemen,” said Mosby, lingering artistically as he took

up a glass and professionally eyed it before wiping it with his towel,

“that voice, cumf'bly fixed thar in thet cabin among them wimen folks,

was Bulger's!”

Briggs got up, with his eyes looking the darker for his flushed face.

“Gentlemen,” he said huskily, “thar's only one thing to be done. A lot

of us have got to ride over to Sawyer's Dam tomorrow morning and pick up

as many square men as we can muster; there's a big camp meeting goin'

on there, and there won't be no difficulty in that. When we've got a big

enough crowd to show we mean business, we must march back here and ride

Bulger out of this camp! I don't hanker arter Vigilance Committees, as

a rule--it's a rough remedy--it's like drinkin' a quart o' whisky agin

rattlesnake poison but it's got to be done! We don't mind being sold

ourselves but when it comes to our standin' by and seein' the only

innocent people in Rattlesnake given away--we kick! Bulger's got to be

fired outer this camp! And he will be!”

But he was not.

For when, the next morning, a determined and thoughtful procession of

the best and most characteristic citizens of Rattlesnake Camp filed into

Sawyer's Dam, they found that their mysterious friends had disappeared,

although they met with a fraternal but subdued welcome from the general

camp. But any approach to the subject of their visit, however,

was received with a chilling dissapproval. Did they not know that

lawlessness of any kind, even under the rude mantle of frontier justice,

was to be deprecated and scouted when a “means of salvation, a power of

regeneration,” such as was now sweeping over Sawyer's Dam, was at hand?

Could they not induce this man who was to be violently deported to

accompany them willingly to Sawyer's Dam and subject himself to the

powerful influence of the “revival” then in full swing?

The Rattlesnake boys laughed bitterly, and described the man of whom

they talked so lightly; but in vain. “It's no use, gentlemen,” said

a more worldly bystander, in a lower voice, “the camp meetin's got a

strong grip here, and betwixt you and me there ain't no wonder. For the

man that runs it--the big preacher--has got new ways and methods that

fetches the boys every time. He don't preach no cut-and-dried gospel; he

don't carry around no slop-shop robes and clap 'em on you whether they

fit or not; but he samples and measures the camp afore he wades into

it. He scouts and examines; he ain't no mere Sunday preacher with a

comfortable house and once-a-week church, but he gives up his days and

nights to it, and makes his family work with him, and even sends 'em

forward to explore the field. And he ain't no white-choker shadbelly

either, but fits himself, like his gospel, to the men he works among. Ye

ought to hear him afore you go. His tent is just out your way. I'll go

with you.”

Too dejected to offer any opposition, and perhaps a little curious to

see this man who had unwittingly frustrated their design of lynching

Bulger, they halted at the outer fringe of worshipers who packed the

huge inclosure. They had not time to indulge their cynicisms over this

swaying mass of emotional, half-thinking, and almost irresponsible

beings, nor to detect any similarity between THEIR extreme methods and

the scheme of redemption they themselves were seeking, for in a

few moments, apparently lifted to his feet on a wave of religious

exultation, the famous preacher arose. The men of Rattlesnake gasped for

breath.

It was Bulger!

But Briggs quickly recovered himself. “By what name,” said he, turning

passionately towards his guide, “does this man--this impostor--call

himself here?”

“Baker.”

“Baker?” echoed the Rattlesnake contingent.

“Baker?” repeated Lance Forester, with a ghastly smile.

“Yes,” returned their guide. “You oughter know it too! For he sent his

wife and daughters over, after his usual style, to sample your camp, a

week ago! Come, now, what are you givin' us?”

IN THE TULES

He had never seen a steamboat in his life. Born and reared in one of the

Western Territories, far from a navigable river, he had only known the

“dugout” or canoe as a means of conveyance across the scant streams

whose fordable waters made even those scarcely a necessity. The long,

narrow, hooded wagon, drawn by swaying oxen, known familiarly as

a “prairie schooner,” in which he journeyed across the plains to

California in '53, did not help his conception by that nautical figure.

And when at last he dropped upon the land of promise through one of the

Southern mountain passes he halted all unconsciously upon the low banks

of a great yellow river amidst a tangled brake of strange, reed-like

grasses that were unknown to him. The river, broadening as it debouched

through many channels into a lordly bay, seemed to him the ULTIMA THULE

of his journeyings. Unyoking his oxen on the edge of the luxuriant

meadows which blended with scarcely any line of demarcation into the

great stream itself, he found the prospect “good” according to his

lights and prairial experiences, and, converting his halted wagon into a

temporary cabin, he resolved to rest here and “settle.”

There was little difficulty in so doing. The cultivated clearings he had

passed were few and far between; the land would be his by discovery

and occupation; his habits of loneliness and self-reliance made him

independent of neighbors. He took his first meal in his new solitude

under a spreading willow, but so near his natural boundary that the

waters gurgled and oozed in the reeds but a few feet from him. The

sun sank, deepening the gold of the river until it might have been the

stream of Pactolus itself. But Martin Morse had no imagination; he was

not even a gold-seeker; he had simply obeyed the roving instincts of the

frontiersman in coming hither. The land was virgin and unoccupied; it

was his; he was alone. These questions settled, he smoked his pipe with

less concern over his three thousand miles' transference of habitation

than the man of cities who had moved into a next street. When the

sun sank, he rolled himself in his blankets in the wagon bed and went

quietly to sleep.

But he was presently awakened by something which at first he could

not determine to be a noise or an intangible sensation. It was a deep

throbbing through the silence of the night--a pulsation that seemed even

to be communicated to the rude bed whereon he lay. As it came nearer

it separated itself into a labored, monotonous panting, continuous, but

distinct from an equally monotonous but fainter beating of the waters,

as if the whole track of the river were being coursed and trodden by a

multitude of swiftly trampling feet. A strange feeling took possession

of him--half of fear, half of curious expectation. It was coming nearer.

He rose, leaped hurriedly from the wagon, and ran to the bank. The night

was dark; at first he saw nothing before him but the steel-black sky

pierced with far-spaced, irregularly scattered stars. Then there seemed

to be approaching him, from the left, another and more symmetrical

constellation--a few red and blue stars high above the river, with

three compact lines of larger planetary lights flashing towards him and

apparently on his own level. It was almost upon him; he involuntarily

drew back as the strange phenomenon swept abreast of where he stood, and

resolved itself into a dark yet airy bulk, whose vagueness, topped by

enormous towers, was yet illuminated by those open squares of light

that he had taken for stars, but which he saw now were brilliantly lit

windows.

Their vivid rays shot through the reeds and sent broad bands across the

meadow, the stationary wagon, and the slumbering oxen. But all this was

nothing to the inner life they disclosed through lifted curtains and

open blinds, which was the crowning revelation of this strange and

wonderful spectacle. Elegantly dressed men and women moved through

brilliantly lit and elaborately gilt saloons; in one a banquet seemed

to be spread, served by white-jacketed servants; in another were men

playing cards around marble-topped tables; in another the light flashed

back again from the mirrors and glistening glasses and decanters of

a gorgeous refreshment saloon; in smaller openings there was the shy

disclosure of dainty white curtains and velvet lounges of more intimate

apartments.

Martin Morse stood enthralled and mystified. It was as if some invisible

Asmodeus had revealed to this simple frontiersman a world of which he

had never dreamed. It was THE world--a world of which he knew nothing

in his simple, rustic habits and profound Western isolation--sweeping by

him with the rush of an unknown planet. In another moment it was gone; a

shower of sparks shot up from one of the towers and fell all around him,

and then vanished, even as he remembered the set piece of “Fourth of

July” fireworks had vanished in his own rural town when he was a boy.

The darkness fell with it too. But such was his utter absorption and

breathless preoccupation that only a cold chill recalled him to himself,

and he found he was standing mid-leg deep in the surge cast over the low

banks by this passage of the first steamboat he had ever seen!

He waited for it the next night, when it appeared a little later from

the opposite direction on its return trip. He watched it the next night

and the next. Hereafter he never missed it, coming or going--whatever

the hard and weary preoccupations of his new and lonely life. He felt he

could not have slept without seeing it go by. Oddly enough, his interest

and desire did not go further. Even had he the time and money to spend

in a passage on the boat, and thus actively realize the great world of

which he had only these rare glimpses, a certain proud, rustic shyness

kept him from it. It was not HIS world; he could not affront the snubs

that his ignorance and inexperience would have provoked, and he was

dimly conscious, as so many of us are in our ignorance, that in mingling

with it he would simply lose the easy privileges of alien criticism. For

there was much that he did not understand, and some things that grated

upon his lonely independence.

One night, a lighter one than those previous, he lingered a little

longer in the moonlight to watch the phosphorescent wake of the

retreating boat. Suddenly it struck him that there was a certain

irregular splashing in the water, quite different from the regular,

diagonally crossing surges that the boat swept upon the bank. Looking

at it more intently, he saw a black object turning in the water like

a porpoise, and then the unmistakable uplifting of a black arm in an

unskillful swimmer's overhand stroke. It was a struggling man. But it

was quickly evident that the current was too strong and the turbulence

of the shallow water too great for his efforts. Without a moment's

hesitation, clad as he was in only his shirt and trousers, Morse

strode into the reeds, and the next moment, with a call of warning, was

swimming toward the now wildly struggling figure. But, from some unknown

reason, as Morse approached him nearer the man uttered some incoherent

protest and desperately turned away, throwing off Morse's extended arm.

Attributing this only to the vague convulsions of a drowning man, Morse,

a skilled swimmer, managed to clutch his shoulder, and propelled him at

arm's length, still struggling, apparently with as much reluctance as

incapacity, toward the bank. As their feet touched the reeds and slimy

bottom the man's resistance ceased, and he lapsed quite listlessly in

Morse's arms. Half lifting, half dragging his burden, he succeeded at

last in gaining the strip of meadow, and deposited the unconscious man

beneath the willow tree. Then he ran to his wagon for whisky.

But, to his surprise, on his return the man was already sitting up and

wringing the water from his clothes. He then saw for the first time,

by the clear moonlight, that the stranger was elegantly dressed and

of striking appearance, and was clearly a part of that bright and

fascinating world which Morse had been contemplating in his solitude. He

eagerly took the proffered tin cup and drank the whisky. Then he rose

to his feet, staggered a few steps forward, and glanced curiously around

him at the still motionless wagon, the few felled trees and evidence of

“clearing,” and even at the rude cabin of logs and canvas just beginning

to rise from the ground a few paces distant, and said, impatiently:

“Where the devil am I?”

Morse hesitated. He was unable to name the locality of his

dwelling-place. He answered briefly:

“On the right bank of the Sacramento.”

The stranger turned upon him a look of suspicion not unmingled with

resentment. “Oh!” he said, with ironical gravity, “and I suppose that

this water you picked me out of was the Sacramento River. Thank you!”

Morse, with slow Western patience, explained that he had only settled

there three weeks ago, and the place had no name.

“What's your nearest town, then?”

“Thar ain't any. Thar's a blacksmith's shop and grocery at the

crossroads, twenty miles further on, but it's got no name as I've heard

on.”

The stranger's look of suspicion passed. “Well,” he said, in an imperative

fashion, which, however, seemed as much the result of habit as the

occasion, “I want a horse, and mighty quick, too.”

“H'ain't got any.”

“No horse? How did you get to this place?”

Morse pointed to the slumbering oxen.

The stranger again stared curiously at him. After a pause he said, with

a half-pitying, half-humorous smile: “Pike--aren't you?”

Whether Morse did or did not know that this current California slang

for a denizen of the bucolic West implied a certain contempt, he replied

simply:

“I'm from Pike County, Mizzouri.”

“Well,” said the stranger, resuming his impatient manner, “you must beg

or steal a horse from your neighbors.”

“Thar ain't any neighbor nearer than fifteen miles.”

“Then send fifteen miles! Stop.” He opened his still clinging shirt

and drew out a belt pouch, which he threw to Morse. “There! there's two

hundred and fifty dollars in that. Now, I want a horse. Sabe?”

“Thar ain't anyone to send,” said Morse, quietly.

“Do you mean to say you are all alone here?”

“Yes.

“And you fished me out--all by yourself?”

“Yes.”

The stranger again examined him curiously. Then he suddenly stretched

out his hand and grasped his companion's.

“All right; if you can't send, I reckon I can manage to walk over there

tomorrow.”

“I was goin' on to say,” said Morse, simply, “that if you'll lie by

tonight, I'll start over sunup, after puttin' out the cattle, and fetch

you back a horse afore noon.”

“That's enough.” He, however, remained looking curiously at Morse. “Did

you never hear,” he said, with a singular smile, “that it was about the

meanest kind of luck that could happen to you to save a drowning man?”

“No,” said Morse, simply. “I reckon it orter be the meanest if you

DIDN'T.”

“That depends upon the man you save,” said the stranger, with the same

ambiguous smile, “and whether the SAVING him is only putting things off.

Look here,” he added, with an abrupt return to his imperative style,

“can't you give me some dry clothes?”

Morse brought him a pair of overalls and a “hickory shirt,” well worn,

but smelling strongly of a recent wash with coarse soap. The stranger

put them on while his companion busied himself in collecting a pile of

sticks and dry leaves.

“What's that for?” said the stranger, suddenly.

“A fire to dry your clothes.”

The stranger calmly kicked the pile aside.

“Not any fire tonight if I know it,” he said, brusquely. Before Morse

could resent his quickly changing moods he continued, in another tone,

dropping to an easy reclining position beneath the tree, “Now, tell me

all about yourself, and what you are doing here.”

Thus commanded, Morse patiently repeated his story from the time he

had left his backwoods cabin to his selection of the river bank for a

“location.” He pointed out the rich quality of this alluvial bottom

and its adaptability for the raising of stock, which he hoped soon

to acquire. The stranger smiled grimly, raised himself to a sitting

position, and, taking a penknife from his damp clothes, began to clean

his nails in the bright moonlight--an occupation which made the simple

Morse wander vaguely in his narration.

“And you don't know that this hole will give you chills and fever till

you'll shake yourself out of your boots?”

Morse had lived before in aguish districts, and had no fear.

“And you never heard that some night the whole river will rise up and

walk over you and your cabin and your stock?”

“No. For I reckon to move my shanty farther back.”

The man shut up his penknife with a click and rose.

“If you've got to get up at sunrise, we'd better be turning in. I

suppose you can give me a pair of blankets?”

Morse pointed to the wagon. “Thar's a shakedown in the wagon bed; you

kin lie there.” Nevertheless he hesitated, and, with the inconsequence

and abruptness of a shy man, continued the previous conversation.

“I shouldn't like to move far away, for them steamboats is pow'ful

kempany o' nights. I never seed one afore I kem here,” and then, with

the inconsistency of a reserved man, and without a word of further

preliminary, he launched into a confidential disclosure of his late

experiences. The stranger listened with a singular interest and a

quietly searching eye.

“Then you were watching the boat very closely just now when you saw me.

What else did you see? Anything before that--before you saw me in the

water?”

“No--the boat had got well off before I saw you at all.”

“Ah,” said the stranger. “Well, I'm going to turn in.” He walked to the

wagon, mounted it, and by the time that Morse had reached it with his

wet clothes he was already wrapped in the blankets. A moment later he

seemed to be in a profound slumber.

It was only then, when his guest was lying helplessly at his mercy, that

he began to realize his strange experiences. The domination of this

man had been so complete that Morse, although by nature independent

and self-reliant, had not permitted himself to question his right or

to resent his rudeness. He had accepted his guest's careless or

premeditated silence regarding the particulars of his accident as a

matter of course, and had never dreamed of questioning him. That it was

a natural accident of that great world so apart from his own experiences

he did not doubt, and thought no more about it. The advent of the man

himself was greater to him than the causes which brought him there. He

was as yet quite unconscious of the complete fascination this mysterious

stranger held over him, but he found himself shyly pleased with even the

slight interest he had displayed in his affairs, and his hand felt yet

warm and tingling from his sudden soft but expressive grasp, as if it

had been a woman's. There is a simple intuition of friendship in some

lonely, self-abstracted natures that is nearly akin to love at first

sight. Even the audacities and insolence of this stranger affected

Morse as he might have been touched and captivated by the coquetries

or imperiousness of some bucolic virgin. And this reserved and shy

frontiersman found himself that night sleepless, and hovering with an

abashed timidity and consciousness around the wagon that sheltered his

guest, as if he had been a very Corydon watching the moonlit couch of

some slumbering Amaryllis.

He was off by daylight--after having placed a rude breakfast by the side

of the still sleeping guest--and before midday he had returned with a

horse. When he handed the stranger his pouch, less the amount he had

paid for the horse, the man said curtly:

“What's that for?”

“Your change. I paid only fifty dollars for the horse.”

The stranger regarded him with his peculiar smile. Then, replacing the

pouch in his belt, he shook Morse's hand again and mounted the horse.

“So your name's Martin Morse! Well--goodby, Morsey!”

Morse hesitated. A blush rose to his dark check. “You didn't tell me

your name,” he said. “In case--”

“In case I'm WANTED? Well, you can call me Captain Jack.” He smiled,

and, nodding his head, put spurs to his mustang and cantered away.

Morse did not do much work that day, falling into abstracted moods and

living over his experiences of the previous night, until he fancied he

could almost see his strange guest again. The narrow strip of meadow was

haunted by him. There was the tree under which he had first placed

him, and that was where he had seen him sitting up in his dripping but

well-fitting clothes. In the rough garments he had worn and returned

lingered a new scent of some delicate soap, overpowering the strong

alkali flavor of his own. He was early by the river side, having a vague

hope, he knew not why, that he should again see him and recognize him

among the passengers. He was wading out among the reeds, in the faint

light of the rising moon, recalling the exact spot where he had first

seen the stranger, when he was suddenly startled by the rolling over in

the water of some black object that had caught against the bank, but

had been dislodged by his movements. To his horror it bore a faint

resemblance to his first vision of the preceding night. But a second

glance at the helplessly floating hair and bloated outline showed him

that it was a DEAD man, and of a type and build far different from his

former companion. There was a bruise upon his matted forehead and an

enormous wound in his throat already washed bloodless, white, and waxen.

An inexplicable fear came upon him, not at the sight of the corpse, for

he had been in Indian massacres and had rescued bodies mutilated beyond

recognition; but from some moral dread that, strangely enough, quickened

and deepened with the far-off pant of the advancing steamboat. Scarcely

knowing why, he dragged the body hurriedly ashore, concealing it in the

reeds, as if he were disposing of the evidence of his own crime. Then,

to his preposterous terror, he noticed that the panting of the steamboat

and the beat of its paddles were “slowing” as the vague bulk came in

sight, until a huge wave from the suddenly arrested wheels sent a

surge like an enormous heartbeat pulsating through the sedge that half

submerged him. The flashing of three or four lanterns on deck and the

motionless line of lights abreast of him dazzled his eyes, but he knew

that the low fringe of willows hid his house and wagon completely from

view. A vague murmur of voices from the deck was suddenly overridden by

a sharp order, and to his relief the slowly revolving wheels again sent

a pulsation through the water, and the great fabric moved solemnly away.

A sense of relief came over him, he knew not why, and he was conscious

that for the first time he had not cared to look at the boat.

When the moon arose he again examined the body, and took from its

clothing a few articles of identification and some papers of formality

and precision, which he vaguely conjectured to be some law papers from

their resemblance to the phrasing of sheriffs' and electors' notices

which he had seen in the papers. He then buried the corpse in a shallow

trench, which he dug by the light of the moon. He had no question of

responsibility; his pioneer training had not included coroners' inquests

in its experience; in giving the body a speedy and secure burial

from predatory animals he did what one frontiersman would do for

another--what he hoped might be done for him. If his previous

unaccountable feelings returned occasionally, it was not from that;

but rather from some uneasiness in regard to his late guest's possible

feelings, and a regret that he had not been here at the finding of the

body. That it would in some way have explained his own accident he did

not doubt.

The boat did not “slow up” the next night, but passed as usual; yet

three or four days elapsed before he could look forward to its coming

with his old extravagant and half-exalted curiosity--which was his

nearest approach to imagination. He was then able to examine it more

closely, for the appearance of the stranger whom he now began to call

“his friend” in his verbal communings with himself--but whom he did not

seem destined to again discover; until one day, to his astonishment, a

couple of fine horses were brought to his clearing by a stock-drover.

They had been “ordered” to be left there. In vain Morse expostulated and

questioned.

“Your name's Martin Morse, ain't it?” said the drover, with business

brusqueness; “and I reckon there ain't no other man o' that name around

here?”

“No,” said Morse.

“Well, then, they're YOURS.”

“But who sent them?” insisted Morse. “What was his name, and where does

he live?”

“I didn't know ez I was called upon to give the pedigree o' buyers,”

said the drover dryly; “but the horses is 'Morgan,' you can bet your

life.” He grinned as he rode away.

That Captain Jack sent them, and that it was a natural prelude to his

again visiting him, Morse did not doubt, and for a few days he lived

in that dream. But Captain Jack did not come. The animals were of great

service to him in “rounding up” the stock he now easily took in for

pasturage, and saved him the necessity of having a partner or a hired

man. The idea that this superior gentleman in fine clothes might ever

appear to him in the former capacity had even flitted through his brain,

but he had rejected it with a sigh. But the thought that, with luck and

industry, he himself might, in course of time, approximate to Captain

Jack's evident station, DID occur to him, and was an incentive to

energy. Yet it was quite distinct from the ordinary working man's

ambition of wealth and state. It was only that it might make him more

worthy of his friend. The great world was still as it had appeared

to him in the passing boat--a thing to wonder at--to be above--and to

criticize.

For all that, he prospered in his occupation. But one day he woke with

listless limbs and feet that scarcely carried him through his daily

labors. At night his listlessness changed to active pain and a

feverishness that seemed to impel him toward the fateful river, as if

his one aim in life was to drink up its waters and bathe in its yellow

stream. But whenever he seemed to attempt it, strange dreams assailed

him of dead bodies arising with swollen and distorted lips to touch his

own as he strove to drink, or of his mysterious guest battling with him

in its current, and driving him ashore. Again, when he essayed to bathe

his parched and crackling limbs in its flood, he would be confronted

with the dazzling lights of the motionless steamboat and the glare of

stony eyes--until he fled in aimless terror. How long this lasted he

knew not, until one morning he awoke in his new cabin with a strange man

sitting by his bed and a Negress in the doorway.

“You've had a sharp attack of 'tule fever,'” said the stranger, dropping

Morse's listless wrist and answering his questioning eyes, “but you're

all right now, and will pull through.”

“Who are you?” stammered Morse feebly.

“Dr. Duchesne, of Sacramento.”

“How did you come here?”

“I was ordered to come to you and bring a nurse, as you were alone.

There she is.” He pointed to the smiling Negress.

“WHO ordered you?”

The doctor smiled with professional tolerance. “One of your friends, of

course.”

“But what was his name?”

“Really, I don't remember. But don't distress yourself. He has settled

for everything right royally. You have only to get strong now. My duty

is ended, and I can safely leave you with the nurse. Only when you are

strong again, I say--and HE says--keep back farther from the river.”

And that was all he knew. For even the nurse who attended him through

the first days of his brief convalescence would tell him nothing more.

He quickly got rid of her and resumed his work, for a new and strange

phase of his simple, childish affection for his benefactor, partly

superinduced by his illness, was affecting him. He was beginning to

feel the pain of an unequal friendship; he was dimly conscious that his

mysterious guest was only coldly returning his hospitality and benefits,

while holding aloof from any association with him--and indicating the

immeasurable distance that separated their future intercourse. He had

withheld any kind message or sympathetic greeting; he had kept back even

his NAME. The shy, proud, ignorant heart of the frontiersman swelled

beneath the fancied slight, which left him helpless alike of reproach

or resentment. He could not return the horses, although in a fit of

childish indignation he had resolved not to use them; he could not

reimburse him for the doctor's bill, although he had sent away the

nurse.

He took a foolish satisfaction in not moving back from the river, with a

faint hope that his ignoring of Captain Jack's advice might mysteriously

be conveyed to him. He even thought of selling out his location and

abandoning it, that he might escape the cold surveillance of his

heartless friend. All this was undoubtedly childish--but there is an

irrepressible simplicity of youth in all deep feeling, and the worldly

inexperience of the frontiersman left him as innocent as a child. In

this phase of his unrequited affection he even went so far as to seek

some news of Captain Jack at Sacramento, and, following out his foolish

quest, even to take the steamboat from thence to Stockton.

What happened to him then was perhaps the common experience of such

natures. Once upon the boat the illusion of the great world it contained

for him utterly vanished. He found it noisy, formal, insincere, and--had

he ever understood or used the word in his limited vocabulary--VULGAR.

Rather, perhaps, it seemed to him that the prevailing sentiment and

action of those who frequented it--and for whom it was built--were of a

lower grade than his own. And, strangely enough, this gave him none of

his former sense of critical superiority, but only of his own utter and

complete isolation. He wandered in his rough frontiersman's clothes from

deck to cabin, from airy galleries to long saloons, alone, unchallenged,

unrecognized, as if he were again haunting it only in spirit, as he had

so often done in his dreams.

His presence on the fringe of some voluble crowd caused no interruption;

to him their speech was almost foreign in its allusions to things he did

not understand, or, worse, seemed inconsistent with their eagerness and

excitement. How different from all this were his old recollections of

slowly oncoming teams, uplifted above the level horizon of the plains in

his former wanderings; the few sauntering figures that met him as man

to man, and exchanged the chronicle of the road; the record of Indian

tracks; the finding of a spring; the discovery of pasturage, with

the lazy, restful hospitality of the night! And how fierce here this

continual struggle for dominance and existence, even in this lull of

passage. For above all and through all he was conscious of the feverish

haste of speed and exertion.

The boat trembled, vibrated, and shook with every stroke of the

ponderous piston. The laughter of the crowd, the exchange of gossip and

news, the banquet at the long table, the newspapers and books in the

reading-room, even the luxurious couches in the staterooms, were all

dominated, thrilled, and pulsating with the perpetual throb of the demon

of hurry and unrest. And when at last a horrible fascination dragged him

into the engine room, and he saw the cruel relentless machinery at work,

he seemed to recognize and understand some intelligent but pitiless

Moloch, who was dragging this feverish world at its heels.

Later he was seated in a corner of the hurricane deck, whence he could

view the monotonous banks of the river; yet, perhaps by certain signs

unobservable to others, he knew he was approaching his own locality.

He knew that his cabin and clearing would be undiscernible behind the

fringe of willows on the bank, but he already distinguished the points

where a few cottonwoods struggled into a promontory of lighter foliage

beyond them. Here voices fell upon his ear, and he was suddenly aware

that two men had lazily crossed over from the other side of the boat,

and were standing before him looking upon the bank.

“It was about here, I reckon,” said one, listlessly, as if continuing a

previous lagging conversation, “that it must have happened. For it was

after we were making for the bend we've just passed that the deputy,

goin' to the stateroom below us, found the door locked and the window

open. But both men--Jack Despard and Seth Hall, the sheriff--weren't

to be found. Not a trace of 'em. The boat was searched, but all for

nothing. The idea is that the sheriff, arter getting his prisoner

comf'ble in the stateroom, took off Jack's handcuffs and locked the

door; that Jack, who was mighty desp'rate, bolted through the window

into the river, and the sheriff, who was no slouch, arter him.

Others allow--for the chairs and things was all tossed about in the

stateroom--that the two men clinched THAR, and Jack choked Hall and

chucked him out, and then slipped cl'ar into the water himself, for the

stateroom window was just ahead of the paddle box, and the cap'n allows

that no man or men could fall afore the paddles and live. Anyhow, that

was all they ever knew of it.”

“And there wasn't no trace of them found?” said the second man, after a

long pause.

“No. Cap'n says them paddles would hev' just snatched 'em and slung 'em

round and round and buried 'em way down in the ooze of the river bed,

with all the silt of the current atop of 'em, and they mightn't come up

for ages; or else the wheels might have waltzed 'em way up to Sacramento

until there wasn't enough left of 'em to float, and dropped 'em when the

boat stopped.”

“It was a mighty fool risk for a man like Despard to take,” resumed the

second speaker as he turned away with a slight yawn.

“Bet your life! but he was desp'rate, and the sheriff had got him sure!

And they DO say that he was superstitious, like all them gamblers, and

allowed that a man who was fixed to die by a rope or a pistol wasn't to

be washed out of life by water.”

The two figures drifted lazily away, but Morse sat rigid and motionless.

Yet, strange to say, only one idea came to him clearly out of this awful

revelation--the thought that his friend was still true to him--and that

his strange absence and mysterious silence were fully accounted for and

explained. And with it came the more thrilling fancy that this man was

alive now to HIM alone.

HE was the sole custodian of his secret. The morality of the question,

while it profoundly disturbed him, was rather in reference to its effect

upon the chances of Captain Jack and the power it gave his enemies than

his own conscience. He would rather that his friend should have proven

the proscribed outlaw who retained an unselfish interest in him than the

superior gentleman who was coldly wiping out his gratitude. He thought

he understood now the reason of his visitor's strange and varying

moods--even his bitter superstitious warning in regard to the probable

curse entailed upon one who should save a drowning man. Of this he

recked little; enough that he fancied that Captain Jack's concern in

his illness was heightened by that fear, and this assurance of his

protecting friendship thrilled him with pleasure.

There was no reason now why he should not at once go back to his farm,

where, at least, Captain Jack would always find him; and he did so,

returning on the same boat. He was now fully recovered from his illness,

and calmer in mind; he redoubled his labors to put himself in a position

to help the mysterious fugitive when the time should come. The remote

farm should always be a haven of refuge for him, and in this hope he

forbore to take any outside help, remaining solitary and alone, that

Captain Jack's retreat should be inviolate. And so the long, dry season

passed, the hay was gathered, the pasturing herds sent home, and the

first rains, dimpling like shot the broadening surface of the river,

were all that broke his unending solitude. In this enforced attitude of

waiting and expectancy he was exalted and strengthened by a new idea. He

was not a religious man, but, dimly remembering the exhortations of some

camp meeting of his boyhood, he conceived the idea that he might have

been selected to work out the regeneration of Captain Jack. What might

not come of this meeting and communing together in this lonely spot?

That anything was due to the memory of the murdered sheriff, whose bones

were rotting in the trench that he daily but unconcernedly passed, did

not occur to him. Perhaps his mind was not large enough for the double

consideration. Friendship and love--and, for the matter of that,

religion--are eminently one-ideaed.

But one night he awakened with a start. His hand, which was hanging out

of his bunk, was dabbling idly in water. He had barely time to spring

to his middle in what seemed to be a slowly filling tank before the door

fell out as from that inward pressure, and his whole shanty collapsed

like a pack of cards. But it fell outwards, the roof sliding from over

his head like a withdrawn canopy; and he was swept from his feet against

it, and thence out into what might have been another world! For the

rain had ceased, and the full moon revealed only one vast, illimitable

expanse of water! It was not an overflow, but the whole rushing river

magnified and repeated a thousand times, which, even as he gasped for

breath and clung to the roof, was bearing him away he knew not whither.

But it was bearing him away upon its center, for as he cast one swift

glance toward his meadows he saw they were covered by the same sweeping

torrent, dotted with his sailing hayricks and reaching to the wooded

foothills. It was the great flood of '54. In its awe-inspiring

completeness it might have seemed to him the primeval Deluge.

As his frail raft swept under a cottonwood he caught at one of the

overhanging limbs, and, working his way desperately along the bough, at

last reached a secure position in the fork of the tree. Here he was for

the moment safe. But the devastation viewed from this height was only

the more appalling. Every sign of his clearing, all evidence of his past

year's industry, had disappeared. He was now conscious for the first

time of the lowing of the few cattle he had kept as, huddled together

on a slight eminence, they one by one slipped over struggling into the

flood. The shining bodies of his dead horses rolled by him as he gazed.

The lower-lying limbs of the sycamore near him were bending with the

burden of the lighter articles from his overturned wagon and cabin which

they had caught and retained, and a rake was securely lodged in a bough.

The habitual solitude of his locality was now strangely invaded by

drifting sheds, agricultural implements, and fence rails from unknown

and remote neighbors, and he could faintly hear the far-off calling

of some unhappy farmer adrift upon a spar of his wrecked and shattered

house. When day broke he was cold and hungry.

Hours passed in hopeless monotony, with no slackening or diminution of

the waters. Even the drifts became less, and a vacant sea at last spread

before him on which nothing moved. An awful silence impressed him. In

the afternoon rain again began to fall on this gray, nebulous expanse,

until the whole world seemed made of aqueous vapor. He had but one idea

now--the coming of the evening boat, and he would reserve his strength

to swim to it. He did not know until later that it could no longer

follow the old channel of the river, and passed far beyond his sight and

hearing. With his disappointment and exposure that night came a return

of his old fever. His limbs were alternately racked with pain or

benumbed and lifeless. He could scarcely retain his position--at times

he scarcely cared to--and speculated upon ending his sufferings by a

quick plunge downward. In other moments of lucid misery he was conscious

of having wandered in his mind; of having seen the dead face of the

murdered sheriff, washed out of his shallow grave by the flood, staring

at him from the water; to this was added the hallucination of noises. He

heard voices, his own name called by a voice he knew--Captain Jack's!

Suddenly he started, but in that fatal movement lost his balance and

plunged downward. But before the water closed above his head he had had

a cruel glimpse of help near him; of a flashing light--of the black

hull of a tug not many yards away--of moving figures--the sensation of

a sudden plunge following his own, the grip of a strong hand upon his

collar, and--unconsciousness!

When he came to he was being lifted in a boat from the tug and rowed

through the deserted streets of a large city, until he was taken in

through the second-story window of a half-submerged hotel and cared

for. But all his questions yielded only the information that the

tug--a privately procured one, not belonging to the Public Relief

Association--had been dispatched for him with special directions, by a

man who acted as one of the crew, and who was the one who had plunged in

for him at the last moment. The man had left the boat at Stockton.

There was nothing more? Yes!--he had left a letter. Morse seized it

feverishly. It contained only a few lines:

We are quits now. You are all right. I have saved YOU from drowning, and

shifted the curse to my own shoulders. Good-by.

CAPTAIN JACK.

The astounded man attempted to rise--to utter an exclamation--but fell

back, unconscious.

Weeks passed before he was able to leave his bed--and then only as an

impoverished and physically shattered man. He had no means to restock

the farm left bare by the subsiding water. A kindly train-packer offered

him a situation as muleteer in a pack train going to the mountains--for

he knew tracks and passes and could ride. The mountains gave him back

a little of the vigor he had lost in the river valley, but none of its

dreams and ambitions. One day, while tracking a lost mule, he stopped

to slake his thirst in a waterhole--all that the summer had left of a

lonely mountain torrent. Enlarging the hole to give drink to his beast

also, he was obliged to dislodge and throw out with the red soil some

bits of honeycomb rock, which were so queer-looking and so heavy as to

attract his attention. Two of the largest he took back to camp with

him. They were gold! From the locality he took out a fortune. Nobody

wondered. To the Californian's superstition it was perfectly natural.

It was “nigger luck”--the luck of the stupid, the ignorant, the

inexperienced, the nonseeker--the irony of the gods!

But the simple, bucolic nature that had sustained itself against

temptation with patient industry and lonely self-concentration succumbed

to rapidly acquired wealth. So it chanced that one day, with a crowd of

excitement-loving spendthrifts and companions, he found himself on

the outskirts of a lawless mountain town. An eager, frantic crowd had

already assembled there--a desperado was to be lynched! Pushing his

way through the crowd for a nearer view of the exciting spectacle, the

changed and reckless Morse was stopped by armed men only at the foot of

a cart, which upheld a quiet, determined man, who, with a rope around

his neck, was scornfully surveying the mob, that held the other end

of the rope drawn across the limb of a tree above him. The eyes of the

doomed man caught those of Morse--his expression changed--a kindly smile

lit his face--he bowed his proud head for the first time, with an easy

gesture of farewell.

And then, with a cry, Morse threw himself upon the nearest armed guard,

and a fierce struggle began. He had overpowered one adversary and seized

another in his hopeless fight toward the cart when the half-astonished

crowd felt that something must be done. It was done with a sharp report,

the upward curl of smoke and the falling back of the guard as Morse

staggered forward FREE--with a bullet in his heart. Yet even then he did

not fall until he reached the cart, when he lapsed forward, dead, with

his arms outstretched and his head at the doomed man's feet.

There was something so supreme and all-powerful in this hopeless act

of devotion that the heart of the multitude thrilled and then recoiled

aghast at its work, and a single word or a gesture from the doomed

man himself would have set him free. But they say--and it is credibly

recorded--that as Captain Jack Despard looked down upon the hopeless

sacrifice at his feet his eyes blazed, and he flung upon the crowd a

curse so awful and sweeping that, hardened as they were, their blood ran

cold, and then leaped furiously to their cheeks.

“And now,” he said, coolly tightening the rope around his neck with a

jerk of his head--“Go on, and be damned to you! I'm ready.”

They did not hesitate this time. And Martin Morse and Captain Jack

Despard were buried in the same grave.

A CONVERT OF THE MISSION

The largest tent of the Tasajara camp meeting was crowded to its utmost

extent. The excitement of that dense mass was at its highest pitch. The

Reverend Stephen Masterton, the single erect, passionate figure of that

confused medley of kneeling worshipers, had reached the culminating

pitch of his irresistible exhortatory power. Sighs and groans were

beginning to respond to his appeals, when the reverend brother was seen

to lurch heavily forward and fall to the ground.

At first the effect was that of a part of his performance; the groans

redoubled, and twenty or thirty brethren threw themselves prostrate in

humble imitation of the preacher. But Sister Deborah Stokes, perhaps

through some special revelation of feminine intuition, grasped the

fallen man, tore loose his black silk necktie, and dragged him free

of the struggling, frantic crowd whose paroxysms he had just evoked.

Howbeit he was pale and unconscious, and unable to continue the service.

Even the next day, when he had slightly recovered, it was found that any

attempt to renew his fervid exhortations produced the same disastrous

result.

A council was hurriedly held by the elders. In spite of the energetic

protests of Sister Stokes, it was held that the Lord “was wrestlin' with

his sperrit,” and he was subjected to the same extraordinary treatment

from the whole congregation that he himself had applied to THEM. Propped

up pale and trembling in the “Mourners' Bench” by two brethren, he

was “striven with,” exhorted, prayed over, and admonished, until

insensibility mercifully succeeded convulsions. Spiritual therapeutics

having failed, he was turned over to the weak and carnal nursing of

“womenfolk.” But after a month of incapacity he was obliged to yield to

“the flesh,” and, in the local dialect, “to use a doctor.”

It so chanced that the medical practitioner of the district was a man

of large experience, of military training, and plain speech. When,

therefore, he one day found in his surgery a man of rude Western type,

strong-limbed and sunburned, but trembling, hesitating and neurotic in

movement, after listening to his symptoms gravely, he asked, abruptly:

“And how much are you drinking now?”

“I am a lifelong abstainer,” stammered his patient in quivering

indignation. But this was followed by another question so frankly

appalling to the hearer that he staggered to his feet.

“I'm Stephen Masterton--known of men as a circuit preacher, of the

Northern California district,” he thundered--“and an enemy of the flesh

in all its forms.”

“I beg your pardon,” responded Dr. Duchesne, grimly, “but as you are

suffering from excessive and repeated excitation of the nervous system,

and the depression following prolonged artificial exaltation--it makes

little difference whether the cause be spiritual, as long as there is a

certain physical effect upon your BODY--which I believe you have brought

to me to cure. Now--as to diet? you look all wrong there.

“My food is of the simplest--I have no hankering for fleshpots,”

responded the patient.

“I suppose you call saleratus bread and salt pork and flapjacks SIMPLE?”

said the doctor, coolly; “they are COMMON enough, and if you were

working with your muscles instead of your nerves in that frame of yours

they might not hurt you; but you are suffering as much from eating more

than you can digest as the veriest gourmand. You must stop all that. Go

down to a quiet watering-place for two months.” . . .

“I go to a watering-place?” interrupted Masterton; “to the haunt of the

idle, the frivolous and wanton--never!”

“Well, I'm not particular about a 'watering-place,'” said the doctor,

with a shrug, “although a little idleness and frivolity with different

food wouldn't hurt you--but you must go somewhere and change your habits

and mode of life COMPLETELY. I will find you some sleepy old Spanish

town in the southern country where you can rest and diet. If this is

distasteful to you,” he continued, grimly, “you can always call it 'a

trial.'”

Stephen Masterton may have thought it so when, a week later, he found

himself issuing from a rocky gorge into a rough, badly paved, hilly

street, which seemed to be only a continuation of the mountain road

itself. It broadened suddenly into a square or plaza, flanked on each

side by an irregular row of yellowing adobe houses, with the inevitable

verandaed tienda in each corner, and the solitary, galleried fonda, with

a half-Moorish archway leading into an inner patio or courtyard in the

center.

The whole street stopped as usual at the very door of the Mission

church, a few hundred yards farther on, and under the shadow of the two

belfry towers at each angle of the facade, as if this were the ultima

thule of every traveler. But all that the eye rested on was ruined,

worn, and crumbling. The adobe houses were cracked by the incessant

sunshine of the half-year-long summer, or the more intermittent

earthquake shock; the paved courtyard of the fonda was so uneven and

sunken in the center that the lumbering wagon and faded diligencia stood

on an incline, and the mules with difficulty kept their footing while

being unladen; the whitened plaster had fallen from the feet of the two

pillars that flanked the Mission doorway, like bandages from a gouty

limb, leaving the reddish core of adobe visible; there were apparently

as many broken tiles in the streets and alleys as there were on the

heavy red roofs that everywhere asserted themselves--and even seemed to

slide down the crumbling walls to the ground. There were hopeless gaps

in grille and grating of doorways and windows, where the iron bars had

dropped helplessly out, or were bent at different angles. The walls of

the peaceful Mission garden and the warlike presidio were alike lost in

the escalading vines or leveled by the pushing boughs of gnarled

pear and olive trees that now surmounted them. The dust lay thick and

impalpable in hollow and gutter, and rose in little vapory clouds with a

soft detonation at every stroke of his horse's hoofs. Over all this dust

and ruin, idleness seemed to reign supreme. From the velvet-jacketed

figures lounging motionless in the shadows of the open doorways--so

motionless that only the lazy drift of cigarette smoke betokened their

breathing--to the reclining peons in the shade of a catalpa, or the

squatting Indians in the arroyo--all was sloth and dirt.

The Rev. Stephen Masterton felt his throat swell with his old

exhortative indignation. A gaudy yellow fan waved languidly in front of

a black rose-crested head at a white-curtained window. He knew he was

stifling with righteous wrath, and clapped his spurs to his horse.

Nevertheless, in a few days, by the aid of a letter to the innkeeper,

he was installed in a dilapidated adobe house, not unlike those he had

seen, but situated in the outskirts and overlooking the garden and part

of the refectory of the old Mission. It had even a small garden of its

own--if a strip of hot wall, overburdened with yellow and white roses, a

dozen straggling callas, a bank of heliotrope, and an almond tree could

be called a garden. It had an open doorway, but so heavily recessed

in the thick walls that it preserved seclusion, a sitting-room, and an

alcoved bedroom with deep embrasured windows that however excluded the

unwinking sunlight and kept an even monotone of shade.

Strange to say, he found it cool, restful, and, in spite of the dust,

absolutely clean, and, but for the scent of heliotrope, entirely

inodorous. The dry air seemed to dissipate all noxious emanations and

decay--the very dust itself in its fine impalpability was volatile with

a spicelike piquancy, and left no stain.

A wrinkled Indian woman, brown and veined like a tobacco leaf,

ministered to his simple wants. But these wants had also been regulated

by Dr. Duchesne. He found himself, with some grave doubts of his

effeminacy, breakfasting on a single cup of chocolate instead of his

usual bowl of molasses-sweetened coffee; crumbling a crisp tortilla

instead of the heavy saleratus bread, greasy flapjack, or the lard-fried

steak, and, more wonderful still, completing his repast with purple

grapes from the Mission wall. He could not deny that it was simple--that

it was even refreshing and consistent with the climate and his

surroundings. On the other hand, it was the frugal diet of the commonest

peasant--and were not those peons slothful idolaters?

At the end of the week--his correspondence being also restricted by his

doctor to a few lines to himself regarding his progress--he wrote to

that adviser:

“The trembling and unquiet has almost ceased; I have less nightly

turmoil and visions; my carnal appetite seems to be amply mollified and

soothed by these viands, whatever may be their ultimate effect upon the

weakness of our common sinful nature. But I should not be truthful to

you if I did not warn you that I am viewing with the deepest spiritual

concern a decided tendency toward sloth, and a folding of the hands over

matters that often, I fear, are spiritual as well as temporal. I would

ask you to consider, in a spirit of love, if it be not wise to rouse my

apathetic flesh, so as to strive, even with the feeblest exhortations,

against this sloth in others--if only to keep one's self from falling

into the pit of easy indulgence.”

What answer he received is not known, but it is to be presumed that he

kept loyal faith with his physician, and gave himself up to simple walks

and rides and occasional meditation. His solitude was not broken in

upon; curiosity was too active a vice, and induced too much exertion for

his indolent neighbors, and the Americano's basking seclusion, though

unlike the habits of his countrymen, did not affect them. The shopkeeper

and innkeeper saluted him always with a profound courtesy which awakened

his slight resentment, partly because he was conscious that it was

grateful to him, and partly that he felt he ought to have provoked in

them a less satisfied condition.

Once, when he had unwittingly passed the confines of his own garden,

through a gap in the Mission orchard, a lissome, black-coated shadow

slipped past him with an obeisance so profound and gentle that he was

startled at first into an awkward imitation of it himself, and then into

an angry self-examination. He knew that he loathed that long-skirted,

womanlike garment, that dangling, ostentatious symbol, that air of

secrecy and mystery, and he inflated his chest above his loosely tied

cravat and unbuttoned waistcoat with a contrasted sense of freedom. But

he was conscious the next day of weakly avoiding a recurrence of this

meeting, and in his self-examination put it down to his self-disciplined

observance of his doctor's orders. But when he was strong again, and

fitted for his Master's work, how strenuously he should improve the

occasion this gave him of attacking the Scarlet Woman among her slaves

and worshipers!

His afternoon meditations and the perusal of his only book--the

Bible--were regularly broken in upon at about sunset by two or three

strokes from the cracked bell that hung in the open belfry which reared

itself beyond the gnarled pear tees. He could not say that it was

aggressive or persistent, like his own church bells, nor that it

even expressed to him any religious sentiment. Moreover, it was not a

“Sabbath” bell, but a DAILY one, and even then seemed to be only a signal

to ears easily responsive, rather than a stern reminder. And the hour

was always a singularly witching one.

It was when the sun had slipped from the glaring red roofs, and the

yellowing adobe of the Mission walls and the tall ranks of wild oats

on the hillside were all of the one color of old gold. It was when the

quivering heat of the arroyo and dusty expanse of plaza was blending

with the soft breath of the sea fog that crept through the clefts of the

coast range, until a refreshing balm seemed to fall like a benediction

on all nature. It was when the trade-wind-swept and irritated surfaces

of the rocky gorge beyond were soothed with clinging vapors; when the

pines above no longer rocked monotonously, and the great undulating sea

of the wild-oat plains had gone down and was at rest. It was at this

hour, one afternoon, that, with the released scents of the garden, there

came to him a strange and subtle perfume that was new to his senses. He

laid aside his book, went into the garden, and, half-unconscious of his

trespass, passed through the Mission orchard and thence into the little

churchyard beside the church.

Looking at the strange inscriptions in an unfamiliar tongue, he

was singularly touched with the few cheap memorials lying upon the

graves--like childish toys--and for the moment overlooked the papistic

emblems that accompanied them. It struck him vaguely that Death, the

common leveler, had made even the symbols of a faith eternal inferior to

those simple records of undying memory and affection, and he was for a

moment startled into doubt.

He walked to the door of the church; to his surprise it was open.

Standing upon the threshold, he glanced inside, and stood for a moment

utterly bewildered. In a man of refined taste and education that bizarre

and highly colored interior would have only provoked a smile or

shrug; to Stephen Masterton's highly emotional nature, but artistic

inexperience, strangely enough it was profoundly impressive. The heavily

timbered, roughly hewn roof, barred with alternate bands of blue and

Indian red, the crimson hangings, the gold and black draperies, affected

this religious backwoodsman exactly as they were designed to affect the

heathen and acolytes for whose conversion the temple had been reared. He

could scarcely take his eyes from the tinsel-crowned Mother of Heaven,

resplendent in white and gold and glittering with jewels; the radiant

shield before the Host, illuminated by tall spectral candles in the

mysterious obscurity of the altar, dazzled him like the rayed disk of

the setting sun.

A gentle murmur, as of the distant sea, came from the altar. In his

naive bewilderment he had not seen the few kneeling figures in the

shadow of column and aisle; it was not until a man, whom he recognized

as a muleteer he had seen that afternoon gambling and drinking in the

fonda, slipped by him like a shadow and sank upon his knees in the

center of the aisle that he realized the overpowering truth.

HE, Stephen Masterton, was looking upon some rite of Popish idolatry! He

was turning quickly away when the keeper of the tienda--a man of sloth

and sin--gently approached him from the shadow of a column with a mute

gesture, which he took to be one of invitation. A fierce protest of

scorn and indignation swelled to his throat, but died upon his lips. Yet

he had strength enough to erect his gaunt emaciated figure, throwing out

his long arms and extended palms in the attitude of defiant exorcism,

and then rush swiftly from the church. As he did so he thought he saw

a faint smile cross the shopkeeper's face, and a whispered exchange of

words with a neighboring worshiper of more exalted appearance came to

his ears. But it was not intelligible to his comprehension.

The next day he wrote to his doctor in that quaint grandiloquence of

written speech with which the half-educated man balances the slips of

his colloquial phrasing:

Do not let the purgation of my flesh be unduly protracted. What with the

sloth and idolatries of Baal and Ashteroth, which I see daily around

me, I feel that without a protest not only the flesh but the spirit is

mortified. But my bodily strength is mercifully returning, and I found

myself yesterday able to take a long ride at that hour which they here

keep sacred for an idolatrous rite, under the beautiful name of “The

Angelus.” Thus do they bear false witness to Him! Can you tell me the

meaning of the Spanish words “Don Keyhotter”? I am ignorant of these

sensuous Southern languages, and am aware that this is not the correct

spelling, but I have striven to give the phonetic equivalent. It was

used, I am inclined to think, in reference to MYSELF, by an idolater.

P.S.--You need not trouble yourself. I have just ascertained that

the words in question were simply the title of an idle novel, and, of

course, could not possibly refer to ME.

Howbeit it was as “Don Quixote”--that is, the common Spaniard's

conception of the Knight of La Mancha, merely the simple fanatic and

madman--that Mr. Stephen Masterton ever after rode all unconsciously

through the streets of the Mission, amid the half-pitying, half-smiling

glances of the people.

In spite of his meditations, his single volume, and his habit of

retiring early, he found his evenings were growing lonely and tedious.

He missed the prayer meeting, and, above all, the hymns. He had a fine

baritone voice, sympathetic, as may be imagined, but not cultivated. One

night, in the seclusion of his garden, and secure in his distance from

other dwellings, he raised his voice in a familiar camp-meeting hymn

with a strong Covenanter's ring in the chorus. Growing bolder as he went

on, he at last filled the quiet night with the strenuous sweep of his

chant. Surprised at his own fervor, he paused for a moment, listening,

half frightened, half ashamed of his outbreak. But there was only the

trilling of the night wind in the leaves, or the far-off yelp of a

coyote.

For a moment he thought he heard the metallic twang of a stringed

instrument in the Mission garden beyond his own, and remembered his

contiguity to the church with a stir of defiance. But he was relieved,

nevertheless. His pent-up emotion had found vent, and without the

nervous excitement that had followed his old exaltation. That night he

slept better. He had found the Lord again--with Psalmody!

The next evening he chanced upon a softer hymn of the same simplicity,

but with a vein of human tenderness in its aspirations, which his more

hopeful mood gently rendered. At the conclusion of the first verse

he was, however, distinctly conscious of being followed by the same

twanging sound he had heard on the previous night, and which even his

untutored ear could recognize as an attempt to accompany him. But before

he had finished the second verse the unknown player, after an ingenious

but ineffectual essay to grasp the right chord, abandoned it with

an impatient and almost pettish flourish, and a loud bang upon the

sounding-board of the unseen instrument. Masterton finished it alone.

With his curiosity excited, however, he tried to discover the locality

of the hidden player. The sound evidently came from the Mission garden;

but in his ignorance of the language he could not even interrogate

his Indian housekeeper. On the third night, however, his hymn was

uninterrupted by any sound from the former musician. A sense of

disappointment, he knew not why, came over him. The kindly overture of

the unseen player had been a relief to his loneliness. Yet he had barely

concluded the hymn when the familiar sound again struck his ears. But

this time the musician played boldly, confidently, and with a singular

skill on the instrument.

The brilliant prelude over, to his entire surprise and some confusion,

a soprano voice, high, childish, but infinitely quaint and fascinating,

was mischievously uplifted. But alas! even to his ears, ignorant of

the language, it was very clearly a song of levity and wantonness,

of freedom and license, of coquetry and incitement! Yet such was its

fascination that he fancied it was reclaimed by the delightful childlike

and innocent expression of the singer.

Enough that this tall, gaunt, broad-shouldered man arose and, overcome

by a curiosity almost as childlike, slipped into the garden and glided

with an Indian softness of tread toward the voice. The moon shone full

upon the ruined Mission wall tipped with clusters of dark foliage.

Half hiding, half mingling with one of them--an indistinct bulk of

light-colored huddled fleeces like an extravagant bird's nest--hung

the unknown musician. So intent was the performer's preoccupation that

Masterton actually reached the base of the wall immediately below the

figure without attracting its attention. But his foot slipped on the

crumbling debris with a snapping of dry twigs. There was a quick little

cry from above. He had barely time to recover his position before the

singer, impulsively leaning over the parapet, had lost hers, and fell

outward. But Masterton was tall, alert, and self-possessed, and threw

out his long arms. The next moment they were full of soft flounces,

a struggling figure was against his breast, and a woman's frightened

little hands around his neck. But he had broken her fall, and almost

instantly, yet with infinite gentleness, he released her unharmed, with

hardly her crisp flounces crumpled, in an upright position against

the wall. Even her guitar, still hanging from her shoulder by a yellow

ribbon, had bounded elastic and resounding against the wall, but lay

intact at her satin-slippered feet. She caught it up with another quick

little cry, but this time more of sauciness than fear, and drew her

little hand across its strings, half defiantly.

“I hope you are not hurt?” said the circuit preacher, gravely.

She broke into a laugh so silvery that he thought it no extravagance

to liken it to the moonbeams that played over her made audible. She was

lithe, yet plump; barred with black and yellow and small-waisted like

a pretty wasp. Her complexion in that light was a sheen of pearl satin

that made her eyes blacker and her little mouth redder than any other

color could. She was small, but, remembering the fourteen-year-old

wife of the shopkeeper, he felt that, for all her childish voice and

features, she was a grown woman, and a sudden shyness took hold of him.

But she looked pertly in his face, stood her guitar upright before her,

and put her hands behind her back as she leaned saucily against the wall

and shrugged her shoulders.

“It was the fault of you,” she said, in a broken English that seemed as

much infantine as foreign. “What for you not remain to yourself in your

own CASA? So it come. You creep so--in the dark--and shake my wall, and

I fall. And she,” pointing to the guitar, “is a'most broke! And for all

thees I have only make to you a serenade. Ingrate!”

“I beg your pardon,” said Masterton quickly, “but I was curious. I

thought I might help you, and--”

“Make yourself another cat on the wall, eh? No; one is enough, thank

you!”

A frown lowered on Masterton's brow. “You don't understand me,” he said,

bluntly. “I did not know WHO was here.”

“Ah, BUENO! Then it is Pepita Ramirez, you see,” she said, tapping her

bodice with one little finger, “all the same; the niece from Manuel

Garcia, who keeps the Mission garden and lif there. And you?”

“My name is Masterton.”

“How mooch?”

“Masterton,” he repeated.

She tried to pronounce it once or twice desperately, and then shook her

little head so violently that a yellow rose fastened over her ear fell

to the ground. But she did not heed it, nor the fact that Masterton had

picked it up.

“Ah, I cannot!” she said, poutingly. “It is as deefeecult to make go as

my guitar with your serenade.”

“Can you not say 'Stephen Masterton'?” he asked, more gently, with a

returning and forgiving sense of her childishness.

“Es-stefen? Ah, ESTEBAN! Yes; Don Esteban! BUENO! Then, Don Esteban,

what for you sink so melank-olly one night, and one night so fierce? The

melank-olly, he ees not so bad; but the fierce--ah! he is weeked! Ess it

how the Americano make always his serenade?”

Masterton's brow again darkened. And his hymn of exultation had been

mistaken by these people--by this--this wanton child!

“It was no serenade,” he replied, curtly; “it was in the praise of the

Lord!”