gettin' just sick of it, he happened to be walkin' in the garden. He was
puzzlin' his brain agin to know how old Sobriente made his pile, when
all of a suddenst he saw suthin' a-movin' in the brush beside the house.
He calls out, thinkin' it was one of the boys, but got no answer. Then
he goes to the bushes, and a tall figger, all in black, starts out afore
him. He couldn't see any face, for its head was covered with a hood, but
he saw that it held suthin' like a big cross clasped agin its breast.
This made him think it was one them priests, until he looks agin and
sees that it wasn't no cross it was carryin,' but a PICKAXE! He makes
a jump towards it, but it vanished! He traipsed over the hull
garden,--went though ev'ry bush,--but it was clean gone. Then the hull
thing flashed upon him with a cold shiver. The old man bein' found dead
in the well! the goin' away of the half-breed and the girl! the findin'
o' that slumgullion! The old man HAD made a strike in that garden, the
half-breed had discovered his secret and murdered him, throwin' him down
the well! It war no LIVIN' man that he had seen, but the ghost of old
Sobriente!”
The colonel emptied the remaining contents of his glass at a single
gulp, and sat up. “It's my opinion, sah, that Raintree had that night
more than his usual allowance of corn-juice on board; and it's only
a wonder, sah, that he didn't see a few pink alligators and sky-blue
snakes at the same time. But what's this got to do with that wanderin'
tramp?”
“They're all the same thing, colonel, and in my opinion that there tramp
ain't no more alive than that figger was.”
“But YOU were the one that saw this tramp with your own eyes,” retorted
the colonel quickly, “and you never before allowed it was a spirit!”
“Exactly! I saw it whar a minit afore nothin' had been standin', and a
minit after nothin' stood,” said Larry Hawkins, with a certain serious
emphasis; “but I warn't goin' to say it to ANYBODY, and I warn't goin'
to give you and the hacienda away. And ez nobody knew Raintree's story,
I jest shut up my head. But you kin bet your life that the man I saw
warn't no livin' man!”
“We'll see, sah!” said the colonel, rising from his chair with his
fingers in the armholes of his nankeen waistcoat, “ef he ever intrudes
on my property again. But look yar! don't ye go sayin' anything of this
to Polly,--you know what women are!”
A faint color came into Larry's face; an animation quite different to
the lazy deliberation of his previous monologue shone in his eyes, as
he said, with a certain rough respect he had not shown before to his
companion, “That's why I'm tellin' ye, so that ef SHE happened to see
anything and got skeert, ye'd know how to reason her out of it.”
“'Sh!” said the colonel, with a warning gesture.
A young girl had just appeared in the doorway, and now stood leaning
against the central pillar that supported it, with one hand above her
head, in a lazy attitude strongly suggestive of the colonel's Southern
indolence, yet with a grace entirely her own. Indeed, it overcame the
negligence of her creased and faded yellow cotton frock and unbuttoned
collar, and suggested--at least to the eyes of ONE man--the curving and
clinging of the jasmine vine against the outer column of the veranda.
Larry Hawkins rose awkwardly to his feet.
“Now what are you two men mumblin' and confidin' to each other? You look
for all the world like two old women gossips,” she said, with languid
impertinence.
It was easy to see that a privileged and recognized autocrat spoke.
No one had ever questioned Polly Swinger's right to interrupting,
interfering, and saucy criticisms. Secure in the hopeless or chivalrous
admiration of the men around her, she had repaid it with a frankness
that scorned any coquetry; with an indifference to the ordinary feminine
effect or provocation in dress or bearing that was as natural as it was
invincible. No one had ever known Polly to “fix up” for anybody, yet
no one ever doubted the effect, if she had. No one had ever rebuked her
charming petulance, or wished to.
Larry gave a weak, vague laugh. Colonel Swinger as ineffectively assumed
a mock parental severity. “When you see two gentlemen, miss, discussin'
politics together, it ain't behavin' like a lady to interrupt. Better
run away and tidy yourself before the stage comes.”
The young lady replied to the last innuendo by taking two spirals of
soft hair, like “corn silk,” from her oval cheek, wetting them with
her lips, and tucking them behind her ears. Her father's ungentlemanly
suggestion being thus disposed of, she returned to her first charge.
“It ain't no politics; you ain't been swearing enough for THAT! Come,
now! It's the mysterious stranger ye've been talking about!”
Both men stared at her with unaffected concern.
“What do YOU know about any mysterious stranger?” demanded her father.
“Do you suppose you men kin keep a secret,” scoffed Polly. “Why, Dick
Ruggles told me how skeert ye all were over an entire stranger, and he
advised me not to wander down the road after dark. I asked him if he
thought I was a pickaninny to be frightened by bogies, and that if
he hadn't a better excuse for wantin' 'to see me home' from the Injin
spring, he might slide.”
Larry laughed again, albeit a little bitterly, for it seemed to him that
the excuse was fully justified; but the colonel said promptly, “Dick's
a fool, and you might have told him there were worse things to be met on
the road than bogies. Run away now, and see that the niggers are on hand
when the stage comes.”
Two hours later the stage came with a clatter of hoofs and a cloud of
red dust, which precipitated itself and a dozen thirsty travelers
upon the veranda before the hotel bar-room; it brought also the usual
“express” newspapers and much talk to Colonel Swinger, who always
received his guests in a lofty personal fashion at the door, as he might
have done in his old Virginian home; but it brought likewise--marvelous
to relate--an ACTUAL GUEST, who had two trunks and asked for a room! He
was evidently a stranger to the ways of Buena Vista, and particularly
to those of Colonel Swinger, and at first seemed inclined to resent the
social attitude of his host, and his frank and free curiosity. When he,
however, found that Colonel Swinger was even better satisfied to give
an account of HIS OWN affairs, his family, pedigree, and his present
residence, he began to betray some interest. The colonel told him
all the news, and would no doubt have even expatiated on his ghostly
visitant, had he not prudently concluded that his guest might decline to
remain in a haunted inn. The stranger had spoken of staying a week; he
had some private mining speculations to watch at Wynyard's Gulch,--the
next settlement, but he did not care to appear openly at the “Gulch
Hotel.” He was a man of thirty, with soft, pleasing features and a
singular litheness of movement, which, combined with a nut-brown, gypsy
complexion, at first suggested a foreigner. But his dialect, to the
colonel's ears, was distinctly that of New England, and to this was
added a puritanical and sanctimonious drawl. “He looked,” said the
colonel in after years, “like a blank light mulatter, but talked like a
blank Yankee parson.” For all that, he was acceptable to his host, who
may have felt that his reminiscences of his plantation on the James
River were palling on Buena Vista ears, and was glad of his new auditor.
It was an advertisement, too, of the hotel, and a promise of its future
fortunes. “Gentlemen having propahty interests at the Gulch, sah, prefer
to stay at Buena Vista with another man of propahty, than to trust to
those new-fangled papah-collared, gingerbread booths for traders that
they call 'hotels' there,” he had remarked to some of “the boys.” In his
preoccupation with the new guest, he also became a little neglectful
of his old chum and dependent, Larry Hawkins. Nor was this the only
circumstance that filled the head of that shiftless loyal retainer
of the colonel with bitterness and foreboding. Polly Swinger--the
scornfully indifferent, the contemptuously inaccessible, the coldly
capricious and petulant--was inclined to be polite to the stranger!
The fact was that Polly, after the fashion of her sex, took it into
her pretty head, against all consistency and logic, suddenly to make
an exception to her general attitude towards mankind in favor of one
individual. The reason-seeking masculine reader will rashly conclude
that this individual was the CAUSE as well as the object; but I am
satisfied that every fair reader of these pages will instinctively know
better. Miss Polly had simply selected the new guest, Mr. Starbuck, to
show OTHERS, particularly Larry Hawkins, what she COULD do if she were
inclined to be civil. For two days she “fixed up” her distracting hair
at him so that its silken floss encircled her head like a nimbus; she
tucked her oval chin into a white fichu instead of a buttonless collar;
she appeared at dinner in a newly starched yellow frock! She talked
to him with “company manners;” said she would “admire to go to San
Francisco,” and asked if he knew her old friends the Fauquier girls
from “Faginia.” The colonel was somewhat disturbed; he was glad that his
daughter had become less negligent of her personal appearance; he could
not but see, with the others, how it enhanced her graces; but he was,
with the others, not entirely satisfied with her reasons. And he could
not help observing--what was more or less patent to ALL--that Starbuck
was far from being equally responsive to her attentions, and at times
was indifferent and almost uncivil. Nobody seemed to be satisfied with
Polly's transformation but herself.
But eventually she was obliged to assert herself. The third evening
after Starbuck's arrival she was going over to the cabin of Aunt Chloe,
who not only did the washing for Buena Vista, but assisted Polly in
dressmaking. It was not far, and the night was moonlit. As she crossed
the garden she saw Starbuck moving in the manzanita bushes beyond; a
mischievous light came into her eyes; she had not EXPECTED to meet him,
but she had seen him go out, and there were always POSSIBILITIES. To her
surprise, however, he merely lifted his hat as she passed, and
turned abruptly in another direction. This was more than the little
heart-breaker of Buena Vista was accustomed to!
“Oh, Mr. Starbuck!” she called, in her laziest voice.
He turned almost impatiently.
“Since you're so civil and pressing, I thought I'd tell you I was just
runnin' over to Aunt Chloe's,” she said dryly.
“I should think it was hardly the proper thing for a young lady to do
at this time of night,” he said superciliously. “But you know best,--you
know the people here.”
Polly's cheeks and eyes flamed. “Yes, I reckon I do,” she said crisply;
“it's only a STRANGER here would think of being rude. Good-night, Mr.
Starbuck!”
She tripped away after this Parthian shot, yet feeling, even in her
triumph, that the conceited fool seemed actually relieved at her
departure! And for the first time she now thought that she had seen
something in his face that she did not like! But her lazy independence
reasserted itself soon, and half an hour later, when she had left Aunt
Chloe's cabin, she had regained her self-esteem. Yet, to avoid meeting
him again, she took a longer route home, across the dried ditch and over
the bluff, scarred by hydraulics, and so fell, presently, upon the old
garden at the point where it adjoined the abandoned diggings. She was
quite sure she had escaped a meeting with Starbuck, and was gliding
along under the shadow of the pear-trees, when she suddenly stopped. An
indescribable terror overcame her as she stared at a spot in the garden,
perfectly illuminated by the moonlight not fifty yards from where she
stood. For she saw on its surface a human head--a man's head!--seemingly
on the level of the ground, staring in her direction. A hysterical laugh
sprang from her lips, and she caught at the branches above her or
she would have fallen! Yet in that moment the head had vanished! The
moonlight revealed the empty garden,--the ground she had gazed at,--but
nothing more!
She had never been superstitious. As a child she had heard the negroes
talk of “the hants,”--that is, “the HAUNTS” or spirits,--but had
believed it a part of their ignorance, and unworthy a white child,--the
daughter of their master! She had laughed with Dick Ruggles over the
illusions of Larry, and had shared her father's contemptuous disbelief
of the wandering visitant being anything but a living man; yet she would
have screamed for assistance now, only for the greater fear of making
her weakness known to Mr. Starbuck, and being dependent upon him for
help. And with it came the sudden conviction that HE had seen this awful
vision, too. This would account for his impatience of her presence and
his rudeness. She felt faint and giddy. Yet after the first shock had
passed, her old independence and pride came to her relief. She would go
to the spot and examine it. If it were some trick or illusion, she would
show her superiority and have the laugh on Starbuck. She set her white
teeth, clenched her little hands, and started out into the moonlight.
But alas! for women's weakness. The next moment she uttered a scream and
almost fell into the arms of Mr. Starbuck, who had stepped out of the
shadows beside her.
“So you see you HAVE been frightened,” he said, with a strange, forced
laugh; “but I warned you about going out alone!”
Even in her fright she could not help seeing that he, too, seemed pale
and agitated, at which she recovered her tongue and her self-possession.
“Anybody would be frightened by being dogged about under the trees,” she
said pertly.
“But you called out before you saw me,” he said bluntly, “as if
something had frightened you. That was WHY I came towards you.”
She knew it was the truth; but as she would not confess to her vision,
she fibbed outrageously.
“Frightened,” she said, with pale but lofty indignation. “What was there
to frighten me? I'm not a baby, to think I see a bogie in the dark!”
This was said in the faint hope that HE had seen something too. If it
had been Larry or her father who had met her, she would have confessed
everything.
“You had better go in,” he said curtly. “I will see you safe inside the
house.”
She demurred at this, but as she could not persist in her first bold
intention of examining the locality of the vision without admitting its
existence, she permitted him to walk with her to the house, and then at
once fled to her own room. Larry and her father noticed their entrance
together and their agitated manner, and were uneasy. Yet the colonel's
paternal pride and Larry's lover's respect kept the two men from
communicating their thoughts to each other.
“The confounded pup has been tryin' to be familiar, and Polly's set him
down,” thought Larry, with glowing satisfaction.
“He's been trying some of his sanctimonious Yankee abolition talk on
Polly, and she shocked him!” thought the colonel exultingly.
But poor Polly had other things to think of in the silence of her room.
Another woman would have unburdened herself to a confidante; but
Polly was too loyal to her father to shatter his beliefs, and too
high-spirited to take another and a lesser person into her confidence.
She was certain that Aunt Chloe would be full of sympathetic belief and
speculations, but she would not trust a nigger with what she couldn't
tell her own father. For Polly really and truly believed that she had
seen a ghost, no doubt the ghost of the murdered Sobriente, according
to Larry's story. WHY he should appear with only his head above ground
puzzled her, although it suggested the Catholic idea of purgatory, and
he was a Catholic! Perhaps he would have risen entirely but for that
stupid Starbuck's presence; perhaps he had a message for HER alone. The
idea pleased Polly, albeit it was a “fearful joy” and attended with some
cold shivering. Naturally, as a gentleman, he would appear to HER--the
daughter of a gentleman--the successor to his house--rather than to
a Yankee stranger. What was she to do? For once her calm nerves were
strangely thrilled; she could not think of undressing and going to
bed, and two o'clock surprised her, still meditating, and occasionally
peeping from her window upon the moonlit but vacant garden. If she saw
him again, would she dare to go down alone? Suddenly she started to
her feet with a beating heart! There was the unmistakable sound of a
stealthy footstep in the passage, coming towards her room. Was it he? In
spite of her high resolves she felt that if the door opened she should
scream! She held her breath--the footsteps came nearer--were before her
door--and PASSED!
Then it was that the blood rushed back to her cheek with a flush of
indignation. Her room was at the end of the passage; there was nothing
beyond but a private staircase, long disused, except by herself, as a
short cut through the old patio to the garden. No one else knew of
it, and no one else had the right of access to it! This insolent human
intrusion--as she was satisfied it was now--overcame her fear, and
she glided to the door. Opening it softly, she could hear the stealthy
footsteps descending. She darted back, threw a shawl over her head and
shoulders, and taking the small Derringer pistol which it had always
been part of her ostentatious independence to place at her bed-head,
she as stealthily followed the intruder. But the footsteps had died
away before she reached the patio, and she saw only the small deserted,
grass-grown courtyard, half hidden in shadows, in whose centre stood the
fateful and long sealed-up well! A shudder came over her at again being
brought into contact with the cause of her frightful vision, but as her
eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she saw something more real and
appalling! The well was no longer sealed! Fragments of bricks and boards
lay around it! One end of a rope, coiled around it like a huge snake,
descended its foul depths; and as she gazed with staring eyes, the
head and shoulders of a man emerged slowly from it! But it was NOT the
ghostly apparition of last evening, and her terror changed to scorn and
indignation as she recognized the face of Starbuck!
Their eyes met; an oath broke from his lips. He made a movement to
spring from the well, but as the girl started back, the pistol held
in her hand was discharged aimlessly in the air, and the report echoed
throughout the courtyard. With a curse Starbuck drew back, instantly
disappeared in the well, and Polly fell fainting on the steps. When she
came to, her father and Larry were at her side. They had been alarmed
at the report, and had rushed quickly to the patio, but not in time to
prevent the escape of Starbuck and his accomplice. By the time she had
recovered her consciousness, they had learned the full extent of that
extraordinary revelation which she had so innocently precipitated.
Sobriente's well had really concealed a rich gold ledge,--actually
tunneled and galleried by him secretly in the past,--and its only other
outlet was an opening in the garden hidden by a stone which turned on a
swivel. Its existence had been unknown to Sobriente's successor, but
was known to the Kanaka who had worked with Sobriente, who fled with
his daughter after the murder, but who no doubt was afraid to return
and work the mine. He had imparted the secret to Starbuck, another
half-breed, son of a Yankee missionary and Hawaiian wife, who had
evidently conceived this plan of seeking Buena Vista with an accomplice,
and secretly removing such gold as was still accessible. The accomplice,
afterwards identified by Larry as the wandering tramp, failed to
discover the secret entrance FROM the garden, and Starbuck was
consequently obliged to attempt it from the hotel--for which purpose
he had introduced himself as a boarder--by opening the disused well
secretly at night. These facts were obtained from papers found in the
otherwise valueless trunks, weighted with stones for ballast, which
Starbuck had brought to the hotel to take away his stolen treasure in,
but which he was obliged to leave in his hurried flight. The attempt
would have doubtless succeeded but for Polly's courageous and timely
interference!
And now that they had told her ALL, they only wanted to know what had
first excited HER suspicions, and driven her to seek the well as the
object of Starbuck's machinations? THEY had noticed her manner when she
entered the house that night, and Starbuck's evident annoyance. Had she
taxed him with her suspicions, and so discovered a clue?
It was a terrible temptation to Polly to pose as a more perfect heroine,
and one may not blame her if she did not rise entirely superior to it.
Her previous belief, that the head of the accomplice at the opening of
the garden was that of a GHOST, she now felt was certainly in the way,
as was also her conduct to Starbuck, whom she believed to be equally
frightened, and whom she never once suspected! So she said, with a
certain lofty simplicity, that there were SOME THINGS which she really
did not care to talk about, and Larry and her father left her that night
with the firm conviction that the rascal Starbuck had tried to tempt her
to fly with him and his riches, and had been crushingly foiled. Polly
never denied this, and once, in later days, when admiringly taxed with
it by Larry, she admitted with dove-like simplicity that she MAY have
been too foolishly polite to her father's guest for the sake of her
father's hotel.
However, all this was of small account to the thrilling news of a new
discovery and working of the “old gold ledge” at Buena Vista! As the
three kept their secret from the world, the discovery was accepted in
the neighborhood as the result of careful examination and prospecting on
the part of Colonel Swinger and his partner Larry Hawkins. And when
the latter gentleman afterwards boldly proposed to Polly Swinger, she
mischievously declared that she accepted him only that the secret might
not go “out of the family.”
LIBERTY JONES'S DISCOVERY
It was at best merely a rocky trail winding along a shelf of the eastern
slope of the Santa Cruz range, yet the only road between the sea and the
inland valley. The hoof-prints of a whole century of zigzagging mules
were impressed on the soil, regularly soaked by winter rains and dried
by summer suns during that period; the occasional ruts of heavy,
rude, wooden wheels--long obsolete--were still preserved and visible.
Weather-worn boulders and ledges, lying in the unclouded glare of an
August sky, radiated a quivering heat that was intolerable, even while
above them the masts of gigantic pines rocked their tops in the cold
southwestern trades from the unseen ocean beyond. A red, burning dust
lay everywhere, as if the heat were slowly and visibly precipitating
itself.
The creaking of wheels and axles, the muffled plunge of hoofs, and the
cough of a horse in the dust thus stirred presently broke the profound
woodland silence. Then a dirty white canvas-covered emigrant wagon
slowly arose with the dust along the ascent. It was travel-stained and
worn, and with its rawboned horses seemed to have reached the last
stage of its journey and fitness. The only occupants, a man and a girl,
appeared to be equally jaded and exhausted, with the added querulousness
of discontent in their sallow and badly nourished faces. Their voices,
too, were not unlike the creaking they had been pitched to overcome, and
there was an absence of reserve and consciousness in their speech, which
told pathetically of an equal absence of society.
“It's no user talkin'! I tell ye, ye hain't got no more sense than a
coyote! I'm sick and tired of it, doggoned if I ain't! Ye ain't no more
use nor a hossfly,--and jest ez hinderin'! It was along o' you that we
lost the stock at Laramie, and ef ye'd bin at all decent and takin',
we'd hev had kempany that helped, instead of laggin' on yere alone!”
“What did ye bring me for?” retorted the girl shrilly. “I might hev
stayed with Aunt Marty. I wasn't hankerin' to come.”
“Bring ye for?” repeated her father contemptuously; “I reckoned ye might
he o' some account here, whar wimmin folks is skeerce, in the way o'
helpin',--and mebbe gettin' yer married to some likely feller. Mighty
much chance o' that, with yer yaller face and skin and bones.”
“Ye can't blame me for takin' arter you, dad,” she said, with a shrill
laugh, but no other resentment of his brutality.
“Ye want somebody to take arter you--with a club,” he retorted angrily.
“Ye hear! Wot's that ye're doin' now?”
She had risen and walked to the tail of the wagon. “Goin' to get out and
walk. I'm tired o' bein' jawed at.”
She jumped into the road. The act was neither indignant nor vengeful;
the frequency of such scenes had blunted their sting. She was probably
“tired” of the quarrel, and ended it rudely. Her father, however, let
fly a Parthian arrow.
“Ye needn't think I'm goin' to wait for ye, ez I hev! Ye've got to keep
tetch with the team, or get left. And a good riddance of bad rubbidge.”