The abrupt disappearance of Jack Hamlin and the strange lady and
gentleman visitor was scarcely noticed by the other guests of the Divide
House, and beyond the circle of Steptoe and his friends, who were a
distinct party and strangers to the town, there was no excitement.
Indeed, the hotel proprietor might have confounded them together, and,
perhaps, Van Loo was not far wrong in his belief that their identity had
not been suspected. Nor were Steptoe's followers very much concerned in
an episode in which they had taken part only at the suggestion of their
leader, and which had terminated so tamely. That they would have liked
a “row,” in which Jack Hamlin would have been incidentally forced to
disgorge his winnings, there was no doubt, but that their interference
was asked solely to gratify some personal spite of Steptoe's against Van
Loo was equally plain to them. There was some grumbling and outspoken
criticism of his methods.
This was later made more obvious by the arrival of another guest for
whom Steptoe and his party were evidently waiting. He was a short, stout
man, whose heavy red beard was trimmed a little more carefully than when
he was first known to Steptoe as Alky Hall, the drunkard of Heavy Tree
Hill. His dress, too, exhibited a marked improvement in quality and
style, although still characterized in the waist and chest by the
unbuttoned freedom of portly and slovenly middle age. Civilization had
restricted his potations or limited them to certain festivals known as
“sprees,” and his face was less puffy and sodden. But with the accession
of sobriety he had lost his good humor, and had the irritability and
intolerance of virtuous restraint.
“Ye needn't ladle out any of your forty-rod whiskey to me,” he said
querulously to Steptoe, as he filed out with the rest of the party
through the bar-room into the adjacent apartment. “I want to keep my
head level till our business is over, and I reckon it wouldn't hurt you
and your gang to do the same. They're less likely to blab; and there are
few doors that whiskey won't unlock,” he added, as Steptoe turned the
key in the door after the party had entered.
The room had evidently been used for meetings of directors or political
caucuses, and was roughly furnished with notched and whittled armchairs
and a single long deal table, on which were ink and pens. The men sat
down around it with a half-embarrassed, half-contemptuous attitude of
formality, their bent brows and isolated looks showing little community
of sentiment and scarcely an attempt to veil that individual selfishness
that was prominent. Still less was there any essay of companionship or
sympathy in the manner of Steptoe as he suddenly rapped on the table
with his knuckles.
“Gentlemen,” he said, with a certain deliberation of utterance, as if
he enjoyed his own coarse directness, “I reckon you all have a sort of
general idea what you were picked up for, or you wouldn't be here.
But you may or may not know that for the present you are honest,
hard-working miners,--the backbone of the State of Californy,--and that
you have formed yourselves into a company called the 'Blue Jay,'
and you've settled yourselves on the Bar below Heavy Tree Hill, on a
deserted claim of the Marshall Brothers, not half a mile from where
the big strike was made five years ago. That's what you ARE, gentlemen;
that's what you'll continue TO BE until the job's finished; and,” he
added, with a sudden dominance that they all felt, “the man who forgets
it will have to reckon with me. Now,” he continued, resuming his
former ironical manner, “now, what are the cold facts of the case? The
Marshalls worked this claim ever since '49, and never got anything out
of it; then they dropped off or died out, leaving only one brother, Tom
Marshall, to work what was left of it. Well, a few days ago HE found
indications of a big lead in the rock, and instead of rushin' out and
yellin' like an honest man, and callin' in the boys to drink, he sneaks
off to 'Frisco, and goes to the bank to get 'em to take a hand in it.
Well, you know, when Jim Stacy takes a hand in anything, IT'S BOTH
HANDS, and the bank wouldn't see it until he promised to guarantee
possession of the whole abandoned claim,--'dips, spurs, and
angles,'--and let them work the whole thing, which the d----d fool DID,
and the bank agreed to send an expert down there to-morrow to report.
But while he was away some one on our side, who was an expert also, got
wind of it, and made an examination all by himself, and found it was a
vein sure enough and a big thing, and some one else on our side found
out, too, all that Marshall had promised the bank and what the bank
had promised him. Now, gentlemen, when the bank sends down that expert
to-morrow I expect that he will find YOU IN POSSESSION of every part of
the deserted claim except the spot where Tom is still working.”
“And what good is that to us?” asked one of the men contemptuously.
“Good?” repeated Steptoe harshly. “Well, if you're not as d----d a fool
as Marshall, you'll see that if he has struck a lead or vein it's bound
to run across OUR CLAIMS, and what's to keep us from sinking for it as
long as Marshall hasn't worked the other claims for years nor pre-empted
them for this lead?”
“What'll keep him from preempting now?”
“Our possession.”
“But if he can prove that the brothers left their claims to him to keep,
he'll just send the sheriff and his posse down upon us,” persisted the
first speaker.
“It will take him three months to do that by law, and the sheriff and
his posse can't do it before as long as we're in peaceable possession of
it. And by the time that expert and Marshall return they'll find us in
peaceful possession, unless we're such blasted fools as to stay talking
about it here!”
“But what's to prevent Marshall from getting a gang of his own to drive
us off?”
“Now your talkin' and not yelpin',” said Steptoe, with slow insolence.
“D----d if I didn't begin to think you kalkilated I was goin' to employ
you as lawyers! Nothing is to prevent him from gettin' up HIS gang,
and we hope he'll do it, for you see it puts us both on the same level
before the law, for we're both BREAKIN' IT. And we kalkilate that we're
as good as any roughs they can pick up at Heavy Tree.”
“I reckon!” “Ye can count us in!” said half a dozen voices eagerly.
“But what's the job goin' to pay us?” persisted a Sydney man. “An' arter
we've beat off this other gang, are we going to scrub along on grub
wages until we're yanked out by process-sarvers three months later? If
that's the ticket I'm not in it. I aren't no b--y quartz miner.”
“We ain't going to do no more MINING there than the bank,” said Steptoe
fiercely. “And the bank ain't going to wait no three months for the end
of the lawsuit. They'll float the stock of that mine for a couple of
millions, and get out of it with a million before a month. And they'll
have to buy us off to do that. What they'll pay will depend upon the
lead; but we don't move off those claims for less than five thousand
dollars, which will be two hundred and fifty dollars to each man. But,”
said Steptoe in a lower but perfectly distinct voice, “if there should
be a row,--and they BEGIN it,--and in the scuffle Tom Marshall, their
only witness, should happen to get in the way of a revolver or have his
head caved in, there might be some difficulty in their holdin' ANY OF
THE MINE against honest, hardworking miners in possession. You hear me?”
There was a breathless silence for the moment, and a slight movement
of the men in their chairs, but never in fear or protest. Every one had
heard the speaker distinctly, and every man distinctly understood him.
Some of them were criminals, one or two had already the stain of blood
on their hands; but even the most timid, who at other times might have
shrunk from suggested assassination, saw in the speaker's words only the
fair removal of a natural enemy.
“All right, boys. I'm ready to wade in at once. Why ain't we on the road
now? We might have been but for foolin' our time away on that man Van
Loo.”
“Van Loo!” repeated Hall eagerly,--“Van Loo! Was he here?”
“Yes,” said Steptoe shortly, administering a kick under the table to
Hall, as he had no wish to revive the previous irritability of his
comrades. “He's gone, but,” turning to the others, “you'd have had to
wait for Mr. Hall's arrival, anyhow. And now you've got your order you
can start. Go in two parties by different roads, and meet on the other
side of the hotel at Hymettus. I'll be there before you. Pick up some
shovels and drills as you go; remember you're honest miners, but don't
forget your shootin'-irons for all that. Now scatter.”
It was well that they did, vacating the room more cheerfully and
sympathetically than they had entered it, or Hall's manifest disturbance
over Van Loo's visit would have been noticed. When the last man had
disappeared Hall turned quickly to Steptoe. “Well, what did he say?
Where has he gone?”
“Don't know,” said Steptoe, with uneasy curtness. “He was running away
with a woman--well, Mrs. Barker, if you want to know,” he added, with
rising anger, “the wife of one of those cursed partners. Jack Hamlin was
here, and was jockeying to stop him, and interfered. But what the devil
has that job to do with our job?” He was losing his temper; everything
seemed to turn upon this infernal Van Loo!
“He wasn't running away with Mrs. Barker,” gasped Hall,--“it was with
her MONEY! and the fear of being connected with the Wheat Trust swindle
which he organized, and with our money which I lent him for the same
purpose. And he knows all about that job, for I wanted to get him to go
into it with us. Your name and mine ain't any too sweet-smelling for
the bank, and we ought to have a middleman who knows business to arrange
with them. The bank daren't object to him, for they've employed him in
even shadier transactions than this when THEY didn't wish to appear. I
knew he was in difficulties along with Mrs. Barker's speculations, but
I never thought him up to this. And,” he added, with sudden desperation,
“YOU trusted him, too.”
In an instant Steptoe caught the frightened man by the shoulders and was
bearing him down on the table. “Are you a traitor, a liar, or a besotted
fool?” he said hoarsely. “Speak. WHEN and WHERE did I trust him?”
“You said in your note--I was--to--help him,” gasped Hall.
“My note,” repeated Steptoe, releasing Hall with astonished eyes.
“Yes,” said Hall, tremblingly searching in his vest pocket. “I brought
it with me. It isn't much of a note, but there's your signature plain
enough.”
He handed Steptoe a torn piece of paper folded in a three-cornered
shape. Steptoe opened it. He instantly recognized the paper on which
he had written his name and sent up to his wife at the Boomville Hotel.
But, added to it, in apparently the same hand, in smaller characters,
were the words, “Help Van Loo all you can.”
The blood rushed into his face. But he quickly collected himself, and
said hurriedly, “All right, I had forgotten it. Let the d----d sneak go.
We've got what's a thousand times better in this claim at Marshall's,
and it's well that he isn't in it to scoop the lion's share. Only we
must not waste time getting there now. You go there first, and at once,
and set those rascals to work. I'll follow you before Marshall comes up.
Get; I'll settle up here.”
His face darkened once more as Hall hurried away, leaving him alone. He
drew out the piece of paper from his pocket and stared at it again. Yes;
it was the one he had sent to his wife. How did Van Loo get hold of
it? Was he at the hotel that night? Had he picked it up in the hall or
passage when the servant dropped it? When Hall handed him the paper and
he first recognized it a fiendish thought, followed by a spasm of more
fiendish rage, had sent the blood to his face. But his crude common
sense quickly dismissed that suggestion of his wife's complicity with
Van Loo. But had she seen him passing through the hotel that night, and
had sought to draw from him some knowledge of his early intercourse with
the child, and confessed everything, and even produced the paper with
his signature as a proof of identity? Women had been known to do such
desperate things. Perhaps she disbelieved her son's aversion to her, and
was trying to sound Van Loo. As for the forged words by Van Loo, and the
use he had put them to, he cared little. He believed the man was capable
of forgery; indeed, he suddenly remembered that in the old days his
son had spoken innocently, but admiringly, of Van Loo's wonderful
chirographical powers and his faculty of imitating the writings of
others, and how he had even offered to teach him. A new and exasperating
thought came into his feverish consciousness. What if Van Loo, in
teaching the boy, had even made use of him as an innocent accomplice to
cover up his own tricks! The suggestion was no question of moral ethics
to Steptoe, nor of his son's possible contamination, although since the
night of the big strike he had held different views; it was simply a
fierce, selfish jealousy that ANOTHER might have profited by the lad's
helplessness and inexperience. He had been tormented by this jealousy
before in his son's liking for Van Loo. He had at first encouraged his
admiration and imitative regard for this smooth swindler's graces and
accomplishments, which, though he scorned them himself, he was, after
the common parental infatuation, willing that the boy should profit by.
Incapable, through his own consciousness, of distinguishing between Van
Loo's superficial polish and the true breeding of a gentleman, he
had only looked upon it as an equipment for his son which might be
serviceable to himself. He had told his wife the truth when he informed
her of Van Loo's fears of being reminded of their former intimacy; but
he had not told her how its discontinuance after they had left Heavy
Tree Hill had affected her son, and how he still cherished his old
admiration for that specious rascal. Nor had he told her how this had
stung him, through his own selfish greed of the boy's affection. Yet now
that it was possible that she had met Van Loo that evening, she might
have become aware of Van Loo's power over her child. How she would
exult, for all her pretended hatred of Van Loo! How, perhaps, they had
plotted together! How Van Loo might have become aware of the place where
his son was kept, and have been bribed by the mother to tell her! He
stopped in a whirl of giddy fancies. His strong common sense in all
other things had been hitherto proof against such idle dreams or
suggestions; but the very strength of his parental love and jealousy had
awakened in him at last the terrors of imagination.
His first impulse had been to seek his wife, regardless of discovery or
consequences, at Hymettus, where she had said she was going. It was on
his way to the rendezvous at Marshall's claim. But this he as instantly
set aside, it was his SON he must find; SHE might not confess, or might
deceive him--the boy would not; and if his fears were correct, she could
be arraigned afterwards. It was possible for him to reach the little
Mission church and school, secluded in a remote valley by the old
Franciscan fathers, where he had placed the boy for the last few years
unknown to his wife. It would be a long ride, but he could still reach
Heavy Tree Hill afterwards before Marshall and the expert arrived. And
he had a feeling he had never felt before on the eve of a desperate
adventure,--that he must see the boy first. He remembered how the child
had often accompanied him in his flight, and how he had gained strength,
and, it seemed to him, a kind of luck, from the touch of that small hand
in his. Surely it was necessary now that at least his mind should be at
rest regarding HIM on the eve of an affair of this moment. Perhaps he
might never see him again. At any other time, and under the influence of
any other emotion, he would have scorned such a sentimentalism--he who
had never troubled himself either with preparation for the future or
consideration for the past. But at that moment he felt both. He drew
a long breath. He could catch the next train to the Three Boulders and
ride thence to San Felipe. He hurriedly left the room, settled with the
landlord, and galloped to the station. By the irony of circumstances the
only horse available for that purpose was Mr. Hamlin's own.
By two o'clock he was at the Three Boulders, where he got a fast horse
and galloped into San Felipe by four. As he descended the last slope
through the fastnesses of pines towards the little valley overlooked
in its remoteness and purely pastoral simplicity by the gold-seeking
immigrants,--its seclusion as one of the furthest northern Californian
missions still preserved through its insignificance and the efforts of
the remaining Brotherhood, who used it as an infirmary and a school for
the few remaining Spanish families,--he remembered how he once blundered
upon it with the boy while hotly pursued by a hue and cry from one of
the larger towns, and how he found sanctuary there. He remembered how,
when the pursuit was over, he had placed the boy there under the padre's
charge. He had lied to his wife regarding the whereabouts of her son,
but he had spoken truly regarding his free expenditure for the boy's
maintenance, and the good fathers had accepted, equally for the child's
sake as for the Church's sake, the generous “restitution” which this
coarse, powerful, ruffianly looking father was apparently seeking to
make. He was quite aware of it at the time, and had equally accepted it
with grim cynicism; but it now came back to him with a new and smarting
significance. Might THEY, too, not succeed in weaning the boy's
affection from him, or if the mother had interfered, would they not side
with her in claiming an equal right? He had sometimes laughed to himself
over the security of this hiding-place, so unknown and so unlikely to be
discovered by her, yet within easy reach of her friends and his enemies;
he now ground his teeth over the mistake which his doting desire to keep
his son accessible to him had caused him to make. He put spurs to his
horse, dashed down the little, narrow, ill-paved street, through
the deserted plaza, and pulled up in a cloud of dust before the only
remaining tower, with its cracked belfry, of the half-ruined Mission
church. A new dormitory and school-building had been extended from its
walls, but in a subdued, harmonious, modest way, quite unlike the usual
glaring white-pine glories of provincial towns. Steptoe laughed to
himself bitterly. Some of his money had gone in it.
He seized the horsehair rope dangling from a bell by the wall and rang
it sharply. A soft-footed priest appeared,--Father Dominico. “Eddy
Horncastle? Ah! yes. Eddy, dear child, is gone.”
“Gone!” shouted Steptoe in a voice that startled the padre. “Where?
When? With whom?”
“Pardon, senor, but for a time--only a pasear to the next village. It is
his saint's day--he has half-holiday. He is a good boy. It is a little
pleasure for him and for us.”
“Oh!” said Steptoe, softened into a rough apology. “I forgot. All right.
Has he had any visitors lately--lady, for instance?”
Father Dominico cast a look half of fright, half of reproval upon his
guest.
“A lady HERE!”
In his relief Steptoe burst into a coarse laugh. “Of course; you see
I forgot that, too. I was thinking of one of his woman folks, you
know--relatives--aunts. Was there any other visitor?”
“Only one. Ah! we know the senor's rules regarding his son.”
“One?” repeated Steptoe. “Who was it?”
“Oh, quite an hidalgo--an old friend of the child's--most polite,
most accomplished, fluent in Spanish, perfect in deportment. The Senor
Horncastle surely could find nothing to object to. Father Pedro was
charmed with him. A man of affairs, and yet a good Catholic, too. It
was a Senor Van Loo--Don Paul the boy called him, and they talked of the
boy's studies in the old days as if--indeed, but for the stranger being
a caballero and man of the world--as if he had been his teacher.”
It was a proof of the intensity of the father's feelings that they had
passed beyond the power of his usual coarse, brutal expression, and he
only stared at the priest with a dull red face in which the blood seemed
to have stagnated. Presently he said thickly, “When did he come?”
“A few days ago.”
“Which way did Eddy go?”
“To Brown's Mills, scarcely a league away. He will be here--even now--on
the instant. But the senor will come into the refectory and take some
of the old Mission wine from the Catalan grape, planted one hundred and
fifty years ago, until the dear child returns. He will be so happy.”
“No! I'm in a hurry. I will go on and meet him.” He took off his hat,
mopped his crisp, wet hair with his handkerchief, and in a thick, slow,
impeded voice, more suggestive than the outburst he restrained, said,
“And as long as my son remains here that man, Van Loo, must not pass
this gate, speak to him, or even see him. You hear me? See to it, you
and all the others. See to it, I say, or”--He stopped abruptly, clapped
his hat on the swollen veins of his forehead, turned quickly, passed out
without another word through the archway into the road, and before the
good priest could cross himself or recover from his astonishment the
thud of his horse's hoofs came from the dusty road.
It was ten minutes before his face resumed its usual color. But in that
ten minutes, as if some of the struggle of his rider had passed into
him, his horse was sweating with exhaustion and fear. For in that ten
minutes, in this new imagination with which he was cursed, he had killed
both Van Loo and his son, and burned the refectory over the heads of the
treacherous priests. Then, quite himself again, a voice came to him from
the rocky trail above the road with the hail of “Father!” He started
quickly as a lad of fifteen or sixteen came bounding down the hillside,
and ran towards him.
“You passed me and I called to you, but you did not seem to hear,”
said the boy breathlessly. “Then I ran after you. Have you been to the
Mission?”
Steptoe looked at him quite as breathlessly, but from a deeper emotion.
He was, even at first sight, a handsome lad, glowing with youth and the
excitement of his run, and, as the father looked at him, he could
see the likeness to his mother in his clear-cut features, and even a
resemblance to himself in his square, compact chest and shoulders and
crisp, black curls. A thrill of purely animal paternity passed over him,
the fierce joy of his flesh over his own flesh! His own son, by God!
They could not take THAT from him; they might plot, swindle, fawn,
cheat, lie, and steal away his affections, but there he was, plain to
all eyes, his own son, his very son!
“Come here,” he said in a singular, half-weary and half-protesting
voice, which the boy instantly recognized as his father's accents of
affection.
The boy hesitated as he stood on the edge of the road and pointed with
mingled mischief and fastidiousness to the depths of impalpable red
dust that lay between him and the horseman. Steptoe saw that he was very
smartly attired in holiday guise, with white duck trousers and patent
leather shoes, and, after the Spanish fashion, wore black kid gloves. He
certainly was a bit of a dandy, as he had said. The father's whole face
changed as he wheeled and came before the lad, who lifted up his arms
expectantly. They had often ridden together on the same horse.
“No rides to-day in that toggery, Eddy,” he said in the same voice. “But
I'll get down and we'll go and sit somewhere under a tree and have some
talk. I've got a bit of a job that's hurrying me, and I can't waste
time.”
“Not one of your old jobs, father? I thought you had quite given that
up?”
The boy spoke more carelessly than reproachfully, or even wonderingly;
yet, as he dismounted and tethered his horse, Steptoe answered
evasively, “It's a big thing, sonny; maybe we'll make our eternal
fortune, and then we'll light out from this hole and have a gay time
elsewhere. Come along.”
He took the boy's gloved right hand in his own powerful grasp, and
together they clambered up the steep hillside to a rocky ledge on which
a fallen pine from above had crashed, snapped itself in twain, and then
left its withered crown to hang half down the slope, while the other
half rested on the ledge. On this they sat, looking down upon the road
and the tethered horse. A gentle breeze moved the treetops above their
heads, and the westering sun played hide-and-seek with the shifting
shadows. The boy's face was quick and alert with all that moved round
him, but without thought the father's face was heavy, except for the
eyes that were fixed upon his son.
“Van Loo came to the Mission,” he said suddenly.
The boy's eyes glittered quickly, like a steel that pierced the father's
heart. “Oh,” he said simply, “then it was the padre told you?”
“How did he know you were here?” asked Steptoe.
“I don't know,” said the boy quietly. “I think he said something, but
I've forgotten it. But it was mighty good of him to come, for I thought,
you know, that he did not care to see me after Heavy Tree, and that he'd
gone back on us.”
“What did he tell you?” continued Steptoe. “Did he talk of me or of your
mother?”
“No,” said the boy, but without any show of interest or sympathy; “we
talked mostly about old times.”
“Tell ME about those old times, Eddy. You never told me anything about
them.”
The boy, momentarily arrested more by something in the tone of his
father's voice--a weakness he had never noticed before--than by any
suggestion of his words, said with a laugh, “Oh, only about what we
used to do when I was very little and used to call myself his 'little
brother,'--don't you remember, long before the big strike on Heavy Tree?
They were gay times we had then.”
“And how he used to teach you to imitate other people's handwriting?”
said Steptoe.
“What made you think of that, pop?” said the boy, with a slight wonder
in his eyes. “Why, that's the very thing we DID talk about.”
“But you didn't do it again; you ain't done it since,” said Steptoe
quickly.
“Lord! no,” said the boy contemptuously. “There ain't no chance now, and
there wouldn't be any fun in it. It isn't like the old times when him
and me were all alone, and we used to write letters as coming from other
people to all the boys round Heavy Tree and the Bar, and sometimes as
far as Boomville, to get them to do things, and they'd think the letters
were real, and they'd do 'em. And there'd be the biggest kind of a row,
and nobody ever knew who did it.”
Steptoe stared at this flesh of his own flesh half in relief, half in
frightened admiration. Sitting astride the log, his elbows on his knees
and his gloved hands supporting his round cheeks, the boy's handsome
face became illuminated with an impish devilry which the father had
never seen before. With dancing eyes he went on. “It was one of those
very games we played so long ago that he wanted to see me about and
wanted me to keep mum about, for some of the folks that he played it on
were around here now. It was a game we got off on one of the big strike
partners long before the strike. I'll tell YOU, dad, for you know
what happened afterwards, and you'll be glad. Well, that
partner--Demorest--was a kind of silly, you remember--a sort of Miss
Nancyish fellow--always gloomy and lovesick after his girl in the
States. Well, we'd written lots of letters to girls from their chaps
before, and got lots of fun out of it; but we had even a better show
for a game here, for it happened that Van Loo knew all about the
girl--things that even the man's own partners didn't, for Van Loo's
mother was a sort of a friend of the girl's family, and traveled about
with her, and knew that the girl was spoony over this Demorest, and that
they corresponded. So, knowing that Van Loo was employed at Heavy Tree,
she wrote to him to find out all about Demorest and how to stop their
foolish nonsense, for the girl's parents didn't want her to marry a
broken-down miner like him. So we thought we'd do it our own way, and
write a letter to her as if it was from him, don't you see? I wanted to
make him call her awful names, and say that he hated her, that he was a
murderer and a horse-thief, and that he had killed a policeman, and that
he was thinking of becoming a Digger Injin, and having a Digger squaw
for a wife, which he liked better than her. Lord! dad, you ought to have
seen what stuff I made up.” The boy burst into a shrill, half-feminine
laugh, and Steptoe, catching the infection, laughed loudly in his own
coarse, brutal fashion.
For some moments they sat there looking in each other's faces, shaking
with sympathetic emotion, the father forgetting the purpose of his
coming there, his rage over Van Loo's visit, and even the rendezvous
to which his horse in the road below was waiting to bring him; the son
forgetting their retreat from Heavy Tree Hill and his shameful vagabond
wanderings with that father in the years that followed. The sinking sun
stared blankly in their faces; the protecting pines above them moved by
a stronger gust shook a few cones upon them; an enormous crow mockingly
repeated the father's coarse laugh, and a squirrel scampered away from
the strangely assorted pair as Steptoe, wiping his eyes and forehead
with his pocket-handkerchief, said:--
“And did you send it?”
“Oh! Van Loo thought it too strong. Said that those sort of love-sick
fools made more fuss over little things than they did over big things,
and he sort of toned it down, and fixed it up himself. But it told. For
there were never any more letters in the post-office in her handwriting,
and there wasn't any posted to her in his.”
They both laughed again, and then Steptoe rose. “I must be getting
along,” he said, looking curiously at the boy. “I've got to catch a
train at Three Boulders Station.”
“Three Boulders!” repeated the boy. “I'm going there, too, on Friday, to
meet Father Cipriano.”
“I reckon my work will be all done by Friday,” said Steptoe musingly.
Standing thus, holding his boy's hand, he was thinking that the real
fight at Marshall's would not take place at once, for it might take a
day or two for Marshall to gather forces. But he only pressed his son's
hand gently.
“I wish you would sometimes take me with you as you used to,” said the
boy curiously. “I'm bigger now, and wouldn't be in your way.”
Steptoe looked at the boy with a choking sense of satisfaction and
pride. But he said, “No;” and then suddenly with simulated humor, “Don't
you be taken in by any letters from ME, such as you and Van Loo used to
write. You hear?”
The boy laughed.
“And,” continued Steptoe, “if anybody says I sent for you, don't you
believe them.”
“No,” said the boy, smiling.
“And don't you even believe I'm dead till you see me so. You understand.
By the way, Father Pedro has some money of mine kept for you. Now hurry
back to school and say you met me, but that I was in a great hurry. I
reckon I may have been rather rough to the priests.”
They had reached the lower road again, and Steptoe silently unhitched
his horse. “Good-by,” he said, as he laid his hand on the boy's arm.
“Good-by, dad.”
He mounted his horse slowly. “Well,” he said smilingly, looking down the
road, “you ain't got anything more to say to me, have you?”
“No, dad.”
“Nothin' you want?”
“Nothin', dad.”
“All right. Good-by.”
He put spurs to his horse and cantered down the road without looking
back. The boy watched him with idle curiosity until he disappeared from
sight, and then went on his way, whistling and striking off the heads of
the wayside weeds with his walking-stick.