The abrupt departure of George Kearney from Devil's Ford excited
but little interest in the community, and was soon forgotten. It was
generally attributed to differences between himself and his partners
on the question of further outlay of their earnings on mining
improvements--he and Philip Carr alone representing a sanguine minority
whose faith in the future of the mine accepted any risks. It was alleged
by some that he had sold out to his brother; it was believed by others
that he had simply gone to Sacramento to borrow money on his share,
in order to continue the improvements on his own responsibility. The
partners themselves were uncommunicative; even Whiskey Dick, who since
his remarkable social elevation had become less oracular, much to his
own astonishment, contributed nothing to the gossip except a suggestion
that as the fiery temper of George Kearney brooked no opposition,
even from his brother, it was better they should separate before the
estrangement became serious.
Mr. Carr did not disguise his annoyance at the loss of his young
disciple and firm ally. But an unlucky allusion to his previous remarks
on Kearney's attentions to Jessie, and a querulous regret that he had
permitted a disruption of their social intimacy, brought such an ominous
and frigid opposition, not only from Christie, but even the frivolous
Jessie herself, that Carr sank back in a crushed and terrified silence.
“I only meant to say,” he stammered after a pause, in which he, however,
resumed his aggrieved manner, “that FAIRFAX seems to come here still,
and HE is not such a particular friend of mine.”
“But she is--and has your interest entirely at heart,” said Jessie,
stoutly, “and he only comes here to tell us how things are going on at
the works.”
“And criticise your father, I suppose,” said Mr. Carr, with an
attempt at jocularity that did not, however, disguise an irritated
suspiciousness. “He really seems to have supplanted ME as he has poor
Kearney in your estimation.”
“Now, father,” said Jessie, suddenly seizing him by the shoulders in
affected indignation, but really to conceal a certain embarrassment
that sprang quite as much from her sister's quietly observant eye as her
father's speech, “you promised to let this ridiculous discussion drop.
You will make me and Christie so nervous that we will not dare to
open the door to a visitor, until he declares his innocence of any
matrimonial intentions. You don't want to give color to the gossip that
agreement with your views about the improvements is necessary to getting
on with us.”
“Who dares talk such rubbish?” said Carr, reddening; “is that the kind
of gossip that Fairfax brings here?”
“Hardly, when it's known that he don't quite agree with you, and DOES
come here. That's the best denial of the gossip.”
Christie, who had of late loftily ignored these discussions, waited
until her father had taken his departure.
“Then that is the reason why you still see Mr. Munroe, after what you
said,” she remarked quietly to Jessie.
Jessie, who would have liked to escape with her father, was obliged to
pause on the threshold of the door, with a pretty assumption of blank
forgetfulness in her blue eyes and lifted eyebrows.
“Said what? when?” she asked vacantly.
“When--when Mr. Kearney that day--in the woods--went away,” said
Christie, faintly coloring.
“Oh! THAT day,” said Jessie briskly; “the day he just gloved your
hand with kisses, and then fled wildly into the forest to conceal his
emotion.”
“The day he behaved very foolishly,” said Christie, with reproachful
calmness, that did not, however, prevent a suspicion of indignant
moisture in her eyes--“when you explained”--
“That it wasn't meant for ME,” interrupted Jessie.
“That it was to you that MR. MUNROE'S attentions were directed. And then
we agreed that it was better to prevent any further advances of this
kind by avoiding any familiar relations with either of them.”
“Yes,” said Jessie, “I remember; but you're not confounding my seeing
Fairfax occasionally now with that sort of thing. HE doesn't kiss my
hand like anything,” she added, as if in abstract reflection.
“Nor run away, either,” suggested the trodden worm, turning.
There was an ominous silence.
“Do you know we are nearly out of coffee?” said Jessie choking, but
moving towards the door with Spartan-like calmness.
“Yes. And something must be done this very day about the washing,” said
Christie, with suppressed emotion, going towards the opposite entrance.
Tears stood in each other's eyes with this terrible exchange of domestic
confidences. Nevertheless, after a moment's pause, they deliberately
turned again, and, facing each other with frightful calmness, left
the room by purposeless and deliberate exits other than those they
had contemplated--a crushing abnegation of self, that, to some extent,
relieved their surcharged feelings.
Meantime the material prosperity of Devil's Ford increased, if a
prosperity based upon no visible foundation but the confidences and
hopes of its inhabitants could be called material. Few, if any, stopped
to consider that the improvements, buildings, and business were simply
the outlay of capital brought from elsewhere, and as yet the settlement
or town, as it was now called, had neither produced nor exported capital
of itself equal to half the amount expended. It was true that some
land was cultivated on the further slope, some mills erected and lumber
furnished from the inexhaustible forest; but the consumers were the
inhabitants themselves, who paid for their produce in borrowed capital
or unlimited credit. It was never discovered that while all roads led to
Devil's Ford, Devil's Ford led to nowhere. The difficulties overcome
in getting things into the settlement were never surmounted for getting
things out of it. The lumber was practically valueless for export to
other settlements across the mountain roads, which were equally rich in
timber. The theory so enthusiastically held by the original locators,
that Devil's Ford was a vast sink that had, through ages, exhausted and
absorbed the trickling wealth of the adjacent hills and valleys, was
suffering an ironical corroboration.
One morning it was known that work was stopped at the Devil's Ford
Ditch--temporarily only, it was alleged, and many of the old workmen
simply had their labor for the present transferred to excavating the
river banks, and the collection of vast heaps of “pay gravel.” Specimens
from these mounds, taken from different localities, and at different
levels, were sent to San Francisco for more rigid assay and analysis.
It was believed that this would establish the fact of the permanent
richness of the drifts, and not only justify past expenditure, but a
renewed outlay of credit and capital. The suspension of engineering work
gave Mr. Carr an opportunity to visit San Francisco on general business
of the mine, which could not, however, prevent him from arranging
further combinations with capital. His two daughters accompanied him. It
offered an admirable opportunity for a shopping expedition, a change of
scene, and a peaceful solution of their perplexing and anomalous social
relations with Devil's Ford. In the first flush of gratitude to their
father for this opportune holiday, something of harmony had been
restored to the family circle that had of late been shaken by discord.
But their sanguine hopes of enjoyment were not entirely fulfilled. Both
Jessie and Christie were obliged to confess to a certain disappointment
in the aspect of the civilization they were now reentering. They at
first attributed it to the change in their own habits during the last
three months, and their having become barbarous and countrified in
their seclusion. Certainly in the matter of dress they were behind the
fashions as revealed in Montgomery Street. But when the brief solace
afforded them by the modiste and dressmaker was past, there seemed
little else to be gained. They missed at first, I fear, the chivalrous
and loyal devotion that had only amused them at Devil's Ford, and were
the more inclined, I think, to distrust the conscious and more civilized
gallantry of the better dressed and more carefully presented men they
met. For it must be admitted that, for obvious reasons, their criticisms
were at first confined to the sex they had been most in contact with.
They could not help noticing that the men were more eager, annoyingly
feverish, and self-asserting in their superior elegance and external
show than their old associates were in their frank, unrestrained habits.
It seemed to them that the five millionaires of Devil's Ford, in their
radical simplicity and thoroughness, were perhaps nearer the type of
true gentlemanhood than these citizens who imitated a civilization they
were unable yet to reach.
The women simply frightened them, as being, even more than the men,
demonstrative and excessive in their fine looks, their fine dresses,
their extravagant demand for excitement. In less than a week they found
themselves regretting--not the new villa on the slope of Devil's Ford,
which even in its own bizarre fashion was exceeded by the barbarous
ostentation of the villas and private houses around them--but the double
cabin under the trees, which now seemed to them almost aristocratic in
its grave simplicity and abstention. In the mysterious forests of masts
that thronged the city's quays they recalled the straight shafts of the
pines on Devil's slopes, only to miss the sedate repose and infinite
calm that used to environ them. In the feverish, pulsating life of the
young metropolis they often stopped oppressed, giddy, and choking; the
roar of the streets and thoroughfares was meaningless to them, except to
revive strange memories of the deep, unvarying monotone of the evening
wind over their humbler roof on the Sierran hillside. Civic bred and
nurtured as they were, the recurrence of these sensations perplexed and
alarmed them.
“It seems so perfectly ridiculous,” said Jessie, “for us to feel as out
of place here as that Pike County servant girl in Sacramento who had
never seen a steamboat before; do you know, I quite had a turn the other
day at seeing a man on the Stockton wharf in a red shirt, with a rifle
on his shoulder.”
“And you wanted to go and speak to him?” said Christie, with a sad
smile.
“No, that's just it; I felt awfully hurt and injured that he did not
come up and speak to ME! I wonder if we got any fever or that sort of
thing up there; it makes one quite superstitious.”
Christie did not reply; more than once before she had felt that
inexplicable misgiving. It had sometimes seemed to her that she had
never been quite herself since that memorable night when she had
slipped out of their sleeping-cabin, and stood alone in the gracious and
commanding presence of the woods and hills. In the solitude of night,
with the hum of the great city rising below her--at times even in
theatres or crowded assemblies of men and women--she forgot herself,
and again stood in the weird brilliancy of that moonlight night in
mute worship at the foot of that slowly-rising mystic altar of piled
terraces, hanging forests, and lifted plateaus that climbed forever to
the lonely skies. Again she felt before her the expanding and opening
arms of the protecting woods. Had they really closed upon her in some
pantheistic embrace that made her a part of them? Had she been baptized
in that moonlight as a child of the great forest? It was easy to believe
in the myths of the poets of an idyllic life under those trees, where,
free from conventional restrictions, one loved and was loved. If she,
with her own worldly experience, could think of this now, why might
not George Kearney have thought? . . . She stopped, and found herself
blushing even in the darkness. As the thought and blush were the usual
sequel of her reflections, it is to be feared that they may have been at
times the impelling cause.
Mr. Carr, however, made up for his daughters' want of sympathy with
metropolitan life. To their astonishment, he not only plunged into the
fashionable gayeties and amusements of the town, but in dress and manner
assumed the role of a leader of society. The invariable answer to their
half-humorous comment was the necessities of the mine, and the policy
of frequenting the company of capitalists, to enlist their support and
confidence. There was something in this so unlike their father, that
what at any other time they would have hailed as a relief to
his habitual abstraction now half alarmed them. Yet he was not
dissipated--he did not drink nor gamble. There certainly did not seem
any harm in his frequenting the society of ladies, with a gallantry that
appeared to be forced and a pleasure that to their critical eyes was
certainly apocryphal. He did not drag his daughters into the mixed
society of that period; he did not press upon them the company of those
he most frequented, and whose accepted position in that little world of
fashion was considered equal to their own. When Jessie strongly objected
to the pronounced manners of a certain widow, whose actual present
wealth and pecuniary influence condoned for a more uncertain prehistoric
past, Mr. Carr did not urge a further acquaintance. “As long as you're
not thinking of marrying again, papa,” Jessie had said finally, “I don't
see the necessity of our knowing her.” “But suppose I were,” had replied
Mr. Carr with affected humor. “Then you certainly wouldn't care for any
one like her,” his daughter had responded triumphantly. Mr. Carr smiled,
and dropped the subject, but it is probable that his daughters' want of
sympathy with his acquaintances did not in the least interfere with
his social prestige. A gentleman in all his relations and under all
circumstances, even his cold scientific abstraction was provocative;
rich men envied his lofty ignorance of the smaller details of
money-making, even while they mistrusted his judgment. A man still well
preserved, and free from weakening vices, he was a dangerous rival to
younger and faster San Francisco, in the eyes of the sex, who knew how
to value a repose they did not themselves possess.
Suddenly Mr. Carr announced his intention of proceeding to Sacramento,
on further business of the mine, leaving his two daughters in the family
of a wealthy friend until he should return for them. He opposed their
ready suggestion to return to Devil's Ford with a new and unnecessary
inflexibility: he even met their compromise to accompany him to
Sacramento with equal decision.
“You will be only in my way,” he said curtly. “Enjoy yourselves here
while you can.”
Thus left to themselves, they tried to accept his advice. Possibly some
slight reaction to their previous disappointment may have already set
in; perhaps they felt any distraction to be a relief to their anxiety
about their father. They went out more; they frequented concerts and
parties; they accepted, with their host and his family, an invitation to
one of those opulent and barbaric entertainments with which a noted San
Francisco millionaire distracted his rare moments of reflection in his
gorgeous palace on the hills. Here they could at least be once more in
the country they loved, albeit of a milder and less heroic type, and a
little degraded by the overlapping tinsel and scattered spangles of the
palace.
It was a three days' fete; the style and choice of amusements left to
the guests, and an equal and active participation by no means necessary
or indispensable. Consequently, when Christie and Jessie Carr proposed
a ride through the adjacent canyon on the second morning, they had no
difficulty in finding horses in the well-furnished stables of their
opulent entertainers, nor cavaliers among the other guests, who were
too happy to find favor in the eyes of the two pretty girls who were
supposed to be abnormally fastidious and refined. Christie's escort
was a good-natured young banker, shrewd enough to avoid demonstrative
attentions, and lucky enough to interest her during the ride with his
clear and half-humorous reflections on some of the business speculations
of the day. If his ideas were occasionally too clever, and not always
consistent with a high sense of honor, she was none the less interested
to know the ethics of that world of speculation into which her father
had plunged, and the more convinced, with mingled sense of pride and
anxiety, that his still dominant gentlemanhood would prevent his coping
with it on equal terms. Nor could she help contrasting the conversation
of the sharp-witted man at her side with what she still remembered of
the vague, touching, boyish enthusiasm of the millionaires of Devil's
Ford. Had her escort guessed the result of this contrast, he would
hardly have been as gratified as he was with the grave attention of her
beautiful eyes.
The fascination of a gracious day and the leafy solitude of the canyon
led them to prolong their ride beyond the proposed limit, and it became
necessary towards sunset for them to seek some shorter cut home.
“There's a vaquero in yonder field,” said Christie's escort, who was
riding with her a little in advance of the others, “and those fellows
know every trail that a horse can follow. I'll ride on, intercept him,
and try my Spanish on him. If I miss him, as he's galloping on, you
might try your hand on him yourself. He'll understand your eyes, Miss
Carr, in any language.”
As he dashed away, to cover his first audacity of compliment, Christie
lifted the eyes thus apostrophized to the opposite field. The vaquero,
who was chasing some cattle, was evidently too preoccupied to heed the
shouts of her companion, and wheeling round suddenly to intercept one
of the deviating fugitives, permitted Christie's escort to dash past him
before that gentleman could rein in his excited steed. This brought the
vaquero directly in her path. Perceiving her, he threw his horse back on
its haunches, to prevent a collision. Christie rode up to him, suddenly
uttered a cry, and halted. For before her, sunburnt in cheek and throat,
darker in the free growth of moustache and curling hair, clad in the
coarse, picturesque finery of his class, undisguised only in his boyish
beauty, sat George Kearney.
The blood, that had forsaken her astonished face, rushed as quickly
back. His eyes, which had suddenly sparkled with an electrical glow,
sank before hers. His hand dropped, and his cheek flushed with a dark
embarrassment.
“You here, Mr. Kearney? How strange!--but how glad I am to meet you
again!”
She tried to smile; her voice trembled, and her little hand shook as she
extended it to him.
He raised his dark eyes quickly, and impulsively urged his horse to her
side. But, as if suddenly awakening to the reality of the situation,
he glanced at her hurriedly, down at his barbaric finery, and threw a
searching look towards her escort.
In an instant Christie saw the infelicity of her position, and its
dangers. The words of Whiskey Dick, “He wouldn't stand that,” flashed
across her mind. There was no time to lose. The banker had already
gained control over his horse, and was approaching them, all unconscious
of the fixed stare with which George was regarding him. Christie hastily
seized the hand which he had allowed to fall at his side, and said
quickly:--
“Will you ride with me a little way, Mr. Kearney?”
He turned the same searching look upon her. She met it clearly and
steadily; he even thought reproachfully.
“Do!” she said hurriedly. “I ask it as a favor. I want to speak to you.
Jessie and I are here alone. Father is away. YOU are one of our oldest
friends.”
He hesitated. She turned to the astonished young banker, who rode up.
“I have just met an old friend. Will you please ride back as quickly as
you can, and tell Jessie that Mr. Kearney is here, and ask her to join
us?”
She watched her dazed escort, still speechless from the spectacle of the
fastidious Miss Carr tete-a-tete with a common Mexican vaquero, gallop
off in the direction of the canyon, and then turned to George.
“Now take me home, the shortest way, as quick as you can.”
“Home?” echoed George.
“I mean to Mr. Prince's house. Quick! before they can come up to us.”
He mechanically put spurs to his horse; she followed. They presently
struck into a trail that soon diverged again into a disused logging
track through the woods.
“This is the short cut to Prince's, by two miles,” he said, as they
entered the woods.
As they were still galloping, without exchanging a word, Christie began
to slacken her speed; George did the same. They were safe from intrusion
at the present, even if the others had found the short cut. Christie,
bold and self-reliant a moment ago, suddenly found herself growing weak
and embarrassed. What had she done?
She checked her horse suddenly.
“Perhaps we had better wait for them,” she said timidly.
George had not raised his eyes to hers.
“You said you wanted to hurry home,” he replied gently, passing his hand
along his mustang's velvety neck, “and--and you had something to say to
me.”
“Certainly,” she answered, with a faint laugh. “I'm so astonished at
meeting you here. I'm quite bewildered. You are living here; you have
forsaken us to buy a ranche?” she continued, looking at him attentively.
His brow colored slightly.
“No, I'm living here, but I have bought no ranche. I'm only a hired man
on somebody else's ranche, to look after the cattle.”
He saw her beautiful eyes fill with astonishment and--something else.
His brow cleared; he went on, with his old boyish laugh:
“No, Miss Carr. The fact is, I'm dead broke. I've lost everything since
I saw you last. But as I know how to ride, and I'm not afraid of work, I
manage to keep along.”
“You have lost money in--in the mines?” said Christie suddenly.
“No”--he replied quickly, evading her eyes. “My brother has my interest,
you know. I've been foolish on my own account solely. You know I'm
rather inclined to that sort of thing. But as long as my folly don't
affect others, I can stand it.”
“But it may affect others--and THEY may not think of it as folly--” She
stopped short, confused by his brightening color and eyes. “I mean--Oh,
Mr. Kearney, I want you to be frank with me. I know nothing of business,
but I know there has been trouble about the mine at Devil's Ford. Tell
me honestly, has my father anything to do with it? If I thought that
through any imprudence of his, you had suffered--if I believed that
you could trace any misfortune of yours to him--to US--I should never
forgive myself”--she stopped and flashed a single look at him--“I should
never forgive YOU for abandoning us.”
The look of pain which had at first shown itself in his face, which
never concealed anything, passed, and a quick smile followed her
feminine anticlimax.
“Miss Carr,” he said, with boyish eagerness, “if any man suggested to me
that your father wasn't the brightest and best of his kind--too wise and
clever for the fools about him to understand--I'd--I'd shoot him.”
Confused by his ready and gracious disclaimer of what she had NOT
intended to say, there was nothing left for her but to rush upon
what she really intended to say, with what she felt was shameful
precipitation.
“One word more, Mr. Kearney,” she began, looking down, but feeling the
color come to her face as she spoke. “When you spoke to me the day you
left, you must have thought me hard and cruel. When I tell you that I
thought you were alluding to Jessie and some feeling you had for her--”
“For Jessie!” echoed George.
“You will understand that--that--”
“That what?” said George, drawing nearer to her.
“That I was only speaking as she might have spoken had you talked to her
of me,” added Christie hurriedly, slightly backing her horse away from
him.
But this was not so easy, as George was the better rider, and by an
imperceptible movement of his wrist and foot had glued his horse to her
side. “He will go now,” she had thought, but he didn't.
“We must ride on,” she suggested faintly.
“No,” he said with a sudden dropping of his boyish manner and a slight
lifting of his head. “We must ride together no further, Miss Carr. I
must go back to the work I am hired to do, and you must go on with
your party, whom I hear coming. But when we part here you must bid me
good-by--not as Jessie's sister--but as Christie--the one--the only
woman that I love, or that I ever have loved.”
He held out his hand. With the recollection of their previous parting,
she tremblingly advanced her own. He took it, but did not raise it to
his lips. And it was she who found herself half confusedly retaining his
hand in hers, until she dropped it with a blush.
“Then is this the reason you give for deserting us as you have deserted
Devil's Ford?” she said coldly.
He lifted his eyes to her with a strange smile, and said, “Yes,” wheeled
his horse, and disappeared in the forest.
He had left her thus abruptly once before, kissed, blushing, and
indignant. He was leaving her now, unkissed, but white and indignant.
Yet she was so self-possessed when the party joined her, that the
singular rencontre and her explanation of the stranger's sudden
departure excited no further comment. Only Jessie managed to whisper in
her ear,--
“I hope you are satisfied now that it wasn't me he meant?”
“Not at all,” said Christie coldly.