Amid the beauty of the most uncultivated and untrodden wilderness there
are certain localities where the meaner and mere common processes
of Nature take upon themselves a degrading likeness to the slovenly,
wasteful, and improvident processes of man. The unrecorded land-slip
disintegrating a whole hillside will not only lay bare the delicate
framework of strata and deposit to the vulgar eye, but hurl into the
valley a debris so monstrous and unlovely as to shame even the hideous
ruins left by dynamite, hydraulic, or pick and shovel; an overflown and
forgotten woodland torrent will leave in some remote hollow a disturbed
and ungraceful chaos of inextricable logs, branches, rock, and soil that
will rival the unsavory details of some wrecked or abandoned settlement.
Of lesser magnitude and importance, there are certain natural
dust-heaps, sinks, and cesspools, where the elements have collected the
cast-off, broken, and frayed disjecta of wood and field--the sweepings
of the sylvan household. It was remarkable that Nature, so kindly
considerate of mere human ruins, made no attempt to cover up or disguise
these monuments of her own mortality: no grass grew over the unsightly
landslides, no moss or ivy clothed the stripped and bleached skeletons
of overthrown branch and tree; the dead leaves and withered husks rotted
in their open grave uncrossed by vine and creeper. Even the animals,
except the lower organizations, shunned those haunts of decay and ruin.
It was scarcely a hundred yards from one of those dreary receptacles
that Mr. Bradley had taken leave of Miss Minty Sharpe. The cabin
occupied by her father, herself, and a younger brother stood, in fact,
on the very edge of the little hollow, which was partly filled with
decayed wood, leaves, and displacements of the crumbling bank, with
the coal dust and ashes which Mr. Sharpe had added from his forge, that
stood a few paces distant at the corner of a cross-road. The occupants
of the cabin had also contributed to the hollow the refuse of their
household in broken boxes, earthenware, tin cans, and cast-off clothing;
and it is not improbable that the site of the cabin was chosen with
reference to this convenient disposal of useless and encumbering
impedimenta. It was true that the locality offered little choice in
the way of beauty. An outcrop of brown granite--a portent of higher
altitudes--extended a quarter of a mile from the nearest fringe of dwarf
laurel and “brush” in one direction; in the other an advanced file of
Bradley's woods had suffered from some long-forgotten fire, and still
raised its blackened masts and broken stumps over the scorched and arid
soil, swept of older underbrush and verdure. On the other side of the
road a dark ravine, tangled with briers and haunted at night by owls and
wild cats, struggled wearily on, until blundering at last upon the edge
of the Great Canyon, it slipped and lost itself forever in a single
furrow of those mighty flanks. When Bradley had once asked Sharpe why he
had not built his house in the ravine, the blacksmith had replied: “That
until the Lord had appointed his time, he reckoned to keep his head
above ground and the foundations thereof.” Howbeit, the ravine, or the
“run,” as it was locally known, was Minty's only Saturday afternoon
resort for recreation or berries. “It was,” she had explained, “pow'ful
soothin', and solitary.”
She entered the house--a rude, square building of unpainted
boards--containing a sitting-room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. A glance
at these rooms, which were plainly furnished, and whose canvas-colored
walls were adorned with gorgeous agricultural implement
circulars, patent medicine calendars, with polytinted chromos and
cheaply-illuminated Scriptural texts, showed her that a certain neatness
and order had been preserved during her absence; and, finding the house
empty, she crossed the barren and blackened intervening space between
the back door and her father's forge, and entered the open shed. The
light was fading from the sky; but the glow of the forge lit up the
dusty road before it, and accented the blackness of the rocky ledge
beyond. A small curly-headed boy, bearing a singular likeness to a
smudged and blackened crayon drawing of Minty, was mechanically
blowing the bellows and obviously intent upon something else; while her
father--a powerfully built man, with a quaintly dissatisfied expression
of countenance--was with equal want of interest mechanically hammering
at a horseshoe. Without noticing Minty's advent, he lazily broke into a
querulous drawling chant of some vague religious character:
“O tur-ren, sinner; tur-ren.
For the Lord bids you turn--ah!
O tur-ren, sinner; tur-ren.
Why will you die?”
The musical accent adapted itself to the monotonous fall of the
sledge-hammer; and at every repetition of the word “turn” he suited the
action to the word by turning the horseshoe with the iron in his left
hand. A slight grunt at the end of every stroke, and the simultaneous
repetition of “turn” seemed to offer him amusement and relief. Minty,
without speaking, crossed the shop, and administered a sound box on her
brother's ear. “Take that, and let me ketch you agen layin' low when my
back's turned, to put on your store pants.”
“The others had fetched away in the laig,” said the boy, opposing a knee
and elbow at acute angle to further attack.
“You jest get and change 'em,” said Minty.
The sudden collapse of the bellows broke in upon the soothing refrain of
Mr. Sharpe, and caused him to turn also.
“It's Minty,” he said, replacing the horseshoe on the coals, and setting
his powerful arms and the sledge on the anvil with an exaggerated
expression of weariness.
“Yes; it's me,” said Minty, “and Creation knows it's time I DID come, to
keep that boy from ruinin' us with his airs and conceits.”
“Did ye bring over any o' that fever mixter?”
“No. Bradley sez you're loading yerself up with so much o' that bitter
bark--kuinine they call it over there--that you'll lift the ruff off
your head next. He allows ye ain't got no ague; it's jest wind and
dyspepsy. He sez yer's strong ez a hoss.”
“Bradley,” said Sharpe, laying aside his sledge with an aggrieved manner
which was, however, as complacent as his fatigue and discontent, “ez one
of them nat'ral born finikin skunks ez I despise. I reckon he began
to give p'ints to his parents when he was about knee-high to Richelieu
there. He's on them confidential terms with hisself and the Almighty
that he reckons he ken run a saw-mill and a man's insides at the same
time with one hand tied behind him. And this finikin is up to his
conceit: he wanted to tell me that that yer handy brush dump outside our
shanty was unhealthy. Give a man with frills like that his own way and
he'd be a sprinkling odor cologne and peppermint all over the country.”
“He set your shoulder as well as any doctor,” said Minty.
“That's bone-settin', and a nat'ral gift,” returned Sharpe, as
triumphantly as his habitual depression would admit; “it ain't conceit
and finikin got out o' books! Well,” he added, after a pause, “wot's
happened?”
Minty's face slightly changed. “Nothin'; I kem back to get some things,”
she said shortly, moving away.
“And ye saw HIM?”
“Ye-e-s,” drawled Minty, carelessly, still retreating.
“Bixby was along here about noon. He says the stranger was suthin' high
and mighty in his own country, and them 'Frisco millionaires are quite
sweet on him. Where are ye goin'?”
“In the house.”
“Well, look yer, Minty. Now that you're here, ye might get up a batch
o' hot biscuit for supper. Dinner was that promiscous and experimental
to-day, along o' Richelieu's nat'ral foolin', that I think I could git
outside of a little suthin' now, if only to prop up a kind of innard
sinkin' that takes me. Ye ken tell me the news at supper.”
Later, however, when Mr. Sharpe had quitted his forge for the night and,
seated at his domestic board, was, with a dismal presentiment of future
indigestion, voraciously absorbing his favorite meal of hot saleratus
biscuits swimming in butter, he had apparently forgotten his curiosity
concerning Mainwaring and settled himself to a complaining chronicle of
the day's mishaps. “Nat'rally, havin' an extra lot o' work on hand and
no time for foolin', what does that ornery Richelieu get up and do this
mornin'? Ye know them ridiklus specimens that he's been chippin' outer
that ledge that the yearth slipped from down the run, and litterin' up
the whole shanty with 'em. Well, darn my skin! if he didn't run a heap
of 'em, mixed up with coal, unbeknowned to me, in the forge, to make
what he called a 'fire essay' of 'em. Nat'rally, I couldn't get a
blessed iron hot, and didn't know what had gone of the fire, or the coal
either, for two hours, till I stopped work and raked out the coal. That
comes from his hangin' round that saw-mill in the woods, and listenin'
to Bradley's high-falutin' talk about rocks and strata and sich.”
“But Bradley don't go a cent on minin', Pop,” said Minty. “He sez the
woods is good enough for him; and there's millions to be made when the
railroad comes along, and timber's wanted.”
“But until then he's got to keep hisself, to pay wages, and keep the
mill runnin'. Onless it's, ez Bixby says, that he hopes to get that
Englishman to rope in some o' them 'Frisco friends of his to take a
hand. Ye didn't have any o' that kind o' talk, did ye?”
“No; not THAT kind o' talk,” said Minty.
“Not THAT kind o' talk!” repeated her father with aggrieved curiosity,
“Wot kind, then?”
“Well,” said Minty, lifting her black eyes to her father's; “I ain't
no account, and you ain't no account either. You ain't got no college
education, ain't got no friends in 'Frisco, and ain't got no high-toned
style; I can't play the pianner, jabber French, nor get French dresses.
We ain't got no fancy 'Shallet,' as they call it, with a first-class
view of nothing; but only a shanty on dry rock. But, afore I'D take
advantage of a lazy, gawky boy--for it ain't anything else, though he's
good meanin' enough--that happened to fall sick in MY house, and coax
and cosset him, and wrap him in white cotton, and mother him, and sister
him, and Aunt Sukey him, and almost dry-nuss him gin'rally, jist to get
him sweet on me and on mine, and take the inside track of others--I'D be
an Injin! And if you'd allow it, Pop, you'd be wuss nor a nigger!”
“Sho!” said her father, kindling with that intense gratification with
which the male receives any intimation of alien feminine weakness. “It
ain't that, Minty, I wanter know!”
“It's jist that, Pop; and I ez good ez let 'em know I seed it. I ain't a
fool, if some folks do drop their eyes and pertend to wipe the laugh out
of their noses with a handkerchief when I let out to speak. I mayn't be
good enough kempany--”
“Look yer, Minty,” interrupted the blacksmith, sternly, half rising
from his seat with every trace of his former weakness vanished from his
hardset face; “do you mean to say that they put on airs to ye--to MY
darter?”
“No,” said Minty quickly; “the men didn't; and don't you, a man, mix
yourself up with women's meannesses. I ken manage 'em, Pop, with one
hand.”
Mr. Sharpe looked at his daughter's flashing black eyes. Perhaps an
uneasy recollection of the late Mrs. Sharpe's remarkable capacity in
that respect checked his further rage.
“No. Wot I was sayin',” resumed Minty, “ez that I mayn't be thought by
others good enough to keep kempany with baronetts ez is to be--though
baronetts mightn't object--but I ain't mean enough to try to steal away
some ole woman's darling boy in England, or snatch some likely young
English girl's big brother outer the family without sayin' by your
leave. How'd you like it if Richelieu was growed up, and went to
sea,--and it would be like his peartness,--and he fell sick in some
foreign land, and some princess or other skyulged HIM underhand away
from us?”
Probably owing to the affair of the specimens, the elder Sharpe did not
seem to regard the possible mesalliance of Richelieu with extraordinary
disfavor. “That boy is conceited enough with hair ile and fine clothes
for anything,” he said plaintively. “But didn't that Louise Macy hev a
feller already--that Captain Greyson? Wot's gone o' him?”
“That's it,” said Minty: “he kin go out in the woods and whistle now.
But all the same, she could hitch him in again at any time if the other
stranger kicked over the traces. That's the style over there at The
Lookout. There ain't ez much heart in them two women put together ez
would make a green gal flush up playin' forfeits. It's all in their
breed, Pop. Love ain't going to spile their appetites and complexions,
give 'em nose-bleed, nor put a drop o' water into their eyes in all
their natural born days. That's wot makes me mad. Ef I thought that Loo
cared a bit for that child I wouldn't mind; I'd just advise her to make
him get up and get--pack his duds out o' camp, and go home and not come
back until he had a written permit from his mother, or the other baronet
in office.”
“Looks sorter ef some one orter interfere,” said the blacksmith,
reflectively. “'Tain't exackly a case for a vigilance committee, tho'
it's agin public morals, this sorter kidnappin' o' strangers. Looks ez
if it might bring the country into discredit in England.”
“Well, don't YOU go and interfere and havin' folks say ez my nose
was put out o' jint over there,” said Minty, curtly. “There's another
Englishman comin' up from 'Frisco to see him to-morrow. Ef he ain't
scooped up by Jenny Bradley he'll guess there's a nigger in the fence
somewhere. But there, Pop, let it drop. It's a bad aig, anyway,” she
concluded, rising from the table, and passing her hands down her frock
and her shapely hips, as if to wipe off further contamination of the
subject. “Where's Richelieu agin?”
“Said he didn't want supper, and like ez not he's gone over to see that
fammerly at the Summit. There's a little girl thar he's sparkin', about
his own age.”
“His own age!” said Minty, indignantly. “Why, she's double that, if
she's a day. Well--if he ain't the triflinest, conceitednest little limb
that ever grew! I'd like to know where he got it from--it wasn't mar's
style.”
Mr. Sharpe smiled darkly. Richelieu's precocious gallantry evidently was
not considered as gratuitous as his experimental metallurgy. But as his
eyes followed his daughter's wholesome, Phyllis-like figure, a new idea
took possession of him: needless to say, however, it was in the line
of another personal aggrievement, albeit it took the form of religious
reflection.
“It's curous, Minty, wot's foreordained, and wot ain't. Now, yer's one
of them high and mighty fellows, after the Lord, ez comes meanderin'
around here, and drops off--ez fur ez I kin hear--in a kind o' faint at
the first house he kems to, and is taken in and lodged and sumptuously
fed; and, nat'rally, they gets their reward for it. Now wot's to hev
kept that young feller from coming HERE and droppin' down in my forge,
or in this very room, and YOU a tendin' him, and jist layin' over them
folks at The Lookout?”
“Wot's got hold o' ye, Pop? Don't I tell ye he had a letter to Jim
Bradley?” said Minty, quickly, with an angry flash of color in her
cheek.
“That ain't it,” said Sharpe confidently; “it's cos he WALKED.
Nat'rally, you'd think he'd RIDE, being high and mighty, and that's
where, ez the parson will tell ye, wot's merely fi-nite and human wisdom
errs! Ef that feller had ridden, he'd have had to come by this yer
road, and by this yer forge, and stop a spell like any other. But it
was foreordained that he should walk, jest cos it wasn't generally
kalkilated and reckoned on. So, YOU had no show.”
For a moment, Minty seemed struck with her father's original theory.
But with a vigorous shake of her shoulders she threw it off. Her eyes
darkened.
“I reckon you ain't thinking, Pop--” she began.
“I was only sayin' it was curous,” he rejoined quietly. Nevertheless,
after a pause, he rose, coughed, and going up to the young girl, as she
leaned over the dresser, bent his powerful arm around her, and, drawing
her and the plate she was holding against his breast, laid his bearded
cheek for an instant softly upon her rebellious head. “It's all right,
Minty,” he said; “ain't it, pet?” Minty's eyelids closed gently under
the familiar pressure. “Wot's that in your hair, Minty?” he said
tactfully, breaking an embarrassing pause.
“Bar's grease, father,” murmured Minty, in a child's voice--the grown-up
woman, under that magic touch, having lapsed again into her father's
motherless charge of ten years before.
“It's pow'ful soothin', and pretty,” said her father.
“I made it myself--do you want some?” asked Minty.
“Not now, girl!” For a moment they slightly rocked each other in that
attitude--the man dexterously, the woman with infinite tenderness--and
then they separated.
Late that night, after Richelieu had returned, and her father wrestled
in his fitful sleep with the remorse of his guilty indulgence at supper,
Minty remained alone in her room, hard at work, surrounded by the
contents of one of her mother's trunks and the fragments of certain
ripped-up and newly-turned dresses. For Minty had conceived the bold
idea of altering one of her mother's gowns to the fashion of a certain
fascinating frock worn by Louise Macy. It was late when her self-imposed
task was completed. With a nervous trepidation that was novel to
her, Minty began to disrobe herself preparatory to trying on her new
creation. The light of a tallow candle and a large swinging lantern,
borrowed from her father's forge, fell shyly on her milky neck and
shoulders, and shone in her sparkling eyes, as she stood before her
largest mirror--the long glazed door of a kitchen clock which she had
placed upon her chest of drawers. Had poor Minty been content with the
full, free, and goddess-like outlines that it reflected, she would have
been spared her impending disappointment. For, alas! the dress of her
model had been framed upon a symmetrically attenuated French corset, and
the unfortunate Minty's fuller and ampler curves had under her simple
country stays known no more restraining cincture than knew the Venus
of Milo. The alteration was a hideous failure, it was neither Minty's
statuesque outline nor Louise Macy's graceful contour. Minty was no
fool, and the revelation of this slow education of the figure and
training of outline--whether fair or false in art--struck her quick
intelligence with all its full and hopeless significance. A bitter light
sprang to her eyes; she tore the wretched sham from her shoulders, and
then wrapping a shawl around her, threw herself heavily and sullenly on
the bed. But inaction was not a characteristic of Minty's emotion; she
presently rose again, and, taking an old work-box from her trunk, began
to rummage in its recesses. It was an old shell-incrusted affair, and
the apparent receptacle of such cheap odds and ends of jewelry as she
possessed; a hideous cameo ring, the property of the late Mrs. Sharpe,
was missing. She again rapidly explored the contents of the box, and
then an inspiration seized her, and she darted into her brother's
bedroom.
That precocious and gallant Lovelace of ten, despite all sentiment, had
basely succumbed to the gross materialism of youthful slumber. On a
cot in the corner, half hidden under the wreck of his own careless and
hurried disrobing, with one arm hanging out of the coverlid, Richelieu
lay supremely unconscious. On the forefinger of his small but dirty hand
the missing cameo was still glittering guiltily. With a swift movement
of indignation Minty rushed with uplifted palm towards the tempting
expanse of youthful cheek that lay invitingly exposed upon the pillow.
Then she stopped suddenly.
She had seen him lying thus a hundred times before. On the pillow near
him an indistinguishable mass of golden fur--the helpless bulk of a
squirrel chained to the leg of his cot; at his feet a wall-eyed cat, who
had followed his tyrannous caprices with the long-suffering devotion
of her sex; on the shelf above him a loathsome collection of flies
and tarantulas in dull green bottles: a slab of ginger-bread for light
nocturnal refection, and her own pot of bear's grease. Perhaps it was
the piteous defencelessness of youthful sleep, perhaps it was some
lingering memory of her father's caress; but as she gazed at him with
troubled eyes, the juvenile reprobate slipped back into the baby-boy
that she had carried in her own childish arms such a short time ago,
when the maternal responsibility had descended with the dead mother's
ill-fitting dresses upon her lank girlish figure and scant virgin
breast--and her hand fell listlessly at her side.
The sleeper stirred slightly and awoke. At the same moment, by some
mysterious sympathy, a pair of beady bright eyes appeared in the bulk
of fur near his curls, the cat stretched herself, and even a vague
agitation was heard in the bottles on the shelf. Richelieu's blinking
eyes wandered from the candle to his sister, and then the guilty hand
was suddenly withdrawn under the bedclothes.
“No matter, dear,” said Minty; “it's mar's, and you kin wear it when you
like, if you'll only ask for it.”
Richelieu wondered if he was dreaming! This unexpected mildness--this
inexplicable tremor in his sister's voice: it must be some occult
influence of the night season on the sisterly mind, possibly akin to a
fear of ghosts! He made a mental note of it in view of future favors,
yet for the moment he felt embarrassedly gratified. “Ye ain't wantin'
anything, Minty,” he said affectionately; “a pail o' cold water from the
far spring--no nothin'?” He made an ostentatious movement as if to
rise, yet sufficiently protracted to prevent any hasty acceptance of his
prodigal offer.
“No, dear,” she said, still gazing at him with an absorbed look in her
dark eyes.
Richelieu felt a slight creepy sensation under that lonely far-off gaze.
“Your eyes look awful big at night, Minty,” he said. He would have added
“and pretty,” but she was his sister, and he had the lofty fraternal
conviction of his duty in repressing the inordinate vanity of the sex.
“Ye're sure ye ain't wantin' nothin'?”
“Not now, dear.” She paused a moment, and then said deliberately: “But
you wouldn't mind turnin' out after sun-up and runnin' an errand for me
over to The Lookout?”
Richelieu's eyes sparkled so suddenly that even in her absorption
Minty noticed the change. “But ye're not goin' to tarry over there, ner
gossip--you hear? Yer to take this yer message. Yer to say 'that it will
be onpossible for me to come back there, on account--on account of--'”
“Important business,” suggested Richelieu; “that's the perlite style.”
“Ef you like.” She leaned over the bed and put her lips to his forehead,
still damp with the dews of sleep, and then to his long-lashed lids.
“Mind Nip!”--the squirrel--he practically suggested. For an instant
their blond curls mingled on the pillow. “Now go to sleep,” she said
curtly.
But Richelieu had taken her white neck in the short strangulatory hug of
the small boy, and held her fast. “Ye'll let me put on my best pants?”
“Yes.”
“And wear that ring?”
“Yes”--a little sadly.
“Then yer kin count me in, Minty; and see here”--his voice sank to a
confidential whisper--“mebbee some day ye'll be beholden to ME for a lot
o' real jewelry.”
She returned slowly to her room, and, opening the window, looked out
upon the night. The same moon that had lent such supererogatory grace to
the natural beauty of The Lookout, here seemed to have failed; as Minty
had, in disguising the relentless limitations of Nature or the cruel
bonds of custom. The black plain of granite, under its rays, appeared
only to extend its poverty to some remoter barrier; the blackened stumps
of the burnt forest stood bleaker against the sky, like broken and
twisted pillars of iron. The cavity of the broken ledge where Richelieu
had prospected was a hideous chasm of bluish blackness, over which a
purple vapor seemed to hover; the “brush dump” beside the house showed
a cavern of writhing and distorted objects stiffened into dark rigidity.
She had often looked upon the prospect: it had never seemed so hard and
changeless; yet she accepted it, as she had accepted it before.
She turned away, undressed herself mechanically, and went to bed. She
had an idea that she had been very foolish; that her escape from
being still more foolish was something miraculous, and in some measure
connected with Providence, her father, her little brother, and her dead
mother, whose dress she had recklessly spoiled. But that she had even so
slightly touched the bitterness and glory of renunciation--as written
of heroines and fine ladies by novelists and poets--never entered the
foolish head of Minty Sharpe, the blacksmith's daughter.