On the back porch of the "office," young Lockwood--his boots, stained
with the mud of the mines and with candle-drippings, on the rail--sat
smoking his pipe and looking off down the cañon.
It was early in the evening. Lockwood, because he had heard the laughter
and horseplay of the men of the night shift as they went down the cañon
from the bunk-house to the tunnel-mouth, knew that it was a little after
seven. It would not be necessary to go indoors and begin work on the
columns of figures of his pay-roll for another hour yet. He knocked the
ashes out of his pipe, refilled and lighted it--stoppering with his
match-box--and shot a wavering blue wreath out over the porch railing.
Then he resettled himself in his tilted chair, hooked his thumbs into
his belt, and fetched a long breath.
For the last few moments he had been considering, in that comfortable
spirit of relaxed attention that comes with the after-dinner tobacco,
two subjects: first, the beauty of the evening; second, the temperament,
character, and appearance of Felice Zavalla.
As for the evening, there could be no two opinions about that. It was
charming. The Hand-over-fist Gravel Mine, though not in the higher
Sierras, was sufficiently above the level of the mere foot-hills to be
in the sphere of influence of the greater mountains. Also, it was
remote, difficult of access. Iowa Hill, the nearest post-office, was a
good eight miles distant, by trail, across the Indian River. It was
sixteen miles by stage from Iowa Hill to Colfax, on the line of the
Overland Railroad, and all of a hundred miles from Colfax to San
Francisco.
To Lockwood's mind this isolation was in itself an attraction. Tucked
away in this fold of the Sierras, forgotten, remote, the little
community of a hundred souls that comprised the _personnel_ of the
Hand-over-fist lived out its life with the completeness of an
independent State, having its own government, its own institutions and
customs. Besides all this, it had its own dramas as well--little
complications that developed with the swiftness of whirlpools, and that
trended toward culmination with true Western directness. Lockwood,
college-bred--he was a graduate of the Columbia School of Mines--found
the life interesting.
On this particular evening he sat over his pipe rather longer than
usual, seduced by the beauty of the scene and the moment. It was very
quiet. The prolonged rumble of the mine's stamp-mill came to his ears in
a ceaseless diapason, but the sound was so much a matter of course that
Lockwood no longer heard it. The millions of pines and redwoods that
covered the flanks of the mountains were absolutely still. No wind was
stirring in their needles. But the chorus of tree-toads, dry, staccato,
was as incessant as the pounding of the mill. Far-off--thousands of
miles, it seemed--an owl was hooting, three velvet-soft notes at exact
intervals. A cow in the stable near at hand lay down with a long breath,
while from the back veranda of Chino Zavalla's cabin came the clear
voice of Felice singing "The Spanish Cavalier" while she washed the
dishes.
The twilight was fading; the glory that had blazed in cloudless
vermilion and gold over the divide was dying down like receding music.
The mountains were purple-black. From the cañon rose the night mist,
pale blue, while above it stood the smoke from the mill, a motionless
plume of sable, shot through by the last ruddiness of the afterglow.
The air was full of pleasant odours--the smell of wood fires from the
cabins of the married men and from the ovens of the cookhouse, the
ammoniacal whiffs from the stables, the smell of ripening apples from
"Boston's" orchard--while over all and through all came the perfume of
the witch-hazel and tar-weed from the forests and mountain sides, as
pungent as myrrh, as aromatic as aloes.
"And if I should fall,
In vain I would call,"
sang Felice.
Lockwood took his pipe from his teeth and put back his head to listen.
Felice had as good a voice as so pretty a young woman should have had.
She was twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, and was incontestably
the beauty of the camp. She was Mexican-Spanish, tall and very slender,
black-haired, as lithe as a cat, with a cat's green eyes and with all of
a cat's purring, ingratiating insinuation.
Lockwood could not have told exactly just how the first familiarity
between him and Felice had arisen. It had grown by almost imperceptible
degrees up to a certain point; now it was a chance meeting on the trail
between the office and the mill, now a fragment of conversation apropos
of a letter to be mailed, now a question as to some regulation of the
camp, now a detail of repairs done to the cabin wherein Felice lived. As
said above, up to a certain point the process of "getting acquainted"
had been gradual, and on Lockwood's part unconscious; but beyond that
point affairs had progressed rapidly.
At first Felice had been, for Lockwood, a pretty woman, neither more nor
less; but by degrees she emerged from this vague classification: she
became a very pretty woman. Then she became a personality; she occupied
a place within the circle which Lockwood called his world, his life. For
the past months this place had, perforce, to be enlarged. Lockwood
allowed it to expand. To make room for Felice, he thrust aside, or
allowed the idea of Felice to thrust aside, other objects which long had
sat secure. The invasion of the woman into the sphere of his existence
developed at the end into a thing veritably headlong. Deep-seated
convictions, old-established beliefs and ideals, even the two landmarks
right and wrong, were hustled and shouldered about as the invasion
widened and penetrated. This state of affairs was further complicated by
the fact that Felice was the wife of Chino Zavalla, shift-boss of No. 4
gang in the new workings.