PART II.

Produced by Donald Lainson

THE TWINS OF TABLE MOUNTAIN AND OTHER STORIES

By Bret Harte

CONTENTS

I. THE TWINS OF TABLE MOUNTAIN

II. AN HEIRESS OF RED DOG

III. THE GREAT DEADWOOD MYSTERY

IV. A LEGEND OF SAMMTSTADT

V. VIEWS FROM A GERMAN SPION

THE TWINS OF TABLE MOUNTAIN.

CHAPTER I.

A CLOUD ON THE MOUNTAIN.

They lived on the verge of a vast stony level, upheaved so far above

the surrounding country that its vague outlines, viewed from the nearest

valley, seemed a mere cloud-streak resting upon the lesser hills. The

rush and roar of the turbulent river that washed its eastern base were

lost at that height; the winds that strove with the giant pines that

half way climbed its flanks spent their fury below the summit; for, at

variance with most meteorological speculation, an eternal calm seemed

to invest this serene altitude. The few Alpine flowers seldom

thrilled their petals to a passing breeze; rain and snow fell alike

perpendicularly, heavily, and monotonously over the granite bowlders

scattered along its brown expanse. Although by actual measurement an

inconsiderable elevation of the Sierran range, and a mere shoulder of

the nearest white-faced peak that glimmered in the west, it seemed

to lie so near the quiet, passionless stars, that at night it caught

something of their calm remoteness.

The articulate utterance of such a locality should have been a whisper;

a laugh or exclamation was discordant; and the ordinary tones of the

human voice on the night of the 15th of May, 1868, had a grotesque

incongruity.

In the thick darkness that clothed the mountain that night, the human

figure would have been lost, or confounded with the outlines of outlying

bowlders, which at such times took upon themselves the vague semblance

of men and animals. Hence the voices in the following colloquy seemed

the more grotesque and incongruous from being the apparent expression

of an upright monolith, ten feet high, on the right, and another mass of

granite, that, reclining, peeped over the verge.

“Hello!”

“Hello yourself!”

“You're late.”

“I lost the trail, and climbed up the slide.”

Here followed a stumble, the clatter of stones down the mountain-side,

and an oath so very human and undignified that it at once relieved the

bowlders of any complicity of expression. The voices, too, were close

together now, and unexpectedly in quite another locality.

“Anything up?”

“Looey Napoleon's declared war agin Germany.”

“Sho-o-o!”

Notwithstanding this exclamation, the interest of the latter speaker was

evidently only polite and perfunctory. What, indeed, were the political

convulsions of the Old World to the dwellers on this serene, isolated

eminence of the New?

“I reckon it's so,” continued the first voice. “French Pete and that

thar feller that keeps the Dutch grocery hev hed a row over it; emptied

their six-shooters into each other. The Dutchman's got two balls in

his leg, and the Frenchman's got an onnessary buttonhole in his

shirt-buzzum, and hez caved in.”

This concise, local corroboration of the conflict of remote nations,

however confirmatory, did not appear to excite any further interest.

Even the last speaker, now that he was in this calm, dispassionate

atmosphere, seemed to lose his own concern in his tidings, and to have

abandoned every thing of a sensational and lower-worldly character in

the pines below. There were a few moments of absolute silence, and then

another stumble. But now the voices of both speakers were quite patient

and philosophical.

“Hold on, and I'll strike a light,” said the second speaker. “I brought

a lantern along, but I didn't light up. I kem out afore sundown, and you

know how it allers is up yer. I didn't want it, and didn't keer to light

up. I forgot you're always a little dazed and strange-like when you

first come up.”

There was a crackle, a flash, and presently a steady glow, which the

surrounding darkness seemed to resent. The faces of the two men thus

revealed were singularly alike. The same thin, narrow outline of jaw and

temple; the same dark, grave eyes; the same brown growth of curly beard

and mustache, which concealed the mouth, and hid what might have been

any individual idiosyncrasy of thought or expression,--showed them to

be brothers, or better known as the “Twins of Table Mountain.” A certain

animation in the face of the second speaker,--the first-comer,--a

certain light in his eye, might have at first distinguished him; but

even this faded out in the steady glow of the lantern, and had no

value as a permanent distinction, for, by the time they had reached

the western verge of the mountain, the two faces had settled into a

homogeneous calmness and melancholy.

The vague horizon of darkness, that a few feet from the lantern still

encompassed them, gave no indication of their progress, until their feet

actually trod the rude planks and thatch that formed the roof of their

habitation; for their cabin half burrowed in the mountain, and half

clung, like a swallow's nest, to the side of the deep declivity that

terminated the northern limit of the summit. Had it not been for the

windlass of a shaft, a coil of rope, and a few heaps of stone and

gravel, which were the only indications of human labor in that stony

field, there was nothing to interrupt its monotonous dead level. And,

when they descended a dozen well-worn steps to the door of their cabin,

they left the summit, as before, lonely, silent, motionless, its long

level uninterrupted, basking in the cold light of the stars.

The simile of a “nest” as applied to the cabin of the brothers was no

mere figure of speech as the light of the lantern first flashed upon it.

The narrow ledge before the door was strewn with feathers. A suggestion

that it might be the home and haunt of predatory birds was promptly

checked by the spectacle of the nailed-up carcasses of a dozen hawks

against the walls, and the outspread wings of an extended eagle

emblazoning the gable above the door, like an armorial bearing. Within

the cabin the walls and chimney-piece were dazzlingly bedecked with the

party-colored wings of jays, yellow-birds, woodpeckers, kingfishers, and

the poly-tinted wood-duck. Yet in that dry, highly-rarefied atmosphere,

there was not the slightest suggestion of odor or decay.

The first speaker hung the lantern upon a hook that dangled from the

rafters, and, going to the broad chimney, kicked the half-dead embers

into a sudden resentful blaze. He then opened a rude cupboard, and,

without looking around, called, “Ruth!”

The second speaker turned his head from the open doorway where he was

leaning, as if listening to something in the darkness, and answered

abstractedly,--

“Rand!”

“I don't believe you have touched grub to-day!”

Ruth grunted out some indifferent reply.

“Thar hezen't been a slice cut off that bacon since I left,” continued

Rand, bringing a side of bacon and some biscuits from the cupboard, and

applying himself to the discussion of them at the table. “You're gettin'

off yer feet, Ruth. What's up?”

Ruth replied by taking an uninvited seat beside him, and resting his

chin on the palms of his hands. He did not eat, but simply transferred

his inattention from the door to the table.

“You're workin' too many hours in the shaft,” continued Rand. “You're

always up to some such d--n fool business when I'm not yer.”

“I dipped a little west to-day,” Ruth went on, without heeding the

brotherly remonstrance, “and struck quartz and pyrites.”

“Thet's you!--allers dippin' west or east for quartz and the color,

instead of keeping on plumb down to the 'cement'!”*

* The local name for gold-bearing alluvial drift,--the bed

of a prehistoric river.

“We've been three years digging for cement,” said Ruth, more in

abstraction than in reproach,--“three years!”

“And we may be three years more,--may be only three days. Why, you

couldn't be more impatient if--if--if you lived in a valley.”

Delivering this tremendous comparison as an unanswerable climax, Rand

applied himself once more to his repast. Ruth, after a moment's pause,

without speaking or looking up, disengaged his hand from under his chin,

and slid it along, palm uppermost, on the table beside his brother.

Thereupon Rand slowly reached forward his left hand, the right being

engaged in conveying victual to his mouth, and laid it on his brother's

palm. The act was evidently an habitual, half mechanical one; for in

a few moments the hands were as gently disengaged, without comment or

expression. At last Rand leaned back in his chair, laid down his knife

and fork, and, complacently loosening the belt that held his revolver,

threw it and the weapon on his bed. Taking out his pipe, and chipping

some tobacco on the table, he said carelessly, “I came a piece through

the woods with Mornie just now.”

The face that Ruth turned upon his brother was very distinct in its

expression at that moment, and quite belied the popular theory that

the twins could not be told apart. “Thet gal,” continued Rand, without

looking up, “is either flighty, or--or suthin',” he added in vague

disgust, pushing the table from him as if it were the lady in question.

“Don't tell me!”

Ruth's eyes quickly sought his brother's, and were as quickly averted,

as he asked hurriedly, “How?”

“What gets me,” continued Rand in a petulant non sequitur, “is that YOU,

my own twin-brother, never lets on about her comin' yer, permiskus like,

when I ain't yer, and you and her gallivantin' and promanadin', and

swoppin' sentiments and mottoes.”

Ruth tried to contradict his blushing face with a laugh of worldly

indifference.

“She came up yer on a sort of pasear.”

“Oh, yes!--a short cut to the creek,” interpolated Rand satirically.

“Last Tuesday or Wednesday,” continued Ruth, with affected

forgetfulness.

“Oh, in course, Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday! You've so many folks

climbing up this yer mountain to call on ye,” continued the ironical

Rand, “that you disremember; only you remembered enough not to tell me.

SHE did. She took me for you, or pretended to.”

The color dropped from Ruth's cheek.

“Took you for me?” he asked, with an awkward laugh.

“Yes,” sneered Rand; “chirped and chattered away about OUR picnic, OUR

nose-gays, and lord knows what! Said she'd keep them blue-jay's wings,

and wear 'em in her hat. Spouted poetry, too,--the same sort o' rot you

get off now and then.”

Ruth laughed again, but rather ostentatiously and nervously.

“Ruth, look yer!”

Ruth faced his brother.

“What's your little game? Do you mean to say you don't know what thet

gal is? Do you mean to say you don't know thet she's the laughing-stock

of the Ferry; thet her father's a d----d old fool, and her mother's a

drunkard and worse; thet she's got any right to be hanging round yer?

You can't mean to marry her, even if you kalkilate to turn me out to do

it, for she wouldn't live alone with ye up here. 'Tain't her kind. And

if I thought you was thinking of--”

“What?” said Ruth, turning upon his brother quickly.

“Oh, thet's right! holler; swear and yell, and break things, do! Tear

round!” continued Rand, kicking his boots off in a corner, “just because

I ask you a civil question. That's brotherly,” he added, jerking his

chair away against the side of the cabin, “ain't it?”

“She's not to blame because her mother drinks, and her father's a

shyster,” said Ruth earnestly and strongly. “The men who make her the

laughing-stock of the Ferry tried to make her something worse, and

failed, and take this sneak's revenge on her. 'Laughing-stock!' Yes,

they knew she could turn the tables on them.”

“Of course; go on! She's better than me. I know I'm a fratricide, that's

what I am,” said Rand, throwing himself on the upper of the two berths

that formed the bedstead of the cabin.

“I've seen her three times,” continued Ruth.

“And you've known me twenty years,” interrupted his brother.

Ruth turned on his heel, and walked towards the door.

“That's right; go on! Why don't you get the chalk?”

Ruth made no reply. Rand descended from the bed, and, taking a piece of

chalk from the shelf, drew a line on the floor, dividing the cabin in

two equal parts.

“You can have the east half,” he said, as he climbed slowly back into

bed.

This mysterious rite was the usual termination of a quarrel between the

twins. Each man kept his half of the cabin until the feud was forgotten.

It was the mark of silence and separation, over which no words of

recrimination, argument, or even explanation, were delivered, until

it was effaced by one or the other. This was considered equivalent to

apology or reconciliation, which each were equally bound in honor to

accept.

It may be remarked that the floor was much whiter at this line of

demarcation, and under the fresh chalk-line appeared the faint evidences

of one recently effaced.

Without apparently heeding this potential ceremony, Ruth remained

leaning against the doorway, looking upon the night, the bulk of whose

profundity and blackness seemed to be gathered below him. The vault

above was serene and tranquil, with a few large far-spaced stars; the

abyss beneath, untroubled by sight or sound. Stepping out upon the

ledge, he leaned far over the shelf that sustained their cabin,

and listened. A faint rhythmical roll, rising and falling in long

undulations against the invisible horizon, to his accustomed ears told

him the wind was blowing among the pines in the valley. Yet, mingling

with this familiar sound, his ear, now morbidly acute, seemed to detect

a stranger inarticulate murmur, as of confused and excited voices,

swelling up from the mysterious depths to the stars above, and again

swallowed up in the gulfs of silence below. He was roused from a

consideration of this phenomenon by a faint glow towards the east, which

at last brightened, until the dark outline of the distant walls of the

valley stood out against the sky. Were his other senses participating in

the delusion of his ears? for with the brightening light came the faint

odor of burning timber.

His face grew anxious as he gazed. At last he rose, and re-entered the

cabin. His eyes fell upon the faint chalk-mark, and, taking his soft

felt hat from his head, with a few practical sweeps of the brim he

brushed away the ominous record of their late estrangement. Going to the

bed whereon Rand lay stretched, open-eyed, he would have laid his hand

upon his arm lightly; but the brother's fingers sought and clasped his

own. “Get up,” he said quietly; “there's a strange fire in the Canyon

head that I can't make out.”

Rand slowly clambered from his shelf, and hand in hand the brothers

stood upon the ledge. “It's a right smart chance beyond the Ferry, and a

piece beyond the Mill, too,” said Rand, shading his eyes with his hand,

from force of habit. “It's in the woods where--” He would have added

where he met Mornie; but it was a point of honor with the twins, after

reconciliation, not to allude to any topic of their recent disagreement.

Ruth dropped his brother's hand. “It doesn't smell like the woods,” he

said slowly.

“Smell!” repeated Rand incredulously. “Why, it's twenty miles in a

bee-line yonder. Smell, indeed!”

Ruth was silent, but presently fell to listening again with his former

abstraction. “You don't hear anything, do you?” he asked after a pause.

“It's blowin' in the pines on the river,” said Rand shortly.

“You don't hear anything else?”

“No.”

“Nothing like--like--like--”

Rand, who had been listening with an intensity that distorted the left

side of his face, interrupted him impatiently.

“Like what?”

“Like a woman sobbin'?”

“Ruth,” said Rand, suddenly looking up in his brother's face, “what's

gone of you?”

Ruth laughed. “The fire's out,” he said, abruptly re-entering the cabin.

“I'm goin' to turn in.”

Rand, following his brother half reproachfully, saw him divest himself

of his clothing, and roll himself in the blankets of his bed.

“Good-night, Randy!”

Rand hesitated. He would have liked to ask his brother another question;

but there was clearly nothing to be done but follow his example.

“Good-night, Ruthy!” he said, and put out the light. As he did so, the

glow in the eastern horizon faded, too, and darkness seemed to well up

from the depths below, and, flowing in the open door, wrapped them in

deeper slumber.

CHAPTER II.

THE CLOUDS GATHER.

Twelve months had elapsed since the quarrel and reconciliation, during

which interval no reference was made by either of the brothers to the

cause which had provoked it. Rand was at work in the shaft, Ruth having

that morning undertaken the replenishment of the larder with game

from the wooded skirt of the mountain. Rand had taken advantage of his

brother's absence to “prospect” in the “drift,”--a proceeding utterly at

variance with his previous condemnation of all such speculative essay;

but Rand, despite his assumption of a superior practical nature, was not

above certain local superstitions. Having that morning put on his gray

flannel shirt wrong side out,--an abstraction recognized among the

miners as the sure forerunner of divination and treasure-discovery,--he

could not forego that opportunity of trying his luck, without

hazarding a dangerous example. He was also conscious of feeling

“chipper,”--another local expression for buoyancy of spirit, not common

to men who work fifty feet below the surface, without the stimulus of

air and sunshine, and not to be overlooked as an important factor in

fortunate adventure. Nevertheless, noon came without the discovery of

any treasure. He had attacked the walls on either side of the lateral

“drift” skilfully, so as to expose their quality without destroying

their cohesive integrity, but had found nothing. Once or twice,

returning to the shaft for rest and air, its grim silence had seemed to

him pervaded with some vague echo of cheerful holiday voices above. This

set him to thinking of his brother's equally extravagant fancy of

the wailing voices in the air on the night of the fire, and of his

attributing it to a lover's abstraction.

“I laid it to his being struck after that gal; and yet,” Rand continued

to himself, “here's me, who haven't been foolin' round no gal, and dog

my skin if I didn't think I heard one singin' up thar!” He put his foot

on the lower round of the ladder, paused, and slowly ascended a dozen

steps. Here he paused again. All at once the whole shaft was filled with

the musical vibrations of a woman's song. Seizing the rope that hung

idly from the windlass, he half climbed, half swung himself, to the

surface.

The voice was there; but the sudden transition to the dazzling level

before him at first blinded his eyes, so that he took in only by degrees

the unwonted spectacle of the singer,--a pretty girl, standing on tiptoe

on a bowlder not a dozen yards from him, utterly absorbed in tying a

gayly-striped neckerchief, evidently taken from her own plump throat, to

the halliards of a freshly-cut hickory-pole newly reared as a flag-staff

beside her. The hickory-pole, the halliards, the fluttering scarf,

the young lady herself, were all glaring innovations on the familiar

landscape; but Rand, with his hand still on the rope, silently and

demurely enjoyed it.

For the better understanding of the general reader, who does not live on

an isolated mountain, it may be observed that the young lady's position

on the rock exhibited some study of POSE, and a certain exaggeration of

attitude, that betrayed the habit of an audience; also that her voice

had an artificial accent that was not wholly unconscious, even in this

lofty solitude. Yet the very next moment, when she turned, and caught

Rand's eye fixed upon her, she started naturally, colored slightly,

uttered that feminine adjuration, “Good Lord! gracious! goodness me!”

which is seldom used in reference to its effect upon the hearer, and

skipped instantly from the bowlder to the ground. Here, however, she

alighted in a POSE, brought the right heel of her neatly-fitting left

boot closely into the hollowed side of her right instep, at the same

moment deftly caught her flying skirt, whipped it around her ankles,

and, slightly raising it behind, permitted the chaste display of an inch

or two of frilled white petticoat. The most irreverent critic of the sex

will, I think, admit that it has some movements that are automatic.

“Hope I didn't disturb ye,” said Rand, pointing to the flag-staff.

The young lady slightly turned her head. “No,” she said; “but I didn't

know anybody was here, of course. Our PARTY”--she emphasized the word,

and accompanied it with a look toward the further extremity of the

plateau, to show she was not alone--“our party climbed this ridge,

and put up this pole as a sign to show they did it.” The ridiculous

self-complacency of this record in the face of a man who was evidently

a dweller on the mountain apparently struck her for the first time. “We

didn't know,” she stammered, looking at the shaft from which Rand had

emerged, “that--that--” She stopped, and, glancing again towards the

distant range where her friends had disappeared, began to edge away.

“They can't be far off,” interposed Rand quietly, as if it were the most

natural thing in the world for the lady to be there. “Table Mountain

ain't as big as all that. Don't you be scared! So you thought nobody

lived up here?”

She turned upon him a pair of honest hazel eyes, which not only

contradicted the somewhat meretricious smartness of her dress, but was

utterly inconsistent with the palpable artificial color of her hair,--an

obvious imitation of a certain popular fashion then known in artistic

circles as the “British Blonde,”--and began to ostentatiously resume a

pair of lemon-colored kid gloves. Having, as it were, thus indicated her

standing and respectability, and put an immeasurable distance between

herself and her bold interlocutor, she said impressively, “We

evidently made a mistake: I will rejoin our party, who will, of course,

apologize.”

“What's your hurry?” said the imperturbable Rand, disengaging himself

from the rope, and walking towards her. “As long as you're up here, you

might stop a spell.”

“I have no wish to intrude; that is, our party certainly has not,”

continued the young lady, pulling the tight gloves, and smoothing the

plump, almost bursting fingers, with an affectation of fashionable ease.

“Oh! I haven't any thing to do just now,” said Rand, “and it's about

grub time, I reckon. Yes, I live here, Ruth and me,--right here.”

The young woman glanced at the shaft.

“No, not down there,” said Rand, following her eye, with a laugh. “Come

here, and I'll show you.”

A strong desire to keep up an appearance of genteel reserve, and an

equally strong inclination to enjoy the adventurous company of this

good-looking, hearty young fellow, made her hesitate. Perhaps she

regretted having undertaken a role of such dignity at the beginning: she

could have been so perfectly natural with this perfectly natural man,

whereas any relaxation now might increase his familiarity. And yet she

was not without a vague suspicion that her dignity and her gloves

were alike thrown away on him,--a fact made the more evident when

Rand stepped to her side, and, without any apparent consciousness of

disrespect or gallantry, laid his large hand, half persuasively, half

fraternally, upon her shoulder, and said, “Oh, come along, do!”

The simple act either exceeded the limits of her forbearance, or decided

the course of her subsequent behavior. She instantly stepped back a

single pace, and drew her left foot slowly and deliberately after her;

then she fixed her eyes and uplifted eyebrows upon the daring hand,

and, taking it by the ends of her thumb and forefinger, lifted it, and

dropped it in mid-air. She then folded her arms. It was the indignant

gesture with which “Alice,” the Pride of Dumballin Village, received the

loathsome advances of the bloated aristocrat, Sir Parkyns Parkyn, and

had at Marysville, a few nights before, brought down the house.

This effect was, I think, however, lost upon Rand. The slight color that

rose to his cheek as he looked down upon his clay-soiled hands was due

to the belief that he had really contaminated her outward superfine

person. But his color quickly passed: his frank, boyish smile returned,

as he said, “It'll rub off. Lord, don't mind that! Thar, now--come on!”

The young woman bit her lip. Then nature triumphed; and she laughed,

although a little scornfully. And then Providence assisted her with the

sudden presentation of two figures, a man and woman, slowly climbing up

over the mountain verge, not far from them. With a cry of “There's Sol,

now!” she forgot her dignity and her confusion, and ran towards them.

Rand stood looking after her neat figure, less concerned in the advent

of the strangers than in her sudden caprice. He was not so young and

inexperienced but that he noted certain ambiguities in her dress and

manner: he was by no means impressed by her dignity. But he could not

help watching her as she appeared to be volubly recounting her late

interview to her companions; and, still unconscious of any impropriety

or obtrusiveness, he lounged down lazily towards her. Her humor had

evidently changed; for she turned an honest, pleased face upon him, as

she girlishly attempted to drag the strangers forward.

The man was plump and short; unlike the natives of the locality, he was

closely cropped and shaven, as if to keep down the strong blue-blackness

of his beard and hair, which nevertheless asserted itself over his round

cheeks and upper lip like a tattooing of Indian ink. The woman at his

side was reserved and indistinctive, with that appearance of being an

unenthusiastic family servant peculiar to some men's wives. When Rand

was within a few feet of him, he started, struck a theatrical attitude,

and, shading his eyes with his hand, cried, “What, do me eyes deceive

me!” burst into a hearty laugh, darted forward, seized Rand's hand, and

shook it briskly.

“Pinkney, Pinkney, my boy! how are you? And this is your little 'prop'?

your quarter-section, your country-seat, that we've been trespassing on,

eh? A nice little spot, cool, sequestered, remote,--a trifle unimproved;

carriage-road as yet unfinished. Ha, ha! But to think of our making

a discovery of this inaccessible mountain, climbing it, sir, for two

mortal hours, christening it 'Sol's Peak,' getting up a flag-pole,

unfurling our standard to the breeze, sir, and then, by Gad, winding up

by finding Pinkney, the festive Pinkney, living on it at home!”

Completely surprised, but still perfectly good-humored, Rand shook the

stranger's right hand warmly, and received on his broad shoulders a

welcoming thwack from the left, without question. “She don't mind her

friends making free with ME evidently,” said Rand to himself, as he

tried to suggest that fact to the young lady in a meaning glance.

The stranger noted his glance, and suddenly passed his hand thoughtfully

over his shaven cheeks. “No,” he said--“yes, surely, I forget--yes, I

see; of course you don't! Rosy,” turning to his wife, “of course Pinkney

doesn't know Phemie, eh?”

“No, nor ME either, Sol,” said that lady warningly.

“Certainly!” continued Sol. “It's his misfortune. You weren't with me

at Gold Hill.--Allow me,” he said, turning to Rand, “to present Mrs. Sol

Saunders, wife of the undersigned, and Miss Euphemia Neville, otherwise

known as the 'Marysville Pet,' the best variety actress known on the

provincial boards. Played Ophelia at Marysville, Friday; domestic drama

at Gold Hill, Saturday; Sunday night, four songs in character, different

dress each time, and a clog-dance. The best clog-dance on the Pacific

Slope,” he added in a stage aside. “The minstrels are crazy to get her

in 'Frisco. But money can't buy her--prefers the legitimate drama to

this sort of thing.” Here he took a few steps of a jig, to which the

“Marysville Pet” beat time with her feet, and concluded with a laugh

and a wink--the combined expression of an artist's admiration for her

ability, and a man of the world's scepticism of feminine ambition.

Miss Euphemia responded to the formal introduction by extending her hand

frankly with a re-assuring smile to Rand, and an utter obliviousness of

her former hauteur. Rand shook it warmly, and then dropped carelessly on

a rock beside them.

“And you never told me you lived up here in the attic, you rascal!”

continued Sol with a laugh.

“No,” replied Rand simply. “How could I? I never saw you before, that I

remember.”

Miss Euphemia stared at Sol. Mrs. Sol looked up in her lord's face, and

folded her arms in a resigned expression. Sol rose to his feet again,

and shaded his eyes with his hand, but this time quite seriously, and

gazed at Rand's smiling face.

“Good Lord! Do you mean to say your name isn't Pinkney?” he asked, with

a half embarrassed laugh.

“It IS Pinkney,” said Rand; “but I never met you before.”

“Didn't you come to see a young lady that joined my troupe at Gold Hill

last month, and say you'd meet me at Keeler's Ferry in a day or two?”

“No-o-o,” said Rand, with a good-humored laugh. “I haven't left this

mountain for two months.”

He might have added more; but his attention was directed to Miss

Euphemia, who during this short dialogue, having stuffed alternately her

handkerchief, the corner of her mantle, and her gloves, into her mouth,

restrained herself no longer, but gave way to an uncontrollable fit

of laughter. “O Sol!” she gasped explanatorily, as she threw herself

alternately against him, Mrs. Sol, and a bowlder, “you'll kill me yet!

O Lord! first we take possession of this man's property, then we claim

HIM.” The contemplation of this humorous climax affected her so that

she was fain at last to walk away, and confide the rest of her speech to

space.

Sol joined in the laugh until his wife plucked his sleeve, and whispered

something in his ear. In an instant his face became at once mysterious

and demure. “I owe you an apology,” he said, turning to Rand, but in a

voice ostentatiously pitched high enough for Miss Euphemia to overhear:

“I see I have made a mistake. A resemblance--only a mere resemblance,

as I look at you now--led me astray. Of course you don't know any young

lady in the profession?”

“Of course he doesn't, Sol,” said Miss Euphemia. “I could have told you

that. He didn't even know ME!”

The voice and mock-heroic attitude of the speaker was enough to relieve

the general embarrassment with a laugh. Rand, now pleasantly conscious

of only Miss Euphemia's presence, again offered the hospitality of his

cabin, with the polite recognition of her friends in the sentence, “and

you might as well come along too.”

“But won't we incommode the lady of the house?” said Mrs. Sol politely.

“What lady of the house”? said Rand almost angrily.

“Why, Ruth, you know!”

It was Rand's turn to become hilarious. “Ruth,” he said, “is short

for Rutherford, my brother.” His laugh, however, was echoed only by

Euphemia.

“Then you have a brother?” said Mrs. Sol benignly.

“Yes,” said Rand: “he will be here soon.” A sudden thought dropped the

color from his cheek. “Look here,” he said, turning impulsively upon

Sol. “I have a brother, a twin-brother. It couldn't be HIM--”

Sol was conscious of a significant feminine pressure on his right arm.

He was equal to the emergency. “I think not,” he said dubiously, “unless

your brother's hair is much darker than yours. Yes! now I look at you,

yours is brown. He has a mole on his right cheek hasn't he?”

The red came quickly back to Rand's boyish face. He laughed. “No, sir:

my brother's hair is, if any thing, a shade lighter than mine, and nary

mole. Come along!”

And leading the way, Rand disclosed the narrow steps winding down to the

shelf on which the cabin hung. “Be careful,” said Rand, taking the now

unresisting hand of the “Marysville Pet” as they descended: “a step that

way, and down you go two thousand feet on the top of a pine-tree.”

But the girl's slight cry of alarm was presently changed to one of

unaffected pleasure as they stood on the rocky platform. “It isn't a

house: it's a NEST, and the loveliest!” said Euphemia breathlessly.

“It's a scene, a perfect scene, sir!” said Sol, enraptured. “I shall

take the liberty of bringing my scene-painter to sketch it some day.

It would do for 'The Mountaineer's Bride' superbly, or,” continued

the little man, warming through the blue-black border of his face with

professional enthusiasm, “it's enough to make a play itself. 'The Cot on

the Crags.' Last scene--moonlight--the struggle on the ledge! The Lady

of the Crags throws herself from the beetling heights!--A shriek from

the depths--a woman's wail!”

“Dry up!” sharply interrupted Rand, to whom this speech recalled his

brother's half-forgotten strangeness. “Look at the prospect.”

In the full noon of a cloudless day, beneath them a tumultuous sea of

pines surged, heaved, rode in giant crests, stretched and lost itself

in the ghostly, snow-peaked horizon. The thronging woods choked every

defile, swept every crest, filled every valley with its dark-green

tilting spears, and left only Table Mountain sunlit and bare. Here and

there were profound olive depths, over which the gray hawk hung lazily,

and into which blue jays dipped. A faint, dull yellowish streak marked

an occasional watercourse; a deeper reddish ribbon, the mountain road

and its overhanging murky cloud of dust.

“Is it quite safe here?” asked Mrs. Sol, eying the little cabin. “I mean

from storms?”

“It never blows up here,” replied Rand, “and nothing happens.”

“It must be lovely,” said Euphemia, clasping her hands.

“It IS that,” said Rand proudly. “It's four years since Ruth and I took

up this yer claim, and raised this shanty. In that four years we haven't

left it alone a night, or cared to. It's only big enough for two, and

them two must be brothers. It wouldn't do for mere pardners to live here

alone,--they couldn't do it. It wouldn't be exactly the thing for man

and wife to shut themselves up here alone. But Ruth and me know

each other's ways, and here we'll stay until we've made a pile. We

sometimes--one of us--takes a pasear to the Ferry to buy provisions; but

we're glad to crawl up to the back of old 'Table' at night.”

“You're quite out of the world here, then?” suggested Mrs. Sol.

“That's it, just it! We're out of the world,--out of rows, out of

liquor, out of cards, out of bad company, out of temptation. Cussedness

and foolishness hez got to follow us up here to find us, and there's too

many ready to climb down to them things to tempt 'em to come up to us.”

There was a little boyish conceit in his tone, as he stood there, not

altogether unbecoming his fresh color and simplicity. Yet, when his

eyes met those of Miss Euphemia, he colored, he hardly knew why, and the

young lady herself blushed rosily.

When the neat cabin, with its decorated walls, and squirrel and wild-cat

skins, was duly admired, the luncheon-basket of the Saunders party was

re-enforced by provisions from Rand's larder, and spread upon the

ledge; the dimensions of the cabin not admitting four. Under the potent

influence of a bottle, Sol became hilarious and professional. The “Pet”

was induced to favor the company with a recitation, and, under the plea

of teaching Rand, to perform the clog-dance with both gentlemen. Then

there was an interval, in which Rand and Euphemia wandered a little way

down the mountain-side to gather laurel, leaving Mr. Sol to his siesta

on a rock, and Mrs. Sol to take some knitting from the basket, and sit

beside him.

When Rand and his companion had disappeared, Mrs. Sol nudged her

sleeping partner. “Do you think that WAS the brother?”

Sol yawned. “Sure of it. They're as like as two peas, in looks.”

“Why didn't you tell him so, then?”

“Will you tell me, my dear, why you stopped me when I began?”

“Because something was said about Ruth being here; and I supposed Ruth

was a woman, and perhaps Pinkney's wife, and knew you'd be putting your

foot in it by talking of that other woman. I supposed it was for fear of

that he denied knowing you.”

“Well, when HE--this Rand--told me he had a twin-brother, he looked so

frightened that I knew he knew nothing of his brother's doings with that

woman, and I threw him off the scent. He's a good fellow, but awfully

green, and I didn't want to worry him with tales. I like him, and I

think Phemie does too.”

“Nonsense! He's a conceited prig! Did you hear his sermon on the world

and its temptations? I wonder if he thought temptation had come up to

him in the person of us professionals out on a picnic. I think it was

positively rude.”

“My dear woman, you're always seeing slights and insults. I tell you

he's taken a shine to Phemie; and he's as good as four seats and a

bouquet to that child next Wednesday evening, to say nothing of the

eclat of getting this St. Simeon--what do you call him?--Stalactites?”

“Stylites,” suggested Mrs. Sol.

“Stylites, off from his pillar here. I'll have a paragraph in the paper,

that the hermit crabs of Table Mountain--”

“Don't be a fool, Sol!”

“The hermit twins of Table Mountain bespoke the chaste performance.”

“One of them being the protector of the well-known Mornie

Nixon,” responded Mrs. Sol, viciously accenting the name with her

knitting-needles.

“Rosy, you're unjust. You're prejudiced by the reports of the town.

Mr. Pinkney's interest in her may be a purely artistic one, although

mistaken. She'll never make a good variety-actress: she's too heavy.

And the boys don't give her a fair show. No woman can make a debut in my

version of 'Somnambula,' and have the front row in the pit say to her in

the sleepwalking scene, 'You're out rather late, Mornie. Kinder forgot

to put on your things, didn't you? Mother sick, I suppose, and you're

goin' for more gin? Hurry along, or you'll ketch it when ye get home.'

Why, you couldn't do it yourself, Rosy!”

To which Mrs. Sol's illogical climax was, that, “bad as Rutherford might

be, this Sunday-school superintendent, Rand, was worse.”

Rand and his companion returned late, but in high spirits. There was

an unnecessary effusiveness in the way in which Euphemia kissed

Mrs. Sol,--the one woman present, who UNDERSTOOD, and was to be

propitiated,--which did not tend to increase Mrs. Sol's good humor.

She had her basket packed all ready for departure; and even the earnest

solicitation of Rand, that they would defer their going until sunset,

produced no effect.

“Mr. Rand--Mr. Pinkney, I mean--says the sunsets here are so lovely,”

pleaded Euphemia.

“There is a rehearsal at seven o'clock, and we have no time to lose,”

said Mrs. Sol significantly.

“I forgot to say,” said the “Marysville Pet” timidly, glancing at Mrs.

Sol, “that Mr. Rand says he will bring his brother on Wednesday night,

and wants four seats in front, so as not to be crowded.”

Sol shook the young man's hand warmly. “You'll not regret it, sir: it's

a surprising, a remarkable performance.”

“I'd like to go a piece down the mountain with you,” said Rand, with

evident sincerity, looking at Miss Euphemia; “but Ruth isn't here yet,

and we make a rule never to leave the place alone. I'll show you the

slide: it's the quickest way to go down. If you meet any one who looks

like me, and talks like me, call him 'Ruth,' and tell him I'm waitin'

for him yer.”

Miss Phemia, the last to go, standing on the verge of the declivity,

here remarked, with a dangerous smile, that, if she met any one who

bore that resemblance, she might be tempted to keep him with her,--a

playfulness that brought the ready color to Rand's cheek. When she

added to this the greater audacity of kissing her hand to him, the

young hermit actually turned away in sheer embarrassment. When he looked

around again, she was gone, and for the first time in his experience the

mountain seemed barren and lonely.

The too sympathetic reader who would rashly deduce from this any newly

awakened sentiment in the virgin heart of Rand would quite misapprehend

that peculiar young man. That singular mixture of boyish inexperience

and mature doubt and disbelief, which was partly the result of his

temperament, and partly of his cloistered life on the mountain, made him

regard his late companions, now that they were gone, and his intimacy

with them, with remorseful distrust. The mountain was barren and lonely,

because it was no longer HIS. It had become a part of the great world,

which four years ago he and his brother had put aside, and in which, as

two self-devoted men, they walked alone. More than that, he believed

he had acquired some understanding of the temptations that assailed

his brother, and the poor little vanities of the “Marysville Pet” were

transformed into the blandishments of a Circe. Rand, who would have

succumbed to a wicked, superior woman, believed he was a saint in

withstanding the foolish weakness of a simple one.

He did not resume his work that day. He paced the mountain, anxiously

awaiting his brother's return, and eager to relate his experiences. He

would go with him to the dramatic entertainment; from his example and

wisdom, Ruth should learn how easily temptation might be overcome. But,

first of all, there should be the fullest exchange of confidences

and explanations. The old rule should be rescinded for once, the old

discussion in regard to Mornie re-opened, and Rand, having convinced his

brother of error, would generously extend his forgiveness.

The sun sank redly. Lingering long upon the ledge before their cabin, it

at last slipped away almost imperceptibly, leaving Rand still wrapped in

revery. Darkness, the smoke of distant fires in the woods, and the faint

evening incense of the pines, crept slowly up; but Ruth came not. The

moon rose, a silver gleam on the farther ridge; and Rand, becoming

uneasy at his brother's prolonged absence, resolved to break another

custom, and leave the summit, to seek him on the trail. He buckled on

his revolvers, seized his gun, when a cry from the depths arrested him.

He leaned over the ledge, and listened. Again the cry arose, and this

time more distinctly. He held his breath: the blood settled around his

heart in superstitious terror. It was the wailing voice of a woman.

“Ruth, Ruth! for God's sake come and help me!”

The blood flew back hotly to Rand's cheek. It was Mornie's voice. By

leaning over the ledge, he could distinguish something moving along the

almost precipitous face of the cliff, where an abandoned trail, long

since broken off and disrupted by the fall of a portion of the ledge,

stopped abruptly a hundred feet below him. Rand knew the trail, a

dangerous one always: in its present condition a single mis-step

would be fatal. Would she make that mis-step? He shook off a horrible

temptation that seemed to be sealing his lips, and paralyzing his

limbs, and almost screamed to her, “Drop on your face, hang on to the

chaparral, and don't move!”

In another instant, with a coil of rope around his arm, he was dashing

down the almost perpendicular “slide.” When he had nearly reached the

level of the abandoned trail, he fastened one end of the rope to a

jutting splinter of granite, and began to “lay out,” and work his

way laterally along the face of the mountain. Presently he struck the

regular trail at the point from which the woman must have diverged.

“It is Rand,” she said, without lifting her head.

“It is,” replied Rand coldly. “Pass the rope under your arms, and I'll

get you back to the trail.”

“Where is Ruth?” she demanded again, without moving. She was trembling,

but with excitement rather than fear.

“I don't know,” returned Rand impatiently. “Come! the ledge is already

crumbling beneath our feet.”

“Let it crumble!” said the woman passionately.

Rand surveyed her with profound disgust, then passed the rope around her

waist, and half lifted, half swung her from her feet. In a few moments

she began to mechanically help herself, and permitted him to guide her

to a place of safety. That reached, she sank down again.

The rising moon shone full upon her face and figure. Through his growing

indignation Rand was still impressed and even startled with the change

the few last months had wrought upon her. In place of the silly,

fanciful, half-hysterical hoyden whom he had known, a matured woman,

strong in passionate self-will, fascinating in a kind of wild, savage

beauty, looked up at him as if to read his very soul.

“What are you staring at?” she said finally. “Why don't you help me on?”

“Where do you want to go?” said Rand quietly.

“Where! Up there!”--she pointed savagely to the top of the

mountain,--“to HIM! Where else should I go?” she said, with a bitter

laugh.

“I've told you he wasn't there,” said Rand roughly. “He hasn't

returned.”

“I'll wait for him--do you hear?--wait for him; stay there till he

comes. If you won't help me, I'll go alone.”

She made a step forward but faltered, staggered, and was obliged to lean

against the mountain for support. Stains of travel were on her dress;

lines of fatigue and pain, and traces of burning passionate tears, were

on her face; her black hair flowed from beneath her gaudy bonnet; and,

shamed out of his brutality, Rand placed his strong arm round her waist,

and half carrying, half supporting her, began the ascent. Her head

dropped wearily on his shoulder; her arm encircled his neck; her hair,

as if caressingly, lay across his breast and hands; her grateful eyes

were close to his; her breath was upon his cheek: and yet his only

consciousness was of the possibly ludicrous figure he might present to

his brother, should he meet him with Mornie Nixon in his arms. Not a

word was spoken by either till they reached the summit. Relieved at

finding his brother still absent, he turned not unkindly toward the

helpless figure on his arm. “I don't see what makes Ruth so late,” he

said. “He's always here by sundown. Perhaps--”

“Perhaps he knows I'm here,” said Mornie, with a bitter laugh.

“I didn't say that,” said Rand, “and I don't think it. What I meant

was, he might have met a party that was picnicking here to-day,--Sol.

Saunders and wife, and Miss Euphemia--”

Mornie flung his arm away from her with a passionate gesture. “THEY

here!--picnicking HERE!--those people HERE!”

“Yes,” said Rand, unconsciously a little ashamed. “They came here

accidentally.”

Mornie's quick passion had subsided: she had sunk again wearily and

helplessly on a rock beside him. “I suppose,” she said, with a weak

laugh--“I suppose, they talked of ME. I suppose they told you how, with

their lies and fair promises, they tricked me out, and set me before an

audience of brutes and laughing hyenas to make merry over. Did they tell

you of the insults that I received?--how the sins of my parents were

flung at me instead of bouquets? Did they tell you they could have

spared me this, but they wanted the few extra dollars taken in at the

door? No!”

“They said nothing of the kind,” replied Rand surlily.

“Then you must have stopped them. You were horrified enough to know that

I had dared to take the only honest way left me to make a living. I know

you, Randolph Pinkney! You'd rather see Joaquin Muriatta, the Mexican

bandit, standing before you to-night with a revolver, than the helpless,

shamed, miserable Mornie Nixon. And you can't help yourself, unless you

throw me over the cliff. Perhaps you'd better,” she said, with a bitter

laugh that faded from her lips as she leaned, pale and breathless,

against the bowlder.

“Ruth will tell you--” began Rand.

“D--n Ruth!”

Rand turned away.

“Stop!” she said suddenly, staggering to her feet. “I'm sick--for all

I know, dying. God grant that it may be so! But, if you are a man, you

will help me to your cabin--to some place where I can lie down NOW, and

be at rest. I'm very, very tired.”

She paused. She would have fallen again; but Rand, seeing more in her

face than her voice interpreted to his sullen ears, took her sullenly

in his arms, and carried her to the cabin. Her eyes glanced around the

bright party-colored walls, and a faint smile came to her lips as she

put aside her bonnet, adorned with a companion pinion of the bright

wings that covered it.

“Which is Ruth's bed?” she asked.

Rand pointed to it.

“Lay me there!”

Rand would have hesitated, but, with another look at her face, complied.

She lay quite still a moment. Presently she said, “Give me some brandy

or whiskey!”

Rand was silent and confused.

“I forgot,” she added half bitterly. “I know you have not that commonest

and cheapest of vices.”

She lay quite still again. Suddenly she raised herself partly on her

elbow, and in a strong, firm voice, said, “Rand!”

“Yes, Mornie.”

“If you are wise and practical, as you assume to be, you will do what I

ask you without a question. If you do it AT ONCE, you may save yourself

and Ruth some trouble, some mortification, and perhaps some remorse and

sorrow. Do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Go to the nearest doctor, and bring him here with you.”

“But YOU!”

Her voice was strong, confident, steady, and patient. “You can safely

leave me until then.”

In another moment Rand was plunging down the “slide.” But it was past

midnight when he struggled over the last bowlder up the ascent, dragging

the half-exhausted medical wisdom of Brown's Ferry on his arm.

“I've been gone long, doctor,” said Rand feverishly, “and she looked SO

death-like when I left. If we should be too late!”

The doctor stopped suddenly, lifted his head, and pricked his ears like

a hound on a peculiar scent. “We ARE too late,” he said, with a slight

professional laugh.

Indignant and horrified, Rand turned upon him.

“Listen,” said the doctor, lifting his hand.

Rand listened, so intently that he heard the familiar moan of the river

below; but the great stony field lay silent before him. And then, borne

across its bare barren bosom, like its own articulation, came faintly

the feeble wail of a new-born babe.

III.

STORM.

The doctor hurried ahead in the darkness. Rand, who had stopped

paralyzed at the ominous sound, started forward again mechanically; but

as the cry arose again more distinctly, and the full significance of

the doctor's words came to him, he faltered, stopped, and, with cheeks

burning with shame and helpless indignation, sank upon a stone beside

the shaft, and, burying his face in his hands, fairly gave way to a

burst of boyish tears. Yet even then the recollection that he had not

cried since, years ago, his mother's dying hands had joined his and

Ruth's childish fingers together, stung him fiercely, and dried his

tears in angry heat upon his cheeks.

How long he sat there, he remembered not; what he thought, he recalled

not. But the wildest and most extravagant plans and resolves availed him

nothing in the face of this forever desecrated home, and this shameful

culmination of his ambitious life on the mountain. Once he thought of

flight; but the reflection that he would still abandon his brother to

shame, perhaps a self-contented shame, checked him hopelessly. Could he

avert the future? He MUST; but how? Yet he could only sit and stare into

the darkness in dumb abstraction.

Sitting there, his eyes fell upon a peculiar object in a crevice of

the ledge beside the shaft. It was the tin pail containing his dinner,

which, according to their custom, it was the duty of the brother who

staid above ground to prepare and place for the brother who worked

below. Ruth must, consequently, have put it there before he left that

morning, and Rand had overlooked it while sharing the repast of the

strangers at noon. At the sight of this dumb witness of their mutual

cares and labors, Rand sighed, half in brotherly sorrow, half in a

selfish sense of injury done him.

He took up the pail mechanically, removed its cover, and--started; for

on top of the carefully bestowed provisions lay a little note, addressed

to him in Ruth's peculiar scrawl.

He opened it with feverish hands, held it in the light of the peaceful

moon, and read as follows:

DEAR, DEAR BROTHER,--When you read this, I shall be far away. I go

because I shall not stay to disgrace you, and because the girl that I

brought trouble upon has gone away too, to hide her disgrace and mine;

and where she goes, Rand, I ought to follow her, and, please God, I

will! I am not as wise or as good as you are, but it seems the best I

can do; and God bless you, dear old Randy, boy! Times and times again

I've wanted to tell you all, and reckoned to do so; but whether you was

sitting before me in the cabin, or working beside me in the drift, I

couldn't get to look upon your honest face, dear brother, and say what

things I'd been keeping from you so long. I'll stay away until I've done

what I ought to do, and if you can say, “Come, Ruth,” I will come; but,

until you can say it, the mountain is yours, Randy, boy, the mine is

yours, the cabin is yours, ALL is yours. Rub out the old chalk-marks,

Rand, as I rub them out here in my--[A few words here were blurred and

indistinct, as if the moon had suddenly become dim-eyed too]. God bless

you, brother!

P.S.--You know I mean Mornie all the time. It's she I'm going to seek;

but don't you think so bad of her as you do, I am so much worse than

she. I wanted to tell you that all along, but I didn't dare. She's run

away from the Ferry half crazy; said she was going to Sacramento, and

I am going there to find her alive or dead. Forgive me, brother! Don't

throw this down right away; hold it in your hand a moment, Randy, boy,

and try hard to think it's my hand in yours. And so good-by, and God

bless you, old Randy!

From your loving brother,

RUTH.

A deep sense of relief overpowered every other feeling in Rand's breast.

It was clear that Ruth had not yet discovered the truth of Mornie's

flight: he was on his way to Sacramento, and before he could return,

Mornie could be removed. Once despatched in some other direction, with

Ruth once more returned and under his brother's guidance, the separation

could be made easy and final. There was evidently no marriage as yet;

and now, the fear of an immediate meeting over, there should be none.

For Rand had already feared this; had recalled the few infelicitous

relations, legal and illegal, which were common to the adjoining

camp,--the flagrantly miserable life of the husband of a San Francisco

anonyma who lived in style at the Ferry, the shameful carousals and more

shameful quarrels of the Frenchman and Mexican woman who “kept house”

at “the Crossing,” the awful spectacle of the three half-bred Indian

children who played before the cabin of a fellow miner and townsman.

Thank Heaven, the Eagle's Nest on Table Mountain should never be pointed

at from the valley as another--

A heavy hand upon his arm brought him trembling to his feet. He turned,

and met the half-anxious, half-contemptuous glance of the doctor.

“I'm sorry to disturb you,” he said dryly; “but it's about time you or

somebody else put in an appearance at that cabin. Luckily for HER, she's

one woman in a thousand; has had her wits about her better than some

folks I know, and has left me little to do but make her comfortable. But

she's gone through too much,--fought her little fight too gallantly,--is

altogether too much of a trump to be played off upon now. So rise up

out of that, young man, pick up your scattered faculties, and fetch a

woman--some sensible creature of her own sex--to look after her; for,

without wishing to be personal, I'm d----d if I trust her to the likes

of you.”

There was no mistaking Dr. Duchesne' s voice and manner; and Rand

was affected by it, as most people were throughout the valley of the

Stanislaus. But he turned upon him his frank and boyish face, and said

simply, “But I don't know any woman, or where to get one.”

The doctor looked at him again. “Well, I'll find you some one,” he said,

softening.

“Thank you!” said Rand.

The doctor was disappearing. With an effort Rand recalled him. “One

moment, doctor.” He hesitated, and his cheeks were glowing. “You'll

please say nothing about this down there”--he pointed to the

valley--“for a time. And you'll say to the woman you send--”

Dr. Duchesne, whose resolute lips were sealed upon the secrets of half

Tuolumne County, interrupted him scornfully. “I cannot answer for the

woman--you must talk to her yourself. As for me, generally I keep

my professional visits to myself; but--” he laid his hand on Rand's

arm--“if I find out you're putting on any airs to that poor creature,

if, on my next visit, her lips or her pulse tell me you haven't been

acting on the square to her, I'll drop a hint to drunken old Nixon where

his daughter is hidden. I reckon she could stand his brutality better

than yours. Good-night!”

In another moment he was gone. Rand, who had held back his quick tongue,

feeling himself in the power of this man, once more alone, sank on a

rock, and buried his face in his hands. Recalling himself in a moment,

he rose, wiped his hot eyelids, and staggered toward the cabin. It was

quite still now. He paused on the topmost step, and listened: there

was no sound from the ledge, or the Eagle's Nest that clung to it. Half

timidly he descended the winding steps, and paused before the door

of the cabin. “Mornie,” he said, in a dry, metallic voice, whose

only indication of the presence of sickness was in the lowness of its

pitch,--“Mornie!” There was no reply. “Mornie,” he repeated impatiently,

“it's me,--Rand. If you want anything, you're to call me. I am just

outside.” Still no answer came from the silent cabin. He pushed open the

door gently, hesitated, and stepped over the threshold.

A change in the interior of the cabin within the last few hours showed

a new presence. The guns, shovels, picks, and blankets had disappeared;

the two chairs were drawn against the wall, the table placed by the

bedside. The swinging-lantern was shaded towards the bed,--the object of

Rand's attention. On that bed, his brother's bed, lay a helpless woman,

pale from the long black hair that matted her damp forehead, and clung

to her hollow cheeks. Her face was turned to the wall, so that the

softened light fell upon her profile, which to Rand at that moment

seemed even noble and strong. But the next moment his eye fell upon the

shoulder and arm that lay nearest to him, and the little bundle, swathed

in flannel, that it clasped to her breast. His brow grew dark as

he gazed. The sleeping woman moved. Perhaps it was an instinctive

consciousness of his presence; perhaps it was only the current of

cold air from the opened door: but she shuddered slightly, and, still

unconscious, drew the child as if away from HIM, and nearer to her

breast. The shamed blood rushed to Rand's face; and saying half aloud,

“I'm not going to take your precious babe away from you,” he turned in

half-boyish pettishness away. Nevertheless he came back again shortly to

the bedside, and gazed upon them both. She certainly did look altogether

more ladylike, and less aggressive, lying there so still: sickness, that

cheap refining process of some natures, was not unbecoming to her. But

this bundle! A boyish curiosity, stronger than even his strong objection

to the whole episode, was steadily impelling him to lift the blanket

from it. “I suppose she'd waken if I did,” said Rand; “but I'd like to

know what right the doctor had to wrap it up in my best flannel shirt.”

This fresh grievance, the fruit of his curiosity, sent him away again to

meditate on the ledge. After a few moments he returned again, opened the

cupboard at the foot of the bed softly, took thence a piece of chalk,

and scrawled in large letters upon the door of the cupboard, “If you

want anything, sing out: I'm just outside.--RAND.” This done, he took a

blanket and bear-skin from the corner, and walked to the door. But here

he paused, looked back at the inscription (evidently not satisfied with

it), returned, took up the chalk, added a line, but rubbed it out

again, repeated this operation a few times until he produced the polite

postscript,--“Hope you'll be better soon.” Then he retreated to the

ledge, spread the bear-skin beside the door, and, rolling himself in

a blanket, lit his pipe for his night-long vigil. But Rand, although

a martyr, a philosopher, and a moralist, was young. In less than ten

minutes the pipe dropped from his lips, and he was asleep.

He awoke with a strange sense of heat and suffocation, and with

difficulty shook off his covering. Rubbing his eyes, he discovered that

an extra blanket had in some mysterious way been added in the night; and

beneath his head was a pillow he had no recollection of placing there

when he went to sleep. By degrees the events of the past night forced

themselves upon his benumbed faculties, and he sat up. The sun was

riding high; the door of the cabin was open. Stretching himself, he

staggered to his feet, and looked in through the yawning crack at the

hinges. He rubbed his eyes again. Was he still asleep, and followed by

a dream of yesterday? For there, even in the very attitude he remembered

to have seen her sitting at her luncheon on the previous day, with her

knitting on her lap, sat Mrs. Sol Saunders! What did it mean? or had she

really been sitting there ever since, and all the events that followed

only a dream?

A hand was laid upon his arm; and, turning, he saw the murky black eyes

and Indian-inked beard of Sol beside him. That gentleman put his finger

on his lips with a theatrical gesture, and then, slowly retreating in

the well-known manner of the buried Majesty of Denmark, waved him, like

another Hamlet, to a remoter part of the ledge. This reached, he grasped

Rand warmly by the hand, shook it heartily, and said, “It's all right,

my boy; all right!”

“But--” began Rand. The hot blood flowed to his cheeks: he stammered,

and stopped short.

“It's all right, I say! Don't you mind! We'll pull you through.”

“But, Mrs. Sol! what does she--”

“Rosey has taken the matter in hand, sir; and when that woman takes a

matter in hand, whether it's a baby or a rehearsal, sir, she makes it

buzz.”

“But how did she know?” stammered Rand.

“How? Well, sir, the scene opened something like this,” said Sol

professionally. “Curtain rises on me and Mrs. Sol. Domestic

interior: practicable chairs, table, books, newspapers. Enter Dr.

Duchesne,--eccentric character part, very popular with the

boys,--tells off-hand affecting story of strange woman--one 'more

unfortunate'--having baby in Eagle's Nest, lonely place on 'peaks

of Snowdon,' midnight; eagles screaming, you know, and far down

unfathomable depths; only attendant, cold-blooded ruffian, evidently

father of child, with sinister designs on child and mother.”

“He didn't say THAT!” said Rand, with an agonized smile.

“Order! Sit down in front!” continued Sol easily. “Mrs. Sol--highly

interested, a mother herself--demands name of place. 'Table Mountain.'

No; it cannot be--it is! Excitement. Mystery! Rosey rises to

occasion--comes to front: 'Some one must go; I--I--will go myself!'

Myself, coming to center: 'Not alone, dearest; I--I will accompany you!'

A shriek at right upper center. Enter the 'Marysville Pet.' 'I

have heard all. 'Tis a base calumny. It cannot be HE--Randolph!

Never!'--'Dare you accompany us will!' Tableau.

“Is Miss Euphemia--here?” gasped Rand, practical even in his

embarrassment.

“Or-r-rder! Scene second. Summit of mountain--moonlight Peaks of Snowdon

in distance. Right--lonely cabin. Enter slowly up defile, Sol, Mrs. Sol,

the 'Pet.' Advance slowly to cabin. Suppressed shriek from the

'Pet,' who rushes to recumbent figure--Left--discovered lying beside

cabin-door. ''Tis he! Hist! he sleeps!' Throws blanket over him, and

retires up stage--so.” Here Sol achieved a vile imitation of the “Pet's”

most enchanting stage-manner. “Mrs. Sol advances--Center--throws open

door. Shriek! ''Tis Mornie, the lost found!' The 'Pet' advances: 'And

the father is?'--'Not Rand!' The 'Pet' kneeling: 'Just Heaven, I thank

thee!' No, it is--'”

“Hush!” said Rand appealingly, looking toward the cabin.

“Hush it is!” said the actor good-naturedly. “But it's all right, Mr.

Rand: we'll pull you through.”

Later in the morning, Rand learned that Mornie's ill-fated connection

with the Star Variety Troupe had been a source of anxiety to Mrs. Sol,

and she had reproached herself for the girl's infelicitous debut.

“But, Lord bless you, Mr. Rand!” said Sol, “it was all in the way of

business. She came to us--was fresh and new. Her chance, looking at

it professionally, was as good as any amateur's; but what with her

relations here, and her bein' known, she didn't take. We lost money on

her! It's natural she should feel a little ugly. We all do when we get

sorter kicked back onto ourselves, and find we can't stand alone. Why,

you wouldn't believe it,” he continued, with a moist twinkle of his

black eyes; “but the night I lost my little Rosey, of diphtheria in Gold

Hill, the child was down on the bills for a comic song; and I had to

drag Mrs. Sol on, cut up as she was, and filled up with that much of Old

Bourbon to keep her nerves stiff, so she could do an old gag with me

to gain time, and make up the 'variety.' Why, sir, when I came to the

front, I was ugly! And when one of the boys in the front row sang out,

'Don't expose that poor child to the night air, Sol,'--meaning Mrs.

Sol,--I acted ugly. No, sir, it's human nature; and it was quite natural

that Mornie, when she caught sight o' Mrs. Sol's face last night, should

rise up and cuss us both. Lord, if she'd only acted like that! But the

old lady got her quiet at last; and, as I said before, it's all right,

and we'll pull her through. But don't YOU thank us: it's a little matter

betwixt us and Mornie. We've got everything fixed, so that Mrs. Sol can

stay right along. We'll pull Mornie through, and get her away from this,

and her baby too, as soon as we can. You won't get mad if I tell you

something?” said Sol, with a half-apologetic laugh. “Mrs. Sol was

rather down on you the other day, hated you on sight, and preferred

your brother to you; but when she found he'd run off and left YOU,

you,--don't mind my sayin',--a 'mere boy,' to take what oughter be

HIS place, why, she just wheeled round agin' him. I suppose he

got flustered, and couldn't face the music. Never left a word of

explanation? Well, it wasn't exactly square, though I tell the old woman

it's human nature. He might have dropped a hint where he was goin'.

Well, there, I won't say a word more agin' him. I know how you feel.

Hush it is.”

It was the firm conviction of the simple-minded Sol that no one knew

the various natural indications of human passion better than himself.

Perhaps it was one of the fallacies of his profession that the

expression of all human passion was limited to certain conventional

signs and sounds. Consequently, when Rand colored violently, became

confused, stammered, and at last turned hastily away, the good-hearted

fellow instantly recognized the unfailing evidence of modesty and

innocence embarrassed by recognition. As for Rand, I fear his shame

was only momentary. Confirmed in the belief of his ulterior wisdom and

virtue, his first embarrassment over, he was not displeased with this

halfway tribute, and really believed that the time would come when

Mr. Sol should eventually praise his sagacity and reservation,

and acknowledge that he was something more than a mere boy. He,

nevertheless, shrank from meeting Mornie that morning, and was glad that

the presence of Mrs. Sol relieved him from that duty.

The day passed uneventfully. Rand busied himself in his usual

avocations, and constructed a temporary shelter for himself and Sol

beside the shaft, besides rudely shaping a few necessary articles of

furniture for Mrs. Sol.

“It will be a little spell yet afore Mornie's able to be moved,”

suggested Sol, “and you might as well be comfortable.”

Rand sighed at this prospect, yet presently forgot himself in the

good humor of his companion, whose admiration for himself he began to

patronizingly admit. There was no sense of degradation in accepting the

friendship of this man who had traveled so far, seen so much, and yet,

as a practical man of the world, Rand felt was so inferior to himself.

The absence of Miss Euphemia, who had early left the mountain, was a

source of odd, half-definite relief. Indeed, when he closed his eyes to

rest that night, it was with a sense that the reality of his situation

was not as bad as he had feared. Once only, the figure of his

brother--haggard, weary, and footsore, on his hopeless quest, wandering

in lonely trails and lonelier settlements--came across his fancy; but

with it came the greater fear of his return, and the pathetic figure was

banished. “And, besides, he's in Sacramento by this time, and like

as not forgotten us all,” he muttered; and, twining this poppy and

mandragora around his pillow, he fell asleep.

His spirits had quite returned the next morning, and once or twice he

found himself singing while at work in the shaft. The fear that Ruth

might return to the mountain before he could get rid of Mornie, and

the slight anxiety that had grown upon him to know something of his

brother's movements, and to be able to govern them as he wished, caused

him to hit upon the plan of constructing an ingenious advertisement to

be published in the San Francisco journals, wherein the missing Ruth

should be advised that news of his quest should be communicated to him

by “a friend,” through the same medium, after an interval of two weeks.

Full of this amiable intention, he returned to the surface to dinner.

Here, to his momentary confusion, he met Miss Euphemia, who, in absence

of Sol, was assisting Mrs. Sol in the details of the household.

If the honest frankness with which that young lady greeted him was not

enough to relieve his embarrassment, he would have forgotten it in

the utterly new and changed aspect she presented. Her extravagant

walking-costume of the previous day was replaced by some bright calico,

a little white apron, and a broad-brimmed straw-hat, which seemed to

Rand, in some odd fashion, to restore her original girlish simplicity.

The change was certainly not unbecoming to her. If her waist was not

as tightly pinched, a la mode, there still was an honest, youthful

plumpness about it; her step was freer for the absence of her high-heel

boots; and even the hand she extended to Rand, if not quite so small as

in her tight gloves, and a little brown from exposure, was magnetic in

its strong, kindly grasp. There was perhaps a slight suggestion of the

practical Mr. Sol in her wholesome presence; and Rand could not help

wondering if Mrs. Sol had ever been a Gold Hill “Pet” before her

marriage with Mr. Sol. The young girl noticed his curious glance.

“You never saw me in my rehearsal dress before,” she said, with a laugh.

“But I'm not 'company' to-day, and didn't put on my best harness to

knock round in. I suppose I look dreadful.”

“I don't think you look bad,” said Rand simply.

“Thank you,” said Euphemia, with a laugh and a courtesy. “But this isn't

getting the dinner.”

As part of that operation evidently was the taking-off of her hat,

the putting-up of some thick blond locks that had escaped, and the

rolling-up of her sleeves over a pair of strong, rounded arms, Rand

lingered near her. All trace of the “Pet's” previous professional

coquetry was gone,--perhaps it was only replaced by a more natural one;

but as she looked up, and caught sight of Rand's interested face, she

laughed again, and colored a little. Slight as was the blush, it was

sufficient to kindle a sympathetic fire in Rand's own cheeks, which was

so utterly unexpected to him that he turned on his heel in confusion. “I

reckon she thinks I'm soft and silly, like Ruth,” he soliloquized, and,

determining not to look at her again, betook himself to a distant and

contemplative pipe. In vain did Miss Euphemia address herself to the

ostentatious getting of the dinner in full view of him; in vain did

she bring the coffee-pot away from the fire, and nearer Rand, with the

apparent intention of examining its contents in a better light; in vain,

while wiping a plate, did she, absorbed in the distant prospect, walk

to the verge of the mountain, and become statuesque and forgetful. The

sulky young gentleman took no outward notice of her.

Mrs. Sol's attendance upon Mornie prevented her leaving the cabin, and

Rand and Miss Euphemia dined in the open air alone. The ridiculousness

of keeping up a formal attitude to his solitary companion caused Rand

to relax; but, to his astonishment, the “Pet” seemed to have become

correspondingly distant and formal. After a few moments of discomfort,

Rand, who had eaten little, arose, and “believed he would go back to

work.”

“Ah, yes!” said the “Pet,” with an indifferent air, “I suppose you must.

Well, good-by, Mr. Pinkney.”

Rand turned. “YOU are not going?” he asked, in some uneasiness.

“I'VE got some work to do too,” returned Miss Euphemia a little curtly.

“But,” said the practical Rand, “I thought you allowed that you were

fixed to stay until to-morrow?”

But here Miss Euphemia, with rising color and slight acerbity of voice,

was not aware that she was “fixed to stay” anywhere, least of all when

she was in the way. More than that, she MUST say--although perhaps it

made no difference, and she ought not to say it--that she was not in

the habit of intruding upon gentlemen who plainly gave her to understand

that her company was not desirable. She did not know why she said

this--of course it could make no difference to anybody who didn't, of

course, care--but she only wanted to say that she only came here

because her dear friend, her adopted mother,--and a better woman never

breathed,--had come, and had asked her to stay. Of course, Mrs. Sol was

an intruder herself--Mr. Sol was an intruder--they were all intruders:

she only wondered that Mr. Pinkney had borne with them so long. She knew

it was an awful thing to be here, taking care of a poor--poor, helpless

woman; but perhaps Mr. Rand's BROTHER might forgive them, if he

couldn't. But no matter, she would go--Mr. Sol would go--ALL would go;

and then, perhaps, Mr, Rand--

She stopped breathless; she stopped with the corner of her apron against

her tearful hazel eyes; she stopped with--what was more remarkable than

all--Rand's arm actually around her waist, and his astonished, alarmed

face within a few inches of her own.

“Why, Miss Euphemia, Phemie, my dear girl! I never meant anything like

THAT,” said Rand earnestly. “I really didn't now! Come now!”

“You never once spoke to me when I sat down,” said Miss Euphemia, feebly

endeavoring to withdraw from Rand's grasp.

“I really didn't! Oh, come now, look here! I didn't! Don't! There's a

dear--THERE!”

This last conclusive exposition was a kiss. Miss Euphemia was not quick

enough to release herself from his arms. He anticipated that act a full

half-second, and had dropped his own, pale and breathless.

The girl recovered herself first. “There, I declare, I'm forgetting Mrs.

Sol's coffee!” she exclaimed hastily, and, snatching up the coffee-pot,

disappeared. When she returned, Rand was gone. Miss Euphemia busied

herself demurely in clearing up the dishes, with the tail of her

eye sweeping the horizon of the summit level around her. But no Rand

appeared. Presently she began to laugh quietly to herself. This occurred

several times during her occupation, which was somewhat prolonged. The

result of this meditative hilarity was summed up in a somewhat grave

and thoughtful deduction as she walked slowly back to the cabin: “I do

believe I'm the first woman that that boy ever kissed.”

Miss Euphemia staid that day and the next, and Rand forgot his

embarrassment. By what means I know not, Miss Euphemia managed to

restore Rand's confidence in himself and in her, and in a little ramble

on the mountain-side got him to relate, albeit somewhat reluctantly, the

particulars of his rescue of Mornie from her dangerous position on the

broken trail.

“And, if you hadn't got there as soon as you did, she'd have fallen?”

asked the “Pet.”

“I reckon,” returned Rand gloomily: “she was sorter dazed and crazed

like.”

“And you saved her life?”

“I suppose so, if you put it that way,” said Rand sulkily.

“But how did you get her up the mountain again?”

“Oh! I got her up,” returned Rand moodily.

“But how? Really, Mr. Rand, you don't know how interesting this is. It's

as good as a play,” said the “Pet,” with a little excited laugh.

“Oh, I carried her up!”

“In your arms?”

“Y-e-e-s.”

Miss Euphemia paused, and bit off the stalk of a flower, made a wry

face, and threw it away from her in disgust.

Then she dug a few tiny holes in the earth with her parasol, and buried

bits of the flower-stalk in them, as if they had been tender memories.

“I suppose you knew Mornie very well?” she asked.

“I used to run across her in the woods,” responded Rand shortly, “a year

ago. I didn't know her so well then as--” He stopped.

“As what? As NOW?” asked the “Pet” abruptly. Rand, who was coloring

over his narrow escape from a topic which a delicate kindness of Sol had

excluded from their intercourse on the mountain, stammered, “as YOU do,

I meant.”

The “Pet” tossed her head a little. “Oh! I don't know her at all--except

through Sol.”

Rand stared hard at this. The “Pet,” who was looking at him intently,

said, “Show me the place where you saw Mornie clinging that night.”

“It's dangerous,” suggested Rand.

“You mean I'd be afraid! Try me! I don't believe she was SO dreadfully

frightened!”

“Why?” asked Rand, in astonishment.

“Oh--because--”

Rand sat down in vague wonderment.

“Show it to me,” continued the “Pet,” “or--I'll find it ALONE!”

Thus challenged, he rose, and, after a few moments' climbing, stood with

her upon the trail. “You see that thorn-bush where the rock has fallen

away. It was just there. It is not safe to go farther. No, really! Miss

Euphemia! Please don't! It's almost certain death!”

But the giddy girl had darted past him, and, face to the wall of

the cliff, was creeping along the dangerous path. Rand followed

mechanically. Once or twice the trail crumbled beneath her feet; but

she clung to a projecting root of chaparral, and laughed. She had almost

reached her elected goal, when, slipping, the treacherous chaparral she

clung to yielded in her grasp, and Rand, with a cry, sprung forward.

But the next instant she quickly transferred her hold to a cleft in

the cliff, and was safe. Not so her companion. The soil beneath him,

loosened by the impulse of his spring, slipped away: he was falling with

it, when she caught him sharply with her disengaged hand, and together

they scrambled to a more secure footing.

“I could have reached it alone,” said the “Pet,” “if you'd left me

alone.”

“Thank Heaven, we're saved!” said Rand gravely.

“AND WITHOUT A ROPE,” said Miss Euphemia significantly.

Rand did not understand her. But, as they slowly returned to the summit,

he stammered out the always difficult thanks of a man who has been

physically helped by one of the weaker sex. Miss Euphemia was quick to

see her error.

“I might have made you lose your footing by catching at you,” she said

meekly. “But I was so frightened for you, and could not help it.”

The superior animal, thoroughly bamboozled, thereupon complimented her

on her dexterity.

“Oh, that's nothing!” she said, with a sigh. “I used to do the

flying-trapeze business with papa when I was a child, and I've not

forgotten it.” With this and other confidences of her early life, in

which Rand betrayed considerable interest, they beguiled the tedious

ascent. “I ought to have made you carry me up,” said the lady, with a

little laugh, when they reached the summit; “but you haven't known me as

long as you have Mornie, have you?” With this mysterious speech she bade

Rand “good-night,” and hurried off to the cabin.

And so a week passed by,--the week so dreaded by Rand, yet passed so

pleasantly, that at times it seemed as if that dread were only a trick

of his fancy, or as if the circumstances that surrounded him were

different from what he believed them to be. On the seventh day the

doctor had staid longer than usual; and Rand, who had been sitting with

Euphemia on the ledge by the shaft, watching the sunset, had barely

time to withdraw his hand from hers, as Mrs. Sol, a trifle pale and

wearied-looking, approached him.

“I don't like to trouble you,” she said,--indeed, they had seldom

troubled him with the details of Mornie's convalescence, or even her

needs and requirements,--“but the doctor is alarmed about Mornie, and

she has asked to see you. I think you'd better go in and speak to her.

You know,” continued Mrs. Sol delicately, “you haven't been in there

since the night she was taken sick, and maybe a new face might do her

good.”

The guilty blood flew to Rand's face as he stammered, “I thought I'd be

in the way. I didn't believe she cared much to see me. Is she worse?”

“The doctor is looking very anxious,” said Mrs. Sol simply.

The blood returned from Rand's face, and settled around his heart. He

turned very pale. He had consoled himself always for his complicity

in Ruth's absence, that he was taking good care of Mornie, or--what

is considered by most selfish natures an equivalent--permitting or

encouraging some one else to “take good care of her;” but here was

a contingency utterly unforeseen. It did not occur to him that this

“taking good care” of her could result in anything but a perfect

solution of her troubles, or that there could be any future to her

condition but one of recovery. But what if she should die? A sudden

and helpless sense of his responsibility to Ruth, to HER, brought him

trembling to his feet.

He hurried to the cabin, where Mrs. Sol left him with a word of caution:

“You'll find her changed and quiet,--very quiet. If I was you, I

wouldn't say anything to bring back her old self.”

The change which Rand saw was so great, the face that was turned to him

so quiet, that, with a new fear upon him, he would have preferred the

savage eyes and reckless mien of the old Mornie whom he hated. With his

habitual impulsiveness he tried to say something that should express

that fact not unkindly, but faltered, and awkwardly sank into the chair

by her bedside.

“I don't wonder you stare at me now,” she said in a far-off voice. “It

seems to you strange to see me lying here so quiet. You are thinking how

wild I was when I came here that night. I must have been crazy, I think.

I dreamed that I said dreadful things to you; but you must forgive me,

and not mind it. I was crazy then.” She stopped, and folded the blanket

between her thin fingers. “I didn't ask you to come here to tell you

that, or to remind you of it; but--but when I was crazy, I said so many

worse, dreadful things of HIM; and you--YOU will be left behind to tell

him of it.”

Rand was vaguely murmuring something to the effect that “he knew she

didn't mean anything,” that “she musn't think of it again,” that “he'd

forgotten all about it,” when she stopped him with a tired gesture.

“Perhaps I was wrong to think, that, after I am gone, you would care to

tell him anything. Perhaps I'm wrong to think of it at all, or to care

what he will think of me, except for the sake of the child--his child,

Rand--that I must leave behind me. He will know that IT never abused

him. No, God bless its sweet heart! IT never was wild and wicked and

hateful, like its cruel, crazy mother. And he will love it; and you,

perhaps, will love it too--just a little, Rand! Look at it!” She tried

to raise the helpless bundle beside her in her arms, but failed. “You

must lean over,” she said faintly to Rand. “It looks like him, doesn't

it?”

Rand, with wondering, embarrassed eyes, tried to see some resemblance,

in the little blue-red oval, to the sad, wistful face of his brother,

which even then was haunting him from some mysterious distance. He

kissed the child's forehead, but even then so vaguely and perfunctorily,

that the mother sighed, and drew it closer to her breast.

“The doctor says,” she continued in a calmer voice, “that I'm not doing

as well as I ought to. I don't think,” she faltered, with something of

her old bitter laugh, “that I'm ever doing as well as I ought to, and

perhaps it's not strange now that I don't. And he says that, in case

anything happens to me, I ought to look ahead. I have looked ahead.

It's a dark look ahead, Rand--a horror of blackness, without kind faces,

without the baby, without--without HIM!”

She turned her face away, and laid it on the bundle by her side. It was

so quiet in the cabin, that, through the open door beyond, the faint,

rhythmical moan of the pines below was distinctly heard.

“I know it's foolish; but that is what 'looking ahead' always meant to

me,” she said, with a sigh. “But, since the doctor has been gone, I've

talked to Mrs. Sol, and find it's for the best. And I look ahead, and

see more clearly. I look ahead, and see my disgrace removed far away

from HIM and you. I look ahead, and see you and HE living together

happily, as you did before I came between you. I look ahead, and see

my past life forgotten, my faults forgiven; and I think I see you both

loving my baby, and perhaps loving me a little for its sake. Thank you,

Rand, thank you!”

For Rand's hand had caught hers beside the pillow, and he was standing

over her, whiter than she. Something in the pressure of his hand

emboldened her to go on, and even lent a certain strength to her voice.

“When it comes to THAT, Rand, you'll not let these people take the baby

away. You'll keep it HERE with you until HE comes. And something tells

me that he will come when I am gone. You'll keep it here in the pure air

and sunlight of the mountain, and out of those wicked depths below; and

when I am gone, and they are gone, and only you and Ruth and baby

are here, maybe you'll think that it came to you in a cloud on the

mountain,--a cloud that lingered only long enough to drop its burden,

and faded, leaving the sunlight and dew behind. What is it, Rand? What

are you looking at?”

“I was thinking,” said Rand in a strange altered voice, “that I must

trouble you to let me take down those duds and furbelows that hang on

the wall, so that I can get at some traps of mine behind them.” He

took some articles from the wall, replaced the dresses of Mrs. Sol, and

answered Mornie's look of inquiry.

“I was only getting at my purse and my revolver,” he said, showing them.

“I've got to get some stores at the Ferry by daylight.”

Mornie sighed. “I'm giving you great trouble, Rand, I know; but it won't

be for long.”

He muttered something, took her hand again, and bade her “good-night.”

When he reached the door, he looked back. The light was shining full

upon her face as she lay there, with her babe on her breast, bravely

“looking ahead.”

IV.

THE CLOUDS PASS.

It was early morning at the Ferry. The “up coach” had passed, with

lights unextinguished, and the “outsides” still asleep. The ferryman had

gone up to the Ferry Mansion House, swinging his lantern, and had found

the sleepy-looking “all night” bar-keeper on the point of withdrawing

for the day on a mattress under the bar. An Indian half-breed, porter

of the Mansion House, was washing out the stains of recent nocturnal

dissipation from the bar-room and veranda; a few birds were twittering

on the cotton-woods beside the river; a bolder few had alighted upon

the veranda, and were trying to reconcile the existence of so much

lemon-peel and cigar-stumps with their ideas of a beneficent Creator.

A faint earthly freshness and perfume rose along the river banks. Deep

shadow still lay upon the opposite shore; but in the distance, four

miles away, Morning along the level crest of Table Mountain walked with

rosy tread.

The sleepy bar-keeper was that morning doomed to disappointment; for

scarcely had the coach passed, when steps were heard upon the veranda,

and a weary, dusty traveller threw his blanket and knapsack to the

porter, and then dropped into a vacant arm-chair, with his eyes fixed

on the distant crest of Table Mountain. He remained motionless for some

time, until the bar-keeper, who had already concocted the conventional

welcome of the Mansion House, appeared with it in a glass, put it upon

the table, glanced at the stranger, and then, thoroughly awake, cried

out,--

“Ruth Pinkney--or I'm a Chinaman!”

The stranger lifted his eyes wearily. Hollow circles were around their

orbits; haggard lines were in his checks. But it was Ruth.

He took the glass, and drained it at a single draught. “Yes,” he said

absently, “Ruth Pinkney,” and fixed his eyes again on the distant rosy

crest.

“On your way up home?” suggested the bar-keeper, following the direction

of Ruth's eyes.

“Perhaps.”

“Been upon a pasear, hain't yer? Been havin' a little tear round

Sacramento,--seein' the sights?”

Ruth smiled bitterly. “Yes.”

The bar-keeper lingered, ostentatiously wiping a glass. But Ruth again

became abstracted in the mountain, and the barkeeper turned away.

How pure and clear that summit looked to him! how restful and steadfast

with serenity and calm! how unlike his own feverish, dusty, travel-worn

self! A week had elapsed since he had last looked upon it,--a week of

disappointment, of anxious fears, of doubts, of wild imaginings, of

utter helplessness. In his hopeless quest of the missing Mornie, he

had, in fancy, seen this serene eminence haunting his remorseful,

passion-stricken soul. And now, without a clew to guide him to her

unknown hiding-place, he was back again, to face the brother whom he had

deceived, with only the confession of his own weakness. Hard as it was

to lose forever the fierce, reproachful glances of the woman he loved,

it was still harder, to a man of Ruth's temperament, to look again

upon the face of the brother he feared. A hand laid upon his shoulder

startled him. It was the bar-keeper.

“If it's a fair question, Ruth Pinkney, I'd like to ask ye how long ye

kalkilate to hang around the Ferry to-day.”

“Why?” demanded Ruth haughtily.

“Because, whatever you've been and done, I want ye to have a square

show. Ole Nixon has been cavoortin' round yer the last two days,

swearin' to kill you on sight for runnin' off with his darter. Sabe?

Now, let me ax ye two questions. FIRST, Are you heeled?”

Ruth responded to this dialectical inquiry affirmatively by putting his

hand on his revolver.

“Good! Now, SECOND, Have you got the gal along here with you?”

“No,” responded Ruth in a hollow voice.

“That's better yet,” said the man, without heeding the tone of

the reply. “A woman--and especially THE woman in a row of this

kind--handicaps a man awful.” He paused, and took up the empty glass.

“Look yer, Ruth Pinkney, I'm a square man, and I'll be square with you.

So I'll just tell you you've got the demdest odds agin' ye. Pr'aps ye

know it, and don't keer. Well, the boys around yer are all sidin' with

the old man Nixon. It's the first time the old rip ever had a hand in

his favor: so the boys will see fair play for Nixon, and agin' YOU. But

I reckon you don't mind him!”

“So little, I shall never pull trigger on him,” said Ruth gravely.

The bar-keeper stared, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Well, thar's

that Kanaka Joe, who used to be sorter sweet on Mornie,--he's an ugly

devil,--he's helpin' the old man.”

The sad look faded from Ruth's eyes suddenly. A certain wild Berserker

rage--a taint of the blood, inherited from heaven knows what Old-World

ancestry, which had made the twin-brothers' Southwestern eccentricities

respected in the settlement--glowed in its place. The barkeeper noted

it, and augured a lively future for the day's festivities. But it faded

again; and Ruth, as he rose, turned hesitatingly towards him.

“Have you seen my brother Rand lately?”

“Nary.”

“He hasn't been here, or about the Ferry?”

“Nary time.”

“You haven't heard,” said Ruth, with a faint attempt at a smile, “if

he's been around here asking after me,--sorter looking me up, you know?”

“Not much,” returned the bar-keeper deliberately. “Ez far ez I know

Rand,--that ar brother o' yours,--he's one of yer high-toned chaps ez

doesn't drink, thinks bar-rooms is pizen, and ain't the sort to come

round yer, and sling yarns with me.”

Ruth rose; but the hand that he placed upon the table, albeit a powerful

one, trembled so that it was with difficulty he resumed his knapsack.

When he did so, his bent figure, stooping shoulders, and haggard face,

made him appear another man from the one who had sat down. There was a

slight touch of apologetic deference and humility in his manner as he

paid his reckoning, and slowly and hesitatingly began to descend the

steps.

The bar-keeper looked after him thoughtfully. “Well, dog my skin!”

he ejaculated to himself, “ef I hadn't seen that man--that same Ruth

Pinkney--straddle a friend's body in this yer very room, and dare a

whole crowd to come on, I'd swar that he hadn't any grit in him. Thar's

something up!”

But here Ruth reached the last step, and turned again.

“If you see old man Nixon, say I'm in town; if you see that --------

----” (I regret to say that I cannot repeat his exact, and brief

characterization of the present condition and natal antecedents of

Kanaka Joe), “say I'm looking out for him,” and was gone.

He wandered down the road, towards the one long, straggling street of

the settlement. The few people who met him at that early hour greeted

him with a kind of constrained civility; certain cautious souls hurried

by without seeing him; all turned and looked after him; and a few

followed him at a respectful distance. A somewhat notorious practical

joker and recognized wag at the Ferry apparently awaited his coming with

something of invitation and expectation, but, catching sight of Ruth's

haggard face and blazing eyes, became instantly practical, and by no

means jocular in his greeting. At the top of the hill, Ruth turned to

look once more upon the distant mountain, now again a mere cloud-line

on the horizon. In the firm belief that he would never again see the sun

rise upon it, he turned aside into a hazel-thicket, and, tearing out a

few leaves from his pocket-book, wrote two letters,--one to Rand, and

one to Mornie, but which, as they were never delivered, shall not burden

this brief chronicle of that eventful day. For, while transcribing them,

he was startled by the sounds of a dozen pistol-shots in the direction

of the hotel he had recently quitted. Something in the mere sound

provoked the old hereditary fighting instinct, and sent him to his feet

with a bound, and a slight distension of the nostrils, and sniffing of

the air, not unknown to certain men who become half intoxicated by

the smell of powder. He quickly folded his letters, and addressed

them carefully, and, taking off his knapsack and blanket, methodically

arranged them under a tree, with the letters on top. Then he examined

the lock of his revolver, and then, with the step of a man ten years

younger, leaped into the road. He had scarcely done so when he was

seized, and by sheer force dragged into a blacksmith's shop at the

roadside. He turned his savage face and drawn weapon upon his assailant,

but was surprised to meet the anxious eyes of the bar-keeper of the

Mansion House.

“Don't be a d----d fool,” said the man quickly. “Thar's fifty agin' you

down thar. But why in h-ll didn't you wipe out old Nixon when you had

such a good chance?”

“Wipe out old Nixon?” repeated Ruth.

“Yes; just now, when you had him covered.”

“What!”

The bar-keeper turned quickly upon Ruth, stared at him, and then

suddenly burst into a fit of laughter. “Well, I've knowed you two were

twins, but damn me if I ever thought I'd be sold like this!” And he

again burst into a roar of laughter.

“What do you mean?” demanded Ruth savagely.

“What do I mean?” returned the barkeeper. “Why, I mean this. I mean that

your brother Rand, as you call him, he'z bin--for a young feller, and

a pious feller--doin' about the tallest kind o' fightin' to-day that's

been done at the Ferry. He laid out that ar Kanaka Joe and two of his

chums. He was pitched into on your quarrel, and he took it up for you

like a little man. I managed to drag him off, up yer in the hazel-bush

for safety, and out you pops, and I thought you was him. He can't be

far away. Halloo! There they're comin'; and thar's the doctor, trying to

keep them back!”

A crowd of angry, excited faces, filled the road suddenly; but before

them Dr. Duchesne, mounted, and with a pistol in his hand, opposed their

further progress.

“Back in the bush!” whispered the barkeeper. “Now's your time!”

But Ruth stirred not. “Go you back,” he said in a low voice, “find Rand,

and take him away. I will fill his place here.” He drew his revolver,

and stepped into the road.

A shout, a report, and the spatter of red dust from a bullet near his

feet, told him he was recognized. He stirred not; but another shout, and

a cry, “There they are--BOTH of 'em!” made him turn.

His brother Rand, with a smile on his lip and fire in his eye, stood by

his side. Neither spoke. Then Rand, quietly, as of old, slipped his hand

into his brother's strong palm. Two or three bullets sang by them;

a splinter flew from the blacksmith's shed: but the brothers, hard

gripping each other's hands, and looking into each other's faces with a

quiet joy, stood there calm and imperturbable.

There was a momentary pause. The voice of Dr. Duchesne rose above the

crowd.

“Keep back, I say! keep back! Or hear me!--for five years I've worked

among you, and mended and patched the holes you've drilled through

each other's carcasses--Keep back, I say!--or the next man that pulls

trigger, or steps forward, will get a hole from me that no surgeon can

stop. I'm sick of your bungling ball practice! Keep back!--or, by the

living Jingo, I'll show you where a man's vitals are!”

There was a burst of laughter from the crowd, and for a moment the twins

were forgotten in this audacious speech and coolly impertinent presence.

“That's right! Now let that infernal old hypocritical drunkard, Mat

Nixon, step to the front.”

The crowd parted right and left, and half pushed, half dragged Nixon

before him.

“Gentlemen,” said the doctor, “this is the man who has just shot at Rand

Pinkney for hiding his daughter. Now, I tell you, gentlemen, and I tell

him, that for the last week his daughter, Mornie Nixon, has been under

my care as a patient, and my protection as a friend. If there's anybody

to be shot, the job must begin with me!”

There was another laugh, and a cry of “Bully for old Sawbones!” Ruth

started convulsively, and Rand answered his look with a confirming

pressure of his hand.

“That isn't all, gentlemen: this drunken brute has just shot at a

gentleman whose only offence, to my knowledge, is, that he has, for the

last week, treated her with a brother's kindness, has taken her into his

own home, and cared for her wants as if she were his own sister.”

Ruth's hand again grasped his brother's. Rand colored and hung his head.

“There's more yet, gentlemen. I tell you that that girl, Mornie Nixon,

has, to my knowledge, been treated like a lady, has been cared for as

she never was cared for in her father's house, and, while that father

has been proclaiming her shame in every bar-room at the Ferry, has had

the sympathy and care, night and day, of two of the most accomplished

ladies of the Ferry,--Mrs. Sol Saunders, gentlemen, and Miss Euphemia.”

There was a shout of approbation from the crowd. Nixon would have

slipped away, but the doctor stopped him.

“Not yet! I've one thing more to say. I've to tell you, gentlemen, on my

professional word of honor, that, besides being an old hypocrite, this

same old Mat Nixon is the ungrateful, unnatural GRANDFATHER of the first

boy born in the district.”

A wild huzza greeted the doctor's climax. By a common consent the crowd

turned toward the Twins, who, grasping each other's hands, stood apart.

The doctor nodded his head. The next moment the Twins were surrounded,

and lifted in the arms of the laughing throng, and borne in triumph to

the bar-room of the Mansion House.

“Gentlemen,” said the bar-keeper, “call for what you like: the Mansion

House treats to-day in honor of its being the first time that Rand

Pinkney has been admitted to the bar.”

*****

It was agreed, that, as her condition was still precarious, the news

should be broken to her gradually and indirectly. The indefatigable

Sol had a professional idea, which was not displeasing to the Twins. It

being a lovely summer afternoon, the couch of Mornie was lifted out on

the ledge, and she lay there basking in the sunlight, drinking in the

pure air, and looking bravely ahead in the daylight as she had in the

darkness, for her couch commanded a view of the mountain flank. And,

lying there, she dreamed a pleasant dream, and in her dream saw Rand

returning up the mountain-trail. She was half conscious that he had good

news for her; and, when he at last reached her bedside, he began gently

and kindly to tell his news. But she heard him not, or rather in her

dream was most occupied with his ways and manners, which seemed unlike

him, yet inexpressibly sweet and tender. The tears were fast coming in

her eyes, when he suddenly dropped on his knees beside her, threw away

Rand's disguising hat and coat, and clasped her in his arms. And by that

she KNEW it was Ruth.

But what they said; what hurried words of mutual explanation and

forgiveness passed between them; what bitter yet tender recollections

of hidden fears and doubts, now forever chased away in the rain of tears

and joyous sunshine of that mountain-top, were then whispered;

whatever of this little chronicle that to the reader seems strange and

inconsistent (as all human record must ever be strange and imperfect,

except to the actors) was then made clear,--was never divulged by them,

and must remain with them forever. The rest of the party had withdrawn,

and they were alone. But when Mornie turned, and placed the baby in its

father's arms, they were so isolated in their happiness, that the lower

world beneath them might have swung and drifted away, and left that

mountain-top the beginning and creation of a better planet.

*****

“You know all about it now,” said Sol the next day, explaining the

previous episodes of this history to Ruth: “you've got the whole plot

before you. It dragged a little in the second act, for the actors

weren't up in their parts. But for an amateur performance, on the whole,

it wasn't bad.”

“I don't know, I'm sure,” said Rand impulsively, “how we'd have got on

without Euphemia. It's too bad she couldn't be here to-day.”

“She wanted to come,” said Sol; “but the gentleman she's engaged to came

up from Marysville last night.”

“Gentleman--engaged!” repeated Rand, white and red by turns.

“Well, yes. I say, 'gentleman,' although he's in the variety profession.

She always said,” said Sol, quietly looking at Rand, “that she'd never

marry OUT of it.”

AN HEIRESS OF RED DOG.

The first intimation given of the eccentricity of the testator was, I

think, in the spring of 1854. He was at that time in possession of a

considerable property, heavily mortgaged to one friend, and a wife of

some attraction, on whose affections another friend held an encumbering

lien. One day it was found that he had secretly dug, or caused to be

dug, a deep trap before the front-door of his dwelling, into which a few

friends, in the course of the evening, casually and familiarly dropped.

This circumstance, slight in itself, seemed to point to the existence of

a certain humor in the man, which might eventually get into literature,

although his wife's lover--a man of quick discernment, whose leg was

broken by the fall--took other views. It was some weeks later, that,

while dining with certain other friends of his wife, he excused

himself from the table to quietly re-appear at the front-window with a

three-quarter inch hydraulic pipe, and a stream of water projected at

the assembled company. An attempt was made to take public cognizance of

this; but a majority of the citizens of Red Dog, who were not at dinner,

decided that a man had a right to choose his own methods of diverting

his company. Nevertheless, there were some hints of his insanity; his

wife recalled other acts clearly attributable to dementia; the crippled

lover argued from his own experience that the integrity of her limbs

could only be secured by leaving her husband's house; and the mortgagee,

fearing a further damage to his property, foreclosed. But here the cause

of all this anxiety took matters into his own hands, and disappeared.

When we next heard from him, he had, in some mysterious way, been

relieved alike of his wife and property, and was living alone

at Rockville fifty miles away, and editing a newspaper. But that

originality he had displayed when dealing with the problems of his own

private life, when applied to politics in the columns of “The Rockville

Vanguard” was singularly unsuccessful. An amusing exaggeration,

purporting to be an exact account of the manner in which the opposing

candidate had murdered his Chinese laundryman, was, I regret to

say, answered only by assault and battery. A gratuitous and purely

imaginative description of a great religious revival in Calaveras, in

which the sheriff of the county--a notoriously profane sceptic--was

alleged to have been the chief exhorter, resulted only in the withdrawal

of the county advertising from the paper. In the midst of this practical

confusion he suddenly died. It was then discovered, as a crowning

proof of his absurdity, that he had left a will, bequeathing his entire

effects to a freckle-faced maid-servant at the Rockville Hotel. But that

absurdity became serious when it was also discovered that among these

effects were a thousand shares in the Rising Sun Mining Company, which a

day or two after his demise, and while people were still laughing at

his grotesque benefaction, suddenly sprang into opulence and celebrity.

Three millions of dollars was roughly estimated as the value of the

estate thus wantonly sacrificed. For it is only fair to state, as a

just tribute to the enterprise and energy of that young and thriving

settlement, that there was not probably a single citizen who did not

feel himself better able to control the deceased humorist's property.

Some had expressed a doubt of their ability to support a family; others

had felt perhaps too keenly the deep responsibility resting upon them

when chosen from the panel as jurors, and had evaded their public

duties; a few had declined office and a low salary: but no one shrank

from the possibility of having been called upon to assume the functions

of Peggy Moffat, the heiress.

The will was contested,--first by the widow, who it now appeared had

never been legally divorced from the deceased; next by four of his

cousins, who awoke, only too late, to a consciousness of his moral

and pecuniary worth. But the humble legatee--a singularly plain,

unpretending, uneducated Western girl--exhibited a dogged pertinacity

in claiming her rights. She rejected all compromises. A rough sense of

justice in the community, while doubting her ability to take care of the

whole fortune, suggested that she ought to be content with three hundred

thousand dollars. “She's bound to throw even THAT away on some derned

skunk of a man, natoorally; but three millions is too much to give a

chap for makin' her onhappy. It's offerin' a temptation to cussedness.”

The only opposing voice to this counsel came from the sardonic lips of

Mr. Jack Hamlin. “Suppose,” suggested that gentleman, turning abruptly

on the speaker,--“suppose, when you won twenty thousand dollars of me

last Friday night--suppose that, instead of handing you over the money

as I did--suppose I'd got up on my hind-legs, and said, 'Look yer, Bill

Wethersbee, you're a d----d fool. If I give ye that twenty thousand,

you'll throw it away in the first skin-game in 'Frisco, and hand it over

to the first short-card sharp you'll meet. There's a thousand,--enough

for you to fling away,--take it and get!' Suppose what I'd said to you

was the frozen truth, and you know'd it, would that have been the square

thing to play on you?” But here Wethersbee quickly pointed out the

inefficiency of the comparison by stating that HE had won the money

fairly with a STAKE. “And how do you know,” demanded Hamlin savagely,

bending his black eyes on the astounded casuist,--“how do you know that

the gal hezn't put down a stake?” The man stammered an unintelligible

reply. The gambler laid his white hand on Wethersbee's shoulder. “Look

yer, old man,” he said, “every gal stakes her WHOLE pile,--you can bet

your life on that,--whatever's her little game. If she took to keerds

instead of her feelings, if she'd put up 'chips' instead o' body and

soul, she'd bust every bank 'twixt this and 'Frisco! You hear me?”

Somewhat of this idea was conveyed, I fear not quite as sentimentally,

to Peggy Moffat herself. The best legal wisdom of San Francisco,

retained by the widow and relatives, took occasion, in a private

interview with Peggy, to point out that she stood in the quasi-criminal

attitude of having unlawfully practised upon the affections of an insane

elderly gentleman, with a view of getting possession of his property,

and suggested to her that no vestige of her moral character would remain

after the trial, if she persisted in forcing her claims to that issue.

It is said that Peggy, on hearing this, stopped washing the plate she

had in her hands, and, twisting the towel around her fingers, fixed her

small pale blue eyes at the lawyer.

“And ez that the kind o' chirpin these critters keep up?”

“I regret to say, my dear young lady,” responded the lawyer, “that the

world is censorious. I must add,” he continued, with engaging frankness,

“that we professional lawyers are apt to study the opinion of the world,

and that such will be the theory of--our side.”

“Then,” said Peggy stoutly, “ez I allow I've got to go into court to

defend my character, I might as well pack in them three millions too.”

There is hearsay evidence that Peg added to this speech a wish and

desire to “bust the crust” of her traducers, and, remarking that “that

was the kind of hairpin” she was, closed the conversation with an

unfortunate accident to the plate, that left a severe contusion on the

legal brow of her companion. But this story, popular in the bar-rooms

and gulches, lacked confirmation in higher circles. Better authenticated

was the legend related of an interview with her own lawyer. That

gentleman had pointed out to her the advantage of being able to show

some reasonable cause for the singular generosity of the testator.

“Although,” he continued, “the law does not go back of the will for

reason or cause for its provisions, it would be a strong point with the

judge and jury--particularly if the theory of insanity were set up--for

us to show that the act was logical and natural. Of course you have--I

speak confidently, Miss Moffat--certain ideas of your own why the late

Mr. Byways was so singularly generous to you.”

“No, I haven't,” said Peg decidedly.

“Think again. Had he not expressed to you--you understand that this is

confidential between us, although I protest, my dear young lady, that

I see no reason why it should not be made public--had he not given

utterance to sentiments of a nature consistent with some future

matrimonial relations?” But here Miss Peg's large mouth, which had been

slowly relaxing over her irregular teeth, stopped him.

“If you mean he wanted to marry me--No!”

“I see. But were there any conditions--of course you know the law takes

no cognizance of any not expressed in the will; but still, for the sake

of mere corroboration of the bequest--do you know of any conditions on

which he gave you the property?”

“You mean did he want anything in return?”

“Exactly, my dear young lady.”

Peg's face on one side turned a deep magenta color, on the other a

lighter cherry, while her nose was purple, and her forehead an Indian

red. To add to the effect of this awkward and discomposing dramatic

exhibition of embarrassment, she began to wipe her hands on her dress,

and sat silent.

“I understand,” said the lawyer hastily. “No matter--the conditions WERE

fulfilled.”

“No!” said Peg amazedly. “How could they be until he was dead?”

It was the lawyer's turn to color and grow embarrassed.

“He DID say something, and make some conditions,” continued Peg, with a

certain firmness through her awkwardness; “but that's nobody's business

but mine and his'n. And it's no call o' yours or theirs.”

“But, my dear Miss Moffat, if these very conditions were proofs of his

right mind, you surely would not object to make them known, if only to

enable you to put yourself in a condition to carry them out.”

“But,” said Peg cunningly, “s'pose you and the Court didn't think 'em

satisfactory? S'pose you thought 'em QUEER? Eh?”

With this helpless limitation on the part of the defence, the case came

to trial. Everybody remembers it,--how for six weeks it was the daily

food of Calaveras County; how for six weeks the intellectual and moral

and spiritual competency of Mr. James Byways to dispose of his property

was discussed with learned and formal obscurity in the court, and with

unlettered and independent prejudice by camp-fires and in bar-rooms. At

the end of that time, when it was logically established that at least

nine-tenths of the population of Calaveras were harmless lunatics, and

everybody else's reason seemed to totter on its throne, an exhausted

jury succumbed one day to the presence of Peg in the court-room. It was

not a prepossessing presence at any time; but the excitement, and an

injudicious attempt to ornament herself, brought her defects into a

glaring relief that was almost unreal. Every freckle on her face

stood out and asserted itself singly; her pale blue eyes, that gave no

indication of her force of character, were weak and wandering, or

stared blankly at the judge; her over-sized head, broad at the base,

terminating in the scantiest possible light-colored braid in the middle

of her narrow shoulders, was as hard and uninteresting as the wooden

spheres that topped the railing against which she sat.

The jury, who for six weeks had had her described to them by the

plaintiffs as an arch, wily enchantress, who had sapped the failing

reason of Jim Byways, revolted to a man. There was something so

appallingly gratuitous in her plainness, that it was felt that three

millions was scarcely a compensation for it. “Ef that money was give to

her, she earned it SURE, boys: it wasn't no softness of the old man,”

said the foreman. When the jury retired, it was felt that she had

cleared her character: when they re-entered the room with their verdict,

it was known that she had been awarded three millions damages for its

defamation.

She got the money. But those who had confidently expected to see

her squander it were disappointed: on the contrary, it was presently

whispered that she was exceedingly penurious. That admirable woman, Mrs.

Stiver of Red Dog, who accompanied her to San Francisco to assist her in

making purchases, was loud in her indignation. “She cares more for two

bits than I do for five dollars. She wouldn't buy anything at the 'City

of Paris,' because it was 'too expensive,' and at last rigged herself

out, a perfect guy, at some cheap slop-shops in Market Street. And after

all the care Jane and me took of her, giving up our time and experience

to her, she never so much as made Jane a single present.” Popular

opinion, which regarded Mrs. Stiver's attention as purely speculative,

was not shocked at this unprofitable denouement; but when Peg refused to

give anything to clear the mortgage off the new Presbyterian Church, and

even declined to take shares in the Union Ditch, considered by many

as an equally sacred and safe investment, she began to lose favor.

Nevertheless, she seemed to be as regardless of public opinion as she

had been before the trial; took a small house, in which she lived with

an old woman who had once been a fellow-servant, on apparently terms of

perfect equality, and looked after her money. I wish I could say that

she did this discreetly; but the fact is, she blundered. The same dogged

persistency she had displayed in claiming her rights was visible in

her unsuccessful ventures. She sunk two hundred thousand dollars in

a worn-out shaft originally projected by the deceased testator; she

prolonged the miserable existence of “The Rockville Vanguard” long after

it had ceased to interest even its enemies; she kept the doors of

the Rockville Hotel open when its custom had departed; she lost the

co-operation and favor of a fellow-capitalist through a trifling

misunderstanding in which she was derelict and impenitent; she had three

lawsuits on her hands that could have been settled for a trifle. I note

these defects to show that she was by no means a heroine. I quote her

affair with Jack Folinsbee to show she was scarcely the average woman.

That handsome, graceless vagabond had struck the outskirts of Red Dog

in a cyclone of dissipation which left him a stranded but still rather

interesting wreck in a ruinous cabin not far from Peg Moffat's virgin

bower. Pale, crippled from excesses, with a voice quite tremulous from

sympathetic emotion more or less developed by stimulants, he lingered

languidly, with much time on his hands, and only a few neighbors. In

this fascinating kind of general deshabille of morals, dress, and the

emotions, he appeared before Peg Moffat. More than that, he occasionally

limped with her through the settlement. The critical eye of Red Dog took

in the singular pair,--Jack, voluble, suffering, apparently overcome by

remorse, conscience, vituperation, and disease; and Peg, open-mouthed,

high-colored, awkward, yet delighted; and the critical eye of Red Dog,

seeing this, winked meaningly at Rockville. No one knew what passed

between them; but all observed that one summer day Jack drove down the

main street of Red Dog in an open buggy, with the heiress of that town

beside him. Jack, albeit a trifle shaky, held the reins with something

of his old dash; and Mistress Peggy, in an enormous bonnet with

pearl-colored ribbons a shade darker than her hair, holding in her

short, pink-gloved fingers a bouquet of yellow roses, absolutely glowed

crimson in distressful gratification over the dash-board. So these two

fared on, out of the busy settlement, into the woods, against the rosy

sunset. Possibly it was not a pretty picture: nevertheless, as the dim

aisles of the solemn pines opened to receive them, miners leaned upon

their spades, and mechanics stopped in their toil to look after them.

The critical eye of Red Dog, perhaps from the sun, perhaps from the

fact that it had itself once been young and dissipated, took on a kindly

moisture as it gazed.

The moon was high when they returned. Those who had waited to

congratulate Jack on this near prospect of a favorable change in his

fortunes were chagrined to find, that, having seen the lady safe home,

he had himself departed from Red Dog. Nothing was to be gained from Peg,

who, on the next day and ensuing days, kept the even tenor of her way,

sunk a thousand or two more in unsuccessful speculation, and made no

change in her habits of personal economy. Weeks passed without any

apparent sequel to this romantic idyl. Nothing was known definitely

until Jack, a month later, turned up in Sacramento, with a billiard-cue

in his hand, and a heart overcharged with indignant emotion. “I don't

mind saying to you, gentlemen, in confidence,” said Jack to a circle of

sympathizing players,--“I don't mind telling you regarding this thing,

that I was as soft on that freckled-faced, red-eyed, tallow-haired gal,

as if she'd been--a--a--an actress. And I don't mind saying, gentlemen,

that, as far as I understand women, she was just as soft on me. You

kin laugh; but it's so. One day I took her out buggy-riding,--in style,

too,--and out on the road I offered to do the square thing, just as if

she'd been a lady,--offered to marry her then and there. And what did

she do?” said Jack with a hysterical laugh. “Why, blank it all! OFFERED

ME TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS A WEEK ALLOWANCE--PAY TO BE STOPPED WHEN I WASN'T

AT HOME!” The roar of laughter that greeted this frank confession was

broken by a quiet voice asking, “And what did YOU say?”--“Say?” screamed

Jack, “I just told her to go to ---- with her money.”--“They say,”

continued the quiet voice, “that you asked her for the loan of two

hundred and fifty dollars to get you to Sacramento--and that you got

it.”--“Who says so roared Jack. Show me the blank liar.” There was a

dead silence. Then the possessor of the quiet voice, Mr. Jack Hamlin,

languidly reached under the table, took the chalk, and, rubbing the end

of his billiard-cue, began with gentle gravity: “It was an old friend of

mine in Sacramento, a man with a wooden leg, a game eye, three fingers

on his right hand, and a consumptive cough. Being unable, naturally,

to back himself, he leaves things to me. So, for the sake of argument,”

continued Hamlin, suddenly laying down his cue, and fixing his wicked

black eyes on the speaker, “say it's ME!”

I am afraid that this story, whether truthful or not, did not tend

to increase Peg's popularity in a community where recklessness and

generosity condoned for the absence of all the other virtues; and it is

possible, also, that Red Dog was no more free from prejudice than other

more civilized but equally disappointed matchmakers. Likewise, during

the following year, she made several more foolish ventures, and lost

heavily. In fact, a feverish desire to increase her store at almost any

risk seemed to possess her. At last it was announced that she intended

to reopen the infelix Rockville Hotel, and keep it herself.

Wild as this scheme appeared in theory, when put into practical

operation there seemed to be some chance of success. Much, doubtless,

was owing to her practical knowledge of hotel-keeping, but more to

her rigid economy and untiring industry. The mistress of millions,

she cooked, washed, waited on table, made the beds, and labored like

a common menial. Visitors were attracted by this novel spectacle. The

income of the house increased as their respect for the hostess lessened.

No anecdote of her avarice was too extravagant for current belief. It

was even alleged that she had been known to carry the luggage of guests

to their rooms, that she might anticipate the usual porter's gratuity.

She denied herself the ordinary necessaries of life. She was poorly

clad, she was ill-fed--but the hotel was making money.

A few hinted of insanity; others shook their heads, and said a curse was

entailed on the property. It was believed, also, from her appearance,

that she could not long survive this tax on her energies, and already

there was discussion as to the probable final disposition of her

property.

It was the particular fortune of Mr. Jack Hamlin to be able to set the

world right on this and other questions regarding her.

A stormy December evening had set in when he chanced to be a guest of

the Rockville Hotel. He had, during the past week, been engaged in the

prosecution of his noble profession at Red Dog, and had, in the graphic

language of a coadjutor, “cleared out the town, except his fare in the

pockets of the stage-driver.” “The Red Dog Standard” had bewailed his

departure in playful obituary verse, beginning, “Dearest Johnny, thou

hast left us,” wherein the rhymes “bereft us” and “deplore” carried

a vague allusion to “a thousand dollars more.” A quiet contentment

naturally suffused his personality, and he was more than usually lazy

and deliberate in his speech. At midnight, when he was about to retire,

he was a little surprised, however, by a tap on his door, followed by

the presence of Mistress Peg Moffat, heiress, and landlady of Rockville

hotel.

Mr. Hamlin, despite his previous defence of Peg, had no liking for her.

His fastidious taste rejected her uncomeliness; his habits of thought

and life were all antagonistic to what he had heard of her niggardliness

and greed. As she stood there, in a dirty calico wrapper, still redolent

with the day's cuisine, crimson with embarrassment and the recent heat

of the kitchen range, she certainly was not an alluring apparition.

Happily for the lateness of the hour, her loneliness, and the infelix

reputation of the man before her, she was at least a safe one. And I

fear the very consciousness of this scarcely relieved her embarrassment.

“I wanted to say a few words to ye alone, Mr. Hamlin,” she began, taking

an unoffered seat on the end of his portmanteau, “or I shouldn't hev

intruded. But it's the only time I can ketch you, or you me; for I'm

down in the kitchen from sunup till now.”

She stopped awkwardly, as if to listen to the wind, which was rattling

the windows, and spreading a film of rain against the opaque darkness

without. Then, smoothing her wrapper over her knees, she remarked, as if

opening a desultory conversation, “Thar's a power of rain outside.”

Mr. Hamlin's only response to this meteorological observation was a

yawn, and a preliminary tug at his coat as he began to remove it.

“I thought ye couldn't mind doin' me a favor,” continued Peg, with a

hard, awkward laugh, “partik'ly seein' ez folks allowed you'd sorter bin

a friend o' mine, and hed stood up for me at times when you hedn't any

partikler call to do it. I hevn't” she continued, looking down on her

lap, and following with her finger and thumb a seam of her gown,--“I

hevn't so many friends ez slings a kind word for me these times that

I disremember them.” Her under lip quivered a little here; and, after

vainly hunting for a forgotten handkerchief, she finally lifted the hem

of her gown, wiped her snub nose upon it, but left the tears still in

her eyes as she raised them to the man, Mr. Hamlin, who had by this time

divested himself of his coat, stopped unbuttoning his waistcoat, and

looked at her.

“Like ez not thar'll be high water on the North Fork, ef this rain keeps

on,” said Peg, as if apologetically, looking toward the window.

The other rain having ceased, Mr. Hamlin began to unbutton his waistcoat

again.

“I wanted to ask ye a favor about Mr.--about--Jack Folinsbee,” began Peg

again hurriedly. “He's ailin' agin, and is mighty low. And he's losin'

a heap o' money here and thar, and mostly to YOU. You cleaned him out of

two thousand dollars last night--all he had.”

“Well?” said the gambler coldly.

“Well, I thought ez you woz a friend o' mine, I'd ask ye to let up a

little on him,” said Peg, with an affected laugh. “You kin do it. Don't

let him play with ye.”

“Mistress Margaret Moffat,” said Jack, with lazy deliberation, taking

off his watch, and beginning to wind it up, “ef you're that much stuck

after Jack Folinsbee, YOU kin keep him off of me much easier than I kin.

You're a rich woman. Give him enough money to break my bank, or break

himself for good and all; but don't keep him forlin' round me in hopes

to make a raise. It don't pay, Mistress Moffat--it don't pay!”

A finer nature than Peg's would have misunderstood or resented the

gambler's slang, and the miserable truths that underlaid it. But she

comprehended him instantly, and sat hopelessly silent.

“Ef you'll take my advice,” continued Jack, placing his watch and chain

under his pillow, and quietly unloosing his cravat, “you'll quit this

yer forlin', marry that chap, and hand over to him the money and the

money-makin' that's killin' you. He'll get rid of it soon enough. I

don't say this because I expect to git it; for, when he's got that

much of a raise, he'll make a break for 'Frisco, and lose it to some

first-class sport THERE. I don't say, neither, that you mayn't be in

luck enough to reform him. I don't say, neither--and it's a derned sight

more likely!--that you mayn't be luckier yet, and he'll up and die afore

he gits rid of your money. But I do say you'll make him happy NOW; and,

ez I reckon you're about ez badly stuck after that chap ez I ever saw

any woman, you won't be hurtin' your own feelin's either.”

The blood left Peg's face as she looked up. “But that's WHY I can't give

him the money--and he won't marry me without it.”

Mr. Hamlin's hand dropped from the last button of his waistcoat.

“Can't--give--him--the--money?” he repeated slowly.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because--because I LOVE him.”

Mr. Hamlin rebuttoned his waistcoat, and sat down patiently on the bed.

Peg arose, and awkwardly drew the portmanteau a little nearer to him.

“When Jim Byways left me this yer property,” she began, looking

cautiously around, “he left it to me on CONDITIONS; not conditions ez

waz in his WRITTEN will, but conditions ez waz SPOKEN. A promise I made

him in this very room, Mr. Hamlin,--this very room, and on that very bed

you're sittin' on, in which he died.”

Like most gamblers, Mr. Hamlin was superstitious. He rose hastily from

the bed, and took a chair beside the window. The wind shook it as if the

discontented spirit of Mr. Byways were without, re-enforcing his last

injunction.

“I don't know if you remember him,” said Peg feverishly, “he was a man

ez hed suffered. All that he loved--wife, fammerly, friends--had gone

back on him. He tried to make light of it afore folks; but with me,

being a poor gal, he let himself out. I never told anybody this. I don't

know why he told ME; I don't know,” continued Peg, with a sniffle, “why

he wanted to make me unhappy too. But he made me promise, that, if he

left me his fortune, I'd NEVER, NEVER--so help me God!--never share it

with any man or woman that I LOVED; I didn't think it would be hard to

keep that promise then, Mr. Hamlin; for I was very poor, and hedn't a

friend nor a living bein' that was kind to me, but HIM.”

“But you've as good as broken your promise already,” said Hamlin.

“You've given Jack money, as I know.”

“Only what I made myself. Listen to me, Mr. Hamlin. When Jack proposed

to me, I offered him about what I kalkilated I could earn myself. When

he went away, and was sick and in trouble, I came here and took this

hotel. I knew that by hard work I could make it pay. Don't laugh at me,

please. I DID work hard, and DID make it pay--without takin' one cent of

the fortin'. And all I made, workin' by night and day, I gave to him. I

did, Mr. Hamlin. I ain't so hard to him as you think, though I might be

kinder, I know.”

Mr. Hamlin rose, deliberately resumed his coat, watch, hat, and

overcoat. When he was completely dressed again, he turned to Peg. “Do

you mean to say that you've been givin' all the money you made here to

this A 1 first-class cherubim?”

“Yes; but he didn't know where I got it. O Mr. Hamlin! he didn't know

that.”

“Do I understand you, that he's bin buckin agin Faro with the money that

you raised on hash? And YOU makin' the hash?”

“But he didn't know that, he wouldn't hev took it if I'd told him.”

“No, he'd hev died fust!” said Mr. Hamlin gravely. “Why, he's that

sensitive--is Jack Folinsbee--that it nearly kills him to take money

even of ME. But where does this angel reside when he isn't fightin' the

tiger, and is, so to speak, visible to the naked eye?”

“He--he--stops here,” said Peg, with an awkward blush.

“I see. Might I ask the number of his room--or should I be a--disturbing

him in his meditations?” continued Jack Hamlin, with grave politeness.

“Oh! then you'll promise? And you'll talk to him, and make HIM promise?”

“Of course,” said Hamlin quietly.

“And you'll remember he's sick--very sick? His room's No. 44, at the end

of the hall. Perhaps I'd better go with you?”

“I'll find it.”

“And you won't be too hard on him?”

“I'll be a father to him,” said Hamlin demurely, as he opened the door

and stepped into the hall. But he hesitated a moment, and then turned,

and gravely held out his hand. Peg took it timidly. He did not seem

quite in earnest; and his black eyes, vainly questioned, indicated

nothing. But he shook her hand warmly, and the next moment was gone.

He found the room with no difficulty. A faint cough from within, and

a querulous protest, answered his knock. Mr. Hamlin entered without

further ceremony. A sickening smell of drugs, a palpable flavor of stale

dissipation, and the wasted figure of Jack Folinsbee, half-dressed,

extended upon the bed, greeted him. Mr. Hamlin was for an instant

startled. There were hollow circles round the sick man's eyes; there

was palsy in his trembling limbs; there was dissolution in his feverish

breath.

“What's up?” he asked huskily and nervously.

“I am, and I want YOU to get up too.”

“I can't, Jack. I'm regularly done up.” He reached his shaking hand

towards a glass half-filled with suspicious, pungent-smelling liquid;

but Mr. Hamlin stayed it.

“Do you want to get back that two thousand dollars you lost?”

“Yes.”

“Well, get up, and marry that woman down stairs.”

Folinsbee laughed half hysterically, half sardonically.

“She won't give it to me.”

“No; but I will.”

“YOU?”

“Yes.”

Folinsbee, with an attempt at a reckless laugh, rose, trembling and with

difficulty, to his swollen feet. Hamlin eyed him narrowly, and then bade

him lie down again. “To-morrow will do,” he said, “and then--”

“If I don't--”

“If you don't,” responded Hamlin, “why, I'll just wade in and CUT YOU

OUT!”

But on the morrow Mr. Hamlin was spared that possible act of disloyalty;

for, in the night, the already hesitating spirit of Mr. Jack Folinsbee

took flight on the wings of the south-east storm. When or how it

happened, nobody knew. Whether this last excitement and the near

prospect of matrimony, or whether an overdose of anodyne, had hastened

his end, was never known. I only know, that, when they came to awaken

him the next morning, the best that was left of him--a face still

beautiful and boy-like--looked up coldly at the tearful eyes of Peg

Moffat. “It serves me right, it's a judgment,” she said in a low whisper

to Jack Hamlin; “for God knew that I'd broken my word, and willed all my

property to him.”

She did not long survive him. Whether Mr. Hamlin ever clothed with

action the suggestion indicated in his speech to the lamented Jack that

night, is not of record. He was always her friend, and on her demise

became her executor. But the bulk of her property was left to a distant

relation of handsome Jack Folinsbee, and so passed out of the control of

Red Dog forever.

THE GREAT DEADWOOD MYSTERY

It was growing quite dark in the telegraph-office at Cottonwood,

Tuolumne County, California. The office, a box-like enclosure, was

separated from the public room of the Miners' Hotel by a thin partition;

and the operator, who was also news and express agent at Cottonwood,

had closed his window, and was lounging by his news-stand preparatory

to going home. Without, the first monotonous rain of the season was

dripping from the porches of the hotel in the waning light of a December

day. The operator, accustomed as he was to long intervals of idleness,

was fast becoming bored.

The tread of mud-muffled boots on the veranda, and the entrance of two

men, offered a momentary excitement. He recognized in the strangers two

prominent citizens of Cottonwood; and their manner bespoke business. One

of them proceeded to the desk, wrote a despatch, and handed it to the

other interrogatively.

“That's about the way the thing p'ints,” responded his companion

assentingly.

“I reckoned it only squar to use his dientical words?”

“That's so.”

The first speaker turned to the operator with the despatch.

“How soon can you shove her through?”

The operator glanced professionally over the address and the length of

the despatch.

“Now,” he answered promptly.

“And she gets there?”

“To-night. But there's no delivery until to-morrow.”

“Shove her through to-night, and say there's an extra twenty left here

for delivery.”

The operator, accustomed to all kinds of extravagant outlay for

expedition, replied that he would lay this proposition with the

despatch, before the San Francisco office. He then took it and read

it--and re-read it. He preserved the usual professional apathy,--had

doubtless sent many more enigmatical and mysterious messages,--but

nevertheless, when he finished, he raised his eyes inquiringly to his

customer. That gentleman, who enjoyed a reputation for equal spontaneity

of temper and revolver, met his gaze a little impatiently. The operator

had recourse to a trick. Under the pretence of misunderstanding the

message, he obliged the sender to repeat it aloud for the sake of

accuracy, and even suggested a few verbal alterations, ostensibly

to insure correctness, but really to extract further information.

Nevertheless, the man doggedly persisted in a literal transcript of his

message. The operator went to his instrument hesitatingly.

“I suppose,” he added half-questioningly, “there ain't no chance of

a mistake. This address is Rightbody, that rich old Bostonian that

everybody knows. There ain't but one?”

“That's the address,” responded the first speaker coolly.

“Didn't know the old chap had investments out here,” suggested the

operator, lingering at his instrument.

“No more did I,” was the insufficient reply.

For some few moments nothing was heard but the click of the instrument,

as the operator worked the key, with the usual appearance of imparting

confidence to a somewhat reluctant hearer who preferred to talk himself.

The two men stood by, watching his motions with the usual awe of

the unprofessional. When he had finished, they laid before him two

gold-pieces. As the operator took them up, he could not help saying,--

“The old man went off kinder sudden, didn't he? Had no time to write?”

“Not sudden for that kind o' man,” was the exasperating reply.

But the speaker was not to be disconcerted. “If there is an answer--” he

began.

“There ain't any,” replied the first speaker quietly.

“Why?”

“Because the man ez sent the message is dead.”

“But it's signed by you two.”

“On'y ez witnesses--eh?” appealed the first speaker to his comrade.

“On'y ez witnesses,” responded the other.

The operator shrugged his shoulders. The business concluded, the first

speaker slightly relaxed. He nodded to the operator, and turned to the

bar-room with a pleasing social impulse. When their glasses were set

down empty, the first speaker, with a cheerful condemnation of the hard

times and the weather, apparently dismissed all previous proceedings

from his mind, and lounged out with his companion. At the corner of the

street they stopped.

“Well, that job's done,” said the first speaker, by way of relieving the

slight social embarrassment of parting.

“Thet's so,” responded his companion, and shook his hand.

They parted. A gust of wind swept through the pines, and struck a faint

Aeolian cry from the wires above their heads; and the rain and the

darkness again slowly settled upon Cottonwood.

The message lagged a little at San Francisco, laid over half an hour

at Chicago, and fought longitude the whole way; so that it was past

midnight when the “all night” operator took it from the wires at Boston.

But it was freighted with a mandate from the San Francisco office; and

a messenger was procured, who sped with it through dark snow-bound

streets, between the high walls of close-shuttered rayless houses, to

a certain formal square ghostly with snow-covered statues. Here he

ascended the broad steps of a reserved and solid-looking mansion, and

pulled a bronze bell-knob, that somewhere within those chaste recesses,

after an apparent reflective pause, coldly communicated the fact that a

stranger was waiting without--as he ought. Despite the lateness of the

hour, there was a slight glow from the windows, clearly not enough

to warm the messenger with indications of a festivity within, but yet

bespeaking, as it were, some prolonged though subdued excitement. The

sober servant who took the despatch, and receipted for it as gravely as

if witnessing a last will and testament, respectfully paused before

the entrance of the drawing-room. The sound of measured and rhetorical

speech, through which the occasional catarrhal cough of the New-England

coast struggled, as the only effort of nature not wholly repressed, came

from its heavily-curtained recesses; for the occasion of the evening had

been the reception and entertainment of various distinguished persons,

and, as had been epigrammatically expressed by one of the guests, “the

history of the country” was taking its leave in phrases more or less

memorable and characteristic. Some of these valedictory axioms were

clever, some witty, a few profound, but always left as a genteel

contribution to the entertainer. Some had been already prepared, and,

like a card, had served and identified the guest at other mansions.

The last guest departed, the last carriage rolled away, when the servant

ventured to indicate the existence of the despatch to his master,

who was standing on the hearth-rug in an attitude of wearied

self-righteousness. He took it, opened it, read it, re-read it, and

said,--

“There must be some mistake! It is not for me. Call the boy, Waters.”

Waters, who was perfectly aware that the boy had left, nevertheless

obediently walked towards the hall-door, but was recalled by his master.

“No matter--at present!”

“It's nothing serious, William?” asked Mrs. Rightbody, with languid

wifely concern.

“No, nothing. Is there a light in my study?”

“Yes. But, before you go, can you give me a moment or two?”

Mr. Rightbody turned a little impatiently towards his wife. She had

thrown herself languidly on the sofa; her hair was slightly disarranged,

and part of a slippered foot was visible. She might have been a

finely-formed woman; but even her careless deshabille left the general

impression that she was severely flannelled throughout, and that any

ostentation of womanly charm was under vigorous sanitary SURVEILLANCE.

“Mrs. Marvin told me to-night that her son made no secret of his serious

attachment for our Alice, and that, if I was satisfied, Mr. Marvin would

be glad to confer with you at once.”

The information did not seem to absorb Mr. Rightbody's wandering

attention, but rather increased his impatience. He said hastily, that he

would speak of that to-morrow; and partly by way of reprisal, and partly

to dismiss the subject, added--

“Positively James must pay some attention to the register and the

thermometer. It was over 70 degrees to-night, and the ventilating

draught was closed in the drawing-room.”

“That was because Professor Ammon sat near it, and the old gentleman's

tonsils are so sensitive.”

“He ought to know from Dr. Dyer Doit that systematic and regular

exposure to draughts stimulates the mucous membrane; while fixed air

over 60 degrees invariably--”

“I am afraid, William,” interrupted Mrs. Rightbody, with feminine

adroitness, adopting her husband's topic with a view of thereby

directing him from it,--“I'm afraid that people do not yet appreciate

the substitution of bouillon for punch and ices. I observed that Mr.

Spondee declined it, and, I fancied, looked disappointed. The fibrine

and wheat in liqueur-glasses passed quite unnoticed too.”

“And yet each half-drachm contained the half-digested substance of

a pound of beef. I'm surprised at Spondee!” continued Mr. Rightbody

aggrievedly. “Exhausting his brain and nerve force by the highest

creative efforts of the Muse, he prefers perfumed and diluted alcohol

flavored with carbonic acid gas. Even Mrs. Faringway admitted to me

that the sudden lowering of the temperature of the stomach by the

introduction of ice--”

“Yes; but she took a lemon ice at the last Dorothea Reception, and asked

me if I had observed that the lower animals refused their food at a

temperature over 60 degrees.”

Mr. Rightbody again moved impatiently towards the door. Mrs. Rightbody

eyed him curiously.

“You will not write, I hope? Dr. Keppler told me to-night that your

cerebral symptoms interdicted any prolonged mental strain.”

“I must consult a few papers,” responded Mr. Rightbody curtly, as he

entered his library.

It was a richly-furnished apartment, morbidly severe in its decorations,

which were symptomatic of a gloomy dyspepsia of art, then quite

prevalent. A few curios, very ugly, but providentially equally rare,

were scattered about. There were various bronzes, marbles, and casts,

all requiring explanation, and so fulfilling their purpose of promoting

conversation, and exhibiting the erudition of their owner. There were

souvenirs of travel with a history, old bric-a-brac with a pedigree,

but little or nothing that challenged attention for itself alone. In all

cases the superiority of the owner to his possessions was admitted. As

a natural result, nobody ever lingered there, the servants avoided the

room, and no child was ever known to play in it.

Mr. Rightbody turned up the gas, and from a cabinet of drawers,

precisely labelled, drew a package of letters. These he carefully

examined. All were discolored, and made dignified by age; but some, in

their original freshness, must have appeared trifling, and inconsistent

with any correspondent of Mr. Rightbody. Nevertheless, that gentleman

spent some moments in carefully perusing them, occasionally referring

to the telegram in his hand. Suddenly there was a knock at the door.

Mr. Rightbody started, made a half-unconscious movement to return the

letters to the drawer, turned the telegram face downwards, and then,

somewhat harshly, stammered,--

“Eh? Who's there? Come in.”

“I beg your pardon, papa,” said a very pretty girl, entering, without,

however, the slightest trace of apology or awe in her manner, and taking

a chair with the self-possession and familiarity of an habitue of the

room; “but I knew it was not your habit to write late, so I supposed you

were not busy. I am on my way to bed.”

She was so very pretty, and withal so utterly unconscious of it, or

perhaps so consciously superior to it, that one was provoked into a

more critical examination of her face. But this only resulted in a

reiteration of her beauty, and perhaps the added facts that her dark

eyes were very womanly, her rich complexion eloquent, and her chiselled

lips fell enough to be passionate or capricious, notwithstanding that

their general effect suggested neither caprice, womanly weakness, nor

passion.

With the instinct of an embarrassed man, Mr. Rightbody touched the topic

he would have preferred to avoid.

“I suppose we must talk over to-morrow,” he hesitated, “this matter of

yours and Mr. Marvin's? Mrs. Marvin has formally spoken to your mother.”

Miss Alice lifted her bright eyes intelligently, but not joyfully;

and the color of action, rather than embarrassment, rose to her round

cheeks.

“Yes, HE said she would,” she answered simply.

“At present,” continued Mr. Rightbody still awkwardly, “I see no

objection to the proposed arrangement.”

Miss Alice opened her round eyes at this.

“Why, papa, I thought it had been all settled long ago! Mamma knew it,

you knew it. Last July, mamma and you talked it over.”

“Yes, yes,” returned her father, fumbling his papers; “that is--well, we

will talk of it to-morrow.” In fact, Mr. Rightbody HAD intended to

give the affair a proper attitude of seriousness and solemnity by due

precision of speech, and some apposite reflections, when he should

impart the news to his daughter, but felt himself unable to do it now.

“I am glad, Alice,” he said at last, “that you have quite forgotten your

previous whims and fancies. You see WE are right.”

“Oh! I dare say, papa, if I'm to be married at all, that Mr. Marvin is

in every way suitable.”

Mr. Rightbody looked at his daughter narrowly. There was not the

slightest impatience nor bitterness in her manner: it was as well

regulated as the sentiment she expressed.

“Mr. Marvin is--” he began.

“I know what Mr. Marvin IS,” interrupted Miss Alice; “and he has

promised me that I shall be allowed to go on with my studies the same as

before. I shall graduate with my class; and, if I prefer to practise my

profession, I can do so in two years after our marriage.”

“In two years?” queried Mr. Rightbody curiously.

“Yes. You see, in case we should have a child, that would give me time

enough to wean it.”

Mr. Rightbody looked at this flesh of his flesh, pretty and palpable

flesh as it was; but, being confronted as equally with the brain of his

brain, all he could do was to say meekly,--

“Yes, certainly. We will see about all that to-morrow.”

Miss Alice rose. Something in the free, unfettered swing of her arms as

she rested them lightly, after a half yawn, on her lithe hips, suggested

his next speech, although still distrait and impatient.

“You continue your exercise with the health-lift yet, I see.”

“Yes, papa; but I had to give up the flannels. I don't see how mamma

could wear them. But my dresses are high-necked, and by bathing I

toughen my skin. See!” she added, as, with a child-like unconsciousness,

she unfastened two or three buttons of her gown, and exposed the white

surface of her throat and neck to her father, “I can defy a chill.”

Mr. Rightbody, with something akin to a genuine playful, paternal laugh,

leaned forward and kissed her forehead.

“It's getting late, Ally,” he said parentally, but not dictatorially.

“Go to bed.”

“I took a nap of three hours this afternoon,” said Miss Alice, with

a dazzling smile, “to anticipate this dissipation. Good-night, papa.

To-morrow, then.”

“To-morrow,” repeated Mr. Rightbody, with his eyes still fixed upon the

girl vaguely. “Good-night.”

Miss Alice tripped from the room, possibly a trifle the more

light-heartedly that she had parted from her father in one of his rare

moments of illogical human weakness. And perhaps it was well for the

poor girl that she kept this single remembrance of him, when, I fear, in

after-years, his methods, his reasoning, and indeed all he had tried to

impress upon her childhood, had faded from her memory.

For, when she had left, Mr. Rightbody fell again to the examination of

his old letters. This was quite absorbing; so much so, that he did not

notice the footsteps of Mrs. Rightbody, on the staircase as she passed

to her chamber, nor that she had paused on the landing to look through

the glass half-door on her husband, as he sat there with the letters

beside him, and the telegram opened before him. Had she waited a

moment later, she would have seen him rise, and walk to the sofa with a

disturbed air and a slight confusion; so that, on reaching it, he seemed

to hesitate to lie down, although pale and evidently faint. Had she

still waited, she would have seen him rise again with an agonized

effort, stagger to the table, fumblingly refold and replace the papers

in the cabinet, and lock it, and, although now but half-conscious, hold

the telegram over the gas-flame till it was consumed.

For, had she waited until this moment, she would have flown

unhesitatingly to his aid, as, this act completed, he staggered again,

reached his hand toward the bell, but vainly, and then fell prone upon

the sofa.

But alas! no providential nor accidental hand was raised to save him,

or anticipate the progress of this story. And when, half an hour later,

Mrs. Rightbody, a little alarmed, and more indignant at his violation of

the doctor's rules, appeared upon the threshold, Mr. Rightbody lay upon

the sofa, dead!

With bustle, with thronging feet, with the irruption of strangers, and

a hurrying to and fro, but, more than all, with an impulse and emotion

unknown to the mansion when its owner was in life, Mrs. Rightbody

strove to call back the vanished life, but in vain. The highest medical

intelligence, called from its bed at this strange hour, saw only the

demonstration of its theories made a year before. Mr. Rightbody was

dead--without doubt, without mystery, even as a correct man should

die--logically, and indorsed by the highest medical authority.

But even in the confusion, Mrs. Rightbody managed to speed a messenger

to the telegraph-office for a copy of the despatch received by Mr.

Rightbody, but now missing.

In the solitude of her own room, and without a confidant, she read these

words:--

“[Copy.]

“To MR. ADAMS RIGHTBODY, BOSTON, MASS.

“Joshua Silsbie died suddenly this morning. His last request was

that you should remember your sacred compact with him of thirty

years ago.

(Signed) “SEVENTY-FOUR.

“SEVENTY-FIVE.”

In the darkened home, and amid the formal condolements of their friends

who had called to gaze upon the scarcely cold features of their late

associate, Mrs. Rightbody managed to send another despatch. It was

addressed to “Seventy-Four and Seventy-Five,” Cottonwood. In a few hours

she received the following enigmatical response:--

“A horse-thief named Josh Silsbie was lynched yesterday morning by the

Vigilantes at Deadwood.”

PART II.

The spring of 1874 was retarded in the California sierras; so much so,

that certain Eastern tourists who had early ventured into the Yo

Semite Valley found themselves, one May morning, snow-bound against the

tempestuous shoulders of El Capitan. So furious was the onset of the

wind at the Upper Merced Canyon, that even so respectable a lady as Mrs.

Rightbody was fain to cling to the neck of her guide to keep her seat

in the saddle; while Miss Alice, scorning all masculine assistance,

was hurled, a lovely chaos, against the snowy wall of the chasm. Mrs.

Rightbody screamed; Miss Alice raged under her breath, but scrambled to

her feet again in silence.

“I told you so!” said Mrs. Rightbody, in an indignant whisper, as

her daughter again ranged beside her. “I warned you especially,

Alice--that--that--”

“What?” interrupted Miss Alice curtly.

“That you would need your chemiloons and high boots,” said Mrs.

Rightbody, in a regretful undertone, slightly increasing her distance

from the guides.

Miss Alice shrugged her pretty shoulders scornfully, but ignored her

mother's implication.

“You were particularly warned against going into the valley at this

season,” she only replied grimly.

Mrs. Rightbody raised her eyes impatiently.

“You know how anxious I was to discover your poor father's strange

correspondent, Alice. You have no consideration.”

“But when YOU HAVE discovered him--what then?” queried Miss Alice.

“What then?”

“Yes. My belief is, that you will find the telegram only a mere business

cipher, and all this quest mere nonsense.”

“Alice! Why, YOU yourself thought your father's conduct that night very

strange. Have you forgotten?”

The young lady had NOT, but, for some far-reaching feminine reason,

chose to ignore it at that moment, when her late tumble in the snow was

still fresh in her mind.

“And this woman, whoever she may be--” continued Mrs. Rightbody.

“How do you know there's a woman in the case?” interrupted Miss Alice,

wickedly I fear.

“How do--I--know--there's a woman?” slowly ejaculated Mrs. Rightbody,

floundering in the snow and the unexpected possibility of such a

ridiculous question. But here her guide flew to her assistance, and

estopped further speech. And, indeed, a grave problem was before them.

The road that led to their single place of refuge--a cabin, half hotel,

half trading-post, scarce a mile away--skirted the base of the rocky

dome, and passed perilously near the precipitous wall of the

valley. There was a rapid descent of a hundred yards or more to

this terrace-like passage; and the guides paused for a moment of

consultation, cooly oblivious, alike to the terrified questioning of

Mrs. Rightbody, or the half-insolent independence of the daughter. The

elder guide was russet-bearded, stout, and humorous: the younger was

dark-bearded, slight, and serious.

“Ef you kin git young Bunker Hill to let you tote her on your shoulders,

I'll git the Madam to hang on to me,” came to Mrs. Rightbody's horrified

ears as the expression of her particular companion.

“Freeze to the old gal, and don't reckon on me if the daughter starts in

to play it alone,” was the enigmatical response of the younger guide.

Miss Alice overheard both propositions; and, before the two men returned

to their side, that high-spirited young lady had urged her horse down

the declivity.

Alas! at this moment a gust of whirling snow swept down upon her. There

was a flounder, a mis-step, a fatal strain on the wrong rein, a fall,

a few plucky but unavailing struggles, and both horse and rider slid

ignominiously down toward the rocky shelf. Mrs. Rightbody screamed.

Miss Alice, from a confused debris of snow and ice, uplifted a vexed and

coloring face to the younger guide, a little the more angrily, perhaps,

that she saw a shade of impatience on his face.

“Don't move, but tie one end of the 'lass' under your arms, and throw me

the other,” he said quietly.

“What do you mean by 'lass'--the lasso?” asked Miss Alice disgustedly.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Then why don't you say so?”

“O Alice!” reproachfully interpolated Mrs. Rightbody, encircled by the

elder guide's stalwart arm.

Miss Alice deigned no reply, but drew the loop of the lasso over her

shoulders, and let it drop to her round waist. Then she essayed to

throw the other end to her guide. Dismal failure! The first fling nearly

knocked her off the ledge; the second went all wild against the

rocky wall; the third caught in a thorn-bush, twenty feet below her

companion's feet. Miss Alice's arm sunk helplessly to her side, at which

signal of unqualified surrender, the younger guide threw himself half

way down the slope, worked his way to the thorn-bush, hung for a moment

perilously over the parapet, secured the lasso, and then began to pull

away at his lovely burden. Miss Alice was no dead weight, however, but

steadily half-scrambled on her hands and knees to within a foot or two

of her rescuer. At this too familiar proximity, she stood up, and leaned

a little stiffly against the line, causing the guide to give an extra

pull, which had the lamentable effect of landing her almost in his arms.

As it was, her intelligent forehead struck his nose sharply, and I

regret to add, treating of a romantic situation, caused that somewhat

prominent sign and token of a hero to bleed freely. Miss Alice instantly

clapped a handful of snow over his nostrils.

“Now elevate your right arm,” she said commandingly.

He did as he was bidden, but sulkily.

“That compresses the artery.”

No man, with a pretty woman's hand and a handful of snow over his mouth

and nose, could effectively utter a heroic sentence, nor, with his arm

elevated stiffly over his head, assume a heroic attitude. But, when his

mouth was free again, he said half-sulkily, half-apologetically,--

“I might have known a girl couldn't throw worth a cent.”

“Why?” demanded Miss Alice sharply.

“Because--why--because--you see--they haven't got the experience,” he

stammered feebly.

“Nonsense! they haven't the CLAVICLE--that's all! It's because I'm a

woman, and smaller in the collar-bone, that I haven't the play of the

fore-arm which you have. See!” She squared her shoulders slightly, and

turned the blaze of her dark eyes full on his. “Experience, indeed! A

girl can learn anything a boy can.”

Apprehension took the place of ill-humor in her hearer. He turned his

eyes hastily away, and glanced above him. The elder guide had gone

forward to catch Miss Alice's horse, which, relieved of his rider, was

floundering toward the trail. Mrs. Rightbody was nowhere to be seen. And

these two were still twenty feet below the trail!

There was an awkward pause.

“Shall I put you up the same way?” he queried. Miss Alice looked at

his nose, and hesitated. “Or will you take my hand?” he added in surly

impatience. To his surprise, Miss Alice took his hand, and they began

the ascent together.

But the way was difficult and dangerous. Once or twice her feet slipped

on the smoothly-worn rock beneath; and she confessed to an inward

thankfulness when her uncertain feminine hand-grip was exchanged for his

strong arm around her waist. Not that he was ungentle; but Miss Alice

angrily felt that he had once or twice exercised his superior masculine

functions in a rough way; and yet the next moment she would have

probably rejected the idea that she had even noticed it. There was no

doubt, however, that he WAS a little surly.

A fierce scramble finally brought them back in safety to the trail;

but in the action Miss Alice's shoulder, striking a projecting bowlder,

wrung from her a feminine cry of pain, her first sign of womanly

weakness. The guide stopped instantly.

“I am afraid I hurt you?”

She raised her brown lashes, a trifle moist from suffering, looked in

his eyes, and dropped her own. Why, she could not tell. And yet he had

certainly a kind face, despite its seriousness; and a fine face, albeit

unshorn and weather-beaten. Her own eyes had never been so near to any

man's before, save her lover's; and yet she had never seen so much in

even his. She slipped her hand away, not with any reference to him,

but rather to ponder over this singular experience, and somehow felt

uncomfortable thereat.

Nor was he less so. It was but a few days ago that he had accepted the

charge of this young woman from the elder guide, who was the recognized

escort of the Rightbody party, having been a former correspondent of her

father's. He had been hired like any other guide, but had undertaken

the task with that chivalrous enthusiasm which the average Californian

always extends to the sex so rare to him. But the illusion had passed;

and he had dropped into a sulky, practical sense of his situation,

perhaps fraught with less danger to himself. Only when appealed to by

his manhood or her weakness, he had forgotten his wounded vanity.

He strode moodily ahead, dutifully breaking the path for her in the

direction of the distant canyon, where Mrs. Rightbody and her friend

awaited them. Miss Alice was first to speak. In this trackless,

uncharted terra incognita of the passions, it is always the woman who

steps out to lead the way.

“You know this place very well. I suppose you have lived here long?”

“Yes.”

“You were not born here--no?”

A long pause.

“I observe they call you 'Stanislaus Joe.' Of course that is not your

real name?” (Mem.--Miss Alice had never called him ANYTHING, usually

prefacing any request with a languid, “O-er-er, please, mister-er-a!”

explicit enough for his station.)

“No.”

Miss Alice (trotting after him, and bawling in his ear).--“WHAT name did

you say?”

The Man (doggedly).--“I don't know.” Nevertheless, when they reached the

cabin, after an half-hour's buffeting with the storm, Miss Alice applied

herself to her mother's escort, Mr. Ryder.

“What's the name of the man who takes care of my horse?”

“Stanislaus Joe,” responded Mr. Ryder.

“Is that all?”

“No. Sometimes he's called Joe Stanislaus.”

Miss Alice (satirically).--“I suppose it's the custom here to send young

ladies out with gentlemen who hide their names under an alias?”

Mr. Ryder (greatly perplexed).--“Why, dear me, Miss Alice, you allers

'peared to me as a gal as was able to take keer--”

Miss Alice (interrupting with a wounded, dove-like timidity).--“Oh,

never mind, please!”

The cabin offered but scanty accommodation to the tourists; which fact,

when indignantly presented by Mrs. Rightbody, was explained by the

good-humored Ryder from the circumstance that the usual hotel was only a

slight affair of boards, cloth, and paper, put up during the season, and

partly dismantled in the fall. “You couldn't be kept warm enough there,”

he added. Nevertheless Miss Alice noticed that both Mr. Ryder and

Stanislaus Joe retired there with their pipes, after having prepared the

ladies' supper, with the assistance of an Indian woman, who apparently

emerged from the earth at the coming of the party, and disappeared as

mysteriously.

The stars came out brightly before they slept; and the next morning

a clear, unwinking sun beamed with almost summer power through the

shutterless window of their cabin, and ironically disclosed the details

of its rude interior. Two or three mangy, half-eaten buffalo-robes,

a bearskin, some suspicious-looking blankets, rifles and saddles,

deal-tables, and barrels, made up its scant inventory. A strip of faded

calico hung before a recess near the chimney, but so blackened by

smoke and age that even feminine curiosity respected its secret. Mrs.

Rightbody was in high spirits, and informed her daughter that she was at

last on the track of her husband's unknown correspondent. “Seventy-Four

and Seventy-Five represent two members of the Vigilance Committee, my

dear, and Mr. Ryder will assist me to find them.”

“Mr. Ryder!” ejaculated Miss Alice, in scornful astonishment.

“Alice,” said Mrs. Rightbody, with a suspicious assumption of sudden

defence, “you injure yourself, you injure me, by this exclusive

attitude. Mr. Ryder is a friend of your father's, an exceedingly

well-informed gentleman. I have not, of course, imparted to him the

extent of my suspicions. But he can help me to what I must and will

know. You might treat him a little more civilly--or, at least, a little

better than you do his servant, your guide. Mr. Ryder is a gentleman,

and not a paid courier.”

Miss Alice was suddenly attentive. When she spoke again, she asked,

“Why do you not find out something about this Silsbie--who died--or was

hung--or something of that kind?”

“Child!” said Mrs. Rightbody, “don't you see there was no Silsbie, or,

if there was, he was simply the confidant of that--woman?”

A knock at the door, announcing the presence of Mr. Ryder and Stanislaus

Joe with the horses, checked Mrs. Rightbody's speech. As the animals

were being packed, Mrs. Rightbody for a moment withdrew in confidential

conversation with Mr. Ryder, and, to the young lady's still greater

annoyance, left her alone with Stanislaus Joe. Miss Alice was not in

good temper, but she felt it necessary to say something.

“I hope the hotel offers better quarters for travellers than this in

summer,” she began.

“It does.”

“Then this does not belong to it?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Who lives here, then?”

“I do.”

“I beg your pardon,” stammered Miss Alice, “I thought you lived where we

hired--where we met you--in--in--You must excuse me.”

“I'm not a regular guide; but as times were hard, and I was out of grub,

I took the job.”

“Out of grub!” “job!” And SHE was the “job.” What would Henry Marvin

say? It would nearly kill him. She began herself to feel a little

frightened, and walked towards the door.

“One moment, miss!”

The young girl hesitated. The man's tone was surly, and yet indicated a

certain kind of half-pathetic grievance. HER curiosity got the better of

her prudence, and she turned back.

“This morning,” he began hastily, “when we were coming down the valley,

you picked me up twice.”

“I picked YOU up?” repeated the astonished Alice.

“Yes, CONTRADICTED me: that's what I mean,--once when you said those

rocks were volcanic, once when you said the flower you picked was a

poppy. I didn't let on at the time, for it wasn't my say; but all the

while you were talking I might have laid for you--”

“I don't understand you,” said Alice haughtily.

“I might have entrapped you before folks. But I only want you to know

that I'M right, and here are the books to show it.”

He drew aside the dingy calico curtain, revealed a small shelf of

bulky books, took down two large volumes,--one of botany, one

of geology,--nervously sought his text, and put them in Alice's

outstretched hands.

“I had no intention--” she began, half-proudly, half-embarrassedly.

“Am I right, miss?” he interrupted.

“I presume you are, if you say so.”

“That's all, ma'am. Thank you!”

Before the girl had time to reply, he was gone. When he again returned,

it was with her horse, and Mrs. Rightbody and Ryder were awaiting her.

But Miss Alice noticed that his own horse was missing.

“Are you not going with us?” she asked.

“No, ma'am.”

“Oh, indeed!”

Miss Alice felt her speech was a feeble conventionalism; but it was all

she could say. She, however, DID something. Hitherto it had been her

habit to systematically reject his assistance in mounting to her seat.

Now she awaited him. As he approached, she smiled, and put out her

little foot. He instantly stooped; she placed it in his hand, rose

with a spring, and for one supreme moment Stanislaus Joe held her

unresistingly in his arms. The next moment she was in the saddle; but

in that brief interval of sixty seconds she had uttered a volume in a

single sentence,--

“I hope you will forgive me!”

He muttered a reply, and turned his face aside quickly as if to hide it.

Miss Alice cantered forward with a smile, but pulled her hat down over

her eyes as she joined her mother. She was blushing.